Iran’s judiciary has placed what it calls the fight against nudity and improper hijab at the center of its enforcement agenda, warning that organizers and permit-issuing bodies for events deemed to violate law or Sharia will be prosecuted, judiciary-affiliated Mizan News said.
The event had turned the university “into a venue for inappropriate entertainment,” according to the Basij group statement. Fars reported that music with political themes had been played over images showing unveiled participants.
Tehran Design Week, which began on November 10, brought together designers presenting creative works across multiple venues in the city.
Images of women attending without the compulsory hijab had already drawn wide attention on social media, where videos shared from the event showed strong turnout from young people.
“The movement promoting moral corruption not only rejects any boundaries, but shows a clear determination to push the situation further and make it worse. This trend – with new examples emerging every day – is intolerable for the religious majority of society and will eventually lead to a social and cultural explosion,” Fars added.
Some government-aligned social media accounts criticized the festival and directed their criticism at university officials and the science minister.
The shutdown comes as Iran shows selective signs of easing social controls while deepening its political clampdown.
A Reuters analysis last week said while signs of looser social restrictions have appeared in several Iranian cities, the government has simultaneously expanded the scope of political repression – a trend that activists and some former Iranian officials say has intensified to an unprecedented degree in recent months.
At an official ceremony unveiling a new statue in Tehran’s Enghelab Square earlier in November, participants faced no mandatory hijab restrictions.
Alex Vatanka, director of the Iran Program at the Middle East Institute, based in Washington DC, told Reuters that the strategy shows “tactical management” but the government's red lines remain firm.
The hijab, which became a central fault line after the 2022 death in custody of Mahsa Amini, is now being enforced unevenly.
With public anger simmering and officials wary of another wave of nationwide unrest, President Masoud Pezeshkian has declined to put into effect the hardline-supported “Hijab and Chastity” law passed last year.
“That contradiction is deliberate: a release valve for the public, coupled with a hard ceiling on genuine dissent,” Vatanka added.
Six years ago, on a cold, rainy November night, the price of gasoline in Iran tripled at midnight. By morning, the streets were burning. The state would later compress that nationwide protests into a bureaucratic phrase, “the gasoline protests,” yet inside Iran it endures as something far more elemental, a breaking point, the moment a long-strained relationship between rulers and ruled finally gave way.
An overnight decree, issued without warning, landed on a society already thinned by corruption, sanctions, and the slow corrosion of trust. Gasoline was not merely fuel; it was the last fragile order of an ordinary life.
By dawn on November 15, unrest had spread through more than a hundred cities. The slogans outgrew the price hike almost instantly. Within hours, the government offered not explanation but silence, plunging the country into a nationwide internet blackout that severed families, stifled communication, and obscured what would unfold in the dark.
Inside that manufactured quiet, the killing quickened. Snipers appeared on rooftops. Live rounds struck torsos and heads. Amnesty International confirmed at least 304 deaths; internal figures passed abroad placed the toll far higher, closer to fifteen hundred. Leaked hospital logs, morgue records, and satellite images of hurried burial sites supported the higher count. No official list of the dead has ever been released, but the names that remain are the ones families refused to let vanish.
The Program
On my Persian-language call-in show, “The Program,” broadcast from Iran International, a Persian-language satellite television channel, two mothers recently spoke to a worldwide audience. Their voices — steady, unadorned — carried the weight of those missing lists, two fragments of a record the state has never acknowledged.
One mother introduced herself not with biography but with loss: “I am the mother of Navid Behboudi. Twenty-three years old. Born in 1998. They killed my child.”
Another spoke with the same stripped-down clarity: “I am Mahboubeh Ramazani, the mother of Pejman Gholipour. My son was eighteen. Born in 1998. They killed him because of the price of gasoline.”
Neither woman had sought confrontation with the state. They wanted what any parent wants — a future for their children, a degree, a job, the possibility of a wedding. Instead, they entered a world of interrogations and quiet threats designed to smother even private grief. Cameras now watch over their children’s graves. Intelligence agents monitor who comes to mourn. In Iran, even grief carries a political charge.
The mothers speak with a precision that feels almost liturgical, as though exactness might preserve what the state has tried to erase.
One recounts the final hours of her son’s life: “At 7:30, I called him. My Pejman was still breathing. At 8:20, they shot my son.”
His clothes still hang untouched behind his bedroom door. “When I go out,” she said, “and my child comes home, he will look for his clothes.” She speaks in the present tense. Grief has its own grammar.
The other mother remembered the moment she saw her son’s body. She had once imagined seeing him in wedding clothes. Instead, she saw him prepared for burial. “I asked him, Navid, open your eyes and look at me,” she said. “He never opened his eyes.”
The machinery of silence
What followed the killings was a choreography of pressure and containment. Families were summoned to Kahrizak, a notorious detention center long synonymous in Iran with torture and coerced confessions. Officials demanded written pledges: no public grief, no interviews, no large funerals.
Even the burial was not theirs to decide. “They told us we had no right to choose where to bury him,” one mother said.
Another recalled being instructed: “Do not cry. Do not gather people. Go home.”
Many families discovered cameras mounted above the graves. “Not just my son’s,” a mother told me. “All of them.” She described visiting the cemetery on her son’s birthday, arriving at 10:30 a.m. and staying until nine at night. “They locked the doors,” she said. “No one was allowed in. We were not allowed to mourn.”
This system is built not only to punish dissent but to prevent solidarity. Silence becomes ritual. Mourning becomes a private burden, watched and circumscribed.
Inside Iran, no independent investigation has ever been allowed. The same institutions implicated in the killings oversee the judiciary. But abroad, a coalition of rights groups convened the Aban Tribunal in London, a people’s court modeled on historical international inquiries. After reviewing hundreds of pieces of evidence, the panel concluded that Islamic republic authorities had committed crimes against humanity, including murder, torture, and sexual violence.
The judgment has no legal force, but for families denied even the vocabulary of justice, the act of naming the crime offered its own narrow, necessary recognition.
The mothers of Aban
The mothers of Aban — Aban being the Iranian month that corresponds roughly to November — have never let November end. Each year, as the month approaches, they begin a ritual that resists the state’s enforced forgetting.
“Today my son was alive,” they tell one another. “Tomorrow he was still alive.” They measure the month not by dates but by the life still present before the gunshots.
One mother described the conversations she continues to hold with her son: “I tell him, Pejman, do you know what happened that day? Maybe we were not careful. Maybe we lost you by mistake.”
She knows precisely who fired the bullets, but maternal instinct searches for any version of the story in which the ending might be undone. “I still cannot accept that he is gone,” she said. “I still cannot accept that he will not walk through that door.”
Amid the devastation, a narrow line of resolve endures. Not hope for happiness — “I will never be happy again,” one mother told me — but hope for a future in which no parent is ordered not to cry at a grave.
“I hope our voice reaches the world,” she said. “We have not lived for five years. Our life is black. Full of tears.”
Their plea is disarmingly simple: that their children not disappear into the silence the state demands, that remembering become a form of resistance, that the world not look away.
The state tried to bury the victims of November 2019 twice — once in the ground and once in memory. The mothers refuse the second burial.
“This government is even afraid of our children’s graves,” one of them said. “If they fear the graves, imagine how afraid they are of the living.”
Holding a candle in the cold November rain
The internet can be shut down. Protests can be crushed. Cemeteries can be lined with cameras. But on a November night, a mother can speak her son’s name into a static-filled line on “The Program,” and a country can still hear its echo.
That night’s show was heavy for all of us on The Program. When I finally walked home through the rain, the city felt emptied out, as if carrying the weight of those two voices. By the time I reached my door, the rain had stopped. I took my dog outside for a walk, put on my headphones, and, almost without thinking, whispered into the dark:
“Nothing lasts forever, not even cold November rain.”
Pollution levels in 14 cities across Khuzestan had reached the red category, meaning the air is unsafe for all groups, Iran’s national air-quality monitoring system reported on Saturday. Four other cities were listed as orange, posing risks to vulnerable populations.
Concentrations of airborne particles smaller than 2.5 microns, according to the report, had exceeded permissible limits at many monitoring stations, pushing much of the province into hazardous territory.
Rising hospital visits and wider spread
Khuzestan has faced repeated episodes of severe pollution in recent days. Farhad Soltani, acting deputy for treatment at Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences, said hospital visits had risen sharply.
“The number of patients coming to hospitals increased 15 to 20 percent in October compared with the same period last year, and 20 to 25 percent in November,” he said, warning that pollution in Ahvaz and Khuzestan had reached a point where “the entire population is affected.”
Air quality has also deteriorated in other major cities. Iranian media reported that the air in the religious city of Mashhad was classified as unhealthy for sensitive groups for an eighth consecutive day on Saturday. The situation was driven by continued use of fossil fuels in industry, power plants and vehicles, combined with stagnant atmospheric conditions, Tasnim news agency wrote.
Isfahan choked for eleventh straight day
In central Iran, air quality in Isfahan remained in the red category for the eleventh consecutive day on Saturday, according to local monitoring data.
Pollution levels in the metropolis and some of its neighboring cities have risen to the point that the air is now deemed unsafe for the general population. Experts warned that conditions could deteriorate further in the coming days, citing the persistence of stagnant weather patterns and rising pollutant concentrations.
58,975 people in Iran had died from causes attributed to air pollution in the past Iranian year, equivalent to 161 deaths a day and around seven every hour, said Deputy Health Minister Alireza Raisi last week. Pollution-linked mortality, he added, had imposed an estimated $17.2 billion in economic losses over the same period.
“Combating nudity and improper hijab is a special priority for the judiciary and judicial officers, and those who issue permits or organize events that violate the law and Sharia will be prosecuted,” Mizan said in a report on Sunday.
Mizan added that agencies authorized to issue permits for ceremonies, celebrations, or gatherings “must obtain serious commitments from applicants to observe social norms before issuing permits and maintain continuous on-site monitoring during events to ensure these commitments are upheld.”
Mizan said prosecutors should supervise how permit-issuing bodies enforce these requirements and act against any negligence.
The outlet cited earlier remarks by Judiciary Chief Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei, who has repeatedly warned that authorities view what they call social “abnormalities” as part of an organized effort.
Ejei has said he instructed prosecutors “to ask security and law enforcement agencies to identify organized and foreign-linked groups involved in social abnormalities and refer them to the judiciary.”
Ejei has argued that the promotion of improper hijab and related behavior is one of the “enemy’s” tools to undermine religious and social values, telling officials in recent speeches that security, intelligence, and judicial bodies must act against groups the state considers coordinated or foreign-influenced.
He has also said event organizers, venue operators, and permit-issuing bodies share legal responsibility for any violation that occurs at their gatherings and will be prosecuted as accomplices if they fail to prevent acts deemed contrary to law or Sharia.
He urged prosecutors to demand strict oversight from judicial officers across public venues such as restaurants, cafés, and entertainment spaces.
Mizan's report comes as authorities in Iran are increasingly targeting businesses rather than individuals who refuse to observe the theocracy’s strict social laws around veiling and gender mixing.
Last month, over alleged violations including “serving alcohol, nudity, and mixed-gender dancing.”
Since August, at least 20 cafes, garden restaurants, and wedding halls have been closed in Tehran, Dezful, Hamedan, Kashan and Maragh in Isfahan province over alleged hijab violations, according to a report by reformist daily Ham Mihan.
