By Xinhua,
Tehran : Iran has launched the “world’s first unisex Muslim skydiving center,” Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency reported here Wednesday.
Iran’s Aviation and Pilot Training Company, Paravaran Asseman, has recently opened the “world’s first unisex Muslim sky diving center” in Tehran “with female instructors,” Fars said.
The center, named “Shahab Skydiving Center,” plans to operate all through winter and is preparing for an expansion of its operations in spring 2009.
According to the report, Muslim women have had no chance of skydiving with male instructors, “due to the fact that their bodies would be intimately positioned whilst harnessed together.”
Therefore, “as a totally new way of allowing Muslim women to participate, Shahab Skydiving Center has specifically employed female sky diving instructors which have uniquely allowed Muslim women to experience the thrill and exhilaration of sky diving for the first time,” it said.
In a bitter experience, Pakistani Tourism Minister Nilofar Bakhtiar resigned in May last year after the “hardline Islamic clerics accused her of obscenity for hugging her sky diving instructor after a charity parachute jump,” according to the report.
Bakhtiar was photographed in the jumpsuit while “hugging her instructor after a tandem jump to raise money for child victims of the earthquake that struck Pakistan in October 2005.”