TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — When you enter Iran’s capital, it starts with just the occasional glimpse — a passenger in a speeding car or a pedestrian trying to frog-marsh through Tehran’s notorious traffic. But when you reach the chilly heights of the sycamore-lined Wali Wali-e Asar Street in the city’s northern neighborhoods of Tehran, they’re almost everywhere, women with their brown, black, blonde and brown locks.
More and more, Iranian women are choosing to ditch the country’s mandatory headscarf, or hijab.
A few years ago this would have been unthinkable 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 nationwide protests outraged women of all ages and opinions like few other issues since the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
“When I moved to Iran in 1999, someone immediately told me not to put my hair on top of my head for fear that the morality police would take me away if I showed a single strand of hair,” said Holly Dagrace, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “It is unimaginable to see where Iran is today: women and girls are openly defying the mandatory hijab.”
“Authorities across the country are overwhelmed by the sheer numbers and worry that if they crack down — at a critical time — marked by power blackouts, water shortages, and a rotten economy — they could prompt 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 at a time when tensions were rising over Tehran’s nuclear program. Reporting access beyond the summit was limited, but the trip gave me a first 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 The Associated Press’s coverage of Iran and the Gulf Arab states as Iran’s economy and protests were rocked by Amini’s death, the coronavirus pandemic and the 12-day war with Israel.
For the past 46 years, the rulers of Iran have been enforcing the rule of hijab. During the strictest times, the police and the Basigis, an all-volunteer force of the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, keep a close eye on women on the streets to ensure compliance.
Whenever the atmosphere felt dull, many women pushed their scarves further and further back on their heads – little challenges to the government of how much hair you can show. But they have hardly dared to remove it.
Many women choose to go without the hijab
Working remotely with my AP colleagues in Iran, I knew from their reporting, photographs and video footage from the street on unrelated assignments that women were beginning to ditch the hijab altogether. But I didn’t fully understand the scale of that rejection until I saw it myself.
Around Tajrish Square, at the foot of Tehran’s Alborz hill, a group of young girls required to wear hijabs to school quickly removed them after midday drop-off. They weaved through traffic, laughing and walking among cars carrying art projects. Women of all ages flocked to the Tajrish Bazaar and walked through the blue-tiled domes of the Imamzadeh Saleh Temple. On the street, two police officers talked to each other saying they didn’t know the woman.
At the luxury Espinas Palace Hotel, dozens of women walked past signs reading “Please observe Islamic hijab” with black-and-white outlines of women in their uncovered hijabs.
A foreign diplomat’s wife attended the summit dinner without her. An Iranian woman in attendance held one briefly on her head while discussing it with a hotel employee, then a moment later it fell completely onto her shoulder.
Those sites were in northern Tehran, an affluent area that is generally more liberal. But even in the more conservative southern district, an unseen woman walked swiftly down the street among others in an all-encompassing black chador.
“All my life I had to wear the hijab, in school, in university, in public,” an Iranian woman who recently immigrated to Canada told me after returning 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 don’t believe in it.”
Signs of war can also be seen. I saw an apartment building, its top floor apartment still in ruins from the Israeli attack.
Resentment simmers beneath the surface
Hardliners within Iran’s theocracy have repeatedly called for increased enforcement of the hijab law. Iran’s reformist President Masoud Pezhekian insisted in an interview with NBC News in September that “people have the right to choose.”
Iran’s supreme leader, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 86, has left the hijab issue alone after a war with Israel this year, which saw the United States bomb Iranian nuclear enrichment sites. Even as economic pressure mounts in the country, where the rial currency trades at 1 million to 1 dollar, Iran’s state-subsidized gasoline, the world’s cheapest, has also remained unchanged.
The reason for this is probably the widespread dissatisfaction of the people of Iran with the theocracy of the time. Previous government actions on both cases led to nationwide protests and security force crackdowns that left hundreds dead and thousands detained.
In recent days, Mohammad-Javad Javadi-Yeganeh, Pezheskian’s social affairs adviser, accepted data from an unpublished survey by the state-affiliated Iranian Student Polling Agency. The polls reportedly suggested widespread discontent with the government, something not previously acknowledged by officials who repeatedly claimed the country had come together during the 12-day war. Fears of another war are rife across Tehran.
“When we go to the provinces, we see in the polls that people are dissatisfied with the administration,” Pezheskian said recently, without directly acknowledging the polls. “We are accountable because we cannot serve people.”
Polling tracks with widespread voter dissatisfaction and low turnout in last year’s early presidential polls.
“Years of economic hardship, inflation, currency instability, unemployment and public frustration with environmental and social challenges have sharply eroded trust in institutions,” the Washington-based National Iranian American Council said in an analysis of reported polling data.
Yet concern over a renewed government crackdown remains for a population weary of international sanctions and widespread fear of another war with Israel.
“Sometimes I have that fear,” said an Iranian woman living in Canada. “Sometimes when I’m behind the wheel, I try to find my headscarf on my head. That fear is still with me.”
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