Follow-up on the Iranian dress code law

Iranian MPs admit that there was a dress code bill being discussed, but that, unlike as has been reported, it doesn’t single out religious minorities.

Iran’s new dress code bill is aimed at encouraging designers to work on imaginative Islamic clothing, lawmakers said on Sunday, dismissing a report that the bill sought special outfits for religious minorities.

[…] A copy of the bill obtained by Reuters contained no such references. Reuters correspondents who followed the dress code session in parliament as it was broadcast on state radio heard no discussion of proscriptions for religious minorities.

Senior parliamentarian Mohsen Yahyavi described the Canadian report as “completely false”.

“The bill aims to support those designers that produce clothes that are more compatible with Islam, but there will be no ban on the wearing of other designs,” he told Reuters.

[…] The parliamentary bill follows a call from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who said two years ago Iranians should design a national costume and not take their lead from Western fashion magazines.

The bill has only been approved as an outline. The details must be agreed then sent to the Guardian Council, Iran’s constitutional watchdog, for approval.

The discredited accusations that the bill would require identifying dress for religious minorities has obscured at least some of the debate about how stringent the new law would be about imposing dress standards on all Iranians.

A draft law aimed at encouraging Islamic dress raised fears Saturday that Iran’s hard-line government plans to re-impose veils and head-to-toe overcoats on women who have shirked the restrictions for years, letting hair show and wearing jeans and shapely outfits.

The looser social rules and dress codes are one of the few legacies left from Iran’s once-strong reform movement.

[…] The bill does not call for police or other bodies to enforce stricter styles of dress for women. Instead, it rallies state agencies to promote Islamic dress and “encourage the public to abstain from choosing clothes that aren’t appropriate to the culture of Iran,” according to the copy received from the parliament’s press office.

It also would give economic incentives, including bank loans, to producers making Islamic-style clothing and impose tariffs on clothes imports. It leaves it to the Culture Ministry and others to define what Islamic dress means.

Canada’s National Post, which ran the story, has retracted it (kinda-sorta). The NP story appears to have been put together by an Iranian emigre opponent of the current regime:

The Post story was drawn from a column in the paper by Amir Taheri, editor of the state-owned Kayhan newspaper under the Shah of Iran before the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Mr Taheri claimed the law was “drafted two years ago” and had been revived “under pressure” from President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad.

“The new codes would enable Muslims to easily recognise non-Muslims so that they can avoid shaking hands with them by mistake, and thus becoming najis (unclean),” Mr Taheri wrote.

A contributor to various newspapers including the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal and Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, a leading Arabic-language newspaper, Mr Taheri is an opponent of talks between the US and Iran.

He wrote in the New York Post last month the US should “go for regime change in Tehran” as the only way to stop Iran’s drive to “dominate the region and use it as the nucleus of an Islamic superpower which would then seek global domination”.

Not that Iranian government attitudes haven’t lent a certain plausibility to the tale. The government there has decided it wasn’t an anti-Tehran Iranian, but, well, the usual suspects:

In Tehran, Hamid-Reza Asefi, the foreign ministry spokesmen, said “a Zionist operation” was “active in different countries, including Canada, to foment psychological war and spread lies” about Iran.