March 8, 2025
Fariba Amini
Newark, Delaware (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – When Ruhollah Khomeini was still in Neauphle-le-Château, in various declarations and interviews, he had promised that women would have the freedom to choose their attire. That they would have the same rights as men.
Fariba Amini
Newark, Delaware (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – When Ruhollah Khomeini was still in Neauphle-le-Château, in various declarations and interviews, he had promised that women would have the freedom to choose their attire. That they would have the same rights as men.
Graffiti picture in Frankfurt am Main for Jina Mahsa Amini on a
demolition building in Gallus. The location was accessible to through
traffic at the time of the photo. 11 March 2024, By Ostendfaxpost.
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.. Via Wikimedia Commons..
“In an interview with a left-leaning Lebanese newspaper, he said that Islam believes in the total equality of men and women; that women are free to choose their own destiny, to vote, to work and be economically independent.”
In reply to a question regarding the veil with the newspaper Ayandegan dated January 21st, 1978, he said, in our opinion, women who wear the veil have chosen to do so. But in the future, women are free to make that decision themselves. We are only against such attire that are against modesty (effat).
We now know that he lied.
If only everyone had read his book, Islamic Government (Hokumat-e Eslami), which was banned during the Pahlavi reign, perhaps we would have been alerted to his ideas. No one really paid attention. Who really cared about the teachings of an old man sitting in Najaf. Yet, we should have.
Early March 1979, I went to Iran soon after Mehrabad airport had opened. The revolution was in progress. I remember the joyous and hopeful atmosphere in Tehran. We used to go to Tehran university where numerous organizations and their leaders were giving speeches. I barely saw any one with hejab. It took a few months before things changed.
Slowly but surely, it was announced that hejab would be compulsory for all women in 1983 and that the Family Law passed in 1967 and extended in 1975 would be abolished. This change became a major point of contention between the Islamic forces and the provisional liberal government of Mehdi Bazargan.
In a speech right after the death of Ayatollah Taleghani who had been supportive of women’s choice, Bazargan quoting Taleghani said, a religion which forces people to do things is a religion that is doomed. Imposing the headcover on women and beating them is ten times worse than being hejab-less.
In a letter to Mehdi Bazargan dated 16 Esfand 1357, 4 March 1978, Khomeini said he had heard women that could enter ministry offices without proper hejab. His reaction? “Naked women should not be allowed to enter any ministry offices.”
The same day he announced that all women must go to ministries with hejab. He declared that they could work in offices, but they must honor the Islamic attire, which meant hejab and long and dark clothing.
This was met with the fury and anger of women who had participated in the revolution. They felt betrayed.
On the night before March 8, a woman spokesperson went on TV and announced that whoever participates in tomorrow’s gathering are not Muslims. What was most amazing was that the anchor woman was Mariam Razi who had worked previously on TV without a headcover and now was wearing a full hejab.
The following day, March 8, women took to the streets en masse. It was a spontaneous demonstration. More than 15,000 women participated in cold, snowy weather—nurses, high school students and university students. This didn’t just happen in Tehran but in many of the provinces as well. The main leftist organizations, fedayeen, mojahedin and the Tudeh, called it a reactionary move and refused to endorse it. Nevertheless, many ordinary women were at the forefront defying the compulsory hejab.
In an interview in later years, Dr Homa Nategh the well-known historian of the nineteenth-century Qajar era, who was herself a proponent of the revolution against the Shah, said how much she regretted her move, that she thought these demonstrations were not necessary.
It was a huge mistake on the part of some intellectuals since these demonstrations, which lasted five days, proved to be beginning of the end.
In the meantime, more than a dozen women’s organizations had been formed.
They were quite active, organizing events for women, even working among working class women. They were mainly of leftist tendencies though the Mojahedin and Islamic groups were also well represented.
Soon, though, hopes were dashed as the new regime in Tehran under the direct orders of Khomeini himself and the hardline clerics around him issued their fatwa mandating that women must cover their hair. Among the clerics, only the liberal Ayatollah Taleghani declared that women were not forced to follow this Islamic rule. He would die soon thereafter.
Yet even the Grand Ayatollah Montazeri in an interview with the French newspaper Le Soir said that Islam does not say anything about Hejab but rather that women should be modest in their clothing.
When Oriana Fallaci the famous Italian journalist went to interview Khomeini in September 1979, she wore the hejab. She asked him why he made women wear the hejab over their clothes. In response he said, if you don’t like it then don’t wear it. At that point Fallaci took off her hejab. Khomeini got and left the room.
What took place next was the cultural revolution which changed the face of the Universities. Many were purged. The tale of Dr. Haydeh Daregahi who had come back from the U.S. to teach at the university and be an instrument of change, is quite telling:
Interestingly while harsh measures were enforced, Khomeini also advocated the education of women. Of course, the Islamic way. Young girls went to universities which at that time had become segregated.
While women singers and actresses were forbidden to perform and even at the hospitals, women nurses and drs. could only treat women, their struggle against gender apartheid.
In 1995, after a long absence, I traveled to Iran. The atmosphere was gloomy. I remember walking with my mother at a rug exhibition, my hair covered with a colorful hejab. A van showed up with two women inside and two men. One of the women came towards me and told my mother tell her to wipe off her lipstick. I obeyed but my mother, who was always outspoken, told her well, ma’m, she doesn’t even wear make-up; but the woman with her black veil was quite rude and intimidating.
Another incident which I vividly remember is when one of our relatives came to our house, shaken. She had just witnessed the shooting of a young woman in a telephone booth by a Pasdar because she had disobeyed him.
Those events passed and I went through the gender-segregated airport security gates to return to the U.S. Again one of the women security guards told me to remove my lipstick.
I guess they didn’t like the color red.
I didn’t return until 2005 when things had vastly improved. I suppose that President Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005) had persuaded the regime to loosen up but to a great extent it was the women’s disobedience to the rules that had changed things. Now women were wearing tunics and tight clothes. In fact, I looked ridiculous in my somber clothes. While at most weddings I attended women and men were segregated , in the northern sections of Tehran, provided you paid the guards, parties and marriage ceremonies were held with music and dancing all mixed and all kinds of alcoholic drinks were served.
During this period, many NGO’s had been formed, many of them run by women.
The million-signature campaign, a grass root campaign, had begun, drawing in thousands of women. Public parks were the scene of men and women defiantly acting in theatre performances. Many guys were supportive.
Young women and men held hands in public whereas in the 1980’s you would be arrested and even jailed for doing so.
Universities were not segregated anymore. Young men and women sat together in classes and mingled.
Still, things weren’t easy for women. I spoke to two female friends who had attended the University of Tehran and Azad University in Semnan, respectively. The latter told me she had to wear the maghnaeh, the full cover tightened at the edge of the face, at all times, even though her classes were mixed. She obtained her masters and left Iran as the professors were not of high caliber. The former studied law and only had to wear the chador. At the end of the semester, her teacher, who was a cleric, failed her, even though she was an excellent student. She was told that she could go see him in his office to discuss her grade. She refused out of fear because she knew what that meant. Finally, her mother intervened and she was finally given a lower grade.
By the way, she told me that one of her law professors would come to class with a security guard. Guess who he was? Ghazi Said Mortazavi, who had tortured Iranian-Canadian photographer Zahra Kazemi to death in Evin Prison.
Still the resistance continued. Women pursued higher education and many became lawyers, engineers, university professors and more. I even sat in a taxi cab driven by a woman. Women in Iran never stopped their struggle against the reactionary laws imposed on them. Little by little the scarf would be lowered and faces had all kinds of makeup and even plastic surgery, sometimes too much in my opinion. All were signs of defiance on the part of women, many of them daughters of women who wore the black chador.
Of course Islamic education has never ceased to exist. I recently read about an organization that has been created in Qom designed to bring women and young girls from the rural areas to study Islam. It is directly funded by Ayatollah Khamene’i and has ample resources; but horror stories about it, involving sexual abuse and even rape have recently come to light.
The last two times I visited Iran, in 2017 and 2019, I attended several lectures where the masters of ceremonies were young female students. At a talk at University of Isfahan, 75 percent of the attendees were female. I also saw many girls and women with minimal head cover or none at all, especially around the University of Tehran. In the bazaar, both in Tehran and in Kashan, and even in religiously strict Isfahan women defied the rules.
Iran is not black and white.
At the same time, gender segregation and the oppression of women have continued. Women must ask their husband’s permission to leave the country. Women do not have the same rights as men in many respects. In shrine cities like Mashhad temporary marriage (sigheh) b continues to thrive. There are offices in place where men can go and chose a two hour or half a day interaction with a woman. Men can still marry 4 wives according to the Sharia law. Young girls are married off to older men.
Courts are generally not in favor of women. If a woman kills her husband or a man who has abused her, she is either imprisoned for life or executed. The case of two young women, Shahla Jahed and Reyhaneh Jabbari, became international news. Both were hung according to the 8th-century law of retaliation in kind (qisas) Sholeh Pakravan, Reyhaneh’s mother, said in an interview later that the Islamic Republic wanted to make sure that no one connected to the Ministry of Intelligence would be ever held responsible. The incompetent and corrupt judge presiding over the case, told Reyhaneh that perhaps, you should have allowed yourself to be raped so none of this would have happened.
It is important to point out that what happened to her is not what upper-class women tend to experience—the northern Tehrani women who drive SUV’s. and who are rarely stopped by the morality police.
Mahsa Amini arrived in Tehran in September 2022 as a tourist on a bus from Kurdistan. She stood out perhaps because she was also a beautiful young woman. Her hair was partially covered. She wore a long black robe. So why target her? Did it have anything to do with Raisi , who had just been elected president of Iran? Raisi, not just a hardliner but, as they call him, the executioner of Evin, a member of the death commission, a 20 year old guy participating in the execution of thousands of political prisoners-men and women as young as 13 and 14 back in the early 1980’s.
If Mahsa or Zhina, her Kurdish name, had been in northern part of Tehran this might have never had happened. She arrived in southern Tehran accompanied by her brother and other family members.
The interrogator called her names: bad kareh, a name meaning whore, they use for women they see as loose. The mentality of the man who interrogated her and the women who witnessed and did nothing is that of some of the men and women of the Islamic republic who are afraid of women for women have shown resilience and defiance vis a vis a most oppressive system.
Mahsa Amini died in custody.
In many ways, the consequent protest movement in 2022-2023 for the dismantling of Hejab is more than just that. It is a movement for women’s rights in every way. We see many women, young girls, fearless and courageous who go out to the streets demanding their rights.
The reprisals against them take many forms: shooting at their eyes, poisoning them or killing them instantly. But this movement will not go away; refused to die in its demand for a modern society.
We saw this movement gain momentum as the entire world stood in awe. The international community rallied behind what is called the largest feminist movement in the modern era. And proudly we have to mention that this movement has been fiercely supported by many of our Iranian men in what continues to be a patriarchal society.
I want to remember my dear late friend Farah Ebrahimi, whose husband was executed, Haleh Sahabi, a woman human rights activist and the daughter of reformer and nationalist Yadollah Sahabi, who died while her father was being buried; and then Neda, Nika, and Zina who were murdered in front of our eyes.
And the many more who are still alive and still struggling.
In a letter dated January 2, 1956, Forough Farrokhzad, the famous poet of Iran wrote, “My wish is for Iranian women to be free and equal to men. I am fully aware that my sisters in this country suffer from men’s injustices, and I use half of my art to articulate their pain and anguish.” She penned the following verses:
Someone is coming,
someone is coming,
someone who in his heart is with us,
in his breathing is with us,
in his voice is with us,
someone whose coming
can’t be stopped.
and handcuffed and thrown in jail…
In reply to a question regarding the veil with the newspaper Ayandegan dated January 21st, 1978, he said, in our opinion, women who wear the veil have chosen to do so. But in the future, women are free to make that decision themselves. We are only against such attire that are against modesty (effat).
We now know that he lied.
If only everyone had read his book, Islamic Government (Hokumat-e Eslami), which was banned during the Pahlavi reign, perhaps we would have been alerted to his ideas. No one really paid attention. Who really cared about the teachings of an old man sitting in Najaf. Yet, we should have.
Early March 1979, I went to Iran soon after Mehrabad airport had opened. The revolution was in progress. I remember the joyous and hopeful atmosphere in Tehran. We used to go to Tehran university where numerous organizations and their leaders were giving speeches. I barely saw any one with hejab. It took a few months before things changed.
Slowly but surely, it was announced that hejab would be compulsory for all women in 1983 and that the Family Law passed in 1967 and extended in 1975 would be abolished. This change became a major point of contention between the Islamic forces and the provisional liberal government of Mehdi Bazargan.
In a speech right after the death of Ayatollah Taleghani who had been supportive of women’s choice, Bazargan quoting Taleghani said, a religion which forces people to do things is a religion that is doomed. Imposing the headcover on women and beating them is ten times worse than being hejab-less.
In a letter to Mehdi Bazargan dated 16 Esfand 1357, 4 March 1978, Khomeini said he had heard women that could enter ministry offices without proper hejab. His reaction? “Naked women should not be allowed to enter any ministry offices.”
The same day he announced that all women must go to ministries with hejab. He declared that they could work in offices, but they must honor the Islamic attire, which meant hejab and long and dark clothing.
This was met with the fury and anger of women who had participated in the revolution. They felt betrayed.
On the night before March 8, a woman spokesperson went on TV and announced that whoever participates in tomorrow’s gathering are not Muslims. What was most amazing was that the anchor woman was Mariam Razi who had worked previously on TV without a headcover and now was wearing a full hejab.
The following day, March 8, women took to the streets en masse. It was a spontaneous demonstration. More than 15,000 women participated in cold, snowy weather—nurses, high school students and university students. This didn’t just happen in Tehran but in many of the provinces as well. The main leftist organizations, fedayeen, mojahedin and the Tudeh, called it a reactionary move and refused to endorse it. Nevertheless, many ordinary women were at the forefront defying the compulsory hejab.
In an interview in later years, Dr Homa Nategh the well-known historian of the nineteenth-century Qajar era, who was herself a proponent of the revolution against the Shah, said how much she regretted her move, that she thought these demonstrations were not necessary.
It was a huge mistake on the part of some intellectuals since these demonstrations, which lasted five days, proved to be beginning of the end.
In the meantime, more than a dozen women’s organizations had been formed.
They were quite active, organizing events for women, even working among working class women. They were mainly of leftist tendencies though the Mojahedin and Islamic groups were also well represented.
Soon, though, hopes were dashed as the new regime in Tehran under the direct orders of Khomeini himself and the hardline clerics around him issued their fatwa mandating that women must cover their hair. Among the clerics, only the liberal Ayatollah Taleghani declared that women were not forced to follow this Islamic rule. He would die soon thereafter.
Yet even the Grand Ayatollah Montazeri in an interview with the French newspaper Le Soir said that Islam does not say anything about Hejab but rather that women should be modest in their clothing.
When Oriana Fallaci the famous Italian journalist went to interview Khomeini in September 1979, she wore the hejab. She asked him why he made women wear the hejab over their clothes. In response he said, if you don’t like it then don’t wear it. At that point Fallaci took off her hejab. Khomeini got and left the room.
What took place next was the cultural revolution which changed the face of the Universities. Many were purged. The tale of Dr. Haydeh Daregahi who had come back from the U.S. to teach at the university and be an instrument of change, is quite telling:
“ A few colleagues gathered in my apartment to go confront the officials. Azar, that is Azar Nafisi who was also teaching at that time, Fereshteh Shahir and I decided to go as usual without any hejab. We were confronted by the guard who was trying to stop us from entering the premises. We went into the meeting. In that meeting, Hassan Shariatmadari, Abdolkarim Soroush, Jalal-e Din Farsi and a woman by the name of Afrooz were there. Farsi said, these people are not just against a cover on their heads but against the totality of the Islamic government. A man sitting behind them shouted, who has allowed this Bahai whore to be here. Later I saw that Mr. Soroush had pointed me out to the revolutionary guards. I was told that If I showed up again, God knows what could happen to me.”
Soon, women would be arrested, even given lashes and imprisoned for violating the new rules This was the first attempt at the suppression, humiliation and intimidation of women in Iran by the Islamic Republic.
Interestingly while harsh measures were enforced, Khomeini also advocated the education of women. Of course, the Islamic way. Young girls went to universities which at that time had become segregated.
While women singers and actresses were forbidden to perform and even at the hospitals, women nurses and drs. could only treat women, their struggle against gender apartheid.
In 1995, after a long absence, I traveled to Iran. The atmosphere was gloomy. I remember walking with my mother at a rug exhibition, my hair covered with a colorful hejab. A van showed up with two women inside and two men. One of the women came towards me and told my mother tell her to wipe off her lipstick. I obeyed but my mother, who was always outspoken, told her well, ma’m, she doesn’t even wear make-up; but the woman with her black veil was quite rude and intimidating.
Another incident which I vividly remember is when one of our relatives came to our house, shaken. She had just witnessed the shooting of a young woman in a telephone booth by a Pasdar because she had disobeyed him.
Those events passed and I went through the gender-segregated airport security gates to return to the U.S. Again one of the women security guards told me to remove my lipstick.
I guess they didn’t like the color red.
I didn’t return until 2005 when things had vastly improved. I suppose that President Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005) had persuaded the regime to loosen up but to a great extent it was the women’s disobedience to the rules that had changed things. Now women were wearing tunics and tight clothes. In fact, I looked ridiculous in my somber clothes. While at most weddings I attended women and men were segregated , in the northern sections of Tehran, provided you paid the guards, parties and marriage ceremonies were held with music and dancing all mixed and all kinds of alcoholic drinks were served.
During this period, many NGO’s had been formed, many of them run by women.
The million-signature campaign, a grass root campaign, had begun, drawing in thousands of women. Public parks were the scene of men and women defiantly acting in theatre performances. Many guys were supportive.
Young women and men held hands in public whereas in the 1980’s you would be arrested and even jailed for doing so.
Universities were not segregated anymore. Young men and women sat together in classes and mingled.
Still, things weren’t easy for women. I spoke to two female friends who had attended the University of Tehran and Azad University in Semnan, respectively. The latter told me she had to wear the maghnaeh, the full cover tightened at the edge of the face, at all times, even though her classes were mixed. She obtained her masters and left Iran as the professors were not of high caliber. The former studied law and only had to wear the chador. At the end of the semester, her teacher, who was a cleric, failed her, even though she was an excellent student. She was told that she could go see him in his office to discuss her grade. She refused out of fear because she knew what that meant. Finally, her mother intervened and she was finally given a lower grade.
By the way, she told me that one of her law professors would come to class with a security guard. Guess who he was? Ghazi Said Mortazavi, who had tortured Iranian-Canadian photographer Zahra Kazemi to death in Evin Prison.
Still the resistance continued. Women pursued higher education and many became lawyers, engineers, university professors and more. I even sat in a taxi cab driven by a woman. Women in Iran never stopped their struggle against the reactionary laws imposed on them. Little by little the scarf would be lowered and faces had all kinds of makeup and even plastic surgery, sometimes too much in my opinion. All were signs of defiance on the part of women, many of them daughters of women who wore the black chador.
Of course Islamic education has never ceased to exist. I recently read about an organization that has been created in Qom designed to bring women and young girls from the rural areas to study Islam. It is directly funded by Ayatollah Khamene’i and has ample resources; but horror stories about it, involving sexual abuse and even rape have recently come to light.
The last two times I visited Iran, in 2017 and 2019, I attended several lectures where the masters of ceremonies were young female students. At a talk at University of Isfahan, 75 percent of the attendees were female. I also saw many girls and women with minimal head cover or none at all, especially around the University of Tehran. In the bazaar, both in Tehran and in Kashan, and even in religiously strict Isfahan women defied the rules.
Iran is not black and white.
At the same time, gender segregation and the oppression of women have continued. Women must ask their husband’s permission to leave the country. Women do not have the same rights as men in many respects. In shrine cities like Mashhad temporary marriage (sigheh) b continues to thrive. There are offices in place where men can go and chose a two hour or half a day interaction with a woman. Men can still marry 4 wives according to the Sharia law. Young girls are married off to older men.
Courts are generally not in favor of women. If a woman kills her husband or a man who has abused her, she is either imprisoned for life or executed. The case of two young women, Shahla Jahed and Reyhaneh Jabbari, became international news. Both were hung according to the 8th-century law of retaliation in kind (qisas) Sholeh Pakravan, Reyhaneh’s mother, said in an interview later that the Islamic Republic wanted to make sure that no one connected to the Ministry of Intelligence would be ever held responsible. The incompetent and corrupt judge presiding over the case, told Reyhaneh that perhaps, you should have allowed yourself to be raped so none of this would have happened.
It is important to point out that what happened to her is not what upper-class women tend to experience—the northern Tehrani women who drive SUV’s. and who are rarely stopped by the morality police.
Mahsa Amini arrived in Tehran in September 2022 as a tourist on a bus from Kurdistan. She stood out perhaps because she was also a beautiful young woman. Her hair was partially covered. She wore a long black robe. So why target her? Did it have anything to do with Raisi , who had just been elected president of Iran? Raisi, not just a hardliner but, as they call him, the executioner of Evin, a member of the death commission, a 20 year old guy participating in the execution of thousands of political prisoners-men and women as young as 13 and 14 back in the early 1980’s.
If Mahsa or Zhina, her Kurdish name, had been in northern part of Tehran this might have never had happened. She arrived in southern Tehran accompanied by her brother and other family members.
The interrogator called her names: bad kareh, a name meaning whore, they use for women they see as loose. The mentality of the man who interrogated her and the women who witnessed and did nothing is that of some of the men and women of the Islamic republic who are afraid of women for women have shown resilience and defiance vis a vis a most oppressive system.
Mahsa Amini died in custody.
In many ways, the consequent protest movement in 2022-2023 for the dismantling of Hejab is more than just that. It is a movement for women’s rights in every way. We see many women, young girls, fearless and courageous who go out to the streets demanding their rights.
The reprisals against them take many forms: shooting at their eyes, poisoning them or killing them instantly. But this movement will not go away; refused to die in its demand for a modern society.
We saw this movement gain momentum as the entire world stood in awe. The international community rallied behind what is called the largest feminist movement in the modern era. And proudly we have to mention that this movement has been fiercely supported by many of our Iranian men in what continues to be a patriarchal society.
I want to remember my dear late friend Farah Ebrahimi, whose husband was executed, Haleh Sahabi, a woman human rights activist and the daughter of reformer and nationalist Yadollah Sahabi, who died while her father was being buried; and then Neda, Nika, and Zina who were murdered in front of our eyes.
And the many more who are still alive and still struggling.
In a letter dated January 2, 1956, Forough Farrokhzad, the famous poet of Iran wrote, “My wish is for Iranian women to be free and equal to men. I am fully aware that my sisters in this country suffer from men’s injustices, and I use half of my art to articulate their pain and anguish.” She penned the following verses:
Someone is coming,
someone is coming,
someone who in his heart is with us,
in his breathing is with us,
in his voice is with us,
someone whose coming
can’t be stopped.
and handcuffed and thrown in jail…
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