For a woman who lives in a liberal democracy with freedom of religion written into its constitution, choosing to wear a hijab might be an exercise in personal liberty. But for those women living in Islamic theocracies where the hijab is mandatory, the notion that it represents liberation is a callous deception.
On September 16, a beautiful young Kurdish woman named Mahsa Amini was taken into custody by Iran’s morality police.
Her crime had been to wear her hijab too loosely. The injuries she suffered while in custody caused her to die from cerebral haemorrhage and a fractured skull, with credible witnesses testifying that the injuries were caused by police.
Amini’s death sparked immediate protests outside the hospital in which she was treated, then in the city of Tehran. The protests then spread outwards to other cities around the nation, with protesters chanting “zan, zendegi, azadi” (woman, life, freedom).
In the face of escalating unrest, the Iranian government moved to shut down internet access and a nationwide blackout of social media was implemented on September 19. Estimates from activists and official sources differ, but at least 41 people have been confirmed to have died.
Women have not always had to wear the hijab in Iran.
The legal requirement came to pass only 43 years ago, and on International Women’s Day in 1979 an estimated 100,000 women marched in protest against the mandatory veiling, chanting: “Freedom is not Eastern or Western, it is universal.” Photos and videos of this historic event show the deep rupture that the revolution inflicted on Iranian society.
More than four decades later and women still risk 10 years in prison if they post to social media an image of themselves not wearing a hijab.
One US-based activist who has encouraged women to post photos online of themselves bare-headed must live in a safe house after several assassination attempts against her life.
Nevertheless, despite this history, and despite the numerous testimonies of dissident Muslim women, Western feminists have remained remarkably sanguine about the forced hijab. High-profile American feminist Roxane Gay, for example, has argued: “Western opinions on the hijab or burkas are rather irrelevant.”
It is often argued that Islamophobia is a bigger problem than the oppression of women by Islamic law and that the unveiling of the Muslim woman is a “colonial project”. Fashion magazines such as Glamour run articles on luxury hijabs and Teen Vogue has regular features on “modest fashion”. Our own public broadcaster ran a story about the empowering nature of the hijab just last year.
But while the concept of “modest fashion” sounds perfectly reasonable, the forced hijab is much more than that. In Arabic, hijab means “curtain”, the purpose of which is to “hide one’s beauty from the outside world”.
Peruse international newspapers and you will find stories of women being killed for not hiding themselves adequately.
The fanciful notion that the hijab is a symbol of empowerment or resistance may be able to exist when the struggles of women in the Islamic world are hidden from view. It is easy to write off a handful of dissident Muslim women in the West as being disgruntled or having an axe to grind.
But when protests against the forced hijab spread from Iran to Kurdistan, Syria, Turkey, Cyprus, Greece, Germany, Chile, Britain, the US, Canada and Australia, with thousands of women and men joining the chorus of freedom, such dishonest apologetics will become harder and harder to sustain.
I asked Iranian dissident poet Roya Hakakian what she thought about the protest movement sweeping her home country and she told me: “The success of these women will enable the global community to understand Islamism in a far more nuanced way.”
Sarah Haider, the co-founder of the non-profit organisation, Ex-Muslims of North America, told me: “The struggle is about more than throwing off the hijab, it is about throwing off the rule of a theocracy that lays claim to absolute truth, one that doesn’t hesitate to brutalise those that dare disagree.”
For Western feminists, the forced veiling of women in Islamic theocracies has not been a mobilising issue. More concerned with gender parity on corporate boards, feminists in the West traditionally have shied away from criticising practices in the Islamic world for fear of being labelled Islamophobic or racist. Yet such avoidance has been able to occur only under the cloak of ignorance: if we cannot see women risking their lives to throw off the hijab, then it is much easier for us to believe the hijab is not oppressive. What the past two weeks have done is puncture that ignorance.
Claire Lehmann is founding editor of Quillette.
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In an article in a 2019 edition of Vogue Arabia, American Democratic politician Ilhan Omar can be seen smiling under a black hijab. The headline reads: “To Me, the Hijab Means Power, Liberation, Beauty, and Resistance.”