Iran’s headscarves protests reignite debate
tehran — A spate of unprecedented protests against Iran’s mandatory headscarves for women have been tiny in number, but have still reignited a debate that has preoccupied the country since its founding.
The issue has returned to the fore in recent weeks after several women took the unprecedented step of protesting in public without their headscarves. Police say 29 people have been arrested.
Iran is the only country in the world to impose a mandatory headscarf on both Muslim and non-Muslim women as part of its illdefined “hijab” rules that require modest clothing, including a ban on shorts for men.
In practice the rules have been steadily eroding for years.
Particularly in wealthier areas, the all-body black “chador” robes have been increasingly replaced by jeans, make-up and loose, colourful scarves which many let drop around their shoulders entirely.
To see how much Iranian society has evolved, one need only listen to the President, Hassan Rouhani.
He once boasted of personally imposing the compulsory headscarf on women in the years after the 1979 revolution. “The women employees... started moaning and making an uproar but I stood firm,” he wrote in his memoirs.
But since he became president in 2013, the morality police that enforce clothing rules have largely disappeared from the streets.
And just days after police announced the 29 arrests, his administration released a report showing that half of Tehranis opposed enforced hijab.
The timing of the release, four years after the study was conducted, was seen as a shot against Rouhani’s conservative critics.
“Rouhani has evolved a lot,” said Hamid Reza Jalaipour, a professor at the University of Tehran. “In a way, everyone has changed and we must forget the positions and statements of 20 or 30 years ago,” he said.
The report said a substantial number — 40 per cent — still support mandatory hijab but that figure has dropped from 55.5 per cent in 2006.
“In a society where at least 40 to 50 per cent believe hijab is a personal and optional matter, it is very difficult to demand enforcement,” it concluded. —