FIGHTING FOR THE FREEDOM TO CHOOSE
Georgia MacLeod
A diverse movement of Islamic Iranian women protesting the forced wearing of
the hijab highlights the importance of freedom of expression, while Denmark
moves toward enforcing a burqa ban.
My body, my choice. Iranian women are speaking out against the status quo.
Flickr: Amir Farshad Ebrahimi
Two women stand on the hillside in Yasouj Iran, each with an arm raised, holding a stick with an unfastened hijab tethered to the end. One woman is covered from head to toe in cloth, the other lets her hair fly free. Both are protesting Iran’s compulsory hijab. These women are part of a small grassroots movement of people in Iran, who through the platform of social media, are connecting across the nation to campaign for the freedom of choice. It is made up of women who choose to wear the hijab as well as those who do not.
As women in Iran fight for the right to choose how they dress, Denmark is moving to join European nations that are restricting this choice, with plans to ban full face veils in public spaces. The ban on the veiling has been criticised by some as a move that would restrict some women’s freedom of expression and ability to participate in society.
Earlier this month 29 women were arrested in Iran for violating the rule that requires women to wear a headscarf or hijab in public. Omid Memarian, previously imprisoned in Iran and now a US-based Iranian journalist stated recently that “the fight against forced hijab is not about whether the hijab is good or bad! It’s about choice and equality. It’s about dignity. That’s why women who wear the hijab by choice are also part of this movement.”
Europe, which includes countries that are ranked under the ‘best countries for gender equality’, might not spring to mind when talking about the oppression of women. However, the wave of burqa bans that are sweeping across Europe starts to paint a different picture. In countries of Europe where there are veiling bans, Muslim women face the same oppression as Iranian women; all these women are deprived of the right to choose how they dress.
“This is about oppression of women, this is about the right to be different but actually it gets much, much more complicated than that… The assumption that many people make is that women who wear these garments are doing so because they’re being oppressed,” says Professor Mark Sedgwick, coordinator of Arab and Islamic Research Network at Aarhus University. “In Europe we know from research, that if you go up to Muslim women in Europe who are wearing these garments and say, ‘Why are you doing this?’ 90 percent of the time they will reply ‘Because this is my choice’. They are responding to discourse which says that it isn’t their choice and they’re saying, ‘I have agency’.”
The law that requires women to wear a hijab in Iran has been in place since 1979, when the country went through a revolution by popular uprising of the people, ridding itself of a monarchy and establishing an Islamic Republic. Women who fail to wear a hijab can be jailed for up to two months. Masih Alinejad, an Iranian US-based journalist who initiated the White Wednesdays campaign against compulsory hijabs in 2017 told the Guardian, “The Iranian police announced in 2014 that they’ve warned, arrested or sent to court nearly 3.6 million women because of having bad hijab, so these arrests are not new, if people are protesting it’s exactly because of a crackdown.”
The European crackdown
Europe has been having a crackdown of its own over the past few years, as more and more countries have restricted or banned the wearing of veils such as the burqa and hijab. Denmark is one of the most recent nations to move toward banning the burqa, after the proposal for the ban gained majority support in parliament last October. Though the ban is still in the proposal stage, Professor Sedgwick thinks Denmark will follow in the footsteps of many of its European neighbours. “It’s very symbolic. It’s an issue which has been big in other European countries, the general move is towards bans, so simply on that basis, I’d say that I wouldn’t be surprised if it did happen.”
Under the proposed ban, people wearing full-face veils could be fined 1000 kroner and up to 10,000 kroner for reoffending. A Danish government estimate in 2010 put the number of women wearing the niqab or burqa between 150 and 200. Critics of the burqa ban argue that outlawing the burqa would result in this minority group of women being ostracised completely from society.
As Professor Sedgwick explains, the strategy of banning “distinctive activities, clothing or identity symbols etcetera” in the pursuit of homogenisation can have polarising effects. “In Southern Thailand for example, they’ve been trying to absorb the Muslim minority for many years… they have banned distinctively Muslim names… [the outcome being] increased polarisation, they currently have a Muslim insurgency.”
In 2017 the European Court of Human Rights upheld Belgium’s ban on wearing the burqa in public places, setting a political precedent. This, along with the general move toward bans across Europe, has paved the way for bringing the issue back into the forefront of political debate in countries such as Denmark. A poll taken in 2017 showed that 62 percent of Danes supported the burqa ban. “It is incompatible with the values of Danish society and respect for the community to keep the face hidden when meeting each other in public spaces,” says Justice Minister Soren Pape Poulsen. “With a ban, we draw a line in the sand and establish that here in Denmark we show each other trust and respect by meeting each other face to face.”
One such critic is Amnesty International, which has voiced its opposition to the burqa ban in Europe, claiming that “general prohibitions on the wearing of Amnesty InternationalOne such critic is full face veil would violate the freedom of expression and religion of those women who chose to wear a full-face veil as an expression of their religious, cultural, political or personal identity or beliefs.”
Value systems at odds
In 2011 France became the first European country to ban full-face veils. The issue of European countries imposing value judgements on Muslim women could be seen in 2016, when a woman was arrested in France for wearing a burkini. French officials stated that the outfit the woman was wearing did not respect “good morals and secularism.” This type of moralising was echoed recently by Danish Social Democrat MP, Mattias Tesfaye, who stated, “I am provoked myself when I see a woman in a burqa. Not so much by the woman, but by what it stands for. I actually perceive it as a form of prison.”
The singular perception of Muslim women as victims of religious oppression is a popular view within Europe. France in 2004 initiated a ban in state schools that forbade students from wearing any forms of religious symbols. Supporters of the ban in state schools claim that it protects young girls from being forced to wear a headscarf by their families. Critics argue that it perpetuates discrimination against Muslim Europeans.
“Anything that was part of the French gender protocols [for instance, wearing high-heels] got painted as a choice, anything that was part of the gender protocol they associated with Islam got painted as something that people were coerced into doing,” said Serene J. Khader, an American political philosopher and feminist theorist speaking on the UnMute podcast. Khader quotes from Joan Wallach Scott, who writes about French officials “complaining in public about the tragedy of young girls covering up their beautiful faces.”
East looks West
Describing the divided opinion of the Iranian population Professor Mark Sedgwick says, “In all these countries [middle eastern] there’s a very complicated view of the West. This has got something to do with the post-colonial situation. On the one hand the west is a sort of model, because it’s wealthy and successful, but the West has also been historically something that has to be resisted... A large section of the population [in Iran] wants to preserve what it sees as its authentic cultural traditions which includes religious elements and the rejection of western cultural imperialism.”
One such Iranian who wants to preserve his country’s authentic cultural traditions is Iran’s Supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. If France sees women covering their faces to be a tragedy, Khamenei certainly does not. When speaking about Europe and the West in 2017, he criticised the fight for gender equality, and claimed that Western women are designated as “goods and means of pleasure”. He went on to say that Western views of women used to be “More decent… When you look at the literature in European countries in the 18th and 19th centuries, it was absolutely different from the 20th century… it is obvious that there has been political work from the Zionist and the colonial system.”
The gender equality that Supreme leader Khamenei disparages, has meant that under Iranian law women are unable to travel, get an education or get married without receiving permission from a man, whether that be her father or husband. Despite this lack in gender equality Iran was elected onto the council of UN Women in 2015. This move sparked criticism from Iranian women’s rights activists towards the European Union and the United States. Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad told UN Watch that the election was “an insult to many Iranian women who are suffering from the lack of equal rights… UN Women was created by the United Nations as a body for gender equality and for the empowerment of women. If so, isn’t it an insult to women to give the leadership role to those governments that oppress their own women?”
As more of Europe moves toward banning the veil, the opinion of women looking toward Europe as a potential place of equal opportunity and rights has also shifted. Ilknur Kucuk, a writer of Turkish origin, told Aljazeera last year that her perspective on Germany has changed since the veil bans across Europe, “My 11-year-old daughter once asked me: ‘Mama, shall I leave Germany to study wearing a headscarf, as you did to leave your home country to study?’ I said, ‘No honey, in Germany you will be able to study and work with a headscarf. Don’t worry.’ But today I’m not sure if she can do so.”
Fears of discrimination are well founded, as hate crimes against Muslims in European cities such as London rose by around 40% in 2017. Studies have shown that Muslim women face higher rates of discrimination and exclusion from European societies than Muslim men do. Tell Mama, an anti-Islamophobia group based in United Kingdom stated, “For years data collected by us has shown that visible Muslim women are the ones most targeted for street based anti-Muslim hatred.” Women are easily targeted in these types of crimes, as they present a visual symbol of a “foreign cultural threat.”
Policing bodies
Despite different and sometimes opposing value systems, the thing that Middle Eastern countries such as Iran and Western countries in Europe, such as France, have in common is their active policing of Muslim women’s bodies through dictating what they can and cannot wear. As countries like Denmark move toward enforcing a burqa ban, the recent protests by Iranian women over Iran’s compulsory hijab should not be ignored. This is an example of women fighting for their right to make their own choices about their own bodies. It is significant that this protest movement is made of women who choose to veil and those who do not; it points to the importance of women gaining empowerment within many contexts and differing value systems.
