Iran Cyber-Police Threatens Beauty Salons, Gyms Over Hijab

Iran's Cyber-Police (FATA) has threatened women fashion businesses, surgery clinics and gyms with closure over unveiled photos in their social media content. 

Ramin Pashaei, deputy chief of FATA, said Monday Cyber Police aims at “clearing the [Persian language] cyberspace of immoral content” and warned that any social media content considered “outside norms and against moral standards” would bring about prosecution. 

Authorities accuse boutiques, beauty salons, modelling agencies, gyms and plastic surgery establishments of encouraging women not to wear the hijab by their “immoral” content. FATA on some occasions in the past has prosecuted them or forced them to shut down their accounts. 

Last week an official of the “Basij-Militia of Retailers”, Gholamreza Hasanpour, told the semi-official Mehr News Agency that female sales staff should wear uniforms to work but have been given a “choice” of one hundred different designs to choose from. 

Unveiled girl protesting against compulsory hijab by performing gymnastics on the streets of Boukan in western Iran. 

Women’s defiance of hijab rules has a history as long as the Islamic Republic itself, but it has escalated to new levels since the death of 22-year-old Mahsa (Jina) Amini in custody of morality police for “improper hijab” sparked nationwide protests. 

Protests gradually subsided after several months but defiance of hijab rules as a form of civil disobedience has forced the government to try to stop the anti-compulsory hijab movement by taking various measures. 

Such measures include preventing defiant women from using public transportation, entering government offices and boarding planes, shutting down shops and shopping malls as well as various plans to “encourage and convince” them to wear the hijab such as billboards and banners extolling “hijab and chastity”. 

One such banner put up by the ministry of Islamic Guidance and Tehran International Bookfair last week quoted the 19th century Russian writer Leo Tolstoy as saying that corruption, sexual derangement, and lack of hijab caused profusion of divorces in Europe. Another banner they have put up quoted 19th century French author Victor Hugo praising modesty of women and its allure for men.

“It's hilarious when you have to fake quotes from Tolstoy and Hugo about hijab because half of your own population is ignoring you,” London-based journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh tweeted. 

Pressure on activists and prosecution of celebrity artists for defiance of hijab in public and through social media are among the other measures the regime has been employing to scare women into wearing the hijab. 

Sepideh Rashno, a 28-year-old art student whose defiance of hijab rules and heated dispute with a hijab enforcer on a city bus landed her in prison in July last year, a few months before the Mahsa protests, was suspended from Alzahra University in Tehran due to "non-observance of the Islamic hijab" last week for two semesters. 

"As a citizen, I have the right to choose the clothes I wear,” she wrote in response to the decision, adding that she planned to return to the university after her suspension “in my preferred outfit”, that is, unveiled.

Pundits have said the regime’s determination to reinforce strict hijab rules is political in nature. Vice President in Legal Affairs Mohammad Dehghan on Sunday confirmed such theories. “The Islamic Republic will not mean much if there is no hijab in the country,” he said. 

On April 4 at a meeting with state officials Tuesday, Khamenei claimed that foreign intelligence services were encouraging Iranian women to disobey mandatory hijab. 

“Discarding hijab is haram based on Sharia and also politically,” he declared. His declaration was a clear signal to authorities that they need to do anything it takes to re-establish control over women which has somehow waned following anti-regime protests.

“The order given by his excellency is clear,” Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf said a day after Khamenei’s speech while promising to give precedence to any hijab-related motion or bill.