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LAST UPDATE | 24 Sep 2022
IRAN’S MAIN REFORMIST party has called for an end to the mandatory Islamic dress code for women in force since 1983, after eight straight nights of protests.
The Union of Islamic Iran People’s Party also called for the winding down of the morality police charged with enforcing the code following the death in their custody of 22-year-old Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini on 16 September.
The party, which is led by former aides of reformist ex-president Mohammad Khatami who oversaw a thaw with the West between 1997 and 2005, called on the authorities to “prepare the legal elements necessary for the repeal of the law on mandatory hijab”.
The party, which remains legal but is firmly outside the corridors of power, said Iran should announce an “official end to the activities of the morality police” and “authorise peaceful demonstrations.”
It said an “impartial commission” should be set up to investigate the circumstances of Amini’s death and called for the “immediate release of people recently detained”.
At least 35 people have been killed and hundreds wounded in the protests that erupted after Amini’s death, according to official figures. Hundreds more have been arrested, including reformist journalists and activists as well as demonstrators.
Under the law adopted in 1983, four years after Iran’s Islamic revolution, all women, regardless of faith or nationality, must conceal their hair with a headscarf in public and wear loose fitting trousers under their coats.
The code has been widely skirted for decades, particularly in the major cities, but there have been periodic crackdowns.
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God help the people of Iran, they brought down the Shah for a Religious leader and hopefully now the table will turn in favour for them. As the Shah said that having Mullahs in power would turn Iran back 1,500 year’s and he was right.
@Mick McGuinness: It is only the weak who seek to control minds through fear, controlling women out of fear of the body God gave them. What weakness is in their logic to impose upon a woman the impression of an inferior being, who gave birth to the man, without who, they (Men) would not exist.
@Mick McGuinness: the shah did a good job of that himself. What a disposable puppet of London and Washington.
This is horrific. Can’t believe this sort of thing still happens in parts of the world. Morality police????? Awful!!!!!!
@Anna Carr: happens in China too for everyone
@Billybutcher: :(
@Anna Carr: reminds me of Holy Catholic Ireland and the network of institutions that they ran right up to the 1990s
@Paul Jude Redmond: Ah stop. Nobody was killed here for not wearing a head scarf
@DK: Try getting pregnant without being married. Then you would know a fate far worse than being killed.
Religion whats that all about . Fables and made up stories.Cant we be honest with ourselfes, we live we die gods are make believe. Live be as happy as possible, the world would be a better place without these imagined gods.
@Boots1220: everyone has a religion – what’s yours ? Veganism, anti-Israel, Man Utd…. Christianity is actually a good religion at its core
@Virgil: i’d nail them all to the cross
@Virgil: oblivion, nothingness, works for me!
Poverty and RELIGION go hand in hand in 3rd world.
@Michael Heery: don’t we know it. Regarding headwear, if my mother had gone to mass without wearing a headscarf she would have become the local pariah
@alan: Not mandatory, to wear a Scarf in our Mother’s Day, not beaten to death, or arrested.
@ÓDuibhír Abú: Perhaps not but branded as a “hussey”? Most definitely. Up to the 1960s and early-mid 70s, Irish society and Catholicism were the greatest enemies of women who didn’t toe the line eg. by covering their heads, albeit loosely, in church.
Only since 1983, imagine.. Iran should be leading the Middle East forward, not in a western way but in a Persian way.
No reason why the average Iranian is not wealthy and educated like once maybe they were, before 1983 perhaps
All religion is evil all about control the masses believe in your own God and be a good person and that’s it
Jeez the bots are out in force here tonight.
For it is culture boss man
have your say