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Jeffrey Epstein [jeeyacation@gmail.com]
Fwd: Foreign Policy magazine: The Ayatollah Under the Bed(sheets):
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Importance: High
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/20 12/04/23/the ayatollah under the bedsheets
AN FP SPECIAL REPORT
The Ayatollah Under the
Bed(sheets)
In the Islamic Republic of Iran, all politics may not be sexual, but all sex is political.
BY KARIM SADJADPOUR I MAY/JUNE 2012
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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)?
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").
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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.
To paraphrase the late U.S. House Speaker Tip O'Neill, 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
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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 emigre 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.
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.
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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.
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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."
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 Islam° -- 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
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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 causefitna [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.
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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.
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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 Mandavi, 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.
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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.
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
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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 negotioations prevent
Iran from obtaining a bomb, or is an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities inevitable?
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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.
Karim Sadjadpour is senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
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