Dowry Makes Man Upset

The rising price of love in Iran

It drives poor families into the clutches of organ harvesters and loan sharks, compels betrothed couples to spend years in pre-marital purgatory, and pushes a nation known for strong family values to the brink of a population crisis. Still, for some Iranians, losing a kidney or signing off on a Faustian bank loan is a lesser evil than the dishonor, or aberoorizi, of failing to provide an acceptable dowry for their daughters.
As in other staunchly patronymic societies, Iran is home to a deeply entrenched system of dowries, typically negotiated by grooms' families and often included in pre-marital contracts. While the results are nowhere near as violent as in India, where some 6000 women are killed each year by husbands who use physical means to extort a larger dowry from the bride's family, the rise of consumerist popular culture in Iran has raised dowry expectations to unrealistic extremes.

The trend of lavishing their daughters with over-the-top dowries, or jahaziyeh, flies in the face of current economic trends, which have seen the purchasing power or urban families fall 23.8% in the past year. Due to high import tariffs and fluctuating supply, Iranians pay exponentially more for furniture and foreign-made household appliances than their western counterparts. Rich, poor, or middle-class, families spare no expense to outfit their daughters with elaborate sets of kitchen gadgets, glitzy home decor and luxury chinaware. At present, a typical jahaziyeh runs a family anywhere between 400 million and one billion rials (about $16,000 to $40,000 at the official rate of exchange), in an economy where the average monthly wage is $500. The wealthier or more competitive families become, the greater the expense; some jahaziyeh lists include around 280 items and cost over five billion rials.

Much of this finery sits unused in the back of aging cabinets, but that is hardly the point. A newlywed daughter’s robust jahaziyeh is considered a source of familial pride and parental love. Mothers and fathers are thus often prepared to go to the extremes to make with the goods – even sell their own body parts, as one man described to an Iranian newspaper: "My wife and I have both been working ourselves to death for a year, and we still haven’t saved up even a third of what we’ll need. No one lets you buy home goods on a payment plan anymore. I’m seriously this close to selling one of my kidneys to see that my other two daughters get a jahaziyeh too."

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Everyone is born equally capable but lacks equal opportunity. Pierre Omidyar