In this article, two young women Zohrah and Hasina, were deported from Iran after being arrested for their choice of shoes and the amount of makeup they were wearing. The Iran officials found it offensive for the two women to be dressed so provocatively while visiting Qom, a holy city in Iran. The two girls were born in Iran, but their parents' homeland is Afghanistan, meaning because their parents don't have Iranian citizenship they would have to be deported back to Afghanistan, where women's rights are even fewer than Iran's. The girls asked their father and Zohrah's boyfriend to help with the deportation process, only when the two men showed up to help they also were proven to not have Iranian citizenship even though both had lived legally in Iran for most of their lives. Now, the two girls their father and soon to be son-in-law, have to leave their mother and younger siblings behind in Iran and return to Afghanistan. Their father is distraught with the thought that he has left his jobless wife and young children to fend for themselves in a country where anything- good or bad- can happen in a blink of an eye.
I thought this article was a great connection to Persepolis and how even today, Iran still has an extremely strict dress code for women. This article talks a lot about Afghanistan as well, and how it is even harder for women to live successfully there without the ridicule of dress. We are lucky to live in a culture where we are free to express ourselves through our choices in clothing.
It's so unbelievable to imagine that someone can be punished so for their appearance and how they choose to express themselves. I find this article really eye-opening. After reading all the posts on the blog about the efforts for and the violations of Human Rights, I feel speechless about them all; this article included.
ReplyDeleteI think the most unbelievable part about this is that these girls are only ages 15 and 16. Since we're seeing this happen from a U.S. scope it seems insane that a teenage girl would be deported because of her fashion choices. It is also eye opening when you realize that even though they were born in Iran they are not safe from deportation. It is a reminder that a universal definition of human rights may be harder to achieve than it seems.
ReplyDeleteThis post really made me think about the future of these nations where rights for women are so minimal. Not to mean that there are nations in which women are treated entirely fairly, the extent to which women face discrimination in modern day Iran makes me think about how a nation can be successful in the future if half of its population is oppressed or faces severe limitations on their freedoms, compared to its counterpart male half. Okay, so maybe a nation has a right to deportation, but these girls were first arrested simply because of wearing makeup and the shoes they were wearing, which doesn't seem to be very just. Great post.
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