Cartoon by Nasrin Sheykhi

How an Iranian student who stripped to her underwear became a symbol of resistance

By Roland Oliphant and Akhtar Makoii

The Telegraph: It is the question trending on Iranian social media, spray-painted on the back of Tehran bus seats, and discussed in hushed tones by her fellow students at the capital’s biggest university. Where is Ahoo Daryaei?

“Everywhere you go on campus, students are talking about her, and everyone is deeply worried about what might be happening to her,” a student who witnessed her arrest earlier this month tells The Telegraph.

“Some of us fear she might be tortured. There’s talk of boycotting classes until she’s released, but that’s challenging since so many regime supporters are also students here,” she adds.

The fate of the 30-year-old modern languages student, who stripped to her underwear at Tehran’s Islamic Azad University in protest at Iran’s hijab law, has become a lightning rod inside and outside of the country.

Two years after the death of Masha Amini sparked the biggest anti-regime protests since 1979, Iranian society is on edge. Amini, a 22-year-old woman from the western city of Saqez in Kurdistan province, was arrested in Tehran by the Islamic Republic’s morality police for violating the country’s draconian dress code, and subsequently died in police custody.

So febrile is the current atmosphere that pro-regime hardliners have accused Israel and the West of trying to manufacture discontent. But others, and especially urban women, are livid – and threatening to explode.

Whisked away by plain clothes officers

Daryaei was detained on November 2, after she appeared outside the science and research branch of her university wearing nothing but a purple bra and striped knickers. Security camera footage of the lead-up to her arrest showed her wandering around in a crowd of students, her arms crossed.

Another shot showed Daryaei sitting on a low wall, kicking her legs, while a man spoke on a mobile phone, apparently after remonstrating with her.

The footage then shows her being bundled into a car by a group of men – thought to be plain-clothes officers – and driven away.

The Amir Kabir Telegram channel, a student newsletter, subsequently identified the woman in the clips as Daryaei, a seventh-semester French-language student. She had stripped to her underwear, it reported, in a fit of anger after being accosted by members of the Basij militia, a paramilitary group known to be fiercely loyal to the Islamic Republic’s rulers. The religious unit’s volunteers were said to have ripped Daryaei’s clothes and headscarf after accusing her of being improperly dressed.

Following her detention two weeks ago, Daryaei was taken to a police station. She was then branded mentally ill and transferred to a psychiatric hospital where, according to Amir Kabir, she “attempted to escape from the quarantine ward at least once but was blocked by security forces.”

“Security-assigned doctors overseeing her case are attempting to destabilise her mental state with unknown pills and injections,” it added. “The registry data shows no history of medical issues or specific illnesses in her official records.”

The Telegram channel said she was being held in a room under strict security control and had been visited by both intelligence personnel and the police spokesman General Saeed Montaze al-Madi.

The semi-official Fars news agency reported that security personnel had “calmly” spoken to Daryaei about flouting dress codes – but did not dispute that she stripped in protest against the dress rules.

Draconian dress laws

Iran’s strict dress code applies to both men and women, and dictates that no part of the body above the ankles and wrists or below the neck (chest for men) should be on display. Women must additionally cover their hair.

For women, it effectively means a uniform of baggy trousers, a long jacket that camouflages the outline of the waist, and a headscarf.

“Bad hijab” is not just a matter of going bare-headed: if the trousers are too tight, the jacket too short or the headscarf too loose, a woman can be accosted by the morality police.

In practice, many women have found ways to push the limits.

A scarf draped with studied carelessness around the back of the head, instead of covering the hair, is a time-honoured form of defiance – as is driving bare-headed in the relative security of one’s car.

But since the 2022 protests sparked by Amini’s death, a growing number of women – many of them in their 20s and 30s – have begun to flout the rules completely. Not for them the daringly loose headscarf. This generation are going around entirely bareheaded instead, with no attempt to shroud their outline in flowing tunics. Some are even wearing skirts.

They’re also fighting back. A few days before Daryaei was arrested, footage appeared of a bare-headed woman in jeans and a red top beating up a militia man who had tried to accost her.

Human rights groups reported that the woman, identified as Roshanak Molaei Alishah, was later arrested. Her whereabouts are currently unknown.

Such defiance has, in turn, elicited a harsher response from Iran’s theocracy. In April, the chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Tehran said his personnel had been ordered to enforce hijab rules “in a more serious manner” in public spaces and announced the creation of a new body to do so.

The same month, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights demanded Iran shelve a draft bill that would tighten hijab rules and introduce harsher punishments. That bill is currently in legislative limbo after the country’s Guardian Council sent it back to parliament to be tweaked. It is not clear when, if ever, it will finally become law.

‘People want answers’

That’s the context in which Daryaeri lost her temper – and disappeared. Her university’s public relations department reported she was “handed over to the police station”, adding she displayed “severe psychological distress and mental health issues”, and was transferred to a “treatment centre.”

The Islamic Republic has frequently suggested political opponents and protesters have “mental disorders”.

In recent years, numerous political prisoners have reported being forcibly admitted to psychiatric hospitals, where they were given drugs that impaired their movement or speech. Some have said they were subjected to electroconvulsive therapy >>>