When 38-year-old Merat Behnam first gathered enough courage to drive her yellow motorbike through the gridlocked streets of Iran's capital to the coffee shop she runs, traffic wasn't her main worry.

She instead girded herself for disapproving looks, verbal abuse and even being stopped by the police in Tehran for being a women riding a motorbike, something long frowned upon by hard-liners and conservative clerics in Iran.

But Behnam found herself broadly accepted on the road — and part of a wider reconsideration by women about societal expectations in Iran.

It's not all encompassing, particularly as hard-line politicians call for hijab or headscarf laws to enforced again as Iran cracks down on intellectuals in the wake of the 12-day Iran-Israel war in June, but it does represent a change.

“It was a big deal for me,” Behnam told The Associated Press after riding up to her café on a recent day in Tehran. “I didn’t really know how to go about it. In the beginning, I was quite stressed, but gradually, the way people treated me and their reactions encouraged me a lot.”

Laws and religion barred women from motorbikesTwo things in the past prevented women from driving motorbikes or scooters.

First of all, police regulations in Iran's Farsi language specifically refer to only “mardan” or “men” being able to obtain motorcycle licenses.

It's a very gender-specific wording in Farsi, which broadly is a gender-neutral language grammatically.

“This issue is not a violation but a crime, and my colleagues will deal with these individuals, since none of these women currently have a driver’s license and we cannot act against the law,” said Gen. Abulfazl Mousavipoor, Tehran’s traffic police chief, in September report carried by the semiofficial ISNA news agency.

Then there's the cultural aspect.

While women holds jobs, political office and car licenses in Iran, the country since its 1979 Islamic Revolution has imposed a strictly conservative, Shiite Islam understanding of conduct by women.

That's included the country's mandatory hijab law, which sparked mass demonstrations in 2022 after the death of Mahsa Amini, who had allegedly been detained over not wearing a headscarf to the liking of authorities.

In the beliefs of some conservative clerics and hard-liners, a woman riding a motorbike is “tabarruj,” or an excessive flaunting of her beauty prohibited by Islam.

“Keeping proper covering for women while riding a motorcycle is very important," hard-line lawmaker Mohammad Seraj told the semiofficial ILNA news agency in September.

"A woman sitting on a motorcycle cannot maintain the modest attire expected of her, since both of her hands are occupied with steering the vehicle and she is exposed to the wind.”