FRONTLINE: Tehran Bureau: SPECIAL REPORT: Your Veil is a Battleground II | PBS
In the last two and a half months, the issue of “immodest dressing” — which is to say, women’s wholesale flouting of the official dress code — has greatly disturbed the fundamentalist universe. Practically every day, the national radio and TV network broadcasts a panel discussion or a speech by some luminary or “expert” variously analyzing, dissecting, lamenting, or fulminating against the improperly clad women of Iran. Similar plaints also emanate routinely from the print media, parliamentary debates, mosque pulpits, and political forums.
Yet, unlike in years past, the decision makers have seemed all but paralyzed, unable to crack down on the erring women. The reason for this remarkable development is not hard to understand. Not only did the execrable “morality patrols” play a major role in inspiring the formation of the Green Movement, a large-scale clampdown now could easily touch off renewed protests on the streets. “As long as this tense social equilibrium exists between the two sides,” said the academic, “the authorities would be taking a major risk in going after women.”
In fact, according to the NAJA officer quoted earlier, last month the government tested the public mood by stopping Tehran couples in the street and asking them for proof of marriage. Some cars were impounded and a number of people were arrested. No riots were sparked — perhaps because of the element of surprise — but vast numbers of people reacted extremely negatively to the news the following day. Informers and intelligence agents were reportedly quick to report the public revulsion to their superiors, and the campaign was quickly ditched. When asked to comment on it, NAJA’s chief, Brigadier General Esmail Ahmadi Moghaddam — who happens to be an in-law of Ahmadinejad’s — made a vague allusion to a “pilot project,” but insisted, “This is more like a joke. The police are not tasked with asking people about their relations.” Iranians beg to differ.
In fact, just a few days ago, police started a low-intensity campaign against women in selected areas. As this video, taken by a bystander in the city of Rasht, appears to show, police had to release a detained women in the face of public outrage or risk a beating themselves.
Several clashes, albeit on a relatively small scale, were reported between the police and outraged citizens even before last June’s rigged presidential election. For example, according to the May 26 issue of Mardomsalari, on August 7, 2007, and again on February 24, 2008, several people were arrested after they came to the rescue of women who were being hauled off to detention centers by vice squads.
Still, passivity is not an option for the regime since women would keep pushing the red lines farther and farther, and because the very raison d’être of the system has been tied to the hejab. To crack down or not — that, in a nutshell, is the quandary facing the fundamentalists.
Hojatoleslam Taghi Rahbar, the eldest Majles deputy, and one of the 36 with the distinction of calling for the execution of protesters last July, said in an interview with the newspaper Pool (since shut down): “If we just let them [women] be, we’ll be no match for them later on…. This issue is of strategic importance to us.” He added, “That is exactly what happened under the old regime with deveiling [kashfeh hejab]. It tormented veiled women and the masses and led families astray on the path of disintegration and corruption.”
Taking another tack, the hardline paper Vatan Emruz, closely connected to the country’s security establishment, ran a front-page article, “The Discovery of the Summer Sedition Project at Hejab Avenue.” Its author purported to show that protest leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi had concocted a scheme to foment disturbances during the summer months on the back of public revulsion at the planned morality crackdown. Warning against the use of Basij militiamen for this unpopular task, he wrote, “In this connection, only those people and organs should take action which are fully cognizant of the sedition leaders’ plans, and, God forbid, do not transform the poorly clad into the totally unveiled, and a mere social aberration into a full-fledged rebellion.”