Humanitarian and senior advisor to UNICEF Naza Alakija reflects on her childhood in Iran, and why the country’s ongoing protests are finally striking a chord globally.
On the day we left Iran, my mother was reprimanded at the airport for allowing me to travel without a veil. I remember her furiously answering the “morality police” and my grandparents desperately holding her back, their faces gripped with fear at the thought of how this could escalate.
It was the mid-’90s. I was nine. Up until that point I had been raised in Shahrak-e-Gharb in Tehran under the rule of the Republic. But the Iran that I remember feels a world away from the country that it is today; a youth where spring was spent playing amongst nature in a body that I believed belonged to me. That moment in the airport was a harrowing goodbye to a country that was ready and waiting to bring my childhood to a close against the backdrop of increasing oppression.
Iran has become a society in which misogyny and patriarchal ideology lurk behind the pretence of religious doctrine and theocracy. Faith has very little to do with it – the intention of the regime is centred on controlling and oppressing women. The enforcement of the hijab is the ultimate symbol of their ideology. As soon as a girl reaches puberty in Iran, if not several years before, she is told she must dress modestly and cover her hair.
Sadly, my father was one of these perpetrators, which eventually led my mother to raise me and my brother alone.and the world watched on in shock and awe at what appeared to be a sudden uprising, there was nothing that seemed sudden about it to me. For the women of Iran, the outpouring of angst that has followed is an intergenerational outcry. They have lived through four decades of this.
The unanimity of the outcry has eclipsed ethnic and gender disparities, and now finally, it is transcending borders and cultures. People around the world are finally understanding the realities of life in the Republic. I’ve seen people around the globe utterly moved by the defiance of revolutionaries armed with scissors. The ones who have cut off their hair and woven through the tear-gassed crowds.
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