While Iran’s parliament passed a law late last year imposing more severe penalties - including a sharp increase in fines - for violating hijab rules, it has so far gone unenforced. Photo / Getty Images
On a recent evening in the north of Iran’s capital of Tehran, a young woman with long hair fashioned into a high ponytail hopped onto a motorcycle behind a male companion.
Not far away, two other young women smoked cigarettes together on a footpath, one with her hair cascading down her back, the other wearing a loose T-shirt with elbow-length sleeves, according to videos sent to the Washington Post.
These urban scenes - seemingly mundane in much of the world but striking in Iran - illustrate how common it has become for Iranian women to flout the law, in place for over four decades, requiring they cover their hair and dress modestly in public.
More than three years after mass protests sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish-Iranian woman who had been detained by police over her dress, open defiance of compulsory hijab use is widespread.
It’s not just in the teeming metropolis of Tehran but also in smaller cities like Rasht and more conservative areas such as Kermanshah, Hamedan and Dezful, according to interviews, videos and local news coverage.
The hijab - a word that could refer to a woman’s head covering but also more broadly to modest dress - has been a pillar of Iran’s ideology since the Islamic republic was founded in 1979, and government officials face pressure from powerful conservative forces to maintain it.
So laws mandating the covering of women’s bodies remain firmly on the books, though they are now frequently unenforced.
Iranian women said in interviews that for months, they have not seen the kind of heavy-handed policing that was common in the summer leading up to Amini’s death, when for instance one woman was dragged screaming into a police van and another stood in front of a van as it drove forward, pleading with officers to let her daughter go.
Security forces have traditionally been deployed throughout major cities to enforce hijab requirements, at times arresting women and holding them for hours or even overnight.
Punishment could include a short prison sentence, but fines have been more typical, with escalating penalties for repeat offenders.
“Unfortunately, this is something that we live with every day from when we wake up until we go to bed at night,” said Marjan, a 49-year-old woman who lives in Tehran, speaking of the authorities’ relentless focus on how women and girls dress.
“For me personally, it never became normal.”
Marjan and other women spoke on the condition that only their first names be used to avoid punishment for speaking to foreign reporters.
The country’s rulers have eased up on policing hijab requirements out of fear that it could spark another bout of unrest, Iranian officials admit, especially at a time when the country is confronting dire economic conditions, a crippling water crisis and stricter international sanctions because of concerns over Iran’s nuclear programme.
Ordinary Iranians also said in interviews that relaxing hijab enforcement has served as a release valve for public pressure in the months after Israel and the United States carried out withering strikes against Iran, prompting popular discontent with the government and a crackdown on dissent.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran is walking a fragile line where it is overwhelmed by the growing number of women and girls not abiding by mandatory hijab rules, yet wary that excessive repression could again push people into the street,” said Holly Dagres, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute.
While Iran’s parliament passed a law late last year imposing more severe penalties - including a sharp increase in fines - for violating hijab rules, it has so far gone unenforced.
Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf revealed earlier this year that Iran’s Supreme National Security Council had ordered parliament not to put the law into effect, reflecting that the issue has become a matter of national security.
President Masoud Pezeshkian said recently that enforcing the law could spark a “war in society”.
And this month, even a senior conservative politician, Mohammad Reza Bahonar, said the era of enforcing hijab with laws and punishment was effectively over.
After a furious backlash from parts of the ruling establishment, he partially watered down his comments, saying that while he believes the country’s values should stay the same, the methods for promoting those values should be rethought.
A spokesman for Iran’s mission to the United Nations did not respond to a request for comment.
Even as the government has eased up on policing the dress of individual women, officials have continued to use other methods to promote what they see as proper modesty.
Authorities have closed down dozens of businesses throughout the country - cafes, restaurants, wedding halls and clothing stores - since late June because they allowed unveiled women to gather, according to the Centre for Human Rights in Iran, a human rights group based outside Iran.
The group has documented at least 50 temporary shutdowns of businesses due to “improper hijab” between June and October, the vast majority occurring outside Tehran, the centre said in a statement earlier this month.
“The enforcement may vary, but as long as these laws exist, women’s rights and freedoms are in danger,” said Bahar Ghandehari, the centre’s director of advocacy.
At Yazd University in central Iran, university officials have recently summoned female students over their clothing, according to a post on X this month by Zahra Rahimi, a student activist.
Rahimi posted a screenshot of one such summons sent via text message and criticised the action. In response to a request for comment, the university said in an email that it “operates in accordance with the regulations issued by the Ministry of Education.”
The structure of Iran’s ruling system contributes at times to confusion over which laws are being enforced, where and against whom.
Pezeshkian, a relative moderate, heads the elected portion of Iran’s Government, but the commander of Iran’s police force is appointed by the country’s theocratic leader, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Khamenei has said that obeying the Islamic hijab is non-negotiable for Iranian women.
Earlier this month, Ruhollah Momen-Nasab, the head of the Tehran branch of a government body called the Headquarters for Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice, which ultimately answers to Khamenei and seeks to promote Islamic behaviour in the public sphere, announced the formation of a “Chastity and Hijab” unit.
He said his agency would seek to train more than 80,000 people to carry out its mission in Tehran province. It was unclear what those people would do, but one of the agency’s main tasks is deploying staff to issue verbal warnings to women over how they are dressed in public.
Fatemeh Mohajerani, a spokeswoman for Pezeshkian’s administration, said the Government had not dedicated any funds for the hijab unit, leaving its status unclear. When asked recently by an Iranian reporter about rumours that morality patrols had been seen in greater numbers recently, she said she was unaware of this.
When Marjan passes groups of police on Tehran streets these days, she said she makes sure she is unveiled. They almost always say nothing.
In one instance about a year ago, she got into an extended back-and-forth with officers over her dress. One officer recorded a video of her, and she was asked for identifying information.
Marjan said the authorities seemed reluctant to detain her and ultimately did not. Their presence in public seemed to be more a show of intimidation, she said.
“When you go in the metro, really a large percentage of women don’t have hijab anymore, even though the surveillance cameras are running,” she said.
She traced the change to one inflection point: women-led protests that arose in late 2022 after Amini’s death and that adopted the Kurdish slogan of “Woman, Life, Freedom”.
Marjan acknowledged that she wears a headscarf when getting into a taxi on her own or a friend’s car, because the authorities sometimes impound vehicles with unveiled drivers or passengers.
She said she doesn’t want others to pay the price of her resistance and she can’t afford taking time off work to retrieve her own vehicle.
Fatemeh, a woman in her late 60s who lives in Tehran, said she married into a conservative family and followed their customs, wearing a headscarf and overcoat in public for decades. Now she leaves her headscarf at home and goes out in shirts and pants.
“After everything that happened I think all of these [rules] are really ridiculous,” she said. “All my hair is grey. Why would it matter to anyone if I cover it or not?”
To the extent that the government continues to restrict women’s dress, in fits and starts, the impact can seem short lived.
In the northern city of Rasht, authorities shut down several cafes last month for serving unveiled women, according to a video posted to social media and a resident who spoke to the cafe owners and recounted what he heard to the Post.
But the closures lasted just a week or so, the resident said. And in new videos that he sent to the Post depicting the scene there last week, women could be seen walking around and seated at clusters of tables, unveiled.
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