Irani women spark debate by defying mandatory hijab rule in cars

An increasing number of Iranian women are refusing to wear the hijab while driving, sparking a nationwide debate about whether a car is a private space where women can practice more autonomy and dress freely, reported The Guardian.

The hijab-wearing policy is a crucial one to the Islamic Republic since the 1979 revolution, but it is the one that the establishment has had great difficulty enforcing. Many Iranian women have already been pushing boundaries and women driving with their headscarves resting on their shoulders is fast becoming a common sight.

However, Iran’s morality police takes more charge in the summers when the temperatures rise and even though the police fine these women and temporarily seize their vehicles such acts of resistance continue. Iran’s moderate president, Hassan Rouhani, has argued that people’s private space should be respected and opposes a crackdown on women who don’t wear the hijab.



Rouhani said explicitly that the police’s job is not to administer Islam. In 2015, Rouhani said, “The police can’t do something and say I’m doing this because God said so. That’s not a police [officer]’s business.”

Many in Iran believe that private space includes the inside of a car, but judicial authorities and the police have opposed that interpretation. “The invisible part of the car, such as the trunk, is a private space, but this does not apply to the visible parts of the car,” Hadi Sadeghi, the deputy head of Iran’s judiciary chief, said last week.

These comments have prompted widespread reaction on social media, with one user tweeting: “The police have said that only the boot is a private space... poor those of us who have a hatchback car [without a boot]... we don’t have any private space.”

“Private or not private?” asked an article carried by the state IRNA news agency on Monday. “This is a question that has created a legal and religious discussion about private space within cars.” This recent movement has caused outrage on the media where at first local media refrained from directly criticising the mandatory hijab, but the extended debate of what counts as public or private has allowed them to publish both perspectives. The law says that the space within a car is a private space,” Hossein Ahmadiniaz, a lawyer, told IRNA. “The government’s citizen’s rights charter [launched by Rouhani] also considers a car to be a private space and it is incumbent upon enforcers to respect that.”



The debate is not only among liberal Iranians. Abolfazl Najafi Tehrani, a cleric based in Tehran, tweeted: “People’s cars, like people’s houses, are their property and a private space and infringing upon this space will disturb people’s moral security and will harm women’s trust with the police.”

اتومبیل مثل خانه شخصی در مالکیت فرد و #حریم_خصوصی است دخالت دراین حریم امنیت روانی شهروندان و احساس امنیت زنان از پلیس را خیلی تضعیف میکند

— ابوالفضل نجفی تهرانی (@najafi_tehrani) July 7, 2017

Further, Yahya Kamalpour, a member of the Iranian parliament, said: “The space within people’s cars is a private space and the police have no right to enter that space without a judicial order.”

In a sign of slowly changing attitudes, Ali Karimi, a veteran Iranian footballer, on Monday called on the authorities to allow female fans to attend stadiums alongside men.

This article originally appeared on The Guardian.