The clothing obligation for women in Iran is one of the most important instruments of restriction of their rights. But it is also true when the ban is the opposite, against the hijab, as is the case in some places in India, France or Spain.
The political use of the female body and the Muslim headscarf has a long history. In the case of Iran, the traditional chador was prohibited from 1936 until the 1979 Revolution, which made the hijab compulsory in all public spaces.
In both circumstances, it is about clothing regulations directed only to a part of the population, which is forced to dress or not dress in a certain way and whose reason for being rests on the same conception of women’s bodies on the that it seems legitimate to decide and exercise any type of coercion and violence.
Mahsa (Jina) Amini, the Iranian Kurdish woman murdered in Tehran on September 16 by the morality police, allegedly for not wearing the hijab according to the law, is one of the latest victims of an authoritarian regime that exercises tight control over the entire population.
These restrictive policies are especially harsh for women, since they not only translate into rigid clothing regulations, but also into others that sanction inequality between men and women by law.
With the arrival to the presidency of Ebrahim Raisi, after years of protests caused by a strong economic and political crisis, the control that the regime exercises through the moral police, which persecute and control especially women, has intensified. Amini’s death has been the trigger for a wave of protests focused, more than ever, on the struggle of women against unbearable authoritarianism.
wave of solidarity
Iranian women have generated a wonderful wave of feminist solidarity, making their protest heard around the world. However, many of the analyzes still focus on the hijab, and not on its imposition, to explain what is happening. The headscarf is decontextualized, that is, it is considered to be the same in any place and in any historical moment and this contributes to not influencing the political responsibility of a regime that uses its religious legitimacy to persecute women.
This exercise in extrapolating and fetishizing the hijab immediately transforms Iranian women into representatives of all Muslim women in the world, who are assumed to have a universal desire to remove their headscarves. In this way, the struggles of the Iranians themselves are diluted, but also those of thousands of Muslim women who have to live their day-to-day lives in contexts in which –unlike in Iran– the use of the hijab is criminalized and sanctioned. This is the case in France, or even in Spain, where it is also prohibited, although there is no legal regulation in this regard, as we have been seeing for years in some educational centers.
Several women protest against the ban on wearing the hijab in high schools and universities in Karnataka, India. /
Saving Narratives
In Feminisms before Islam. The veil and women’s bodies, we analyzed how the obsession with the hijab, its dominant construction as a symbol of the oppression of Muslim women and the situation of underdevelopment in Islamic contexts, has its roots in the colonialism of the XIX and XX centuries.
In colonial Algeria and during the country’s war of liberation, France organized collective ceremonies in which Algerian women were admonished and instigated – when not pressured – to burn their veils in order to “free themselves”. Today women are burning scarves in Iran to show their opposition to a regime that legislates over their bodies to control them.
It is a curtailment of freedoms that also occurs in certain European countries where sexist and racist policies are being applied that impose only on Muslim women a certain corporality, without a headscarf, sometimes in the name of feminism.
We must ask ourselves about the meaning of these restrictions in each case: what happens when it is an authoritarian regime like the Iranian that imposes clothing and what happens when this same clothing is prohibited in the name of democracy and freedoms? It happens that a perverse and paradoxical logic is used that allows supporting both the legitimate struggle of Iranian women, as well as the prohibition of the headscarf for Muslim women in Europe, most of them of immigrant origin. It follows from this argument that the only problem for Muslim women – anywhere, anytime – seems to be the hijab. In short, they are essentialized, reproducing once again the saving narratives that have been so functional to imperialist and racist projects.
It was the Russians who started the Revolution of 1917 claiming bread. Perhaps the struggles of Iranian feminists and internationalist feminism for the right to the body will also push other revolutionary processes that end murderous regimes. Let us support the protests of Iranian women against the imposition of the hijab and let us also make ours the struggle of other Muslim women in Europe who are fighting to be able to wear it.
This article has been published in ‘The Conversation‘.
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