Word: shahs
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Conservative mullahs, in their quest for a return to the old traditions, want this trend reversed. They accuse the Shah of degrading Islamic womanhood by exposing females to Western ways and destroying the former practice of sex segregation. But any return to the strict Islamic codes would affect the status of Iranian women and doubtless bar them from a number of jobs that they now hold...
...future of women under an Islamic government has become a controversial issue. Ironically, many educated women are taking more traditional 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...
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...
...allow their country to be turned into another "grim and miserable" Lebanon. But unlike Lebanon, riven by deep religious differences, Iran is a nation of 34 million people who are more or less homogeneous and overwhelmingly (98%) Muslim. What divides Iran today is warring perceptions of the Shah and the direction in which he has pushed his oil-rich remnant of the old Persian empire. A cross section of Iranians interviewed by TIME...
Rajab Motamedi, 45, is a shopkeeper in Tehran's central bazaar, focus of some of the most violent anti-Shah protests. Like other small merchants, Motamedi has been hurt by Iran's cruel inflation (currently 50% annually) more than he has been helped by the prosperity that has expanded the country's middle class, and he believes that the Shah's drive to make Iran a modern industrial state has led to foreign domination. Jailed three times for anti-government activities, he has closed his shop and vows not to reopen until the Shah is overthrown...