Of the many paradoxes presented by the Islamic Republic of Iran, the most confounding remains its stubborn preoccupation with regulating women. The 1979 revolution that brought fundamentalist clerics to power in an ancient, diverse, and cosmopolitan nation also stripped women there of the right to hold a job without the permission of her husband, or wear what she chooses in public. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The friction from that grinding repression ignited a conflagration in the last months of 2022 that threatened to destroy the regime.