A month has rolled by since the outburst of nationwide protests over the death of the 22-year-old Iranian-Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini arrested by Iran’s morality police for what the authorities argued was her “inappropriate hijab,” a movement that soon ballooned into a broader social revolt characterized by the centrality of women demanding freedom and equal rights.
The core element of the uprising that has convulsed Iran has been the rejection of the grotesque morality police equally loathed by the religious women who wear hijab voluntarily and the more progressive, liberal-minded women who don’t wish to subscribe to the government-prescribed lifestyle.
Iranian women have become emboldened to urge the leadership to abandon its long-standing position on compulsory hijab and introduce reforms like what the conservative Persian Gulf kingdom Saudi Arabia has embraced by abjuring its hijab orthodoxies and initiating multi-pronged social liberalization.
In scenes that were inconceivable weeks before the eruption of the protests on September 16 but are omnipresent now, women in different cities stand on publicly visible platforms such as telecommunication boxes and set their headscarves ablaze.
They don’t have anything against hijab as a religious tradition, but their actions are an indication of their dismay at the government’s use of force and coercion to foist the hijab codes on each and every woman.
The morality police in particular have generated widespread discontent in the past year since the coming to power of Ebrahim Raisi as president, and their violent encounters with women in public places had become the daily routine, going beyond the pale even by the standards of the Islamic Republic’s law enforcement.
This vice squad has existed since 2006, but its operations have waxed and waned. The hardline cleric Ebrahim Raisi, who as a former chief justice had expressed commitment to implementing the hijab mandate tooth and nail, upon claiming the mantle of president in August 2021 gave the “Gasht-e Ershad” vans carte blanche to storm the streets and confront women arbitrarily for dressing styles one officer might perceive as a transgression of the strict stipulations and another might just decide to ignore.
The new president assumed that by putting the hijab restrictions on steroids, he would be able to drum up support for his administration among ultra-conservative loyalists and derive political power from an uncompromising narrative on civil liberties.
In lockstep with the rejuvenation of the morality police, the Initiative for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, a state-run religious watchdog tasked with theorizing and policing Islamic lifestyle with an exclusive fixation on women, was given new oxygen with a thumping budget equivalent to US$3.9 million, and state media and institutions affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) went into overdrive kicking up publicity on the imperative of upholding the compulsory hijab.
Unintended consequences
Many experts believe the government’s recourse to intimidation and appeal to duress to proliferate Islamic ideology in the society has backfired and indeed has sown the seeds of anti-Islamic attitudes, especially among the younger population.
“Decline in religiosity has been an outcome of the forced Islamization of Iranian society, and statistics point to a rise in atheism in society. These trends have been prevalent in urban areas of Iran for well over a decade,” said Sanam Vakil, a senior research fellow at the Middle East and North Africa Program at Chatham House, a London-based think-tank.
“The government is tone-deaf when it continues to reinforce social Islamic control when ordinary people are under so much economic pressure,” she told Asia Times.
The general argument made by the authorities explaining why they obsess about the idea of hijab is that it is a religious requirement, and as a theocracy, the government has an obligation to ensure that the rules of Islam are rolled out widely and that it maintains its distinction from secular, ungodly governments.
But critics have been asking why the Iranian government doesn’t similarly care about other religious precepts gravely at stake, including social justice, Islamic finance and banking and equal wealth distribution, and the core principles of honesty and integrity, which have long been dislodged from the authorities’ playbook of ethics.
They wonder why the Islamic Republic treats hijab, which is not one of the five pillars of Islam or even one of the 10 ancillaries of Shia Islam, as if it is the only Islamic canon that should be proselytized.
Melody Moezzi, an Iranian-American Muslim author and visiting associate professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, says the Raisi administration’s heightened hijab curbs are among the stimulants fueling people’s anger that exploded with the death of Mahsa Amini under enigmatic circumstances.
“There is absolutely a deeper context here. The current protests in Iran were no doubt sparked by the Raisi administration’s increased enforcement of the compulsory hijab by the morality police, both in relation to Mahsa Zhina Amini and others before her, especially over the summer,” Moezzi said.
“But the sustained protests are the result of so much more than the morality police or the compulsory hijab, which, for the record, is a wildly un-Islamic policy, since the Koran specifically teaches that there should be no compulsion in religion, and regardless, the hijab is a pre-Islamic concept that isn’t central to the faith.
“The abysmal economy, largely courtesy of a brutal sanctions policy that functions as a form of economic warfare that suffocates the people of Iran more than the government, compiled with growing corruption and police brutality is at the heart of the persistence of these protests,” she added.
Misplaced priorities
On October 4, the University of Tehran convened a special session featuring some of the most outspoken professors, who came together to diagnose the ongoing crisis and propose solutions for people’s grievances to be addressed and calm to be restored.
Elaheh Koulaei, a pro-reform political scientist, lamented that the government has decided to regulate women’s dress through morality-police patrols, asking why the government hasn’t ever conjured up a “prayer patrol” or “fasting patrol,” referring to essential Islamic practices, but instead is insisting on patrolling women’s appearance.
Yet the more pessimistic observers postulate that the leadership in Iran won’t recant its long-standing position on compulsory hijab, even in the face of nationwide protests that are a display of women’s frustration with this dogma, because for the Islamic Republic, the perpetuation of hijab appears to be a way of consolidating and projecting power and dominion.
“Since the 1979 revolution, the power structure has turned hijab into a powerful instrument for a certain political faction and to eliminate opposing, rival groups,” said an Iranian journalist in Shiraz, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect her identity. “As such, there is no divergence at the top echelons of power over the notion of compulsory hijab, and in all sectors, there has been a unanimity over maintaining the compulsory-hijab policy as a religious principle and political strategy.
“Prior to the nationwide protests, the establishment didn’t heed any warnings and instead of listening to the demands of the citizens, increased the costs associated with the continuation of morality police. It might be that after the crackdown, the morality police and detentions of women can be diluted, but there will be no compromise or reform when it comes to compulsory hijab as a principle,” she told Asia Times.
Still, voices sympathetic to the government say there will be an accommodation in society over the enforcement of hijab, namely a somewhat lax compliance with less intrusive surveillance, with conversation about the revocation of the mandatory hijab being put on the back burner, pending the resolution of more urgent matters.
“Prior to the renewed operation of the morality police in the administration of Mr Raisi and the heart-rending death of Ms Amini, the debate on hijab had been resolved in Iran normatively. We could see compliance with hijab in a conventional way, which could be problematic legally but was accepted socially and conventionally,” said Afifeh Abedi, a researcher at Iran’s Center for Strategic Research.
“It seems that the policy of settling on the conventional hijab will continue in Iran, which will be a middle ground for the cultural and social demands of the two traditional and modern factions of the society,” she said.
Statements by military figures and administration officials imply that for the government, the concept of hijab is no longer a religious concern. Although this is a realization many Iranians had made for some time, officials are now driving home unambiguously that the Islamic Republic perceives hijab as a way of projecting soft power, and some of them blurt out in more naive ways that the enforcement of hijab is indeed one of the outposts of its hard power and domestic control.
But it is Iranian women who are being victimized in this power play. Many of them are expressing, in honest terms, through their social-media posts that they just aspire to an uninterrupted, peaceful stroll on the streets of Tehran without being forced to put on a headscarf they don’t believe in, and for many of them, this desire has morphed into a dream.
The resilience they have shown in recent weeks is exemplary.
Kourosh Ziabari is an Iranian journalist. A Chevening Scholarships alumnus, he has reported on grants by the Council of Europe, UNESCO and Deutsche Welle. He is a 2021 Dag Hammarskjold Fund for Journalists fellow and a 2022 World Press Institute fellow. In 2015, he reported from the United States, Malaysia and Pakistan on a Senior Journalists Seminar fellowship by the East-West Center. Follow him on Twitter @KZiabari.