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IRAN has banned private schools from teaching music, proverb it clashes with the country's Islamic values.
Said Ali Bagherzadeh, caput of the private schools role in the Education Ministry building:

The use of musical instruments is against the principles of our value system.

Educational activity music in state schools has always been prohibited, Bagherzadeh added. A school that teaches music may be permanently closed and its director barred from opening some other school, he emphasised. The ban applies to the use of all instruments, including those played in traditional Iranian music.
Iran'south 16,000 private schools have 1.i million students.
Meanwhile, Iran has gear up aside $1.five billion to promote "moral conduct," including enforcement of its dress code for women, "to solve the cultural and social ills" in lodge, Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar said last month.

Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar, pictured when he was defence minister

His comments followed the introduction of a code of behave at Shiraz University of Medical Sciences that bans loud laughter, blast shine, high heels and immodest habiliment for women and men.
The law will "deal firmly" with violators of Islamic republic of iran's laws on moral conduct, Mohammad-Najjar, a former defense mininster said. His statement follows the words of a mad cleric who said in April that women who dress immodestly cause earthquakes.
A commission is to be formed to offering a unmarried clothes code for university students in Iran, said a higher teaching official in April.
Said Jalil Dara, a manager for cultural diplomacy at the Ministry of Science, Enquiry and Technology:

It'due south best if there is a unmarried policy, a benchmark and criteria about academy dress codes, and so that private universities do not enforce different standards.

Shiraz University adopted a strict code in February nether which women must wear loose, and long coats in subdued colors that go below the knee. Men aren't permitted to habiliment jewellery, except for a wedding ring, nor short-sleeve shirts, and their trousers should be loose. Shoes shouldn't have pointy toes, brand dissonance or take heels college than 3 centimeters (ane.2 inches). Sandals, makeup and smoking are banned.
Only back to the music. Why do Muslim fundies hate it so much?
In a lengthy, and utterly deadening soapbox on the field of study, Turkish "expert" Mustafa Sabri wrote:

With music, a alone person feels his loneliness more, an orphan feels more than the loss of his parents, a patient feels more sorrowful of his situation, and an aged person feels sorrier that the about of his life has already gone. Yet once more, with music, a lucky person with wealth and a loftier ranking position feels happy more than he usually is. In curt, music paints the reality in darker colours by increasing the sorrow of the sorrowful and the happiness of the happy. And this mode, the effect of music resembles that of booze, causing people to perceive the reality in a more than stretched way than it really is. Above all of these, music has a tremendous event in agitating the feelings of romance and love.

In a far more illuminating examination of the subject, Daniel Pipes, in a 1998 article entitled "Y'all demand Beethoven to Modernise", said:

American popular music epitomizes the values that Muslims find most reprehensible about Western civilisation — the celebration of individualism, youth, hedonism, and unregulated sexuality.

He pointed out that the Pakistani fundamentalist grouping Hizbullah had singled out Michael Jackson and Madonna as cultural "terrorists" who aspire to destroy Islamic culture. The grouping'southward spokesman explains this fearfulness:

Michael Jackson and Madonna are the torchbearers of American society, their cultural and social values รข€¦ that are destroying humanity. They are ruining the lives of thousands of Muslims and leading them to destruction, away from their religion, ethics and morality. Terrorists are not simply those who set off bombs. They are likewise those who hurt others' feelings.

Hizbullah finished with a call for the two Americans to be brought to trial in Pakistan.
In 2007 Pipes revisited the bailiwick in "Music and Muslims".
Hat tip: Alan