Three months after the start of a revolt against vice squads accused by crowds of killing a woman in “inappropriate clothing”, Iran’s judiciary claims to have abolished this controversial religious police unit.
Iran has announced the abolition of the vice squad responsible for the arrest of young Mahsa Amini, whose death in custody has sparked a nearly three-month wave of protests in Iran.
The announcement, seen as a gesture towards protesters, came after authorities decided on Saturday to revise a 1983 law requiring veils in Iran, imposed four years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
It was the morality police who arrested Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman, in Tehran on September 13, accusing her of not respecting the Islamic Republic’s strict dress code, which requires women in the audience to wear the veil.
His death was announced three days later. Activists and her family say Mahsa Amini died after being beaten, but authorities have linked her death to health problems, which her parents have denied.
Her death sparked a wave of demonstrations in which women, spearheading the protest, took off and burned their headscarves and shouted “Woman, life, freedom”.
Despite the repression that has claimed hundreds of lives, the protest movement continues.
“The morality police (…) were abolished by those who created them,” Attorney General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri said on Saturday evening, quoted by the Isna news agency on Sunday.
“decency”
After 1979, “Islamic Revolutionary Committees” under the Revolutionary Guards conducted patrols to enforce dress code and “morality” in Iran.
But the morality police, known as Gasht-e Ershad (Executive Patrols), were created under ultra-conservative President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005-2013) to “spread the culture of decency and hijab”.
This unit, made up of men in green uniforms and women in black chadors covering the head and torso, began patrolling in 2006 to enforce the Islamic Republic’s strict dress code, which also forbids women from wearing tight pants and shorts. Women who break the code risk being taken away.
Gasht-e Ershad was then founded by the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution, which is now led by ultra-conservative President Ebrahim Raisi, who was elected in 2021.
In July, Ebrahim Raïsi even called for the mobilization of “all institutions to strengthen the law on the veil,” stating that “the enemies of Iran and Islam want to undermine the cultural and religious values of society.”
Nonetheless, under his moderate predecessor Hassan Rouhani, one could come across women in tight jeans with brightly colored veils.
veil law
On Saturday, the same prosecutor, Mohammad Jafar Montazeri, announced that “the parliament and the judiciary are working on the issue of the veil”, without specifying what could be changed in the law.
This is an ultra-sensitive issue in Iran, with two camps clashing: conservatives, who back the 1983 law, and progressives, who want to give women the right to vote or not.
Under the law, in force since 1983, Iranian and foreign women, regardless of their religion, are required to wear a veil and loose clothing in public.
Since the death of Mahsa Amini and the ensuing demonstrations, more and more women are baring their heads, especially in upscale northern Tehran.
Also read How Iran Made the Veil the Banner of Islamism and How the West Didn’t Understand For Forty Years
On September 24, a week after the protests began, Iran’s main reform party called on the state to lift the veil.
The Iranian authorities consider the demonstrations “riots” and have accused foreign forces of being behind the movement to destabilize the country.
According to a recent report by Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps General Amirali Hajizadeh, more than 300 people have died in protests since September 16.
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