Chapters Islamic Cultural and Media Policy: Revolutionary Reformations
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Chapters Islamic Cultural and Media Policy: Revolutionary Reformations The Islamic Revolution and a Cultural Disappearance On 26 February 1979, only two weeks after the victory of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini's office announced that the Family Protection Law was to be abrogated. On 3 March, it was announced that women would be barred from becoming judges. On 6 March, Khomeini said in a speech that women should wear the veil (hejab) at work. Later that month, beaches and sports events were segregated and, a few weeks later, coeducation was banned. Soon, the revolutionary regime banned the use of western personal names, and removed from public places any references to previous monarchs and their legacies. As the most visible sign of radical cultural transformations, a traditional gendered dress code institutionalized and enforced: for men, ties and short-sleeved shirts in public were banned - a tie-less shirt buttoned at the neck and several days' growth of beard symbolized an ideal or officially-favoured youth (keeping the face clean shaven instead of wearing a beard was considered as transgression of Islamic morality and tendency to western immorality), and for women, they were prevented to appear without veil in public (light-coloured cloths were not tolerated, while black chador was presented as women's ideal cover); thus, fokol-keravati - dandy tie-wearer - and bi-hejab and bad-hejab - non-veiled and ill-veiled - became the most telling slurs that the religious regime employed against the secular men and women. In the name of 'public chastity' people were subjected to strict surveillance either by police 95 patrolling the streets or, later, by 'promoters of good and forbidders of evil' (the Islamic revolutionary groups composed of politically active and militant youths), and every couple had to explain and justify their relationship to them. Obviously, the ground for such organized endeavours was prepared by the Islamic cultural attacks to secular life styles in mass media. For example, Zahra Rahnavard, a pro-Shariati revolutionary and the editor of Ettelaat e Banovan (Women's Ettelaat), in a series of articles in Ettelaat newspaper and its index, started to argue for a reduction in women's working hours and their return to their home 'primary tasks', referring back to the enforced unveiling of women by Reza Shah in 1920, concluded that the Muslim women should wear the veil to regain their lost 'identity'; in a serial articles titled 'Colonial Roots of the Abolition of Hejab' in July 1980, she wrote: 'Yes, we can use the hejab as an anti-colonial weapon against these looters [the Pahlavi's protectors]. That is exactly why the planners behind the Shah prevented veiled women's entry into universities and offices. And that is why the raising of this issue, the wearing of the veil as an anti-colonial dress, although I don't agree with the particular way in which it is done at the moment, has so angered these female servants of America. They protest against it to please their masters. This is precisely the protest of America that is voiced through its internal allies.' (1) Likewise, gender segregation and restriction in education, sport, and leisure were followed by banning 'non-Islamic' entertainment and recreations such as discotheques, bars, night clubs, and casinos; 'immoral' and 'harmful' books by 'anti-Islamist' Iranian and non-Iranian authors were strictly banned; music stores were closed while pop songs were prohibited and popular singers had to leave the scenes; wine shops had to disappear as any kind of producing, distributing, selling, and drinking of any alcoholic beverage was considered a serious transgression of the islamic law; cinemas were 'cleansed' of Hollywood movies and western-styled icons, the national radio and television were 'purified' from 'trivial' and 'banal' contents, and 'pro-Pahlavi' and 'pro- American' producers and presenters were dismissed. Of course, the new regulations 96 covered not only public scene, but also private space and social life form as well as individual life style: from recommending to avoid chair and table and to sit on the ground to banning some fishes and frozen chicken, they condemned the western way of life as something abhorrent and detestable, considered it as a sign of idolatrous luxury with a negative cultural connotation rather than a sense of civilization. Moreover, as a sign of longer-term cultural revolutionary reforms, official calendar of Iranian social life was rearranged so as to not only erase anniversaries of the ancient monarchist and pre- Islamic nationalist functions and festivals, but also include the Islamic lamentations and revolutionary events as 'divine' dates and days - even though the extremists' proposition for removing Nowruz (the national celebration of the ancient new year) from the official calendar were not approved as well as the other Islamist suggestions for converting the ancient ruins of Persepolis into a public urinal and banning the Shahname and so on. (2) It was no surprise that, as the Shah's failure to wage a successful campaign to divide his opposition along ideological and cultural lines was symptomatic of his inability to contend with the Islamic Revolution, all of his enemies were united under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini, an Islamic icon who wanted to Islamize the Iranian territory and beyond. As I indicated earlier, the Shah seemed totally misguided in identification of his real adversary forces; even in the ending years of 1970s, in his last chances for paying attention to actual thought and taste of his own people while the country was sinking into anti-western Islamism, the megalomaniac monarch, with his heroic illusion of creating a Iranian civilization superior to the western world, was simply eager to lecture westerners on 'how they were not working hard enough, not paying enough for oil, not conserving valuable resources, not teaching the virtues of social responsibility, and, by not disciplining their youngsters, producing human monsters like those in the popular film Clockwork Orange.' (3) Soon, the nationalist Aryamehr and his imperial orders were to be replaced by the Islamist Imam whose 'divine decrees' were signed by his Arabic name in Arabic dates. Not only the Iranian 'national identity' was to be undermined as something historically reproachable in several ways, but the very notion of Mellat (a 97 nation-based society) was to be faded against the united Islamic Ommat (a conference of iVIuslim communities) while the new regime, with its strict stress on the 'religious identity,' was ready to 'export' its revolution by propagating its internationalist-leftist Islamic ideology by means of preventing individual autonomy. As the course of cultural clashes revealed, Khomeini's 'Pure Mohammadean Islam' had no enough room for the Shah's 'Authentic Iranian Culture'. Although, in the years of his exile, Khomeini provisionally promised a free political and social system for the future of Iran, and appointed some moderate liberal figures in revolutionary transitory government, it took only a few months to erase liberal figures and to annihilate western forms of life from Iranian political and social scene, as he launched an aggressive systematic suppression of nationalist aspirations and a massive introduction and imposition of the new Islamic life style. As a matter of fact, during 1979 to 1983, Islamization of Iran was the most persistent ideological agenda for the leader who often declared that his biggest fear for the Islamic country is not any American's invasion but the cultural dependency to them. Hence, the absolute source of political power one/the supreme spiritual power, Khomeini thereupon rushed to replace secular nationalism by religious spiritualism, and westernization and modernization by arabication and Islamization, to the extent that the 'Islamic' became a fixed adjective for all the events that were to be happened in the 'Islamic Iran'. Since he had truly realized that the Islamic regime as a pervasive system of thinking and governing needs a new cultural identity, fundamentally different from western-oriented Iranian national identity, Khomeini was violently inflexible against the previous profane life styles which were dominated in urban areas in Iran during 1970s. To purify the society from its secular pollution and purge the public scene from sign and symbol of such a profane promiscuity was the first necessary step to open the space for Islamic propaganda and proclamations in public and then to internalize the religious agenda in privacy. In effect, the most manifested images of the Islamic Revolution's anti-imperialist scenario were its struggle against the so-called 'cultural imperialism' with the United 98 states of America as the 'Great Satan' in its centre. Parallel to rapid action of the revolutionary tribunals for the punishment and execution of prominent high-ranking officials of ancien regime, from Amir Abbas Hoveyda, the former prime minister, and six cabinet ministers (of whom one was the woman who had held the ministry of education, accused of nourishing 'cultural imperialism') to military officers, including not only generals such as Nematollah Nasiri (the head of SAVAK) but also captains such as Monir Taheri (who was charged with involvement in Cinema Rex event), (4) imprisonment of the less dangerous political adversaries and public confessions and recantations of rival revolutionaries, and vast confiscation and expropriation of Pahlavi- related foundations and families, (5) the Islamic Republic led an unannounced cultural invasion to conquer the biggest battlefield and to win the civil cultural war. Since Islamization as religious leftism set the ideological agenda for the revolutionary state, a wide range of social and individual matters, from educational system and school textbooks to family and gender relations, was considered as an area to be regularized and Islamized as such: by the name of 'Islamic values,' the aim was to cure the Iranian 'alienated society', infected by recent western cultural conquest, and the remedy was to be delivered as a religious ideology of another alien culture that had captured the country 14 centuries ago.