Drawing on my experience growing up in Iran and engaging Iranian women of different ages and social strata, this project charts the history of Iran’s sexual revolution from the 19th century to the early 21^st century.

Sexual Politics in Modern Iran focuses on gender and sexuality and draws on her experience of growing up in Iran and her involvement with Iranian women of different ages and social strata. These observations, and a wealth of historical documents, form the kernel of this book, which charts the history of the nation’s sexual revolution from the nineteenth century to today. What comes across is the extraordinary resilience of the Iranian people, who have drawn on a rich social and cultural heritage to defy the repression and hardship of the Islamist state and its predecessors. It is this resilience, the author concludes, which forms the basis of a sexual revolution taking place in Iran today, one that is promoting reforms in marriage and family laws, and demanding more egalitarian gender and sexual relations.

Table of Contents

Part I.  Premodern Practices

• Chapter 1.  Formal Marriage
• Chapter 2.  Slave Concubinage, Temporary Marriage, and Harem Wives
• Chapter 3.  Class, Status-Defined Homosexuality, and Rituals of Courtship

Part II.  Toward a Westernized Modernity

• Chapter 4.  On the Road to an Ethos of Monogamous, Heterosexual Marriage
• Chapter 5.   Redefining Purity, Unveiling Bodies, and Shifting Desires
• Chapter 6.  Imperialist Politics, Romantic Love, and the Impasse over Women’s Suffrage
• Chapter 7.  Suffrage, Marriage Reforms, and the Threat of Female Sexuality
• Chapter 8.  The Rise of Leftist Guerrilla Organizations and Islamist Movements

Part III.  Forging an Islamist Modernity and Beyond

• Chapter 9.   The Islamic Revolution, Its Sexual Economy, and the Left
• Chapter 10.  Islamist Women and the Emergence of Islamic Feminism
• Chapter 11.  Birth Control, Female Sexual Awakening, and the Gay Lifestyle
• Conclusion:  Toward a New Muslim-Iranian Sexuality for the Twenty-First Century

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Excerpts from the introduction to sexual politics in modern Iran

Most studies of nineteenth-century Iran have painted a chaotic social canvas, focusing on imperialist designs, the intrigues of Qajar rulers, or the poverty, hunger, and ill health of the masses. A focus on the evolution of the institution of marriage offers a different perspective. Qajar Iran had a rigidly hierarchical social order, with a clearly defined class, ethnic, and religious structure and an entrenched pattern of family obligations. Religious beliefs provided the basis for shared values. Many cherished a relative sense of security fostered by communal identities. Marriage was nearly universal, holding families and communities together. Parents found a spouse for their son or daughter and provided the means for their marriage. At or before puberty, the young bride moved in with the groom’s family, where the mother-in-law taught her how to be a wife and mother. Reported crimes were low in a world where girls, boys, and women endured or quietly resisted incest, sexual molestation, and rape. Monogamy was the norm for the vast majority of urban, rural, and tribal communities. But among the upper classes, the practices of polygamy and of keeping boy concubines were common.

Three prevalent types of legally sanctioned, heterosexual intimacy existed among the urban elites of this period: nekah, or formal marriage; sigheh, or temporary marriage; and slave concubinage. Nekah was usually contracted between a man and woman of more or less equal social status. A wife in a nekah marriage was known as an ʿaqdi wife. Nekah was intended to be permanent, but the husband could terminate it by divorce. Sigheh, a Shiʿi institution, was a renewable contract of marriage for a defined duration, from a few hours to ninety-nine years. Sigheh provided sex for pleasure and was often contracted between a lower-class woman and a man of higher social standing. The wife in a sigheh marriage was also known as a sigheh. The institution differed from European concubinage in that the recognized children of a sigheh marriage were considered legitimate and eligible for inheritance, although the father could easily deny his paternity (Haeri 1989). The third form of recognized heterosexual intimacy involved the purchase or inheritance of a female slave. Having borne a master’s child, the slave continued to work as a maid/concubine in the house, though she would normally be manumitted upon the master’s death. The children were free and legitimate, provided that the master recognized them. All three of these forms of heterosexual intimacy could be found in the elite harems, together with male slaves and concubines.

The position of an ʿaqdi was relatively stable. By her early thirties, she might be the mother of several grown children and even the matriarch of a family. However, arranged marriage, polygamy, and the extended family often led to weak emotional bonds between an ʿaqdi wife and her husband. While divorce was rare within the rural and urban lower classes, it was somewhat more acceptable among the urban middle and upper classes. Strong social ties between the two families, and the financial obligations of a man after divorce, made it difficult, however. The remarriage of a divorced woman from these social strata was justifiable and incurred little stigma.

Strong bonds of love might develop initially in a nekah marriage, but sustaining them proved daunting. Family interference and lack of privacy created severe obstacles. Physical intimacy might be confined to the bed, where sex took place quickly and furtively, soon interrupted by children who shared their parents’ room. In time, the lack of reliable contraceptives, multiple pregnancies, and high infant mortality rates would exhaust the wife. In addition, social norms encouraged her to minimize her erotic attachment to her husband, and to divert her attention to motherhood and other familial pursuits that earned her more respect and authority.

In elite families, the burdens of physical labor were less onerous, but the impediments to creating and maintaining strong conjugal relations were even more tenacious. A man’s rights to divorce and polygamy under- mined the couple’s emotional investment in one another. The fact that children of all polygamous unions (and any offspring from temporary marriage or a slave concubine) had formal inheritance rights, also weakened the ties between husband and wife (Hodgson 1974, I:341). These male prerogatives reduced the wife’s emotional commitment to the husband. Often, romantic feelings for her husband would be transformed over time into a close attachment to her son. Similarly, a husband’s easy access to other women and the presence of the mother-in-law in the house reduced his commitment to the happiness of his wife.

Girls and wives did not always succumb to these pressures. There were no “Great Refusals” in this period, no large-scale public forms of resist- ance, but in James Scott’s apt characterization, numerous smaller and more readily available “weapons of the weak” were deployed in daily life (Scott 1985). Young women resisted their parents’ choice of suitors and attempted to exercise some influence over the process. Aided by resourceful midwives and love brokers, women underwent secret hymen repair and abortions, and sought medicinal, magical, and even illicit solutions to a husband’s infertility. Wives exercised a measure of control in bed, in the kitchen, and in the general management of the house and the children. Their influence manifested itself in their propensity to withhold or grant favors. A wife could refuse to share in her husband’s pleasure in bed, even if she complied with his demand for sexual intimacy. She gained prestige by organizing elaborate dinner parties, keeping her house meticulously clean, and developing extensive information about his relatives. She often called on relatives, neighbors, and even the police in cases of domestic violence. Combined with her skills as a hostess, the decline of erotic bonds with her husband as she grew older might boost her stock in the eyes of her mother-in-law, who had less fear of her daughter-in-law’s sway over her son. Often the wife’s ties with her mother-in-law and sisters-in-law effectively isolated the husband among the household’s most powerful women. Alternatively, the wife could strike a balance in her own house by reinforcing her relationship with the family into which her sister-in-law had married. Should her concerted efforts to control her husband fail, a woman could resist her husband’s decision to take another wife and try to wreck his second wedding, sometimes by attempting suicide. Overall, the wife invested less in the emotional relationship with her husband and more in the relationship with her children and his or her kin. As she grew older, the wife could become a powerful matriarch who exercised control over the life of her son and her daughters-in-law, thereby also asserting increased authority over her husband in his old age.

Nineteenth-century Iranian society did not adhere to modern definitions or sensibilities concerning same-sex relations. Although legally prohibited, homosexual sex was common, and homoerotic passion was accommodated. Falling in love with a youth and celebrating that love were recognized practices, as long as the lovers remained circumspect and observed certain conventions. However, elite urban men often flouted these conventions. In the royal court and among government officials, wealthy merchants, and clerics, the practice of keeping boy concubines was widespread and commonly known; close, homosexual relations between free adult men were less often discussed or divulged, however. Among married women, same-sex relations known as sisterhood vows were also culturally recognized practices. Although we have much less information on female homosexuality, we know that such courtships involved an exchange of gifts, travel to a shrine, and cultivation of affection between the partners. Finally, while people were expected to observe rigid social hierarchies, such social orders could be breached in both hetero- sexual and homosexual unions. The slave who gave birth to a son could become a sigheh wife. The favorite sigheh often became an ‘aqdi, and the chosen boy concubine could rise to a high post at the royal court.

Gender and sexual conventions changed as a result of protracted encounters with the Ottoman Empire, Russia, and Western Europe, the rise of democratic reforms, and the advent of modern nationalism. By the early twentieth century, the foreign slave trade was restricted, while the Constitutional Revolution dismantled the harems. Several Iranian journals and many women’s associations campaigned in favor of greater women’s rights although in the course of the revolution, the most vocal advocate of new gender and sexual mores, the journal Molla Nasreddin, emerged from outside the country in Tbilisi (modern Georgia). An Azeri-Iranian diaspora publication, the journal advocated companionate marriage and criticized sexual relationships with minor children, including the institution of child marriage. It also suggested a link between men’s intransigence toward gender reforms and their reluctance to abandon sex-segregated homosocial spaces. Notably, Molla Nasreddin became the first publication in the Shiʿi Muslim world to endorse normative heterosexuality. In the decades that followed, other Iranian intellectuals, first in the diaspora and later within Iran, continued to push for the type of agenda initiated by Molla Nasreddin.

In the late 1930s, modernization in Iran came to involve the use of the police to enforce new disciplinary practices on women’s and men’s bodies, a process that accelerated after women were unveiled by state decree. Women’s bodies became sites of political and cultural struggle, complicated further by the subjection of unveiled women to an intense public gaze and sexual harassment. Reforms in health and hygiene in this period had an equally important impact. Old rituals of purification, which had marked public and private spaces for men and women, were reinterpreted in light of modern sciences, which featured explanations involving germs and sickness. With religious justifications for gender segregation weakening, and the state encouraging greater public participation by women, social hierarchies loosened. As a new Civil Code raised the legal age of marriage for girls to fifteen and further eroded the hierarchies that had enforced gender segregation, Iranian women began to assert themselves through schools, clubs, and other institutions of civil society.

Leading intellectuals of this era such as Ahmad Kasravi developed new normative discourses on sexuality and marriage. Although marriages were still arranged by parents and required paternal approval, a more companionate form of marriage gained greater approval. Support for formal polygamy (having multiple ʿaqdi wives) and status-defined homosexuality sharply declined, while heterosexual monogamy came to be seen as the new norm. Paralleling earlier patterns in the West, the urban communities of Iran became less accepting of pedophilic relationships, regardless of context. Overt bisexuality became less prevalent among men and women of the middle and upper classes. People of the upper classes, including a new generation of men in the Pahlavi dynasty, also abandoned the practice of keeping multiple wives. The old middle classes, composed of those affiliated with the bazaar, the clerical families, and the tribal leaders, continued to practice polygamy, although even in these instances the number was usually limited to two wives.

From 1941 to 1953, Iran experienced a period of relative political freedom from the Pahlavi autocracy as the Allies ousted Reza Shah Pahlavi in favor of his young son Muhammad Reza Shah, and a variety of political parties emerged. Subsequently the struggle for the nationalization of oil, led by Prime Minister Muhammad Mosaddeq and the National Front, set Iran against Britain. Gender issues were just beneath the surface of these economic and political conflicts, however. Contemporary periodicals reveal that the struggle over women’s suffrage became highly contentious during these years, dividing the National Front. Had the Western powers allowed Mosaddeq to carry out his twin projects of social reform and national independence, these issues might have been resolved peace- fully. Instead, the 1953 Anglo-American coup derailed the democratic movement, and Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi returned to power.

Although the shah crushed democracy with brutality, he continued to support gender modernization. In the 1950s and 1960s, companionate marriage and the nuclear family began to supplant strictly arranged unions and the remnants of formal polygamy within the new urban middle classes. In addition, the influence of the extended family over the nuclear one was mitigated. Young men took a more assertive part in choosing their spouses, and young urban women gradually followed suit. A rising generation of educated women, among them university professors, lawyers, Members of Parliament, and leaders of the state-sponsored Women’s Organization of Iran (WOI), began to cautiously campaign for new laws granting women substantially greater marital rights.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the WOI assisted in reforming the institution of marriage, partially legalizing abortion as well. It also helped enact laws that granted women greater rights in divorce, placing limitations on men’s unilateral right to divorce and child custody. Polygamy was legally restricted and subject to the permission of the first wife. The emergence of a modern gay lifestyle in a few sectors of the urban elite also caused social anxiety.

These changes were more dramatic than their counterparts in Europe, in part because they took place over the relatively short period of about seventy years. The triple introduction of normative monogamy, normative heterosexuality, and companionate marriage in the first part of the twentieth century, and the dramatic changes that took place in the status of women and in marriage and divorce laws after 1960, caused severe tremors in the social fabric. This had become quite evident by the 1970s. The increasingly critical attitudes of Iranian intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s toward the West are correctly attributed to the CIA-backed coup of 1953, which toppled Mosaddeq’s nationalist government. But opposition to Western influences was also rooted in cultural anxiety. Ever since the beginning of the twentieth century, advocates of modernity had pushed for greater women’s rights through an implicit social contract. They had promised that if families agreed to greater educational opport- unities for their daughters, these new rights would not destroy conventional gender hierarchies. Women tacitly promised to remain attentive wives, mothers, and daughters-in-law, even as they assumed a more public role in society. As Nikki Keddie has pointed out, by the mid-twentieth century, Iran had become a nation of “two cultures,” in which the new middle classes hardly comprehended their more religious and conservative compatriots (Keddie 2003, 102). Modern urbanites also assumed that it was only a matter of time before the rest of society joined them. This cultural bifurcation marked the sexual mores of Iranian society, dividing women as well as men.

Women from the educated middle classes followed the dictates of modernity and the consumer society. They went to university, got jobs, played an active role in selecting their mate, and entered into companion- ate marriages. They petitioned for divorce when their marriages failed and demanded child custody, which the courts were beginning to grant to mothers. Women from the old middle classes continued to observe the veil, seldom went to university, and entered strictly arranged marriages often before finishing high school. Some endured an ʿaqdi or sigheh co-wife, but seldom petitioned for divorce. In their extended families, marriage was still an institution for procreation rather than for emotional intimacy and female sexual fulfillment.

A backlash against the gender reforms of the more modernized sectors of society was underway by the late 1970s. Leftist critics of the Pahlavi autocracy, of Western imperialism, and of consumerism joined forces with conservative Islamists in anti-regime protests. To an extent, these two oppositional factions coalesced, not only on broad political issues, but also in their criticisms of the sexual norms of the modern urban woman. The partial confluence of the two groups’ views on cultural issues helped make the Islamic Revolution possible.

Capitalizing on these circumstances, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had lived in exile in Iraq and then briefly in France, managed to assume overall leadership of the revolution and to establish the Islamic Republic in 1979. Retrogressive policies soon followed: the regime attempted to reinstate shariʿa law and resegregate public spaces. It also abrogated reforms benefiting women in marriage and divorce, lowered the age of marriage for girls to nine, pursued pronatalist polices, restricted women’s employment, and mandated the hijab for all women. The very recent toleration of a modern gay lifestyle in elite communities also vanished, sometimes by means of executions.

Post-revolutionary Iran did not experience a wholesale return to the sexual and gender mores of the early twentieth century, however. Parents did not return en masse to the practice of child marriage. The mean age of women at first marriage, which had reached nineteen in 1976, continued to climb. Although they were subject to many restrictions, women were not forced out of public spaces such as mosques, schools, streets, and offices, nor did Iran slide back into illiteracy. In fact, literacy rates increased substantially after the revolution. On the whole, the Islamist regime was not altogether antimodern and it employed various techniques of modernity. It continued the literacy and health campaigns of the Pahlavi era, projects that the public embraced more enthusiastically when offered by an Islamist state that was the product of a popular uprising. The new state even adopted a constitution, one of the characteristic features of a modern nation-state.

The Islamic Republic’s constitution granted unparalleled authority to the Shiʿi clergy. The seventy-year struggle among the shah, the Parliament, and the clerics had resulted in a decisive victory for the clerics, who founded a new kind of theocracy that eliminated the position of monarch and gave most of the executive power to the Supreme Leader, at first Ayatollah Khomeini. In addition, the Supreme Leader appropriated many of the former powers of the Parliament. The supervisory bodies of the new state recognized only those people who accepted the principles of the Islamic Republic and expressed devotion to Khomeini. Only groups that did so could participate in the political process. These changes were accelerated by the Iran–Iraq war of 1980–1988.

After 1979 the state gave men more power over women’s sexuality and reproductive functions. In the name of protecting the honor of women and the nation, men of all social classes gained easier access to sex through marriage, and sometimes outside of it. Likewise, pederastic relations between adult men and youth were ignored in the newly sex-segregated spaces of the Islamic Republic, while sometimes claiming an openly gay or lesbian identity became a capital offense.

The state also attempted to reverse modern trends in love and marriage. Open dating and expressing public affection, even between married couples, could lead to arrest. The morality police punished anyone who violated the hijab regulations or any of the other conventions of the sex-segregated order. Unilateral, male-initiated divorce through repudiation was reinstated. During the Iran–Iraq War of 1980–1988 and in its aftermath, the new theocratic state encouraged polygamy, including temporary marriage, as solutions for war widows and disabled war veterans, and as outlets for those constrained by the strict regulations against dating.

We know from the work of Foucault that in Europe a pervasive discourse about sexuality belied the repressive and puritanical morality associated with Victorian England, where sexuality came under increasing state regulation. The state involved itself in even the most prosaic issues of gender and sexuality, ranging from marriage and fertility to the sexual conduct of partners. As Foucault – who called this state intervention in sexuality a form of “governmentality” – and recent feminist scholars have shown, some of the most radical transformations in gender and marriage relations arose beneath the calls for sexual purity in the Victorian era. Such theoretical perspectives can also help to conceptualize changes in post-revolutionary Iran’s economic and sociological indices, including literacy rates, infant mortality, and fertility rates.

To be sure, the Islamic Republic instituted a reversal in women’s rights, gay rights, and human rights more broadly. But it also developed policies that have directly affected the sexual conduct of its citizens in ways that are hardly traditional. Indeed, various factions inside the regime have actively deployed what might be called a new sexual economy. The effects of this new economy have proven ambiguous. Its accompanying laws have denied women many basic rights in marriage and divorce, but they have also contributed to numerous state initiatives promoting literacy, health, and infrastructural improvements that benefited the urban and rural poor.

Many of the traditions instituted by the state were in reality “invented traditions,” a term coined by the historian Eric Hobsbawm. Here are three examples: At the turn of the twentieth century, social custom, religion, class, and ethnicity determined a woman’s outer clothing. Lower-class and many non-Muslim women wore looser veils, while upper-class urban women were fully veiled. Veiling was thus a class and social marker that more respectable women and their families observed as a way of setting them- selves apart from the lower orders. For a short period between 1936 and 1941, the state imposed unveiling. The police ordered all urban women to take off their veils and encouraged then to wear modern dresses and hats. But Iranian society had never experienced what it has endured since 1979 – morality squads dragging respectable women to police stations and flogging them for sporting nail polish or makeup, wearing their hijab too loosely, or showing strands of hair.
The practice of honor killings is a second example. Police records and other sources indicate that honor killings were rare in premodern Iran, usually confined to the Kurdish and Arab peripheries of the nation. Most families quietly resolved problems of honor through hymen repair, abortion, or hasty marriage. With regard to married women’s extramarital affairs, the husband and family usually handled such matters discreetly, rather than lose honor in the community. Occasionally clerics or the community took action, executing a prostitute or some other low-status transgressor of sexual boundaries. But the post-1979 Islamist state estab- lished a new type of “honor killing,” one that was adjudicated and enforced by the state, rather than the father, the brother, or the commun- ity. The idea that the state would drag an urban, middle-class woman to court and possibly execute her on charges of adultery, even if her family and community vigorously protested, was unprecedented not just in Iran but in the Muslim world.

A third example is the execution of homosexuals. In premodern Iran, discreet homosexual relations were a common practice despite religious prohibitions. The punishment of homosexuality required repeated offenses and the testimony of four adult male witnesses, though even then repentance was possible. Cases actually reported to the police in urban middle-class communities might involve male prostitution in a residential neighborhood and pedophilia but not pederasty. However, the Islamic Republic broke these traditions and also did away with the religious requirement for witnesses. The state continued to ignore homosexual relations in religious seminaries and bazaars, but from time to time prosecuted young urban gay men if a single person reported them or simply after a medical examination. After 2005, an official policy of active entrapment via Internet chat rooms was also initiated.

Urban Iranian women reacted in very different ways to the 1979 revolution. On the one hand, modern women from the new urban middle and upper classes resisted the severe restrictions the new regime imposed on their lives. Some fled the country, forming a significant part of the Iranian diaspora in cities such as London, Paris, Vienna, Frankfurt, Toronto, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago. On the other hand, women from the old middle classes tended to embrace the revolution’s culturally conservative ideology and helped to enforce its policies. The regime gained additional recruits through recognizing and subsidizing the families of war veterans and martyrs. Paradoxically, women who joined the regime’s Islamist organizations were often able to free themselves from the strictures of the patriarchal family and avoid strictly arranged marriages, or marriage altogether. They joined the literacy and health corps, volunteered for the reconstruction program, enlisted in the auxiliary military organizations that aided the war effort, or signed up for female morality squads that monitored the lives of more modern-oriented women and men.

By the 1990s, a generation of Islamist women that had pursued graduate degrees had risen to prominence. Some were relatives of high-ranking male Islamists; others were related to war veterans and martyrs, or had themselves participated in the war. One might consider them an Islamist “New Class,” similar to the Nomenklatura in the Soviet Union (Djilas 1983). Soon, women in these culturally conservative social sectors were marrying later than previously. The number of arranged marriages among them shrank, and that of more companionate marriages grew, reducing the vast cultural gap on gender issues that had existed in the 1970s.

In the 1990s, as the state responded to the increase in fertility by reversing course and encouraging smaller families, the result was even more dramatic. Without relenting on many other women’s rights issues, a comprehensive family-planning program in both rural and urban com- munities was established alongside the literacy and health campaigns. Family planning classes offered sex education for prospective couples and encouraged them to limit their offspring to two. By enlisting tens of thousands of female volunteers as counselors, and by providing free contraceptives for married couples, the family planning program contributed to a major decrease in fertility rates.

This birth control campaign showed that the state could adopt a some- what liberal and tolerant discourse on sexuality in order to achieve its goals – in this case, population control. On most other gender issues, though, the state followed a patriarchal hard line. It stalled, halted, or reversed some previous reforms regarding the legal age of marriage for girls, polygamy, unequal inheritance rights, domestic violence, and divorce. On these issues, the regime often followed a misogynistic reading of Islam, insisting that this was the only proper interpretation of the shari ʿa.

In response to this intransigence, battles for a more tolerant society have been fought in numerous and sometimes unlikely sites since the liberalization of the mid-1990s. Writers, journalists, lawyers, artists, musicians, fashion designers, actors, film directors, college students, and home- makers become activists in the Reform Movement. Reformists came from many different social and religious backgrounds. Some were leftist Islamists who had participated in the revolution, fought in the war, and contributed to subsequent literacy, health, reconstruction, and family-planning campaigns. Many were increasingly dissatisfied with the theocratic state and the losses from the war, in which nearly a million people were injured or killed on both sides. Reformist Islamists and more secular opposition sectors, which were repressed but never extinguished, sometimes reached a provisional agreement to unite for a common cause. The new Reformist organizations were reinforced by the increasing numbers of youth influenced by satellite television and the Internet, who chafed under the restrictions of the theocratic state and its morality police.

By the first decade of the twenty-first century, the institution of marriage had irrevocably changed. Both husband and wife entered marriage with greater expectations about companionship and emotional intimacy, hopes that often remained unfulfilled. These rising expectations contributed in turn to an increase in unhappy marriages and a rising divorce rate, despite limitations on women’s right to initiate divorce. In the absence of legal reforms that would have granted women greater rights within the family, and economic reforms that would have provided them with greater financial autonomy from fathers and husbands, social problems among women and girls increased. Since 2000, hundreds of thousands of young women have run away from home, but they have too often ended up in domestic prostitution rings or in the Persian Gulf sex trade. Drug addiction, risky sexual behavior among urban youth, and suicide rates among impoverished rural women were also on the increase.

Today we are witnessing a sexual awakening that builds on the nation’s rich religious, cultural, and social repertoire in order to challenge the theocratic regime and to work for a more democratic society. Unlike struggles in the West, where feminist movements emerged out of democratic societies and attempted to expand the limited rights of liberal democratic states, these struggles in Iran are taking place under an authoritarian system. Iranian cinema, women’s magazines, secular and Muslim feminists, advocates of women’s rights in various government posts, human rights activists, and supporters of modern gay and lesbian lifestyles are all contributing to new discourses on gender, sexuality, and modernity. These new discourses transcend earlier internal religious disputes and ideological divisions between the West and the Middle East. They favor more egalitarian gender relations, sweeping reforms in marriage and family laws, and liberal readings of Islamic law. They also call for a new relationship to the outside world and to the complex phenomenon of modernity itself. Iranian society may be approaching a critical stage in a sexual revolution that began more than a century ago.

This book offers a preliminary study of the evolution of marriage and Iran’s sexual revolution since the nineteenth century. The coming years will no doubt see a deluge of publications on this subject, filling in gaps, offering rebuttals, and illustrating variations on these themes according to region, social class, and religious affiliation, all of which I shall welcome. Until then, I hope that my broad sketch will be useful to those who care about gender, sexuality, women’s rights, and the rights of sexual minorities.