Rita Panahi: Plight of Iranian women ignored by Western feminists

Iranian women are risking their lives to protest against tyranny, but their struggle isn’t receiving the sort of support one would hope from Western feminists.

Right now the courageous women of Iran are risking their lives protesting against the country’s compulsory hijab laws.

Nationwide protests erupted three weeks ago after a young woman, Mahsa Amini, died in custody.

She was violently arrested by the morality police for allegedly wearing her headscarf loosely and revealing too much hair.

That is the plight of women living in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

That’s why at great personal risk women are marching in their tens of thousands, supported by like-minded men, who want an end to the backward laws of the mad mullahs who have ruled the country since the Islamic Revolution of the late 1970s.

A protester holds a portrait of Mahsa Amini during a demonstration.

Dozens of protesters have been killed but sadly their struggle isn’t receiving the sort of support one would hope from Western feminists.

Too often the Left turn a blind eye to the plight of genuinely oppressed women for fear of creating “Islamophobia”. They celebrate Muslim veils as symbols of diversity, even as women in Iran are beaten, locked up and killed for fighting against compulsory hijab laws.

For millions of women living under Islam these garments are symbols of subjugation.

There’s good reason why the majority of Muslim women in the West do not to wear the hijab and why women’s rights campaigners living under Islam fight against compulsory veiling. These brave warriors are not risking their lives to protest against a piece of cloth.

It represents much more than that.

Iranian women weren’t always subjected to sharia law.

Before the Islamic Revolution, women of my mother’s generation were relatively free.

They wore miniskirts, tube tops and had beehive hairdos.

Now their daughters want to reclaim the freedoms their mothers lost when the country fell to the Islamists.