During past Valentine’s Day, when lovers sent greeting cards to each other, a very special type of card sent from ‘Islamic Republic’ Iran was titled ‘Will you marry me - temporarily?’
You think I am kidding? No, it is true.
A temporary marriage, known generally as muta, is a specifically Shia tradition. It involves a contract between a man, who may or may not be married, and an unmarried woman - a contract in which the duration of marriage and the dowry are specified in advance. Both sides agree by mutual consent to the length of the marriage, which can range from an hour to 99 years.
There is no divorce; the mut’ah contract simply expires with the lapse of its duration. Although witnesses are not required, the marriage has to be registered in court. Unlike in an ordinary marriage, a temporary wife cannot claim maintenance. But a temporary husband cannot disown the children born from a muta marriage. Children of temporary marriages are considered legitimate, and are entitled to equal status in inheritance and other rights with their half- siblings born of permanent marriages.
Since the "Islamic Revolution" of 1979, the Iranian regime has promoted muta vigorously, extolling its virtues in mosques and schools, at religious gatherings, in news papers and on radio and television.
As far as Iranian men are concerned, temporary marriage has been largely the preserve of the mullahs. This is why those seeking muta marriages have tended to go straight to Qom and Mashad, two popular and important religious centers in Iran, where eager religious scholars can be seen wandering the streets, muta contracts in hand, enticing visiting women to sign them. However, this mullah monopoly, I am glad to report, is about to be shattered.
In Iran, clergies are taking the advantage of Mut’ah marriage for meeting their sexual lust. It is reported in a large section of newspapers around the world that, prostitution is flourishing in that ‘Islamic Republic’ under the garb of such temporary marriage code.
According to reports, prostitution and drug-taking are widespread among young Iranians. There are up to two-million drug addicts, some of them schoolchildren, with an estimated five tonnes of narcotics consumed every day in the capital, Tehran. Prostitution is also said to be sharply increasing, along with divorce rates and suicides.
The report comes from Mohammad Ali Zam, the head of Tehran's cultural and artistic affairs, who is seen as an influential figure.
His report found a dramatic rise in the problems between 1998 and 1999.
"Drug addiction is the rage among schoolchildren, prostitution has increased 635% among high school students and the [growth] rate of suicide in the country has exceeded the record by 109%," says the report.
Mr. Zam says the average age of prostitutes has dropped from 27 to 20 years over the past few years, with a growing but unspecified number of women involved.
Nearly all the young girls who run away from home end up as prostitutes, he said.
Iranians already behave like a defeated people. That is why they are so unstable, and so dangerous. The new Persian Empire masquerading as an Islamic Republic is a wounded beast. The rural misery and urban squalor that drive Iranian women into the brothels of Dubai and Brussels contrasts sharply with neighboring Azerbaijan, whose economy will double in size by 2010 as new oilfields come online. Half of Iranians do not speak Persian, and half of those speak Azeri. Azerbaijan's oil wealth is a giant magnet; it must attract either the largest national minority in Iran, or the military attentions of Iran itself. If a Kurdish state asserts itself out of the ruins of Iraq - a long-delayed justice for that ancient and resilient people - Iran's Kurds will be tempted to throw off the Persian yoke.
The proliferation of Iranian prostitutes in Western Europe as well as the Arab world helps explain the country's population trends. The European Commission's most comprehensive surveys of human trafficking found that Iranian women made up 10-15% of the prostitutes working in Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy. "Fatima" from Persia has become as familiar as "Natasha" from Belarus. Iranian whores long have been a scandal in the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, which periodically round up and expel them.
It is hard to obtain reliable data on prostitution inside Iran itself, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it has increased since Ahmadinejad became president last year. Anti-regime sociologists claim that at least 300,000 women are whoring in Tehran alone. The ADNKronos website reported on April 25: Prostitution is on the rise in Iran ... Sociologist Amanollah Gharaii Moghaddam told ADNKronos International [AKI] that he believes Iran's deteriorating economy and the high unemployment rate among youths to be the main causes of this worrying phenomenon. In Iran, 28% of young people between the ages of 15 and 29 are unemployed ... The age of prostitutes is increasingly younger, and girls as young as 12 are selling their bodies on Iran's streets. Overall, the number of prostitutes is also on the rise and there are an estimated 300,000 of them in Tehran alone ... Nevertheless, Gharaii Moghaddam says "the number isn't so high when compared [with] the 4 million unemployed only in Tehran and the 5 million drug addicts today in Iran".
The clerical regime vacillates between repressing prostitution and sanctioning it through "temporary marriages", an arrangement permitted under Shi'ite jurisprudence. In the latter case the Muslim clergy in effect become pimps, taking a fee for sanctioning several "temporary marriages" per women per day.
These numbers cannot be verified, to be sure, but the spillover of Iranian prostitutes into Western Europe and the Gulf states suggests that the actual numbers must be very large indeed, so large, in fact, as to help explain the frightful rate of Iran's demographic decline. Along with Albanian, Chechen and Bosnian women, Iranian prostitutes are living evidence of the dissolution of the traditional Muslim society that purports to shield women from degradation.
Islamism responds to the crisis of faith. As I wrote on November 8, 2005:
The crisis of modernization first of all is a crisis of faith, and the attenuation of religious faith is the root cause of the birth-rate bust in the modern world. Traditional society is everywhere fragile, not only in the Islamic world; by definition it is bounded by values and expectations handed down from the past, to which individuals must submit. Once the bands of tradition are broken and each individual may choose for herself what sort of family to raise, religious faith becomes the decisive motivation for bringing children into the world ...
The collapse of traditional society has brought about a collapse of birth rates across cultures.. Cultures that fail to reproduce themselves by definition are failed cultures, for the simple reason that they will cease to exist before many generations have passed.
That is why the Islamists - Muslims who seek a new theocracy - display a sense of extreme urgency. They are not conservative Muslims, for they reject Muslim society as it exists as corrupt and decadent. They are revolutionaries who want to create a new kind of totalitarian theocracy that orders every detail of human life.
Nothing is more threadbare than the claim of Islamists to defend Muslim womanhood. Islamist radicals [like the penny-a-marriage mullahs of Iran] are the world's most prolific pimps. The same networks that move female flesh across borders also provide illegal passage for jihadis, and the proceeds of human trafficking often support Islamist terrorists. From Jakarta to Kuala Lumpur to Sarajevo to Tirana, the criminals who trade in women overlap with jihadist networks. Prostitutes serve the terror network in a number of capacities, including suicide bombing. The going rate for a Muslim woman who can pass for a European to carry a suicide bomb currently is more than US$100,000. The Persian prostitute is the camp follower of the jihadi, joined to him in a pact of national suicide.
Sex scandal of Iran official:
General Reza Zarei, Tehran's chief of police, has been under arrest in Iran since mid-March 2008 for a curious scandal: He was caught in a brothel with six prostitutes. One of the women involved says Zarei, 52, asked the group to remove their clothes, "stand in a row in front of him and pray naked."
The trouble for Zarei -- and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who hired him -- is not just that he's chief of police in the Iranian capital. He's also in charge of vice crime. He should have been arresting the prostitutes, not paying them for kinky prayers.
The one-time chief of police in the northern province of Gilan was raised to one of the nation's top law-enforcement posts three years ago, reportedly with Ahmadinejad's patronage. His harsh moral sermons on state TV have made him famous. Fashionable young women who let their headscarves slip down around their necks were subject to his strict enforcement of Iran's dress code, and his office gave out an estimated 35,000 warnings -- to unmarried couples, for example, who held hands.
Until April 2008, conservative Iranians even denied there was prostitution in Iran. The government also denied at first that Zarei had been arrested. But reports about the scandal began to appear on Persian-language Web sites and local newspapers until Iran's Justice Department confirmed Zarei's arrest in mid-April.
Finally it appeared that the arrest was personally ordered by Iran's justice minister, Ayatollah Hashemi Shahrudi, whose office had been monitoring Zarei for weeks. Even the feared chief prosecutor, Saeed Mortazavi -- a close friend of Zarei's -- wasn't told. Zarei's numerous supporters tried to hush up the case, and even after the government confirmed the scandal, it was played down as "minimal" and of "a purely private nature."
But in the meantime the prosecutor in charge of the case, Mohassan Ghasi, has raised even more suspicion: With his remark that a "high police official" could exploit his position for "material" as well as "private" gain, the prosecutor hinted that Zarei may also be suspected of pimping. Iranian police as well as the nation's Revolutionary Guard have, in fact, long stood under suspicion of taking kickbacks from Iran's various red-light districts.
Prostitution in Iran -- an Islamic theocracy -- is against the law. Harsh punishments for prostitutes as well as their customers include not just jail but execution. The business flourishes anyway. Thousands of women reportedly work in the 12 million-strong capital of Tehran. On Motahari Street, in the wealthy northern part of the city, the price for an hour of sex ranges from â?¬20 to â?¬50 [$31 to $78].
During end of 2008 it was reported that Zarei committed suicide in jail, raising speculation that an inconvenient Tehran insider had been liquidated. Tehran, though, says Zarei is still alive.
Silent screams:
Anyone exploring the internet will be pleasantly surprised to discover that just about every intellectual, activist and women's rights advocate in Iran, including lawyers and journalists, keeps extensive weblogs, filled with useful information, opinions and social commentary - the kind of information that is woefully absent from official publications in Iran; the kind of information that the Islamic regime has masterfully, at times forcibly, eliminated from public view for almost three decades.
Being traveled in to the depths of human sufferings, you will witness the tears of mothers, the loneliness of daughters, and the hopelessness of fathers and brothers.
You will feel the crushing weight of their silence.
There are detailed accounts of torture, executions, beatings and prisoner abuse. You will become all too familiar with the pain of the families whose daughters are sentenced to death for acts they never committed, or acts that are the natural right of every human to commit.
You will learn that by replacing a once progressive legal system with Sharia doctrine, the ‘Islamic regime’ has systematically oppressed, marginalized and dehumanized one half of its own citizens. Under this draconian system, Iranian women have lost their inheritance rights, as well as custodial rights to their own children. They are required to secure the express approval of their husbands or male guardians to obtain passports and to travel. Under Sharia law, a woman's testimony in court is, at best, worth half the testimony of her male counterpart.
Even more astonishing, Iran's new Islamic-guided government has established a system of legalized prostitution, through the practice of "sigheh" or "temporary marriages," by which a mullah arranges a "legal union" between a man and a girl [some as young as nine years old] for a fee. The so-called marriage can last anywhere from one hour to 99 years. Under this system, men are free to enter into as many temporary marriages as they so desire, without having any legal obligation or responsibility toward the women and children that they "marry" only to use as sexual objects and slaves.
Not surprisingly, this legalized system of slavery and oppression has led to a growing sex-trafficking industry that is partially operated by government officials and mullahs themselves. The girls who are forced into this system of sexual and economic slavery are typically transported to various countries in the Persian Gulf and are sold to individuals as well as to established brothels. The budding industry of sexual trafficking of Iranian girls has led to growing concerns about the spread of AIDS/HIV and other sexually-transmitted diseases throughout the region.
Temporary marriages are not the only method of institutionalized oppression of women and girls by the Islamic regime. Atefeh Rajabi was hanged in the city of Neka in the early hours of August 15, 2004. Her crime was officially declared to be "adultery," even though she had never married and was only 16 when the very judge who had condemned her to death served the added role of executioner by personally placing the noose around Atefeh's tiny neck and ordering her body to be raised.
Unofficially, however, Atefeh's crime was defiance - defiance of the unnatural and unreasonable rules that were forced upon her by the Islamic government; defiance of her status as something less than human; defiance of the inequality, poverty and misogyny that have infested Iran in the past 27 years; and defiance of the binds designed to break the human spirit and destroy the essence of childhood.
To the very end, Atefeh maintained her defiance. Witnesses speak of an unusual sense of calmness in her beautiful blue eyes to the last minute. They recount the child's insolent last words, which were: "At the very least, you could have given me a glass of water. Animals are slaughtered more humanely than this."
Atefeh is not the only girl to be sentenced to death by the Islamic regime, nor the only child. Despite being a signatory to international treaties that expressly prohibit the heinous practice of child execution, Iran had the dubious honor of being the only country to execute children in 2005. In 2006, it shared this odious status with Pakistan - the only other country to have executed a child last year.
According to Amnesty International, Iran executed at least eight child offenders in 2005. It carried out its first child execution of 2006 on May 13 with the hanging of an unnamed 17-year-old boy along with an unnamed 20-year-old man. The two were hanged because they had allegedly engaged in homosexual acts.
Iran shows little sign of curbing its use of the death penalty on child offenders, just as it shows little respect for the rights of children and women as a whole. Delara Darabi, another Iranian teenage girl on death row, has spent the past two and a half years in prison for a crime she never committed. After murdering a woman related to Delara, Delara's 19-year-old boyfriend persuaded her to admit responsibility for the crime to protect him from execution. Apparently, both teenagers believed that because Delara was under the age of 18 she could not be sentenced to death. This belief proved to be devastatingly false.
With complete disregard for its obligations under the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and despite overwhelming evidence of Delara's innocence, a court in the city of Rasht found the teenager guilty of murder based on her initial claim of responsibility and sentenced her to death by hanging. The Islamic regime displayed even greater disregard for its promises to the international community, as well as to the rights of its own children, when its highest court upheld Delara's death sentence.
In prison, Delara has proven to be a remarkably poised and strong young girl with an amazing talent for painting and drawing. She has used her gift to compile a diary of her pain as a child prisoner on death row. She has produced an impressive collection of paintings that speak of the horrors of torture, of beatings, of hopelessness, loneliness, and the loss of a child's innocence. They are haunting images of injustice and brutality. They are the stories of the innocent women and children of Iran, shackled by the injustices of a brutal regime. They are a teenager's diary of crimes against humanity committed by her government.
Nowadays, we have witnessed a few rays of hope amongst the darkness that has befallen the citizens of Iran. By using the Internet to communicate with human rights lawyers, activists, and journalists inside Iran, we have been able to organize an international network of lawyers and journalists who have selflessly and bravely dedicated themselves to saving the lives of innocent Iranians.
Islamism in Iran forcing women into prostitution:
One of the worst consequences of Islamist regime governed by clergies in Iran is causing fast increase in unemployment scale in that country. Hidden and even exposed poverty and frustration is everywhere. Women are the worst sufferers. Because, they not only are suffering from unemployment and poverty, they are regularly repressed under the nasty Shariah law.
Qom, a place where Irans most hated Ayatullah Khomeini is burried may have become a prostitution hot spot due to the abundance of shrines. Young female runaways with no shelter come to the city knowing they can take refuge at holy sites by sleeping in rooms intended for pilgrims. They have no way of making a living, so after awhile they get involved with the sex trade. The city's young theological students and transient tourists form the main clientele.
Of course, Qom isn't the only place in Iran where prostitutes walk the streets. Back in 2002, the Iranian newspaper Entekhab estimated that there were nearly 85,000 prostitutes in Tehran alone. But now, the number of prostitutes will cross million if not even more. In that city, and especially in nearby suburbs, there are neighborhoods where heavily made-up prostitutes in traditional garb stand idly at traffic circles.
Prospective customers drive by slowly to check out the human wares, then make a deal. The visual difference between an ordinary citizen wearing makeup who happens to be standing alone and an actual prostitute is, again, quite subtle. Apparently, mistakes are not uncommon.
The penalties for prostitution are although severe—ranging from whipping to execution. But there's a loophole in Islamic law called sigheh, or temporary marriage.
According to Shiite interpretation, a man and a woman may enter an impermanent partnership with a preset expiration date. There's no legally required minimum duration [a day, a week, anything goes] and no need for official witnesses—unless the woman is a virgin, in which case she needs the consent of her legal guardian. An Iranian who's wary of arrest can simply escort a prostitute to a registry, obtain a temporary contract from a Muslim cleric, and then legally satisfy his sexual needs.
People can find prostitutes almost everywhere in the city. I repeat everywhere! Why? Before Islamic revolution -1979 it was specific area in Tehran something like Red Light District - Amsterdam although it wasn’t legalized like what it is in Amsterdam but at least it was in one specific area of city. During Islamic revolution, they killed some prostitutes in very barbaric way! They tore a woman apart while she was alive then burned her in street. So prostitution became a hidden deathful activity. It became an adultery crime but with less punishment for men because men just spelt with a prostitute! I don’t know how they justify hypocrisy in their Sharia law too.
Since that time prostitution has extended and extended in cities, in every corner and street. Guys usually pick up prostitutes in streets by a little negotiation on price.
Since the Islamic revolution prostitution has speeded through cities and even between teens from age 14 and there are many factors that we should consider here like high inflation rate usually more than %17, more than %35 unemployment rate specially between young generations 18-35 ages, poor economic status between more than %60 of people, high poverty between %40 - %50 of people, drug addiction like heroin, lack of fun for young generations, high rate of divorce it’s about %30 - %40 and lack of freedom for whole population extends the problem.
Prostitution will speed up more and more in the Islamic Republic of Iran as long as there are high rate of poverty and lack of social security. So far, Islam rulings in Iran have made more poor people, more poverty then more prostitutes.
Most serious concern here is, Iranian clergies are openly allowing child prostitution under the garb of Shariah law. Iranian leader Ayatullah Khomeini issued a sermon on temporary marriage law, allowing men even to marry breast feeding children.
Although it may sound to be extremely unimazinable and ridiculous, but it is all true. Children are being sexually violated, some even killed by men, under this notorious Islamist law.
