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Force can never be used to achieve freedom, writes Azar Mahloujian, an opponent of the Islamic regime in Iran, who has been living in Sweden since 1982. Women cannot accept anyone else telling them that they must – or must not – wear the veil
 Many, many years ago my grandmother told me how, when she was a young girl, the government suddenly decided to prohibit the veil in Iran. They wanted to modernise the country – overnight. Grandmother and many other women showed their opposition to this, by not going out of doors. It was their way of reacting. If a policeman saw a woman with a veil he pulled it off her with the help of a stick with a hook at its end. A man could not touch a woman!
This was in 1935 and the father of the Shah, Reza Shah, needed cheap labour for industry. At the same time he wished to imitate his neighbour, Kemal Ataturk, who had introduced reforms in Turkey. Reza Shah forced ”liberation” on women. That was then. Forty-four years later we revolted and then the mullahs told us that the king was corrupt and that his orders about female dress were immoral. Today women again must save the country, this time by wearing the veil. Angry women filled the streets of Teheran in protest. “We don't want to carry the obligatory veil!” we shouted for three days, but the government despatched their official forces who used tear-gas and their hooligans who used sticks and chains to drive us away from streets and squares. “Rusari, ya tusari (Either a veil over their head, or a beating over their head)” they screamed threateningly as soon as an unveiled women passed and soon they made good their threats: the women were accosted, insulted and some had acid thrown in their faces by men on motorbikes who wished to set an example. And then everything happened fast. Government institutions refused to serve women without veils, taxi- and bus-drivers who provided rides for them had to pay fines and the shops would not serve them. They hung a sign on the door saying ”Women without veils will not be served”. So Iran became a country in which the government decided how much of a woman's body may be seen in public. I became an opponent of the veil. My reaction was similar to that of my grandmother. It made no difference that she was for the veil and I was against it. What she and I had in common was that nobody should declare us incapacitated. We did not accept that other people one day could decide that we take off our veils and another day order us to put them on. Now after three decades, Iranian women are still fighting to rid themselves of bits of fabric that lock out hair and legs and arms from sun, wind and air. In Iran the veil is a political question. To be against the obligatory veil is the same as being in opposition to the Islamic regime. But what happens here, with us in the West? As a result of exile and immigration the veil question has spread over the continent and reached the Western world. But here the problem is reversed. Here it is not the regimes that force women to wear the veil, on the contrary, this time they wish to forbid the veil. If opposition against the wearing of the veil is part of the struggle for democracy in Iran, this does not mean that we in the Western world must oppose the veil at any cost. The thought is good – to free women from duress – but in our eagerness to make a positive contribution for half of mankind we forget that we must not use force to achieve freedom. A few years ago I returned to Stockholm from my visit to India in the middle of winter. Here we had snow and my body had difficulty adjusting to the 40-degree difference in temperature between Bombay and Stockholm. One day I pulled my warm cashmere shawl up from my shoulders and over my head. It provided more warmth than a cap or a scarf. The shawl protected ears, throat and the back of my head from an icy wind. I had until then, for 24 years, been an opponent of the veil. To me it had meant force, degradation and a symbolic form of prison when the mullahs had made me wear a veil. They had decided over me and my body and this I hated. But that day, and the following days, I noticed that something new was happening around me. I noticed that I had become the target of hostile looks. It was a while before I understood that this had to do with my shawl, that I was being taken for a veiled Muslim woman. I thought directly about my mother who must have encountered just this hostility every time she walked through the streets of Stockholm. The feeling of defiance made me proudly wear my shawl over my head for the rest of that winter. (Azar Mahloujian is an Iranian writer who went to Sweden as a political refugee in 1982 and has been living in Stockholm since. She is the author of several books including Back to Iran and The Torn Pictures. This article first appeared on Swedish Radio) Infochange News & Features, December 2009
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