An Iranian court has sentenced an outspoken female singer to 74 lashes for performing at a concert without wearing a hijab, according to a person close to her family and state media news reports. The punishment indicated a possible tightening of religious rules for women under an Iranian political order reshaped by war.
The singer, Parastoo Ahmadi, was sentenced last week at a closed trial in Qom Province along with eight band and crew colleagues.
A video of the 2024 performance in which the singer’s hair, arms and shoulders are uncovered, in defiance of Iranian law, went viral on YouTube.
Ms. Ahmadi and her colleagues were also banned from performing or leaving the country for two years, said the person close to the family, who asked to remain anonymous, fearing reprisal for speaking to the media. Two of the nine individuals sentenced were not in Iran when the verdict was announced, the family member said.
The sentencing came just days after Iran and the United States tentatively agreed to end a monthslong conflict that has killed thousands across the Middle East and sent shock waves throughout the global economy.
The government’s crackdown on artistic expression and women’s dress has made clear to Iranians that little has changed with a new postwar order.
“Besides being an inhumane and humiliating punishment, the 74-lash sentence against Parastoo Ahmadi simply for singing without compulsory hijab is a dangerous signal that the regime, emboldened by the peace deal with the U.S., may intensify its crackdown on women,” said Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, director of the Norway-based Iran Human Rights.
The strikes against Iran by the United States and Israel that began in February killed several key figures, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who oversaw the violent and repressive theocracy over nearly four decades.
President Trump justified the war, in part, by saying the United States intended to help Iranians overturn their leaders. “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING — TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!” he wrote on social media in January.
That month, the Iranian authorities responded to widespread protests by killing thousands of people. Raha Bahreini, a lawyer and an Iran researcher at Amnesty International, called it a “state-orchestrated massacre.”
Now, it is not clear that the war has left Iran in less restrictive hands than before. Ayatollah Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, has succeeded his father as supreme leader, and a group of hard-line senior members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has assumed an expansive role in running the country.
In 2022, there were also hopes that change might come for Iranian women. Large protests erupted after the death of a young woman who was in the custody of the country’s morality police for violating the hijab law. The state responded by killing hundreds of people.
During the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement that followed, more Iranians decided to flout the hijab rules, and violent crackdowns appeared to abate slightly, according to a U.N. report documenting the aftermath of the protests.
It was in that context that the video of Ms. Ahmadi’s 2024 performance, in which she crooned a set of patriotic folk songs while wearing a simple black dress, went viral. The caption read: “I am Parastoo, a girl who wants to sing for the people I love. This is a right I could not ignore; singing for the land I love passionately.”
Ms. Ahmadi and two of her collaborators were briefly detained after the video was posted.
Now, with a postwar political order appearing to solidify in Iran, some in the country are looking at the sentencing of Ms. Ahmadi and her bandmates and wondering what it may mean for the future.
“Will this country ever be fixed one day?” said Mariam, 30, a teacher in Mashhad who asked that her last name be withheld for fear of reprisals. “Where in the world is a woman’s singing punishable by lashes?”
The Iranian authorities have attempted to “project an image of normalcy” after the war, said Bahar Ghandehari, director of advocacy at the Center for Human Rights in Iran. But, she said, “cases like Parastoo’s expose the reality of the human rights situation in Iran: Women continue to face profound discrimination under the law, and defiance results in punishment and state violence.”
It was unclear when the authorities planned to lash Ms. Ahmadi and the other defendants. Since the 2022 protests, there have been multiple documented cases of the authorities whipping women accused of violating hijab rules or speaking out against them.
