Morally bankrupt: the failure of Western feminism in the face of Islamic oppression.

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Hadis Jahaan-far, Quantitative Sociologist specializing in women’s rights and equality

Disclaimer: I am a strong advocate of women’s rights and full equality. What I reject is the idea that Western feminism is the only or universal path to achieving them, especially in non Western societies. Feminism emerged from Western history and culture and does not automatically work for the East.

TL;DR.

Iranian women are waging a direct revolt against an Islamic legal system that governs not only their bodies but their lives. Much of Western feminism, especially left wing feminism, refuses to attribute the problem of this oppression to Islamic law. By holding Islam up as an untouchable identity and not an ideology, Western feminism has smothered the women it professes to embrace and thereby silenced its own women and placed itself as the morally bankrupt woman in which in this treatment is its own moral bankruptcy. By treating Islam not as an ideology but as a harmless identity, not as a religion and rejecting and repressing the rights and liberties of women.

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What Resistance Looks Like Inside Iran

In Iran today, women are on the leading line on perhaps the most radical uprising of the present era, a revolution against modern-day Iran. Young girls and women line up at the front lines, taking off their hijabs in public, burning them out in the street and lighting up images of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Islamic Republic’s supreme political and religious leader. These are not symbolic protests. In Iran, they are a crime punishable by prison, torture or death [1]. Such defiance is not academic. It is the result of a life of oppression.

Iranian women are not protesting an abstract patriarchy. They are rebelling against a political system that is openly built on Islamic values, regulation of their bodies, limiting their movement, depriving them of legal status and treating them as inherently unequal. Under the law of Iran, women’s testimony is half that of a man, inheritance is unequal, hijab is compulsory and enforced by the state, and morality police monitor daily life [2][3]. They make this clear and unapologetically.

And yet, as these women risk everything, a striking absence stays: the silence of Western feminism. That silence is not coincidental. It is ideological. And it unveils the roots of a movement that is intellectually dishonest and morally bankrupt now.

When Feminism Become Afraid of Ideas

Fourth wave feminism, which emerged in the early 2010s, describes itself through intersectionality, identity politics, and resisting power. Ideally, it should be prepared to challenge systematic oppression. Effectively, it has developed one deadly blind spot: Islam.

In modern left wing feminist discourse, Islam is no longer treated as an ideology, meaning a belief system with legal, moral, and political consequences. It is taken for an identity, safeguarded from critique similar to race or ethnicity. Consequently, criticism of Islamic law is reflexively cast as Islamophobia, even when expressed directly by women living under Islamic law [4]. This is abandoning feminism’s most fundamental tenet: the right to criticize systems that control women’s lives.

Iranian women are not confused about what is oppressive against them. They are not demanding softening their mouths from Western scholars. They say that this system is violent, they say, because it is Islamic. Its statement undermines the dominant theory, so it is erased, watered down or re-translated into words that are more palatable like authoritarianism, culture, or misuse of religion.

But Iran’s oppression of women is no accident. Mandatory hijab laws, unequal inheritance, reduced legal testimony, restrictions on travel and moral policing all aren’t cultural oddities. Hence they are elements of an Islamic legal order enforced by a clerical state [5].

Silence Is a Choice

Western feminists’ suppressed response to Iran’s uprising reveals the contradiction at the center of feminism as we perceive it today. Movements that mobilise, on the one hand, immediately over symbolic grievances in the West, on the other, have largely failed to mobilize over women beaten and killed for taking a headscarf off [6]. This is not ignorance. The images are everywhere. The silence is a choice.

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Why? Because true solidarity would mean naming Islamic law itself as a source of oppression. That is still prohibited for much of the left in the West.

Instead, Western feminists claim to be on the side of Iranian women while denying that they are actively fighting. Some even caution Iranian dissidents against their pronouncements, lest such words stoke Islamophobia. Thus oppressed women must lower their voices so Western activists can maintain ideological ease [7]. That is not solidarity. It is condescension.

The Hijab Lie

Nothing highlights this moral collapse more than how the hijab is treated by Western feminists. In the West, it’s held up as an emblem of emancipation and choice. In Iran, women are beaten, jailed, and die for not wearing this clothing [8].

Iranian women burn their hijab precisely because they understand what Western feminists won’t admit: clothing imposed by law cannot be a token of liberation. To celebrate the hijab while ignoring compulsory veiling is not at all culturally sensitive. This is willful blindness.

Feminism without courage is empty

Iranian women are doing something feminism has long insisted on doing: challenging power directly at great personal cost. They do not need Western feminists to reinterpret their struggle. They need honesty and solidarity without conditions.

Until Western feminism can clearly and fearlessly declare that no religion, no ideology, or culture is above women’s rights, it will remain what it already is: morally bankrupt, intellectually compromised, and unworthy of the women who are actually fighting for freedom.

References

1. BBC News. Iran protests: Why women are taking the lead. 2022. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-63047363

2. Freedom House. Iran: Freedom in the World 2023 https://freedomhouse.org/country/iran/freedom-world/2023

3. Human Rights Watch. Everything You Need to Know About Iran’s Morality Police. 2022 https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/09/22/everything-you-need-know-about-irans-morality-police

4. Phyllis Chesler. The Death of Feminism. Palgrave Macmillan. 2005 https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9781403978407

5. United Nations Human Rights Council. Situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran. 2023. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/03/iran-women-and-girls-systematically-discriminated-against

6. CNN. Iran protests: Women killed and detained for defying hijab law. 2022. https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/07/middleeast/iran-protests-women-intl/index.html

7. Politico. Masih Alinejad on why the world must listen to Iranian women. 2022 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/10/07/masih-alinejad-iran-women-protests-00060863

6. Amnesty International. Iran: Women tortured for defying compulsory hijab laws. 2023 https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/03/iran-women-tortured-for-defying-compulsory-hijab-laws/