The Dilemma of Postcolonial And/Or Orientalist Feminism in Iranian Diasporic Advocacy of Womenʼs Rights in the Homeland

chapter 7 The Dilemma of Postcolonial and/or Orientalist Feminism in Iranian Diasporic Advocacy of Womenʼs Rights in the Homeland

Mahmoud Arghavan

Introduction

Masih Alinejad, an Iranian u.s.-based journalist and women’s rights activist launched a campaign on May 3, 2014 against compulsory hijab in Iran called My Stealthy Freedom. The campaign was initiated when she posted a photo of herself on her Facebook page. The photo was taken on a street in the u.k., where she used to live at the time, with wind blowing in her bushy hair. The Iranian women from inside Iran, who have been subjected to compulsory hijab for 38 years now, reacted to Alinejad’s photo with various feelings of envy for her freedom, fury for the Islamic Republic’s law, and enthusiasm to express their discontent with the current compulsory hijab in Iran. Thus, Alinejad, be- ing aware of dual lives of the Iranian women who do not believe in the Islamic veil but are forced to submit to it in public, because otherwise they will be penalized, asked her followers on Facebook to use their stealthy freedom and send her their unveiled photos. She called it Stealthy Freedom because, according to the Islamic Republic’s law, the Iranian women are not free to appear in public without hijab. However, they can and would remove the veil once they are somewhere beyond the borders of the realm of the Islamic law, such as in their private sphere or in the heart of nature. The campaign by now has won over one million followers. Not only because of this campaign and her advocacy of the Iranian women’s rights to wear or not to wear hijab, but also because of covering political issues, social problems, and cases of human rights violations in Iran, Alinejad was awarded the 2015 Women’s Rights Award by the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy. The Stealthy Freedom campaign received different reactions from various parties who concerned themselves with the issue of women’s rights in the Middle East. Liberal feminists have praised Alinejad’s campaign because from their perspective the Islamic veil represents the most tangible case of oppres- sion of women in Muslim majority societies and women’s liberation in these

The Dilemma of Postcolonial and/or Orientalist Feminism 151 societies should and could begin with refusing the compulsory hijab. However, postcolonial feminists critiqued the campaign because it incites the old ‘Ori- entalist cultural imaginary’ in the West, which was built upon the tropes of the oppressed women in the Orient who must be liberated through adaptation of the Western values. In addition, Islamic feminists received this campaign as reinforcing the new wave of Islamophobia in Europe and the United States, which represents Islam as a misogynist religion. In the speech that she gave for receiving the Women’s Rights Award, Masih Alinejad countered her critics, who charged her campaign of provoking Is- lamophobic sentiments in the West, catering to the Western value system, and neglecting the gender complexities of the Muslim majority societies. She argued that in the West, because of the terrorist attacks, Islamophobia, Donald Trump’s campaign in the United States, and other nationalist anti-immigrant movements, people rightfully defend Muslim people’s rights as a minority in the West. But they totally ignore the Iranian women’s struggle with compulsory hijab.1 She calls into question the Western female politicians’ integrity because they travel to Iran and wear the compulsory hijab without challenging the Is- lamic Republic for forcing them and Iranian women to veil their hair (Alinejad, 2015).2 She called these politicians hypocrites because they spoke out against the Burkini Ban in France as a case of violation of religious freedom but fail to support the Iranian women in their campaign against the compulsory hijab. She responds to four arguments that the Western female politicians have made for not challenging the compulsory hijab. According to Alinejad, West- ern female politicians have argued that “compulsory hijab is required by law in Iran and we have to respect the law.” She responds that “Burkini Ban was a law in France, slavery used to be legal and so on. We have to protest against the bad law and alter it into a respectable law” (ibid.). The second argument has been that “hijab is a cultural issue and we want to respect the Iranian culture.” Alinejad responded that “here we’re talking about compulsion that is by no means any part of our culture. How could forcing a 7-year-old girl to wear hijab be a cultural issue?” (ibid.). The third argument is that “compulsory hijab is a domestic issue and an internal matter.” Alinejad counters this argument by

1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCgysXS_zE0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeY03WCKbgA. http://mystealthyfreedom.net/en/. 2 In the latest case, on Feb. 11, 2017, Sweden’s Prime Minister, Stefan Löfven, led a Swedish del- egation to Iran. He was criticized back home by Swedish feminists, because the female of- ficials of the delegations including Ann Linde, Sweden’s minister for European Union affairs and trade, conformed to the compulsory hijab rule in Iran and put on headscarves in Iran.