The Jina uprising, ignited by the state-sanctioned killing of Jina (Mahsa) Amini in September 2022, marked a historic convergence of gender, ethnic, and religious resistance in Iran, particularly in Eastern Kurdistan (also known as Rojhelat or Iranian Kurdistan). Although the movement was initially framed as a feminist revolution, Sunni Muslim clerics and leaders played a pivotal role in shaping its trajectory. This article examines how religious discourse catalyzed and sustained the uprising, challenging conventional secular frames of social movement theory. Sunni-majority Eastern Kurdistan became a hub for both Kurdish nationalist and religious mobilization as clerics leveraged mosques and sermons to amplify the movement’s demands, intertwining gender-based struggles with calls for ethnic and religious recognition. Despite historical restrictions on political organization, networks of Sunni Islamic groups and clerical bodies provided leadership, solidarity, and moral legitimacy to protesters, even as state violence escalated. By contextualizing the Jina uprising within Iran’s Persian Shiʿi nationalist framework, this article demonstrates how religion, often sidelined in analyses of modern uprisings, remains a powerful force of resistance, uniting diverse grievances against multilayered systemic oppression. It also is a reminder of the duality of religion as both a site of state control and a transformative vehicle for recognition and liberation.

In the late-nineteenth century, a bookbinder from Bratislava named Stefan Illés relocated to the city of Jerusalem in Ottoman Palestine. There he produced what came to be known as the Illés Relief, a miniature three-dimensional model of his adopted city. In an age of ever-expanding colonial interests in the region and popular curiosity about the Holy City, the Illés Relief toured Europe to great fanfare, leading interested parties in Geneva, Switzerland to arrange its purchase and permanent display in the city, which had been cast by Jean Calvin as the “Protestant Rome.” Presently, the Illés Relief is on view in the Tower of David Museum in Jerusalem, nominally on loan since 1984 but without a defined return date. The following is an interview with the art historian and founder and director of ARCH Jerusalem, Maryvelma O’Neil. Our conversation moves from the history and trajectory of the Illés Relief to her own digital humanities work stemming from the Relief, specifically the Virtual Illés Relief Initiative and the Mughrabi Quarter Virtual Archive.1,2 Although the themes of the interview, memory and cultural heritage, suggest agents and events long past, as our conversation reveals, these issues remain relevant today, in the ongoing disposition of Palestinians and destruction of Palestinian life and culture.