Two Girls Beat Up Muslim Cleric Over Hijab

They may be a far cry from their Western counterparts fighting for the acceptance to breast-feed - or go topless - in public, but two girls clobbered a cleric recently in a small town in Iran when he admonished one of them to cover herself more completely.

The cleric said he asked "politely," but the girl's angry reaction and some pugilistic double-teaming with her friend landed the holy man in the hospital, according to an account Monday in the semiofficial Mehr News Agency.

Hojatoleslam Ali Beheshti said he encountered the girls on his way to the mosque in the village of Shahmirzad for noon prayers in late August. He told one of the girls to cover up, the report said.

"She responded by telling me to cover my eyes, which was very insulting to me," Beheshti said. So he asked her a second time to cover up and also to put a lid on what he felt was verbal abuse.

She hit the man of the cloth, and he hit the ground. "I don't remember what happened after that," he said. "I just felt her kicks and heard her insults."

Beheshti, who emerged from the infirmary three days later, said he did not file a complaint against the girls.