A badly placed veil. A bright, deep red gloss. A tight fabric. A fairly thin headscarf exposing strands of a woman’s hair. These are only a few examples of how a woman can be charged with ‘immoral dress’ by the morality police of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Just yesterday, Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi vowed to reactivate the morality police and enforce mandatory hijab law. This comes just one month before the one-year anniversary of Mahsa Amini’s death, following her arrest for allegedly not properly wearing the headscarf. Parliamentarians in the country were reportedly surprised that the reactivation took place without approval by the parliament. “The morality patrol was shut down due to criticism of police behavior … Before redeploying the force, we must first do a cost-benefit analysis of its work,” parliamentarian Mahmoud Abbaszadeh Meshkini expressed to the media. Layers of repression After months of protest last year, women in Iran are now seeing their voices, their courage, and their fight for freedom erased and forgotten. While acts of hijab burning and hair cutting dominated global headlines and social media, their protests were reduced to retweets, comments, and likes,…
