Mick Hartley

Perhaps our judiciary should take some lessons from the Iranian police on the vexed question of how women should dress:

Thousands of Iranian women have been cautioned over their poor Islamic dress this week and several hundred arrested in the capital Tehran in the most fierce crackdown on what’s known as “bad hijab” for more than a decade.

It is the talk of the town. The latest police crackdown on Islamic dress has angered many Iranians – male, female, young and old.

But Iranian TV has reported that an opinion poll conducted in Tehran found 86% of people were in favour of the crackdown – a statistic that is surprising given the strength of feeling against this move.

Police cars are stationed outside major shopping centres in Tehran.

They are stopping pedestrians and even cars – warning female drivers not show any hair – and impounding the vehicles and arresting the women if they argue back.

Middle-aged women, foreign tourists and journalists have all been harassed, not just the young and fashionably dressed…

At the start of every summer the police say they will enforce the Islamic dress code, but this year has been unusually harsh.

Thousands of women have been cautioned by police over their dress, some have been obliged to sign statements that they will do better in the future, and some face court cases against them.

Though the authorities want coverage internally to scare women – they don’t want the story broadcast abroad…

One shopkeeper selling evening dresses told us the moral police had ordered him to saw off the breasts of his mannequins because they were too revealing.