The Current - A rare look inside Iran, where women are pushing back

Episode Date: May 6, 2025

The CBC’s Margaret Evans recently travelled to Iran on a rare reporting trip, where she saw a striking number of women choosing not to wear headscarves. Evans discusses what's fuelling this act of defiance against the Islamic regime, whether a crackdown is coming, and what the young Iranians she met want for themselves and their nation.

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This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is the Current Podcast. The last time the CBC was inside Iran was eight years ago. Then seeing a woman without a headscarf was extremely rare. Defying the mandatory hijab dress code could lead to serious consequences, including arrest, fine, imprisonment and beatings. It still can, but the streets of Tehran look a lot different now, as a growing number of women are refusing to accept the rules that had been imposed since the revolution of 1979. The CBC's senior international correspondent,

Margaret Evans, recently returned from a rare reporting trip to Iran where simmering anti-American anger coexists with hope for a less isolated nation. Margaret joins us now from London. Margaret, good morning. Hi, Matt. I ask you this because most of us have not been there recently, obviously. How do the streets of Iran look compared to when you were last there? Well, I haven't been recently either, aside from this last visit. It's been about 15 years for me. I was there in 2009 at a time of great hope for reform.

There were sort of elections going on and people contesting those elections, they thought it was, you know, a fraudulent result and a big crackdown followed. So, it's been a long time for me. The changes you're talking about are even more recent than the protests we saw following the death of Massa Amani, if you remember, in 2022, who died in custody of the morality police because she wasn't wearing, following the dress code, allegedly. And those protests were put down brutally. So, this change is even, you know, really as late as November and December, we're told from people when we were talking to them, you wouldn't have seen as many women without head scarves. And I was part of a three-woman crew, our videographer, Liza Saleh, our producer, Stephanie Jenser, and we were all genuinely blown away at what

we were seeing, which was, you know, not everybody, but about sometimes you'd be on the street and about 20% of the women that you saw were not wearing head scarves. They had long hair. Some of them had scarves around their neck so they could pull them up, but it was just like nothing you could even imagine. I should point out that we were in the capital in more middle-class, upper-class neighborhoods where people with more privilege, perhaps more influence in society were living, but women of all different ages. It was just really extraordinary.

You spoke with one woman who was not wearing the headscarf. What did she tell you? Yeah, she was, she's walking near a market with her aunt who was also not wearing a headscarf. She didn't want to give her name. She didn't want to have her picture taken. But I asked her if Iran was changing and have a listen to what she said. I don't think so, but maybe it's going to be easy because the women are fighting for them rights and they are going to know things that they should know and the social, I mean,

came easier with that. I mean, if you back to the last 10 years, the women should have scarves, longer dresses, but now the people look at it easier. I mean, women and men look at it easier. Why do you think that is? Because we are knowing we should have rights and we are updating about rights. All my family thinks like that. And when I want to dress and I say,

Mom, I think it's going to make me problems in the street, she said, no, it's okay. You can dress short dresses. It's okay. And you should dress open dresses. Look how the people dress in the Europe and other countries and something like this. Oh, wow. Yes. So you're not afraid? No.

She says she's not afraid and she clearly wasn't on some levels, but she still didn't want to have her picture taken. And a lot of the women that we did speak to said they are afraid to, you know, but they're doing it anyway is, I think, the extraordinary thing about it. I mean, one woman in her 30s who did do an on-camera interview with us said, you know, she'd been given warnings, sent warnings, you know, about it in from the authorities, but she said she was continuing because she didn't want any daughter of hers, a future daughter, she didn't have any kids, to feel the way that she did in Iran. I thought the other comment that that young woman that you

spoke with made was that was interesting was she said look at what young women in Europe, look at what women in Europe and elsewhere are wearing. I mean, people are aware there, people are aware of what's happening outside of Iran. That's right. And I mean, listen, these women are very fashion forward. They are right on trend in terms of what they're wearing, again, in the milieu that we were circulating in. But some people that we were talking to would show us clips that they watched on Instagram of Saturday Night Live.

This world has become much, much smaller. This is still a law that's on the books, right? That women have to wear a hijab. Do you have a sense as to why that law is not being enforced as strongly or as uniformly as it has been in the past? Yeah, it's the million dollar question because the fear is real. It still exists there.

The laws have actually been toughened. They were toughened at the beginning of this year, the fear is real. It still exists there. The laws have actually been toughened. They were toughened at the beginning of this year, the end of last. And there are calls from hardliners for them to be fully enforced, but we would be out. We'd see lots of women without their headscarves and you'd see the morality police waiting in vans nearby, but we didn't see them in use at all. I think most people, activists would say, listen, the authorities are letting these kind of acts of defiance go on because it suits them to do so just now. Perhaps it distracts from other human rights violations. You know, there were more executions in Iran last year than there've been in a decade, nearly a thousand. And that is a tactic that

opposition activists will tell you is used as a tool of silencing dissidents. And that hasn't changed. But there are other things going on. You know, there are the negotiations with the United States. There are also, this is a country, as you say, you know, that it sees the outside world, it sees what's happening elsewhere. But but also people have been living with these economic sanctions for decades and the economic pressure is really real for people and that is a pressure on the government to offer something. The president, Massoud Pesachkian, was elected promising reform of some form, but of course, as we all know, he doesn't really have any power when compared to the supreme leader.

Pete You mentioned the Instagram reels. I mean, it's a young society, it's a connected society, and yet these women are trying to figure out their place in it and some are defying the laws, but they're also, they're being monitored electronically, is this right? Anna Yeah, it's, there are a lot of contradictions in terms of what's happening because the rules have tightened and yet they're not being enforced. And the methods of monitoring women in particular are becoming more and more sophisticated facial recognition technology. There was a UN report about it being used at the entrance for the University

of Tehran. There are these phone apps that people can apply to the police to have to be accepted to be given permission to use the app so that they could basically report on women who are in violation of the dress code, So on, you know, in buses or, you know, private cars, whatever. So vigilantism in a sense is encouraged. You could report your neighbor. There are security cameras monitoring traffic. The woman I was talking about earlier who said she'd been sent a fine. She was fined because she was in her car driving without a headscarf, sent a fine and a warning saying next time, you know, you could face jail. So all of that is going on. And then on top of that, there's a different sort of

more subtle societal pressure, which is we were in a few restaurants where we noticed these signs, very, very polite to the clientele saying, please observe the Islamic dress code because if you don't, it might mean we will go out of business because we will be shut down so a different level of pressure. I'm Sarah Trelevin and for over a year I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who's faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know.

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Available now. What are the hardliners worried about? I mean, part of this is about control in the face of defiance, right? Well, that's right. I think the hardliners, certainly there will be worry that the genie might not be able to be put back in the bottle. As we're talking about the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, he's in his mid-80s. People are starting to talk about succession in the conservative hardline

community that will, you know, makes the possibility of kind of a hardening and a crackdown potentially more likely because they don't want that genie out of the bottle. At the same time, the longer this goes on, the more women are going to actually want to continue and try to create genuine change. But I guess, you know, traditionally we've seen in Iran periods of previous liberalization or attempts at liberalization, like the last time I was there, 2009, you know, which are put down. The other thing is, again, we've got the eyes of the world watching Iran right now with these nuclear talks. And even us, for Canada, for Canadian journalists, it's very difficult to get visas. And we're still wondering why did they give them to us now because we've applied again

and again over the years. You spoke with an advisor to the Supreme Leader about these talks. What did you learn? Because as you mentioned, people are watching these talks are stalled between Iran and the United States, but there is, well, it's unclear what's going to happen. What did you hear? I don't think they're clear either. This was Ali Shamhani. He is, yes, an advisor to the supreme leader. Pretty consistently with the sort of the elites or people connected with the government, there was the messaging of, we're not bothered by Donald Trump.

We don't care who the US president is. We were negotiating, you know, during the Biden administration. We're always there ready to talk. And there is, you know, there was also kind of this strand of messaging, which was, yes, he might be threatening to bomb us, but we think that's theater.

And, you know, the bottom line is that if they wanted to use military force, they would have done so by now. If you ask them, what about the weakened position that you find yourselves in? Because over the past year, since October 7th in 2023, what we saw happening in the Middle East with Israel, with Hamas, which is one of Iran's proxies. We've seen Hezbollah taking, you know, another proxy, take hits in Lebanon. We've seen the fall of Bashar al-Assad in neighboring, in Syria. And these are all allies of Iran, so there's a sense that they're in a weak position.

They don't accept that. They don't accept that. They wouldn't accept that, unsurprisingly. But there is a clear desire to have this nuclear deal. They do have their red lines, and they do talk a lot about cultural pride. And the narrative that exists, you know, we see their narrative, you know, these murals that say down with the USA, but there are also American narratives that they feel are deeply unfair to them. But what they say is they want a fair negotiation. They repeat, they insist they are not trying to build a nuclear weapon. Of course, many in the West don't agree, don't believe that that's true.

But there is a sense that they need this negotiation, and I think they know that Donald Trump wants a deal. And one of the stories that you did for CBC News, you talked about those murals and how one of them had a fresh coat of paint on it. When you... And it's not... I'm not asking you to generalize, but when you think of the people that you spoke with, how do they feel about the United States now?

How do they feel about the West now? Well, it depends, you know, where you are. We went to Friday prayers, where there's a typical Friday sermon, which is very much kind of hardliner religious sentiment, the ayatollahs, messaging what the regime wants to message. And I should say, in general, people are very welcoming and really happy to see foreigners. People do believe, you know, there is the, there were the down with the United States chanting, this is a typical platform for the

regime to do its strident messaging and it brings people into those events. We met a lot of people who said what they want is peace. They prefer peace. They don't want to feel so isolated anymore. And the economy again, again and again, especially young people saying, I don't want to have to move abroad. I met one young man who was, you know,

doing conscription. He was in the second year of military service who was scathing about the regime spending money on supporting Hamas or the Houthis in Yemen saying, we need it here. And he didn't want the West to actually, you know, kind of reconcile with Iran. But there were a lot of people who were very, very desirous of that. They would like to have a normalized relationship. And that was really, you know, we had really good interactions with people. We really didn't have, you know, the people in the street, even with people who don't like the West, incredibly polite and willing to tell you what they think about your country and others. Pete Slauson And you were able to talk to people, just finally, I mean, you talked about

visa and that you've been applying for a visa for a long time and suddenly they give you one and you're not sure why. What is it like to do this work there? Are you able to speak with people? Are you followed around? How does that unfold? Danielle Pletka It's actually pretty challenging. You are often monitored. You are supplied with a translator from a media agency, which is connected to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which decides whether you get your visa or not. Now that translator sometimes acts as a mouthpiece. You get a message from the translator saying, we don't like that you're asking so many questions about women and the headscarves. We continue to do that. The translator never, he didn't ever try to distort what the person was saying. So on some levels we felt free to operate, on

others we didn't. We found other ways to talk to people, but again that's another challenge of reporting in a country like Iran, because you don't want to endanger the people who could get into real trouble, you know, find themselves in jail under potentially torture, depending what subject you're talking about. So you have to be very careful that you aren't followed. So we were definitely monitored sometimes up close, sometimes from afar, we were asked not to ask certain questions of officials and, and or face deportation, we chose to ask the questions. We weren't deported. It's not an easy place. But even to spend a week, which was the length, you know, the only short time that we were

there, invaluable in terms of being able to report on a country that we often don't get a chance to and therefore it's sometimes, you know, oversimplified in the media because we don't, we just don't have that kind of access. What are you still thinking about having come home? What are you still thinking about from your trip? I want to go back. I want to go back and I worry about the women, you know, again, I mean, it was incredibly courageous of them

and what a movement to witness if it manages to last. Margaret, thank you very much for this. Well, thanks for having me. Margaret Evans is the CBC's senior international correspondent. She was in London.