How an Iranian student who stripped to her underwear became a symbol of resistance

It is the question trending on Iranian social media, spray-painted on the back of Tehran bus seats, and discussed in hushed tones by her fellow students at the capital’s biggest university. Where is Ahoo Daryaei?

“Everywhere you go on campus, students are talking about her, and everyone is deeply worried about what might be happening to her,” a student who witnessed her arrest earlier this month tells The Telegraph.

“Some of us fear she might be tortured. There’s talk of boycotting classes until she’s released, but that’s challenging since so many regime supporters are also students here,” she adds.

The fate of the 30-year-old modern languages student, who stripped to her underwear at Tehran’s Islamic Azad University in protest at Iran’s hijab law, has become a lightning rod inside and outside of the country.

Two years after the death of Masha Amini sparked the biggest anti-regime protests since 1979, Iranian society is on edge. Amini, a 22-year-old woman from the western city of Saqez in Kurdistan province, was arrested in Tehran by the Islamic Republic’s morality police for violating the country’s draconian dress code, and subsequently died in police custody.

So febrile is the current atmosphere that pro-regime hardliners have accused Israel and the West of trying to manufacture discontent. But others, and especially urban women, are livid – and threatening to explode.

“Women stood up in 2022, and the authorities should be worried,” says the student in Tehran. “We’re like embers under the ashes, ready to ignite.”

Whisked away by plain clothes officers

Daryaei was detained on November 2, after she appeared outside the science and research branch of her university wearing nothing but a purple bra and striped knickers. Security camera footage of the lead-up to her arrest showed her wandering around in a crowd of students, her arms crossed.

Another shot showed Daryaei sitting on a low wall, kicking her legs, while a man spoke on a mobile phone, apparently after remonstrating with her.

The footage then shows her being bundled into a car by a group of men – thought to be plain-clothes officers – and driven away.

The Amir Kabir Telegram channel, a student newsletter, subsequently identified the woman in the clips as Daryaei, a seventh-semester French-language student. She had stripped to her underwear, it reported, in a fit of anger after being accosted by members of the Basij militia, a paramilitary group known to be fiercely loyal to the Islamic Republic’s rulers. The religious unit’s volunteers were said to have ripped Daryaei’s clothes and headscarf after accusing her of being improperly dressed.

Following her detention two weeks ago, Daryaei was taken to a police station. She was then branded mentally ill and transferred to a psychiatric hospital where, according to Amir Kabir, she “attempted to escape from the quarantine ward at least once but was blocked by security forces.”

“Security-assigned doctors overseeing her case are attempting to destabilise her mental state with unknown pills and injections,” it added. “The registry data shows no history of medical issues or specific illnesses in her official records.”

The Telegram channel said she was being held in a room under strict security control and had been visited by both intelligence personnel and the police spokesman General Saeed Montaze al-Madi.

The semi-official Fars news agency reported that security personnel had “calmly” spoken to Daryaei about flouting dress codes – but did not dispute that she stripped in protest against the dress rules.

Draconian dress laws

Iran’s strict dress code applies to both men and women, and dictates that no part of the body above the ankles and wrists or below the neck (chest for men) should be on display. Women must additionally cover their hair.

For women, it effectively means a uniform of baggy trousers, a long jacket that camouflages the outline of the waist, and a headscarf.

“Bad hijab” is not just a matter of going bare-headed: if the trousers are too tight, the jacket too short or the headscarf too loose, a woman can be accosted by the morality police.

In practice, many women have found ways to push the limits.

A scarf draped with studied carelessness around the back of the head, instead of covering the hair, is a time-honoured form of defiance – as is driving bare-headed in the relative security of one’s car.

But since the 2022 protests sparked by Amini’s death, a growing number of women – many of them in their 20s and 30s – have begun to flout the rules completely. Not for them the daringly loose headscarf. This generation are going around entirely bareheaded instead, with no attempt to shroud their outline in flowing tunics. Some are even wearing skirts.

They’re also fighting back. A few days before Daryaei was arrested, footage appeared of a bare-headed woman in jeans and a red top beating up a militia man who had tried to accost her.

Human rights groups reported that the woman, identified as Roshanak Molaei Alishah, was later arrested. Her whereabouts are currently unknown.

Such defiance has, in turn, elicited a harsher response from Iran’s theocracy. In April, the chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Tehran said his personnel had been ordered to enforce hijab rules “in a more serious manner” in public spaces and announced the creation of a new body to do so.

The same month, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights demanded Iran shelve a draft bill that would tighten hijab rules and introduce harsher punishments. That bill is currently in legislative limbo after the country’s Guardian Council sent it back to parliament to be tweaked. It is not clear when, if ever, it will finally become law.

‘People want answers’

That’s the context in which Daryaeri lost her temper – and disappeared. Her university’s public relations department reported she was “handed over to the police station”, adding she displayed “severe psychological distress and mental health issues”, and was transferred to a “treatment centre.”

The Islamic Republic has frequently suggested political opponents and protesters have “mental disorders”.

In recent years, numerous political prisoners have reported being forcibly admitted to psychiatric hospitals, where they were given drugs that impaired their movement or speech. Some have said they were subjected to electroconvulsive therapy.

Among the women accused of mental illness was Vida Movahed, the “Enghelab Street Girl”, who, in 2017, climbed a utility box on Enghelab Street, a major trunk road in Tehran, and raised her headscarf in protest at the mandatory hijab. She was detained immediately. A judiciary spokesperson later claimed she suffered from depression.

Two years later, in 2019, Sahar Khodayari set herself on fire after learning she might face prison for attempting to enter a stadium to watch an Esteghlal FC football match in the capital. When news of her self-immolation spread, judiciary officials claimed she had bipolar disorder.

Today, it seems, many are unwilling to accept a similar explanation for Daryaeri’s behaviour. “People want answers,” a female employee at a private bank in Tehran tells The Telegraph. “With each day that passes without information about her, people grow angrier.”

“They should be worried and avoid harming her – they should remember how people responded when they killed Mahsa Amini,” she adds. The protest movement Women, Life, Freedom coordinated mass demonstrations for several months after Amini’s death, posing one of the boldest challenges to Iran’s theocracy since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

“This isn’t just about one girl being harassed for not wearing a headscarf – it’s about half the population being denied their basic rights. We’re suffocating under the rules and restrictions they’ve imposed on us.

“Wherever we go, we’re confronted by angry, aggressive morality police for not wearing what they want us to.”

‘Treatment clinic’ for those flaunting the hijab rule

After days of silence following Daryaei’s detention, and facing a wave of graffiti in Tehran demanding her release, the Iranian government moved to assure the public that she would not be prosecuted.

Fatemeh Mohajerani , a government spokeswoman, told a press conference on November 5 that “no punitive action has been taken.”

“According to the report presented to the cabinet, the issue did not begin with a hijab warning – rather, it stemmed from taking photos in class. Social services were contacted, and the student was transferred through social emergency services.”

Hossein Simaei-Sarraf, the minister of science, who is in charge of university affairs, claimed a day later that Daryaei had “not been expelled” from Azad University, despite her “neither culturally nor ethically acceptable” behaviour.

“The student is dealing with mental health and family issues, so sending her to a treatment centre instead of detention was a very reasonable decision,” he said.

The Iranian Psychiatric Association, meanwhile, announced that it had followed up on her case and called on the government to respect “citizens’ rights, adhere to ethical standards, and respect diverse viewpoints.”

The association added that it had received “reassuring explanations from the responsible physicians regarding the observance of human rights, professional ethics, and scientific standards in her case.” But Daryaei has still not been seen in public.

There’s an obvious reason for this communication strategy – informed by a sense that if Daryaei is harmed, the streets could explode again.

“The responsibility for anything that happens to Ahoo Daryaei lies with the Islamic Republic regime,” Hossein Ronaghi, a well-known activist and former political prisoner, said last week.

Attempts to smooth things over have produced some strange initiatives. On Thursday, the city of Tehran’s Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice Headquarters said it would open a “treatment clinic” where judges could send women refusing to wear the hijab, as an alternative to punitive action such as fines or imprisonment.

It’s less a medical facility than a support group, or self-help centre, offering counselling and workshops on self-awareness and managing social pressures, Mohammadreza Mirshamsi, a city official claimed.

“Judges from the judiciary had requested alternative penalties for those arrested for removing their hijab,” he told Iranian media. “We believe that engaging in conversation with these women and raising their awareness about the harms of this unlawful and non-religious act is more beneficial than filing legal cases and imposing monetary penalties on them.”

The supposedly conciliatory idea of treating “hijab removal” as an illness rather than a crime drew a predictably withering response from activists. “It sounds more like a bad joke than an actual proposal,” scoffed one.

A regime unable to shift

From outside Iran, all this looks very strange. Why would an authoritarian regime put so much effort into enforcing something that elicits such resentment? It’s hardly as if bareheaded women will challenge Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s control of the security establishment, or the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ grip on the economy.

But for the regime hardliners, the hijab is something that sets the Islamic Republic apart as, well, Islamic. It is central to the late Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary project.

There’s history here. The regime remembers very well that in the late 1970s the Shah’s attempts to assuage revolutionaries with concessions only hastened his demise. So they fear that giving in to demands from women to dress as they wish could be the first nail not only in the coffin of the Islamic Republic’s notion of itself, but the regime’s grip on power.

“Mandatory hijab is one of the key pillars of the Islamic Republic, which is why authorities have only further cracked down on women rather than the opposite in the wake of the Women, Life, Freedom uprising,” says Holly Dagres, an Iranian-American who curates The Iranist newsletter. “And even if authorities decided to remove the mandatory law, it would not address the systemic issues that plague the country.”

That logic leads many hardliners to link challenges to the dress code to Iran’s external enemies. Kayhan, a hardline Tehran newspaper, claimed in an editorial this week that the scandal around Daryaeri’s arrest was a deliberate operation “pouring fuel on the Zionist project of removing [the] hijab and promoting nudity in the country.”

“The project, especially amid regional developments following the Al-Aqsa Storm operation and the True Promise operation, is intended to gradually collapse the Islamic Republic from within,” it wrote. “Aside from the stirring of public emotions, the same groups that rode the wave of public sentiment after Mahsa Amini’s death to pursue their overthrow agenda are once again poised to leverage a new incident.”

Al-Aqsa Storm is the name Hamas gave to its October 7 attack on Israel last year. True Promise One and Two were the operational names for Iran’s missile strikes on Israel in April and October this year.

‘They’ve twisted a religion’

There is no doubt that the wars that erupted after October 7 have placed the Iranian regime under unique strain. Abroad, its powerful proxy network, including Hezbollah and Hamas, has suffered massive damage, and two direct exchanges of missiles with Israel have brought it closer than ever to a potentially catastrophic all-out war.

The return to the White House of Donald Trump, who, in his first term as president, withdrew America from the Iran nuclear deal, massively increased sanctions, and killed Qassem Soleimani, the then-leader of the republic’s elite Quds force, only adds extra pressure.

Domestically, meanwhile, the Iranian economy is ailing after years of stagnation. Masoud Pezeshkian, the relatively moderate president elected after the death in a helicopter crash of his hardliner predecessor Ebrahim Raisi, has made sanctions relief a key objective of his government.

That is widely seen as recognition that the country cannot carry on its current fiscal death spiral – and that the regime is willing to entertain talks on its nuclear programme to get out of it. In this febrile and uncertain atmosphere, the authorities are continuing their crackdown on dissent.

On Wednesday, the Iranian judiciary announced death sentences for six men accused of killing a Basij militia operative during the Women, Life, Freedom protests triggered by Amini’s death. The charges are disputed.

The same evening, political prisoner Kianoosh Sanjari leapt to his death from a Tehran high-rise in protest at the regime’s refusal to release two men and two women jailed for taking part in those demonstrations. “My life will end after this tweet but let’s not forget that we die and die for the love of life, not death,” he wrote in his final message. “I wish that one day Iranians will wake up and overcome slavery.”

Sanjari’s friends blamed the regime for driving him to suicide.

The public outcry over Daryaei’s treatment to date may save her from a similar fate – the authorities are wary of creating another martyr. But she risked being beaten up, imprisoned and even death when she defied the clerics, Dagres points out. For many Iranians, her act was one of “utmost bravery”, she says.

“She is a symbol of Iran. Across the country, women are angry – they’re fed up with what the mullahs dictate. They don’t own our bodies, yet they control them more than we even control ourselves,” says the female student who witnessed Daryaei’s arrest.

“They’ve twisted a religion that doesn’t align with these oppressive laws.

“Nowhere in Islam does it say that a woman should be killed for not wearing a headscarf, or barred from university for refusing to cover her hair.”