The emancipation of women in Iran will be against state Islam

The tragic death of Mahsa Amini on September 16, 2022, beaten to death by the morality police in Iran because of her “bad veil”, led to an uprising of incredible and unprecedented courage by the entire Iranian population which lives since the Islamic revolution in 1979 – which marks the beginning of globalized Islamism -, in an open-air prison built essentially on the control of women’s bodies, through their veiling, and their inferiorization made sacred by medieval “Islamic law”, the chari’awhich confirms gender inequality.

The veiling of women’s bodies, which for the moralists of pagan antiquity and of the three monotheisms is a symbol of modesty and a sexual marker of inferiority signifying that they are the property of the husband and/or the father, is strongly contested in particular by the first Iranian and Arab feminists of the beginning of the 20th century who got rid of it by leading to a generalized unveiling until the end of the 1970s.

Subversive youths

The advent of Islamism imposed from above, as in Iran or Afghanistan, or disseminated from below by Islamist players, as in Egypt or within populations of Muslim descent in Europe, is everywhere accompanied by a massive veiling of young girls and women. Indeed, globalized Islamism makes the compulsory Islamic veil – even though no Koranic verse mentions the covering of female hair – its spearhead by reducing the relationship between women and men to sexualized bodies where the former are assimilated to objects of desire to be concealed and the latter reduced to beings incapable of controlling their sexual appetites.

Islamists, in Islamic and non-Islamic contexts, succeed in imposing their thesis of the compulsory veil by opposing “the modest and virtuous veiled woman” to the “immodest and sinful unveiled woman” while instrumentalizing women’s bodies through their veiling who become, willy-nilly, the standard-bearers of the Islamist ideology whose social project is based on the reorganization of gender relations in the perspective of a patriarchal religious sexual morality.

The philosophy of the imposed or “chosen” Islamic veil – religious guilt, conveyed by Islamist discourses, threatening with the flames of hell believers who do not submit to this female dress constraint seriously questions the notion of free choice – leads to manifest sexual inequalities involving in particular the prohibition for women to have the slightest physical contact with an individual of the opposite sex outside the framework of marriage, while men, through the legitimization of polygamy, can claim a certain sexual freedom . In addition, women are ordered not to uncover, from puberty, the smallest part of their body, apart from the face and hands, even for a public bath, while men can freely abandon themselves, hair in the wind and shirtless, to the pleasures of the caresses of the air and the waves on their skin.

In societies with a Muslim majority, the success of the Islamist veil is mainly explained by the fact that women undergo severe control of their sexuality, in particular through the requirement of virginity before marriage, because they are not yet considered as free individuals, in their own right, but are always apprehended as collective property that represents the “honor” of the family, the community and the State. In these contexts, the right of women to freely dispose of their bodies requires a veritable mental and sexual revolution which would result, among other things, in the passage, in social representations and practices, from “the woman object of desire” to a desiring subject in the same way as men to achieve the celebration of a free, egalitarian and reciprocal sexuality.

In this regard, for the past ten years, subversive youths and democratic forces have openly claimed the principles of freedom and sexual rights there, calling in particular for the decriminalization of sexual relations outside marriage.

rule of law

In Iran and throughout the Muslim world, the Family Codes and Penal Codes are based on the moral, sexual and social order and not on individual freedoms. Also, feminists have been denouncing there for decades the fate of women who are held hostage between a state Islam that has made them legally inferior since independence, through the Family Codes resulting from the chari’a – which ratifies, among other things, marital authority, polygamy and inheritance inequality –, an Islamism that socially subjugates them based on the argument of religious authority, a societal sexual morality that weighs on their bodies and an absence of freedoms programmed politically by the non-democratic authorities in place.

Thus, unlike Islamic feminists – who claim “Islamic equality” based on the primacy of religious sources – secular feminists – who claim full gender equality by referring exclusively to universal human rights values ​​– are fully aware that the emancipation of women will be against state Islam and Islamism, both built on medieval scriptural sources that sanctify male preeminence and ignore modern concepts of equality and citizenship. This secular feminist contestation, in Islamic contexts, with regard to state Islam and Islamism does not, however, oppose the cultural and spiritual Islam of individuals.

In Iran, since the death of Mahsa Amini, young girls and women are heroically burning their veils, probably inaugurating the end of globalized Islamism, and Iranian men and women, all social strata and generations combined, demonstrate massively, at the risk of their lives, to demand freedom, equality and democracy. Therefore, the UN, democratic governments and the international community must compel the bloodthirsty theocratic state of Iran to immediately cease its repression of its people.

Finally, all Muslim regimes and non-democratic authorities would benefit from establishing a rule of law, secular or secular, based on the separation of powers, the guarantee of individual freedoms and gender equality.

Photo credits: Iranian women in 1999 (Jeanne Menjoulet, Flickr).