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Good morning. The death in custody last month of the 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa Amini has led to weeks of protests and rioting in which over 100 people are said to have died. This young woman, arrested for not complying with the state mandated head coverings in Tehran was, her family claim, beaten inside a police van from which she later slipped into a coma. For days now videos have emerged across social media showing young protesters, often women, demonstrating in defiance, by taking off their headscarves or cutting their hair. There have been demonstrations in solidarity around the world under the slogan “Woman, life, liberty.” And one Iranian activist said proudly, `we don’t have one leader. The beauty and strength of our movement is that every single one of us here is a leader.’ While police try to clamp down on this growing unrest, these protests are about far more than what women wear - they are essentially about that most controversial subject – a woman’s freedom. The headscarf and other forms of covering have been debated within Muslim societies for decades. The Qur’an calls for believers to be modest, to lower their gaze, verses which apply equally to both men and women but over the years these and other verses have been reduced primarily to debate what a woman should or shouldn’t wear especially in public; and to what extent her choice of dress is a reflection of her faith and devotion to God. But how a woman practices her faith shouldn’t be under the control and dogma of the state. This desire for greater freedom to be your own person has become a defining struggle especially under regimes which easily remove civil liberties under the guise of religious values. Governments will often do whatever they can to consolidate political power. But when society becomes restless for change, when the human spirit yearns and dreams for a different kind of life, things will shift whatever the cost. It can take a long time for some women to find their voice, to have the courage to resist in the face of all kinds of societal and religious obstacles but when they do speak up, we shouldn’t reduce the complexity of their lives and causes to simple hashtags. Some may find that the only recourse they have to live fully, is to leave the country and live in the West, as the writer Azar Nafisi did and who said, 'it takes courage to die for a cause but also to live for one.’