Iranian leaders are safe but protests raise the stakes over the imposition of the veil

DUBAI- The popular uprising in Iran sparked by the death of a woman in police custody is unlikely to pose an immediate threat to clerical leaders whose elite security forces have crushed protest after protest in recent years.

But the protests, the largest since 2019, are another crack in the fabric of the Islamic Republic, which faces turmoil over economic hardship, inflation and freedoms.