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How To Spot a Persian ProstituteStreetwalkers in chadors.

By Juliet Lapidos
Posted Wednesday, April 23, 2008, at 6:53 PM ET
Qom

Tehran's former police chief Reza Zarei attempted suicide in prison yesterday, a month after being arrested for consorting with six naked women in a brothel. In the aftermath of the scandal, the Times, the Associated Press, and the BBC all reported that prostitutes are becoming more visible on Iranian streets. Given the Islamic dress code, how do Persian prostitutes signal their trade?

Location, location, location. In the 1970s, Bostonians looking for a proverbial good time went to the "Combat Zone" and New Yorkers flocked to 42nd Street; in contemporary Iran, the holy city of Qom is known (unofficially) as a place of "both pilgrimage and pleasure." There, prostitutes wearing veils and even chadors mill about temples or sit together in public courtyards where men can inspect them. Sometimes a male go-between offers "introductions," at which point the prostitutes pull aside their headgear so the potential client can get a glimpse, but the whole process is fairly subtle. For an outsider, it's difficult to pick a street girl out of a crowd.

Qom may have become a prostitution hot spot due to the abundance of shrines. Young female runaways with no shelter come to the city knowing they can take refuge at holy sites by sleeping in rooms intended for pilgrims. They have no way of making a living, so after awhile they get involved with the sex trade. The city's young theological students and transient tourists form the main clientele.

Of course, Qom isn't the only place in Iran where prostitutes walk the streets. Back in 2002, the Iranian newspaper Entekhab estimated that there were nearly 85,000 prostitutes in Tehran alone. In that city, and especially in nearby suburbs, there are neighborhoods where heavily made-up prostitutes in traditional garb stand idly at traffic circles. Prospective customers drive by slowly to check out the human wares, then make a deal. The visual difference between an ordinary citizen wearing makeup who happens to be standing alone and an actual prostitute is, again, quite subtle. Apparently, mistakes are not uncommon.

The penalties for prostitution are severe—ranging from whipping to execution. But there's a loophole in Islamic law called sigheh, or temporary marriage. According to Shiite interpretation, a man and a woman may enter an impermanent partnership with a preset expiration date. There's no legally required minimum duration (a day, a week, anything goes) and no need for official witnesses—unless the woman is a virgin, in which case she needs the consent of her legal guardian. An Iranian who's wary of arrest can simply escort a prostitute to a registry, obtain a temporary contract from a Muslim cleric, and then legally satisfy his sexual needs.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Camelia Entekhabi-Fard and Barbara Slavin. Thanks also to reader Alice Clapman for asking the question.

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Juliet Lapidos is a Slate editorial assistant.
Map of Qom by Kaveh with M Samadi. Photograph of woman in a chador smoking a cigarette on Slate's home page by Yola Monakhov/Getty Images.
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Notes from the Fray Editor

This article combined two delicate subjects, so there were plenty of people to offend and to be offended. Read the comments in full for a good range of responses. There's a discussion on the correct term for temporary marriages, and a look at the history of Muslim tolerance. One reader mentioned the 'sex tourism industry in Iran' after reading the post below, and got this response from Jascob: "Are you seriously concerned that people reading this forum (mostly westerners) are going to hop on a plane and try to pick up prostitutes (i.e., exploit Muslim women) in Iran? In Iran?"

Comments from the Fray

It's not that in Iran (and Afghanistan for that matter) men are able to discern prostitutes through a complex calculus of the amount of make-up they are wearing in relation to their coordinates on a street map. Coming-on to a woman, not to mention mistaking one for a prostitute, is high risk behavior in Iran. Men wouldn't risk jail, or worse, if it were such a hit and miss endeavor. Just ask the teens in Esfahan and Tehran who have come up with ingenious ways to let the other sex know they're interested. (Ever walk down a busy street and notice someone several yards behind you keeps blurting the same 7-digit number only to disappear once you've turned around to take a gander?)

Instead of these shenanigans, prostitutes use a universally known symbol- they wear their chadors inside-out. I found this out because as a novice chador-wearer visiting Iran in 2005, I once accidentally slipped mine on the wrong way. Thankfully, a roommate filled me in before we even stepped outside the dorms in Qom. After I knew what to look for, I saw it more than once.

--Saba360

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