On December 7, 2022, an initiative of The Economy of Francesco in support of Iranian youth, the Shahrazad Reading Marathon: ars narrandi, ars vivendi.
An event promoted by the young women and young men of EoF to express solidarity and closeness with the Iranian women, on the occasion of the rally organized by Iranian activists from December 5 to 7, the day on which Iran celebrates 'Student Day'. It is precisely on the occasion of December 7 that EoF's young men and women will engage in an all-day activity from Italy, Portugal, India, the Ivory Coast, Australia, Guatemala, the USA and Mexico in a marathon in which they will take turns reading the famous collection of Oriental stories A Thousand and One Nights in different languages.
"We have witnessed 3 months of street protests that have been going on since the death of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Kurdish woman accused by Tehran's morality police last Sept. 16 of not wearing her headscarf properly"
- the EoF youth reported. Since that day, a wave of rallies, which were cracked down with bloodshed, has swept across the country to the entire international community.
"Some of us joined the Iranian women's protest by imitating that unequivocal and courageous gesture: cutting a lock of hair."
A custom in Kurdish culture (ed. cutting one's hair as a sign of mourning) has become a symbol of anger, a desperate cry demanding change, a sharp cut that becomes a metaphor for the severed words, freedom, and rights.
"Today," the young economists and businesswomen of the world continue, "we feel it is our duty to stand beside the Iranian women who are fighting for their freedom and beside all the young people who are trying - risking their lives - to build a better future. We will do so using words, to emphasize the 'saving' capacity of speech, the right to speak out and protest."
Moreover, the narrative expedient of A Thousand and One Nights reminds us that storytelling is also a place to go to try to defeat death: the art of telling, the art of living. Women have a special familiarity with words because they have a special intimacy with life. They teach us the first words: let women generate again the essential primary words of the new world that is to be born.