One year has passed since the tragic death of Mahsa Jina Amina at the hands of Iran’s morality police. Her death became the beginning of the Woman Life Freedom movement in Iran. Jina Amini (because she was a member of the Kurdish minority, I will use her original name, Jina, instead of the colonial name, Mahsa) was arrested due to what the police saw as improper hijab, an accusation leveled against thousands of Iranian women since the Islamic Revolution in 1979 and the implementation of the mandatory hijab law. During the Woman Life Freedom protests, some two million people came to the streets, and the Twitter hashtag #mahsaamini broke the world record of 284 million tweets. These women-led protests targeted mainly the mandatory veiling laws in Iran, and Woman Life Freedom (‘Jin, jiyan, azadî’ in Kurdish, ‘zan, zendegi, azadi’ in Farsi) became a slogan in defense of women’s freedom of choice and bodily autonomy, and so brought together a variety of oppressed groups. With its characteristic unveilings, head-scarf burnings, and other seemingly anti-religious symbolic gestures, the Woman Life Freedom movement confused those observers who had understood resistance to the veil as mostly a Western and Islamophobic move. In this piece, I reflect on the implications of this movement for our current understanding of the hijab in feminist discourse.
For a long time, what scholars (like Leila Ahmed and Serene Khader) call colonial feminism or missionary feminism has considered the hijab to be a sign of oppression, lack of autonomy, cultural and civilizational backwardness, and all in all the absolute opposite of what feminist emancipation looks like. The catch in this reductive and hasty understanding of the hijab was that it served as a self-congratulation of white culture for its supremacy and the freedom of white women at a time when non-western women barely enjoyed anything like feminist emancipation and still lacked basic rights and freedoms. The empty and instrumental use of pseudo-feminist rhetoric in colonial discourse becomes all the more obvious in light of the fact that often the ones who pretended to be the most upset about the oppression of women in the colonies were at the same time harsh opponents of feminist change in their own countries. In his piece “Algeria Unveiled,” Frantz Fanon discusses the racist character of western colonial perceptions of women’s oppression, showing how colonial powers seek to dominate cultural signs such as the veil and transform them into symbols of the backwardness of pre-colonial cultures. These views are not only a thing of the past, but continue to be influential in our time in the form of the racialization of the hijab, xenophobic sentiments against Muslim immigrants, and discrimination against hijab-wearing women in various contexts. Neocolonial feminism has adopted and preserved the discourse of colonial feminism, not only deeming other cultures inferior, but also supporting military intervention in the name of saving (Muslim) women, as we saw in the case of the invasion of Afghanistan.
Although this reductionist, colonial (and racist) view about the hijab still exists in feminist discourse, fortunately, it has been increasingly challenged in the last few decades, partly thanks to the work of postcolonial and decolonial feminists who have problematized the white colonial bias of these perspectives. Leila Abu-Lughod addressed this problem in the context of post-9/11 politics, arguing that “our stereotyping of Muslim women also distracts us from the thornier problem that our own policies and actions in the world help create the (sometimes harsh) conditions in which distant others live.” Saba Mahmood’s influential work also challenged the simplistic view that all pious Muslim women who follow traditional religious rules are oppressed, and traced this view back to Western anxieties about forms of life that don’t correspond to liberal secularism. Feminist philosophers Alia Al-Saji and Falguni A. Sheth have explored the racialization of the hijab in the context of discriminatory politics in the west and have analyzed the unfair prejudices, hostile attitudes and harmful beliefs that constitute the cultural racism against Muslim women. These bodies of literature have contributed to the creation of a new strand in the feminist discourse where the critique of the hijab is regarded as entangled with the biases and shortcomings of the white gaze and the long history of missionary feminism.
What remains under-discussed in the feminist theoretical engagements with the hijab are the political dimensions of the hijab beyond the white gaze, i.e., how the hijab functions as a cultural norm and how it is experienced by Muslim women, especially in Muslim-majority countries like Iran. Most of this literature is focused on the critique of western liberalism or the discussion of discrimination against Muslims in the west—perhaps unsurprisingly, since the literature is also written by scholars working at western universities. However, in the aftermath of political events like the Woman Life Freedom movement, it becomes clear how little we know about the politics of hijab in the Global South. Abu-Lughod’s argument about the self-serving nature of the western obsession with the oppressed Muslim woman might have been timely in the context of post-9/11 politics, but it lacks rigor from a feminist perspective since it ultimately downplays gendered oppression in Muslim-majority countries like Afghanistan and Iran. Abu-Lughod is certainly right in writing that “If we think that U.S. women live in a world of choice regarding clothing, we need to look no further than our own codes of dress and the often constricting tyrannies of fashion,” but for those of us who are committed to an understanding of feminism that is transnational, the critique of gendered oppression and lack of choice in western societies and non-western societies are not mutually exclusive. Arguing that Muslim women are not oppressed and don’t need emancipation is only a dangerous over-correction of missionary feminism.
In the context of Iran, the Islamic Revolution was the beginning of a new era of policing women’s bodies. The institution of public dress codes forced all women to wear the hijab or face legal punishment (policing women’s bodies, however, did not start with the revolution but was also a characteristic part of the politics of the Pahlavi era, especially exhibited in the so-called mandatory de-veiling of 1936). It is safe to say that thousands of women had been verbally and physically attacked for their supposedly improper hijab (many videos of which you can find online) before the tragic death of Jina Amini triggered a series of national protests against mandatory hijab. Some observers argue that these protests are not so much about the veil, but more about freedom and autonomy. I think they are about both. We should not shy away from acknowledging that mandatory hijab has become an oppressive force against women’s autonomy over their own bodies, and from understanding why that is. Hoodfar argues that compulsory hijab was introduced by the Islamic regime in Iran “partly in celebration of its victory of the modernist state of the shah, and partly as a means of realizing its vision of ‘Islamic’ Iran.” Moallem’s scholarship on the politics of patriarchy in modern Iran shows us how the idea of “Islamic femininity” that became the symbol of originality and indigeneity is a response to the crises of (Iranian) modernity and needs to be understood in the context of transnational relations of power. The idea of mandatory hijab is not rooted in Islam or Iranian culture. Rather, it was a political formation responding to, on the one hand, the violence of secular fundamentalism and the top-bottom modernization during the Pahlavi era and, on the other, the era’s imperialist politics, which engendered feelings of alienation and frustration and revealed the need for a new construction of indigenous tradition as refuge. Women were forced to be carriers of indigenous spiritual authenticity in many anti-colonial contexts (as Chatterjee’s work shows), and Iran was no exception. Mandatory hijab, far from being a problem of tradition, is in a sense both a product of colonial modernity and the anti-colonial resistance against it. In mandatory hijab, we see an interesting case of policing women’s bodies in which transnational relations of power and local anti-imperialist sentiments unite against women and their freedom of choice. Although veiling is seen merely as a traditional form of clothing by many, a closer look shows that it has been, like any other item of clothing, a product of historical relations of power. Protestors in Iran and the Iranian diaspora show in their signs and slogans that these protests are not against an oppressive tradition, or one corrupt government per se, but against patriarchy’s control over women’s bodies in all the complex forms that it takes.
We can think of the resistance of the Woman Life Freedom movement as an invitation to a feminist analysis that bases the need for feminist critique of religious cultures and forms of life on the actuality of the critical practices and local forms of resistance, and not in the abstract skepticism about religion, non-western cultures, or Islam as such (as it has often been assumed in the discourse of missionary feminism). This critique can study oppressive effects of gendered dress codes such as the hijab through a multi-directional lens that analyzes the transnational colonial and racial structures alongside the misogynistic politics of local governments and communities. Here Foucault’s idea about local forms of resistance as catalysts for recognizing and understanding relations of power is helpful. If we take the voices of local activists and advocates for social justice and their demand for freedom seriously, it becomes evident that feminist freedom does not lose its relevance for Muslim women just because it is instrumentalized by orientalist and imperialist discourses. Perhaps the better way of being anti-imperialist feminists is by acknowledging that imperialism is not all-encompassing, that its discourse is not the only speech in the world, and that we have other voices to listen to. As feminist scholars, informing ourselves about local forms of resistance beyond the borders of the Global North and engaging with them in our work is not always easy, but this difficulty remains part of the task of transnational feminist solidarity.
Zeinab Nobowati
Zeinab Nobowati is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Oregon. She works on social political philosophy, feminist philosophy and postcolonial theory.
