The second Iranian Revolution

SALEEM SAMAD

Thousands of enraged Iranians in a nationwide dissent against the Islamic clergy’s regime are holding demonstrations for justice for the murder of a Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, over the country’s abusive forced hijab dress code for women.

Mahsa Amini, 22, on 16 September was on a family trip to Iran’s capital Tehran from a liberal city of Saqez in Iran’s Kurdistan, where 10 million Kurds live.

She was detained by the notorious Morality Police (Basij para-military force) at a metro station in Tehran for not appropriately wearing a hijab (or chador in Farsi/Persian) and dragged to a centre.

The young woman died as a result of torture inflicted on her at a detention facility and the authority claimed that she died of heart failure, which her family refused to believe.

The so-called Morality Police recruited from rural Iran are Islamic vigilantes to insult to heart their dignity and detain women for violating stringent Shariah laws.

The Basij has a history to have brutally suppressed popular strife. Once again the ruthless armed group has been mobilised to quell the unrest.

In defiance, hundreds of women poured into the streets in Iran are burning their hijab and others removing their chador (headscarf) and waving in the air in busy streets and squares.

Many are cutting their hair in public, in their home and dared to post on social media as a symbol of protest, which never happened before.

The antagonism transgressed to a crossroad where protesters either insulted Iran’s supreme leader and chanted “death to the dictator”.

Nonetheless, the Kurdish woman’s death has reignited popular anger and united the dissidents and people from all walks of society, despite having different opinions.

An irate ‘unnamed woman’ removed her hijab while walking in a street in Iran posted a video on Twitter urging the Basij: “Come and arrest me….and arrest everyone campaigning for peace, freedom and human dignity.”

Iranian women are taking a huge risk and need more than expressions of solidarity, observed Yalda Zarbakhch, Head of the Farsi (Persian) service of the German news organisation Deutsche Welle (DW).

The demonstrators, especially the womenfolk must have calculated the risk factor – arrest, torture, legal harassment and intimidation of their families by the repressive regime.

Amnesty International urged that Mahsa Amini’s death must not go unpunished.

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi called for an investigation into the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody. He also said protesting is allowed in the country but “rioting” will not be tolerated.

Despite assurance for a probe into her death, the street protests besides the demand for justice for the death of Amini are also asking to end the hegemony of the Islamic clerical ruling system.

The crackdown on the demonstrations engulfed like wildfire in more than 40 major cities and towns, including Tehran University – where the official Friday prayers (Jumma) used to be held since the revolution.

Scores of protesters were killed by riot police and hundreds of others were wounded in street battles – the number of casualties is increasing every day. A few thousand protesters were detained from all over the country, according to the rights groups.

Determined, angry and, above all, courageous women in Iran are at the forefront of the current protests and lots of Iranians have rejected the hijab dress code.

On the other hand, a critic of the Mullahs in Iran, a feminist journalist Masih Alinejad in a charged tweet says: “Iranian women [are] removing their hijab, facing guns and bullets alongside men and chanting against [the] Islamic Republic.”

Meanwhile, reformist group the Union of Islamic Iran People’s Party has called for the mandatory dress code to be repealed and appealed to allow “peaceful demonstrations”. The party remains legal but unfortunately is firmly outside the corridors of power.

For the first time, demonstrators are collectively denouncing a religious symbol of the Islamic Republic.

The latest protest coincides with the fading popularity of Ebrahim Raisi’s government which miserably failed to deliver on its promises to citizens, one year after taking office in August 2021.

Amini’s death has unleashed anger over issues including personal freedoms and economic challenges in Iran which pose an existential threat to Iran’s theocratic regime.

A recent situation report by the International Institute for Iranian Studies (Rasanah) says, these developments occurred against the backdrop of a tense domestic environment and deteriorating economic and social conditions.

Nonetheless, the recent unrest highlights the growing chasm between the government and its self-proclaimed identity which it is attempting to impose on the people through repression and society.

The ongoing unrest reflects growing popular rage and discontent, as well as a sense of deprivation and injustice, says the Rasanah study. This cycle of discontent is linked to the crisis-ridden political environment as a result of the Raisi government’s failure to deliver on promises made one year ago, both at home and abroad, political observers stated.

Iran’s bleak economic situation, runaway inflation, horrendously high gas prices and social crises explain the popular outrage which is swiftly sparked by the latest public dissent. Moreover, the elimination of subsidies, unemployment, chronic inflation, and the government’s fiscal deficit enraged the general public.

The hard-line Islamist regime of the conservative Shia Mullahs led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power, after the so-called Islamic Revolution in 1979 which ousted pro-American Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Islamic Republic’s tunnel vision policy is to “control the female body”. Whether they are Muslims or other religious and ethnic communities, the hijab was been made mandatory by the clergies in 1983 for all women.

Well, hijab means ‘curtain’ or to shut out in Arabic. Hijab, is not a religious obligation in the Quran, a divine book for the Muslims, according to verse 24:31 for modesty.

The 21st-century Muslim clergies have falsely branded hijab, niqab, burqa, chador or other headscarves as Islamic traditions and made them compulsory for women.

Renowned Bangladesh-born feminist writer in exile, Taslima Nasrin and an ex-Muslim wrote on the recent unrest in Iran: “If you encourage them not to wear burqa or hijab, and become free women who believe in women’s rights and freedom, if you encourage them to become enlightened, secular, humanist and feminist, you are really well-wishers of Muslims.”

In another development, the intermittent blackouts of the internet followed after the eruption of nationwide protests over Amini’s death.

Unfortunately, there is no private broadcast network in Iran, thus the critical voice on the internet is the “only place” where protesters can make their voices heard on social media.

Earlier, the shutdown of the internet is one of the biggest tools of the Islamist regime and was used when unrest breaks.

Exiled Iranian leader Maryam Rajavi, President of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) founded in 1981, in a tweet urged the world [leaders] to condemn the cruel [internet] censorship and provide free access #Internet4Iran.

Political observers predict that the anti-government movement will further escalate after attention has been drawn by international news organisations, Western countries and human rights organisations.

More and more people have turned their backs on the autocratic regime, its ideology and even their theocratic “Islam”.

The Iranian dissident and critics in self-exile and expats are possibly the largest community living abroad and have lent their shoulders to the uprising.

In fact, the rulers cannot and will not make any concessions on the veiling of women — abolishing the obligation to wear the hijab is tantamount to the beginning of the end for the Islamic Republic.

Now that apolitical Mahsa Amini became a symbol of defiance in Iran, the Mullahs in Tehran and Qom (a haven for the Ayatollahs) are feeling the pinch in their shoes as they are facing the worst challenge of their regime. The Islamist leaders are spending sleepless nights in fear of losing their luxurious lifestyle and dominance in the region will extinguish. Despite cruel backlash by the state machinery, the movement went internationally viral.

First published in the International Affairs Review, 28 September 2022

Saleem Samad is an independent journalist and columnist based in Bangladesh, a media rights defender. Recipient of Ashoka Fellowship and Hellman-Hammett Award. Twitter: @saleemsamad

Backlash against Bangladeshi bloggers

GITA SAHGAL

The bloggers of Shahbagh are facing a backlash – hunted by fundamentalists, denounced in mosques as atheists, arrested by the government. Those abroad are under threat. Meanwhile activists are still demanding justice and cyber movements are using their mobilising power to deal with disasters

This has been a troubling week for those who care about Bangladesh. The April 26 collapse of Rana Plaza, the garment factory building owned by a prominent member of the ruling party, the Awami League, shows the economic costs of the country’s “economic miracle.”  Bangladeshi cyber-activists threw themselves into raising funds and helping to buy medicines for hospitals running out of supplies. If lives are being saved, one told me, it is because ordinary people are helping to mobilise relief.

The movement for accountability for war crimes, consists of several generations of activists - from those who feel strongly about the war because they witnessed its atrocities, to the children of victims demanding justice, to younger generations born since the mass movements of the 1990s first demanded war crimes trials. Each generation has experienced a backlash against it from both fundamentalists and the state.

And this is true of the most recent of these movements. The mass populist uprising occupying Shahbag in Dhaka, calling for ‘maximum punishment’ (the death penalty) for war criminals, was sparked by the triumphant V sign made by a convicted man. He saw his life sentence as a victory.  At first, the political parties courted the Shahbag movement, with the government promising to rush through legislation that reflected its main demands – allowing the prosecution to challenge the sentence to make it harsher, and amending the law to enable  the Jamaat e Islami  to be put on trial as an organisation. The Jamaat-e-Islami,the largest Islamist political party in Bangladesh, responded to the conviction and death sentence of the Deputy leader of the party, Delawar Hussein Sayeedi, with a country-wide campaign of violence, with particularly vicious attacks on religious minorities, including killing Hindus and destroying temples and homes. Christian Bangladeshis also reported attacks, but in some cases people were too afraid to make an official report.

Abroad, the conviction was referred to as ‘judicial murder’, to capitalise on the revulsion against the death penalty. But Western criticism of the Tribunal process failed to note also that peaceful opposition to religious fundamentalism was met by death threats, assault and murder. All  opposition to them was labelled ‘atheists’, and a label that seemed intended to provoke mass revulsion, promote extra-judicial killings as well as create a climate for  laws criminalising blasphemy.

Rajib, a young blogger, activist and professed atheist who was targeted online and then murdered,  has become an iconic figure in the movement. The fundamentalists have gone after a number of individual bloggers, beating people up and issuing death threats online or on mobiles. Labelling people as atheists, whether they are or not, puts them at risk of attack, and the bloggers have been targeted as atheists by both Muslim fundamentalists and the government.

In their defense, atheists, humanists and secularists  and declared April 25 an International Day to Defend Bangladesh's Bloggers. With some more protests planned on 4th May in deference to the tragedy currently gripping Bangladesh. The young bloggers need all the support they can get, for another fundamentalist group has arisen out of nowhere with a familiar list of fundamentalist demands. On April 7 this group, Hefazat e Islam, staged a mammonth “long march” of half a million people to protest against the mixed sex, peaceful, candlelit gatherings in Shahbagh. They made 13 demands,which contain many of familiar obsessions of fundamentalists. Apart from demanding a defamation law with the highest punishment (in other words making blasphemy punishable by death), Hefazat wants to declare Ahmadiyas to be non-Muslim, attacks practices such as candle lighting and putting up sculptures, opposes sexual mixing and “promotion of Islamophobia among the youth,” wants compulsory Islamic education at all levels and an end to “ungodly education, inheritance laws and unIslamic laws generally.” Christian and other NGOs are attacked for proselytizing and “an immediate and unconditional release of all detained Islamic scholars” is demanded.

Rather than defend the Shahbagh bloggers against fundamentalists, the government has found it expedient to crack down on them. When Hefazat e Islam prepared a list of 84 “atheist” bloggers, the government responded with its own list of those who had “hurt religious sentiments.” Four bloggers have been taken into custody and more arrests are threatened.  In order to humiliate and terrify dissenters, the police paraded the bloggers and had them photographed with their computers as if they found a cache of stolen goods. One blogger wrote, “it broke our hearts but it will not break our spirits.” Their accounts have been hacked, whether by non-state or state-backed people it is hard to say. Some bloggers have noticed that their arrested colleagues’ accounts remained active even after they were arrested, and have speculated that “evidence” may have been planted in them.

These demands are nothing new to Bangladesh, where Islamists have been trying to get a blasphemy law passed since the early nineties, when they went after the writer Taslima Nasrin. By labelling all bloggers as atheists, the fundamentalists hope turn the tide of public opinion against them. Throughout the war crimes trials, Jamaat’s strategy has been to say that they are being attacked as Muslims and as an opposition party, and to evade addressing the grave crimes  of which they are accused. Their lobbying campaign has been very persuasive for many MPs in Britain, who  demanded an invitation to monitor the Tribunal while also instructing the government of Bangladesh that they should not have ‘a retributive process’ but adopt a reconciliation model.

That is why it was heartening to see support for the principle of accountability from MPs from a range of parties. Two British MEPs, Charles Taylor, Conservative, and Jean Lambert of the Green Party, addressed a rally on war crimes in London on 28th April, which passed off peacefully. Emily Thornberry, the Shadow Attorney General, who has recently travelled in Bangladesh, acknowledged the strong democratic mandate for the trials and the immense strength of feeling on the issue. She said that if people were assured that life actually meant life, rather than a sentence that could be reversed by a change in government, the issue of the death penalty may not have arisen at all.

Writing in 2002 about the campaign by Jamaat e Islami and other fundamentalist organisations to make blasphemy a criminal offence, Bangladeshi Supreme Court lawyer Sara Hossain described a three-pronged strategy, “invoking criminal laws to curtail speech by targeted individuals and groups, fomenting a climate of intolerance against them, and mobilising public sentiment for the enactment of draconian new laws – as key tools in their project of silencing expressions of difference, and asserting their vision of a monolithic Islam.” All these elements are present in today’s battles.

The conflict between Bangladeshi secularists and fundamentalists has spread to London’s East End where, on Feb. 8th, at Altab Ali Park, young demonstrators supporting Shahbagh clashed with men from the Jamaat-dominated East London mosque.  For older anti-racists, the scenes were remniscent of decades old battles where the police simply protected the aggressors ‘freedom of speech’ and right to threaten and intimidate. Fundamentalist demonstrations from the Jamaat associated East London Mosque have been taking place regularly after Friday prayers, according to activists. Secular Bangladeshis of all religious backgrounds and none were finally able to rally and march outwards from Altab Ali park through Brick Lane and the surrounding streets. It was a suitable demonstration that the secular activists who have been receiving regular death threats have not been cowed into retreat.

Thousands of leaflets have been distributed from the East London Mosque and across the world labelling prominent bloggers as atheists. Sermons have been read attacking atheists, Hindus and suggestive statements made regarding sexual assault. In Bangladesh, fundamentalists  paraded a banner which said, ‘we demand the death penalty for atheist bloggers because they use obscene language to criticise Allah, Mohammed and the Quran.’  Statements such as these, along with murderous attacks on atheist and free thinking bloggers, need to be considered alongside the leaflets identifying named individuals as atheists and accusing them of insulting religion, to see whether they amount to incitement to  murder. Fundamentalists consider it an obligation for believers to kill apostates; a recent Moroccan fatwa  makes this very clear, as does the experience of an atheist from Bangladesh, applying for asylum in Canada.

It is clear that free-thinking activists will be actively targeted first by fundamentalists, and then by the state, so can expect no protection anywhere.

As Asif Mohiuddin, one of the Bangladeshi bloggers said just before his arrest, “To drag religion into politics and playing with it like a football is the real offence towards religion.”  Authorities in both London and Dhaka are playing with fire if they think protecting hate campaigns is the same as defending freedom of religion.

First appeared in the openDemocracy.net,  29 April 2013

Gita Sahgal, is a film maker and writer, formerly worked with the Amnesty International. She is founder of the Centre for Secular Space, which opposes fundamentalism, amplifies secular voices and promotes universality in human rights.

Bangladesh Islamist: Bad moon rising

The Shahbag protests in Dhaka, which were held recently to condemn Bengali Islamists' collaboration with the Pakistani Army in 1971, have found both allies and critics in India's West Bengal region. Ironically, the Indian state is exploiting the anti-Shahbag narrative - led by Islamist forces within India - to earn brownie points with what it sees as a valuable minority. But at what cost?

GARGA CHATTERJEE

1971 is still fresh in the mind of many Bengalis from the West, when a massive relief and solidarity effort was undertaken on our side of the border to help a mass of humanity trying to escape what has been described variously as "civil war" and "genocide". The leaders of the Jamaat-e-Islami in East Bengal and its student wing organized murder and rape squads, at times in collaboration with the Pakistani Armed Forces. Their specific crimes included mass-murder, rape as a weapon of war, arson and forced conversions. They escaped prosecution because Bangladeshi generals used them to cast an Islamic veneer of legitimacy over their illegal capture of power. In this way the JI was gradually rehabilitated. 

But then the present Awami League-led government came to power, and its manifesto promised the trial of war criminals. Thus started the proceedings against the collaborator mullahs in the War Crimes Tribunal. Last month's Shahbag protests were held to demand maximum punishment for the guilty. 

In West Bengal, which is in India, a few meetings and assemblies have happened around the issue of Shahbag. However, to the shock and dismay of many, the largest of these assemblies was a massive rally held in central Kolkata's Shahid Minar on 30th March, explicitly against the Shahbag protests and in support of the war criminals convicted by the tribunal. Various Muslim groups, including the All Bengal Minority Council, All Bengal Minority Youth Federation, Madrassa Students Union, Milli Ittehad Council and Sunnat-ul-Jamaat Committee, convened the meeting. People had also arrived in buses and trucks from distant districts of West Bengal like Murshidabad and Nadia, in additional to those from the adjoining districts of North and South 24 Parganas, Haora and Hooghly. Students of madrassas and the newly minted Aliah Madrassa University were conspicuous at the gathering.

They rallied because "Islam is in danger" in Bangladesh. Never mind that post-1947, that part of the world through all its forms (East Bengal, East Pakistan, People's Republic of Bangladesh) has seen a continuous drop in the population percentage of religious minorities, in every census since 1951.This rallying cry is not new. It was heard in 1952 when the motherland language movement was in full swing; in 1954 when the United Front led by Fazlul Haq and Maulana Bhashani challenged the Muslim League; in 1969 when the Awami League made its 6 demands; and in 1971 when Bengalees fought for independence. Now this demand is being made in the context of Shahbag in 2013. The pattern shows that 'Islam in danger' comes up during every secular movement for rights and justice. One of the main accused in the war-crimes trial, Golam Azam (also the leader of the Jamaat in East Pakistan in 1971), had used this old trick in the hat when he stated in 1971: "The supporters of the so-called Bangladesh Movement are the enemies of Islam, Pakistan, and Muslims." Replace 'Bangladesh' with 'Shahbag' and 'Pakistan' with 'Bangladesh', and you have the latest slogan.

Describing the struggle in Bangladesh as one between "Islam and Shaitan" (Satan), the Indian Muslim protestors announced at the meeting that they would cleanse West Bengal of those who were trying to support the present Prime Minister of Bangladesh and the war-crime trial effort. It was also threatened that those political forces that support Shahbag would be "beaten with broomsticks" if they came to ask for votes from Muslims. For effect they added that, just like Taslima Nasreen and Salman Rushdie, Sheikh Hasina too will be kept out of Kolkata. They also endorsed the anti-Shahbag "movement" in Bangladesh. This last assertion is especially worrisome as the so-called movement has let loose its fury on the religious minorities of Bangladesh. It has resulted in a wave of violent attacks on Hindus, Buddhists and secular individuals, with wanton burning and destruction of Hindu and Buddhist homes, businesses and places of worship. Amnesty International communique mentioned attacks on over 40 Hindu temples as of 6th March. The number is over 100 now and still rising. 

Given the recent trends of politics in West Bengal, this large gathering and its pronouncements are not shocking. The writing has been on the wall for a while. A collapse in the Muslim vote of the Left Front is an important factor in its recent demise after more than three decades of uninterrupted rule. Various Muslim divines like Twaha Siddiqui of Furfura Sharif have explicitly pointed out that decline as a point of threat to the present government. The Trinamool Congress wants to ensure a continued slice of this vote. The present government has tried to hand out sops to build a class of Muslim "community leaders" who eat out of its hand by giving monthly stipends to imams and muezzins. Very recently it was decided that such a cash scheme might be worked out for Muslim widows too. Given that it is beyond the ability of the debt-ridden, visionless government to solve the problems that are common to the poor, it has cynically chosen to woo a section of the marginalized on the basis of religion using handouts. These are excellent as speech-making points that masquerade as empathy and social justice. But it is dangerous politics to say the least. It sets into motion currents and gives fillip to forces whose trajectories are beyond the control of the present political groups. The Left Front's political fortune has not improved after its humiliating defeat. It has cynically chosen not to oppose this communal turn to West Bengal's politics, for it too believes that silently waiting for the incumbent to falter is a better roadmap to power. 

The damage such tactics are doing to the state's political culture is immense and may well be irreparable. The incumbent's connivance and the opposition's silence are largely due to decades of erosion in the culture of democratic political contestation through grassroots organizing. Both the incumbent and the opposition parties deal with West Bengal's sizeable minority population primarily via intermediaries, often doing away with any pretense of political ideology while indulging in that transaction.

For their part, organizations owing allegiance to a particular brand of political Islam have exploited this disconnect fully. An emerging bloc of Islamist divines and ex-student leaders have amassed students at short notice and launched protests to influence government policy. Such blackmailing is hardly aimed at uplifting the living standards of West Bengal's Muslims. Rather, it is a show of brute force that began with the successful driving-out of writer Taslima Nasreen during the Left Front regime. Its most recent example was the governmental pressure that managed to keep Salman Rushdie out of a proposed literary event in Kolkata, after he had successfully done such events in Bangalore, New Delhi and Mumbai. This slow pushing of the envelope fits into a sequence of events that are increasingly stifling the freedom of expression in India. At the same time, its double standards are explicit. On March 21st, a medium-sized group consisting of small magazine publishers, human rights workers, theatre artists, women's organizations and peace activists had announced that they would march in solidarity with the Shahbag protests and express their support to the Bangladesh government's war crimes trial initiative by marching to the Deputy High Commission of Bangladesh. Even after it had obtained prior intimation, the rally was not allowed to move by the police due to "orders" and some of the marchers were detained. The same police provided security cover to pro-Jamaat-e-Islami organizations as they conducted their rally a month earlier, and again later when they submitted a memorandum to the same Deputy High Commission demanding acquittal of convicted war criminals. Last year the state issued a circular to public libraries to stock a sectarian daily even before its first issue had been published! 

The role of the state is explicit in these actions - it thinks it can play this game of brinksmanship with finesse. The flight of cultural capital from India is but a natural corollary of such unholy alliances, with the political class playing tactical spectators and enablers. 

The recent bye-election to Jangipur, a Muslim majority constituency, carried certain signals. Prompted by the elevation of Mr. Mukherjee to India's Presidency, this election saw the combined vote of the two main parties fall from 95% in 2009 to 78% in 2012. The major beneficiaries were the Welfare Party of India, a thinly veiled front organization of the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind and the Social Democratic Party of India, an even more radical group of a similar ilk. Such groups are armed with a program of "tactical pluralism" (which is, it has to be said, akin to the tactical defence of Taslima Nasreen's freedom of speech by majoritarian communal political forces in the Indian Union). The rallying against Shahbag has blown the cover of faux pluralism. 

Communal tension in India has grown in recent years. There has, for instance, been serious disturbance by West Bengal standards in Deganga and Noliakhali. The majoritarian forces smell a subterranean polarization of the polity. Mouthing banalities about Bengal's "intrinsically" plural culture is useless: culture is a living entity, something that is always in flux, created and recreated every moment. At present it is being recreated by the victimization discourse of fringe groups like Hindu Samhati. And it is being recreated in religious congregations in parts of West Bengal where unalloyed poison produced by divines like Tarek Monawar Hossain from Bangladesh is played on loudspeakers. Thanks to technology, such vitriol produced in a milieu of free-style majoritarian muscle-flexing in Bangladesh easily finds its way to a place where the demographic realities are different. Hence the popularity and consequent defence of one of the convicted war criminals, Delwar Hossain Sayedee, who in his post-71 avatar had become something of a superstar in the Bengali waz-mahfil (Islamic religious discourse congregation) circuit. What are the effects of the subterranean cultural exchange of this kind? Well, one of them is a Holocaust-like denialism, evident in the audacious defence of Sayedee as proclaimed loudly at the recent rally in West Bengal.

First published in The Friday Times, April 19-25, 2013 - Vol. XXV, No. 10