Iran hesitates to clamp down on defiance of headscarf rules as war and economic pressures mount

Women sit at outdoor cafes without headscarves and wearing crop tops. Men in shorts and women in leggings exercise together in parks. At sidewalk concerts, women stop to dance and literally let their hair down.

The scenes from the Iranian capital of Tehran, shared in social media videos, point to how dramatically enforcement of social restrictions has eased in the Islamic Republic in recent years.

That’s in part because of the mass protests that erupted after the Sept. 16, 2022, death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who was detained by morality police for allegedly not wearing her headscarf properly. Security forces crushed the protests with a crackdown that killed more than 500 people, and thousands were arrested. But to keep the peace, authorities backed off on enforcement of the rules mandating the hijab, or headscarf, and modest dress for women.

The question now is whether that can be reversed.

Hard-liners in Iran’s ruling establishment increasingly demand a clampdown on women’s dressing habits. But top leaders caution against triggering a public backlash at a time of war, when U.S. attacks, sanctions and a naval blockade are pushing the crippled economy toward collapse.

“We can’t enter into that front as we ought to because of wartime conditions,” Gholam Ali Haddad Adel, a politician and father-in-law of Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, said last week in public remarks about headscarves.

An activist and former political prisoner who lives in Tehran, Pouran Nazemi said disagreements about the hijab became more acute after the war started. “They are afraid of protests,” she said in a phone call.

A university student in her early 20s who lives in an affluent northern area of the capital said she doesn’t wear a headscarf but wears outfits that cover most of her arms and legs — and “I feel like I am wearing too much.”

Her friends, she said, go out in tops that show their bare shoulders and shorts that stop at the knee. She spoke with The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity out of security fears.

At its strictest, Iran’s ruling theocracy requires women to wear a scarf covering the hair and loose-fitting clothes that hide the entire body. Religious police in the streets have fined, harassed or arrested women skirting the rules. But over the past decade, many women challenged the limits, moving the scarf to show more hair and wearing more closely fitting clothes.

Since 2022, many stopped wearing the headscarf entirely. Even more recently, women in some parts of Tehran have bared their arms, legs or even stomachs.

In a piece published Wednesday, four years after Amini’s death, a hard-line newspaper overseen by the supreme leader said the removal of headscarves had grown into “promoting nudity and permissiveness” and called it a “security threat.” The report in Kayhan added that the judiciary chief, Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei, had called for “prudent and urgent action” on headscarves.

Hard-liners hold nightly rallies across the country attended by women in black conservative robes and head coverings. But even there, a few women without headscarves can be seen.

Hijab rules have become a lightning-rod issue dividing pragmatists from hard-liners among Iran’s ruling theocracy, much like questions of whether to negotiate with the U.S. or escalate the war.

Many of the calls for enforcing headscarves have come from figures linked with the supreme leader’s office, though it is not known if they reflect Khamenei’s stance. The supreme leader has not appeared in public — nor released any audio or video recordings — since succeeding his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed by an Israeli strike on Feb. 28. The elder Khamenei long called for firm enforcement on the hijab.

In a sermon on Aug. 28, a top cleric in the eastern shrine city of Mashhad portrayed women without the hijab and others he described as irreligious as a domestic force that the U.S. could use against Iran. Ahmad Alamolhoda, who is the city’s Friday prayer leader and the supreme leader’s representative in the province, called on officials to use “all their resources” to curb such behavior.

Some conservative figures and media have blamed the pragmatist President Masoud Pezeshkian for preventing a stricter hijab policy.

“As soon as we say anything, they say there’s a war, let’s not make trouble,” Abdol Hossein Khosrowpanah told reporters last week after a meeting with officials about headscarves. Khosrowpanah heads a state body overseeing universities and cultural institutions that is controlled by the supreme leader.

Authorities have briefly shuttered some Tehran cafes and public places for violations of hijab rules, but the effort has not expanded.

Iranian leaders are cautious, particularly in the face of intensified U.S. sanctions they say aim to foment popular unrest. In January, protests over a currency crash snowballed into nationwide marches calling the Islamic Republic’s overthrow. The ensuing crackdown killed thousands.

Women are finding they can pass with their hair uncovered even in places where they long had to be the most wary.

One Tehran resident in her mid-30s said she recently went without a headscarf on an errand to a government office, where hijab rules are normally strongly enforced. She spoke to AP by phone on condition of anonymity because of security fears.

Three women in Tehran contacted by AP said security forces hadn’t commented on their lack of a hijab while going through street checkpoints, which often include members of the feared Basij, the all-volunteer force that enforces morality rules and is used to crush protests.

The new head of the Basij, hard-line cleric Hossein Taeb, a former intelligence chief, cautioned a gathering of commanders last week that the headscarf issue should be addressed in a way that does not harm “internal cohesion,” according to the semiofficial news agency Mehr.

That echoed a statement by Khamenei last month that prioritized the war struggle above other issues.

Women are still targeted on morals-related charges. In a video posted to her Instagram page on Aug. 19, singer Hiwa Seyfizade said she had been sentenced to four years in prison after performing a public concert in the capital last year.

Turning points in Iran’s modern history have often linked with the hijab issue. The Iranian monarchy forced women to remove headscarves in its drive to Westernize society in the 1930s. After the shah’s overthrow in 1979, the mandatory hijab became a defining tenet of clerical rule.

“Women who don’t put it on are, in a way, carrying out civil disobedience toward the government,” Sedigheh Vasmaghi, a lawyer and former political prisoner, said by phone from northern Iran.

The deaths of Amini and other women targeted for dress violations prompted Vasmaghi to discard the headscarf in 2023, after decades of wearing it. Vasmaghi is a scholar of Islamic jurisprudence and has written widely on women in Islam.

“Taking off the headscarf wasn’t an easy thing, especially for a person like myself,” she explained. She was detained in 2024 after openly arguing that there was no basis for the mandatory hijab in Islam.

Vasmaghi said she fears authorities could try a new crackdown after the war. But she noted that past attempts have failed.

“People aren’t going to go back to how it was,” the activist Nazemi said. “They aren’t capable of doing it.”

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