There was a lot of hue and cry about Sushma's choice of clothing during her visit to Iran.
It doesn’t matter how far a woman has travelled in the world or where she has reached or even what she has achieved, some people will never get past her appearance or what she’s wearing. The latest to bear the brunt is External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj who wore a sari and a pink shawl for her meetings in Iran, which drew more attention than anything she did there.
Social media chatter focused on how Swaraj had covered her head, which is absolutely ridiculous. For starters it wasn’t even a hijab, Swaraj had simply covered her head. Why she chose to do so isn’t known but one assumes it was because as a graceful guest, she chose to follow the norms of the country that she was visiting.
Sushma Swaraj — not the only one
Kate Middleton in Malaysia in 2012.
A recent memo by Air France, demanding it stewardesses to wear veils when entering Iran was met with derision. On the other hand, a host of celebrities including Katy Perry, Madonna, Selena Gomez, Kim Kardashian and Rihanna have been pictured wearing either the hijab/niqab/burqa on their visits to Dubai, Morocco and other Islamic countries.
Hillary Clinton wearing the hijab in a recent campaign video.
Similarly, a US Navy Sailor was forced to wear a hijab when detained in Iran. Celebrities and soldiers aren’t the only ones who comply with the strict Islamic adherents. The late Princess Diana wore a headscarf when she visited Pakistan in 1997, Democratic candidate hopeful Hillary Clinton wore one on a state visit to Pakistan (and even wore one during a recent campaign video). Laura Bush wore one when she visited Saudi Arabia.
However, others have refused to comply from time to time. German Chancellor Angela Merkel was bare-headed on her Saudi visit in 2012 (though she wore one in 2007 to Tajikistan). Similarly, Michelle refused to wear one when she visited the late Saudi king’s funeral, a move that caused some backlash in Saudi Arabia.
Hijab politics in Iran
For centuries, since ancient pre-Islamic times, female headscarf was a normative dress code in but the situation changed in the Middle Ages with the arrival of Turkic nomadic tribes from Central Asia. Things took a turn under the pro-Western Reza Shah, who in a hardline modern-secular French way, banned all forms of veils since he didn’t want Westerners to laugh at them. Instead of giving a choice, he asked the police to physically remove the veil off women wearing them in public. Many women chose not to leave their homes and the move was even criticised by the British consul in Tehran.
The terror continued till the Reza’s abdication, and during the Iranian Revolution, the headscarf became a major rallying tool. Two years after the revolution ended, in 1983, the hijab became mandatory in public places. Again, the state sought to control women’s clothing and even a strand of hair outside the hijab was unacceptable in public.
Now Iranian women are taking to social media to protest against the outfit, and it has become a strong social media movement. A dedicated Facebook page called My Stealthy Freedom actively puts up pictures of bareheaded women without hijabs and currently has almost 1 million followers.
The page was started by journalist Masih Alinejad, who was forced to leave the country in 2009. Sadly, there’s little hope for the citizens of Iran where an Iranian parliament passed a bill in October 2014, that gives the moral police a free hand. It lets them follow the principle of ‘commanding the right and forbidding the wrong’ and says no person or institution has the right or authority to prevent the enforcement of “commanding the right.”
This means that law allows the police to take harsh measures without fear of prosecution while those who are being oppressed don't have the right to respond. High-ranking religious leaders such as Grand Ayatolla Naser Makarem Shirazi and former conservative presidential candidate and a member of parliament Gholamhossein Hadad-Adel are strong supporters of the garment.
Even President Rouhani, a moderate in most cases is forced to walk the line and has defended the garment, taking pot-shots at Reza Shah Pahlavai’s forced unveiling.
The Supreme Leader of Iran, Sayyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei has also criticised Iranian women’s rights activists and is a well-known advocate of the practice. He has sought to turn the debate by blaming the West, stating that women have lost their ‘honour’ : "In effect, they have been treating women like a commodity, like another of their products. If you were to look at the magazines, which are published in the West, you would see that they advertise a commodity for sale next to the naked picture of a woman. Can you imagine a bigger insult to women? They [the West] must be answerable [not Islam]."
All of the aforementioned has created an atmosphere where women are the subject of acid attacks for not dressing up.
Women's clothes — society's biggest problem
At the end of the day, whether it's Sushma's sari, a hijab (which covers the head), a niqab (which covers the face except for the eyes) or the burkha (which covers the entire body), it all boils down to an authoritarian group, mostly made up of men, deciding what a woman should or shouldn't wear.
All the three garments have been the subject of debates across the world. While many in the Western world consider wearing either of these garments itself an oppression (while those freely choosing to wear them say that dictating such terms is oppression), in many Islamic countries women groups continue to fight religion, sometimes backed by the state, to not wear these garments.
Sadly, all of this stems from people not realising a woman's fundamental right to choose. None of us have a right to choose what a woman should wear, whether it's the niqab or a bikini. That's her fundamental choice and any society that bans either, or any piece of clothing in between, has no right to call itself a civilised society.
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 "Sushma Swaraj in Iran")
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