Iran protests and that word we won’t say

If you’ve been reading about the January 2026 protests in Iran, you could be forgiven for thinking they’re about the failing economy. They aren’t; not really. The economy is the trigger but it isn’t the cause.

The Iranian currency has indeed crashed, with the rial falling to a record low against the US dollar. Inflation is out of control, with, for example, the cost of rice increasing tenfold over the past three years. And yes, the protests were started by bazaar merchants in Tehran, a significant development given the merchants’ long-standing alignment with the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The protests have since spread to over 100 cities – 111 by January 8 according to the BBC.

But it is reductionist, or even inaccurate, to suggest that the protests are all about the economy. The proximate cause is not what happened a week or two ago but a deep hatred for a regime that rapes and blinds women, has taken Iran from a thriving modern nation to a hub for global terrorism, and that murders its own civilians en masse.

Protests in Iran have broken out much more frequently in the past decade than at any previous point since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, with the Woman, Life, Freedom movement of 2022 being the most significant to date.