Is Iran's mullah-backed system of temporary marriage a godsend for the sexually frustrated—or religious prostitution?
On a dusty morning in the holy city of Qom, I went looking for a shrine in a walled cemetery of martyrs known as Sheikhan. The graveyard’s walls are lined with glass cases containing the framed photos of soldiers felled by the Iran-Iraq war. The shrine, I’d been told, is a hangout for women seeking temporary marriage, an intriguing mechanism in Shiite Islam for relieving sexual frustration. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, sex outside of marriage is a crime, punishable by up to 100 lashes or, in the case of adultery, death by stoning. Yet the purpose of a temporary marriage is clear from its name in Arabic—mut’a, pleasure. A man and a woman may contract a mut’a for a finite period of time—from minutes to 99 years or more—and for a specific amount, mehr in Farsi, which the man owes the woman.
An interesting read throughout.
it’s true, officer, we were simply engaging in some mut’a for some mehr, allahu akbar
