Banned from the stands.

This spring, for the first time since the Islamic revolution in 1979, Iranian women were allowed to enter a stadium and root for their country's national soccer team--although the women sat in a section apart from the men. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had unexpectedly lifted a ban that barred women from attending major sporting events. "Certain prejudices against women have nothing to do with Islam," he said. But on May 8, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei-the Muslim cleric who is Iran's supreme leader--rescinded the president's decision. Under Iran's system of clerical rule, Khamenei has final say on all government policy. Senior clerics determined that rowdy behavior at sporting events made them inappropriate for women, and that it violated Islamic law for women to look at male strangers. Since the revolution, the Iranian government has enforced a strict Islamic dress code for women and segregation of the sexes in public. But soccer is the most popular sport in Iran, and women had been demanding the right to attend games for more than a decade. Ahmadinejad had contended that the presence of women at games would promote better behavior.