In some ways, the social police in Iran have become less suffocating in recent decades. Unmarried men and women now date, and sometimes even live together. Meanwhile, Facebook may be illegal, but the government generally ignores the 4 million Iranians who use it regularly.
But one area where the government has been unyielding is with the dress code for women. They are r equired to dress “modestly,” which includes always wearing a veil. If they remove their veils in public, they can receive 70 lashes or 60 days in prison. Now some Iranian women are challenging that rule in a particularly in-your-face way. They have taken to Facebook to post photos of themselves veil-less. Instead of wearing the veils, they’re wrapping them around their necks, holding them up or flying them like ceremonial flags. The veils are everywhere except where the government says they’re supposed to be—on women’s heads, covering their hair.
A Facebook post earlier this month from liberal Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad sparked the movement, which has grown under the hashtag #stealthfreedom. It has spawned a Facebook page of its own, which gathered over 30,000 likes in its first five days.
The movement’s creator, Alinejad, lives in exile in the United Kingdom, where she works for OnTen, a satirical news show that’s broadcast into Iran by Voice of America’s Persian Service. “I just asked women to send selfies of their private moments of freedom,” she says. “When I was in Iran, I would take my head scarf off when I was out in a field or some place private, and I wondered how many Iranian women [did the same]. Apparently a lot.”
Many of these women have added poignant commentary. “I always take off the hijab whenever I can because it was never my choice to put it on,” says one Facebook user who also posted a photo.
“The solution to women’s issues can only be achieved in a free and democratic society in which human energy is liberated, the energy of both women and men together. Our civilization is called human civilization and is not attributed only to men or women.”
