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Video Editor: Puneet Bhatia
Voice Over: Zijah Sherwani
(This article was originally published on 19 November 2022. It has been reposted from The Quint's archives after Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi was awarded 2023 Nobel Peace Prize for her fight against the oppression of women.)
"I remember I would have dreams that I was out of the house without a hijab and it would stress me out," Sussan Tahmasebi, a women's rights activist who left Iran in 2010, recalls her last days in her home country, Iran.
"Wearing your hijab properly comes out of real fear. What happens if you lose your headscarf, a wind blows it away? They are not unusual fears that Iranian women have and I had them as well," she adds.
Tahmasebi's recollection draws a contrast with the change Iran has undergone after the Islamic revolution of 1979.
"I had grown up in Iran as a child where hijab wasn't mandatory," she recalls.
Popular media often depict the juxtaposition of Iranian women before and after the Islamic revolution of 1979.
These contrasts, of women in modern clothes before 1979 and of women in compulsory veil after 1979, give an inaccurate impression that women enjoyed full freedom before the Islamic revolution, which transformed Iran into a theocracy.
After taking over Iran's reigns in 1925, Reza Shah Pahlavi aimed to westernise the 2500-year-old Persian kingdom on similar lines to what its next-door neighbour Turkey was doing under Mustafa Kemal Pasha.
"Women were forced to take off their hijab and this was seen as a sign of progress by Reza Shah," says Tahmasebi.
Tahmasebi's grandmother was one of those women who suffered the "unjustified ban" on hijab under Reza Shah. The ban robbed the women of their right to choose. Women who chose to wear the hijab in public were humiliated, with police publicly removing it off their head.
In a society where covering of head was considered obligatory for women, they found a way to do so despite the ban.
Enforcing western clothing in a conservative society like Iran did not go down well and clothing became an issue which would drive the Iranian politics for the times to come.
After the Soviets and the British invaded Iran during the Second World War, Reza Khan abdicated his throne and flew the country.
Reza Shah's son and successor, Mohammed Reza Pehlavi, lifted the ban on hijab but continued to push for the modernisation of the Iranian State and society.
"There was personal freedom in those times. You could go out wearing any clothes you wanted," says Nasrin Parvaz, an author-activist and a torture survivor who had to flee the country in the mid 1980s, recalling her younger days in Iran.
The modernisation efforts by the Shah meant that women gained some rights, including the suffrage.
There was, however, widespread discontentment against the Shah owing to poverty and rising economic inequality. Further, the oppression inflicted by corrupt Shah regime added to the woes of the Iranian people in the 1970s.
"We had personal freedom during Shah's regime but not political freedom. People had the freedom to wear the clothes of their choice, but they didn't have the freedom of expression. One couldn't speak against the Shah or if you advocated for forming a political organisation or workers' union, you would get arrested and executed," remembers Parvaz.
With the Shia cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as its face, people's movement against the Shah gained rapid momentum. And within a few days, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was overthrown in 1979, marking the end of 2500 years of monarchy in Iran.
Soon after taking over Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini's new Islamic government announced that it was compulsory for women in public places to wear a hijab. This did not fo down well with ordinary Iranians, who came out on the streets to protest against it.
Such a big opposition just at the beginning of his rule forced Khomeini to backtrack on his hijab diktat to calm down the situation.
The mandatory hijab was eventually brought back a couple of years after the women's protest. By then, Khomeini and his religious regime had established their absolute authority in Iran.
"It was actually the war with Iraq, which started in 1980, that helped stabilise Khomeini's rule and consolidated his power," Navai says.
"They rolled out the compulsory veiling of women gradually. First, the women working in government offices were forced to comply with the new dressing law. Many women lost their jobs because they didn't want to accept it," Parvaz recollects. "Slowly, compulsory hijab was introduced to all the places."
Besides imposing compulsory hijab, the new religious government under Ayatollah Khomeini rolled back some of the laws passed during the Shah regime which had given rights to women.
"Even though women had gained rights during the 1960s and 1970s, a lot of discrimination against women already existed from before the revolution, but they were not justified on the basis of religion," says Tahmasebi.
She adds that after the establishment of theocratic State, new laws curtailing the rights of women were justified on the basis of religion.
Tahmasebi argues that while not everything was perfect before 1979, the events following the Islamic revolution meant a "giant leap backwards to 1400 years ago that had no basis in reality."
About two years after the 1979 protest march of women, hijab officially became compulsory for women in public places. To enforce the mandatory hijab, a special force became active, called the "morality police."
"We had to cover our heads with veils, otherwise we would get arrested or harassed by pro-regime agents," recalls Parvaz.
With a firm grip on the country, Khomeini's regime began to suppress any dissent or protests it faced.
Parvaz, 23 then, was arrested in 1982 and sentenced to death. After serving eight severely torturous years in prison and witnessing executions of several of her activist friends, she was released from prison in 1990.
She left Iran for London in 1993 and has never gone back.
Innumerable women have faced harassment, penalisation and even deaths by the hands of morality police for "inappropriate appearance."
The tipping point of the current uprising may have been the alleged custodial death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini for non-adherence to the strict hijab law, but it concerns a wide variety of discriminatory laws against women, and this uprising can be seen as the boiling point of a long history of suppression.
The uprising in Iran is the culmination of the fears that women in Iran have been sustaining for the last 43 years. It encapsulates the cries of millions of women in Iran who have been historically treated as second class citizens.
And the demonstrations refuse to die down even after continuously sustaining fatal crackdowns by the authorities that has killed over hundreds of Iranians.
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