A protester holds a portrait of Mahsa Amini during a demonstration in Iran. Many women protesters defiantly symbolically took off their hijabs and burned them in bonfires in support of Mahsa Amini. AFP
New Delhi: Hijab-wearing women have joined the anti-hijab movement in Iran claiming mandatory hijab impinges on their right to voluntarily wear it.
A woman with hijab from Mashhad, one of the most religious cities of Iran has said that women with hijab have joined the uprising.
“We hijabi women are against compulsory hijab. It trumps on our rights who wear it voluntarily as well.”
Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian, was pronounced dead on 16 September after she was detained for allegedly breaching rules requiring women to wear hijab headscarves and modest clothes, sparking Iran’s biggest wave of popular unrest in almost three years.
Solidarity rallies with Iranian women — who have defiantly burnt the hijabs they have been obliged to wear since the 1979 Islamic revolution — have been held worldwide, with demonstrations in more than 150 cities over the weekend.
In Iran itself, clashes between protesters and security forces have rocked cities nationwide for several days in a row after they first flared in western regions home to Amini and Iran’s Kurdish minority.
Students in Iran also clashed with security forces at a top Tehran university amid the wave of unrest sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini.
Concern grew over violence at Sharif University of Technology overnight where, local media reported, riot police confronted hundreds of students, using tear gas and paintball and carrying weapons that shoot non-lethal steel pellets.
“Woman, life, liberty,” students shouted, as well as “students prefer death to humiliation”, the Iranian Mehr news agency reported, adding that the country’s science minister later came to speak to the students in an effort to calm the situation.
(With inputs from agencies)
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