A Night With the Morality Police and the famous Persian hijab

This is an article about an interesting encounter with the “hijab police”;

Spooning up some pomegranate seeds by the side of the road while waiting for my German friend Nadia, I noticed the morality police approaching. But dressed in my baggiest clothes and a pair of nerdy glasses, I didn’t imagine I could possibly be mistaken for a moral transgressor. I was wrong. The two ladies in long black chadors informed me that my coat was too short, and ordered me into their van. I protested that I was waiting for a foreign friend whom I couldn’t just desert. They considered the argument, then decided to wait and take both of us. When Nadia arrived, they loved her. “Look at her, she’s a foreigner and her coat is longer than yours,” one officer said. The other added that I needed to learn better hijab (Islamic covering) from my German friend!

Everyone familiar with the situation in Iran had tried to change my mind when I decided to spend a few months there this fall. “It’s become bad, people prefer to stay home rather than go out because they keep bothering everyone,” the argument usually went. I had dismissed this as exaggeration. Even in the back of the van, Nadia and I were quite comfortably eating our pomegranate and at times laughing about the absurdity of the situation. I joked with the morality police ladies that I was the worst catch they had ever made. “You really couldn’t find someone a little more provocatively dressed? Am I just filling your nightly catch quota?”

Read more here.

Personally, I think the Morality Police achieve the opposite of what they want… Instead of encouraging these girls to wear hijab, they make them despise it. I think force most often lead people to the other opposite. Nobody can force you to have hijab in your heart.

What do you think?