Other Women Were Scared of Me and I Didn’t Know Why!
As an Iranian woman, I’m either a “good girl” or a piece of trash that doesn’t deserve any respect.
For most of my life in Iran, I was following every single dress code out there as a “good girl” of a religious family is supposed to do. So, you can imagine me in the same clothes as the woman in the attached picture. But the further I went from my family’s social circle, the more difference I saw in people’s clothing and their beliefs.
I remember walking in the street as a teenager with my black chador fully covering my entire head and body while passing women who clearly did not believe in compulsory hijab and were only wearing it to survive the police brutality. They would sometimes look at me with anger and roll their eyes at me. Some other times they would look at me with a little fear in their eyes and quickly “fix” their hijab on their head to cover more of their hair.
At the time, I believed I was the oppressed one. I thought that others just did not like people like me, with “proper” hijab. Maybe they were Islamophobes living in an Islamic country! I simply did not know the importance of agency and freedom of choice and could not imagine the horrors that those women were facing or the “hijabi privilege” which I had.
Later on, during college, I slowly stopped being such a “good girl” and started to have my own opinions instead of just following the structure I was born into. I was still a Muslim but did not feel comfortable with the head-to-toe coverage of chador. I still had hijab but I started wearing more colorful clothes. And what do you think happened? I lost all my privileges and stopped receiving as much respect in society.
The authorities from my dormitory started questioning me and insulting me for the smallest reasons, acting as if they’d arrested a criminal. I couldn’t easily enter governmental organizations or even my college anymore and would be asked to “fix” my hijab. I was being stopped and insulted on the street by the morality police who would respond to my attempts to defend myself with: “Just shut up or we will arrest you, take you to the station, and call your father to come and teach you a lesson.” Yes, let’s not forget that I always legally belong to my father or my husband like property!
Before this point, I was just oblivious to the fact that as a woman, I was not considered a human being with any kind of agency in my own country. I was worthy of safety and respect only as long as I remained a blind soldier to their ideology. Otherwise, I was just a piece of trash. This was such a painful lesson to discover but it was surely the stepping stone for many Iranian women’s fight for freedom which you might have heard by now.
I made this realization four years ago and it made me question everything even more. I became so sick of all those rules and dress codes that kept reminding me I was a second-class citizen in my own country and that in our legal system, I did not matter at all. Slowly, I even became sick of looking at those damn headscarves which were the symbol of the systematic oppression of generations of Iranian women by the womenophobic regime.
These days, if you see Iranian women like me burning their headscarves, remember the 44 years of gender apartheid oppression that brought them to this point. Also, remember that the headscarf we’re burning is a small symbol representing a political system of dictatorship.
