"The state's current policy on the issue of the hijab is not to follow strict rules," Ali Motahari, a conservative Iranian politician, told journalists last week on the fringes of the International Book Fair in Tehran.

He added that the police should only intervene in the event of gross violations.

"You have to know that even at the time of the Shah, before the 1979 revolution, women were arrested if they did not dress decently in public," he said. Wearing a hijab, or headscarf, remains mandatory in Iran.

However, even before the nationwide protests following the death of Jina Mahsa Amini in police custody in September 2022, Motahari was one of those conservative politicians who repeatedly called for a crackdown on women who dared to deviate even slightly from the strict dress code.

In 2014, he asked, "Why are women allowed to wear trousers under their coats?" He called on the authorities to take more rigorous action against the women concerned.

"What we have achieved in the last three years can no longer be taken away by the state," a gender researcher and journalist from Tehran told DW. She asked DW not to publish........

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