Abu Dhabi, UAECNN —
A young Iranian woman was pulled off the streets of Tehran by the country’s notorious morality police and taken to a “re-education center” for lessons in modesty last week. Three days later, she was dead.
The government has strongly rejected responsibility for 22-year-old Mahsa Amini’s death, but the news has nonetheless galvanized thousands of Iranian women who have for decades faced the wrath of the Islamic Republic’s morality enforcers firsthand.
Amini’s story has pulled Iran’s apparatus of discipline back into the limelight, raising the question of accountability and impunity enjoyed by the country’s clerical elite.
The morality police are a law enforcement force with access to power, arms and detention centers, she said. They also have control over the recently introduced “re-education centers.”
The centers act like detention facilities, where women – and sometimes men – are taken into custody for failing to comply with the state’s rules on modesty. Inside the facilities, detainees are given classes about Islam and the importance of the hijab (or headscarf), and then forced to sign a pledge to abide by the state’s clothing regulations before they are released.
The first of these establishments opened in 2019, said Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran, adding that “since their creation, which has no basis in any law, agents of these centers have arbitrarily detained countless women under the pretense of not complying with the state’s forced hijab.”
“The women are then treated like criminal[s], booked for their offense, photographed and forced to take a class about how to wear a proper hijab and Islamic morality,” he added.
Videos on social media showed a woman cutting her hair in protest, as the crowd chants “death to the dictator” in Kerman province in southeast Iran. In other parts of the country, demonstrators chanted “We are the children of war, come on and fight, we’ll fight back,” and “death to Khamenei.”
“This time protesters aren’t only calling for justice for Mahsa Amini,” said Ghaemi. “They’re also calling for women’s rights, for their civil and human rights, for a life without a religious dictatorship.”
While there is a sense that the regime may feel vulnerable, some question whether the current movement will expand or simply weaken in the face of a state crackdown.
“Not only are these protests brutally cracked down [on] and contained each time, but there is no leadership,” said Tara Kangarlou, author of “The Heartbeat of Iran,” who grew up under the gaze of the morality police.
“Growing up as a teenager, we would make sure we avoid[ed] streets that we knew the morality police vans would be parked [on] during the weekend,” said Kangarlou.
She says young Iranians have evolved within the “oppressive system” in order to live their lives, but the “average Iranian is fed up.”