English transcript

Something really interesting is happening in Iran right now.

Iranians, like a lot of Iranians,

are ignoring their government's social restrictions

and getting away with it on a scale

we really haven't seen before.

I'm going to get married in Iran.

Married!

Women are out in public without covering their hair,

wearing things that would have gotten them

arrested in the past.

Yes, even crop tops.

While men are sometimes out in the streets in shorts,

which I would have never dared to wear outside

when I was living in Iran.

Shh, shh, shh, shh.

Mixed gender crowds are dancing together

at street concerts, ticketed concerts, cafe parties,

and whatever this thing is.

Women are also singing solo in public, which typically

hasn't been allowed.

Like diamonds in the sky.

And they're riding motorcycles in groups,

even though they're formally denied motorbike licenses.

And look, this isn't really new.

This sort of defiance has long been happening here and there,

especially since Iran's Women, Life, Freedom protest

movement in 2022.

What is new is that all this has become

so widespread without drawing a consistent reaction

from the authorities that it appears

to have been normalized.

Hi, I'm Yara.

And to unpack what's going on in Iran,

I spoke to Dr. Shadi Mohtari, who

researches the politics of human rights in the Middle East

and beyond.

The Women, Life, Freedom movement,

I mean, was such a pivotal, pivotal inflection point.

And then it's just been kind of drip, drip, drip,

pushing the lines further and further.

Certain people within the regime are coming to the conclusion

that this is not something they can control,

and it has to do with how weak they

are at this particular moment.

But at the same time, the Women, Life, Freedom protest,

the financial crisis, the water crisis.

Electricity crisis.

Yes, people are really suffering economically.

You hear kind of, certainly amongst insider reformists,

a degree of pragmatism.

And you're starting to hear those voices amongst hardliners

and conservatives as well.

And then the others are saying, we

need to not get people back out on the streets

again and ease up on the social restrictions.

I knew that if I did this, there would be a war

that I couldn't put an end to.

Did the 12-day war with Israel play a factor?

So there was a rise in nationalist sentiment,

at least among a segment of the population that

was very dissatisfied with the regime.

But then say, you know, this is an attack on Iran.

We need to stand up.

And so they wanted to tap into that

to kind of legitimize themselves.

There's been a lot of infighting

over social freedoms in Iran.

Like in early October, when a very senior

conservative Iranian official basically

said the headscarf restrictions were no longer a thing.

But a week later, after a conservative outcry,

he's sort of walked that back.

And the Iranian president has also

been pushing back against enforcing

the mandatory dress codes.

When the Iranian parliament passed a bill

to crack down on hijab violations,

the presidency and other bodies decided

against enacting it in late 2024.

But of course, some people are not taking this well.

There is no unified stance on this within the regime.

The regime has tried to put, you know,

the cat back into the bag.

But ultimately, enough women refused to back down

that it has become untenable for them.

But it's still not smooth sailing from here.

The dance parties are sometimes shut down,

as are businesses that allow people

to violate the social restrictions.

The morality police sometimes, though rarely,

shows up here and there.

This lady was pulled over by police

for riding a motorcycle.

And people sometimes still get arrested

and then sometimes released.

One official has even vowed to deploy

80,000 morality police volunteers

to crack down on these violations.

As it is with a lot of social restrictions,

there's a lot of back and forth

and conflicting evidence, right?

So with the satellite dishes, right?

I believe are still not technically legal.

But then I remember, again, 10 years ago,

under the administration of Hassan Rouhani,

the minister of culture came out and said

something like 70 some odd percent

of Iranian households have satellites.

But then on the front page of a newspaper,

some months later, there would be,

oh, these police forces crushed

these illegal satellite dishes and we confiscated them.

We went through a lot of cycles of protest movements

and political currents that tried to reform

the regime from within.

And by the time we've gotten to women,

like freedom and sin, the population's just like,

we don't care what you do, state.

We are doing what we're doing.

We're, you know, we are going to proceed and defy you.

And to their credit, I think most of the protesters

did a very good job of showing that

this was not about them challenging Islam.

It was really about challenging political structures

that were assembled in the name of Islam.

They had a lot of allies also who were, you know,

women who chose to wear the hijab.

This idea of choice rather than mandatory hijab.

What I've been seeing that's actually been

really uplifting to me throughout all this

is I have been actually seeing photos of

a woman in full black chador,

like next to a woman whose hair is like just fully out.

And they're just friends.

That certainly exists inside Iran.

You know, you do see a pretty strong commitment to,

no, we need choice.

Hijab ehtiogi, because people, you know,

they see each other in more human terms

and it's more complex than just their religious identities.