The news begins with the act of silence by the members of Iran’s women’s national football team during the match against South Korea in the Asian Cup in Australia. At the beginning of the match, the national anthem of the Islamic Republic is played. The camera moves across the faces of the women footballers; across lips that do not move and eyes that are staring straight ahead. The national anthem continues, unaccompanied by the women’s voices. The camera turns to the face of Marzieh Jafari, the team’s head coach, who looks at the women with pride. The women remain standing firm and are still silent. The sound of the spectators’ applause can be heard. The national anthem ends, and the women’s silence remains.

In this text, I intend to address the agency of silence. If the national anthem invites its audience to read the glorious history of nations and derives its اعتبار from players and spectators who place words upon the background music, then silence invites the reading of the history and systematic repression of nations and the refusal to recognize it. Silence exposes that glorious background music. Perhaps that is why it places the agent in danger. Silence itself is also aware of that danger. Silence is not empty, yet it wants to resist being translated. Although the media always translates it. In this case, because the members of the national team remain silent in the face of singing the national anthem, that translation is placed in the service of nation-centered narratives in diverse ways, whether by the Islamic Republic, its opponents, or the governments of Australia and the United States.

The Islamic Republic’s way of confronting this act is predictable. Mohammadreza Shahbazi, a presenter on state television, calls those who remained silent traitors to the homeland, dishonorable, and stateless, and calls for severe برخورد with them; a threat that causes concern for the safety of the national team members. CNN, quoting one source close to the team, writes: “The players are under intense security measures and officials are closely monitoring them, including a person said to be close to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.” In another statement, the Office of the Prosecutor General asks the team members to return to the country so that, “in addition to alleviating their families’ concerns,” they will not be “in the line of confrontation with the enemies of the country.” Here, silence is immediately recoded as betrayal. The reference to “family concerns” is not accidental. This reference shows how the ruling system uses kinship as a mechanism of control. The players are not only athletes; they are women, and it is precisely through this position that pressure is applied.

In another statement, Ahmad Donyamali, the Minister of Sports and Youth of the Islamic Republic, claims that the Australian government, with “seductive offers,” tried to make the women’s national football team players regret returning to the country. Mehdi Taj also accuses Australia of “holding Iran’s women footballers hostage.” A little before these statements, a documentary by Australia’s News10 network had been broadcast in which one of the security officials of the Ministry of Sports and Youth, named Mohammadrahman Salari, was following the women footballers in the stairwell of the hotel where the national players were staying in order to prevent them from leaving the hotel. In the end, in the next match against the Philippines, the players, while singing the anthem, gave a military salute during the playing of the anthem; a process that bears much resemblance to what we have witnessed in forced confessions by the Islamic Republic; a process that, through creating an opposing image at the moment of agency, seats the agent back again on the side of the Islamic Republic.

The President of the United States, Donald Trump—who is known for intensely anti-immigration policies—reacted to these conditions by asking the Australian government to grant the players asylum and said that if they returned to Iran, they might face persecution. The Australian government, in turn, granted humanitarian visas to five members of this team. Tony Burke attributed the act of silence and these women’s asylum request to their “being in Australia” and said: “Australians should be proud that it was in our country that these women experienced a country where real options were in front of them.” Here too, silence is appropriated; this time in the form of a liberal narrative of rescue and freedom. The players’ act is interpreted as a sign of the moral superiority of another nation-state. What is eliminated in this framework is the unequal global order that shapes both repression and refuge. The very regimes that claim support and protection are themselves often complicit in other forms of violence, exclusion, and border-making.

Throughout all these processes, a group of Iranians outside Iran also tried to support the players. Iranians residing in Australia formed a human shield in front of the bus carrying the players to the airport. In the video published that day, one can hear people standing beside the bus and shouting, “Lion and Sun girls”; another symbol of a nation-centered narrative. In the account of one eyewitness at Sydney Airport on Instagram, Iranians who gathered at Sydney Airport, despite police warnings, wandered between gates one and eight of the airport so that they could find the women footballers. Upon hearing the news that Golnoush Khosravi’s mother had asked her daughter not to return to Iran, one person wrote the message on a white shirt, another bought a paper bag and wrote on it: “Golnoush, your mom said stay.” Someone bought a speaker to play the voice of Golnoush’s mother. This eyewitness account ends with the scene in which the crowd of Iranians who had gone to Sydney Airport hear the news that Golnoush is staying, and then “the Lion and Sun flag began to dance.”

In this text, I do not intend to impose yet another meaning on that silence. Rather, I want to arrive at this question: how can one join a protest that takes shape in silence, without attaching a meaning or symbol to it from outside, and without assuming it to be an empty act? How can one refrain from taking away the agency of the agents of silence and recognize silence, and silence alone, as action? And how can one care for the agents of silence without speaking in their place from a top-down position?

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Perhaps contrary to the claim of this text, the news did not begin there, when these women became silent. The news began where Iran’s women’s national football team, despite all the structural inequalities against women footballers, succeeded in becoming the only team from the Middle East to qualify for these competitions. Or on the day when Zahra Ghanbari, because her scarf fell off while celebrating after a goal, was at risk of being barred from football. Or on the day when Atefeh Ramezanizadeh, at her team Khatoun Bam’s championship celebration, raised the victory cup overhead with a sorrowful face in honor of the dead. Or perhaps the news was that women footballers do not have a training ground; as Golnoush Khosravi had written: “Many times, they did not even give us a grass field to train on, like the conditions of many of our girl footballers.” Or perhaps the news was that out of a total of 51 active sports federations in Iran, in recent years, only 2 federations have been headed by women. Or that the wrestling, football, taekwondo, and weightlifting federations, with the largest share of Iran’s sports budget, have had the smallest share of women’s presence in managerial sections. Or that the one-year income of the best woman footballer equals the income of one-fifth of the lowest contract of a bench player in the men’s league. As Zahra Khajavi, goalkeeper of Iran’s women’s national football team, had told Iranian media: “The wages of women footballers are not one-tenth of male players. Women’s football contracts are in no way comparable to men’s, and many players are forced to have a second job.” Or perhaps the news was the killing of Zahra Azadpour, a premier league player, by gunfire from the forces of the Islamic Republic. Or the day when, at her fortieth-day memorial ceremony, her friends and teammates sang songs at her grave.

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Among the players, Atefeh Ramezanizadeh and Fatemeh Pasandideh appeared at the women’s football training site “Brisin Roz” and trained without compulsory hijab. Mona Hamidi, Zahra Sarbali, and Mohaddeseh Panahi withdrew their asylum requests. The remaining women returned to Iran. In a statement, the Football Federation announced the arrival of “three children of Iran in Malaysia” and said that Farideh Shojaei, the federation’s vice president for women, and Marzieh Jafari, the team’s head coach, welcomed them: “Mona Hamoudi, Zahra Sarbali, and Zahra Meshkinkar, three members of Iran’s women’s national football team, who in a patriotic decision turned their backs on Australia’s seductive and political offer of asylum, arrived in Malaysia a few minutes ago.”

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In response, I return to the beginning of the text and join the silence of the women footballers during the singing of the anthem of the Islamic Republic.