Authoritarian Power and Religious Ideology in Strategies of Surveillance and Identity Verification
In recent years, particularly after widespread civic uprisings and a societal shift in attitudes toward mandatory veiling, the Islamic Republic of Iran has launched a systematic effort to exploit identity recognition technologies and digital surveillance. These efforts aim to redefine social control in public spaces through policies, regulatory frameworks, information infrastructure, and identity verification systems.
In contemporary authoritarian regimes, especially in the digital age, citizen identity verification in public spaces is not merely a security tool but has become a central mechanism for exercising political power, conducting public manipulation, and controlling bodies and everyday behavior. Tools such as surveillance cameras, biometric systems, mobile phone tracking, and interconnected databases are deployed not to preserve public order but to identify, categorize, and manage social actors.
The so-called “Social Credit System” in the People’s Republic of China is one of the most emblematic cases of merging technology with control-oriented governance. In this model, citizens’ behavior in urban, economic, and digital domains is monitored and scored according to predefined criteria. While the system has not been fully implemented nationwide in China and remains largely confined to local pilots, its conceptual foundation, linking technological surveillance to social consequences, has inspired regimes such as the Islamic Republic of Iran. In practice, China’s focus has been primarily on legal and administrative violations, but in Iran the model has been pursued with a more ideological and security-driven orientation.
Beyond the typical authoritarian rationale of technologically managing public spaces, the Islamic Republic has additional motives for building such systems. In addition to classic security concerns about controlling civic dissent, the ruling establishment is guided by an ideological and religious doctrine in which a mandatory dress code known as hijab is framed not merely as female attire but as a symbol of loyalty to the religious order.
In this context, hijab in Iran is not simply a cultural norm or a religious obligation. It functions as a central instrument for managing citizens’ bodies and identities. Unlike in some other Muslim-majority countries where hijab is treated as an individual religious choice, in Iran defiance of mandatory veiling is criminalized as a state offense subject to security penalties. As a result, broad mechanisms have been created to identify and punish those who resist, ranging from physical patrols (morality police or Ershad) to urban and digital surveillance technologies. The regime has used hijab as an entry point for building identity and control infrastructures that can easily be extended to other forms of civil disobedience.
In such a framework, public space, from streets and subways to parks and shopping centers is no longer neutral ground but an arena of state power. The citizen is no longer anonymous in the crowd but a traceable subject whose behavior must be monitored. Mandatory hijab, framed in religious or moral terms, has in practice become a platform for expanding identity systems, digital verification, and public surveillance technologies. Initially justified as a response to “improper veiling,” these technologies are rapidly extended to other socially defiant groups such as protesters, civil activists, women, and minorities.
The waves of social protest in recent years, from January 2018 and November 2019 to September 2021, marked a turning point in the Islamic Republic’s control strategies. During this period, the regime gradually shifted away from traditional methods based on physical patrols and moved toward more structured technological surveillance models. This shift was driven by two key factors: first, the declining legitimacy and effectiveness of street patrols, particularly after the killing of Mahsa Amini in the custody of the morality police and public debate over the role of CCTV cameras; and second, the establishment of technical infrastructures that enabled citizen identification through facial recognition systems, SIM card tracking, national ID card databases, and vehicle license plate monitoring.
Strategic Shift in Veil Enforcement: From Cultural Campaigning to Security Surveillance
The Islamic Republic of Iran’s strategic trajectory in enforcing hijab has moved clearly from cultural promotion to security-driven surveillance. Three major resolutions of the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution (SCCR), Resolution 413 (1998), Resolution 566 (2005), and Resolution 820 (2019), show how state policy on “chastity and hijab” evolved from cultural and propaganda tools toward intelligence, enforcement, and technological mechanisms. Resolution 820 marked the first time that “modern technologies,” “statistical monitoring,” and “security reporting” were explicitly emphasized, while policy responsibility shifted from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance to the Ministry of Interior, a sign of the transition from cultural framing to security enforcement.
The killing of Mahsa Amini in September 2022 challenged the social legitimacy of the morality police and turned hijab into a focal point of civil resistance. In response, policymakers in the Islamic Republic did not retreat but instead accelerated the use of digital and invisible surveillance tools. Systems such as SIM card registration, smart ID cards, judicial and banking databases, urban CCTV, and crowd-sourced monitoring android mobile apps such as Nazer. Under the framework of the so-called Hijab Law, these digital technologies became formal instruments of identification, monitoring, and repression. During this period, senior officials openly endorsed digital tools for hijab enforcement:
- Mohammad Saleh Hashemi Golpayegani, then-head of the Headquarters for Enjoining Good and Forbidding Wrong, announced that urban cameras connected to identity systems would be used to send warning SMS messages to unveiled women.
- Hossein Ashtari, then commander of Iran’s police, declared that CCTV would be deployed against “social anomalies.”
- His successor and current commander of Police, Ahmad Reza Radan, repeatedly stressed that digital surveillance would be central to police operational programs.
- Mousa Ghazanfariabadi, head of parliament’s Judicial and Legal Commission (2020–2024), stated: “For those who violate norms in public, we must move from physical action toward facial recognition; in that case, the offender will be notified and deprived of certain social rights.”
- Then–Minister of Interior Ahmad Vahidi and Chief Justice Mohammad Jafar Montazeri also emphasized that hijab enforcement must rely on “smart technologies” and “digital tools.”
These directions were ultimately codified in the Hijab Law, which legitimized the use of facial recognition, access to national registries, and digital crowd-sourcing for law enforcement, granting police and judiciary formal powers in this domain.
The Hijab Law: Legal Framework for Digital Surveillance in Public Spaces
The turning point in the Islamic Republic’s surveillance strategy was the passage of the Law on Supporting the Family by Promoting the Culture of Chastity and Hijab, commonly referred to as the Hijab Law, in October 2023. Ostensibly aimed at formalizing mandatory veiling in public spaces, the law entrenched the legal foundation for technology-driven surveillance. It built directly on the three earlier SCCR resolutions that had traced the shift from “cultural promotion” to “smart control” in women’s dress enforcement.
Various provisions of the law lay out infrastructure for citizen identification and management in urban environments. It obligates the Ministry of Interior to create a “regional social profile,” enabling local cultural engineering, and instructs the Ministry of ICT to accelerate the development of the NIN under the supervision of the SCC. The law assigns intelligence functions to the Ministry of Intelligence (MOIS) and the IRGC-IO, mandating the use of digital tools to identify and pursue individuals involved in unveiling, nudity, or sharing images with foreign media.
The Hijab law also requires the police to deploy “fixed and mobile cameras,” “artificial intelligence,” “public reporting,” and “identity systems” to identify and confront unveiled individuals. This article represents the direct convergence of surveillance technologies with the policing agenda of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
To compensate for technological gaps, the law designates the Basij (Public militia of IRGC) as auxiliary human resources for judicial officers. The Hijab law extends surveillance mandates into workplaces and social services, making compliance with hijab a prerequisite for employment, promotion, or licenses.
Last but not least, the law institutionalizes the digital surveillance framework: all government agencies, banks, private companies, and even individuals are required to provide their camera footage to police and grant police access to citizens’ identity data, including national ID numbers, mobile phone records, and geolocation. From this perspective, the Hijab Law is not merely a cultural or policing policy but a comprehensive legal framework for structured digital governance in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Conclusion
What is outwardly enforced as hijab is, in practice, a foundation for establishing a broader system of digital surveillance. In this structure, the defense of personal freedoms and digital rights is not simply a cultural or political demand but an urgent necessity to safeguard human dignity in an age of authoritarian technology.