Opinion: What Canadians are getting wrong about the hijab protests in Iran – Edmonton Journal

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Images of anti-government protests continue to pour out of Iran, with women chopping off their hair and burning their hijabs in demonstrations. Protests started after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini following her apprehension by the morality police mid-September and have spread to 40 cities across the country. At the same time, western media has frenzied around these images, seeming to drum up international calls for interference in Iran; and, the U.S. has increased sanctions on the country already debilitated by decades of economic distress, much of which has contributed to existing unrest.

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This is happening despite less overall coverage of previous Iranian protests, and one cant help but ask why. Of course, the tone of these protests can be seen as unique in that they have a feminist flavour to them, while also being women-led. My suspicions, however, are that something more sinister is happening related to protest depictions and how those are being weaponized in the public sphere.

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As a religious studies scholar committed to fostering critical conversations around religion and politics, I am inviting Canadians to think deeply about what we are subscribing to in adopting smugness and the anti-Islamic rhetoric developing around the situation in Iran. We know that the economy is tough in Iran because of sanctions. We know that the political situation is corrupt. We know that calls for change are obstructed and brutally oppressed. Iranians have been protesting about these issues for years now. And yet, because these factors are coalescing in this moment on hijab practices and due to the western disproportional fixation on them, all that is really centred here are western cultural assumptions about religion.

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In the West, where religion is assumed to be a personal, private set of beliefs (rather than an entire way of life), the elevation of the hijab (as a religious practice) to the centre of these protests has been painted as being against Islam itself. Popular discussions conjure up alarming echoes of the western lead-ups to the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan in 2002 and Iraq in 2003. In both cases, just as we see in Iran today, the trope of the veiled, oppressed Muslim woman is used to justify the rhetoric around western saviourist interventions in Muslim countries. At the same time, the voices of actual Muslim women protesting are drowned out and their nuance is lost, objectifying them for the self-interested desires of non-Iranian forces.

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Even if pundits and keyboard warriors are not calling for outside intervention, the conflation of protestors anti-government violence as a validation of anti-Islamic rhetoric is both troubling and misses the point. The politicization and enforcement of the veil in Iran is oppressive and rightfully protested, but it is also inherently un-Islamic. We must unequivocally stand with Iranian women and other protestors who are outraged at the violence and oppression they are experiencing at the hands of law enforcement and their government without seeking to automatically replace their cultural system and religious ways of being with ours.

It does not follow that we should view the form their protests have taken as an affront to the religion in totality. Protesting the weaponization of religious symbols by a regime is the target of protestors, not Islam in its entirety a point that far too many western sources get wrong and which creates a stunning ironic hypocrisy for Canadians in particular.

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Why?If the weaponization of religious symbols sounds familiar, it should. Here in Canada, where Bill 21 reigns in Quebec and women wearing the hijab are literally banned from public service and employment, we have our own examples of state oppression and overreach, this time under the guise of neutrality. And yet, where are the protests? If we want to stand with Muslim women, we must listen to them, wherever they are found; we must stop objectifying them for dubious ends; and we must stop construing their protest as being anti-Islam. Authoritarianism of all varieties is worth our attention; its time we paid it.

Dr. Joseph Wiebe is associate professor of Religion and Ecology at the University of Alberta Augustana, and the interim director of the Chester Ronning Center for the Study of Religion and Public Life.

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Opinion: What Canadians are getting wrong about the hijab protests in Iran - Edmonton Journal