Quarters for the Magdalene Laundries

Adrian Jenkins

By Adrian L. Jenkins, Special to Fog City Journal

March 5, 2008

Every night in an Iranian cemetery a parliament of blackbirds gathers to blackly flower the kingdom of the dead. One midnight after another they walk the earth with the fortified graces of the most beautiful birthday girls in the world, because birthday girls are ever the most beautiful girls in the world – just as beautiful as queens for a day are supposed to be.

The ones who gather in this cemetery are rendered suddenly perfect beneath the dry baptisms of the evening’s moonlight. But look at these blackbirds closely. Closer. Look closely enough at them, at their dispassionately made up faces, at their cold and very flat hijab-limned stares, and you’ll see the tangled threads of hopelessness, of fatelessness, that somehow has each tethered to the specters of impeccable stars huddled imperiously above them.

After all what is hell if not a perfect imperfect place to dream tirelessly of a better life?

Welcome to the City of Blood and Uprising, or rather welcome to that corner of it which is its crestfallen hush. Welcome to the loveless court of the broken down palace queens, an underworld royalty huddled together in geometries of sad-eyed queues and each of them posited in their deplorable turn as Jezebel Buddhas sat upon the sham thrones of constellated dirt graves.

Welcome to the impossibly holy city of Qom, reputedly one of Iran’s most active and prominent centers of sigheh, a government-sanctioned variant of legalized prostitution. Welcome, then, to where one might at long last come to know why the caged bird sings.

For a very large contingent of the world’s Shi’ite Muslim population the holy Iranian city of Qom is the equivalent of the Vatican. Whether approached from the south or the north, east or west, the horizon of this standby Mecca is heavily ornamented by a profusion of the blues and golds of cones or domes of shrines that embroider the horizon with an architectural beauty that is patient, mannered and quite generous.

About an hour’s drive outside of Tehran, this revered corner of Iran is wondrously unique and altogether unrivaled in quantity of these particular majesties. Especially commissioned and designed for the offspring of the imams of the holy city, there are about ten of these structures which were erected principally in the 14th century, ornately domed sanctuaries brilliantly constructed upon square or octagonal bases that have stolidly endured the unforgiving and never relenting exams of time.

The vertiginous beauty of these structures grant abundant warning as to the stratospheric scale of Qom’s holiness, monolithic and worn butterflies fluttering motionless age after static age in a great garden that might be breathlessly walked at any moment by Allah or His angels surreptitiously come from heaven.

Tentatively stalked by the strange animals of tourists, for here is no normal or random place for infidels. Literal saints are enshrined within these structures. In a cemetery not considerably far from Iran’s second holiest site, the frequently pilgrimed and exponentially revered shrine of Hazrat-e Masumeh, may peace be upon her, there are frequently reported gatherings of Iranian women wrapped like a monochrome of bleak and shipwrecked angels in their monotonously starless and Bible black chadors.

These decidedly forlorn and morosely lovely ravens have not gathered here to call for the suns of the dead to rise, nor to remember the permanence of those breathlessly absent from this world, or to even mourn anything whatsoever not any longer of this earth other than the intimacies of their own fractured fates and too human miseries. It is said that no nation, empire or kingdom is truly crestfallen and vanquished until it relinquishes – or rather sells – its women and children, a veritable devouring of its Venuses and young both.

The desperate, plasticine flowers of the ersatz new Persian Empire who have not fled the squalid socioeconomic urban decay of the preening Islamic Republic for the brothels of Brussels and Dubai have opted to engage in a more localized form of mortal commerce. While the European Commission’s recent and most comprehensive studies of human trafficking found that Iranian women comprised an estimated 10-15 percent of the aggregate number of prostitutes working principally in the Western European-based precincts of Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy, comparatively it has been a far more nebulous and outright elusive challenge to obtain similarly sound and algebraically correct data on the scale of prostitution as it exists in Iran specifically.

Anecdotally, however, there is a relative preponderance of evidence that supports that among other Iranian precincts the religious center of Qom is akin to a Magdalenian hive, and their johns are most prominently – and typically – young males who are students and erstwhile holy men-in-training from the nearby Qom Seminary.

Attired in the traditional robes, capes and turbans which are the clandestine raiment of the mullahs to whom they aspire, one man-child upon another clustered in a wide-eyed shoulder to shoulder procession of wonder boy awe and amazement, these clusters of seminary students descend upon the amassed women as a pack of praying and properly mannered beasts, all of them mutedly hungered by masculine desires and pangs that should not ever be spoken aloud amid such holy splendor.

In a patchwork of miniaturized droves these men come upon the courtyard of the mosque that is bordered by the graves of the Sheikhan cemetery. An achingly strange yet surreally timeless commerce begins that takes place equally beneath the moon and the sun, at all hours of the day, brazenly and not at all shyly.

In the summer months when Qom is a popular destination for finding God and mortal fun alike, when far more generous outsiders become the preferred option to the less abundant charities of the locals, it is frankly a very good time to be a prostitute. And so the Venuses of Tehran, Esfahan, Yazd and countless other Iranian hamlets and cityscapes sit waiting patiently under the steadied white stares of the unforgiving summertime sun for someone to rent the yielded, covertly tarted up and kitted out symmetry of their bodies for a purchased hour. An hour that lasts eternally and ever after as to their forfeited psyches.

Welcome, alas, to Valentine’s Day in Iran.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that prostitution in Iran on the whole has increased since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president in 2005. The claim formally asserted by Iran’s contingent of anti-regime sociologists is that an estimated 300,000 women are actively engaged in prostitution in the capital of Tehran alone. The Iranian sociologist Amanollah Gharaii Modghaddam affirmed a long-standing perception by stating to ADNKronos International (AKI) that Iran’s incessantly deteriorating economy and abysmal unemployment statistics continually contribute to the unabatedly growing phenomenon of prostitution’s rise as a perceived and valued socioeconomic option among Iranian women.

An estimated 28 percent of Iran’s demographic, aged 15-29, is unemployed. Additionally the age of Iran’s prostitutes is becoming increasingly younger; at one point in time the average age of an Iranian prostitute was reported at 27. This soon dropped markedly – and quite scandalously – to as young as 20. Presently girls as young as 12 have reportedly been witnessed hustling their mortal wares on Iranian streets, abysmal evidence to the fact that ever younger females are being inexorably drawn into the country’s morass of ‘fallen women’.

Comparatively, according to Modghaddam, the estimated 300,000 prostitutes reportedly active in Tehran isn’t so alarming as contrasted with the 5 million drug addicts calculated to be thriving desperately within the country and the nearly 4 million determined to be unemployed within Tehran alone.

Jezebel’s most favored flower is heavily scented with despair. While the estimates of the number of prostitutes active throughout Iran cannot be verified with any inviolate mathematical accuracy, conversely the calculated spillover of Iranian prostitutes who have progressively ventured into Western Europe and the Gulf states provides a substantive and documented commentary on what – upon extrapolation – the actual numbers of Iran’s domestic prostitute population might be.

These estimated numbers are indeed quite significant. They are in fact figures considerable enough to at least partially address the alarming rate of Iran’s overall demographic decline. More and more Iranian women are choosing to opportunistically devote the capacities of their bodies to the left-handed endeavor of human commerce as opposed to motherhood. Albeit on a smaller scale, Iran is presently facing a phenomenon of population decline similar to that experienced in the Ukraine subsequent to the migration of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian female ‘tourists’ who sought economic viability in Germany after then-foreign minister Joschka Fischer loosened visa standards in 1999. The result has been that Ukraine is presently experiencing what some analysts qualify as the world’s fastest rate of population decline.

In the case of Iran the rise of prostitution will – over time – similarly bear upon the country’s national decline not exclusively on either moral or ethical grounds, as well as their attendant effects, but directly upon an ever declining birth rate, in effect burdening the country in time enough with an elderly population at least proportionate to that of Western Europe’s within the alarmingly modest scope of just one generational cycle.

What some Westerners might in effect derisively oversimplify and categorize as an Islamo-fascist Iranian culture of jihadists and loose women is actually a culture on the verge of utter and conclusive socioeconomic collapse. Needless to say Iran is not a country that is idly rushing headlong and blindfolded towards becoming a post-millennial Sodom and Gomorrah. Iran’s clerical regime has vacillated between attempting the repression of prostitution’s determined rise and sanctioning it through sigheh, a much castigated and highly controversial system of temporary marriages sanctioned in Shia Islam.

Recently Iran’s interior minister, Moustafa Pourmohammadi, has urged the full-on revival of sigheh in the interest of at the very least legitimizing the act of sex that has been purchased. A conservative cleric, Mr. Pourmohammadi has quantified the practice of sigheh as “God’s rule” and has further affirmed that it is an ideal alternative to pre-marital sex, an affront to a number of the core interpreted tenets of Islam.

In a news conference held in the city of Qom, Mr. Pourmohammadi asserted that given the recent increase of the minimum marital age in Iran, concessions must be made to cater to the sexual urges and tendencies of the country’s youth who legally don’t have marriage as an alternative given their age. The plea for the implicit merits of – and in effect deliverance ostensibly afforded by – sigheh is nothing new in Iran as far as the incessant battle against prostitution is concerned.

In 1990 Iran’s then president Hashemi Rafsanjani similarly prescribed temporary marriages as a preferred option to the country becoming ever more “promiscuous like the Westerners”. Attacked by women’s groups on an international scale, the practice of temporary marriages is the equivalent of an infinitesimal band-aid placed quixotically upon a profuse and gaping wound.

Whether called by another name or simply acknowledged for what it is, the reality is that in Iran’s precincts from Qom to Tehran, and all stations in between, the practice of prostitution is the torrential ocean that continues to shipwreck the lives of an ever younger demographic of females. It is as well an illicit form of human endeavor that is fraught with all the dire perils classically associated with it.

According to statistics released by the Iranian Health Ministry, an estimated 90,000 Iranian women annually apply for abortions at hospitals; further an average of 221 abortions a day take place. While these figures have not been specifically attributed to prostitution, there is a certain measure of extrapolation that can be done to that end. Moreover the specter of AIDS looms ever larger over the country as prostitution manifests itself increasingly as part of the country’s precariously hushed subculture.

Of 7,510 reported cases of HIV positive carriers, health officials calculate this figure as being closer to 40,000. Given that the trend of transmission has rapidly changed from intravenous drug users to high-risk sexual behavior, including prostitution, the lid to Iran’s Pandora’s Box seems indeed more and more ajar.

Alas, Mary Magdalene speaks Farsi and her translated words – should you choose to listen – will absolutely break your heart.

Adrian L. Jenkins is a San Francisco-based writer who hails originally from Chicago. A self-described “Southern gentleman by default”, Adrian has contributed short works of fiction to Paris-based Purple Magazine and is presently at work on his first full-length novel. He lists as his personal heroes Helene Cixous, Paul Virilio, and – above all others – his mother and father and the beautifully insane myths and legends of their lives before they were his mother and father. Among his passions are truly old books, an impeccably cut suit, wise women on the steps of old Mexican churches and the unbreakable faith that can only be found in the eyes of tirelessly true friends.

Adrian Jenkins

Bio Adrian L. Jenkins is a San Francisco-based writer who hails originally from Chicago. A self-described “Southern gentleman by default”, Adrian has contributed short works of fiction to Paris-based Purple Magazine and is presently at work on his first full-length novel. He lists as his personal heroes Helene Cixous, Paul Virilio, and – above all others - his mother and father and the beautifully insane myths and legends of their lives before they were his mother and father. Among his passions are truly old books, an impeccably cut suit, wise women on the steps of old Mexican churches and the unbreakable faith that can only be found in the eyes of tirelessly true friends.

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