Protests in Iran aren't about the hijab. They're about policing women's bodies

This column is an opinion by Zahra Khozema, a freelance journalist based in Toronto. For more information about CBC's Opinion section, please see the FAQ.

The death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while she was under the detainment of Iran's so-called morality police has inspired protests beyond Iran. Women in solidarity with Amini are burning their headscarves and chopping off their hair in a defiant act of resistance against the Islamic Republic's strict rules on attire and those who enforce it.

Human rights groups say over 75 people have died since the beginning of the unrest, and more than 1,200 have been arrested by the regime. However, experts say the numbers might be higher since internet blackouts have made it increasingly difficult to confirm fatalities.

After its 1979 Islamic revolution, Iran enacted a strict dress code which requires women, regardless of their faith or nationality, to wear the hijab and cover their bodies. The state enforces these laws through the Gasht-e Ershad (Guidance Patrols). The squad is tasked with ensuring the respect of Islamic morals through tactics like imprisonment, fines and physical abuse as a punishment for non-compliance.

A similar nightmare unfolded last year in Afghanistan after the Taliban ordered harsher dress codes requiring women to cover their faces when leaving the house. Despite the new decrees, brave Afghan women led an online campaign with hashtags like #DoNotTouchMyClothes and #AfghanistanCulture to showcase their nation's colourful cultural clothing.

Demanding justice and fighting for basic human rights is no easy feat, especially before a regime that uses religion as a shield to justify abuse. No part of Islam I know condones torture or murder for what tyrant men consider modest. The will and valour of these women should garner international solidarity and celebration.

But before you think the West can take the moral high-ground on this, let's reconsider the role of Western states (and India) in eradicating the same freedom for women who choose to veil. France, Denmark, Netherlands, Austria, Germany, Bulgaria, Belgium, and Switzerland all have a partial or total ban on the hijab in some or all of their municipalities. 

And let's not forget the laws of a province in our own country, which ban some public servants from wearing religious symbols, including the hijab. But hijab-opposing laws in the West, for some reason, don't enflame the same passions in us as the hijab-forcing ones in Iran and Afghanistan. The leap to use foreign intervention is not the way to deal with those passions and the anti-Islam sentiments that underline them, yet the West often takes advantage of these situations.

Maybe it's because of the narrative we've all been fed. You know, the one in which places like Tehran or Kabul are romanticized for once-upon-a-time being cosmopolitan centres where women could socialize in miniskirts and other Western attire. Then, medieval Islamists came to power and reverted them to the dark ages, legitimizing the foreign governments' need to go and "save" them.

"Because of our recent military gains, in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes," said Laura Bush in her husband's customary weekly radio address in 2001, as justification for the violent invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. 

"They can listen to music and teach their daughters without the fear of punishment," she added. 

Politicians in the U.S. and its ally nations have long weaponized this imperial feminist rhetoric under a plight-of-women cloak to defend their wars. Even now, their response unsurprisingly remains the same. Last week, for example, U.S. lawmakers pushed for additional sanctions on Iran, enabling economic and political unrest that further marginalizes women and minorities.

This phenomenon of imperial feminism needs to reckon with a brutal truth. One in which women in the Muslim world or Muslim women in the West do not need saving — at least not through Western intervention and war. An item of clothing does not determine the measure of freedom. It requires a much deeper lens, one beyond the hijab. 

So, what is this mythical measure of freedom, if not a headscarf? And why do women need to fight tooth and nail for it? I don't know, but there is a lyric in the sung and screamed Song of Equality, written by Iranian women activists subjected to the oppression of the Islamic Republic, that may help direct us to an answer. The line translates to "I sprout from the wound on my body, just because I am a woman, a woman, a woman."