You might want to read more on Iran and Iranian Islamic Socialism and the Iranian Revolution, Whitecrow. From it's inception, the various forms of Shia Islam have been the main alternatives to Sunni Islam. And their major difference is that the Shia traditions do not close the door to ijtihad, or innovation in religious interpretation of Sharia or Islamic law. The Sunnis closed the door to Ijtihad somewhere around 1000 AD.
The Shiites also have a much different authority structure. Shiites are divided between "Sevener" (Ismaili (which include the Druse and the Nizari (Assassin sects ; the devotees of the Aga Khan in Pakistan and Tanzania and elsehwere who by the way are quite liberal) and Twelver Shites who are the major sect in Iran, Iraq, the Shiites of Lebanon , eastern Saudi Arabia and the Hazara of Afghanistan (who are severely persecuted by the Sunni Taleban). And they make up about 17% of the population of Pakistan including much of the landowning class there.
Twelver Shiites believe that through study of the Koran, a mullah can ascend to advanced degrees of Hojteeslam and then to Ayatollah, where he ibecomes a mujtahid, a supreme religous authority and aa marja i taqlid, or object of imitation.
What Ayatollah Khomeinei did with his concept of Islamic Socialism, or Vilayet il Fakih was to end the tradition of the Sha clergy staying out of politics and bring in a concept of the Cclergy playing an active role, although not actually running the organs of Iran's government. That's why the office of President is elected and different from that of Supreme Leader. I suppose you could say that the ulema functions in place of a Communist Party in a Communist state. There are a lot of books about Iranian politics.
What this means in practice is that an Ayatollah has the power to innovate and change religious tradition and custom in a way that Sunni ulema cannot. Sunni ulema can only restate the Koran and trying to go against tradition can get them killed. For Sunni, liberal Muslims are irreligious Muslims and the Salafists have the logic of orthodoxy on thier side. But an Ayatollah in Shia Islamcan in certain circumstances, change certain apractices and create innovations as this article in which Ayatollah Khomeinei behaving in a fashion that on the surface most American Christian fundamentalists would consider extremely liberal but in reality explains and puts in context Mahmoud Ahmedinijad's remarks that "there's no homosexuality in Iran" . Yes, an Ayatollah's fatwas can chantge things --up to a point.
Thursday, Jul 28, 2005 4:08 PM UTC
A fatwa for transsexuals
One woman's courage in appealing to the late Ayatollah Khomeini has made Tehran the unlikely sex change capital of the world.
By
Robert Tait
Salon
Topics:
News
It could take something extraordinary to move the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa (or religious and legal decree). Novelist
Salman Rushdie did it by challenging the sanctity of the prophet Mohammed in “The Satanic Verses,” provoking Iran’s austere revolutionary leader into pronouncing the death sentence. For Maryam Khatoon Molkara it required the equally dramatic step of confronting Khomeini in person and proving, in graphic terms, that she was a woman trapped inside a man’s body.
To do so, she had to endure a ferocious beating from bodyguards before coming face to face with the ayatollah in his living room, covered in blood, dressed in a man’s suit and, thanks to a course of hormone treatment, sporting fully formed female breasts.
“It was behesht [paradise],” Molkara, 55, says of the meeting 22 years ago. “The atmosphere, the moment and the person were paradise for me. I had the feeling that from then on there would be a sort of light.” Light or not, the encounter produced, in turn, a religious judgment that — unlike the unfulfilled edict on Rushdie — has had an enduring effect that still resonates. Because today, the Islamic Republic of Iran occupies the unlikely role of global leader for sex changes.
In contrast to almost everywhere else in the Muslim world, sex change operations are legal in Iran for anyone who can afford the minimum $3,500 cost and satisfy interviewers that he or she meets necessary psychological criteria. As a result, women who endured agonizing childhood and adolescent experiences as boys, and — albeit in fewer numbers — young men who reached sexual maturity as girls, are easy to find in Tehran. Iran has even become a magnet for patients from eastern European and Arab countries seeking to change their gender.
Every Tuesday and Wednesday morning in Dr. Bahram Mir-Jalali’s Tehran clinic, young men and women gather in preparation for a new start on the opposite side of the gender divide. Many are desperate, seeing the operation as an escape from a confused sexual identity that has led to parental rejection and persecution by police and religious vigilantes.
Ali-Reza, 24, wearing thick makeup, has livid red burn marks on his arm after his father poured boiling water over him in a rage over his “sexual deviancy.” “I have attempted suicide three times,” he says. “The interpretation of my family was that having a child like me was a punishment from God. My parents were religious and traditional, and they called me trash under the name of Islam.”
Others voice feelings of spiritual renewal after the surgery. “It’s like a rebirth,” says Hasti, formerly Hassan, now reinvented as a svelte, leggy 20-year-old who is planning to marry her German fiancé. “I’ve even forgotten my male birthday. I only remember my female birthday, the day when I received the operation. It was very painful, but I feel happy whereas before I was always crying.”
Mir-Jalali, 66, a Paris-trained surgeon, has performed 320 gender operations in the past 12 years. Around 250 have involved the complex and physically painful process of transforming men into women by creating female genitals through a skin graft from the intestines. In a European country, he says, he would have carried out fewer than 40 such procedures over the same period. The reason for the discrepancy, he says, is Iran’s strict ban on homosexuality, as required by the Quran.
“In Iran, homosexuality is treated as a crime carrying the death penalty,” he says. “In Europe and North America, it is accepted. Transsexuals aren’t homosexuals. Unlike homosexuals, they suffer from a separation of body and soul where they believe their own body doesn’t belong to them. But in Europe they can have a free life. They aren’t under the same pressure to change their sex. In Iran, transsexuals suffer from a lack of awareness, within their own family and in wider society. That increases the psychological pressure and contributes to the higher number of operations here.”
Nevertheless, the surgery’s availability has provided deliverance to a community that was once cowed and confined to a secret underground existence. Bringing it about has required a theological rethink from Iran’s Shiite Islamic rulers, accustomed to rigidly traditional stances on sexual matters.
Indeed, Islamic scholars are still trying to reconcile the fatwa with religious thinking. Hojatolislam Muhammad Mehdi Kariminia, a cleric based in the holy city of Qom, is writing a Ph.D. thesis on transsexuality. “The basic humanity of the person is preserved,” is his conclusion. “The change is simply of characteristics.”
This situation would have been unthinkable were it not for the bravery and persistence of Molkara, who embarked on a personal odyssey that brought persecution and abuse in her quest for Khomeini’s official blessing. Khomeini had pronounced on gender problems in a book written in 1963, when he indicated there was no religious proscription against corrective surgery. However, says Molkara, the statement applied only to hermaphrodites, defined as those bearing both male and female genital characteristics. It provided no remedy for those — such as Molkara — who physically belonged to one gender but were convinced that they were members of the opposite sex.
In 1975, Molkara — then working with Iranian television and going by her male name of Fereydoon — wrote the first of several letters to the ayatollah, then exiled in Iraq in opposition to the shah.
“I told him I had always had the feeling that I was a woman,” she says. “I wrote that my mother had told me that even at the age of 2, she had found me in front of the mirror putting chalk on my face the same way a woman puts on her makeup. He wrote back, saying that I should follow the Islamic obligations of being a woman.”
In 1978 Molkara traveled to Paris, where Khomeini was by then based, to lobby him in person. She was unsuccessful, and the subsequent Islamic revolution, far from easing the transsexuals’ path, cast them into darkness. Some were locked up in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison while others were stoned to death. Molkara, meanwhile, was fired from her job, forcibly injected with male hormones and confined to a psychiatric institution.
Thanks to her contacts with influential clerics, Molkara was released and resolved to keep fighting. She lobbied several leading figures in the regime, including Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who later became president. All urged her to write once again to Khomeini.
“I couldn’t continue like this,” she says. “I knew I could get the operation easily enough in London, but I wanted the documentation so I could live.” Desperate for the religious blessing that would confer legal protection in staunchly Islamic Iran, Molkara decided on a fateful step.
Donning a man’s suit, she walked to Khomeini’s heavily protected compound in north Tehran, carrying a copy of the Quran. In an additional piece of religious symbolism, she had tied shoes around her neck. The gesture — redolent of Ashura, the Shiite festival depicting the heroism of the third imam Hossein — was meant to convey that she was seeking shelter.
At first, it failed to provide her with any. As she approached the compound, armed security guards pounced and began beating her. They stopped only when Khomeini’s brother, Hassan Pasandide, witnessing the scene, intervened and took Molkara into his house.
There, Molkara — then bearded, tall and powerfully built — hysterically tried to explain her predicament. “I was screaming, ‘I’m a woman, I’m a woman,’” she says. The security guards, fearing Molkara was carrying explosives, were anxious about the band wrapped around her chest. She removed it to reveal the female breasts underneath. The women in the room rushed to cover her with a chador.
By then, Khomeini’s son, Ahmad, had arrived and was moved to tears by Molkara’s story. Amid the emotion, it was decided to take Molkara to the supreme leader himself. On meeting the nearly mythic figure in whom she had invested such hope, Molkara fainted.
“I was taken into a corridor,” Molkara says. “I could hear Khomeini raising his voice. He was blaming those around him, asking how they could mistreat someone who had come for shelter. He was saying, ‘This person is God’s servant.’ He had three of his trusted doctors in the room, and he asked what the difference was between hermaphrodites and transsexuals. What are these ‘difficult neutrals,’ he was saying. Khomeini didn’t know about the condition until then. From that moment on, everything changed for me.”
Molkara left the Khomeini compound with a letter addressed to the chief prosecutor and the head of medical ethics giving religious authorization for her — and, by implication, others like her — to surgically change their gender. It was the fatwa she had sought.
Subsequently, Molkara struggled to convince fellow transsexuals of their rights and to introduce the requisite medical standards for sex change operations to Iran. She only completed her gender change four years ago, ironically undergoing the surgery in Thailand because of unhappiness with procedures in her native country.
Today she runs Iran’s leading transsexual campaign group and has become the community’s spokesperson. But two security monitors in her living room attest to her vulnerability in a society still intolerant of sexual unorthodoxy. “It is hard to live with constant fear,” she says. “I hope things are easier for the next generation of transsexuals. Every time a transsexual is arrested by the police I am called to bail them out. Outside the police station there will be a crowd of vigilantes waiting to beat me or stone my car.”
A brief encounter with Iran’s hallowed religious leader may have brought light. But for many Iranians, enlightenment has yet to dawn.
May 11, 2007
CHANGE SEX OR DIE: An Exclusive Interview with an Iranian Transgendered Activist on Iran's Surgical "Cure" for Homosexuality
The following article was written for Gay City News -- New York's largest lesbian and gay weekly -- which published it yesterday:
The situation of the transgendered in Iran has been the subject of frequent media reports that paint a rosy picture of life for them in the Islamic Republic, and which characterize Tehran - in a recent description in the U.K. daily The Guardian - as "the unlikely sex-change capital of the world."
Western journalists seem to find it exotic that, in Iran's patriarchal society - in which sexuality and expressions of sexual identity are religiously codified with the force of law, women are restricted to second-class citizenship, and homosexuality is a crime punishable by death - sex reassignment surgery has mushroomed, with the approval of the country's religious authorities.
This came about after Maryam Khatoon Molkara (
left), then a 33-year-old pre-op transman, forced his way into an audience in the early 1980s with the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini - leader of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and founder of and undisputed authority in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Moved by Molkara's pleas, Khomeini was eventually persuaded to issue a fatwa which declared that sex-change surgery was permitted since it was not mentioned as forbidden in the Koran.
Western journalists present the contemporary Iranian theological discourse on transsexuality that has developed in the ensuing years since Khomeini's fatwa as a curiosity that contradicts the West's prevailing view of Islamic attitudes toward all things sexual.
But Afsaneh Najmabadi, an Iranian who is a professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University, said in an article on Iran.com that she feels "uneasy" when reading these "celebratory" portrayals of Iran's attitude toward the transgendered.
"Every time I read one of these reports I want to say BUT, BUT, BUT, because there are some scary things going on that have gone almost unnoticed," she said.
Najmabadi (
right), author of "Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity" (University of Chicago Press), wrote not long ago that Iran's official position on the transgendered has manufactured "a religio-psycho-medicalized discourse on 'unnatural and deviant' [
ghayr-i tabi'i and
inhirafi] sexualities" that is "deeply troubling because of the explicit framing of transsexuality within a particular mapping of sexuality that simultaneously renders homosexuality, and more generally any sexual and gender non-conformity, as deviant and criminal."
And while a positive and progressive attitude toward sex-change surgery is liberating for genuinely transgendered people, it can have an enormously deleterious effect when deformed to be used as a supposed "treatment," or even as punishment, to "normalize" homosexual desire.
Because homosexuality is a capital crime in Iran, and because the regime of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been engaged in a what he has called a "cultural revolution" that involves highly-organized persecutions targeting feminists and homosexuals, the choice presented to Iranian same-sexers is often a stark and unpleasant one, a choice epitomized by the title of a recent documentary by the France 2 public television network's newsmagazine "Envoyé spécial," which called its half-hour broadcast on the transgendered in Iran "
Changer de Sex ou Mourir" - "Change Sex or Die."
How Iran's official discourse on the transgendered conceals a multitude of evils and ills can be seen in the following, eye-opening interview with Atrian, a 26-year-old male-to-female transsexual activist also known as Sayeh, who fled Iran last year to Turkey.
Atrian was extensively interviewed in Kaysen, Turkey, on April 5 by Arsham Parsi (
left), the 27-year-old executive director of the
Iranian Queer Organization (or IRQO, the new name adopted by the Persian Gay and Lesbian Organization, or PGLO). Parsi was on a fact-finding trip to meet and help the many LGBT Iranian refugees in Turkey whom the IRQO is assisting.
The interview with Atrian was conducted in Persian, and a transcript was provided exclusively to this reporter, and translated into English for Gay City News by Morteza Dehghani.
Atrian says that there are many people who accept sex-change surgery to escape persecution as homosexuals.
"A significant number of people who get a sex change in Iran are gay, as you cannot state in Iran that you are a man and want to be with another man, even if your appearance is feminine," Atrian declared.
"There are only a small percentage of people who get a sex-change operation who are actually transgendered. Out of some 100 transsexuals whom I've encountered," she reported, "only 20 of them were genuinely transgendered, and the rest are gay."
Atrian explained, "If you are known to be gay, you will be hanged. Therefore, many gays try to plead for societal acceptance by announcing themselves as transgendered. A lot of gays have been brainwashed into believing they are ill. Some believe that if they present themselves as women, they might find a boyfriend more easily."
It is not often mentioned in Western reports, but to gain approval for sex-reassignment surgery, one must have a certificate signed by the religious authorities declaring that one is "mentally ill." So, Atrian said, "Many gays believe they will get accepted more easily by society by claiming they are ill [as transgendered]."
Unable to endure the barrage of government persecution, scathing religious opprobrium, and often the hatred of their own families, said Atrian, "Many gays, for many different reasons, become emotional and get the operation. But soon after getting the operation, they'll cry for days at the mistake they have made."
Atrian recalled her visit to one gay man who had opted for sex-change surgery.
"I was visiting him in the hospital, and he told me, 'If you can, flee Iran.' I asked him why - and as he was crying like a river, he replied: 'I have committed a huge mistake. Why did I want to become a woman? I didn't even become a woman, I've become something deficient, and I would give anything to go back to my previous state.' In another incident, I was at a doctor's office and encountered two transsexuals who were begging the doctor to operate them to go back to their previous state."
This sort of thing, Atrian related, is quite common.
Atrian described the typical path of what she calls "the many gays who are forced by the society into believing that they are transsexuals. This group is under constant pressure from their parents, telling them that they have been led into deviation from the righteous path. They start analyzing themselves, thinking 'I am a boy, so how can it be that I like other boys? Because this is a sin! I must be a prostitute. I've deviated from the righteous path!'"
So, Atrian recounted, these gays "start contemplating ways to obtain society's acceptance so that it would be okay for them to like other boys. And then they reason: The only way to do that is to attach a label to myself that shows I'm a sick person, because when you are sick, people pity you and say, 'Oh my god, this poor kid! This is the way God has created him, it is a genetic disease!' So, he will be forced to make himself known as a transsexual" who is mentally ill, in order to be treated leniently.
"If you want to prove you're not a homosexual," Atrian underscored, "you'll be forced to get the sex-change operation. You don't want to be forced to explain why you are attracted to your own sex, and the only way to avoid that is to get the operation."
And, added Atrian, "A lot of people become drug addicts after the operation because they realize it was a mistake, they become depressed, and often commit suicide because there is no way to undo the operation. But neither the doctors, nor the parents, nor anyone else take responsibility for these tragedies, because no one respects or values transsexuals."
Atrian said that transsexuals are often raped by the very doctors who are involved in their surgery.
"This is a quite normal occurrence, as normal as saying that your doctor smokes," she explained. "The doctor knows that the patient is scared and does not have any family support, therefore he will listen to the doctor who claims he wants to help him. But just because they are doctors doesn't mean they are ethical."
Moreover, Atrian said, "You can't complain about these doctor rape cases to anyone, because the police forces themselves commit the same sort of acts. When I'm already depressed and have problems about my situation, and when this doctor - whom I desperately need and who is in control of my future destiny - forces me to have sex with him, I think to myself, 'How can someone possibly take advantage of another human being in this situation? What such a doctor is doing is similar to a supposedly charitable person who asks a hungry person for sex in exchange for a loaf of bread.'"
In Iran, Atrian said, sex-reassignment surgery has become a lucrative, assembly-line business.
"The doctors performing the operations in Iran are so careless - for them, it is like cutting paper and not flesh," she explained. "Left and right, on a daily basis, they perform sex-change operations on people without even paying proper attention to each case, just because it's a highly profitable business. Yet they are so proud that they are in a country that allows people to have sex changes. But they perform all these operations improperly, and often incompletely."
Atrian asserted that, "Out of all the people they operate on, only a few remain healthy. How many of these patients do not become psychotic because of the way they've been treated and mutilated? How many do not commit suicide? How many can live a normal life after their operation? Most of them don't even get the chance of finding a companion - they are shunned as transsexuals, and their past will always haunt them."
Atrian added that even some psychiatrists "take advantage of the simpleness of their patients. A couple of years ago, one of my friends visited a psychiatrist - and this doctor told him that, if my friend wanted to prove that he had feminine emotions in order to be permitted to get a sex-change operation, my friend had to have sex with him. This is not a common sort of incident with psychiatrists, but it happens from time to time." (
Read this reporter's August 19, 2006 interview with an Iranian lesbian whose psychiatrists attempted to force her to have sex-change surgery.)
Transsexuals in Iran, Atrian said, are often targeted for beatings in the streets - both by the Basiji (the thuggish para-police used by the regime to enforce its draconian moral codes) and by people pretending to be Basiji. "Anyone who wears Basiji gear and has a motorcycle can beat you and nobody would question them for it, no one would ever check their IDs to make sure they are Basiji forces." (See
this reporter's February 9, 2006 interview with Mekabiz, a 21-year-old, self-described "transsexual man" who was tortured by police and raped with the complicity of his jailers,)
Atrian related that, "Even though the special forces of the police have no specific orders to arrest transsexuals, they too can arrest you. I myself have been arrested three times, and was disrespected in the most brutal way possible. I remember how four men who looked like Basiji beat me close to death in the middle of the street. They kept slamming their boots on my head so hard that even now, when I think about it, subconsciously my head starts moving to dodge their boots."
For transsexuals, said Atrian, Iran is "a sick society which made you ill in the first place and is now pointing at you and calling you sick."
With help from the IRQO, Atrian has obtained a visa to Canada, and is now waiting for a departure date from Turkey, where homophobia and transphobia are rampant and where she has been beaten several times and been threatened with death.
"I hope to get to Canada alive," she said. "Even if it is only for one year there, I would like to be myself and live without needing to pretend to anyone that I'm a poor and helpless person, live without needing to beg them not to belittle me or attack me. I don't want to feel the need to explain to people that I'm not a dirty and inferior person."
"My life," Atrian added, "is not like a cigarette that you can smoke and then throw away, as I will live and suffer in its ashes. I might get to Canada, or I might not. But I will never forget that all my rights were taken away from me in Iran. From now on, I want to build my life."
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