TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — As you enter Iran’s capital, you begin with only the occasional glimpse — a passenger in a speeding car or a pedestrian trying to outrun Tehran’s notorious traffic. But as you reach the cooler heights of Tehran’s northern neighborhoods along the city’s sycamore-lined Vali-e Asr Street, they are almost everywhere, women with their brown, black, blonde and gray locks.
More and more, Iranian women are choosing to forgo the country’s mandatory headscarf, or hijab.
It was unthinkable just a few years earlier in the Islamic Republic, whose conservative Shiite clerics and hardline politicians have been pushing for strict enforcement of laws requiring women to cover their hair. But the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022 and the nationwide protests that followed angered women of all ages and views in a way that few other issues have since the country’s Islamic Revolution of 1979.
“When I went to Iran in 1999, leaving one strand of hair would immediately show someone telling me to tuck it back under the headscarf for fear that the morality police would take me away,” said Holly Dagres, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “To see where Iran is today feels unimaginable: Women and girls openly defy the mandatory hijab.”
“The authorities are overwhelmed by the large numbers across the country and worry that if they slow down – at a delicate time characterized by power outages, water shortages, and a rotten economy – they could spur Iranians to return to the streets.”
First trip to Iran in years
I received a three-day visa from the government to attend a summit addressed by Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi as tensions remain high over Tehran’s nuclear program. Access to reporting beyond the summit was limited, but the trip gave me my first on-the-ground look at Iran since my last visits in 2018 and 2019.
In those intervening years, I watched from abroad in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in my role overseeing Associated Press coverage of Iran and the Gulf Arab states as Iran was rocked by protests over the economy and Amini’s death, the coronavirus pandemic and a 12-day war with Israel.
For the past 46 years, Iran’s leaders have imposed the rule of the hijab. At the tightest times, the police and the Basijis, the all-volunteer force of the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, kept a close eye on women on the streets to ensure compliance.
Whenever the atmosphere felt more laxer, many women pushed their scarves further and further back on their heads – little challenges to the government about how much hair you can ask for on display. But they rarely dared to remove it.
More women choose to go without the hijab
Working remotely with my AP colleagues in Iran, I knew from their reporting, photos and video footage from the streets even on unrelated assignments that women had begun to drop the hijab altogether. But I didn’t fully understand the scale of that rejection until I saw it myself.
Around Tajrish Square, at the foot of Tehran’s Alborz Mountains, one group of girls who are required to wear hijabs to school took them off immediately after leaving in the afternoon. They walked between cars idling through the traffic, laughing and carrying art projects. Women of all ages went naked in the Tajrish Bazaar and passing through the blue tile domes of the shrine of Imamzadeh Saleh. Two police officers on the street talked to each other as the women passed by without comment.
At the luxury Espinas Palace hotel, several naked women walked past signs that read, “Please observe the Islamic hijab” with a black and white outline of a woman in a hijab.
A foreign diplomat’s wife attended a summit lunch without one. An Iranian woman attendee placed one on her head briefly while discussing with a hotel staff member, then let it fall completely onto her shoulders a moment later.
Those sites were in northern Tehran, an affluent area that is generally more liberal. But even in a more conservative southern district, a naked woman walked briskly down the street among others in the all-encompassing black chador.
“All my life I had to wear the hijab, at school, at the university, everywhere in public,” an Iranian woman who recently immigrated to Canada told me after returning to Dubai, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
“I always tried to follow the rules but it made me feel a lack of confidence… because I wore the hijab and I didn’t believe in that.”
The signs of war could also be seen. I saw one apartment building, his apartment on the top floor is still in ruins from an Israeli strike as well.
Dissatisfaction simmers beneath the surface
Hard-liners within Iran’s theocracy have repeatedly called for more enforcement of hijab laws. Iran’s reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian has pushed to stop this, saying in September in an interview with NBC News that “human beings have a right to choose.”
Iran’s top authority, 86-year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has so far left the hijab issue alone after this year’s war with Israel, which also saw the United States bomb Iranian nuclear enrichment sites. Any changes to Iran’s government-subsidized gasoline prices, among the cheapest in the world, are also being suspended, despite mounting economic pressure on the country as its rial currency trades at more than a million to $1.
The reason probably rests in the widespread dissatisfaction of the people of Iran with its theocracy at the moment. Previous government actions on both issues have led to nationwide protests and a crackdown by security forces that has killed hundreds and seen thousands detained.
In recent days, Pezeshkian’s social affairs adviser Mohammad-Javad Javadi-Yeganeh acknowledged data from an unpublished poll by the state-linked Iranian Student Polling Agency. The survey reportedly suggested widespread discontent with the government, something previously unacknowledged by officials who repeatedly claimed the country had come together during the 12-day war. The fear of another war permeates conversations around Tehran.
“When we visit provinces, we see in the polls that people are dissatisfied with the administration,” Pezeshkian said recently, without directly acknowledging the vote. “We respond as we cannot provide services to people.”
Voting tracks with widespread voter discontent and low turnout during last year’s initial presidential vote.
“Years of economic hardship, inflation, currency volatility, unemployment and public frustration over environmental and social challenges have sharply reduced trust in institutions,” the Washington-based National Iranian American Council said in an analysis of reported polling data.
However, the worry of renewed government repression persists for a population exhausted by the sounds of international sanctions and the widespread fear of another war with Israel.
“Sometimes that fear is with me,” said the Iranian woman who lives in Canada. “Sometimes when I’m behind the wheel, I try to find the scarf on my head. That fear is still with me.”
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