You may not remember, but you have tried far more than this before. “Either a headscarf or a blow to the head” is not the creativity or policy of today.

You have already travelled the road of preventing employment and entry into government offices; sentences of flogging and imprisonment; arrest, humiliation and forced undertakings; beatings in the street; and heavy fines substituted for imprisonment.

Today add washing the dead, forced labour as cleaners, reading books and copying them out, and referral to a psychologist. These latest punishments reveal above all your own inner fears and what you yourselves regard as difficult and painful: reading and writing, the dignity of serving people, and consulting a psychologist.

But what was the result of all those restrictions and punishments that makes you imagine the outcome will be different today?

What you do not understand is that it is impossible to take away by force a human being’s free will and right to choose. If it were possible, many more than you would have been attracted to the idea and achieved it before you. But they did not.

If you, or anyone else, have worn the hijab willingly and with genuine conviction, the reason was not compulsion. It was either because you chose it yourself or because you grew up in a family where hijab had already been chosen by the previous generation and you internalised it as a value from childhood.

Somewhere in Dostoevsky’s *Notes from Underground* he writes, in the rendering given here:
Tell a human being that they have no choice and are nothing but a piano key, and they will descend into madness and even set themselves and the world on fire to prove that a human being is still a human being and not a piano key. Even if you prove through scientific laws that they are a piano key, threaten them, or direct them throughout life so that they cannot desire anything outside the limits of your rules, they will still rebel in order to prove that a human being is a human being and not a piano key.

You have driven this beautiful country and its good people toward the edge of destruction through this futile madness, only because you fail to understand that human freedom is a precondition of salvation. Even God did not take away human freedom of choice in order to make humanity eternal in paradise. If God praised Himself for this creation, what was it for if not the creation of a being who, higher than the angels eternally in paradise, possessed the right to choose?

Continue along this road beside ISIS, the Taliban and Boko Haram to its end and see which will remain in history: you, or human freedom of choice.

Aydin Areta