Edit: Changed the Vice Police creation date to December 6th.
Deputy police in Iran abolished? Not so fast. Many media outlets, including 20 Minutes, ran headlines on Sunday about the dismantling of those police forces who arrested Mahsa Amini on September 13 on charges of improperly wearing her headscarf. The young woman’s death three days later sparked a wave of demonstrations that are still taking place.
Iran’s Attorney General has reportedly announced the abolition of these police forces. “The morality police have nothing to do with the judiciary and they have been abolished by those who created them,” said Mohammada Jafar Montazeri in the city of Qom.
NOT CORRECT
This quote appeared on Saturday on the website of the Iranian news agency Isna, which claims to refer to the public prosecutor’s office. The statement is said to have taken place during a conference on “the dimensions of hybrid warfare in recent unrest,” according to the agency.
This conference took place, it was held on December 1st in a seminary in the holy city of Qom. It had been announced online and it was possible to follow it remotely.
In the minutes of that conference, available on the seminar website, the Attorney General says the opposite of statements attributed to him on Saturday. “The justice system has never taken any action or planned to shut down this patrol,” he says of the morality police. 20 Minutes’ translation was confirmed by two Persian-language sources. The Isna agency also picked up this quote and this report in a first article on Friday.
So far, no authority has confirmed or denied the removal of this font.
A “particularly violent, abusive” police force
The Moral Police was created in 2005, but it existed in other forms before that, reminds 20 Minutes Azadeh Kian, professor of sociology at Paris Cité University and author of Women and Power in Islam*. This police “does not depend on the judiciary, but on the Ministry of the Interior,” she recalls.
Mahnaz Shirali, sociologist and political scientist and author of Window on Iran, describes the cry of a gagged people as “good respect for Islamic constraints in public space”. Women have to hide their hair, don’t wear makeup, don’t wear bright colors, and boys have to have an extremely simple haircut, they can’t have T-shirts, sneakers. This violence “is particularly violent, offensive,” she notes.
If this policy were to disappear soon, wearing the veil would remain mandatory. “A law from 1983 is still in force,” Azadeh Kian recalls.
The removal of this police force is not one of the demonstrators’ demands, remind these two specialists in Iran. They have a very broad demand, the end of the regime.
* Women and Power in Islam was published by Michalon Editions in 2019. Window on Iran, the cry of a gagged people was published by Les Pérégrines Editions in 2021.