Rasool Akbari
Continuations and Disruptions of Digital Religion in Contemporary Iran: A Follow-up on the Hijab Issue
The hijab, understood today primarily as women’s head covering, remains one of the most symbolically charged arenas of contestation in Iranian society, but its meanings and implications have shifted significantly in recent years. What began in the mid-2010s as digitally mediated micro-acts of resistance, largely in the form of hashtags, sharing images of unveiled women, online activisms against obligatory hijab, and similar practices, evolved into wide-reaching movements, culminating in the 2022 social crisis that brought questions of gender, freedom, and justice to the forefront. Since then, digital platforms, especially those most widely used by Iranians, such as Instagram, Telegram, and X (formerly Twitter), have become both sites of state surveillance and spaces where new forms of belonging, experience, expression, and practice are contested, negotiated, altered, sustained, and performed. This paper follows up on my earlier work presented at the Olomouc Digital Religion Conference in 2023, by examining how, in 2024-2025, hijab-related discourse continues to shape trajectories of religious and/or spiritual participation, disaffiliation, and transformation in Iran. Digital spaces do not merely reflect what occurs on the street; but as emphasized in Giulia Evolvi’s Hypermediated Spaces theory, they increasingly constitute alternative environments spanning both virtual and physical realms, serve as nexus for negotiating religious and modern values; where religion and spirituality are reimagined, contested, and hybridized. For some, these platforms enable feminist, secular, or diasporic identities to flourish; for others, they open new avenues for devotional practice and creative reinterpretations of Islamic faith and practice. Framing the hijab as a contested digital resource reveals how belonging in contemporary Iran is being continuously reconfigured: between compliance and resistance, faith and critique, displacement and re-rooting. By tracing these developments, this paper situates the Iranian case within broader debates on digital religion, asking how hypermediated contestations over symbols like the hijab generate new communities of meaning and project possible futures of religious and cultural life.