[Yoshie:]
>> In any case, the original laws of the Islamic Republic themselves,
>> especially their political and economic aspects, were the results
>> of what you call radical revisionism to begin with, very different
>> from the previous norms of Shi'ism; and many aspects of personal
>> laws, such as ones concerning women's rights, have been legally or
>> practically revised since the founding of the Islamic Republic;
>> and I'm sure that Iranians will continue to revise all of them
>> further.
[Tahir Wood:]
> No that's not what I was calling revisionism. I am well aware that
> the legal framework was cobbled together in Paris with a mishmash
> of traditional Shia Islam, aspects of the French 5th Republic
> constitution and whatever else at hand seemed to guarantee power
> for the Islamic Republic Party. Bani Sadr even had the task of
> persuading Khomeini that votes for women were a good idea. I'm
> talking about the kind of enlightenment revisionism that would
> banish such oppressive laws permanently into the dustbin of
> history. But how about admitting that what you wrote was wrong,
> that ritual ablutions do not make homosexual acts OK? Or are you
> too steadfast in your partisan politics to ever be wrong about
> anything?
>
> Tahir
[Y:] In the same 1947 religious manual, Khomeini also makes "a distinction between 'sodomy' with a man/boy who is related to a woman one intends to marry (her son, brother, or father), in which case marriage may not take place" and says that "In the case of a person who marries the mother, sister, or daughter of a man and after marriage has sodomite relations with that man [his wife] will not become unlawful to him" (Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, University of Chicago Press, p. 159). Afary and Anderson cite Montazari and Golpaygani's religious manuals as other examples containing similar rules. Should these be understood the way you insist, positing dichotomous ideological worlds of "sinfulness" and "uncleanliness"?
T: No this is a different matter. Regarding the distinction I made, it is in fact quite fundamental: There is no way that someone in a normal daily state of ritual impurity, i.e. having had sex with a spouse, is thereby in a state of sin. But the matter you now describe above is the way in which two acts, one of which is sinful, may have a bearing on each other. I suspect that this might also be a matter of interpretation and disputation. But in any event it is not the same thing. My point was this, that you seized on something that turned out to be a misconception to try to establish that homosexuality can be condoned within the law. It cannot, not in any interpretation in which the notion of religious law is upheld.
[Y:] (If so, is the idea that it is OK to be the wife of a sinful man depending on his state of cleanliness.) Or can these be understood in a way Afary and Anderson read them?
. . . theologians are quite accommodating of what are
officially seen as sexual transgressions, provided
proper rituals of cleansing and penance are performed.
Moreover, unlike Roman Catholicism, Islam does not
require an oral confession. . . . Sexual transgressions
can remain a secret between the individual and God.
Despite the commonly held view of Muslim societies
as puritanical, they can therefore be more tolerant of
(status-defined) homosexuality, provided the relationship
is not flaunted. (Afary and Anderson, pp. 159-160)
T: The first sentence above is simply not correct.
[T:] That practical tolerance of older forms of same-sex love and lust that has existed, as Afary and Anderson note, are not the same as "recognition of civil rights and legal equality" of "homosexuals/bisexuals" and "heterosexuals" as defined in modern discourse of sexual orientations, the discourse that is not the norm in Iran.
T: You got that right.
[Y:] The question is how Iranians, who are not strangers to the Enlightenment, (as well as others in the global South who do not live the discourse of sexual orientations), can move from practical tolerance to civil and legal recognition of same-sex relations in the public sphere. That will be a long cultural struggle.
T: But it is more of a struggle, the more religious the country is, the very point that you don't want to concede. It was relatively easy for Cuba to move to a position of official toleration. In South Africa, the situation is ambiguous, with official protection of gay rights, but extremes of social prejudice that compromise that. But in Iran under the present regime the debate is a non-starter, as your friend made clear in New York. Now you can dig and dig through all the arcane documents that you can find but what you need to do is to show me a government today that rules in the name of Islam that is opening up a public debate around the decriminalisation of homosexuality and then you will really make my jaw drop. Another point: the sources that you're currently looking at appear to reflect an older Islamic society, a pre-fundamentalist one, precisely the kind of society that the fundamentalists of every stripe regard as degraded, disgraceful and shameful (you can go back a number of decades and find Iranian clergy, including Khomeini, even condoning the smoking of opium, which they would never do publicly today). My other point: whether fundamentalist Islam today is a modernist movement, i.e. post-enlightenment. It is so, but only partially. In natural sciences and technology it is thoroughly modernist, but there is no notion of social progress within it other than the propogation of Islam plus technological rationality. There are very deep historical reasons for this, and also profound similarities with the fascist project of the corporatist state. But the bottom line is that there is nothing enlightened in religious law. Period. I don't share your enthusiasm for nation states, any of them, and I don't champion any against the others, but I recognise the necessity rather from a leftwing perspective of pressuring every government to shed its obscurantism and its hocus pocus forms of oppression, including the US. That is only a precondition for social progress.