Word: chadors
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1978-1978
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...liberties and the enforcement of Islamic laws. A few even demanded the legalization of the Tudeh, Iran's outlawed Communist party. The crowd, at times numbering more than 100,000, was a colorful, sometimes incongruous cross section of Iranian society: dissident students in jeans; women shrouded in the black chador, the traditional head-to-foot veil; peasants and merchants; and most important the bearded, black-robed Muslim mullahs, the religious leaders of the Shi'ite branch of Islam, which commands the allegiance of 93% of Iran's 34.4 million people...
...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...