The Continuation of Ignorance by other Means!

By Ahmad Alehossein

The following video clip presents the story of an Iranian Muslim woman who decides to remove her Hijab after leaving her country. She explains that she experienced huge difficulty convincing herself to stop wearing Hijab after 25 years (she had been a political figure in the regime especially during the reformist government of Mr Khatami and was married to a member of revolutionary guard). She now describes Hijab as a symbol of oppression. She acknowledges that women’s oppression may happen among non-Muslims and even non-religious people but she believes religion/Islam always exacerbates the oppression by justifying it in the name of God. She therefore see herself liberated by giving up her Hijab. A documentary is made about her which must have been seen across social networking websites by many

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10150461174982788

I am so sorry to see how confused are some of my fellow Iranians, especially the youth and the women, in relation to their identities, their history, their religion, and their culture. It must have been a very difficult decision for her and many like her to change their social conducts. I cannot, however, fully condemn the mainstream religious system for such confusions, though I see it as the source of many of our problems today. This is because, despite claiming monopoly over the interpretation of Islamic ideas, many young women after the revolution were easily able to differentiate between the original Islamic values and the traditional ones developed throughout a long history of patriarchal despotism. Many of them even lost their lives for breaking the religious hegemony of clerical institutions.

We, especially the educated middle class Iranians, have had many chances (before and after the revolution) to explore the truth about the teachings of our religion. I know many who did not take Hijab as a truly Islamic issue but rather a liberating response to the demolition of their identity by a corrupt, culturally assimilating secular system before the revolution. I know many women who just saw Hijab as a symbol of resistance rather than something rooted in original Islamic thoughts.

Most of us however, right after the revolution decided to use the simplest ways for shaping our identities. We compromised with the so-called Islamic regime and did not bother ourselves to ask if this was really an Islamic code of behavior or not. Or perhaps it was not in our interest to do so!

Many people like this lady in the clip were critical of thinkers like Ali Shariati for his view about Hijab. Many of them condemned many of their own fellow reformist Muslims for being mistaken about their Islam. They acted exactly the same as the hardliners today. They were the hardliner of their own time who directly or indirectly participated in establishing theocracy in the name of Islam and shattering the hopes of millions who were just seeing Islam as liberating civil societal force. Now with the demise in the legitimacy of the Iranian theocracy, after being excluded from the power circles, they have come with the idea that it was Islam as the source of their problems.

However, when I see such people I feel that people like me are still being censored by these self liberating heroines in their discourses!! These people would never tell you that they met many Iranian Muslims who did not follow their hard-line and paid the price for this. Why they keep neglecting us? I believe I have an explanation for this. By doing this they attempt to neglect their own past. This way, they ignore their irresponsibility in discovering truth about their religion; they try to justify their intentional contribution in the oppression of alternative expressions in Islam. That is why they still keep their black and while picture of reality. In the picture they portray today for the world there is no place for those who resisted the religious authorities. It was all darkness at the beginning; everyone was living in the same dark age, and then all of sudden with their exposure to the truth of human rights and modernity discourses they found the light. They figured out how to liberate themselves, and they did!

But  the complete picture of reality is something completely different. Since the simplistic actions we take to deal with a complex reality only to secure our own interest usually go wrong, many of us will finally face with crisis in our identity. Our responses to this failure then once again becomes another simplistic and reactionary one; i.e. accusing religion in a very ESSENTIALIST way for all of our own wrong doings! Mistakes which were not taken by many of our classmates who just simply became disappeared right in front of our eyes and we tended to ignore them, to pretend as if we did not know them; to pretend as if they were non-Muslims. And even today we do not talk of them. Oops, sorry! yes, we do talk! Especially to show how passionate we are about women’s rights and how sensitive we are to the root causes of political oppressions, we speak out about crimes like the 1980s massacres of political prisoners in Iran but in a way as if the victims were all secular atheists!!! In my most trustful interpretation, I would just like to call this the «continuation of ignorance by other means».