The irony of Iranian women agitating against the hijab and Indian schoolgirls insisting on wearing it has not gone unnoticed. It’s no clash of civilisations, though—both are insisting on the right to be left alone. The real irony is that Indian opinionators, who should know better due to historical influences, apparently don’t get the picture, and Iranians on the net are politely asking them to leave Iran alone.
But it’s the New Yorker that has pushed the envelope, projecting New York activist Masih Alinejad as ‘The Exiled Dissident Fuelling the Hijab Protests in Iran’. That’s the headline of their thrilling story, and the claim is so bizarre that its subject, who did originate the White Wednesday online movement in 2017—it did not actually reject Islamic clothing—has had to clarify that the real leaders of the movement are, naturally, in Iran, not in NYC. Marjane Satrapi, the author of the bestselling graphic novel Persepolis, said that they were fighting for democracy, whose biggest enemy is the patriarchy.
That clear binary sets Indian observers apart from Iran. We have many more inequalities to address, almost all of which spring from patriarchy and its prominence in organised religion. Other nationalities find it difficult to understand that a thread looped over the shoulder can be a passport to power, opening doors everywhere and shutting them hard on the face of threadless people. They are alarmed to learn how easily that thread is exported to Silicon Valley and US university campuses, hidden under a T-shirt and hoodie. Cultural markers are rooted in a social context, and while we may understand what’s going on with the hijab in Karnataka schools and why the matter has reached the Supreme Court, we don’t really know of the context in Iran. How much could you possibly learn from watching Argo?
So let’s leave the Iranians alone to interpret their movement as advised. It’s obvious, though, that it will alter perceptions of modesty, the fluid, an undefined but universally understood notion which is behind all cover-ups. A senseless death at the altar of modesty moves the public powerfully and immediately. Mahsa Amini, 22, was picked up for keeping her hijab loosely tied, and in some days, she was dead. Hours later, protests broke out in which women cut their hair and burned their hijabs. Now, who knows how many are dead?
Real fires are being lit, unlike in the Sixties bra-burning, which was an urban legend that American feminists had tried hard to quash. The truth is that at a protest against a beauty pageant in New Jersey, women chucked their semiotically potent lipstick and high heels into a “freedom trash can”, and then someone shucked her bra from under her shirt and threw it in, too. It wasn’t set on fire, but the act lit a flame that refused to die out. Now, the movement against the headcloth is spreading much faster, leaping to The Levant and on to Europe.
In collateral damage, Christiane Amanpour lost an interview with Iran President Ebrahim Raisi in New York. He had insisted that she wear a headcloth, as she would have had to do if the interview was held in Iran. She refused. Viewers wondered about the effect if she had agreed—and then taken the headcloth off during the interview. It would have rocked the TRPs, at least.
In the popular imagination, Saudi Arabia is the true home of Muslim modesty, but that’s not true anymore. The hijab is legally prescribed only in Iran and Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia made it optional during the 2018 reforms of Crown Prince Salman (who was made prime minister on Wednesday), though it remains in universal use out of cultural inertia. The rest of the attire has changed. Girls wear abayas cut like robes in a kung fu movie, and it’s fine.
The Saudi religious police, the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice or Mutaween, widely accepted as a positive force since the Seventies—they hunted down Barbie dolls, so they were politically correct, sort of—and enjoyed police powers, lost them when people died because of their actions, exactly like in Iran now. In a car chase, a father drove off a bridge with his family. In 2010, a man was severely punished for appearing in an amateur gay video. Fortune-tellers were tormented. Like the Indian loony right, the Mutaween became holy terrors on Valentine’s Day. But the turning point was the 2002 girls’ school fire in Mecca, in which the moral police physically beat fleeing girls because they were not modestly dressed, and 15 died.
Modesty has also taken a toll outside the Islamic countries. In 1943, in the St Joseph’s Orphanage in Cavan, Ireland, nuns of the order of Poor Clares apparently precipitated a tragedy when a fire broke out at night, but they did not evacuate the premises because it would be indecent for the girls to be seen in their nightgowns.
The Saudi moral police lost their powers when state violence caused deaths. Their peers in Iran will go the same way, eventually. People instinctively know that the gift of life is more valuable than the social construct of modesty.
But modesty without frighteners invites satire. The Victorians were apparently such prudes that they clothed table legs in frilly, skinny-fit trousers for fear of inflaming the baser appetites, but that’s another urban legend. It was originally a dig that the English naval author Captain Frederick Marryat (author of Mr Midshipman Easy for adults and The Children of the New Forest for kids) took at puritanical 19th century Americans he was visiting in A Diary in America. Incredibly, it rebounded on the English, and the Americans escaped unscathed, and the world now believes they’re the ones liberating the world from prudery. That’s irony for you!
Pratik Kanjilal
(Tweets @pratik_k)
Editor of The India Cable