In a video posted this weekend on social networks, we see a woman, in her underwear, sitting on a low wall in Iran. Students call out to her, then she starts walking; passers-by try to look away, or look at her with curiosity. In another video, we see, although with difficulty, the young woman being violently arrested by the moral police. Ahou Daryaei, like thousands of women every day, suffers repression from a regime at war against their lives and their freedom.
Images of a revolt
We now know a little more about the context of the video, and the reasons which pushed Daryaei to undress in public. Of the basiji (a volunteer paramilitary force within the Revolutionary Guard Corps) allegedly arrested her at the Azad Islamic University in Tehran, where she studies French literature, because she was not wearing the veil. According to some sources, the guards ripped off his hoodie which they considered “immoral”.
The dean of the university spoke on Twitter, referring to the young woman’s “mental disorders”, a pathologizing rhetoric frequently used by the regime to discredit the actions of Iranian activists who refuse to comply with the dress code imposed by the Islamic Republic. Daryaei would also have been interned in a psychiatric rehabilitation center, a common fate for political opponents of the wearing of the veil. In 2017, when Vida Movahed removed her veil and climbed onto street furniture, she was also accused of being psychologically unstable. Movahed’s action led to a large protest movement against the wearing of the veil.
The uprisings after the death of Mahsa Amini had forced the regime to make some concessions, but the escalation with Israel allowed the regime to tighten repression and once again extend its control over women’s bodies in the name of struggle. against the “enemy within”. If the new “reformist” president Massoud Pezechkian announced at a press conference, in response to a journalist, that the morality police “ would stop bothering women » during the electoral campaign, these promises were quickly contradicted by the facts. In September, Parliament ratified a new “Hijab and chastity” law. The law, which must still be validated by the Council of Guardians of the Constitution, defines, among other things, how women must cover themselves and what sanctions they face in the event of an infraction.
Images of Ahou Daryaei’s action went around the world, arousing both admiration for his courage and indignation at the fate that the Iranian regime reserves for women. But they were also exploited by the French political class. By the very people who tolerate the equally inhumane treatment reserved for women in Saudi Arabia, for example. When it comes to selling Rafales, they are immediately less careful…
Racist exploitation by the political class
It is above all to fuel their offensives against Muslims in France that the political class is outraged by the condition of women in Tehran even as they multiply laws to control the way women dress, from the law on the veil of 2004, the ban on the abaya at school, the endless controversies over the crop-top or the burkini.
When Jordan Bardella, at the head of a party historically hostile to the cause of women, began to attack the “obscurantism” of the Iranian regime, Valérie Boyer went on a crusade against the veil and PMA-GPA. In both cases, we suspect that their motivations for defending women’s rights in Iran are far from feminist. Iranian women need better allies than these politicians who are feminists only to appear as respectable Islamophobes.
The courage and sacrifice of Ahou Daryaei must not serve the interests of these Islamophobic politicians. It is necessary that, like Mahsa Amini, Vida Movahed, and many others before them, these resistance actions serve to revive a radical movement for women’s rights and the struggle of students and workers which has already shaken repeatedly the reactionary Iranian regime. For Iranian women, against the religious fundamentalism of a corrupt regime, let us demand freedom for Ahou Daryaei and all women persecuted by the morality police and denounce the hypocritical exploitation of their acts of resistance by a few interested politicians.
