Terms of Endurance

About the Book

Terms of Endurance is an honest memoir, which illuminates Iranian and Islamic traditions through heartwarming, suspenseful, and at times painful stories. The author has collected episodes from his life, from a very tender age through adolescence and beyond.

The book’s theme is the author´s search for identity in a deeply rooted religious family. Terms of Endurance explores the life of the author’s father, a renowned Ayatollah who practiced polygamy, and his mother´s fortitude while living in poverty and raising eight children.

His first realization of who he was comes at the age of four when he finds himself in a butcher´s barn on a hot summer night with his mother and six brothers and a sister in the company of a herd of sheep to be slaughtered at dawn the next day. In his absence, his father´s second wife had kicked them out of the house. His mother took refuge with her children in the neighboring butcher’s barn.

Disheartening stories about the fate of the author’s sisters before and after their marriages reveal the discrimination against women both in the home and in the prevailing traditional society at large.

He fails the fifth grade twice because of poor math and composition and decides to discontinue schooling after barely finishing sixth grade. At fourteen he works at a low-paid manual craft to save money to fund his secret plan to run away from home to a distant oil-production province, hoping to redeem himself. The moving story of hunger, defeat, and disappointment and the agony of a heartbroken mother who had lost her young son take the reader on an emotional trip through the depths of despair.

When the author discovers that poor vision is the cause of his failure, he resumes his education and takes a three-day national exam covering 7th, 8th, and 9th grades. As the nation´s awareness of the seeds of modern education flourished, he enters the university and witnesses the rise of both communism and the non-communist national uprising against the Shah, which forced the monarch to flee the country. Fearing a possible communist take-over in Iran, the United States’ covert plan Operation Ajax overthrew the new national, non-communist government and restored the Shah to the throne. A recent law school graduate, the author is brutally disappointed and determines to leave the country.

While he waits for documents and a passport in Tehran, poverty compels him to live in the narrow, low-ceilinged tomb of a famous Ayatollah. To make his ghastly situation more bearable, he opens a dialogue with the Ayatollah’s spirit. The engaging story of the relationship with the spirit of the godly man shows how the author gains the confidence to undertake a seemingly impossible journey.

Without money he makes his way on Japanese tankers for thirty-two days over the Indian and Pacific Oceans to Japan and then to California. The author´s accounts of his experience on the tankers and of his brief stay in Japan show a young man exposed for the first time to the ways of worlds he never knew existed.

On US soil his greatest challenge was to survive and adapt to a new way of living in a land of plenty where a stranger can die of starvation if he does not earn his way. His reception by Americans, some admirable, some despicable, is told in stories that sweep the reader along the suspenseful path to eventual success.

The reader of Terms of Endurance will be thrilled, taught, and entertained. From first page to last, the book shows endurance and faith overcoming insurmountable odds and making reality of an apparently unattainable dream.

About the Author

Seid Zekavat is professor of Statistics, Economics and Political Economy of Islam at Loyola Marymount University of Los Angeles. He earned a law degree from the University of Tehran, a degree in Political Science from Pepperdine University, and a doctorate in Economics from the University of Southern California. He served as chair of Loyola’s Economic Department a number of times, chapter president of the American Association of University Professors and vice president of the Southern California chapter of the American Statistical Association. As well as Political Economy of Islam, he is the author of Terms of Endurance, Perils of Blind Faith, and State of Environment in Iran, and has published a number of research articles in the fields of Economics, Statistics and Political Islam. Seid Zekavat has won awards for the most distinguished teacher of the year, dedication to students, and outstanding contributor to scholarly research.