Republished permission Inter Press Service (IPS ) copyright Inter Press Service (IPS)
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NEW YORK, Jul 15 (IPS) - Director Cyrus Nowrasteh's latest feature film "The Stoning of Soraya M." begins with a car radio blaring the successes of Iran's 1979 Revolution.
In a few seconds, the movie transports viewers to a riverbed, where an elderly woman named Zarah tends to the body of her niece, whom the town mullahs framed for adultery and then stoned to death - the appropriate punishment in the new Islamic Republic of Iran - a day before.
The tale of Zarah and Soraya is a true story, first documented in the 1994 book "The Stoning of Soraya M." by the late French journalist Freidoune Sahebjam.
Having written critically of the regime, in 1986 Sahebjam was journeying undercover through his native Iran when he stumbled on the village of Kapuyeh. There, he met Zarah and heard her account.
As it traces Soraya Manoucherhi's journey from picking flowers with her two young daughters and sewing a new skirt for her aunt to bleeding profusely and finally dying at her stoning, the film sends a powerful message.
"The movie is pointing out that this is a very horrible way to die or for any kind of modern society to punish anyone," Nowrasteh told IPS.
According to the director, the movie's harsh critique of stoning and the Sharia law that authorises it has garnered some support from the Muslim community.
"I hear from Muslims who say this is a pro-Muslim film, showing how the religion is hijacked, because there is nothing that encourages stoning in the Koran," Nowrasteh told a U.S. magazine.
Originally a Jewish practice, the stoning of adulterers only entered Islamic law when the second Caliph Umar stated that though the verse could be found in Koran, God had sent Mohammad a passage proclaiming that adulterers should be stoned death.
Since Caliph Umar, the penalty authorised by the Koran (24:2) - a public flogging of adulterers with100 hundred lashes - has not been widely performed by Muslims.
In the 1,400 years since Caliph Umar, Islamic leaders have instead developed laws detailing how exactly to stone someone. Males being stoned are to be buried to the waist and women to the neck; after the burial, a crowd pelts the condemned with rocks until the person dies.
If a convict manages to pull themselves out of the ground, by Islamic law, that person will remain free from punishment.
Today the stoning of adulterers occurs in the Islamic Republic of Iran as well as the Muslim-dominated countries of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia, all three of which enforce Sharia law in some, if not all, of their respective provinces.
With a 20-minute death scene depicting each stone striking Soraya and the outpouring of blood and bruising the battering causes, "The Stoning of Soraya M." graphically demonstrates that, as Nowrasteh says, "stoning anybody for anything is a kind of barbaric and horrific form of punishment."
Nevertheless, taken from the point of a young woman and mother, the movie stresses the plight of Muslim women accused of adultery and sentenced to stoning under Sharia law.
As conservative political commentator Katharine DeBrecht told IPS, the majority of stoning victims in the world are women.
This trend is clearly seen in Iran where, Amnesty International notes, seven out of 10 people awaiting public stoning are women.
"Often times when a woman reports rape," DeBrecht said, "it is considered a confession to adultery."
Also leading to the high number of women's stoning is women's lack of education and legal rights under Sharia law.
Typically less educated than men due to the limitations Sharia law places on girls' education, women cannot represent themselves in court as well as men.
Moreover, as Lily Mazahery, president of the Washington-based Legal Rights Institute, reports, "In 99 percent of these cases, the accused women have received no legal representation because, under the Sharia legal system, their testimony is at best worth only half the value of the testimony of men."
When two men accuse Soraya of adultery, she is told that since men are bringing charges against her, as a woman, she bears the burden of proving her innocence (meanwhile, if women brought charges against a man, they would have the burden of proving him guilty).
Unable to exculpate herself, Soraya is found guilty.
The great disparity between women's rights and men's rights in Iran inspired Iranian women to rally their support in this year's elections around candidates like Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hossein Moussavi, who have pledged to tackle discrimination against women.
In spite of vicious crackdowns by the police, women have turned out in droves to protest the results of the controversial Jun. 12 election.
But even if Moussavi, Karroubi, and fellow Iranian liberals remain out of office, Iran may still outlaw the stoning of both Iranian men and Iranian women.
According to Iran's state news agency, when Iran's judicial commission revised the country's penal code earlier this year, it removed the punishment of stoning. With the consent of parliament and the Guardian Council, this revised penal code will become Iran's official law.
But not everyone is confident that Iran will indeed ban the practice.
Tom Mackey of Amnesty International told IPS, "The provision for stoning was removed by a parliamentary committee, but that is no guarantee it will not be reinstated before it comes to a final vote, or even if it remains removed, that the Guardian Council, which vets legislation for conformity to Islamic Law and the Constitution, will not insist on its reinstatement."
"I think it's all crap," Nowrasteh bluntly told IPS. "They make these announcements and then different organisations say, 'See we're having an impact. They're going to ban stoning,' and then they don't. It's for public consumption."
