Saba Vasefi is an Iran­ian women’s and children’s rights activist who is now liv­ing in Aus­tralia. Her doc­u­men­tary, Do Not Bury My Heart–for which I have not been able to find much infor­ma­tion on the web – about the exe­cu­tion of minors in Iran was screened recently in the under­ground doc­u­men­tary sec­tion of the Copen­hagen Inter­na­tional Doc­u­men­tary Fes­ti­val. She’s writ­ten an arti­cle, which I found on the Tehran Bureau web­site and which was orig­i­nally pub­lished in Mianeh, about the increase in Iran of the num­ber of women accused of mur­der­ing their hus­bands. “This is,” she writes, “a sig­nif­i­cant shift in Iran­ian soci­ety, where mur­ders involv­ing spouses have in the past almost always involved men killing women, often in what is known as an ‘hon­our crime.’” More­over, these mur­ders are usu­ally, nom­i­nally, legal since “Arti­cle 630 of Iran’s Islam-based crim­i­nal code makes it legal for a man to kill both his wife and her part­ner if he finds them in the act, and it is con­sen­sual.” This bur­den of proof, she goes on to say, “is rarely met,” with most honor killings being more about “jeal­ousy, sus­pi­cion or merely a way of end­ing a marriage.”

One of the things I found most inter­est­ing about Vasefi’s arti­cle is the dif­fer­ence between what her research reveals about women who’ve been accused of mur­der­ing their hus­bands and what the avail­able research says.

In the case of wives who kill their hus­bands, the avail­able research indi­cates that two-thirds of cases are moti­vated by a desire for revenge for the hus­band being unfaithful.

The sur­vey that Moaz­zami and Ashouri con­ducted across 15 provinces of Iran showed that in 58 per­cent of cases, the women had been unable to get a divorce because their hus­bands or fam­i­lies would not agree to it, or had chil­dren and would have had no means of sup­port­ing them­selves if they had sep­a­rated from their spouses.

My own research indi­cates that many women who resort to vio­lence are them­selves vic­tims of abuse, and have been unable to find jus­tice through the legal system.

She points out that many of the women who mur­der their hus­bands fit the same pro­file: they are poor, rel­a­tively une­d­u­cated, often forced into mar­riage at an early age to men who are much older than they are, cir­cum­stances which com­bine to make much more dif­fi­cult for them to get help through the legal sys­tem or to find other ways out of their sit­u­a­tion. Mur­der is, for them, “a last act of desperation.”

Akram Mah­davi, one of the women Vasefi inter­viewed, is in Rajayi Shahr prison under a sus­pended death sen­tence for hir­ing a man to kill her hus­band, whom her father had forced her to marry – she was 20 and her hus­band was 75. Her motive? That she’d dis­cov­ered her hus­band was sex­u­ally abus­ing her daugh­ter and her attempts at secur­ing a divorce had failed. Yet it’s not that there aren’t peo­ple in Iran try­ing to call atten­tion to the plight of such women. Women’s rights activists have been call­ing on the gov­ern­ment to set up shel­ters for bat­tered women for years, but the gov­ern­ment has always refused, “cit­ing Islamic laws that state it is wrong for a woman to leave home with­out her husband’s per­mis­sion.” I con­fess that rea­son­ing leaves me almost speech­less, as it still does all these many years later when I remem­ber the cop who asked me, when I was six­teen and call­ing for help because my mother’s boyfriend had forced her into her bed­room and locked the door behind them because she’d finally asked him to leave and he didn’t want to,“Are you sure your mother’s in their against her will, son?”

I don’t want to erase the dif­fer­ences between what hap­pened to my mother and what hap­pened to Akram Mah­davi, nor do I want to triv­i­al­ize the sig­nif­i­cance of the fact that, in Iran, the rea­son­ing that makes it so dif­fi­cult for bat­tered women, or women like Mah­davi, who was try­ing to pro­tect her daugh­ter from abuse, to find jus­tice is couched in an abso­lutist reli­gious rhetoric – though it’s not as if reli­gion has not been used here in the States to jus­tify treat­ing women, not to men­tion peo­ple of color, as sec­ond class cit­i­zens – but I find right now the sim­i­lar­i­ties more com­pelling than the dif­fer­ences. In each case, the woman’s auton­omy is under­stood to be cir­cum­scribed by the author­ity of the man who pos­sesses her sex­u­ally. In Islam, the hus­band must give her per­mis­sion to leave the sphere of his author­ity (and, there­fore, of his pro­tec­tion) with­out him¹; in the case of the cop on the phone, his assump­tion was that I might have mis­taken some kind of sex­ual play, in which my mother was enjoy­ing the force her boyfriend was using to keep her in the room, for a sit­u­a­tion in which the boyfriend was unwill­ing to let my mother go out­side the sphere of his author­ity and in which he might turn – was already turn­ing – vio­lent because she did not obey him. That the author­ity is legal in the case of Islam and, for want of a bet­ter word, cul­tural in the case of my mother and her boyfriend, does not change the fact that the nature of the author­ity, a man’s right to rule his women, is the same.

1. One of the odd­est expe­ri­ences I’ve had being mar­ried to a Mus­lim woman who occa­sion­ally trav­els to Iran has been the require­ment, imposed by the Iran­ian gov­ern­ment, that I write her a let­ter giv­ing her my offi­cial per­mis­sion to travel with­out me. [↩]