نیویورک تایمز هم صدای زنان ایرانی این صفحه را شنیده است. این مقاله ای است در مورد زنان و اعتراض آنها به حجاب اجباری:
در حالیکه رهبران ایالت متحدهٔ آمریکا و اتحادیه اروپا درگیر مذاکرات هسته‌ای با ایران بودند، بحث دیگری بین زنان ایرانی و کاربران فضای مجازی در جریان بود.
زنان شجاع ایرانی حجاب از سر برداشته و برای کمپینی به نامه "آزادیهای یواشکی" جلوی دوربین عکس میگیرند. در حالیکه مقامات غربی در تلاشند تا جلوی دسترسی ایران به "بمب" را بگیرند، این کمپین خود انفجاری در ایران به پا کرده است و موجب پاسخی بسیار متخاصم از سمت دولت ایران شده است.
حکومت ایران که تصاویر در حال اشتعال سمبل آمریکا (عمو سام) و تصاویر گروگان های چشم بسته را در خاطرات بینندگانی که انقلاب اسلامی سال 1979 را از تلویزیون دیدند، سوزاند. اکنون توسط زنان ایرانی توجه ها را دوباره به خود جلب کرده است. اين كمپين ثابت كرده است كه اگرچه جمهورى اسلامى به طور رسمى بر مصدر قدرت است، اما تلاش ٣٥ساله اش براى القاى عقايد و ايدئولوژي هايش، حداقل بر نيمى از ملت اثرى نداشته است. به تلافى از انتشار عكس بدون حجاب صدها زن ايرانى بر روى فيسبوك، پليس تهران اقدام به دستگيرى گروهى دختر و پسر جوان كرد كه با آهنگ "هَپى" از فارل ويليامز رقصيده بودند. آنها روى پشت بامى ميرقصيدند كه نمايش تاريخى شعار "الله اكبر" توسط آيت الله روح الله خمينى در سال ١٩٧٨ در آنجا برپا شد، روزهايى كه سقوط شاه را به دنبال داشت.
رویا حکاکیان
***
As the leaders of the United States and European Union engaged in nuclear talks with Iran in recent weeks, another conversation was going on between Iranian women and citizens of cyberspace. Brave Iranian women took off their veils and posed for the cameras in a campaign called My Stealthy Freedom. While Western officials worked to prevent Tehran from getting “the bomb,” the women’s campaign caused an explosion of its own, and provoked a belligerent response from the government.
The regime that burned the images of flaming effigies of Uncle Sam and blindfolded hostages on the memories of viewers who watched the 1979 Islamic Revolution unfold on television has now been upstaged by its female citizens. The campaign has proved that while the Islamic Republic may officially be in charge, its 35-year effort to instill its ideology on half of the nation has mostly failed. To retaliate against the images of hundreds of bareheaded women posted on Facebook, Tehran resorted to arresting a group of young people who had posted a YouTube video of themselves dancing to Pharrell Williams’s “Happy.” They danced on one of the rooftops where Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s historic spectacle of chanting Allah-akbar was staged in 1978 in the days leading up to the fall of the shah.
Just as the civil rights movement is important to understanding the other United States, so is the story of the nearly 100-year struggle over the hijab important to deciphering the hidden Iran. As the country modernized in the early part of the last century, Reza Shah Pahlavi ordered his gendarmes in 1936 to pull the veil off the heads of women in public. The abolition of the veil and the desegregation of genders defined the Pahlavi rule and became the ethos of modern Iran. In the heady days of 1978, when revolutionary zeal engulfed the nation, the majority of secular voices embraced the hijab as a symbol of their rejection of the monarchy and its values.
If one follows the history of the veil in Iran, one can trace the failure of the country’s democratic movement. The secular leadership positioned itself against the clergy on most issues, including freedom of the press and speech. But when it came to freedom of dress for women, or protecting women’s rights, they deemed them less pressing than issues like a potential American-backed coup against the fledgling regime. In uniting with the clergy against the shah, the male-dominated secular opposition found that the hijab was an easy sacrifice to make.
Within days after the victory of the 1979 revolution, Khomeini issued an order to reinstate the mandatory veil. A small yet effective group of women, accompanied by a few French activists and the American feminist Kate Millett, demonstrated against the decree on Ma Bishomarimrch 8, 1979, and forced him to back off, and the veil did not become law until 1983.
In that historic demonstration, a reporter asked Ms. Millett what she thought of the ayatollah’s position on the Islamic dress code. Ms. Millett, who was later detained and thrown out of Iran, cast an indignant look at the camera and called the most venerated man in Iran a “male chauvinist.”
Her statement, in the wake of a revolution that her famous fellow leftist intellectuals had hailed as anti-imperialist, was prescient. Even as Iran’s schools, buses and theaters were segregated and women were banned from most careers in law, medicine and engineering, misogyny was dismissed as the usual feminist petulance. Women lost the right to travel and divorce. In court, the value of a woman’s testimony in a criminal trial dropped to half of a man’s. They were relegated to second-class citizenry, but Khomeini’s malice was still measured by the fear he provoked in the West, not by the harm he caused to millions of women at home. He was called a terrorist, a fundamentalist, a religious megalomaniac, but rarely a misogynist.
Today, the My Stealthy Freedom campaign reveals that Ms. Millett’s fiery declaration was the harbinger of the real order that would veil itself in the name of an Islamic Republic: a gender apartheid. Khomeini’s brand of misogyny, disguised in the cloak of Islam, inspired maliciousness in others in the region, and has become a ubiquitous and multiheaded beast: on Tahrir Square, it raped female demonstrators; in Pakistan, it took aim at Malala; in Nigeria, it stole nearly 300 girls from a school.
Decades since the rule of the shah, Iranian women are covertly retaking the freedom the monarchy once gave them by force. For this generation, the goal is not to ban the veil, as many Iranian women still embrace it, but to legally protect the choice to veil or not. So far, their successful virtual spectacle — with hundreds of thousands of Facebook likes — and the media coverage is not a victory, for victory in cyberspace is ethereal.
A real victory is rooted in a campaign with vision, values, strategy and a strong identity. Those who are fighting must connect the dots of global sisterhood to transcend mere spectacle and begin a real movement. Citizens of the free world cannot stop their support at a virtual thumbs up on social media. A new generation of Kate Milletts must see past the religious smokescreen that misogynists have put up to keep them at bay. The personal is still political, to be sure. But now, it is also global.
(Roya Hakakian is the author of “Assassins of the Turquoise Palace
در حالیکه رهبران ایالت متحدهٔ آمریکا و اتحادیه اروپا درگیر مذاکرات هسته‌ای با ایران بودند، بحث دیگری بین زنان ایرانی و کاربران فضای مجازی در جریان بود.
زنان شجاع ایرانی حجاب از سر برداشته و برای کمپینی به نامه "آزادیهای یواشکی" جلوی دوربین عکس میگیرند. در حالیکه مقامات غربی در تلاشند تا جلوی دسترسی ایران به "بمب" را بگیرند، این کمپین خود انفجاری در ایران به پا کرده است و موجب پاسخی بسیار متخاصم از سمت دولت ایران شده است.
حکومت ایران که تصاویر در حال اشتعال سمبل آمریکا (عمو سام) و تصاویر گروگان های چشم بسته را در خاطرات بینندگانی که انقلاب اسلامی سال 1979 را از تلویزیون دیدند، سوزاند. اکنون توسط زنان ایرانی توجه ها را دوباره به خود جلب کرده است. اين كمپين ثابت كرده است كه اگرچه جمهورى اسلامى به طور رسمى بر مصدر قدرت است، اما تلاش ٣٥ساله اش براى القاى عقايد و ايدئولوژي هايش، حداقل بر نيمى از ملت اثرى نداشته است. به تلافى از انتشار عكس بدون حجاب صدها زن ايرانى بر روى فيسبوك، پليس تهران اقدام به دستگيرى گروهى دختر و پسر جوان كرد كه با آهنگ "هَپى" از فارل ويليامز رقصيده بودند. آنها روى پشت بامى ميرقصيدند كه نمايش تاريخى شعار "الله اكبر" توسط آيت الله روح الله خمينى در سال ١٩٧٨ در آنجا برپا شد، روزهايى كه سقوط شاه را به دنبال داشت.
رویا حکاکیان
***
As the leaders of the United States and European Union engaged in nuclear talks with Iran in recent weeks, another conversation was going on between Iranian women and citizens of cyberspace. Brave Iranian women took off their veils and posed for the cameras in a campaign called My Stealthy Freedom. While Western officials worked to prevent Tehran from getting “the bomb,” the women’s campaign caused an explosion of its own, and provoked a belligerent response from the government.
The regime that burned the images of flaming effigies of Uncle Sam and blindfolded hostages on the memories of viewers who watched the 1979 Islamic Revolution unfold on television has now been upstaged by its female citizens. The campaign has proved that while the Islamic Republic may officially be in charge, its 35-year effort to instill its ideology on half of the nation has mostly failed. To retaliate against the images of hundreds of bareheaded women posted on Facebook, Tehran resorted to arresting a group of young people who had posted a YouTube video of themselves dancing to Pharrell Williams’s “Happy.” They danced on one of the rooftops where Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s historic spectacle of chanting Allah-akbar was staged in 1978 in the days leading up to the fall of the shah.
Just as the civil rights movement is important to understanding the other United States, so is the story of the nearly 100-year struggle over the hijab important to deciphering the hidden Iran. As the country modernized in the early part of the last century, Reza Shah Pahlavi ordered his gendarmes in 1936 to pull the veil off the heads of women in public. The abolition of the veil and the desegregation of genders defined the Pahlavi rule and became the ethos of modern Iran. In the heady days of 1978, when revolutionary zeal engulfed the nation, the majority of secular voices embraced the hijab as a symbol of their rejection of the monarchy and its values.
If one follows the history of the veil in Iran, one can trace the failure of the country’s democratic movement. The secular leadership positioned itself against the clergy on most issues, including freedom of the press and speech. But when it came to freedom of dress for women, or protecting women’s rights, they deemed them less pressing than issues like a potential American-backed coup against the fledgling regime. In uniting with the clergy against the shah, the male-dominated secular opposition found that the hijab was an easy sacrifice to make.
Within days after the victory of the 1979 revolution, Khomeini issued an order to reinstate the mandatory veil. A small yet effective group of women, accompanied by a few French activists and the American feminist Kate Millett, demonstrated against the decree on Ma Bishomarimrch 8, 1979, and forced him to back off, and the veil did not become law until 1983.
In that historic demonstration, a reporter asked Ms. Millett what she thought of the ayatollah’s position on the Islamic dress code. Ms. Millett, who was later detained and thrown out of Iran, cast an indignant look at the camera and called the most venerated man in Iran a “male chauvinist.”
Her statement, in the wake of a revolution that her famous fellow leftist intellectuals had hailed as anti-imperialist, was prescient. Even as Iran’s schools, buses and theaters were segregated and women were banned from most careers in law, medicine and engineering, misogyny was dismissed as the usual feminist petulance. Women lost the right to travel and divorce. In court, the value of a woman’s testimony in a criminal trial dropped to half of a man’s. They were relegated to second-class citizenry, but Khomeini’s malice was still measured by the fear he provoked in the West, not by the harm he caused to millions of women at home. He was called a terrorist, a fundamentalist, a religious megalomaniac, but rarely a misogynist.
Today, the My Stealthy Freedom campaign reveals that Ms. Millett’s fiery declaration was the harbinger of the real order that would veil itself in the name of an Islamic Republic: a gender apartheid. Khomeini’s brand of misogyny, disguised in the cloak of Islam, inspired maliciousness in others in the region, and has become a ubiquitous and multiheaded beast: on Tahrir Square, it raped female demonstrators; in Pakistan, it took aim at Malala; in Nigeria, it stole nearly 300 girls from a school.
Decades since the rule of the shah, Iranian women are covertly retaking the freedom the monarchy once gave them by force. For this generation, the goal is not to ban the veil, as many Iranian women still embrace it, but to legally protect the choice to veil or not. So far, their successful virtual spectacle — with hundreds of thousands of Facebook likes — and the media coverage is not a victory, for victory in cyberspace is ethereal.
A real victory is rooted in a campaign with vision, values, strategy and a strong identity. Those who are fighting must connect the dots of global sisterhood to transcend mere spectacle and begin a real movement. Citizens of the free world cannot stop their support at a virtual thumbs up on social media. A new generation of Kate Milletts must see past the religious smokescreen that misogynists have put up to keep them at bay. The personal is still political, to be sure. But now, it is also global.
(Roya Hakakian is the author of “Assassins of the Turquoise Palace
