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Iranian nurses defy strict Islamic law and dance to cheer Coronavirus patients [VIDEOS]

Public dancing was banned in Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and such incidents garner extreme wrath of mullahs and other Islamic hard-liners

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Coronavirus : New travel advisory

By Tuesday, the number of coronavirus cases in Iran reached 2,336, along with 77 fatalities. Given the fact that the west Asian nation reported its first case only on February 19, such a huge surge in the number of cases raises serious questions about country's health infrastructure, government's efforts to handle the crisis and whether the Iranian regime tried to shield the disease outbreak, at first.

With cases surmounting, hospitals are overwhelmed with patients. With the country reporting the highest coronavirus fatality rate, fear and panic among common citizens are obvious. At such a crucial moment, several videos have emerged from Iran, where medicos are seen dancing, in an attempt to lift the morale of patients as well as fellow medicos.

Iranian nurses dance to cheer coronavirus patients

Coronavirus
Workers make face masks in the workshop of a textile company in Jimo District of Qingdao, east China's Shandong Province, Feb. 12, 2020. Qingdao Municipal Bureau of Industry and Information Technology has mobilized two large textile companies to produce face masks to help the fight against the novel coronavirus epidemic. With the help and coordination of local authorities, the companies have retrofitted their production equipment and modified the assembly lines to produce face masks. It's expected that an average of 60,000 face masks could be produced per day in the first phase of production. (Photo by Liang Xiaopeng/Xinhua/IANS) Xinhua/IANS

In a video, the patients can be seen waving their hands, with music playing in the background as a woman tries to cheer them up. The video has gone viral on social media as people in the country continue their fight against the deadly virus.

Iran has a ban on several things: Dancing is one of them

Ruhollah Khomeini
Ruhollah Khomeini, man behind Iran's Islamic Revolution (1979) Wikimedia Commons

Although dancing was an important aspect of Persian life, before the Islamic Revolution of 1979, public dancing has been banned, since then, with an aim to strictly segregate the two genders. A woman is not allowed to dance in the presence of another man if he's not a family member.

In 2018, a Tehran municipality event to mark International Women's Day, attended by city's reformist mayor Ali Najafi drew wrath from Islamic hard-liners as grown-up women (above the age of nine) danced and the crowd applauded and cheered.

When Tehran's prosecutor threatened to open an investigation into the incident, Tehran's mayor had to post a picture of girls to assert that the girls were actually just eight years old, thus nothing "un-Islamic" had happened. In May 2018, several Iranian women were detained for posting their dancing videos. They were made to appear on a state news broadcaster, where they said they regretted for their activity online.

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