If the perpetuity of click-baiting validates anything, it is that nothing sells better than fear. And subscribing to this dogma has meant that since 9/11, newspapers, cable news, blogs, social media and advertisements all over the world have capitalized on fabricating a fear of Islam. For over two decades, the average consumer has been trained to view societal ills through a warped interpretation of Islamic ideology. Scholars call this form of representation ‘pulp orientalism,’ whereby those of Middle East and North African (MENA) heritage are understood as either violent radicals or oppressed victims. Either way, they are personifications of a backward system broadcasted on news forums and satirical comic bits, or as personified plot devices in movies and television — such as Raza in Marvel’s Iron Man and Nadia Shanaa on Netflix’s Elite. To most outside the MENA region, this pulp orientalism has interwoven a common thread of religion between the Iranian government and Iranian citizens such that they can be distinguished by obedience to or against Islam and little else. However, this is a gross oversimplification. Simply put, the people of Iran are engaged in a civil rights revolution demanding a dissolution of the current theocratic regime under 83-year-old Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. While the curtailment of civil liberties forms the crux of the citizens’ grievance with their government, brought to ignition by the abuse and subsequent death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the ‘morality’ police, Iranian leadership was already sitting on a powder keg of discontent.

To begin with, Former U.S. President Trump’s sanctions after Iran failed to dismantle its nuclear program according to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in November 2018 led to a sharp nosedive in the currency value of the Iranian Rial. This was soon followed by the prohibition of all political candidates except the Khamenei-backed Ebrahim Raisi in the 2021 presidential race, which gathered the lowest voter turnout in Iran yet. Additionally, 60% of Iran’s economy is state-planned and the other private 40% has to compete with large state-funded businesses masquerading as independent religious enterprises. This has resulted in economic monopolization that has produced a ten-fold increase in the cost of everything since 2018 with record high unemployment and declining wages. Worse still, their reaction to those who dissent, either in mass protests or individual acts of activism, has been various apropos militia groups—including but not limited to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Basij, FARAJA and Special Units – who are tasked with stifling civil liberties in all degrees including orchestrating arbitrary arrests during peaceful protests to enacting the capital death penalty without due process. Cumulatively, the government of Iran in the last five-years has constantly violated their citizen’s rights as enshrined in Iran’s Constitution of 1979, including the prevention of foreign economic domination over the country’s economy (Article 43.8), the election of the President on the basis of public opinion (Article 6), enablement of freely held public marches (Article.27) and prohibition of torture for information (Article 38). Islam is finally brought into the civic discourse as an all-inclusive justification for the aforementioned economic, political and social ordains to legitimize their theocratic power and prevent any further accountability, regardless of how little influence the religion actually had on their policies.

In essence, it can be said that Iran is plagued by a systematic inertia of insensitivity and greed among those holding the highest offices. The issue is they perpetuate their legitimacy by consolidating oppressive archaic hierarchies but then justify them as a preservation of ancestral ideology. As with new restrictions on reproductive rights in America, albeit on a lesser scale, Ali Khamenei’s theocracy consolidates oppression vis-a-vis women’s bodies. They have done so by mandating a form of veiling for women whose parameters can be arbitrarily set by any militia onlooker, rejecting the exercise of female financial autonomy without male consent and prohibiting women from places of public gathering including political assemblies and sports stadiums. Although the biases of pulp orientalism suggest these rulings to be directly inspired from Islam, this is not the case. The term hijab is specified for women and men to mean the “lowering of their eyes and guarding of their chastity” and that to ensure so for themselves, women can draw their veils over their chest (Quran 24:30-31). Even if the woman has not done so, the men are then obligated to maintain their hijab and avoid making assumptions of her character (Quran 49:12). Most scholars of Islam also unanimously rule that a woman (a wife or otherwise) has a due right to her inheritance and to spend her own money in all circumstances (al-Mughni, 4/513; al-Ansaaf, 5/342; al-Baari, 5/318). And the idea of banning women from mobility in society is not only completely absent in the Quran and Sha’aria Law, but unfathomable by scholars who prove that under the leadership of their Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), women regularly practiced medicine (Rufayda al-Aslamiyyah), philosophy (Aisha bint Abu Bakr), politics (Nusayba bint Ka’b), business (Khadīja bint Khuwaylid) and science (Al-Shifa bint Abduallah). Article. 20 in the Iranian Republic’s Constitution ordains that policies for women will be constructed on the basis of Islamic Law but as hence proven, the Islamic epistemology contradicts their rulings entirely. As is sufficiently evident, despite Khameini’s claims otherwise, his policies draw neither from the republic constitution it is committed to, nor the Islamic tenets it was founded upon.

 I can confidently say no amount of words can ever sufficiently express the humiliation you feel at the moment you are condemned from an opportunity because of your gender. The only experience that further degrades you is when people foreign to the region allegedly try to understand your grievances, simplify the cause to a conservative religion and then resort to comfortable ignorance. On behalf of the Iranian population hence, I implore the readers of this article to begin breaking down the disillusionment pulp orientalism has synthesized within the Western collective consciousness and begin critically understanding the events occurring in the MENA region, because every day spent in ignorance comes at the cost of more innocent lives. The Iranian citizens have had their limbs of economic, political and social power amputated and their voices choked by the drawstring of Khameini branded Islam. Unless they are internally empowered by the international media, human rights organizations and unilateral political pressures, their circumstances will continue to worsen, because the Iranian Republic is committed to maintaining one doctrine alone: those in power, stay in power.