Shiite Islam’s Temporary Marriages
I remember learning about this from my Arabic professor “back in the day.” To put it mildly, the practice did not impress her. Here is an excerpt from an article that Alex Tabarrok found:
ON A DUSTY MORNING in the holy city of Qom, I went looking for a shrine in a walled cemetery of martyrs known as Sheikhan. The graveyard’s walls are lined with glass cases containing the framed photos of soldiers felled by the Iran-Iraq war. The shrine, I’d been told, is a hangout for women seeking temporary marriage, an intriguing mechanism in Shiite Islam for relieving sexual frustration. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, sex outside of marriage is a crime, punishable by up to 100 lashes or, in the case of adultery, death by stoning. Yet the purpose of a temporary marriage is clear from its name in Arabic—mut’a, pleasure. A man and a woman may contract a mut’a for a finite period of time—from minutes to 99 years or more—and for a specific amount, mehr in Farsi, which the man owes the woman.
The problem, of course, is if a woman gets pregnant during her short-lived temporary marriage. I woman having a child out of wedlock in the Muslim Middle East isn’t exactly an easy ride.
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