Rafsanjani on female beauty

"Can anyone tell me where it says in the Holy Koran that women have to make themselves look ugly?"

That's former Iranian president Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, the man the media call the best hope for challenging Khameinei's hold on power, speaking in the mid-1980s, in reference to hard-right female journalists decked out in black. From a dispatch by John Simpson, who was in Tehran with the BBC until he was recently kicked out.