Word: chador
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Rather like a schoolmaster dressing down unruly students, Bazargan dismissed the women's demonstrations as a lot of fuss over "a one-word issue" (the chador, or all-enveloping veil), and admonished students to go back to school and factory workers to stop their agitation. In an emotional appeal for a return to national sanity, Bazargan said, "We have passed a number of mountains, but we still have not reached the promised land...
...freedom, there is an absence of freedom." "We fought for freedom with the men," one woman explained. "None of us knew freedom would come with chains." Political fashions were changing fast: many of the women now denouncing the veil as a mark of repression gladly wore the all-covering chador as an anti-Shah symbol during the revolution...
...views as a form of political involvement and protest against the Shah's autocratic rule. The day care centers are now almost deserted. Many of the young women who took to skirts, slacks and blue jeans as signs of their emancipation have gone back to the ankle-length chador. Intended to hide the female form, it has been worn in Persia since the ninth century. Religious law requires that it be worn outdoors at all times and indoors in the presence of strangers. Because it has no buttons or hooks, it is difficult to keep from slipping...
Iranian reformers have long sought to abolish the garment, which they consider a symbol of women's subordinate status. But even after the Shah's father, Reza Shah, outlawed the chador in the 1930s, rural women continued to wear them. After his abdication from the Peacock Throne in 1941, chadors began to reappear in Iranian cities. Today, four-fifths of older Iranian women wear the chador, as do an increasing number of younger women. But today's chador does not always fulfill its intended purpose: some are quite diaphanous. In an ironic display of Iranian women...
...Tehran, Qum is both a symbol and a model of the Iran that the mullahs yearn to preserve. No television aerials mar the pristine skyline; no public cinemas threaten to seduce the inquisitive; no bars or liquor stores offend the strict life of the observant. All women wear the chador and devote much of their lives to weaving fine Persian carpets. Thronging the streets are thousands of turbaned, black-robed mullahs whose entire lives are submerged in the study of theology with Qum's learned...