Iranian men in headscarf

The Iranian anti-government movement took an innovative step that revealed the capabilities and potentials of new media in social mobilization.  This new phase of movement began with Iranian men posting pictures of themselves on social networks such as Facebook wearing women’s headscarves as a political statement after the arrest of a student protester, Majid Tavakoli. The day after his arrest, an Iranian news agency (Fars), which is close to the Revolutionary Guard, published a picture of Tavakoli dressed in women clothing and a headscarf.  Fars reported that the man had been caught wearing an all-covering woman’s Islamic dress in an attempt to hide himself and avoid arrest.  The news agency concluded that such actions were a “permanent stain on the illegal student movement.”

Majid Tavakoli was arrested after his speech on December 7^th, a large student-led protests where he explicitly denounced Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, and urged students to reject his dictatorship.  In the Web campaigns calling for his release, Iranian oppositions have posted hundreds of photos online of men in women’s clothing to mock what they say was a government attempt to humiliate the activist and discredit the opposition.  Many of them accused authorities of forcing Tavakoli into women’s clothing and photographing him.  Others claimed that the pictures might have been digitally manipulated.

The online backlash underlined the power of an image in the cyber-based political participation.  Many of the published pictures were whimsical self-portraits.  Iranian men wore the similar scarf that they believed Mr. Tavakoli was forced to wear implying that there has been three decades that all women in Iran are forced to wear such clothing.  Needless to say that the green color that has become the opposition’s emblem appeared in the most of the pictures.

Such online campaigns captured a fundamental shift in Iran’s political culture.  Pictures were meant to be shameful and humiliating.  With eyes downcast, they were published by the state to portray that a protester afraid of his imprisonment simply denies his manhood.  However, it backfired when hundreds of Iranian men published the similar pictures of themselves with the statement that: “We are all Majid.”

Given a close relations between the news agency and the Revolutionary Guard that engineered the fraudulent presidential election in last summer, the news agency action is interpreted as an attempt by the authorities to prove to the public that the opposition leaders are “less than men” who are lacking courage and bravery.  This is an old practice by the government which goes back three decades, at that time the government published a picture of the first president of the Islamic republic, Abolhassan Banisadr in woman headscarf. Though the authenticity of the picture has never been proven, state media at the time used it as evidence that Banisadr attempted to escape the country in a gutless way after his ouster in 1981.  Fars agency juxtaposed the photos of Tavakoli alongside with Banisadr’s. However, this time with new generation of Iranians the decision was subject to fail.  Iranians updated their facebook status with a prevailing statement: “Majid is multiplied, not humiliated.”

Today Iranians from both genders have questioned many of the gender codes that firmly enforced by the authorities over the past 30 years.  The Islamic Republic within two years after the revolution began to restrict the public sphere and introduced a sexual morality policy in which women were forced to wear hijab. An official gender policy and culture were first instituted, symbolized by obligatory head covering for women.  Soon after, the Islamic government expanded gender segregation in public space and criminalized sexual contact outside marriage.

It is worth mentioning that it is not just Iranian new generation who has been questioning the government moral codes, the authorities have been violating their own law.  Very often when Iranians who are residents of other countries arrive at the Iran’s airports, they have to provide their facebook account logging username and password along with their passports.  In this respect, a security agent at the airport feels free to exempt himself from the state sexual morality codes, and gets access to account of the arriver including private photos.  This is the way that the Islamic regime maintains its security.

Here I provide a video from youtube that includes some images from the online campaign of “Majid is not humiliated, he is multiplied” along with a dialogue between two Iranian Columbia professors about the characteristics of the Green movement:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Hcu5v3hxEg