On April 13th, the news about Iran was on the front pages of the world media. The Iranian regime launched a retaliatory attack on Israel, during which it sent two hundred drones into the enemy’s territory. But on the same day, he launched another aggressive attack, which is no longer talked about – against his own women.
On that day, the Islamic Republic Police announced that they were beginning to implement the “Nur Plan”. It aims to “preserve the sanctity of chastity and the hijab and combat bad behaviour”. However, as the opposition website Zamaneh writes, the details of the plan have not been published – that is, mainly how the police will deal with women who do not respect the order to wear a headscarf.
Khamenei: Wearing the hijab must be observed
And there are a significant number of such in Iran – as part of the protest movement after the death of the Kurdish woman Mahsa Aminiya, many Iranian women put down their hijabs, and videos filmed in the streets of Iranian cities or even in the subway, in which women walk with uncovered hair, quickly flooded the Internet.
In the early months, it seemed that the Ayatollahs’ regime had at least relented on this issue and that the mandatory headscarf would become a thing of the past. Last summer, however, the government renewed the morality police, which is now supposed to focus on the wearing of hijabs.
“If persons, whether as pedestrians or passengers in a vehicle, refuse to obey police orders and are unwilling to wear hijab and obey the law, the police will be forced to act according to the law,” Mehr quoted the police statement as saying.
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Noor’s plan comes in response to a speech by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in early April, who said: “From a religious point of view, the hijab is a definite religious order and is obligatory for women, except for covering the face and hands, and this cannot be ignored; it must be observed.”
Khamenei linked not wearing the headscarf to the “efforts of enemies” and accused women who refuse to wear it of being hired to “violate the sanctity of the hijab”.
The regime has thus fully restored the so-called hijab patrols in the streets, which are supposed to supervise the “morality” of Iranian women. They detained many women and girls in the very first days, often without violence: “She was holding on to the street railing and crying. The policewoman punched her in the hand and the officer forcibly released her fingers. They dragged her into a police van. It was like they were arresting members of the Islamic State,” social media users described one of the incidents in which a teenage girl was arrested in Tehran.
Bystanders tried to convince the police to let the girl go, and one of the men offered her a scarf to convince the police. But the patrol threatened them with the use of tear gas and arrest, after which the persuasion turned into shouting and swearing.
Iranian media also reported the arrest and subsequent release of the wife and daughter of legendary former Iranian national football team goalkeeper Ahmadreza Abedzadeh for “causing tension and conflict” in public for not wearing the compulsory hijab.
How women live in Iran
Protests in Iran have weakened significantly. Kathy no longer believes in the continuation of the revolutionary movement: “Protests are probably not the right way, we have already lost too many lives.” We have no power against them and no country supports us. Maybe it needs a gradual change of governance, that seems more logical to me than protests,” he thinks. According to her, the protests have changed only two things: Everything has radically become more expensive, and women and girls are now daring to go without the hijab.
Some social media users wrote that Iran is taking revenge on women because it does not have the courage to take “hard revenge” on Israel, the Iran International website reported. Criticism also comes from reformists.
Former Communications Minister Mohammad Javad Jahromi said on Telegram that “as the Holy Prophet and other Muslim saints stated, the rules of Islam cannot be established by using force against Muslims.” Jahromi criticized the government for not learning from the failure of previous repressions against women. It is not about any democrat – the former intelligence officer was sanctioned by the West for his role in censorship and spying on people during anti-regime protests in 2019.
Mosques as basij bases
In addition to tightening the dress code, the regime is consolidating power in other ways, for example by building mosques in parks. People meet in them and, according to the regime, they can even plan protests, so these spaces need to be reduced and controlled. The mosques have another important significance besides the religious one: They serve as bases for the Basij paramilitary units, a notoriously brutal force subordinate to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.
In Tehran, people are protesting against the planned construction of a mosque in one of the main parks – they argue, among other things, that there are already several mosques in the vicinity of the park, but their attendance is low.
Because of the mosque, a number of centuries-old trees would probably also fall, even ecologists are against it. Therefore, several activists went to the park to measure the volume of the trunks and thus prove the age and rarity of the trees. When people gathered in the park for a peaceful demonstration at the beginning of April, the police brutally intervened against them. “Death to the dictator,” chants rang out during the crackdown.
