Iranian Women Anti Hejab Protests
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What will IRI do, arrest half the population?Anti-hijab protesters defy Iranian authorities after the arrest of nearly 30 women for not wearing headscarves Alastair Tancred
Daily Mail
http://www.dailymail.co.uk* Symbolic protests took place throughout the country by defiant women
* Images posted on social media show the women uncovered in public places
* A prominent activist meanwhile describes the hijab as a 'symbol of oppression'
* 'It is the 21st century and we want to be our true selves,' Masih Alinejad said
Protests against the compulsory wearing of hijabs in Iran have continued despite the arrests earlier this week of 29 women for appearing in public without a headscarf.
Symbolic protests took place throughout the country this week with women posting videos and photographs on social media of themselves standing on utility boxes, street sidewalks and other public places as they defiantly waved their hijabs.
Chief Prosecutor Mohammad Jafar Montazeri played down the escalating protests on Wednesday, saying they were 'trivial' and 'childish' moves possibly incited by foreigners.
The defiance of the women comes as an influential Iranian activist said that disquiet over the hijab showed that women are symbolically rejecting the wider 'interference of religion' in their lives.
'We are fighting against the most visible symbol of oppression,' said Masih Alinejad, who hosts the website My Stealthy Freedom where women in Iran post photos of themselves without hijabs.
Under Iran's Islamic law, imposed after the 1979 revolution, women are obliged to cover their hair with a scarf, known as a hijab, and wear long, loose-fitting clothes. Violators are publicly admonished, fined or arrested.
'These women are saying, 'It is enough - it is the 21st century and we want to be our true selves,'' the Iranian activist told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Iranian police said on Thursday that 29 women who took part in the campaign had been arrested in Iran for protesting against the country's compulsory hijab rules, the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported.
Those arrested were accused of public order offences and referred to the state prosecutor's office, Iranian media reported.
Alinejad said the protests picked up momentum after video and images were posted online of a woman waving a white scarf on a stick in December - a day before demonstrations erupted against economic conditions in eastern Iran.
Unrest quickly spread across the country and the focus broadened as protesters began calling for Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to step down.
The video went viral as police cracked down, and Alinejad said the woman was arrested. She has since been released, according to a Facebook post by Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh.
On Monday, a woman named locally as Nargess Hosseini, was arrested after standing on an electricity box in central Tehran, waving her head scarf in front of her.
Journalist and campaigner Masih Alinejad, the founder of the White Wednesdays and My Stealthy Freedom movements, which fights the compulsory hijab in Iran, has claimed that Ms Hosseini's bail has been set at a record-high level to detain others from protesting.
'While the law imposes a maximum of $12 or two months of jail time, the court has recently asked for a bail of $125,000 to release one of the newly detained women,' Ms Alinejad tweeted Thursday.
A prominent human rights lawyer told AFP on Tuesday that one of the detained women had her bail set at more than $100,000 (80,000 euros).
Although the wider anti-government demonstrations have ended, women across Iran are 'fed up' and continue to protest against 'the interference of religion in our personal lives', said the activist.
Alinejad said she is now flooded with videos and photos of women imitating the viral video and she shares them on the My Stealthy Freedom Twitter account and Facebook page.
'These people are not fighting against a piece of cloth, they are fighting against the ideology behind compulsory hijab,' said Alinejad, who called the movement the 'true face of feminism'.
To campaign against the obligatory wearing of headscarves, Alinejad last year encouraged women to take videos or photos of themselves wearing white and upload them on social media with the hashtag #whitewednesdays.
The #whitewednesdays campaign is part of a larger online movement started three years ago by Alinejad, a journalist who has lived in self-imposed exile since 2009. She has received death threats since her campaigning started.
'I wake up everyday with the voices of these women in my inbox,' said Alinejad from New York where she now lives.
'I am full of hope. Civil disobedience is the first step to gain our victory.'
*
Why Iranian Women Are Taking Off Their Head ScarvesNahid Siamdoust
New York Times
https://www.nytimes.comOn Dec. 27, Vida Movahed stood bareheaded on a utility box on one of Tehran’s busiest thoroughfares, waving her white head scarf on a stick. Within days, images of the 31-year-old, who was detained and then released a few weeks later, had become an iconic symbol.
In the weeks since Ms. Movahed’s peaceful protest of the compulsory hijab, long one of the most visible symbols of the Islamic Republic, dozens of women, and even some men, throughout Iran have followed her lead. So far, at least 29 women in cities throughout the country have been arrested.
These bold acts of defiance against the hijab are unprecedented in the nearly 40-year history of the Islamic Republic, but a movement that may have helped inspire them has been going on for years. It began on the social media account of a Brooklyn-based Iranian journalist named Masih Alinejad. In 2014, Ms. Alinejad started a Facebook page called “My Stealthy Freedom,” urging women to post images of themselves without the hijab in public places. Last year, she launched “White Wednesdays,” inviting women to wear white scarves on Wednesdays in protest of the compulsory hijab law. (Ms. Movahed carried out her protest on a Wednesday and held a white scarf, though her actual allegiance to Ms. Alinejad’s campaign is unknown).
Ms. Alinejad, who worked as a journalist in Iran before emigrating to England in 2009, says her campaign came about by chance. She posted a photo of herself driving her car in Iran without hijab and invited others to share “hidden photos” of themselves on her Facebook page. The overwhelming response — the page now has more than a million followers — prompted her to focus more on the issue. “I was a political reporter, but the women in Iran forced me to care about the issue of personal freedoms,” she told me.
For Ms. Alinejad and the protesters, the struggle against the compulsory hijab is about regaining a woman’s control over her own body, not a matter of questioning the validity of the hijab itself. Now that bareheaded women are joined in these acts by women who proudly wear the full-body chador, it is clear that the movement on the ground is also about a woman’s right to choose how to dress — something that, over the past century, various Iranian leaders have tried to deny.
The founder of the Pahlavi dynasty, Reza Shah, banned the hijab, in a gesture of modernization, in 1936, which effectively put some women under house arrest for years since they could not bear to be uncovered in public. The leader of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, made the hijab compulsory in 1979.
Mass protests by women were unsuccessful in overturning the edict. Pro-hijab campaigners invented the slogan “Ya rusari ya tusari,” which means “Either a cover on the head or a beating,” and supervisory “committees” — often composed of women in full chadors — roamed the streets and punished women they deemed poorly covered. Those who opposed the strict measure called these enforcer women “Fati commando,” a derogatory term that combines Islam — in the nickname Fati for Fatemeh, the prophet’s daughter — and vigilantism.
While the requirements have remained firmly in place, Iranian women have been pushing the boundaries of acceptable hijab for years. Coats have gotten shorter and more fitted and some head scarves are as small as bandannas. This has not gone without notice or punishment: Hijab-related arrests are common and numerous. In 2014, Iranian police announced that “bad hijab” had led to 3.6 million cases of police intervention.
But for years, many women’s rights activists have written off the hijab as secondary to other matters such as political or gender equality rights. In 2006, the One Million Signatures for the Repeal of Discriminatory Laws campaign, one of the most concerted efforts undertaken by Iranian feminists to gain greater rights for women, barely mentions the hijab. Iranian feminists have also been determined to distance themselves from the Western obsession with the hijab, almost overcompensating by minimizing its significance. Western feminists who have visited Iran and willingly worn the hijab have also played a hand in normalizing it.
But fighting discriminatory policies has not resulted in any real change, as the crushed One Million Signatures campaign proved. So now Ms. Alinejad and a younger generation of Iranian women are turning back the focus on the most visible symbol of discrimination, which, they argue, is also the most fundamental. “We are not fighting against a piece of cloth,” Ms. Alinejad told me. “We are fighting for our dignity. If you can’t choose what to put on your head, they won’t let you be in charge of what is in your head, either.” In contrast, Islamic Republic officials argue that the hijab bestows dignity on women.
The government has had a mixed response to the protests. On the day that Vida Movahed climbed on the utility box to protest the hijab, Tehran’s police chief announced that going forward, women would no longer be detained for bad hijab, but would be “educated.” In early January, in response to recent weeks of unrest throughout the country, President Hassan Rouhani went so far as to say, “One cannot force one’s lifestyle on the future generations.” In the past week, faced with a growing wave of civil disobedience, Iran’s general prosecutor called the actions of the women “childish” and the Tehran police said that those who were arrested were “deceived by the ‘no-hijab’ campaign.”
But these young women appear undeterred. Their generation is empowered by a new media ecosystem, one that not only unites protesters but also helps to spread potent images of defiance. Ms. Alinejad believes that the movement has already, in a sense, succeeded. “Women are showing that they are no longer afraid,” she said. “We used to fear the government, now it’s the government that fears women.”
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