By Asa Fitch and Aresu Eqbali Updated March 8, 2018
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, seeking to stop women removing their head scarves in public, defended the garments Thursday, saying wearing them protected against “a deviant lifestyle.”
The comments were the first from Iran’s most powerful figure since the spread of a movement in which women remove their head scarves, or hijabs, in the streets, to protest against laws requiring them to don them in public places. Scores of women have been captured on video with their heads uncovered in 2018 in cities and towns across the country.
“By promoting modest dress (#hijab), #Islam has blocked the path which would lead women to such a deviant lifestyle,” Mr. Khamenei said Thursday on his official Twitteraccount. “Hijab is a means of immunity, not restriction.”
“The western model for women is symbolic of consumerism, cosmetics, showing off for men as a tool of male sexual arousal,” he said in another tweet.
Women have protested against wearing the hijab for decades, but the displays of defiance entered a new phase late in 2017, when a 31-year-old mother named Vida Movahed clambered onto an electrical box on a busy Tehran street, took her head scarf off and waved it from the end of a stick.
As the number of women engaging in similar protests and video shared of them on social media has grown into the hundreds, the authorities have clamped down. In early February, Tehran police said they had arrested 29 protesters.
Ms. Movahed was arrested and released after a few weeks. On Wednesday, Tehran’s chief prosecutor announced that an unidentified hijab protester had been sentenced to two years in prison, signaling that others may be dealt with more harshly. The identity of the person sentenced couldn’t be independently determined and a request for comment from Iran’s United Nations mission in New York wasn’t immediately met.
Women have traditionally been given far lighter penalties for hijab violations, although immorality statutes allow for one to 10 years’ imprisonment.
The prosecutor, Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi, also said women seen driving without their headscarves would have their cars impounded, according to the judiciary’s official Mizan Online news agency.
The moves come as Iran’s regime contends with wider social discontent that boiled over in late December and early January with a wave of protests over economic grievances and political disenfranchisement. Those demonstrations, the biggest in nearly a decade, died down after two weeks in the wake of a crackdown by security forces.
As the authorities move to quell dissent, a public outcry has grown over the treatment of people caught in the net. Kavous Seyed Emami, a 63-year-old Canadian-Iranian environmental activist arrested during January’s crackdown and accused of spying, died in February in Tehran’s Evin Prison under what his family said were suspicious circumstances. The authorities called it a suicide, an explanation family members don't accept.
Mr. Seyed Emami’s family say they have faced continued harassment by the authorities since raising the alarm internationally about his death. On Wednesday, family members boarded a plane to flee to Canada, but the authorities barred Mr. Seyed Emami’s wife from leaving, according to his son Ramin.
“The emotional damage and distress that we’ve endured are beyond comprehension,” Ramin Seyed Emami said after arriving in Vancouver on Thursday.
He said his family has endured threats and harassment from Iranian authorities since his father’s death. He said his mother’s passport was confiscated.
“She said I just want you guys to be safe and away from this horrible place, and no matter what happens to me don’t ever come back,” Mr. Seyed Emami said.
He said he and his brother were pressured not to speak about their father’s case. “But we will not be silenced,” he said.
Canada’s foreign minister, Chrystia Freeland, posted about the case on Twitter on Wednesday. “I am outraged to learn that Maryam Mombeini, widow of Kavous Seyed-Emami, was barred from leaving Iran. We demand that, as a Canadian, she be given the freedom to return home,” Ms. Freeland wrote. She also spoke with Ms. Mombeini earlier on Thursday, according to a spokesman.
Even after the nationwide protests ended, worker strikes over unpaid salaries have continued amid economic stagnation exacerbated by Iran’s weakening currency. Steelworkers, railway workers and employees of a sugar-production outfit are among those who have aired grievances since January, sometimes drawing security crackdowns and arrests.
“The regime has done nothing to accommodate labor demands besides using repression,” said Alireza Nader, the chief executive of the Nader Research Group.
The hijab protests, which U.S.-based activist Masih Alinejad has helped organize under a campaign called My Stealthy Freedom, have persisted alongside other forms of unrest.
“Compulsory hijab is a backward law,” Ms. Alinejad tweeted Tuesday, ahead of a weekly anti-hijab protest dubbed White Wednesdays. “We will take to the streets.”
—Kim Mackrael in Ottawa contributed to this article.
Write to Asa Fitch at asa.fitch@wsj.com
Appeared in the March 9, 2018, print edition as 'Iran’s Top Leader Urges Women to Wear Head Scarves to Avoid ‘Deviant Lifestyle’.'
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