The award of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize to Narges Mohammadi for her struggle for human rights in Iran was no surprise. By conferring the prize on Mohammadi, the Nobel committee publicised her plight. She has been arrested 13 times and has been sentenced to 31 years in prison and 154 lashes. Mohammadi’s mentor is 2003 Nobel laureate Sherin Ebadi, who trained as a lawyer and became a judge in pre-revolutionary Iran. After the 1979 overthrow of the shah, she opened a legal practice defending dissidents. Ebadi was the first Iranian and first Muslim woman to win the award.

Mohammadi is an engineer who took up the cause of women’s rights and campaigned to abolish the death penalty which is widely applied in Iran. She was initially arrested in 2011 for trying to aid jailed activists. While incarcerated in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison she strives to improve conditions and fight against abuse, torture, and solitary confinement.

The award to Mohammadi is meant to revive global interest in Iran’s women-led protest movement dubbed, “Women, Life, Freedom” at a time demonstrations have subsided, and Iran’s conservative clerical rulers have clamped down hard on dissent.

Iran’s parliament has enacted a law imposing harsh punishments on protesters, particularly on women who attempt go bareheaded in public. While the “hijab and chastity” law has to be approved by the Council of Guardians, Iran’s morality police are back in the country’s streets and squares enforcing the “hijab” law. The latest alleged victim was 16-year-old schoolgirl Armita Geravand who was either knocked down by morality police officers or beaten senseless for refusing to wear a hijab while travelling to school on a commuter train in Tehran. She was hospitalised in a coma. Her case is a mirror image of the experience in September last year of Mahsa Amini who was detained for “improper hijab” and died in the custody of the morality police. Her death sparked nation-wide protests which went on for seven months. At least 500 were killed during unrest and 18,000 arrested; seven men were executed for their part in the unrest.

Women can be detained and prosecuted for “revealing or tight clothing, or clothing that shows parts of the body lower than the neck or above the ankles or above the forearms.” Men got off light, of course. They can be punished for donning “revealing clothing that shows parts of the body lower than the chest or above the ankles, or shoulders.” No head covering for men, naturally.

By insisting that women and girls cover their heads, Iranian clerics have made the hijab a pillar of the regime. By submitting to the hijab, women show they recognise and respect the system of governance installed by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979. To remove the hijab is seen as rejection of Vilayet-e Faqih, Guidance of the Islamic Jurist. This is precisely why young Iranian women have doffed the hijab over the past year. To make matters worse for the mullahs, hijab protests were joined by thousands of Iranian men and boys demonstrating against the soaring cost of living, mismanagement, corruption, and unemployment.

Seeking to Westernise Iran, the country’s ruler Reza Shah banned the hijab and chador in 1936. By taking this stand, he made clothing a political issue and stirred considerable resentment among conservative Iranians. Consequently, his son and successor Mohammad Reza Shah revoked the ban when he seized the throne in 1941, allowing women to choose whether to wear head coverings or chadors. During Khomeini’s 1978-1979 revolt against the shah thousands of women wore not only the hijab but also donned the chador, which has come to represent repression for many young women. Those involved in the morality police patrols wear the chador.

In the Gulf and Saudi Arabia both men and women wear traditional clothing which is not legally prescribed. In Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Jordan men wear both Western style and traditional dress while women adopt Western fashions with or without the hijab or put on the abaya over Western clothing.

Veiling of women preceded the rise of Islam by more than 3,000 years and was a socio-cultural practice adopted in the Byzantine, Greek and Persian empires where women wore the veil to show their superior status. Around the 13th century BC head coverings were made mandatory by Assyrian notables whose wives, daughters and widows were ordered to cover their heads as a sign of piety. Lower class women were forbidden to wear scarves and were punished for violating the ban. Women in Saudi Arabia wore head-coverings before the advent of Islam which adopted the hijab and other conservative dress for women although Islamic scholars argue over whether this is required or not.

Early Christian and Jewish women adopted headscarves. Medieval women in the West wore head coverings and drapes. Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu, Orthodox Jewish women, Catholic nuns, and elderly Greek and Cypriot women continue to wear scarves in different styles. In the Western world, hats joined or replaced scarves. In the US and Europe women of all classes wore hats into the 20th century and some still do. British royal women are rarely to be seen without hats although hats are not mandatory. The late Queen Elizabth II had a collection of hats of the same style in many colours to match her clothing. During stays at her Balmoral estate in Scotland she wore scarves while riding a horse or driving her Range Rover around her property.

Queen Camilla, the wife of King Charles III, and female courtiers have maintained the practice of wearing hats.

Photo: TNS