In a Tehrani living room decorated with beautiful traditional Persian handicrafts, three family members - two women and a man - pose smiling for the camera. But there is something different about this photograph - it's the guys who are wearing the compulsory headscarf, or hijab, while the woman has left her hair uncovered. This powerful picture was recently taken and uploaded to Facebook under the hashtag #meninhijab as part of a social media campaign by
, a protest group fighting against the compulsory wearing of the headscarf for women in the Middle-Eastern country.
The group was founded in 2014 by political journalist and campaigner Masih Alinejad. Now living in Brooklyn, the 39-year-old was forced to leave her country seven years ago after reporting on the 2009 Iranian elections and the faults in former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government.
She got the idea for My Stealthy Freedom after moving to London - a city where she was free to walk around with her hair uncovered. 'I talked about my personal life [on my Facebook page], how it felt to walk around without wearing a scarf,’ Alinejad says. ‘I uploaded a picture of myself in a street full of blossoms with the wind in my hair, and wrote a caption about how my hair had once been like a hostage in the hands of the Iranian government.’
Then she found an old photo from 2008, which showed herself driving on a quiet road towards the rural north Iranian village where she grew up. In the picture, she wasn’t wearing her hijab. 'The caption I wrote was ‘this is my stealthy freedom’ - though I knew I did not officially have freedom inside my country I knew I could bypass the authorities and create my own freedom.' The ‘My Stealthy Freedom’ name stuck, and Alinejad asked other women to upload their own photos of themselves with their hair flowing free.
At the moment, women and girls aged 7 and over in Iran have to wear the headscarf as well as a long coat called the manteau - this is the law and has been since the official ‘re-veiling’ in 1984 following the Islamic Revolution. Though the fashion, especially in the capital Tehran and other major cities, is to wear brightly coloured scarves pulled back over the head, the undercover Gasht-e Ershad, or 'morality police' patrol the streets to ensure that women are dressed appropriately.
Women can be reported to the Iranian police for anything from loose clothing, not covering enough of their hair or having too much makeup on, and if they are punished they can receive fines or harsh penalties such as floggings. An app was even developed earlier this year to warn people of the whereabouts of the Gasht-e Ershad - one female Iranian Twitter user described each download as a 'protest' against the government.
After Alinejad posted her request for photos, she was inundated with photos of women inside Iran who had snapped selfies without their headscarfs on, which she uploaded on to the Facebook page alongside their stories written in Farsi and translated into English. 'I realised these women wanted a platform to express themselves and be their own story tellers,' she says. ‘For such a long time women inside Iran haven’t been portrayed by the media as their true selves, for example on TV it’s just all women in hijabs. The scarf is the most obvious symbol of oppression for us.’
The Facebook page now has over a million 'likes', with numbers growing by the day. Has social media improved things for women in Iran? Undoubtedly, Alinejad says. ‘It gives them the chance to express themselves and take their own identities back. Because of social media, people in the West can see that Iranian women are not victims, that instead there is a big feminist movement here fighting for women’s freedom.’
Some of the stories, she says, are exceptionally powerful. One young woman submitted a photo of herself taken from the back, telling Alinejad that she was not afraid of the government, but instead she was frightened of her father. 'I don't want to break the honour of my family,' she had admitted. A week on, she sent in another picture of herself smiling on camera, taken by her brother. 'She told me that he had said she was a big fan of the Facebook page and that she didn't need to be scared anymore. That made my day.'
The #meninhijab campaign also proves that many Persian men have solidarity with their female counterparts, and that they too believe in gender equality. Last month, Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, visited France and was questioned about the need for female visitors to Iran to wear the hijab. ‘He responded by saying that tourists don’t mind because they respect the culture, which angered me,’ Alinejad says. Her reply was to photoshop him wearing a hijab and posting it online.
‘I posed questions underneath directed at him, like “Do you feel insulted, isolated, strange, like this is not you? Humiliated? This is the way so many of the women of Iran feel after being forced to wear a headscarf from the age of 7”.’ she says. Men started sending in photos of themselves trying on their female partners’, friends’ and relatives’ hijabs. ‘A lot of them said “at first this was funny, but we soon realised this is not easy, it’s hot, I don’t feel like myself”, she adds. The #meninhijab hashtag trended on Twitter and Facebook and generated news headlines around the world, drawing further attention to her work for My Stealthy Freedom.
However, although there was hope a few months ago after the more moderate Iranian President Hassan Rouhani expressed doubts about crackdowns on women’s dress, Iran is not a secular country. The religious clerics have the constitutional sway over the security forces – and it looks like there is a long way to go before the restrictions on women’s dress are removed.
'They [the religious leaders] are scared of My Stealthy Freedom, no doubt about it. They are frightened of powerful women,' Alinejad says. The first time she spoke out, she was discredited on state TV. A fake news broadcast went out, horrifically saying that she had been raped in London in front of her young son. 'I couldn't believe the ideology behind the religious hard-liners’ mindset,' she says. 'They were basically saying that if a woman talks about freedom of choice then she deserves to be raped.'
She says she has heard that there are billboards up in Iran comparing the women who have sent in their photos to My Stealthy Freedom to spoiled fruit, and that an upcoming week of events has been planned to promote the importance of dressing 'correctly'. In May this year, a number of Instagram models and fashion workers were forced to flee Iran to avoid arrest, while a model called Elham Arab was tried in court for posting photos of herself online without her scarf on. ‘The Iranian government would rather we hid behind a curtain and kept quiet,’ Alinejad says. ‘But we won’t be silenced. We are aware of the backlash and aware of the risks, but this is one of the few ways we can be heard.’
What would she say to those who believe she is against a woman's right to choose if they actually want to wear the hijab? Iran is officially a Muslim country, and many Persian women who live there, as well as in other countries around the world, feel covering up is an important part of their religion. 'I believe in choice,' she says firmly. 'Many of the women in my family are religious and traditional, including my mother. They wear the hijab, and of course I’m not against them.
'Instead, I am against those who restrict the law and those men who say that you have to wear the hijab in the name of honouring your family. The women and men who participate in My Stealthy Freedom are anti-compulsion and want freedom of choice for Iranian women and the opportunity for them to express themselves however they wish.
'The word freedom should not have to come with an adjective like 'stealthy' in front of it. We women are mature enough to know what we want to wear. It is our right to be free.’
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.