The Islamic dress code - or hijab - is a game for 25-year-old Tahereh, who feels perfectly comfortable letting her headscarf fall off her shoulders as she covers the distance from her car to a friend's apartment building on a residential street in central Tehran. The same cannot be said for the Basij militiamen who regularly cruise through this part of town on their motorcycles, stopping to reprimand pre-teen girls for stepping out of their home without a headscarf and a loose coat, or manteau. Typically, this is the minimum level of covering tolerated by an Islamic establishment whose official line is that "hijab is protection from sin."
Despite the official hard line, the scale of covering up in Iran varies by region and neighbourhood, and many women agree that in terms of their rights, hijab is low on the list of their immediate worries. Nevertheless, it remains a universal topic of public discourse among the secularising middle class that helped elect the moderate President Hassan Rouhani into office this summer. Though the enforcement of public dress code has remained largely unchanged during his first three months in office, the government has indicated an imminent change in the current policy on "hijab and chastity."
One recent signal is the announced plan to transfer the responsibility for hijab enforcement from the police force to the interior ministry, which would free the police to focus on more pertinent "security" issues. Another indication are the statements of Rouhani himself, which have been in line with his pre-election promises to lift the restrictions on personal freedoms young people experienced under the previous administration.
At a recent government meeting, the president advised the police force to approach the hijab issue "with respect for human dignity and refrain from excessive measures," according to a 13 November front-page article in the reformist Shargh daily analysing the signs of a potential change in the official stance on hijab enforcement. At the same time, the newspaper highlighted Rouhani's message to the public, in which he asked the people to treat "the topics of character, chastity and hijab" with sensitivity and to respect "societal norms."
