Tehran
An Iranian-American dance instructor got a 10-year suspended prison sentence in Iran this week for “corrupting the nation’s youth.” Mohamad Khordadian, 46, headed a ballet company in Tehran before the 1979 Islamic Revolution spurred him to flee to America, where he taught dance in Los Angeles. When he returned this year to visit family for the first time, he found that videos and TV broadcasts of his dancing—including a wriggling demonstration of the belly dance—had won him the adulation of Iranian teens and the wrath of Islamic clerics. Iran’s brand of strict Islam bans dancing. An Islamic court ordered Khordadian, an American citizen, not to leave Iran for 10 years, and forbade him to teach dance or even attend celebrations where dancing may occur.
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