dung become impure and drinking their milk will be unlawful"). As a young boy growing up in the American Midwest, I remember being both horrified and bewildered after coming across these precise passages in a translated volume of Khomeini's sayings I found
in our Persian émigré home.
Scholars of Shiism -- including harsh critics of Khomeini -- emphasize that such themes were the norm among clerics of Khomeini's generation and should be understood in their proper context: Islam was a religion that emerged out of a rural desert, and the Prophet Mohammed was himself once a shepherd. Whereas religions like Christianity and Judaism simply declare such behavior to be sinful, Islam addresses them from a juridical point of
view.
The underlying problem, says Islamic scholar Mehdi Khalaji, a former seminary student in the Shiite epicenter of Qom, is not that such issues were addressed, but the fact that "Islamic jurisprudence hasn't yet been modernized. It's totally disconnected from the
issues that modern, urban people have to deal with."
Indeed, Khomeini's religious prescriptions are often the butt of jokes among Iran's post- revolutionary generations. "I've never even seen a camel in Tehran,” prominent Iranian
cartoonist Nikahang Kowsar told me, "let alone been tempted to have sex with one."
IF THERE IS A DOUBLE ENTENDRE that aptly captures today's Middle East, it is the "youth bulge.” The Arab world's median age is 22, Iran's is 27; Western Europe's, by contrast, is near 40. High levels of Internet and satellite television penetration, with their pervasive pornography, coupled with the region's youthful demographics, have
accentuated the Muslim Middle East's fraught relationship with sexuality.
Google Trends, which monitors searches from around the world, shows that of the seven countries that most frequently search the word "sex" on Google, five are Muslim and
one (India) has a large Muslim minority. (The word "sexy" is even more popular among Arabs.) Google Insights, another trend spotter, shows that the most rapidly rising search term for Iranians so far in 2012 has been "Golshifteh Farahani," a popular exiled actress
who in January posed topless for the French magazine Madame Figaro.
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_026554