Sigheh or Mut’a marriage (temporary marriage), which is a pre-Islamic custom practiced by the Iranian Twelver Shi’is, is an alliance that was common at the time of the Prophet Muhammad and is believed to have been sanctioned in the Qur’an. However, there are numerous debates about the practice of temporary marriages as Sunni schools condemn it and believe that the prophet and later the second Caliph banned it; whereas, the Shi’i Muslims still practice it to this day. Although compared to permanent marriage (Nikah), temporary marriage gives a degree of sexual freedom to women, the gender roles – female/passive and male/active – are still dominant and women who enter a temporary marriage are “otherized” and situated at the margins of the society. In this paper, I explore the way Ebrahim Golestan in his 1967 short story “‘Esmat’s journey” (Safar-i ‘Esmat”) sketches the transformation of a “repentant whore” from prostitution to temporary marriage with the help of a young sayyid. During these temporary contracts, ‘Esmat is expected to serve the sexual needs of her customers –largely clerics and religious sects in the shrine – under the sanctity of religion; not much different from what she did before repentance. I argue that since liminal experiences shape our social and cultural boundaries, the self (the sayyid) and the Other (‘Esmat as a prostitute), the center and the periphery depend on each other. And since the self and the Other are interdependent, and the Other is both socially despised and desired, the self/Other dyad is an integral part of the dominant culture’s social imaginary. Thus, the Other – in this case ‘Esmat – is simultaneously in the periphery and center of society as she is both despised and desired, both at the margins and the center. By looking at the socio-cultural and political changes of the 1960s in terms of Iranian women’s emancipation and sexual liberation, I also address the question whether religious sanctioning of temporary marriage helps diminish the stigma and creates a more egalitarian perspective, or whether it perpetuates the victimization of women under the facade of religious regulation.