Vad kommer hända med Kirkuk? (§140) Blir det krig mellan Irak och Kurdistan?

" ... If one looks at the record of Iranian historians during the same period, the scene is similar: a rather barren landscape relieved by a few lofty peaks. In 1927-8 Ahmad Kasravi led the way with the publication of three seminal articles entitled Nizhad va Tabar-i Safaviyya (`The genealogy of the Safavids'); Safaviyya sayyid nabuda and (`The Safavids were not sayyids'); and Baz ham Safaviyya (`The Safavids again')[17]. Kasravi disputed the validity of the `official' Safavid genealogy contained in the Safvat al-Safa and followed by most later Safavid chronicles[18], and argued convincingly that the ancestors of Shaykh Safi al-Din, who founded the Safavid Order (tariqa), were indigenous inhabitants of Iran (az bumiyan-i bastan-i iran budan) and were of pure Aryan stock (juz nizhad-i aryani nadashta and). Today, the consensus among Safavid historians is that the Safavid family hailed from Persian Kurdistan. Kasravi's important articles were published in the journal Ayandeh, which was not readily available in the West, and, despite the fact that they were republished as a pamphlet in 1944, in an expanded and revised form, they unfortunately continued to be overlooked by many historians. These included the Turkish scholar Zeki Velidi Togan who, working on the oldest available MSS. of the Safvat al-Safa, independently reached many of the same conclusions reached by Kasravi thirty years earlier[19]. At the same time, Togan tried to lay to rest the persistent claim by Turkish historians that Shah Isma'il I was a Turk, but this claim resurfaced from time to time in the writings of Turcophiles, such as David Ayalon[20], and was usually based on the fact that Isma'il spoke the Azari dialect of Turkish, which Toynbee calls one of "the vulgar tongues of camp and court"[21], and had written poems in Azari under the pen-name of Khata'i. ..." Roger M. Savory, Professor Emeritus University of Toronto (one of the authors of the "Encyclopaedia Iranica")

Iran's parliament has passed legislation this week that expressly authorizes “temporary marriages” and requires their registration only in limited circumstances, primarily if the woman becomes pregnant.


The law allows men to have as many sexual partners as they want, sanctioned by sharia law under the term "temporary marriage".

Sex outside marriage is a crime in Iran punishable by 100 lashes or, if adulterous, by stoning to death. However, temporary marriage is a way around those provisions. Such a marriage can be for a few minutes or several years. If a couple is married, the man -- but not the woman – can have as many additional temporary marriages as he wants.

The system is known as the sigheh system and the marriage contracts are known as Nikaḥ al-Mut’ah ("pleasure marriage") contracts. They are fixed-term contractual marriages and are customary in the Shia tradition.

The man in a temporary marriage can end the sigheh at almost any time, but there is no divorce right for women in temporary marriages. For her they continue until they automatically expire at the end of the stated period of time.

A spokeswoman for the Iranian Parliament's Cultural Commission had proposed that registration should be compulsory for all temporary marriages. That proposal was rejected on the grounds of privacy. A member of the Parliament's Legal and judicial Commission stated that the main appeal of temporary marriages is that are unregistered, because family issues, especially marriage, are among the most private matters in an individual's life, and lawmakers should not interfere so deeply in people's private affairs.

Many people consider sigheh to be a type of legalized prostitution. Others see it as a loophole for couples to have a relationship within the rigid Islamic laws Women who practice temporary marriage are often the poor and desperate, while men from any age and economic status may find the practice attractive. It was the subject of a film in 2009 entitled In the Bazaar of Sexes, the poster for which is shown above.

"One of the main attributes of marriage is publicity and the celebration of it," said Ziba Mir-Hosseini, a legal anthropologist who wrote a study of Islamic family law. "Women who enter this kind of marriage never talk about it. That's why I call it a socially defective marriage."