The hidden return of Iran’s morality police
Kambiz Hosseini
Host of nightly show The Program
On paper, Iran’s law still mandates the compulsory hijab. But the streets tell a more complicated truth.
Host of nightly show The Program
On paper, Iran’s law still mandates the compulsory hijab. But the streets tell a more complicated truth.
In Tehran, many women now walk unveiled. At airport checkpoints, they pass bareheaded—and officers look away. Yet that fragile tolerance evaporates beyond the capital.
In Isfahan, women receive automated text messages accusing them of “improper veiling,” detected by license-plate cameras. In Qom and Mashhad, inspectors visit offices to “remind” employees of the rules.
Inside the state, there is no agreement on how to confront defiance.
President Masoud Pezeshkian concedes that “coercion doesn’t work.” Parliament hard-liners demand new crackdowns. Friday-prayer leaders thunder about moral decay. The country’s morality directorate boasts of “eighty thousand trained field operatives.”
The people, however, have made their choice.
Across Iran’s cities, millions of women walk unveiled—not in protest marches, but in daily, deliberate normalcy. Their quiet defiance has become an act of collective civil resistance, echoing Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat in Montgomery: simple, silent and transformative.
In doing so, Iranian women have written a new, unwritten law.
From street vans to soft surveillance
The morality police of the 2000s were visible, violent and crude. The new version is quieter but no less insidious.
The loud green vans are gone, as are the street scuffles and viral videos of women being dragged away. In their place stands a bureaucratic apparatus: text warnings, sealed storefronts, administrative summonses and digital dossiers.
Three years after the death of Mahsa Amini, the state has returned to where it began—only this time, it wears a digital mask. The danger is deeper because it is diffuse.
But society has moved on. The question is no longer just about the veil; it is about the freedom to choose one’s own life.
The morality police are no longer merely an institution; they are a symbol of a larger confrontation—the logic of control versus the logic of choice.
One seeks to recreate a past that no longer exists. The other insists on claiming a future that has already begun.
In that struggle, victory will not belong to those with the greater machinery of repression, but to those who still possess the will to live free.
