I’m not allowed to go to Iran. Neither is my Iranian-born mother, nor my grandparents, aunts, or uncles. When I first heard that they could be killed if they returned, I thought it was a joke. I was eight years old.
Though I can’t go to Iran, I do what I can to make Iran come to me. Much of my connection to Iran has been forged through the consumption of Iranian news and media. Not long ago, after reading a story in The Guardian my aunt had written regarding her nostalgia for the Caspian Sea, I texted and asked about her “aunt’s husband,” briefly mentioned in the article.
“Who was your aunt’s husband?”
“Siavosh Bayani.”
“Is he still alive?”
“No.”
I searched up that name and found some headlines: “US Spy Hanged in Tehran,” read one of them.
Since they left, much of my family has kept our homeland at a distance. My grandparents didn’t talk much about Iran. It was hard to watch my grandmother cry when she read the news. My mother was too busy to reflect on a past life, one that seemed so distant and unrelated to the present.
No one in my family wears a hijab. When they fled Iran, they became disillusioned with religion and abandoned Islam. Now in America, when they see other women wearing a hijab without the compulsion of a theocratic state, they can’t help but pass judgment: “Who would choose to wear that?”
Perhaps because of my Western sensibilities, I never shared their hostility toward the hijab. In many liberal circles, it has transformed into a feminist symbol. Last year, the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement’s rejection of the hijab presented an ideological quandary: Is the hijab feminist or a tool of oppression? In the case of Iran, it’s not that simple.
Piety and Perversion
At the turn of the 20th century, the hijab was customary in Iran. However, the ascension of Reza Shah to absolute power in 1925 led to a transformation of Iranian gender politics. Pursuing the development of a more secular state, Reza Shah supported the unveiling of women despite existing cultural and religious stigmas. Going against the clergy, he endorsed and protected women’s rights activists who chose to publicly appear unveiled. He encouraged women to participate in society — particularly, education and the workplace — and unveiling held massive symbolic weight in moving toward that objective. In 1936, Reza Shah banned Islamic veils, and the enforcement of unveiling became state policy.
Reza Shah’s forced abdication in 1941 voided his unveiling decree, but his ideas had become culturally entrenched. By the time his son and successor, Mohamed Reza Pahlavi, took power, social stigmas had been turned on their head. By the 1940s, veiled women were seen as backward, assumed to come from a low-class background, and received fewer employment opportunities.
Just as women in the 1920s ditched the hijab on political — often anti-clerical — grounds, the 1970s witnessed yet another political use of the hijab. As anti-monarchy and anti-Western sentiment grew, donning the hijab became a tool of revolutionary advocacy, representing opposition to the Shah. This became common practice among middle class women, and the unveiled were painted by the Islamist opposition as corrupted by the West and stripped of their honor. They were sometimes harassed and physically attacked by fundamentalist revolutionaries.
In 1979, Ruhollah Khomeini came to power in the Iranian Revolution, proclaiming the Islamic Republic and ending 2,500 years of Iranian monarchy. He swiftly addressed the issue of women’s fashion and sexuality, declaring on March 7, 1979 that women must wear veils in the workplace and government offices. A day later — not incidentally, International Women’s Day — many of the non-conservative women who had previously veiled in opposition to the Shah took to the streets. They would not stand for mandatory veiling: “We did not have a revolution to take a step backwards,” chanted many.
But life under the Islamic Republic was in fact a great leap backwards for Iranian women. “Back to dog status,” as one protest leader put it. For decades, the “morality police” has violently enforced Islamic law and mandatory veiling, allegedly killing 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in September of 2022 and 17-year-old Armita Geravand last October, among many others.
Before the revolution, the enfranchisement of women was a central grievance of Khomeini against the Shah. In fact, he tried to pervert his misogynistic ideology into an ostensibly feminist cause. In the 1970s, Iranian women were quite simply freer than ever, dressing as they pleased, attending university, and constructing identities on their own terms. Khomeini, instead of recognizing this reality, conflated women’s freedom with what he considered the sexual depravity of the toxic West.
He lamented in 1970, “Sexual vice has now reached such proportions that it is destroying entire generations, corrupting our youth, and causing them to neglect all forms of work! They are all rushing to enjoy the various forms of vice that have become so freely available and so enthusiastically promoted.”
By veiling, Khomeini claimed that women would no longer be subject to the sexual objectification characteristic of the West. In Khomeini’s Islamic utopia, men were to lower their gaze and women were to behave modestly. But Iranian mullahs’ strange obsession with sex and senior officials’ involvement in brothels suggests that they do not practice as they preach.
In fact, in spite of the regime’s efforts to quell sexual desire, Iranians have never been more obsessed with sex. Illegal prostitution is rampant throughout Tehran and young Iranians watch pornography via satellite TV. The Iranian parliament has essentially codified male adultery through Sharia-sanctioned “temporary marriages.”
Khomeini was no feminist. He politicized sexuality because of its Western connotations, and now the regime can hardly manage its people’s pent-up frustrations. The hijab was evidently central in his battle against sexuality — the Islamic Republic’s first president posited that a woman’s hair emitted sexually arousing rays — and mandatory veiling should thus be understood as a political power play.
Khomeini did not uphold Islam — he hijacked it.
An Existential Issue
When Iranian women set fire to their hijabs last fall in nationwide protests, it wasn’t simply a rejection of a clothing item. It was a rejection of the state itself. Unveiling is the first step toward the greater participation of women in Iranian society, a direct threat to the traditional power base of the clergy that runs Iran.
For current Supreme Leader Khamenei, veiling is what “prevents our society from being plunged into corruption and turmoil.” Unveiling is a “gateway freedom,” in the words of Iranian author Azadeh Moaveni, and the hijab symbolically underlies the Islamic Republic’s authority over ordinary Iranians. It is fitting that Khamenei associates unveiling with “fitna,” a word sometimes translated as “sedition” and used by those in power to describe the 2009 Green Movement and, more recently, the Mahsa Amini protests.
In 2003, Khamenei asserted on state TV: “More than Iran’s enemies need artillery, guns, and so forth, they need to spread cultural values that lead to moral corruption … I recently read in the news that a senior official in an important American political center said: ‘Instead of bombs, send them miniskirts.’”
Iranian leadership views female beauty as a greater threat to state power than military invasion because of the former’s sociopolitical implications. The judicial system has revealed that veiling transgressions are taken more seriously than domestic homicide. Just last year, Sajjad Heydari beheaded his 17-year-old wife, strolling through the streets of Ahvaz with a dagger in one hand and his wife Mona’s head in the other. He was sentenced to eight years and two months in prison. Filmmaker Mojgan Ilanlu was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 74 lashes for posting pictures of herself unveiled.
In the wake of last year’s protests, women have proudly forsaken the hijab as they roam public spaces. In doing so, they are reclaiming their agency and resisting the state’s colonization of every mundane aspect of their lives. For all Iranians, but especially women, the revolution did not go according to plan. Now, they are recovering the moral agency, youth, and human dignity denied to them by a few elderly clerics.
An Issue of Agency
The Iranian regime’s policy of mandatory veiling is yet another case of an authoritarian power exercising its control and consolidating its power through a denial of agency. Standing with Iranian women has nothing to do with criticism of the hijab or Islam. The Islamic Republic’s own treatment of the hijab has nothing to do with Islam — they have perverted the hijab into a political tool, holding Islam hostage in the process.
While Iranian women struggle in their quest to put the hijab behind them, women in other parts of the world struggle for the right to wear one. In southern India, Muslim girls banned from wearing the hijab in school are suing for the right to keep them on. Various countries in the West have instituted hijab bans. On top of that, there remains a general stigma associated with the hijab, which may discourage Muslim women from wearing it.
This is not about Islam. It’s about my mother, who at 10 years old was strangled by a schoolteacher for an improperly worn hijab. Denigrated as a “dirty, dirty whore,” her teacher threatened her, “I’m going to break your arms, then I’m going to break your face, then we’ll see what you look like after I’m through with you!” My mother never told me this story. I had to find out through a story published by my aunt last year.
Speaking with Time, writer Assal Rad offered an explanation as to why Mahsa Amini’s death in police custody for an alleged offense of “bad hijabi” inflamed such widespread backlash: “It’s the fact that it could have been anybody; millions of Iranian women wear this hijab loosely.” Reading about my mother’s trauma 44 years after it happened placed the issue in a different light for me. When Iranian women are brutally assaulted for not veiling properly, it’s not just that it could’ve been my mother — it was her.
