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Demonstrators in the historic city of Isfahan on Wednesday shouted slogans against militants.
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Arya Jafari/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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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 “eight to nine” women had been
attacked over the past three weeks by men on motorcycles who splashed
them with acid 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 Islamic State militants. 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 investigating 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 since rallies after the
disputed 2009 elections were put down with blunt force.
The
acid attacks have prompted a heightened resistance to the new law,
which Parliament passed on 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 criticized the new law on 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,” Mr.
Rouhani said during a trip to the provincial city of Zanjan. “It is upon
all Muslims to exhort love, respect for others and human dignity.”
“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 designed and welcomed the law.
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