These days, Iranians are honoring the memory of an innocent girl called Mahsa Amini. Mahsa died being in the custody of the Morality police, a force in charge of women’s Islamic attire. Although the state regime does not admit any act of violence towards her, most human rights activists believe she died of brain damage, caused by physical injury.
As a woman who comes from Iran, Mahsa’s destiny is our everyday nightmare as we step out of our homes in our “less Islamic” clothes. but for most of the women living across the globe, a tragedy like this can seem “unacceptably” brutal. This is why it’s important to explain what an Iranian woman goes through to survive.
For centuries, women of Iran have been neglected and deprived in so many ways. 200 years ago, an Iranian girl would most likely end up abandoned or killed right after birth because her parents couldn’t take the blame for having a daughter. This awful tradition still exists in patriarchal communities and their anti-female behaviors are passed to generations ahead.
Iranian girls are taught to stay away from their same-age and older male kinds. Most of them never learn how to communicate with a man outside of their family. The patriarchal vibe in society turns women into the secondary gender. As women are disempowered, men are taught to dominate and control them more and more, up to a level that a woman can’t decide for her life anymore.
The schooling system of Iran is designed to discriminate against women. There is no shared school with boys even if you’re 5 years old. religious laws create a huge gap between men and women from an early age. The law emphasizes controlling girls from a young age rather than creating an equal plan for teaching modesty to all genders. a lot of these rules objectify girls from childhood, which means Iranian girls are open targets for child marriage from the age of 9. However, they are being subjected to a non-social life. Lately, the education authorities managed to remove illustrations of girls on book covers of primary schools.
From age of 7, all girls need to wear a hijab at school where all staff and teachers must be women. Besides, girls need to wear long-sleeved clothes with pants all the time. they only have 2 years to dress as they like outside of school.
At the age of 9, they should start practicing the religion by Islamic law, while boys start at the age of 15. The practices include praying, fasting, and wearing a hijab like an adult. To this date, no one dares to question this law and prove if girls that age are grown enough for adapting to a religion.
Some families go easy on girls till they’re fully grown but also some families won’t allow girls to wear colorful clothes anymore, calling them grown-ups while they’re only 9. This is why most women aged 30 and above have a wardrobe full of dark clothes and some of them say that they feel uncomfortable wearing bright or vibrant colors.
The oppression against women of Iran never gets as tough and complicated as facing the Morality police does. Those women who never had a childhood like normal girls, always covered themselves and stuck to the rules of the religion are brainwashed not to bear women with the opposite attitude. In their minds, a person with a non-Islamic look is the source of all evil and their interference actually means everyone is being saved from hell!
They and like-minded men join police forces to do their so-called religious duty. They know themselves as responsible to warn other women about their different appearances and they call it “Enjoining to Good and Forbidding from Evil.”
The Islamic Republic of Iran did not start the practice of Islam in the country. Muslims lived in Iran long before the revolution without a problem. But with the pressure of the old-fashioned Muslim clergy, the mandatory hijab has turned into a law and the aggressive Morality Police have become responsible for it.
There were multiple rallies in the late 19s, to give women a chance for freedom and equality. But it didn’t work. It was not meant for Iranian women to feel their voice is heard or they have power in this new system, not anymore.
Women in Iran go through lots of problems that generally arise from inequality. But the appearance of the Morality police damaged us in a big way. We feel we’re not safe from the law and there is no authority to trust anymore, the law and authority that supports women in other parts of the world, has now encouraged molesters, rapists, and thugs to openly harass women fearing no consequences.
As a woman, nothing hurts more than knowing your country sees you like a criminal while they remained silent for all of their constant cruelty that we witnessed as a child, sister, wife, mother, citizens, employees, students, and all the roles we could not take without feeling oppressed and traumatized.
We just want to feel we have a homeland, not a torture chamber. We want to feel safe in our Beloved land, Iran.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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