In your quest for
public penises in the Islamic world, don't forget that most Muslims live far from the Arabic-countries of the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa, in Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, South Asia, and Indonesia.
1. Turkey is the most secular Muslim country in the world, with a large percentage of the population "culturally Muslim" but not observant. I spent a semester there in the spring of 1989, and found it no more homophobic than Texas in the U.S.
The first president of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, tried hard to Westernize the country, which included introducing public art. There's a lot of it, including many statues commemorating Ataturk himself. Like the Monument of Great Triumph in Afyonkarahisar, about 100 miles from Ankara.
It's a nude, muscular Ataturk jumping over the bodies of his enemies.
2. Eskişehir, a two-hour drive north of Afyonkarahisar, is called the "City of Sculptures." There are napping commuters, soccer players, turtles -- and this brawny fisherman.
3. Antalya, on the Southern Coast, features several more statues, including another of Ataturk, and this neoclassical figure of Attalu, mythical founder of the town.
There are lots of real Graeco-Roman relics in Turkey, too, such as "The Runner" in the Archaeological Museum in Izmir.
4. Ahmet Bedevi (1899-1963), called the "Manisa Tarzan" was an environmentalist and eccentric who planted thousands of trees around Manisa, plus walked around nearly naked. There is a nearly-naked statue to commemorate his work.
5. In Mersin, the War of Independence memorial is a naked, muscular torso carved into the stone face of a mountain.
More after the break
6. Moving eastward to Iran, the Islamic Republic disapproves of human images, but ancient Iran was part of the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman empires, so there is some beefcake to be found.
On the road to Kermanshah, in western Iran near Kurdistan, you can see the Zoroastrian god Vahram, stylized as Hercules. He was carved about 150 BC.
7. The Turkic-speaking Central Asian states are generally lacking in public penises, but at least theres' some beefcake in the Coal Miners' Monument in Karaganda, Kazakhstan: two Tom of Finland hunks, one shirtless, the other falling out of his shirt, cruising each other.
8. The Partition of India in 1947 was one of the biggest imperialist blunders in history. The British thought it would be a good idea to split India into Hindu and Muslim countries. Bangladesh later split off from the Muslim country, Pakistan.
At Dhaka University, you can see the Aporajeyo Bangla, the monument to the Liberation War, some muscular soldiers with guns.
9. Indonesia has the largest Muslim population of any country in the world, and the capital, Jakarta, has been undergoing a renaissance of public art. Russian artists Matvey and Otto Manizer sculpted the Panung Pahlawan, "The Hero," a young man going off to war without his shirt, while his mother hands him his lunch.
10. But the most famous of Jakarta's public monuments is "Youth Builds a Nation," a muscular young man screaming, maybe because he is carrying a flaming pizza over his head and there's a smokestack in his butt.
See also:
The Top 10 Public Penises of Islam; A Bodybuilding Contest in Turkey.
