Iran’s strict Islamic authorities allowed women to attend men’s football matches on Wednesday night, after decades of banning what one religious scholar called the practice’s “vulgarity”.
Men in the Islamic Republic have long been banned from attending football matches, at least in part because of the theory that women shouldn’t hear swearing or that fans see men wearing skinny clothing like shorts and T-shirts.
The AP reported that videos posted on social media on Wednesday night showed the women in the stadium during a national league match between Iran’s second most popular team, Esteghlal, and Mes-e Kerman, who entered the field to compete.
Footage of the event shows women waving the Esteghlal team’s blue flags and cheering from their seats in a special area reserved for 500 women in the 100,000-seat stadium.
FIFA has demanded that Iran provide assurances that women will be allowed to compete in the 2022 FIFA World Cup qualifiers, despite the country’s women’s squad and a large number of men awaiting breast replacement surgery.
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In 2019 and for the first time in decades, hundreds of Iranian women were allowed to play Persepolis in Tehran with Japan’s Kashima Horns in the Asian Champions League final.
However, the AP said in March that Iranian authorities banned women from participating in the 2022 FIFA World Cup final qualifiers between Iran and Lebanon in the holy city of Mashhad.
Iranian football fans in hats and blue flags wait to enter the Azadi (Liberty) stadium in western Tehran to watch a football match between Esteghlal and Mes Kerman on August 25, 2022. (Morteza Nicoubase/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
At the time, Iranian media reported that 12,500 tickets, 2,000 of which were reserved for women, were sold online.
As Breitbart News reported, in 2018, female football fans wore fake beards, mustaches and wigs to sneak into a major football match in Iran, violating the country’s strict Islamic code of conduct.
Football fans wore fake beards, mustaches and wigs to sneak into a big football match in Iran in 2018, opposing the government’s ban on female spectators. (Instagram)
Before the Islamic Revolution in 1979, women were allowed to participate in sporting events.
However, Ahmed Alamolhoda, a strong Friday prayer leader appointed by the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in Mashhad, reportedly said he was against the presence of women as spectators at sporting events.
An expert on the religion of Islam called it “bulgarism”.
Source: Breitbart
