A Match Made in Heaven: Love and Piety in Iranian Mate-Selection

• In Event: 078 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 07. Traditions, Ideologies, and Modernity

Abstract

Romantic love, especially as a basis of marriage, has been the subject of much attention and debate in recent academic and non-academic discussions. It has been argued that in the Muslim world and especially in Iran, limitations imposed by religion and tradition are impediments to marriages being based on love. Using Latent Class Analysis, we uncover classes of people who have different constellations of preferences for selecting their spouse. This analysis reveals that love can be simultaneously associated with other values, which prima facie might appear contradictory. Although we find a commonly expected notion of secular and liberal love, we also find a class of Iranians that have a more religious orientation towards love. We take the formation of these classes as structural manifestations of underlying meanings of love. We take a macro-structural as well as a cultural phenomenological approach to studying love in Iran, in order to both shed light on the substantive issue of love marriages in Iran and to call attention to the importance of considering the ontological bases of cultural phenomena. Our substantive findings show that, in the main, love has conquered Iranian marriages. We also find that traditionalism instead of religiosity is the main impediment to love becoming an important basis for marriage. Through considering the more implicit cultural influence of Sufism that closely conjoins love and God, we show how love in this context has a basis in religion, and piety a basis in love.

Authors

• Ramina Sotoudeh, Princeton

• Roger Friedland, Departments of Sociology and Religious Studies

• Janet Afary, UCLA