Tehran, Iran ? A young woman driving through the Iranian capital blared the Eagles’ “Hotel California” from her car speakers – an act that would have gotten her pulled over by police, and possibly arrested, 20 years ago during the frenzy of the Islamic Revolution.

To Pari Mahmoudi, who grew up in an era when many of the 1979 revolution’s restrictions have been dropped or ignored, a new ban on Western music ordered this week by Iran’s hard-line president seems too ludicrous to be real.

“Don’t take this man seriously,” the 25-year-old scoffed Tuesday, referring to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

But some fear the ban that Ahmadinejad enacted Monday is a sign of more to come. The order affects only state-run television and radio, which occasionally play Western music – without lyrics – in the background of newscasts or other programs.

However, some worry it is only a first step toward the wider bans imposed after the revolution, which forbade all popular music – including Iranian – as “un-Islamic.”

Many find it inconceivable that the government could start imposing restrictions again.

“This president speaks as if he is living in the Stone Age. This man has to understand that he can’t tell the people what to listen to and what not to listen to,” Mohammed Reza Hosseinpour said while browsing through a Tehran music shop.

Iranian guitarist Babak Riahipour said a wider ban on music could not be enforced because Iranians’ access to the outside world through the Internet and satellite television is easier than it was in the 1980s.

“Mr. Ahmadinejad maybe doesn’t know his society well enough … especially among the youth,” he said. “We can still get the music we would like to listen from somewhere else. We can get it from the Internet, we can get it on Tehran’s big black market, anywhere.”