Iran's Khamenei Regime Under Fire Over Hijab Hardliner's Daughter's Wedding
Iran's hardline Islamic regime, led by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is embroiled in a type of scandal seldom seen in the Islamic Republic. The controversy surrounds the wedding of Khamenei's close aide's daughter, where the bride was seen wearing a strapless wedding gown, with critics accusing the regime of hypocrisy over its draconian hijab diktat.
The video in question is from the 2024 wedding of Ali Shamkhani's daughter. Shamkhani is one of Iran's most senior defence and national security officials and a confidant of Khamenei, who has advocated for the enforcement of strict Islamic rules on women and girls and ordered violent crackdowns on protesters.
In 2022, Shamkhani was leading Iran's National Security Council when a nationwide uprising convulsed Iran, with women taking to the streets and burning their headscarves in protest of the country's hijab rule.
The Video
In the old clip recently doing the rounds on social media, Admiral Shamkhani, a member of Iran's Expediency Council, is seen walking his daughter down the aisle into a wedding hall at the luxury Espinas Palace Hotel in Tehran. The bride, Fatemeh, is seen wearing a low-cut, strapless dress, with a nearly see-through veil barely covering her head.
Shamkhani's wife is seen wearing a similarly revealing blue lace evening gown with a bare back and sides. She is also not wearing a headscarf. Several other women in the video were also seen not wearing the hijab.
Criticism Over The Video
The extravagance at the Western-style wedding and the sartorial choices of the bride and her mother-- both unusual for a country where hijab is mandatory and modesty laws have been strictly enforced for decades-- have drawn people's attention, with critics calling out the Khamenei regime for double standards.
'"The daughter of Ali Shamkhani, one of the Islamic Republic's top enforcers, had a lavish wedding in a strapless dress. Meanwhile, women in Iran are beaten for showing their hair, and young people can't afford to marry," wrote Masih Alinejad, Iran's exiled activist, on X.
She noted that the video made millions of Iranians furious because the Khamenei regime enforces "Islamic values with bullets, batons and prisons on everyone but themselves."
"The main advisor of Khamenei was celebrating his daughter's wedding at a palace-like venue. The same regime that killed Mahsa Amini for showing a bit of her hair, jails women for singing, who hired 80,000 "morality police" to drag girls into vans, throws itself a luxury party. This isn't hypocrisy, it's the system. They preach "modesty" while their own daughters parade in designer dresses. The message couldn't be clearer: the rules are for you, not for them," she added.
Amir Hossein Mosalla, an Iranian journalist, said on social media that the video showed that "the regime officials themselves have no belief in their own laws that they support, they only want to make people's lives miserable."
On Monday, Shargh, Iran's reformist-leaning newspaper, ran a front-page photograph of Shamkhani with the headline: "Buried Under Scandal".
Omid Memarian, an Iran expert at DAWN, a Washington-based research organisation that focuses on American foreign policy in the Middle East, told The New York Times, "It's hypocrisy in its purest form."
Ellie Omidvari, an Iranian women's rights activist, recalled the hundreds killed in the protests, some of them newlyweds. "Their bride is in a palace, our bride is buried under the ground," she said.
Even the Tasnim news agency, which is affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards, criticised Shamkhani. "There is no doubt that the lifestyle of officials in the Islamic Republic must be defensible," it said, while also criticising publishing a private video as unethical.
Shamkhani's Defence
Shamkhani has accused Israel of leaking a video from the April 2024 function. "Hacking into people's privacy is Israel's new method of assassination," he was quoted as saying by Iran International.
According to the publication, former Iranian minister Ezzatollah Zarghami has defended Shamkani, stating that he had kept his head down and that the ceremony was 'female-only.'
"Some women were veiled, and the rest were close relatives," Zarghami said.
Trending News