Gravestone photos of women without hijabs painted over in Iran
Women in Iran are required to wear a hijab (Collage: RBC-Ukraine)
In the capital of Iran, Tehran, 98 photos of women's tombstones, where the hijab is incorrectly worn or absent, have been painted over with paint. Engravers are doing this during the creation of the monument, according to material from Human Rights Monitor.
Director of Behesht-e-Zahra Cemetery, Saeed Ghazanfari, upon discovering such tombstones for women, warned the firm creating them that the cemetery would cease cooperation with them.
"Engraving images of women without hijab is not worthy of the graves of believers," Ghazanfari said.
Grave photos of women without hijab are being painted over in Iran (Photo: iran-hrm.com)
He adds that the cemetery's management informs families about the rules before burial and asks them to sign relevant documents. However, some people put an image of the deceased woman without a hijab on the tombstone.
When relatives of the deceased saw the defaced photos, they were outraged and deeply affected.
"I was shocked to see my mother’s picture covered with paint when I visited her grave on Thursday,” Fatemeh Haji Ahmadi, whose mother’s headstone was vandalized," said Fatemeh Hadji Ahmadi.
Such incidents are not happening for the first time
Such incidents are not unprecedented in Iran. In October 2020, the caretaker board of Royan cemetery in Mazandaran, in the country's north, distorted images of women on tombstones without informing their relatives.
Following this, the administration stated that placing images of women on tombstones was religiously incorrect.
