The woman's hair, the people's body

The protests that started with the killing of Mahsa Amini in custody by the morality police have spread to many cities in Iran. Despite Iranian sources initially trying to trivialise the protests because Amini was Kurdish, the protests have now spread to the major cities that are the pillars of the mullah regime. 

Women have been under compulsory veiling pressure since the 1979 'Islamic Revolution' in Iran. In addition to the Revolutionary Guards, who hunt on the streets as guardians of morality, honour and religion, mobilised teams controlling hijabs, the colour of lipstick and the length of skirts started to squeeze the bodies of the people under the mullah regime under the corset of morality from the female body.

Iran is the most remarkable experiment showing that compulsory veiling is the credo of religion-based state organisation. The Khomeini regime and its continuation, which swept women out of workplaces, universities, squares and the media and confined them to the home and the family, had established a system in which men were exploited in small spheres of power by having the right of ownership over women with the favour of the state. The hair concealed under the hijab was the substance, not the metaphor, of the link between the Shiite sharia state, which operates in a strict hierarchical order, and social life. The more a woman's hair was covered, the more the body of society would be squeezed around the mullah regime. 

In the 40-odd years since Khomeini's seizure of power, many women have been executed on moral grounds, not to mention the number of women who have been subjected to street and police violence, detained and arrested for disobeying the veil. The violence against women who were excluded from the labour market and other parts of the public sphere, dependent, parasitised, destitute and impoverished, was a test of society's resilience and a lesson for others. A condition for the distribution of material and immaterial resources under sharia!

The class stratifications that emerged over time in the specific development of Iranian capitalism, each with its own ideas, opened up possibilities for questioning the limits to women's employment, education and visibility. The ideological tensions between the liberal elements of the Iranian regime demanding flexibility and the puritanical perpetuators of the mullah regime have also facilitated the pushing of boundaries in social life. 

As living conditions worsened, the struggles of Iranian labourers became harder to suppress. Women, too, have tried to loosen the compulsory veiling with small adjustments in the way they tie their hijabs. As the country's precarious political equilibrium was tested by small instabilities, especially starting just before the 2000s, women were gradually enlarging these breaches. The white hijab protests in 2017-2018 could be considered a turning point. The women who took off their white hijabs and published videos objected to the hijab system. However, these protests, which were reserved for middle-class women, did not lead to radical protests at the time. It was obvious that it had created an important accumulation. 

What differentiates today's protests from those of the past is that they have become mass, rather than requiring the courage of individual women as before. The death of Mahsa Amini showed that there is an irreducible link between violence against women's bodies and the whip (no metaphor) on the backs of all Iran's poor.

Despite the limitations of communications, the images coming from Iran show that the composition of the protests is not limited to women. Male labourers are clashing with the police alongside women. This historical moment of enlightenment, when it was realised that the hijab is not only a women's bond but the chain of all working people, is extremely important not only for Iran but also for the world. In this respect, the woman's body is clearly the body of the people. Every attack and oppression against it is for the protection of the system of production and distribution. In the case of Iran, plus the Sharia state, which owes its existence to the subjugation of the entire population. Therefore, compulsory veiling is also a subject of class struggle.

It is precisely for this reason that workers went on strike in many cities in Iran, shopkeepers closed their shutters for days, independent trade unions pointed to the link between the struggle of the working class for rights and freedom and the struggle of women and declared their involvement in this struggle.

"Mahsa is our child, one of our family," said a statement issued on behalf of the Organising Committee of the Oil Subcontractor Workers' Protest, adding that "the combative stance of women in social movements, especially in the struggle of workers, teachers and pensioners, has deeply frightened the Iranian regime."

The Iranian people seem to have found an answer to the question that has been accumulating until now. The system that oppresses women is the enemy of all of us.

Joan Baez said in one of her songs, 'The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind”. Now in Iran, that wind is blowing through the hair of a proud woman who dances around a fire in the centre and burns her veil. The woman's hair is the flag of freedom.