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From the Light of the Eyes to the Eyes of the Power: State and Dissident Martyrs in Post-Revolutionary Iran

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 25; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/08949468.2012.629560

1545-5920

Shahla Talebi,

Islamic Studies and History

Abstract In 2006 the courtyard of Sanati Sharif University in Tehran became a battleground over the geographies of life and death. The conflict transpired between students who protested the burying of state martyrs on campus, while the state and its supporters carried out the act regardless of the protest. In analyzing this act this essay traces the genealogy of the transforming geographies of life and death in modern Iran. It strives to demonstrate how the imposition of the dead in the eyes of the living and the struggles against it are informed by modern discourses and rationalities and are in keeping with, while transforming, the presumed boundaries between life and death and their sociality. The author sees the incursion of state martyrs into the public eye as a means to marginalize and render invisible the deviant "other," the dissident martyrs. It demonstrates how the conflation of the vicinities of the dead and the living by burying corpses in public arenas reveals the stark contrast between the hyper-visibility of the state martyrs and the discriminatory invisibility and lack of recognition of dissident martyrs. In its corporeality this invasion echoes the previously symbolic, metaphoric and discursive dimensions of the visual presence of state martyrs as the eye of the power. It illuminates how state martyrs are employed to play the role of eternal soldiers for the state, be utilized as its eyes to oversee obedience to its laws and the safeguarding of taboos. The event that followed the post-presidential election of 2009, however, showed the contested role and position martyrs play in post-revolutionary Iran. Notes "Upon empty coffins" was the title of an internet news article posted on the Peik Net website on March 13, 2006. "Bar Faraz" conveys both a literal meaning of location as "upon" or over, which concerns the coffins that are carried on the shoulders of the people, and a metaphorical notion of position, which herein refers to the higher status of these dead over the living. The Farsi phrases in this section are taken from this website's news section [www.Peiknet.com]. In Farsi, gomnam has two different, though often interrelated, connotations. Translated literally according to the combination of the two parts of which the term is constituted, gom (lost) and nam (name), it translates as "lost name," a reference to someone whose name is lost. The word gomnam, however, refers to two different conditions of namelessness that have often more to do with lack than with loss. In regard to the living subjects, it often connotes a status of being a non-celebrity, non-famous, a lay person. In this case, aside from rare cases where one might have been famous but later have lost fame and thereby name, the reference is often to someone who never had a name to lose. The name in this case has more to do with fame or having one's name known by the public, than having a name as such. This connotation, when utilized about the dead, and herein particularly "martyrs," alludes to their lay status. As such it refers to those martyred individuals who were not, for example, commanders, or whose names were not particularly capitalized by the state and its media. The common usage of shahid-e-gomnam, nevertheless, implies the detachment of the body and the name; when the body of the martyr is not found or it is so shattered that remains are unrecognizable. In this latter form, the names and the bodies are lost to one another, and therefore the dead whose body is lost or shattered also loses his name. I use the term "nearly" for burials within public spaces that were not entirely non-existent. In fact, a saint's shrine is located within Shaid Beheshti University, formerly Melli or National University. These cases differ however from the modern insertion of the dead into public space, of which Sharif University gives an example. Sometimes public institutions were built around, or in close proximity to, the saints' shrines. There are different versions of a joke that circulate in Iran, and are taken up also by satirists in the alternative internet media. This joke, in its various versions, makes a mockery of the confusion of spaces, roles and titles in Iran today and compares it to "the rest of the world." It suggests that in Iran prisons are called universities, universities are turned into jails; the dead live forever, while the living are seen as dead; on and on this continues. Basij is a voluntary army that was created around and after the Revolution of 1979. Formed as a grassroots and spontaneous army, initially its goal was to defend the neighborhood during the early days after the revolution when the state and the army were not yet prepared to completely control the streets and alleys. It eventually became part of the army and was actively involved both in the external war and the suppression within. Basijis are now often seen by the majority of Iranians as thugs and as a violent force of suppression that is unaccountable to the law. According to the news, 82.5 percent of the students had voted against it. See www.Peiknet.com (March 13, 2006). This University is well-known for its farar-e maghzha. "Brain drain" is an equivalent English phrase which refers to the phenomenon prevailing in, though not unique to, Iran, whereby the most accomplished and talented intellectuals and educated young scholars or scientists leave their home countries for the West. With its admission requirement which includes only the top 1 or 2 percent of the highest scores in the extremely competitive national university entrance exam, mainly in engineering and the hard sciences, Sharif University is the most affluent resource for this phenomenon. Over 50 percent of students who get bachelors' degrees from there are accepted by the most prestigious schools in the West, including MIT, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, etc., though this rate seems to have declined, especially in the United States, since, and due to, the event of September 11, 2001. This suicide attempt, though unsuccessful, further augmented the conflation of the spaces of death and education. I recognize the problematic of my referring to the state and citizens as if they are homogeneous and entirely separate entities. My intention is however not to obscure the reality of their heterogeneity within, as well as the interactive relationship between, them. Only for the sake of brevity do I employ these terms without a constant qualification. In relation to the question of the eye, the act of seeing, and visibility, Hal Foster provides a useful commentary. In the preface of his edited book [1988 Foster , Hal 1988 Vision and Visuality: Discussions in Contemporary Cultures . Hal Foster , ed. New York : The New Press . [Google Scholar]] he writes: "Although vision suggests sight as a physical operation, and visuality sight as a social fact, the two are not opposed as nature to culture: vision is social and historical too, and visuality involves body and the psyche. Yet neither are they identical." Most relevant here is the way Foster elaborates on the "difference within the visual—between the mechanism of sight and its historical techniques, between the datum of vision and its discursive determinations." The reality of this difference, or in Foster's words, "many differences, among how we see, how we are able, allowed, or made to see, and how we see this seeing or the unseen therein" [1988 Foster , Hal 1988 Vision and Visuality: Discussions in Contemporary Cultures . Hal Foster , ed. New York : The New Press . [Google Scholar]: ix] underscores this struggle over the visibility and the imposed invisibility of these two distinctive groups of the dead, the state and dissident martyrs. Michael Jackson [2002 Jackson , Michael 2002 The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression, and Intersubjectivity . Copenhagen : Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen. [Google Scholar]] reads Hannah Arendt's notion of "public sphere" as she explained in her book [1958 Arendt , Hannah 1958 The Human Condition . New York : Doubleday .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]]: "Phenomenologically, the public realm is a space of appearance where individual experiences are selectively refashioned in ways that make them real and recognizable in the eyes of the others. Sociologically, the public realm is a space of shared interest, where a plurality of people work together to create a world to which they feel they all belong" [Jackson 2002 Jackson , Michael 2002 The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression, and Intersubjectivity . Copenhagen : Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen. [Google Scholar]: 11]. Jackson suggests that this view hinges on the premise that "our individual humanity always has an extension in space and time" and therefore a sense of having "roots" [ibid.: 12]. What makes Jackson's discussion of public and private so relevant to my argument here are two interrelated points. First, his notion of a mutual connection between visibility—thus public appearance—and recognition by others in relation to one's sense of belonging, which, in his view, means believing that "one's being is integrated with and integral to a wider field of Being, that one's being emerges and touches the lives of others …" [ibid.: 12]; and secondly, that through storytelling these individual and collective experiences and their geopolitics of public and private become intertwined and recreated. While the Mojahedin Organization was never favored by most clergy members, this did not stop the Islamic Republic from claiming "their martyrs," who were killed under the Shah, as its own. It is also important to note that, in the very early phase of the Islamic Republic, Mojahedin still had strong support among the state officials. It is important also to remember that in those early days there were much more diverse sociopolitical and religious perspectives within the Iranian state, including Mojahedin's views, orientations, and even direct organizational influence. The decision to bury state martyrs in public spaces emerged and provoked opposition even among some state officials of the Khatami era, during my fieldwork in 2003–2004. At the time this initiative was limited to squares and mosques. The recent confusion of universities and graveyards, though innovative, is continuous with and an extension and intensification of that initiative. In fact, so very often since then the news about burying martyrs in yet another university ground has stirred up protest. The protests fail however to stop these state-supported acts. Because of the highly competitive national entrance exams, public universities in Iran are much more prestigious than the private, so-called "Free" (Azad) Universities. Ironically public universities which are the most sought-after are the ones that are free of tuition, while the private ones charge extremely high tuition. Still more paradoxically, since public universities are much more competitive and harder to enter, people have to invest great amounts of money in their children's elementary and high school education. In addition, they often pay for private classes and tutors so that their children get the best education possible to enter these schools. This simply means that with the exception of the most brilliant students or those children of martyrs, only the most privileged and wealthy can afford to enter these schools. The private schools are attended by those living on the verge of poverty. Parents often take out substantial loans so that their children can enter private colleges. My usage of the term "invasion" might imply an active agency for the dead, as though the dead are responsible for these imposed incursions. However, I continue using these terms to suggest and somewhat illuminate the way the state utilizes them as if they were alive and endowed with agency. While the cemeteries have been built outside villages and cities, there have always been exceptional shrines of saints around which villages were established. Although many of these shrines are seen as spurious, the important issue is that most people in the villages do believe them to be the burial sites of certain saints. While the existence of these shrines within residential areas appears to undermine my argument about the exceptionality of burying the dead within the spaces of the living, shrines are themselves unique cases. Saints are believed to be pure and, as dead, they differ from the ordinary dead. This purity places them along with martyrs who are also seen as pure and sacred. Neither the separation of the spaces of the dead and the living nor the disconcerting feelings about their conflation are ahistorical and universal phenomena; they are rather modern emergences. In Cairo, for example, a community of urban poor lives within the cemetery, in the so-called "City of the Dead" [Nedoroscik 1997 Nedoroscik , Jeffery A. 1997 The City of the Dead: A History of Cairo's Cemetery Communities . Westport and London : Bergin and Garvey . [Google Scholar]]. There are of course functional and practical reasons for the treatment of the dead and the location of the burial sites in different societies. One could offer hygienic reasons for the separation from the dead, or suggest the problem of transportation for the proximity of the cemeteries. For example, it is suggested that burying the dead within villages would have caused contamination of the waters due to the irrigation system in countries like Iran [conversation with Dr. Hossien Kamaly, April 2006]. Significant too are the religious dicta concerning the dead. I have chosen not to pursue these approaches. I am alluding here to Stefania Pandolfo's poetic account of burying the dead in a Moroccan village, where the result of seeing death is characterized as besiegement, thus a temporary loss of interest in worldly affairs, a return to which is rendered possible only by an Angel who, as these Moroccan villagers explain, appears at the burial site, and "sprinkles a handful of earth over our heads. It is the earth of forgetting and makes us blind, once again to the paralyzing vision of Death. Again we can see the world, set back into its boundaries by our blindness, and again we caught ourselves in daily affairs" [1997 Pandolfo , Stefania 1997 Impasse of the Angels: Impasse of the Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory . Chicago : University of Chicago Press . [Google Scholar]: 239]. Rather than the sight of death and burial, Benjamin is more concerned with the experience of dying, which he suggests has now been pushed out of rooms and houses into the hospitals [1968 Benjamin , Walter 1968 Illuminations: Essays and Reflections . Hannah Arendt , ed. New York : Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group . [Google Scholar]: 93–94]. Rafael discusses the implications of the photographs of dead bodies, and specifically the "numerous photographs of Filipinos killed in a battle" during the Filipino-American War of 1899–1902 [2000: 87]. Having transformed the corpses into "what Roland Barthes would call 'living images of [the] dead,'" these photos, as Rafael points out, engender "a hopelessly out of place" quality for the dead. Human concern with the spatial-temporal relationship of the living and the dead has been a constant preoccupation manifest not only in the shifting and enduring features of religious and sociocultural landscapes of different societies, but also in artistic, literary, critical and philosophical inquires. Freud attempts to draw an "appropriate," universal period for mourning and a return to life by liberating oneself from the "lost object" [1963 Freud , Sigmund 1963 Mourning and Melancholia . In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud . Vol. 14. James Strachey , trans. and ed. Pp. 237 – 260 . London : Hogarth Press . [Google Scholar]]. Exceeding the economy of expenditure of grief, according to Freud, turns mourning into melancholy. It is noteworthy to attend to this difference between the ways in which most current Christian funerary practices keep the dead in sight for at least a couple of days for the living to pay their respect and bid farewell. In Iran, on the other hand, according to Islamic law, people are expected to visit the dying person but after death the ceremonies are performed rapidly and the body is taken out of sight immediately after the necessary rituals are completed. Any touching of the dead renders the living polluted, obliging a religious ablution. Coinciding with my fieldwork, I experienced this tension when my father passed away. While my sisters and I could not keep our hands off our father's body our women neighbors constantly dragged us away from him and reminded us that it was not sanctioned to touch the dead, and that the deceased needed his peace and his emotional strength in order to be able leave this world for the long journey to the other world. Not our remorse or cries: what our father and the dead in general needed for this journey, we were told, were the words of God recited in the room to prepare him for his first night in his dark, cold and lonely grave, for his first interrogation session as a deceased. In fact certain ghosts appeared in dreams to foretell the future, offer advice, and in general relate the world of the dead to the living. But the more claims to modern rationality, the less accepting the society became of the ghosts and their dreams, yet perhaps more frequently they appeared and conflicted with this rejection. See Mittermaier [2011 Mittermaier , Amira 2011 Dreams That Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination . Berkeley : University of California Press . [Google Scholar]] for an elaborate ethnographic study of dreams and the presence of death in modern Egypt. In fact the still continuing practice of visiting cemeteries on Thursdays and Fridays is the remaining trace of this belief. For some Islamic countries, including Iran, Thursdays and Fridays are considered the weekend days. Norman Bryson offers a definition of gaze, which he suggests is neither that of Sartre nor that of Lacan, as "something" that "cuts across the field of vision and invades it from the outside." Vision, in this notion of gaze, "is traversed by something wholly ungovernable by the subject, something that harbors within it the force of everything outside the visual dyad" [1988 Bryson , Norman 1988 The Gaze in the Expanded Field . In Vision and Visuality: Discussions in Contemporary Cultures . Hal Foster , ed. Pp. 87 – 108 . New York : The New Press . [Google Scholar]: 104]. The sense of one's gaze being captured by the sight of the dead resonates with Bryson's "expanded field of Gaze." For the history of the Pahlavi era, see Abrahamian [1982 Abrahamian , Ervand 1982 Iran between Two Revolutions . Princeton : Princeton University Press .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]], Keddi [1981] and Najmabadi [1987 Najmabadi , Afsaneh 1987 Land Reform and Social Change in Iran . Salt Lake City : University of Utah Press . [Google Scholar]]. For a detailed history of progress under the Pahlavi regime see Halliday [1978 Halliday , Fred 1978 Iran: Dictatorship and Development . New York : Penguin . [Google Scholar]] and Abrahamian [1982 Abrahamian , Ervand 1982 Iran between Two Revolutions . Princeton : Princeton University Press .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]]. The truth of this statement is as limited and contradictory as is capitalism's capability to control its own monstrous growth. The constant crises of the capitalist system and its recurring destructive episodes find their parallel in the horrific and horrifically repeating incidents of massive violence from systematic wars to genocidal massacres. Migration from villages was a national phenomenon which brought people of different ethnicity, language and religion to a large and often the capital city, Tehran, to work alongside each other. For some these were their first confrontations with any other language or ethnicity. Even though under the Pahlavis, especially Mohammad-Reza, there seemed to be no long-term war, military conscription was never abandoned. There were always internal wars and suppressions in which soldiers fought, killed and were killed. There were also short-term external wars, including occasional conflicts with Iraq. The killing of the state opponents or the unlawful individuals did not fall under the state's definition of "sacrifice." In his book [1998], Giorgio Agamben argues that the life of such individuals is perceived as bare life and cannot be sacrificed. It is simply eliminated. He referred to the opponents of his mission as "black reactionary," and "red reactionaries," references to the religious and leftist dissidents, respectively. Under the pressure of the revolutionary movement, in his desperate attempt to save himself and the regime, the Shah gave up his prime minister of 13 years, Howeida, and had him arrested, which resulted in his execution only a few days after the victory of the revolution. This is an allusion to the Shah's televised address to the nation a couple of months before the victory of the revolution, in which he said: "the dignified people of Iran! I heard the message of your Revolution." This speech should be seen within the context of months of state officials' repetitive references to people's uprisings as tape-recorded or as the acts of foreign-instigated troublemakers and thugs. See Abrahamian [1999 1999 Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran . Berkeley and Los Angeles : University of California Press . [Google Scholar]] and Rajali [1994 Rajali , Darius M. 1994 Torture and Modernity: Self, Society, and State in Modern Iran . Boulder : Westview Press . [Google Scholar]], about elaborate details of techniques and terminologies of torture and imprisonment in modern Iran. Also see Talebi [2011 Talebi , Shahla 2011 Ghosts of the Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran . Stanford : Stanford University Press .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]]. Hadd in Arabic and in Farsi has two meanings: it means a geographical, territorial boundary, as the particular border, as in hadd between two countries. It also refers to a limit, as capacity, implying, for instance, that one should recognize one's hadd, limit. This type of hadd could refer to a wide range of limits, from one's eating or drinking capacity to the social status within whose boundaries one is allowed to maneuver. Hadd, as punishment-torture, under the Islamic Republican law, is to set these personal boundaries straight and was to discipline people in this life to supposedly lead the people to heaven rather than hell after their death. On witnessing/visibility and how the modern seeing subject is formed (in relation to violence) see Foster [1996 1996 Death in America . October , 75 : 37 – 59 . [Google Scholar]]. This issue is also discussed in Siegel [2002 Siegel , James T. 2002 Once again, Why War? Connect , 4 : 119 – 130 . [Google Scholar]]. In the context of television see Weber [1996 Weber , Samuel 1996 Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media . Palo Alto : Stanford University Press . [Google Scholar]]. This material connection between the sacred soul of the martyrs and their body and clothes has had tangible and pragmatic implications for their families and the society at large. The fact that these sets of photos are significant to the representation of martyrs in this museum is evident in their location in the hall: they are placed immediately on the left side of the entrance to the hall so that visitors would see, and get impressions of them, either right at the beginning or at the end of their visit, depending on from which side of the exhibition hall they begin their visit. In either case one's experience of the visit to the museum is overshadowed by this image. Two contradictory views went hand in hand under the Islamic Republic: obligation to embrace martyrdom even against parents' wishes, and the saying that satisfying a mother's wishes would lead one to Paradise. An example of this phenomenon is manifested in a television movie in which years after the end of the war a middle-aged former Iran–Iraq war veteran, now married and a successful though still pious executive, decides to take a trip to Mecca in response to a call for pilgrimage in a dream. On his way to the airport the cab in which he rides hits a pedestrian, a tall young Jesus-like man with long blond hair and a long white robe. Already ghostly looking, the man falls unconscious. Later we learn that he is a chemically afflicted war veteran about to die, and yet the movie implies also that he has already joined the dead. Upon seeing each other the two men recognize each other, for the young man is the one who has appeared to the other in his dreams, asking him to go to Mecca. The movie constantly deploys and fuses the boundaries of the dead and the living; presence and absence; intent, action, and speech; the boundaries between reality, dream, life and death are all rendered blurry. These kinds of blurred boundaries might also be found in Bao Ninh [1996 Ninh , Bao 1996 The Sorrow of War . Frank Palmos , ed. Phan Than Hao , trans. New York : Riverhead Trade . [Google Scholar]]. As a visible reminder to self-police one's behavior the martyrs are (literally) watching from the posters, etc. In this sense, they invoke Foucault's notion of the panopticon, whereby individuals' very cognizance of being under constant surveillance does the trick in urging them to self-discipline themselves. One could also think of al-Ghazali's conception of self-disciplining by way of remembering death and thereby growing wary of the punishments that await the sinful in the world of the hereafter [al-Ghazali 1995 al-Ghazali , Hamid 1995 The Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife. Kitab Dhikr al-Mawt . Cambridge : The Islamic Texts Society . [Google Scholar]]. Yet the deployment of the martyrs by the state in the public arena is less about the latter than the former. Even though there were many cases of burying selected state martyrs in the monumental mosques of small towns or villages, for instance, in Agha Khan Mosque in Kashan, these incidents drew less public attention, at least not of the public in the capital city, or of the national media, which the new practices in Tehran have engendered. This practice was never entirely discontinued, for the regime and its paramilitary forces haunted dissidents by abducting them, killing and leaving them on the streets, even outside Iran; but during 1999 and 2000 it took its toll in what came to be referred to as chained murders during which dissident intellectuals, often poets and writers, were brutally killed and left on the streets or in front of their houses. Fortunately this time the families did not have to bury them within their own yards: there were already established spaces for the dissident dead. If Setareh succeeded in protecting her son from seeing his father as a decomposing corpse in his playground, she could not prevent him from facing the scene of her own tortured body crawling into the prison cell; nor could she do much to hold him in her aching arms to reduce the intensity of fright in the eyes of her five-to-six-year-old son confronted by such impossible situations. See Dai [2002 Dai Jinhua 2002 Redemption and Consumption: Depicting Culture in the 1990s . In New Asian Marxisms . Tani E. Barlow , ed. Pp. 89 – 104 . Durham, NC, and London : Duke University Press . [Google Scholar]], which discusses how classic narrative of divinity and revolution are retold through the media in China and how it uses/constructs the image of Mao. There are many resemblances in the tactics employed by the Islamic Republic and those of both China and Vietnam, in the former concerning the cult of Mao and in the latter of Ho Chi Minh. For Ho Chi Minh see Malarney [1996 Malarney , Shaun 1996 The Emerging Cult of Ho Chi Minh? A Report on Religious Innovation in Contemporary Northern Viet Nam . Asian Cultural Studies , 22 : 121 – 131 . [Google Scholar]]. I am grateful to Dr. Lauren Meeker for suggesting the literature on China and Vietnam. This statement alludes to Benjamin's notion of violence which in breaking the law makes it into a law. See Benjamin [1996 1996 Critique of Violence . In his Selected Writings , Vol. 1 . Edmund Jephcott , trans . Pp. 236 – 252 . Cambridge , MA : Harvard University, Belknap Press . [Google Scholar]]. In fact the events that followed the burial of the "state martyrs" in Sanati University proved this concept by formally writing it into the law. An example of this perspective is the Homeland Security spokesperson, Michael Chetrof's claim: "We think of our traumatic and tragic events [like the fifth anniversary of September 11th] for a brief time and we get over it. These people [the Muslim fundamentalists] are still caught up in those events that happened over a thousand years ago. These people have a different mentality." Additional informationNotes on contributorsShahla TalebiShahla Talebi, a native of Iran, came to the United States in 1994, and after getting a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, she obtained an M.A. and Ph.D., also in Sociocultural Anthropology, from Columbia University. She is the author of Ghosts of Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran, and is an assistant professor at Arizona State University. She is currently working on a monograph on discourses and practices of self-sacrifice and martyrdom, primarily in post-revolutionary Iran.