later created a website, My Stealthy Freedoms, from which she launched a second campaign—“White Wednesdays”—which asked Iranian women to gather weekly in public wearing white hijabs and then remove them.
Both campaigns have gone viral on social media, gaining a widespread following among Iranian women and girls, and unnerving Iran’s conservative courts. The regime’s religious police routinely break up the protests and arrest the demonstrators. According to Iran’s Tasnim news agency, police last year described those arrested as “people who have been deceived by the ‘My Stealthy Freedoms’ movement.” An Iranian judge said anti-hijab protesters had been influenced by foreign groups and “industrial recreational drugs.”3
Until recently, the anti-hijab protesters received two-month jail sentences and the equivalent of a $100 fine for violating the Islamic dress code. But in July, the courts increased the sentence to 10 years for removing a hijab in public or sending photos or videos to Alinejad’s website. Bails have been set as high as $110,000.4
“If the authorities thought this would scare off Iranian women, they were wrong,” said Alinejad, who left Iran in 2009 and now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. She said she gets 2,000 messages a day from Iranian women showing themselves removing their headscarves.5
Iran’s conservative religious leaders who came to power after the 1979 Islamic revolution imposed compulsory hijab laws. That did not sit well with many Iranian women, who had enjoyed new rights under the rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. On March 8, 1979—the day after Iran’s new clerical rulers imposed the new law—some 100,000 women, many accompanied by their husbands, brothers and fathers, marched through the streets of Tehran to protest the rule.6
Although the shah had also imposed authoritarian policies and brutal police methods, women were allowed to leave their heads uncovered. The shah also:
Provided free education to girls as well as boys, and allowed women to attend Tehran University.
Granted women the right to vote and run for public office.
Allowed women to petition for a divorce and gain child custody, eliminating antiquated statutes that permitted men to unilaterally divorce their spouses with a simple verbal declaration and automatically gain child custody.
Required men to go to court to take a second wife.
Raised the legal age when girls could marry from 13 to 18.7
After the revolution, the new, ultraconservative religious government kicked women out of government and judicial positions and required them to cover their heads in public. Family laws again made wives the property of their husbands, removed restrictions on polygamy, allowed girls to be married at nine years of age and reimposed the death-by-stoning penalty for women convicted of adultery.8
Since then, Iranian women have clawed back some of their rights, according to Haleh Esfandiari, former director of the Middle East program at the Wilson Center, a Washington think tank. Iran’s women’s movement, she said, is one of the most dynamic in the Muslim world.9
That movement scored its most recent victories in October, when the regime allowed women to pass their Iranian citizenship on to children with non-Iranian fathers and lifted a ban on women attending soccer games. The soccer ban sparked international outrage in September after Sahar Khodayari, a 29-year-old sports fan, set herself on fire to protest her prosecution for appearing in public without a hijab after being caught sneaking into a soccer match dressed as a man. She died from her burns.10
“To say that these concessions were granted reluctantly by Iran’s misogynistic rulers would be an extreme understatement,” wrote Jason Rezaian, a Washington Post columnist and former Tehran bureau chief who was imprisoned with his Iranian wife in 2014 for 18 months on charges of espionage. “But a prolonged and principled commitment by activists inside Iran and their supporters in the international community of human rights advocacy to extend women’s liberties is paying off.”11
In February, Alinejad met with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Washington and urged him to speak out more forcefully against Iran’s discrimination against women.12
“I fear the Trump administration will cut a deal with Tehran that ignores human rights, emboldening the clerical regime to crack down on domestic opposition without concern for international pressure,” she later said.13
—Jonathan Broder
1 “Iran: Family of women’s rights activist arrested in despicable attempt to intimidate her into silence,” Amnesty International, Sept. 25, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/y5tctqs4.
2 “Masih Alinejad,” Human Rights Foundation, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/yht2lopv.
3 “Iranian women defiant against compulsory hijab,” Deutsche Welle, June 2, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/y49om7pq.
4 Ibid.
5 Masih Alinejad, “My Brother Ali Is Iran’s Latest Hostage,” The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 6, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/y2pe38po.
6 Pip Cummings, “The day 100,000 Iranian women protested the head scarf,” womenintheworld.com, Sept. 15, 2015, https://tinyurl.com/y34owyj2.
7 Haleh Esfandiari, “The Women’s Movement,” The Iran Primer: Power, Politics and U.S. Policy (2010), p. 45.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Farnaz Fassihi, “Iran’s ‘Blue Girl’ Wanted to Watch a Soccer Match. She Died Pursuing Her Dream,” The New York Times, Sept. 10, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/yyubwg6l; “Iran Adopts Amendment Allowing Women To Pass Citizenship To Children,” Radio Farda, Oct. 2, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/y2qw92ux.
11 Jason Rezaian, “Women in Iran need America’s help. Why won’t we give it to them?” The Washington Post, Oct. 8, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/y5a5roka.
12 “Pompeo Tells Iranian Rights Activist of U.S. Support” Radio Farda, Feb. 5, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/yez9ktvs.
13 Alinejad, op. cit.
Also during the decade, the United States was drawn into conflict with Iran during the 1980-88 Iraq-Iran war, the Middle East’s longest and bloodiest armed struggle. Iraq initiated the war by invading Iran to prevent Tehran from inciting Iraq’s predominantly Shiite population to revolt. The United States provided Iraq with intelligence and chemicals to produce poison gas, which the Iraqis used against the Iranians. In addition, after a Kuwaiti oil tanker struck Iranian mines in the Persian Gulf, the Reagan administration placed Kuwait’s entire tanker fleet under the U.S. flag and sent Navy warships to escort them in and out of the gulf. In 1987, U.S. warships destroyed two Iranian oil rigs in the Persian Gulf after Iranian missile attacks on several reflagged tankers. And after an Iranian mine badly damaged a U.S. Navy destroyer in 1988, U.S. air and naval forces sank or crippled half of Iran’s naval ships.43
Iranians Say Sanctions Block Critical Medicines
“People are losing their lives.”
Dr. Ghader Daemi Aghdam, the director of a Tehran pharmacy, has the difficult job of informing many customers that he cannot fill their prescriptions. The reason: U.S. sanctions on Iran.
“Out of every 20 people, we have to tell at least 10 that we have run out of medications they need,” Aghdam said.1
Although the Trump administration asserts that medicine, food and other humanitarian goods are exempt from the U.S. sanctions on Iran, economists and Iran experts say international