A number of factors made the issue of the veil in Iran a crisis, the most important of which are government policies and social change;
Over the decades and with the new generations, the issue of religious and social values has been confronting modernity that has shaped the lives of young generations in Iran, so that the issue of the veil has occupied a wide area of religious, political, social and cultural debate in Iran.
While the veil has by law become a political symbol that transcends its religious and doctrinal space, taking it off in public places has become a form of protest that may go beyond the issue of the veil to extend to other issues. The core of the crisis situation.
Amidst a growing controversy regarding what is known as "Guidance Patrols"... the death of the girl # Mahsa_Amini after she was arrested by the police for allegedly not observing the hijab causes popular anger in #Iran |
Report: Noureddine Al-Dughair # News pic.twitter.com/7ffHlbfOF6
- Al Jazeera (@AJArabic) September 17, 2022
The insistence on publishing guidance patrols in the streets appears to be an indication of a political failure to understand the value changes in society, and to acknowledge the fact that generations in Iran have had priorities and value, normative, and behavioral preferences based on the modern value system such as personal freedom and individual choice. On the one hand, this category of Iranian society is totally missing.
Iranian researchers, including Professor of Social Sciences, Mansour Saei, believe that these value changes in Iranian society require a tolerant and democratic social and cultural policy based on accepting differences and respecting the multiple values of all active identities in Iran today.
In his article I asked: Why has the veil turned into a crisis, Saei believes that the regime in Iran, regardless of environmental developments and the surrounding value, continues to emphasize only traditions and reproduce its traditional values, thus losing the possibility of understanding the modern world and its values, accepting, communicating and interacting with it. .
In some aspects, the crisis reveals the government’s lack of understanding of developments and appropriate interaction with the representatives and bearers of new values from the generations who have been socially brought up in a world different from the traditions of the first and second generations of the revolution in Iran.
Is it just the veil?
Mostly women demonstrated in front of the Iranian embassy in Belgium to protest the killing of Mahsa Amini on September 23, 2022. (Getty Images)
In his memoirs issued in 2017 in Tehran, entitled: “60 Years of Patience and Thanksgiving,” Ibrahim Yazdi, the first foreign minister of Iran after the revolution, says: “Iran is passing through a very violent stage...The stage of awakening and movement towards the overthrow of internal tyranny began with the tobacco uprising, in 1890 The Al-Matroouta Revolution, in 1905, the Mosaddeq movement to nationalize oil, 1950, and the Islamic Revolution, in 1979, and it has not yet reached its goal.
The protest movements are socio-political movements, and they are a related and interrelated phenomenon. The protest movement related to the veil cannot be separated from other protests of an economic and political nature.
Therefore, the regime may need to think outside the legal framework that it drew for the society in a period of tyranny of the Islamic state, especially since this state is witnessing a significant decline.
And talking about the state of protest in Iran with its latest wave or the waves that preceded it does not mean in any way to analyze it as a case that seeks to overthrow or a situation capable of overthrowing the regime as much as it is a case inherent in Iranian society, and the protest is almost inherent to the Islamic Republic over the past decades, which was The most prominent of them are the protests of Tehran University students during the era of Khatami and the protests of the Green Movement, in 2009, following the re-election of Ahmadinejad, and the protests during the Rouhani era, in 2017, the most recent of which is the current protests. Bashiriyeh in his book "The Mind in Politics".
Protest in Iran takes many forms, including direct political protest. Ayatollah Montazeri represented, from the mid-1980s until his death in 2009, a state of intellectual and political protest.
It is he who moved as one of the theoreticians of the revolution and the drafters of the constitution of the Islamic Republic from supporting the absolute Wilayat al-Faqih based on inauguration to the Wilayat al-Faqih based on election and conditional on the approval of the people.
Perhaps the decline in voter turnout and the reluctance to participate in the elections is a case of political protest that has emerged in recent years in Iran.
We can also talk about the protests that we find in music and cinema;
In the last half of the nineties, Iran witnessed a number of films that were ranked among the best films of this decade, and carried with it a case of protest, a trial of the ruling elite, and harsh criticism of the state of affairs. Freedom of expression, criticism of the government, rights of minorities, rejection of violence, and the promotion of dialogue and criticism.
In Iranian cinema, despite the censorship, we find critical references to censorship itself, unemployment, exclusion of intellectuals, the desire to emigrate, addiction among youth, violence, poverty, lack of confidence in the future, and marginalization of women.
The film "The Glass Agency", directed by Ibrahim Hatami Kia, carried a dialogue with clear political implications. The dialogue takes place between a young taxi driver and an old driver who takes the helm of the young man and asks the passengers: Where to?
One by one, the passengers answer:
Penalties and their actions
You may find voices in Iran questioning the impact of the sanctions, but in reality they have deprived Iranian society of economic benefits, and their effects have extended to the middle class in society. Therefore, there is a state of dissatisfaction with living due to the deteriorating economic conditions, and the sanctions are one of its causes.
Iran's opponents abroad are aware of the extent of the pressure caused by the economic situation, and therefore they are pressing with more sanctions and providing what would strengthen the protest situation inside Iran and widen the distance between the people and the regime, in order to force the Iranian government to accept an agreement within the terms Iran insists on rejecting to this day.
Narrowing economic options and declining income levels may lead to another protest situation of a living nature in a major era, similar to what happened under the Rouhani government.
Tehran considered that Washington's decision "to ease the severity of a number of sanctions on the telecommunications sector, while maintaining maximum pressure", is an American attempt to advance its goals against Iran, and that it is a decision that is in line with the hostile position of the American administration aimed at provoking instability in the Islamic Republic. .
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani described the US measures as "attempts to violate his country's sovereignty by the United States of America, which has repeatedly tried to undermine Iran's stability and security, to no avail, and it will not pass without a response."
The Iranian government responded with more restrictions on the Internet, and many websites became impossible to access.
Protest or violence: where is the head?
Parallel to the protest situation that used the rejection of the compulsory veil as a slogan, Iranian cities were witnessing cases of intentional violence and chaos, including the slaughter of a security man in the street and the burning of a number of ambulances and banks, and among the 41 dead, a number of youths from the mobilization forces “Basij Those affiliated with the government, and while the security forces are accused of shooting, the government confirms the presence of "infiltrators" among the demonstrators who are pushing matters towards violence and chaos, and an official statement announced the arrest of a number of non-Iranians involved in this.
In contrast to the protests, regime supporters rallied heavily in Tehran and Mashhad, and the government has shown that it is still able to mobilize the street against what it sees as chaos and violence intended for itself.
A banner held by government supporters: "The Iranian people love Islam, revolution and leadership, obedient to the leader" (Anatolia)
In fact, the recent protest movements in Iran lack a head, or a clear leadership, while the leaders of protest movements in general can be divided into three types: ideological leaders, theoretical leaders, and tactical leaders. , similar to what happened in the Islamic Revolution, but the subsequent protest movements in the Islamic Republic, and the Green Movement is no exception to this, lack leadership of all kinds.
to where?
Despite their apparent clarity, they are protest movements that lack clarity in terms of purpose, and you cannot categorize them if they are peaceful or violent, but in general they do not present a clear and different social and political system, although the case of the protest protest - which is the tyrant of Iran's protests - expresses in a way that A clear state of people’s dissatisfaction with the regime, but it lacks structure and organized mobilization, and does not represent a realistic threat that has the ability to overthrow the regime, or aims primarily to bring down the regime. This includes protests by workers, teachers, and protests of an economic nature.
The protest in Iran represents a realistic indication of the crisis of the relationship between the regime and the people, or between the regime and a significant group of the people, a crisis that requires a change in the political behavior of the state.
In fact, this protest is a struggle over Iran's image and its political and social identity, and the result that all parties will reach is that the social change that Iranian society is witnessing will impose its conditions in the end.
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This article is taken from Al Jazeera Center for Studies.