The desperation of a faltering regime

Iran is in flames. And, if it were possible to limit the conflagration to the country’s brutally theocratic regime, I’d say let it burn.

But it’s the citizenry that, as always, is suffering, even as both women and men have risen courageously in massive protest over the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini. The 22-yearold from Kurdistan had been visiting Tehran with her brother before beginning her college program in microbiology. She drew the attention of the nation’s notorious morality police for wearing her hijab “improperly” — apparently in the louche style of some younger Iranian females, dark hair fringe peeping out. Which got up the nose of a passing morality patrol.

As the world knows by now — her arrest caught on phone video — Amini was bundled off the street, dragged into a van and taken to a “re-education centre” for a lesson in modest behaviour. She was never seen alive again, her death occurring within days. Exactly how has been disputed. Officials claimed she collapsed in custody due to a pre-existing heart or brain condition. Amini’s family hotly disputes this, insisting she’d been in perfectly fine health. The widespread belief is that Amini had been subjected to severe beatings and died from a blow to the head. Her brother says he saw bruises on Amini’s corpse when it was released.

As of the weekend, demonstrations had broken out in upwards of 80 cities as women defiantly removed their head scarves and flung them into bonfires, in some cases symbolically cutting off their own hair. Men have joined the protests as well in the largest anti-government demonstrations since 2009 — the so-called Green Movement, sparked by rising fuel prices and a disputed presidential election — even as authorities have escalated a crackdown that has reportedly scores of people, with dozens of prominent activists and journalists arrested, according to human rights groups and media agencies monitoring the situation, a difficult undertaking since the government has blocked access to social media platforms including Instagram and WhatsApp.

The protests have been largely peaceful, at least on the dissident side, though the official IRNA news agency has accused demonstrators of hurling stones, setting fire to police vehicles and chanting anti-government slogans. It’s the security forces that have unleashed lethal violence, firing live bullets into crowds and rubber bullets at close range, in one case striking a10-year-old in the head, her blood-spattered image gone viral on social media. The child is in critical condition. Upwards of 220 people had been wounded by the end of last week in Kurdistan alone, according to the Norway-based Kurdish human rights group Hengaw.

Head scarves have been compulsory for females from age seven since the Iranian Revolution that overthrew the Shah in 1979, despite some public protests against forced hijab in the regime’s early days, when “DEATH TO THE UNVEILED” was a common chorus. In the years since, enforcement of the mandatory dress code and its details has varied.

Of late, however, especially under hardline president Ebrahim Raisi, following the more moderate tenure of his predecessor Hassan Rouhani, policing by the morality goons has escalated again, with harsher consequences — by letter of the law, a loosely tied hijab punishable by up to 74 lashes or 60 days in prison. Further, doubling down on any violation has given license to harass women in the street — civilian on civilian — even slapping them in the face, while encouraging conservative busybodies to upbraid neighbours for not properly supervising their daughters.

What’s different this time is the diversity of the anti-government rallies, with even some conservative clerics questioning how the law is being applied. Most crucially is how the hardfisted reaction by authorities has revealed the desperation of a faltering regime, terrified it will lose the streets and thus vulnerable to a populist revolt — just as in its own genesis and seizing of power.

Public antipathy for the regime had been gaining steam for months, years even, a growing groundswell to dissent quashed, international sanctions against Iran that have crushed the economy — a cost of living crisis, Iran’s currency at a record low and inflation at around 50 per cent — Tehran at loggerheads with almost all its neighbours, particularly Saudi Arabia, diplomatic shunning, and endless meddling in wars in Syria and Yemen.

The hijab has become a flashpoint with Amini’s death, not so much for its existence but as a symbol of repression, misogyny and merciless suppression of dissent under an autocracy which has repeatedly massacred its own citizens. It represents unspeakable cruelty and an inflexible interpretation of Shia Islam, even as — sadly — the appearance of the hijab worn by models on the runway and by athletes at the Olympics has been widely celebrated.

If the hijab falls, might the regime follow? It certainly feels like a tipping point, as nightly protests bravely continue, in spite of very real risks to life and limb.

Masih Alinejad, the Iranian journalist and activist in exile who eight years ago began My Stealthy Freedom, Iranian women photographing themselves daringly without head scarves, says that women are furious. “This is not a piece of cloth — it is the Berlin Wall,” Alinejad told The Guardian, arguing that the hijab isn’t a byproduct of Islamic rule but rather at its emblematic foundation. Every woman rebelling now is another loose brick in that wall.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has not publicly commented on the demonstrations or the surging wrath of the country’s women. Perhaps, since his remit is spiritual rather than temporal, he’ll leave the contending to Raisi. The president, who signed the decree for more rigorous enforcement of hijab rules in August, struck a defiant tone in his speech at the UN General Assembly last week (including condemnation of Canada’s treatment of its Indigenous people) and got a blasting earful in return.

Christiane Amanpour had a scheduled interview on the UN sidelines with Raisi but it was cancelled by the president after the acclaimed CNN correspondent refused to wear a head scarf as requested, purportedly because it was the holy months of Muharram and Safar. Amanpour explained on Twitter: “We are in New York, where there is no law or tradition regarding head scarves.” Adding that no other Iranian president had ever requested that she wear a head scarf when she interviewed them outside Iran.

Not as dramatic an episode as when the late, great Italian combat journalist Oriana Fallaci, feminist and secularist, during a 1979 interview with the Ayatollah Khomeini at his home, at the height of the revolution, famously ripped off her chador. She’d just asked Khomeini, mischievously, how women could swim chador-clad. He responded testily: “Our customs are none of your business. If you do not like Islamic dress, you are not obliged to wear it.”

Fallaci: “That’s very kind of you, Imam. And since you said so, I’m going to take off this stupid, medieval rag right now.” Khomeini left the interview. The hijab has become increasingly ubiquitous in the West, whether out of piety, modesty or as a political statement, as the kaffiyeh is for pro-Palestinians.

It’s not my place to tell women how to dress. But if only as an act of solidarity with embattled and horribly subjugated sisters in Iran, I’d say now is a good time to take it off.