Whose America Is It?

(Opinion) She has a glowing face with perfect makeup, stunning eyes, full lips, and hair meticulously covered with a headscarf. Her ​“hijab” is an American flag carried on a patriotic poster that proclaims: ​“I am America.”

The poster aims to unsettle the right-wing Trumpophiles whose venomous anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant propaganda is spreading across America, poisoning the civil society that has inspired so many generations of democratic minded intellectuals worldwide.

I stand among several hundred others who have come out on a cold New Haven night to protest this absurd new ban on immigrant from Muslim nation. But, the ​“I am America” poster unsettles me.

I was born to a middle class secular Muslim family in Iran and forced to leave the country in 1981 when the Islamic regime began large-scale executions of young political activists. I left my entire family behind, crossed the border into Pakistan and arrived in the U.S. a year later on a student visa — an undertaking that is becoming impossible for daring youth like myself under a Trump administration.

Despite the decades that now divide me and those early revolutionary years in Iran so long ago, I still vividly remember the ways that our lives were tragically stripped of freedom. My mother, the principal of a local high school, was forced to wear the hijab and ultimately booted out for not being ​“Muslim enough.” Her fate was not unique, as many other urban women lost their careers, and were banished to the margins for similar reasons.

Iranian women did not take this rollback of their rights without a fight. Thousands bravely protested the mandatory hijab, which became law in 1982, and suffered beatings, imprisonment, and torture. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) organized street gangs and began a systematic attack on women that the new government labeled as ​“bad hijab.” In the new Islamic Republic, where piety and purity, were the order of the day those who showed their hair were sexually provoking men and spreading corruption.

The struggle against the hijab by Iran’s women and the regime’s insistence to impose it, the ​“hijab war,” has become a focal point of confrontation between the Islamic regime and Iranian civil society activists. Today, Iranian women who are fighting the mandatory hijab law pay a high price for their resistance on a daily basis. More recently, in an attempt to spread even greater fear, state-sponsored street gangs have begun throwing acid on the faces of women who are not covering their hair properly. The ​“Acid Brigade” walks away from their crime with complete impunity. By imprisoning the activists who have protested against the recent acid attacks, the regime has brazenly shown with which side of this war it is standing.

For many of us, secular Iranians, hijab has become the symbol of a continuous and organized brutality against women and a contested attempt to roll back their rights. ​“Hijab” is the flag of the regime’s social engineering, the brand for the historical attempt at making a uniform mass Muslim society at any cost. To see it today as a symbol of political mobilization here in the United States is profoundly devastating to secular Iranian-Americans who have been either witnessed or been victimized to atrocities in the name of hijab.

There is no doubt that the American Muslim community is under siege and has become the main target of punitive immigration policies of the new administration. It is every conscientious American’s civic duty to stand in solidarity with the Muslim minority whose rights are being threatened. But why not extend this solidarity to the victims of religious intolerance and political refugees of Islamic dictatorships? Why have we not seen thousands of American Muslim women standing up for reproductive rights of fellow women, or protesting the mandatory hijab law of Iran and other dictatorial nations were their counterparts do not have the freedom to choose their dress code? Why does the American Muslim community remain silent in the face of crimes that are committed in the name of their faith?

America can’t ban a faith, nor can it exercise various forms of religious discrimination and still claim to be a democracy. The claim of the ​“I am America” poster, with its well-groomed hijab-clad young woman, is far from the inclusive and culturally sensitive America that has been my sanctuary and new homeland. Far from symbols of religious purity and domination, America is about impurity and tolerance. If our country is to be portrayed by a singular image, say in a poster, it needs to be a collage of us all who come in every ethnicity and religion, live side by side, and dress in whatever way we wish – in veils, saris, hijabs and bikinis.

Ramin Ahmadi (pictured) is the author of several books in Persian, and the co-founder of the New Haven-based Iran Human Rights Documentation Center.