Tehran’s Red-Light District
failedarchitecture.com
failedarchitecture.com
https://open-education-repository.ucl.ac.uk//799/1/Sadaf_Tab...
It would be nice if the author had included some GPS coordinates for the place, would be good to have a look in Google Maps satellite view what the place looks like now (since I assume Street View isn't allowed in Iran)
> Eventually, in 1997, the space was finally put to use again when the Tehran Municipality inaugurated the Razi park and cultural complex, which includes a variety of public services such as a library, movie theatre, artificial lake and an amusement park. It’s a far cry from the area’s previous functions. Nonetheless, some traces of the demolished neighbourhood remain visible on the street edges...
Isn't it all sex trafficking and generally a pretty dangerous place for any woman?
Note that this contradicts nearly all official usage of the term "sex trafficking", which just refers to sex work. Far and away the most common kind of sex trafficking is a woman working independently trafficking herself.
The less legal sex work is, the more underground it needs to be. The more underground it is, the less recourse women have to address exploitation.
https://humantraffickinghotline.org/what-human-trafficking/m...
And no, not all sex work is the result of sex trafficking.
In know, this is not the norm, but it does exist.
But while I get how this space would grant the women inside some freedom they could not otherwise have, I wonder how much its existence mattered for the women outside its walls.
Here, on the page 9 of this dissertation, we have a newspaper from before the revolution that describes the area as "cages" for women, most of whom are "caught in mental and/or familial issues and crisis", "some of whom never see daylight". The older ones, who apparently could leave, ended up "becoming child caretakers for younger prostitutes". In the middle of this "women's space", there was an open air "garbage dump", and "mattresses were made from the cotton of discarded sanitary napkins".
So yeah, a "prison" "concretely" belongs to the inmates.
https://open-education-repository.ucl.ac.uk//799/1/Sadaf_Tab...
> Police reports from the Muzaffarī period (1896–1907) show that the most common punishment for women caught selling sex was a practice known as nafie-balad. This was a form of forceful banishment or eviction from the city targeted at sinful, criminal and undesirable subjects and those who defy social and moral conventions of the society ... One day, all the women suspected of selling sex were gathered and moved by military trucks to a nearby caravanserai outside of Tehran’s wall: "the wayward women were all thrown in there like sheep… later, houses were built and a neighbourhood took shape which was named Shahrinaw" ... Eventually, in 1953 the municipality bowed to public pressure and ordered the erection of a two-and-a-half-metre tall brick wall around Shahrinaw ... While the gate was open to men seeking illicit pleasure, women were allowed neither in nor out.
----
Perhaps I am being puritanical here, but I've never understood this obsession of some trying to associate women's right with prostitution. Everywhere in the world, even in countries where prostitution is legalised / regulated, it is only the desperate and economically weak women who are pushed into this trade and it invariably gives rise to a parallel and illegal industry of sex trafficking and forced prostitution. Worse, where it is legalised, the administration and police largely ignore such illegal sex trafficking as prostitution is now an "economic activity" (until of course there is a public outcry and / or international outrage - Denmark made child pornography illegal only in 1980's!).
Even where religious sanctions for prostitution are available, the prostitutes are both admired and looked down upon by some and face repeated sexual violence (God’s Wife, Every Man’s Woman: The Lives of 'Joginis' in South India - https://thewire.in/rights/photos-sexual-slavery-ban-telangan... ). I do know that there have been periods in the Islamic empire and in Asia, where courtesans, who also sometimes prostituted themselves (often not out of choice), had some semblance of respect and rights largely because they were also highly talented artists (singers, dancers, musicians etc) but mainly because they had the patronage of the rich and the powerful. But once that patronage was lost, they were often vilified by society despite their talents. (All said, I am really unsure on whether glorification of prostitution in the media is good or bad though).
> ... Police reports from the Muzaffarī period (1896–1907) show that the most common punishment for women caught selling sex was a practice known as nafie-balad. This was a form of forceful banishment or eviction from the city targeted at sinful, criminal and undesirable subjects and those who defy social and moral conventions of the society ... Public discontent came to a head at the end of the 1910s with the first series of petitions in 1919 calling for sex workers to be banished from Tehran.
> The political figure and writer Hassan Ezam-Qodsi notes that sex workers from Qajariyah alley in Tehran were moved to this new neighbourhood in order to avoid sexual assaults on "respectable" women in the city ... One day, all the women suspected of selling sex were gathered and moved by military trucks to a nearby caravanserai outside of Tehran’s wall: “the wayward women were all thrown in there like sheep... later, houses were built and a neighbourhood took shape which was named Shahrinaw”.
> The district offered its services as usual until the 1940s when public dissatisfaction surged again ... In this period, the practice of nafie-balad was again deployed as a tool to address the public concern over the rapid spread of sexually transmitted diseases ... the result of an STD test undertaken by Pasteur Institute of Tehran in 1929 showed that 43 per cent of the 3,498 participants were tested positive ... Eventually, in 1953 the municipality bowed to public pressure and ordered the erection of a two-and-a-half-metre tall brick wall around Shahrinaw, restricting entry to a rusty metal gate on the southern edge of the neighbourhood. While the gate was open to men seeking illicit pleasure, women were allowed neither in nor out.
No it's not. That's a tactic the regime used to silence any opposition for a long time after the revolution. I can't tell you how many times I have turned on the TV and heard something along these lines. Nowadays, however, they have new favorite bogeymen.
Shah was a garden variety dictator backed by the United States. You can find the likes of him in today's Saudi Arabia, for example. It certainly was not paradise for regular people.
But Islamic Republic on the other hand is a theocratic dictatorship. It's like an octopus that wants to wrap its tentacles around every matter of people's personal lives. From their bedroom to the women's bodies to the clothes they wear. Ironic for them, as a result, the current generation who were born after the revolution are more pro-US than ever and unfortunately are even more sympathetic to Shah than one might expect; which is not surprising.
So Shah's misdeeds are no excuse for the demons who have forced themselves upon the country right now.
Context: I was born and used to lived in Iran in a non-Musilm family whose members were in opposition to both Shah and the new regime alike.
The support of the Shah was very much an Anglo-American concern. The coup to oust Mosaddegh was much the US as it was the the UK, Churchill and Eisenhower, MI6 and CIA.
While the revolution obviously resulted in a much worse situation, the Shah was a dictator. https://historyofyesterday.com/the-shah-of-iran-was-not-a-sa...
& So what that he was a dictator? He wasn't dictating a course of national destruction; he was dictating a revival of an ancient nation. The historical record of Pahlavi dynasty is exceptionally clear. You just need to grab hold of the National Geographic issue dedicated to "Persia" from just before Pahlavi dynasty and compare to Iran they created 57 years later. From a complete basket case to a nation that was seen to be a threat to Western imperial structures (as soon as he helped create OPEC) in the so-called Middle East.
And who was opposing him? A regressive clerical class -- a class -- that had a strangle hold over what passed for Iranian education and judiciary since the Saffavids, and their substantial network of two digit IQ illiterates that saw pictures of khomeini in the moon. And the past 44 years are exhibit A in why Iranian must eradicate the cleric from Iran and Islam once and for all. The second group, young people who where sent to West, entirely on the Iranian goverments' dime btw as all their education and room and board was covered (!), and instead of returning (like some) to help develop Iran they became "marxists", and later "Islamic-Marxists". (That last bit should shed some light on their conceptual and intellectual ability and integrity). Finally, we had the mini-army of all the descendants of various Qajar aristocracy that just wasn't happy with having an uppity soldier's family (Reza Shah) putting an end to the disaster that was Qajar dynasty.
~
p.s. for interested Persian speakers, this is a fantastic resource:
https://library.harvard.edu/collections/iranian-oral-history...
I rest my case.
Peter the Great was a dictator too.
Read the thread.
Furthermore, even if we trust him to be unbiased (I don't), he only says that people who were fighting against the Shah (the armed rebels, the Communist supporters, etc) didn't enjoy a good life. He doesn't say that the Shah gave trouble to the regular people who weren't trying to overthrow the government.
FWIW, every single person I talked to who lived in Tehran during the Shah said it was great. However, I know It's a biased sample. For one, none of them were Communist sympathizers. And even more importantly, they all emigrated. Maybe if I talked to people who live in Tehran now, they'd also say it's great, who knows.
The westener who defends such rule are racists unable to grant the oriental people the right to live and organize in a manner of their choosing. It is a “the-white man’s burden” and into the “heart of darkness” brand of racism which justifies itself by painting the East as backwards. But why is the East backwards? Is it because the East does not buy up the hedonistic materialism that the West has always been peddling as “liberalism” and instead prefers its own culture?
So ironic that the first intervention to claim a “public place for women” is one which paints the destruction of brothels negatively as a consequence of the religious gaining too much power. Is there any doubt that those who are claiming to be “enlightened” truly prefer a world where people in general — and women especially —remain objects of sexual desire which are used to herd people through endless cycles of aesthetically-driven consumerism?
The West has deeply undermined itself with this interference. Quite a few people around the world actually did want what the West had to offer until the bombs and coups came and pushed them into the arms of domestic totalitarians.
All you have to do is turn it around. Imagine if the USA had a brutal dictatorship and China invaded us to "fix" it. How well do you think that would go over?
Edit: Sanctions are a little better but grossly over-used. I think they should be reserved for cases of violation of international law, such as Russia invading Ukraine, to exact a financial penalty for that. Otherwise sanctions tend to just harm the average people of a country. The Iranian dictators and mullahs are rich. It's the people who feel the sanctions. If anything sanctions make it harder for the people to organize any alternative to their current government by keeping them in brutal poverty.
Also to really understand how the West fucked up Iran you have to go back to before the Shah when the bogie man of communism was used as an excuse to intervene the first time. Read up on that history.
Now, now, some hold democracy in contempt generally, not just for foreigners. Others believe that people have a right to live and organise in a manner of their choosing, not that they must be governed in a manner pleasing to Westerners.
"I hate the government, not the people" is a thinly-veiled neocolonial trope when applied to sovereign nations like Iran. It translates to "I don't like it when those people govern themselves".
What you deem oppression is entirely cultural. It's your choice to project that on others.
The Western liberal views the Iranian woman as oppressed because they can no longer freely sell their bodies.
The Iranian revolutionary may view the Western sex worker as oppressed because capitalism effectively forces them to sell their body to buy shelter and food. Or something about spiritual oppression. I don't really know, to be honest.
> It's perfectly fine to have an opinion about the form of government
About as fine as caring about what your neighbor is doing in their bedroom. Which is to say, pretty weird, albeit normalized in imperialist societies. It's literally none of your business.
Ignoring how those governments operate in an adversarial environment of nations where if you don’t sell out your people you face endless assignation or coup plots by the Israeli Mossad or the American CIA.
People today don’t realize the extent of the present evil and the depth of the historical of the west. Take communist China. How can you ignore the fact that Britain was literally a cartel for opium sales in China? When the emperor banned opium to get ahead of the epidemic what did “Great” Britain do? Respect the sovereignty of the Chinese people?
This is the IRI propaganda line that you are repeating and you are adding your own unique bits of outright 'errors'.
Let's start with the "colonized" lands. Iran was never colonized. It had a pseudo-feudal order, with landowning Iranian families and tenant peasants in villages. Of course this is entirely news to you (which makes you a useful unwitting IRI asset) but in the late 60s, one of the reasons the so-called Ayatollah Khomeni attacked the Shah was Land Reform.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Revolution
The other reason was the evil Shah gave the vote to women, right to divorce, and all other necessary social support so that being 'cut off from family' did not determine a future outside of society.
And again as an evil man he removed the requirement to swear on the Quran for official procedures -- he said any divine book, Torah, Bible, Qur'an will do.
Clearly he was an evil dictator and had to go!
My family:
My father born to a provincial merchant, with no religious affiliation. He happened to get the top score for the national examination, after which he got his PhD, and later with two other engineers from Tehran university started their company that went on to build some of the major high-voltage infrastructure in Iran. He also taught in the engineering school. Clearly we are oppressors longing for the good old days when we could unjustly enjoy the fruits of our minds and abilities. (Btw, this same father of mine came to US starting at 0 again and again proved himself a man of distinguished ability. These people are Iran's loss.)
So yes, we miss the meritocracy, we miss the freedom, and not lastly I personally miss the aesthetics.
> ironic that the first intervention to claim a “public place for women”
Too bad you can't read this - try a translator (this is from this year):
بسم ا لله ا لر حمن ا لرحیم
قال رسول الله(ص):النّکاح، ُ سُنَّتی، فَمَنْ رَغِبَ عَنْ سُنّتى فَلَيسَ مِنّى.
آستان قدس رضوی جهت ارتقای فضای معنوی جامعهٔ و ایجاد شرایط مناسب روحی و آرامش خیال برای برادران زائری( خصوصا برادراني كه از كشورهاي اسلامي ديگر، عراق، سوریه، لبنان... آمده اند) که در مدت زیارت حرم مطهر امام هشتم از همسر خود دور می باشند اقدام به برگزاری مرکز صیغه های کوتاه مدت در جوار حرم رضوی نموده است. در این راستا از کلیهٔ خواهران باکره که سن آنها بین ۱۲ تا ۳۵ سال است دعوت به همکاری مینماید . هر یک از خواهران بر اساس قرارداد ۲ ساله ای که با آستان قدس رضوی منعقد مینمایند موظفند که ماهانه حد اقل ۲۵ روز به صیغه برادران زوار در آیند. مدت قرار داد جزو سابقه اشتغال متقاضی محسوب میگردد مدت هرصیغه از ۵ ساعت تا ۱۰ روز متغیر میباشد . مبلغ پرداختی بابت هر صیغه بدین شرح است:
صیغه های ۵ ساعته: مبلغ پانصد هزار تومان
صیغه های ۱ روزه صدو هفتاد و پنج هزار تومان؛ ٢ روزه سیصد هزار تومان؛ ٣ روزه چهارصد و پنجاه هزار تومان و از ۴ روز تا ۱۰ روز هفتصد هزار تومان تا یک میلیون خواهران باکره که برای اولین بار صیغه میشوند مبلغ ۱۰۰۰۰۰ تومان اضافه بابت برداشته شدن پردهٔ بکارت دریافت خواهند نمود.
بعد از انقضای قرارداد ۲ ساله در صورتی که سن خوهران به حد نصاب ۳۵ سال نرسیده باشد در صورت تمایل میتوانند در لیست انتظار صیغه های دایم قرار بگیرند. خوهران بالای۳۵ بدلیل بالا بودن سن لطفا ثبت نام نفرمایند. خواهران موظفند ۵ در صد از مبلغ دریافتی هر صیغه را به ضریح مطهر واریز نمایند. از کلیه خواهران علاقه مند در خواست میشود ۲ قطعه عکس تمام قد (با حجاب اسلامی) ، آخرین مدرک تحصیلی، وضعیت بکارت و گواهی سلامت کامل روانی و جسمانی از سازمان بهداشت شهرستان محل سکونت خود را به آدرس ذیل ارسال نمایند (برای خواهران کمتر از ۱۶ سال رضایت رسمی پدر یا جد پدری یا عمو الزامی میباشد)
آدرس: مشهد – بارگاه امام رضا -خیابان شهید نواب صفوی -صحن کوثر – دفتر امور صیغه
جهت اطلا عات بیشتر با تلفن 09121169680 حاج مجید علیزاده 09124251704 حاج علی قهرمانی تماس حاصل فرمائید و یا به نشریه استان قدس مراجعه نمایید.
اینم از مملکت اسلامی و فاحشه گری به ر وش اسلامی..! اگر ایرانی هستی کپی کن و به اشتراک بذار تا همه بفهمند که احمد علم الهدی وعواملش دارند به اسم دین ناموسمون رو به عربها هدیه میدهند!!!..
خواهشا این را نشان بدهید که عموم مردم ایران بدانند که چه کثافتکاری دارد انجام میشود در زیر پرده دین.... نشر دهید..
"The holy state of Razavi [i.e. Khorasan] in order to improve the spiritual atmosphere of the society and create suitable mental conditions and peace of mind for the pilgrim brothers (especially the brothers who came from other Islamic countries, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon...) who during the pilgrimage to the Holy Shrine of the 8th Imam are detached from their wives, has started organizing a center for short-term concubines [Sigheh marriage] near the Razavi shrine. In this regard, all virgin sisters between the ages of 12 and 35 are invited to cooperate."
Now you're likely curious as to the rates of this 'holy' prostitution system? Here you go:
صیغه های ۵ ساعته: مبلغ پانصد هزار توما
5 hour marriage: 500,000 Tomans.
صیغه های ۱ روزه صدو هفتاد و پنج هزار تومان
1 day marriage: 175,000 Tomans.
etc.
So how does this work?
"After the 2-year contract expires, if the sisters are not 35 years old, they can be on the waiting list for permanent concubines if they wish. Sisters over 35 please do not register due to their age. The sisters are obliged to deposit 5 percent of the received amount of each concubine to the holy shrine. All interested sisters are requested to send 2 full-length photos (with Islamic hijab), the latest academic degree, virginity status and a certificate of complete mental and physical health from the health organization of the city where they live to the address below (for sisters less than 16 years old, official consent of father or paternal grandfather or uncle is required)"
Anything to help our Muslim brothers from Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, and soon comarades from Russia. Iranians should be delighted to be free from the yoke of the evil "dictator" Shah. This, after all, is clearly progress.
Character is destiny.
Like I said: those nostalgic for the Shah almost always are of an elite class that profited from status quo.
Have to fast during Ramadan? Job performance suffers because you aren't eating? Companies will absolutely go out of their way to make you miserable.
You might not be banned from practicing, but you better believe you aren't really protected either.
At least, that's how I understood it.
To be honest, it's such a masculine thing to begin with.
So yes, it's very much a women's rights issue, as legalizing and regulating the industry would allow women who are interested in the work to do so with protections and without fear of jail time. They can operate with relative security.