How would you like your daughters to live in a world dominated by the mullahs? To help you decide let’s go On patrol with Iran’s fashion police.

It all starts with one simple sentence, spoken almost in a whisper, but which has a thunderous effect.

A female police officer deployed in Tehran’s latest moral crackdown tells a woman that her manto (overcoat) is too short and infringes Iranian Islamic dress rules.

“Azizam (my dear), good afternoon, if possible could we have a friendly chat, please allow us to have a small chat,” the officer, a graduate of Tehran’s police academy, tells the young woman.

“My dear there is a problem with your manto. Please do not wear this kind of manto. Please wear a longer manto from now on.”

Some are just let go there, but others are escorted to waiting minibuses with dark black tinted window panes and labeled “Guidance Patrol.”

A girl in a short white manto whose long hair was tumbling out the front of her headscarf is taken by the police to one of the minibuses on Vanak Square in central Tehran — an unexpected and unhappy end to her shopping trip.

Another arrested woman is already inside the bus. She begins to cry. “I promise, I promise!”

And the minibus doors slam shut.

Tehran’s police have said they are operating a three stage process in implementing the new wave of a crackdown on dress deemed to be un-Islamic, which started with some intensity on Monday afternoon.

First, women are given a verbal warning on the street. If the problem is not resolved there, they are taken to the police station for “guidance” and to sign a vow not to repeat the offense. Should this be unsuccessful, their case is handed to the judiciary.

“Sure my manto is short, but there are many others whose clothes are more seductive than mine and they walking by without any punishment,” one of the arrested girls in the minibus complained bitterly.

The arrested women will now go to a “center for combating vice”.

What makes the mad mullahs of Iran treat women like chattel? Are they perverting Islam? Or are they, perhaps, following specific instructions in the Koran? What does the Koran say? Let’s check with Robert Spencer‘s Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades.

On March 18, 2005, a Muslim woman named Amina Wadud led an Islamic prayer service in New York City. Because she is a woman, three mosques refused to host the service, so it was set for an art gallery, but the gallery withdrew the invitation after receiving a bomb threat. Finally, it was held in an Episcopal church. A Muslim protester outside the event fumed, “These people do not represent Islam. If this was an Islamic state, this woman would be hanged, she would be killed, she would be diced into pieces.” Undoubtedly true; nevertheless, Wadud maintained that such treatment was fundamentally un-Islamic: in the Qur’an she asserted, men and women are equal. It is only by distorting the Qur’an that Muslim men have come to regard women as only good for sex and housekeeping.

But did the Taliban really originate the features of Islam that discriminate against women? Will a ‘rereading’ of the Qur’an and other core texts of Islam really help ‘open Islam for women’? These are some of the texts that will have to be reread:

Women are inferior to men, and must be ruled by them: “Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other” (Qur’an 4:34)

The Qur’an likens a woman to a field (tilth), to be used by a man as he wills: “Your women are a tilth for you to cultivate, so go to your tilth as ye will” (2:282)

It declares that a women’s testimony is worth half that of a man: “Get two witnesses, out of your own men, and if there are not two men, then a man and two women, such as ye choose, for witnesses, so that if one of them errs, the other can remind her” (2:282)

It allows men to marry up to four wives, and have sex with slave girls also: “If ye fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly with the orphans, marry women of your choice, two or three or four: but if ye fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly with them, then only one, or captive that your right hands possess, that will be more suitable, to prevent you from doing injustice” (4:3)

It rules that a son’s inheritance should be twice the size of that of a daughter: “Allah thus directs you as regards your children’s inheritance to the male, a portion equal to that of two females (4:11)

It tells husbands to beat their disobedient wives: “Good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded. As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them” (4:34)

Aisha, the most beloved of Muhammad’s many wives, admonished women in no uncertain terms: “O womenfolk, if you knew the rights that your husbands have over you, every one of you would wipe the dust from her husband’s feet with her face.”

Individual Muslims may respect and honor women, but Islam doesn’t.