TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — When Merat Behnam first gathered enough courage to ride her yellow scooter through the gridlocked streets of Iran ‘s capital to the coffee shop she runs, traffic wasn’t her main worry.
She instead girded herself for disapproving looks, verbal abuse and even being stopped by the police for being a women riding a motorbike in Tehran, something long frowned upon by hard-liners and conservative clerics in Iran.
But Behnam, 38, found herself broadly accepted on the road — and part of a wider reconsideration by women about societal expectations in Iran.
It’s not all encompassing, particularly as hard-line politicians call for laws on the hijab or headscarf to be enforced as Iran cracks down on intellectuals in the wake of the 12-day Iran-Israel war in June — but it does represent a change.
“It was a big deal for me,” Behnam told The Associated Press after riding up to her café on a recent day. “I didn’t really know how to go about it. In the beginning I was quite stressed, but gradually the way people treated me and their reactions encouraged me a lot.”
‘Exposed to the wind’
Two things in the past prevented women from driving motorbikes or scooters. First of all, police regulations in Iran’s Farsi language specifically refer to only “mardan” or “men” being able to obtain motorcycle licenses. It’s a very gender-specific wording in Farsi, which broadly is a gender-neutral language grammatically.
“This issue is not a violation but a crime, and my colleagues will deal with these individuals, since none of these women currently have a driver’s license and we cannot act against the law,” Gen. Abulfazl Mousavi …