Hijab and Oppression: Iranian People’s Call Hijab and Oppression: Iranian People’s Call

Pictures of women burning their headscarves in public, often chanting and dancing beside the fire have been circulating the internet as thousands had taken to the streets of Iran after the death of Mahsa Amini in the past month. The 22-year-old Kurdish woman was accused of breaching Islamic dress code by not wearing her hijab properly and wearing skinny jeans, thus was detained by the country’s morality police, who had only one job: to enforce strict rules monitoring people’s dressing and behavior. Her death during police custody sparked even more public outcry when her family revealed that Mahsa was beaten up with multiple bruises on her face, whilst Iranian officials insisted that she died out of “underlying illness” and refused to disclose any further.

Despite the mass arrests and public execution of protesters, Iran’s oppressive state apparatus does not seem to halt the social unrest nor diminish the morale of protesters, many of whom are courageous young women and schoolgirls. In fact, the Iranian regime is faced by an unprecedented threat as its people joined hands to fight against their government, women burning their hijabs and cutting their hair as an act of rebellion against government oppression; even the Iran football team refused to sing their national anthem at the World Cup 2022 in Qator last November. In addition, the movement’s slogan Women, Life, and Freedom is antithetical to the Islamic Republic at its core, which has been built itself on being anti-women and repressive.

“Women started this wave of protest,” says Ramyar Hassani, spokesman for the Hengaw organisation for Human Rights.

”But everyone else joined. Women and men are shoulder-to-shoulder. All of Iran is united.”

For the FIrst time in the history of Iran since the Islamic Revolution, there is this unique unity between the ethnicities. Everyone is chanting the same slogan. Their demand is the same.”

As a matter of fact, the country has been no short of recurring protest circulating the people’s disappointment and resentment over the status quo, from the Student Protest in 1999, to the Green Movement in 2009 over the removal of their conservative leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from office, then to the November Protest in 2019 over unreasonable rise in fuel prices, but in stark contrast, none of their magnitude is comparable to the current protest. In Iran, leaders of the Islamic Revolution defend that the compulsory hijab rule is liberating for women, as it leads to a more “purified” society when women cover up more of their bodies, leading to a lower crime rate at the end of the day. As preposterous as it may sound, some parts of the world are still led by these ignorant leaders and women from these patriarchal societies are unequivocal ly being oppressed by a set of absurd rules restraining how they dress, act, and make a living.

After the death of Mahsa, Iranians, especially women, have largely lost hope for institutional change and the social stability for generations to come. However, is Hijab the only source of repression Muslim women have been subjected to? Does the removal of headscarf truly indicate a sign of freedom?

To understand how the veil had been associated with negative connotations in the West, it is requisite to introduce the concept of Islamophobia and its everlasting influence in western societies regardless of change in their social paradigm across centuries. Since the Enlightenment in 1789, science, reason, The Social Contract, and democracy have filled up people’s heads and hearts and even became their religion instead. Seen in this light, people had grown to refuse the idea of monarch and the king being the embodiment of God. Put simply, people leaned more towards the notion of diminishing the power of church while asserting individual freedom and expression. With the countless Islamic terrorist attacks happening in recent years, they immediately pointed fingers at Islamic practices and jumped into conclusion that the religion was problematic at its own, exacerbating the phenomenon of Islamophobia. Instead of a custom and tradition unique to its own, every single headscarf is seen as a political statement and every Islamic practice is viewed as a threat to the widely recognized Judeo-Christian, as proposed by the far-right wing. Meanwhile, the left-leaning French government had also perpetuated the phenomenon by implementing headscarf laws, increasingly reduce Muslim women’s right to wear a hijab in public institutions. An epitome of this would be how Muslim girls were suspended from school for refusing to remove their headscarves in French societies in recent decades.

Apart from the influence of Islamophobia, the advocacy and urge for Muslim women to unveil themselves might not be as noble and righteous as it seems, as it largely stems from the concept of Orientalism, which has been deep-rooted in western societies for decades.

Orientalism, put simply, is the depiction and imitation of various aspects of the Eastern world via Western lens in a commodified and sexualized way, often emphasizing and exaggerating the difference of people and culture between these two ends of the world. The term first became prominent during the French colonial rule of Algeria in the 1930s, the sight of the veiled women evoked erotic fantasies by Western males and drew on their desire for domination. For instance, a series of postcards depicting Algerian women in an erotic light were printed to send home, French artists created paintings of them partly veiled, half-naked or completely naked. While the seclusion of the women from the public sphere created in the colonizer’s mind an erotic invitation, this desire was entangled with the idea of freeing these women from their backward culture – even though none of these women asked for it.

The power dynamic between the French as a colonizer and the colonized Muslims as the underdeveloped and in desperate need for “help” and “rescuing” from the West continues to feed on to the male fantasy to rescue Oriental women from their violent patriarchal society. Freedom of choice and religion are always the largest proclamations made within the Western society, but ironically, the French Government began set rules to dictate how Muslim women eat, speak and dress (most preferably “more French”), ultimately cancelling culture differences and assimilating Islamic traditions in the name of cultural integration.

Some might argue that the situation in France and Iran could not be compared on the same common ground – at least France has never killed a woman for wearing hijab. Whilst Muslim women in France are fighting the French government for their right to wear a hijab; they are also fighting the Iranian government for their right to not wear one. In both cases, all that these Muslim women yearn for, is a freedom of choice, which is not a lot to ask for in our modern world. If we were to really care for our Muslim female counterparts, why don’t we stop pointing fingers on how they should think and act and stand in solidarity with all women across the globe who are fighting for a right to choose? Unarguably, a hijab is just a piece of fabric carrying both religious and cultural significance, and the custom of being veiled on one hand should not be forcefully bequeathed to younger generations; on the other hand, no one should be condemned if they opt to continue such practices.

At the end of the day, women across the globe should be endowed with a fundamental right to make their own clothing decisions regardless of their race, religion and personal beliefs, without that choice being held up for close scrutiny at every turn.