Young dancing girls end career of Tehran’s mayor

A troupe of young dancing girls throwing rose petals may have ended the career of Tehran’s mayor, who suddenly resigned on Wednesday.

The mayor, Mohammad Ali Najafi, attended a celebration last week amounting to an Islamic version of Mother's Day. There he encountered six girls dancing in traditional costumes and throwing the rose petals in honour of a female saint.

There is a ban on dancing in public, however, for women in the Islamic republic. Girls older than age 9 are regarded as women by clerics, who resist any change in social norms.

Mr Najafi, a 66-year-old graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who came to lead the capital promising change, did not leave the auditorium when the girls took to the stage. A video of the event shows him immersed in paperwork as they twirl around and are handed baskets of rose petals by an adult.

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The audience can be heard enthusiastically cheering on the dancing girls. But hardliners who saw the video were outraged. “A celebration of indecency,” the semiofficial Fars news agency wrote of the event.

An influential Friday Prayers leader, Ahmad Alamolhoda, said the performance had been planned by enemies set on disgracing the Shia saint the event was itself meant to honour, Fateme Zahra.

Mr Najafi tried to defend himself. The mayor said the girls were all younger than 9, and that he regretted their dance had been a part of the event.

Mr Alamolhoda was having none of that, however. “One cannot argue that these were children,” he said, according to the semiofficial ILNA news agency. “They were young girls who incited arousal. They made the most atrocious movements. This cannot be justified.”

Pole dancers

On social media, Iranians, many of whom love to dance whenever they can, mocked Mr Alamolhoda by posting an image of the six girls before their appearance next to a picture of scantily clad pole dancers. “This is what hardliners see, versus what other people see,” one user wrote.

Hardliners took a different view. “A vulgar display, and the mayor is cheering it on,” one wrote.

Mr Najafi, who as an official in the Islamic republic has extremely little space to manoeuvre on the issue of personal freedoms, replied that he had not clapped for the girls but for the musicians who were also on stage. “The organisers of the event,” the Entekhab news website quoted him as saying, “said the girls were all under 8 years old, 9 years old, so the dancing was not against the Sharia law. However, I admit it would have been better had that part of the programme not been performed.”

It was too late. The Tehran prosecutor’s office summoned Mr Najafi, and the city council, which is dominated by reformist politicians like Mr Najafi, held an emergency meeting to discuss the episode. During his short term as mayor of Tehran, a city of 12 million including the outskirts, Mr Najafi was notably absent from the hardliner-dominated state media.

Stepping stones

Some of his predecessors, among them Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, used their years as mayor of the capital as stepping stones to national political roles. Mr Ahmadinejad became president and Mr Qaliba the commander of the Revolutionary Guards.

Mr Najafi, the first reformist to take on the post since 2005, seemed reined in. His administration did manage to hang billboards across the city honouring famous Iranian women, something unthinkable under the other administrations. But as often happens in Iranian politics, victory goes to those who most rigidly interpret Islam.

On Wednesday, Mr Najafi handed in his resignation, a city council member told the Fars news agency. Another council member said Mr Najafi had resigned because of medical reasons. – New York Times