The Ayatollah’s Conundrum - Virgin Women in Iran Facing Execution, Best Practice

This below is from a 2002 article I came across when I searched the related issue. As should be obvious from the title, this isn’t light reading. I heard of this in the same interview where I heard mention of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Little Green Book, which I then dipped into online and wrote about here. I was probably doing art while I had that interview playing and so wasn’t fully paying attention. The mental shorthand that my distracted mind filtered through was that under the Khomeini/IRGC rule, if a virgin Iranian woman was facing execution, according to their religious beliefs, in her virginal state she would go straight to heaven after her death. And so they would consider her execution to be a kind of benevolent act in terms of her salvation, apart from the good her execution would effect in terms of ridding Allah’s earthly realm of evil impurities. A very warped sense of virtue but anyway.

Along with checking out the Little Green Book though, I did subsequently look up this half-heard executing of virgin women, and the reality turned out to be a little less ‘benevolent’. The apparent reality is that the Khomeinian regime mindset was appalled at the idea of sending such a death deserving virgin woman to heaven, and so instead the solution to the spiritual conundrum was to rape her so she would now be free to be sent to hell unimpeded. But, and here the religious virtue comes back in, to have sex or to rape her outside of marriage would be sinful, and so the regime would marry her to her executioner, then this holy marriage could be consummated, and then she could be executed, following which impeccable spiritual procedures she could, oh joy, go straight to hell for eternity.

Besides the seriously extreme thoughts by the regime’s leader in the Little Green Book, I’ve seen plenty witness accounts by Iranians that very much validate the plausibility of all this. And just as an illustration, one the more ‘sane’ quotes from the Little Green Book:

The person who governs the Muslim community must always have its interests at heart and not his own. This is why Islam has put so many people to death: to safeguard the interests of the Muslim community.

The relevant extract from the 2002 article below,:

  https://aljadid.com/content/caskets-and-rape-prison-irans-islamic-republic-review-chahla-chafiqs-new-islamist-man-politi

A woman's rape is frequently the last act that precedes her execution. This is explained by the rule in Iranian political prisons that the sentence of execution cannot be carried out if the woman is a virgin. Since there is a theological belief that if a woman dies a virgin she will go to heaven, the politically active virgin is forced to "marry" before her execution and thus to insure she will go to hell. She is forced to "marry" the hangman who will carry out her execution.. This marriage is conducted as a legitimate and official contract which includes, among other things, an estimated dowry. This "dowry" is subsequently paid to the family of the victim; it simultaneously becomes the equivalent of an official notification that she was executed.

 

Translated from the Arabic by Elie Chalala.

 

This article appeared in Al Jadid Magazine, Vol. 9, Nos. 42/43, Winter/Spring 2003.