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Reihane Taravati, an outspoken social media activist, was riding in a taxi the other day when she received a stern reprimand from the driver.

Unbeknownst to Taravati, 26, her headscarf which Iranian women are required to wear as a show of modesty had slipped down the back of her scalp, leaving most of her hair exposed.

Fix your scarf, or the undercover [moral] police will see it, the cabbie told her. He worried about receiving a ticket in the mail, which would cost him about $30.

As Taravati relayed this story while sipping tea with friends in a Tehran cafe, a debate was raging in the Iranian capital that combines two things that people here obsess over: cars and the way women dress.

Specifically: is the car a public space, where women must clothe themselves modestly in accordance with Islamic laws, or a private space in which Irans ruling clerics have tolerated a bit more personal freedom?

In this traffic-choked city, private vehicles are the latest battleground in Irans ongoing culture wars, which Tehran denizens are watching ever more closely in the wake of the May presidential election.

There is growing tension between President Hassan Rouhani, who comfortably won reelection and has said that Irans police should not be empowered to enforce adherence to Islam, and hard-line clerics who favor a stricter interpretation of religious laws.

President Rouhani has reiterated over and over in the past year that a police officer is not authorized to poke his nose into peoples private lives and enforce what they perceive as Gods preferred lifestyle, Taravati said.

Questions over what is often referred to as bad hijab a lax interpretation of the official dress code that requires women to cover their hair and figures tend to rise in the summer along with Tehrans temperatures, which frequently touch 100 degrees in July.

Last week, in the closely watched Friday sermon at Tehran University, a leading cleric, Ayatollah Mohammad Ali Movahedi Kermani, took on the issue directly, saying: Private cars are not the private sphere.

Kermani invoked the forcible removal of the hijab in the 1930s by Irans former secular regime, led by Reza Shah Pahlavi, and argued that those who flouted the dress code were thumbing their nose at the ideals of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

I have heard that in some cars women do not wear hijab at all, he said. You who dont have proper hijab, you are violating the countrys independence. I thank law enforcement for trying to enforce the Islamic hijab.

In the political Shiite Islam that prevails in Iran, there is no concrete boundary between what is private and what is public. Moral police have been known to break up private parties attended by both men and women and arrest people for posting Instagram selfies because they are seen as immodest.

This month, reformist news sites reported that satellite dishes had been seized from the rooftops of private residences in two districts of Tehran. The dishes are officially outlawed hard-liners view them as a weapon of cultural invasion but a common feature of middle-class households.

Since Rouhani took office in 2013, he has insisted that peoples private lives should be protected from the regular police force and the moral police. But since May, Irans judiciary, which is close to the clerical establishment, has tried to further curtail the social freedoms that Rouhani promised.

The invisible part of the car, such as the trunk, is a private space, but this does not apply to the visible parts of the car, Hadi Sadeghi, deputy head of Irans judiciary, said this month.

Golnar Ramesh, a 28-year-old tour guide, said the post-election backlash against Rouhani supporters was a predictable turn in the rivalry between conservative and reform-minded Iranians.

In public, women and men should have the right to choose what they wear, Ramesh said. That is the meaning of the 24 million votes given to President Rouhani. It has become a repetitive and vicious pattern to crack down on freedom of choice for clothing after elections, whenever the hard-liners lose.

Shiva Ershadi, a 30-year-old interpreter who works with Afghan refugees in Tehran, recalled driving her car one evening in February 2016 following the results of parliamentary elections in which moderates and reformists won a sizable victory. She was stuck in traffic when she heard a loud banging noise it was a basij paramilitary soldier, in plainclothes and sporting a beard, warning her to fix her hijab, which had fallen off her head.

He was mad with rage and saw people like me responsible for [the election] loss, Ershadi said.

The logic behind [the hard-liners] argument is flawed and demagogic. The police consider people as potential sinners who must be punished whenever they are caught, rather than regarding them as respectful citizens entitled to the right of privacy.

Not all Rouhani supporters endorse the view that the car is private. Monireh Turkmanazar, a 66-year-old attorney, said anything visible on the streets should be considered part of the public domain and subject to police monitoring.

I think the opposition whether based abroad or inside Iran are raising a minor, irrelevant issue to raise pressure on reformists and moderates.

A reformist human rights defender, Saleh Nikbakht, said that since both cars and houses have roofs and windows, both should be considered in the private domain. But the frequent raids on houses show that the private sphere in Iran has been under attack, he said.

Hard-liners argue that when the police see through car windows that clear crimes are happening, then they can arrest people, said Nikbakht, 61. They do not want to distinguish between a woman without a scarf and a true criminal.

Taravati the free-spirited activist who in 2014 was arrested for participating in an online video set to the hit Pharrell Williams song Happy said the enforcement of Islamic dress was an attempt by hard-liners to punish Rouhani supporters.

Private life in the car, in the house and in the apartment must be respected, she said. That is what we voted for, and it is time for the president to deliver.

Special correspondent Mostaghim reported from Tehran and Times staff writer Bengali from Mumbai, India.

shashank.bengali@latimes.com

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Iran's latest culture battle: Should women in cars keep their heads covered? - Los Angeles Times

ISTANBUL A high-stakes power struggle between Irans moderate president and his hard-line opponents in the judiciary appeared to escalate with the arrest of the presidents brother and the conviction of an American student for espionage this weekend rulings that seemed timed to embarrass the Iranian leader at home and abroad.

President Hassan Rouhani, who was reelected in a landslide in May, has challenged the conservative establishment by pledging reforms in Iran and advocating diplomacy and openness toward the rest of the world. His recent criticisms of the hard-line judiciary and powerful security forces have prompted public rebukes from the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who wields ultimate authority in Iran.

The tensions come as Iran and the United States spar over the terms of a nuclear deal struck with world powers to limit Irans nuclear weapons program. On Monday, the White House grudgingly certified to Congress that Iran is in compliance with the deal, which was negotiated by the Obama administration and lifts major sanctions. The Trump administration has taken a much harsher stance on Iran, threatening to abandon the deal, and the Treasury Department on Tuesday announced new sanctions primarily targeting Irans ballistic missile program.

But the moves by Irans judiciary including the sentencing of a Princeton graduate student, Xiyue Wang, to 10 years in prison for spying also undermine Rouhanis attempts to build better relations with the West, which more-reactionary Iranian institutions such as the judiciary oppose. And they suggest an effort by ruling clerics to pressure the president to back down from confrontation on the domestic front, particularly ahead of the official inauguration of his second term next month, when Rouhani will pick his new cabinet.

More broadly, however, the actions by the judiciary and Khamenei paint a picture of a hard-line establishment hitting back at an outspoken and popular president who has promised to curb some of the regimes worst excesses.

Rouhanis pro-reform agenda poses a major threat to their worldview and political agenda, Nader Hashemi, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver, said of the hard-liners.

In recent weeks as well as during the May presidential campaign, Rouhani rapped the judiciary for what he said were arbitrary arrests and a history of atrocities. He also criticized the economic role of the elite Revolutionary Guard Corps, Irans most powerful security institution, at the expense of the countrys private sector.

Those admonishments led Khamenei to publicly defend the judiciary.

The judiciary should be a pioneer in establishing public rights within the society ... and confront anyone who violates laws, Khamenei said in a speech this month, according to the Center for Human Rights in Iran, an independent nonprofit based in New York.

Rouhani, addressing a gathering of judicial officials the previous day, had called on jurists to limit the practice of summoning people for interrogation without due cause.

Last month, Khamenei dressed down the president in front of the countrys most senior politicians, warning Rouhani against suffering a fate similar to that of Irans first post-revolution president, who served from 1980 to 1981. Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr was impeached after facing off against the powerful clergy and was forced to flee to France.

Using the institutions of the state that they control primarily the judiciary they are sending a message to Rouhani and his supporters that they are in control of the political system, Hashemi said. And that they will oppose his attempts to engage with the Western world and promote more freedoms at home.

The arrest and conviction of Wang, a 37-year-old scholar at Princeton, appeared to target Rouhanis wider foreign policy and engagement with the West. Although Wang was detained in August 2016, the timing of the verdict is suspect, analysts say.

Why did they keep it a secret as long as they did? Timing is important, said Alex Vatanka, an Iran expert at the Middle East Institute in Washington.

Wang, who colleagues say traveled to Iran to research the Persian Empires Qajar dynasty for his thesis, was accused of attempting to create a digital archive for the State Department and Western academic institutions.

Wangs sentencing by the Iranian judiciary is yet another indicator that the hardest of Irans hard-liners are the ones who set the direction for Iranian domestic and foreign policy, said Behnam Ben Taleblu, an Iran analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington.

But the arrest of Rouhanis brother, Hossein Fereydoun, this weekend appeared to be a more immediate and direct attack on Rouhani. Fereydoun is a close adviser of the president and was a key player in nuclear negotiations. He came under attack by conservatives this year for alleged financial impropriety, although the formal charges are still unclear.

Corruption and graft are widespread in Iran, but the probes are often politically motivated phenomenon, said Taleblu, adding that they have more to do with political score-settling than reforming business practices.

Elements of the Iranian judiciary and hard-line establishment have been looking at taking down Fereydoun for quite some time, he said.

According to Suzanne Maloney, a senior fellow and expert on Iran at the Brookings Institution, targeting Rouhanis brother is a very convenient way to cause pain to the family without necessarily provoking a crisis of office.

The general message that the rest of the system is trying to send to Rouhani is not to get too far ahead of himself, she said, to not allow his decisive election victory to give him illusions of greater autonomy and authority than his position actually has.

Whether Rouhani will bow to the pressure remains to be seen. During his first term, the president deferred to the supreme leader and failed to push through more-serious reforms.

The relationship between Rouhani and Khamenei in the coming years will be tense, Hashemi said. There has been an ongoing public feud between both figures, but ultimately power lies with the supreme leader.

If I had to bet, my bet would be for Rouhani to reluctantly submit to the limits established by the supreme leader, he said. All second-term Iranian presidents had to do this.

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With US scholar's conviction, power struggle escalates between Iran's president and hard-liners - Washington Post

Maryam Mirzakhani will be remembered as a woman who broke glass ceilings in life and in death. In 2014, the Iranian mathematician became the first and only woman ever to win the Fields Medal, popularly known as the Nobel Prize of the math world. And when she died last Friday at age 40, some Iranian media outlets, as well as President Rouhani himself, broke a national taboo by publishing photos in which she appeared with her hair uncovered.

In Iran, women have been required to wear the hijab in public since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iranian women rarely appear without the headscarf in the press. Mirzakhani, who grew up in Tehran but attended graduate school at Harvard and became a professor at Stanford, did not wear the hijab.

When Mirzakhani won the Fields Medal three years ago, Iranian newspapers went to extreme lengths to avoid showing her hair: They either digitally retouched her photo to add a hijab, published dated photos in which she appeared wearing one, or drew a sketch of her wearing one. But this past weekend, when the news that she had died of breast cancer at a U.S. hospital dominated the front pages of most newspapers in Iran, some of them finally allowed her to be pictured as she had lived. Mirzakhani had two things going for her this time: She had become a source of deep national pride. And she had passed away.

The First Woman to Win Math's Highest Award Dies at 40

In this case, she is dead, said Haleh Esfandiari, the Iranian American former director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. Because shes no longer around, whether they print a picture with or without a hijab doesnt make a difference for people. Its not relevant as a policy issue.

The centrist state newspaper Hamshahri ran a full portrait of Mirzakhani without a hijab, under the headline Math Genius Yielded to Algebra of Death. The reformist daily Donyaye Eghtesad did the same, with an accompanying headline that read The Queen of Mathematics Eternal Departure.

Another reformist daily, Shargh, showed her wearing a hat and dubbed her The Queen of Numbers Land. The Iran daily showed her without a hijab but used photo editing to fade her dark hair into a black background. Only ultraconservative newspapers Resalat and Keyhan didnt splash her image on the front page, according to PRI; Keyhan printed a photo of her wearing a headscarf on an inside page.

Esfandiari added that the emotion many Iranians felt for their world-famous genius and queenpride mixed with griefwas so intense that it overrode modesty rules: People admire her for her achievements and for who she was and there is a serious sadness around the country, that a young woman who was so promising died of cancer at an early age.

Masih Alinejad, a Brooklyn-based Iranian writer known for launching the Facebook page My Stealthy Freedom (the campaign encourages women in Iran to post pictures of themselves without a hijab, and has more than a million followers), suggested there was a different underlying motivation in the way some Iranians are claiming the mathematician as part of their national mythology. She was especially dubious about Rouhani, who was quick to publish a photo of a hijab-less Mirzakhani on Instagram.

Why didnt they publish her unveiled picture when she was alive? Alinejad asked. Now, when shes gone, theyre trying to own her, in a fake and disgusting way. They want to publish this to show the world, See, we broke the taboo!to use this opportunity to show that theyre moderate.

Rouhani came under fire from Alinejad and other activists when, in 2014, Mirzakhanis image was Photoshopped in Iranian newspapers. Alinejad said that her campaign had named and shamed the president and the offending media outlets online, and that Rouhani began to feel the heat as he was repeatedly confronted on the compulsory hijab issue over the past few years. In 2015, a journalist in France presented him with one of the My Stealthy Freedom photos and asked if he found it offensive. More recently, at this years Oscars, an Iranian TV stations decision to censor the image of Anousheh Ansari as she accepted The Salesmans award for Best Foreign Language film ignited social media outrage around the world. The president is facing not only international pressure, but also internal pressurefor instance, in the form of White Wednesday protests, during which women wear white and demonstrate in public against the dress code.

The Rouhani government is facing domestic discontent on another front: Irans serious brain drain problem. Mirzakhani left to pursue her studies in the United States, just as thousands of Iranians do every year; despite her having spent her career in the U.S., her death now offers Irans government and media an opportunity to symbolically reverse that phenomenon by memorializing her as one of their own.

They feel that their reputation is ruined around the world, and they want to get it back, Alinejad said. Maryam is a big name, so they jump on her to make a name for themselves. Its a sign of hypocrisy. If you really care about freedom of choice, you have to hear your own women whove been shouting for years inside Iran, not a person who has died.

For her part, Esfandiari doesnt see the medias shift on Mirzakhani as hypocrisy so much as understandable self-preservation. I think the newspapers that [covered up Mirzakhani in 2014] thought they were protecting her and protecting themselves, she said. They were probably worried that the newspaper would be confiscated and banned. In some cases its a kind of self-censorship by the newspapers, because they dont want to give an excuse for the censors to come.

Esfandiari added that some Iranian media outlets use the hijab issue as a way to punish women they have incentive to criticize. She cited Shirin Ebadi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her work on human rights issues, particularly in Iran. When the conservative press wanted to go after Ebadi, they published a picture of her taken abroad without the hijab, Esfandiari said. In the case of the beloved Mirzhakhani, however, there is no political incentive to tarnish her, so the conservative papers barely bothered covering her story.

Alinejad said that she considers the less conservative newspapers truthful depiction of Mirzhakhani a small step toward womens equalityand that its important to give credit to the vocal activists who protested Photoshop hijab until the government and media took notice: Some people say that its an achievement of Maryams. I have respect for Maryam and shes my hero, too. But Maryam Mirzhakhani didnt protest. Anousheh Ansari didnt protest either. This was the voice of Iranian women. They were trying to shame the government. And now they have been heard.

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Why Iran Broke Its Strict Hijab Rules for the 'Queen of Math' - The Atlantic

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- The wife of a Princeton graduate student sentenced to 10 years behind bars in Iran called on authorities there to release him Tuesday, saying the Chinese-American man has been "unjustly imprisoned."

Xiyue Wang was arrested nearly a year ago but his confinement only became known Sunday when Iran's judiciary announced his sentence, accusing him of "infiltrating" the country and sending confidential material abroad.

The 36-year-old, described by Iranian authorities as holding Chinese and American citizenship, was in Iran doing research for his doctorate in late 19th and early 20th century Eurasian history when he was detained.

In her first comments on his case, Wang's wife Hua Qu described her husband as "one of the kindest, most thoughtful, and most loving men I have ever known." She said the couple has a 4-year-old son.

In this undated photo made available by the family of Xiyue Wang, via Princeton University, Xiyue Wang, a Chinese-American Princeton graduate student poses for a photo at an unknown location.

Princeton University via AP

"Our son has missed his father for more than a year of his young life, as my husband has been unjustly imprisoned for espionage that I know he did not and never would commit," she said in a statement distributed by Princeton. "We fervently hope that the Iranian authorities will release him soon so that he can return home to his young family."

Princeton has been working quietly with Wang's family, the U.S. government, lawyers and others to secure his release, and hopes he will be released on appeal.

In an email distributed to staff and obtained by The Associated Press, university President Chris Eisgruber said Princeton has been working on a daily basis to try to free Wang and support his family.

The university and his family chose not to publicize Wang's arrest because U.S. government officials and other advisers warned that doing so might harm Wang's interests, Eisgruber said.

In a statement to CBS News on Sunday, Daniel Day, Princeton's assistant vice president at the Office of Communications, said, "We were very distressed to learn that charges were brought against him in connection with his scholarly work, and to learn of the subsequent conviction and sentence."

He added, "We cannot comment more at the present time, except to say that the University continues to do everything it can to be supportive of Mr. Wang and his family."

In this undated photo made available by the family of Xiyue Wang, via Princeton University, Xiyue Wang, a Chinese-American Princeton graduate student pose for a photo with his wife Hua Qu and their son in an unknown location.

Princeton University/AP

Wang was arrested on Aug. 8, 2016 and is accused of passing confidential information about Iran to the U.S. State Department, Princeton's Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies, the Harvard Kennedy School and the British Institute of Persian Studies, according to Mizan Online, a website linked to Iran's judiciary.

It alleged he scanned some 4,500 pages of digital documents, paid thousands of dollars to access archives he needed and sought access to confidential areas of Tehran libraries.

The U.S. State Department has not provided details on the case but called on Tehran to immediately release "all U.S. citizens unjustly detained in Iran."

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Xiyue Wang, a 37-year old Chinese American man who was in Iran conducting historical research of the country, has been arrested and imprisoned on...

Wang's advising professor, Stephen Kotkin, said his student planned to continue his research in Russia after Iran, a country he had not visited before.

His work in Iran involved scanning large numbers of documents that he intended to use while preparing his dissertation after he had left the country -- something that Kotkin described as "normal, standard scholarly practice."

In addition to Mandarin and English, Wang knows some Persian, Turkish and Pashto, and had worked as a Pashto translator in Afghanistan, Kotkin said.

Wang studied in China as a child and into his first year of college, then dropped out for a chance to study in India before eventually securing a spot at the University of Washington in 2003, he said in a speech given to an education agency.

He later studied Russian and Eurasia studies at Harvard University, then worked as a Princeton in Asia fellow at the law firm Orrick in Hong Kong in 2008.

He quit that position after only a year to join the International Committee of Red Cross as a translator for humanitarian work in Afghanistan, a country that had long captivated his interest, according to an article that appeared in China Newsweek in 2010 and was reposted on the official website of ICRC.

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The U.S. transferred $400 million to Iran last January, around the same time Iran freed four American prisoners. Now GOP members are accusing the...

There, he helped collect bodies or body parts of those killed in clashes and offered aid to those injured and captured, including Taliban militants.

Fluent in the written Pashto language, Wang amused the locals with his not-so-smooth, Beijing-accented spoken Pashto, but still managed to chat with them, according to the media report.

He told Chinese media that he cherished the opportunity to work in the conflict-stricken region. "How many people will have the chance to talk and laugh with the Taliban?" Wang said.

He began his doctoral work at Princeton in 2013. In recent years, he has contributed to the Chinese online news outlet The Paper as well as podcasts.

Wang is one of several Americans in Iranian custody.

Iranian-American art gallery manager Karan Vafadari was detained along with his Iranian wife last year. They have yet to be convicted of a crime.

Iranian-American businessman Siamak Namazi and his 81-year-old father, Baquer Namazi, are each serving 10-year sentences for "cooperating with the hostile American government."

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"Unjustly imprisoned": Wife of Princeton researcher held in Iran speaks out - CBS News

Iranians eat out at a high-end French sushi chain that opened this month in northern Tehran AFP/ATTA KENARE

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TEHRAN: For years, Iranians have had to put up with the likes of "Mash Donalds" and "Pizza Hat". Now real Western food franchises have finally arrived, but doing business in Iran is not for the faint-hearted.

Despite strict international sanctions being eased under a nuclear deal with world powers last year, the Iranian economy remains bogged down by red tape and struggles to attract foreign investors.

But a couple of European food franchises have decided the risks are worth taking for a taste of the estimated US$7 billion Iranians spend in restaurants each year, and which local consultancy ILIA says will double in the next decade.

Spain's Telepizza opened its first outlet this month through an Iranian consortium that plans to pump 100 million euros into expanding nationwide.

But one of the first Europeans to really get his hands dirty on the ground is 41-year-old French entrepreneur Amaury de la Serre, who bought the rights to launch Sushi Shop in Iran after falling in love with the country during a visit in 2013.

The first branch of the high-end French chain opened last week in a chic north Tehran neighbourhood, marking the culmination of a bruising 18 months of work.

"There's a strong government will to bring foreign capital and know-how here, but at the day-to-day administrative level, it's hell," de la Serre told AFP.

'NO PAIN, NO GAIN'

"Everything takes time, everything is complicated. It is very, very difficult to deal with customs.

"But no pain, no gain. And things are changing at full-speed here. I love this country and I'm very excited to be a spectator to its evolution."

Getting the supply chains running was certainly complex -- the restaurant uses 150 mostly local suppliers and must ship fresh fish from Norway three times a week.

It took a year just to get the licence to import Japanese sauces, and navigating Tehran's notorious real estate rackets was a saga in itself.

The government says it is trying to streamline its bureaucracy, but Iran actually fell three places in this year's ease of doing business rankings from the World Bank, down to 120 out of 190 countries.

Still, some of the biggest headaches are back in Europe, where banks are so afraid of US penalties that they freeze accounts at the merest whiff of a link to Iran.

"It's crazy. We went to the French Ministry of Economy and they gave us a list of all the banks that would agree to work with Iran. But when we called them, every single one said no," said de la Serre.

Eventually he found a small private bank willing to handle his transactions because they have no links to the US.

'THEN MR TRUMP ARRIVED'

But while he remains bullish on Iran's economic prospects, there are enough storm clouds on the horizon to keep him cautious.

"We wanted to launch several brands at once, but then Mr Trump arrived so we're taking the foot off the pedal a little," said de la Serre.

The US president has worried would-be investors in Iran with his aggressive stance against the country.

Just this week, he announced new sanctions over Iran's ballistic missile programme and what it called Tehran's support for terrorist groups in the Middle East.

Conservatives in Iran still rail against Western "cultural infiltration", even if the time in 1994 when the first post-revolution McDonald's was burned to the ground -- two days after opening -- seems a distant memory.

Today, Iran's affluent middle class has largely rejected ideology and is hungry for foreign brands, while fast-food has spread like wildfire even in remote villages.

And even conservatives recognise the urgent need for jobs with unemployment at 12.5 per cent, and far higher for young people.

"Expansion in the fast-food sector is a job creator precisely where Iran needs it most," wrote Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, founder of the Europe-Iran Forum, in a recent briefing note.

"After all, many of the world's greatest entrepreneurs got their start delivering pizzas."

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Foreign food chains brave risks for a bite of Iran - Channel NewsAsia