Unveiled and Rising Up: How Protests in Iran Cut to the Heart of National Identity

Unveiled and Rising Up: How Protests in Iran Cut to the Heart of National Identity

New York Times – Oct 6th 2022

Long before protests started spreading across Iran last month, the hijab — the Islamic head scarf that Iranian law requires women to wear in public, along with loose-fitting modest clothing — had been at the center of conflicts over national identity, religious authority and political power for decades.

Worn by mandate, the veil has long served as a reminder of the Islamic Republic’s power. But now, stripped off and waved in furious protest by young women, it has come to symbolize the gulf between the population’s demands and what the government is willing, or even able, to provide.

Enforcement of the modesty laws was the apparent reason the country’s morality police arrested Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, several weeks ago. The police claimed that Ms. Amini had collapsed suddenly from a heart attack during mandatory training on the hijab rules while in custody. But when a video and photo of her in the hospital in a coma, bruises on her face and blood dripping from her ear, were shared online, they quickly went viral — and provoked fury. After she died a few days later, the protests exploded into the largest mass demonstrations Iran has seen for years.

But this was much more than anger over a tragic, scandalous death. The protests, led by women, have galvanized a broad swath of Iranian society to rise up in one of the most significant political movements that the Islamic Republic has seen since its founding in 1979.

Ms. Amini’s death was the spark for the protests. But the tinder that turned them into a conflagration was a series of changes that has been playing out for decades in Iran, leaving the hard-line government increasingly out of step with the demands of the population.

Ideological battles, women’s bodies

The politicization of the veil began not with the Islamic Republic’s law mandating it, but with a far earlier law prohibiting women from wearing it in public.

In 1936, Reza Shah Pahlavi — the father of the shah deposed in the 1979 revolution — barred women from wearing the veil, or hijab, in public, in an effort to Westernize Iran. Women who wore the veil in public could have it forcibly yanked off their heads, which effectively confined many religious women, and those from conservative families, to their homes, said Mona Tajali, a professor of international relations at Agnes Scott College in Georgia and the author of “Women’s Political Representation in Iran and Turkey: Demanding a Seat at the Table.”

That law was so unpopular that it lasted only a few years. But it was enough to cement the hijab as a symbol not just of religious identity, but also of battles over national identity.