Žina [Mahsa] Amini Died at the Hands of the Minority
Protestors gather after the death of Žina Amini.
Just under a month ago, Žina Amini was arrested by the Iranian Morality Police for wearing her headscarf, a hijab, too loosely, showing some hair. Two hours later, she was dead. Evidence points to the cause of death as being torture and severe beating, which the government denies and appears to be strenuously attempting to cover up. Nearly 200 people have been killed at protests in the wake of Ms. Amini’s death, with the government brutally suppressing the protests by firing tear gas and live ammunition into the crowds.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the hijab was required. As the century progressed, the hijab was first pushed back, revealing more hair, and sometimes accompanied by the wearing of makeup, then banned outright by the monarch as oppressive of women in the 1930s. Iranian women’s dress and hairstyles for the next forty years depended on what the women preferred, often reflecting western styles.
All of that ended in 1979, with the Iranian Revolution. Within a month, religious authorities decreed that a woman in public without a hijab was naked. Violence, harassment, and imprisonment of noncompliant women began. Somehow, I cannot believe that Žina Amini is the only woman to have been murdered by the Morality Police over the last forty years.
The “sins” of letting hair show, of wearing makeup, of plucking eyebrows, of letting skin show, are sins of comfort and pleasure. Of enjoying feeling pretty, of glorying – however minutely – in one’s appearance and personal expression. They offend those who would control completely, because they evidence some tiny bit of personal control on the part of the woman.
We should be as concerned about our sisters in Iran and elsewhere as we are about events here in the U.S. As different as our lives are, in so many ways we are all the same. Žina Amini was a healthy young woman with her whole life ahead of her. She had hopes, dreams – she was a daughter, a sister, a niece, a cousin, a friend – she had a *life*, and it was all brutally taken from her in a painful, terrifying way, by a tiny minority of her countrymen.
Legally compulsory wearing of the hijab is only supported by 15% of the Iranian population. The most recent numbers I can find are from 2014, when the Iranian government employed just over 17% of the working populace. That means that even if every person that supports this brutal oppression of women works in the government that enforces it (I’m not saying they do, this is an example), there are still many people inside the government, and nearly all of them outside of it, who do not agree. And yet, that 15%’s word is law. It can be death.
The United States’ government employment percentages are similar to Iran’s – including the military, just over 15% of us work for the government. Only 13% of the U.S. population supports a total ban on abortion, a position that is dropping, possibly as people become more aware of the actual circumstances that lead to most abortions and the consequences of denying this basic healthcare.
We can argue all day about why people support oppression of women and why it is wrong, but the one thing we all need to be aware of, every single day, is that *all* of our freedoms can depend on a very small minority of the population when they successfully grab power, which they have been doing very strategically for quite a while now. The keys are disinformation and voter apathy.
Iran went from relative freedom for women to total oppression in one *month* after the Revolution. Afghanistan fell and went from relative freedom for women to total oppression in ten *days* after the U.S. withdrew. Don’t think it can’t happen here. The fall of Roe v. Wade is the first time in our history that we have been stripped of a Constitutional right. It is part and parcel of revoking the entire right to privacy. How far behind can the Morality Police be?
Find your polling place. Turn in an absentee ballot. Make a plan. However you have to do it, please, inform yourself – source your information - and VOTE. It has never been more important.