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Iran: Women protest against forced wearing of hijab, 1979

Apr 15, 2014 3:03 pm By Robert Spencer

IranWomanAgainstHijabWho spoke up for these women? No one. Where are they now? Those who are still alive are all wearing the hijab, unless they were able to escape from Iran.

Who speaks up for such women now? No one. But who speaks up for their oppressors? Many, many people, including the President of the United States: “Moreover, freedom in America is indivisible from the freedom to practice one’s religion. That is why there is a mosque in every state in our union, and over 1,200 mosques within our borders. That’s why the United States government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab and to punish those who would deny it.” — Barack Obama, Cairo, June 4, 2009

The women in this picture deserved the vocal and energetic support of Western feminists and the United States government in 1979. They didn’t get it. Neither did Aqsa Parvez, whose Muslim father choked her to death with her hijab after she refused to wear it; or Amina Muse Ali, a Christian woman in Somalia whom Muslims murdered because she wasn’t wearing a hijab; or the 40 women who were murdered in Iraq in 2007 for not wearing the hijab; or Alya Al-Safar, whose Muslim cousin threatened to kill her and harm her family because she stopped wearing the hijab in Britain; or Amira Osman Hamid, who faces whipping in Sudan for refusing to wear the hijab; or the Egyptian girl, also named Amira, who committed suicide after being brutalized for her family for refusing to wear the hijab; or the Muslim and non-Muslim teachers at the Islamic College of South Australia who were told that they had to wear the hijab or be fired; or the women in Chechnya whom police shot with paintballs because they weren’t wearing hijab; or the women also in Chechnya who were threatened by men with automatic rifles for not wearing hijab; or the elementary school teachers in Tunisia who were threatened with death for not wearing hijab; or the Syrian schoolgirls who were forbidden to go to school unless they wore hijab; or the women in Gaza whom Hamas has forced to wear hijab; or the women in Iran who protested against the regime by daring to take off their legally-required hijab; or the women in London whom Muslim thugs threatened to murder if they didn’t wear hijab; or the anonymous young Muslim woman who doffed her hijab outside her home and started living a double life in fear of her parents, or all the other women and girls who have been killed or threatened, or who live in fear for daring not to wear the hijab.

Who speaks up for them? No one. To do so would be “Islamophobic.”

This picture was posted on Twitter by Feminist Pics, but their sisters were not on the case at the time.

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Filed Under: Iran, women's rights in Islam Tagged With: featured


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Comments

  1. Gleaner1 says

    Apr 15, 2014 at 3:41 pm

    I remember those days well, and the years preceding, the Shah sent all his young people to the west including to my college where they learned from us.

    The boys certainly had no trouble or issue with dating our western girls, but they did lack charm and respect.

    Those girls are now women and mothers, that picture should bring home to those for whom the head bag is NOT an issue, just WHAT can be achieved in 35 years by men’s fists, sexual violence and prison.

    • mariam rove says

      Apr 15, 2014 at 4:45 pm

      The boys certainly had no trouble or issue with dating our western girls, but they did lack charm and respect…..

    • RG says

      Apr 15, 2014 at 6:31 pm

      trouble is, we’re doing nothing to prevent this from happening here!…. and it won’t take another 35 years. I’d say we have about 3.5 before Sharia really starts to raise its ugly head–maybe less!

  2. andy says

    Apr 15, 2014 at 5:05 pm

    The religion of peace has no respect to woman as a human being. They are second class citizen.

    • mariam rove says

      Apr 15, 2014 at 5:11 pm

      you mean the “so called religion of peace”. M

  3. mortimer says

    Apr 15, 2014 at 6:00 pm

    I have no doubt that Persian women are just waiting for the first chance to take off that medieval garment of repression.

    • Defcon 4 says

      Apr 16, 2014 at 11:40 am

      I’ll bet a significant proportion don’t want to take of their hag rags at all — because they actually believe in islam.

  4. General Pershing says

    Apr 15, 2014 at 7:03 pm

    But girls and women likes to dress up as tents and wear hijabs, niqabs and burkas. That is what the PC press always try to convince us of . These prostesters on the picture must be islamophobes right?

    • mortimer says

      Apr 15, 2014 at 10:38 pm

      10,000 Persian women protested the order to veil in Tehran. The next day, the crackdown began.

      The rest of the world abandoned them.

  5. Wellington says

    Apr 15, 2014 at 7:20 pm

    Women in the Islamic world who know full well how repressive Islam is to their gender have, unfortunately, an addtional enemy to deal with in our times before any true liberation can ensue for them. The additional enemy are all those in the West who keep making excuses for Islam, thus giving it a breathing space it certainly does not deserve.

    These deeply culpable Westerners include, among others, the vast majority of feminists (disgusting, hypocritical, clueless group of human beings if ever there were one), the vast majority of academics (still suffused with a moronic anti-Western bias), the vast majority of the media ( a more superficial lot would be hard to find), and the vast majority of the politicos of our era, whether in America, Britain, Sweden, France, Germany, etc., who are contemptible to their core because of an obdurate, willful ignorance about Islam.

    Man has been stupid many times in its history, for instance in coddling Hitler in the 1930s, but right now many are demonstrating that they are determined to be as stupid, if not more so, than any stupid people in all of history. Ah, the real tragedy of history is that mankind refuses to learn from history. Such as now.

    • EYESOPEN says

      Apr 15, 2014 at 8:53 pm

      Great post, Wellington! A pox on all of their houses!

    • mortimer says

      Apr 15, 2014 at 10:41 pm

      The Islamic Stockholm Syndrome keeps the women from rebelling by the unending threat of spousal murder and the vicegrip of cousin marriage.

    • mortimer says

      Apr 15, 2014 at 10:41 pm

      The Islamic Stockholm Syndrome keeps the women from rebelling by the unending threat of spousal murder and the vice grip of cousin marriage.

    • Jay Boo says

      Apr 16, 2014 at 10:36 am

      Islamists have their own agenda and are willing to manipulate as Kalliope pointed out below.

      Gullible Allies …
      The blood of many stained the hands of Khomeini

    • Defcon 4 says

      Apr 16, 2014 at 11:31 am

      If they’re ignorant, they’re deliberately so, it doesn’t take a world renowned scholar to find out what islam is allah about these days. It doesn’t take years of exhaustive study either. I’d argue that some of them might be suffering from a paid-for ignorance of just what islam stands for (e.g. the ACLU or the SPLC).

  6. Clare says

    Apr 15, 2014 at 7:32 pm

    Out of the mouth of our Appease Mahometan President – an endorsement of misogyny veiled under freedom of religion. This is a fine example of a man speaking with a forked tongue.

  7. Clare says

    Apr 15, 2014 at 7:40 pm

    Oh, and in direct resistance to these words of the President is the ‘American Law for American Courts’ that has been passed in several states, ensuring equal treatment before the law for all Americans.

    • EYESOPEN says

      Apr 15, 2014 at 8:54 pm

      Unfortunately, it has not been passed in ALL 50 states.

      • dumbledoresarmy says

        Apr 16, 2014 at 7:09 pm

        But ACT for America is working on that…They haven’t given up.

        Do you belong to ACT for America? If not, why not?

        The more members such a body has, the more effective its lobbying can be.

  8. Kalliope says

    Apr 16, 2014 at 12:11 am

    Many Persian women wore the veil as a symbol of defiance against the Pahlavi regime, since it was the first Pahlavi Shāh, Rezā Šâh Pahlavi, who banned the veil in 1936.

    Covered in messages: The veil as a political tool
    By Azadeh Namakydoust (2003):

    “During the 1979 Islamic Revolution many women deliberately chose to observe the Hejab, either in the form of wearing the veil or a scarf, as a sign of solidarity with Ayatollah Khomeini and a symbol of opposition to the Shah’s regime. In the months immediately following the return of Khomeini to Iran, what had been a private matter before became very public and Shari’a Islamic laws became the law of the land.

    During the revolution women were encouraged to participate in demonstrations against the regime. Women, who had been actively opposing the regime in various ways, became an integral part of the anti-Shah movement. They had many of the same ideals as their male counterparts. They believed in equal rights for men and women, in freedom of speech and expression, and in “abolishment of all discrimination in law against women, particularly in relation to the family”.

    None of these ideals became reality after the revolution. As Haleh Esfandiari notes, almost all the women she interviewed for her book, Reconstructed Lives, felt a sense of betrayal and loss. Almost all said that “they had felt profoundly the humiliations visited on them by the regime’s policies and actions regarding women.

    It did not take long for the hopes of the women for a democratic society to turn into a nightmare, as the country became a theocracy. Some of the women Esfandiari interviewed kept their hopes alive for a year or two after the revolution; for some the dream died almost immediately after the IRP took over. Mari, one of the women interviewed by Esfandiari, says:

    Like many others, I was also swept off my feet by the revolution… I remember the night Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran. I was excited and agitated… I never considered this [wearing the chador] a social movement, but rather a show of defiance against the system. I was too worried about communism to pay much attention to Islam.

    This seems to be how most of the women felt. Most women who took part in the revolution did not cover their heads for strictly religious purposes. Most of the women saw wearing the chador as a sign of opposition to the shah’s regime and as Esfandiari suggests, as a sign of protest “against a government associated in the minds of its opponents with the West.”

    Millions of women took part in the 1979 Islamic Revolution. They saw the revolution as a means to achieve the rights they thought they deserved to have. Many of the women did indeed wear the chador voluntarily during the revolution, but for them the revolution was a political movement rather than a religious one. They resented the Pahlavi regime and every thing that it stood for and in the 1970’s Hejab represented what the Pahlavi’s had rejected. As Sullivan states, “the chador is used by opposing camps for opposite reasons: the veil as a symbol of liberation from the dictatorial state and as an instrument for hegemonizing a revolution by those whose only aim was political power.”

    The IRI regime has tried its best, without much success, to sell the idea and impose the veil on women. Today’s women not only oppose the enforcement of the chador and compulsory veiling with as much rigor as they did in 1980, they are slowly gaining some of the rights they had hoped to gain through the revolution. These women are utilizing the experiences they gained through organizing and activism during the revolution to bring about change in the Islamic Republic.

    It seems that this is precisely what the regime was afraid of at the onset of the revolution. They realized that women had been so empowered through their involvement in the revolution that no one could have stopped them, thus they became even obsessed with restraining women and denying them their rights. Today, most women in Iran are of the opinion that the veil and the scarf are not their Hejab (restriction); they believe that the laws and denying them their rights are their real Hejab. Today, both religious and secular women are striving to acheive those ideals that they had hoped to be able to acheive some 23 years ago.”

    • Jay Boo says

      Apr 16, 2014 at 10:24 am

      Excellent post
      Also, I wish that all Western leftists and feminists would read it and realize that Islamists always betray their temporary ‘allies’

    • Albert Salmi says

      Apr 16, 2014 at 9:51 pm

      The Persians are cowards and disgusting filthy lot.

  9. Tim says

    Apr 16, 2014 at 10:02 am

    The picture is so sad. When hundreds of thousands, maybe even over a million, people gather to protest something superimposed onto them you got to feel pretty sad. What would we do if we were stuck in the same situation with half of the country supporting pure savagery and the other half opposing it?

  10. Jay Boo says

    Apr 16, 2014 at 10:13 am

    Islam is so fragile

    Without the hijab — Islam would cease to exist.
    Without murder of apostates —- Islam would cease to exist.
    without mandatory prayers — helpless Allah would be without honor.

  11. Jay Boo says

    Apr 16, 2014 at 10:17 am

    and then came the imposition of the (1979 Islamic DELUSION)
    base on Muhammad’s deception.

  12. Defcon 4 says

    Apr 16, 2014 at 11:24 am

    But isn’t the wearing of the hijab and burka a liberating experience for women?

    At least that’s what one of the libtards on CNN said.

    • Islamisdeath says

      Apr 16, 2014 at 10:02 pm

      Yeah and many women have had positive experiences with genital mutilation as well.

  13. dumbledoresarmy says

    Apr 16, 2014 at 7:24 pm

    I call it the Slave Rag.

    It takes two basic forms: the faux-demure Slave Hood, leaving the face still visible, which deceptively imitates the Christian nun’s wimple (though it in fact signifies something completely different); and the Slave Mask (any form of the Slave Rag that involves covering up part or all of the woman’s face).

    It identifies the wearer as a Camp Follower or Gang Moll – whether voluntarily or under compulsion – of the allah gang, the mohammedan Mob.

    It is, at bottom, a political and indeed military and militant garment, since it symbolises the wearer’s willing or coerced submission to the Sharia system …which system Muslims fully intend to impose upon every human being on earth, willynilly.

    It is the functional equivalent of SS uniform, of Swastika armband, or of the KKK hood and robe: it is a declared threat to all nonislamically-dressed women encountered by the wearer.

    Nuns do not expect that every woman who is not a nun or a Catholic should dress like a nun. Nuns do not look down on married and single women who dress differently from themselves, or condemn them for being “immodest” because they don’t wear habit and wimple.

    But Muslimahs in hijab, the ones who wear it willingly (as many, many do), *do* puff themselves up with vanity and pride and hubris, and despise and look down on non-Muslim women, as well as on Muslim women who wear less covering than themselves. For they *do* think, many of them, that every woman in the world should be forced to dress as they do; and that if a woman refuses so to dress, she *ought* to be punished, harassed, perhaps even raped and/ or enslaved, or killed, and she will ‘deserve’ it because she is ‘immodest’, she is a whore exposing her “awrah” in public.

    • Clare says

      Apr 16, 2014 at 7:58 pm

      Wow.

    • Defcon 4 says

      Apr 17, 2014 at 12:21 am

      Nuns haven’t been required to wear the habit for decades — at least according to a nun I met. I don’t think I’ve seen a nun in a habit in my entire life.

  14. Nyn says

    May 10, 2014 at 7:53 am

    Islam is dangerous 4 our world so ignore stupid fucking muhamad

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