A woman in the Tehran airport – not wearing the mandatory headscarf – confronted a cleric and removed his turban. She placed it on her own head like a scarf, and said to the man “So you have honor now? You claim to be a Shia of Ali?” She is searching for her husband Navid: “What did you do to my husband?”.
The date and cause of the confrontation aren’t clear. The video circulated online earlier this year. At the time, Iranian state-linked accounts tried to dismiss it saying it was years-old but it was not. The state regularly tries to frame acts of disobedience as mental disturbances as well. She was also derided as a “Mossad agent.”
Here the woman took the cleric’s turban – a badge of authority and sanctity – as her headscarf, subverting traditional power relations (‘your symbol will now cover me, on my terms’).
At Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport, a woman boldly confronted a cleric who questioned her for not wearing a hijab.
she took off his turban and wore it as a scarf in defiance. pic.twitter.com/H9GFxzZKub
— Lakshay Mehta (@lakshaymehta08) October 19, 2025
Women have been engaged in heightened disobedience over mandatory headscarfs following the the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of religious morality police following her arrest for not wearing a hijab in September 2022. Crackdowns on women who defy hijab laws in airports have been on the rise as well.
- The head of airport police in Tehran has stated that women not wearing hijabs could not fly.
- Similar announcements and threats have been made at Iran’s second-busiest airport in Mashhad and at Fasa Airport.
In summer 2024, Iran shut down the Turkish Airlines office in Tehran because staff there weren’t complying with hijab laws.
State news reported that the woman was detained and released with the cleric’s consent, but that hasn’t been independently verified.
Since then, Iran adopted an even tougher “Chastity and Hijab” law in late 2024 (the ‘Family Protection through Promoting the Culture of Chastity and Hijab’ law) with enhanced surveillance and draconian penalties. Implementation was officially paused due to backlash but sporadic enforcement continued.
That woman is courageous. Over there, she could get killed for this. This is yet another example of why we do not want a theocratic dictatorship anywhere. Hope she can get out of there, relocate to a free-er society.
Replace “could get” with “will be” or even “has been.”
@Denver Refugee — Hope not, but, probably so. I’d argue, she she now has a valid claim to ‘refugee’ status, elsewhere, under international law, if anyone would actually follow and support human rights, anymore. And, to those that seek to do a (wealthy, white, male, straight, conservative) nationalist Christian (Nat-C) version of this to the USA, no, we do not want ‘morality police’ here, either. Separation of church and state; freedom of and from religion are literally the First Amendment of our U.S. Constitution.
Here is what awaits us n NYC and MN