source: BBC News

published: 15 September 2023

Image Credit: Pexels/Duda

A young woman walks down a street in Tehran, her hair uncovered, her jeans ripped, a bit of midriff exposed to the hot Iranian sun. An unmarried couple walk hand in hand. A woman holds her head high when asked by Iran's once-feared morality police to put a hijab on, and tells them: "Screw you!"

These acts of bold rebellion - described to me by several people in Tehran over the past month - would have been almost unthinkable to Iranians this time last year. But that was before the death in the morality police's custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who had been accused of not wearing her hijab [veil] properly.

The mass protests that shook Iran after her death subsided after a few months in the face of a brutal crackdown, but the anger that fuelled them has not been extinguished. Women have just had to find new ways to defy the regime.

A Western diplomat in Tehran estimates that across the country, an average of about 20% of women are now breaking the laws of the Islamic Republic by going out on to the streets without the veil.

"Things have changed so much since last year," a 20-year-old music student in Tehran, who we are calling Donya, tells me over an encrypted social media platform.

She is one of the many women who now refuse to wear the veil in public.

"I still can't believe the things I now have the courage to do. We've become so much bolder and braver.

"Even though I feel scared to my bones whenever I walk past the morality police, I keep my head up and pretend I haven't seen them," she says. "I wear what I like now when I go out." But she quickly adds that the stakes are high, and she is not reckless. "I wouldn't wear shorts. And I always carry a headscarf in my bag in case things get serious."

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