Let's do a little experiment: try looking at this photo, which comes straight from the 1970s. What country would you associate it with? These are young girls full of life, fashionably dressed, with a hopeful look towards the future. Well this photo was taken in Iran. Reading the news these days it seems unbelievable, unreal, to associate such an image with a country like Iran. Instead, this is precisely the reality of the facts.
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The history of the status of women in Iran is laden with contradictions, attempts at modernization, and huge throwbacks to the past. For much of the 20th century, from the 1920s through the 1970s, Shah Reza Pahlav and later his son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, carried out a series of reforms aimed at modernizing the country, most notably the White Revolution that began in 1963 and offered a range of rights to women, from voting to economic support for motherhood. The situation changed dramatically with the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which effectively led to a shift from monarchy to the Shiite Islamic republic, whose constitution is inspired by Quranic law.
Thus, the hijab obligation, which had been abolished in the 1930s, returns (it sounds really surreal but it is so) and Iranian women see their rights thinned out: they can no longer attend sports tournaments, law schools, and are subject to Sharia law (which includes the death penalty for adultery).
Let’s go back to the present day. Just over a month ago, an earthquake erupted: on September 16, 22-year-old Mahasa Amini, a resident of Saqqez, Kurdistan Province, was arrested by the religious police in Tehran while on vacation with her family. The motivation? It sounds like a joke, yet the cause of the arrest is blamed on a hijab worn incorrectly, too loosely. From the police station where she was taken, she emerged in a coma, according to official sources, due to a heart attack, a thesis denied by her family (the girl was in fact in excellent health) and her brother, who, during her hospitalization, noticed bruises and contusions on her sister's body, signs of a beating.
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To die at the age of 20, to die in the prime of one's youth because of an ill-worn hijab, to die in the most barbaric and brutal way possible: the insane illogicality of a law that is applied without the slightest regard for humanity. The sheer brutality of this affair has raised one of the largest waves of protest in recent years.
Iranian women have taken to the streets, heedless of danger, because demonstrating in this situation is an immense risk, if not a death sentence. It is a movement that has spread widely, generating demonstrations, sit-ins, actions of rebellion: these are women young and old who remove their hijabs and cut their hair, an act that in Kurdish culture is a sign of mourning. But it is not only women; men, institutions, and associations have also joined in these protests, which show no signs of stopping. As of Oct. 20, the Human Rights Activists News Agency, Hrana, recorded that since the protests began around Sept. 17, 244 people have died, including 24 children, and more than 12,500 have been arrested.
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Another case, that of athlete Elnaz Rekabi, who participated in the Asian sport climbing championships in South Korea without wearing a veil, has caused a stir in recent days. The woman, who apologized, saying the veil had "inadvertently" slipped, would now find herself under house arrest. The forced confession allegedly came, according to a source reported by the BBC, after threats from the authorities, who would seize her family's assets if she made no statement on the matter. Yet the woman was greeted upon her return to Iran as a heroine. The wind is clearly changing.
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What we are witnessing is one of the greatest waves of protest for the last few years. And it is not only a battle for women: it is a battle for freedom, for the recognition of denied rights, against religious fanaticism, and for the desire, extremely simple, banal, which for that very reason, becomes something terrible when it is trampled upon, to build a future, to exist, even if a lock of hair comes out of the hijab. And today there is an awareness that has never been so acute and a sounding board like that of social media, which outside of performative activism (see various French actresses who cut off a lock of hair to demonstrate their "participation"), where if you want to take the truth outside official bodies, you just do it.
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We cannot predict what the outcome of these protests will be. What we can hope is that this movement, supported also by international associations, may lead to glimmers, to openings, to rebuilding over time a denied freedom. It may seem very idealistic to express such an idea in these times, when darkness, of reason and beyond, seems to envelop the world. But we cannot do without it and we must not do without it, continuing to talk about it, to inform ourselves, to build small lights in this cone of shadow.
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