Sharia, swedish model

Police and revolutionary guards crack down hard on women not adhering to islamic dress code in Iranian capital Tehran right now. The tightening of the already strictly moralistic dress code introduced during the Khomeiny revolution three decades ago, Iran-watchers claim, is due to internal power struggle within the ruling class of mullahs and pressures due to growing dissent with social and economic failures of Iranian society. Since 1979, Iran has more than trebled it's population and a large group of teenagers and people in their twenties crave for music, romance and a more relaxed and secular lifestyle.

Here at home everybody are of course abhored by the treatment of women in traditional islamic societies. Yet, female victims of rape are still not receiving a very decorous treatment from police and courts here in the self proclaimed Foremost Welfare State. Writer and colleague Chatarina Wennstam has in two books described how rape victims are systematically degraded and humiliated in the process. "The victim was wearing a blouse, a skirt, a bra, stockings and knickers" is a common fact of female victims attire found in court minutes up to this day, as Wennstam has showed. At the same time a male victim of a mugging is seldom questioned in court why he brandished an expensive wristwatch under the nose of the perpetrators or why he wore expensive looking clothes as he made a short cut through the dark part of the park.

In the 17th C, swedes were subjected to a criminal code deriving from the Old Testament, (you know, the part of the Bible where God is really pissed off at mankind most of the time).
Hence adultery, being a jew or a catholic or even swearing, would lead to the stake or even worse. In fact, during those times Sweden did not only have the largest standing army of Europe, it was an effective Lutheran military dictatorship based on the riches of natural resources such as iron, tar and timber. Not really far from Iran or Saudi Arabia of thoday, really.