A report from Iran, in the Sunday Times today, on the return of the morality police:
A young woman is sitting on a plastic chair in a bus station in Amol, a city in northern Iran, her hair uncovered and her legs bare in a pair of shorts, when a female officer from the morality police begins filming her.
“What you’re doing is disgraceful,” the officer says. “Even in Turkey, you couldn’t go out dressed like this. Stand up, please. Get up and leave.” The young woman initially apologises, but when the officer continues berating her, she shoots back: “It’s none of your business. Leave me alone and get lost.”
In the grainy 76-second video, which is circulating on social media and which an Iranian journalist confirmed was authentic, a sound like a police siren can soon be heard as two male officers surround the young woman and force her to put on a pair of trousers. But the female officer is not finished. She delivers one final order: “Put on your headscarf.”
The footage is one of several signs that the policing of women’s dress codes is once again intensifying in Iran. The crackdown is not confined to Amol. Videos released by Iranian police show so-called morality patrols returning to the streets of Rasht, in northern Iran, while witnesses have reported seeing their vans again in the central Iranian city of Isfahan and in the capital, Tehran.
Despite a shattered economy and the country suspended in a state of neither war nor peace, the Islamic Republic has returned to one of its most familiar battlegrounds: women’s bodies.
In June, images shared on social media appeared to show a morality police van also returning to the streets of Qom, the centre of Shia pilgrimage in Iran. In a separate video said to have been filmed in Tehran, a plainclothes officer confronts a woman wearing short sleeves, with her ponytail uncovered.
On July 20 and 21, police sealed a large number of cafés in central Tehran, including popular venues on Sanaee, Iranshahr and Nofel Loshato streets, accusing women of violating compulsory hijab rules and “Islamic norms”.
For women’s rights activists — and for those who have been summoned, threatened, detained or flogged for defying Iran’s compulsory hijab laws — the message is unmistakable: not even war will halt the regime’s repression of women at home.
“I never believed they would back down on the hijab,” said Maral, a 36-year-old English teacher from a small city near Tehran. “Women’s clothing is bound up with the regime’s very nature and identity.”
Many women, however, are standing their ground. Recent photographs and videos taken in Tehran show scenes that could have been captured in any major global city: women walking on the pavement with their hair flowing, some wearing western-style clothes, including sheer skirts and fitted tops, along with make-up, piercings and tattoos.
The courage of these womn…
“The main thing that saps our energy in Iran is exactly this,” Ahoo said. “You cannot say with certainty: will they arrest me now or not? Will they object to my clothes or not? If they arrest me, will they kill me, or will they give me six months in prison? It is chaotic. There is no order.”
Sarina, a 34-year-old women’s rights activist in western Iran, told The Sunday Times she was flogged 74 times after posting a photograph on Instagram of herself without a hijab. But her resolve remains unbroken. “If the authorities try to force women back under the hijab,” Sarina said, adding that women will not retreat. “We gained this with blood and pain, and I, for one, see it as my duty to fight to preserve it,” she added. “Whatever the price, it does not matter to me.”
Golshan Fathi, 36, a PhD student in law and a women’s rights activist in Tehran, who did not want to use a pseudonym, was recently summoned and released on bail over social media posts showing her without a hijab.
“This shows what civil society and political forces have been saying for years: the Islamic Republic as a whole will never voluntarily back down on the issue of women unless it is forced to retreat for a time in order to survive,” she told The Sunday Times. “Hijab is the main ideological pillar of the Islamic Republic.”
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