Iranian women have been standing hand in hand for nearly a year now, against one of the most brutal and oppressive regimes ruling the world. After the tragic death of Mahsa Amini, they have filled their lives with the sweetness of a serious, courageous, and persistent struggle for freedom. They have taken off the forced hijab as a symbol of the structural oppression of women and have paid the price for this fight with their lives. They have faced harassment, threats, beatings, assaults, and insults from the security and military forces on the streets and public places, and have endured imprisonment and torture. However, the government sees women’s freedom as equivalent to the collapse of its ideological grip and the displacement of its hegemonic foundation. For this reason, the judicial system, legislature, security and military institutions, and self-proclaimed forces have been mobilized, and the institutions of “enjoining good and forbidding wrong” have been equipped throughout Iran, chasing after the oppressed women and calling their

The revolutionary council, which was unable to bring the bill on securing women’s safety against violence to the public forum after more than fourteen years of being passed between politicians, is now urgently reviewing the bill on hijab and chastity in order to address the widespread issue of structural violence against women.

The bill entitled “Supporting Families through Veil and Chastity” from the beginning to the end reveals the excessive concern of the Islamic Republic system about the presence of women in the public sphere and their struggle against compulsory veiling, and unveils the curtain of a determined effort to suppress the movement and eliminate women.

First, with the assumption that the institution of family has not fulfilled its duties properly and has weakened women by putting up barriers and restrictions, and has allowed their disobedience and rebellion to prevail, the idea of reforming the family and strengthening loyal commitments within it arises. This is done through educating couples on the Islamic way of life, and making it mandatory for all government agencies to establish a mechanism for learning the Islamic way of life from representatives of religious seminaries. Then, detailed preparations are made for organizing and monitoring practical operations, and all agents are engaged and obligated to it in some way.

The draft aims to create an antagonistic conflict between unveiled women and owners of speech, professions, trades, and different places, and to try to put the burden of suppressing women on the shoulders of other people, and to govern with ease over the conflicting dual poles that it imagines in its mind. The draft is based on putting the heterogeneous masses of people in a predetermined ideological framework and shaping them like a flexible dough according to its own desires and will, and authoritatively determining their lines of thought, lifestyle, fashion, clothing, transportation, education, and healthcare.

The draft does not know the people who have spent the past year in the turmoil of the revolution and have achieved their human rights with their lives, wealth, comfort, and freedom. They will never enter the factory of building a human being equal to the Islamic Republic and society is not in a situation to once again put its head on the path of oppression and calm down, and the social conditions do not lead to the emergence of a regressive populism. The people have long been scattered from the scattered system and nothing connects them to the body of government.

All the perspectives that the bill depicts in imagination revolve around the axis of changing lifestyle through the help of compulsory education. However, the bill’s authors are not aware of the alphabet of society and do not know that lifestyle is not created in the factory of ideology. Some consider lifestyle as the material expression of individual identity, which serves as a powerful force in all aspects of human life, including ways of thinking, awareness, giving meaning to life, social relationships, activities and actions, frameworks and boundaries, leisure time, companionship, etc. The formation of this concept is the result of historical action, land, culture, language, and communication between nations. Anthony Giddens, a British sociologist, sees lifestyle as a product of reflection in the modern era; because having it requires individuals to choose from various options to both construct their identity and meet their life needs. Pierre Bourdieu, a famous French sociologist, sees lifestyle as a product of systematic habits and will, which is understood

Therefore, the concept that is structured and enforced with violence, laws, and resorting to threats, coercion, punishment, expulsion, and elimination, and relies on ideology, aims to unify society and change its view towards family, hijab, and loyalty, and organize space based on gender, and even determine “fashion” for the first time in the world according to the government’s desires, is not considered a way of life, and planning and structuring to suppress differences and diversity and lifestyles through the use of security-based criminal policies.

From this perspective, the foundation of the draft, which intends to modernize the lives of a nation with seventy fundamental articles, is based on a serious misunderstanding and a serious sociological perspective. Furthermore, the draft writers seem to have not understood or are not willing to understand the significant social changes of the past year. They are not aware that the people have long been freed from the shackles of the oppressive regime. The draft writers fail to comprehend the inhumane and unethical suppression of the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement by the government, which has crossed all boundaries of violence and cruelty, leaving no one to believe in the legitimacy of the regime. Under the shadow of ideology and social obligations, the government has no right to engage in conflicts with unveiled women, protesting men, and those who spread news and spy against them.

After efforts to create a comprehensive structure for the suppression of women throughout the country and all its inhabitants, and the punishments in the recent section of the bill, which clearly shows the government’s insistence on expelling women from public spaces and encouraging men to confront them as a deterrent to their normal business activities. The bill includes detailed and numerous and unprecedented crimes; including penalties for business owners and workers who allow veiled individuals to enter their place of business, as well as designing, reproducing, promoting, and importing and exporting prohibited clothing.

The draft bill alone has been hit by inflation in the criminal system of this land. Sometimes the prescribed punishments are based on discrimination and involve giving superiority to their own forces – such as the situation of punishment for those who harass veiled women – or for expelling women, they have imposed strange and contradictory punishments to the principle of personal punishment and contrary to the constitution and ordinary laws, and it is on this basis that by setting a monetary penalty as punishment, it punishes women with poverty and destitution and as a result, forces them out of the public sphere, and punishes the poor who cannot afford it, once for exercising their human right to freedom of dress and once for poverty.

But what is being discussed under the title of the bill in the committees of the Islamic Consultative Assembly is not actually a proposal by the government and the judiciary to establish a new law that addresses rights and responsibilities. Rather, it is a comprehensive, widespread, and all-encompassing plan for the suppression of women by a ruling authority; a plan in which all branches of the system, all government employees, students, teachers, healthcare workers, researchers, etc. are mobilized against women and both encouraged and punished at the same time. Through this plan, all spaces are gendered and all ministries are required to draw boundaries and segregate genders. As a result, even the Housing and Urban Development Organization is required to make the space above homes off-limits, or related health and medical institutions are forced to segregate genders.

This bill results in creating a prison the size of a country, in the company of women from that country.

But the organizers of war, both visible and hidden, are completely unaware of their own situation with women and do not realize how their strong insistence on suppression undermines their power foundations.