HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_026558.jpg

Interestingly, the word Khamenei employs against the potential unveiling of women -
- fitna -- is the same word used to describe the opposition Green Movement that took to
the streets in the summer of 2009 to protest President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's
contested reelection. In other words, women's hair is itself seen as seditious and
counterrevolutionary. Even so-called liberal politicians in the Islamic Republic have long
fixated on this issue. Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, Iran's first post-revolutionary president, who
has spent the past three decades exiled in France, reportedly once asserted that women's
hair has been scientifically proven to emit sexually enticing rays. (An Iranian satirist
responded with a cartoon showing a man inadvertently aroused while eating lunch at his
friend's home; the culprit turned out to be an errant strand of his friend's wife's hair in
the ghormeh sabzi stew, an Iranian national dish.)

OVER THE LAST TWO DECADES, the women of Iran's younger generation have
increasingly pushed back and loosened their veils, but any discussion of abolishing the veil
altogether is not tolerated by Khamenei. In addition to opposition toward the United
States and Israel, the hijab is often considered one of the Islamic Republic's three
remaining ideological pillars. "For Islamic Republic officials, the hijab has vast symbolic
importance; it is what holds up the dam, keeping all of Iranians' other demands for social
freedoms at bay," says Azadeh Moaveni, an Iranian-American author. "Relax on the
hijab, they think, and all hell will break loose; next people will want to swill beer on the
street and read uncensored novels. They think of it as a gateway freedom."

Despite Khamenei's assertion that the hijab prevents men from straying, governmental
policies in fact encourage the opposite. For example, to help accommodate the apparently
incorrigibly wandering libido of the Iranian male, the country's parliament -- composed of
Khamenei loyalists -- has supported sharia-sanctioned "temporary marriages" (known in
Persian as sigheh) allowing men as many sexual partners as they want. The marriage
contract can last as little as a few minutes, and it doesn't need to be officially registered.
The man can abruptly end the sigheh when he likes, but initiating divorce is far more
difficult for women. Indeed, women who stray from the sanctity of their marriages do so at
grave risk -- dozens have been stoned to death in Iran for adultery.

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_026558