Wearing a veil or a hijab is mandatory for most women in Iran as it falls under the Islamic code of conduct. Flouting the rule can attract fines and serious punishments. Just last year 3.6 million women were warned, fined or arrested by Iran’s moral police for inappropriate dressing. While the age-old rule finds many takers, not everyone is happy with the mandatory rule. The younger generation in fact has found a great way to rebel against the traditional.
Using the freedom of the Internet, Masih Alinejad, an Iranian journalist and activist living in the U.S., started an online movement, aptly named #MyStealthyFreedom. The aim is to encourage Iranian women to send in pictures of themselves enjoying their unveiled hair. “My mother wants to wear a scarf. I don’t want to wear a scarf. Iran should be for both of us,” she says in an interview with Vox.
What started out as a Facebook post where Masih uploaded her photo without a headscarf asking if other Iranian women also didn’t agree with the compulsory rule, has snowballed into an international movement with over eight lakh Facebook likes. In an interview with Vogue, Masih says she cannot remember a single moment from her childhood where she took off her scarf. “I used to wake up in middle of the night and touch my head to see if my scarf was there. If it had slipped off, I would find it in the dark and cover my hair before falling asleep.”
“I did not know the meaning of human rights at the age of seven, but it angered me that my brother, just two years older than me, could dash out of the door any time he wished, ride a bike, and swim in the river, but I, as a girl, was banned from doing all those things,” she adds.
At the age of 19 when she married her husband, a poet, she discovered her hair. Her husband, unlike her father, was okay with her letting the headscarf slip and it was when he took pictures of her on the beach without the hijab, that the seed of this idea got planted in her head.
Masih has been using social media to document the stories of numerous women who sent her photographs with their hair showing, most of them taken in public. A recipient of the Women’s Rights Award at the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy, her campaign as expected has received a lot of flak from Iran but that isn’t stopping women from putting their point across.
Take a look at some of the entries received on her Facebook page.
‘I wish I could shout “love” in the land I lovingly cherish.’
‘Hi there. This picture was taken on the shores of the Caspian Sea, North of Tehran. I went there just in order to get away from everything for even one day: from lies, from betrayal, from vile people…Here is my stealthy Freedom, but please go on during these terrible days.’
‘It was during the days when even the colour green had been banned (making reference to the Green Movement of 2009). On the motorway between Lahijan and Rasht (Northern Iran), while it was pouring with rain, I took off my headscarf for the first time in 2009 and let head my stick out of the car window, exposing it to the downpour. At that very moment, I had felt like a free bird that enjoyed a fleeting moment of freedom out of its cage.
Yet, this photo was taken in 2011. During those days, bright colours had been forbidden to us. Even the act of wearing something green had become punishable (since the government was still hunting down the supporters of the Green movement). They had snatched joy and happiness out of our lives. Plucking up your courage to even momentarily take off your headscarf in the street was a big taboo. I named this photo the following: In my dream of freedom….’
‘In this country where I typically feel unsafe due to all these unjustifiable harassements stemming from the way that you dress, I get a sense of safety at the company of my husband. The others that bother me for who I am expect me to be someone else whereas my husband accepts me with my own beauty, not under some kind of obligatory cloth that is foreign to me. When you have the assurance that your husband supports you wholeheartedly in your endeavours, nothing scares you. I call it unity of beliefs as we both believe in the same principles.’
‘Why would they so forcefully attempt to send us to “heaven”? My heaven is some where that I can be free. somewhere that other can respect my my choice and thought.’
Image courtesy:Facebook
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