22 May, 2006
Iran's new dress code bill was aimed at encouraging designers to work on imaginative Islamic clothing, lawmakers said on Sunday, dismissing a report in Friday's edition of the Canadian newspaper "National Post" that the bill sought special outfits for religious minorities. The paper had reported that the draft bill approved last week would force Jews, Christians and other religious minorities to wear color-coded clothes to distinguish them from Muslims. A copy of the bill obtained by "Reuters" contained no such references, and the "National Post" officially retracted the story. The Iranian parliamentarian Mohsen Yahyavi described the report as "completely false", adding: "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." Iran's Jewish MP Maurice Motamed also agreed the bill made no attempt to force special garments on the minorities. "There is no single word in the bill about a special design or color for the religious minority groups," he said. "Our enemies seek to create tension among the religious minorities with such news and to exploit the situation to their benefit," he added.
However, a leading spokesman for Iranian Jews in the United States expressed his satisfaction about the report.
Sam Kermanian, secretary-general of the Iranian American Jewish Federation in Los Angeles, told the "New York Sun" that he suspected early reports of this kind may have been a trial balloon. "I am not sure if we have the whole picture. The person who originally reported this, Amir Taheri, is someone with fantastic credibility. In my heart, I think there must have been something that triggered this."
Laws in place since the 1979 Islamic Revolution require women to wear a "chador", a head-to-toe, loose-fitting black overcoat and veil that covers their hair and hides their shapes. They were enforced by religious police and paramilitaries, who castigated women who showed too much hair, wore makeup or had a chador that did not fit the required dark colors and shape. Under President Mohammad Khatami, elected in 1997, enforcement became lax, and many women took advantage, adding color to their clothes, pulling back scarves and shortening their coats. The new law, which focuses on economic incentives for Islamic dress, has been touted by conservatives as a vital tool to curb Western influence in the Islamic Republic. No date has been set yet on a final vote on the bill.
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