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By Randy Robinson
Prostitution is a profession typically frowned upon in both American and Middle Eastern cultures. Throughout most of both regions, prostitution is outright outlawed.
In Amsterdam, however, a brothel called Hot Croissant now offers “halal prostitutes” for Muslim clients.
An oxymoron, you say? Bear with me.
Hot Croissant’s halal-friendly ladies of the night don’t drink, don’t do drugs, and they pray five times a day. But that can’t be all, right?
Right. The entire idea of halal prostitutes revolves around Nikah al-Mut’ah, roughly translated as “pleasure marriage.” The client signs a temporary marriage contract with the prostitute, which can last for as little as a couple of nights or a few hours. After the contract expires, the couple is no longer married to one another, and the “husband” must pay-out to the “wife” with a “dowry.”
Nikah al-Mut’ah comes from Shi’a Islam. Sunnis in general forbid it and consider the practice blasphemous.
Controversy aside, Sunni men, particularly from Saudi Arabia, have been known to purchase pleasure wives. Amsterdam, in fact, didn’t invent the business. Sunni-dominated Indonesia has a tourist industry centered on Mut’ah, and Shi’a-led Iran has its own in-house version of the sigeh.
The existence of Nikah al-Mut’ah begs two questions, one for Westerners and one for Middle Easterners.
For Westerners, what’s to stop, say, Christians (or any other faith or lack thereof) from instating a similar practice? After all, in the United States and throughout much of Western Europe, the divorce rate is roughly 50 percent. That means half of all marriages fail before one of the spouses dies. There are no laws in the U.S. or Europe governing how long a marriage must last, as was (in)famously demonstrated by Khloe Kardashian, whose celebrity marriage lasted a mere 72 hours. Considering the recent trend of unsanctimonious marriage in the West, “prostitution” could easily, and legally, be replaced with a temporary marriage.
For Middle Easterners, why the extra steps? Prostitution is prostitution, let’s be frank, here. The idea is a payment in exchange for sex. What’s it matter if the client is temporarily married during the raucous romp? If this is some kind of “legit in the eyes of God” thing, I doubt God Almighty can be tricked into thinking Nikah al-Mut’ah is anything other than whoring.
Actually, here’s another question for Middle Easterners. What happens if, say, the client/husband happens to die during sex? Does the “wife” inherit all the things guaranteed to her by the Quran after her “husband” passes away? Of course not, because a Mut’ah isn’t considered one of the four wives every Muslim man is entitled to. If that’s the case, is she ever really a wife – and is it ever really a marriage?
For Americans and Arabs, the answer to all of these questions is simple: legalize prostitution and regulate it. Tax it. Study it. As long as sex is pleasurable, men (and women) will pay for it. As a world, we’re starting to wake up. The War on Drugs is ending, the War on Terror is tapering down, and LGBT rights are sweeping the globe.
The next step for social progress is to get over our sexual hang-ups altogether. If religious people need a religious outlet for prostitution, then fine. But let’s start getting honest about what we want and who we are as a species. If prostitution is legalized, institutionalized, and normalized – no matter its spiritual flavor – everyone wins.
