Ahmad Alamolhoda during Friday prayers on January 21, 2022
Iranian hardliner cleric Ahmad Alamolhoda says women with loose-fitting hijab should not feel secure in public, urging people to express hatred towards them.
During his Friday Prayer sermon, Alamolhoda – Ali Khamenei’s representative in Mashhad and father-in-law of Iran's President Ebrahim Raisi – said that women with loose hijab should feel the hatred, stressing that “expressing hatred and disgust for a woman without hijab is a divine duty”.
“People should solve the problem, not the police”, he said. His remark could be seen as a green light for religious zealots to confront women in the streets and cause harm.
Similar calls for crackdown on those who fail to comply with compulsory hijab by other hardliners sparked a series of acid attacks on women in Esfahan in 2014.
He also talked about an official ban on women not to enter soccer stadiums, saying, “Stadiums are a place of excitement”, stating that women should not be excited in the presence of men.
His comments came less than a month after hundreds of Iranian social media users protested to compulsory hijab and the ideology the government is imposing on them, trending the hashtag #LetUsTalk.
A report by the parliament's research center in 2018 said the number of Iranians who believed in mandatory hijab had waned. According to the report those who considered the hijab a value that could be stipulated in law had fallen from 85 percent in the early 1980s to around 35 percent.