Friday, March 21, 2025
Mehdi Yarrahi, a singer and songwriter, was given 74 lashes March 5 for the crime of writing and singing a song of which the Islamic Republic did not approve. The song celebrated the first anniversary of the start of protests over the death of Mahsa Amini while in police custody for violating the dress code.
Mostafa Nili, the singer’s lawyer, said he was in the next room as Yarrahi, 43, was flogged and could hear the sound of each lash on Yarrahi’s back. “I could hear him shouting, ‘Thank you, God,’ after each lash,” Nili told The New York Times. Nili also said that Yarrahi was unable to sit or put any pressure on his back after the flogging. The flogging was carried out by officers of the Morality Security Prosecutor’s Office in Tehran.
After the flogging, Yarrahi’s punishment was declared completed and he was freed. He then posted on his X account, saying, “He who is not willing to pay the price for freedom does not deserve freedom (Two days after the flogging and an upheaval of anger on social media, the Fars news agency, which is affiliated with the Pasdaran, ran a story saying Yarrahi was flogged for drinking alcohol and not for his song.
The story quoted an unnamed official as the only source. The government has not said anything on the record about the flogging.) Yarrahi was arrested August 28, 2023, in a wave of detentions that aimed to quell any protests marking the first anniversary of the 2022 uprising. Shortly before the anniversary, he released “Roo Sarito,” a song praising Iranian women who rejected the hejab rule and exposed their hair as an act of civil disobedience. “Take off your scarf; let your hair flow,” he sang in a video that featured a woman dancing, her uncovered hair swaying.
Yarrahi, who made his music in secret and released it only online to avoid censorship, faced instant arrest. The Judiciary said Yarrahi had released an “illegal song” that defied the “morals and norms of an Islamic society.” He was initially sentenced to two years and eight months in prison, the singer said in a video published on social media recently.
But his sentence was commuted to one year as he experienced “poor physical health,” he said, and was then later commuted to house arrest with 74 lashes. For that year, Yarrahi was confined to his home and wore an electronic ankle bracelet, he said. The Canada-based IranWire described two other instances in which a male singer, Abbas Ghaderi, and a female singer, Gol-Andam Taherkhani, were flogged in the 1980s for singing in public.
Flogging is a frequent punishment used under the Islamic Republic. In the early years after the revolution, it was routinely carried out in public, but that is rarely done anymore.
