Iran flogs singer 74 times over protest song against women’s strict dress code
A popular singer in Iran was given 74 lashes for a song which slammed Iran’s strict dress code for women.
Mehdi Yarrahi released the song ‘Roosarito’ a year after the ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ movement in 2023, sparked by the death of young Iranian women Mahsa Amini while she was in custody for ‘breaking’ the dress code.
His lawyer announced yesterday that his flogging sentence had been carried out. The song’s emotional lyrics dared women to ‘take off your scarf’ and ‘open your hair’. Roosarito translates to ‘your head scarf’ in Persian
‘My love don’t be afraid, laugh, protest to cry; Women, life, freedom,’ Yarrahi sang.
Six months after the song’s release, Yarrahi was given a jail sentence of more than two years and 74 lashes.
Flogging is a common form of punishment in Iran – often carried out for ‘crimes’ of adultery, kissing in public, theft, homosexual acts, drinking or selling alcohol, and others.
Iran’s dress code is so strict that a mental health clinic in the capital Tehran was opened to ‘treat’ women who refuse to wear the hijab.
The Iranian state announced that the centre will be called the Clinic for Quitting Hijab Removal.
Mehri Talebi Darestani will run the centre and said it ‘will be for the scientific and psychological treatment of removing the hijab, specifically for the teenage generation, young adults, and women seeking social and Islamic identity’.
She also said it is focused on promoting ‘dignity, modesty, chastity, and hijab’ and claimed that attendance would be ‘optional’.
A young woman in Iran was brutally lashed 74 times by the regime’s morality police for not wearing a hijab in the street in January.
Roya Heshmati, a vocal critic of the compulsory headscarf, was punished after a photograph was published a few months ago showing her in Tehran with her head uncovered.
The Kurdish-Iranian defiantly removed her headscarf as she arrived at court to be whipped and had to be restrained so officers could put it back on.
Iranian authorities said the flogging was because she had been ‘encouraging permissiveness’.
In a post that has since been taken down, Ms Heshmati said she ‘did not yield’, adding: ‘I maintained my stance and did not wear the hijab.’
The officer carrying out the punishment told her to put the headscarf back on and when she refused he threatened to add another 74 lashes to her sentence.
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