EDITORIAL: As anti-hijab protests in Iran refuse to relent and grow in severity the authorities have reportedly abolished the morality police that had patrolled streets to enforce the state dictate by force for the last many years. It all happened following the arrest and death in police custody of Mahsa Amini who was declared guilty of violating the country’s female dress code.
Since her death 470 persons have been killed, 18,210 arrested while 61 members of security forces have perished in violent protests in the Islamic republic. “The same authority which has established this police has shut it,” said Attorney General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri in reply to a question at a religious conference where he was asked ‘why the morality police were being shut down?’. But the law that mandates this dress code is still in force, and voices against it too are being raised. Tehran is expected to be swarmed this week by students seeking abolition of the hijab law. Wearing hijab became obligatory for all Iranian women from April 1983.
It is important to note that the party of former president Mohammad Khatami stands for “legal elements paving the way for cancellation of the mandatory hijab law”. It is heartening to note that President Ebrahim Raisi, who heads Iran’s Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution, now seems to be rethinking his position on the issue of hijab by “implementing the constitution that can be flexible”. That would be a retreat from his earlier position he took in July when he called for mobilisation of “all institutions to enforce the headscarf law”.
However, the debate as to what does hijab mean and is it the same thing as ‘purdah’ remains inconclusive. And its application on the ground too remains diverse, with some Muslim countries making it mandatory that head and upper parts of women should be covered while others leave it to women themselves. For instance, in Iran and Afghanistan hijab is compulsory and Saudi Arabia too had employed morality police to enforce female dress codes and other rules of behaviour.
But that is no more the case in the kingdom: since 2016 that force has been sidelined in a move to shake off its austere image. In Indonesia wearing hijab or not is optional, but in its province of Aceh Muslim women are required to wear hijab.
Hijab wearing is also a subject of fierce debate in India. And there is the growing cry in the West against wearing hijab, a move that is resisted by the Muslim women in there and thanks to the intensifying globalisation is being copied in a number of Muslim countries. Be that as it may, hijab helps women maintain modesty and privacy, and on that there should be no debate. It is up to a woman how to go about that. Hopefully, Iranian women’s right to wearing hijab or not would be upheld by the judiciary and parliament and that should be the case in Afghanistan as well.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
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