[DEBATE] : Khomeini on Sodomy

[Tahir Wood]

>>> "Yoshie Furuhashi" <critical.montages at gmail.com> 09/25/07 4:58 PM
>>>
For instance, do you know Khomeini had a hilarious opinion about
sodomy?

     Ayatollah Khomeini's 1947 manual, Risaleh-yi Towzih
     al-masa'il (Explanation of problems), is a case in point.
     Article 349 of this book states that "if a person has sex
     and [his organ] enters [the other person's body] to the
     point where it is circumcised [corona] or more, whether
     he enters a woman or a man, from behind or the front,
     an adult or pre-adult youngster, and even if no semen
     is secreted, both persons will become ritually polluted
     (najes)." But ritual impunity can always be cleansed
     away through the observance of rules stated in the
     same manual. (Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson,
     Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the
     Seductions of Islamism, University of Chicago Press, p. 159)

Iranian men and women might amend the existing laws against sodomy,
which, if successfully prosecuted, entails harsh punishments, by
reinterpreting this 1947 Khomeini opinion: you may commit sodomy as
long as you are mature and clean yourself by ablution after your
enjoyment!

There is so much misconception and ignorance parading as knowledge here
that one is almost at a loss. Firstly, there is nothing here that is
Khomeini's opinion; this is standard Islamic law, both Sunni and Shia.
Secondly, this post grossly underestimates the analytical nature of such
law. The latter makes subtle distinctions of logic which are quite lost
in this discussion. Ritual impurity is not in the same category as
sinful (haraam) acts. This means that you may well have regained your
state of ritual purity (so you can pray), but you have not in any way
removed your sin thereby. Conversely, as you should have been able to
work out even from the above quote, if a man and his wife have sex they
are in a state of ritual impurity even though their sex was halaal, i.e.
they have not sinned. So there is nothing in traditional Islamic law
there that will stand between you as an adulterer, whether homo- or
heterosexual, and the stones. The only thing that can help with that is
a radical revisionism in Islamic thought, something which has frequently
been attempted but never with much success.
Tahir

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