Every Feminist Must Stand with Iranian Women

"Morality police," formal or informal, are garbage.

Photo by Sajad Nori on Unsplash

Iranian women (and many good men) are protesting across the nation after a 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Ahmini, died while in the custody of the morality police. She was apprehended because she was allegedly wearing her hijab incorrectly. These protesters are risking their lives by taking off their headscarfs; some are burning them; some are publicly cutting their hair. They are chanting slogans opposing the Islamic Republic, the morality police, and the dictators they live under.

It’s hugely inspiring, and totally terrifying. Iranian law enforcement understands that these women are a real threat to patriarchal and misogynist rule, and they are cracking down, often violently. According to rights groups, at least seven people have lost their lives in the protests; hundreds have been injured, and hundreds arrested. The government has begun to block the social media platforms where protesters share information and organize.

Women in Iran live under a strict set of rules. As soon as girls hit puberty, they are required to have their heads covered in public, and they must wear loose-fitting clothes. Girls in Iran can be legally married at 13, and their parents can marry them off younger if they choose. Iranian law gives women fewer rights than men in marriage, divorce, inheritance, and work, even though women outnumber men at universities. Women are largely shut out of politics, and particularly from the highest political offices. Women are entitled to just a fraction of the inheritance to which men are entitled when their spouse or parent dies. Men can divorce their wives at will, while women have to beg a religious court to grant them divorces. The husband is the official “head of the family,” and his wife is his subordinate and his subject; she is required to have sex with him at his demand, and he determines her freedom of movement. Being in public without wearing hijab is a criminal offense.

This is not how many women want to live. And for many people in Iran, a young woman who died while in custody of the morality police is simply the last straw after decades of repression and growing financial strain.

And while Iranian women are risking their lives to demand basic freedom and bodily autonomy, Western feminists, I’ve noticed, are remarkably silent on mandatory misogynist modesty cultures outside of Western nations. The same folks who will (rightly) get angry when an American high school principal suspends a female student for wearing spaghetti straps often have very little to say about laws in places like Iran that mandate female modesty. Part of this, I suspect, is the problem of old news and the soft bigotry of low expectations: We get publicly and loudly angry when France bans the headscarf in public schools and offices because we expect France to be better; when Iran mandates it, we shrug, because what else do you expect from a repressive Islamic republic?

And part of the Western feminist silence is out of a well-meaning desire to avoid any perception of Islamophobia. The headscarf in particular has been widely politicized, and wearing it in schools or government buildings has indeed been banned or curtailed in a handful of nations, from France to Belgium to Tunisia to Turkey; until recently, women couldn’t wear headscarves on the floor of Congress in the US. Anti-Muslim sentiment is rife in the United States, and women who wear headscarves and are therefore seen as publicly Muslim are too often harassed, threatened, or abused (just consider the attacks on Ilhan Omar, and how many of them are about her scarf, not her politics). So I understand why, in a US or European context, feminists want to tread lightly.

But feminists also need to support women who are struggling mightily for their basic rights to their own bodies and futures. And feminists need to be honest: And the honest truth is that modesty culture and purity culture — which extend far beyond Islam — are misogynist bullshit.