Tehran: Thousands of Iranians took to the streets of the historic city of Isfahan on Wednesday to protest several acid attacks on women. The attacks had coincided with the passage of a law designed to protect those who correct people deemed to be acting in an ‘un-Islamic’ way.
A local official said on Wednesday that men on motorcycles had attacked “eight to nine” women with acid over the past three weeks in Isfahan, one of Iran’s largest urban centers and the country’s chief tourist destination. Some of the women were blinded or disfigured.
The protesters, more than 2,000 according to the semiofficial news agency Fars, gathered in front of the local judiciary office and shouted slogans against extremists whom the protesters likened to supporters of the militant group Daesh. They also called for the city’s Friday prayer leader and the prosecutor to step down, witnesses said. Critics have long accused the Iranian authorities of playing down episodes that could embarrass leaders rather than investigate the cases.
“We do not want to propagate virtues by acid,” some of the protesters chanted, a reference to the Islamic obligation of “propagating virtue and preventing vice.”
Others shouted, “Death to extremists.”
The demonstration seemed to have been initiated on social media. That sort of protest rarely occurs in Iran, especially after rallies following the disputed 2009 elections were put down with blunt force by security forces and militias.
The acid attacks have prompted a heightened resistance to the new law, which parliament passed Sunday. The law is aimed at protecting citizens who feel compelled to correct those who, in their view, do not adhere to Iran’s strict social laws. The details of the law, which would officially empower the government and private citizens to give verbal or written statements on social mores, have yet to be completed.
While strict rules on dress, alcohol, sexual relations and much more are not new, the law is aimed at defining crimes against propriety or decency, which in the past would often be corrected informally. In Iran, where most people live in cities and many are highly educated, conservatives are trying to avert changes in attitudes by enforcing traditions.
President Hassan Rouhani strongly criticised the new law Wednesday, saying that he feared it would divide society because, as many observers have pointed out, in reality it offers the country’s small but influential faction of hard-liners more power.
“The sacred call to virtue is not the right of a select group of people, a handful taking the moral high ground and acting as guardians. It is upon all Muslims to exhort love, respect for other and human dignity,” Rouhani said in the provincial city of Zanjan.
“May such a day never come - that some lead our society down the path to insecurity, sow discord and cause divisions, all under the flag of Islam,” he said, his voice shaking with emotion.
His words indicated that his government would take steps to oppose the law. That would further isolate the president on social issues from Iran’s other centers of power, like the conservative-dominated parliament and the judiciary, which had designed and welcomed the law.
— New York Times News Service
