Four years after Jina Amini’s death, women are no longer only demanding rights from the state. Increasingly, they are exercising them in everyday life.
Four years have passed since the death of Jina Mahsa Amini, the young Kurdish woman who died in September 2022 after being detained by Iran’s morality police in Tehran. Her death ignited protests that, under the Kurdish slogan “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî” and its Persian equivalent, “Woman, Life, Freedom”, grew into one of the most significant protest movements in the history of the Islamic Republic.
The significance of this movement cannot be measured solely by the number of demonstrations, the scale of repression, or formal political change. Woman, Life, Freedom must be understood within the much longer history of women’s struggles in Iran, a history that reaches back at least to the Constitutional Revolution, the formation of the first women’s associations and publications, and the activism of women such as Sediqeh Dowlatabadi. In 1919, Dowlatabadi founded Zaban-e Zanan (The Language of Women) in Isfahan, a publication that addressed women’s education and social rights. Her activities, from journalism and women’s education to her opposition to the veil, demonstrate that the struggle over women’s right to participate in public life and to make decisions about their own lives and bodies began long before the establishment of the Islamic Republic.
This conflict entered a new phase with the establishment of the Islamic Republic. Only weeks after the victory of the 1979 Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini’s declaration that women should observe hijab in government offices triggered widespread protests. Beginning on 8 March 1979, International Women’s Day, thousands of women took to the streets of Tehran and continued protesting over the following days against the imposition of hijab and restrictions on their rights and freedoms. From the outset, the question of dress was not simply a disagreement over a religious injunction. It became a political question about the limits of state intervention in women’s lives and bodies. Compulsory hijab was subsequently embedded in the legal and administrative structures of the Islamic Republic, but women’s resistance to it never entirely disappeared.
From this perspective, the Jina uprising was not the beginning of this conflict but a new and more radical phase in a struggle stretching back more than four decades. What distinguishes it from many earlier periods is the way it connected the question of women with broader concepts such as life, freedom, human dignity, and the individual’s right to determine how to live. From the beginning of the movement, Mohammad Reza Nikfar placed the concept of “dignity” at the centre of his analysis. The issue, he argued, was not simply the headscarf but an order that reproduces multiple forms of discrimination, humiliation, and interference in people’s lives (Nikfar, 2022). Asef Bayat likewise understands the Jina uprising not simply as a women’s revolution, a generational revolt, or a protest against compulsory hijab, but as a struggle for the “reclaiming of life”: a free and dignified life against the pervasive intrusion of power (Bayat, 2023).
Four years later, perhaps the movement’s most important effect can be seen not in changes to the law, but in the transformation of social norms and everyday ways of living.
Women’s Bodies: From a Symbol of Islamic Order to a Site of Disobedience
From the earliest years of the Islamic Republic, women’s bodies and clothing were never treated merely as personal or religious matters. Hijab became one of the most visible symbols of the new political order. In the discourse of Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamist forces of the revolution, the “revolutionary Muslim woman” was set against their image of women under the Pahlavi monarchy and the supposedly “Westernised woman”. The Islamic Republic’s ideal woman was not necessarily confined to the home. She could participate in society, university life, war, and politics, but her presence had to be defined within an Islamic identity.
The veiled woman was therefore not simply someone fulfilling a religious obligation. Her body and clothing became symbols of the identity of the new political system. It is precisely here that a distinction must be made between hijab as a religious injunction or norm and compulsory hijab as state policy. The existence of religious norms concerning dress does not in itself explain why the state should transform one specific interpretation of those norms into criminal law and then make it a matter of police enforcement. The central issue concerns the limits and justification of such intervention, and the difference between regulating public dress and imposing a particular religious model through criminal and policing mechanisms.
The diversity found across Muslim societies further demonstrates the importance of this distinction. Most Muslim-majority countries do not employ a system resembling that of the Islamic Republic for the police enforcement of women’s dress. Even Saudi Arabia, despite its history of an extremely conservative social order, no longer follows the Iranian model of compulsory hijab enforced by the police. Restrictions on women singing solo before male or mixed audiences are likewise not a universal feature of Muslim societies. Such restrictions therefore need to be examined in relation to the particular interaction between jurisprudential interpretation, cultural policy, and the structure of power in the Islamic Republic.
Developments in recent years show that this conflict remains very much alive. In December 2024, Parastoo Ahmadi performed her “Caravanserai Concert” without compulsory hijab and without a live audience, later publishing the video online. In June 2026, a criminal court in Qom sentenced her and eight musicians and production staff involved in the performance, in a first-instance ruling, to 74 lashes, a two-year ban on artistic activity, and a two-year travel ban. The charge was “offending public decency”, with the court citing, among other provisions, Article 638 of the Islamic Penal Code and Article 743 of the Computer Crimes Law (Deutsche Welle, 2026; IranWire, 2026).
Ahmadi’s case is significant because it brings together two spheres through which women’s social presence has been controlled: the body and the voice. The case of Hiva Seyfizadeh reveals another dimension of the same restrictions. The Iranian classical singer announced in 2026 that, following a case opened after her performance at Rooberoo Mansion, she had received an initial sentence of four years’ imprisonment on the charge of “promoting corruption and vice”. Hamidreza Nourbakhsh, CEO of Iran’s House of Music, questioned the basis for such a charge and argued that the status of women singers should be determined through clear regulations (Iran House of Music, 2026).
A “woman’s voice”, or women singing solo, is not in itself defined as a separate criminal offence under Iran’s Islamic Penal Code. In practice, restrictions on women singers arise from a combination of licensing policies, jurisprudential interpretations and, in some cases, the use of other criminal charges. Even legal opinions attributed to Ayatollah Khomeini do not categorically declare a woman singing solo before a male audience to be forbidden. Rather, the ruling is made conditional on whether it is deemed morally corrupting (Institute for the Compilation and Publication of Imam Khomeini’s Works, 2019). This demonstrates that the transition from a jurisprudential debate about women’s voices to the practical prohibition of women’s professional singing is a political, legal, and institutional process.
Sedigheh Vasmaghi’s work is particularly important in this context. Vasmaghi, an Islamic scholar and researcher of Islamic jurisprudence, has questioned both the prevailing interpretation of hijab as a religious obligation and the legitimacy of its imposition by the state. In her reading of the Quran’s social injunctions, the historical and social circumstances in which verses were revealed are fundamental. From this perspective, such injunctions cannot simply be transformed, without regard to the historical circumstances of their original audience, into fixed and universally binding legal rules for all societies and all times. Her interpretation of verses concerning women’s dress therefore leads to conclusions different from the official interpretation promoted by the Islamic Republic (Vasmaghi, 2017).
The importance of this critique for the present discussion lies in the relationship between jurisprudence, law, and political power. Even if a particular act is regarded in one jurisprudential interpretation as obligatory, forbidden, or undesirable, it does not automatically follow that the state should turn that judgement into a binding law for the entire population and punish those who violate it. The conflict over compulsory hijab therefore cannot be reduced to a simple opposition between “Islam and secularism” or “religion and the West”. Part of the conflict takes place within religious thought itself, concerning the limits of jurisprudential authority and the state’s right to transform one religious interpretation into binding law.
From Religious Norm to Police Enforcement
The morality police must also be understood as part of this same process: the transition from religious norms to legal obligation and then to police enforcement. State control over women’s clothing long predates this institution, but the emergence of the morality police in its specific, organised form embodies one of the important contradictions in the history of the Islamic Republic.
On 26 July 2005, during the final days of Mohammad Khatami’s presidency, the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution approved the “Strategies for Promoting the Culture of Chastity”. The resolution did not explicitly refer to the “morality police”, but it established a mechanism for coordinating government bodies on questions of chastity and hijab. Esmail Ahmadi-Moghaddam, then commander of the Law Enforcement Force, later linked the establishment of the morality police to this resolution, saying that the decision had been made during the final days of Khatami’s administration and implemented at the beginning of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency.
Politically, this history is striking. For a large part of Iran’s younger generation and many Iranian women, the Khatami era was associated with hopes for reform, the expansion of civil society, and greater social and cultural openness. Yet the institutional foundations for a policy that would later become one of the most recognisable symbols of policing women’s clothing were laid at the end of that same period. In the summer of 2006, the Law Enforcement Force announced that the morality police had begun operating. Initially, officials claimed that its mission would be limited to issuing warnings about clothing, but the detention of women gradually became part of its routine operations.
The morality police vans became one of the most visible symbols of the relationship between the state and women’s bodies. Police officers could decide in the street whether a woman’s clothing was “appropriate” or “inappropriate”, stop her, and in some cases take her to a police facility. Seventeen years after those policies were approved, Jina Mahsa Amini’s detention by the morality police and her death following that detention placed this very mechanism at the centre of one of the largest protest movements in the history of the Islamic Republic.
But women’s resistance did not begin with Jina. One recent example was Sepideh Rashno, who was arrested on 16 July 2022, around two months before Jina’s death, following an altercation on a bus with a woman who objected to her clothing. What made the incident significant was precisely its everyday character: a bus, a woman’s clothing, and her resistance to someone attempting to decide how she should dress. A few weeks later, the same conflict returned on a vastly larger scale.
From Demanding Rights to Exercising Them
What happened after Jina’s death can also be understood through Asef Bayat’s concept of “non-movements”. Bayat uses the term to describe the dispersed but similar actions of ordinary people: individuals who are not necessarily members of an organisation, who have no shared leader and may not even know one another, but whose mass repetition of similar practices in everyday life can gradually transform power relations and the boundaries of what is possible. From this perspective, a woman entering a café without a headscarf, or a student attending university without compulsory hijab, is not necessarily taking part in a political demonstration. Yet when such acts are repeated on a mass scale, they can become a social force.
A fundamental shift has taken place here: a move from “demanding rights” to “exercising rights”. In earlier periods, much of women’s struggle against discriminatory laws focused on legal reform, formal institutions, or reinterpretations of Islamic jurisprudence. Woman, Life, Freedom did not abandon these approaches, but it brought another form of action to the forefront: putting into practice a right that the legal system has yet to recognise. A woman who appears in public without compulsory hijab does not wait for the state to recognise her right to choose what she wears; she exercises that right directly.
The image of two young women sitting without headscarves and eating breakfast in a café during the early days of the movement was bold and dangerous in 2022. Four years later, the presence of women without compulsory hijab in parts of Iran’s public space is no longer as exceptional as it was then. Compulsory hijab laws have not disappeared, and the state still possesses an array of policing, judicial, administrative, and technological tools with which to exert pressure. A transformation in social norms should therefore not be confused with the abolition of legal coercion. What has changed is the relationship between law and social obedience: the law remains, but its capacity to secure widespread compliance in the way it once did has diminished.
Shervin Hajipour’s song “Baraye…” is perhaps the clearest cultural expression of this transformation. The desires gathered within it were less an ideological programme for revolution than aspirations for an ordinary life: freedom, happiness, security, choice, and release from the constant intrusion of power into personal life. It is here that the analyses of Bayat and Nikfar converge. What Bayat calls the “reclaiming of life” intersects with Nikfar’s emphasis on “dignity”. When the state makes decisions about clothing, music, women’s voices, social relationships, and how citizens may inhabit public space, the demand for an ordinary life itself becomes political.
Political Revolution or Social Transformation?
During the first months of the protests, one of the central debates in political and media circles concerned how the events should be described. Should Woman, Life, Freedom be regarded as the beginning of a revolution, or as a protest movement with revolutionary potential? From the movement’s earliest weeks, Mohammad Reza Nikfar was cautious about using the concept of revolution too quickly. In October 2022, alongside the movement’s capacity to mobilise different groups against discrimination and humiliation, he pointed to factors such as the cohesion of the power structure, the state’s ability to continue its repression, the limited capacity of protesters to maintain a sustained street presence, the absence of a general strike, and the lack of clear leadership or programme (Nikfar, 2022).
Four years later, a clearer assessment is possible. The Woman, Life, Freedom movement did not result in a political revolution in the sense of transforming the structure of government. But this does not mean its impact was limited or that the movement failed. The distinction between political revolution and social transformation is crucial here. Legal and political structures can remain intact while social norms, forms of obedience, and citizens’ everyday relationship with power undergo profound change. Four years after Jina Amini’s death, assessing Woman, Life, Freedom through the simple binary of “victory or defeat” is misleading. If the criterion is regime change or the complete abolition of compulsory hijab law, neither has occurred. But if social transformation is not measured solely through changes in law, a different picture emerges.
The Jina uprising demonstrated that hijab is not simply about a piece of clothing. The deeper issue concerns the relationship between power and life: how far does the state have the right to decide about citizens’ bodies, clothing, voices, happiness, social relationships, and ways of living? Three perspectives help illuminate different dimensions of this question. Asef Bayat emphasises the “reclaiming of life”; Mohammad Reza Nikfar foregrounds human dignity and resistance to relations of discrimination and humiliation; and Sedigheh Vasmaghi, working from within Islamic thought, questions the religious and jurisprudential foundations used to justify parts of this coercive system.
Four years after Jina, the state still has compulsory hijab law at its disposal and retains the ability to exert pressure in enforcing it. But the taken-for-granted expectation of obedience has been broken. For some women, disobedience to compulsory hijab has shifted from an exceptional and high-risk act into an everyday practice. It is here that the distinction between “demanding rights” and “exercising rights” acquires its fullest meaning. Some women are no longer simply asking the state to recognise their right to decide how they dress. Through their everyday presence in public space, they are already exercising that right.
Perhaps the most enduring legacy of Woman, Life, Freedom lies precisely in this transformation. Iranian women are no longer merely the objects of state policy on hijab. They have become political actors who question the legitimacy of the state’s claim to authority over their bodies and who, through everyday life, actively redefine the boundaries of that authority.
Ultimately, the question raised in Iran’s streets four years ago by the death of Jina Amini remains unresolved, but its form has become clearer. The question is no longer simply what kind of clothing the state permits women to wear. The more fundamental question is this: who has the right to decide what happens to a woman’s body and how she lives? The answer that large numbers of Iranian women have given over these four years, not only through slogans but through their everyday lives, is clear: women themselves.
