A popular uprising against oppression, heroic women in the vanguard for equality, a dictatorship shaken: The revolt of Iranian society since the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in Tehran on September 16 after her arrest by the morality police highlights many of the values that the left has carried throughout its history. Logically, the marches shouting “woman, life, freedom,” the incredible spectacle of Iranian women tearing off their headscarves and burning them in bonfires, should have aroused massive processions of support and enthusiastic actions of solidarity.
As expected, feminist movements and left-wing elected officials in France participated in rallies and issued statements of support. The Parti Socialiste (PS) “saluted the courage of Iranian women” and La France Insoumise (LFI) paid tribute to “a citizen revolution of Iranian youth.” But the demonstrations were slow to happen, poorly attended, and the commentary was limited to generalities. It was as if LFI and the Greens, entangled in their own affairs mixing violence against women and leadership battles, had little energy to devote to a major international event.
In France, Iran’s anti-scarf revolt brings the left back to a question that has been fracturing it since 1989, the year of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie launched by Ayatollah Khomeini, and of the exclusion of veiled students from a school in Creil. Is the Islamic headscarf a clothing accessory whose meaning is strictly a matter of free individual interpretation or is it a vector of political domination? The first view prevails within the factions of the Nouvelle Union Populaire Écologique et Sociale (NUPES).
An instrument of political oppression
“If you decide how women should dress, you will not get away with it,” saidLFI leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, on French television channel C8, in February, citing the headscarves of “good Catholic grandmothers,” which “was not a problem.” His position is best understood in light of the 69% of the votes of Muslim voters in France, according to a study by IFOP, that the LFI leader collected in the first round of the presidential election in April. For her part, Sandrine Rousseau (Europe Écologie-Les Verts), during an interview on television channel LCP at the end of 2021, said she “felt despair” that women’s bodies and the way they dress was still a topic for debate, adding that “women wearing the veil is not political Islam” and that some wear it as mere embellishment.
The trouble is that the events in Iran say something quite different. The demonstrators confronting the police are focusing on the veil because the religious character of the regime serves as a pretext for the military in power. The enslavement of women, through the criminalization of any non-conforming dress, is a part of controlling society as a whole. “Keeping women under the veil means keeping society under the yoke of traditional Islamic law. The corrupt and repressive elite [of the Iranian regime] needs this shield of the subjugation of women to maintain its power,” the French-Iranian sociologist Farhad Khosrokhavar said in L’Obs (aka Le Nouvel Observateur). The rebellion is all the stronger because it is not inspired by the West and comes from women who are themselves Muslims.
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