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 The Hijab Is Vanishing from Iran's Streets—and So Is the Mask of the Mullahs

A Stark Warning to the Taliban: The Wind of Change Is Coming for Them, Too.

By Wahab Raofi

The hijab is falling from the heads of Iranian women—and in the same moment, the mask of the mullahs is falling too. The upheaval sweeping Iran since 2025 has not only given women the courage to remove their headscarves; it has unmasked a regime that is no longer the force it once was.

Decades of institutionalized gender restrictions have made women the unlikely catalyst for the Islamic Republic's deepest crisis of legitimacy in its 45-year history. Across the country, women are publicly casting aside their hijabs, defying a dress code that has been enforced by law and by force since the revolution. This is not a fashion statement. It is a generation refusing to accept the terms their parents were forced to live under.

An Iranian woman writing under a pseudonym in Persuasion magazine recently described... what this moment means to her generation—the so-called "Burnt Generation," raised in the shadow of the Iran-Iraq War. They grew up on war films and martyrdom songs, took school trips to old minefields, and inherited grief from relatives who came home from the front with unspeakable trauma. Whether or not they understood the politics of that war as children, they inherited its weight. Now, she writes, that inheritance is turning into defiance.

She writes that a friend of her who recently left Iran put it to me more simply: it feels like walking through the streets of Paris. Young men and women sit in cafés, listen to music, hold hands. Women no longer wear the hijab. Walk into a gallery, a café, a restaurant, and people are singing and dancing—and if you ask discreetly, someone might even bring you a drink under the table. "It's this young generation," he told me. "They're something else." And it isn't confined to Tehran. The same quiet testing of boundaries is visible even in religious strongholds like Mashhad and Qom—cities the Islamic Republic built its identity around.

Maryam Rajavi, an Iranian dissident politician who serves as President-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, captured the regime's unease in a recent piece titled "No to Executions, Yes to Democratic Republic": "Today, the remnants of the regime live in a nightmare of impending uprisings. They tremble at the consequences of the mass slaughter during the January uprising—and indeed, of the 48 years of suppression, massacre, and the simmering rage of a deeply dissatisfied society. For this legacy has awakened and driven the young generation to confront the regime."

Some will point out that Iran's mullahs have already held power for nearly half a century, and ask why this moment should be different. It's a fair question. But there is a structural difference between Iran's regime and the one next door in Afghanistan. Tehran has sustained itself on billions of dollars in oil revenue—income that has let it pay civil servants and maintain basic public services even through sanctions and unrest. The Taliban have no such cushion. Their government survives largely on outside financial assistance, which makes it considerably more fragile than Iran's.

That fragility matters, because the wind of change in Iran does not stop at the border. It carries directly to Afghanistan, where the Taliban have banned women from working alongside men and denied girls access to secondary education. If a regime as entrenched and self-financing as Iran's can be shaken this badly by its own women, a regime as dependent and brittle as the Taliban's should be far more worried. The mask is slipping in Tehran first. It won't stop there.

 

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