Iran International
Several dissident figures linked to Iran's Green Movement from fifteen years ago have called on the Iranian elite to support women's civil disobedience against the hijab mandate rather than merely criticizing the new hijab law.
One such call to civil disobedience came from Abdollah Naseri this week, a former managing director of Iran's official news agency (IRNA), who called the hijab law “pure evil”.
“It is a good time for the revolutionary men and women of ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ to take over the streets again and without violence shout the right to freedom of how to dress, a gift from God to his creatures,” Naseri said in a note published by the banned Kalemeh website Tuesday.
Like the prominent jailed dissident Mostafa Tajzadeh, Naseri is a member of the banned Mujahedin of the Islamic Revolution, a small but once very influential Reformist political organization withing the Islamic Republic's political elite.
Naseri has been one of several activists and political figures to be vocally against Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s leadership and policies including his insistence on the necessity of hijab. The hijab laws have continued to worsen in the wake of the uprising in 2022, sparked by the death in morality police custody of Mahsa Amini, arrested for not wearing her head covering properly.
He said the current situation as laws continue to become ever more draconian, is “extremely unstable”.
Vasmaghi, a female Islamic scholar and politician, has argued that the Islamic Sharia does not require women to cover their hair and alleges that the Islamic Republic has used it to enhance its discrimination against women.
After years of wearing the hijab by choice, Vasmaghi posted a video of herself in October 2023 that showed her unveiling in protest.
In a note published on Telegram about the new hijab law, Isa Saharkhiz, another dissident and former politician, has warned that the new hijab law has the potential to trigger a national civil disobedience movement and an “unpredictable domino [of events]”.
One must emphasize that an opportunity has presented itself now to test the ruling establishment’s reaction to a peaceful but effective “national movement” against the new law, he wrote.
Saharkhiz also raised the question of whether given his declaration of total obedience to Khamenei, President Masoud Pezeshkian will eventually yield and carry out Khamenei’s wishes or resign if he could not honor his promise to stop hijab enforcement.
Some dissident politicians appear very optimistic about what civil disobedience against the hijab can achieve.
“Iranian women’s resistance will defeat the Hijab and Chastity Law,” Ardeshir Amir-Arjomand, the spokesman of the Coordinating Council of the Iranian Green Movement and a former senior adviser to Mousavi, tweeted Sunday.
Amir-Arjomand, who lives in exile, argued in his post that the solution to the problem caused by the new hijab law is “resistance and civil disobedience” rather than appealing to the Supreme Leader to abolish it by using his extraordinary powers as some politicians and the media in Iran have suggested in the past few days.
The UN has called Iran's hijab enforcement a form of "gender apartheid" and rights groups have called it a "draconian campaign" to force women to veil and a "war on women".
