In late July,
Mousa Ghazanfarabadi, the conservative head of Tehran's Revolutionary
Court, announced
publicly that the
Iranian regime had identified a new "hostile government" with
whom interaction was henceforth banned, punishable by up to a decade in
prison. That entity wasn't the Trump administration, which has launched an
escalating campaign of economic pressure against the Islamic Republic over
the past year. That entity wasn't Israel, which Iranian officials have
blamed over the years for everything from promoting
global homosexuality to using pigeons as
nuclear spies.
Rather, the target
of the blacklisting was a petite forty-two-year-old Iranian-American
activist named Masih Alinejad.
At first glance,
Alinejad may not seem like a particularly formidable political adversary.
Slight and demure, she is unfailingly polite in person and easygoing in
demeanor—at least when she isn't speaking about the Iranian regime. A
former reporter who worked for reformist news outlets before becoming
fundamentally disenchanted with clerical rule, her personal story is
similar to that of many others who have chosen—or been forced—to flee Iran
in the four decades since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
But when it comes
to social media, Alinejad is a bona fide powerhouse. Since
2014, her online movement, "My Stealthy Freedom," has become a
clearinghouse for photos, videos, messages and communiques from thousands
of Iranian activists (mostly women, but also a growing number of men)
protesting the Islamic Republic's religious strictures. Through this
campaign, Alinejad has turned into the most visible champion of a
particular strain of grassroots activism that has taken root in Iran over
the past two years.
At the center of
this campaign is the hijab, the religious head covering that the
Islamic Republic requires its female citizens to wear. Under Iranian law, a
failure to do so in public can result in fines or short prison terms, and
regime officials have enforced the rule (often arbitrarily) as a way of
flaunting their religious credentials. The practice is exceedingly unpopular;
an official study published last year by the Iranian Center for Strategic
Studies, the dedicated think tank of Iranian president Hassan
Rouhani, found that approximately half of all
Iranians oppose compulsory veiling.
Not surprisingly,
the anti-regime protests that began in Iran in late 2017 quickly evolved to
incorporate these sentiments. The iconic photo of Vida Movahed, who removed her
white headscarf on a Tehran thoroughfare in an act of public protest,
quickly went viral, inspiring other Iranian women to follow suit. Over
time, such acts of defiance have continued, despite the severity of the
regime response. (Movahed was sentenced to a year in
prison for her
demonstrations; other people have received similar punishments, as have
lawyers who advocated on their behalf.)
It would be fair
to say that the outbreak of anti-hijab activism took Iranian
authorities by surprise. But, says Alinejad, it shouldn't have.
"Compulsory hijab," she notes, "is in the DNA of the
Islamic Republic." The veiling of women represents a fundamental
component of the Iranian regime's claim to power and religious authority,
so rejection of the hijab is a logical part of any resistance to it.
Alinejad has
helped provide an important outlet for this struggle. Via Facebook,
Instagram and other social-media platforms, she tirelessly interacts with
numerous activists within Iran and shares their messages and videos with the
wider world. While these have long documented instances of public unveiling
(and many still do), more and more now provide other examples of bad regime
behavior—serving as a sort of public "naming and shaming" on the
part of a populace increasingly outraged by the humiliations of clerical
rule.
If Alinejad has
anything to say about it, however, that's just the start of the story. Her
vision is to harness this discontent into a broader, crowdsourced
anti-regime movement. As she sees it, social media and online organization
have already succeeded in creating a framework for the empowerment of
Iran's increasingly restive population: the "silent majority"
that hates the regime and seeks fundamental political change. That is a
message she has communicated in numerous interviews with a broad array of
media outlets, from the London-based Manoto television channel
to the BBC's Persian broadcasting service, as well as via her short weekly
segments for the Voice of America.
These
commonalities, she suggests, should serve as the basis for a broader
movement that both unifies and amplifies the disparate strains of dissent
now percolating within Iran. But to what end? The Iranian opposition,
Alinejad observes, is currently fragmented and divided. It needs to think
of "the day after" the Islamic Republic, and unify in pursuit of
a common vision and shared goals, the most vital of which is the demand for
free and fair elections.
Here, America
could become the biggest supporter of Iran's human rights movement—or end
up being its downfall. Alinejad's work has caught the attention of the
White House, and back in February she was formally
hosted by Secretary
of State Mike Pompeo, who emphasized the Trump administration's commitment
to Iranians advocating for their basic human rights. But those words, she
notes, have not yet been matched by concrete action. Human-rights issues
were conspicuously absent from the twelve
conditions laid out by
Pompeo last year as prerequisites for normalizing diplomatic relations
between Washington and Tehran, and they don't figure at all in the
administration's current sanctions campaign against the Iranian regime.
They might never
do so. The biggest fear of Alinejad and her fellow activists is that the
Trump administration—despite its talk of "maximum pressure" on
Iran's ayatollahs—could end up cutting a deal with Tehran that completely
ignores human rights. Indeed, President Donald Trump himself has said
repeatedly that he is
prepared to negotiate with the Iranian regime, and do so "without
preconditions." Should that happen, Iran's clerical regime will surely
be emboldened to crack down in earnest on its domestic opposition without
fearing retribution from the international community.
In the meantime,
the stakes in the anti-hijab campaign have gotten higher
still. According to
Alinejad, the July edict
from Tehran's Revolutionary Court hasn't dampened the activism of Iranian
women, who continue to send her videos and express opposition to the
regime's religious strictures en masse. Some have paid dearly
for it. In early August, three women were sentenced by the same court to a combined
total of more than fifty-five years in prison for the crime of
"disrespecting compulsory hijab."
For Alinejad, this
eloquently proves her central point: that "the Islamic Republic is
afraid of its women." "The day that thousands of women take off
their headscarves and burn them," she insists, "is the day the
Islamic Republic is finished." Moreover, Alinejad is convinced that
such a day is coming—and sooner rather than later. Whether the United
States and its allies will be ready and willing to exploit such an opening,
however, is another matter entirely.
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