Afsaneh Najmabadi, from Encyclopedia...

UCLA e-collection

Iran:Love: Modern Discourses

Iran

Transformation of the concept of love has been a key marker of Iranian modernity: heteronormalization
of sexual mores and heterosocialization of public life called for re-envisioning marriage from a
procreative to a romantic contract. Modernist intellectuals, from the mid-nineteenth century,
condemned arranged, temporary, and polygynous marriages, advocating monogamy and marriage
based on love. Initially, romantic love turned out to be a hard sell. When a later generation turned to
issues of love, sexuality, and marriage at the turn of the twentieth century, two literary genres, both
with a tragic narrative logic, were most popular. First, there were the clean (with no hint of sex)
romantic tales, dynamized by national reform imperatives. In these novels, the possibility of a happy
ending was frustrated by such obstacles as existing concepts of marriage, parental control over choice
of spouse, relations and expectations between man and woman, lack of modern education for women,
and unconscionability of men of religion and state, all the way to the autocracy of governments. Such
tragic closures contained the possibility of happiness: removal of autocracy, educational and legal
reforms, or cultural transformations concerning gender and sexuality would make it possible to rewrite
the story with a happy ending.
The second genre was the sexual moral tales of warning about urban corruption and abusive men who
took advantage of naive young (often rural immigrant) women in the new climate of gender
socialization. For young women, the desire for romantic marriage and resistance against arranged
marriage were controlled by fear of consequences of such desire as emplotted in these tragic tales of
deceit, often with a suicidal closure. The disciplinary effects of these tales on a generation of women
about to participate in the emerging heterosocializing culture of modern urbanity cannot be

overestimated.
Modernity, of course, did not invent tragic romance. What distinguished the early modernist tragedies
was the emplotment of tragic love as political and cultural critique. What moved the plot in these
stories were not the obstacles to happy endings in the older tragedies, like class/status incompatibility
for Shrn and Farhd, or tribal/kinship issues for Layl and Majnn, but political and cultural issues.
The frustration of erotic desire in the text was employed to produce a different kind of desire in the
reader: the desire for political and cultural transformations. This political work of romantic love seems
to have been critical for its own emergence. It is as if romantic love needed a patriotic mantle to
establish its own viability. In these romances heterosexualization of love was made to produce patriotic
desire, which in turn further consolidated heterosexualization of love by its intense focus on a female
beloved, now the homeland, now the woman compatriot.
There is another important difference between modernist and classical tragic romances. In the latter,
love, sex, and marriage were not necessarily connected. Apart from popular homoerotic love stories,
such as that of Mamd and Ayz something totally absent from modernist love stories union
of the lovers in heteroerotic tales did not necessarily translate into a wedding. Marriage was dominantly
a procreative contract. This is reflected in the structure of books of ethics and advice with separate
chapters on love and on marriage, and in the arguments for necessity of marriage. Until an important
paradigm change in the nineteenth century, the important goal of marriage remained procreation.
This shift took two different forms, driven by distinct impulses. For Iranians who interpreted European
public heterosociality as unregulated heterosexual chaos, marriage became Islam's superior way of
satisfying human sexuality. This is most notable in religiously-informed and theologically-oriented
texts and remains so to our times. The impulse to differentiate Muslim-Iranian from European moved
this reconceptualization of marriage from a procreative to a sexual contract.
Modernists who focused on becoming like Europe at once identified with and disavowed the European

perception of Iranian society as homosocial, homosexual, and therefore backward. For them, male
homoerotic affectivity was recast from the best love into the worst vice. Relatedly, they
reconceptualized marriage as a covenant of affective bonds, even love. This may explain why Iranian
male reformers' discourse was short on monogamy and reform of divorce laws (two central issues for
women reformers), but long on what Kandiyoti calls male longing for the modern woman expressed
through clamorous demands for love; (1998, 282).
Desire had to be re-homed into marriage and wedded to the emergence of a new family. Male
homoerotic sociality was reconfigured through a complex process of redirecting its erotic component
toward heteroerotic romance and companionate marriage and its homosociality toward bonds of
patriotism, itself mediated through the female figure of beloved Iran. Iran as beloved was critical for
this process of dissolution and redirection, at once consolidating the beloved as female and serving as a
shared erotic mediator for patriotic brotherhood. Romantic love, companionate marriage, women's
education were not simply necessary for mothering modern citizens and supporting male patriots. They
were implicated in reconfiguration of male homoerotic affectivity.
In addition to redirecting love and affection away from despised paths to their naturalized
heteronormative home, malemale friendship was invoked as the sentiment that could now underwrite
husbandwife companionship. This posed difficult challenges. The radical parity that underwrote
malemale friendship would come against a culture that had assumed an innate inferiority of women
and their subordination to men. A wife was subject to her husband, even in modernist discourse. Then,
there was a sex problem. Unlike the religiously-grounded discourse of marriage as regulated
heterosexuality, the modernists were leery of sex. Malemale friendship (and love) was so burdened
with homoeroticism that for it to legitimize heterosexual love, it had to be almost desexed.
From a modernist woman's perspective, if companionate romantic marriage was to replace marriage as
a sexual procreative contract, men had to give up a variety of culturally sanctioned sexual practices

including sex with adolescent males, temporary marriage, and polygyny. Modernist women demanded
of men equal emotional and erotic investment in the new marriage.
Production of the new man in women's writings would eventually break into mass-circulation novels of
the 1980s and 1990s, most successful as tales of deep disillusionment with romantic love. Ironically,
the full force of romantic marriage as tragedy broke out when love was no longer performing
allegorical patriotic and social reformist labors. In these later novels, romantic marriage as such became
an almost unrecuperable tragedy, as told in the most popular novel of this generation, Bmdd-i
khumr (The morning after) (jj Sayyidjavd 1995).
In Bmdd-i khumr the obstacles to a happy ending of the tale are not outside the essence of
romantic marriage, to be removed through modernist reforms. Romantic passionate marriage, when
transgressing rules of parity and parental approval, is written as tragic in and of itself, an unreformable
project, to be abandoned in favor of marriage based on wisdom of the elderly, not on blind physical
love; on kuf (social, class, and cultural parity), not on the daring transgressions of a class-crossing
marriage; on living within a tense yet blissful bigamy, instead of the illusive pretensions of monogamy;
and on a return to the paternal family instead of escaping from it into a nuclear hell.
The driving force of the novel, sexual desire and passion, is a centrally contemporary issue. This is
another way in which the new genre is different from earlier modernist fiction. Whereas early modern
romances are clean of any hint of sex, these novels vibrate with sexual energy.
Considered as texts disciplinary and productive of youth sexuality they belong to the current discourse
on youth crisis a euphemism for adult panic over youth sexuality. They share the same universe as
the Friday prayers through which religious leaders have been proposing a popularization of temporary
marriage for young people not yet ready to settle into permanent marriages; they belong to the same
discursive world as the advice columns of magazines warning and chastising the young against sexual
license. As Haeri (1992) has discussed, this discourse, instead of denying, assumes the naturalness of

teenage sexual desire, for both male and female adolescents. But it also has to cope with several
modern facts: the multiplicity of social spaces within which young people meet, socialize, and establish
relationships outside family control and supervision, the later-than-puberty marriage age, the social
stigma of temporary marriage (especially for women), and young peoples' refusal to accept their
parents' choice of a partner.
Afsaneh Najmabadi
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Bibliography
S. Haeri, Temporary marriage and the state in Iran. An Islamic discourse on female sexuality, in Social
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F. jj Sayyidjavd, Bmdd-i khumr, Tehran 1995.
M. R. M. Ishq, Kulliyt, ed. A. A. Mushr Salm, Tehran 1971.
D. Kandiyoti, Some awkward questions on women and modernity in Turkey, in L. Abu-Lughod (ed.),
Remaking women. Feminism and modernity in the Middle East, Princeton, N.J. 1998, 27087.
Sh. Miskb, Dstn-i adabiyt va sarguzasht-i ijtim, Tehran 1994.
A. Najmabadi, The Morning After. Travail of sexuality and love in modern Iran, in International
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