Melody Moezzi, an Iranian-American Muslim author and visiting associate professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, says the Raisi administration’s heightened hijab curbs are among the stimulants fueling people’s anger that exploded with the death of Mahsa Amini under enigmatic circumstances.
“There is absolutely a deeper context here. The current protests in Iran were no doubt sparked by the Raisi administration’s increased enforcement of the compulsory hijab by the morality police, both in relation to Mahsa Zhina Amini and others before her, especially over the summer,” Moezzi said.
“But the sustained protests are the result of so much more than the morality police or the compulsory hijab, which, for the record, is a wildly un-Islamic policy, since the Koran specifically teaches that there should be no compulsion in religion, and regardless, the hijab is a pre-Islamic concept that isn’t central to the faith.
“The abysmal economy, largely courtesy of a brutal sanctions policy that functions as a form of economic warfare that suffocates the people of Iran more than the government, compiled with growing corruption and police brutality is at the heart of the persistence of these protests,” she added.
Read Kourosh’s full article here:
https://asiatimes.com/2022/10/iranian-womens-resilient-fight-for-rights-inspires-hope