Today, February 1, is World Hijab Day. Ironically, the date coincides with the day in 1979 when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Tehran and became the country’s Supreme Leader, helping turn Iran into a theocracy.
Part of the theocratic changes involved laws forcing women to wear the hijab. The women of Iran didn’t like that. They took to the streets, demonstrating against the regulation, but it was to no avail. Now women in Iran are being jailed, even for years, for simply removing their hijab in public (see my posts here and here, and the collection here). It’s not optional, but mandatory, and it might as well be mandatory in Afghanistan, where social pressure and the morality police mean that virtually every woman covers their head.
In other places where hijab isn’t mandatory, social pressure and parental and peer pressure mean that even young girls are forced to…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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