October 14, 2016
by Azadeh Moaveni
When the World Chess Federation designated Iran host of the 2017 Women’s World Chess Championship games, Mitra Hejazipour was thrilled. She is a women’s grandmaster. She learned chess at 6, played in her first formal championship at age 9, and, now 23, she has spent her life traveling the world for chess tournaments and returning to the Islamic Republic of Iran with shiny medals.
When she plays, she wears a hijab, and presumably, when the world’s best women gather in Tehran to play chess next year, they will, too. But the excitement of the chess championship news — widely celebrated in Iran — soon turned to protest. Calls for a boycott are growing louder, raising the possibility that the championship won’t be held in Tehran at all.
Some international players are saying they don’t want to wear head scarves, but they seem to be making this statement for Iranian women, too: Iranian women shouldn’t have to do this, so we’ll make a stink. But this kind of protest — outsiders who think they know best — is exactly the opposite of what most Iranian women want, and is at the heart of what’s worst about policing how Muslim women dress.
The controversy has largely been kicked off by the Georgian-American chess champion, Nazi Paikidze, who said she would boycott the games on grounds that female participants would need to wear the head scarf, which is mandatory for women in Iran. She started an online petition to “stop women’s oppression” and to challenge the chess federation’s decision. A former Pan American champion chimed in, along with Nigel Short, a British grandmaster, who told a British newspaper that the hijab is “a symbol of Islamic repression.” (Mr. Short, incidentally, has said in the past that men are “hard-wired” to be better at chess than women.)
Ms. Hejazipour and other Iranian chess players told me they were bewildered by the international outcry, since Iran has held a number of high-level games in the past, drawing women from around the world who played in head scarves, without fanfare. They say a boycott would be a major setback for Iranian women, who are singular in the Middle East for participating in public life at the highest levels. “Holding the championship will propel our progress in women’s chess, and for other sports as well,” Ms. Hejazipour said.
The players acknowledge that state dress codes are a challenge, but view them as part of the nation’s laws and a matter that must evolve domestically, not by diktat from outside. “The clothing preferences we see in young people show that a segment do not want hijab to be compulsory,” Ms. Hejazipour said.
It is precisely this pushing of the boundaries by young people that has gradually changed the norms around hijab. What is tolerated now across much of Iran — cloaks without buttons, short tunics that are essentially blouses, alongside an influx of international tourists with their own interpretations — reflects a relaxing of dress codes that some people fear will be reversed if outsiders with their own agendas inflame the issue.
As for players going abroad having to adopt a mode of dress that is foreign to them, it is perhaps useful to be clear about the sartorial burden: This isn’t about having to wear a burqa, but a light head scarf and a modest outfit. Wearing a head scarf can feel awkward at first, but it seems the calls for a boycott are driven more by politics than worries of physical discomfort.
Participating in international games, and hosting them, says the chess player Sara Khadem, 19, only works to give Iranian women opportunities, which many have had to fight bitterly for. “It’s had such a huge effect on me, to play around the world,” she said. “And it is a great encouragement to Iranian young women to have foreign players come here, their presence is so considerable.”
She isn’t sure if the people signing the petition really know what would be best for her, or if that’s what they’re thinking about.
When I asked Jila Baniyaghoob about the protests, she said it was crucial to take the long view. She is a journalist and activist who has spent time in prison. While she herself opposes mandatory hijab, she points to the athletic wear Iranian female athletes wore in the 2016 Olympic Games, outfits that 30 years ago would have been inconceivable. “Women’s progress goes step by step here, and the route forward isn’t a boycott,” she said. “When a woman shines in a sports competition it boosts women’s rights in all areas, it reverberates everywhere, beyond those games.”
Iranian women’s rights activists worry that anti-hijab protests, which flared up in Europe recently over the French burkini ban, are now being aimed at Iran. The West’s preoccupation with the veil and the growing popularity of simply being “anti-hijab” as an existential and political position muddles too many things.
What best serves Iranian women must be kept separate from security-related outrages over jihadist terrorism, for instance, or Europe’s fractured relations with its Muslims. A boycott of a chess tournament does Iranian women no favors, and plays into the hands of conservatives who claim that the West uses women’s rights as a tool to humiliate and pressure them.
The Western focus on the veil in Iran overlooks reality. Veiling has been customary in Iran for centuries, and a majority of Iranian women, regardless of the law, wear the head scarf by choice. Mansoureh Ettehadieh, a leading historian whose career spans shah-era Iran, when hijab was optional, and today’s Islamic Republic, told me that hijab has been essential to Iranian women’s broadening participation in society. Most activists in Iran are more concerned with matters from women’s unemployment to domestic violence. While mandatory hijab certainly matters, it is for Iranian women to determine what level of priority to accord it.
“All these girls and women who would not have left the house, hijab gave them a chance to study, to progress, to become involved in all kinds of activities, from laboratories to business to academia,” Professor Ettehadieh said. Outsiders may think they speak for Iranian women. “But they don’t.”
Azadeh Moaveni is a lecturer in journalism at Kingston University and the author of “Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America and American in Iran.”This article originally appeared on the New york Times.