Golshifteh Farahani is an Iranian actress who has lived in exile since 2008. She was reportedly under investigation in her home country after appearing in the Hollywood film Body of Lies without wearing a hijab. The movie starred Leonard DiCaprio and Russell Crowe and according to the Los Angeles Times, it set off a bootlegging frenzy in Teheran. Settling in France, she assured she wouldn’t be welcome back by posing nude for French magazines.
In an opinion piece in Friday’s New York Times, Farahani takes Western feminists to task for not being quicker and more vocal in their support of the protests that began in September in response to the death of Kurdish-Iranian Mahsa Amini at the hands of the Guidance Patrol officers.
The latest outpouring of rage started on September 16, triggered by the death of the 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish student Mahsa Amini, who was bundled into a morality-police van reportedly for wearing tight trousers. Witnesses say she was violently beaten in the van and later collapsed inside a correction center, before being transported to a hospital where she died three days later.
Teheran police chief Brigadier-General Hossein Rahimi said she was also guilty of wearing her headscarf improperly. The incident served as a last straw for a generation of Iranians who have long chafed under the strict rules of the Islamic Republic. But I think Farahani goes too far with the following description of the principles involved.
So why is this uprising different? This time, there are no shades of gray. What Iran’s Generation Z wants is very simple: Freedom. Freedom of choice. Freedom for Iranian women to behave, dress, act, walk and talk as equals to Iranian men. There is no ideology involved, no formal political movement from the right or left. The simplicity of the demand for freedom is what makes it so powerful. There are no two perspectives. There is no complex argument. There is no room for confusion.
I feel this is the reason previous uprisings, some more violent and brutally suppressed, did not succeed and did not attract the same attention worldwide.
For this to be accurate, we’d have to completely dismiss the perspective of the government and its supporters. There are quite obviously at least two perspectives about the hijab law that went into effect in 1983 and how central it is to the identity of the revolutionary government. It should be noted that the first hijab law sought to ban the practice rather than making it mandatory.
The first attempt to use hijab as the subject of legislation was in 1936 by a new monarch, Reza Shah (1925-1941), who wanted to force women to remove the veil in public under his “unveiling” order. The shah’s vision of modernity, influenced by Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, included changing what Iranian women wore.
For almost 90 years, the ideological battle in Iran between tradition and modernity and western versus Islamic values has been caught up in what women are permitted to wear. Since 1979, and especially 1983, the question has been implicated in support or opposition to the revolution’s legitimacy and principles.
This becomes clear when we look at what the Iranian protesters in Iran are demanding. The want to overthrow the Islamic government. Some are just yelling this in the streets, but others want it done through a referendum.
In a largely leaderless revolution, clerics and some students are making demands that the regime try to resolve the crisis by holding an immediate referendum with the presence of international observers. The original Iranian revolution in 1979 was endorsed by a simple referendum in which all Iranians aged over 16 were asked: “Should Iran be an Islamic Republic?”
The call for a new referendum was first made by Iran’s leading Sunni cleric Molavi Abdulhamid, who is based in the south-eastern city of Zahedan. “Hold a referendum and see what changes people want and accept whatever the wishes of the people. The current policies have reached a dead end,” he said.
“This constitution itself was approved 43 years ago and those who compiled it have all left and another generation has come. This law should also be changed and updated. Many clauses of this law are not up to date.
“It has been said many times that this law should be put to a referendum, but unfortunately nothing has been done and even the same law of 43 years ago has not been properly implemented.”
It’s unsurprising that a Sunni cleric would prefer not live under a Shi’a constitution, but that view is shared by most of the protesters whether they’re ethnic or religious minorities or not. It’s hard to see how this can truly lack an ideological component, unless we don’t consider the clerics who run Iran and their supporters to have an ideology.
These protests are about regime change, essentially, but that implicates so much more than women’s rights. It implicates everything the Islamic government has done in foreign policy in the Middle East (and now in Ukraine) since the fall of the Shah. It has implications for the country’s foreign relations pretty much anywhere you look, from Israel, the USA and the UK, to Russia, to Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Lebanon.
In the end of her piece, Farahani makes a plea for support.
But this movement will fall apart without you. We don’t need military interventions. Even political interventions are viewed with suspicion by so many people in the Middle East. The foreign involvement in the 1953 coup d’état against Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh is deeply ingrained in the Iranian psyche.
A movement like this needs raised voices of support. Remaining silent is being complicit. The way I see it, ignoring Iranian women and their courageous fight means turning your back on centuries of women’s struggles for freedom and equality.
I agree with her on two points. This movement deserves our moral support and Western help should not come in a military form. But I don’t agree that the movement will fall apart without us. As she notes, Iranians are suspicious of Western meddling in their affairs, and nothing is more meddlesome that lending aid and comfort to a movement in the process of overthrowing their government. I’d love to see them succeed, and precisely for that reason, we should be conscientious about keeping this an Iranian-led affair.
It started out as about women’s rights, and success in Iran could lead to advances for women throughout the Middle East and beyond. But we can’t look at this conflict through such a narrow lens. Everyone has their own reasons for wanting to see the clerics in Iran survive or fail, but it’s up to the Iranians to resolve.
