Mehdi Yarrahi, an Iranian singer and musician known for his song encouraging women to remove their hijabs, was lashed 74 times as part of his punishment for supporting the protests that swept the country, his lawyer said Wednesday.
The punishment was “fully and completely implemented,” his attorney, Zahra Minoui, said in a post on X. Yarrahi, 42, was arrested in August 2023 and sentenced by the Tehran Revolutionary Court to two years and eight months in prison, as well as 74 floggings. He eventually served one year of his sentence and was fined, alongside the lashing.
Yarrahi had been accused of “releasing an illegal song that is against the morals and customs of Islamic society,” the state news agency IRNA said in 2023.
Flogging is a form of beating that involves a whip or rod and is commonly administered to the person’s back.
He was detained four days after releasing his famous song “Roosarito” – Farsi for “your headscarf” – where lyrics included the lines: “Take off your scarf, the sun is sinking. Take off your scarf, let your hair flow.”
“Don’t be afraid, my love! Laugh, protest against tears,” the lyrics add.
A month after Yarrahi’s arrest, protests erupted throughout Iran to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the death of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old woman who died in the custody of Iran’s morality police after being arrested for allegedly not wearing her headscarf properly.
Rights groups have been outraged over the hijab law and the cruel ways it is enforced.
In December, Amnesty International said that Iranian authorities had imposed new draconian laws against veil-wearing, including threats of “imposing the death penalty, flogging, prison terms and other severe penalties to crush ongoing resistance to compulsory veiling.”
Other artists in Iran have received floggings as part of their sentences, including acclaimed movie director Mohammad Rasoulof, who in May of last year was sentenced to eight years in prison and flogging for national security crimes, his lawyer said.
In 2015, two Iranian poets faced 99 lashes each for shaking hands with people of the opposite sex. They were also both sentenced to years in prison for “insulting the sacred” in their writings, a decision slammed by freedom of expression activists.