Under the moonlight on a hotel roof, a 22-year-old Iranian woman last month unfurled her black headscarf, leant back on a carpeted bed, and took a puff of mint-infused tobacco from a hookah, a traditional water-pipe recently deemed illegal by the morality police in Yazd, a city in central Iran's desert. A man to whom she was not married stroked her hair, another crime under Iran's law. "My hair is too beautiful to hide under a headscarf," she said defiantly. After focusing their energy on stifling political dissent in the wake of disputed elections in 2009, the authorities are back to business as usual, meddling in personal lives and curbing social freedoms.
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