Both the strength and weakness of the current agitation in Iran is that it is leaderless. The government has imprisoned ordinary citizens but there is not one person who can be called the leader in the current movement. It is the spontaneous anger of the fearless women of Iran.
A woman's hair is part of her personality and has been celebrated in poems, books, and cinema down the ages. Fairytales have been written on flowing locks like the much-loved Rapunzel. But hair is also a powerful symbol of protest, of defiance of a patriarchal system where women have no freedom of choice, not even over their own bodies. Men in authority decide whether she should show her hair and what she should wear.
“Hair comes weighted with a great deal of emotion and identity, often created by wider society rather than the wearer,” Rachael Gibson, a hair historian said in a recent conversation with Vogue. She explains that for a long time society insisted that women wear their hair long. It was not acceptable for women to sport short hair as men felt that long hair was linked to femininity. It was only around the 1920s that the western world accepted short hair. Initially, there was stiff resistance from men. Fathers tried to bring in criminal charges against hairdressers cutting their daughter's hair short without the permission of the head of the family.
“Hair has been used as an expression of politics and personal beliefs since the earliest times, and we see examples of it time and again in diverse cultures across the globe,” Rachael Gibson explained “Afro styles became intrinsically linked with civil rights, as natural hair came to be viewed as an important symbol of the movement and its ‘black is beautiful’ ethos; skinheads represented rebellion and rejection of traditionally accepted social aesthetics in the 1980s; and the hair powder tax of 1786 led to mass rejection of wigs for men and brought in a new movement of short, natural hairstyles.’’
For centuries men have used religion to enforce their misogynist views on women. But neither the Koran, the Bible or Hindu or Sikh religious texts have laid down such rules. At best the Koran had advised modesty in dress for both men and women.This has been interpreted to enforce hijab among Muslim women by conservative clerics in several Islamic countries though there are no similar strictures for men. For a brief while when the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 1996-2001, men were asked to sport a short beard. Clean-shaven men were lashed in public.
In Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Ayatollahs who took control insisted that not a single strand of hair was to be exposed in public by women. At that time the majority of Iranians opposed to the Shah welcomed the announcement. The Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, was against women covering their hair. The Shah was regarded by the clergy as pro-American, and anti-Islam, and a man who encouraged permissiveness and excesses in Iranian society. His wife Farah Diba was a fashion icon and one of the most stylish women in Europe at that time. Many women opposed to the Shah’s undemocratic regime willingly took to covering their hair as a mark of support for the Iranian revolution. In rural areas wearing the hijab was also an act of piety. But it has been 43 years since the revolution. The new generation of Iranians born has no memory of the Shah and what happened earlier. Young people in Iran growing up in the inter connected world of social media are yearning for freedom like kids in other parts of the world.
The hope of many Iranians that the government would gradually lift restrictions around the hijab has not happened. Reformists like former President Hassan Rouhani and Mohammad Khatami could not deliver. The Ayatollahs have had their way and with the election of hardline President Ebrahim Raisi in 2021, the government had ramped up policing of women’s dress code. Cameras have been placed in public places to alert the moral police of those not following the strictures.
Anger and frustration against an unfair system have been brimming under the surface for decades but the flashpoint came in September 16, when Masha Amini, a young 22-year-old woman was killed in Iran. She was arrested by the morality police, or guidance patrols, which is a part of the national police force, in Tehran for allowing strands of her hair to show under a loosely thrown scarf over her head. She was also wearing skinny jeans. She was tortured and beaten during interrogation and later died in hospital.
That broke the floodgates. Defying the authorities’ people, both young and old, mostly the young poured into the streets to protest against the regime’s brutal treatment of a young woman. The 7000-strong guidance patrols do pretty much what they please and are protected by the state. People had had enough of these patrols trampling over their personal space.
Young women in anger have thrown out the hijab to let their hair flow freely, some have clambered on to the roofs of cars and defiantly cut off their hair in public, all the while surrounded by cheering clapping supporters chanting "No to the headscarf, no to the turban, yes to freedom and equality!"
Despite the brutal crackdown by the Iranian authorities the protests have not died down and young people have risked their lives for freedom. There is Nika Shakarami, a 17-year old teenager who had been outraged by what happened to Masha.She was out in the streets of Tehran joining angry crowds. On September 20, she messaged a friend that she was running away from armed security forces men. Despite frantic searches by her family and friends in police stations and hospitals, she could not be traced. Finally, after ten days the family traced her body to a morgue at a police detention centre in Tehran. The police story was that she had been pushed by construction workers from a tall building and died of fatal injuries and she had not been detained. But the injuries to her body told a different story. She had been tortured and killed much like Masha.
Among other women who have been killed during the protests are Sarina Esmailzadeh, 16 from Alborz, Mahsa Mougouyi Isfahan, 18 from Isfahan. Hannaneh Kia, 22, from Mazandaran, Hadis Najafi 23, from Alborz, Ghazaleh Chelabi, 33 from Mazandaran and Minoo Majidi 62, from Kermanshah. The BBC has got the names and photographs of the women. But these are not the only ones. Many deaths are possibly unreported.
In a show of support for Iranian protesters, women across Europe have publicly chopped off their hair.
The protests over the killings have metamorphosed to a much larger movement. The slogans now are also more directly political, with ``Death to the Dictator’’ and ``Death to Khamenei’’ the Supreme Leader of Iran. There are calls for regime change. This leaderless protest is perhaps the biggest challenge the regime has faced since the revolution. There had been protests earlier too, most notably against the stealing of votes, when rallies were held in 2009 against the stolen votes, when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad backed by Ayatollah Khamenei defeated the moderate popular candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi. His supporters said he had roundly defeated Ahmadinejad. However, it came to an end with the jailing of political leaders. Again in 2019, when the subsidies on oil were removed by the government, there were protests. People were killed but they did not become a mass movement. Both the strength and weakness of the current agitation is that it is leaderless. The government has imprisoned ordinary citizens but there is not one person who can be called the leader in the current movement. It is spontaneous anger of the fearless young people of Iran. The decades of sanctions, the shutdown during the pandemic and rising inflation has made life difficult for the common man and there is unhappiness all around over the government’s snuffling of any form of protest.
According to the latest reports from Iran’s Human Rights Activists around 244 people, including 32 children have been killed by security forces during the protests. Roughly 12,500 people have been detained. What is most disturbing is that eight people were charged on October 29 by the Islamic court in Tehran with crimes carrying the death penalty. Public trials would take place later.
It is a measure of the courage and determination of Iranian youth that has made the movement persist against all odds. Iran’s Nobel prize winner Shirin Ebadi, now living in exile in London, said at a recent interview: "The young generation is way better informed than the previous one, and they know that they do not have a future if the Islamic Republic keeps going," said said. "We now have a great number of well-educated young people; but among them, 40% are not finding work, and those who find work are not earning enough to leave the family home and make a living for themselves." She believes that the protests are not going to stop anytime soon.