When Namus Controls the Marriage: Resisting Qeyrat and Patriarchal Authority in Iranian Relationships

Tuesday, September, 23, 2025. This is for the Mango farmer.

The Third, Fourth, and Fifth Guests in the Room

Couples therapy is never just two people in conversation.

With Iranian couples, you quickly discover the chairs are already full: qeyrat (masculine honor), namus (family honor tied to women’s bodies), centuries of law, and the voice of a mother-in-law who somehow materializes even across time zones.

They don’t speak directly, but they dictate the script.

What Namus Really Means

Translated blandly, namus means “honor.” In lived experience, it is a sort of social ledger, and women are both the asset and the liability.

A daughter’s virginity, a wife’s obedience, a widow’s modesty—each is treated as family currency.

Qeyrat is the enforcer.

It is the masculine duty to guard this imagined treasure. A husband who allows too much independence is not only a “weak man”; he has failed the lineage.

Call-out box:
Qeyrat Culture = Masculine duty to defend namus.
Namus = Family honor tied to women’s sexuality.
Together, they structure patriarchal authority in Iranian marriages.

Authority, Staged Nightly

Masculinity here is less identity than performance.

Historian Sivan Balslev shows how, in the Qajar and Pahlavi eras, men were cast as guardians of both family and nation. A wife’s chastity became a metaphor for national sovereignty.

And the audience?

Always present. Mothers-in-law phoning from Tehran, cousins watching on WhatsApp, neighbors whispering. Even in Los Angeles or Toronto, qeyrat culture books a front-row seat. A wife’s obedience is applause; her independence, a heckle.

Control, Presented as Care

In session, control rarely introduces itself as such. It shows up dressed in the robes of “protection.”

A husband forbids travel or education, but insists it is safety, not authority.

As Ziba Mir-Hosseini has pointed out, this turns domination into devotion. Patriarchy has always had a talent for rebranding.

The Cost Carried by Women

The toll is heavy. Research connects spousal control with depression, anxiety, and marital dissatisfaction among Iranian women. Living where choices are monitored corrodes intimacy at its core.

And yet women resist.

They resist in ways that look ordinary: saving a little grocery money for English classes, cultivating friendships just beyond reach, re-interpreting scripture to find cracks in the wall. Quiet disobedience is not trivial. It is survival disguised as daily life.

Men Without Namus

In 2020, after the honor killing of 14-year-old Romina Ashrafi, Iranian social media lit up with something new. Men began to reject namus publicly.

Zahra Darvishpour’s research documents hashtags like #ManWithoutNamus and #IOwnNoNamus. These men described namus as “a concept of violence, misery, shame, humiliation and bloodshed.” Rejecting it was not emasculation but liberation.

“These are not minor gestures. They are cultural earthquakes in miniature.”

Beyond “Honour”: Whose Voice Counts?

Scholar H. Çetinkaya reframes namus not just as a code of honor but as an epistemic system—a formal way of deciding whose voice is credible. In practice, this means a wife’s account of her own safety or autonomy can be dismissed before she finishes speaking.

“To resist namûs is to reclaim the right to be believed.”

On Screen: Namus in Iranian Cinema

Iranian cinema has long rehearsed these dynamics.

In Rakhshan Banietemad’s Tales, masculinity is fragile yet coercive, with namus functioning like a silent character in every marriage. Nina Khamsy’s analysis shows how these films reveal women as both possessions and rebels.

Film doesn’t just reflect culture; it tutors it. Audiences learn the script and the penalties of defiance. Perhaps cinema therapy will have an emerging role.

Qeyrat Abroad: Patriarchy in the Diaspora

Even abroad, qeyrat doesn’t retire—it relocates. In-laws monitor from across oceans, sons are groomed for authority, daughters for deference.

I’ve worked with couples in Los Angeles where wives savor new freedoms—careers, education, autonomy—while husbands feel as though they are drowning.

This is cultural gridlock: women breathing more freely, men gasping in thinner air.

What Therapists Can Do

We cannot rewrite Iran’s family code. But we can:

• Name the ghosts. Acknowledge namus and qeyrat as the third (or fifth) voice in the room.

• Validate resistance. Hidden language lessons are not betrayal; they are resilience.

• Offer new masculinities. Leadership as care, not surveillance.

• Correct epistemic injustice. Ask: whose voice is dismissed here?

• Bridge atmospheres. Help couples navigate two worlds—freedom and fear.

Closing Thoughts

In many Iranian marriages, namus and qeyrat hang in the air like smoke—so pervasive that couples forget they are breathing it. They dictate the permissions, as well as the silences, and ongoing resentments.

But coherence is not permanence.

I’ve seen cracks: a wife secretly studying, a husband finally asking what respect feels like, a young man calling himself “without namus.”

Patriarchal authority in Iranian marriages may be unusually coherent—legally sanctioned, cleric-blessed, mother-in-law approved—but therapy reveals its fractures.

But in the Iranian diaspora, change begins in quiet rooms, with couples willing to speak against the script, and therapists brave enough to be introduced to the ghosts in all of the extra chairs.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Balslev, S. (2019). Iranian masculinities: Gender and sexuality in late Qajar and early Pahlavi Iran. Cambridge University Press.

Çetinkaya, H. (2025). Re-theorising namûs beyond ‘honour’: self-making, feminist onto-epistemologies and epistemic justice. Journal of Gender Studies.

Darvishpour, Z. (2021). New alternative masculinities among Iranian young men: A case study of a campaign on social media. Master’s thesis, Linköping University.

Khamsy, N. (2021). Masculinities in Banietemad’s Tales: Reshuffling gender dynamics under socio-economic pressures. Edinburgh University Press.

Mir-Hosseini, Z. (2010). Marriage on trial: Islamic family law in Iran and Morocco. I.B. Tauris.

Paidar, P. (1995). Women and the political process in twentieth-century Iran. Cambridge University Press.

Rashidi, A., & Khosravi, Z. (2019). Spousal control and women’s mental health in Iran: A sociological analysis. Iranian Journal of Psychiatry, 14(1), 24–33.