This Week's Edition Has Arrived

In this week's Unbelief Brief: Iran is taking a dangerous turn by proposing "hijab clinics" to institutionalize women who defy its dress codes under the guise of psychological treatment. In the U.S., Texas public schools face pressure to adopt a curriculum favoring Christian teachings, blurring the line between church and state. Meanwhile, Indonesia’s arrest of a transgender influencer for alleged blasphemy highlights the country’s growing crackdown on religious dissent.

Unbelief Brief

Iran is becoming increasingly brazen in its prosecution of hijab-related disobedience. Despite the recently-inaugurated president, Masoud Pezeshkian, promising women they would not be “bothered” by the morality police, religious authorities revealed plans for a new “hijab clinic” to treat teenage girls and women with “scientific and psychological treatment for hijab removal.” Pathologizing women who refuse to abide by Islamic dress codes is nothing new in Iran. However, this plan to institutionalize women who defy the hijab is both an alarming and novel assault on Iranian women’s already limited freedoms. Although Mehri Talebi Darestani, Head of the Women and Family Department of the Headquarters for the Promotion of Virtue in Tehran Province, claims that admittance to the clinic is voluntary, the regime’s brutal response to any form of religious dissent says otherwise. Women who refuse to comply with the state’s stringent hijab requirements are routinely incarcerated and institutionalized against their will so there is little doubt that religious authorities won't begin to forcibly admit women to these clinics in the future.

Meanwhile, in the US, the Texas Board of Education is set to vote to approve a new curriculum for the state’s public schools—one which would reference and incorporate teachings from the Bible into classroom lessons. The curriculum, currently designed for students in kindergarten through fifth grade, proposes, for example, to teach students about “Jesus and his Sermon on the Mount” during a lesson about the Golden Rule. While the New York Times reports that religion comprises a “relatively small” portion of the overall curriculum’s content, it references Christianity much more often than in previous curricula. Though school districts are not mandated to adopt the new curriculum, they would receive financial incentives for doing so, putting undue pressure on poorer districts to accept the new lesson plans. This example of religious re-encroachment into public life is likely to increase in frequency as conservative state governments are emboldened by a new pro-Christian federal administration.

Finally, Indonesia is drawing international attention over a blasphemy case against Christianity, a rarity for the Muslim-majority country. Ratu Thalisa, a transgender influencer on TikTok, suggested Jesus should shave his head in order to look less like a woman. Thalisa had made the video in response to a subscriber’s suggestion that she should shave her own head since as a transwoman was “really a man.” Thalisa was arrested after an uproar on social media prompted her to post an apology video. Amnesty Indonesia points to this case as an example of the increasing stringency with which Indonesian authorities prosecute blasphemy, with 120 recorded such cases over the last six years.

Until next week,

The Team at Ex-Muslims of North America

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