Iranian Mullahs in sex trade

by Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury
July 2, 2010

http://www.weeklyblitz.net/840/iranian-mullahs-in-sex-trade

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. 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 to 29 years of age, and 43 percent for women 15 to 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. One factor contributing to the increase in prostitution and the sex-slave trade is the number of teen girls who are running away from home. The girls are rebelling against fundamentalist-imposed restrictions on their freedom, domestic abuse and parental drug addictions. Unfortunately, in their flight to freedom, the girls find more abuse and exploitation. Ninety percent of girls who run away from home will end up in prostitution. As a result of runaways, in Tehran alone there are an estimated 25,000 street children, most of them girls. Pimps prey upon street children, runaways and vulnerable high-school girls in city parks. In one case, a woman was discovered selling Iranian girls to men in Persian Gulf countries; for four years, she had hunted down runaway girls and sold them. She even sold her own daughter for US$ 11,000.

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.

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. Given the totalitarian rule in Iran, most organized activities are known to the authorities. The exposure of sex slave networks in Iran has shown that many mullahs and officials are involved in the sexual exploitation and trade of women and girls. Women report that in order to have a judge approve a divorce they have to have sex with him. Women who are arrested for prostitution say they must have sex with the arresting officer. There are reports of police locating young women for sex for the wealthy and powerful mullahs.

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.

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.

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 alloted by Islam. Many of these brothels are near "holy sites," so that male pilgrims can "relieve their urges" while on a "religious" pilgrimage.

Does Quran permit sexist practice?

These sexist practices are justified by Quranic verses and other Islamic texts that proclaim women to be inferior sub-humans 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 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.

One particular Quranic ayah 4:34 makes men superior to women and allows them to beat them says:

"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."

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 Prophet of Islam 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 Quran."

While it may be argued that a number of Western countries, including Muslim majority country like Bangladesh or Indonesia have legal, government-approved brothels, the fact is that forced prostitution is against laws of all these nations and are generally vigorously prosecuted wherever it is found. The victims of forced prostitution 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.

Since I started writing serialized articles on rogue administration in Iran, a large number of people continued to contact me asking what can be done to stop such repression. They also asked why Quran has one-sidedly accorded every privilege to men, thus great ignoring the women.

I said overthrow of the mullahs and the defeat of their theocracy will liberate women from a system based on contempt and hatred for women. Moreover installation of democracy based on rule of law will rid Iran of the corruption and mafia-like control of the country. I also said it is time for Muslims to make a drastic reform in Islamic laws as well its attitude towards women.

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