A rite of spring in Iran: fashion crackdown Nazila Fathi | International Herald Tribune | April 26, 2007
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/26/news/tehran.php?page=2 The Iranian police force has come under criticism for its clampdown on women over their dress, an annual exercise that began over the weekend and has affected thousands of women. Women here have been required by law since the 1979 Islamic revolution to cover their hair and wear long loose clothes to cover the shape of their body. The ideal dress is considered to be a black head-to-toe chador that covers all the body except for the hands and the face. But many women defy the law and the regime has been engaged in a constant battle with them over what they can wear and how they should look. The police have launched a clampdown every year at the beginning of the summer, because women start wearing fashionable and shorter coats and show more hair because of the heat. Since the weekend, the police have been stopping women in major squares and at subway stations in Tehran to warn them over their appearance. The police chief, Ismail Ahmadi-Moghaddam, said this month that the force would target women who wore small head scarves, tight coats and short pants. He also said the police would focus on men in the second phase of its campaign. But he stressed that the police would avoid force and would only talk to violators to persuade them to dress appropriately. On Tuesday, Ahmadi-Moghaddam appeared before the parliamentary Commission for National Security to hear complaints about the clampdown. "Some of the members of Parliament complained that the security forces should not put itself in a position to deal with such issues," Dariush Ghanbari, a member of the commission, said in a telephone interview. She said some members of Parliament had expressed the view that the women's dress code required "cultural work." Three women who have been stopped gave accounts of their run-ins with the police. All three refused to give their last names because they feared they could be identified by the police and punished. Nazanain, 28, a reporter who thought she had dressed more modestly than usual, said she had been stopped in Vanak Square in Tehran and told her coat was tight and showed her body shape. "I just joked with them and tried to stay calm but they told me to sit so that they could see how far my pants would pull up in a sitting position," she said. Nazanin was told by the police that they were trying to help her so that she would not look awkward and attract the attention of men. She received a warning for her large sunglasses, her coat, her eyeliner and her socks, which they said should be longer. She was allowed to go after she signed a letter saying she would not appear in public like that again. But a friend, Niloofar, who responded angrily to the police when she was told to fix her head scarf, was kept in a bus for five hours. "They want to intimidate us," said Somayeh, 31, who was crying after she was stopped at the Mirdamad subway station. She was asked to call home and get her national ID number for the letter she was asked to sign. A photographer who accompanied a police team said many women reacted angrily to the warnings. The traffic police have also stopped women drivers - dragging them out of their cars to check their clothes, newspapers reported. The newspaper Etemad wrote over the weekend that a group of European women who were visiting a religious site in northern Tehran were approached by the police because they wore their scarves over their heads instead of tying them around their necks. The tourists were terrified and left the site immediately, the newspaper reported. Another newspaper, Etemad-Melli, reported that about 2,000 students had held a demonstration in the southern city of Shiraz on Tuesday to protest new restriction on women and men's dress at the university. The newspaper reported that men had been banned from wearing shorts at the dormitories. At least three state-sponsored fashion shows have been held in the last year to encourage women to wear more Islamic clothes rather than the short and tight clothes that some favor. Restrictions have also relaxed compared with the earlier days of the Islamic Revolution when women were flogged, jailed and fined for what was considered immodest dress. The government's publicity campaign has been larger this year, with the security authorities stressing on television that people are happy with the clampdown and that they consider women responsible for the chastity of society. But the head of the judiciary, Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, warned governors-general throughout the country Monday that such attitudes toward women and youth could backlash. "Hauling women and young people to the police station will have no result except social harm," Etemad-Melli quoted him as saying Tuesday. Even the press adviser to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mehdi Kalhor, tried to distance the government from the clampdown and warned the police chief in a letter that his force "should not go to the extreme," the newspaper reported. The hard-line daily Kayhan also wrote in a column that "women's immodest dress is not the only vice." "The way the vices are dealt with should be in a way that people - especially the youth - would believe that the authorities really want to eradicate them," the daily wrote, saying that poverty, bribery and injustice in society were more important problems.
