Iran: Regime losing its foothold Shereshevsky's alignment

Iran’s morality police have resumed patrols to make women comply with strict Islamic dress code, Saeid Montazeralmahdi, Spokesman for the Police Command of the Islamic Republic of Iran, has said.

The morality police are a special unit that monitors the clothes and behavior of citizens. Theoretically, for everyone, but in practice it comes down mainly to women wearing the hijab in the right way, from the point of view of the Iranian regime.

There is no consensus among Iranians about whether a woman should wear a hijab, and if so, how. In addition, a certain part of the Iranian population does not consider themselves Muslims. But for the regime of velayat-e-faqih (the state of the supreme jurist-theologian), this does not play a role.

The Iranian regime is a theocracy, led by a supreme leader who has ruled the country for over 30 years and has almost absolute power. To doubt the correctness of the instructions of the great Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is, according to the regime, to challenge the state, faith and God himself. That's why it's so important for the regime to control how women dress. Conversely, some critics believe that if the hijab disappears, the regime will also disappear, which, however, seems to be an exaggeration.

Last August, newly elected Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi decided to tighten controls on women's clothing. By that time, the Iranian women, who were mortally tired of all this, and most of whom want to dress and live as they see fit, began to wear a headscarf shifted somewhere on the back of their heads. The president in Iran, as former president Muhammad Khatami noted, is "the person who provides the logistics for the supreme leader". He oversees the economic block in the government and is engaged in diplomacy, but his decisions are nothing more than the implementation of the will and instructions of Khamenei. And yet, until recently, the Iranians had the opportunity to choose a “logistics chief” from among famous people who proposed various political ideas and economic projects.

In the case of Raisi, the elections finally turned into a farce. At the direction of the supreme leader, out of approximately 600 candidates, only seven people were vetted to stand in the race. Even the country's former president, the conservative and populist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who drowned the 2009-2010 protests in blood, was not allowed to stand as a candidate.

As a result, the majority of voters did not come to the polls at all, millions supported the “candidate against all”, and the authorities, in order not to completely disgrace themselves, drove millions of state employees to the polls to fill out the ballots in the right way. In the end, even by Iran's standards, Raisi is just a man appointed by a dictator to the presidency.

Then the new president, of course, with the approval of the Supreme Leader, decided to, as they say, "bring up discipline", demonstrating to the Iranians and, in particular, the Iranian women, that he is a big and important boss.

“A woman who observes the hijab has a master and her master is her husband. And a woman who does not observe the hijab is ownerless. That is, it is not known to whom she belongs? Does she belong to her husband? Does she belong to someone else?" These are the words of Seyyed Reza Akrami, head of the Cultural Council under the Interior Ministry of Iran. They probably determine the worldview of Raisi.

In September 2022, the police began to act, that is, to attack women and beat them in case of resistance. One of the victims was the young Mahsa Amini, who came to Tehran to visit relatives. She wore a hijab, but not properly, according to the police. Shortly after her arrest, she was severely beaten and later died. She was 22 years old.

The brutal murder shocked the Iranians. A real uprising broke out throughout the country, in which, however, mainly young people took part. There had been protests against the regime before, but this time many were no longer shy about their means. Molotov cocktails, edged weapons and firearms were used. 

A few months later, the regime was able to suppress the demonstrations, during which only the death toll was about 500 people, but among them were about 70 security officials. In the province of Sistan-Baluchistan, the uprisings could not be suppressed. The city of Zahedan, the capital of the province, is still the center of anti-regime demonstrations (they take place every Friday) and armed attacks on security forces. Nevertheless, the regime was able to bring down the wave of resistance across the whole country.

One of the consequences of the resistance, called the Mahsa Amini Movement, was the cessation of the moral police. It is not entirely clear whether this was a centralized decision of officials, or just a natural result of events - no one wants to get stabbed by a woman you force to wear a headscarf, or by her husband/friends/relatives. And now, with the protests seemingly crushed, the regime appears to have decided to go back to the way it was before.

Ali Alfoneh, a scholar who specializes in the study of Iranian society, notes that the regime had three pillars in the past. These are Shiism, elements of the republican system - relatively fair elections of the president and parliament, and, finally, social policy, which greatly facilitated the life of the majority of the country's inhabitants in comparison with the rule of Shah. But today, all three pillars of the velayat-e-faqih system have cracked.

Modern Iranian society is much less religious than during the 1978-1979 revolution that established the regime of the Islamic republic. Then the Iranians gave birth to an average of 5-7 children and adhered to traditional conservative morality. At that time, most people lived in villages or small towns. Modern Iranian men and women are residents of industrialized megacities. They use running water, electricity and the Internet, study at schools and universities, dream of getting a good job. Their way of life differs less and less from that adopted in most developed countries and they have less and less in common with the conservative-religious system of the Islamic Republic.

The powerful welfare state created in Iran in the early years of the existence of the Islamic Republic, which acted under the slogan of "classless society", is now being destroyed. Previously, the advantages of the Iranians were obvious - the network of universities grew (today six million students study there), workers were almost impossible to fire, various social funds provided significant services to the poor. Cheap affordable medicine completed the picture. Today, large-scale privatization has led to an increase in temporary employment and work in degraded conditions. At the same time, corruption and sanctions have finished off the economy - with inflation over 50 per cent, more than half of Iranians live on or below the poverty line.

And finally, as mentioned above, those electoral elements that were characteristic of the Iranian political system turned out to be practically destroyed.

Having lost all three bulwarks of support, the regime faced a permanent crisis. Every few years, waves of protests rise in the country, and each subsequent one is usually stronger than the previous one. All that is left for the regime to hold on to power is violence.