Sociologist Warns, Iranians Might Take Up Arms Against Each Other

The new campaign began with an Instagram story by reformist activist and sociologist Mohammad Reza Jalaeipur on July 20 when he urged religious women who wear the hijab by choice to oppose the government's pressure on other women to comply with forced hijab.

Jalaeipur’s story went viral and tens of thousands of hijab-wearing women either shared his story or posted their own pictures with the hashtag “I wear the hijab but am against morality police patrols”.

The campaign which is a separate initiative from the anti-hijab campaign launched earlier this month by women’s rights activists has angered many hardliners.

Meanwhile, in a statement Friday, fifteen prominent Iranian figures who are usually referred to as “religious intellectuals”, some of whom have a background in Shiite seminaries condemned the government policy of compulsory hijab and suppression of women.

They also urged religious scholars to display solidarity with Iranian women and condemn forced hijab and tools of suppression such as morality police’s hijab enforcement patrols.

However, hardliner clerics did not mince words in their Friday sermons, calling those who campaign for freedom of choice traitors.

Jalaeipur, a practicing Muslim, has long been speaking against the government's policy of forcing all women to abide by the prescribed hijab rules and argues that imposing these violates the rights of the majority citizens who are against compulsory hijab.

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“When are you going to accept that the policy of compulsory hijab has failed and when exactly are you going to revise it?” Jalaeipur had challenged the authorities for a response in a Telegram post on June 27.

Iran’s government which is now fully controlled by hardliners has adopted a harsher than usual approach amid economic crisis and hardship for tens of millions. Government and military officials have warned the population a disobeying hijab rules and the morality police hijab enforcement patrols have detained many women, sometimes violently, on the streets.

The government also designated July 12 as the Hijab and Chastity Day this year and celebrated it with gatherings of women with full hijab at stadiums and other public venues.

Hundreds of thousands have supported the anti-hijab campaign on social media in the past few weeks. Many women have shot videos of themselves with uncovered hair in public places and posted the videos on social media with the ‘No2Hijab’ hashtag to display civil disobedience in reaction to the government’s harsh treatment of women for hijab.

Several activists have been arrested for their defiance of the hijab rules in July including Souri Babai-Chegini, a civil activist who published a video of herself removing her hijab, and Nazi Zandieh, a twenty-one-year-old student who also supported the anti-hijab campaign.

Officials usually insist that complying with hijab rules is “the demand of the majority of Iranians”.

Several surveys in the past few years, including a survey by Gamaan polling agency in the Netherlands, show that more than 50 percent of all Iranians and 75 percent of citizens in larger cities including the capital Tehran, oppose the compulsory hijab rules.

Results of surveys conducted by Iranian government agencies are usually not made public but according to Mehdi Nasiri, the former managing director of the hardline Kayhan newspaper, a survey carried out by the ministry of Islamic guidance in 2015 showed that more than 70 percent of Iranians did not agree with compulsory hijab.

In an interview broadcast on state television Thursday evening, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said, "Last week we received a message from Iraqi foreign minister [Fuad Hussein] saying that the Saudi side is ready to move the talks from a security phase to a political and public one.”

"We also expressed our readiness to continue talks at the political level so that it leads to the return of Iran-Saudi Arabia ties to the normal level," he added. 

Late in June, Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi traveled to Iran and met with President Ebrahim Raisi after a visit to Saudi Arabia and meeting with the kingdom’s de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman aimed at jumpstarting stalled talks between Tehran and Riyadh. 

Iran and Saudi Arabia -- which are locked in proxy conflicts around the region -- have held several rounds of talks mediated by Baghdad since 2021. In April, they finally held the much-anticipated fifth round of negotiations, saying that a clear outlook was reached for the resumption of regular talks. 

However, it was the Islamic Republic that suspended the talks earlier in April a day after Saudi Arabia announced it had beheaded 81 men, for “heinous crimes.” Forty-one were Saudi Shiites, Human Rights Watch reported, apparently convicted over protests.

Saudi Arabia cut ties with Iran in 2016 when mobs attacked its embassy in Tehran after Riyadh executed 47 dissidents including the leading Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr.

On July 17, lawmakers re-elected Nasrollah Pejmanfar, a die-hard Paydari member, as chairman of the high-profile Article 90 committee. This will give Paydari more leverage against Ghalibaf and his allies in the parliament.

The rivalry between Ghalibaf and Paydari members dates to the 2013 presidential elections in which both Ghalibaf and the Paydari-backed former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili ran against moderate conservative Hassan Rouhani who won with reformists’ support.

Ultra-conservatives whose domain of influence in the Islamic Republic’s power structures is consistently growing, dealt a heavy blow on Ghalibaf in April by leaking a video of his family members returning to Iran from a shopping trip to Turkey with massive luggage that included a layette set for his unborn grandchild.

The video leaked on social media by a well-known hardliner activist, Vahid Ashtari, was followed by a barrage of criticism and resurfacing of other alleged corruption cases against the family, which prompted calls for his resignation.

The scandal got worse as the whistle blower claimed that during the trip, Ghalibaf’s wife had bought two apartments in Istanbul worth $1.6 million.

Ashtari’s revelations portrayed the Speaker as a hypocrite who tells others to live in austerity while his own family lives in luxury. Referring to government policies, Ashtari argued that it was not acceptable for the speaker to preach to people to buy Iranian-made cars and other products, ban the import of home appliances, and send his own family abroad to buy a layette set for a grandchild.

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Many speculated that the shopping spree by Ghalibaf’s family may have not been leaked if it were not for the undercover surveillance of him and his family members by elements close to the Paydari faction in intelligence organizations.

Ghalibaf has weathered several major scandals in the past decade with the help of his political allies. During his term as mayor of the capital Tehran, several of Ghalibaf’s deputies and people in his close circle were sentenced to 20 to 30 years in prison for corruption but the judiciary never prosecuted him.

As before, after the recent scandal he threatened legal action against those who he accused of defaming him but his attempt at minimizing the shopping scandal which came to be known as “layette-gate” did little to protect him against rivals’ attacks.

Ghalibaf has also suffered the loss of a very powerful ally, the IRGC intelligence chief Hossein Ta’eb, who was dismissed in June for other reasons, but his absence could make Ghalibaf much more vulnerable to his rivals.

Ghalibaf’s supporters say in recent months that the state broadcaster (IRIB), whose head Payman Jebelli has close ties to Paydari has been intentionally underrepresenting news related to his activities including his “provincial visits”.

“The few seconds-long coverage of Dr. Ghalibaf’s provincial trip by the state broadcaster is nothing other than censorship driven by partisan interests … This kind of news coverage related to speaker of the parliament is spiteful,” a Ghalibaf supporter tweeted earlier this month.

The presidential elections last year consolidated hardliners grip on all three government branches, which are now united against reformist and moderate conservative rivals. But in recent months many have predicted an eventual confrontation between the parliament speaker and the president and the emergence of deep rifts in the so-called ‘Principlist’ camp.

Amani added that the people are so angry over the behavior and performance of the authorities that they attack any official as soon as they see them. "People make such strongly-worded comments about officials that I cannot quote what they say about them," Amani said.

IRGC’s Fars news website said Amani receives many messages from the people and municipality workers, but as he told Tehran City Council Chairman Mehdi Chamran, he has to censor the comments in his reports to the council.

Amani said that municipality workers, like other government employees are angry because the government has failed to meet its promise of giving a 10 percent pay rise to its employees. He said some municipality workers did not get any raise while others received far less than 10 percent.

The comments by Amani came one day after Parviz Piran, a prominent sociologist and Tehran University academic told Shargh newspaper in Tehran that "There is a very serious likelihood of a "white mutiny" or a "Bread Riot" in Iran.

Professor Piran said that Iranian society cannot envisage a future, adding, "All that some 50 to 60 percent of the population in Iran can do is look for bread, as the minimum requirement for survival."

A survey earlier this year found that over 30 percent of Iranian wanted to leave the country out of despair and lack of hope for future..

Piran further said that an extensive body of research in Iran indicates that the government's social capital has dramatically dropped as the people have lost their confidence in its management. This has coupled with a decline in ethical values that could bring the society to the verge of mutiny, the academic maintained.

He said that trying to make ends meet and pass the day without thinking of tomorrow is a key pathological characteristic of the Iranian society today. "This is a seriously dangerous situation," he assessed.

"In such a situation," said the sociologist, "Norms and values become meaningless and sometimes convey exactly the opposite meaning. This effectively erodes solidarity in society." He added that this situation requires a re-definition of norms and values. Piran said that Iranian society desperately needs to criticize itself to facilitate this re-definition.

Without mentioning the Iranian establishment's dogmatic ideological nature, the sociologist stressed that Iranians need to realize the relative nature of ethics, rationality, social progress and so on.Meanwhile, he said that one of the weaknesses of the Iranian society is that it lacks a theoretical foundation for itself. Academics simply tried to adopt foreign theoretical foundations and apply them to the Iranian society.

Piran noted that some politicians force the academics to come up with a solution for the Iranian society's problems, "but how can you come up with solutions if you do not have the right theoretical frameworks?" he asked.

Explaining his theory of "momentary society," Piran said, "When 50 to 60 percent of the population live under the poverty line, all they can do is think of how to feed themselves to ensure their survival. In a society with high unemployment and high cost of housing, people begin to lose their dream of owning a house as they find it impossible.

The Islamic regime's enmity with MeK is so fierce that even those remotely connected to the group have been handed jail sentences by revolutionary courts, but Mirsalim’s son was pardoned and walked away.

Critics launched an attack on Mostafa Mirsalim for concealing his son’s arrest for three years from those who voted for him. They also criticized the Guardian Council for endorsing his credentials as candidate for the presidency in 2021 and parliamentary elections in 2020.

Mirsalim explained on Twitter earlier this week that "The MeK took advantage of" his son, a simpleton unable of making ends meet in his personal life." However, he said that "the group's only success was recruiting my son," meaning that the group did not get access to any key intelligence through his son. Mirsalim appears to have deleted the tweets later, but it was too late as the press had already cited them.

Critics on social media strongly challenged him. One critic wrote on Twitter that with Mirsalim's position at the Majles and the Expediency Council, “he has released tons of intelligence at home even through sneezing!”

Mirsalim further explained that his son was arrested in June 2019 and was sentenced to five years in jail in February 2020 on charges of acting against national security but was out on bail. He was finally jailed in February 2021. During this period, Mirsalim did not tell anyone about this. However, the lawmaker's son was soon pardoned and released as Mirsalim told the press.

Conservative activist Mansoor Haghighatpoor told Etemad News: "Mirsalim's son could have given a world of intelligence to the MeK as he had access to tons of information. The critic also revealed that the children of some of the Guardian Council members were killed because of their links to the outlawed group. "Although the council disqualified former Majles Speaker Ali Larijani only for her daughter being a resident of a foreign country, it endorsed Mirsalim's qualification for both the presidential and parliamentary elections," Haghighatpoor said.

Aftab News website, quoted reformist activist Abbas Abdi as saying that the arrest and release of Mirsalim's son in 2019 was one of the most destructive forms of discrimination in Iran's political structure. He criticized Iran's conservatives for their silence about the development as well as their attempt to conceal it while even much more benign reasons could have led to severe punishment if the accused was linked to reformists.

Mirsalim, a seasoned member of the hardline conservative Islamic Coalition Party, was previously interior and culture minister in the early years of the Islamic Republic. He who represents Tehran, is known for making potentially libellous comments about the alleged corruption of Majles Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. The bitter relations and financial rivalries and conflict of interests over Mirsalim's role in preventing the import of new cars to Iran could have played a part in the revelations about his son's case.

Mirsalim's behavior was most certainly being scrutinized by his political rivals. Last week, he had to explain why he was wearing US-made shoes, revealed in a photograph from the parliament floor, that found its way to news websites and social media.