The Women of Iran Are Not Backing Down

Politico -Jan 22nd 2023

By SUZANNE KIANPOUR

Persian pop music blasts from the speakers of our silver Peugeot as we weave through Tehran traffic. It’s a Friday in early 2007 and I’m taking advantage of winter break from school to visit my cousin who lives in Tehran. We have meticulously planned our outfits, pushing the boundaries of the required dress for women of the Islamic Republic of Iran: a colorful ‘monteau’ (tunic) as short as we can get away with, matching hijab covering our hair with as little fabric as possible.

My Iranian hosts wanted to show me, an Iranian American, a good time, and so they offered one of the few pleasures afforded them in the strict Islamic Republic: a ride around town.

The boys sit in the front; girls are in the back. Normally, as an American college student, I wouldn’t bat an eyelash at the scene. But we’re dabbling in dangerous territory: unmarried women riding around with unmarried, unrelated men, listening to “haram” (un-Islamic) music, wearing haram clothes.

Our minds are not on mullahs or morality police — until we spot flashing lights in the rearview mirror.

“Oh my God, it’s the police,” I think.

I remember what I’d witnessed earlier that week: a woman in a long black “chador,” a type of cloak that covers the whole body except for the face, flinging open the door of a green and white van and snatching a young woman off the street. The morality police were active again, and we would not pass the Islamic purity test.

But the car passes by us. My fear, in this instance, is unfounded: Those flashing lights were nothing more than a souped-up whip on a joy ride, attempting some semblance of normality in an abnormal society.

Fifteen years later, the morality police took it too far. In September 2022, during what seemed a typical detention over an inadequate hijab, Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman visiting Tehran, was arrested and beaten. She subsequently died in custody. Two female journalists broke the story. They are now in prison. The country erupted in widespread protests not seen since the Green Revolution of 2009, demanding justice for Mahsa and freedom and civil rights for all women.

At the time I was in production for my BBC documentary on Iran’s war with Israel and the U.S., “Out of the Shadows.” I’d moved from Washington to Dubai — 70km from Iran, the distance between Washington and Philadelphia — to work on the hour-long program. The region felt like a tinderbox.

While no one could have predicted the flashpoint would be a routine morality police arrest, it did not come as a complete surprise to me. Throughout my years of reporting on Iran and the wider Middle East, I’ve always kept a keen eye on the hidden power of the women. All this time, they’ve been quietly, strategically, slowly pulling at a literal thread in the fabric of the Islamic Republic regime: the hijab. Now, it’s unraveling.