why does iran force women to wear scarves

Mahsa Amini died because of hair. Her own hair. She was picked up by men who decided that she was showing too much hair. And punished her for it. Fatally.

How can a society get it so wrong?

VOA

Like most things this question can be answered with three words.

Power and Money.

Islam is a religion that wants to lay out the rules of life. Including how you manage and present your hair. It has rules for women and it has rules for men. These rules are generally :

• don’t look like the other gender
• don’t look like a non muslim (i.e don’t have hassidic hair styles, etc)
• women, cover your hair
• men, either shave your head or leave it. Don’t partially shave

Christianity also has rules for hair. Corinthians 11:6 states “For if the woman be not covered, let her also be shorn: but if it be a shame for a woman to be shorn or shaven, let her be covered”. In other words a woman should cover her hair or shave her head.

The history of women wearing head coverings is not new and is certainly not restricted to the middle east. Even today sects such as mennonites have women covering their heads.

But what is going on in Iran is more tied to power and wealth than with any religious rules. The religion is simply a tool.

To understand how we got here we have to understand this guy.

Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini was the de facto leader of Iran from 1980 to 1989 when he died. Once a professor of philosophy and self professed student of Aristotle and Plato, Khomeini came from a family of landowners and clerics.

And it is this fact upon which the present state of Iran rests.

In 1963 Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, then leader of Iran, kicked off the white revolution - a revolution to modernize Iran and align it to western values. Values that would give women and religious minorities more rights and freedoms.

A foundational pillar of the white revolution was land reform. Iran at the time saw most of the arable land owned by a very small group of elites and religious foundations. And land was not specifically measured and parceled as much as it was akin to a feudal system wherein land ownership was related to the land of a particular village. Which meant that the villages worked the land around the village for the owners or paid rent to have land.

In an attempt to build a middle class the Shah distributed the land to the villagers. The wealthy land owners and religious groups now had a fraction of the land they previously had and their rent income dropped precipitously.

Shah of Iran with new land owners

As you would expect, this did not go over well with the elites and clerics. From the outset religion was used as the means of denouncing the Shah’s plans and clerics conflated the changing social norms with the change in land ownership.

Of the many clerics against these reforms Khomeini was the one to explicitly denounce the Shah and he was briefly imprisoned and then exiled for it.

The white revolution struggled to gain a foot hold. The Shah undertook large public projects to bolster the economy but due to large scale corruption they floundered. In 1973, during a oil price spike, the economy took a turn for the worse. All the while Khomeini was being supported by the disgruntled elites of Iran and was gathering political momentum. In large part because of the promises he was making, which included freedom of speech and shared wealth from the nations oil.

In 1979 the cultural revolution took place, the Shah was deposed and the Khomeini was the head of state. And this is when Khomeini’s real intentions emerged.

In addition to restricting freedom the Khomeini started a process of repossessing the land that was distributed. A process that continues to this day where those not allied with the religious leadership of Iran see their land seized and subsequently operated by the clerical organizations.

A return the way things were.

Mahsa Amini died because her freedom to not wear a head scarf represents the loss of wealth for the religious leadership of Iran. Their business organization, named SETAD, whose acronym translates to “Headquarters for Executing the Order of the Imam” was, as of 2013, thought to be worth in excess of $95 billion dollars.

Khomeini passed away in 1989 and was replaced by an adherent, Ali Khamenei, who continued where Khomeini left off.

Iran is under the grip of a kleptocrat disguised as a religious leader. A modern monarch.

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