Female students in Iran have been barred from more than 70 university degree courses in an officially-approved act of sex-discrimination which critics say is aimed at defeating the fight for equal women's rights.
This is part of the same Islamic tradition which kept women from attending school in Afghanistan.
In a move that has prompted a demand for a UN investigation by Iran's most celebrated human rights campaigner, the Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, 36 universities have announced that 77 BA and BSc courses in the coming academic year will be "single gender" and effectively exclusive to men.
'BSc' stands for Bachelor of Science, and is the British abbreviation; in the U.S., 'BS' is the standard way to refer to such degrees. While women have been barred by the Muslim government from studying many subjects at Iranian universities, men have been barred from none.
Senior clerics in Iran's theocratic regime have become concerned about the social side-effects of rising educational standards among women.
The Islamic leadership - the imams and mullahs - is working to keep women legally and socially inferior to men.
Under the new policy, women undergraduates will be excluded from a broad range of studies in some of the country's leading institutions, including English literature, English translation, hotel management, archaeology, nuclear physics, computer science, electrical engineering, industrial engineering and business management.
Similar measures are being taken in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. In those countries, unlike Iran and Afghanistan, the measures to oppress women are organized through the political party known as The Muslim Brotherhood. In Iran, such measures are being forced onto the oil industry - a major source of the region's wealth and power - by the ayatollahs. Islam has a commanding hold on the Iranian economy:
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.
If female graduates are often jobless - a questionable assertion at best - it is either because they face discrimination in the Muslim-dominated industry, or it is because they've chosen to be wives and mothers. In either case, there is no justification for preventing women from studying. Ebadi wrote a letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, and to the high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay.
"[It] 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," says the letter, which was also sent to Ahmad Shaheed, the UN's special rapporteur for human rights in Iran. "The aim is that women will give up their opposition and demands for their own rights."
Beyond education, the larger issue is simply personal freedom and individual liberty for women. There are already many regulations in the Islamic state of Iran which prevent women from exercising rights. This latest move simply indicates the trend toward even fewer freedoms for women, removing the few rights or liberties they had left. Until this latest legislation, women had been making substantial progress within Iranian universities:
Sociologists have credited women's growing academic success to the increased willingness of religiously-conservative families to send their daughters to university after the 1979 Islamic revolution.
Legal and social equality for women - long a hallmark of cultures in Europe and North America - remains elusive in the Middle East; in these cases, things seem to be getting worse rather than better.
