Since the death of Mahsa Amini after her arrest by Iran’s morality police, women in Iran have led several protests demanding freedom and equality.
A few days ago, a female student stripped down to her undergarments at an Iranian university in an apparent protest against the mandatory hijab rule. In a video circulating on social media, the woman is seen walking around on a college campus in her underwear over alleged harassment by the morality police for not wearing a proper hijab.
The incident reportedly happened on Saturday at the Science and Research Branch of Islamic Azad University. According to university official Amir Mahjoub, the student wore "inappropriate clothes" in class and "stripped" after being warned by officials. Security guards there were quick to intervene and handed the student over to law enforcement. She was detained and taken to an undisclosed location. In a post on X, Mahjoub further said that the student was found to be under "severe mental pressure" and had a "mental disorder".
Since 2006, special police units in Iran, formally known as the Gasht-e-Ershad (Guidance Patrol), have been tasked with enforcing a dress code that requires women to cover their heads in hijab and wear loose, covered clothing in public. The special unit, commonly known as the morality police, has been aggressively patrolling the streets for over a year to enforce the rules.
On September 13, 2022, when a 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman – Jina Mahsa Amini – was arrested by Iran’s morality police and allegedly tortured to death in custody, massive protests erupted demanding women’s freedom not just in Iran but across the world. Women in Iran took over the streets, tore off their hijabs, and cut their hair publicly in defiance of the Iranian regime.
The women who defied authorities by removing their headscarves were violently suppressed, resulting in 551 deaths and thousands of arrests. Amini has since become a symbol for the fight for women’s rights over their bodies and their right to equality.
Outlook's 21 April 2023 issue paid homage to the women's movement in Iran over the country's hijab rules and to those who died protesting for freedom.
In an article in the issue, Iranian-Canadian professor Sara Hassani writes about how women have always played an incredibly significant role in Iranian politics but it is between 1905-1911, that the beginnings of today’s gender apartheid system have started to take hold. "My sense is that the reality for many of these different constituencies across Iran—an intersectional contingent of women, workers, students, and ethnic minorities—the killing of Amini embodied the kind of oppression and violence they had experienced at the hands of the current regime," she writes.
In another article, Outlook's Rakhi Bose traces the politics of hair and its significance in women's protest in Iran. She writes about the anthropological and psychoanalytical studies on hair and the inter-relations between sex, religion and the public/private or ritual/religious sphere in the 19th and 20th centuries that tended to look at its cultural and psycho-social connotations through a male lens. Be it by equating the not cutting of hair with phallic sexuality or cutting of it with castration anxiety.
In an interview with Abhik Bhattacharya, Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf spoke about how the demonstrations in Iran are a cry by women to live life on their own terms. He talks about his films like A Moment of Innocence, Time of Love and Kandahar that address the hegemony in Iran, social realities and the dream of freedom, especially the freedom of women.
In light of the recent arrest of the young college student, Outlook takes a look at this issue once again.