Dear amargulies@salon.com,

...

:)

At least they didn't round up all the women who had posted ads and stone them for prostitution.

Haram alaik!

Can I get your E-Mail address?..Maybe a photo?

it's really hard to turn tricks in teheran and a business woman would be foolish not to enlist latest technology.

anyway, we all know they are devils in disguise, those ayatollahs. for one thing, they are rude to our dear leader.

Before he is voted away in Iran's next not nearly soon enough national elections.

on the surface it doesn't make sense, but if one of the choices was "iranian temporary marriage," then that could indeed mean prostitution. since unmarried men and women can't rent a hotel room together in iran, you can apply for a temporary marriage that lasts say half an hour and get a hotel room together. it's a common tactic for johns and prostitutes to do this kind of thing. unfortunately it's also a common tactic for people who are trying to date. surely the ayatollahs know that temporary marriages are used for dating as well as for prostitution, but if you throw the baby out with the bath water that's fine with them - they have almost as much beef with dating as they do with prostitution.

here's a bit from an nyt article about temporary marriages:

"The couple could have gotten married for as short a time as a few minutes or as long as 99 years. They could have specified whether and how much money Maryam would be paid as a kind of dowry, or how much time they would spend together."

http://www.library.cornell.edu/colldev/mideast/tmpmrig.htm

there's still Jdate.

I spent several months living in Turkey and Morocco a few years ago, both very Westernized Islamic cultures, and there was almost no distinction between dating and prostitution even in those countries, so I can only imagine how much worse of an issue this must be in Iran. So this story is no surprise. In fact, from what I observed, any unmarried woman spending time alone with a man who is not a relative is basically perceived as a whore.

Two examples which may demonstrate the extreme cultural differences which are almost impossible for Westerners to understand:

I spent some time with a Turkish man who was a friend, we were in Istanbul waiting for a bus, and a stranger came up to my friend and started yelling at him, and afterward my friend explained that the man was very angry that we were sitting next to each other, and he was shaming my friend and urging him to stop this behavior. I was shocked that anyone could be so upset at something which seemed to me so innocent. He explained that boys and girls are not even allowed to sit next to each other in school.

There was another incident where I needed a wake up call at my hotel, but I was having trouble explaining this to the hotel clerk given the language barrier, so I asked my friend to come in and explain what I wanted to the hotel clerk. He was very hesitant and reluctant to do this, he said the clerk would misunderstand and that it would be a problem, and I just thought he was being shy or something. But the look on the clerk's face when he saw that I had entered the hotel with a man was akin to the look an American might have when witnessing a murder - he was aghast and horrified, and this did not abate even after my friend explained what I wanted and then turned and walked out the door. And up to that point the clerk had treated me politely, but after that his treatment of me totally changed, just because of the mere fact that I brought my friend in, even though he never ventured past the front desk.

Just thought this might help some people understand how vastly different the cultural standards are for male-female interaction - even in a large urban area in a Westernized Islamic country.

Did you know that Jews control all the slavery in the world too?

Ah, arrogant Americans!

Maybe a fine point, but as far as I know, there is no such thing as an "Islamic temporary marriage."

To be sure, there is a long-standing, and almost entirely for mullahs only, IRANIAN SHI'AH (known as nikah mut‘ah) tradition of temporary marriages (they can last as briefly as an hour, and require no official ceremony or contract, at least if one of the parties has the keen legal skills and unimpeachable integrity of a mullah as one partner, so they ain't prostitution you see), but I know a whole lot of non-Iranian Muslims (and indeed a fair number of Iranian ones at that) that would beg to differ, differ quite strongly in fact, about it being particularly Islamic.

In fact, I rather expect this story is causing a certain amount of cynical amusement across the Islamic world, the mullahs condemning a site for encouraging prostitution, for reasons other than allowing connections for (nikah mut‘ah) "temporary marriages" to be arranged.

The reason for the crackdown was, I expect, to a certain degree, one of ire from the mullahs that nikah mut‘ah was looking a whole lot more possible for men other than mullahs.

Or is it just fear of criticism from other cultures?

The people wants to know...