Women defying the headscarf are tools for Israel, senior cleric says

By noon, the stand was rubble. Ahmad Baledi, a twenty-one-year-old university student, watched as the officers came to dismantle his father’s livelihood. Then he poured gasoline over his body and lit a match.

He died a few days later, burned beyond recognition in a hospital bed.

Baledi’s death was not an act of madness, it was the death of a promise. The Islamic Republic came to power in 1979 vowing to defend the poor. Forty-six years later, the same government polices them with bulldozers.

Across Iran, municipal squads clear vendors, confiscate carts, destroy kiosks, and often humiliate those who resist. Unconfirmed reports suggest that Baledi warned an officer he would set himself on fire. “Go ahead, let’s see,” the officer allegedly said. And Baledi did it.

That exchange -accurate or not- is entirely believable by Iranians exposed to something more corrosive than cruelty, a state so practiced in coercion that the sees value of life as negotiable.

Bouazizi moment

The scene echoed another young man, thousands of miles away. In 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian fruit seller, set himself on fire after officials seized his cart, igniting the Arab Spring.

But where Bouazizi’s death cracked open a political order, Baledi’s has been met mostly with silence, a measure of how exhaustion now tempers outrage in a country smothered by inflation, censorship and despair.

Ahvaz, the capital of Khuzestan Province, is a city of contradictions: immense petroleum wealth, staggering poverty and air so thick with refinery dust it dims the sun. For years, residents have lived under a system in which the law is elastic for the powerful and absolute for the weak.

In the hours after Baledi’s death, a wave of grief and anger shook this system in a way the authorities had not anticipated. His self-immolation, captured in trembling phone videos, forced the local government into an uncharacteristic retreat.

The mayor of Ahvaz, Reza Amini, resigned, and the Khuzestan governorate announced the dismissal of four senior municipal officials.

Days later, the prosecutor acknowledged that the mayor and one of his deputies had been arrested and briefly jailed before being released on bail, with additional cases opened against several municipal employees.

But the rush of resignations and arrests sharpened an underlying truth. In Iran, impunity is procedural. Investigations are ritual gestures, designed less to reveal responsibility than to contain it.

Ground truth

Each tragedy is framed as excess zeal at the bottom rather than intent at the top. The machine stays intact.

For many outside Iran, the country registers as an abstraction: centrifuges spinning in Natanz, proxy fights in the Persian Gulf, headlines about sanctions or war with Israel.

But its political reality begins at ground level, in moments like this —a family’s livelihood crushed at dawn, a young man driven to flame.

These are not aberrations; they are the daily grammar of a state that has turned humiliation into an instrument of order.

Baledi’s father later said the family had paid “fees” for years to keep their stand open, bribes functioning as rent to local authorities. It is a metaphor for the nation itself, citizens renting their survival from the very state that claims to protect them.

Bouazizi’s act in Tunisia derived its force from recognition. People saw in his burning the reflection of their own submission and, for a moment, turned that recognition into revolt. In Iran, recognition has hardened into fatigue.

Outrage flares, then recedes beneath the next injustice. The Islamic Republic has mastered the art of exhausting empathy.

Yet Ahmad Baledi’s fire endures as a warning. It exposes a government that mistakes fear for stability and silence for peace. It reminds us that dignity is not ornamental, it is political. Baledi did not die because of gasoline or flame. He died because no one in authority believed his life mattered.

Who killed Ahmad Baledi? The answer, written in fire, is that people eventually stop asking for mercy and start asking to be seen.

Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei delivered the directive on Friday in the religious city of Qom, warning that foreign adversaries sought to exploit issues such as unveiled women and online activity.

“One manifestation of the enemy’s efforts is in the matter of nudity and lack of hijab, and another is the virtual space,” he said.

He urged officials to avoid amplifying internal disputes. “We must be alert to the enemy’s mischief and not inadvertently play on its field,” he said. “A small domestic issue should not be framed in a way that gives the enemy an opportunity.”

Senior officials call for tougher enforcement

Ejei’s comments align with a series of recent directives by senior Iranian officials favoring stricter enforcement of the mandatory hijab, a policy advanced in recent months with judiciary backing and active support from security institutions and state-aligned media.

Kayhan, a newspaper overseen by a representative of Iran’s supreme leader, wrote on Wednesday that hijab was “the first defensive shield of Islamic identity,” warning that its erosion would open the way for broader cultural decline.

Prosecutors were also obliged to act with seriousness against women who do not observe the compulsory dress code, Prosecutor General Mohammad Movahedi Azad said on Sunday.

Days earlier, Esfahan’s judiciary chief, Asadollah Jafari, called for action against what he described as “norm-breaking behavior.”

More than 80,000 so-called promoters of virtue had been organized to monitor women’s clothing in public spaces, Ruhollah Momen-Nasab, head of Tehran’s headquarters for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice said in October.

Clerics intensify pressure

In Mashhad, senior cleric Ahmad Alamolhoda renewed warnings on Friday, saying unveiled women posed a threat. “We must fight lack of hijab. Today, lack of hijab has reached nudity,” he said. He likened the situation to a house fire, urging officials to intervene directly.

Alamolhoda also criticized domestic streaming platforms, accusing them of exposing young viewers to inappropriate content at a vulnerable age.

Critics argue the state’s expanding enforcement apparatus shows that the priority is social control rather than easing economic hardship.

Despite mounting threats, civil resistance to the mandatory hijab persists, with many women appearing in the public without hijab to reject the policy.

Iran’s academic system had been confined by shifting governance structures that weakened its capacity, Gholamreza Zarifian told an annual assembly of university instructors.

“In the past ten years, 12,000 university professors have left Iran, and 60 percent of them did so in the past four years,” he said.

Vetting pressures

“These days, we lose one university professor every week,” Ebrahim Azadegan of Sharif University of Technology said in an interview with KhabarOnline last month.

The latest wave of departures has sharpened criticism of vetting rules that academics say have disqualified candidates over personal matters.

Karan Abri-Nia, secretary of the Iranian University Professors’ Trade Union, said in late October that at least 1,500 engineering and technical faculty members at leading institutions had emigrated in the past five years. “I see migration as a wound on the body of our universities, one that keeps deepening,” he said.

Between the 2018-19 and 2022-23 academic years, Abri-Nia added, about a quarter of the 6,000 faculty members in core engineering departments at top universities left the country. At the University of Tehran, he said about ten professors in engineering mechanics either took early retirement to continue work abroad or went on sabbatical and did not return.

Broader professional flight

The academic exodus reflects a wider flight of skilled workers, including doctors and nurses seeking opportunities in the United Arab Emirates, Oman and elsewhere. Medical associations in Iran have warned repeatedly of a growing strain on the healthcare system and the risk of future breakdown if departures continue.

Officials have recently authorized passport and immigration police to monitor elite migration in coordination with the National Elites Foundation, which operates under the presidency, a sign of growing concern over the accelerating loss of talent.

The steep decline in faculty numbers points to a structural crisis for Iran’s universities as they face shrinking resources, political constraints and persistent economic pressures.

Alireza Raisi told a diabetes symposium that cases have quadrupled in 35 years. “Relying only on drugs and hospital-based treatments will not bring lasting results,” he said.

About 600 million people worldwide are diabetic and that forecasts place the figure above 850 million by 2050, with the sharpest increases expected in Africa and the Middle East, Raisi mentioned.

He warned that lifestyle factors – limited physical activity, poor diet, obesity, air pollution and chronic stress – continue to drive growth in type-2 diabetes. “If we want effective control, we must shift to prevention,” he added.

Younger patients and heavy medical costs

Type-2 diabetes once mostly found in people over 40, is now being identified at about age 20 and in some cases younger, the deputy minister said. “This is a serious warning for the country’s future health.”

He linked diabetes to soaring treatment costs including dialysis, bypass surgery and vascular stents. “If you ask patients in a dialysis ward about the cause of their illness, more than 90 percent have diabetes or chronic hypertension,” he noted.

Only half of Iran’s estimated diabetic population, according to Raisi, is registered in the national health system, while WHO expectations for the next five years call for identifying and controlling 80 percent of patients and ensuring full access to insulin and self-monitoring tools for those with type-1 diabetes.

Poor diet, obesity, and low physical activity are driving a “growing national health burden,” Head of Iran’s Endocrine and Metabolism Research Institute, Bagher Larijani, said on Monday.

Diabetes and its complications consume up to 15% of Iran’s healthcare spending and shorten healthy life expectancy by about 300,000 years annually, he added.

Nine million Iranians, Larijani said, have pre-diabetes and that only a quarter of treated patients maintain proper glucose control.

Average monthly incomes now stand near $200, leaving millions unable to keep pace with food inflation. Many respondents said basic protein disappeared from their tables months ago.

“Our daily cost for five people is about 30,000,000 rials (around $27), not even counting meat, oil or rice,” one respondent said. “Our table has not just shrunk, it has been wiped out,” the message said.

Another described a timeline of disappearing foods: meat long ago, dairy a year ago, chicken six months ago, fruit four months ago. “It costs 1,000,000 rials (about $0.90) every time we buy bread. There is not much distance left until absolute hunger,” the person said.

One self-described employee earning 220,000,000 rials (around $195) a month and renting on a city’s outskirts said survival required queuing for subsidized poultry. “We removed meat from our diet at Nowruz because we were coming up short,” the message said.

Several said long-considered staples – Iranian rice, fish, nuts, fresh fruit and legumes – had become aspirations. “We eat only bread, yogurt and rice from morning to night,” another message said.

Health concerns mounting

In mid-October, domestic outlets reported that roughly 35 percent of recorded deaths were linked to undernutrition. Health ministry estimates say at least 10,000 people die each year from shortages of omega-3 fatty acids, another 10,000 from low fruit and vegetable intake, and about 25,000 from insufficient whole grains.

Shortages extend beyond food. “People are cutting doctor visits and medicine before anything else,” another respondent wrote. “We live on luck alone.”

One family of four said six months had passed since they last bought meat. “Life has become hard. My 16-year-old son left school to work, yet we still cannot cover daily needs,” the message said.

Another wrote that the essentials most families consider the heart of a meal – red meat, chicken and fish – were now out of reach. “If this government continues, the rest will disappear too, whether we like it or not,” the person said.

Many described a shift to cheaper staples. “Everything has been removed from my basket: fruit, dairy, meat, legumes. The only things I can still manage, with difficulty, are Indian rice, eggs and potatoes,” one message said.

Middle-class erosion

Several respondents who once identified with the middle class said they were now buying fruit with difficulty. “We take four apples, some pears, persimmons, cucumbers and oranges – it reaches 20,000,000 rials (around $18). One kilo of meat is 15,000,000 rials (about $13),” a message said, calling the situation “frightening and broken.”

Travel – once a marker of modest stability – has vanished. “Red meat, chicken, fish, clothes and gold have become dreams. Travel is zero,” one person said.

Amid the accounts of vanished foods, one message pressed for solutions rather than surveys. “We need a way out, not a question whose answer we all already know,” the person said.

Independent labor and pensioner groups warned in a joint 21 October statement that worsening living conditions and unanswered demands were pushing more workers, teachers and retirees toward street-level protest. They wrote that daily demonstrations reflected a determination to “win rights and express grievances” despite the economic strain.

The broad concern running through the messages is not only what families can no longer buy, but how long they can endure a decline that has turned routine meals into calculations of survival.