In brief glimpses of Tehran, an AP journalist sees a changing and challenged Iran

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) – As you enter Iran’s capital, it starts with only occasional glimpses – a passenger in a car speeding by or a pedestrian trying to leapfrog through Tehran’s notorious traffic. But as you reach the cooler heights of Tehran’s northern neighborhoods along the city’s sycamore-lined Vali-e Asr Street, they are almost everywhere, women with their brown, black, blonde and gray locks.

More and more, Iranian women choose to forgo the country’s mandatory headscarf, or hijab.

It was something unthinkable just a few years earlier in the Islamic Republic, whose conservative Shiite clerics and hard-line politicians long pushed for strict enforcement of laws requiring women to cover their hair. But the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini and the nationwide protests that followed enraged women of all ages and views in a way few other issues have since the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.

“When I moved to Iran in 1999, letting a single strand of hair show would immediately prompt someone to tell me to tuck it back under my headscarf out of fear of the morality police taking me away,” said Holly Dagres, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “To see where Iran is today feels unimaginable: Women and girls openly defying mandatory hijab.”

“Authorities are overwhelmed by the sheer numbers across the country and worry that if they crack down – at a delicate time marked by power blackouts, water shortages, and a rotten economy – they could spur Iranians to return to the streets.”

I received a three-day visa from the government to attend a summit addressed by Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi as tensions remain high over Tehran’s nuclear program. Access to reporting beyond the summit was limited, but the trip gave me my first look on the ground in Iran since my last visits in 2018 and 2019.

In those intervening years, I had watched from abroad in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in my role overseeing the Associated Press’ coverage of Iran and the Gulf Arab states as Iran was roiled by protests over the economy and Amini’s death, the coronavirus pandemic and a 12-day war with Israel.

For the past 46 years, Iran’s rulers have imposed the hijab rule. At the strictest times, the police and the Basijis, the all-volunteer force of the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, kept a close eye on women in the streets to ensure compliance.

Whenever the atmosphere felt laxer, many women pushed their scarves further and further back on their head – small challenges to the government on how much hair can you get away with showing. But they rarely dared to remove it.

Working remotely with my AP colleagues in Iran, I knew from their reporting, photographs and video footage from the streets on even unrelated assignments that women had begun to drop the hijab completely. But I didn’t fully understand the scale of that refusal until I saw it myself.

Around Tajrish Square, at the foot of Tehran’s Alborz Mountains, one group of young girls who are required to wear the hijab to school immediately removed them after leaving in the afternoon. They darted between cars idling through traffic, laughing and carrying art projects. Women of all ages went uncovered at the Tajrish Bazaar and walking past the blue-tile domes of the Imamzadeh Saleh shrine. Two police officers on the street talked among themselves as the women past by unremarked.

At the luxury Espinas Palace Hotel, multiple women with their uncovered walked past the signs reading, “Please observe the Islamic hijab” with the black-and-white outline of a woman in hijab.

A foreign diplomat’s wife attended a dinner for the summit without one. An Iranian woman in attendance briefly put one over her head while in discussion with a hotel staff member, then let it fall fully to her shoulders a moment later.

Those sites were in northern Tehran, an affluent area that is generally more liberal. But even in a more conservative southern district, an uncovered woman walked quickly down the street among others in the all-encompassing black chador.

“All of my life I had to wear hijab, at school, at university, everywhere in public,” one Iranian woman who recently emigrated to Canada told me after I returned to Dubai, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.

“I always tried to follow the rules but it made me feel a lack of confidence … because I wore the hijab and I didn’t believe in that.”

Signs of the war could be seen too. I saw one apartment building, its top-floor apartment still in ruins from an Israeli strike as well.

Hard-liners within Iran’s theocracy repeatedly have called for increased enforcement of the hijab laws. Iran’s reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian has pushed to halt that, saying in September in an interview with NBC News that “human beings have a right to choose.”

Iran’s top authority, 86-year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has so far left the hijab issue alone after this year’s war with Israel, which also saw the United States bomb Iranian nuclear enrichment sites. Also on hold is any change to Iran’s government-subsidized gasoline prices, among the cheapest in the world, despite increasing economic pressure on the country as its rial currency trades at over 1 million to $1.

The reason likely rests in the widespread dissatisfaction of Iran’s people with its theocracy at the moment. Previous government actions on both issues led to nationwide protests and security force crackdowns that killed hundreds and saw thousands detained.

In recent days, Pezeshkian’s social affairs adviser Mohammad-Javad Javadi-Yeganeh acknowledged data from an unpublished survey by the state-linked Iranian Students Polling Agency. The polling reportedly suggested widespread discontent with the government, something not previously acknowledged by officials who have repeatedly contended that the country came together during the 12-day war. Fear of another war breaking out permeates conversations across Tehran.

“When we visit provinces, we see in surveys that people are discontent about the administration,” Pezeshkian recently said, without directly acknowledging the polling. “We are answerable since we cannot provide services to people.”

The polling tracks with widespread voter discontent and a low turnout during last year’s initial presidential vote.

“Years of economic hardship, inflation, currency volatility, unemployment and public frustration over environmental and social challenges have sharply eroded trust in institutions,” the Washington-based National Iranian American Council said in an analysis about the reported polling data.

Yet the worry of a renewed government crackdown persists for a population exhausted by the grind of international sanctions and the widespread fear that another war with Israel will come.

“Sometimes that fear is with me,” the Iranian woman living in Canada said. “Sometimes when I’m behind the wheel, I try to find my headscarf on my head. That fear is still with me.”