Masih Alinejad tells MSNBC why 22-year old Mahsa Amini was beaten to death in police custody, and why women all across Iran are burning their chadors. Mahsa wasn’t even unveiled, it turns out; she was just showing a little slice of hair above her forehead. It was enough to set the hateful morality police off. She sustained a vicious beating, and the result was a massive head trauma that killed her.
It’s not just a petty rebellion against a scrap of cloth, Alinejad says; it’s a fight against the “gender apartheid régime” that seized power following the toppling of the Shah in the late 1970s. Anti-veil sentiment (and demonstrations) is nothing new there, but protests of this magnitude are. It’s now gotten to the point where even men are joining in, and beating up plainclothes cops who dare to assault demonstrating women.
If you’ve read Marjane Satrapi’s cartoon-autobiography, Persepolis, you’ll know just how long this has all been going on. And if you’ve read Azar Nafisi’s memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, you’ll even understand that Islam — the pretext for all this harsh moralizing and gender apartheid — is not the reason for the crackdowns. It’s all about power and control, and gendered repression. And Iranian women have had enough of all of that.