Sex and the single-minded Muslim

Thought this was an interesting read in light of some of the conversations we've had on this board with some defending the oppression of women under the guise of multiculturalism.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1072-1739644,00.html

August 18, 2005

Sex and the single-minded Muslim
Cherry Potter
Young, unmarried men . . . extreme aggression . . . sexual repression. Is there a link?

IF WE REALLY want to understand the mindset of the Muslim fundamentalists, it’s time that the issue of sexual politics was addressed head on. Just how does the total domination of women in fundamentalist societies affect the men? After all, when it comes to sex, both genders are involved. And when it comes to extreme forms of aggression and violence, sublimated sexual fear and repression are all too often at the root of the problem.
Take the heartbreaking story of a young Muslim woman, Fatima (I have changed her name), who was referred for psychotherapy. When I first saw her in the waiting area, she looked hunched and lifeless in her scruffy jeans and T-shirt. She had become so severely depressed she rarely left her refugee hostel. Her English was excellent. She was from a progressive Middle Eastern country where she had been a university lecturer before fleeing to the West. As a teenager she had been raped by her brother-in-law. Her mother swore her to secrecy — imperative to save the family honour. Years later, despite her successful career, her mother, against Fatima’s wishes, arranged for her to be married to a much older man. To conceal her lost virginity, her mother hired a doctor to sew up Fatima’s vagina. In an act of desperation Fatima took rat poison in a mosque. Her mother publicly denounced her daughter to protect the family from scandal. Should Fatima ever return home her brothers would murder her for bringing dishonour to their family. “Honour” killings, Fatima told me, were common — the authorities either turn a blind eye or issue six-month prison sentences.



It’s too easy to pigeonhole Fatima’s distress as a “woman’s issue”. Men are also victims of a cultural mindset that obliges them to display their masculine dominance by murdering their sisters if they are suspected of losing their virginity before marriage, or killing their wives if suspected of adultery.

Fundamentalists demand that women be veiled and segregated at every level of society, starting at puberty. Public displays of affection between husbands and wives are forbidden. Wife-beating is so prevalent, many see it as a normal part of marriage. In bed any sexual position where the woman is on top is haram or sinful. It’s difficult to imagine how either gender can enjoy intimacy in such a climate.

So what is the effect on young unmarried men who, like youths the world over, are subject to a whole host of fears about their burgeoning sexuality? What do they do with their unacceptable sexual fantasies fuelled by the strict regime and the temptations of the mysterious, hidden feminine world? Too often they project their self-disgust on to their object of desire, whom they blame for causing them to have “impure” thoughts. Twenty-five years ago when Ayatollah Khomeini took over Iran, women who let a single lock of hair fall beneath their headscarves were beaten for abusing their sexual power. Women who had worn make-up and Western dress under the Shah were denigrated as “Westoxicated”. And the supposedly sexually licentious West became, and remains, “the Great Satan”, purveyor of all evil that must be destroyed.

The connections between sexual repression, extreme violence and a male obsession with war and death are recognisable in the West. In America Christian Reconstructionists, a fundamentalist sect, also advocate the death penalty for adultery, homosexuality and “unchastity before marriage” (but for women only). Studies of the psychology of Fascism show how the Nazi cult of obeying, adoring and fearing the Führer is rooted in the patriarchal family obeying, adoring and fearing the father. The Nazis, like modern Islamic and Christian fundamentalists, were also obsessed with virgins and women as submissive housewives and perfect mothers. Their extreme masculinity values, above all else, male bonding and sacrificing their lives for the fatherland’s high ideals of racial or religious purity, with the promise of glorious martyrdom.

Fascist mindsets promote the abuse and denigration of “impure” women. In modern Islamist Tehran there is a thriving sex trade — an estimated 84,000 women are in prostitution and thousands of girls are sold as sex slaves across the Arab world.

Arguably such societies are in the grip of mass psychosis. Like a paranoid psychotic they split the world between those they hopelessly idealise as pure and good, and those they denigrate as evil and out to destroy them. It is not unusual for a paranoid psychotic to nurture delusions of grandeur and an imaginary hotline to God.

Western and Islamic feminists have for too long agonised about what right we have to assume that the sexual freedoms enjoyed by Western women should be a global gold standard of how to live in the modern world. The debate always becomes ensnared in multiculturalism — that we must respect the diversity of beliefs and traditions even if these include human rights abuses of women in Muslim countries. But we only have to look around us to see how, in the most sophisticated levels of society where women are seen as equal, men also benefit — they are more tolerant, more able to enjoy intimacy and less aggressive towards women and each other. So attitudes towards gender and sexuality are not just a feminist issue for women to discuss while the men set about combating terrorism.

To understand the violence of the fundamentalist fascist mentality, skewed gender relations and repressed sexuality, far from being peripheral, have to be confronted head on.

 

Try a search for the Sharia law in Canada thread, if you want an example. Er, well I guess Max beat me to it.

As a proponent of the intervention in Iraq I admit this is a huge potential negative.

 

I'm not sure this is a 'funny' topic. The Shi'ites have a 'loophole' (Sunnis have banned the practice) with temporary marriages but that hardly invalidates Fatima's story. Strangely enough though, you just gave a nice example of being an advocate for oppression.

In addition, the temporary union shows many of the same oppressive tendencies. Here's a good article about how the modern man in Iran still gets to use a woman and then discard her for a virgin. That's progressive, in a warped way, I guess.

http://www.library.cornell.edu/colldev/mideast/tmpmrig.htm

Love Finds a Way in Iran: 'Temporary Marriage'
By ELAINE SCIOLINO

TEHRAN, Iran — For five years, Maryam, the hairdresser, and Karim, the home appliance salesman, carried on a love affair, meeting secretly at the house where Karim lived with his parents. The young couple's relationship was officially sanctioned by Iran's Islamic Republic, even though unmarried couples who have sex or even date and hold hands can be arrested, fined, even flogged. That is because Maryam and Karim were married.

Sort of.

Iran is a country where rules are fluid, where people of all classes and degrees of religiosity pride themselves on finding loopholes in the Islamic system. Temporary marriage, or sigheh, is one of the oddest and biggest.

The practice of temporary marriage is said to have existed during the lifetime of Muhammad, who is believed to have recommended it to his companions and soldiers. The majority Sunni sect in Islam banned it; the minority Shiite sect did not. Historically, the practice was used most frequently in Iran by pilgrims in Shiite shrine cities like Meshed and Qum. Pilgrims who traveled had sexual needs, the argument went. Temporary marriage was a legal way to satisfy them.

Maryam and Karim chose temporary marriage for a practical reason. "We went out a lot together, and I didn't want to get into trouble," Maryam, 31, said. "We wanted to have documents so that if we were stopped on the street we could prove we weren't doing anything illegal."

Their "marriage" ritual was simple. Even though they could have sealed the contract privately, they went to a cleric in a marriage registry office in Tehran with their photographs and identity papers. Maryam had been forced into a loveless marriage at 15 to an opium-smoking, womanizing factory owner nearly two decades her senior who divorced her nine years later; so she brought along her divorce decree. If she had been a virgin, she would have needed her father's permission to marry.

The couple could have gotten married for as short a time as a few minutes or as long as 99 years. They could have specified whether and how much money Maryam would be paid as a kind of dowry, or how much time they would spend together. Instead, they decided on a straightforward contract of six months, which they renewed again and again.

What was unusual about Maryam's situation was her willingness to talk about it. Despite its religious imprimatur, temporary marriage has never been very popular in Iran. Tradition dictates that women be virgins when they marry; even when they're not, they should pretend to be. Many Iranians regard sigheh as little more than legalized prostitution, especially since it is an advertisement that a woman is not a virgin. In some circles, even illicit sex is considered better — as long as it can be kept secret.

But now an odd mix of feminists, clerics and officials have begun to discuss sigheh as a possible solution to the problems of Iran's youth. An extraordinarily large number of young people (about 65 percent of the population is under 25), combined with high unemployment, means that more couples are putting off marriage because they cannot afford it. Sigheh legally wraps premarital sex in an Islamic cloak.

"First, relations between young men and women will become a little bit freer," said Shahla Sherkat, editor of Zanan, a feminist monthly."Second, they can satisfy their sexual needs. Third, sex will become depoliticized. Fourth, they will use up some of the energy they are putting into street demonstrations. Finally, our society's obsession with virginity will disappear."

Even conservatives like Muhammad Javad Larijani, a Berkeley-educated former legislator, favor temporary marriage. As Mr. Larijani put it: "What's wrong with temporary marriage? You've got a variation of it in California. It's called a partnership. Better to have it legal than have it done clandestinely in the streets."

Though most of Iran's reformist publications have closed in recent months, newspapers and magazines that remain have begun to discuss the issue. A recent front-page article in a weekly tabloid, "World of Medicine," about a chador-wearing, AIDS-infected prostitute who took pleasure in infecting her clients included a recommendation on avoiding infection: take a temporary wife.

Advocates of temporary marriage also point out that children of such unions are legitimate and entitled to a share of the father's inheritance.

More rarely, unrelated couples have used nonsexual "temporary marriage" in order to live or work in close quarters.

But the popular response to such a sweeping societal solution has not been favorable. After "The Hope of Youth," a weekly, ran an article in favor of sigheh, readers called and wrote in with scathing attacks.

"I am 23 years old," one unnamed young man told the paper. "If I temporarily marry a young woman for three years and then divorce her, would anyone be willing to marry her? It would be impossible that any man would want to have a family with this woman."

Another unidentified caller was quoted as saying: "Those who want to promote temporary marriage don't understand that they would be promoting prostitution. Who would be there to be a father for the children from temporary marriage?"

The paper wrote back: "The reality is that young men and women do have sexual relationships. If these relationships are defined within an Islamic framework, we will not have the danger of prostitution."

As for what to do about children of temporary marriages, the editor added, "It is not so complicated to use birth control anymore."

This is not the first time that people in the Islamic Republic have tried to promote sigheh. The first person to discuss it openly was none other than Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani when he was president. In a sermon in 1990, he called sexual desire a God-given trait. Don't be "promiscuous like the Westerners," he advocated, but use the God-given solution of temporary marriage.

That sermon brought thousands of protesters to Parliament, in part because a married man can have as many temporary wives as he wants, and up to four permanent ones, and can break the contract anytime he wants, whereas women cannot. Many secular Iranians are irked by what they perceive to be the hypocrisy of clerics, who have made ample use of temporary marriage over the years but are adamantly opposed to premarital or extramarital sex.

Clerics seldom talk about their experiences. But in the book "Law of Desire," Shahla Haeri, a Boston University cultural anthropologist and granddaughter of an ayatollah, cited interviews with clerics.

One proclaimed that because God banned alcohol, he allowed temporary marriage.

Ms. Haeri, who lectured on the subject in Iran, said that neither the clerics nor leading thinkers had begun to analyze its implications in a coherent way. "If they are really serious," she said, "they should study the matter in the context of sexuality, birth control, sexually transmitted diseases, morality, religion and gender relations."

But what of Maryam and Karim?

He gave her clothes and a little money from time to time during their "marriage," but not the gold coin he had promised her with each renewal of their contract. He told her she was beautiful, something her husband had never done. She cleaned his house occasionally and even met his brothers. He met her mother — who, twice divorced, had married (permanently) for the third time. They kept their temporary marriage a secret, even from her.

"She knew that I was with a man," Maryam said, "but would have preferred I was with him illegally than his sigheh."

In fact, Maryam and Karim are not the couple's real names. Maryam remains so ambivalent about what she did that she asked that not even their first names be used.

In the fifth year of their relationship, Karim began to call less frequently. Maryam went to a fortuneteller, who told her that Karim was to be married. When she confronted him, he said that it was over. After their contract ran out, he married a virgin chosen by his parents.

Because of her divorce, she said, "he told me right from the start that he couldn't marry me permanently. But he treated me so nicely that I thought things would change."

Maryam was so much in love that she even offered — half jokingly — to become Karim's temporary wife again after he was permanently married. He refused.

"I think sigheh is good, very good," she said, but added that she would not do it again. "I want to get married permanently now, as soon as possible."