The
Islamic Republic’s Failed Quest for the Spotless
City
Azam
Khatam
(Azam Khatam is an urban sociologist, a member
of the Iran Sociological Association and a member
of the editorial board of Goft-o-gu.)
A
bathroom sign at Persepolis. Contrary to
myth, the Islamic Republic mandates only
that women wear a manteau and headscarf,
not the chador. (Axel Schmidt) |
It
is characteristic of modern social revolutions
to seek moral improvement of the population,
as well as redress of the injustices of the ancien
regime. In 1794, Paris echoed with calls to “righteousness”;
in 1917, the Bolsheviks denounced the bourgeois
decadence of the czarist era. For Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini and other clerical leaders, the Islamic
Revolution of 1979 was not only a seizure of
political power, but also the moment of revival
of Islamic morality, which had been systematically
weakened by the secular Pahlavi regime. The clerics
set out to build in Iran “a spotless society.”[1]
Since
its inception, the Islamic Republic has labored
tirelessly to indoctrinate society with a state-sponsored
Islamic ethical vision, through the education
system, state-owned broadcast media, propaganda
films known as “holy defense cinema” and a host
of coercive measures. In 1980, the regime infamously
launched a “cultural revolution” aimed at intellectual
elites, closing the universities for three years,
and reopening them only after extensive purges
of the faculty, administration and student body.
But
the lives of ordinary Iranians have been far
more deeply affected by a parallel project, based
on the Qur’anic verse “commanding what is just
and forbidding what is wrong” (amr-e be ma‘ruf va
nahy-e az monkar), a basic tenet of Islamic
jurisprudence and a moral obligation for every
Muslim. In most times and places in Islamic history,
this formulation has been akin to the concept
of “personal responsibility” propagated by social
conservatives in the contemporary United States—an
exhortation to industry, propriety and clean
living that is, in the end, up to the individual
to heed or ignore. Under the Islamic Republic,
it was to be up to the state. For two decades,
a special morality police rigidly enforced “Islamic”
codes of behavior in the streets, workplaces
and parks of Iranian cities.
By
the end of the 1990s, it was clear that the morality
police had lost its power to intimidate. Increasingly
youthful and educated, Iranians came to make
a clear distinction between Muslim religious
identity and the claim that Islam is a basis
for an alternative social and political order.
And they would simply decide for themselves what
was pious personal behavior and what was not.
Sights that once incurred the wrath of the virtue
squads—forelocks poking out from under women’s
headscarves, satellite dishes and weekend parties
of young friends—were now regarded as ordinary
aspects of life, especially in big cities like
Tehran. Women, in particular, kept expanding
the definition of the ordinary by dint of their
actions, working outside the home, exercising
in parks, walking the streets in colorful dress
and running businesses in the male preserve of
the bazaar.[2] Young
people were not necessarily becoming secular.
The same man might have a taste for Western music
and for innovative hymns of mourning for the
martyrdom of Imam Husayn; the same woman might
have a keen interest in fashion and believe in
a religious duty to cover her hair. Youth turned
the occasion of Ashoura, when Shi‘i Muslims commemorate
the death of Husayn, into a mix of sacred ritual
with provocative fashion, flirting and a festival
atmosphere.
Conservative
hardliners were resentful of the slippage in
enforcement of their puritanical standards, a
slippage they regarded as a betrayal of the revolution
as well as an offense against Islam. Their presidential
candidate in 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, ran what
has been called a campaign of “stealthy radicalism,”
pledging to restore moral rectitude by example
and not by force. Once he was elected, of course,
he cracked down. But the children of the revolution
no longer fear or respect the cultural code that
Ahmadinejad seeks to reimpose—and, indeed, they
have defied it.
Revolutionary
Piety
In
April 1979, Khomeini ordered the Revolutionary
Council to create a morality bureau (dayereh
amr-e be ma‘ruf) that would uproot corrupt
pre-revolutionary cultural habits. Initially,
this bureau may have held some populist appeal,
in that Khomeini hinted it would be a people’s
watchdog in the corridors of power. In a May 1979
speech, the ayatollah said: “The morality bureau
will be independent of the state, so as to monitor
it, and no one, not even the highest authorities,
will be exempt from its supervision.”[3] Indeed, Article 8 of the Islamic
Republic’s constitution refers to amr-e be
ma‘ruf—the shorthand term for public morality—as
a key basis of social relations and a mutual
obligation of ordinary citizens and government.
In practice, enforcement of amr-e be ma‘ruf has
been directed overwhelmingly at the citizenry—and
in particular at women.
A
morality police unit was established in Tehran
in 1979. One of its first acts was to demolish
the old red-light district of Tehran, removing
2,700 prostitutes.[4] In
the ensuing months, thousands of people were
arrested for such “moral crimes” as extra-marital
sexual relationships, alcohol consumption, gambling
and pederasty, and hundreds were executed. More
liberal Revolutionary Council members objected
to the excesses, as well as the unaccountability
of the morality bureau to the Council, and the
Revolutionary Court briefly disbanded the bureau,
citing unauthorized arrests and confiscation
of personal wealth. The bureau was resurrected
in 1981, this time as a special court for prosecuting
cases of “prohibited activities.” In the same
year, the Islamic Republic mandated that women
wear modest “Islamic” attire. (Contrary to persistent
myth, the law in Iran has never required women
to don the full chador, though they are
strongly encouraged to do so. In practice, “Islamic”
attire has meant a variety of manners of dress,
typically a manteau covering the arms
and a headscarf. The chador is enforced,
however, in mosques, judiciary buildings and
other public spaces, including on some university
campuses.)
At
first, the power of the morality court was absolute.
Then, in 1982, the first Islamic penal law was
ratified by Parliament. The law codified the
prohibition of “non-Islamic” dress for women.
Article 102 declared that women dressed “improperly”
in public would receive up to 74 lashes, a penalty
only softened in 1996, when it was changed to
jail time or a fine. This clause of the penal
law remains the only legal instrument for implementing amr-e
be ma‘ruf. With codification, the bureaucratic
state sought not only to restrain judicial autonomy,
but also to construct an Islamic identity through
threat of sanction. In the 1980s, the state promoted
a culture of self-sacrifice and obedience, and
any resistance on the part of women to strictures
upon dress was treated as counter-revolutionary
treason. Even as the Iran-Iraq war raged, prominent
conservative figures took the line that the struggle
over moral issues should not take a back seat.[5] Authoritarian
enforcement of amr-e be ma‘ruf created
what Roxanne Varzi has called a “public secret,”[6] by which many urbanites hid their
“non-Islamic” beliefs and habits at home, while
appearing to be properly Islamic in public.
The
Post-War Era
Authorities
begin a nationwide program to enforce
“Islamic” dress codes, Tehran, April
23, 2007. (document IRAN/Mohammad Berno) |
In
the late 1980s, morality policing entered a second
phase with the formation of a new state “headquarters”
(setad) for enforcing amr-e be ma‘ruf and
the return of thousands of Basiji (voluntary
militia) activists from the war front. The Basij,
initially created to shield the Islamic Republic
from internal security threats, was now assigned
the role of ensuring that Islamic ethics were
observed. Basiji checkpoints in the streets gradually
turned to the task of imposing Islamic codes,
peaking in 1993, when Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
Khomeini’s successor as Supreme Leader, espied
a “cultural invasion” of Western, secular and
counter-revolutionary influences. The state-owned
press put the number of Basijis thus engaged
at anywhere from 230,000 to 3.5 million.[7]
The
target population was no longer the secular Iranians
who had criticized the revolution in the 1980s,
but the masses of urban middle-class youth who
were born and raised under the Islamic Republic,
and had supposedly eaten and breathed nothing
but revolutionary Islamic ideals. Patrolling setad units
harassed, humiliated and arrested young men and
women in streets, workplaces, universities and
other public places, accusing them of moral misconduct.
Meanwhile,
the face of the capital was changing under Gholamhossein
Karbaschi, the mayor from 1989 to 1998. In the
first half of the 1990s, Tehran witnessed an
explosion of new construction, financed partly
by the municipality, which levied steep new taxes
on commercial developers, and partly by the developers,
for whose benefit the city bent zoning laws.[8] The
number of parks doubled, and 74 new cultural
centers appeared in less than five years.[9] Meanwhile, the proliferation of shopping malls
reflected the decline of revolutionary fervor,
with its collective ideals, as individual consumerism
took root. Eventually, the new urban policy became
the focal point of a confrontation between the
“reformist” figures associated with President
Mohammad Khatami and traditional conservatives.
Mayor Karbaschi’s Hamshahri, the most
popular newspaper at the time, endorsed Khatami’s
presidential run in 1997. The next year, he was
tried and imprisoned on corruption charges related
to the methods behind Tehran’s urban renewal.
But
the modernization and revitalization of Tehran’s
public spaces reflected powerful desires among
city residents, desires that also hindered the
implementation of amr-e be ma‘ruf. The
post-revolutionary technocratic elite, for instance,
having made fortunes through political connections,
wanted to indulge in conspicuous consumption.
The generation of youths that had grown up under
the Islamic Republic were highly frustrated by
the limits imposed by scarce resources and exclusive
policies upon their life chances. They understood
the policies as an effort to marginalize those
who were insufficiently “Islamic.” Public opinion
on cultural values began to fragment. The families
of war martyrs, who tended to be of humbler origins,
supported the fight to safeguard the moral promise
of the revolution as well as their protected
access to state-sponsored privileges. Meanwhile,
the modern middle classes were eager to make
a clean break with the “republic of piety.”
The
extension of setad activities into government
offices and the provinces intensified official
disagreements. Conservatives, raising the specter
of cultural invasion, accused the more pragmatic
Khatami camp of being indifferent to the ethical
promise of the revolution. They mounted attacks
in the press on Karbaschi’s cultural centers
in Tehran.
As
minister of culture and Islamc guidance in 1992,
Khatami ratified the Principles of Cultural Policy,
which became the reformist charter for cultural
reform. The charter advocates relatively tolerant
policies and refers not at all to amr-e be
ma‘ruf. On the contrary, it calls for government
institutions to restrict the selective imposition
of severe religious views upon the public, for
fear of negative social consequences. In 1999,
an Islamic institute at Tehran University sponsoring
research on amr-e be ma‘ruf proposed that
“the political system should avoid imposing on
people too much ideological pressure, too many
restrictive codes and too much propaganda based
on religious principles.”[10]
The
ascendancy of the reformist bloc in Parliament,
and the associated intellectual and cultural
ferment, effectively ended the second stage of
moral policing in the name of amr-e be ma‘ruf.
From 1996 to 2005 the Basij checkpoints were
fewer and further between, and the government
told the setad it lacked legal authority
for its indiscriminate patrols.[11] Setad authorities also lost their control over believers
in faraway cities. The discourse of “cultural
invasion” through communications technology and
mass media was replaced by Khatami’s talk of
the “dialogue of civilizations.” People expressed
their will for cultural change through street
celebrations, starting with the victory of the
national soccer team over Australia in the 1997
World Cup qualifying match. These celebrations
were a cultural turning point, since such “non-Islamic”
emotions of jubilation had not been expressed
in public since the revolution.”
Yet
the hardliners did not simply acquiesce in their
marginalization. Renegade “operational teams”
of the setad meted out “Islamic punishment,”
as with the serial killings of women accused
of being prostitutes in Mashhad and Kerman in
2002 and 2003.
The
New Puritanism
In
2003, even as many conservatives in Parliament
dropped revolutionary-era rhetoric in recognition
that Iranian society has changed, the hardliners
consolidated themselves in a coalition of more
than 18 groups, some of which had been active
since the 1990s, and others of which were new
associations organized by clerics and officials.
Although the coalition had ties to traditional
conservatives in the bazaar and among clergy
in Qom and Tehran, it aimed primarily to give
voice to the less privileged among Islamist ranks,
including the radicals marginalized under Khatami
and the urban low-income strata.[12] The hardliners turned amr-e be ma‘ruf into a mobilizing
slogan for radical Islamist forces as the reformists’
moment waned. Later, they used amr-e be ma‘ruf to
gain leverage in their political conflicts with
reformists and even more pragmatic conservatives.
Conservatives
took over Tehran’s city council in 2003, Parliament
in 2004 and the presidency in 2005. From their
first move back into power, they upped the volume
of their demands for aggressive policies to control
public life, directing harsh criticisms at the
laxity of the reformists to prepare society for
the coming retrenchment in cultural policies.
The judiciary announced another initiative to
create a force responsible for policing “moral
crimes” in November 2004. Committees answering
the force’s national command were to be formed
in each mosque, neighborhood, factory, school
and government office, with the task of implementing amr-e
be ma‘ruf. Several clergymen, including teachers
in the Qom seminaries responsible for training
judges since the revolution, mildly protested
the idea of placing such a body under judicial
supervision.[13] Independent
lawyers also pointed to the clear conflict of
interest, as well as the lack of parliamentary
approval for the plan.[14]
As
the 2005 presidential campaign got underway,
the leader of the hardline coalition, Ahmadinejad,
promised his followers a new age of economic
justice and Islamic piety. The two components
of his populist platform were harmonious, even
if they aimed at different political targets.
With his denunciations of corruption and promises
to put the fruits of oil wealth on the humblest
of dinner tables, Ahmadinejad cast himself in
subtle, but clear opposition to Islamist power
brokers such as former President Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani,
a founder of the Islamic Republic who wound up
as his rival in the presidential runoff. At the
same time, he stoked resentment of the reformists
among the more ideological sectors of his base,
such as war martyrs’ families and Basiji families,
by decrying reformist disregard for amr-e
be ma‘ruf and vowing as well to crack down
on conspicuous consumption. The 2005 presidential
election was the first since the revolution in
which candidates felt compelled to declaim a
“mild” position on veiling. Wary of being labeled
a fundamentalist, Ahmadinejad promised that he
would not “interfere with the choice of hairstyle
of young people.” But after he won, and all the
branches of government were back in conservative
hands, the conservatives resumed attempts to
discipline public behavior with the language
of amr-e be ma‘ruf.
In
May 2005, Tehran’s conservative city council
called in the police commander and blasted him
for excessive tolerance of “inappropriately veiled”
women in public. A few days later, special morality
patrols reappeared in the streets, for the first
time employing women officers.[15] In August of that year,
the arch-conservative newspaper Keyhan demanded
that the government step up its efforts to enforce amr-e
be ma‘ruf: “Why do secular states expend
such great effort to protect their youth from
moral decadence while our Islamic state is painfully
indifferent and silent toward the degradation
of ethics among our youth?”[16]
The
same month, the city council ratified a document
called “Strategies to Extend Piety,” mandating
still more bureaucratic organs, including a coordination
committee drawn from various ministries and executive
bodies, that would cooperate with police to punish
violators of “moral codes.” By the spring of
2006, the morality police were once again ubiquitous,
arresting or intimidating young women and men
for their dress and conduct, confiscating satellite
dishes and punishing shopkeepers who were selling
“inappropriate” articles of clothing. At the
same time, several cultural institutes formed
during the reformist period were closed. Others
were severely restricted; the budgets of cultural
centers in Tehran were cut by half, while more
funding was provided to religious institutions.
Within
the conservative coalition, there were disagreements
over amr-e be ma‘ruf. The director of
the parliamentary cultural commission mounted
what he called a “fundamentalist critique of
fundamentalism,” pointing to the inefficacy of
past attempts to police morality. Another conservative
said enforcement efforts should be “soft, not
hard.” As conservative intellectuals left the
coalition in protest of the morality campaign,
more power accrued to the radicals.
In
the spring of 2007, the most extreme conservatives
in the Tehran courts designed a “public safety
program” (tarh-e amniat-e ejtema‘e) aimed
at allaying public fears about increased consumption
of drugs, thuggish behavior among youth, rape
and burglary—but also at enforcing amr-e be
ma‘ruf. As it was nominally a normal anti-crime
initiative, the program was assigned to the regular
municipal police by the president. The move was
in keeping with Ahmadinejad’s “stealthy radicalism”
during the campaign, for he sought to assure
Tehranis that the regular police, not the notorious
Basij, would be the enforcers. As a police commander
told the Fars News Agency, “We didn’t use Basij
forces, because we assumed there would be more
resistance from the people.”
The
Basij, however, criticized police for their “mild”
methods. By August, the Basij had been invited
to take over operations targeting drug dealers
and gangs of robbers. Basij commanders, embedded
in the state bureaucracy, used the chance to
proclaim themselves the saviors of political
stability of the Islamic Republic in the cities.
They inveighed against a “cultural NATO” and
a “conspiracy of foreign forces” seeking to overthrow
the Islamic Republic through the propagation
of “non-Islamic” behavior among youth and women.
The mix of cooperation and competition between
the Basij and police ended in a kind of military
occupation of cities in the spring of 2008. Patrols
criss-crossed each of Tehran’s 23 main thoroughfares,
where confrontations between police and citizens
over “moral issues” were a daily occurrence.
The
fresh campaign was vicious in its treatment of
young people dressed in “non-Islamic” fashion
and its harassment of alleged arazel va obash,
a derogatory phrase meaning drug dealers, addicts
and thieves. In the first four months, nearly
1 million people were publicly humiliated,
or “instructed,” in the streets and 40,000 were
arrested. Of those detained in 2007, 85 percent
were youths aged 16 to 26, and 10 percent
were accused drug dealers and thieves, 35 of
whom were executed within a month of their arrest.
Reports on the program’s progress were released
to the press as a warning to all. Investigative
reporters revealed that an “instruction” center
for addicts in Kahrizak, on the southern fringe
of Tehran, was turned into a temporary prison,
where “criminals” were severely tortured for
one or two months, without trial, to terrorize
them prior to their release.
This
new puritanism disguised as a “public safety
program” lifted the most fanatical elements of
the hardline conservative firmament to the commanding
heights of cultural policymaking in the Islamic
Republic, and turned amr-e be ma‘ruf into
a major challenge for the government, at a time
when it already faces crises in economic and
international policy. Human rights lawyers and
activist women started a round of protests against
the “public safety program” in 2007. The feminist
website Meydan Zanan took the initiative, publishing
news of street demonstrations, human rights activities
and government debates on the issue. At the same
time 20 independent lawyers filed a complaint
against police with the highest court with jurisdiction
over government agencies, claiming that the “public
safety program” is illegal because it is not
included in routine police tasks and it lacks
parliamentary sanction. One year later, the court
rendered its verdict that “there is no sanction
or legal requirement” for the “public safety
program.” In the summer of 2008, the main independent
student organization, Tahkim Vahdat, initiated
a series of public meetings on “violations of
human rights by the public safety program” in
Tehran and other cities. In most of these activities,
there was reference to principles of human rights
and the protections of personal freedom outlined
in the constitution.[17]
In
late January 2009, the new minister of interior
and the deputy police commander suggested that
the “public safety program” violates the citizenship
rights of the people.[18] Regular police patrols have
decreased markedly in the streets of the capital.
At the same time, Basij commanders and others
among the arch-conservatives dream of institutionalizing
the agencies enforcing amr-e be ma‘ruf as
a separate ministry[19] and of making amr-e be ma‘ruf the basis of the penal
system. Already, toward the end of 2008, the
Basij had declared that its enforcement activities
would intensify in redress of the “retreat” of
the municipal police.[20] The failure of the “public safety program”
is another piece of evidence for the proposition
that present-day Iran is de facto a post-Islamist
society, a place “where, following a phase of
experimentation, the appeal, energy and sources
of legitimacy of Islamism get exhausted even
among its once ardent supporters.”[21] During the 2005 presidential
campaign, Elahe Kolaei, spokeswoman for the reformist
candidate Mostafa Moin, referred passingly to
his opposition to mandatory veiling. In January
2009, the Coalition of Nationalist Religious
Parties, a collection of liberals and social
democrats with active “Islamist feminists” among
its members, has published a statement calling
for the “remedy of discrimination everywhere”
and asking that obligatory veiling be abandoned.
This is the first time since the consolidation
of the Islamic Republic that a political party
has taken this step. The events of early 2009
mark both the end of the third phase of the attempts
of the state to impose amr-e be ma‘ruf upon
an increasingly recalcitrant population and an
unprecedented degree of political fragmentation
within the power centers of the Islamic Republic.
Endnotes
[1] Keyhan,
December 12, 1981.
[2] See
Asef Bayat, “A Women’s Non-Movement: What It
Means To Be a Woman Activist in an Islamic State,” Comparative
Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle
East 27/1 (2007).
[3] Ettelaat,
April 4, 1979.
[4] Ettelaat,
February 20, 1980.
[5] Ettelaat,
April 21, 1986.
[6] Roxanne
Varzi, Warring Souls (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2000).
[7] The
lower number appeared in Keyhan, November 11,
1995, and the higher number in Ettelaat,
February 5, 1997.
[8] For
details, see Kaveh Ehsani, “Municipal Matters:
The Urbanization of Consciousness and Political
Change in Tehran,” Middle East Report 212
(Fall 1999).
[9] Yas-e
No, November 22, 2003.
[10] Jahad
Daneshgahi, A Study on the Conditions of Revitalization
of the Tradition of “Commanding the Just and
Forbidding the Wrong,” (1999), p. 138. [Persian]
[11] Sharq,
September 8, 2003.
[12] See
Mohammad Maljoo, “Political Economy of the Rise
of Ahmadinejad’s Government,” Goft-o-gu 49
(August 2007). [Persian]
[13] See,
for example, Laila Asadi, “On Legal Aspects of
Veiling in Iran,” a paper published by the research
section of the Hozeh Elmieh Qom, and accessible
online at http://www.porsojoo.com/fa/node/73527.
[Persian]
[14] Aftab
Yazd, December 12, 2004.
[15] Hamehan,
June 14, 2005.
[16] Keyhan,
August 14, 2005.
[17] For
more on the protest campaign, see the Meydan
Zanan website at http://meydaan.org/campaign.aspx?cid=55.
[Persian]
[18] Etemad,
January 29, 2009.
[19] Iran,
February 5, 2009.
[20] Etemad,
December 16, 2008.
[21] See
Asef Bayat, “What Is Post-Islamism?” ISIM
Review 16 (Autumn 2005).
