RESISTANT READINGS

In a sense, the negative and positive readings discussed so far are submissive readings: they are submissive to the apparent narrative logic of the novel and to the declared authorial intention. Those hundreds of thousands of readers, mocked with designations such as

āmmah or bānū, may in fact be engaged in more “radical readings” of the novel than some literary critics. Notwithstanding their disdain, The Morning After is a highly complex text that, despite the author's declared intentions, encourages resistant readings. Though not intended by the author (as explicated in her interviews), these resistant readings are not caused by authorial oversight; rather, for the text to do the kind of moral work that the author intends it to do, the possibilities for these counter-readings have to be constructed in the text itself. In its simplest form, for the novel to work as a text of admonition for a “sinful” lustful marriage, it first has to invoke the pleasures of the lustful sinning in the reader. Unless the reader first desires that sinful pleasure, the subsequent punishing closure will not work as an

ibrat.

From its very first sentence, the novel constructs an identification between the old aunt, Mahbubah (lit., the beloved) and the young niece, Sudabah. Through this identification it constructs a textual focus of identification for young female readers. As much as the larger lesson of the novel aims to disassociate Sudabah, the young woman inside the text (and, by affiliation, young female readers outside the text), from her old aunt so that she does not commit the same error of judgment that the aunt did, this larger disassociation needs first to construct an identification with the aunt as the young, rebellious woman she once was (and that is Sudabah's present state). The first sentence of the novel is uttered by Sudabah's mother. “Over my dead body,” she tells her daughter, who is determined to marry the man of her choice. We soon learn that Mahbubah's mother uttered the exact same words when she heard that Mahbubah wanted to marry Rahim.²⁹

But perhaps more significant than the many similar textual constructions and echoes is that the old aunt, in her narration of her life story as a stubborn young woman madly and passionately in love with the wrong man, must be constructed not only as a genealogical duplicate (through the many segments in which the young Mahbubah and the current Sudabah are compared, physically and temperamentally, by the aunt, by the mother, and by Sudabah herself),³⁰ but in terms of the two central themes of the novel: the intense sensuality and sexuality of the young female character and her stubborn youthful rebelliousness.

The end of Mahbubah's story is well known to Sudabah, the listener in the text, but only hinted at and culturally presumed to be known to the first time reader outside the text.

³¹

Thus, as they unfold in the old aunt's narrative, the events already have a teleological meaning for Sudabah—a meaning that they acquire for the reader fully only toward the end of the novel. The presence of Sudabah as the knowing listener in the text presumably should consolidate for the trusting reader the teleological lesson, dāstān-i

ibrat, that seems to be the author's intention. Yet Sudabah herself is a resisting listener in the text. Her position in the text thus encourages resistant reading from the very beginning of the novel. She projects, from the start, an alternative lesson, and at the end she pronounces her pride in being like her aunt. Her pride is not founded in making a wrong choice but, rather, in simply making a choice. She is proud of her aunt's rebellion, of her passion and her pursuit of that passion, and of her survival as a divorcee—a childless, sterile, divorcee in a bigamous second marriage—to tell a tale that reads heroically enough to make Sudabah proud of her own potential heroism. Sudabah as a resisting listener in the text, inviting resistant reading of the text, allows young female readers to read the story pleasurably—and to read it rebelliously. Contrary to declared authorial intention and some critics' dismay and anger, the novel invites readings against its main plot line.

The first time we meet the aunt actually comes before Sudabah's mother calls her in to tell her life story as a lesson for her niece. She is textually recalled by Sudabah to support her stand against her mother. Mahbubah is called into the plot as a figure of solidarity rather than as one of admonition. Arguing against her mother that times have changed and parents no longer can determine the spousal choice of their offspring, Sudabah strengthens her argument by recalling that, even in the old days, there were women who demonstrated their own agency and did not accept parental oppression; they made their own lives. She then adds, “Look at dear Aunt! Isn't she in front of your eyes? Didn't she marry the man she desired? No? Didn't she?”³²

It is only then that the mother, noting the many similarities between the two female figures, decides to call on the aunt to tell her story as a lesson for the young rebel. The aunt reciprocates her niece's call for complicity. As she begins to tell her story, she interrupts her narrative, smiles at Sudabah with wet eyes, and asks: “Did you say you love him a lot?” When she hears Sudabah's positive response, she says, “God help you, dear girl, God help you.”³³ The repetition indicates that Mahbubah does not believe that her storytelling will help, that her story will be the story of admonition Sudabah's mother hopes it will be. She knows that Sudabah will not, cannot, listen to it. This foreknowledge, expressed in the repetition of the phrase “God help you,” invites Sudabah's not listening to, her not hearing, the lesson of the aunt's life. Some 400 pages later, the novel—by leaving unstated and ambiguous what lesson, after all has been said, Sudabah will take from the tale of the aunt (“she desired the night of drinking but was apprehensive about the morning after”)—leaves open in the text, and for readers outside the text, the possibility of not drawing the lesson that all critics and the author seem set to draw.³⁴

Sudabah not only invokes the aunt as a figure of resistance rather than of passion; she also pre-empts her mother's lesson of the aunt's life by drawing a different lesson from the failure of the marriage. Against her mother's rhetorical challenge, “You think she is happy?” Sudabah retorts angrily, “Yes. She is happy, and she would have been happier if my grandpa, her noble father, had not made their life poisonous, had not turned his back on her; if only he had not driven them out and away.”³⁵

Even though this is not the lesson that the larger plot (and the author) intends to construct for the aunt's life story, much of the narrative supports Sudabah's conclusion. Once Mahbubah overcomes her parents' volatile opposition to her intended marriage to Rahim, the text constructs her sense of abandonment, in the details of her humble marriage ceremony,³⁶ in her feelings of abandonment about the wedding night,³⁷ in her repeated inquiries of the nanny (who visits her once a month to bring family news and an allowance from father to ease her financial hardship) about whether her parents ask for her and whether they send greetings, and in her intense desire to have her mother next to her during labor.³⁸ Although such instances occur throughout the narrative—until Mahbubah escapes Rahim and his mother and turns to her father for help—the earliest feelings of abandonment textually and temporally predate even the earliest moments of the marriage's going wrong, which supports Sudabah's holding her grandfather's behavior rather than Mahbubah's responsible for the failure of the marriage. If only he had not turned his back on her.

Centrally important to the issue of insurmountability is that the whole tragic affair is launched by the girl's initiative. In fact, throughout the novel the reader is never quite certain whether Rahim reciprocates her love or wants her only for her wealth and social status. Against a modernist novelistic tradition in which men of the upper classes could marry women of lower classes and uplift them in multiple senses, in The Morning After the woman is from the upper classes and the initiator of the love affair. One can thus read the tragedy as one of gender reversal rather than as one of class or cultural insurmountability.

These are not the only alternative lessons the novel invites. My 90-year-old mother is of the same generation as Mahbubah in the text. She began to read the novel before I did but stopped reading half way through. (I read the novel, as Ferdowsi has astutely observed, not as a novel, as my mother was doing, but because hundreds of thousands of Iranians were reading it, and I could no longer not read it.) When I asked why she had stopped, she said, controlling her tears with great difficulty, that she did not need to read it; this was her own life story. Her marriage—one of choice and love strongly opposed by my father's mother, who refused to see the young couple until their first child was born—went wrong, she said, because of her mother-in-law's interference. She had lived it once, she said; she could not bear to read it. I then set to reading the novel in part because of her pained statement. This was not a plot line at which any of the secondary critical literature had even hinted. My mother proved to be right. The novel invites the alternative reading of holding the mother-in-law, Zivar Khanum, rather than passionate love responsible for the failure of the marriage. More than Rahim it is she who embodies, constructs, and performs class and cultural difference within the text. It is she who chooses the wrong name for the newborn son, who takes over the care of the infant. She performs female alterity; she is and does everything that Mahbubah has been taught not to be and do. She talks too loud, uses the wrong language, carries her body the wrong way, and so on. Her every moment of being constructs class and cultural alterity through a gendered embodiment.³⁹

It is she who always brings out the bad side of Rahim, who provokes him against Mahbubah, who undoes all the civilizing and humanizing work that Mahbubah does to change Rahim and make something of their marriage. The very first moment of discord and discomfort between Mahbubah and Rahim comes with her first visit to the newly married couple, her entrance into the scene of their happy life.⁴⁰ By the end, Rahim and his mother are on one side, and Mahbubah is on the other side, alone and abandoned by all. It is Zivar Khanum who becomes her jailer. Mahbubah's heroic break from her marriage as trap, from the prison house of marriage, is performed through the beating up of Zivar Khanum and physically reducing this alter-female to impotence. Mahbubah escapes triumphantly from her, and from her marriage, only after she beats Zivar Khanum, having first been beaten by Rahim.

Through these alternative textual possibilities for the failure of marriage, the novel itself encourages resistant readings. The failure of marriage can no longer be straightforwardly assumed to have resulted (as the author and all critics and supporters urge us to do) from the stubborn passionate love of a young woman for the wrong man.

By the end of the novel, the text overturns the very dichotomy between mindless passion and considered affection. At a critical moment, Mahbubah reflects on her feeling of jealousy toward Mansur's first wife, Nimtaj (who is again pregnant), and contemplates whether this jealousy indicates that she has fallen in love with Mansur, her paternal cousin and now her second husband. “[B]ut this time slowly, bit by bit…this time quietly, considered, and mature,” she turns to him and addresses him as “Rahim, dear [Rahim jan].

⁴¹

” In the ensuing argument between the angry and despondent husband and the distressed wife, Mahbubah repeats a familiar line: that what she felt for Rahim was not love but lust.⁴²

She explains that her slip may indicate that she has fallen, finally, in love with Mansur. But this is supposed to be mature love—the love that grows after marriage, slowly over time, through living together; the love that develops like good wine. But this wine gets its name from the other wine: Mansur is called Rahim. This wine does not have a morning after? The text—by mixing its wines and metaphors, its two kinds of love, and by conflating at a critical moment two male figures that had embodied opposite kinds of love and contrary types of masculinity⁴³

—scripts the impossibility of separating love and lust and opens a possible way out of the dilemma that Sudabah is now facing. Thus, it works against its own

ibrat by creating the space for alternative readings.

I am not suggesting that any of these alternative reading possibilities are necessarily feminist or progressive. Displacing blame for a failed marriage from passionate love for an unkufū man to his mother or to the girl's father are not particularly enlightened plot lines. But such displacements lift the burden of guilt and blame from passionate love itself, thus opening space for Sudabah and for young (female) readers to imagine their own happy endings for passionate love.

Other details of the novel work similarly. Some of the miseries of Mahbubah's life, meant to underline the main thrust of the novel—that is, a failed marriage—resist being read as failure of the female character. Mahbubah and Rahim's son's death, for instance—at one level, testimony to the unmixibility of the two bloods—rescues Mahbubah from becoming a self-sacrificing mother sticking it out in a bad marriage.⁴⁴

His death opens the possibility of giving up on that marriage.

The final sterility of Mahbubah is not only a punishment for an immediate “criminal act,” abortion, or punishment for her “sin” of class and cultural crossings and falling in love with a mere carpenter. It stands for the sterility of passionate love in general. It is a threatening warning to a generation of young people, like Sudabah in the novel, who refuse to marry their parents' choice. Yet her sterility also forecloses the possibility that she will turn into a mother even in a second marriage. As Ferdowsi has observed, we come to know Mahbubah as an aunt, but not as a mother.⁴⁵

The Morning After is a novel driven by a woman's heterosexual passion in which the woman does not die at childbirth and her life's meaning is not motherhood and sacrifice.⁴⁶

She survives as a sterile woman. She is wanted in a new marriage, even though she is known to be sterile. She, Mahbubah, the beloved, becomes a complementary wife to an almost unwanted yet fertile woman, Nimtaj, the half-crowned. This is of course a highly charged scenario, but from the novel's refusal to either kill Mahbubah or turn her into a despised spinster, Sudabah and young female readers can take solace in possibilities of sexuality and passion. Despite the many repetitions of “What a terrible mistake I'd made!”⁴⁷ Mahbubah does not emerge as a miserable, failed figure. Perhaps the number of times this phrase is repeated speaks to the fact that the text needs to belabor a message that is resisted by itself. Mahbubah comes through as a rebellious woman who stands her ground, gets away with it, and survives. It is a celebration of survival against all odds. The ending moment of pride confirms this possibility. But even before the end, against a novelistic tradition of sinful women dying, this “sinful” woman survives. She survives her expulsion from her parents' home and kin support; she survives her husband's beatings, her mother-in-law's scheming, her child's death, her abortion, her sterility, her divorce, her co-wife, and her second husband. She survives to tell her life story as she herself recalls Shahrzad as a figure of survival and storytelling.⁴⁸ In fact, by not ending happily ever after in a good marriage, the novel opens the possibility of imagining not-motherhood and not-wifehood for female readers. Mahbubah's failed marriage can thus be read as marriage as failure, though here the text explicitly refuses to go in the direction in which many modern feminists of that generation went: out of divorce and marriage refusal into a life of public service. Mahbubah contemplates the modernist alternative of going to Namus—a well-respected school for girls that educated many of the first generation of female school teachers—and becoming a teacher.⁴⁹ At that moment, however, Mansur, her paternal cousin, moves into her vista; the idea of going to school and becoming a teacher is never revisited, and eventually she concludes, “My only salvation…is a second marriage.”⁵⁰

Mahbubah seeks peace and contentment in a bigamous marriage. Shahla Lahiji is outraged, but Ferdowsi is strangely silent on this. Ferdowsi ends his essay with Mahbubah's return to the paternal fold, as if agreeing with her father that “now you have become my own girl/daughter again.”⁵¹

Yet the novel continues for sixty more pages in which it rejects some options (for Mahbubah, such as continuing her education and becoming a teacher) and takes others—that is, the second marriage. None of this further development of the novel is discussed by Ferdowsi. His silence speaks to the fact that his readings of the pleasures of the text and the body do not take into account the gender of modernity and the politics of feminism in Iran. The experience of modernity for women has not been identical to that of and for men. The feminist disavowal of the novel in part speaks to these gendered structures and experiences. Ferdowsi's conclusions about the morning after of our civil society—or, rather, in his view current political experiments that have claimed the name of civil society—as the cold morning after of our hot night of drinking the wine of revolution (a point to which I will return) is precisely what justifiably worries many feminists.

Ferdowsi's reading of the closure as simply a return to the fold of a generous understanding father, in which he finds grounds for national solace, is objectionable to Lahiji for good reason. For a feminist reader, there is no solace in that closure. Feminists dislike and fear the novel not only because novels are texts of pleasure but also because through that very pleasure they do creative labor. In particular, novels constitute particular notions of women's subjectivity not only through the projection of heroines as female types but also through the location of female readers via the text and critics. A female public is created through these positionings. While Ferdowsi has argued persuasively for considering the text as a site of sympathy and solidarity where readers construct the meaning of the text, he ignores the ways in which the gendered politics of modernity make that site a highly fractured one. The pleasures (and pains) of the text are not universal, ungendered, and atemporal. They have historical, cultural, and political implications that raise questions about what constitutes the pleasures of reading for different female readers, for different class-affiliated readers, and for women's choices. Entering a bigamous marriage or turning to teaching and other professions when your marriage fails is just one such modern legacy. For feminists with a memory of women such as Sadiqah Dawlatabadi, who divorced her way out of an unhappy marriage and devoted the next forty years of her life to women's education, and for feminists with strong socialist leanings (a strong current because of the historical affiliation and origin of many feminists in leftist currents of 1970s and 1980s),⁵²

sympathy and solidarity with Mahbubah is disrupted through the narrative of the novel itself because that sympathy is conflated with solidarity with her aristocratic noble markings against a working-class husband.⁵³ Nor can they sympathize with Rahim, who stands not only for a (hetero-) sexual dynamo, as Ferdowsi has aptly called him, but also for an abusive husband. Ferdowsi's dismissive comment about feminism and his jab against “political correctness” notwithstanding, sympathy with Mahbubah as a young passionate woman and a rebel for many feminists is disrupted by these textual moves. It is further disrupted by the long years of Mahbubah's submission in a battering marriage.⁵⁴

THE SO-CALLED YOUTH CRISIS

If The Morning After allows and even incites many resistant readings, and alternative lessons about the failure of the marriage are at the core of its story, why is the dominant reading of the novel, by dismissers and defenders alike, as a tale of caution, if not punishment, for passionate love? As discussed, the novel was written and has been received by many critics as a “lesson” for youth against illusory infatuations. Within the text, the lesson is given in the form of the tragic life of an aunt narrated for the benefit of a niece who is about to make the same mistake by choosing an unsuitable romantic marriage against the advice of her wise parents. In the narration, the aunt is finally fulfilling her father's curse: when he married her off to Rahim, he wished her to become a lesson (

ibrat) for others.

⁵⁵

But what is the lesson at issue? As a text of admonition and salvation, the novel seeks to be a text of control—not control of love but of youthful sexuality. The prevalence of reading the novel as a text of control can be understood if we locate the novel within another contemporary “reading site.” The discussion of which norms of sexuality are considered morally acceptable circulates outside this novel in such diverse locations as Friday prayers, magazine advice columns, interviews with prominent religious leaders, and numerous essays and books.

It is not only the frame story—the argument between a mother and a daughter over the daughter's choice of spouse—that makes the novel temporally relevant and connected to its presumed young female readers. The driving force of the novel—sexual desire and passion of Mahbubah for Rahim—is a centrally contemporary issue, at least if one believes the advice columns, press coverage (including crime stories, such as the story of the young couple who killed their family members so they could get married), and vast social circulation of gossip and tale-telling. This is another way in which The Morning After is different from earlier modernist fiction. Whereas early modern romances are clear of any hint of sex, even implicitly, The Morning After vibrates with sexual energy. For the novel to be able to do its disciplinary work of controlling sexuality, it has to be productive of particular notions of that sexuality. This double work is most evident in the passages where pleasure (lizzat) and sin (gunāh) are simultaneously called on, even though the sexuality in the novel is heterosexuality within marriage.⁵⁶

By linking pleasure and sin, the novel evokes another modern writer of female sexuality: the famous poet Furugh Farrukhzad and, in particular, her celebrated poem, “I Sinned, a Sin Full of Pleasure.”⁵⁷ It can thus be read erotically even as and because it aims to control Eros.

Considered as a text disciplinary (and productive) of youth sexuality, The Morning After belongs to the current discourse on “youth crisis” in Iran—a barely disguised euphemism for adults' panic over youth sexuality. It shares the same universe as the Friday prayers and other sermons in which the question of youth sexuality has occupied an important place and through which religious leaders have been proposing a popularization of temporary marriage for young people not yet ready to settle into permanent marriages.⁵⁸

It belongs to the same discursive world as the magazine advice columns that warn and chastise the young about sexual license. If one believes these columns to be a true reflection of the real sexual life of Iranian adolescents, a not-so-underground sexual revolution is going on. At the same time, whatever is perceived to be going on among the youth is causing panic among the adults who write these columns. A survey of “Your Advisor” pages of the journal Payam-i zan (Woman's Message), a monthly published in Qum for women by the Islamic Propagation Bureau of Qum Theological Seminary, would make one believe that the young women and men who presumably write the letters that are partially printed and lengthily answered in these pages are engaged in the most forbidden sexual practices, including same-sex practices among both women and men, masturbation, and adulterous relations with married and unmarried partners.⁵⁹ One of the most common scenarios is a young woman in love (contemplating, or already engaged in, sexual involvement with a man) seeking advice. The advice offered is remarkably uniform and echoes some of the central lessons from The Morning After: keep to the rules of “looking” (as Mahbubah would say, “What a heavy punishment for the eye that saw and the heart that desired”⁶⁰); stay away from sexual involvement in the wake of youthful romantic fantasies; turn to your parents for advice in choosing a life partner; follow the rules of gender segregation between men and women who are legally entitled to marry; be careful where your intense same-sex friendships may be heading; and put your energy into studying, religious practices, and sports if your time for a permanent marriage has not yet come. In several instances, temporary marriage has been discussed at length as the “Islamic progressive alternative” to the “West's corrupt practices” of sexual relations outside marriage. Yet in at least one case, a woman who had used temporary marriage to have an affair with a married man was severely chastised for having abused the institution.⁶¹ As Shahla Haeri has discussed at some length, instead of denying it this discourse assumes the “naturalness” of teenage sexual desire for both male and female adolescents.⁶² 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;⁶³ the social stigma of temporary marriage (especially for women); young people seeking their own solutions to “the youth crisis”; and young people's refusal to accept their parents' choice of a partner. As articulated by “the adviser” from Payam-i zan in response to a compilation of letters from “young friends,” “You are at an age that is filled with delicate feelings…. Adolescence is the period in which dormant sexual instincts and feelings of a person are awakened.” The adviser warns these young people against the illusion that, if only they could satisfy their sexual needs, all their other needs would be satisfied. She warns them against deluding themselves into believing that they can control the terms of their friendships and avoid falling into a state of sin. She advises them against opposing their parents and transgressing their culture's norms of how to choose a partner for marriage.⁶⁴ The repetition of very similar scenarios in the letters printed in this advice column and the parallel repetition of the same set of advice offered in response, in issue after issue, makes one wonder whether the advice column is really aimed at young women and men, the presumed authors of these letters, or whether these are stories of warnings to be read by panicked parents at their wit's end.⁶⁵

One of the highest policy-making institutions of the state also has been preoccupied with male–female socialization as a matter of national policy. The Council for Cultural Revolution has been discussing a new initiative, proposed by the Social and Cultural Council on Women, entitled the Project to Spread Chastity (Ṭarḥ-i tawsi

ah-

i

ifāf). Its aim is to introduce “discipline in sexual ethics.”

⁶⁶

ALLEGORICAL READINGS

The richness of The Morning After invites not only resistant and alternative readings, but also allegorical ones. One such attempt is made in the essay by Ferdowsi. His allegorical reading turns the central theme of passionate love and incommensurability into a different tale—a story about the passionate love of a generation of modern Iranians for combining their modernist desires with Islamism. The 1979 revolution, in this reading, stands for the impossible, sinful marriage that is destined to turn catastrophic. As Mahbubah said of her passion, “If paper and cloth could be grafted together, the noble blood of my father could have mixed with the vulgar blood of Rahim the carpenter. Even the thought of it was a sin; it was madness,” Ferdowsi considers the revolution as a sinful, mad attempt to bring together the two insurmountably different cultural worlds of tradition (conflated by him with Islam) and modernity that have been battling each other in Iran for more than a century. For Ferdowsi, The Morning After finally marks the acceptance of this cultural duality and the recognition of the futility of attempts to overcome it through a utopian project of national unity. The 1979 Islamic Revolution was the apotheosis of this historic effort on the part of Iranian intellectuals. Mahbubah's mad love for Rahim stands for this madness. In a way similar to Mahbubah's grand illusion that her love for Rahim could overcome the cultural divide between them, in Ferdowsi's narrative Iranians sought to overcome the divide between Islam and modernity. For Ferdowsi, the novel marks “the morning after” of this madness; he is grateful that, like Mahbubah's father, Father Iran is generous and kind enough to receive his children back to his protective fold.

Connected to this allegorical reading is Ferdowsi's contention that Islam and politics have been the two repressors of sexuality in Iran. Discussing politics, religion, and sexuality as three victims of censorship in modern Iran, he continues by saying that “this is not quite an accurate statement, there is a kind of close affinity between the first two that does not exist between sexuality and the other two. But more importantly, sexuality is not on the same side of the equation of oppression that politics and religion reside. In fact, sexuality is the main victim of the other two. The great inquisitors of our civilization are these two: politics and religion, and every repression, especially repression of sexuality, in the end takes place on the order of these two.”⁶⁷

But as I argued in the previous section, sexuality, far from being liberatory outside a repressive Islam, is centrally produced within it—as is the case with any other disciplinary system.

Furthermore, Ferdowsi's allegorical reading is gender-oblivious. To begin with, it changes Iran, a mother (or a female beloved) in modernist rhetoric, to a father without pondering the meaning of this transgendering. This is not simply a move to coincide with the father figure in the text. The recuperating hopes of the final page of his essay are dependent on a paternal figure. The maternal figure of his “family romance” has already been occupied by “a wounded womb” that has given birth to “us.” The “we” of these pages, a presumed national “we” of Iran, remains the all-male national brotherhood of modernity. The reading ignores that women's relation to modernity—with its ambivalence and hazards—was distinct from that of the male citizens and intellectuals who are the implicit subject of Ferdowsi's concluding “we.”

If one is to read the novel as political allegory, it seems to me it would be more persuasive to move from the allegory set up within the novel itself. Early in the novel, the narrator says, “Outside the house Iran had thrown herself into the arms of Reza Khan [later Reza Shah Pahlavi], and I desired an apprentice carpenter. Iran had succeeded much faster than I. Much faster and much easier.”⁶⁸

The equivalence established between the female Iran and the narrator is mirrored in the parallels established between “the apprentice carpenter” and Reza Khan of a similarly non-elite class background. The two noble females threw themselves mindlessly and madly into the arms of the two lowly but strong males. In many places, Mahbubah reinforces this imagery by narrating the physical attributes of Rahim's masculine body, in particular his supporting arms. One can read the tragic end of one love for the tragic end of the other embrace, Mahbubah's return to “old paternal wisdom” then becomes an allegory for Iran's turn to an Islamic Republic, her distressful yet content acceptance of a bigamous marriage standing in for cohabitation of religion and politics.⁶⁹

If we read Mahbubah's passion as a passion for love, for falling madly in love, rather than for Rahim, we can then read the novel allegorically as a narrative of Iran's passion for falling madly in love with modernity. In this reading, Rahim becomes an incidental man. Iran first threw herself into a revolution—the Constitutional Revolution (1906–1909)—that did not quite deliver. Next she threw herself into the arms of Reza Shah—he, too, becomes an incidental man. Mahbubah's failed marriage and sterility come to stand for Pahlavi's modernity. If the next throw is into the embrace of the Islamic Revolution, then we can reread that revolution as part of Iran's continuous experiments of mad love for modernity, a reading that Ferdowsi's irreconcilability of Islam and modernity would reject. For Ferdowsi, the current situation in Iran is the aftermath of a sterile experiment breaking into the cold sweat of the morning after, the cold civil society. In this alternative allegorical reading, the civil society for which Iranians are currently struggling is what Sudabah considers and contemplates at the end of the novel: is it possible to go after her mad love without the travails of her aunt? Is there a way out of the dichotomy of

aql and

ishq? The novel's refusal to have Sudabah make a decision rejects this as a necessary duality to be played and replayed with no hopeful resolution. Instead of seeing the current situation in Iran as the cold morning after a night of drinking, it provides the possibility of seeing the current situation as an indeterminate opening for leaving behind the historical duality between modernity and Islam.