Two More Bookstores Closed In Tehran For Failing To Enforce Hijab

Closing cafes and coffee shops, which are very popular with students and other young people, is apparently part of the larger plans of the ruling hardliners to shut down all such establishments as symbols of “corruptive western culture”.

In the past two years many cafes and coffee shops have been forced to shut down across the country, often on various charges including “failure to enforce the hijab” or for live music.

In a letter to the higher education minister apparently leaked on social media by hackers who targeted the ministry earlier this week, the university’s chancellor, Seyed Mohammad Moghimi, has boasted that all but one of the cafes around the university campus have been closed “with the help of all of the university’s departments” in the past eighteen months.

Authorities have not confirmed or denied the authenticity of the letter which suggests that the university owns the land on which the buildings of the cafes stand and offers cooperation in shutting down even those built on land not owned by the university.

Many social media users are baffled that the chancellor of the country’s biggest and oldest university should be so concerned about the existence of cafes around the university campus.

“I think shutting down cafes is useless. Shut down the university to find relief from your concerns,” a comment on X said while someone else opined that the authorities are concerned about these cafes because they are a place for students to gather freely. “I forgot the parks around the university. You should turn them into parking lots, too,” another tweet said.

Meanwhile, on Saturday Defa Press, the news agency of Iran's Armed Forces, alleged that some cafes had been “centers for networking against national security”.

The article in Defa Press, used complex syllogism to prove its allegation and claimed that half of the 150 cafes in the central areas of the capital Tehran, where the said university campus is also located, had been partially funded by “European embassies, particularly the one involved in last year’s riots” before shutting down.

Iranian authorities and hardline media always refer to last year’s nationwide protests during which over 500 protesters were killed as “riots” and “sedition” and blame western powers of stirring them up to weaken the Islamic Republic and destroy it.

“Over 50 percent of these [cafes] were not economically viable but they continued to operate because all of them received funding from the same source,” Defa Press wrote.

Defa Press claimed that the cafes were helped by these western powers because they were places for young gamers to convene and network, and argued that new technologies, including those employed by these gamers, could be used against the Islamic Republic’s national security without elaborating on the connection.

Referring to Tehran University Chancellor’s letter, writer and journalist Abdoljavad Mousavi in a commentary for the reformist Ham-Mihan newspaper on Tuesday strongly criticized the efforts for Islamizing the “appearance” of the Iranian society including elimination of everything that looks influenced by the western culture.

Comparing the mindset of the Iranian hardliners to the Taliban, Mousavi warned that shutting down cafes -- like banning video players in the 1980s, satellite TV in the 90s and internet filtering after 2002-- would only encourage “underground cafes” and draw more people to these underground establishments. “Stop acting with [fake] modestly, do what your brothers [in Afghanistan] did. Ban women from leaving their homes. Shut down the universities too and put an end to all this,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, a group of protesters in Zahedan took to the streets, blocking roads by lighting fires, as seen in videos published by Halvash, a platform reporting events in Iran's Sistan-Baluchestan Province.

Bloody Friday, which unfolded in Zahedan, the capital of Sistan-Baluchestan, on September 30 last year, witnessed the loss of nearly 100 lives among protesters, with dozens more sustaining injuries.

The incident being the bloodiest event during anti-regime protests during the past year has gone unpunished, as the violence by security forces was not investigated and no officers were held accountable.

On Friday, residents in Zahedan and other cities in the region held protests and scores were wounded by government gunfire. A Baluch Telegram channel announced that Saturday shopkeepers in both Zahedan and Chabahar embarked on a widespread strike in response to the calls for action.

Additionally, other cities in the predominantly Sunni province, such as Nowbandegan, joined the strike. There have also been reports of the Islamic Republic's security forces attempting to quell potential protest gatherings by besieging Zahedan's market.

Internet access in some cities within the province also experienced disruptions on Saturday as the government usually tries to prevent news of unrest spreading to other cities.

On September 29, residents of Zahedan, Suran, Khash, Rask, and Tafatan and some other cities took to the streets, marching and expressing their opposition to the Islamic Republic with slogans. The agents of the regime fired shots at the protesters in Zahedan.

Halvash reported that at least 29 people, including eight children, were injured by rubber bullets. The source further disclosed that the number of detainees reached at least 51 individuals.

The tragic events of Bloody Friday were initially sparked by a gathering of protesting worshippers after a police commander had sexually assaulted a 15-year-old Baluch girl a few weeks earlier. Moreover, anti-regime protests in the rest of the country were in full swing by then, which encouraged the Balush minority to vent its anger. In response, military personnel and agents of the Islamic Republic resorted to live ammunition against the demonstrators and other innocent citizens in and around Zahedan's main mosque.

According to the latest updates from Halvash, the brutal attack resulted in the deaths of at least 105 civilians, including 17 children and teenagers, leaving numerous others with spinal cord injuries, blindness, mutilations, and limb impairments.

Meanwhile, the Oslo-based Iran Human Rights Organization has urged the international community to refer the incidents of Bloody Friday to international judicial bodies for investigation as crimes against humanity. Its director, Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, emphasized, “Killing more than a hundred unarmed men, women and children is a clear example of crimes against humanity and Ali Khamenei and the forces under his command must be held accountable.”

“Despite enduring one of the bloodiest crimes of the last 30 years, the Islamic Republic couldn’t break the resistance of Baluch people to achieve their fundamental rights. And Zahedan’s weekly protests in the last year is proof of that,” he added.

The delegation's purpose is to take part in the 37th International Islamic Unity Conference, as reported by Iran's state news agency, IRNA, citing the Islamic Republic's Embassy in Kabul.

In May, a clash between Iranian border guards and the Afghan Taliban resulted in the deaths of at least two Iranians and one Taliban soldier. According to a report in the Iranian reformist daily newspaper Ham-Mihan, approximately 50 Iranians have lost their lives in border skirmishes with the Taliban since 2021.

Despite Iran's official non-recognition of the Taliban government, several delegations from the Taliban have made trips to Iran following their assumption of power in Afghanistan. In June 2022, Taliban representatives visited Tehran to participate in a border commission summit between Tehran and Kabul.

The Taliban move to cut off Helmand River's water flow from Afghanistan has had dire consequences for the inhabitants of the southeastern province of Sistan and Baluchestan. Wetlands in Sistan have transformed into salt flats, the once-thriving wildlife has vanished, and many local villages have been deserted.

Firebrand Iranian cleric Ahmad Khatami, a member of the presidium of the Assembly of Experts, made this assertion during the assembly's annual meeting. However, the Constitution's Article 111 clearly grants the Assembly of Experts the authority to supervise and even remove the Supreme Leader if he is deemed "incapable of fulfilling his responsibilities as leader." Observers have called Khatami's statement unprecedented and against the Constitution.

Meanwhile, a video clip from the 1980s showed Assembly of Experts Chairman Ahmad Jannati advocating for limiting Khamenei's powers and supervising his behavior and performance. Jannati argued that such limitations were necessary to prevent chaos and distrust among the nation. Khatami, on the other hand, claimed that the law only required Assembly members to ensure that the Supreme Leader remained consistently capable of leading the nation.

There have been disputes over the past 30 years about what exactly the Constitutional Law says about the Assembly's role, but Khatami's unprecedented attempt to do away with the AoE's supervisory role, was an elaborate act to please Khamenei.

Obviously, no one at the Assembly meeting was brave enough to tell Khatami that he was wrong, and the leader's performance needed to be supervised by the Assembly. However, the institution has been so weakened by Khamenei during the past decades that instead of controlling Khamenei, its members have been turned into Khamenei's inferior employees whose only function is to praise him twice a year during their rare meetings while most of its elderly members are seen dozing off.

Khatami claimed that some of the AoE members wish to find faults in Khamenei's performance. This was perceived as another way of intimidating other members.

A scholarly article in the Koranic Studies Journal stated in 2012 that although the word supervision has not been used in article 111 of the constitution, what the article calls for cannot be done by any means other than supervising the leader's performance and behavior.

Iranian analyst Mehdi Mahdavi Azad recalled in an interview with Iran International that while the Assembly initially was debating limiting Khamenei’s powers, Khamenei himself was in favor of the limitations. At that time in 1989, Khamenei at times aligned with reformist politicians either genuinely, or to garner their support. Mahdavi Azad said that Ahmad Khatami probably was backed by other radicals at the Assembly of Experts on Wednesday. However, Khamenei said once again during a meeting with students in 2000 that he was in favor of Assembly of Experts' supervision of his performance.

Since late 2000s, however, Khamenei gradually changed from a hardline cleric to a dictator who treated even his close friends such as former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani ruthlessly.

Another Iranian analyst, Morteza Kazemian told Iran International that “The six clerics appointed by Khamenei to the Guardian council were handpick radicals. During the past way, Khamenei has changed the Assembly's combination to serve his own interests."

Kazemian quoted Ahmad Khatami as having said after an AoE meeting with Khamenei in 2006 that he was against the Assembly’s supervision of his performance although according to Khatami, a majority of the Assembly's member believed there should be checks and balances on Khamenei and his financial conglomerate which holds a large part of the country's assets.

The statement comes in stark contrast to video and photo evidence, as well as reports from rights groups, which indicate that over 500 people, including 71 minors, were killed, thousands were injured, and 22,000 were arrested in the wake of the protests sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini while in custody.

Kowsari also said that "Mahsa Amini was a code name used to prolong the protests for up to three months," though, like other regime officials, he did not provide any evidence to support this claim.

He added, "The events of the previous year were a deliberate plan to undermine the stability of the regime."

To date, the judicial and security authorities in the Islamic Republic have refrained from offering any explanation to the families of the slain protesters regarding their role in the shootings during the Women, Life, Freedom protests.

Kowsari alleged that, in order “to minimize casualties, forces were instructed not to open fire.” However, online videos during and after the protests clearly show that regime forces directly fired at demonstrators, resulting in fatalities and injuries.

The Islamic Republic has also imposed several death sentences on protesters arrested during the demonstrations, with seven of them executed. The Iranian judiciary claims that the verdicts were issued by a "court of first instance," but details regarding the location and fairness of the trials remain undisclosed. In most similar cases, the government does not permit defendants to choose their own legal representation, and due process of law is often absent.

Numerous countries and international organizations, including Canada, Germany, and the United Nations, have called on the Iranian government to refrain from imposing death sentences on protesters.