She sits in her car with the sun through the roof, bare shoulders, loose hair - as free beautiful women do in the Western world - and says the word that people throw at her like an accusation, and then she does something most don't dare - she accepts it.
Yes, she says. I am afraid of this.
And then she shows the pictures.
Iran in the 1970s - young women on a bench in a park, miniskirts, boots, books in their laps, sun on their faces.
Iran now - a street where everything female is wrapped in black.
Afghanistan before - three friends, arm in arm on a pavement, skirts, bags, a life.
Afghanistan now - a row of blue burqas up against a wall, faceless, interchangeable. And then the image that hurts in a different way, because it isn't far away and it isn't long ago: Michigan then, Michigan now.
One could object that the before-pictures show the city, not the village. That's true, and that is precisely why they are so revealing. Because the pictures do not claim that all women dressed that way.
They show what was possible.
A woman in Tehran in 1974 could choose the headscarf, or she could leave it. Today she cannot. This is not a movement from one fashion to another. It is a movement from permission to command. From choice to coercion. And that movement has gone the same way, every time, in every country where the Islamic order has gained the power to decide.
It is that pattern she is afraid of. Not a neighbour. Not a person.
A PATTERN.
And here the word becomes interesting. Islamophobia.
A phobia is an irrational fear, the fear of spiders in a land with no poisonous spiders, the fear of flying in the safest mode of transport there is.
But what do you call the fear of something that has happened, that is documented, that can be photographed before and after, and that has repeated itself again and again and again across countries and decades with the same result?
It is not a phobia. It is memory.
The word is constructed to turn memory into a disease. To move the conversation away from the pictures and onto the one showing them. And it works, until someone sits in their car and says - Yes. Call me that, then. I'm still looking at the pictures. And I know what I see. And I'm not afraid to say it.
The most striking thing is the silence from those who have made women's freedom their banner. They can find oppression in an advertisement, in a pronoun, in a joke. But before the image of little girls wrapped from top to toe, because adult men otherwise cannot control themselves, it goes quiet. There, tolerance is suddenly more important than the girls.
The hypocrisy roars so loud it hurts your ears.
She sits in her car and is herself a before-picture. Loose hair, bare shoulders, her own voice. Everything that was normal in Tehran in 1974, and that no one then believed could disappear.
They didn't believe it in Kabul either. Or in Beirut. Or in Cairo.
Europe doesn't believe it either.
Everyone knows how it ends.
Because that is the pattern.
❤️🔥🪽
