Of numbers greater than nineteen

Mahsa Shekarloo

It is an open secret that the way strangers meet and hook up in bars in the U.S., so do men and women in Iran’s shared cabs, with a fellow passenger or driver.  In fact, a great part of the cab ride experience is witnessing and participating in the very un-Islamic state of being sardined with two men in the back seat, or better, practically sitting on one’s lap- as front seats carry two passengers- up front.  Looking or not, the combination of frequent, intimate and semi-private encounters with strange men have produced what else, if not unintended consequences.

Accordingly, riding in a cab always entails the risk of being hit on by the driver or the passenger next to you, much like sitting next to a man at a bar does, except that it’s much easier to avoid a bar than it is a city’s major form of transportation.  The fact that a woman cannot touch  her cousin because it is religiously prohibited, but often feels the unpleasant experience of having a stranger’s thigh rub tightly against her in cabs is particularly absurd.  For the purposes of my discussion here, what this form of public transportation also offers is some degree of camouflage for the increasing number of prostitutes working the streets.  

Rising prostitution has been on the public’s mind for the last few years. It’s become a truism: Traffic is nightmarish, the pollution is deadly, the economy sucks, prostitution is on the rise.  While it’s unclear exactly how much, the worsening economy is definitely a  contributing factor, and the industry has noticeably bounced back from the early days of the revolution when Tehran’s notorious red-light district, Shahr-e No, was destroyed and the prostitutes rounded up. With the red-light districts gone and prostitution no longer concentrated and safely tucked away from respectable society, it has found refuge in the daily routines of public transportation. As a result, less controversial non-marital sexual expressions and prostitution are sharing public transportation as the underground site for social interaction and exchange. As dissatisfaction grows, people are finding less motivation to mask their desires and needs, and the underground is increasingly moving to the fore for all to see.

Saeed Hanei said that his disgust and anger at the daily sight of street prostitutes on his way to work laid the groundwork for his murdering 16 women in the city of Mashad.  Mashad is a religious city that receives over a million visitors every year who make the pilgrimage to Iran’s holiest and most visited site, the burial place of Imam Reza.  Its temporary and transitory quality also makes it potentially prime for extra- and non-marital sexual activities like prostitution and for the legal, but socially stigmatized sigheh (temporary marriage).  The tomb is located in the heart of the city and its urban surroundings are saturated with a slew of hotels, ranging from the seedy we-don’t-ask-many-questions, to the family-oriented. 

For Hanei, the final straw was when his wife was mistaken for a prostitute while waiting for a cab.  He began picking women off the street when his wife and children were visiting the shrine, bring them home, and strangle them with their headscarves or chadors.  When their strangled bodies began appearing in the summer of 2000, and it was discovered that some of the victims had previously been arrested for prostitution, police suspected a ring of people targeting prostitutes, or zanan-e khiabani (street women), as they are euphemistically called.  The last woman he picked managed to fight and claw her way out of his house and straight to authorities. 

Over the course of a year, 19 dead women were found, of which Hanei confessed to killing 16.  Some of the victims had children, but the state ultimately became the plaintiff because no family members stepped forward to claim the women and press charges.  On April 17, cursing and screaming in disbelief until- according to witnesses- literally his last breath, Saeed Hanei was executed by hanging.

Saeed Hanei was a 38 year-old father, husband, war veteran, and basij who made a living doing construction work.  He was known as a pious man in the community, and after his arrest, he proudly and unapologetically claimed that by killing the women, he was carrying out his religious duty in getting rid of the flagrant manifestations of corruption that was destroying Iranian society, and even went as far as stating his pleasure and satisfaction in committing the murders.  Conservative newspapers such as Keyhan, Resalat, and Siasat-e Rooz sprang to his defense and dug out principles and dictates from Islamic texts to provide supporting evidence to his inspired defense.  His supporters heralded him as a religious do-gooder who had committed necessary killings sanctioned by Islam (see Salman Rushdie for another example) as many others cried foul, outraged by the conservative reaction.

When the medical examiner discovered Hanei’s semen in 13 of his victims, his defenders lost their collective voice and Hanei claimed that it was emotional problems after all, that led him to kill.  He added that the sex lasted “only two or three seconds” because he was concerned about catching some disease, and that many of the women had made fun of his lacking sexual stamina (basij spokesmen later announced that his membership was bogus and that he had falsified his identity card).  On the day of his hanging, Hanei said mental illness had rendered him incapable of controlling his actions, and that he now knew his actions were wrong, and if the state would let him live and display the courage necessary to deal with this social “affliction,” he would be willing to help.

By Khosrow Hassanzadeh

The case sparked a national scandal.  Newspapers wrote of society gone awry and public safety gone to hell.  Like almost every issue, it was dragged in the ongoing fight between the political factions.  After conservatives lost their ill-received religious argument, the case was held as an example of President Khatami’s ineffectiveness and inability to govern.  They argued that the government’s incompetence in ensuring moral order left a vacuum that left Hanei no choice but to fill.  Reformists responded that in an Islamic republic, there was no need for individual mavericks to secure religious and moral values and that slandering Khatami, not public interest, was the real motivation of such talk.  Some even suggested that the murders were committed to make the President and reformers look bad.  Nevertheless, conservative and reformist papers may have disagreed on the solutions, but both had framed the problem as one of disintegrating morality.  The main difference was that the former defended the right of the individual, and the latter argued for the state’s exclusive responsibility.

A front page article in women’s magazine Zanan, sarcastically titled, “An Innocent Man and the Guilty Women,” raised many issues.  It challenged conservatives’ religious interpretation, analyzed current laws, questioned official conclusion that he acted alone, considered a link with his sexual dysfunction worth exploring, and finally, but only indirectly addressed the title’s point by asking why Hanei didn’t target dirty men instead of women upon hearing that his wife had been mistaken for a prostitute.  Although the article didn’t push the issue further, it touched upon that age-old problem of using women both as vessel and threat to public morality, and their responsibility for its demise. 

By publicly declaring war on prostitution (as he was partook in it himself), Hanei was exposing what everyone already knows- that it’s spreading and taking on new forms and moving uncomfortably close to mainstream society.  Yet, despite all the media coverage surrounding the case, people wouldn’t publicly address it.  With one exception, the silence of women’s groups to the murders was a telling reflection of this reluctance and of an unwillingness to associate themselves with prostitutes.  Zanan magazine covered the story, but only by way of examining Hanei, religious reinterpretation, and critique of official response.  Prostitution as sexual institution or economic market, for example, was never addressed.  

Hanei’s highly visible and egregious crimes shocked and disrupted the status quo and momentarily exposed the underbelly and foundations on which Iranian society’s sexual politics is based.  While prostitution, “moral decay,” and sexual violence in and of themselves are not news to Iranian society or the state, Hanei highlighted Iranian society’s increasing failure to regulate sexual practices and norms of morality.  Norms that define and establish the “good” women from the “bad,” and that keep sexuality- especially women’s sexuality- in check are frequently undergoing attack.  Growing prostitution is just one indication of people’s willingness to do the previously unthinkable. 

One outcome to the changes in Iran’s sexual landscape has been the use of a conventionally non-sexual medium, public transportation, for all sorts of “illegitimate” sexual expressions, and it’s confusing everyone.  The sexual and moral order of things, where it’s clear who’s a “good” woman and who is not, have long been disrupted on Iran’s city streets.  Hanei’s wife is not the only woman who has been mistaken for a prostitute while hailing a cab.  So was the college student he murdered.  So is practically every woman who stands on the street just trying to get somewhere.  Pretty much everyone is fair game now.  What is at risk is not just the loss of sexual restraint, confusion of categories, or “moral degeneration.”  Those in power understand that the state’s increasing inability to control sexuality carry threatening consequences for social stability and safety as well.  Newspapers and political factions, completely attuned to the dangers, fretted and slung accusations over the teetering social stability, but the state’s complicity and failure to ensure women’s safety was entirely ignored, and reports of murdered women continue. 

With the crisis now passed, the social climate has resumed its relative lull.  The economy is still desperate, prostitution continues, the insiders wage their battle, the streets flourish with bodies of desire, and women will just have to fend for themselves.   

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