Word: hijab
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Twelve years after Khomeini came to power, Iran's Islamic revolution has finally softened around the edges. The signs of fitful change are everywhere. On Tehran's streets women still observe hijab (the veil), the Islamic injunction that women keep themselves covered save for their faces and hands. But some have exchanged their shapeless black chadors for slightly fitted raincoats in colors like green and purple. Veils that are supposed to completely cover a woman's hair are inching back to reveal hints of the lush coiffures underneath. Women's lips and fingernails are beginning to sport glosses...
...indirectly endorsed by President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who came to power two months after Khomeini's death. Rafsanjani has not actually called for a reversal of strict Islamic injunctions, but in oblique ways he is signaling that he favors a more relaxed approach, especially in the enforcement of hijab. In a much publicized sermon last November, for example, Rafsanjani chided fellow clerics who make a virtue of "austerity" and argued that "appreciating beauty and seeking embellishment are serious feelings. To fight them is not God's desire...
...remarks ignited a debate among the country's mullahs that is still blazing. Two weeks ago, Ayatullah Abdul Karim Mousavi Ardebili, a conservative religious figure and former chief justice, said in a televised sermon that he was ashamed by the way hijab was being flouted and that "the revolution was headed for destruction" if the people did not step forward. Within a few days the Revolutionary Guards, who sometimes act independently of government wishes, began rounding up young women in the street whose dress they found objectionable. On Vali Asr Avenue, the capital's main shopping boulevard, a guardsman tried...