“Woman, life, freedom!” Those are the words that have shaken Iran over the past three weeks. Protesters across the nation have poured into the streets to condemn the regime, which has responded with its usual brutality. Since the demonstrations began on Sept. 17, the police have killed dozens of protesters and arrested thousands more.

What sparked the largest antiregime protests in three years was the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman of Kurdish descent, on Sept. 16. Three days earlier, she had been arrested by Tehran’s “guidance patrol” for failing to wear her headscarf—a mandate first imposed on Iranian women by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1983. The police claim she died as a result of a “sudden heart problem.” But eyewitnesses saw that Amini was beaten by the police, and her family noticed bruises on her dead body.

Since news of Amini’s death became public, countless women have ripped off their hijabs; others have burned them in street bonfires. Such public defiance probably isn’t what Khomeini expected when he first issued his decree. He and his allies meant to shield Iran from “toxic” Western influence and ensure obedience to Islam, as they define it, for all. But by forcing their severe and cramped religious vision on an unwilling people, they’ve driven many from Islam itself.

Many Western visitors to Iran have noticed this. They’ve found a much less pious society than they expected. The Economist’s Nicolas Pelham visited Tehran in 2019 and found the city “defiantly secular.” The regime builds new mosques, he noticed, but few attend them. “Alcohol is banned,” he noted, “but home delivery is faster for wine than for pizza.”

In 2020 the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran released an online survey gauging Iranians’ attitudes on religion. Results showed “unprecedented secularization.” Approximately half of the population “reported losing their religion” and around 60% reported that they never pray. Sixty-eight percent supported the separation of church and state—the antithesis of the Iranian regime.

Meanwhile, many Iranians have converted to Christianity. Iran’s underground church may be the fastest-growing in the world. “The best evangelist for Jesus was the Ayatollah Khomeini,” an Iranian pastor anonymously told the makers of the 2019 documentary “Sheep Among Wolves Volume II.” Some of the country’s wiser Muslim clerics have acknowledged the counterproductivity of religious coercion, albeit also anonymously. One cleric recently told the Middle East Eye that the Islamic Republic “has both weakened Islam and clerics in the eyes of people.”

Yet the regime’s answer to declining religious observance, unsurprisingly, is to blame everybody but itself. President Ebrahim Raisi recently accused “the enemies of Iran and Islam” of weakening the “religious foundations and values of the society.”

The same is true in neighboring Turkey. Though the country is still officially a secular republic, it is led by an increasingly corrupt and authoritarian government whose virulent propaganda is soaked with references to Islam. The consequence has been a widespread aversion to religion and an embrace of “deism” among the youth.

In the Arab world, too, recent surveys have found an increase in secularization and growing calls for reforms in religious political institutions. Disillusionment with the faith, they note, owes in part to both violent and illiberal manifestations of Islam.

That’s the story behind the cheers of azadi, or freedom, by Iranian women today. They aren’t protesting religious faith itself. They are shaking their fists at regimes—across the Middle East and beyond—that impose narrow interpretations of faith by the brutal methods of totalitarianism: “morality police,” blasphemy laws, bans on books and websites, arbitrary arrests and torture. Iran’s hijabless objectors are reminding the world that religion, if it’s to flourish, must ally itself with freedom.