TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — As you enter Iran’s capital, it starts with only occasional glimpses — a passenger in a car speeding by or a pedestrian trying to leapfrog through Tehran’s notorious traffic.

But as you reach the cooler heights of Tehran’s northern neighborhoods along the city’s sycamore-lined Vali-e Asr Street, they are almost everywhere, women with their brown, black, blonde and gray locks.

More and more, Iranian women choose to forgo the country’s mandatory headscarf, or hijab.

It was something unthinkable just a few years ago in the Islamic Republic, whose conservative Shiite clerics and hardline politicians long pushed for strict enforcement of laws requiring women to cover their hair.

But the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini and the nationwide protests that followed enraged women of all ages and views in a way few other issues have since the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.

“When I moved to Iran in 1999, letting a single strand of hair show would immediately prompt someone to tell me to tuck it back under my headscarf out of fear of the morality police taking me away,” said Holly Dagres, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “To see where Iran is today feels unimaginable: Women and girls openly defying mandatory hijab.”

“Authorities are overwhelmed by the sheer numbers across the country and worry that if they crack down — at a delicate time marked by power blackouts, water shortages, and a rotten economy — they could spur Iranians to return to the streets,” she said.

I received a three-day visa from the government to attend a summit addressed by Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi as tensions remain high over Tehran’s nuclear program.

Access to reporting beyond the summit was limited, but the trip gave me my first look on the ground in Iran since my last visits in 2018 and 2019.

In those intervening years, I had watched from abroad in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in my role overseeing the Associated Press’s coverage of Iran and the Gulf Arab states as Iran was roiled by protests over the economy and Amini’s death, the coronavirus pandemic and a 12-day........

© The Times of Israel