Iranian Crackdown on Female Defiance

"All people love beauty and fame."
"They would like to be seen, but it is important to know what price they will pay to be seen."
Iranian model, Elham Arab

Arab interrogated on camera at the Iranian Revolutionary Court, her blonde hair hidden under a black chador

"We found out that about 20 percent of the [Iranian] Instagram feed is run by the modelling circle."
"[They have been] making and spreading immoral and un-Islamic culture and promiscuity."
"[It was the judiciary's duty to] confront those who committed these crimes in an organized manner."
Javad Babaei, state prosecutor

Iranian girls and women since 1979, the year that the Shah of Iran was deposed and went into exile and the Iranian Revolution took place with the return of Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to Tehran from Paris, were exhorted to be modest, to wear clothing that covered, not revealed their forms, lest pure-in-mind Iranian men be introduced to lust by these Jezebels.

In April, Tehran's chief of police General Hossein Sajedinia had announced that his public decorum department was deploying 7,000 male and female officers to a new plainclothes division. This represented the largest undercover assignment in memory tasked to enforce government-mandated Islamic dress code. And they obviously take their job seriously.

Now it has been revealed that Iranian police have mounted a crackdown to target "un-Islamic acts" online, mostly female Iranian models posting images of themselves in seductive poses, their hair uncovered, according to state media. This represents in part a more widespread cultural battle in the Islamic Republic, determined to ensure that the country's future as a purely Islamic state without illicit introduction of Western cultural influences in music and dress codes sully the nation.

Artists, poets, journalists and activists have already been detained for their proclivities to follow Western-inspired cultural values. Arrests taking place and their harsh followup sentences indicate that hardliners in the police and judiciary mean to reassert Iranian fundamentalist values, in the fear that the nuclear accord with the West will help to introduce Western influences to Iranian youth and in the process turn them away from the kind of fanatical Islam that is propagated by the state.

The challenge to the power of the Ayatollahs who control cultural awareness in attempting to block the moral permissiveness pervasive in the West and which continues to be popular among Iranian youth in surreptitious displays of occasional lapses in the popularizing of Western music and clothing, threatens the influence of the hard-line Islamists. Television coverage in Tehran has reported on the interrogation by Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dowlatabadi of model Elham Arab.

The charges brought against her were not revealed as required details to be divuleged in the television broadcast. The seven people arrested with her were not identified, though police, according to the broadcast, identified 170 people who were brought in as derelict to Islamist cultural and religious values, through their social media activity, involved in modelling. Of that number, 58 models, 59 photographers and makeup artists were accused. 

The subjects targeted saw their businesses shuttered, their pages on Instagram and Facebook removed. These operations have been given the name 'Spider I' and 'Spider II'. Spider I had previously targeted "pornography and insulting Islamic sanctity", according to officials. Women in general, in Iranian society, have taken to wearing the mandatory scarf covering their hair too loosely, and in so doing have enraged the Islamic Republic conservative core.

In recent years, Iranian women - especially in the capital, Tehran - have worn the mandatory scarf loosely on their head, drawing the ire of conservatives in the Islamic Republic. Pictured right is Elham Arab

Saving the Islamic Republic of Iran from the hedonistic corruption of the West is paramount. Hastening the creation of nuclear bombs miniaturized to fit neatly on ballistic missiles to chastise those in the West plotting to destroy the purity of Iranian womanhood and bedevil the Ayatollahs will proceed henceforth with all due dispatch.