The death of Mahsa Amini showed once again the massive violence of the Iranian vice squad. Their actions have little to do with the Koran: there is nothing here about men in uniform who are supposed to use violence to enforce dress codes. Why are the moral police in Iran so powerful?
On September 16, Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman, died after being ill-treated by the country’s vice squad. After her death, protests erupted across Iran, lasting for ten straight days. At least ten people had died as of Sunday. In the Islamic Republic there are strict regulations regarding dress, behavior and intercourse between the sexes in public.
The freedom of women is particularly severely curtailed, as the Amini case shows: her crime was apparently wearing the hijab loosely. The Vice Police serve as the enforcers of the government. Who are these people and do they reflect Islamic teachings?
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The Koran enjoins Muslims to “enjoin what is right and forbid what is wrong,” a personal duty known as hisbah. However, early Islam had no moral police. Since the reign of the Prophet Muhammad, public morals have been monitored by a muhtasib, or market inspector, appointed by the government to prevent fraud and protect traveling merchants (one of the first market inspectors Muhammad appointed in Medina was a woman).
Over the centuries, they increasingly took control of upholding moral standards, including dress codes for women. There are some records of muhtasibs handing out fines and even flogging, but they did not have the clout of modern police forces.
The traditional laws of Islam changed as a result of changing kingdoms and, in part, the colonization of western countries. As a result, the muhtasib disappeared from most places by the early 20th century.
But in Saudi Arabia, the moral police regained prominence under the influence of Wahabism, a puritanical movement within Sunni Islam that arose there in the mid-18th century and became the dominant religious ideology within the kingdom.
The first modern moral police, a committee for enforcing what is right and forbidding what is reprehensible, was founded in 1926. The officials prevented the mixing of the sexes and made sure that the citizens came regularly to pray.
In 2012, a third of all countries in North Africa and the Middle East had some form of religious police. Such forces can also be found in other countries, for example in Malaysia and Aceh, a province of Indonesia. Their powers vary, but most advocate a narrow interpretation of Islam: the Hisbah police in northern Nigeria have forcibly shaved men’s heads in the streets and banned female mannequins.
In Iran, the vice squad only appeared later, after the 1979 revolution. Ayatollah Khomeini, the Shia cleric who came to power at the time, wanted to curb citizens’ behavior after a period of secularism. The current morality police force, the Guidance Patrols, was formed in 2005 and consists of several thousand police officers, only a minority of whom are women.
Some young men are doing their compulsory military service in their ranks. Since then, through March 2014, the vice squad has reported nearly three million women for improperly wearing their hijab.
With the death of Mahsa Amini, Iran’s vice squad has drawn the anger of the country’s citizens. Elsewhere, too, the zeal of the moral guardians had serious consequences. In 2002, 15 Saudi girls burned to death at their school after morality guards prevented them from escaping the fire because they were not wearing abayas, loose robes worn to maintain modesty.
This incident and the deaths of several young Saudis who died in chases by vice squads sparked calls for change. In 2016, the Kingdom’s religious police were stripped of their power to arrest people. Now they are only allowed to “politely” correct those who step out of line. In view of the ongoing protests in Iran, the moral guards there could be put to a similar test. But the Republic’s government shows little willingness to undertake reforms.
The article first appeared in The Economist under the title “Who are Iran’s hated morality police” and was translated by Andrea Schleipen.
The article “How the hated moral guardians of the mullahs terrorize the Iranians” comes from The Economist.