Leila Moayeri Pazargadi is an associate professor of English at Nevada State College, teaching composition, postcolonial literature, life writing, and Middle Eastern literature. She received her PhD in comparative literature with a certification in gender studies from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2012. Her research focuses on Middle Eastern women writers producing autobiographical material in fiction and nonfiction. In 2020, she was a visiting scholar at UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies, researching Middle Eastern women’s memoirs for her upcoming monograph. She has been published in Biography, a/b: Autobiography Studies, Gender Forum, and the Getty Research Journal.

As an innovative aesthetic in transnational life writing, humor can facilitate an affective transmission of eyewitness experiences, particularly of past historical traumas. In Iranian American[1] diasporic writing, comedic writing has become an innovative and increasingly popular tool for recounting experiences of immigration from Iran to America during the aftermath of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and for confronting ensuing acculturative and racist struggles. One early example of this subgenre occurred in 2004 when Firoozeh Dumas debuted her popular memoir, Funny in Farsi, offering readers a comparison of life in America before and after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. As part of her autobiographical self-disclosure, Dumas notes increased racial hostility against Iranians in America, using humor to explore themes of white passing, racism, and liminality in America. Yet, rather problematically, the author at times uncritically embarks on a racial transformation to socially ascend and pass for white as a French woman, perhaps as a way of coping with liminality. In contrast to Dumas’s earlier work stand two comedians who similarly employ humor in their memoirs, but complicate their experiences of racialization as Iranians in the American diaspora.

Maz Jobrani employs humor akin to Firoozeh Dumas in his 2015 memoir, I’m Not a Terrorist but I’ve Played One on TV: Memoirs of a Middle Eastern Funny Man, in order to bridge gaps between his Iranian identity and surrounding American fears about Iranians. Like much of his stand-up work, Jobrani’s memoir does not wade deep into controversial waters. However, it does manage to ruminate on changing perceptions of Iranian racial identity, particularly from his perspective as a brown Muslim man living in increasingly hostile America. Jobrani entertainingly uses humor to ease tensions between Iranians and his mostly non-Iranian audience, who might mistake Iranians for threatening terrorists.

To round out these comparisons, Negin Farsad’s 2016 How to Make White People Laugh approaches Iranian liminality from a space of Black power and allyship, as opposed to a position of white passing. Farsad uses humor to teach her audience about the nuanced liminality of Iranians, while disrupting neatly packaged narratives and exposing gaps of belonging. Like Jobrani, she offers a few suggestions to build bridges between peoples, but more so, she ruminates on the liminality of Iranian Americans. In this way, her humor takes Jobrani’s observations and criticisms one step further, speaking to the messiness of fitting into a neoliberal American social order that seeks to ostracize her. Farsad embraces her Otherness, while deftly employing critical race theory to outline a different positionality for Iranians living in the diaspora, one that rejects racial erasure.

Ultimately, through the stylistic aesthetics of humor, the structure of these comedic confessionals playfully offers alternatives to the more traditional form of memoir, thereby allowing for a rich exploration of Iranian American racial identity. Thus, this essay explores the ways in which Jobrani and Farsad reflect on the process of their racialization from white to brown, depending on how threatening they are perceived as being, especially after 9/11. This racialization fluctuates from rewarding Iranian Americans with whiteness when they are received as model minorities, to punishing them with brownness when they are perceived as threats. Ultimately, both Jobrani and Farsad touch on themes uncovered in John Tehranian’s and Neda Maghbouleh’s works that explore the legal paradoxes of government categorization of Middle Easterners as white compared with Iranian American perceptions of themselves as “Other.” Additionally, by applying Maghbouleh’s concepts of “racial hinges” and “racial loopholes” to these memoirs, this essay considers how Jobrani and Farsad use humor as a mechanism to confront and acknowledge their liminality in America. At the same time, they employ comedy to diffuse tension around racial stereotyping and identity fragmentation in order to carve out a space for Iranian Americans.

The Legacy of Racial Formation Theory: Racializing “White Ethnics” in America

In terms of life writing aesthetics, both Jobrani’s I’m Not a Terrorist but I’ve Played One on TV and Farsad’s How to Make White People Laugh use humor to expose racial paradoxes; at the same time, they propose views that challenge American stereotypes about Iranians and Muslims alike (since these identities often converge in stereotypes). Through their narratives, the authors employ a unique intersection of comedy and racial politics to interrogate identity in the United States and appeal to readers’ affective state. As Iranians in the American diaspora, the authors use humor to undercut the audience’s expectations that Iranian Muslims are threatening or terrorists, thereby diffusing tensions. Jobrani often claims that he is “brown and friendly,” as expressed in his 2009 comedy tour of the same name, while Farsad ups the ante by heralding the “Muslims Are Coming” in her 2013 comedy tour and corresponding comedic documentary. Both comedians mock American stereotypes about Iranians and Muslims, but in varying degrees: Jobrani mildly mocks the stereotype, trying to prove himself in an acculturative way, while Farsad identifies as a woman of color, borrowing from African American studies to align with Black Power movements to disrupt narratives of perceived whiteness. Compared with Dumas’s earlier examples, the narrative critiques of both authors go one step farther than Dumas’s polite acquiescence and assimilative approach to being Iranian in America.

Central to both Jobrani’s and Farsad’s texts is an interrogation of racial politics that explores the boundaries of white designation for Middle Easterners, specifically Iranian Americans. To determine this process of racial self-selection, Jobrani and Farsad touch on debates about the racialization of perceived whiteness, which are stirring inside and outside the Iranian community. For instance, according to law professor John Tehranian, in his study of the racial status of Middle Eastern Americans in Whitewashed, Iranian Americans often work through the state’s designation of them as Caucasian and “white,” as opposed to their social Othering as “brown,” particularly after 9/11. In the American diaspora, this question has come to a boiling point given the ongoing war against terrorism, which simultaneously disrupts the settlement of racial categorization for Iranians. Under the umbrella of Middle Eastern American, Iranian Americans are categorized as white according to the US census; however, in practice they are socially excluded and politically marginalized as people of color. According to Tehranian’s assessment in Whitewashed, Middle Eastern Americans are discriminated against in their daily lives, but have little legal recourse to challenge this discrimination since the American government classifies them as white.[2] Relegated to the status of Other, Americans of Middle Eastern descent are not afforded the benefits of white privilege.[3] He echoes Anita Famili’s assessment that Middle Eastern Americans are “both interpolated into the category of Caucasian while simultaneously racialized as an ‘other’…Middle Eastern Americans do not appropriately fit into the prevailing categories of race. Rather, their ethnic/racial identity is constantly contested.”[4] This makes any type of integration that speaks to the American project of equality difficult to achieve.

This is not unlike the established racial dissonance between other minorities who were classified as white and treated as marginalized. Tehranian draws on long contemplations of the racialization of “white ethnics,” such as the Irish, Italians, and Jews who immigrated to the United States. Building on notions of liminality, he expounds on increased Islamophobia since the 9/11 attacks, which compounds racism for Iranians and Middle Easterners (regardless of religious identity or belief). Very briefly, many critical race theory scholars have found that white ethnics, for lack of a better phrase, have experienced the paradox of white legal classification along with racialized mistreatment. Drawing on Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s seminal theory of racial formation, scholars note the social constructions of race that shift along with social mores. As legal scholar Kevin Johnson observes, “The slow social assimilation, or ‘whitening,’ of various immigrant groups, such as the Irish and Jews, evidences how concepts of races are figments of our collective imagination, albeit with real-life consequences.”[5] Indeed, Steven Belluscio notes in his study of Jewish American and Italian American writers in To Be Suddenly White: Literary Realism and Racial Passing that Italian and Jewish American writers historically were posed as part of the white majority, but were simultaneously considered as ethnic Others, and denied privileges associated with whiteness.[6] Similarly, in Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color, the author focuses on the concept of race as a social construct in evaluating how society has historically regulated white privileging in America. In his discussions of Jewish Americans, he notes that a non-Christian prototype for Iranians exists, suggesting that Iranians are also simultaneously white and Other.[7] Jacobson focuses on visual cues of race, describing the way in which anti-Semitism is centered on appearance since “race is social value become perception; Jewishness seen is social value naturalized and so enforced.”[8] Most notably, Karen Brodkin adds to these conversations, showing How Jews Became White Folks since many Jewish Americans were perceived as outsiders, but opted for model minority status and assimilated to the American way of life.[9] Of course, all of these theories and discussions are much more nuanced and complex than presented here, but for the purposes of this study, their overview is helpful for identifying the trajectory of critical race theory and its relevance to the discussion of Iranians and race.

Returning to the discussion of Iranian Americans, what ensues from this discourse is a paradox that supports Tehranian’s observations about Iranian Americans’ navigation of whiteness. In the racial spectrum of America, Iranians forge a separate identity in a liminal, tertiary space. His case studies and legal references, in addition to previous conversations about the racialization of white ethnics, are helpful in determining the way in which Iranian Americans are paradoxically classified as white but socially denied the status.[10] Consequently, he makes the case for new racial classifications and official designations for Iranian Americans, especially on the census.

Building on Tehranian’s work, Neda Maghbouleh similarly observes in The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race that everyday experiences of racism and racialization simultaneously occur alongside legal designations of whiteness and internalized “racial covering.”[11] Iranian Americans often Anglicize their names (at least their first name) so as not to easily draw attention to their difference.[12] Moreover, they may obscure their national identities and ties to Iran, instead fabricating points of origin or focusing on former residences in countries lived in prior to immigration to America. This process of racial covering (as Tehranian puts it and on which Maghbouleh expands) attempts to reconcile the legal paradoxes of government categorization of Middle Easterners as white compared with their mistreatment by the Transportation Security Administration, law enforcement, and border patrol officers, who perceive Iranian Americans as Other.[13] They must adapt to access whiteness, since they are left with little legal recourse to challenge discrimination in light of their legal classification as white.[14] Maghbouleh also evaluates the scholarship extending from Omi and Winant’s racial formation theory to show how “racial categories involving liminal groups expand, contract, and transform through social, economic, and political force.”[15]

While Tehranian points out the legal issues for Iranians, Maghbouleh takes the material a step further by offering an innovative theory for articulating the process of racializing Iranians. Her concepts of “racial hinges” and “racial loopholes” are pertinent to the racial explorations of Jobrani’s and Farsad’s identities in America. According to Maghbouleh, the concept of “racial hinges” touches on how “the geographic, political, and pseudoscientific specter of a racially liminal group, like Iranians, can be marshaled by a variety of legal and extralegal actors into a symbolic hinge that opens or closes the door to whiteness as necessary.”[16] Furthermore, “racial loopholes” diagnose the daily “contradictions and conflicts that emerge when a group’s legal racial categorization is inconsistent with its on-the-ground experience of racialization or deracialization.”[17] Racial loopholes is another way of referring to the racialized paradoxes that Tehranian notes about the dissonance between the white status of Iranian Americans and their everyday marginalization.

Taken together, these concepts are useful to show the paradoxes noted in Jobrani’s and Farsad’s memoirs. Combining these paradoxes with notions of humor and affect inherent in the aesthetics of comedic memoirs, these two Iranian American comedians provide plenty of thoughtful fodder for those left wondering about the complexity of racial categorization concerning Iranian Americans. They both use humor and draw upon their stand-up comedy routines to evoke laughter from the audience, so that readers can take in the irony, the mockery, and the light-hearted approach to heavier topics like racism, dispossession, and un-belonging. Furthermore, a comedic approach allows for the bridging of gaps and the diffusing of racial tensions in creating an affective response in readers, who might reexamine their biases and prejudices. In so doing, through the power of their autobiographical disclosure, these comedian-cum-authors attempt not only to entertain but also to instruct audiences about how to coexist.

I’m Not a Terrorist but I’ve Played One on TV

In my discussion about the racialization of Iranian Americans, it is first useful to discuss Maz Jobrani’s memoir, I’m Not a Terrorist but I’ve Played One on TV: Memoirs of a Middle Eastern Funny Man, since he takes a less critical and more exploratory approach to racial dynamics than does Negin Farsad in her memoir. In his debut memoir, Jobrani addresses the elephant in the room by announcing through his title that he is not in fact a terrorist, contrary to American stereotypes about Iranians and Muslims. This notion is even more pronounced by the cover of Jobrani’s memoir, which shows him wearing a suit with a keffiyeh and a lit bomb, accompanied by a puzzled look that casts doubt on the whole scene. From the very beginning, Jobrani regales his audience with tales of how television producers and film directors attempted to dress him in a random assortment of stereotyped clothing meant to look like Islamic terrorist chic. Throughout this discussion about Middle Eastern and Muslim stereotypes, Jobrani notes that he refuses to take these roles, considering the damage that they do for Iranians and the broader Middle Eastern community. It is with this frame of mind that Jobrani opens his memoir in discussing stereotyping and racialization of Iranians.

In his memoir, Jobrani discusses his early childhood in Iran, his move to Northern California at six years old, his acclimation to America, and his rise to becoming a world-traveling comedian. As a 1.5-generation immigrant,[18] he uses humor to cope with the liminality of leaving Iran and moving to America, particularly during the aftermath of the 1979 American hostage crisis in Iran. Just like many other Iranian Americans, the Jobrani family’s journey was a bit unexpected: they “packed for two weeks” but “stayed for thirty years.”[19] Immediately, Jobrani recalls classmates making fun of him in the predominately white city of Tiburon in Northern California. But what ensues is a comedic approach to discussing issues like racism, racial profiling, and double consciousness as a way of addressing Iranian Americans like him. In so doing, he means to reeducate American and Iranian readers about one another as he attempts to dispel negative stereotypes about Iranians as threatening, particularly the misperception that they are terrorists. For Jobrani, memories of being teased at school are undercut by his public reprimands of a school bully in his memoir.

While microaggressions against him started during his childhood, Jobrani recounts how they continue throughout his life and career. Even so, he finds the capacity to laugh, using humor to inject his own critiques while undermining racially motivated slights and teasing. Through his comedic approach, Jobrani attempts to tackle the past trauma of his childhood with scathing sarcasm:

My attempt at blending in failed miserably when I was in the fourth grade. I was met with a verbal confrontation by a sixth grader named Jim who somehow figured out that I was the representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Marin County. After all, I had a funny name, beautiful furry eyebrows, strange-sounding parents, and a dad who drove a better car than his dad. I had to be involved with the hostage crisis somehow – I looked the part. This sixth grader came up with a clever nickname, calling me a Fucking Eye-ranian. That’s what people called Iranians back then: Fucking Eye-ranians. “First of all,” I explained, “it’s pronounced Ee-ron-ian, not Eye-ranian. Second, you’re bigger than me so it’s whatever you want it to be. Third, I’m not sure where you heard a rumor that I’m Iranian. I’m not. I’m totally Italian – ciao!”[20]

Jobrani’s Iranian and Muslim identities are read as Other, particularly through his perceived foreignness as evidenced through his “funny name,” “furry eyebrows,” and “strange-sounding parents.” At the time of the hostage crisis, when tensions were high, Iranians in the United States were treated as enemy combatants—even when they had nothing to do with the crisis. The epithet “Fucking Eye-ranian” is doubly damning since it not only includes a forceful expletive, but it also willfully mispronounces Iranian to provide further ridicule. Countless others can attest to having experienced the particular barb embodied by the word Eye-ranian, which unleashes its sting as it is transformed from a noun to a verb in its mispronunciation. Through learning about Jobrani’s experience, at the beginning of his acclimation to America, the reader is able to glean a few points: first, Jobrani is considered an outsider; second, through his use of comedy, he makes a joke to diffuse the tension; and third, he hints at Iranians obscuring their origins and passing for Italian, which is a practice that resurfaces throughout his memoir.

Just as in the rest of the book, here Jobrani relies on humor to create a cathartic release regarding this specific racial tension. Reflecting on this specific instance, he employs what Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson refer to as the “narrating I,” which is the autobiographical voice aware of crafting a memoir during the process of narration.[21] This usually occurs during chronological jumps forward and backward in time when Jobrani (and other autobiographical writers) revisits a memory from the past with a new perspective. Employing the “narrating I,” he notes, “Years later, while doing stand-up comedy, I began talking about these incidents. It felt like I was opening up an old wound, but it was good to talk about the childhood troubles I had with Jim.”[22] In the practice of comedy, autobiographical confession is often mixed with a sense of irony or satire, which can help to heal “old wounds,” as Jobrani says. Specifically, the relief theory of comedy suggests that “humor enables a release of psychic energies otherwise deployed in restraining the primal impulses and emotions like hostility, anger, or sexual desire; laughter saves energy otherwise spent on self-control.”[23] Indeed, humor is a coping mechanism and tool that allows Jobrani to reevaluate his childhood traumas. This is not surprising, since life writing often allows for catharsis, particularly for those who have been marginalized. Even more so, the use of humor allows a comedic writer to work through past trauma to show racism and bigotry to be just as reprehensible as other atrocities.

Additionally, and perhaps significantly, Jobrani’s early experiences with racialization in America touch on Tehranian’s research on racial covering. Not unlike the earlier example of Dumas’s passing for French, Jobrani also jokingly attempts to pass for another white ethnic: Italian. He mentions this numerous times, making jokes via name changes and Italian words and phrases like ciao, eventually pointing out the absurdity of this habit carried out by many Iranian Americans. In the earlier example when he notes he had a “funny name,” what is indeed funny about his name is that Maziyar is an ethnically Persian name that is neither Arabic nor Muslim in origin (as it is mistakenly perceived), and Jobrani, which is also Persian, sounds Italian in its foreignness. It is not surprising that Jobrani is able to pass for Italian, even if it is a practice that increasingly frustrates him. In fact, these modes of white passing become vexing for Jobrani, who attempts to encourage Iranian Americans to embrace their authentic identity. For example, he admits that many of his friends changed their names to “Tony” after Not without My Daughter debuted in the United States and depicted Iranian men as particularly threatening and abusive toward women. Jobrani recalls:

They went from being named Shahrokh, Mahmoud, and Farsheed to all being named Tony. I’m not sure why they all chose Tony, but it seemed odd to me that women wouldn’t question you when you would introduce your friends this way: “I’m Maz. This is my friend Tony. Over there, next to Tony, is Tony. Over there next to Tony and Tony is Tony. Yes, they’re all Italian. Very Italian. Me? I’m Iranian. Wait, where are you going? Did I say Iranian? I meant Persian, like the cat. Meow!”[24]

This passage includes a punch line that Jobrani often repeats—“Persian, like the cat. Meow!”—which often elicits laughter from Iranians and non-Iranians alike. Here, he attempts to turn the tables on an ignorant audience who associates Persians only with cats. In this way, laughter is used to build a coalition amongst other Iranians, while they are laughing at American stereotypes about Iranians. Jobrani’s humor also creates space for non-Iranians to laugh at themselves and their own ignorance, eventually moving on from that unawareness. Lastly, there is another layer of humor since the word Persian is used by some Iranians as a form of racial covering designed to obscure their supposedly undesirable origins. Whether through his stand-up or his memoir, Jobrani often makes fun of the way in which some Iranians attempt to become associated with a more romantic origin.

Throughout the passage, Jobrani affirms his identity as Iranian and notes the way in which other Iranians around him attempt to pass for Italian, especially via an appellative transformation to “Tony.” Regarding this type of appellative passing, Tehranian observes that Iranian men in particular would change their name to “‘Mike’ for Mansour, ‘Morty’ for Morteza, ‘Al’ for Ali, and ‘Moe’ for Mohammed” as a way of passing for white.[25] About racial covering, Tehranian observes that the more someone associates with the white community, the more accepted and assimilated they will be. Their whiteness will become more legitimized through association with “credible” whites. Furthermore, associational covering can use financial success as a signpost for whiteness, which explains the Iranian American community’s preoccupation with wealth and status, and more specifically, the Jobrani family’s emphasis on driving a nice car. Group affiliation is another form of covering, wherein Iranian Americans purposely mislead or fail to correct their ethnicity when mistaken for Italian, French, or another more preferable identity. All of this is done to avoid the stigma of being associated with terrorism, hostage takers, and general foreignness.[26] But these measures are also taken because they point to the precarious situation in which Iranians find themselves: their legal classification is white, which is incongruous with their marginalization.

There is little legal recourse for these chasms between legal and perceived racial identities for Iranian Americans, yet steps like legal identification on the census would help ameliorate racial ambiguity. When discussing the US census, Jobrani, like Tehranian, Maghbouleh, and Farsad, finds the lack of ethnic and racial choices frustrating. Jobrani notes that because many Iranian Americans want to fit in, they often indicate “white” on the census. As he sarcastically observes about the question concerning ethnic background, in an affected Persian accent, “Ethnic background? Vhite. Or Italian. Or whichever ethnicity is not currently making headlines.”[27] The census is a sticking point for Jobrani and for many Iranian Americans because as Tehranian points out, “white privilege still reigns supreme, and, naturally, immigrant groups still seek white recognition”; they often check “white” due to an unwillingness to relinquish legally sanctioned whiteness, or for lack of a better option.[28] Despite changes to the 2000 census, which allowed Middle Eastern individuals such as Iranian Americans to identify themselves as “Other,” Tehranian notes that “it appears that very few Iranian Americans took the opportunity to do so. In fact, only 338,266 individuals in the United States identified themselves as Iranian.”[29] Surprised, Tehranian remarks that “any visitor to Los Angeles (often referred to as Tehrangeles or Irangeles) can attest that there are probably 338,266 individuals of Iranian descent living in Southern California, let alone the rest of the country.”[30]

Even a nearly decade later, Jobrani, who was part of the 2010 census effort to encourage Iranian Americans to identity as Other and “write in” Iranian so that they could be counted, laments:

Iranians continue to mark the box that reads “white” and move on with their lives. Based on the last census in 2010, there are about 300,000 Iranians in America. Based on my personal experiences in Westwood, California, there are at least 300,000 Iranians at most Persian weddings. There have been estimates between 300,000 and 1.5 million Iranians in America. The reason for this wide discrepancy is that Iranians are not into filling out census forms. That’s because they want to lay low and avoid the government.[31]

His take is more humorous than Tehranian’s, but it confirms the same quagmire concerning race. Iranians attempt to pass for white, particularly as they see the denigrating mistreatment toward African Americans and other minorities. The solution is to change the census to offer more inclusive categories. In her memoir, Farsad adds that the United States should change the census: “How can we build policies or have a basic understanding of our country with that? We have five categories, but why not have 105 categories? [. . .] Let us figure out who actually lives in this country, how they identify, and what they need!”[32]

This attachment to whiteness for Iranians predates coming to America, as it was part of Pahlavi-era nation making that tenuously claimed Iranians were descendants of Aryans, just at a time when modern nation making in the Middle East attached itself to European self-determination movements.[33] Zia-Ebrahimi elaborates on Pahlavi-era revisionist narratives about nezhad-e ariyayi (Aryan race), noting Leon Poliakov’s observation that “le mythe aryen”[34] found its roots in Reza Shah’s renaming of Persia as Iran, or “land of the Aryans” and through Mohammad Reza Shah’s self-styling as ariyamehr or the “Light of Aryans.”[35] The myth, as Zia-Ebrahimi notes, “divides humankind into several races, and considers most Europeans, but also Iranians and Indians, as members of the Aryan race.” While it was first philologically used to categorize Indo-European languages, it soon took on a political connotation through European claims to whiteness. As Zia-Ebrahimi observes, “Aryanism’s political charge, infused with romantic imagery, intensified over time, propagating claims that the Aryan race was bestowed with a special destiny, that of supremacy over what were now deemed to be the ‘others,’ the ‘inferior races.’”[36] It is not surprising, then, that both Pahlavi regimes, and by extension, Iranians involved in nationalization projects, would refer back to the ancient word ariya and wrongfully appropriate it as the malapropism ariyayi, in order to make a tenuous connection to Aryans reimagined as white Europeans.[37] The national revisions taking place throughout the twentieth century begin to account for the legacy of attachment to the myth that Iranians come from a Europeanized Aryan stock, particularly when they clutch for claims to whiteness in Euro-American spaces.

Both Jobrani and Farsad poke fun at these misconceptions of Aryanness. In his memoir, Jobrani cites the Aryan myth as the reason for many Iranians’ attachment to white racial identity. He explains:

Growing up, most of my friends were white with a few Persians sprinkled in here and there. Before I go any further, I know that any Iranians reading this right now are thinking: But Iranians ARE white! That is true. Iranians are ethnically white. The word “Iran” derives from the word “Aryan.” Our ancestors can be traced back to the Caucuses, so that makes us Caucasian – the original white people. Yes, Aryans were originally dark complexioned people with thick, hairy eyebrows. This is a point that many educated Iranians in the West insist on making.[38]

In this instance, Jobrani turns his comedic gaze to Iranians and addresses the old guard, in particular, who are attached to their whiteness vis-à-vis the Pahlavi romanticization of a distant past. Tehranian similarly observes, “they will tell you that the word Iran comes from the Sanskrit word meaning ‘Land of the Aryans’ and that they, not the Germans, are the original Aryans.”[39] Gelareh Asayesh might put it best: “This tenuous link to the global ruling class permits Iranians to look down on the other people of the Middle East, most notably the Arabs, who had the temerity to defeat the faltering Persian Empire in the seventh century.”[40] Maghbouleh also finds that for first-generation parents—who were “socialized into an Aryan and anti-Arab national history, ‘Caucasian’ geographic location, and concomitant white racial identity as children in Iran”—relinquishing these ties is hard, particularly when challenged by their children (second-generation immigrants), who might perceive themselves as people of color.[41] As Jobrani points out in his earlier observation, it is the Iranians educated in the West (the 1.5- and second-generation immigrants) who note that Aryan ancestors of Iranians who migrated from the Indian subcontinent were probably swarthy people of color as opposed to images of the fair-skinned Aryans reimagined by Hitler. Although there is an ambiguity in this passage concerning Jobrani’s stance on Iranian whiteness, elsewhere throughout his memoir and in paratextual material, he refers to Iranians as people of color.

While Jobrani emphasizes the many instances wherein Iranians might consider themselves white, he also makes reference to their unfair marginality via their perceived brownness. As evident in the naming of his “Brown and Friendly” comedy tour, Jobrani attempts to educate Iranians and non-Iranians alike that Iranians can be racialized as brown and Other. He seems to refer to himself as a person of color, though he spends little time explaining his own racial self-perceptions. He admits, “In the West, despite our Caucasian heritage, Iranians are seen as more brown than white. If you don’t believe me, try this test. Get an Iranian with a thick Persian accent and a unibrow and have him run up to the front of an airplane before the doors close for takeoff and tell the stewardess he doesn’t feel well and needs to get off the plane.”[42] What he goes on to imply is that Iranians can be stereotyped as threatening because of their perceived difference from white Americans. Per usual, he uses humor to trouble a stereotype with which he disagrees. To explain the racial ambiguity of Iranians further, Tehranian notes that “Middle Easterners are consistently subjected to a process of selective racialization” that renders them as white when they socially advance and exhibit positive values, and conversely as Other when they are seen as committing a transgression.[43] Here, Maghbouleh’s notion of racial hinges is also helpful, since it describes the mechanisms for which doors seem to open for Iranians who are perceived as white as opposed to racial loopholes and opportunity loss for Iranians perceived as brown. As Maghbouleh notes, the racial hinge is symbolic, opening and closing access to whiteness depending on social demands, dramaturgy, and sometimes, legal codification.

How to Make White People Laugh

On racial hinges and racial loopholes that account for the double consciousness experienced by Iranians in the diaspora, Negin Farsad’s memoir, How to Make White People Laugh, is both entertaining and instructive. Farsad, who is a second-generation Iranian American, sees her navigation of race a bit differently from Jobrani. Rather than dance around questions of race and color, Farsad embraces her identity as a woman of color, often comparing her experience to other intersectional minorities in the United States. Like Jobrani, she employs humor to skillful effect. Her title makes clear references to her targeted audience: they are white people, and she intends to make them laugh. This title is visually echoed via her book cover, which features a silhouetted Farsad standing in front of—what we later learn to be—her TEDx PowerPoint visual, which inspired her ensuing memoir. In both cases, her life storytelling mixes humor, anti-racism discourse, and social justice principles to cogently discuss the liminality of Iranian Americans who feel estranged from whiteness.

Farsad’s approach is refreshing for Iranian Americans who have felt alienated from or dissatisfied with their legal white designation. From the very first words in her introduction’s title, she heralds her ensuing reflections with “I Used to Be Black,” which automatically signals an identity apart from the usual Iranian claims to whiteness.[44] Of course, the past tense quickly reminds the reader that there has been some sort of change or evolution from this idea. Still, what she refers to is her internalized feelings of being Other, which naturally coincided with what she had known of African American studies and the Black struggle. She quickly clears up impressions that she is trying to appropriate Blackness by disclosing, “To be clear, I’m actually an Iranian-American Muslim female comedian-slash-filmmaker” and quickly corrects any misperceptions that she is putting on some sort of racial “black face.”[45] Elaborating further, she notes, “I used to feel black. Sometimes ‘kinda pretty black,’ occasionally ‘really black,’ and, depending on how drunk I was, ‘Don Cheadle.’ I’m Iranian, an ethnically brown Muz type, and definitely not black.”[46] Depending on the everyday racial loopholes that depict Farsad through a colorist spectrum, and on her personal sentiment and social mistreatment from others, her feelings of Otherness vary. Farsad signals a very different memoir from other Iranian American life writers who avoid answering questions about race. However exaggerated Farsad might be in her initial proclamations of Blackness, what seems sincere are her frequent pronouncements that she is brown and Muslim, and more authentically, that she is not in fact Black. It is funny to note that for many Iranians, as she points out, the fact that she is a female comedian also presents a marginalized community, albeit mostly amongst more traditional Iranians.

For Farsad, the attraction to Blackness stems from a desire to build coalitions between marginalized minorities. Especially because she grew up with immigrant parents, Farsad “felt like my minority and ethnic status was the flashpoint of national blame for some kind of social tension [. . .] So my still burgeoning mind decided to embrace the struggle, embrace that blackness. It was the only narrative around ‘otherness’ out there.”[47] Karen Brodkin observes that this sense of belonging to a racialized category “comes from racial middleness: of an experience of marginality vis-à-vis whiteness, and an experience of whiteness and belonging vis-à-vis blackness.”[48] Aptly, Farsad notes about this experience, “That’s what a lot of hyphenated Americans say to themselves when they glom onto the larger minority groups: close enough.”[49] For Farsad, what is at stake is racial self-determination for Iranians who want to authentically embrace their national, cultural, and ethnic identities in the United States.

This type of coalition building is a cornerstone for social justice work, about which Farsad is passionate throughout her memoir. Additionally, Farsad points out the precariousness of not being able to fully fit in. She feels a bit more at ease with the Black struggle and its fight, but at the same time, she is aware that she is white passing, admitting, “I can pass, but when the full scale of the whiteness hit me, I realized passing wasn’t my choice. I didn’t get to choose whiteness. You’re rewarded whiteness.”[50] This speaks to Maghbouleh’s notion of Iranians and model minorities as racial hinges who are rewarded with whiteness and the privileges thereof. But even more so, it speaks to the racial ambiguity and complexity concerning Iranian social status, which Farsad is quick to point out. This ambiguity and complexity are not surprising, since “Iranians, who have from their arrival in the United States been legally situated inside whiteness, have been simultaneously escorted, framed, and deported out of its everyday social limits.”[51]

After struggling with her racial identity, Farsad realizes that she must reject extra-cultural affiliations and articulate the paradoxes of Iranian American identity to bring her identity into existence. About her racial epiphany and self-acceptance, she observes:

And that’s when it struck me: I wasn’t black, or Mexican or Asian or Russian. I was an Iranian-American Muslim female (the comedy, filmmaking, and honey-mustard enthusiasm didn’t come till later). To large swaths of the American public, that meant I was a possibly dangerous brown person who potentially sympathized with Al Qaeda or

Hezbollah. To other swaths of the American public, I was the kind of person who pronounced “Iran” in a way that didn’t make it sound like a past-tense verb.[52]

Farsad’s proclamations that she is both brown and an “Iranian-American Muslim female” are significant and direct identifiers, particularly because she acknowledges, like Jobrani, terrorist stereotypes lodged against Muslims. To counter this, she notes the potential power of intersectionality, stating, “The fight in being a woman and the fight in being a person of color is the same fight, but being a woman and a person of color just adds twelve extra steps.”[53] This witty disclosure at the end of her observation injects some humor to vary the sting of her critique that evaluates her limited mobility in American society with respect to race and gender.

These identity struggles speak to Maghbouleh’s research on the differences between first-generation and second-generation Iranian immigrants and their navigation of race. Maghbouleh finds that second-generation Iranian American immigrants come of age, “chafe against their social position at the limits of whiteness [. . .] by eschewing the ‘white’ category altogether.”[54] In fact, Maghbouleh adds that because second-generation Iranian immigrants are “pushed outside the limits of whiteness,”[55] they operate in an in-between space, functioning as racial hinges, “crafting political identities as racial outsiders, banding together with other youth [. . .] and practicing an antiracist and strategically inclusive Iranianness [. . .] They are becoming brown by choice and by force.”[56] This self-selection of brownness is significant because it allows Iranian Americans to properly address racial loopholes that allow for their everyday discrimination, while more powerfully reclaiming an identity that has been whitewashed by political machinations in Iran and in the United States.

Considering the revival of anti-Iranian and anti-Muslim sentiment after 9/11, the acceptance of Iranian and Muslim identities as people of color can allow Iranian Americans to push back against their liminal positions between whiteness and Blackness. In response to post-9/11 racist surges of what Farsad calls “Muz-hate,”[57] the author sagely observes “the need to shoehorn Islam as the major reason for everything in post-9/11 America defines so much of how we see mainstream American Muslims. We’ve created an arsenal of icons based on this shoehorning, and those icons do not represent me or fit my worldview.”[58] The word me is significant here as it highlights Farsad’s ownership over her Muslim identity and her repudiation of Islamophobia, which does not fit her world view. Furthermore, she spends some time discussing Islamophobic iconography, demonstrating the intensifying stereotyping of Muslims as backward and threatening. As she notes about white Americans’ perceptions of Muslims, “Islam = the promotion of violence. Muslims = violent people with dusty faces always running around the desert. The Middle East = a place full of violent people with dusty faces always running around the desert, plus women shrouded in what appear to be blankets.”[59] Throughout the text, Farsad pays particular attention to the way stereotyped images become recycled and reified, drawing attention to the “violent” and “dusty” qualities that have permeated Euro-American orientalist imaginations about the Middle East for centuries, from the paintings of Jean-August-Dominique Ingres to the ravings of Bill Maher.

Fully acknowledging these multiple identities and their subsequent marginalization by the white majority, Farsad finally concludes that there is not a neat racial construction of her intersectional identities. She refers to this liminality as a “Third Thing”: “I’m a Third Thing- Islam doesn’t explain me, Iranian poetry doesn’t explain me, and apple pie doesn’t explain me. And yet I understand all of these things. Being a Third Thing is a designation for people who straddle worlds, who may have a foot in every door yet their butt is hovering between door frames and they may even have more than two feet, and either way they’re definitely going to pull a groin muscle.”[60]

Farsad hits the nail on the head for many Iranian American Muslims: they are hybridized in a tertiary space where they experience becoming a “Third Thing” that exists between worlds. There is a “thirdness,” perhaps even a triple consciousness, that allows Iranian Americans to be aware of their difference, which speaks to the way in which Iranians have to identify themselves in distinct racial, ethnic, and religious categories (not just lumped in with whites). Consequently, Farsad notes that when one is “the de facto voice of your people’s Third Thing subgroup [. . .] the people in the First and Second Things aren’t necessarily going to like it.”[61] Farsad, who attended graduate school for a master’s degree in African American studies, is surely referencing Stuart Hall’s and Homi Bhabha’s works on liminality, hybridity, and the “Third Space.” Briefly, in Hall’s prolific body of work, the author often points to hybridity as a way for those with diasporic cultural identity to negotiate a footing in liminal spaces. In particular, through creolization of cultural practices, those in the diaspora can start to describe themselves in new tertiary terms, as opposed to binary ones of tradition and opposition.[62] This relates well to Bhabha’s notions of hybridity in The Location of Culture, wherein all cultural statements and systems are constructed in a negotiated “Third Space” that defies binary positionality between the colonizer and the colonized.[63] In the in-between third space, there is a burden for producing new cultural modes of belonging that recognize the complexity of transcultural identity. For Farsad, this third space signals the possibility for a hybrid identity that blends together her Muslim faith, Iranian ethnicity, and American surroundings.

The mention of becoming a “de facto voice” begins to touch on Farsad’s mission throughout her memoir: to use humor to collapse binary categories and unsettle seemingly established truths. Farsad notes the impact of accepting her multilayered identity on her comedy and ability to use her voice. Her sense of urgency is announced at the beginning of the memoir:

I needed to come out of the closet. I wasn’t helping anyone by glossing over my real identity. This was my struggle, and I had work to do! There [were] 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide whose identity was being hijacked! People needed to know that secular, fun Muslims who smell nice are the norm- more the norm than the dusty brown people we were seeing on television. And I had to let people know it with the only tool I had: comedy.[64]

Returning to those “dusty brown” stereotypes, Farsad senses the importance of coming to terms with her identity instead of culturally affiliating with Black identity or other ambiguously ethnic identities. Rather, Farsad takes up the mantle of diversifying images about Muslims, carving out a space for herself as a secular Muslim, despite white American expectations and Islamic hardliner denials that she may not be Muslim enough to make these claims. These rhetorical and comedic approaches, which she dubs “social justice comedy,”[65] enable Farsad to engage in “educational accounting,” a strategy of informing cultural outsiders about one’s culture in order to help non-Iranians to confront their ignorance.[66] In fact, in her conclusion, Farsad highlights the importance of this educational accounting: “Do people ask where you’re from? That’s great! Let ‘em know. Don’t assume that they’re otherizing you [. . .] you’re a teacher. Yeah, I know you didn’t sign up to be a teacher.”[67] Using her oft-employed sarcasm, Farsad acknowledges what she is asking of her readers: to either take the time to educate others or to be educated as part of her plan to build coalitions in her social justice work.

In order to understand her motivations for using comedy and penning her memoir, it is important to consider the following rhetorical question posed by Farsad: “Why aren’t minorities in the United States building bridges and finding the commonality?”[68] It is a central question that births her comedic memoir since she makes the argument that comedy can propel people to laugh and “start fewer wars.”[69] Continuing, she notes, “I think laughter is the key to all sorts of conflict resolution, and in these pages I want to show you how, why, where, and when this laughter is useful [. . .] Comedy is the great lubricant, metaphorically, for easing people into tough discussions [. . .] I wanna lube up the whole nation [. . .] I won’t stop until we all just get along.”[70] This last reference to getting along is similar to the messages echoed throughout Dumas’s and Jobrani’s memoirs. It is interesting that despite their varying approaches to navigating race, they all agree on taking a moderate approach that aims to establish common ground.

Additionally, on an aesthetic level, comedy and its use in life writing can allow authors like Farsad and Jobrani to inspire change and provide conflict resolution. According to Indira Ghose, “One of the most insidious fallacies is the belief that laughter is trivial. The function of laughter is to make things trivial—and thus gain mastery over whatever threatens to overwhelm us. Laughter is a serious matter [. . .] Laughter is a strategy of self-defence that enables us to face sources of fear or pain.”[71] Humor and its byproduct, laughter, are certainly helpful tools for releasing tension. This is because “humor is inextricably linked with power, and can be used both to reinforce and to challenge dominance and power; the marginal humor [of those in socially disadvantaged positions] may empower the powerless, may invert and subvert the status quo.”[72]

In Farsad’s case, she mentions numerous times throughout her memoir that she wishes to educate those (namely, white people) who are interested in evolving their views about Iranian Americans. According to Farsad, that is the ultimate point of her memoir: to use her voice to educate white people, who possess so much control and power in America. Discussing her reasons for writing, Farsad offers two motivations. First, she declares, “I want to give voice to the multi-hyphenated Americans caught in the margins. I want to give voice to all those feelings of self-censorship and cross-cultural pressures that they feel. I want mainstream American culture to take note, because we can’t be ignored anymore, and recognizing us is a matter of social justice.”[73] Using one’s voice and asserting one’s agency is very important to Farsad, particularly as she attempts to counter invisibility because she advocates standing up and speaking out as a woman of color. Her second motivation pertains to audience: to address white people, who hold so much institutional power. Anticipating questions about her book’s title and focus, Farsad reflexively asks, “Why do white people matter anyway? Because, here’s the thing: White people (still) sorta control stuff.”[74] As a way to undercut that power, Farsad employs humor to “break up the truth” by unsettling accepted notions of race.[75]

Ultimately, as an innovative aesthetic, humor has the ability to undercut traditional beliefs, while at the same time, create connections between comedian life storytellers and their captive readers. Both Maz Jobrani and Negin Farsad aim to laugh at life’s hypocrisies and absurdities with their readers. If they are laughing at anyone, it is themselves. Furthermore, they both reevaluate traumatic moments from their lives and expose the barbs that racists hurled at them. But, as each comedian advances from childhood to adulthood, they refocus their attention on using comedy to explore their racialization. Along the way, they also reject stereotypes lodged against them, ranging from model minority to terrorist. In contrast to other Iranian American memoirists, both Jobrani and Farsad ask challenging questions about the way in which Iranians have been legally categorized as white but paradoxically mistreated as Other. While many Iranian Americans cling to whiteness—and by extension, white privilege—these two authors poke holes in those arguments. They assert themselves as people of color who use comedy to build bridges and coalitions with other ethnic minorities who also find that they are unchecking the white box.

[1]Because I do not want to neatly situate or categorize identity, I do not hyphenate Iranian American identity. Rather, I would like to draw attention and bring awareness to the tension and difficulty in reducing identities to distinct ethnic categories.

[2]John Tehranian, Whitewashed: America’s Invisible Middle Eastern Minority (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 3; Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), 3.

[3]Tehranian, Whitewashed, 3.

[4]Anita Famili, “What About Middle Eastern American Ethnic Studies?” (paper presented at Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programs Symposium, University of California, Irvine, 17 May 1997); Tehranian, Whitewashed, 3.

[5]Kevin R. Johnson, “The End of ‘Civil Rights’ as We Know It? Immigration and Civil Rights in the New Millennium,” UCLA Law Review 49 (2002): 1481–1511. Quote on pp. 1488–89. Tehranian, Whitewashed, 22.

[6]Steven Belluscio, To Be Suddenly White: Literary Realism and Racial Passing (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006).

[7]Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 174.

[8]Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 137.

[9]Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998).

[10]Tehranian, Whitewashed, 3–4.

[11]Maghbouleh, Limits of Whiteness, 4; Tehranian, Whitewashed, 65.

[12]Tehranian, Whitewashed, 6.

[13]Tehranian, Whitewashed, 38. As a member of the Iranian American community, I have also personally observed cases of racial covering and appellative passing amongst many Iranians in the diaspora.

[14]Tehranian, Whitewashed, 6.

[15]Maghbouleh, Limits of Whiteness, 170.

[16]Maghbouleh, Limits of Whiteness, 5.

[17]Maghbouleh, Limits of Whiteness, 5.

[18]Sociologist Ruben Rumbaut coined the term 1.5 generation to “describe the situation of immigrant children who are socialized and begin their primary schooling abroad but immigrate before puberty.” Ruben Rumbaut, “Assimilation and Its Discontents: Between Rhetoric and Reality,” International Migration Review 34 (1997): 923–60. Quote on p. 950.

[19]Maz Jobrani, I’m Not a Terrorist but I’ve Played One on TV: Memoirs of a Middle Eastern Funny Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 31.

[20]Jobrani, I’m Not a Terrorist, 52.

[21]Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 73.

[22]Jobrani, I’m Not a Terrorist, 53.

[23]Ambreen Hai, “Laughing with an Iranian American Woman: Firoozeh Dumas’ Memoirs and the (Cross-) Cultural Work of Humor,” Journal of Asian American Studies, no. 2 (2018): 263–300. Quote on p. 275.

[24]Jobrani, I’m Not a Terrorist, 58–59.

[25]Tehranian, Whitewashed, 80.

[26]Tehranian, Whitewashed, 105.

[27]Jobrani, I’m Not a Terrorist, 46.

[28]Tehranian, Whitewashed, 75.

[29]Tehranian, Whitewashed, 77.

[30]Tehranian, Whitewashed, 85.

[31]Jobrani, I’m Not a Terrorist, 46.

[32]Negin Farsad, How to Make White People Laugh (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016), 226.

[33]Tehranian, Whitewashed, 85; Maghbouleh, Limits of Whiteness, 11.

[34]Reza Zia-Ebrahimi, “Self-Orientalization and Dislocation: The Uses and Abuses of the ‘Aryan’ Discourse in Iran,” Iranian Studies 44 (2011): 445–72. Quote on p. 447.

[35]Zia-Ebrahimi, “Self-Orientalization and Dislocation,” 446.

[36]Zia-Ebrahimi, “Self-Orientalization and Dislocation,” 448.

[37]Zia-Ebrahimi, “Self-Orientalization and Dislocation,” 447.

[38]Jobrani, I’m Not a Terrorist, 46.

[39]Tehranian, Whitewashed, 85.

[40]Gelareh Asayesh, “I Grew Up Thinking I Was White,” in My Sister, Guard Your Veil; My Brother, Guard Your Eyes: Uncensored Iranian Voices, ed. Lila Azam Zanganeh (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 12–19. Quote on p. 12. Tehranian, Whitewashed, 179.

[41]Maghbouleh, Limits of Whiteness, 11.

[42]Jobrani, I’m Not a Terrorist, 47.

[43]Tehranian, Whitewashed, 73.

[44]Farsad, White People Laugh, 1.

[45]Farsad, White People Laugh, 1.

[46]Farsad, White People Laugh, 1.

[47]Farsad, White People Laugh, 3.

[48]Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks, 2.

[49]Farsad, White People Laugh, 6.

[50]Farsad, White People Laugh, 86.

[51]Maghbouleh, Limits of Whiteness, 171.

[52]Farsad, White People Laugh, 8.

[53]Farsad, White People Laugh, 102.

[54]Maghbouleh, Limits of Whiteness, 171.

[55]Maghbouleh, Limits of Whiteness, 171.

[56]Maghbouleh, Limits of Whiteness, 172.

[57]Farsad, White People Laugh, 7.

[58]Farsad, White People Laugh, 143.

[59]Farsad, White People Laugh, 7. Emphasis in original.

[60]Farsad, White People Laugh, 144.

[61]Farsad, White People Laugh, 146–47.

[62]Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. J. Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 222–37.

[63]Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 37.

[64]Farsad, White People Laugh, 8.

[65]Farsad, White People Laugh, 9.

[66]Amir Marvasti and Karyn D. McKinney, Middle Eastern Lives in America (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).

[67]Farsad, White People Laugh, 227.

[68]Farsad, White People Laugh, 62.

[69]Farsad, White People Laugh, 27.

[70]Farsad, White People Laugh, 27.

[71]Indira Ghose, Shakespeare and Laughter: A Cultural History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 7.

[72]Hai, “Laughing with an Iranian American Woman,” 274.

[73]Farsad, White People Laugh, 24.

[74]Farsad, White People Laugh, 24.

[75]Susanne Reichl and Mark Stein, ed., Cheeky Fictions: Laughter and the Postcolonial (New York: Rodopi, 2005), 10.

The Beginning of New Education in Nineteenth-Century Iran

David Menashri Volume 5, Number 3, Fall 2020

David Menashri is a professor emeritus and the founding director of the Alliance Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University. Prof. Menashri has authored and edited ten books. His book Education and the Making of Modern Iran has been translated into Persian as Nezam-e Amuzeshi va Sakhtan-e Iran-e Modern, published by Hekmat Sina in 2017. He is currently completing a book titled tentatively “Iran: Domestic Challenges and Regional Ambitions.”

Toward a New Education System

The progressive deterioration of Iran’s internal situation and the expanding contacts with the West, including the military defeats and the humiliating treaties of Golestan (1813) and Turkmanchay (1828) with Russia, sustained awareness of the country’s weakness and spurred the desire to adopt new methods to meet the growing challenges facing the country. All these promoted—much as they did in the Ottoman Empire and in semi-independent Egypt—the twin processes of imitation and change. The Middle East could no longer ignore the threatening strength of the West and sought to “discover and apply the elusive secret of its greatness and strength.”[2] The West, thus, provided both the impetus for change and the model for imitation, generating a conspicuous tension between the urge to reject and the desire to emulate.[3] As the challenge was noticed primarily in the battlefield, the response was first sought in imitating Western military technology. Gradually, it was realized that modern military techniques and technologies could not be implanted into an otherwise unchanged society. The fabric of the social, economic, and political order needed to be reshaped. In the view of a growing number of Iranian thinkers, education was one of the main secret sources of Western progress and its adoption the main route to progress.

In Muslim lands, the value placed on education was readily received. Western models and Indigenous tradition reinforced, rather than battled, each other in recognition of the value of knowledge. In Iran, both the pre-Islamic and Islamic traditions commend education. Both understand it as a twofold process: acquisition of knowledge and character formation. This is reflected in the two-term expressions used to connote the educational process: ta‘lim va tarbiyyat or amuzesh va parvaresh (a neologism derived from old Persian roots). The Avesta contains numerous references to education and educated people. Of even greater relevance to the realities of modern Iran is the prominence of knowledge in Islam. Islamic tradition makes the search for knowledge (talab al-‘ilm) “a duty of all Muslims . . . from the cradle to the grave” and in any place, “even in [distant] China.”[4] Even greater importance is attached to ‘ilm in the tradition of the Shia—the religion of Iran since the early sixteenth century. The ultimate aim of ‘ilm is the knowledge of God and, thus, traditional schools—maktab or madrese—concentrate on religious subjects. The admiration Iranians have for classical literature and poetry further stresses the importance of knowledge. Sa‘di, for example, devoted a chapter in Golestan to tarbiyyat. Human beings’ ability, he said, is based on knowledge. A phrase from Ferdowsi’s Shahname became the motto of the Ministry of Education in the 1930s: “Capable is the one who possesses knowledge” (tavana bavad an ke dana bavad), or in modern parlance, “education is power.” Following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the motto was changed to ta‘lim va tarbiyyat ‘ebadat ast (“education is worship”). With all the differences in their approach, both terms glorify learning.

Such proud traditions notwithstanding, the school system in the early nineteenth century was incapable of responding to the momentous challenges of modern times. Yet the plea for change was confronted by the forces of tradition, with the ‘ulama’ (prominent clerics) at their head. Customarily, they rejected innovation as un-Islamic—bid‘ah (unlawful innovation)—and regarded it as their “religious obligation” to oppose any idea imported from the infidel West.[5] By and large, political dignitaries and social elites, too, rejected any change likely to jeopardize their status. Crown Prince ‘Abbas Mirza thus complained in 1812 that his brother and political rival, Mohammad ‘Ali, had rendered him and his reform plans odious by arguing that “in adopting the customs of the infidels,” he was subverting Islam.[6] Still, some channels for the infiltration of new ideas gradually opened during the century, not from any ideological preference but because of exigencies of the situation.

Since weakness was most painfully sensed on the military front, the first steps were to acquire Western military technology. A French training mission was invited to Tehran (1807–9), followed by a British one. In keeping with the growing contacts with the West, the first Iranian diplomatic mission was set up in London in 1809, followed by resident embassies in other European capitals. Living in Europe, the diplomats and their companions became acquainted with Western culture and politics and, no less important, learned foreign languages, which was instrumental in transferring ideas. The first steps to obtain the benefits of Western schooling were the government’s initiatives to finance students to study at European universities. The process was slow and limited in numbers, but in retrospect, the contribution of returning graduates to the process of change was invaluable. It was no less than groundbreaking change for the government to take upon itself responsibility for the education of its people (hitherto the exclusive domain of religion), and to send their children to learn from the infidels.

In 1811, the first two Iranian students left for London, placing them among the first Middle Eastern students to do so, followed by another five in 1815. Five more left to France in 1845 (but were rushed home because of the political change in Paris and the shah’s death in 1848). Three others studied in Russia and another in Italy. The initiative was accelerated under Nasser al-Din Shah (1848–96). In 1856–57, three students left for France; two years later, forty-two students left for France. This group stands out not only because of its unprecedented size, but also because all its members were graduates of Dar al-Fonun (discussed below), and thus were better prepared for studies abroad than were their predecessors. The early choice of England soon made room for a preference for France, which was to last well into the twentieth century. Almost all students came from prominent, wealthy families.

Returning graduates were appointed to prestigious positions upon their return and rose rather quickly to prominent positions; but their positions often had little to do with the fields of their studies. Given their social background, they would have been assured of a fine career in any case; nevertheless, new education—particularly European education—was of growing weight in their elevation. Gradually, upper-class families came to feel that the careers of their children had to be underpinned by educational qualifications. Appreciation of Western science and technology, coupled with the curiosity toward these “explorers” of Europe, turned the graduates into a focus of social attention. People were not interested much in their academic credentials; what mattered more was that they had had a glimpse of the West and its secrets. As Malkom Khan—one of the most influential proponents of change in the late nineteenth century—put it, anyone who had wandered in the cities of Europe for a few days was regarded as a source of knowledge.[7] In “Shaykh va Shukh,” the author conveys that it did not matter how much the graduates had actually learned of Western science; they were lionized just for having been to Europe. Shukh comments: “Whoever walked in the streets of Paris is appointed upon his return to a directorship in a government hospital [. . .] build[s] himself a large house, is granted a title, earns a good salary, [and] obtains decorations?”[8]

The first six graduates were initially appointed to positions related to their fields of study. Many of those who studied in Europe between 1845 and 1848 did not complete their studies, which explains why most of them served in positions where they could make use of their general education and knowledge of foreign languages, rather than specific training. Those sent out by Nasser al-Din Shah did complete their studies yet usually proved reluctant to work in their fields of expertise. Clearly, the returning graduates and their families preferred political, diplomatic, or administrative appointments. Mirza Asadollah Khan was exceptional in expressing annoyance at such a turn of events. Having studied paper manufacturing and then been assigned to a senior position in the post office, he cynically remarked: “Thanks God, I still have business with paper; although I am not a maker of paper (kaghaz saz), I still play with paper (kaghaz baz).”[9] Already in the early 1850s, such practices limited the contributions that the specialists were capable of making to the community. While this turn of events was not intended by the initiators of the program, in the wider process of change, the participation of the specialists with new education in the country’s social, political, and cultural life contributed significantly to the overall process of modernization.

The establishment, in 1851, of the Dar al-Fonun (polytechnic college), was the natural outgrowth of the motives that had led to the dispatch of students to Europe—to acquire Western technology. It was the first educational institution in modern Iran to be set up by the government, and the first to hire European instructors to teach Western sciences. Amir Kabir, the initiator and driving force behind the college, had modeled it after similar schools in Russia (where he had traveled in the 1820s) and the Ottoman Empire (where he had spent a long time in the late 1840s). In Russia, he was particularly impressed by the technical college at St. Petersburg, and in Istanbul, by the Maktab ‘Ulum Harbiye and by the wider educational reform in the 1840s. At Dar al-Fonun, Amir Kabir expected to gain the same benefits as were derived from sending students abroad, without incurring the heavy expenses of travel abroad and without exposing them to the “negative influences” of residence in a foreign country.[10]

Opposition to Dar al-Fonun came mainly from the ‘ulama’, who opposed setting up schools outside their influence and resented the teaching of modern subjects modeled on Western design. The founders tried to smooth tempers by incorporating religious studies into the curriculum and by holding public prayers at school, but to no avail. Having failed to prevent its establishment, the ‘ulama’ pressured the shah to deny support for the school, arguing that it was bound to foster anti-monarchical philosophies. Their pressure increased with the spread of the liberal movement in the Ottoman Empire and the approval of a constitution there in 1876, and later with the growth of the liberal movement in Iran, in which graduates of Dar al-Fonun and of foreign universities played a significant part. Even before its opening, the assassination of Amir Kabir had removed the school’s most vigorous supporter. Later, the shah’s initially enthusiastic support for the school gave way to indifference, before turning more favorable again in the late 1870s. In all, the status of the school alternated according to the shah’s arbitrary and inconsistent approach.[11]

Dar al-Fonun became the cornerstone of modern education, and some scholars view its establishment as signaling the beginning of new education in Iran. It trained relatively large cadres of Iranians and acquainted them with Western technology and general education. Many of its graduates later pursued their higher education in Western countries. Dar al-Fonun itself turned into a cultural center, hosting public lectures and discussions and publishing newspapers, textbooks, and translations of Western literature. Graduates, in the high positions they came to occupy, worked hand in hand with graduates of Western universities to support the overall process of change and reform.

Dar al-Fonun owed its existence to a government initiative and relied on its support. The government appointed its academic and administrative staff, drafted the curriculum, selected the entrants, and managed the employment of its graduates. This benefited the school as long as leading state figures (such as Amir Kabir, Mirza Hosein Khan Sepahsalar, Moshir al-Doula, and, at times, Nasser al-Din Shah) supported it, but harmed it when those in power turned against it. In all, the school contributed significantly to the development of modern education and to the larger process of Westernization. Hekmat’s conclusion that its graduates were of “the most important service for the advancement of Iran,”[12] and Safa’s assertion that they were an “important source for ideological, scientific and literary change,” do not seem to be exaggerated.[13]

Almost half a century later, several ministries founded schools of higher learning to provide them with expert staff in their ministries. An important feature of these schools was that they were the first to go beyond imitating the military or technological feature of Western education. In the stormy years of the early twentieth century, Madrese-ye ‘Ulum-e Siyasi became a center of intellectual activity. In 1907–8, its graduates founded the Sherekat-e Ma‘aref (Association for Education), which organized cultural events and founded new schools. These institutions of higher learning later became the building blocks of Tehran University.

New elementary and secondary schools were opened in Iran beginning in the 1870s (missionary schools started earlier). Their establishment was made possible largely through the collaboration between reformist intellectuals and politicians supportive of their vision. Most prominent among the latter were Sepahsalar (in the 1870s) and Mirza ‘Ali Khan Amin al-Doula (end of the century); the ministers of education Ja‘far Qoli Khan and Mirza Mahmud Khan Ehtesham al-Saltane; and to a degree, Shah Mozaffar al-Din himself. In 1873–74, Sepahsalar established in Tehran the first public secondary school, named Moshiriye in his honor. A similar school was established in Tabriz in the same year, to be followed by military high schools in Isfahan (1882–83) and Tehran (1884–85). Public elementary schools were opened in 1890, first by Mirza Hasan Roshdiye and later mainly by Sherekat-e Ma‘aref. Schools for girls were founded in the late 1890s, in addition to already-existing missionary schools and classes in private houses for the affluent. By 1918–19—over a century after the first contacts with Western education—there were a considerable number of new elementary and secondary schools, with a total of no less than thirty thousand students.[14] The curriculum and pedagogical approach differed from one school to another according to the educational philosophy of the founders. It was, as ‘Isa Sadiq (a student at such a school and later minister of education) noted, a period of “experimentations with a new education.”[15] However, each school differed thoroughly from the traditional system: the curriculum went far from what was taught in the maktabs, including new sciences and foreign languages. The majority of the teachers and headmasters were graduates of foreign schools or of Dar al-Fonun.

Few reasons made the opposition by the ‘ulama’ to the new elementary schools more forceful and passionate than their resentment of Dar al-Fonun or of the dispatch of students to Europe. They viewed the elementary schools as a threat to the students’ faith and resented their own lack of control over education, especially as such schools dealt with young children in a sensitive phase of their life. Also, unlike the earlier, numerically limited initiatives, they feared that the new elementary schools would lead to sweeping change embracing the entire country. Sending students abroad or to Dar al-Fonun did not threaten the madrese, but the opening of new elementary schools often resulted in the closure of maktabs. Eventually, the ‘ulama’ also deplored the loss of an important source of income by the akhunds (junior clerics). To the clergy, the struggle against the new elementary schools was a struggle for their faith and a defense of their traditional privileges and functions.

Consequently, the struggle over new elementary schooling turned into an acute cultural battle. The ‘ulama’ pressured the government to refrain from supporting the new schools, threatened the schools’ headmasters and staff, and brought pressure to bear on the students and their families. Roshdiye, the driving force behind such schools, suffered takfir (accused of apostasy), and his school in Tabriz was destroyed by tullab (theological students). His father had warned him that by founding new schools, he would be branded as an infidel.[16] In 1903–4, a fatva (religious ruling) by four mojtaheds (prominent clerics) from Najaf urged the shah to forbid the foundation of new schools. The supporters of modern education persuaded the shah to reject the request.[17] Opponents then argued that the new education was harmful to Iran and to Islam, and served as a tool for foreigners to advance their imperialist schemes. Nonetheless, the advocates of the new education overcame clerical opposition. Once the crucial early years had passed, and mainly under Reza Shah (1925–41), the expansion of the new school system—and the concomitant closure of the maktabs—became irreversible.

With all its quantitative and qualitative limitations, the new education of the nineteenth century became the cornerstone of twentieth-century education. In a manner neither planned nor foreseen by its initiators, the new education became extremely significant to the overall modernization of Iran. Beyond the academic contribution, it signified two major innovations: there was a deliberate, even methodical, attempt to learn from the West; and the state assumed responsibility for education, dislodging the religious establishment from its monopoly. These remained major features of Iranian education until the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The Educated Class as a Motor for Change

The new educated class played a crucial role in the nineteenth-century reforms and the liberal movement that led to the Constitutional Revolution. Although too weak to mobilize mass support for their new ideologies, the members of this class were successful in mobilizing some key politicians to endorse reforms, contributing to the growing intellectual enlightenment and promoting new schools. The fact that many recipients of new higher education had moved into politics, government, or various cultural engagements, coupled with the social prestige that went with being Western educated, rendered them all the more capable of promoting the overall modernization of Iran, despite not working in the fields in which they had been trained. In the hectic years of the late nineteenth century, they proved instrumental in promoting Western concepts and offering the ideology to underpin both the Constitutional Revolution and the tobacco movement. Considering their small numbers, graduates of new schools, overseas and at home, had an astounding influence on the spread of liberal thought and the modernization of Iran. In due course, a number of influential reformist politicians emerged. Most prominent among them were the Crown Prince ‘Abbas Mirza and his chief minister Mirza Abu-Qasem Qa’em-maqam early in the century, Amir Kabir in mid-century, and Sepahsalar in the 1870s. A growing number of intellectuals, most of them graduates of foreign universities, joined their entourage.

One of the most important testimonies to the influence of Europe on the first students is the travel book of Mirza Saleh Shirazi, who studied in London (1815–19).[18] He expanded upon his impressions of the political system; personal liberties; the supremacy of law; the limits of royal authority; the concepts of freedom, religion, and the state; and the education system. The notion of political freedom so captivated Shirazi that he referred to England as the “Realm of Freedom” (velayat-e azadi). With much amazement, he described how the regent (George IV) wished to build a new street (to be named after him) but failed because a shopkeeper refused to sell his property. Even all the army, Shirazi maintained, could not force the shopkeeper to sell his property against his will, nor could the regent cause him any harm. All citizens—from the poorest to richest—were subject to the same law and enjoyed the same liberties. Even more illuminating is his remark that azadi (freedom) did not contradict entezam (public order). He wrote of the separation of powers, and tried to make it comprehensible to his readers that the people elected their representatives freely and, thus, became responsible for their destiny; that members of parliament enjoyed unlimited freedom; and that their decisions had sovereign force. “If necessary,” he exclaimed, “parliament can even change the religion.”[19] He took note that, unlike Islam, Christianity was a religion of conscience rather than practice. This led him to conclude that the ‘ulama’ were an obstacle to the progress of Muslim societies.[20]

If his was not the first Persian book to describe the European political system,[21] Shirazi was the first student—from anywhere in the Middle East—to set out his impressions of the West for the benefit of his countrymen. Study abroad influenced the students’ personal conduct and behavior and, with the prestige that went with studying abroad, they influenced many others. Shirazi’s descriptions of England were illuminating for Iranians, contrasting Western practices with the situation in Iran. Finally, rather than in its details, the importance of Shirazi’s book lies in the positive image of the West that it conveyed.

Though not entirely divorced from their Persian–Muslim heritage, the Iranian thinkers found new inspiration in the West. Their writings showed traces of French eighteenth-century thought on education, and some betrayed the influence of the founding fathers of the United States, who held that freedom and illiteracy were irreconcilable. Yet promoting new ideas was not easy. Given the prevalent religious ambience, some of them sought—often unconvincingly or awkwardly—to accommodate Western ideas with Islam. In 1876, Malkom proposed that reformists should present their desired innovations in Islamic terms to make them more easily acceptable. He labeled his approach “reformation of Islam”[22]—a concept reminiscent of the contemporary Egyptian thinker Mohammad ‘Abduh’s “Islamic modernism.” Yet in the second half of the nineteenth century, a new group of reformist thinkers managed to introduce some new ideas and advance the wheels of change.

The interrelation between education, freedom, and progress became the mainstay of intellectual argument then. In numerous treatises, Malkom drove home his view of education as the prerequisite for progress in general and constitutional order in particular. In his Shaykh va Vazir, a fictional dialogue between the shaykh (conservative) and the vazir (reformist), the latter argued that the secret of the strength, welfare, and the survival of nations depend on knowledge, and opined that unless it adopts Western education, Iran will fail to equal the achievements of the West.[23] In Neda’-ye ‘Edalat, he stated that only the spread of education had enabled the West to establish a political order based on justice. Iran is poor because it lacks legal justice (‘edalat-e qanuni) and because of its leaders’ failure to perceive the importance of education.[24] Sepahsalar was concerned primarily with the establishment of a constitutional order as a guarantor of freedom and social justice. To achieve these, he held that a European-style education was essential. ‘Ilm va Jahl, attributed to him, stressed: “The key to spiritual and material progress is knowledge,” adding that “one can achieve perfection only by knowledge.”[25] Mirza Yusef Khan Mostshar al-Doula attached similar importance to the spread of education, but considered a constitutional regime its prerequisite. In Yek Kalame, he claimed that “a single word” contained the key to progress: “Law.” However, without education the reign of law would not survive.[26] In a report to the Crown Prince Mozaffar al-Din, he opined—apparently for the first time in Iran—that education was also vital for fostering national unity.[27]

At the turn of the century, intellectuals’ appeals to expand new education turned more insistent, as was their critique of traditional schooling. Inaugurating a new school in Tehran (1898), Malek al-Motakallemin gave vent to his boundless expectations: “Only through knowledge can mankind achieve the highest peaks of progress; only under its aegis is it possible to establish justice and bring redemption to the world.” Turning to the young students, he said: “Having come to study at these factories for producing human beings (karkhane-ye adam-sazi), you ought to know that the destiny of the world, the fate of your nation, your own future and that of your children—[all] depend on knowledge alone.”[28] In Malkom’s Shaykh va Vazir, the shaykh queried, “How is it at all possible to adopt the principles of infidels?” just for the vazir to respond: “I do not deny that they are infidels. My only claim is that the strength of Europe derives from their unique mechanisms [. . .] The ‘ulama’ should either permit us to imitate the principles of Europeans’ strength, or bring some squadrons of angels down from heaven to rescue us from European rule.”[29] Abul-Qasem Khan Nasser al-Molk, a statesman educated in Britain, regarded constitution as “the origin of happiness, nobleness, and honor.” However, in Iran it may become the “origin of chaos, destruction, suffering, insecurity, and [. . .] sore evils,” because Iran lacked “the knowledge and potential” to turn it to good use. Constitutional order could not survive in an illiterate society as progress did not depend on the formal approval of a constitution but on the spread of education. He added passionately: “In the name of Allah, we need educated people. In the name of the Ka‘ba, the prophet and faith [. . .] we need educated people. The one and only way toward progress, equality, justice, happiness, sovereignty and pride is through spread of knowledge and existence of people who are educated according to the requirements of the times.”[30] For ‘Abd al-Rahim Talebov (Talebzade), the “lack of knowledge and spiritual poverty” were not only the “enemies of freedom,”[31] but education also had a significant economic value. In line with Adam Smith, he regarded “human potential” (este‘dad) as “economic wealth” and education as the main means for its cultivation. In his words, “If we will have a constitution, we will have education, and will possess wealth, order (nazm) and independence. But if we ignore these truths, we will be nothing but fools who betray their nation, homeland and religion.”[32]

At the end of the period under review, the intellectuals’ optimism was further fueled by the modernization of Japan. Its victory over Russia (1904–5) fired the imagination of Muslim intellectuals and breathed confidence in the East’s ability to equal and, eventually, outpace the West. They were impressed by the way the Meiji restoration benefited from educational reform. The fact that Japan, an Eastern country with a constitution, defeated a Western power with no constitution was especially illuminating for them. Ignoring what was unique in the Japanese experience, Iranians used it as a paradigm, a proof of the linkage between education, constitution, and advancement. They often seemed to view education—and in a way also parliamentarism and constitutionalism—as an entity isolated from social, economic, and political structures, one that could be easily transplanted from one country to another. Malek al-Motakallemin and Malkom Khan attested to their underlying sentiment by referring to schools as “factories for producing human beings.” Just as industrial factories “take in raw materials and turn out final products,” Malkom opined, the schools “take in ignorant children and turn out engineers and accomplished thinkers.” Setting up several such “factories” would enable Iran “to advance by 3000 years in the space of three months.”[33] Similar sentiments were expressed by Talebov in his fictional book Ketab-e Ahmad (inspired by Rousseau’s Emile) in a dialogue between the author and his sons, Ahmad and Mahmud. Soon after Ahmad entered a new school, the father told him that in only four months, “you have gained more knowledge than Mahmud, who is attending the maktab for over three years.” Before the age of nine, students at the new schools learned the history of their nation, religion, geometry and arithmetic, geography, physics, chemistry, literature, and several foreign languages. “While the tullab, even at the age of seventy, are still stuck in the laws of taharat (purification), wondering how to spell that word.”[34]

Graduates of universities abroad and Dar al-Fonun were also the driving force behind the first newspapers. The first newspaper, Kaghadh-e Akhbar, published in 1837, eventually led to the publication of Vaqaye‘-e Ettefaqiye in 1851 at Dar al-Fonun, which lasted until the Constitutional Revolution. Later, official or semi-official papers—such as Iran, Sharaf, and Ettela’, still habitually praising the shah and his conduct—also included some educational and literary articles. Much more important were the newspapers published in the diaspora by expatriates mainly from the 1870s onward. Free from supervision or censorship, they argued for reform and for a constitution. The most significant of them were Malkom’s Qanun (London, first published in 1890); Akhtar (Istanbul, 1876); Habl ul-Matin (Calcutta, 1893); and Thoraya and Parvaresh (Cairo, 1890s). Many more were published closer to the Constitutional Revolution. Altogether, Browne lists 371 newspapers published until the revolution, some of which were of “a very high order, and afford examples of a prose style, forcible, nervous, and concise, hitherto almost unknown.”[35]

Another important avenue for intellectual discourse was translation and critical writing. Most prominent among the early translators was Mirza Reza Mohandes (studied in Paris), who translated (in 1829–30) Voltaire’s essays on Peter the Great and Charles XII of Sweden and later Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Many more books appeared with the establishment of Dar al-Fonun. In addition to textbooks, they included translations of European classics, such as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Moliere’s plays, Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, and, of particular significance for Persian readers, Morier’s Hajji Baba of Isfahan. Additionally, biographies of Napoleon Bonaparte, Nicholas I (Russia), Frederick the Great, William I (England), and Louis XV, and short histories of Rome, Athens, France, Russia, and Germany also became available in Persian. The shah likely commissioned some of these translations to glorify the monarchy, but they inadvertently allowed for unflattering comparison, contrasting the shahs and the prevalent poverty in Iran with famous world leaders and an advanced Europe.

In the last quarter of the century, numerous original books were also published, usually conveying critical messages. Most influential were the books by Talebov (such as Ketab-e Ahmad and Azadi va-Siyasat), Zayn al-‘Abedin Maraghe’i (Siyahat Name-ye Ebrahim Beg), Mostshar al-Doula (Yek Kalame), the treatises of Malkom, and the publications of Mirza Mohammad-Hasan Khan E‘temad al-Saltane (who studied at Dar al-Fonun and later in France). It is not certain whether the last actually wrote and translated the countless books appearing under his name, or if some of them were written by the team that he headed in the Ministry of the Press, but they are believed to reflect his views. Among such books are the Salnames, Mir’at al-Boldan, Matla‘at al-Shams, and Al-Ma‘ather va al-Athar. His sharp criticism of the mismanagement of Iranian affairs came out most clearly in Khalsa (Ecstasy), also known as Ketab-e Khab (Dream Book). Like Maraghe’i’s Ebrahim Beg and Talebov’s Ketab-e Ahmad, Khalsa adopted a loose fictional framework—a poetical dream—to castigate Qajar dignitaries for the decline of Iran. In Khalsa, the nineteenth-century chancellors were called upon to confess their sins in a tribunal “in the presence” of the great rulers of Persian history, standing accused of Iran’s decadence. Reviewing the Qajar period through their actions, eight years later, Seyyed Jamal-al-Din Wa‘ez, Malek al-Motakallemin, and Sheykh Ahmad Kermani wrote Ro’ya-ye Sadeqe (True Dreams), making the dignitaries, clerics, and governors account for their sins at the Last Judgment. Among the charges against the ‘ulama’ was their opposition to new education.

Gradually, many more intellectuals felt an urge to make their newfound views public. Though merely “inexperienced youngsters,” Hedayat wrote about the returning graduates, “each holds under his arms a thesis (resale) about the French Revolution and wishes to play the role of Robespierre or Danton.”[36] Writing about the leading intellectuals of that time, Mangol Bayat stated that they perceived themselves “as the new apostles,” spreading reason, science, liberty, and progress.[37] They did not necessarily share the same perception of Western civilization, nor did they want to imitate it in every respect, but they were impressed by what they witnessed and viewed borrowing elements of it as indispensable. However, a major barrier was the perception that change and innovation are un-Islamic (tantamount to bid‘ah). Yet throughout the century, intellectuals managed to mitigate such concerns, at least to some degree and in certain limited groups.

The urge to publish was supplemented by a desire to read. The reading public fed on political treatises, periodicals, and newspapers. Banned publications were smuggled into the country and read avidly, even at the shah’s court. Iranians, with their traditional admiration for verbal skill, marveled at the new idiomatic style and popular language of such books. “The intricate tales and excitements of this new literature were so fascinating [. . .] that families used to gather to hear them read aloud.”[38] The urge to write, however, seemed stronger than the aptitude to read. There is some truth in what Hedayat grieved: “Of books we have enough; what we lack are readers [. . .] The customers are illiterate.”[39]

Thus, when it came to mobilizing mass support for the tobacco revolt (1891) or the Constitutional Revolution (1906), the intellectuals needed elite groups as a driving force. The main contribution of the intellectuals was in influencing the influential segments of the elites, including some ‘ulama’ and officials, not the populace. When political change was finally in the offing and revolutionary forces were searching for an ideology to unite the divergent components of their camp, the intellectuals offered their ideology as the cohesive element. Freedom, parliamentarism, and constitutionalism were their contribution, and the wording of the constitution of 1906 carried their imprint. In the 1970s, their fellow intellectuals could not claim as much.

In all, the nineteenth century was a significant phase in transition from traditional schooling to new education inspired by the West. It was a slow process—in fact, too slow—involving severe ideological and political clashes between contradictory convictions. The following overly picturesque description by Mojtaba Minovi, a prominent twentieth-century historian, seems to properly illustrate the situation. He compared the role of the recipients of new education to spreading seeds in an uncultivated soil, where the land had not been fertilized or irrigated, and weeds and stones had not been removed. Some of the seeds, therefore, fell on spots where they could not germinate, but a few fell on fruitful soil and yielded the crop of progress.[40]

Conclusion

In the search for a path to confront the challenge of modernism, Iranian political thought over the last two centuries has fluctuated between extremes. From the Islamic doctrine that characterized the country’s general outlook until the late eighteenth century, Iran gradually underwent a phase of change, inspired by the West, that was exacerbated in the generation preceding the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

Integral to the general fabric of society, education has been a catalyst for change and an element itself subject to transformation. In the contest between traditional-religious and new, Western-style schooling, which took on the nature of a Kulturkampf in the late nineteenth century, the latter emerged triumphant and the religious establishment lost its age-old monopoly over education. Once the government had control, it changed the structure and content of the schooling system. New subjects, not previously included in the traditional curriculum, became the stock-in-trade of the new education. The new education of the nineteenth century was only the prelude, still limited at the end of the century. This initial change was underpinned by the Pahlavi monarchy (1925–79).

Perhaps the most significant testimonial to the value of the new education and to the degree to which it has become rooted in Iranian culture has come from the Islamic regime. With all the opposition of the ‘ulama’ to Western-style education, the elementary school system, despite significant changes in the content, follows the new patterns. Even as they became firmly in control in the first four decades of Islamic rule, the ‘ulama’ did not reverse the process. Education, with the exception of the madrese, has remained much closer to Westernized education than to traditional schooling. New sciences are included in the curriculum, and English language is taught at schools. Universities, closed for Islamization immediately after the revolution, were reopened after two years with their overall structure intact. The clerics in power have used the fruits of modern education in the service of their revolutionary goals in spite of their initial opposition. In a way, they seem to aspire to turn the wheel back to where it had been at the outset of the period discussed, when a distinction was made between (desirable) Western science and technology and (undesirable) Western culture. There is no reason to think that it is more feasible to make such a distinction now than it was then.

Finally, Iran’s historical identity has long been based on two main pillars—which did not necessarily live in harmony throughout the centuries—ancient/imperial/Persian and Islamic/Shi‘i. Since the nineteenth century, a third layer of Iranian identity seems to have emerged—modern/Western. Together, they shape Iran’s new distinctiveness. New education has had a significant role in introducing Western-style education and, through it, has influenced other aspects of Iranian life. Constitutionalism, parliamentarism, and nationalism, as well as modern education—deeply entrenched in modern Iranian history and endorsed also by the Islamic regime—are borrowed from Western culture. The question, it seems, is not if Western civilization and local traditions can live together, but rather if it is at all possible to totally separate them.

[1]This article has been reproduced from my book Education and the Making of Modern Iran (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). This book was translated into Persian in Tehran in 2017: Nezam-e Amuzeshi va Sakhtan-e Iran-e Modern, by Hekmat Sina.

[2]Bernard Lewis, The Middle East and the West (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 45.

[3]Gustav von Grunebaum, “Acculturation and Self-Realization,” in The Contemporary Middle East, ed. B. Rivlin and J.S. Szyliowicz (New York: Random House, 1965), 141–42.

[4]Franz Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant: The Concept of Knowledge in Medieval Islam (Leiden, NL: Brill, 2007), 89–91, 295.

[5]A lecture by Malkom Khan in London cited in Fereshte Nura’i, Tahqiq dar bare-ye Afkar-e Mirza Malkom Khan, Nazem al-Doula (Tehran: Ketabha-ye Jibi, 1973–74), 48–52.

[6]James Morier, A Second Journey through Persia, Armenia and Asia Minor (London: Longman, 1818), 213.

[7]See Malkom Khan, “Dastgah-e Divan,” in Majmu‘e Athar-e Mirza Malkom Khan, ed. Mohit Tabataba’i (Tehran: Danesh, AH 1327/AD 1948–49), 73–95. Quote on p. 78. All translations are mine unless otherwise stated.

[8]“Shaykh va Shukh,” in Afkar-e Ejtema‘i va Siyasi va Eqtesadi dar Athar-e Montasher Nashode-ye Dowran-e Qajar, ed. Fereydun Adamiyyat and Homa Nateq (Tehran: Agah, 1977), 144–49. Quote on p. 149.

[9]As cited by Mohit Tabataba’i, Shafaq-e Sorkh, “Tarikhche e‘zam muhasel beh Orupa,” (6 Murdad 1312/28 July 1933).

[10]‘Abdollah Mostowfi, Tarikh-e Ejtema‘i va Edari Dowre-ye Qajariye, vol. 1 (Tehran: Tehran Mosavvar, n.d.), 70; Hajj Mirza Yahya Doulatabadi, Tarikh Mo‘aser ya Hayat-e Yahya, vol. 1 (Tehran: Ibn Sina, 1957–58), 324–28; Hosein Makki, Zendegani-ye Mirza Taqi Khan, Amir Kabir (Tehran: ‘Ilmi, 1958), 183.

[11]Mostowfi, Tarikh-e Ejtema‘i, 86; Doulatabadi, Tarikh Mo‘aser, 327–29; Mehdi Qoli Hedayat, Khaterat va Khatarat (Tehran: Rangin, 1950–51), 75.

[12]‘Ali Asghar Hekmat, “Ta‘limat-e ‘Aliye: Notq-e Jenab-i Aqa-ye Hekmat . . .,” Ta‘lim va Tarbiyyat, sal 6, shumareh 4 (Tir 1315/June–July 1936), 249–60. Quote on p. 251–52.

[13] Dhabihollah Safa, “’Madrase,” Iranshahr, vol. 1 (Tehran: Daneshgah-e Tehran, 1963), 736. See similarly Mostowfi, Tarikh-e Ejtema‘i, 86; Hedayat, Khaterat va Khatarat, 94.

[14]Sazeman-e Barname va Budjeh, Markaz-e Amar, Bayan-e Amari-ye Tahavvolat-e Ejtema‘i va Eqtesadi-ye Iran dar Dowran-e [. . .] Pahlavi (Tehran: 1976–77), 35–36; ‘Isa Sadiq, Tarikh Farhang-e Iran (Tehran: Daneshgah-e Tehran, 1976), 354–59.

[15]Sadiq, Farhang, 359.

[16]Doulatabadi, Tarikh Mo ‘aser, 180–84; “Roshdiye Pir-e Ma‘aref,” Amuzesh va Parvaresh, Dawreh 14, Shumarah 10 (December 1944), 543–46; Mehdi Malekzade, Tarikh-e Enqelab-e Mashrutiyyat-e Iran, vol. 1 (Tehran: 1948–49), 150.

[17]Doulatabadi, Tarikh Mo‘aser, 238–43.

[18]Mirza Saleh Shirazi, Safarname (Tehran: Razun, 1968).

[19]Shirazi, Safarname, 325.

[20]Shirazi, Safarname, 427.

[21]Two others had preceded him: Mir ‘Abd al-Latif Shushtari, Tuhfat al-‘Alam va Zayl al-Tuhfah, ed. Samad Muvahhid ([Bombay: s.n., 1847]; Tehran: Tahuri, AH 1363/AD 1984), 363–67; Mirza Abu-Taleb Khan ibn Mohammad Esfahani, Masir Talebi fi Bilad al-Faranji (Tehran: Ketabha-ye Jibi, 1973).

[22]Wilfrid S. Blunt, Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt (London: 1907), 83–84.

[23]Malkom Khan, Nazem al-Doula, Kolliyyat-e Malkom (Tehran: n.p., 1907), 88–95.

[24]Malkom Khan, “Neda-ye ‘Edalat,” in Majmu‘e Athar-e Mirza Malkom Khan, ed. Mohit Tabataba’i (Tehran: Danesh, AH 1327/AD 1948–49), 193–217. See also Nura’i, Afkar-e Mirza Malkom Khan, 35–57.

[25]Guity Nashat, The Origins of Modern Reform in Iran, 1870–1880 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 144.

[26]Mehdi Bamdad, Sharh-e Hal-e Rejal-e Iran dar Qorun-e 12-14 Hejri, vol. 4 (Tehran: Navar, 1968–69), 490–93; Ferydun Adamiyyat, Fekr-e Azadi va Moqaddame-ye Nehzat-e Mashrutiyyat (Tehran: Sokhan, 1961–62), 182–211.

[27]See the report in Nazem al-Islam Kermani, Tarikh Bidari-ye Iraniyan, vol. 1 (Tehran: Bonyad-e Farhang, 1967–68), 206–11.

[28]Malekzade, Tarikh-e Enqelab-e Mashrutiyyat, 152–54.

[29]Malkom, Kolliyyat, 89–91.

[30]Nazem al-Islam Kermani, Tarikh Bidari-ye Iraniyan, vol. 2 (Tehran: Bonyad-e Farhang, 1967–68), 214–23.

[31]Mirza ‘Abd al-Rahim Talebov [Talebzade], Azadi va Siyasat (Tehran: Sahar, 1978–79), 111–13.

[32]Mirza ‘Abd al-Rahim Talebov, Ketab-e Ahmad, vol. 2 (Istanbul: 1895–96), 80–84, 89–90.

[33]Tabataba’i, Malkom Khan, 8–13; Hamid Algar, Mirza Malkum Khan: A Study in the History of Iranian Modernization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 28.

[34]Mirza ‘Abd al-Rahim Talebov, Ketab-e Ahmad, vol. 1 (Istanbul: 1895–96), 10–11; Talebov, Ketab-e Ahmad, vol. 2, 5–7.

[35]Edward Browne, The Press and Poetry of Modern Persia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), 27–153; Edward Browne, The Persian Revolution of 1905–1909 (London: Frank Cass, 1966), 127–28.

[36]Hedayat, Khaterat va Khatarat, 150.

[37]Mangol Bayat, Mysticism and Dissent: Socioreligious Thought in Qajar Iran (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1982), 134.

[38]Hassan Kamshad, Modern Persian Prose Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 28.

[39]Hedayat, Khaterat va Khatarat, iii.

[40]Mojtaba Minovi, “Avvalin Karavan-e Ma’refat,” Yaghma 6 (1953–54): 181.

Ten Theses on Iranian Cinema

Sara Saljoughi Volume 3, Number 3, Fall 2018

Sara Saljoughi <sara.saljoughi@utoronto.ca> is Assistant Professor of English and Cinema Studies. She has published articles in Iranian Studies, Camera Obscura, Feminist Media Histories, Film International, and Jadaliyya. Her current book project, Burning Visions: The Counter-Cinema of the Iranian New Wave, examines the aesthetics and politics of art cinema in Iran during the 1960s and 1970s. She is the co-editor of 1968 and Global Cinema (Wayne State University Press, 2018).

In memory of Abbas Kiarostami, 1940-2016

The study of Iranian cinema has blossomed over the past two decades. Where it was once dominated by the study of auteur cinema made in the context of the new film industry of the Islamic Republic of Iran, it now spans the history of the moving image in Iran. New studies push forward earlier understandings of the field by introducing new periodization, critical genres, and new methods of reading and interpretation. Alongside the expansion of topics and approaches is a breadth in disciplinary methodologies. Current research in Iranian cinema is informed by fields as diverse as Middle Eastern studies, film studies, comparative literature, history, and anthropology, to name a few. It is now crucial to signal this shift away from earlier studies that tended to focus on the social and political dimensions of cinema, at the cost of examining other equally important aspects of film. Insofar as fields of study form by first offering an account of objects, it is especially important to chart how the field has changed and, more specifically, the ways it has opened up and expanded. Alongside that opening must necessarily come some questioning of the object itself. While it is certainly useful to ask “what is Iranian cinema?” we might also want to ask how we have told the stories of Iranian cinema and how we might alter and change those stories as we begin to utilize new interdisciplinary paradigms.

The present essay takes this opening of the field as the occasion to propose ten theses on Iranian cinema that open possibilities for rethinking the field as well as key moments in its history. The title of the essay is a nod to Abbas Kiarostami’s Dah/Ten (2003), a text that represents dynamic shifts, both in the work of the filmmaker and in the broader Iranian cinematic landscape. In attempting to attach ten theses to Iranian film history, the essay borrows the experimental, fragmented structure of Ten in order to imagine a new synchronic history.

Iranian cinema has always been attentive to the politics of looking.

From its earliest years of production, Iranian cinema has concerned itself with the politics of looking. While an engagement with the politics of looking might be inherent to the moving image itself, investigations into contemporary Iranian cinema overwhelmingly suggest that attention to the look is the province of post-revolutionary film culture and its focus on an Islamic cinema. Doubtless, this emphasis is part of an overall tendency to equate the new film culture post-1979 as representing a radical departure from previous film practices. This is certainly true in terms of the guidelines on screen representations of women and of heterosexual relations. But beyond this, there are questions of aesthetics and politics that persist throughout the history of Iranian cinema. One of these is the question of fascination with the image and how that fascination prompts us to look in particular ways—at each other, the world, and ourselves. Haji Agha, Aktor-e Sinama/Haji Agha, the Cinema Actor (1933, dir. Ovanes Ohanians) one of the earliest feature length films made in Iran, explores this fascination with the image in the context of skepticism of the new technology of the film camera. In particular, the film asks us to consider how propriety is implied and/or challenged by the looks the cinema engenders. The question seems urgent because the moving image differs in significant ways from the images that had circulated in Iranian culture prior to this moment. It was not just the images that differed but the manner in which they were exhibited and seen.

Haji Agha, the second feature by Ohanians—who is also credited with the first Iranian feature film Abi and Rabi (1930), can be read as a critique of a reactionary society that wishes to modernize but is deeply suspicious of the changes that come with modernization, such as new technologies. Ohanians acts in the film as a director looking for a subject for his film. He lands on the titular Haji Agha, a rich conservative with community importance. Haji Agha’s daughter and son-in-law conspire with the director to capture Haji unawares. In an exaggerated manner, when Haji Agha sees his own image in the finished film, he is captivated by it, forgetting the suspicion he previously held. Seeing himself reflected on screen completely transforms his position on the cinema, which he comically comes to appreciate. The politics of looking as presented in the film can be read as an allegory for the push-and-pull effect of modernization; on the one hand, it is seen as the road to the dilution of so-called tradition values (that might try to restrict certain looks), while on the other hand it offers a seductively new way of understanding the world around us.

The fascination with the image, as it is explored in Haji Agha, opens out in later Iranian cinema as a potential of the frame. The film shows us, through Haji Agha’s altered stance on cinema—indeed, his transformation—the possibilities of the frame as a device for shaping our vision of the world. Nowhere is this explored more explicitly than in Kiarostami’s cinema. The windows and cars that abound in Kiarostami’s films are suggestive of multiple ways to frame vision, even within a single shot. Kiarostami often have us think about looking by framing and reframing, but also by playing with light to introduce new types of images. In 2010’s Copie conforme/Certified Copy, we see Elle (Juliette Binoche) and James (William Shimell) through the windshield of a car, which reflects buildings and cobblestones that lie in the road ahead. We also see straight through the car and out the rear window, seeing what they have passed and what Elle, the driver, might see in her rearview mirror. Throughout the film, Kiarostami plays with these multiple viewpoints, suggesting different possibilities for looking.

One of the implications of this long history of interest in looking is that the modesty guidelines imposed on Iranian cinema after the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran are not novel in their attempts to write overlooking as a troubled and troubling act. Throughout the history of Iranian cinema, filmmakers have used various types of looks to trouble any notion of straightforward visuality and looking relations.

Sabzian is Iranian cinema.

Sabzian, the cinephile star of Abbas Kiarostami’s Nema-ye Nazdik/Close-Up (1990) states, quite baldly, “I am interested in cinema.” This declaration is more than the admission of a hobby or interest; it is the crux of the man’s journey of self-transformation.

Hossein Sabzian infamously impersonates Mohsen Makhmalbaf to an impressed and impressionable Tehran family, thereby gaining access to their home, lives, and eventually, financial support. Close-Up is one of Kiarostami’s most revered films for the manner in which it restages the real-life events of the Sabzian case with the social actors playing themselves. The reenactment allows for reflection on what occurred and its repetition in front of Kiarostami’s camera. Through the reenactment, the depth of Sabzian’s desire to become Makhmalbaf compels viewers to contemplate this very bewildering form of cinematic embodiment. In stating his interest in cinema, Sabzian symbolizes something much larger than the scope of the film. It is a statement that calls forth a radical subjectivity, which mirrors the transformative moment in Iranian cinema within which the film takes place.

To speak of his interest in cinema, Sabzian described an inclination toward cinema. It is a statement of cinephilia, but one so deep that it performs the work of transforming the subject into cinema itself. It is as though Sabzian is stating he is the cinema. The statement is reflective of the official status of cinema post-revolution. If Sabzian is the cinema, then it bears asking what we know of Sabzian and what that might tell us about cinema. He is a pious, working class man struggling to survive. He belongs to the segment of Iranian society that the nation-state (following the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran) projects. He then must also be implicated in the state’s opposition to cinema as a technology of imperialism. Sabzian embodies the cinema by becoming what he knows of it—seemingly a sole film by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, The Cyclist (1987). He is thus a condition of possibility for the rebirth of Iranian cinema for his very existence implies that watching film is a transformative experience. The regime too, as Negar Mottahedeh has argued, imagines a heterosexual male as its ideal spectator, for the manner in which screen codes are oriented always toward that subject’s projected desire.[1] The notion of becoming and transforming though the act of spectatorship is one implicit in the very position the state took toward cinema after 1979. This is the case both in terms of restrictions and guidelines, as well as in Khomeini’s famous vote of confidence for the productive possibilities of revolutionary cinema. Sabzian’s transformation into Makhmalbaf, even if dubiously intended, suggests that cinema holds possible an endless variety of such transformations. The relationship between cinema and subjectivity then opens out onto different configurations, which may or may not align with the project of the nation-state. In other words, the state may wish to engender a particular type of citizen at various points in history but this may or may not “work” in the spectatorial experience.

Iranian cinema is in intimate dialogue with other Iranian arts.

Through its engagement with a variety of Iranian arts, such as poetry, painting, and drama, Iranian cinema is in a constant state of questioning about cinema’s relation to these arts and its pivotal position in national culture.

“Cinema is not cinema as we know it.” This could be the message of Shirin (2008), one of Kiarostami’s more experimental films. One of the film’s central concerns is the nature of cinema, how viewers understand the medium, and what process best enables thinking through these questions. The viewer of Shirin watches a number of women—all well- known actresses—watching a film at the cinema. The film they are watching is an adaptation of the twelfth-century epic poem, “Khosrow and Shirin.” Kiarostami’s spectator is never permitted to watch the film-within-the-film, seeing only the faces of the women as they watch and react to the events on the screen. The film attempts to make an ontological statement about cinema by breaking image from sound. It also robs us of the point-of-view of the women who watch the film, as we never see a reverse shot from their perspective. These challenges to our understanding of film language break open what we consider cinema—that composite whose elements are often seamlessly combined. The story of Khosrow and Shirin becomes as important as Kiarostami’s film because it is the sonic accompaniment to our observation of the women spectators. This is a novel take on adaptation better described as a kind of marriage. Here we have the persistence of the old, through the re-imagining of such an important cultural text. Through this juxtaposition, we are invited to re-think cinema and also to re-imagine the ways in which cinema and other Iranian cultural traditions relate to one another. In this, the gambit of Shirin shares much with the contrapuntal stance of Sabzian. It is the proximity of cinema to other arts, the intimacy of the moment of suture for the spectator (regardless of the ideological outcome) that makes cinema such a vital part of the politics of Iranian culture.

The relationship of cinema to Iranian literature is a long one. As Hamid Naficy discusses, there has been a long history of stories and poems from Iranian mythology and folklore adapted for the screen, as well adaptations of contemporary Iranian literature in the mid-twentieth century.[2] During the heyday of the Iranian New Wave in the 1960s and 1970s, dissident literature by writers such as Gholamhossein Sa’edi and Houshang Golshiri were adapted into relatively successful screenplays for films that were understood to be critiquing the regime of Mohammed Reza Shah. Through this intimate relationship, cinema gained a degree of gravitas as a serious art form through its encounter with literature and poetry. This collaboration between cinema and other forms is evident not only in terms of literature providing the narrative content of films but also in terms of the aesthetics of various forms. The very notion of a poetic cinema (most often ascribed to documentary in the Iranian context) owes much to the historical encounter between cinema and poetry. Poet Forough Farrokhzad’s film editing, which begins with Golestan’s A Fire but comes into full fruition in her film, Khaneh siah ast/The House is Black (1962), put forward a groundbreaking collaboration between the two forms. The rhythm of Farrokhzad’s poetic language fuels her experiments with montage, while the worldview of the film provides an intertextual link to the social consciousness of her poetry.[3] The sensibility of this encounter between poetry and cinema can be traced in Iranian art cinema over the last half century.

If we consider Iranian cinema to have always been in collaboration (rather than only “dialogue”) with other Iranian arts, then we have opportunity to imagine anew the emergence of cinema in Iran. One of the dominant theses regarding cinema in Iran posits that we can consider the form as co-emerging with modernity.[4] While there is certainly much to suggest this historically, the relationship of cinema to Iranian art provides a model for thinking cinema beyond the model of an imported Western technology. To conceptualize the development of Iranian cinema in a local and national context allows us to see the ways in which the status of cinema can be understood differently in different historical situations.[5] Future work that expands existing insights into the relationship between Iranian arts such as pardekhani and cinema could help develop knowledge in this area.

Iranian art cinema pays homage to the Persian miniature.

If Iranian cinema is intimately involved with earlier Iranian art forms, then the tradition of miniature painting is its most forceful example. The miniature has been described as “using a continuous space that infers a single temporal moment”—monoscenic, while at the same time representing multiple perspectives.[6] Multiple perspectives are particularly important to what David J. Roxburgh calls the visual logic of the paintings, for they “do not control the viewer’s bodily relationship to surface.”[7] As we look at a miniature painting, its compositional structure frees the viewer’s head and eyes to roam over the entire painting, moving in multiple directions. For Roxburgh, this opens up interpretational possibilities that supplant the temporality of the image.

This feature of the composition is striking for its compatibility with the temporal slowness of Iranian art cinema. There is a mutual relation of intermediality that is afforded and aided by this compatibility. The temporality of a film like Zir-e darakhtan zeitoun/Through the Olive Trees (Kiarostami, 1994) and its final scene, where the lovers weave through the trees and out into a clear field as we watch from an extreme long shot, brings to life the compositional possibilities of the miniature in its collision with cinema. Filmmakers such as Marva Nabili, director of Khak-e sar be morh/The Sealed Soil (1977), have noted the influence of miniature painting on the mise-en-scène of their films. This influence can take shape in several ways. We have, on the one hand, a mimicry of composition. In Nabili’s film this is expressed by way of the isolation of the human figure within a natural landscape. On the other hand, we also see in Iranian cinema a propensity to emulate the loose interpretative framework offered by the miniature form. Miniatures could be interpreted differently depending on the time of reading. They relied upon the person explicating the image and the context within which the explication took place.[8] In this way, we might argue vehemently against the charge of style over substance. This charge has been aimed, quite unsurprisingly given their fame, at directors such as Kiarostami. Indeed, David J. Roxburgh notes that this same charge of superficiality and surface was made against Persian miniature painting, aided by a disciplinary dependence on Western paradigms of analysis.[9] But where one might see a lack of explicit political content—this is despite strategies of distanciation that are quite common in the filmmakers’ work—we might instead consider that lack as an interpretive openness whereby the moving image signifies in a multitude of political ways. This does not suggest that the films are so open that they are meaningless and flat. Rather, those who wish to analyze Iranian art cinema must look for aesthetic strategies such as citations of the miniature in addition to their more common identification of modernist techniques.

Iranian cinema must be understood in the disciplinary context of film studies.

The interpretation of Iranian cinema reached a new horizon with the publication of Negar Mottahedeh’s Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema (Duke University Press, 2008). This groundbreaking book presents a new moment in the study of Iranian cinema by re-reading post-revolutionary art cinema as a women’s cinema. This interpretive gesture aimed to re-think the new guidelines on screen representations of women and of heterosexual, non-familial relations. Importantly, Mottahedeh reads in directors’ interpretations of the guidelines not only the usual workarounds artists must do under censorship, but instead the seizure of an unparalleled creative opportunity. Filmmakers such as Bahrami Beyzai, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and Abbas Kiarostami, Mottahedeh argues, were creating a new grammar for Iranian cinema, one based in part on the state’s projection of the ideal citizen-spectator. Mottahedeh’s reading of Iranian art cinema in the 1980s and 1990s is facilitated by an engagement with psychoanalytic and semiotic theories of cinema. It is her engagement with 1970s feminist film theory in particular that heralds the book’s new methodology for understanding Iranian film culture. In this way, Mottahedeh’s book represents the beginning of entirely new possibilities for understanding Iranian cinema within the framework of the discipline of film and media studies.

The specter of fire haunts Iranian cinema.

It is possible to write a history of Iranian cinema as a history of fire. When we invoke fire in relation to Iranian cinema, we think first of the infamous Cinema Rex fire in 1978, an event that is a metonymy of the mainstream reaction to cinema in the lead-up to the 1979 Revolution. The Cinema Rex fire took aim at the trajectory of Iranian cinema, at the audacity of the moving image, and at the spectators who convened for the pleasures of the screen. Its perpetrators remain shrouded in mystery, with various theories as to which faction might have committed the crime. One thing is certain: the fire in Abadan led to many other copycat fires at cinemas across Iran. The year 1978 might be said to present the death of cinema in Iran, and it certainly appeared that way, even if its death was short lived. The metonymic fire flickered years into the post-revolutionary cinematic culture, as a quiet rage that had once stopped cinema in its tracks only to turn around and reignite its very language. Fire functions not only as the engine of death and change in Iranian cinema, but also as potential. It is renewal that persists. And we may think of the qualities of fire, such as burning, as metaphor for the utopian ideals of Iranian cinema prior to the revolution. Elsewhere I discuss the Cinema Rex fires as an eruption of energy and how that energy contained within it not just a reactionary dismissal of cinema, but also visions of how cinema could be used toward social transformation.[10] The repetition of the Cinema Rex story in so many accounts of Iranian cinema demonstrate the perception of fire as renewal in the collective unconscious of those who wish to tell the stories of Iranian cinema. Perhaps the burning oil fields of Ebrahim Golestan’s Yek atash/A Fire (1961) were prescient in more than one way. Golestan is associated with the tradition of poetic documentary in pre-revolutionary Iran and A Fire, which was edited by poet and filmmaker Forough Farrokhzad, sets forth a new film language. The images of the industrial site of the oil fields, the images of workers and the landscape are paired with a poetic voice (Golestan’s own) describing the massive, seemingly unending fire and the efforts to contain it. The spread of the fire strikes us now as metaphor for Golestan and Farrokhzad’s influence on Iranian cinema, much of which bears the imprint of the poetic rhythm of their editing and the non-interventionist attitude to the social world conveyed by the films’ commentary. If the year of cinema burnings in 1978 managed to only briefly terminate the Iranian film industry, the story of the rebirth of Iranian cinema after the revolution is all the more compelling for such a powerful fire ceases only when it is transformed into something else.

When we refer to Iranian cinema as a national cinema, we understand Iranian cinema as a distinctly international phenomenon.

A familiar way of looking at Iranian cinema has been through the category of national cinema. As Andrew Higson has argued, one of the ways a body of films comes to stand as the “national” cinema of a given nation-state is often through international perception of that nation’s cinema.[11] Moreover, as Higson argues, art cinema often comes to stand in for and define national cinema because it is in most cases the cinema that circulates at international film festivals and the like.[12] This could not be truer in the Iranian context. Think here of the appearance of Abbas Kiarostami on the cover of Cahiers du cinéma, with the question, “Qui-êtes vous M. Kiarostami?” signalling the recognition of Iranian cinema beyond its borders, but even more so, suggesting, with its questions, that recognition by European film circles confers upon non-Western cinemas an arrival of sorts.[13] This notion of art cinema standing in for national cinema raises the question of whether Iranian art cinema is too dominant in terms of the reception and understanding of Iranian cinema more broadly. What makes the films of Kiarostami and other auteurs examples of national cinema? Why not an immensely popular film such as Marmoulak/The Lizard (2004)? The conflict between art and popular cinemas is neither new nor unique to Iran, but it remains important to ask why a supposed “cinema of quality” is considered to speak for the nation. In the context of Iran, it is somewhat troubling that the period of political reform in Iran coincided with international audiences ascribing a relationship of paradox between Iranian cinema and Iran the state. The charming children and bucolic landscapes of Iranian art cinema were interpreted as salves for the more common media images of Iran circulating in the West—threatening and hostile crowds on the other side of a supposed civilizational divide. This type of praise is more than troubling for it posits cultural production as a kind of oasis, while also undermining the manifold nuances of a given film into a mere example of triumph under censorship.

It is the work of the international circulation of Iranian art cinema that write that cinema back into the nation’s “national” cinema. To call Iranian cinema an international phenomenon does not undo its “Iranian-ness,” but rather ascribes to this vast body of films a quality of mutability not dissimilar from the transformative effects of watching a film. The act of traveling, bringing with it encounters that inevitably change the traveler (whether human or here, an art object) can also function as bringing to the fore qualities that are less visible when rooted. When we discuss the politics of reading in the Anglo-American academy, we often interrogate the practices of reading non-Western art as an act rife with assumptions about the object in question. In particular, it is the tendency to allegorize non-Western art as always nationally oriented that collapses the particularities of the work.[14] But if we consider that strange object—the Iranian film abroad—as a thing quite distinctly its own and therefore only representative of “national cinema” in that context, we can begin to clarify the different ways in which the “national” in national cinema comes into being. The stakes of this letting go are a more productive mode of inquiry that might allow us to see the ways in which Iranian films themselves are persistent in their interrogation of the national. Indeed, “which Iran?” as the protagonist of Ferydoun Rahnema’s Pesar-e Iran az Madarash Bikhabar Ast/The Son of Iran Has No News from His Mother (1976) asks.

Iranian cinema, as a field of study, is in the midst of a significant transformation.

How do we understand and write the history of Iranian cinema? The publication of Hamid Naficy’s four-volume opus, A Social History of Iranian Cinema (Duke University Press, 2011-12) represents a major turning point in the field. Until Naficy’s book, there had been virtually no account, in English, that covered the breadth and longevity of Iranian cinema. Beginning with the dawn of cinema in Iran and taking the reader through to the contemporary moment, with all its transnationalism and box office successes, Naficy’s history of Iranian cinema is a robust treatise on the diversity of what we call “Iranian cinema.” Discussing everything from artists’ film to queer cinema and diasporic film, the books present numerous new areas for research. These areas would undoubtedly bring with them new research methodologies. Where the study of Iranian cinema was once rather limited to studying the effects of the revolution on film and visual culture, a more expansive understanding of film cultures in Iran and the Iranian diaspora allow for a more multifaceted understanding of cinema.

Studies of cinema after 1979 focused rather significantly on auteur-based studies or works that emphasized the social dimensions of cinema. Newer works, such as Blake Atwood’s Reform Cinema in Iran: Film and Political Change in the Islamic Republic (Columbia University Press, 2016) put forward new critical genres. Atwood argues that to simply label Iranian cinema after 1979 “post-revolutionary” is to gloss over the significant differences between revolutionary cinema (that which came with regime change in the immediate years after the revolution) and reform cinema, which was closely aligned with the politics of the reform movement and former President Mohammad Khatami.[15] Atwood reads the relationship between cinema and politics as mutually determining, which marks a departure from the way this relationship has been understood in the field. New concepts require new methodologies and here Atwood’s book is also illustrative of the changes underway in the field. In Reform Cinema, the political dimensions of cinema are considered in tandem with an analysis of the aesthetics and formal strategies of films. What these new approaches to studying Iranian cinema demonstrate is that the field is opening up and in that opening, reveals itself to be capacious for different modes of reading. The opening of the field to accommodate new approaches also operates at the level of individual films, which can only deepen in significant when understood through different approaches at various points in the history of the field.

This is not a thesis on Iranian cinema.

Jafar Panahi’s In Film Nist/This is Not a Film (2011) made under house arrest after he was sentenced to time in prison and a twenty-year ban on filmmaking, raises significant questions about the conditions of film production in Iran. The film cheekily claims it is “not a film” in order to bypass the restrictions on Panahi’s activities. But it is also not a film insofar as the activity of making it frustrates Panahi’s expectations of what a film ought to be. In a crucial scene, Panahi and his co-director Mojtaba Mirtahmasb sit on the floor of his living sketching an outline of frame composition in a scene, and Panahi writes off his “film” as not at all a film for its lack of story or plot. Blake Atwood discusses the manner in which This is Not a Film uses the question of medium specificity to investigate who has the right to tell stories and how they are told.[16]

This is not a thesis on Iranian cinema. To have a thesis on “Iranian cinema” would be to work against what I have described here as its mutability, its volatility, and its openness to transformation. The act of watching Panahi’s film makes us ask, if I am watching it, is it a film (even if the director claims it is not)? And so we might ask, in our attempt to theorize Iranian cinema, what is Iranian cinema? Who decides that its history can be chronicled, or that its objects are known and therefore closed to interpretation? Who decides its parameters? To avoid a definitive answer would allow the thing itself—the object—to escape our grasp, and it is precisely what might allow us to think with these films and non-films.

The future of Iranian cinema is…

Why write ten theses on Iranian cinema? I have proposed ten arguments for thinking Iranian cinema, which range from an analysis of the aesthetics of Iranian cinema, its relationship to other arts, and ways of understanding the changing field of Iranian cinema studies. What repeats in these theses is the mutual existence of historical discontinuity and, what remains a steadfast feature of Iranian cinema—its ability to engage in transformation. This transformation, whether in the spectator-screen relation, or as a way of understanding the object as it circulates globally, belies the determined nature of a project of “ten theses.” Not only do multiple theses suggest the impossibility of one, but they also represent a desire to resist a grand narrative that collapses the particularities of aesthetics and politics in Iranian cinema.

Kiarostami’s Ten, the inspiration for this piece, represents a particularly generative moment for thinking Iranian cinema. It is widely known as Kiarostami’s first digital film, and it is also his first film to feature a female protagonist. It maintains some of Kiarostami’s recognized cinematic signatures, such as working without a script and the use of non-actors. It represents at once the pre-‘79 period of cinema, during which Kiarostami began his career, as well as the celebrated elements of the post-‘79 period, most notably the interplay between reality and fiction). Ten also represents the future of Iranian cinema, both in its digital mode and its emphasis on women’s experiences. In its signalling of new directions in Iranian cinema, Ten represents the engagement from Iran’s celebrated auteur with a democratic form of filmmaking. With digital cinema, more young Iranian filmmakers had access to creating moving images and participating in cultural production. In the contemporary political moment, these young filmmakers bring new political questions and renewed formal strategies, thereby expanding our understanding of “Iranian cinema,” beyond the long-held dichotomies between “popular” and “art” cinema, and “tradition” and “modernity.”

[1]Negar Mottahedeh, Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).

[2]Hamid Naficy, “Iranian Writers, Iranian Cinema, and the Case of ‘Dash Akol,’” Iranian Studies 18.2, no. 4 (1985): 231-251.

[3]For a more detailed discussion of this relationship, see Sara Saljoughi, “A New Form for a New People: Forough Farrokhzad’s The House is Black,” Camera Obscura Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 94, vol. 32, no. 1 (April 2017): 1-31.

[4]See Hamid Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volumes 1-4 (Durham: Duke University Press), 2011-2012 and Hamid Dabashi, Close Up: Iranian Cinema Past, Present, and Future (London: Verso, 2000).

[5]For a discussion of distinctly local cinematic practices, see Shahab Esfandiary, Iranian Cinema and Globalization: National, Transnational, and Islamic Dimensions (London: Intellect, 2012).

[6]David J. Roxburgh, “Micrographia: Toward a Visual Logic of Persianate Painting,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 43 (Spring 2003): 12-30: 23.

[7]Ibid., 27.

[8]See Christiane Gruber, “Questioning the ‘Classical’ in Persian Painting: Models and Problems of Definition,” Journal of Art Historiography 6 (2012): 1-25.

[9]Roxburgh, “Micrographia,” 15.

[10]I explore this concept in my manuscript on the aesthetics and politics of cinema in Iran during the 1960s and 1970s, provisionally titled Burning Visions: The Counter-Cinema of the Iranian New Wave.

[11]Andrew Higson, “The Concept of National Cinema.” Screen 30, no. 4 (1989): 36-47.

[12]Ibid., 41.

[13]“Qui-êtes vous Monsieur Kiarostami?” Cahiers du cinéma (July 1995).

[14]This tendency is encapsulated by the response to Fredric Jameson’s, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1986): 65-88. See also Aijaz Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory,’” Social Text 17 (1987): 3-25.

[15]Blake Atwood, Reform Cinema in Iran: Film and Political Change in the Islamic Republic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 14.

[16]Ibid., 203.

Risking Prophecy in the Modern State: Foucault, Iran, and the Conduct of the Intellectual

Corey McCall Volume 3, Number 2, Summer 2018

Dr. Corey McCall <cmccall@elmira.edu> is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Elmira College in upstate New York. His teaching and research interests include 19th and 20th century European philosophy, American philosophy, postcolonial literature and thought, and the history of philosophy more broadly. Recent and forthcoming publications include the co-edited volumes Melville Among the Philosophers (2017) and Benjamin, Adorno, and the Experience of Literature (Forthcoming in 2018).

For too long, Foucault scholars have kept Foucault’s Iranian writings at arm’s length. Considered a curiosity at best, the essays and dispatches that stem from his two visits to Iran in the fall of 1978 were long thought extraneous to Foucault’s writings.[1] With the publication in recent years of Foucault’s Collège de France lecture courses, we can begin to see how misguided this earlier view of these writings truly was. The initial effort in this direction was made by the compilers of Foucault’s Iranian writings in English, Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson.[2] While the Afary and Anderson volume was certainly valuable as a compilation of Foucault’s Iranian writings, their interpretive essay that introduced the volume contained serious misunderstandings of Foucault, Iran, and Foucault’s writings on Iran.[3] Initially, many readers and scholars of Foucault’s writings reacted to these texts on events in Iran with puzzlement, if not outright embarrassment. Indeed, Afary and Anderson’s interpretive essay can be seen as the culmination of this initial phase of the scholarly reception of Foucault’s Iranian texts. Despite the fact that it attempts to place these writings within the broader context of Foucault’s thought, it offers a thoroughly inadequate reading of Foucault’s work.

More recently, Foucault scholars have attempted to place Foucault’s writings on Iran within the broader context of his published writings and his lecture courses. Melinda Cooper’s essay “The Law of the Household: Foucault, Neoliberalism, and the Iranian Revolution” is a good example of this more recent approach to Foucault’s Iranian writings.[4] Cooper’s essay contextualizes Foucault’s writings in terms of his analysis of two very different revolutions (the neoliberal “revolution” and Iranian Revolution) by reading Foucault’s dispatches from Iran alongside his 1978-1979 Birth of Biopolitics lecture course. My own approach will be similar to Cooper’s, but I wish to examine these writings through the lens of the course that Foucault delivered just prior to visiting Iran, the 1977-1978 lecture course subsequently published as Security, Territory, Population. In this course Foucault develops the concepts of conduct and counter-conduct that represent both a shift in how he conceives power relations and an anticipation of his later work on the care of the self. Like his Iranian writings, Security Territory, Population should be read on its own terms as well as seen as a text that serves as an incubator for subsequent work. In other words, these writings are transitional, provided that we understand this transition as the work of transforming his previous writings and conditioning what comes later rather than a simple move from one position to another. Just as Melinda Cooper suggests that we read Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism in terms of his Iranian writings and in anticipation of his later work on the care of the self, I want to trace another trajectory that runs through counter-conduct and its attendant risks, the Iranian Revolution, and parresia read through the lens of governmentality and the intellectual’s political attempts to understand, critique, and ultimately contest modern technologies of government.[5] I hope to contribute to this more recent interpretive trend by examining how governmentality and parresia (or at least anticipations of these) can be seen to function within Foucault’s writings on Iran.

Foucault becomes increasingly interested in parresia (frank or fearless speech) in his lecture courses of the 1980s, but we can glean the origins of this later concern with fearless speech through Foucault’s conception of counter-conduct as developed in Security, Territory, Population. The first section of this essay focuses on the role that governmentality plays in Foucault’s Iran texts before making the connection between governmentality and parresia plain. The second section focuses on various anticipations of parresia in Foucault’s writings on the Iranian Revolution beginning with Foucault’s understanding of the intellectual’s political role and his claim that we understand philosophy as “the politics of truth” before turning to Foucault’s ambivalent remarks concerning the intellectual’s prophetic voice. Finally, I conclude with some general considerations of Foucault’s conception of the modern intellectual, based upon insights from his Iranian writings and his collaborative work in the early 1970s with the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (GIP) and his characterization of Ali Shariati as the intellectual voice of the Iranian Revolution.

Governmentality and Modern State Power in Iran

With the publication of Foucault’s lecture courses, it becomes much easier to see the coherence and hidden congruencies within his work. The earliest reception of Foucault’s work was driven by a belief that his work consisted of distinct periods in which the work of the later period superseded that of the earlier period. The conception of the later Foucault rewriting the work of his earlier self is the basis of Hubert Dreyfus’ and Paul Rabinow’s influential study Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Indeed, their approach makes it seem as if the works of the later Foucault constitute an erasure and revision of the earlier one, for by their account, Foucault senses that his archaeology led to a methodological dead-end so he develops his genealogical method. However, such an interpretive approach forces the reader to discount Foucault’s own claim that he was doing both archaeology and genealogy in his later works. More recently, Thomas E. Flynn has argued more convincingly for a prismatic approach that finds Foucault’s work coalescing around three main themes, that of knowledge, power, and ethics. Flynn’s interpretive strategy provides a better account of the relationship between the lecture courses and the published work, for Foucault did not strive to provide the final word on anything. In the lecture courses, we can see him constantly returning to what he has previously said and rethinking it—not in order to correct it, but to open it up for new exploration. The lecture courses do not provide the last word, nor should they take precedence over the published works, but do they help us to better grasp Foucault at work.

If we keep these methodological considerations in mind, we can better grasp how Foucault’s lecture courses relate to each other and how his occasional writings in turn relate to both the lecture courses and the published works. No doubt Foucault proceeds through fits and starts, and we would not want to minimize various discontinuities and dead ends present in his lecture courses, but we find correspondences and connections within them as well. Here, I wish to focus on the connection between Foucault’s treatment of governmentality (understood as the conduct of conduct) on the one hand and the two of the forms that resistance to governmentality may take, counter-conduct and parresia. From this connection we can see how Foucault conceives of the conduct of the intellectual in his lecture courses and how this conception informs Foucault’s Iranian writings. In other words, the conclusion of this section will examine the question of whether Foucault reconceives his conception of the intellectual’s role in contemporary society as a result of the events witnessed in Iran. In the next section I will show how these related concepts provide insights into Foucault’s Iran writings and his conception of the intellectual during the last years of his life.

In the “Course Context” to Security, Territory, Population, Michel Senellart places the 1978 lecture course within the broader trajectory of Foucault’s writings. The lecture courses from 1976-1979 form a triptych in which Foucault broaches the topic of biopower and biopolitics, but always haltingly and indirectly. He announces the project in his 1976 course Society Must Be Defended as well as in the conclusion to the first volume of The History of Sexuality. As Senellart points out, it is as if this conception of the various mechanisms that govern life can only be approached obliquely. He announces the biopower project (biopower understood here as the various modern technologies of power that take populations as their object) toward the end of Society Must Be Defended, but he does not begin to develop the concept until 1978 (Foucault did not offer a course at the Collège de France in 1977). Even here, the lectures quickly turn away from a general analytic of biopower and toward a more specific analysis of governmentality; indeed, by the fourth lecture, governmentality and pastoral power have taken center stage.[6] Similarly, Foucault begins The Birth of Biopolitics by announcing that he will focus that year’s lectures on biopower but quickly takes up the birth of neoliberalism. “What is actually involved in both cases is bringing to light the forms of experience and rationality on the basis of which power over life was organized in the West. But at the same time the effect of this research is to shift the center of gravity of the lectures from the question of biopower to that of government, to such an extent that in the end the latter almost entirely eclipses the former.”[7] Whether it is because Foucault realizes that he cannot say anything about biopolitics without first developing the concept of governmentality itself (in Security, Territory, Population) and neoliberal governmentality (in The Birth of Biopolitics) or for some other reason, one of the interesting consequences of this decision to focus on governmentality in these lectures is that the anticipation of the later work becomes readily apparent. Senellart points this out: “Breaking with the discourse of the ‘battle’ employed from the 1970s, the concept of ‘government’ would mark the first shift, becoming more pronounced from 1980, from the analytics of power to the ethics of the subject.”[8] Foucault completes the Security, Territory, Population lectures in April of 1978 and is sent to Iran by the Italian newspaper Corriere della serra in the fall of 1978, so it seems reasonable to surmise that we would find some connections between the material in the lecture course and Foucault’s writings on Iran.

Governmentality plays various roles in Foucault’s Iranian writings, though never a central one. I shall focus on two instances where Foucault uses the term in ways that indicate its growing significance in his work during this period. But first, a few words about one of the common criticisms of these texts: it has often been claimed that Foucault fails to adequately understand the Iranian Revolution on its own terms but instead imposes categories from his own European frame of reference upon these events.[9] This criticism is true to a certain extent; furthermore, such a practice is likely unavoidable for someone who lacks expertise in these fields. Nevertheless, it does not follow that Foucault is the latest in a long line of European thinkers engaging in an Orientalist project to understand the Middle Eastern and Asian cultures in European terms, nor is he dazzled by the exotic sights he witnesses in Iran. Rather his claims concerning parallels between, say, power relations in European contexts and cross-cultural parallels to places such as Iran or Japan remain invariably probing and tentative. Connections between his work and what he witnesses in Tehran or Qom are not dogmatically asserted but instead remain searching and hypothetical.

Stuart Elden has recently traced the chronology of Foucault’s work during this period, and he reminds us that Foucault concluded Security, Territory, Population in April 1978 and then proceeded to travel to Japan, where he gave two lectures and visited a Zen monastery.[10] Elden suggests we read these lectures as well as many of his Iranian writings as attempts to test whether his re-conceived notion of power as governmentality has anything like cross-cultural validity. He is not attempting to impose this schema upon other cultural conceptions of power, but rather determining whether it can be applied. And this is a useful way to approach the Iran texts as well: Foucault is testing a hypothesis in order to see whether his conception of power as government (as “the conduct of conduct”) provides something more than merely a European matrix for understanding power relations.[11]

As evidence, we can first consider this reference to government found in “Tehran: Faith Against the Shah”: “I do not feel comfortable,” Foucault writes, “speaking of Islamic government as an ‘idea’ or even an ‘ideal.’ Rather, it impressed me as a form of ‘political will.’ It impressed me in its effort to politicize structures that are inseparably social and religious in response to current problems. It also impressed me in its attempt to open a spiritual dimension in politics.”[12] Readers are often puzzled by the introduction of the term “political spirituality” in these texts; Foucault employs the term here to characterize this distinctive form of government introduced in Iran by the revolutionaries, a form of government that was developed through opposition to the Shah. That is, Islamic government was shaped through opposition, through the counter-conduct that eventually led to the shah’s ouster. In other words, Islamic government is a set of concrete practices that politicize domains that had previously been free from governmentalization.

In both Security, Territory and Population and The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault’s concerns lie not only with the innovation and proliferation of arts of government characteristic of modernity, but also with the limitations imposed upon these innovative arts of government, either externally or through self-limitation. In The Birth of Biopolitics, one of the key differences he emphasizes between previous forms of government and eighteenth century forms of liberalism is that prior to the eighteenth century both innovations in governmentality and limitations on government were imposed from the outside. Liberal and later neoliberal theorists held that government ought to restrict itself. At the end of the eighteenth century, “there is a shift of the center of gravity of public law. The fundamental problem of public law will no longer be the foundation of sovereignty, the conditions of the sovereign’s legitimacy, or the conditions under which the sovereign’s rights can be exercised legitimately as it was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The problem becomes how to set juridical limits to the exercise of power by a public authority.”[13] Liberal governmental rationality consists of self-imposed limits that will ultimately help it achieve its aims through “the management of risk”:

A number of consequences follow from this. First, we can say that the motto of liberalism is: “Live dangerously.” “Live dangerously,” that is to say, individuals are constantly exposed to danger, or rather, they are conditioned to experience their situation, their life, their present, and their future as containing danger. I think this kind of stimulus of danger will be one of the major implications of liberalism. An entire education and culture of danger appears in the nineteenth century which is very different from those great apocalyptic threats of plague, death, and war which fed the political and cosmological imagination of the Middle Ages, and even of the seventeenth century.[14]

Risk is the complement of liberty, and by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the main task of liberal governmentality in Western states had become the management of risk. Individuals and corporations are obliged to assume risk within society, but the truth of liberalism lies in the calculation of that risk. Drawing on the work of neoliberal economists such as Gary Becker, Foucault develops this theme of individual risk in liberalism and neoliberalism later in the lecture course by considering the neoliberal account of crime and the criminal. The criminal is one who “invests in an action, expects a profit from it, and who accepts the risk of a loss.”[15] Consequently, the penal system targets the conduct of the criminal: “It has to concern itself with a conduct or a series of conducts which produce actions from which the actors expect a profit and which carry a special risk, which is not just the risk of economic loss, but the penal risk, or that economic loss which is inflicted by a penal system.” That is, the penal system provides a set of reactions to the “supply of crime.”[16] The management of risk gives rise to various techniques of neoliberal governmentality that develop around the economic calculation of risk, with criminal justice as just one dimension of this economization. In other words, neoliberalism sees everything through an economic lens, and the penal system becomes subject to economic analysis for the first time. Although it may not initially appear so, this conception of governmentality, understood as “the conduct of conduct,” and various forms of resistance (“counter-conducts”) to it, lies in the background of these writings on the Iranian Revolution.[17]

Foucault’s claim that Islamic government represents a new form of political will occurs in the final section of his article “What Are the Iranians Dreaming About?” entitled “The Inventors of the State.”[18] He concludes the article with four observations, two about the present and two about the relationship between the present and the distant past. First, he remarks that the intensity of this political will precludes a moderate solution, but secondly he also wonders at its depth, whether it is “rooted deeply enough to become a permanent factor in the political life of Iran, or will it dissipate like a cloud when the sky of political reality have finally cleared […]?” These questions indicate present concerns, but Foucault has deeper concerns that center around state power, governmentality, and resistance; that is, that concern conduct and counter-conduct from a historical perspective. “At the dawn of history, Persia invented the state and conferred its models on Islam. Its administrators staffed the caliphate. But from this same Islam, it derived a religion that gave to its people the power to resist state power.”[19] So, Foucault asks, how does the present revolution relate to this longer history of the state and resistance to the state? With the Iranian Revolution, are we witnessing a re-invention of this state, or something new? His second historical question concerns political spirituality: “For the people who inhabit this land, what is the point of searching, even at the cost of their own lives, for this thing whose possibility we have forgotten since the Renaissance and the great crisis of Christianity, a political spirituality. I can already hear the French laughing, but I know that they are wrong.”[20] The crisis of Christianity occurred during the same period as the initial proliferation in arts of government: in both cases, we see a close connection between spiritual matters and governmentality. An Islamic government, in other words, would be one that institutionalizes and governmentalizes political spirituality.

With the exception of Khomeini, Foucault harbors no illusions regarding whether the Shi’ite clergy themselves might constitute a revolutionary vanguard, but he remains open to the possibility that Shi’ism itself can. Foucault detects a split in the opposition, between those he terms “politicians” who believe that Khomeini has no concrete governing program and the people themselves, for whom Khomeini’s charisma, which Foucault characterizes as “a mysterious current that flowed between an old man who had been exiled for fifteen years and his people,” is irresistible.[21] He notes in several places in these texts that what the world is witnessing is a revolution from below in the name of Islam. Of course, this scrambles the neat Western dichotomy that draws a rigid distinction between revolution and religion, with religion seen as a conservative force within society that seeks to maintain its hold on tradition. One source of this rigid distinction between revolution and religion is Marx himself, who famously claimed that religion was “the opiate of the people,” but another source of it can be found in the Enlightenment legacy of bourgeois humanism that contrasts progress in society in such fields as science, technology, and politics with the benighted realm of religious superstition. One of the things that fascinates Foucault about what he witnessed in Iran was that the revolt against the Shah was in the name of religion: it was a religious revolt that scrambled this neat distinction between religion and revolution.[22] Foucault reports that he never once heard the word “revolution.” Instead, the people are clamoring for “an Islamic government,” which was what Ayatollah Khomeini repeatedly claimed was the aim of resistance to the Shah as well.[23] Foucault distinguishes two possible meanings for this term. “Islamic government” may mean a “utopia” or, alternatively, “an ideal” that refashions ancient meanings into something qualitatively new. “At any rate, it is something very old and also very far into the future, a notion of coming back to what Islam was at the time of the Prophet, but also of advancing toward a luminous and distant point where it would be possible to renew fidelity rather than maintain obedience.”[24] In other words, the demand for Islamic government is a demand for the creative renewal of Islam that will transform its current legalism.[25] He continues that “it is first and foremost about a movement that aims to give a permanent role in political life to the traditional structures of Islamic society. An Islamic government is what will allow the continuing activity of the thousands of political centers that have been spawned in mosques and religious communities in order to resist the shah’s regime.”[26] Foucault gives an example of an earthquake in Ferdows that devastated the city. When the authorities presented their rebuilding plan, it was rejected by the people, who, under the guidance of a religious leader, raised the money to rebuild the city at a nearby site that was dubbed Islamiyeh.[27] This is the sort of political creativity at the heart of a revolt focused squarely on a revolutionary transformation of the present.

It is simultaneously this demand for Islamic government and the focus on the present that fascinates Foucault here. While this makes some amount of sense given Foucault’s self-description as an historian of the present, it contrasts markedly with his understanding of European historico-political discourses prior to the nineteenth century. In their recent analysis of Foucault’s work on state and civil society, Mitchell Dean and Kaspar Villadsen remind us of this forgetting of the present in eighteenth-century discourses on both state power and the various resistances to it, as documented in Foucault’s 1976 course Society Must Be Defended:

In the old eighteenth-century historico-political discourse the present is always viewed as a moment of profound forgetfulness. More precisely, the present was understood to be permeated by a complex of shifts and alliances between rival forces that had rendered the fundamental and primitive state of war muddled. The present was negatively valued because the objective was to awaken form or cure oneself from this forgetfulness.[28]

This nostalgia for a national past changes at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, when thinkers begin to prize the present for its own sake rather than seeing it as a “muddled” moment of oblivion during which the nobility demanded a reawakening of past glories.[29] Late eighteenth-century and nineteenth century thinkers become simultaneously more focused on the present and more forward-looking. The European nobles in Foucault’s 1975-1976 lecture course sought a return to the archaism of the nation as a way to call into question the legitimacy of the absolutist state. In his last published text, Foucault will claim that it is Kant’s focus on the present that marks him as an Enlightenment thinker. Foucault knows that Kant is not the first philosopher to reflect on the present, but he believes that he is the first to reflect on the present on its own terms, and not, as a dimension of world history (Plato), or as a sign pointing to the future (Augustine), or a transition to something new (Vico). Instead, Kant sees the present as an Ausgang or exit from self-incurred immaturity that precludes thinking and acting for oneself, both at the level of the individual and the social.[30]

This return to Kant in Foucault’s late texts seems to have perplexed some readers, but it really shouldn’t. After all, Foucault began his intellectual career with the publication of a translation and interpretation of Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, and Foucault’s various engagements with Kant extend throughout his career.[31] The next section focuses on one aspect of this engagement. I focus on the conception of intellectual praxis that we find in Foucault’s engagement with Kant’s work in the late 1970s and how it relates to his Iranian writings. Ali Shariati, the thinker who is often cited as the ideological prophet of the Iranian Revolution, will provide my focus.

Contesting State Power: Kant, Shariati, and the Risks of Resistance

The question concerning the intellectual’s role in modern societies has been a recurring theme throughout Foucault’s writings, though this theme manifests itself more in his occasional writings and lecture courses than in his published writings. This is an enduring concern that can be traced to quite early in Foucault’s career. For example, “Intellectuals and Power,” which is a dialogue between Foucault and Gilles Deleuze conducted in March of 1972, addresses the changing role of the intellectual in modern European societies.[32] This piece dates from the pair’s involvement with the Groupe d’information sur les Prisons (GIP), a loosely-affiliated group of intellectuals and activists who sought to provide French inmates with a platform so that they could draw attention to the squalid prison conditions in France. It was important to the intellectuals involved that the prisoners be given an opportunity to speak for themselves instead of acting as their representatives. Hence, one of the topics of this dialogue was representation, i.e. an analysis of the various conditions under which the intellectual is authorized to speak on behalf of another.

Foucault has already begun to contest the Marxist conception of the engaged intellectual, according to which the intellectual both speaks on behalf of the exploited proletariat and attempts to get the members of this class to see their wretchedness. By 1972 Foucault sees that this conception of the engaged intellectual, one that extends from Marx and Engels at least through Sartre, was inadequate. He endeavors to replace this Marxist conception of the engaged intellectual who speaks on behalf of others and serves as their representative with the conception of the specific intellectual. Among other things, this individual does not pretend to have privileged knowledge that remains inaccessible to those she represents. Foucault here discusses the role of the intellectual in much the same way that he will some seven years later in his interview with Baqir Parham. He notes that the intellectual’s political status in bourgeois society typically stems from two sources: either it results from her position within society, “the position as an intellectual in bourgeois society, in the system of capitalist production, in the ideology which that system produces or imposes” or from the “intellectual discourse itself, in as much as it revealed a particular truth, uncovering political relationships where none were before perceived.”[33] The first reason for politicization of the intellectual is due to the fact that many intellectuals exist on the margins, either ignored or actively persecuted by the authorities. The second reason for the intellectual’s politicization within bourgeois society stems from her role as a critic. This figure of the marginalized intellectual who engages in social critique provides the basis both for Foucault’s analysis of intellectual counter-conduct (what he with some hesitation labels “dissent” in Security, Territory, Population) and his understanding of the political role that the intellectual plays in the Iranian Revolution. This is most evident in his understanding of the significance of Ali Shariati as a prophet of the Revolution, whom Foucault characterizes in startlingly Kantian terms.

One of the most important continuities between Security, Territory, Population and Foucault’s other writings during this period can be found in his attempt to develop this insight from 1972 and his work with the GIP that intellectuals are always imbricated in the political. Despite various attempt to tenaciously cling to an apolitical, objective stance that remains above the fray, intellectual labor always has specific political implications. This is put most succinctly in Foucault’s re-conception of philosophy at the beginning of the Security, Territory, Population lectures that philosophy ought to be understood as “the politics of truth.” As I noted above, Foucault begins the lecture course by claiming that his aim for that year will be the study of biopower, though he quickly becomes ensnared first in the study of governmentality and then of pastoral power as the antecedent of modern arts of government. He begins by presenting a series of “indications” or “principles of intent” regarding where he hopes the investigation of biopower that year will lead. After noting that these indications will neither yield a general definition of power relations nor a conception of power as an essence that exists independently of the relations constituting it. He concedes that the analysis may indeed lead to a general analysis of society, but that possibility will not guide him. Rather, this project is a philosophical one, provided that we understand philosophy as “the politics of truth,” that is a discipline whose “role is showing the knowledge effects produced by the struggles, confrontations, and battles that take place within our society, and by the tactics of power that are the elements of that struggle.”[34] Indeed, he seems here to be taking up Deleuze’s suggestion in “Intellectuals and Power” that theories be seen as a tools in a tool box, or, as Foucault says in 1972, that theory be seen as a “local and regional” praxis:

A struggle against power, a struggle to bring power to light and open up where it is most invisible and insidious. Not a struggle for some ‘insight’ or ‘realization’ (for a long time consciousness as knowledge has been acquired by the masses, and consciousness as subjectivity has been taken, occupied by the bourgeoisie)—but a struggle to undermine and take power side by side with those who are fighting, and not of to the side trying to enlighten them. A ‘theory’ is the regional system of this struggle.[35]

The intellectual remains immanent within society and not a privileged member of it. Furthermore, society is here understood as a site of struggle that forms the basis for state power and its technologies of government. Hence the problem with treating the intellectual as an authoritative prophet is that this status assumes privileged knowledge that she would share if only her fellow members of society would listen. Foucault underscores this position in a series of interviews he gave with the Italian Marxist journalist Ducio Trombadori after his return from Iran at the end of 1978. In the final interview, included in the 1991 collection Remarks on Marx as “The Discourse on Power,” Foucault makes his reservations regarding the modern intellectual’s role within society plain. Trombadori attempts to get Foucault to admit that the intellectual has some general political role to play in society, and Foucault responds:

My role is to address problems effectively, really: and to pose them with the greatest possible rigor, with the maximum complexity and difficulty so that a solution does not arise all at once because of the thought of some reformer or even in the brain of a political party. The problems that I try to address, these perplexities of crime, madness, and sex which involve daily life, cannot be easily resolved. It takes years, decades of work carried out at the grassroots level with the people directly involved; and the right to speech and political imagination must be returned to them.[36]

The intellectual’s task is direct involvement “at the grassroots level.” Instead of speaking on behalf of people due to the peculiar authority of the intellectual, the intellectual must work to restore what the people have lost, the right to speech and political imagination. Foucault continues: “I carefully guard against making the law. Rather, I concern myself with determining problems, unleashing them, revealing them within the framework of such complexity as to shut the mouths of prophets and legislators: all those who speak for others and above others.”[37] This concern with speaking for others and its attendant problems of representation and misrepresentation had already been addressed in the 1972 interview, and Foucault remains concerned with it here. In his conversation with Trombadori, Foucault seems to categorically deny that the intellectual any prophetic role. However, if we return to the Iranian writings, we see that Foucault’s emphasis on political imagination and the right to speech (what he will subsequently term parresia) render this condemnation of intellectual prophecy less categorical. While he never advocates the view that the intellectual be seen simply as a prophet, once we examine what he has to say about Iranian intellectuals in general and Ali Shariati in particular we can surmise that Foucault would likely endorse this qualified sense of immanent intellectual prophecy—the intellectual as a specific prophet rather than a general one.

In his discussion with Trombadori, Foucault’s main worry about understanding the intellectual in terms of a prophet or a legislator is that these conceptions provide the intellectual with prescriptive authority. According to these two conceptions, the intellectual does not simply analyze and describe how things are; in addition, she assumes a position of authority that makes it possible for her to render the phenomena or actors involved in her social analyses and critiques as objects of research who must submit to her authority and in whose name she speaks. There is another worry here, though, and it is this worry that provides the basis for a modified conception of the prophetic intellectual, one not subject to Foucault’s reservations. The typical prophetic intellectual is able to secure a position that minimizes her risk, one that might be literal or figurative. For example, a professor employed by a university generally assumes fewer risks than the intellectual who is not part of such an institutional setting. The intellectual might find a way to comment on events (on a blog or in the media) and thereby avoid becoming implicated in the social events that occasion her analysis thus remaining above the fray. So, does Foucault offer us a way for the intellectual to be both prophetic and assume the risks borne by individuals who lack the intellectuals’ various institutional advantages?

An adequate answer to this question would require a fuller examination of Foucault’s lectures on parresia during the final years of his life than I will be able to provide here.[38] Instead, I would like to examine two moments that anticipate his later work on parresia. In addition to contributing to an account of the development of this idea in Foucault’s work, it will also help us to see the role of the prophetic intellectual in Foucault’s writings on Iran. I will begin with Foucault’s remarks on the intellectual found in his interview with Baqir Parham. I conclude by discussing Foucault’s remarks on Ali Shariati as an exemplar of the prophetic intellectual who risked speaking out against a tyrannical government.

Foucault begins his dialogue with Parham by reiterating his claim that one’s status as an intellectual entails political engagement, but he rejects previous attempts to define the intellectual in purely theoretical or objective terms.[39] The salient question, then, is what sort of relationship to politics the intellectual ought to have: will it be characterized by the intellectual’s attempts to remain aloof from engagement, or will she embrace it? And, if she embraces it, then how best to do so? Since the French Revolution, Foucault claims, the intellectual has “played the role of a prophet, a foreteller of the future society. In other words, the intellectual was one whose responsibility was to deal with general and universal principles for all of humanity.”[40] Due to various changes in modern society, this pretension to speak on behalf of all humanity has been undermined. He continues, “In my opinion, today the intellectual must be inside the pit, the very pit in which the sciences are engaged, where they produce political results.”[41] It is necessary, Foucault claims, to begin anew, “to construct another political thought, another political vision, and teach a new vision of the future.”[42] In other words, the intellectual’s task remains oriented to the future, but a specific future in which she can no longer speak for all. This is how Foucault understands his role in Iran, and it is how he characterizes the role of Ali Shariati.

Foucault characterizes Ali Shariati as the intellectual hero of the Revolution. In “Tehran: Faith Against the Shah,” Foucault writes about Ali Shariati in a way that anticipates his formulation of the Kantian present as an “Ausgang” or “exit” in his final writings. Shariati dies in June of 1977, but his work provides the basis for Foucault’s conception of political spirituality. Indeed, Foucault claims that the present is haunted by the spirit of Ali Shariati. In terms that echo the famous opening lines of The Communist Manifesto (“A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism”), Foucault characterizes Shariati as the ghost that haunts Iran today:

But one dreams also of another movement, which is the inverse and converse of the first [i.e. an Islamic government]. This is one that allow the introduction of a spiritual dimension into political life, in order that it would not be, as always, the obstacle to spirituality, but rather its receptacle, its opportunity, and its ferment. This is where we encounter a shadow that haunts all political and religious life in Iran today: that of Ali Shariati, whose death two years ago gives him the position, so privileged in Shi’ism, of the invisible Present, of the ever-present Absent.[43]

Shariati defines the present for a Shi’ism in revolt, just as Kant had defined the Enlightenment for liberal Europe two centuries before. Furthermore, Shariati constitutes a public outside the university through his teaching. Foucault continues: “His ‘luck’ was that persecution forced him to go to Tehran and to have to teach outside of the university, in a room prepared for him under the protection of a mosque. There, he addressed a public that was his, and that could soon be counted in the thousands: students, mullahs, intellectuals, modest people from the neighborhood of the bazaar, and people passing through from the provinces.”[44] The distinction Foucault draws here between a life devoted to university teaching and one devoted to a public one constitutes oneself echoes the distinction that Kant drew between the private and public use of reason. Private reason is constrained by another, while public reason permits one to speak unfettered, in one’s own voice.

In May 1978, Foucault gives a lecture at the Sorbonne entitled “What is Critique?” In this lecture, he gives a first sketch of what he terms here “the critical attitude” from the beginning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and extending through Kant and the European Enlightenment.[45] The significance of this critical attitude can only be understood in light of Christian pastoral power in which “every individual, whatever his age or his status, from the beginning to the end of his life and down to the very details of his actions, ought to be governed and ought to let himself be governed […] by someone to whom he is bound in a total, and at the same time meticulous and detailed, relation of obedience.”[46] This is a summary of the genealogy of modern governmentality that Foucault had just traced from its roots in the Middle Ages administration of obedience in Security, Territory, Population. Modernity witnesses “a veritable explosion” of these arts of governing. What had been limited to the institutional site of the monastic life became both widespread throughout society and unmoored from its religious context.[47] This laicization and proliferation of the arts of government prompt individuals and groups to find ways to avoid this governmentalizing tendency in society. The question in a wide variety of both sacred and secular contexts becomes, “How not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of these principles, in view of such objectives and b the means of such methods, not like that, not for that, not by them.”[48] This “art of not being governed so much” is the essence of the critical attitude. Foucault next provides three examples: the European Protestant refusal of the governing Church hierarchy, refusal of sovereign power in the name of natural rights, and questioning authority. “I will say that critique is the movement through which the subject gives itself the right to question truth concerning its power effects and to question power about its discourses of truth.”[49]

This implicit association of Shariati with European Enlightenment critique becomes less jarring once we recall that Foucault characterizes his account of parresia in Fearless Speech as a genealogy of the critical attitude, “concerned with the question of the importance of telling the truth, knowing who is able to tell the truth, and knowing why we should tell the truth, we have the roots of what we could call the ‘critical’ tradition in the West. And here you will recognize one of my targets in this seminar, namely, to construct a genealogy of the critical attitude in Western philosophy.”[50] Foucault and Shariati both realized that critique properly understood is the political work to imagine other futures than the one that seems given.

[1]Indeed, in his otherwise excellent reconstruction of Foucault’s work during this period, Stuart Elden adopts this attitude by dismissing Foucault’s Iranian writings as mere journalism. See Stuart Elden, Foucault’s Last Decade (Cambridge: Polity, 2016). On 101-102, he writes that “his reports, principally for the Italian newspaper Corriere del Sera [sic], have provoked controversy both at the time and since. Much of their detail is now of historical interest, and the way that events have developed has outstripped what is, in truth, journalism and prediction rather than the more considered work of his lectures, books, or other writings.” In a footnote Elden acknowledges those who have found these works to be a more significant part of Foucault’s corpus, but I believe he remains too dismissive of Foucault’s writings on Iran.

[2]Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, eds., Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

[3]The inadequacies of Afary and Anderson’s interpretive essay were recognized in the first reviews of the book by Foucault scholars. See, for example, James Bernauer’s review essay of Foucault and the Iranian Revolution in Philosophy and Social Criticism 32, no. 6 (2006), 781-786 and Richard Lynch’s review in Foucault Studies, no. 4, (February 2007), 169-176. More recently, Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi has used Foucault’s Iranian writings as the basis to reinterpret the Iranian Revolution. See Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

[4]Cooper’s essay appears in the collection The Government of Life: Foucault, Biopolitics, and Neoliberalism, eds. Vanessa Lemm and Miguel Vatter (NY: Fordham University Press, 2014), 29-58.

[5]Melinda Cooper, The Government of Life, 32. In his dialogue with Baqir Parham, Foucault characterizes the intellectual as one whose action are always already political, and he claims that the since the French Revolution the role of the intellectual has always been understood in terms of prophecy. He accepts this conception of the intellectual with the stipulation that the intellectual function specifically rather than universally. He then proceeds to situate the intellectual within the context of revolutionary praxis and the risks of thought. See Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 183-184. We will explore this connection further below.

[6]Later in 1978, after he gives the Society Must Be Defended lectures and returns from Iran, Foucault gives a series of interviews with Duccio Trombadori. In the last of these interviews, Foucault provides a helpful definition of governmentality: “And by ‘government’ I mean the set of institutions and practices by which people are ‘led,’ from administration to education, etc. It is this set of procedures, techniques, and methods that guarantee the ‘government’ of people, which seems to me to be in crisis today.” Michel Foucault and Ducio Trombadori, Remarks on Marx, trans. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito (NY: Semiotext(e), 1991), 176. I will return to Foucault’s account of the intellectual in this interview in the subsequent section of this essay.

[7]Michel Senellart, “Course Context” in Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 370.

[8]Senellart, “Course Context,” 370.

[9]This is one of the main critiques advanced by Afary and Anderson. However, they manage to mangle Foucault’s thought so thoroughly that this criticism loses some of its force. They freely state that they read Foucault’s genealogical method itself becomes “a suprahistorical grand narrative” that “privileges not modernity but the traditional social orders.” Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 13-14.

[10]Stuart Elden, Foucault’s Last Decade (Malden, MA: Polity, 2016), 101: “It [‘Sexuality and Power,’ one of the two lectures Foucault gave in Japan] closes with a return to the theme of pastoral power, which is of principal interest for its relation to Feudalism within Europe and Confucianism in the East. On this trip Foucault also spent time in a Zen temple, clearly fascinated by the rituals and rules, in which he saw both parallels and distinctions from Christian monasticism and mysticism.”

[11]Ian Almond does a good job of capturing Foucault’s ambivalence toward non-European societies (indeed, often ambivalence can be indistinguishable from tentativeness). He claims that Foucault wants to critique the otherness of Islam at the same time that he surreptitiously employs it. “On the one hand, like Nietzsche, Foucault will always be aware of ‘the thousand-year old reproach of fanaticism’ that has been directed at Islam and the perennial outsider status it has been given by the West; on the other, the very European ‘outsiderness’ that Foucault analyses will simultaneously be of use. The complexity of Foucault’s approach to the Islamic Other—be it Tunisian demonstrators or Iranian Shiites—lies in this consecutive (at time even concurrent) analysis and appropriation of Islam’s alterity.” The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 22-23.

[12]Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 208.

[13]Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 39, cf.

[14]Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 66.

[15]Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 253.

[16]Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. Bernard Harcourt develops Foucault’s sketch of the transformation of criminality under liberal and neoliberal regimes of governmentality in The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).

[17]Governmentality must be understood in terms of conduct: it consists of the techniques whereby the conduct of individuals and groups is conducted. Cf. Corey McCall, “Conduct,” The Foucault Lexicon, eds. Leonard Lawlor and John Nale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 68-74.

[18]Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 208-209.

[19]Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 208.

[20]Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 209.

[21]Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 204-205.

[22]Melinda Cooper notes this in her essay “The Law of the Household” as well: “Foucault was convinced that something quite extraordinary was at stake here. The revolutionary movement in Iran, he contended, paved a way for a new form of politics, one which escaped the limitations of the two most salient models of revolution in European history—one the one hand, the liberal revolution which had introduced parliamentary democracy, citizenship, and ‘the monstrosity of the state; and on the other, Marxist revolution, with its tendency to reduce all conflict to class struggle.’” See The Government of Life, 34-35.

[23]Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 205.

[24]Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 206.

[25]Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 206.

[26]Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 207.

[27]Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 207.

[28]Mitchell Dean and Kaspar Villadsen, State Phobia and Civil Society: The Political Legacy of Michel Foucault (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 82. Cf. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-1976, eds. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (NY: Picador, 2003), 227: “In the history and historico-political field of the eighteenth century, the present was, basically, always the negative moment. It was always the trough of the wave, always a moment of apparent calm and forgetfulness.”

[29]Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 227.

[30]Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 1: Ethics, ed. Paul Rabinow (NY: New Press, 1997), 304-305.

[31]Michel Foucault, Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, ed. Roberto Nigro (NY: Semiotext(e), 2008). See also Marc Djaballah, Foucault, Kant, and the Forms of Experience (London: Routledge, 2011) for an account of Foucault’s sustained engagement with Kantian critique throughout his career.

[32]Gilles Deleuze, “Intellectuals and Power,” Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina (NY: Semiotext(e), 2004).

[33]Deleuze, “Intellectuals and Power,” 207.

[34]Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 2-3.

[35]Deleuze, “Intellectuals and Power,” 207-208.

[36]Michel Foucault and Ducio Trombadori, Remarks on Marx, trans. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito (NY: Semiotext(e), 1991), 158-159.

[37]Foucault and Trombadori, Remarks on Marx, 159.

[38]Minimally, an engagement with Foucault’s 1981-1982 lecture course The Hermeneutics of the Subject, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and his final lecture course from 1983-1984 The Courage of Truth, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Finally, his Berkeley lectures from the fall of 1983 published as Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (NY: Semiotext(e), 2001) provide a succinct statement of the meaning and significance of parresia.

[39]Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 183.

[40]Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 184.

[41]Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 184.

[42]Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 185.

[43]Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 207.

[44]Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 208.

[45]Michel Foucault, “What is Critique?” in What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth Century Answers and Twentieth Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 382.

[46]Foucault, “What is Critique?” 383.

[47]Foucault, “What is Critique?” 383-384.

[48]Foucault, “What is Critique?” 384.

[49]Foucault, “What is Critique?” 385.

[50]Foucault, Fearless Speech, 170-171.

The Abject Outsider: “The Story of Two Gay Men”

Claudia Yaghoobi Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2018

Introduction

In his “Homosexuality in Arabic Literature,” Frederic Lagrange offers the following categorizations regarding the presence of diverse sexualities, and representation of (male) homosexual characters in Arabic literature: “a typical aspect of traditional society, either to be denounced or simply neutrally described [. . .], a homosexual character, whether central or secondary, is often represented as undergoing a malaise and loss of self-worth, possibly leading to death or suicide; thirdly, homosexuality may be articulated in the traumatic relationship with the Other.”[1] While Persian literature, to some extent, suffers from a paucity of discussion about (male) sexuality, Amir Soltani and Khalil Bendib’s graphic novel, Yousef and Farhad Struggling for Family Acceptance in Iran: The Story of Two Gay Men (referred to as Yousef and Farhad hereafter), Arsham Parsi’s memoir, Exiled for Love, and Jean Beaini and Mohammad Khordadian’s biography, For the Love of Mohammad, provide us with homosexual characters similar to the ones in Lagrange’s categorization.[2]

Yousef and Farhad breaks the silence on diverse (male) sexualities and redefines masculinity as non-singular, rather than the outcome of a biological or social construction. The graphic novel chronicles the struggles of a gay man, Yousef, after coming out to his family. Yousef and his lover, Farhad, are exposed to harassment and violence after revealing their true sexual orientation.[3] They appeal for acceptance and dignity from their family and society, but are instead rejected and abandoned. The graphic novel illustrates that central to the construction of the dominant (heterosexual, middle-class) masculinity is the subordination of the gay masculinity as a repository for everything that heterosexual masculinity deems as weak and feminine.[4] This subordination of gay masculinity normalizes heterosexuality while deeming homosexuality as abnormal. Although today’s Iran is considered one of more than 75 countries globally that criminalize homosexuality by punishing with death, Soltani and Bendib show that the new generation of Iranian society is undoubtedly evolving toward a more tolerant and accepting relationship with the LGBTQ community. Exploring the characters, this paper considers Yousef and Farhad as the “abject outsiders” of their society, who simultaneously mark the boundaries and initiate the destabilization of hegemonic masculinity while their sexuality is constituted and defined in relationship to the dominant heterosexual and middle-class masculinity.[5]

To explore the hierarchy of masculinities in Iran within various genres, I also examine two memoirs: Arsham Parsi’s Exiled for Love and Jean Beaini and Mohammad Khordadian’s For the Love of Mohammad. Exiled for Love delineates Parsi’s coming to terms with his identity as a gay man in Iran and his attempts to bring the LGBTQ community together via the Internet, while raising awareness about the Iranian LGBTQ community in the world. It expounds on the torture and imprisonment of gay men (and all LGBTQ individuals), the brutal socio-cultural environment, and the harsh Islamic laws in Iran against homosexuality. For the Love of Mohammad discloses the complexities of a relationship into which a young gay man, the renowned Iranian male dancer Mohammad Khordadian, has been manipulated while in love with another man. It hints at the socio-cultural constraints mandating men marry women, and the fact that many gay men enter into these marriages to avoid ostracism, while maintaining a relationship with another man on the side. This type of secrecy within relationships not only elucidates the impact of such marriages on the lives of gay men, but also shows how such decisions alter the lives of the women involved. Utilizing Parsi’s and Khordadian’s accounts of lived experiences, this paper brings to light the influence of suppression and silencing on those whose lives are affected. Focusing on all three works, this paper attempts to show what has been excluded in the construction of the dominant masculinity and to address the public silences about diverse sexualities and sexual practices.[6] In Joan Scott’s words, “[W]orks such as these provide evidence for a world of alternative values and practices whose existence gives the lie to hegemonic construction of social world,” in this case to the hegemonic, socio-cultural construction of gender and sexuality.[7] By bringing Parsi’s and Khordadian’s experiences to the fore, the memoirs make visible the experiences of a group of men who are deemed different, and they simultaneously expose a long history of repressive mechanisms. While memoirs are viewed as more authoritative because they attribute a sense of authenticity to a narrative, graphic novels are often deemed less credible in academia. Nonetheless, this paper considers Soltani and Bendib’s choice of graphic novel as a means of subversion to the hegemonic discourses of not only masculinity in Iran, but also literature in academia.

Hierarchy of Masculinities

Regardless of the fact that the title of the graphic novel and the storyline revolve around the relationship between Yousef and Farhad, the character who provides us with the most pertinent characteristics regarding the question of masculinity is Yousef’s father, Mr. Jafari. Though he does not fit into the traditionally constructed category of a protagonist, he is not entirely an individual antagonist either. He can, however, be considered as the embodiment of heterosexual, homophobic masculinity in current Iran. Of course, Mr. Jafari is not the archetypal representation of the community’s hegemonic masculinity in his capacity as the head of the family; however, he can implement power over Yousef. As Connell points out, “The public face of hegemonic masculinity is not necessarily what powerful men are, but what sustains their power and what large numbers of men are motivated to support.”[8] The preferred hegemonic masculinity is “an unattainable ideal” that most men representing sub-hegemonic masculinities strive for.[9] Hegemony is established through the “correspondence between cultural ideal and institutional power,” which claims authority.[10] These dominant masculinities are those that benefit from the “patriarchal dividend” of the instituted hegemony, while not being subject to the risk of those few that do embody the wholly archetypical exemplar of that hegemony.[11] Mr. Jafari falls within this category of masculinities.

Since masculinity is a culturally specific construction, answers about Middle Eastern masculinities should be sought in the cultures where they are shaped.[12] The ideal of masculinity in Muslim societies generally, and in Iran particularly, revolves around the institution of family and procreation; that is, a man is expected to marry, have a wife, and father a child. Maleeha Aslam writes, “The most central and almost universal expectation from the masculine gender is to be and to perform like a breadwinner. Men fall down the appropriate gender order if they fail to fit into this assigned gender role.”[13] According to Amanullah De Sondy, “Masculinity is constructed around the tenets of power, and the powerful needs a power base. In the lives of most Muslim men this locus has become the heterosexual family.”[14] Since homosexuality is not a topic of discussion or debate in countries like Iran, Asia Siraj’s words ring true that “the accommodation of ‘deviant’ identities is considerably more difficult …. In countries … where Islam predominates, the subject continues to be clouded in ignorance and intentional neglect. Indeed, the traditional and continued silence on the issue prevents many with homosexual feelings from identifying themselves publicly.”[15] In such societies, “coming out,” which S. Seidman defines as “the dramatic quality of privately and publicly coming to terms with a contested social identity” is more often than not accompanied with violence and disavowal from family and society.[16]

In Yousef and Farhad, the very fact that Yousef is afraid to “come out” to his family and when he does, is faced with violence and abandonment, confirms the rationale behind this imposed public silence and neglect in regard to representations of diverse human sexuality, particularly homosexuality. In his memoir, too, Mohammad Khordadian echoes the complexity of this fear and public silence. He writes, “By the age of nineteen, I was already beginning to realize the implications of having been born into a culture and religion with many restrictions on how, who, or when one should love, and a pervading intolerance towards the crossing of those lines.”[17] It takes Khordadian experiencing a painful marriage and distressing struggles in exile to be able to “come out” to his wife, family, and friends. Likewise, in his memoir, Arsham Parsi chronicles similar traumatic experiences. It is only in exile that he is able to tell his family the truth about his identity. Regarding violence against the LGBTQ community in Iran, Parsi touches upon the grave matter of the criminalization of homosexuality and the brutal executions of homosexuals as well. He writes that murdering a homosexual “bestowed blessings on those that inflicted these punishments for they were carrying out the will of God.”[18] He keeps questioning, “How does a person feel when they discover that their life is worth nothing to those that hold the power in their society?”[19] While Khordadian’s and Parsi’s families seem to be understanding, such tolerance cannot be overgeneralized or extended to all Iranian families. Although Khordadian and Parsi critique society for upholding traditional beliefs regarding homosexuality, and the state for exerting strict laws and punishments, in Yousef and Farhad, the authors focus on the family’s struggles to come to terms with Yousef’s homosexuality. Of course, the truth is, behind the family’s troubles in accepting their sons are such thoughts as “what will others think?” and “I do not want them to hang him up”, giving voice to the aforementioned traditional and political perspectives operating against the idea of homosexuals as human and homosexuality as a crime against the state.

In Yousef and Farhad, once Mr. Jafari becomes aware of Yousef’s homosexuality, he reacts in a way that reveals exerts his hegemonic power position immediately. Soon after confronting Yousef, Mr. Jafari strikes him across the face and degrades Yousef and Farhad’s poetic correspondences, calling them “filth.”[20] He physically eliminates his son from his life, tearing down posters and impetuously throwing Yousef’s belongings out into the street. In order to further assert his son’s subordinate position, Mr. Jafari humiliates him by throwing him out into the rain, thus solidifying his position as a dominant heterosexual male, as well as the patriarch of the family.

Figure 1: Panels from p. 9 of Yusuf and Farhad in Persian. Here, Mr. Jafari, who has just become aware of Yusuf’s relationship with Farhad, slaps Yusuf, condemns him for his correspondences with Farhad, and throws Yusuf out of his house.

This illustrates that to the heterosexual Mr. Jafari, homosexual masculinities fall at the bottom of the gender hierarchy and must be subordinated. To Mr. Jafari (and by extension to all who desire to punish homosexuals), his son’s sexual orientation is what is banished from hegemonic definitions of masculinity. De Sondy discusses the hierarchy of masculinities in Islam referring to the “prophetic tradition [that] places emphasis on the valiant and heroic form of Islamic masculinity above the more softer form of Islamic masculinity,” exemplifying that traditions are always “partially subjective to suit the needs and desires of individuals who choose as they desire.”[21] In fact, Mr. Jafari’s understanding of his son’s gayness falls along those same binary lines which are distorted with homophobic notions that consider male homosexuality as the softer type of masculinity parallel to femininity. As Siraj argues, “Heterosexist norms construct heterosexual masculinity based upon a static binary of male/female; the antithesis of this construct is, in effect, the homosexual male.”[22] Therefore, through his self-identification, the homosexual male (and female) challenges the dominant gender binary and disrupts hegemony.

Discussing male homosexuality in Iran, Najmabadi argues that what made homosexuality “a cultural assault and moral insult [in Iran] was … the shame of being kuni. The most derogatory word in the realm of sexuality, kuni literally means anal, but in Persian it exclusively means to be receptive of anal penetration.”[23] Given the story was allotted a mere 20 pages for the tale of events to unfold, Yousef is almost immediately painted as a passive-receptive participant in the relationship. Such expediency helps explicate why Mr. Jafari deems Yousef’s actions defamatory toward the family reputation as well as actions that are not worthy of a living person. Mr. Jafari’s attitude is mirrored in another encounter Yousef has when a passerby in a vehicle approaches him as he is wandering the streets as a homeless youth. The driver yells out to Yousef, “Hey, Good Looking! How much?” and when Yousef denies giving his attention to the driver, the driver angrily shouts out, “You filthy homo! You’re too good for me?!” Correspondingly, when his father initially throws Yousef out of his home, the neighborhood kids proceed to call him “faggot.”[24]

Figure 2: Panels from p. 11 of Yusuf and Farhad in Persian. After being thrown out of his house by his father, Yusuf is exposed to verbal harassment by the neighbors who call him a “faggot.”

These instances reify the lack of humanity and masculinity culturally associated with male homosexuality. The word that Soltani and Bendib use in the Persian text is “koonie” which harps on the passivity of one partner in same-sex relationships following the rhetoric of positionality. The importance of the word choice and limitation is emphasized in Khordadian’s memoir where he indicates, “Yet at the same time our language did not possess a single decent word for homosexual. A homosexual was a koonie, ‘one who gives arse’, and so I dared not speak of my love for this man who had captured my heart, because I did not want my parents to know or to suffer the shame of their youngest son being labeled in this derogatory way: a ‘koonie’.”[25] A conversation also comes up in Parsi’s memoir where he is asked if homosexuality means being a “sodomite.”[26] In another instance, Parsi is called a “faggot” which is a literal translation of the Persian word “koonie”.[27] The belief that the passive-receptive partner deserves condemnation is consistent with pre-modern Arabo-Muslim (also Greek) discourses on same-sex desire and relations which regard “a preference for the passive-receptive role in sexual intercourse … as the very antithesis of masculinity.”[28] Such discourses emphasize the importance of positionality; that is, the active-passive roles of the participants in the relationship.[29] In pre-modern Arabo-Muslim societies, the role of the passive-penetrated was perceived to be either feminine, diseased, pathological condition, or a great sin, as it was assumed the penetrated or passive partner enjoyed the act.[30] Traditional Arabic medical discourse, following the Greek, regarded a man who desired to be penetrated as being afflicted with a disease with prescribed remedies. This was considered an innate condition and was called ubnah. The individual afflicted with the disease was called ma’bun and was “perceived as being at odds with the ideal of masculinity.”[31] The belief in female-passive and male-active gender roles continues to this day as Najmabadi remarks that this gender-binary renders any fissures in hegemonic masculinity as effeminization.[32] While discussing his son’s homosexuality with Zahra and Miriam, not only does Mr. Jafari consider him feminine (passive-receptive partner), but also he distraughtly declares that his son has an incurable disease.[33]

Documenting the experiences of its characters as “abject outsiders,” Yousef and Farhad demonstrates how Yousef’s father continuously condemns his son’s membership in his family and even denies him human existence. Talking to Miriam and Zahra about his son, Mr. Jafari uses the past tense, completely dissociating himself from Yousef.[34] He considers Yousef’s sexuality and vivacious self-embracement as a prudent attempt to defame and detract from his and the family’s honor and thus an unbelievable embarrassment in his life, asking, “How could you be so selfish, my son?”[35] When Yousef attempts to commit suicide, it is an even additional impudence and disgrace to Mr. Jafari, who remarks while sitting in the hospital waiting room, “First dishonor, and now this…,” an implacable comment when read alongside the one made previously to Zahra and Miriam suggesting that Mr. Jafari’s life would be painless if his son was actually dead.[36] Mr. Jafari’s aloofness and the insensitivity of his comment prompts Miriam to remind him to be thankful that Yousef is not dead.[37] Yousef’s “coming out” and public act of subversion through suicide is what Mr. Jafari believes has brought shame and dishonor to the family. Not only does Mr. Jafari view Yousef as the passive-receptive partner in his relationship, he also perceives Yousef’s suicide attempt as a weak and thereby non-masculine act.[38]

In addition to physically undermining subordinated masculinities, a very important factor in maintaining hegemony for heterosexual, middle-class men is denying “cultural definition and recognition as alternatives” to different sexualities.[39] In Yousef and Farhad, this denial is enacted through Mr. Jafari’s repudiation of Yousef’s humanity and a refusal to name him. When asked, “Who is this?” while looking at the torn fragments of Yousef’s photograph, he answers that “He has no name.”[40] This dismissive attitude about naming and acknowledging Yousef’s identity persists throughout the graphic novel. Mr. Jafari’s disinterest in acknowledging Yousef’s identity is parallel to renouncing Yousef altogether from the Jafari family. In this way, Yousef is stripped from his familial and societal identity. While Mr. Jafari is the one who estranges Yousef from his family, he is also the one character who is recognized by his last name (denied first name) only and is addressed by the honorific “Mr.” throughout the graphic novel. Mr. Jafari’s lack of identity, however, has a contrastive effect which makes him to be easily generalized as a representation of Iranian hegemonic masculinity.

Calling normative narratives into question, Mr. Jafari’s prejudice and homophobia are set at odds with his brother Taymour’s acceptance and support for his nephew. Teymour becomes the voice of reason for Yousef’s father as he points out the hypocrisy in the fact that Mr. Jafari had premarital sex with the woman who became his wife because they were so in love. For Yousef’s uncle, true love is true love, whether between a man and a woman or a man and another man. Yousef’s uncle draws connections between Yousef’s parents’ premarital sex and Yousef’s homosexuality, questioning Mr. Jafari’s beliefs about the superiority of iteration of one love over the other.[41] The two Jafari brothers’ physical appearances are, however, juxtaposed significantly (disused fully in the next section). Taymour is tall, broad, muscular, wearing a full beard, whereas Mr. Jafari is short, thin, gaunt-looking, with a thin mustache. While Taymour is respectably employed at his own print-and-copy store and Internet café, Mr. Jafari drives a taxi which he parallels with a coffin, and which is frequently associated with lower-income class of the society. The contrast between the brothers illustrates that the relationship between the dominant and subordinate group is not a fixed one. In particular situations, this power structure changes. This is further crystalized in the scene where another irritated driver confronts Mr. Jafari and proceeds to call him a “faggot.”[42] This greatly insults and enrages Mr. Jafari and results in a physical confrontation between the two drivers. Scott’s argument resonates with the scene: “Not only does homosexuality define heterosexuality by specifying its negative limits, and not only is the boundary between the two a shifting one, but both operate within the structure of the same “phallic economy” –.”[43] Even though Mr. Jafari (like other men similar to him) holds and exercises power in the society for being heterosexual, at any point, he too might be exposed to subordination by other masculinities that are higher than his on the hierarchy. However, these subordinations do not mean that those who are subordinate submit to the power structure. As we witness in the memoirs and graphic novel, they challenge and disturb such power structures.

Figure 3: Panels from p. 33 of Yusuf and Farhad in Persian. This is when the tables are turned and another driver calls Mr. Jafari a “faggot.” This name-calling drives him mad and he treats the other driver violently.

Mr. Jafari’s reactions to Yousef’s “coming out” demonstrate how family and home shape men’s public image. The domestic sphere or the home has a fluid, yet pervasive relationship with the male body.[44] The private sphere, although confined within the walls of the home, influences gender performances. The male self must not only act as a son, husband, or father in the private space of the home, but also wrestle with being a politically, culturally, and professionally active figure in society.[45] Likewise, openness is potentially deadly. Like Yousef, not all Muslim homosexuals are received with love and acceptance. The act of identifying as a gay man means risking rejection, because of which Yousef is forced to find a new space to enact his masculinity and social status.[46] The identification with the LGBTQ community and potential rejection from a previous community may require the drawing of new boundaries between private and public spaces. Judith Butler notes that gender is not stable; rather, gender is the combination of body movements, gestures, and acts that all constitute an illusion of a gendered self.[47] Butler’s definition of gender as performative, and not a rigid or fixed identity, pushes for a better understanding of gender as an identity. In Yousef and Farhad, Yousef must answer for himself what it means to embody masculinity as a man and as his identity, and perform it. Yousef’s abrupt, yet forced departure from home suggests his departure from the traditional male role and rejection of conformity. Yousef’s father not only forces Yousef out of a private space where his sexuality is no longer secret, but he also crumbles Yousef’s poems and throws them outside of his home. While walking in the rain and receiving insults from gossiping neighbors, in his mind, Yousef notes a line from the well-known thirteenth century Persian poet Sa’di Shirazi: “I am in love with all of creation for all of creation emanates from the Creator.”[48] However, unable to retort vocally, Yousef chooses not to embrace the masculine emotion of anger. He chooses to cling to his own definition of masculinity while at the same time rejecting society’s identification of him as a “faggot”.

Figure 4: Panel from p. 18 of Yusuf and Farhad in Persian. This is the letter Yusuf leaves behind before his attempted suicide.

As a safer space, Yousef chooses the “third space of writing” where he can embrace his own definition of masculinity. The line of poetry that Yousef reads in his mind is suggestive of Yousef’s choice of love through Sufism rather than anger and resentment. Mr. Jafari’s denial and disavowal creates the possibility for Yousef to redefine and form his masculinity. Within the “third space of writing” in his letter to his family, he seeks forgiveness, engaging in a different masculine behavior—humility. Yousef’s departure from the domestic sphere reinforces his departure from his role as a child and offers him a way to reshape his masculinity. In this way, not only does Yousef challenge the hegemonic notions of masculinity, he also marks its boundaries as his own sexual identity is defined in relationship with that same hegemony.

Facial Hair and Bodily Form

To what extent does “the body, as the locus where experiments are played out and attitudes performed, both [replicates] the status quo and [provides] challenges to it[?]”[49] In Yousef and Farhad, whether the authors intentionally present stereotypical features or not, the characters’ outward appearances disclose much about their sexual orientation. Conventional beliefs dictating that a man who is gay should perform his sexual identity through make-up or hairstyle, form much of the public’s (mis)perception about the gay community. In his memoir, Parsi explains how while waiting to be interviewed by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, another Iranian waiting asked him why he was there. When he responded that it was because of his sexual orientation, he was perceived to be a liar because he had not shaved and he was not wearing make-up.[50] This type of interaction harks upon stereotypical views and highlights the public’s misunderstanding of gay individuals and their outward appearance.

In Yousef and Farhad, the characters’ physical features, especially the use of “feminine” features for Yousef and Farhad, are exaggerated. One aspect of these illustrations is the use (or lack thereof) of beard and facial hair. Historically in the Muslim world, beards and mustaches have been viewed as the most visible characteristics of masculinity and male honor.[51] Soltani and Bendib’s unbearded characters, Yousef and Farhad, challenge notions of dominant masculinity. In contrast, the other males of the graphic novel sport facial hair, mustaches and beards. Bendib chooses to omit facial hair on his protagonists so as to draw on typical stereotypes and perceptions of homosexuality as feminine. On the other hand, a beard, a mustache, or both features adorn his older, masculine subjects’ faces.

Figure 5: Panel from p. 13 of Yusuf and Farhad in Persian. This is when Yusuf is wandering on the streets after being thrown out of his house. He is verbally harassed, spends time with stray dogs, and uses the state-run newspaper “Keyhan” as a blanket.

Interestingly enough, Mr. Jafari and the stranger who harasses Yousef on the street lack a beard. The stranger boasts a thin, well-groomed mustache whereas Mr. Jafari wears a thick, untrimmed mustache. As he is walking on the street, Yousef becomes the object of this much older man’s desire. When Yousef rejects his invitation, he calls Yousef a “filthy homo.”[52] Yusef’s clean-shaven face provokes the driver’s stereotypical understanding of male homosexuality. It is important to note that this older man’s comment is a reference to a certain population of heterosexual men who besides their heterosexual marriages and families, have tendencies for homosexual sex as well. Ironically, Mr. Jafari lacks what Yousef and Farhad lack: a beard. Mr. Jafari’s thick eyebrows and the taxi driver’s angular and linear facial features serve as physical representations of their restricted, linear views on homosexuality. These contrasting bodily representations are an apropos reminder of the discourse that to shape his own subjectivity, a heterosexual individual needs an “abject other.” Judith Butler astutely comments that, “The forming of a subject requires an identification with the normative phantasm of “sex,” and this identification takes place through a repudiation which produces a domain of abjection, a repudiation without which the subject cannot emerge.”[53] Yousef and Farhad’s unbearded presence places them in the category of “abject outsiders” through the repudiation of those whom the heterosexual father and stranger use to assert their own subjectivity.

In addition to their facial hair, Yousef and Farhad are characterized with long eyelashes, sensual, quasi-feminine lips, and fluid curves. Their long, slender fingers intertwine and embrace one another. In the scene where Yousef and Farhad rekindle their love under the nighttime sky, both gaze at the other with large, beautiful, narcissus-eyes during their night together. But Yousef and Farhad are not exclusively drawn with feminine physical traits, an attempt to break away with stereotypes. In their intimate night in the mountains, within their own private space, Yousef and Farhad are shown to embody broad muscular physiques, and hairy arms. Their fit, muscular bodies differ from the jolly, curvy, husky bodies of Yousef’s uncle, Taymour. Their bodies also differ from Yousef’s scrawny, angular father. However, Bendib does not zoom-in on the eyes or lips of his “masculine” men, rather, Mr. Jafari’s thick eyebrows and angular face are emphasized. The contrasting aesthetics of Yousef and Farhad and the heterosexual males of the story are an attempt to show the prevalent hierarchy within masculinities, to disclose the public’s stereotypical misperceptions of the gay community, and to break away from those conventional perceptions. Through image and text the authors emphasize that “both masculinity and femininity are learned performances, affected but not dictated by genetics and societal expectations, with as many nuances and meanings as there are individuals who adopt, embody, or redesign them.”[54]

Figure 6: Panel from p. 8 of Yusuf and Farhad in Persian. This is an image depicting the intimate moments between Yusuf and Farhad in the mountains. Here, they use symbolic religious and Sufi language.

Religion and Sufism

The relationship between religion and gender is interdependent, with religion at the male ego’s service, as Aslam notes.[55] However, in Soltani and Bendib’s graphic novel, religion is not portrayed as the problem or root of the issues the young gay men are having. For the authors, cultural norms, state laws, and familial expectations regarding male sexuality and masculinity are the key issue while religion, particularly Sufism, is seen as a potential solution. Soltani and Bendib’s narrative seeks to subvert heteronormative discourses about male sexuality through the use of Sufi discourse and religious symbolism.

Throughout Yousef and Farhad, allusions to, and imageries of, the twelfth hidden Imam in Shi’ism, Mahdi, abound.[56] Yousef’s movement between social spaces or states of being in relation to his community can be compared to Mahdi’s occultation. To draw these parallels, looking at Soltani and Bendib’s other graphic novel, Zahra’s Paradise, is necessary. In Zahra’s Paradise, Soltani and Bendib tell the story of a young man named Mehdi, gone missing after participating in the 2009 protests in Iran following Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election to presidency, and of Mehdi’s mother and brother’s search for him. Though Mehdi’s (the character) occultation is slightly less concrete than that of Yousef’s since he is not actually present in the story, both are seeking “refuge” in response to personally targeted injustice. Mehdi’s mother Zahra, her Armenian friend, Miriam, and Yousef’s father are actually present in both novels, and it is in Zahra’s home that Yousef and Farhad begins. When Mr. Jafari relates his struggle with discovering his son’s sexuality to Zahra and Miriam at the beginning, he is unwilling to speak frankly about it, forcing the women to guess the source of his vexation. Once it is revealed that Mr. Jafari is grieving his son’s sexual identity, Miriam asks, “So he’s not an addict, not a thief and not a murderer…but worse than all of them combined?” to which Zahra replies, “Almost sounds like my murdered son, Mehdi….”[57] When Zahra mentions that the situation reminds her of her murdered son, Mr. Jafari says “your Mehdi may be dead, but lives inside you. Mine is alive, but he’s dead inside me.”[58] Here, Soltani and Bendib seem to be making a point about the way in which being homosexual in Iran is perceived. The authors adequately demonstrate the inanity of viewing homosexuality as worse than murder. Yousef has not harmed any individual by theft or violence, and yet he is like Mehdi, someone who stood against the state. So, Yousef is standing against the state and in danger of the same fate as Mehdi simply by being who he is. This idea is further supported when Mr. Jafari throws Yousef out of the house and rips a “One Love” poster down from his wall, drawing another parallel to the poster and music in Mehdi’s room and the shirt sporting the same design that Mehdi wore during the protests when he disappeared.[59] The descriptive terms used by Mr. Jafari to denote his son’s supposed “devious” act all focus on family shame and dishonor. At a later point in the story, after Yousef’s suicide attempt, Mr. Jafari gives him the money saved for his future wedding and tells him to “go find another country” after informing him that there are “no gays in Iran.”[60] This is an obvious jab at the comment made by former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but also a statement about the ways in which “homosexual” and “Iranian” are seen as mutually exclusive identities.[61] Yet at no point does Mr. Jafari specifically use an Islamic reference or religious source to condemn Yousef’s love for another man, although he does refer to the fact that the state punishes gay men by hanging them from the crane.[62] Hence, the problem comes from culturally based gender constructions of masculinity and the theocratic state laws against diverse sexualities, and not an inherently religious adjuration of same sex love.

Soltani and Bendib audaciously utilize Sufi symbolism and metaphors to shine a positive light on Yousef and Farhad’s love for each other. In the scene where the two exchange a tender moment in the mountains, they reference the well-known medieval Persian Sufi poet Rumi and his master-beloved, Shams, as lovers.[63] The relationship between Rumi and Shams and the reference to them in the graphic novel hints at the Sufi philosophy of shahed-bazi which allows “the possibility of love between man and creator, and … accept(s) the likelihood of a beatific vision or of an experience leading to the presence of God.”[64] According to this Sufi philosophy, considering all God’s creatures as His emanations and contemplating their beauty, the individual is led on a spiritual path toward union with the divine. The beauty of God’s creations becomes the shahed, witness or testimony, to God’s beauty and love. While Soltani and Bendib might have this philosophy in mind, their view of Sufism is also in line with D. S. Ahmed’s argument that “Sufism glorifies contemplation and a passive-receptive attitude. The word ‘Islam’ itself has profound connotation of submission, acceptance and surrender – all resounding, stereotypically feminine attributes.”[65] It would follow then, that much like homosexuality, Sufism challenges the dominant discourses about strict religiosity, surrender, and acceptance.

In addition to the allusion to Imam Mahdi, Yousef and Farhad also make use of religiously charged terms such as “Kaaba” and “pilgrimage” in their declarations of love to one another.[66] Teymour also uses religious language and emphasizes the beauty of everything God creates. He tells Yousef after his suicide attempt that “we have enough martyrs” and that he should “practice resurrection.”[67] Eventually, Yousef is taken to Qom, a city with much religious significance in Iran, and given refuge with Farhad’s uncle, an ayatollah. Farhad describes his uncle as a “friendly fanatic” which evokes the question “a tolerant ayatollah? Isn’t that an oxymoron?” from Yousef.[68] We find the ayatollah working in his garden commenting on nature as part of God’s beautiful creation. In line with Sufi beliefs, this comment gives the impression that the ayatollah sees Yousef and Farhad, as well as their love for each other, as part of what God creates. Yousef is surprised by the ayatollah’s acceptance of his sexual orientation, yet his acceptance is indicative of Sufi teachings of love. Through love, the characters in Yousef and Farhad are able to find peace and acceptance. The ayatollah is associated with knowledge as he lives in Qom, the center of theological learning, but he also seeks love, and shows action by giving refuge to the young couple.

Graphic Novel as a Means of Subversion

Historically, the comic and graphic novel mediums have been shunned for depicting serious topics. There is a stigma surrounding the use of graphic novels, as they are believed to depict lighthearted subjects, mainly appealing to adolescents. Graphic novels have been stereotypically presented as “intellectually devoid fodder.”[69] However, there have also been a number of graphic novels which conveyed a serious message such as Maus, Art Spiegelman’s classic graphic novel which tells the story of a boy learning about his father’s experiences during the Holocaust. Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis is another example which “introduced personal biography to the form.”[70] While many scholars look down on the graphic novel as an inferior art form devoid of any intellectual fodder, it is gradually gaining recognition as an alternative for portraying evocative messages, due to the creative expression in literary form that primarily deals with the arrangement of images and words to emphasize points in a story, or to dramatize an idea.[71]

The use of the graphic novel medium is an interesting choice to depict the love story of Yousef and Farhad. Both the medium by which the story is told, and the story itself are unconventional, and draw parallels from each other, such that they force the reader to seek a different approach in understanding the struggles of the characters, the disavowal of homosexuality in Iran, the hierarchy of masculinities, and the lack of legitimacy that graphic novels are given in the world of academia. The story and medium encourage the acceptance of alternate forms of not only masculinities, but also writing styles. In Yousef and Farhad, a few elements of visual imagery particularly invite critical thinking. One such scene is the presence of a dog when Yousef is thrown out of his home and walks the neighborhood.[72] The dog is seen later again when Yousef rests at the bench.[73] In traditional Islam, dogs are considered impure and contact with them is to be avoided. It may be inferred that among his family Yousef’s newfound identity as a homosexual is equated to the impurities of a dog, and therefore has cast an obscene light on him, which is insupportable to his family. Furthermore, it can be interpreted that Yousef’s homelessness is a circumstance directly caused by the laws of the state, as is seen in the image of Yousef lying on the bench covered in Kayhan, a state-run newspaper, with the crescent moon and stars in the background sky.[74] These are but a few small examples found throughout the novel, but references like these make the graphic novel, contrary to popular belief, a notable method of storytelling as it forces the reader to be more analytical and conscientious of what is on the page in terms of visual cues and text, versus simply analyzing blocks of scholarly text, which is often done in academia.

Using graphic novels as non-traditional sources of information in higher education challenges the conventional hierarchical notions of appropriateness in academia.[75] Nevertheless, in the special case of homosexuality in Iran, it seems as though a nontraditional mode of storytelling fits the mood for portraying and celebrating the story of Yousef and Farhad, as the story of the LGBTQ community in Iran deserves recognition. Utilizing the graphic novel as their platform, the authors provide a combination of thoughtful images and key words that require the reader to use critical information literacy skills in deciphering the strong message that is being conveyed. Both topics of homosexuality in Iran as well as the stage of graphic novels have received much criticism for not living up to heteronormative standards that society has arbitrarily placed values on. Furthermore, both medium and subjects require the reader to question conformist methods and to appreciate the vast multitudes in differences of perspective that every writing medium as well as every lifestyle and person has to offer.

[1]Frederic Lagrange, “Homosexuality in Arabic Literature,” Imagined Masculinities: Male Identity and Culture in the Modern Middle East, ed. Mai Ghoussoub and Emma Sinclair-Webb (London: Saqi Books, 2006), 175.

[2]Amir Soltani and Khalil Bendib, Yousef and Farhad Struggling for Family Acceptance in Iran: The Story of Two Gay Men (OutRight Action International, 2015); Arsham Parsi and Marc Colburne, Exiled for Love: The Journey of an Iranian Queer Activist (Halifax: Roseway Publishing, 2015); and Jean Beaini and Mohammad Khordadian, For the Love of Mohammad: A Memoir (U.S.: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014).

[3]The names of the protagonists might be of significance to our discussion in this paper. Yousef shares his name with Prophet Yousef (Joseph) who was one of Jacob’s twelve sons. In Islamic tradition, Yousef is the ideal of male beauty. However, Yousef’s male beauty and sexuality is contested as it is portrayed as fluid in Persian cultural productions throughout history. See Claudia Yaghoobi, “Yusef’s ‘Queer’ beauty in Persian Cultural Productions,” The Comparatist Journal 40, no.1 (Fall 2016): 245-266. Farhad is the name of the most important character in an ancient tragic Persian love story written by many poets including Nezami in his Khosrow and Shirin, which projects Farhad as the epitome of true and pure lover.

[4]See Raewyn W. Connell, Masculinities (CA: University of California Press, 1995).

[5]For a discussion of the relationship between homosexuals and heterosexuals see Clyde W. Franklin II, “‘Ain’t I a Man’? The efficacy of black masculinities for men’s studies in the 1990s?” in The American Black Male: His Present Status and His Future, ed. R. Majors and J. Gordon (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1994).

[6]Judith Newton, “White Guys,” Feminist Studies 24, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 575-560.

[7]Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (Summer, 1991): 773-797.

[8]Raewyn W. Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics (CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 185.

[9]Connell, Gender and Power, 185.

[10]Connell, Masculinities, 77.

[11]Connell, Masculinities, 79.

[12]See D. D. Gilmore, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1990) and Misogyny: The Male Malady (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).

[13]Maleeh Aslam, “Gender Theory,” in Gender-Based Explosions: The Nexus between Muslim Masculinities, Jihadist Islamism and Terrorism (Tokyo: UNU Press, 2012), 85. Regarding the importance of establishing family in perception of masculinity, see also Marcia Claire Inhorn, The New Arab Man: Emergent Masculinities, Technologies, and Islam in the Middle East (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012).

[14]Amanullah De Sondy, “Feminists’ Nonothering Hermeneutics,” in The Crisis of Islamic Masculinities (London, NY: Bloomsbury Publishers, 2015), 72-3.

[15]Asif Siraj, “On Being Homosexual and Muslim: Conflicts and Challenges,” in Islamic Masculinities, ed. Lahoucine Ouzgane (New York: Zed Books, 2006).

[16]S. Seidman et al., “Beyond the Closet? The Changing Social Meaning of Homosexuality in the United States,” in Sexuality and Gender, ed. C. L. Williams and A. Stein (Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2002), 427.

[17]Beaini and Khordadian, For the Love of Mohammad, 25.

[18]Parsi and Colborne, Exiled for Love, 13.

[19]Parsi and Colborne, Exiled for Love, 13.

[20]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 7.

[21]De Sondy, “Introduction,” 10.

[22]Asif Siraj, “On Being Homosexual and Muslim,” 212.

[23]Afsaneh Najmabadi, Professing Selves: Transexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 138. I have used the spelling of the word ‘kuni’ or ‘koonie’ the way it has been spelled in various works.

[24]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 8.

[25]Beaini and Khordadian, For the Love of Mohammad, 27.

[26]Parsi and Colborne, Exiled for Love, 24.

[27]Parsi and Colborne, Exiled for Love, 37.

[28]Khaled El-Rouayheb, “Pederasts and Pathics,” in Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World: 1500-1800 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 21.

[29]Janet Afary, Sexual Politics in Modern Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 107.

[30]El-Rouayheb, “Pederasts and Pathics,” 16. See also Frederic Lagrange, “Homosexuality in Arabic Literature,” 171.

[31]El-Rouayheb, “Pederasts and Pathics,” 19-21.

[32]Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards (CA: University of California Press, 2005), 3.

[33] Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 4.

[34] Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 2.

[35] Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 4.

[36] Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 13.

[37] Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 13.

[38] Yet, Yousef is not the only character that Mr. Jafari subordinates. In the same scene in the hospital waiting room, he confronts Farhad during his attempt to visit Yousef. He accuses the young man of corrupting his son, calling him a “bastard” and a “faggot” and asserting that he has “no rights” before harshly dismissing him with a threat of further violence (Yousef and Farhad, 13).

[39]Connell, Gender and Power, 186.

[40]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 2.

[41]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 15.

[42]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 20.

[43]Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” 779.

[44]Joanna De Groot, “The Bureaucrat, the Mulla and the Maverick Intellectual ‘at Home’: Domestic Narratives of Patriarchy, Masculinity and Modernity in Iran, 1880–1980,” in Raffaella Sarti, ed., Men at Home, Special Issue of Gender & History 27, no.3 (2015): 791–811. See also Joanna de Groot, “Brothers of Iranian Race”: Manhood, Nationhood and Modernity in Iran 1870-1914,” in Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History, ed. Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann and John Tosh (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 137-56.

[45]de Groot, “The Bureaucrat, the Mulla and the Maverick Intellectual ‘at Home’,” 795.

[46]de Groot, “The Bureaucrat, the Mulla and the Maverick Intellectual ‘at Home’,” 794.

[47]Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (December 1988): 519-531.

[48]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 8. This line is from Sa’di’s Ghazal number 13, which is considered to be his most mystical (Sufi) line. It refers to the belief in love mysticism where all creations are emanations of the divine and through contemplating and loving the creations, even if they are subversive, a Sufi or individual will be guided to divine beauty and love.

[49]Anthony Shay and Jennifer Fisher, ed. “Introduction,” in When Men Dance: Choreographing Masculinities Across Borders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 9.

[50]Parsi and Colborne, Exiled for Love, 1-2.

[51]El-Rouayheb, “Pederasts and Pathics,” 26.

[52]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 9.

[53]Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London, NY: Routledge, 2014), 3.

[54]Shay and Fisher, “Introduction,” 12.

[55]Aslam, “Gender Theory,” 73.

[56]Shortly after the death of his father, the twelfth Imam, also called Mahdi, or “the one who is guided by Allah”, is said to have retreated into protective hiding or occultation (al-Ghayba). This hiding represented a withdrawal of Allah’s guidance from humanity as a result of the injustice in the world at that time, and when the end of time arrives and Mahdi is revealed again, it is the Shi’i belief that with him will come a time of perfect peace, justice, and rebirth.

[57]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 3.

[58]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 3.

[59]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 8; Soltani and Bendib, Zahra’s Paradise (New York: Macmillan, 2011), 95, 126, and 188.

[60]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 16.

[61]See www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-483746/We-dont-gays-Iran-Iranian-president-tells-Ivy-League-audience.html.

[62]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 16.

[63]Some scholars believe that Rumi and Shams were actually lover-beloved while others deny such a relationship.

[64]Dror Ze’evi, “Morality Wars: Orthodoxy, Sufism, and Beardless Youth,” in Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500-1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 81.

[65]D. S. Ahmed, “Gender and Islamic Spirituality: A Psychological View of ‘Low’ Fundamentalism,” in Islamic Masculinities, ed. L. Ouzgane (London and NY: Zed Books, 2006), 18-20.

[66]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 6.

[67]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 14.

[68]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 18.

[69]Steven Hoover, “The Case of Graphic Novels,” in Communications in Information Literacy 5, no. 2 (2012): 174-186.

[70]Jeremy J. Llorence, “Exploring Graphic Literature as a Genre and its Place in Academic Curricula” in McNair Scholars Journal 15. 1 (2011): 30-40.

[71]Hoover, “The Case of Graphic Novels,” 178.

[72]The dogs are present in Zahra’s Paradise where they are killed and thrown into the river, foreshadowing the incident which happen later to the youth, including Mehdi, during the protests. This symbolism refers to the fact that the subversive youth in Iran who challenge conventions are viewed as impure dogs that need to be eradicated.

[73]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 9.

[74]Soltani and Bendib, Yousef and Farhad, 9.

[75]J. B. Carter, “Comics, the Canon, and the Classroom,” in Teaching Visual Literacy: Using Comic Books, Graphic Novels, Anime, Cartoons, and More to Develop Comprehension and Thinking Skills, ed. N. Grey and D. Fisher (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 2008), 47-59.

Abbas Kiarostami’s “Lessons of Darkness”: Affect, Non-Representation, and Becoming-Imperceptible

Tanya Shilina-Conte Volume 2, Number 4, Winter 2018

In the total darkness, poetry is still there, and it is there for you.

-Abbas Kiarostami

I dream not of being invisible, but imperceptible.

-Gilles Deleuze

On July 4, 2016 when the world awoke to the devastating news of the passing of Abbas Kiarostami, many netizens, including the Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, paid tribute to the late director by replacing their avatar on social media with a black screen. This “non-image” stood as a shroud of mourning, lamenting Kiarostami’s untimely demise, but it also contained within itself the very force of his cinematic art and pedagogy of the image. In his films Kiarostami gave us both lessons of silence and lessons of darkness,[2] communicating a different vision of cinema. His cinema often plays with withholding sound, visuals, and discernible forms, all of which otherwise would rely on representational models of recognition. Babak Tabarraee has previously expounded on a variety of auditory absences in Kiarostami’s “cinema of silence,”[3] and my intention here is to focus on visual absences, or black screen sequences, in such films by Kiarostami as Taste of Cherry (1997), The Birth of Light (1997), The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), ABC Africa (2001), and Five Dedicated to Ozu (2003). These black screen sequences are not simply extended structural cuts to black. Following Saige Walton’s conception of baroque cinema, they can be approached as folds, in which light is folded into darkness and darkness into light, not contrasted or opposed, but enmeshed and entangled. Walton explores the affinities between cinema and the baroque in her writings, finding inspiration both in Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the fold and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notions of the flesh and the chiasm.[4] In particular, she analyzes baroque darkness, as found in Claire Denis’s films, describing it as ominous and threatening. As opposed to Walton and for my own purposes here, I will approach the modulation of darkness in Kiarostami’s films as vitalist, enabling, and liberating. To avoid sinister undertones, I will refer to the analyzed material as “black screen sequences,” not as “dark screen sequences.” In these sequences darkness acts as a camouflaged environment that takes us beyond established meanings, recognizable figures, and limits of perception.

In this essay I argue that the black screen sequences in selected Kiarostami films trigger a process of becoming-imperceptible through creative deterritorialization, transfiguration of surrounding environment, and transformation of registers of perception informed by habitual modes of living and being, including modes of institutionalized reception of images. These moments in his films encourage us to conceive of cinema not in terms of the passive reception of representation, based on the subject-object identification and the “dualism machines” of binary thinking,[5] but rather invite us to approach images through a non-representational lens. To facilitate the task at hand, this essay sets in motion a number of Deleuzian concepts that offer novel ways of engaging with cinema in a non-representational regime, such as “becoming-imperceptible,” “any-space-whatever,” “the fold,” and the “genetic power” of the black screen. As Brian Massumi famously observed, there is “no cultural-theoretical vocabulary specific to affect,”[6] and hence we could say the same of non-representation; however, Deleuze’s unique conceptualization of the world permits speaking nearby,[7] if not directly about, non-representation.

Non-representational theory gained momentum in the mid-1990s, originating from within the field of human geography, where it set about to describe embodied everyday practices of social life .[8] According to Phillip Vannini, non-representational theory is an experimental, nomadic, and non-dogmatic approach, engaged with works that aim “to rupture … and reverberate rather than report and represent.”[9] Often linked to the philosophy of Deleuze and Félix Guattari, it offers a much-needed break from the succession of “-posts,” but is still rather underdeveloped in terms of its methodology. Recently, such fields as art, philosophy, media theory, and film studies have also begun exploring the potential of “negative” prefixes, such as non-philosophy, non-photography, non-cinema, and non-representation.[10] As Gregory Seigworth observes, there is a tendency in affect studies to make use of such prefixes and “pre-” or “–non,” as in “pre-personal” or “non-representational.” With respect to the latter, however, it is important to understand that “-non” does not equal “anti-,” nor is it a negation or elimination; it is “not less.” Instead, the attention is shifted to “the ‘more than,’ the ‘other-than,’ the ‘different-than,’” or, in other words, “the saturating/magnetizing circumambience of everything,”[11] which destroys identity and imitation as such. In contrast to the legacy of structural, post-structural, and psychoanalytic models of analysis, heavily informed by the language of representation, meaning, and signification, these new approaches deal more with experience, emotion, and force of sensation. As Simon O’Sullivan aptly notes, this signals a shift from hermeneutics to heuristics, as a result of which an operative set of more familiar terms such as “representation,” “identification,” “subject” and “object” gives way to an alternative terminology of “movement,” “flux,” “assemblage,” and “transmission of affect.”[12] Such a turn in the cultural condition and visual regime underscores new modes of perception that offer unprecedented capacities and affordances for our emotional states.

“ [W]e see through a glass, darkly.”[13] The public has grown accustomed to the images of Kiarostami wearing dark glasses, even on the set of his films.[14] Kiarostami once confessed that he wore dark glasses both in public and in private for medical reasons: “The retina in my left eye has remained open, and no matter what I do it remains open, and it lets too much light in. I have no idea what happened.”[15] Such a medical condition might be considered a handicap for a filmmaker, but Kiarostami’s (im)personal vision of the world through dark glasses signals a change in habitual perception, an attunement to the unseen and the imperceptible. In answering the question, “What Is Baroque?” in The Fold, Gilles Deleuze observes that the art of the historical baroque announced a new age of light and color, one in which the worlds of light and shadows are separated by the thinnest of lines, however, not set in opposition but effectually enfolded. Specifically, he asserts: “This is a Baroque contribution: in place of the white chalk or plaster that primes the canvas, Tintoretto and Caravaggio use a dark, red-brown background on which they place the thickest shadows, and paint directly by shading toward the shadows.”[16] Kiarostami’s practice of filming through dark glasses, his heightened sensitivity to the indiscernible, can be read as analogous to the Baroque artists’ application of a dark background instead of a white primer for their canvases. In this manner, that which would normally be obscured or overlooked in contrast to brighter figures is now engaged in the dynamic interplay of light and darkness, if not necessarily in equal measure. Kiarostami’s own photosensitivity demands that we reach outside of normative subjectivity and switch our registers of perception from representation to non-representation.

Image 1: Abbas Kiarostami wearing dark glasses in the final scene of Taste of Cherry

Kiarostami’s black screen sequences have been addressed before as part of an analysis of separate films, but not in comparison to one another as a unique characteristic of his cinematic style.[17] In many of the black screen sequences under consideration, feeble sources of lighting and dark shadows obstruct representational content, focusing on the material plane of the image and inviting the force of sensation rather than offering any form of signification. The low-light conditions reduce cinema to its essential resources of light and movement, so that “cinema is … distilled as an aesthetic that relies less upon light and more upon dark.” These types of “sunless images,”[18] according to Nadia Bozak, are dependent on “withholding light sources and thus foregrounding how the constant availability of this cinematic ingredient has become naturalized as part of viewing expectations.”[19] Despite their apparent minimalism, however, Kiarostami’s black screen sequences are incredibly rich. For example, one can trace a variety of light sources in them, whether natural or artificial. There is a gradual switch from the prolonged darkness of night to the first rays of solar light at the end of The Birth of Light and Five; lunar light is present in Taste of Cherry and Five; and we see flashes of lightning in ABC Africa, Taste of Cherry, and Five. In addition to natural atmospheric light, artificial light sources include a lantern (Where the Wind Will Carry Us); a lighter and car headlights (Taste of Cherry); a flashlight, hotel floodlights, and matches (ABC Africa). As Bozak states, the history of cinema can be traced to the energy of the sun, which is “the heart of cinema, its fuel and perhaps even its spirit.”[20] In the course of its development cinema depended on both outdoor sources of light as well as artificial light: “The cinema originated, at least in part, within the same imagination as the electric light bulb.”[21] So the condition for the appearance of images and cinematic technology in general lies in the interrelation between natural and artificial light. But as Bozak further observes, even though the cinematic image relies on the availability of light, it also requires darkness as the condition of its emergence.[22]

There is a characteristic switch from darkness to light, night to day, and death to life that is traceable in all the black screen sequences. Henry Corbin once called the twilight, a common motif in Iranian poetry, a moment of “in-between, where one side looks towards the brightness of day, and the other side towards the darkness of night.”[23] Importantly, Kiarostami does not set darkness and light in opposition but rather explores their interrelation as a creative interplay of folding and unfolding matter that gives birth to images. Deleuze suggests thinking of the fold in connection to Heidegger’s concept of “Zweifalt, not a fold in two … but a ‘fold-of-two,’ an entre-deux, something ‘between’ in the sense that a difference is being differentiated.”[24] We can only think of darkness through light, death through life, non-representation through representation (and vice versa) in the moments when the two intersect, intermingle, bend, and re-fold: “Non-representational theory needs ‘a hinge-logic, a hinge-style.’”[25] Darkness and light, black and white act as the genetic forces of cinema, providing material out of which the visible appears and into which it recedes. Deleuze holds that the genetic power of the black or white screen in time-image cinema “restor[es] our belief in the world,”[26] invoking the Nietzschean concept of an eternal return to origins for renewed value. The energy of the sun acts as a source and force of not only images but also life in general: “sun makes the world visible,” but it also “makes it possible.”[27] In Kiarostami’s films, all moments of darkness end with an affirmative gesture of the “birth of light,” suggesting that life regenerates itself and goes on: “[a]s long as there is sun, the earth’s fossil fuels could in fact be renewed.”[28]

Darkness also acts as a fuel: it becomes a driving force for the viewer’s imagination. Kiarostami’s unfinished cinema retains its secrets because it “requires gaps, empty spaces like in a crossword puzzle, voids that it is up to the audience to fill in.”[29] Because this is an experience at the limits of perception, the rarefied sensory-motor aspect is driven to connect with the affective and cognitive modes. Many of Kiarostami’s films produce new visions for possible becomings, such as a becoming-woman, a becoming-animal, a becoming-minor, and a becoming-molecular, which run counter to traditional structures of the visual world. “Becoming,” a pivotal concept in this discussion, is regarded by Deleuze and Guattari as a constitutive process of existence, the condition of continuity and sustenance of life. Becoming is not about imitation or identification but about transformation and change. Deterritorialization through darkness in particular involves a becoming-imperceptible, the ultimate chain in a flow of becomings. Deleuze and Guattari describe it as a type of perception that no longer pertains to the subjective-objective view of the world (which could serve as a capsule definition of representation), but approaches life in the context of non-personal affect and intensity, which is inherently non-representational. Imperceptible does not necessarily mean invisible: rather it is a stage (but not a state) in which perception becomes molecular, when we “arrive at holes, microintervals between matters, colors and sounds engulfing lines of flight, world lines, lines of transparency and intersection.”[30] As Simon O’Sullivan observes, art can reveal “other ‘planes’ of reality” that may become discernible through changing temporal and spatial registers.[31] Abbas Kiarostami is often described as a filmmaker who does not engage in manipulating the medium. But in what follows I show that Kiarostami points to the imperceptible by relying specifically on the prosthetic technology of cinema, sometimes under the guise of darkness. By mobilizing our perceptual fields in an attempt to address and renew the very limit of what is perceivable, the black screen sequences in Kiarostami’s films bring into the open the degree to which we are caught in the flow of habitual and deep-seated perceptions.

The Meeting of the Wind and the Leaves: Poetry, Secrets, and the Darkness of the Screen-Cave

The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) takes place in the Kurdish village of Siah Darreh, or “Black Valley,” where a crew of filmmakers has arrived to record the mourning rituals for the local centenarian, a woman who has stubbornly refused to die on cue. The man in charge of the crew, Behzad (Behzad Dorani), observes a young woman from the village bringing fresh milk to a well digger, Yossef, a man burrowing deeper into the valley. Behzad is determined to follow this fresh milk to its source. First directed to “Kakrahman’s house,” Behzad is then shown into a dark cellar, stooping beneath the low ceiling and carrying his milk pail. He is a disbeliever, uninitiated in local rituals: “Why is it so dark here?,” he asks, hesitating on the threshold. As he moves forward, he advances on the camera position until his own body blocks the remaining light from the low door—most likely, an invisible cut[32] occurs here, and the screen goes completely black for several seconds.

(Image 2: Zeynab is milking the cow in The Wind Will Carry Us)

Behzad has entered a pitch-dark cellar, with only the sounds of his tentative footsteps, the bleating of a goat, and the lowing of the cow to orient the viewer. Miss Zeynab appears out of the darkness carrying a hurricane lantern, which does not illuminate the girl’s face throughout the scene of the milking which follows. Behzad is reminded of the opening lines of Forough Farrokhzad’s poem, “Gift” (Hediyeh): “I speak out of the deep of night / Out of the deep of darkness / And out of the deep of night I speak,” as he is suddenly inspired to recite the second stanza of the poem.[33] Taking Zeynab by surprise, he declares, “If you come to my house … Oh, kind one, bring me the lamp and a window through which I can watch the crowd in the happy street.”[34] After asking Zeynab’s permission, Behzad then recites to her another of Farrokhzad’s poems, “The Wind Will Take Us,”[35] which lends the film its title. In his reading of this scene, Hamid Dabashi regards the recital of Farrokhzad’s poems in the darkness of the cellar as that of “a vulgar man intruding into the private passions of a young woman.” He also calls the milk “a substance with mischievously sexual connotations” and notes that “the protagonist leaves with a bucketful of milk and a satisfied grin on his face,” condemning the whole scene as “ocular masturbation.”[36] He concludes, hyperbolically, that the “stable sequence is one of the most violent rape scenes in all cinema.”[37] Dabashi’s emphatic interpretation of the scene has been met with some apprehension, and a few film critics, such as Joan Copjec and Chris Lippard, offered alternative readings of this poignant moment in the film. In contrast to Dabashi, whose attention was focused on the male figure (it is notable that he never identifies Zeynab by her name, referring to her only as a “milkmaid”),[38] Copjec shifts the emphasis from Behzad’s shameless behavior to “the awakening of shame in Zeynab,”[39] who “requires an intervention, the presence of others as such, in order to emerge from the milking, from the gerundive form of her impoverished existence, as a subject.”[40] This approach itself is an important feminist intervention of reading from a woman’s point of view, illustrating the impact of a female character who is placed in a more active subject position. Copjec continues, “In Dabashi’s reading of the encounter between Behzad and Zeynab, it is Behzad who brings shame to Zeynab. This misreading depends on the reduction of shame to the product of a simple intersubjective relation in which the belittling or degrading look of another person is sufficient to ignite shame. I would argue, however, that it is not Behzad who occasions shame in Zeynab, but the erotic poem by Forough Farrokhzad, ‘The Wind Will Carry Us.’”[41] Two important observations by Copjec invite another reading, one that transcends the subject-object relationship. My Deleuzian approach to this scene draws inspiration from an affective encounter that takes place in the darkness of the cave and poetry as a deterritorializing creative force.

Dabashi’s representational analysis is deeply locked within the subject-object position (a brutal man “raping” a helpless milkmaid) and is, most likely, informed either consciously or unconsciously by his knowledge of the peculiar system of codes in Iranian cinema. As Copjec and others explain, the system of sartorial modesty, or hejab, is quite pervasive in Iranian culture. Its influences can be traced in cinematic representations after the Iranian revolution, which dictated that female characters had to remain veiled in the presence of their onscreen husbands (and also, by extension, the off screen male spectators).[42] As bodies and feelings had to be cloaked, “[p]oetry became the only option for expressing intimacy, at first primarily for the men.”[43] For example, in his analysis of Rakhshan Banietemad’s The May Lady (1998), Hamid Naficy describes an exchange between Foruq, whose name is a nod to Forough Farrokhzad, and Mr. Rahbar, who “exchange letters and, using one of the favorite Iranian devices of intimacy, sexuality, and love, quote poetry to each other.”[44] In trying to find the key to the cryptography of the scene, Dabashi interprets the recital of the poem solely as a means of indecent and immoral seduction. But rather than portraying the scene as unbecoming, I propose instead that it invites multiple becomings.

“You’ll get used to it if you stay here,” says Zeynab to Behzad, for whose benefit she has lit the hurricane lantern. He replies, “I’ll be gone before I get used to it.” For both Behzad and Zeynab, this encounter offers a new connection, another relation to the world other than the one they are used to. Behzad descends into the cellar from the sunlit world outside, while Zeynab spends her days in the dark. They both momentarily undergo a reaching out to something that is outside of their habituated experience, an “experimental milieu” outside of their normal selves .[45] The habitual modes of their existence are interrupted by an affective moment in the cellar, where a switch in perceptual orders takes place. For Behzad, the darkness of the cellar and Zeynab, the keeper of its secrets, exist on a different perceptual register. For Zeynab, the stranger’s presence interrupts her existence through the light of the lamp cast on her while she is milking. The poem Behzad recites brings her a “window” into the world through which she can “watch the crowd in the happy street” out of her windowless cellar. “The wind is about to meet the leaves,” continues Behzad and, after a pause, he explains this line to Zeynab: “the two are meeting.” He tries to find a more accessible way to explain the affective power of poetry through language that would be understandable to Zeynab and adds, “It’s like when you went to see Yossef” (who likewise spends his days in the dark and whose face we never see). This scene, however, is not just about an ordinary meeting between Zeynab and Yossef, or Zeynab and Behzad; rather, it is an encounter with an asubjective power of affect. As O’Sullivan points out, “affect is a more brutal, apersonal thing. It is that which connects us to the world. It is the matter in us responding and resonating with the matter around us.”[46] The meeting of “the wind and the leaves” in the darkness of the cellar affects both Zeynab and Behzad, inviting becomings. This affective desire is “connected to the feminine, defined as fluidity, empathy, pleasure, non-closure, a yearning for otherness in the non-appropriative mode, and intensity.”[47] For both Behzad and Zeynab, it starts with an opening to a becoming-woman. Behzad steps into the zone of dark quarters occupied by Zeynab, and Zeynab, who went to school approximately the same number of years as Forough, “becomes-woman” through and with her poetry.

Kiarostami urges us to look for poetry even (and especially) in complete darkness. In her illuminating study Khatereh Sheibani describes the influence of modern Persian poetry on Kiarostami’s filmmaking. In her discussion of the film The Wind Will Carry Us, Sheibani observes that “the concept of binaries, which suggests a fixed-reality scheme through which many of us perceive the world, is problematized” here.[48] The film invites an overstepping of the “black and white” alternatives,[49] or for that matter the urban and rural, above and below ground, life and death, male and female, and subject and object pairings. The film abjures these “rationalizing” linguistic patterns in favor of the assemblage of disparate expression, “this way or that,” “both good and bad,” that can be found in the poetics of Farrokhzad and Sohrab Sepehri.[50] In their discussion of becoming-music, which can also apply to lyric poetry, Deleuze and Guattari remark that “musical expression is inseparable from a becoming-woman, a becoming-child, a becoming-animal” because it participates in a form of “creative deterritorialization.”[51] Zeynab is (in)visibly affected by Forough’s lines. Unlike in the classic affection-images (the close-ups of Joan’s face) in Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928),[52] we are unable to see the traces of affect on Zeynab’s face, as it is obscured by darkness. We can only sense her affect, as her re-action is suspended and remains non-actualizable, in a state of virtuality and potentiality. Male and female, subject and object, voyeur and observed are swept up in the creative deterritorialization of poetry.

Dabashi considers the scene an obscenity, but it is only because he is examining what is perceptible to the voyeur. Instead, this scene invites us to explore the process of becoming-imperceptible, through the pathways of poetry and secrets. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the “secret has a privileged … relation to perception and the imperceptible.”[53] The secret issues an invitation to becoming-imperceptible, though it may do so in part through what it reveals as much as through what it withholds, in its form and in its content. To Behzad and the spectator, Zeynab remains a secret, an enigma: “The protector of the secret is not necessarily in on it, but is also tied to a perception, since he or she must perceive and detect those who wish to discover the secret.”[54] The choice of a dark cellar in this film, as well as the choice of a grave in Taste of Cherry is quite notable. Both, as subterranean grounds, offer a tangibly material contact with the earth’s innards. A meeting point between the Cosmos and the Brain, caves have taken center stage in many religions and philosophies. Yulia Ustinova connects the importance of caves in ancient Greece to the recent findings in neuroscience, building on the concept of altered consciousness. According to her, the descent into a dark cave (catabasis), immersing oneself in a state of sensory and significatory deprivation, provided a path to the ascent (anabasis) of the mind.[55] As Ustinova also observes, “[c]aves hid awe-inspiring secrets and treasures.”[56] The prehistoric caves of Lascaux, the underground spring of the ancient oracle at Delphi, and even a rough-hewn cellar in a remote Kurdish village—such underground precincts hold hidden secrets and mysteries precisely because they are sealed off from the perceptible world. The secret remains hidden in the dark, the unseen, the becoming-imperceptible, for those who seek it. It is not too much, perhaps, to suggest that at the same moment in which Behzad and the viewer enter the realm of darkness, he/we experience an altered state of consciousness, as the mind lets go of its dependence on habitual vision and the appearance of things. But if for Behzad the reaching out to an “experimental milieu”[57] outside of himself is triggered by his passage into a dark space, for the spectator this happens through recourse to the “experimental night”[58] that cinema spreads over us, thereby affecting “the visible with a fundamental disturbance, and the world with a suspension, which contradicts all natural perception.”[59] This scene prompts us to put normative perceptions and expectations into flux, distorting the habitual cinematic codes that usually rely on visibility and audibility. For the spectator, becoming-imperceptible is not about disappearance but about reconstituting the nature of one’s perceptual field and changing the threshold of the perceivable world. The secret of the scene in the dark cellar lies in “a perception that seeks to be imperceptible itself”[60]: “Listen / Do you hear the darkness blowing?”[61]

Modification of Speeds I: Drugs and the Darkness of the Screen-Grave

The critical response to Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (1997) has emphasized its minimalist techniques, often at the expense of its vision, including its long, uninterrupted takes, lack of apparent action, long shots that encompass a barren landscape, and extended durations without dialogue.^{^[62]} For most of the film Mr. Badii (Homayoun Ershadi) drives through Tehran and the surrounding countryside in zigzagging patterns seeking an accomplice for his planned suicide. This departure from the Hollywood action film model led critics such as Roger Ebert to declare the film “excruciatingly boring,” because from the perspective of western feature cinema, there was almost nothing to see.[63] What Ebert fails to see are the imperceptible changes: each time Badii travels to the same spot with a pre-dug grave and a tree next to it, he undergoes a series of transformations, not unlike Behzad in The Wind Will Carry Us. Behzad also repeatedly drives up the winding road to the top of the hill (where the cemetery is located) in search of a signal whenever he receives a call from his Tehran boss. Even though the route is repeated, it is never the same journey for either Behzad or Badii. Every time they come to “the same” location, they arrive there in a renewed state, transformed by a series of affective encounters with the villagers (Behzad) or the car passengers (Badii).

The final sequence of the film, after Mr. Badii has recruited an Azeri taxidermist to throw earth on his body if the latter finds him dead in the morning, demands a changed perspective. First, we watch Mr. Badii from a distance moving from one room to another in his apartment. He appears to take into his mouth what we can only infer is an overdose of sedatives or some other drug. Then, under the guise of night, the taxi with Mr. Badii in it heads on a zigzagging path up the hillside to the spot of the open grave. If we look at the scene in a planar dimension, instead of inferring three-dimensional space, then what might be a pair of headlights presents a folded line of flight in the dark with relation to what might be a scattering of streetlights or lit domiciles. Without the changed perspective of holes in space or lines of transparency, without drawing our attention away from the world of perceivable objects and toward the molecular realm of becoming-imperceptible, we cannot appreciate what is about to transpire at the gravesite. We next see the seated Mr. Badii with his back to the fixed camera, framed against the darkened landscape just described. He smokes his “last” cigarette after fighting with his lighter, which stubbornly refuses to work. He then takes his position inside the grave waiting for the drugs to take effect. Drugs of various sorts can be inducements to altered consciousness, “All drugs fundamentally concern speeds, and modifications of speed. What allows us to describe an overall Drug assemblage in spite of the differences between drugs is a line of perceptive causality that makes it so that (1) the imperceptible is perceived; (2) perception is molecular; (3) desire directly invests the perception and the perceived.”[64] The face of Mr. Badii, recumbent in his shallow grave, is momentarily illuminated by the moon and then obscured by the clouds passing above him, lit by a flash of lightning and then cast into a blackout that, in screen time lasts for over a minute but, as Mr. Badii passes into the imperceptible, unfolds for an eternity. As Rosi Braidotti poignantly intones, “What we most truly desire is to surrender the self, preferably in the agony of ecstasy, thus choosing our own way of disappearing, our way of dying to and as our self. This can be described also as the moment of ascetic dissolution of the subject; the moment of its merging with the web of nonhuman forces that frame him/her—the cosmos as a whole.”[65] The prolonged blackout will be irritating to those who wish for only the conventionally perceptible in cinema, to know “what happened.” But for those more conducive to a changed perspective, it invites us to an experience of becoming-imperceptible in the disappearance of the subject, the collapse of the subject-object dichotomy.

(Images 3 and 4: The obscured moon in Taste of Cherry and Un Chien Andalou)

The effect of the blackout, the obscuring and eclipsing of light, recalls the famous play on cuts in Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou (1929), when thin clouds are passing in front of a full moon and a straight razor is drawn across a woman’s wide-opened eye.[66]

In Taste of Cherry we hear the sound of distant thunder and in the split second of the lightning flash, we can see that Mr. Badii’s eyes have closed. The extended black screen, or cut, is simultaneously the occluded moon, Mr. Badii’s shut eyes, his presupposed diegetic passing, and our experience of the darkened theater in which we view Taste of Cherry.[67] But the imperceptible cut that takes place here suggests that the black screen is not simply a “symbol” of death or an “emblem” of a funereal cloak. As darkness comes to its end, we first hear and then see—but in the differing vision and framing of video—a troop of soldiers marching along the winding road in full daylight. It is not the morning after, or the arrival of the taxidermist, but a completely different season and a grainier camcorder footage of Kiarostami, Homayoun Ershadi,[68] and the film’s crew and cast, shooting scenes or relaxing between takes, as the soundtrack introduces Louis Armstrong’s jazz dirge, “St. James Infirmary Blues.” If the latter seems culturally disparate, it is a funeral march that celebrates life rather than mourns death. As Deleuze claims, “Becoming imperceptible is Life, ‘without cessation or condition’ … attaining to a cosmic and spiritual lapping.”[69] The videotape coda is an assertion that for the past ninety minutes we have been watching not an act of self-annihilation but of creative deterritorialization, one that affirms life on the plane of immanence. Nagisa Oshima once said of his method of banishing green, “No matter how severe a human confrontation you are portraying, it immediately becomes mild the instant that even a little green enters it. Green always softens the heart.”[70] The switch from a barren landscape to a scene with bright greenery promises regeneration and rebirth. The extended black screen, then, serves as a “fold-of-two,”[71] as the processes of life and death are materially enmeshed together rather than separated in the either/or of the “dualism machine.” An invitation to becoming-imperceptible is achieved through the treatment of the medium itself, in which the cut from 35 mm film to videotape not only transfers and enfolds the two media within one another but the two ontological registers as well. The black screen is neither erasure nor negation but the locus of an encounter. There is no cessation in the flow of matter, but rather a fold of two world lines, the intersection of which situates itself in the realm of the imperceptible and explored through the very materiality of the medium. As spectators, we reach this creative deterritorialization of seemingly opposed states of life and death, disparate media, and levels of ontology through the imperceptible blackout that they share.

Modification of Speeds II: Time-Lapse Effects and Any-Space-Whatever

The short film The Birth of Light (1997) and the documentary Five Dedicated to Ozu (2003) eschew conventional narrative development and typical character representation. Instead, the attention in both films is shifted to alternative planes: animal, inanimate, molecular (a becoming-dog, a becoming-duck, a becoming-wood, a becoming-wave). They also invite us to explore the threshold between the perceptible and the imperceptible. The Birth of Light and the final section of Five emerge from a primordial darkness into the first emanations of light. The initial darkness in The Birth of Light, first through a thin ray of light that becomes stronger, transforms into dawn as the sun rises over the distant mountains. The short film was commissioned by the Locarno International Film Festival, with photography by Bahman Kiarostami and music by Peyman Yazdanian. Rumor has it that it might have been intended for inclusion in Lumière and Company (1996), an anthology of films by international directors who were encouraged to use the vintage Cinématographe of the Lumière brothers to commemorate the centennial of motion pictures.[72] One might be tempted to explore the link between the birth of cinema and the birth of light (lumière); however, the film is not in black-and-white, but in color, and much longer than the anthology’s required fifty-two seconds. Curiously though, two aspects of this short film link it to Kiarostami’s final film-compilation, 24 Frames (2017), alternatively known as 24 Frames Before and After Lumière. The Birth of Light runs just under five minutes, which is approximately the time (about four-and-a-half minutes) of each segment included in the compilation. In addition, both projects examine the boundary between still and moving images, real and artificial, manipulation and non-manipulation. If the still images in 24 Frames, mostly personal photos by Kiarostami, come to life through imperceptible digital techniques, The Birth of Light relies on a time-lapse effect, animating a seemingly static image of the mountain landscape.[73]

Five, also known as Five Dedicated to Ozu, is an ensemble of non-narrative shorts. In Five (as well as in The Birth of Light and 24 Frames) Ozu’s “pillow-shots”[74] become extended meditations on backgrounds, which come to the fore in a non-representational style. According to Vannini, backgrounds are the “sites that fall outside of common awareness, the atmospheres we take for granted, the places in which habitual dispositions regularly unfold.”[75] In these films Kiarostami abandons representational dramas of the foreground in favor of the backdrops that often pass unnoticed. The segments in Five are separated by black or white screens overlaid with music, which are ontologically different (as straightforward structural cuts) from the final black screen sequence. This section is the longest and runs to nearly thirty minutes. It begins in total darkness, and then light is gradually reflected on shallow, dappled water, appearing and disappearing into darkness again. The wind susurrates, a thunderstorm brews and raindrops splash on the water’s surface, frogs croak and waterfowl squawk. Or so it seems, with a sort of Zen consciousness and placidity that we could ascribe to Ozu. But like the planar screen that we observed in Taste of Cherry, the image is so rarefied and difficult to discern that we become aware that we are watching the projection of light and not (only) observing a contemplative nature-scape. The liminality between the imperceptible and the perceptible is at issue here, defined in Deleuze and Guattari as “zones of indiscernibility”: “The Cosmos as an abstract machine, and each world as an assemblage effectuating it…. To be present at the dawn of the world. Such is the link between imperceptibility, indiscernibility, and impersonality—the three virtues. To reduce oneself to an abstract line, a trait, in order to find one’s zone of indiscernibility with other traits, and in this way enter the haecceity and impersonality of the creator.”[76]

(Image 5: Light reflected on the water’s surface in the final segment of Five)

The impressionist appreciation of what appears to be a single long take—perhaps so long as to try the patience of the distractible filmgoer, and indeed Five also doubled as a gallery installation piece—was “achieved only after filming several ponds over an extended period.”[77] This segment is an artfully composed montage, painstakingly achieved through the manipulation of the shot(s), concealing the edits in what appears to be the diegetic blackness of the screen. We are led to believe that the light of the moon reflected on the surface of the pond is eclipsed by the passing clouds as we are plunged into complete darkness. But as we saw in Taste of Cherry and Un Chien Andalou, it might be just a subtle nod to the cinematic cut. Like the dawning in The Birth of Light, the muted grays, low contrast, and barely discernible surfaces are eventually tinged by Homer’s “rosy-fingered dawn” and the crowing of a cock. The appearance of such “naturalness,” however, is only arrived at through the technical manipulation of film, the use of time-lapse montage.[78] As discussed earlier, one entrée into the virtue of imperceptibility is speed. Just as drugs affect humans in various ways, speeding up or slowing down bodily functions (Mr. Badii who takes his sleeping pills), the effects of modifying of speeds, such as time-lapse, high-speed, or slow-motion effects, change the metabolism of cinema. It only takes about “five minutes” for the darkness to be transformed into light in The Birth of Light. In time-lapse cinematography, the frame rate is lower than the speed used to watch the sequence, so that the processes that would appear imperceptible to the human eye can become perceptible. Deleuze and Guattari tell us, “Movements, becomings, in other words, pure relations of speed and slowness, pure affects, are below and above the threshold of perception. Doubtless, thresholds of perception are relative…. What we must do is reach the photographic or cinematic threshold … according to variable speeds and slownesses.”[79] The becoming-imperceptible is all around us; it is, among other things, happening at speeds that are either above or below the threshold of human perception: the geologic time of continental drift or the beating of a hummingbird’s wings; or, the rotation of the planet that brings dawn and dusk each day. The kino-eye, as demonstrated throughout the manipulation of frame rate, grants the spectator an entrance into the imperceptible.

The black screens in The Birth of Light and Five are instances of what Deleuze describes as the rarefaction of the image (“less information”), in which little or no light penetrates and observable objects are minimal or few.[80] Blackness and whiteness can be conceived—cosmically and cinematically—as either the fundamentals out of which all the stuff of the world begets or the elementals into which it disintegrates. In Kiarostami darkness is not negative, but enabling, and the vitalist forces always prevail. In both films, a new day arises out of the darkness of night, a characteristic of Kiarostami’s themes of birth, death, and regeneration. Deleuze references the concept of any-space-whatever in his descriptions of the affection-image of classical cinema as well as in the depiction of the movement-image crisis and time-image films. Extending as far as the void, these any-spaces-whatever manifest their genetic power: “Nothingness itself is diverted towards that which comes out of it or falls back on it, the genetic element, the fresh or vanishing perception.”[81] No coordinates can be assigned to these spaces, instead, they exhibit independent qualities and forces outside of belonging to any actual locations.[82] Famously, Deleuze describes Joris Ivens’s Rain (1929) as no longer a direct representation of any concrete rain, but a qualisign, a pure quality of rain as an affective state achieved through an accumulation of images in rapid montage.[83] In the last segment of Five the rain abruptly begins and ends, and there are irregular flashes of lightning, illuminating the black screen, not unlike irrational cuts in experimental flicker films, which render the space in a fragmented and disconnected manner. Kiarostami’s waterscape, as any-space-whatever, is not any localizable basin of water, but a space of virtual dimension, deterritorialized and indeterminate. As affect overflows the frame, it becomes a “pond of matter in which there exist different flows and waves.”[84]

“The Electricity is Off”: Power Cuts and Any-Space-Whatever in Minor Cinema

Kiarostami’s documentary film, ABC Africa (2001), was made at the invitation of the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development. The director and his assistant, Seifolah Samadian, travel to Uganda, where they spend ten days recording digital video of the many children orphaned by AIDS and warfare, being cared for by the Uganda Women’s Effort to Save Orphans. One night, as Kiarostami and his assistant discuss the day’s shooting, they observe a swarm of mosquitoes around the hotel’s floodlights. As soon as they are told that the electrical power will be cut off by the local authorities at midnight, they (and we) are immediately plunged into darkness.[85] We are reminded of the moment in The Wind Will Carry Us when Behzad finds himself in complete darkness in the cellar, and in response to his bewilderment, Zeynab explains, “We have a flashlight. The electricity is off.” In a rural Kurdish village, episodic power outages might be a fact of life. For the cosmopolitan Tehrani Behzad, however, darkness disrupts habitual systems of sensory perception as he struggles to acclimate himself to an utterly different mode of existence. When Kiarostami and his assistant find themselves in a similar situation in Uganda, they are equally unable to cope, nor have they brought a flashlight as recommended by the authorities: “How can they live in this darkness?,”[86] they ask each other. The videorecording rolls for another seven minutes in the dark as the filmmaker and cinematographer attempt to find their way by a single matchlight and, eventually, flashes of lightning through the window. For a filmmaker reliant upon the electrical grid for production, and with light being the constituent medium of cinema, the unexpected power loss is profound. They observe of the locals, “The sun is gone, life is gone,” but they could equally be speaking of their own work. “With no candles, no lights, no television and no internet [and we could add, no cinema]. I can’t think of anywhere in this world where the sun could be more precious and welcome,” they say, referring to Ugandans. In Bozak’s words, during this moment we get a glimpse into the “privileged world without its natural mechanisms of power and structure … deprived of its electrical supply.”[87]

(Image 6: The matchlight in ABC Africa)

Kiarostami makes us aware of how much we rely on the habituation of our motor-sensory faculties to carry ourselves through our daily (and nightly) activities. When any one of those faculties is disturbed, we are paralyzed, fixed in place like a bat suddenly unable to echolocate its position in a cave. Groping in the dark, Kiarostami and his assistant continue conversing, “They live half their lives within these dark walls, like blind people. We can’t even handle five minutes of it.” But, of course, it is not only the director and the cinematographer who are deprived, we, the spectators in the theater, or perhaps streaming this sequence on our laptops, likewise feel unable to handle five minutes of the black screen—a veritable eternity in our habituation to an ever-flickering image—so that we experience something like anxiety, claustrophobia, or simply displeasure. The black screen presents itself against naturalized systems of representation, defamiliarizing “the privileged viewing conditions that ‘institutional’ (from [Noël] Burch) or ‘state’ (Deleuze) viewership takes for granted.”[88]

Kiarostami’s cinema has been previously placed under the rubric of Deleuzian “minor cinema” in connection with new political forms of consciousness.[89] In this sense, Kiarostami, an Iranian filmmaker, undermines the dominant Hollywood “language” through his “accented cinema,”[90] much like Kafka, writing in German as a Jew living in Prague, and creates “lines of flight” by way of experimentation.[91] The black screen in ABC Africa, similar to that at the end of Five, can also be approached as an any-space-whatever. For one, there is the shared motif of lightning strikes that make the screen appear and disappear out of the throbbing darkness, thus fragmenting the space. But, poignantly, in minor cinema these spaces of virtuality, invisibility, and affect also become the locus in which “the missing people are a becoming,” they create their collectivity and “invent themselves”[92] in the absence of recognition in the black tunnels and the underground into which they were pushed by power structures. For these “missing people,” either the Kurdish milkmaid Zeynab or the Ugandan grandmother who cares for thirty-five children in a single room, the power failure might be caused either by poor infrastructure or by political struggles. The “voided” nature of the spaces where the missing people find themselves has a strong genetic element, which in minor cinema acquires the special meaning of an anticipatory function, the seeds of the people to come. These “disconnected spaces”[93] (from electricity and privilege) become emancipatory channels, a call “for a future form, for a new earth and people that do not yet exist.”[94] And if there is hope for humanity, then it will be because the privileged, sunstruck cosmopolite Behzad, a cognate of the film director, will acclimate himself to the motor-sensory deprivation of the dark cellar, thus “becoming-woman,” “becoming-molecular,” “becoming-imperceptible,” just as Kiarostami and his assistant will also see in the lightning-illuminated trees of Uganda their own “becoming-other,” “becoming-minor.” There is also hope for the spectator who will reach out to the imperceptible and co-emerge with the world through the affective power of darkness and for whom the non-signifying black screen will become a virtual space where new possibilities can be thought. But above all, there is hope for all people who will engage with the Earth differently.

Coda

In this essay I address the deep affinities between Deleuzian philosophy and Kiarostami’s films, placing the latter’s cinema within the recent turn to non-representation, affect theory, and the reframing of regimes of visuality in film-philosophy and media theory. I argue that Kiarostami’s cinema, especially his black screen sequences, aspire to the logic of non-representation in the audiovisual medium of cinema, which so willingly succumbs to the tenets of mimesis. The sequences of darkness in Kiarostami’s films invite an imagination of baroque interiors characterized by folds within the intersection of light and shadow, allowing entry into the realm of the imperceptible. Many of Kiarostami’s seemingly uninterrupted and non-manipulated shots mask elaborate labor, capturing movements invisible to the human threshold of perception, which in the black screen sequences is aided by darkness. As Ahmad Kiarostami noted during the post-screening conversation about 24 Frames at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, in many of his father’s films, what you see and take for granted has been in fact painstakingly constructed. It should not come as a surprise, then, that in Kiarostami’s last film, 24 Frames, “everything is very carefully designed” by means of digital manipulation.[95]

24 Frames, a reference to the twenty-four frames per second at which film is projected, was shown posthumously at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. The film was inspired by Kiarostami’s desire to know what comes “before” and “after” each given image. Recalling Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic concept of “thirdness,” which splits the binary of the signifier/signified,[96] there has always been an indiscernible twenty-fifth frame in Kiarostami’s cinema, an element outside of the system of signification, which compels the viewer to reach beyond the dimensions of narrative content. The final black-and-white frame in 24 Frames depicts a young woman sleeping in front of the big window, with her head on her desk. On the computer screen beside the woman is a scene from the classical Hollywood film, William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), which portrays a kissing couple. Famously, Kiarostami did not object to spectators sleeping during his films and even encouraged them to do so: “dreams are windows in our lives, and the significance of cinema is in its similarity to this window.” He emphasized that it was more important how the spectators felt after the film, and he wanted them to experience a “relaxing feeling” following the film’s end.[97] We then hear Andrew Lloyd Weber’s song, with lyrics by Glenn Slater, “Love Never Dies”: “Love never dies once it is in you / Life may be fleeting, Love lives on.” Finally, “The End” flashes on the computer screen, depicted against the background with streaks of light and shadow. The credits start rolling to the side of the frame, announcing Abbas Kiarostami as the director of the film. The twenty-fourth frame is a folded farewell that finds itself betwixt and between the happy ending of the classical movement-image cinema and the time-image cinema’s unresolved closure. “Nothing is ever finished in [Kiarostami], nothing ever dies,”[98] and thus there is no END in his open-image cinema. We walk away tranquil and unhurried, but now it is up to us to open that window into our individual lives and unravel what comes “after” the final frame, to track the course of Life in its reverberating process of growth and change. Kiarostami’s cinema demonstrates an affirmative ethics that helps us to survive and sustain ourselves against all odds: there is the birth of light and continuance of life on earth, even in the face of death. It’s Life, And Nothing More…

(Image 7: “The End” frame from William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives [1946])

[1]Tanya Shilina-Conte <tshilina@buffalo.edu> is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of English, University at Buffalo. She teaches a wide variety of courses in Film and Media Theory, Cinema in the Post-media Age, Global Culture and Media, and Theories of Montage and Representation. She has published articles and book chapters in Studia Phaenomenologica, Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry, Border Visions: Identity and Diaspora in Film, and Studia Linguistica. She is currently involved in a research project entitled Black Screens, White Frames: Recalculating Film History, based on Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy and theory of cinema.

[2]I am alluding here to Werner Herzog’s documentary, Lessons of Darkness (1992) of burning oil fields in post-Gulf War Kuwait, but not in any overtly political sense, nor in an apocalyptic manner. Lessons of Darkness, directed by Werner Herzog (France, Canal+, 1992), Film.

[3]See Babak Tabarraee, “Abbas Kiarostami: A Cinema of Silence,” Soundtrack 5, no. 1 (June 2012), 5-13, and also his MA thesis, “Silence Studies in the Cinema and the Case of Abbas Kiarostami” (Master’s thesis, University of British Columbia, 2013). Kiarostami’s cinema has also been described as “cinema of questions,” “delay and uncertainty,” “ellipsis and omission,” cinema of an “open image,” and “unfinished” or “half-created cinema.” See Godfrey Cheshire, “Abbas Kiarostami: A Cinema of Questions,” Film Comment 8, no. 6 (July/August 1996): 34-36, 41-43; Laura Mulvey, “Kiarostami’s Uncertainty Principle,” Sight and Sound 6 June 1998, 24-27; Saeed-Vafa Mehrnaz and Jonathan Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Shohini Chaudhuri and Howard Finn, “The Open Image: Poetic Realism and the New Iranian Cinema,” Screen 44, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 38-57; Abbas Kiarostami, “An Unfinished Cinema,” Text Written for the Centenary of Cinema, distributed at Odon Theatre, Paris, 1995; and Mohammad Jafar Yousefian Kenari and Mostafa Mokhtabad, “Kiarostami’s Unfinished Cinema and its Postmodern Reflections,” International Journal of the Humanities 17, no. 2 (2010): 23-37.

[4]See Saige Walton, “Enfolding Surfaces, Spaces and Materials: Claire Denis’ Neo-Baroque Textures of Sensation,” Screening the Past 42 (2013), Web, www.screeningthepast.com/2013/10/enfolding-surfaces-spaces-and-materials-claire-denis’-neo-baroque-textures-of-sensation/, 24 November 2017;

“Affective Forces and Folds of Night: Les Salauds/Bastards (2013) as Baroque Dark Matter,” The Cine-Files 10 (Spring 2016): 1-25; and Cinema’s Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

[5]Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 276.

[6]Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. Paul Patton (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996), 221.

[7]See Nancy N. Chen, “‘Speaking Nearby’: A Conversation with Trinh T. Minh-ha,” Visual Anthropology Review 8, no.1 (Spring 1992): 83-91.

[8]Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (London and New York: Routledge, 2007).

[9]Phillip Vannini, “Non-Representational Research Methodologies: An Introduction,” in Non-Representational Research Methodologies: Re-envisioning Research, ed. Phillip Vannini (New York: Routledge, 2015), 5.

[10]See, for example, François Laruelle, Principles of Non-Philosophy, trans. Nicola Rubczak and Anthony Paul Smith (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013) and William Brown, “Non-Cinema: Digital, Ethics, Multitude,” Film-Philosophy 20, no. 1 (Feb. 2016): 104-30. As Brown notes, one of the characteristics of non-cinema is an imposition of darkness.

[11]Gregory J. Seigworth, “Capaciousness,” Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry 1, no. 1 (2017), ii, iii, Web, doi:10.22387/CAP2017.7.

[12]Simon O’Sullivan, “The Aesthetics of Affect: Thinking Art Beyond Representation,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 6, no. 3 (December 2001), 125.

[13]1 Corinthians 13:12.

[14]See, for example, such images as “Kiarostami at Work,” Photos 12/Alamy, in David Denby, “End Games: The Films of the Iranian Director Abbas Kiarostami,” The New Yorker 87, no. 4 (14 March 2011), 65; and “The Director Abbas Kiarostami,” by Laurent Thurin Nalset, in Nicolas Rapold, “Master of Illusions Faces His Own Mirage,” New York Times 8 February 2013: AR12.

[15]Abbas Kiarostami, Fanfare 6 April 1998, Web, 24 May 2017. Other directors who have also regularly worn dark glasses in public appearances, if not for medical reasons, then possibly as an affectation or a prop, are Jean-Pierre Melville, Jean-Luc Godard, Wong Kar-wai, Tim Burton, and Claire Denis. In Agnès Varda’s recent film, Faces Places (France: Ciné Tamaris, 2017), dark glasses become one of the cross-cutting themes. Varda’s partner in this film, a young visual artist named JR, is constantly wearing dark glasses, which reminds her of Jean-Luc Godard. Varda remarks in the film that JR’s dark glasses are like “the black screen” between them.

[16]Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 31.

[17]See Chris Lippard, “Disappearing into the Distance and Getting Closer All the Time: Vision, Position, and Thought in Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us,” Journal of Film and Video 61, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 31-40; Michael Price, “Imagining Life: The Ending of Taste of Cherry,” Senses of Cinema 17 (November 2001), Web; Hamish Ford, “Driving into the Void: Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry,” Journal of Humanistics and Social Sciences 1, no. 1 (2012): 1-27; Mathew Abbott, “The Appearance of Appearance: Absolute Truth in Abbas Kiarostami’s ABC Africa,” Senses of Cinema 67 (July 2013), Web; Justin Remes, “The Sleeping Spectator: Nonhuman Aesthetics in Abbas Kiarostami’s Five: Dedicated to Ozu,” in Slow Cinema, ed. Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 231-42; and Alberto Elena, The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami (London: SAQI Books/Iran Heritage Foundation, 2005), among others.

[18]A reference to Chris Marker’s film, Sans Soleil (Sunless) (France, Argos Films, 1983).

[19]Nadia Bozak, The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 42; 40.

[20]Bozak, Cinematic Footprint, 18.

[21]Bozak, Cinematic Footprint, 32.

[22]Bozak, Cinematic Footprint, 40.

[23]Henry Corbin, The Voyage and the Messenger: Iran and Philosophy, trans. Joseph Rowe (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1998), 156.

[24]Deleuze, The Fold, 10.

[25]Marcus A. Doel, “Representation and Difference,” in Taking-Place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography, ed. Ben Anderson and Paul Harrison (London: Ashgate, 2010), 128.

[26]Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 201.

[27]Bozak, Cinematic Footprint, 19-20.

[28]Bozak, Cinematic Footprint, 18. Also a reference to Kiarostami’s film Life, and Nothing More… (Iran, Kanoon, 1992), sometimes also translated as And Life Goes On.

[29]Kiarostami, “An Unfinished Cinema.”

[30]Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 282.

[31]O’Sullivan, “The Aesthetics of Affect,” 127.

[32]This type of “blackout cut” was often practiced in classical cinema, when objects or characters momentarily blocked the camera. In film literature, blackout cuts have variously been described as hidden cuts, masked cuts, or invisible edits, as they are presumed to pass unnoticed.

[33]Forough Farrokhzad, “Gift” (Hediyeh), Web, www.forughfarrokhzad.org/selectedworks/selectedworks1.php#Gift, 31 May 2017.

[34]The Wind Will Carry Us, directed by Abbas Kiarostami (France, MK2 Productions, 1999), Film.

[35]Forough Farrokhzad, “The Wind Will Take Us,” Web, www.forughfarrokhzad.org/selectedworks/selectedworks1.php#The%20Wind, 31 May 2017.

[36]Hamid Dabashi, Close-Up: Iranian Cinema Past, Present, and Future (New York: Verso, 2001), 253.

[37]Dabashi, Close-Up, 253, 254.

[38]Dabashi, Close-Up, 253. She does remain silent when asked her name by Behzad, but we know that her mother has called her Zeynab.

[39]Copjec, “The Object-Gaze: Shame, Hejab, Cinema,” Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism 14 (2007), 176.

[40]Copjec, “The Object-Gaze,” 177.

[41]Copjec, “The Object-Gaze,” 179.

[42]Copjec, “The Object-Gaze,” 164.

[43]Hamid Naficy, “Veiled Voice and Vision in Iranian Cinema: The Evolution of Rakhshan Banietemad’s Films,” Social Research 67, no. 2, Iran: Since the Revolution (Summer 2000), 565.

[44]Naficy, “Veiled Voice and Vision in Iranian Cinema,” 572.

[45]O’Sullivan, “The Aesthetics of Affect,” 127. He references Chapter 6 of A Thousand Plateaus, on “The Body Without Organs.”

[46]O’Sullivan, “The Aesthetics of Affect,” 128.

[47]Rosi Braidotti, “The Ethics of Becoming Imperceptible,” in Deleuze and Philosophy, ed. Constantin Boundas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 157.

[48]Khatereh Sheibani, “Kiarostami and the Aesthetics of Modern Persian Poetry,” Iranian Studies 39, no. 4 (December 2006): 524.

[49]For example, Behzad is perplexed as to why the whitewashed village is called Black Valley, not White Valley, a (for him) confusing reorganization of binaries.

[50]Sheibani, “Kiarostami,” 524.

[51]Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 299.

[52]The Passion of Joan of Arc, directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer (France, Société Générale des Films, 1928), Film.

[53]Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 286.

[54]Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 287.

[55]See Yulia Ustinova, Caves and the Ancient Greek Mind: Descending Underground in the Search for the Ultimate Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 2.

[56]Ustinova, Caves and the Ancient Greek Mind, 1.

[57]O’Sullivan, “The Aesthetics of Affect,” 127.

[58]Deleuze, Cinema 2, 201. Deleuze is quoting from Jean-Louis Schefer, L’homme ordinaire du cinema (Paris: Cahiers du cinema, Gallimard, 1980).

[59]Deleuze, Cinema 2, 201.

[60]Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 287.

[61]Forough Farrokhzad, “The Wind Will Take Us.”

[62]Taste of Cherry, directed by Abbas Kiarostami (Iran, France, Zeitgeist Film, 1997), Film.

[63]Roger Ebert, review of Taste of Cherry, Chicago Sun-Times 27 February 1998, Web, www.rogerebert.com/reviews/taste-of-cherry-1998, 21 May 2017.

[64]Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 282.

[65]Braidotti, “Ethics of Becoming Imperceptible,” 153.

[66]Un Chien Andalou, directed by Luis Buñuel (France, Les Grands Films Classiques, 1929), Film.

[67]It is of interest that Mr. Badii, just like Luis Buñuel in the razor scene of Un Chien Andalou, is smoking a cigarette.

[68]Homayoun Ershadi lights up a cigarette and hands it over to Kiarostami, an extension of the gesture from the previous scene.

[69]Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London and New York: Verso, 1998), 26.

[70]Nagisa Oshima, “Banishing Green,” in Color: The Film Reader, ed. Angela Dalle Vacche and Brian Price (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 119.

[71]Deleuze, The Fold, 10.

[72]Keith Uhlich, “Kiarostami at MoMA, Day 1: Birth of Light and Taste of Cherry.” Slant 6 May 2007, Web, www.slantmagazine.com/house/article/kiarostami-at-moma-day-1a-birth-of-light-taste-of-cherry, 24 November 2017. Lumière and Company includes a different short by Kiarostami, Dinner for One (Iran, France: Cinétévé, 1996).

[73]The most typical use of time-lapse is usually sunset to sunrise.

[74]Noël Burch coined this term in comparison to a “pillow-word” (makurakotoba) in Japanese poetry, “a conventional epithet or attribute for a word,” that serves a brief auxiliary function in a poem. Based on this analogy, “pillow-shots” are scenes of everyday life seemingly disconnected from the main plot, and without humans present in them. In To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 160.

[75]Vannini, “Non-Representational Research Methodologies, 9.

[76]Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 280.

[77]Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Spoiler Alert,” Chicago Reader 8 June 2006, Web, www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/spoiler-alert/Content?oid=922348, 22 May 2017.

[78]See Tom Paulus, “Truth in Cinema: The Riddle of Kiarostami—Part Two,” Cinea 3 January 2017, Web, https://cinea.be/truth-cinema-the-riddle-kiarostami-part-two/, 22 May 2017.

[79]Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 281.

[80]See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 12.

[81]Deleuze, Cinema 1, 122.

[82]Deleuze, Cinema 1, 120.

[83]Deleuze, Cinema 1, 110-11. Regen (Rain), directed by Joris Ivens (Netherlands: Capi-Holland, 1929), Film.

[84]Deleuze, The Fold, 5. Deleuze is quoting from Letter to Des Billettes, December 1696 (GPh, VII, 452).

[85]“It’s a good thing we took our pills,” they say right before the power is cut off, wondering if any of the mosquitoes carry malaria.

[86]ABC Africa, directed by Abbas Kiarostami (Iran: IFAD, 2001), Film.

[87]Bozak, Cinematic Footprint, 42.Think also of blackouts during the Special Period in Cuba or extended periods of time without electrical supply on some Caribbean islands after the recent hurricanes Jose and Maria.

[88]Bozak, Cinematic Footprint, 43.

[89]See, for example, Vered Maimon, “Beyond Representation: Abbas Kiarostami’s and Pedro Costa’s Minor Cinema,” Third Text 26, no. 3 (May 2012), 331-44.

[90]See Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

[91]See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “What Is a Minor Literature?”, Mississippi Review 11, no. 3 (Winter/Spring 1983), 13-33.

[92]Deleuze, Cinema 2, 217.

[93]Deleuze, Cinema 2, 273.

[94]Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (London and New York: Verso, 1994), 108.

[95]Conversation with Ahmad Kiarostami at the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, about 24 Frames, 13 September, 2017. For instance, Ahmad Kiarostami talks about the zigzagging path in Where is the Friend’s Home? (1987), trampled down by a class of children who were directed to walk back and forth across the hill. Another example includes a piece of wood “spontaneously” split apart by the waves in Five, which occurred because Kiarostami hid an explosive in it (see Mahmoud Reza Sani, Men at Work: Cinematic Lessons from Abbas Kiarostami [Los Angeles, CA: Mhughes Press, 2013], 16).

[96]Peirce’s three trichotomies of the sign (Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler [New York: Dover, 1955]) influence Deleuze’s analyses of the image in the Cinema books.

[97]Xueili Wang, “Sleeping Through Kiarostami,” Los Angeles Review of Books 7 October 2016, Web, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/sleeping-through-kiarostami/, 24 November 2017. A few reviews of the screening of 24 Frames at the Cannes Film Festival described sleeping spectators in the audience: “During the screening at the Lumière, where I sat in the balcony, probably half the audience in my area got up and left in the first hour. Over half of those who remained spent portions of the film asleep,” Nolan Kelly, “24 Frames: The Last Word of Filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami,” The Pavlovich Today 12 August 2017, Web, http://thepavlovictoday.com/mixed-media/24-frames-last-word-filmmaker-abbas-kiarostami/, 24 November 2017. For a scholarly treatment of “the sleeping spectator,” see Remes, “The Sleeping Spectator: Nonhuman Aesthetics in Abbas Kiarostami’s Five.”

[98]Deleuze, in “The Greatest Irish Film (Beckett’s “Film”), gave this assessment of Beckett, in Essays Critical and Clinical, 26.

Namag: A Concise Etymology and Semantic

Nima Jamali Volume 2, Number 3, Fall 2017

نامگ /nāmag/ (هزوارشِ آن:[1] MGLTA) واژه‌ای است که در زبان‌های فارسی میانۀ زرتشتی و مانوی باقی مانده است.[2] صورت باستانی آن را می‌توان nāmanka*، متشکل از دو جزء nāman به معنای نام و پسوند ka- دانست که پسوند اسم‌ساز است. منتها، از آنجا‌ که اولاً این کلمه در هیچ‌یک از زبان‌های دورۀ باستانی باقی‌ نمانده، ثانیاً چون که نه n نهایی nāman در نامگ آمده است و نه جبران آن، باید تاریخ پیدایش این کلمه را دورۀ میانۀ زبان‌‌‌‌‌های ایرانی دانست.[3] به عبارت دیگر، نامگ صورت باستانی ندارد و در دورۀ میانه، از دو جزء nām و پسوند ag-، ساخته شده است.[4] ظاهراً کهن‌ترین ضبط کلمه در ۴ کتیبۀ کردیر، متعلق به نیمۀ دوم قرن سوم میلادی، آمده باشد؛ یعنی سندی قدیمی‌تر که حاوی کلمه‌ی نامگ باشد به دست ما نرسیده است. نامگ در این ۴ کتیبه‌ مجموعاً ۱۱ بار به کار رفته است.[5] این تعدد موارد استفاده نشان می‌دهد که نامگ در آن تاریخ واژه‌ای پذیرفته‌شده در زبان فارسی میانه بوده و لاجرم از پیدایشش در آن زمان مدتی نه ‌چندان کوتاه گذشته بوده.

نامگ سه معنای اصلی دارد: ۱. مطلق مکتوب همچون کتاب و هر چیزی که نوشته‌ شده باشد، ۲. سند، ۳. مراسله.

۱. نامگ در معنای مکتوب

در باب پانزدهم فرهنگِ پهلوی که مجموعه‌ای است از هزوارش‌ها و املاهای دشوار فارسی میانۀ زرتشتی،[6] نامگ را معادل کلمۀ آرامی כתיב /ketiv/ (در عربی کتیب، در سریانی ܟܬܝܒܗ) دانسته‌اند. کلمۀ آرامی به معنای نوشته، کتاب و هر چیز مکتوب دیگری است.[7] در سطر 22 کتیبۀ کردیر در نقش رجب چنین می‌خوانیم:

… um ēn nāmag ēd-iz rāy nibišt kū…

۲۲. . . . و این نامه را نیز نوشتم که . . .[8]

نامگ در اینجا در معنای نوشته آمده است.

در معنای کتاب هم نامگ در نام چند کتاب فارسی میانۀ زرتشتی آمده است: ارداویرازنامگ و جاماسپ‌نامگ که باقی مانده‌اند.[9] نامگ در نام کتاب‌های دیگری که اصلشان از دست رفته نیز آمده است: خودای‌نامگ (xwadāy-nāmag)، طوطی‌نامگ، اسکندرنامگ، سندبادنامگ و اونگ‌نامگ (ēwēnag-nāmag لفظاً: آیین‌نامه).[10] نامگ همچنین در همین معنا در ترکیب کارنامگ در عنوان کتاب مهم کارنامگ اردشیر پاپکان نیز آمده است.[11] ترجمۀ تحت‌اللفظی آن نام چنین است: کتاب اعمال اردشیر پسر بابک. همچنین، در مادیان هزاردادستان[12] به نام کتاب‌های حقوقی ازدست‌رفته‌ای برمی‌خوریم که طرف استناد مؤلف آن کتاب بوده‌اند: دادستان‌نامگ،[13] مُستبارنامگ[14] (mustbār-nāmag لفظاً: تظلم‌نامه)، خویشکاری‌نامگ موبدان[15] (xwēškārīh-nāmag ī mowbadān)، خویشکاری‌نامگ کارفرمایان[16] (xwēškārīh-nāmag ī‌kārframān[ān]‌).

نامگ غیر از جزیی از عنوان کتاب‌های خاص، در معنای عام برای نامیدن نوع مشخصی از مکتوبات نیز به کار رفته است. مثلاً در مادیان هزاردادستان ترکیباتی را نظیر پرسش‌نامگ[17] (pursišn-nāmag) در معنای صورت‌جلسۀ بازجویی و سخن‌نامگ[18] (saxwan-nāmag) در معنای صورت‌جلسۀ دادگاه، هِشت‌نامگ[19] (hišt-nāmag) در معنای طلاق‌نامه و یزش‌نامگ[20] (yazišn-nāmag) در معنای صورت‌جلسۀ انجام مراسم ور می‌توان یافت. همچنین، در آن کتاب به نامگ‌دان[21] (nāmag-nīdān) به معنای بایگانی برمی‌خوریم.

۲. نامگ در معنای سند

در مادیان هزاردادستان نزدیک به 20 بار نامگ در معنای مکتوبی دارای ارزش حقوقی آمده است. مثلاً در بندی از آن کتاب می‌خوانیم:

Ud ān-ī guft kū ka gōwēd kū-m ēn wizīr ō tō dād ēg-iš gil ud nāmag dād bawēd.

و آن گفته شده که اگر گوید که ”این قباله را به تو می‌دهم.“ پس گِل (مُهر) و نامه را داده باشد.[22]

۳. نامگ در معنای مراسله

کتابی موسوم به آیین نامه‌نویسی (پهلوی: Abar ēwēnag ī nāmag nibēsišnīh) احتمالاً از اواخر دورۀ ساسانی باقی‌ مانده است.[23] کتاب مطابق عنوانش حاوی الگوهای گوناگون مراسله است. این کتاب چنین آغاز می‌شود:

Nūn nibēsīhēd pad sazīd nibišt nāmag-ē ō kas kas xwadāyān…

اکنون نوشته می‌شود، نوشته‌ای سزاوار، نامه‌ای به یکایک خداوندان . . .

همچنین، در بند ۱۸ آمده است:

Nāmag pad bēš pursišnīh hunsandīh dādan…

نامه برای غمگساری، تسلیت . . .[24]

همچنین، در کارنامۀ اردشیر بابکان آمده است:

uš nāmag ō pāpak kard kū amā ēdōn ašnūd kū ašmā rāy pus-ē ast ī abāyišnīg pad frahang ud aswārīh abēr frahixtag.[25]

۲۷. و نامه به پاپک کرد که ما ایدون شنیدیم که شما را پسی هست که بایسته، به فرهنگ و اسواری بسیار فرهیخته.[26]

نامگ در فارسی دری

پسوند ag- ایرانی میانه که خود بازماندۀ aka- ایرانی باستان است، در گذر به فارسی دری g نهایی خود را از دست داده و در گویش‌های متفاوت به اشکال فتحه یا کسره تبدیل شده است.[27] از این رو، نامه صورت فارسی دری نامگ فارسی میانه است. از لحاظ معنی‌شناسی، نامه هر سه معنای نیای خود را حفظ کرده است.

۱. نامه در معنای مکتوب

در عناوین کتاب‌های مشخصی همچون شاهنامه، مرزبان‌نامه، مصیبت‌نامه، اسرار‌نامه، گشتاسب‌نامه، سیاست‌نامه، نوروزنامه و مانندشان آمده است. همچنین، برای اشاره به نوع مشخصی از مکتوبات هم از نامه استفاده می‌شود: فرس‌نامه، بازنامه، فتوت‌نامه، ساقی‌نامه، خواب‌نامه، سفرنامه و مانند اینها. نامه در این معنا از پرکاربردترین واژه‌ها برای برساختن کلمات جدید در فارسی معاصر است: فیلم‌نامه، نمایش‌نامه، نظام‌نامه، پایان‌نامه، اساس‌نامه، لغت‌نامه، دانش‌نامه‌، اجازه‌نامه، دعوت‌نامه، بخش‌نامه، آیین‌نامه، جشن‌نامه، یادنامه، شناخت‌نامه، شب‌نامه، شیوه‌نامه و مانندشان. همچنین، نامه اخیراً در عنوان بخشی از فصول کتاب هم به کار می‌رود: نام‌نامه و کتاب‌نامه. در عناوین بعضی متون روایی و نمایشی فارسی معاصر، ملهم از عناوین کتب قدما، نامه در معنای حکایت یا داستان آمده است: عارف‌نامه یعنی داستان عارف و نه کتاب مستقلی دربارۀ عارف قزوینی.[28] همچنین‌اند فتح‌نامۀ مغان (داستان فتح مغان)،[29] گنج‌نامه (داستان گنج).[30]

نامه همچنین برای اشاره به جراید دوره‌ای به کار می‌رود. در این معنا به طول دورۀ انتشار جریده می‌پیوندد: روزنامه، هفته‌نامه، دو‌هفته‌نامه، ماهنامه، فصلنامه، دوفصلنامه، سالنامه و گاهنامه.

نامه، خارج از ترکیباتی اینچنین، در معنای کتاب در فارسی کلاسیک آمده است:

یکی نامه بود از گه باستان

فراوان بدو اندرون داستان[31]

این معنا در فارسی امروز متروک شده است.

۲. نامه در معنای سند

نامه در فارسی دری برای اشاره به نوشته‌ای به کار می‌رود که ارزش حقوقی دارد. در این معنا، به عنوان عقد یا عمل یا وضع حقوقی‌ای منضم می‌شود که در آن نوشته درج شده است: اجاره‌نامه، وصیت‌نامه، وکالت‌نامه، عقد‌نامه، طلاق‌نامه، بیمه‌نامه، گذر‌نامه، گواهی‌نامه، شهادت‌نامه، رضایت‌نامه، عهد‌نامه، پیمان‌نامه، مقاوله‌نامه، بیع‌نامه، صلح‌نامه، دادنامه، بارنامه، وقف‌نامه، شناسنامه و مانند اینها.

۳. نامه در معنای مراسله

استعمال نامه به صورت مجزا در معنای کتاب در فارسی امروز متروک شده است. مراسله در فارسی امروز یگانه معنای نامه است، وقتی که مجزا و بیرون ترکیب به کار می‌رود. این معنا در فارسی کلاسیک نیز وجود داشته است:

به سمرقند اگر بگذری ای باد سحر

نامۀ اهل خراسان به بر خاقان بر

نامه‌ای مطلع آن رنج تن و آفت جان

نامه‌ای مقطع آن درد دل و سوز جگر

نامه‌ای بر رقمش آه عزیزان پیدا

نامه‌ای در شکنش خون شهیدان مضمر[32]

[1] هزوارش کلمه‌ای بوده است که صورت آرامی‌اش نوشته، اما صورت ایرانی‌ میانه‌اش خوانده می‌شده است. بنگرید به ژاله آموزگار یگانه و احمد تفضلی، زبان پهلوی: ادبیات و دستور آن (تهران: انتشارات معین، ۱۳۸۲)، 60-61.

[2] دیوید نیل مکنزی، فرهنگ کوچک زبان پهلوی، ترجمۀ مهشید میرفخرایی (تهران: پژوهشگاه علوم انسانی و مطالعات فرهنگی، ۱۳۸۳)، ۱۰۹؛

Desmond Durkin-Meisterernst, Dictionary of Manichean Middle Persian and Parthian (Turnhout: Breplos, 2oo4), 238.

[3] زبان‌های ایرانی را از لحاظ زمانی در سه دوره قرار می‌دهند: از آغاز تا سال ۳۳۱ق‌م و یورش اسکندر دوران باستان است. از ۳۳۱ق‌م تا ۸۶۷م، سال به سلطنت رسیدن یعقوب لیث صفاری و رسمی شدن زبان فارسی دری، دورۀ میانه است و پس از آن دورۀ جدید. بدین ترتیب، حیات زبان فارسی نیز به سه دورۀ باستان، میانه و جدید تقسیم می‌شود. فارسی باستان، زبان کتیبه‌های پادشاهان هخامنشی، نیای فارسی میانۀ زرتشتی یا پهلوی است که خود نیای زبان فارسی دری است. در اینجا فارسی دری را، که زبانی است که این مقاله به آن نوشته شده است، به دو دورۀ کلاسیک، از ۶۳۰م تا ۱۹۰۶م (سال انقلاب مشروطه)، و فارسی معاصر، از آن تاریخ به این سو، تقسیم کرده‌ام تا تحول معنایی واژه را در طول تاریخ زبان فارسی دری دقیق‌تر نشان دهم. برای آگاهی از تاریخ زبان فارسی بنگرید به محسن ابوالقاسمی، تاریخ زبان فارسی (تهران: سمت، ۱۳۹۴).

[4]Henrik Samuel Nyberg, A Manuel of Pahlavi (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1974), vol. 2, 135.

[5]Philippe Gingnoux, Glossaire des Inscriptions Pehlevies et Parthes (London: Lund Humphries, 1972), 30.

[6] احمد تفضلی، تاریخ ادبیات ایران پیش از اسلام، به کوشش ژاله آموزگار (تهران: سخن، ۱۳۷۶)، ۳۲۱.

[7]Henrik Samuel Nyberg, Farhan ī Pahlavik (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1988), 12.

[8]Philippe Gingnoux, Les Quatre Inscriptions du Mage Kirdīr (Paris: Association pour l’Avancement des Études Iraniennes, 1991), 36.

[9] تفضلی، تاریخ ادبیات، ۱۶۷ و ۱۷۳.

[10] تفضلی، تاریخ ادبیات، ۲۶۹، ۳۰۴، ۲۹۹ و ۲۴۵

[11] تفضلی، تاریخ ادبیات، ۲۶۰.

[12] تفضلی، تاریخ ادبیات، ۲۸۶

[13]برای آگاهی از محتوای مادیان هزاردادستان -مختصراً برای بخش اول MHD و برای بخش دوم MHDA- بنگرید به

Maria Macuch, Das Sasanidische Rechtsbuch “Mātakdān I Hazār Dātistān” (Wiesbaden: Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, 1981), Teil 2; Maria Macuch, Rechtskasuistik Und Gerichtspraxis Zu Beginn Des Siebenten Jahrhunderts in Iran: Die Rechtssamlung Des Farroḫmard I Wahrāmān (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1993); Anahit Perikhani︠a︡n, The Book of a Thousand Judgements: A Sasanian Law-book, trans. Nina G. Garsoïan (Costa Mesa: Mazda, 1997); MHD, 11-2, 36, 2.

[14]Mātakdān I Hazār Dātistān, A5, 11.

[15]Mātakdān I Hazār Dātistān, A26, 15.

[16]Mātakdān I Hazār Dātistān, A38, 16-17.

[17]Mātakdān I Hazār Dātistān, 78, 4-5, 7, 14, 15; 98, 4; 100, 7,11 etc.

[18]Mātakdān I Hazār Dātistān, 4, 8; 9, 7; 73, 12-14 etc.

[19]Mātakdān I Hazār Dātistān, 87, 10.

[20]Mātakdān I Hazār Dātistān, A13, 7; A27, 8.

[21]Mātakdān I Hazār Dātistān, 78, 12-13.

[22]Mātakdān I Hazār Dātistān, A34, 2-3.

[23] تفضلی، تاریخ ادبیات، ۲۹۴.

[24]Jamaspji Dastur Minocherji Jamasp-Asana, Corpus of Pahlavi Texts (Bombay, 1913), 132 and 135.

[25] آوانویسی برگرفته از محسن ابوالقاسمی، راهنمای زبان‌های باستانی ایران (تهران: سمت، ۱۳۸۶)، جلد ۱، ۲۲۵.

[26] ترجمه برگرفته از ابوالقاسمی، راهنمای زبان‌های باستانی ایران، ۲۳۱.

[27] محسن ابوالقاسمی، دستور تاریخی زبان فارسی (تهران: سمت، ۱۳۹۴)، ۳۲۵.

[28] محمدجعفر محجوب، دیوان کامل ایرج‌میرزا (تهران: نشر اندیشه، 2536شاهنشاهی/1356ش)، 75-96.

[29] هوشنگ گلشیری، نیمۀ تاریک ماه (تهران: نشر نیلوفر، ۱۳۸۰)، 311-336.

[30] گلشیری، نیمۀ تاریک ماه، 517-532.

[31] ابوالقاسم فردوسی، شاهنامه، تصحیح جلال خالقی مطلق (تهران: دائره‌المعارف بزرگ اسلامی، ۱۳۸۶) جلد ۱، ۱۲.

[32] محمدتقی مدرس رضوی، دیوان انوری (تهران: علمی فرهنگی، ۱۳۷۶)، جلد ۱، ۲۰۱.

Cyrus in Judeo-Persian Literature

Nahid Pirnazar Volume 2, Number 2, Summer 2017

بررسی اشعار فارسیهود نمودار همبستگی ایرانیان یهودی با ادب و فرهنگ ایران است. این همبستگی‌ها در دوره‌های ایران باستان و ایران اسلامی به دو گونۀ متفاوت بود. در ایران باستان، آنچه قوم یهود را به ایران پیوند می‌داد حمایت از قوم یهود و بازسازی معبد مقدس به دست پادشاهان دوران هخامنشی و تکوین تلمود بابلی در نیمۀ اول دورۀ ساسانیان بود، اما در دورۀ ایران اسلامی، یعنی پس از ورود اعراب به ایران، زبان فارسی به این رابطه استحکام بخشید. نقش یهودیان در پیگیری رابطۀ فارسی میانه و فارسی نو را نباید از یاد برد، زیرا اولین نوشته‌های فارسی نو همانا نوشته‌های فارسیهود است که زبان فارسی را به حروف عبری می‌نوشتند.

بازتاب احترام‌آمیز یهودیان از ایران و ایرانی را در کتب مقدس یهود، به‌ویژه کتاب اشعیای نبی و در سه کتاب عزرا و دانیال و استر می‌توان مشاهده کرد. در کتاب‌های اشعیا و عزرا و استر، نقش فعال و نجات‌دهندۀ پادشاهان ایران، به‌ویژه کورش و داریوش و خشایارشاه، در زندگی و ادامۀ حیات یهودیت بازگو شده است.

توصیف کورش در ادبیات فارسیهود اصولاً از گزارشات و توصیفات شعرای فارسیهود یا از منابعی یهودی مانند تورات و حکایات و روایات تلمود یا از مراجع غیریهودی اسلامی برگرفته شده که غالباً ریشه در منابع یهودی دارند. در مراجع یهودی، عهد قدیم اولین مرجع است که در آن نام کورش مستقیماً 23 بار و مطالبی دربارۀ او به دفعات بیشتر آمده است. از آن جمله می‌توان به تواریخ دوم 33-‌36:22؛ عِزرا 8 – 1:1؛ عِزرا 3:7؛ عزرا 5‌ و 4:3؛ عِزرا 17-3‌:5؛ عِزرا 14 و 3: 6‌؛ اشعیا 44:28؛ اشعیا 13و 1: 45؛ دانیال 1:21؛ دانیال 6:28 و دانیال 10:1 رجوع کرد.[1] در منابع یهودی خارج از کتاب مقدس، وصف کورش را در حکایات و روایات یهودیان و به‌خصوص در تلمود می‌توان جُست.

در منابع غیرایرانی غیریهودی آنچه را مربوط به دوران ایران باستان است می‌توان در نوشته‌های هردوت، گزنفون و بعدتر در آثار فلاویوس ژوزیفوس یافت، زیرا هر یک از آنان به‌گونه‌ای درست یا افسانه‌وار از کورش نام برده‌اند.

در منابع ایرانی اسلامی باید از تاریخ طبری یا تاریخ الرسل و الملوک تألیف ابوجعفر محمدبن جریر طبری وت رجمه و تفسیر فارسی آن یعنی تاریخ بلعمی نام برد که ابوعلی محمدبن محمدبن بلعمی آن را تألیف کرد. آگاهی شعرای فارسیهود از نوشته‌های منابع غیریهودی غیرایرانی مانند آثار هردوت، گزنفون و ژوزیفوس بعید به نظر می‌رسد، اما منابع اسلامی به خوبی در دسترس آنان بود. محققاً هر یک از این منابع در شرح وقایع آن دوران تفاوت‌هایی با آگاهی‌های امروزی ما از تاریخ مستند آن دوران دارند، اما آنچه همگی در آن مشترک‌القول‌اند مدح کورش و سپاس از او به برای رهایی یهودیان از اسارت است.

با نگاهی کلی به نام کورش در ادبیات فارسیهود می‌توان شخصیت کورش را در چهار اثر ادبی پیگیری کرد:[2]

قصۀ دانیال: اثری به نثر که در قرن دوازدهم هجری نوشته شده و احتمالاً برداشتی از کتاب دانیال در عهد عتیق یا ترجمه‌ای از نسخۀ گم‌شدۀ ترجمۀ کتاب دانیال از عبری به آرامی بوده است.
دانیال‌نامه: اثری به نظم از شاعر فارسیهود، خواجه بخارایی(قرن هفدهم میلادی)، که نسخ معدودی از آن در دست است.
اردشیرنامه: اثر شاعر فارسیهود شاهین (اواخر قرن سیزدهم و اوایل قرن چهاردهم میلادی) است. در این کتاب داستان ملکه استر با شاه اردشیر و داستان افسانه‌آمیز ایرانی دیگری در هم آمیخته شده است که حکایت فرزند دیگر شاه اردشیر از ملکه وشتی است. در کنار داستان استر و فرزندش کورش، شاعر از فرزند دیگر شاه اردشیر از وشتی، به نام شیرو، و عشق او با یک پریزاد سخن می‌گوید.
عزرا‌نامه: اثر دیگر شاهین است که در اکثر نسخه‌ها در دنبالۀ اردشیرنامه آمده است.

نگاهی کلی به نام و جایگاه کورش در ادبیات فارسیهود و منابع یهودی و اسلامی آن

اصولاً شاعران حماسه‌سرای مذهبی فارسیهود که بعد از حملۀ مغول و حکومت ایلخانان می‌زیستند، از شاهنامه فردوسی الهام می‌گرفتند. آنان قدیسین یا وقایع رزم‌های مذهبی را به تقلید از شاهنامه توصیف کرده در این راه از قهرمانان ایران باستان، از جمله زال و رستم و اسفندیار، برای معرفی شخصیت‌های مذهبی استفاده کرده و حتی برای توصیف برخی از این شخصیت‌ها از مفهوم ایرانی ”فرّه ایزدی“ به مفهوم گسترده‌تری به معنی ”التفات الهی“ (Divine Providence) بهره برده‌اند. مثلاً عمرانی، شاعر فارسیهود قرن شانزدهم میلادی، برای توصیف شائول، اولین پادشاه یهودی، و حضرت داوود از همین موهبت یاد کرده است. او دربارۀ شائول گفته است :[3]

در آن عهد در میان نسل عِبَر

نبود چون او یکی با هیبت و فرّ

رُخش آیینۀ نور الهی

سزای تاج و تخت پادشاهی

پدر او را نهاده نام شائول

جوان قابل و دانا و معقول

و دربارۀ داود نیز چنین می گوید:[4]

خوش آمد شاه را دیدار داوود

کمال و دانش و گفتار داود

جوانی دید با فرّ و هدایت

دلیر و کاردان و با درایت

منابع هر دو شاعر در خصوص کورش دانش آنان از کتاب عهد قدیم بوده، ولی سعی کرده‌اند روایات خود را بیشتر با

منابع ایران اسلامی مطابقت دهند، مگر در بعضی موارد که تناقض بسیار موجب عدم رعایت این امر بوده است. شرح این تناقضات را به ترتیت ذیل می‌توان بیان کرد:

در بسیاری ازمراجع یهودی، داریوش و کورش معاصر هم معرفی شده‌اند. کورش فاتح ماد و بابل و داریوش فاتح آسور و پارس خوانده شده‌اند. در همین روایات، گاهی هم به اشتباه کورش داماد و جانشین داریوش معرفی شده است.[5]

باید به خاطر سپرد که در روایت یهودی دیگری داریوش‌شاه فرزند اَحَشوِرُش (خشایارشاه) و شخصی معرفی شده است که معبد مقدس را باز سازی کرد.[6]

در تاریخ طبری و تفسیر بلعمی نیز ترتیب کورش وداریوش و خشایارشاه (اَحَشوِرُش) در هم آمیخته است. بنا به گفتۀ تاریخ بلعمی، بهمن فرزند اسفندیار و نواده گشتاسب بود. و او اَحَشوِرُش [خشایارشاه] را به جای داریوش بر تخت عراق و بابل نشاند:

بهمن نامه فرستاد سوی اَحَشویرش که به عراق حادثه چنین افتاد، باید که تو [اَحشویرش] به هندوستان خلیفتی شایسته بنشانی و به تن خویش بیایی و مُلک عراق و شام و حدود مغرب به تو ارزانی داشتم. آنجا شوی و به جای داریوش بنشینی.[7]

به کار بردن نام‌های اردشیر و بهمن به جای اَحَشوِرُش [خشایارشاه] در اشعار فارسیهود ریشه در منابع اسلامی دارد که خود متأثر از روایات تلمودی‌اند. تاریخ بلعمی به نقل از اخبار ملوک عجم، نام مرکب بهمن اردشیر را برای خشایارشاه چنین توصیف می‌کند که گروهی بهمن را فرزند اسفندیار و نوۀ گشتاسب خوانده به او ”لقب اردشیر [درازدست] خواندندی و گفتند اردشیر بهمن.“[8]

معرفی کورش به نام فرزند اردشیر و اِستر در اشعار فارسیهود هم برگرفته از همین منابع اسلامی است:

و او آنجا به ملک بنشست . . . و مر او احَشویرش را یکی زن بود بزرگوار، به نام ”وشنا“ [وشتی]. برای زن خطایی برفت، او را بکشت و یکی زن از بنی‌اسراییل به زنی کرد، نیکوروی. نام او ”استیر“ واو را از آن زن پسری آمد و او را کیورش نام کرد.[9]

نکته‌ای که مبین ریشۀ منابع یهودی در متون اسلامی است به کار بردن نام ”اخشویرش“ در منابع اسلامی تاریخ طبری و ”احشویرش“ در تفسیر بلعمی است، زیرا این نام همان اَحَشوِرُش (خشایارشاه) ذکرشده در کتاب استر است که در سایر منابع اسلامی او را اردشیر یا بهمن هم خوانده‌اند.[10]

از سایر موارد اختلاف منابع یهودی و اسلامی نَسَب و نسبت خانوادگی استر با کورش است. در یهودی بودن او همه متفق‌القول بوده‌اند و کم‌و‌بیش او را هم به نام‌های مشابه اِشتر، استوریا یا استار خوانده‌اند. طبری نَسَب یهودی او را به ”طالوت که مَلِک بنی‌اسراییل“ است می‌رساند.[11] آنچه متناقض است، نسبت او با کورش است. تاریخ طبری و تفسیر بلعمی در دو جا استر را مادر اردشیر بهمن و راحب را همسر او خوانده‌اند: الف: ”و این اردشیر را مادری بود نام او استوریا از فرزندان طالوت که مَلِکِ بنی‌اسراییل بود؛“[12] و ب: ”و مادر فرزندان بهمن، راحب دختر فِنحَس [پینحاس/ Pinhas] از اولاد رِحبُعَم [Rehovoam] پسر سلیمان، پسر داود است.“[13]

اما تاریخ بلعمی در فصل پیشینش استر را همسر اَحَشویرش [بهمن یا ادشیر] معرفی کرده است. همسری که فرزند مشترکشان کورش نامیده می‌شود: ج: ”احَشویرش . . . یکی زن از بنی‌اسراییل به زنی کرد، نیکوروی. نام او استیر و او را آن زن پسری آمد و او را کیورش نام کرد.“[14]

کورش را فرزند مادر یهودی خواندن در تاریخ بلعمی و اشعار شاهین نمودار انگیزۀ یهودی ساختن او به علت ”محدودیت مذهبی“ است. شبیه همین انگیزه را فردوسی به سبب ”غرور ملی“ دربارۀ اسکندر داشته است.[15] در منابع یهودی نیز به سبب همین محدودیت مذهبی است که اشعیا انتخاب کورش را میل خداوند می‌داند که به او این توان را داد. اشعیا با این توجیه سعی کاربرد عنوان ”مسیح“ یا نجات‌دهندۀ قوم یهود به کورش را مشروعیت بخشد که اصولاً باید به کسی از ”خانواده داوود“ داده می‌شد. در این خصوص تمایل اشعیا به حدی است که می‌گوید: ”خداوند کورش را برگزید و به او توانایی بخشید تا پادشاه شود.“[16] او در ادامۀ ارادۀ خداوند می‌گوید:

اکنون نیز کورش را برانگیخته‌ام تا به هدف عادلانۀ من جامۀ عمل بپوشاند. من تمام راه‌هایش را راست خواهم کرد. بی‌آنکه انتظار پاداش داشته باشد، شهر اورشلیم را بازسازی خواهد کرد و قوم اسیر مرا آزاد خواهد ساخت. این است کلام خداوند متعال.[17]

فلاویوس ژُزیفوس (37-100م)، فیلسوف و تاریخ نویس یهودی‌الاصل روم باستان، معتقد بود که اشعیا کتاب خود را قبل از برپایی کورش و در حدود 140 سال قبل از خرابی معبد نوشته است و بر این عقیده بود که کورش از آنچه حدود یک قرن و نیم پیش از او در باره‌اش نوشته بودند آگاهی داشته، به خدای یهود ایمان آورده و از تمایل او برای بازسازی معبد خبر داشته است.[18]

پس از عهد قدیم، منابع یهودی دیگر دربارۀ کورش سخنی به میان نمی‌آورند، زیرا نه فقط معلومات تاریخی آنها اطلاع بیشتری دربارۀ کورش به آنها نمی‌داد و در منابع تلمودی هم دیگر جنبۀ تقدسی که در منابع قبلی به او داده می‌شد مشاهده نمی‌شود.

در سال 399م که تدوین تلمود بابلی عملاً پایان پذیرفت، حدود 900 سال از گفته‌های کتاب‌های عزرا و استر گذشته بود و یهودیان بار دیگر در پراکندگی زندگی می‌کردند و لذا دیگر در شرایطی نبودند که کورش را هم‌شأن ابراهیم، موسی و داوود بدانند. به این سبب برداشت آنها از کورش دیگر جنبۀ تقدس خود را از دست داد و او را بیشتر به چشم یک پادشاه دادپرور می‌دیدند تا مسیح و ناجی. [19]

در منابع اسلامی، کیورش یا کورش را در مقام فرزندی و جانشینی اَحَشوِرُش (بهمن/خشایارشاه) می‌شناختند و بر تخت نشستن او ا در سن چهارده سالگی چنین توصیف می‌کنند:[20]

و احشویرش از پس آنک او را این پسر آمد. چهارده سال بزیست اندر مُلک . . . و چون پسرش چهارده ساله شد، احشویرش بمرد و کیورش به ملک بنشست . . . و منشور نو فرستاد، او بنی‌اسرائیل را نیکو همی داشت و بزرگ داشتی و گفتی این خویشان مادر من‌اند.‌[21]

این امر را فقط در اردشیرنامه شاهین می‌بینیم، در حالی که در دانیال‌نامه خواجه بخارایی، کورش هم‌زمان حاکم پارس است و بعدتر جانشین داریوش در بابل (بغداد) می‌شود.

از جمله مواردی که کاملاً با مراجع یهودی متناقض است و هیچ یک از دو شاعر به آن تأسی نکرده اند، ”اسلام آوردن شاه بهمن و کورش است.“ به نظر می‌رسد که منظور بلعمی مترادف شناختن اسلام با یکتاپرستی است، چون اوخدا پرستی را از یک سو ”اسلام“ می‌خواند و از سوی دیگر آن را به ”دین موسی“ نسبت می‌دهد. محمدتقی بهار، مصحح تاریخ بلعمی، در توضیح این موضوع به این بخش ارجاع داده است:[22]

و دانیال . . . مر کورش را به خدای خواند و بدین مسلمانی . . . اما دین مسلمانی پنهان همی داشت تا بهمن آگاه نشود. چون از ملک او سیزده سال بگذشت، بهمن بمرد. چون خبر به کیورش آمد که بهمن به بلخ نماند، او دین مسلمانی آشکار کرد و همه خلق را به شریعت توریت خواند و بر دین موسی، و دانیال را بر همۀ پادشاهی خویش حاکم کرد تا همۀ خلق را به حکم توریت آورد.

نماد کورش از دیدگاه مولانا شاهین

اگر زندگینامۀ کورش را از قول شاهین بررسی کنیم، متوجه می‌شویم که بسط و تفسیرات شعری شاهین بیشتر به برخی از منابع تاریخ طبری و منابع تلمودی، به ترتیب، شباهت دارد تا نقل داستان از تورات عهد قدیم، هرچند در خود این منابع نیز عدم هماهنگی وجود دارد. شاهین دانش خود را در خصوص متن تورات و زبان عبری در موسی‌نامه و آفرینش‌نامه نشان داده بود و در اردشیرنامه، منابع افسانه‌ای ایرانی و اسلامی مبتنی بر دوران تلمودی را تا زمان بر تخت نشستن کورش به جای پدر (شاه بهمن) در هم آمیخته و داستانی درهم‌تافته از ریشه‌های مذهبی تاریخی و افسانه‌ای می‌سراید. اما پس از این دوران، دیگر بسیاری از گفته‌های او با منابع یهودی و اسلامی مطابقت ندارد و شاید برگرفته از افسانه‌های دیگر ایرانی و غیرایرانی باشد. برخی از جمله داستان‌های درآمیخته با متن اصلی گزارش عبارت‌اند از رابطۀ رستم و بهمن وتربیت او به دست رستم، بازگشت بهمن به سوی پدرش گشتاسپ، وفات گشتاسپ و بر تخت نشستن بهمن پس از پدر، پادشاهی کردن بهمن، آگاهی بهمن از وفات رستم و بالاخره ازدواج و جدایی بهمن از وشتی، عشق افسانه‌ای شیرو، فرزند نخست شاه بهمن از ملکه وشتی، پس از مرگ شاه بهمن در جنگ با اژدها و در نهایت وفات او در کام اژدها.[23]

از جمله تناقضات طبری و بلعمی با شاهین، معاصر بودن دانیال با کورش، دعوت کورش به دین اسلام ، تشویق او به دست برداشتن از ”آتش‌پرستی“ و قبول ”اسلام“ و کتمان آن تا زمان فوت پدر به مدت 13 سال است. بعضی از این گفته‌ها تا حدی غیرمستندند که محمدتقی بهار، مصحح متن، نیز به آنها اشاره می‌کند.[24]

شاهین ابتدا در قالب فرهنگ ایرانی به توصیف بر تخت نشستن شاه بهمن (اردشیر/ اَحَشوِرُش)، ازدواج او با ملکه وشتی و تولد فرزندشان، شیرو، می‌پردازد. پس از حکایت خشم پادشاه بر ملکه وَشتی و طرد او، به چگونگی انتخاب استر برای ازدواج پرداخته، در پی آن پیوند عروسی پادشاه را با ملکه استر چنین آغاز می‌کند:[25]

صفت پیوند شاه بهمن با استر

پیروز و پشوتن و دلیران

میلاد و یلان ملک ایران

از حضرت شهریار رفتند

با هدیه و با نثار رفتند

چون بر در قصر او رسیدند

میران ز دو رویه سرکشیدند

استر ز پرده همچو ناهید

بنمود رخی چو ماه و خورشید

پوشیده نقاب حُسن در رو

در پای کشان، کمند گیسو

آهسته به ناز شد خرامان

چون کبک دری، بتی بسامان

. . .

با مطرب و با نشاط همراه

رفتند پیاده تا در شاه

از حضرت شاه بانویی چند

با موبد و هَگای خرمند

رفتند به پیشواز آن ماه

آن زینت تاج و و زیور گاه

پس از آن دربارۀ تولد کورش، که فرزند این زوج است، سخن می‌گوید.[26]

زاییدن استر کورش را

استِر چو همدم شهنشاه

گردید و بیافت رفعت و جاه

دلشاد شد اردشیر از آن حور

در چهرۀ او ندید جز نور

با او به صفا و ذوق می‌بود

با عشرت و عیش و شوق می‌بود

استر به امر فرد اکبر

شد حامله از شه هنرور

هنگام، چو در رسید زایید

زیباپسری به رخ چو خورشید

حق باب صفا بدو ببخشید

اندر خور تاج و تخت جمشید

شه شاد شد از جمال آن پور

در چهره بُدَش ز خسروی نور

کورش بنهاد نام فرزند

بنیاد ستم ز دهر بر کند

برداشت ز راه کاروان باج

زر داد و درم بسی به محتاج

در شوش نماند بینوایی

از جود و عطای او به جایی

تربیت و تحصیل کورش

آنچه در بسط شاهین در تربیت کورش قابل توجه است جنبۀ تربیت او برای پادشاهی و پهلوانی است تا

جنبه‌های آسمانی و تقدس او:[27]

کورش چو چهار ساله گردید

رویش چو بهار و لاله گردید

شه بی رخ او نداشت آرام

روز و شب و صبح صادق و شام

یک روز پشوتن هنرور

فرمود به اردشیر صفدر

آمد گه آنکه شاهزاده

چشمشن به هنر شود گشاده

نیک و بد و بیش و کم بداند

ضایع‌شده روز او نماند

چون پند وزیر شاه بشنید

از وی همه آن به راه گردید

شه خواست هنروران بسیار

اندر خور کار خود به هر کار

زر داد به هر یکی و فرزند

با زر به هنرور خردمند

تا هر هنری که نامداران

گُردان و یلان و شهریاران

دانش همه یک‌به‌یک بیاموخت

رو از هنر و یلی برافروخت

عمرش برسید چون به ده سال

دولت بگشاد بر درش بال

بر جملۀ شهرهای ایران

درگاه شجاعت، آن دلیران

کس پایۀ او نداشت در جنگ

پولاد بُدش چو موم در چنگ

. . .

مشهور شد او به نامداری

چون رستم زال در سواری

در توضیح کشته شدن شاه بهمن (خشایارشاه) به دست یکی از سرداران محافظ سلطنتی خود،[28] شاهین از افسانۀ کشته شدن او در کام اژدها سخن می‌گوید؛ اژدهایی که محصول کشاوزان را به باد می‌داد و شاه برای نجات ملتش به جنگ او رفت و کشته شد:[29]

رفتن شاه اردشیر به شکار ، کشتن اژدها و مردن در شکم اژدها

این گفت و به کار آن پرداخت

چو باد به نزد اژدها تاخت

از دور ورا چو اژدها دید

چو رعد بهار و شیر غُرید

از دَم بفشاندی آتش و دود

در دم بکشید شاه را زود

چو در دَمِ اژدها بشد شاه

با خنجرِ مُشک سر به آن راه

خود را به مقام بوالعجب دید

در صبح امید، شام شب دید

پس از مرگ شاه بهمن، کورش بر تخت پادشاهی نشسته، خطابۀ تاجگذاری خود را ایراد می‌کند. در اینجاست که شاعر با بسط و تفسیر سرنوشت کورش را به تاریخ باستانی ایران پیوند زده، از بی‌عدالتی پدر شاه بهمن، پسر اسفندیار، با رستم سخن می‌گوید و از افرادی همچون نوذر، کی‌قباد، رستم، طوس، ایرج، سلم و تور، لهراسب، بهمن، زال، گیو و گشتاسب نام می‌برد و اشاره می‌کند که همه از این جهان رفتند و آنچه می‌ماند عدالت است. کورش دادگستری را به ملت خویش چنین وعده می‌دهد:[30]

بر تخت نشستن کورش به جای کی اردشیر و عدالت پروری او

چون صبح برآمد از سیاهی

بر شب به فراز تخت شاهی

بر جای کی‌اردشیر بنشست

با داد و صفا و عدل پیوست

. . .

کورش بگشاد لفظ دُر بار

گفت ای سر سرکشان هوشیار

اندیشۀ بد ز دل برانید

با هم همه یک‌به‌یک بدانید

حق داد به من چو پادشاهی

ناید به جهان زمن تباهی

کارم همه عدل و داد باشد

از داد زمانه شاد باشد

پیوسته به عدل وداد کوشم

در داد، چو کی‌قباد کوشم

ظالم نبود ز تیغ من شاد

خاکش بدهم به تیغ بر باد

دانم که کی‌اردشیر سرکش

در دانش و داد در زد آتش

. . .

من جامۀ ظلم در نپوشم

دایم پی عدل و داد کوشم

دود از دل ظالمان برآرم

در خاک چو دانۀ امان بکارم

دانم به کسی نماند این جاه

خرم دل آن که باشد آگاه

کو نوذر و کی‌قباد و کاووس؟

کو سام سوار و رستم طوس؟

کو رنج و ظلم و زور لهراسب؟

کو بهمن زار و جور گشتاسب؟

. . .

گُردان چو ز کورش آن شنیدند

سر بر فلک برین کشیدند

از او همه شاد شاد گشتند

در دل همه تخم داد کِشتند

کورش همه روز داد می‌داد

دایم دل خلق ازو بُدی شاد

ظالم به جهان نماند یک تن

از شاه و گدا و مرد و از زن

در اینجا شاعر می‌بایست قبل از وصف آزادی یهودیان به دست کورش، ابتدا از خرابی معبد مقدس و به اسارت رفتن یهودیان به شهر بابل سخن بگوید. او خرابی معبد اول را به دست بخت‌النصر نتیجۀ گناهکاری یهودیان و عدم پیروی از قوانین موسی می‌داند:[31]

صفت خراب شدن معبد مقدس

چون قوم کلیم حق خطاکار

گشتند همه چو اهل کفار

با هر بد و نیک یار گشتند

بر بد همه استوار گشتند

نامد ز نبی و شرطشان یاد

برخاست غبار و گرد و فریاد

. . .

در بابل و بصره بود یک شاه

بَدگوهر و بُت‌پرست و گمراه

با لشکر بی قیاس و بی مَر

لشکر همه چو شاه کافر

او بود به نام بختُ‌النصر

عاصر چو وی نبود در عصر[32]

سرلشکر جمله عاصیان بود

گمراه لعین و بدگمان بود

جبّار جهان ورا به قدرت

انگیخت ز جا، بداد نصرت

لشکر بکشید گَبرمعیوب

بر جانب خاندان یعقوب

. . .

نگذاشت به دهر هر کلام او

تورات شریف بانظام او

و آن‌گاه بشد او به سوی بابل

با فتح و مراد گشته حاصل

با نعمت و چارپای بسیار

با بَرده و گنج‌های بسیار

به گفتۀ شاهین در عزرانامه، عزرا چنین درخواستی از کورش می‌کند و سختی‌های اسارت، پس از فتح بابل به دست کورش، عِزرا را به فکر می‌اندازد تا برای نجات قوم خود و جلوگیری از نابودی آنان چاره‌ای بیندیشد. او رهبران جامعۀ یهودی بابل را ترغیب می‌کند که به نزد کورش رفته، هویت قومی خود را به او ظاهر کرده، از او درخواست آزادی و بازگشت به سرزمین کنعان کنند. برای این منظور، عِزرا از سه نمایندۀ دیگر جامعه به نام‌های حَگای، زخریا و مَتَتیا درخواست می‌کند تا همراه او به حضور کورش بروند. آنان مَتَتیا را، که پیرِ قوم و پیشوای یهودیان بود، به سخنگویی برمی‌گزینند:[33]

او را همه عجز وانماییم

بر وی همه راز برگشاییم

تا صورت حال ما بداند

ما را ز عذاب وارهاند

کنعان بکُند دِگر ره آباد

با معبد خاص و جای میعاد

گفتار نبی سران شنیدند

فرمان ورا به جان خریدند

آن روز گذشت و روز دیگر

عِزرای نبی، رسول اکبر

با حَگای پیر و با زخریا

با مهترِ خسروان، مَتَتیا

شد جانب کورشِ سر افراز

خود همچو همای با سه شهباز

به هنگام حضور آنان نزد پادشاه، رفتار کورش نسبت به مَتَتیا، پیشوای روحانی قوم و اسیر خود، همراه با احترام و حرمت بود و فرمان پیروی از همین رفتار را به اطرافیانش نیز صادر کرد: [34]

دریاب که این سران عزیزند

قوم خوش خوب باتمیزند

پیغمبر و شاه و نام دارند

بر قوم کلیم شهریارند

نام همه را که گفت با شاه

یک‌یک همه سرفراز آگاه

کورش همه را به تخت بنشاند

نامحرم را ز پیش خود راند‌[35]

گفتا پس از آن با متتیا

ز آن مه ز خاندان یهودا

برگو که ز من چه کام خواهی

از گوهر و گنج و پادشاهی

تا کام دلت برآرم از پیش

کامت به صفا بر آرم از پیش

گفتا به شه ای به دانش آباد

گیتی ز تو گشته خرم و شاد

. . .

دریاب شَها که ملک کنعان

از دورِ کلیم ابنِ عمران

مأوا و مقام و جایگه بود

از جود عطا و فضل معبود

. . .

زآنجا شدیم سرنگونسار

گشتیم به هر بدی گرفتار

. . .

اکنون بگذشت سال هفتاد

کان ملک خراب شد ز بیداد

خواهم به کرم تو آن زمین باز

معمور کنی اَیا سرافراز

پس از این درخواست متتیا، کورش به شرط نوشیدن یک جام شراب به او قول کمک می‌دهد، ولی متتیا

نمی‌تواند فوراً این درخواست را قبول کند.[36]

خواهی که مراد تو بر آرم

من با تو یکی مراد دارم

خواهم که ز دست من یکی جام

مِی نوش کنی به کام و ناکام

. . .

آن چو بشنید ازو مَتتیا

گفتا به سخا چو ابر دریا

امروز ناید این ز دستم

مَپسند و مَکوش در شکستم

اکنون بروم به سوی یاران

در پیش سران و نامداران

بینم که شریعت جهاندار

فتوا چه دهد ز بهر این کار

شاعر در اینجا سعی می‌کند موضوع شراب نوشیدن از دست یک ”غیریهودی“ را که یکتاپرست نیست مطرح کند. در اینجا این سوال پیش می‌آید که چرا شاعر ناگهان موضوع غیریهودی بودن کورش را مطرح می‌سازد، در صورتی که خود در ابتدای داستان او را پسر استر یهودی معرفی کرده است. امری که در منابع اسلامی، از جمله تاریخ طبری، نیز تأیید شده است که همسر بهمن، رحاب، دختر پینحاس یهودی بود.[37] شاهین این مسئله را می‌دانست و به راحتی می‌توانست مطابق فقه یهود در این داستان کورش را به علت یهودی بودن مادرش یهودی به شمار آورد، ولی چنین نمی‌کند. شاهین مخصوصاً در این داستان ساختگی تردید متتیا را مطرح و قبول آن را منوط به مشورت با یاران می‌کند. متتیا هم پس از مشورت، تنها به صرف بازگشت قوم یهود و فرمان بازسازی معبد تن به قبول پیشنهاد کورش می‌دهد و توجیه عزرا را در این زمینه می‌پسندد:‌[38]

هر چیز که آن ز دست کفار

نوشی بود آن حرام، پرُبار

بستان و بنوش یک قدح بیش

گر خواهی نخوری ز دست بدکیش

تا خانۀ خاص بار دیگر

معمور بگردد ز امر داور

لذا متتیا پس از خوابی که در این خصوص می‌بیند، روز بعد با زخریا و سایر همراهان به نزد کورش بازمی‌گردد تا جام شراب را از دست او بنوشد:[39]

برخاست ز خواب خوش متتیا

رفت بر شاه، با زخریا

با هم رُخِ دو سه یاران

آزاده سران و نامداران

کورش چو ورا بدید و بنواخت

جایش بر تخت خویشتن ساخت

بنشاند ورا به رسم و آیین

چون خسرو روم و هند و ماچین

پس از آن کورش به قول خود وفا کرده، فرمان آزادی آنان و بازسازی سرزمین کنعان و معبد مقدس را صادر می‌کند.[40]

کورش پس از آن بداد فرمان

کآباد کنند مُلک کنعان

تا خانۀ خاص را بسازند

چندی زر و سیم درو ببازند

زان قوم کلیم شاد گشتند

از کار تباه درگذشتند

بسط شاهین دربارۀ تردید متتیا در خصوص نوشیدن شراب با کورش را در منابع اسلامی، که الگوی اولیۀ او هستند، نمی‌بینیم. چنین بسطی ممکن است به این علت باشد که شاعر قرن چهاردهم میلادی تحت تأثیر ربانان گذشتۀ تلمودی و شاید هم به علت افسردگی از ادامۀ پراگندگی قوم یهود و این اصل که کورش بالمآل نتوانست ماشیه معهود باشد و آنان را از پراگندگی همیشگی نجات دهد، می‌خواهد کورش را از درجۀ تقدس به مقام پادشاهی عادل پایین آورد.[41]

وفات یافتن کورش‌بن اردشیر[42]

مرگ کورش آخرین فصل عزرانامه است و شاعر پس از وصف صفات انسانی و عدالت‌پروری او و سخن از مرگ طبیعی بشر، شرح غسل دادن او با گلاب و خاکسپاری او را بیان کرده، به نظر می‌رسد از کشته شدن کورش در میدان جنگ خبر ندارد:[43]

هر گل که برآید از سر خار

هم عاقبت او، بریزد از بار

روزی دو سه بیش و کم نماند

هم کار ورا اجل براند

حال بشر زمانه این است

بر شأن بشر جهان به کین است

کورش چو فراز تخت اقبال

شادان بنشست خرم آن سال

می‌بود فراز تخت عالی

از داد نبود شاه خالی

مأوای پدر نگاه می‌داشت

اندر بر حق به راه می‌داشت

چون گاه شدن فرازش آمد

بر رحمت حق نیازش آمد

. . .

روح از برخویشتن روان کرد

ترک بد و نیک و این و آن کرد

بر تخته فتاد کارش از تخت

پیچید ز کار خسروی رخت

غسّال ورا بشست زیبا

پوشید برش ز حرز و دیبا

دراینجا شاعر در شرح مرتبت کورش او را علاوه بر شخصیت‌های مذهب با آدم‌های زمینی در قالب قهرمانان شاهنامه مقایسه می‌کند:[44]

کو آدم و نوح و شیث و ایوب

موسی و خلیل و اسحق و یعقوب

کو عوج و کی‌قباد و نوذر

جمشید و گیو و قباد و قیصر

. . .

کو رستم زال و نیرم و سام

کو بیژن و طوس و گیو بهرام

و به تأسی از متقدمان ایرانی خود به توصیف فلسفۀ زندگی و گذرا بودن جهان می‌پردازد:[45]

او مُرد و هر آنکه زاد میرد

کس را به جهان بقا نگیرد

خاکیم و به خاک بازگردیم

گر خود همه گنجِ راز گردیم

. . .

ا ز مرگ نه شَه رهد نه دَربان

نه دیو و پری، نه مُرغ و حیوان

بر سوی عدم رهی‌ست دشوار

باید همه را شدن به ناچار

در این زمینه به نظر می‌رسد که شاعر قرن چهاردهم میلادی با فلسفه و اشعار حکیم عمر خیام، شاعر قرون یازدهم و دوازدهم میلادی آشنایی داشته است، زیرا که تأثیر زمان و مکان در افکارو اندیشۀ او نمایان است.[46] خیام سروده است:

این کوزه چو من عاشق زاری بوده است

در بند خم زلف نگاری بوده است

این دسته که بر گردن او می‌بینی

دستی است که بر گردن یاری بوده است

در هر دشتی که لاله‌زاری بوده است

از سرخی خون شهریاری بوده است

هر شاخ بنفشه کز زمین می‌روید

خالی است که بر رخ نگاری بوده است

و شاهین می‌گوید:

در هر وطنی که لاله زاری‌ست

آن لاله ز خون شهریاری‌ست

در کوزه‌گران یکی گذر کن

در حالت و کارشان نظر کن

تا کاسۀ سر ز کوزه بینی

بر دست و زبان و چشم بینی

گستاخ مبین، کوزه در دست

کو از من و تو کمی نبوده‌ست

این کهنه سبوی ما دگر هم

اشکسته شود دریغ آدم

کورش از دیدگاه خواجه بخارایی

خواجه بخارایی نیز، همچون شاهین، کورش را از برخی منابع اسلامی برگرفته از حکایات و امثال یهودی متفاوت معرفی می‌کند. از جمله تفاوت‌های اصلی دانیال‌نامه خواجه بخارایی و اردشیرنامه شاهین موضوع معاصر بودن داریوش و کورش و جانشینی کورش بعد از داریوش است. این امر را هم در حکایات یهودی و هم در گوشه‌هایی از تاریخ طبری و تفسیر بلعمی مشاهده می‌کنیم؛ در حالی که شاهین یا از آن بی‌خبر بوده یا به علت تناقض با گفتۀ خودش ذکری از آن به میان نمی‌آورد:[47]

قضارا داریاوش شاه مادی

به کورش گفت در کیفیت می

که آورده است پیکی تیزگام

ز بغداد از برای من پیامی

که پورِ بُخت‌ النصر آن شاه بدنام

به تخت سلطنت بگرفته آرام

. . .

روان باید شد اکنون بر سر او

که اکنون است غافل لشکر او

. . .

شهنشه را چو کورش بود داماد

به ناچاری به تدبیرش رضا داد

به بلشاصر خیال رزم کردند

به رفتن بر سر او عزم کردند

به هنگام حملۀ سپاه فرنگ به بغداد و نیاز داریوش به کمک، کورش همچون یک فرمانده قوی و دلیر، بدون هیج توصیف تقدس‌آمیزی، به نجات بغداد و پادشاهی داریوش می‌شتابد و دشمن را از خاک بابل (بغداد) بیرون می‌راند. در این توصیف است که شا عر از صحنه‌های رزمی شاهنامه وآلات و ابزار جنگی آن مدد می‌گیرد:

چو کورش دید این احوال هایل

تو گویی گشت از او ادراک زایل

به میدان تاخت همچون شیر سرمست

به آن نام‌آوران در جنگ پیوست

به مردی، گرز در جولان درآورد

سمندش گرد از میدان بر آورد

. . .

ز کورش آن سپه این ضرب چون دید

به غایت تند و خشم‌آلود گردید

. . .

درافتادند با هم از سر قهر

همی خوردند از هم تیغ پُرزهر

ز ضرب گرز و تیغ تیز و خنجر

تن بسیار کس گردید بی‌سر

. . .

چو سردار عدو از پا درآمد

سپاه خصم را دولت سر آمد

به سوی کشور خود رو نهادند

اساس بارگه از دست دادند.

دربارۀ جانشینی کورش به جای داریوش، خواجه بخارایی چنین می‌سراید که که پس از کشته شدن داریوش در جنگ، کورش به جای داریوش بر تخت پادشاهی بغداد هم می‌نشیند و در هر دو مُلک پارس و عراق (بغداد) در جایگاه پادشاهی عادل حکومت می‌کند.[48]

چو کورش گشت ازین هنگامه دلشاد

گرفت آرام اندر شهر بغداد

امیران را نوازش کرد بسیار

به قانونی که گفتند نیست در کار

بشد بخت و سعادت همدم او

مبدل گشت با شادی غم او

به ملک فارس دایم بود دلشاد

هم از وی شد عراق و ملک بغداد

چو در کشور فروغ مهر او تافت

ازین، آن مملکت زیب دگر یافت

نبودش پیشه‌ای در شهر جز داد

بُدی از عدل او بحر و بر آباد

به تخت خسروی منزل گرفتی

ز بخت و ملک کام دل گرفتی

چنان در وادی عشرت فتادی

که جامش یاد از جمشید دادی

ز بزمش مردمان بودند دلشاد

از او این مملکت شد عشرت‌آباد

برخلاف شاهین که در بسط و تفسیر خود سعی دارد کورش را پادشاهی عدالت‌پرور و زاده از مادری یهودی معرفی کند، خواجه بخارایی به هر دو پادشاه، یعنی داریوش و کورش، رنگ تقدس بیشتر و خداشناس بودن می‌دهد. خواجه بخارایی با الهام از اشعیا، فصل 45، آیات 1-5، داریوش و کورش را مخاطب خدا قرار داده و ندای خداوند به آنان این است که به جنگ بلشاصر پادشاه بابل بروند:[49]

به وقت صبحدم آمد ندایی

که شام تیره را آمد ضیایی

شما را بخت و دولت یار گردید

سعادت مونس و غمخوار گردید

. . .

همان دم بازگردید و بیایید

به شهرستان بغداد اندر آیید

که بلشاصر بسی پژمرده آمد

به چنگال شما بسپرده آمد

چو بشنیدند شاهان آن ندا را

ثنا گفتند بی‌حد کبریا را

که ای اهل جهان را روزی از تو

صلاح و زهد و دین‌اندوزی از تو

خواجه بخارایی دربارۀ بازسازی اورشلیم و بازگشت یهودیان به آنجا، برخلاف شاهین که پیشنهاد را از قول عزرا مطرح می‌سازد، این امر را از سوی دانیال مطرح می‌کند. مر جع او در این تفاوت ممکن است تاریخ طبری باشد که در توصیف دوران پادشاهی کورش چنین می‌گوید:[50]

و آن‌گاه دانیال علیه‌السلام ازو [کورش] دستوری خواست که [به] بیت‌المقدس شود با بنی‌اسرائیل و آن مزگت را و شهر را به حال آبادانی باز آرد، و [کورش] او را دستوری نداد و گفت همه اعتماد من به تُست.

نتیجه

به دنبال کشف منشور کورش در 1879م در نزدیک بغداد به دست هرمزد رَسام و پژوهش‌های ارنست هرتسفلد، باستان‌شناس معروف آلمانی، نام و توصیف کورش را در ادبیات ایرانی قرن گذشته مشاهده می‌کنیم. این در حالی است که طی تاریخ دو هزار سال گذشته، به‌خصوص در ادبیات ایران اسلامی و حتی شاهنامه فردوسی، کمتر به نام کورش برخورد می‌کنیم. شاید علت آن عدم آگاهی از تاریخ آن دوره باشد. اما شعرای فارسیهود که از دو فرهنگ ایرانی و یهودی بهره می‌بردند، همواره در توصیف کورش، چه در نقش ناجی و چه در نقش پادشاهی دادپرور و قهرمانی شجاع، شعر سروده‌اند. پر کردن چنین کمبودی در تاریخ ادبیات ایران به دست شعرای فارسیهود جایگاه آنان را در ادبیات ایران معین می‌سازد. آنچه راجع به کورش از شاهین و خواجه بخارایی آمد، نشانه‌ای از کورش در ذهن دو شاعر یهودی ایرانی است. شاهین کورش را در حاشیۀ داستان زندگی خشایارشاه و ملکه استر و عزرا و به سبب بازسازی معبد اول تحت راهنمایی عزرا می‌شناساند، در حالی که خواجه بخارایی او را در داستان دانیال همراه و سپس در مقام جانشین داریوش معرفی می‌کند.

تناقض حوادث و اتفاقات مطرح در این اشعار با آنچه امروز دربارۀ کورش می‌دانیم غیرمنتظره نیست، زیرا همین حکایات و احادیث در برخی از منابع یهودی و اسلامی دیده می‌شود؛ منابعی که شاعران فارسیهود نیز از آنها استفاده کرده‌اند.

آنچه در سروده‌های هر دو شاعر قابل توجه است توصیف متفاوتی است که از کورش عرضه می‌کنند. در قسمت‌های آغازین، آنان همراه با متن تورات او را به مرتبۀ تقدس رسانیده و ناجی توصیف می‌کنند. گاهی هم او را یکتاپرست، خداشناس و از سوی مادر یهودی‌زاده توصیف کرده‌اند. اما در مسیر گفتار خود همراه با احادیث و منابع تلمودی، توصیف آنان نیز تغییر می‌کند. مقام کورش کم‌کم از ناجی و کسی که از خداوند به او ندا می‌رسد، صرفاً به مقام پادشاهی دلاور و دادپرور تبدیل می‌شود، کسی که با یهودیان به نیکی رفتار و آنان را از اسارت آزاد کرد. در خصوص علل این تغییر که از سویی ریشه در دوران تلمودی دارد، می‌توان دوران زندگی شاعران و آگاهی آنان از منابع اسلامی را دخیل دانست. این تفاوت مقام را شاهین به‌خصوص در شرط شراب نوشیدن رهبران یهودی با کورش به هنگام درخواست آنان برای بازسازی بیت‌المقدس مطرح می‌سازد. در شراب نوشیدن با کورشی که خارج از متن تورات به نام فرزند استر و یهودی‌زاده معرفی شده است، در پایان به علت عدم یکتاپرستی تردید می‌شود. این تغییر دید را در خواجه بخارایی نیز مشاهده می‌کنیم. در روایت او، در ابتدا کورش و داریوش از عالم بالا ندا می‌شنوند و برای آزادی بابل به ستیز با بلشاصر می‌روند، ولی همین دو قهرمان در پایان به صورت دو پادشاه با محدودیت‌های انسانی از جمله کشته شدن به دست سپاه فرنگ یا با رشادت‌های قهرمانی در میدان نبرد و شکار و بزم و نوشیدن شراب توصیف می‌شوند.

با ذکر این تفاوت‌ها سوالی پیش می‌آید که اصولاً شاهین و خواجه بخارایی حماسه‌های دینی خود، اردشیرنامه و دانیال‌نامه، را برای چه کسانی سروده‌اند و مخاطب آنان کیست؟ آیا خوانندگان مطلوب آنان یهودانی هستند که با زبان عبری آشنایی دارند، تورات و کتاب‌های اهل عتیق را که شامل داستان‌های عزرا و اِستر و دانیال است می‌شناسند یا اینکه این دو روایت را برای کسانی سروده‌اند که اگر هم خط فارسیهود را می‌دانستند، بیشتر با فرهنگ ایران اسلامی آشنایی داشتند تا با مراجع یهودی. آیا شاهین پس از حدود 19 قرن و خواجه بخارایی پس از 22 قرن زندگی یهودیان در ایران، رابطۀ قومی و دینی خود را با سرزمین یهودا از دست داده بودند یا می‌خواستند حماسه‌ای از یهودیت را به سبک ایرانی به زبان فارسی برای هم‌عصران خود باقی گذارند، ولی چون زمان زیادی از وقوع حوادث گذشته بود، حین استفاده از منابع در دسترسشان، گاهی بنا به سلیقه یا به عللی دیگر به آن اضافاتی غیرحقیقی و اغراق‌آمیز افزوده‌اند.[51]

مسلم این است که جامعۀ یهودی ایرانی نیز مانند سایر اقوام از نظر دانش فرهنگی و دینی به طبقات گوناگونی تقسیم می‌شدند و دانشمندان و فقهای یهودی کم نبودند و اگر هم صرفاً به فارسیهود می‌نوشتند، علت عدم آشنایی و سواد مخاطبان به خط فارسی- عربی بود. سطح دانش این دو شاعر در زمینۀ یهودیت را می‌توان با رجوع به سایر کارهای آنان سنجید. دربارۀ خواجه بخارایی متأسفانه معیار دیگری در دست نداریم، اما در خصوص شاهین، آفرینش‌نامه و موسی‌نامه او مبین اطلاع او از روال تاریخ یهود است و به نظر نمی‌رسد تغییرات و تفسیرات او به سبب بی‌اطلاعی بوده باشد. از سوی دیگر، استعمال آرایه‌های شعری و ادبی و قهرمانان ملی ایرانی مؤید این نکته است که آنان دقیقاً با شاهنامه و آثار سایر متقدمین ادبی خود آشنایی داشته‌اند . مقایسۀ شاهین و خیام نمونه‌ای از این امر است. آنچه درخور اهمیت است تصویر مثبتی است که در سروده‌های هر دو شاعر از کورش ارائه می‌شود، چه در نقش ناجی فرستادۀ خدا و چه در نقش قهرمانی حماسی با محدودیت‌های انسانی

آن گوهر شهریار والا

چو سرو سهی کشید بالا

شه بی رخ او نداشت آرام

روز و شب ]و[صبح صادق و شام

جمع آوردن شاه بهمن هنرمندان را جهت تعلیم دادن کورشيک روز پشوتن هنرور

فرمود باردشير صفدر

بر تخت نشستن کورش به جای کی‌اردشیر

دانای سخن ز تار تا پود

از حال شه جهان بفرمود

سرش چو ز سوک باب پرداخت

از نو علم صفا برافراخت

^{^[1]} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_the_Great_in_the_Bible/.

^{^[2]} Amnon Netzer, “ Some Notes on the Characterization of Cyrus The Great in Jewish and Judeo-Persian Writings,” Acta Iranica, 2 (1974), 43, at http://azargoshnasp.net/famous/Cyrus/cyruscharacterizationjp.pdf /.

^{^[3]} عمرانی، فتح‌نامه (نسخۀ لندن، OR: 1370, 292: 3-4, 8).

^{^[4]} عمرانی، فتخ‌نامه نسخۀ بن‌صوی، إBZ: 964, 280a: 5-6).

^{^[5]} Louis Ginxberg, Legends of the Jews (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication society, 2003), vol. 2, 111 and 119.

^{^[6]} Ginzberg Legends of the Jews, vol. 2, 1129.

^{^[7]} ابوعلی محمدبن محمد بلعمی، تاریخ بلعمی، تصحیح محمدتقی بهار (تهران: انتشارات دانشگاه تهران، 1353) جلد 2، 674 .

^{^[8]} بلعمی، تاریخ بلعمی، جلد 2، 683-684.

^{^[9]} بلعمی، تاریخ بلعمی، جلد 2، 675 .

^{^[10]} محمد جریر طبری، تاریخ طبری یا تاریخ الرسل و الملوک، ترجمۀ ابوالقاسم پاینده (تهران: انتشارات فرهنگ ایران، 1352)، جلد 2، 486؛ بلعمی، تاریخ بلعمی، جلد 2، 677 .

^{^[11]} ‌”وهی استار بنت یائیر بن شمعی بن قیس بن میشا بن طالوت الملک.“ بنگرید به بلعمی، تاریخ بلعمی، جلد 2، 685.

^{^[12]} بلعمی، تاریخ بلعمی، جلد 2، 685._

^{^[13]} طبری، تاریخ طبری 484.

^{^[14]} بلعمی، تاریخ بلعمی، جلد 2، 675.

^{^[15]} Jalal Khaleghi Motlagh, Women in the Shahnameh, trans. Brigitte Neuenschwander, edited by Nahid Pirnazar ( : , ), 67: n. 152.

به روایت شاهنامه، اسکندر حاصل ازدواج داراب با همسر یونانی‌اش، ناهید، است.

^{^[16]} اشعیا، فصل 45، آیۀ 1.

^{^[17]} اشعیا، فصل 45، آیۀ 13.

^{^[18]} Netzer, “Some Notes,” 41-41; Antiquities XI, 1 and 2.

اکنون ثابت شده است که این کتاب طی 200 سال، به‌تدریج و در قسمت‌های مختلف نوشته شده است.

^{^[19]} Amnon Netzer, “ Some Notes,” 40-41.

^{^[20]} بلعمی، تاریخ بلعمی، جلد 2، 675-676.

^{^[21]} بلعمی، تاریخ بلعمی، جلد 2، 675-676.

^{^[22]} بلعمی، تاریخ بلعمی، جلد 2، 676-67، پانوشت 3. عدم مستند بودن این قسمت از تاریخ بلعمی را محمدتقی بهار ذکر کرده و می‌گوید که منظور از این پادشاهان همان کورش و داریوش و خشایارشاه است که قوم یهود را از اسارت بابل نجات داده، با آنان به نیکی رفتار کردند، ولی خود به یهودیت نگرویدند.

^{^[23]} مولانا شاهین، اردشیرنامه (نسخۀ لندن)، برگ ب 174.

^{^[24]} بلعمی، تاریخ بلعمی، جلد 2، 676-677، پانوشت 3.

^{^[25]} آمنون نتصر، منتخب اشعار فارسی از آثار یهودیان ایران (تهران: فرهنگ ایران زمین، 1352)، 165.

^{^[26]} نتصر، منتخب، 170-171.

^{^[27]} نتصر، منتخب، 171-172.

^{^[28]} http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/imperialism/notes/xerxes.html/.

^{^[29]} مولانا شاهین، اردشیرنامه (نسخۀ لندن)، برگ ب 78ا: 15-11.

^{^[30]} مولانا شاهین، اردشیرنامه (نسخۀ برلین)، برگ الف 184؛ برگ ب 185.

^{^[31]} مولانا شاهین، اردشیرنامه (نسخۀ برلین)، برگ الف 187؛ برگ ب 188.

^{^[32]} عاصر به معنای مرد اندک‌خیر و ممسک است. بنگرید به لغتنامۀ دهخدا.

^{^[33]} مولانا شاهین، اردشیرنامه (نسخۀ برلین)، برگ الف 189، برگ ب 190.

Amnon Netzer, “ Some Notes,” 4.

هویت متتیا در تورات در این مقطع شناخته نیست. ویلهلم باخر احتمال می‌دهد که منظور همان زروبابل باشد که در تورات از او رسماً به نام پادشاه یهودیه نام برده شده است (حگای، فصل 2، آیۀ 23).

^{^[34]} مولانا شاهین، اردشیرنامه (نسخۀ برلین)، برگ ب 190.

^{^[35]} مولانا شاهین، اردشیرنامه (نسخه برلین)، برگ الف 190.

^{^[36]} مولانا شاهین، اردشیرنامه (نسخۀ برلین)، برگ ب 191 .

^{^[37]} طبری، تاریخ طبری، 484. .

^{^[38]} مولانا شاهین، اردشیرنامه (نسخۀ برلین)، برگ الف 191._

^{^[39]} مولانا شاهین، اردشیرنامه (نسخۀ برلین)، برگ ب 192- الف 191.

^{^[40]} مولانا شاهین، اردشیرنامه (نسخۀ برلین)، برگ ب 192.

^{^[41]} Netzer, “ Some Notes,” 51.

^{^[42]} مولانا شاهین، اردشیرنامه (نسخۀ برلین)، برگ الف- ب 194؛ نتصر، منتخب، 174-175.

^{^[43]} حرز به معنای طلسم و منظور از آن زینت‌آلات یا طلسم‌های است که رسم بود با جنازه دفن کنند. بنگرید به لغتنامۀ دهخدا.

^{^[44]} نیرم همان نریمان، جد رستم، است. بنگرید به لغتنامۀ دهخدا.

^{^[45]} مولانا شاهین، اردشیرنامه (نسخۀ برلین)، ؛ نتصر، منتخب، 175.

^{^[46]} جلال متینی، ”اهمیت آثار ادبی فارسی یهودیان،“ ایران‌نامه، سال 1، شمارۀ 3 (بهار 1366)، 432.

^{^[47]} بلعمی، تاریخ بلعمی 674 ؛

119 , Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, 111 and 119;

آمنون نتصر، منتخب، 262.

^{^[48]} نتصر، منتخب، 296.

^{^[49]} نتصر، منتخب، 272. اشاره به اشعیا، فصل 45، آیات 1-5: ”ای کورش، من پیشاپیش تو حرکت می‌کنم، . . . آن‌گاه خواهی فهمید که من خداوند، خدای اسرائیل هستم و تو را به نام خوانده‌ام. من تو را برگزیده‌ام تا به اسرائیل که خدمتگزار من و قوم برگزیده من است یاری نمایی. هنگامی که تو مرا نمی‌شناختی من تو را به نام خواندم . . . زمانی که مرا نمی‌شناختی من به تو توانایی بخشیدم.“

^{^[50]} بلعمی، تاریخ بلعمی، جلد 2، 676-677.

^{^[51]} برای آکاهی از چگونگی پیدایش حماسه و توصیف حماسۀ مذهبی بنگرید به ذبیح الله صقا، حماسه‌سرایی در ایران (چاپ 6؛ تهران: انتشارات دیبا، 1374)، 341-385؛

William L. Hanaway Jr., “The Iranian Epics,” in Heroic Epic and Saga, An Introduction to the Worlds Great Folk Epic, ed.Felix J. Oinas (Bloomington & London: Indiana University Press, 1978), 93-96; Ehsan Yarshater, Persian Literature (New York: Bibliotheca Persica, 1988), 96-103; Michael Roberts, Biblical Epic and Rhetorical Paraphrase in Late Antiquity (London: Francis Cairns, 1985), 116.

Mistaken Modernity and Its Critics: Hussein Alatas and Jalal Al-e Ahmad

ایران نامگ Volume 7, Number 1, Spring 2024

Mistaken Modernity and Its Critics: Hussein Alatas and Jalal Al-e Ahmad

Ali Mirsepassi, New York University

Tadd Fernée, Université de Tours

There already exists an idea of an American or European social science tradition. Though both draw upon a common universal fountain of social science knowledge, yet we do speak of an American or European social science tradition.

Syed Hussein Alatas, 2002

THE PERILS OF MISREMEMBERING

The late Tony Judt’s book Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century alerts us to a systemic tendency to mis-remember the intellectual history of the twentieth century as one of political extremes, filled with tragic mistakes and mistaken choices, a period of delusion from which the world has now thankfully awakened. In the spirit of Judt’s wider project, this essay offers a more nuanced understanding of twentieth-century political thought, focused on experiences outside of the West. Our aim is to revisit a critical intellectual debate which broached the predicaments of postcolonial societies. Specifically, we investigate an innovative intellectual tradition which took to task the uncritical Western imitation pervasive among governing elites in postcolonial countries. This new intellectual intervention sought to radically redefine how we understand agency in non-Western societies emerging from colonial domination. The new tradition gave special consideration to local cultural questions while engaging in a passionate dialogue with European intellectuals. The influence was a complex and bilateral relation, rather than a case of the West either preceding these Asian thinkers or giving birth to their recycled ideas. The intellectual process was simultaneous, dialectical, and interdependent, for Western and Asian thinkers alike were mesmerized by the perplexing significance of multiple independence wars and social struggles taking place in Algeria, Vietnam, Cuba, and Palestine. The worldwide national liberation struggles imaginatively impacted progressive public intellectuals everywhere and provide a background for the new intellectual tradition examined in this article.

However, to all appearance, the new twenty-first century political environment—and especially the virulent rise of political Islam—has prompted many to misremember the broader global contexts defining the postcolonial intellectual tradition we discuss in this article. The vibrant and broadly cosmopolitan communities from which Asian, Middle Eastern and African public intellectuals participated have been either forgotten or dismissed as marginal to postcolonial history. Instead, a history is routinely recycled depicting a squandered Third World reckoning with the unscalable heights of the modern world. It is now common to regard postcolonial intellectuals as confused ‘Third World’ individuals, helplessly obsessed with their own self-made dreams, a serpentine oscillation which—in practical reality—has catalysed the nightmarish explosion and ruins of the Iranian Revolutionary trajectory, of Latin American radicalism, and the liberation movements across Asia and Africa. In this new discourse of imperial self-affirmation, the unleashed fantasies of non-Western intellectuals are deemed responsible for all that went tragically wrong in every colonial aftermath.

The Idea of Autonomous Social Sciences:

We shift the investigative frame to the Malaysian sociologist and public intellectual, Syed Hussein Alatas (1928-2007), who identified and critiqued the conventionalized ‘unthinking’ systemically permeating postindependence Asian scholars and political elites. Alatas articulated theories rooted within local historical contexts, sociocultural realities, and the hopes of populations in contemporary postcolonial societies. Alatas aimed to construct “an autonomous social science,” the fruit of intellectual engagement and political activism, and therefore his work belonged to the humanist tradition of transforming social orders through direct action:

[…] an autonomous tradition cannot develop without the commitment of an intellectual, creative and independent group striving for that tradition.[3]

In Alatas’ “The Captive Mind in Development Studies,” there are two essential categories: “the factorgenic and the actorgenic.”[4] Factorgenic includes “all those matters which are the results of human action, external to man and able to survive longer than an individual or a group.” Actorgenic includes “all those matters which are found within the individual or the group.” Alatas explains:

[…] we should seriously devote increasing attention to the roles of entrepreneurs and political groups in developing societies. All analyses of human behaviour and achievements can be grouped into two broad categories, the factorgenic and the actorgenic. By factorgenic I mean all those matters which are the results of human action, external to man and able to survive longer than an individual or a group. By actorgenic I mean all those matters which are found within the individual or the group. Though in real life there is a strong interaction and interdependence between factorgenic and actorgenic phenomena, at an initial level of comprehension it is fruitful to make a conceptual distinction.

Within the purview of this double concept, Alatas makes the following observation with regard to the concept of a developing country:

economists of underdevelopment and development planners have been, on the whole, factorgenic in orientation. When they discuss problems the picture which emerges is that of anonymous forces bringing about or obstructing certain changes. They discuss the absence or presence of natural resources, the size of the market, the terms of trade, institutional impediments, labour productivity per capita income, and a host of other data…[5]

While conceding the importance of these “anonymous” factors, Alatas charges such development analysis with drifting into the “ahistorical.” He contrasts them unfavourably with the Weberian tradition which includes “concrete empirical discussions of socio-economic groups centred around actorgenic data.” Alatas writes: “our major problems are to my mind best understood in terms of actorgenic analysis. If we desire to break the chain of circular explanation involving the continuous repetition of known data and problems, we have to enter a wider area of discourse.” Alatas cites as important the available “moral and mental energies,” the “feelings of groups and individuals,” the “dominant conceptions and ideas,” the “personality traits” of the “entrepreneurs and the power holders” whose decisions “decisively condition a country’s reaction to all its major problems.”[6] Therefore, Alatas argues that it “is not enough to explain how and why development plans fail but who makes them fail and how actorgenic factors operate in the group which causes the plan to fail.”[7] Although Alatas is perfectly cognizant of the crucial role of institutional context, his view resembles that of Amartya Sen, for whom the exclusive preoccupation with institutions in isolation is “institutional fundamentalism,” and who prioritizes positive transformations in public values and meanings as the existential foregrounding of any good institution-building.[8]

Alatas writes: “Citing factorgenic data repeatedly will not help us solve basic problems. It is not enough to explain how and why development plans fail but who makes them fail and how actorgenic factors operate in the group which causes the plan to fail […] Discussions on the goals and prospect of development planning would then become more fruitful [and] make planning more meaningful and desirable [when] freed from the relatively ethnocentric offshoots which have grown around them.”[9] Any emancipatory development process requires an agentive, creative and meaningful theoretical framework which closely considers the myriad details of local, social, and historical context.

This view suggests, as in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi, “an idiom very different from that of the European Liberal-Labour radicals or the Marxists,” but which “his followers [millions of both sexes and all classes, castes, religions and regions] had little difficulty in understanding” in its message of “political and social rights” and “democratic socialist development.”[10] It follows that a profound political importance attaches to Alatas’ theories for the objective process of economic and political unification of nations overcoming legacies of the colonial yoke. Also like the Gandhian strategy, Alatas’ cosmopolitanism embraced an anti-imperialism that avoided “degenerating into ‘reverse’ racism of any kind.”[11]

Alatas embraced the social science tradition, while rejecting “the unreality of the basic assumptions, misplaced abstractions, ignorance or misinterpretation of data, and an erroneous conception of problems and their significance” resulting from an “uncritical demonstration effect” in the spreading of “social science knowledge in Asian countries.”[12] He rejects a kind of inflationary ontology identifiable with Eurocentrism. Alatas promotes a social science tradition based not on “laws of society” deduced from perfected individual psychology (John Stuart Mill) but applying scientifically disciplined intelligence to problems of social reform in concrete contexts driven by moral motivation (John Dewey). He nevertheless identifies universal foundations for the “social science tradition,” comprising “factors peculiar to [that tradition] that distinguish it from other traditions.” These include: “(1) The raising and treatment of definite problems, (2) the application of definite methodologies, (3) the recognition of definite phenomena, (4) the creation of definite concepts, and (5) the relation with other branches of knowledge.”[13]

Alatas therefore links the epistemic character of his Social Science project to the Marxian tradition of transforming the world rather than merely passively understanding it as a fixed reality. Alatas’ ‘autonomous social science’ is intended to liberate: “what were the factors conducive to the birth of such a tradition and what were the serious impediments? In order to liberate, one must first understand the condition of bondage. This led me to the problem of the captive mind.”[14] Meanwhile, the existing imitative practice has done untold harm: “Asian scholars are still under intellectual domination. The pattern and effects of this domination can be easily traced […] Whole nations have been subjected to ill-conceived planning with serious consequences.”[15]

Alatas defines the “Captive Mind” as the consequence of the “intense bombardment on the developing societies of an ever-growing volume of literature from the West resulting in uncritical assimilation by the scholars of developing societies.”[16] The failure to produce an original and emancipatory social science in postcolonial contexts is the legacy of a colonial system “which did not have a functioning group of independent scholars.”[17] The colonial afterlife persists in postindependence scholars who have “picked up the habit of discourse, employing a stock of general concepts and method of analysis [while] clearly not focusing on the distinctive features of this society [i.e. Malaysia]. This is nothing but imitation of instant scholarship that abounds in the fields of economics, political science, sociology and development studies.”[18] The word “instant” indicates a prefabricated template, requiring no further reflection, only a passively “imitative” reproduction of fixed guideline answers. These answers were strictly laid down by unquestioned authorities in the wealthy and powerful universities and research institutes of those rich countries which were the erstwhile colonial masters of Asian countries from Malaysia to India.

It follows, Alatas argues, that discursive productions are so tightly defined by genre types that texts on different Asian countries are interchangeable. This renders them irrelevant abstractions bound only by superficial discursive conventions. Alatas noted that “more and more Asian scholars of the demonstration effect type are being produced and diffused.”[19] Haunted by this impression of superficiality in established academia, Alatas did an experiment while teaching in Singapore:

Several years ago, at the National University of Singapore I read out in class an article on education written by a sociologist. The entire class thought that this was the situation of education in Singapore. But this was not so. This article was about another Asian country. I merely substituted the name ‘Singapore’ in place of the country’s original name. The strange thing was that it clicked. There was nothing wrong with the content. It dealt with a general concept and processes, and attempted causal analyses of the kind that are valid everywhere. When I told the students that the article was not about Singapore, they were truly shocked.[20]

Alatas’ Cosmopolitan World:

Alatas’ project of launching new and creative analytical strategies focused on dynamic Asian social realities invokes a specific ‘tradition’ of humanist universalism. This ‘tradition’ is grounded in ongoing dialogic exchange with multiple social science streams from around the globe. Alatas writes: “Ignoring a valuable contribution from the West is as negative as uncritically accepting whatever is served on the academic platter.”[21] Alatas’ social scientific investigation therefore transcends the new game of ‘nativism’ that gained considerable influence over public imaginations in many Asian countries at around the same time. His writings never entertained the revivalist fantasy of a total cultural rebirth realized through violent rupture away from the West. This is why he writes: “The domination of the greater part of mankind by Western civilisation has led to certain positive as well as negative effects. Our concern in the field of the social sciences is to identify these two effects and to avoid the negative ones.”[22] In the principle of concretion, or fact confronted with alternatives, Alatas adopts a pragmatic and consequentialist schema rather than utopian totality. He calls for more opening—not closing—of new horizons in the global intellectual space, envisioning an inclusive cosmopolitanism embracing postcolonial experiences, histories, and realities.

Until now, then, we have established that Alatas coined the concept of ‘the Captive Mind’ to debunk the conventional ‘un-thinking’ defined by professional practices of simple reproduction of Western thought by non-Western intellectuals in the social sciences. Alatas calls for a new ‘tradition’ of social science theory rooted in the collective imaginaries of Asian societies: the singular modes of living, seeing and making social existence through imaginary significations lacing together a society and defining its moral claims to change. Democracy is not the institutional reflection of an idealized image of property law contracts projected as the transcendent motive for social cohesion (i.e., the “social contract” tradition), but the framework for applying intelligence to the ethical and practical problems of the given society. To illustrate how this issue concerns concealed epistemic power inequalities, Alatas proposes a thought experiment:

Can you imagine a Japanese writer writing a book on the American national character, published in Japan, reviewed by a Japanese scholar, popularized by the Japanese propaganda machinery and eventually sold in the United States, resulting in thousands of [American] students seeing their own country through Japanese eyes?[23]

The reverse situation, where Western scholars set the standard for societies they have scarcely encountered, has persisted despite the end of Empire. It has inflicted, Alatas argued, a crisis of creative reflection upon social problems in non-Western societies:

Intellectual imperialism conditions the mental attitude of those who have been caught in its web. Apart from encouraging docility, it stifles creativity. As a result of being dominated by intellectual imperialism scholars cannot become creative. They spend their time imitating. They spend their time trying to be acceptable and trying to gain approval from the group whom they look up to [i.e., in a power relation].[24]

Alatas hence indicates the emulatory behaviour to which capital gives rise within a stratified order of power and prestige, because its power to allow or refuse access to institutional resources shapes the destinies of millions. Domination of one country over another persists within spaces of exile, or the wider liminal zone, defining the parameters of independent countries and the metropole as power constructs. This was also the subject of Sudanese author Tayeb Salih’s 1966 Season of Migration to the North.[25] The novel depicts how the speech act, as conditioned by the colonial aftermath, is stuck in forced repetitions through the underlying force of hidden layers of historical violence. The two principal characters, the unnamed narrator and Mustafa Sa’eed, represent a typology of alternative “us” and “others” constructions. They are two Western-educated Sudanese intellectuals still struggling to achieve national liberation in the colonial aftermath, upon a topography crisscrossed with the power legacies of Empire. We might very well compare Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1923-69) to the revolutionary Mustafa Sa’eed, whose murderous acts of violence echo the Orientalist fantasies of his women victims, a closed loop immortalized in Richard Wright’s 1940 Native Son, which examines the psychological linkage between systemic deprivation of autonomy, blind anger, repressive condescension, and retaliatory violence as a political dead end:

In all of [Bigger’s] life these two murders were the most meaningful things that had ever happened to him […] Never had he had the chance to live out the consequences of his actions […] Blind anger had come often and he had either gone behind his curtain or wall, or had quarrelled and fought. And yet, whether in running away or in fighting, he had felt the need of the clean satisfaction of facing this thing in all its fullness, of fighting it out in the wind and sunlight, in front of those whose hate for him was so unfathomably deep that, after they had shunted him off into a corner of the city to rot and die, they could turn to him, as Mary had that night in the car, and say: ‘I’d like to know how your people live.’[26]

Mustafa Sa’eed, like Al-e Ahmad, desires a total and radical break from the West in the colonial aftermath. Alatas, by contrast, more resembles the unnamed narrator who endeavours to build his nation based on the reform of power abuse and improvement of public institutions. Contemporary Iran, one may argue, is to all appearances the outcome of Wright’s “closed loop” approach while other parts of Asia—for example, postindependence Nehruvian India—reflected for several decades the creative reform model promoted by Alatas. The comparison brings to mind Marcus Aurelius’ citation: “the best revenge is not to be like your enemy.”

A larger backdrop to Alatas’ epistemic reflections is to be found in the central twentieth-century debate about “independent thought.” In the Soviet Marxist camp, this was dismissed as “bourgeois.” Important Eastern European dissidents and philosophers of science like Michael Polanyi, however, argued that “autonomy of thought” is not only the basis for scientific practice but also a free society.[27] The Autonomy of Science debate originated when Polanyi was invited to the Ministry of Heavy industries in 1930s Moscow. His 1935 conversation with Bukharin, editor of the Party newspaper Pravda and leading Kremlin theoretician, exemplifies alternative twentieth-century Left “development” paths. Both embraced modern science as a social ideal, discussing the “scientific” rationale for Soviet government conduct. Bukharin declared “pure science,” truth-seeking regardless of extraneous influences, the illusion of contradictions in capitalist society. Independent initiative, Bukharin held, is unnecessary. Individual and communal concerns harmonize as a “whole” through the Five-Year Plan. Bukharin’s denial of an intrinsic link between economic development and political freedom constituted a denial of the central value in everyday communication, for party dogma replaced its function in resolving the perennial contradictions of rapidly changing modern societies. This debate indirectly paved the way for Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm theory.

Alatas partakes of this twentieth-century social science tradition that shifted centrality to the communicative act in pursuing democratic social transformation, emphasizing “the role of human sciences in the dialogue among civilizations.” This included the “participation in and monitoring of public discourse with the objective of breaking stereotypes and unsettling commonly held notions that typically translate into prejudiced views.” This extended to “formal education of the public at all levels, that is, primary, secondary and tertiary education, such that intercivilizational encounters, the multicultural origins of modernity, and the variety of points of view, inform the development of curricula.” Alatas champions public non-conformity, willingness to pursue radical reform, and the popular masses having a share through direct action in the changes that need be brought about in post-colonial power configurations.

The desire or courage to think for yourself and be critical of conventional thinking defines Alatas’ “humanist” vision of the Captive Mind. It is not uncommon among “radical” scholars to dismiss this tendency as “liberal,” but it underpins the essential quality of any truly radical way of thinking which aims to challenge any dominant discourse. These debates mainly took place in the 1960s and 1970s, during the Cold War, and Alatas makes a unique contribution to them from the perspective of non-Western societies whose rich and profound cultural histories had been marginalized and degraded by Empire.

Alatas proposes a process of theory making to counter the resulting creative paralysis constricting Asian intellectual culture, which he calls the “autonomy of the social sciences.” His two interconnected ideas, the “Captive Mind” (condition of un-thinking) and the “new social science tradition” (postcolonial theory making), are joint elements in his vision of a new cosmopolitanism:

The emancipation of the mind from the shackles of intellectual imperialism is the major condition for the development of a creative and autonomous social science tradition in developing societies.[28]

To justify its rule and protect its interests, Empire had to articulate a historical narrative ideologically purveying an image of its benevolence and of native inadequacy. These myths, Alatas argues, had a concealing function. Undermining the legacy of such official belief systems, Alatas points out, requires the rigours of objective scholarship:

Certain neglected phenomena crucial to the history of Malaysia and Indonesia, such as the destruction of the trading classes by colonial rule, had to be seriously studied and the sociological mechanism bringing about the destruction had to be described in order to understand the motives of the aliens to describe the natives as ‘lazy.’[29]

Alatas therefore urges a prolonged process of intellectual struggle to remake the established order of ideological power across diverse civil society plateaus, to overcome their historically unbalanced military, political, and economic power orders.

The Last Muslim Intellectual:

Hamid Dabashi, in his elegantly written new volume, is fascinated with the world and time of Iranian intellectual Jalal Al-e Ahmad, a literary figure, essayist, and author of the influential Gharbzadegi (Occidentosis). Dabashi calls Al-e Ahmad “the last Muslim intellectual.” We find it valuable to place Dabashi’s presentation of the “last Muslim intellectual” in conversation with Alatas’s idea of the “Captive Mind.” Alatas and Al-e Ahmad hailed from the same generation of non-Western intellectuals who sought to re-envision their respective societies on their own terms while also self-consciously participating in the larger spaces of the modern world. Al-e Ahmad’s thoughts drew inspiration from literary and cinematic premonitions of the modern world as bound to an inevitably apocalyptic path. He regularly criticised the “unthinking” of the Iranian modernizing elite, yet his was an alternative conception of “unthinking,” one based on the contagious disease of modernity that he labelled “Gharbzadegi:”

[…] Albert Camus, Eugene Ionesco, Ingmar Bergman and many other artists, all of them from the West […] all regard the end of human affairs with despair. Sartre’s Erostratus fires a revolver at the people in the street blindfolded; Nabokov’s protagonist drives his car into the crowd […] These fictional endings represent where humanity is really ending up […] crushed under the machine …

It follows that the West had already been fully contaminated by the Gharbzadegi disease, while in Asia there still remained some hope for a cure. The comparison between Alatas and Al-e Ahmad throws new light upon twentieth-century anti-colonial thought by highlighting the crucial practical differences entailed by alternative modes of thoughts. Too often these differing modes of thoughts are blurred together in a nebulous anti-modernism. By underlining the differences, we also starkly display the enduring legacy of these alternative modes of thoughts in today’s brand new but retro world.

Dabashi’s recent critique of our remembrance of events like the Iranian Revolution and Al-e Ahmad provides one illuminating departure point for understanding the contemporary world. We comparatively analyse Al-e Ahmad and Alatas, two outstanding individuals of the same generation who shared kindred intellectual and political concerns. Dabashi urges us to remember important twentieth-century figures in new ways, freed from Eurocentric theoretical distortion, or misassessment born of the violent passions of the time. Al-e Ahmad, by Dabashi’s account, was the “last Muslim cosmopolitan.” An entire world became extinct with his passing. The unique qualities of an irretrievable era also passed from the Earth shortly after Al-e Ahmad’s death. Dabashi writes:

After the Iranian revolution of 1977–9 came the devastating Iran–Iraq war of the 1980s, then the two successive US invasions of Iraq in the 1990s and 2000s, the Afghanistan invasion in 2001, the Green Movement of 2008–10 in Iran, and then the Arab Spring of 2010–12, then the rise of the criminal

gang of ISIS, followed by the mayhem in Syria and the Saudi genocide in Yemen.

This citation from Dabashi powerfully poses the following problematic: the twenty-first century witnesses a decline in both Liberal Humanism and Marxism, but do we live in a better century? Analytically remembering Al-e Ahmad and Alatas as distinctive but related visionaries is one way to avoid falling into forgetfulness about the past, but to recall its genuine complexity and even its promise.

Al-e Ahmad and Alatas shared a definition of twentieth-century intellectual vocation by their both being public intellectuals. Both would have embraced such description. Alatas’ key idea, the “Captive Mind,” and Al-e Ahmad’s, “Gharbzadeghi,” were both articulated to radically critique postcolonial modernity while imagining an alternative future. For Al-e Ahmad, the intellectual horizon was tainted by polarized ideologies, all covertly enslaved by industrial modernity: “all of these ‘isms’ and ideologies are roads leading to the sublime realm of mechanization.”[33] He sought a secure ontological ground beyond the conflicted intellectual confusion of the times, a space of being and belonging to provide a shelter.

Unlike Al-e Ahmad, Alatas presents the “Captive Mind” as a sociological category. For Al-e Ahmad, as a literary essayist, “Gharbzadeghi” has a deeply metaphysical connotation. Al-e Ahmad strikingly depicts “Gharbzadeghi” analagously with the spread of a contagious virus: “I speak of [‘Gharbzadegi’] as of tuberculosis.” The infectious disease “Gharbzadegi” preserves the outer aspect of its victims while corrupting them from inside, like a latent infection: “[‘Gharbzadegi’] more closely resembles an infestation of weevils. Have you seen how they attack wheat? From the inside. The bran remains intact, but it is just a shell.” Although tuberculosis and weevils are only metaphors, Al-e Ahmad concludes: “At any rate, I am speaking of a disease: an accident from without, spreading in an environment rendered susceptible to it.”

We ask: What differences in intellectual traditions explain the differing critiques of these two pioneering thinkers on the postcolonial experience of modernity? What is the significance of those differences for political practice within the spheres of public activism, social revolution, and ultimately nation-building? For both their time, as well as for ours. Alatas is especially concerned with an imperial politics of extraction that simultaneously silences its victims on the basis of their exclusion from educational and other power circuits:

I met a leading traditional healer who used to supply some British writers with information. He was not able to make the finished product, as he had not been taught to write, he did not know how to use footnotes, and was not able to write essays. The colonial scholars took the data and just published them without any acknowledgement or further analysis. This was then distributed. There is a parallel here between economic exploitation and the exploitation of knowledge.[35]

Alatas’ theory combines Marxian analysis of exploitation with assessment of how knowledge acquition is systemically abused within the same process. But Alatas does not reduce all knowledge acquisition to an intrinsically coercive process, in contrast to Heidegger’s harmonizing powers of “restored” being. Alatas’ major difference from Al-e Ahmad is in this aspect. Al-e Ahmad certainly had a passionate early interest in imagining a so-called postcolonial intellectual paradigm through a rich cosmopolitan dialogue with Western traditions from Existentialism to Marxism. As Dabashi himself acknowledges, this dialogue on alternative paradigms is mostly limited to Al-e Ahmad’s earlier period. This was subsequently followed by Al-e Ahmad’s later period, when he became influenced by Ahmed Fardid and German romantic thought. In this latter context, Al-e Ahmad advanced his key idea of “Gharbzadeghi.” Comparing Alatas and Al-e Ahmad provides the opportunity for a new discussion on Alatas’s “Captive Mind,” which urges postcolonial intellectuals and the educated middle class to re-learn independent, open, and creative thought in the social sciences, in the aftermath of the colonial mould.

Unlike the “Captive Mind,” Al-e Ahmad’s idea of “Gharbzadeghi”—coined by Fardid and appropriated by Al-e Ahmad—lacks many positive qualities due to its provenance in pessimistic traditions of understanding the human condition: 1) it originated from Heidegger’s notion of the “darkening of the world;” by definition, this is an anti-humanist vision. It envisions salvation in a return to the roots and is defiantly hostile to cosmopolitanism. It concerns cultural authenticity: “we [Iranians] are like strangers to ourselves, in our food and dress, our homes, our manners, our publications, and most dangerous, our culture […] If in the beginning of the Constitutional era the danger brushed up against us, it has now touched our souls.”[36] Lastly, it is a deeply deconstructive idea, without corresponding positive vision, except for the militant anti-modernism that vaguely alludes to utopia beyond everything in the “modern” present. Alatas articulates a different conception of the colonial aftermath for intellectual culture in countries recovering from domination:

with the political edifice of the colonial state gone, the thought structure continues to operate but in a different form outside the area of obvious political control […] There is a kind of intellectual bondage that is not directly brought about by intellectual imperialism. This is the phenomenon of the captive mind in the non-Western world […] In brief, a captive mind is one that is imitative and uncreative and whose thinking is based on Western categories and modes of thought.

We compare Alatas and Al-e Ahmad in terms of their distinctive intellectual vocations. Alatas lived his life as a public intellectual, like Al-e Ahmad, while also being a serious sociologist engaged in debates and discussion within social and scientific communities worldwide. Alatas had a sharply analytical mind. He carefully explained and documented his arguments, despite clear political motivation. His concept of the “Captive Mind” is built upon the criterion of verifiability, not a fictitious category like “being” or “authenticity.” It must be “studied through empirical observation.” He wrote, citing K. William Kapp: “the current disenchantment with the rate of economic development in many countries is the result of the inadequacy of theoretical frameworks to diagnose the nature of the problem and to prescribe appropriate course of action.”[38]

Alatas’ hypothesis is based on the observation of the functioning of institutions. He starts by defining the “Captive Mind” as “a product of higher institutions of learning, at home or abroad, whose way of thinking imitates, and is dominated by, Western thought in an uncritical manner.” From this, the following characteristics follow: “It is uncreative and incapable of raising original problems […] Its method of thinking depends on current stereotypes […] It is incapable of separating the particular from the universal, and consequently fails to adapt the universally valid corpus of knowledge to the particular local situations.”

Alatas is exceptional among late twentieth-century intellectuals in deeply thinking through the crisis of modern universalism. The “Captive Mind,” he argues, is “fragmented in outlook,” that is, it lacks universality. His committed universalism was exercised as careful self-criticism of his own beliefs, not empty self-congratulation. For example, Alatas pursued the following inquiry:

This passage, and many others, show that Alatas explicitly never doubted the universality of a “fountain of social science knowledge.” We never find any entertainment of the Heideggerian idea of modern science as a disguised Will to Power eradicating every variety of local cultural being. However, Alatas does argue that the “Captive Mind” is “alienated from the major issues of society” and “unconscious of its own captivity and its conditioning factors,” which are the

“result of Western dominance upon the rest of the world.” Alatas is concerned with how modern science, although universal, can be appropriated by wealthy and powerful nations to the exclusion of poorer ones, not merely in terms of access to its benefits (i.e. medicine, health care, goods), but in terms of an epistemic problem he called the tertium comparationis.

As a comparative device serving scientific research, Alatas took no issue with the tertium comparationis as such. He presents one example:

Christianity and Islam are subsumed under religion. The problem with this is that the characteristics of religion are derived from Christianity to begin with. Therefore, the supposedly general scientific concept ‘religion’ is culturally defined by Christianity. Islam is looked at in terms of Christianity, rather than compared to Christianity in terms of a tertium comparationis, a general concept of ‘religion.’

What this amounts to is saying certain categories taken for scientific generalizations are, upon examination, determined by concealed cultural prejudices. The tertium comparationis, to function seriously and accurately within the field of sociological research, must be subjected to the rational scrutiny of a world community of social scientific inquirers. Alatas invokes something not far from Thomas Kuhn’s “paradigm theory” in the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. This has nothing to do with an uncritical acceptance of dogma as we might imagine in theocratic social orders or religious institutions. It is about the polyvocal upshot of ongoing research among multiple institutions and individuals, and how a consensus forms and then transforms, in modern secular domains of knowledge production. Its history is defined by established norms that preside at a wide pan-institutional level. These norms are partly the upshot of broader social changes (for example, military interests, international business, changes in higher education, etc.) but at another (and this is where Kuhn’s theory happens) there is a community of working scholars whose combined research and teaching practices produce a body of theoretical consensus. With this evolving consensus comes the eruption of paradigm changes in the history of scientific thought, what Kuhn calls revolutions. This, however, is where Alatas proposes a more controversial idea in the “Captive Mind.”

Alatas is a what we might call a new cosmopolitan intellectual. That is, he is a person who cares deeply about Asia, particularly the predicaments of postcolonial Malaysia/Indonesia, while also holding a broader “humanist” vision. For example, Alatas cites how “Malinowsky spent a couple of years in the Trobriand Islands in the Pacific,” from where “he succeeded in evolving a theory of human behaviour [that was] a landmark in the history of cultural anthropology.” Alatas took no issue with the veracity of the theory. However, he urgently queried “why he succeeded and not our own scholars.” Alatas finds the reply in a frozen posture of subservience towards the erstwhile colonial master that obstructs the flow of “self-confidence” and “creativity.” Alatas writes: “[Malinowsky] had no complexes. He did not feel compelled to imitate. He was not interested whether his writing would be accepted by this or that journal. He spent his time thinking and evolving his theory.”[44] It is a hidden problem of power inequality.

Alatas adopts a scholarly distance to articulate the idea of the “Captive Mind,” comprising on the one hand a claim that the “native” elite is demonstrably unable to think beyond the colonial worldview (and, therefore, unable to conceive an appropriate tertium comparationis through rational criticism of Eurocentric scientific hegemony, thereby triggering a new paradigmatic revolution at the transnational level). None of this is a Heideggerian argument against modernity, but a scientific variant of paradigm theory. It takes full account of the devastating mental impact of colonial conquest in non-Western countries around the world. Alatas, meanwhile, proposes the break with the “Captive Mind,” or the postcolonial impasse, through a positive vision of building a humanist cosmopolitanism based on creative thinking and a pragmatic approach to solving specific problems. Alatas emphatically encouraged a cosmopolitan approach to knowledge production:

One crucial question has to be answered if we wish to see the growth

of an autonomous social science tradition in Asia. Should Asian social science isolate itself from that of the West and the rest of the world? Definitely not. On the contrary, there should be greater and continuous attention paid to knowledge developed elsewhere, particularly in the West. But the problem is to select the significant from the trivial.[45]

For Alatas, the collective selection process of fact confronted by alternative lines of public action constitutes the core of the social scientific vocation. Al-e Ahmad, by contrast, was an undisciplined, larger than life figure, with a unique and original Persian writing style expressing dynamism while being blunt, enunciated rhythmically in a way both pleasing and arresting. Al-e Ahmad’s ideas were deeply seductive, but not necessarily intellectually productive. In his own words, Al-e Ahmad was a man of the “pen.” He wrote: “I am professionally a teacher. Yet I am not devoid of preaching either. I don’t know what I am.”[46] Beyond his considerable literary talents, Al-e Ahmad was a genuine wonderer, driven by the certainty that something was deeply wrong with how the world is set up. He spent his entire short life in search of an answer—from Boston to Washington DC, from Israel to Iran’s rural areas, while also reading widely about histories and events in revolutionary countries like the Soviet Union, and dynamic Western capitals like Paris or Berlin. The experience of Israel provoked Al-e Ahmad to speculate: “I as an Easterner [prefer] an Israeli model over all other models of how to deal with the West. How to extract from its industries by the spiritual power of mass martyrdom […]”[47] In effect, Al-e Ahmad imaginatively opened new secular spaces for politicization which borrowed the structure of traditional religious ritual—thereby defining nation-building as a religiously rooted process of constructing and endowing national meaning to secure collective identity.

We needn’t doubt Al-e Ahmad’s sincerity in seeking a new postcolonial vision of the world. His very life was almost a performance and a novel, “written” in his daily actions inspired by a vision he ceaselessly projected to all other Iranians. He became almost an icon, a semiotic entity like the Bastille might mark the French Revolution in people’s minds all over the world. Al-e Ahmad was a master of capturing the imagination through his writings and actions. For example, his Meccan Pilgrimage resulted in Khasi dar Mīqāt (Lost in the Crowd), a monumental if highly entertaining rethinking of religion and modern politics written entirely from the perspective of one among millions of massed faithful in their human ordinariness. Al-e Ahmad was by his own account, and of those who knew him, a deeply intelligent and sensitive man who was also confused by the appalling reality of the world around him. The Iran of his lifetime suffered from disease, autocratic modernization, and a police state, all in the aftermath of foreign occupation and decades of revolutionary struggle. We are not to be surprised that his searching imagination wandered to widespread possible explanations, and he entertained the notion that perhaps the cause of Iranian freedom had been genuinely held in the hands of anti-constitutionalist figures like Sheikh Nouri:

To me, the corpse of that great man hanging on the gallows is like a flag they raised over this country after two-hundred years to symbolize the ascendancy of Gharbzadegi.

That a reactionary cleric who vehemently opposed the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1906-11) should become a symbol of the struggle against “Gharbzadegi” proves that the term is not synonymous with Alatas’ the “Captive Mind.” Al-e Ahmad reveals the nature of this difference by citing the ideological source of “Gharbzadegi” in German romanticism: “(Ernst) Jünger and I were both exploring more or less the same subject, but from two viewpoints. We were addressing the same question, but in two languages.”

That is, Al-e Ahmed embraced the “question” of forgotten “authentic being” late in his literary and activist career. Alatas was concerned with a less utopian type of recollection. He was concerned with how the victims of prolonged oppression require a catalyst to reignite their self-confidence and to break free from internalized abuse patterns:

Humanism and Revivalism:

Upon a superficial reading, Alatas’ thought could be viewed as similar to a Heideggerian roots revivalism. This, however, would be a rudimentary error of intellectual judgement. In contrast to the prevailing Heideggerianism of many post-colonial theories, Alatas does not declare modern science a Western episteme—he instead claims that legacies of Western imperialism have historically monopolized a modern science tradition that should rightfully belong to humanity as whole. He writes:

A reflection on the meaning of indigenization and autonomous development should not be taken as a mere wrangling on terminology. It reveals the nature, function and genesis of the scientific spirit, the forward movement of humanity, the necessity to break with the past to forge something new but at the same time to preserve what is considered as valuable from the past. The spirit of indigenization cannot facilitate the development of the social sciences.[51]

Alatas is not a positivist, but an adherent of science as creative and ever-evolving collective inquiry. That is, science is not a monovocal product but a polyvocal process: “In public discourse and formal education, human sciences need to facilitate the dialogue among civilizations to inculcate an attitude founded on appreciation, understanding, interest, and compassion for the cultures and worldviews of the other.” The paradigm shift in conceiving science as a social process made possible by the everyday dialogic practices of countless participants through myriad institutions is traceable to the late nineteenth-century writings of Charles Peirce, and impacted Pragmatism (John Dewey), Phenomenology (Edmund Husserl), Structuralism (Alexandre Koyré) and important religiously inspired paradigm revaluations (Michael Polanyi). All of these outlooks retained an Enlightenment universalist foundation, while criticizing specific traditions within that foundation (i.e. the “social contract” as we saw earlier). Alatas belonged very much to this spirit of fundamentally democratizing our understanding of the meaning and practice of modern science.

Alatas, too, is a universalist, championing “genuine knowledge,” but liberated from the historical fetters of entrenched imperial power abuse that manifests itself in a culturally conditioned but usually unconscious ontological inflation.

Human sciences must go beyond merely correcting the fallacies and distortions of public discourse. They must attack the root of the problem, which is the problem of Eurocentrism in social science education that ultimately informs public discourse. The problem has to be dealt with at the level of knowledge production in teaching and research. This in turn would mean a greater need for interaction among scholarly communities in the various civilizations.

The above citation underlines Alatas’ commitment to modern universalism which remains open to dialogue with the past as well as a wide variety of different narratives. Moreover, the fundamental feature of Alatas’ argument is to denounce the hardened and inflexible hegemony of a Eurocentric universalism that both shut out Alatas’ own ideas and helped to create a situation of sustained subordination of the Global South in the twenty-first century. As the following citation shows, the two problems are interconnected:

I am not suggesting that we should close our minds to genuine knowledge from any part of the world. We should assimilate as much as possible from all sources, from all parts of the world, all useful knowledge. But we need to do this with an independent critical spirit, without turning our backs on our own intellectual heritage. The phenomena of servility and intellectual bondage are not the same as genuine creative assimilation from abroad.

The different genealogies underlying the two ideas, “Gharbzadegi” and the “Captive Mind,” can be represented as follows: “Gharbzadegi” is a philosophical/literary concept originating from the German intellectual tradition of the counter-Enlightenment. Al-e Ahmad, and also Fardid, were in conversation with Western literary and philosophical interlocutors who imagined the modern world as the “darkening” of the human condition. As we read in the original Heideggerian articulation, this “disease” began in the West but spread to global proportions through technology and science, having been seeded in ancient Greece through the labours of rationalism and at the expense of meaning-bestowing mythic understandings of being. Alatas’ “Captive Mind,” by contrast, proposes a sociological concept which—while it may hold certain elective affinities with “Gharbzadegi”—is a deeply productive idea which sees the requisites for social progress in both conversation with Western traditions and selectively preserving the cultural past as an inhabitant of any meaningful and autonomous present.

[1] Syed Hussein Alatas, “The Development of an Autonomous Social Science Tradition in Asia: Problems and Prospects, Asian Journal of Social Science 30, no. 1 (2002): 151.

[2] Tony Judt, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twenty Century (New York: Penguin Books, 2009).

[3] Alatas, “The Development of an Autonomous Social Science,” 150.

[4] Syed Hussein Alatas, “The Captive Mind in Development Studies: Some Neglected Problems And the Need for an Autonomous Social Science Tradition in Asia,” International Social Science Journal 24, no. 1 (1972): 22.

[5] Alatas, “The Captive Mind,” 23

[6] Alatas, “The Captive Mind,” 23.

[7] Alatas, “The Captive Mind,” 24.

[8] Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (London: Penguin, 2009), 57.

[9] Alatas, “The Captive Mind,” 24-25

[10] Bipan Chandra, The Writings of Bipan Chandra: The Making of Modern India from Marx to Gandhi (Hyderabad: Orient Black Swan, 2012), 18.

[11] Chandra, Writings, 15.

[12] Alatas, “The Captive Mind,” 11.

[13] Alatas, “The Development,” 151.

[14] Alatas, “The Development,” 150.

[15] Alatas, “The Captive Mind,” 10

[16] Alatas, “The Development,” 150.

[17] Alatas, “The Development,” 150.

[18] Alatas, “The Development,” 151.

[19] Alatas, “The Captive Mind,” 11.

[20] Alatas, “The Development,” 156.

[21] Alatas, “The Development,” 150.

[22] Alatas, “The Development,” 151.

[23] Syed Hussein Alatas, “Intellectual Imperialism: Definition, Traits, and Problems,” Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science 28, no. 1 (2000): 30.

[24] Alatas, “Intellectual Imperialism,” 30.

[25] Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North (New Hampshire: Heinemann,

1970).

[26] Richard Wright, Native Son (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1970), 231.

[27] Michael Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 8.

[28] Alatas, “Intellectual Imperialism,” 44.

[29] Alatas,“Intellectual Imperialism,” 27.

[30] Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Occidentosis: A Plague from the West, trans. R. Campbell, ed. Hamid Algar (Berkeley: Mizan Press, 1984), 227.

[31] Hamid Dabashi, The Last Muslim Intellectual :The Life and Legacy of Jalal Al-e Ahmad (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021).

[32] Dabashi, The Last Muslim Intellectual.

[33] Al-e Ahmad, Occidentosis, 29.

[34] Al-e Ahmad, Occidentosis, 27.

[35] Alatas, “Intellectual Imperialism,” 25.

[36] Al-e Ahmad, Occidentosis, 57-8.

[37] Alatas, “Intellectual Imperialism,” 37.

[38] Alatas, The Captive Mind,” 11.

[39] Alatas, “Intellectual Imperialism,” 37.

[40] Alatas, “Intellectual Imperialism,” 37.

[41] Alatas, The Development,” 151.

[42] Alatas, “Intellectual Imperialism,” 37.

[43] Alatas, “Intellectual Imperialism,” 37.

[44] Alatas, “Intellectual Imperialism,” 31.

[45] Alatas, “The Development,” 153.

[46] Al-e Ahmad, “Kārnāmah-i Sih Sālhā,” (Tehran: Revagh Publisher, 1984), 159.

[47] Al-e Ahmad, Safar bih Vilāyat-i ‘Izrā’īl (Tehran: Revagh Publisher, 1984), 52.

[48] Al-e Ahmad, Occidentosis, 59.

[49] Al-e Ahmad, Occidentosis, 25.

[50] Alatas, “Intellectual Imperialism,” 44.

[51] Alatas, “The Development,” 155.

[52] Syed Hussein Alatas, “The Role of Human Sciences in the Dialogue Among Civilizations,” Development and Society 31 (2002): 265.

[53] Alatas, “Intellectual Imperialism,” 27.

The Matrix of the Mystic: The Enclosure of Being in the Ikhwan as-Safa’ and Saadya Gaon’s Commentary on the Sefer Yezirah

Gyongyi Hegedus Volume 6, Number 3-4, Fall-Winter 2021

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Racial Profiling of Iranian Armenians in the United States: Omid Fallahazad’s “Citizen Vartgez”

Claudia Yaghoobi Volume 6, Number 2, Summer 2021

Claudia Yaghoobi is Roshan Institute Associate Professor in Persian Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received her PhD in comparative literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2013. She is the author of Temporary Marriage in Iran: Gender and Body Politics in Modern Iranian Literature and Film (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Subjectivity in ‘Attar, Persian Sufism, and European Mysticism (Purdue University Press, 2017). She is also the coeditor (with Janet Afary) of a book series titled Sex, Marriage, and Family in the Middle East for Bloomsbury Press.

Throughout history, Armenians have endured several resettlements and migrations, one of which dates back to the seventeenth century when the Safavid monarch Shah Abbas (r. 1588–1629) forcibly moved Armenians to Isfahan, Iran. However, Armenians’ most major migration came after the 1915 genocide. Some settled in the Middle East, yet others resided in Europe and North America. A number of those who resettled in Iran post-1915 moved to the United States, especially after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and during the Iran–Iraq War (1980–88). In this paper, focusing on Omid Fallahazad’s “Citizen Vartgez,” I will examine the (hi)story of Vartgez, Fallahazad’s protagonist, as an Iranian Armenian in the diaspora in the United States. First, I will briefly chart the various waves of Armenian migration to the United States regardless of the migrants’ origin state. In this section, I will also point out the ways that Armenians have been exposed to discrimination in the United States. Next, I will delineate the ways that Iranian Armenians, along with other Middle Easterners, have been subjected to racism and Islamophobia in the United States post-9/11. In the following section, examining Fallahazad’s “Vartgez,” I will map out the ways that Iranian Armenians attempt to hold onto their heritage in the United States while simultaneously maintaining their ties with both Armenian and Iranian cultures. I will also discuss the fact that regardless of whether they live in Iran or in the United States, Armenians have had to negotiate their minoritized status within a codified legal hierarchy—in Iran, with an ethno-religious hierarchy and in the United States, with a racial one. Because Armenians are Christians in a Muslim-majority Iran, their identity is defined via its ethno-religious minoritized status in official Iranian narratives. However, after their migration to the United States, Iranian Armenians enter a national context defined by race, ironically enough; now, they are considered a white ethnic minoritized group, but are lumped together with Muslim Middle Easterners and subjected to America’s racism and Islamophobia. In the next section, I will address questions of racial profiling against Iranian Armenians along with other Middle Easterners in the United States. I will conclude this paper with a discussion of Iranian Armenians’ transnationalism as a result of their precarious minoritized position within the United States.

Armenian Migration to the United States

Since much of Vartgez’s story is set in the United States, it is beneficial to look at a few of the major Armenian migration waves to America. Armenians arrived in the United States as early as the seventeenth century, when a few were brought to America to help grow silkworms. The earliest record of an Armenian pioneer to America belongs to “Malcolm the Armenian,” who arrived in Jamestown in 1618–19. The most considerable Armenian migration to the United States began when American missionaries visited Turkey in the early nineteenth century, prompting some Armenians to enter the United States in pursuit of a theological education, while others arrived to develop the Oriental rug industry. It has been estimated that approximately 60 businessmen educated by New England Protestant missionaries came to the United States from Asia Minor before 1870, yet that number rose to 1,500 by the late 1880s. Most of these immigrants were artisans and laborers seeking economic opportunities.[1] Between 1869 and 1890, 1,400 Armenians arrived in the United States, with another 5,000 emigrating in the following years. While the first major wave of migrants entered the United States after the 1894–96 Ottoman massacres, the trend of Armenian immigration to the United States continued well into the twentieth century. After the 1909 massacres of Cilicia, this number increased to 5,500 in 1910, for instance. Interestingly, as the number of immigrants rose, the boat fare from Constantinople to New York decreased from $34 to $24 in 1913.[2] In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Ottoman policies and violence motivated Armenians to take refuge in the United States in the first fourteen years of the twentieth century; immigration rates rose dramatically; and by World War I, there were approximately 60,000 Armenians in the United States. Before World War I, the majority of the Armenian immigrants arriving in New York hailed from Asia Minor. A small number of Russian Armenians (about 2,500) also arrived between 1898 and 1914, first moving to Canada and later to Southern California in 1908. This migratory trend continued after World War I, when many of the 1915 genocide survivors continued to migrate to America until the 1924 quota system took hold in the United States.[3]

The post-1915 immigrants settled in the eastern states of the United States within industrial centers before moving to California and engaging in farming there. Today, multitudes of Armenian churches and schools are found in and around Los Angeles.[4] As Levon Boyajian expresses, for the children of Armenian immigrants, “survivors of the 1915 genocide, growing up in Washington Heights, that particular corner of the New York which was our home, was an experience of very special quality [. . .] Our little corner, in a sense, was what was left of the Armenian homeland for those who ended up in Upper Manhattan clustered around the Holy Cross Church on 187^th street.”[5] The same was true for Armenians in New England (where Vartgez lives), who had created “little Armenian homelands” in their neighborhoods. While each neighborhood was different in its composition and architecture, they were each distinct and different from the mainstream neighborhoods. Isabel Kaprielian-Churchill writes: “Yet each Armenian neighborhood had many similar physical characteristics [. . .] More importantly, each neighborhood was dominated by the same overarching sense of Armenianness [. . .] Armenian neighborhoods have played a critical role in molding and strengthening Armenian identity in the American diaspora.”[6]

Between 1920 and 1924, a total of 20,559 Armenians arrived in the United States. As opposed to prewar immigrants, over half of the postwar immigrants were women, many of whom were widows, and one-fifth were orphaned children scarred by the atrocities of the war and the genocide. A few of these refugees had been rescued from Turkish homes, but the majority arrived from refugee camps run by Armenian charitable associations or European and American missionaries in Syria, Greece, and Egypt. Between 1924 and 1965, when the quota system was in effect, Armenians were able to circumvent restrictive barriers to immigration. The American National Committee for Homeless Armenians (ANCHA) was established in 1947, and relocated 4,500 Armenians who had been in settlement camps in Germany and Italy after World War II, using the Displaced Persons Act, which effectively exempted them from the quota. Later, ANCHA also helped Armenians from Palestine, those fleeing communist regimes in Romania and Bulgaria, and those escaping the socialist Arab governments of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. ANCHA helped about 25,000 Armenians immigrate to America as refugees between 1947 and 1965. After the 1965 liberalization of the quota law, Armenian immigration to the United States again increased. This coincided with political turbulence in the Middle East, including the start of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975 and the Iranian Islamic Revolution in 1979. The 1980 US census showed only 8 percent immigration from Iran before 1959, about 25 percent between 1960 and 1974, and 65 percent between 1975 and 1980. Three-quarters of Armenian immigrants from Iran settled in Glendale, Los Angeles.[7]

Hence, Armenian immigration to the United States can be divided into three waves: the earliest wave, beginning as early as 1618 to World War I; the post-World War I wave, which included the survivors of the 1915 genocide; and the third one in the post-quota era beginning in 1965, which included the Armenians who had escaped the political turmoil in the Middle East. While Vartgez’s story centers on Iranian Armenians, it is important to briefly explore the various waves of Armenian immigration from different countries to the United States.

It is also important to highlight the way Armenians were treated upon their arrival in the United States. Vered Talai describes Armenian presences in American cities as “relative anonymity,” meaning that they decided to remain ethnically vague.[8] While their dispersion across the United States contributed to less exposure to discrimination, it did not rescue them from stereotyping. Along with Jewish, Greek, Syrian, and Japanese Americans, they were stereotyped as “too ambitious and with a crafty kind of self-interested intelligence.”[9] The congregation of Armenians in different states and cities in the United States depended on various factors. From the beginning, however, their choices of settlement were limited; and while they were not exposed to explicit discrimination in many places, their settlement relied on the permission of the natives of those cities or states.[10] In Fresno, California, things were different, however, as Armenians were subjected to overt discrimination there.[11] In 1909, Armenians were placed in the category of “Asiatic” aliens, thus prohibiting them from purchasing land in California. This continued until the case of re Halladjian was brought to the United States Circuit Court of Appeals in December of 1909, and the court ruled that Armenians are “Caucasian,” based on Franz Boas’s testimony.[12] However, even this rule did not support property ownership for Fresno’s Armenians, as the areas accessible to them did not include better neighborhoods. In addition to redlining, Armenians were forbidden from other aspects of US life, including being excluded from Protestant churches (a reminder that harkens back to Iran’s exclusion of Armenians from mosques); they also could not create social and professional associations, and were ill-treated by clerks, salespersons, and other townspeople; and Armenian schoolchildren were openly abused by teachers and classmates. According to Richard LaPierre’s 1920s research, descriptions of Armenians were similar to the negative portrayals of other communities of color, labeling Armenians as dishonest, deceitful, parasitic, heavily reliant upon community welfare, morally inferior, and inherently criminal.[13] In Fresno, anti-Armenian discrimination’s roots can be found in economic and social factors. The influx of Armenians who purchased land and attained professional positions incited fear and anxiety among Fresno’s non-Armenian population. In addition to their independent attitude, and despite their legal classification as Caucasian, Armenians exhibit a diverse set of traits including darker complexions, a unique language, and ancestral costumes. While they were exposed to discrimination, Armenians avoided any direct confrontation. This is the predicament of a minoritized population living among a dominant group that exhibits anti-ethnic discrimination. Since Armenians were not as widely known in other parts of California, Fresno natives did not succeed in mobilizing opposition to pass discriminatory laws, as they had done against the Chinese.[14] This invisibility soon ended with the advent of the Americanization process in the 1910s to 1930s, and later post-9/11.

Iranian Armenians in the United States Post-9/11

Due to their affiliation with Iran, Iranian Armenians have faced an additional layer of discrimination in the United States, particularly after the Iranian hostage crisis in the 1980s and post-9/11. Iranian Armenians have been subjected to further racial profiling along with other Middle Easterners and Arab Americans after 9/11. Much of the scholarship on American racism is centered on the white–Black binary. Focusing on Puerto Ricans and referring to them as “sandwiched minorities,” Elizabeth M. Aranda and Guillermo Rebollo-Gil problematize this dichotomous rhetoric and argue that while the rhetoric is true, “the nature of the binary racial discourse reifies the subordinate position of other Americans in the same studies that attempt to unravel how race operates in the daily lives of those most affected by it. In this manner, the duality of race and the implications for White racial subjects undermines their structurally subordinate position, shaped by centuries of institutional racism.”[15] Whereas skin color and phenotype are the typical tools for racial profiling, “the inclusion of ancestry and nativism provides an axis of racialization that differentiates citizens from noncitizens and/or Americans from non-Americans.”[16]

In the West, Iranian Armenians are frequently placed in the category of Middle Eastern “brown” bodies. In this context, Kumarini Silva writes: “In the eight years since 9/11, both the local and global arena has changed as governments and citizens respond to the growing crisis of ‘terror’, or what this issue identifies as ‘deviance’ – bodies that are identified and subsequently disciplined as out of control because they challenge the status quo.”[17] This type of “browning” is based on color, ethnicity, language, nationality, and those religions associated with a racial “Other” often viewed as a foreigner, an illegal immigrant, or un-American. Like many minoritized bodies, this brown body poses threats to the US racial and ethnic hegemony; hence, it is deemed deviant or dangerous. Therefore, the racialization of brown bodies does not require one to be a member of a specific ethno-racial group. According to Silva, “While the processes of racializing and categorizing people based on somatic identities and perceived differences are deeply historical in the United States, it is perhaps not until 9/11 that identification—of specifically targeted communities and peoples as threats to national security—has so effortlessly become incorporated into everyday life.”[18]

After 9/11 and with the rise of Islamophobia, Iranian Armenians have been lumped together with other Muslim Middle Easterners and subjected to American prejudice against non-white Muslim bodies. Despite being legally classified as white, Middle Easterners—including Armenians—are neither seen nor treated as white by the US legal system or society. When it comes to Islamophobia, however, Muslim Middle Easterners are considered anti-American because of their allegiance to Islam. Interestingly enough, religion as a motivating factor within Islamophobia is misplaced when it comes to the racialization of Armenians who identify as Christian. In the post-9/11 United States, Armenian religious affiliation is irrelevant as religious, ethnic, national, and other boundaries are blurred. Hence, post-9/11, Iranian Armenians grapple with what Neda Maghbouleh calls “racial loopholes”—the paradoxes between their legal status in American society and their everyday lived experience.[19] As Trinh T. Minh-ha points out, “At a time when the rhetoric of blurred boundaries and of boundless access is at its most impressive flourish, the most regressive walls of separation and racial discrimination [. . .] continue to be erected around the world to divide and conquer, exacerbating existing conflicts as one world, one nation, one community, [. . .] continue to be dramatically raised against another.”[20] In such a world, every immigrant or potential traveler is viewed as a terrorist. In this sense, airports and official governmental institutions become fraught with moments of racial profiling where individuals are randomly selected for background checks only because their name might sound Muslim or they were born in the Middle East.

Maintaining Heritage vs. Assimilating

Fallahazad’s story “Citizen Vartgez” begins with Vartgez, the protagonist, having a nightmare the night before his citizenship oath ceremony. Part of his nightmare includes the neighborhood grocer, Masis, who appears as a bearded and chubby king.[21] Vartgez wakes up from his nightmare and notices a police car’s light entering his apartment from a window. The confluence of anxieties about citizenship, a bearded king, and a police car right in the first paragraph of the story sets the scene for the reader to expect issues of nationality, citizenship, and power dynamics. The anxiety induced from seeing the police car makes Vartgez fetch his citizenship pamphlet, which has the red stripes, blue stars, and image of the Statue of Liberty on it—markers of superiority or integration forces. Yet Vartgez feels that he cannot tolerate the pamphlet or its symbols anymore.

With this initial scene, Fallahazad presents the reader with a character who is struggling with his immigrant status and anxieties regarding the American integrative strategies. The integrative ideology of the United States and the Americanization League in the 1910s to 1930s challenged all diasporic communities, including Armenians. This ideology provided the Armenian diaspora with greater opportunity of abandoning their heritage. Armenians were caught in between their desire to assimilate and their efforts to pass on their heritage to the next generation. Regardless of all the hardships, the Armenian political parties and the elite managed to create a core of committed Armenians with a nationalist vision. This is not to say that Armenians did not assimilate, however. For nation building in diaspora regardless of location, schooling and education became a cornerstone. Even today, Armenian diaspora schools try to instill and create a new image of what a “true” Armenian looks like. This new Armenian is conscious of their culture, heritage, history, and language, and is nationalistic. This type of nationalistic education and identity formation played an important role for the diasporic Armenians notwithstanding all the difficulties and troubles they faced.[22]

Conscious of his cultural heritage and trying to maintain his Armenian language but at the same time endeavoring to assimilate into mainstream American culture, Vartgez undertakes his journey through this citizenship process. Vartgez remembers that he had bought the citizenship pamphlet two months ago with an album of Vigen’s songs, but read only a few pages of it.[23] Building and maintaining collective identity based on shared consciousness, memory, and knowledge is a major source of identity for a minoritized diasporic community. The fact that Vartgez purchases the US nationalization books and pamphlets alongside a music album by an Iranian Armenian singer, Vigen, hints at his hybridity and the ways that he maintains his Armenian heritage but also has a tendency to assimilate. Vigen Derderian, an Iranian Armenian pop singer, was labeled “the sultan of Iranian pop music.” Before the 1950s, the Iranian music landscape was dominated by traditional singers with limited knowledge of Western pop music. In that sense, Vigen ushered in a revolution in the music industry. Even thematically, his songs were different from those of his predecessors. Traditional songs revolved around the candle and the moth, the rose and the nightingale, and an imaginary beloved and the pain of separation from this beloved. However, Vigen departed from these gloomy descriptions with mirthful content which he derived from common people and their colloquial language while also drawing from Persian rhythms. Vigen’s works became the prologue for a new type of music taking root in Iran. After the Islamic Revolution, Vigen left Iran and resided in California, where he continued to perform. When he died in 2003, his last wish was to go home (to Iran) and perform for that vast audience there, and one of his last songs, “Awazeh-Khan-e Mardom” (“People’s Entertainer/Singer”), expressed that desire. Interjecting Vigen’s name within his story, Fallahazad accomplishes two things: an intertextual dialogue between Vigen and Vartgez and a reference to Iranian Armenian collective consciousness.

Fallahazad is using intertextuality to place Vartgez’s status in the diaspora in conversation with Vigen’s diasporic story through a mosaic of allusions and intertextual references. Intertextuality, as propounded by Julia Kristeva in her essay “Word, Dialogue, and Novel,” refers to the ways in which a single work engages in dialogue with other texts, or intertexts, creating complex, layered meanings. Intertextuality manifests itself through symbolism, metaphors, allusions, and other rhetorical figures. According to Kristeva, “Any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another.”[24] Using this intertextual reference, Fallahazad transcends the limitations of history and culture and creates compounded, nuanced meanings. Intertextuality helps evoke the liminality diasporic communities experience living between cultures, languages, and literary traditions. Techniques of intertextuality help convey the layered, nuanced complexity of diasporic multivocal aspects.

By choosing Vigen’s music, Vartgez reveals the way he views himself as a part of the Iranian Armenian consciousness—a consciousness shared by an entire community. Per Emile Durkheim’s ideas, societies are constantly influenced by people who are no longer alive but have left their mark on the consciousness of the community.[25] In this sense, not only does Fallahazad’s inclusion of Vigen in the story hint at the group identity and consciousness of Armenians, but also as the sultan of Iranian pop music, Vigen is integral to the collective national consciousness of all Iranians regardless of their ethno-religious orientation.

Cultural identity encompasses shared culture, a sort of collective self, hiding inside the many other, more superficial and artificially imposed identities which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common. This means that Armenian cultural identity reflects the common Armenian historical experiences and shared cultural codes, which provide Armenians as one people with stable, unchanging, and continuous frames of reference and meaning, beneath the shifting divisions and vicissitudes of the actual history.[26]

Finally, on the night before his citizenship interview, when Vartgez is confused as to which questions to read and what parts of the citizenship pamphlet to learn, his brother, Mato, gives him a ten-page photocopied pamphlet. There are no stars or stripes on this pamphlet, which contains twenty-five questions in three languages: English, Spanish, and Armenian. The Armenian part is handwritten.[27] Using the significance of language, Fallahazad draws on the idea that language is a tool for demarcating an ethnic group from other groups in the diaspora. The relationship between ethnicity and language also influences the links between language and national identity. Language and religion are typically considered markers of ethno-national identity. According to Steven Gryosby, language and religion are considered integral parts of primordialism, into which individuals are born.[28] Depending on time and place, the relationship between the two varies; however, they are associated with and feed upon one another.[29] With modernity and secularization, ethno-identities have increasingly been created based on socioeconomic status and political-territorial context; however, for ethno-national communities outside the homeland, a common language and/or religion are the major markers of collective identity, as in the case of diasporic Armenians, Chinese, Greeks, Indians, Jews, Sikhs, and Tibetans.[30]

By choosing to include a multilingual citizenship pamphlet in the story, Fallahazad offers the reader a moment of character hybridity, where instead of reading the naturalization questions in English, Vartgez is provided with a shorter, multilingual version specifically prepared for immigrants. Most importantly, the questions have been translated into Armenian; however, they are handwritten, indicating that another Armenian member has translated them for the community and that Armenians have to find ways to negotiate the exclusionary policies of the host nation by asserting themselves.

It is also important to note that after the 1915 genocide, Armenian language mastery became a cultural marker for Armenian identity. Since the genocide had the most impact on Armenians of Istanbul, their language (Western Armenian) became the hegemonic Armenian language of the diaspora, with the exception of Iran. Other dialects of Armenian language were confined to private spheres, and the use of Turkish was condemned. Western Armenian unified the polyglot diaspora Armenians into a community. Languages of the host nations were considered second languages. Of course, in the United States this was more challenging. The fluidity of borders, pressures for acculturation from the host nation, and the lack of Armenian schools contributed to the rapid integration of Armenians into mainstream American society and culture. For this community, language could not serve as a cultural identity marker which divided the diaspora Armenians in the United States. Out of necessity, this community replaced language with religion and the Apostolic Church controlled by Armenian political parties.[31]

After the citizenship interview, Vartgez promises himself that he will learn the questions from the English version before his oath ceremony: “The day when his nationality will officially become American.” He feels that reading the questions from the Armenian pamphlet is a form of cheating right before this “so-called new life, or [. . .] this rebirth.”[32] Rightfully so, Vartgez feels that this American naturalization and citizenship means the death of his roots and heritage and a rebirth into a new life. Hence, as he tries to integrate into the host nation in the United States, he first needs to disintegrate from the memories and languages of the homeland: Iran and Armenia. This is a common process of disintegration and reintegration that diasporic communities undergo. Vartgez must first empty his soul so that the new culture can penetrate and settle in. However, this strategy proves unsuccessful as the past continues to haunt him. Therefore, he has to reinvent himself, bringing the past, present, and future together rather than disintegrating from one and integrating into the other. The cultures are not mutually exclusive; he has to combine all three into a form of transnationalism and multiple consciousnesses.

Anxiety-Induced Racial Profiling

However, Vartgez’s collective consciousness is not limited to the shared memories of Armenians but also includes those of Iranians: twice a stranger, he has two homelands in his consciousness. After twenty years of living in the United States, Vartgez has given in and accepted, or more accurately, been forced, to become an American citizen. Mato and Mato’s friend Avizhan fill out the forms for him and pay for his interview without his knowledge. After they tell him the truth, when he finally tries to explain to them that “[he] may one day want to go back [to Iran], because you cannot bury twenty years of memories,” Mato interrupts him: “What memories? You grew up in Abadan, but with the first signs of the war [Iran–Iraq War], you left and moved here. Don’t talk about memories in front of me. I have memories, not you, of fighting during the war in Basra, Iraq. Four years, yes it was imposed, but still, my body is torn, haven’t you seen?”[33] The conversation leads to a discussion about how, during wars, everything becomes binary. You are either a supporter of one group or the other; there is no middle way.

Avizhan tells Vartgez that it is important to become a US citizen because his nationality is currently stamped “Iranian.” Mato continues: “It doesn’t matter if you are Armenian or non-Armenian, your passport says Iranian; it will become a headache here in these conditions. It’s happened to us once when we were kids. You and dad were in Abadan. Mom and I in Basra. I’m still suffering from that.”[34] Mato’s comment about the irrelevance of Vartgez’s Armenian nationality or religion hints at the ways that people of Middle Eastern descent are racialized in the United States. It also indicates the increasing visibility of non-white and non-Black ethno-racial minoritized groups in the United States. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls this visibility the “intermediate racial categories” and conceives of “racial groups in the Americas as inhabiting ‘spaces’ – that is, as sharing a location without necessarily crystalizing into a social collectivity.”[35] This intermediary group occupies a “different location[s] in the racial order, and [is] racialized through ethnicity, national origin, and/or religion, rather than strictly phenotype.”[36] Legally in the category of Caucasian but racialized as non-white, Iranian Armenians (like other Middle Easterners) are located in an ambiguous space as neither white nor non-white—a group that Gualtieri calls the most “invisible of invisibles” but at the same time hyper-visible, as seen in Vartgez’s case.[37]

The racialization of Iranian Armenians has less to do with race, ethnicity, and religion, and more to do with the US foreign policy that has fluctuated throughout history.[38] As citizens of Iran, Iranian Armenians have been increasingly viewed as threats to US national security with the increasing Islamophobia that has targeted Muslims, specifically after 9/11. When Vartgez gets to his oath ceremony, breaking news appears on TV: the image of a fugitive terrorist whose facial components are ironically similar to those of Vartgez, from his tuft of tongue-shaped hair on his balding head, to his sunken eyes on his wide face, and worst of all his full mustache. Seeing the image of this “terrorist,” Vartgez begins sweating, and taken over by his anxiety, he feels that everyone is staring at him. When the woman in charge of his file calls him, all he thinks about is “to immediately make her understand that while his nationality is Iranian, he is actually a Christian Armenian.”[39] That day, things end up well, but he avoids the news for the next two days. Since Mato is a fan of the news, he notices a change in Vartgez, and finally realizes that ever since his oath ceremony, Vartgez has been wearing a beard so he will not look like the “terrorist.”[40] This scene in the story clearly dramatizes the fact that while race has been understood as a biological entity, it is in fact a social construction. What is significant in this episode, however, is that this socially constructed understanding of race has global implications where nationality, language, religion, and history come into play.[41] Race sociologists have called this process “brown racialization,” which encompasses a confluence of skin color with ethnic, religious, linguistic, or national factors.[42]

Interestingly enough, racialization of brown bodies requires only being viewed as a foreigner or a terrorist, not any racial or ethnic specificity. This homogenization leads to racialization of all brown bodies in the same way. During the oath ceremony, the young man next to him asks Vartgez, “so we should congratulate you for two things? [. . .] one for your citizenship, and one for getting rid of your dictator leader?” A woman sitting next to them corrects the young man, saying “like everyone else, he confuses Iran with Iraq. It’s on your paper. But he means Saddam.” The young man asks Vartgez if he is Iranian or Iraqi. Vartgez responds: “I am Iranian. Honestly, I was born in Iraq. My parents were Armenian. Then my father took me to Iran and was forced to get an Iranian birth certificate for me, but in reality, I’m Armenian.”[43] As they are singing the American anthem, Vartgez thinks, “what would happen to him? Would he be taken to court? For what? Betrayer? Rioter? Terrorist? American? Iraqi? Iranian? Or Armenian?”[44]

What happens to Vartgez in this scene crystalizes that for brown bodies, American citizenship is legally obtainable; however, American cultural identity remains elusively unattainable. In the context of blackness, Devon Carbado labels this as testimony to the policies of “inclusive exclusion: inclusion in American citizenship and exclusion from American identity.”[45] This is also true about brown bodies that are positioned both inside and outside of America’s national imagination. According to Louise Cainkar, “As a result of exclusion and denigration in American society, the normative pattern among Arab immigrants arriving in the last 40 years and their American-born children was to develop a range of transnational identities [. . .] Shun[ing] a hyphenated identity [. . .] wait[ing] for a society more willing to incorporate them as full members.”[46]

Iranian Armenian Transnationalism

As Vartgez’s story shows, diasporic subjects inherently navigate a dual challenge—namely, the everyday implications of a kaleidoscopic identity in a new environment, and the task of puzzling together an identity rooted in a fragmented home and host nation. In their attempts to resolve both challenges, the subjects’ cultural identity simultaneously takes root. Stuart Hall defines cultural identity as a focus on a shared culture and the mixture of vectors that cultural identities occupy, taking up multiple cultures.[47] Because diasporic subjects experience multiple consciousnesses, establishing a cultural identity is often full of challenges, including the suffering arising from fragmented memories, the weight of solitude, and constant roaming between borders of two or more worlds. The new and old environments exist together, placing life in diaspora “outside of habitual order. It is nomadic, decentered, contrapuntal.”[48] This decentered lifestyle necessitates physical representation as a single point of consistency in a life of constant movement. Focusing on the idea of dignity inherent in the concept of “multiplicities” rather than in the attempts to belong, as Franz Fanon puts it, diasporic multiplicities often contradict one another as a “way of being.” To become their true self is a never-ending journey for diasporic subjects[49]; they cannot seek approval in either the majority or the minoritized group and must create an amalgam of all identity factors, firmly establishing diasporic multiplicity in all aspects of life.[50]

For Iranian Armenians in the United States, this is achieved by diasporic transnationalism as they are culturally anchored in the host nation yet simultaneously maintain symbolic and spiritual ties with their homeland(s). The hybrid, diasporic transnational identity of Iranian Armenians indicates that they recognize one another’s differences, fractured identities, and fragmented memories, yet they also connect with others cross-culturally. Diasporic transnationalism softens the boundaries of “us” versus “them” via exchanges and mutual connections. While not always harmonious, these exchanges allow Iranian Armenians to negotiate their social differences and positions. This, of course, is the result of centuries of similar exchanges and negotiations that the preceding generations have undergone to make the boundaries porous today. The transnational, in-between, hybrid position of Iranian Armenians today is the reason for their cultural permeability, which is essential in a world where individuals live together in their differences. This diasporic transnationalism also challenges former understandings of diaspora, immigration, and assimilation; Iranian Armenians subvert hegemonic identity formations by insinuating the marginalized Other into the fabric of the dominant. This re-articulation decolonizes hegemonic notions of one unified national identity and destabilizes the power relations between “the ethnic” and the native. The transnational boundary-blurring casts doubt on the hierarchical dualism of the center and the periphery. In Michael Smith’s words, diasporic subjects become not only transnational but also translocal—that is, “situated yet mobile subjectivities,” both here and there.[51]

[1]Anny Bakalian, Armenian Americans: From Being to Feeling Armenian (London: Routledge, 1993), 10.

[2]Donald E. Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller, Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 141–42.

[3]Bakalian, Armenian Americans, 10–11.

[4]Aghop Der-Karabetian, Armenian Ethnic Identity in Context: Empirical and Psychosocial Perspective (Beirut: Haigazian University Press, 2018), 46.

[5]Levon Z. Boyajian, Hayots Badeevuh: Reminiscences of Armenian Life in New York City (London: Taderon Press, 2004), v.

[6]Isabel Kaprielian-Churchill, “Changing Patterns of Armenian Neighborhoods in New England,” in The Armenians of New England, ed. Marc C. Mamigonian (Belmont, MA: Armenian Heritage Press, 2004), 16–23. Quotation on p. 17.

[7]Bakalian, Armenian Americans, 11.

[8]Vered Talai, “Mobilization and Diffuse Ethnic Organization: The London Armenian Community,” Urban Anthropology 13 (1984): 197–218. Quotation on p. 203.

[9]George Eaton Simpson and J. Milton Yinger, Racial and Cultural Minorities: An Analysis of Prejudice and Discrimination, 5th ed. (New York: Plenum Press, 1985), 101.

[10]Kaprelian-Churchill, “Changing Patterns,” 18.

[11]Robert Mirak, Torn between Two Lands: Armenians in America, 1890 to World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 144–47.

[12]Anahid Victoria Ordjanian, “Children of Ararat: Political Economy and Ideology at an Armenian Ethnic School in the United States” (PhD diss., Temple University, 1991), 60–61. See also In re Halladjian, 174 F. 834 (1909), cite.case.law/f/174/834/.

[13]Richard LaPierre, “The Armenian Colony in Fresno County, California: A Study in Social Psychology” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1930), 390–415.

[14]Mirak, Torn between Two Lands, 146.

[15]Elizabeth M. Aranda and Guillermo Rebollo-Gil, “Ethnoracism and the ‘Sandwiched’ Minorities,” American Behavioral Scientist 47 (2004): 910–27. Quotation on pp. 912–13.

[16]Bradley J. Zopf, “A Different Kind of Brown: Arabs and Middle Easterners as Anti-American Muslims,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 4 (2018): 178–91. Quotation on p. 179.

[17]Kumarini Silva, “Brown: From Identity to Identification,” Cultural Studies 24 (2010): 167–82. Quotation on p. 168. See also Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday

Politics of Race (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017).

[18]Kumarini Silva, “What Is Brown? Theorizing Race in Everyday Life,” in Brown Threat: Identification in the Security State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 25–51. Quotation on pp. 26–27.

[19]Maghbouleh, Limits of Whiteness, 5.

[20]Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Foreignness and the New Color of Fear,” in Elsewhere, within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event (New York: Routledge, 2010), 1–10. Quotation on p. 5.

[21]Omid Fallahazad, “Citizen Vartgez,” in Vartgez: The Trilogy of Watertown (London: Mehri Publication, 2019), 5–28. Reference on p. 5.

[22]Razmik Panossian, The Armenians: From Kings and Priests to Merchants and Commissars (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 296–99.

[23]Fallahazad, “Vartgez,” 6.

[24]Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue, and Novel,” in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 64–91. Quotation on p. 66.

[25]Emile Durkheim, Rules for the Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and Its Method, ed. Steven Lukes, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: Free Press, 1982).

[26]Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Ruthengord (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 222–37. Reference on p. 223.

[27]Fallahazad, “Vartgez,” 6.

[28]Steven Gryosby, “The Verdict of History: The Inexpungeable Tie of Primordiality – A Response to Eller and Coughlan,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 17 (1994): 164–71. Reference on p. 168.

[29]William Safran, “Language, Ethnicity and Religion: A Complex and Persistent Linkage,” Nations and Nationalism 14 (2008): 171–90. Reference on pp. 171–74.

[30]Safran, “Language, Ethnicity and Religion,” 184.

[31]Panossian, The Armenians, 299–300.

[32]Fallahazad, “Vartgez,” 7. All translations are mine.

[33]Fallahazad, “Vartgez,” 12.

[34]Fallahazad, “Vartgez,” 13.

[35]Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “More Than Prejudice: Restatement, Reflections, and New Directions in Critical Race Theory,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1 (2015): 73–87. Quotation on pp. 79–80.

[36]Zopf, “Different Kind of Brown,” 178.

[37]Sarah A. Gualtieri, “Strange Fruit? Syrian Immigrants, Extralegal Violence, and Racial Formation in the United States,” in Race and Arab Americans before and after 9/11: From Visible Citizens to Visible Subjects, ed. A. Jamal and N. Naber (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 147–69. Quotation on p. 149.

[38]Louise Cainkar, “Thinking outside the Box: Arab Americans and U.S. Racial Formations,” in Race and Arab Americans before and after 9/11: From Visible Citizens to Visible Subjects, ed. A. Jamal and N. Naber (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 46–80.

[39]Fallahazad, “Vartgez,” 9.

[40]Fallahazad, “Vartgez,” 10.

[41]Aranda and Rebollo-Gil, “Ethnoracism,” 913.

[42]Silva, “Brown.”

[43]Fallahazad, “Vartgez,” 21.

[44]Fallahazad, “Vartgez,” 25.

[45]Devon W. Carbado, “Racial Naturalization,” American Quarterly 57 (2005): 633–58. Quotation on p. 638.

[46]Louise Cainkar, “No Longer Invisible: Arab and Muslim Exclusion after September 11,” Middle East Report 224 (2002): 22–29. Quotation on p. 25.

[47]Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), 222–37. Reference on p. 226.

[48]Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 137–49. Quotation on p. 149.

[49]Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1952), 14.

[50]Homi Bhabha, foreword to Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1952), vii.

[51]Michael Peter Smith, “Translocality: A Critical Reflection,” in Translocal Geographies. Spaces, Places, Connections, ed. Katherine Brickell and Ayona Datta (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 181–98. Quotation on p. 181.

Iran’s Literary Becoming: Zokaʾ ol-Molk Forughi and the Literary History That Wasn’t

Aria Fani Volume 5, Number 3, Fall 2020

Aria Fani is an assistant professor of Persian and Iranian studies at the University of Washington. He earned a BA in comparative literature from San Diego State University and a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from UC Berkeley. In addition to research and teaching, he engages in social advocacy for asylum seekers in the United States.

The most salient marker of character, the instrument of national distinction, the basis upon which a nation becomes distinct and distinguishable from other nations is language, and the soul of language is literature^{^[2]}

Depending on context, there could be two radically different readings of the above passage. If one were to find it in Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, it would read as a critique of a national imaginary rooted in linguistic and cultural difference. If one were to encounter it in a late-twentieth-century literary textbook, it would read as a bold declaration of romantic nationalism and its obsession with cultural singularity. The first reading relies on a critical knowledge of the role that language has played within the discourse of romantic nationalism in order to strip it down to its most basic impulse: the production of distinction. The second reading frames the passage as an effort to raise language and literature as identitarian fixtures tied to a national imaginary, one that operates through the production of distinction. I will revisit this intriguing ambivalence in my conclusion.

Although this passage may be relevant to both contexts, it did not appear in either one. It was extracted from Mohamad Hosayn Forughi’s Literary History, written with astonishing clarity between the 1890s and 1910s, lithographed posthumously in 1916–17, but never distributed widely or published using later print technologies. This source may be familiar to scholars of late Qajar Iran, but its significance remains largely unexplored outside of that subfield. Precisely because it has not been extensively analyzed or even critically introduced, it can generate a host of unaddressed questions about the social processes by which literary nationalism took shape in the late nineteenth century, particularly for scholars who research different iterations of nationalism in the Middle East.^{^[3]}

My purpose here is to introduce this important literary and historical source and meditate on what its “rediscovery” in the twenty-first century means for the field of Persian and Iranian studies. This article is the result of my ongoing dialogue with Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak about the emergence of literature as a social institution in the Persian-speaking world. The path to becoming a scholar is more than just a matter of earning academic credentials. Along the way, what shapes a young scholar’s intellectual and human development is the presence of a community who fulfills different but complementary roles: teacher, friend, peer, champion, and mentor. In the past five years, Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak has mentored me, championed my work, and treated me as a peer. It is only appropriate in writing an article in his honor that the focus should be on an astounding literary figure who shaped debates and trends in the field of Persian literature and literary history.

This article comprises three methodical vignettes centered on Mohamad Hosayn Forughi’s life, his little-known Literary History, and the broader cultural context to which it belonged. The brief biographical section places the author in the emerging ecosystem of literary institutions and journals in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, illustrating his liminal position in the Qajar court and his role in creating a national pedagogy based on which generations of Iranian students were educated. The second section focuses on introducing his Literary History by outlining its different sections, explaining what they mean and why they were important to the formation of literary history as a modern genre. The last vignette addresses the common historiographical impulse of overestimating works of prominent intellectuals by demonstrating how Forughi’s Literary History belonged to a much broader social context in which similar ideas were in circulation. Ultimately, this article hopes to raise relevant and unaddressed questions that speak to the gestation of Persian literature as an academic discipline in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.^{^[4]}

The Figure: Zokaʾ ol-Molk Forughi

This section introduces Forughi’s biography and demonstrates his centrality to the political, cultural, and literary life of nineteenth-century Qajar Iran. The details of his life highlight a period of social change that witnessed an itinerant merchant enter the Qajar court and shape how modern-day Iranians understand and celebrate a certain past as their own. Mohamad Hosayn Forughi (d. 1907) was born in 1839 in Isfahan, the son of Mohamad Mahdi Arbab Isfahani.^{^[5]} Forughi was a prominent Qajar-era litterateur, translator, educator, and advocate for constitutionalism.^{^[6]} In 1894, he was given the royal epithet Zokaʾ ol-Molk, in praise of his intelligence (Zokaʾ), which he put in the service of the Qajar political domain (molk).^{^[7]} He received a madrassa education in Persian and Arabic in Isfahan. Encouraged by his father, the young Forughi paused his education and became a merchant in the Persian Gulf and India.

After fourteen years, he returned to his life of learning by working as a poet in the court of Kerman’s ruler Esmaʿil Khan Vakil ol-Dowle Nuri. In 1872, Mohamad Hasan Khan Eʿtemad ol-Saltane (d. 1896), who directed the Publication and Translation Bureaus (Dar ol-tebaʿa, Dar ol-tarjome-ye homayuni), hired Forughi as a translator in the court of Naser ol-Din Shah (r. 1848–96).^{^[8]} Forughi entered the court as a merchant and man of learning, not on the basis of aristocratic pedigree or background in bureaucratic or administrative work. As an outsider, he maintained a liminal position vis-à-vis the Qajar dynasty. Farzin Vejdani writes, “This liminal position may explain why, despite being a Qajar bureaucrat, Muhammad Husayn Furughi supported constitutional change and moved in circles critical of the ruling dynasty.”^{^[9]} Thanks to his knowledge of Arabic, French, and English, combined with his mastery of Persian prose and rhetoric, Forughi produced important literary textbooks and translations and edited canonical works of Persian literature. In doing so, he played a major role in the proliferation of print culture and the promotion of a nationalist historiography that valorized the study of the past.^{^[10]}

In the mid-1890s, Mohamad ʿAli Tarbiyat founded Iran’s first independent newspaper, called Tarbiyat or Education (1896–1907), thanks in no small part to newfound political freedoms that followed the assassination of Naser ol-Din Shah in 1896. Tarbiyat was published by an eponymous library in Tehran, which was among the new sites for the reading and the distribution of literary production that had proliferated in late-nineteenth-century Tehran. Forughi served as Tarbiyat’s editor.^{^[11]} In its first issue, released on December 16, 1896, Forughi boldly declared that the difference among people and societies boiled down to only their education.^{^[12]} As Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet has noted, “Most newspapers published in the late Qajar period heralded the virtues of education in shaping a civilized and progressive society—ideals to which a beleaguered Iran aspired.”^{^[13]} Tarbiyat represents only one example of Persian-language newspapers, many of which remain unexamined, that aimed to cultivate a normative national subject in the early twentieth century.

For Forughi, the idea of literature—which he understood as a nationally enshrined corpus of prose and poetry—was a major pillar of education. Since print capitalism was understood as an instrument for the production and dissemination of literature, he wrote a series in Tarbiyat about the history of printing in Europe. Another important series in that newspaper was called adabiyat, a novel concept that needed extensive contextualization for uninitiated readers in the late 1890s, since in its premodern iteration, adabiyat referred to adab-derived sciences such as balagha (rhetoric).^{^[14]} Mid- and late-nineteenth-century thinkers like Forughi invested a great deal of intellectual labor toward bringing adabiyat into close alignment with the nineteenth-century French notion of littérature, a national culture in possession of a singular and distinct literary tradition.^{^[15]}

In Tarbiyat, Forughi featured biographies of poets like Hafez and ʿOmar Khayyam to highlight the literary achievements of New Persian.^{^[16]} The inclusion of Persian poets’ biographies in Tarbiyat was novel not only in its radical rewriting of the tazkere genre or biographical dictionary (more commonly transliterated as tadhkira or tazkira, and also translated as commemorative biographical compendia by Mana Kia), but also for mass producing it for a nationally imagined readership in the format of periodicals.^{^[17]} Kevin Schwartz has conceptualized the tazkeres of Persian poets as a “transregional library” in that the genre forged imagined literary communities with competing poetics and geographical centers of gravity.^{^[18]} Forughi’s literary history and his columns in Tarbiyat can then be understood as an “autobiography” for Qajar Iran at a time when romantic nationalism—the idea of one nation, one language—had become the cultural and cognitive center of gravity for most late-nineteenth-century intellectuals.^{^[19]}

Forughi taught at premier schools of higher education in Qajar Iran, notably Tehran’s School of Political Science (est. 1899), which he directed until his death in 1907.^{^[20]} I insist on the political qualifier “Qajar” to describe Forughi’s Iran to reduce the risk of collapsing the multitude of political, cultural, and social experiences that existed in different regions of mid-nineteenth-century Iran. Forughi also directed the Education Committee or Anjoman-e maʿaref, wherein he helped to develop a literary curriculum based on different components of Perso-Arabic rhetoric (balagha), including textbooks on maʿna, bayan, and badiʿ, as well as manuals on rhyme and prosody.^{^[21]} His lithograph on Persian literary history includes materials that he used for teaching at the School of Political Science. ʿAbbas Eqbal Ashtiyani (d. 1956), a literary historian at the University of Tehran, claimed that “Zokaʾ ol-Molk was the first in Iran to systemize the history of Persian poets in the style of European writers and [also] add literary criticism to [this European-inspired system].”^{^[22]}

This important assertion lends itself to the observation that balagha was an integral component of a rising literary culture centered on literature and its ties to a national imaginary. Eqbal Ashtiyani’s note about arranging the biography of poets in the style of Europeans is what is identified today as a new mode of historiographical production, in other words a new discourse of literature. His mention of tanqid-e adabi or literary criticism denotes new approaches to writing about Persian literary works, therefore a new discourse on literature. Maintaining such distinction opens new avenues of inquiry for a deeper understanding of these two literary discourses: one creates literature (adabiyat) as a conceptual category, while the other provides a system of approaching its object of critique (naqd).

Like many in his generation, Forughi also composed poetry, and his takhallos or pen name was adib. His divan or collected poems was lithographed in 1900, when Forughi was in his early sixties; it has received passing mentions and very little scholarly attention. His divan opens with a note about the importance of adabiyat for the nation and the education of its body politic, once again demonstrating how the topic remained at the forefront of Forughi’s mind:

I have said this a number of times, but I will repeat it once more: literature (adabiyat) is a page or a text that must bear the imprint of all sciences (tamam-e ʿolum). We must understand that a container will die away without its content. Let me be more clear: the education of a nation lies in literature (tarbiyat-e mellat dar adabiyat ast). That is the reason why I have undertaken this task for fifty years. I will not yield to the enemies’ disapproving taunts, I will not deviate from the straight path (sirat al-mustaqim), and I will not abandon my way.^{^[23]}

This passage indicates that the notion of literature, even as early as the nineteenth century, was not limited to works of literary history. Followed by Forughi’s preface to his divan, there appears a biographical note written by Shams ol-ʿOlama in the flowery style of Qajar-era courtly writings, which reads like a manaqeb-style hagiography, short on factual information and full of laudatory epithets and rhyming phrases.^{^[24]} A part of Forughi’s translation of E. Abkarius’s Rayhanat ol-Afkar is appended to his divan. This is a curious addition given that the work is framed as the “divan of Zokaʾ ol-Molk” and not an anthology of his writings. Forughi’s poetry mainly consists of qasides that eulogize the prophet of Islam, his daughter, the imams (which he composed during his time in Najaf and Karbala), and his patron Naser ol-Din Shah. Also included are robaʿis with spiritual themes and a versified narrative on love interspersed with prose. His divan is a little over six hundred pages and contains more than five thousand lines of poetry.

In the course of his extraordinarily productive career, Forughi helped to set in motion a new discourse of (and on) literature and nationalist historiography. His legacy has shaped the careers of many intellectuals who came after him. The memoirs of scholars who were taught and mentored by Forughi are a testament to this claim.^{^[25]} Mojtaba Minovi (d. 1977), the distinguished scholar of Persian literature, recalls that when he was receiving his secondary education in Tehran, he studied textbooks that had been produced primarily by Mohamad Hosayn Forughi and his son Mohamad ʿAli.^{^[26]} During his lifetime, Forughi’s work was known in elite circles familiar with or invested in Persian literature.^{^[27]} For instance, in 1926, Ömer Halis Bıyıktay (d. 1939) translated into Turkish a primary-school textbook on Iran’s history that Forughi had coauthored with his Mohamad ʿAli.^{^[28]} Forughi’s success is not only a recognition of his intellectual force but also a clear indication that the discursive tools with which he was engaged in late Qajar Iran were in global circulation.

The Text: Forughi’s Literary History

Forughi’s intellectual capital helped to create literature as a social enterprise in late Qajar Iran. He did not operate within ready-made conceptual categories that had been imported wholesale from Europe; instead, he cultivated a set of discursive toolkits with which to rewrite and realign literary concepts in Persian literature. Forughi was part of a network of global intellectuals who were politically, socially, and cognitively preoccupied by the idea of the nation and its cultural properties. In order to fully substantiate some of these assertions, this section examines Forughi’s Literary History in a detailed and focused fashion.

I first learned about this work in a footnote in the journal Daneshkade (1918–19).^{^[29]} I could not locate Forughi’s Literary History in any university library in the United States or Europe. This is because the work was catalogued under the title ʿElm-e badiʿ, denoting a branch of Perso-Arabic rhetoric that deals with innovations and beautification of literary style. This is because the Forughi sons gathered their father’s disparate writings (or his mosavvades or rough drafts, as they called it), slapped them together under the title ʿElm-e badiʿ, and printed it.^{^[30]} Its posthumous production gives the text an uncertain status and provenance. Was it intended to be a literary history? More importantly, what did it mean for a work to be read as such in the 1910s when literary history was not yet a bounded and institutionally recognized category?

Similar to Forughi’s position in the Qajar court, his Literary History—or one that wasn’t—also occupies a liminal position in the field of Persian studies. It is the work of a scholar who gave the idea of literature arguably its clearest expression in the nineteenth century, yet it is a largely forgotten text. Despite its unique and original ideas—ones that would preempt a generation of scholars—by a twist of fate, it never came into being as a clearly expressed literary product in the author’s lifetime. It has subsequently slipped through the cracks of publishing houses and later generations of scholars and editors. Now, my task is to make sense of the work, its rhetorical novelty, and its discursive logic at a time when Persian literary history has been automatized as a mythologized narrative mapped onto an ethno-geographical entity called Iran. For those reasons, the most sensible approach to understanding it will be through intentional ambivalence.

Because I was searching for Forughi’s work under the title Tarikh-e adabiyat, I did not realize that a copy was held by the library of my own home institution at the University of California, Berkeley until I had graduated and left California.^{^[31]} Curiously, the lithograph copy held at Berkeley is different from the copies my colleagues Alvand Bahari and Shahla Farghadani sent me from the National Library and Archives of Iran and the Library of the Academy of Persian Language and Literature respectively. The Berkeley version has 124 pages of notes on ʿElm-e badiʿ along with samples of Persian and Arabic poetry that elucidate different aspects of Perso-Arabic rhetoric; the copies held in Tehran do not include those pages. The Berkeley version has two systems of pagination: the notes on badiʿ run from pages 1 to 124 followed by the section analyzed in this article, which runs from pages 1 to 353. This is yet another indication that the work was put together with haste and lacks clear organization.

The task of introducing Forughi’s work begins with clarifying its unusual publication status. It was lithographed, but its number of print runs is unknown. Besides the three copies currently held in Tehran and Berkeley, I do not know of another copy.^{^[32]} Also unknown is whether it was intended to be sold or handed out informally amongst scholars of Persian literature. The only mention of a publisher is on the last page of the copy, bearing the stamp of Mirza ʿAli Asghar’s Press (matbaʿe-ye Mirza ʿAli Asghar), who was a grand vizier to three Qajar monarchs.^{^[33]} The last page also bears information about the scribe, simply identified as Malek ol-Khattatin or “the Chief Scribe,” and one of the book’s patrons, ʿAbdol Vahab Nezam ol-Molk (d. 1917), a Qajar administrator who occupied different positions inside and outside the court. Finding clear answers to these questions would provide a better understanding of the context in which Forughi’s work was disseminated.

The second challenge is how to precisely name this work. His sons, Mohamad ʿAli (d. 1942) and Abol Hasan (d. 1959), classified it as ʿElm-e badiʿ, writing in their introductory note that they had compiled class notes that their father had designed for his literature classes at Tehran’s School of Political Science.^{^[34]} Those notes primarily consisted of biographies of Persian poets and samples of their verse. Forughi never had the chance to produce a final version for dissemination or publication beyond the classroom, as he may have intended.^{^[35]} Two of his biographies were featured in the newspaper Tarbiyat, demonstrating an overlap in audience. The Forughi sons stated that it was their father’s unfulfilled goal to compose a “Persian literary history in the style of European literary texts” which would “mitigate our shame among educated nations who have studied the history of our literature and knowledge.”^{^[36]}

Could we then call it a literary history? This article refers to Forughi’s work as a literary history with the following caveats: In the 1890s, the first literary histories of Persian had not yet been published, no less translated into Persian. For instance, the first volume of Edward G. Browne’s A Literary History of Persia appeared in 1902, and Shibli’s multivolume Shiʿr ul-ʿAjam was published in Urdu between 1908 and 1918. The University of Tehran’s Faculty of Letters, which became a major site of scholarly production, was not founded until 1935. Therefore, literary history did not yet exist in the late nineteenth century as an institutional fixture. But Forughi exhibited the language, if not the entire structure, that marked the beginning of literary history’s gestation, as this section will show.

Alexander Jabbari has illustrated how the genre of Persian literary history was the result of a long and uneven process of repurposing and refashioning the tazkere genre.^{^[37]} Jabbari has analyzed the rhetorical devices and discursive innovations used by Persian- and Urdu-language scholars like Shibli Nuʿmani (d. 1914) and Mohamad Taqi Bahar (d. 1951) that set in motion a new mode of historiographical production across national and linguistic boundaries. His analysis of how Persian translations of Urdu-language texts helped to define the domain of literary history in Iran and Afghanistan helps disrupt anxieties of originality and influence that surround the study of Persian-Urdu literary dynamics in the twenty-first century. As the earliest instance of literary history (yet) in the Persian language, Forughi’s work bears a formative connection to the tazkere genre in that it is chiefly organized by biographies of Persian poets. Unlike tazkeres, it lucidly articulates adabiyat as the cultural possession of a national historical subject called Iran.^{^[38]}

Forughi’s literary history, lithographed in the nastaʿliq script,^{^[39]} contains 353 pages and is made up of the following five sections:

Note by the Forughi sons, 4 pages
Preface, 12 pages
Introduction: On the Essence of Literature, Its Influence and Quality, 9 pages
The Definition, Subject and Benefit of Literature, 51 pages
Biographies of Persian Poets, 282 pages

The dibache or preface is on the nature and importance of literature for the nation. The preface mainly delves into the nature of linguistic interplay, particularly regarding Persian and Arabic. Forughi reminds readers that “no language is pure,” an astonishingly progressive declaration for a nineteenth-century nationalist intellectual.^{^[40]} For Forughi, Arabic elements in Persian do not constitute a linguistic or cultural “flaw or shortcoming” (asbab naqs va ʿeyb).^{^[41]} Forughi’s view shows that not all forms of Iranian linguistic nationalism were accompanied by ideological hostility toward the Arabic language and literature.^{^[42]} Not showing racial or ideological hostility toward Arabic does not prevent Forughi from asserting that in all the works of Arabic poetry, he does not find a single poet who equaled Ferdowsi’s Shahname.^{^[43]} Writing more than a century before Forughi, Sir William Jones (d. 1794) praised Ferdowsi’s Shahname, but decided that it was ultimately no match for the works of Homer.^{^[44]} Although they belong to different time periods, both assertions are rooted in an evaluative notion of literature with the nation as its uncontested unit of analysis.^{^[45]}

For Forughi, Arabic elements in Persian stand as historical remnants of a time when Arabic was the dominant language of scientific and literary production in Persian-speaking lands.^{^[46]} Yet Forughi implies that while it may have made sense for “our forefathers” (niyakan-e ma) to borrow their lexicon and aesthetic norms from Arabic, it is no longer appropriate for modern-day Iranians to do so.^{^[47]} He may not flag Arabic elements in Persian as inherently problematic, but Forughi does consider them fundamentally foreign. In fact, his preface reads as a clear declaration of Iranian cultural singularity, with Persian as its most enduring symbol, an idea largely upheld by many in the field of Iranian studies today.^{^[48]}

Language does not only serve as an identitarian symbol for Forughi. He is equally preoccupied with the idea of transforming Persian into a linguistic vehicle capable of producing different types of knowledge, both humanistic and scientific. This transformation primarily requires a simplified, exact, and clear prose style that Forughi thematizes in his own diction. His preface lauds the work of the Académie française (est. 1634) (or Anjoman-e adabiyat-e Faranse, as he called it), for systematically coining new words based on industrial and scientific needs (hajat-e ʿelm va sanʿat) while not giving in to the idea of purging “foreign words” (loghat-e ajnabi) from its lexicon.^{^[49]} According to Forughi, the French language was historically in need of borrowing words from Latin and Greek because the latter were languages of knowledge production, similar to the interplay of Persian and Arabic during the advent of Islam. However, the nineteenth century is the time for Persian to step into the age of knowledge production by strengthening its literature, the “true distinction of being Iranian” (emtiyaz-e haqiqi-ye Irani budan yaʿni adabiyat).^{^[50]} He bemoans the absence of literary associations and individuals who would light up such assemblies (na anjomani na anjoman-araʾi).^{^[51]} Here, Forughi anticipates and calls for the establishment of the Academy of Persian Language and Literature (est. 1935), which now houses a copy of his literary history.^{^[52]}

The following section of Forughi’s text is titled “On the Essence of Literature, Its Influence and Quality” (Dar haqiqat-e adabiyat va asar va khasiyyat-e an). He writes that speech was assigned to human nature (nahad-e bani Adam) by the “Creator” (afarinande) and its quality transcends ethnic difference, whether “Iranian, Roman, Indian, or Chinese.”^{^[53]} For Forughi, balagha is the “soul of literature” (ruh-e adabiyat); the key term is often translated as rhetoric, here with the caveat that it defies self-evident and easy translation.^{^[54]} Throughout his literary history, Forughi employs a constellation of terms centered on Perso-Arabic rhetoric whose semantic domain in this period remains underexplored: balagha or belaghat, fesahat, sokhan-vari, sokhan-saraʾi, and terms that pertain to its evaluative or critical domain like sokhan-sanji and sokhan-dani (some of these terms are defined by Forughi below). In fact, Forughi was insistent on classifying literature—and by extension rhetoric—as a science (ʿelm) whose study is indispensable for national education. He writes, “Some have assumed that poetry and prose composition (enshaʾ) are a matter of national amusement (omur-e tafannoni-ye mellal) and pastime while that is decidedly not the case; eloquent poetry and prose (nazm-e fasih va nasr-e baligh) constitute an essential part of rational sciences (ʿolum-e maʿqul), beneficial wisdom (hekmatʾha-ye nafeʿ), honorable ethics (akhlaq-e hamide), and desirable attributes (owsaf-e pasandide).”^{^[55]}

In the same section, Forughi expresses his idea with precision, writing “Let me be more clear: literature (adabiyat) transmits the true nature of knowledge (ʿelm) through the language of people (be zabaan-e ʿavam).”^{^[56]} This passage should be read in the context of an era whose central ethos was the cultivation of a national readership, designated by Forughi as an undifferentiated entity called ʿavam or the commoners.^{^[57]} The task of literature was to transform the language of commoners and edify their conduct. He writes: “It is important to discern which linguistic register will prevail and prove durable as an instrument of safeguarding language; there are no doubts that the vulgar and reprehensible register of commoners (zaban-e zesht va rakik-e ʿavam) and the grossly weak language of the merchant class (ʿebarat-e sost va sakhif-e mardom-e bazari) lack the stature to prevail and [in turn] deliver durability to the masses.”^{^[58]} If literature embodied the highest character of the nation, then the formation of an Iranian national subject for Forughi necessarily meant being versed in canonical works of Persian literature like Saʿdi’s Golestan, the only work he mentions under its own subheading.^{^[59]}

Forughi goes one step further and asserts that a nation’s own durability lies chiefly in the rhetorical force of its literature: “What lands have been conquered by a pithy expression (yek ʿebarat-e abdar) and what armies have been broken by an eloquent word (yek kalame-ye baligh).”^{^[60]} He then lauds the works of Nezami and Ferdowsi for capturing the imagination of people living in “climes of knowledge” (aqalim-e maʿrefat).^{^[61]} A survey of the most salient ideas of this section raises two questions. Generally, in order to better understand the processes of adabiyat’s formation as a new discourse of literature, its discursive ties to forms of knowledge related to adab and the role played by balagha therein must be critically examined. More specifically, it is equally important to analyze the way Forughi fashions a crisp and clear prose style to set in motion a new model of literariness.^{^[62]} Consider the following example:

طول نمیدهم و پاک و پوست کنده میگویم انسان بعد از خوب فهمیدن محتاج بخوب گفتن و خوب نوشتن میباشد تا بتواند مدرکات صحیح و سالم خود را مدلّل و ثابت کند و الاّ خوب فهمیدن او غالباً لاطایل و بیحاصل میشود پس سخندانی بیش از هر چیز طرف احتیاج است و این دولت احدیرا چنانکه باید و شاید دست ندهد مگر بمدد ادبیات یعنی احاطه در نظم و نثر استادان سخن و بزرگان اهل فن و بصیرت و وقوف کامل در طرق کلام و خبرت و اطلاع از آغاز تا انجام.

I will cut to the chase: in addition to good comprehension, people need good speaking and writing [skills] so that they can realize and demonstrate their sound and robust intellectual faculties, otherwise their good comprehension will prove futile. Therefore, more than anything, one needs [the ability] to discern eloquence (sokhan-dani). This government can extend a hand to [its] people only through literature—[literature] meaning a command of the prose and poetry of literary masters and [the work of] notables of science and wisdom, and a comprehensive knowledge of and dexterity with the paths of speech [or syntactic constructions], from its inception to conclusion.^{^[63]}

Forughi’s prose style varies throughout the work. In certain passages, it reads as flowery and creative, as exemplified in his entry on Saʿdi’s Golestan.^{^[64]} In other instances, it adopts a more informative rather than creative register, as exemplified in the above passage. The pioneers of literature as a social enterprise in the early twentieth century possessed distinctly different prose styles. Understanding their stylistic and rhetorical variation will help us better distinguish their approaches to meditating on and writing about works of literature. This refers to the generation of scholars who overlapped with and succeeded Forughi, scholars like ʿAbdol ʿAzim Qarib Garakani (d. 1965), Mohamad Qazvini (d. 1949), Mohamad Taqi Bahar, Eqbal, and many others. Broadly put, the question of style has not been fully examined in the formation of various modes of literary production in early-twentieth-century Persian literature.

Other points in this passage demand critical attention. Perhaps the most salient one is the way Forughi defines the notion of literature. He does not see it as a corpus of writing consisting of prose and poetry regarded to possess a certain aesthetic and imaginative quality, as rendered by most dictionaries in the latter part of the twentieth century. Instead, Forughi refers to literature as a type of literacy tied to a particular literary canon. He understands adabiyat as an evaluative, skill-based outcome, not merely an expression of national and literary achievement. Writing in the early twentieth century, ʿAli Akbar Dehkhoda similarly defined adabiyat as “knowledge pertaining to adab” and “literary works,” containing both valences present in Forughi’s literary history.^{^[65]} Adabiyat’s discursive ties to adab, as understood in the nineteenth century, are the main reason we cannot accept the term literature as its clear-cut and self-evident English translation and the anxiety of influence with which it comes. Analyzing these ties will clarify the processes of adabiyat’s conceptual realignment from a plural designation for knowledge linked to adab into a singular term primarily denoting the concept of literature in modern European literary cultures.^{^[66]}

The next section of Forughi’s work is titled “The Definition, Subject and Benefit of Literature” (Taʿrif va mozuʿ va fayede-ye adabiyat). In the first paragraph, he lays out his critical vocabulary. It demands critical attention because it illustrates the ways in which Forughi aims to realign these terms linguistically and conceptually:

Adab has been translated in Persian as culture (farhang); the composite term farhang consists of farr meaning honor and glory, and hang meaning understanding and intelligence. Adab and farhang are both essentially related to knowing the limits and extent of any subject. Therefore, one can refer to adab or farhang as knowledge (danesh) which is not that different from science (ʿelm). According to the terminology of the learned of the age of science (odabaʾ-ye ʿasr-e ʿelm) adab denotes the knowledge of poetry (nazm) and prose (nasr) which in Persian is called sokhan-sanji. Whomever is in possession of this knowledge may be called a discerner of literary discourse (sokhan-sanj); its Arabic equivalent is adib. Literature (adabiyāt) refers to expressions that will render students and any human prosperous through a profitable acquaintance with knowing (shenasaʾi) and a shining light of awareness (agahi). Everyone knows that literary discourse (sokhan) is of two types: metered and unmetered (mowzun va ghayr-e mowzun). metered speech is called poetry and unmetered is called prose; poetry has [different] types which are known in Arabic as qasida, ghazal, taghazul, musammat, qitʿa, rubaʿi, and mathnawi; these types [of poetry] in Persian are called chame, chakame, setayesh-name. Arabs call poets shaʿir or nazim while Persians (ʿajam) call them chame-sara and chakame-sara, a prose writer is called munshi in Arabic and dabir in Persian . . . ^{^[67]}

To many twenty-first-century readers, this passage may read like a vocabulary lesson given the extent to which the notion of literature has become automatized in Persian literary culture, treated as a given. In the late nineteenth century, however, this passage played a vital role, rhetorically and discursively, in bolstering Forughi’s twofold agenda: turning Persian literature into an object of scholastic inquiry and mythologizing it as a fixture of Iran’s national patrimony. For instance, outlining the discourses of farhang and danesh in parallel to the Arabic adab and ʿelm indicates the interplay of Persian with Arabic, but it also shows Forughi’s insistence on the idea of Iranian cultural singularity expressed through a facile bifurcation of Arabic and Persian concepts and terminologies.

According to Forughi, the subject of literature is prose and poetry, and the science of literature (ʿelm-e adabiyat) is tasked with forming a knowledge of and doing an evaluative assessment of literary discourse (az hays-e dorosti va na-dorosti va khubi va badi).^{^[68]} Adab has two types: adab-e nafs and adab-e dars.^{^[69]} The former includes forms of knowledge like philosophy that bring about moral conduct and self-refinement, while the latter includes academic subjects like geometry, medicine, and geography “whose knowledge has little bearing on perfecting the self (kamalat-e nafsani).”^{^[70]} Both forms of knowledge, rational and authoritative (ʿaqli va naqli), fall under those two types of adab.^{^[71]} Changing his tone, Forughi then laments the poor state of education in Qajar Iran, writing that “in our age, visions are so impaired that the sun’s appearance would not be sufficient proof of its existence.”^{^[72]} In other words, the importance of literature is far from self-evident and needs enforcement in the form of national education.

The remainder of this section draws extensively on the works of Persian poets to establish various points. Lesser-known figures include Maktabi Shirazi, ʿAmʿaq Bokhari, Mokhtari Qazvini, Azraqi Heravi, Seyyed Hasan Ghaznavi, Adib Saber Termezi, Saba-ye Kashani, and Fadaʾi Ardestani. Forughi’s poetic selection speaks to different themes, but he frames them to articulate a single message: One cannot cultivate a national subject through geometry and medicine alone; literature is what instills in people a sense of cultural singularity and moral conduct, while language secures their political autonomy from other nations. The poems do not merely illustrate the points that Forughi made in prose. They embody the rhetorical force with which he wishes to reconfigure the Persian language for its newly imagined role: mass education. Following that point, Forughi writes, “The heart of the speech lies in rhetoric (sokhan-dani) and if what I am saying is not right, then burn it after reading, or wash it off, and say whatever you wish.”^{^[73]} There remains a substantial amount of analysis left to be done on the discursive entanglements of literature, rhetoric, and philosophy in nineteenth-century Iran, which also holds the key to a deeper understanding of Forughi’s conceptual vocabulary and the ways in which he maps them onto newly emerged semantic domains.

The bulk of Forughi’s literary history delves into the biography of Persian poets, opening with a brief note on the rise of New Persian literature—or zaban-e Farsi-ye haliye, as Forughi called it—in the western edges of the ʿAbbasid political realm.^{^[74]} He writes: “Persian literature, particularly poetry, began in the ninth century during Iran’s Islamic era, which is also the period that we are in.”^{^[75]} He notes that Umayyad rulers in Iran did not pay attention to Persian, leading to the lack of literary production in that language. Here, Forughi invokes Persian as an undifferentiated language, not specifying to which variation of Middle or New Persian he is referring. Perhaps this context does not necessitate any linguistic or historical differentiation as Forughi mainly aims to locate the origins of a literary tradition that best captured the essence of Iranians—another undifferentiated entity—as a people. As New Persian emerged as a medium for literary production, Forughi writes, “our lands (mamalek-e ma) became a fertile field for the sprouting of knowledge and excellence.”^{^[76]}

The main section of the book is the biographies of Persian poets, which includes a brief overview of lesser-known Samanid poets such as Abu Salik Bokhari, Abu Shaʿib Heravi, and Esteghnaʾi Nayshaburi and samples of their poetry. Following this section, he provides an extensive biography for several Persian poets, starting with Rudaki of Samarqand (d. 941) and ending with Hafez of Shiraz (d. 1390).^{^[77]} Forughi’s work is uniquely different from most literary histories of Persian writing that were developed later in the twentieth century in that it does not place the biography of Persian poets within a political and dynastic history.^{^[78]} Instead, the biographies are organized chronologically. Forughi alludes to his sources mostly in the body of the text and does not cite, with the exception of Jules Mohl’s introduction to the Shahname, his European sources. This is in stark contrast to some of his counterparts writing in other languages—for instance, Mehmet Fuat Köprülü (d. 1966), whose essay “Methods in Turkish Literary History,” published in 1913, is replete with references to European scholars and literary historians.^{^[79]}

Persian literary history is a highly composite genre, and Forughi’s Tarikh-e adabiyat is no exception. By composite, I am referring to the ways in which literary history draws on and radically rewrites different types of historical and literary production composed across linguistic and geographical boundaries.^{^[80]} In Forughi’s case, these modes include tarikh (history), tazkere (biographical dictionary), hagiography, various kinds of anthologies, periodicals, rhetorical treatises, dictionaries, literary studies, and the received literary taste and judgment of his period.^{^[81]} Forughi synthesizes these elements into a work that poses as singular, functioning as greater than the sum of its parts.

Let us return to the notion of adabiyat, which lies at the center of Forughi’s cultural undertaking. I argued that adabiyat prior to the nineteenth-century served as a designation for a body of knowledge related to adab. In the mid-nineteenth century, Persian-language intellectuals such as Fathʿali Akhundzade (d. 1878), Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani (d. 1897), and Forughi set in motion an epistemological break from an adab-oriented definition of literature by bringing adabiyat into close alignment with a nineteenth-century colonial concept of literature as a canon of literary works that encapsulates the essence of a racialized people.^{^[82]} In light of this conceptual realignment, there was a shift in emphasis from balaghat to history as the social status and meaning of literature changed from a subject to be learned through cultivating adab—using tools like balaghat—to a historical artifact to be studied and enshrined. Adabiyat, a plural concept, was made singular during a time when romantic nationalism set out to collapse concepts such as origin, ethnicity, homeland, and language with multitudes of meaning and relationships into a singular entity that poses as homogeneous.

Forughi’s Literary History is an important source that needs to be extensively analyzed alongside other late-nineteenth-century works. If literature, then a new and unfamiliar concept, had found such a cogent expression in the 1890s, then it means that decades prior to the compilation of Forughi’s Literary History, these ideas must have been discussed and debated in elite circles in Qajar Iran. But the field of Persian studies is largely left to imagine how such ideas entered literary circles and poetry salons in early-nineteenth-century Iran, a period before the proliferation of print culture and the establishment of literary journals. In that light, there is a need for more analysis or even brief critical introductions of Qajar-era literary sources, both well-known works such as Name-ye daneshvaran and Majmaʿ ol-fosaha and lesser-known anthologies and treatises that have yet to receive careful study. Forughi’s lithograph helps place the gestation of a new discourse of literature earlier than previously thought,^{^[83]} but its rise cannot be attributed to a single work of literary history. Therefore, it is important to place Literary History within a macroscopic framework.

Framing Forughi’s Literary History as the only earliest instance of an emerging mode of new literary knowledge can be problematic if not also teleological.^{^[84]} It is important to understand and appreciate Literary History through its own discursive logic. I am referring to its biographical structure (as opposed to periodization based on national political history); its varied conceptualizations of literature, which include adabiyat as a science encompassing all forms of knowledge expressed through human speech; and its definition of adabiyat as a form of literacy. These features constituted alternative scenarios of literary modernism that did not become a normative part of the genre of literary history. In fact, today these features of Forughi’s work would be labeled by many in Iran as “traditional,” an assessment informed by a presentist vision of literary history. More inquiries into the distinct ways in which Forughi and nineteenth-century European scholars like Browne viewed the concept of literature will deepen our understanding of local forms of knowledge that existed prior to the proliferation and co-options of orientalist interventions that were linked to the “colonial matrix of power.”^{^[85]} In short, there are more questions than answers, and there is more ambiguity than certainty in our understanding of Persian literary historiography.

The Context: Literature as a Social Enterprise

In his lifetime, Forughi put a great deal of intellectual labor into creating an Iranian national imaginary closely tied to the rise of New Persian literature. He spent his career writing, translating, teaching, and building institutional sites of national education and literary production. The ideas he produced and promoted were both aligned with and subversive to Qajar state politics. He did not achieve his goal of producing what could have been—and may still be dubbed as—the first literary history of Persian. His lithographed Literary History, compiled by his sons, may remain largely unknown, but the ideas he expressed in it reached a transregional readership through the newspaper Tarbiyat from the 1890s to the 1910s. For instance, his definition of adabiyat and his biographies of Hafez and Khayyam were first printed in the pages of Tarbiyat. In fact, the main vehicle for the creation of a new discourse of literature in Persian was periodicals that sprang up in the early twentieth century.^{^[86]} In other words, the format through which the novel idea of adabiyat—and by extension literary history—took form was decidedly the small magazine.^{^[87]}

Early-twentieth-century newspapers and journals created a new literary ecosystem. The ecosystem metaphor refers to a specific literary context wherein certain ideas and behaviors germinate. It operated, in this case, through an interconnected network of ideas with symbolic and binding values: nation, ethnicity, land, origin, race, culture, history, language, literature, and many other notions with which the nation-state rendered itself distinct and complete.^{^[88]} The literary ecosystem nourished a constellation of agents who were in one way or another connected to it: publishers, readers (students, educators, semi-literate readers, listeners), distributors, writers, translators, patrons (the state, merchants, etc.), and many other actors. It gave an institutional form and authority to the multiple sites of power and literary production operative within it: administrative bureaus, national schools, literary associations, language academies, reading rooms or qeraʾat khane, universities, national libraries, and many others. This literary ecosystem was in no way bounded by language or political territory; in fact, it survived through cross-pollination with other literary cultures, regardless of the fact that each national context had its own center of gravity. The most lasting outcome of this literary ecosystem was the constitution of literature as a culturally authoritative and socially prevalent enterprise—in other words, literature as an institution.

Unless Forughi’s Literary History is placed squarely within this expansive literary ecosystem, we run the risk of rendering it a standalone work, thus necessarily overvaluing it. The same conclusion can be applied to other towering figures such as Edward Browne and Mohamad Taqi Bahar, the authors of A Literary History of Persia and Sabk-shenasi respectively. Both scholars have rightly been credited for setting in motion a new model of literary historiography. In Browne’s case, this model was a literary history of a people called Iranians based on a system of political periodization. Bahar’s model forged four different historiographical categories—Khorasani, ʿEraqi, Hendi, and Bazgasht—based on a study of stylistic differences.^{^[89]} Both figures have undoubtedly left their mark on the formation of Persian literature as an academic discipline. However, the literary ecosystem within which their works were produced and read is rarely included in critical assessments of their work.^{^[90]} This omission has led to an overestimation of their work.

One study that critically contextualizes the rise of national historiography is Farzin Vejdani’s Making History in Iran. Among other topics, Vejdani analyzes the ways in which two generations of Iranian intellectuals became involved in researching and writing Iran’s national history from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. In other words, it tells the story of how history writing became a social enterprise, a profession culturally enshrined and socially institutionalized. Vejdani convincingly demonstrates that there is no single pole from which a new historical and literary knowledge is transmitted, disrupting the tired narrative of an undifferentiated entity called the East passively receiving knowledge from a transhistorical entity called the West. Vejdani does that partially by highlighting the idiosyncratic nature of the writings of Iran’s prominent historians. Whether considering history or literature as a discourse, the social processes that led to the formation of new ecosystems—or as Vejdani puts it, a “Republic of Letters”—must be analyzed.^{^[91]} The alternative is to treat literature as a derivative discourse.^{^[92]}

It is worth clarifying my critique of influence as a category of analysis. I do not deny that nineteenth-century Europe was a major source of inspiration for the transmission of a new mode of literary knowledge. In fact, most late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Middle Eastern intellectuals who nationalized their literary curriculum also professionally translated works of European literature and history into Turkish, Arabic, and Persian.^{^[93]} But the rise of literary nationalism was not the inevitable outcome of translation. Instead, it was the result of a non-linear process of network and institution building that allowed certain ideas to take anchor in different Middle Eastern cultural contexts, setting in motion new conceptualizations of language and literature in the age of romantic nationalism. Influence as a rubric is rarely ever defined, woefully overused, and closely linked to colonial forms of knowledge; thus, it is incapable of elucidating the nuances involved in the emergence of literary nationalism in the Middle East.^{^[94]}

By way of conclusion, I will address the ambivalence formulated in this article. Writing in the late nineteenth century, Forughi aimed not only to create a new mode of literary knowledge, but also to cultivate a normative literacy required to understand and respond to it. This literacy was defined by the positivist impulse of modern historiography and was inseparable from the ethos of romantic nationalism, the idea that each nation is in possession of a singular literary tradition that renders it unique and complete.^{^[95]} The intellectual force and clarity of his ideas notwithstanding, Forughi’s work is also marked by its inbetweenness: not a tazkere, but not quite a literary history; printed, but not distributed widely; linked to the courtly discourse of power, but also independent from and vulnerable to it. Therefore, it is important not to erase the text’s ambivalent status in the historical journey that marked the gestation of literary nationalism in Iran. Effortful ambivalence can produce the type of analysis that dispels the false assumption that Iran’s literary becoming was the predestined and inevitable outcome of a pure contact with Europe.

By writing that the most salient marker of a people is their language and literature, Forughi set out to bring Qajar Iran into closer alignment with elite global networks that were constructing and adopting a new set of symbols and myths that resulted into a new imagined community. For Forughi, the production of distinction was an outcome that he was seeking to achieve. For twenty-first-century readers, particularly in the institutional setting of the university, the production of distinction is only a means to better understand how elite Iranians created a national imaginary in the early twentieth century. The growing body of scholarship on different aspects of nationalism has enabled us to read Forughi’s passage with intentional ambivalence, opening a vital space in which the myths that bind us are subject to the process of humanistic inquiry, as opposed to unquestioned devotion. What may emerge as a result of valorizing ambivalence as a conscious part of humanistic inquiry is a new literary map of our worlds, one no longer beholden to the idea of cultural singularity.

^{^[1]}I am grateful to Kevin Schwartz, Alexander Jabbari, and Amir Vafa for their critical comments. My thanks also go to Farzin Vejdani for answering my inquiries about Forughi.

^{^[2]}In Persian: Avval ʿalamat-e tashakhkhos yaʿni asbab-e shakhsiyat-e mellat ke mayeh-ye emtiyaz va joda kardan-e an melal az sayer melal mishavad zaban ast va ruh-e zaban adabiyat mibashad. Mohamad Hosayn Forughi, ʿElm-e badiʿ, compiled and prefaced by Abol Hasan Forughi and Mohamad ʿAli Forughi (n.p: Matbaʿ-e Mirza ʿAli Asghar, 1916–17). Copy available at the National Library and Archives of Iran (Cat. No. 13157). I will later explain why I refer to this work as “literary history.” My analysis here is based on the lithograph available at the National Library and Archives of Iran. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

^{^[3]}For a cogent analysis of Mohamad Hosayn Forughi’s role in the creation of history as a social enterprise, see Farzin Vejdani, Making History in Iran: Education, Nationalism, and Print Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 35–54. Vejdani shows that Forughi had an ambivalent relationship with the Qajar court and was a more independent actor than many other courtiers. Vejdani’s dissertation offers a lengthier biography of Forughi and his father, Mohamad Mahdi Arbab Isfahani. See “Purveyors of the Past: Iranian Historians and Nationalist Historiography, 1900-1941,” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2009). For an examination of the rise of Persian literary history as a genre, including a brief analysis of Forughi’s work, see Manzar Soltani, “Tahlil-e sayr-e tazkere’ha va tarikh-e adabiyat’ha-ye Farsi dar Iran az 1258/1880 (mashrute) ta 1332/1953,” (PhD diss., Tarbiyat Modares University, 1999). Forughi’s Literary History has received passing references in Persian-language periodicals, but it has not been analyzed in a standalone article in English or Persian. I am not able to verify this claim when it comes to scholarship on Persian literature in other European languages.

^{^[4]}See Mahmud Futuhi Rudmaʿnji, Daramadi bar adabiyat-shenasi: Rahnema-ye osul-e amuzesh va parvaresh dar adabiyat-e Farsi (Tehran: Pazhuheshgah-e ʿolum-e ensani va motaleʿat-e farhangi, 2017).

^{^[5]}For a biographical essay on Mohamad Mahdi Arbab Isfahani, see Jalal ol-Din Homaʾi, “Khandan-e Forughi,” Yaghma 66 (AH 1332/AD 1953): 361–65. Most notably, Arbab was the first Iranian to produce a lithographed edition of the Shahname.

^{^[6]}For biographical information on Forughi, please see Manouchehr Kasheff, “FORUGI, MOHAMMAD-HOSAYN Khan Dokaʾ-al-Molk,” Encyclopedia Iranica, 2012, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/forugi-mohammad-hosayn; Baqer ʿAqeli, Zokaʾ ol-Molk Forughi va Shahrivar-e 1320 (Tehran: AH 1367/AD 1988); Edward Granville Browne, The Persian Revolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1910), 404–5.

^{^[7]}That is in addition to “Forughi,” an epithet that was bestowed on him by Naser ol-Din Shah after he composed a qaside on the occasion of tree plantation. Kasheff, “Forugi” Encyclopedia Iranica. He shared this epithet with the distinguished Qajar-era poet ʿAbbas Forughi Bastami (d. 1857). The two Forughis are unrelated.

^{^[8]}For a description of his exact duties at the court, see Kasheff, “Forugi,” Encyclopedia Iranica.

^{^[9]}Vejdani, Making History in Iran, 41; Kasheff, “Forugi,” Encyclopedia Iranica.

^{^[10]}ʿAbbas Eqbal Ashtiyani, “Zokaʾ ol-Molk Forughi,” Adabiyat va zaban’ha 163 (AH 1340/AD 1962): 517–22.

^{^[11]}H. Maʿsumi Hamadani, “Zokaʾ ol-Molk Forughi va ruzname-ye Tarbiyat,” Nashr-e Danesh 4 (AH 1363/AD 1984): 5–19.

^{^[12]}Zokaʾ al-Molk Forughi, “Aqaz-i sukhan,” Tarbiyat, no. 1 (11 Rajab 1314/17 December 1896), 1–3; quote on p. 2; digitized archive of Universität Bonn, Abteilung für Islamwissenschaft und Nahostsprachen (accessed September 29, 2017).

^{^[13]}Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Frontier Fictions: Shaping the Iranian Nation, 1804–1946 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 291.

^{^[14]}Adab is a discourse of humanistic inquiry centered on civility and self-conduct. For more on the term and idea of adabiyat and Tarbiyat’s role in reframing it, see Aria Fani, “Becoming Literature: The Formation of Adabiyat as an Academic Discipline in Iran and Afghanistan (1895–1945)” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2019), chap. 1.

^{^[15]}Another example is Fathʿali Akhundzadeh, who wrote that “literātur consists of any composition whether in prose or poetry,” leaving the French term untranslated in Persian. Maktubat (n.p.: Mard-e Emruz Publications, 1985), 10.

^{^[16]}For instance, the newspaper featured a biographical series of Johannes Gutenberg (d. 1468), the inventor of the movable-type printing press; on Hafez, see Tarbiyat, no. 255 (1902): 14.

^{^[17]}Mana Kia, Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin before Nationalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020).

^{^[18]}Kevin L. Schwartz, “A Transregional Persianate Library: The Production and Circulation of Tadhkiras of Persian Poets in the 18th and 19th Centuries,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, no. 1 (2020): 1–27.

^{^[19]}I have borrowed this phrase from Charles Kingsley, one of the pioneers of English literature, who in 1848 declared that “literature of every nation is its autobiography.” Charles Kingsley, “On English Literature: Introductory Lecture Given at Queen’s College,” in The Works of Charles Kingsley, vol. XX, Literary and General Lectures and Essays (London: Macmillan and Co., 1880), 257.

^{^[20]}Majid Tafrishi, “Madares-e ʿali-ye hoquq va ʿolum-e siyasi dar Iran az ebteda ta taʾsis-e daneshgah-e Tehran,” Ganjineh-ye asnad, no. 1 (1991): 53–81.

^{^[21]}Depending on the discipline in which it is encountered, maʿna can mean different things. To highlight the absence of an English equivalent or close approximation, Alexander Key has proposed the deliberately unfamiliar phrase “mental content.” See Key, Language between God and the Poets: Ma‘na in the Eleventh Century (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018). ʿElm-e bayan broadly refers to a branch of Perso-Arabic rhetoric concerned with eloquence. The term bayan denotes manifestation, lucidity, and clearness. ʿElm-e badiʿ as a branch of rhetoric is concerned with figures of speech and innovation in language.

^{^[22]}Ashtiyani, “Zokaʾ ol-Molk Forughi,” 520. It is important to note that premier schools of higher education in Iran, such as Dar ol-Fonun and the School of Political Science, were not only sites of teaching and learning forʿolum-e jadid, or the new sciences, but also sites for groundbreaking innovation in humanistic inquiry that paved the way for the formation of the humanities decades later.

^{^[23]}Mohamad Hosayn Forughi, Divan (n.p., 1900).

^{^[24]}According to the divan, the biography had been originally intended for inclusion in Name-ye daneshvaran. Manaqeb is a genre focused on the praiseworthy deeds and memorable sayings of saints.

^{^[25]}ʿAbbas Eqbal-Ashtiyani, “Mohamad Hosayn Zokaʾ ol-Molk,” Yaghma 14/11 (AH 1340/AD 1962): 517–22; Qasem Ghani, Yaddashtha -ye doktor Qasem Ghani, ed. S. Ghani, 12 vols. (London: n.p., 1980–84); Habib Yaghmaʾi, “Asar va taʾlifat-e marhum Mohamad Hosayn Forughi,” Yaghma 19/3 (AH 1345/AD 1966): appendix.

^{^[26]}Mojtaba Minovi, “Rejal: Jaryan-shenasi-ye rejal dar tarikh-e moʿaser-e Iran (Zokaʾ ol-Molk Forughi),” Ravesh-shenasi-ye tarikh-e shafahi 41/42 (AH 1375/AD 1996): 81–100.

^{^[27]}Forughi’s Divan includes laudatory prose and poetry—poems mostly in Arabic, prose in Persian—about different Arab leaders of the late Ottoman Empire, including Muhamad ʿAli of Egypt (d. 1848) and Muhamad III as-Sadiq (d. 1882). Forughi noted having met Muhamad III as-Sadiq and given him his biographical dictionary of poets, Tabaqat ol-Shoʿara. See Divan, 121–39. There is a need for a critical biography of Forughi, one that would take into consideration his cultural exchanges and travels.

^{^[28]}Mohamad Hosayn Forughi and Mohammad ʿAli Forughi, Büyük İran Tarihi: Safavi, Afşar, Zend, Kaçar şahları ve kayi-i tarihiyyesi, trans. Ömer Halis Bıyıktay (Istanbul: Matbaʿ-i Askeri, 1926). The Persian original was titled Tarikh-e mokhtasar-e Iran (Tehran: Sherkat-e Matbuʿat, AH 1309/AD 1930–31) or The Abridged History of Iran, originally published in 1905. I am grateful to Farzin Vejdani for bringing this translation to my attention.

^{^[29]}It was in ʿAbbas Eqbal Ashtiyani’s column “Tarikh-e adabi” (“Literary history”), Daneshkade 1 (April 1918): 8. His footnote stated: Tarikh-e adabiyat-e marhum Zokaʾ ol-Molk Forughi. Eqbal Ashtiyani (d. 1956) was among the first in early-twentieth-century Iran to introduce “literature” and “literary history” as conceptual categories to Persian-language readers.

^{^[30]}In a parenthetical note, the Forughi sons wrote, “In full disclosure these biographies, as stated in the preface by the publishers, consisted of disorganized and incomplete rough drafts for teaching at the School of Political Science” (Mohamad Hosayn Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, compiled and prefaced by Abol Hasan Forughi and Mohamad ʿAli Forughi [n.p: Matbaʿ-e Mirza ʿAli Asghar, 1916–17], 242, 310). The contemporary Persian term to describe class notes, used as study guide for exams by students, would be jozve.

^{^[31]}Mohamad Hosayn Forughi, ʿElm-e badiʿ (Tehran: Matba‘ah-i Mirza ‘Ali Asghar, AH 1335/AD 1916).

^{^[32]}The Berkeley copy has been digitized by HathiTrust Digital Library, accessible here: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.b5069901. Encyclopedia Iranica lists the two works separately as ʿElm-e badiʿ (AH 1333/AD 1915) and Tarikh-e adabiyat (AH 1335/AD 1917). Kasheff, “Forugi,” Encyclopedia Iranica.

^{^[33]}This must be a reference to Mirza ʿAli Asghar Amin ol-Soltan, in whose stable Forughi took refuge to escape from the wrath of the shah, who had been led to believe that Forughi had written for the dissident newspaper Qanun (Vejdani, “Purveyors of the Past: Iranian Historians and Nationalist Historiography, 1900–1941,” 149). On Mirza ʿAli Asghar’s biography, see J. Calmard, “Atabak-e Aʿzam, Amin-al-Soltan,” Encyclopedia Iranica, 2011, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/atabak-e-azam.

^{^[34]}Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 1, 3.

^{^[35]}In his entry on Hafez, Forughi mentioned that he was writing a Persian literary history. Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 349.

^{^[36]}Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 1.

^{^[37]}Alexander Jabbari, “The Making of Modernity in Persianate Literary History,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, no. 3 (2016): 418–34; Alexander Jabbari, “Late Persianate Literary Culture: Modernizing Conventions between Persian and Urdu” (PhD diss., University of California, Irvine, 2017); Alexander Jabbari, papers presented at “The World of the Tazkirah: Sources for Study of the Premodern Persianate Lands” conference, University of California, Irvine, 5 February 2016, https://sites.uci.edu/tazkirah.

^{^[38]}Fani, “Becoming Literature,” chap. 1.

^{^[39]}Alexander Jabbari has analyzed the importance of formal conventions such as script in making Persian literature appear modern in the early twentieth century. He writes: “Lithography, which allowed for the inexpensive reproduction of handwritten nastaʿliq script, helped popularize printed books among Iranians, who preferred nastaʿliq over naskh.” See “Late Persianate Literary Culture,” 72.

^{^[40]}Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 3.

^{^[41]}Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 5.

^{^[42]}The Qajar Prince Jalal ol-Din Mirza (d. 1872) was an example of an Iranian nationalist who was ideologically hostile toward Arabic. See Afshin Marashi, Nationalizing Iran Culture, Power, and the State, 1870–1940 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011).

^{^[43]}Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 9.

^{^[44]}Sir William Jones, “An Essay on the Poetry of the Eastern Nations,” in The Collected Works of Sir William Jones, vol. 4 (London: Printed for John Stockdale, Piccadilly, and John Walker, Paternoster-Row, 1807), 544.

^{^[45]}Jones’ claim can be understood within a civilizational—as opposed to national—discourse in which Greek literature was being framed as “Western,” though the term Western civilization did not yet exist in the time of Sir William Jones.

^{^[46]}Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 8.

^{^[47]}Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 8–13. He writes, “zur-e tāzi bar Pārsi becharbid va kalamāt-e loghat-e ʿArab na yek yek balke dah dad va sad sad dākhel mohāverāt va resāʾel mā gasht zirā ke tamām-e estelāhāt-e ʿelmi rā bāyad az ʿArabi farā-girim.”

^{^[48]}Aria Fani, “The Allure of Untranslatability: Shafiʿi-Kadkani and (Not) Translating Persian Poetry,” Iranian Studies (forthcoming).

^{^[49]}Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 3.

^{^[50]}Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 12.

^{^[51]}Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 11.

^{^[52]}Forughi’s entry on Hafez includes a note on Hafeziye, the poet’s resting place, and all the changes that different dynasties made to it throughout history. This note is in the context of enshrining Hafez as part of a pantheon of Iran’s seven most distinguished luminaries. In doing so, Forughi also anticipates the foundation of Anjoman-e asar-e melli or the National Heritage Society, which set out to build mausoleums for Persian poets, transforming their resting place into a site of national memory and pilgrimage. Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 349–50.

^{^[53]}Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 14.

^{^[54]}Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 15. The field of literary studies has begun to pay more critical attention to the importance of balagha in the conceptualization of literariness in non-European and American cultural contexts. The project “Global Literary Theory: Caucasus Literatures Compared” at the University of Birmingham is focused on the role of balagha in Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Georgian literature. The project, which includes extensive bibliographies in those languages, may be accessed here: www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/lcahm/departments/languages/research/projects/globallit/index.aspx.

^{^[55]}Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 15.

^{^[56]}Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 15.

^{^[57]}Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, “Language Reform Movement and Its Language: The Case of Persian,” in The Politics of Language Purism, ed. Björn H. Jernudd and Michael J. Shapiro (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1989), 81–104.

^{^[58]}Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 16.

^{^[59]}Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 334–35. For the ways in which Golestan was read in the Mughal milieu, see Mana Kia, “Adab as Ethics of Literary Form and Social Conduct: Reading the Gulistan in Late Mughal India,” in No Tapping around Philology: A Festschrift in Celebration and Honor of Wheeler McIntosh Thackston Jr.’s 70th Birthday, ed. Alireza Korangy and Daniel J. Sheffield (Wiesbaden, DE: Harrassowitz, 2014), 281–308.

^{^[60]}Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 19.

^{^[61]}Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 19.

^{^[62]}For the use of colloquialisms in nineteenth-century Persian prose, see Afshin Marashi, “Print Culture and Its Publics: A Social History of Bookstores in Tehran, 1900–1950,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 47 (2015): 89–108. See pages 94–95.

^{^[63]}Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 22.

^{^[64]}Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 334–35.

^{^[65]}ʿAli Akbar Dehkhoda, Mohamad Moʿin, and Jaʿfar Shahidi, Loghatnameh (Tehran: Daneshgah-e Tehran, 1949), 6:1545.

^{^[66]}One instance of adabiyat denoting sciences related to adab is Mohamad Amoli’s fourteenth-century Nafaʾes ol-fonun fi ʿAraʾes al-ʿoyun, ed. Abol Hasan Shaʿrani (Tehran: Islamiya, 1957), 16.

^{^[67]}Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 23.

^{^[68]}Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 24.

^{^[69]}Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 24.

^{^[70]}Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 25.

^{^[71]}Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 26.

^{^[72]}Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 26.

^{^[73]}Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 69.

^{^[74]}Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 301.

^{^[75]}Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 70.

^{^[76]}Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 71.

^{^[77]}The full list is Rudaki, Ferdowsi, ʿOnsori, Farrokhi, ʿAsjadi, Manuchehri, Abu Hanife, Eskafi, Masʿud Saʿd Salman, ʿOmar Khayyam, ʿAttar, Saʿdi, and Hafez. The last four poets were not included in Forughi’s class notes, but are included in the lithograph copy compiled by his sons (Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 310). Also, the entry on Rudaki is primarily about Ferdowsi and his Shahname and does not include much information about him (Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 83–127).

^{^[78]}For instance, Badiʿozzaman Foruzanfar wrote Sokhan va Sokhanvaran (Tehran: Sherkat-e sahami-ye entesharat-e kharazmi, 1971), which reads more like a tazkere in the way it has a brief preface followed by biographical sketches of poets and selections of their work. The same scholar also wrote Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Iran: Baʿd az Eslam ta payan-e Taymuriyan (Tehran: Sazman-e chap va entesharat, Vezarat-e farhang va ershad-e eslami, 2004), which is organized not by poets’ biographies but by a dynastic and political history of Iran. Yet both are often classified as works of literary history because they were produced in the same time period.

^{^[79]}Mehmet Fuat Köprülü, “Method in Turkish Literary History,” trans. Gary Leiser, Middle Eastern Literature, no. 1 (2008): 53–84. I am thankful to Selim Kuru for introducing me to Köprülü’s work.

^{^[80]}Sunil Sharma was among the first to place Persian literary history within a multilingual and transnational framework of historiographical production. See “Redrawing the Boundaries of ʿAjam in Early Modern Persian Literary History,” in Iran Facing Others: Identity Boundaries in a Historical Perspective, ed. Abbas Amanant and Farvin Vejdani (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 51–64.

^{^[81]}The following offer one example of each mode of writing used in Forughi’s Literary History: Tarikh-e bayhaqi (tarikh), Tazkera tol-shoʿara (tazkere), Chahar maqale (hagiography), Majmaʿ al-fosaha (tazkere/anthology), al-Hilal (periodical), Tarjoma tol-balaghe (rhetorical treatise), Borhan-e qateʿ (dictionary), Jules Mohl’s introduction to his edition of the Shahname (literary studies), and Azad Bilgrami’s Subhat al-marjan (literary judgment).

^{^[82]}Fani, “Becoming Literature,” chap. 1.

^{^[83]}William L. Hanaway, “Is There a Canon of Persian Poetry?” Edebiyat, no. 1 (1993): 3–12.

^{^[84]}One example is Naser Qoli Sarli’s recent book Dowre-bandi-ye adabi (Tehran: Nashr-e khamush, AH 1397/AD 2018). On page 19, Sarli writes: “the tradition of literary historiography in Iran has still not released itself from the model of tazkere writing which is based on the biography of poets and writers in sections that are self-contained and unrelated to one another. [This model] does not pay much attention to the history of literary change and the trajectory of literature on its terms. In this vein, accounts of literary history by Orientalists are closer to the concept of literary history [than the tradition of literary historiography in Iran].” Sarli’s purity test ignores the fact that the ideas of literary history and literature are both modern inventions. The discursive ties of Persian literary history with the tazkere genre need to be further analyzed, but certainly not in light of anachronistic criteria uncritically set by modern-day understandings of literary history.

^{^[85]}Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman, ed. Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses (Baltimore, ML: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).

^{^[86]}Fani, “Becoming Literature.” For a list of these periodicals, see Edward G. Browne and Mohamad ʿAli Tarbiyat, The Press and Poetry of Modern Persia: Partly Based on the Manuscript Work of Mírzá Muḥammad ʻAlí Khán “Tarbiyat” of Tabríz (Los Angeles: Kalimát Press, 1983); Mohamad Mohit Tabatabaʾi, Tarikh-e tahlili-ye matbuʿat-e Iran (n.p.: Moʾassese-ye entesharat-e besʿat, 1987); Mohamad Sadr-Hashemi, Tarikh-e jaraʾed va majallat-e Iran (Isfahan: Entesharat-e kamal, 1948). Sadr-Hashemi’s four-volume dictionary of Persian-language periodicals, printed in Iran and its diaspora, is a work of encyclopedic scope. It even includes periodicals printed in Afghanistan although the title suggests otherwise.

^{^[87]}I speculate that one of the main reasons Forughi’s Literary History remains unpublished is the fact that the ideas he tried to promote in the nineteenth century have become normative and prevalent in the twenty-first century.

^{^[88]}Mana Kia has convincingly attempted to restore our pre-nation-state imagination by analyzing such concepts as origin, place, and land in eighteenth-century Persian-language sources from West and South Asia. See Persianate Selves.

^{^[89]}Forughi mentioned the idea of Sabk-e Hendi or the Indian Style of Persian poetry, curiously in the context of Hafez’s poetry, a poet whose oeuvre is thought to have predated the rise of the Indian Style. Forughi’s mention of Sabk-e Hendi is also one of the earliest instances, to the best of my knowledge, of this idea. This questions the tendency to single-handedly attribute the idea of sabk to Bahar. Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 348. For a critical examination of Bazgasht as a historiographical category, see Kevin L. Schwartz, Remapping Persian Literary History, 1700–1900 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020).

^{^[90]}The following studies exemplify this paradigm: Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, “Stranger in the City: The Poetics of Sabk-i Hindi,” Annual of Urdu Studies 19 (2004): 1–94; Rajeev Kinra, “Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the Indo-Persian State Secretary,” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2008); Mostafa Vaziri, Iran as Imagined Nation: The Construction of National Identity (New York: Paragon House, 1993). His polemical and dismissive assessment of Bahar notwithstanding, Faruqi inaccurately claims that the term “Sabk-e hendi” was coined by Bahar (although he was right in adding the qualifier “perhaps” to his claim). As Forughi’s Literary History proves, the term “Sabk-e hendi” was in use well before Bahar’s career started. Kinra largely attributes the nationalist ideas produced in early twentieth-century Iran to Bahar and a select group of orientalists. More importantly, both Faruqi and Kinra treat Sabk-e hendi as a bounded and stable category of description when in reality that was not the case in early twentieth-century discussions of stylistic variations in Persian literature. Mostafa Vaziri attributes the rise of literary nationalism in Iran entirely to Edward Browne. The ways in which we have understood the role of literary institutions in ushering in a new conceptualization of Persian language and literature also exhibits the same impulse to overestimate. These institutions were the outcome of decades-long social processes— that included debating and networking—that gave rise to their establishment. One article that critically examines the role of the Academy of Persian Language and Literature is Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak’s “Language Reform Movement and Its Language: The Case of Persian.” For Karimi-Hakkak, the establishment of the Academy was only the culmination—and not the originator—of language reform in its cultural and conceptual sense.

^{^[91]}Vejdani, Making History in Iran, 147.

^{^[92]}The edited volume History of Iranian Literature represents this trend. In it, Kubíčková (a collaborator on Rypka’s book) writes, “The knowledge of European languages and literatures, western education, with its opening of new possibilities in technology, natural sciences, and the social sciences, and the reflection of all this in everyday life, is for Iranian literature a discovery in the light of which truths accepted as immutable for thousands of years collapse and the existing social order appears as what it is – a mediaeval survival.” Jan Rypka, History of Iranian Literature, ed. Karl Jahn (Dordrecht, NL: D. Reidel, 1968), 362.

^{^[93]}Vejdani, “Purveyors of the Past: Iranian Historians and Nationalist Historiography, 1900-1941,” 148.

^{^[94]}See the “Introduction” to Hamid Rezaei Yazdi and Arshavez Mozafari, ed., Persian Literature and Modernity: Production and Reception. Iranian Studies (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2019).

^{^[95]}Forughi’s critical attitude toward tazkere writers, seen in many parts of his Literary History, is a function of this positivist impulse.

Worlding with Images: Nexus between Art and Anthropology

Mazyar Lotfalian Volume 3, Number 3, Fall 2018

Mazyar Lotfalian <mazyar.lotfalian@gmail.com>is a scholar of the anthropology of science, technology, and media. He is engaged in public space policy debates and the role that arts play in urban revitalization.

After the events of 9/11, the Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf released his film, Kandahar. Just in time after the US invasion of Afghanistan, New Yorkers lined up to see this film with great curiosity. Was Kandahar the movie an accurate representation of Afghanistan? Made by an Iranian filmmaker who once was an Islamist revolutionary in Iran and now a political exile, was it a critique of war and the rise of political Islam? Makhmalbaf contended that Afghanistan is a country with no “image.” Afghanistan’s lack of image (in the media, prior to 2001) has been due to a variety of reasons in the country’s recent history: the stricture and censorship by colonial forces such as Soviet troops, or the Taliban’s ban on image production, photography or painting. In addition, at the international level, there had been very little image production of Afghanistan until the defeat of the Taliban by US forces. Kandahar is a type of story that builds on three main elements, an Afghan diaspora in search of her identity, an assassin fleeing from the US, and a war amputee in Afghanistan. The film asks: how can we create an image for a country of no-image in the West?

In Kandahar, Makhmalbaf addresses the question of representing or identifying a place at the outset of 20 years of war and destruction. If Alain Renais’ style in his iconic film, Hiroshima Mon Amour,[1] is “false documentary,” I suggest that Makhmalbaf’s is that of “participant simulation,” where real people enter the world of imaginaries to play out alternative meanings that are arrested on the transnational circuits. Makhmalbaf uses a set of techniques or poetics modes of subversions to re-open dialogue and understanding.

If Renais addresses the effect on the level of mnemonic reconstruction, by problematizing facile ways of representing a traumatic experience, Makhamalbaf addresses the reconstruction of places and people by prostheses (modes of externalities or technologies), retracing places through people and experiences, that are no longer whole, identified, and centered. Furthermore, he uses stereotypical images to generate and open dialogues with a contested past.

Kandahar marks the beginning of a new era of image-production for the Islamicate cultures in the transnational landscape. Along with new modes of production and circulation, there is the question of what the images are trying to address. What technological practices, for example, are deployed? In the context of a new Cold War, one must address the question of the political ends of images.

In the post 9/11 world, the Iranian diaspora has created an ecology of images that call for something like anthropology to understand. The Cold War between the US and Iran, which has pushed the two countries into mediatic politics and inhibited real dialogue, also presents the possibility of communication by other means. “Worlding” with images fills this communicative gap. In this article, I go beyond Orientalized and Self-Orientalized images of Iran and show a much more active agency from artists to create a different world.

Transnational Space of Image-making

The space of image-making is heterogeneous. Various practices intersect with politics and aesthetic forms to give rise to images. Here different media types and technologies interconnect to create the condition of possibility of communicating through images. Here people manipulate images in order to present an alternative reality. In worlding with images, artists often contest a reality that is imposed on them by creating an alternative reality or dimension. Anthropological studies of space, since the late 1980s and into 1990s, have explored space as forms of disjunctive cultural flows, “transnational space” or “transnational circuitries” and “diasporic space,” where globalization of culture and production create its particular logic. Anthropology considers art objects not as bearers of meaning but as mediating social action. To look at Iranian production of visual art in transnational space is to study social action and politicized aesthetics, and by the same token, to study social action is to study visual production.

Specifically, In the 1990s, Iranian cinema became transnational. First, Iranian films circulated at film festivals elsewhere and festivals in Iran brought other work into the country. Then, bit by bit, modes of production ventured beyond the national boundary, moving from the Toronto International Film Festival to Cannes and beyond. For three decades, Iranian cinema went through the thick and thin of reinventing itself and has not stopped. It became a voice for Iran to those in the West who had no firsthand knowledge. It also became space for cultural critique to experiment with cultural codes such as the veil, family relations, and war trauma. At times, what could not be discussed in public spaces could be fictionalized on the screen. Iranian films became a surrogate for a real dialogue between Iran and the rest of the world.

After 2001, Iranian cultural production started to boom, expanding to underground music, painting, photography, and graphic art. These modes of expression built on the success of cinema and in turn have fueled intercultural dialogue. My attempt is to track this transnational expansion: the movement of people across borders, changes in the practices of museums and other institutions, the rise of digital technologies, and to show how all of these merge into a politicized aesthetics. Yet when I began preliminary work on this topic in 2001, the curatorial practice was sparse in the area of the visual culture of the Middle East; I was on the ground as it eventually grew to a large enterprise in New York City, Los Angeles, London, San Francisco, Paris, and Beirut. I have had an ethnographic relationship with many exemplary cases, focusing my discussion on them, yet knowing that I must omit many more.

This study addresses Iranian visual culture in the transnational setting beyond the representational content – whether it is a national cinema, or Islamicate culture, etc. – instead it focuses on what people do with images. In short, image-making tends to create representational values, but it also has a playful value and aesthetic value. The two latter are different in that they are acted upon to generate forms of sociality.

Aesthetics and Politics

Politicized aesthetic and aestheticized politics are symptoms of political shifts. Jacques Rancière connects the uses of political aesthetic to a shift in representational politics that challenges established forms of visibility and invisibility.[2] The contemporary Iranian image production in transnational space is an instance of this political shift, where the aesthetic enters into the political discourse. Iranian image-makers find themselves in the midst of a new Cold War, coping with what I call “meta-political space.” They try to generate expressive modes (poetic) that speak to their experiences of war, displacement, and a desire for new political identity. These expressive modes can become scaffolding for new forms of identity.

Whether structural shifts are in politics or urban structure, Brian Larkin suggests that we should see them not only as architectural and physical, such as roads and bridges, but also in language, accent and emergent cultural patterns. This can also be seen in African films that evoke Diawara’s suggestion about “diasporic aesthetics.”[3] There is also a parallel in “Accented Cinema” that Hamid Naficy suggested a couple of decades ago about a network of diasporic artists who use alternative modes of production to create their work of art.[4]

After Larkin, I interpret “cultural systems” of Iranians and “technologies” together in generating their “cultural ambition.”[5] An obvious example of this cultural ambition, today, can be seen in the Iranian public relation stunt to install artistic rendition of “Cyrus Cylinder” as a giant sculpture in downtown LA in 4th of July, 2017. This is a fusion of aesthetics, materiality, and political publicity that get translated into forms of political dissensus. The reference to an ancient object (the cylinder) is to disrupt and neutralize the portrayal of Iranians as a variation in Muslim signifiers. This neutralization is not necessarily oppositional; Rancière calls it dissensus.[6] “Cultural ambition” is a performative act that functions on this political dissensus.

Objects such as Cyrus Cylinder can have social agency. Alfred Gell points to the social agency of work of art as they mediate social relations, and shows the connection between art and anthropology. Images as much as they are objects mediate social agencies: “I have just provisionally defined the “anthropology of art” as the theoretical study of “social relations in the vicinity of objects mediating social agency” – art object equivalent to persons.[7] I concur with Gell that an art object’s production, circulation, and forms of practices that created it can be taken as a person who embodies experiences and agency to change a course of action. This allows us to understand the social relations that created art, and bestows on it an agency to mediate social relations. I would add that technology also enhances social agency. Technology frames new sets of social relations rather than just facilitating them.

Iranian “cultural ambition” incarnates in various technological realms as well as politics of identity and fiduciary plans. Digital technologies have dominated the transnational landscape, in terms of circulation of art, production, and formation of new practices. Traditional public spaces such as museums and galleries have been active as well. Furthermore, “underground production” should not be understood literally. For the rest of this article, I discuss how new and old practices come together through aesthetics and politics.

Diasporic Imaginaries and Heterology of Resistance

My first ethnographic exposure to this emergent cultural ambition was formed in New York City around 2001. A group of artists, led by Shirin Neshat, used alternative spaces of production to challenge the mainstream visual culture of Muslims. They played with aesthetics of veils, religious piety, and gender segregation among other things to show how stereotypes can be turned around and be used to invite the audience for critical reflection. This coincided with 9/11 and the beginning of the war in Afghanistan. In 2001, I performed in a “Logic of the Birds” performance (based on Manṭiq-uṭ-Ṭayr, an eleventh-century Persian Sufi poem by Farid-u-din Attar) by Neshat and her collaborators. This was a multi-sensory performance of film, sound, and movement. It was also the beginning of her multi-screen installations. During one of the nights when we were rehearsing, an intense conversation broke out among the performers: should we continue? We had little understanding of, but feared, the Islamophobia that was beginning to surface in a completely new way. The twin towers had just been attacked in New York, a tragic and confusing event. The artist’s local community was very much affected, then later emerged stronger. The event took place in The Kitchen. All shows were sold out, an astonishing debut for a new era for the production of aesthetics and politics.

“Logic of the Birds” was the Ur event of this new era, at least among Iranians. The aesthetics and politics of Iran, Islam, and the West formed a new connection after this event. The US had begun playing a more active role towards Iran, which oscillated between rapprochement and war. This approach was tested differently in Afghanistan. On the one hand, its invasion of Afghanistan unleashed a new era of politics in which the US and its allies took an aggressive stance towards Muslim majority nations. On the other hand, the politics of Islamism began to enter the realm of aesthetics. In the US, while Islamophobic sentiment grew, aesthetic forms from Muslim world became an important cultural consideration in institutions of cultural making, such as museums and festivals.

How can we understand the use of religious themes in these emerging artworks? These earlier cases of politicized aesthetics such as “Logic of the Birds” were ignoring the meaning of scripture, as it is evident in the work of Shirin Neshat. This is to build a new sensible world, not to conceal the real meaning of the original texts but to give the audience a chance to imagine new meaning. As Rancière suggests, the aesthetic of ignorance is to overcome the hierarchy of knowledge and to break away from established rules.[8] The aesthetic of ignoring the established meaning of scripture, hijab, and gender roles is about neutralizing the established rules to open alternative discussion.

To what extent are images, made by Iranian diaspora, forms of protests? I found the notion of dissensus in Rancière important to situate the mediation of images. Dissensus is a political process that resists political litigation. Rancière does not conceive it as a challenge to replace that litigation but to neutralize it. I found the images of Iranians in Iran and the diaspora, including underground production, are best understood as mediating a form of dissensus. For example, Shirin Neshat’s earlier works used the veil and Islamic subjectivities to work within the space of dissensus. Earlier commentators classified her work as Orientalist[9] . Her earlier work is best understood as heterology in political art [which]:

…refers to the way in which the meaningful fabric of the sensible is distributed: a spectacle does not fit within the sensible framework defined by a network of meanings, an expression does not find its place in the system of visible coordinates where it appears. The dream of a suitable political work of art is, in fact, the dream of disrupting the relationship between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable without having to use the terms of a message as a vehicle….[10]

Instead of focusing on meaning of the images, dissensus and heterology point to the act and performance of the art that in the process destabilize those meanings. In the revolutionary moment, modes of artistic expressions register a kind of traumatized or ruptured society; artists often use their bodies to express forms of affect. In post-revolutionary times, this gets translated into meta-political space, a kind of second-order politics in Rancière’s sense.

Practice, Technology, and Space

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, there have been two major changes that have implications on cultural practices. These are the rise of Islam as a political and cultural force and the emergence of the Internet technology that form the context for artist practice. The technological context for the Iranian Revolution of 1979 consisted of mass-media, on the one hand, and cassette player technology on the other hand . A technological shift in circulation and communication had occurred, from one-to-many to many-to-many.

This is a paradigm shift in how content flows, from media-specific devices (like radios or televisions or cassette players) to devices that can run multiple technologies (smartphones, computers). In this shift, the simple boundary between top-down (or state) and participatory media breaks down. In the convergence mode, mobile technologies have enabled individuals and groups to interact in a particular configuration of space, time, and place.

These shifts have led to emergent discursive practices in cultural production. In the realm of the visual, as it happened in the Iranian presidential election of 2009, images flowed from mobile technologies to the Internet and onto different Web-enabled technologies such as YouTube, Twitter, Web blogs, and various social networking sites. Raymond Williams argued for emphasizing social practice when discussing media.[11] The notion of practice fills the gap between individual agency and the state; it situates the opposition in a network of active discourses, expertise, and social movements. I argue that the notion of circulation in new media and theories of representation both are insufficient to address the impact of digital culture on protest art and its effect on the public sphere. I propose a theory of practice that accounts for new forms of social practice that is based on a convergence mode of production. My approach here is to expand the notion of practice (media is always already a social activity) to materiality and technology. In convergence culture, attending to both practice and various mobile technologies helps us avoid easy conclusions such as these are democratic technologies and there are technologies of resistance. Technology as a form of “cultural ambition” is present among Iranian diaspora.

Technology as a frame for advancing Iranian “cultural ambition” emphatically emerged during the 2009 election. The online digital environment provides a transnational space not only for the circulation of images but also, and more importantly, for their production. Political cartoonists and graphic artists (most of whom have gone into exile) especially moved to the online environment to both produce their protest art and circulate it through social networking sites such as Facebook. In addition, after Mousavi’s camp promoted the slogan, “media is you,” amateur graphic artists flourished online, producing political posters. For instance, the Facebook group Iranian Graphic Artists became the repository of 2009 protest posters that self-proclaimed graphic artists, not necessarily professional graphic artists, individually or collectively created and circulated online. Mousavi’s Facebook page itself was created by an Iranian who lived in Germany; because the campaign created no Facebook page, this poster became the Facebook voice of the presidential candidate. Many digital posters appeared after the election, signed with authors’ first names or pseudonyms. Internet sites such as United4Iran.org or rahesabaz.net (the Green Path) were set up by individuals, but are now mostly gone from the Internet and untraceable. In all of these examples, circulation and production merge online.

In what follows, I analyze the image-making in the digital environment through one prominent example. Two important icons were the images of Neda Agha Sultan and Sohrab Arabi, protestors who were killed by government forces immediately after the election of 2009. The original pictures showed the two protestors on the street, in action, but later artists used these abstracted images and further worked on them and subjected them to various social and technical practices.

Neda was shot within days after the election. As she was walking with her music teacher and observing a street demonstration, Neda was suddenly shot from the rooftop of a building. She fell to the ground and a medical doctor who happened to be nearby offered assistance, putting his hands on her chest to stop the bleeding. Within seconds Neda died. The first images were in a mobile video of her actual death. Other images quickly followed, and Neda’s image moved from the grainy mobile video to artistic experiments in a variety of media: painting, sculpture, cartoons, a slide show, and collage.[12] Two years later, a Google search of her name yields more than 675,000 results; some of the YouTube images have been viewed more than a million times. Neda’s image appeared in perhaps more online forms than any other political image of the post-2009 protests.

One of the earliest renditions of Neda was made by the caricaturist Bozorgmehr Hosseinpour, who based his image on the raw mobile video. This was arguably the first abstraction of the actual image, the first aestheticized (though representational) image of Neda circulated online. Using the Internet to circulate street art is an emerging way of linking the street to the virtual world; for example, Banksy, the British graffiti artist, has used online photos of his site-based art to expand his audience globally. In Iran, cartoon and caricature artists—such as Mana Neyestani, who mostly worked for newspapers—started using the online digital environment to spread their art prior to 2009.

The place that Neda’s image occupies in the collective imaginary in the West could be compared to that of the Tank Man from Tiananmen Square in June 1989, the young Chinese man who stood in front of a tank to protest the massacre of hundreds of people a couple of days earlier. A few professional news photographers took his picture and smuggled the film out of China. The difference in technological materiality between the two events, Neda’s shooting, and the Tank Man’s protest has been explored by Patterson and Whitehouse.[13] The photographers of the Tank Man had to physically transport their image out of China, and, more importantly, the state could control the access of Chinese viewers to this image. So, while the Tank Man became a symbol of freedom in the West, his image remained out of the mass media and carried no political meaning in China. In contrast, Neda’s case happened in the age of the Internet and YouTube, collaborative work platforms where nonprofessional photographers could transfer, share, manipulate, and appropriate images easily. Thus, Neda Agha Sultan became the iconic image of the post-2009 election both in and outside Iran.

One of the main organizing affective devices for these visual works has been the Karbala paradigm, the martyrdom of Imam Hossein (the third Shiite imam) as a meta event of injustice. At the time of the revolution, activists used the allegory of Karbala to liken the shah to Yazid, who committed horrendous injustices. Allegorical references to the martyrdom of Imam Hossein were central to political aesthetics both historically and especially after the revolution of 1979.[14] After the revolution, though, its uses could no longer be distinctly associated only with religious groups. In the aftermath of the election of 2009, these allegorical references became more contested. There is more diversity in their usage. A few artists created YouTube collages in which they have tried to challenge the secular versus religious division, targeting the state’s exclusive right to use the Karbala paradigm. As Mousavi tried to revive revolutionary mottos from 1979, artists and activists found the online digital environment to be a space of incarnation of aestheticized politics where they could assert that state-sponsored political slogans deviated from their original meanings. Mousavi’s revival of the paradigm, they could say here, was an act of proliferation and subversion of religious symbols.

One of these materials is a video collage by Reza Deghati.[15] Consider the image from the video shown in Figure 5, in which Neda’s face is superimposed on every woman’s face in the frame. This frame is taken from a popular rendition (widely circulated, online and offline) of a late-19th-century depiction of the Imam Hossein’s household in Karbala. The original popular rendition shows only the tents and the women who are facing Zuljinah (the imam’s horse). Zuljinah is bringing the news of the imam’s death to the household; it is the marker of tragedy and injustice. In the original drawing, to the right of Zuljinah, there is no one, just the landscape. In various collage techniques that Deghati applied to the original, he added the face of Neda to the scene. In addition, farther to the right in this image, modern anti-riot forces (a collage of actual images of riot police in Tehran during the 2009 election) are attacking protesters. The video continues, including various images of individuals who were killed during the post-election demonstrations of 2009. Although the images are not animated—they are laid as wallpaper or tableaux in a coffee-house painting style (this genre of painting, usually displayed in public spaces, sets a mood of nostalgia and remembrance of the past)—the YouTube format creates an animation effect with familiar warm colors of red and yellow. The elegiac music that complements the images is a mix of songs that are associated with mourning during the commemoration of the Karbala event.

Media Practices and the Transformation of the Public Sphere

In the aftermath of the election of 2009, particular social practices merged with technology to simulate another revolution in Iran. Images became live: sometimes they became objects with which Iranians in Iran and its diaspora expressed their opposition and imagined a democratic future, and sometimes they became detached from what was happening in the streets of Iran. To outside viewers, such a digital revolution can eclipse what actually happens on the streets. The transnational audience is likely to forget street life in favor of what they see, read, and hear online—to read the online material as mirroring actual experiences. After the Arab Spring, the street social movement in the United States reemphasized the importance of location, as in Occupy Wall Street.

It is important, however, to understand an emerging form of image-making, through digital and internet platforms which frame media practices. Some emergent elements of image-making are worth summarizing here. First, the digital environment encourages collaborative work while relying on a dispersed mode of production (people connecting from many geographical areas). Secondly, the digital processing makes simulation – that is, imitating a particular form or model in a computer environment – possible, which in turn, adds a new dimension to representational art. Thirdly, simulation creates the possibility of what W. J. T. Mitchell calls an image-thing, a concept that speaks to how contemporary media is addressed by its audience.[16] In this concept, viewers (including other artists) have opportunities to interact with the image. I would argue that because these images are produced in a convergent mode of production, their signification is always emergent—that is, they can be religious, secular, and subversive, depending on the context and audience. In this way, a representational analysis is insufficient.

Underground

One of the arenas of artistic activities in Iran, has been referred to as “underground” after the similar space that existed in the Soviet Bloc, before its fall. Underground is often characterized as an illegal product: those that do not pass government censors have to relocate to space outside the purview of the authorities. If the previous Cold War created underground music to create a counter-culture, the new Cold War has produced an “underground” that cannot simply be located physically, nor in terms of its value as a political opposition to the state. Much of the Iranian underground is transnational. A digital archive of Iranian cultural product virtually exists and defies a physical space.

I argue that the cognitive and affective categories of Iranian culture that lead to forms of art are essential to understanding this new Cold War condition. I situate artists’ work not in resistance and oppression but in the everyday experience of ideology. I use the important distinction that Peter Sloterdijk has made between cynical reason and kynical creative process of self-making.[17] Below, I explore the creativity of the underground in Iranian cultural categories such as khalvat and rendi.

The transformation of the publics after the Iranian Revolution of 1979 is essential to understanding the relationship between the public and private realms. One of the earlier linguistic works on affect and space in Iranian culture is conducted by William Beeman; for example, as a socio-linguist, he argues for an emotional frame of Iranian interactional situations.[18] In this frame, the outward (zaher) and inward (baten) world of persons together define the quality of interaction. Baten is recognized as more pure and sincere, and zaher as more superficial.

Architecture provides another spatial metaphor that is rooted in mysticism. In Islamic mysticism, the concept of khalvat (roughly translated as solitude) is central to something closer to the underground in the Iranian cultural context. Khalvat is a spatial concept that signifies a form of withdrawal from the business of public spaces to privacy of the centered self, a meditative act towards truth (haq) by way of secrecy. There are two kinds of khalvat, khalvat of zaher and that of baten.[19] The khalvat of zaher is simply when one removes oneself from the gathering of people. The khalvat of baten is mediation of secrets of life and witnessing truth. In the second form, there is a sense of zen-like existence, where one witnesses the appearances but one’s heart is with a higher meaning of existence than only the appearance of things. This cognitive discourse of knowledge is manifest in architecture as well. Maymaneh Farhat[20] argues that in Islamic architecture, khalvat (that structurally plays between zaher and baten) is the focal point and sanctum towards the multiplicity of existence, which is often achieved in dome design. In this sense, the underground, affectively, is a space of creativity that removes the artists from guise of government regulation to the emancipated space where the artist freely experiments with possible forms and norm.

There is also another relevant term, rendi which chiefly appears in poetry of the 13th century poet Hafez.[21] I argue that rendi is an important term to understand the Iranian underground. Hafez uses rendi as an embodied cognitive practice to break out of the bonds of established rationality. Rendi means “slyness” and a rend person is sly. The characteristic of rendi is associated with detachment from conventional forms of social existence that are associated with zaher. Rendi is linguistically structured in the Persian language from a range of “street smarts” to a form of creative act that ultimately leads to higher moral value.

This existential move is to bring back the Dionysian laughter to a concept of modernity that is caught between secularism and Islamism. As Sloterdijk argues, cynicism is the false consciousness of the Enlightenment. He wants to counter the cynicism of everyday life with a kynicism of laughter.[22] This is an argument for a place for the body and senses in the enlightenment discourses– not self-denial.

Although it is not accurate to situate the underground movement as a function of neoliberal ideology, in forms of “human rights” or “democracy,” and “resistance” to totalitarianism, this movement is threatened to be appropriated by a neo-liberal agenda. The point is that one has to be attentive to both sides: on the one hand, it is an aesthetic move for existential insertion of laughter into everyday life; on the other hand, it can be appropriated by the culture industry as a “freedom movement.”

One of the foremost ethnographic examples of underground production is the phenomenon of Mohsen Namjoo. He is musician and lyricist who has begun his career in literal underground spaces of Iran, later moved to the US to establish himself as a transnational artist. His work embodies what I am theorizing here. Namjoo himself historicizes his work and situates it within the evolution of poetry in Iran. He claims that people first doubted they could do anything with Persian new poetry – i.e., Nima Yushij’s poetry. He suggests that with the publication of Barahani, Chalangi, and Royai who have paved the way for new ways of looking at poetry this mindset started shifting. All-the-sudden there were words that convey feelings (tabayoni) rather than describing the feeling (tozihi).[23]

In a series of haiku-like evocative words, he conveys an affect – or what he calls tabayoni words. The effect is the condition of modernity for Iranians – constantly in translation and transition. The dilemma for him is not to be in denial of this condition but to work through it. In this example, the underground is where this denial which is the condition of post-revolution Iran, is restored.

It is interesting and relevant to Namjoo’s work that a genre of writing emerged in the sixties Iran that was a combination of caricature and text – karikalamature. This genre was associated with Parviz Shahpoor who used to write in a comic magazine, Tofigh. Karikalamature was a kind of satire of social criticism pointing at this bricolage of norms and forms. Namjoo’s songs are very similar to this bricolage. He combines not only traditional poetry and new poetry, but also music, such as jazz, blues, rock, and Persian classical. He suggests that he has broken the connection between the rhythm and lyrics.[24]

Works such as the ones produced by Namjoo vacillates between the cynicism of everyday life and the creative force that karikalamature exemplified. I have pointed to the creative aspect of his work that has universal aspiration, and how it is grounded in Iranian culture as well. It remains to be seen how they will evolve in dialogue with diaspora politics. In addition, the underground as a self-descriptive and existential referential category remains important whereas I would argue against it having an ontological place in opposition to Islam.

Central to practices of art-making are modes of representation and exhibition. Curating, the practice of bringing together artwork (and now most cultural events) can teach us how to trace the source of the money as well as the discursive practices of representing art. To understand curation is to understand the practices for the distribution of sensible, which, according to Rancière, means that what is rendered visible and invisible follow a particular regime of representation.

Curating Iran

Curating cultural productions, that include a range of music, poetry and many visual events, became the hallmark of public spectacle connecting Iran and the West. Cultural diplomacy during the Cold War between Iran and the West began taking shape after September 11, 2001, when George W. Bush promoted the idea that the Iranian diaspora had become a defining force in this dialogue. This was the beginning of a range of institutional shifts that indicated that a thaw between the two countries had begun. Museums became interested in contemporary Iranian art. Galleries in New York, London, and Los Angeles began exhibiting Iranian visual art. Universities turned over a new leaf in favor of renewed Iranian studies. Such programs, wiped out in the 1980s, began to re-emerge with the financial support of the Iranian diaspora.

Part of my argument here is that worlding with images happens in the context of institutional and curatorial practices. Specifically, curating visual culture has become central to a dialogue between Iran and the West. I use curation to refer to a process of cultural production in the late capitalist condition where people bring together individual forms of expression, critical discourse, and politics of aesthetics in a public space. To “cure” and “care” are etymologically similar. The idea is to bring seemingly unrelated objects, texts, and people together to curate/care/create work of art. In the context of Islamic(ate)/Islamic political challenges to western secularism, visual culture is a site where diasporic Iranians articulate emergent identities. Literal sites of this work include venues of Western cities: galleries, museums, university halls, screening rooms, and foundations. Earlier, central themes of the visual material included the veil. Artists post-revolutionary experiences blurred Western interests in Islam and Iran.

This was a crucial moment in curating Iran and Islam and an ambiguous one. I think the early phase in the shift in distribution of the sensible (i.e., politics of aesthetics inclusion and exclusion) in the US was important not because Islamic(ate) signifiers appeared in the contemporary art form, which has happened before, but because a new confluence of experts (art historians, gallery owners, composers, videographers) have come together to collaborate in this new shift in representation from Iran and other Muslim-majority countries. No longer the insistence by museums, galleries, and performance spaces on historical aesthetics of the past, no longer familiar Oriental program music, veils, domes, minarets, turbans, and scimitars; instead we now have contemporary cutting-edge avant-garde experimentalism.

Two major exhibitions in the US, first in 2004 at MOMA NYC, called “Without Boundary,”[25] and a second in 2015 at LACMA (Los Angeles), called “Islamic Art Now,” reinforced Islamic art as a category still operative in the contemporary curatorial imagination, if newly open to an anthropological understanding of revelation as an access to alternative norms for living in the contemporary world. Of course, Islamic art can be modern in the sense that forms of Islamic aesthetic traditions have extended into the modern moment. But can Islamic art be also contemporary in the sense of addressing new problems of a changing world? I have already been using Marshall Hodgson’s term “Islamicate”[26] to distinguish the religious category Islam as a temporal and cultural category, an aesthetics in Rancière’s terms that changes over time, a metapolitical set of discourses.[27] Here I want to also invoke, with modification, those of Shahab Ahmed for upholding Islamicate as an important category that includes revelation.[28] I would modify this to revelability: revealing other norms and forms as sources for the contemporary imagination. Anthropological literature has begun to address this emergent space of art that includes experiences of religious faith[29] or uses Islamic(ate) cultural settings where cultural forms and the politics of the everyday come together to suggest alternative visions.

For example, in the first exhibition of 2004 at MOMA, among the artists included in this exhibition were Shirin Neshat, the Atlas Group/Walid Raad, Shazhia Sikandar, Marjane Satrapi, and Shirana Shahbazi. Their works represented a wide range of style and degrees of more or not-particularly-political signifiers. The funding came from a range of sources, including ethnic foundations and individual donors such as the Persian Cultural Foundation and the Namazee family. Viewers can immediately recognize the kinship among these disparate works, connecting it to contemporary political situations in the Muslim world or the US. And yet the styles of representations are so diverse that one must ask what brought them together under the same roof. The work of, for example, Shirin Neshat or Marjane Satrape are so nuanced and textured that one cannot only attribute them to politics. I argue that they share an emergent aesthetics that combines Islamicate and other forms to create a potent form of critique.

I suggest that curation has become part of a wider assemblage of artistic production, archiving and the underground. By around 2010 on, Iranians both in the diaspora and Iran, have shown interest in archival projects and databases as forms of collective cultural memories. In both the diaspora and Iran, the interest partly stems from the fact that the revolutionary regime has put the pre-1979 history under a meta-narrative of state and thus facilitated the erasure of possible stories. The hauntology of this past, not so distant, is a productive space: oral histories; biographies; memoirs; and now with the advent of the internet, we have raw audio/visual material of the pre-revolution in terms of film, Youtube uploads, pictures, and music.

Conclusion

The research for this project was spread over a long period (10 years) while moving from one city to another for teaching jobs beginning in New York in 2001 and ending in California in 2007. Methodologically, this project relied on participating in the works of art, playing the role of curator, observing others, and conducting many interviews, in the US, Iran, and other parts of the Middle East. The conclusions will result in a book but this article addresses some critical points that will be presented.

This research builds on some of earlier works on visual cultures of Iran. The study of visual culture in relation to Iranian politics came to maturity after the revolution. By adopting semiotic approaches authors such as Fischer and Naficy focus on the socio-cultural meaning of images rather than the literal interpretation of images.[30]

First, the work of Michael M. J. Fischer on the Iranian revolution and semiotics of posters, stamps, and words in the revolution is significant. In addition to this, Fischer’s later work on Iranian cinema uniquely established continuity between cinema and culture. Secondly, the work of Hamid Naficy that began as semiotics of Iranian cinema and media, later focused on the history of Iranian cinema. One major emphasis on his work was the transnational nature of cinema and media, particularly modes of production and circulation. By 1990s he argued that there were new forms of practices arising in transnational settings. This work, here, expands on what Naficy has done, focusing emergent practices (from accented mode to cultural ambition and digital technologies).

Asking questions concerning emergent forms and styles, this research focuses on the role of technology. How does technology frame culture and give rise to new forms? To this end, in the book, I will explore how religious ritual transforms with technology and how autoethnography becomes stylistic preference in the context of digital technology. I argue that technology gets appropriated for advancing cultural ambition.

Since the early 2000s, the work of Iranian visual culture has been significant culture-making practices in transnational settings. These practices have merged with digital technologies to advance a cultural ambition unprecedented in the contemporary history of Iranians. This cultural ambition has also been merged with political spaces. Technologies and different political articulations have framed and challenged artistic productions. Artists, like anthropologists, have to understand their politics of representation.

I have been arguing that aesthetic practices in knowledge production are key in understanding the Middle East. As an anthropologist, I would like to highlight the parallel between the anthropological practice of ethnography and the artistic practices of social, political, and conceptual art. This work situates the artistic production of Iranians in its transnational context where emergent forms of aesthetics and curatorial practices merge with artists’ experience of the diaspora. The result vacillates between the meta-political appropriation of politicized art and creative practices of critical art.

[1]Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, directed by Alain Renais (1959; France: Argos-Films), Film.

This article is based on my forthcoming book, What People Do with Images: Aesthetics, Politics, and Production of Iranian Visual Culture in Transnational Circuits. In Press, Sean Kingston Publishing, UK.

[2]Jacques Rancière, “The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge,” Critical Inquiry 36, no. Autumn (2009): 1-19.

[3]See Manthia Diawara, African Cinema: Politics and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.

[4]See Hamid Naficy, Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, ed. Hamid Naficy (New Jersey: Princeton University Press), 2001.

[5]See Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham: Duke University Press), 2008.

[6]Jacques Rancière, “The Aesthetic Dimension.”

[7]Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 7.

[8]See Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rokhill (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004).

[9]Jaleh Mansoor, “Shirin Neshat,” ArtForum April (2008), 365.

[10]Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 63., 63.Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 63.

[11]Raymond Williams, “From Medium to Social Practices,” in Marxism and Literature (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 153-64.

[12]Reza Deghati, “Neda of Ashura.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv9ehsW6PN8&feature=player_embedded#.

[13]Margaret Jones Patterson and Virginia Whitehouse, “The Power of Tank Man Versus Neda: How New Media Ironic Images Penetrate Censorship and Indifference,” (Unpublished work, 2009).

[14]Mazyar Lotfalian, “Aestheticized Politics, Visual Culture, and Emergent Forms of Digital Practice,”International Journal of Communication 7, (2013): 1371-90.

[15]Reza Deghati, “Neda of Ashura.”

[16]See W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005).

[17]See Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

[18]William O. Beeman, “Emotion and Sincerity in Persian Discourse: Accomplishing the Representation of Inner States,” International Journal of Socio-Linguistics 148 (2001): 31-57.

[19]Khosrow Zafarnavaie, “Khalvat in Islamic Mysticism (Khalvat Dar Erfan E Islami),” Professional Journal of Religion and Mysticism (faslname takhasosi e adian va erfan) 7, no. 25 (2010/1389).

[20]Maymanah Farhat, “Khalvat: Towards Meaning,” The Third Line (2014), <www.thethirdline.com>.

[21]See Daryoosh Ashouri, ed., Mysticism and Rindi in Poetry of Hafiz (Tehran: Markaz, 2002).

[22]Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, xii.

[23]These observations are taken from Mohsen Namjoo’s personal notes from his workshop at Stanford University, Persian Studies, 2009.

[24]Ibid.

[25]See Fereshteh Daftari, Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2006).

[26]Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).

[27] Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics 12.

[28]Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015

[29]Keneth M. George, Picturing Islam: Art and Ethics in a Muslim Lifeworld (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

[30]See Michael M. J. Fischer and Mehdi Abedi, Debating Muslims: Cultural Dialogues in Postmodernity and Tradition (University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); see also Naficy, Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking.

Foucault and Epicureanism of the Iranian Revolution

Yadullah Shahibzadeh Volume 3, Number 2, Summer 2018

Yadullah Shahibzadeh <yad79@hotmail.com> took his Bachelor, Master and PhD from the University of Oslo. He taught and researched at the same university for many years. Shahibzadeh is author of The Iranian Political Language: From the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present (2015), and Islamism and Post-Islamism in Iran: An Intellectual History (2016). He expects to publish his new book, Marxism and Left-Wing Politics in Europe and Iran in 2018.

Introduction

Following Hegel and Marx, many students of the history of modern philosophy have called Immanuel Kant the philosopher of the French Revolution.[1] They claim “it was the French Revolution that activated the latent political dimension of Kant’s philosophy…”[2] Similarly, there are students of modern Iran who argue that the Iranian Revolution activated the latent political dimension of Michel Foucault’s thought, although they may disagree on the content, meaning, and scope of that dimension.[3] Rather than resolving the problem of whether or not the Iranian Revolution activated the latent political dimension of Foucault’s thought, this article examines Foucault’s complex relation to Marx and Marxism as the backdrop of his response to the Iranian Revolution.

Foucault ascribed a grandiose significance to the Iranian Revolution, but he can barely help us understand the nature of this revolution, its politico-intellectual underpinnings or its local and international significance. Rather than the process of subjectivity and moments of subjectivation, Foucault’s concern was subjectification, a process through which individuals are constituted as subjects whose subjectivities are expressed through objectification, exclusion, and marginalization of the other. Rather than revolutionary consciousness or the science of revolution revealing the dominant ideology, Foucault deals with how these seemingly opposite theoretical stances are part of epistemic knowledge and discursive practices of every period. After his first book in 1954,[4] Foucault had never been interested in any systematic investigations of what erroneously or correctly is considered as emancipatory politics. Rather than politics and individual and collective emancipation, he is concerned with power and government of the individual and people. However, he saw the Iranian Revolution as a possible opening toward a full-fledged emancipatory politics against the existing government of the individual and people locally and globally. Foucault was perhaps the last great European intellectual who was convinced of the existence of an us constituted by a common history toward a common destiny. He described the Iranian Revolution as an uprising against “the weight of the entire world,” and as “perhaps the first great resurrection against a planetary system, the most modern form of revolt.”[5] This description implies the universality of an us in need of revolutionary leadership to transform it into a global we.[6] Whereas Foucault was “discovering” this Revolution as an opening toward a “great transformation,” European Marxists, as masters of universal solidarity, failed to employ the simplest method of theoretical universalization to locate the Revolution within our common humanity and destiny as the concrete transformation of the us into the we in this event.

In the early 1950s, without knowing Marx very well, Foucault became a Marxist.[7] A decade later, while Louis Althusser, his former teacher, was promoting Marx’s science of history as an epistemological break with ideology,[8] Foucault was arguing that Marxism was a product of the nineteenth century epistemological arrangement.[9] Again, more than a decade later, Foucault saw the Iranian Revolution as verification of his intellectual convergence with Marx’s thought. My contention in this article is that while this universal us had always been present in Foucault’s work, it was in the 1970s that he realized that his us was the same as Marx’s us. But what Marx did and Foucault had never done, the inference of a revolutionary we from us. Unlike Althusser’s return to Marx through a rigorous reading of his work, Foucault’s return to Marx is very peculiar. He returns to the sources that shaped the universal us in Marx, i.e., Epicurus and the Epicurean tradition of thought. Foucault claims, in his later studies, that the rule know yourself (gnothi seauton) is subordinated to the principle of care of the self (epimeleia heautou).[10] This claim is an endorsement of Marx’s reading of Epicurus, who in turn dealt with the dilemma that Democritus had experienced, “The knowledge that he considers true is without content, the knowledge that gives him content is without truth.”[11]

In the process of reconciliation with the Epicurean Marx, Foucault understood the Iranian revolution within the planetary system in the same way that Epicurus understood atoms within the straight line, as both elements and principles, with the capacity for deviation and attraction expressing their individuality and universality.[12] First, I discuss Foucault’s fascination with Marxism. Second, I examine his apparent departure from Marxism. Finally, with emphasis on 1978-1982 lectures, I examine his return to Marxism.

Alienation and de-Alienation

Until the late early 1940s, rather than an intellectual factor Marxism remained a political force in France. Describing the late 1940s’ French philosophical mode, Althusser claims, “Our philosophers had Descartes and self-evidence on their side, the simple act of the lucid mind, and ‘the great tradition of French Philosophy.’”[13] While not taking Hegelian philosophy seriously, this “great philosophical tradition” saw Marxism as a perverted version of Hegelianism. In the early 1950s, thanks to a new generation of French thinkers interested in Hegel, phenomenology and Marx, the French intellectual scene was entirely changed. For the young students and teachers of philosophy such as Foucault, Francoise Lyotard, and Louise Althusser, the question of truth had become “a question of history.”[14] Lyotard would argue “truth is defined in its becoming, as the revision, correction, and surpassing of itself- a dialectical operation which always takes place within the living present (lebendige Gegenwart).”[15] To liberate the subject from the transcendental presuppositions that excluded historical time and concrete social reality, these young French intellectuals challenged the Cartesian thinking subject through the Hegelian-phenomenological conception of truth. In their academic and public life, these young students and teachers had the backing of a new generation of French interpretative authorities including Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Hyppolite,[16] Maurice Merleau Ponty, George Canguilhem[17] and Georges Bataille. These interpretative authorities had received their philosophical training from Alexander Kojeve’s Lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind (1936-1939). The interest in Hegel’s phenomenology was followed by a passion for Marx’s conception of history, the dialectics of master and slave, the concept of labor, alienation, self and class-consciousness and class-struggle. For Sartre, Descartes-Locke and Kant-Hegel represented two significant moments of modern philosophy. But Marx was the culmination of this philosophy. Sartre wrote: “These three philosophies become, each in its turn, the humus of every particular thought and the horizon of all culture; there is no going beyond them so long as man has not gone beyond the historical moment which they express.”[18] Through Hegel, the new generation of French thinkers began to see the great philosophical value of Marx’s conceptualization of history, labor, and alienation. They learned from Hegel and Marx that the subject was more than “an abstract epistemological placeholder” that attained true knowledge, but a “human being rooted in the social, political and historical world.”[19] With Hegel came Heidegger who argued that the possibility of knowledge depends on the subject that produces its object.[20] Heidegger conceptualization of existence as “an activity of endless transcendence” implies the reliance of man’s essence on his existence,[21] which calls into question the essential self or :and constitutes the subject within his socio-historical world. Whereas the subject’s self-understanding depends on his understanding of his socio-historical world, his actions are not predetermined by this world. The subject’s capacity to interpret his inherited situation enables him to project a new future, liberated from the limits of his present situation. Thus, man’s interpretation becomes the guardian angel of his freedom enabling him to decide the courses of his actions toward his own and his society’s freedom. Reflecting on his youth, Foucault claims that the intellectual horizon of his generation as students was limited by “Marxism, phenomenology, and existentialism.”[22] This limited intellectual horizon, shaped by the existentialist Marxism, inspires the young Foucault to develop an existential-psychology as a theoretical base for the advancement of psychiatry. He hopes that his existential-psychology plays the same role in psychiatry, that physiology has played in medicine: “Or, la psychologie n’a jamais pu offrir à la psychiatrie ce que la physiologie a donné à la medicine.”[23]

Toward an Existential-Psychology

In his Maladie mentale et personalité (1954), Foucault studies the conditions under which an illness is defined as mental illness and examines types of relationship which can be established between mental and organic pathology.[24] He argues that there is no similarity between illness of the body and mental illness, because whereas the body can be decomposed into its elements before its spirit constitutes a whole.[25] Hubert Dreyfus writes in his comments on Foucault’s Mental Illness and Psychology: “In Foucault’s accounts, social contradiction causes alienation, alienations causes mental defenses, defenses cause brain malfunction, and brain malfunction causes abnormal behaviour.”[26] The book Dreyfus is commenting on is a complete revision of Maladie mentale et personalité, published in 1962. However, according to the main thesis of the original book which is maintained in the revised version, awareness of social contradictions will lead to eradication of social alienation, and thus the disappearance of psychological alienation and mental illness. But since society refuses to relate mental illness to its own contradictions, it turns on the mentally ill individuals, alienates them from their fellow human beings, deprives them of their social, legal, and human rights, and then subjects them to the power of the doctors.[27] For Foucault, the behavior of the mentally ill is both the expression of his social existence and a protest against the condition of his existence, which reduces him to a mere thing, an object of observation and analysis. In this way, mental illness is a defense mechanism against social contradictions producing social and psychological alienation.[28] This means, the social alienation of the mentally ill is not a result of his or her illness, but the source of his mental illness. Thus, the healing of the mentally ill depends on whether his or her social environment is free from contradictions or not.[29] The task of psychology is uncovering of the existing interconnections between the state of man’s alienation and his socio-historical reality as the context within which he develops his pathological behavior toward mental illness. Foucault aspires to make this existential psychology a true science and a theory of emancipation from mental alienation.[30] He challenges psychoanalysis’ construction of mental illness as the expression of the mentally ill’s failure to deal with his reality. He argues that psychoanalysis’ conceptualization of mental illness prevents the mentally ill to make any efforts to understand his illness as a phenomenon within the existing social practices and historical conditions. Psychoanalysis deprives the mentally ill to discover that his illness is an expression of the contradictions within the real condition of or his or her existence while presenting this reality as normal and instructs the mentally ill to come to terms with the existing environment.[31] What psychoanalysis forgets, according to Foucault is that it is the alienated reality which hides itself in the consciousness of the mentally ill.[32] Foucault explains schizophrenia, for instance, as a result of man’s experience of a self that has inaccurate consciousness of the social life and its contradictions, of the economic exploitation and class-struggles. Schizophrenia is a consequence of a world which forces man to produce new technologies but does not allow him to see these products as the result of his own activities. Otherwise man could exert his control over the way these technologies function.[33] “Le monde contemporain rend possible la schizophrénie non [pas] parce que ses techniques le rendent inhumain et abstrait; mais parce que l’homme fait de ses techniques, un tel usage que l’homme lui-même ne peut plus s’y reconnâitre.”[34] Since Foucault considers his psychology of alienation to be a continuation of Marx’s theory of alienation, he situates mental illness between the experience of the contradictions of the existing reality and the consciousness of these contradictions.

Alienation as a Construct

In 1961, seven years after the publication of Maladie mentale et personnalité, Foucault publishes his groundbreaking book Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l âge classique. In 1962, he publishes Maladie mentale et psychologie, a revision of Maladie mentale et personnalité, which includes a summary of Folie et déraison. Whereas in the original version, hospitalization of the mentally ill is regarded as the expression of his or her legal alienation, deprivation of all freedom and rights that a normal person enjoys, in the revised version, the institutionalization of madness becomes the “scientific field” or the condition of possibility of psychiatric practice. Foucault seeks, in the original version, a better understanding of the relationship between the state of social alienation and mental illness to defend the rights of those confined in the hospitals. But in the revised version, he investigates how psychiatric practices used confinement and hospitalization as a mean of silencing the voice of the mad to establish psychiatry as a scientific discourse on mental illness. Whereas in the first version, Foucault tries to constitute psychology as the theoretical base of psychiatry to recognize mental illness as the expression of a society alienated from itself, in the second version he tries to remind psychology and psychiatry of their historicity. In 1963, Foucault does a similar historiography on somatic medicine.[35]

The second version of Maladie Mentale indicates Foucault’s change of focus from the social and psychological condition of the emancipation of the mentally ill to mapping the institutional process preventing his integration into the society and reducing him to the object of knowledge of the doctor. Foucault’s departure from Marxism rests on this move from looking at mental illness as a reality whose precise and objective characteristics guarantee the truth of its conceptualization, to looking at it as a construct whose “scientific conceptualization” is constituted and validated by particular social and discursive practices. By focusing on the historicity of the concept of mental illness and challenging the claim of its universal validity, Foucault distances himself from Marxism. He argues that, because of their failure to participate in the process of “production, circulation, or accumulation of wealth,” since the middle of 17^th century, the mad, the poor, the unemployed, the sick and the libertine were considered a threat to society. As a result, they were subject to exclusion and confinement.[36] After the French Revolution, the mad individual was separated from this dangerous group and subjected to moral rehabilitation to develop his dependency, his sense of guilt, his gratitude and humbleness supposed to be the characteristics of the normal feeling.[37] For Foucault, whereas psychology claims to have shown the truth of madness, the history of madness reveals the truth of psychology.[38] Despite Foucault’s attempt to go beyond the phenomenological and Marxist interpretation of madness and their conceptualization of mental illness, he remains faithful to what Paul Ricoeur called the hermeneutics of suspicion as uncovering of a state of reality that covers up the truth of that reality.[39] But Foucault’s remarks, in 1966, on Marxism, made him an enemy of Marxism.

At the deepest level of Western knowledge, Marxism introduced no real discontinuity it found its place without difficulty as a full, quite comfortable and, goodness knows, satisfying form for a time (its own), within an epistemological arrangement that welcomed it gladly ( since it was this arrangement that was in fact making room for it) and that it, in return, had no intention of disturbing and, above all no power to modify, even one jot, since it rested entirely upon it.[40]

Sartre wrote in response to Foucault: “Marxism is the target, it is a matter of establishing a new ideology, the final dam that the bourgeoisie can erect against Marx.”[41] Foucault’s response to Sartre, came as a comment on his La Critique de la raison dialectique, as “the magnificent effort of a nineteenth-century man to conceive of the twentieth century. In this sense, Sartre is the last Hegelian, and even, I would say the last Marxist.”[42] He claims in an interview after the publication of The Order of Things, that unlike Sartre’s generation that “had a passion for life, politics and existence” his generation has a passion for concepts or systems.[43] Through his historical investigations Foucault becomes aware of the fact that “Before any human existence, there would already be a discursive knowledge, a system that we will rediscover.”[44] However, Althusser who shared Foucault’s passion for concepts and systems remains Marxist and assumes that Foucault mistakes “humanist Marxism” or Hegelian Marxism for real or scientific Marxism.[45] An Archeology of the Human Sciences as the subtitle The Order of Things is meant to remind us that beneath the old city, that may be the object of our history, there might be an archaic city ready to be discovered, the disappearance of which was the condition of the appearance of that old city.[46] Thus, the knowledge of the archeological is the condition of possibility of the knowledge of the historical. Foucault’s archeological approach to human sciences is an investigation of the epistemological field or the epistemic criteria which determine what counts as knowledge and what does not in every period. A new episteme is never a continuation and development of the previous episteme toward the truth, but a discontinuation of and a rupture with the previous episteme or epistemological field. Foucault defines episteme as “the total set of relations that unites, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures…”[47] The archeological level of knowledge or episteme is the condition of possibility of conceptual knowledge. For instance, the episteme of the renaissance determines that the world is occupied by signs in need of interpretation. To know in this episteme means to interpret.[48] Hence, the episteme of the classical age the seventeenth and eighteenth century) affirms dependence of knowledge on the table as a means of representation and comparison through decomposition of a body into simple elements and its reconstruction into more complex combinations.[49] According to this episteme, God created the world and expected man to discover its order through representation, which he obeys and uses language to represent things according to their allocated places in the world. The episteme of the classical age was about the discovery of the laws of nature as the foundation of knowledge; it was about the intersection of “nature and human nature.” Classical episteme did not generate a “science of man,” because human beings were absent from the table of representation.[50]

Man had to wait for the modern episteme to design language as a theory of signification to constitute him as both the subject and object of his knowledge, namely the condition of possibility of the Hegelian and Marx’s discourses. Whereas in the pre-modern epistemes man saw himself as an object among others objects, his new position as the subject and object of his knowledge in the modern episteme enables man to discover his capacity to change his place vis-à-vis others worldly objects. In the modern episteme, language indicates man’s finitude and limitation to grasp the truth of the world. This limitation leads man to both accept the world as it is and discover its hidden possibilities, through a search for the origin and analysis of his mode of being. “It is in the analysis of that mode of being,” which man becomes the philosophical foundation of modern knowledge.[51] As a representative of the modern episteme, Kant clarifies not only man’s finitude with regard to space and time, but also his “empirico-transcendental” character whose search for origin creates the condition of possibility of history.[52] It is within the discourse on the “empirico-transcendental” character of man that Hegelian phenomenology examines the transformation of in itself into for itself, and Marx examines man’s transformation from his current alienation to his future de-alienation.[53] Foucault argues that Marx’s concept of history based on his conceptualization of labor as “the real production of real life,”[54] does not question the concept of man upon which the idealist philosophy rests.[55] By man, Foucault means the subject and object of knowledge, the supposed maker of his own history. This “man” is, for Foucault, a result of the modern arrangement of knowledge, “an invention of recent dates” which may disappear when a new arrangement of knowledge appears.[56]

Contrary to Althusser’s distinction between science and ideology, Foucault argues that science has no privilege over ideology because it is the modern episteme, which determines what counts as ideology or science. Surprisingly, Althusser describes The Order of Things as a contribution to a general theory of ideology.[57] This remark receives a response from Foucault in the early 1970s when he distinguishes between the Marxism of “Althusser and his brave comrades” from the Marxism of the French Communist Party.[58] Foucault’s academic work in the 1970s which includes The Order of Discourse (1970), Discipline and Punishment (1975) and The History of Sexuality Part One (1976), could be understood as reconciliatory moves toward the anti-bureaucratic Marxism of Althusser and Sartre despite the long distance between their theoretical presuppositions.

III. The Iranian Revolution and the Universal Transformation

As the Iranian Revolution was reaching its peak, at the end of 1978, Foucault gave a long interview to Duccio Trombadori, a journalist from L’ Unità, the Italian Communist Party’s newspaper. When he is reminded that he had been absent from the political debates in the 1960s, Foucault claims his absence from those debates does not make him less experienced politically. He refers to the student movement in Tunisia in the late 1960s as a valuable political lesson and the main source of his political experience, which taught him, that every political movement should be situated within a global perspective and dealt with in relation to what is happening in other parts of the world.[59] The Tunisian students, and young men and women who exposed themselves to serious dangers of being murdered, tortured or imprisoned for the simplest political acts such as writing or distributing a leaflet, or advocating student strikes in the late 1960s, were the most valuable political experience of Foucault’s life.[60] These young Tunisian students who were mostly Marxist taught him that a different Marxism is possible, a Marxism that was totally different from the French academic Marxism of the early 1960s and the Marxism of the socialist countries which he had witnessed while staying in Poland. He argues that the Marxism of these young Tunisians was astonishingly radical, violent, intense, spectacular and real because Marxism was for them not only a means of analyzing reality but “a kind of moral force, an existential act that left one stupefied.”[61] Foucault argues that the dissimilarity between the domesticated Western and East-European Marxism and the Tunisian way of being Marxist convinced him to take an interest in the political debate again. “It wasn’t May of ’68 in France that changed me; it was March of ’68, in a third-world country.”[62]

The interview with Trombadori is taking place after Foucault’s first visit to Iran and after the publication of his most debated article regarding the Iranian revolution, What are the Iranians dreaming about?[63] A few months earlier, in September 1978, he describes the revolutionary movement in Iran the embodiment of the “political will” and the expression of the “political spirituality” of the Iranian people. However, Foucault does not mention Iran in the interview. Trombadori’s reason for the interview is that after “a decade of an almost uninterrupted enthusiasm for Marxist “language,” many people are circulating Foucault’s vocabulary on “micro-physics of power,”[64] which challenges the emancipatory claim of the Marxist discourse.[65] Foucault claims in the interview that he “had only produced a history of power.”[66] As mentioned above, Foucault’s new interests in politics is a result of his Tunisian experience. By experience he means a changing and transformative determinant. He also refers to the processes of writing his books as transformative experiences because he does not write his books to communicate what he already knows but to enter into the experience of learning something new which can change him radically.[67] In addition to his Tunisian experience which taught him the existential and political way of being Marxist, Foucault claims in another interview with Farès Sassine, conducted in 1979, that his reading of Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope coincided with the Iranian Revolution. Bloch discusses the religious origin of the idea of revolution, at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of Renaissance, because in his view the religious dissidents of the time had faith in the possibility of this-worldly revolution. So, when he hears about the uprising in the name of religion in Iran, he tries to establish a connection between what was happening in Iran and Bloch’s conceptualization of the revolutionary hope. Foucault learns from the connection between the Iranian Revolution and its religious eschatology that without a revolutionary hope there will never be a political revolution.[68] In The Principle of Hope, Bloch argues that Marxism does not distinguish between the cold stream of analysis of the historical and socio-economic condition and its ideology, from the warm stream of the revolutionary expectations.[69] For Bloch, the cold stream of Marxism as the science of struggle forms a unity with its liberating warm stream which connects “the debased, enslaved, abandoned, belittled human being” to the proletariat toward their common emancipation. Bloch sees the Marxist construction of communism an expression of the warm stream of Marxism because the struggle for emancipation needed a home for the de-alienated humans of the future. Bloch equates hope with work, whereas work was the means of man’s transformation from animal into human, hope is the means of his second transformation from his alienated condition into his de-alienated condition in the future.[70]

Foucault’s fascination with Bloch’s conceptualization of hope, his Tunisian experience, his historiography of discursive practices and power, and finally, his approach toward the Iranian revolution were not contradictory but consistent with what he had perused throughout the 1970s, that is, the reconciliation of the realm of theory with the realm of practice. In the same vein, Foucault changed his focus from the discourse on micro-physics of power to a discourse on governmentality and governing and who is qualified to govern. Foucault claims that the Tunisian experience made a decisive political impact on him. Now, we can raise the question: can we expect any transformative impact from his experience of the Iranian revolution on him? In my view, Foucault approached the Iranian Revolution as a spectator rather than actor and with only one thing in mind: verification of the revolutionary hope of the Iranian people toward emancipation. Foucault’s final work, both published books and lectures are about the redefinition of the concept of political power renamed as the art and forms of governmentality, which I consider as significant supplements to the Marxist theory of state and ideology and analysis of a new form of imperialist structure. Since the early 1990s or earlier, this imperialist governmentality has enchanted former “leftists,” “radical,” and “revolutionaries” to the extent they gladly serve the states within the domain of this imperialist governmentality against all other states and people resisting this governmentality. Foucault’s investigation of how the subject of governing has been constituted is a supplement to Lenin’s conceptualization of political power in The State and Revolution and Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatuses.

Foucault and the Concept of Governmentality

In the middle of his lectures on Territory, Security, Population (1977-1978), Foucault claims that he preferred “a history of governmentality” as the course’s title.[71] In these lectures, Foucault challenges misconception of the state whether as a “cold monster confronting us,” or as a

means reproducing the relations of production. Foucault argues that these misconceptions have made the state to look like more important than it truly is because the danger is not the state intrusion into society (étatisation) but the art of governmentalization. This art of governmentalization of the state, discovered in the eighteenth century, saved the state from various crisis and revolutions and as a result, is “the only real space of political struggle and contestation.”[72] The idea of the government of the state as the political form of the state by the prince began at the same time as man’s government of himself, his soul, his conducts and his children.[73] The concern of government is men’s relations to wealth, resources, territory, fertility, customs, habits, and “ways of acting and thinking.”[74] In the 1978-1979 lectures which coincide with the Iranian Revolution, Foucault describes the art of government as what the state should be, its raison d’État. The art of government is an arrangement of the things which recognize the state as “a discontinuous reality” whose chance for survival depends on its strength, wealth and capability of protecting itself against external and internal threats that may put its existence in danger.[75] These are the main character of the state before the emergence of the neo-liberal art of government.

For Foucault, the neo-liberal art of government is not a disciplinary society, mass consumption society dominated by commodities, spectacle, and simulacra, but a home to “dynamic of competition” and “enterprise society.”[76] It replaces human labor by human capital and devalues Marx’s analysis of value without contesting it. Marx argued that the logic of capitalism transforms the concrete human labor into abstract labor power “measured by time, put on the market and paid by wages.” As the concrete human labor is cut off from its human reality to fit into the logic of capital, labor is reduced into “the effects of value produced.”[77] Thus, instead of challenging Marx’s critique of the logic of capitalism neo-liberal art of government argues that labor is only “a factor of production” which can be activated by investment.[78] It argues that Marx mistook “[t]he abstraction of labor, which actually only appears through the variable of time” as the product of real capitalism, whereas this abstraction of labor was only a construct put forward by Marx’s contemporary economic theory.[79] With the epistemological transformation from the classical economy into the neo-liberal economy, the “domain of objects, the general field of reference of economic analysis” such as mechanisms of production and exchange are transformed into “the study and analysis of the way in which scarce means are allocated to competing ends,…”[80] This transformation changes the worker possessing labor power into “an active economic subject” whose wage is not the price of his or her labor power, but an income resulted from the investment of his human capital.[81] As the neo-liberal practice transforms human labor into human capital and every worker into a capitalist, the art of neo-liberal governmentality is focused on the question: who can or should govern?

To discuss this question, Foucault revisits the notion of the care of the self (epimelia heautou), a subject elaborated extensively by Epicurus and Epicureans who believed that “Every man should take care of his soul day and night and throughout his life.”[82] Foucault argues that modem philosophy “neglected the notion of care of the self in its reconstruction of its own history.” Despite the fact that there has been a similar amount of texts and documents on “the care of the self” as there is on “know yourself,” modern philosophy gave a privileged position to know yourself (gnothi seautou).[83] As a result of this neglect, philosophy has become a “form of thought that asks what it is that enables the subject to have access to the truth” and determines “the conditions and limits of the subject’s access to the truth.” The neglect of the care of the self has led modern philosophy to ignore spirituality as “the search, practice, and experience through which the subject carries out the necessary transformations on himself in order to have access to the truth.” According to Foucault, spirituality is the price the subject pays for “access to the truth” because spirituality says that the subject can have “access to the truth” provided that he experiences transformation from himself into “other than himself.” This means, without spirituality, the subject does not have the right to the truth. Whereas the presence of truth indicates that the subject has transformed himself into something new, modern philosophy and science speak of truth only in terms of the “activity of knowing.”[84] For Foucault, the privileged position of Marxism and psychoanalysis lies in their effort to remind the subject that the truth which can liberate him is related to his being. Because of their preoccupation with “the subject’s preparation for access to the truth” and his “spirituality as a condition of access to the truth,” Marxism and psychoanalysis are more concerned with the care of the self than other branches of knowledge.[85] The relationship between the truth and transformation of the subject is reflected in the relationship between the cathartic use of “know yourself “and the political use of “know yourself” on the one hand, and “the political use and the cathartic use of care of the self,” on the other hand.[86] The interaction and interconnection of know yourself and care of the self, constitute “tekhne tou biou (the art of living).” As in the Christian asceticism and monasticism of the third and fourth centuries, the art of living is about how one transforms his own self to have access to the truth.[87]

Foucault argues that Descartes and Kant saw the relation of the subject’s spiritual transformation to the truth as a paradox indicating “what we cannot know is precisely the structure itself of the knowing subject” and “the condition of spirituality for access to the truth.”[88] Foucault relates this same function of spirituality to Demetrius of Phalerum’s conceptualization of effective-relevant and ineffective-irrelevant modes of knowledge. Whereas the former mode of knowledge can be transformed into prescriptions, the latter mode of knowledge lacks the quality of being transformed into prescriptions. Whereas, the relevant-effective knowledge can change “the subject’s mode of being,” the irrelevant-ineffective knowledge cannot make any impacts on “the subject’s mode of being.”[89] We find the same function of spirituality in Epicurus’s concept of phusiologia which stands in opposition to paideia as a mode of knowledge which produces only eloquence and suits people who look for their personal interests. Paideia does not reflect on logos or reason but performs with phones or sounds. Epicurus calls the performer of this mode of knowledge phones ergastikous who instead of making reason the object of his reflection, reflects on phones to impress the masses, and engages in “conceited chatter with others.” Against phones ergastikous, Epicurus says, “You must practice philosophy for yourself and not for Greece,” because philosophy is “the genuine practice of the self. “[90] Contrary to paideia, phusiologia prepares (paraskeuei) the subject for “whatever circumstance” he encounters in life. As Epicurus defines it, phusiologia prepares the subject to resist “every impulse and temptation” which comes from the external world because it enables him “to remain stable” and overcome all disturbances which prevent him to attain his aim.[91] The impact of phusiologia on the subject is his “boldness and courage” to resist “beliefs that others wish to impose on him, but also against life’s dangers and the authority of those who want to lay down the law.”[92]

The final impact of phusiologia is autarkeia making the individual subject autarkeis, a subject that depends only on himself, needs nothing other than himself, and is content with himself since he is the source of all possibilities, experiences, pleasures, and delights. The aim of Epicureanism is absolute mastery over the self. This mastery cannot be achieved through savoir but through connaissance of nature, insofar as this knowledge leads the subject to overcome fears from nature and gods, and transforms himself into “a free subject” capable of finding within himself permanent and impeccable serenity and joy.[93] A physiologist is not the one who merely knows nature, but the one who uses his knowledge of nature to transform himself into a free subject and uses parrhesia as the technic of mediating true and relevant knowledge to his disciple. Epicurus says that “I would rather speak in oracles about the things useful to all men” than give “my approval to popular opinion.”[94] Thus, the subject who tries to use his true knowledge is different from the one whose search for being understood, recognized and approved by everyone, leads him to succumb to the dominant opinion. A truth-seeker who is looking for acceptance by everyone cannot change his mode of being.[95] Epicureans consider “the most speculative knowledge of physics” as effective and relevant knowledge because it is “part of the subject’s practice on himself” and because it transforms the subject.[96] Here, Foucault refers to the interrelationship between the principle of care of the self, and know yourself.[97] In response to the Greek tradition of education, “Socrates advised Alcibiades to take advantage of his youth to take care of himself: “At fifty it will be too late.”[98] Epicurus’ response to this is “It is never too early or too late to take care of one’s soul. We should therefore practice philosophy when we are young and when we are old.”[99] Philosophy is for Epicurus, the practice of the care of the soul throughout one’s life.[100] Now, the question is: who can or does have the time to practice philosophy or care of the soul or the self? In order to have time to care of themselves, the Spartans “entrusted the cultivation of their lands to slaves instead of keeping this activity for themselves” because “[t]aking care of oneself is a privilege; it is the symbol of social superiority, setting one apart from those who have to concern themselves with…a trade in order to live. The advantage conferred by wealth, status, and birth is expressed in the fact that one can take care of one self.”[101]

That is why, “taking care of the self (epimeleisthai heauto),” should not be understood as an advice that teachers gave to their disciples to refrain from making mistakes in their private life. They were educating them about a range of “complex and regular activities” which govern the people in their domain.[102]

In December 1978, in the climax of the Iranian revolution, Foucault writes to L’ Unità, the Italian Communist Party newspaper, to inform them about his willingness to discuss with Italian Communist intellectuals the situation of “the capitalist and socialist states,” “the success of the revolutionary movements in the world,” the “strategy of the parties of Western Europe” toward the “development everywhere of the apparatuses of repression and institutions of national security” and finally “the difficulty in connecting local struggles with the general stakes being waged” internationally.[103] The subjects proposed by Foucault for discussion give a clear picture of how he sees the world while the Iranian Revolution is unfolding. For Foucault, the world is in a deep economic crisis, and the crisis is nearing its decisive moment because the conflict between “rich” and “poor” nations, industrialized and underdeveloped countries have coincided with the emergence of “a crisis of government” in the developed nations. The letter to L’ Unità indicates that Foucault is convinced that the world needs a decisive response from the revolutionary forces. Of all the crises, Foucault emphasizes the crisis of government because government as “the set of institutions and practices by which people are ‘led’, from administration to education” is in a deep crisis. Foucault sees crisis everywhere, in the capitalist as well as in the socialist world because the “techniques, and methods” that have guaranteed the “government” of people, thus far, do not function anymore and people cannot tolerate “the way they are led.”[104] For Foucault, this crisis of government resembles “the period following the Middle Ages,” which resulted in the “entire reorganization of the government of people,” the emergence of “the great nation-states,” “authoritarian monarchies” and “the administration of territories.” Foucault argues that this reorganization generated the new “way of managing and governing people, both in their individual relations and in their social and political one” and considers the situation in 1978-1979 to be “not very far from a similar period,” because all old relationships are called into question, and the people who are in the position of governing are unable to see or manage and govern the ongoing changes. He observes, “We are, I believe, at the beginning of a huge crisis of a wide-ranging reevaluation of the problem of government.”[105] Because of his understanding of the crisis of government in the late 1970s, Foucault sees the Iranian Revolution as a historic opportunity for the revolutionary left to put forward its own strategy, but the left missed the opportunity. Foucault’s argument is similar to Lenin’s remark that “it is not enough for revolution that the lower classes should not want to live in the old way. It is also necessary that the upper classes should be unable to rule and govern in the old way.”[106] Foucault’s understanding of the revolutionary situation in Iran can be compared to Rosa Luxemburg’s understanding of the 1905 Russian Revolution and her efforts to convince the German workers to consider this Revolution “as their own affair, …. as a chapter of their own social and political history.”[107] Luxemburg tried to convey the same message to the German workers in 1918. But as the German workers were preoccupied with their own “distorted expression of the socialist class struggle,” she failed in both cases. For Luxemburg, the failure of the 1917 Russian Revolution to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat as the advancement of the bourgeois democracy, was caused partly by the German and international proletariat’s infidelity to the “proletarian revolution in an isolated land, exhausted by world war, strangled by imperialism…”[108] The German and international proletariat failed to see their common destiny through the Russian Revolution.

The common destiny is what Moses Mendelssohn and Immanuel Kant are preoccupied with when they are asked to reflect on the question What is Enlightenment? Because they recognize, according to Foucault, “that they belong to the same history.”[109] To Foucault, Kant’s reflection on the question of Enlightenment indicates that the critical ontology of modernity is not a theory, a doctrine, a body of knowledge through which we can understand our current condition, but “an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life” which includes in its critique of our social being both a “historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us” and “experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.”[110] This philosophical ethos is a critical attitude which not only analyzes and discovers the limits of our being but also makes it possible to go beyond those limits.[111] According to Foucault, this critical attitude is not transcendental, but “genealogical in its design and archaeological in its method.” The aim of the archaeological method is not the identification of “the universal structures of all knowledge or of all possible moral action” but revealing the instances of discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do. The genealogical aspect of this critical attitude will help us to reveal the contingencies that have generated our present condition and mode of being, and the possibilities of going beyond our present “being, doing, or thinking.”[112] This is the meaning of transformation, whether general or specific. Foucault expected the Iranian Revolution to be the beginning of a general transformation.

Conclusion

As the Iranian Revolution “failed” to fulfill his expectation regarding the general transformation of the global system and the crisis of government, Foucault returns to “the specific transformations” of “our ways of being and thinking,” of our “relations to authority, relations between the sexes” and of our conception of “insanity and illness.” He describes these transformations as a result of the interaction between the “historical analysis and the practical attitude,” which in his view are much preferable than the totalitarian politics which in the name of “a new man” have justified “the worst political systems” of the 20^th century.[113] A few years earlier, Foucault was advising his audience to relinquish the issue of the intrusion of the state into civil society, because the real danger lies in the art of governmentalization of the state. But Foucault’s list of the transformations signifies the “advantages” of this art of governmentalizations over other political systems which he deems totalitarian. Since the early 1990s, the lists of such transformations have rationalized the preoccupation of almost all scholars of modern history and politics of the Middle East with two seemingly interconnected questions: who is “for or against the Enlightenment” in the Middle East and, who should govern in this region, seculars (left versus liberal or neo-liberal) or Islamists (radical versus moderate)? Foucault referred to the former question as an “intellectual blackmail,” a result of “the historical and moral confusionism that mixes the theme of humanism with the question of the Enlightenment.”[114] Whereas the first question has brought about historical and moral confusionism, the second question has generated various types of political opportunism. The combination of the historical and moral confusionism and political opportunism have constituted the main principle of an ideology which in the name of democracy and human rights has rationalized the most perverted form of governmentalization of the states and societies of the Middle East. This ideology does not allow commentators and analysts of modern Iran to examine or interpret the Iranian Revolution as a story or event whose importance does not lie in its closing act or its immediate results but “in its opening up new horizons for the future.” According to Arendt, for Kant, the most significant aspect of the French Revolution was “the hope it contained for future generations.”[115] The scholarly works on the Iranian Revolution have rarely been interested in touching this particular aspect of the event. Foucault had never tried to write a systematic history or analysis of any political events of historical significance. For him, politics was not an object of systematic analysis but transformative acts of human collectivities against forms of domination shaping our mode of being, seeing, thinking and doing, which he had been analyzing throughout his academic life. Without knowing anything about the details of the universal structure and Epicurean aspects of the Iranian Revolution expressed in its ideology, inspired and cultivated by Marxism, Foucault tried to universalize the Revolution in order to become its spectator-actor. Retrospectively, he realizes that he had never been involved in the act of the Revolution and seems content with his spectator-actor involvement with a community of spectator-actors in France which in his view has brought about specific democratic changes.[116] Since its outbreak, the Iranian Revolution has been a local and global a transformative event, a universal point of reference which cannot be reduced to the actions and views of a selected number of its actors or spectators. Similar to the French and Russian Revolutions, the Iranian Revolution indicated a rupture with the existing discursive and political order, but it did not fit in Foucault’s research program.

[1]Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 36.

[2]Fehér Ferenc, ed., The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity (Los Angeles: University of California Press 1990), 204.

[3]Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

[4]Michel Foucault, Maladie Mentale et Personalité, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954).

[5]Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (London: Faber&Faber, 1992), 287.

[6]Eribon, Michel Foucault, 261-262.

[7]Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx: Conversation with Duccio Trombadori (New York: Semiotext(e) 1991), 51.

[8]Louis Althusser, Pour Marx (Paris: La Découverte, 2005), 82-83.

[9]Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1994).

[10]Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France 1981-82

(New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2005), 11-12.

[11]Karl Marx, The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature (PhD. diss.), Part I, section on Difficulties Concerning the Identity of the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, https://archive.org/stream/Marx_Karl.

[12]Marx, The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, Part II, Ch. I, section on The Declination of the Atom from the Straight Line.

[13]Louise Althusser, The Spectre of Hegel (London: Verso, 1997), 173.

[14]Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy (London: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 63.

[15]Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, 64.

[16]Hyppolite’s Studies on Hegel and Marx exerted immense influence on Foucault and he inherited Hyppolite’s Chair of The History of Philosophical Thought at the Collège de France.

[17]Canguilhem, who had mentored the most celebrated French thinkers of 20^th century such as Althusser and Derrida, remained Foucault’s soul defender when he was under attack in the late 1960s.

[18]T.Rockmore, Heidegger and The French Philosophy ( New York: Routledge, 1995), 23.

[19]Rockmore, Heidegger and The French Philosophy, 48.

[20]Rockmore, Heidegger and The French Philosophy, 50.

[21]R.Kerney, Modern Movements in European Philosophy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 31.

[22]Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel (London: Continuum, 2000), 176.

[23]Foucault, Maladie mentale et personalité, 13.

[24]Foucault, Maladie mentale et personalité, 1.

[25]Foucault, Maladie mentale et personalité, 12.

[26]Michel Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology (California: University of California Press 1987), XVI.

[27]Foucault, Maladie mentale et personalité, 15-16.

[28]Foucault, Maladie mentale et personalité, 101-104.

[29]Foucault, Maladie mentale et personalité, 108.

[30]Foucault, Maladie mentale et personalité, 110.

[31]Foucault, Maladie mentale et personalité, 106-109.

[32]Foucault, Maladie mentale et personalité, 110.

[33]Foucault, Maladie mentale et personalité, 86.

[34]Foucault, Maladie mentale et personalité, 89.

[35]Michel Foucault, Naissance de la Clinique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963).

[36]Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology, 67-68.

[37]Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology, 73.

[38]Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology, 74.

[39]Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 27.

[40]Foucault, The Order of Things, 261-262.

[41]Eribon, Foucault, 164.

[42]Eribon, Foucault, 161.

[43]Eribon, Foucault, 161.

[44]Eribon, Foucault, 161.

[45]Louis Althusser, For Marx, 28.

[46]Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, 111.

[47]Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge (London Routledge 1995), 191.

[48]Foucault, The Order of Things, 26-31.

[49]Foucault, The Order of Things, 74-75.

[50]Foucault, The Order of Things, 311.

[51]Foucault, The Order of Things, 335.

[52]Foucault, The Order of Things, 330-331.

[53]Foucault, The Order of Things, 327.

[54]Karl Marx, Early Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994), 138.

[55]Foucault, The Order of Things, 322.

[56]Foucault, The Order of Things, 387.

[57]Macey, The Lives of Foucault, 197.

[58]Macey, The Lives of Foucault, 171.

[59]Foucault, Remarks on Marx, 133.

[60]Foucault, Remarks on Marx, 134.

[61]Foucault, Remarks on Marx, 135.

[62]Foucault, Remarks on Marx, 136.

[63]Michel Foucault, À quoi rêvent les Iraniens?” Le Nouvel Observateur, no. 727, 16- 22 octobre 1978, 48- 49.

[64]Foucault, Remarks on Marx, 15.

[65]Foucault, Remarks on Marx, 16.

[66]Foucault, Remarks on Marx, 17.

[67]Foucault, Remarks on Marx, 27.

[68]Michel Foucault, Entretien Inédit avec Michel Foucault 1979, Assassines, Le Blog de Farès Sassine,

http://fares-sassine.blogspot.no/2014/08/entretien-inedit-avec-michel-foucault.html.

[69]Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol.1 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1996), 209.

[70]Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 210.

[71]Michel Foucault, Territory, Security, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-78 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009),144.

[72]Foucault, Territory, Security, Population, 144.

[73]Foucault, Territory, Security, Population, 127.

[74]Foucault, Territory, Security, Population, 127.

[75]Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 4-5.

[76]Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 146-147.

[77]Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 221.

[78]Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 220.

[79]Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 221.

[80]Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 221.

[81]Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 223.

[82]Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981-82

(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 9.

[83]Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 12.

[84]Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 15.

[85]Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 29.

[86]Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 174.

[87]Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 178.

[88]Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 190.

[89]Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 237.

[90]Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 239.

[91]Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 240.

[92]Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 240.

[93]Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 241.

[94]Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 242.

[95]Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 242.

[96]Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 243.

[97]Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 491.

[98]Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 494.

[99]Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 492.

[100]Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 493.

[101]Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 493.

[102]Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 493.

[103]Foucault, Remarks on Marx, 175.

[104]Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 176.

[105]Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 177.

[106]V. I. Lenin, Collected Work, vol. 19 (Moscow: Progress Publisher, 1977), 222.

[107]Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution & The Mass Strike (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008), 165.

[108]Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, Ch. 8, “Democracy and Dictatorship.”

[109]Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 33.

[110]Foucault, The Foucault Reader, 50.

[111]Foucault, The Foucault Reader, 50.

[112]Foucault, The Foucault Reader, 46.

[113]Foucault, The Foucault Reader, 46-47.

[114]Foucault, The Foucault Reader, 45.

[115]Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 56.

[116]Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. See 58-63 for Kant’s conception of actor and spectator.

Queering the Iranian Nation: Be Like Others and Resistance to Heteronormative Nationalism

Amy Tahani-Bidmeshki Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2018

Dedicated to the life-affirming work of Maryam Khatoon Molkara (1950-2012)

Introduction

Tanaz Eshaghian’s 2008 documentary Be Like Others simultaneously messages entrenched stereotypes about the Islamic Republic of Iran, but also moves beyond a cursory exploration about the life of trans Iranians living in the present-day country. The film offers the viewer opportunities for reflection about the role of gender, sexuality, whiteness,[1] and belonging in nation-building broadly, and in the post-1979 landscape of Iran, in particular. Eshaghian’s work as a filmmaker follows a longer legacy of Iranian artists pushing back against hegemonic-governmental control of the narrative of Iranianness, extending to the late-Qajar era through contemporary times. The film closely follows the stories of several trans Iranians, particularly Male-to-Female trans persons who are undergoing the Iranian regime’s four- to six-month process of medical and psychological therapies ending with partially subsidized sex reassignment surgery (SRS). Throughout the film, the viewer catches glimpses of contemporary Tehran with flashes of urban life with the usual hustle and bustle of cars, skyscrapers, and more specifically, chador-clad women. Huge murals of Ayatollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Khamenei amidst revolutionary heroes and the Iran-Iraq war martyrs puncture the narratives of the trans persons, signaling cues about expected gender roles for men.[2] Amidst these images of the pious, brave, and pure, Be Like Others focuses on the personal spaces and intimate relations of the trans protagonists, which works in counterpoint to the stereotypical images of masculinity throughout the film as these trans individuals were born male.

Despite the focus on the experiences of the trans persons, Iran’s gender binary system reverberates in nearly every conversation, landscape, and visual representation in the film, especially as regulated by the Islamic Republic. In multiple scenes, which I explore in depth below, the discussions center on making the trans person fit into the mold of heteronormativity as dictated by the Islamic state.[3] Thus, Be Like Others complicates post-1979’s project of nation-building through a narrative of heternormativity by countering this representation of citizen-subjects as gender and sexuality conforming thereby “disrupt[ing] the political order by binding audiences to stories that are open not only to interpretation, but also to political and cultural negotiations.”[4] Eshaghian’s Be Like Others showcases the Islamic Republic’s homophobia and transphobia by allowing the viewer to know the trans subjects through their own descriptions of their gender and sexuality identities, and how the state and cultural customs disrupt their connections to their hometowns, families, and desires to pursue education, jobs, and living spaces. Thus, gender and sexuality stand out as part of a network of self-identity and livelihood and not a singular issue contrary to the government’s approach towards these complexities. Benedict Anderson’s concepts of nostalgia, romance, and a sense of belonging to a particular region and cultural heritage of the world in Imagined Communities (1991), is a particularly useful point of entry to discuss the project of nation-building in Iran starting in the late 18th-century with a peak in the mid to late 19th-century. The nation as an “imagined community” is “an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.”[5] The Iranian regime’s acceptance of post-SRS trans Iranians as citizen-subjects presupposes the “imagined community” of heteronormative Iran.

With the “imagined community” in the backdrop, that is, a collective of heteronormative, patriarchal and religious nationalists looming over the citizens, the film focuses on the stories of Iranians seeking SRS. The film emphasizes that they are in this process because they want to remain in Iran and must undergo the procedure of transformation in order to live with equal rights and access to the resources of the nation, dignity, and safety. However, as these narratives unfold throughout the film, the viewer realizes that the trans Iranians participate in “passing” as female because in order to its members to remain Iranian citizens, the nation requires that they ascribe to the gender binary system. In this regard, I will elaborate on the intertwining legacies of the role of gender and sexuality starting in the late-Qajar and Pahlavi regimes, which then established networks of medical-legal-religious governmental interventions in the lives of its subjects, so that Iran could stake a nationalist claim on the world stage in line with European modern nation-state building.[6] Afsaneh Najmabadi reminds us that, “Iranian state-formation is an on-going, fractious, and volatile process, which—more than three decades after the 1979 revolution—continues to shape and reshape, fracture and refracture, order and reorder what we name ‘the state.’”[7]

This effort to modernize Iran through gender and sexuality transformations mimicked a Victorian European nationalist turn in the early 1800s as Iranian and European interactions gained strength. While not solely a consequence of colonialism and European influences in Iran, gender and sexuality became increasingly entangled in the narrative of nation-building complicated by the white gaze. This “white mimicry” as M. Shadee Malaklou points out, reveals that “Iranians who narrate their same-sex or trans sexualities in [documentaries] seek recognition from the gatekeepers of empire not for their non-normative genders and sexualities but for their modern human types.”[8] While I agree with Malaklou’s assessment, Be Like Others, simultaneously seeks this recognition and challenges the controlling mechanisms of the Iranian government because audiences in some parts of the world can readily access this counter-narrative with relative ease,[9] which in turn thwarts the Islamic regime’s efforts to control and disseminate a heteronormative and modernist national identity. To complicate the Iranian government’s turn to heteronormativity as requisite to citizen-belonging and nation-building since the era of the Qajars, the concept of time and the evolution of gender and sexuality under the guise of Enlightenment Humanism are at stake. Malaklou states,

Social and political constructions of time induced by Enlightenment Humanism are chronological and continuous; they privilege persons with access to the social, political, and economic capital to move forward (literally and metaphorically) towards an identity or type that is whole, polished, and perfected. If, as Foucault describes it, ‘to be modern’ is ‘not to accept oneself as one is in the flux of the passing moments,’ but rather ‘to take onself as object of a complex and difficult elaboration’—to ‘[occupy] an imagined place at the new end of a sequence’—then to be atavistic or uncivilized, as Iranians are caricatured in literatures of empire, is to be chronopolitically queer.[10]

The European gaze upon Iranians as primitive and archaic, which renders them as out of time and sync with progress, modernity, and therefore, the ability to be fully human terrified the Iranians of the nineteenth century and set the stage for the urgency to find acceptance from and approval into whiteness. This anxiety of being subservient to Europe’s dominance becomes paramount to the government’s notions of nation-building. Ultimately, the gaze from Europe and America overpowers and heavily influences the discourse of nation-building in Iran.

Encountering Gender and Sexuality in Qajar Iran

In Women with Mustaches, Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity, historian Afsaneh Najmabadi outlines the transformation of gender and sexuality in the nineteenth-century as notions of masculinity and femininity merged with notions of “an imagined political community,”[11] which led to the rise of nationalism and statehood in the early twentieth century.[12] Najmabadi details how in the last half of the nineteenth-century as Iranians and the British in particular became more interactive, Iranians repressed male and female homosociality in recognition of ascribing to European notions of nationhood.[13] Soon, there developed a narrative about “vatan”[14] (homeland) as female in need of masculine protection and adoration, which harmed the once accepted bonds of homoeroticism and deemed homosociality as a dangerous passageway to homosexuality. One overt attempt to modernize Qajar Iran was to discourage men from effeminate behaviors and desires and pulling women away from their homosocial bonds and into the public sphere. In practice, this meant men chose female companions in the public and private spheres. Najmabadi says, “Centered on a female beloved, [the concept of love of vatan] indicates the depth of transformations already taking place in Iranian erotic sensibilities. The overpowering love of a female vatan mediated between homeland and heterosexuality, between nation and gender.”[15] This project of modernization through clear practices of gender and sexuality combined with efforts of nation-building required the removal of so-called backward practices and behaviors likened to homosexuality and developed the current gender binary system of male-female in Iran. Nineteenth-century Iranians’ attention to implementing a gender binary, and therefore establishing heteronormativity as the status quo, developed as a result of their knowing that another gaze was present from Europe. Najmabadi reflects, “Iranian men interacting with Europeans in Iran or abroad became highly sensitized to the idea that their desire was now under European scrutiny.”[16] Therefore, the project of modernization from the time of the Qajars until today, as revealed in Be Like Others, remains to a large extent, a replication of homophobia and transphobia in imitation of the structures in Europe and now, America, with the hope of recognition as “coeval…with Western, presumably white nations and persons.”[17] Malaklou signals the work of anthropologist Johannes Fabian who states, “Coevalness aims at recognizing contemporality as the condition for truly dialectical confrontation between persons as well as societies […] [We] are not the same societies at different stages of development, but different societies facing each other at the same time.”[18] In other words, Iranians wrestle with the cultures, history, religions, and politics of their own development as part of an emerging nation-state as well as Europe’s notions of racial superiority. As Najmabadi notes, even “the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) is […] oblivious to the irony of its shared ground with secular modernists and with Orientalizing Europeans [whose] concept of homosexuality—sexual deviancy, inhiraf-i jinsi—[is] more akin to late nineteenth-century western European concepts than to anything from Islam’s own classical heritage.”[19]

Despite the Qajars’ efforts to display visual political representations of the Western gender binary system such as that of the male lion wielding a sword in front of a female sun rising in the backdrop of the homeland, Qajar artists continued to represent androgynous couples. Najmabadi observes, “notions of beauty were largely undifferentiated by gender in early Qajar Iran (1785-1925); that is, beautiful men and women were depicted with very similar facial and bodily features.”[20] A popular emblem of gender and sexuality, the male-female amorous couple, particularly in paintings, Najmabadi suggests, allowed for homoerotic passing because we see visual depictions of men and women in androgynous modes: with facial hair as a marker of masculinity, painters depicted women with facial hair and men without facial hair. Najmabadi calls this passing “masquerading”[21] as both Qajar men and women look the same in these paintings except for certain clothing adornments that indicate male and female distinctions. This latent homoerotic desire often depicted in Qajar paintings and other visual modes such as on tapestries, pottery, and playing cards moves beyond a simple “dyad” between painter and subject and becomes more of a triangular mode of desire between painter, subject, and viewer.[22] Thus, several agents participate in complex desire: the painter; the subject depicted in a romantic embrace with someone of the opposite sex; and the viewer who can desire the male or female subject in the artwork.

In this sense, the case of the Qajars reveals that Iranian artists and their visual representations of gender and sexuality posed a contentious challenge to the project of nation-building among the emerging citizen-subjects and the government; people’s desires and self-expressions or representations of gender, sexuality, and desire broadly did not readily align with the emerging heteronormative impulse of the government. This Qajar-dilemma remained palpable during the Pahlavi era and continues to haunt current efforts of the Islamic regime’s nation-building as evident in Be Like Others, which again reveals the complications and nuances of gender and sexuality, not only in family and social life, but especially as trans Iranians navigate the governmental dictums for streamlining desire and citizenship. While the current vein of Islamophobia and Iranophobia in the United States and Europe paints the current Iranian regime as particularly brutish, corrupt, and homophobic, a closer turn to the Pahlavi regime and the mid-twentieth century intellectual ideologues of the Islamic Revolution reveals a troubling truth: the Islamic Republic adopted earlier iterations of homophobia.

Pahlavi Iran

A closer examination of the cultural and political transformations regarding sexuality and gender reveal that in the past two centuries, Iranian (including Islamic Iran) modernity required a significant repression of public displays of homoeroticism in order to support a sense of belonging to 18^th– and 19^th-century social science notions of human becoming.[23] While the Qajars configured representations of the nation to depict heteronormative gender and sexuality such as in emblems for public, namely European, consumption (i.e., national flag), the social and cultural transformations occurred sporadically and with resistance from the citizens. This tension continued to exist in the Pahlavi era with the indoctrination of the Iranian polity with Western notions of manhood and womanhood as well as governmental enforcement of gender roles and expectations.[24] Reza Shah’s particular allegiance to whiteness in the guise of Iranians as Aryans[25] transferred to his son, Mohammad Reza Shah. During the Pahlavi era, the conflation of race with gender undergirded the project of modernity.[26] Even those who politically opposed the Pahlavi regime, such as Jalal Al-e Ahmad, condoned gender conformity. Al-e Ahmad ridicules Iranian men in particular who ascribe to “Weststruckness” by describing them as “effete [qerti]. He is effeminate [zan-sefat; efféminé]. He attends to his grooming a great deal. He spends much of his time sprucing himself up. Sometimes he even plucks his eyelashes.”[27] The important connection here between the governmental push to modernize through streamlining gender and sexuality with the critiques against empire by Iranian intellectuals is a shared practice of homophobia. While Al-e Ahmad, Shariati, and other Islamic intellectuals turned their backs to Iranian subservience to European and American imperial projects, they nonetheless echoed the need for a gender-binary system and heteronormativity.

Islamic Republic of Iran

Although SRS became a legal-medical health topic under the Pahlavi regime, intersex people were the main recipients of the procedure.[28] While LGBTQ citizens were a part of Pahlavi society, there were no particular edicts and codes of conduct for LGBTQ individuals other than typical homophobic sentiments, which forced most LGBTQ peoples into oppression or exile. There were no governmental procedures, programs, or discourses concerning the well-being of LGBTQ persons and specifically, no protocols for people identifying as trans who sought SRS, even though according to Najmabadi, the first documented case of SRS occurred in 1930 for an inter-sex individual.[29] However, as early as 1964, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini discusses the acceptable practice of SRS within Islamic paradigms as part of his two-volume series of fatwas known as Tahrir al-Wasilah. In a section called “The Changing of Sex,” Khomeini states, “The prima facie [al-zahir] view is contrary to prohibiting the changing, by operation, of a man’s sex to that of a woman or vice versa […] [sex change] is not obligatory if the person is truly of one sex, and changing his/her sex to the opposite sex is possible.”[30] Even before the establishment of the Islamic Republic, the Supreme Leader envisioned a plan to address the trans community in Iranian society. In the Pahlavi era, Khomeini’s fatwa carried little more than light conversations among clerics and for several years after the Islamic revolution, the fatwa remained untenanted. The policy changes under the Islamic regime were the result of the staunch activism of Maryam Khatun (formerly Fereydoun) Molkara, a Male to Female (MtF) transgendered activist in Iran, who risked her life and relentlessly wrote to urge Khomeini to enact the fatwa. Molkara even met with the Grand Ayatollah, enduring violent attacks, to encourage him to uphold his earlier musings.[31] Because of her tireless efforts, SRS became governmental policy in 1985 backed by various modes of support for the post-SRS trans community.

This seemingly pro-trans position stands in stark contrast to a regime known for its various human rights violations. Presently, Iran is the only Muslim-majority nation in the world whose government partially subsidizes SRS for its citizens. However, a closer look at the four- to six-month process of undergoing religious-medical-legal interventions towards SRS makes clear that the fatwa for sex reassignment aims to abolish homosexuality by ensuring a particular form of trans identity. The film shows that the trans persons only go through with the process because it is required by law; not because their identities and desires necessarily fall in line with government expectations. Near the end of the film, two trans women share that they would have refused SRS if “we were not in Iran”[32] and if they had known that the process would sever their family ties.[33] To further complicate matters, the government sponsors trans-activists and organizations, partially subsidizes SRS, and issues new birth certificates and identification materials to post-operative trans citizens, which supports an overt rejection of homosexuality. In a sense, the nation gives many incentives to LGBTQ Iranians as far as citizen-subject recognition and access to state-mandated resources if they follow through with SRS procedures, and for the nation, despite the gender and sexuality identifications of the Iranian individuals, SRS eradicates homosexuality in a bureaucratic sense. In a cruel sense, the trans community in Iran finds one of its most stable, albeit treacherously dubious, allies in the government and not in the social, cultural, and familial experiences of living in Iran. The simultaneous rejection by society-family and acceptance by orthodox nation-state strengthens the Islamic Republic’s reputation as a guardian of its citizens.

As Minoo Moallem posits, “the emergence of a gendered Islamic subject in the context of the Iranian revolution of 1979 and its aftermath provided a surface on which cultural and religious nationalists were able to write their own meanings of the Islamic nation.”[34] Following Foucault’s notion of “the art of governmentality,”[35] the Iranian government uses various modes including technology such as visual media to display its self-narrative,[36] but Be Like Others functions as counterpoint to the project of heteronormativity by depicting the tensions between state-sanctioned gender and sexuality identities and human desires.

In “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” John D’Emilio traces how with the rise of industrialization and capitalism, the heteronormative family became less necessary, thus allowing a new category for homosexual men and women to emerge, who could also contribute to the economic system without relying on interdependent family units. As D’Emilio observes, “only when individuals began to make their living through wage labor, instead of as parts of an interdependent family unit, was it possible for homosexual desire to coalesce into a personal identity [and therefore a political entity].”[37] Thus inadvertently, capitalism was imperative in the earliest stages of LGBTQ liberation, but also simultaneously a terrorizing force to repress and punish sexual variation and desire. While D’Emilio examines these shifts in European and American contexts, his observations apply to the Iranian case as well. Just as European values, beliefs, and practices shifted with the new economic system of capitalism, Iranian society underwent transformations that upheld industrialization, capitalism, and the project of modernity. However, in the Iranian landscape, European colonialism impacted the rise of heteronormativity.

Be Like Others

In Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran, Najmabadi highlights that Iranian LGBTQ concerns took the forefront during the early years of this new century. Namely, between 2003-2008, a substantial focus from the national and international communities as well as a plethora of visual productions emerged during these years highlighting the experiences of Iranian trans communities. Perhaps this interest in LGBTQ Iranians stemmed from the more liberal and reformist political climate of President Mohammad Khatami, but the concerns facing the oppression of LGBTQ experiences certainly became critical when on September 24, 2007 President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared at a talk in New York that, “In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country.”[38] Ahmadinejad’s avowal, while atrociously reductive and simplistic, alludes to a conundrum among Iranian Islamic authorities and theorists who were left with no particular strategies in dealing with Ayatollah Khomeini’s declaration that “[sex change] is not obligatory” and that trans individuals’ experiences are acceptable within Islamic faith. Saying that “In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country” reveals that the Iranian government officially denies the existence of LGBTQ Iranians and instead funnels the broad spectrum of LGBTQ identities into only one form of queer existence, which encourages people with same-sex desire to follow a program of transitioning away from homosexual practices. Essentially then, homosexual people whether cisgender male or female, that is whether gay or lesbian, do not exist in the Iranian national narrative.

Najmabadi surmises, “keeping all gender/sex variant desires and practices in close proximity”[39] demonstrates the continuous and contentious discourses among biomedical, psycho-sexual, and Islamic jurisprudential experts while the lives of trans Iranians remain in the balance. For many of these specialists and scholars, the legal, religious, and medical consequences outweigh the preferences and lived experiences of trans Iranians; especially for the religious officials, the most critical issue remains abolishing homosexuality at all costs. I would argue though that this insistence on the “sinful prohibited practices”[40] of LGBTQ people in Iran moves beyond Islamic dictums and demonstrates the Iranian government’s homophobia and fear of appearing weak on the world stage. In the Ahmadinejad statement, his emphasis is on the concerns of the “country” while he is speaking in the United States, a historic enemy, which indicates that the Islamic Republic’s main focus remains on the image of the nation rather than a progressive program for improving the lives of its citizens.

Moallem suggests that “Islamic notions of masculinity are influenced by the perceptions of the modern nation-state and the relationship between nationalism, masculinity, and respectability.”[41] Further, “after the establishment of the Islamic Republic, the hegemonic masculinity of the citizen/subject became a site of tension and contradiction between the pious masculinity of the clergyman and the secular masculinity of the citizen.”[42] Be Like Others allows us to interrogate the contentious negotiations between the nation and its trans citizens. The documentary opens with two lines on a black screen: “In the Islamic Republic of Iran, sex change operations are legal” and “Homosexuality is punishable by death.”[43] The film immediately addresses the viewer’s curiosity about the apparent irony of trans Iranians living in an Islamic country.

The scene cuts away and focuses in on Mirdamad Surgical Center, Iran’s premiere privately-owned institution for SRS where Paris-trained surgeon, Dr. Bahram Mirjalali examines, advises, and schedules procedures for trans Iranians on “Tuesdays and Wednesdays” as the voiceover informs the viewer.[44] The film captures the crowded waiting room of trans men and women and their companions all of whom rise to greet and shake hands with the stoutly and silver-haired Dr. Mirjalali who speaks warmly as he receives each extended hand or touches his heart with a slight bow and moves rapidly into a private room to meet a patient. The voiceover informs the audience about Dr. Mirjalali’s extensive record of performing SRS in Iran “with the approval of the Iranian government.”[45] This particular caveat, which indicates the Islamic regime acknowledges the existence of queer Iranians despite Ahmadinejad’s declaration, also reveals the interlocking systems in Iran, which respond to trans issues in the country. The medical, psychobiological, Islamic jurisprudential and political networks must all work in tandem.

Soon after this introductory glimpse at the clinic, the viewer eavesdrops on the consultation between Dr. Mirjalali and the only patient seeking a Female to Male (FtM) sex reassignment surgery highlighted in the film. Dr. Mirjalali says to his patient, “Shoma yek mowjudat-e estesna-yi hastid” [“You are unusual creatures”—film’s translation], “vali sad-dar-sad tabi-ee hastid”[46] [“But perfectly normal”—film’s translation]. The voiceover alerts the viewer to a sobering fact after Dr. Mirjalali’s encouraging thoughts: “Those who seek treatment from the doctor realize that the authorities see their condition as an illness that has a cure.”[47] For this reason, Iranians seeking SRS are required to undergo a six-month process that includes physical examinations, hormonal therapies, and psychological evaluations to confirm that they are identifiable as trans men and trans women before the surgery and thus are obliged to endure SRS to be recognized as citizen-subjects. The patient seeking FtM transition interrupts the doctor’s explanation of the required process and asks that he introduce the patient to a psychiatrist who is “enlightened” like the doctor and will not end up “put[ting] a bad label” on the patient[48] and in essence, rejecting the patient’s request for the surgery. This patient’s fear of the psychological process indicates what many queer Iranians fear about the six-month process of evaluations. Often, the process ends up with the patients’ experiencing forced exiles, unwanted interventions, and suicide or murder because the multi-layered vetting system for SRS reveals the complexities of trans identity which do not always align with the regime’s dictates of singular sexuality. Needless to say, SRS is not the desired option for many trans Iranians, but for those who wish to remain in Iran and live with less police harassment, social stigma, and gain equal rights, SRS paves a viable path.

Be Like Others highlights that staying in Iran is a critical issue for trans Iranians. For various reasons, many trans individuals wish to remain in Iran and therefore seek SRS as a means for safely pursuing their lives in the nation. As citizen-subjects, trans Iranians want the same rights and dignities as their fellow non-trans compatriots. The film focuses on the question of gender through representation with nuanced care. At one point, someone asks a MtF seeking SRS, why a man would want to live as a woman in Iran in particular. The trans Iranian replies that living in the guise of a stereotypical man is not any easier for a trans person because of the harassment trans persons receive from law enforcement, their families, and broader Iranian society. The political, economic, social, religious, and familial rejection of being trans forces Iranians to succumb to the government’s dictates of streamlining gender and sexuality through SRS.

The film never explicitly identifies the class positions of the trans Iranians it follows, but one can assume from the individuals’ lifestyles, jobs, and hometowns (not all of them are from the capital but end up in Tehran for SRS) that we are watching what middle- and lower-class trans Iranians have to do in order to remain in Iran with equal rights and access. As one of the exchanges in the film between a transwoman and a conservative Muslim journalist reveals, the surgery itself is not desired by all the trans Iranians undergoing the mandated evaluation. The journalist retorts, “Iran has the best social services in the world for transsexuals. First of all, no other country on Earth changes the gender on your birth certificate […] The first supreme leader, the first religious authority in the whole world to give a ruling on sex change is Imam Khomeini.”[49] While her commentary aligns with the official national position on transsexuality, she never acknowledges the decades of trans-activism which influenced Khomeini’s edict becoming policy and trans-activists such as Vida in the film, who continuously engage directly and at great risks with governmental agencies to ensure a dignified life for trans Iranians.

Further, as the trans Iranian woman replies, “In European countries, religion is not the law [because religion is separate from politics—(the film does not translate this part)],”[50] which pulls on the anxieties of the Iranian regime in its struggles to appear powerful especially when placed in a comparative context with Global North nations. This instance in the film highlights the tensions between trans experiences and the nation’s self-narrative which hopes to appear as “enlightened Shi’ism” and not “homicidal homophobia.”[51] We see how murky the distinctions are between acceptable citizenship and disciplinary mechanisms for deviant behavior, while recognizing the Islamic Republic’s mimicry of Victorian European values of nation-building.

One of the trans women in the film says, “In this society, you have to be either a man or woman;” otherwise, the nation will punish alternative gender representations. Be Like Others allows the viewer to understand the connections between nationalism, gender, and sexuality and the restrictions upon these categories by the Iranian government. In another scene, one trans Iranian SRS-patient’s mother brings her employer to a conference about transsexuality out of fear that she may get fired from her job if her son receives SRS. She asks Dr. Mirjalali to speak to her boss and explain that legally, medically and religiously, trans people are accepted and respected. The doctor speaks to the conservative man, but the employer chillingly tells the woman and Anoush, her trans child, that they should be “patient” and not go through with the surgery. He tells them he will email the doctor to understand more, but the look on Shahin’s face indicates to the viewer that she did not get the answer and reprieve from unemployment anxiety that she was hoping for with his attendance at this conference. This scene depicts the nexus of class, nation, and gender expectations in explicit terms which other media fails to showcase.

Moallem’s observation that “filmic space [is] an alternative site for cultural struggle,”[52] allows us to examine gender and sexuality dynamics in the Iranian landscape as part and parcel to the Islamic regime’s program of self-representation and nation-building. The pressure to eradicate so-called weakness-cum-homosexuality from the nation-state appears in the daily dealings of the Iranian polity such that one’s livelihood is threatened if the parameters of ideal citizenship are not met. In this case, Shahin is already a single-mother and in addition to this less than desirable status in Iranian society, as her eldest child is trans and seeking SRS. Despite governmental acceptance of her child’s situation and the process involved in aligning their family with state dictates about acceptable citizenship, Shahin still struggles with social and economic prejudices of other Iranians, which can completely undermine her family’s well-being. This dilemma is double-edged: for her child, SRS may allow a more equitable and liberatory life in Islamic Iran, while for her, it could mean shame, ridicule, unemployment, and virtually, disenfranchisement from all of Iranian society. As the documentary traces, whether the trans Iranians remain connected with their families or not, the emerging relationships are strained, confusing, difficult and often result in more complications for both the trans person and the extended family.

Be Like Others ends with some complicated issues remaining unresolved for the trans Iranians in the film. Several times towards the end of the film, the trans Iranians are asked whether they would go through with the surgery if it was not required by the government. In every reply, the answer was a clear “no.” When one trans person says in the film, “Who is forcing you to have the operation?” she is met with silence from her peers and then she answers for the collective with, “Society.”[53] She continues that “I am an Iranian. I want to live here”[54] and thus, in order to live safely and humanely, she and other trans Iranians, have to comply with the government dictates and cultural expectations. The film shows the viewer that the lives of post-SRS trans Iranians involve a series of more medical tests, evaluations and procedures while they have to deal with the adjustment for themselves and their loved ones to their new identities. One couple, Anoush/Anahita and Ali, who plans to get married, moves forward with the engagement but the male-identifying partner becomes more hesitant about marriage after his fiancée’s operation. While Anoush/Anahita is satisfied with the post-operation situation, with the hope that they can marry sooner than later, Ali seems despondent and reluctant as he relays to the interviewer that “I don’t want to get married.”[55] Ali’s hesitance indicates that the heteronormative lifestyle, required by custom and law in Iran, remains undesirable for some Iranian subjects. He says he can “handle” the sex-change status of his partner, but to fully engage in heteronormativity is not what he wants for himself.

In another instance, a trans woman named Farhad who comes to Tehran to support her friend through her transition, tells the interviewer that she has decided to wait on the operation. She says that in part, she hesitates to go through with the surgery because although her relationship with her family is strained, they agree to talk with her so long as she avoids the operation. She continues that her friends who went through with the procedure seem unhappy and often tell her about attempted suicides because they no longer experience sexual satisfaction; they have health complications; and she indicates that some of the trans Iranians end up “forced to do things you don’t want to.”[56] In essence, this Iranian subject defies the system as she lives a non-gender binary life within the nation despite the risks and rejections this situation brings to her.

Ali-Asghar, now Negar after the operation, struggles to live in Tehran. The voiceover tells the viewer that “like many who have had sex-change surgery in Iran, she’s struggling to make ends meet.”[57] The viewer sees Negar enter a small apartment, take off her black chador, and reveal a hot pink, tightly fitting dress. Negar tells the interviewer about her life after her operation and says that after a period of depression, she now feels she “has been born again.”[58] She no longer has a relationship with her family who “shunned”[59] her, but she lives with other trans Iranians who have had the operation and she is happy with their living arrangement. When asked how they afford their apartment and lifestyle, Negar says “I do business”[60] and then lists the various boulevards and streets where one can find her at work. She boldly says, “I do a temporary marriage” and “we sell ourselves.”[61] Negar emphasizes that they have “principles” such as making sure to “first do a temporary Islamic marriage contract” before having sexual relations with someone because “halal mishim” (translation, “In other words, it’s allowed by Islam”).[62] Negar continues, “Since we don’t have female reproductive parts and can’t get pregnant, we can get ‘married’ once an hour or so.”[63] Earlier in the film, Veda, a trans activist, discusses that prostitution becomes one of the only work opportunities for trans Iranians, which also indicates her plea for more support of the trans community. Prostitution is illegal in Iran for trans and non-trans citizen-subjects alike, but the government cannot curtail its existence especially for disenfranchised citizens whose identities are shunned and rejected by larger society. Ironically, the Islamic custom of the temporary marriage supports the legal application of prostitution for trans Iranians who cannot financially support themselves otherwise.

The film ends with these unresolved stories: Ali, whose sexual identity remains unknown and who rejects heteronormative patriarchy; Farhad, who identifies as trans but opts out of SRS; and Negar, who declares she has killed a sense of love in herself after following through with the complete process dictated by the government. Foucault reminds us to think about these individuals’ situations as reflective of the “sovereign state and the modern autonomous individual co-determin[ing] each other’s emergence.”[64] Despite the Islamic regime’s intervention in defining gender identities for the Iranian trans community, the film leaves the viewer with a sense that sexuality and gender cannot be boxed into a binary system. Further, the film shows that a sense of national belonging and desire to remain in Iran as a full Iranian citizen complicates the living conditions of the trans community in Iran. The intersection between politics, gender, class, and sexuality in Be Like Others disrupts the “art of governmentality” and thus, the project of modernization in Iran. Moallem suggests, “it is crucial to challenge dichotomous notions of gender, religion, culture, and modernity in order to interrogate and deconstruct the conditions under which political and cultural citizenship constitute and are constituted by citizen-subjects”[65] and Be Like Others allows us to continuously engage with these issues. Highlighting Malaklou’s interventions in Enlightenment Humanism, the viewer also finds the intersections of race with gender and sexuality in a critical rupture in this film: Iranians stumble towards whiteness vis-à-vis the European social and political order as the Islamic Republic dubiously stakes a claim in patriarchal heteronormativity.

In a nation whose visual self-representation includes images of martyrs in military uniforms, pious clerics with austere gazes, chador-clad mothers, sometimes holding a child in one arm and a weapon in the other, the Iranian family is a heteronormative, patriarchal, devoutly religious unit and therefore, the pillar of the Islamic nation. As Gerami observes,

Three versions of masculinities in postrevolutionary Iran stand out well beyond the revolutionary stage: the martyr as brave and innocent, the mullah as otherworldly and pious, and ordinary men as sexual and dominant. Women were not discouraged from emulating the manly traits of the first two prototypes.[66]

However, Be Like Others challenges the Islamic Republic’s notions of gender and sexual identity by disrupting the monolithic depictions of Iranian masculinity and femininity. While the film participates as a tool in “the art of governmentality,” its purpose of highlighting the complex stories of trans Iranians makes the film a work of resistance against the state’s mission to use technology to promote its self-image. If we understand visual technologies such as print media, television broadcasts, and films as part of what Foucault calls “the art of government,” then Be Like Others pushes back against the government’s “technologies of domination.”[67]

Further, by showing the complexities of trans lives, the film pushes back against the homophobia and transphobia of the Iranian state that falsely proclaims that the Iranian government, contrary to more democratic nations, supports its trans population and allows these individuals more freedom to live in their authenticity than other nations. In Be Like Others, this visual representation of trans experiences inside and outside of Iran is particularly powerful as the Islamic regime relies heavily on visual culture to promote its ideals, values, and political philosophy to its own citizenry and by extension, the world. The film provides a critical tension against the state’s domination and disciplinary program, making it difficult for the Islamic regime to control the effects of the film on its own population or the broader world’s viewers.[68] The film continuously challenges Iran’s best efforts to eradicate homosexuality and gender-queer identities by merely remaining in the public’s access.

Conclusion

While Iranians never experienced settler-colonial practices, their on-going relationship with the British in particular shaped many of the emerging nation’s homophobic views. As early as 1838, Iranian travelers to Europe were writing about same-sex practices in various countries in Europe and condemning the hypocrisy of Europeans towards homosexuality in Iran. Najmabadi suggests that this “anxiety over Europeans’ judgment of Iranian sexual mores and practices remained a preoccupation”[69] for nineteenth-century Iranians, but it also plagued the Pahlavi era and continues to haunt the Islamic regime. Today, Iran’s government vehemently invests in erasing visual representations of queer identities. By directly coercing queer Iranians into SRS, the Islamic Republic maintains the most rigorous program of heteronormativity of the last two centuries of Iranian regimes.

Najmabadi reminds us, for instance, that “Nineteenth-century Iranian culture…had other ways of naming [gender beyond the man/woman binary], such as amrad (young adolescent male) and mukhannas (an adult man desiring to be an object of desire for adult men), that were not equated with effeminacy”[70] but indicated same-sex relations. That said, Iranian masculinity weakened as female agency to dictate the parameters of marriage, sexual relations, and divorce, gained strength. With the establishment of a military and state bureaucracy under Reza Shah Pahlavi, gender roles and expectations increasingly dictated the political, social, and economic behaviors of Iranian men and women, but until the establishment of the Islamic Republic, manhood, masculinity, and sexual behaviors were not under the jurisdiction of the government, although as Sivan Balslev notes, “during the late nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century, western-educated elite men created and promoted a new model of Iranian masculinity by means of mass communication, cultural production, modern education and governmental reforms.”[71] While masculinity re-presented itself after 1979, “the Islamic revolution and the Republic constituted a hypermasculine social order. This misogynistic order was hard on women, but it also harmed men. The state’s imposition of Sharia, its harsh implementation of sex segregation and condoning of vigilantism, hurt men as it did women”[72] and effectively obliterated any gender and sexual nonconformity. Needless to say, this deliberate erasure, by any means necessary, makes the project of Iranian nation-building problematic and inhumane.

[1]I will turn to the critical intervention by M. Shadee Malaklou in thinking about Iranians and how they “narrate their non-normative genders and sexualities as identity and type to negate (for themselves as Other, not pace Hegel but Fanon) the racial schemas that atavistically hail them in modern historiography.” Maryam Shadee Malaklou, Chronopolitical Assemblages: Race/ism, Desire, and Identification in Iranian Contexts (ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing, 2016), 13.

[2]Shahin Gerami, “Mullahs, Martyrs, and Men: Conceptualizing Masculinity in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Men and Masculinities 5, no. 3 (January 2003): 257-274. In this essay, Gerami traces the development of “an Islamic hypermasculinity” which focuses on developing heteronormative men and women who abide by new “ideals of manhood” with three main identities for men: “mullahs,” or clerics, as wise interpreters of the Quran; “martyrs,” as young men who sacrifice their lives for the Republic; and “ordinary men” who benefit from Shari’at at the family and civil society level, but suffer depending on class status.

[3]Be Like Others/Transexual in Iran, directed by Tanaz Eshaghian (2008), Film.

[4]Minoo Moallem, “Passing, Politics, and Religion,” The Scholar and Feminist Online, Issue 9.3: Summer 2011, http://sfonline.barnard.edu/religion/moallem_01.htm.

[5]Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (Verso, 1991), 6.

[6]Afsaneh Najmabadi, Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 3.

[7]Najmabadi, Professing Selves, 6.

[8]Malaklou, Chronopolitical Assemblages, 2.

[9]Eshaghian, Be Like Others. The film is readily accessible online in the US under the title, Transsexual in Iran.

[10]Malaklou, Chronopolitical Assemblages, 12.

[11]Anderson, “Introduction,” Imagined Communities, 6.

[12]While still recognized as a functioning monarchy, Iran, then known as Persia, formed a majlis or parliament in 1906, thus heralding the early steps to statehood.

[13]Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches, Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press). Najmabadi relates how “Iranian modernity was shaped in the rearticulation of concepts like nation (millat), politics (siasat), homeland (vatan), and knowledge (‘ilm),” 1.

[14]Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches, 98.

[15]Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches, 1.

[16]Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches, 4.

[17]Malaklou, Chronopolitical Assemblages, 2.

[18]Malaklou, Chronopolitical Assemblages, fn. 3, 2.

[19]Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches, 57.

[20]Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches, 11.

[21]Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches, 58.

[22]Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches, 27.

[23]Malaklou dissects this idea through a turn to antiblackness in notions of modernity. She says, “Liberal pluralism, the grandchild of evolutionary humanism, assigns Iranian and black persons non-commensurate ranks in the saga of Man. Theirs is a difference not of degree but of kind; while Iranians can slowly stand upright to arrive at human capacity abstracted in shades of white, black persons as ‘the missing link between ape and man’ are altogether proscribed from human dialectical spirit and agency,” Chronopolitical Assemblages, 8.

[24]The era of Reza Shah Pahlavi’s terror on the masses is well known. As Najmabadi says, “Riza Shah’s state was a re-formed military and bureaucratized state, even though it was centered around the individual figure of the king […] Riza Shah’s manhood and kinghood did not tolerate frivolous and playful associations with what had now becomes signs of a despised manhood and womanliness,” Women with Mustaches, 93.

[25]Reza Zia-Ebrahimi, “‘Arab Invasion’ and Decline, or the Import of European Racial Thought by Iranian Nationalists,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 37, no. 6 (November 2012): 1046. Zia-Ebrahimi traces the adoption by Reza Shah and the Pahlavi regime in general of the developing nationalist ideologies of Qajar era intellectuals such as Mirza Fath’ali Akhunzadeh (1812-78) and Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani (1853-96). This ideology, he says, grew out of “a racialized historiography of Iran developed primarily in nineteenth-century European scholarship,” 1045. In, “Self-Orientalization and Dislocation: The Uses and Abuses of the ‘Aryan’ Discourse,” Iranian Studies 44, no.4 (2011): 445-472, Zia-Ebrahimi elaborates on the development of the identification of nineteenth-century Iranians with the concept of Aryan and how they used literature, politics, and culture to align themselves with European notions of whiteness and superiority.

[26]Hamideh Sedghi, Women and Politics in Iran: Veiling, Unveiling, and Reveiling, (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Modernity for the Pahlavi regime meant embodying whiteness through imitation of European fashions and values. Although her analysis fails to think through antiblackness and the Pahlavi project of Aryanness, Sedghi posits, “My focus is on the centrality of unveiling to Reza Shah’s policy and politics. I view unveiling [and the adoption of European dress] in the context of state-building,” 85.

[27]Jalal Al-i Ahmad, Occidentosis: Plague from the West, trans. R. Campbell (Mizan Press, 1984), 96.

[28]As Najmabadi notes, “In its earliest reported appearance in Iran, in the 1930s and 1940s, ‘changing sex’ referred to intersex transformations—some reported as spontaneous—but increasingly the phrase indicated those transformations effected through surgical interventions,” Professing Selves, 38.

[29]Najmabadi, Professing Selves, 40.

[30]Although Khomeini briefly discusses the case of trans people as accepted in Islam in his works, he never clearly outlined the state’s role in the well-being and inclusion of trans individuals who do not ascribe to the gender binary system. Ayatollah Ruhullah Khomeini, Tahrir al-wasilah, 2 vols. (Najaf: Matba‘at al-Adab, 1387 AH/1967/8).

[31]“Transgender in Iran: The Story of Maryam Khatoon Molkara,” Transgender Universe, 25 February 2016, http://archive.transgenderuniverse.com/2016/02/25/transgender-in-iran-the-story-of-maryam-khatoon-molkara/.

[32]Eshaghian, Be Like Others, minute mark 55:46.

[33]Eshaghian, Be Like Others, minute mark 57:26.

[34]Moallem, “Passing, Politics, and Religion.”

[35]In his lectures, Michel Foucault describes the various modes by which governments produce citizens to fit into their notions of policies, practices, and self-narratives. Foucault includes political, legal, religious, educational, familial, and socio-cultural inventions including the use of technology and media by the government to control the narrative of its ideologies.

[36]As Ziba Mir-Hosseini notes, “Through its various organizations, the regime promoted the creation of a distinctively Islamic cinema in the early 1980s. In those years no quality film was produced […] and women and love were almost totally absent from the screen,” and today, the Islamic government contends with filmmakers who want to expand beyond the fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence ideology, because it is still palpable in Iran. See Iranian Cinema: Art, Society and the State,” Middle Eastern Research and Information Project, http://www.merip.org/mer/mer219/iranian-cinema.

[37]John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharan Thompson, New Feminist Library Series (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 470.

[38]Satyam Khanna, “Iran Denies Existence of Gays in Iran,” Think Progress, 24 September 2007, https://thinkprogress.org/ahmadinejad-denies-existence-of-gays-in-iran-e1418f709193/.

[39]Najmabadi, Professing Selves, 185.

[40]Najmabadi, Professing Selves, 182.

[41]Moallem, “Passing, Politics, and Religion.”

[42]Moallem, “Passing, Politics, and Religion.”

[43]Eshaghian, Be Like Others, minute mark 0:03 and 0:07.

[44]Eshaghian, Be Like Others, minute mark 0:52.

[45]Eshaghian, Be Like Others, minute mark 1:07.

[46]Eshaghian, Be Like Others, minute mark 1:24-1:32

[47]Eshaghian, Be Like Others, minute mark 2:18-2:22.

[48]Eshaghian, Be Like Others, minute 2:48-3:00.

[49]Eshaghian, Be Like Others, minute mark 36:03.

[50]Eshaghian, Be Like Others, minute mark 36:12.

[51]Afsandeh Najmabadi, “Verdicts of Science, Rulings of Faith: Transgender/Sexuality in Contemporary Iran.” Social Research 78, no. 2 (2011): 2.

[52]Moallem, “Politics, Passing, and Religion.”

[53]Eshaghian, Be Like Others, minute mark 37:17.

[54]Eshaghian, Be Like Others, minute mark 37:19.

[55]Eshaghian, Be Like Others, minute mark 55:25-55:33.

[56]Eshaghian, Be Like Others, minute mark 49:26-49:29.

[57]Eshaghian, Be Like Others, minute mark 51:51.

[58]Eshaghian, Be Like Others, minute mark 51:57-52:00.

[59]Eshaghian, Be Like Others, minute mark 52:26.

[60]Eshaghian, Be Like Others, minute mark 52:47.

[61]Eshaghian, Be Like Others, minute mark 52:56-53:01.

[62]Eshaghian, Be Like Others, minute mark 53:03-53:12.

[63]Eshaghian, Be Like Others, minute mark 53:16-53:26.

[64]Thomas Lemke, “Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique.” Paper presented at Rethinking Marxism Conference, University of Amherst, 21-24, 2000, www.thomaslemkeweb.de/publikationen/Foucault,%20Governmentality,%20and%20Critique%20IV-2.pdf.

[65]Moallem, “Politics, Passing, and Religion.”

[66]Gerami, “Mullahs, Martyrs, and Men,” 264.

[67]Lemke, “Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique,” 2.

[68]Indeed, the Islamic Republic continues to make counter-documentaries and interviews to reinforce and render as ethical and acceptable its own viewpoints. For some videos that depict the Islamic Republic’s efforts to erase homosexuality and position itself as supportive of trans Iranians, please see www.aparat.com/result/%D8%AA%D8%B1%D9%86%D8%B3_%D8%B3%DA%A9%D8%B4%D9%88%D8%A7%D9%84.

[69]Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches, 37.

[70]Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches, 3.

[71]Sivan Balslev, “Dressed for Success: Hegemonic Masculinity, Elite Men and Westernization in Iran, c. 1900-40,” Gender & History, vol. 26. no. 3 (November 2014): 546.

[72]Gerami, “Mullahs, Martyrs, and Men,” 260.

An Approach to Humour in Persian Literature

Homa Katouzian Volume 2, Number 4, Winter 2018

Homa Katouzian is the Iran Heritage Foundation Research Fellow, St Antony’s College, and Member, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford. He is editor, International Journal of Persian Literature and co-editor, the AIS-Routledge book series in Iranian studies.

In the eleven hundred years of literature in Persian, humour has been quite visible and has played important roles in various contexts. It has also been widely varied in style, form and scope. There has been both verbal and fictional satire, lampoon and buffoonery , some of them soft and subtle, others coarse and even obscene, but all of them more or less amusing, though behind many of them are such motives as anger, revenge, blackmail, sarcasm, mockery, social criticism and so on, while some others resemble maxims and aphorisms dressed up as satire. The title of this talk is too ambitious for the time available, so I shall offer an overview of classical humour and modern satire in the early twentieth century.

Generally, there is not much difference between Persian and Western satire beyond the inevitable differences of from, but we find more indelicate jibes and abuses in Persian satire, especially when matters of sex and honour are brought into them. Still, even these are quite distinct from simple invective because it is precisely their literary form that shapes them into humour. For example, Mahsati or (Mahasti) Ganjavi, a twelfth century female poet, wrote in a quatrain:

When the judge’s wife came with child, he cried

Struck by pain he found it extremely odd

Saying I am old and cannot have an erection

This whore is not Mary, so whence the benediction.[2]

This quite compares with the style of reporting in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s Decameron. But theirs are relatively rare in the body of Western satire, whereas they are more common in Persian literature. Some of Rumi’s tales in his Masnavi almost border on pornography, even though, oddly enough, they too are lessons in mysticism. However, there are also many subtle and delicate satires, verbal as well as fictional, not only in the works of such great classicists as Sa’di and Hafiz but also in modern satirists such as Dehkhoda.

Abolfazl Beyhaqi (995-1077) wrote in his great history a thousand years ago about a man who procured concubines for a prince and received ample rewards for them. A judge told him to remember that pimping is better than judging.[3] Naser Khosrow (1004-1088), who also flourished in the eleventh century, was a very serious and highly religious man who, in his polemics against his religious enemies called them, ass, cow and so on. He wrote in a humorous aphorism:

نشنیده ای که زیر چناری کدو بنی

بر رست و بردوید بر او بر به روز بیست

پرسید از چنار که تو چند ساله ای

گفتا چنار سال مرا بیشتر ز سی ست

خندید پس بر او که من از تو به بیست روز

بر تر شدم بگوی که این کاهلی ز چیست

او را چنار گفت که امروزه ای کدو

با تو مرا هنوز نه هنگام داوری ست

فردا که بر من و تو وزد بعد مهرگان

آنگه شود پدید که نامرد و مرد کیست

Have you heard that once a marrow grew

Under a maple tree and bore fruit in a day or two?

It asked the tree’s age which it said

Was more than thirty years

The marrow laughed and said how come

That by me in a few days you have been overcome

The tree said today o marrow

It is too early to compare me and you

For when the October wind begins to blow

It’ll be seen which one of us is to bellow[4]

Not long afterwards, the nobleman Keykavus ibn Eskandar (1021-1087) wrote in his Qabusnameh, the book intended for the education of his son, that a dress-maker whose shop was near the cemetery used to throw a pebble into a vase each time they buried a dead person, and counted the pebbles every month. After his death a man showed up looking for him and was told that the tailor too had fallen into the vase.[5]

In another anecdote, he says that a sheep owner used to dilute milk with water and sell it. One night his shepherd was sleeping on high ground when a flood came and swept the sheep away. Next day the shepherd told the sheep owner: last night the waters that you used to put in the milk gathered together and took the sheep away.[6] He also tells the tale of a hundred-year-old man who was bent and leaning on a walking-stick. A young man asked him in mockery how much he would sell his little bow. He told him, if you wait long enough, life would give it to you free of charge, although you are not worthy of it[7]. Keykavus emphatically advises his son not to resort to obscene words when he jokes, but, as mentioned, that advice is not observed by a number of Persian poets and satirists.

Anvari Abivardi (d. 1189), that twelfth century great but not very ethical poet, wrote in a long qasideh that emptying cesspits is better than writing poetry because that is a useful occupation whereas there is no use in writing poetry.[8] He wrote once, addressing himself, that he would not be immune from danger as long as he is in danger of writing poems. Although he did write panegyrics, he was not successful in earning a good living, so he resorted to lampoon and blackmail to milk the rich. Once he addressed a short stanza to one such:

انوری نام هجو می نبرد

چون ترا چشم بر عطا ست هنوز

کیر خر نام می برد لیکن

می نگوید که در کجاست هنوز

Anvari will not talk of lampoon

Since he still hopes for a donation

He does mention donkey’s prick

But does not yet mention its location[9]

In another piece he complained of the meanness of the prince:

گر اندک صلتی بخشد امیرت

از او بستان کز او بسیار باشد

عطای او بود چون ختنه کردن

که اندر عمر خود یک بار باشد

If the prince gives you a little reward

Take it from him for it is too much.

His gift is like circumcision

In a lifetime it happens only once.[10] Reflecting on his own lack of fortune, he wrote once:

هر بلایی کز آسمان آید

گر چه بر دیگری روا باشد

نرسیده به خاک می پرسد

خانه انوری کجا باشد

Whatever ill descends from the heavens

Even if intended for someone else,

Before reaching the earth it asks

Where’s Anvari’s residence?[11]

It is perhaps not surprising because, apart from lampooning for money, he scandalised anyone he disliked. Addressing a man, for example, he wondered why every woman he married slept around with others, ending by the question: Do you want whorish wives to praise / Or it just happens to be the case?[12] He overreached himself in ribaldry when he wrote in a stanza:

اگر سهلان رستم نذ ر کرده ست

که هر کس را که من گایم بگاید

بگادن چون تواند خواهرش را

و یا مادر , که قتلش واجب آید

وگر گآید مر ایشان را و گوید

که در سوگند تا ویلی نباید

بگادن چون تواند خویشتن را

مگر بر علم ما چیزی فزاید

If Sahlan son of Rostam has vowed

To fuck anyone that I fuck

How can he fuck his mother and sister?

Since he would surely be executed.

But if he does it nevertheless

Saying that an oath should not be broken.

How can he possibly fuck himself?

Perhaps he’ll teach us a lesson. [13]

He was very unhappy with his wife and wrote such obscene verses about her which are almost unprintable. He wrote about marriage that: To get married in this era / Is naught but pure pimping (کاندر این روزگار زن کردن / بجز از محض قلتبانی نیست ).[14] However, sometimes he also wrote humorous poems without targeting himself or others, but still using foul language. For example, he tells the tale of a group of ladies who had gone out to the countryside. A he- donkey happened to be mating with a she-donkey ‘with a two-feet long ebony’ (یک گز و نیم آبنوس), ‘while farting and braying with much excitement’ (گوز می افکند و میزد عر عر ان). The leader of the ladies said to the others: ‘If copulation is what this donkey is doing / Our husbands surely shit on our pussies’(گر جماع این است که این خر می کند

بر کس ما می ریند این شوهران ).[15]

It is not just Anvari, but many a twelfth-century poet has tried his hands at ribaldry. Sana’i Ghazanavi (b. 1150) – to become a mystic later in life – tells the tale of a woman in labour that sends someone to ask for a remedy from a holy man which would relieve her pain. The messenger comes across a eunuch on the way who tells her to tell the woman that pain cannot be avoided: ‘You have enjoyed the sweetness of fucking / So put up with the pain of squatting (چون چشیدی حلاوت گادن / بکش اکنون مشقت زادن).[16]

Yet, in a more subtle anecdote, he says that an old woman had a pretty daughter called Mahsati as well as three cows. One day the girl became seriously ill, making the mother extremely unhappy. Meanwhile, one of her cows put her head into a pan but could not take it out. She emerged from the kitchen with her head in the pan. The mother thought it was the Angle of Death and shouted: I aren’t Mahsati, Angle of Death / I am only a poor old woman; If it’s Mahsati you have come to claim / There she is for you to take’; It is she who is ill, not me / Don’t with her confuse me.

ملک الموت من نه مهستی ام

من یکی پیرزال محنتی ام

گر تو را مهستی همی باید

اینک او را ببر که می شاید [17]

Khaqani (1126-1198), the great twelfth century poet was so proud that he did not regard any other living poet worthy of the name. This got him into highly scathing exchanges, among others, with his teacher and father-in-law Abol’ala Ganjavi and his own pupil Mojir al-Din Bilaqani, both of them poets of different standing, though much less talented than him. He wrote other lampoons and abuse about all and sundry, even including the lesbians of Baghdad: This is drumming, not fucking / resulting in a world-full of noise.[18] He wrote about a Lord As’ad:

خواجه اسعد چو می خورد پیوست

طرفه شکلی شود چو گردد مست

پارسا روی هست , اما نیست

قلتبان شکل نیست , اما هست

When Lord As’ad goes on drinking

His appearance looks ironical – drunk

He is pious looking but he is not one

He is not looking like a pimp, but he is one.[19]

Khaqani’s contemporary, Suzani Samarqandi (1072-1166) is perhaps the most notorious classic in harsh lampooning and ribaldry. His Divan is packed with harsh lampoons many of which are low in artistic touch. He too was at odds with his contemporary poets and used to attack them in poems which he wrote in the same metres and rhymes as theirs. One of his targets was the great poet Nezami Ganjavi for whom he wrote an elegy before his death:

نظامی ار چه نمرده ست , مرده انگارم

به نظم مرثیتش حق طبع بگزارم

چه گر بمیرد و آنگاه مرثیت گویم

چو نشنود که چه گویم چه سود گفتارم

لطیف مرثیتی پیش او فرو گویم

چنانکه در دل او آرزوی مرگ آرم…

بمیرد آن سگ زن روسپی به مرگ سگان

اگر چه گوید با شیر نر به پیکارم…

Nezami is not dead but I assume he is

And write his elegy in verse

For if I do so after he dies

What’s the use when he hears it not?

I’ll write him such a delicate elegy

That would induce him to have death-wish…

Let that dog of a wife-whore die like dogs,

Even though he says he will fight me like a lion…[20]

Both Rumi and Sa’di, two of the all-time great classics flourished in the thirteenth century. They were both humorous in different ways, though, as mentioned, Rumi has a number of virtually pornographic tales. One of the better known is the story of the lady without a male partner who discovered that her slave girl lets the donkey in the stable have sex with her, not suspecting that she uses a pumpkin as a buffer. She tried to imitate the girl without the use of the pumpkin and died as a result: ‘It was a most disreputable death, my friend / Have you ever seen someone martyred by a donkey’s prick? (مرد مرگی با فضیحت ای پدر / تو شهیدی دیده ای از کیر خر ؟’)[21] Rumi also tells the story of two men, one of them good looking with a small beard, the other, ugly, whose beard had not yet grown. They once stay the night in a khaneqah, and in the middle of the night the beardless youth erects a barrier around himself with bricks. A resident man comes along with ill intentions. The pretty male had a small beard and so was out of bounds. He asks the beard-less youth why he had done that. He said, to protect myself from geezers like you, since: A few hairs on the chin are more protective / than thirty bricks around one’s ass (بر زنخ سه چار مو بهر نمون / بهتر از سی خشت گرداگرد کون).[22]

However, much that Rumi wrote in his Masnavi, let alone Divan-e Shams, was far from harsh and indelicate. He tells the tale of a man whom a group of dervishes invite to eat with them. At the dinner spread he joyfully repeats with them the zekr (evocation) ‘the donkey’s gone, the donkey’s gone, the donkey’s gone’ (خر برفت و خر برفت و خر برف), unaware that they had secretly sold his donkey to throw the feast. The camel’s knees are rough and dirty since she sits on them. Rumi says in a piece:

آن یکی پرسید اشتر را که هی

از کجا می ایی ای اقبال پی

گفت از حمام گرم کی تو

گفت خود پیداست از زانوی تو

Someone asked the camel, hey

Whence come you, you lucky one?

From your neighbourhood’s bath, he answered

Ah, it’s obvious from your knees, he said.[23]

Almost everything that Rumi wrote contained a mystical message, though this did not stop them from being humorous as well. The tale is famous of the merchant who had a parrot and, going to India, he asked it what it wanted as a souvenir. The parrot asked him to ask wild parrots how it could return to them. On return, the merchant said that when he put the question to the Indian parrots one of them dropped dead. Whereupon his own parrot dropped dead and he threw it out of its cage. The parrot flew up and was free.

Sa’di (c1210-1292) was the greatest Persian satirist of the thirteenth century. His satire is usually subtle and amusing, and contains a maxim or is instructive in other ways. In some of his works he resembles Rabelais who flourished more than two centuries after him, and sometimes Voltaire, who came centuries later, although no work of Sa’di’s is blasphemous. No wonder that Voltaire said if Sa’di is from Persia then Persians must be a highly civilised people. He wrote in a short stanza:

مردکی بود غرقه در جیحون

به سمرقند بود پندارم

بانگ می کرد و زار می نالید

که دریغا کلاه و دستارم

A little man was drowning in the River Oxus

– It was in Samarqand, I think –

Clamouring and complaining desperately

Woe for my hat and headdress![24]

Sa’di’s Golestan, a gem of a prose book that also includes the occasional verse, is packed with verbal and fictional satires of various kinds. A minister told a great Sufi that he served the sultan day and night, hoping for his reward while fearing his wrath. The Sufi told him that if he worshipped God as much as he worshipped the sultan, he would be one of the most pious.[25]

He tells the story of an imposter who dressed up his hair in the style of the descendants of the Prophet Mohammad and arrived in a town saying he was returning from Hajj and presented a qasideh to the king who gave him ample reward and treated him with great respect. However, one of the courtiers said that at the time of Hajj he had seen the man in Basra, so he was not a Hajji. Another one said that his father was Christian, how could he be a descendent of the Prophet. And they found his qasideh in Anvari’s Divan. The king ordered him to be flogged and driven out of town. He told the king ‘I’ll tell you one more thing and if it is not right I would deserve any punishment that you would mete out on me’. The king agreed, and he said in verse:

غریبی گرت ماست پیش آورد

دو پیمانه آب است و یک چمچه دوغ

اگر راست می خواهی از من شنو

جهاندیده بسیار گوید دروغ

If a stranger brings you yoghurt / It’ll be diluted and full of water; Ask me if you want to

know the truth / An experienced traveller tells all sorts of untruths.

The king laughed and let him go[26].

A religiously devout man was guest of a king and at dinner he ate less than usual. And when they stood to prayers he prayed longer than he was used to. Returning home, he asked for food. His son asked him why and he said he had not eaten much at the court to impress the king. The son told him to repeat his prayers as well because his prayers at the court would not be answered.[27]

A king asked an ascetic ‘Do you ever remember me?’ He said yes, when I forget God[28].

They said an ascetic ate a lot of food every night and then prayed until dawn. A wise man said it would be much better if he ate lightly and slept through[29].

A king faced a difficulty. He vowed that if it was resolved he would give so much alms to the ascetics. When his prayers were answered he asked a trusted servant to distribute the alms among the ascetics. Next day the servant returned and said he could not find one. Surprised, the king said to his knowledge there were four-hundred ascetics in his land. The servant said Sire those who are ascetic refuse the alm, and those who accept it are not ascetic.[30] Someone told his guru that he was tired of having so many visitors. He said give a loan to those of them who are poor and ask for a loan from those who are rich. You would then not be bothered by any of them.[31]

Someone got an eye-ache and went to a vet. The vet put in his eye what he would for beasts and he got blind. The case went before the judge. The judge said there is no compensation, since if he was not an ass he wouldn’t seek treatment from a vet.[32]

Someone’s young good-looking wife died and his mother-in-law stayed at home on account of the dowry. The man found her presence unpleasant, but he could see no way out of it. One day a group of friends came to see him. One of them asked how he was in the absence of his beloved. He said seeing my mother-in-law is worse than missing my wife.[33]

The relatively long tale of the Hamedan judge and the pretty farrier boy could have made a scandal in the twenty-first century. The judge fell madly in love with the youth and tried every trick to seduce him and eventually succeeded. One night they got together and on the same night the police chief was informed. The judge was at the height of ecstasy when one of his retainers brought him the news that the prince was on the way. The judge did not heed the warning. The prince showed up and this was the scene he saw:

شمع را دید ایستاده , شاهد نشسته, می ریخته , قدح شکسته , قاضی در خواب مستی بی خبر از ملک هستی.

The candle standing, the youth sitting, the wine spilled on the floor and the judge

drunken and sleep, unaware of all that there was.

The prince gently told him to wake up since the sun was rising. The judge got the message and said: Where did it rise from? He said from the east. The judge said thank God it is still possible to repent [since according to a hadith, as long as the sun rises from the east it is possible to repent]. His canny response was ineffective since the prince thought a man of his standing must be punished for others to take a lesson from it, and so ordered that he be thrown down the castle. The judge said I have been a servant of your dynasty, why don’t you throw someone else so I would take a lesson. The prince laughed and forgave him.[34]

Sa’di also tells the tale of a fox who was running away. They asked it why, it said they were catching camels. They said but you are not a camel. It said if an enemy said I was, it would be all over before he was proven wrong. In several anecdotes, Sa’di is critical of the marriage of old men with young women. In the shortest one of them he says that they asked an old man why he did not marry. He said “I don’t enjoy the company of old women.” They said but you are wealthy and can marry a young one. He said, “Being old, I don’t have any joy with old women. How can a young woman have affection for me?”[35] In a lengthier anecdote he says that an old man married a young woman, trying to amuse her every night to make her happy. One night he told her that luck was with her in marrying him, not an arrogant and ill-tempered young man. The woman sighed and said what you have told me so far is not as good as what I heard from my midwife who said it would be better for an arrow to sit at the side of a young woman than an old man. So there was no hope of agreement and they separated. The woman then got married to a poor and aggressive young man and constantly thanked God that she had escaped from that hideous torture and reached this state of bliss.[36]

The great fourteenth-century poet, Hafiz (1325-1389), lived for five years under the religious tyranny of a ruler who had defeated in battle his favourite prince and imposed the strictest possible Islamic rule. In his ghazals, we find jibes and subtle humour reflecting his acute unhappiness in those circumstances. He used to call the ruler, Amir Mobarez, “the chief religious police” or mohtaseb, each time he wanted to say something critical about him. For example, he says in a ghazal: Do not ever drink with the city’s mohtaseb / because he will drink your wine and throw stones at its cup.[37] And in another: “We drink, we are licentious, we love pretty youths / who is there in town unlike us; Do not mention to mohtaseb my vices / Because he is drinking constantly like us.”[38]

میخواره و سرگشته و رندیم و نظر باز

وان کس که در این شهر چو ما نیست کدام است

با محتسبم عیب نگو یید که او نیز

پیوسته چو ما در طلب عیش مدام است

In yet another ghazal, he writes: Try to learn libertinism from mohteseb / Since he is drunk and no-one suspects it (ای دل طریق رندی از محتسب بیاموز / مست است و در حق او, کس این گمان ندارد ) .[39]

Neither does Hafiz leave the divine and the preachers unscathed. For example: The preachers who appear thus at the altar and pulpit / Do the other thing when no-one is looking. ( واعظان کاین جلوه در محراب و منبر می کنند / چون به خلوت می روند آن کار دیگر می کنند )[40] Or: The Lord Imam whose prayers was so long / washed up his gown in the blood of wine (امام خواجه که بودش سر نماز دراز / به خون دختر رز خرقه را قصارت کرد.[41] Somewhere else he wrote: Although I am drunk, libertine and sinful / Thank God my fellow citizens are all sinless (من ار چه عاشقم و رند و مست و نامه سیاه / هزار شکر که یاران شهر بی گنهند).[42]

Again: Forty years we suffered and in the end / Our remedy was in the hands of two-year-old wine (چل سال رنج و غصه کشیدیم و عاقبت / تدبیر ما به دست شراب دو ساله بود).[43] In general, the humour of Hafiz is so subtle that it is difficult to appreciate fully out of the context.

The greatest classical satirist, however, is Obeyd Zakani (c.1300-1370). He compares with Voltaire and Jonathan Swift, to the extent that his satire involves sharp criticism of social injustice, prejudice and irrational beliefs. Contemporary but senior to Hafiz, he was an accomplished poet in his own right, but most of his satire is found in a series of small books such as Cat and Mouse, Ethics of the Gentry, Joyous Treatment, The Hundred Maxims, etc. His long poem, Cat and Mouse, is a political allegory about the war between the noted religious tyrant of Shiraz who had previously been the prince of Kerman and had defeated and killed the ruler of Shiraz, who was both a favourite of Hafiz and Obeyd. It tells how a cat in Kerman repented in a mosque of catching mice, unaware that a little mouse was hearing him. The mouse rushes to its friends and gives them the good news, and being elated, they bring the cat presents for its life-saving decision. But no sooner do they get close to him that he jumps at them and begins to catch as many as possible: “Five mice he captured-two in each front paw / And one was snapped up in his lion-like jaw’ (دو بدین چنگ و دو بدان چنگال

یک به دندان چو شیر غرانا .[44] The mice declare war and capture the cat, but it manages to break free of its fetters and attacks and wins the war. This is a mockery of Amir Mobarez al-Din – Hafiz’s mohtaseb – portrayed by the cat whose piety is implied to be pure hypocrisy.

It would take a volume to describe and discuss Obey’d satirical booklets. Here let me quote a couple from his Resaleh-ye Delgosha or Joyous Treatment, some of which are written in Arabic:

For example:

They asked a man why does your son not look like you. He said, ‘If our neighbours leave us alone, my children would look like me’.[45]

A man saw a baby cry and would not stop despite her mother’s gentle touches. The man told her if you don’t stop I’ll give your mother a treatment. The mother said this baby will not believe what you say unless she actually sees it. [46]

And in Persian:

A man asked a preacher what is the name of Satan’s wife. He said ‘Come here and I’ll tell you’. The man went to him and the preacher said into his ear ‘You bloody pimp, how would I know?’ When he returned to his place, others asked him what the answer was. He said: Whoever wants to know should go and ask his reverent himself.[47]

In another anecdote, Talhak (Cf. dalqak) the court jester was asked the meaning of cuckoldry. He said this question should be asked of judges.[48]

In another anecdote we read:

A man went to a doctor of religious law and told him that when he stood to prayers he got an erection; what is the remedy? He told him to think of his dead parents. He said it would not work. He said think of when you die. He said that would not work either. No matter how many advices of this kind the doctor gave, it was useless. He lost his cool and said ‘little man come and push it up my ass’. He said ‘I have come to you to do whatever you advise’.[49]

In yet another coarse anecdote:

They were mating two donkeys in a village, a pretty woman being the owner of the he-donkey. The she-donkey’s owner told the woman how come you want 5 drachmas for the services of your donkey whereas if I want to copulate with a woman she would demand ten drachmas from me? The woman said ‘bring me a prick like this and I would give you fifty drachmas.’[50]

Mowlana Qotb al-Din, a renowned physician, went to visit an important man who was ill. He asked the patient how he was. He replied that he had had fever but it had now broken, although his neck was still hurting. The physician said let’s hope that that too would break soon.[51]

A judge fell ill and the physician ordered him to be fed wine through his ass. This they did and he got drunk and began to shout and bellow. They asked his son what he was doing. He said he is shouting through his ass.[52]

As it can be imagined there are a number of anecdotes in Obeyd’s Treatise on marriage and the relationship between husbands and wives, not to mention men and youths. He says in one of them:

A young wife went to the judge and complained, ‘I am a young woman and my husband does not serve me right’. The husband said, ‘I serve her as much as I can’. She said ‘I am not content with less than five times a night’. He said, ‘More than three times is not in my power’. The judge said ‘What a strange plight I am in. They don’t bring a case to me unless I have to contribute something myself. But let it be. I will undertake the other two times myself.’[53]

Some of the anecdotes regarding men and youths cannot be repeated in polite society. Let us, nevertheless, quote one which more or less can be.

A Christian boy converted to Islam. The police chief ordered him to be circumcised. At night fall he sodomised the boy. Next day his father asked him how he had found the Muslims. The boy said they are a strange lot, when someone converts to their religion, in the morning they cut off his prick and at night they tear up his ass.[54]

As mentioned, there is much more to Obeyd than has been presented here. But his was the peak of both coarse and subtle classical humour.

Passing over the neo-classical period in which much of the satire in poetry, such as in Yaghma Jandaqi and Qa’ani Shirazi, was coarse though still humorous, we arrive in the twentieth century which among so many other literary and cultural developments saw the popularity of humour both at the literary and journalistic level. The century opened with the movement against arbitrary rule (estebdad) and for the establishment of a constitution, subsequently known as the Constitutional Revolution. Within a short period, young poets and satirists took to the field and published their works in the extensive revolutionary press which had mushroomed up both in the capital and the provinces. The focus was on the aims of the revolution and especially the central objective of ending the shah’s arbitrary powers. The old shah (Mozaffareddin) gave up resistance relatively easily, but he died soon, and when his son and successor (Mohammad Ali) mounted the throne it took two years of struggle between 1908 and 1909 before he would be overthrown.

Ali Akbar Dehkhoda (1879-1955) is everybody’s darling for his famous ‘charand parand’ or charivari column in the newspaper Sur-e Esrafil. He displayed unrivalled talent both for his clear, simple and somewhat colloquial prose and for his highly effective political satire. But what he wrote was often scathing and sometimes libelous. He addressed one piece to Adam Smith whom he described as “the father of political economy.” He said that Smith had been wrong in identifying nature, labour and capital as the three factors of production, because in that case the shah would have no way of increasing his wealth. The shah does not work, he went on to explain, his nature does not function well ever since he has been taking an opium tablet every night, and he has no capital. Would he then not be able to increase his wealth? He would, Dehkhoda went on to say, by holding a circumcision ceremony for the boy heir-designate, Ahmad Mirza, and collect the pishkeshes that courtiers and notables would be obliged to present to him on such an auspicious occasion.^{^[55]}

In another piece he wrote a letter, as if addressed by the shah to the Swiss parliament. In it the shah is made to address the Swiss parliament as “his exalted excellency the parliament of Switzerland”, ask the parliament to arrest all the Iranian dissidents in “his” realm and have them bastinadoed, and end by saying that the letter is accompanied by a ceremonial robe (khal’at) to show the shah’s appreciation of his, i.e., the parliament’s, services.^{^[56]}

Dehakhodâ wrote a few satirical poems as well, but, though sometimes sounding colloquial, they tended to contain archaic words, and in any case were no match for his prose in charand parand.

Seyyed Ashraf (1871-c1934) published the newspaper Nasim-e Shomal (Northern Breeze), all the columns of which he virtually filled single-handedly. He was to a considerable extent Dehkhoda’s counterpart in writing simple and colloquial poetry in support of constitutionalism as well as constitutionalists. He too was vehement in dealing with the shah, the anti-constitutionalists and critics of constitutionalism, but stopped short of Dehkhoda in his personal attacks. Still, he was scathing enough. He accused Sheikh Fazlollh Nuri, a conservative cleric, of putting his faith on sale and destroying the dignity of Muslim people:

دشمن فرقه ابرار منم

قاتل زمره احرار منم

شیخ فضل الله سمسار منم

دین فروشنده به بازار منم

مال مردار حراج است حراج

كو خریدار حراج است حراج…

I am the enemy of the freedom party [the sheikh is made to say]

I am the murderer of all freedom-lovers

I am Sheikh Fazlollah the pawn-broker

I am selling religion in the bazaar…

-Dead stuff I must put on sale

Come buyers, sale, sale!^{^[57]}

Iraj Mirza (1873-1925) who was not a typically political poet was nevertheless moved by the action of Sheikh Fazlollah Nuri in taking sanctuary against the parliament (Majlis) to write:

حجت الاسلام کتک می زند

بر سر و مغزت دگنک می زند …

چک زن سختی بود این پهلوان

ملتفتش باش که چک می زند

دستش اگر بر فکلی ها رسد

گوز یکایک به الک می زند …

حالا در حضرت عبدالعظیم

شیخ در دوز و کلک می زند

ان شاءالله دو روز دگر

خیمه از آنجا به درک می زند

His reverend smacks you

He clubs your head and brain

A big slapper is this champion

Look out or he’ll slap you.

If he gets his hands on men with a bowtie

He would beat the fart of each of them by a stick…

Now in the shrine of Abdol’azim

The sheikh is busy scheming

God willing in a couple of days

He would leave there and camp in Hell…^{^[58]}

Of the poets who continued – indeed advanced – the writing of harsh political poetry in the period of post-revolutionary conflict and chaos, the highest prize should go to Aref-e Qazvini (c.1281-1933) and Mirzade-ye Eshqi (1893-1924). Much of the humorous effects of their political lampoons are due to the coarseness of the language, although Eshqi’s poetry is considerably more mature, and he might even have made a notable poet had he not fallen victim to political assassination at an early age.

The end of World War I and the conclusion of the 1919 Agreement led to an explosion of nationalist passions both in response to the influenza epidemic, famine and chaos, and to what was firmly (but erroneously) believed to be the design to turn Iran into a British protectorate.^{^[59]} It was of course not just poetry. The newspapers opposed to the 1919 agreement – that is, most of the papers published in Tehran were full of innuendos and sometimes downright libels against the government and its leading figures. Eshqi addressed an obscene poem to Vosuq, the prime minister, saying that Iran was not his daddy’s property, was not the rent of his boyhood adventures, and was not the wages of his loose-laced daughter.

ای وثوق الدوله ایران ملک بابا یت نبود

اجرت المثل زمان بچگی هایت نبود

مزد کار دختر هر روز یکجایت نبود…^{^[60]}

Aref went overboard and described the entire Iranian people as asses:

…People of this lawless land are asses

By God both common and grand are asses…

He who heads the ministers,

– I swear by the God of both worlds –

Is a bigger ass than them all

In fact he is a stable-full of asses …[61]

And he ended this long poem with verses which could well be the subject of a separate study:

بلشویک است خضر راه نجات

– بر محمد و آله صلوات –

ای لنین ای فرشته رحمت کن

کن قدم رنجه زود و بی زحمت

هین بفرما که خانه خانه توست

تخم چشم من آشیانه توست…

The Bolshevik is the divine guide to salvation

– Blessed be Mohammad and his people –

O’ Lenin, O’ angel of bliss

Take the trouble if you please

You may nest in the apple of my eye

Please step in, the home is yours…^{^[62]}

The period between the 1921 coup and the fall of the Qajars in 1925 was one of intense power struggle between popular democrats and constitutionalists, on the one hand, and nationalists and modernists, on the other. Towards the end of the period, the body politic was divided between those for and those against a dictatorship led by Reza Khan, but in the first couple of years the situation was a good deal less clear-cut. For example, when Vahid Dastgerdi wrote a poem in praise of Reza Khan and incidentally attacked Eshqi and Aref, Eshqi wrote a long and devastating reply in a qasideh, leaving little to imagination:

ای وحید دستگردی شیخ گندیده دهن

ای که نامیدی همی گند دهانت را سخن

ای شپش خور شیخ یاوه گوی شندر پندری

ای نداده امتیاز شعر با گند دهن

پوستین بر پیکرت چون جلد خرسی کول سگ

هیکلت اندر عبا چون دوش نسناسی کفن

بر سرت عمامه چون آلوده با گچ سنده ای

رو در آیینه نگر باور نداری گر ز من

ای سخن هایت همه مانند گوز اندر هوا

ای زبانت در دهان مانند گه اندر لگن…

O Vahid-e Dastgerdi, filthy-mouthed sheikh

Who call the filth of your mouth poetry!

O louse-eating sheikh in torn-off rags

Who mistake poetry for the filth in your mouth!

Your skin coat is like a bear’s skin on a dog’s shoulder

Your garment looks like a shroud around a baboon

Your turban is like a turd wrapped in plaster

Look in the mirror if you doubt my word

Every word of yours is like a fart in the air

Your tongue in your mouth is like shit in a basin…and so on.^{^[63]}

At about the same time, Eshqi wrote a general condemnation of politics and politicians:

بعد از این بر وتن و بوم و برش باید رید

به چنین مجلس و بر کر و فرش باید رید

به حقیقت در عدل ار در این بام و در است

به چنین عدل و به دیوار و درش باید رید

آنکه بگرفته از او تا کمر ایران گه

به مکافات الا تا کمرش باید رید…

From now on the motherland and its environs must be shat on

Such a parliament and both its high and low members must be shat on.

Truly if the gate of justice is this roof and gate [i.e. the parliament]

Then such justice and its wall and gate must be shat on.

He who has been shitting on Iran up to her waist,

In retribution, up to his waist he must be shat on…^{^[64]}

At the close of the fourth parliament in 1923, both Aref and Eshqi were still pro-Reza Khan. Aref was to continue his support but Eshqi was to renounce it. When the fourth parliament ended, Eshqi wrote his infamous poem in which he haled insult and invective on virtually every politician:

این مجلس چارم به خدا ننگ بشر بود

دیدی چه خبر بود

هر کار که کردند ضرر روی ضرر بود

دیدی چه خبر بود

این مجلس چارم خودمانیم ثمر داشت

ولله ضرر داشت

صد شکر که عمرش چو زمانه به گذر بود

دیدی چه خبر بود…

دیگر نکند هو نزند جفت مدرس

در سالن مجلس

بگذشت دگر مدتی ار محشر خر بود

دیدی چه خبر بود…

This fourth parliament was a blot on humanity,

Didn’t you see it all?

Whatever they did was loss upon loss,

Didn’t you see it all?

Honestly was this fourth parliament of any use?

By God it was all loss

Thank heaven that its life was not to last,

Didn’t you see it all?…

No more will Modarres jump and somersault

In the parliament’s hall

The jamboree of donkeys is now up,

Didn’t you see it all?. . .^{^[65]}

Parvin E’tesami was a prominent woman poet with a pessimistic view of life and society, and was extremely sympathetic towards the meek, weak and downtrodden. And she often employed irony, not satire, in defending the weak and castigating the strong. She does however have a piece in the form of a dialogue or debate, in which she satirizes the symbols and agents of religious authority in a very effective way. The morality police (mohtaseb) stops a drunk and grabs his neck. The drunk tells him that what he has grabbed “is a shirt, not a [donkey’s] rein(این پیراهن است افسار نیست ).”

In the course of the conversation the policeman tells the drunkard he can be held at the mosque before they call the civil police, but he rebuffs that by saying that the mosque is no place for evil-doers. The policeman then says that the house of the judge is nearby so they can go there, but the drunk retorts that the judge himself may be in the tavern. In the end the policeman says that the sober should punish the drunk by whipping them, and the drunk says but no-one here is sober.[66]

Iraj was an outstanding poet and satirist and in no way can justice be done to his work in this brief. He is, among other things, famous for his opposition to face veil. And we may here quote two specimens of his long poems on this subject.[67]

Very briefly, the narrator says that as a young man he had once invited a woman into his home on a bogus pretext. He had then asked the woman to show him her face and the woman had severely rebuked him. As a result, he had changed tactics and, instead, made physical passes at the woman. The woman had responded positively, and they had ended up copulating while she was holding fast onto her hejab, refusing to show her face, because, the narrator jibes, chastity was in her face. The poet then concludes that, compared with liberated women, ignorant women wearing the face veil are far less capable of defending their honour.^{^[68]}

And once more criticizing hejab, he says in another poem that they once drew the picture of a woman above the gate of a caravanserai. The clerics, whom he calls ‘the turban masters,’ hear of it and arrive at the scene without delay. They mix dust with water, make a neqab for the picture, and thus save the faith—he comments—with a fistful of mud.[69]

Another outstanding poet was Poet-Laureate Bahar who did not often write humorous poems but he has a long piece satirising the efforts to turn Iran into a republican dictatorship, in 1923-24, with a couple of stanzas of which we may end this talk[70]:

چو جمهوری شود آقای دشتی

علمدارش بود شیطان رشتی

تدین آن سفیه کهنه مشدی

نشیند عصرها در توی هشتی

کند کور و کچل ها را خبر دار

ز حلاج و ز رواس و ز سمسار

-دریغ از راه دور و رنج بسیار…

ز عدل الملک بشنو یک حکایت

که آن بالا بلند بی کفایت

میانجی گشته بین بول و غایط

کند گاهی تدین را حمایت

شود گاهی سلیمان را مدد کار

که سازد این دو را با یکدگر یار

– دریغ از راه دور و رنج بسیار…

When there appears a republican in Mr. [Ali] Dashti

His standard bearer being that devil of a Rashti [Mirza Karim Khan]

[Seyyed Mohammad]Tadayyon, that insane old Mashti

Sits every night in the entrance hall of his home

Summons the riffraff up to the hashti

From cotton-whippers to pawn-brokers

– Alas the long way and great suffering

Listen to a tale about Adl-al-Molk

That that tall and useless bloke

Between shit and piss he tries to mediate

He sometimes to Tadayyon lends support

And at other times becomes Soleyman’s assistant

To bring these two together

– Alas the long way and great suffering. . .[71]

To conclude this necessarily incomplete talk, ever since the rise of classical literature circa eleven centuries ago, satire was a genre that was used especially in poetry though sometimes in prose as well. In classical era it peaked in the fourteenth century, though it did continue less frequently and less prominently until the twentieth century when it flourished in the constitutional era. In the regime of one-man-rule that followed – and putting aside the occasional “harmless” satirical journals – it necessarily was either unpublished or muted, until the 1940s and early 50s when a number of good satirical magazines emerged in a free atmosphere. But that did not last long, until the revolution of February 1979 changed the nature of many things, including satire.

[1]The revised and extended version of Keynote address delivered at the conference of the International Society for Humour Studies, Montreal, 10-14 July 2017.

[2]Divan-e Mahhasti Ganjavi, ed. Taheri Shahab (Tehran: Tahuri, 1957), 28.

[3]Abolfazl Beyhaqi, ed. Ali Akbar Fayyaz (Tehran: N.P, 1995), 458.

[4]Divan-e Naser Khosrow, ed. Seyyed Hasan Taqizadeh, re.ed., Mehdi Soheili (Isfahan: Enteshar-e Ketabforushi-ye Ta’id, 1956), 616.

[5]Keykavus ibn Eskandar, Qabusnameh, ed. Amin Abdolmajid Badavi (Tehran: Ibn Sina, 1956), 134.

[6]Keykavus ibn Eskandar, Qabusnameh, 136.

[7]Keykavus ibn Eskandar, Qabusnameh, 134.

[8]Divan-e Anvari, ed. Modarres Razavi (Tehran: Bongah-e Tarjomeh va Nashr-e Ketab, 1968), 471-473.

[9]Homa Katouzian, “Satire in Persian Literature, 1900-1940” in Literature of the Early Twentieth Century, From the Constitutional Period to Reza Shah, ed. Ali-Asghar Seyed-Gohrab (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2015), 163.

[10]Mehdi Hamidi, Behesht-e Sokhan (Tehran: Pazhang, 1987), 439.

[11]Divan-e Anvari, Ba Moqaddameh va Tashih va Moqabeleh-ye Hasht Noskheh, ed. Sa’id Nafisi (Tehran: Mo’asseseh-ye Matbu’ati-ye Piruz, 1959), 379.

[12]Hamidi, Behesht-e Sokhan, 438.

[13]Hamidi, Behesht-e Sokhan, 439.

[14]Hamidi, Behesht-e Sokhan, 437.

[15]Ali Asghar Halabi, Tanz o Shukh Tab’i dar Iran va Jahan-e Eslami, Tehran: Entesharat-e Behbahani, 1998, 491.

[16]Sana’i Ghaznavi, Hadiqa al-Haqiqa, ed. Modarres Razavi (Tehran: N.P., 1951), 387.

[17]Hamidi, Behesht-e Sokhan, 329.

[18]Divan-e Khaqani Shirvani, ed. Zia Al-Din Sajjadi (Tehran: Zavvar: 1959), 808-809.

[19]Sajjadi, Divan-e Khaqani Shirvani, 847.

[20]Divan-e Hakim Suzani Samarqandi, ed. Naser al-Din Shah-Hosseini (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1959), 62.akim Suzani SamarqandiHh

[21]Ketab-e Masnavi-ye Ma’navi, ed. Reynold A. Nicholson, Book Five (Tehran: N.P., N.D.), 86-87.

[22]Nicholson, Ketab-e Masnavi-ye Ma’navi, Book 6, 493-495.

[23]Homa Katouzian, Tanz o Tanzineh-ye Hedayat (Tehran: Pardis-e Danesh, 2016), 90.

[24]Katouzian, Satire, 162.

[25]Homa Katouzian, Golchin-e Sa’di (Tehran, Nashr-e Markaz, 2009), 25.

[26]Katouzian, Golchin-e Sa’di, 25-26.

[27]Katouzian, Golchin-e Sa’di, 30.

[28]Katouzian, Golchin-e Sa’di, 32.

[29]Katouzian, Golchin-e Sa’di, 33.

[30]Katouzian, Golchin-e Sa’di, 35.

[31]Katouzian, Golchin-e Sa’di, 36.

[32]Katouzian, Golchin-e Sa’di, 62.

[33]Katouzian, Golchin-e Sa’di, 50.

[34]Katouzian, Golchin-e Sa’di, 55-56.

[35]Katouzian, Golchin-e Sa’di, 58.

[36]Katouzian, Golchin-e Sa’di, 57.

[37]Ghazaliyat-e Hafiz, ed. Adib Borumand, aided by Purandokht Borumand (Tehran: Pazhang, 1988), 329.

[38]Borumand, Ghazaliyat-e Hafiz, 47.

[39]Borumand, Ghazaliyat-e Hafiz, 279.

[40]Borumand, Ghazaliyat-e Hafiz, 422.

[41]Borumand, Ghazaliyat-e Hafiz, 290.

[42]Borumand, Ghazaliyat-e Hafiz, 426.

[43]Borumand, Ghazaliyat-e Hafiz, 452.

[44]“Cat and Mouse,” trans. Dick Davis, in Hasan Javadi, Obeyd-e Zakani (Washington: Mage Publishers, 2008), 129.

[45]Kolliyat-e Obeyd-e Zakani, ed. Abbas Eqbal, re-ed., Parviz Atabaki (Tehran: Zavvar, N.D.; date of preface, 1963), 251.

[46]Eqbal, Kolliyat-e Obeyd-e Zakani,118.

[47]Javadi, Obeyd-e Zakani, 112.

[48]Javadi, Obeyd-e Zakani; Kolliyat-e Obeyd-e Zakani, ed. Abbas Eqbal, re-ed., Parviz Atabaki, 289.

[49]Eqbal, Kolliyat-e Obeyd-e Zakani, 278.

[50]Eqbal, Kolliyat-e Obeyd-e Zakani, 286.

[51]Eqbal, Kolliyat-e Obeyd-e Zakani, 281.

[52]Eqbal, Kolliyat-e Obeyd-e Zakani, 287.

[53]Javadi, Obeyd-e Zakani, 93.

[54]Eqbal, Kolliyat-e Obeyd-e Zakani, 279.

[55]See Maqâlât-e Dehkhodâ, ed., Mohammad Dabir-Siyâqi, vol. 1 (Tehran, 1983), 194-195.

[56]Dabir-Siyâqi, Maqâlât-e Dehkhodâ, 199-200. For a study of Dehkhoda’s life and works see the entry in Encyclopedia Iranica, www.iranica.com/articles/dehkoda.

[57]See Edward G. Browne, Press and Poetry (Hyderabad, India: Osmania University, 1914), 213-214. For Browne’s English translation of this poem’s first five stanzas see 215-216.

[58]See Divan-e Kâmel-e Iraj Mirzâ, ed. Mohammad Ja’far Mahjub, fifth impression (America: 1986), 12-13.

[59]Almost everyone was convinced that this was the case until 1981 when, for the first time, this author argued against it. See Homa Katouzian, The Political Economy of Modern Iran (London and New York: Macmillan), 77-78. For a detailed and documented study of the Anglo-Iranian 1919 Agreement, see idem, State and Society in Iran: The Eclipse of the Qajars and the Emergence of the Pahlavis (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006), chapters 4-7.

[60]See Kolliyat-e Mosavvar-e Eshqi, ed. Ali Akbar Mir-Salimi (Tehran: Mir-Salimi, 1943), 292. For a study of Ehsqi’s life and works see the entry in Encyclopaedia Iranica, www.iranica.com/articles/esqi-mohammad-reza-mirzada. For further and more recent studies of Eshqi and his works see Mohammad Qa’ed, Eshqi, Sima-ye Najib-e yek Anarshist, Virast-e Dovvom (Tehran: Tarh-e Naw, 2001); Solmaz Naraqi, Mirzadeh-ye Eshqi (Tehran: Nashr-e Thaleth, 2009).

[61]Divan-e Aref-e Qazvini, ed. Abdorrahman Seyf-e Azad (Tehran: Seyf-e Azad, 1948), 298.

[62]Seyf-e Azad, Divan-e Aref-e Qazvini, 300.

[63]See Mir-Salimi, Kolliyat-e Mosavvar, 407-409.

[64]Mir-Salimi, Kolliyat-e Mosavvar, 403.

[65]Mir-Salimi, Kolliyat-e Mosavvar, 396-402.

[66]Divan-e Parvin E’tesami, ed. Heshmat Moayyad (Costa Mesa, Calif: Mazda Publishers, 1987).

[67]For a longish study of Iraj’s work, see Homa Katouzian, “Iraj, the Poet of Love and Humour” in HK, IRAN, Politics, History and Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2013).

[68]Divan-e Kamele- Iraj Mirza, ed. Mohammad Ja’far Mahjub (Washington: Shrkat-e Ketab, 1989), 79-84.

[69]Mahjub, Divan-e Kamele- Iraj Mirza, 177-178.

[70]For a longish treatment of Bahar’s humour, see, Katouzian, “Satire in Persian Literature, 1900-1940″; and “Literature and Politics in Iran: 1919-1925.”

[71]Divan-e Ash’ar-e Mohammad Taqi Bahar, Malek al-Sho’ara, ed. Mehrdad Bahar (Tehran: Tus, 1989), I.

Culture and Democracy

Ali Mirsepasi Volume 2, Number 3, Fall 2017

دموکراسی یا حقیقت محصول بحث‌هایی بود که طی اقامتم در ایران و حین تدریس در دانشکدة علوم اجتماعی دانشگاه تهران در سال 1378 با روشنفکران، استادان و دانشجویان داشتم. هر چند این کتاب اولین اثری بود که از من در ایران به چاپ می‌رسید، خوشبختانه مباحث کتاب با نقد و بررسی‌های مفیدی روبه‌رو شد و خوانندگان از آن استقبال کردند و شاید بتوان آن را یکی از علت‌های گفت‌وگو و زمینۀ نقدهایی جدی‌‌‌تر میان روشنفکران و اهل ‌نظر دربارة دموکراسی در ایران دانست. به‌رغم انتشار سه کتاب دیگرم در ایران، عمدتاً از طریق مباحث مطرح در این کتاب به خوانندگان فارسی‌زبان معرفی شده‌ام. با این ‌همه، باید اذعان کنم که ضمن دفاع از بنیان و اساس نظریاتی که در این کتاب به آنها پرداخته‌ام، مطالب مطرح شده در این اثر دربرگیرندة همة موضوعات و مشغولیات ذهنی امروز من نیست و به اقتضای زمان با سویه‌های دیگری از این مباحث و مسایل درگیر شده‌‌ام. بحث‌های ده سال اخیرم دربارة ”سنت‌های روشنفکری در ایران،“ ”اخلاق در حوزة عمومی“ و ”نقد گرایش‌های آزادی‌ستیز در ایران“ به من کمک کرد تا به محدودیت‌های آن کتاب پی ‌ببرم و به زوایای دیگری از تدوین نظریة دموکراسی در ایران بپردازم. می‌کوشم در این مقاله چند نکتة مهم نظری را عرضه کنم که برای پیشبرد مباحث مطرح شده ضروری‌اند.

حقیقت و سیاست

به هر میزان که حقیقت و سیاست از یکدیگر مستقل‌تر باشند، جامعه بازتر، شهروندان شادمان‌تر و بی‌اخلاقی، تزویر و ظلم کم‌رنگ‌‌‌‌‌‌تر خواهد بود. اگر دلسوزانه خواهان زندگی در جامعه‌ای باز و آزادیم، بهتر است فریب اشتیاق برای ساختن جامعه‌ای کامل و متعالی را نخوریم و پاسداران جدایی حقیقت از قدرت (سیاست) باشیم، زیرا اگر آنان که در کار اخلاق، دین و فلسفه‌اند در حوزة سیاست مستقر شوند، هم حقیقت و هم سیاست قربانی خواهند شد. در عوض، اگر گفتمان حقیقت‌خواه به نقد سیاست و قدرت دست‌زند، هم سیاست تلطیف می‌شود و هم جامعه به فضایل مدنی بیشتر راغب خواهد شد. محور اصلی بحث دموکراسی یا حقیقت بر این پایه قرار گرفته است که حقیقت‌‌‌خواهی در حوزة سیاست، عملاً به معنی ادغام حقیقت با قدرت سیاسی است. این در حالی است که قائل شدن به ارجحیت هرگونه نظام فکری (خواه فلسفی یا دینی) سبب فساد فرهنگ و رواج ظلم در جامعه خواهد شد. به گمان من، دموکراسی‌خواهی و حقیقت‌خواهی دو حوزة گوناگون با کیفیات متفاوت و ملاحظات متمایزند و به ‌هیچ‌وجه نباید یکی را جای دیگری پنداشت.

در روشنفکران ایران: روایت‌های یأس و امید کوشیده‌ام به پیامدهای دهشتناک این وسوسة روشنفکرانه بپردازم که جامعه را بر اساس نوع خاصی از حقیقت تعریف می‌کند. در نوشته‌های دیگرم هم کوشیده‌ام به خطرات این شور روشنفکرانه به منظور تسلط مطلق حقیقتی واحد بر جامعه توجه دهم. از آنجا که به‌ هیچ‌وجه و تحت هیچ شرایطی نمی‌توان تعریفی واحد از حقیقت را به کلیت جامعه تعمیم داد، هرگونه تلاش برای برتر دانستن حقیقت در جامعه در عمل منجر به خشونت می‌شود. بنابراین، حوزة فلسفه و دین، که حقیقت در مرکز توجه‌شان است، اگر در مرکز سیاست نباشند، به طراوت و بهروزی جامعه کمک‌های اساسی می‌کنند. اما اگر به قصد تحول اجتماعی به مرکزیت سیاسی وارد شوند، ‌جز اعمال قهر و خشونت چاره‌ای نخواهند داشت. نمونة بارز این امر در فلسفة مارتین هایدگر دیده می‌شود. هایدگر در دنیای مدرن به دنبال تعریفی اصیل از هستی انسان -در مقابل هستی‌های متفاوت واقعاً موجود- در نهایت به خشونت و نازیسم رسید. همچنین، می‌شود تبعات ناگوار این نوع نگرش را در تلاش کسانی دید که در روسیه، چین، کوبا و کشورهایی از این دست مارکسیسم را بر واقعیات انسانی و اجتماعی مرجح دانستند. صورت دیگری از این مسئله را در حمله به افغانستان و پاکستان و عراق می‌بینیم.

برای اجتناب از سوء تفاهم باید بگویم که بحث من این نیست که فلسفه، و حتی فلسفه هایدگر که به آن اشاره کردم، در ذات خود خشونت‌زا و قهرآمیزند و از این‌ رو باید از آن گریخت. کاملاً به عکس، فلسفه و حتی فلسفة هایدگر و دیگر حوزه‌های تعریف حقیقت، اگر قصد غلبه بر عرصة سیاسی جامعه را نداشته باشند، نقشی مثبت در اصلاح و بهبود جامعه خواهند داشت و نتیجة پرداختن به آنها توسعۀ آزادی فکری و فرهنگی در جامعه است. توسل به راه ‌‌‌حل‌‌‌های فلسفی به منزلۀ حقیقتی مطلق و یکّه در جوامع بحران‌زده می‌‌‌تواند یکی از راه‌ حل‌‌‌های سیاسی و اجتماعی باشد که پیامدهایی تراژیک در بر خواهد داشت. برای نمونه، ایده‌های مارکس هرچند به دیدن و شناختن محدودیت‌ها و دشواری‌های نظام سرمایه‌داری کمک شایانی کرد، اما زمانی به فاجعه بدل شد که در کشورهایی کوشیدند این نحوة نگرش را چونان حقیقتی مطلق به نگرش غالب در جامعه بدل سازند. تجربة جنبش‌ها و کشورهایی را که با توسل به فلسفة مارکسیسم انواع آزادی را از مردم سلب کردند و در نهایت سبب تحقیر و سرکوب مردم شدند باید از این منظر کاوید. شاید اگر به اندیشة مارکس در این جوامع به ‌منزلة نگرشی انتقادی توجه می‌شد، از بسیاری از تجارب ناگوار تاریخ اجتناب شده بود.

دین هم در حوزة سیاسی سرنوشت مشابهی دارد. به گفتۀ جان لاک، به محض اینکه دینداران در پی تعریف و تعیّن همة زوایای جامعه با قرائت خاصی از دین باشند، زبان و بیان دین به ناگزیر با قهر و خشونت می‌آمیزد.

تقدم دموکراسی

بنابراین، برای بررسی وجود یا عدم وجود دموکراسی در جامعه و برای بحث بر سر توسعه یا گفت‌وگو بر سر موانع دموکراسی در جامعه باید بیش از هر چیز به تحلیل و ارزیابی نهادها، چه حقوقی و به اصطلاح ”گفتمانی“ و چه مادی و حقیقی، پرداخت. بحث از تاریخ، فرهنگ، عادات و آداب و رسوم بسیار لازم است و گاه آنها با ارزش‌های دموکراتیک یا استبدادی یکی می‌دانیم. باید توجه داشت که این ارزش‌های فرهنگی و تاریخی با نهادهای دموکراتیک یکی نیستند.

این منظری خطاست که دموکراسی نوعی ”اندیشه“ یا ”فرهنگ“ است و وجود آن بدون قبول آن فرهنگ و بدون درک تفکر و اندیشة دموکراتیک تصورناپذیر است، زیرا نه با تجربة تاریخی تحقق دموکراسی هم‌خوان است و نه با تجربة دموکراسی در دورة معاصر. با این ‌همه، پذیرش تقدم فرهنگ بر واقعیات مادی و اجتماعی در ایران سبب بروز دشواری‌های جدی و جانکاه نظری و عملی در تدوین و پیشبرد دموکراسی شده است.

در دورة روشنگری، زمانی‌که عمدتاً شرایط مادی و اجتماعی برای شکل‌گیری نهادهای دموکراتیک فراهم شده بود، این بحث مطرح شد که فرهنگ خردمدار سبب انقلابی نو در اروپا شده و امکان تحقق لیبرالیسم سیاسی و سکولاریسم فرهنگی را فراهم کرده است. اما این تفسیر فلسفی از توسعة مدرنیته و دموکراسی در اروپا بیش از آنکه نشان از واقعیاتی تاریخی داشته باشد، نشان‌دهندة نوعی خودشیفتگی اروپاییان به فرهنگشان بود و روایتی تک‌بُعدی از تجربۀ دموکراتیک اروپایی به ‌دست می‌دهد. پیامد این نگرش تاریخی، یعنی اتکای یکجانبه بر پیدایش و توسعة دموکراسی به مثابه نوعی فرهنگ و ایدئولوژی، باعث ناسازگاری این فرهنگ با فرهنگ‌های دیگر، خاصه فرهنگ‌هایی با ریشۀ غیرمسیحی، شده است.

این تلقی رایج که دموکراسی فرهنگی خاص است و فقط با رسیدن به آن فرهنگ می‌توان به دموکراسی دست ‌یافت، از یک سو باعث رونق بحث‌هایی پیرامون اخذ تمدن اروپایی و تجددخواهی و از سوی دیگر غرب‌زدگی شده است. در این بحث‌های چالش‌برانگیز، دموکراسی کم‌وبیش پروژه‌ای کم‌اهمیت و سطحی جلوه داده می‌شود و عملاً با رویکردی ایدئولوژیک اولویت به سکولاریسم یا ظواهر و روابط فرهنگ غربی داده می‌شود. این طرز تلقی غالباً برای حکومت‌های استبدادی سکولار توجیهات موجهی فراهم می‌کند.

در ایران، متأسفانه نقد دموکراسی با این پیش‌فرض ملازم بوده است که مدرنیته و دموکراسی پروژه‌هایی ”فرهنگی“‌اند و بنابراین، جریان انتقادی از یک‌سو با فرهنگ ”غربی“ به ‌مثابه فرهنگ حامل دموکراسی و ارزش‌های آن خصومت می‌ورزد و از سوی دیگر، به‌ دنبال پالایش فرهنگ ”ایرانی/اسلامی“ از عناصر فرهنگ غربی برمی‌آید و می‌کوشد فرهنگ بومی یا ایرانی/اسلامی اصیل را در ایران رواج دهد. پیامد چنین نگرش چیزی نخواهد بود جز استقرار نوعی استبداد و فرهنگ به ظاهر ”خودی“ تحت عنوان سیاست فرهنگ دینی و بومی. بدیهی است که در تقابل با این نوع ”فرهنگ دینی، بومی“ شاهد پیدایش و گسترش گروهی هستیم که پرچم ”فرهنگ سکولار و لاییک“ را بالا می‌برند.

آیا دموکراسی فرهنگ دارد؟

حال اگر دموکراسی را پدیده‌ای مادی و دربرگیرندة روابط و نهادهای اجتماعی، سیاسی و حقوقی در نظر بگیریم و تحقق آن را با تحولات و توسعة جوامع مرتبط بدانیم، پرسش اساسی پیش ‌رو این است که آیا روابط اجتماعی و امکانات مادی است که جامعه را تبدیل به جامعه‌ای باز، آزاد و برخوردار از اعتماد و حقوق مدنی می‌کند. اگر چنین است، نقش نهادهای حقوقی و ارزش‌هایی که سازمان‌ها و روابط دموکراتیک را در جامعه تقویت و تشویق می‌کنند و سبب توسعه و طراوت آنها می‌شوند چگونه توضیح‌پذیر است؟ آیا رابطۀ میان ارزش‌ها و نهادهای دموکراتیک دلیل ارجحیت امور فرهنگی نیست؟

به گمانم این پرسش به حدی مهم و بنیادین است که در شرایط کنونی ایران ‌باید هرچه وسیع‌‌‌تر طرح شود و در خصوص آن بحث و گفت‌وگو و تبادل‌ نظرهای مداوم صورت گیرد.

فضیلت‌های دموکراتیک

هرچند گمان می‌کنم تحقق و توسعة دموکراسی و اساساً هر جامعۀ مدنی آزاد به معنی متداول امروزی امری مادی است که در زمینه‌های اجتماعی و همراه با رشد و توسعة نهادهای مدنی و اجتماعی دموکراتیک معنا می‌یابد، مسایل بسیار مهم دیگری نیز وجود دارند که در تبیین نظری توسعه و پیدایش جامعه‌ای دموکراتیک بسیار اساسی‌اند و به ما ثابت می‌‌‌کنند که تحقق دموکراسی تقلیل‌پذیر به پدیده‌های مادی نیست. جامعة‌ آزاد و نیک و باطراوت جامعه‌ای است که در آن هم میان فرد فرد شهروندان جامعه روابط اخلاقی مدنی وجود دارد و هم در آن وسایلی فراهم می‌شود که بهره‌گیری از منابع تاریخی، اخلاقی و فرهنگی آن سرزمین و نیز تجربة دیگر جوامع -چه تجربة معاصر جوامع و چه تلاش تاریخی تمدن بشری برای ساختن جامعه‌ای نیک- به منظور تحقق جامعه‌ای بهتر، آزادتر و عادلانه‌تر را ممکن می‌سازد. به سخن دیگر، حفظ، توسعه، شادابی و تعالی دموکراسی در سطح کلی و نهادهای مدنی و دموکراتیک در سطح عینی و مشخص تا حد زیادی در پیوند با توانایی، خلاقیت، اخلاقی بودن و فرهنگ شهروندان جامعه است که از طریق برجسته کردن، عزیز شمردن و بحث و گفت‌وگو دربارة ارزش‌های دموکراتیک فرهنگی به ظهور می‌رسد؛ امری که من آن را ”فضیلت اخلاقی و دموکراتیک“ نامیده‌ام.

در همین زمینه است که با ریچارد رورتی (Richard Rorty, 1931-2007) و آرای او نیز هم‌عقیده‌ام که انسان از طریق منطق یا روندی پیش‌بینی‌شده به دموکراسی نمی‌رسد و چه ‌بسا بسیاری با استدلال و منطق استبداد را مرجح بدانند. بنابراین، دموکراسی نوعی گزینش اخلاقی است که در تجربة زندگی معاصرمان آن را پذیرفته‌ایم: شیوه‌ای که ما را خودمختارتر می‌سازد، رنج و دردمان را کمتر می‌کند و امکانات زندگی شرافتمندانه و به دور از خشونت را برای اقشار بیشتری از جامعه ممکن می‌سازد. از این ‌رو، دموکراسی در حیطة اخلاقی مذاکره‌پذیر است و قابل بحث و گفت‌وگو.

جان دیویی (John Dewey, 1859-1952)، متفکر دیگر امریکایی، در این زمینه بحث‌های هوشمندانه‌ای مطرح کرده است. او دموکراسی را پروژه‌ای اجتماعی قلمداد می‌کند و تحقق و توسعة آن را مشروط به همبستگی، تعاون و نیک‌خواهی برای همة شهروندان جامعه و سراسر جهان می‌داند. در عین ‌حال، دیویی به عنصری ”غیرمادی“ و ”غیرساختاری“ در خصوص امکان تحقق، به‌ویژه توسعه و تعمیق دموکراسی، هم اشاره می‌کند که همان خلاقیت، ایمان و کلاً ارزش‌های اخلاقی است که سبب تعالی جامعه می‌شوند، انسان را با تاریخ و دستاوردهای آن مرتبط می‌کنند و تصور آزادی و عدالت را چونان اعتقاد بشر ممکن می‌سازند.

دیویی در کتاب ایمانی مشترک (A Common Faith) به طرح این نکته می‌پردازد که قدرت خلاقیت و خیال در انسان کیفیت و پیامدهایی بسیار مهم و اساسی برای توسعه و حفظ دموکراسی دارد: اولاً، قدرت خلاقه و خیال انسان باعث نوعی تعهد یا ایمان اخلاقی به نیک‌خواهی برای خود و دیگران شده و سبب می‌شود که شهروندان جامعه از منافع و محدودیت‌های شخصی و محلی‌شان فراتر رفته، با نیک‌خواهی و حس تعاون خواهان بهبود اوضاع و آزادی دیگران در جامعه شوند، زیرا قدرت خیال انسانی کیفیتی دموکراتیک و اخلاقی دارد و سبب پیوندی مستحکم میان ارزش‌های اخلاقی و آزادی‌خواهانه در همة تمدن‌های بشری می‌شود و سنت عدالت‌خواهی و آزادی‌خواهی را زنده و پویا نگه می‌دارد.

ثانیاً، جان دیویی قدرت خلاقه و خیال تاریخی بشر را نوعی ”ایمان به سرنوشت مشترک“ انسان‌هایی می‌داند که بخش مهم و بنیادین هستی‌شان را نیک‌خواهی یا عدالت‌خواهی قلمداد می‌کند. به همین سبب، از منظر دیویی انسان‌هایی به ظاهر تنها، محدود و کم‌قدرت در خیالشان به جزیی از کلیتی وسیع، تاریخی و متعلق به همة تمدن‌های بشری تبدیل می‌شوند که تعهداتی مشخص، انسانی و اخلاقی دارند و با کمک قدرت خلاقۀ انسانی‌شان قادر به خلق پدیده‌ها و دستاوردهای عظیم در حوزه‌های علمی، هنری و فرهنگی می‌شوند. دیویی بر این باور است که فارغ از چنین تعهدی و بدون قبول سرنوشت مشترک انسانی، دانشمندان و شاعران و نویسندگان و رهبرانِ مبارزات آزادی‌خواهانه قادر به خدمت نبودند.

این فیلسوف پراگماتیست در بسط نظریة خود رابطة دموکراسی را در مقام پروژه‌ای اجتماعی با پدیدة دین توضیح می‌دهد، زیرا در نظر دیویی اغلب انسان‌هایی که در طول تاریخ در راه نیک‌خواهی، کم‌ کردن درد و رنج انسان‌‌‌ها و بهبود و عدالت مبارزه کرده‌اند و امروزه به آنها افتخار می‌کنیم، عمدتاً در مقام انسان‌هایی دینی و مؤمن چنین تعهدی را احساس کرده‌اند. بنابراین، دیویی اصرار دارد که فرهنگ و ارزش‌های دموکراتیک زمانه را باید در رابطه‌ای خلاقانه با این شکل از تجربۀ دینی در نظر آورد. به عقیدة او، طرح این مسئله که جامعة دموکراتیک جامعه‌ای سکولار است، انگاره‌ای جامد و ساده‌انگارانه است که به نوعی سبب تعصب و شکنندگی روابط و ساختارهای دموکراتیک می‌شود. البته باید این نکته را در بحث دیویی در نظر گرفت که اصرار او بر تجربۀ انسان‌های دینی است که در کار نیک‌خواهی بوده‌اند، تجربه‌ای که باید به آن ارج نهاد و از آن تأثیر پذیرفت. دیویی این تجربه را از نهادها و دکترین دینی متمایز می‌کند.

از منظر او، تجربۀ انسانی از دین تجربه‌ای خلاق، خیالی و نیک‌خواهانه و عدالت‌جویانه است، در حالی‌ که تجربة نهاد دین معمولاً بسته و متعصب و یکسونگر است که آگاهانه یا ناخودآگاه مانع خلاقیت و تحقق خیال‌پردازی و نیک‌خواهی می‌شود.

طرح این مفهوم تاریخی‌ـ فرهنگی از دین در نظریة دیویی واجد دو نکتة اساسی است: اول آنکه او دین را نه از طریق الهیات یا باورهای متافیزیک، بلکه با متعالی‌ترین تجربیات عینی و اجتماعی تعریف می‌کند که متعهد به تعالی و نیکی و رشد جامعه است. برخلاف پندار کسانی ‌که دین را آیینی فراتر از انسان‌ها و به مراتب بالاتر و ارجح‌تر از آنها می‌دانند، جان دیویی تجربة دینی را بدون پرده‌‌‌پوشی بیان اصلی و اساسی حقیقت دینی می‌داند که تاریخ بشری را بدل به عامل تعالی انسانی، تعهد به نیک‌اندیشی، آزادی و عدالت‌خواهی می‌کند. در این فرایند، تجربة دینی یا امر دینی از محدودیت نهاد دین آزاد می‌شود.

همچنین، در نظریة دیویی و نگاه او نسبت به دین، امر دینی نوعی تعهد اخلاقی به منظور اصلاح، بهبود و تعالی جامعه و امری کلی و عمومی به حساب می‌آید. او حتی ریشة عشق، علاقه و مسئولیت دانشمندان و هنرمندان و کارشناسان، کار معلم یا هر انسان نیک‌خواه دیگر را در امر دینی می‌بیند. به باور او، تجربة دینی (امر دینی) پدیده‌ای منحصر به فرد و از لحاظ فرهنگی محدود به آموزه‌ها و ارزش‌های یک دین خاص نیست. تجربة دینی تجربه‌ای تاریخی و اجتماعی است که برای درک آن باید زمان، مکان و روابط اجتماعی، سیاسی و فرهنگی جوامع را در نظر گرفت. مثلاً تجربة دینی در تاریخ اولیة مسیحیت با تجربة دینی مسیحیان در زمان حال یکی نیست. مسیحیت در دوره‌های معینی در ساختار و آداب و رسوم مرتبط با کلیسا و نیز در مدارس و نظام آموزشی و همچنین در عرصة سیاست و حقوق حاضر و فعال بود. در قرون وسطا، هر فرد مسیحی در خانواده، روستا یا شهری عمدتاً مسیحی متولد می‌شد و در همان منطقه رشد می‌کرد و سپس می‌مرد. اما امروزه مسیحیان بعد از تولد انتخاب‌های گوناگونی در پیش دارند.

ایران و اسلام

با توجه به بحث‌هایی که مطرح شد، یعنی تقدم نهادهای دموکراتیک بر فرهنگ، و نیز فهم دین به منزلة نوعی تجربة خلاق بشری و تعریف تجربه دینی متناسب با زمان و مکان مشخص، حال باید بررسی کرد که دین از منظر روشنفکران و سیاستمداران ایرانی چه ارتباطی با ایجاد توسعه و تعمیق دموکراسی در ایران داشته است.

نگرش غالب در میان برخی از روشنفکران ایرانی، و البته نگرش غالب در میان متفکران اروپایی و شرق‌شناسان، این است که دموکراسی و مدرنیته ‌ــ که پروژه‌هایی یگانه تصور می‌شوند ‌ــ پروژه‌هایی سکولارند و نوعی فرهنگ عمومی و ایدئولوژیک با ‌نام ”سکولاریسم“ پیش‌‌‌زمینه و بنیاد فرهنگی و ارزشی تحقق توسعۀ جوامع مدرن دموکراتیک است. بر اساس این باور ایدئولوژیک، امکان تحقق دموکراسی و مدرنیته بدون قبول نظام فکری سکولار به منزلۀ حقیقت مطلق تصورناپذیر است.

اغلب شرق‌شناسان بر اساس چنین پیش‌فرض نظری به طرح این پرسش ایدئولوژیک می‌پردازند که آیا اسلام با سکولاریسم و ارزش‌های دنیای جدید هم‌خوانی و آشتی دارد یا خیر و پاسخ به این پرسش بدون استثنا منفی است. در این نوع نگاه، با استناد به این امر که اسلام قائل به جدایی میان حوزۀ دین و سیاست نیست و با تأکید بر برخی از شاخص‌های تاریخی اسلام، مانند نظامی‌گری خشونت‌آمیزش که می‌‌‌دانیم در فرهنگ قبایل عرب پیش از ظهور اسلام ریشه دارد، و با برجسته کردن این امر که توسعة اسلام از طریق جنگ بوده است و دست‌‌‌آخر با تأکید بر نگرش افراطی اسلام بر ”تسلیم“ به خدای یکتا نتیجه می‌‌‌گیرند که هرگونه امکان آشتی میان این دین با دموکراسی ناممکن است. این گروه از روشنفکران در ادامة قضاوتشان پدیدة ”اسلام سیاسی“ و بنیادگرایی کنونی را نیز ادامۀ همان روند تاریخی خشونت در این دین ارزیابی می‌کنند.

در میان روشنفکران ایرانی هم بحث‌های این حوزه کمابیش مشابه مباحث شرق‌شناسان است و مهم‌ترین انتقادات به اسلام و اشاره به عدم هم‌خوانی آن با مدرنیته تقریباً تکرار بی‌چون‌وچرای مباحث شرق‌شناسان است. در این مباحث، فرهنگ جامعه در آرای معدودی از متفکران یا متألهان سرشناس خلاصه می‌شود و از طریق قرائت چند کتاب مرجع و متون دوران قدیم به این نتیجۀ از پیش مشخص می‌رسند که فرهنگ و ارزش‌های اسلامی و ایرانی از بنیاد با فردگرایی، اندیشۀ انتقادی و آزاداندیشی بیگانه است و حتی با آن خصومت دارد.

برخی از روشنفکران مدافع این نگرش از طریق تحلیل رابطة فرهنگ با مدرنیته و دموکراسی به این نتیجه می‌‌‌رسند که جامعة بشری پدیده‌ای یگانه و یکرنگ و یکدست است. آنان حتی اعلام می‌‌‌کنند که فرهنگ نیز پدیده‌ای بدون گوناگونی و فارغ از خصلت‌های متفاوت است. پاره‌‌‌ای دیگر از این گروه نیز، متأثر از وجود طرز رفتار حکومت دینی، سکولاریسم را کم‌وبیش به منزلة نوعی ایدئولوژی فرهنگی/سیاسی و یگانه طریق مخالفت به منظور رهایی از وضع موجود قلمداد می‌کنند و از منظر دفاع از ”سکولاریسم“ به نقد ”فرهنگی“ می‌پردازند.

عمدۀ مباحث در این تئوری کلان‌‌‌نگر عملاً غیرتاریخی‌ و تکرار گفته‌های شرق‌شناسان دربارۀ اسلام تاریخی است. چنین نقدی به سیاست و حکومت امروز ایران در عمل منجر به تمرکز عمده بر پدیده‌ای کلی با نام ”فرهنگ“ و طرح تفسیرهای سیاسی از آن می‌شود. پیامد چنین نگرشی نادیده انگاشتن تمایز میان حوزة قدرت (ظلم) و پندارها و رفتارهای توده مردم است: رادیکالیسمی به ظاهر فرهنگی که در اغلب اوقات دچار نوعی محافظه‌کاری غیراخلاقی هم می‌‌‌شود.

بحث من البته این نیست که تحلیل شرق‌شناسان اروپایی به این علت بی‌اعتبار است که محصول دورة استعمار اروپایی است، بلکه بحث من عمدتاً معطوف به زمینه‌های تاریخی و اجتماعی نظریات شرق‌شناسان است که نباید و نمی‌شود نسبت به آنها بی‌توجه بود. در این نوشته فرصت کالبدشکافی این بحث نیست، اما پاره‌‌‌ای از متفکران معاصر انتقادات بسیار مهمی به محدودیت بحث‌های شرق‌شناسان و پیش‌زمینه‌های تئوریک آ‌‌نها وارد کرده‌اند که متأسفانه روشنفکران ایرانی چندان توجهی به این انتقادات ندارند.

بنابراین، فرهنگ جامعه را نمی‌توان در ایده‌های چند متفکر صاحب‌‌‌نام یا چند کتاب، هرچند مهم، خلاصه کرد. مردم در اقشار و گروه‌های گوناگون و در زمان‌های متفاوت در زندگی روزمره‌شان برخی از ارزش‌های فرهنگی را می‌پذیرند یا آن ارزش‌ها را متحول می‌کنند. حتی ممکن است برخی از ارزش‌های دینی یا فرهنگی را بخشی از جامعه، مثلاً گروه‌‌‌هایی از نخبگان، بپذیرند. اما این امر لزوماً باعث سازگاری بخش‌های دیگر جامعه با آن ارزش‌های فرهنگی نیست. در اغلب جوامع، حتی از مقدس‌ترین ارزش‌ها و مثلاً اسلام، تفسیرهای بسیار گوناگون و متفاوتی وجود دارد. تأسف‌بار است که اکثر روشنفکران ایرانی مجموعه‌ای از بحث‌های مهم و انتقادی در خصوص مفهوم فرهنگ را که در چند دهۀ اخیر مطرح شده و امروزه تقریباً مورد قبول عموم نظریه‌پردازان علوم اجتماعی و انسانی است نادیده گرفته‌اند. اکنون سال‌هاست که متفکران علوم اجتماعی به نظریاتی که فرهنگ را به پدیده‌ای واحد، منسجم، جامع و غیرقابل تحول تقلیل می‌دهند یا به نظریاتی که این پدیده‌‌ را به کل جامعه و تاریخ تعمیم می‌دهند توجهی جدی نشان نمی‌دهند. سنتی که در قرن نوزدهم در علوم انسانی رونق بسیار یافت و تا سال‌های 1950 هم ادامه داشت و در واقع عملاً نظریه‌پردازی در علوم اجتماعی و انسانی را به حوزۀ ”متافیزیک“ برد و تمام هم و غم‌‌‌اش توسل به نوعی کلی‌گویی ظاهرفریب و پیامبرگونه بود که غرب و تاریخ و فرهنگ آن را محصول خِرد و آزادی و شرق را محکوم به بردگی و خشونت می‌دانست. این نگرش خودپسندانه هر آنچه را در عمل و به شکل عینی و تاریخی برخلاف باروش بود بی‌اهمیت جلوه می‌داد.

فرهنگ را نمی‌شود پدیده‌ای با معنی و مفهوم قالبی و از پیش‌‌‌ دانسته تلقی کرد. حتی در غرب هم ”فرهنگ“ مفهومی به نسبت تازه و جدید است. مثلاً در انگلستان تا اواسط قرن نوزدهم میلادی استفاده از مقولۀ ”فرهنگ“ رواج چندانی نداشت. به ‌جای آن مقولة ”فضیلت“ در نوشته‌ها و بحث‌های نظری به‌ کار گرفته می‌شد و از جمله هنگام بحث دربارة ارزش‌های دموکراتیک به فراوانی از فضیلت‌های مدنی صحبت به میان می‌آمد و نه از فرهنگ مدنی. در ایالات متحد امریکا نیز در بحث‌هایی که حول محور دموکراسی‌خواهی مطرح می‌شد، توجه ویژه‌ای به رابطۀ میان نهادهای دموکراتیک و ارزش‌هایی معطوف می‌شد که فضیلت‌های جمهوری‌خواهی (دموکراسی‌خواهی) را بازتاب می‌‌‌دادند و البته این مباحث خود بسیار متأثر از بحث‌های دورۀ روشنگری در انگستان بودند.

مفهوم فضیلت از یک‌سو، به زبان امروزی، به برخی از ارزش‌های فرهنگی نظیر نیک‌خواهی عمومی، اعتماد به دیگران، پذیرفتن آزادی دینی و مانند اینها اشاره داشت و از سویی دیگر، این ارزش‌ها در رفتار و زمینه‌هایی مادی و اجتماعی معنا پیدا می‌کردند که شامل تحقق و توسعۀ دموکراسی بود. از این لحاظ، مفهوم ”فضیلت“ بسیار نزدیک به مفهوم ارسطویی ”فضیلت اخلاقی“ بود که در آن، ارزش‌های فرهنگی در بستری معنا می‌یافت که انسان‌ها در زندگی روزمرۀ خود انتخاب یا نفی می‌کنند و در نتیجه، تعامل و تعاون و همکاری با یکدیگر را می‌آموزند. بعدها با شکل‌گیری جامعۀ امریکایی و شکل‌گیری بافت‌های طبقاتی گوناگون، مفهوم فرهنگ رفته‌‌رفته به ‌جای مفهوم فضیلت نشست. در چنین زمینه‌‌‌ای بود که فرهنگ، عمدتاً شهرنشینی، بیان برخی ارزش‌ها و رفتار طبقۀ فاخر و متمول جامعه شد. به ‌‌‌تدریج در تلقی مدافعان این نگرش، مفهوم فرهنگ با توجه به افزایش سطح سواد و تحصیلات رسمی، آگاهی از هنر و ادبیات و حتی با طرز لباس پوشیدن، آداب صحبت کردن و ظواهر زندگی بورژوایی یکی پنداشته شد و کار به‌ جایی رسید که دیگر رابطة میان ارزش‌های دموکراتیک و فرهنگ به فراموشی سپرده شد و فرهنگ نیز خصوصیتی طبقاتی به ‌خود گرفت.

بررسی مفهوم فرهنگ در ایران هم تاریخی جالب توجه دارد. در جامعه‌ای عمدتاً کشاورز و با وجود نگرش محافظه‌کار و نخبه‌پرور ایرانی، غیر از ارزش‌های دینی، ادبیات هم عمدتاً بیان ارزش‌های متعالی جامعه بوده است. دو واژة ”ادب“ و ”علم“ را شاید بتوان نزدیک به آنچه امروزه فرهنگ می‌نامیم دانست و سپس آنها را در شکلی تاریخی بررسی کرد. ادب عمدتاً با شعر و سوادآموزی مرتبط دانسته و ”عالم“ به کسانی اطلاق می‌‌‌شد که در حوزة تدریس و تحصیل و مکتبخانه اشتغال داشتند. البته همة این‌ مقولات در حوزة ادبی اتفاق نمی‌‌‌افتاد و گاه عالمان به نشر فلسفی مبانی مذهبی هم می‌پرداختند و امور روحانی را نیز عهده‌دار بودند. اما نکتة جالب ‌توجه در تلقی تاریخی و به اصطلاح سنتی مفهوم ”ادیب“ و ”عالم“ است که به‌رغم ویژگی غلبه‌گرایانۀ این مفاهیم، به گونه‌ای منصب نزدیک‌ترند تا فرهنگ. ادب در عین‌ حال که به شعر و شاعری و زیستن در حوزۀ ادبیات اشاره داشت، بیان نوعی رفتار و زیست هم بود. از سوی دیگر، عالم کسی بود که از یک طرف سر در حوزۀ علم و تحقیق داشت و از سوی دیگر، قرار گرفتن در این جایگاه به مدلی از زیستن اشاره می‌کرد. در عین حال، در ایران کسانی مانند حافظ در شعرهایشان با کنایه و اشاره به نقد قشر به اصطلاح بافرهنگ جامعه می‌پرداختند، یعنی قشری که لزوماً ارتباطی میان دانسته‌ها با رفتار و کردارشان نیست. این امر نشان‌دهندۀ این است که جامعة ایرانی با تیزهوشی فرهنگ ایستای اقشار بالای جامعه را فاسد می‌دانست و به نقد آن کمر می‌بست. با حضور انکارناپذیر این تفاسیر، مشخص است که قشر بافرهنگ جامعه بهره‌ای انحصاری از برخی منصب‌های اخلاقی داشت.

امروزه در جامعۀ دانشگاهی و حوزۀ علوم اجتماعی غرب و در ایران دو نوع نگرش عمده دربارة فرهنگ وجود دارد: یکی فرهنگ را مجموعه‌ای بسته، مستقل و مصون از تغییرات تاریخی می‌داند و آن را بیان متعالی‌ترین ارزش‌های جامعه می‌پندارد که به دست اقشار نخبه در نهادهای مرتبط با این اقشار مانند نهاد دین، نهاد هنر، ادبیات رسمی، میراث تاریخی و معماری تجلی پیدا می‌کند. در این نگرش، فرهنگ و ارزش‌های تجربی مردم مستقل نیستند و صرفاً بازتولید فرهنگ فاخر در زندگی روزمرۀ مردم‌اند. اگر چنین بازتولیدی وجود نداشته باشد، نشان بی‌فرهنگی تودۀ مردم است. این نوع نگرش نسبت به فرهنگ گاه در دین، فرهنگ اسلامی یا فرهنگ سنتی و گاه با توجه به ملیت در فرهنگ ایرانی یا ترکی و گاه در مقایسه با غرب در روایت‌های عقب ماندگی فرهنگی ایرانیان بازنمایی می‌شود.

در قرن نوزدهم و اوایل قرن بیستم، زمانی‌که متفکران علوم انسانی در پی تدوین نظریات کلان فرهنگ بودند، برخی از متفکران اروپایی، به ویژه متأثر از فرهنگ جدید اروپایی، نظریاتی مشابه بحث ماکس وبر (Max Weber, 1864-1921) دربارة پدیده‌ای با نام روح سرمایه‌داری یا اخلاق سرمایه‌داری را به منزلة فرهنگ و سرنوشت زمانه مطرح کردند. بحث‌های دیگری نیز حول محور فرهنگ مدرن در تضاد با فرهنگ سنتی یا فرهنگ و جهان‌بینی غربی در مقابل فرهنگ شرقی مطرح شد.

امیل دورکم (Emil Durkheim, 1858-1917)، که تقریباً هم‌زمان با ماکس ‌‌‌وبر می‌زیست، هرچند بسیاری از پیش‌فرض‌های وبر نظیر دوگانگی روشن میان سنت‌/مدرن را پذیرفته بود، اما بحث‌ و استدلال‌‌‌هایش دربارة مقوله فرهنگ بسیار هوشمندانه‌تر از وبر بود. نکتة قابل ‌توجه در نظریات دورکم این است که او، چه در تعریف دین و چه در تحلیل فرهنگ و چه در تبیین و توضیح رابطة میان حوزه‌های تولید معنا (فرهنگ) و پدیده‌های دینی و مقدس و عرفی این جهانی، همواره به زمینه‌های اجتماعی این پدیده‌ها در نهادهای اجتماعی توجه شایانی نشان می‌دهد.

شاید مهم‌ترین نکته‌ای که دورکم به آن اشاره می‌کند و بر آن تأکید می‌‌‌ورزد این باشد که میان وجود مادی و اجتماعی ما (یعنی انسان به مثابه واقعیت و تجربۀ اجتماعی) و آنچه به آن فرهنگ اطلاق می‌‌‌شود (یعنی دین و سایر ارزش‌ها، باورها و آداب و رسوم) رابطه‌‌‌ای متقابل وجود دارد. این رابطه نه فقط در سطح تودۀ مردم و زندگی روزانه، بلکه در سطح فرهنگ متعالی و در سطح باورهای مقدس نیز وجود دارد و فعال است. در نگاه دورکم، فرهنگ در حقیقت منبعی معنابخش به زندگی اجتماعی ماست. به بیانی دیگر، حوزه‌های فرهنگی است که زندگی و نهادهای اجتماعی ما را در کلیت خود برمی‌سازد و از این طریق باعث توسعه و گسترش آنها می‌شود.

در تعریف دورکم از فرهنگ نکاتی مهم قابل بررسی است: شناخت فرهنگ بدون شناخت روابط و نهادهای اجتماعی و بدون شناخت تجربۀ زندگی روزمرة مردم در جامعه ناممکن است. در نظر دورکم، فرهنگ پدیده‌ای مستقل یا صرفاً تولید ذهن افراد جامعه نیست. فرهنگ و پدیده‌های فرهنگی رابطه‌ای جدی و انداموار با سبک زندگی ما دارند و از آن متأثرند و در عین‌ حال که به شیوۀ زندگی ما معنا می‌دهند سبب تداوم یا تغییر آن نیز می‌شوند. بنابراین، فرهنگ در این نگرش پدیده‌ای بسیار مهم و تاثیرگذار بر جامعه محسوب می‌‌‌شود و به‌رغم اینکه پدیده‌ای مستقل نیست، اما می‌تواند در همبستگی جامعه نقش بسیار مؤثری داشته باشد و بنابراین، باعث پدید آمدن تعاون و شادمانی شود. در حالی ‌که این ظرفیت را نیز دارد که به ایجاد بحران، آشفتگی و بی‌ثباتی دامن بزند.

با این ‌همه، نظرات دورکم دربارة فرهنگ بعد از او به دامچالة تفسیرهای یک‌بُعدی جامعه‌شناسان مکتب کارکردگرایی سقوط کرد و به تأکید دورکم بر این نکته که حوزة فرهنگ نقشی اساسی در تحول جامعه دارد چندان توجهی نشد. از سوی دیگر، نفوذ مارکسیسم در محیط‌های دانشگاهی نیز به مهجور ماندن نظریات دورکم کمک شایانی کرد. مارکسیست‌‌‌ها غالباً به دورکم همچون متفکری محافظه‌کار می‌نگریستند که منش فرهنگ را مهم می‌دید.

بسیاری از هواداران مارکسیسم هم نظرات مارکس دربارة ارتباط هستی اجتماعی با ذهن انسان را به بوتة فراموشی سپردند. مارکس، به‌خصوص در نوشته‌های بعد از انتشار ایدئولوژی آلمانی، از سیطرة بلامنازع آرای هگل و تفکر او منزجر شده بود تا جایی‌که در واکنش به او هیچ امکانی را برای موجودیت مستقل پدیده‌های فرهنگی نظیر ایدئولوژی، فلسفه، دین و مانند اینها قائل نبود. با وجود این، مارکس نقد‌های بسیار جالب و خلاقی را در آثار و مکتوباتش از جمله در دست‌نوشته‌های فلسفی و اقتصادی یا نقد فلسفة حق هگل صورت‌بندی کرد و شناخت پیچیده‌ای از رابطۀ میان هستی اجتماعی با دنیای ذهنی انسان در جهان سرمایه‌داری به مخاطبانش عرضه کرد. متأسفانه هیچ‌‌‌یک از این تزها مورد عنایت قرار نگرفتند.

مارکسِ اولیه نظریات بسیار جالبی دربارۀ ارتباط متقابل میان خودآگاهی انسان با روابط مادی طرح کرد که با نظریات ساده‌انگارانۀ بعدی او که در آنها فرهنگ را فقط انعکاسی از زیربنای اقتصادی می‌دید تفاوت‌های عمده داشت.

از سال 1940م به بعد، گروهی از متفکران مارکسیست، که به مکتب فرانکفورت شهرت یافتند، تلاش کردند بحث‌های فرهنگی را با نگرش تازه‌تری از اندیشۀ مارکس به جامعۀ روشنفکری عرضه کنند و امروزه عمدتاً میراث فکری این گروه نمایندۀ بحث‌های فرهنگی به شمار می‌آیند. برخی از متفکران مکتب فرانکفورت در طرح نظریات مارکس در خصوص جامعة مدرن سرمایه‌داری به طرح و توضیح فرهنگ جوامع سرمایه‌داری و چگونگی دموکراتیزه‌شدن باورهای فرهنگی و مدرنیته‌ در خصوص تحولات مادی و تکنولوژیک ‌پرداخته‌اند. بحث والتر بنیامین (Walter Benjamin, 1892-1940) دربارة رابطه فرهنگ و مدرنیته از جملۀ این بحث‌هاست. اما در بین برخی از متفکران این مکتب، از جمله آدورنو (Theodoe W. Adorno, 1903-1969) و مارکوزه (Herbert Marcuse, 1898-1979)، نگرش رادیکال ضدروشنگری قوت گرفت. متفکران مکتب فرانکفورت با دنباله‌روی از نیچه، نقدهای مارکس به سرمایه‌داری را که نقدی بسیار پیچیده و دوگانه بود و جوانب انتقادی فراوان داشت به منظری بسیار نخبه‌گرایانه و اشراف‌‌‌منشانه بدل کردند که متأسفانه در انتها منجر به نفی بسیاری از سنت‌های نظریۀ انتقادی شد.

باید به این نکته اشاره کرد که متفکران و نظریه‌پردازان مکتب فرانکفورت، خاصه آدورنو، اندیشمندانی با بصیرت و هوشمند بودند و به‌رغم بازگشت به سنت نیچه‌ای، کمک شایانی به شناخت انحصاری جامعۀ مدرن کردند. یورگن هابرماس (Jürgen Habermas, b. 1929) نیز ازجمله متفکران معاصری است که مکتب فرانکفورت را در سنت انتقادی و دموکراتیکش ادامه می‌دهد. برخلاف دیگر متفکران مکتب فرانکفورت، هابرماس در طرح و نظریه‌پردازی دربارة جامعه مدرن نگرش دو وجهی مارکس را مد نظر دارد و با برخی از تناقضات نظریة مارکس هم آشناست. اما او به‌ جای حل این تناقضات یا بازگشت به سنت ضددموکراسی‌خواهی (اندیشۀ هایدگری)، نوعی آشتی میان سنت انحصاری مارکس و سنت دموکراسی‌خواهی لیبرال پدید آورده است. نکتة جالب ‌توجه اینجاست که هابرماس در طرح نظراتش به دورکم هم توجه دارد و از او تأثیر پذیرفته است.

هم‌زمان با پیدایش مکتب فرنکفورت و نظریه‌پردازان فرهنگ آن و هم‌زمان با غلبۀ اندیشۀ مارکسیستی در جوامع روشنفکری، سنت مهم دیگری هم به طرح نظریات انتقادی از جامعة سرمایه‌داری و به ‌ویژه نقد اخلاقی و فرهنگی آن همت گماشت. مهم‌ترین متفکر این مکتب جان دیویی، فیلسوف نظریة دموکراسی، در امریکاست. دیویی منتقد جدی نظریات آن دسته از روشنفکرانی بود که اساس، پیدایش و توسعۀ جامعۀ مدرن و دموکراسی را در قبول برخی ارزش‌های نظری و فرهنگی جهان‌شمول (خردگرایی) خلاصه می‌کردند. این گروه از روشنفکران که مورد خطاب دیویی قرار داشتند عملاً قائل به وجود نیازهایی شناخت‌شناسانه و برتری و تقدم آنها بر روابط و نهادهای اجتماعی و زمینه‌های مادی زندگی در جامعه بودند.

جان‌‌‌دیویی، و اصولاَ سنت فکری پراگماتیسم، قائل به دوگانگی و جدایی ذهن و عین نیست؛ یعنی موضوعی که از زمان افلاطون مطرح بوده است. در نظر دیویی، ”زندگی مادی انسان“ و حوزۀ ”آگاهی و شناخت“ دو حوزۀ جدای از هم تعریف نمی‌‌‌شوند و لزوماً یکی (عینیت) بر دیگری (ذهنیت) تقدم ندارد. براساس این نظریه، روابط اقتصادی و اجتماعی در هر جامعه و در نهادهای فرهنگی آن، از دین گرفته تا هنر و علم و غیره، همگون با جامعه است.

دیویی با تکیه و توجه دقیق بر این روند مستند و عینی (تجربه) نظریۀ‌‌‌ بسیار جالب و شجاعانه‌‌‌ای مطرح کرد و توانست عین و ذهن را آشتی دهد. در نظر او، آنچه مهم و واقعی است عینیت یا برداشت‌هایی فرهنگی ناشی از ”تجربۀ“ انسان در زندگی روزمره است.

شاید روشنفکر ایرانی نیز با توجه به دستاوردهای عظیم و گاه بسیار پرهزینۀ تاریخ معاصر بشر این ‌‌‌بار ناگزیر باشد به مقولة ”تجربه“ به منزلۀ پدیده‌ای واقعی و ملموس که رابطه‌ای درونی و مستقیم با هستی انسان دارد و از قضا به تصویر انسان انتزاعی هگلی نیز شباهتی ندارد، عنایت بیشتری مبذول دارد و برای استقرار دموکراسی از آن بهره‌‌‌ها گیرد، زیرا این مقوله (تجربه) در عین‌حال در زمینه‌ای مادی و در همگامی با انسان‌های دیگر و تجربۀ مشترک آ‌نها معنا پیدا می‌کند.

اسلام، ايران و دموكراسى

باتوجه به بحث‌هايى كه پيش از اين مطرح شد، اکنون به نقد نظریه‌ای می‌پردازم که ميان گروهی از روشنفكران ايران همچنان مقبولیت دارد. این دسته از روشنفکران چنین می‌پندارند که برای آزادى و آبادانی اين جامعه باید به نوعى انقلاب يا خانه‌تكانى فرهنگى دست ‌زد. به باور من، قائل بودن به پديده‌اى با ‌نام فرهنگ و اشتياق برای تحول بنیادین فرهنگ به منزلة پيش‌شرط و بنياد تحول اجتماعی عمدتاً برآمده از سنت فكرى ضدروشنگرى و راديكاليسم اشرافى (محافظه‌كارانه) است. این نظریه دمکراسی و مدرنيته را به پديده‌هایی فرهنگى يا اخلاقى تقليل مى‌دهد و به سبب خصومت با آن، برای بازسازی نوعى اصالت فرهنگى می‌کوشد. در نهایت، این نظریه با توجه به ”شرايط محلى“ ممكن است به انواع گفتمان‌هاى محافظه‌كارانۀ ناسيوناليستى و دينى یا گفتمان‌هایی نظیر آنها بدل شود.

ويژگى مشترك ‌-و غالباً پنهان- اين نگرش عملاً خصومت با دموكراسى و خوار پنداشتن آن است که تحت پوشش نظريه‌پردازى دربارة بنياد‌هاى فكرى و روش‌شناسی و شناخت‌شناسى، دموكراسى را امرى ثانوی و مهجور مى‌پندارد. اما اگر با رهیافت نظري متفكران دنياى جديد، از کارل ماركس گرفته تا امیل دورکم و به‌خصوص جان دیويى، فرهنگ را امرى اجتماعى بدانیم كه در بافت روابط موجود جامعه ریشه دارد و با شرايط و نهادهاى مادى جامعه در ارتباط نزديك و متقابل است، آن‌‌‌گاه شايد بهتر و روشن‌تر بتوانیم به بحث‌هايى بپردازیم كه امروزه در کشور ما پیرامون ايران‌خواهى و اسلام‌خواهى ‌به منزلة پديده‌هایی فرهنگى و تاريخى جریان دارد و قرار است ارزش‌هاى عام جامعه به‌واسطة آنها معنا پیدا کند.

پيش از وارد شدن به اين بحث بايد گفت كه توسل به دين یا مليت در كارزارهاى سياسى تقريباً در همة جوامع معمول و مرسوم است. از اين ‌منظر، اين داعیة سياسى كه فرد يا گروهى از مردم هویت و اهداف سياسى‌ خود را با ايران‌خواهى و اسلام‌مدارى تعريف می‌كنند و در اغلب موارد آنها را يكى می‌دانند نیز ادامه و بازتاب تأثیر دیرپای همین نگرش است.

زمينه‌هاى همبستگى ذهنى

جان دیویی نقدی مهم و تاریخی بر ”سكولارهاى افراطی“ (militant secularism) وارد کرده است. اساس نظریة دیویی اين است كه هر جامعۀ دموكراتيك با داشتن نظام حقوقى دموكراتيك و نهادهاى سياسى مردم‌‌‌سالار لزوماً نمی‌تواند آزادی و دموکراسی را حفظ کند و آن را توسعه دهد، زیرا بدون وجود نوعى تعهد (commitment) عمیق و همگانی به اين باور كه دموكراسى و زيستن آزادانه و در صلح بودن انسان‌ها بخشی مهم و انضمامی از هويت و ارزش‌های بشری است، دمکراسی صرفاً به پدیده‌ای بروکراتیک و بیگانه با ارزش‌های مدنی تقلیل می‌‌‌یابد. او سپس نتیجه می‌‌‌گیرد که چنین تعهد اخلاقی‌ای با قبول برخى از مهم‌‌‌ترین فضيلت‌هاى مدنی و اجتماعى ممکن می‌شود. ارزش‌هایی كه زندگى یک شهروند جامعة دموكراتيك را از تنهایی و ”جزء“ (insular) بودن به زندگى اجتماعى ديگر شهروندان پيوند مى‌زند و در یک روند آرام و طبیعی -و در نتیجه کم‌‌‌هزینه- زندگى امروز ما را به تاريخ گذشتۀ ما و تمدنى كه به آن تعلق تاريخى داريم پیوند می‌دهد. این پیوند در عین‌حال به ما امکان می‌دهد که با فرهنگ‌ها و تمدن‌هايى مرتبط شویم كه نشان از تعالی و فضیلت‌های تاریخی تمامی بشريت دارند. در چنین بستری است که ذهنيت تاريخى ما تلاش طولانى، فداکاری‌‌ها و رنج بردن خیل عظیمی از مردم براى تحقق آزادى و عدالت در جامعه را درک می‌کند و هستى‌مان را با گونه‌ای هستى تاريخى/فرهنگى وسيع‌تر و متعالى‌تر مرتبط می‌‌‌سازد؛ ارتباطی كه از زندگى‌ مادى و روزمره فراتر رفته و به زندگی جمعی ما هویت و معنا می‌بخشد. بدين‌سان، بستر رشد و شکوفایی فضيلت‌هایی مدنی از قبیل احساس اعتماد، همبستگی و اميد به آینده فراهم می‌‌آید و این فضیلت‌ها به‌ تدریج و در فرایندی بلندمدت به ارزش‌های اصلی آن جامعه تبدیل و در آن نهادینه می‌شوند. از این منظر، دموكراسى پديده‌اى‌ است كه هم در عمل مفيد و هم از لحاظ اخلاقى نيك و مآلاً خواستنی است.

بنابراين، دو مبحث نظرى در این زمینه اهميت پيدا مى‌كند: 1. توجه به دموكراسى به‌منزلة نوعی پديدار اجتماعى معاصر و ارتباط آن با زندگى و تجربة تاريخی وسیع‌تر و میراث متعالی بشر و 2. تمرکز بر آن دسته از ارزش‌هاى فرهنگى و تاريخى كه امكان چنين ارتباطى را با سرنوشت تاريخى بشريت به منظور حصول آزادى و عدالت فراهم كرده‌اند و امروزه نیز سبب همبستگى اجتماعى و ملى در جوامع دموكراتيك‌اند.

با توجه به این دو نكتة اساسی است كه تجربة تاريخى مهمى كه همة‌ جوامع دنيا از سر گذرانده‌اند و هويتشان در روابط و نهادهاى اجتماعى نیز از آن متأثر بوده‌ است (پديده‌هايى كه امروز به آن ”فرهنگ“ مى‌گویيم) اهميت پيدا مى‌كند. تعریف فرهنگ از این منظر ازجمله با تعريف مردم‌‌‌شناسانۀ آن که به ارزش‌ها و آداب و رسوم زندگى روزمره توجه دارد و نیز با تعريف نخبه‌گرایانه‌ای كه فرهنگ را در ارزش‌هاى كلى قشر نخبۀ جامعه خلاصه می‌‌‌کند قطعاً متفاوت است. البته فرهنگ به آن معنى كه در اين‌ بحث در نظر داريم شامل هر دو تعریف مى‌شود. اما در تعریف جامع‌‌‌تر چندان حد و مرز روشنى ميان ارزش‌ها، باورها و رفتارهاى فرهنگىِ به اصطلاح متعالى جامعه با ارزش‌ها و آداب و رسوم مردم عادى وجود ندارد. مهم‌تر اينكه بنا به این تعریف، فرهنگ گذشته و حال، سنت‌هاى فرهنگى و کلاً پديده‌هاى جديد فرهنگى از یکدیگر جدا نیستند. پديدة فرهنگ در تعريف ما از ويژگی‌هاى دوركمى برخوردار است. معنی این سخن آن است که این پدیده در زندگى روزمره نقش مهمى دارد و به آن معنا و شكل مى‌بخشد و در عین‌حال، خود این پدیدار در متن زندگى تحول پيدا می‌‌‌کند و معناى جديدترى به دست می‌‌‌آورد. با این ‌همه، تلاش براى تمایز قائل شدن میان ارزش‌های فرهنگی برآمده از سنت گذشته و آن دسته از پدیده‌های فرهنگی که محصول تحولات دنیای جديدند چندان ممكن نيست. اغلب ارزش‌ها و رفتارهاى فرهنگى آمیزه‌‌‌ای از هر دو است. با اين ‌حال، بحث من اين نيست كه فرهنگ تعریف‌ناشدنی، فهم‌ناپذیر و ناشناختنی است، بلکه كاملاً برعكس، همة پديده‌هاى فرهنگى به‌رغم آنكه ممكن است آ‌نها را برآمده از سنت و تاريخ قدیم یا صورت بیانی از دنیای جديد و مدرن، دينى و مقدس، عرفى یا اين دنيايى بدانيم، به احتمال قريب به‌‌يقين نشانه‌اى از همة این خصوصیت‌ها را در خود دارند. اگر به این ویژگی پیچیده توجه نکنیم و قادر به درک روابطی نزديك و متقابل نباشیم -منظورم روابط پُرتنشی است که بین مفاهيمى چون قديم و جديد، مقدس و اين‌جهانى، ما و ديگرى، وجود دارد- احتمالاً دچار آشفتگی اندیشه خواهیم شد.

برای شناخت قديم باید به عناصر و تجربه‌هاى معاصری رجوع کرد كه شناخت ما را از سنت‌هاى گذشته شكل می‌دهد و برای فهم عمیق‌‌‌تر دين ناگزیریم به امور اين دنيايى نظر بکنیم كه صد البته بخش بسيار مهمى از الهيات و تجربه‌هاى دينى را شامل می‌‌‌شود. به این صورت است که شناخت غنى‌تر و بهترى از پديده‌هاى فرهنگى حاصل خواهد شد.

حال با توجه به نكات پیش‌گفته ناگزیریم بر این نکته پای بفشاریم كه پديده‌اى با نام اسلام يا ايران كه ذاتی يگانه و از لحاظ تاريخى ماندگار و بدون تغيير و تحول داشته باشد و از ارزش‌ها و خصوصياتی جهان‌شمول برخوردار باشد در عالم واقع وجود ندارد. اصرار بر اين امر كه ”يك اسلام“ يا ”يك ايران“ وجود دارد، در بهترين حالت، اين دو پديدۀ اجتماعى، فرهنگى و تاريخى را تقريباً از اكثر كيفيات درونی و غنایی‌‌‌شان كه ناشی از تجربة تاريخى و فرهنگى در طى هزاره‌هاست تهی می‌‌‌کند و تحولی تدریجی را که این پدیده‌ها به خود دیده‌اند خواهی‌‌‌نخواهی نادیده می‌گیرد.

درک اسلام و ايران جدا از قرن‌‌‌ها تلاش و تجربة خلاقانه میلیون‌‌‌ها مردم و ندیدن رنج‌‌‌ها و آرزوها و بيم و اميدهاى مسلمانان و ايرانيان در اقصی نقاط جهان، در واقع تهى کردن این دو پدیده از هستی واقعی و تاریخی‌‌‌شان است و در نهایت، معنایی انتزاعی بخشیدن به این پدیده‌‌‌های انضمامی است.

بايد توجه داشت كه زمينۀ بحث من در اين نوشته شناخت الهيات اسلامی و مسایل اعتقادی‌‌‌اش نيست. اسلام مانند هر دين و آیين ديگر در حیطة اعتقادى خود به ‌نوعی با جامعه و بیرون از خود ارتباط دارد كه معمولاً در چارچوب قبول الهيات مقدس و مناسكى معنا پيدا مى‌كند. در چنین بستری است كه تفسيرهاى گوناگون از دين و اسلام عرضه می‌‌شوند. اتفاقاً در همین زمینه است که خصوصيت ”مقدس“ دين مطرح می‌‌‌شود و اساس بحث قرار می‌گیرد. مثلاً در کشور ما، بخش بزرگی از مؤمنان و دين‌داران ایرانی به الهيات شيعى عقيده دارند و از مناسك مربوط به آن پيروى مى‌كنند. ولى در دنیای کنونی، بخشى هم از این دین‌داران سنى هستند و بخش‌هاى ديگر هم، مانند دراویش و نیز انواع دیگر فرقه‌‌‌های اهل حق، پيرو الهيات ديگری‌اند. هرچند از لحاظ تاريخى حوزۀ تقدس و دامنۀ قبول باورهاى متافيزيكی عملاً تغییرناپذیر است، با اين‌همه، نظام‌های متفاوتی با نام اسلام در کنار هم كم‌وبيش در صلحی به سر می‌برند که مستلزم احترام و قبول تقدس مناسک يكديگر است.

بحث ما در اينجا نقش فرهنگى و عمومى اسلام است كه نه مى‌شود و نه بايد آن را در قالب تعريفی از يك نظام فقهى و الهی خلاصه و محدود کرد. همان‌گونه كه مسلمانان و آنها كه به دين‌ باور دارند و خود را مؤمن و مسلمان مى‌دانند بخش مهمى از زندگى روزمره، آرزوها و رنج و دشواري‌‌‌شان به واسطة مسایلى است كه لزوماً ارتباط مستقيم و نزديكى با دين و الهياتشان ندارد و عمدتاً مربوط به اين دنيا و مسایل عرفى و مادى و سياسى جامعه است، به همان شكل هم اسلام مانند هر دين زندۀ ديگر، هرچند بر مبنای الهياتى مقدس استوار است، اما به‌ مثابه پديده‌ای اين‌جهانى با اقتصاد، سياست و مسایل ديگر عرفى روبه‌روست و از آنها هم تأثير مى‌گيرد و هم بر آنها تأثير مى‌گذارد. از اين منظر، اسلام در بُعد اجتماعى و عرفى تاريخ‌هاى گوناگونى دارد و در دنياى معاصرهم هستى و معناى متفاوتی یافته است. مثلاً از لحاظ تاريخى، اسلام در دنياى عرب با زبان عربى رابطه‌اى دارد كه مسلمانان فارسى‌زبان يا ترك يا مسلمانان هند و پاكستان با آن زبان ندارند. در اغلب جوامع عربى، مثلا در مصر، يادگيرى زبان (خواندن و نوشتن) عربى و آموزش رسمى دينى عملاً يكى است و كودك در شش یا هفت سالگى فراگرفتن زبان مادرى‌اش (عربى) را با فراگرفتن قرآن شروع مى‌كند. جالب است كه چنين رسومى هم در بین كودكان مسلمان رواج دارد و هم در بین مسيحيان و علت آن است كه حداقل تا نسل گذشته، هر دانش‌آموز مسيحى مصرى تقريباً به اندازۀ دانش‌آموز مسلمان تعليمات دينى را فرا مى‌گرفت، زیرا جدايى ميان زبان و دين در جوامع عربى ناممکن بود. به همين سبب، از قرن نوزدهم به بعد كه انديشۀ مدرنيته و گرايش به سكولاريسم در دنياى عرب مطرح شد، متفكرانى مانند طاها حسین زبان عربى و مسئلۀ جدايى زبان و دين را به بحث و نقد کشیدند. در دنياى عرب، عمدتاً تاريخ هم به‌گونه‌اى پیچیده با دين پيوند دارد، به قسمی كه آغاز تاريخ و پيدايش اسلام و اعراب يك زمان و يك روایت مشترک دارند. اما مثلاً در تركيه، كه اهالی آن چند قرن بعد از پيدايش اسلام به آن گرویدند و مهاجران آسيايى به اسلام‌ محسوب می‌شوند، روابط چندانى ميان زبان، تاريخ و دين وجود ندارد. با این‌ همه، کار مصطفی کمال آتاتورك و سكولارهاى این کشور كه تصور می‌کردند با تغيير الفبا به الفبای غربى و تبدیل تاريخ اسلامى به مسيحى جامعة تركيه سكولار خواهد شد، عملاً بى‌معنى بود. دليلى وجود ندارد كه قبول کنیم باور ترك‌ها به اسلام کمتر از ساير جوامع است. جدايى ميان برخى از عناصر فرهنگى زندگى‌ ترک‌ها (زبان، تاريخ، نژاد) با دين اسلام هم قبل از پيدايش جمهورى تركيه و کمال‌‌‌آتاتورك وجود داشت و هم بعد از آن وجود دارد. از سوى ديگر، در ايران بسيارى از روشنفكران و متفكران ايرانى زبان فارسى را بيان‌کنندۀ ويژگى‌هاى فرهنگ غيرعربى و غيراسلامى ايرانیان مى‌دانند. حتى برخی از تجددخواهان ايرانى اواخر قرن نوزدهم (آخوندزاده، کرمانى، تقى‌زاده)، با تأکید بر نقش فرهنگی زبان فارسى و تلاش برای پالايش آن از عربى، در انديشة رواج سکولاریسم و تضعیف نقش اجتماعى، فرهنگى و سياسى اسلام در ايران بودند. از منظر تاريخى، زبان فارسى در ايران زبان شعر و حوزۀ تخيل و خلاقيت ايرانيان بوده است و در حوزة فلسفه، الهيات و حوزه‌های سنتى ”علم“ زبان عربى رواج داشته است. بنابراین، همواره نوعى تنش ميان زبان و دين در ايران وجود داشته است.

تصور ايرانيان از تاريخ هم با اعراب مسلمان متفاوت است. بی‌‌‌شک ايرانيانی كه بر تاريخ پیش از اسلام در فرهنگ ایران تأکید می‌کنند، به‌نوعى در انديشة كم‌رنگ كردن نقش اسلام در هويت ايرانى‌اند. همچنین، می‌توان گفت آن عده از نخبگان ایرانی كه نقش اسلام را در ايران برجسته کرده‌اند، قصدشان مهجور ساختن مقام تاریخی ایران پیش از اسلام است.

تبیین و شناخت ماهيت پديده‌هايى مانند دين و مليت در جوامع معاصر، ازجمله شناخت رابطة اسلام و ايران یا ملیت با دین، کاری به‌‌‌ غایت دشوار و پيچيده است، چرا که در ايران معاصر تصورها، تفسيرها و نگرش‌هاى متفاوت و متناقضی از نقش دین و ملیت به‌ دست داده شده است. اغلب این نظریه‌ها تقلیل‌گرایانه و تک‌بعدی‌اند. برای نمونه، تصورى كه از اسلام در جوامع عربى يا تركيه يا در ايران وجود دارد نبايد سبب شود كه گمان بریم مثلاً در همۀ كشورهاى عربى تاريخ پيش از اسلام را با جاهليت یکی می‌پندارند. همچنین، باید پذیرفت که در تركيه بسيارى از مسلمانان ترك ‌خواهان تعريف هويتشان براساس تاريخ اسلام‌اند و در ايران بسيارند كسانى كه هر نوع بحث از ايران را به منزلة خصومت با اسلام می‌دانند. بنابراين، ناگزیریم توجهی جدى به اين امر داشته باشیم كه هيچ فرهنگ، تاريخ يا جامعه‌اى به صورتی یکدست و غيرقابل تغيير و تحول داراى يك فرهنگ، هویت یا تصوری از دين و مليت خود نیست.

با توجه به این همه، در نظر آوردن اسلام بدون در نظر گرفتن موقعیت جغرافيايى بحث و بدون توجه به رابطة اسلام با عناصر فرهنگي و زمينه‌هاى اجتماعی ديگر بى‌معنى خواهد بود. اين امر هم در خصوص شناخت تاريخى اسلام از بدو پيدايش و تحول آن و همچنین، در خصوص شناخت از آن در دورۀ معاصر بايد مد نظر باشد. اعتقاد و باور به اینكه پديده‌‌اى فرهنگى، مانند ملیت ايراني، به‌گونه‌ای روشن، خالص و دست‌نخورده وجود دارد كه مى‌توان به آن دسترستى پيدا كرد، افسانه است. پديده‌هايى كه ما آنها را اصالت‌گرایی يا ايراني‌گرايى مى‌دانيم در واقع محصولات ذهنی انسان‌های این زمانه‌اند و بيش از اینكه بیانی عینی و ”صادق“ از ایران یا اسلام باشند، نمایندۀ آرزوها و بیم و امیدهای دنياى موجود و شرايط فرهنگى و اخلاقى آن‌اند.

پديدة اسلام ناب و اصیل يا دورة طلايى اسلام کمتر با تجربۀ تاریخی آن مربوط است و اساساً این مفهوم پروردة معاصران ‌‌‌ماست. اسلام، مسيحيت يا هر دين و آيين ديگرى كه تاریخشان به 2 هزار سال يا 1500 سال پيش می‌رسد، حتى در دورة آغازينشان نیز پديده‌هايى خالص و یکدست نبوده‌اند و از تأثيرات جوامعى كه در آن به وجود آمدند و فرهنگ و روابط اجتماعى آن جوامع بر کنار نبوده‌‌‌اند. شايد مثال برده‌دارى و توضيح آن اين نكته را روشن كند. شكى نيست كه هم مسیحیت و هم اسلام در مقام دو آیين اخلاقى ظاهر شدند كه هدفشان تغيير روابط فاسد و ناعادلانه در جوامع بود. در كتاب‌های مقدس اين دو دين، چه در تعاليم كلى و چه در آموزه‌‌‌ها و سنت‌های اخلاقی‌‌‌شان، عدالت و عزيز شمردن انسان‌ها بسيار مهم و اساسى تلقى شده است. به این ترتیب، در نگاه اول چنين به‌نظر می‌رسد كه این ادیان باید با يكى از مهم‌ترين، رايج‌ترين و غيراخلاقى‌ترين و حقارت‌بارترين اموری كه هم در روم و هم در شبه‌جزيرۀ عربستان رواج داشت، يعنى برده‌دارى، مخالفت کنند. به عبارت دیگر، باید مخالف آن باشند كه انسانى را كه خداوند او را آزاد خلق كرده و ويژگی‌هایی متعالی به او بخشیده مملوک انسانی دیگر شود و با او مانند حيوانات و اشيا رفتار کنند. اما مى‌دانيم كه مسيحيت و بعدها كليسا هيچ‌گاه جرئت نکردند اعلام کنند که برده‌دارى كارى ضدمسيحى و ناميمون و گناه است. در مسيحيت، كه در دوره‌اى در آن هزاران گناه خلق کردند و مردم را به بهانه‌های بسیار کوچک مجازات می‌کردند و كليسا بر همة امور نظارت داشت، برده‌دارى آزاد بود. در امريكا، در اوایل دورة مبارزه با برده‌دارى، كليساى سفيدها شايد مهم‌ترين نهاد رسمى بود كه برده‌دارى را امرى برمی‌شمرد كه مسيح آن را نيك مى‌دانست. در اسلام هم برده‌دارى پذيرفته شد، هرچند شریعت اسلام تشويق می‌کرد كه برده‌ها آزاد شوند و برده‌دارى را ارزشى نيكو در اسلام به حساب نمى‌آورد. اما خريد و فروش برده، گرفتن انسان‌ها برای بردگی و برقراری رابطة جنسى با زنان برده (کنیز) هم در کلیسا و هم در اسلام پذيرفته شده است، تا جایی‌که در اسلام مقررات و دستورات بسیاری در این زمینه موجود است. حال پرسش اساسى اين است كه چرا اين دو دين بزرگ تاريخ بشر و دو سنت ملهم از دستورات اخلاقى و الهى نيك زیستن و عزت انسانى برده‌دارى را تحمل کردند. مسلمانان و حتی بسیاری از معتقدان و رهبران آ‌نها چگونه به خريد و فروش برده می‌‌‌پرداختند، درحالی‌که برده انسانى مانند ساير انسان‌هاست كه در انجيل و قرآن به صراحت تکریم شده است؟

پاسخ من به نكتة بالا همان است كه هم اميل دوركم و هم انسان‌شناس معاصر، کلیفورد گیرتز (Clifford Geertz, 1926-2006)، به آن اشاره كرده‌اند. بنا به تعاریف، دين محصول نوعی نظام فرهنگى و اخلاقى عام است كه به زندگى، رفتار و كردار جامعه و مردمش خط و جهت مى‌دهد و آنها را راهنمايى مى‌كند و براى اينكه چنين كند، خود بيان‌کننده و بازتابندۀ برخى از مهم‌ترين ارزش‌هاى فرهنگى و اجتماعى آن جوامع است و دقيقاً به همين علت است كه اديان هم‌تراز با جوامع پدید مى‌آيند و همراه با جوامع تحول می‌‌‌پذیرند. امروز مسيحيان و مسلمانان برده‌دارى را كارى زشت و ناپسند مى‌دانند و حتى مسلمانانى كه قصدشان ظاهراً بازگشت به ارزش‌‌‌های صدر اسلام است نیز خواهان بازگشت به برده‌دارى نيستند.

اسلام ايرانى چيست؟

در تحليلی تاريخى و اجتماعى از پیدایش و توسعة اسلام، خصوصيات اساسى آن را بايد مرتبط با نيازهاى مبرم اجتماعى اعراب قرن هفتم میلادی در شبه‌جزيرة عربستان ديد و در این زمینه آن را توضيح داد. اعراب در دورة پيش از اسلام نوعى روابط اجتماعى نسبتاً مستقل قبیله‌ای داشتند. این قبایل تا حد زیادی از يكديگر مستقل بودند و در نوعى جنگ و جدال دایم به‌ سر می‌بردند. از نظر فرهنگى، اعراب چندان درك جدى و عمیقی از دين يا هر نوع مجموعۀ اخلاقى نداشتند و عمدتاً در بین آنان پرستش بُت‌هاى محلى و حتی خانوادگی و شخصى مرسوم بود. وضع در این زمینه هم بدین‌گونه بود که اعراب خود را در بسيارى از موارد قدرتى بالاتر از موضوع مورد پرستش‌شان می‌دانستند. به‌رغم اين‌‌كه یکی دو شهر در شبه‌جزيرة عربستان وجود داشت، اما اين سرزمین دور از ”مراكز تمدنى“ آن زمان، یعنی ايران و روم و مصر، قرار داشت.

دو دين عمدة ديگر آن زمان، يهوديت و مسيحيت، نیز حضور كم‌رنگى در این منطقه داشتند. با این اوصاف، روى ‌هم ‌رفته، جامعة قبيله‌اى بسيار پراكندة اعراب تقريباً از هر نوع ارزش و پديدۀ‌ فرهنگى كه امكان وحدت، اتحاد يا اشتراك فكرى و اخلاقى را سبب شود به دور بودند. زندگى پراكندۀ قبيله‌اى پُر از تنش و خشونت و وجود روابط طبقاتى ناعادلانه کل جامعۀ اعراب را با بحرانی عمیق روبه‌رو کرده بود که محتاج تحولی جدی بود.

از سوى ديگر، زيستن در چارچوب قبیله در آن زمان نوعى ارزش و مجموعه‌ای از روابط ”دموكراتيك“ را در ميان اعراب مرسوم کرده بود. رئیس قبیله هرچند كه احتمالاً سخت‌گیر و خشن بود، اما با ديگر افراد قبيلهو حتى فقيرترين آنها نشست و برخاست مى‌كرد و اصولاً زندگی قبیله‌‌اى نهادى بود كه به ‌هيچ‌وجه با رفتار و ارزش‌های بسيار اشراف‌منشانۀ امپراتورى ايرانى قابل مقایسه نبود.

دين اسلام در چنين شرايط و زمينه‌اى با اعراب شبه‌جزيرة عربستان متولد شد که در پاسخ‌ به نيازهاى اساسى آنان مهم‌ترين ويژگی‌اش معرفى مفهوم ”توحيد“ بود. توحید، به‌منزلة مقوله‌ای مقدس، اساس وحدت اعراب در قالب جامعه‌ای واحد (امت) شد و بدین‌ترتیب بود که اسلام توانست با آیین اخلاقی‌اش به جامعۀ پراكندة اعراب نوعی نظام ارزشی ‌مشترک فرهنگى و اخلاقى هدیه کند. درست در همین زمینۀ تاریخی است که می‌بینیم مفاهيم مقدسی مانند مقولۀ توحيد و امت جنبۀ عرفى و اجتماعى مهمی دارند. از جمله فهم جامعۀ مشترك و يگانۀ مسلمانان، يعنى امت، هم از این منظر توضيح‌پذیر است.

شايد دومين مفهوم مهم كه در پاسخ ‌به نيازهاى اساسى آن دورة در اسلام اهميت پيدا كرد، مفهوم عدالت و برابرى ميان مسلمانان بود. در آن زمان، طرح اين مفهوم اخلاقى/اجتماعى باعث شد كه پذیرش اسلام به ‌منزلة آيينی اخلاقى و پيروى از آن و داشتن هويت مسلمانى در نهايت از ديگر هويت‌های قبیله‌ای، سرزمینی، طبقه‌ای و نژادی مهم‌تر و کارآمدتر باشد. از اين ‌نظر، اسلام نوعى ويژگى جهان‌شهری دارد و گاه با ملی‌گرایی در تضاد قرار می‌گیرد.

اين خصوصيت فرامحلی اسلام و اصرار بر فرارفتن از تعلقات جغرافيايى و نژادى در ابتدا نقطۀ قوت سیاسی اسلام بود، در ميان قبایل بسيار پراكندۀ اعراب سبب وحدت شد و پدید آمدن حكومت مركزى را در میان اعراب امکان‌پذیر ساخت. از سوى ديگر، اسلام اوليه در بيرون از شبه‌جزيرة عربستان با تأكيد بر عدالت و برابرى همه مسلمانان، به‌رغم جايگاه طبقاتى، مقبول بخش‌هايى از طبقات فرودست امپراتورى ساساني و ديگرانى شد كه در جوامع به‌ شدت طبقاتى و كاستى زندگى مى‌كردند.

با این همه، سرنوشت سياسى اسلام، مانند هر پديدة اجتماعى ديگر، در رويارويى با سنت‌هاى فرهنگی و سياسى و واقعیت‌های اين‌جهانى دچار تحولات اساسی شد. مدل‌های سیاسی شناخته‌شده نزد مسلمانان اوليه يكى ساختار خليفه‌‌گری بود و ديگر، ساختار امپراتورى‌هاى ايرانى و روم. آیين اسلام نه نظريه‌اى روشن در زمینۀ ساختار سياسى دارد و نه در دورۀ زندگى پيامبر اسلام در عمل تلاشى جدى براى به دست دادن الگوی نظام سیاسی اسلامی صورت گرفت. این شد که بعد از وفات پیامبر اسلام، مهم‌‌‌ترين‌ چالش ميان مسلمانان بر سر چگونگى ساختار قدرت سياسى درگرفت كه عملاً نوعى جنگ داخلى در ميان مسلمانان بود. جدالی كه هزینه‌‌‌های سنگین و پيامدهایی خونين در پی داشت و طى آن، اسلام عملاً دچار انشعاب شد و میان رهبران و شخصیت‌های مهمی مانند امام على^(ع)، عثمان و همسر پیامبر (عايشه) خصومت و جنگ درگرفت و جامعة مسلمانان به دو جناح اكثريت (سنى) و اقليت (شيعه) تقسيم شد.

در واقع، اتفاقاتی كه پس از وفات پيامبر رخ داد و به‌خصوص جنگ قدرت در ميان مسلمانان عرب بسیاری از خصوصیات اوليۀ اسلام را عملاً متحول کرد و برتری هويت قبيله‌ای و نژادی بار دیگر حیات خود را باز یافت. اما در دوران اموی، دیگر بخش مهمی از جامعة اسلامی عرب نبود و بنا به برتری نژادی، حكومت بنى‌اميه حكومت قوم عرب بر غيراعراب پنداشته می‌شد. بدین‌سان، اولین مدل حكومتى نسبتاً مركزى و ماندگار، حكومت اموى (661-750م)، تجربة تلخى براى مسلمانان غيرعرب بود، زیرا بسيارى از آنان هرچند در پی شكست نظامى از اعراب به اسلام گرویده بودند، پيام عدالت‌خواهانه و برابری نژادى و قومى اسلام اوليه را باور كرده بودند و حال می‌دیدند كه رهبرى سياسى جهان اسلام تعلقات خانوادگى و قومی را اساس تبعیض سیاسی قرار می‌دهد. شايد كمك نسبتاً فراوان مسلمانان غيرعرب و به‌خصوص ايرانيان مسلمان به خانوادة بنى‌عباس که سبب شكست بنى‌اميه و پيدايش مهم‌ترين امپراتورى اسلامى، يعنى امپراتورى بنى‌عباس، شد به علت عرب‌گرايى شديد بنى‌اميه بود.

حکومت عباسيان نوعی امپراتورى پهناور اسلامى را بنا نهاد كه مرزهاى مسلمانان عرب‌نشين را درنوردید و اقوام و نژادها و فرهنگ‌هاى گوناگونى را در بر گرفت. حتى در بغداد، كه مركز خلفای عباسیان بود، نوعى فرهنگ اسلامى جهان‌شهرى پدید آمد. مسلمانان غيرعرب، به‌خصوص ايرانيان، نقش مهمی در شکل دادن به اين امپراتورى بزرگ اسلامی داشتند و بعید نیست که بسیاری از ساختارهای سیاسی امپراتورى ساسانيان در حکومت عباسیان تجدید شده باشد.

تعريف سياسى اسلام به‌مثابه پديده‌اى با شكلى عام (امت اسلامى) و برآمده از آخرين امپراتورى اسلامى، يعنى حكومت عثمانيان، شدت بيشترى گرفت. عباسيان هرچند مانند امويان دچار نژادگرايى افراطى عربى نبودند و در دنياى اسلام ديگر نژادها و فرهنگ‌ها را مشروع مى‌ديدند، کماکان اعراب را در مركز و برتر از ديگران می‌دانستند، زیرا زبان عربى مركز توجه‌شان بود و از تلاش برای عربى‌كردن فرهنگ‌هاى مناطق جغرافيايى جديد ابايى نداشتند. اما عثمانى‌ها از قوم عرب نبودند و از نژاد ترك آسیای مرکزی برخاسته بودند. آنها دوران پيامبر و خلفاى راشدین را هم تجربه نکرده بودند و گروهی مهاجر از آسيا به داخل مرزهاى مسلمان‌نشین به‌ حساب می‌آمدند. ترک‌ها مهم‌ترين امپراتورى عرب اسلامى را در جنگ شكست دادند و در نتیجه، ديگر نمى‌توانستند مشروعيت خود را با فريب از نژاد عرب (پیامبر) يا زبان عربى (قرآن) کسب كنند. آنان از لحاظ سياسى و فرهنگى نیز صلاح نديدند كه نژاد یا زبانشان را مبنای هویت فرهنگی امپراتوری جدید اسلامی قرار دهند. مى‌دانيم كه امپراتورى عثمانى در تصرفات خود در اروپاى شرقى و مناطق مسيحى‌نشين چندان علاقه‌ای به غلبه بر زبان يا حتى مسلمان ‌كردن ایشان نشان ندادند. مهم‌تر اينکه فرهنگ نخبگان عثمانى به ‌جاى بزرگ داشتن تعلق نژادى و زبانى‌ (ترك‌ بودن) نوعى فرهنگ متعالى جديد پدیدآوردند و خود را عثمانى معرفی کردند و به همین واسطه، ترك بودن را كمى خوار دانستند و آن را از ويژگى‌های قشرهاى كم‌فرهنگ قلمداد کردند. از این ‌رو، در دربار عثمانی در استانبول زبان فارسى رواج داشت و نه تركی يا عربى.

تاريخ امپراتورى‌هاى اسلامى در عین‌ حال شامل تجربة ديگری هم در هند است -و البته تجربه‌هاى ديگری كه کم‌اهمیت‌ترند- که متأسفانه به آن توجه چندانى نمى‌شود. تجربه‌اي كه از قضا بسيار مى‌توان از آن آموخت، زیرا امپراتورى اسلامى در هند اولين و يگانه تجربة حكومت سياسى مسلمانان در مقام اقلیت در سرزمينی وسيع و پُرجمعیت بود كه بخش اصلی جمعیت آن نیز مسلمان نبودند.

امپراتورى اسلامی در هند (1526-1707م) از لحاظ فرهنگى چند ويژگى منحصربه‌فرد داشت: حكومت نخبگان مسلمان بر كشورهايى با اكثريت غيرمسلمان و حتى حکومت بر هندى‌های غيرمسلمانی که ”اهل كتاب“ هم نبودند. شواهدی جدى در دست است كه شاهان دربار هند آگاهانه چندگانگى فرهنگى/دينى اين كشور را پذیرفته بودند و نوعى مدارای دينى را رواج داده، تشویق می‌کردند. شواهد بسیاری هم از مدارای دیگر اديان در دورة امپراتورى اسلامى مغول در هند موجود است. اكبر، پادشاه هند، حكومتش را پایه‌گذاری تمدنی مى‌دانست كه در آن، تضادهاى فرهنگى و دينى از بين مى‌رفت. سياست این حکومت براساس ”صلح كل“ (مفهومى عرفانی به معنای آشتى و زيستن همه) بود كه چه در عرصة زندگى مادى و چه از لحاظ فرهنگی و اخلاقی، نيكى و سعادت همگان را امكان‌پذير می‌كرد و اين خود مقدمه‌اى براى رسيدن به ”محبت كل“ به‌حساب می‌آمد كه در آن، عشق و خيرخواهى براى همه ممکن خواهد بود[1].

اسلام سياسى امروز

در سه دهة اخیر، اسلام سیاسی به يكى از حادترين موضوعات سياسى و روشنفكرى تبديل شده است. اسلام سیاسی چگونه پديده‌اي است و رابطة آن با فرهنگ و تاريخ اسلام به ‌منزله آیينی مقدس و نیز با تجربة تاريخى اسلام به ‌مثابه نهادی سياسى كه عموماً در امپراتورى‌هاى اموى، عباسي، عثمانى، هند و صفوى ظهور یافت واقعاً چیست؟ آيا گفتمانى كه امروزه با نام ”اسلام سياسى“ يا ”بازگشت به اصول‌گرايى و هويت دينى“ شناخته می‌شود، پديده‌‌اى دينى است يا فرهنگى و ملى يا سياسى؟ یا اینکه امری ا‌ست كه باید به آن در حوزة قدرت توجه کرد؟ آيا عناصر و عوامل جديدى در اين گفتمان وجود دارد و نوعى تلقى جديد از اسلام و رابطه‌‌اش با سياست در حال شکل‌گیری است؟

اسلام سياسى ‌-كه متفاوت با اسلام تاريخى و اسلام به ‌مثابه‌ تجربة فرهنگى/ايرانى است- بيان‌کنندة رويارويى قشر نخبة مسلمانانی است که موقعیتشان در شرایط گسترش مدرنيته تضعیف شده است. اين بخش از نخبگان مسلمان غالباً در علوم جديد و حوزه‌های فنی و مهندسى یا در حوزة فكر و انديشه کار مى‌كنند. آنان بر این باورند که هم به علوم جدید آگاه‌اند و هم به اندیشة غرب. این گروه بیشتر با اندیشة غربى از طریق متفکران آلمانى آشنا شده‌اند که ريشه در دين‌دارى مسيحى داشته و سنت مهم محافظه‌كاری راديكال را در اروپا بنا کرده است؛ جنبشی ضدروشنگرى كه از نيمة اول قرن نوزدهم شروع شد و با يونگر و هايدگر به حوزة سياسى گسترش یافت. به‌رغم آنكه این رویکرد از لحاظ فلسفى و حتى عرفانى با علم و مدرنيتة غربى ناهم‌خوان است، اما اين متفكران و رهبران سياسى، که خود دانشجويان و تكنوكرات‌هاى جديدند، در حوزة سياسى بر اين باورند كه با كسب تكنولوژى غرب می‌توان نوعى اصالت‌گرايى فرهنگى و دينى ایجاد کرد و جامعه‌ را از ارزش‌ها، رفتارها و فرهنگ ليبرال پاك‌ ساخت.

پروژة اروپايى ضدروشنگرى و پروژة بسیاری از متفکران اسلام سياسى به‌رغم شيفتگى‌ نسبت به ارزش‌های عرفانى و سنت‌های روحانی در حوزة سياسى از کاربرد تكنولوژى‌های جديد کوچک‌ترین ابایی ندارد. در ايران هم بسیاری از رهبران اسلام سیاسی و كسانى كه خود را نخبگان این نحله معرفى كرده‌اند دانشجويان رشته‌های مهندسى، مهندسان تكنوكرات‌، پزشکان و کسانی‌اند که علم و تکنولوژی جدید را بخشی از فرایند تحقق جامعة ایدئال خود می‌دانند. بدین‌سان، اسلام سیاسى هم از اين لحاظ كه به علم و تکنولوژی جديد اهميتی اساسی مى‌دهد و هم از این ‌رو‌ كه به لباس اسلامى و به اصطلاح سنتى‌ درآمده ‌در روايت خود به‌شدت از تفكر ضدروشنگرى مدرن اروپايى بهره مى‌برد و نوعی از فكر و ايدئولوژي فراهم می‌آورد كه در آن تکنولوژی و مدرنيته از هم جدا نیستند.

بايد توجه داشت كه وضعيت اسلام سیاسی به ‌سبب وجود عوامل و عناصر دينی، سنتى، علمى و تکنولوژیک به‌گونه‌ای است که قادر به نزديكي با بخش‌هايی از جوامع اسلامى‌ است كه لزوماً گرايشی به ايدئولوژى اسلام سياسى ندارند. تکنوکرات‌ها و بخش‌‌‌هایی از قشر تحصیل‌‌‌کردة شهری در عین‌حال با گفتما‌نى که دنياى سنت‌هاى تاريخى و اخلاقى به آن توجه دارد احساس نزديكى مى‌كنند. همچنین، اقشار تحصيل‌كرده و طبقة متوسط هم خود را با گفتمانى دينى كه با زبانى امروزى ‌(غربى و تا حدى ‌علمی) نزديك می‌دانند.

بنابراین، اسلامى كه امروزه همچون پديده‌ای سياسى در مقابل ما قرار دارد از مدرنيته تمايزناپذیر است. به سخن ديگر، سرنوشت اسلام سیاسی با اين امر گره خورده كه جامعه‌ای دینی، اما مرفه و مدرن، پدید آورد. از اين منظر، لازم است بین اسلام سياسى و پديده‌هاى ديگری كه تا حدى به آن نزديك‌اند (طالبان و جنبش‌هاى گروه‌هاى وابسته به آن) تفاوت قائل شد. درست است كه هم در اسلام سياسى ممكن است گرايش‌هاى طالبانى دیده شود و هم گفتمان طالبانى توجهی به اسلام سياسى داشته باشد، اما اسلام سياسى عمدتاً محصول آرزو و آمال مسلمانان تحصيل‌كرده در نهادهاى آموزشی جديد یا در دانشگاه‌هاى غربى و اقشاری از شهرنشينان جوامع نسبتاً پيشرفتة اسلامی (ايران، مصر، تركيه، الجزاير، تونس، مراكش) است.

بسيارى از رهبران فكرى جنبش اسلام سياسى در ايران، تركيه، مصر، الجزاير، مراكش و کشورهایی نظیر اینها روشنفكران و تحصيل‌كردگان دانشگاه‌هاى اروپايى و امريكايى‌اند. در ايران، برای نمونه، سابقة تحصیل اشخاصی چون احمد فرديد، على شریعتی و رضا داورى در غرب بيشتر از رابطة آنها با حوزه‌های علمیه و مردم است. رهبران اصلى جنبش الجزاير نیز در اروپا تحصيل‌كرده‌اند. گذشته از سابقة تحصيلى رهبران فكرى جنبش اسلام سياسى، اصولاً رهبران سنتى دينى در اكثر كشورهاى اسلامى رغبتی به ايدئولوژى اسلام سياسى ندارند. در برخى از كشورها، از جمله مصر، رهبران سنتی دینی آشکارا با اسلام سیاسی مخالف‌اند. در ميان اقشار متمایل به اسلام سياسى هم اصولاً قشر تحصيل‌كردة شهرى و آن بخش از طبقة متوسط كه عمدتاً در دانشگاه‌هاى جديد و در رشته‌هاى فنى، پزشکی و دیگر علوم عملى فارغ‌التحصيل شده‌‌‌ا‌ند، به مراتب بیشتر از اقشاری که عموماً بخش سنتی جامعه به‌حساب می‌آیند ‌و از جمله روستاییان مسلمان ‌تودة متمایل به اسلام سياسى را تشکیل می‌دهند. روحانیان سنتی فقط در شرايطى از اسلام سياسى حمایت می‌کنند که مقبوليت عام داشته و بر جامعه غلبه پیدا ‌كند و البته این حمایت غالباً سیاسی و مصلحت‌آمیز است، نه ایدئولوژیک.

بنابراین باید این افسانه را کنار گذاشت كه اسلام سياسى بيان‌کنندۀ بازگشت یا احیای دين و سنت است و پذیرفت كه آنچه امروزه با نام اسلام سياسى مطرح است، پدیده‌ای جدید و تمایزناپذیر از پروژة مدرنيته است. از این‌ رو، پرسش اساسی اين نيست كه از ميان اسلام و مدرنيته يا سنت‌هاى خودى و غربى كدام را باید انتخاب كرد، بلكه مسئله را باید چنین طرح کرد که اسلام سياسى چه نوع ”شناختى“ از وضعيت دنياى امروز دارد و چه نقش و برنامة سياسى و فرهنگى‌ای براى تحول جامعه عرضه مى‌كند.

اسلام سياسى منادی سنت‌گرايى يا بازگشت به اسلام اوليه نيست. ایدئولوژی‌های مادی‌گرایانه‌ای هم که هدفشان احیای عظمت دوران باستان است روایت دیگری از مدرنیتة ملی‌اند. اسلام سياسى انرژى فكری و ايدئولوژيك خود را صرف ”پاك‌سازی“ جوامع اسلامى از فرهنگ سكولار، ليبرال و دموكراتيك مى‌كند. این برداشت ایدئولوژیک و سیاسی از دین براى دست‌یابی به اهدافش از انديشه‌هاى غربى ضددموكراتيك کمال استفاده را می‌‌‌برد و در این راه، از نزدیکی با دولت‌‌هاى كمونيستى و سکولار ضدغرب هیچ‌گونه ابایی ندارد. در این خصوص، البته از آن عناصر فرهنگى جوامع اسلامى كه با ارزش‌هاى دموکراتیک در تضادند نیز استفاده مى‌كند. در چارچوب این‌ تفکر ایدئولوژیک، تأكيد بر اسلام عمدتاً شامل تأکید بر خصوصيات تسليم مردم به رهبران و دفاع از نوعى عدالت‌گرايى برای سرکوب آزادى‌هاى فردى و اجتماعی است.

بنابراین، بحث از فرهنگ و پديده‌هايى كه ما آنها را نمودهاى فرهنگى جامعه مى‌دانيم، فقط در زمينة‌ خاص تاريخى و اجتماعى‌آنها معنا پیدا می‌کند. فرهنگ در این تعریف بسيار تحول‌پذیر است. نگرانى كسانى كه در قدرت‌اند و خود را پاسداران و حافظان انحصاری ”فرهنگ“ جامعه مى‌دانند، معمولاً تقويت و توسعة فرهنگى جامعه نیست، بلکه حفظ موقعيتشان در مسند قدرت است، چرا که فرهنگ در همزیستی باورها و رفتارهاى متنوع جان مى‌گيرد و زنده مى‌ماند و اين دقيقاً امرى ا‌ست که در جامعة دموكراتيك محقق می‌شود.

دموكراسى زيستن فرهنگ‌ها را در صلح و صفا امکان‌پذیر می‌کند، اما به ‌خودی‌ خود صاحب هیچ فرهنگی نيست. دموكراسى روابط قدرت را در جامعه به‌گونه‌اى تنظيم می‌کند یا روابط قدرت متفاوتى پدید مى‌آورد كه به واسطة آن، فرهنگ جامعه هرچه بیشتر شكوفا و بارور می‌شود و در نتیجه، امكان صلح اجتماعى فراهم می‌‌‌‌آید.

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Table of Contents, Volume 2, Number 1

- Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2017

Iran Namag: A Bilingual Quarterly of Iranian Studies
Volume 2, Number 1 (Spring 2017)

English Verso

The Rhetoric and Performance of the Trickster Nasreddin
Janet Afary &Kamran Afary

The Perfect Human in Modern Iranian Shī‘ism: Murtaḍá Muṭahharī’s ‘Irfān-Oriented Conception of the Ideal Human Being
Fitzroy Morrissey

Of the Sins of Khalil Maleki
Homa Katouzian

Towards a History of Iran’s Baha’i Community during the Reign of Mohammad Reza Shah, 1941-1979
Mina Yazdani

Persian Recto

From Appearance to Character: A Exploration of Sexual and Gender Conceptions in Safavid Physiognomy
Behzad Karimi

A Glance at the Creativity of Firdawsi: “Ant” in the Shahnameh
Mahmoud Fazeli-Birjandi

Iranian Ideas in Farabi’s Philosophy
Hooshang Shokri

Richard Frye’s Narrative of Iranian Cultural Continuity
Halimeh Jafarpoor & Mohsen Massumi

Towards a Sociology of Technology Transfer and Reception: The Case of Abbas Mirza Qajar’s Military Reform
Yasser Khoshnevis

Critical Child: An Examination of the “Reader” in Ali Ashraf Darvishian’s Our School’s Wall Newspaper
Jafar Mirzaee & Neda Akbari

Zarir Memorial (Yadegar-e Zariran) and the Maiden’s Battle 130 Chronicle (Razmnameh-’i Kanizak)
Arash Akbari Mafakher

The Ishraqi Path: Toward Systematization of Suhrawardi’s Sufism

Abolfazl Moshiri Volume 6, Number 3-4, Fall-Winter 2021

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Reflection of India in the Works of Hedayat

Nadeem Akhtar Volume 5, Number 3, Fall 2020

Nadeem Akhtar obtained his PhD in Persian literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University. His area of research is Sadegh Hedayat. He has authored a book on Hedayat in India titled Hedayat dar Hindustan (Cheshmeh, 2017), written various research articles and papers for journals and magazines in India and abroad, and contributed an entry to the Encyclopaedia Iranica. Akhtar is a visiting faculty member in Persian at Ashoka University in Sonipat, India.

Introduction

Sadegh Hedayat was a pioneer of novel writing in Iran. His writing style and techniques were new to Persian literature. His extensive study of French language and literature made a huge impact on him, which resulted in a style of novel writing new to Iranian writers. Though French literary techniques were dominant in Hedayat’s work, he never lost sight of the richness of Persian literature.

Alongside the techniques from French and Persian literature, India and its civilization appear vividly in Hedayat’s literary world. Unlike with the French influence (Heyadat was educated in French from childhood), it is difficult to state where Hedayat acquired the deep insight into India that is reflected in his writing. Currently, no source can confirm that, unlike with French, he made any attempt to study Indian languages or India’s past. However, he and his Indian connections always appear as an interesting subject in contemporary Indo-Persian studies.

Hedayat travelled to India in 1936 but began to write about India and Indians years earlier when he started his writing career. In the treatise Man and Animal and the later work Vegetarianism, he refers to India. In these works, he advocates vegetarian food habits and says that eating the flesh of an animal is not essential for the growth of the human body. He praises the hectic work done by the Indian postman and says that Iranians must learn from the Indian postman, who eats only rice in his meals and walks miles and miles to deliver letters to people in cities and villages.[2]

Hedayat’s later work Buried Alive, which he wrote six years before he travelled to India, proves that he had always found India a place of tranquility and solace. The protagonist of Buried Alive is depicted as ill fated. He is fed up with society and is going against its social norms. He wishes to isolate himself far from the world and acquaintances that he knows, preferring to live in Siberia near the woods or in India, the land of sun, thick forests, and strange and uncanny surroundings.[3] Through these words, Hedayat shows his long-standing fascination for India and his respect for Indians in both his real and fictional worlds.

In Man and Animal, Hedayat expresses his fondness for India and its people by introducing the hard-working Indian postman who lives by eating rice alone. Since Man and Animal is not a work of fiction but rather an essay against the carnivorous habits of human beings, the writer cannot delineate the Indian postman as a fictional character. However, through historical and real characters, Hedayat not only demonstrates his admiration for India but also represents the country’s life and culture in his later works.

Hedayat entered the port of Bombay in 1936 and shared an apartment in Summer Queen at Colaba, Bombay, with his friend Sheen Partow.[4] The exact reason behind his visit to India is still debatable since various arguments have been put forth by different scholars. Iraj Bashiri’s bold claim that Hedayat’s interest in Indian culture and his tilt toward Buddhism made him visit the country is not a substantial argument according to Homa Katouzian. The latter claims that Hedayat’s visit to India was “purely an accident, and no part of a design to pursue Buddhist studies and experiment.”[5] Hedayat’s letters to Mojtaba Minovi and Jan Rypka support Katouzian’s argument because Hedayat himself wrote that “he was not happy in Tehran and wished to escape from that rotten and suffocating graveyard which brings one bad omen.”[6]

Whatever his reasons for travelling to India, Hedayat stayed there for more than a year, and travelled to different parts of the country.[7] He was based in Bombay but visited Bangalore, Mysore, and Hyderabad. He captured the images and life of these cities, as well as Indian culture, customs, and ethos, in his works. His novels and stories portray and beautifully delineate Indian characters. “Lunatique” (in Persian, “Hawasbaz”) depicts the settings of the city of Bombay and incorporates the Indian philosophy of waxing and waning of the moon. Bangalore can be seen as a canvas on which “Sampinge” is drawn, the short story featuring two Indian sisters, Sita and Laxmi.

Hedayat’s Love of India: The Blind Owl

The Blind Owl is the work in which Hedayat’s love of India is most apparent. He uses the name of India more than 25 times in this seminal work. Hedayat has chosen the fine fabrics of Indian culture, customs, and religion in the making of his best artistic work. As far as the impact of Indian culture on the characters of Hedayat’s novels is concerned, The Blind Owl may be taken as the most representative one. In the novel, Hedayat not only depicts named Indian characters but also adds minute Indian elements to the characters’ physical appearance. For example, he describes the outfit of Bogam Dasi, adorning her with Indian hues, colors, and flowers; presenting her in an Indian city playing Indian music; and having her perform Indian dances and fill the air with Indian perfumes:

Above all, the voluptuous significance of the spectacle was intensified by the acrid, peppery smell of her sweat mingling with the perfume of champak and sandalwood oil, perfumes redolent of the essences of exotic trees and arousing sensations that slumbered hitherto in the depths of the consciousness. I imagine these perfumes as resembling the smell of the drug-box, of the drugs which used to be kept in the nursery and which, we were told, came from India- unknown oils from a land of mystery, of ancient civilization.[8]

Hindu mythology, temple traditions, and customs are also connected with various characters in The Blind Owl.

Bogam Dasi: Etymology of Name

Hedayat pays special attention to the character of Bogam Dasi and portrays her appearance with all Indian features. The word Bogam Dasi is not popular in India; instead, devadasi is the commonly used word to describe the women who are devoted to the service of gods and goddesses in the Hindu temples. Though the services performed by Bogam Dasi in the novel are exactly the same as those performed by the devadasi in the non-fiction world, the question arises as to why Hedayat is using the word Bogam Dasi instead of devadasi. In his book Hedayat’s “Blind Owl” as a Western Novel, Michael Beard writes: “Bugam is not, strictly speaking, a name at all, but a transcription in Arabic script of an archaic title, the Urdu word “begam” from an eastern Turkish feminine of “beg” or “bey” usually anglisized as “begam.””[9] Beard suggests that in naming the character, Hedayat has used only Dasi from the devadasi of temple tradition and Indianized or Persianized the character by adding Begam before Dasi. Further, Beard offers a French novel as a possible source of the word begum: “Hedayat is likely to have known the word through French, where it is better than “begum” in English (e.g., from Jules Verne’s title Les cinq cents millions de la Begum ).”[10]

But when a detailed study of the etymology of Bogam Dasi within the Indian tradition is done, it reveals some interesting facts. Among the twenty-nine states of India, the devadasis have different names in different states: they are famous as Bhavin in Goa, Nati in Assam, Murali in Maharashtra, Jogati in Karnataka, Ganika in Orissa, and Thevardiyar in Tamil Nadu, among others. One of the reasons for the different usage of terms could be the diversity of traditions followed and languages spoken by the people of India.[11] Similarly, in Andhra Pradesh, a southern state of India, the devadasis have popular names such as Kudikar, Jogin, and Bogamdasi, the last of which Hedayat has chosen and used in The Blind Owl. Delving into the etymology and history of Bogamdasi in the state of Andhra Pradesh reveals an interesting relation between the Bogamdasi of Andhra Pradesh and the fictional character in The Blind Owl. Bogam is a Tamil word, spoken in the southern part of India, which means a dancing girl. In The Blind Owl, the narrator’s father is visiting the narrator’s mother, Bogam Dasi, to see her performing a dance in a temple, which was a casual practice prevailing in the society of South India. In the story, the narrator’s mother serves in a Lingam Temple. Lingam Temple in India is associated with the Hindu god Shiva, and also the history of real-life Bogamdasi shows that “though the Devadasi system was practiced by almost all major Brahmanical temples, particularly the Shivaite temples in South India, in some regions it had attained its maximum growth.”[12]

In Northern India, similar customs were followed by the Gandharbs. The word devadasi refers to the heavenly musician who entertains the gods at Indra’s court. According to one scholar, “These people were mainly concentrated in places like Banaras, Ghaziabad and Allahbad,” and mainly they were associated with the god Vishnu.[13] Hence, like those of other characters in The Blind Owl, Bogam Dasi is also a common name and a synonym of devadasi in the southern part of India. Hedayat traveled to the southern part of India, but only after the publication of The Blind Owl.[14] The source from which Hedayat derived Bogam Dasi in his seminal work is still debatable.

Father and Uncle: Vishnu and Shiva

Though The Blind Owl does not reveal the presence of Vishnu and Shiva in any form directly, the Lingam Temple used in the novel suggests that two characters—the narrator’s father and uncle—have been cast by Hedayat to depict the two chief gods of Hindu mythology. There is no temple named after Lingam, including any temple associated with Shiva. But there is a temple named Lingaraja Temple in Orissa. Lingaraja means the “lord of the Lingam,” which is associated with the Hindu god Harihara. Harihara is a compound version of Shiva (Hari) and Vishnu (Hara). Shiva and Vishnu are considered as one entity, like the two sides of the same coin. The characters of the father and his twin brother might be derived from the images of Harihara present at the Lingaraja Temple of Orissa.

Bogam Dasi, Zan-i-Asiri, and Lakkateh: The Trilogy

The character of Bogam Dasi has attracted Heyadat’s special attention as far as depicting Indian culture is concerned. She is a continuous source of solace to the narrator of The Blind Owl, particularly when he is in distress. The narrator is surrounded with all the negative or villainous characters in the novel. He thus describes them with harsh words, but he empathizes with Bogam Dasi and looks upon her as a living victim of the evil world. Moreover, at the time when the narrator sees Zan-i-Asiri (another character in the novel) and becomes an admirer of her endless beauty, he describes her as a creature of God who is not made from the elements of this base world and later says that only temple dancers of India (i.e., Bogam Dasi) can have those ethereal qualities.[15] Zan-i-Asiri and Bogam Dasi can be seen as the image of each other: the former is heavenly, carrying all the features to win the heart of the narrator, and the latter has come to the world as the mother–Bogam Dasi to get exploited at the hands of the Rabbles. These two characters, who showcase two women of different worlds, have ample resemblances to the two women personae in Hinduism. One is the devadasi, who represents the real characters of the Hindu temple traditions and corresponds to Bogam Dasi of The Blind Owl. The other is the “heavenly nymph called Apsara who dances for the Gods” in Hindu mythology.[16] She corresponds to Zan-i-Asiri in The Blind Owl.

A comparison between the characters of Bogam Dasi and Zan-i-Asiri reveals the following differences: a worldly creature versus a heavenly one, a woman who entertains devotees but gets exploited versus a woman who appears to win the narrator’s heart but then disappears to heaven, and an object of seduction versus an object of heavenly beauty.

In the Hindu religion, Apsaras are the female spirit of the clouds and the waters, who are beautiful and supernatural females. They are youthful and elegant and excel in dancing, and they sometimes seduce gods and holy men to the world of pleasure. Meneka, Urvashi, Rambha, and Tilottama are a few of the famous Apsaras who were sent from heaven to earth to distract the austere sages of India, who are proud of their piety.[17] In Hindu mythology, sages practice austerity to make the gods happy and in return get their wish fulfilled. Sometimes, their wish makes the sage more powerful than the gods. Sometimes, gods, too, fear losing their power and hence send Apsaras to use their seductive beauty to distract and destroy the austerity of the sages in the middle of their devotion. Once the Apsaras’ mission is complete, they return to heaven, leaving the sages sad, repentant, and abandoned.

Here, a linkage can easily be drawn between the Apsaras of Hindu mythology and Zan-i-Asiri of The Blind Owl. Zan-i-Asiri casts her magnetic spell over the narrator, and having made him a restless lover, flees away to the valley of death and takes refuge in the sleep of eternity. She escapes the exploitation by the Rabbles, and the narrator hides her under the ground in the city of antiquity. The devadasi in the real world is considered to be the prototype of an Apsara, who dances in the Hindu temple and somehow also seduces the people of the temple. But unlike the Apsara, a devadasi could not flee to heaven but had to remain in the temple or town itself. Thereafter, a devadasi is fated to lead the life with the person or persons whom she has seduced, and at times, the devadasi is exploited by these people. Bogam Dasi, the mother of the narrator in The Blind Owl, is also an example of this.

Perhaps Hedayat was aware of the two characters of Hindu mythology and temple traditions, and thus, there are commonalities and linkages between the Zan-i-Asiri and Bogam Dasi of Hedayat, and the Apsara and devadasi of the Hindu mythology and temple tradition. The paintings of Apsaras distracting the austerity of sages appear very near to the situation depicted in the novel when the narrator is portraying Zan-i-Asiri. The promiscuity of the Lakkateh makes all the Rabbles of the town hover around her, and this makes the life of the narrator tormented and miserable. The Lakkateh is the inverse development of Zan-i-Asiri or an Apsara in human form in the novel. Indian religion and culture seem to have had a profound impact on Hedayat in the development of the characters in his novel. The characters in The Blind Owl reveal numerous traits of Indian deities.

Father, Uncle, and the Cobra Trial

Among the many Indian elements and characters used in The Blind Owl is an interesting event which has a close affinity with the myths of Hinduism. When the narrator’s uncle returns to Benares after transacting his business, he falls in love with his brother’s wife—that is, the narrator’s mother, Bogam Dasi. Since the two brothers are twins and bear ample resemblance to each other, Bogam Dasi fails to distinguish her brother-in-law from her husband. Hence, it is easy for the uncle to dupe and ditch Bogam Dasi. When Bogam Dasi comes to know about her brother-in-law’s act, she feels that she has been wronged by the Iranian brothers. She becomes badly offended and thus asks both her husband and his brother to pass through the trial of the cobra, in which both the twins have to enter into a dark room and a cobra tests them to distinguish the real from the unreal sinner in the chamber. The person who is killed by the cobra is the real culprit, and Bogam Dasi continues to live with the survivor for rest of her life.

This event plays an important role in the plot of the novel. The event finds its source in the Hindu sacred text Garuda Purana. In the text, twenty-eight different kinds of hell are defined and described, where people will be punished for the sins they committed in their life. One hell is called the Mahararuravam, which “means death by snake.”[18] This hell is filled by the people who stole others’ wives or lovers and will be killed by a snake. The Mahararuravam resembles the dark room of the cobra trial in The Blind Owl. Perhaps Hedayat used Hindu mythology to present the narrative of Bogam Dasi being coveted and seduced by her husband’s brother, incorporating the apt and perfect milieu of the Mahararuravam.

Reflection of India in Haji Agha

In mid-1937, Hedayat traveled to South India. He visited Bangalore and later Mysore at the invitation of Mirza Ismail. The latter had invited Jamalzadeh to the state of Mysore, whose divan Ismail was. Jamalzadeh could not accept the invitation; instead, he asked Mirza Ismail to extend the invitation to Hedayat, who was then living in Bombay. Thus, the host invited Hedayat to Mysore.[19] There he also attended the lavish birthday celebration of the Prince of Mysore, Maharaja Krishna Raja Wadiyar IV. Hedayat says in his letter to Mojtaba Minowi: “Almost fifteen days I spent a comfortable and elegant life . . . fortunately the birthday celebration of Maharaja was going on and I was involved in all part of the ceremony and I went to the court wearing a long funny dress, I myself spoke to the Maharaja.”[20]

His conversation with the maharaja is recorded in his letter, where he says that the maharaja offers him lavish hospitality and bears his travel expenditure, which he refuses. This is reflected in the novel Haji Agha. Hedayat’s travel to Mysore Palace can be seen in the conversation of Haji Agha, when he says the following: “On two occasions the Maharaja of the Deccan has approached me about becoming his foreign minister, but I wouldn’t accept. I said I didn’t want to be buried abroad. If I am fit for anything, let me work for the sake of my country. Perhaps my only sin is to be an Iranian. Here I was born, and here I wish to die. The giant of foreign money has no attraction for me.”[21] In Haji Agha, Hedayat also brings in an Indian character, Major Jawala Singh, in the discussion of the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran. During the invasion, the Indian army were on the British side and played a vital role.[22]

Besides the prominent characters of The Blind Owl and Haji Agha who represent Indian civilization (discussed above), Hedayat’s work shows many characteristic Indian elements and features which speak volumes about the impact of Indian culture on him. On one hand, he is critical of India, referring to Indians as wahshi. He also finds the clothing of Indians funny and compares it to the clothing of the Arabian Nights.[23] But on the other hand, he cannot fail to mention the richness and colorful traditions of the country in both his novels and his letters. He writes to Mojtaba Minowi that “perhaps the only place in the world which is worth seeing is any part of India” and that it is fascinating for him to see how in this country, gods, humans, and animals all live together.[24] It is also surprising to see that Hedayat wrote about India at the beginning of his writing career and also at the end, in his last fiction, The Pearl Cannon, in 1947. By that time, he was so acquainted with India that he associated the cannon placed in the middle of Maidan-e-Arg, Tehran, with the lingam placed in Indian temples.

Conclusion

Hedayat found music and dance in Indian mythology and traditions which represented the centuries-old pains and sufferings of millions of innocent people or humanity at large. The Blind Owl, among other works, represents Hedayat’s love for India, which he conveys to the Persian-speaking people in the most artistic form, and he is a link in the chain of events that bridges the two cultures of India and Iran. The journey of Indo-Iranian literary contact begun by hakim Burzoe has recently been revived by no other hakim than Sadegh Hedayat.

[1]The article is an edited version of part of my PhD thesis, Characters of the Novels of Sadegh Hedayat: An Anatomical Study, submitted in 2018 to the Centre of Persian and Central Asian Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.

[2]Sadegh Hedayat, Sadegh Hedayat Complete Works, vol. V, ed. Jahangir Hedayat (The Iranian Burnt Book Foundation, 2011), 39.

[3]Sadegh Hedayat, Sadegh Hedayat Complete Works, vol. I, ed. Jahangir Hedayat (The Iranian Burnt Book Foundation, 2008), 17.

[4]Nadeem Akhtar, “HEDAYAT, SADEQ v. Hedayat in India,” in Encyclopædia Iranica, 2015, www.iranicaonline.org/articles/hedayat-sadeq-v.

[5]Homa Katouzian, Sadeq Hedayat: The Life and Legend of an Iranian Writer (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1991), 59.

[6]Katouzian, Sadeq Hedayat, 59.

[7]Nadeem Akhtar, Hedayat in India: The Blind Owl & S. Hedayat’s Tryst with India (Tehran: Nashre Cheshmeh, 2017).

[8]Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl, trans. D.P. Costello (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 48.

[9]Michael Beard, Hedayat’s “Blind Owl” as a Western Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 182.

[10]Beard, Hedayat’s “Blind Owl,” p. 182.

[11]Jayashree Ahuja Sanker Sen, Trafficking in Women and Children: Myths and Realities (New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company, 2009), 84.

[12]Sanker Sen, Trafficking in Women and Children, 85.

[13]Nagendra Kr Singh, Divine Prostitution (New Delhi: A.P.H. Publishing Corporation, 1997), 15.

[14]The Blind Owl was published in Bombay between 21 February and 12 March 1937. However, Hedayat traveled to the southern part of India during June 1937. For further details, see Akhtar, Hedayat in India.

[15]Hedayat, Blind Owl, 13.

[16]Judith Lynne Hanna, Dance, Sex and Gender: Sign of Identity, Dominance, Defiance & Desire (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 104.

[17]John Dowson, A Classical Dictionary of Hindu Mythology and Religion, Geography, History, and Literature (New Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, 2008), 19–20.

[18]Shaik Imthiyaz Amhed, “28 Deadly Punishments Mentioned in Garuda Puran Which Are Likely to Be Held after Death,” All India Roundup, 24 February 2016, allindiaroundup.com/india/28-deadly-punishment-in-garuda-puran/.

[19]Akhtar, Hedayat in India, 50.

[20]Mohammad Baharlo, Namehaiye Sadegh Hedayat (Tehran: Nashre Waja, AH 1387/AD 2008), 189. (Translation is mine.)

[21]Sadegh Hedayat, Haji Agha: Portrait of an Iranian Confidence Man, trans. G.M. Wickens, int. Lois Beck (Austin: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 1979), 24.

[22]Hedayat, Haji Agha, 128.

[23]Baharlo, Namehaiye Sadegh Hedayat, 188. (Translation is mine.)

[24]Baharlo, Namehaiye Sadegh Hedayat, 182. (Translation is mine.)

What is at the Heart of the Dispute? Reflections on the Foucault Controversy Forty Years Later

Kevin Gray and Rida Faisal Volume 3, Number 2, Summer 2018

Dr. Kevin W. Gray <kevinwgray@gmail.com> is a visiting scholar at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, and a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. He was previously Assistant Professor of International Studies at the American University of Sharjah and director of its Gulf Studies Centre. His monograph, The Birth and Death of Legal Radicalism, co-authored with Prof. Thomas Simon, is forthcoming in 2018 with Springer Press.

Rida Faisal <ridafaisal19@gmail.com> is an independent scholar who holds a Bachelor of Arts in International Studies. She was previously a research assistant at the American University of Sharjah.

After failing to find any French newspapers interested in employing him as a columnist, Michel Foucault initially visited Iran during the summer of 1978 as a special correspondent for the Italian Corriere della sera to discuss the circumstances of the Iranian Revolution. Between Summer 1978 and May 1979, Foucault published articles on Iran not only in the Corriere, but eventually also in Le Monde, and Le Nouvel Observateur, as well as agreeing to an interview with an Iranian writers’ journal.^{^[1]} The articles were soon condemned as Panglossian, and Foucault was criticized as an apologist for the repression of the Iranian Revolution. The articles provoked furious responses from many quarters: from feminists in France such as Simone de Beauvoir and the Franco-Iranian writer known only as Atoussa H, and by French scholars of Islam, most notably the well-known Marxist Maxine Rodinson, known to scholars of the Middle East and Islam for his Marxist biography of the prophet and his work on the relationship between Islam and capitalism.^{^[2]}

Michel Foucault was not a historian of Islam. Other than a brief sojourn in Tunisia, he had spent very little time in the Muslim world. While this may have created a more politically aware and anti-colonial sentiment in Foucault, it did not lead to a more nuanced understanding of Islam.^{^[3]} What he knew of Islam he had learned, it appears, from studying the work of Paul Vielle, Louis Massignon and Henry Corbin.^{^[4]} The choice of these thinkers was not unproblematic for Foucault. In the work of these eminent French sociologists or philosophers of religion, we find an emphasis on the mystical elements of Islam, an emphasis which Foucault would adopt in his own writings, and less emphasis on the historical and material conditions of the emergence of Islam or contemporary Iran, as one would find in the writings of Rodinson. Both Henry Corbin, other than in his magisterial history of Islamic Philosophy,^{^[5]} and Louis Massignon, built their reputations on studies of mystical elements of Islam.^{^[6]} While Paul Vielle, in his early work, had focused on providing a structuralist account of life in Iran,^{^[7]} heavily influenced by French sociologists of the mid-century, his later work, on nationalist accounts of revolution, avoided as far as possible, any analysis of materialist explanations of revolutionary nationalism.^{^[8]}

While there is no dearth of issues on which Foucault was challenged, subsequent debate has turned on the question of whether or not Foucault or his critics presented an accurate accounting of the revolution. For his critics, the points of contention include his representation of Islam, his purported blindness to the retrograde nature of the revolution, his infatuation with what might be called the spiritualism of right-wing Shiism,^{^[9]} and his blindness to questions of gender.^{^[10]} Those who argue on one side of the debate, such as Afary and Anderson, suggest that there was a leftist current to the revolution which Foucault should have identified, that he was uncritical in his support of the right-wing elements of the Iranian Revolution, and that his supposed turn to ethics later in life is at least in part a recognition of his failure to understand the consequences of his involvement in Iran.^{^[11]} Ghamari-Tabrizi has argued, convincingly, that they overstate the leftism of the Iranian Revolution and that by the time of Foucault’s involvement with Iran, the Iranian left had largely ceased to be a driver of revolution in Iran.^{^[12]}

In our paper, we argue that underneath the debate is actually a much larger debate in the social sciences about materialist and structural explanations of history. Ghamari-Tabrizi hints at this when he argues that Foucault finds in the revolution an ambiguous moment for reinvention.^{^[13]} We argue in our paper that much of the dispute can actually be traced to a dispute not only in the philosophy of the social sciences, but also in French academia, over the role of such explanations in the study of the Middle East and political Islam. Foucault’s choice of authors and method (not just in his writings on the Iranian revolution but elsewhere) meant that he was committed to giving primacy to a non-deterministic explanation of history; this did not allow for an in-depth sociological investigation of the material conditions on the ground as understood by his leftist and Marxist critics. As such, we develop Rodinson’s work on political Islam to advance the dispute between Foucault and other members of the left.

Two Accounts of Foucault and the Revolution (Or the Twin Seductions of Islamic Revolution and Radicalism)

The initial dispute turned on the question of the extent to which Foucault ignored alternative groups also involved in the Iranian Revolution. Afary and Anderson argue that in unequivocally applauding the revolution, Foucault dismissed the rightful concerns of women and other minority groups alike. In deeming all criticisms of the religiously driven revolutionary movement as being Orientalist in nature, his intellectual lacuna, pertaining to feminism, they claim, extends itself beyond the confines of mere theory. This had notable ramifications for women, homosexuals, and religious minority groups, the eventual suppression of whom under Khomeini drew a half-hearted passing criticism in Foucault’s essay “Is it Useless to Revolt?”

Foucault’s methodology differs both from structural and historical materialist accounts of history insofar as tracing the trajectory of groups of people in history does not require, he claims, a totalizing ideology under which the subject is subsumed. In Foucault’s words, a genealogical telling of history rejects grand narratives of a linear march towards progression. In a concrete example, the concept of liberty and emancipation is not defined in consistent and constant terms in history—liberty as is understood in a Marxist sense, perhaps, is a result of class domination, and is not universal in the way it has been grasped and appropriated throughout history.^{^[14]} Foucault writes, “The forces operating in history are not controlled by destiny or regulative mechanisms, but respond to haphazard conflicts.”^{^[15]}

Yet, Afary and Anderson suggest that a closer look at Foucault’s writings on genealogy reveals his own “meta-narrative, a binary construct wherein traditional social orders were privileged over modern ones.”^{^[16]} On that view, Foucault’s romanticization of the Iranian Revolution and the consequent disregard for notes of caution sounded by feminists and other radicals was not a philosophical aberration. In fact, it was the product of a one-sided, Western-centric indictment of modernity, a theme that reverberated throughout his writings.^{^[17]} In expressing a simplistic critique of modernity, Foucault downplays the repercussions of the “harsh and confining disciplinary practices of the pre-modern world,”^{^[18]} the brunt of which was often borne by women and children, amongst other groups of people.

Amongst those who called on Foucault to formulate a more nuanced view of the Iranian revolution was the Marxist French scholar Maxime Rodinson. Rodinson, in addition to his embrace of historical materialism, was an accomplished student of Islamic history, so it comes as no surprise that his criticism of Foucault is primarily rooted in discerning “great gaps in his [Foucault’s] knowledge of Islamic history.”^{^[19]} He criticized Foucault for being too obsessed with sociological theory at the expense of actual material conditions when he romanticized the Revolution as the “people’s revolution.” In reality, Rodinson argued, it was largely driven from the top down – by a spiritual leader who advanced the theory of Velayat-I Faqih (government by the clerics).^{^[20]} Although Foucault was no proponent of a theocratic government and state apparatus, Rodinson identifies the articulation of a “political will” by the masses as a point of immense fascination for Foucault. Inspired by Shariati, Foucault was drawn to the idea of political life as a repository for spirituality, with the latter being its lifeblood and chief source of sustenance, with both elements existing in symbiosis driven by the tenacity of a people determined to incite change.^{^[21]}

Since Afary and Anderson as well as Ghamari-Tabrizi all identify Shariati as being formative to Foucault’s writings on the revolution, and since Shariati is considered the “main ideologue of the Iranian revolution,”^{^[22]} our argument depends on reconstructing those elements of Shariati’s thought borrowed by Foucault. Afary and Anderson correctly observe that Foucault’s support for the revolution was grounded in his overall anti-modernism, since both he and the Islamist revolutionaries were “searching for a new form of political spirituality as a counter discourse to a thoroughly materialistic world.”^{^[23]} Shariati’s philosophy, which influenced the more religiously driven factions of the revolution, envisioned a fusion of traditional Shia Islamic thinking with resources at the disposal of the modern subject.^{^[24]} Aysha comments that religion’s purpose in both Shariati’s and Foucault’s thinking was to be “a force for change, progress, for moving forward in time towards something other than what existed in the Islamic past and the Western present.”^{^[25]} However, it is probably a stretch to argue, as Afary and Anderson do, that both parties locate this political spirituality in “idealized notions of premodern society.”^{^[26]} Borrowing both from the corpus of traditional Islamic scholarship and from the writings of Western revolutionaries (most notably Marx’s writings on objectification and alienation), Shariati went above and beyond in conceptualizing a unique liberation theology steeped in Shia Islam, espousing the emancipatory ethics that he believed were stamped out through the institutionalization of religion.^{^[27]} Aysha aptly elaborates on this:

“…they [the Iranian people] fall back on their cultural heritage and indigenized their desire to deal with the West on an equal footing…It is the tale of a philosophical journey of self-discovery that the conceptually loaded term ‘‘fundamentalism’’ cannot capture in the peculiar case of Iran.”^{^[28]}

Rodinson’s criticisms of Foucault stems from his incredulity towards what Foucault refers to as “political spiritualities.” He believes him to have been far too optimistic about the possibility of a progressive theocratic regime. He accuses Foucault of assuming that labeling a state or society humanist would “render the states to which they are applied magically capable of faithfully meeting the obligations to which the doctrine they venerate should commit them.”^{^[29]} He takes issue with Foucault for revering and being fascinated by political spirituality because doing so means placing it above and outside of history, as something untainted by corruption at the hands of humans. The fact of the matter, according to Rodinson, is that “all of these ‘political spiritualities’ escape only rarely from the usual laws of political struggle.”^{^[30]} Foucault could be optimistic about the establishment of humanist ideals under a clerical regime only because he was not intimately acquainted with the history of the matter. For Rodinson, “political spirituality” was simply a “covering over the more material motives for the discontent and the revolt” and not an idea that was innate to the revolutionary movement.^{^[31]} Rodinson believes that Foucault had essentially ignored any empirical understanding of the course of the revolution and instead been seduced by his a priori assumptions.^{^[32]}

However, it would be an overstatement to claim that Foucault’s analysis of the Iranian Revolution was entirely bereft of historical consideration and entrenched only in theory. While it is true that a reappraisal of all philosophical and political thought was a driving force for his decision to place his hopes in the revolution, and that he was glaringly neglectful of many elements of Islamic history, it is also true that the hope he harbored reflected his analysis of the historical role of religion and spirituality in revolutionary politics. Drawing parallels between Shi’ite Islam and Christianity, he believed Shi’ism to have “played a key role in ‘inciting and fomenting political awareness’”^{^[33]} and saw Christianity to have played a similar role in formulating an oppositional role during certain periods of European history. In particular, religious movements powered by Christian thought “had sometimes fought against feudal lords, against the state, and alongside the revolutionary peasantry. Here, Foucault singled out the Anabaptist movement and its role in the German peasant uprisings of the sixteenth century.”^{^[34]} In his dialogue with Baqir Parham, Foucault explains that these Christian movements “rejected the power of the state, government bureaucracy, social and religious hierarchies—everything. This movement supported the right to individual consciences and the independence of small religious groups that wished to be together, have their own organizations, without hierarchy or social stratification between them.”^{^[35]}

With that in mind, it becomes clear that Foucault’s enthusiasm (albeit uncritical) for the Iranian Revolution was not cemented in a transcendental, innately emancipatory perspective of religion. Rather, he situated it in its historical context, limited by time and spatial considerations, deliberating on the ways in which it can be subsumed under and appropriated for revolutionary praxis. He views it as a challenge to what he sees as the reductivist Marxist account of religion as a method of social control.^{^[36]} He observes that the form of religion that would rightfully be considered an opiate of the people was one the religious form advocated by the Church and State in Europe during the rise of capitalism. Religion was singled out to instill a sense of resignation in the “rebellious workers…and make them accept their fate.”^{^[37]}

Other evidence pointing towards the retrograde nature of the result of the revolution had a gendered aspect to it. Afary and Anderson are the principle writers to have addressed, in scrupulous detail, Foucault’s willful ignorance of the history of religion in Iran, and his disregard for the fact that issues pertaining to gender were inevitably part and parcel of the revolutionary movement. They too, like Rodinson, emphasize an absence of historical rigor in his writings on the Iranian revolution. Since he uses language that uncritically romanticized Shi’ism as a force of revolution, Afary and Anderson point out that “he seemed unaware of the fact that Shi’ism was first imposed on the majority of the population as late as the Safavid dynasty of the sixteenth century.”^{^[38]} They also charge him with turning a blind eye to the simple fact that for the most part, religious institutions outwardly maintained their allegiance to the state, and that the clashes that occurred “had often been over social and political reforms that threatened to undermine existing class, religious, or gender hierarchies.”^{^[39]} In their book, they suggest that Foucault’s oblivion extended to his ignorance or denial of Khomeini’s convictions as a junior cleric during the Muhammad Reza Shah era. This is when he published “Kashaf al-Asrar (the unveiling of secrets) in 1943, a book that advocated a return of clerical supervision of the entire legal code, the return of the veil, as well as Quranic physical punishment.”^{^[40]} All of this should have alerted Foucault, the argument goes, to the dissonance between his optimism for the egalitarian outcome of the revolutionary movement and the less equitable ideas espoused by the spearheads of the movement. Foucault had a sizeable blind spot where women’s rights issues were concerned, and he all but glossed over their significance during the revolution. It is noteworthy that he failed to acknowledge the reality of women’s circumstances in the Islamism advanced by Khomeini, something going beyond just pning. However, if the best that could be said is that Foucault underestimated the role of the revolutionary left in the revolution, then Afary and Anderson are on thin ground. We will suggest however that the failure to properly consider the role of the left in the Revolution, including its failings, is indicative of larger methodological debates, which we turn to in the final section of this paper.

Ghamari-Tabrizi has shown that the role of the left – both in its Communist and feminist forms – in the Revolution was scattered and uneven at best. It is true that Communists have been active in Iran since the constitutional revolution of 1906,^{^[41]} with the largest of the Iranian Communist parties, the Tudeh, being founded in 1941. However, Iranian Communists have suffered from oscillating and at most periodic success. They suffered from an initial legitimacy crisis due to their perceived subordination to the USSR, most notably during the period of Soviet Occupation^{^[42]} and during the nationalization crisis over the Anglo-Iranian dispute over the legitimacy of oil rights.^{^[43]} During the period between 1941-53, Tudeh operated in a relatively free political environment, and was not overtly subservient to Moscow. However, after the coup in the 1950s and the repression of leftist movements, Tudeh had limited presence in the country in 1960s. Eventually the détente between the USSR and Iran, where the Soviet Union ultimately approved of the Shah’s reforms in 1961, forced the Communist party into an unhappy collaboration with Shah (the Tudeh part at least) even if members were ideologically opposed.^{^[44]}

Moreover, as Tudeh lost its base, it became more and more reliant on Moscow.^{^[45]} As part of its policy of rapprochement, Moscow encouraged Tudeh to create closer links with clergy, and blamed them for not having done it before.^{^[46]} This tended to reduce the importance of Tudeh amongst the new generation of Marxists which emerged in the 1970s, who viewed as wholly negative Soviet influence in the country.^{^[47]} Moreover, the Shah’s secret police, the SAVAK, broke Tudeh and Islamic Faidayan in the 60s and 70s, eliminating their ability to participate effectively in the revolution.^{^[48]} By September 1978, Ayatollah Khomeini had become the undisputed leader of the revolution.^{^[49]}

The post-revolutionary transformation proceeded in three stages. After the revolution, the Islamists emerged as the leaders of the revolution. Nevertheless, they saw their first goal as eliminating elements of the old regime. They continued to co-exist, generally, with the other revolutionary parties. Even within the Islamist movement, the leftist Islamic wing co-existed alongside other more conservative elements. Initially, tension inside the new regime was between the Provisional Government faction headed by Mehdi Bazargan, who was known as a leftist-Islamist, and the Revolutionary Council dominated by the Islamic Republic Party and Ayatollah Mohammad Hosein Beheshti.[50] Bazargan was appointed the first post-revolutionary prime minister, holding power from February until November 1979, when he resigned after the storming of the American Embassy by radical student groups associated with right wing elements of the revolution. Bazargan, during his time as leader of the Provisional Government, attempted to bring the government under the control of the constitution. He believed that the principle task of the government was to act “as a regulator and arbitrator between different components.”[51] In contemporary Iran, Bazargan argued, “the state had come to dominate social life and to impose itself on all social domains.”[52] With these arguments Bazargan brought back tensions from the earlier constitutional debates in Iran over the compatibility between Islamic government, favored by the right-wing elements, and constitutionalism.[53]

After the resignation of Bazargan, and in particular during the period of 1981-1983, Iran society saw a gradual reduction in the freedoms (such as the freedom to organize), which emerged in the post-revolutionary environment.^{^[54]} During that time, the Islamists moved to eliminate the last remnants of the Marxists organizations. By 1983, they were in complete control of the country and the government.

Similarly, women’s opposition to the Islamists peaked in the early years of the Revolution, and had very limited success thereafter. Those women who challenged the revolution were often middle and upper-class women who had benefited from the loosening of strictures on women by the Shah prior to the Revolution.^{^[55]} During the revolutionary period, they attempted to organize a series of protests against the increasing Islamization of the revolution. Timed for March 8, 1979 – International Women’s Day – protests were organized by the National League of Women (ettehadieh-ye melli zanan)^{^[56]} and by the more centrist organization Liberation of Women (raha’i-ye zanan)^{^[57]} They found few allies. One Marxist party, the Fadaiyan, initially defended the rights of the demonstrators. However, they ultimately took no concrete action. Mired in Marx’s class based analysis, they were theoretically unprepared for an analysis of gender politics during the Revolution.^{^[58]} With little external support, the women’s demonstration on 8 March 1979 were brutally suppressed by pro-IRI groups known as Hezbollah^{^[59]} and the organizations soon faded from view. Eventually the IRI removed women from judiciary and made demands on Islamic dress.

Additionally, the Marxists were utterly outmaneuvered by the Islamists in terms of their radicalism and anti-imperialism.^{^[60]} As we saw with respect to the Faidayn, Tudeh’s analysis of Islamic history remained mired in a Marxist theory of class.^{^[61]} There existed no peasantry to join a revolutionary peasant class (and, in any rate, no Maoist theory of revolution led by the peasant class was tolerated by the majority of communists in Iran).^{^[62]} Not only were the Communists greatly weakened by the Shah’s agents following the 1953 coup, but their support was also undercut by the rise of political Islam.^{^[63]}

Varieties of Explanation in the Social Sciences

If Foucault’s understanding of the forces at play during the Iranian revolution was at least partially defensible on empirical grounds, where should we look to fully grasp the greater significance of this debate? In this final section, we turn to accounts of the role of materialist and structuralist explanations in history. Marxist materialism can be succinctly outlined in Marx’s own words when he wrote, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.”^{^[64]} In Marxist terms, the modes and relations of production that constitute the economic relations of a society form the base upon which culture, religion, ideology, art, legal, political and social institutions, norms and values supervene. Although both exist in a state of constant interplay, in Marx’s view the superstructure grows out of the base (the relations of production) and is a direct reflection of it insofar as the existing prevailing norms and ideologies seek to justify the base.^{^[65]}

Early on, despite his claims to the contrary, Foucault was associated with Marxism under the influence of his teacher Althusser. Later in life, he argued that the Marxist approach could be subsumed under general conceptions of social scientific discourse. He claimed that “Marx’s economic discourse comes under the rules of formation of the scientific discourses that were peculiar to the nineteenth century … Marxist economics – through its basic concepts and the general rules of its discourse – belongs to a type of discursive formation that was defined around the time of Ricardo.”^{^[66]}

The rejection of this model is evident in his writings on the Iranian Revolution wherein he gives primacy to the act of rebellion itself and the doors of transformation that it unlocked over anxieties about the consequences of the revolutionary movement.^{^[67]} Ignoring the material conditions on the ground, both economic (related to the failure in Iranian history for a revolutionary proletariat and workers movement to develop) and political (the oppression of the communists by the Shah’s regime), Foucault is able to instead cast the revolution as moment of emancipatory breach.

This reading of the Iranian revolution is rooted in his general stance on the inevitability of power relations and the implications this has for emancipatory politics. However, while Foucault rejects the role of economic history, he effectively replaces economic determinism with determinism by relations of power which, “like historical materialism, takes all social practices as transitory, and all intellectual formations as indissociably connected with power and social relations.”^{^[68]} Flynn notes that for Foucault, the fact that “…every exercise of power is accompanied by or gives rise to resistance opens a space for possibility and freedom in any context.”^{^[69]} Similarly, Ghamari-Tabrizi notes that “rather than posing a conventional opposition between a particular past-orientation and a prescriptive future-project, Foucault defined history as a way of reinventing the present moment.”^{^[70]} In the Iranian Revolution, Foucault saw the near-mythical concept of the “collective will of the people” brought to life. Although the uprising was wrought with ambiguities and complexities (as all revolutions inevitably are), it was this ambivalence that Foucault found notably appealing and what other members of the French intelligentsia found objectionable. Their objection was rooted in, according to scholars like Ghamari-Tabrizi, an analysis steeped in a strict bifurcation of secularist versus religious groups within the revolutionary movement, and in a teleological view of the revolution; that is, the end or aftermath was already preordained and constitutively encompassed at the revolution’s inception.

Yet for Foucault, historical events were what people made of them; they are decidedly unconditioned by material conditions. He rejected the inevitability of a people being rendered helpless in the midst of sweeping changes unraveling around them. Being opposed to understanding history in universal terms, Foucault’s writings rejected any “uniform model of temporalization.”^{^[71]} This is because his historical method is “based on a profound distrust of essences, natures, and other kinds of unifying, totalizing, and exclusionary thought that threaten individual freedom and creativity.”^{^[72]} Characterized by qualities of postmodernism that include “multiplicity of lines of explanations,” “dispersion of events”, and an “appeal to space” instead of time, Foucault’s philosophy is an attempt to move away from linear “master narratives” such as the Marxist conceptualization of history.^{^[73]} This is better characterized as expansion of lines of causation.

This theoretical background explains how Foucault grappled with a momentous event such as the Iranian Revolution of 1979. In a conversation with Baqir Parham in1978, Foucault argued that humanity was at “point zero.”^{^[74]} This insight stemmed from his understanding of the “two grand and painful experiences…in the last two centuries.”^{^[75]} The first were the liberal revolutions of the eighteenth century that gave rise to an industrial capitalist society in which he found little to extol. Second, the emancipatory promises espoused by the socialist and communist movements ultimately fell short and resulted in highly authoritarian dictatorships of the twentieth century. Hence, in the uprising of the Iranian people, he saw a momentous possibility for a colossal reinvention of political thought and vision for the future. When asked what his thoughts on the role of religion were in the then transpiring revolutionary movement, he stressed the positive historical role of Shi’a Islam and argued that it, of all religions, was particularly conducive to political awakening,^{^[76]} drawing implicitly upon Ali Shariati’s Shia liberation theology. For Shariati, Shia Islam creates a theology “in which prayer and politics, submission and subversion, mystical seclusion and revolution conjoin in a struggle for justice.”^{^[77]} Foucault was inspired by this account. However, whereas Foucault’s critics indict him for naively enabling the establishment of a theocratic regime, his interests lay not in the relation between religious dogma and forms of governance. Rather, he was interested in religion’s ability to convert multiple forms and layers of mass discontent into a powerful revolutionary force.^{^[78]} This train of thought on Shia Islam specifically was influenced by the French scholars Louis Massignon and Henry Corbin, “both of whom regarded the quest for justice and mystical spirituality as the kernel of Shi’ism.”^{^[79]} In his writings on Iran, he turns both economic determinism and an Orientalist reading of the foundations of the revolutionary movement on their heads:

In rising up, the Iranians said to themselves—and this perhaps is the soul of the uprising: ‘Of course, we have to change this regime and get rid of this man, we have to change this corrupt administration, we have to change the whole country, the political organization, the economic system, the foreign policy. But, above all, we have to change ourselves. Our way of being, our relationship with others, with things, with eternity, with God, etc., must be completely changed and there will only be a true revolution if this radical change in our experience takes place.’ … In this way they had of living the Islamic religion as a revolutionary force, there was something other than the desire to obey the law more faithfully, there was the desire to renew their existence by going back to a spiritual experience that they thought they could find with Shi’ite Islam.^{^[80]}

Foucault indicates that the Iranian people did not just allow history to run its course; they exercised astounding agency, taking matters of historical precedence into their own hands. At the same time, they were able to unite different factions of society under a common slogan: “We want nothing from this regime.”^{^[81]}

Concluding Remarks

Afary and Anderson charge Foucault with willful ignorance of feminist and secularist warnings about the more exclusionary nature of the religious groups policies and attitudes.^{^[82]} Believing him to be dismissive of the antidemocratic and anti-minority facets of the Islamist factions, he was taken to task for being enraptured by political spirituality, which resulted in a monumental lapse in judgment on his part. As we have shown however, drawing on the work of other observers of the Iranian Revolution, Afary and Anderson overstate the participation and strength of leftist groups during the revolutionary period.

However, their analysis of Foucault’s understanding of the potential of revolutionary Shia Islam successfully highlights lacuna in his thought. By stressing freedom above the determinism of material conditions, by relying on a genealogical approach which attempts to develop a Nietzschean model of the contingency of history,^{^[83]} Foucault turned his back on an analysis of material conditions in society. As we have suggested, the rise of conservative factions in the Revolution is entirely explainable by features of Iranian history. At the same time, these features of history shown by the Revolution was always likely to be retrograde, particularly with respect to the rights of women and minorities.

^{^[1]}All translated into English in Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005).

^{^[2]}Rodinson Maxime, Islam and Capitalism (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 1974). See also Maxine Rodinson, Mohammed (London: Penguin Press, 1971). The latter book, in particular, attempts to explain the development of Islam in terms of the economic and material conditions prevalent in Arabia at the time of the Prophet.

^{^[3]}Robert J. C. Young, “Foucault in Tunisia,” in Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (New York: Wiley, 2016).

^{^[4]}Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution After the Enlightenment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 56.

^{^[5]}Louis Corbin, History of Islamic Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2006).

^{^[6]}Louis Massignon, Salmān Pāk and the Spiritual Beginnings of Iranian Islam (Bombay: J. M. Unvala, 1955); See, e.g., Henry Corbin, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969).

^{^[7]}Paul Vieille, “Naissance et mort dans une société islamique,” Diogène (1957): 114; Paul Vieille, “Un Marriage en Iran, ” Revue française de sociologie VII, no. I, (January-March 1966).

^{^[8]}Paul Vieille and Farhad Khosrokhavar, Le discours populaire de la révolution iranienne, 2 vols. (Paris: Contemporanéité, 1990).

^{^[9]} Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005).

^{^[10]}Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 92 et passim.

^{^[11]}We find the last claim here suspicious at best, but it has been well-treated elsewhere and we do not discuss it here.

^{^[12]}Ghamari-Tabrizi, Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution After the Enlightenment, Chapter Three.

^{^[13]}Ghamari-Tabrizi. Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution After the Enlightenment, 58.

^{^[14]}Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D.F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 150.

^{^[15]}Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 154.

^{^[16]}Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 22.

^{^[17]}Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 9.

^{^[18]}Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 26.

^{^[19]}Maxime Rodinson, “Critique of Foucault on Iran,” in Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism 2005, ed. Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 270.

^{^[20]}Rodinson, “Critique of Foucault on Iran,” 270. Khomeini argued that, in the absence of the Imam, Allah had ordained clerics to rule in his stead. (Imam Khomeini, Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations of Imam Khomeini (1941-1980) (Berkeley: Mizan Press, 1981).

^{^[21]}See, e.g. Ali Shariati, Man and Islam (Berkeley: Islamic Publications International, 2005).

^{^[22]}Ervand Abrahamian, “Ali Shari’ati: Ideologue of the Iranian Revolution,” MERIP Reports, no. 102, Islam and Politics (1982): 24-28.

^{^[23]}Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 13.

^{^[24]}Emad El-Din Aysha, “Foucault’s Iran and Islamic Identity Politics: Beyond Civilizational Clashes, External and Internal,” International Studies Perspectives, no. 7 (2006): 378.

^{^[25]}El-Din Aysha, “Foucault’s Iran and Islamic Identity Politics,” 378.

^{^[26]}Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 13. For rebuttal, see Emad El-Din Aysha, “Foucault’s Iran and Islamic Identity Politics.”

^{^[27]}El-Din Aysha, “Foucault’s Iran and Islamic Identity Politics,” 378.

^{^[28]}El-Din Aysha, “Foucault’s Iran and Islamic Identity Politics,” 378.

^{^[29]}Rodinson, “Critique of Foucault on Iran,” 275.

^{^[30]}Rodinson, “Critique of Foucault on Iran”, 276.

^{^[31]}Rodinson, “Critique of Foucault on Iran”, 272.

^{^[32]}Similarly, see Robbie Duschinsky, “‘The First Great Insurrection Against Global Systems’: Foucault’s Writings on the Iranian Revolution,” European Journal of Social Theory 9, no. 4 (2006): 555 (writing that: “caused by a seductive desire to see in a contemporary radical movement the solution to their theoretical problems and a possible path out of the cage of Western metaphysical thought.”).

^{^[33]}Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 76.

^{^[34]}Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 76.

^{^[35]}Michel Foucault and Baqir Parham, “On Marx, Islam, Christianity & Revolution”, reprinted in Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islam, ed. Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 187.

^{^[36]}Karl Marx, “Introduction,” in Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, ed. Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.)

^{^[37]}Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 130.

^{^[38]}Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 84.

^{^[39]}Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 84.

^{^[40]}Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 76. They argue that Khomeini’s understanding of Hudd punishments had a strong elements of gender discrimination to it.

^{^[41]}Maziar Behrooz, Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran (London: I.B. Taurus, 2000), xii.

^{^[42]}Behrooz, Rebels with a Cause, 22.

^{^[43]}Behrooz, Rebels with a Cause, 7.

^{^[44]}Sepehr Zabih, The Communist Movement in Iran Berkeley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 240.

^{^[45]}Zabih, The Communist Movement in Iran, 144.

^{^[46]}Zabih, The Communist Movement in Iran, 128; citing Rostislav Ulyanovks, Sarnevesht-e Enqelab-e Iran (The Fate of Iranian Revolution), trans. Tudeh Party (np: Tudeh Publishers, 1985), 11. See also, Rostislav Ulyanovks, “The Iran Revolution and its Peculiar Features,” in Social Theory and Practice, no. 2 (February 1983): 104.

^{^[47]}Zabih, The Communist Movement in Iran Berkeley, 145.

^{^[48]}Zabih, The Communist Movement in Iran Berkeley, 49.

^{^[49]}Zabih, The Communist Movement in Iran Berkeley, 96.

[50]Maziar Behrooz, “Factionalism in Iran under Khomeini,” Middle Eastern Studies 27, no. 4 (October 1991): 597-614, 597.

[51]Saeed Barzin, “Constitutionalism and Democracy in the Religious Ideology of Mehdi Bazargan,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 21, no. 1 (1994): 85-101, 98.

[52]Barzin, “Constitutionalism and Democracy,” 98.

[53]For a helpful discussion, see, e.g. Saïd Amir Arjomand, “The 1906-07 Iranian Constitution and the Constitutional Debate on Islam,” Journal of Persianate Studies 5, no. 2 (2012): 152-174.

^{^[54]}Zabih, The Communist Movement in Iran Berkeley, 102-103.

^{^[55]}Zabih, The Communist Movement in Iran Berkeley, 107.

^{^[56]}The group, comprising Marxists supporters of the Faidayan (including mainly students, teachers and nursed, published the magazines Equality and Women and Struggle.

^{^[57]}They were the more radical of the women’s group, publishers of the journal women’s emancipation. See Farah Azari, “The Post Revolution Women’s Movement in Iran,” in Women of Iran: The Conflict with Fundamentalism, ed. Faraz Azari (Ithaca: Ithaca Press, 1983), 195-6.

^{^[58]}Eliz Sanasarian, “An Analysis of Fida’i and Mojaheedin Positions on Women’s Rights,” in Women and Revolution in Iran, ed. Guity Nashat Becker (Boulder: Westview, 1983), 97-198.

^{^[59]}Zabih, The Communist Movement in Iran Berkeley, 107.

^{^[60]}Zabih, The Communist Movement in Iran Berkeley, 137.

^{^[61]}Zabih, The Communist Movement in Iran Berkeley, 139.

^{^[62]}Nikki R. Keddie, Iran and the Muslim World (New York: University Press of New York, 1995), 60-95.

^{^[63]}Zabih, The Communist Movement in Iran Berkeley, 149.

^{^[64]}Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1904), 11.

^{^[65]}As Marx argues, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past” (Karl Marx, 18^th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (Moscow: International Publishers, 1994).

^{^[66]}Michel Foucault. Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion (The Essential Works, vol. 2 (London: Penguin, 2001), 269; cited in Mark Olssen, “Foucault and Marxism: Rewriting the Theory of Historical Materialism,” Policy Futures in Education 2, nos. 3 and 4 (2004): 454-482. Of course, he also denied a number of other things: “I have never been a Freudian, I have never been a Marxist, and I have never been a structuralist.” (Michael Foucault, “Critical Theory/Intellectual History,” (an interview with Michel Foucault by Gérard Raulet) in Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977- 1984, trans. Alan Sheridan et al., ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (London: Routledge, 1988), 22.)

^{^[67]}Ghamari-Tabrizi, Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution After the Enlightenment, 58.

^{^[68]}Mark Olssen, “Foucault and Marxism,” 457; Mark Poster, Foucault, Marxism, History: Mode of Production vs Mode of Information (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), 39-40.

^{^[69]}Thomas Flynn, “Foucault’s Mapping of History,” in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 36.

^{^[70]}Ghamari-Tabrizi, Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution After the Enlightenment, 58.

^{^[71]}Flynn, “Foucault’s Mapping of History,” 37.

^{^[72]}Flynn, “Foucault’s Mapping of History,” 39-40.

^{^[73]}Flynn, “Foucault’s Mapping of History,” 44.

^{^[74]}Michel Foucault and Baqir Parham, “On Marx, Islam, Christianity & Revolution,” Daedalus 128, no. 1 (2005).

^{^[75]} Michel Foucault and Baqir Parham, “On Marx, Islam, Christianity & Revolution,” 128.

^{^[76]} Michel Foucault and Baqir Parham, “On Marx, Islam, Christianity & Revolution,” 129.

^{^[77]}Ghamari-Tabrizi, Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution After the Enlightenment, 65.

^{^[78]}Ghamari-Tabrizi, Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution After the Enlightenment, 65.

^{^[79]}Ghamari-Tabrizi, Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution After the Enlightenment, 65.

^{^[80]}Michel Foucault, “Iran: The Spirit of a World without Spirit,” in Foucault and Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism 1978, ed. Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 250-259.

^{^[81]}Michel Foucault, “The Shah is a Hundred Years Behind the Times,” in Foucault and Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism 1978, ed. Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 194.

^{^[82]}Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 76.

^{^[83]}Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.”

Transition from Orient to the Third World: Sketch of a Phenomenological Study of a Historical Fall

Daryoush Ashouri Volume 2, Number 4, Winter 2018

Daryoush Ashouri has studied at the Faculty of Law, Political Science, and Economics of the University of Tehran. He has worked extensively as author, essayist, translator, encyclopedist, and lexicologist. His main concern is with cultural and linguistic matters of his motherland as a Third World country encountering modernity. He is author, compiler, and translator of more than 25 books. He has been a visiting lecturer at the Universities of Tehran, Oxford, and Tokyo.

The “Third World” as a term with a referential object became prevalent in the early 1950s. It designated, primarily, the neutral political situation of the countries not belonging to the two hostile blocs of power, East and West, a division emerging out of the victorious allied powers in the Second World War. The period of the ideological and political strife between the two blocs, in its earlier phases, witnessed the process of achieving political independence by previous European colonies in Asia and Africa. Later, these emerging powers were politically categorized or designated as Third World countries.

These old colonial, or semi-colonial, countries gradually attained their independence through political, and, in some cases military struggles under the leadership of their modern intelligentsia, or the main transmitters of the modern revolutionary political and social ideas into their native lands. The anti-colonial movements of the Third World strove to shape their formally independent states after the modern concept and model of the nation-state, originating from nineteenth century Europe. But this aspiration encountered great obstacles emanating from their economic, political and cultural backgrounds. Therefore, the next related term emerging in this period, or somewhat later, was “underdeveloped” countries which complemented the concept of the Third World, and underscoring, comparatively, the economic situation of those lands. The new term, which replaced the older and ambiguous term of “backward countries”, with its quantitative economic and social measures, assessed the underdeveloped against the developed countries in the atmosphere of the Cold War era which witnessed the restless competition of the two main blocs of power for “development”. However, for decades the concept of the Third World, contained “underdevelopment” as its componential notion, echoing the existence of the poor, non-industrial countries, desperately entangled in seemingly unsolvable political, social, and, worst of all, economic problems on the way to establish the modern nation-state and achieving a developed industrial economy.

However, the twentieth century, in its closing decades, witnessed radical changes in the international scene. The downfall of the Soviet empire, by putting an end to the bipolar system of rival political and military powers of the Cold War era, made the concept of the Third World devoid of its international political connotation as a third party in this relationship. Subsequently, the vast industrialization of a considerable number of the previously underdeveloped countries in East Asia and, later on, other parts of the world to the point of the emergence of the great world economic powers among them, rendered obsolete the term “Third World” connoting “underdeveloped countries”.

In spite of all these processes, from a certain point of view, the “Third World”, as a useful term, still seems applicable in a new context, not by far alien to its old usage. That is, its capability to express the social psychological and cultural situation of those nations still entangled, embarrassingly, between their historical past, usually termed as “traditional”, on one hand, and on the other hand, involvement in the process of modernization. This paradoxical status could be formulated, in my terms, as transition from the Orient to the Third World. In this discussion, my focal point of view, obviously, is my native country, Iran, as my immediate source of knowledge and personal experience of a psychologically and culturally Third World status, as such. Iran, alongside other Middle Eastern countries, in spite of all apparent material developments achieved by the immense influx and dispersal of petrodollars, could be considered as the most expressive representation of this phenomenon.

During the height of Orientalism, an earlier title for “Oriental Studies” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European scholarship categorized old Asiatic empires and cultural domains as “Oriental”, vis-à-vis their own Occidental region. The bipolar concept of Occident-Orient in the nineteenth century obviously put into contrast two geographically and culturally opposing worlds: on one side the prosperous, self-confident Western European modern nation-states, enjoying the tremendous boom of the scientific and industrial revolutions as dominant world powers encroaching upon all oceans and continents; on the other side, the rest of the world still lived in their enclosed local cultures and premodern or primitive economies and political systems, encountering the shocking presence of those coming from unknown or extremely remote lands with unimaginable material and intellectual means of power for dominance.

Modernity, by its revolutionary philosophical and scientific achievements, created a totally new meaning and prospect for being human, reflected in the term “humanism” in modern thought, promoting free will for modern individuals. However, the Industrial Revolution, alongside the social and political revolutions that had changed fundamentally the economic and social life of the Western world, by its contagious nature gradually changed all pre-modern human societies that came into permanent contact with Western Europe through European colonial encroachments and political expansionism. The great transforming power of Modernity manifests itself in the actions of modernization: there is now nowhere in the world that has not been “discovered” by European explorers, and no human society left without, somehow, being touched by material, technical modernization.

This historical story is normally formulated under the sociological terms as transition from traditional to modern society. But a sociological approach doesn’t take into account a fundamental aspect of this phenomenon which might be called the ontological transition. The colonial and military encroachments of the modern commercialist, rationalist world equipped, in the first instance, with achievements of natural sciences and, then, cultural and historical sciences, alongside amazing inventions and productions of the Industrial Revolution, has had a fateful role in displacing peoples from their imaginary focal geographical and historical locations. That is, places which were once defined by mythological ontologies and which, through oral or literary traditions, described their place on Earth and in the Universe. It is well known that all pre-modern cultures and civilizations, geographically, felt themselves being at the center of the World. But, the modern European geographical knowledge, following the naval adventures to explore the entire globe, based on empirical science and exact calculations, inevitably deposed mythological imaginations about the Earth and the place of everything on it. That signaled the first great step toward modern civilization, the demythologization and disenchantment of Nature, and its gradual submission to human domination. These achievements, noticeably, had shocking effects on the minds of the peoples who had no part in these discoveries and still lived in their legendary place at the center of the World. The demythologization of geography was the first step for putting all traditional human cultures out of their imaginary centrality and relocating them in the periphery of a Eurocentric world totally defined by modern European scientific mentality.

The demystification of nature by development of the natural sciences and demythologization of history through human sciences were integrated processes reinforcing modern rationalism and humanism in their European homeland. The European modern mind not only re-read its native history through scientific approach, but, at the same time, through universal notions of modern science, undertook the project of compiling world history as a general encyclopedia of the human race on Earth. This all-inclusive approach following natural history as general history of all natural beings, integrated all dispersed local histories into a universal scheme of general human history. As mentioned before, until the development of the universal human history by European scholarship, all premodern human cultures and civilizations had their own oral or written local histories rooted in mythological times and traditional legends. But by being enforced to transit from premodern countries or empires into modern nation-states, as a prerequisite for becoming a nation, following the model of the secular modern national historiography, all newly borne states, or those transformed from pre-modern into modern states, were engaged to compose their own specific national histories to define their own national identification. To this purpose, traditional local historical narratives were re-read and re-written to articulate a “national” history which, explicitly or implicitly, evaluated their place in the modern universal human history.

The forced openness of the Orient to the modern Occidental world through the actions of European colonialism, created, as a sub-product, the intelligentsia of the Oriental type. A basic characteristic of the early generations of the fledgling Oriental intelligentsia who were often reared at the service of their colonial masters, was losing confidence in their own native world views and style of life, and showing great fascination for European way of life and thought. They tried to learn languages of their masters, received modern European education, and adopted European-styled attire, in an effort to imitate every detail of the sophisticated modern European social conduct. These behaviors obviously demonstrated the alienation of this newly- arrived privileged social and political layer from their own native historical past and their aspirations for quickly changing their “uncivilized” peoples and countries according to the civilized European model. Thus, the early generations of the Oriental intelligentsia in China, Japan, India, Iran, Egypt, or elsewhere, by absorbing certain ideological elements from the mentality and knowledge of the modern European intellectualism and following the enlightening role of the intellectuals in Europe, recognized the historical mission of transforming their native worlds in accord with modern values and way of life produced by the European Enlightenment. This task demanded the awakening of their slumbering societies and offered to people a modern historical consciousness by encouraging them, or forcing them by revolutionary actions, to abandon their backward way of life drowned in ignorance and superstition, mental and material poverty, and thereby embracing Europeanization as the path to economic, intellectual, and, moreover, higher moralistic prosperity.

In this way, the resentment of the newly borne intelligentsia against their traditional culture and way of life gradually transmitted to other layers of the “Oriental” societies. In later historical developments, the transmutation of the Oriental man, originally submissive toward his own eternal destiny, to a human being in search of another meaning and means of life, is one of the essential causes for the disintegration of the Oriental world and its ultimate dissolution into Third World conditions. All contributions to the “underdeveloped” world, in the form of reorganization of the governmental system through the introduction of bureaucratic, educational, military, and other kinds of modern national institutions, in general, was not effective for the realization of the intellectual ideal of Europeanization of the Oriental worlds. In contrast, the presence of the clumsy and imbalanced elements of modernization aggravated the situation. Heterogeneity between the mentality of the native peoples and their traditional morals and manners made the achievement of those expectations almost impossible. Exposure to the modern world and its humanistic attitudes and aspirations played an essential role to push these societies further toward their doomed, chaotic Third World destiny.

The post-Second World War era, with the rise of anti-colonial enthusiasm for political freedom from Western dominance, turned the previous fascination for everything “European” into a sense of anger and resentment. Presence of the extreme leftist movements, leaning toward Soviet bloc and communist ideology, intensified these feelings. By so-called “scientific” theorizations, proponents of extreme leftist ideologies by absolute demonization of the Western world, depicted it as a monstrous, voracious, capitalist entity with an unbridled thirst for plundering the natural resources of other parts of the world and exploiting their societies. Communist propaganda presented the Western world as ultimately responsible for all the misery and poverty of the people in other parts of the world by keeping them forcefully deprived of all technological means necessary for modern life.

By keeping in mind this general depiction of the historical situation in the Third World, in this short presentation, as a concrete example, I turn to review briefly the multiple stages of reactions in the Iranian world versus the West and modernity. Iran, in spite of its long history of foreign invasion, permanent destruction and reconstruction, had kept until recent times the Oriental spirit of its culture, based on strong religious and mystical inclinations in its way of life and thought. This mystical spirit of Iranian culture reflected itself best of all in the immense output of its vast inventory of poets. Some of them, like Rumi and Hafiz, stand at the top of the illustrious names in the Persian literary world. The prevalence of the irrationalist, illuminist way of thought in this cultural world, from the remote historical ages to modern times, manifestly demonstrates the original “Oriental” nature of Iranian culture. Now, disregarding all interfering political, military, and economic factors, we may say that the encounter with the Occidental world and its rationalist spirit, imposed by direct or indirect influence of European ways of thought, had been destructive to a culture which had self-confidently and proudly preserved its unique spirituality throughout its pre-modern times. This culture, by means of the Persian language and, properly, its poetic genius reflected in the works of its great mystical poets, had created an immense sphere of influence in the central, south, and western parts of the Asiatic continent, extending to the Ottoman Empire’s occupied territories in south-east Europe.

The damaging effects of the influence of modern ideas and ways of life on this Middle Eastern empire is a painful story which, might be said, had been experienced in the same way, and almost at the same time, by all spheres of Asiatic cultures and civilizations. As a formally independent state, Iran was never officially colonized by European powers but, in the nineteenth century had been left to exist as a buffer zone between two great European colonial powers, Russia and Great Britain, under their strong political influence. Under this semi-colonial situation which gradually witnessed the transition of Iran from Orient to the Third World, the early generations of its emerging intelligentsia, like their analogues in other Oriental lands, aspired for Europeanization of their people and country in every aspect of their life. Their attempts to remodel the old political structure of Asiatic despotism into the modern nation-state led to the Constitutional Revolution which, without palpable results for democratization of the country and rule of law, resulted in total chaos. The essential needs for building modern governmental, educational, social and cultural institutions, and basic industrialization of the country demanded an iron hand demonstrated by the dictatorial reign of Reza Shah. But the Second World War and subsequent occupation of Iran by Allied powers shortened this period. By the polarization of the main world powers into Eastern and Western blocs almost immediately after the war, Iran found itself under the newly defined category of the “Third World” and its associative concept, the underdeveloped country. Nevertheless, by initiating a political movement for the nationalization of the British Oil Company in the early 1950s, Iran stood amongst the first nations to push back against European colonialism and dominance.

The period of the revolt against the West amongst the Third World nations bore in Iran a semi-modern intellectual movement, with strong appeal among younger generations of educated people in search for a national identity based on original Oriental spiritualism radically in contrast to the so-called Western materialism. This intellectual movement later played a complementary role to a politically active religious movement which brought about the 1957 revolution. Under the pressure of opposing political forces and imbalanced projects of modernization, at last the country fulfilled its Third World destiny by way of a revolution under religious leadership, an event that astonished and later stunned the world. The final question, however remains: What is the meaning of an “Islamic revolution” in the context of an apparently demythologized world haunted by humanistic aspirations of the modern times?

The Western Problematic and the Idea of Everyday Culture and Life in the Post-Revolutionary Iran

Mohammad Reza’i and Hadi Aqajanzadeh Volume 2, Number 3, Fall 2017

پیش‌درآمد

با پایان جنگ هشت ساله و درگذشت آیت‌الله خمینی، دگرگونی بنیادینی در فضای زیست روزمرۀ ایرانیان پدید آمد. دولت پس از جنگ ، در رویارویی با واقعیت‌های اقتصادی-سیاسی و خسارت‌های سنگین بر جای مانده، نیازمند برخوردی عمل‌گرایانه‌تر و مبتنی بر نفع متقابل با جریان‌های سرمایه‌ای بین‌المللی بود. مذاکرات ایران با بانک جهانی اندکی پس از پایان جنگ آغاز شد و سرانجام به موافقت اصولی با اختصاص 250 میلیون دلار برای بازسازی اقتصاد ایران و جبران خرابی‌های زلزلۀ رودبار در شمال کشور منجر شد. روایت‌های رسانه‌های جهانی، که در مطبوعات ایران نیز انعکاس می‌یافتند، حاکی از آن بود که کشورهای اروپایی و امریکا قصدی برای ممانعت از دریافت حمایت‌های مالی ایران ندارند.[1] برای نمونه، فیگارو در گزارشی دربارۀ سیاست‌های دولت ایران پس از جنگ نوشت: ”تمامی نشانه‌ها حاکی از آن است که کمتر از دو سال پس از رحلت آیت‌الله خمینی، ایران مجدداً مشی صحیح خود را بازیافته است . . . ایران جهت جمع‌آوری و کسب 28 میلیارد دلاری که برای بازسازی خود نیاز دارد، نشانه‌های تضمین به غرب را آشکار ساخته است.“[2] همین گزارش در پایان با نقل جمله‌ای از هاشمی رفسنجانی، رئیس جمهور وقت، نوشت که انقلاب آینده در ایران اقتصادی خواهد بود. از سوی دیگر، در کنار تلاش‌ به منظور برقراری روابط تجاری با غرب، خبرهایی مبنی بر تأسیس دو منطقۀ آزاد تجاری در جزایر قشم و کیش منتشر شد و نشان داد دست‌کم زمینه‌های روانی و اجتماعی کافی برای تغییر سیاست‌های جاری در جمهوری اسلامی پدید آمده است.

با این همه، انقلاب اقتصادی در ایرانِ پس از جنگ بسیار زودتر از آنچه گمان می‌رفت ابعادی فرهنگی به خود گرفت. افرادی که با چارچوب‌های ایدئولوژیکی شکل‌گرفته در دهۀ نخست انقلاب به زندگی فردی و اجتماعی در سال‌های پس از جنگ می‌نگریستند، بیش از آنکه به جزئیات فنی این تغییرات اقتصادی کاری داشته باشند، نسبت به پیامدهای فرهنگی و فکری آن حساس بودند. برای فهم بهتر این نگرانی، باید به تلاش‌های فکری کسانی بپردازیم که نه انقلابیون حرفه‌ای، بلکه عمدتاً نظریه‌پردازان و استادان فلسفه در دانشگاه‌های ایران بودند. اینها کسانی‌اند که پیش از انقلاب رفته‌رفته درگیر مقوله‌بندی و تعیین خط‌مشی‌های معضله‌های فرهنگی ایرانیان در جهان معاصر بودند. بخشی از آنها پس از پیروزی انقلاب نیز در مقام ایدئولوگ‌های فرهنگی اصلی جمهوری اسلامی به فعالیت‌های خود وسعت بخشیدند و به برداشت نظام نوظهور از مقولاتی چون فرهنگ، غرب، هویت ایرانی-اسلامی و مانند اینها شکل دادند. در نوک این جریان نام افرادی چون رضا داوری اردکانی، شمس آل‌احمد، غلامعلی حداد عادل و نصرالله پورجوادی به چشم می‌خورد. بسیاری از این افراد که دانش‌آموختگان فلسفه و به‌ویژه گروه فلسفۀ دانشگاه تهران در دهه‌های 1340 و 1350 بودند، مفروضاتی فلسفی و نظری دربارۀ سیاست‌های فرهنگی، استعلاگری فرهنگی و نسبت زیست روزمره با آن داشتند و پس از انقلاب اسلامی این آموزه‌ها را به انقلابیون قدرت‌گرفته منتقل کردند. اما این مفروضات چه بودند؟ و چرا تا این اندازه مؤثر واقع شدند؟

روشنفکران ایرانی و مسئلۀ غرب در سال‌های پیش از انقلاب: از ادبیات تا فلسفه

پس از کودتای 28 مرداد 1332، بسیاری از روشنفکران ایرانی با درهای بسته برای تداوم نقد سیاسی روبه‌رو شدند. تلاش‌ها‌ی رژیم پهلوی به منظور انسداد فضای سیاسی، روشنفکران را به مجلات و مطبوعات ادبی و فرهنگی کشاند. این نشریات تنوع بسیاری داشتند و بسته به قدرت و نفوذ مدیرانشان و علایق ادبی و هنری حاکم بر آن دوره به طیف‌های مختلفی تقسیم می‌شدند.[3] روشنفکران به میانجی این نشریات بار دیگر به گفت‌و‌گو با یکدیگر پرداختند، اما این گفت‌و‌گوهای گاه بسیار تند هرچه بیشتر از بیان صریح وضعیت سیاسی فاصله می‌گرفت و حالتی نمادین می‌یافت. این روشنفکران از سویی نمی‌توانستند به صراحت از دولت اعلام برائت کرده و بی‌واهمه به نقد آن بپردازند و از سوی دیگر، تمایلی نداشتند تا با تأیید دولت اعتبار عمومی خود را خدشه‌دار سازند. بنابراین، چنانچه بروجردی متذکر شده‌است،[4] روشنفکران یادشده ناگزیر در دو سطح ”دیگری“ خود را تعریف کردند: دیگری نخست یا به بیان دیگر، دیگری نزدیک، دولت برآمده از نظام پهلوی بود، هر چند پرداختن مستقیم به آن دشوار می‌نمود. اما دیگری دوم، که در سطحی انتزاعی‌تر تعریف می‌شد و سهم بسیاری از معضله‌های فکری و فرهنگی بر دوش آن گذاشته می‌شد، غرب بود؛ غربی که به مرور آن‌چنان در ذهن نحله‌های مختلف روشنفکران ایرانی پُررنگ ‌شد که بسان خصمی نیرومند حضور نامرئی‌اش چونان شبحی همه‌جا حاضر حس می‌شد: ”دشمن یک موجودیت مسلح، سرکوبگر و محدود به ‌نام دولت نبود. بلکه یک کلیت دوردست و ناروشن و انتزاعی به نام غرب بود.“[5] این دشمن چنان قدرتمند بود که روشنفکران ایرانی ـ با سمت‌گیری‌های سیاسی و فکری متفاوت ـ فقط می‌توانستند از هیمنه و نفوذ آن شِکوه کنند. عمدۀ این گلایه‌ها از غرب، به مثابه دیگری نامرئی ولی همه‌جا حاضر، فاقد نظم و نسق و برنامۀ بدیل و ایجابی بود و خود را به دو شیوه در متون ادبی-فلسفی و جامعه‌شناختی ‌نمایاند.

شیوۀ نخست نگاهی معتدل‌تر و از سر دریغ و افسوس را دنبال می‌کرد و روایت خود را چنان پی می‌گرفت که گویی با افزایش تأثیرات فرهنگی غرب، ”غربت“ و ”مه‌گرفتگی“ در جسم و جان ایرانیان دارای سابقۀ تمدنی و فرهنگی کهن نشسته است. نمونۀ بارز این نگاه در ادبیات ایران دفتر شعر طنین در دلتا از طاهره صفارزاده است که شعرهای او در سفر به اروپا و امریکا طی سال‌های میانی دهۀ 1340 را در‌ بر ‌می‌گیرد. او در اشعار این دفتر از ترس و واهمه و غربت خود در غرب می‌گوید. در شعر ”شیرها که با توپ نقره بازی می‌کنند،“ از واهمه و تردید می‌گوید:

هر شب مرا بیدار می‌کنند

شیرهای سنگین جلو عمارت را می‌گویم

من فضای گذر توپ‌های سنگین هستم

توپ‌هاشان رنگ نقره دارد

و نفس‌هاشان هرم غریو

من از پنجه‌هاشان می‌ترسم

پنجه‌هاشان که توپ را پرتاب می‌کنند

سرم روی سینه خمیده است

سرم به روی سینه‌ام به منتهای تردید رسیده است

کدام نسیم نمناکی گرم پوستم را خواهد سترد[6]

در شعر ”مه در لندن،“ از غربتی می‌گوید که او را فراگرفته است:

مه در لندن بومی است

غربت در من

در زمستان توریست اول مه را می‌بیند

بعد

باغ وحش

و برج لندن

غروب‌ها وقتی به اطاقم در الزکورت برمی‌گردم

جاده مخدر مه

حافظه قدم‌هایم را مخدوش می‌کند[7]‌

در این اشعار، غرب در قالب تمثیل و استعاره به شیرهای سنگین و هوای مه‌آلودی تشبیه می‌شود که ترسی غریب و درک‌ناشدنی را به جان شاعر می‌افکند. این بیان شعری طنینی نیرومند در عرصۀ تفکر اجتماعی سال‌های پیش از انقلاب نیز داشت که نقد رمانتیک غرب از موضع سنت‌گرایانه بود. داریوش شایگان و احسان نراقی شخصیت‌های عمدۀ نقد رمانتیک غرب بودند و بیشتر بر همین وجه ”غربت غرب“ دست گذاشتند؛ عنوانی که روی یکی از کتاب‌های نراقی در سال 1353 نشست.

غربت غرب که خود با عطف توجه به عنوان کتاب سهروردی –الغُربه الغَربیه– برای نوشته نراقی انتخاب شد، از آغاز وجه استعاری، رمزآلود و البته رمانتیک خود را آشکار می‌‌کرد، چنان که نراقی خود با اشاره به کتاب سهروردی نوشته بود: ”شرق و غرب در حقیقت اشاراتی است عرفانی . . . بدین معنی که شرق جهان نور و مظهر روشنایی و پایگاه فرشتگان مقرب الهی است در حالی که غرب جهان ظلمت و نشانۀ تاریکی است.“[8] نراقی در ادامه کوشید با استفاده از مباحث متفکرانی چون اریش فروم، مسئلۀ بحران هویت، مصرف‌گرایی، اعتیاد و غلبۀ تکنیک در غرب را مطرح سازد. اما مسئله آنجاست که در آثار نراقی، بحران‌های یادشده در اروپای پس از 1968 معضله‌هایی سیاسی و اجتماعی نیستند، بلکه بحران‌هایی ماهوی با قدمتی به درازای همۀ تاریخ تفکر غربی‌اند.‌ به نظر نراقی، برای رهایی از غربت غرب باید به دامان شرق و معنویت و آرامش آن بازگشت. در این بازخوانی رمانتیک، گرچه نوعی زمینه‌مندی و توجه زمینه‌مند به فرهنگ بومی مستتر است، اما این زمینه‌گرایی با نوعی اصالت جوهری همراه می‌شود و تا سرحدات اعتقاد به مقولاتی چون ”ذات غرب“ پیش می‌رود: ”من معتقدم تمدن غرب ذاتاً ستمگر است.“[9]

شیوۀ دوم، که با پیروزی انقلاب قوت بیشتری گرفت، نفی آنتاگونیستی غرب از رهگذار مواجهه‌ای تند و مستقیم است. این رویکرد بیشتر در میان نویسندگان و شاعران چپ‌گرایی مانند سیاوش کسرایی، سعید سلطانپور، نعمت میرزازاده و خسرو گلسرخی در دهه‌های 1340 و 1350 رواج یافت. به خلاف شیوۀ نخست که بازگشت به امنیت شرقی و فروگذاشتن غرب با بحران‌های ذاتی ویرانگرش را توصیه می‌کرد و از این‌رو، مواجهه‌ای میان شرق و غرب را صورت نمی‌داد، در این شیوه شاهد نوعی به مبارزه طلبیدن غرب از جانب شرق هستیم. شرق در این روایت‌ها معادل شوروی و نظام کمونیستی است. برای نمونه، در شعر ”امریکا، امریکا“ از سیاوش کسرایی، برقراری تناظری میان دوگانۀ غرب-شرق با دوگانۀ جنگ‌سرد شوروی-امریکا یا کمونیسم-لیبرالیسم را می‌شود مشاهده کرد:

بشنو!

می‌آیند

چنداچند و گروه‌هاگروه

نه! غم‌آوای شبانه نیست

سرود سرخ سحرگاه‌ست

که پا می‌گیرد

نگاه کن!

ستارگانت

یکایک از پرچم تو می‌گریزند

و در دستت تنها

پارچه‌ای می‌ماند

بل، قابدستمالی

برای برق افکندن به کفش کهنۀ سرمایه

آری، نگاه کن

که ستارگان می‌گریزند

چه، آفتاب برمی‌آید[10]

این رویکرد که در متن مخاصمات جنگ سرد ‌فهمیدنی است، به جای گریختن از غرب و پناه بردن به انزوای شرق، تصویری از غرب ارائه می‌دهد که در حال گریختن از خود است و ستاره‌های پرچم امریکا نیز آن‌گاه که آفتاب از شرق برمی‌خیزد، پا به فرار می‌گذارند.

این دو شیوۀ مواجهه با غرب با ناخرسندی‌‌های عمیق‌تری ارتباط داشت که ذیل مجادلۀ ”دیگری‌سازی غرب“ مورد توجه اصحاب فلسفه بود. در برهۀ انقلاب، صورت‌بندی از دیگری‌سازی غرب به سبب ترس یا خشمی مفصل‌بندی شد که در میان فعالان سیاسی و اجتماعی نسبت به غرب و مشخصاً امریکا وجود داشت. حاصل مفصل‌بندی سطوح معنایی و هویتی دیگری‌سازی غرب با سطوح سیاسی و اجتماعی آن در جریان انقلاب پروژه‌ای بود که از آن می‌توان به ”غرب‌ستیزی انقلابی“ یا چنانچه در ایران شناخته‌شده‌تر است ”استکبارستیزی“ یاد کرد.

بحران هویتی و نقد هستی‌شناختی غرب در ایران پیش از انقلاب

مفصل‌بندی نقد هستی‌شناختی غرب با رتوریک انقلابی سوابقی در سال‌های پیش از انقلاب دارد. چنان‌ که اشاره شد، روحیۀ حاکم بر فضای روشنفکری ایران طی سه دهۀ پیش از پیروزی انقلاب اسلامی روحیه‌‌ای حاکی از خشم و استیصال توأمان بود. تغییرات تجویزی در جامعه‌ای که از آزادی‌های سیاسی و اجتماعی کافی برخوردار نبود ناراحتی بسیاری از روشنفکران ایرانی را برانگیخته بود، اما دلایل سیاسی این ناراحتی عموماً پنهان بودند. جلال آل‌احمد، که صراحت بیشتری در بیان نارضایتی‌های خود داشت، در کتاب مهم خود غرب‌زدگی بحران هویتی ایرانیان را به غرب نسبت داد. آل‌احمد نیز گرچه مانند نراقی صورت‌بندی دقیقی از مواجهۀ شرق-غرب به‌دست نداد و بیان احساسی‌اش بر قوت استدلالی‌اش غالب بود، اما دست به کاری اساسی‌تر زد و با نگاهی به وضعیت هویتی ایرانیان از صفویه بدین‌سوی، کوشید ریشۀ این وضعیت معضله‌گون هویتی را مشخص سازد:

اجازه دهید که اکنون به عنوان یک شرقی پای در سنت و شائق به پرسشی دویست سیصد ساله و مجبور به این همه درماندگی و واماندگی و نشسته بر زمینۀ آن کلیت تجزیه‌شدۀ اسلامی، غرب‌زدگی را چنین تعبیر کنم: مجموعۀ عوارضی که در زندگی و فرهنگ و تمدن و روش اندیشۀ مردمان نقطه‌ای از عالم حادث شده است بی‌هیچ سنتی به عنوان تکیه‌گاهی و بی‌هیچ تداومی در تاریخ و بی‌هیچ مدرج تحول یابنده‌ای.[11]

از بیان آل‌احمد مشخص است آنچه خشم او و دیگر منتقدان فرهنگ غرب را برانگیخته، تجزیۀ کلیت تاریخ تمدن اسلامی است. او گرچه در این کتاب اشاراتی به سهم ایرانیان از جمله در دوران صفویه و مشروطه می‌کند،[12] اما معضلۀ هویتی ایرانیان و گسست تاریخی‌شان را عموماً به غرب نسبت می‌دهد؛ غربی که بر یک کلیت تاریخی و تمدنی شکاف انداخته و مبنای معرفتی این تمدن را از سطح بیرونی آن -که همان سطح زندگی روزمره باشد- جدا کرده است. تمثیلی که آل‌احمد از غرب‌زدگی به مثابه ”سن‌زدگی“ عرضه می‌کند، به خوبی نشان می‌دهد او زیست روزمرۀ فرهنگی را جایگاه اصلی شکاف در مبانی معرفتی تمدن ایرانی-اسلامی می‌داند: ”دیده‌اید که [سن‌زدگی] گندم را چطور می‌پوساند؟ از درون. پوستۀ سالم پابرجاست، اما فقط پوست است، عین همان پوستی که از پروانه‌ای بر درختی مانده.“[13] آل‌احمد سطح زندگی روزمره را به پوسته‌ای تشبیه می‌کند که به ظاهر پابرجاست، اما دوام پوشالی آن فریبنده است و اگر بنا باشد از عمیق‌تر شدن آن شکاف جلوگیری به عمل آید، آن پوسته باید با توجه به وضعیت درونی‌اش داوری شود.[14] از آنجا که پرسش از چیستی و ماهیت این بحران هویتی-تاریخی که علایم و نشانه‌های آن در قالب سبک‌های زندگی و شیوه‌های پوشش و مصرف در حال مرئی‌شدن روزافزون بود، بیشتر به قلمرو فلسفه تعلق داشت، مسئلۀ تجزیۀ کلیت تاریخی و تمدنی ایرانیان در مواجهه با غرب وارد دستگاه فلسفی‌ای شد که هدف خود را برطرف کردن این شکاف فرهنگی و تمدنی معرفی می‌کرد.

بنیادگر چنین دستگاه فلسفی کل‌گرایانه‌ای در سال‌های پیش از انقلاب احمد فردید بود. فردید که آل‌احمد اصطلاح ”غربزدگی“ را از او وام گرفت،[15] در جوانی مطالعاتی در حکمت قدیم و جدید و به‌خصوص آرای ابن‌عربی داشت، اما رفته‌رفته و پس از گذر از آرای کسانی چون هانری برگسن،[16] شیفته و دلدادۀ فلسفۀ مارتین هایدگر شد و کوشید مبتنی بر دو پایۀ اصلی فلسفۀ او، یعنی پدیدار‌شناسی و اتیمولوژی، مبنایی برای افکارش بیابد. فردید در واقع همان شکاف تاریخی-تمدنی را نقطۀ عزیمت خود در نظر گرفت، اما صورت‌بندی متفاوت و رادیکالی از آن به‌دست داد. او به جای آنکه دوگانۀ شرق-غرب را بر اساس مؤلفه‌های جغرافیایی، سیاسی، اقتصادی و حتی دینی توضیح دهد، مبنایی وجودی برای دوگانۀ شرق-غرب قائل شد. از این رو، شرق و غرب ”صرفاً به احوال و ساحات گوناگون درونی، فکری و معنوی آدمی اشاره دارند و تعابیری مجازی برای اشاره به طلوع و اشراق آفتاب حقیقت یا ظلمت و غروب نور حقیقت در وجود آدمی‌اند.“[17] در واقع، به نظر فردید اصالت وجودی شرق و غرب که محصول نظام مفهومی و تفکر غربی است، خود جای اشکال دارد. در این خصوص، فردید نقد هایدگر به ظهور اندیشۀ متافیزیکی در غرب و تأثیر آن بر تاریخ تفکر فلسفی را امکان خوبی می‌داند تا از طریق آن تمامی تحلیل‌های اجتماعی، سیاسی و اقتصادی را ذیل دوگانگی انتولوژیک درآورد. بر پایۀ این دوگانگی انتولوژیک، از دوگانگی جغرافیایی، سیاسی و اقتصادی شرق-غرب مرکزیت‌زدایی می‌شود و غرب‌زدگی بدل به معضله‌ای می‌شود که سراسر جهان را از شرق تا غرب درنوردیده است. فردید شکاف تمدنی-تاریخی را که پیش‌تر بدان اشاره شد به تکثرگرایی، غفلت از وجود، و اومانیسم نسبت می‌داد، اما نقد او به اومانیسم و نسیان تفکر فلسفی غرب نقدی جزءنگرانه و متکی بر عوامل مادی نبود، بلکه او درکی ازلی-ابدی از این نسیان داشت و به همین سبب سخنان خود را با یاد ”خدای پریروز و پس‌فردا“ آغاز می‌کرد. پریروز به باور فردید به دوران پیش از افلاطون بازمی‌گشت که غرب هنوز تحت سیطرۀ اندیشۀ متافیزیکی قرار نگرفته بود، اما هیچ طرح روشنی به لحاظ تاریخی برای پس‌فردایی که فردید مدعی‌اش بود عرضه نشد و پس‌فردا بیشتر به ساحتی استعلایی شبیه است که فقط از طریق عرفان و کشف و شهود می‌توان بدان وقوف یافت. طرح دوگانۀ انتولوژیکی فردید در سال‌های پیش از انقلاب، دست‌آخر مفصل‌بندی مشخصی با پروژه‌های سیاسی دوران خود نیافت.

صورت‌بندی فردید از معضلۀ هویتی-فکری ایرانیان، که بر اساس آن همۀ کاستی‌ها به دوگانۀ انتولوژیک شرق و غرب بازمی‌گشت، پرداختن به مسئلۀ هویت و حیات فرهنگی ایرانیان در حوزه‌های گوناگون علوم انسانی را با دشواری‌ها و سوءتفاهم‌های بسیاری مواجه ساخت، چرا که فردید از سویی صلاحیت و اعتبار علوم انسانی و اجتماعی را به کل به پرسش گرفت و آنها را نیز محصولات غلبۀ همان تفکر متافیزیکی‌ای دانست که موجد غرب‌زدگی شده‌اند و از سوی دیگر، مطالعۀ آنچه در سطح انضمامی زندگی مردم جریان دارد را به تنهایی و از طریق بهره‌گیری از علوم انسانی و اجتماعی، بازتولید رویکرد اومانیستی و جلوه‌ای دیگر از غرب‌زدگی دانست. او عرصۀ انضمامی فرهنگ و همۀ دانش‌ها -از جمله علوم انسانی و اجتماعی- را که مطالعۀ این وجوه مادی، نفسانی و انضمامی زیست انسانی را مد نظر داشتند، سراسر طاغوت‌زده و غرب‌زده معرفی می‌کرد: ”به‌طور کلی علوم انسانی طاغوتی است.“[18] بنابراین، دوگانه‌ای متخاصم میان فلسفه‌ و سایر علوم انسانی ساخته ‌شد و بر پایۀ آن، هر چقدر علوم انسانی طفیلی مدرنیته و تفکر انسان‌مدارند، فلسفه -آن‌ هم با صورت‌بندی انتولوژیک فردیدی آن- راهی برای رستگاری و نجات در اختیار می‌نهد. اما مشکل اصلی آنجا بود که فلسفه فی‌نفسه نمی‌توانست بانی چنین امری در سطح زندگی روزمره و جهان اجتماعی شود و به زدودن زیست‌جهان اجتماعی از آفات غرب‌زدگی بپردازد. بنابراین، باید هم‌دستی و پیوندی میان این دستگاه فلسفی با یک پروژۀ سیاسی مشخص صورت می‌گرفت که آن پروژه سیاسی بتواند این صورت‌بندی انتولوژیک را در قالب کنش سیاسی انضمامی درآورده و در زیست‌جهان اجتماعی وارد کند. فردید و همفکرانش حتی در سال‌های پیش از انقلاب ‌کوشیدند از طریق نزدیک شدن به رژیم پهلوی این کار را به انجام رسانند، اما موفقیت چندانی به دست نیاوردند.[19] پیروزی انقلاب اسلامی همان فرصت مناسبی بود که آنها به منظور مفصل‌بندی آرای خود با شرایط سیاسی و اجتماعی انقلابی کمال استفاده را از آن بردند.

عرفان سیاسی خمینی و ماهیت‌باوری فلسفی فردید: پیش به‌سوی سیاست فرهنگی انقلابی

وجود شباهت‌های ظاهری در ادبیات فردیدی‌ها و انقلابیون، اعم از چپ‌گرایان و اسلام‌گرایان، پیوند صورت‌بندی انتولوژیک فردید از دوگانۀ شرق-غرب با پروژه‌ای سیاسی-انقلابی را تسهیل کرد که شعار خود را ”نه شرقی، نه غربی، جمهوری اسلامی“ قرار داد. چرا که فردید نیز دست ‌آخر غرب و شرق سیاسی و جغرافیایی را غرب‌زده دانسته و نفی می‌کرد. با این همه، پرندۀ اقبال از جهتی دیگر بر شانۀ فردیدی‌ها نشست. گرچه کمتر کسی از میان انقلابیون درگیر مسئلۀ وجودشناختی غرب بود، با این حال نزدیکی خاصی راه نفوذ تفکر فردیدی در عرصۀ سیاست فرهنگی سال‌های نخست انقلاب اسلامی را هموار کرد. آن نزدیکی خاص این بود که آیت‌الله خمینی در مشرب فکری خود وامدار محی‌الدین ابن‌عربی و کتاب مهمش فصوص‌الحکم بود، ‌چنان که طی هفت سال زیر نظر استادش، آیت‌الله شاه‌آبادی، این کتاب را خوانده و بر آن تعلیقه نوشته بود.[20] ابن‌عربی همان‌ کسی بود که فردید علاوه بر هایدگر توجه ویژه‌ای به آرای او داشت. توجه آیت‌الله خمینی به ابن‌عربی و عرفان امری معمول در دستگاه فقهی شیعه نبود و چه بسا در آغاز می‌توانست به بدنامی‌اش بیانجامد. اما به لحاظ سیاسی، توجه خمینی به عرفان ابن‌عربی در شکل‌گیری پایه‌های تفکر انقلابی او مؤثر بود: ”او مسائل عرفانی را از انزوا و قلب سالک به همۀ عالم هستی تسری داد و عرضۀ مباحث عرفانی را به جامعه نه تنها موجب تحقیر ندانست، بلکه نیاز جامعه را به عرفان از هر علومی بیشتر می‌دانست. بدین‌ ترتیب، عارف کامل یک مصلح اجتماعی نیز هست.“[21] گذر از عرفان شیعی به سیاست رادیکال ناشی از درکی نسبت به تحقق حقیقت بود که بر پایۀ آن، غایت راستین سلوک عارف ”سفر من الخلق الی الخلق بالحق“ است، یعنی همان‌گونه که عارف از خلق جدا می‌شود تا به حق برسد، سرانجام باید به جامعه و متن زندگی بازگردد تا همراه خلق در سیر به جانب حق شود. با چنین خوانشی، زیست‌جهان انسانی و ساحت زندگی روزمره گذرگاهی است که انسان‌ها باید در آن برای حرکت به سوی حق کوشش کنند. از این روست که برساخت سوژه‌هایی انسانی‌ مورد توجه قرار می‌گیرد که زندگی روزمره‌شان می‌باید از همۀ حجاب‌های نفسانی برکنار بماند:

بدان که رغبت به دنیا موجب احتجاب از حق و بازماندن از سلوک الی ‌الله است و مقصود از دنیا، هر چیزی است که انسان را از حق‌ تعالی به خود مشغول کند . . . این حجب انسان را از جمال محبوب باز می‌دارد و دلبستگی به هر چه غیر حق است، خار طریق سلوک الی الله است.[22]

این جمله از خمینی را اگر کنار این بند از آرای فردید بگذاریم متوجه نزدیکی ریشه‌های فکری این دو در نگاه به عرفان عملی می‌شویم: ”روش فلسفه جدید نسبت به گذشته، روشِ از حق به خلق است و خلق، همان نفس اماره مخصوصا نفس اماره جمعی است.“[23] فردید و خمینی به‌رغم اینکه از جهاتی متفاوت به ابن‌عربی نزدیک شده بودند و اهدافی که در سر داشتند یکی نبود، اما به یک چیز اشاره داشتند: به جای از حق به خلق رسیدن، باید از خلق یا با خلق به حق رسید. نتیجۀ حرکت در این مسیر سیاستی عرفانی است که زندگی روزمره را مهم می‌شمارد، چون حرکت به جانب حق حرکتی فردی نیست و نقطۀ عزیمتش از زیست روزمرۀ انسان‌هایی است که گرفتار فراموشی شده‌اند و البته علوم و فلسفه نیز به این غفلت کمک کرده‌اند.

سیاست فرهنگی انقلابی و زندگی روزمره در دهۀ شصت

فردید و همفکرانش اندکی پس از پیروزی انقلاب دریافتند عرفان انقلابی با پیروزی انقلاب نباید در حد مدعاهای فردی باقی بماند. از این رو، انقلابیون به ترویج گستردۀ شیوۀ زیستی ملزم شدند که در آن مظاهر زندگی روزمره نیز باید تلاشی برای تحقق حقیقت الهی باشد. چنین شد که به فاصلۀ کوتاهی پس از پیروزی انقلاب، جمعی از همین فلسفه‌دانان متأثر از فردید با مدعای پاسخگویی فلسفه به تمامی معضله‌های زندگی مادی و معنوی افراد وارد دستگاه‌های سیاست‌گذار فرهنگی همچون شورای ‌عالی انقلاب فرهنگی، شورای فرهنگ عمومی و شورای تدوین و بازنگری در کتاب‌های دانشگاهی شدند و کوشیدند با استفاده از بیان ضدغربی و ضدطاغوتی انقلاب اسلامی، غرب جغرافیایی، سیاسی و وجودشناختی را به منزلۀ دیگری هویت انقلابی در یک کلیت فلسفی و مفهومی ادغام کنند.

سیاست فرهنگی‌ ماحصل این پیوند میان فلاسفۀ یادشده و قائلان به اندیشۀ ولایت فقیه رفته‌رفته زندگی روزمره و زیست‌جهان فرهنگی را به نفع یگانه حقیقت موجود که به تعبیر خمینی چیزی جز ”سیر الی‌ الله و فی ‌الله“[24] نبود اشغال کرد، به نحوی که اگر بنا بود به ابژه‌ها یا مناسبات زندگی روزمره در سال‌های ابتدایی انقلاب اشاره شود، این اشاره صرفاً از طریق درکی ماهیت‌باورانه ممکن بود، چندان ‌که ابژۀ یاد‌شده باید نقش خود را در تقرب به حقیقت موجه می‌ساخت، وگرنه بی‌درنگ به مثابه مظهری از مظاهر طاغوت کنار گذاشته می‌شد. از این رهگذر، نوعی دستگاه سیاسی ایدئولوژیک پدید آمد که متکی بر آن هر ابژه‌ای به جوهری‌ترین سطح خود تجزیه می‌شد، چندان که گویی ابژه‌های زندگی روزمره دارای ماهیاتی‌اند که همگی در خدمت یک نظام یکپارچه‌ساز معرفتی قرار می‌گیرند. این نظام یکپارچه‌ساز معرفتی می‌کوشد روابط واقعی در زیست روزمره به سوی آنچه رکسانا ورزی (Roxanne Varzi) با الهام از عباس امانت ”فانتزی‌های ایدئولوژیک بیمارگونه“ (Ill-conceived Ideological fantasies) می‌خواند بکشاند.[25] از آنجا که سیاست ماهیت نمی‌سازد، هم‌دستی با فیلسوفان ضروری بود تا به میدان آیند و جهان اشیاء را به تسخیر ایده‌های ماهیت‌باورانه درآورند. آنها این کار را با بهره‌گیری از تکنیک‌های نام‌گذاری و استیضاح سوژه صورت می‌دادند و هر تلاشی به منظور جداسازی تجارب زیسته از آن ماهیات را نوعی نزدیکی به غرب می‌دانستند، که هم بار سیاسی و جغرافیایی داشت و هم بار وجودشناختی، و آن را محکوم و طرد می‌‌کردند.

اولین واکنش‌ها به چنین رویکردی از درون دستگاه سیاست‌گذاری فرهنگی رژیم انقلابی، ستاد انقلاب فرهنگی، پا گرفت؛ جایی که عبدالکریم سروش، از شخصیت‌های محوری آن ستاد، متأثر از مباحث فلسفۀ تحلیلی و شناخت‌شناسی پوپری به جدالی تمام‌قد با قائلان به ماهیت‌باوری فلسفی برخاست. سروش این جدال را دقیقاً جایی استوار کرد که فردید و همفکرانش، که سروش آنها را به طعنه غرب‌ستیزان هگل‌مشرب می‌خواند، بر آن تأکید بسیار داشتند که اعتقاد به اصالت ذاتی و وجودی غرب بود. سروش غرب‌زدگی را مفهومی معرفی کرد که بیش از واقعیت‌های ملموس و تاریخی بر کلیات و ماهیات ناروشن و مبهم متکی است:

اگر غرب‌زدگی معنای محصلی داشته باشد، همین است که شخص، با وهم و افسون و تلقین، چنان خویشتن را آماده و حساس کند که با دست زدن بر جزئی از غرب، کلِ ”غرب“ او را بگیرد. بلی، غرب‌گرفتگی و غرب‌زدگی بیماری‌اند، اما بیماری‌ای که مخلوق وهم است و محصول تلقین و القای اذهانی که به غرب شخصیت و کلیتی بخشیده‌اند، و آن‌گاه خود مسحور و مسخر آن شخصیت موهوم شده‌اند.[26]

سروش دریافته بود که اگر بخواهیم همۀ جزئیات غرب را، از اشیاء گرفته تا فنون و آداب، منطبق بر مشرب وجودشناختی در فلسفه تعیین اعتبار کرده و با اصل و خاستگاهی بسنجیم که خود روشن و شفاف نیست، دیگر چیزی از آن آداب و اشیاء و رسوم و علوم بر جای نخواهد ماند:

شئون جاری در غرب محصول تاریخ پرحادثۀ آن دیار است، اما چگونه می‌توان گفت که در دل ذره‌ذرۀ این شئون و اجزا همۀ تاریخ دیار غرب نهفته است و از آن بالاتر، به هر جا که بروند، غرب و فضا و احوال آن را هم با خود خواهند برد؟[27]

البته نقد سروش به ذات‌انگاری در غرب‌شناسی او را به تمامی از دام کل‌گرایی نمی‌رهاند. سروش همچنان بر مدار دستگاهی فلسفی می‌ماند که متکی بر روش‌شناسی فلسفی می‌کوشد زیست‌جهان ایرانیان را پس از انقلاب و در سال‌های دهۀ 1360 سامان دهد. دستگاه فکری سروش نیز چنان که خود در مقالۀ ”وجود و ماهیت غرب“ نوشته است، غرب را چنان یک ”کل“ می‌بیند، اما کلی که وحدت اعتباری دارد و نه وحدت حقیقی و ماهوی و بنابراین، قابل تجزیه است و می‌توان از آن بهره‌هایی گرفت و گزینش‌هایی از آن صورت داد.[28]

زندگی روزمرۀ ایرانی پس از جنگ: بحران ناکارآمدی سیاست فرهنگی انقلابی

جنگ ایران و عراق همۀ مناسبات زندگی روزمره را تحت تأثیر قرار داده بود. کمبود ارزاق و توزیع محدود و کوپنی اقلام ضروری زندگی در کنار نایاب ماندن بسیاری از لوازم مصرفی، کنترل دولتی زیست‌جهان مردم و رابطۀ آنان با ابژه‌های مادی را آسان‌تر می‌ساخت. اما پایان جنگ بسیاری از محدودیت‌های ناخواسته را مرتفع ساخت و دولتِ پس از جنگ راهی جز حرکت به سوی اقتصاد مدرن و تعامل با نظام بین‌المللی نداشت، چرا که استفاده از واسطه‌های غیررسمی یا اخذ وام‌های اعتباری کوتاه‌مدت خارجی با ریسک بالا، موسوم به یوزانس که در دوران جنگ رایج بود، نمی‌توانست شرایط بحرانی کشور را به حالت عادی بازگرداند. بنابراین، اقداماتی به منظور پایین آوردن نرخ ارز رقابتی، دریافت وام‌های خارجی با ریسک کمتر و افزایش ظرفیت تولید صنعتی در دستور کار قرار گرفت، گرچه این سیاست‌ها کمتر از یک دهه بعد به بحران بزرگ پولی و مقروض شدن شدید دولت انجامیدند، اما آثار و نتایج فرهنگی و اجتماعی بازگشت‌ناپذیری از خود باقی گذاشتند. مبنای سیاست‌های اقتصادی دولت هاشمی در آن مقطع چندان روشن نبود و فقط از روی تغییراتی که بر سبک و کیفیت زندگی مردم برجای می‌گذاشت قابل ارزیابی بود:

تصمیم‌گیری‌های اساسی دربارۀ اقتصاد کاملاً پنهانی و توسط صاحبان قدرت انجام می‌گرفت و ما صرفاً نتایجش را در زندگی روزمره می‌دیدیم؛ مانند ورود کالاها و تکنولوژی‌های جدید یا امکان‌های جدیدی که برای رفت و برگشت به خارج ایجاد شده بود و افرادی می‌رفتند و می‌آمدند و یا بحث ویدئو و . . . در چنین فضایی روشن است که جامعه ابتدا همین تغییرات فرهنگی را مشاهده می‌کرد، به‌خصوص که تغییرات اقتصادی و دعواهای پشت‌پرده امکان بازتاب چندانی نداشتند.[29]

چنان که فرهادپور به خوبی اشاره می‌کند، گرچه فقط سطح فرهنگی تغییرات قابل رویت بود، اما این سطح جبهه‌گیری‌های اقتصادی، سیاسی و به‌ویژه فلسفی و معرفت‌شناختی بسیاری را در خود پنهان داشت. توضیح جبهه‌گیری‌های سیاسی و اقتصادی نیازمند مجال دیگری است، اما در خصوص جبهه‌گیری‌های فلسفی، تأثیر این سیاست‌های جدید ویرانگر بود و به بیان دیگر، طرفداران فلسفه‌های ذات‌باور و غرب‌ستیز را تا آخرین سرحدات بسط لوازم منطقی تفکراتشان پیش برد. اگر مجموعۀ هم‌آیندی‌های دهۀ 1360 و به‌ویژه هم‌زمانی میان وقوع جنگ، کمبود اقلام مصرفی و کاریزمای عرفانی آیت‌الله خمینی به آنها اجازه می‌داد از منظری کل‌گرایانه فلسفی زندگی روزمره را کنترل کنند، این امر دیگر در دهۀ بعد ممکن نبود: پای تکنولوژی‌های مدرن، ابژه‌های مصرفی و حتی جهانگردان غربی بار دیگر به زندگی روزمرۀ ایرانیان باز شده بود. غلامحسین کرباسچی، شهردار وقت تهران، با اختیار تام از طرف هاشمی رفسنجانی مسئول تغییر فضای شهری شد. ارزش‌های مدرن مبتنی بر توجه به مؤلفه‌هایی چون محیط‌زیست، فرصت‌های بیشتر برای سرگرمی و مصرف و زیست شادمانانه آرام‌آرام جای خود را در میان مردم می‌یافتند.

تصویر 1. فرهنگسرای بهمن، اولین مرکز فرهنگی مدرن پس از جنگ که در زمان کرباسچی در محل کشتارگاه سابق تهران ساخته و در سال 1370 افتتاح شد.

چنین شد که اولین صف‌بندی جدی نیروهای انقلاب پس از فوت خمینی در عرصۀ فرهنگی رخ داد. رهبر جدید در سال 1370 تعبیر ”تهاجم فرهنگی غرب“ را برای توصیف این روند به کار برد. اما پرسش این بود این غربی که دوباره متهم اصلی شده و به پشت میز محاکمه بازگشته است کدام غرب است؟ در آغاز انقلاب و فضای ایدئولوژیک آن دوران و سپس در سراسر دوران جنگ، درک کمابیش مشترکی از غرب وجود داشت، آن غرب در یک دستگاه فلسفی و کل‌گرایانه ساخته و پرداخته شده بود و مفصل‌بندی نیرومندی نیز با شرایط سیاسی آن سال‌ها داشت، چرا که جنگ ایران و عراق و نیز تداوم جنگ سرد، درک دوقطبی از مناسبات جهانی و آوردن آن ذیل دستگاه اصالت وجودی را آسان‌تر می‌ساخت. اما پس از پایان جنگ ایران-عراق و نیز پایان جنگ دوقطبی‌ساز سرد، سخن گفتن از تهاجم فرهنگی غرب نمی‌توانست در همان دستگاه تفسیری‌ای باقی بماند که در سراسر دهۀ شصت از آن نیرو گرفته بود. بنابراین، یک ‌بار دیگر همان ایدئولوگ‌های فلسفی فراخوانده شدند تا برای حفاظت از زیست‌جهان فرهنگی ایرانیان در برابر ابژه‌های مادی و مصرفی چاره‌ای بیاندیشند. مطبوعات و به‌ویژه مجلۀ کیهان فرهنگی -که در آن مقطع کاملاً از تفکر سروش و همفکرانش پاکسازی شده بود- نشست‌ها و میزگردهای بسیاری برگزار کردند و در آنها افرادی چون داوری، حداد عادل، اعوانی، کریم مجتهدی و شمس آل‌احمد شرکت کردند. هدف از برگزاری این نشست‌ها تبیین مفهوم تهاجم فرهنگی و ارزیابی موانع و چالش‌هایی بود که سیاست‌گذاری فرهنگی از همان منظر کل‌گرایانۀ فلسفی را دشوار می‌ساخت. اما آنچه ماحصل این نشست‌ها بود، نه تنها نتوانست پاسخی به هم‌آیندی‌های جدید دهد، بلکه نشان داد رویکرد پیموده شده در دهۀ شصت با همان قالب دیگر قابل تداوم نیست. در بیان دلایل ناکامی این کوشش‌ها باید به دو نکته اشاره کنیم. نکتۀ نخست آنکه در همین نشست‌ها اذعان شد که شرایط دانش فلسفی در ایران وضعیت مناسبی ندارد و گرچه علاقه‌مندانی بدان راغب شده‌اند، اما به‌ویژه در زمینۀ فلسفۀ غرب بی‌اطلاعی و کمبود منابع غوغا می‌کند:

در کار آموزش نواقص و مشکلاتی وجود دارد. کتاب کم است و در بعضی مطالب اصلاً [کتابی موجود] نیست. استاد باید زیاد درس بدهد. تعداد کسانی که در خارج از کشور فلسفه خوانده‌اند بسیار معدود است و چنان که می‌دانید، آثار فلسفۀ اروپایی بیشتر به دست کسانی که فلسفه نمی‌دانسته‌اند ترجمه و نشر شده است. به این جهت مشکل آموزش در فلسفه از رشته‌های دیگر بیشتر است.[30]

اذعان به ضعف دانش فلسفی در قبال غرب از جانب داوری متضمن نکتۀ دیگری نیز بود و آن اینکه مدعای ایستادگی در برابر تفکر و فرهنگ غربی مستلزم شناخت آن است، ولی واقعیت این است که تا آن مقطع، تلاشی جدی برای معرفی منابع فکری غرب -به‌ویژه پس از روشنگری- صورت نگرفته بود و حتی قریب به اتفاق آثار هایدگر و هگل نیز به فارسی ترجمه نشده بودند. به بیانی دیگر، دانش فلسفی در ایران دموکراتیزه و وارد حوزۀ عمومی نشده است و بیشتر از طریق سنت فردیدی، و به‌گونۀ شفاهی، محدود و نادقیق انتقال یافته است. چنان که در همان جلسه کریم مجتهدی، استاد باسابقۀ فلسفه در دانشگاه تهران، نیز متذکر شد: ”تسلیم نشدن در برابر فرهنگ غرب، مستلزم شناختن آن است. ما وقتی می‌توانیم با این فرهنگ مقابله کنیم که آن را بشناسیم.“[31] اما واقعیت این بود که حتی کسانی هم که بر ضرورت شناخت ماهیت اندیشۀ غرب تأکید داشتند، کمکی به انتقال دقیق و بی‌واسطۀ دانش فلسفی غرب به مخاطبان ایرانی نکردند.

نکتۀ دوم این است که با طرح اندیشۀ غرب‌زدگی در بیان فردیدی آن چگونه می‌شد آموزشی فلسفی‌ طرح‌ریزی کرد که از غرب‌زدگی در امان بماند؟ داوری معتقد بود:

ما فلسفۀ غرب را نمی‌خواهیم که سخنان فیلسوفان غرب را تکرار کنیم. بلکه می‌خواهیم عالمی را که در آن به ‌سر می‌بریم بشناسیم و امکانات خود را بازیابیم. ما می‌توانیم و باید علم را از زبان هرکس که عالم است بگیریم . . . علم را از هر جایی اخذ می‌کنیم و این عین تواضع است، اما غربی شدن و غرب‌زدگی مسئله‌‌ای است که گمان نمی‌کنم در اینجا بتوان بی‌تفاوت از کنار آن گذشت.[32]

بیان داوری تناقضی حل‌ناشدنی را در خود داشت و آن اینکه رجوع به علم و فلسفۀ غرب برای شناخت آنها ذیل بحث غرب‌زدگی ره به جایی نمی‌برد، چرا که به بیان خود داوری ”حساب علم و تکنولوژی را از کلیت و تمامیت غرب نمی‌توان و نباید جدا کرد.“[33] و اگر بناست به این گزارۀ داوری عمل شود، هر گونه مواجهۀ بی‌واسطه‌ با علم، تکنولوژی و فلسفۀ غرب پیش از آغاز به پایان می‌رسد.

نوفردیدگرایان و تهاجم بی‌امان به تهاجم فرهنگی

چنان‌چه اشاره شد، دو مانع عدم ترجمۀ بی‌واسطۀ منابع مهم فلسفی و دشواری مواجهۀ بی‌واسطه با دانش فلسفی غرب ذیل اندیشۀ غرب‌زدگی راه را برای اثرگذاری ایدئولوگ‌های فلسفی جمهوری اسلامی در دهۀ 1360 در دوران تازه می‌بست. نتیجۀ این بن‌بست که افرادی چون داوری اردکانی را به نگارش کتابی با عنوان فلسفه در بحران (1373) و سرانجام تعدیل برخی مواضع غرب‌ستیزانۀ پیشین‌شان کشاند، ظهور طیف جدیدتری از منتقدان ذات‌گرای غرب بود که به سرعت پایگاه‌های مطبوعاتی نیرومندی چون روزنامۀ کیهان، کیهان هوایی، صبح، نیستان و مشرق را در اختیار گرفتند. در حالی که احمد فردید در سال 1373 در انزوا درگذشت، برخی شاگردان انقلابی‌اش که پس از انقلاب به حلقۀ او راه یافته بودند، مسیر جدیدی برای کاربست آرای او گشودند. ما این رویکرد را به اختصار ”نوفردیدگرایی“ می‌نامیم. نوفردیدگرایی در مجموعه‌ای از اصول بنیادین با جریان فلسفی کلیت‌باور دهۀ نخست انقلاب هم‌نوا بود. با این حال، شرایط زندگی روزمرۀ مردم چنان تغییر کرده بود که نمی‌شد به آسانی بر جهان اشیاء حکومت کرد یا مردم را به پذیرش بی‌قید و شرط تفسیری معنوی از ابژه‌های زندگی روزمره وادار ساخت. ایدئولوگ‌های فلسفی دهۀ شصت کار ساده‌تری در پیش داشتند و آن استفاده از محدودیت‌های اقتصادی دوران جنگ و ناممکن بودن تجربۀ سبک‌های مختلف زندگی برای در صدر‌ نشاندن نوعی درک وجود‌شناختی از کلیت هستی و نیز جهان غرب بود، اما در دهۀ هفتاد مادیت زندگی و تنوع و تکثر سبک‌های زندگی چنان اهمیت یافت که کنترل فرهنگی جامعه بر اساس دستگاه فلسفی کل‌گرا ناممکن شد. نوفردیدگرایی تلاشی بر پاسخ روزآمد به فضای زندگی روزمره در دهۀ هفتاد بود و مهم‌ترین ویژگی آن، خرد و زمینی‌کردن دعوی غرب‌زدگی بود. آنها با تمرکز بر جزئی‌ترین ابژه‌ها و مناسبات زندگی روزمره و ارائۀ تصویری هراس‌آلود از پدیده‌هایی چون ماهواره، موبایل، اینترنت، موسیقی رپ، تبلیغات شهری، فروشگاه‌های زنجیره‌ای، فعالیت حرفه‌ای زنان در محیط‌های کاری و . . . سودای کنترل همه‌جانبه بر ابژه‌های زندگی روزمره را در سر داشتند و از آنجا که دولت هاشمی را همراه خود نمی‌دیدند، می‌کوشیدند از آنچه رهبر جمهوری اسلامی ”تهاجم فرهنگی غرب“ خوانده بود، برای حقانیت موضع خود استفاده کنند. این طیف به سرعت مظاهر متناسب با ایدۀ تهاجم فرهنگی غرب را شناسایی و به آنها پرداختند و از آنجا که مبنای فکری‌شان ملهم از فردید مبتنی بر نوعی کل‌باوری آخرالزمانی و اصالت وجودی بود، هر جزئی از اجزا و ابعاد زندگی روزمره را چنان تفسیر می‌کردند که گویی همین اجزا در خودبسنده‌ترین وضعیت ممکن همۀ تاریخ غرب را در خود دارند. برای نمونه، هنگامی که به نقش اینترنت، موبایل یا سینما در زندگی روزمره می‌پرداختند، این ابزار یا ابژه‌ها را چکیده و عصارۀ ماهیت استکباری غرب –در مقام یک کل- معرفی می‌کردند و بنابراین، هر‌گونه تلاشی در سطح زندگی روزمره برای استفاده از اشیاء مادی و مصرفی با خوانشی آخرالزمانی از جانب نوفردیدگرایان روبه‌رو می‌شد. برای درک بهتر این رویکرد، بخشی از مقالۀ ”دوزخ پایتخت“ نوشتۀ یوسفعلی میرشکاک دربارۀ فضای زندگی روزمره در شهر تهران را نقل می‌کنیم. میرشکاک، که شاگرد فردید بود، در این مقاله خوانشی آخرالزمانی و تصویری مسخ‌شده از زندگی روزمرۀ مردم تهران در دهۀ 1370 به دست می‌دهد:

تو گویی روزی که پایتخت را می‌ساختند، آن را همچون آینه‌ای از فولاد صیقل‌خورده روبه‌روی غرب قرار دادند، تا هم تمام آنچه را که در فرنگ می‌گذرد منعکس کند و هم با هر ایمان آهن‌گدازی از در ستیز درآید. با دانسینگ‌های سیار، با عشرتکده‌ها و قمارخانه‌های پنهان، با فیلم‌های عفت‌سوز، با بریک‌دانس، با لامبادا، با عرق ارمنی‌کش، با مواد مخدر و توهم‌زا، با عشق آزاد، با آمار روز‌افزون طلاق، با مطبوعاتی که یا به غرب دعوت می‌کنند یا شعار می‌دهند یا به تحمیق مشغول‌اند. با روشنفکرانی که پشت به مردم دارند و رو به ینگی فرنگ. با انبوه نوجوانانی که یا به پرستش عضلات سیلوستر استالونه و آرنولد گرفتارند، یا به وقاحت ”مدونا“ و ”مایکل“ ایمان آورده‌اند. با آنتن‌های کوچک ماهواره‌ای رو به تزاید، با سرگردانی جوانانی که در افق مبهم فردای خویش می‌نگرند، با خیل سیل آموزشگاه‌های انگلیسی که زبان فردای فرزندان فردوسی را تعلیم می‌دهند، با انبوه زنان کارمند و کارگری که فرزندان خود را به امان مهدکودک و کوچه‌ها رها کرده‌اند.[34]

همین بخش از نوشتۀ میرشکاک نشان می‌دهد چگونه نوفردیدی‌ها همۀ جزئیات زندگی شهری در دهۀ هفتاد را که حاصل تغییر در زیست‌جهان فرهنگی دهۀ نخست انقلاب اسلامی بود، چونان آینۀ غرب قلمداد می‌کردند. گرچه در نگاه نخست به نظر می‌رسد چنین نقدی شباهت‌های انکار‌ناپذیری با نقد مدرنیته در مکتب فرانکفورت دارد، اما این شباهت‌ها بیشتر به رتوریک و سطح بحث‌ها بازمی‌گردد، چرا که دست‌آخر میان نقد درون‌ماندگار فرهنگی با نقد آخرالزمانی و ایدئالیستی فرهنگ تفاوت است. آدورنو این تفاوت را به دقت صورت‌بندی کرده است:

آنها دربارۀ چیزی که با آن سر و کار دارند بی‌تجربه‌اند. آنها در آرزوی محو کردن این کلیت به بربریت نزدیک می‌شوند. دلبستگی‌های آنها ناگزیر متوجه امور بدوی‌تر و نامشخص‌تر است، بدون توجه به اینکه تا چه حد با سطح نیروهای مولد فکری در تعارض است. طرد فراگیر فرهنگ بهانه‌ای می‌شود برای برافراشتن آنچه ”وحشی‌تر،“[35] ”سالم‌تر“ و حتی سرکوبگرتر است. مهم‌تر از همه تضاد ازلی بین فرد و جامعه است که هر دو به یک شیوه ترسیم می‌شود، که لجوجانه همیشه به نفع جامعه حل و فصل می‌شود، آن هم براساس قاعدۀ حاکمانی که آن را به کار گرفته‌اند. از اینجا فقط یک قدم تا تثبیت رسمی فرهنگ راه است. روش درون‌ماندگار علیه این تلاش‌ها مبارزه می‌کند.[36]

به همین سبب است که به‌رغم شباهت‌های صوری میان نقد فرهنگی نوفردیدی‌ها و نقد فرهنگی مکتب فرانکفورت، گروه نخست سرانجام به نوعی خشونت بدوی می‌گراید،[37] چرا که هدفش از توجه به امر منفی در فرهنگ و زندگی روزمره نه نشان دادن تناقضات درونی زیست‌جهان فرهنگی، بلکه حل کردن همۀ تناقضات در نوعی امر استعلایی یا به تعبیر آدورنو ”ایدئولوژی محض“[38] (Mere Ideology) است. به‌رغم این نکات، نوفردیدگرایی از طریق رسانه‌هایش بیش از آنکه درگیر فلسفۀ محض باشد، درگیر فرهنگ در سطوح انضمامی بود و می‌کوشید از طریق تولید امر منفی و بازنمایی هراس‌آمیز همۀ اجزا و ابژه‌های مدرن زندگی روزمره را با استفاده از گفتمان ناظر بر ”تهاجم فرهنگی“ مظاهر غرب‌زدگی معرفی کند.

تا اینجا روایتی از جدال‌های فلسفی بر سر فرهنگ و زندگی روزمره و نحوۀ مواجهه با تفکر و تمدن غرب به دست داده شد. در اوایل دهۀ 1370 روشن شده بود که سیاست فرهنگی مبتنی بر درک ذات‌باورانه از ماهیت غرب و فرهنگ و فلسفۀ آن از تأمل و تفسیر ژرف آنچه در زیست روزمره مردم می‌گذرد عاجز مانده است. این باور را سیاست‌های دولت هاشمی تشدید می‌کرد. در واکنش به این سیاست‌ها، همۀ غرب‌ستیزان و فردیدی‌ها علیه این دولت و سیاست‌های فرهنگی آن بسیج شدند. بنابراین، نیازی جدی برای گشایش مسیری جدید به سوی شناخت نظام‌مند فلسفه و فرهنگ غرب احساس می‌شد. در ادامه خواهیم دید کدام برنامه‌ها برای رفع این خلأ‌ها اجرا شدند.

ارغنون: پاسخی به نوفردیدگرایی

وزارت فرهنگ و ارشاد اسلامی دولت هاشمی نشریات متعددی در حوزه‌های نظری فرهنگ از تئاتر و سینما گرفته تا نقد ‌ادبی همچون فصلنامه‌های فارابی، نمایش و هنر منتشر می‌کرد. این فصلنامه‌ها به‌رغم تلاش‌های صورت‌گرفته فاقد اثرگذاری کافی بودند و مهم‌تر آنکه افرادی آنها را اداره و منتشر می‌کردند که همان بازیگران عمدۀ فرهنگی و فکری دهۀ نخست انقلاب بودند. در جلسه‌ای که در اوایل سال 1372 به ‌منظور نقد و بررسی یکی از این نشریات، فصلنامۀ هنر، در مرکز مطالعات و تحقیقات فرهنگی معاونت فرهنگی وزارت ارشاد برگزار شد، دست بر قضا جوان کمتر شناخته‌شده‌ای نیز شرکت کرد که در دهۀ شصت و اوایل دهۀ هفتاد در نشریاتی چون دنیای سخن نقد ادبی و نقد تئاتر می‌نوشت و مدتی نیز ممنوع‌القلم شده بود. این جوان که حمید محرمیان معلم نام داشت، در جلسۀ یادشده حملۀ تندی به سیاست‌های پژوهشی وزارت ارشاد در حوزۀ آرای نظری در باب فرهنگ کرد و این تندی دردمندانه خوشایند مرتضی شفیعی شکیب، مدیر آن مرکز مطالعاتی دولتی، قرار گرفت که خود سودای تغییری اساسی در سر داشت. تندی محرمیان معلم واکنش یکی از بسیارانی بود که از بیرون این جدال‌های فکری را می‌دیدند، اما به‌جای آنکه از ابهاماتشان کاسته و بر آگاهی‌شان افزوده شود، خود را سرگشته‌تر از قبل می‌یافتند:

در آن مقطع به جرئت می‌توانم بگویم مثلاً در زمینۀ تئاتر کتاب‌های موجود به ده عنوان هم نمی‌رسید یا اگر در زمینۀ ادبیات می‌خواستید بحثی را به‌طور سیستماتیک دنبال کنید، حتی دو عنوان کتاب هم پیدا نمی‌کردید. یکی آمده‌ بود چیزی ترجمه کرده و رفته بود تا بیست سال بعد. ترجمه‌ها هم از افراد دست دوم و سوم بود. دغدغۀ آدم‌هایی مثل من این بود که از آبشخور اصلی این تفکرات-که عموماً در غرب بود- بهره بگیریم. بنابراین، بدون اینکه من خودم مطلع باشم در ذهن خام من قضیۀ غرب‌شناسی شکل می‌گرفت.[39]

این ذهنیت خام هم‌زمان با نیازی واقعی در بیرون بود و نیاز به عاملانی واقعی داشت که حامل رویکرد جدیدی باشند. ناگزیر باید جایی بیرون از مناسبات موجود به دنبال این عاملان گشت: کسانی که به شیوه‌های گوناگون، به علت تن ندادن به مناسبات ایدئولوژیک دهۀ نخست انقلاب حاشیه‌ای شده و فضا و مجال چندانی برای کار و فعالیت نداشتند. محرمیان معلم اتفاقی مراد فرهادپور را یافت. فرهادپور، مارکسیستی که پیش‌تر فلسفه و اقتصاد را در ایران و انگلستان آموخته بود و پس از دورۀ کوتاهی فعالیت برای انتشار مجلۀ تئوریک مارکسیستی جدل در آغاز انقلاب و پس از سرکوب جریان‌های چپ به انزوایی ناگزیر وارد شده بود، بدل به شخصیت محوری مجله‌ای شد که نامش ارغنون، تداعی‌گر تلاقی فلسفه، هنر و ادبیات بود[40]. طعنه‌آمیز است که پروژۀ غرب‌شناسی‌ای که در واکنش به حملات غرب‌ستیزان و نوفردیدی‌ها به تفکر غربی به شکل عام و مدرنیته به شکل خاص صورت می‌گرفت، با محوریت افرادی با تمایلات مارکسیستی و به‌ویژه تمایل به نقد فرهنگی مکتب فرانکفورت صورت گرفت، اما این مسئله نباید چندان عجیب به نظر رسد، چرا که پیش‌تر نیز با نقل از آدورنو نشان دادیم که نقد درون‌ماندگار مدرنیته با نقد ایدئولوژیک و استعلایی مدرنیته تفاوت‌های جدی دارد. فرهاد‌پور و اباذری، دو شخصیت اصلی ارغنون با تعلقات جدی به مکتب فرانکفورت،[41] می‌دانستند نقد کلیت فرهنگ جامعه، به‌رغم ظاهر رادیکال آن، امری ارتجاعی است. به باور آنها، شناخت فلسفه و فرهنگ غرب با نقد آن همراه است و اگر شناخت دقیق از فلسفه و فرهنگ غرب حاصل شود، چه بسا روشن شود نقد فرهنگ غربی با آنچه می‌توان تحویل فرهنگ به ایدئولوژی خواند یکی نیست.

ارغنون بنا بود بدون آنکه اشاره‌ای صریح به مسایل سیاسی یا ناظر بر زمینۀ اجتماعی داشته باشد، محک و معیاری برای شناخت و به تبع آن نقد اندیشه و فرهنگ فلسفی غرب به دست دهد. از همین رو، در مقدمۀ شماره نخست ارغنون چنین آمده است:

اغلب آثار اصیل و متون معتبر دربارۀ فرهنگ و فلسفه و ادب و هنر معاصر غرب، به دلیل دشوار بودن آنها، یا اصلاً ترجمه نشده یا ترجمه‌های نامناسب و نارسایی از آنها به دست داده شده است و لاجرم، آشنایی ما با مبانی و تعابیر و اصول و ارزش‌های تفکر غرب، اگر نگوییم عموماً، توانیم گفت در موارد متعددی مبتنی بر متن و مرّ آراء و انظار متفکران غربی نیست، بلکه مستند به منابع و مراجع دست دوم و چندم از آنهاست.[42]

آنها به‌جای تأکید بر اهداف غایی و رسیدن به امر مطلق -که پس از انقلاب اسلامی ذیل مفهوم امت واحده مطلوب دانسته می‌شد- صرفاً به معرفی نظام‌مند، بی‌واسطه و گستردۀ نحله‌ها و شاخه‌های گوناگون فکری در غرب، از نقد ادبی و روانکاوانه گرفته تا نظریات فرهنگی و فلسفۀ تحلیلی، پرداختند. بدین‌ترتیب، ارغنون از آغاز سال 1373، همان‌سالی که فردید درگذشت و هم‌زمان با تولد نشریات صبح و مشرق، منتشر شد و در شمارۀ نخست خود به سراغ ”فرهنگ و تکنولوژی“ رفت و به ‌نحوی تأمل‌برانگیز مقالۀ مهم مارتین هایدگر، ”پرسش از تکنولوژی،“ را ترجمه و در اختیار علاقه‌مندان به فلسفه قرار داد.

ارغنونی‌ها با مدیران فرهنگی دولت هاشمی مصالحه‌ای بیان‌نشده داشتند که وارد مسایل سیاسی و جبهه‌گیری‌های فکری و فرهنگی داخل کشور نخواهند شد. با وجود این، به وضعیت تفکر فلسفی در کشور و نسبت آن با مجادلات و سیاست‌های فرهنگی بی‌اعتنا نبودند. در جامعه‌ای که کنترل فرهنگی و سیاسی به میانجی نوعی بیان رازآمیز فلسفی صورت می‌گرفت، ‌درآوردن آن بیان رازآمیز از انحصار جمعی مشخص که این انحصار و ابهام یا به بیان رامین جهانبگلو ”تفسیر از تفسیر از تفسیر“[43] را منبع قدرت خود می‌دانستند اهمیت سیاسی بسیاری داشت. از سوی دیگر، پرداختن به فلسفه‌های ناظر بر فرد نیز لازم بود تا روشن شود در برابر فلسفه‌های کل‌گرایانه‌ای که با رازورزی و شهود همراه‌اند و در آنها جزء یا همان فرد وسیله‌ای ضروری برای ذوب در وجود کل است، فلسفه‌هایی نیز وجود دارند که اهمیت بیشتری برای تجربه‌های انسانی قایل‌اند و به‌جای تقلیل همۀ اشکال زیست فردی در قامت یک رهبر، پیشوا یا شخص استثنایی، به همان افراد معمولی و زیست روزمره‌شان و روابط میان‌فردی‌شان توجه نشان می‌دهند. توجه به این مسئله از جانب ارغنون به شکل ضمنی مبین این مسئله بود که هدف فلسفه و تفکر نظری سرکوب و منقادسازی زیست روزمره نیست و انحصاری و رازورزانه کردن ساحت اندیشه به دست فردید و سایر ایدئولوگ‌های فلسفی غرب‌ستیز در آغاز انقلاب بیش از آنکه مبنایی فلسفی داشته باشد، تمهیدی سیاسی برای مداخله در زندگی روزمره بوده است.

ارغنون کوششی به منظور درک انضمامی بودن فرهنگ و زیست روزمره به جای غارت آن بود. آنها آموخته بودند نقد زیست روزمره و جهان مصرفی فقط از خلال شناخت عمیق و فهم و توصیف همدلانۀ آن میسر است و نه از طریق یورش بردن به زیست‌جهان فرهنگی مردم و تحقیر آن و اگر کسی نتواند ذائقه‌های حاکم بر زیست روزمره و رنگ و لعاب آن را از نزدیک زندگی کند، نمی‌تواند نقدی از آن به دست دهد. به تعبیر فرهادپور،

در چنین فضایی برای اینکه نشان دهیم این مفاهیم صرفاً برای اینکه در بازی‌های ایدئولوژیک و سخنرانی‌ها مورد استفاده قرار گیرند نیستند، شروع کردیم این مفاهیم را که برای آنها قدسی بودند ربط دادیم به زندگی روزمره، به توالت رفتن، به سکس و . . . اصلاً غربی‌ها به همین علت است که نقد ادبی دارند، موسیقی جاز و راک اند رول دارند، انواع ژانرهای فیلم دارند، سبک‌های مختلف زندگی دارند که پانک و هیپیزم از دل آنها بیرون می‌آید و در واقع بخش وسیعی از ساختن مفاهیم و بالا و پایین رفتن‌های فلسفی هم در ارتباط با همین مسایل زندگی روزمره است. می 1968 را نمی‌توان صرفاً بر اساس یکی دو مفهوم مثل مبارزه با عدالت فهم کرد. نه! یک ‌سری هم آمده بودند در خیابان عشق‌بازی کنند. می 1968 انقلاب جنسیتی و انقلاب در زندگی روزمره هم بود. حالا اگر این تجربه‌ها را نداشته باشیم نمی‌توانیم این مسایل را درک کنیم و همۀ حرف ما این بود که اتفاقاً باید به سمتی برویم که رابطۀ مفاهیم با این امور انضمامی را روشن کنیم.[44]

طرفه آنکه این همان چرخش فرهنگی مهمی بود که بعدها مطالعات فرهنگی را به مثابه پیکره‌ای از دانش در فضای نهادی و آکادمیک ایران ممکن کرد، چرا که تا پیش از آن مسئلۀ فرهنگ در تسخیر اندیشه‌های ذات‌گرا و استعلایی بود که بیشتر در پی تسخیر زیست‌جهان فرهنگی بودند تا فهم همدلانۀ آن. جامعه‌شناسی رسمی و آکادمیک در ایران نیز پس از انقلاب برای آنکه امکان بقا داشته باشد، خود را از معضله‌های فرهنگی با این مدعا که می‌خواهد از قضاوت ارزشی مبرا بماند برکنار داشته بود و بدین سبب، در غیاب نیروهای انتقادی در فضای آکادمیک، سهم عمدۀ این بار بر دوش ارغنون افکنده شد. ارغنون در زمینه و زمانه‌ای منتشر شد که جدال برای تسخیر ابژه‌ها و مناسبات زندگی روزمره داغ بود و شاید آن دوران را بتوان جنگ تفسیرها نام نهاد. چرا که نوفردیدی‌ها به علت منابع فکری‌شان به زبان و نماد بسیار علاقه‌مند بودند و هر ابژه‌ای را فوری بسان نماد یا نشانه درمی‌آوردند:

در نزد نشریه صبح و امثال آنها، فرهنگ کلیتی شده بود که همه‌چیز را بلعیده بود. اما اگر این بازی را ادامه دهیم، یعنی نوعی نگاه فرهنگی بدون میانجی به جهان، به توهمی در خواهیم افتاد و آن این ا‌ست که فرهنگ را جهان بسته‌ای خواهیم دید که مدام خودش به خودش ارجاع می‌دهد و می‌کوشد همین جهان بسته را کشف کند و بخواند. اگر فَکتی در کار نباشد که بتوان به آن ارجاع داد، هر کس بیشتر متوهم‌تر و متخیل‌تر باشد بیشتر می‌تواند بنویسد.[45]

ارغنون کوشید از طریق انتخاب مقالات مهمی که دربارۀ زندگی روزمره نوشته شده بودند، به‌ویژه مقالاتی از گئورگ زیمل، والتر بنیامین، رولان بارت، استوارت هال، ریموند ویلیامز و جان فیسک این درک محدود و خودارجاعانه به امر فرهنگی را درشکند و نشان دهد نشانگان فرهنگی به‌ جای چرخش ابدی بر مدار نوعی خوانش آخرالزمانی که دارای رد و نشان مناسبات هژمونیک خاصی است، می‌توانند به شیوه‌های دیگری و بر مَدارات دیگری نیز بچرخند. این حرکت بر مدارات دیگر شاید همان چیزی باشد که با وام‌گیری از میشل دوسرتو بتوان آن را تاکتیک‌های ابداعی در برابر استراتژی‌های مستقر در زندگی روزمره دانست.[46] ارغنون منابع اولیه و شیوه‌های مواجهه‌ای متفاوتی را در خوانش فرهنگ انضمامی و زندگی روزمره معرفی کرد که می‌توانست مناسبات زندگی روزمره را نه به منزلۀ نشانه‌های هراس‌آمیز آخرالزمانی، بلکه به مثابه نشانه‌هایی قرائت کند که در آنها مقاومت و ابداع موج می‌زند. این رویکرد همان چیزی بود که رفته‌رفته در اواخر دهۀ 1370 وارد فضای نهادی علوم اجتماعی ایران شد و اولین جرقه‌های آشنایی با مطالعات فرهنگی را به معنای نهادی آن روشن ساخت.

[1] البته امریکا پس از کش و قوس‌های بسیار با پرداخت کمک‌های مالی به ایران مخالفت کرد و تحریم‌های اقتصادی بیشتری علیه ایران تصویب شد.

[2] ‌”بازگشت ایران به صحنۀ بین‌المللی،“ سلام، پیش‌شمارۀ 3 (26 اسفند 1369)، 3.

[3] برای آشنایی اجمالی با این تنوعات بنگرید به علی قیصری، روشنفکران ایران در قرن بیستم: از مشروطیت تا پایان سلطنت، ترجمۀ محمد دهقانی (تهران: هرمس، 1393)، 140-145.

[4] بنگرید به مهرزاد بروجردی، روشنفکران ایرانی و غرب، ترجمۀ جمشید شیرازی (تهران: فرزان روز، 1377).

[5] بروجردی، روشنفکران ایرانی و غرب، 88.

[6] طاهره صفارزاده، طنین در دلتا (تهران: رواق، 1357)، 53-54.

[7] صفارزاده، طنین در دلتا، 58.

[8] احسان نراقی، غربت غرب (چاپ 2؛ تهران: امیرکبیر، 1354)، 9.

[9] نراقی، غربت غرب، 91.

[10] سیاوش کسرایی، ”امریکا، امریکا،“ در گزینۀ اشعار سیاوش کسرایی (چاپ 8؛ تهران: مروارید، 1391)، 150-151.

[11] جلال آل‌احمد، غرب‌زدگی (تهران: رواق، بی‌تا)، 34.

[12] آل‌احمد، غرب‌زدگی، 53-54.

[13] آل‌احمد، غرب‌زدگی، 21.

[14] البته آل‌احمد خود در چنین صورت‌بندی بنیادینی ناموفق ماند. او اگرچه صورت‌بندی‌های سیاسی و جغرافیایی از دوگانۀ شرق-غرب را به کناری نهاد و مسئلۀ ماهیات فلسفی را برجسته کرد، اما سرانجام به هنگام وضع صورتبندی بدیل، تحت تأثیر خوزه دوکاسترو (Josué de Castro)، نظریه‌پرداز و سیاستمدار برزیلی بود [بنگرید به محمدمنصور هاشمی، هویت‌اندیشان و میراث فکری احمد فردید (تهران: کویر، 1393)، 152] و معضلۀ اصلی را نابرابری اقتصادی و توسعۀ نامتوازن میان غرب و شرق دانست: ”برای من غرب و شرق، نه معنای سیاسی دارد و نه معنای جغرافیایی، بلکه دو مفهوم اقتصادی است. غرب یعنی ممالک سیر و شرق یعنی ممالک گرسنه.“ بنگرید به آل‌احمد، غرب‌زدگی، 22-23.

[15] آل‌احمد، غرب‌زدگی، 16.

[16]فردید در اوان جوانی علاقۀ خود به برگسون را در مقالۀ ”هانری برگسون و فلسفۀ برگسونی“ آشکار کرد. او در این مقاله که در سال‌های 1316-1317 طی دو شماره در مجلۀ مهر منتشر شد، چنین پرشور از برگسون ستایش کرد: ”هانری برگسون یک تن از آن اندیشمندان بینادلی است که اکنون نزدیک است که بر ویرانه‌های فلسفه مادی یکی دو قرن اخیر، کاخ باشکوهی از حقیقت و روحانیت برافرازد.“ به نقل از بیژن عبدالکریمی، هایدگر در ایران: نگاهی به آثار و اندیشه‌های سیداحمد فردید (تهران: بنیاد حکمت و فلسفه، 1392)، 51. بعدها که فردید از برگسون گذر کرد، با تعابیری تند همچون ”حیوان لایعلم و صاحب رسالۀ مسخره‌ای به‌نام خنده“ و ”برگسون یهودی“ به او تاخت. بنگرید به احمد فردید، دیدار فرهی و فتوحات آخرالزمان، به کوشش محمد مددپور (تهران: نشر نظر، 1381)، 388-389.

[17] عبدالکریمی، هایدگر در ایران، 145.

[18] فردید، دیدار فرهی، 136.

[19]احسان نراقی که پیش از انقلاب از دوستان فردید و البته مشاوران حکومت بود دربارۀ تلاش فردید برای نزدیکی به قدرت سیاسی و بدل شدن به یکی از تئوریسین‌های سیاست فرهنگی در عصر پهلوی چنین گفته است: ”این آقا که خودش را فیلسوف می‌دانست و خدا را بنده نبود، هنگام تأسیس حزب رستاخیز [که محصول تک‌حزبی شدن فضای سیاسی ایران به دستور شاه در سال 1353 بود] پایش را کرد توی یک کفش که مرا ببر پیش هویدا، می‌خواهم کاندیدا بشوم برای نمایندگی شهر یزد در مجلس. گفتم آقای فردید! تو فیلسوفی، می‌خواهی چه ‌کنی؟ در مجلس مسخره‌ای که تنها یک حزب وجود دارد؟ می‌گفت نه! من آنجا می‌توانم منشأ اثر باشم. بعد جریان دیالکتیک انقلاب [شاه و ملت] پیش آمد. خودش را کشت که در آنجا حاضر باشد و آمد و بحث کرد و بیچاره نیکخواه [فعال سیاسی چپ که از عوامل سوءقصد نافرجام به جان شاه بود و بعدها به یکی از تئوریسین‌های فرهنگی حکومت پهلوی تبدیل شد] که فردید به او اصرار داشت می‌خواهد دیالکتیک انقلاب را بنویسد. در هر عملی که ممکن بود او را به صاحبان قدرت نزدیک کند داوطلب می‌شد.“ به نقل از بکتاش منوچهری، فردید از نگاه دیگران (تهران: قصیده‌سرا، 1388)، 254-255.

[20] تعلیقه شرحی است که در حاشیۀ کتاب یا رساله نوشته می‌شود. عبدالرضا مظاهری، شرح تعلیقۀ آیت‌الله العظمی امام خمینی بر فصوص الحکم ابن‌عربی (تهران: علم، 1387)، 36.

[21] اسماعیل منصوری لاریجانی، سیری در اندیشۀ عرفانی حضرت امام (تهران: مرکز نشر فرهنگی آیه، 1377)، 144.

[22] روح‌الله خمینی، شرح حدیث جنود عقل و جهل (تهران: مؤسسۀ تنظیم و نشر آثار امام خمینی، 1382)، 300.

[23] به نقل از سیدموسی دیباج، آراء و عقاید سیداحمد فردید: مفردات فردیدی (تهران: علم، 1386)، 60.

[24] روح‌الله خمینی، آداب نماز: آداب الصلوه (تهران: مؤسسۀ تنظیم و نشر آثار امام خمینی، 1372)، 348.

[25]Roxanne Varzi, Warring Souls: Youth, Media and Martyrdom in Post-Revolution Iran (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 9.

[26] عبدالکریم سروش، تفرج صنع: گفتارهایی در اخلاق و صنعت و علوم انسانی (تهران: صراط، 1393)، 235.

[27] سروش، تفرج صنع، 235.

[28] عبدالکریم سروش، ”وجود و ماهیت غرب،“ کیهان فرهنگی، شمارۀ 5 (مرداد 1363)، 19-22.

[29] برگرفته از مصاحبۀ اختصاصی با مراد فرهادپور، 1392.

[30] رضا داوری اردکانی، ”تهاجم فرهنگی و وضعیت تفکر (میزگرد)،“ کیهان فرهنگی، سال 9، شمارۀ 6 (شهریور 1371)، 12.

[31] کریم مجتهدی، ”تهاجم فرهنگی و وضعیت تفکر (میزگرد)،“ کیهان فرهنگی، سال 9، شمارۀ 6 (شهریور 1371)، 12.

[32] داوری اردکانی، ”تهاجم فرهنگی،“ 11.

[33] رضا داوری اردکانی، فلسفه در بحران (تهران: امیرکبیر، 1373)، 101.

[34] یوسفعلی میرشکاک، ”دوزخ پایتخت،“ صبح، سال 1، شمارۀ 7 (1374)، 7.

[35] شاید بی‌راه نیست که میرشکاک در گفت‌و‌گویی مکرر خودش را ”سگ هار“ و ”هار فرهنگی“ معرفی می‌کند. بنگرید به یوسفعلی میرشکاک، ”از تلخ پروا نیست،“ صبح، سال 1، شمارۀ 28 (1374)، 8-9.

[36]Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1997), 31.

[37] دربارۀ نسبت نقد فرهنگی نوفردیدی‌ها و خشونت‌ سیاسی مطالب متفاوتی نقل شده است. عبدالکریم سروش در این ‌باره نوشته است: ”فردید به شدت طرفدار خشونت بود. من خودم به یاد دارم که یکی از شاگردان فردید، که در کلاس‌های فلسفۀ علم من هم شرکت می‌کرد، یک بار برخاست و به صراحت خطاب به من گفت که همیشه نمی‌توان با مخالفان استدلال کرد. در مواردی باید شمشیر به کار برد.“ به نقل از منوچهری، فردید از نگاه دیگران، 186.

[38]Adorno, Prisms, 31.

[39] برگرفته از مصاحبۀ اختصاصی با حمید محرمیان معلم، 1392.

[40] ارغنون، که عنوان کتاب مهم ارسطو است، در عین حال جزو ادوات موسیقی است و در یکی از اشعار حافظ نیز اشاره‌ای به آن شده است: ”ارغنون‌ساز فلک رهزن اهل هنر است / چون از این غصه ننالیم و چرا نخروشیم.“

[41] دیگر اعضای شورای سردبیری ارغنون را علی مرتضویان و حسین پاینده تشکیل می‌دادند. محمد پوینده، نویسنده و مترجم ایرانی که در جریان قتل‌های زنجیره‌ای سال 1377 کشته شد، نیز یکی دیگر از اعضای این شورا به حساب می‌آمد که پس از چندی از عضویت در آن انصراف داد.

[42]شورای نویسندگان، ”یادداشت،“ ارغنون، سال 1، شمارۀ 1 (بهار 1373)، دو.

[43] رامین جهانبگلو، موج چهارم، ترجمۀ منصور گودرزی (تهران: نی، 1381)، 221-243.

[44] برگرفته از مصاحبۀ اختصاصی با مراد فرهادپور، 1392.

[45] برگرفته از مصاحبۀ اختصاصی با یوسف اباذری، 1392.

[46] Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1988), 29.

Shahrzad: Pop Culture, Media Culture, and the Representation of Gender in the Digital Age

Khatereh Sheibani Volume 2, Number 2, Summer 2017

مقالۀ پیش رو کندوکاوی است در بازنمایی جنسیت و روابط زنان و مردان در مجموعۀ تلویزیونی پُرمخاطب شهرزاد، نوشتۀ نغمه ثمینی و حسن فتحی و کارگردانی حسن فتحی، محصول سال‌های 1393-1394، که در سال 1395 در شبکۀ نمایش خانگی در ایران توزیع شد. این بررسی تطبیقی و تاریخی ضمن مرور تاریخ تلویزیون و ادبیات مردمی در ایران، تحولات فرهنگ مردمی و فرهنگ رسانه‌ای را دنبال می‌کند، به تأثیر فناوری دیجیتال بدر فرهنگ رسانه‌ای ایران می‌پردازد و نشان می‌دهد چگونه ژانرهای بصری و ادبی جاافتاده‌ای چون ملودرام و رومانس در یک سریال جدید ایرانی برای بیان مسایل زنان و مردان و مشکلات فرهنگی و اجتماعی به کار گرفته شده‌اند. به علاوه، به نقش بازدارندۀ سانسور در نمایش روابط عاشقانه اشاره شده و استفادۀ نوآورانه از ویرایش صدا در غیاب تصویر برای بازسازی مفاهیم عشقی و اروتیک بررسی می‌شود. این سریال از کهن‌الگوهای ادبیات مردمی چون ”شهرزاد قصه‌گو“ و روایت زنانه و ملودرام زنانه بهره برده است تا نقشی تازه از بازنمایی جنسیت در تاریخ سریال‌های سرگرم‌کنندۀ ایرانی بر جا گذارد. قسمت پایانی این نوشته به طرح مسئلۀ انقلاب رسانه‌ای در ایران، شروع فصل تازه ‌ از ادبیات تلویزیونی و کم‌رنگ‌تر شدن نقش رسانه‌های متمرکزی چون صدا و سیمای جمهوری اسلامی می‌پردازد. از رهگذر مطالعۀ شهرزاد، گونه‌ای طبقه‌بندی از انواع ملودرام در بافت فیلم‌سازی ایرانی نیز عرضه شده است. سریال‌های تلویزیونی و به‌ویژه فیلم‌های ملودراماتیک جایگاه ویژه‌ای در فرهنگ مردمی و فرهنگ رسانه‌ای داشته و دارند. در این مقاله نشان داده می‌شود که رابطۀ میان فرهنگ رسانه‌ای و فرهنگ مردمی رابطه‌ای دوطرفه و پویاست و پویندگی سیاست جنسیت و تعاریف جدید از زنانگی و مردانگی در سطح اجتماعی و فرهنگی موجب تحول نمود جنسیت در رسانه شده است. تاریخ فیلم در ایران نشان داده است که شخصیت‌های ماندگار داستان، فیلم و تلویزیون نیز بر فرهنگ مردمی تأثیر گذاشته‌اند. فرهنگ مردمی و فرهنگ رسانه‌ای بر همدیگر اثرگذارند و این تأثیر و تأثر در بازنمایی جنسیت در سریال شهرزاد مشاهده می‌شود.

شهرزاد از شبکۀ نمایش خانگی به نمایش درآمد که پدیده‌ای نسبتاً نو ظهور در عرصۀ پخش فیلم و سریال در ایران است. در فضای مجازی، برای بینندگان داخل و خارج از کشور، با پرداخت مبلغی در دسترس بود و هر دوشنبه یک قسمت از آن در فروشگاه‌های محصولات فرهنگی و همۀ سوپرمارکت‌ها در ایران به شکل لوح فشرده با کیفیت بالا (دی‌وی‌دی) به فروش می‌رسید. مجموعۀ شهرزاد به شکل غیرمجاز از وبگاه‌هایی چون ایران‌پراود و یوتیوب نیز در دسترس بود که البته به سبب سرعت پایین اینترنت در ایران و فیلتر وبگاه‌هایی چون یوتیوب، بینندگان داخل کشور کمتربه این سایت‌ها دسترسی داشتند. این مجموعه زندگی عاطفی، خانوادگی و اجتماعی دختری با نام شهرزاد (با بازی ترانه علیدوستی) را به نمایش می‌گذارد که در هنگامۀ کودتای ۲۸ مرداد ۱۳۳۲ دانشجوی پزشکی دانشگاه تهران است و نامزد روزنامه‌‌نگارش، فرهاد (با بازی مصطفی زمانی) حین درگیری با کلاه‌مخملی‌ها و عوامل کودتا دستگیر می‌شود. شهرزاد مجبور به ازدواج با مردی از خانوادۀه اشراف با نام قباد (با بازی شهاب حسینی) می‌شود که از همسر اولش بچه‌دار نشده است. نظام پدرسالار، تحولات نوگرایانه در اجتماع و حوادث سیاسی روز به تنش‌‌ها و تضادهای میان شخصیت ‌ها قوت می‌بخشد و رابطۀ زنان ومردان مجموعه را تحت تأثیر قرار می‌دهد. ساخت و پرداخت حرفه‌ای فیلم و داستان پُرکشش آن با اقبال عمومی مواجه شد و توجه منتقدان و صاحب‌نظران حوزۀ رسانه و ارتباطات جمعی را نیز به خود جلب کرد. سریال شهرزاد یکی از پُرمخاطب‌ترین و موفق‌ترین سریال‌های ایرانی پس از انقلاب است و این موفقیت را مرهون عوامل بسیاری است که به برخی از آنها اشاره می‌کنیم.

الف. به کارگیری تکنولوژی جدید در عصر دیجیتال، شامل استفاده از شبکه‌های اجتماعی مانند اینستاگرام و تلگرام برای تبلیغ سریال و شبکۀ نمایش خانگی، که در جلب نظر بینندگان تأثیر داشته است. راه‌اندازی وبگاه رسمی شهرزاد و خبررسانی دربارۀ ساخت سریال، بارگذاری عکس‌ها و پوسترهای سریال در تلگرام و وبگاه رسمی این مجموعه همه به ترغیب بینندگان به تماشای سریال کمک کرد. کانال تلگرامی شهرزاد بیش از 500 هزار عضو دارد و هم‌اکنون آخرین تصاویر و اخبار مربوط به ساخت قسمت دوم مجموعه را در اختیار دوستداران مجموعه می‌گذارد. [1]

شبکۀ نمایش خانگی یا رسانۀ خانگی در ابتدای کار بازنشر ویدیویی فیلم‌ها و سریال هایی را بر عهده داشت که قبلاً از سینما و تلویزیون پخش شده بود. در دهۀ 1380، با همت فیلمسازان نسل جدید شبکۀ خانگی به نشر ویدیویی فیلم و سریال‌هایی دست زد که برای اکران در سینما و تلویزیون ساخته نشده بودند. سریال‌های پُرطرفداری چون قهوۀ تلخ، به کارگردانی مهران مدیری در ۱۳۸۹، در رسانۀ خانگی تولید شده‌اند. استفاده از شبکۀ نمایش خانگی به جای نمایش مجموعۀ شهرزاد ازطریق رسانۀ ملی یا صدا و سیمای جمهوری اسلامی ایران باعث شد ساخت و پخش این مجموعه کمتر دستخوش اعمال ممیزی حکومتی شود. فضاهای داستانی و رابطۀ شخصیت‌های داستان کمی واقعی‌تر و باورپذیرتر از مجموعه‌های تولید رسانۀ ملی از جمله مجموعۀ معمای شاه (به کارگردانی محمدرضا ورزی در1394-1395) است که بسیاری از بینندگان آن را مجموعه‌ای پُرخرج و شعارزده یافتند که علاوه بر تحریف تاریخ، در داستان‌پردازی و بازیگری هم ضعف دارد.[2]

ب. به کارگیری ژانر ملودرام و بهره‌گیری از سبک داستان‌های عاشقانه که در پاورقی‌های مجله‌های قدیمی و در فضای مجازی امروز رایج است. داستان عاشقانۀ شهرزاد در قالب روایتی به سبک ”ملودرام زنانه“ ساخته شده است و از مثلث عشقی قباد–شهرزاد–فرهاد برای ایجاد تنش دراماتیک و تقابل شخصیت‌های داستان استفاده کرده است. جذب مخاطب فراوان این سریال مرهون به کارگیری روایتی عشقی–تاریخی است.

پ. استفاده از ستاره‌های مطرح سینمای ایران و ارائه بازی خوب هنرمندانی از سه نسل و به‌خصوص بازی حرفه‌ای علی نصیریان، شهاب حسینی و ترانه علیدوستی این سریال را به سریالی محبوب و پرطرفدار بدل کرد.

ت. طرح فضای ادبی و اجتماعی وقت و دغدغه‌های روشنفکران دهۀ 1330 و واکنش آنان به کودتای ۱۳۳۲ این سریال را برای طبقۀ تحصیلکرده و روشنفکر جامعه جذاب کرد. شهرزاد تصویر زنده‌ای از فضای فرهنگی زمانۀ مذکور ارائه می‌دهد: دانشجویان و بازیگران تئاتر در کافه نادری که پاتوق روشنفکران آن زمان بوده گرد هم می‌آیند و شعرهای نیما یوشیج را می‌خوانند، از ترس‌ها و دلهره‌هایشان در فضای سیاسی پس از کودتا صحبت و با دکتر مصدق و دکتر فاطمی همدردی می‌کنند. در خانه‌ها صدای صفحه‌های موسیقی پُرطرفدار آن زمان از گرامافون‌ها پخش می شود. زنان برای حضور بیشتر در اجتماع با خانواده‌ها بحث و جدل می‌کنند و همراه با مدرن شدن شهر تهران، خانواده‌های سنتی آرام‌آرام با نوگرایی اجتماع و تعریف‌های جدید مردانگی و زنانگی ایرانی آشنا می‌شوند. در واقع، فتحی و ثمینی در این سریال موفق می‌شوند با آمیزش ملودرام و رئالیسم نوعی داستان عشقی و خانوادگی را در بستری تاریخی به تصویر بکشند و مباحث روشنفکری و اجتماعی زمان را نیز مطرح کنند. این همه باعث جذب حداکثر بیننده شده است.

ث سبک روایی حسن فتحی و دستیابی به نوع جدیدی از دستور زبان سریال‌سازی ایرانی -از جمله مونتاژ صدا و تصویر و استفادۀ صحیح از ویرایش صدا و هم‌نشینی آهنگ و تصویر- در موفقیت این سریال مؤثر بوده است. حسن فتحی در واقع پخته‌ترین تجربه‌های تلویزیونی‌اش را در شهرزاد به نمایش گذاشت.

در بین عوامل موفقیت این سریال به جذب مخاطب بسیار هم از لایۀ روشنفکری جامعه و هم از میان تودۀ مردم اشاره شد. توجه زیاد مردم به این سریال و اشتیاقشان به خرید آن و صرف وقت برای آن در مقابل سریال‌های رایگان ترکی ماهواره و مجموعه‌های صدا و سیما نشان می‌دهد که این مجموعه جایگاهی ویژه در فرهنگ مردمی و فرهنگ رسانه‌ای دارد.

به گمان من، در حوزۀ مطالعات فرهنگی و رسانه‌ای، نقد و تحلیل مجموعه‌های تلویزیونی و ویدیوهای داستانی–تفریحی به اندازۀ کنکاش و پژوهش در رسانه‌های دیگر و از جمله سینمای هنری ارزش و اهمیت دارد. سینمای هنری بازتاب تفکر و جهان‌بینی قشر محدود روشنفکر و تحصیل‌کردۀ هر جامعه هست که برای مخاطب روشنفکر ساخته می‌شود. سینمای هنری در دنیای امروز، مانند شعر متعالی در زمانی نه چندان دورتر، محل عرضۀ فرهنگ ”برتر“ ایران مدرن است[3]. در عوض، مجموعه‌های داستانی و تفریحی – که تا چندی پیش فقط از طریق رسانۀ تلویزیون دولتی به نمایش درمی‌آمدند – بازتاب فرهنگ مردمی‌اند. اگر سینمای هنری امروز با شعر متعالی دیروز ایران قابل قیاس باشد، مجموعه‌های تلویزیونی و ویدیویی را می‌توان با هنرهای مردمی مانند هنرهای نمایشی سنتی و قدیمی ایرانی چون نقالی و شاهنامه‌خوانی در میدان شهرها و روستاها و داستان‌سرایی در قهوه‌خانه‌ها مقایسه کرد. سینمای هنری بخشی از فرهنگ برتر و رسمی جامعه است که به سبب توجه وافر منتقدان به شکلی نظام‌مند نقد و بررسی شده است و سریال‌های سرگرم‌کننده بخشی از فرهنگ شفاهی هر جامعه‌اند که به علت جایگاه ”فرودست“ آنها در طبقه‌بندی فرهنگ والا و کم‌ارزش در حیطۀ نقادی به بوتۀ فراموشی سپرده شده‌اند.[4]

اصولاً از بدو پیدایش تلویزیون، سریال‌های تلویزیونی مجموعه‌هایی برای سرگرم کردن عامۀ مردم قلمداد شده‌اند و در نقد فرهنگی کمتر به این هنر مردمی بها داده‌اند. با این همه، برنامه‌های تلویزیونی که برای صفحه‌های کوچک خانگی ساخته می‌شوند، نسبت به فیلم‌های هنری ایرانی، که غالباً برای نمایش در جشنواره‌های بین‌المللی فیلم ساخته شده‌اند و گاه حتی اجازۀ نمایش در داخل کشور را ندارند، مخاطبان بیشتری دارند. مجموعه‌های داستانی با خاستگاهی عمومی و اجتماعی در خیلی از موارد انعکاس فرهنگ عامه یا فرهنگ رسانه‌ای روزند و گاه وقایع اجتماعی، فرهنگی و سیاسی زمان خودشان را بازنمایی می‌کنند و از این جنبه باید مورد توجه پژوهشگران حوزۀ رسانه و فرهنگ واقع شوند. می‌باید گفت که سریال‌های ایرانی بیشتر مصرف ملی و منطقه‌ای دارند،[5] حال آنکه سینمای ایران و به‌خصوص سینمای هنری مصرف فرامرزی و جهانی هم دارد. با این همه، باید خاطرنشان کرد که رسانۀ تلویزیون در ساخت‌و‌ساز فرهنگ مردمی و تأثیر متقابلش بر فرهنگ رسانه‌ای جایگاه مهمی دارد. ساختار فرهنگی، اجتماعی و سیاسی هر جامعه با فرهنگ تلویزیونی آن رابطۀ تنگاتنگ دارد.

مجموعۀ شهرزاد نمونه‌ای از بازتاب فرهنگ رسانه‌ای و فرهنگ مردمی در هنرهای نمایشی است: رشد فرهنگ رسانه‌ای، ایجاد شبکۀ خانگی پخش فیلم و رهایی کارگردانان و تهیه‌کنندگان از وابستگی به صدا و سیما بستری ”مناسب‌تر،“ و نه کاملاً مناسب، برای آنان فراهم آورده تا به دور از اعمال مستقیم ممیزی رسانۀ ملی داستان را به شیوه‌ای واقعگراتر و جذاب‌تر تهیه کنند. انتخاب گریم و لباس در این مجموعه واقع‌گرایانه‌تر و ”گاهی“ منطبق با نوع آرایش و پوشش ایران دهۀ 1330 است و اثری از از ایدئولوژی‌زدگی شدید رایج در سریال‌های تلویزیونی در این کار یافت نمی‌شود. باید ذکر کرد که پوشش زنان سنتی‌تر مانند مادر شهرزاد و مادر فرهاد مطابق رسم دوران مربوط به سریال طراحی شده است، اما پوشش زنان مدرن در این سریال و از جمله شخصیت شهرزاد و شیرین به پوشش زنان در دهۀ 1330 شباهت کامل ندارد؛ واضح است که این امر به علت محدودیت حجاب و اعمال ممیزی وزارت ارشاد بوده است.

در صد سال گذشتۀ ایران، بارها و بارها حوادث سیاسی اثری شگرف بر زندگی اجتماعی و فردی ایرانیان گذاشته‌اند که در سریال‌هایی چون دایی جان ناپلئون (به کارگردانی ناصر تقوایی در ۱۳۵۵)، دلیران تنگستان (به کارگردانی همایون شهنواز در 1353-1354) و امیرکبیر (به کارگردانی سعید نیکپور در 1363-1364) به تصویر کشیده شده‌اند. در مجموعۀ شهرزاد ناملایمات پیش‌آمده برای دلدادگان داستان، شهرزاد و فرهاد، ناشی از کودتای ۱۳۳۲ و سقوط دولت مردمی دکتر محمد مصدق است که برای بسیاری از بینندگان امروز یادآور حوادث پس از انتخابات ۱۳۸۸ نیز هست. شرایط نابرابر اجتماعی برای زنان و مشکل دوهمسری نیز مشکلاتی اجتماعی‌اند که در این مجموعه بازنمایی شده‌اند. در ایران امروز، با ورود شبکۀ نمایش خانگی و در عصر دیجیتال، فرهنگ رسانه‌ای در حال تغییر و دگرگونی است. رابطۀ شخصیت‌های این مجموعه، میزانسن، انتخاب گریم و لباس بازیگران همه و همه منعکس‌کنندۀ تغییرات فرهنگ رسانه‌ای است. پیش از بررسی این عوامل لازم است تاریخچۀ سریال‌های تلویزیونی ایرانی و سیاست‌های اثرگذار بر فرهنگ رسانه‌ای ایران آورده شود تا بتوان سریال شهرزاد را از منظر تاریخی و تطبیقی مطالعه کرد.

تلویزیون و سریال‌های سرگرم‌کننده در خانه‌های ایرانی

نخستین فرستندۀ تلویزیونی ایران در ساعت ۵ بعدازظهر جمعه یازدهم مهرماه ۱۳۳۷ اولین برنامۀ خود را پخش کرد. این فرستنده را، که تلویزیون ایران نامیده شد، بخش خصوصی و با سرمایه و تلاش حبیب‌الله ثابت پاسال پایه گذاری کرده بود.[6] تلویزیون ایران در اندک زمانی به بخش دولتی منتقل شد و حالا سال‌های سال است که دولت‌های حاکم بر ایران تولید و پخش تمامی برنامه‌های تلویزیونی و از جمله سریال‌های تلویزیونی را کنترل می‌کنند. این کنترل به شکل منسجم و رسمی از طریق دولت از سال ۱۳۴۵ و با تأسیس تلویزیون ملی ایران در بخش دولتی شروع شد. اگرچه رژیم شاهنشاهی سعی در ”رهبری افکار عمومی در جهت حفظ منافع ملی“[7] و نظام شاهنشاهی داشت، هدف اصلی تولید و پخش برنامه‌های تلویزیونی تأمین سرگرمی برای مردم و بعد از آن، افزایش آگاهی و دانش عمومی همگان بود. در بخش برنامه‌های مستند، داستانی و فیلم‌های سینمایی پیش از انقلاب گاه فیلمسازان برجسته‌ای چون آربی اوانسیان ، فریدون رهنما و فرخ غفاری آثار بی‌نظیری تولید کردند. برنامۀ مستند ایران‌زمین (ساختۀ فریدون رهنما در ۱۳۴۵) از بهترین مستندهای تلویزیون ملی ایران بود. رهنما سنت مستندسازی با نگاه دقیق و شاعرانه را در تلویزیون ایران پایه‌گذاری کرد. فیلم چشمه، ساختۀ اونسیان، یکی از شاهکارهای ماندگارسینمایی ایران، در سال ۱۳۵۰ اولین محصول سینمایی تلویزیون ملی ایران بود که در سال بعد در سینما کاپری به نمایش درآمد و با شکست مالی مواجه شد و حتی نظر منتقدان زمان خودش را هم جلب نکرد. [8] در همین سال‌ها، مستندهای برجسته‌ای چون باد جن (ساختۀ ناصر تقوایی در ۱۳۴۸) و فیلم‌های سینمایی ماندگاری چون طبیعت بی‌جان (ساختۀ سهراب شهید ثالث در ۱۳۵۴) با سرمایه‌گذاری تلویزیون ملی ساخته شدند.

در کنار ساخت برنامه‌های سرگرم‌کننده و فیلم‌های سینمایی و مستند و داستانی، تلویزیون ملی ایران به ساخت سریال‌های تلویزیونی نیز اقدام کرد. در دهۀ 1350، دو عامل مهم باعث محبوبیت رسانۀ تلویزیون در میان مردم شد: 1. فضای اختصاص داده شده به هنرهای نمایشی مدرن از قبیل تئاتر و سینما در دهۀ 1350 بیشتر فضاهای مردانه و/یا روشنفکری بودند. تئاترمدرن در ایران هیچ‌گاه به منزلۀ سرگرمی مردمی جا نیفتاده بود. سالن‌های تئاتر محل اجتماع دانشجویان و روشنفکران بود. در این سال‌ها، اجرای تئاترهای کانون پرورش فکری کودکان و نوجوانان، از قبیل نمایش‌های عروسکی ، محدود بودند و بیشتر فعالیت‌های تئاتری کانون در شهرهای بزرگ صورت می‌گرفت. سالن‌های سینما در دهۀ 1350 بیشتر فیلم های تجاری و به اصطلاح ”فیلمفارسی“ نشان می‌دادند. این فیلم‌ها صحنه‌هایی ”کافه‌ای“ همراه با رقص و گاهی سکس داشت و مخاطبان اصلی این فیلم‌ها هم مردان جوان کم‌سواد بودند. [9] 2. نمایش‌های سنتی از قبیل نقالی و تعزیه در شهرها و روستاها یا در حال اضمحلال بودند یا بیشتر در قهوه‌خانه ها اجرا می‌شدند که محل گردهمایی مردان بود، مردانی که به طبقۀ سنتی بازار یا طبقۀ کارگر متعلق بودند. 3. رشد شهرهای بزرگ و خانه‌سازی در حومۀ شهرها، سفرهای شهری به مرکز شهر را که محل سالن‌های سینما و تئاتر و کافه‌ها بود دشوارتر ساخت. تلویزیون بعد از روزنامه و مجله‌خوانی و گوش سپردن به رادیو اولین رسانۀ در دسترس برای همۀ اهالی خانه بود. تلویزیون دستگاهی بود خانگی که امکان سرگرمی برای همۀ خانواده را فراهم می‌کرد و استفاده از آن نیازی به خروج از خانه و مسافرت‌های شهری نداشت. برای بسیاری از خانواده‌های سنتی‌تر، رفتن زنان به سینما و کافه‌ها هنوز جا نیفتاده بود و محیط خانه برایشان امن‌تر بود. این امر نیز عامل استقبال از تماشای تلویزیون به جای سینما و باقی هنرهای نمایشی بود. 4. نوسازی جامعه در ایران دهه‌های 1340 و 1350 و رشد طبقۀ متوسط شهری که قادر به خرید دستگاه‌های تلویزیون بودند نیز به عمومی شدن تلویزیون شدت بخشید. 5. تولید بیشترسریال‌ها و استقبال عمومی از برنامه‌های سرگرم‌کننده و سریال‌های عامه‌پسند خرید یک دستگاه تلویزیون را توجیه‌پذیر کرده بود و به همین علت، اکثر خانه‌های ایرانی یک دستگاه تلویزیون داشتند.

کم‌کم برای بسیاری از خانواده‌های ایرانی تماشای تلویزیون در اوقات بعدازظهر و شب جایگزین گوش کردن به رادیو در این ساعات شد . ”تا سال ۱۳۵۵، طبق برآوردهای ادارۀ آمار تلویزیون، ۹۳ درصد مناطق شهری و ۴۵ درصد مناطق روستایی ایران زیر پوشش برنامه های تلویزیونی قرار گرفته بود.“[10] در نیمۀ دوم دهۀ 1350، محبوبیت سریال های تلویزیونی بیشتر و منجر به بحران اقتصادی سینمای تجاری در ایران شد. تلویزیون به وسیلۀ سرگرمی شمارۀ یک ایرانیان بدل شد و در اتاق‌های نشیمن جایگاهی اساسی پیدا کرد، به شکلی که حتی چیدمان مبلمان اتاق نشیمن رو به تلویزیون بود.[11]

بیشتر مجموعه‌های تلویزیونی پیش از انقلاب از جنبۀ تکنیکی و هنری در سطح پایینی قرار داشتند. بازیگری و فیلمبرداری اکثر این مجموعه‌ها با سهل‌انگاری و تعجیل انجام می‌شد و کارگردانی این سریال‌ها را، که ”به تعبیر طنزآلودی عده‌ای سه ریال می‌نامیدند،“[12]— افراد معدودی صورت می‌دادند. از میان مجموعه‌های تلویزیونی آن سال‌ها، اندکی از ارزش هنری برخوردار بودند. سلطان صاحبقران در ۱۳۵4 با بازی درخشان پرویز فنی‌زاده و به کارگردانی علی حاتمی، دایی جان ناپلئون در ۱۳۵۵ با فیلمنامه‌ای بر اساس رمان موفق ایرج پزشکزاد، بازی حرفه‌ای فنی‌زاده و پرویز صیاد و کارگردانی ناصر تقوایی و طلاق در ۱۳۵۶، ساختۀ مسعود اسداللهی با فیلمبرداری علیرضا زرین‌دست نمونه‌هایی از سریال‌های برتر ایرانی آن سال‌هایند. بر اثر محبوبیت این سریال‌ها، واژه‌های مصطلح در آنها به فرهنگ کوچه و خیابان وارد شد: اصطلاحات رایج در سریال دایی جان ناپلئون مانند ”تا قبر آ . . . آ . . .“ که کنایه‌ای از زودگذر بودن عمر بود و ”سانفرانسیسکو رفتن“ به معنای رابطۀ جنسی وارد زبان روزمره شد. زنان زورگو و به اصطلاح عوام ”سلیطه“ با اشارۀ غیرمستقیم به سریال قمرخانم (با بازی محمدعلی کشاورز و فخری خوروش در 1348-1350) قمرخانم خوانده می‌شدند و مردان ساده‌لوح روستایی که آرزوی شهرنشینی داشتند به مزاح ”صمدآقا“ نامیده می‌شدند که کنایه‌ای به صمدآقا، شخصیت اصلی سریال پُربینندۀ ماجراهای صمد به کارگردانی پرویز صیاد در 1353 بود.

موضوعات تاریخی و اجتماعی درون‌مایۀ بسیاری ازسریال‌های قبل و بعد از انقلاب بوده است. در سریال‌های پس از انقلاب، اعمال نفوذ حکومت بر تولید و پخش سریال‌ها فزونی گرفت. با این حال، سریال‌های تاریخی و اجتماعی پُرمخاطبی چون هزاردستان (به کارگردانی علی حاتمی در 1360-1366)، سربداران (به کارگردانی محمدعلی نجفی در ۱۳۶۲)، سلطان و شبان (به کارگردانی محمدعلی نجفی در ۱۳۶۳)، خانۀ سبز (به کارگردانی بیژن بیرنگ و مسعود رسام در ۱۳۷۵)، کیف انگلیسی (به کارگردانی سیدضیاالدین دری در ۱۳۷۸) و پس از باران (به کارگردانی سعید سلطانی در ۱۳۷۹) در صدا و سیما تولید و پخش شدند. در دهۀ 1390 بود که حسن فتحی شروع به ساخت سریال‌های پُربیننده کرد.

گذری و نظری بر کارنامۀ حسن فتحی

حسن فتحی کارگردانی شناخته‌شده و پُرمخاطب در عرصۀ فیلم‌های سینمایی و مجموعه‌های تلویزیونی ایران است. او با فیلم ازدواج به سبک ایرانی در ۱۳۸۳ و زمانی که بیشتر کارگردانان ایرانی از کارکردن با هنرپیشه‌های فیلم‌های تجاری قبل از انقلاب و به‌خصوص آنان که از ایران به غرب کوچ کرده بودند ابا داشتند، سعید کنگرانی، هنرپیشۀ نام‌آشنای پیش از انقلاب، را به سینمای ایران بازگرداند. اگرچه کنگرانی بازی ضعیفی ارائه داد، حضور او و داستان گیشه‌پسند فیلم بینندگان فراوانی را جذب فیلم کرد.

حسن فتحی در ساخته‌هایش از واقعیت‌های تاریخی و عناصر فرهنگ مردمی برای خمیرمایۀ اصلی داستان استفاده و سعی می‌کند با نوآوری و در عین حال کاربرد فرمول‌های آشنای روایی تماشاگران را جلب کند. او با فیلم یک روز دیگر در ۱۳۹۰ و سریال تلویزیونی مدار صفر درجه در ۱۳۸۶، بازیگران خارجی را به پردۀ نقره‌ای و صفحۀ تلویزیون‌های مردم ایران دعوت کرد و با انتخاب کشورهای اروپایی برای محل فیلمبرداری توانست زنان (خارجی) را بدون حجاب روی صحنه بیاورد و روابط زنان و مردان را در حالت‌هایی نسبتاً طبیعی‌تر به تصویر بکشد. در هنگامۀ سخنان پُرهیاهوی رئیس جمهور وقت، محمود احمدی‌نژاد، دربارۀ انکار هولوکاست، فتحی در مدار صفردرجه آزار و اذیت یهودیان به دست نازی‌ها در جنگ جهانی دوم را به تصویر کشید و داستان یک رابطۀ عاشقانه میان دختری یهودی از فرانسه با نام سارا آستروک (با بازی ناتالی ماتی) و پسری مسلمان از ایران با نام حبیب پارسا (با بازی شهاب حسینی) را از شبکۀ یک تلویزیون به روی آنتن برد. این مجموعه نگاهی همسو و موافق با یهودیان ایرانی و غیرایرانی دارد و کمک یک دیپلمات ایرانی در فرانسه به یهودیانی را تصویر می‌کند که زندگی‌شان به خطر افتاده بود.[13] شخصیت‌های منفی این فیلم کارگزاران بلندمرتبۀ حکومت پهلوی اول، هوداران رایش سوم وصهیونیست‌ها هستند. شخصیت‌های مثبت داستان افراد تحصیل‌کرده و روشنفکران مسلمان و یهودی‌اند که با یکدیگر همزیستی مسالمت‌آمیز و دوستانه‌ای دارند. حبیب و دوستان کتابخوانش کتاب‌های بزرگ علوی و صادق هدایت را می‌خوانند و شعرهای پل الوار را زمزمه می‌کنند، به وجود تکثر مذهبی و ملیتی در جامعه اعتقاد دارند و با رژیم رضاشاهی سر سازش ندارند.

سریال شب دهم فتحی (تولید ۱۳۸۰) روایت ده شب عزاداری محرم، طغیان مذهبیون و لوطی‌های محله علیه فرمان منع تعزیه از طرف رضاشاه و رابطۀ عشقی میان مردی عامی و شاهزاده خانمی قجر است. در این سریال، مانند فیلم‌هایی چون قیصر (ساختۀ مسعود کیمیایی در ۱۳۴۸)، فرهنگ لوطی‌گری به طرز فریبنده و جذابی به تصویر کشیده شده است. او در سریال دیگری با نام میوۀ ممنوعه در ۱۳۸۶ برداشتی مدرن و آزاد از عشق پیری شیخ صنعان به ترسای رومی در منطق الطیر عطاررا عرضه کرد که در این داستان به شکل عشق نامتعارف یک دختر جوان با نام هستی (با بازی هانیه توسلی) و یک پیرمرد متمول با نام حاج‌ یونس (با بازی علی نصیریان) به نمایش درآمده است. میوۀ ممنوعه از سیاه و سپید جلوه دادن شخصیت‌ها پرهیز می‌کند و بیننده را به همسویی و هم‌ذات‌پنداری با هر سه شخصیت درگیر، یعنی حاج یونس و همسرش و دختر جوان، وامی‌دارد.

سریال‌های فتحی از فرمول روایی خطی و معمول استفاده کرده‌اند، از ایدئولوژی‌زدگی سریال‌های دیگر تلویزیونی تا حد زیادی فاصله گرفته‌اند و به سمت و سوی داستان‌های رومانتیک و عاشقانه توجه بیشتری نشان داده‌اند. با ساخته‌های فتحی، بار دیگر مخاطبان تلویزیونی فراوانی از برنامه‌های سرگرم‌کنندۀ تلویزیونی استقبال کردند. محدودیت‌های دست و پاگیر رسانۀ ملی، سانسور و جرح و تعدیل در فیلمنامه و ساخت و ویرایش سریال‌ها فتحی را برآن داشت که برای آخرین سریال خود رسانۀ صدا و سیما را انتخاب نکند. در مجموعۀ شهرزاد، فتحی بار دیگر ملودرامی اجتماعی را با چاشنی سیاست و درگیری‌های خانوادگی در هم می‌آمیزد. این اولین مجموعۀ حسن فتحی بود که از شبکۀ نمایش خانگی پخش شد.

ملودرام و درون‌مایۀ عشق در سریال‌های صدا و سیما و مجموعۀ شهرزاد

با نگاهی کلی می‌توان گفت که اگرچه امروزه وزارت ارشاد اسلامی بر ساخت و توزیع فیلم‌های سینمایی و سریال‌های تلویزیونی نظارت دارد، اما سانسور -یا آنچه رسماً اعمال ممیزی خوانده می‌شود- در سریال‌های تلویزیونی بیش از فیلم‌های سینمایی بوده است. علت این امر این است که اولاً صدا و سیما نهادی دولتی است و زیر نظر مستقیم نهاد رهبری کار می‌کند و ثانیاً، سرمایه‌گذاری بیشتر فیلم‌ها و سریال‌های تلویزیونی از طریق صدا و سیما و سازمان‌های وابسته یا سازمان‌های دولتی دیگر تأمین می‌شود. سانسور صدا و سیما در ساخت سریال‌های تلویزیونی اثری منفی در کیفیت برنامه‌های ارائه شده داشته است. از این گذشته، به سبب اسلامی‌سازی بازیگری و دکوپاژ، نمود زنان و مردان و رابطۀ انسانی در بازنمایی خانواده یا رابطۀ عشقی یا عاطفی در داستان‌های صدا و سیما به شدت غیرواقعی و مخدوش است. زنان در اتاق خواب با روسری و حجاب کامل اسلامی نشان داده می‌شوند و وقتی زنی در یک صحنه غش می‌کند، شوهر یا برادرش نمی‌توانند به او دست بزنند و باید منتظر یکی از شخصیت‌های زن داستان بشوند تا همسر یا خواهرشان را از روی زمین بلند کند. صحنه‌های نماز و دعا خواندن و زیارت از امامزاده در نماهای طولانی و کشدار جزء لاینفک بیشتر سریال‌های رسانۀ ملی است و بازدید از اماکن مذهبی و بجا آوردن عبادات نشان‌دهندۀ مثبت بودن شخصیت‌های داستان. [14] تا چندی پیش، در بسیاری از سریال‌های صدا و سیما اسامی اصیل ایرانی از آنِ شخصیت‌های منفی داستان بود و اسامی اسلامی از آن شخصیت‌های مثبت داستان، که بیشتر اوقات از قضا سیّد و اولاد پیامبر اسلام هم بودند. سریال‌های تلویزیونی ایرانی بیش از فیلم‌های سینمایی ایدئولوژی‌زده‌اند و غالباً همراه با سیاست روز حکومت مبلغ شعار سیاسی و فرهنگی خاصی می‌شوند. اعمال ممیزی شدید در این رسانه درون‌مایۀ عشق را نیز تحت تأثیر قرار داده است. نمود عشق، شاید بی‌پرده‌تر از هر برنامۀ تلویزیونی دیگری در دوران پس از انقلاب، در سریال شهرزاد نمایش داده شده است.

درون‌مایۀ اصلی سریال شهرزاد عشق و رابطۀ عاطفی شهرزاد با دو شخصیت فرهاد و قباد است که دستخوش بازی‌های سیاسی و نظام مردسالارانۀ اجتماع ایران دهۀ 1330 می‌شود. شهرزاد شخصیت اصلی این مجموعه است و رفتار و کردار باقی شخصیت‌های داستان از منظر رابطه‌شان با شهرزاد یا تأثیرشان بر زندگی شهرزاد سنجیده می‌شود. در این مجموعه، به کارگیری ژانر ملودرام بستر مناسبی برای پرداختن به درون‌مایۀ عشق فراهم آورده است و باعث جذب بینندگان به تماشای قسمت‌های بعدی سریال شده است. باید اضافه کرد که این سریال در قالب دو ژانر اصلی و یک ژانر یا سبک فرعی‌تر ساخته شده است که به ترتیب اهمیتشان در این مجموعه عبارت‌اند از ملودرام با بازنمود بیشتر رئالیسم خانگی،[15] فیلم جنایی و فیلم-نوآر با بازنمود بیشتر اَکشن.

سبک نوآر به منزلۀ نوعی ”سبک نمایشی“[16] فقط در سکانس‌هایی از این مجموعه و به اقتضای روند داستان به کار گرفته شده است تا صحنه‌های دراماتیک و جنایی را با به کارگیری تضاد سیاه و سفید، نورپردازی در شب و استفاده از سایه و روشن در نمایش چهرۀ پُرتنش شخصیت‌هایی چون بزرگ‌آقا، فرهاد و شهرزاد باورپذیرتر و جذاب‌تر کند. حسن فتحی در سریال‌های قبلی و از جمله در شب دهم هم از ویژگی‌های بصری فیلم-نوآر استفاده کرده است. نقش زن اغواگر یا زن ویرانگر (femme fatale) در فیلم-نوآر اهمیت ویژه‌ای دارد. مثلاً زن اغواگر در شخصیت‌پردازی زنی از تبار قاجار (با بازی کتایون ریاحی) در شب دهم نقشی اساسی داشت، اما در مجموعه شهرزاد به شکلی بسیار کم‌رنگ‌تر و کم‌اهمیت‌تر در شخصیت زنی به نام شربت (با بازی پانته‌آ پناهی‌ها) تبلور یافته است که مانند یک نینجا[17] آدم می‌کشد و ناپدید می‌شود. جالب آنکه موفق‌ترین قاتل و کارسازترین عامل خشونت و سرکوب به فرمان رؤسای گروه‌های مافیایی در این مجموعه همین زن است و نه مردان لوطی و کلاه‌مخملی. شربت از نقش سنتی مادر فداکار، همسر سربه‌راه و زن ‌کنش‌پذیر، مانند مادر شهرزاد، فاصله می‌گیرد و به شخصیتی کنشگر، اما منفی، بدل می‌شود. شربت برخلاف سایر زنان که در فضاهای زنانه، مانند خانه، کارکرد بیشتری دارند، در فضاهای مردانه و خشنی مانند صحنۀ نزاع و قتل رفت و آمد می‌کند. اگرچه این سریال مانند سایر سریال‌های ایرانی تولید‌شده در سی و چند سال گذشته از نمایش صحنه‌های اروتیک بری است، به وضوح پیداست که شربت و نصرت (مباشر اصلی بزرگ‌آقا پس از مرگ حشمت، با بازی پرویز فلاحی‌پور) به یکدیگر علاقه‌مند شده‌اند. با این همه، قدرت اصلی شربت در جذابیت جنسی او نیست، بلکه در مهارت‌های مردانه‌اش در قتل واعمال خشونت است. در هر صورت، نقش زن اغواگر در این فیلم نقشی فرعی و کم‌رنگ است.

شربت در لباس مردانه، آماده برای قتل دشمنان بزرگ‌آقا.[18]

صحنه‌های تاریک و رازآمیز نوآر در مجموعۀ شهرزاد.

قتل اصلان توپچی به دست عوامل بزرگ‌آقا، میزانسن با نوردهی سیاه – آبیِ نوآر.

پایه و اساس ژانر جنایی بازنمایی و درشت‌نمایی خشونت و نیروی مردانه است. به نظر می‌رسد که فیلم‌های مافیایی از نوع پدرخوانده (به کارگردانی فرانسیس فورد کاپولا در ۱۹۷۲) تأثیر مستقیمی بر ساخت سریال شهرزاد داشته‌اند. شخصیت بزرگ‌آقا در کسوت پدرسالار و رهبر یک گروه مافیایی و جنایی در این مجموعه حائز اهمیت است. قتل‌های مرموزی که به دست ایادی بزرگ‌آقا صورت می‌گیرد، قراردادهای اقتصادی، سیاسی و جنایی پشت پرده بین گروه‌های مافیایی، زندگی مجلل، پُرتنش و پُراضطراب پدرسالار فیلم، مهمانی‌های پُرخرج در باغ‌های زیبای تهران و نگاه ابزاری پدرسالار به افراد زیردست، از جمله فرزندانش، همه و همه یادآور فیلم پدرخوانده است. روابط سنتی افراد، مبتنی بر حفظ نظم پدرسالارانه، که در خانواده‌های ایتالیایی- امریکایی فیلم یادشده دیده می‌شود، به راحتی بر سریال ایرانی منطبق شده است. اهمیت داشتن وارث، خانه‌های بزرگ و مملو از کالاهای لوکس، اسلحه، زنان زیبارو و ماشین‌های آخرین مدلی که در فیلم‌های جنایی- مافیایی و از جمله پدرخوانده به چشم می‌خورد در این سریال هم مشهود است. جای گانگسترهای فیلم‌های امریکایی یا افراد گروه مافیایی را در این سریال کلاه‌مخملی‌ها به فرمان پدرسالارانی چون بزرگ‌آقا، شیروانی، بهبودی و اصلان توپچی گرفته‌اند که عاملان جرم و جنایت می‌شوند، در خیابان‌های تهران فریاد ”جاوید شاه“ سر می‌دهند، حکومت مصدق را سرنگون می‌کنند، باعث ارعاب روشنفکران می‌شوند و دفتر مجله و روزنامه‌ها را ویران می‌سازند. روابط علّی و معلولی در رابطۀ گروه‌های مافیایی در این فیلم همیشه به خوبی پرداخت نشده است یا توجیه‌پذیر نیست و گاه در هاله‌ای از ابهام باقی می‌ماند. مثلاً کاملاً مشخص نیست که روایت فیلم از رهگذر کشته شدن حشمت (با بازی ابوالفضل پورعرب)، که پیشکار اصلی بزرگ‌آقا بود، چه بهره‌ای می‌برد و چرا نصرت عیناً جایگزین شخصیت حشمت می‌شود. مهم‌تر اینکه حشمت اصلاً چرا و به دست چه کسانی کشته شد. شاید پاسخ این سوال‌ها در قسمت دوم سریال داده شود.

عوامل مافیایی بزرگ‌آقا مشغول شناسایی یکی از مردان گروه رقیب.

کلاه‌مخملی‌ها در شب قبل از کودتای ۲۸ مرداد در خانۀ بزرگ‌آقا آماده می‌شوند.

ساختار ملودراماتیک فیلم اما از روشنی بیشتری برخوردار است و جزییات آن بیننده را به دنبال قسمت بعدی سریال می‌کشاند. نکتۀ حائز اهمیت در این سریال استفاده از دو ژانر جنایی و ملودرام است که کارگردان توانسته از هر دو مؤلفۀ جذاب اَکشن/نیروی مردانه و مرکزیت احساسات عاشقانه در بافت رئالیسم خانگی استفاده کند. در ملودرام احساسات، رنج‌ها و حالات روحی شخصیت‌ها اهمیت خاصی دارند.[19] زندگی سراسر رنج و درماندگی زنان در جامعۀ پدرسالار محور توجه داستان ملودراماتیک است.[20]

گفته شد که مسایل تاریخی و اجتماعی و گاه خانوادگی درون‌مایۀ اصلی بیشتر سریال‌های پیش از انقلاب بوده است. اگرچه سریال‌های تاریخی و اجتماعی غالباً درون‌مایه های فرعی ملودراماتیک هم دارند، سریال‌های عاشقانۀ این دوران انگشت‌شمار بوده‌اند. نمونه‌ای از عاشقانه‌های قبل از انقلاب سریال سیزده قسمتی شهر من شیراز (ساختۀ شاهرخ ذوالریاستین در 1354-1355) بود که بر اساس رمانی از نادر ابراهیمی ساخته شده بود. شهر من شیراز ملودرامی بود جوان‌پسند که روایت عشقی نافرجام را توصیف می‌کرد. اکثر ملودرام‌های تلویزیونی پس از انقلاب ملودرام‌های ضعیفی بوده و از واقعیت‌های جامعۀ ایرانی فاصله داشته‌اند.

قدمت داستان‌های عاشقانه، یا آنچه در اصطلاح ادبی ژانر رومانس خوانده می‌شود، به پیش از اختراع سینما و تلویزیون بازمی‌گردد. شاهنامه فردوسی از معدود حماسه‌های هندواروپایی است که داستان‌های عاشقانه (رومانس) را چاشنی داستان‌های پهلوانی و حکایت جنگ‌های بی‌پایان ایران و توران (حماسه) کرده است. داستان‌های عاشقانۀ ادبیات کلاسیک فارسی داستان عشق شاهان، مردان پُرهیبت درباری و پهلوانان قَدَر قدرت ایرانی و زنان زیباروی درباری یا اشراف است. این داستان‌ها در فرهنگ مردمی محبوبیت بسیار داشته و دارند. داستان‌های ”بیژن و منیژه“ و ”زال و رودابه“ از شیرین‌ترین و پُرطرفدارترین روایت‌های شاهنامه هستند که بعدها دستمایۀ آثار هنری دیگری در عرصۀ ی اُپرا، تئاتر، نقاشی و نقالی هم شده‌اند. داستان‌های عاشقانۀ ”لیلی و مجنون“ و ”خسرو و شیرین“ با روایت دلنشین و زبان شاعرانۀ نظامی گنجه‌ای تأثیری جاودانه بر فرهنگ و ادب پارسی گذاشته‌اند. اگرچه داستان‌های عاشقانه در قالب شاهکارهای بی‌نظیری در شعر فارسی و نقاشی مینیاتور ایرانی به جا مانده‌اند، ریشۀ داستان‌های عاشقانۀ ایرانی را در فرهنگ مردمی و شفاهی باید یافت. [21] داستان‌هایی مثل ”داستان دختر شاه پریان“ و ”داستان حسن کچل“ عاشقانه‌های عامیانه‌اند. در این داستان‌ها معمولاً شاهزاده‌ای نیک‌خو دل به پسر یا دختری از طبقۀ تهی‌دست می‌بندد. شخصیت‌های منفی داستان مثل وزیر خبیث، مادر ناتنی، شاه بی‌خرد یا جادوگر بدخواه با ایجاد موانعی سعی در دوری دلدادگان دارند و در نهایت، در جدال میان نیکی و بدی، نیکی به پیروزی می‌رسد و عاشقان به وصال می‌رسند. داستان‌های هزار و یک شب که محور اصلی روایی‌اش حول پادشاهی تشنه به خونِ دختران باکره و همسری خردمند و دانا می‌گردد نیز شامل داستان‌های عشقی فراوانی است که ریشه در ادبیات شفاهی و فرهنگ مردمی ایران‌زمین دارند. از رابطۀ میان داستان‌های هزار و یک شب و سریال شهرزاد در بخشی دیگر به تفصیل بحث خواهد شد.

جنبش مشروطیت که به امضای فرمان مشروطه در سال ۱۲۸۵ش به دست مظفرالدین‌شاه قاجار منتهی شد، فرهنگ مردمی و داستان‌نویسی را تحت تأثیر قرار داد. با تأثیر گرفتن از رمان‌های اروپایی و داستان‌های عامیانۀ ایرانی، رمان‌نویسی در ایران باب و پای طبقۀ متوسط به ”میدان اندیشه و هنر“ گشوده شد.[22] از سوی دیگر، روزنامه‌نگاری در همین سال‌ها رشد کرد و قسمتی از مجله‌ها و روزنامه‌ها به داستان‌نویسی اختصاص یافت. شایان ذکر است که رونق مجله‌های خانوادگی و جا افتادن پاورقی‌ها و داستان‌نویسی نتیجۀ نوگرایی جامعه، تجدد فکری، رشد طبقۀ باسواد شهری و به‌خصوص افزایش زنان باسواد پس از انقلاب مشروطه بود.[23] با رونق گرفتن مجله‌های خانوادگی و سرگرم‌کننده در ایران، پای ملودرام از ادبیات کلاسیک، داستان‌های عامیانه و فرهنگ شفاهی به ستون داستان‌های دنباله‌دار یا پاورقی مجله‌ها باز شد.[24] از پاورقی‌های مشهور قدیمی تهران مخوف به قلم مرتضی مشفق کاظمی بود که در ستارۀ ایران در سال ۱۳۰۳ به چاپ می‌رسید. در سال‌های بعد، رسول اورنقی کرمانی، سردبیر و پاورقی‌نویس مشهور اطلاعات هفتگی، پاورقی محبوب امشب دختری می‌میرد را نوشت. از پاورقی‌نویس‌های دیگری که با شرح و بسط داستان‌های رومانتیک در قرن بیستم به شهرت رسیدند می‌توان از حسینقلی مستعان، محمد حجازی، حسین مسرور، ذبیح‌الله منصوری و ر. اعتمادی نام برد. بسیاری از داستان‌های دنباله‌دار مستعان، حجازی و دیگران بعدها به شکل کتاب به چاپ رسیدند. [25] پاورقی‌ها هنوز طرفداران خود را در فرهنگ عامه دارند. پاورقی‌های امروزی سر از فضای مجازی هم درآورده‌اند و در شبکه‌های اجتماعی چون وبلاگ‌های شخصی، اینستاگرام، فیس‌بوک و تلگرام پخش می‌شوند. داستان‌های پستچی و شیدا و صوفی نمونه‌هایی از این پاورقی‌های مجازی‌اند که به قلم چیستا یثربی نوشته شده‌اند.[26]

اندک‌اندک، شاهزاده‌ها و پهلوانان داستان‌های ادبیات کلاسیک فارسی در داستان‌های پس از مشروطه جای خود را به شخصیت‌هایی از خانواده‌های متوسط شهری و روستایی دادند. ”زن به عنوان موجودی اجتماعی، هم‌زمان با انقلاب مشروطه به ادبیات راه می‌یابد“[27] و شخصیت اصلی رمان‌ها و پاورقی‌ها می شود. زنان روسپی نماد بدکاری جامعه و ظلم نظام پدرسالار به زنان شده، شخصیت اصلی بسیاری از این داستان‌ها می‌شوند و روسپیگری درون‌مایۀ اصلی داستان می‌شود. برای مثال، استفادۀ جنسی از زنان در تهران مخوف موضوع اصلی یک داستان عشقی است. [28] به نظر می‌رسد که سریال شهرزاد با الهام از پاورقی‌های عاشقانه نوشته شده است. در مجموعۀ شهرزاد، مانند پاورقی‌های اوایل قرن چهاردهم شمسی، درون‌مایۀ عشق از اهمیت بسیار بالایی برخوردار است. در ژانر ملودرام، مانند داستان‌های اجتماع‌محور در ادبیات، مسایل اجتماعی در قالب مشکلات و مسایل خانوادگی به نمایش درمی‌آیند و وضعیت روحی و روانی آدم‌های داستان به شکل مشکلات اجتماعی بروز می‌کنند.[29] درست مانند رمان تهران مخوف، موضوعات خانوادگی و شکست‌های عشقی با چاشنی اتفاقات تاریخی و اجتماعی در سریال شهرزاد بینندگان را هر هفته به دنبال کردن ملودرامی پُرکشش فرامی‌خواند. شاید اتفاقی نباشد که در صحنه‌ای از این مجموعه، فرهاد را می‌بینیم که در فرش‌فروشی پدرش نشسته و مشغول خواندن رمان تهران مخوف است. در مجموعۀ شهرزاد، مانند رمان قدیمی تهران مخوف، درون‌مایۀ عشق بر اساس شخصیت زن داستان نمود یافته است. در واقع، در ژانر ملودرام پرسوناژ زن داستان از نقش‌های حاشیه‌ای به سمت نقش‌های مرکزی سوق داده می‌شود و این وجه ممیزۀ ملودرام از ژانرهای دیگری چون فیلم‌های جاهلی و مافیایی است. اصلی بودن شخصیت شهرزاد در این مجموعه عامل اصلی موفقیت و جذابیت داستان سریال است. اهمیت زن در داستان هم در خط اصلی روایت و هم در عنوان مجموعه نمود یافته است. قابل ذکر است که بسیاری از پاورقی‌ها و رمان‌های پس از انقلاب مشروطه با ”به سخره گرفتن رسم خانواده‌های سنتی که زنان خانواده‌شان را با نام کوچکشان صدا نمی‌زدند، نام زنان را برای داستان‌های خود انتخاب کردند:“[30] شهرناز به قلم یحیی دولت‌آبادی در 1305، پروین دختر ساسانی نوشتۀ صادق هدایت در 1309، زیبا اثر محمد حجازی در 1312 نمونه‌هایی از این داستان‌هایند. شهرزاد از نظر انتخاب نام مجموعه نیز از همین شیوۀ قدیمی بهره برده است.

با پاگرفتن صنعت سینما و رونق سالن‌های پخش فیلم، ژانر ملودرام وارد فیلم‌های تجاری شد و سپس در سریال‌های تلویزیونی هم به کار گرفته شد. اگر به تاریخ فیلم‌های سینمایی و تلویزیونی در ایران دقت کنیم، می‌بینیم که در مجموع شخصیت‌پردازی زنان در ساخته‌های امروز دقیق‌تر از فیلم‌ها و سریال‌های تلویزیونی گذشته است.[31] بازنمایی دقیق‌تر زنان علل بسیاری دارد، از جمله اینکه امروزه در میان تماشاگران رسانه‌های جمعی، زنان و آنان که به برابری جنسیتی معتقدند فزونی یافته‌اند و کارگردانان و تهیه‌کنندگان برای جذب تماشاگران بیشتر به شخصیت‌پردازی زنان داستان‌هایشان بهای بیشتری می‌دهند. در سال‌های ابتدایی صنعتی شدن سینمای ایران، بیشتر بینندگان فیلم‌های سینمایی مردان بودند و شاید به همین سبب مسیر اصلی روایت حول محور قهرمانی مردان می‌چرخید. زنان داستان نقش‌هایی فرعی داشتند و از شخصیت زن جوان داستان‌ها فقط استفادۀ ابزاری و جنسیتی می‌شد. رسانۀ تلویزیون از همان ابتدا رسانه‌ای خانگی بوده است و بینندۀ سریال‌های تلویزیونی همۀ اهالی خانه بوده و هستند. در بسیاری از موارد در ایران، تماشای سریال‌های تلویزیونی در خانواده‌ها فعالیتی خانوادگی و جمعی بوده و هست. به همین سبب، یک روایت جذاب و پُرکشش برای خانواده روایتی است که هم مردان و هم زنان را به هم‌ذات‌پنداری دعوت کند. حتی در سریال‌هایی که شخصیت‌پردازی و سینماتوگرافی به شکل غیرحرفه‌ای صورت گرفته، زنان داستان به اندازۀ مردان در نقش کلی روایت نقش‌آفرین و مهم‌اند. مجموعۀ تلخ و شیرین (ساختۀ منصور پورمند در ۱۳۵۳)، که نشان‌دهندۀ اختلافات و دغدغه‌های سه نسل زنان و مردان ساکن تهران است، شاهدی بر این مدعاست.

بازیگران سریال تلخ و شیرین، برگرفته از ویکی‌پدیا.

در سریال شهرزاد، شخصیت‌پردازی زنان از دقت و عمق بیشتری نسبت به بیشتر مجموعه‌های تلویزیونی پیشین ایران برخوردار است. شاید علت آن باشد که حسن فتحی در نوشتن فیلمنامۀ سریال از همکاری نویسندۀ زن بهره برده است. نویسندۀ دوم این سریال، نغمه ثمینی، نمایشنامه‌نویس و استاد دانشگاه تهران است که در نوشتن فیلمنامه‌ها و نمایشنامه‌های زن‌محور دیگری چون فیلم همیشه پای یک زن در میان است (ساختۀ کمال تبریزی در ۱۳۸۶) همکاری داشته است.

در پنجاه سال اخیر، مطالعات دانشگاهیان نشان داده است که استفاده از ژانر ملودرام در فیلم و سریال‌سازی با اهداف فمینیستی و جامعه‌شناسانه همراه است و در بسیاری از مواقع، نظام پدرسالار و شرایط نابرابر زنان را به پرسش کشیده است. پژوهش‌های جدی در این زمینه ملودرام را از نظر سینمای مؤلف، میزانسن و مطالعات روان‌شناسانه، تاریخی، فمینیستی و نئومارکسیستی بررسی کرده‌اند.[32] زیرمایه (موتیف) ملودرام یا داستان‌های عاشقانه زمینۀ خوبی برای نمود تضاد و تقابل شخصیت‌های یک خانواده است. تقابل اصلی در داستان‌های ملودرام میان خودی و غیرخودی نیست، بلکه میان افراد خودی است: آنان که با هم پیوند خونی و عاطفی دارند. صحنۀ نبرد در داستان‌های ملودراماتیک عموماً نه خیابان است و نه میدان جنگ، صحنۀ نبرد خانه است و افراد متخاصم افراد یک خانواده یا عشاق قدیمی‌اند. تضاد اصلی در این ژانر میان نیروی تولید، کار و سرمایه (به شکل سنتی مرد/ پدر) و نیروی خانگی و تولید مثل (زن/ مادر) است.[33] در ملودرام های جدیدی مثل شهرزاد می‌بینیم که با مدرن شدن اجتماع و ورود زنان به عرصه‌های اجتماعی، نیروی محرک اجتماعی و در نتیجه قدرت به شکل انحصاری در دست مردان نیست. با این همه، نظام مردسالار از ورود زنان به عرصۀ کار و سرمایه بیم دارد و برای حفظ قدرت سنتی خود تلاش می‌کند نقش زنان را در صرفاً در جایگاه نیروی خانگی حفظ کند. دانشجو بودن شهرزاد در دانشگاه و مهم‌تر از آن، شخصیت اندیشه‌ورز، پویا و گاه کنشگر او در طول داستان وجودش را برای مردانی چون بزرگ‌آقا، پدرش، جمشید (با بازی محمود پاک‌نیت)، و شوهر اولش، قباد، مشکل‌آفرین می‌کند. شهرزاد پس از آنکه متوجه می‌شود بزرگ‌آقا در تصمیم خود مبنی بر ازدواج او با دامادش قباد مصمم است، با نامزدش فرهاد از تهران فرار می‌کند. در قسمت‌های بعدی سریال می‌بینیم که پس از متارکه با قباد، به‌رغم عرف زمان و موانع خانوادگی و فرهنگی، با فرهاد ازدواج می‌کند. شهرزاد نمونۀ زن متجددی است که نظام مردسالار را به چالش می‌کشد.

اختلافات طبقاتی و عشق میان فقیر و غنی نیز از زیرمایه‌های ژانر ملودرام است. بیشتر داستان‌های ملودراماتیک حول محور دو عاشق و خانواده‌هایشان شکل می‌گیرد. در نظام مافیایی و پدرسالاری این مجموعه، اختلاف طبقاتی و رعایت سلسله‌مراتب قدرت و ثروت نقشی اساسی در سرنوشت شخصیت‌های داستان دارد. فرهاد باید از عشق شهرزاد دست بشوید و نامزدش را به قباد بسپارد، چرا که پدرش نوچۀ بزرگ‌آقاست. شهرزاد به‌رغم تحصیلات عالی و مهم‌تر از آن بارور بودن، که در نظام مردسالار یکی از وظایف زن و اصلاً علت وجودی اوست ، در برابر شیرین متمول (با بازی پریناز ایزدیار) احساس ضعف می‌کند، چرا که پدرش جیره‌خوار بزرگ‌آقاست. داستان در دورۀ نوگرایی جامعۀ ایران می‌گذرد. بوتیک‌های خیابان لاله‌زار لباس و کفش فرنگی عرضه می‌کنند، زنان و مردان به اصطلاح متجدد شده‌اند و در تئاترهای پایتخت نمایش هملت و اتللو دایر است، اما زیر پوستۀ نازک این نوگرایی، اختلاف طبقاتی به همان شیوۀ قدیمی سرنوشت انسان‌ها را عوض می‌کند.

زیرمایه‌های ساده‌ای چون تقابل خیر و شر یا فقیر و غنی در ملودرام باعث شده است که داستان‌های عاشقانه در بسیاری موارد جزو ادبیات حاشیه‌ای و کم‌ارزش رده‌بندی شوند. بسیاری از ناقدان تصور کرده‌اند که داستان‌های عاشقانه برای مخاطبان زن ساخته و پرداخته می‌شوند.[34] فارغ از نظر ناقدان و تحلیلگران، داستان‌های عاشقانۀ شفاهی در فرهنگ ایران و ادبیات فارسی مورد توجه مردان و زنان، بزرگسالان و خردسالان از هر طبقه و سطح تحصیلاتی بوده و هست. استقبال همه‌گیر از شهرزاد، که یک ملودرام خوش‌پرداخت است، بار دیگر بر این نظریه صحه می‌گذارد. گفته شد که ژانر ملودرام پس از تجدد و نوگرایی رشد شایان توجهی یافت. در این مجموعۀ تلویزیونی، تضاد اصلی میان تجدد و سنت در بافت ملودراماتیک است. بزرگ‌آقا، پدر شهرزاد و پروین (با بازی سهیلا رضوی)، مادر شهرزاد، نمایندگان و حامیان اصلی سنت‌اند. برای بزرگ‌آقا ازدواج مایۀ بقای ثروت و نام خانوادگی است و به همین علت حاضر می‌شود برای دختر خودش هوو بیاورد.[35] برای پدر و مادر شهرزاد، ازدواج دخترشان با خانواده‌ای از طبقۀ اجتماعی بالاتر نوعی افتخار محسوب می‌شود، حتی اگر دخترشان همسر دوم شوهرش باشد. آسایش مادی و مقام اجتماعی برای آنان مهم‌تر از عشق و علاقۀ شخصی دخترشان است. شهرزاد و فرهاد نمایندۀ تجدد و عامل تغییر در جامعۀ ایرانی نشان داده شده‌اند. شهرزاد دانشجوی پزشکی است و حتی پس از ازدواج با قباد بر ادامۀ تحصیل پافشاری می‌کند، به مکان‌های عمومی مانند کافه نادری که از مکان‌های مردانه محسوب می‌شود هم آمد و شد دارد و ازدواج بر پایۀ عشق را حق مسلم هر زن و مردی می داند. با اینکه شهرزاد در سریال به اقتضای عبور از سد سانسور با کلاه و گاه روسری نشان داده شده، در اصل بی‌حجاب است. دغدغۀ اصلی فرهاد هم رشد فکری و اجتماعی مردم ایران است. فرهاد به مصدق، رهبر ملی، و وزیر امور خارجه‌اش، دکتر فاطمی، عشق می‌ورزد و شعرهای مدرن و اجتماعی نیما یوشیج را زمزمه می‌کند. فرهاد و شهرزاد هر دو خواهان برابری و آزادی همۀ شهروندان‌اند و عشق برای هر دو از جایگاه مهمی در زندگی برخوردار است.

با اینکه در بسیاری از تولیدات سینمایی و تلویزیونی اخیر زنان به شکل پُررنگ‌تری نمود یافته‌اند، عاشقانه‌های ایرانی در فیلم‌ها و سریال‌های سال‌های اخیر کم بوده‌اند. یکی از علل این امر می‌تواند اعمال ممیزی شدید در تلویزیون رسمی و موانع ناشی از آن باشد. حتی در بعضی از تولیدات قبلی حسن فتحی، درون‌مایۀ عشق موضوعی فرعی است که موازی با داستان اصلی‌تر روایت می‌شود. سریال‌های تلویزیونی به سبب چندقسمتی و طولانی بودن روایت بستر مناسبی برای پرداخت ملودرام فراهم می‌کنند. با این حال، در صدا و سیمای جمهوری اسلامی، که شهروندان را مقید به رعایت اخلاق اسلامی می‌داند، موضوع عشق و رابطۀ رومانتیک میان زنان و مردان یکی از موضوعات ”دشوار“ بوده است. نگاهی به فهرست سریال‌های تولیدشده در سال‌های پس از انقلاب گواهی بر این مدعاست. عشق در بسیاری از مجموعه‌های تلویزیونی سال‌های اولیۀ پس از انقلاب، چون هزاردستان، نه درون‌مایۀ اصلی، بلکه موضوعی فرعی و گذراست. با باز شدن ظاهری فضای فرهنگی در تلویزیون در دورۀ ریاست جمهوری اکبر هاشمی رفسنجانی، ملودرام‌هایی چون سریال در پناه تو (ساختۀ حمید لبخنده در ۱۳۷۴) سعی در جذب بینندگان جوان‌تر داشتند. دیالوگ‌های کشدار و گاه بی‌معنی این سریال داستان مثلث عشقی میان یک خانم دانشجو با نام مریم افشار (با بازی لعیا زنگنه) و دو پسر دانشجو با نام‌های رامین (با بازی رامین پرچمی) و محمد (با بازی حسن جوهرچی) را روایت می‌کند. محمد، که جوانی مسلمان با چهره‌ای موقر و دارای ”محاسن“ است، در نهایت با مریم که در عشق و ازدواج با رامین سبکسر شکست خورده ازدواج می‌کند. این سریال که قرار بوده تصویرگر رابطه‌ای عشقی ”جذاب و جوان‌پسند“ باشد، در نهایت روایتی از عشق اسلامی–دانشجویی است که ارزش‌های طبقۀ مذهبی جامعه از قبیل تقوی و پاکدامنی و حیای زن در مواجه با مرد را تبلیغ می‌کند و بر اهمیت ساختار خانوادۀ سنتی مرکب از پدر، مادر و فرزند و حضور مداوماً تصمیم‌گیرندۀ بزرگ‌ترهای فامیل صحه می‌گذارد. مریم افشارِ داستانی، برخلاف اکثریت دختران دانشجوی واقعی در طبقۀ متوسط که بدحجاب و گاه طغیانگرند و قوانین پوشش و رفتار اجتماعی دولتی را با انتخاب روسری‌های کوتاه‌تر و لباس‌های رنگی به چالش می‌کشند، دختر نجیب و باحجابی است که چادر و روسری مشکی به سر می‌کند، سرسپردۀ قوانین خانواده‌اش است و پاسدار ارزش‌های اسلامی مورد تأیید حکومت و صدا و سیما. با معرفی چهره‌های زیبایی چون لعیا زنگنه و حسن جوهرچی در نقش دانشجویان متعهد، صدا و سیما رسالت اسلامی خود را بازارپسندانه به بینندگان عرضه می‌کند. صدا و سیما در سریال‌های دیگری چون ستایش (ساختۀ سعید سلطانی در ۱۳۸۸) هنرپیشه‌های فرشته‌گون و زیبارویی چون نرگس محمدی در نقش ستایش را به شکل زنان مطیع و وابسته به نظام مردسالار به تصویر می‌کشد تا خاطرنشان کند که قدرت نظام سنتی مردسالار ورای نیازهای عاشقانه و خواهش‌های زودگذر جوانی، موجب تحکیم نظام خانواده و پاسدار زنان است. در این سریال، هنرپیشۀ مشهور سینما، داریوش ارجمند، که در نقش پدر و یگانه تصمیم‌گیرنده و رئیس خانواده بازی می‌کند و هنرپیشۀ جوان و زیبایی در نقش ستایش، که زنی آرام و مطیع قوانین مردسالار است، ارزش‌های سنتی–اسلامی را در قالب سریالی سرگرم‌کننده تبلیغ می‌کنند. زنان باتقوی در سریال‌هایی چون ستایش با اعمال نور از سه جهت و آرایش نامرئی و گریم حرفه‌ای فرشته‌گون و معصوم به نظر می‌رسند. این زنان بیشتر در فضاهای خانگیِ بسته دیده می‌شوند و اگر به تنهایی و سرِ خود اقدام به فعالیت‌های خارج از خانه کنند به دردسر می‌افتند و باید مردان خانواده آنها را از مخمصه نجات دهند. آرایش تند ندارند، لباس‌های گشاد می‌پوشند و بیرون از خانه و در مواجه با نامحرم بیشتر از پوشش برتر، چادر مشکی، استفاده می کنند. زنان بدطینت داستان که از توجه خاص دوربین، مثل زوم کردن روی صورت با نور سه‌جهته، بی‌بهره‌اند آرایش تند دارند، لباس‌های رنگی به تن می‌کنند، رفتار جلف از خود نشان می‌دهند، مستقل‌اند یا با یک مرد مجرم یا قاچاقچی یا معتاد زندگی و همکاری می‌کنند، رانندگی می‌کنند و در اجتماع آزادانه رفت و آمد می‌کنند و سرانجام به قهقرا کشیده می‌شوند. در سریال شب دهم نیز زنان طبقۀ اشراف زنانی بدطینت‌اند که به اخلاقیات نیز پایبندی نیستند و از قربانی کردن افراد زیردست ابایی ندارند. زنان طبقۀ کارگر برعکس نماد تقوی و فداکاری و پایبندی به اخلاقیات معرفی می‌شوند.

پوستر تبلیغاتی سریال در پناه تو، برگرفته از شاپ‌آث.

در بسیاری از سریال‌های تلویزیونی پس از انقلاب، تمرکز بر زنان و مسایل خانوادگی و عشقی محملی برای تبلیغ ایدئولوژی اسلامی–حکومتی بوده و از چهرۀ زن محجبه و پاکدامن برای شخصیت مثبت داستان استفاده شده تا حجاب زنان و سرسپردگی آنان در قبال مردان را امری عادی و پسندیده جلوه دهند و به نوعی آن را در اجتماع بازتولید کنند. ملودرام‌هایی از نوع ستایش و در پناه تو را می‌توان ”ملودرام اسلامی“ یا ”ملودرام صدا و سیمایی“ نام نهاد که در آنها، جریان داستان به نحوی اتفاق می‌افتد که در پایان هم آشتی میان نیروی مردانه/نیروی کار و نیروی زنانه/ نیروی خانگی صورت می‌گیرد و هم زنان با گذشتن از فراز و نشیب‌های عاطفی/خانگی/اجتماعی، به اهمیت برتری نیروی مردانه و دوام و بقای نظام پدرسالار پی می‌برند. تولیدکنندگان مجموعه‌هایی از این دست ملودرام اسلامی می‌سازند، به این امید که این الگوهای تلویزیونی تبدیل به الگوهای کلان اجتماعی و فرهنگی در جامعه ایران شوند، غافل از اینکه بینندۀ ایرانی بیننده‌ای منفعل و بی‌کنش نیست که هر آنچه را که می‌بیند تمام و کمال قبول کند. [36] زنان ایرانی در شهرها و حتی روستاها در 30 سال گذشته در عرصه‌های اجتماعی و فرهنگی پویاتر از گذشته فعالیت کردند، بیش از گذشته در دانشگاه‌ها و مؤسسات عالی اسم نوشتند و حتی به حربۀ بدحجابی با حجاب اجباری به روشی نظام‌مند برخورد کردند که می‌توان آن را به نوعی نافرمانی مدنی تعبیر کرد.[37] نتیجۀ غیرمترقبه برای صدا و سیما از حضور هرچند کم‌رنگ یا مخدوش زنان در ملودرام های اسلامی این بوده است که زنان هنرپیشه حضور خودشان را در رسانۀ تلویزیون حفظ کردند. وجودشان هم‌پای زنان بازیگر در عرصه‌های تئاتر و سینما موجب دیده‌ شدنشان در مقام شخصیت‌های هنری شد و آنان به زنان کنشگر در فضاهای عمومی و رسانه‌ای بدل شدند و در حیطه‌های اجتماعی و فرهنگی توانستند صدای زنان اجتماعی و مدرن باشند. دست به دست شدن عکس‌های بدحجاب و بی‌حجاب این زنان در شبکه‌های اجتماعی و فعالیت‌هایشان که گاه با روایت اسلامی–ایدئولوژیکی سریال‌هایی که در آن نقش‌آفرینی کرده بودند هم‌خوانی نداشت، موجب شد بینندگان ملودرام‌های اسلامی نقش مطیع این زنان را فقط یک ‌”نقش“ ببینند که با حضور اجتماعی‌شان در تقابل است.[38]

در مجموعۀ شهرزاد، درون‌مایۀ عشق از ایدئولوژی‌زدگی دور می‌شود. شخصیت‌های سپید و سیاه سریال‌های رسانۀ ملی در این مجموعه جایی ندارند. بزرگ‌آقا گروهی مافیایی را رهبری می‌کند، برای دخترش هوو می‌گیرد و به دامادش ظلم می‌کند، اما در نهایت شر مطلق نیست. احساسات انسانی بزرگ‌آقا نیز در سریال به نمایش گذاشته می‌شود: گاه برای دخترش و گاه برای شهرزاد دل می‌سوزاند و فرهاد را از مرگ نجات می‌دهد. علاوه بر اینها، بزرگ‌آقا شخصیت و رفتاری باوقار دارد. سخاوت و مناعت طبع دارد، خوش‌پوش است، به کسبۀ تهران مثل صاحب مغازۀ جگرفروشی کمک مالی می‌کند و گاه حتی با باغبان خانه‌اش هم درد دل می‌کند. شهرزاد هم با اینکه شخصیت محبوب سریال است در جاهایی دچار اشتباه در محاسبۀ واکنش افراد می‌شود. مثلاً چون از میزان قدرت بزرگ‌آقا بی‌خبر است، با نامزدش به سمت شیراز فرار می‌کند، غافل از آنکه عوامل بزرگ‌آقا او را پیدا خواهند کرد. شیرین، دختر بزرگ‌آقا، هم نسبت به شهرزاد حسود و در رابطه‌اش با خدمتکاران بدطینت است، ولی در عین حال گاه با قباد و بیشتر اوقات با فرزند قباد مهربان. وضعیت شیرین ترحم‌برانگیز و دشوار نمایش داده شده است، اما گاه بیننده با دیدن رفتار خشن او نمی‌تواند برایش دل بسوزاند. آدم‌های داستان قربانی مطلق یا ظالم مطلق نیستند. گاه قربانی می‌شوند و گاه افراد دیگر را قربانی می‌کنند. نمونه‌اش سرهنگ شهربانی است که در پایان و پس از عمری سرکوب گروه‌های مخالف شاه تصمیم می‌گیرد به فرهاد در پیدا کردن حقیقت و رو کردن دست متهمان واقعی کمک کند.

طراحی صحنه و تأثیر ژانر ملودرام

به جای شعارزدگی و دنبال کردن یک خط مشی سیاسی یا مذهبی مشخص، سعی سازندگان سریال شهرزاد جذب مخاطب است؛ مخاطبی که قرار است برای هر قسمت از سریال مبلغی بپردازد و داستان را دنبال کند. قسمت اعظم روایت شهرزاد بازنمایی مشکلات خانوادگی است: رابطۀ یک شوهر با دو همسرش (قباد با شهرزاد و شیرین)، رابطۀ دو دلداده (شهرزاد و فرهاد) و رابطۀ فرزندان با والدین در زمینه‌ای پدرسالارانه. سریال از یک سو درامی عاشقانه است و از سوی دیگر درامی خانوادگی و اجتماعی. نقش خانواده‌ها در روابط عاشقانه و عاطفی فرزندانشان در ایران نقشی بسیار پررنگ است. در جوامع مردسالار، اصولاً سلطۀ پدر خانواده و پدرخوانده‌های جامعه، نظیر بزرگ‌آقا، نقشی تعیین‌کننده در زندگی افراد خانواده دارد. درگیری‌های این افراد در خرده‌داستان‌های این مجموعه به تفصیل نشان داده شده است، اما روایت داستان از تبلیغ سیاسی یا مذهبی پرهیز می‌کند. در عوض، علاقه‌های تجاری سازندگان آنان را به استفادۀ بهتر از میزانسن و طراحی صحنه و انتخاب درست بازیگران سوق داده است.

در ژانر ملودرام بازی کمتر واقع‌گرا یا نئورئالیست و بیشتر فرمالیست و دراماتیک است و از رئالیسم فقط برای خدمت به مؤلفه‌های ملودراماتیک استفاده می‌شود. بازی هنرپیشه‌هایی چون ترانه علیدوستی، علی نصیریان و شهاب حسینی دراماتیک و در عین حال باورپذیر و حرفه‌ای است. باید تأکید کرد که در غیاب صحنه‌های اروتیک و نمایش بدن برهنه در سریال‌ها و فیلم‌های ایرانی، تمامی توجه بیننده به جزییات بازیگری معطوف می‌شود و این بازیگری را دشوارتر می‌کند. طی دهه‌های پس از انقلاب، بازیگری حرفه‌ای در ایران بسیار رشد کرده است و حاصل توجه به ظرایف بازیگری و بازی گرفتن در سریال شهرزاد به وضوح دیده می‌شود. بازی شهاب حسینی در یک کلام بهترین کار تلویزیونی او بود. او احساسات یک عاشق سرخورده و یک داماد بزدل را به خوبی با حرکات صورت و دست و بدن القا می‌کند. علی نصیریان مثل همیشه یک بازی فرمال و دقیق و حساب‌شده ارائه کرده است و به جرئت می‌توان ادعا کرد که نقش پدرخوانده‌های ایرانی پس از این بدون تأثیر از بازی بی‌نظیر او در فیلم‌ها و سریال‌های آینده امکان‌پذیر نخواهد بود. ترانه علیدوستی با صورت ساده و بدون عمل زیبایی و حرکات طبیعی و راحت یادآور دختران زیباروی دهۀ 1330 ایران است. بازی پریناز ایزدیار در نقش شیرین از ظرافت کار ترانه علیدوستی کمی فاصله می‌گیرد و در بعضی از صحنه‌ها بازی او کمی بیش از حد تئاترگونه و دراماتیک، با ژست‌های تکراری است. باعث تأسف است که بسیاری از زن‌ها و مردهای بازیگر در این سریال تاریخی که نشان‌دهندۀ وضعیت ایران شصت سال و اندی پیش است با دماغ‌هایی بازی کرده‌اند که مشخصاً تحت عمل جراحی زیبایی قرار گرفته‌اند. شاید یک گریم حرفه‌ای می توانست قیافۀ این بازیگران را به ترکیب صورت آدم‌های دهۀ 130 نزدیک‌تر کند.

رنگ‌های اشباع‌شده مشخصۀ سینماتوگرافی ژانر ملودرام است که در این مجموعه به وفور از آن استفاده شده و یادآور فیلم کلاسیک نوشته بر باد (به کارگردانی داگلاس سرک در ۱۹۵۶) است. فضاسازی و طراحی داخلی این فیلم منعکس‌کنندۀ ارزش‌های بورژوازی نوکیسۀ دهه 1330، مانند شخصیت بزرگ‌آقا، در ایران است. طراحی صحنه از معماری رضاشاهی و سنت‌های ایرانی آن دهه بهره برده است. فضاسازی سریال با مؤلفه‌هایی چون نمایش لوطی‌ها و جاهل‌های تهرانی، تقابل در نمایش خانۀ اشراف و تهیدستان و انتخاب پوشاک فاخر و پرزرق و برق زنان ته مایه‌ای از فیلمفارسی‌های قبل از انقلاب نیز دارد.

صحنه‌ای از فیلم نوشته بر باد. عشق سرکوب‌شده، قدرت، ثروت، باروری و اتومبیل به منزلۀ نماد نوگرایی در ژانر ملودرام.

در شهرزاد به مادیات، اتومبیل و رقابت‌های عشقی توجه شده است.

در خانۀ بزرگ‌آقا، اشیا همه نو و رنگی‌اند. اثری از قدمت اشیا در دکور صحنه دیده نمی‌شود که دو علت دارد: اول آنکه به اقتضای فضای ملودراماتیک، میزانسن شلوغ و مدرن است و سینماتوگرافی و نورپردازی عمداً با نوردهی بالا و رنگ‌های سیر و اشباع است. دوم آنکه افرادی چون بزرگ‌آقا که با زد و بند و رانت‌خواری متمکن شده‌اند، تازه به دوران رسیده‌اند و در نتیجه، اشیای گرانبها و خانه‌های موروثی ندارند که رنگ قدمت و گذشت زمان داشته باشد. طراحی صحنۀ شلوغ و لعاب‌زدۀ این سریال بدون در نظر گرفتن این مهم که مختصات ملودراماتیک را در نظر داشته است، با انتقاد برخی صاحب‌نظران روبه‌رو شده است.[39] باید اذعان کرد که طراحی صحنه می‌توانست با ظرافت و دقت بیشتری صورت گیرد تا به حال و هوای دهۀ 1330 ایران نزدیک‌تر شود. مثلاً در صحنه‌ای در خانۀ ی مادر و پدر اکرم، ندیمۀ شیرین، مادر اکرم مشغول آماده کردن قلیانی با طرح جدید است که به هیچ‌وجه شبیه قلیان‌های قدیمی 60 سال پیش نیست. در صحنه‌ای دیگر، در منزل پدر و مادر شهرزاد، یک پارچۀ تکه‌دوزی پاکستانی طرح جدید به دیوار نصب شده که حتی تا ده سال پیش هم در بازارهای ایران یافت نمی‌شد.

خانۀ بزرگ‌آقا پر زرق و برق و مملو از اثاثیه است و با رنگ‌های سیر ملودراماتیک نشان داده شده است.

به هر ترتیب، طراحی ملودراماتیک صحنه، وجود رنگ‌های سیر و اشباع‌شده و دکوراسیون قدیمی یا شبه‌قدیمی باعث لذت بیننده می‌شود. نمایش تهران قدیم در این مهم نقشی اساسی بازی می‌کند: تهران مجموعۀ شهرزاد تهرانی است در میانۀ پروژه‌های مدرن‌سازی محمدرضا پهلوی که هنوز رنگ و بوی معماری ایرانی رضاشاهی را دارد. سردر زیبای کاخ دادگستری، نرده‌های دانشگاه تهران، خانه‌های زیبای دورۀ رضاشاهی با ستون‌های بلند و استوار، حیاط، قسمت بیرونی و اندرونی و محیط کافه‌ها همه و همه برای بینندۀ ایرانی سریال جذاب و خاطره‌انگیز است. در تهران مدرن آن دوران، که اکنون برای ما حال و هوای تهران قدیم را دارد، کاباره‌ها پر رفت و آمدند و خواننده‌های بلند و لاغراندامی که چهره و صدای ویگن را به خاطر می‌آورند، آهنگ‌های پاپ عاشقانه می‌خوانند. سینماها فیلم کازابلانکا و بر باد رفته را نمایش می‌دهند و مغازه‌های خیابان لاله‌زار آخرین لباس‌ها و کراوات‌های پاریس را در ویترین گذاشته‌اند. کافه نادری محل قرار عاشقان و روشنفکران است و جواهرفروشی قازاریان بهترین جواهرات کشور را به زنان متمول تهرانی می‌فروشد. در خیابان‌های سنگ‌فرش تهران، فرش‌فروشی و خیاطخانه و بقالی و چلوکبابی و کوزه‌فروشی و بوتیک و تئاتر و سینما و کاباره و کافه نمود آمیزش زندگی قدیم و مدرن تهران آن سال‌هاست، نمودی نوستالژیک و شاعرانه که در کنار داستان جذاب این مجموعه بیننده را هر چه بیشتر مشتاق دیدن قسمت‌های بیشتری از سریال می‌کند.

بناهای قدیمی، سرگرمی‌های جدید: آمیزش سنت و نوگرایی در تهران.

تهران قدیمِ بازنمایی‌شده در این سریال نوستالژیک و زیباست، اما شهری است بسیار کوچک که همۀ رفتار و سکنات مردم مدام زیر ذره‌بین بزرگ‌آقا و گروه های مافیایی دیگر است. آدم‌ها در فضاهای داخلی و خارجی تحت کنترل پدرها و پدرخوانده‌ها هستند. فضاهای کلاستروفوبیک و تاریک داخلی با رنگ‌های نارنجی، سیاه و قرمز تیره‌ای مثل اتاق خواب فرهاد یا اتاق خواب شیرین نمادی از شرایط روحی و روانی شخصیت‌های داستان‌اند. هجمۀ خیابانی روز کودتا و کلافگی شهرزاد در میانۀ زدو بندهای خیابانی مثال دیگری از بازنمایی شرایط روانی شخصیت‌ها در میزانسن است که در ژانر ملودرام و فیلم–نوار استفاده دارد. فردیت شخصیت‌ها و حریم خصوصی زندگی‌شان، که با مدرن شدن اجتماع اهمیت بیشتری پیدا کرده، در هر زمان و هر جا مورد تجاوز قدرت‌های تمامیت‌خواه و پدرسالار اجتماع قرار می‌گیرد. طراحی صحنه و میزانسن خفقان، ناچاری، گرفتاری و بیزاری آدم‌ها را در این شرایط بازنمایی می‌کند.

رنگ قرمز سیر و آزاردهنده، نشان اتاق خواب شیرین و نماد عشق سرکوب‌شده، خشم و اندوه زن جوان.

”در تندباد حوادث عشق اولین قربانی است.“ نقل قولی از پوستر تبلیغاتی سریال شهرزاد.

فروپاشی دولت مصدق فقط تبعات سیاسی به همراه ندارد، فروپاشی زندگی شاد وعشق شهرزاد متعاقب آن اتفاق می‌افتد.

سانسور، داستان عشقی، مونتاژ صدا

با اینکه مجموعۀ شهرزاد در شبکۀ خانگی تولید شد و از سرمایه‌های دولتی صدا و سیما استفاده نکرد، مانند همۀ تولیدات رسانه‌ای در ایران باید از زیر تیغ سانسور ارشاد اسلامی عبور می‌کرد. پُرواضح است که مجموعه‌ای که به صورت قانونی و علنی در شبکۀ خانگی به فروش می‌رسد نمی‌تواند صحنه‌های عشقی و اروتیک را به نمایش بگذارد، ولو اینکه ملودرامی عاشقانه باشد. پس از انقلاب، شخصیت‌های عاشق در سریال‌های ایرانی باید با استفاده از برداشت از زاویه دیدِ عاشق به معشوق یا در حال رویابافی نشان داده شوند. آرایش صحنه و میزانسن هم در سریال‌های ایرانی به کارگردان کمک می‌کند جای خالی تماس بدنی و رابطۀ عشقی را پر کند، مثلاً عاشق اگر نه خود معشوق، عکس معشوق را در بغل می‌فشارد و اگر نتواند گردن معشوق را نوازش کند، گردن‌بندی به آن می آویزد.

شهرزاد پس از دستگیری و حکم اعدام فرهاد دیگر امیدی به بازگشت او ندارد.

فرهاد گردن بند مرغ آمین را در کافه نادری به گردن شهرزاد می آویزد.

آنچه باعث موفقیت هرچه بیشتر کارگردان در القای لحظه‌های عشقی و اروتیک شد، استفادۀ درست از مونتاژ صدا و آهنگ بود. در نبود تصویرهای عاشقانه، صدای گرم و خش‌دار محسن چاووشی، خوانندۀ محبوب پاپ ایران، به کارگردان کمک کرد اروتیسم را در لایۀ صدایی و با همنشینی درست صدا و تصویر در مرحلۀ ادیت/ویرایش وارد روایت کند. مثال بارز همنشینی صدا و تصویر را می‌توان در سکانسی پس از ازدواج شهرزاد با قباد در اتاق خوابشان دید که همراه با تقطیع موازی از صورت غمگین و گریان فرهاد نشان داده می‌شود. صورت عاشق شکست‌خورده و شهرزادِ خوابیده در تخت با صدای محزون محسن چاووشی که برداشتی آزاد از غزل ”هم‌خواب“ وحشی بافقی را می‌خواند، همنشین شده است.[40] شعر ”هم‌خواب“ زیرمایه‌ای اروتیک دارد، مخصوصاً به این سبب که با تصویر شهرزاد در رختخواب مونتاژ شده است. در رختخواب، شهرزاد تنها خوابیده است، قباد با عشق و علاقه بالای سر او ایستاده و به او نگاه می‌کند، روی نوعروسش پتو می‌کشد و به سمت خانۀ بزرگ‌آقا حرکت می‌کند. فرهاد فقط در خیال و با حسرت چهرۀ زیبای معشوق را می‌بیند، چرا که شهرزاد حال هم‌خواب رقیب شده است.

محسن چاووشی با آهنگسازی در ملودرام موزیکال علی سنتوری (به کارگردانی داریوش مهرجویی در ۱۳۸۵) کار موفق خود را در آهنگسازی برای فیلم شروع کرد. این فیلم، که دربارۀ نوازنده و آهنگسازی عاشق و معتاد به مواد مخدر است، از صدای خش‌دار و گرفتۀ چاووشی و موسیقی اعتراض‌آمیز او به نحو احسن استفاده کرد. چاووشی اصلاً کُردتبار است و کمی پیش از جنگ ایران و عراق در خرمشهر به دنیا آمد. پس از جنگ، به همراه خانواده‌اش شهر به شهر کوچ می‌کند تا سرانجام در تهران سکنی می‌گزیند.‌[41] صدای چاووشی زخمه‌های جنگ و انقلاب، عصبانیت و سرخوردگی از عشق و احساس سرکوب‌شدۀ نسل جوان را با هم به شنونده القا می‌کند. آهنگ‌های چاووشی از قسمت پنجم سریال جایگزین آهنگ‌های کلاسیک علیرضا قربانی شده، موجب محبوبیت بیشتر سریال شدند. برخی از این ترانه‌ها عاشقانه‌اند، برخی دیگر خشمگین و طغیانگر و بعضی هم واخورده و غمگین. شاید این آهنگ‌ها از نظر زمان تاریخی سریال با بافت زمانی و اجتماعی آن به اندازۀ سبک خواندن قربانی همخوانی نداشته باشند، اما با بینندۀ مدرن و جوان به شکل مؤثرتری ارتباط برقرار می‌کنند و در واقع پلی می‌شوند میان زمان تاریخی سریال و موضوعات و دغدغه‌های زمان حال بینندگان این مجموعه. آهنگ‌های چاووشی که اختصاصاً برای این مجموعه درست شده بودند میلیون‌ها بار در یوتیوب و تلگرام همرسانی و باربرداری شده‌اند. به گفتۀ روابط عمومی سریال شهرزاد و به نقل از روزنامۀ شرق، فقط در سایت تلگرام این سریال آهنگ ”کجایی؟“ در عرض یکی دو ماه چهار میلیون مرتبه باربرداری شده است. مونتاژ صدا برای القای اروتیسم و عشق واخورده فقط با استفاده از آهنگ‌های عاشقانه صورت نگرفته، صدای گرم و پراحساس ترانه علیدوستی در لحظه‌های تنهایی‌اش با فرهاد در کافه نادری و شعرخوانی رسا و زیبای فرهاد راه‌هایی دیگر برای عاشقانه کردن روایت و عبور ازسد سانسور بوده‌اند.

ترانه‌خوانی زنان شهری و روستایی در فرهنگ مردمی ایرانیان ریشه‌ای کهن دارد، اما سال‌هاست که در صدا و سیما و همۀ فضاهای اجتماعی مختلط در ایران، خواندن زنان ممنوع شده است. ترانه‌خوانی زنان شاید برای اولین بار پس از انقلاب در سریال شهرزاد به نمایش گذاشته می‌شود و این سریال را از نظر مونتاژ صدا و القای زمان تاریخی داستان به شکل واقع‌گرایانه به اثری موفق بدل می‌کند. اضافه کردن صحنه‌های جشن و مهمانی زنانه با ترانه‌خوانی زنان به شکل دست‌جمعی یا انفرادی از قسمت‌های زیبای این سریال است. در یک صحنه هم آذر (با بازی غزل شاکری)، عاشق بی قرار فرهاد و هوادار توده‌ای که به زندان می‌افتد، برای کودک از دست رفته‌اش لالایی آهنگین و زیبایی می‌خواند. صدای گیرای غزل شاکری در این سکانس تا حدی بازی ضعیف و مصنوعی او را در نقش آذر جبران می‌کند. ممیزی در حذف صدای زنان خواننده در این سریال صورت نگرفته است. غزل شاکری که قبلاً هم قطعه‌هایی را همخوانی یا تک‌خوانی کرده و در فضای مجازی در اختیار بینندگان قرار داده بود، یک شعر غیررسمی با نام ”حدیث آشنایی“ را که قبلاً پوران، خوانندۀ مشهور پیش از انقلاب، خوانده بود برای این سریال بازخوانی کرد که در شبکه‌های اجتماعی همراه با تصویرهایی از سریال پخش شد. اینها همه نوآوری‌های مونتاژ صدا در مجموعۀ شهرزاد و در حاشیۀ این مجموعه‌اند.

همخوانی سه زن در عروسی شهرزاد و ترانه‌سرایی‌شان به سبک تصنیف‌های روحوضی تهران.

نگاه زنانه و روایت زنانه

مطالعات پژوهشگران فیلم و تلویزیون در چهار دهۀ اخیر نشان می‌دهد که در بیشتر فیلم ها و سریال ها ”نگاه مردانه“ (male gaze) و ”روایت مردانه“ (male discourse) لحاظ شده است.[42] نگاه حاکم مردانه از طریق زاویۀ دید دوربین و نوع نگاه کارگردان و فیلمنامه‌نویس در نوع نگاه بینندگان هم تأثیر می‌گذارد.[43] لورا مالوی، پژوهشگر مشهور سینما، در مقالۀ جنجالی‌اش با بهره‌گیری از اصول علم روان‌شناسی تحلیلی لذت‌جویی بصری مردان از تماشای فیلم را نقد و بررسی و نتیجه گیری کرد که در سینمای تجاری، زنان سوژۀ لذت‌جویی بصری مردان‌اند. در این روایت‌های مردانه، که با نگاه مردانۀ دوربین به زنان همراه است، زنان برای تماشا شدن و حظ بصر مردانه در فیلم ظاهر می‌شوند. گرچه در سال‌های اخیرگاه نگاه زنانه (female gaze) و روایت زنانه (female discourse) در فیلم و سریال ها منظور می‌شوند، در سریال‌های صدا و سیما نگاه دوربین همچنان نگاه و روایت مردانه بوده است. روایت‌های مردانۀ صدا و سیما پدرسالاری سنتی را توجیه‌پذیر و عامل بقای خانواده و جامعه معرفی می‌کند. نگاه مردانه یا نگاه مردمحور (phallocentric gaze) دوربین، که به نگاه بینندگان مرد تعمیم داده می‌شود، در فیلم و سریال‌های قبل از انقلاب با تکیه بر لذت‌جویی مردانه از بدن برهنه یا نیمه‌برهنۀ زن استوار بود. در ساخته‌های پس از انقلاب و به‌رغم محدودیت‌های مرتبط با حجاب و رعایت موازین اسلامی حذف نشده، اما بیشتر به قرص صورت زن در برداشت‌های طولانی و خیره شدن دوربین به خط نگاه زن و مرد در نماهای مکمل خلاصه می‌شود.

وجه افتراق مجموعۀ شهرزاد با بسیاری از ساخته‌های تلویزیونی که از رسانه ملی نمایش داده می‌شوند تأکید بیشترآن بر روایت زنانه از عشق و زندگی است که با بازنمایی نگاه زنانه در کنار نگاه مردانه همراه شده است. برای روشن شدن این موضوع لازم است به عشق در سریال‌هایی از قبیل شب دهم و میوۀ ممنوعه و روایت مردانه از عشق توجه کنیم که هم موضوع عشق و هم معشوقه از نگاه مرد نشان داده می‌شوند. در شب دهم، شخصیت مرد اصلی داستان (حیدر) آن‌قدر محو نگاه به شاهزاده خانم است که پاک غافل می‌شود و در دام نقشۀ مزوّرانۀ شاهزاده‌های قجری می‌افتد، مراسم ممنوعۀ تعزیه را دوباره بر پا می‌کند و در نهایت قربانی هوس‌بازی معشوقه‌اش می‌شود. در شب دهم، شخصیت اصلی زن، زیباروست و سوژۀ عشق مردانه و نگاه‌های عاشقانۀ حیدر و بینندگان مرد است. این زن زن اغواگر و ویرانگر داستان هم هست. با اینکه مرد قربانی دسیسه‌های زن اغواگر می‌شود، اما روایت داستان بر منطقی و اخلاقی بودن رفتار شخصیت اول مرد و احساسی و نادرست بودن رفتار شخصیت زن صحه می‌گذارد. به هر صورت، زن سوژۀ عشق و نگاه مردانه است. در شهرزاد، شخصیت اول زن سوژۀ عشق سه مرد (بزرگ‌آقا، قباد و فرهاد) است و کلوزآپ‌های بسیاری که به صورت شهرزاد اختصاص داده شده شخصیت زن را سوژۀ نگاه مردانه نشان می‌دهد. در عین حال، بیننده بسیاری از وقایع را از دید شهرزاد می‌بیند و در مثلث عشقی شهرزاد- فرهاد – قباد، دلداده‌ها از چشم شهرزاد نمود می‌یابند. تصاویر طولانی از صورت خوش‌سیمای فرهاد و در بیشتر اوقات با استفاده از کلوزآپ یا نمای متوسط که بازنمای نگاه شهرزاد است نگاه زنانۀ فیلم را نشان می‌دهد. روایت داستان گاه به سمت و سوی روایت مردانه می‌گراید، مخصوصاً در قسمت‌هایی از داستان که به فعالیت‌های مافیایی بزرگ‌آقا و رقیبانش اختصاص یافته است، اما داستان در مجموع روایتی است که همدلی بیننده را با شهرزاد برمی‌انگیزد و این امر نشان‌دهندۀ استفادۀ کارگردان از کاربرد روایت زنانه در داستان است. در بخش‌هایی از سریال، منظر شیرین، آذر یا مرضیه، مادر فرهاد با بازی فریبا متخصص، پُررنگ شده است و روایت داستان را به روایت زنانۀ چندصدایی نزدیک‌تر کرده است.

وقتی که در فیلم یا داستان روایت از دید زنان تعریف می‌شود، خواننده یا بیننده با زنان هم‌ذات‌پنداری یا با مشکلاتشان احساس نزدیکی می‌کند. مقایسه‌ای ساده این امر را واضح‌تر نشان می‌دهد: فیلم قیصر فیلمی است که به مسئلۀ تجاوز جنسی و دفاع از ناموس می‌پردازد. روایت داستان روایتی مردانه است و بیننده به ندرت با زنان داستان هم‌ذات‌پنداری می‌کند. فاطی، خواهر قیصر و فرمان، قربانی تجاوز جنسی شده و فقط در صحنه‌های کوتاهی روی برانکارد دیده می‌شود یا در مونتاژی تند با حرکات سریع دوربین، صحنۀ تجاوز به او در یک فلاش‌بک بازسازی شده است. مادر قیصر فقط آه و ناله می‌کند و حتی یک کلوزآپ هم به صورت او اختصاص داده نشده است. نوردهی روی صورت او نوردهی سخت است که باعث بزرگ‌نمایی چروک‌های صورتش و وضعیت بد روحی‌اش می‌شود. نامزد قیصر اگرچه با نور سه‌جهته روی صورت و کلوزآپ‌های طولانی‌تر دیده می‌شود، اما دغدغه ها و رنج‌هایش و حتی نظرش دربارۀ واکنش قیصر به نمایش نیامده است. نامزد قیصر نمود زن خوب و فرمانبر است که در هنگام حادثه حاضر به فداکاری و از خودگذشتگی است. روایت مردانه با الهام از ژانر کلاه‌مخملی که با فیلم قیصر در فیلمسازی ایرانی نهادینه شد و در سریال شب دهم هم اعمال شده است، اما شخصیت‌های زن داستان بیشتر دیده می‌شوند و از آنها به شکل زن اغواگر استفاده شده است. حال این شیوۀ روایت مردانه را با شیوۀ روایت زنانه در سریال‌هایی چون شهرزاد می‌توان مقایسه کرد. اول آنکه برخلاف مدار صفر درجه و شب دهم که شخصیت اصلی‌شان مرد بود، در اینجا شخصیت اصلی شهرزاد است که نظرش را در بسیاری مواقع بیان می‌کند و دوربین رفتار بی‌رحمانۀ بزرگ‌آقا، پدر و شوهر اولش را از دید شهرزاد به نمایش می‌گذارد. مرضیه نیز از نقش زن سنتی بارها فاصله می‌گیرد و نظرمثبتش را دربارۀ ازدواج فرهاد با شهرزاد -زن مطلقه با بار معنایی منفی‌اش در سال‌هایی که داستان به وقوع می‌پیوندد- بیان می‌کند. چون عشق فرهاد و آذر از دید آذر هم دیده شده، بیننده با او نیز هم‌ذات‌پنداری می‌کند و برایش دل می‌سوزاند.

در روایت‌های زنانه زن‌های داستان ایستا و منفعل نیستند. مثلاً درست است که شهرزاد در رسیدن به فرهاد شکست خورد و در زندگی زناشویی‌اش با قباد به علت دخالت‌های بزرگ‌آقا ناموفق بود، اما برای به دست آوردن خواسته‌هایش تلاش کرد؛ نه فقط منفعل نبود که در جاهایی کنشگر هم بود، اما خواسته‌هایش در بیشتر مواقع سرکوب شدند. سرکوب خواسته‌های شهرزاد در ابتدا باعث تثبیت قدرت مردان (بزرگ‌آقا، قباد، جمشید) شد، اما در نهایت شهرزاد به خواسته‌اش رسید و با فرهاد پیوند زناشویی بست.

شهرزاد: ملودرامی زن‌محور

ملودرام ایرانی، بسته به درجۀ اهمیت فضاهای عمومی یا خصوصی و تمرکز بر مفهوم عشق یا خانواده یا اجتماع، به سه نوع تقسیم می‌شود: ملودرام عشقی، ملودرام خانوادگی و ملودرام اجتماعی. این سه نوع ملودرام گاه در هم ادغام می‌شوند که در شهرزاد هم اتفاق افتاده است. استفاده از یک داستان عاشقانه به منزلۀ بستری برای نمایش تأثیر سیاست و اجتماع در زندگی خصوصی بارها در ساخته‌های تلویزیونی و سینمایی در ایران صورت گرفته است. کیف انگلیسی نمونه‌ای از این سریال‌هاست. فیلم‌های تهمینه میلانی و از جمله سه‌گانۀ فرشته نیز از این مؤلفه بهره برده‌اند تا مسایل امروز زنان ایران را با مشکلات اجتماعی و سیاسی گره بزنند.[44] شهرزاد در قسمت اول به شکل ملودرامی اجتماعی شروع شد، اما در قسمت‌های بعدی از مسایل اجتماعی و به خصوص سیاسی فاصلۀ بیشتری گرفت و تبدیل به ملودرامی خانوادگی و گاه عشقی شد. این سه نوع ملودرام ایرانی ، بسته به زاویۀ دید و نگاه جنسیتی، خود به چند دسته تقسیم می‌شوند.

۱. ملودرام مردانه یا مردمحور (male melodrama)[45] که مشکلات خانوادگی و عشقی در پایان داستان با آشتی طرفین و گذشت زن از خواسته‌ها و توقعات اولیه‌اش خاتمه می‌یابد. در ملودرام مردانه، زنان معمولاً در پایان به برتری مرد و نقش مرد در مقام رئیس خانواده گردن می‌نهند. ملودرام اسلامی پس از انقلاب که به شکلی نظام‌مند در صدا و سیمای تولید و پخش می‌شود نوعی ملودرام مردانه است. سریال شب دهم حسن فتحی نیز که با درشت‌نمایی لوطی جوانمرد ماجرای عاشقانه‌ای را روایت می‌کند ملودرامی مردانه است. نقش زنان در ملودرام مردانه بیشتر به نقش خانگی‌شان محدود می‌شود. حتی اگر این زنان شاغل باشند، باز هم نقش اولیه‌شان وظایف خانگی آنان است. زن اغواگر نیز گاه صاحب نقش مهمی می‌شود تا سرانجام از نیروی مردانه شکست بخورد. در این نوع ملودرام، نیروی مردانه نمادی از قدرت نگهدارندۀ جامعه و ضامن نظم اجتماعی معرفی می‌شود.

۲. ملودرام زنانه یا زن‌محور (female melodrama) مبتنی بر تضادهای لاینحل در نظام خانوادگی است؛ تضادهایی که قرار نیست در طول روایت از بین بروند. در ملودرام زنانه، نقش زن و مرد در خانواده و اجتماع با نوگرایی و تجدد در جامعه دگرگون می‌شود و هر دو جنس درگیری‌های تازه‌ای پیدا می‌کنند. زن‌ها فقط در قالب نیروی تولید مثل و عامل بقای نام و نشان خانواده ارزش‌گذاری نمی‌شوند، بلکه برای کرامت انسانی، فردیت و استعدادهای منحصر به فرد انسانی‌شان ارزش پیدا می‌کنند. زن‌ها در ملودرام زنانه صرفاً سوژۀ نگاه مردانه نیستند. ملودرام زنانه اگرچه این روزها به سبب نوگرایی اجتماعی و تجدد فردی بیشتر تحلیل می‌شود، ریشه درکهن‌الگوهای ادبیات داستانی فارسی دارد.

۳. ملودرام مادرانه یا مادر‌محور (maternal melodrama) با درشت‌نمایی فداکاری یا مقاومت یا خطاهای مادران داستان همراه است.[46] ملودرام مادرانه زیرشاخۀ ملودرام زنانه نیست. زاویۀ دید در ملودرام مادرانه ممکن است زاویۀ دید مردانه باشد یا زاویۀ دید زنانه. اصل در ملودرام مادرانه تأکید بر ارزش زن در مقام مادر، زاینده، پرورش‌دهنده و بارآورندۀ کودک و در نهایت پرورش‌دهندۀ جامعه یا ملت است. [47] ملودرام مادرانه ممکن است بر ارزش‌های صرف مادرانه یا ارزش‌های انسانی شخصیت مادر داستان تأکید داشته باشد.[48]

بر اساس این طبقه بندی می‌توان گفت که مجموعۀ شهرزاد -تا پایان قسمت اول- ملودرامی زنانه است. شهرزاد شخصیتی چندبُعدی و پیچیده دارد؛ گاه کنشگر است و گاه کنش‌پذیر. پویایی او و تلاش‌هایش برای کسب آزادی فردی و اجتماعی نمودی از پایوری و پویایی زنان (female agency) در دهۀ ۱۳۳۰ در ایران است.[49] زنان در مجموعۀ شهرزاد از همۀ کارهای قبلی حسن فتحی پُررنگ‌تر و فعال‌تر به نمایش درآمده‌اند. برخلاف شاهزاده‌خانم بدطینت شب دهم که با رفتار مردانه و پر از عشق و تعهد دلداده‌اش متحول می‌شود، در این مجموعه شهرزاد است که مردان را تحت تأثیر قرار می‌دهد. با اینکه بزرگ‌آقا عامل کنترل و سرکوب پدرسالارانه در میان خانواده و اطرافیانش است، شهرزاد با ازدواج اجباری و پیوستن به تبار بزرگ‌آقا باز هم به ورطۀ عزلت خانگی نیفتاد و با پافشاری به تحصیل رشتۀ پزشکی ادامه داد. این مقاومت زنانه و استفاده از تدبیر زنانه یادآور شخصیت داستانی ”شهرزاد“ در هزار و یک شب است.

بازآفرینی شهرزاد، قصه‌گوی هزار و یک شب

شخصیت اصلی مجموعۀ شهرزاد هم‌نام قصه‌گوی داستان‌های پارسی کهن هزار و یک شب است. شهرزاد قصه‌گو در هزار و یک شب فقط یک شخصیت ساده در تاریخ ادبیات فارسی نیست. شهرزاد در ادبیات مردمی و عامیانۀ ایران سمبل شجاعت، خردورزی و شکیبایی زن ایرانی است. در هزار و یک شب می‌خوانیم که شهرزاد یکی از دو دختر وزیر و، ”دختر مهین، دانا و پیش‌بین و از احوال شعرا و ادبا و ظرفا و ملوک پیشین آگاه بود. چون ملالت و حزن پدر بدید و سبب آن دانست به پدر گفت: ’مرا به مَلَک کابین کن. یا من نیز کشته شوم یا زنده مانم و بلا از دختران مردم بگردانم.‘“[50] شهرزاد قصه‌گو در هزار و یک شب با شجاعت و جسارت مثال‌زدنی حاضر به ازدواج با شهریار دیوانه‌خو می‌شود تا دختران را از خطر نابودی و مردم سرزمنیش را از سوگواری مدام برای فرزندانشان نجات دهد. داستان‌های هزار و یک شب بیش از 1500 سال است که بارها و بارها در فرهنگ‌های گوناگون ترجمه و اقتباس شده‌اند. فراتر از این، داستان‌های جادویی این کتاب سیال مدام در زبان‌های فارسی، عربی، انگلیسی، فرانسه، آلمانی، ترکی، اسپانیولی و. . . در حال بازتولید، تغییر و تطور و توسعه بوده‌اند. قصۀ شهرزاد و شهریار که قصۀ اصلی شکل‌دهندۀ کتاب است بارها ترجمه و اقتباس شده و از رسانه‌ای –مثلاً نوشتاری- به رسانۀ دیگر -مثلاً بصری- رفته است. علاوه بر اینها، داستان‌های هزار و یک شب هم از نظر فرم روایی و هم از نظر محتوا بارها الهام‌بخش آثار هنری دیگر شده است. شهرزاد قصه‌گو با همکاری خواهرش دنیازاد و با بهره بردن از دانش وسیع و هنر داستان‌سرایی سایۀ مرگ را هر شب از خود یک قدم دور می‌کند، پادشاه دیوانه را در حالت تعلیق و تشنۀ شنیدن باقی داستان نگاه می‌دارد، او را از اندیشیدن به قتل زنان برحذر می‌دارد، سرزمینش را نجات می‌دهد و حتی در امور مملکت‌داری سررشته را به دست می‌گیرد و در نهایت، شهریار را به آرامش دوباره می‌رساند. هزار و یک شب به سبب موضوع پرکشش و داستان‌های تو در تو از ادبیات فارسی میانه/پهلوی به ادبیات عرب و پس از آن به ادبیات اروپایی ترجمه و اقتباس و شهرزاد قصه‌گو تبدیل به کهن‌الگویی جهانی شده است. نویسندگان پرآوازه‌ای چون خورخه لوییس بورخس، مارسل پروست و ادگار آلن پو با الهام از این اثر بزرگ قصه‌های جدید نوشته‌اند.[51] فیلمسازان فراوانی در سینما و تلویزیون نیز از شخصیت شهرزاد قصه‌گو گرته‌برداری کرده اند که از آن جمله‌اند شب‌های عربی جان رولین در ۱۹۴۲، نیمۀ پنهان تهمینه میلانی در ۲۰۰۱، شهرزاد قصه‌ای برایم بگو اثر یسری نصرالله در 2009 و سریال تلویزیونی هزار و یک شب قدرت صابانچی در 2006-2009.

سریال حسن فتحی نیز از این کهن‌الگوی ادب فارسی و فرهنگ مردمی تأثیر پذیرفته است. پس از تماشای چند قسمت از این سریال، بیننده متوجه می‌شود که شباهت اسمی شخصیت اصلی سریال با شهرزاد قصه‌گو اتفاقی نیست. شهرزاد این مجموعه حاضر به ازدواج با قباد می‌شود تا فرهاد را از خطر مرگ و زندانی شدن برهاند. گاه شهرزاد قصه‌گوی قباد می‌شود و هر شب با امید اصلاح قباد برایش از داستان‌های هزار و یک شب می‌خواند. این مجموعه نیز مانند مجموعۀ داستانی الهام‌دهنده‌اش متعلق به فرهنگ مردمی است، اما بار معنایی جدیدی برای بینندۀ مدرن خود به ارمغان می‌آورد. مبارزۀ شهرزاد این مجموعه با پدرسالاران پیرامونش مبارزۀ زنانی را به خاطر می‌آورد که برای فعالیت‌های اجتماعی و آزادی‌های فردی و حقوقی در ایران سال‌هاست که تلاش می‌کنند.[52]

شجاعت شهرزاد تاریخی در رویارویی با نظام خشن مردسالارانه و پایداری‌اش به مدت هزار و یک شب فقط به یمن هنر قصه‌گویی و دانش وسیع او از علوم تاریخی و ادبی و اجتماعی حاصل آمده بود. روایت در داستان‌های شهرزاد برای شهریار روایت زنانه است . قصه‌های او با حکایت‌هایی از زنان بدکار شروع می‌شود که به دست شوهران خشمگینشان تنبیه می‌شوند، اما هیچ‌گاه به قتل نمی‌رسند. سپس، آرام‌آرام در داستان‌های بعدی زنان خردمندتر شده و مردان داستان نیاز به مشاوره با این زنان دارند. اگرچه شهرزادِ مجموعۀ تلویزیونی حسن فتحی دانشجوی پزشکی است و در اجتماع آمد و شد دارد، اما دانایی و تدبیر شهرزاد تاریخی را ندارد و مانند شخصیت‌های داستان‌های مدرن دچار اشتباه و لغزش می‌شود. شخصیت اول این مجموعه مانند شهرزاد قصه‌گو سعی دارد با ملاطفت و سازشگری تغییرات مثبتی در زندگی خود و خواهر کوچک‌ترش ایجاد کند؛ تغییری که او را از کنش‌پذیری محض نجات دهد، قباد را انسان باوجدان‌تر و شجاع‌تری بسازد، زخم‌های روحی او را التیام بخشد و فرهاد را وادار کند واقع‌گرایانه‌تر به زندگی نگاه کند. شهرزاد این داستان اگرچه در محیط خفقان‌آور پدرسالاری زندگی می‌کند و زن دوم آدمی بزدل و بی‌اراده است، در زمانه‌ای زندگی می‌کند که به علت سیاست اصلاح جنسیتی، فضا برای مشارکت اجتماعی و سیاسی زنان بازتر شده است و او نیز از حقوق خود باخبر است. شهرزاد این مجموعه مانند زنان در پاورقی‌های قدیمی و ملودرام های مردانه و گاه مادرانه قربانی یا لکاته نیست، انسانی است با همۀ خصوصیات و پیچیدگی‌های انسانی.

شهرزاد قصه‌گو نجات‌دهنده است، نه نجات‌یافته. او قدرت استفاده از واژه‌ها را دارد و با کمک واژه‌ها از مرگ نجات می‌یابد، همسر دیوانه‌اش را با داستان‌هایش مداوا می‌کند و جان زنان کشورش را نجات می‌دهد. برای شهرزاد این مجموعه نیز واژه‌ها یگانه مأمن و پناهگاه‌اند. با کمک واژه‌ها مغازۀ خیاطی را برای دوست مغضوبش سعیده از بزرگ‌آقا پس می‌گیرد که البته بی‌فایده است، چون سعیده تصمیم می‌گیرد به شیراز برگرد، زندگی خودش با قباد را تحمل‌پذیرتر کرده و محبت و اعتماد قباد را جلب می‌کند و برای خواهرش، سیمین، امکان شرکت در فعالیت‌های ورزشی را فراهم می‌آورد. اگر مردانی چون بزرگ‌آقا از اسلحه برای پیشبرد مقاصدشان استفاده می‌کنند، زنانی چون شهرزاد واژه‌ها را برای رسیدن به هدف به کار می‌گمارند. کهن‌الگوی شهرزاد الگوی زنده و پویایی در فرهنگ و ادبیات ماست. شهرزادهای بسیاری سر از داستان‌ها و فیلم‌های ایرانی و غیرایرانی درآورده‌اند، شهرزادهایی که با تعامل و گفت‌وگو و خویشتن‌داری سودای تغییر در سر دارند و می‌خواهند با صبر و بردباری به مردان و مردسالاران اطرافشان بفهمانند که سرانجام خردورزی بر خشونت پیروز خواهد شد. یکی از این زنان داستانی فرشته (با بازی نیکی کریمی) در ملودرام نیمۀ پنهان تهمینه میلانی است که با نوشتن یک نامه و پرده‌برداری از زندگی گذشته‌اش برای تجدید نظر شوهرش در پروندۀ اعدام یک زن به جرم فعالیت سیاسی می‌کوشد. شهرزاد این مجموعۀ تلویزیونی هم یکی از آن شهرزادهاست. زاویۀ دید در بسیاری از خرده‌روایت‌های این مجموعه زاویۀ دید شهرزاد است و بیننده از طریق هم‌ذات‌پنداری با او بدل به یکی دیگر از شهرزادهای قصه‌گو می‌شود.

انقلاب رسانه‌ای در ایران و شکست رسانۀ ملی

امبرتو اکو دربارۀ اهمیت رسانه‌های جمعی گفت که امروزه ”در عصر ارتباطات زندگی می‌کنیم.“ رسانه و محتوای آن هر روز دستخوش تحولات بیشتری می‌شود و آنان که سودای در دست گرفتن قدرت سیاسی و اجتماعی در هر کشوری را در سر می‌پرورانند، در اولین اقدام رسانه‌های جمعی آن کشور را تحت کنترل قرار می‌دهند.[53] تحول رسانه‌های جمعی مرهون تحولات فناورانه و تغییر فرهنگ مردمی و فرهنگ رسانه‌ای است. به عبارت دیگر، در عصر ارتباطات شیوۀ تولید، پخش و دریافت محتوای رسانه در تحول رسانه‌های جمعی مؤثر است.[54]

در قرن بیست‌ویکم، فناوری مدرن در سطح جهانی با ظهور فناوری‌های رسانه‌ای نو چون ویدیو، تلویزیون ماهواره‌ای، محصولات فرهنگی دیجیتال، اینترنت و رسانه‌های جمعی متداوماً در حال تغییر و تحول سریع و لحظه‌ای است. شکل پیام‌رسانی جمعی ریشه‌ای و متمرکز در شبکه‌های تلویزیونی و رادیویی و خبرنگاری رویکرد کنترل‌شدۀ سنتی بود که فقط دست گروه‌های محدود و خاصی را در انتخاب، ساخت و تولید پیام رسانه‌ای باز می‌گذاشت. این گروه خاصِ صاحب اختیار در مطالعات رسانه‌ای به دروازه‌بانان رسانه‌های جمعی (gatekeepers of mass media) مشهورند. پیام‌رسانی غیرمتمرکز و ریزومی ابتدا با دستگاه‌های پخش ویدیو و سپس ماهواره ها و بعدها با تکنولوژی دیجیتال با سرعت پا به عرصۀ وجود گذاشت. برای مثال، امروزه در حیطۀ روزنامه‌نگاری، شبکه‌های رسانه‌ای قدرقدرت و روزنامه‌های کثیرالانتشار که زمانی یگانه مسیر دسترسی به اخبار و گزارش‌های روز بودند، با حضور اینترنت رقیبان سرسختی پیدا کرده‌اند که به ظاهر قدرتی ندارند و فقط با یک گوشی همراه کوچک و با استفاده از اینترنت به ”شهروندان خبرنگار“ (citizen journalist) تبدیل شده‌اند. با انتشار خبرهای متفاوت و موازی خبرهای رسمی، خوانندگان و بینندگان با زاویه‌ای نو و نگاهی متفاوت می‌توانند اخبار را در شبکه‌های اینترنتی دنبال کنند. شبکه‌های ارتباط جمعی گوناگون از قبیل یوتیوب، فیس‌بوک، توییتر، اینستاگرام و سایر شبکه‌های اجتماعی فضایی را برای خبررسانی و بازنمایی خود و دیگران در اختیار مردم عادی گذاشته‌اند.[55]

در عرصۀ هنرهای نمایشی نیز شاهد تغییر رسانه در مستندسازی و ساخت فیلم‌های داستانی هستیم. برای ساختن یک فیلم دیگر نیازی به دوربین‌های بزرگ و گروه فیلمبرداری نیست. فیلم‌های زیرزمینی در ایران نیازی به اجازۀ وزارت ارشاد ندارند و برای نمایش، به جای پردۀ نقره‌ای سینما به صفحه‌های کوچک کامپیوتر و حتی صفحۀ تلفن‌های همراه قناعت کرده‌اند. امروزه بسیاری از کارگردانان بزرگ دنیا، مانند کن لوچ، فیلم‌هایشان را گاه به رایگان در اختیار ببیندگان رسانه‌های دیجیتال گذاشته‌اند. این پدیده رویدادی جهانی است که منجر به نوعی انقلاب رسانه‌ای در دنیا شده است؛ انقلابی که رسانه‌های سنتی گذشته چون سینما و شبکه‌های تلویزیونی را به آرامی به حاشیه می‌راند.

تا چندی پیش، تولید و پخش سریال‌های سرگرم‌کننده در ایران و جهان به شکل متمرکز و کنترل‌شده صورت می‌گرفت. در نیمۀ دوم قرن بیستم و پس از پا گرفتن تلویزیون، شبکه‌های متفاوت تلویزیونی کار ساخت و تهیۀ برنامه‌های سرگرم‌کننده و از جمله ساخت سریال‌های تلویزیونی را شروع کردند. مثلاً در کشورهای امریکای شمالی اکثر سریال‌های تلویزیونی و برنامه‌های تفریحی را شبکه‌های قدرتمند امریکایی از قبیل فاکس، ای‌بی‌سی و اچ‌بی‌او می‌ساختند و پخش می‌کردند. در واقع، سلیقۀ کارگردانان و بازیگران و ذائقۀ تماشاچیان برنامه‌های تلویزیونی همه تحت‌الشعاع سلیقه و سرمایۀ شبکه‌های بزرگ تلویزیونی و منطقه‌ای قرار داشت. دستگاه‌های پخش ویدیو در اواخر دهۀ 1970 میلادی امکانی فراهم آورد تا بینندگان یک کشور یا منطقۀ خاص بتوانند از برنامه‌های سرگرم‌کنندۀ متنوع‌تر و بیشتری بهره‌مند شوند. این پدیده در کشورهایی چون ایران و عربستان سعودی که از نظر برنامه‌های سرگرم‌کننده محدودترند و تلویزیون در خدمت تبلیغات دولتی و حکومتی است با استقبال شایانی مواجه شد. پس از ویدیو، تلویزیون ماهواره‌ای پای شبکه‌های خارجی را به خانه‌های مردم باز کرد.[56] با اینکه استفاده از ماهواره در ایران ممنوع است و حتی برخی از مراجع دینی تماشای تلویزیون ماهواره‌ای را حرام دانسته‌اند،[57] در حال حاضر در کشور ایران و سایر کشورهای منطقه، بینندگان بسیاری سریال‌های ترکی پخش‌شده از ماهواره را با علاقۀ وافر دنبال می‌کنند. برنامه‌های ماهواره‌ای با بیش از صدها کانال خبری و سرگرم‌کننده از کشورهای ترکی، عربی و انگلیسی و هندی‌زبان به صورت رایگان در اختیار خانواده‌های شهری و روستایی ایرانی است.[58]

عصر تلویزیون و شبکه‌های محدود و کنترل‌شده در اروپا، امریکا و خاورمیانه به پایان رسیده است. حالا در قرن بیست‌ویکم و به یمن وجود اینترنت و ظهور شبکه‌های موازی همچون نت‌فلیکس قدرت شبکه‌های بزرگ و قدرتمند در امریکای شمالی به پرسش کشیده شده است. امروزه نت‌فلیکس با 93 میلیون عضو در 190 کشور جهان هم برنامه‌های تلویزیونی را از طریق سامانۀ اینترنتی بازپخش می‌کند و هم از سال ۲۰۱۳ به ساخت سریال‌های تلویزیونی مستقل دست زده است.[59] پخش اینترنتی برنامه‌های سرگرم‌کننده و دسترسی به رسانه‌های غیرمتمرکز از مختصات مهم عصر دیجیتال است که روند رو به رشدی دارد و آیندۀ تلویزیون در دنیا را تصویر می‌کند. در ایران، به سبب کند بودن سرعت اینترنت، عدم دسترسی به ویزاکارت و فیلتر شبکه‌هایی چون یوتیوب، اکثر بینندگان به نت‌فلیکس و دیگر شبکه‌های فیلم و سریال اینترنتی دسترسی ندارند. در عوض، در عرصۀ ملی، شبکۀ نمایش خانگی یا رسانۀ خانگی کاری مشابه نت‌فلیکس، البته در مقیاس بسیار کوچک‌تر، به انجام رسانده است و در سال‌های اخیر، برخی فیلم‌های سینمایی و مجموعه‌های تلویزیونی مستقیماً برای شبکۀ نمایش خانگی ساخته می‌شوند.

چون تولیدات شبکۀ خانگی زیر نظر صدا و سیما ساخته نمی‌شوند، تحت اعمال ممیزی صدا و سیما قرار نمی‌گیرند، هرچند باز هم باید به تأیید وزارت ارشاد اسلامی برسند. تهیه‌کنندگان بخش خصوصی که بیشتر به فکر بازگشت سرمایه‌اند، برای جلب بیننده و خریدار محصولات فرهنگی خود می‌کوشند تولیداتشان نسبت به محصولات صدا و سیما از کیفیت بهتری برخوردار باشد. در عصر دیجیتال، بینندۀ محصولات فرهنگی لزوماً به دستگاه‌های نسبتاً بزرگ‌تری مانند تلویزیون وابسته نیستند و می‌توانند با دستگاه‌های کوچک‌تر الکترونیکی قابل حمل چون کامپیوتر، تبلت/لوح هوشمند و تلفن همراه هم برنامه‌های دلخواه خود را تماشا کنند. پس امکان تماشای برنامه‌های شبکۀ خانگی قابل بارگیری از برنامه‌های تلویزیون سنتی به مراتب بیشتر است. ببیندگان ایرانی سال‌هاست سرخورده از رسانۀ ملی و برنامه‌های کم‌مایه و بی‌مایه‌ای که کمترین شباهتی با فرهنگ واقعی مردم کوچه و خیابان ندارند، گوش و چشم را به سریال‌های کم‌مایه‌تر ترکی سپرده‌اند که لااقل سرگرم‌کننده‌ترند، رابطۀ زن و مرد را واقعی‌تر بازنمایی می‌کنند و اثری از ایدئولوژی حاکم در آنها نیست.

پخش گران‌ترین مجموعۀ تلویزیونی تاریخ سینمای ایران با هزینه‌ای بالغ بر 30 میلیارد تومان و یکی از باکیفیت‌ترین تولیدات تلویزیونی از شبکۀ نمایش خانگی خبر از حرکت تلویزیون به سوی تولید غیرمتمرکز و غیردولتی در سال‌های آتی می‌دهد. نحوۀ متفاوت نگارش و تولید، پخش و توزیع و استقبال از سریال شهرزاد به روشنی نشان‌دهندۀ تغییرات رسانه‌های جمعی در ایران است که به نوبۀ خود متأثر از تغییرات در زمینۀ فناوری، اقتصاد، فرهنگ و سیاست بوده است. با ساخت شهرزاد به وضوح پیداست که ملودرام زنانه، که قبلاً در سینما با ساخته‌های کارگردانانی چون تهمینه میلانی رونق یافته بود، در رسانۀ تلویزیون هم با استقبال روبه‌رو شده است و امکان رشد بیشتر دارد. مجموعۀ شهرزاد از آثار سینمایی و تلویزیونی فراوانی الهام گرفته است: از زیباشناسی فیلم‌های مافیایی امریکایی چون پدرخوانده تا فیلم‌–‌نوار هالیوودی، سریال‌های ملودراماتیک پُربینندۀ خارجی و حتی فیلم‌های تجاری درجۀ دو ایرانی که به فیلمفارسی شهرت دارند. گرچه سبک نمایشی ژانر فیلمفارسی از جمله نمایش لوطی‌ها و بریز و بپاش خانه‌های اشرافی در این فیلم جذابیت بصری ایجاد کرده، اما روابط جنسیتی سمت و سوی تازه‌ای دارد. پدرسالاری اگرچه به تصویر کشیده شده، اما همیشه تأیید نشده است. زن‌ها ازامامزاده‌ها، پستو و آشپزخانه و کاباره‌های فیلمفارسی بیرون آمده‌ و آماده‌اند که نظام مردسالار را به پرسش بکشند یا حداقل تکانی در ذهنیت مردسالار جامعه بدهند. شهرزادی که حسن فتحی و نغمه ثمینی خلق کردند می‌توانست پس از ازدواج اول و متارکه و از دست دادن فرزندش تا ابد دلگیر و مغموم کنج خانۀ پدر و مادر زندگی کند. زن تلخی بشود تا در پی دسیسه‌چینی برای به دست آوردن دوبارۀ فرزند و شوهر اولش باشد و هنوز هم شخصیت محبوب بیننده باقی بماند. اما چنین نشد. شهرزاد مادر خوب و وظیفه‌شناسی نشان داده شد، اما وقتی حق قیمومیت فرزند را ازدست داد، درجا نزد و تبدیل به شخصیتی ایستا نشد. زندگی شهرزاد در عشق دوباره، ازدواج دوباره و زندگی جدیدش ادامه پیدا کرد. اگر شهرزاد داستانی پس از ازدواج اول و مادر شدن و سپس متارکه توانست باز هم به زندگی بازگردد، دوباره عاشق شود و پیوندی بر مبنای عشق و تفاهم با فرهاد ببندد، باید در سریال‌های آینده منتظر بود و دید خواهرهای جوان‌تر شهرزاد چگونه عمل می‌کنند و چگونه پویایی زنانه‌شان را در عرصه‌های داستانی جدید رقم می‌زنند.

گفته شده که خواندن داستان‌های عشقی و تماشای ملودرام برای زنان نوعی فرار از روزمرّگی و روزمَرگی بوده است و موجب به فراموشی سپردن وظایف خانگی و فشارهای نظام پدرسالار. خواندن این داستان‌ها به گمان نظریه‌پردازانی چون ژانیس رادوی، ورود زنان به دنیای ذهنی شیرین و گوارای عشق بوده است در قالب داستان خیالی غریب و پر ماجرایی با پیچ و خم‌های پرفراز و نشیب عشقی.[60] با این حال، استقبال مردم از این مجموعه به روشنی نشان داد که ملودرام فقط برای زنان ساخته نمی‌شود و طرفدارانی در میان مردان و کودکان هم دارد. هر دوشنبه که خیل عظیم بینندگان سریال سرگرم تماشای قسمت جدید مجموعه می‌شدند، انگار به نوعی از دنیای واقعی و روزمرّگی‌هایشان فاصله می گرفتند تا فراز و نشیب عشقی شهرزاد و فرهاد و قباد را مزمزه کنند. در این مجموعه، ملودرام از سیاست فاصله می‌گیرد تا مسایل عاطفی شخصیت‌های داستان را بازنمایی کند. می‌توان تصور کرد که شهرزاد با انتخاب آگاهانه و هوشمندانۀ شبکۀ خانگی برای پخش توانست از سیاست و سیاست‌زدگی دنیای رسانۀ رسمی عبور کند و از عشق سخن بگوید، سخنی که در ایران سیاست‌زدۀ امروز و به‌خصوص پس از سرخوردگی‌های سیاسی پس از انتخابات ۱۳۸۸ و واخوردگی‌های اقتصادی ناشی از تحریم و رسوایی فساد مالی بیش از هر سخنی مخاطب دارد، هم برای مردان و هم برای زنان. آرزوی این زنان و مردان برای رهایی از سرخوردگی‌های اجتماعی و سیاسی و پناه آوردنشان به داستانی عشقی یادآور آرزوی نیما یوشیج برای آمدن مرغ آمین است، همان مرغ افسانه‌ای که بر فراز بام مردمان رنج‌دیده و محروم پرواز می‌کند تا آرزوهایشان را برآورد. شعر زیبای ”مرغ آمین“ که در اسفندماه ۱۳۳۰ و قبل از کودتا علیه مصدق و در اوج فعالیت‌های دکتر مصدق و جنبش ملی در ایران سروده شده بارها در سریال شهرزاد از زبان فرهاد برای شهرزاد خوانده شد و گردن‌بند مرغ آمین به نشانۀ پیوند دو دلداده و امید به آینده‌ای بهتر به گردن شهرزاد بسته شد:

مرغ آمین درد آلودی‌ست کآواره بمانده

رفته تا آن سوی این بیدادخانه

بازگشته رغبتش دیگر ز رنجوری، نه سوی آب و دانه.

نوبت روز گشایش را

در پی چاره بمانده.

می‌شناسد آن نهان‌بین نهانان (گوش پنهان جهان دردمند ما)

با صدای هر دم آمین گفتنش، آن آشناپرورد،

می‌دهد پیوندشان در هم

می‌کند از یأس خسران‌بار آنان کم

می‌نهد نزدیک با هم، آرزوهای نهان را.[61]

^[1] برای اطلاعات بیشتر دربارۀ نحوۀ عمل روابط عمومی شهرزاد بنگرید به سایت رسمی شهرزاد و شبکۀ تلگرامی این مجموعه، دسترس‌پذیر در

@shahrzadname (in Telegram); http://shahrzadseries.com/.

و نیز گزارش روزنامۀ شرق با عنوان ”چرا شهرزاد با استقبال روبرو شد؟“ در گزارش ویژۀ روزنامه شرق، دسترس‌پذیر در وبگاه شهرزاد.

http://shahrzadseries.com/392864/.

^[2] بنگرید به ”عارضۀ خودنظام‌پنداری این بار گریبان کارگردان معمای شاه را گرفت،“ در وبگاه تابناک، دسترس‌پذیر در

http://www.tabnak.ir/fa/news/549932/

و ”معمای شاه در بوته نقد“ دسترس‌پذیر در

http://www.ion.ir/News/47382.html/.

^{^[3]} برای اطلاع از جزییات رابطۀ میان شعر فارسی و سینمای هنری ایران بنگرید به

Sheibani, Khatereh, The Poetics of Iranian Cinema: Aesthetics, Modernity, and Film after the Revolution (London : I.B.Tauris, 2011).

^[4] در حیطۀ نقد رسانه در غرب نیز اوضاع در گذشته به همین منوال بوده است. بنگرید به

Bernadette Casey et. al. (eds.) Television Studies: The Key Concepts (London and New York: Routledge, 2007).

^[5] گاه برخی از سریال‌های ایرانی در کشورهای فارسی‌زبان یا عرب‌زبان منطقه هم توزیع و تماشا شده‌اند. نمونه‌ای از آنها سریال پرهزینه (فاخر) و پُربینندۀ یوسف پیامبر (به کارگردانی فرج‌الله سلحشور در ۱۳۸۷ ) است که به سبب درونمایۀ مذهبی و به کارگیری هنرپیشه‌های خوش‌سیمایی چون مصطفی زمانی و کتایون ریاحی در کشورهای افغانستان، پاکستان و تاجیکستان هم پخش و با استقبال فراوان روبه‌رو شد.

^[6] مسعود مهرابی، تاریخ سینمای ایران از آغاز تا سال ۱۳۵۷ (تهران: مسعود مهرابی، ۱۳۶۴)، ۳۱۴.

^[7] مهرابی، تاریخ سینمای ایران، ۳۱۵.

^[8] مهرابی، تاریخ سینمای ایران، ۳۲۱.

^[9] Hamid Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), vol. 3, 161-162.

^[10] مهرابی، تاریخ سینمای ایران، ۳۱۶.

^[11] پژوهشگران تلویزیون در فرهنگ‌های دیگر نیز به قرار گرفتن تلویزیون در جایگاهی مرکزی در خانه‌ توجه کرده‌اند. برای مثال، در خصوص نقش تلویزیون در خانه‌های امریکایی بنگرید به

Lynne Joyrich, “All the Television Allows: TV Melodrama, Postmodernism and Consumer Culture,” Camera Obscura, 6:1 (1988), 129-157.

^[12] مهرابی، تاریخ سینمای ایران، ۳۲۵.

^[13]

شباهت های اندکی میان دیپلمات ایرانی این سریال که به کمک یهودیان می شتابد و با صدور گذرنامه ایرانی آنان را از خطر مرگ می رهاند و شخصیت تاریخی عبدالحسین سرداری دیپلمات ایرانی ساکن فرانسه که ناجی یهودیان غیر ایرانی در هنگامه جنگ جهانی دوم شده بود وجود دارد ولی این شباهتها از طرف سازندگان مجموعه به تایید نرسیده است.

^[14] قابل ذکر است که زیارت از امامزاده‌ها و اماکن مذهبی در فیلم‌های سینمایی قبل از انقلاب هم درشت‌نمایی می‌شد، هم در ژانر تجاری فیلمفارسی و هم در فیلم‌های موج نو. اصولاً زیارت رفتن یکی از مشخصه‌های شخصیت‌های مثبت مرد و زن فیلم‌های قبل از انقلاب بود. نمونۀ آن زیارت قیصر و ننه مشهدی از حرم امام رضا در فیلم قیصر است. این امر در سریال‌های پس از انقلاب به شکل قابل توجهی پُررنگ‌تر شد، به قسمی که سکانس‌های طولانی از یک سریال فقط به نمایش زیارت شخصیت‌ها اختصاص یافته است.

^[15] برای تعریفی از رئالیسم خانگی بنگرید به

Michael Stewart, Melodrama in Contemporary Film and Television (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 13.

^[16] برای اطلاع از فیلم-نوآر به منزلۀ سبکی نمایشی بنگرید به

Susan Hayward, Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts (3^rd ed.; London & New York: Routledge, 2006), 149.

^[17] فکر می کنم اصطلاح نینجا برای توصیف شخصیت شربت را در مصاحبۀ بی‌بی‌سی فارسی با پرویز جاهد شنیده‌ام.

^[18]

تمام تصویرها برگرفته از وبگاه رسمی سریال شهرزادند.

^[19] Stewart, Melodrama, 4.

^[20] Stewart, Melodrama, 13.

^[21] قابل ذکر است که فردوسی در شاهنامه به دفعات ذکر می‌کند که بسیاری از داستان‌هایی را که نقل می‌کند از دهقانان (زمین‌داران و حاکمان محلی و نگهدارندگان اصلی فرهنگ ایرانی که در دوران خلافت اعراب و ترکان فرهنگ ایرانی را سینه به سینه منتقل و نگهداری می‌کردند) به صورت شفاهی شنیده است. بنابراین، می‌توان نتیجه گرفت که بسیاری از داستان‌های عاشقانۀ شاهنامه نیز ریشه در فرهنگ شفاهی و مردمی دارد. بنگرید به محمدجعفرمحجوب، ادبیات عامیانۀ ایران: مجموعه مقاله‌ها دربارۀ افسانه‌ها و آداب و رسوم مردم ایران (چاپ 4؛ تهران: نشر چشمه، ۱۳۸۲)، ۴۴.

^[22] بنگرید به حسن عابدینی، صد سال داستان‌نویسی در ایران (تهران: نشر چشمه، ۱۳۸۰)، ۲۱.

^[23] بنگرید به فیض‌الله امامی، ”نقش زنان در انقلاب مشروطه و تحولات آن،“ در زن در تاریخ ایران معاصر: از انقلاب مشروطه تا انقلاب اسلامی، ویراستۀ منصوره اتحادیه و شیرین بیانی (تهران: انتشارات کویر، ۱۳۹۰)،53-89.

^[24] ملودرام، رومانس و داستان/فیلم عاشقانه در بسیاری از بحث‌های تئوریک گاه به شکل واژه‌های هم‌معنا به کار برده شده‌اند.

^[25] بنگرید به ایرج باباحاجی، ”ادبیات عامه پسند: نگاهی به تاریخچه،“ دسترس‌پذیر در

http://hamshahrionline.ir/details/21569/.

^[26] کانال پاورقی‌های تلگرامی چیستا یثربی با بیش از 26 هزار عضو فعال است. بنگرید به

@chista_yasrebi (in Telegram).

^[27] عابدینی، صد سال داستان‌نویسی در ایران، ۵۵.

^[28] عابدینی، صد سال داستان‌نویسی در ایران، ۵۵.

^[29] Hayward, Cinema Studies, 238.

^[30] Janet Afary, Sexual Politics in Modern Iran (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 168.

^[31] Sheibani, The Poetics of Iranian Cinema, 139-161.

^[32] Pam Cook, The Cinema Book (London: BFI, 2007), 316-322.

^[33] Hayward, Cinema Studies, 236-248.

^[34]

Casey et. al., Television Studies, 171.

^[35] جالب آنکه در دورۀ وقوع داستان، ازدواج محمدرضاشاه پهلوی با همسر دلخواهش، ثریا اسفندیاری، به علت ناباروری ثریا به بن‌بست کشیده می‌شود و چون ثریا با ازداوج موقت دوم شاه مخالفت می‌کند، مجبور به متارکه با شاه و ترک ایران می‌شود. دوهمسری در ایران سال‌های 1330 از نظر عرفی عملی ناپسند محسوب می‌شد. به گفتۀ ژانت آفاری، حتی در زمان رضاشاه پهلوی دو یا چند همسری در میان اکثر مردم کاری ”از مد افتاده“ به حساب می‌آمد. بنگرید به

Afary, Sexual Politics, 154.

^[36] امبرتو اکو می‌گوید پیام هر رسانه برای بینندگان متفاوتی که از خاستگاه‌های اجتماعی و فرهنگی گونه‌گون آمده‌اند یک پیام واحد نیست. تفسیر و برداشت از پیام هر رسانه به دریافت‌کنندگان آن پیام بستگی دارد. ملودرام اسلامی، که سبک زندگی سنتی و محافظه‌کار چندین دهه پیش ایرانیان را به شکلی جذاب و نو و رنگ و لعاب‌دار ارائه می‌‌کند، برای بینندگان شهری طبقۀ متوسط پیام جذاب و نوی نبود و باعث کاهش بینندگان صدا و سیما و در عوض افزایش بینندگان برنامه‌های ماهواره‌ای و از جمله ملودرام‌های ترکی شد. بنگرید به

Umberto Eco, “Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warefare,” in Travels in Hyperreality (San Diego, NY and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 135-150.

^[37] Nayereh Tohidi, “Women’s Rights and Feminist Movements in Iran,” International Journal of Human Rights, at http://sur.conectas.org/en/womens-rights-feminist-movements-iran/.

^[38] با جستجویی ساده در شبکه‌های اجتماعی می‌شود به عکس‌های بدحجاب بازیگرانی از قبیل نرگس محمدی، بازیگر ستایش، دست یافت. در حالی که حضور زنان در استادیوم‌های ورزشی ممنوع است، نرگس محمدی در سال ۲۰۱۴ در استادیومی در برزیل به تماشای فوتبال ایران و نیجریه نشست و خبرساز شد.

^[39]

شهرام کریمی، ”نگاهی به طراحی صحنه سریال شهرزاد،“ در سایت سینما –چشم .

^[40]

همخواب رقیبانی و من تاب ندارم / بی‌تابم و از غصۀ این خواب ندارم / دلتنگم و با هیچ کسم میل سخن نیست / کس در همه آفاق به دلتنگی من نیست / بسیار ستمکار و بسی عهدشکن هست / اما به ستمکاری آن عهدشکن نیست / پیش تو بسی از همه کس خوارترم من / زان روی که از جمله گرفتارترم من / روزی که نماند دگری بر سر کویت / دانی که ز اغیار وفادارترم من / بر بی‌کسی من نگر و چارۀ من کن / زآن کز همه کس بی‌کس و بی‌یارترم من / بی‌یارترم من، بی‌یارترم من، بی‌یارترم من.

^[41] http://www.mohsenchavoshi.net/#Biography/.

^[42] Stephanie McBride, “The Female Gaze: Looking at Women in Popular Cinema,” Circa, 44 (1980), 19-21; Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen: Oxford Journals, 16:3 (1975), 6-18.

^[43] Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 6-18.

^[44] Michelle Langford, “Practical Melodrama: From Recognition to Action in Milani’s Fereshteh Trilogy,” Screen, 51:4 (Winter 2010), 342.

^[45] Hayward, Cinema Studies, 243.

^[46]

ملودرام و بازنمود مادران سینمایی را در مقاله‌ای مجزا به تفصیل بررسی کرده‌ام. بنگرید به

Khatereh Sheibani, “The Aesthetics of Dis/Empowered Motherhood in Iranian Cinema (1956-1978),” in Screening Mothers: Motherhood in Contemporary World Cinema, ed. Asma Sayed (Toronto: Demeter Press Canada, 2016), 374-419.

^[47] طبقه‌بندی‌های ملودرام بر اساس مشاهداتم از فیلم‌ها و سریال‌های ایرانی و بر اساس مطالعۀ طبقه‌بندی‌های مشابه در آثار تئوریک مطالعات فیلم و رسانه صورت گرفته است. با این همه، طبقه‌بندی‌های متفاوت از ملودرام به گمانم با سبک‌شناسی فیلمسازی ایرانی کاملاً سازگار نیست. برای نمونه‌هایی از این طبقه‌بندی‌ها بنگرید به به سبب تمرکز این مقاله بر یک مجموعۀ سرگرم‌کنندۀ مشخص، از طرح مثال‌های بیشتر و بحث مفصل‌تر در زمینۀ انواع گوناگون ملودرام خودداری کرده‌ام.

Casey et. al., Television Studies, 171; Hayward, Cinema Studies, 242-248; Janice a. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women Patriarchy and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill, NC & London: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).

^[48] فیلم‌های سلطان قلب‌ها (با بازی محمدعلی فردین در ۱۳۴۷)، باشو غریبه کوچک (به کارگردانی بهرام بیضایی در ۱۳۶۴) و سریال ستایش هر سه ملودرام مادرانه‌اند، اما نقشی که از مادر در هر اثر بازنمایی می‌شود کاملاً متفاوت است.

^[49] Afary, Sexual Politics.

^[50] هزار و یک شب، اقتباس عبدالطیف تسوجی (تهران: هرمس، 1383)، ۸.

^[51] “Modern Echoes” in Daniel Heller-Roazen (ed.), The Arabian Nights (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010), 356-379.

^{^[52]} برای مطالعۀ بیشتر دربارۀ مطالبات زنان و دستاوردهای جنبش زنان در قرن حاضر بنگرید به

Afary, Sexual Politics in Modern Iran, 360-373.

رابطۀ میان وقایع تاریخی سریال و وقایع جامعۀ کنونی بسیار مشهود است. حتی دستگیری و حصر مصدق در داستان از سوی عده‌ای به حصر رهبران جنبش سبز ربط داده شده بود و ادامۀ پخش مجموعه را با خطر توقف و سانسور روبه‌رو کرده بود. بنگرید به فرهاد بهمن، ”آیا شهرزاد قصۀ انتخابات سال ٨٨ را می‌گوید؟“ دسترس‌پذیر در

http://www.bbc.com/persian/arts/2015/12/151201_l10_pfb_shahrzad/.

^[53] Eco, “Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warefare,” 135-136.

^[54] Eco, “Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warefare,” 135-136.

^[55] John Pavlik and Shawn McIntosh, “The Changing of Media Landscape,” in Converging Media: A New Introduction to Mass Communication (2^nd ed.; New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 2-28.

^[56] Khatereh Sheibani, “Film and Media in the Middle East,” in Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World, ed. Richard C. Martin (2^nd ed.; Macmillan Reference USA, 2015).

^[57] به گزارش خبرگزاری ایسنا، آیت‌الله مکارم شیرازی فروش، نصب و استفاده از تلویزیون ماهواره‌ای را حرام دانسته است. بنگرید به

http://isna.ir/fa/news/92100301264/.

^[58] بنگرید به ”وقتی ۷۱ درصد مردم ماهواره نگاه می‌کنند، چه می‌توان کرد؟“ در وبگاه تابناک و ”گزارش مرکز پژوهش‌ها در مورد دیدگاه‌ها و سیاست‌های مرتبط با ماهواره در ایران،“ در وبگاه مرکز پژوهش‌های مجلس شورای اسلامی، دسترس‌پذیر در

http://rc.majlis.ir/fa/news/show/897801/.

^[59] https://ir.netflix.com/.

^[60] Radway, Reading the Romance.

^[61] نیما یوشیج، ”مرغ آمین،“ دسترس‌پذیر در

http://www.nimayoushij.com/poetry116.html/.

A Seventeenth-Century Prose Abridgment of the Shahnamah Produced by a Zoroastrian Priest

Iranian American Comedic Memoirs: Interrogating Race and Humor in Diasporic Life Writing

The Beginning of New Education in Nineteenth-Century Iran

Ten Theses on Iranian Cinema

Risking Prophecy in the Modern State: Foucault, Iran, and the Conduct of the Intellectual

The Abject Outsider: “The Story of Two Gay Men”

Abbas Kiarostami’s “Lessons of Darkness”: Affect, Non-Representation, and Becoming-Imperceptible

Namag: A Concise Etymology and Semantic

Cyrus in Judeo-Persian Literature

Mistaken Modernity and Its Critics: Hussein Alatas and Jalal Al-e Ahmad

The Matrix of the Mystic: The Enclosure of Being in the Ikhwan as-Safa’ and Saadya Gaon’s Commentary on the Sefer Yezirah

Racial Profiling of Iranian Armenians in the United States: Omid Fallahazad’s “Citizen Vartgez”

Iran’s Literary Becoming: Zokaʾ ol-Molk Forughi and the Literary History That Wasn’t

Worlding with Images: Nexus between Art and Anthropology

Foucault and Epicureanism of the Iranian Revolution

Queering the Iranian Nation: Be Like Others and Resistance to Heteronormative Nationalism

An Approach to Humour in Persian Literature

Culture and Democracy

Table of Contents, Volume 2, Number 1

The Ishraqi Path: Toward Systematization of Suhrawardi’s Sufism

Reflection of India in the Works of Hedayat

What is at the Heart of the Dispute? Reflections on the Foucault Controversy Forty Years Later

Transition from Orient to the Third World: Sketch of a Phenomenological Study of a Historical Fall

The Western Problematic and the Idea of Everyday Culture and Life in the Post-Revolutionary Iran

Shahrzad: Pop Culture, Media Culture, and the Representation of Gender in the Digital Age