Col Massoud Amir Behrani escaped from Iran just before the Ayatollah Khomeini's forces overthrew the Shah in 1979. In Andre Dubus III's novel, House of Sand and Fog, he works by day and night as a dime shop clerk and highway garbage collector to support his wife, Nadereh, and two children in a manner they can't afford, but believe they must maintain.
Massoud and Nadereh belong to an old culture whose values deny them intimacy. She overspends from the upholstered prison of her expensively decorated apartment, while he ventures alone into the public spaces of America, finding them indecipherable and ultimately treacherous. In a novel about many other themes, Dubus traces the profound tragedy of worlds where men and women don't communicate, either because they can't or because it is forbidden.
Although Iran has changed since the Shah, the tradition of gender apartheid is even more entrenched now. The Iranian authorities' apparently generous decision to permit Irish women to attend the Ireland-Iran match in Tehran may look like a flexible cultural compromise between two very different states. Delicate cail∅ns needing to be spared the indignities of excessive male language? What a spin.
If the Republic qualifies for the World Cup, the feelgood factor will touch almost everyone on the island. If not, there'll be little to sing about over the coming months. So much rides on Ireland's matches against Iran they could benefit sectors from the economy to the timing of the next general election - or indeed the victors.
Ireland must beat Iran, but Iran is winning the wider publicity battle thus far. The Iranian authorities have obviously calculated that the potential political fallout of excluding Irish women from the Tehran match is worse than the simple expedient of letting the few attend who have the money and leisure time to do so. It's only a game, after all.
But the cloak of cultural difference is a tactic countries like Iran are using increasingly to mask injustice, with the international community enabling the myth to grow by failing to challenge it.
Basic human rights affecting women are being squandered by diplomatic decisions to pretend that it is all only a game, that matters of where to work and what to wear are culturally specific details, rather than basic statements of individual rights.
Successive reports by the United Nations, Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have condemned the abuses of human rights to which Iranian women are subjected. Elsewhere, states that should know better are choosing to look the other way.
Obstructionist countries such as Pakistan, Algeria, Nicaragua, Syria and the Holy See have successfully combined forces in international assemblies to attack principles of democracy and equality similar to those now quoted liberally by self-styled Western leaders to justify their war against terrorism.
The obstructionists' ostensible rationale is to defend traditional cultures and family values, but the effect is keeping women and other so-called minorities down.
Iran's international image improved after the death of Ayatalloh Khomeini, and the more recent elections to what was perceived as President Khatami's reforming new assembly.
The status of women improved hardly at all, however, which meant that the status of other minorities, whether faith communities such as Jews or Baha'is, or people with a different sexual orientation, remains equally at rock bottom.
Within months of Khatami's election, right-wing forces who control many major institutions, including the judiciary, had succeeded in closing over 25 independent newspapers and magazines, imprisoning dissident journalists, and ensuring that traditional punishments of amputation and execution of men and women were maintained at virtually the same levels.
Women's status was not been restored even to its relatively low level under the Shah. During the Islamic revolution, many women had lost their jobs or were forced into early retirement; their rights within the public world were severely curtailed, and those to privacy disappeared almost completely.
Since 1983, they had been obliged by law to wear the chador, and allowed remove it only in their own homes. The word chador means a tent, which illustrates the transient basis of women's place in the public world. Restricting their access to public spaces and events is not a cultural matter; it's intolerable social control.
Excessive models of masculinity and femininity thrive instead. Shirin Neshat, the Iranian artist now showing at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, uses the prohibition as a metaphor of gender apartheid in her film, Turbulence.
On one screen, the actor Shoja Azari performs a traditional love song to an all-male audience; a second screen shows the singer/composer Sussan Deyhim standing on stage in an empty auditorium.
When Deyhim's voice begins to sound as Azari finishes his song, singing outside traditions in a melody blended between a form of sean-n≤s and jazz improvisation, the men on the opposite screen look on in stunned surprise.
Sex segregation may not affect the quality of Iranian football, but it ought to affect the quality of Ireland's response. This time, it really is much more than a game.
mruane@irish-times.ie