Unveiled Iranian women continue to defy regime despite crackdown two years after protests

A white van with a green stripe heads down a Tehran street as two hijab-less teenagers hide behind an electrical box. The vehicle stops and several female morality police officers in chadors, the robes that cover from head to toe, rush at them. One is forced into the van. The other resists. Up to four police officers cover her mouth and nose, grab her by the neck and head and drag her along the ground, pulling her hair, until she is put into the vehicle. “Leave her alone, for God’s sake, she’s just a child,” a passerby yelled at them, according to the teenager’s mother. The protagonist of this scene, captured in a viral video in Iran, recorded on June 21, is called Nafas Haji Sharif. She is 14 years old.

By mid-August, at least 620 Iranian women had been arrested for not wearing a veil under the so-called “Operation Noor (Light),” announced in April by police chief Ahmadreza Radan, according to the Iranian human rights organization HRANA. This figure is surely an underestimate, as this operation is just one of several carried out in the past two years by the Islamic Republic of Iran to suppress the growing number of women and girls who have adopted the civil disobedience gesture of renouncing the veil required by law from the age of nine.

Many Iranian women – some of them veiled – had been fighting for decades against the imposition of this garment, an exponent of a misogynistic legislation and social practice that subordinates them for life to the authority of a man and an ideological pillar of a regime that has used this religious symbol as a tool of social control of the female half of the population. That struggle, however, reached a point of no return two years ago due to the repression of the demonstrations sparked by the death, on September 16, 2022, of Yina Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who three days earlier had been arrested in Tehran for wearing the hijab in an “inappropriate” way. Hours later, what began as a shopping spree for her imminent birthday for this Kurdish woman ended with her leaving a police station in an ambulance, brain dead. According to the UN Independent Fact-Finding Mission on Iran, after suffering a beating by the police.

Two years after the violent official response to the protests — at least 551 protesters were killed, some by gunfire; another 60,000 were arrested and nine hanged, according to the UN — Iran is “intensifying its efforts to suppress the fundamental rights of women and girls and crush women’s activism initiatives,” reads a statement from the Mission. Faced with “the rise of women’s activism in Iran,” confirms the NGO HRANA, the “response” is “worsening government repression.”

In the past two years, the UN Mission denounces, security forces in Iran have stepped up “pre-existing patterns of physical violence, including beatings, kicking and slapping women and girls” without a hijab, the statement said. The authorities “have strengthened surveillance of compliance with the hijab”, using traffic cameras and even drones. An Iranian woman without a veil was even sentenced to washing corpses in a cemetery in 2023. A law, the Hijab and Chastity law, which increases prison sentences for this reason to up to five years, is in its final stages of approval.

The judicial offensive continues, too. With a qualitative leap: the increase in sentences against female activists. These sentences, in theory not related to the veil, constitute a “repression of female dissent” that “extends to the imposition of death sentences as a form of retaliation,” censures HRANA. On July 4, trade unionist Sharifeh Mohammadi was sentenced to death for “armed rebellion.” That same month, feminist Pakhshan Azizi suffered the same fate for her alleged membership in Kurdish armed groups. Another 15 women, these from the persecuted Baha’i religious minority, had been sentenced in May to a total of 75 years in prison, accused of “propaganda against the system.” The reason is that they gave “music and tutoring classes,” says Spanish-Iranian activist Ryma Sheermohammadi.

“The Iranian government continues to face significant discontent,” says Naysan Rafati, senior Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group, in Washington, driven in large part by “its restrictions on women, lack of social and political freedoms, economic tensions, and a particularly acute sense of discrimination among religious and ethnic minorities.” Iran’s new president, the moderate Masud Pezeshkian, “acknowledged some of these grievances during the campaign,” Rafati continues, “but it is far from clear that his administration can address them.”

A single female minister

The question of the veil is seen as an indicator of the president’s room for manoeuvre in the face of the almost absolute power of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guard. Pezeshkian promised at a rally to abolish the morality police “if possible”. That promise remains just that. The composition of his government, announced in August, does not raise any hopes either. It has only one minister: Farzaneh Sadegh, in the portfolio of roads and urban development.

The ministry that oversees the police, the Interior Ministry, has a new head, Eskandar Momeni, a commander of the Revolutionary Guards known for supporting the arrests of women without headscarves. Iran’s involvement in the Middle East conflict has also blurred the already moderate external pressure on Iran and its authorities regarding the violation of women’s rights. The international community’s attention has focused this summer on possible Iranian retaliation against Israel for the assassination in Tehran of Ismail Haniya, the political leader of Hamas, on July 31.

Despite everything, “cultural and social change in Iran is irreversible,” says activist Sheermohammadi. Iran “is not the same as it was two years ago,” she stresses. “Even in the poor and conservative neighbourhoods of southern Tehran, unveiled women go out for a run – another taboo broken – even with their partners, something unthinkable before,” she says, citing the testimony of women around her in the city.

For the Iranian historian Arash Azizi, author of What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom (What do Iranians want? Women, Life, Freedom), the “millions of Iranians who continue to practice civil disobedience by not covering their hair” are the “most lasting change” of these two years. The protesters’ “demands” for a life for women “without the draconian restrictions of the Islamic Republic”, for “basic freedoms and a normal life” were, in her opinion, embodied in that old Kurdish slogan, which became the motto of the protests, and which she alludes to in the title of her book: Women, Life, Freedom.