TEHRAN REVIEWS HIJAB LAW AS PRESSURE GROWS
Parliament and judiciary are examining changes after months of protests rock country following the death of a woman detained by morality police
Iran has said it is reviewing a decades-old law that requires women to cover their heads, as it struggles to quell more than two months of protests linked to the dress code.
Protests have swept Iran since the September 16 death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian of Kurdish origin arrested by the morality police for allegedly flouting the sharia-based law.
Demonstrators have burned their head coverings and shouted anti-government slogans. Since Amini’s death, a growing number of women have not been observing hijab, particularly in Tehran’s fashionable north.
“Both parliament and the judiciary are working [on the issue]” of whether the law needed any changes, attorney general Mohammad Jafar Montazeri said.
Quoted by the ISNA news agency, he did not specify what could be modified in the law by the two bodies, which are largely in the hands of conservatives.
The review team met last Wednesday with parliament’s cultural commission “and will see the results in a week or two”, the attorney general said.
President Ebrahim Raisi on Saturday said Iran’s republican and Islamic foundations were constitutionally entrenched.
“But there are methods of implementing the constitution that can be flexible,” he said in televised comments.
The hijab headscarf became obligatory for all women in Iran in April 1983, four years after the Islamic Revolution that overthrew the US-backed monarchy.
It remains a highly sensitive issue in a country where conservatives insist it should be compulsory, while reformists want to leave it up to individual choice.
After the hijab law became mandatory, with changing clothing norms it became commonplace to see women in tight jeans and loose, colourful headscarves.
But in July this year Raisi, an ultraconservative, called for mobilisation of “all state institutions to enforce the headscarf law”. Many women continued to bend the rules, however.
State media on Saturday also announced that the family home of Elnaz Rekabi, an Iranian female rock climber who competed abroad with her hair untied, had been demolished.
Iran’s official judiciary news agency, Mizan, said the destruction of her brother’s home was due to its “unauthorised construction and use of land”, as the family had failed to obtain a construction permit, and that demolition took place months before Rekabi competed. Anti-government activists say it was a targeted demolition.
Rekabi became a symbol of the anti-government movement in October after competing in a rock climbing competition in South Korea without wearing a mandatory headscarf required of female athletes from the Islamic Republic.
Her actions were widely assumed to have expressed support for the protests. In an Instagram post the following day, Rekabi described her not wearing a hijab as “unintentional”. However, it is unclear whether she wrote the post or what condition she was in at the time.
In September, Iran’s main reformist party called for the mandatory hijab law to be rescinded.
The Union of Islamic Iran People Party, formed by relatives of former reformist president Mohammad Khatami, on Saturday demanded the authorities “prepare the legal elements paving the way for the cancellation of the mandatory hijab law”.
The opposition group was also calling for the Islamic republic to “officially announce the end of the activities of the morality police” and “allow peaceful demonstrations”, it said in a statement.
Iran accuses its sworn enemy the United States and its allies, including Britain, Israel and Kurdish groups based outside the country, of fomenting the street protests, which the government calls “riots”.
A general in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps last week, for the first time, said more than 300 people had lost their lives in the unrest since Amini’s death. Iran’s top security body, the Supreme National Security Council, said the number of people killed during the protests “exceeds 200”.
Cited by state news agency IRNA, it said the figure included security officers, civilians and “separatists” as well as “rioters”.
There are methods of implementing the constitution that can be flexible
IRANIAN PRESIDENT EBRAHIM RAIS