[ The far reach of the Iranian and U.S. struggles for freedom is a
testament to the tenacity and resistance of both Iranian and African
American women against master-slave relations.]
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THE SHARED STRUGGLE OF IRANIAN WOMEN AND AFRICAN AMERICANS  
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Piruz Alemi and Gregory N. Heires
September 20, 2023
The New Crossroads
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_ The far reach of the Iranian and U.S. struggles for freedom is a
testament to the tenacity and resistance of both Iranian and African
American women against master-slave relations. _

Women on the streets of Iran, protesting for human rights., Photo:
Richard Vogel/AP

 

The struggle for freedom of women in Iran and the fight against racism
in the United States — seemingly unrelated or independent – are
shared struggles as deep as the ocean. 

The gender segregation imposed after the 1978-79 Islamic Revolution is
fundamentally no different from the black code laws implemented after
the Civil War (1861-65) in the United States. In both instances, a
conservative ruling elite adopted a system of apartheid based upon
police terror and religious authority to maintain its hegemonic power
through unwritten and written laws.

Historically, African Americans have been at the forefront of
movements to make the United States live up to the country’s
democratic promise. But sadly, with polls showing Democratic President
Joseph Biden running neck and neck with Republican Donald Trump, the
indicted former president, there is a real fear that United States
could move in the opposite direction as white supremacist voters
succeed in ushering an era of fascism, long in the making.

THE PERSISTENCE OF STRUGGLE

The far reach of the Iranian and U.S. struggles for freedom is a
testament to the tenacity and resistance of both Iranian and African
American women against master-slave relations.

Make no mistake about it, the Woman Life Freedom (WLF) movement is a
21st century abolitionist movement against gender apartheid in the
country and region. 

Indeed, the cause of WLF in Iran mirrors the cause of emancipated
slaves in a long, persistent struggle for political, civil and
economic rights that has continued to this day. Black Lives Matter in
the United States is but one strand of a larger abolitionist movement.

African-American activists, philosophers and feminists like Angela
Davis view the opposition to police brutality of African Americans in
the United States and the challenge of Iranian women facing state
terror as a common struggle.  

The two domestic yet international struggles reflect and feed upon
each other’s history of activism and have much to share.

Davis describes the struggles in both countries as a reflection of a
growing worldwide movement against patriarchy, segregation, and
economic inequality. Davis views the Iranian protestors as “the
harbingers of hope for all that want an end to racial capitalism,
misogyny, and economic repression.”

IRANIAN WOMEN’S BOND WITH THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS STRUGGLE

The current rebellion in Iran stems from the death of Mahsa Amini,
also known as Jina, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, in Sept. 16, 2022. 

Brutally beaten and tortured, she died three days after being taken
into custody by the country’s morality police for improperly wearing
her head scarf as required by sharia law. Pieces of her hair revealed
from under her head scarf constituted her crime.

The murder–which the theocratic state infamously attributed to a
natural heart attack–struck a deep chord that sparked demonstrations
in 80 cities throughout the country, revealing the depth of the
resentment for the Islamic state and exposing the plight of Iranian
women and their fight for freedom to the world. 

In 2022, the state atrocities included the killing of some 530 people
many of them children. The number of people imprisoned rose to more
than 20,000 by April of this year.

Norway-based Iran human rights group reported 354 executions in the
first half of 2023. Where legitimacy has failed, terror has been the
modus operandi of the Islamic state’s morality police.

Recalling post-Reconstruction practices of White Leagues, red-shirt
groups of Mississippi, Louisiana, North and South Carolina, and the
lynching of African Americans by the Ku Klux Klan, paramilitary and
undercover agents in Iran target and kidnap demonstrators in public to
further terrorize public assemblies.

During the demonstrations, the protestors’ signature chants are
“Death to the dictator!,” “Don’t be scared, don’t be scared,
we are all together,” “We do not want Islamic Republic” and
“This State is a baby killer,” the last a reference to gassing
high schools, as a system of punishing the youth.

Reuters notes “The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s is a great
guide. Today, America’s best Middle East expert is Dr. Martin Luther
King” who said, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our
enemies, but the silence of our friends.” 

In conversations, protestors often share how they find inspiration in
new methods of struggle. The rap music and protest songs of Toomaj
Salehi, currently sentenced to six years in prison, is reminiscent of
how African Americans advanced their struggle through spirituals, the
blues and jazz. 

In 1978 Khomeini banned chess, music, dance and singing by women. But
Persian culture and its spirit of creativity has persevered despite
Islamization, as reflected by the protests.

The two historical struggles share much in tactics. Both advocate
individual rights, peaceful civil disobedience, general strikes, and
creative arts in their calls for political transformation of civil
society.

Both struggles have vast international solidarity and are century-old
historical struggles. 

Some 8 million Iranians living overseas or in exile are more than an
echo of the WLF struggle, as they join with progressive international
forces to fight the gender apartheid. This is exposing the
international corporate and banking deals that help legitimize the
Islamic state’s brutal repression of its opposition, primarily
women. 

In the words of Golshifteh Farahani, the Iranian activist, interviewed
on CNN, “When other countries come in and inject money in that
system they are participating in every bloodshed”. That includes the
United States, China, and now the Saudis, according to Farahani.

When it comes to defending human rights and women’s liberation, the
international community seems utterly paralyzed by multi-national
corporate interests’ reluctance to deal with anything but profit. In
this international bureaucracy of inter-continental master-slave
relations no one is held accountable for violating human rights.
Violence, rape and sexual assault as a preferred method of terror has
become the nature of it all. 

BLACK-CODE LAWS = SHARIA LAWS

The similarities of black code enforcement of racial segregation and
sharia laws of gender segregation is striking.

In the United States, as described by historian C. Vann Woodward,
“The code lent the sanction of law to racial ostracism that extended
to churches and schools, to housing and jobs, to eating and drinking.
Whether by law or custom, that ostracism extended to virtually all
forms of public transportation, to sports and recreations, to
hospitals, orphanages, prisons, asylums, and ultimately to funeral
homes, morgues, and cemeteries.” 

Similarly in Iran, gender segregation has extended to restaurants,
sports facilities (women are banned from football stadiums), parks,
swimming in pools, rivers, lakes, seas, public transportation (women
are not permitted to ride a motorcycle), the judiciary (women are
barred from becoming judges), mosques, universities and schools.  

Legally, married women need the official permission of their husbands
to obtain a passport to travel outside the country. The sharia code
allows a husband to prohibit his wife from having a job he regards as
against “family values,” while maintaining the legitimacy of
having four legal wives for himself.  

Dress codes–including the forced hijabs–are imposed on women from
all walks of life. The only exception to these rules seems to be
foreigners or diplomats with immunity who, not surprisingly, follow
the Islamist rules. 

Journalist and activist Ida B. Wells (1862-1931), a chronicler of the
horrors of Jim Crow and one of the founders of the NAACP, explains how
the system of terror was grounded and applied systematically in United
States. Her work applies equally to what is going on today in Iran,
Afghanistan and elsewhere. 

Just as Jim Crow enforced segregation, sharia law is the foundation
for today’s misogynist practices in Iran. The Jim Crow statutes were
upheld by what Wells calls “unwritten laws” based on “customs”
and “common senses” that legitimize repression. In Iran, religious
and social practices uphold the oppression of women.

“Lynching were public spectacles turned into ways of thinking and
customs by a white majority before they became written laws in
confederate States,” Wells said. From 1882 to 1968, 4,743 lynchings
occurred in the United States, according to NAACP records, and
hundreds of African Americans were killed as they fought for their
political rights after Reconstruction.

Today, the Islamo-fascist state is carrying out a similar
Machiavellian reign of terror, which is vital for the survival of an
autocratic state. Soon after the Jina rebellion began in September
2022, the state hung the bodies of their political opponents in public
spaces, from cranes in the town of Mashad, a Shiite holly city in
eastern Iran. 

Iran Human Rights reports that bodies were displayed in soccer
stadiums and shown on national TV. The public display of terror
recalls the public lynching—often announced in advance by city
councils—during the Jim Crow era in the United States.

In the southern states governed by Jim Crow practices, segregation was
enforced through the terror machinery of citizen councils, whose
members included white evangelicals. Similar citizen councils that
enforce Islamic laws through custom and terror are also present in
Iran. They include liberal men and reformists of all walks as well.

The unwritten laws described by Ida B. Wells find their Islamic
versions in Fatwas, which are used to enforce Islamic laws. Any
Islamist jurist (_mujtahid_) can issue a Fatwa and any Muslim can
forbid a “wrong” presumably based on the word of God. Fatwas were
used in calls for assassination of Persian activist Masih Alinejad and
the attacks on writers such as Salman Rushdie and Iranian historian
Ahmad Kasravi. 

“THE ORIGIN OF OTHERS”

The masculine-based superiority complex underlying Iranian patriarchy
subjugates women by constructing “The Other,” a term author and
Nobel prize winner of literature Toni Morrison uses to describe the
method of racism in master-slave relations in the United States.

In “The Origin of Others,” Morrison writes, “What is denied in
the other is personhood, the specific individuality we insist upon
ourselves.”  She adds, “What more, really, do you know about
these characters when you know their race? Anything?”

The concept of master-slave otherness provides a justification for
maintaining power over excluded groups, especially minorities, through
dehumanization and subjugation. The more slaves, the more the power of
the master.

The idea of the “Other” legitimizes economic exploitation and
ideological domination through the ruling ideas of an authority (like
white power) on what constitutes good or is forbidden, beautiful or
ugly. Interpreted broadly, the “Other” is an expression that
reflects master-slave relations enforced by black code laws of racial
segregation in the South.

Sharia laws have codified similar master-slave relationships in Iran
through the state, mosques and schools, down to city councils and
families.

The categorization of women as society’s “Other” has led to a
marginalization of women in the economy. In 2020, the labor force
participation rate of women was 14 percent compared to 70 percent for
men—even though over 57 percent of university graduates were then
women. A quota system in admissions further restricted Iranian
women.  

But women are fighting the mullahs’ gender-based dehumanization
through the art of politics, creative arts and freedom of expression.

They are challenging their rulers through music, songs, dance,
theater, cinema, photography, painting, and literary works and
performing arts. Women are defending the right to flow their hair in
the air freely—anywhere.

Similarly, for the black community in the United States, music, songs,
history and literature have often been tied to identity and rebellion
against bigotry, perhaps best exemplified in the case of Billie
Holiday 1939 protest song “Strange Fruit.”

THE FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY

Increasingly, the Women, Life, Freedom movement is about democratic
rights. Formally, Iranian women have the right to vote. But in
practice that’s meaningless as the mullahs control the political
agenda and name their own candidates. 

In the United States, African Americans confront voter restriction
laws, the weakening of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 by the U.S.
Supreme Court and voter intimidation–reminders of how fragile the
country’s democratic institutions remain despite historic civil
rights gains. 

Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, in a talk at Colorado
University earlier this year, expressed her optimism that the
women’s rights movement will lead to a permanent rebuke to the
mullahs and the rise of democracy in Iran.

“Today’s fight led by women stands to be more far-reaching than
the male-dominated overthrow of the Shah in 1979 that led to the
installation of the country’s theocratic, dictatorship,” she said.

“This time, in 2022, when women took to the streets and decided to
cut their hair off, the men decided to support the women, and that’s
why this revolution will succeed,” Ebadi said. 

“It’s a glamorous revolution—the men have found out that
democracy will come to Iran through women’s rights,” Ebadi said.
She said that the rebellion carries a message for U.S. women, who must
not back down in the face of the loss of the constitutional right to
abortion that threatens to result in a further loss of their rights.

ECONOMIC RIGHTS

The women’s movement is occurring as Iranians face a deepening of
the country’s long-term economic problems, including growing
inequities, insufficient jobs, and a gender-based segmentation of the
work force. 

As more Iranians fall into poverty, women have suffered
disproportionately. Mullahs are the top beneficiaries of Iran’s
annual billions of dollars in oil and gas revenues. Without oil, the
Iranian theocracy has no material or financial base. Its rial currency
does not circulate on the basis of a fatwa or Islam.

In his 1963 “I have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke
of the “othering”—or marginalization–of African Americans in
the U.S. economy, saying “America has given the Negro people a bad
check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’”
The government reneged on its promise to provide freedmen 40 acres and
mule after the Civil War.

In the more than 150 years since then, African Americans have faced
persistent economic and other hardships including job, housing and
credit discrimination, pay inequity, redlining and educational
inequality, all of which has led to a great racial wealth gap. The
average per capita wealth of white Americans was $338,093 in 2019 but
only $60,126 for Black Americans, according to the Federal Reserve
Bank of Minneapolis. That’s a 6 to 1 gap.

THE END OF THE ISLAMIC STATE?

Today, activists and political analysts are increasingly predicting
that women’s revolution in Iran will ultimately topple the mullahs
and lead to democracy. “How long? Not long” as Dr. King would ask
in relation to the 1960’s civil rights movement in United States. 

Increasingly, the international community and its civil groups need to
take the initiative themselves rather than rely on their respective
governments’ empty slogans to stand for and uphold individual or
human rights at home or abroad. WLF is an abolitionist movement waging
a protracted civil war against slavery. International support for the
movement is building, despite growing banking transactions for Islamic
state’s oil and gas exports. 

The Islamic state’s widespread repression and terror speaks to how
seriously the mullahs have taken their opposition to Iran’s civil
society, especially women. The repression also has shown how through
executing absolute terror, the Islamic State lost legitimacy.

Without legitimacy, no state can govern for long by relying solely on
violence and terror. Today, what gives these mullahs their power is
not just the Sharia laws but also state power backed by
morality-police terror. 

The billions in oil and gas revenues accrued with the support of
international corporate finance, led by United States, the United
Kingdom, the European Union and China, provides the material basis and
literally the bloody fuel for the Islamic theocracy. 

_Piruz Alemi is a contributor to the Antonio Gramsci International
Studies at Marxist Education Program (MEP). He is guest lecturer in
the Dept of Politics, Economics and Law at the State University of New
York and a faculty member at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Blogger Gregory N. Heires is the former president of the NY Metro
Labor Communications Council._

* Iranian women
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* African American Women
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* liberation struggles
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