Cartoon by Mana Neyestani

Iran Makes Fresh Push to Force Women to Wear Hijab

By Sune Engel Rasmussen and Aresu Eqbali

The Wall Street Journal: Iranian authorities launched a fresh campaign to force women to wear a headscarf, or hijab, as the clerical establishment seeks to reassert its grip on power months after women’s rights protests morphed into a nationwide movement against the Islamic Republic.

As part of the new campaign, which began Saturday, Iranian police said they would use surveillance tools to identify and prosecute women who didn’t wear the headscarf.

The CCTV cameras and other surveillance tools would be used in public spaces and businesses, and photographic evidence of infractions sent to women caught without a hijab, the police have said. Women found violating the rules will be prosecuted. Cars of women breaking the hijab law inside the vehicles could be impounded in cases of repeated offenses.

The new initiative is a response to a growing refusal among Iranian women to wear the hijab, a resistance that has exposed a widening chasm between the Islamic leadership and swaths of the population. Some women said the recent protests have emboldened them to confront the state.

“I used to be afraid of the morality police, but since the protests, I feel less stressed,” said a 19-year-old law student in Tehran who wore her violet-dyed hair uncovered. “I am no longer afraid.”

The hijab has been mandatory in Iran, and a source of tension between the public and the state, for four decades. Upholding it is a cornerstone of what the leadership sees as its defense of Islam, and a tool of political control, particularly over more-secular factions of the Iranian population.

It was also the catalyst behind nationwide protests that were triggered in September by the death in police custody of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested for allegedly violating Iran’s strict Islamic dress code.

The protests have since abated, following mass arrests and a violent crackdown by authorities, in which more than 500 protesters were killed, according to rights groups. Thousands were arrested and at least 16 people have been sentenced to death for their roles in the protests. Four were executed.

Iran’s government has acknowledged that hundreds died in the protests, but says many of them were security forces or innocent bystanders. It has accused what it describes as the country’s foreign enemies of fomenting the unrest without providing any proof.

Defiance of the hijab law has grown since the protests erupted, in ways that have been difficult for authorities to roll back. Thousands of Iranian women now walk the streets daily without the hijab—an unthinkable sight a year ago.

Following the protests, Iranian authorities disbanded the feared morality police. But officials, including Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, insist that the country’s Islamic laws remain in place, as they roll out new initiatives to enforce them.

While morality police officers and their vans, previously used to arrest those violating the dress-code rules, are absent from the streets, other police units are tasked with enforcing the hijab mandate.

Many Iranians still support the hijab law, and authorities have encouraged Iranians to report on their fellow citizens.

That has led to verbal and physical altercations. Many Iranians were outraged by a recent video that showed a man in the northeastern city of Shandiz throwing yogurt at two unveiled women in a grocery shop. The footage, caught on surveillance camera, went viral. Another recent viral video, posted online by the Iran-based 1500tasvir activist network, shows a man appearing to hit an unveiled woman with his prayer beads >>>