The Iranian protests were first instigated when 22-year-old Mahsa Amin was announced dead after being detained by the Iranian morality police for violating the dress code. The protests have captivated excessive media coverage that misrepresents the conflict as a simple revolt against the Hijab, an Islamic headscarf. The Hijab has always been a collective issue in the Muslim world and globally. It has had significance in the political, religious, and social realms. Controversy is raised over choice vs. obligation, clothing item vs. symbol of oppression, and religious identity vs. political statement. News headlines were plastered with images of Iranian women burning their hijabs without context, history, or understanding of the conflict. This article dives into how this narrative oversimplifies the revolt as a fight against Islam rather than looking deeper into the Iranian people’s grievances, such as their economic hardship, minority rights, and social conditions.

It is important to remember that the Iranian people have been rising against the Islamic regime since it came to power in 1979. However, the media’s binary vision of Secularism vs. Religion; hence, the west vs. Islam plays right into the Islamophobic narrative. This is the simple case of highlighting the dominant orientalist narrative that serves to frame the conflict in line with us vs. them rhetoric, the democratic secular west as opposed to the medieval oppressive east. This reduces the conflict to a revolt against religion rather than a political crisis. In the name of orientalism, the east is romanticized as a place where women once wandered the streets in miniskirts and other western attire until the medieval values of Islam reverted the region back to the dark ages.

(Photo by Leonardo Munoz/VIEWpress)

This tale serves the simple purpose of legitimizing foreign intervention under the belief that women needed ‘saving.’ Throughout history, this imperial feminist rhetoric has been used to consolidate public support. Western women supported the military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan under the belief that they were saving oppressed women. Ironically, during the Arab spring women wore the hijab as a form of protest against oppressive western domination. The Iranian protests serve as a good example that women in the Muslim world do not need saving; well at least not from western intervention or war.   

In reality, the only true losers, in this case, are women. Women’s bodies have been a political statement for both religious extremists and secular extremists. The policing of female bodies is not a battle of religion but a political statement. The west defines freedom as the liberation of the female body, exposing one’s body has become freedom of expression. However, they hypocritically ignore the fact that freedom of expression is subjective, it could come from covering one’s body too. Therefore, the west does not have the privilege of taking the moral high ground in the Iranian case as France, Denmark, Netherlands, Austria, Germany, Bulgaria, Belgium, and Switzerland have all engaged in state oppression with partial or total bans on the Hijab. Thus, eradicating the freedom of expression of women who choose to veil. In both cases, women are standing for the same cause; the oppression and state policing of female bodies. Clothing is not enough to determine the measure of freedom, if women in Iran are not free because they are forced to put on the hijab then the same principle must apply to the Muslim women in the west who are forced to take off their hijab.

Moving forward, reshaping the narrative to highlight the Iranian people’s needs is crucial. The removal of the Hijab is a symbol; one that aims to display the rejection of oppression imposed on the Iranian people by the Islamic state. The Iranian people are not simply fighting to undress; to assume so undermines their cause and their grievances. This is a protest against a violent system that continuously violates human and minority rights.

Rowa Kordi

Undergraduate student – Koc University & Erasmus University