Dissent can take many forms. There are times when a single image can project dissent more powerfully than armed resistance. One such image went viral on social media last week. It was the video of a young woman at Tehran’s Islamic Azad University defiantly walking in her underwear. Her long hair is uncovered and she keeps her arms folded in a gesture that is at once steely and protective of her unclothed body.
The woman had been accosted by Iran’s morality police for not wearing her hijab properly. According to eyewitness accounts, she was roughed up by them, and, in protest, took off her clothes and walked around in her underwear. Her act — brave, dramatic, and in some ways desperate — was a stark reminder of Iranian women’s ongoing struggle against the regressive and repressive dress code imposed on them by the country’s hardline theocratic regime, which makes it mandatory for them to cover their heads and wear loose-fitting clothes.
The young woman at Azad University was later surrounded by the police, bundled into a car and taken to an undisclosed location. One Iranian newspaper reported that she had been taken to a psychiatric hospital. The authorities said that she was mentally ill.
‘Crazy’ Women
“Crazy” is, of course, a hoary old descriptor that a male-dominated society routinely uses to insult women who are bold, who do not conform to its ideas of how the female sex should behave, and who, above all, seek equal rights with men (Donald Trump, who has just been re-elected as President of the United States, regularly deploys the term against women who stand up to him). So it is no surprise that a regime as misogynistic as the Islamic Republic of Iran would seek to trivialise the young woman’s courageous protest by dismissing her as unhinged.
The diktat of compulsory hijab for women came into force in Iran after the revolution of 1979, which put the Islamic clerics in power. Since then, it has been ruthlessly enforced by the country’s morality police. Violators can be arrested, beaten, fined, imprisoned or taken to “re-education” centres where they are sought to be indoctrinated in the virtues of wearing the Islamic headdress.
The Death Of Mahsa Amini
Even so, Iranian women have consistently resisted the autocratic state’s loathsome attempt to control their bodies, which really translates into controlling their lives. In 2022 their rage over the draconian dress code and laws that keep them as second-class citizens boiled over when a 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini, was arrested and assaulted by the morality police for not wearing her hijab in the proper way. Amini died of her injuries three days later.
The outrage over Amini’s death sparked massive protests and many women showed their defiance by cutting off their hair and dispensing with their headscarves. Their rallying cry, “Women, Life, Freedom” rang out, not just across the country, but all over the world. Human rights groups say that more than 500 people were killed and thousands detained by Iran’s law enforcement forces during the protests.
The subjugation of women in Iran plays out in other ways, too — by permitting child marriage, by limiting their access to divorce, child custody, and so on. Iranian women have the lowest employment rate among women in other Islamic countries in the Middle East, barring Afghanistan. According to World Bank data, Iranian women’s labour participation rate in 2020 was 19%, compared to, say, 51.8% in Qatar or 30.5% in Oman (as of 2019). You cannot restrict the human rights of one-half of a population and not pay a price in terms of their human development.
Trump’s Sinister Return
However, the impulse to control women’s bodies and curb their freedom of choice is hardly confined to medievalist theocracies. Women in large swathes of India see their freedom of choice trampled, be it in their choice of what to wear, how far to study, whom to love or marry, whether to work or where to work. We may not have a band of morality police surveilling and rounding up women who defy the code of modesty, but the fact is that many of our women have little ownership over their own bodies. Their bodies are controlled by social and familial dictates, controlled by the fear of sexual violence, controlled by the fear of being slut-shamed, controlled by fathers who marry them off at will, husbands who decide when they should have a child and how many, or those who feel it is their divine right to beat up their wives.
The sad truth is that even in countries where women had won hard-fought battles to secure equal rights and freedom over their own bodies, there has been a disturbing slideback. In 2022, the conservative majority in the US Supreme Court overturned the landmark Roe v Wade judgement of 1973 that gave American women the right to abortion. It was a stunning act of revisionism, a huge blow to women’s reproductive rights and an institutionalised move to force women to give up control over their bodies and their lives.
An Age-Old Tale Of Oppression
And now that the US has voted Trump back into power, one can only imagine a further hardening of the conservative agenda. The incoming Trump government is widely expected to either institute a nationwide ban on abortion or further restrict women’s access to contraception, reproductive health and, of course, abortion.
When will we see an end to this misogyny? Why is the instinct so deep-rooted in society that each time you feel it has been stamped out and the women set free, it comes right back and thrives anew? Why does the state arrogate to itself the right to determine a woman’s decisions — be they reproductive or sartorial? The only heartening aspect of this millennia-old tale of oppression is that women are never giving up. They will keep fighting. As the young woman in Tehran fought back, standing in her underclothes and turning her body into a searing symbol of resistance against the attempt to control and invisibilise womankind.
(Shuma Raha is a journalist and author)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author