On September 13, Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman, was arrested in Tehran by officers of the Gasht-e Ershad, the morality police set up in 2005, but whose roots go back to after the Islamic revolution in 1979. His crime? Wearing the hijab inappropriately. So far, nothing new under the Middle Eastern sun. However, a tipping point was reached when, on her arrival at the police station, the young woman collapsed and fell into a coma. According to eyewitnesses (her fellow prisoners), she would have been brutally beaten during her transport in the police van. On September 16, three days after her arrest, Mahsa Amini succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage following a head trauma resulting from a violent blow to the head.
To have your life stolen for a lock of hair is absurd, meaningless. Killing for a lock of hair is vile, ignominious. The death of Mahsa Amini has therefore caused consternation and triggered a wave of demonstrations in Iran. But in the country of the ayatollahs, nothing must transgress the established order and nothing must change. The demonstrations, which continue to this day, are therefore repressed with the most abject violence.
The causes of the Iranians’ anger, deep and multiple, cannot be reduced to a simple question of wearing the veil. After forty years of systemic discrimination, daily humiliations and subjugation; after forty years of being forced to adhere (reluctantly) to a macho ideology and to conform to a highly unequal prescribed doctrine, Iranian women (now joined in their demands by many Iranian men) will not be satisfied with nothing less than a regime change.
While a wind of revolt is blowing through Persia, the silence of Quebec feminists in the face of the protest movement triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini is deafening. Could it be that no one in Quebec cares that women are imprisoned or killed in Iran for not adequately covering their hair?
Could it be that no one in Quebec cares that Iranian university students are beaten to death for standing up to tyranny and for defending liberal values (thehabeas corpus, freedom of expression, freedom of belief and political freedom) which form the foundation on which Western civilization has proudly been erected? In any case, we can only deplore that those who do not miss an opportunity to denounce the patriarchy when it is white shut themselves up in silence when it is not.
Some even tried to draw a false parallel between the compulsory wearing of the hijab in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the obligation of neutrality in the Quebec public service. It is odious to equate the Quebec conception of secularism (which, if it does not achieve consensus, nevertheless remains the fruit of a democratic exercise) with the enslavement of women by the regime of the mullahs.
It is unforgivable to divert the conversation in this way from the more than due criticism of the ideological current – political Islam – which has inflicted so much suffering on an entire people over the past four decades through short-sighted opportunism. What constitutes a means of oppression in Iran cannot concurrently constitute a vector of freedom and emancipation in the West.
Through this letter, we call on Quebec feminists: stop wallowing in the comfort of indifference. Join your voice to those of your courageous Iranian sisters as they fight for the end of an apartheid regime that has elevated misogyny as a founding principle, echo their just anger and their legitimate demands. Do not abandon them while they demonstrate at the risk of their lives to free themselves from subjection.