Iran’s Islamic Leaders Face a Crisis of Faith as Protests Swell

For decades, Iran’s clerical leaders have striven to make sure their country stays on a conservative, Islamic path. They have expanded religious education. The faithful have been urged to have more children. Those deemed to be exhibiting what the government regards as anti-Islamic behavior risk the full force of the law.

Monthslong protests in Iran against the core values underpinning the Islamic system suggest the country might be heading the other way.

Teenage girls now share videos of each other stomping on pictures of the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei, and his successor, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Young Iranians have been filmed knocking turbans off clerics’ heads, with the footage posted online. Thousands of women now walk around the streets of Tehran without the mandatory hijab, or headscarf, in what would have been a rare act of defiance just a few months ago.

It is a secular turn that has long been under way. In the years leading up to the current protests, young Iranian men and women gathered freely together in Tehran coffee shops, defying conservative Islamic norms. Affluent city dwellers kept houses on the shore of the Caspian Sea, where unrelated men and women vacationed together. For an elite few, drugs, alcohol and miniskirts—all illegal—were regular features at house parties.

Now many of those who sought out more freedoms are calling for the end to the Islamic Republic itself, often at great risk, and pose one of the biggest challenges to Iran’s establishment since the 1979 revolution that brought the clerics to power.

“Iranian society by every measure is now more secular, decidedly anti-religion, decidedly anticlerical than it ever was,” said Abbas Milani, a professor and expert on Iranian culture at Stanford University.

A 2020 survey by Iranian researchers with the Netherlands-based GAMAAN research foundation showed more than 30% of Iranians identified as nonreligious or atheist—about the same proportion who said they followed the state religion of Shiite Islam.

A survey by the Iranian Parliament’s research center in 2018 showed support for the hijab had fallen from around 85% in the early 1980s, in the years immediately following the revolution, to around 35%.

The cultural shift is tearing apart families, dividing generations.

This year’s protests erupted in mid-September after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in police custody after she was arrested for allegedly violating Iran’s strict dress code. Her death quickly ignited deep-seated grievances toward Iran’s aging clerics and in some cases set parents and children against each other.

 “Once my mother called me and cried: ‘I’m ashamed that you are my daughter,’” said a 32-year-old woman in Tehran who joined the rights movement on the first day. She said she was raised to believe in the Islamic Republic and wear a full-body Islamic garment from the age of 9, but had been arrested twice in recent weeks and beaten by security forces for joining protests.

Her parents, she said, remain strong supporters of the government, as is her sister, who she lives with. One afternoon, she returned home battered and bruised from a police crackdown. Her sister ignored her.

“She thought I deserved it,” the woman said. “We don’t have the relationship we had before,” she said, her voice breaking. “It’s like I have lost my family.”

Mr. Khamenei, the final authority in Iran’s Islamic system, accuses Western powers of orchestrating the protests as a way to weaken Tehran, which has become a significant regional power. For years he has called on artists, clerics, professors and propagandists to resist what he calls a “cultural NATO” of Western nations bent on destroying Iran through soft warfare.

“The real war is this,” Mr. Khamenei said in 2017.

To fight it, authorities are seeking to influence Iranians in nearly every aspect of their lives. The paramilitary Basij militia, which is best known for upholding domestic security and suppressing unrest, began focusing more on cultural threats and making sure people were given correct religious instruction. By 2016 it employed 20,000 clerics to teach in some 250,000 religious training circles at the country’s mosques, the force’s former commander has said.

Iran has spent $300 million to set up and run dozens of educational centers to promote conservative Islamic teachings, according to Iranian media reports. It also established Revolutionary Guard units in all 31 provinces to instill the Islamic Republic’s revolutionary ideals from kindergarten all the way up to university.

No facet of modern Iran appears untouched by this growing culture war.

Authorities have cracked down on pet ownership, issuing fines to dog walkers and encouraging residents to snitch on their pooch-owning neighbors. In July, hundreds of dogs, which are considered unclean in Islam, were shot and buried in a landfill north of Tehran.

Religious conservatives are trying to coax the working classes, traditionally a bedrock of support, to have more children and increase their share of the population after government efforts to slow population growth had more effect than they intended.

“They go into the streets and they’re in the minority, they look at social media and they’re in the minority, they look at the movies and they’re in the minority,” said Pooya Azadi, an expert on Iranian demographics. “They’re losing ground everywhere.”

Around the time of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iranian women had on average 6.5 children. By 2005, after years of family-planning efforts involving birth-control pills, vasectomies and the construction of the Middle East’s first state-funded condom factory, the fertility rate had dropped to around two children per woman—below replacement level.

Mr. Khamenei admitted that Iran’s demographic transition had gone faster than intended in 2012, after the median age rose from around 19 years old in the 1990s to more than 30.

To encourage couples to have children, the state now offers cheap fertility treatment and the additional incentive of free shares in the stock market valued at up to 15 million rials, equivalent to around $41. Parents are able to retire a year earlier with each child they have. After having a third child, couples are offered $5,000 in housing loans to be repaid in 20 years.

Military commanders, meanwhile, call on female Revolutionary Guard members to be “pioneers” and have at least five children. State media has made a minor celebrity out of a cleric called Mohammad Muslim Mafi who encourages Iranians to have as many children as possible. His wife has given birth to 13.

Some Iranian parents are responding to what they see as their Islamic duty.

“We had two children for a while, and because of what you hear in the media, and particularly what the leader himself said, we decided to have more,” said Reza Shafiei, a 42-year-old fabric seller and father of four, referring to Mr. Khamenei.

A growing cohort of Iranians is immune to this kind of messaging. Some 1.3 million abortions are carried out in Iran every year, said Mohammad Esmail Akbari, adviser to Iran’s health minister, more than twice as many per woman as in the U.S.

Others are considering whether to get married at all.

Faezeh, a 40-year-old teacher in Tehran, has lived with her romantic partner for two years without getting married—an illegal but growing trend known as a “white marriage.” Cohabiting without getting hitched avoids the potentially crippling expense of a wedding, makes it easier for women to separate from their partners and lessens family pressure to have children.

“I want to continue living in Iran, and I don’t see a very good future for a kid here,” said Faezeh, who says she has chosen not to have children because of global warming, Islamic indoctrination in Iranian schools and the country’s poor outlook. 

Supporters of the Islamic Republic insist that secularists constitute a small minority of the population.

“Let’s remember that Iran has a population of 98% Muslim,” said Fereshteh Sadeghi, a pro-establishment analyst and activist in Tehran. “Maybe a percentage of that population is not observing their religious duties, but Islam is part and parcel of the Iranian culture for at least 14 centuries.”

The protests are continuing, however, with some demonstrators willing to defy their own parents by taking to the streets. One 30-year-old described how his mother once threatened to call the police on him when she caught him preparing to leave the house for a rally.

 “The Islamic Republic had brainwashed her to such an extent that a mother was ready to call the police on her child,” he said. “That day was a turning point that made me want to fight this filthy regime until my very last breath.”