Iran International
Cafés—and the social life that has grown around them—have become the latest battleground for Iran’s hardliners, who increasingly see their control over everyday behavior slipping out of reach.
That tension was on display this week when Saeed Jalili, a leading figure of Iran’s ultra-hardline camp, attacked café culture as a Western plot designed to undermine the family.
“They define three spaces: the dormitory, the workplace, and a ‘third space,’ like a café, to escape loneliness,” Jalili said. “In this paradigm, the family loses meaning. This stands in opposition to Islam’s philosophy of marriage.”
For conservative factions that have long insisted on strict gender segregation and rigid enforcement of compulsory hijab, the spread of cafés represents more than a shift in leisure habits—it signals a loss of authority over how people socialize and occupy public space.
Even in religious strongholds
People who have recently visited Iran report a striking expansion of café culture, including in religious centers such as Qom, long seen as resistant to such social change. Analysts note that the trend reflects not only generational preferences but also economic pressure.
“At a time when many traditional forms of leisure have been eliminated due to economic hardship, cafés are the only place left that can fill the recreational void for young people,” the news website Jaryan24 wrote, describing the phenomenon as a version of the “lipstick effect.”
The spread of cafés in cities like Qom and Mashhad has been particularly alarming to ultra-hardliners.
In September, Mannan Raisi, a hardline lawmaker representing Qom, condemned the opening of a new café in the city and warned that “the people themselves” would intervene.
Videos circulating from the event showed young men and women socializing at a DJ-led gathering—images that drew outrage from conservatives in a city that hosts Iran’s most influential Shiite seminaries.
The café was shut down within a day. Shortly afterward, a member of Qom’s city council announced that the owner’s business license had been revoked and that criminal charges had been filed for allegedly promoting “moral corruption.”
That anxiety has been sharpened by what hardliners view as the authorities’ retreat from enforcing a stringent hijab law passed by parliament in 2023 but later shelved by the Supreme National Security Council for fear of public backlash.
‘Society has moved on’
Jalili’s remarks triggered a broad backlash across Iranian media and social platforms. Critics argued that his comments revealed a widening gap between hardline ideology and everyday social realities.
Seyed-Ali Pourtabatabaei, a former editor at Qom News, described café culture as “the new nightmare of Saeed Jalili and his supporters.”
“Jalili does not fear cafés because he believes the West is destroying the family,” Pourtabatabaei argued. “He fears them because cafés symbolize a society that no longer needs him or his ideology—and does not vote for it.”
Legal scholar Mohsen Borhani went further, writing that such thinking “places no value on citizens’ freedom of choice,” adding that even authoritarian systems of the past did not seek to regulate cafés.
What the debate reveals is less about coffee than about power. As traditional mechanisms of control weaken, seemingly ordinary spaces have taken on political meaning—becoming sites where the struggle over Iran’s social future is quietly, and visibly, playing out.
