Iran’s Parliament, after months of deliberations/consultation with the Guardian Council appointed by “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, passed the “Chastity and Hijab” bill into law, to be implemented on December 13.¹ It institutionalizes and escalates the crackdown enforcing compulsory hijab (headscarf) laws which have already been rampant on the streets this year. It unleashed a societal wave of condemnation, with some activists calling it “medieval.”

Whipping, escalating fines deducted from private bank accounts, shuttered stores—even possible death sentences! In the Islamic Republic of Iran (IR), these are now official punishments for women wearing or “promoting” “improper attire.” What is improper? Clothing that “exposes areas below the neck, above the ankles, or above the wrists, or clothing that ‘tempts’ others.”

One obscurely worded clause “grants the judiciary authority to issue death sentences to individuals accused of promoting nudity, unveiling, or improper attire in collaboration with foreign entities, classifying such acts as ‘corruption on earth.’”² This could open the floodgates to charge anti-mandatory-hijab activists who have received international support, such as Narges Mohammadi, with “collaboration with foreign entities,” making them potentially subject to death sentences.

A wide variety of forces have expressed opposition for different reasons. For example, three prominent Iranian cultural institutions, the Iranian House of Cinema, House of Theater, and House of Music, issued a joint statement calling it a threat to national unity and social peace. Filmmaker Jafar Panahi and others posted a statement signed by 111 filmmakers opposing the law. 

A variety of forces inside (or formerly part of) Iran’s fascist theocratic regime voiced meek opposition to the law, likely in the interests of shoring up the regime in a moment of particularly unstable regional and domestic political situation. They warn that the law risks triggering a national civil disobedience movement and a possible “domino effect.”

This takes place in a context in which the Iranian theocratic regime has been weakened by Israeli attacks on its fundamentalist Islamist allies in Palestine and Lebanon, air strikes on its supply lines, and now the advance of various reactionary forces against the also reactionary al-Assad regime in Syria, a key ally. Pro-U.S. imperialist forces are actively taking advantage of this to widen divisions among reactionaries inside and close to Iran. This further plays into the hands of the theocratic regime which paints all opposition to its rule as manipulations by the U.S., its CIA and the Israeli (vile secret police) Mossad. It can and does use all this to rile up reactionary nationalism in its social base.

In this situation, it is all the more important for people in the “belly of the beast” of the imperialist U.S., which is backing and arming Israeli genocide in the region, to take up the unique stand and demands of the IEC:

We demand of the Islamic Republic of Iran: FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS NOW! We say to the U.S. government: NO THREATS OR WAR MOVES AGAINST IRAN, LIFT U.S. SANCTIONS!

Narges Mohammadi Wins 21-Day Brief Leave from Evin

We reported last week of a hunger strike by two wardmates and international outcry that demanded an urgent medical release of 2023 Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi. She was finally granted a three-week suspension of sentence for her to recover at her Tehran home from her recent surgery. The 3 weeks will be time added onto the end of her prison sentence. On December 4, she emerged from an ambulance (which she had to rent herself) hijab-free and shouting defiantly.

She spoke by phone to her children and husband (exiled in France) for the first time in three years. “The first thing she told me was that she went out without the obligatory veil and that she had only one word on her lips: ‘Woman, life, freedom,’" her son Ali said at a press conference in Paris. “The second, & most important, is that she will continue to fight tirelessly against the Islamic Republic of Iran so that gender apartheid is recognized as a universal crime throughout the world, and she will also continue to fight against the death penalty.”

“You Have Done Unpredictable, Magnificent and Unbelievable Things”

Another heartwarming message came from rapper Toomaj Salehi, conditionally released after two years and a (revoked) death sentence for his music and activism supporting the Woman, Life, Freedom Uprising in 2022. His first post after being released stated:

Today we are no longer an ordinary family, a bond between us is formed of self-sacrifice, today we are not separate trees, we are roots intertwined. For the past two years you have done for me unpredictable, magnificent and unbelievable things, I am a part of you today and for you, I thank you more than anything for allowing me to be a part of you. ~ Toomaj