Iran is a country of deep mosques

The first "e;achievement"e; Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini presented to the Iranian people was the imposition of the hijab. This was a brilliant blow that struck at the very heart of society, a blow that the cleric, raised in the seminaries of Najaf, Qom, and Mashhad, could not have foreseen. Yet, it resonated in a unique way, dividing society into two camps: urban dwellers in the major cities who condemned and rejected this measure, and rural inhabitants of hundreds of thousands of villages across the vast subcontinent who stood firmly in support of the decision. Khomeini declared himself the Imam of the oppressed and the leader of the poor, and he went to the obscure Jamaran Hosseiniyeh north of Tehran and stayed in a modest house nearby, whereupon the entire poor of Iran rallied behind him. The countryside supported the hijab because it was a tradition that villagers were reluctant to change, because it was cheaper, because it suited farming and strenuous work, and because it kept women under the protection of a male guardian ("e;mahram"e;). Thus, the inherited socio-economic and historical divisions remained unaltered. As for Iran's urban centers, the hijab crisis was incredibly devastating. Stylish Iranian women from these cities flocked to the United States and some European countries in search of freedom without the hijab. The political struggle with the clerics transformed from a conflict over power, wealth, resources, and influence into a struggle over liberating women from the Islamic veil as envisioned by Ruhollah Khomeini and the pillars of the Islamic Republic. The years of the Iran-Iraq War helped keep the hijab issue in the shadows, as the slogan "e;Everything for the Sacred Defense"e; overshadowed everything else, prioritizing this objective above all else.