The Decibel - The ‘quiet rebellion’ underway in Iran

Episode Date: March 3, 2025

The Islamic Republic of Iran is as isolated from the western world as ever. It has no diplomatic relations with Canada, President Trump recently recommitted to exerting “maximum economic pressure” on the country to force it to abandon its nuclear weapons program and support for terrorism. Western sanctions have contributed to its 32 per cent inflation rate.And yet, as The Globe’s Africa Bureau Chief Geoffrey York found on a recent — and rare — reporting trip to the country, ordinary Iranians are pushing for change. More women are defying the strict dress code laws and don’t cover their hair in public, despite the violent crackdown on their protests in 2022. Iranian films are also defying morality laws, screening them in Iran, and submitting them to the international film festival in Cannes.Enter this Decibel survey: and share your thoughts for a chance to win $100 grocery gift cardsQuestions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

In 2022, the world was captivated by protesters in Iran. Their anger was sparked by the death of Massa Amini. She was a young Kurdish-Iranian woman who died after being arrested by the country's morality police for wearing her hijab incorrectly. In response, protesters burned their head scarves and faced security forces for over a hundred days. Hundreds of people were killed, thousands detained. And since then, a growing defiance to some of the country's religious laws has been simmering. Geoffrey York is a Globe correspondent and the Africa bureau chief. He recently

went to Iran. Today, he'll talk about how people in the streets, shopping malls, and movie houses are quietly rebelling. I'm Maynika Ramen-Welms and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Jeff, thanks so much for being back on the show. Thank you for having me. So I know that you were in Iran earlier this year, and it is very rare for Canadian journalists to actually get into the country these days. Can you just tell us why is it so hard for Canadian journalists to get into Iran, and

how were you able to report from inside the country? Canada's diplomatic relations with Iran have been frozen since 2012. And, you know, one of the issues I was wondering about when I went to Iran is whether there was any indication of any improvement in those relations, but there is not. The relations are as bad as ever. I asked the Canadian foreign minister if there's been any contacts with Iran over the last couple of years, and she said, no, there have not. So there's not even any contacts or talks between Canada and Iran. That's how bad the relationship is. So when I applied for a visa for Iran, using an agency that sometimes is able

to get journalists into Iran, they had to have lengthy discussions with the Iranian Foreign Ministry and other government departments to find out whether they would allow a Canadian journalist to visit. And this is the first time in quite a few years, as I understand it. And it's mainly just because of those very, very poor relations. I mean, I imagine it must be somewhat dangerous then to report from Iran? There's a sort of an unofficial policy of almost hostage taking where Iran responds to the arrest of its citizens in other countries by arresting and imprisoning the nationals of that country in Iran.

So for example, in December, an Iranian national was arrested in Italy. And apparently as a result of that, an Italian journalist was arrested and imprisoned in Iran for several weeks in very poor conditions in one of the most notorious prisons in Iran. At the Globe, we had to consider that and discuss whether to go. And we decided ultimately that was worth taking the risk. But certainly it was something we were concerned about.

Once you were there, Jeff, you were talking to a number of people and in a piece for the Globe you wrote that what you found in Iran was a quote, quiet rebellion underway. Can you tell me what you meant by that? Well, what's immediately visible to any visitor in Iran these days is that the number of women who are disobeying the national law on hijab, on the dress code, is definitely increasing quite dramatically. I compare this to my previous visits, but also what others have said, what Iranians themselves say.

One of them told me that the number of women who disobey that law, who defy that law has doubled in the past two or three years. The law, as you probably know, since the Iranian revolution in 1979, the law is that women must comply with this dress code, including wearing headscarves to cover their hair. And it's increasingly clear that more and more women are defying that law. It's partly for personal reasons, and it's partly a symbolic gesture. It's a symbol, a signal of their unhappiness with the Islamic regime, a symbol of their preference to be free from these rules and regulations of laws that they consider excessive. Let's talk about what you heard directly from some of the women that you were talking to when

you were there. I know that you spoke to one woman named Gila. She was in Tehran. Jeff, what did she tell you about how she's experienced what you're calling this quiet rebellion? Well, she herself has been refusing to wear the hijab since the protest in 2022. And she admits that it makes her nervous. Her car was impounded by the police because someone reported her for failing to wear a his scarf. And she said that she sort of surprised herself by arguing with the police officer

who had impounded her car. She told them that she shouldn't be forced to obey this law, that she considers, in a way, her hair is her voice. It's her way of signaling what she believes about the laws and what she believes about her personal freedom. But what she was most proud about was, you know, she acknowledges her own fears, but she's proud about the fact that her daughter, who is 17 years old, has never worn the hijab,

has never worn a head scarf, and just considers it normal not to do that. So she is, you know, in the view of her mother, she is growing up without this fear that a lot of Iranians have. And is there any kind of generational divide there? You're saying this, you know, her daughter, this younger woman is really not used to wearing hijab, decides not to. Are you seeing kind of a generational split?

Yeah, definitely. And you know, a lot of Iranian women told me that their parents are much more conservative. What's interesting is a number of women saying that their parents have gradually accepted that their children don't feel the same way. It's interesting also that a lot of men are becoming more accepting of this defiance. Of course, the hardliners and the conservatives who are men are running the country.

They have the ultimate power. They're the ones who've decided to keep this law on the books. They're the ones who've decided to keep enforcing it, to keep the police arresting people, using surveillance cameras to ticket women who are not wearing the hijab. So it's clearly a lot of men who still support it. But an increasing number of men are not supporting the law. You know, women were telling me that they find it very encouraging and a positive sign that men, who used to sort of harass women, who used to tell women, oh, put your headscarf

on. Just randomly, they would tell women in the street to do that. Women are getting a lot less of that kind of harassment and pressure from men. Wow. That's a really interesting point to actually see, not just the way the women are responding, but the way that society as a whole, men included, this is actually changing now in slight ways. Yes. And it's important to say that the law is still on the books. It's still being enforced. What's new is that more and more women are taking the risk of defying the law.

So they're willing to accept the risk of a fine, you know, having their cars seized, going to prison even. I mean, they're more and more willing to accept that risk. And as one Iranian man told me, there's just too many women to arrest. There's not enough handcuffs to arrest everybody. And so, what's interesting also is that the government now is almost trying to take credit for this. The Vice President Zarif was at the Davos summit in Switzerland, and he told people there that the Iranian government is allowing women to do this.

He was almost sort of boasting about this as a sign of the benevolence or generosity of the regime. If you go to the streets of Tehran, you see that there are women who are not covering their hair. It's against the law, but the government has decided not to put women under pressure. And this was a promise that President Pesach Kian made, and the promise is being observed. And this caused a real backlash in Iran. Hardliners said that, you know, he is encouraging people

to break the law. And women, on the other hand, were saying that it's completely hypocritical for the government to be, you know, taking credit for what women themselves are courageously doing at great risk to themselves. This is a really interesting point here that, you know, someone told you there aren't enough handcuffs. So it's not that the government necessarily doesn't want to enforce the law. It's just that there's so many people defying it now that just it's kind of overwhelming. They actually don't have the capacity to stop it. Is that accurate?

Yes, I think that's true. And it's also important to note that there's divisions within the government. At the top, the elite, you know, the supreme leader Ali Khamenei and the people who hold the ultimate power, they don't seem to have changed very much. They're as conservative as ever. But what's happened is that from time to time, there are elections in Iran which bring to power reformists. And last July, there was a new president elected, President Pazeshkian, and he is clearly a reformist. He's

somebody who promised that the laws would be eased, that there would be reforms, some of the censorship would be reduced. And he has actually allowed for the first time in many years, he has allowed some of the social media sites like WhatsApp to be legalized. So he's a reformist, and he doesn't seem to be in favor of this massive enforcement of the Hitch-Out Law. So he's a reformist and he doesn't seem to be in favor of this massive enforcement of the Hitch Out Law. So you have a division within the government. I guess help me understand though, Jeff, because you mentioned before the 2022 protests, right? And in those protests, thousands of people were out on the streets protesting. Hundreds of people were killed at that time as well. What is different about how people are defying the law now

as opposed to in 2022? Well, I think what happened in 2022 is that the protests became very quickly kind of evolved into anti-government protests. Although it was the hijab that sparked those protests. But like a lot of the protests over the last 10 or 15 years, the protests quickly took on an anti-government kind of sentiment, and that's what the government wants to crush. But what's interesting is that in small ways,

that defiance continues today. We'll be right back. Let's talk a little bit more then about how things have changed over time. Jeff, I specifically want to look back at 1998 and 2000 when I know you were in the country, you were in Iran at that point as well. What can you tell me about what you saw then and what you found now just regarding politics and people's reaction to it? Like how does it differ? Well, that's the interesting thing is that there have been episodes in the past when reformists were in power. And people had this feeling that, oh, big changes are coming, but it actually did not transpire, that there was any huge change in the country. So, you

know, on my first visits in 1998 and 2000, that was a period of great optimism by reformers in Iran. There was a reformist president who'd been elected, President Khatami. He was quite a popular leader who had a huge amount of support. And he was definitely trying to liberalize the system, reform it, change it. And for example, on the international front, he was open to contacts with the United States for the first time in, I think, first time since the revolution under President Hatemi, an American wrestling team was allowed into the country. So it was a time of kind of liberalization internationally. And there were some people who said, oh, it's just like the Soviet Union in the late 1980s.

It's a period of glass lost and perestroika, and it will lead to the collapse of the system, just as happened in the Soviet Union. But in fact, what happened in Iran after those reforms in 1998 and the late 90s, early 2000s, in the next election, thousands of reformers were prohibited from running.

They lost their power that they had under President Hattemi. And the reform cycle ended at that point. Now it came back later with other presidents. It's one of the tactics of an authoritarian regime is to find ways to relieve the pressure. And if you're not changing the system at the top, which they don't want, I mean, they want to retain the ultimate power at the top.

So what they do is they relieve pressure by allowing smaller changes further down and by occasionally allowing reformers to be elected as president. So we're seeing one of those cycles again. And that's why I'm cautious about saying that the defiance of women against the hijab law is going to necessarily lead to political changes in Iran. It might or it might not. I mean, the system has a habit of outlasting these challenges. Yeah. That's a really interesting perspective to look back on the history and see how, as you say, these cycles kind of tend to happen in the country. You mentioned US relations with Iran, and when we saw those positive relations, that was a period of kind of opening up of things there.

Can we talk about current US-Iran relations? Because I think this is on a lot of people's minds with US President Donald Trump back in the White House, the way he's approaching geopolitics these days. How is America approaching Iran right now? Well, it's, of course, as with everything that Trump does, it's unpredictable and it's difficult to get a clear sense of what his strategy is or even if he has one. All we know so far is that he has brought in an executive order, various White House directives that seem to be trying to toughen the pressure on Iran by

bringing in new sanctions or toughening the enforcement of existing sanctions, the so-called maximum pressure strategy that Trump had in his first term in office. But at the same time, he has certainly not ruled out the possibility of negotiations. I'm signing this and I'm unhappy to do it, but I really have not so much choice because we have to be strong and firm, and I hope that it's not going to have to be used in any great measure at all. It'd be great if we could have a Middle East

and maybe a world at total peace. We don't want to be tough on Iran. We don't want to be tough on anybody, but they just can't have a nuclear weapon. When he took office on January 20th, I was in Iran, and a lot of analysts, commentators, Iranian officials were optimistic that there could be negotiations. Now, most Iranians remember that the first Trump term was not very positive for Iran. We recall, you know, how the US military under Trump assassinated a senior Iranian commander. And they remember in 2018, when Trump brought in

much tougher sanctions against Iran. But at the same time, I mean, there's no question that the sanctions are deeply hurting Iran and they would like to negotiate and find some way out of that. So there was some hopefulness at that time. It sort of diminished somewhat since then because of this executive order that seems to reimpose that maximum pressure policy of the past.

Let's talk about those Western sanctions though and the effect that they are having against Iran. These are things like limiting its oil and other exports as well as access to international banking. Jeff, can you just give us a sense of how Iran's economy is affected by this? Well, it was very visible to me because I had to basically go into Iran with nothing but cash. Credit cards don't work there.

You can't use international credit cards. You can't do international banking. Obviously, there's a huge potential for investment in Iran with its oil and gas resources and with its huge population and so on. A lot of business people in the United States and Canada and Europe would like those sanctions to be lifted actually. But the way the system is right now, it's definitely damaging the Iranian economy. And we're seeing the Iranian currency, which has lost more than 90% of its value

against the US dollar over the past seven or eight years. So it's having a huge effect. It's causing inflation. But at the same time, Iranians point out that it's not only the sanctions that are the problem, that the economic crisis that Iran is going through right now is partly a result of state mismanagement of the economy. It's a very heavy-handed state control of the economy, and a lot of Iranians feel that if there was better, smarter economic policy in Iran, they could reduce the impact of those sanctions. Yeah, you mentioned inflation. I believe that's at something like 32%, like very, very, very high. How did people that you spoke to, Jeff, how did they say that affects their day-to-day?

Well, everyone's affected. I mean, you don't have to talk to anyone for more than a minute before they... You start getting examples of how they're affected. I was in a tea shop in Isfahan, the third biggest city in Iran, and customers were asking if they could pay later because they didn't have money to pay even for tea. And this is a normal thing according to the manager there. He just allows people to pay when they have money later. You know, the manager of the tea shop told me that he himself, his salary is only enough for half of the month. For the second half of the month, he

has to basically borrow or get money from other people, kind of scrounge some income for the rest of the month. He has to basically borrow or get money from other people, kind of scrounge some income for the rest of the month. I mean, this sounds like it's really, it's quite difficult for a lot of people. And have we seen them respond to this situation in different ways? Yeah, there's been protests, actually, a number of protests that seem to be continuing even this year, protests by shopkeepers, protests by pensioners, by workers of different kinds, because they're severely affected by this inflation, by the near collapse of the currency. Jeff, in our last few minutes here, I want to come back to this idea of the quiet rebellion

that we were talking about earlier. I understand that while you were in Tehran, you attended an underground screening actually of a film called Writing on the City. So can you just tell me what is this film about and what was so significant about this screening? Everyone knows that Iran has an amazing film industry. I'm sure many of our listeners have watched, you know, incredible Iranian films over the years.

There's one that's currently nominated for an Academy Award, the seat of the sacred fig. But these films generally are not approved by the Iranian authorities. So they're smuggled out, they're put onto the international festival circuit, but they're not shown in Iran. Instead, if they are shown, they're shown in sort of these unofficial underground screenings.

So this one that I went to was by a filmmaker, Kevin Karimi, and it was the first time since he had made that film more than 10 years ago, that he's actually been able to screen it in Iran. This film, Writing on the City, which is a film about, a documentary really about graffiti in Iran and advertisements on the walls and so on, and how they've evolved over the years. And really it was making a parallel between the anti-government graffiti

at the time of the revolution in 1979, and the more recent anti-government graffiti that's happening in recent years in the protests that are happening now. So really this is a message that the Iranian regime did not want to be broadcast because it suggests that the anti-government protests of today are as legitimate and valid as those in 1979 that led to the revolution. When Mr. Karimi made this film, he was actually arrested and charged

and was sentenced to six years in prison and hundreds of lashes. And he was in and out of court for years. He eventually managed to appeal it. He ended up serving, I believe, seven months in prison. And it was very interesting to see the room full of people who were eager to see these unofficial films and to see films that are officially banned. Yeah, that must have been quite an experience, honestly.

And I know, Jeff, you also had attended an opening ceremony of the government's official International Film Festival. I'm just wondering, how did that differ from this underground screening? Well, of course, the official film festival, you know, I have attended it twice now. I attended it in 1998 as well. And back then it was actually more open. There was less government control. Now it is very much a government film festival. And so when I went to the opening ceremony, being a government event with government ministers attending, it was pretty tightly controlled. But it was interesting that even there,

there was women who disobeyed the hijab law, despite, you know, big signs telling them to cover up. And there was an incident on stage where a man and a woman, filmmaker and actor shook hands on stage. And that might seem normal to us, but it's actually prohibited in Iran. And so it was an act of defiance for a man and a woman to be touching in public,

an unrelated man and woman. And so it was a gesture of defiance. And the next day, the government announced that it was investigating charges against this actor and filmmaker, the two announced that it was investigating charges against this actor and filmmaker, the two people who had shook hands on stage. So it's interesting how even at these government events, this kind of defiance plays out. Jeff, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today.

Thank you for having me. That's it for today. I'm Maynika Ramin-Wilms. This episode was produced by Kashima Hylobic. Our producers are Madeline White, Michal Stein, and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Cheung is our senior producer and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. You can subscribe to the Globe and Mail at globeandmail.com slash subscribe.

Thanks so much for listening.