Azar Nafisi writes in today's Times (£):
A friend's sister was at a party with some colleagues from her architecture firm in Tehran last week when it was raided by the Revolutionary Guards. She was so infuriated by the intrusion that she confronted the men. For this act of defiance, she was arrested and put in solitary confinement for two days, during which time her family waited outside the jail with other worried parents hoping to find out what would happen to her.
The architect was eventually freed on bail after her aunt paid for her release. This is an everyday occurrence in Iran. In fact, when I heard the story, I thought that she was lucky to have been held only for two days.
We read much about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's nuclear plans but less about the heroism of my daughter's generation, who wear their own weapons of mass destruction - better known as fashion. They go out showing a bit of hair or wearing lipstick. For this, they are thrown into jail, flogged and fined - but the next day they go back and do it all again. These women are not for or against the veil or Islam, they are campaigning for freedom of choice. No state has the right to tell its citizens how to dress or that they should believe in its version of God.
There are many ways of being eliminated by the authorities. They can take you to jail, torture and kill you. But they can also take away every aspect of a person that makes them individual. Something deeper than bravery motivates these women. Under such a totalitarian system you feel neither fear nor courage: instead, these acts of rebellion are an instinctive reaction because the insult goes so deep, the tone of the voice of the authorities is so dehumanising. As human beings, the women of Iran have had no choice but to defend who they are.
.....
The extreme violence that the regime has shown in suppressing every protest is not a sign of strength and self-confidence, but is rooted in its extreme vulnerability. It fears both the political opposition and ordinary Iranians who defy it by refusing to submit to its daily intrusions into their private lives.
I post what Nafisi says, first, for the main point of it, concerning the nature of the regime in Tehran; but also, second, for this point by the way: 'No state has the right to tell its citizens how to dress'. A truth applicable to France as much as to Iran. I don't need to add that, by this, I do not intend any moral or political equivalence: France is a democracy.