Ever since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, women in Iran have been required to wear the hijab in public. However, an increasing number of Muslim women are kicking back against the ruling – by refusing to wear a headscarf while driving.

According to the Guardian’s Iran correspondent Saeed Kamali Dehghan, it is now commonplace to see women driving with their hijabs untied and resting on their shoulders in Tehran, the Iranian capital. And while it might sound like a small act of rebellion, it is infuriating Iran’s “morality police”.

Formally known as Gasht-e Ershad, the morality police are undercover agents hired to enforce Islamic rules in public. They focus predominantly on making sure that women are observing hijab, resulting in the arrests of hundreds and sometimes thousands of Iranian women during the summer months.

Most of these women are urban, educated and middle-class, and stand accused of the crime of wearing “bad hijab” (where the headscarf is pushed as far back on the head as possible). Women who drive with their hijabs loosely tied are regularly stopped and fined, or have their cars seized.

Despite this, police are finding it difficult to force women to wear headscarves in their own cars – in part because of a thorny debate about whether a car constitutes public or private space.

Women in Iran are defying the country’s extreme hijab laws from behind the wheel