A court in Qom has sentenced Iranian singer Parastoo Ahmadi and eight members of her band and production team to 74 lashes each, along with a two-year travel ban for Ahmadi, over a live-streamed concert in which she appeared without a hijab, according to IranWire and The Jerusalem Post. The ruling is preliminary and subject to appeal.

The performance at issue took place on December 11, 2024, at Dayr-e Gachin Caravanserai — a historic caravanserai in Iran — and was streamed live on YouTube. Ahmadi performed without a hijab and sang "Mara Bebous" alongside musicians Ehsan Beiraqdar and Soheil Faqih Nasiri. The event drew immediate official attention. Three days later, on December 14, 2024, Iranian authorities arrested Ahmadi in Sari City, the capital of Mazandaran province in northern Iran, according to AP News. The charges encompassed not only the concert performance but also what prosecutors characterized as an "obscene" music video.

The sentencing covers the full group: Beiraqdar, Faqih Nasiri, and six members of the production team all received the same 74-lash sentence alongside Ahmadi, per The Jerusalem Post and IranWire. IranWire also reports that the sentences include artistic bans — a sanction that, if upheld on appeal, would bar those convicted from professional creative activity within Iran.

Iran's mandatory hijab law has been enforced with escalating legal force since the crackdown that followed the 2022 nationwide protests triggered by Mahsa Amini's death in morality police custody. Flogging as a judicial punishment is codified under Iran's Islamic Penal Code; 74 lashes falls within a standard range for ta'zir — discretionary offenses — rather than the more severe hadd category that carries fixed Quranic penalties. The practical effect, however, is rarely purely physical: such rulings generate documented self-censorship and professional paralysis well beyond the individuals directly sentenced.

The targeting of an entire production team is consistent with a broader enforcement logic the judiciary has applied in recent years. Holding sound engineers, camera operators, and logistics staff criminally liable for a performer's choices raises the legal risk across any creative project involving dissent-adjacent content, regardless of how peripheral the collaborator's role. It is a form of collective deterrence.

The case has drawn international attention partly because of the venue. Dayr-e Gachin Caravanserai is a Safavid-era site — one of the oldest surviving caravanserais in Iran — and Ahmadi's choice to perform there, bareheaded, in a space saturated with national cultural heritage, was not a neutral staging decision. That framing gave the concert symbolic weight that purely online dissent typically does not carry.

Whether the appeal will modify or overturn the ruling is uncertain. Iranian appellate courts have, in some high-profile cases, reduced sentences under diplomatic or reputational pressure, though the trajectory since 2022 has run more consistently toward affirmation or escalation. For Ahmadi and her collaborators, the more immediate consequence may be the travel ban and any accompanying professional restrictions — measures that can be enforced irrespective of whether the lashes are ever carried out.