Hijab Enforcers
and the Everyday Resistances of Life

Everyone knows the news: the increasing presence of hijab enforcers at metro stations and the filming of passengers in order to impose compulsory hijab.
The question now is: what will society choose?

We, the people, lose our power only when we believe we have none. The greatest weapon of the oppressor is nothing other than the mind of the oppressed person.

Let us revisit a historical story.
In 1955, a major civil movement began in Montgomery, Alabama, in the United States.
The movement, which came under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr., became known as the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

The boycott began after the arrest of Rosa Parks, a Black woman who refused to give her seat on a bus to a white passenger. This event led the Black community to decide to boycott Montgomery’s bus system.

The boycott, which lasted for more than a year, demonstrated the power of solidarity and nonviolent resistance by a community subjected to repression and discrimination against racism. It not only contributed to improving conditions for Black people in Montgomery but became an inspiration for other civil-rights movements throughout the United States.

Martin Luther King, then a young man, emerged as one of the movement’s principal leaders. Through his steadfast commitment to Black civil rights, he helped accelerate the struggle for equality and social justice.

The truth is that a metro boycott would become an effective display of social unity only if Iranian men joined women in the boycott. But why, up to now, have similar cases—such as banning women from stadiums—not been accompanied by a boycott by most men, either through refusing to attend or refusing to participate in sporting events?

A look at the history of Iranian women’s civil movements—for example the struggle for women’s right to education at the end of the Qajar period—shows that only a limited number of men supported that movement. Yet women ultimately prevailed through their own persistence.

There is no doubt that the community of Iranian men today is not the same as the male society of the Qajar era. The reason is precisely those women who, through a century of education and advancement, raised men different from and more progressive than the men of previous generations.

In my view, the central challenge in our society today is, above all, the absence of effective social leaders such as Martin Luther King. Through his steadfast defence of Black civil rights he helped accelerate the struggle for equality and social justice. This is an important social function of nonviolent leaders such as him in expanding social rights and freedoms.

Michel de Certeau, the French scholar, examined tactics of everyday resistance in his 1980 book *The Practice of Everyday Life*.
He argues that in the absence of coherent leadership, people express resistance individually in their everyday lives through creative and unexpected uses of available resources and spaces.

For example, instead of boycotting the metro, people enter it and, whenever they can, refrain from compulsory dress within that space. In doing so they transform what was supposed to be a site of repression into a site of their own resistance.

This form of resistance—creative, individual-centred and dispersed—is described here as a “de Certeau tactic”, in contrast to strategic resistance such as a metro boycott. It appears that our society has presently chosen this form of resistance, which, in the de Certeauian account presented here, creatively erodes repression.

Over the past year we have seen this form of resistance almost continuously, every day, only a small part of it entering the news—for example today’s report about students at Sharif campus choosing not to wear compulsory hijab during their graduation ceremony. The individual cost of “de Certeau’s tactics” is heavy, but they are more flexible and, across their wider field, more difficult to suppress socially. They keep resistance alive and flowing through every alley and street.

What is certain is that compulsory hijab will sooner or later pass into history in our society. Future generations will look upon our history with astonishment, just as we look with surprise upon periods in which women did not have the right to education or to vote. All this passed into history in less than a century. Everything we treat today as obvious was made possible through the heroic struggle of individuals who fought to make these things obvious.