FEMEN and One Law for All called for a Global Day of Action to defend Ahoo Daryaei on 8 November. On the day, women’s rights campaigners, including from Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, FiLiA, Southall Black Sisters, Women’s Place and Campaign Against Execution London gathered at Piccadilly Circus to ask where she was and to demand her freedom. Several women at the protest wore bras and underwear similar to Ahoo’s, including Maryam Namazie, Pragna Patel, Suzan, Veiled Rose and Victoria Gugenheim. The protest, which was MCed by Victoria who sang and recited a poem for #MahsaAmini, also saw Monica Vinoly play the violin, Nehanda sign a song about women’s revolution.
Some of the media coverage of London’s protest can be found here.
Throughout the day and week, women across the globe stood in solidarity with Ahoo. A more comprehensive report of this to follow.
Maryam Namazie of One Law for All who organised the protest in London gave the below speech.
Farsi Translation can be found here.
English Text below:
Ahoo was violently arrested for stripping at her Tehran university campus and sectioned in a psychiatric ward for being ‘mad,’ but there is nothing mad about her scream against misogyny. Women who rebel have always been labelled insane by the Islamic regime in Iran but also historically. In fact, it is the regime, its laws, Islam, religion, misogyny, patriarchy that is mad not Ahoo.
Why with nude protest though some ask? Because nudity is the antithesis of veiling. It is a subversion of the ideal woman who must be obedient, submissive, silent, and erased from the public space. The regime calls unveiled women naked. Ahoo and we will show you what naked is. The insistence by the Islamists to erase women’s bodies and voices from the public space means that nudity is an important form of resistance.
So, you want everyone to be naked as the Islamic regime says about nude protest? Maybe you don’t understand the concept of ‘My body, My choice’ or how rights work. The right to abortion, or gay rights doesn’t mean you have to have an abortion or be gay.
Women’s nudity as protest brings out deep-seated hatred and misogyny particularly when a women’s body is in her own hands outside of the socially accepted limits of being either “virgin” or “whore.”
Still, often opposition to the Islamic regime of Iran equate nudity with deviance and obscenity. This is the regime’s view of women’s bodies, hence the Woman, Life, Freedom slogan ‘You are the deviant, I am a Free Woman.’
In fact, Ahoo’s stripping is the crux of the Woman, Life, Freedom revolution, which is not just about the hijab. The hair is an extension of the body. Women’s bodies are not shameful. Shame is not between a women’s legs or within her breasts. As Gisele Pelicot said in her mass rape trial, ‘Shame must change sides.’ It is the Islamic regime of Iran, misogynists and patriarchs that should be ashamed, not Ahoo. The problem is not with women’s bodies; the problem is your deep-seated misogyny.
Nude protest makes women’s bodies visible and redefines who controls her body – not religion, culture, the patriarch, and certainly not ‘Man, Nation, Prosperity,’ a slogan raised in confrontation to ‘Woman, Life, Freedom,’ representing more of the same old man as lord and master.
Nude protest goes to the crux of the Woman, Life, Freedom revolution in Iran by reclaiming a battlefield for suppression into a battlefield for liberation of self and society. A reimagining of a world that is based not on ‘Man, Nation, Prosperity,’ but on ‘Woman, Life, Freedom.’