by D.M. Murdock
June 6, 2010
from
Examiner Website
With the approaching first anniversary on June
12th of last year's controversial Iranian presidential elections, officials
of the Islamic Republic are bracing for possibly millions of protestors
pouring into the streets in a show of strength that could eventually spell
the end of the government's 30-year reign of terror and oppression.
So terrified is the current regime, apparently,
that the Supreme Leader
Ayatollah Khamenei, on the recent celebration
of Ayatollah Khomeini's birthday, ordered all Iranians living abroad to
return to their native land to be hanged or jailed for being "enemies of the
Islamic Republic."
The list of the Iranian people's grievances against the Islamic Republic
headed by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is long indeed, and includes
the blatant and vicious oppression of women, manifested most pathologically
in government-sponsored prostitution and sex slavery.
While the regime's apologists put forth weak arguments and excuses for the
blatant Islamist abuse of women in Iran - claiming, for example, that
because there are female Iranian lawyers and doctors women are thus treated
well and fairly - festering below this shallow surface remains a horrendous
record of sexism and misogyny justified by classical, not "radical" or
"extremist," Islamic teachings.
Iranian Shah's wife, before
1979 revolution
One need only look at images preceding the
Islamic fundamentalist takeover of Iran in 1979 to see how poorly women have
fared in the past three decades under what some Iranians consider a criminal
occupation of their ancient nation.
Says Iranian-American writer
Amil Imani,
for example:
"Under the late Shah, Iranian women were the
most respected females in the entire Muslim world. These thugs who are
currently running my native country are not Iranians but packs of Muslim
wolves who are simply following the examples of the prophet of Islam,
Muhammad.
"This misogynist religion of Allah is custom-made for the savage male. A
faithful follower of Allah is allowed to have as many as four permanent
wives - and replace any of them at any time he wants - as well as an
unlimited number of one-night or one-hour-standers that he can afford to
rent. But, woe unto a woman if she even has a single love affair with
another man. Nothing less than death by stoning is her just punishment."
Mr. Imani, an ex-Muslim co-founder of
Former
Muslims United, has good reason to make what sound to the untrained eye to
be inflammatory remarks about the Islamic Republic, as he has watched from
the safety of his well-appreciated adopted home of America the absolute
oppression of his beloved Persian people, male and female, by rabid
Islamists who use Islamic
sharia law in order to establish a male-dominant,
sexist and misogynistic regime that abuses, enslaves and exploits girls and
women to the hilt.
This exploitation and abuse include the
kidnapping of girls and women off the streets to be enslaved in
government-approved brothels, as well as to be trafficked in sex slavery
around the Arab world and elsewhere globally.
Iranian brothels
service male "pilgrims"
The government-approved or run whorehouses with kidnapped sex slaves who
service male "pilgrims" and others are Iran's "dirty little secret," which
mainstream media and human-rights activists may be ignoring as a "cultural
idiosyncrasy" or "religious freedom" but which is in reality the cause of
the intense suffering of thousands of Persian girls and women, as men have
turned them into sex slaves, to be used in Iran as well as to be sold to men
in other countries, including in the West, according to Dr. Donna M.
Hughes of the University of Rhode Island.
Dr. Hughes is a "leading international researcher on trafficking of women
and children" whose studies have included the trafficking of girls and women
in such diverse places as not only Iran, Russia and Korea, but also the
United States, France and Great Britain.
In "Islamic Fundamentalism and the Sex Slave
Trade in Iran" (2005), Hughes writes:
"A measure of Islamic fundamentalists’
success in controlling society is the depth and totality with which they
suppress the freedom and rights of women. In Iran for 25 years, the
ruling mullahs have enforced humiliating and sadistic rules and
punishments on women and girls, enslaving them in a gender apartheid
system of segregation, forced veiling, second-class status, lashing, and
stoning to death.
"Joining a global trend, the fundamentalists have added another way to
dehumanize women and girls: buying and selling them for prostitution.
Exact numbers of victims are impossible to obtain, but according to an
official source in Tehran, there has been a 635 percent increase in the
number of teenage girls in prostitution.
The magnitude of this statistic conveys how
rapidly this form of abuse has grown. In Tehran, there are an estimated
84,000 women and girls in prostitution, many of them are on the streets,
others are in the 250 brothels that reportedly operate in the city. The
trade is also international: thousands of Iranian women and girls have
been sold into sexual slavery abroad.
"The head of Iran’s Interpol bureau believes that the sex slave trade is
one of the most profitable activities in Iran today. This criminal trade
is not conducted outside the knowledge and participation of the ruling
fundamentalists. Government officials themselves are involved in buying,
selling, and sexually abusing women and girls.
"Many of the girls come from impoverished rural areas. Drug addiction is
epidemic throughout Iran, and some addicted parents sell their children
to support their habits. High unemployment - 28 percent for youth 15-29
years of age and 43 percent for women 15-20 years of age - is a serious
factor in driving restless youth to accept risky offers for work.
Slave traders take advantage of any
opportunity in which women and children are vulnerable. For example,
following the recent earthquake in Bam, orphaned girls have been
kidnapped and taken to a known slave market in Tehran where Iranian and
foreign traders meet.
"Popular destinations for victims of the slave trade are the Arab
countries in the Persian Gulf. According to the head of the Tehran
province judiciary, traffickers target girls between 13 and 17, although
there are reports of some girls as young as 8 and 10, to send to Arab
countries..."
Hughes's article also reports the breaking up of
several prostitution networks thriving in Turkey and Europe, extending to
Pakistan and Afghanistan as well.
In the Islamic fundamentalist country of
Pakistan, she explains, also exist institutionalized brothels in which these
sex slaves often end up.
Islamic sexism and
misogyny
Iranian women today
(Photo by Zoom Zoom)
While Islamist apologists may argue that
sex
slavery exists around the world, exploiting innocent girls, women, boys and
men, the fact will remain that in these Muslim nations this human-rights
abuse has become institutionalized, with government-run brothels in Iran,
for instance, offering what is called
mutah or a temporary contract that
allows men to "marry" for sexual purposes women other than the four
concurrent wives allotted by Muhammad.
Many of these brothels are near "holy sites," so
that male pilgrims can "relieve their urges" while on a "religious"
pilgrimage.
These sexist practices are justified by Quranic verses and other Islamic
texts that proclaim women to be inferior subhumans to be used and exploited
at will by men, who are given permission to beat and control them as they
would property and animals.
For example, the
Quranic verse or ayah 4:24 is held up as justification for
mutah:
"Also [forbidden to you are] married women,
except those whom you own as slaves. Such is the decree of God. All
women other than these are lawful for you, provided you court them with
your wealth in modest conduct, not in fornication.
Give them their dowry for the enjoyment you
have had of them as a duty; but it shall be no offense for you to make
any other agreement among yourselves after you have fulfilled your duty.
Surely God is all-knowing and wise."
Believers in a literal and eternal
interpretation of the Quran/Koran seem to have only one place to go with
this verse, which basically says that Muslim men can own sex slaves.
Moreover, according to Islamic or sharia law, a
woman has no right to divorce, as only a man does, a right he may freely
exercise in some Muslim areas merely by saying the word
talaq - "I divorce
you" - three times. A man can then proceed to marry another woman and
another after that by doing the same thing.
The notorious
Quranic ayah 4:34 makes men superior to women and allows them
to beat them:
"Men have authority over women because
God
has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their
wealth to maintain them.
Good women are obedient. They guard their
unseen parts because God has guarded them. As for those from whom you
fear disobedience, admonish them and forsake them in beds apart, and
beat them."
Woman in niqab in Yemen
(Photo by Steve Evans)
As concerns the guarding of "unseen parts," in
some Muslim sects, a woman's entire body is considered awrah or "naked" and
thus must be completely cloaked.
In other words, a woman is wholly a sex
organ. In other sects, a woman's hands and face may be exposed, but the rest
of her is a "walking vagina" and must be covered up in loose-fitting clothes
so that no man but her husband-owner may see her shape.
Additionally, there are many hadiths or commentaries on the Quran and
Muhammad that disparage women and essentially allow for their subjugation
and enslavement.
In the Tabari (9:113) or
History of the Prophets
and Kings, written in the 10th century by a respected Islamic scholar and
theologian, we read the following about women:
"Allah permits you to shut them in separate
rooms and to beat them, but not severely. If they abstain, they have the
right to food and clothing. Treat women well for they are like domestic
animals and they possess nothing themselves. Allah has made the
enjoyment of their bodies lawful in his Qur'an."
Islamic misogyny is so rampant that it extends
to
the Muslim hell, the main occupants of which are women, allegedly seen by
Muhammad himself:
"I stood at the gates of Paradise, most of
those who entered there were poor, I stood at the gates of Hell, most of
those who went in there, were women."
Forced prostitution is
illegal in civilized countries
While it may be argued that even the United States has legal,
government-approved brothels, as in the state of Nevada, the fact is that
forced prostitution is against American law and is generally vigorously
prosecuted wherever it is found.
The victims of forced prostitution in Western
countries are not imprisoned and raped as they are in Iran and elsewhere, as
part of the "religious" punishment according to Islamic or sharia law.
Nor is the sexploitation of women in the West
justified by "sacred scriptures" or "religious traditions" of any sort,
although sexism and misogyny themselves are also common to the other
Abrahamic faiths of Judaism and Christianity, as well as other religions.
In the end, the fact will remain that according to mainstream, classical
Islam, women are subordinate to men and can be exploited at will.
As the
Quran (2:223) also says:
"Women are your fields: go then, into your
fields whence you please."
Concerning the Iranian Islamic fundamentalists,
Hughes states,
"Misogyny is at the heart of their ideology
and is the framework of their state structure and authority."
Until the world grapples with the fact of
religiously justified sexism and misogyny, it cannot call itself enlightened
and civilized.
In conclusion, the videos appended to this article (below) give a sad view of what
has happened to so many women in Iran since Islamic fundamentalists took
over - as well as what happens to any nation that oppresses women and does
not allow them the opportunity to pursue their own natural and God-given
gifts and talents.
As Dr. Hughes also says,
"Only the overthrow of the mullahs and the
defeat of their theocracy will liberate women from a system of contempt
and hatred for women."
The lovely women - and men - of Iran deserve a
much better life than they have been consigned to these many years,
including the right to self-rule in a free, democratic state.
Videos
Iranian Documentary - Mutah and prostitution
by
youmuslim
June 28, 2008
from
YouTube Website
Iranian documentary on how
Mutah or Temporary Marriage
is used as a means of prostitution in
Iran today...
Iran before and after 1979
by
Amavand
April 21, 2008
from
YouTube Website
Persia, Iran before Khomeini (L), I love my Persia
by
ramiz110
March 17, 2008
from
YouTube Website
Pictures of good Iranian people, god save them, long live free
Persia-Iran...
http://iranold.pib.ir/