Ted Halstead - The Saudi-Iranian War

This was one time, though, that conversation would have served Neda well. She found out after waiting for a year to propose a vacation to Europe that he had no interest in tourist travel outside Iran. As Kazem made clear the first time she brought it up, all his travel outside Iran had been for study or work, with the sole exception of their honeymoon. When Neda suggested a few extra days after an academic conference she wanted to attend in London, the discussion became particularly unpleasant.

It turned out that once Kazem had been identified as the head of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, he had become unwelcome at any related academic event. Even after the Americans walked away from the JCPOA, Kazem was still off every invitation list. Neda had never seen Kazem bitter before. It was not a good look.

So, her brilliant plan had backfired completely. Neda was married to a US citizen who could travel to America or Europe anytime he wanted to go.

Which turned out to be never.

What could she do now?

Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Vahid Turani was a patient man. He had learned patience the hard way, waiting over thirty years for his predecessor as Iran’s Supreme Leader to finally meet his maker. The day was finally about to come, though, and once the Supreme Leader’s coma released him to Paradise then Vahid would finally be able to right the many mistakes made by the last Supreme Leader as well as Iran’s elected leadership.

Vahid had recognized long ago that Iran’s perpetual isolation, far from being seen as negative by its leaders, was actually desired for several reasons.

International sanctions were used to justify government ownership of the bulk of Iranian industry and much of its service sector. Oil and gas production accounted for most of Iran’s export earnings, and was entirely government controlled. Iran Electronics Industries was as well, producing everything from semiconductors to satellites. With over a hundred subsidiaries, the government’s Industrial Development & Renovation Organization of Iran was involved in everything from auto manufacturing to health care. The Iran Insurance Company used government backing to account for over half of the policies issued in Iran.

As well as guaranteed lifetime government salaries, isolation also justified continued repression, including suppression of legitimate complaints about the miserable living conditions for Iranians not among the lucky few with government jobs. After all, surrounded by enemies how could the authorities tolerate disorder?

Most important of all, Iran’s isolation justified its continued control by an unelected theocracy. Obviously, an Iran under continuous threat from the West could hardly afford to experiment with untried forms of government-such as genuine democracy.

Vahid was well aware of the irony of his situation. On the one hand, he would need every bit of the considerable power of the position of Supreme Leader to push through significant change. On the other, the changes he planned would end up weakening his position as Supreme Leader — and maybe even ending the clergy’s control of the government.

Vahid shrugged. He had always known he would have to move carefully to have any chance of success. Now he had to hope that the relationships he had carefully built over the previous decades he had served in the Assembly of Experts would supply him with the information he needed to make his plans reality.

The report he was reading on “temporary marriages” made Vahid’s upper lip curl, and was a perfect example of the aberrations he planned to remove from Iranian society. Literally translated as ‘pleasure marriage’ (nikah mut’aa), a temporary marriage typically lasted for three to six months. The woman usually received a sum of money at the start of the marriage, which — incredibly — was recorded as valid by any mullah in Iran following a ceremony at a mosque.

So, Vahid thought, the man could make use of the woman and then discard her without consequence. Of course, no respectable man would ever consider her subsequently for marriage, since she would no longer be a virgin. It did not even occur to Vahid that no Iranian man would ever be held to this standard.

However, Vahid did frown impatiently when the report described the basis for permitting such marriages in Iran, when they were forbidden in most other Muslim countries. Oral tradition. Given credence in Shiite tradition and generally condemned by Sunni clerics, statements attributed to the Prophet Mohammed but nowhere to be found in the Koran were in Vahid’s view one of the primary sources of many of Iran’s current problems.

Now, if he could just figure out a way to make the case that this and other traditions needed to be ended without being branded as a Sunni sympathizer as soon as he became Supreme Leader.

Neda Rhahbar had never given up on her dream to leave Iran. Her younger sister Azar had married right out of high school, and done it to fulfill her dream of escaping her parents’ house. Azar’s husband had a government job as an inspector that required him to travel around Iran frequently, which she knew before agreeing to the marriage arranged by her mother.

Azar never went with him on these trips.

Azar was also determined to avoid being tied down by children, and was helped by two factors. The first was that her husband was not particularly interested in having children. The second was that when Azar married, birth control was free and endorsed by both the government and the religious authorities. This was due to a realization that Iran’s exploding population was far outstripping the government’s ability to provide it with employment and services. So, without telling her husband, Azar had a tubal ligation.

Until Neda married herself, she hesitated about following suit because she thought a potential foreign spouse might balk at a marrying a woman unable to have children. Once she married Kazem, though, those concerns disappeared. Neda had the procedure just in time, before yet another policy change from the government and the religious authorities. They had decided that, even though job prospects for Iranians were still poor, they wanted a rapidly growing population after all.

Neda shook her head in disgust as she remembered a billboard that had appeared all over Iran to mark the policy change. On one side was a family with two parents and two children, looking sad and lonely. On the other was a family bursting with children, who along with the parents were all happy and smiling.

This was one area where Kazem’s obsession with his job worked to Neda’s advantage. Kazem had never discussed children with her, and Neda guessed correctly that he saw them as a distraction, when he thought of children at all.

Though her mother was disappointed, she did no more than make a few comments about Neda having “waited too long” to get married.

This left Neda and Azar free to use each other as alibis when they wanted to leave the house. Neither did anything that would have seemed out of the ordinary for a married woman in any Western country, and sometimes they actually did do things like shopping together. Sometimes Azar invited friends to her home, many of them women from other countries, and Neda came as well to learn about the world outside Iran. But the fact that they had to lie to even go alone to a cafe grated on both of them.

Azar had joined the thousands of Iranian women who had protested the laws requiring head coverings by walking down the street without one, but was one of the lucky few who avoided arrest. After the government crackdown intensified, Azar put her scarf back on, but picked a brightly colored one that served to symbolize her disdain for the practice. Neda sympathized with the protesters, but could not imagine spending even a minute inside an Iranian jail. Besides, she wanted far more than to leave home without a scarf, and one way or another was determined to find the freedom she had been seeking for years.