On September 16, we will celebrate the first anniversary of the death of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Iranian of Kurdish origin who was arrested and then violently beaten three days earlier in Tehran by officers of the morality police because she was wearing her hijab in a manner deemed inappropriate. This tragic event was at the origin of one of the largest waves of demonstrations, mainly led by women, against the regime of the ayatollahs since the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979. Rallies in support of Iranian women also took place in dozens of countries, including here in Quebec.
Henry Kissinger, an American specialist in geopolitics, often said about Iran that it would have to decide between being a country or being a cause. This remark, which is very fair, deserves clarification.
The doctrine that took root in Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini during the Islamic Revolution is the following: the Iranian State, unlike other States, is not simply a sociological, administrative and legal entity; it is above all the armed arm of a religious ideology. In the eyes of Khomeini and his followers, Iran, led astray by foreign infidels and secularized Muslims, suffered the consequences of the abandonment of laws and principles consistent with Islam as well as their replacement by laws and secular values. Making an expansionist reading of the Koran, Khomeini carried out the complete re-Islamization of Iranian society: all aspects of society (the political, economic and legal systems, the cultural, the social, the values, the morals) were forged in the crucible of Islam.
To put it another way, the “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” of Christianity has no equivalent in the fundamentalist Islam of the ayatollahs. For them, the only legitimate authority comes from God; the government derives its power not from the people, but from divine law. It should therefore come as no surprise that the Iranian Islamic regime is so intransigent regarding the wearing of the veil.
On the occasion of these commemorations in tribute to Mahsa Amini, I call on all Quebec feminists — women and men — to loudly express their support for Iranian women in their fight against an apartheid regime. There is nothing Islamophobic about vigorously challenging the dogma of Sharia supremacy. We can both have the greatest concern for those who adhere to the Muslim faith and recognize that the Islamic veil is not insignificant and that it serves as a Trojan horse for the fundamentalist ideology of the ayatollahs. .