During a press conference in Tehran on 3 December, Iran’s Attorney General, Mohammad Javad Montazeri was asked by a journalist what had happened to the country’s morality police, which have been strangely absent from Iran’s streets. Clearly irritated by the question, Montazeri snapped that the morality police had nothing to do with the judiciary and they had been ‘abolished’ by the same body that had installed them. The word he used could also be translated as ‘suspended’ but the implication that the force had been in some way removed was seized upon by international journalists that something was beginning to give in the Islamic Republic. But as is often the case with the Islamic Republic, it is always worth pausing and reading the small print before rushing to judgement.
Indecision clearly afflicts the regime which finds itself bewildered by the attitudes of a new generation it simply does not understand
Soon after the authorities in Iran denied that the morality police had been removed and argued that Montazeri had been ‘misinterpreted’. They
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