Placing Hospitality Iranian Citizens and Afghan Refugees in the City of Shiraz
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Placing Hospitality Iranian Citizens and Afghan Refugees in the City of Shiraz Elisabeth Jane Yarbakhsh May 2017 A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The Australian National University © Copyright by Elisabeth Jane Yarbakhsh, 2017 All Rights Reserved i Declaration I declare that this thesis is my own work. It contains no material that has been accepted for the award of any degree of a university or other institute of higher learning. This thesis contains no material previously published or written by any other person, other than where due acknowledgment has been made in the text. Elisabeth Yarbakhsh ii Acknowledgements The moment of sitting down at my desk to write these acknowledgments marks the end of a long journey. Often times it has felt a lonely journey and yet, on reflection, I realise it has been undertaken with the support, encouragement and companionship of numerous individuals. Many of those who contributed to my fieldwork in Iran cannot, for their own wellbeing, be mentioned by name. That they are not listed here in the acknowledgements should not be taken to indicate a lack of gratitude. I will make special reference to the fabulous crew in Marvdasht whose unwavering commitment to justice for Iran’s Afghan refugees was inspirational and who willingly shared their expertise with me. I am only sorry that circumstances have precluded me from foregrounding their work in this thesis. Much thanks to ‘Kobra’. Our serendipitous meeting in the village of Ghalat proved instrumental to my research. Wherever she and her children are now in the world I wish them all the very best and hope that the hospitality extended to me might be returned to them in some small measure. Thanks to my husband’s family in Shiraz for their hospitality in all its various guises. Special thanks to Tannaz Yarbakhsh for her assistance in Iran and for the help she provided in the last critical weeks of writing; Masoud Fakhrfeshani who went above and beyond the call of duty in his efforts to guide me through the labyrinthine bureaucracy of higher education in Iran; Tajolmalouk Dabiri Shirazi whose fearlessness was an asset in the field; and the late and greatly mourned Abdol Khalegh Yarbakhsh whose kindness and graciousness I will forever associate with the city of Shiraz. My sincere thanks to Amin Saikal and the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies, the Middle East and Central Asia (CAIS) at The Australian National University (ANU) for hosting me as a research student over a period of four years. Throughout this time my colleagues have been a source of support and intellectual stimulation. I would be remiss not to mention the late Jacky Sutton who was always generous in her advice and whose death had a profound impact on all of us at the Centre. iii I acknowledge the assistance and support of my supervisor Kirill Nourzhanov who has drawn on his remarkable breadth of knowledge to provide ideas for improvements and suggested sources of inspirational scholarship to stretch me beyond my comfort zone and keep me striving to the end. Thanks is owed to Melinda Hinkson for reading and providing timely feedback and encouragement. In many ways I can say that Melinda started me on the research journey and I am grateful that she has remained a part of it throughout. While undertaking my degree I was the recipient of the ANU Kathleen Woodroofe PhD Scholarship in the Humanities/Social Sciences. I am grateful for the financial support that made it possible to complete this research. I also received an Australian Government Research Training Program Fee-Offset Scholarship. Thanks to McComas Taylor who read early drafts of several chapters and provided helpful feedback. Much thanks to my dear friend Harriet McHugh-Dillon for reading this thesis from beginning to end and for scrutinising it with an eagle eye. It is customary to conclude acknowledgments by thanking family for their invaluable (and incalculable) contribution. If on occasion I have craved silence and blocks of time uninterrupted by the pressing need of small children for love and attention (not to mention warm food, clean clothes and late-night assistance with school projects) it has been only a momentary madness for which the laughter, joy and warmth of family life is the surest cure. My two older children, Afryna and Ilyan, took to life in the field with remarkable aplomb, proving themselves valuable research assistants, as they opened doors for me that would otherwise have remained firmly shut. Araan slipped his way into our family with little fanfare, part way through this research and has left his own indelible mark on my thesis—mostly in the form of truncated paragraphs and surprising tangents. Thanks to my parents, John and Judy Chapman, and to Ben Chapman and Kate Pederson for ‘being there.’ The absence of Emily Chapman has cast a long shadow over my years at ANU but it is in the shadows that I have found the courage to keep going. iv Finally, my thanks to Abbas, who has been unstinting in his support, lavish in his love and generous in his praise. Without Abbas this thesis would, quite simply, not have been. v Abstract Iranian hospitality is not enacted only at the border, but in the everyday interactions between Iranian citizens and Afghan refugees at sites of national significance in and around the city of Shiraz. In my thesis I take the broad notion of hospitality—as articulated by Jacques Derrida and engaged with by numerous scholars over a number of decades and across a broad range of disciplines—and place it in the Shirazi locale. I argue that shifting policies and practices towards refugees between 1979 and 2014 run parallel to shifting notions of what it means to be Iranian. The tension between Islamic and historical-nationalist discourses of identity forms the background for my exploration of hospitality in the context of the relationship between Iranians and Afghans in Shiraz. I seek to understand the interplay between identity and hospitality as expressed through the notion of ‘Iranian hospitality,’ which itself emerges out of variously competing and intersecting Islamic, historical and literary narratives. Narratives of identity and hospitality adhere to particular sites in and around the city of Shiraz. I locate three sites (or clusters of sites) around which some of the most significant myths of Iranian nationalism have been woven and over which Shiraz exerts a certain proprietorship. These sites can be broadly categorised as religious sites (amongst which I include two major shrine complexes within the city), historical sites (centred primarily on the Persepolis ruins located just north of Shiraz) and literary sites (focussed on the mausoleums of two Shiraz-based classical Persian-language poets). I explore these sites both in terms of their symbolic significance in Iranian constructions of the hospitable nation and as lived spaces in which Iranian citizens and Afghan refugees interact (or, indeed, fail to interact). Techniques of social anthropology lie at the very heart of my thesis. By inserting myself, as an ethnographer-guest, into a space of hospitality, I have sought to explore how hospitality maps onto the city and its surrounds. Furthermore, by tracing modalities of inclusion and exclusion in the urban space I offer an alternative to state-centric narratives of migration. vi In this thesis I have examined how a principle of hospitality comes to be articulated and experienced in Iran. I have shown that such a principle is not static but in fact shifts and changes over time and in accordance with shifting notions of identity. As I have interrogated the idea of Iranian hospitality in light of the occasionally fractious relationship between Iranian-citizens and Afghan-refugees in the city of Shiraz, I have exposed tensions and contradictions in the Iranian construction of national identity. At the same time, I have concluded that within the current hostile environment for Afghan refugees in Iran, the potential for hospitality remains. vii A note on transliteration Throughout this thesis I have used a simplified transcription system in which I have deliberately forgone the use of the diacritics that are commonly used in the transliteration of the Persian script to the Latin alphabet. As such, I have prioritised ease of reading for English speakers unfamiliar with the Persian language, and sought to enhance the flow of the thesis by not drawing undue attention to non-English words. Both Iran and Afghanistan use the Solar Hejri (SH) calendar. The year 1396 SH began on 21 March 2017. To convert to the SH calendar it is a simple matter of taking away 622 years (if the date in any given year falls between 1 January and 20 March) or 621 years (if the date falls between 21 March and 31 December). Unless otherwise indicated, all dates in this thesis are Christian Era (CE). viii Contents Declaration ii Acknowledgments iii Abstract vi A note on transliteration viii Contents ix Part One 1 Chapter One: Placing the research 2 Locating the research 3 Locating the researcher 5 Looking to the margins 8 Exploring existing research 10 Journeying through hospitality 13 Hospitality and place 20 Shiraz as a site 26 Disciplinary space 31 Mapping the thesis 40 Chapter Two: Afghans in Iran 46 Afghan migration in historical context 47 Afghanistan and Iran: a shared history 49 Afghan refugee policy pre-1979 50 Afghan refugees and the Khomeini decade: 1979–1989 52 Afghan refugees in contemporary Iran 57 Afghan refugees in the city of Shiraz 61 Anthropology and refugees 68