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(Dis)honoring the 1979 Iranian Revolution

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts on Feb 08, 2010

February 11 marks the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Ten years after the revolution, its leader — the Ayatollah Khomeini — issued a death warrant against the novelist, Salman Rushdie.

I’m keeping both of these facts in mind as I begin to write a new chapter of my next book.

A bit of background: Recently, I announced an experiment called “Notes From My Next Book.” With this experiment, I’m giving you a sneak peak at ideas being explored in my next book and inviting you to comment on them. Click here to learn more.

This week, I’m starting to write a chapter tentatively entitled, “Culture is not sacred.” My point is that Arab tribal culture, emanating from the Middle East but exported far beyond, has corrupted the practice of Islam.

For all its nasty passages, the Qur’an still speaks of personal freedom, spiritual growth and social justice. If that version of Islam is ever to be realized, then Muslims have to tackle what’s holding us back from just doing it.

I’ll argue that we have to challenge — and change — an Arab cultural custom called “honor.” Click here to understand what “honor” means in the Arab-Islamic context.

In my next book, I’ll include little-known insights about “honor,” such as the eery parallels between the oppression of Blacks in the honor-based 19th-century American south and the repression of women in the honor-based Muslim world today.

But the custom of “honor” can produce hilarity, too. Here are some of my research notes, culled from an interview I’ve conducted with Salman Rushdie…

SALMAN: “I remember, in the early days of the Iranian Revolution, a number of bizarre issues were being debated by the Ayatollahs. Seriously, this is not a joke. One of the questions being asked was, if a woman is wearing a head-to-toe veil but she’s wearing Western clothes like a skirt underneath, is it ok? I mean, given that she is completely covered and all you can see is her eyes?

It was decreed that this was not ok. The reason it was not okay was that the friction of her thighs against each other inside the skirt would generate sexual heat and this heat would be transmitted through her eyes to men who might observe her and might inflame. And that was, of course, not acceptable.

The best of these arguments, actually, had to do with the limits of incest. Is it incestuous if you were to have relations with your aunt by marriage? It might be improper and a bit upsetting to your uncle, but is it actually incestuous? In the end, they [Iranian clerics] decided that it was and should not be allowed.

But there was an exception: If you were not able to control the entry into your bed of an aunt by marriage, what then followed was not your fault. And if your aunt by marriage lived upstairs and the floor collapsed and the aunt by marriage landed in your bed from above, no man could be expected to restrain himself.

Honor culture leads to these kinds of appalling aberrations and, at worst, to the phenomenon of honor killings.”

IRSHAD: “How should clear-thinking people address this?”

SALMAN: “Dishonorably. I think that honor culture is a very dangerous thing.”