TEHRAN, 3 June 2007 — Iran’s interior minister faced criticism from women activists yesterday after advocating the practice of temporary marriage as a way to meet the needs of young people in the Islamic state, which bans extramarital sex.

“Is it possible that Islam is indifferent to a 15-year-old youth into whom God has put lust?” newspapers quoted Interior Minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi, who is also a cleric, as telling a religious seminar this week.

The minister said Iran should seek to promote the practice with “boldness” and urged seminary scholars to study the matter and come up with ways to “execute God’s command in society.”

Temporary marriage, or sigha, is an agreement between a man and a women to get married for a specified time, even for just a few hours or days. It has long been practiced by Shiites, who are dominant in Iran, even though it is unclear how common it is.

Sunnis say it is illegal and akin to prostitution, but some Shiites scholars say it reflects the reality of human nature and provides for the rights and responsibilities of both the man and the woman.

“Although temporary marriage has always existed in our law, it is considered improper by Iranian culture,” Shadi Sadr, an Iranian activist for women rights, told the ISNA news agency.

Pourmohammadi spoke on Thursday in Qom, Iran’s religious center, and his comments were carried mainly by reformist dailies yesterday. They also published reaction, mostly from opponents of the practice but also from some clerical backers.

“Islam is a comprehensive and complete religion and has a solution for every behavior and need and temporary marriage is one of its solutions for the needs of the youth,” Pourmohammadi said according to the Sharq daily.

“For fulfilling the sexual desires of the youth who do not have the possibility to get married a decision should be taken.”

“We should expect violations and repercussions if we do not practically respond to young people’s sexual needs,” the centrist Kargozaran daily quoted the minister as saying.

A temporary marriage is easy to arrange. A couple will agree on how long they will get married — it’s usually anywhere from a day to months — and on financial matters.

Couples often go to a Shiite cleric for approval of the contract. “A great number of women who agree to have temporary marriage do it because of their problems and financial need,” another women activist, Fatemeh Sadeghi, told ISNA.

The Ham Mihan daily quoted a receptionist at a hotel in Tehran as saying it accepted couples with documents showing they were temporarily married and that it had about 100 such guests per week. “Our clients are young men with older women,” he said.

“In this kind of marriage there is no force, therefore we cannot say it is violating women’s rights,” one Iranian cleric, Hojjatoleslam Ahmad Ghabel, told Sharq.

But a women former parliamentary deputy, Fatemeh Rakei, suggested that entering into a temporary marriage made it difficult for young women to later find permanent husbands and also expressed concern about the future of children from such marriages.

“Have those who discuss such issues thought about the children of these marriages and their fate?” she asked.