Ln September 16, 2022, young Mahsa Amini was beaten to death by Iranian police in Tehran for improperly wearing her Islamic veil, which is compulsory in public places. Since then, not a day has gone by without Iran experiencing demonstrations, isolated or massive, symbolic or brutal. Iranian women are showing incredible courage in the face of a repression that is claiming hundreds of victims. They dragged men into a struggle for the freedom to dress as they saw fit. It’s a struggle for freedom, plain and simple, in the face of a 100% male government that reigns fear, on the basis of religious law. If that’s not patriarchy, what is?
And yet: French feminists do not give it its rightful place. We cut our hair, at the same time as we hunt down meat lovers, but we will be discreet to define what the Iranian women are actually fighting against. Of course, many associations and eminent figures expressed their support. Others said nothing, like Rokhaya Diallo. Others support them, not without remembering that they do not sit at the same table as the “Islamophobes”. But here it is: when you fight against a political order that claims the letter of a religious law, the link between “patriarchy” and religion is anything but a shortcut. And today, whether in the United States, in Poland or in Iran, liberticidal politics and religious substrate walk hand in hand – by fundamentalism, or by electoral calculation. Today, there is no political courage to criticize, when one is a feminist in France, the Republican evangelists and the Polish conservatives, or to call for the resignation of such an elected official who is not on his side. Criticizing Muslim fundamentalism requires more force.
It is difficult to distinguish dictatorial aspect and religious interpretation in a country which has “a Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance” and inscribes in its Constitution different duties for men and women. Blame it on modernity? The world reported on a “survey on the values and attitudes of Iranians” conducted by the Iranian government, which regrets that it “also creates damage in the field of culture and social systems, such as the collapse of values or the decline of the family institution”. Either the maintenance of traditional roles, this fight against gender stereotypes that our feminism has undertaken since the 1950s with Simone de Beauvoir.
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It is not the intimate and individual faith of Muslims that I am criticizing, it is an economic, political, legal and cultural order which, in the name of religion, legitimizes a hierarchy of individuals according to their sex or their sexual orientation. . A proper patriarchy. Denying the religious dimension of this control over women remains a mental barrier that prevents serious treatment of the subject, in Iran as elsewhere.And it would be wrong to think that this concerns only Islam. It took until 1956 for a pope to establish that childbirth without pain was not contrary to Christian morality, recalls Elisabeth Badinter on the set of 100 minutes to understand (INA 2004 archive), where she faces three young veiled girls. She adds: “All the progress that has been made so that the woman becomes master of her body, all this progress, forgive me for telling you, has been made against religions. »
Should the veil be banned in France?
This very French focus on the veil is turning into a hobby. In Iran, he is a symbol. There, those who throw it respect those who wear it. I am against the ban on wearing the veil in France, in public spaces, on football pitches and by swimming pools. To prohibit it is to play by the same rules as totalitarian regimes, it is to make the veil a tool of social control. On the other hand, making its port a feminist demand is both sad and hypocritical. The imperative of “inclusivity” seems to take precedence over the goal of feminist emancipation. If the miniskirt was compulsory at the North Pole, should we take it for a symbol of inclusivity?
Of course, feminist indignation can only be selective – except to be a robot. I will never blame activists for prioritizing their battles: there are so many to fight. Yes, Iran is far from home, while women are in danger on our street corners. But the United States is also far away, and naming the fundamentalist and conservative enemy there seemed easier. Critics like mine would “aim to put feminists out of the game, to get out of the political discussion by accusing them of cowardice, of inconsistency”, criticizes political scientist Réjane Sénac. It’s quite the opposite: I want to see feminists at the center of the game. It’s nothing other than the task they have given themselves: the dissolution of “patriarchy”.
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The private is political, said one of the feminist slogans in the 1960s, when almost everything was still up for grabs. Fashion is political, headlined a recently published book. This discourse today has a limit. It is always turning your back on a society where the private, and therefore individual freedom, would take precedence over the public, and therefore the risk of control. It is to legitimize the intervention of public authority to repress morally dissenting behavior, such as refusing to wear the veil. Abolishing the distinction between private and political works until a conservative or religious government comes to power. Theocracy explodes these salutary distinctions: the private, the political and the religious are only the pages of the same story.