At issue is the Islamic Republic’s legal practice of qasas, usually summarized in English as an “eye-for-an-eye,” the Old Testament punishment standard.
In this case, it is quite literally an eye-for-an-eye. A spurned lover threw acid in the face of the woman who rejected him, thus blinding her; she is now demanding her right under qasas to blind him.
One thing that is different about this case is that it doesn’t involve some poorly educated villagers, but two students at Tehran University, the country’s most prestigious institution of higher education.
The court gave permission for 32-year-old Ameneh Bahrami to pour acid into the eyes of her attacker, Majid Mohedi, 27.
Bahrami showed up Saturday at the hospital where Mohedi was due to be anesthetized before Bahrami herself would drop acid into his eyes—20 drops of sulfuric acid in each eye. There she was told the punishment had been postponed. She was not told why. And she was not told when she should return to exact the revenge she demands.
The sentence is an open-and-shut matter under Iranian law. Bahrami is doing nothing but exercising a right that the qasas (retribution) law gives her. But the case has sparked unusual controversy inside Iran as well as loud objections from foreign human rights organizations—and even doubts within the Judiciary.
It isn’t clear which impressed the authorities the most—the foreign or the domestic objections. Certainly, Iranian officials still have not emerged from the nasty sting they suffered globally over the stoning sentence meted out to Sakineh Mohammad-Ashtiani. But many Iranians have balked at allowing Bahrami to blind her attacker.
This is not by any means the first eye-for-an-eye acid blinding sentence in Iran. But in the past, Iranians have largely rolled their eyes, clucked and shaken their heads at the qasas philosophy. This time, however, many are damning the Judiciary as medieval.
Mohedi threw sulfuric acid in Bahrami’s eyes at a bus stop in 2004 after he had begged her in vain to marry him. For months, he had stalked the electronics major.
In the end, she was left blind and disfigured. She underwent 19 operations.
The court awarded her 300 million rials ($30,000) in compensation and ordered Mohedi sent to jail. But Bahrami did not want the money. She wanted her attacker to suffer the same anguish she was forced to endure.
His mother phoned her parents, begging for mercy. Bahrami was quoted last week as saying the young man‘s mother “said that Majid would always work for me if he could keep his eyes. But now it’s too late.”
Bahrami says she has received death threats because of her determination to exact revenge. “The police have told me not to go out on the street alone. My parents are scared. They think the judges are wrong.”
The day before the scheduled retribution, she said: “I’m very happy. After six years, I’m getting justice. But we are both losers because we have both suffered greatly.”
The long delay in scheduling the sentence was apparently due to the fact that the Judiciary did not want to see it carried out. Judges reportedly talked to her repeatedly, trying to convince her to accept blood money from the young man’s family in place of the acid blinding. Bahrami would not budge.
But this week, after the postponement of the sentence, the daily Rouzegar reported that Bahrami had told it she would accept 2 million euros to forego blinding the man—far more than the blood money amount allotted by law. But she reportedly added that she knew the Mohedi family didn’t have that kind of money so the sentence would be carried out.
Some Tehranis sneered that they thoiught Bahrami was trying to take advantage of the public opposition to her blinding Mohedi by extorting 2 million euros from the offended populace.
Bahrami told Rouzegar, “It is my ultimate wish that Majid be blinded.” She said that within her family only her brother opposed the blinding.
She also complained that neither Mohedi nor his parents had ever made any gesture of apologizing for what he had done over the years.
She said that the judges in the case told her the retributive blinding was “too cruel.” She said they only abided by the law of qasas after years of hounding by her.
In other interviews, Bah-rami seemed to respond to complaints from other Tehranis that revenge was not a proper motivation. She said she was not acting out of revenge, but out of a desire to deter others who might be thinking of blinding someone.
However, Mohedi did not invent the idea of throwing acid in someone’s face. His was at least third instance of such actions in Iran in a decade. Each case got major media attention. In fact, some argue that the attention given these cases is what encourages others to resort to acid attacks.
Along the way, the case has seen some bizarre twists. For example, at one point Bahrami was told she could only blind her attacker in one eye because she is a woman.
The legal issue is that Islamic law says a woman’s courtroom testimony is only valued at half a man’s, and the blood money payable for injuring or killing a woman is only half that for injuring or killing a man. Applying that principle to Bahrami’s case, only one eye of her male attacker need be blinded to make “equal” retaliation for blinding the woman in both eyes.
“I explained to the judge that with one eye one can still live,” she said.
The court then ruled that Bahrami would be allowed to have her attacker blinded in both eyes only if she gave up the $30,000 in compensation the court had awarded her. That was fine with her.
“He will be anesthetized and will not suffer pain. His face will not be disfigured because only a few drops [of acid] will be needed He will not have the internal injuries I had,” Bahrami told Spanish reporters who interviewed her two years ago while she was in Spain for treatment.
“He did not have any compassion when he waited for me for hours outside my workplace and threw the acid on me,” she said.
Bahrami was then living off $500 a month in Spanish welfare payments.
Spanish news reports said that after undergoing treatment in Barcelona, Bahrami recovered 40 percent of her vision in one eye. Shortly afterward, however, Bahrami suffered an infection that caused her to lose complete sight in both eyes. In addition to being blinded, Bahrami also suffered serious injuries and permanent scars on her face and body.
While many in Iran have spoken up against qasas, many have also strongly called for Bahrami to blind her attacker. Those people usually have argued that her action would serve as a deterrent to future attacks.
There have been other acid attacks in Iran. The most notorious was in 1997 when a spurned suitor hired a man to throw acid in the face of the 17-year-old girl who rejected him. The hired man did so, disfiguring, but not blinding, the 17-year-old and her 10-year-old sister who was standing nearby.
A court sentenced the hired hand to 15 years in prison, but the spurned suitor got only three years imprisonment. The public uproar was swift and loud. As the case worked its way through appeals courts, the sentences were progressively increased until the hired hand was sentenced to be disfigured with acid and the suitor was hanged.
Some see in the Bahrami-Mohedi case just another wrenching news story. But others see the case as telling something about weaknesses in Iranian society. Nayereh Tohidi, a professor at California State College in Northridge, told Time magazine: “[Based on] such customs, a man sees it as his prerogative to possess the woman he desires, regardless of her feelings and mutual love. This eye-for-an-eye tribal approach to crime underlies how the law reinforces a cycle of violence instead of reducing it. A young blind man is going to be added to a young blind woman for society to take care of.”
