Tehran: Minoo Khaleghi easily won a seat in the Iranian Parliament in February, part of a wave of independents and reformists who now have the numbers to wrest authority from the hardliners. On Wednesday, however, a powerful state committee demonstrated that the conservative forces would not relinquish power without a fight.

Citing “evidence” that had emerged against her, the Dispute Settlement Committee of Branches, a part of Iran’s generally conservative judiciary, ruled that Khaleghi could not be sworn in a new member of Parliament, the semi-official Fars News Agency reported. The evidence, it turned out, consisted of photographs of Khaleghi, “leaked” on social media last week, showing her in public in Europe and in China without the obligatory Islamic headscarf. Hardliners immediately accused her of “betraying the nation”.

But opposition-aligned analysts and Khaleghi shot back that the case against her was politically motivated, more about curtailing and marginalising prominent reformists — and a woman — than about her travelling abroad without a headscarf.

While acknowledging that all Iranian women are obliged to cover themselves in public, even when travelling abroad, they said there was a problem with the evidence. The photographs were, Khaleghi said in a statement to the official government newspaper Iran, malicious fakes.

“I am a Muslim woman, adhering to the principles of Islam,” she wrote, adding that she was suing the distributors of her images. Those who published them, she wrote, were driven by “political greed”.

Adding to the confusion, the committee acted a day after the Interior Ministry, headed by an ally of Iran’s moderate President Hassan Rouhani, arrested a hard-line activist for having published the photographs. He was the administrator of the channel on the messaging app Telegram where the images appeared.

Rouhani himself had just sent out a post on Twitter indirectly supporting Khaleghi as one of 18 women to win election to the Parliament, or Majlis, this spring.

“For the first time, 18 women MPs have made their way to the Majlis, which is a record, and we are happy that the dear ladies of our country are present in all scenes and especially in politics,” he said in the post.

The case illustrates how state religion continues to trump politics in Iran, even after the recent electoral gains of moderate forces, analysts said. Despite sweeping all seats in the country’s most important constituency, Tehran, the reformists could only watch in dismay as the much-despised morality police returned to the streets and as actors and artists began receiving judicial warnings urging them to behave in “Islamic” fashion or face prosecution.

Khaleghi’s troubles began some weeks after her election victory, when she was disqualified without explanation by the powerful Guardian Council, a 12-member group that includes six clerics appointed by the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. That was, at the very least, surprising, because the council had screened her extensively before the vote, just as it does all candidates, and had proclaimed her fit.

What has alarmed Khaleghi and other reformists is that, under the Iranian constitution, only the Parliament is empowered to review and approve the credentials of new lawmakers. In this instance, however, for what seemed to be the first time, the Guardian Council asserted at least equal rights.

“This means that any winner in the elections can be disqualified by the Guardian Council,” said Ali Shakourirad, a reformist lawmaker. “It sets a bad precedent for future elections.”

The disqualification set off a dispute between Parliament and the government, on one side, and the Guardian Council on the other. After waiting in limbo for weeks, the Interior Ministry asked the Dispute Settlement Committee of Branches to take up the case.

Khaleghi and her allies say they remain hopeful that Khamenei, who has the last word on every major decision in Iran, might step in and reinstate her.

“There is a small chance she might be qualified,” said Farshad Ghorbanpour, a political analyst close to the government.

Ghorbanpour said this battle might herald many political fights to come, now that the Iranian Parliament is evenly divided between reformists, hardliners and independents.

“This is the first muscle-flexing by the hardliners,” he said. “We will see more.”