How ‘saving Muslim women’ helps justify the self-serving wars of Western democracies
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The assassination of Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the possible end of the Islamic regime is being perceived and discussed as particularly beneficial for Iranian women. In joint strikes on February 28, the US and Israel attacked Iran, killing Khamenei and other senior leaders in the country, setting off a broader confrontation in West Asia.
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On social media and in the news, videos and posts claim to show women especially, dancing and celebrating Khamenei’s death. The undertone is that the US and Israel are now the saviours of Iran and especially Iranian women – even as the strikes bombed a primary school in Iran, killing at least 165 people, most of them girls between the ages of seven to 12. As of March 5, Iran’s death toll had crossed 1,000, according to a local news agency.
Such gendered narratives have a long history.
For instance, a series of widely circulated images compare “women in Iran in the 1970s”, dressed stylishly in short skirts and dresses, their hair free, with images of women after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, in black chadors or headscarves. Among the most popular of these images is one showing women sitting in a public space, their legs bare and hair open.
But this is disingenuous. It ignores the reality that the regime under pro-American Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah...