Iranian women’s growing defiance to hijab law grows too loud for a troubled regime to silence 

Good long read and reporting:

…Despite the rebellion on the street, Iran’s rigid system of religious rule has never been formally liberalized. Women today are still reprimanded, arrested and even imprisoned for their defiance. Surveillance cameras on the streets are calibrated to detect women in cars who fail to wear a headscarf – and they are routinely ticketed and fined. Warning signs in building entrances sternly order women to obey Islamic rules and cover their hair.

But what’s new is that an increasing number of women are willing to accept this risk and pay the price. And the authorities have been unable to stop them. “The police don’t have enough handcuffs for all of them,” says Keywan Karimi, a Kurdish filmmaker in Iran. “The system is the same, the police are the same – but what’s changed is the level of resistance. People are pushing more against the system, and they’re accepting the cost of resistance. Where once it was one person, now it is thousands.”

The growing defiance by fearless women is just one of the mounting pressures on the Islamic regime that has ruled Iran since the overthrow of the monarchy. After a wave of large-scale protests over the past decade, social unrest continues to ferment. Political uncertainty has worsened the situation: Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, is now 85 and lacks a clear successor. The election of a new reformist president, Masoud Pezeshkian, has sparked frictions inside the ruling elite as Mr. Pezeshkian tries to placate the population with some limited easing of traditional restrictions….

Source: Iranian women’s growing defiance to hijab law grows too loud for a troubled regime to silence