Tehran, June 23: Iranian police have issued warnings to 62,000 women who were ‘badly veiled’ in the Shiite holy province of Qom as part of a crackdown on dress and behaviour, The Telegraph reported.
Colonel Mehdi Khorasani, the provincial police chief, said police had also confiscated around 100 cars for carrying improperly dressed women and said that “encouraging such relaxations are among the objectives of the enemy.”
The population of Qom is more than one million, with most of them concentrated in the city itself which is Shiite Iran’s clerical nerve-centre.
By law, women in the Islamic republic must be covered from head to foot, with their hair completely veiled and social interaction is banned between men and women who are not related.
Iran is known particularly for summertime crackdowns on improperly dressed women but the issue has sparked debate after the hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said he ‘firmly’ opposed the crackdown. Earlier this month, he said he was “firmly against such actions. It is impossible for such actions to be successful.”
His remarks have drawn the wrath of fellow hardliners and several top clerics who have criticised him for opposing the police crackdown. Iran’s morality police have returned to the streets in past weeks, confiscating cars whose male drivers harass women, local media said, without clarifying what amounts to harassment.
The reports say the police or hardline militiamen have been stopping cars with young men or women inside to question their relationship. The Islamic dress code for women is also being more strictly enforced.
Women are often warned about wearing figure-hugging short coats and flimsy headscarves in the streets of big cities in defiance of the law which requires modest dress.
The punishment for women flouting the strict dress code can range from fines of between 5,00,000 and 13 million rials ($50 to $1,300) to jail terms of up to two months.
The police also target young men sporting tight, low-slung jeans and funky hairdos.
—AGENCIES