Tehran Metro Turns Into Hijab Battleground
Maryam Sinaiee
Iran International
The use of “jihadi groups” to enforce hijab rules has turned the capital’s metro stations into a battleground with women who are refusing to wear the hijab.
Iran International
The use of “jihadi groups” to enforce hijab rules has turned the capital’s metro stations into a battleground with women who are refusing to wear the hijab.
Videos circulating on social media show black veiled women warning female passengers over hijab and plainclothesmen and uniformed agents standing at the ticket gates preventing the women who ignore the warnings from passing through the ticket gates.
Tehran’s mayor, Alireza Zakani said at a city council meeting Sunday that the municipality has formed a special uniformed security unit to stop unveiled women from passing through the ticket gates.
“We will proceed according to the country’s laws in this regard. Our first step is issuing notices, then we issue warnings to the unveiled [women], and in the third stage we prevent them from entering the metro stations,” Zakani said.
Hijab enforcement at Tehran metro.
Social media users say arguments break out very frequently between hijab defying women and their companions with hijab enforcers. The battle continues even after women pass through the ticket gates and onboard the train where arguments often break out between vigilantes and hijab enforcers with women who remove the veil after passing the checkpoint.
As a last measure, Tehran municipality has installed screens between the metro cars allocated to women and other cars that can be used by men or both genders. Zakani claimed that installing such screens started in Tehran and “is now being copied by other countries,” without mentioning which countries have done so.
The main reason for installing screen barriers is preventing men from entering the cars allocated to women and harassing them,” Mayor Zakani claimed.
The CEO of Tehran Metro, Masoud Dorosti, said the installation of the screens had started in early March and such screens would be installed in all metro trains within the next few weeks.
Dorosti claimed that the screens, which he called “retaining doors”, were installed by popular demand and have been welcomed.
Referring to the installation of the screens in an article entitled “Living the Magic Realism” Monday, Mehdi Afrouzmanesh, deputy editor of the reformist Ham Mihan newspaper, said it is unbelievable that the authorities have resorted to such measures. Installing screens between metro cars and other things that happen in Iran are like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s surrealistic stories in which things that are hard to believe but not impossible happen, he wrote.
As another example of such unbelievable happenings, he mentioned the declaration of President Ebrahim Raisi’s deputy in women’s affairs, Ensieh Khazali, “who, as the person in charge of improving the quality of women’s life, said proudly that she married when she was sixteen.”
Woman playing a song on harmonica at a Tehran metro station unveiled as an act of protest.
In the past few weeks authorities have sealed thousands of businesses including restaurants, cafes, tourist accommodations, retail shops and even a counselling clinic and a gym -- in Tehran and other cities for women’s refusal to wear the compulsory hijab.
Several shops in Opal mall, a massive modern shopping center with over 450 businesses in Tehran, which was shut down last week were sealed again Sunday immediately after the mall’s re-opening. According to the reformist Shargh daily, the closure of the mall had resulted in the loss of around 2,500 jobs.
The recent campaign to enforce hijab rules has caused some violent incidents involving pro-hijab vigilantes and women who defy it. A 60-year-old woman had a cardiac arrest this week when a fight broke out between vigilantes and members of her family over hijab.
At one of the world’s leading organizations specializing in civil rights law, Pahlavi made the powerful address in Washington, slamming the regime's campaign of oppressing women and minorities.
Pahlavi, a viable alternative to the regime in the eyes of the Iranian people, spoke of the current women led movement to topple the regime. “Iranian women quickly became the foremost target of the revolutionaries and their new government. They were publicly beaten, harassed, and segregated from the early days of the revolution,” he said, underlining that for four decades women have been systematically disenfranchised by the regime.
He cited that “most notably [women are] legally considered to be worth half of a man” according to the Islamic Republic’s interpretation of Islamic law or sharia, and spoke of the regime’s campaign of bigotry against its minorities.
While he acknowledged the deep anti-semitism and holocaust denial intrinsic to the regime, the hatred does not stop with the Jewish people, Pahlavi also referring to the Islamic Republic’s campaign of bigotry against religious minorities including members of the Baha’i faith as well as Sunni Muslims, who constitute about 10 percent of Iran’s 88 million population.
“Members of the Baha'i faith are punished for their religious beliefs, face government-mandated discrimination in schools and workplaces, and experience property confiscation and desecration of their cemeteries. Sunni Muslims were denied the right to worship in their own mosques. Christians were forced into secretive house churches.”
He also referred to his recent trip to Israel, in which he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu among other leading figures and community members. He said: “I visited Israel to stand up against the Islamic Republic's antisemitism, and to stand in solidarity with victims of the Holocaust in the face of the regime's Holocaust denial.”
“I went to mourn with the victims of the regime-sponsored terrorism, but I also went to Israel to stand up for my people, so that there will be no further victims of hate and bigotry,” he added.
He called the historic trip “a new vision for our region, a vision that is not bogged down in the forced ideological divisions of recent decades but instead based on ancient ways of our lands and connections between our people”.
Peace in the region will only be sustainable when a secular democratic Iran joins its ranks, he said.
At the event, marking the 75th anniversary since the founding of the State of Israel, Israel's President Isaac Herzog delivered a virtual message to the attendees about the threats posed by the Islamic Republic to Israel and other countries of the region.
ADL Director Jonathan Greenblatt -- who served as a special assistant to former president Barack Obama and director of the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation -- spoke of his sympathy for the Iranian people who are suffering from “brutality and oppression of the Islamic regime”.
He went on to speak of Iran’s destabilizing influence across the Middle East and beyond through its proxies. "It is an extremist regime with an ideology as dangerous as Al-Qaeda, because it is unwilling to reconcile societies,” he said. “Indeed, Iran is the leading state sponsor of terror around the world and a country whose number one export is antisemitism.”
Greenblatt hailed Pahlavi, seen by many as a legitimate alternative to the regime, a “catalyst for a free, democratic, and secular Iran; one at peace with its own people, at peace with Israel, and at peace with the world”.
Earlier in the day, Pahlavi slammed a letter by 32 Knesset members to Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen, threatening Iran's territorial integrity. Describing the letter as “completely unacceptable and a service to the interests of the anti-Iranian Islamic Republic regime,” he called it “in total conflict with the positions communicated to me by Israeli leaders and senior government officials.”
Insiders say political prisoners are being deprived of the minimum rights and have not been able to contact their families for two weeks.
In addition, prisoners do not have beds to sleep in and no place to heat their food. The inmates have access to just one telephone line which is tied up most of the time.
Informed sources say there is no canteen for them to buy snacks or essential items.
“The prison food is of a very low quality and as a result inmates suffered stomachache and many other problems,” the source said.
Sources say there are no training courses and gyms, and the detainees routinely take pills to fall asleep.
Political prisoners have been threatened that if they protest, they will be sent to other wards where prisoners of crimes related to drugs, robbery, or murder are locked up. All phone conversations are also being tapped to exert more pressure.
The reason for these pressure tactics can be of a deterrent nature, to intimidate activists and would be protesters from engaging in anti-regime activities. It could also have coercive purpose to extract confessions or cooperation from prisoners.
Prison authorities refuse to provide medicine and proper treatment to political prisoners and seek to make the conditions more difficult by creating psychological stress.
They also harass the political prisoners of Ward 15 refusing to allow them to have face-to-face visits, and the inmates can visit their families every two to three months.
Some of the prisoners in the ward are those arrested in the case of the killing of Basij agent Ruhollah Ajamian in November.
Ruhollah Ajamian was killed in Karaj, near Tehran, a group of men the regime called “rioters”. The member of the Basij militia of the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) was stabbed, beaten, and stripped naked by a group of men and died of his injuries later.
The Islamic Republic has already executed Mohammad Mehdi Karami and Mohammad Hossein over Ajamian’s death.
14 protesters were also jailed in connection with the killing, with five of them receiving long-term prison terms of 10 and 15 years earlier this month.
Jurists and human rights activists have described the trials as “unfair” and questioned the verdicts.
The judiciary of Alborz province claimed that the charges leading to the verdict were not "intentional murder" but "corruption of the earth" and "moharebeh", or “waging war against God”.
Among the defendants, Hamid Qarahasanlou, who was previously sentenced to death, received the longest prison term and was given 15 years in prison. He and his wife Farzaneh Qarahasanlou are set to serve their sentence in the religious city of Mashhad in the northeast.
These are only some of the lengthy sentences handed down by the Iranian regime to countless protesters in the widespread demonstrations that followed the death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini last September.
Protests broke out in scores of cities across Iran, with crowds demanding justice for Mahsa and calling for an end to the regime’s oppressive policies.
The Sunday statement issued on the occasion of May Day underlined that the Islamic Republic "neither deserves to survive nor it is capable of surviving.”
Decrying the “bloody crackdown” by the regime during the current wave of protests ignited by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, the statement said that people from all walks of life including "teachers, workers, filmmakers, artists, and civil and political activists” are against the Islamic Republic.
They noted that the "revolutionary” uprising of the Iranian people is “still alive and moving" forward and no day passes without rallies and acts of protests calling for change.
Referring to the sexual discrimination against women in Iran and the chemical attacks on schoolgirls, they said "Women are deprived of their most basic human rights."
The civil rights groups and labor unions also said the regime "is not able to control rising prices and inflation even for a single week and has plunged a community of 90 million people into poverty and misery in a rich country."
The Council for Organizing Oil Contract-Workers' Protests, which has been one of the main organizers of the current wave of strikes, and workers of the Haft-Tappeh Sugarcane complex – who recently snubbed President Ebrahim Raisi -- were among the signatories of the statement.
The statement came as workers in more than 100 oil, gas, petrochemical and other plants across the country have been staging strikes since April 22, protesting poor working conditions, low wages and rising cost of living. Almost all the striking workers in oil, gas, steel, petrochemicals and other industries, are not officially hired by the country’s oil company or relevant ministries and are working on temporary contracts, risking their only means of livelihood by joining the strikes.
Authorities claim that the strikes are being organized by anti-regime groups, a charge the Islamic Republic often makes to de-legitimize the demands of the workers who earn less than $200 a month. An official at South Pars gas field on the Persian Gulf stated that 4,000 protesting workers will be replaced by new ones.
Earlier in the day, three prominent Iranian labor activists condemned the recent detention of workers calling it "organized brutality" by the regime.
More than 1,600 labor rallies and strikes have been held in the past year across Iran. The Islamic Republic’s security and judiciary apparatus have summoned, arrested and imprisoned dozens of labor activists to stifle dissent.
In their Labor Day statement, the signatories also called for "immediate and unconditional release of all political prisoners,” and also cautioned the authorities against “criminalization of political, trade union, and civil actions."
In recent years, as the Iranian National Oil Company has ceded many operations to quasi-private companies, most of the work is done by temporary contract workers with little pay and no benefits.
The so-called private companies are controlled by military or other state entities, or by well-connected regime insiders who quash labor demands by using government security forces.