TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — As you enter Iran’s capital, it starts with just a few casual glances — a passenger in a speeding car or a pedestrian trying to jump through Tehran’s notorious traffic. But as you reach the cooler heights of Tehran’s northern neighborhoods along the city’s sycamore-lined Vali-e Asr street, women are almost everywhere, with their locks of brown, black, blonde and gray.
More and more Iranian women are choosing to ditch the country’s mandatory headscarf, or hijab.
It was unthinkable just a few years earlier in the Islamic Republic, whose conservative Shiite clerics and hardline politicians have long pushed for strict enforcement of laws requiring women to cover their hair. But the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022 and the nationwide protests that followed enraged women of all ages and views in a way that few other issues have since the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
“When I moved to Iran in 1999, letting a single strand of hair out immediately prompted someone to tell me to put it back under my headscarf for fear that the morality police would pick me up,” said Holly Dagres, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “To see where Iran is today is unimaginable: women and girls openly defy the mandatory hijab.”
“Authorities are overwhelmed by the numbers across the country and worry that cracking down — at a delicate time marked by power outages, water shortages and a rotten economy — could encourage Iranians to return to the streets.”
First trip to Iran in years
I received a three-day visa from the government to attend a summit addressed by Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi as tensions remain high over Tehran’s nuclear program. Access to reporting beyond the summit was limited, but the trip gave me my first on-the-ground look at Iran since my last visits in 2018 and 2019.
In those intervening years, I watched from abroad in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in my role overseeing Associated Press coverage of Iran and the Gulf Arab states, as Iran was roiled by protests over the economy and the death of Amini, the coronavirus pandemic and a 12-day war with Israel.
For the past 46 years, Iran’s rulers have imposed the hijab rule. At the strictest times, police and the Basijis, the all-volunteer force of the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, closely followed the women on the streets to ensure compliance.
Whenever the atmosphere felt looser, many women would push their scarves further and further back on their heads – little challenges to the government about how much hair you can get away with showing. But they rarely dared to remove it.
More women choose to go without the hijab
Working remotely with my AP colleagues in Iran, I knew from their reports, photos and video footage from the streets, even on unrelated assignments, that women had begun to ditch the hijab entirely. But I didn’t fully understand the magnitude of that refusal until I saw it myself.
Around Tajrish Square, at the foot of Tehran’s Alborz Mountains, a group of young girls who are required to wear hijabs to school took them off just after they left for the afternoon. They darted between cars idling through traffic, laughing and carrying art projects. Women of all ages walked uncovered at the Tajrish Bazaar and past the blue-tiled domes of the Imamzadeh Saleh Shrine. Two policemen on the street talked to each other as the women passed unnoticed.
At the luxury Espinas Palace hotel, several uncovered women walked past signs that read “Please observe the Islamic hijab,” with a black-and-white outline of a woman in a hijab.
A foreign diplomat’s wife attended a summit dinner without one. An Iranian woman in attendance briefly draped one over her head while chatting with a hotel staff member, then let it fall completely over her shoulders a moment later.
Those sites were in northern Tehran, an affluent area that is generally more liberal. But even in a more conservative southern neighborhood, an uncovered woman quickly walked down the street in, among other things, the all-encompassing black tsador.
“All my life I had to wear the hijab, at school, at university, everywhere in public,” an Iranian woman who recently immigrated to Canada told me after I returned to Dubai, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.
“I always tried to follow the rules, but it made me feel a lack of confidence… because I was wearing a hijab and I didn’t believe in it.”
There were also signs of war. I saw an apartment building, his apartment on the top floor was still in ruins, also from an Israeli strike.
Resentment simmers beneath the surface
Hardliners in Iran’s theocracy have repeatedly called for increased enforcement of hijab laws. Iran’s reformist president Masoud Pezeshkian has pushed to stop this, saying in an interview with NBC News in September that “human beings have the right to choose.”
Iran’s supreme authority, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 86, has so far left the hijab issue alone after this year’s war with Israel, in which the United States also bombed Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites. Also pending are any changes to Iran’s government-subsidized gasoline prices, among the cheapest in the world, despite growing economic pressure on the country as its rial currency trades at more than 1 million to $1.
The reason probably lies in the widespread dissatisfaction of the people of Iran with its theocracy at this time. Previous government actions on both issues have led to nationwide protests and crackdowns by security forces that have killed hundreds and seen thousands detained.
In recent days, Pezeshkian’s social affairs adviser, Mohammad-Javad Javadi-Yeganeh, acknowledged data from an unpublished survey by the state-linked Iranian Student Polling Agency. The poll suggested widespread discontent with the government, something previously unacknowledged by officials who have repeatedly claimed the country had come together during the 12-day war. Fear of the outbreak of another war permeates the conversations in Tehran.
“When we visit the provinces, we see in the polls that people are dissatisfied with the administration,” Pezeshkian said recently, without directly acknowledging the poll. “We are responsible because we cannot provide services to people.”
Polls show widespread voter dissatisfaction and low turnout in last year’s primary presidential vote.
“Years of economic hardship, inflation, currency volatility, unemployment and public frustration with environmental and social challenges have drastically eroded trust in institutions,” the Washington-based National Iranian American Council said in an analysis of the reported polling data.
However, fears of a renewed government crackdown persist for a population exhausted by grinding international sanctions and widespread fear that another war with Israel is coming.
“Sometimes this fear is with me,” said the Iranian woman who lives in Canada. “Sometimes when I’m behind the wheel, I try to find my headscarf. That fear is still with me.”
___
The Associated Press receives support for nuclear security coverage from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Outrider Foundation. AP is solely responsible for all content.