Protests in Iran call for abolition of mandatory hijab

Massive demonstrations spark talk of reforming strict dress code laws for women

Iran appears to be preparing to revise a law requiring women to wear the hijab amid ongoing protests. Struggling to quell more than two months of protests over the strict dress code, the Islamic Republic’s Attorney General said parliament and the judiciary were looking into the matter.

Iranian authorities have said they will revise a decade-old law that requires women to cover their heads as Tehran struggles to quell more than two months of dress code-related protests.

“Both the parliament and the judiciary work [над этим вопросом]about whether any changes to the law are needed, Iranian Attorney General Mohammad Jaafar Montazeri said on Saturday. According to the Iranian news agency, he did not specify what the two bodies, which are largely in the hands of conservatives, could change in the law.

On Wednesday, the review team met with the parliamentary commission on culture “and will see the results in a week or two,” the attorney general said.

President Ebrahim Raisi said on Saturday that Iran’s republican and Islamic foundations are constitutionally enshrined.

“But there are ways to implement the constitution that can be flexible,” he said in television commentary.

As The Guardian recalls, the protests in Iran began on September 16 after the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman of Kurdish origin, who was arrested by the vice police for allegedly violating Sharia law.

Over the following weeks, demonstrators burned their hats and shouted anti-government slogans. After Amini’s death, more and more women do not wear headscarves, especially in the north of Tehran.

Hijab became mandatory for all Iranian women in April 1983, four years after the Islamic Revolution toppled the US-backed Shah’s monarchy.

The headscarf remains a sensitive issue in a country where conservatives insist it should be mandatory, while reformists want to leave it up to personal preference.

In July of this year, ultra-conservative Ebrahim Raisi called for the mobilization of “all state institutions to enforce the headscarf law.” And in September, Iran’s main reformist party called for the removal of the hijab law. The Union of the Islamic People’s Party of Iran, formed by relatives of former reformist President Mohammad Khatami, on Saturday demanded that the authorities “prepare legal elements paving the way for the abolition of the law on the mandatory wearing of the hijab.”

The opposition group also called on the Islamic Republic to “officially end the vice police” and “allow peaceful demonstrations,” the statement said.

Tehran is accusing its archenemy the US and its allies, including the UK, Israel and Kurdish groups based outside the country, of fueling what the government calls “riots” in the streets.

Oslo-based NGO Iranian Human Rights said on Tuesday that at least 448 people have been “killed by security forces in ongoing nationwide protests.”

UN human rights chief Volker Türk said last week that 14,000 people, including children, were arrested in the crackdown on protests. Film star Mitra Hajjar, who was detained at her home on Saturday, was among the latest arrested, according to the reformist newspaper Shargh.