In January, the BBC reported that the Islamic Students Associations of Britain (ISA) has been promoting online events in which Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) commanders have given anti-Semitic and Islamist talks to students. One such speaker even later boasted about his role in training Hamas before the 7 October attacks. The ISA is different from mainstream student Muslim groups in that, as the BBC reported, it ‘was founded to promote the philosophy of the leader of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini.’ The IRGC is one of the arms of the Iranian state and it supports Islamist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. The British security services say that they have dealt with more than a dozen kidnapping and assassination plots by the IRGC since 2020.

All of this reveals just how insidiously the Iranian regime is using Muslim organisations in the West to target and radicalise Muslim youth. Despite this, and despite the fact that the Iranian leadership has a long history of waging proxy conflicts in the Middle East to destabilise the region, Iran was appointed chair of the 2023 United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) Social Forum.

It is important to mention that the Social Forum took place amid Israel and Hamas’ ongoing conflict (though the initial appointment of Iran to the chair preceded the conflict). On 7 October, Hamas entered Israel with the sole goal of killing as many people as they could. They brutally massacred more than 1,000 people of all ages, including men, women, children, and entire families.

Given the links between Iran and terrorist groups like Hamas, 7 October raised the question of Iran’s involvement in the massacre of Israeli civilians. There have been conflicting reports about Iran’s direct involvement in the attack, but Iran has publicly praised the attack and voiced its strong support for Hamas. Nevertheless, the UN let Iran chair the Social Forum. Less than a month after 7 October, the UN General Assembly rejected a resolution to condemn Hamas for such a vicious attack on civilians.

This is not to mention that, while the UN’s response to 7 October and Hamas’s crimes has been severely lacking, Israel has been harshly criticised for its counter-attack. It is reprehensible that the United Nations, the very organisation that was established to resolve international conflicts and promote human rights, has been unable to consistently do so in this case.

Despite their theological differences, the Iranian regime and the extremists it supports share essentially the same ideology as the likes of al-Qaeda and Islamic State. They seek to subjugate people under Islamic law and to establish and spread Islamic states. People who think that the dream of establishing the caliphate died with the military destruction of Islamic State are wrong. Islamic State’s ideology lives on in the shape of Hamas and Hezbollah and the theocratic regime that supports them. Radicalisation and terrorism remain as dangerous as ever.

In the UK, the director general of MI5, Ken McCallum, has said that MI5 is ‘focused with particular intensity’ on the growing risk of attacks within the UK following recent events in the Middle East. He further said:

‘Sadly, over the course of my career, it has often been the case that events in the Middle East can then echo in Europe, in the UK, and so my teams are absolutely alert to the possibility that events in the Middle East cause some people in the United Kingdom to attempt some form of attack of whatever sort.’

By allowing Iran to chair the UNHRC Social Forum, the UN demonstrated extreme indifference to the plight of the people suffering at the hands of extremists. The Iranian people have been protesting in the streets since 2022, demanding an end to an oppressive, cruel, authoritarian dictatorship that sanctions state-sponsored terrorism. This appointment, announced shortly after Iran executed two men for blasphemy, was a disastrous choice that both subtly and explicitly validated Iran’s brutal treatment of its citizens.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has a history of overtly violating human rights, especially those of women and anti-regime dissidents. It is regrettable, to put it mildly, that the United Nations let Iran’s corrupt and theocratic government legitimise its brutal treatment of the Iranian people by giving them a platform at the UNHRC.

The Iranian protests since September 2022 were provoked by the death, in custody, of Mahsa Amini, 22. She likely died after being beaten by the morality police for wearing ‘improper’ hijab. Last year, 17-year-old Armita Geravand passed away after purportedly being beaten into a month-long coma by a member of the morality police. Her crime was the same as Amini’s.

This presents a bleak picture of the state-sponsored violence that is a reality for the Iranian people, especially for women and girls. It is a sad state of affairs that after Mahsa Amini was killed, very little was done by the international community to hold the Iranian authorities responsible for the use of lethal force against demonstrators.

The UN has a long history of pusillanimity when it comes to Iran. In 2022, Iran was chosen to serve on the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). After Amini’s death, the United States proposed the successful resolution to remove Iran from the CSW. This was viewed as a positive step in holding the Iranian regime accountable for its long history of mistreatment of and discrimination against women and girls.

The irony is that the resolution was proposed and approved because the member states felt that Iran’s membership on the Commission had tarnished the UN’s reputation on human rights. But the very next year, as we have seen, the UN appointed Iran to chair the UNHRC Social Forum.

The Iranian people were left in the dark by this appointment. It showed once again that the UN’s commitment to human rights is, at best, shaky and inconsistent. The Iranian regime is an Islamist regime, whose aims include the dissemination of terror and extremism around the world and the theocratic oppression of its own people. The UN’s criminal negligence has had and will continue to have terrible ramifications for the Middle East and the entire world. Not least, it emboldens Iran in its continued support for the heinous act of terrorism that Hamas carried out on the Israeli people on 7 October. The UN is effectively giving the go-ahead to a murderous terror organisation to destroy everything that stands in the way of their theocratic dreams.

Further reading

The ‘Women’s Revolution’: from two activists in Iran, by Rastine Mortad and Sadaf Sepiddasht

The need for a new Enlightenment, by Christopher Hitchens

The hijab is the wrong symbol to represent women, by Khadija Khan

Religion and the Arab-Israeli conflict, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Bloodshed in Gaza: Islamists, leftist ideologues, and the prospects of a two-state solution, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

An Islamic (mis)education about Israel, by Hina Husain

Is the Israel-Palestine conflict fundamentally a nationalist, not a religious, war? by Ralph Leonard

Young, radical and morally confused, by Gerfried Ambrosch

The post Iran and the UN’s betrayal of human rights appeared first on The Freethinker.

In 1877, a woman was put on trial for publishing what the prosecutor called a ‘dirty, filthy book’.

The book was a manual on rudimentary contraception, called Fruits of Philosophy. And the woman was Annie Besant – feminist, freethinker and vice-president of the National Secular Society. She and Charles Bradlaugh, the founder and president of the NSS, were both prosecuted for obscenity over this ‘dirty, filthy book’.

Besant’s story is extraordinary. In a highly patriarchal, highly Christian society, she fought fearlessly for the right of couples in Victorian England’s desperately poor and overcrowded slums to access information which would allow them to control their family planning. Alongside that, she fought for the right to free speech, and the right of women to control their bodies. 

Incredibly, Besant’s ‘dirty, filthy book’ is still upsetting religious fundamentalists even today, nearly 150 years later.

Last November, the NSS held a history talk in London all about Victorian birth control, including the fight to publish Fruits of Philosophy. To our astonishment, our talk was picketed by an anti-abortion Christian group. This was particularly bizarre; the manual argued one of the main aims of contraception was to reduce abortion. But when questioned, the protestors revealed that their group is not just against abortion – they are against all forms of birth control.

While it was somewhat amusing that an anti-abortion group would embarrass itself by protesting against this small and rather tame history talk, it was also disturbing. The incident revealed the extent to which the religiously-motivated desire to control women’s bodies, women’s choices and women’s participation in society is still alive in Britain.

Secularism is a feminist issue. This was true at the time of Besant’s trial, and it is true today, worldwide.

The 2023 United Nations Gender Social Norms index found that there has been no improvement in worldwide biases against women in the last decade. It also found that gender hierarchies in religious practices can strongly influence behaviours and attitudes.

It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that in recent years we have seen some dramatic and devastating leaps backward – driven, in part, by fundamentalist religion.

In 2021, the Taliban re-took Afghanistan and immediately set about imposing its fundamentalist Islamic ideology on women and girls. Women there are now banned from most public places. To visit the few places where they are permitted outside their homes, they must now be clad in a burqa. Girls cannot attend school from over the age of 11.

Male doctors have been banned from treating female patients, a policy with deadly implications. Naturally, the Taliban ordered pharmacies to clear their stocks of contraception. Is it any wonder that since the Taliban takeover, Afghanistan has seen a surge in women attempting suicide?

Then there is Iran. Following the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the theocratic Iranian state has required all women and girls over the age of nine to wear hijab in public. Women who break this law are often subject to brutal punishment, as horrifically demonstrated in 2022 when Mahsa Amini died at the hands of Iran’s notorious ‘morality police’. She had been arrested for failing to wear hijab correctly. Witnesses saw her being brutally tortured in the back of a police van. She died days later. She was 22 years old.

Mahsa Amini’s death sparked huge waves of protest in Iran, which were described as the biggest challenge to the government since the Islamic Revolution. The regime’s response was to double down on its laws, rather than make any meaningful change.

But perhaps it is a matter of time. Consistent surveys find that most Iranians oppose mandatory hijab and, on top of this, support a secular state. Protests may have died down, but the mood of resistance has not been extinguished. As one banner displayed during international protests against Iran said: ‘To the world leaders. Iranian women do not need you to save them. They only need you to stop saving their murderers.’

So how are leaders in the UK responding to the brutal oppression and killing of women in Iran, Afghanistan and other countries where religion prescribes patriarchy and misogyny?

Well, the suffering of women forced to wear hijab did not stop UK schools, universities, and even the Home Office this year observing ‘World Hijab Day’ – an event which explicitly celebrates the veiling of women.

And it did not stop Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council last year approving a 16-foot steel statue of a veiled woman for a park in Smethwick, Birmingham. The statue, called ‘The Strength of the Hijab’, was revealed to the public just days before the first anniversary of Mahsa Amini’s death. It is as if it was timed as an act of triumph against Iran’s courageous women who dare to show their hair; a tribute to the morality police.

Much of British authorities’ enthusiasm for the hijab comes from a concern to appear ‘respectful’ of minority groups. But an unwillingness to think critically about religious practices which are at odds with democratic values spells disaster for women’s rights. It also does Muslims a disservice by erasing debate and dissent from within that community.

This attitude is coupled with a fear of challenging religion – a fear which is, sadly, quite rational. There are now too many examples of people being accused of bigotry, losing their jobs, being threatened and even being physically attacked for questioning, criticising or poking fun at religion.

And it is something that schools with concerns about hijab have had to face. In 2017, St Stephen’s Primary School in east London told parents that girls under eight should not be sent to school in hijab, because of concerns about integration and the promotion of ideologies which are incompatible with British values. This sparked a furious backlash from Islamist fundamentalists, who bombarded school leaders with emails, many of which were threatening. As a result, the school backed down on its policy.

Decision-makers in the UK still operate under the belief that religion is a wholly positive force that should be respected, accommodated and showcased, not something to be questioned. This is particularly evident in the charity sector.

Incredibly, there are registered charities promoting the idea that husbands can dominate and even beat their wives, and that women who dress ‘sexily’ (for example, by wearing trousers) are to blame for rape. We have even seen charities signposting material which says the torturous and illegal practice of female genital mutilation has benefits, including reducing ‘excessive sensitivity of the clitoris’ which is ‘very annoying to the husband, especially at the time of intercourse’.

These charities do this in the name of religion. ‘The advancement of religion’ is a recognised charitable purpose in law. [On the problems with the ‘advancement of religion’ provision, see further in the Freethinker and New Humanist – Ed.]

As long as a charity is registered under this purpose, it seems to have carte blanche to say just about anything. Charities are meant to provide a public benefit in return for the generous tax breaks and Gift Aid they get. But it is difficult to see how promoting misogyny benefits the public – at least the female half of the public.

The fact that the state is willing to forgive misogyny when it is cloaked in religion reveals just how normalised it is. And what else could we expect, when the UK’s own state religion, the established Church of England, is itself drenched in sexism.

It is quite incredible that in the 21st century, 500 Anglican churches ban female priests. The Church has said this is because it is ‘committed to enabling’ those who are ‘unable to receive the ministry of women bishops or priests’ to ‘flourish’.

The established Church’s commitment to helping chauvinists within their ranks ‘flourish’ tacitly implies that there is something so subversive about women with authority that it is reasonable for men to reject them.

Let us not forget that as the established church, the C of E is part of our state. The lines between theology and politics are blurred when it comes to a state church. This is institutionalised, structural sexism at the highest level.

Religiously sanctioned notions that women exist to serve men translate into decision making which limits women’s opportunities, and feed into relationships which are coercive, controlling and abusive.

While women’s rights in the UK have inarguably progressed, women are still under-represented in positions of power and overrepresented as victims of domestic violence. A meagre seven per cent of FTSE 100 companies had female CEOs in 2023. Only 35 per cent of members of the House of Commons and 29 per cent of the Lords are female. According to Refuge, one in four women in England and Wales will experience domestic abuse in her lifetime, two women a week are killed by a current or former partner, and domestic abuse drives three women a week to suicide. Ninety-three per cent of defendants in domestic abuse cases are male while 84 per cent of victims are female.

If Annie Besant were alive today, what would she think? 

While she would no doubt welcome the many successes achieved by feminists and secularists in improving equality for women, I think she would also be dismayed and bewildered at the numerous and complex threats posed to women by fundamentalist religion today.

Progress on women’s rights can only go so far if we only treat the symptoms of misogyny, and not the causes. And one of the most important causes is patriarchal religion, which is not only tolerated by the British state, but nurtured, protected and endorsed.

That is why, to protect the rights of women and girls worldwide, we must not allow religion to pull the veil over our eyes when it comes to injustice, discrimination and oppression.

We must be free to look religion in the eye, to challenge it, and to criticise it in the strongest terms, without fear of punishment by society or the state.

We must stop letting religious extremists exploit our good intentions to promote pluralism and inclusivity by portraying symbols of misogynistic oppression as symbols of social justice.

And we must separate church and state to ensure women’s rights are never subordinated to religious agendas.

The National Secular Society is holding a free online talk on April 10^th with Michael Meyer, the author of a new biography on Annie Besant. More information and booking here.

The post Secularism is a feminist issue appeared first on The Freethinker.

A 16 year old girl, Armita Geravand, is one of the latest victims of the Iranian regime’s oppressive hijab laws. She was assaulted by the so-called morality police for not wearing a hijab. After going into a coma, she died in custody on 28 October.

The images of Armita Geravand in a coma are terrifying and disturbingly similar to those of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who was killed by Iran’s ‘morality police’ for donning an ‘improper’ hijab.

According to reports, Mahsa Amini was tortured in the back of a police van. She died after suffering significant head injuries during this abuse. She became a global symbol of resistance to religious orthodoxy, and many people are determined to say her name in protest against the sexism and misogyny that is condoned by religious doctrine.

Tragically, the first anniversary of Mahsa Amini’s death has been marked by the death of another young woman in similar circumstances. This shows that there is still a long way to go in the struggle against the imposition of the hijab on women regardless of their views – both in Iran and elsewhere.

Some people, however, have chosen to actually ‘celebrate’ the hijab, rather than the brave women who have refused to wear it and in some cases died for their refusal.

In Smethwick, Birmingham, a 16-foot-tall steel statue depicting a woman wearing a hijab has been constructed and was due to be installed last month. The title, The Strength of the Hijab, which is written on a tablet at the statue’s base, is a betrayal of the brave women who refused to wear this restrictive clothing and were destroyed by their own resoluteness and dignity. Ironically, the statue that arguably celebrates a symbol of women’s submission to men was designed by a man, the sculptor Luke Perry. Perry said that he had drawn inspiration from ‘speaking to Muslim women’; according to his Instagram page, his ‘work is often about under-represented people’.

Underneath the title of the piece is the platitudinous statement, ‘It is a woman’s right to be loved and respected whatever she chooses to wear. Her true strength is in her heart and mind.’ This statement, superficially appealing but fundamentally vacuous, fails to acknowledge the utter lack of ‘love and respect’ shown towards so many Muslim women around the world, whether in forcing them to cover their hair or in persecuting them when they say ‘no’.

Regardless of the intentions of Perry and Legacy West Midlands, the charity that commissioned the statue, this ‘celebration’ of the hijab unfortunately cannot help but remind viewers of the utter indifference and lack of humanity that is prevalent in the authoritarian, brutal Islamic regimes where millions of women are forced to wear it.

Of course, in Britain, some Muslim women wear the hijab as a matter of personal choice and freedom of conscience. As long as this does not impinge on the rights of others, they should be free to do so, their choice should be respected, and they should not be discriminated against.

This does not mean, however, that the hijab as a symbol should not be open to criticism. Moreover, it is important to bear in mind that in countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan, Islamic governments routinely violate the rights of women who break ‘modesty’ regulations, subjecting them to imprisonment and harsh penalties.

Altogether, given the connotations of theocracy and violence against women which the hijab has in contexts around the world where it is not freely chosen, you might have thought that its presence was hardly something to be celebrated.

Moreover, the mere assumption that the hijab represents all Muslim women lends credence to the orthodox assertion that women who refuse to wear it are violating divine morality laws. This may embolden religious zealots who are already hell-bent on subjugating women in the name of religious modesty. Even in Western countries, women are regularly shamed, ostracised, tortured and in some cases even killed for not complying with this restrictive clothing regime.

Not long ago, a 17 year old Muslim girl was caught on camera twerking while wearing the hijab in a busy city centre in Birmingham. The video went viral on social media, drawing harsh reactions from certain members of the Muslim community. As reported by the Mail, she was called a ‘f****** s***.’ ‘Stupid b**** needs to be killed,’ another wrote. She received death threats. Apparently, it was not her dancing that landed her in this situation. Rather, she was abused and humiliated for dancing while wearing the hijab. She was forced to apologise publicly for ‘disrespecting’ it.

The brutal killing of Banaz Mahmod still evokes horrifying images in the mind. Born and raised in a highly conservative Muslim family, she was strangled to death by her father and uncle because she disobeyed the traditional teachings of Islam and tried to escape from an arranged marriage. Liberation from what are arguably cultish ideas was viewed by her relatives as a shameful deed that would bring disgrace on the family. She was strangled and her body was buried in a suitcase in Handsworth, Birmingham.

The problem is that these women who suffer in silence are often ignored in conversations about hijab culture. The dominant narrative on social and political issues has been dominated by religious fanatics. These fanatics self-identify as the guardians of religion, and somehow they have gained recognition as the representatives of their communities.

It is a dismal reality that religious zealots enjoy a privileged status in the UK. They exploit this position to bully individuals into compliance without facing any opposition from both inside and outside the community. They shield themselves from criticism by claiming the right to freedom of religion.

A new report by the conservative think tank Policy Exchange, The Symbolic Power of the Veil, has revealed how Islamists have been permitted to dominate the debate about the religious dress code in the United Kingdom and abroad.

The report makes five policy recommendations. Most significantly, it advises that ‘the government should resist any definition of Islamophobia that inhibits the public criticism of religious practices and traditions, including dress codes.’ It also recommends that ‘the government should refrain from publicly endorsing or promoting any specific religious attire, including events such as World Hijab Day.’

As reported in the Independent, the Labour MP Khalid Mahmood supported the key findings and recommendations in the Policy Exchange report. He pointed out that ‘the wearing of the hijab clearly does not represent all Muslim women. And it is grossly insensitive to those Muslim women in Iran, Afghanistan, Yemen and elsewhere who are compelled against their wishes to wear the hijab to declare that it does.’

The introduction to the report highlights ‘the importance of resisting factitious accusations of “Islamophobia” too often made by Islamists against those who campaign for the human rights and freedoms of people living under oppressive regimes.’ As it rightly observes, ‘in too many societies, the control of women’s bodies through religiously-sanctioned restrictions, including those relating to clothing, [is] a key tool of oppression.’

The findings of the report, in particular the way that accusations of ‘Islamophobia’ are being weaponised to suppress debate about women’s dress codes, should be a wake-up call for legislators and administrators. Sadly, for far too long, Islamist organisations that support restricting women’s freedoms in the guise of religious modesty have dominated the conversation on their religious attire. It is a sad fact that the authorities have long been ignorant of these issues, which remain some of the most pressing in British society today.

The authorities often seem oblivious to the fact that the normalisation of religious fanaticism further marginalises already marginalised groups in society – such as women in minority communities. Such fanaticism, and its tolerance, cannot but erode the liberal, secular and democratic principles on which British laws and customs are to a large extent predicated.

It is time to talk about truly ‘inclusive’ human rights which protect everyone, instead of pandering to divisive religious preaching. The misogyny of religious fundamentalists who overtly or covertly impose dress codes on the women and girls in their sphere of influence must be resisted, not appeased.

The presumption that all religious and cultural beliefs, no matter what their content, are entirely beneficial forces that should be accommodated at all costs, and celebrated rather than criticised, needs to be debunked.

It would be wise for Legacy West Midlands to reconsider the decision that led to the commissioning of this statue. Women should be honoured for who they are, not for what they wear. They should not be forced to carry the symbolic burden of any faith or culture. Reverence for a culture should not be used as a justification for ‘celebrating’ religious and cultural ideas that conflict with human rights.

The post The hijab is the wrong symbol to represent women appeared first on The Freethinker.

The series of plastic dolls made by Mattel has made the headlines again through the recent Barbie film. Yet the Barbie brand has long been criticised for promoting an unrealistic and unattainable image of what a woman should look like. In Barbie’s world, a woman can be anything she wants – as long as she looks perfect. While this may seem like a paradise for young girls, it has created a living hell for many women in the real world. Unfortunately, these beauty standards are not only unattainable for most women, they also make a mockery of those who struggle to survive in a still largely male-dominated world.

In 2017, a Barbie in hijab was designed to celebrate US Olympic Medalist Ibtihaj Muhammad’s achievements. This doll was part of Mattel’s ‘Sheroes’ series. Mattel portrayed this doll as serving as an ‘inspiration for countless little girls who never saw themselves represented in sports and culture.’ It was wholeheartedly welcomed and the hijab-wearing doll soon became a sign of inclusion and diversity.

However, as pointed out by the New York Post, the hijab-wearing doll does not tell the story of a little Ibtihaj Muhammad who chose the sport of fencing for herself. It was her mother who decided that fencing was the best sport for her daughter, because it was the only sport in which athletes could wear a uniform covering their entire body. And Ibtihaj was required to honour her parents’ religion and culture, regardless of what her own inclinations might have been.

Thus the hijab-clad Barbie appeared to be more of a marketing tool for retrograde clothing like the hijab for kids than it did a celebration of a free-spirited girl with great aspirations. 

Wearing the veil as a religious obligation is a controversial subject within Muslim communities around the world. Many renowned Muslim scholars disagree with veiling being adopted or presented as a religious obligation. 

Making children wear hijab is not even a religious requirement. It stems predominantly from fundamentalists’ perception of piety, which is imposed on women and girls under immense social and political pressure. This misogynistic ideology absolves men of mistreating women and puts the onus on the victim to use the veil as a means of guarding herself against unwanted advances. The primary goal of covering young girls from an early age is to introduce them to the culture of ‘modesty’ and force them to adopt a strict and unyielding way of life. They have little choice but to fall in with these arbitrary religious and cultural norms.

In such circumstances, when powerful businesses like Mattel promote hijab-wearing in the name of cultural relativism, this ploy serves as nothing more than a marketing strategy tool designed to placate religious fundamentalists, rather than to empower the women who suffer discrimination at their hands.

Furthermore, when corporations like Mattel choose the hijab as a symbol of Muslim women, they support a stereotyped idea of what it means to be a Muslim. This approach delegitimises the worries and suffering of women who reject the hijab and are chastised for doing so.

In addition, the choice of the hijab runs counter to the reality of women in Muslim-majority countries such as Iran and Afghanistan, where women are protesting against the hijab and turning to the streets to demand their fundamental human rights. The hijab is being used as a tactic by the brutal Taliban regime and the theocratic government of Iran to oppress women and girls. Women are tortured and imprisoned for not wearing hijabs, and girls have been prohibited from entering the school gates.

It is thus highly inappropriate for corporations such as Mattel to peddle the hijab – a symbol of oppression – as an inspiration for Muslim girls. They sell an imagined feeling of freedom, a fictitious sense of independence, to Muslim girls who often have no choice but to comply.

It is concerning that such capitalist firms have gained power to redefine what social justice means by marketing symbolic goods which serve no purpose other than to tick the diversity box, while doing little to improve the social and political standing of women. Such exaggerated assertions about women’s rights and diversity convey the ideologically motivated message that ‘all is well’. This could not be farther from the truth.

Such progressive tokenism often does more harm than good. It distracts people from addressing concerns and adopting measures that would actually help to protect women.

The Barbie doll has arguably been used to perpetuate a variety of misogynistic attitudes for years. At least until relatively recently, many of its models depicted women as flawless sexual objects – even when they had careers.

Mattel has never given a satisfactory response to these criticisms, but instead has laid the blame elsewhere. In 2014, Mattel’s lead designer for Barbie, Kim Culmone, said that mothers, not dolls, are to blame for girls’ body issues. ‘Barbie’s body was never designed to be realistic,’ she reportedly said, ‘she was designed for girls to easily dress and undress.’

It is all the more perplexing to find the same Barbie being portrayed as an embodiment of feminism in Greta Gerwig’s new Barbie movie. While Gerwig and her partner Noah Baumbach reportedly had creative freedom in writing the script, Mattel was involved as co-producer.

The movie has managed to capture the attention of people who probably grew up playing with Mattel’s dolls, or knew someone who did. Many commenters have defended Barbie’s fictional struggle as an act of feminism and seem to think that opposing Barbie is the same as endorsing the patriarchy.

The film’s idea of making Barbie develop self-awareness and anxiety, along with physical changes like flat feet and ‘thoughts of death’, is intriguing. However, after venturing into the ‘real world’ of the movie, its heroine feels starts sexualised and objectified. This is perhaps rather an obvious plot development. At the same time, calling Barbie a ‘fascist’, as Gerwig has another female character do, makes her appear gullible and foolish.

The Barbie film presents its protagonist as a feminist icon. Yet it does not deal with the fundamental problem of Barbie’s instrumentalisation by a culture that was, and in many ways still is, structually misogynistic. According to one recent study, playing with a Barbie doll may have a range of negative impacts on women and girls, such as reduced self-esteem and a desire for a slimmer body. 

There is a clear significance in the film’s attempt to engage a younger audience in discussions about the struggle for women’s rights. However, it seems disingenuous to use the figure of Barbie, with her pink lipstick, matching clothes and perfect waistline, to raise awareness about these struggles. The movie comes across as a deliberate effort to reintroduce the Barbie brand with fresh traits like morality and self-realisation in a bid to clear Mattel of all criticism, pay lip service to 2020s feminism – and advertise new Barbie dolls.

It is questionable, to say the least, whether companies like Mattel are in the business of empowering women. Whatever the movie may suggest, toys like the Barbie doll surely continue to commodify girls and are designed to encourage them to be nothing but consumers of a cheap ideal of themselves.

Whether you take the Barbie movie or Mattel’s series of Sheroes, everything revolves around the Barbie brand. It seems like a cynical joke to promote this brand as a symbol of feminism and the struggle against the patriarchy. Corporations like Mattel should give up their apparent attempts to whitewash the subjugation of women – whether through Islamic dress codes or unrealistic body images.

It’s time to put the doll back in the box and let the world be inspired by real women.

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The post Hijab or hairdo, it’s time to put Barbie back in the box appeared first on The Freethinker.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan triumphed in a closely contested election in May, ensuring another five years in power and extending his two-decade-long reign over Turkey. As he edged out his opponent, Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, 52 per cent to 48 per cent, in the first ever presidential runoff in the country’s history, Erdoğan reaffirmed his control over a Turkey that is more divided than ever.

There are many reasons why the opposition missed out on arguably its best opportunity to oust Erdoğan in recent years, including the regime’s use of the state machinery to influence election results. However, a major cause behind Kılıçdaroğlu’s defeat was his abandonment of the Turkish secularism that was rooted in the founding principles of the republic.

Turkey, and the CHP, were both founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, based on the ideology he propounded, which has since become known as Kemalism. The latter is best illustrated in his thirty-six-hour-long speech, Nutuk, delivered to the party’s second congress in 1927. Kemalism is often summarised using six bullet points, and depicted as six arrows on the CHP’s flag. One of these is laicism. 

Atatürk took up the task of creating a Turkish republic from the remnants of a long-decaying Ottoman Empire, where Islamic dogma had reigned supreme and was, indeed, a critical contributor to the realm’s downfall – despite the way that Ottoman sultans intermittently toyed with a skewed enforcement of religious pluralism as a means of exercising arbitrary rule over a multiethnic and multireligious realm. Their privileging of Muslim elite over non-Muslim populations, or Sunni over Shia majority regions, eventually created separate, non-Muslim nation states in Eastern Europe and sectarian fault lines within Islam across the Middle East.

Therefore, where secularisation would have been a practical remedy to the religionist quagmire in Turkey, the sheer extent of the Islamist inertia necessitated a state more assertive in its separation from religion. Hence laiklik, the Turkish brand of laicism that echoes French laïcité, was as much an existential requirement for Turkey to loosen its Islamist stranglehold, as it was a reflection of Atatürk’s own modernist worldview.

Yet when the CHP presented a bill endorsing the hijab in public institutions in October last year, Kılıçdaroğlu effectively surrendered his party’s secularist legacy. Turkey’s ban on religious and anti-religious manifestations in state institutions, the bedrock of laicism, had already been lifted a decade ago. Hence this provision of exclusive protection for sexist Islamic headgear was nothing but a comprehensive capitulation to Islamisation, and was clearly intended to win votes.

The CHP’s endorsement of the hijab was also an extension of the frequently regurgitated misinterpretation of laicism as an exclusively ‘anti-Islam’ phenomenon, which has been especially echoed in criticisms of France. The CHP appear to have conveniently forgetten that laiklik was, like French laïcité, equally applicable to all religious displays, such as the Christian cross. The CHP’s prioritisation of the protection of Islamic symbols, while the Turkish government has been busy demolishing, or converting, churches, including Hagia Sophia, represents a categorical abandonment of Atatürk’s vision.

It is not the departure from an individual’s guidelines, no matter how critical their position in any people’s history, that makes the renunciation of ideals damaging for a nation. In fact, the idolisation of Atatürk, which included a sweeping ban on criticising him, has helped foster the Islamist opposition in a country where laiklik has long been collectively treated as one man’s decree and not as the empirically provable foundation of Turkish progress. Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) have managed to successfully channel the religionist backlash, merging Islamist parties under one big umbrella that has now ruled over Turkey for over 20 years.

Many have deemed Kılıçdaroğlu’s legislative endorsement of the hijab a political necessity, since he was leading a wide coalition which included many parties that wanted to demonstrate their support for the Islamic garb. Supporting the hijab could be said to be especially necessary on a political level, given how hotly debated the issue has been in recent years. And yet Kılıçdaroğlu has admirably defended LGBT rights in Turkey, albeit without overtly supporting them, thereby categorically contradicting the beliefs of the same Islamist stakeholders. The CHP’s support for the hijab, including within the party’s own ranks, stems not from realpolitik, nor from an exhaustive endorsement of Islamic injunctions, but simply from its succumbing to the Islamisation of Turkish nationalism. The AKP have long used Islamic headgear as the unofficial flag of this movement.

As the Erdoğan regime has rekindled Turkey’s Ottoman past, using modesty codes as a way of Islamising society, and suppressing non-Muslim emblems as a way of Islamising politics, it has also used a newly found neo-Ottoman soft power to Islamise its diplomacy. Where global Muslims were traditionally drawn to glamorous Turkish soaps depicting lifestyles often violently punishable in their countries, in recent years they have been infatuated by shows narrating fictionalised renditions of Ottoman conquests. After undertaking the Islamisation of Turkey, Erdoğan aspired to position himself as the leader of the Muslim world, boosted by reminders of the Ottoman caliphate and its power over Islam’s holiest sites in the Arabian Peninsula for four centuries.

This is why Erdoğan has been the first to claim a ‘Muslim genocide’ in France over satirical caricatures of Muhammad. By doing so, he seems to be hoping to undermine laicism in France, as he already has in Turkey. Similarly, he has threatened to cut ties with Muslim or Arab states maintaining diplomatic relations with Israel, even though Turkey has recognised the latter since 1949. A similar paradox can also be seen in the way that Erdoğan is still pursuing Turkey’s stalled application for EU membership, while simultaneously aligning the country more closely with the Islamic states that he is wooing. And yet it is precisely Turkey’s alignment with the Islamic states that might have actually cost the country its best opportunity to consolidate its position as leader of the Muslim world.

The lessons from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire were not limited to the Atatürk-led Turkey, but also extended to other parts of the empire, as well as the broader Muslim world, as states in these regions gained their freedom after World War II. In the Arab world, a secular nationalism emerged, albeit under the control of dictatorial rulers, such as Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt. Some were swayed by the western powers that colonised the area: French laïcité, for instance, influenced Tunisia, Syria and Lebanon. By the 1970s, which saw the rise of the socialist and Arab nationalist Baath party in Syria and Iraq, Arab secularism had become synonymous with absolutist regimes. The monarchy in Iran, led by the Pahlavi dynasty, and the republic of Afghanistan briefly proclaimed by Daoud Khan, also demonstrated the way in which secularism was adopted by autocracies in the wider Muslim world. From Algeria to Afghanistan, military regimes became protectors of secularisation because they wanted to quell populist Islamist parties and groups. In Turkey, too, the army was the defender of secularism.

When the region imploded into the Saudi-Iran proxy wars in the 1980s and the jihadist radicalisation that followed, in Turkey, the army stepped in, taking charge of the country following the 1980 coup d’état. Turkey’s membership of NATO helped protect it from the jihadist spillover, because NATO gave it support to resist jihadist infiltration and to fight against the Islamic state, while military rule prevented the Islamisation of the country. Unfortunately, just because secularism was implemented by the army, this only reinforced laiklik as a coerced ideology and further emboldened its Islamist opponents with their long-festering grievances.

Despite this, as jihadism wreaked havoc with the Muslim world at the turn of the millennium, it was Turkey that remained the bastion of Muslim secularism. Its proximity to the West, and its aspirations to join the EU, ensured that freedoms and human rights were provided with much better safeguards, in addition to the long tradition of uncompromising separation between mosque and state. As a result, Turkey remained the constantly cited inspiration for Muslim states that wanted to undo Islamist radicalisation. This became even more evident after 9/11, as jihadism spread around the world, leading to counter-efforts to defuse militant Islamism and reform Islam. Turkey was in the pole position to lead the much needed secularisation of the Muslim world; this would have been bolstered by the country’s transformation into a truly liberal and secular democracy. However, it was at this point that Turkey, under Erdoğan and the AKP, opted instead for Islamisation.  

As a result, the baton for Muslim modernisation has once again been taken up by a few totalitarian Arab regimes such as Saudi Arabia. These kingdoms are largely responsible for the global explosion of radical Islam, the economic interests of which now align with selective progressivism centered on the support of these Arab monarchies. The failure to undertake a populist secularisation movement within the Muslim world, compounded by the failure of the Arab Spring, means that Islam, and its deployment at state, regional, or global levels, currently remains under the control of autocrats. And the ideological surrender of the CHP underlines the point that Turkey, formerly a model of secularism in the Muslim world, has conclusively capitulated to Islamisation.

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When news first broke out about Mahsa Amini’s murder by the so-called ‘morality police’, the intelligence and security apparatus of the Islamist regime in Iran could not have possibly foreseen the historical consequences that would follow. To them, it seemed like an insignificant event. Because in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a woman’s life is worth nothing.

Under the banner of Allah, violence against women has been systematised as one of the main functions of the state. Hence the term ‘gender apartheid’. And hence the declaration by Masih Alinejad, an Iranian journalist, dissident, and women’s rights activist, that under the Islamic Republic of Iran, the veil is akin to what the Berlin wall once represented to both Soviet officials and its oppressed subjects.

Ironically, the person who first drew this analogy was not Masih Alinejad, but Mohammad-Saleh Hashemi Golpayegani, the head of the government agency tasked with directing the morality police’s activities. When he drew this parallel, only a couple of days had passed since the nationwide ‘Anti-Hijab Day’ campaign, which expressly protested ‘against the Islamic Republic’s 12 July National Day of Hijab and Chastity’ and mandatory hijab. A mere three months later, and Golpayegani’s prediction seems to be coming to pass. Not least because of the ceaseless efforts of Masih Alinejad, who has been leading campaigns against the forced hijab for many years now.

Alinejad’s own story is symbolic of the Islamic regime’s utter fear of women, and is indicative of the violence it is willing to perpetrate in order to silence them. In 1979, the Islamic revolution placed the Iranian nation in the firm grip of a theological elite whose only guiding principles have been those of Islam. And the policies which have resulted in the squalid living conditions of 80 million Iranians today are grounded in the same line of reasoning that refuses to compromise on the chokehold it has over ‘the second sex’ in the form of the forced hijab.

Women’s struggle for emancipation in Iran is far older than the 1979 revolution. It was not long after the establishment of the Islamic Republic that Iranian women began fighting against the state’s encroachment on their bodies. But as steadfast and uncompromising as these movements were, they were repeatedly undermined by the rest of the body politic. In the early years of Islamic rule after 1979, women’s struggle was undermined by supporters of the Islamic regime, both men and women, who claimed that their demands were tangential to more pressing matters, such as ‘the struggle against imperialism’. However, the unfortunate truth is that in the four decades that followed, women’s struggle against gender discrimination was often undermined even by opponents of the Islamic regime.

It was only with Mahsa Amini’s death that the Iranian nation began to launch a concerted attack on the forced hijab as the principal revolutionary question. Mahsa’s murder changed everything, and now, after 43 years of self-denial, it seems that Iranian society is agreed on what women like Masih Alinejad have been saying for decades. Namely, that the elimination of the forced hijab, far from being a distraction from more pressing issues, is the fortress which, once conquered, will result in the total defeat of our enemies.

The voices of the millions of Iranian people in the streets today, both throughout Iran and across the globe, are a unanimous rejection of all the anti-woman ideals which the Islamic regime has toiled so hard to impose on us all. But not only is this the first revolution in history to hold the cause of women’s emancipation at the very forefront of its charge forward: it is perhaps the only revolution that has been unequivocally led by women too.

‘Woman, life, freedom’ is our slogan, and is being echoed throughout the farthest corners of the nation. But what is it about these three words that threatens the Islamic regime so much?

The answer is that the values and principles which ‘woman, life, freedom’ connote are quite simply irreconcilable with the Islamic regime’s ‘revolutionary ideals’. The state has known this since its inception. At last, the Iranian women and men, fighting together hand in hand, have accepted that there can be no compromise. The regime may consider the life of an innocent 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman to be insignificant, but we do not. And since the death of Mahsa, Iranians have demonstrated their willingness to die fighting to establish an Iran that is permanently cured of the cancer of Islamism. What we are fighting for is a democratic, secular Iran. Our revolution is a vindication of the rights of women, and by extension a vindication of all human rights.

However, this is not only a feminist revolution. It is no exaggeration that every Iranian, regardless of gender, age, income, religion or beliefs has a claim over this uprising. There is not a single group in Iranian society whose voice is not contributing to this uproar. We have all been victimised by the Islamic state.

Whether it be the teachers who have taken to the streets to demand the dignity withdrawn from themselves and their students; school girls in primary, middle and high schools following their teachers’ example; farmers in protest against state policies that have caused water shortages throughout the country; a middle class which has lost all hope of attaining dreams it had once felt within reach; or a working class that has been systematically exploited and undermined –– today, all Iranians are suffering, and they recognise the source of all their maladies in a common enemy, which has always been clear in its logic. An ill-begotten logic derived from a holy book which has not only justified the misery its agents have inflicted on us, but which has elevated this assault to the realm of holy duty. The lives and dignity of Iranians have been fodder for a frail idea whose only legacy has been abject destitution. And despite what Islamist apologists around the world still claim, what is happening in Iran today is as appropriate an example of what ‘true Islam’ constitutes as any other in history.

People in the streets today know exactly what it is they are fighting for. It is the negation of everything which the 1979 Islamic revolution represents. What is happening inside Iran is the historical expression of the clash of two irreconcilable and contradictory set of values, ideals and principles.

Iran is by no means a homogenous whole. It constitutes a multitude of different ethnic peoples, identities and social classes. The Islamic regime has exploited these differences to sow division among us for more than four decades, and with great success too. And yet, today, all these differences seem to have been swept aside.

Only hatred can unite a people so thoroughly. The object of our hatred is the enemy which has inflicted pain and suffering on us all. This uniting force may be most aptly described in the words of Ahmad Shamlu, who once wrote of the ‘common pain’ in one of his most memorable poems. In our case, this common pain finally found its voice in Mahsa Amini’s name. Mahsa, whose real Kurdish name was never legally recognised because of its un-Islamic origins, has become a symbol of all the injustices which we are subject to under the Muslim God’s iron rule. Her Kurdish name is Jina. And as the words on her tombstone so prophetically predict, her name, both in its Kurdish and Islamic forms, has become a code for freedom. The headstone reads: ‘Dear Jina, you shall never die. Your name shall become a cipher’.

The very phrase ‘woman, life, freedom’, finds its origin in Kurdish culture. It was the Kurdish women present at Mahsa’s burial in the Kurdish city of Saqqez in north-western Iran who first called out this old Kurdish phrase as they took their veils off and twirled them in the air. This was their answer to the rhetorical question being chanted by the Kurdish men: ‘Another murder for the veil … How much longer will we put up with this indignity?’ Soon the crowd at the cemetery were chanting, ‘Death to the dictator.’ And as this cry rose against a backdrop of state violence (a brutal assault began at the cemetery itself), the uprising spread to other major Kurdish cities and then on to the rest of the nation, as Azerbaijan declared its solidarity with the Kurdish people. Today, the entire nation is united. ‘Mahsa’ has become a synonym for the idea that the truth that had been suppressed until now has been liberated, and that we are no longer afraid to shout it out loud:

Down with the dictator!
Down with Islamic rulership!
Down with theocracy!
The Islamic Republic must be eradicated!
Down with this anti-woman regime!
Down with this anti-woman reaction!
The Islamic Republic must be eradicated!
Cannons, Tanks and Firecrackers, it don’t matter, Mullahs have to get lost! We can only reclaim our rights out on the streets!
Out on the streets until the revolution’s success!
Hey Iranian, yell, shout, claim your rights!
We will fight, we will die, we will reclaim Iran!
Neither Gaza, nor Lebanon, I will only die for Iran!
Islam and the Quran, both to be sacrificed to Iran!
So long as the dictator remains, the insurrection will go on!
This is our final message: we’re aiming for the entire Islamic regime!

These are the words being shouted in our cities today, against the sound of the regime’s gunshots. Our shouts grow louder, every time we are confronted by anti-riot vehicles filled with armed men, who either believe they are doing the work of their Lord, or who are perfectly aware that Allah whom they once served has died long ago, and who are only there for their own material gain.

It is important to note that people opposing the regime have not burned Qurans. We would be perfectly within our rights to do so. But unlike our enemies, book-burning does not align with the principles we uphold. Almost a century ago, Ahmad Kasravi, a figure who represents what Leo Strauss once termed the ‘sword of philosophical atheism’, organised a Quran-burning. He was eventually murdered at the hands of Navab Safavi at the behest of a young Ruhollah Khomeini.

Once we have got rid of the Islamist state, it will not be laws, nor the threat of Islamist violence, that will keep us from repeating Ahmad Kasravi’s gesture. Our own dignity will withhold us from following in the footsteps of the likes of Khomeini (whose fatwa against Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses resulted in the author being stabbed just two months ago), or the caliph Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Mansur (1184-1199), who ordered the burning of the works of the great rationalist thinker Averroes. The burning of the works of Ibn Rushd (Averroes’ Arabic name), and those of his namesake Salman Rushdie (whose father changed his last name to Rushdie in honour of Ibn Rushd) almost a thousand years later, are not incidental to the Iranian uprising today; they are emblematic of everything we are fighting against.

Our revolution is a contemporary expression of a renaissance of Enlightenment ideas. One of the most central aspects of this concerns the principles of freethought, free expression, and freedom of the press. The Islamic revivalists of the 20th century, following the example of their prophet and remaining true to their faith, worked to extinguish the light of reason with the sword. In contrast, in our revolution, the pen will always be mightier than the sword. The weapons which are monopolised by our enemies today are nothing but evidence of the intellectual bankruptcy of their cause.

Many have been shot at and brutalised over the past three weeks, and at least 154 people, including children, have been killed. But they have not managed to silence us: ideas cannot be murdered.

Consider for example, the poem composed by Asma bint Marwan, a female Arab poet of the seventh century, in honour of the memory of the Jewish poet Abu ‘Afak, killed because of his criticisms of Muhammad:

Do you expect good from him [Muhammad] after the killing of your chiefs / Like a hungry man waiting for a cook’s broth?
Is there no man of pride who would attack him by surprise / And cut off the hopes of those who expect aught from him?

These words live on, and the revulsion which many felt at Muhammad’s message is plain for all to see. In this rebuttal of Muhammad’s claims, Asma bint Marwan seems to have fulfilled the ideal which Baal (one of the characters in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses) sets for the poet, when he claims that a poet’s work is ‘to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.’

The Muslim historian Ibn Ishaq relates that upon hearing these verses, Muhammad turned to his companions and asked: ‘Who will rid me of Marwan’s daughter?’ The prophet of Islam ordered an assault on a brave woman who happened to be a poet too.

No, the war on women and freethought is not external to ‘true Islam’, as liberal Muslims like to keep repeating, but fundamental to it. In Crescents on the cross: Islamic visions of Christianity, V. J. Ridgeon draws a compelling parallel between Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie and Muhammad’s order to assassinate Asma bint Marwan. The Islamic regime of Iran fears reason more than anything else. In the words of Rushdie, what scares it is the human mind’s ‘ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.’

What is happening in Iran today is the clash of two irreconcilable and contradictory set of values, ideals and principles. It is represented, on the one hand, by the people, and on the other, by an occupying Islamic elite. This is a clash between the values of the Enlightenment and the values of the Islamic Revolution. Only one can win.

The removal of the hijab is a performative act which contains within it a thousand and one stories waiting to be told. Stories of the reclamation of dignity, but perhaps more importantly, of a long-alienated identity. To remove the hijab is to strike a blow, not only against the state, but against a theocratic system which has worked very hard to rid people of their identities outside its own strict confines. As Le Figaro accurately observed, the significance of the revolution in Iran is embodied in the dance of the young girl who tossed her hijab into the flames.

There really is a reason why the Islamic regime cannot compromise on the issue of the hijab. There really is a reason why writers, thinkers and poets have been executed in droves under this regime, and why so many journalists and artists who covered the topic of Mahsa’s death have been imprisoned in the past two weeks. Freedom is something which the foot-soldiers of Allah simply cannot abide by. Our enemies are perfectly aware that in an equal playing field of ideas, their claims cannot possibly stand up to the scrutiny of common sense. And so they will never allow this scrutiny to occur. It is the bankruptcy of their thoughts which makes them so completely reliant on the sword. And yet, as is being witnessed in the streets of Iran today, even their weapons are impotent in the face of the words being spoken by unarmed civilians. The entire force of their Umma is nothing in face of the women who confront them shouting ‘woman, life, freedom’.

And yet, as footage of Iranian women burning their veils began gaining traction on social media and spreading like wildfire across the world, so-called ‘Islamic Feminists’ started to spread disinformation that was aimed at obfuscating the true character of this uprising. Nora Jaber, for example, claims that by paying attention to Iranian women unveiling themselves, ‘mainstream media narratives contribute to the victimisation and homogenisation of Iranian women.’

In fact, is it is narratives like the one spun out by Jaber that are the true perpetrators of the  ‘victimisation and homogenisation of Iranian women’. For four decades, the voice of women from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) telling Western audiences about the true condition of women in their countries were ignored or attacked. Women such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Masih Alinejad and Maryam Namazie have received a lot of criticism for their honest description of women’s lives under sharia. The fearful atmosphere of political correctness cultivated by Islamist apologists had made it such that any mention of the hijab was framed as a redline. ‘This is our/their culture’, they would say. ‘You can’t offend other people’s culture!’ Today we say that every single one of the politically correct apologists of Islamism that have forged public opinion in the West about proper attitudes to the hijab in Iran have been complicit in the crimes committed by the Islamic regime against humanity.

For a long time, anti-Islamophobia crusaders like Hoda Katebi have acted as apologists for the Islamic Republic’s systematised violence against Iranian women. And now, being acutely aware of the threat that the women’s revolution in Iran poses to all the falsehoods they have perpetuated, they aim to censor its true tenets and frame it as a movement in line with their own reactionary agenda.

Jaber, for instance, claims that Western coverage of the uprising in Iran ‘ignores the pluralistic nature of Islam and conceals various rich historical accounts of women in Iran and in other Muslim contexts grounding their demands for rights and justice within an Islamic framework, known to many as Islamic Feminism.’ Apparently, she really believes this revolution is not a negation of political Islam as such, but one which still reveres the Islamic ‘framework’, even though it aims to change certain aspects of it – for example, by eradicating the morality police. Or at least, she is trying to get others to believe this.

Jaber claims that media focus on the performative act of unveiling, and the innumerable recorded instances of women burning their headscarves, ‘builds on and perpetuates a reductive understanding of Islam (in this case, one that is brutally enforced by the regime and its institutions) as the root of Iranian women’s oppression, which in turn fuels Islamophobia and harms Muslim communities abroad.’

In other words, our uprising represents precisely what Jaber rejects. But today, the world is finally hearing the voice of the Iranian nation’s unequivocal disavowal of Islam as ‘our culture’. Our culture does not degrade women. Our culture is one which celebrates life, not death. Our culture is one that values freedom, and which, as has been proven in the past three weeks, is more than willing to pay the high price of attaining it.

The distinction between the rejection of the veil and women’s freedom of choice is a false one. No one is denying that what Iranian women are fighting for is the right of choice over their own bodies. No one is proposing a reversion back to Reza Shah’s state ban on the hijab. But were it the case, as Jaber proposes, that this fight for her ‘freedom to choose’ does not entail a rejection or critique of Islam, and that this struggle is being waged ‘within an Islamic framework, known to many as Islamic Feminism,’ it would have sufficed for women simply to have removed their veil. Instead, what we have seen again and again is women not just removing but ceremoniously burning their hijabs. This is not just a rejection of the veil, but a celebration of freedom: freedom from a faith that preaches submission.

The values that we are fighting for are irreconcilable with those which drive Islamist apologists. The threat which Islamists around the world feel as they watch events unfolding in Iran today is not an imaginary one. They are as justified in their fear of our cause, as we are of theirs. The term ‘Islamophobia’ has quite a literal meaning amongst Iranians these days. People are ‘afraid of Islam’ not because they are confused about ‘its true message’, but because they know exactly what it is.

The Iranian insurgency has already sent shockwaves throughout the so-called ‘Islamic world’. Female Turkish artists were among the first to express their solidarity with the Iranian women occupying the streets and setting fire to the hijab, that symbol of oppression, despite the threat to their lives. It is not a coincidence that women across the region have found inspiration in the Iranian revolution. Women in Afghanistan have gathered in front of the Islamic Republic’s embassy in Kabul to express their anger at the assaults being made on their sisters who are chanting ‘woman, life, freedom’. The ideas fuelling this movement are not foreign to any of the people in the Middle East. The support we have received demonstrates that the protesters in Afghanistan, Turkey and elsewhere are perfectly aware of the values they too would fight for, given the chance.

For the first time, women stand on the brink of total victory over an adversary that has wrought nothing but humiliation upon their lives for centuries. And even though the Iranian nation has not achieved its political aims just yet, the fact is that women have succeeded in breaking free of that captivity of mind which had been built up around them for so long. Today, hope has revitalised a catatonic society. Brave women and girls have broken the spell of the Islamic regime’s infallibility. We hope that our revolution against this regime will inspire our sisters and brothers across the region too.

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The post The ‘Women’s Revolution’: from two activists in Iran appeared first on The Freethinker.