Word: chador
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...took my 8-month-old baby boy Hourmazd for a walk in the foothills of Tehran's Alborz Mountains. Families and young people crowded the tree-lined path ahead, chatting leisurely and snacking on crepes and barbecued corn. As I pushed the stroller along, a policewoman in a black chador blocked my way. She fingered my plain cotton head scarf, pronounced it too thin and directed me toward a parked minibus. It took a full minute for me to realize that she meant to arrest me. "I've been wearing this veil for over five years," I pleaded. "Surely...
...uniform we had discarded in the late '90s. The crackdown had everyone on edge, in part because it was so inexplicable. Many women avoided going out in public unless it was necessary. Even the pious considered the new mood egregious. As a friend of mine who wears the black chador out of conviction put it, "This is a mockery to focus on dress when our country has so many more urgent problems...
...decade ago, there were no such concerts to attend in Tehran because the mullahs frowned on music as un-Islamic. This summer there were concerts scheduled across the country, several of them including orchestras with female musicians. At least 3,000 people, among them many women in black chadors, mingled before the candlelit steps of the palace under a velvet sky. The country's preeminent poets and directors sat alongside government officials and their chador-clad wives, and gazing at the scene, you could be forgiven for imagining this was a society at peace with itself...
...snared by a young woman of little religious conviction, who happily assumed greater propriety and more modest dress to cement the match. Most recently, I met the girlfriend of a bohemian but pious painter; she had spent half her life unveiled in London, but donned the full-length black chador to satisfy his expectations. She still says "Ciao!" when leaving the room, and seems at ease in her new reincarnation. The hejab marriage prerogative also works in reverse. When one of my lightly religious relatives married a woman from a traditional family, she downgraded to a simpler headscarf...
...notion of immortality certainly beat Botox. But Ikhwan was using his jewel vs. flower analogy to explain why it was preferable for female students at his Islamic boarding school to wear the chador, a flowing black dress that covers everything but the eyes. Indonesian women, though living in the world's largest Muslim-majority nation, have traditionally worn somewhat sexier garb: a loose, lacy veil, a cleavage-hugging blouse and a tight sarong. But over the past few years, as Southeast Asia's moderate forms of Islam have struggled to hold sway against the challenge of a more conservative, Middle...