The following is a translation of an article from the French group Plateforme Communiste Libertaire.
After long months of revolts in Iranian society against the mullahs’ regime and its desire to control women’s bodies in order to control society as a whole, the Iranian theocratic state seemed to have regained the upper hand. However, the suppressed revolt is not dead and is just waiting to be reborn. Despite this, international solidarity does not seem to be sufficiently present, at least with regard to certain “ left ” sectors.
On November 2nd in Iran, the unthinkable happened: at Tehran’s Azad University, a young woman known as Ahou Daryaei stunned the world by appearing in public in her underwear on the esplanade of the university. The video of her protest went around the world. According to available information, she got to this point after being attacked by the morality police of the Basij militia, who allegedly tore her clothes after harassing her for wearing a ” badly ” veil.
We learn that she is 30 years old, a doctoral student in French literature and the mother of two children. We don’t know anything more about her so far, and it doesn’t matter anyway. We can see the incredible courage that it takes for this, for this step that has never been taken before.
Let us recall that the revolt in Iran in the name of ” Women, Life, Freedom ” was provoked two years ago by the murder of Jina Mahsa Amini, also for simply wearing a veil that was considered improper. The protesters were now increasingly numerous in daring to go outside in broad daylight without a veil.
The movement had already gained momentum, particularly at the end of 2017, with actions such as that of Vida Movahed, who brandished her scarf at the end of a branch in public.
A hyper-repressive regime!
But Ahou Daryaei’s courage can be measured when we know the methods of repression of the Iranian regime, torture, rape, murder… A global repression that has already caused more than 500 deaths. Including, the executors of the mullahs’ dirty work have not even hesitated to poison the water of girls’ schools in many cities.
A second video shows the violent arrest of Ahou Daryaei, during which she allegedly suffered head injuries. In an attempt to find a way out, she was described by the regime, like many other dissidents, as a psychiatric patient. This classic and pitiful method is common in authoritarian regimes to try to discredit opponents. Even more pitiful: a few hours later, a man claiming to be her husband and the father of her children published a video in which, in tears, he begged not to broadcast these images. We learned that she was finally released on November 19 without prosecution… for the same reasons.
But the recent cases do not stop there. A few days later, two young high school girls, named Aynaz Karimi and Arezou Khavari, both Afghan refugees, committed suicide, due to harassment also linked to wearing the veil, which was deemed incorrect. A little later, a young female singer, Parastoo Ahmadi, was arrested after showing her head uncovered during an online concert, and furthermore having transgressed the ban on singing in public, only to be released a few hours later, also following a viral mobilisation. Who knows if these cases will not contribute once again to relaunching the revolt against the regime, at a time when it is already increasingly weakened abroad after having lost its protectorate over Syria in particular.
These revolts are, however, resurfacing in a context of worsening repression. On December 13, the Iranian government announced that it would further increase sanctions against not wearing the veil, a measure already announced last year, while this law is increasingly openly defied. This also shows that President Pezeshkian, recently elected and presented as a ” reformer “, is in reality nothing more than a puppet, not to say a guarantor.
Solidarity first “at the base”
The dissemination of Ahou Daryaei’s videos was immediately massive worldwide. Clearly their media coverage, and the widespread negative reactions that this created, paid off. The Iranian regime therefore seems sensitive, particularly in the delicate period it is going through today, to not give too much of a deplorable image. This is how this ” affair ” joins the major causes that have succeeded, such as that 10 years ago of the Iranian ” happy “(1) or, more recently last June, the rapper Toomaj Salehi who escaped the death penalty .
All tendencies combined, the Western political world has of course not missed the opportunities for hypocritical recovery for a cause that cost them nothing. In our country, the Macronists and the traditional right first of all, despite their complacency towards all sorts of aggressors such as a Depardieu and despite the presence in their own ranks for example of a Darmanin against whom a complaint for rape was filed in 2017. The dismissal rendered in this case did not convince the victim’s supporters. Even more enormous when we see the alleged support of the government for Gisèle Pélicot and at the same time the re-appointment of this same Darmarin to the government.
Nothing surprising either from the extreme right, with the reaction of Bardella in the first place (President of far right Rassemblement National-translator). There too the aggressors are not less numerous. And their regressive projects concerning women’s rights, their consideration at least selective towards the victims show that their support for the Iranian victims is only a racist opportunism, especially when they always oppose the arrival of migrants fleeing this same regime.
On the left and the far left, overall, the information was also very widely relayed, which was at least expected… but it must be noted that this was not systematically the case either. If no one contested the revolt in Iran, the treatment of this affair revealed lines of divergence in the Western left.
When ambiguity rears its ugly head!
We could also take the emblematic case of Nesrin Sotoudeh, an Iranian lawyer imprisoned multiple times, about whom very few within the radical left seem to have cared. This was the case on March 11, 2019, the day she was sentenced to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes for her commitment to the rights of women and minorities, in particular for having defended women who had removed their hijab in public. On March 12, 2019, the National Council of Bars launched a petition to Macron that collected more than 400,000 signatures.
On August 11, 2020, after two years of imprisonment, she began a hunger strike to obtain the release of political prisoners in her country. Because of her state of health, and especially the international mobilisation, she obtained “suspensions “ of a few months of her incarceration. She was arrested again, brutally, on October 29, 2023 during the funeral of Armita Gravand, a young Iranian woman of Kurdish origin who fell into a coma in the Tehran metro on October 1, 2023, following her arrest by a morality police brigade who accused her of not wearing the compulsory veil.
To return to the Ahou Daryaei affair, it appears that the disinterest that could be expressed first affected those who are influenced by postmodern ideology. All their embarrassment and all their withdrawal in the face of the endless blackmail of the accusation of Islamophobia therefore seems to be at the heart of these ambiguities. Thus the sites Arrêt sur Image or MrMondialisation have skirted the subject by hiding behind prevarications on the way in which she would be represented among veiled women. Considerations totally out of place in view of the gravity of the situation.
But the most despicable reactions came from certain movements, including the Indigènes de la République or the site Parole d’honneur , which denounced the support by claiming that it was only an alignment behind Western imperialist and racist objectives.
We will conclude by citing another form of ambiguity, that which consists in putting on the same level the ” freedom ” to wear the veil and that of not doing so. A significant and noted reaction, among others, was that of Sandrine Rousseau. On November 3, 2024, she dared to tweet: ” Our body, and everything we wear – or not – to dress it, belongs to us. Strength to Iranian women, to Afghan women, to all those who suffer oppression .” Sandrine Rousseau had already been roundly booed two years ago during a demonstration in support of Iranian women in struggle for having declared that the veil could be taken as an ” embellishment .” She was also taken to task this fall via social networks by Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian refugee and author of the comic strip adapted into an animated film Persepolis. The latter severely reminded her of the episode of the embellishment 9 .
That women in France are demanding the ” freedom ” to wear the veil is a reality, and we have always maintained that the discrimination and sometimes the violence they suffer are not acceptable. However, this parallel between the right to dignity claimed by Iranian women who remove their veil and the demand of women in France who show their willingness to wear it is also not only out of touch with reality but totally inappropriate given the seriousness of the situation. The terrible risks incurred by Iranian women who unveil themselves deserve not to spare our support, nor to relativise it by comparing it to situations that are out of all proportion. This is a political mistake and an insult to Iranian women who are subjected to such repression.
The fight of Iranian women and men against the domination of the theocracy over their lives is an eminently universalist fight. A country where women are oppressed is a country where freedom does not exist. Moreover, Iran is a country that violently represses workers’ struggles, although this aspect of the Iranian dictatorship is largely passed over in silence by the media. The fact remains that in the face of the feminist fight in Iran, we have a duty to show unwavering support without any relativisation. A fight without “yes but“! “Woman, Life, Freedom “! This slogan resonates everywhere on the planet and reminds us how religions, all religions, are and will remain ideologies of domination.
(1) https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2014/09/iran-happy-dancers-sentenced-jail-and-flogging-flagrant-assault-freedom-expression/