her mother, she looks down shyly. The children are sitting on their heels (du zanou), a position showing respect to their parents. An interesting aspect of the illustrations is their body language, which indicates the modesty expected from the young people. Sitting on one’s heels (du zanou neshastan) is a gesture whereby one lowers oneself and acknowledges a superior other. The common Iranian expression “kneeling out of politeness” (zanou-ye adab zadan) demonstrates a relationship between “sitting on one’s heels,” “good manners,” and modesty. In front of Allah, this gesture is part of daily prayers.
Female modesty is confirmed by veiling, but normative modesty defines its own fashion for men as well; khaki pants, military overcoat, boots, a Palestinian shawl, and an unshaven two- to three-day beard, testify to one’s neglect of the worldly life. This dress code gives one a “hezbollahi look” (qiyafeh hezbollahi). Paradoxically, however, the Revolutionary aesthetic has also favored American and German military overcoats.6 The Revolutionary morale has forged a kind of cultural capital, based on a working-class lifestyle, a simple appearance, and unpretentiousness. To present oneself as simple and indigent is seen as a measure of one’s commitment to the Revolution. Such an aestheticization of poverty can also be traced among secular leftist movements in Iran.7 In encounters with representatives of the authorities, “hezbollahi style” and use of Arabic/Islamic phrases play a significant role. Many times I asked my informants why they did not shave, and they answered that they were going to visit certain authorities. Dara said that when he was going to visit an authority he wore the oldest and most ragged clothes he had, adding half-jokingly, “When I attend a meeting at university I wear the dirtiest socks I have. The more they stink, the more I look like a revolutionary.” The “hezbollahi style” evokes the “proletarian style” promoted in the communist states.8 The Islamic Republic, however, has fashioned its own distinct “judgment of taste.”
BASIJI
The government’s ideal model for Iranian youth is the basiji, a modest, self-restrained (qanne), self-possessed (mattin) young man. He is “profound” (‘amiq), “weighty” (sangin), serious, and ready to sacrifice himself for Islam and the Revolution. The archetype of the basiji is Hossein Fahmideh, a thirteen-year-old basiji who at an early stage of the war destroyed an Iraqi tank by a suicide attack. Books retell his life story, and his picture is paraded on posters and stamps. Ayatollah Khomeini called him “the real leader.” After the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war in 1988 basijis somehow lost their significance. These men had left their school benches or jobs when they were still teenagers. They were seen as national heroes as long as the war lasted. They had sacrificed their careers, youth, friends, and frequently their health or parts of their body. Returning from the front, many basijis who came from poor backgrounds were disappointed to see that the original revolutionary ideas they had sacrificed themselves for were gone. An ideal basiji is modest in attitude and thereby spiritually rich but materially poor. “A rich basiji” is a contradiction in terms.
Nevertheless, sometimes the ideal necessitates a reforging of identity. Merhdad, a young basiji, comes close to pretending to be deprived. Merhdad is thirty years old and the only child of the family. He lives with his parents in the same alley where I resided during my fieldwork, in a wealthy neighborhood in North Tehran. His father is a well-off physician. Merhdad neither has nor needs an ordinary job. However, he has been active in the basij since the mid-1980s. While his father goes to his clinic in a suit and tie and his mother goes to meet her friends “not properly veiled,” Merhdad is always dressed as a hezbollahi. He goes to the mosque he belongs to unshaven and dressed in a white shirt hanging over his military pants.
In his case, this is not a matter of any generational revolt. I can see clearly that he likes his parents and respects them. Yet he is ashamed of belonging to a wealthy family. He never invites his basiji friends home. He told me how he had tried to hide his bourgeois background from other basijis:
The first month I joined the basij we went for a military training in the mountains. When we opened our lunch boxes I was embarrassed. All had simple cheese sandwiches except me. My mother had put rice and chicken in my box. The group leader said “We have a rich kid here.” It was embarrassing.
Merhdad told me that he sold the Peugeot his father had given him as a birthday present the previous year, to buy a second-hand Iranian-made Peykan. Merhdad wants to keep his family distant from his basiji comrades, because he knows that his family’s ostentatious lifestyle is seen by other basijis as “superficial bourgeois aesthetics,” which is in stark contrast to the ideology of the basij.
However, the majority of basijis come from the working class, and being basiji empowers them in the daily class conflicts on the Tehran streets. A former basiji from the working neighborhood Javadieh confessed:
It was just to have fun, to tease the rich sousol [effeminate] kids of north Tehran. With some other basiji friends we jumped in a car and drove to Shahrak-e Gharb or Miydan Mohseni. We put a “Stop, Check Point” sign up and annoyed “rich kids” in their khareji [foreign] cars. If one had a beautiful girl in his car we teased him even more. Sometimes if we did not like one, we cut his hair to belittle him before the girls.
For this young man as well for many others, basij has been a means to transgress the social hierarchy, albeit temporarily and symbolically. The state attempts to fit basijis into the educational system and the labor market by quotas and to retain their loyalty by granting them special privileges. They are given priority for subsidies for building houses or the hajj pilgrimage. Almost 40 percent of university places are reserved for basijis, their children, or the families of martyrs (Zahedi 2001: 119–20). This has widened the gap between basijis and other young persons who consider such favoritism to be discrimination.
A Veiled Society
Another side of the aesthetic of modesty has been the politics of veiling. The first stage was a project for the desexualization of society. Modesty and chastity are conflated in the Islamic notion of female virtue. Veiling is its instrument. Religions often regard sexuality as a menace and therefore repress it in order to keep people focused on salvation, and this view of what was necessary for the task of forming modest citizens has been shared by the Iranian clergy. Women are supposed to possess an uncontrollable sexual passion which is regarded as a threat to or calamity (fetneh) for the social order. Thus, sexuality is recognized only within the boundaries of permanent or temporary (mut‘a) marriage.9 In an ideal Islamic society the sphere of the family (the site of sexuality) should be separate from society. Such a separation purifies society from social corruption such as adultery and prostitution and takes the form of veiling, a responsibility that falls on women.
A woman’s beauty and sexuality are to be reserved for her husband. A woman is expected to make up and wear attractive clothes only for her husband’s gaze. It is women’s responsibility to ensure that their faces and bodies are not being watched by unrelated (namahram) people. Even sexual relations between spouses are regulated by Islam. Married couples should not have sex during the hajj pilgrimage or fasting, as it is thought to cause impurity, and such activities require prior ritual washing. A married couple may not hug or kiss in public, not even at their own wedding. Any sexual expression in public is discouraged. The preservation of “public chastity” (‘effat-e ‘omoumi) demands the absence of anything that can be associated with (female) sexuality.10
Desexualizing society has its roots in how sexuality is conceived in Iranian society. In Iranian culture, a beautiful woman can be admiringly described as a “calamity maker” (fetneh angiz) or “one who causes confusion in town” (shahrashob) (cf. Mernissi 1975). Interestingly the “calamity making” of women is inherently linked closely to their pattern of consumption.
