queers in that country? One could read the cultrual history of a nation for eternity, it won't change if the authoritarian rulers are not listening to reason.
The other thing that jumps at me from this interesting link is that they have gone backwards! They had a history of tolerance and then, a lot like what is happening here in the US, except it came from the left, homosexuality came under attack.
I hope this is not too much clip and paste, but the article is a sobering insight to how history may repeat itself:
http://www.inthesetimes.org/article/4305/irans_history_comes_out>>All formal marriages were arranged, often with girls just entering puberty, often leading to loveless relations. This fostered the institution of temporary marriage, or sigeh, which could last from a few hours to 99 years.
And while homosexual acts were in theory condemned as sins by Islamic teaching, in practice they were rarely punished and were widely tolerated in pre-modern Iran...
Indeed, what Afary terms a “romantic bisexuality” was celebrated and even highly codified.
Sometimes men exchanged vows, known as brotherhood sigehs with homosocial or homosexual overtones.
Sisterhood sigehs involving lesbian practices were also common in Iran. A long courtship was important in these relations. The couple traded gifts, traveled together to shrines, and occasionally spent the night together.
Then the modern world intruded via Russia and Russian style tolerance. One of Afary’s most stunning revelations is how political homophobia was introduced into Iran from the West, by an Azeri-language newspaper edited and published in the Russian Caucuses. Molla Nasreddin, also known as MN, appeared from 1906 to 1931, and it influenced the Iranian Revolution with a “significant new discourse on gender and sexuality.”
With an editorial board that embraced Russian social democratic concepts, including women’s rights, MN was also “the first paper in the Shi
Muslim world to endorse normative heterosexuality.”
Afary writes that “this illustrated satirical paper, which circulated among Iranian intellectuals and ordinary people alike, was enormously popular in the region because of its graphic cartoons.” MN’s attacks on homosexuality “would shape Iranian debates on sexuality for the next century,” and in their wake, “leading constitutionalists enthusiastically joined the campaign against homosexuality.”
One of those greatly influenced by MN was Ahmad Kasravi, whose nationalist movement, Pak Dini (Purity of Religion), developed a broad following. Kasravi preached that “homosexuality was a measure of cultural backwardness,” that Sufi poets of homoeroticism led “parasitic” lives, and that their queer poetry “was dangerous and had to be eliminated.” Kasravi’s Pak Dini movement “went so far as to institute a festival of book burning, held on winter solstice. Books deemed harmful and amoral were thrown into a bonfire in an event that seemed to echo the Nazi and Soviet-style notions of eliminating ‘degenerate’ art.”
Eventually, Prime Minister Mahmoud Jam, who held office from 1935 to 1939, acceded to Kasravi’s demand that homoerotic poems be banned. Afary notes sorrowfully that, “in this period, neither Kasravi nor feminists distinguished between rape or molestation of boys and consensual same-sex relations between adults.”
While the law against veiling of women was promulgated in 1936, by the end of the 1940s, nearly all traces of sympathetic homosexuality had been eliminated from textbooks, newspapers and public discourse.<<
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