teams supervise public places and give guidance (ershad) and correction (eslah). An annual report delivered during the 1995 week claims that the basijis have “managed to give oral guidance to about 1,889,000 people whose families have expressed satisfaction with the constructive move by the basij.”27 In official speeches basijis are thanked on behalf of families whose “immoral youth” have been guided and corrected by them.
TABLE 2. SCHEDULE OF DEMONSTRATIONS AND MANEUVERS, AMR-E BE M’AROUF VA NAHI AZ MONKAR (1999)
The basiji play prominent parts in the maintenance of public Islamic order. Alongside these groups, the police devote a large part of their forces to dealing with “moral issues.” I use the term “moral police” to refer to this part of the police. “Cultural crime” is not very precisely defined in Iranian law but is constituted by any act deemed to be against the cultural principles of the country. Due to this lack of precision, the application of the law regarding “cultural crimes” is left to the discretion of the moral police on the streets. Alongside the permanently patrolling moral police, the basijis sporadically take over the streets and public places to fight against “cultural corruption,” as illustrated in Table 2, which I found on a notice-board in a mosque.
The Islamic Revolution has constructed its “art of government” by engineering a new social order based on Islamic family ethics and values. The social order in post-revolutionary Iran is indeed a juxtaposition of the patriarchal family structure, the morad/morid hierarchical ethos, and the police. Claiming to guard the “health and purity” of the nation as a “protecting” father guards his household, the Islamic governmentality arranged its “caring” politics by conducting its own “normalization” of the Muslim subject. This politics is based on modes of disciplining—e.g., the “panopticon” and punishment—and through the “pastoral modality of power,” guidance (ershad) and correction (eslah). Despite the surface of its politics—referring to “early Islam” and striving after the ideal ummat—the Islamic Republic has had to adapt its social order to the logic of a nation-state: a juristic system with strong elements of centralization and codification, a centrally controlled mass media and education system. The next chapter deals with how this social order has been embodied in individuals in their everyday lives.
Chapter 2
The Aesthetics of Authority
A prisoner’s meekness is a prison’s pride.
—Vladimir Nabokov
Strange times, my dear!
And they chop smiles off lips
songs off the mouth.
We should hide joy in the larder.
—Ahmad Shamloo
In order to understand the criminalization of youth culture, we have to explore the aesthetics of authority, which have produced the notion of bidard youth. A crucial aspect of the post-revolutionary social order is the hegemonic discourse of self-abasement. An overwhelmingly religious Revolution has sought to sacrifice the self for a “higher value.” Its mobilizing ideology (as I shall show in this chapter) is grounded in an “aesthetic of the modest self” and a “culture of sadness,” both profoundly rooted in the Iranian/Shiite tradition. The order of things is designed to be sustained by the Iranian self through mechanisms of normative modesty and politics of emotion.
In Shiite Iranian culture the self is understood in terms of the dichotomies of ’oumq/sæth (depth/surface) and sanggin/sæbouk (weighty/light). An ’amiq (profound) and sanggin (weighty) person is quiet, gentle, serious, and thoughtful. A sæthi (shallow) and sæbouk (light) person is playful, unserious, childish, and joyful. The personal character most valued in Iran is quiet and gentle, demonstrating nejabat (modesty) by conspicuous self-abasement. The immense value of the “modest self” is also reflected in the Persian language.
In his study of language and power in Iran, William Beeman indicates how Persian pronouns and verbs correspond with basic orientations in social relations. He argues that Persian interpersonal discourse is based on relationships of inequality and a process of “other-raising” versus “self-lowering.” Basically, in interpersonal interaction “one uses terms that serve to place oneself in an inferior status and the other person in a superior one. . . . Thus self-reference may use the expression bandeh (slave) in place of the neutral pronoun man (I)” (Beeman 1986: 16). Similarly, there are two versions of the verb “to say” (goftan): farmoudan (to command) is used for others and ‘arz kardan (the self-lowering version of the verb) for oneself. In Persian, it is “you mifarmaeid” and “I ‘arz mikonam.” This principle of “self-lowering” is the core of ta‘arof, a major code of communication among Iranians.1 The accomplished use of ta‘arof is taken as a sign of social sophistication, while an inability to observe the rules of ta‘arof in interaction is indicative of social ineptness. “Ta‘arof is valued because it is viewed as an expression of selflessness and humility” (Beeman 2001: 47). This favored self-abasement is also expressed by many Iranians in their choice of modest names for children; for example, a not unusual name for men is Gholam (slave), which is often combined with the names of Imams, like Gholam-Hossein (Hossein’s slave) or Gholam-Ali (Ali’s slave).
The norm of modesty is well expressed in veiling as a form of highly valued self-effacement. The highly regarded personal quality of being mahjoub means to be both veiled and modest. Another feature of this social ethic is to value grief. A person’s capacity to experience and express grief is an indication of his/her “deep” and “weighty” character. The verbs gham khordan or ghosseh khordan (to eat sorrow, to grieve) also mean “to care” and “to be concerned.” The hegemonic ideal of noble suffering and normatively desired dysphoria is best expressed in Persian as sokhtan va sakhtan (burning and enduring). The ideal self is well acquainted with sorrow.
The experience of sadness, loss, melancholy, and depression is rooted in two primary meaning contexts in Iranian culture: one associated with an understanding of the person or self, the other with a deep Iranian vision of the tragic, expressed in religion, romance and passion, and in interpretation of history and social reality. (Good et al. 1985: 385)
An emulation of sorrow is based on pre-Islamic mythology, in classical Persian poetry, and Iranian interpretations of history. Primarily, however, it relates to the central Iranian religious traditions and the tragedy of Karbala (Good et al. 1985: 387).
What follows is a discussion of how the new regime in Iran has used these symbolic resources to implant the desired social order in its subjects. Articulated as resistance to the consumer culture (farhang-e masrafi) and “Weststruckness” that characterized the pre-Revolutionary, West-oriented Shah era, the contemporary Islamic order builds on an aestheticization of modesty manipulated through three mechanisms: a Revolutionary romanticization of poverty; veiling practices; and the emotionalization of politics.
Consumption and Purity
As will be shown below, both Islamist and secular intellectuals in Iran have regarded consumption as a primary cause of corruption, self-alienation, and dependence on neocolonial capitalism. They argue that in a consumer society there is no place for native identity, authentic culture, or morality. Throughout his book Gharbzadegi (especially
