I’ve hardly gone off to Iran before the Danish debate on the Islamic headscarf runs amok. Danish MP and theologian Søren Krarup insists that in some ways the islamic headscraft can be compared to the nazi swastika in the sense that both are symbols of an totalitarian ideology. Not the best analogy I’ve seen and quite limited in its use, but still it is causing quite a stir. Seems like everything in Denmark is about islam these days. Very exhausting. But perhaps worth making a point of as I try to gather my thought on my two very intense weeks in Iran.
According to Jacob Mchangama, Krarup forgets christians’ tendency through history to cover their women up as well. Having returned this morning from a country where it is a crime for women not to wear the Islamic hijab when they are among strangers, the comparison is thoughtprovoking but maybe not entirely justified. Nobody in the Christian world now enforces a law to cover women up, but the strange thing is that until a few decades ago many countries in the Islamic world didn’t as well. Is Islam going backwards? Maybe – and maybe not.
In Iran it was forbidden to wear the hijab until the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The Shah wanted to modernize the country by force and followed in the footsteps of Turkey, and this development in turn provoked an Islamic counter-revolution. Which is perhaps also what waits countries like France when they try to forbid Islamic dress (here we try to forget for a minute that many women choosing the hijab in the Western world do so of their own free will/religious beliefs and not because of tradition).
The irony for a country like Iran is obvious: Until the mid-1930’es the hijab was optional, worn by women from a traditional or religious background, but many others chose not to. Of course after the “unveiling” nobody wore the hijab, but after 1979 it returned with a vengeance. And the new Islamic powerholders were in some ways justified in now forcing the modernizers to wear the hijab. After all, were they not themselves forced to take it off? Now they wanted their freedom to dress as they wished. Use of political force to achieve one’s (perhaps enligthened) goals is a two-edged sword: With the winds of change, the force might soon be turned on you. Better to tread carefully, hubris awaits for anyone believing that they can change hundreds of years tradition with a pen-signature and a police order.
Of course this goes both ways: The Islamic Revolution’s insistence on forcing all women to wear the hijab does not make the women any more religious. The Islamics Revolution’s really rather modern attempt to revolutionize a whole society (which is where the comparison to other recent all-consuming ideologies becomes important) by in a way “out-shahing the shah” will probably in the end lead to another counter-revolution – or maybe just lead the country down the drain.
Actually, the regime is doing their religion a great disservice. Taking the Air France plane this night, the first thing I saw in the cabin after take-off was a planeload of women removing their hijabs and headscarfs. They couldn’t wait to loose what is to them a symbol of oppression. Maybe, if the Iranian women were free to choose, a few more might want to leave it on.