Iranian Cleric Pummeled By Girls He Scolded Over Dress Code

Two girls clobbered a cleric recently in a small town in Iran when he admonished one of them to cover herself more completely.

The cleric said he asked “politely,” but the girl’s angry reaction and some pugilistic double-teaming with her friend landed the holy man in the hospital, according to an account Monday in the semiofficial Mehr News Agency. Hojatoleslam Ali Beheshti said he encountered the girls on his way to the mosque in the village of Shahmirzad for noon prayers in late August. He told one of the girls to cover up, the said.

“She responded by telling me to cover my eyes, which was very insulting to me,” Beheshti said. So he asked her a second time to cover up and also to put a lid on what he felt was verbal abuse. She hit the man of the cloth, and he hit the ground.


Beheshti, who emerged from the infirmary three days later, said he did not file a complaint against the girls. But he doesn’t mind the local prosecutor’s investigation into the matter either “as long as the case helps the cause of Islamic hijab.”

The girls may have put the “jab” into “hijab,” but fighting with morality police or private individuals telling women to cover up is rare in small towns. It’s more common in larger cities, where women are more likely to take a stand.

Do you think the cleric deserved all the clobbering from the girls? Or, was the girls’ reaction just too much for a “polite” request to cover up? Feel free to express your opinion regarding this matter!

Source: CNN

Image: Feeddoo

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A suicide bomber disguised as an elderly visitor blew up a major Sunni mosque in Baghdad, Iraq, killing 28 people and leaving 37 injured on Monday, during special prayers just a few days before the conclusion of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan.

The bomber, who was swathed in bandages, detonated the bomb in the main hall of the blue-domed Umm al-Qura mosque in west Baghdad, where an estimated 200 people were praying. This is the city’s largest Sunni mosque. The 9:40 p.m. attack was blamed on Al Qaeda. However, none of Iraq’s armed groups immediately claimed responsibility for this. [Read more...]