Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Thursday, May 02, 2019

What is not allowed in Iran

Clerical influence in Iran spreads more widely.

Tehran bans dog walking in public spaces

Iran's capital city has banned the public from walking pet dogs, as part of a long-standing official campaign to discourage dog-ownership…

As if this were not draconian enough, Brigadier-General Rahimi added that driving with a dog in your car was also banned…

Owning dogs as pets, and walking them in public, has been contentious ever since the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, and owners have sometimes had their dogs confiscated.

Dogs are viewed as "unclean" by Iran's Islamic authorities, who also regard dog-ownership as a symbol of the pro-Western policy of the ousted monarchy…

Iran TV pulls game shows amid religious gambling row

Iranian state TV has temporarily banned the country's equivalent of "Who Wants to a Millionaire" after complaints by senior clerics and conservatives.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned that game-shows endanger the "culture of hard work and productivity" that the country seeks to encourage.

Now a senior Shia cleric has issued a fatwa (an Islamic religious ruling) against shows like "Be a Winner" that offer cash prizes.

Gambling is banned under Islamic law…

The show, hosted by actor and model Mohammad Reza Golzar, gives contestants the chance to win up to 1bn Iranian rials (about $25,000) and allows audiences to win money by participating at home via an app…

Mohammad Reza Golzar

Buffalo bottoms prove too much for Iranian TV censors

You might expect Iran's state broadcaster to remove images of women eating cucumbers on television - but the backsides of buffaloes and the outlines of ears under headscarves?

Censors in the conservative Islamic republic have banned these from screens over the years and exasperated TV production staff are now taking to social media to laugh about them.

TV writer Amir Mehdi Jule kicked off a campaign on Instagram with the hashtag #Censorship_and_I, talking about the challenges of depicting women's bodies.

"One of the problems of displaying women on television, in addition to the [need for them to wear a] headscarf… is the perception or illusion of the size of their body parts underneath their clothes," he said.

But he never expected feedback asking him to pay attention to the size and shape of women's ears. "We never realised that an ear covered by a headscarf could be provocative," he said…

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