Civil disobedience and hijab protests in Iran

A young Iranian woman waves a white headscarf 

in protest against her country’s compulsory hijab rule.

From the New York Times

On Dec. 27, Vida Movahed stood bareheaded on a utility box on one of Tehran’s busiest thoroughfares, waving her white head scarf on a stick. Within days, images of the 31-year-old, who was detained and then released a few weeks later, had become an iconic symbol.

In the weeks since Ms. Movahed’s peaceful protest of the compulsory hijab, long one of the most visible symbols of the Islamic Republic, dozens of women, and even some men, throughout Iran have followed her lead. So far, at least 29 women in cities throughout the country have been arrested.

These bold acts of defiance against the hijab are unprecedented in the nearly 40-year history of the Islamic Republic, but a movement that may have helped inspire them has been going on for years. It began on the social media account of a Brooklyn-based Iranian journalist named Masih Alinejad. In 2014, Ms. Alinejad started a Facebook page called “My Stealthy Freedom,” urging women to post images of themselves without the hijab in public places. Last year, she launched “White Wednesdays,” inviting women to wear white scarves on Wednesdays in protest of the compulsory hijab law. (Ms. Movahed carried out her protest on a Wednesday and held a white scarf, though her actual allegiance to Ms. Alinejad’s campaign is unknown).

Ms. Alinejad, who worked as a journalist in Iran before emigrating to England in 2009, says her campaign came about by chance. She posted a photo of herself driving her car in Iran without hijab and invited others to share “hidden photos” of themselves on her Facebook page. The overwhelming response — the page now has more than a million followers — prompted her to focus more on the issue. “I was a political reporter, but the women in Iran forced me to care about the issue of personal freedoms,” she told me.

For Ms. Alinejad and the protesters, the struggle against the compulsory hijab is about regaining a woman’s control over her own body, not a matter of questioning the validity of the hijab itself. Now that bareheaded women are joined in these acts by women who proudly wear the full-body chador, it is clear that the movement on the ground is also about a woman’s right to choose how to dress — something that, over the past century, various Iranian leaders have tried to deny.

The founder of the Pahlavi dynasty, Reza Shah, banned the hijab, in a gesture of modernization, in 1936, which effectively put some women under house arrest for years since they could not bear to be uncovered in public. The leader of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, made the hijab compulsory in 1979.

Mass protests by women were unsuccessful in overturning the edict. Pro-hijab campaigners invented the slogan “Ya rusari ya tusari,” which means “Either a cover on the head or a beating,” and supervisory “committees” — often composed of women in full chadors — roamed the streets and punished women they deemed poorly covered. Those who opposed the strict measure called these enforcer women “Fati commando,” a derogatory term that combines Islam — in the nickname Fati for Fatemeh, the prophet’s daughter — and vigilantism.

While the requirements have remained firmly in place, Iranian women have been pushing the boundaries of acceptable hijab for years. Coats have gotten shorter and more fitted and some head scarves are as small as bandannas. This has not gone without notice or punishment: Hijab-related arrests are common and numerous. In 2014, Iranian police announced that “bad hijab” had led to 3.6 million cases of police intervention.

But for years, many women’s rights activists have written off the hijab as secondary to other matters such as political or gender equality rights. In 2006, the One Million Signatures for the Repeal of Discriminatory Laws campaign, one of the most concerted efforts undertaken by Iranian feminists to gain greater rights for women, barely mentions the hijab. Iranian feminists have also been determined to distance themselves from the Western obsession with the hijab, almost overcompensating by minimizing its significance. Western feminists who have visited Iran and willingly worn the hijab have also played a hand in normalizing it.

But fighting discriminatory policies has not resulted in any real change, as the crushed One Million Signatures campaign proved. So now Ms. Alinejad and a younger generation of Iranian women are turning back the focus on the most visible symbol of discrimination, which, they argue, is also the most fundamental. “We are not fighting against a piece of cloth,” Ms. Alinejad told me. “We are fighting for our dignity. If you can’t choose what to put on your head, they won’t let you be in charge of what is in your head, either.” In contrast, Islamic Republic officials argue that the hijab bestows dignity on women.

The government has had a mixed response to the protests. On the day that Vida Movahed climbed on the utility box to protest the hijab, Tehran’s police chief announced that going forward, women would no longer be detained for bad hijab, but would be “educated.” In early January, in response to recent weeks of unrest throughout the country, President Hassan Rouhani went so far as to say, “One cannot force one’s lifestyle on the future generations.” In the past week, faced with a growing wave of civil disobedience, Iran’s general prosecutor called the actions of the women “childish” and the Tehran police said that those who were arrested were “deceived by the ‘no-hijab’ campaign.”

But these young women appear undeterred. Their generation is empowered by a new media ecosystem, one that not only unites protesters but also helps to spread potent images of defiance. Ms. Alinejad believes that the movement has already, in a sense, succeeded. “Women are showing that they are no longer afraid,” she said. “We used to fear the government, now it’s the government that fears women.”

Nahid Siamdoust is a postdoctoral associate of Iranian studies at Yale University and the author of “Soundtrack of the Revolution: The Politics of Music in Iran.”

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Commentary on a radical Christian past

New post on Khanya Roman Catholic radicals and Orthodoxy by Steve Jim Forest has just written a biography of a Jesuit priest, Daniel Berrigan, who died last year. Why would an Orthodox Christian write a biography of a radical Roman Catholic priest, and why would an Orthodox Christian want to read such a thing? Jim Forest himself gives an answer to that specific question here: FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN, SJ: WHY SHOULD AN ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN BE INTERESTED IN HIM? by Jim Forest | ORTHODOXY IN DIALOGUE: “And just what is it,” my friend asked, “that was so Christ-revealing about Berrigan’s life?” When he died last year, age 94, obituaries focused on the anti-war aspects of Berrigan’s life: he was eighteen months in prison for burning draft records in a protest against conscription of the young into the Vietnam War; then there was a later event in which he was one of eight people who hammered on the nose cone of a nuclear-armed missile. No one has kept count of his numerous brief stays in jail for other acts of war protest. He was handcuffed more than a hundred times. But it raises other wider questions too. For the last few years the "mainstream" media have focused on the phenomenon of the "religious right", but fifty years ago the focus was more on the "religious left", exemplified by people like Daniel Berrigan, protesting against the Vietnam War. I first learned of Daniel Berrigan in 1969, through a radical Christian magazine called The Catonsville Roadrunner. The magazine was inspired by the actions of Daniel Berrigan and his brother Philip, who with several others had broken into an office containing records of military conscription and publicly burnt them. It became a legendary act of Christian civil disobedience Ikon magazine cover, designed by Hugh Pawsey, my fellow student at St Chad's College Jim Forest himself was involved in a similar act of civil disobedience in Milwaukee, for which he was jailed.Those were interesting times, the late 1960s and early 1970s, the age of hippies and moon landings and radical Christian protests. Inspired by The Catonsville Roadrunner I and a group of friends launched our own radical Christian magazine in South Africa, called Ikon. So I want to turn Jim Forest's question around. Not "Why should Orthodox Christians be interested in the life of a Jesuit priest like Daniel Berrigan?" but why did so many people involved in the radical Christian scene of the late 1960s become interested in Orthodoxy? One factor may have been that at that time Orthodoxy was peculiarly powerless. In 1968 I visited St Sergius Orthodox Church in Paris, and there was a seminary in the crypt of the church where the students lived in humble and primitive conditions -- sleeping cubicles separated by threadbare curtains, and an open drain running down the middle of the floor. That, to me, represented the poverty of him who came to be poor among the poor, rather than the power and prestige needed to maintain a religion. Most of the traditionally Orthodox countries were under communist or Muslim rule, and in those places Orthodox Christians were treated as second-class citizens, and deprived of civil rights. Many Orthodox Christians in the West were refugees and asylum seekers. or children of refugees and asylum seekers. Another reason for the attraction of Orthodoxy for radical Christian activists was that Orthodoxy had a firm theological base. In the West, theological liberalism led to political conservatism and vice versa. Theological liberalism was embarked on a project to adapt the Christian faith to the modern world, and that meant adapting Christianity to support the status quo. Radical Christians wanted to change the status quo on earth, so that God's kingdom would come and God's will be done on earth, as it is in heaven. G.K Chesterton said that the modern young man would never change the world, for he would always change his mind. Christians who are always changing their theology will never change the world. This can be seen in the media expectations of Roman Pope Francis. They are looking to him to bring about change in the Roman Catholic Church. Will he change the theology and bring it up to date? But most of the time they are disappointed, because he criticises the state of the world from the point of view of existing theology -- the wars, civil repression and exploitation that continue pretty much as they did in the 1960s. There is much talk about "progressive" theology and "progressive" politics, but what do we mean by "progress"? As G.K. Chesterton put it, more than a century ago now: Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to suit the vision. Progress does mean (just now) that we are always changing the vision. It should mean that we are slow but sure in bringing justice and mercy among men: it does mean that we are very swift in doubting the desirability of justice and mercy: a wild page from any Prussian sophist makes men doubt it. Progress should mean that we are always walking towards the New Jerusalem. It does mean that the New Jerusalem is always walking away from us. We are not altering the real to suit the ideal. We are altering the ideal: it is easier. Silly examples are always simpler; let us suppose a man wanted a particular kind of world; say, a blue world. He would have no cause to complain of the slightness or swiftness of his task; he might toil for a long time at the transformation; he could work away (in every sense) until all was blue. He could have heroic adventures; the putting of the last touches to a blue tiger. He could have fairy dreams; the dawn of a blue moon. But if he worked hard, that high-minded reformer would certainly (from his own point of view) leave the world better and bluer than he found it. If he altered a blade of grass to his favourite colour every day, he would get on slowly. But if he altered his favourite colour every day, he would not get on at all. And that is why I think that some radical Christian activists have been attracted to Orthodoxy. And that complement's Jim Forest's point about why Orthodox Christians should be interested in people like Daniel Berrigan -- because people several people who have shared the interests of Daniel Berrigan have also become interested in Orthodoxy. So by all means buy and read Jim Forest's book about Daniel Berrigan.

Religious leaders occupy environment minister's office to protest Adani's Carmichael coalmine

The post below is an edited version of an article 
which appeared on The Guardian website of 25 July 2017.

Rabbi Jonathan Keren-Black is joined by seven other religious leaders 
occupying Josh Frydenberg’s office in Melbourne.

A Rabbi, a Uniting Church reverend, a former Catholic priest and a Buddhist leader call for Josh Frydenberg, Minister for the Environment and Energy,

to withdraw support for the Adani coal mine in Queensland.

Religious leaders from several faiths have occupied the electorate office of Josh Frydenberg today, demanding the federal environment minister withdraw his support for Adani’s Carmichael mine, and vowing to stay there until he does so.

Rabbi Jonathan Keren-Black told The Guardian before the action that he had never undertaken such an act of civil disobedience before.

“I have been involved with the environment for many years,” said Keren-Black. “But I haven’t taken action in this way before. It seems to me now the situation is so dire and so urgent that we have to get him to take responsibility. Because we’re talking about an ethical responsibility to the future.”

 A rabbi, a Uniting church reverend, a former Catholic priest and a Buddhist leader 

call for Josh Frydenberg to withdraw support for the Carmichael mine. 

Photograph: Supplied

“In April this year I, along with ecumenical Christian, Jewish and Buddhist leaders, signed an open letter to Minister Frydenberg stating our clear opposition to the mine. We do not feel that the response has been sufficient,” he said.

They have vowed to remain in the office until Frydenberg makes a statement removing his support for the mine, or until they are removed by force.

They say that emissions from burning coal from the mine – which would be the biggest coal mine in Australia’s history – would make meeting the Paris commitment of keeping global warming at “well below 2C” above pre-industrial levels impossible.

As the occupation happens inside the office, outside about a dozen religious leaders are holding a symbolic “funeral for coal”.

Jarrod McKenna, teaching pastor at the Cornerstone church in Perth, is among those leading the funeral.

Fact v fiction: Adani's Carmichael coal mine – video explainer

He said people from various faiths would present eulogies for coal, which would acknowledge the contribution that coal has made to society – particularly in Victoria – but that “it is now time to leave it in the ground”.  McKenna said the group is hoping that the action will move Frydenberg “to listen”.  

“Primarily to listen 

to the wishes of the traditional custodians

who have repeatedly said no. 

To the scientists who have unequivocally said no. 

To listen to the general public who have said no – 

and to listen to his own conscience.”

The coalition of non-partisan groups joining the movement fighting against the development of Adani’s Carmichael coalmine in Queensland’s Galilee Basin has grown in recent months. Last month a group representing about 2,000 farmers joined the Stop Adani alliance, bringing the total number of groups in the alliance to 13.