When Ayatollah Khomeini Punished Women in Public *Warning REAL FOOTAGE

When Ayatollah Khomeini Punished Women in Public *Warning REAL FOOTAGE

In 1979, a 77year-old cleric stepped off a chartered Air France jet in Tran.

5 million people lined the streets to greet him.

They were chanting his name.

They believed he was going to set them free.

Within months, he would build one of the most suffocating systems of control the modern world has ever seen.

And his first target was not an army, not a political rival.

It was the women of Iran.

This is the story most people have never been told.

Not the sanitized version you read in textbooks.

The version where women were dragged through the streets by their hair.

Where teenage girls were lashed in public for showing a strand of it.

Where an entire nation of women woke up one morning and realized the revolution they helped win had just declared war on them.

His name was Roua Kmeni.

He born in 1902 in the small town of Kain about 200 m south of Tehran.

His father, a local cleric, was murdered when Rua was barely 5 months old.

Killed on the orders of a local landlord.

His mother and aunt raised him.

By the time he was 15, both of them were dead, too.

Kalera took them in the same year, orphaned three times over before he could drive.

That kind of loss either breaks a man or hardens him into something else entirely.

Kumeni became something else entirely.

He threw himself into religion, memorized the Quran as a child, studied Islamic law, philosophy, and mysticism in the seminaries of Iraq, and then Kum.

He married at 27.

His wife was the daughter of a cleric in Thran.

They would have seven children, though only five survived infancy.

By his 30s, and he was teaching at the highest levels.

By his 50s, he was one of the most respected Shia scholars in Iran.

He wrote over 40 books on Islamic philosophy, law, and ethics.

He could have spent his life in quiet scholarship.

Many of his mentors believed religion should stay out of politics entirely.

Kmeni disagreed.

He was never just a scholar.

He watched, he waited, and he seethed.

What made him seethe was the sha.

Muhammad Resa Palavi had inherited the throne from his father and spent decades trying to modernize Iran using a western template.

He called it the white revolution.

Land reform, infrastructure, women’s suffrage, new schools, new hospitals.

Women could become lawyers, doctors, engineers, judges.

They could travel freely, dress as they wished, attend university alongside men.

To the outside world, it looked like progress.

To Kmeni, it looked like an assault on everything sacred.

He was particularly enraged by the expansion of women’s rights.

He publicly condemned the Shaw for granting women the right to vote, calling it propaganda designed to hide a dictatorship behind a mask of liberalism.

He compared women’s political participation to prostitution.

He led protests so fierce that the voting rights law was temporarily repealed.

In 1963, Kmeni spoke out so forcefully that the sha had him arrested.

Riots followed.

The sha crushed them, then exiled Kmeni.

First to Turkey, then to Iraq, then to France.

For 15 years, Kmeni sat in exile, recording his sermons on cassette tapes that were smuggled back into Iran by the thousands.

Every tape was a weapon.

Every sermon was a countdown.

While he waited, Iran changed.

And the Shaw’s modernization created wealth but also staggering inequality.

His secret police sav tortured and disappeared political opponents.

The oil boom raised expectations that the government could not meet.

By the late 70s, students, intellectuals, bizarre merchants, communists, liberals, and Islamists all wanted the Shaw on.

Kumeni from his exile in a small village outside Paris became the face of that opposition.

Not because everyone agreed with his vision, but because he was the loudest voice saying what millions were feeling.

The Sha must go.

On January 16th, 1979, the Sha fled Iran.

He never came back.

He would die in exile in Egypt the following year.

2 weeks later, on February 1st, Kmeni’s plane touched down at Mehabad International Airport.

The plane circled low before landing.

A reportedly to check that no tanks were blocking the runway.

The crowd that greeted him was estimated between 5 and 10 million people.

One of the largest gatherings in human history.

A journalist on the plane asked him what he felt upon returning to his homeland after 15 years.

His answer was a single word.

Nothing.

That word should have been a warning.

Within weeks, Kmeni began dismantling every freedom the revolution had supposedly been fought for.

And no group felt the blade faster than women.

On March 7th, 1979, barely five weeks after his return, Kmeni issued a decree.

Women must wear the hijab in all public spaces and government offices.

Any woman who appeared without it was, in his words, naked.

Not inappropriate, not immodest, naked.

The next day was International Women’s Day.

And something remarkable happened.

At a tens of thousands of Iranian women poured into the streets of Tehran.

They marched to the prime minister’s office.

3,000 more marched in calm, the holiest city in Iran, right under Kmeni’s nose.

They appeared without veils.

They chanted slogans that would have gotten them killed a year later.

We did not have a revolution to go backwards.

In the dawn of freedom, there is an absence of freedom.

The regime’s response was immediate and vicious.

Pro- Kamani mobs stormed the marches.

Women were beaten with sticks, slashed with knives, called enemies of Islam, agents of the West.

The protest lasted 6 days.

6 days of women standing against what they knew was coming.

And then it came anyway.

At first, the enforcement was informal, but informal did not mean gentle.

Vigilantes roame the streets on motorcycles, e harassing women who were not dressed according to the new code.

Some carried razor blades and slashed women’s faces.

some through acid.

Two revolutionary slogans captured the atmosphere perfectly.

Wear a veil or we will punch your head.

And the other one, death to the unveiled.

These were not whispered threats.

They were chanted in the streets by men who believed the regime had given them a license to terrorize.

The state looked the other way.

By July 1980, the government made it official.

Unveiled women were banned from government buildings, banned from their own workplaces, fired from their jobs if they refused to comply.

The phrase used was the Islamification of offices.

It sounded bureaucratic.

It was anything but.

Then came July 1981.

An edict of mandatory veiling in public was issued, not just in offices, everywhere.

And in 1983, the hammer came down completely.

The Islamic punishment law was passed.

Women who appeared in public without proper Islamic covering could be sentenced to up to 74 lashes.

Not a fine, not a warning.

74 lashes of a whip across the back of a woman who showed her hair in public.

To enforce this, Kmeni created what became known as the Islamic Revolution Committees, patrols of armed men who roamed the streets looking for violations.

They did not just check what women were wearing, they checked who women were with.

If a man and a woman were seen together in public, in a car, walking down a street, the patrols had the authority to demand proof that they were related.

Husband and wife, brother and sister, father and daughter.

If you could not prove it, punishment followed.

Uh, these patrols eventually evolved into the guidance patrol, known in the west as the morality police, formerly established in the early 90s, but operating in spirit since the revolution’s first days.

mostly men arriving in unmarked vans pouring into neighborhoods in green uniforms.

The women among them, less than a quarter of the force, wore black cloaks that covered them from head to toe.

They stopped women on the street, dragged those they considered improperly dressed to morality courts.

Some were sentenced on the spot.

Some were taken away and not seen for days.

Reports described officers using catchpholes, long poles with nooes at the end, the kind used for controlling animals to drag women into police vehicles in public, in broad daylight, in front of their children.

And it was not just the hijab.

When Kmeni’s regime stripped women of rights that their own grandmothers had possessed, the family protection law, which had given women rights in divorce and custody, was repealed.

The legal marriage age for girls was lowered from 18 to 9.

Women were forbidden from becoming judges, forbidden from running for president, forbidden from singing solo in public, forbidden from dancing, forbidden from riding bicycles, forbidden from attending sports matches.

They were forced to sit at the back of buses.

Their testimony in court was worth half that of a man’s.

Their inheritance was worth half.

They could not travel abroad without their husband’s written permission.

Male teachers were removed from girls schools.

Since most math and science teachers were men, this meant an entire generation of girls lost access to proper education in those fields.

At universities, men and women were separated.

Women were banned entirely from certain fields of study.

Child care centers were shut down.

Family planning programs were dismantled.

Women were told their highest purpose was to bear children and serve the household.

Kmeni called motherhood the most important role a woman could pursue.

But here is what the textbooks leave out.

This was never about faith.

Kmeni used the language of religion to disguise what was really a political power grab.

Controlling women’s appearance became the most visible symbol of the Islamic Republic’s identity.

Every covered head on every street was a walking advertisement that the old western influenced Iran was dead.

The hijab was not just a garment.

It was a flag.

And every woman who defied it was committing an act of war against the state.

Kmeni wrapped his regime in the cloak of Islam.

But what he built had far more to do with authoritarian control than with anything the faith itself teaches.

Public morality laws gave the regime the ability to police not just clothing, but thought, movement, and association.

If you could control what a woman wore, you could control where she went.

If you could control where she went, you could control who she spoke to.

If you could control who she spoke to, you could control what she believed.

It was a system of total surveillance disguised as religious duty built not to protect faith but to protect the regime’s grip on power.

Some women fought back.

They wrote letters to Kmeni’s office demanding their rights be restored.

During the Iran Iraq war when when tens of thousands of young men were sent to the front, the government was forced to employ women in roles it had previously banned them from.

Women became the sole breadwinners of their families.

They proved they could not be erased.

But the punishments never stopped.

Kmeni died on June 3rd, 1989.

He was 86 years old.

More than 2 million people attended his funeral, but the system he built did not die with him.

His successor, Ayatollah Ali Kam, continued the brutality.

The morality police remained.

The lashings continued.

The surveillance deepened.

And then on September 13th, 2022, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman named Masa Amini was arrested by the guidance patrol in Tran.

Her crime was wearing her hijab too loosely.

She was beaten inside a police van, taken to a hospital 2 hours later.

She was already brain dead when she arrived.

She died 3 days later, 5 days before her 23rd birthday.

Her death did something Kmeni’s regime had spent 43 years trying to prevent.

It united the country in rage.

Men and women flooded the streets.

Young women set their headscarves on fire in public.

Young men tore down posters of the Supreme Leader.

The protest spread to every major city.

The chant that echoed through the streets was three words that the regime feared more than any army.

Woman, life, freedom.

The regime responded the only way it knew how.

Mass arrests, torture, killings, over 500 dead, tens of thousands detained.

But the women of Iran did not stop.

They had been fighting this fight since March 8th, 1979.

Since the day they marched in Tehran and were beaten with sticks and slashed with knives for daring to say that freedom should mean freedom for everyone.

Kmeni built a system designed to make women invisible, to erase them from public life, to turn their bodies into battlegrounds where the state could demonstrate its absolute authority.

He failed because you cannot erase half a population.

You can beat them, lash them, imprison them, kill them, but you cannot make them disappear.

The women of Iran prove that.

They are still proving it.

And that is the dark reason Ayatollah Kmeni punished women in public.

Not because Islam demanded it, because his regime demanded obedience and it used religion as the weapon to enforce it.

And the women of Iran were the one thing he could never fully control.

45 years later, they are still fighting, still marching, still burning headscarves in the streets, still proving that no regime, no matter how brutal, can silence half the world forever.