Here’s a question: if the veiling of women or forcing them into cloth sacks in countries like Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan was purely voluntary, why do those countries need “morality police” to ensure that women obey those religious dictates? If they all did it willingly, you wouldn’t need police!

Here, for instance, is a Morality Policeman in Afghanistan beating a women who didn’t cover her head properly:

The Morality Police enforce things other than dress, of course: you get punished, or taken away, if you engage in homosexual behavior, eat the wrong things, like pork, or leave your store open during prayer hours. Things can get quite serious, as Wikipedia notes (see the BBC report here):

Perhaps the most serious and widely criticized incident attributed to them occurred on March 11, 2002, when [morality police] prevented schoolgirls from escaping a burning school in Mecca, because the girls were not wearing headscarves and abayas (black robes), and not accompanied by a male guardian. Fifteen girls died and fifty were injured as a result. Widespread public criticism followed, both internationally and within Saudi Arabia.

Can you imagine a religion that would rather see girls die than go out without their coverings? (Yes, of course you can: Catholicism does something similar when it lets both mothers and babies die rather than give the mother an abortion during a life-threatening pregnancy).

Although Iran already had morality police, they’ve decided to make them more pervasive—and more insidious. According to this week’s Guardian, Iran is recruiting 7,000 undercover morality police to enforce dress codes and other infractions. There are already morality police in Iran, but their presence is obvious, as they drive around in marked vans. In response, they’ve created an app so people can see where the vans are if they want to show some hair. Now, though, there will be “undercover” police.

As the Guardian notes:

Every spring, as the temperature rises and with it the desire of people to go out, the authorities in Iran tighten their grip on social norms, increasing the number of the so-called morality police deployed in public places. They target anything from loose-fitting headscarves, tight overcoats, shortened trousers for women and glamorous hairstyles to necklaces for men. Walking dogs has also been added to the long list of activities that upset the authorities. It is not clear if the announcement is a response to the recent launch of the Android smartphone app Gershad, which enables users in Iran to circumvent the morality police vans based on information about their locations collected by other users. . . . Sajedinia [Tehran’s police chief] said “confronting bad hijab and removal of veils inside cars, driving recklessly, parading in the streets, harassing women and stopping noise pollution are the priorities”, according to AFP. The new recruits will not confront people directly, local news agencies said, but instead will send number plates to their superiors who will then officially summon them to see the police. Culprits will be prevented from selling their cars if they do not report to police after receiving a notice.

The sick thing is that, along with many Iranians, Hassan Rouhani, the nation’s president, claims to oppose the morality police, but he can’t do anything about it because they’re run not by him but but by Iran’s “Supreme Leader”, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has been the all-powerful theocrat in Iran since 1989.

There’s no doubt that the use of police to arrest women who have “bad hijab” shows that wearing of the hijab is not, in general, something that women in Iran do voluntarily—out of love of Islam. Before the Islamic revolution in 1979, Iranian women didn’t go around veiled; there’s a huge difference between the way women dressed in 1970 and the way they dress now (see the photos in my post on Iranian and Afghan women).

The lesson is simple, and was tw**ted by Maryam Namazie, an ex-Muslim activist born in Iran and living in England:

If veiling was people's culture, you wouldn't need 7000 morality police to patrol the streets of Tehran https://t.co/QZLbftnU2W — Maryam Namazie (@MaryamNamazie) April 22, 2016