Five months after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told Columbia there are no homosexuals in Iran, Dr. Janet Afary argued otherwise Wednesday evening in the International Affairs building.
“Are There Homosexuals in Iran?” was one part of a five-lecture-long series on Iran organized by the School of International and Public Affairs and the Middle East Institute of Columbia University. It was planned in response to both University President Lee Bollinger’s wish to increase campus awareness on the Islamic Republic of Iran and the recent rise in student interest in Iranian issues.
“After the invitation of President Bollinger to President Ahmadinejad last September, there was a big push to have a larger awareness of Iran and U.S.-Iran relations, and so planning began for a longer full-semester, Iran-speaker series for the whole of Spring of 2008. ... This is an attempt to have an array of topics that are looking at Iran as a country,” said Zaki Raheem, the program assistant for the Office of External Affairs and Communications and an organizer of the event.
This past September, SIPA invited Ahmadinejad to speak at Columbia, causing a frenzy of media controversy. In his speech, the Iranian president denied that there are homosexuals in Iran. Although later reports pointed out that this translation is not entirely accurate, his comment was one of the most quoted of the event.
Afary, who has a doctorate in modern Middle Eastern history from the University of Michigan, has done extensive research on Iran-related topics for her upcoming book, Sexual Politics in Modern Iran. She has received this year’s award for Best Dissertation of the Year from the Foundation for Iranian Studies and is currently an associate professor of history at Purdue University.
Her lecture focused mainly on the evolution of the culture and tolerance of homosexuality in Iran. She began by discussing the rich history of Iranian homosexual relationships dating back to medieval Persia, where older men of high status would couple with younger, lower-class men. Such relationships, she said, were recognized and even condoned, as long as they were kept discreet and did not interfere with socially recognized marriages.
Although Islamic law has always explicitly prohibited homosexuality, actual social practices have not always strictly adhered to it, and homosexuality has been thoroughly documented in both European memoirs and Persian accounts.
Afary emphasized that although homosexuality has increasingly been seen as a deviant behavior in Iran, Ahmadinejad’s presidency has marked a drastic shift in the attitude of the Iranian government toward homosexual “offenders.” According to her, Ahmadinejad’s Iran has been “actively pursuing” homosexuals and prosecuting them for crimes such as pedophilia and rape in order to provide additional reasons for entrapment and persecution.
“The state is trying to not recognize Iran’s gay community,” Afary said, “but time is not on their side. It’s inevitable.”
Ira Stup, GS, said he attended the event in large part because of the controversy around Ahmadinejad’s statements in September. “I found it fascinating that ... gay identity [in Iran] is kind of seen as a new phenomenon, whereas it’s clearly rooted deep in Iranian sexual expression and companionship,” he said.
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