Iran Universities To Ban Women From 77 Fields of Study 585
New submitter jasper160 writes "An August 20th, 2012 announcement from Iran places restrictions on female university students. Iran will be cutting 77 fields of study from the female curriculum, making them male-only fields. Science and engineering are among those affected by the decree. 'The Oil Industry University, which has several campuses across the country, says it will no longer accept female students at all, citing a lack of employer demand. Isfahan University provided a similar rationale for excluding women from its mining engineering degree, claiming 98% of female graduates ended up jobless.' The announcement came soon after the release of statistics showing that women were graduating in far higher numbers than men from Iranian universities and were scoring overall better than men, especially in the sciences. Senior clerics in Iran's theocratic regime have become concerned about the social side-effects of rising educational standards among women."
Iranian Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Shirin Ebadi wrote to the UN that this effort is "part of the recent policy of the Islamic Republic, which tries to return women to the private domain inside the home as it cannot tolerate their passionate presence in the public arena,"
Re:Iran had a secular democracy (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radcliffe_College
tl;dr: Women technically went to "Radcliffe", although starting in the sixties and seventies the courses were the same and the diplomas all said "Harvard" on them, by 1977 the distinction was entirely nominal.
Church/state separation was preached by Jesus (Score:5, Informative)
"Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's"
Separation of Church and state was preached by Jesus, and it is no coincidence that it emerged in Christian Europe, even if Europe took centuries to start following that teaching.
People who complain of the medieval European theocracies are guilty of anachronism. The whole world was theocratic then, and it took centuries for someone to think "outside the box".
See http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/ratzinger2.html [lewrockwell.com]
Re:Is it too late to get UN sanctions on them? (Score:3, Informative)
"So how did a nation with such cultural depth, such delightful people, so much going for them go so far off the track."
They tried to nationalize their oil and the US and UK did this to them in response:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_ajax
Compare and contrast to Norway nationalizing their oil and you will see that racism underscores our foreign policy.
Re:Is it too late to get UN sanctions on them? (Score:5, Informative)
I find it so fascinating. I've known many Persians. To a man and woman, they were intelligent, passionate, vocal and idealistic. So how did a nation with such cultural depth, such delightful people, so much going for them go so far off the track.
America happened [wikipedia.org].
Re:Is it too late to get UN sanctions on them? (Score:4, Informative)
Seriously, the problems of modern Islam are almost entirely a reaction to the obliteration of the Muslim intellectuals by Tamerlane.
You are probably right, according to this..
http://books.google.com.au/books?id=nFx3OlrBMpQC&pg=PA174&lpg=PA174&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false [google.com.au]
Independent scholars estimate that his military campaigns caused the deaths of 17 million people, amounting to about 5% of the world population.[16] The historian of Islamic Asia John Joseph Saunders summarized that "Till the advent of Hitler, Timur stood forth in history as the supreme example of soulless and unproductive militarism".
A bit more about Tamerlane AKA Timur? "Unlike his predecessors Timur was also a devout Muslim and referred to himself as the Sword of Islam."