Noted Iran analyst and writer Karim
Sadjapour, wrote a piece for a special "Sex" issue of
ForeignPolicy.com, entitled "In the Islamic Republic of Iran,
all politics may not be sexual, but all sex is political."
(May/June 2012) The article is longer than my usual posts, but this
is a subject often overlooked in discussions of Iranian culture and
Islamic rule:
In the early years of the Iranian
Revolution, an obscure cleric named Ayatollah Gilani became a
sensation on state television by contemplating bizarre hypotheticals
at the intersection of Islamic law and sexuality. One of his most
outlandish scenarios -- still mocked by Iranians three decades later
-- went like this:
"Imagine you are a young man
sleeping in your bedroom. In the bedroom directly below, your aunt
lies asleep. Now imagine that an earthquake happens that collapses
your floor, causing you to fall directly on top of her. For the sake
of argument, let's assume that you're both nude, and you're erect,
and you land with such perfect precision on top of her that you
unintentionally achieve intercourse. Is the child of such an
encounter halalzadeh (legitimate) or haramzadeh (a bastard)?"
Young Iranian men, hanging out |
Such tales of random ribaldry may sound
anomalous in the seemingly austere, asexual Islamic Republic of Iran.
But the "Gili Show," as it came to be known, had quite the
following among both the traditional classes, who were titillated by
his taboo topics, and the Tehrani elite, who tuned in for comic
relief. Gilani helped spawn what is now a virtual cottage industry of
clerics and fundamentalists turned amateur sexologists offering
incoherent advice on everything from quickies ("The man's goal
should be to lighten his load as soon as possible without arousing
his woman") to masturbation ("a grave, grave sin which
causes scientific and medical harm").
Perhaps it's not entirely surprising
that Iran's Shiite fundamentalists -- not unlike their evangelical
Christian, Catholic, Orthodox Jewish, and Sunni Muslim counterparts
-- spend an inordinate amount of time pondering sexuality. They are
human, after all. But the sexual manias of Iran's religious
fundamentalists are worthy of greater scrutiny, all the more so
because they control a state with nuclear ambitions, vast oil wealth,
and a young, dynamic, stifled population. Yet for a variety of
reasons -- fear of becoming Salman Rushdie, of being labeled an
Orientalist, of upsetting religious sensibilities -- the remarkable
hypocrisy of the Iranian regime is often studiously avoided.
That's a mistake. Because religion is
politics in a theocracy like Iran, uninformed or antiquated notions
of sexuality aren't just confined to the bedroom -- they pervade the
country's seminaries, military barracks, boardrooms, courtrooms, and
classrooms. A common aphorism among Iranians is that before the
revolution, people partied outside the home and prayed inside, while
today they pray outside and party inside. This reverse dichotomy is
true of a lot of social behavior in Iran. For many Iranians, this
perverse state of affairs is now so ingrained, such an inherent
aspect of daily interactions with Iranian officialdom, that it is no
longer noteworthy. For those in the West who seek to better
understand what makes Tehran tick, though, the regime's curious
fixation on sex cannot be ignored.
...in the Islamic Republic of Iran all
politics may not be sexual, but all sex is political. Exhibit A is
the revolution's father, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Like
all Shiite clerics aspiring to become a "source of emulation"
(marja'-e taqlid), Khomeini spent the first part of his career
meticulously examining and dispensing religious guidance on personal
behavior and ritual purity that ranged from the mundane ("It is
recommended not to hold back the need to urinate or defecate,
especially if it hurts") to the surprisingly lewd.
In his 1961 religious treatise A
Clarification of Questions (Towzih al-Masael), Khomeini issued
detailed pronouncements on issues ranging from sodomy ("If a man
sodomizes the son, brother, or father of his wife after their
marriage, the marriage remains valid") to bestiality ("If a
person has intercourse with a cow, a sheep, or a camel, their urine
and dung become impure and drinking their milk will be unlawful").
As a young boy growing up in the American Midwest, I remember being
both horrified and bewildered after coming across these precise
passages in a translated volume of Khomeini's sayings I found in our
Persian émigré home.
Scholars of Shiism -- including harsh
critics of Khomeini -- emphasize that such themes were the norm among
clerics of Khomeini's generation and should be understood in their
proper context: Islam was a religion that emerged out of a rural
desert, and the Prophet Mohammed was himself once a shepherd. Whereas
religions like Christianity and Judaism simply declare such behavior
to be sinful, Islam addresses them from a juridical point of view.
The underlying problem, says Islamic
scholar Mehdi Khalaji, a former seminary student in the Shiite
epicenter of Qom, is not that such issues were addressed, but the
fact that "Islamic jurisprudence hasn't yet been modernized.
It's totally disconnected from the issues that modern, urban people
have to deal with."
Indeed, Khomeini's religious
prescriptions are often the butt of jokes among Iran's
post-revolutionary generations. "I've never even seen a camel in
Tehran," prominent Iranian cartoonist Nikahang Kowsar told me,
"let alone been tempted to have sex with one."
If there is a double entendre that
aptly captures today's Middle East, it is the "youth bulge."
The Arab world's median age is 22, Iran's is 27; Western Europe's, by
contrast, is near 40. High levels of Internet and satellite
television penetration, with their pervasive pornography, coupled
with the region's youthful demographics, have accentuated the Muslim
Middle East's fraught relationship with sexuality.
Boardwalk, Bandar Bushehr |
Google Trends, which monitors searches
from around the world, shows that of the seven countries that most
frequently search the word "sex" on Google, five are Muslim
and one (India) has a large Muslim minority. (The word "sexy"
is even more popular among Arabs.) Google Insights, another trend
spotter, shows that the most rapidly rising search term for Iranians
so far in 2012 has been "Golshifteh Farahani," a popular
exiled actress who in January posed topless for the French magazine
Madame Figaro.
Before the 1979 revolution, religious
fundamentalists were revolted by images of scantily clad Iranian
women in the country's cinema and television; today, state television
and cinema are forbidden from showing unveiled Iranian women. This is
despite the fact that most of the country's citizens have access to
the much more tawdry fare on satellite TV (the dishes are officially
illegal, but thought to be smuggled in by the Islamic Revolutionary
Guard Corps itself). In the forthcoming documentary The Iran Job,
Kevin Sheppard, an American who played basketball in Iran's
professional leagues, is shocked while surfing his newly connected
satellite television. "We have 600 channels," he remarks,
"400 of them are sex!"
Because of its religious pretensions,
however, the Iranian regime is forced to spend untold millions of
dollars trying to jam satellite TV broadcasts to prevent them from
reaching the country's citizens -- a futile attempt to simultaneously
repel the forces of both technology and human nature. In an interview
with the New Yorker several years ago, an Iranian security
official candidly assessed the challenge at hand:
"The majority of the population is
young.… Young people by nature are horny. Because they are horny,
they like to watch satellite channels where there are films or
programs they can jerk off to.… We have to do something about
satellite television to keep society free from this horny jerk-off
situation."
One might assume a country that suffers
from chronic inflation and unemployment -- not to mention harsh
international sanctions and a potential war over its nuclear program
-- would have better things to do than discourage its youth from
masturbating. Yet the regime continues to pour hundreds of millions
of dollars into Chinese censorship technology to create a moral Iron
Dome against political and cultural subversion, with decidedly mixed
results. Piped-in BBC Persian and Voice of America television are
sometimes successfully scrambled, but those who want pornography have
no shortage of outlets. That said, the censorship software sometimes
get a bit overzealous. One Iranian friend told me of repeated
unsuccessful attempts to access his British university's email
account from Tehran, only to realize that the school's apparently
bawdy name -- Essex -- was prohibited by the regime's Internet
filters.
During the rule of Western-oriented
autocrat Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, Tehran was a rapidly evolving
society that deceptively appeared to be crossing into the modern age.
My own family history is perhaps representative of Iran's urban
middle-class trajectory during the 20th century: My devout paternal
grandmother, born in 1907, wore a chador and wasn't formally educated
beyond elementary school; three of her four daughters attended
university, and all eschewed the veil. All of their daughters grew up
in a Tehran in which miniskirts were the trend, and Googoosh --
Iran's pre-revolutionary J. Lo (but remarkably modest by today's
standards) -- was their main "source of emulation." [It
should be said that this modernity was to be found in certain
quarters of Tehran; small towns and villages, even during the Shah's
reign, saw women typically clad in chadors. -- AP]
Miss Iran, Aylar |
Khomeini's opposition to the shah was
fueled in part by the latter's enfranchisement of women, which the
ayatollah deliberately conflated with sexual decadence. In his 1970
book Islamic Governance (Hukumat-e Islami) -- which would
later provide the ideological and political template for
post-revolutionary Iran -- Khomeini hyperventilated that "sexual
vice has now reached such proportions that it is destroying entire
generations, corrupting our youth, and causing them to neglect all
forms of work! They are all rushing to enjoy the various forms of
vice that have become so freely available and so enthusiastically
promoted."
Khomeini nonetheless reassured his
liberal revolutionary compatriots -- just months before the
revolution, while in Paris exile -- that "women [would be] free
in the Islamic Republic in the selection of their activities and
their future and their clothing." Much to its retrospective
dismay, a sizable chunk of Iran's liberal intelligentsia -- both male
and female -- lined up behind Khomeini, some even referring to him as
an "Iranian Gandhi." Shortly after consolidating power,
however, Khomeini and his disciples swiftly moved to crush opposing
views and curtail female social and sartorial freedoms. "Islam
doesn't allow for people to [wear swimsuits] in the sea," he
proclaimed shortly after becoming supreme leader. We "will skin
their hide!"
Women who resisted the mandatory veil
were met with violence and intimidation, including lyrical taunts of
"Ya roosari, ya toosari!" ("Cover your head or be
smacked in the head!"). As Iranian Nobel Peace Prize laureate
Shirin Ebadi recently wrote, "Although the 1979 revolution in
Iran is often called an Islamic revolution, it can actually be said
to be a revolution of men against women.… The drafters of [the
Islamic Penal Code] had effectively taken us back 1,400 years."
Like Islamists in today's Egypt -- and
some among America's Christian right -- Iran's revolutionaries found
fertile ground on which to play the politics of pious populism,
rather than concretely address the enormous challenges of building a
diversified economy. The country's massive oil wealth made it appear
all too easy. Khomeini famously dismissed economics as "for
donkeys," and he responded to complaints of inflation by saying,
"The revolution wasn't about the price of watermelons."
Three decades later, the results are self-evident: In 1979,
resource-rich Iran's GDP was almost double that of resource-poor
Turkey. Today, it is roughly half.
The brutal reality is that Iranians had
entrusted their national destiny to a man, Khomeini, who had spent
far more time thinking about the religious penalties for fornicating
with animals than how to run a modern economy.
After his death in 1989, Khomeini was
succeeded by the current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who
has remained loyal to Khomeini's vision for Iran, including his
prudishness regarding matters of the flesh. For Khamenei -- who has
said that keeping women in hijab would "prevent our society from
being plunged into corruption and turmoil" -- outward displays
of feminine beauty are viewed not only with religious disfavor, but
as an existential threat to the regime itself.
Khamenei contends that the health of
the family unit is integral to the Islamic Republic's well-being and
is undermined by female beauty. Although to some this worldview is
fundamentally misogynistic, Khamenei sees men, not women, as
untrustworthy and incapable of resisting temptation:
"In Islam, women have been
prohibited from showing off their beauty in order to attract men or
cause fitna [upheaval or sedition]. Showing off one's physical
attraction to men is a kind of fitna … [for] if this love for
beauty and members of the opposite sex is found somewhere other than
the framework of the family, the stability of the family will be
undermined."
The ubiquitous "nose-job" patch |
Interestingly, the word Khamenei
employs against the potential unveiling of women -- fitna -- is the
same word used to describe the opposition Green Movement that took to
the streets in the summer of 2009 to protest President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad's contested reelection. In other words, women's hair is
itself seen as seditious and counterrevolutionary. Even so-called
liberal politicians in the Islamic Republic have long fixated on this
issue. Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, Iran's first post-revolutionary
president, who has spent the past three decades exiled in France,
reportedly once asserted that women's hair has been scientifically
proven to emit sexually enticing rays. (An Iranian satirist responded
with a cartoon showing a man inadvertently aroused while eating lunch
at his friend's home; the culprit turned out to be an errant strand
of his friend's wife's hair in the ghormeh sabzi stew, an Iranian
national dish.)
Over the last two decades, the women of
Iran's younger generation have increasingly pushed back and loosened
their veils, but any discussion of abolishing the veil altogether is
not tolerated by Khamenei. In addition to opposition toward the
United States and Israel, the hijab is often considered one of the
Islamic Republic's three remaining ideological pillars. "For
Islamic Republic officials, the hijab has vast symbolic importance;
it is what holds up the dam, keeping all of Iranians' other demands
for social freedoms at bay," says Azadeh Moaveni, an
Iranian-American author. "Relax on the hijab, they think, and
all hell will break loose; next people will want to swill beer on the
street and read uncensored novels. They think of it as a gateway
freedom."
Despite Khamenei's assertion that the
hijab prevents men from straying, governmental policies in fact
encourage the opposite. For example, to help accommodate the
apparently incorrigibly wandering libido of the Iranian male, the
country's parliament -- composed of Khamenei loyalists -- has
supported sharia-sanctioned "temporary marriages" (known in
Persian as sigheh) allowing men as many sexual partners as they want.
The marriage contract can last as little as a few minutes, and it
doesn't need to be officially registered. The man can abruptly end
the sigheh when he likes, but initiating divorce is far more
difficult for women. Indeed, women who stray from the sanctity of
their marriages do so at grave risk -- dozens have been stoned to
death in Iran for adultery.
The country's economic malaise has also
led to a reportedly sharp rise in plain old, non-Islamically
sanctioned prostitution. Tehran's high-end taxi drivers, often
underemployed university graduates, casually point them out on the
street.
"When economies take a downturn,
informal economies and illicit networks become more attractive,"
says Pardis Mahdavi, author of a book on sexuality in Iran.
"Technology facilitates this too."
During the shah's time, Tehran's
notorious red-light district was known as Shahr-e Noe (New City), a
place where countless young Iranian men lost their virginity. Like
many things post-revolution, however, the Islamic Republic just
imagined that banning the symptom would make the problem go away. But
pouring saltpeter from the minarets hasn't worked. "They razed
Shahr-e Noe thinking it would end prostitution," a retired
Iranian laborer once told me. "Now all of Tehran has become
Shahr-e Noe."
Unsurprisingly, the outwardly chaste
nature of Khomeinist political culture has perverted normal sexual
behavior, creating peculiar curiosities -- and proclivities -- among
Iranian officialdom. Omid Memarian, a journalist who spent several
months in the notorious Evin prison for his articles critical of the
government, told me that his interrogators seemed far more interested
in his sex life than his political peccadilloes. "I tried to
answer their questions in very general terms, but they'd interrupt
me," he recalled. "They wanted to know details. 'Start from
when you were unbuttoning her blouse.…'" In one instance, he
told me, he was horrified when an interrogator appeared to be rubbing
himself while listening.
Observers of American politics -- the
land of Jimmy Swaggart, Mark Sanford, and Newt Gingrich, to name just
a few -- won't be surprised to learn that it is often the most
outspoken Iranian advocates of traditional values who fall short of
achieving them. Memarian spent part of his mandatory military service
in Tehran writing speeches for a senior Revolutionary Guard commander
who routinely attacked the craven immorality of the "Global
Arrogance" (i.e., the United States). "His filmi [the
person who brought him bootlegged films on CD] later told me that he
always requested 'films with scenes' [film-haye sahne-dar]," a
euphemism for porn.
In a well-publicized national scandal
in 2008, the Tehran police commander responsible for enforcing Iran's
strict anti-vice laws, Reza Zarei, was caught nude in a brothel with
six women (one of the women claimed he had asked them to pray naked
in front of him). While American politicians might bounce back from
such transgressions with their own television show (see: Spitzer,
Eliot), the revelation of the incident reportedly led Zarei to
attempt suicide while in prison.
The shame of sexual malfeasance has
been routinely used by the regime as a form of political coercion and
intimidation. When the famously jocular reformist cleric Mohammad Ali
Abtahi, former vice president to Mohammad Khatami, was imprisoned
after Iran's contested 2009 presidential election, he surprised his
supporters by confessing with great gusto to being part of a
Western-backed conspiracy to foment a velvet revolution. Although his
confession was undoubtedly forced, his close associates claim that
what compelled him to confess was not physical or psychological
torture but hidden photos of him -- in flagrante delicto -- at a
secret Tehran love nest that was long being monitored.
Two takes on hijab style |
The Islamic Republic isn't always so
prudish, however. In fact, it's been willing to use sexual incentives
as a form of statecraft. In a WikiLeaked U.S. State Department cable,
for example, senior Iraqi tribal chief Abu Cheffat confided in a U.S.
diplomat in Baghdad that Tehran effectively wielded influence over
Iraqi politicians -- ostensibly visiting Iran for "medical
treatment" -- by offering inducements including "temporary
marriages" with Iranian women. Not that Cheffat was complaining,
mind you: The perks were surely better than when he visited President
George W. Bush at the White House in 2008. It was not without reason,
he explained, that Iranian soft power was trumping American hard
power in Iraq.
More recently, three Iranian
intelligence agents who unsuccessfully tried to kill Israeli
government officials in Bangkok this past February photographed
themselves at a bar in the beach resort of Pattaya with local
"escorts." When I asked the scion of a powerful cleric in
Tehran how ostensible devotees of Khomeini's religious ideology are
able to reconcile frequenting non-Muslim prostitutes and drinking
alcohol, he quickly dismissed any religious obstacles. "There
are government clerics who can easily grant them religious pretexts
[mojavez'e Shar'i]," he explained. "They can make the case
that if they didn't frequent prostitutes and drink alcohol they would
appear to be [terrorists] and raise suspicions."
In essence, the Iranian regime's
approach toward sex, like its philosophy of governance, is marked by
maslahat, or expediency, and used alternately as a tool of
suppression, inducement, and incitement. In the summer of 2009, when
hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets to protest
Ahmadinejad's reelection, many protesters were brutally beaten by the
Basij militia, gangs of young regime thugs on motorbikes who were
given a green light to quell the uprising. As Iranian-American
academic Shervin Malekzadeh reported from Tehran, the Basij seemed to
be driven by a combination of class resentment and pent-up
frustration. "They don't screw; they don't drink or smoke
joints," one of his sources told him. "What else are they
going to do with all of that energy?"
But perhaps the seminal -- and most
heartbreaking -- moment of the Green Revolution was the murder of a
26-year-old female protester, Neda Agha-Soltan, whose bloody death
was caught on cell-phone camera and rendered one of the most viral
videos in history. In an HBO documentary about her life, Neda's
mother recalls a message that some sympathetic female Basij members
relayed to Neda days before she was killed by a sniper: "Dear,
please don't come out looking so beautiful.… Do us a favor and
don't come out because the Basiji men target beautiful girls. And
they will shoot you."
While the iconic faces of Iran's 1979
revolution were bearded, middle-aged men, Neda has come to symbolize
the new face of dissent in 21st-century Iran: a young, modern,
educated woman. For her opposition to the regime and to the hijab,
she is the embodiment of fitna in Khamenei's eyes.
Three Springs later, the Iranian regime
once again is faced with a crisis, this time of an external variety.
As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatens war in between
meals, the Pentagon plays war games and policy planners huddle in the
White House: Is the Iranian regime rational or irrational? Can
diplomatic negotiations prevent Iran from obtaining a bomb, or is an
attack on Iran's nuclear facilities inevitable?
Many Iran watchers assert that to
persuade Tehran not to pursue a nuclear weapon, Washington must
reassure Khamenei that the United States merely seeks a change in
Iranian behavior, not a change of the Iranian regime.
What they fail to consider is
Khamenei's deep-seated conviction that U.S. designs to overthrow the
Islamic Republic hinge not on military invasion but on cultural and
political subversion intended to foment a "velvet"
revolution from within. Consider this revealing address on Iranian
state TV in 2005:
"More than Iran's enemies need
artillery, guns, and so forth, they need to spread cultural values
that lead to moral corruption.… I recently read in the news that a
senior official in an important American political center said:
"Instead of bombs, send them miniskirts." He is right. If
they arouse sexual desires in any given country, if they spread
unrestrained mixing of men and women, and if they lead youth to
behavior to which they are naturally inclined by instincts, there
will no longer be any need for artillery and guns against that
nation."
Khamenei's vast collection of writings
and speeches makes clear that the weapons of mass destruction he
fears most are cultural -- more Kim Kardashian and Lady Gaga than
bunker busters and aircraft carriers. In other words, Tehran is
threatened not only by what America does, but by what America is: a
depraved, postmodern colonial power bent on achieving global cultural
hegemony. America's "strategic policy," Khamenei has said,
"is seeking female promiscuity."
Khamenei's words capture the paradox
and perversion of modern Iran. While dropping bombs on the Iranian
regime could likely prolong its shelf-life, a regime that sees
women's hair as an existential threat is already well past its
sell-by date.
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