Extensive media coverage of the Iranian women's protest after the killing of young Mahsa Amini in the Kurdish town of Saqqez has painted the protest as a revolt against the hijab.
Iranian women are rising against the hijab, we're told in headlines, with images of hijab burning flashing all over the western media — no context, no history. In this reductive and oversimplified narrative there is little mention of minorities' rights or the economic hardship that Iranians have endured for years.
Iranians have been protesting against the oppressive Islamic Republic regime since the Ayatollahs came to power in 1979. The media's binary vision of the West vs. Islam feeds into Islamophobia everywhere. Framing conflicts around the Muslim world as collisions between the modern democratic secular West and the traditional oppressive superstitious East is an old Orientalist racist narrative, dusted off to reduce Iran's political crisis to a showdown where the hijab meets Victoria's Secret.
The West's fixation with Muslim women's wardrobes portrays the protest as a revolt of the harem. As Edward Said explained in "Orientalism," the obsession is part of the self-image of Western sexuality itself. Western feminists supported the military invasion of Muslim countries to liberate Muslim women in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet women during Arab Spring uprisings wore the hijab as a symbol of protest against oppressive secularized regimes and Western domination.
M.B.S. in Saudi Arabia allows women to take off their hijab as long as they cover up their minds. El-Sissi's Egyptian prisons are filled with women wearing hijabs.
Women's bodies have been a battleground between religious extremists and secular extremists in the West. The fight to dictate what women do with their bodies, whether in the name of the beauty mystique or sharia law is all about control, not freedom. In the West a woman may reveal her body as an expression of self-assurance; a Muslim woman may choose to cover her body for the same reason.
More people obey the guidelines of modern sharia proclaimed on Facebook and elsewhere on social media than follow Muslim sharia anywhere. We tend to accept things if they are presented as "modern"; most of those Iranian women who are burring their hijab are wearing Victoria's Secret bras, which they should burn first. I wonder how Western media would cover it then.
Western modernity liberated women, teaching them to expose their bodies in public as a form of freedom of expression — to heed the commandments of the fashion industry and spend billions of dollars on clothing that reveals more than it covers. The West wants Iranian women freed from the oppressive Iranian morality police so they can hand them over to the fashion industry and its oppressive zero-size beauty standard.
