Iran is not in good news again. Yet again one or the other issue that the country manifestly subscribes to is fetching a bad name for the Islamic revolutionary orientation on which the radical theo-democratic state was born under the stellar leadership of late Ayatollah Khomeini more than forty years ago. This is at a time when western powers do not seem to lose an opportunity to launch ire against any shortcoming in the Islamic states of Iran or Afghanistan, exercising all efforts to search for examples construed as suppression of freedom by the fundamentalist regimes.
The people at the helm of affairs in the Islamic republic of Iran are being urged to be more serious in dealing with the sensitive hijab and legitimate women’s issues. The belligerent policy of offending the Islamic modus-vivendi by the west in Iran has always been politically motivated. The Westerners will choke to death in a society devoid of nudity and sexual promiscuity. In fact, the West has no problems with the Islamic followers or number of mosques growing all over but they seek to dispute at all costs the Islamic order of governance.
Undoubtedly the Islamic republic has every now and then been on the radar of her Islamophobic adversaries that remain awfully busy milling out baneful propaganda deemed to fit their designs. A young 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini, having been allegedly arrested by the controversial morality police in Tehran for wearing inappropriate hijab, is reported to have accidentally succumbed to death upon torture. This is no doubt unjustifiable and deplorable. The idea of morality police has time and again been controversial even in Iranian intellectual circles; obviously because an Islamic society is essentially thought to be founded on the sincerity to the element of faith that calls for no censorial policing. Moral police reportedly scanning people in religious practices including hijab attire is taken as an act of values that hardly have relevance to faith in Islam.
An Islamic societal domain has always been equipped with a strong moral teaching force without exercising coercion. Unfortunately the present-day Islamic regimes subscribe to bring reactionary to all they construe as un-Islamic. Irrespective of sectarian affiliation, several modern-age Islamic scholars and visionaries around the world strongly believe in personal liberty values and their recognition in an Islamic state, for they believe that an Islamic State is not authoritarian at all. Disastrously, instead of taking legal action against the moral police authorities for custodial killing, a police clampdown was initiated on protesting people that further fuelled countrywide protests claiming dozens of lives and setting on fire many places.
Women out of reaction to these measures started trimming their hair and removing head scarves, for moral policing was thought to be the brain child of the elements at the helm of affairs. Iran has been in bad news many times in the past and her adversaries in France and US are time and again provided golden opportunities to gear up renewed attacks on the Islamic conformist regime. The Islamic regime does not reckon with its past socio-economic debacles. The country having abundant natural oil and gas resources is already in a hobbling state of economy, to the extent that it forced her to announce changing her currency in the recent Shanghai organisation conference summit in Tajikistan. The authorities have failed to prevail upon corruption and maladroit practices at official level and the mismanagement of state economy has sent it to rock-bottom.
The anguish shown by the women across streets of Tehran has inevitably an element of economic woes, and not only the manhandling of the woman on the pretext of malapropos attire. Unquestionably, modesty is an essential element of an Islamic society not alone for women but for men too, and its violation is liable to penalty in some Islamic countries. Unfortunately, Iran is not free of the problems that plague Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Syria, Yemen, and sometimes Pakistan, too. The authorities in Iran failed to contain the Covid-19 second wave that killed hundreds and thousands of people due to allowing attendance at sacred religious places in masses with no restriction imposed by authorities. Iran’s economy is in search of a sound management that the country’s top financial experts have been time and again expressing. At a time when a large chunk of Iranian intellectuals including Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi and Abdul Karim Saroush are already questioning the government on upholding of republican ideals and striving for a referendum, there are doubts if the majority still backs the regime.
Tehran has earlier exhausted its worthy resources on backing rebellion in Yemen and helping the Syrian monarch for a protracted time. Tehran’s economic debacles drew people to the roads in 2019, but the people’s hopes were not restored and scores of them were killed and others arrested. The state policy of blaming anti-Iran forces and seeing foreign hand in disruptive peoples has not been rewarding in the past. It actually helped America and likeminded countries to hit Iran’s economy by imposing more sanctions. People in Iran opine that Iran is in pursuit of a self-harming policy. The question now is how the message emanating from the killing of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, on account of inappropriate attire is read by the Lauren Booths and Yvonne Ridleys in the West who have conformed to live in consonance with Islam.

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DR MUZAFFAR SHAHEEN