22nd, September, 2016
In recent discussion period of our ASTU class, we mainly talked about Persepolis. This book used comics to describe the childhood story of Marji Satrapi who was a little girl born in Iran. As a girl born to be in a Muslim country, religion came with her from the very beginning. The first portrait of her appeared in the book was a common girl with the veil covered her head, which is one of the most obvious symbol that will remind people of women in that religion.
Since 1980, just as what Satrapi told on the first page of Persepolis, women in Iran started to be obligated to wear veil. And until now, veil for women in Muslim countries is still a controversial issue on the planet. The majority usually categorizes wearing hijab as symbol of discriminating women. It is also believed by the mainstream society that wearing veil is not voluntary but oppressed by the government and the religion or to work as a tool to avoid men being attracted by women. Not only people nowadays find the hijab stands for discrimination, at the very beginning of Persepolis, women in Iran had similar point of view just as people nowadays. They spoke out and fought against the veil. They tried to defend their rights of wearing anything they want. It seemed that both women in Iran and the rest of world all negatively criticised about hijab.
However, what I realized after reading Persepolis are not exactly the same as most of the criticisms. There are exactly women who are willing to wear veil and think themselves born to like wearing veil in order to be close to Allah. And they were the characters who stood against Marji’s mother and the other women who spoke for the freedom of wearing anything in the book. They believed every woman should obey the instruction and should be forced to wear veil even they actually did not want to do so. At the same time, it was always those women who played the role of punishing the other women who broke the rule in the book, which means the biggest enemy of achieving female rights can be females themselves but only the religion or the male. It reminds me of what I learnt from Geography in high school that to eliminate discrimination, sometimes we may start from the group that is discriminated. People who belongs to the group that is discriminated should stop being a participant of depriving rights of themselves.
