Conservatives In Iran Concerned Over Crisis, Public Anger

A video from a CCTV camera was released on media showing a car, which apparently was following Majid Abdolbaghi’s vehicle as it went into the parking lot, stopped in front of a building, as one man started shooting with a handgun from the front seat and another one got out of the car and started shooting from behind the car. According to reports Abdolbaghi succumbed to injuries after he was taken to hospital.

The Metropol twin towers collapsed on May 23 burying more than 80 people under the rubble, with about 42 bodies recovered. Soon after the collapse it became apparent that the owner and builder, Hossein Abdolbaghi, was a powerful and politically well-connected businessman who had disregarded regulations and building codes, backed by officials, who might have had their own financial interests.

Following the incident, Iranian media initially reported that Abdolbaghi, who was reportedly connected to Iran’s top security official Ali Shamkhani, had been arrested, but the government later announced that he had died in the collapse. The public did not believe the claim and many said that he escaped and corrupt officials, who had allowed him to violate building regulations, wanted him to disappear.

In June, reports came out that a physician who refused to cooperate in the alleged coverup had died mysteriously.

Earlier in the week, Iran’s prosecutor general issued an indictment against 20 people accused in the case of the Metropol incident.

Bokharai also warned in an interview with the moderate Rouydad24 news website that excessive restrictions on society is likely to lead to revolts. He further warned that the government-fabricated bipolarity might lead to conflicts between ethnic groups.

The sociologist said the government's strict control over the media leaves no room for critics of hardliners dominating the government.

During recent weeks the government has unleashed its so-called chastity squads to crackdown on women who do not wish to observe compulsory hijab. Patrols and roadblocks by the morality police and vigilante hardliners have led to a series of confrontations in the streets and on public transport with women who are seen as not fully covering their heads and bodies.

In several social media videos men and women are seen confronting each other and pushing one other out of trains and buses as government’s forced hijab enforcers try to intimidate women for their “lose headscarves”.

While Iranian reformists and some well-known regime apologists call these conflicts “social bipolarity” between two groups of people, many Iranians on social media point out that this is in fact a conflict between the government and those who oppose it. They accuse the apologists of portraying a political problem that is occurring because of the despotic and totalitarian nature of the Islamic regime as a divide between two segments of the Iranian society.

Although the conflict is wider than the issue of hijab, most recent cases, including the one in a video posted by moderate cleric Rahmatollah Bigdeli on Twitter, involved intimidation by government hardliner supporters linked to the IRGC and other parts of the core of the fundamentalist regime. At least in one case a young woman who argued against compulsory hijab with an enforcer was arrested and the woman who confronted her and was pushed out of a bus, was praised by several religious officials and the state television as a hero.

Ahmad Abdollahi a religious official in Esfahan charged that women who are against the idea of compulsory hijab are the same women who keep dogs as pets and get rabies from their dogs!

Reformist activist Majid Tavakoli says, "Bipolar divisions are created by the government to give the sense of power and supremacy to its supporters who fight for the regime's survival." Another Twitter user argued that "A bipolar conflict takes place between two equal forces. But when one side has all the power and the other side is absolutely powerless, what the latter does is resistance."

Bokharaei said that such bipolarity might also occur in economic and cultural spheres as the government highlights and boosts divisions between insiders and the rest of the population. Pointing out that clusters of people are being formed at both ends of this bipolarity, and the government is constantly supporting one of the poles against the other, the sociologist warned that the escalation of these divisions might pose a danger for the clerical regime far more serious and detrimental that it could ever imagine.

Bipolar situations give way to disillusionment and eventually push society toward a quick implosion, he warned.

The new campaign began with an Instagram story by reformist activist and sociologist Mohammad Reza Jalaeipur on July 20 when he urged religious women who wear the hijab by choice to oppose the government's pressure on other women to comply with forced hijab.

Jalaeipur’s story went viral and tens of thousands of hijab-wearing women either shared his story or posted their own pictures with the hashtag “I wear the hijab but am against morality police patrols”.

The campaign which is a separate initiative from the anti-hijab campaign launched earlier this month by women’s rights activists has angered many hardliners.

Meanwhile, in a statement Friday, fifteen prominent Iranian figures who are usually referred to as “religious intellectuals”, some of whom have a background in Shiite seminaries condemned the government policy of compulsory hijab and suppression of women.

They also urged religious scholars to display solidarity with Iranian women and condemn forced hijab and tools of suppression such as morality police’s hijab enforcement patrols.

However, hardliner clerics did not mince words in their Friday sermons, calling those who campaign for freedom of choice traitors.

Jalaeipur, a practicing Muslim, has long been speaking against the government's policy of forcing all women to abide by the prescribed hijab rules and argues that imposing these violates the rights of the majority citizens who are against compulsory hijab.

“When are you going to accept that the policy of compulsory hijab has failed and when exactly are you going to revise it?” Jalaeipur had challenged the authorities for a response in a Telegram post on June 27.

Iran’s government which is now fully controlled by hardliners has adopted a harsher than usual approach amid economic crisis and hardship for tens of millions. Government and military officials have warned the population a disobeying hijab rules and the morality police hijab enforcement patrols have detained many women, sometimes violently, on the streets.

The government also designated July 12 as the Hijab and Chastity Day this year and celebrated it with gatherings of women with full hijab at stadiums and other public venues.

Hundreds of thousands have supported the anti-hijab campaign on social media in the past few weeks. Many women have shot videos of themselves with uncovered hair in public places and posted the videos on social media with the ‘No2Hijab’ hashtag to display civil disobedience in reaction to the government’s harsh treatment of women for hijab.

Several activists have been arrested for their defiance of the hijab rules in July including Souri Babai-Chegini, a civil activist who published a video of herself removing her hijab, and Nazi Zandieh, a twenty-one-year-old student who also supported the anti-hijab campaign.

Officials usually insist that complying with hijab rules is “the demand of the majority of Iranians”.

Several surveys in the past few years, including a survey by Gamaan polling agency in the Netherlands, show that more than 50 percent of all Iranians and 75 percent of citizens in larger cities including the capital Tehran, oppose the compulsory hijab rules.

Results of surveys conducted by Iranian government agencies are usually not made public but according to Mehdi Nasiri, the former managing director of the hardline Kayhan newspaper, a survey carried out by the ministry of Islamic guidance in 2015 showed that more than 70 percent of Iranians did not agree with compulsory hijab.

In an interview broadcast on state television Thursday evening, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said, "Last week we received a message from Iraqi foreign minister [Fuad Hussein] saying that the Saudi side is ready to move the talks from a security phase to a political and public one.”

"We also expressed our readiness to continue talks at the political level so that it leads to the return of Iran-Saudi Arabia ties to the normal level," he added. 

Late in June, Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi traveled to Iran and met with President Ebrahim Raisi after a visit to Saudi Arabia and meeting with the kingdom’s de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman aimed at jumpstarting stalled talks between Tehran and Riyadh. 

Iran and Saudi Arabia -- which are locked in proxy conflicts around the region -- have held several rounds of talks mediated by Baghdad since 2021. In April, they finally held the much-anticipated fifth round of negotiations, saying that a clear outlook was reached for the resumption of regular talks. 

However, it was the Islamic Republic that suspended the talks earlier in April a day after Saudi Arabia announced it had beheaded 81 men, for “heinous crimes.” Forty-one were Saudi Shiites, Human Rights Watch reported, apparently convicted over protests.

Saudi Arabia cut ties with Iran in 2016 when mobs attacked its embassy in Tehran after Riyadh executed 47 dissidents including the leading Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr.

On July 17, lawmakers re-elected Nasrollah Pejmanfar, a die-hard Paydari member, as chairman of the high-profile Article 90 committee. This will give Paydari more leverage against Ghalibaf and his allies in the parliament.

The rivalry between Ghalibaf and Paydari members dates to the 2013 presidential elections in which both Ghalibaf and the Paydari-backed former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili ran against moderate conservative Hassan Rouhani who won with reformists’ support.

Ultra-conservatives whose domain of influence in the Islamic Republic’s power structures is consistently growing, dealt a heavy blow on Ghalibaf in April by leaking a video of his family members returning to Iran from a shopping trip to Turkey with massive luggage that included a layette set for his unborn grandchild.

The video leaked on social media by a well-known hardliner activist, Vahid Ashtari, was followed by a barrage of criticism and resurfacing of other alleged corruption cases against the family, which prompted calls for his resignation.

The scandal got worse as the whistle blower claimed that during the trip, Ghalibaf’s wife had bought two apartments in Istanbul worth $1.6 million.

Ashtari’s revelations portrayed the Speaker as a hypocrite who tells others to live in austerity while his own family lives in luxury. Referring to government policies, Ashtari argued that it was not acceptable for the speaker to preach to people to buy Iranian-made cars and other products, ban the import of home appliances, and send his own family abroad to buy a layette set for a grandchild.

Many speculated that the shopping spree by Ghalibaf’s family may have not been leaked if it were not for the undercover surveillance of him and his family members by elements close to the Paydari faction in intelligence organizations.

Ghalibaf has weathered several major scandals in the past decade with the help of his political allies. During his term as mayor of the capital Tehran, several of Ghalibaf’s deputies and people in his close circle were sentenced to 20 to 30 years in prison for corruption but the judiciary never prosecuted him.

As before, after the recent scandal he threatened legal action against those who he accused of defaming him but his attempt at minimizing the shopping scandal which came to be known as “layette-gate” did little to protect him against rivals’ attacks.

Ghalibaf has also suffered the loss of a very powerful ally, the IRGC intelligence chief Hossein Ta’eb, who was dismissed in June for other reasons, but his absence could make Ghalibaf much more vulnerable to his rivals.

Ghalibaf’s supporters say in recent months that the state broadcaster (IRIB), whose head Payman Jebelli has close ties to Paydari has been intentionally underrepresenting news related to his activities including his “provincial visits”.

“The few seconds-long coverage of Dr. Ghalibaf’s provincial trip by the state broadcaster is nothing other than censorship driven by partisan interests … This kind of news coverage related to speaker of the parliament is spiteful,” a Ghalibaf supporter tweeted earlier this month.

The presidential elections last year consolidated hardliners grip on all three government branches, which are now united against reformist and moderate conservative rivals. But in recent months many have predicted an eventual confrontation between the parliament speaker and the president and the emergence of deep rifts in the so-called ‘Principlist’ camp.