Mashad was officially awarded the title in a ceremony held in the city on Tuesday, attended by a large number of high-ranking Iranian officials and representatives of 51 Islamic countries.

Iranian Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance Seyed Reza Salehi Amiri and Health Minister Seyed Hassan Qazizadeh Hashemi were among the officials attending the event.

The ISESCO, which is associated with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), launched the initiative for three cities to be named each year as the capitals of the Islamic culture in Asia, Arab, and African regions.

Back in July 2016, Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qassemi said that selection of the holy city of Mashhad as the capital of the Islamic culture in 2017 by the OIC provides a good opportunity for introducing Iran’s Islamic civilization. </s> The Iranian city of Mashhad has been officially named as the cultural capital of the Islamic world in 2017 during a ceremony held in the holy city on Jan.24. Shahindokht Molaverdi, Iran's vice-president for women and family affairs, has said that the role of women in the Islamic societies should be studied during such events, IRIB news agency reported.

Start the conversation, or Read more at Trend. </s> TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iranian authorities have arrested dozens of people in fresh crackdowns on models and associated colleagues posting “immoral images” online.

The official IRNA news agency reported Monday that officials in the southern port city of Bandar Abbas, some 1250 kilometers, or 630 miles, south of the capital Tehran, arrested eight women and 36 other people in the photography, beauty salons and wedding businesses who used Instagram to share what they considered indecent images and clips.

Her name is Maeade Mahi. Recently she got arrested just because of uploading her dancing videos on her Instagram. If you are a woman in Iran and you dance or sing or show your hair then you are a criminal. If you want to enjoy your true self, you have to brake the laws every day. pic.twitter.com/0eIq5ld5x6

Police said they were “damaging public virtue through the organized spreading of anti-cultural” activities.

Iran conducts regular similar crackdowns to combat western cultural influence, which draws the ire of the Islamic Republic’s hard-liners. </s> TEHRAN, Iran - A powerful magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck northeastern Iran near the holy city of Mashhad on Wednesday, sending people fleeing out onto the street as aftershocks shook the region. Iranian state radio said the epicenter of the quake appeared to be the Sefid Sang district, a remote mountainous area home to 5,000 people some 80 kilometers southeast of Mashhad.

Start the conversation, or Read more at The Washington Post. </s> A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck near the holy city of Mashhad in Iran's northeast on Wednesday, the U.S. Geological Survey and Iranian media said. USGS said the quake occurred 76 km east-southeast of the city and at a depth of 33 km.

Start the conversation, or Read more at Reuters. </s> MASHHAD, Iran : A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck 76 km east-southeast of the city of Mashhad in northeastern Iran on Tuesday, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) said.

USGS said the quake occurred at a depth of 33 km.

Mashhad is the second most populous city in Iran and capital of Razavi Khorasan Province. It is located some 970 kilometers from Quetta. </s> LONDON, April 5 (Reuters) - A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck near the holy city of Mashhad in Iran's northeast on Wednesday, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and Iranian media said.

USGS said the quake occurred 76 km east-southeast of the city and at a depth of 33 km.

Iranian state television said the quake happened at 10:40 a.m. local time (0610 GMT) and had shaken Mashhad and cities around it.

Tasnim news agency reported that phone lines in parts of affected areas were disrupted.

There were no immediate reports of casualties. </s> The ceremony was held at the World Intellectual Property Organization building in Geneva on March 21, marking the beginning of the Persian New Year and arrival of spring.

During the ceremony, Iranian ambassador to UN office at Geneva, Esmaeil Baghaei, delivered a speech on behalf of the 11 countries which celebrate Nowruz, discussing the philosophy of Nowruz and the importance of getting inspiration from this ancient rite to promote solidarity, friendship and mutual respect among nations.

Baghaei described Nowruz as the bearer of this universal message of welcoming transformation and renewal, and perceiving the dependency of human beings on nature and the environment.

Nowruz was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009, and recognized as an international day by UN General Assembly in 2010.

The Nowruz ceremony in Geneva was attended by more than 2000 people, including ambassadors and diplomats, officials and staff from international organizations and Iranians living in Switzerland.

In addition to the Islamic Republic of Iran, which coordinated the ceremony, representatives from Afghanistan, Iraq, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Turkey also participated in the event. </s> The war of words between regional religious and political rivals Iran and Saudi Arabia has heated up as more than two million Muslims assembled in the Grand Mosque in Mecca to perform the initial rituals of the annual Hajj pilgrimage.

Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani, a moderate mid-level Shia cleric, called on Muslims to unite and punish the Sunni Saudi government for its mismanagement of last year’s Hajj when at least 2,411 pilgrims (according to the Associated Press), among them 464 Iranians, were killed in a stampede – and for Saudi involvement in wars in Syria and Yemen.

Rouhani was replying to Saudi Arabia’s chief cleric, Grand Mufti Abdelaziz al-Sheikh, who declared that Shias are “not Muslims [but] children of the Magi [Zeroastrians] and their hostility towards Muslims is an old one”.

This policy line towards Shias, considered along with Sunnis an orthodox Islamic sect, was adopted by the 18th-century cleric Mohamed Ibn Abdul Wahhab, who called for a return to Islam’s founding principles and partnered with Muhammad Ibn Saud in the conquest of Arabia.

Al-Sheikh’s pronouncement came in response to Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who said the Saudis had “murdered” last year’s victims and urged the Muslim world to challenge Saudi stewardship of not only the Hajj but also of Mecca and Medina, the cities where Islam was born. If his call were accepted, it would nullify the right of the Saudi monarch to assume the title of “Guardian of the Two Holy Sites”.

Khamenei wants a commission representing all Muslim sects to take over management of the Hajj and the holy cities, although the Saudis conquered Mecca and Medina nearly a century ago and have spent billions of dollars on pilgrimage infrastructure, earning billions in return from the Hajj.

When the multitude gathers today and tomorrow in the tent city at Mina ahead of the pilgrimage, some 61,000 Iranians will be absent. For the first time in nearly 30 years, Iranians are not participating, after Tehran and Riyadh rowed over terms surrounding the pilgrimage.

The major obstacle was Riyadh’s insistence that Iranians should apply for Hajj visas from the Swiss embassy in Tehran, as the Saudi embassy in Tehran has been closed since an arson attack on it last January by an Iranian mob after the Saudis executed Nimr al-Nimr, a leading Saudi Shia cleric accused of “terrorism”.

The last time Iranians stayed away from the hajj was after the 1987 event, when 400 pilgrims and police died in clashes sparked by Iranian anti-western political protests.

On Sunday, the throng will move to the Plain of Arafat where the faithful will stand in silence at noon to commemorate the “Standing” of the congregation listening to the Prophet Muhammad’s sermon. That night, ahead of the Feast of Sacrifice, the pilgrims will camp at Muzdalifa, located between Arafat and Mina, where each will gather stones to fling over the next three days at three pillars, in a symbolic rejection of temptation.

The traditional small stone pillars surrounded by low white-washed walls have been replaced by a multilevel, circular pedestrian bridge from which pilgrims carry out the stoning of massive pillars. The concrete bridges and their approaches have been the sites of seven deadly crushes between 1994 and 2015, with a total of some 4,000 fatalities.

The causes of the 2015 stampede and the number of victims are disputed, prompting many countries to criticise Riyadh for failing to impose crowd control.

The tussle over the hajj is a bitter religious aspect of Iranian-Saudi rivalry, intensifying the power struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia which began in earnest with the 1979 creation of the Iranian Islamic Republic.

Since then Iran has stirred dissent among Shias in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and elsewhere but failed to extend its influence to a major Arab country until 2003, when the US installed a pro-Iranian Shia regime in Baghdad.

Today Iran backs the Syrian government and Shia Houthi rebels in Yemen while Saudi Arabia seeks the overthrow of the Syrian regime and is waging war on the Houthis.
Mashhad in northeastern Iran was officially named the capital of the Islamic culture in 2017 by the ISESCO.