By ALI AKBAR DAREINI, Associated Press Writer

QOM, Iran (AP) - Fixing her black head-to-toe cloak, Zahra Langroudi settles in behind the wheel and pulls away from the curb with her first passenger, officially becoming Iran's first female taxi driver.

Langroudi and nine other women represent the private Nesa Taxi Service, the first in Iran and in the unlikely location of the country's holy city of Qom, which is also known as Iran's "Vatican City."

Nayereh Aghaz, director of the Nesa Taxi Service, told The Associated Press on Thursday that she launched the company to promote women's rights and abilities in a society where men are dominant.

"I didn't launch the all-female taxi service to make history but to offer tension-free services to women and also to highlight their capabilities and promote the rights of women in Qom where women have little public life," Aghaz said.

Since starting the service Saturday, Aghaz says her office has been flooded with calls from female seminaries, hair salons, schools and wives of clerics.

"A female taxi service conforms with the cultural atmosphere in this religious city where women don't feel comfortable traveling with male drivers," she said.

But authorities imposed many restrictions before approving the service. Drivers must be married, at least 23 years old, offer services only to women and boys under 12 and wear the Islamic chador — the black head-to-toe flowing robe.

"The wife and children will take our taxi but the husband has to walk," Aghaz joked. [...]

The lives of Qom's women are vastly different from those in Tehran, Iran's capital, where many women appear heavily made up in public, their hair only partly covered with colorful loose headscarves and their dresses shorter and tighter.

In Qom, women wear no makeup and almost all are dressed in the loose-fitting chador. Authorities prevent women pilgrims without the chador from visiting the shrine of Masoumeh, a female Shiite Muslim saint.

But the birth of the Qom taxi service could be a spark for larger change that women have been craving, Langroudi said before taking her first fare.

"Driving a taxi is not a top job but an achievement by women. Now the men's monopoly has begun to end," Langroudi said. "Men in our religious city should see that women are not only housewives."