According to semi-official media, Iranian authorities have shut down one of the country’s largest e-commerce companies’ offices and begun legal proceedings after it released photos online showing female employees not wearing the required Islamic headscarf.
The effort appears to be part of a new push initiated last week to impose the Islamic dress code, over a year after the morality police were mostly disbanded in the face of widespread demonstrations.
Digikala, known as “Iran’s Amazon,” appeared to have broken the regulations by uploading photos of a company event in which several female employees were not wearing the hijab.
The organisation has approximately 40 million active monthly users and more than 300,000 retailers. Because of Western sanctions related to the country’s contentious nuclear programme, Iranians are essentially cut off from worldwide shops such as Amazon.
Late Sunday, the website of Iran’s Hamshahri newspaper, which is associated with the municipality of Tehran, stated that one of Digikala’s offices had been sealed. It stated that the website was operational normally.
The Iranian judiciary’s website stated that legal cases had been filed in relation with the images, but did not elaborate.
Protests erupted across the country last autumn after Mahsa Amini, 22, died in morality police custody. She appears to have been arrested for violating the country’s dress code, which mandates men and women to dress conservatively and women to cover their hair in public.
Women’s protests swiftly developed into calls for the collapse of Iran’s theocracy, which assumed control following the 1979 revolution. Authorities responded with a severe response, killing over 500 demonstrators and imprisoning nearly 20,000. The protests had largely subsided by the beginning of this year, but there are still widespread signals of dissatisfaction.
Following the start of the protests, the morality police departed from the streets, and many women, notably in Tehran and other cities, stopped wearing the headscarf.
Throughout the crisis, officials asserted that the regulations had not altered. The governing clerics in Iran regard the hijab as a crucial pillar of the Islamic Republic and Western-style clothes as a sign of decadence.
The morality police were back on the streets this week, as officials unveiled a new drive to force women to wear the hijab.