Iran’s social churn

liberalism versus orthodoxy

During the second fortnight of September, since the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who died in the custody of Iran’s ‘morality police’ over her “inappropriate hijab”, protests over her death have spread across 46 Iranian cities, towns and villages. Many people have been killed in the protests amid clashes with security forces. Crowds in the capital city of Tehran shouted “death to the dictator”, calling for the end of the over three-decade rule of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Iran’s streets are wracked by fierce demonstrations of intense rage, resistance and anger, led mostly by women fighting for their rights, seen burning their headscarves and chopping off their locks, joined by men singing the Persian rendition of the Italian resistance song “Bela Ciao”, evoking memories of resistance in the past, the more recent being the 2019 agitations sparked by a rise in fuel prices.

The recent outrage followed a rather predictable crackdown that is the hallmark of every repressive regime. This time, too, the regime run by President Ebrahim Raisi, who took office last year, has made it clear that it would not shy away from using crushing force – (“decisive action without leniency”, according to Iran’s Judiciary chief, Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei) – against the rioters (“traitors”, according to the Revolutionary Guard Corps), who in our parlance today would be “anti-nationals”.

Iran’s ‘morality police’, also known as ‘guidance patrol’, ‘fashion patrol’, etc., is that country’s official arrangement of what we in India would recognise as vigilante groups that keep a sharp eye on citizens’ “transgressions” such as “love jihad”, partaking of wrong meat, or dressing “improperly”. Established in 2005 to ensure compliance with dress codes, its officers are deployed in public spaces like shopping centres, subway stations, city squares, etc., and are always on the prowl to “re-educate” deviants such as Mahsa Amini, Ghazale Chelavi, Hanane Kia, Mahsa Mogoi, who all paid with their lives. Particularly shocking was the death of Hadis Najafi, a 20-year-old woman, who was getting ready to join the protest against the death of Mahsa Amini. She was shot six times by Iranian security forces in the chest, face and neck.

The ongoing anti-hijab protests must be seen as yet another instance of Iran swinging between progress and regress, torn as it is between the impact of Western views on the hijab in the 19th century on the one hand, and a range of seminarian thinking, on the other.

Iran is divided on the issue of the hijab. While representative thinkers such as Murtaza Mutahhari uphold veiling to be compulsory, or Ahmad Qabil argues for the “desirability” of the hijab, Muhsin Kadivar considers it neither necessary nor desirable. The younger generation of scholars have offered divergent judgements about the hijab. While Iranian women had been spared from wearing the hijab in 1936 by order of Reza Shah, the first Pahlavi monarch, who eased the ban on hijab imposed by his father, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 ended the establishment of the monarchy in Iran and replaced it with an Islamic republic reimposing hijab.

From the middle of the 19th century, Iran had been through a process of social churning that shook the foundations of both political and religious despotism. The 1906 Constitutional Revolution was the fruit of this movement for change, which saw the active participation of intellectuals, minorities, clerics, ordinary people, and enlightened women. Right before the Iranian Revolution in 1979, women were active in all areas of life in Iran as the number of girls attending schools, even universities, increased manifold. In every field except the clergy, Iranian women were visible – as scholars, judges, engineers, police officers, pilots, etc.

What did the Iranian Revolution imply on the ground? The Islamic regime repealed the Family Protection Law which, since 1967, had helped women work outside the home and provided them with substantial rights in their marriage, and had it replaced by the traditional Islamic law, the Sharia. It made polygamy and temporary marriages legal, whereby one man could marry as many women as he desired by contract, renting them for any period from five minutes to 99 years, changed the age of marital consent for girls from 18 to nine years, and made adultery and prostitution punishable by stoning.

All such actions were justified by Ayatollah Khomeini on the pretext of, as Azar Nafisi writes (My Sister, Guard Your Veil; My Brother, Guard Your Eyes: Uncensored Iranian Voices, edited by Lila Azam Zanganeh), “restoring women’s dignity and rescuing them from the degrading and diabolical ideas that had been thrust upon them by Western imperialists and their agents, who had conspired for decades to destroy Iranian culture and traditions.”

Khomeini’s imposition of the veil made women take to the streets, with protests spiralling across the country similar to the current welter in Iran, and finally led to an eight-point manifesto, urging notably why “the decision over women’s clothing, which is determined by custom and the exigencies of geographical location, (should best) be left to women.” If things in Iran now look desperate, one can recall how on February 21, 1994, a gesticulating woman in full view of the crowd in a public square in Tehran, removed her government-mandated veil and full coat, poured gasoline on her body and lit herself on fire. To the horrified crowd watching her, she committed a slow, painful suicide, while screaming, “Death to tyranny! Long live freedom!” in a last, desperate attempt to make the world aware of the slave-like conditions of women in Iran.

Eruptions of large-scale protests despite violent repression — particularly in 2009, 2019, and now in 2022 – show that Iran will continue to be torn between orthodoxy and reformism. Iran saw at least two reformist Presidents for two terms — Mohammad Khatami in 1997 and Hassan Rouhani in 2013 – who could not pull the political system, mired as it is by the bogs of political Islam in a sea of massive national oil revenues and soaring social inequalities – from the clerical stranglehold. But the sobering thing is the emergence of a younger generation who are at the forefront of the protests, with younger women taking on the country’s ruling elite to defend their bodily rights.

Both in the case of Iran and India (where the apex court has reserved judgement on petitions to uphold the right of female students in Karnataka to wear hijab in school), the common lesson that one can draw is that the right to either wear or abandon, or to champion the veil, should rest with women and not with the State.
(The writer is a Kolkata-based commentator on geopolitical affairs, development and cultural issues)