Iran’s Mandatory Hijab Is its Achilles’ Heel

On June 23, 1988, just weeks before the Iran-Iraq war ended, I was arrested and beaten in Tehran for not wearing my headscarf according to Iran’s mandatory hijab laws.

Five veiled morality-police officers assaulted me. They shouted accusations of “moral corruption” at me and other young women. Inside the police van, they spat on us and called us traitors – publicly shaming us by stating that while Iranian soldiers were fighting Saddam Hussein at the country’s borders, we were disgracing our nation.

We were teenage girls. Yet to the Islamic Republic, we were the “enemy within.”

I was fortunate. I was able to call the mother of a friend – a devout, veiled Muslim woman who opposed compulsory hijab. Her family had connections to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and she used those connections to secure my release. I survived the ordeal, but I learned its lesson: Fear the state. Keep quiet. Obey.

I stayed silent about another part of my identity. I am from a Jewish family, and revealing that fact could have made my situation even more dangerous. Religious minorities in Iran have been vulnerable to political pressure and discrimination since the 1979 revolution. My parents, who themselves faced harassment at work, would have been terrified had they known what happened to me.

Decades later, the Islamic Republic is still policing women’s bodies. But something important has changed: The regime has learned that it cannot rely on religious ideology alone. Increasingly, it must combine ideology with nationalism, military power and propaganda.

That evolution exposes one of the regime’s deepest contradictions.

The death in police custody of Jina Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman arrested over her headscarf, ignited the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising. Many women across Iran removed their headscarves in defiance of authorities, often knowing they could face arrest, violence, fines or imprisonment.

Yet the Iranian state has not simply doubled down. It has also learned to appropriate the imagery of the resistance.

In recent months, state-sponsored demonstrations have featured women who are veiled in some instances and unveiled or loosely veiled in others. During the recent wartime mobilization, Iranian state media have showcased women as symbols of national unity and patriotic resistance. Reuters has reported that the government has increasingly emphasized nationalism and Persian national symbols in its propaganda, even as the IRGC remains central to the state’s power.

This is not necessarily liberalization. It can be something more cynical: selective enforcement.

The message appears to be that an Iranian woman may be unveiled when her image serves the state — but not necessarily when her freedom challenges the state.

That distinction matters.

Compulsory hijab law is the Islamic Republic’s Achilles’ heel. IRGC’s repression has turned against the “enemy within,” women.

That strategy became especially visible after the nationwide protests that began in late December 2025. The protests were fueled by economic hardship and rapidly developed into a broader challenge to the political system. Authorities responded with lethal force, mass arrests and long periods of internet shutdown. Human-rights organizations documented extensive abuses while the blackout made it extraordinarily difficult to report the full scale of the killings.

At the same time, the government intensified public displays of national unity.

This is where the hijab contradiction becomes politically revealing. The state that arrests women for violating compulsory dress rules can simultaneously put women who are not traditionally veiled on display when their images serve its propaganda.

The Iranian judiciary continues to prosecute dissidents under sweeping national security and religious charges. Women’s-rights activists, journalists and political opponents have faced imprisonment and, in some cases, the death penalty. Fatemeh Sepehri, a devout Shiite Muslim woman and outspoken critic of the Islamic Republic, has been imprisoned since 2022 for criticizing the policies of IRGC. Sepehri – who has always been fully veiled – is a widow of an Iran-Iraq war veteran. 

Like Fatemeh Sepehri, my friend’s mother, the devout Muslim woman who helped save me in 1988, opposed compulsory hijab. So do many other religious Iranian women. Their objection is not to faith. It is to the state’s appropriation of faith as an instrument of political control.

The Islamic Republic’s most enduring strategy has been to make opposition to the regime appear synonymous with opposition to Iran, Islam or national security.

This strategy places the ordinary Iranian population in an impossible position: oppose the political leadership of IRGC and risk being portrayed as an enemy of the nation; support Iran against foreign attack and risk strengthening the very institutions that repress you.

The IRGC has become particularly adept at exploiting that dilemma. A state apparatus that must constantly adjust which version of itself it presents — Islamic, nationalist, revolutionary, military or patriotic — is revealing its vulnerability.

That is why the hijab remains so significant.

For decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran treated women’s veiling as a test of obedience. Today, it sometimes treats women’s appearance as a tool of propaganda. But Iranian women have spent decades rejecting that premise. I know because I was one of them. In 1988, fear taught me to put on the headscarf.

Girls cannot attend elementary school without hijab and no one is accepted into the University campuses without wearing hijab. The Judiciary in Mashhad has requested a harsher enforcement of hijab rules in the city. The loyal base of IRGC and the Basij demands hijab rules. They want a population adhering not only to nationalism but also to the strict hijab according to their interpretation of Shia Islam. Thus, the political fight over hijab continues. 

The younger generation who are well connected to the outside world via social networks and VPNs that bypass the censorship, have since taught the world something far more consequential: A government can force a woman to cover her hair. It cannot force loyalty.

That may ultimately be the Islamic Republic’s greatest contradiction — and its deepest vulnerability.

Elham Gheytanchi is an Associate Faculty member at Santa Monica College.