Brief Reflection on the Rumor of the Abolition of the Iranian Morality Police and the Reform of the Laws of Hijab

 

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 The New York Times, as well as other leading press organs around the world, have recently reported  (wrapped up in whatever passes for strategic analysis and sentiment management) an interesting potential development in Iran, as its state and religious apparatus continue to float strategic options in dealing with the protests that erupted over the death Mahsa Amini in September 2022 while she was detained by by the morality police.

A senior Iranian official said this weekend that Iran had abolished the morality police, the state media reported, after months of protests set off by the death of a young woman who was detained by the force for supposedly violating the country’s strict Islamic dress laws. The morality police “was abolished by the same authorities who installed it,” Attorney General Mohammad Javad Montazeri said on Saturday during a meeting at which officials were discussing the unrest, according to state media reports. It was unclear whether the statement amounted to a final decision by the theocratic government, which has neither announced the abolition of the morality police nor denied it. (Iran Has Abolished Morality Police, an Official Suggests, After Months of Protests)

As is usual in cases of this kind, this may be not merely too little too late ("Iranian women and activists took to social media to dismiss talk of disbanding the force as a propaganda tactic by the government to distract from the larger demands of protesters for an end to the Islamic Republic’s rule" Ibid.), but also perversely, a stunningly obvious ploy to bamboozle the gullible ("But other security forces, including the notorious Basij militiamen, have been beating and arresting women who go out with their hair uncovered, videos show." Ibid.) or a sign of institutional weakness that will be exploited by virtually anyone with an adverse interest to the current theocratic government ("In September, the United States imposed sanctions on the morality police." Ibid).  In that context, any effort to reform the dress laws applicable to women would pose as a much of a danger to the state it might contribute to the pacification of the population ("The review team met on Wednesday with parliament's cultural commission "and will see the results in a week or two," the attorney general said. President Ebrahim Raisi on Saturday said Iran's republican and Islamic foundations were constitutionally entrenched." (Protest-Hit Iran Reviewing Mandatory Headscarf Law, Official Says)). Even odder, of course, is that this is not the first time the state and religious apparatus has sought to fine tune its management of culturally contextually religious modesty ("starting in January 2018. According to this new decree, women who did not observe the Islamic dress code no longer faced fines or imprisonment but rather had to attend Islam educational classes" (Hijab law in Iran over the decades: the continuing battle for reform)). Yet its authority, even within the  strictures of ijtihad in Iranian state Jaʿfarī jurisprudence (Arabic: الفقه الجعفري ) set out in Article 12 of the Iranian Constitution.

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And thus the situation has now evolved into a most peculiar state: (1) the long history of these events now make it difficult to see in the actions of authorities anything but forms of gaslighting; (2) certainly, in the matter of state policy, it is hardly  surprising that where a state believes its existence is threatened, that it will do anything to survive; and (3) with the Pilgrimage of Grace as a reminder, it is not clear that the protesters can afford now to compromise or that the state will feel itself bound by any agreement or gesture made to those groups. Moreover, while this is ostensibly a state matter, the realty is that it is not.  It is primarily a religious matter (within the political construct that is Iran)--its application then administered through state organs. And it is hardly clear that the religious establishment and its disciplinary cultures of ijtihad will tolerate anything like the expectations now quite visible within a population that continues to embrace modesty but not the administrative forms that it has taken under the the current religious leadership in Iran.  Most importantly, of course, is that the time for solving the current crisis through a reform of the hijab laws and the abolition of the religious police (though mot of the authority to apply and police the hijab laws) have now passed.  It passed with the failure by the state to adequately suppress the initial reaction or to meet its criticisms with the sort of reform (and apologies for the bad con duct of its officials) that might have instilled some benefit of the doubt reduction of protests. It passed with the inability of the religious community to engage in the sort of explanation and education it sought after 2018 to apply to females that it determined violated the state hijab law. But ultimately, it failed when it sought to  triumph by disrespecting the mothers, grandmothers, wives, and daughters of Iran without provocation equal to the contempt that initial public measures communicated. It augmented that faiolure failed with the contemptuous and sometimes ethnically charged treatment of women by the orality police and other official disciplinary groups.  It was in the hands of the ruling establishment to make good on its theology and the ideological foundations of the state; the state and its religious leaders bear a heavy responsibility--and they must as well bear the consequences of their failures--both to the people of Iran and for their failures to the higher authority from which they have claimed they derive their authority.  It is to be hoped, of course, that these failures can be rectified, and that the leadership will seek guidance from above and do great penance to the people with whose welfare they were charged to protect. Nine of this was inevitable. but all of it follows when officials lose sight of the higher purpose as well as their humanity. For the moment, however, there is little to indicate much forward movement--just theater. No particular result is inevitable and one can only hope that the genius of the Iranian people will find a way to overcome this current challenge.