September 3, 2021
A prominent cleric has decreed that women must not be allowed to be pilots partly because of their periods, but also because no country in the world allows women to pilot aircraft (or so he said).
Yusef Tabatabai-nejad, the Friday prayer leader of Esfahan and the Supreme Leader’s representative in the province, told a ceremony July 29, “In foreign countries, they are wise enough not to let women take the helm.” Actually, the Iran Times could not find any country that has a legal ban on women becoming pilots.
The cleric embarked on a tirade about women being too volatile for certain professions because of their “time of the month.”
In his speech, Tabatabai-nejad said, “When they come and proudly say that a woman can fly an airplane, or a woman is driving a trailer truck, is this really something to be proud of? They should go [abroad] and learn.”
He then claimed that other, unspecified countries barred women from these activities. “Over there, it’s not like this,” he said. “We must not do these things. They don’t give the control to women! In an airplane – I apologize – suddenly that time of the month starts, something happens to the woman, and she lets go of the plane. She gets sick. Is this the way to go?
“They [foreigners] don’t do it this way. They are wise!”
IranWire said this was far from the first time that Tabatabai-nejad, who represents Esfahan in the Assembly of Experts, the body that elects the Supreme Leader when the post falls vacant, has declared his opposition to women’s free presence in public spaces.
The cleric has previously railed against women riding bicycles. He also called for the use of “force” against “bad hejab.”
“Society should be made insecure for women who unveil,” Tabatabai-nejad said in 2014. “They should not be allowed to break the norms so easily on the streets…. The issue of hejab has gone beyond warnings. To fight bad hejab, we must raise the stick and use force.”
Tabatabai-nejad has also said that women’s failure to “care for their husbands” was a major contributing factor to the increasing divorce rate in Iran. “Mothers don’t teach their daughters how to care for their husbands,” he said. “We have girls who have had high levels of education but, after they are married, they don’t know how to sew a button or cook a simple dish. They don’t know how to do the simplest household chores.
“Mothers must educate women. They must bring up wives and mothers. A higher education degree has nothing to do with a woman’s running the life of a household.”
Tabatabai-nejad also said last year that women should be banned from working in shops, government offices and companies. He also said educating women in mining and industry was “against Islam.”
