Everybody Let Their Hair Down

When Iranian woman Mahsa Amini was arrested by Iran's "morality police" for showing too much hair from under her hijab and taken to a "re-education center," she was tortured to death.  Now women everywhere in Iran are protesting in the streets with their boyfriends, husbands, fathers and brothers joining in. 

Many women in Iran are not only tearing off their hijabs - meant to conceal hair to prevent women from showing any feminine beauty in public, an act of depravity in strict Islamic custom - they're also cutting or shaving off their hair in public.  One Iranian expatriate woman living in Italy explained this to CNN this way:  "We want to show them that we don’t care about their standards, their definition of beauty or what they think that we should look like.  It is to show that we are angry."  She also explained this practice being rooted in history and culture.  "In our literature, cutting the hair is a symbol of mourning, and sometimes a symbol of protesting,” she told CNN. "If we can cut our hair to show that we are angry . . ., we will do it."

Iranian women are doing it to the point where women all over the globe are expressing solidarity with them - even in America, where liberals have a tendency to show solidarity with Muslim women for supporting their right to leave their hijabs on.  (That white bourgeois liberal insistence that non-Western practices must always be condoned as cultural tolerance, you understand.)  The policing of women's dress in Iran as been a bone of contention ever since the Islamic Republic of Iran's first Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, first issued the hijab degree as part of his effort to roll back the Westernization of the country under the Shah.  That was the price to pay for being rid of the Shah's autocratic rule and suppression of dissent.  Except that the Islamic Republic is known for the exact same thing, apart from the fact that the Shah gave more freedoms to women than the mullahs running the country today do.

With so much anger at the the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei - only the second Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic - and the gerontocratic Guardian Council that sustains him coming from Iranian youth over Mahsa Amini's death, some pundits are actually suggesting that the Islamic Republic's days are numbered and another revolution is at hand.  Don't bet on it.  The mullahs are well seasoned at maintaining power through their Revolutionary Guards and a well-funded police.  They take advantage of the latest information technology by studying how to suppress it and shut it down.  The Iranian leadership is, in short, well-versed in staying in power after 43 years of experience as Iran's government.

These protests are just the latest challenge to their authority.  This time they'll win by . . . a hair.