Iran is at a momentous crossroads as the establishment battles the protests which erupted after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, when arrested by Iran’s morality police. Mahsa Amini who is ethnically Kurdish, was travelling to Tehran with her family and was arrested by the morality police and taken to a detention facility for the crime of showing a bit of her hair under the hijab according to Iranian activists. Iran has some of the world’s strictest rules on the wearing of the hijab, with ‘improper wearing of the hijab’ resulting in women being detained and sanctioned.
When her brother was waiting outside the detention centre, he heard screams from inside and someone told him that the security forces had killed a young woman. Social media was then saturated with images of Amini lying unconscious in a hospital with tubes in her mouth and nose and blood coming out of her ear.
Mahsa Amini’s custodial death triggered an outpouring of rage not only on social media but on the streets of Iran. The spontaneous protests have now spread to most of Iran’s 31 provinces with several people being killed in the protests according to media sources.
Women have been at the forefront of these protests and the protests have included women burning the hijab, symbolically cutting their hair and going about bare headed in violation of the hijab regulations.
The question is why has the hijab become such a symbol of oppression as far as women in Iran are concerned? The story goes back to the Iranian revolution in the aftermath of which the compulsory hijab for women was introduced. When the compulsory hijab was introduced for the first time in 1979, it was greeted by a mass demonstration on international women’s day by thousands of women marching without the hijab. As Iranian feminist, lawyer, author and winner of the Nobel Prize for peace, Shirin Ebadi tells it, the hijab became a visible symbol of the oppression of women. In the first meeting she attended at the Ministry of Justice after the Iranian revolution, where she had worked as a judge she was first told by her boss to cover her hair, ‘out of respect for our beloved Imam Khomeini’. She says that she was shaken and replied that she had ‘never worn a head scarf’ in her life and it ‘would be hypocritical to start now.’
The compulsory hijab was only the beginning of women being stripped of rights. Ebadi who was a judge in pre-revolutionary Iran was stripped of her judgeship and demoted to a clerk in the same court in which she had been a judge! The Islamic Penal Code was passed under which the compensation for a woman’s death was half that of a man. The divorce law was unequal with men having easy access to divorce with women’s right to divorce being hedged in by too many qualifications. Myriad other laws and regulations were passed which put women within the box of second class citizenship.
The current President of Iran, the hardline cleric Ebrahim Raisi, who came to power in 2021, introduced a new list of restrictions including the introduction of surveillance cameras to monitor and fine unveiled women or refer them for “counselling”, and a mandatory prison sentence for any Iranian who questioned or posted content against the hijab rules online.
This history of how the state has mandated the hijab and made its non observance a matter of criminal prosecution accounts for why the hijab has become a symbol of oppression.
Underlying the protests is the principle that the state has no business regulating the dress of women.
To those of us in Karnataka, the protests in Iran against the hijab, seem to embody a contradictory impulse from the Muslim women in Karnataka who seem to be asserting their right to wear the hijab. However, both the protests in Iran as well as the protests in Karnataka embody the same principle, namely that it is not the business of the state to tell women what to wear.
A woman’s dignity is affronted when in as personal a decision as dress, she is told that she must cover her head. Her dignity is equally affronted when she is told that she does not have the right to cover her head.
The Iranian government must listen to the protesters’ cry that equality and freedom are their birth right and repeal not only the compulsory hijab law but also other laws which discriminate against women in spheres of social, economic, political and cultural life.
(The author is a lawyer & writer based in Bengaluru. He is the co-editor of Law like love: Queer perspectives on law.)