Narrow vision of Iran’s protests is a Western media catastrophe

Iran’s governmental regime has for decades enforced laws that are not only restrictive but ones that are also inhumanly implemented. Freedom of speech along with freedom of expression in almost all its forms is practically nonexistent. Protests have long been forcibly silenced with the aid of media blackouts.

In 2021 Iran saw the election of its new president Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline ally of the current supreme leader Ali Khamenei and seen as a frontrunner for his succession. With this new government came in full force the fist of the “Gasht-e-Ershad,” which translates as “guidance patrols” and is widely known as the “morality police”. It is a unit of Iran’s police forces tasked with enforcing the laws on Islamic dress code in public. The latest victim of this brutal enforcement is Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who after being detained by the ‘morality police’ for violating the law on headscarves succumbed while in their custody. Her demise has sparked protests in Iran and around the world demanding that the government end the reign of the ‘morality police’, a revision of the Iranian regime’s Islamic laws and justice for Amini.

The international media has been covering the protests with great zeal and rightfully so but as with much of this coverage we have yet again come to witness the narrow focus of the Western gaze. Yes, it is a worldwide responsibility for the media to keep its cameras rolling and its coverage live, aiding in the plight of an oppressed and unjustly treated people, but it is also the media’s responsibility to zoom out and understand that its rhetoric and analysis should encompass a wider perspective all the while considering the impact of their reporting. 

The Western media has casually named the worldwide protests over the outrageous killing of Amini the ‘Anti-Hijab Protests,’ with no regard to what such a naming would have on the hundreds of millions of Muslim women around the world who choose to cover their hair as a symbol of their religious faith. The manner in which the Western media packages and sells the news, be it unconsciously or with full knowledge of the consequences, has long played a negative role in portraying the majority of moderate Muslims who practise their faith in its true essence of peace and tolerance. Once again, we witness the erosion of this beautiful religion of peace at the hands of the media in the West. It seems nothing was learned from the racial profiling and emotional damage that the media has caused after the September 11 attacks of 2001 whose effects Arabs and Muslims in general still feel reverberating through most airport security checkpoints around the world. Muslim names, dark skin, long beards and headscarves are targets of unjust, racist and humiliating consequences of a media’s narrow coverage of news from the Middle East that the world must put up with for generations.

The so-called ‘morality police’ is a work of fiction that extremist governments have created to control their people, it has no background in the Islamic faith and never existed historically in any form since the dawn of this religion. It is and has always been a weapon for the collective mentality to control and silence individual expression. 

Sadly, Amini is not the first female to fall victim at the hands of the Iranian regime. In 2009’s Iranian presidential elections the world witnessed the final moments of Neda Agha-Soltan’s life broadcast through a cellphone camera, a student of philosophy and a music teacher, who was protesting the integrity of the elections and was shot in the chest; she was 26 years old. 

By painting the suffering of the Iranian people as a rage against Islam the Western media is not only misrepresenting these brave protests but demeaning them. The Iranian people are not protesting the ‘hijab’ or their faith, they are and have been for years protesting for freedom of expression of this faith, a freedom that is practised in Muslim countries around the world. The media need not cast its eyes away from this truth, the truth of a people’s true desire for freedom, and must be held accountable for the consequences of its categorical representation of the plight of oppressed people. 

The coverage of such injustices should not create new ones. Muslim women around the world who choose to wear the hijab or dress modestly should not because of the Western media’s rhetoric suffer being viewed as oppressed, they should not be judged for their choices or painted as a target for harassment. The hijab is not a symbol of an oppressive regime as the media would like the world to associate it with, it is a symbol of respect for a faith Muslim women around the world wear with pride. 

Muslim women have the freedom of choice, taking away this freedom is non-Islamic, it is dictatorship in Islamic clothing.

This article was first published in the Gulf Today Newspaper on 04-10-2022.

History cannot remain masculine

Women are mostly kept out of history books, and if they are marvellous enough to have made it into them their images most likely did not 

History is a past retold, a series of events that have been documented by those who have witnessed their occurrence. It is human nature to write of that which interests us, of facts that are deemed essential at the time of inscription and that is why history as is documented, is as much an interpretation, as it is a collection of facts. The names and events that have made it into history books have changed the world one way or the other, their existence and our knowledge of it is essential, but what of those names that were never uttered by history teachers, are their world-altering actions erased? Or do their trials and tribulations factor into the shaping of the future whether they are remembered or not?

If we casually flick through the history books we are most likely to see pages filled with iconic figures that have left their imprint on the world, most of which are men. Great and not-so-great men have both maimed and healed our world simultaneously and from their experiences we have much to learn. Even those of us who are not prolific in politics, sports or technology are instantaneously able to recognise an image of such men as Che Guevara, Maradona and Steve Jobs. Though just as it may be, to have such figures made iconic and embraced by pop-culture how many of those faces we see on posters, T-shirts and spray-painted on walls are of women? Does that mean that throughout history no woman has ever been iconic enough? Or is it that the telling of her story was not deemed essential to those documenting at the time of inscription? No female face would be so widely and easily identified except maybe those of whom who made it to the silver screen. Could you point out Florence Nightingale in a series of photos like you would Marilyn Monroe? Would you know the great Fatima al-Fihri’s contribution to the world just as you would Umm Kulthum’s?

Throughout the world and specifically throughout the Middle-Eastern one, much to do with women is concealed. Women are mostly kept out of history books, and if they are marvellous enough to have made it into them their images most likely did not. This makes it impossible for people to know of them and for those searching for them it makes for an absolutely exhausting task, in turn their accomplishments and impact on the world are rendered obsolete and the chance of people learning from them non-existent. Just as is the way of the world, change is inevitable and for women’s struggle with history, change is coming. 

Recently Muslim women have become more visible than they ever were, standing up to oppression and advocating the plight of minorities around the world. In a visual world where icons are required their images have helped immortalise their work. Malala Yousafzai’s survival and perseverance has become a representation of all women facing the horrors of extremism and the plight for female education. Young girls today have forces such as seventeen-year-old Ahed Tamimi, whose brave defiance in the face of Zionist settlers landed her in prison, catapulting her to icon-status for resistance against occupation around the world. Women have become revolutionary icons, Iranian Neda Agha-Soltan, a student, who died from a fatal shot to the head during protests in Tehran has become a symbol of an entire revolution. Along with Egypt’s Ghada Kamal Abdul Khaleq, known to the Western press as the Girl in the Blue Bra and affectionately dubbed Sitt el Banat (Leader of the Girls) in Egypt, whose image being dragged half-naked by police has become a source of artistic representation of oppression. 

During the Women’s March against the Trump administration in the United States an image of Munira Ahmed wearing the American flag as a Hijab (headdress) became the representation of American tolerance and pro-immigration ideals. And the latest brave soul who was unfortunately taken too soon is Palestinian Razan Najjar, a twenty-one-year-old paramedic, who spent her days saving the lives of fellow countrymen and women peacefully protesting the Israeli occupation. She was killed in cold blood by an Israeli sniper while attending to the injured, she will forever be a symbol of humanity amidst bloodshed.

Because we have borne witness to those women who have shattered glass ceilings and died for their rights we have the obligation to correct the errors of the past, to not let their work go unnoticed, to broadcast, interview, write and teach about those women who are changing our world. In the near future the images in history will differ and the faces who changed the world would no longer be reserved for the masculine. We always knew history to be a story told by him but the future will have one that is written by her as well.

This article was first published in The Gulf Today newspaper 10 June, 2018 http://bit.ly/2JCRplR  
Arabic version of the article appeared on the same day  in Al Khaleej newspaper http://bit.ly/2McgVg4