Women’s Hair Flows Freely in Iran
‘I have not worn a scarf for months,’ one student said.
An engineer strode onstage at an event in Tehran, wearing tight pants and a stylish shirt. Her long brown hair, tied in a ponytail, swung behind her, uncovered, in defiance of Iran’s strict hijab law.
“I am Zeinab Kazempour,” she told the convention of Iran’s professional association of engineers. She condemned the group for supporting the hijab rules, and then she marched offstage, removing a scarf from her neck and tossing it to the floor under an image of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The packed auditorium erupted in cheers. A video of Ms. Kazempour went viral on social media and local news sites, making her the latest champion in a growing, open challenge to the hijab law.
Women have resisted the law, uncovering their hair a strand at a time, since it went into effect two years after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. But since the death last year of Mahsa Amini, 22, while in the custody of the morality police, women and girls have been at the center of a nationwide uprising, demanding an end not only to hijab requirements but to the Islamic Republic itself.
“I have not worn a scarf for months — I don’t even carry it with me anymore,” said Kimia, 23, a graduate student in the Kurdish city of Sanandaj, in western Iran, who, like others interviewed, asked that her surname not be used for fear of retribution.
Kimia said that many female students at her college did not cover their hair even in classrooms in the presence of male professors. “Whether the government likes to admit it or not,” she said, “the era of the forced hijab is over.”
Iran’s hijab law mandates that women and girls over 9 cover their hair, and that they hide their bodies under loose robes. Many still adhere to the rule in public, some by choice and others from fear. Videos of the bazaar in Tehran, Iran’s capital, show most women covering their hair. But videos of parks, cafes, restaurants and malls — places popular with younger women — show more of them uncovered. Many prominent women, including celebrities and athletes, have removed their hijab.
The state has long promoted the hijab law as a symbol of its success in establishing the Islamic Republic, but enforcement has varied. After the election in 2021 of Ebrahim Raisi, a hard-liner, as president, the rules have been increasingly enforced, and with a strictness and brutality that have enraged Iranian women.
Anger boiled over in September, when Ms. Amini died, and as the protests that broke out across Iran morphed into calls for an end to being ruled by the country’s clerics.
The protests have fizzled amid a crackdown that has included mass arrests and the executions of four young protesters. But many acts of civil disobedience continue daily.
For the moment, officials are only occasionally enforcing the hijab rules, activists in Iran said. But the judiciary has opened a case against Ms. Kazempour, according to Iranian news reports.
Even many religious women who wear a hijab by choice have joined the campaign to repeal the law. A petition with thousands of names is circulating on Instagram and Twitter with the message, “I wear the hijab, but I am against the compulsory hijab.”