The dress code for women in Iran is one of the most important instruments to limit 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 banned from 1936 until the 1979 revolution, making the hijab mandatory in all public areas.
In both cases, it is a question of dress codes that are only aimed at a part of the population, who should or should not dress in a certain way and whose raison d’être is based on the same conception of women’s bodies on the fact that it seems legitimate to decide and of coercion and violence.
Mahsa (Jina) Amini, the Iranian Kurdish woman murdered by vice squads in Tehran on September 16, allegedly for not wearing a hijab under the law, is one of the latest victims of an authoritarian regime that tightly controls the entire population holds .
This restrictive policy is especially harsh on women, as it not only leads to strict dress codes, but also others that penalize gender inequality by law.
With the arrival of the presidency of Ebrahim Raisi, after years of protests triggered by a severe economic and political crisis, the control exercised by the regime through the moral police, which persecutes and controls women in particular, has intensified. Amini’s death sparked a wave of protests, more than ever focused on women’s struggles against intolerable authoritarianism.
Iranian women have generated a wonderful wave of feminist solidarity, whose protest has been heard all over the world. However, much of the analysis still focuses on the hijab, not imposing it, to explain what is happening. The headscarf has been decontextualized, i.e. it is considered the same everywhere and at every historical moment, and this helps to ensure that the political responsibility of a regime that uses its religious legitimacy to persecute women is not affected.
This practice of extrapolating and fetishizing the hijab instantly transforms Iranian women into representatives of all Muslim women in the world, who are believed to have a universal desire to take off their headscarves. In this way, the struggle of the Iranians themselves is diluted, but also that of thousands of Muslim women who have to live their daily lives in a context where – unlike in Iran – the use of the hijab is criminalized and punished . This is the case in France, or even Spain, where it is also banned, although there is no legal regulation in this area, as we have seen for years in some educational centers.
In Feminisms for Islam. With the veil and the female body, 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 19th and 20th centuries.
In colonial Algeria and during the country’s war of liberation, France staged collective ceremonies in which Algerian women were urged and urged — when not pressured — to burn their veils to “liberate themselves.” Today, women burn scarves in Iran to show their resistance to a regime that makes laws over their bodies to control them.
It is a curtailment of freedoms that also occurs in certain European countries where there are sexist and racist policies that impose a certain physicality on only Muslim women, without a headscarf, sometimes in the name of feminism.
We always have to ask ourselves what these restrictions mean: what happens if an authoritarian regime like the Iranian imposes clothing and what happens if the same clothing is banned in the name of democracy and freedoms? It happens that a perverse and paradoxical logic is used that makes it possible to support both the legitimate struggle of Iranian women and the ban on 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 – everywhere and at all times – seems to be the hijab. In short, they are essentialist, reproducing the saving stories that were so functional for imperialist and racist projects.
It was the Russians who started the 1917 revolution and claimed bread. Perhaps the struggle of Iranian feminists and internationalist feminism for the right to the body will also stimulate other revolutionary processes that end murderous regimes. Let’s support the protests of Iranian women against the imposition of the hijab and also fight other Muslim women in Europe who are fighting to wear it.
This article was published in ‘The conversation‘.
Source: La Verdad
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