The nice man Isam B has written a new post about niqab and feminism.
This time it's calmer than the first one.
The first message was - "wearing a niqab is one of the most feminist things a woman could do".
Now it *can be* feminist - if, that is, we define feminism as being solely about self-determination.
The words have grown softer. The smile nicer. The outstretched open hands, asking for understanding and wanting to explain themselves - and to be met with reasonableness - more visible.
But the argument is the same.
And apparently it's not only in Denmark people have been reading along. Because yet another letter has reached my inbox, even though this time I was only on cc:
It comes from -
THE MINISTRY OF GUIDANCE AND PUBLIC MORALITY, TEHRAN
To Mr Isam Bachiri, Copenhagen
Dear friend.
We have read your latest post with great pleasure.
It has been translated, framed and hung in our reception, next to your earlier statement about the woman who "is just a ninja" - her, whom men would like to see, but who can see them, without them being able to see her.
It is a thought we have worked from since 1979. It is encouraging to see it formulated so freshly.
We note especially your point that freedom can also be the right to choose one's own limitations.
That is EXACTLY how we see it.
We merely help with the choice - assist so that no woman should stand alone with it, and know what she risks.
Your use of Fanon moved us.
"The veil as protection against the foreign power's gaze" - we could not agree more, and precisely for that reason we have made the protection mandatory here, so that no one misses out on the safeguarding.
You should know that we conduct the work with great care.
Our patrols are called guidance patrols in Persian, and that is what they do. They guide. They are dedicated souls who with diligence monitor and guide round the clock so everyone chooses rightly and correctly.
The vast majority of women accept the guidance immediately, and only in rare cases every single day year-round does a woman need hospitalisation.
One regrettable case in 2022 gave rise to an internal evaluation, which completely exonerated the guidance. There was some unrest in the streets in the weeks after, and out of concern for the population's peace we chose at times to spare them access to the internet.
We note in this connection your beautiful formulation about "the right not to be visible". We take that right seriously. In special cases we have actually extended it to full invisibility. Permanent, if desired. According to our own count, there were 3,117 who chose it in January this year. Others put the number in the tens of thousands, but they count as they please.
We were briefly concerned when you wrote that it is also control when a man says that the woman must put on the niqab. But then we read on and understood your real gift to us - in your system, one cannot tell from the outside the difference between the woman who has chosen and the woman who has been told. And as long as no one can see that difference, then no one can see us. So all good.
We have of course noted the women who in these years burn their veils in our streets. But rest assured, you need not worry about them.
As you would put it yourself - those women just haven't finished choosing yet. It will come.
Finally a confession, quite between us.
There is one thing we envy you. We only have the law to work with here.
You have freedom.
If we said to Copenhagen that women must be covered, all of the West would rise up. But when you say that she has the right to choose it, the West sits down again.
Your society has built doors that can only be opened from within - tolerance, self-determination, religious freedom - and you stand inside. Everything we could never force in from outside, you can ask permission to have.
And they give you permission.
It is their finest principle.
That is brilliant.
You need not answer whether you wish for our order here. We don't need to know. The order doesn't need your intention - only your argument. And you have already shown and given that. We understand.
You write that you will remain standing.
We understand that too.
We have stood here since 1979.
P.S. The guidance patrol has unanimously nominated you for its medal of merit as a special honorary member. May we ask for an address we can send it to?
🤓🤷🏼♂️
.
AFTERWORD
The letter is fiction. What the letter stands on is not.
There are at this moment women sitting in Iranian prisons whose crime is that the world saw their hair.
Four years ago a 22-year-old woman died in the morality police's custody because her headscarf sat wrong, and the women who since went into the street and burned their veils were met with the answer an order gives when it no longer needs to argue.
I leave it to your imagination.
And meanwhile we are discussing in Denmark whether niqab can be feminist. In national TV studios.
And pretending the question can be taken seriously among adult human beings.
The inversion in the media is hereby complete. They stand 180 degrees on their heads and no longer think with them.
For notice what the discussion itself presupposes. It presupposes a society where you can say what you like about the holiest things. Where a woman can put on the veil tomorrow and take it off again the day after, without anyone knocking. That is, her face. Or her body. Where a musician can defend a religious garment in nationwide radio and afterwards complain about the criticism, and sound like a Radical Liberal politician with a reasonable case.
None of this is a natural state. These are Western creations, paid for over centuries, and they only exist here because we built an order where faith is a private matter, and where NO revelation stands above the law.
Those are the principles the argument now borrows.
Tolerance, self-determination, religious freedom - they were all built on ONE premise - and an order that does not share the premise can still use the principles. Not as values. But as arguments.
It is not an attack, and that is why it works. Including on the journalists who look at each other confused, and think "yes okay, maybe a niqab can be freedom!??"
Nothing is being broken up. It is being asked nicely, with our own words - within our own frame - for space for an order that NOWHERE on the ENTIRE EARTH EVER has given the space back without armed struggle. And what follows from that.
I'm not claiming that Isam B wants that order. I cannot know that, I don't know him. But I don't need to either, and that is the very point.
Arguments don't ask about the sender's intention. They work for whoever can use them. And the same argument that now in Copenhagen on national TV for those with their brains installed backwards sounds like freedom, hangs framed on a wall in Tehran. Or in a crane.
For in Copenhagen the niqab is a choice. In Tehran it is an order. The fabric is the same. The only thing separating the two cities is the power relation behind the fabric - and that is precisely the relation the argument asks us not to see.
And that relation which everywhere changes, the more of that order rises into a culture and a society.
You don't need to take freedom from a people.
You can settle for taking the word for it.
I think, however, that we should simply preserve freedom as the Western world's story handed it to us - and ask anyone who wishes to change it to travel somewhere else. Voluntarily, in the first instance.
What do you think?
❤️🔥🪽
