An Irishman's Diary

We've had "an Irish solution to an Irish problem" but it pales against the much more audacious Iranian solution to a perennial problem. Allow me to introduce the notion of "temporary marriage". Try it. You'll like it. And as many times as you like. You and your partner feel like spending an hour/day/days/week/ weeks/month/months/year/ years together but without that final binding commitment? Hey presto! It can be done. But only in Iran.

And indeed it is not entirely approved of there in "good" society either. It is not terribly popular though perfectly legal. It is also turning out to be a practical solution in a country which is so young and where jobs are scarce. About 65 per cent of the population is under 25 and unemployment is between 13 and 16 per cent, (according to separate sets of official figures).

Housing crisis

Many young people cannot afford to marry. With the soaring price of property here it just might turn out to be the ideal "temporary little arrangement" for couples in this country too.

Housing has been a problem in Iran as well. There's a joke about former President Rafsanjani (there are many) who one day overheard a young couple say to each other on the street: "Your place or mine?" "And they say we have a housing crisis!" Rafsanjani said. The same man, when president of Iran, said in 1990 that sexual desire was a God-given trait. But he advised people not to be "promiscuous like the Westerners". Instead they should avail of the (also) God-given solution of temporary marriage, he said.

A couple wishing to do so, go to a Muslim cleric in a registry office and specify whether they want to be married "for as short a time as a few minutes or as long as 99 years" as one account put it. However if the woman is a virgin she must first get her father's approval. And it is done. And, if for a short time, it can be renewed again and again.

Temporary marriage is believed to have been practised in Mohammed's time. He is said to have recommended it to friends and to soldiers. It was banned by Sunni Muslims, but most Iranians are Shi'ite Muslims and can continue to practise it.

In the past it was most frequently used by pilgrims to Shi'ite holy cities such as Mashhad and Ghom (in Iran). The enlightened view was that pilgrims had sexual needs and temporary marriage was a legal way to satisfy them.

In contemporary Iran there is further encouragement. Illicit sex is frowned upon, to put it mildly, and severely punished. Unmarried couples who have sex, even date or hold hands, can be arrested, fined, or flogged. This however has relaxed in recent years, though 250 young Iranians were arrested for attending a mixed sex New Year's Eve party in Tehran on December 31st last. Floggings followed.

Detained

One Iranian explained how in the mid-1990s he was walking down a Tehran street with his sister one day when they was picked up by the police. Both were detained until the police succeeded in contacting their mother. She arrived and identified them. They were released. He was 32 at the time.

Some months later the same man and his then fiancee, now wife, were driving to a holiday resort in the north of the country when they were stopped by police. This time both were detained for 24 hours while both sets of parents were contacted. The couple were sentenced to be lashed, but succeeded in persuading the authorities to let them pay a large fine instead.

Despite recent relaxations the incentive for couples to become temporarily married remains. One such couple are Maryam and Karim, both in their early 30s. They carried on a secret love affair for five years before their temporary marriage. "We wanted to have documents so that if we were stopped in the street we could prove we weren't doing anything illegal," she explained. Their marriage is for six months, which they have renewed again and again.

Illicit sex

Probably what is most surprising about this phenomenon is the Iranians who support it. Many still see it as little more than legalised prostitution, with the woman openly declaring that a virgin she is not, in a country which expects that every woman be a virgin when she (permanently) marries - or at least pretends to be! Indeed illicit sex is considered better, if it is kept hidden. But an odd mix of clergy, officials, and feminists, support the idea wholeheartedly, particularly in the context of Iran's age profile and its economic problems.

As Ms Shahla Sherkat, editor of the feminist publication Zanan, said recently, temporary marriage freed up relations between young men and women. It means "they can satisfy their sexual needs . . . sex will become depoliticised . . . they will use up some of the energy they are putting into street demonstrations . . . (and) finally, our society's obsession with virginity will disappear."

A right-wing former legislator Muhammad Javad Larijani said: "What's wrong with temporary marriage? You've got a variation of it in California. It's called partnership. Better to have it legal than have it done clandestinely in the streets". Which would be rather difficult, at least in crowded Tehran!

It should also be said that the children of such marriages are legitimate in the eyes of the law but generally, when the marriage ends, it is the father who has first call on caring for them. So, how about it?