I Shall no Longer Contribute to Nurturing this Hideous Monster!
The Former Asian Chess Champion Decries Compulsory Hijab.
On January 28, Mitra Hejazipour posted an elegant essay on her Instagram. She describes the story of her life under the compulsory hijab. Mitra has taken a very brave step to voice her protest against the tyranny of compulsive hijab. I believe the entire chess society should support the current #237 in the world. FIDE as the guardian of the gens una sumus, we are one people, must denounce the Islamic Republic Chess Federation. Why has she been expelled from the Iranian National Team?
I know Mitra from the very same 2003 World Championship she narrates about. I am aware that this is not an easy decision to speak out publicly against hijab in Iranian society. This makes her courageous act very admirable. I can only imagine the frustration Mitra and millions of other Iranian girls experience when such basic rights of theirs are denied throughout their life.
Here is a translation of Mitra’s Instragam post [modified from the original translation published by IranWire]:
[…] but here I want to fearlessly write about what I think. My life under the tyranny of forced hijab began at the age of six, with the sentence, “Sweetheart, wouldn’t it be better to wear the headscarf, rusári?” Ever since I was obliged to respect hijab even at home. […]
I still remember my first foreign trip as a member of the national team. I was a nine-year-old kid. I was stunned by blond-haired Germans who staring at us with astonishment and kept their distance from the chador-clad guard of the team, who were praying not in a corner but in the middle of the airport. […]
I remember my little German friend who wanted to shake hands to congratulate me but the team’s supervisor gestured me not to shake hands and scared the boy away by saying, “Muslim, no-touch men [in English]!” And pictures of headscarves and long manteaux crying on our body, their awful look attracted everybody’s attention [..] From childhood, they bring us into their favourite game and turn us into puppets to promote their thoughts and their ideas without us being aware of it.
From religious textbooks from primary school to university, from the pictures and the graffiti on the walls to the brochures and the calendars and from TV programs to street names — they are present at every moment in our lives and, if you look carefully, you shall see that the role played by each one of us in spreading this propaganda is not insignificant. By laying bricks that we might consider small and trivial we help build the edifice of the misfortune that has befallen us. We ourselves have fed this monster. In any case, it might be late, but I have decided that I will no longer contribute to nurturing this hideous monster and I will no longer play the game of “we love hijab and have no problems with it.”
I believe that forced hijab is a clear symbol of an ideology that considers women the second sex. [This ideology] creates a mountain of restrictions for women and denies them their most basic rights. Is this to protect them? No, I say decisively. This is only, and only, to constrain them.
FM Arash Akbarinia, PhD., is currently a research scientist at the University of Giessen in Germany. He studies biological and artificial intelligence aiming to understand how humans and machines perceive the world.
He is a former silver-medalist of the Asian U14 and U16. As a boy with long curly hairs, I experienced interesting stories back in Iran. Once, a former President of the Islamic Republic Chess Federation threatened me to not issue a bureaucratic letter if I don’t cover my ponytail inside my shirt!