There are times, strolling down a British high street, faced with crop-tops and micro-minis that reveal bulging flesh — which good taste as much as decency would require covering up — when one almost understands the mentality behind the burka.

Almost. The difference is that the strict Islamic clerics who decree such dress apparently believe that any sight of the female body will inflame male lust. Women’s sexual self-expression isn’t part of the equation.

The late Ayatollah Khomeini, whose Islamic revolution in Iran was a watershed in reviving fundamentalism — and who is presumably now enjoying the favours of the promised virgins in paradise — would not approve of Marjane Satrapi.

Born in 1969 in Rasht on the shores of the Caspian Sea, Satrapi is an illustrator whose graphic novel Persepolis, with its simple pen-and-ink drawings and wry, witty, poignant personal story, is the most accessible history of that revolution and its human fallout.

Persepolis reminded us that before Iran was brutally transformed into a theocracy, with attitudes and laws that to most Europeans or Americans seem medieval, it was a remarkably modern state with a relatively large, well-travelled and sophisticated middle class.

Her new book, Embroideries, goes behind the veil that Iran’s male clergy has drawn to tackle the country’s private parts in intimate, explicit — the ayatollahs would say outrageous — and hilarious detail.

Satrapi gives a vivid, astutely drawn account of a full and frank after-dinner conversation at her grandmother’s house between a group of Iranian women after their cigar-puffing “better halves” have left the room.

It lives up to the old lady’s cynical motto: “To speak behind others’ backs is the ventilator of the heart.” This is a no-holds-barred, worldly-wise litany of the failings and foibles of their menfolk.

One woman tells of forced marriage to an older man, another to an absentee dowry-hunter, while a third has never seen a penis because her husband insists on turning out the light and all her children are girls.

At the same time they debate European love-making, the merits of the foreskin, buttock-to-breast transplants, and the mechanics of faking virginity, from nifty razor-blade techniques to the title’s gruesomely cynical “embroideries”, involving intimate stitching.

This is a book to provoke and entertain. But don’t show it to a mullah: it will only make him mad.

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