Daylight not saved

last updated 8 January 2015

Tehran

Iranians are furious at President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s decision not to observe daylight savings time this year. The government said there was no point in moving the clocks forward an hour, as the time change hadn’t produced significant energy savings in the past few years. But it announced that schools and government offices would open an hour earlier over the summer, at 7 a.m. instead of 8 a.m. That move has wreaked havoc on the schedules of working parents, since schools now operate on different hours from businesses. Daylight savings time was suspended in Iran for a while during the 1980s, when Shiite clerics contended that it was un-Islamic because it changed the hours of prayer. It’s unclear, though, whether Ahmadinejad’s motives were religious.