By Louise Mathews
Over the last two weeks, one of the more meaningful moments of the war on Iran was the celebration of the Iranian people when they learned of the death of the longtime tyrant, Ayatollah Khamenei. I was particularly impressed by the women who jubilantly burned their hijabs.
I looked up “hijab” and learned it is the concept of modesty which includes women covering their hair. There are many forms of hijab from a simple scarf to the elegant turbans worn by Sheika Moza, mother of the current Emir of Qatar, to burqas which are like a clothing jail. A woman in a burqa is covered head-to-toe in a loose garment and a veil with bars or mesh over her face.
One of my child’s teachers had a daughter in the Army who returned from Afghanistan with a burqa. She brought it to school, and we mothers were invited to try it on. I immediately felt anxious at being completely enveloped by a garment that even restricted my view of the people around me. It was like being swallowed by an octopus.
I do not have a problem with women who choose to wear hijab, unless their dress restricts their ability to be understood. A woman in medieval dress was normal to me as I attended a Catholic elementary school.
In those days, the sisters wore ankle-length black dresses, white wimples that encircled their faces, and long black veils. My earliest memories of school include the smell of lavender, the clack-clack of rosary beads, and the fear of the horrible thing that would happen if the veil touched me as Sister Leon walked up and down the aisles.
When I was teaching at Technical College of the Lowcountry, a student in full abaya with a veil over the lower part of her face entered class one semester. When she spoke, I could not understand her, and I guessed it was the face veil. I became increasingly frustrated with her obscured words when she sat three or four rows from the front. I asked her to move closer.
In the second month, she washed out of class for lack of attendance which solved any continued misunderstanding we might have had due to clothing.
In a free country such as ours, wearing hijab is a choice any woman is free to make. In Iran and Afghanistan, woman cannot make such a choice. They must scrupulously cover hair and body. Since the Great Skedaddle from Afghanistan under the Biden Administration, there is no telling what suffering women have endured under the revitalized Taliban. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, written about Afghani women in the years leading up to the first Taliban regime, can give us an idea.
In Iran, where the nearly half century reign of the theocratic dictators has forced women to wear hijab, we have an idea of what women have suffered for daring to take off their head coverings. Being jailed is the usual penalty. Occasionally, the morality police go overboard and murder a woman such as Mahsa Jina Amini whose “crime” was not adequately covering her hair.
Protests that arose following Ms. Amini’s death in 2022 resulted in the deaths of 500 people, wounding of thousands, and jailing of 20,000 people whose crime was dissent.
I have recently read of women having their eyes poked out for wearing mascara. Even more tragic is the story of a girl who was raped four times beginning at age nine and was hanged at age 16 because “she was the offender.”
The thugs who have controlled Iran still have the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Narges Mohammadi, locked up in Tehran’s Evin Prison. She has been sentenced multiple times to decades of incarceration because she stood up for every woman’s right to be considered a human being.
In the United States, the usual rent-a-mob has been protesting Operation Epic Fury. Female demonstrators have actually put on versions of hijab.
I expect that they are putting these outfits on as a kind of theatrical costume. They really need to wear hijab for at least a week to fully appreciate their cultural appropriation.
Obviously, they know not what they do.
There are many issues to debate regarding Operation Epic Fury. Was Iran weeks away from creating small nuclear warheads that could have been delivered via ballistic missile to U.S. bases in the Mideast and Europe? Did Israel push the U.S. into this war?
Unlike previous Presidents’ use of military options, was Congressional approval needed in this case? Are people who think we should leave the ayatollahs in power protesting because they sincerely believe that a regime that declared “death to America” for 47 years will change with more plane loads of cash? Are they protesting because they believe each and every action President Trump undertakes is wrong?
The one issue that we should all agree on is that women in Iran are totally repressed, and Operation Epic Fury, if successful, will liberate them. Perhaps this should be renamed “Operation Hell Hath No Fury.” Certainly, the scorned and abused women of Iran deserve recognition and justice.
Louise Mathews retired from a career in community colleges and before that, theater. A 13-year come-here in Beaufort, she has been a dingbatter in North Carolina and an upstater from New York.