With the escalation of repression in Iran, hardliners in the regime are showing the nature of the state: totalitarian, retrograde and intolerant. They won the presidential and parliamentary elections and dominate the institutions, but without popular legitimacy, because abstention reached 53% of the census.
Article 638 of the Penal Code condemns appearing in public without a hijab, showing one’s hair and wearing tight and torn pants. Consequently, the complaints acquire a political dimension, which goes beyond moral freedoms, contrary.
The fight in Iran against the obligation to wear Islamic dress refers us to the debate that exists among scholars – including women intellectuals and activists – about the use of the Islamic headscarf. According to the practice of free interpretation (ijtihad), some point out that in the Koran it is only recommended that women cover themselves in the street with a cloak. The hijab would be a curtain that separates the caliph from the population of him or the different spaces between men and women. Its generalization comes more from some hadiths (stories about the life of the Prophet, written later), which the conservative tradition validates to impose the veil.
Critical believing women demand a rereading of Islamic jurisprudence, hijacked by Islamic jurists. Many are not covered, except in some religious celebrations. Spirituality cannot be reduced to a way of dressing.
However, the hijab can have a double interpretation. Muslim women, especially young women, wear various types of hijab, for example in Europe, as a sign of identity and conviction of faith in the face of neocolonial ideological uniformity and as a reaction to a hostile and Islamophobic environment, expressed in legal, labor and social obligations. everyday life, which can limit individual freedoms.
However, another large sector of women of Muslim origin, now secular, strongly point out that the hijab represents the subordination to men, intrinsic in Islam. The decision to cover up is never free, but rather responds to family, social and religious pressure.
Due to their impoverishment, the popular classes -in their day more conservative because they depended on the rentier economy favored by the State- have joined the professionals (lawyers, university students, journalists…) who have demanded reforms and freedoms in Iran for many years. In 2017 and 2018 they converged in the revolts against the increase in the cost of living, the devaluation of the rial and the price of fuel, demands transformed into demands for collective, political and social justice freedoms.
There is a class component to the repression: the nefarious morality police detain women from the most popular sectors, especially in the poorest districts of Tehran and other Iranian cities, while being more permissive with the wealthy sectors or those related to powerful clerics.
Women have been one of the social forces that has most driven political and social change in Iran, despite government restrictions. They themselves have imposed their visibility. They have broken the rural fence and tradition and have joined the public space: they are the majority in universities and social networks and hold positions in the municipal councils of some towns. They try to bypass moral obstinacy in social habits: they put on lipstick and make-up; handkerchiefs and colored coats are placed; decide on her motherhood.
In recent years, many Iranian women – Muslim and secular – have voiced their opposition to the regime. Naming some means recognizing their protagonism. Shahla Sherkat founded the monthly magazine Zanan (Woman) in 1992. It was closed in 2008, after 152 issues. In its pages highlighted issues of politics, domestic violence, sexuality and even personal aesthetics.
The lawyer Shirin Ebadi achieved international prestige with the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003. She has promoted several NGOs in defense of human rights, women and children. In 2009, women also led protests against electoral fraud, displaying their green scarves, which barely covered part of their hair.
In recent years, lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh has been jailed for defending women in detention. Yasaman Aryani and Vida Mohamed ended up in prison for throwing off the scarf and spreading its images. The “Enghelab street girls” encouraged women to wear light scarves, without covering themselves completely. They marked a path that students have joined these days.
That Muslim women wear the hijab in Western societies may represent the exercise of their personal freedoms, guaranteed by religious freedom in the rule of law. But, in parallel, from the same defense of individual and collective rights, it is necessary to claim the freedom not to wear the hijab when it is imposed in any Muslim country, with coercion and violence, now in Iran. This pressure is reprehensible without worth any cultural and religious relativism.
Javier Aiza Journalist specializing in international news. Co-founder of Espacio REDO
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