As the school year comes to a close and Tehran’s scorching heat becomes a daily affair, Iran’s morality police have snuggled back into their favorite parking spots on the western edge of Vanak Square. From aboard a public bus, I spot five morality police vans patrolling the streets between this square and the capital’s busiest intersection downtown.



On Sunday, 195 members of the Iranian parliament signed a letter warning moderate Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to get serious about confronting women failing to properly observe modest Islamic covering - or hijab - or else, the letter reads, Iranian society will face “irreversible consequences” from a western cultural onslaught seeking to “change the Iranian people’s way of life vis-à-vis hijab and chastity.” For weeks state TV has drawn attention to the hijab in televised debates, and pro-hijab posters likening badly veiled women to unwrapped candy bars preyed on by flies made the rounds on social networks. A popular Facebook page run by an Iranian expat journalist hosting photos Iranian women have furtively snapped of themselves sans-headscarf has caused a conservative uproar.



It intensified when in a provocative speech, Rouhani asked hardliners to stop “interfering in people’s lives.” On the anniversary of his election, he slammed opponents who still “think we’re living in the Stone Age.” This is not new. Even before his election in a largely forgotten interview with the youth magazine Chelcheragh, then presidential hopeful Rouhani hinted that even those who don’t observe the Islamic veil in the “desired way” can be good people. “Before the revolution, many women in our society did not wear the hijab - but were they not virtuous humans?” On the campaign trail, Rouhani vowed to rein in the morality police, an organ the president does not directly control. But attempts to shuffle police commanders and move morality police under the jurisdiction of his own interior ministry have been defeated by more powerful conservative forces in the establishment.

What’s painfully apparent from all this is that it’s summer in Tehran, which in recent memory has meant a renewed push by hardliners who control the disciplinary forces to redeploy the morality police in larger numbers to keep tabs on those who stray from the ambiguously defined public dress code. But as we enter Rouhani’s first full summer as president, it’s clear the presence of the morality police does not approach levels under Ahmadinejad.

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I decide to join friends-of-friends for lunch in south Tehran, later retreating to one of their homes for some refreshing virgin mojitos-from-concentrate. It turns out they work for the arts section of an Iranian cultural digest and passing mention of the morality police this summer inspires lively debate.

“They’re not as noticeable as they used to be,” notes writer Banafsheh, speaking of of the morality police. Her friend Sepideh cuts in from across the room, disagreeing - “No way, I still see them at Haft-e Tir Square - they’re still there.” Banafsheh’s husband Hadi puts the debate to rest.

“There are far fewer morality police, it’s obvious” he says, adding that their latest tactic is to stealthily patrol the streets rather than planting themselves in a crowded public area.

Hadi owns a women’s clothing store downtown and works in manteau production as well. He’s watched the seasonal process unfold every year: the ramp-up in promotional hijab campaigns and pointed televised debates as the weather starts to warm and wardrobe begins to malfunction. “When do they start these debates? When they want to increase their morality police deployments,” he says.

Hadi recently received a warning from his guild to stop producing the latest garment used to skirt what are often ambiguous restrictions: the “open” (i.e. unrobed), buttonless manteau. But such regulations for storeowners like Hadi have proven fruitless. He remembers when he was instructed not to sell short manteaus years ago, “but then [storeowners] started selling them behind the counter” for exorbitant prices, Hadi says. The DIY solution at the time, he says, was for women to “snip their manteaus short.” Orders from above can’t institute change: “if it’s not demanded, then it won’t be produced,” he says. Despite eight years of conservative domination when the morality police were a staple of Tehran’s busiest junctions and metro stops, Tehran’s wardrobe deviations have historically failed to be “corrected.”

Bracelets, necklaces, extraordinary haircuts, western graphic tees, and long hair that once landed men in the pound have largely been thrown out the window because today, the morality police has evolved to almost exclusively target women. For them, pushing boundaries once meant donning colorful outfits and light makeup in the early years after the 1979 revolution. Then came boots - some recall former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani’s chador-clad daughter making headlines with her high-tops in the mid-90s. During the Khatami era in the late 90s and early 2000s, Iranian women speak of Capri pants, shorter manteaus, and more exposed hair. But hardliners tried to roll back as much of that as possible when conservative Ahmadinejad took office, or a period Hadi describes as “the Taliban all over again” when for a time, women were fined for each individual painted fingernail. But still, even as the morality police units grew in number, manteaus continued to grow progressively shorter and tighter, sleeves shrank, and a new technique emerged to hang the headscarf on a small, pointy bun on the back of women’s heads.

These days, hardliners are riled by exposed ears, “leggings,” and robe-like “open” manteaus. Since Rouhani, headscarves remain off inside cars for some; others simply neglect to put their scarves back on when they fall off in public spaces.

All of this has produced outrageous styles “you might not even see in Europe,” Hadi says, his conservative Mashhadi roots making a brief cameo. “Our society isn’t that open,” he says. “We have to accept that we live in an Islamic society.” He expects his wife Banafsheh to dress accordingly in the pious, working class south Tehran neighborhood where we ate. When you’re at a friend’s house, you have to abide by their house rules, he says—“wherever you are, wear clothes that are suitable for the location.”

Photograph: Kamyar Adl via Flickr

I meet up with Maryam, a graduate student, and her dorm-mates at a cavernous café downtown. From the mood-lit plumes of cigarette smoke emerges our server - a woman - wearing one of those “open,” untied, unbuttoned robes Hadi was talking about, hair flowing out from underneath a rag that looks like it could slide off her head at any moment. The café is a kind sanctuary for women, with an abundance of exposed ears, forearms, and hair.

Maryam senses a tangibly diminished morality police “presence.” “During the Ahmadinejad era,” she says, “there were always two to three vans in Vanak [Square] every day, but now, they’re there one day, but not the next.” Internally, I can’t help but agree. I think back to just two years ago - a chador-clad officer stationed inside a hamburger joint near Parkway with a walkie-talkie in hand to call in for back up, the unit that practically guarded the Mellat Park entrance every waking moment of the day, the van loading up unsuspecting denizens outside an ice cream shop in Gisha, the officers perched just outside the Haft-e Tir metro exit. The morality police is still here in a big way, getting ready for another season of public harassment, but it’s nothing like it used to be.

“We’ve learned where they are” and how to avoid them, Maryam says - her getup today seems a bit risky, but she assures me she’s only dressed this way because they don’t patrol this area “unless they’re driving back to the station” with their daily catch. Still, she frequently looks over her shoulder when roaming the streets.

For her younger dorm-mate Zahra, who’s taken up work at a bank, it’s no big deal. “Before we used to get scared, but now it’s a routine affair for us,” she says of being arrested. It’s nothing like the early days of the revolution when neighborhood vigilantes would torment those they deemed immodest under a selective interpretation of the Islamic principle of “commanding the good and forbidding the evil.” Today, Zahra says, “they just snap a few pictures [of the arrestees] and let them go” after calling in a relative to bring a change of [more “modest”] clothes.

But what the government can’t control is effortlessly kept in check by social forces, as has always been the case in Iran. In other words, Maryam won’t dare wear the outfit she’s wearing in front of me - nor would Zahra - in Rah-Ahan Square in south Tehran, which is almost entirely devoid of morality police unlike the affluent north. “We could never go walking looking like this in Rah-Ahan,” Zahra says. “Sure, there’s no morality police—but it’s the people.”

The quieter Saeedeh, a college student, speaks up. Even if the mandatory hijab is removed one day she says, “you still won’t be able to wear shorts near Rah-Ahan Square” in south Tehran.

I find myself seated on a bench on the outer rim of Vanak Square, swarming with morality police, when another man takes a seat beside me. We’re both enraptured by the unfolding squabble between a woman in a conservative getup, excepting the red-streaked hair just peaking out from underneath her black headscarf, and the chador-cloaked morality police officer accosting her. Several stop dead in their tracks to watch; others look over their shoulder mid-stride. It’s a public spectacle. The male officer orders spectators to move along. “Don’t worry,” the man tells me, ”they won’t ask us to move along because we’re sitting on this bench here.” We continue to watch.

The woman is resisting arrest. After failed attempts by the chador-clad woman to reel her in with her scowling face, the male officer intervenes to give it a shot, gesturing with a typical “come on now, let’s go,” but the red-streaked lady jolts back in a don’t-touch-me kind of way.

As she continues to resist, a rather flamboyantly dressed, hair-flaunting woman—her scarf tucked behind her ears - carouses past them unscathed. I turn away for an instant and when my attention returns to the scene, I notice the red-streaked woman has disappeared into what I presume is the van.

Another group of schoolgirls walks past us - “which one do you think they’re going to arrest?” the man seated next to me asks. He’s hedged his bets on the one in the center, in blue. I tell him I really can’t say. As the past few minutes of people-watching on this bench have revealed, a few of them tidy up their headscarves as they approach the morality police unit, only to have them almost immediately slide back again.

This story initially ran without a byline



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