On the 16 September 2023 Masha Amini, also known as Jina Amini, a twenty-two years old Iranian girl was arrested by the morality police for wearing the hijab or head scarf, ‘wrongly’. Soon after she died in prison in mysterious circumstances.

The Islamic Republic of Iran on their state media said that she had suffered a heart attack after having been transferred to an hospital in a state of coma. 

However, witnesses, including women, said that while in custody she was harshly beaten and died from severe blows to the head that caused a cerebral haemorrhage. This was then confirmed by medical scans.

Her death caused a public outcry with huge mass protests all over the country by women and even men.

During the demonstrations many women in defiance bravely took off their hijabs and even publicly cut their hair.

These were soon brutally suppressed by the police with vicious violence causing many deaths, imprisonments, tortures, rapes and even public hangings done by the state appointed “morality police’. -a morality police that of morality, compassion and humanity has nothing at all…

While there is lots of information about Masha Amini and the uprising, this fact offers an opportunity to explore the strict code of rigid attire imposed on women, not only in Iran, but in the whole Muslim world, where in some countries restrictions on how women should dress reach absurdities and total violations of women’s rights such as: Afghanistan where women are so covered up in every part of the body including the nose and the eyes that they look like walking tents.

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The covering of the head and shoulders was first imposed on women on the seventh century AD seventy years after the death of the founder of Islam, when his ideology was ordered to be recorded in verses under the order of the caliph Abu Bakr and then compiled into a book by scribes appointed by the caliph Uthman.

The reason for the head covering was that it had to be a symbol of women’s modesty and purity. Though in reality it was a symbol of women’s subordination to men, being Islam a rigid patriarchal society where men are held to be on higher existential and social status to women. – Oddly enough men are given birth and therefore life by women…

In the early eighteenth century the covering of women from head to toes, including the face, was imposed because, as foreigners began to travel to the Arab countries Arab men didn’t want foreigners to look at their women, so they covered them all up to the point that only the eyes were visible, while in Taliban ruled Afghanistan not even the eyes.

Basically, such impositions of how women should dress amount to no more that genderism or gender’s bullying and theocratic oppression that are not only exclusive to Islam but existed and still exist also in other religions.

In a free world of equal gender rights people should dress as they like, as long as their dress is adequate to the circumstances of a given environment.

Moreover, in Iran there are many women of other religions, or even agnostic or atheists that begs the question: why should they wear a hijab?

Furthermore, what’s wrong in showing the hair of the head that are a natural growth?

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So, what can be done to stop such suffocating genderism and callous theocratic absurdity?

Mass manifestations of millions of people, like the one shown here in the photo, that took place in Berlin and many other cities around the world following the protests in Iran in support of Iranian women’s rights, are most important to raise concern on issues of social or environmental nature in order to trigger positive, beneficial changes. 

However, often those in power have got accustomed to them and either ignore them, until they weaken in intensity, or pass away when the media decides that are no more useful for filling their pages.

Or even worse, as in Iran and other oppressive dictatorial countries, they are subdued with brutal force.

There are other ways that are much more effective and totally peaceful.

We at ISE know them. In fact, we know a few useful things that would make this a better world for everyone.

The one trillion dollars question though is: would the media, or politicians, indeed people listen to us? 

Like for everything only time will tell.

Thank you for reading this post and may you be blessed with lots of health and many years of happiness.

Taken from the book: “Women’s Rights and Other Issues” by Pierrot Armanno.