An Inconvenient Wife 4 comments

By A.G. Harmon

In 1986, Soraya Manutchehri, a young Iranian mother, was buried up to her waist in dirt with her arms bound at her sides. People with whom she’d lived her entire thirty-five years—including her own father and sons—then cascaded her skull with stones. The rocks were carefully chosen, large enough to cause pain, but not large enough to kill quickly. Her death was to be slow; that was the point. And under the Sharia law of Iran, it was sanctioned; commanded.

Fereydoune Sahebjam, the French-Iranian journalist, memorialized this true story in his novel, recently made into a devastating film, The Stoning of Soraya M. Directed by Iranian Cyrus Nowrasteh, the movie picks up the day after the murder, as Sahebjam (Jim Caviezel) finds himself in the village with a broken down car. Soraya’s aunt, Zahra (Shohreh Aghdashloo), risks everything to tell him the tale.

The cause of this barbarism was a lie. Soraya’s husband, Ali (Navid Negahban), had found a fourteen year-old girl that he wanted. As a prison guard, he arranged to trade the girl’s father (a doctor subject to execution) in exchange for the child. But Ali did not want to support two wives, so he set out to rid himself of the inconvenient one.

In the film, he beats Soraya (Mozhan Marnò), spreads rumors about her frigidity, and turns his young sons against her. The corrupt mullah in the village is a sham, a former convict, and Ali knows his secret. So he blackmails the mullah into helping him, though the man takes little convincing. As he solicits Soraya in Ali’s behalf, the mullah also solicits her as a concubine for himself. Soraya will have none of this. She knows that after a divorce, Ali will leave her and her daughters to starve.

Only Zahra (Shohreh Aghdashloo), a respected woman of the community, comes to her aid. Zahra is permitted a certain scope with the townsmen—up to a point. So when the men plot to get Soraya a job—cooking for a widower and his mentally handicapped son—Zahra demands she receive a good wage in return. Soraya starts to earn money and hopes to free herself in time from her dependency.

But Ali’s lust won’t wait. He wants the fourteen year-old, so he and the mullah threaten the widower. He must join them in an accusation of adultery against Soraya. Under Sharia, two witnesses are all that is needed to indict a woman. She is assumed guilty when her husband accuses her, and must prove her innocence (a man, on the other hand, is always innocent and the woman must prove his guilt). Shocked at the charge, Soraya can do nothing as the town prepares her death.

The movie has a mesmerizing power despite the inevitable outcome. A kind of nauseous hope refuses to admit that these women are this helpless, that these people can be this ruthless. Shirley Jackson’s horror story The Lottery comes to mind, as boys gather the stones with a horrible relish. Children’s cruelty is immortal; it is even forgivable, to the extent their wills are unformed. But the adults who take up the stones enter an evil nearly unspeakable, and hardly watchable, if it were not our duty to know that these things still exist, and that we must call them what they are.

“Honor killings” of rape victims are all too common a thing—witness Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, a thirteen year-old who was stoned to death in Somalia just last year, for daring to tell the police of her violation. Female mutilation, subjugation—a girl’s school was gassed in Afghanistan in May—make the news regularly. These epic atrocities shame all who are silent about them.

“How can you do this to me?” Soraya asks the mob who surrounds her. “You act as though you don’t know me—as though we weren’t friends.” She names herself to them, recounts their relationships to each other. A man shouts back in answer that God tells them to do what they do. Only Zahra calls such a lie what it is, and even rises to God’s defense. He is bigger than their plots, and the tale she tells Sahebjam will come out in the end. She is sure of it.

But I wonder. The theater I was in was mostly empty. Some reviews of the film are brave, but I’ve also seen some cautious notices (and worse)—wary of praising the story, couching the terms as if too strong a denunciation of the events would be a sin against cultural tolerance.

No culture or religion—none—should tolerate this barbarity in its name. It is a disgrace that cannot be abided, and it is why those who fight for the dignity of human life must cry out against any concession. Brutalism is only a stone’s throw away.