Red-Light Tehran: Prostitution, Intimately Public Islam, and the Rule of the Sovereign, 1910-1980

Jairan Gahan

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department for the Study of Religion University of Toronto

Red-Light Tehran: Prostitution, Intimately Public Islam, and the Rule of the Sovereign, 1910-1980

Jairan Gahan

Doctor of Philosophy

Department for the Study of Religion University of Toronto

2017 Abstract

This dissertation investigates the urban life of the red-light district of Tehran, Shahr-i naw, from its inception in the early twentieth century to its erasure after the Islamic Revolution in 1980.

“Red-light Tehran” broadens the scope of the literature on modern Islam to the arena of state sovereignty and the governance of precarious subjects. Shahr-i naw is an unlikely place to explore Islam. However, beginning in the early twentieth century in Tehran, the increasingly visible business of urban prostitution and street solicitation, perceived as an unhygienic, immoral and un-Islamic practice, became a site of contestation for larger debates about the role of Islam, in the domain of public. The district serves as a central site for inquiries about the shifting role of

Islam in the governance of subjects that were never fully integrated into the political system of the modern post-constitutional state. This exploration of the history of the district remaps the force of religion in Tehran, a city that is so often glossed as a case of state-oriented top-down secularization and subsequent Islamization.

In the early twentieth century, Islamic periodicals and physicians of the time anchored on the medico-moral crusade against prostitution and (re)articulated Islam as a disciplinary force, compatible with microbiological sensibilities. In response to mass religious petitioning against street prostitutes in the 1920s, the state evicted prostitutes to a segregated district outside the city ii gates. In the 1940s, as Tehran grew larger, enveloping the red-light district into the heart of the city, prostitutes returned to the public eye, only this time the point of attractions was their precarious lives and work conditions. This shift in concern intimated the advent of a compassionate impulse and a humanitarian Islamic culture of care. In the 1950s, the state gestured towards closing the site to “rescue” female residents, while simoultaneously it experimented with modern “regimes of care,” with minimum expense and maximum ambition, through funding social work projects, and launching “salvation houses.” The district was a sixty- year long sovereign experimentation with regimes of governance, comprising of juridical, economic, welfare, and medical techniques of governance including bodily regimentation, medical regulation, and rehabilitation.

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Acknowlegments

When I started this project, little did I know the places it will take me, and how it will shape my professional and personal future. Neither did I imagine the eventfulness of the few years of my life at University of Toronto. This project has taken me to a twofold journey, personal and historical, one that would not have been possible without the expertise, help, support, and generosity of the following individuals, to whom I am utmost grateful.

Professor Tavakoli, for introducing me to the humbling practice of archival endeavor; for never being satisfied; and for pushing me to keep searching without looking for a finite end in the archives. This dissertation would not have been possible without his unconditional attention, diligent training, and patient guidance, over sometimes three-hour long meetings without a break! Professor Farzaneh Hemmasi, who generously became an intellectual interlocutor and a friend. Our conversations over lunch or coffee, on the green spaces of the campus under magnolia trees, on her porch, or at my tiny balcony have shaped this dissertation in major ways.

She taught me how to deploy an anthropological lens onto historical material and supported me when the ground beneath my feet seemed quaking and life was unsound. Professor Amira

Mittermaier, for her intellectual rigor, capacity for empathy, and setting the bar high as an exemplary academic. Above all, I continue to learn from her, the art of thinking and communicating clearly, while embracing the messiness of subjects, concepts, and practices. Her commitment to professionalism and her steady presence has been reassuring. Professor Arzoo

Osanloo and Professor Nada Moumtaz, for their generous and detailed reading of this dissertation and their sharp and constructive criticism which has already expanded the horizon of this project.

My father, Neisan Gahan-Gholian, whose sudden death during the writing of this dissertation deferred the finishing of this project. His death made me doubt the very merit of many dissertations including my own, that are submitted every year to humanities departments.

Losing him forced me to pause. It was only through this pause that I rediscovered our shared enthusiasm for imagination and for intellectual labor. My mother, Professor Farzaneh Farahzad, who has formed every inch of who I am today, with her idealistic unreal and unconditional love, coupled with her pragmatism in life. My brother, Javad Gahan, for reminding me always that life takes different shapes, and that my reality is not the only one out there. Amir Yalchi, my life partner, who has put up with a doctoral student for one too many years. He has endured my pain while he was in pain himself and has been a patient listener to the stories I found in the archives, to my thoughts and findings that were test run orally with him first. Dr. Safoura Nourbakhsh, who has been my older sister, my mother, and my friend in diaspora; a rigorous force of emotional and intellectual support over these past six years. Our meet ups at AAA or MESA, weekly skype conversations, and her welcoming home which was my frequent holiday escape, will stay close to heart forever.

Friends and colleagues at the departments of Religion and Near and Middle East Studies who have made these challenging years warm, inviting, and intellectually stimulating. Professor

Golbarg Rekabtalaie, Leila Pourtavaf, Khalida Ali, Usman Hamid, Dr. Arun Brahmbhat, Ian

Brown, and Brigidda Bell, have all one way or the other been there for me, offering a space to complain about graduate life, a second pair of eyes to revise my work, or a pleasant company after a long day of writing. Fereshteh Hashemi, whose pleasant smile made the department a tad warmer every morning. The Banan family, who made Toronto homier, as they played the role of my parents quite consciously and playfully. Knowing that I will never be homeless in a city two continents away from home made a difference. v

Finally, this dissertation would not have come together without the help and attention of senior experienced archivists in the Parliament Archives, as well as the National Archives in

Tehran, who are still openhandedly guiding me through the maze of archival collections. Last but not least, Firouz Firouz, who so generously shared his personal archives and contcts and helped me reach out to the larger official archivist community in Tehran.

Table of Contents

Abstract ………………………………………………………………………...………………….ii

Acknowledgements ...... iv

Table of Contents ………...……….……….………..………..………..………..………..………vii

Notes on Transliteration, Names, and Dates ………...……….………..………..……………….ix

List of Figures...... x

Introduction Politicized Narratives, Rival Memories: On Studying the Red-light District of Tehran ...... 1

Chapter I The Tribulation of Venereal Diseases: From Moral Subjects to Vulnerable Citizens 1.1 Introduction……….………..………..………..………..………..…………………..29 1.2 Venereal Diseases, the Blight of Modernity………………………………………....34 1.3 Biopolitics...... ……………………………..………………………....43 1.4 Conducting Moral Conduct...... …………………………………….……………...51 1.5 Medicalization and Governmentalization of Islam ………………...……………….60 1.6 Prostitute as Unfit Citizens ………………………………………………………….67 1.7 Conclusion …………………………………………………………….……………71

Chapter II Governing Morality: Religious Mobilization and the Formation of the District 2.1 Introduction ………………………………………………………..………………...74 2.2 Shahrinaw, the Neighborhood ………………………………………..……………...77 2.3 Suffering Neighbors against Threating Prostitutes……………….…………………..84 2.4 The Sovereign Formation ………………………………………..…………………..99 2.5 Public Morality and the Law.……………...………………………………………..104 2.6 Space of Threshold ……………………...……………………….………………....118 2.7 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………….131

Chapter III Compassionate Citizens: The Affective Landscape of Popular Literature 3.1 Introduction ………………………………………………………………………..135

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3.2 New Publics....……………………………………………………………………..140 3.3 Between Disgust and Compassion ………………………….…………………….152 3.4 Islamic Humanitarianism …………………………………….……………………162 3.5 Conclusion ………………………………………………….……………………..174

Chapter IV Sovereign Experimentation: Trial and Error in the District 4.1 Introduction ……………………………………………………………………….177 4.2 A Brief History of Welfare State ………………………………………………….184 4.3 Medical Governance: Security or Welfare? ……………………………………….190 4.4 Laws on Prostitution: Between Compassion and Fear …………………………….195 4.5 Humanitarian Visions ……………………………………………………………...206 4.6 Calculating Compassion …………………………………………………………...210 4.7 The Indeterminate Laboratory …………………………………………………….212 4.8 The Social Work Center …………………………………………………………..220 4.9 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………...223

Afterward On Erasure ……………………………………………………………………………………227

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………...239

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Notes on Transliteration, Names, and Dates

In the translation of Persian words, I have adopted the Library of Congress Persian Romanisation Table, but I have applied a more simplified version of the table. The diacritics indicated in the have ظ and, ث ,ح ,ذ ,ص ,ض ,ط Library of Congress Romanisation Table for Persian letters such as been dropped. The diacritics indicating long and short vowels, however, remain intact. Almost all Persian names (and nouns), including the names of authors, filmmakers, and characters in films, have been transliterated according to the simplified version of the Library of Congress Persian Romanisation Table. For the names of renowned politicians and scholars (in the field of Iranian Studies), the common and predominant spelling of the names has been used. In general matters of citation and footnotes, the 16th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style (for footnotes) has been followed. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. For all dates of events and publications, I have provided the Gregorian calendar date. Wherever the Persian Solar Hijri calendar date was indicated in the sources (for example archival state letters), I have provided the Solar calendar dates followed by the Gregorian date. In the case of sources that had only supplied a Lunar calendar date, I have supplied both the Lunar and Gregorian dates. The red-light district of Tehran was most commonly referred to as “the New City” (Shahr-i naw). In this dissertation, for the purpose of easing the process of reading, I use the alternate transliteration “Shahrinaw.” The district was also commonly referred to as (Qal‘ah) which I have translated into “the Ward.”

List of Figures

Figure 1 Shahrinaw in 1925...... 80

Figure 2 Petition against the Cossack’s traffic to a brothel in the Qājāriyyah neighborhood, 1912………………..85

Figure 3 Petition against the residency of prostitutes in the Arabs’ neighborhood, 1915……………………...……93

Figure 4 Petition against the residency of prostitutes in the Qājāriyyah neighborhood, 1919………………………95

Figure 5 The order to move prostitutes from Shimrān neighborhood to Shahrinaw, 1922…...... ………………...102

Figure 6 The review of the request for reconsidering the legal case involving Fātimah, the prostitute, and Mu‘in Huzūr in the court of appeal, 1921……………………………………………………………………...... …....108

Figure 7 The final ruling of ‘Abbas’ trial, 1921...... 110

Figure 8 The final ruling on the trial of the pander, 1922……………………………………………...... 112

Figure 9 The first page of the census report of the residents of Shahrinaw, 1956…...... 123

Figure 10 A letter from the municipality confirming the construction of walls around the district, 1965...... 126

Figure 11 Map of Tehran in 1969, created by Dr. Hussein Karīmān...... 182

Figure 12 A demolished brothel in Shahrinaw, 1980...... 232

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Introduction Politicized Narratives, Rival Memories: On Studying the Red-light District of Tehran

On January 29, 1979, two days before Ayatollah Khomeini’s return to Iran, the revolutionaries marched to the south of Tehran and set the brothels in the red-light district, also known as the

Ward (Qal‘ah), on fire.1 The next day, ‘Ittilā‘āt newspaper’s headline read “The South and the

West of Tehran was Burning in Blaze.”2 Both the police and the fire department withheld aid, allowing the revolutionary attackers to burn down the houses. Ayatollah Tāliqānī strongly condemned this violence against prostitutes: “These women are victims of the previous corrupt system . . . they need to be guided properly, ornamented by penitence, and [then, they] must return to society.”3 The next day, in opposition to this public act of violence, protestors assembled at Tehran University. They carried the burnt corpse of a supposedly Ward woman around the campus to express their discontent. The Kayhān newspaper reported: “The wave of rage and tears reverberated in the university and the campus trembled with collective chants of

Allah Akbar.”4 On March 1980, the state shut down the gates of the district. A banner was put

1 Before entering the district, the crowd first marched into the entertainment district and set restaurants and cafes, such as Shams Brewery, Shukūfah-yi naw, Ārāstah-yi naw, and Shahāb cinema on fire. These places were located in the vicinity of the official bounds of the red-light district. See “Qarb va junūb-i Tehran dirūz qarq dar ātash būd,” Ittila’at, 15772, Bahman 10, 1357/January 30, 1979, sec. Akhbār-i Iran va Jahān,. 2 “Qarb va junūb-i Tehran dirūz qarq dar ātash būd,” 8. 3 “Sākinīn-i Qal‘ah mahkūmīn-i nizām-i fāsid-i isti‘mār ast,” Ittilā’āt, 16773, Bahman 11, 1357/January 31, 1979, sec. Akhbār-i dākhilī, 12. 4 “Tehran bār-i digar bā mawj-i ātash va dūd rūbirū shud,” Kayhān, 10626, Bahman 11, 1357/January 31, 1979, sec. Akhbār-i lishvar.

2 up at the gate with the following message: “To the brothers who are the visitors of the Ward:

What would you have done if other people did such shameful acts to your honor [i.e. women]?”5 The newly established department of the Fight Against Vice (mubārizah bā munkarāt) put up public notifications on the walls of the Ward requesting that the residents evacuate the premises. Due to women’s refusal to leave, the state forcefully removed the remaining residents in pick-up trucks. The scene caused a spectacle in the public press.6 In the following year, as the Islamic Republic was consolidating, the state bulldozed most of the area.7

The Ward, also known as “The New City” (Shahrinaw), has a significant place in the archives of collective memories of Iranians. It is a site of multiple urban, social, national, and religious myths, with proliferating rumors, stories, and legends based around it. Formed around 1922 and shut down after the Islamic revolution in the summer of 1980, the history of

Shahrinaw neatly maps the Pahlavi period. Accordingly, it contributes to the articulation of the grand political narrative of twentieth century Iran, which is premised on a radical rupture between the secular Pahlavi regime and the Islamic Republic that followed on its heels. The consolidating Islamic regime rendered Shahrinaw emblematic of the moral and political corruption of the previous regime—as shown in Ayatollah Tāliqāni’s words, which identified them as being “doomed by the corrupt colonizing regime.”8 Consequently, the destruction of

5 “Barā-yi hamīshah darhā-i Qal’ah imrooz bastah shud,” Javānān-i imrūz 14, no. 683 (January 3, 1980): 12–14, 12. 6 “Barā-yi hamīshah darhā-i Qal’ah imrooz bastah shud,” 1980, 13. 7 Fūdāzī Aqīlī, “Az fa‘āliyyat-i bīsh az 11 hizār nafar dar Shahrinaw va mukhālifat-i rūhāniyūn-i barjista bā takhrīb-i ān tā sahm-i Gūgūsh az Cafe Shukufa-yi naw,” by Abbas Tahmāsibīzādah, Khabarguzāri-yi Ilna, March 5, 2017. 8 “Sākinīn-i Qal‘ah mahkūmīn-i nizām-i fāsid-i isti‘mār ast,” 12.

Shahrinaw after the revolution marks and reinforces this grand narrative of rupture, from before the revolution to after the revolution, from a secular state that privatized religion, to an

Islamic theocracy that imposed Islam on the public realm.

This dissertation, “Red-Light Tehran: Prostitution, Public Islam, and the Rule of the

Sovereign,” begins with this powerful narrative of rupture, only to complicate it. In doing so it probes into the relationship between Islam and the rule of the modern state. The red-light district of Tehran is an unlikely place to explore Islam. However, beginning in the early twentieth century in Tehran, the increasingly visible business of urban prostitution and street solicitation, as an immoral and un-Islamic practice, became a site of contestation for larger debates about the role of Islam in the domain of public space. Shahrinaw, located at the heart of Tehran, as the official place for prostitution, serves as a central site for inquiries about the

(trans)formations and intersections of collective moral Islamic sensibilities, notions of public morality, and moral governance. The study of the district further facilitates an exploration of the formative relationship between religion and the state, problematizing the grand narratives of rupture in the history of twentieth century Iran.

To this end, the focus of “Red-Light Tehran” is on the rule of the modern state in

Shahrinaw, rather than the everyday life of its inhabitants. It demonstrates that the governance of Shahrinaw was a sixty-year long sovereign experimentation with ideas, including the welfare state and vulnerable citizenship, and techniques of governance including bodily regimentation, medical regulation, and rehabilitation. Sovereignty in Shahrinaw was expressed in the indeterminacy of the state to uphold the boundaries that construct the foundation of modern rule, including the boundaries of private/public, religious/profane, moral/immoral and ultimately legal/illegal. I demonstrate that as Shahrinaw was never fully legal, nor illegal;

4 never really public, nor fully private, it was ruled under the “state of exception.”9 It was a space of thresholds, a liminal space where the state occasionally transcended its own law, and expanded its regimenting bio-political power as it experimented with new domains and techniques of governing morality, with minimum expenditure. I illustrate that in effect,

Shahrinaw was a laboratory for the modern nation-state to test and shape the techniques of governance, as it perpetuated its rule.

Crooked archives

The 1979 Islamic Revolution was not the first political moment that appropriated the history of Shahrinaw. Urban legends and rumors about the affiliation of Shahrinaw women to statesmen accumulate as they circulate in a web of memoirs and popular historical accounts that build up on one another. Hussein Makkī tied the inception of the red-light district of

Tehran to a public scandal involving two British officers and a famous madam in Tehran.10

According to his historical account, in 1921, following the public lashing of the prostitutes who had relations with two British diplomats, Reza Khan, who was then the commander in

9 I use Giorgio Agamben’s analytical terms, sovereign rule and the state of exception, in order to extend Foucault’s analytical concepts including bio-power, the governance of population, and governmentality. See Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). The use of the state of exception allows one to bring to the center the question of inequality and precarity. The production of difference and inequality is central to any study of the governance of subjects that reside on the periphery of legality and as a result suffer from precarious life and work conditions. Foucault's analytical concepts alone fall short in providing the tools to tackle the problematic of systematic modern production of difference and inequality in state institutions. Sovereignty and exception, together, do this labor. They allow the analysis of the "production of difference" not as a secondary mechanism of the biopolitical modern state, but the heart of it. The sovereign power of the state is not exactly invested or expressed in regulating its subjects or regulatory mechanisms. Hussein Ali Agrama argues that the sovereign modern state power is expressed through the state's drawing of the boundaries of its domain. But that decision as to where to draw this line, inherently lends itself to indeterminacies that results in the expansion of the rule of law. The sovereign power of the state is primarily invested in the possibility of the constant shifting of this line. See Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt (London: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 240. 10 The eight volumes, Tārīkh-i bīst sālah-yi Iran, were published between the 1940s and the 1980s. The edition that is referred to here is a later edition of the second volume. Hussein Makki, Tārīkh-i bīst sālah-yi Iran, 6th ed., vol. 2, 8 vols. (Tehran: Intishārāt-i ‘ilmī, 2001), 84-85.

5 chief, ordered the city police (Nazmiyyah) to relocate all the prostitutes in Tehran to

Shahrinaw, a neighborhood outside the city gates. Mr. Howard, the British Council General, and Reza Khan conspired together with this plan. Reza Khan gained popularity amongst the people and Mr. Howard gained monopoly over British power in Iran. This story is reiterated in

Mohammad Tulū‘ī’s 1993, The Father and the Son, and later in Zand Moqaddam’s 2012, The

Ward (Qal‘ah).11 And so the legend persists: the formation of Shahrinaw as the red-light district of Tehran was a result of a political conspiracy.

Jafar Shahrī in his popular four-volume collection on the history of Tehran emphasizes the state’s use of “wrong-doing” women (badkāra-hā) in politics.12 According to him, the Constitutional Revolution (1905-1909) was the first time that the state used prostitutes in street protests to confront the revolutionaries.13 He gives a lengthy list of incidents where prostitutes were hired as covert agents of the state in street protests, including the 1921 coup d’état, and the 1932 protests against D‘arcy’s Oil concession. The prostitutes’ role in state-orchestrated street protests is most vividly remembered in the 1953 coup d’état against Mosaddeq’s nationalist government.14 The infamous photo of a pick-up truck packed

11 Mahmūd Zand Muqaddam, Shahr-i naw, Qalʻah-ʼi Zāhidī 1348: Hamrāh bā dū dīdār az mujtamiʻ-i bihzīstī 1368, Chāp-i nukhust (Gūtinbirg: Istukhulm: Khānah-i hunar va adabiyāt; Kitāb-i Arzān, 2012); Muhammad Tulū‘ī, Pidar va Pisar: Nagufta-hā az zindagī va rūzgār-i Pahlavī-hā (Tehran: Intishārāt-i ‘ilmī, 1993). 12 Jaʻfar Shahrī, Tehran-i qadīm, Chāp-i 4, vol. 3, 5 vols. (Tehran: Muʻīn, 1383). 13 For counternarratives see Camron Michael. Amin, The Making of the Modern Iranian Woman: Gender, State Policy, and Popular Culture, 1865-1946 (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2002); Nima Naghibi, Rethinking Global Sisterhood: Western Feminism and Iran (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Conceiving Citizens: Women and the Politics of Motherhood in Iran (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

14 Iskandar Dildum, La‘l Shākirī, Mustafa, and Hādī Vakilī, “Naqsh-i rūspiyān-yi Shahrinaw dar Coup du-tā-yi 28 Murdad-i 1332.” Ganjina-‘i Asnad vol. 26, no. 1 (May 21, 2016): 60–81.

6 with ruffians and a woman, wearing a loose chadur, standing next to them, with a club in her hand circulates in the virtual space of the internet as a testimony to the presence of Shahrinaw women in the coup. The coup itself occupies a significant place in the political history of twentieth century Iran as a critical moment where foreign influence won over nationalist forces. The fact that the Americans orchestrated the coup under operation AJAX marks the lack of sovereignty of Iran’s body politics. Popular historical accounts perceive the presence of the figure of the prostitute, together with ruffians, supposedly hired by Ayatollah Kashani, as a proof of the fraudulent character of the street protests. Prime Minister Mehdi Bāzargān recounts the day of the coup in his memoir thusly: “We saw a bus coming from Shahrinaw with obvious women (zanān-i ma‘lūm al-hāl) who were chanting pro Shah slogans. The manner and movement of these women indeed cannot be recounted as national uprising . . . prostitute women do not understand national feelings and collective uprising. They were undoubtedly hirelings.” 15 He interprets the presence of prostitutes in the street protests on the day of the coup as a catalyst that separated the events on 28 Murdad from a national movement, proving that the protest was an American scheme rather than a grass roots movement.

Regardless of the unreliability of such accounts, it is of little importance whether the women on the bus were actual prostitutes or not. The proliferating narratives about Shahrinaw prostitutes who contributed to the coup play a pivotal role in the construction of the figure of the prostitute as a subject that lacks sovereignty and moral and political boundaries.

Throughout this dissertation, I demonstrate that prostitutes could not be integrated into the

15 Mehdi Bāzargān, Mudāfi‘āt, vol. 6 (Tehran: Shirkat-i sahāmī-yi intishār, 1385/2006), 270-271; cited in Mustafa La‘l Shākirī and Hādī Vakilī, “Naqsh-i rūspiyān-yi Shahrinaw dar coup du-tā-yi 28 Murdad-i 1332,” Ganjinah-‘i asnad vol. 26, no. 1 (May 21, 2016): 60–81.

7 political system of the nation-state. I explore the discursive and concrete processes through which the figure of the prostitute was constructed as an abject without physical, political, or moral autonomy. The abject, for Kristeva, is something that disgusts us, evoking a repulsive bodily reaction. An open wound, excrement, and menstrual blood can all invoke such responses. “These responses are for Kristeva a reaction to aspects of the world, which threaten our sense of boundaries.”16 The word Fāhishah, which is the Persian/Arabic term for prostitute, comes from the Arabic root fa-ha-sha, which means excess. Fāhishah in its Arabic root means that which transgresses its own limits. In Chapter I, I demonstrate how in the early twentieth century, against the backdrop of increasing concern with territorial integrity, the already excessive body of the prostitute was re-grounded in a new nationalist political regime of knowledge as a subject that was unfit to meet notions of proper citizenship.17 Another

Persian term for prostitute, most commonly used in the early twentieth century, is zan-i harjā- yī, which literally translates into “the anywhere woman.” The fluidity and mobility of this figure is contrasted with the conception of the ideal domesticated modern woman, zan-i khānah—that literally translates into “the woman of the household.” The itinerant figure of harjā-yī woman stands in sharp contrast to the liberal notion of the ideal citizen, who has intact boundaries, and can be spotted and monitored.18 As such, the figure of the prostitute

16 Kathleen Lennon, “Feminist Perspectives on the Body,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2010 Edition). 17 The conception of the prostitute as a counter-nationalist force is not exclusive to Iran. Rather similar conceptions can be seen across the Middle East including in Egypt, Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. See for example Liat. Kozma, Global Women, Colonial Ports: Prostitution in the Interwar Middle East (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017); Emine Ö Evered and Kyle T. Evered, “‘Protecting the National Body’: Regulating the Practice and the Place of Prostitution in Early Republican Turkey,” Gender, Place & Culture 20, no. 7 (November 1, 2013): 839– 57; Margot. Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation : Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995). 18 Charles Taylor introduces two different conceptions of bodies, the porous and the buffered. The former adheres to pre-modern conceptions of the body and the latter points to that of secular liberalist modern conceptions. He

8 turned into a prop that supported the dominant popular political narratives of corruption and foreign conspiracy.

Amongst all such figures, Malakah I‘tizādī is the most curious case. There are numerous inconsistent stories about her life, her connection to Shahrinaw, and her involvement in the coup. As a descendant of a Qajar royal family, she had close ties with the

Pahlavis and led the anti-Mosaddeq “Zulfaqār” party that was actively involved in the coup.

Popular memoirs almost unanimously hold that she had tight connections with Shahrinaw, which is the most readily accessible spatial place associated with prostitution. Surprisingly, none of these accounts attend to the autobiographical book that she published in August 1956, only a few years after the coup, in which she clearly stated her pro-Shah political opinions and criticized Mosaddeq for his politics. Could it not be that Malakah I‘tizādī had conservative viewpoints, helped to orchestrate the coup, but had no ties with prostitution and trafficking networks in Tehran? Dildum claims that she owned brothels in the red-light district of Tehran and was General Zahedi’s fixer.19 Other accounts hold that since she was well connected with the royal family and the military, she brought prostitutes to many military men. This is while still others claim that she was General Zahedi’s mistress. She has turned into an urban legend.

Her figure is instrumental in crafting the grand narrative of the corruption of Muhammad

Reza’s government. The figure of a prostitute, with close ties to Shahrinaw, becomes once again emblematic of political corruption, deception, and the lack of state autonomy. However,

notes that the modern self is conceived to be buffered. I do not necessarily follow Taylor’s theory of the secular age, and the respective experience of the secular subject. However, two conceptions of the self are helpful in partially explaining the difficulty of recognizing the prostitute as a subject. For more discussion on buffered and porous selves see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). 19 Iskandar Dildum, Khātirāt-i man va farah-i Pahlavī, bi qalam-i yak rūznāmah-nigār-yi qadīmī, ed. Ahmad Pirānī, 2nd ed., vol. 2, 3 vols. (Tehran: Mu‘assisah-yi intishārāt-i Bihāfarīn, 2001), 294.

9 this urban legend does not merely narrate the political history of Iran. The image of Malakah

I‘tizādī, coupled with ruffians, simultaneously constructs the figure of the prostitute as a counter-revolutionary subject and a part of the lumpenproletariat class.20 At the first glance, it might appear as though prostitutes are merely instruments, facilitating the political narrative of

Iran under Muhammad Reza Shah. However, this political narrative is equally instrumental in constructing the figure of the prostitute as a subject with no sense of morality, unaware of her own oppression, with no understanding of politics, easily bought and sold, and lacking sovereignty.21 How does one recover the history of Shahrinaw and its residents when it is buried under such a volume of mythical and ideologically driven narratives? Just as Malakah

I‘tizādī’s life story and identity as a political subject is lost, so is the story of Shahrinaw as a neighborhood and its residents. How does one begin to recover the history of a neighborhood, the legend of which is so instrumental in the grand narrative of Iran between the two revolutions? To what extent do official archives provide an insight into lived social relations in the district, if any?

The hyper-visibility of these urban myths in the cultural memory of Iranians is contrasted by the absence of scholarly accounts of prostitution in the historiography of modern

Iran. Ida Meftahi aptly points out that Shahrinaw, together with the cluster of entertainment centers in the south of Tehran, including the cafes and cabarets of Lālahzār street, constitute a

“negative space” in the cultural history of Iran, that “has been actively kept absent from

20 For a review of the literature on how prostitution is not considered as “real” work see Deborah Brock, “Reframing Prostitution as Work,” in Queerly Canadian: An Introductory Reader in Sexuality Studies, ed. Maureen FitzGerald and Scott Rayter (Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2012), 243–55. 21 There is a lot of controversy around the scope and nature of ruffians including Sha‘bān bimukh, Mahmūd Misgar, and the Tayeb and Taher brothers. Historians have reached no consensus on this issue.

Iranian historiography.”22 Respectively, performers, café dancers, and prostitutes have not been direct subjects of the historical studies of modern Iran. While the role of women in the ideological project of nation building is the subject of many scholastic historical investigations, there is a consistent lack of scholarly attention given to such “negative spaces.”23 This absence is a result of three interlocking reasons. First, during the Pahlavi period of modernization, the category of woman, as many have noted, becomes emblematic of modernity and progress and pivotal to the modern image of Iran.24 Respectively, various historical accounts of women in twentieth century Iran have highlighted the narrative of the nation-building project in expense of backgrounding the construction, regulation, and local governance of women at the margins of this project. Second, the lack of attention to marginal groups of women is reflective of the politics of the archives. Official records primarily provide insight into the discursive and concrete processes of the construction of the “modern woman” in various domains, including education, modern sciences, public hygiene, and the state- sponsored women’s movement. Lastly, residents of Shahrinaw have not left a written body of literature behind. This dissertation draws on public press material including diaries and memoirs, medical publications, women’s periodicals, Islamic publications, and popular literary productions, none of which were written by the residents of the district. This is indeed due to the fact that the press, during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, signals and embodies the emergence of a public sphere that represents the new Iranian literate middle-

22 Ida Meftahi, Gender and Dance in Modern Iran: Biopolitics on Stage (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016). 23 There is only one scholarly piece written directly on prostitution during the early modern period, by Rudi Matthee, “Prostitutes, Courtesans and Dancing Girls: Women Entertainers in Safavid Iran,” in Iran and Beyond: Essays in Middle Eastern History in Honor of Nikki R. Keddie, ed. Beth Baron and Rudi Matthee (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2000). 24 Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Veiled Discourse-Unveiled Bodies,” Feminist Studies 19, no. 3 (Autumn 1993): 487–518.

11 class to which the residents of Shahrinaw had no access. I demonstrate in Chapter III that while, beginning in the 1910s, the narratives of the lives of prostitutes became a pivotal part of the entertainment industry in popular literature and later in the film industry, there are almost no autobiographical accounts of the prostitutes.25 The dominance of the “woman’s project” as a part of the ideology of the state, the grammar of the archives, and prostitutes’ inaccessibility to the written discourse have made them silent subjects in storiographies of Shahrinaw.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot points to different levels of silencing in archives, including

“the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history).”26 While Trouillot puts emphasis on silences in archives, Anjali Arondekar, in the context of the British Colonial archives on sexuality, accentuates how archives equally make practices, ideas, and people visible.27 In this dissertation I probe the ways in which archival materials make prostitution visible at the three first levels that Trouillot mentions, while remaining mindful of the fact that there is a consistent and persistent silencing of the experiences of the prostitutes in the making of the archives. Instead of inquiring about the history of Shahrinaw and its female residents, through

25 The exception here is a book titled The Secret of Sexual Fulfillment (Rāz-i kāmyābī-yi jinsī) that is attributed to Mahvash, a dancer performer said to have originated from Shahrinaw. However, Ida Meftahi convincingly demonstrates how the book is not really written by Mahvash, but only uses her fame as a publicity tool. See Meftahi, Gender and Dance in Modern Iran. 26 Cited in Sonja Luehrmann, Religion in Secular Archives: Soviet Atheism and Historical Knowledge, 1st [edition], Oxford Series on History and Archives (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 4. 27 Anjali Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India, Next Wave (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).

12 a lens of invisibility, this dissertation asks the following question as it explores the archives:

How is Shahrinaw made visible in the archives?

In the summer of 2012 when I first visited Iran’s National Archives in Tehran, which proved to be one of the major sites of archival investigation for this project, I was surprised to find myself in a large room with high ceilings, minimal furniture, and five desktop computers.

There were no physical archives, catalogues, or reference books on site. Similar to the UK national archives, the desktop computers connected me to an online catalogue that includes archival records accompanied with descriptions and keywords. This meant that what I could find was already limited by those short descriptions, many of which proved to be misleading.

It took me a few more visits to figure out the logic and the grammar of the descriptions, what they revealed and what they concealed. Most significantly, prostitution in Tehran is made visible in the official archives only as a problem: The problem of public hygiene, criminal activity, public morality, and religious and national sensibilities.

Upon my many future visits to the archives I realized that the keyword “venereal disease” almost without exception led me to medical records regarding the regulation of prostitutes. Different Persian terms for the word “prostitute”, including “known woman”

(ma‘rūfa), “wrong-doing woman” (badkārah), “prostitute” (fāhishah), and rūspī, signal different grammars. They took me to different types of records in distinct periods, including police reports, court cases, local petitions, and literary works of fiction. This of course does not mean that prostitution was perceived similarly in the district as a problem. In fact, recent studies on prostitution support the idea that in many cases, prostitution is a temporary solution

13 to poverty or hostile working conditions.28 Although there is little access to the experiences and voices of women who lived there in the early twentieth century, their actions leave traces of their will. The prostitutes’ persistence in residing in the district despite implicit government efforts to shut it down, the stubborn expansion of the district despite the state’s efforts to contain it in 1953 through the erection of walls around it, and the later development of other sites of prostitution in Tehran in the 1950s are signs that prostitution increasingly became a means for women to make a living in the ever-expanding city of Tehran. Aside from prostitution, the archives reveal that there was a growing market for informal prostitution and other forms of sex-work in Tehran, in entertainment centers including bars and cafes. For instance, beginning in the 1920s, the state issued work permit/visas with which foreign women could engage in labor in the service industry in Tehran. These licenses were called service permits (tazkarah-yi khidmatkārī). It is unclear whether the state used these licenses as an implicit way of recognizing and regulating prostitutes, or foreign women.29

28 For example, see Svati Pragna Shah’s rich ethnographic study of prostitution and sex-work in Mumbai, which shows how migrant women engage in both informal sex-work and formal prostitution as a way of negotiating their precarious life conditions in the city. Svati Pragna, Shah, Street Corner Secrets: Sex, Work, and Migration in the City of Mumbai (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 29 This type of license is mentioned in the archives throughout the twentieth century. In particular, I have come across it in a 1920s document on French prostitutes, in 1940s files on Polish female refugees who worked in the service industry in Tehran, and in a 1960s report on sex-work in Tehran. Although it is hard to make a meaningful statement about these licenses with only three documents, scholarship on the prominent place of migrant women workers in the service industry can shed light on the possible function of these licenses. Scholars of sex-work have extensively demonstrated that the growing presence of women in the service industry in the twentieth century is a result of globalization and migration. Men and women crossed borders in the search of better job opportunities and life conditions. Although Iran was not amongst the most popular countries for foreign prostitution and women’s migration in the region in the early twentieth century, there is evidence of the presence of migrant female workers in the twentieth century. Thus, it is highly possible that these licenses were a way to monitor and regulate migrant female workers in the country. For evidence of female migrant workers (many of whom engaged in prostitution) in Iran, see Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Conceiving Citizens: Women and the Politics of Motherhood in Iran (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Liat Kozma, Global Women, Colonial Ports: Prostitution in the Interwar Middle East (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016). For some examples of scholarly works on globalization, prostitution, and female migration, see Kamala Kempadoo, “Abolitionism, Criminal Justice, and Transnational Feminism,” in Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work, and Human Rights, ed. Jyoti Sanghera, Bandana Pattanaik, and Kamala Kempadoo (Routledge, 2015); Luise, White,

Nevertheless, the grammar through which records are tagged and the kind of archival material that is kept and cataloged not only in the National archives, but also in the Parliament archives, which function similarly, has shaped this dissertation. Records on the red-light district can be categorized under four main groups: Medical records about the problem of the venereal disease epidemic in Tehran; local petitions against the residency of prostitutes and street solicitation in Tehran neighborhoods; the police and the municipality’s meeting proceedings about this “problem;” and police records on organized crime in “sites of corruption” (amākin-i fisād), including gambling houses (qumār-khānah), opium bars (shirahkish khānah), and alcohol shops.30 Insofar as this dissertation is primarily premised on these archives, it probes into the conditions through which prostitution becames a moral, religious, national, urban, and medical problem in the early twentieth century. To this end, it tells yet another political story of Shahrinaw, one which is invested in exploring the discursive and concrete production of the district as a marginal site, and the analytics and modalities of its governance.

The Structure of the Thesis

A central concern of this dissertation is to recast the much-debated relationship between Islam, as the public religion of Iran, and the formations of the modern state between the two revolutions. Historiographies of twentieth century Iran explain the Islamic Revolution

The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 30 Another source of archival knowledge on the red-light district is the lengthy files on urban ruffians, such as Hassan Arab and Mahmūd Misgar, who possessed brothels, opium houses, liquor bars, and gambling sites in the district. These files provide an insight into the social relations in the district. They attest to a relative tolerance toward crime in the district. However, the police records hardy mention the brothels. Rather, they are more focused on drug dealing, street violence, and alcohol.

15 retrospectively, and as a result of the inconsistent and incomplete development of secularism beginning with the Constitutional Revolution. Scholars have achieved consensus over the fact that religion and the state were never fully separated in Iran. In particular, they have paid acute attention to the continued role of the ulama in politics—either as opposition to or as part and parcel of the state body.31 The central role of the clerics in the debates around the Constitution is well-documented and reflected on in public press material. For instance, in 1907 Kashkūl-i

Tehran published visual material criticizing the clerics, in particular Ayatollah Shaikh

Fazlullah Nūrī (1843–1909), for opposing the Revolution in favor of securing Islamic law

(shari‘a). The abundance of satirical paintings in periodicals of the time, such as Kashkūl-i

Tehran, mirrors the emergence of the tension within the state body, between the rule of

Islamic law and that of a universal secular law.32 Indeed, Iran is hardly the place to inquire about secularism. As the parliament was sketching out the legal body of the state following the

Constitutional Revolution, there developed a fraction between the government of Islamic rule

(shar‘) and the government of the constitution (shart), (hukūmat-i mashrū‘a va hukūmat-i mashrūta).33 The first charter of rights, passed in 1906, recognizes Jafari Shi’a Islam as the

31 The strong presence of the ulama in the Constitutional Revolution (1905-10909), coupled with the Islamic Revolution (1979,) has prompted debates about the secular character of the state in Iran between the two revolutions. Shahrough Akhavi for instance, aptly notes the malleable line between religion and the state, as he demonstrates the pivotal role of the ulama including Shaykh Fazlullāh Nūrī and Sayyid Muhammad Tabā‘tabā‘ī in the Constitutional Revolution. He further argues that the role of the ulama in parliament as elect members jeopardized the secular character of parliament, since they did not have secular sensibilities. Hamid Algar is another scholar who has extensively examined the role of ulama in the Constitutional Revolution and as opposition to the Qajar Monrachy. See Shahrough Akhavi, Religion and Politics in Contemporary Iran: Clergy-State Relations in the Pahlavī Period (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1980); Hamid Algar, Religion and State in Iran, 1785-1906: The Role of the Ulama in the Qajar Period. (Berkeley, University of California: University of California Press, 1970). 32 See for example Ali Naqqāsh, Kashkūl-i Tehran sal 1, shumarah 18 (August 31, 1907): 2. 33 Mangol Bayat, Iran’s First Revolution: Shi’ism and the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1909, Studies in Middle Eastern History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

16 official religion of the country, and obliges the Shah to propagate it. This is while most of the rest of the charter is based on European law, specifically the Belgian and Russian charters.

Whereas mashrūtiyat was premised on the idea that universal constitutional law was to limit the power of the king, mashrū‘iyat was founded on the idea that Shi‘i law had to be the foundation of legitimate ruling. It is in this context that Hassan Nasrullāh, a member of the

First Parliament, argued: “Indeed, fighting oppression and bringing justice is desirable.

However, maintaining independence and preserving shari‘a is the priority [amongst the objectives of the parliament].”34 Proliferating examples in the First Parliament proceedings, such as this, demonstrate an inherent conflict in the Constitutional Revolution, with many debates around the competing primacy of shar‘ and universal rights.

However, this blurring of the line between secular and religious rule is not specific to the Iranian state. Recent studies on secularism have demonstrated that there are inherent inconsistencies within the secular power of the modern state, which undermine its own principals as it perpetuates its rule.35 Most significantly, scholars have illustrated that the domain of religion can only be separated from the domain of state politics if there is a sphere outside the rule of the modern state. This foundational aspect of secularism relies on the construction of a problematic modern divide between the realm of the private and the domain of the public. The private/public dichotomy has been instrumental in conceptualizing the secular power of the modern state: A “proper” secular state is a state that rules the domain of the public under non-religious principles, and leaves matters of the private sphere to religion.

34 Hassan, Nasrūllah, Majlis-i shawrā-yi milli, dawrah 1, jalasah 88 (Khurdād 25 1325/June 15 1946), http://www.ical.ir/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2377&Itemid=12. 35 Craig J. Calhoun, Mark. Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan. VanAntwerpen, eds., Rethinking Secularism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

The anthropologist Talal Asad has extensively explored the historical development of personal status law in Egypt as a process through which the secular state privatized religion. Asad has explained that through the privatization of religious authority in Egypt Islam was reconfigured. Following Asad, a growing number of anthropological and historical studies have focused on the process of the privatization of religion as a secular operation of the modern state.36

In Iran, in 1933, the parliament passed the personal status law (qānūn-i ahvāl-i shakhsī), which aspired to privatize the domain of religion (minority religions in particular), limiting it to family matters on marriage, inheritance, and child custody.37 However, neither family nor religion were privatized indefinitely and un-problematically. The study of the formation of the institution of family under the Pahlavi state reveals the inherent inconsistencies at the heart of the secular modern state. The state pulled the institution of family in two opposing directions. On the one hand, family was pushed to the private domain along with religion through judicial processes such as the personal status law. On the other hand, family was conceived of as a national matter and as the foundation of the nation’s population and strength. As such it was put at the forefront of sanitation reforms and became a public political problem. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, family was the battleground of the larger private/public, religious/secular conflict.

36 Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2003); Mona. Atia, Building a House in Heaven: Pious Neoliberalism and Islamic Charity in Egypt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). 37 “Qānūn-i ijāzah-yi ra‘āyat-i ahvāl-i shaksiyyah-yi Irāniyān-i qair-i shi‘a dar mahākim” (1312), Pāygāh-i ittilā‘āt-i qavānīn va muqarrarāt-i kishvar, accessed June 9, 2017, http://www.dastour.ir/brows/?lid=18782.

Perceived as indispensable to the institution of family, morality was subjected to state regulations in the twentieth century. In 1926, parliament passed the very first penal code, under which acts of immorality were punishable by law under a section titled “Violation of honor and derogation from chastity,” (hatk-i nāmūs va munāfiyāt-i ‘iffat). Sodomy (lavāt), extramarital relations, and solicitation of prostitution were punished under this law. I extensively explore the shifts in morality laws and their implication for Islam as the public religion of Iran in Chapter II and Chapter IV. Here, I suffice to point out that the 1933 revised version of the morality law only rendered immoral acts punishable if they were either public or forced. Accordingly, the section on morality laws was renamed “On crimes against chastity, public morality, and family responsibilities” (dar junhah va jināyāt bar zidd-i iffat-i va akhlāq-i‘ūmūmī). The legal periodical “The Legal Collections” (Majmū‘a-yi huqūqī) commented on this shift:

The penal code is only to maintain security. The legal system does not have its eye on individual moral good and moral responsibilities. People’s actions will not be penalized simply because they are not moral. Personal morality is the matter of inner police (pulis-i bātinī).38

As such the law drew a line (however ambiguous) between public morality and private morality, producing two different moral domains-- one within the private realm of family and the other within the public domain of the state. Private morality was situated within the domain of religious practice, while the state was responsible for regulating public morality.

Nevertheless, with marriage health certificates, mandatory medical check-ups, and other policies the state monitored and regulated the intimate sexual mores of citizens. After all, what exactly does it mean for the state to punish public acts of immorality such as sodomy because they disturb public morality, but then permit them in private?

38 Muhammad Shāhkar, “Gunāh va muāzāt az nazar-i muqannin va dādras,” Majmū‘i-yi huqūqī 1, no. 2 (November 5, 1317): 27–28.

Although the law aspired to compartmentalize private/public and religious/non- religious with such subtle shifts, morality as it related to family matters and sexual mores effectively remained at the threshold of these modern divides. Hussein Agrama, in the context of family courts in Egypt, extends Asad’s line of argument to demonstrate that there is an inherent “intractability” within secularism, insofar as it is an expression of the modern state power. The secular power of the state, according to him, does not solely lie in the privatization of religion, but, more fundamentally, in drawing a malleable line between private and public.

He further demonstrates that due to the “precariousness” of these categories, the line that separates them is always fuzzy and indeterminate. With this explanation, he rejects the perception of the secular state as a state that separates the domain of religion from politics.

According to him, the process of drawing the line between private and public domains is a political procedure of the sovereign state and already politicizes religion. Sovereignty of the state is not solely invested in an extra-legal space of governance. Rather, sovereignty, he explains, is invested in “the state’s expanding regulatory capacity ever and within social life,” which is realized through the constant reconfiguration of the private and public.39 As such, sovereign rule comes with the problematic of defining the domain of the state’s regulatory mechanisms as it simultaneously attempts to expand this domain.

The division between private and public is constantly undermined by the mechanisms and techniques of modern governance that are inherent to the modern state. Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower and governmentality is instrumental in illustrating that the modern state, in fact, attempts to regulate, monitor, and conduct the most private aspects of citizens’ lives,

39 Hussein Ali Agrama, Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt (London: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 31.

20 leaving no domain of life, including religion, outside its rule. In the context of historiographies of modern Iran, while there has been an acute attention given to the state-ulama dynamics to analyze the relationship between religion and the state in Iran, the relationship between the state’s regulation of public life and respective (trans)formations of Islamic ideas and practices remains understudied. There are a growing number of social histories that explore the formations of modern institutions, including science, medicine, and family, during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.40 However, they mostly do not engage with the ways in which these institutions, as expressions of the modern secularizing state, transformed the relationship between Islam and the state. In the context of late nineteenth century Iran,

Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi demonstrates how an “intrusive state” (dawlat-i fuwzūl) advanced in the context of growing concern with public hygiene. The emergence of monitoring and regulating mechanisms, such as quarantines and regular medical check-ups, facilitated the state’s ability to direct minute aspects of citizens’ lives and regiment their bodies.41 He explains elsewhere that the newly established measures of the state to ensure hygiene recast

Islam and its relation to the state as Islamic principles of purity were radically refashioned to become compatible with modern scientific notions of public hygiene.42 This dissertation extends this analysis, in order to bridge this scholarly gap, by proposing that despite the

40 See for example Pamela Karimi, Domesticity and Consumer Culture in Iran: Interior Revolutions of the Modern Era (London; New York: Routledge, 2013); Kashani-Sabet, Conceiving Citizens, 2011; Cyrus Schayegh, Who Is Knowledgeable Is Strong: Science, Class, and the Formation of Modern Iranian Society, 1900-1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 41 Mohammad Tavakoli-Targhi, “Everyday Modernity and Religious Inocilation,” Iran Nameh 4, no. 26 (2008). 42 Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, “From Jinns to Germs: A Genealogy of Pasteurian Islam” (60th Anniversary Conference, Pre-nineteenth century Workshop, Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University, May 16, 2014).

21 common assumption, secularism is in fact a productive lens through which one can revisit the relationship between society, Islam, and the state.

The first chapter of this dissertation, “The Tribulation of Venereal Diseases: From Moral

Subjects to Vulnerable Citizens,” explores the emergence of the moral regime of governance in

Iran and the shift in the role of Islam in public life as the vanguard of morality. Beginning in the

1910s, sexually-transmitted diseases moved to the forefront of sanitary reforms. This chapter puts the crisis of venereal disease in Iran at the center of historical inquiry. The focus will be partly on the work conducted by the medical institutions of the Iranian state in refashioning Islamic moral sensibilities, practices, and concepts. This chapter tackles the larger multifaceted epistemic shift in conceptions of subjecthood, governance, and the triad relationship between the state, morality, and religion, as it primarily reads medical periodicals and state-sponsored physicians’ publications along with and against Islamic journals. With the backdrop of fear from foreign invasion and the loss of control over Iran’s national borders, the relatively nascent and increasingly popular medical science of microbiology provided a language and a system of knowledge with which to address national political concerns. Notions of good citizenship became intimately related to the pursuit of good health. The state developed an awareness campaign and implemented measures to prevent the spread of venereal disease. In doing so, the government began to manage the sexual and marital conduct of citizens, which in turn prompted the rise of moral governance. Morality was then subject to state regulations.

Consequently, an Islamic system of morality was disarticulated in favor of the medico-moral language of the state, as the state began to regulate the moral conduct of society.

Islamic publications revitalized Islamic principles of purity, insisting that Islam was compatible with modern science and the predominant medico-moral security discourse of the state. They conceptualized Islam as a disciplinary force that organized subject citizens as

22 morally hygienic. Through this medico-moral campaign, vulnerability and illness were rendered in sharp contrast to liberal notions of citizenship. Prostitutes, perceived as essentially immoral, un-Islamic, and the primary cause of the spread of venereal disease, were conceptualized as the antithesis of the proper moral and healthy citizen. Their bodies were rendered as the most vulnerable against venereal disease microbes, their reproductive organs as physiologically infertile, and their sense of morality as corrupt. The figure of the prostitute, incapable of keeping her moral and bodily boundaries intact, at once both in danger and dangerous, was made a priority of sanitary, moral, and social reform. Various political parties, including Islamists, nationalists, monarchists, and secularists, found a shared language of critique that targeted the prostitute as a source of national, medical, and religious threat. The national medical predicament of venereal diseases moved Islam outside of institutional Shi‘a spaces like mosques and seminaries and into urban sites of interaction and even entertainment, including sites of sex work. It made moral religious sensibilities foundational to nationalism.

Chapter II, “Governing Morality: Religious Mobilization and the Formation of the

District,” proposes that the red-light district of Tehran was formed as a state of exception and was an expression of the secular power of the modern state. As such, the history of its governance and the juridical developments around the question of prostitution in Tehran serve as a site through which to probe into the larger developments of secularism and the shifting role of Islam in public space. In particular, this chapter unpacks the (trans)formation of the categories of private and public as they relate to the urban governance of morality and demonstrates that the secular power of the state that was invested in deciding the role of

Islamic sensibilities in the city relied on the ambiguities and indeterminacies of the categories of private and public. In doing so, it first probes into the moral crusade against prostitution, which started at the local level in various Tehran neighborhoods with intensive local

23 campaigns in opposition to the changing pattern of the sex trade, street solicitation, and the rapid growth of the number of brothels in the city. This chapter brings together state measures in relation to the governance of prostitution, residents’ collective petitions to parliament, and court cases to further complicate the narrative of privatization of religion under the secular rule of the sovereign state.

Since the early twentieth century, prostitutes, as the main transmitters of venereal disease and the primary cause of population decline, were framed as a national security threat.

At the same time, the clerics understood prostitutes as a threat to the Islamic image of Tehran and an obstacle to maintaining public morality. Concomitantly, the residents of Tehran perceived the growing presence and solicitation of prostitution in Tehran streets as a threat to their personal morality as well as their businesses that were in proximity to sites of prostitution. To respond to the public moral crusade against prostitution, the state transcended its own law, homogenized contested public moral sensibilities, and forcefully relocated Tehran prostitutes to a nascent neighborhood in a segregated area outside the city gates, adjacent to

Cossack’s military camp. I use this case to demonstrate that in matters of public morality

(akhlāq-i ‘umūmī), modern conceptions of citizenship that separate the public sphere, governed by universal rights, from the realm of religiosity as confined to private matters of family, crumble. This is due to the configuration of morality as at once public, and intimate, belonging to both spheres.

In this chapter, I extend Agrama’s argument to the analytics of urban governance as exercised in Shahrinaw. As mentioned, for Agrama secularism is the power of the sovereign modern state to inconsistently draw the malleable threshold of private/public and the

24 respective place of religion in public life. 43 Contemporaneous with this state move, the legislative body of the state began to develop codified laws on morality under the penal code system. I extensively examine court cases along with and against the developing codified morality laws. These cases illustrate that the state aspired to compartmentalize morality in terms of private and public, but utilized the ambiguity of the line that separates them to expand its regulatory power into the intimate domains of citizens’ lives. Although the law increasingly compartmentalized and temporalized religion, the formation of Shahrinaw attests to the fact that the state distributed the right to the city on the premise of moral judgment that was rooted in religious sensibilities. In containing prostitutes in a neighborhood outside the city, the state made an extra-judicial judgment call that was ingrained in public-intimate Islamic sensibilities, and justified by a security discourse. This case further demonstrates that secularism, as an expression of state power, carries an inherent contradiction: while it attempts to separate religion from the rule of the state, it simultaneously attempts to devour spaces that are outside its reach and therefore folds religion into the mechanisms of the state.

In the 1940s, as Tehran grew larger, enveloping the red-light district into the heart of the city, prostitutes returned to the public eye, only this time the point of attraction was their precarious lives and work conditions. Concomitantly, western medicine discovered penicillin as the definitive cure for syphilis, which was previously considered to be an incurable disease.

43 Relying on Agamben’s theory, Agrama draws a connection between secularism and the sovereign exception, pointing to the “extralegal measures” of states today to “defend against the alleged dangers of religious violence.” According to Agamben, the increasing dominance of the discourse of national security has prompted governments to normalize emergency states, under which the state is allowed to transcend its own law, and practice its absolute sovereignty. Agrama diligently demonstrates how governments utilize this discourse to shift the threshold of private and public and leave no domain of religion outside the rule of the state. See Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998).

Venereal disease ceased to be an urgent national threat, following the state’s mass importation of penicillin after WWII. This shift in concern intimated the advent of a compassionate impulse and a culture of care in the mid-twentieth century that evoked Islamic principles of justice (‘adl), oppression (zulm), and suffering (‘azāb). Chapter III, “Compassionate Citizens:

The Affective Landscape of Popular Literature,” explores the emergence of the ethos of compassion through the cultivation of individualist compassionate sensibilities toward

Shahrinaw prostitutes. This chapter explores the popular literary-journalistic campaign that took off in the 1940s in public press, which relied on the production of the affective attachments of the public to the figure of the vulnerable, abject, diseased body of the oppressed (mazlūm) prostitute. Islamist journalists evoked the concept of “doing good”

(‘amal-i khayir) to ground their philanthropic efforts in Islamic ideas and ideals. Ultimately, these humanitarian interventionist politics maintained the gap between the philanthropist and the diseased prostitute, allowing the moral superiority of the former.

With the expansion of the district in the 1950s, the state implemented contradictory policies. While gesturing towards closing the site to “rescue” female residents, it experimented with notions of vulnerable citizenship and modern “regimes of care,” with minimum expense and maximum ambition, through funding social work projects, launching “salvation houses” (khānah- yi rastigārī), and work camps (urdū-ya kār) with minimal standards and capacities and a low budget. By the 1960s the district had expanded noticeably but the living conditions were dire, with undocumented residents; unpaved alleys; and limited accessibility to electricity, water, and hygiene. For the better part of the 1970s the district was left with a small social work center, a poorly-run medical clinic, and a busy police station. What happened between the 1920s and the

1960s so that, in spite of the compassionate campaign in the public press, life conditions in

Shahrinaw became increasingly precarious? The final chapter, “Sovereign Experimentation: Trial

26 and Error in the District”, engages with government meetings and budgetary plans for the district to probe into this question as a window into the mechanisms of the welfare state in Iran. It illustrates that the increasingly precarious condition of prostitutes in the district was a result of the state’s 50-year long indeterminate and contradictory measures that were constantly vacilating between compassionate prohibitionisim and criminalizing regulationism. Prohabitionism treats sex-work as a practice that is inherently violent toward women and attempts to completely eradicate it. Regulationist policies attempt to monitor and regiment the health of prostitutes as threats to public hygiene and the health of the population. The two policies have been subject to continuous debates amongst feminists and governments throughout the twentieth and the twenty- first centuries.44

This chapter demonstrates that the incoherency of the way in which the state managed

Shahrinaw is not a sign of the ineffectiveness of the state’s welfare institutions. Rather, it is an expression of what is at the heart of the modern state: sovereign experimentation. In this case, experimentation with the political and economic decision of how much care prostitutes deserved, what degree of a “good life” the welfare state ought to provide for them, and the proper role of Islam in public space. In effect, the space of the district, where less-worthy

44 Today, there are three different legal models regarding prostitution: decriminalization (based on abolitionism), legalization (based on regulationsim), and criminalization. For rich debates on criminalization and its harmful implications for sex-workers in global and national contexts, see Kamala Kempadoo, “The Modern-Day White (Wo)Man’s Burden: Trends in Anti-Trafficking and Anti-Slavery Campaigns,” Journal of Human Trafficking 1, no. 1 (January 2, 2015): 8–20; Kamala Kempadoo, Jyoti Sanghera, and Bandana Pattanaik, Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work, and Human Rights (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm Publishers, 2005); Annie George, Vindhya, and Sawmya Ray, “Sex Trafficking and Sex Work: Definitions, Debates and Dynamics — A Review of Literature,” Economic and Political Weekly 45, no. 17 (2010): 64–73; Kamala Kempadoo, “Freelancers, Temporary Wives, and Beach-Boys: Researching Sex Work in the Caribbean,” Feminist Review, no. 67 (2001): 39–62; Kamala Kempadoo, “The War on Human Trafficking in the Caribbean,” Race & Class 49, no. 2 (October 1, 2007): 79–85; Jo Doezema, “Ouch!: Western Feminists’ ‘Wounded Attachment’ to the ‘Third World Prostitute,’” Feminist Review, no. 67 (2001): 16–38; Saskia Sassen, “Women’s Burden: Counter-Geographies of Globalization and the Feminization of Survival,” Journal of International Affairs 53, no. 2 (2000): 503–24; JK Anarfi, “Ghanaian Women and Prostitution in Cote d’Ivoire,” in Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition, ed. Kamala Kempadoo and Jo Doezema (New York: Routledge, 1998).

27 citizens lived, served as an “underfunded and overextended” laboratory of the modern nation- state, where relations between the state and subject citizens were constantly tested and shaped.

As a space on the threshold of the legal bounds of the city, the district was governed under the

“state of exception” for the entire sixty years of its life, ruled under moral principles founded upon ever-shifting values and affects that were rooted in resentment of the diseased prostitute, but evoked Islamic concepts and ideas of compassion and doing good.45 To this end, this chapter explores changes in the materialization of Islamic ideas and practices of compassion, as well as the possibilities of moral action in the long process of experimentation in the district.

The dissertation closes the story of the red-light district of Tehran with the same moment that the work opens with: the bulldozing of Shahrinaw. Through the execution of three famous Shahrinaw women a few months after the official closure of the district, the consolidating Islamic government made a statement: the Islamic regime is radically different from the secular Pahlavi regime. Later, a park was constructed on top of the district. However, the abolitionist plan of turning the district into a public park was developed before the revolution by a religious local neighborhood association that proposed it to the state in the

1950s. Although the Ministry of internal affairs approved the plan, the funds were never raised for its implementation. Yet again, the inception of the red-light district in 1921 was also a result of Islamic mobilization. What are we to make of these shifting collective Islamic

45 According to Agamben, states of exception are spaces where the limit of the juridical order is negotiated. He particularly challenges understandings of states of exception which attempt to define it either as extra-legal or as legal: “State of exception is neither external nor internal to the juridical order, and the problem of defining it concerns precisely a threshold, or a zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not elude each other but rather blur with each other. The suspension of the norm does not mean its abolition, and the zone of anomie that it establishes is not (or at least claims not to be) unrelated to the juridical order.” Agamben, State of Exception, 23.

28 sensibilities that informed these two distinct modalities of action? How is the Islamic state radically different from the Pahlavi state, if both demolishing the district and creating it were informed by Islamic ideas and practices and implemented by the state? This dissertation remaps the force of Islam in Tehran, a city that is so often glossed as a case of state-oriented top-down secularization in the twentieth century. The aim is not to argue against the secularization thesis, but to complicate the relationship between Islam, public morality, and the state in order to recover the collective historical amnesia about the central role of Islam in the Pahlavi state. The secular power of the Iranian state was not invested in the suppression of

Islam. Rather it was expressed through organizing and mediating both Islam, as the public religion of the country, and public morality, and the relation between the two. As such this dissertation proposes a non-western genealogy of Iranian secularism that was formed and informed by collective and ever-shifting Islamic sensibilities.

Chapter 1 Governing Morality: the Tribulation of Venereal Diseases

1.1 Introduction

In his 1920 “The New Era” (Dawrah-yi jadīd) article, Hassan Taqīzādah (1878-1970), the editor of the journal Kāvah, described Iran as experiencing a novel “condition” after WWI. According to him, while in the pre-war period Iran suffered from “acute diseases” (maraz-i hād), in the post-war era it was “chronic diseases” (maraz-i muzmin) that struck the country. He explained:

While previous diseases required urgent struggle, seeking doctors and drugs, and intense fighting against the disease, today’s diseases demand prevention, constant care, precaution, and a strong stable mind . . . Fighting this disease, which gradually sneaks into the veins and roots of the nation . . . requires stability, stamina, and reason.46

Taqīzadah’s medicalized account of the political climate of Iran in the post-war period signals a multifaceted epistemic shift in Iran, which included shifts in conceptions of public health, national and religious sensibilities, and notions of citizenship and governance. The cure for the chronic disease of the nation, Taqīzādah explained, was “absolute westernization of the soul

(rūhī),” as an internal operation of reform, which he called a spiritual revolution (inqilāb-i rawhānī). 47 In the context of fear of foreign invasion and the loss of control over Iran’s national borders, the relatively nascent and increasingly popular medical science of microbiology

46 Seyed Hassan Taqīzādah, “Dawrah-yi jadīd,” Kāvah, no. 36 (September 1910): 1–2. 47 This revolution entailed that Iran become “physically and spiritually” (jisman va rūhan) westernized. The contradiction of nationalist politics after WWI was that politicians saw the westernization of knowledge, science, and industry as the only path to national sovereignty. For more discussion on the politics of this “spiritual revolution” see Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, “Tajaddud-i ikhtirā‘ī, tamaddun-i ‘āriyatī, va inqilāb-i rawhānī, Iran Nameh 1, no. 20 (1381/2002): 195–236.

30 provided a language and a system of knowledge to address national political concerns, while focusing on the interiority of subject citizens. On March 14, 1925, the daily periodical Iran published an article entitled “War in the Human Body,” in which the nation was anthropomorphized as a body under the threat of foreign microbes:

Foreign enemies intend to conquer the body, as internal armies are busy defending it. The living body is a vast field with vessels and war lines running through it. Once foreign enemy, that is the microbe, finds its way into the castle [i.e. the body] it invades in a horrifyingly rapid manner.48

The slippage from the territorial language of war into the medical language of health was particularly powerful in the post-WWI context where the maintainance of the national and territorial sovereignty of Iran against British and Russian interventions was a major concern.

Simultaneously, the spread of venereal disease gained visibility in the public consciousness of

Iran as the most urgent political and medical concern in the country. The microbes of venereal diseases became emblematic of foreign enemies, sneaking under the skin of the nation, threatening the future generation. While in the nineteenth century waterborne and airborne epidemics were state’s main public health concerns, in the early twentieth century venereal disease moved to the forefront of sanitary reforms. Taqīzādah in the same article keenly observed: “While political threats before the war were like plague, tuberculosis, and gangrene, now they resemble syphilis and cancer.”49 In 1926, Vahīd Dastgirdī, the editor of Armaqān weekly publication, described the nation thusly in a satirical poem: “We are all syphilisque

48 “Jang dar badan-i insān,” Iran 9, no. 1792 (1303/1924): 3. 49 Taqizādah, “Dawrah-yi jadīd,” 2.

[syphilisvār i.e. afflicted by syphilis], murdering an infectious generation. Like Satan we are enemies to the sons of Adam.”50

The identification of syphilis and gonorrhea as the main epidemic diseases of the twentieth century signals a second phase in medicalization, and the emergence of a new mode of governance premised on the construction of healthy bodies, or the birth of what Foucault called biopolitics, in Iran.51 In exploring the emergence of this regime of governance, this chapter carries out three interlocking tasks. First, it explores the rise of moral governance as a biopolitical project of the government. Second, it investigates the medicalization of Islamic ideas through moral governance. The aim is to tackle the larger processes of (re)arranging and

(re)articulating Islam as a disciplinary force, pertinent to the bipolitical nation-building project of the state. Third, this chapter demonstrates that this state-oriented moral governance imagined and positioned the figure of the prostitute as its antithesis; a threat to the social, moral, national, and religious integrity of the nation.

50 Muhammad Vahīd Dastgirdī, “fukāhiyāt: huchīnāmah,” Armaqān 7, no. 1 (January 4, 1305): 52–53. 51 Foucault himself reflects on the relation between biopolitics, population control, and public hygiene in eighteenth century Europe: “Amongst other things, management of this population required a health policy capable of reducing the infant mortality rate, preventing epidemics and lowering the rates of endemic diseases, intervening to modify and impose norms on living conditions (whether in the matter of diet, housing, or town planning), and adequate medical facilities. The development in the second half of the eighteenth century of what was called medizinische Polizei, public hygiene, and social medicine, should be re-inserted in the general framework of a “biopolitics”; the latter aims to treat the “population” as a set of coexisting living beings with particular biological and pathological features, and which as such falls under specific forms of knowledge and technique.” (474) According to Foucault, biopolitics refers to the mode of politics in which the first subject of politics is the life of the population. He further argues that, beginning in the seventeenth century in the West, the notion of politics was transformed into biopolitics, and power into biopower, as the modern state began to “care” for the life of its people. For Foucault, an interlocking system of bodily regimentations, institutional architectures, and processes of knowledge production form the art of modern governance, which he terms “governmentality.” Disciplinary power and biopower are two expressions of the modern state governmentality that together make possible the larger work of governmentality. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78, ed. François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2007).

Venereal diseases were distinct from previous pandemic and endemic epidemics such as tuberculosis, typhoid, and cholera, which were radically fatal diseases. They could kill thousands within a short time span of a few weeks.52 On the other hand, venereal diseases, particularly syphilis and gonorrhea, were “tenacious” (simij) diseases, known literally as “hard to cure” (sa‘b al-alāj). Accordingly, the hygienic modern Qajar state, whose public health regulations were previously focused on keeping citizens alive, turned its attention to governing their lives, or what

Foucault has called “the conduct of conduct.” Notions of good citizenship became intimately related to the pursuit of good health. In return, the good state became associated with care for the health of its citizens. Governance of venereal disease further facilitated the prevalence of the idea that the state is not merely responsible for keeping citizens alive (the security state), but should also work towards caring for citizens and ending their suffering (the welfare state).53 The interplay between the security state and welfare state is one that I come back to in Chapter IV.54

The state developed three main mechanisms to manage citizens’ knowledge and attitude about maintaining their health: an awareness raising campaign—which is the focus of this chapter—, new regulations such as regular medical check-ups, and laws pertaining to marriage and morality which I discuss in more detail in Chapter III and Chapter IV. These strategies contributed to the regulation of subjects that focused on the moral dimension of both citizenship and governance.

This chapter explores the rise of moral governance, particularly through investigating the state’s

52 Physicians noticed this difference in the pattern of the spread of diseases and commented on it. See for instance, Mahmūd Najmābādī’s description of the spread of previous epidemics in Mahmūd Najmābādī, Balā-yi ‘azīm-i nasl-i bashar (Tehran: Chāpkhānah-yi firdawsī, 1927), 62. 53 Mohammad Tavakoli-Targhi notes that "social welfare" (rifāh-i ijtimā‘ī) turns into a state concern first in the mid- nineteenth century with the spread of waterborne and airborne epidemics. See “Everyday Modernity and Religious Inoculation,” Iran Nameh, 4, no. XXIV (2008). 54 Foucault explains that welfare and security are the two main rationales behind the art of governance, or the governmentality of the modern state. See Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 474.

33 discourses and mechanisms for the prevention and treatment of venereal diseases. To this end, this chapter is not simply concerned with the implementation of laws, rules, and procedures regarding public health, but also with the mobilization of values, affects, and judgments.55

The public press conceptualized venereal disease as the “tribulation of the time” (balā-yi zamān). Although tribulation (balā) has roots in Quranic terminology, in the context of the outburst of venereal disease in the early twentieth century it referred to a medical-national collective calamity. The emergence of venereal disease in public consciousness as the

“tribulation” (balā) of Iran at the time at once shaped and was shaped by the larger shift in conceptions of subjecthood, citizenship, governance, morality and the respective place of Islam in society. This chapter further demonstrates that identifying venereal disease as a crisis gave rise to a regime of moral governance that transformed the place of Islam in relation to the state.

Medicalized Islamic principles of morality were evoked and used to address the national project of producing a healthy population. As such, the public press began to articulate Islamic morality as a force that was in line with the state’s mechanisms of population control. Even when religious figures and political activists criticized the state for not observing Islamic principles of morality, they still imagined Islam as a nation-building force. As such, through this moral and national project Islam was rearticulated as pertinent to the political project of the state.

55 I follow anthropologist Didier Fassin’s conception of the state, which moves beyond Durkheimian and Weberian analysis that “generally lead to a vision of the state as an impartial and dispassionate institution.” Instead he focuses on moral “economies of the state,” by which he refers to “production, circulation, and appropriation of values and affects regarding a social issue.” Fassin explores what he calls “the heart of the state”, which includes passions and moral judgments at work in state institutions. Although my focus is not on a specific institution and its micro-politics in this chapter, I explore the role of moral values in state mechanisms. For more discussion on moral governance see Didier Fassin, At the Heart of the State: The Moral World of Institutions (London: Pluto Press, 2015).

Prostitutes, as subjects that categorically could not be integrated into the institution of family, were put in a precarious position and were pushed to the margins of the modern conception of citizenship. They were conceived of as the ultimate antithesis of the state’s public health projects. They were seen as the primary transmitter of venereal disease, immoral, un-

Islamic, and polluted. Being both dangerous and in danger, they were the exceptions against which the biopolitical mechanisms of the state were set.

During the nineteenth century, Iran witnessed the advancement of train routes, automobiles, telegraph lines, and other modes of transportation, which facilitated the swift transmission of knowledge, goods, ideas, capital, bodies, and, indeed, diseases, across its borders. The inauguration in 1885 of the Alexandria-Suez-Cairo rail line, running all the way from Hijaz to Egypt to Europe, boosted the passage of goods across continents, furthered pilgrimage to Mecca and reburials in sacred ground, and also facilitated the outbreak of pandemics such as the Cholera epidemic in 1889-1890. Specifically, airborne and waterborne diseases including cholera, tuberculosis, malaria, and typhoid became major public and government concerns.56 The urgency of controlling epidemic diseases ushered in the inception of a centralized institutional approach to health, which later, in 1904, resulted in the inauguration of the Sanitary Council (majlis-i sihhat), which was mainly responsible for the establishment and regulation of quarantines.57 With the development and improvement of quarantines at Iran’s borders, the threat of pandemics considerably decreased towards the end of nineteenth century.

56 Amir Arsalan Afkhami, “Defending the Guarded Domain: Epidemics and the Emergence of an International Sanitary Policy in Iran,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 19, no. 1 (March 1999): 122– 36. 57 The Sanitary Council of Iran was first founded in 1876. However, it was only in 1904 that the council set permanent regular meetings. Later, in the 1920s, the council evolved into the Ministry of Public Health. For more information about the inception of the Sanitary Council see Afkhami, “Defending the Guarded Domain," 122–36.

Although the Eastern Sanitary Council of Reform kept regular meetings in Tehran well into the twentieth century in order to monitor and control epidemics at borders, no major pandemics were reported. Many quarantines were phased out, while others remained active. In 1915, the Sanitary

Council reported that the threat of cholera had passed in Tehran indefinitely. Consequently, the

Council closed the quarantine post in Karaj, a town near Tehran, on October 25 of that year.58

As the government gained relative control over the spread of pandemics, sexually transmitted diseases moved to the forefront of sanitary reforms. Syphilis (kūft), soft chancre

(ātashāk), and gonorrhea (sūzanak) were amongst the most widespread venereal diseases across

Iran, especially in large cities including Mashhad, Tabriz, Abadan, Isfahan, and Tehran. In

February 1910, Tūs, a Mashhad-based weekly journal, reported that 60 out of 100 people were suffering from syphilis in Nishābūr.59 According to a League of Nations’ report, 11 percent of residents in Tehran had syphilis or gonorrhea in the 1920s. Private practices and drugstores advertised at least five different drugs for syphilis alone in the newspaper Iran. In April 1914, the

Eastern Sanitary Council of Reform60 reported that 1923 people across Iran had syphilis. A year later in June 1915, the council reported 8257 cases of syphilis.61 Venereal diseases did not cause high mortality rates, compared to other epidemics and endemics such as Tuberculosis (TB), smallpox, and typhoid. For instance, according to the Sanitary Council’s report, in November

58 “File 2612/1912 ‘Persia. Tehran Sanitary Council,’” January 13, 1914, Office of India Records, The British Library, India Office Records and Private Papers. 59 “Maktūb az Naishābūr, Rāji‘ bi hifz al-Sihha,” Tūs 1, no. 4 (January 10, 1910): 3–4. 60 This was an international council with the purpose of controlling pandemics. There were German, Russian, British, and Persian physicians and administrators on this council. The main office was in Iran and the main concern of this council was to control the spread of diseases through borders. The main diseases of concern were malaria, cholera, typhoid, and other water and airborne diseases. 61 “File 2612/1912 ‘Persia. Tehran Sanitary Council.’”

1926 there were 53 deaths due to TB in Tehran and only 6 reported deaths related to syphilis. In fact, as Cyrus Schayegh, a historian of modern Iran, notes, foreign delegates found venereal diseases to be a “benign” problem.62 Iranians, however, insisted on the mass scope of their damage. The reliability of these figures and statements is of little significance. Rather, what matters is the emergence of a public consciousness about a shared condition that Iran was experiencing. The emergence of venereal disease as the major medical concern of the twentieth century marks a new phase in sanitary measures.63

1.2 The Blight of Modernity

Venereal diseases did not simply emerge in bodies, but also in public consciousness as the tribulation of the time (balā-yi zamān).64 Around the 1910s a countrywide campaign for fighting venereal disease had taken off in periodicals and newspapers such as Tūs, Iran, Armaghān, and

Tarbiyat, which conceptualized venereal diseases as detrimental to the nation. Even satirical publications such as Āshuftah included regular syphilis jokes. Syphilis in particular was believed to be detrimental to the nation’s health, as congenital syphilis transmits from mothers to their fetuses, thus endangering the future bodies of the nation.65 If the advent of modernity in Iran is tied to medical concerns with epidemic diseases, then it is equally tied to a shared experience of

62 Cyrus Schayegh, Who Is Knowledgeable, Is Strong: Science, Class, and the Formation of Modern Iranian Society, 1900-1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 63 Schayegh notes that the shift in the early twentieth century of reformist attitudes from political reform to social refor, was expressed through medical discourse. See Who Is Knowledgeable, Is Strong. 64 Both Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet and Cyrus Schayegh note that venereal diseases were seen as detrimental to the population. Kashani-Sabet notes how syphilis in particular was framed as the “house burning” (khānimān-sūz) disease and therefore a threat to the institution of family. See Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Conceiving Citizens: Women and the Politics of Motherhood in Iran (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Schayegh, Who Is Knowledgeable, Is Strong. Paul Farmer, Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 65 Congenital syphilis is a fatal infection seen in infants with mothers who are infected with syphilis.

37 novel tribulation (balā) from venereal diseases. For instance, in a 1921 issue in the Islamic monthly journal The Jafari Society (Jāmi‘a-yi ja‘fariyyah), Hāj Ja‘far Khandaqābād interpreted

Iran’s experience of balā as a sign that Mahdi, the absent Shi‘a Imam, would soon make an appearance. He cited the Prophet Mohammad’s saying in the collection of hadiths, Bahār al-

Anwār: “God will make them suffer from such a balā, from which there is no salvation.”66 The experience of modernity was thus tied to notions of disaster. In 1927, Mahmūd Najmābādī

(1903-2000), a prominent state-sponsored physician, published The Grand Tribulation of

Humankind: Syphilis and Gonorrhea (Balā-yi ‘azīm-i bashar: syphilis va sūzāk) in which he warned the readership:

The heartbreaking health condition of society, the corruption [fisād] of public morality [akhlāq-i ‘umūmī], the abundance of venereal diseases, the infected youth, the wretchedness and desperation of women and young girls, and a series of other problems are no secret to anyone.67

This sense of disaster and experience of balā was articulated in terms of the decline of the health of the nation and moral corruption [fisād-i akhlāqī]. The Persian dictionary of Mu‘in defines balā as an unjust predicament (sitam va giriftārī) or pestilence (āfat). However, Farhang-i dihkhudā defines balā as a trial (āzmūn) and experiment (āzmāyish). The plentitude of articulations of balā within Islamic traditions in Iran is beyond the scope of this chapter.

However, it is fruitful to read the popular use of balā against its Quranic use. In the Quran, balā refers to the trials (both collective and individual) that God puts forward in Muslims’ lives in

66 Ja‘far Khandaqābādī, “Bayān-i alā‘im-i zuhūr-i hazrat-i mahdi ‘alayh al-salām,” Jāmi‘a-yi ja‘fariyyah 2, no. 13 (1301/1922): 69–70. 67 Najmābādī, Balā-yi ‘azīm-i nasl-i bashar, 1927).

68 order for them to “practice” (tamrīn) and realize their aptitudes (‘isti‘dād) in Islamic virtue.

How one faces balā determines who someone is.69 We already see how the public press re- conceptualized this understanding of Quranic crisis in line with the national project of

(re)producing a healthy and strong population. In the context of the 1920s’ concern with venereal diseases, physicians and politicians evoked balā to refer to what was conceptualized as a medical and national crisis. Reading the twentieth century use of balā along alongisde its Quranic meaning is productive, as the Quranic interpretation affords certain analytics that otherwise remain unexplored. There is a certain modernist-Islamic attitude that informs writings on syphilis, which can be grasped through the analytics of trial.

Of course, this trial differs from divine trials, as it does not simply target the Islamic community, but a Muslim nation-state. In this trial, the central role of the state is to produce a new understanding of trial and tribulation, while allowing for Islamic articulations of the problem. Physicians and state officials did not necessarily understand syphilis as a divine trial, although some writers did interpret it that way. Nevertheless, they imagined Iranians as witnessing and experiencing the trial and tribulation of modernity. While the analytics of this trial were premised on hard scientific facts, they were cast within readily recognizable Islamic analytics. The fundamental difference between medical trials and the trials described in the

Quran is that the outcome of the former gestured towards an empirical telos: cure the nation and end the suffering. Respectively, the purpose of subjects under trial was to end their suffering. For

68 Aatullah Mutahharī argues, “The purpose of godly trials is so that humans reach perfection through facing predicaments.” Cited in ‘Abdul Ali Pākzād, “Ibtilā va āzmāyish dar Quran,” Pajhūhish-ha-yi Quranī 1, no. 14 (Tīr 1, 1387/June 21, 2008): 342–77. 69 Some of the verses in the Quran that mention the realization of human aptitude through divine trials and tribulation include: 37:106, 47:31, 3:154, 21:35, 7:168, 76:2.

39 instance, Dr. Yūnis, a regular columnist in Armaqān journal, commented on the curability of syphilis, drawing on a famous verse by the classical poet Sa‘di “Agreeable is the pain, when there is hope for its cure.” (khush ast dard ki bāshad umīd-i darmānash).70 However, in the

Quran trials play a role in the making of Islamic subjects. In a way, some interpretations of

Quranic trials depict them as processes of becoming, as facing tribulations was an Islamic virtue.

In the case of the epidemics of venereal disease, the virtuous Quranic conceptions of the trial were flipped upside down and spilled into modernist medical understandings of the historical condition of Iran. In this framework, the trial of venereal diseases produced subject citizens.

Journalists and physicians staged the problem of syphilis, in particular, as a historical empirical condition. Yet again, it was in facing syphilis as a historical tribulation that the nation realized and performed its modernist aptitudes. The balā of syphilis, as a novel trial of modernity, played a role in the making of particular modern Iranian sensibilities and subject citizens. To become modern was then tied to an awareness of a collective suffering in Iran. A suffering, which was new, brought on by modernity as a test, a trial, and a tribulation.

Physicians who published material on venereal diseases between the 1890s and 1920s identified syphilis as a new disease, distinct from all past types of venereal disease. They insisted that the predicament of venereal diseases marked a rupture between the past and the present of

Iran. In 1899, Muhammad Kirmānshāhī (1829-1908) wrote a manuscript on venereal diseases, which was later published in lithographic print for the use of public. 71 He identified syphilis as a

70 Yūnīs, “Parhīznāmah,” Armaqān 1, no. 8 (1306/1927): 351–55. 71 Mirza Muhammad Kirmānshāhī (1829-1908) was Nasir al-Din Shah’s private physician. After finishing his studies in Dār al-Funāun, he studied medicine in Paris for three years.

40 new disease different from previously recognized venereal diseases.72 Although he admitted that there was evidence of previous knowledge about similar diseases in the works of Rāzī, Galen,

Hippocrates, and the Arab physicians of the classical age, he was insistent in siding with

Fournier and other French and Italian physicians who believed that Columbus brought syphilis to

Europe in the fifteenth century from the New World and that this was the first contact the Old

World had with the disease. He acknowledged that classic physicians had noticed scarred tissue on patients’ genitals, diagnosed them as “sexually transmitted diseases” (amrāz-i muqāribatī), and written extensively about them. However, he explained that such scars were most probably wounds from soft chancre. According to him, it was only in 1492 that the historians of the time complained about “a new disease that struck people like a tribulation from the skies, like a burning fire.”73 Going through the different origin stories of syphilis, he observed how during the Napoleonic wars syphilis, “this sudden tribulation, with an infinite speed, spread in both armies. From then on, it spread all over Europe and this impure seed was sown on earth.”74 Later

Iranian physicians wrote extensively on alternative treatments and modes of transmission, but reiterated the canonical assumption that syphilis was a new misfortune. Dr. Najmābādī, for instance, insisted that syphilis was only a hundred years old in Iran.

The novel tribulation of venereal disease was understood as a peculiar modern and foreign predicament. Known as “French Pox” (ātāshak-i farangī), physicians understood syphilis in particular as a result of mal-modernity. In 1930, Dr. Dūbshān, a physician in the Soviet

72 Muhammad Kirmānshāhī, Amrāz-i muqāribatī, 1895. 73 Kirmānshāhī, Amrāz-i muqāribatī, 6. 74 Kirmānshāhī, Amrāz-i muqāribatī, 7.

Hospital (marīzkhānah-yi Shawravī), published a book on syphilis in which he explained the origin of syphilis in Iran:

The first present that the European imperialists brought to Eastern lands is syphilis. Consolidation of civilization expands the domain of communication between nations while at the same time it drives people towards syphilis, in a time when effects of the influence of civilization are slow and gradual, the eternal friend of this civilization (tammadun) is the house-wrecking disease of syphilis, which spreads rapidly.75

Dūbshān conceptualized the tribulation of syphilis as an indispensable companion to modernity.

In becoming modern, in becoming civilized, one would be exposed to venereal diseases. In 1910, an anonymous physician who practiced medicine in Nishabur wrote an article in the periodical

Tūs, in which he expressed his concern with venereal diseases, and syphilis in particular: “What has distressed me constantly is the spread of kūft (syphilis) which is growing by day. If things remain the same and no measures are taken, we will be at the same state as the Americans in their savage days, when they suffered from [this disease.]”76 According to this journalist- physician the path towards civilizing and modernizing Iran was to fight venereal diseases.

Reiteration of the most widespread origin story of syphilis, which held that syphilis was a native

American disease, served to further establish syphilis as a disease closely associated with modernity (comes from the West) but originating in the New World, in savagery. In 1927 Dr.

Mahmūd Najmābādī, a prominent state physician, claimed in The Grand Tribulation of

Humankind: “One could say that foreign countries transmitted it [i.e. syphilis] to us.”77 Syphilis became the residue of the New World that haunted the colonizers, and in turn polluted Iran.

Other popular medical myths about the origin of syphilis include intercourse with animals,

75 S. Dūbshān, Syphilis va mukhtasāt-i intishār-i ān dar Iran (Tehran: Matba’a-yi majlis, 1930), 1. 76 “Maktūb az naishābūr, Rāji‘ bah hifz al-sihha.” 77 Najmābādī, Balā-yi ‘azīm-i nasl-i bashar.

42 intercourse between a man with leprosy and a woman with soft chancre, Napoleon’s soldiers who were fed human meat, and lastly, intercourse between soldiers and foreign women, including the prostitutes that the Italians sent over to the French army during the Napoleonic wars or the French army’s sexual relations with Russian women.78 Origin stories about sexual relations between veterans and foreign women in particular re-inscribe venereal disease as an excessive force that crosses national boundaries and pollutes territories. The novelty of the disease, together with its unnatural and perverted intimate origin and its transgressive spread framed it as an unintended and unnatural mistake of modernity. The idea behind these origin stories is that when modern humans do inhumane things (such as sleeping with animals, prostitutes, savages, and eating human meat), a horrible disease is born. In a way, venereal diseases were conceptualized as the excess of modernity and only modernity was seen as fit to fight its own flaw.

Physicians described Iran as particularly unfit to defeat and control this disease as they assumed that the nation did not possess modern sensibilities. Najmābādī observed: “Every day, as I read European journals, I observe how fast they are approaching civilization [tamaddun] but we have not taken a step toward happiness.”79 He later opined: “There is a direct correlation between the spread of this disease [syphilis] and civilization (tamaddun).”80 Najmābādī explained further that the more urbanized a city becomes, the more opportunities people have to

“socialize” (hashr va nashr) and therefore the greater the chances to spread venereal disease. As

78 Most of these origin stories are enumerated in Najmābādī’s book. Other accounts are mentioned in the following works: Dūbshān, Syphilis va mukhtasāt-i intishār-i ān, 2; Najmābādī, Balā-yi ‘azīm-i nasl-i bashar, 11; Muhammad Ali Tūtiyā, Amrāz-i zahrawī (Tehran: Chāpkhāna-yi fardīn va barādarān, 1310/1931). 79 Najmābādī, Balā-yi ‘azīm-i nasl-i bashar. 80 Najmābādī, Balā-yi ‘azīm-i nasl-i bashar, 29.

I will discuss in Chapter III, the emergence of new sites of sociability such as cafes, bars, brothels, and hotels caused a collective anxiety in nineteenth and twentieth century Tehran. Of course this medical tribulation could not be fought with the analytics and practices with which earlier divine tribulations were faced. Rather, it required new methods, new ways of thinking, and new ways of knowing. Most significantly, this sense of medical tribulation transformed people’s relationship to the state and vice versa.

1.3 Biopolitics

Beginning in the 1910s, as venereal disease turned into the most visibly urgent public health issue, sanitary reforms entered a new phase. The focus of sanitary reforms shifted from state- sponsored cleanses of public space to the direct regulation and discipline of bodies.

Subsequently, the state’s main concern shifted from the reduction of deaths to the governance of lives. Venereal diseases differed greatly from earlier epidemics and other rival endemics in that the state could not control them through the basic public sanitary measures that had been so successful in earlier decades, since the transmission of venereal disease took place in intimate private spheres. This new phase in sanitary measures shifted the role of the state in the lives of citizens, as it set the foundation for a biopolitical regime of governance that cut across the private/public divisions that are themselves constructions of the modern state.81

81 Scholars have shown that the institution of the modern state relies on the production and maintenance of certain dichotomies, of which one of the most fundamental is the private/public binary. For discussions on the precarity of these two categories see Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Cambridge, Mass: Zone Books; Distributed by MIT Press, 2002); Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text, no. 25/26 (1990); Lauren Berlant, Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2014).

In the nineteenth century, in order to control waterborne and airborne epidemics, the

Qajar state began to systematically plan for the public health and wellbeing of the nation. In doing so, it employed multiple state mechanisms, including the establishment of quarantines,

“building public toilets, sweeping streets, collecting garbage, and paving roads.”82 The state was then further institutionalized and developed apparatuses such as the municipality to control and sanitize water-storage, water sources and conduits, tanneries, mortuaries, and graveyards.

Initially, physicians treated venereal disease similar to earlier epidemics and assumed that they could be prevented with the sanitization of public spaces in urban centers. In 1910, Kirmānshāhī wrote extensively about the role of public baths, public water, and infected air in the transmission of syphilis and gonorrhea:

Four hundred years ago, when this disease spread all over Europe, its fire caught and destabilized principles of human civilization, destroying families, some doctors realized that the transmission of this disease is not limited to close contact. Rather, it travels with air, like plague and cholera.83

Not only did he draw on experiments to prove that syphilis was transmitted through the sharing of breath, but he also claimed that syphilis was transmitted through public contaminated water.

While reviewing various potential transmission scenarios, he criticized people’s ignorant daily habits:

In some cities in Iran, people use the water of running ditches for the purposes of cooking and cleaning. Not only does the filth of the alleys penetrate this water, but also women and servants wash bloody diapers and pads drenched in excrement [nijāsat], filth [kisāfat], and infection from people with syphilis, gonorrhea, soft chancer, diarrhea, and alopecia.84

82 Tavakoli-Targhi, “Everyday Modernity and Religious Inoculation.” 83 Kirmānshāhī, Amrāz-i muqāribatī, 27. 84 Kirmānshāhī, Amrāz-i muqāribatī, 29.

He further advised that the state should develop a proper plumbing system in cities and ban the direct use of running public water without taps. However, Kirmānshāhī acknowledged that venereal diseases did not work quite the same as other epidemics. For instance, he observed that vaccination did not work in the case of venereal disease: “In fact, it [vaccination] infects the person.” An anonymous physician-columnist alarmed the public in regards to infected public water:

In many cases, the patients who are not familiar with the science of microbes and transmission wipe their wounds with handkerchiefs and then wash those with public running water. They also contaminate other public things with germs. I am certain that if we examine a few drops of Khurāsān's public baths or the pools in the sacred shrine, we will find a wondrous world of harmful parasites, especially syphilis and gonorrhea microbes.85

In the following decades, with advancements in the medical knowledge of microbiology, physicians realized that venereal disease microbes are not, in fact, transmitted through water or air. In 1927, Dr. Dūbshān noted: “The microbe of syphilis is not long-lived outside the body.” In

1931, Dr. Muhammad Ali Tūtiyā explained: “If Gonococci [the microbe of gonorrhea] is on the skin it is no threat. However, once they penetrate the genitals, eyes, mouth, nose, and anus they generate the disease.”86 Once medical knowledge proved definitively that syphilis and gonorrhea microbes are extremely short-lived outside the human body, it became apparent that earlier public health measures could not respond to the problem of venereal disease. With this new realization, sexual intimacy (both non-penetrative and penetrative) came to be known as the main

85 “Maktūb az Nishābūr: rāji‘ bi hifz al-sihha (idāmah),” Tūs 1, no. 7 (January 17, 1910), 3–4. 86 Muhammad Ali Tūtiyā, Amrāz-i zuhravī (Tehran: Chāpkhāna-yi fardīn va barādarān, 1310/1931), 34.

46 cause of transmission: “99% of the time syphilis and gonorrhea are transmitted through sexual intimacy and proximity [nazdīkī va mujāvirat]”.87

Another unique aspect of venereal disease was that, unlike the nineteenth century epidemics, they did not kill a large number of people in a short timespan. Rather, they interrupted the productive and reproductive abilities of citizens. According to Dr. Mihrābiyān, chronic gonorrhea could cause life-long arthritis.88 Other doctors believed that it caused sterility in women. Syphilis, in particular, was known as a difficult-to-cure (sa‘b al-‘alāj) disease that caused mental illness in its chronic form. In addition, at the time the main drug for the treatment of syphilis was mercury, which did more harm to the body of the patient than good. Dr.

Najmābādī explained:

Plague, cholera, tuberculosis, and other epidemics hit all the people at once, causing anxiety in the public mind. After casualties, they disappear. However, these two grand balās, gonorrhea and syphilis, are permanent. They take their time and render the human race and nations extinct.89

Dr. Mihrābiyān recounted the complications that syphilis caused: “This disease causes many complications: Indigestion; optical, aural, sensory, and mental disorders; and general debility.”

Most significantly, syphilis could debilitate the future generation: “Syphilis and gonorrhea cause serious fatal complications for children and newborns. Many are stillborn or die immediately after birth. Many children are born blind, deaf, mute, deformed, or retarded due to congenital syphilis.”90 How could the state control venereal diseases when all previous measures of public

87 Giyurk Mihrābiyān, Bimārīhā-yi zuhravī va jilawgīrī az ānhā (Tabriz: Shirkat-i Chap-i Kitāb, 1947), 36. 88 Mihrābiyān, Bimārīhā-yi zuhravī va jilawgīrī az ānhā, 27. 89 Najmābādī, Balā-yi ‘azīm-i nasl-i bashar. 90 Mihrābiyān, Bimārīhā-yi zuhravī va jilawgīrī az ānhā, 28.

47 health, including mandatory vaccination, quarantine regulation, and public space sanitation proved ineffective? The key to this shift in the state’s mode of governance was the state’s investment in awareness campaigns that aimed to discipline the intimate relations of citizens, and the development of new policies to regulate the sexual conduct of citizens. These processes altered and tailored the sensibilities of citizens.

In the 1920s and 1930s, state-affiliated physicians, including Dr. Dūbshān, Dr. Kāsimī,

Dr. Tūtiyā, Dr. Tumāniyāns, Dr. Mihrābiyān, and Dr. Mustashfā, published books on syphilis and gonorrhea.91 Beginning in the 1930s, the state intensely invested in public education and raising public consciousness about venereal diseases. For instance, in 1934 the Ministry of

Public Health agreed to allocate funds to Dr. Hansel Fox, a German physician in Isfahan, to conduct public medical lectures and screen educational films about syphilis and malaria in large urban centers in Iran.92 In 1937, the Ministry of Education (Vizārat-i Ma‘ārif) included special mandatory lessons on venereal diseases and their transmission during birth in the nationwide curriculum for nursing degrees. The curriculum also included educational films on malaria and syphilis for female nursing students.93 The state either encouraged physicians through public recognition of their efforts or directly commissioned them to author manuscripts, which mainly targeted the young male urban literate population. In the preface to Dr. Mihrābiyān’s Venereal

Diseases and their Prevention he specifically noted: “This manuscript provides the necessary

91 Nassrullah Kāsimī was a physician, poet, academic, politician, and member of the parliament (1911-1995.) He was also the CEO of the Imperial Organization of Social Services in the 1930s. He had literary, political, and medical careers. He published the medical journal “Darmān” in 1937. Mustafā Alamūtī, “Kāsimī, Nusrat-Allāh,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, 2012, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/kasemi-nosrat. 92 “Taqāzā-yi ductur Fox-i ālmānī dar mawrid-i vurūd-i film-hā-yi āmūzishī,” 1313/1934, 290/902, Iran's National Archives. 93 “qismat-i rasmī,” Ta‘līm va tarbiyat 6, no. 7 (Āzar 1, 1316/November 22, 1937): 580–600.

48 information for young people from all different classes . . . I hope this to be a true guide for the prevention of such diseases [i.e. venereal disease].”94 The state referred to the physicians’ efforts in raising public consciousness as public service (khidma) and occasionally awarded them.

Mihrābiyān praised educational measures in foreign countries:

Medical and other bureaus in cities deliver daily advice about the consequences and the wretchedness and filth that a patient with syphilis or gonorrhea has to face. Or else, they use plays and movies to show the condition of people with such diseases. This is especially beneficial for young people and kids.95

In 1937, the Ministry of Education commissioned Dr. Kāsimī to translate a book titled What a

Young Boy ought to Know: The Prevention of Venereal Disease and Its Consequences. In the prelude to the book he mentioned that the ministry of education planned to include his book in high school curriculum. He noted that he considered this fact when choosing the style of writing.

Dr. Najmābādī commented on the importance of the state’s educational campaigns:

As a result of the efforts of public health bureaus, useful information has been made accessible to the public. At the same time, they have included special public health lessons in the curriculum of schools to fill children’s ears with horrible and severe complications of diseases from a young age so that in the future they prevent them.96

According to him, the purpose of “filling the children’s ears” with medical knowledge was to produce a public that would act in a certain way and cultivate sensibilities to ultimately avoid contracting diseases. Newspapers and periodicals including Armaqān, Darmān, Sihat-namā-yi

Iran, Shafaq-i surkh, Iran, Iran-i naw, Shikūfah, and Dānsih included regular columns on venereal diseases. Dr. Najmābādī noted: “In order to cure venereal diseases, not only does [one]

94 Mihrābiyān, Bimārīhā-yi zuhravī va jilawgīrī az ānhā, 6. 95 Mihrābiyān, Bimārīhā-yi zuhravī va jilawgīrī az ānhā, 54. 96 Najmābādī, Balā-yi ‘azīm-i nasl-i bashar, 61.

49 need to avoid them, but also there are other effective methods which need to be employed constantly. These methods are sanitary teachings and sanitary advice.”97 According to him, the most significant responsibility of public health bureaus was to “raise people’s awareness” about venereal disease in order to fight “public ignorance” (jahl-i ‘umūmī). The microbiological medical regime not only invested in changing how people acted, but also in how they were oriented towards the world, how they felt about the world, and their sense of right and wrong.

Dr. Tūtiyā referred to this campaign as medical propaganda: “There needs to be propaganda amongst people. Their minds have to develop. If everyone cares about principles of public hygiene, it is only then that public hygiene can be ensured.”98 He suggested that the state run

“propaganda cars”, which distributed free pamphlets and books about public health, around cities. He even suggested that, following Switzerland, Belgium, Argentina, and Russia, the state should print national health stamps.99 The larger assumption was that venereal disease was uncontrollable because of citizens’ ignorance and lack of proper knowledge. Dr. Tumāniyāns observed: “Practicing medicine and conversing with patients throughout these years has proved to me that patients know nothing about the causes, the treatment, and the prevention of these two diseases [i.e. syphilis and gonorrhea].” In the preface to Syphilis and Its Contagion, Dr. Dūbshān explained the motivation behind preparing the manuscript:

Most of my patients do not even have an elementary knowledge of these diseases. In response to the question why, they say there is no such book in Farsi. This has motivated me to prepare this book and make it available to lay people.100

97 Najmābādī, Balā-yi ‘azīm-i nasl-i bashar, 62. 98 Muhammad Ali Tūtiyā, Kuliyyāt-i andarz-hā-yi sūdmand, vol. 9 (Istanbul: Ma‘ārif, 1935), 7. 99 Tūtiyā, Kuliyyāt-i andarz-ha-yi sūdmand, 30. 100 Dūbshān, Syphilis va mukhtasāt-i intishār-i ān dar Iran, 1.

Producing popular medical knowledge on venereal diseases worked towards cultivating new sensibilities in order to change people’s attitudes regarding their bodies and daily social conduct.

Dr. Tūtiyā explained his intention in publishing Venereal Diseases:

As a result of misconduct in social life, syphilis is spreading beyond imagination … Although syphilis is one of the catastrophes of humankind and a house-burning tribulation, Iranians do not know much about this terrifying disease.101

The state, reformists, journalists, and physicians actively participated in this grand project of reorienting and refashioning the public, so that citizens would respond to the world around them with an active consciousness of microbiological knowledge. The tribulation of venereal disease could be overcome, but only once medical knowledge was disseminated, cultivated, and lived. In the preface to Venereal Diseases, Dr. Tūtiyā projected onto the future of his book: “I hope that this book works in shedding people’s ignorance about this house-burning disease and serves to

[elevate] public opinion.”102 While, as discussed earlier, tribulation refers in its Quranic meaning to the subject’s trial of suffering as a means of getting closer to God, this medical tribulation referred to the subject’s efforts and capacity to acquire medical knowledge and eventually become a morally responsible citizen, to become a better citizen. To grow out of ignorance, to know the truth about how diseases worked, Iranians had to know differently (not know more, but know differently). This medical tribulation relied on the production and cultivation of a mainstream microbiological knowledge.

First and foremost, the medical trials of the twentieth century transformed subjects into subject citizens. As the knowledge of microbiology turned into cultural capital, the relationship

101 Tūtiyā, Kuliyyāt-i andarz-ha-yi sūdmand, 3. 102 Tūtiyā, Kuliyyāt-i andarz-ha-yi sūdmand, 4.

51 between subjects and scientific truth became a habitual one, i.e. knowing about venereal diseases and living an everyday hygienic life became a habitus. The campaign against the tribulation of venereal diseases in turn became a moral campaign, invested in producing and maintaining healthy subject citizens who knew how to navigate their social lives so as to prevent transmission of the microbes of venereal diseases. This medical campaign invested in cultivating popular medical knowledge, which would eventually turn subjects into healthy citizen subjects with microbiological sensibilities. The significance of the theme of citizenship is twofold. First, it allows us to see the particular national sensibilities at the time and what it meant to be a citizen.

Second, it signals the prevalence of a moral order that defined subjects primarily in relation to the nation-state, as opposed to God. In what follows, I will first explore how morality was governmentalized, i.e., morality turned into a state matter, through syphilis regulations and awareness campaigns. Then I will show how in the public press, Islamic morality was recast so as to respond to citizenship problems and medical concerns. The second point is in line with larger transformations of religion and Islam in the context of the Constitutional Revolution.

1.4 Conducting Moral Conduct

In 1920 Hassan Taqīzādah sharply criticized Iranian statesmen for their lack of attention to internal problems, including the spread of diseases:

From 1909 onwards, with the restoration of the Constitutional movement eighty percent of our struggles and efforts were tweaked towards foreign policy . . . most statesmen believe that maintaining and protecting the nation from possible threats can only be done through foreign policy. The rescue or even progress [of the nation] relies on international relations [for them]. They think that our miseries and problems all arise from the pressure and the violence from foreign states. If they can manage that, then the road [to progress] is paved with no hindrance. This is why politicians’ minds are consumed with making a treaty with Japan, telegraphing European countries, uniting Islam, uniting the East, hoping for the victory of Russian’s revolution, India’s rebellion, Egypt’s movement, and

Ireland’s political movement. They have no time for reforming the water streams in Tehran and the propulsion of the filth that is causing diseases. 103

According to him, the first priority of the state should be “A fiery war against bodily diseases and social pestilence (āfāt-i ‘ijtimā‘ī) such as alcohol, opium, and syphilis.”104 He further noted that due to the extreme corruption of public morality (akhlāq-i ‘umūmī), the “house” of Iran was in “ruins” (khānah-yi Iran virān ast). Seven years later, in the monthly publication Taqaddum he boldly asserted: “In my opinion the most significant disease in Iran is moral disease.”

How did the general sense that Iran was facing a medical tribulation transform into the idea that Iran was in a moral crisis? At what point and to what end did morality and moral reform emerge in the discourse of national progress? At what point did politicians start to see morality— or the lack thereof-- as that which was hindering the progress of the nation? The short answer is that health and morality became aligned with each other since the transmission of venereal diseases were directly related to the social conduct of citizens. The long answer, however, needs to address the rise of concern with population governance. Since creating and then maintaining a healthy population turned into a national state project, reformists, politicians, and physicians saw morality and health as constitutive of one another. Population control became a problem of governance.

In 1921, Sadr al-dīn Balāqī noted that “Social reform and economic reform will never take place in a nation if strong pillars of moral reform (islāhāt-i akhlāqī) are not implemented well in advance.”105 The idea was that if Iran did not have a healthy productive and reproductive

103 Sayyid-Hasan, Taqizādah, “Islāhāt-i furī was asāsī, Kāvah, vol. 2, no. 12 (1920): 1–6. 104 Sayyid-Hasan Taqizādah, “islāhāt-i furī,” Kāvah-yi dawra-yi jadīd, (1920): 6. 105 Sadr al-dīn Balāqī, “Parvarish-i irādah,” Shu‘ār-i Islam 1, no. 1 (1921), 6.

53 nation then it could not sustain political autonomy, become properly industrialized, and properly modernized. On the other hand, taking the moral high ground allowed nationalists to push back against Eurocentric understandings of progress. In 1924 Hussein Kāzimzādah, the editor of the periodical Iranshahr, published an article on knowledge (ma‘ārif) in which he proposed a change in the quality of thought and faith:

Iran is like a diseased body that has been lying [on the bed] for such a long time … in order to rescue Iran from the current condition, and in order to realize the nation’s dream, there need to be healthy children with strong bodies.

He further noted that, as the Western countries had not disciplined their spiritual and emotional strength—which always comes before physical and mental strength, they had not yet overcome illness, despite all the civilization and progress that they had made.106 The fundamental requirement of having a large, productive, and healthy population is to have reproducitive families. The public perceived venereal disease as the number one threat to the institution of family.107 As such, families were put in the spotlight of the state’s reformist policies and everyday morality intersected with social hygiene.

The concern with “population reduction” (taqlīl-i nufūs) goes back to the physicians’ warnings about high infant mortality rates in late nineteenth century.108 However, it was only in the first half of the twentieth century that the state and policy makers started to take measures to regulate the sexuality of men and women in the interest of the nation. The sense that Iran needed

106 Hussein Kāzimzādah, “Ma‘ārif va arkān-i sigāna-yi ān,” Iranshahr 2, no. 8 (April 21, 1924), 16. 107 Kashani-Sabet extensively demonstrates in her book that population control and the institution of family were at the core of women’s reform movements in Iran throughout the Pahlavi period. According to her, reform in hygiene refashioned the institution of family as the fundamental unit of the nation-state. See Kashani-Sabet, Conceiving Citizens. 108 Kashani-Sabet, Conceiving Citizen, 35.

54 a healthy young population in order to be able to defend its borders was pervasive in public press materials, which mainly aimed to educate citizens about reproduction and related diseases. In

1935, the Ministry of Health commissioned Dr. Tūtiyā, who believed that public hygiene should be a part of the state’s “propaganda,” to compile a book on public health. The book was published in a series called “The Principles of Useful Advice,” and was a collection of articles from his journal, Iran’s Health Watch (Sihhatnamā-yi Iran). On the first page, the main theme of the book was announced as “health, reproduction, and the increase of the population.” In another publication, following the suggestion that dangerous diseases including syphilis can erase a generation of a nation, Dr. Tūtiyā contended: “to defend against the invasion of such diseases, the first thing to do is to spread social public health (hifz al-sihha-yi ‘ijtimā‘ī) and public wellbeing.”109 As such, he articulated a national project in terms of a medical project. In 1938, Dr.

Mustashfā warned the readership that: “syphilis causes nations to become extinct and empties countries of healthy people.” He further reported that: “syphilis kills 4% [of patients]. 25% cannot live normal lives and 30% die from complications that syphilis causes.”110

Dr. Tūtiyā was strongly concerned about the reduction in the population and wrote prolifically on the political significance of population health. He wrote an essay with the title

“What Should be Done to Increase Iran's Population?”, in which he explained the importance of population:

There is no denying that civilized nations who want to take hurried steps in the path of progress need a large population . . . With such a vast land, Iran only has a population of 13 million. This population is never enough for Iran. The population of Iran needs to increase drastically. In comparison with civilized countries, Iran needs to have at least a hundred and fifty million citizens . . . the population of Anglo-Saxons, Latins, Germans,

109 Tūtiyā, Amrāz-i zuhravī, 6. 110 Ali Mustashfā, “syphilis (kūft),” Armaqān 19, no. 4 (1317/1938): 269–72.

and Slovaks has great impact on their powerful political presence.111

He further claimed, “venereal diseases are amongst the most important causes of population decline . . . in fact syphilis is the enemy and the murderer of newborns.”112 He ended his provocative essay with the moto “kill syphilis and save newborns.” The public saw venereal diseases as the “enemy” of the institution of family, both because of their mode of transmission and the complications that they caused in birth, for the fetus or the newborn.113

In the early twentieth century, the state began to develop mechanisms for regimenting and monitoring the health of families through the establishment of free women’s and venereal disease clinics in large cities including Mashhad, Tehran, Isfahan, and Abadan. In 1910, the

Sanitary Council founded a venereal disease clinic in the Government’s Hospital (marīzkhānah- yi dawlatī). In Tehran, Dr. Amir ‘Alam (1861-1961) opened the Women’s Clinic (marīzkhāna-yi niswān) in 1916. In February 1920, the Sanitary Council, with Dr. ‘Alam as its chair, decided to open a hospital exclusively for venereal diseases nextdoor to the Government Hospital with a monthly budget of 600 Tomans, a relatively large sum at the time.114 Dr. Mirza Muhammad

Khan, a physician trained in London, was to be in charge of it. In 1938, the National Parliament passed a law that mandated marriage registry offices to require health certificates from men stating that they did not have venereal disease. In 1941, the state passed the Sexually-

111 Tūtiyā, Kuliyyāt-i andarz-ha-yi sūdmand. 112 Tūtiyā, Kuliyyāt-i andarz-ha-yi sūdmand, 69. 113 Other social and moral issues including opium use and alcoholism were treated very similarly. In fact, fighting venereal diseases as a moral cause was part of a larger national moral project against practices and problems which interfered with the productivity and reproductivity of the nation, and were seen as weakening the institution of family. For similarities between discourses around opium, alcohol, and venereal diseases see Schayegh, Who Is Knowledgeable, Is Strong, 110-157. 114 “File 2612/1912 ‘Persia. Tehran Sanitary Council.’”

Transmitted Diseases Act (ghānūn-i bimārīhā-yi āmīzishī), according to which all patients with venereal diseases, including syphilis, soft chancer, and gonorrhea, were obliged to seek free treatment from public clinics and hospitals. Failing to do so had penal consequences. I will discuss this Act in more detail in Chapter IV.

At the same time, the educational awareness campaigns run by the state addressed the danger of venereal diseases for families. Physicians published extensively on both male and female sexual organs, sperm, eggs, hormonal glands, the process of insemination, and intercourse. They included pictures of the anatomy of male and female organs, sperm, and eggs.

As mentioned, in 1937, the ministry of education convened the translation and publication of

What a Young Boy Ought to Know: Prevention of Venereal Diseases and Its Consequences. The

English version What a Young Boy Ought to Know, first published in 1911 in the US, belongs to the popular American “Self and Sex” series written by Sylvanus Stall (1847-1915), an American pastor. The series is one of the first sex education collections prior to the Freudian revolution and sold about a million copies. The book is well-known for its anti-masturbation campaign. 115

However, Dr. Kāsimī, who, as mentioned, was commissioned by the state to translate the book, redirected it towards raising awareness about venereal diseases. Not only did he add a subtitle about venereal disease to the main title of the book, but he also rearranged and rewrote the text in the process of translation so that it spoke more to the problem of venereal diseases as a national problem. He put the nationalist agenda at the forefront of the prevention of venereal disease, as he argued that only strong healthy bodies are valued citizens. He even exemplified Samuel from the bible as a soldier whose main asset was his physical abilities: “The greatness of each country

115 Jennifer Burek Pierce, “What Young Readers Ought to Know: The Successful Selling of Sexual Health Texts in the Early Twentieth Century,” Book History 14, no. 1 (November 9, 2011): 110–36.

57 is dependent on its troops . . . Samuel was chosen as the king of Israel because he was taller than his own kind and therefore he was stronger.”116 He dedicated half of the book to chapters on marriage including choosing spouses, the dangers and hinderances in marriage, the naturalness of marriage, and the religious aspect of marriage.

Syphilis, in particular, was commonly referred to as the “house-burning” disease as it resulted in stillborn babies and miscarriages. Additionally, congenital syphilis could infect the fetus. Dr. Dūbshān noted: “I witness with my own eyes how this nation is moving towards extinction … Many visit me with congenital syphilis and they do not even know what has caused their complications.” Following the assertion that syphilis and gonorrhea, in most cases, infect all family members including nursing mothers and children, physicians conceptualized it as a threat to the institution of family and fighting venereal disease became part of the larger maternalist movement in early twentieth century Iran.117

Venereal disease was situated at the intersection of citizenship, morality and hygiene, due to its close affiliation with population reduction and family destruction. The fight against venereal disease was at once a medical, moral, and political fight. Physicians asserted that syphilis and gonorrhea were not merely physical diseases. Rather, they were primarily moral diseases (amrāz-i akhlāqī) for three reasons. First, syphilis and gonorrhea were known to be transmitted primarily through sex outside of marriage. Secondly, they sabotage the reproductive

116 Stall Sylvester, Ānchah bāyad yik javān bidānad: hikmat-i ‘ilmi, hifz al-sihha, akhlāq, trans. Nasrullah Kāsimī (Tehran: Chāpkhānah-yi dānish, 1316/1937), 13,14. 117 Kashani-Sabet conceptualizes the movement to protect families as “maternalism.” She argues that the figure of the woman was re-conceptualized as the mother of the nation, responsible for the health and growth of population at the turn of the century. For more discussion on maternalism see Kashani-Sabet, Conceiving Citizens, 2011.

58 and productive abilities of the diseased. And third, they weakened the nation. Dr. Mihrābiyān dedicated a section of his book to “moral and medical advice for young people,” in which he warned against “bad socializations with evil people” and “sharing beds with people who have a home-wrecking sense of morality.” He went on to complain about the moral condition of Iran:

“Unfortunately there are still no rules of sociability for our young population.”118 According to him, the rules for prevention of gonorrhea and syphilis for young people were as follows:

“forbearing their lust and getting married.”

Dr. Najmābādī devoted a chapter of The Tribulation of Human Kind to “The Relations

Between Public Hygiene, Moral Knowledge, and Medical Knowledge.” He differentiated between the science of medicine (‘ilm-i tibb) and public hygiene, asserting that the latter aims at the prevention of diseases, whereas the former cures diseases. He concluded: “If public hygiene is observed, the science of medicine would not have much to do.”119 The observance of public hygiene was referenced as only having sex within the bounds of marriage, having regular medical check-ups, being honest with doctors about one’s sexual life, avoiding sex altogether if infected, and many more cautionary measures. Putting public health before medical knowledge,

Dr. Najmābādī conceptualized the fight against venereal diseases as a moral fight. Dr. Kāsimī claimed: “morality and intelligence depend on bodily health.”120 In 1925, Tūs drugstore, in collaboration with a Hamburg-based drug company, ran a daily advertisement for a syphilis drug

(Bismogenol) in the newspaper Iran. The advertisement asked the rhetorical question:

118 Mihrābiyān, Bimārīhā-yi zuhravī va jilawgīrī az ānhā, 53. 119 Najmābādī, Balā-yi ‘azīm-i nasl-i bashar, 58. 120 Stall Sylvester, Ānchah bāyad yik javān bidānad: hikmat-i ‘ilmi, hif al-sihha, akhlāq, trans. Nasrullah Kāsimī, 18.

Have you ever considered the fact that the bedrock of humanity is moving towards extinction? Have you ever thought about how syphilis, the ominous and shameful disease, is an axe chopping at the roots of the future human generation? … I wonder how kindness and familial affection, especially the sweet smiles of your young children, do not remind you that, aside from obvious pain and overwhelming hassles, you are also involving those wretched [children when you do not cure yourselves]. You are leaving them with a shameful legacy instead of establishing a sweet comfortable life premised on science, civilization, and humanity. Your soul would suffer from shame forever.121

According to the advertisement, only shameless citizens would not seek treatment for their venereal diseases. They were the ones who did not care about the future of their nation, and the health of their children, and therefore they had no shame! To be good citizens meant to be moral, which in turn meant to only have sexual relations within the bounds of the institution of family.

Daily publications and periodicals called for the establishment of a moral police (pulīs-i akhlāqī) force to monitor and punish immoral behavior such as prostitution.122 A reporter at Iran claimed that in Scandinavian countries such as Sweden the urban police had a department called the moral police which recruited undercover police men to identify sex workers in cabarets, theater houses, play houses, and ballroom parties!123 He additionally claimed that the moral police made the identity of sex workers public, so that fewer women engaged in the profession. The physician

Ali Mustashfā commented extensively on the role of the state in regulating morality for the purpose of the prevention of venereal disease. He enumerated the ways to prevent the spread of venereal disease as “social advice, and moral and legal measures” (andarz-hā ijtimā‘ī va tadābīr- i akhlāqī va qānūnī).124 He mentioned that there were laws around venereal disease in Germany,

Italy, and Monaco and claimed that according to marriage laws in Germany, spouses are granted

121 “Barā-yi ‘alāj-i qat‘ī-yi syphilis,” Iran 9, no. 1800 (Farvardīn 19, 1304/April 8, 1925). 122 “Dar atrāf-i hijāb,” Habl-i matīn 35, no. 18, 19 (May 3, 1927). 123 Vahīd Dānishpūr, Iran 35, no. 18–19 (1303/1924), 18. 124 Ali Mustashfā, “Sūzāk,” Armaqān 19, no. 8 (1317/1938): 543–44, 553–60.

60 the right to divorce in case their partners carry venereal diseases. He further suggested that in

Iran, carriers of venereal diseases should be arrested if the police found that they were spreading the disease. He even went so far as to recount instances where carriers of syphilis were evicted from the city or hanged in medieval Europe! He further discussed the British medical regulationist model of governing prostitution and argued that it was urgent to identify sex workers and subject them to medical examinations in Iran.125

Bringing together the concepts of police, law, and morality, the state entered a new mode of governance, which as I will later argue, cut through private/public divisions. What is important here is the shift that happened in the concept of morality. As morality moved within the domain of the state’s governance, moral subjects turned into moral subject citizens, whose morality was defined in terms of their productive and reproductive abilities, and what they could do to strengthen the political autonomy of Iran. This shift in the domain of the state transformed the conception and practice of morality, and the respective place of Islam in public life.

1.5 Medicalization and the Governmentalization of Islam

In his educational book on venereal diseases, Dr. Kāsimī included a chapter on purity (pākī), which opened with the advice: “‘Keep yourself pure,’ as a religious leader said more than nineteen centuries ago. This expression will never get old. May each new generation reiterate

125 The regimes of the governance of prostitution, depending on the time and the place, have varied from lax regulationism to strict prohibitionism. In regulationism, the state controls the businesses at different degrees, while in the latter model prostitution is criminalized. The prohabitionist model often does not punish prostitutes directly, but prosecutes pimps, madams, brothel owners, and any other kind of facilitator. For more information on these different models of governing prostitution, see Joyce Outshoorn,The Politics of Prostitution : Women’s Movements, Democratic States and the Globalisation of Sex Commerce (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

61 it.”126 And indeed, each generation reiterated the principles of purity, though in slightly different ways. In this section, I demonstrate how Islamic notions of purity, which once had no apparent overlap with the empirical modern science of microbiology, gained currency as a moral force against the spread of microbes of venereal diseases. The articulation of Islam as a medico-moral force facilitated the emergence of what Tavakoli-Targhi has called “embodied political Islam,” which rests on Foucault’s conception of biopolitics.127 Islam was then situated at the intersection of individuals’ private conduct and the state’s politics. It was through this shift in the notions of purity that Islam was articulated as a social and political force relevant to the project of nation- state building.

In Iran’s Islamic literature prior to the nineteenth century, purity did not necessarily mean to be free of disease. Rather, being pure (tahārat) referred mostly to ritualistic notions of purity.

Tavakoli-Targhi demonstrates that Islamic notions of purity and impurity (tahārat va nijāsat) changed into hygiene and filth (nizāfat va kisāfat) in the nineteenth century, following the epidemics of waterborne and airborne diseases.128 He further notes that this shift in the conception of purity signals the emergence of what he refers to as “Pasteurian Islam” (Islam-i pasturizah). While he focuses on changes in the conception of pure water, the same shifts can be traced in the conception of the purity of the body with the outbreak of venereal disease in the early decades of the twentieth century.

126 Stall, Ānchi bāyad yik javān bidānad, trans. Kāsimī, 19-33. 127 Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, “From Jinns to Germs: A Genealogy of Pasteurian Islam,” Iran Nameh 30, no. 3 (Fall 2015): IV–XIX. 128 Tavakoli-Targhi, “From Jinns to Germs: A Genealogy of Pasteurian Islam.”

The question of tahārat of the body, as a way of keeping the body intact, has always been prominent in Islamic teachings. In the Shi‘a tradition, the mujtahids’ responsa (risālah-yi

‘amaliyah) included instructions about how one could keep the body pure. They included minute guidelines for managing bodily excretions, such as how to wash bodily fluids. Shi‘i responsa paid close attention to bodily contact zones, through which subjects encounter the world. In a sense, practical dissertations provided blueprints of how to spill over to the world and how to take it in: What to eat, where to sleep, how to wash urine, what water to drink, what body to have sex with, and more. Islamic teachings were concerned with the question “How does one encounter the world through bodily orifices with an Islamic attitude?” If we assume that the physical body is the threshold of the inside and outside of the subject, and if we take that bodies are that through which we encounter the world around us, the rules of purity could then be understood as Islamic guidelines. They are ways of being in the world, in that they align subjects towards and against foods, ideas, bodies, and spaces. At the same time, they construct notions of bodily integrity.

The anthropologist Miriam Ticktin argues that conceptions of bodily integrity are contingent upon social, historical, and political contexts and “regimes of care” that shape them.129 The Islamic conception of bodily integrity and purity transformed at the beginning of the twentieth century into a concept of purity and body integrity as being free of venereal disease, which then turned into an urgent national matter. With the state investing in health, morality, and family matters as modes of population control, Islamic conceptions of purity, morality, and even family were refashioned. This is not to say that there was ever a stable notion

129 Miriam I. Ticktin, Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France (Berkely: University of California Press, 2011).

63 of family, morality, or purity in Islam. Nor is it to suggest that state-oriented Islam was the only articulation of Islam in the twentieth century. However, the entanglement of Islam with the state’s biopolitics and the microbiological regime of knowledge is a distinctively modern phenomenon that began in the nineteenth century and took on new forms in the twentieth century.

Both Islamists and anti-Islamists invoked Islam’s relationship to public hygiene, the nation’s population decline, and medical regimes of truth to either defend or critique Islam.130

Nationalists attacked religious figures and practices that did not protect families and bodies from venereal diseases. Mushfiq Kāzimī provocatively critiqued religious authorities for not acknowledging the reality of un-Islamic sexual practices and therefore closing the doors for mandatory check-ups for venereal disease.131 He contended that to “rescue the nation,” Iran needed to get rid of “ignorant deceptive mullahs” who stubbornly would not accept the existence of licentious people and disregarded preventive methods. However, there is no concrete evidence proving that venereal disease check-ups had anything to do with peoples’ level of religiosity.

130 The terms Islamist and Islamism are highly contested amongst scholars and politicians both inside and outside of Muslim majority countries. There are numerous understandings of Islamism, and so often the concept is tied to current Islamic militant groups including the Taliban or Al-Qaida. Scholars commonly link the rise of Islamism to the fall of communism and leftist movements. In Iranian Studies, Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson are the pioneers of this historical analysis: Islamism turned into the only alternative political ideology that challenged the state, in the absence of strong leftist movements during the second Pahlavi period. See Janet Afary, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). I use the term Islamist to refer to individuals, including commoners, politicians, activists, and journalists, who conceptualized Islam to be part and parcel of the project of the modern nation-state. This conception of Islamism is different from ideological Islam, as it allows for understanding Islam not simply as a political ideology, but also as a disciplinary force. It is notwithstanding that the term Islamiyyat—which Richard Martin and Abbas Barzegar translate into Islamism—is used in some of my primary sources, and mostly refers to the role of the spirit of being a Muslim (rūh- i islamiyaat) in modern public life. Richard Martin and Abbas Barzegar note that the term cannot be found in classical Islamic literature, including hadiths, the Quran, and Islamic law. For a more in-depth discussion on the debates around and variations of Islamism see Islamism: Contested Perspectives on Political Islam (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2010). 131 Mushfiq kāzimī, “Zindigi-yi Iranī va zindigi-yi urūpāyī,” Iranshahr 2, no. 8 (April 21, 1924).

Nevertheless, critiques of Islamists argued that Islamic practices were backward, superstitious, and deviant and they all, in one way or the other, caused the spread of venereal diseases. For instance, physicians specifically attacked the Islamic practice of Mut‘a (temporary marriage in

Shi‘a law), as they explained that it put the husband in definite danger of venereal disease.132

The hijab was another common point of offence to Islam as a backward practice. Claiming that unveiling causes inner veiling, nationalists argued that it is the inner self that has to be modest.

Likewise, a cloth on the head does not necessarily make people moral. The anti-Islamists even contended that: “veiling causes bad actions and contagious diseases,” and wrote poems about it:

The Islamic jurist is not inclined towards unveiling

Because of the many deceits that the veil affords

When the Quran is not to his liking

He goes beneath the veil and allows for the wrongful133

The most significant critique of microbiological knowledge towards religious moral sensibilities was that microbes do not respect religious boundaries. It is interesting that Dr. Tūmāniyāns, who wrote passionately about the compatibility of Islam with public health in his book titled Public

Hygiene in Islam,134 observed that his patients wrongly believed that “it is impossible for a woman to generate illness [gonorrhea] if she is a halāl shar‘i wife.”135 Despite this common belief, Dr. Tūmāniyāns continued: “Contracting gonorrhea has nothing to do with sīqah,‘aqd,

132 Dūbshān, Syphilis va mukhtasāt-i intishār-i ān dar Iran. 133 Iran 35, no. 20, 1920, 9. 134 Surin Tūmāniyāns, Bihdāsht dar dīn-i Islam (Isfahan: Bungāh-i matbūati-yi mutahhar, First published in 1313/1937, Reprint in 1336/1957). 135 Surin Tūmāniyāns, Chirā sūzāk va syphilis mu‘ālija nimīshavad (Tehran: Barādarān-i bāghirzādah, 1309/1930).

65 halāl, and haram. . . . when a woman has gonorrhea, nothing can stop its transmission to the man.”136 Even married women, according to him, could be sources of impurity. Here we have an interesting case. A physician, Dr. Tumāniyāns, praised Islamic attitudes when they happened to be in line with microbiological concerns. At the same time, he warned against Islamic practices that were not tuned in with preventive medical public hygiene measures. The issue at stake was that venereal diseases fundamentally transgress the boundaries between Islamic and un-Islamic spaces and practices. Other physicians including Dr. Dūbshān argued strongly that the sacredness of the Islamic institution of marriage would not protect it from venereal diseases.

Islamic publications and periodicals in turn drew a distinction between “true” Islam and

Islam as practiced by lay people in order to distance Islam from “backward” customs. In defense of the “truth” (haqīqat) of Islam, Dr. Tumaniyāns argued: “The only thing which is causing backwardness in Islam is the behavior of Muslims, which makes the world suspect towards

Islam. This is because most nations evaluate the truth of Islam and the Quran on the basis of

Muslims’ practices.”137 The idea was that true Islam was capable of fighting this moral fight. Dr.

Tumāniyāns even went so far as to suggest: “The progress of the nation relies on the health of their bodies. This means that people can only act upon Islamic rules and do service (khidmat) for their country when their bodies are healthy.”138 Going through different prohibitions in Islam, he explained how each case somehow prevented transmission of a certain microbe. He explained that the principle of washing the body after sex (qusl-i jimā‘, qusl-i jinābat) is in fact to avoid

136 Tūmānisiyān, Chirā sūzāk va syphillis mu‘ālijah nimīshavad, 13. 137 Tūmāniyāns, Bihdāsht dar dīn-i Islam. 138 Tūmānisiyān, Chirā sūzāk va syphillis mu‘ālijah nimīshavad, 10.

66 venereal diseases such as syphilis and gonorrhea.139 He further drew on the Prophet

Muhammad’s hadith, according to which washing the newborn at birth is preferred (mustahab).

He clarified that, actually, gonorrhea microbes are transmitted from the mother to the newborn at birth, and can blind the child.140 He concluded that all Islamic teachings and the rules of purity are grounded in the science of microbiology. The true Islam, accordingly, responded very well to matters of public health. Similarly, Islamist journals wrote extensively about the true medical aptitude of Islam. In 1928, the periodical Religious Admonitions (Tazzakurrāt-i diyānatī) published an article titled “Health and Security” (Sihha va ‘amān), which contended that “health is the most significant divine blessing.” The article explained the importance of enacting punishments according to Islamic law (shar‘ī hadds) for zinā (sexual relations outside the institution of marriage) in order to keep society healthy:

If we acted upon the Quranic punishment for zinā and punished the adulterer in public for his/her indecent actions, with either 100 lashes or stoning, this act would have never become this common and thousands of young bodies would not have suffered from this intractable (sa‘b al-‘alāj) disease that is syphilis.141

Here the purpose of punishment for zinā is oriented towards the national problem of the health of the population. Islamic journalists brought in examples of how The Prophet encouraged Muslims to exercise and keep their bodies strong and healthy. Microbes and the transmitters of microbes were seen as sacrilegious. Later in the 1940s, Islamic periodicals wrote intensely on the war against immorality and what they glossed as moral corruption (fisād-i akhlāqī) to actually critique the Pahlavi government. As such, microbes were conceptualized not merely as immoral

139 Tūmānisiyān, Chirā sūzāk va syphillis mu‘ālija nimīshavad, 32. 140 Tūmānisiyān, Chirā sūzāk va syphillis mu‘ālija nimīshavad, 22. 141 Āqā Shaikh Ghulām Hussein, “Sihha va ‘amān,” Tazakkurāt-i diyānatī, no. 44 (1307): 1–10.

67 but also as un-Islamic. Moral critique and political critique collapsed into one another in religious critiques of the state.

It is in this context that Islamic periodicals launched an intense moral campaign with the purpose of saving the nation (nijāt-i millat). Moral corruption became a condensed signifier that referred to those practices that interfered with productivity, or the reproductive capacity of the nation. The biweekly journal Parcham-i Islam claimed that the “only path to cure social ailments is through moral reform.”142 However, this morality was medicalized and differed from earlier moral concerns of Shi‘a responsa. Islamic and medical discourses found a shared point of social critique, in which they both aimed at defeating microbes as enemies. Identifying and purifying spaces of moral pollution played a key role in organizing Islam as an active component of moral reform (tahzīb-i akhlāq-i ‘umūmī).143 At the same time, new terms such as inner police (pulīs-i bātinī), inner morality (akhlāq-i darūnī), and inner spirituality (‘irfān-i darūn) emerged within

Islamic discourse as modern disciplinary mechanisms. The notions of discipline privatized

Islamic morality, while defining it in relation to the state and notions of good citizenship.

Perceptions of Islam as an “inner police” was common in the 1940s. Since Islamic morality was refashioned as the cure for the tribulation of the time, Shi‘ism was re-grounded as a disciplinary force that could cure the disease of immorality while providing a critical counter-state voice.

Shi‘ism was then reframed as a disciplinary force that could cure social, moral, and physical ailments (‘alāj-i dardhā-yi ‘ijtimā‘ī va akhlāqī, tasfiyah-yi amrāzi rawhānī).

142 Yahyā Faqih Shirazi, “Akhlāq-i ‘umūmī va tamaddun-i jadīd,” Parcham-i Islam, n.d., 1 edition. 143 “Ulūm va sanā‘i‘ dar Ālmān.”

1.6 Prostitutes as Unfit Citizens

Throughout the twentieth century, Islamist, nationalist, and state fronts situated prostitution at the core of their moral campaign as an immoral, un-Islamic, and non-familial practice that was the main cause of the spread of venereal diseases and a threat to the nation and the institution of family. Medical, Islamic, nationalist, and state discourses converged in identifying prostitution as the main cause of Iran’s backwardness. The reformist discourse imagined prostitution as that which hindered progress: “Avoiding the vices of prostitution has tremendous impact on the progress of nations,”144 wrote a journalist in the biweekly publication Taqaddum. Various political fronts appropriated the fight against prostitution and claimed it as exclusively theirs.

Islamists critiqued secularists for spreading prostitution and venereal diseases. For instance, in 1927 Muhsin Shirāzī argued that the main reason behind the spread of venereal diseases was “prostitution and a lack of veiling.”145 Islamists contended that the lack of public moral grounding in Islamic teachings, which warn against zinā, causes prostitution and the spread of venereal diseases. The women’s monthly journal Dukhtarān-i Iran condemned prostitution as it contended that prostitution “encourages people to moral corruption and it is against the principles of morality.”146 This is while secularists critiqued and attacked Islamists for their superficial and backward traditions, claiming they led to “covert” and unofficial prostitution. Prostitution then became a common site of struggle for political fronts and instrumental in larger territorial and political conflicts. Prostitution, understood as a byproduct of

144 “‘avāmil-i taraqqī va inhitāt,” Taqqadum 1, no. 7 (1307/1928): 403–8, 407. 145 Ali Mustashfā, “syphilis (kūft),” Armaqān 19, no. 204 (1317/1938): 269–72. 146 Zandukht, “Atharāt-i ‘ishq dar zindagi-yi ādam,” Dukhtarān-i Iran, (Ābān va Āzar, 1311), 11.

69 immorality, was politicized to the point that it was completely stripped from the concrete reality of its practice as a business and a way of earning wages. It was within this context that in the

1920s Jāmi‘a-yi ja‘fariyyam, an Islamist anti-Bahā‘i publication, articulated its mission in terms of the fight against moral corruption and prostitution, and aligned with state goals and efforts. In a piece critiquing the Bāb and Bahā’s tradition, the periodical accused the community of a number of sins and wrongdoings. Significantly, the piece juxtaposed sins such as “denying the oneness of God” (shirk), “denouncing prayer” (nahi-i ‘ibādat) and “the denial of resurrection” with medico-moral wrongdoings such as “infidelity” (khiyānat-i navāmīs) and “spreading prostitution and that which is forbidden” (ishā‘a-yi fahshā va munkarāt).147

Meanwhile, two different logics of governance, one territorial and the other medico- moral, intersected in conceptualizing the problem of prostitution. First, women were understood as the primary carriers of venereal disease, but prostitutes were particularly vulnerable to venereal diseases. For instance, Dr. Tūmāniyāns gave many different scenarios of transmission in all of which he assumed that the wife, mistress, the mut‘a wife (temporary Shar‘i wife), or the prostitute were the primary carriers of gonorrhea.148 Significantly, physicians differentiated the

“normal” body from the body of the female prostitute as a more potent site of venereal disease infection. Tūmāniyāns suggested that prostitutes were mostly infertile due to the “plentitude of the microbe of gonorrhea in their ovaries”149. He went so far as to claim that all prostitutes were sterile due to chronic gonorrhea and that is why they rarely became pregnant. Physicians rendered the body of the prostitute as innately prone to contracting and transmitting microbes of

147 “Maqsad-i Bāb va Bahā‘,” Jāmi‘a-yi Ja‘fariyyah 2, no. 14 (1301/1925): 44–45, 44. 148 Tūmāniyāns, Chirā sūzāk va syphillis mu‘ālija nimīshavad: 12, 16, 23. 149 Tūmāniyāns, Chirā sūzāk va syphillis mu‘ālija nimīshavad: 75.

70 venereal disease. Dr. Dūbshān asserted that “prostitution is the main cause of syphilis.”150 He keenly observed: “Ten years ago in Tehran streets one would rarely encounter a prostitute.

Today, however, prostitutes are in major passageways. Which one of us has never crossed paths with a prostitute?”151 He went on to explain: “All prostitutes contract gonorrhea within the first three months from when they start working [as a prostitute]. Within the first year they contract syphilis.”

Second, aside from the common perception of prostitutes as the cause of the spread of venereal disease, the public press perceived them as being instrumental to foreign assault. As I demonstrated earlier, many of the origin stories of syphilis that Kirmānshāhī told described a close affiliation between prostitution and armies. Other physicians shared Kirmānshāhī’s views.

For instance, Dr. Mustashfā had a story about the German army and the lack of control over prostitution as the main cause of the outbreak of venereal disease during WWI.152 I will further discuss in detail in the next chapter how prostitutes in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries became known to cater to Cossack military camps in the vicinity of Tehran. It is within this historical legacy that in 1950, Abul’hasan Ha’irizādah (1888-1972), a member of the parliament, described Iran as the prostitute who “winks at the other [Russia], while signing a contract with Britain.”153 Economic labor was collapsed into political labor as sexual service in exchange for money was translated into national treason. It was at this historical juncture, with

150 Dūbshān, Syphilis va mukhtasāt-i intishār-i ān dar Iran, 17. 151 Dūbshān, Syphilis va mukhtasāt-i intishār-i ān dar Iran, 17. 152 Mustashfā, “syphilis (kūft).” 153 Abul’hasan Ha’erizadah, Mashrūh-i muzākirāt-i majlis, dawrah 16, Majlis-i shawrā-yi millī, jalasah 117 (Bahman 26, 1329/February 16, 1951), 6.

71 the predominance of territorial logic, that vulnerability to disease was negatively configured in terms of a lack of solid boundaries and nationalist sensibilities. Stories of prostitutes’ pretense of love and betrayal sneaked into newspapers under urban currents (havādis-i shahrī), which usually reported urban crimes. Akbar Hakamīzādah, the editor of the monthly publication

Humāyūn, warned against the “venereal diseases and moral corruption” caused by prostitutes. He described prostitutes as “flirtatious, emotionless women who are all microbes from head to toe.”154 He further warned about the men who “bed” these women: “These are the ones who enter the path of death.” Taqaddum described prostitutes as women “inferior in thought, morals, and nature,” compared to other women and indeed men. Time and again, they were described as the necessary evil.

Prostitutes became emblematic of contact zones, through which Iran encountered the world. Prostitutes were put at the spotlight of reformist, moral, and religious literature as the most vulnerable, penetrable bodies without boundaries or sense of morality. This understanding of prostitutes as dangerous, diseased citizens put them outside the line of citizenship and made them cases of exception. Fassin, in the context of immigrant politics in France, refers to immigrant subjects that simultaneously evoke compassion and fear as “unwanted” citizens,” and highlights the unresolvable ambivalence of the state in governing them.155 Similarly, the Iranian state included prostitutes into the modern system of citizenship only as exceptions, as subjects that could not be regarded as full citizens and therefore did not enjoy full citizenship rights. In the following chapter, I demonstrate how the state governed prostitutes as morally disapproved

154 Akbar Hakamīzādah, “Ranj-i bihūdah: guftār-i haftum,” Humāyūn 1, no. 10 (Tīr 1314/June 1935), 26. 155 Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 133-161.

72 subject citizens. Within the moral economy of the emerging medical regime, prostitutes were cast as subjects who were innately immoral and un-Islamic, with uncontainable bodies prone to diseases and foreign assault and were conceptualized as less than other citizens.

1.7 Conclusion

The problem of venereal disease was instrumental in the rise of the medico-moral mode of governance, which facilitated a multifaceted shift in the conception of modern citizenship, the modern state, and the role of Islam in public life. The rise of moral governance in turn facilitated the state to aspire to cut across private/public divisions, meddle in intimate aspects of citizens’ lives, and manage public sexual and familial attitudes. The state’s awareness campaign did not solely seek to eliminate venereal disease. Rather, it aspired to discipline the knowledge and attitude of citizens about sexual and familial relations with the ultimate purpose of producing a healthy and strong population. This process marks the rise of biopolitics in Iran, which turned the personal into the political. As morality was put at the forefront of the state’s governing concerns and governmentalized the dual relationship between health and citizenship that had formed in the nineteenth century following the outbreak of airborne and waterborne epidemics and transformed into a triad between health, morality, and citizenship. This shift not only changed conceptions of morality—as moral conduct was conceptualized in relation to the state’s rationale, territorial logic, and population concerns—but it also refashioned the role of Islam in public life. The state rationale mediated the idea and practice of moral conduct and physicians and Islamic periodicals rearticulated Islam as the vanguard of public morality. Consequently, Islam became a disciplinary force relevant to modern forms of governance.

Within the discourse of the state and public press, the problem of venereal disease was seen as a trial through which Iran had to realize its ambitions as a modern nation. Victory in this trial could be achieved through curing the nation, which depended on citizens’ aptitude in attaining microbiological sensibilities and conducting their social and sexual lives with a consciousness of microbes as invaders of bodies. Politicians paralleled this specific understanding of the science of microbiology with the territorial securitizing logic of nationalism, which was premised on keeping the borders of the nation intact. The convergence of microbiological knowledge and the discourse of security worked particularly well within the historical context of the early twentieth century, when Iran was caught between British and

Russian interventionist forces and saw its autonomy as under threat. Vulnerability stood in sharp contrast to notions of proper citizenship as the concept of bodily integrity was re-grounded into a microbiological-securitizing discourse. 156 Agamben asserts that “citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system”157 of the state are the ones who are ruled by the state of exception and are subject to the intermediacies of the sovereign power of the modern state. 158 In the context of early twentieth century Iran, the figure of the prostitute, who was

156 Charles Taylor notes that the modern self is conceived as being buffered, contained, and not vulnerable to cosmic forces, spirits, or demons. However, the liberal buffered body is constantly haunted by diseases and microbes that threaten its physical integrity. As a result, the self that cannot master its own body against microbes is considered an unfit self. Self-control and self-direction become impossible when the self catches illnesses easily, is moved easily, or is transformed easily. Taylor, A Secular Age, 300-301. 157 Agamben, State of Exception, 2. 158 I follow Agamben’s model of the modern state, which builds a synthesis of Hannah Arendt and Karl Schmitt with Foucalt’s conception of modern state. He extends Foucault’s conception of biopolitics to allow for the analysis of the state’s sovereign power that takes place in the ambiguities of executive spaces of governance. Agamben offers a unique reading of Foucault’s conception of biopolitics and argues that, although as Foucault notes, modern states govern lives, they are equally invested in governing “bare lives” and consequently deaths, as they decide on who gets to live. He follows Foucault’s formulation of the modern state as the institution that politicizes citizens’ lives and constantly produces subject citizens. However, he demonstrates that the modern state equally eliminates citizens that cannot be integrated into the political system of the state. In my understanding Agamben’s

74 vulnerable to the demons of the modern world, i.e. disease microbes, was understood to be unfit to meet medico-moral notions of citizenship.159 The prostitute was conceptualized as lacking intact physical and emotional boundaries. Throughout the twentieth century the public saw prostitutes as being vulnerable to disease, unable to master their own bodies, and incapable of keeping their bodily boundaries intact. They were configured as exceptions to citizenship. As I will demonstrate in the next chapter, they were put at the forefront of reform and made the direct subjects of moral governance. As subjects that were proximate to diseases and microbes, they could not be fully integrated into modern conceptions of citizenship. Thus, they were ruled at the threshold of the juridical rights-based bounds of citizenship and the humanitarian regime of governance.

project is to open a critical space of analysis for the government’s production of inequality and totalitarianism, a concept that Foucault’s governmentality and biopolitics backgrounds to a great extent. See Agamben, Homo Sacer. 159 Tavakoli-Targhi demonstrates that in the nineteenth century, Islamic literature and Shi‘a responsa re-articulate the Quranic notion of jinns as germs, and harmonized demonology with microbiology. See “From Jinns to Germs.”

Chapter 2 Tehran’s Moralscape: Islamic Mobilization and the Governance of Shahrinaw

2.1 Introduction

In November 1945, residents of streets adjacent to the red-light district of Tehran, Shahrinaw addressed a letter of grievance to Parliament’s Committee for Complaints, requesting that the state remove the district, which was located in a central part of the city:

In the name of protection of honor, we, 300, 000 residents of district 10 and 20 . . . ask you to attend to our request, in the name of preserving nationalism (milliyat), mercy (rahm), compassion (shafaqat), and the protection of the honor of your Muslim brothers, and order the government to evacuate two streets of Hāj Abdul Mahmūd and Ghavām Daftar, which are the prostitute-residing areas (mahhal-i fahshā-nishin) [of Tehran], and move the residents of this neighborhood to a place outside of the city as soon as possible. If you do not take any action, then we have no choice but to come down to the Parliament with our families [to do a sit in.]160

This petition belongs to large collections of collective complaints submitted to the National

Parliament in opposition to the residency of prostitutes in Tehran. Similar to other petitions

160 This letter is found in a large collection of petitions and government documents about prostitution and the consumption of opium in Tehran found in the Library, Museum, and Document Center of the Iranian Parliament archives. In the same archives, there is another collection which mainly includes petition letters against sites of vice and illicit entertainment including opium bars, alcohol shops, and bawdy houses in Tehran, 1951-1960. The collections contain some overlapping materials and both occasionally include government letters and proceedings of government meetings about vice in Tehran. They both include an extensive census report that the government conducted in 1957 in Shahrinaw. The report contains information about the number of bawdy houses and opium bars, their managers, and their staff, including the names of madams and the prostitutes of each house. Many of the letters, petitions, and other documents do not have full identification information. Throughout this chapter, whenever I use documents from these two collections, I include the record number if available. In the absence of the record number, I only to refer to the collection. For instance, the above letter belongs to the following collection and has no record number. “Rāji‘ bi man‘-i fahshā va isti‘māl-i taryāk,” 1951-1957/1330-1336, sīn2/22210/405/1/21, Library, Museum, and Document Center of the Iranian Parliament. The second collection that I refer to throughout this chapter is: “[Nāmah-hā-yi muti‘addid az sākinīn-i Tehran] rāji‘ bi [Muzzir budan-i favāhish [khānah-hā] va marākiz-i fisād [va taqāzā-yi bastan-i ān-hā],” 1957-1960/1336-1339, 19/35/11/4/20, Library, Museum, and Document Center of the Iranian Parliament.

76 against prostitution, it frames Shahrinaw as a multilayered problem at both local and national levels. Local residents perceived the presence of prostitutes as a threat to their sense of morality and to the moral integrity of their families. The larger public saw the district as ruining the

Islamic character of the country and urged the state to erase it from the surface of the city. In this chapter, I examine this large body of petitions together with court cases about prostitution along and against the developing laws on morality in order to explain the role of the state in the governance of morality, and to investigate the process of the production of proper moral space in

Tehran. The petitions are found in the Library, Museum, and Document Center of the Iranian

Parliament and date back to 1912, before the state turned Shahrinaw into the semi-official red light district of Tehran, and run through the 1950s. In this chapter, I analyize the petitions along with government documents about Shahrinaw to recover the history of the formation and expansion of the district, which—as mentioned in the introduction—is buried under urban legends and myths.

The petitions, court rulings, and government documents provide a sense of the kinds of arguments citizens and the state made about prostitution, as well as the kind of actions that the state took to govern prostitutes. One of the key arguments of this chapter is that the moral remapping of the city in the early twentieth century was not simply imposed top-down by the state. Rather, the district emerged out of a negotiation between citizens and state institutions, including the police and the municipality. This remapping, together with the governance of

Shahrinaw, can tell us something about the shifting role of Islam in public life. This chapter asks:

How did the state govern the moralscape of Tehran? What drove the state to form a semi-official red-light district in a Muslim majority society? How did the public conceptualize Islam as the vanguard of public morality and deploy it in their petitions to convince the state to move the prostitutes? What did it mean for the secular state, with a secularizing legal body, to act on

77 public Islamic sensibilities? How was the place of Islamic sensibilities rearranged in social life under the modern states?

Throughout the twentieth century, residents of Tehran used petitions to directly call out the state to intervene in the moral fabric of Tehran, since they mediated the Islamic character of the country. In 1957, the mayor of Tehran, Mūsā Mahām, proposed a solution for the problem of

Shahrinaw to the Parliament Committee for Complaints. The proposal, which was to be submitted to the parliament as a bill, described his plan:

In the name of executing the principles of the most enlightened Islamic shar‘, preserving the foundations of morality, and the prevention of social disasters, the government will have permission to confiscate all properties and transfer them to the municipality of Tehran. The municipality can sell the properties and use the revenues to provide the means for accommodation, moral guidance (irshād), and the cure of the residents of the Ward, in collaboration with the ministries of Culture and Health. After securing their morality and health, the prostitutes will gradually be sent back into society.161

In this letter the municipality, as an arm of the state, planned for the gentrification of the neighborhood and simultaneously imagined the state as the ultimate moral actor in the city, the vanguard of Islamic shar‘, and the moral guide of the women in the district. However, in order to have the executive power to implement this plan the municipality needed legal permission. In this chapter I further explore the interplay between the legislative body of the state and the executive institutions as they authoritatively defined the role of Islam and shar‘ in the governance of morality in Tehran. I demonstrate in this chapter that Shahrinaw, as a place that could not be integrated into the proper space of the city, remained at the threshold of legality. As such it is a perfect site for inquiries about the rule of law, its ambiguities and exceptions, and the

161 “Rāji‘ bi man‘-i fahshā.” 1336/1957.

78 ultimate assertion of sovereignty of the modern state over the question of morality.162 In the words of the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, the modern state is a political institution that increasingly relies on the legitimization of extra-legal spaces of governance. According to

Agamben, the modern state asserts its sovereignty through the normalization of “emergency states,” or “states of exception”, under which the state blurs the line between the legal and illegal as it perpetuates its rule. In this chapter, I demonstrate that Shahrinaw was ruled as a “space of exception”, as it dwelled in a liminal space between legitimacy and illegitimacy for fifty-eight years, from its inception in 1922 to its erasure in 1980. I ask, what are the ramifications for secularism, as a mode of power pertinent to the modern state, if we conceptualize the state as a political entity that inherently weaves governmentality and lawfulness into sovereignty and extra-legality?163 In other words, if we take modern politics as that which links life to politics, i.e., bio-politics, what work does secularism, as an expression of modern politics, do to link religious life to the politics of the state? Throughout this chapter, I tackle the larger question of

“How do we begin to talk about the place of religion under such a state?”

2.2 Shahrinaw, the Neighborhood

The urban business of prostitution in Tehran was rearranged in the 1900s, following shifts at both local and national levels, including the growing presence of foreign armies in the city, and

162 For more discussion on the normalization of "the state of exception" throughout the 20th century, see Giorgio Agamben's See State of Exception. 163 I follow Agrama, who conceptualizes the modern state as the institution that constantly blurs the domain of religion and politics as it indecisively draws the line between the two, and, therefore, constantly imposes politics on religion. He further argues that secularism is an expression of the modern state and as such lends itself to the respective characteristics of the modern state: “Secularism itself incessantly blurs together religion and politics in Egypt, and it is a form of power that works through and relies upon the precariousness of the categories it establishes.” Agrama, Questioning Secularism, 71.

79 rapid urbanization.164 According to police reports, during the Muzaffarī period (1896–1907) prostitutes were dispersed throughout the city. The most common punishment for them was eviction from their neighborhood, and in some instances urban eviction, nafi balad. In case of a public controversy however, they were flogged publicly as a form of shaming.165 Simultaneously with the relatively rapid growth of the city; urban-rural migration to Tehran; the emergence of non-familiar and non-filial spaces of sociability such as cafés, hotels, and shops; and the heavy presence of Russian troops following the Constitutional revolution166 and the Russo-Japan war;167 the numbers of brothels grew.168 Urban stories suggest that brothels were distinguished from other houses through a lit lantern hung at the entrance of the house.169 The construction of new streets such as Bāb-Humāyūn, Chirāq-Gāz, Lālazār, and Marīzkhānah increasingly turned public pathways into multifunctional sites for entertainment, business transactions, and other

164 During Nasir al-Din Shah’s reign (1848-1896), the Russians managed to establish an army unit in Tehran with the leadership of a Russian colonel. Gradually, however, they assigned Russian soldiers to Iranian brigades to the point where Iran’s army consisted by and large of Cossack soldiers. For more information see Qahramān Mīrzā Sālūr, Rūznāmah-yi khātirāt-i ʻAyn al-Saltanah, ed. Īraj Afshār and Mas ʻūd Sālūr, Chāp-i 1, vol. 3, Ganjīna-yi khātirāt va safarnāmaʹhā-yi Īrānī (Tehrān: Asātīr, 1995). 165 Ensiah Rezaei and Shahla Azari, Guzārish-ha-yi nazmiyyah az mahallāt-i Tehran: rāpurt-i vaqāyi‘-i mukhtalifah-yi mahallāt-i dār al-khilāfah, vol. 1, (Tehran: Iran National Archive Organization, 1999). 166 The brigade of Cossack soldiers was first established in Iran in 1879. In 1880, the first barracks for Cossacks was constructed in Tehran. Their presence proved to be highly influential during the Constitutional Revolution. For more information see Mumtahin al-Dawlah Mahdī Khān Shaqāqī., Khātirāt-i Mumtahin al-Dawlah: aindaḡ’nāmah- yi Mahdī Khān Mumtahin al-Dawlah Shaqāqī (Tehrān: Intishārāt-i Firdawsī, 1362/1983). 167 Rotem Kowner, The A to Z of the Russo-Japanese War (Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2009). 168 A major phase of urban development and population growth in Tehran took place in the 1870s. See Hussein Karīmān, Tehran dar guzashtah va hāl (Tehran: University of Tehran, 1976). 169 Murtizā Tafrishī, Pulīs-i khafiah-yi Iran: Murūrī bar rukhdād-hā-yi siyāsī va tārikhchah-yi shahrbānī (1299–1320) (Tehran: Quqnūs, 1988), 35.

80 urban services.170 With these changes, a new pattern of sex-trade, namely street solicitation, became common.

The presence of the Cossack soldiers in particular was a point of public anxiety. In 1910, there are reports of fining prostitutes for socializing with men—mostly Cossack soldiers—in public.171 Most probably, these are early instances of the pattern of prostitutes using the streets as a site for bargaining and business transactions. Female prostitutes and their costumers were occasionally jailed and/or fined due to neighbors’ complaints, public drunkenness, assaulting the police, or physical fights between costumers.172 According to police reports, they were dispersed all around the city in the Bāzār, Sangilaj, Dawlat, and Hasanābād neighborhoods. However, they organically concentrated in a few main neighborhoods, including Qājāriyyah alley, the Arabs’ neighborhood, and Shahrinaw.173 Amongst such neighborhoods, Shahrinaw later developed as the official red-light district of Tehran.

170 Muhsin Habibi, Az shār ta shahr: tahlīlī tārīkhi az mafhūm-i shahr va sīmā-yi kālbudī-yi ān: tafakkur va ta‘assur (Tehran: Danishgāh-i Tehran, 2006), 87. 171 “Gūzārish-i ittifāqāt-i rūzānah,” 293/4757, National Library and Archives of Iran. The reports mostly refer to the act of socializing as “joking.” Most probably, these are amongst the first instances of prostitutes seeking out customers. The reports demonstrate that the Cossacks were major sources of disorder in the nightlife of Tehran, as they frequently got into street fights, enageged in public drunkenness, and damaged public property. 172 “Gūzārish-i ittifāqāt-i rūzānah.” 173 “Gūzārish-i Ittifāqāt-i rūzānah.”

rict. The circular land at the back end of end back the at land circular The rict.

This is a photo of Shahrinaw in 1304/1925. The streets in the front on a grid are the two main streets of the dist the of streets main two the are grid a on front the in streets The 1304/1925. in Shahrinaw of photo a is This

9 Figure Figure the photo is King’s Garden.

Although Shahrinaw is a rather old neighborhood in Tehran, its history is often neglected in the historiography of urban Tehran. Even Hussein Karimān’s canonical book Tehran dar guzashtah va hāl,174 on the urban history of Tehran, does not mention Shahrinaw while highlighting the history of “the King’s Garden” (Bāq-i shāh), whose development, as I will demonstrate briefly, was contemporaneous with that of Shahrinaw. This neighborhood developed mainly during the Constitutional Revolution and its growth was by and large dependent on the transformation of the King’s Garden into a military camp. The neighborhood was located in the south of the King’s Garden,175 right outside of the Qazvīn gate.176 It was known for its green gardens and lands during the Muzzafari period (1896–1907). However, Shahrinaw was much more frequented under Muhammad Ali Shah’s reign, as the Shah turned one of the buildings into his private headquarters.177 Further, part of the King’s Garden became the city’s prison, and the

Cossacks established military camps there.178 In June 1908, Muhammad Ali Shah left the city and moved to his palace in the King’s Garden to reside under the protection of the Cossack

Brigade. Many constitutionalist prisoners were kept in the King’s Garden and some

174 Karīmān, Tehran dar guzashtah va hāl. 175 The King’s Garden was a horse field located outside the West end of Tehran, which was established in Fath Ali Shah’s reign (1797-1834). During Nāsir al-Din Shāh’s reign it was developed further. For more information on The King’s Garden, see Karīmān, Tehran dar guzashtah va hāl. 176 Qazvin gate was constructed in 1892, when the borders of Tehran were expanded simultaneously with the establishment of Tehran’s Railroad. For more information on the expansion of Tehran and the construction of new gates and borders see Karīmān, Tehran dar guzashtah va hāl. 177 Sālūr, Rūznāmah-yi khātirāt-i ʻAyn al-Saltanah. 178 Sālūr, Rūznāmah-yi khātirāt-i ʻAyn al-Saltanah, 2084, 2088, 2193.

83 revolutionaries were hanged there.179 Most probably, as Hasan I‘izām Qudsī has suggested,

Shahrinaw, as an emerging neighborhood in the vicinity of the King’s Garden, became the primarily caterer to the King’s Garden and Cossacks’ Brigades.180

In his memoir, Qudsī offers one of the lengthiest accounts of the formation of the district.

He suggests that in the 1900s some royals arranged to move prostitutes from the Qājāriyyah neighborhood to Shahrinaw, with the approval of Muhammad Ali Shah. According to him, the royals received Muhammad Ali Shah’s consent with the logic that without distractions, “military men might harass Shahrinaw’s female residents, as it had already happened a few times.” They further contended that the “right” thing to do was “to move badkārah [prostitute] residents of

Qājāriyyah to Shahrinaw. This way, not only would the residents of Qājāriyyah be relieved, but also residents of Shahrinaw will be safe from soldiers’ violations.” This is one of the earliest narratives about the formation of Shahrinaw as the red-light district of Tehran.181 Not surprisingly, the story feeds the gendered nationalist discourse as it re-inscribes a sense of urgency to protect the vulnerable female figure from masculinized foreign invasion. 182 Although

Qudsī, once a parliament member, wrote his memoir in 1963, this narrative reflects the early twentieth century anxieties around security and the sovereignty of Iran. Qudsī also described the scene in which prostitutes were put into military vehicles and taken to Shahrinaw. According to

179 Houchang E. Chehabi, Peyman Jafari, and Maral Jefroudi, eds., Iran in the Middle East: Transnational Encouters and Social History, International Library of Iranian Studies 56 (London: Tauris, 2015); Sālūr, Rūznāmah-Yi Khātirāt-I ʻAyn Al-Saltana. 180 Hasan I‘zām Qudsī, Khātirāt-i man: yā rawshan shudan-i tārikh-i sad-sālah, vol. 1 (Tehran: Haidarī, 1342/1963), 203. 181 Willem Floor, A Social History of Sexual Relations in Iran (Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 2008). 182 Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

84 him, the event made “such a spectacle and people from all around [Tehran] came to see the scene.” The prostitutes were first settled in Abdul Mahmūd Bānkī’s caravanserai and from there they gradually started to move in to other houses in the neighborhood.183 Qudsī’s narrative cannot be treated as hard fact in so far as it is not premised on any prior narratives and/or visual and written documents. More significantly, his highly militarized narrative washes off the impact of citizens’ familial, political, and religious sensibilities in the shaping of the moral landscape of

Tehran. He emphasized the role of elite royalty in the displacement of prostitutes from the city to

Shahrinaw as an effort to protect the public (in this case women) from the possible harm of the

Cossacks. Put differently, this narrative inscribes a certain elite militant nationalism onto a social phenomenon, i.e., the formation of Shahrinaw as the red-light district. What this narrative ignores, however, is the role of the residents of Tehran and public moral concerns in this urban arrangement.

Petitions, court cases, and neighborhood depositions demonstrate a growing local concern with prostitution in Tehran in the early twentieth century, and offer an alternative narrative of the formation of Shahrinaw. Moving prostitutes from one neighborhood to another was a part of the greater moral re-mapping of Tehran in the context of the presence of foreign military forces in the city, the growing concern with the decline of the Islamic image of Tehran, and anxieties about the country’s sovereignty. In what follows, I explore collective petitions of Tehran residents against prostitutes in order to tackle the kinds of arguments that the public made to contest the moral topography of the city. In doing so, I demonstrate that the plan to bring prostitutes into a concentrated area was partly the state’s response to the growing public discontent against public acts of immorality (referred to in the documents as ‘amal-i manāfī-yi

183 Itimād al-Saltanah Muhammad Hasan Khān, Rūznāmah-’i khātirāt (Tehran: Amir Kabīr, 1971).

‘iffat). Further, these petitions reveal the role of Islam as central to the analytics of urban governance. They further signal a larger shift in the role of public Islamic sensibilities in governance, in the context of the emerging secular state that was said to privatize religion.

2.3 Suffering Neighbors Against Threatening Prostitutes

The moral crusade against prostitution at the local level started around the 1910s with collective petitions and plaintiffs in neighborhoods where prostitutes were organically concentrated. Public concerns were partly a response to the changing pattern of prostitution in Tehran, which as briefly discussed, was in turn a result of the emergence of a new heterosocial urban public, the growing number of brothels, and street solicitation in the city. In Chapter I, I explored how the public press, including books, journals, and newspapers, voiced a collective concern with prostitution as the cause of the spread of venereal disease. The press further reveals that the residents of Tehran called upon the state to take action. For instance, in 1911 Iran-i naw newspaper reported that a group of women submitted a petition to the Minister of Internal

Affairs against prostitute women in the city.184 Accordingly, the Ministry of Internal Affairs ordered the police (nazmiyyah) to “stop the prostitutes to an extent.”

The presence of the Cossacks on Qājāriyyah street in ‘Ūdlajān neighborhood, in the southwest of Tehran, was a major point of concern for the public. In May 1912, Rahīm Āqā, a local panderer, took three Cossacks to visit a prostitute in Qājāriyyah.185 At three in the morning, a group of neighboring residents went to the local governor, Muhammad Āqā Khan, and complained about this incident. Fearing the complainants’ further reaction, Muhammad

184 “Akhbār-i shahrī,” Iran-i naw, May 17, 1911. 185 “Tajammu‘ va i‘tirāz-i yiki az mahallah-hā-yi Tehran,” 1912, 293/4757, National Library and Archives of Iran.

Figure 10 Petition against the Cossack’s traffic to a brothel in the Qājāriyyah neighborhood, 1912.

Khan walked up to the house of the prostitute to “respectfully” evacuate the Cossacks

(muhtaramana). Upon the refusal of the panderer to cooperate, the police stepped in. Following a fistfight between the police and the panderer, who was injured, the Cossacks and the panderer were all taken to the local commissioner’s office (kumīsāri). Subsequently, the Central Police

Department wrote to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and requested that the Cossacks should not be allowed in the city or in brothels.186 Although the report notes the neighbors’ discontent, it is not clear how the brothel and the Cossacks caused a “disturbance” (asbāb-i muzāhimat) in the neighborhood.

Public press materials provide some insight into the reasons for the discontentment of the residents. For instance, nationalist sentiments and anxieties toward foreign invasion exacerbated residents’ bias against prostitutes, particularly because they largely catered to the Cossacks. The

Iran-i naw newspaper was filled with reports of the Cossacks’ reckless behavior in the city. In

1911, Iran-i naw published a piece about residential concerns with the Cossacks in the city. The author complained: “The Cossacks are violating (darīdah) our women’s honor and respect.”187

The collective petitions that the residents of Tehran submitted to the state against the presence of the prostitutes are rich sources for providing further insight into the multiple sensibilities of the residents. But before exploring the petitions, I briefly recount the history of petitioning and its significance to the historiography of the Constitutional Revolution in Iran.

Schneider notes that the practice of petitioning (tazallum) in Iran is rooted in the institution of mazālim (court of grievances) and dates back to the early stages of the development

186 “Tajammu‘ va i‘tirāz-i yiki az mahallah-hā-yi Tehran,” 1912, 293/4757, National Library and Archives of Iran. 187 “I‘lān,” Iran-i naw, vol. 3, no. 20, April 18, 1911, 4.

88 of governing institutions in the Islamic world. 188 Under the mazālim courts, civilians and commoners could take their grievances directly to the governor who would make a final ruling on their case or delegate the decision to a minister. According to Nielsen, mazālim, which is commonly translated to oppression, should be understood in contrast to the “‘adālah” (justice) of the ruler, and is a continuation of pre-Islamic Arab political structures. Nielson characterizes the mazālim system as “secular justice,” as these courts operated independently from the main state juridical body, which was premised on Islamic law.189

Scholars of the Constitutional Revolution have demonstrated that many constitutionalist- activists did not have a clear concept of parliamentary arrangements. Rather, the Constitutional

Revolution for them was a “cry for justice,” and a way to revive the mazālim system and free it from nepotism and political corruption.190 Ahmad Kasravi argues that, in fact, the pro- constitution clerics “requested the creation of the House of Justice” and not a parliament.191

Accordingly, following the Constitutional Revolution, the petitioning system was rearranged and the petitions were addressed to the newly established parliament instead of the royal court. The sociologist Nader Sohrabi aptly notes that, despite the fact that the responsibility of the parliament was legislative and not juridical, petitions poured into parliament when it was first

188 Irene Schneider, The Petitioning System in Iran: State, Society and Power Relations in the Late nineteenth century (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006). 189 Schneider, The Petitioning System in Iran. 190 Nader Sohrabi, “The Circle of Justice and Constitutionalism in 1906 Iran,” in State/Culture : State-Formation after the Cultural Turn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). 191 Ahmad Kasravī, History of the Persian Constitutional Revolution: Tarikh-e Mashrute-ye Iran (Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda Publishers, 2006), 287.

89 formed.192 The parliament created a “Petitions Committee” (kumisiūn-i ‘arāyīz) that was specifically in charge of responding to and managing the voluminous amounts of petitions that they received. The responsibility of the committee was to delegate the petitions to relevant government sections. Both Sohrabi and Kasravi interpret the formation of the parliament in this light, and conclude that the establishment of the parliamentary body was initially a revival of the non-religious mazālim court system. Hence, it pushed Islam, as the public religion of society, to the margins of modern rule.

However, a closer reading of petitions complicates this narrative. As Schneider demonstrates, petitioning was the sole way for the civilians to directly communicate with the ruling body of the state. Consequently, petitions provide a “grass-roots perspective” of the civilians’ experiences of everyday life and encounters with policemen, tax collectors, neighbors, and local governors. In particular, the petitions against prostitution reveal the focal place of Islam in the residents’ dialogues with the state. Together with the state’s measures to regulate the prostitutes, they demonstrate that, in effect, Islamic public sensibilities, far from being pushed away, remained central to the analytics of urban governance. In fact, they illustrate that the narrative of religious decline fostered a new sense of urgency for keeping things “Islamic” in the social fabric of the city. Thus, they reintroduced Islam as a key factor in the image of the city, for which the state was held responsible. Petitions further reveal the malleability of the categories, such as religious/secular and private/public, that the modern state constructs, and modern rule relies on. In particular, the petitions against prostitution reveal that morality, which was seen as closely related to maintaining order in the city, tied citizens to the state in intimate ways that could not be grasped by modern judicial structures.

192 Sohrabi, “The Circle of Justice and Constitutionalism in 1906 Iran.”

The three petitions that I closely engage with in this section—found in the National

Library and Archives of Iran—were all written between 1910-1919. Petitions from this period typically consisted of a main body with the complaint and then additional commentaries, which literate, well-reputed, and well-respected members of the community added to its margins along with their signature stamps. Other petitioners used customized stamps with their names on them as signatures. The petition style changed later in the 1940s as people stopped writing commentaries at the margins of the main body. In a sense, these petitions were early forms of what we recognize today as signature campaigns and they signaled a new type of relation between citizens, the state, and religion. In reading these documents I ask: How did Tehran residents frame prostitution as a problem? What kinds of measures did they envision the state would take against the residency of prostitutes? How did they understand the role of Islam in relation to social order in the city?

The first petition, written on October 17, 1910, is a group compliant against a brothel run by Said Divān on Takht Zummurrud Street.193 The petitioners contended that the brothel and the prostitutes who lived there were “disturbing” the locals:

The traffic of the scoundrels and the wicked will have a negative impact and produce corruption [fisād]. There have been a few incidents already that we have responded to with remission. Since it’s the duty of the residents of this neighborhood to immediately report to your enlightened blessed sacred presence [khātir-i mubārak-i anvar-i muqaddas] anything that happens in this area, we say that under no circumstances can the adjacent residents tolerate [tahammul] a bawdy house of prostitutes. In addition, as believers [mu‘taqid], we and our spouses have never seen such things around us. Thus,

193 It should be noted that this petition was filed after the bombing of parliament in 1908. Since there was no parliament to submit the grievance to, the document is addressed to the local governor (vālī) of Takht Zummurud, and not to the parliament.

we ask you to put this controversy to rest, either through moving them to outer areas, or any other measure that you see fit, before another corruption and scandel takes place.194

As Schneider notes, the framing of the petitioners as facing an injustice is central to the grammar of tazzallum. The residents had to describe their problem with the brothel within this discourse of justice so that the petition would have standing. In this grievance and others like it, the residents describe themselves as experiencing injustice, and being “disturbed” and incapable of

“tolerating” the presence of the bawdy house. These grievances evoke the language of justice, and petitioners described themselves as suffering from an injustice caused by what the prostitutes were doing to them.

In 1915, approximately 30 residents of the Arabs’ Neighborhood (Mahallah-yi Arab-hā) submitted a tazzallum against the residency of prostitutes in their adjacent streets. The petition is a follow-up on previous grievances to which the government had not responded. The body of the complaint described the petitioners as “suffering” and identified honor, public hygiene, and

“spiritual repression” (tahrīs-i ma‘navī) as the three main causes of the injustice that they experienced:

With their manners and traffic in the streets, they have brought shame and disrepute to our honor, wives, children, and us. The public baths of this neighborhood are filled with contagious diseases that come with this act [prostitution.] . . . We are certain that if you pay a slight attention to this shameful matter, you will see its damages. It brings immorality and corruption. It is detrimental to the population, and public hygiene. It wastes people's wealth. It will invite God's wrath. Therefore, we hope that this petition of ours affects the respected representatives of the nation [i.e. parliament members].195

194 “Shikāyat-i sakanah-yi takht-i zummurud bi dalīl-i ījād-i muzāhimat barāyi ahālī,” 1328gh/1910, 360/5563, National Library and Archives of Iran. 195 “Gūdnishīnhā-yi mahallah-yi Arab-hā.”

The petitioners refer to themselves as “mubtalā” to describe their state of suffering. The term has the double meaning of being infected by a disease and experiencing a tribulation. The

Dihkhūdā encyclopedia defines mubtalā as the state of suffering caused by “tribulation”

(balā) and “misery” (mihnat). Mubtalā also is attributed to the diseased subject. As I discussed in Chapter I, physicians and the public press perceived the epidemic of venereal diseases as a form of collective suffering. Following this logic, the petitioners suggested that public baths in the neighborhood were “filled with contagious diseases, which spread through this act [prostitution.]” It is important to note that, as discussed in Chapter I, up until the

1920s physicians and the public press wrongly assumed that venereal diseases were transmittable through water in public baths and even the air. It was only after the 1920s and through state-oriented physicians’ efforts and the state’s awareness campaigns that the public realized that venereal diseases could only be transferred through sexual intercourse and intimate physical contact. These early misconceptions facilitated the framing of prostitutes as a threat to the health of the residents. The petitioners perceived prostitutes as the cause of the spread of venereal diseases, and consequently, the cause of their suffering.

Medical language shaped the demand for the geographical shifting of prostitutes in the city and converged with the language of justice in the petitioners’ perception of prostitutes, as causing injustice and bringing disease to their suffering neighbors. The petitioners went so far as to invoke a sense of repulsion (inzijār) towards prostitutes, claiming that they “cause repulsion and resentment in families.” Evoking their sense of disgust as a source and evidence of injustice, they asked the “sacred” government to take action. Constructing the figure of the prostitute as the disgusting abject facilitated petitioners’ claims experiencing suffering. I elaborate on the relationship between the sense of public disgust from abject bodies that were perceived as approximate to diseases and the state’s measures to ensure just rule in the final

93 chapter, the focus of which is to tackle the state’s performance of care and compassion.

However, the role of feelings and the visceral bodily responses of the residents in their petitions reveal the intimate nature of the public and their demand for justice. Medical reasoning alone cannot capture residents’ call to justice. Rather, their visceral reactions, i.e., disgust toward prostitutes, is partly what brought them together as a collective body with presumably civil requests.

The discourse of justice—premised on suffering caused by the sense of disgust that stems from proximity to the source of disease—defined who deserved the care and protection of the state. The petitioners asked the state to do the just thing and end their suffering, at the expense of interrupting the lives of prostitutes, i.e., by displacing them. Within this grammar of suffering, the state was actively called to decide which lives were “valuable and grievable”

(in the words of the philosopher Judith Butler).196 The question of the relationship between justice, suffering, and the care of the state is one that I return to in Chapter IV.

The third petition, signed by approximately 230 residents of the Qājāriyyah neighborhood, was submitted to parliament in 1919. Like in the 1915 petitions, the residents requested the government move the prostitutes outside of their neighborhood:

We, the respectable residents of Qājariyyah neighborhood, under the Commissionaire Office Number Seven, are fed up with the growing debauchery and affront of prostitutes in this neighborhood. The filth [lawth] of their beings is about to contaminate the modest women of this neighborhood. In helplessness, we ask the guardians of the government to clear this notorious sign off of our names. We ask that you do not allow for the Qājāriyyah neighborhood to carry an ill reputation.197

196 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso Books, 2016). 197 “Shikāyat az shuyū‘i fisād dar mahallah-yi Qājāriyyah,” 1338gh/1919, 997/234, National Library and Archives of Iran.

Figure 11 Petition against the residency of prostitutes in the Arabs’ neighborhood, 1915.

The commentaries on both petitions further emphasized the state of “suffering” of the residents.

For instance, Hāj Āqā Nizām al-Din, referenced the Quran in his commentary: “Our Lord, take us out of this city of oppressive people”198 Muhammad Ibn Ali, the liturgist, used a common

Persian expression to express his hopelessness and belief that “this cry [for justice] will indeed not result in any change.” 199 Sye Mustafa Isfahānī contended that he was fed up with those women and he would move out from the neighborhood if the state did not take action. The main text of the petition further asked: “Is it not that the pleasure of a handful of people causes the

“suffering” of the rest?” The 1915 petition requested the parliament end their suffering:

Rescue our family and honor [nāmūs va haysīyyat] and the people of the Arabs’ neighborhood, from the threat of these people [prostitutes]. Order the respective authorities to either scatter them around the city, or reside them in an area especially for them. Even if there was a principle of equity [taqsīm bi nisbat], the Arabs’ neighborhood has done its share for three to four years [of living next to prostitutes].200

The petitioners argued that they have done their share of enduring the suffering of being close to prostitutes and it was now the turn of other residents of Tehran to live in proximity to prostitutes. They called on the government to intervene in the social texture of the city, and to either move or evict the prostitutes in their neighborhood. The 1919 petitioners wrote: “The filth of their being is about to reach to the modest women of this neighborhood.”

Conceptualizing immorality as a disease that transmits and spreads, the petitioners imagined

198 Quran, “al-Nisa,” 4:75. 199 The literal translation of the expression is as follows: If the ear is yours, and the cry is mine, that which will be useless is indeed my cry, (gush agar gush-i man va nāla agar nāla –yi tu, āncha albatta bi jāyī narisad faryād ast). 200 “Gūdnishīnhā-yi mahallah-yi Arab-hā.”

96 the prostitutes not only as spreading diseases, but also as spreading immodesty and un-Islamic behavior. In the

Figure 4 Petition against the residency of prostitutes in the Qājāriyyah neighborhood, 1919.

98 commentaries, Hāj Sadr al-Mutikallimīn claimed that other religious figures were “reluctant” to visit the neighborhood mosque. Another petitioner asked the government to “eliminate the evil of these licentious and shameless people.” Sayyid Mustafā Isfahānī wrote that he was sick of “the dangers of women” and would move out from the neighborhood if the situation were not addressed. Mr. Hussein wrote that the residents were “wounded” due to the close proximity of the “prostitutes.” He further noted that it was “unjust” to remain silent in this situation. It should be noted that the rationale for the perception of prostitutes as causing injustice was not singular. For instance, one of the commentators of the 1919 petition was a camel seller in the neighborhood whose main concern was that the noises at night interfered with his sleep. He wrote: “I cannot take this anymore. I can’t get any sleep, to which even animals are entitled.”

Significantly, in these collective complaints the role of religion as the vanguard of public morality in the everyday lives of people gained momentum. In the 1919 petition, a commentator referenced the Quran: “Do not come near zinā.201 Verily, it is a Fāhishah. [which has the double meaning of obscenity and prostitution.]”202 By mixing the practice of prostitution with the act of zinā, the commentator was able to pose the problem of prostitution as a religious problem. Other commentators evoked Islamic duty (vazīfah-yi Islāmiyyat) and the spirit of religiosity (rūh-i diyānat) to convince the government to evict prostitutes and intervene in the fabric of the city.

One of the commentators of the 1915 petition justified his compliant in relation to his Islamic duty:

201 Zinā in Islamic law stands for sexual relations outside the institution of marriage. It received different punishments, from lashes to execution, according to the married/single status of the sinners. 202 Quran, “Al-Isra," 17:32.”

Under Shar‘ and Islam, it is necessary [lāzim] for every Muslim who is capable [qādir] to prevent and stop any harm [azziyyat] that the respected and the wretched face. Especially, it is vājib [Islamic duty] for the authorities to take the best measures to eliminate the harms and damages that the people of the Arabs’ neighborhood are facing.203

Another commentator noted that the state was responsible for stopping the prostitutes in the name of “protection of Jafari Shi‘a law and people’s honor.” If the mazālim system previously worked independently from the Islamic juridical system in Iran, as Schneider asserts, then this arrangement had now shifted, as we can observe the ways in which the idea of Islamic rule and the modern state come together in these statements. The petitioners’ concerns with Islamic sensibilities intersected with morality and public health in these collective efforts to shape the cityscape of Tehran. The main body of the 1915 petition rhetorically asked:

Why are they [prostitutes] let around loose, when they cause spiritual agitation (tahrīs-i ma‘navī)? Is it not that the pleasure of a handful of people causes suffering and disgust of families, and disinclination of the youth towards marriage, and it tears Islam’s honor apart in the central part of the city, which is the capital of an Islamic land?204

They held the state responsible for the “spiritual agitation” of Tehran society and what they saw as the loss of the Islamic character of the city, to convince the government to evict the prostitutes while meddling in the socio-moral fabric of the city.205 There are other instances of imagining the state as responsible for maintaining the Islamic image of Tehran that can be seen in public journals and other letters written to different governmental bodies, such as the letter from the municipality to parliament which I discussed in the beginning of this chapter. Another instance is the 1922 series of complaints that the residents of ‘Ūdlajān neighborhood wrote to the Police

203 “Gūdnishīnhā-yi mahallah-yi Arab-hā.” 204 “Gūdnishīnhā-yi mahallah-yi Arab-hā.” 205 “Gūdnishīnhā-yi mahallah-yi Arab-hā.”

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Bureau (nazmiya) and the House of Justice (divān-i ‘idālātkhānah) about women’s clothing in public. They criticized the “un-Islamic” practice of women wearing lace socks in public, which they claimed “seduced” and “incited” men. Interestingly, the reports are titled as “the prevention of fahshā.”206

The petitioning residents most commonly identified three intersecting reasons for framing prostitutes as local threats and sources of injustice: a). the assumption that prostitutes spread venereal diseases, and were their primary transmitters, b). that they threatened the Islamic character of society, and c). that they threatened the modesty of families and caused disinclination towards marriage. Many of the commentators, including Mr. Tehranī, evoked the principle of “Commanding what is right and opposing what is wrong” (‘amr bi ma‘rūf va nahy-yi az munkir), which are twin Islamic principles of public morality that gained momentum amongst

Muslim reformer activists after the Constitutional Revolution.207 In the context of modernizing

Egypt, Talal Asad aptly notes that these two moral principles, which used to be ethical practices in the pre-modern configuration of Islam, became matters of modern law and public order under the emerging nation-state.208 He further translates the second clause of the principle, nahy-yi az munkir, as “opposing what is wrong” instead of the common translation “forbidding what is wrong” in order to emphasize the complex process of self-cultivation that this principle captures.

206 “Shikāyat Az Munhiyāt Dar Ma‘ābir-I Umūmī,” 1302 [1922-1923 1301, 298/82300, Iran’s National Archives. 207 The anthropologist Saba Mahmood, in the context of the Islamic Revival movement in contemporary Egypt, argues that Muslim reformers are keener on inviting society to do good than opposing what is wrong. However, in this context it seems that to invite one to do good is just the other side of prohibiting one from doing bad. The two concepts prove relevant in the present case. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Subject of Feminism (Princeton, N.J.; Woodstock: Princeton University Press, 2004). 208 Talal Asad, “Thinking About Tradition, Religion, and Politics in Egypt Today,” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 1 (September 1, 2015): 166–214.

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In the present case, it is indeed significant that residents “opposed” what they saw as being un-

Islamic through their collective appeal to the National Parliament. In other words, they turned to the state to ensure the observance of the principle of “commanding what is right and opposing what is wrong.” The question that remains crucial is this: How did the state respond to these collective concerns? Regardless, these petitions reveal a significant tipping point in the formation of the triad relationship between Islam, society, and the state, as the public called on the state to ensure the practice of an Islamic principle. Now to be sure, the state’s actions cannot be understood as simply ethical and/or Islamic. Rather, I argue that the state’s response to the petitions was in fact an exercise of the secular power of the state, in so far as the state decided on the role of religion in the public space through the kinds of action that it took in response to these petitions.

2.4 The Sovereign Formation

The appealing residents proposed two possible measures for resolving what they saw as an urban moral, religious, and public health problem. They suggested that the state either concentrate prostitutes in a single area, or evict them from Tehran altogether and move them to a camp outside of the city. Three years after the last petition, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, together with the municipality and the police force, took matters into their own hands, choosing the former suggestion. Around March 1922, in what appears to be one of the earliest attempts to concentrate prostitutes into a single area, the Ministry of Internal Affairs (vizārat-i dākhilah), with the cooperation of the Commissioner’s Office of Shahrinaw209 displaced a number of

209 In 1914, Tehran was divided into ten police districts, each of which was run by a distinct Commissioner’s Office. Shahrinaw—which was a newly developed neighborhood at the time—became the 10th police district in Tehran and received its own Commissioner’s Office. For more detailed information on zoninginf Tehran in 1914, see Tafrishī, Pulīs-i khafiah-yi Iran: murūrī bar rukhdād-ha-yi siyāsī va tārikhchah-yi shahrbānī (1299-1320).

102 prostitutes to Shahrinaw.210 The police at first found 15 resident-landowners in Shahrinaw who agreed to move ouof their homes and rent their places to prostitutes who had formerly worked and lived in Shimrān gate (a neighborhood located in the northwest of Tehran). Unfortunately, there are no records of the identity of the neighbors, or the process through which they were convinced to cooperate with the state. In return for this voluntary displacement, the Ministry of

Internal Affairs offered resident-landowners a 35 percent extra surplus value on their rent amount, which was to be subsidized by the Ministry itself. This state-sponsored organized effort to rehouse prostitutes in a residential cluster seems to have been be one of the first documented attempts to centralize the space of prostitution in Tehran.211 As such, Shahrinaw, which was then a newly-developed neighborhood known for its green lands and gardens and large properties, turned into the red-light district of Tehran in the 1920s with a strong government push.212

What is significant in this instance is the ambiguous legal status of the state’s role in the formation of the moralscape of Tehran. Under Article Fourteen of the First Amendment of Iran’s

Constitution, passed in October 1907, under the chapter “Rights of Iranian Citizens,” no Iranian could be expelled from their land, forcefully settled in a specific place, or forbidden from

210 “Mālikīn-i khānah-hā-yi Shahrinaw, shikāyat az ra‘īs-i jadīd-i kūmisāriyā-yi Shahrinaw ki dar sadad-i muzāhimat va mudākhilāt-i qair-i qānūnī dar amlāk-i ān-hā bar āmadah ast,” February 4, 1922, 4/30/16/2/59, Library, Museum and Document Center of Iran Parliament. 211 Popular narratives attribute an earlier organized attempt for concentrating the space of prostitution in a single district to the Chief of Tehran’s Police, the Austrian Conte de Monte Forte, who apparently displaced them to Chalah Silābī. This account mainly stems from a folk song from Tehran about the Conte and her daughter who supposedly is abducted to work in Chalah Silābī. Such accounts, however, are closer to urban legends, and further do not provide any substantial information about the logistics of the plan. For the folk song see Tafrishī, Pulīs-i khafiah-yi Iran. 212 For the state of Shahrinaw in its earlier years see Tafrishī, Pulīs-i khafiah-yi Iran, 49.

103 residing in a place unless indicated by the law.213 The municipality, which is a state actor, undercut this principle of the rights of citizens without relying on any codified law, partly to respond to what petitioners defined as their “suffering.” This exceptional, extralegal measure is a perfect example of the exercise of the state’s absolute sovereignty over citizens and the land (for if the state’s sovereign power is bound by its own law, then it is not absolute sovereignty). The formation of the district was an expression of the state’s sovereign power, as the state suspended its own law to form the area. The rivalry between the discourse of rights and the discourse of suffering maps onto the contested relationship between humanitarianism and politics, which

Agamben points to, and is the focus of Chapter IV. 214

The state’s measure to move the prostitutes unlawfully cannot be understood as the disciplinary and regulatory mechanism of the meddling state (dawlat-i fuzāul), which relies on medical institutions and awareness campaigns to manage citizens’ everyday conduct. As discussed in the previous chapter, in the 1910s Iran witnessed the emergence and expansion of bio-power through the expansion and development of public health institutions. Agamben re- conceptualizes bio-power as that which is equally, but covertly, invested in “capturing” the life

213 “Mutammam-i qānūn-i asāsī,” Mihr 15, 1286/October 8, 1907, accessed June 10, 2017, Pāygāh-i ittilā‘āt-i qavānīn va muqarrarāt-i kishvar, http://www.dastour.ir/brows/?lid=1734. 214 He argues: “The separation between humanitarianism and politics that we are experiencing today is the extreme phase of the separation of rights of man from rights of the citizen.” (133) He contends that humanitarianism can only grasp human life as “bare life,” and does not protect the ways of lives of subjects. Bare life points to the very biological fact of life (zoe), as opposed to lifestyles and manners of living (bios). He further explains the failure of humanitarian organizations in protecting humans that are not protected by states, as a result of the failure of humanitarianism to sovereignly recognizethe rights of man: Humanitarian organizations— which today are more and more supported by international commissions—can only grasp human life in the figure of bare life, and therefore, despite themselves, maintain a secret solidarity with the very powers they ought to fight. It takes only a glance at the recent publicity campaigns to gather funds for refugees from Rwanda to realize that here human life is exclusively considered . . . as bare life . . . that only as such it is made into the object of aid and protections.” Agamben, Homo Sacer, 133.

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Figure 5 The order issued from the Ministry of Internal Affairs to move prostitutes from Shimrān neighborhood to Shahrinaw, 1922.

105 of subjects that cannot be integrated into the political system of the nation-state.215 If we take bio-power as the distinctively modern power of the state which links life and power together, then regulatory mechanisms alone cannot grasp the scope of it. Bio-power then includes the exclusionary mechanisms of the state, such as containment of the improper within the proper space of the city. As Agamban demonstrates, bio-power is not merely premised on producing lives, but in producing lives with different values, which are then isolated as exceptions. Most significantly, this re-grounding of bio-power points to the sites of inhabitance that are kept outside the regulatory lawful proper space of the state, but still are ruled under that very state.

In relocating some residents. i.e. prostitutes, for the “comfort” (āsāyish) of others, i.e., the petitioners, the just state sovereignly and unlawfully distributed the “right to the city” in accordance with principles of public morality, which were in turn rooted in religious moral sensibilities that were medicalized during the period of the epidemic of venereal disease in the

1910s. As such, around the 1920s the state rearranged the moral topography of Tehran according to Islamic public/intimate sensibilities through exclusionary measures. Moral governance, as an expression of modern state power, lends itself to the respective ambiguities of modern rule, which rely on the construction of dichotomous categories including private/public, personal/political, and religious/secular. But these dichotomies are only precariously held and constantly disrupted by the very notion of moral governance. The early petitions, together with the state’s sovereign move to form a red-light district in Tehran, reveal the intimate character of the public and public life. They further demonstrate that residents perceived their own sense of morality to be dependent on the public observance of Islamic principles. The state was intimately

215 For a secondary source on Agamben’s theory of the relationship between bio-power and sovereign power see Katia Genel, “The Question of Biopower: Foucault and Agamben,” Rethinking Marxism 18, no. 1 (January 2006): 43–62.

106 implicated in the lives of citizens, as the agent of assuring the observance of public morality.

This entanglement of personal morality with public morality exposes the inseparability of the categories of private and public. The fuzziness of private/public can also be seen in the laws that the state passed on matters of morality. In what follows, I explain how, between the 1910s and the 1930s, the legislative body of the state experimented with the very definitions of the domains of public and private through laws on morality.

2.5 Public Morality and the Law

While the petitions demonstrate the focal place of Islam in the analytics of urban governance, under the rule of the modern sovereign state they do not offer an insight into the governance of the moralscape of the city outside of the red-light district and under the rule of modern law. In the introduction, I briefly discussed the clause “acts against public morality” (a‘māl-i manāfī-yi iffat) under the first penal code (qānūn-i jazā) that was passed in 1926. In this section, I investigate five court cases that were brought to the court of misdemeanors in the period prior to the passing of this law, in order to unpack the juridical procedures through which the state governed public morality in the city. I use these court cases as a way of tackling larger debates around the place of Islamic law in the juridical system following the Constitutional Revolution.

The court cases belong to a four-year span, between 1921 and 1924, a period in which the parliament was reconstructing trial procedures through experimentation with codified law.

Following the formation of the parliament and the establishment of the new juridical and legislative bodies, the dual court system which included ‘urfī (customary) and shar‘ī (Islamic) courts was put out of practice and the parliament introduced a new triad system, which operated

107 according to a centralized singular legal penal code.216 In September 1911, the second parliament passed the first set of experimental and temporary codified laws about the criminal court system under the constitutional regime.217 In August 1912, the code was completed and declared the temporary law in place and remained intact until 1925.218 Although the law was amended many times, it was not until 1999 that the parliament abolished it entirely. The forth statute book of the “Law of the Principles of Criminal Trials” (qānūn-i usūl-i muhākimāt-i jazā‘ī) classified crimes into the three categories of “serious crimes” ( jināyat), “serious misdemeanors”

(junhah), and “minor offences” (khalāf). According to the type of crime, trials were processed in three different courts. However, the rulings of all three courts were bound by the penal code.

Significantly, according to a series of articles in this law (421–429), the “Special Criminal

Court” was created, which had jurisdiction over crimes that had fixed punishments in shari‘a, including hadd, ta‘zīr, qisās, and qatl. The boundaries between these courts were not clear-cut due to the ambiguity of the law around the definition of different types of crime. In the case of acts against morality, this ambiguity led to court debates about the role of Islam in governing citizens’ moral behavior.

216 ‘Urfī law is typically translated into customary law, in contrast to shar‘i law. The juridical and trial system of the Qajar period consisted of the two separate institutions of ‘urfi courts and shar‘i courts. Typically, cases of personal status, property disputes, and some commercial issues were brought to shar‘i courts. However, as Abbas Amanat and Hadi Enayat have noted, the boundaries between these courts were contested regularly. Even their laws and rulings overlapped often. For a more detailed discussion on the dual courts system during the Qajar period, see Hadi. Enayat, Law, State, and Society in Modern Iran: Constitutionalism, Autocracy, and Legal Reform, 1906-1941 (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Abbas Amanat, Apocalyptic Islam and Iranian Shi’ism (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009). 217 Hadi Enayat explains the experimental and temporary nature of the 1911 codified law in detail. In fact, he notes that the title of the law literally translates into "The Temporary Law of the Civil Trials." For a more detailed explanation of the shifts in parliament structuring see Law, State, and Society in Modern Iran, 86. 218 Enayat, Law, State, and Society in Modern Iran.

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In April 1921, a case of an “act against chastity” (‘amal-i manāfī-yi ‘iffat) with a Muslim foreign prostitute named Fatimah was brought to the misdemeanors court (dādgāh-i junhah).219

The court sentenced the defendant, Mu‘īn Huzūr, to two months of correctional jail and 20 days of buyable detention, for three Tomans a day.220 His lawyer, Muhammad Sultānī, appealed this decision on the grounds that the misdemeanors court was incompetent and did not have the authority to rule on matters of public morality. The misdemeanors court was commonly responsible for the investigation of minor crimes against persons.221 Sultānī explained the place of customary law in relation to acts against public chastity:

In the absence of ‘urfī law the misdemeanors juries have no right to legislate laws and cannot pass a verdict without relying on legal clauses . . . It is unconstitutional to amalgamate the legislative and judiciary institutions and it [i.e. such a ruling] does not count. Defendants will not be obliged to submit to unconstitutional verdicts. So long as there are no ‘urfī laws [with regards to acts of immorality] in our country, such accusations need to be reviewed in accordance to shar‘ī provisions and the misdemeanors court is not competent to deal with them.222

Sultānī further argued that, since acts against chastity were not committed directly against a person, they had to be reviewed in the “Special Criminal Court” (the name of these courts has changed to dādgāh-i jarā‘im-i vijhah over time). According to Article 421 in the “Law of the

219 The nationality and identity of the foreign woman is not clear from the documents. However, the works of historians including Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet and Lia Kozmat suggest that female prostitutes moved between Iraq and Iran in pursue of new clientele. See Kozma, Global Women, Colonial Ports, 2016, 99; Kashani-Sabet, Conceiving Citizens, 2011, 90. 220 Hussein Sālār-i Mu‘tamid Mu‘īn Huzūr was a statesmen and the local ruler (hākim) of Āmul in 1916. This suggests that due to his power and reputation, the ruling of the court might have been biased in his favor. See 360/9087. 221 For details on what counted as misdemeanor crimes, see Kitāb-i chahārum: qavānīn-i muvaqqati-yi muhākimāt- i jazāyī, No. 28243, (Tehran, 3 September 1911/11 Shahrivar 1290), National Library and Archives of Iran, http://www.dastour.ir/brows/?lid=10387. 222 “Farjām Khāhī-yi Mu‘ayyin Huzūr az sudūr-i hukm dar dādgāh-i Tehran,” 1921, 298/47001, National Library and Archives of Iran.

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Principles of Criminal Trials” passed in 1911, special courts typically investigated the crimes with fixed Islamic penalties in shari‘a.223 Sultānī argued that this case is closest to a case of zinā

(sexual relations outside the institution of marriage), which is punishable under the shar‘ by lashes. There are two possible logics behind presenting this argument to the Court of Appeal.

First, it is extremely difficult to prove zinā, as the shar‘ requires four adult men to have witnessed the act of penetration and testify in court. Second, the initial appeal mentioned that the woman, with whom the defendant had sexual relations, was a prostitute, who was paid for her services. The appeal concluded that the sexual relationship between the defendant and Fātimah could not be considered zinā. The lawyer then might have predicted that even in the “Special

Criminal Court,” there would not have been any grounds for penalizing his client. The Court of

Appeal eventually dismissed the case altogether and annulled the penalty, on the grounds that the

Court of Misdemeanors was not eligible to rule on matters of public morality, since the penal code had not determined punishment for such acts.

The court further claimed that before the Constitutional Revolution, issues of immorality were addressed in ‘urfī courts (mahkamah-yi ‘urfī). Since there were no codified laws regarding crimes of immorality, they were directed to the “Special Criminal Court,” which ruled according to shari‘a. In the present case, the court report followed this juridical logic, mentioning that in the absence of any laws about “acts against chastity,” such cases should be referred to the “Special

Criminal Court,” which specifically dealt with crimes that have penalties in Islamic law. This ruling is significant as it displays the shifting role of Islam in relation to public morality in the

223 These special courts remain subject to debate, as legal scholars believed that they undercut constitutional rights of citizens, and subject them to Islamic law. See for instance the debate over the persistent role of Islamic law in courts in Murtizā Sarrāf, “Nigarishī ktāh bi tārīkh-i qānūn dar dawrān-i mu‘āsir,” Mahnāmah-yi qāzāyī 72, no. 6 (1971 1350): 122–34.

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Figure 12 The review of the request for reconsidering the legal case involving Fātimah, the prostitute, and Mu‘in Huzūr in the court of appeal case, 1921.

111 early twentieth century. Before the legislative and juridical restriction of parliament, matters of morality were not tried under the shar’i courts’ jurisdiction. Rather, morality was a matter of customary law. In fact, there are no Islamic laws that directly address “morality.” There are laws about sexual relations outsideof the institution of marriage in the Quran and laws on same-sex sexual encounters in hadiths, which have moral implications. However, “morality” is not a direct subject of shari‘a. The lawyers’ line of argument, together with the petitions, clearly demarcate the 1910s as the period where Islam gained currency in public life as the vanguard of public morality in Iran.

Not all court rulings were consistent in their decisions about the role of shar‘i courts in public morality trials. In October 1921, another case of immoral acts, which involved same-sex relations, was brought to the Court of Misdemeanors in Tehran.224 The defendant’s lawyer,

Abbas, had a different argument this time. He argued that his defendant’s crimes should be proven according to the shari‘a, and as such he could not be penalized in the absence of four male adult witnesses. This time, the Court of Misdemeanors did not find the appeal to have standing and the defendant was sentenced to ten days of correctional detention (habs-i ta‘dībī) and financial penalty. The court argued, quite contrary to the previous case, that acts of immorality are punished according to customary law, and therefore the shari‘a court is not competent to make verdicts on this matter. The Court closed by stating that during the interrogation the defendant had confessed to his crime (‘amal-i shanī‘) by admitting that he had engaged in anal sex (dar-mālī). Despite the lawyer’s efforts to convince the court that the confession was made under pressure from the interrogator, the court found the defendant guilty.

Significantly, the court

224 “Shikāyat dar khusūs-i a‘māl-i manāfī-yi ‘iffat,” October 1921, 298/88522, National Library and Archives of Iran.

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Figure 13 The final ruling of Abba’s trial for same-sex sexual relations and crimes against public chastity, 1921.

113 explicitly stated that acts against chastity (‘amal-i manāfī-yi iffat) are matters of ‘urfī law and should be addressed in the Court of Misdemeanors.225

In September 1922, a case of a pimp was brought to the Court of Misdemeanors. Since the panderer had a previous record, and had even signed a repentance letter (tawbah-nāmah), the court found him guilty.226 The repentance letter reveals the mixing of Islamic law and costume law in the supposedly secular misdemeanor courts. Although the classification of ‘urfī and shar‘ī courts, under the Qajar regimes, at first glance implies a separation between two distinct trial institutions, namely the Islamic and the non-Islamic, such incidents exhibit their overlaps in court rulings. In March 1924, a case of a prostitute named Rubābah was brought to the Court of

Misdemeanors.227 Interestingly, this time the court abided by Article 421 and referred her case to the Special Criminal Court, to be ruled under shari‘a. Unfortunately, there are no records in the archives of the final ruling of her case. Yet, Rubābah’s case reveals inconsistencies in the

Court’s decisions that could very well be interpreted as a reflection of the bias of the judges and the local dynamics, power relations, and reputation of the defendants and their lawyers.

Nevertheless, the arbitrariness of court decisions regarding cases of acts against chastity arose from a larger issue at the heart of the consolidating secular law. The issue at hand was that there were no determined punishments for acts against chastity (‘amāl-i manāfī-yi ‘iffat) in the shari‘a.

The penal code also did not address this category of crime. Acts of immorality were

225 “Shikāyat dar khusūs-i a‘māl-i manāfī-yi ‘iffat,”. 226 “Farjām-khāhī-yi mustafā ‘arāqī az hukm sādirah az dādgāh-i Tehran dāyir bar habs,” September 1922, 298/46971, National Library and Archives of Iran. 227 “Risīdigī bi jurm-i Rubābah mabnī bar sahl nimūdan-i ‘amal-i manāfī-yi iffat barāyi dīgarī,” March 1324, 298/79779, National Library and Archives of Iran.

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Figure 14 The final ruling on the trial of the panderer, 1922.

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situated in an ambiguous place before the law due to the fact that neither the shari‘a nor the legal penal code addressed them directly.

In February 1924, a case of same-sex relations was brought to the court. This time the court of appeal made a significant argument.228 The court claimed that one of the defendants had lured the other through gestures such as winking in public. Since such acts were “against public order and security” (nazm va amniyyat-i ‘umūmī), the Court of Misdemeanors was found eligible to hold the trial. The Court further argued that the case should be referred to the Special Criminal

Court only if the act was solely transgressing Islamic legal codes. However, since the act of public luring interfered with “public order and security”, the lawyer’s objection regarding the incompetency of the Court of Misdemeanors was found to be invalid. In the final ruling, the court found the defendant to be guilty, but deferred his punishment for five years since it was his first offense and he had a sick mother who needed him. If the defendant did not commit a similar crime during the next five years, then his penalty was to be annulled. These cases reveal a crucial moment in the history of the development of secular codified law in Iran, as the law had to rearrange itself around the question of morality and form a clear and unified code addressing it.

Furthermore, the law had to define the place of Islam in governing morality, which was clearly ambiguous for the judges as well as the lawyers.

***

228 “Risīdigi bi ittihām-i Hājī va Hasan mubtanī bar irtikāb-i ‘amal-i shanī‘,” February 1924, 298/80746, National Library and Archives of Iran.

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On January 27, 1926, parliament passed the first penal code that codified acts against morality. Through a series of amendments between 1926 and 1933, parliament experimented with public morality law and the respective role of Shari‘a. The first version of the penal code criminalized sexual relations outside the institution of marriage, convening such relations, and public acts that violate codes of morality, under Chapter III, “Crimes Against People” (junhah va jināyāt nisbat bi afrād), Section Five, “Violation of Honor and Derogation from Chastity” (hatk-i nāmūs va munāfiyāt-i iffat). Article 207 particularly noted that acts of zinā and lavāt (same-sex sexual relations between men), if proven under Shar‘i principles—which require four sane adult men to witness the act of penetration—were punishable by execution. Otherwise, such crimes were to be tried in common courts and ruled according to Articles 208–214. On January 28,

1931, the bill for amending Article 207—that the respective parliament commission had proposed—was passed. The bill omitted the word zinā—which is an Islamic legal term—from the body of the article, and substituted it with descriptions of sexual relations outside the institution of marriage. The commission additionally overwrote the Shar‘i punishment for such crimes and indicated specific penalties, ranging from lashes to detention. Simultaneously, the parliament commission annulled the Shar‘i “Special Criminal Court” system and indicated that

“experimentally” (āzmāyishī), all acts against chastity were now to be tried in common courts.229

The bill further noted that the implementation of the amendment was subject to change: “The shortcomings that the bill might encounter as it is put into practice can be resolved, and the bill will be completed accordingly. It [i.e. the new version of the bill] will be proposed to the parliament.”

229 On December 1, 1931, the law for shar‘i trial procedures was passed, which excluded matters of morality from the domain of Islamic courts. Issues of divorce, marriage, child custody, and issues that required the defendant to swear on the Quran were referred to shar‘ī courts.

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The final amended version of the bill was passed on September 20, 1933. The title of the law changed from “Violation of honor and derogation from chastity” to “On crimes against chastity, public morality, and family responsibilities” (dar junhah va jināyāt bar zidd-i iffat va akhlāq-i ‘umūmī va takālīf-i khānivādigī). This shift indicates the legislative effort to re- conceptualize morality as having two dimensions: familial/private and public. Articles 207-209 address incidents of forced sexual relations (which are interpreted as violations of chastity).

Articles 210 and 213 particularly addressed crimes of immorality that were committed in

“public” (manzar-i ‘umūm), in sites such as “playhouses” (tamashākhānah), “public baths”

(hammām-i ‘umūmī), and coffee houses (qahva-khānah). Article 212 penalized sexual relations between married persons outside the institution of marriage with a sentence of six months to three years in prison. Further, under Article 207, sexual relations with “mahārim” (relatives that one is not allowed to marry under Shari‘a) were punishable separately by 10-15 years in prison.

Under this finalized version of the laws on immorality, familial crimes of immorality match those identified in Sharī‘a with different penalties. Crimes of public acts of immorality, however, did not follow the Islamic law. As such, between 1926 and 1933 the new legal system attempted to privatize the Shar‘ and confine it to matters of family. This process of legal experimentation was an exercise of the state’s “active principle of secularism,” through which the state sovereignly decided on the place of religion in social life.230

Significantly, the codified law directly addressed crimes related to prostitution under the same law in Articles 212 and 213. There were explicit penalties for pandering, running prostitution businesses, and sex-trafficking. I extensively discuss the oscillation of the codified

230 Agrama proposes that the secular power of the state is exercised through "the active principle of secularism" through which the state decides on what "should count as essentially religious and what scope it can have in social life" Questioning Secularism, 2012, 72.

118 law between the two legal models of prostitution laws, namely regulationism and prohabitionism, in Chapter IV. Regardless of the internal ambivalences within the law, the state’s measures to govern prostitution pulled in opposite directions. While the state formed the red- light district of Tehran around 1922, it later criminalized prostitution in 1926. The codified law attempted to address and resolve this contradiction in the penal code through an additional article that granted permission to the local government of an executive power above the law. Article

214 of the 1933 draft of the Penal Code gave executive power to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Justice to “Arrange for other ‘regulations’ (muqarrarāt) for preventing the spread of prostitution (jilawgīrī as intishār-i fahshā) as they see fit.” This clause is crucial in understanding the analytics of the governance of prostitution in Tehran, as well as the secular power of the state. This article left room for the sovereign governance of prostitution outside the unified body of law. In effect, this article allowed state institutions including the local police, the

Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the municipality to govern Shahrinaw under arbitrary rule, sometimes in line with the Islamic religious sensibilities of the public, and sometimes against them. To tie this back to the question of secularism, despite the omission of Islamic legal language from the laws on morality, Article 214 allowed for the “active principle of secularism” to remain intact in the governance of prostitution in Tehran as the state institutions, including the police and the municipality, continued to determine the domain of Islamic sensibilities in the neighborhood. State institutions navigated the petitions that evoked the Islamic sensibilities of the residents through a series of measures in the district that cannot be understood as abiding by the law. Neither can they be simply understood as abiding by Islamic principles.

This brief legal history of the transmutations of codified law and trial procedures as they related to morality troubles two suppositions. First, despite the common assumption that Islam condemns prostitution, the jurists’ and lawyers’ line of arguments demonstrate that there were no

119 legal penalties for prostitution in the shar‘. The mixing of prostitution with zinā was proposed as a way to resolve the ambiguity of the law on matters of morality, and does not seem to have had precedence. Second, the law on morality classified it as having two aspects: private and public, and subsequently Islamic and non-Islamic. There are traces of Islamic legal penalties in articles that address the private and familial aspect of morality (such as having sexual relations with mahārim). However, the public aspect of morality with the Islamic principle of “commanding what is right and opposing what is wrong” was never taken up directly in codified law. The secular state, as the primary institution responsible for public order, turned into the agent of this principle implicitly. Consequently, “commanding what is right and opposing what is wrong” turned into a matter of the modern state, and its governance lends itself to characteristics of the rule of the modern state.

Nevertheless, a historical anthropology of the life of the district reveals that Islamic sentiments continued to play a role in the way in which the executive body of the state made decisions about prostitution in Tehran. The transformations of the codified law on morality further affirmed the argument of the previous chapter, as they display how Islam was situated as the vanguard of public morality at the turn of the century, but then was pushed to the background by the judicial system. This is due to the fact that, as I discussed extensively in the previous chapter, Islam as the public religion of the country was reorganized as a force in congruence with nationalistic goals. The first draft of the experimental codified law on morality allowed for cases to be tried in both common courts and Islamic courts. It was only in the 1931 draft of the law that

Islamic “Special Criminal Courts” were dismantled. Although eventually in 1933 the law formed a clearer stance on the place of religion in matters of public morality, on the ground the executive body of the state continued to take arbitrary measures through extra-legal activities, in Shahrinaw and outside, to govern the moralscape of the city.

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2.6 Space of Threshold

The expansion and transformations of the district over the course of the fifty years to come cannot be understood solely through the legal unfolding of morality clauses and the criminalization of prostitution. Rather, it should be understood within the executive space of governance that Article 214 of the criminal code afforded state institutions. Shahrinaw was not only formed under the “state of exception,” but it also continued to be ruled as such, at the threshold of the legal bounds of the city. The purpose of the formation of Shahrinaw on the margins of Tehran was initially to cleanse the moral image of the city. Early petitioners explicitly requested that the state move prostitutes outside of the city “if the ultimate rule of Allah” (which is the eradication of prostitution altogether) was not realizable. However, immediately after its formation the district turned into the marker of the un-Islamic character of the state, as it was seen as an attempt towards the legalization of prostitution. For instance, in 1924, Seyed Ali

Shushtarī gave a public lecture in which he criticized the state’s measures with regards to

Shahrinaw, suggesting that the state “wanted to make things better, but only made them worse.”231 He further complained that the state was now openly recognizing prostitutes, who hung lanterns in front of their doors announcing their services publicly. In 1928, Vahid Dastgirdī

(1879–1942), the editor of Armaqān Journal wrote:

The antithesis of public health (hifz al-sihhah-‘i ‘umūmi) is the red-light district of Tehran, Shahrinaw . . . Although this is an Islamic country, and prostitution is against the shar‘ [Islamic law], the state sanctions brothels; the spring, from which contagious diseases flood out to the rest of the country.232

231 Qahramān Mīrzā Sālūr, Rūznāmah-ʼi Khātirāt-I ʻAyn Al-Saltanah, ed. Īraj Afshār and Mas ʻūd Sālūr, Chāp-i 1, vol. 8, Ganjīnah-ʼi Khātirāt va Safarnāmahʹhā-Yi Īrānī 8–12, 14–18 (Tehran: Asātīr, 1374). 232 Dastgirdī, “ ’Adl-amān-sihhat,” Armaqān, no. 9–10 (1928): 495–505.

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The presence of Shahrinaw as an official place for prostitution not only caused religious and moral outrage, but also led to an uneven distribution of wealth and de-gentrification of the area.

A look into the petitions written after the formation of Shahrinaw can provide insight into these processes. In 1933, the former residents of Shahrinaw wrote a letter asking the state to arrange for them to return to their houses in the district.233 They explained in their petition that

Shahrinaw’s rental prices had dropped drastically after the “state’s suggestive measures” to settle prostitutes there. According to the letter, the “innocent” (bi-gunāh) petitioners could not afford to live outside the neighborhood any longer due to the widening of the gap between the rent they received from their prostitute tenants and higher rents they had to pay to live in other neighborhoods. They further explained that in each stretch, there were only a few brothels and the rest of the units were left vacant. Due to the scattered concentration of prostitutes in

Shahrinaw, many of the owners could not rent out their properties. They requested that the government take measures and relocate the red-light district somewhere else. In this letter of complaint, the petitioners asked the state to take organized measures and intervene in the texture of the city, to once again resolve the “injustice done to them”:

If things continue to stay the same we, the owners, will have to give up our houses to pay our rent outside [of Shahrinaw] and ultimately this will ruin and destroy our families. We can see then, that prostitutes are terminating us . . . Do the just thing. Do noble men deserve to be sacrificed for some prostitutes’ lust [havā va havas]? Is it right that an owner loses his/her house, and ends up in destitution, living in others’ houses as tenants? . . . we are a bunch of innocent people, who submitted to the orders of the government of the time and evacuated our homes urgently. We took asylum in the city. It is unjust that we are being pressured by this ever-increasing detriment to the point of complete

233 “Mālikīn-i Shahrinaw rāji‘ bi ishkālātī ki barāyi mālikin ruy dādah,” 1312/1933, 9/47/5/1/19 jim, Library, Museum and Document Center of Iran Parliament. Also catalogued as “Mālikīn-i Shahrinaw rāji‘ bi tafāvutī ki bain-i kirāyah-yi daryāftī az khānah-hā-yī ki khārij az ān mahallah ijārah kardah-and vujāud dārad va ma‘īshatī ki īn tafāvut barāyishān ījād kardah,” November 1933, 9/47/5/1/19, Library, Museum, and Document Center of the Iranian Parliament,

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destruction. The recent legislation about public virtue gives us a glimpse of hope. However, we are close to falling from a cliff while awaiting some change.234

The conception of justice in this petition reveals a perceived hierarchy of citizenship according to which the residents requested the state to distribute the right to the city unlawfully, systematically and asymmetrically. The discourse of justice in the petitions is significant as its underpinning sheds light on the extra-legal space of governance that eludes the codified law.

While the language of the codified law on morality and prostitution did not invoke justice and suffering, the petitions constantly invoked this discourse in order to have standing before the state. Earlier, the state moved prostitutes to serve the moral sensibilities of Tehran residents at the expense of the dislocation of prostitutes. A few years later, the state had to respond to the interests of former Shahrinaw residents whose land value had dropped drastically. This is while a new wave of petitions poured into parliament opposing Shahrinaw as an un-Islamic place that ruined the reputation of the city and “hurt the Islamic sensibilities” (ihsāsāt-i Islāmī) of the residents.

In the twenty years between the 1930s and the 1950s, as Tehran grew larger, Shahrinaw came to be located at the heart of the city. Complaining residents called it the “corrupt and filthy spot at the center of the capital.”235 Beginning in 1932, the state initiated the destruction of the eight gates of Tehran and the walls that surrounded the city, situating Shahrinaw within the bounds of the city. By 1934, the local government had filled up the ditches on the outer edge of the walls and constructed new roads on top of them.236 The Sī-mitrī Street was built adjacent to

234 “Mālikīn-i Shahrinaw.” 235 “[Nāmah-hā-yi muti‘addid az sākinīn-i Tehran],” 1336-1339 /1957-1960, 19/35/11/4/20, Library, Museum and Document Center of Iran Parliament, Letter no. 28838. 236 Karīmān, Tehran dar guzashtah va hāl.

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Shahrinaw, connecting it to the rest of Tehran. In 1938, the municipality announced Bāq-i Shāh as the new border at the west end of Tehran.237 This meant that Shahrinaw was now officially a part of the city, situated between the military camp in the west end and the train station at the south end. By 1944, there was a police station next to the district on the northern side. In the

1940s, approximately two decades after the eviction of prostitutes from Tehran and their settlement in Shahrinaw, a civil movement with purpose of moving the district outside of Tehran had formed. In November 1946, the Jamāl al-haq association (ittihādiyah-yi mahalli-yi jamāl al- haq), which was a local association consisting of members who lived two blocks south of the district, wrote a petition in which they explained that, due to the expansion of Tehran, residential buildings were constructed in the southern part of the city and the south was now populated by

“respectable” people. They requested that the state move the prostitutes from Shahrinaw to an area outside of Tehran. The association described the moral threat of prostitutes to adjacent neighborhoods:

Just as when fruit sellers put away rotten apples so that other apples are not rotten, you surely agree that moral corruption spreads rapidly in society . . . . Furthermore, the streams of water that pour outward from Shahrinaw [to the rest of the city] are infected with filth and microbes of stray people and drunks. They deprive innocent children of health.238

The state was not indifferent towards these petitions. In February 1949, the Ministry of Health requested that the municipality deal with the Jamāl al-haq association and respond to them in writing.239 On May 6, 1950, Abbās Bahārdūst, the chief editor and owner of the journal Āsrār-i

Iran (1940s–1980s), wrote a letter of complaint as the representative of the residents of District

237 Karīmān, Tehran dar guzashtah va hāl, 302. 238 “Hay‘at-I Ittahadiyah-Yi Mahallah Jamāl Al-Haq Taqāzā Dārand Ki Favāhish-I Shahrinaw Rā Bah Jā-Yi Digar Intiqāl Dahand,” November 1326, 610823, Library, Museum and Document Center of Iran Parliment. 239 “Taghāzā-Yi Ittihādiyah,” February 26, 1327, Library, Museum, and Document Center of the Iranian Parliment.

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10.240 In his letter, he mentioned that the municipality had promised to confine and control the traffic at Hāj Abdulmahmūd Street temporarily, but had failed to do so.

Despite public complaints, Shahrinaw’s businesses grew more affluent. According to the

1956 police census, licit and illicit entertainment centers, including restaurants, “opium bars”

(shirah-kish-khānah), and “gambling houses” (qumār-khānah) flourished in Shahrinaw and in the adjacent streets of the district such as Sī-mitrī Street, Jamshīd Street, and Istakhr Street.

While in the 1930s many of the houses in Shahrinaw were vacant, by the 1950s the district was populated by 1620 residents, and 753 businessmen.241 As a space outside the law, there was relative tolerance towards crime within the constraints of the district. The plentitude of crime reports in the 1950s affirm that Shahrinaw became a center for organized crime in Tehran.

People such as Mahmūd Misgar, a mob leader who had gambling houses in Hāj Abdulmahmūd

Street, Hussein Zāqī, and Hassan Arab are amongst the well-known criminals of the neighborhood who carried their personal guns around and occasionally got into street fights with the police.242 Residents of adjacent areas wrote many letters of complaint to parliament about these criminals. 243 In July 1950, residents of Jamshīd Street, one of the main streets in the

240 Abbas Bahārdūst, “Abbās-i Bahārdūst, Shikāyat as ‘adam-I Tawajjuh-I Idārah-Yi Shahrbānī,” May 29, 1329, Library, Museum, and Document Center of the Iranian Parliment. 241 In the 1933 petition, the owners of Shahrinaw houses who have moved to the city, note that in every alley there were only a few houses that have residents. The rest were left abandoned or empty. “Mālikīn-i Shahrinaw rāji‘ bi tafāvutī ki bain-i kirāyah-yi daryāftī az khānah-hā-yī ki khārij az ān mahallah ijārah kardah-and.” 242 See for instance the 118 page long file on Majmūd Misgar in “‘ījād-I amākin-i fisād dar Tehran tavassut-i Mahmūd Misgar va Hussein Zāri‘ī,” 1959, 298/7675, National Library and Archives of Iran. 243 “Rāji‘ bi man‘-i fahshā va isti‘māl-i taryāk,” 1951-1957/1330-1336, 805967, Library, Museum and Document Center of Iran Parliament, “[Nāmah-hā-yi muti‘addid az sākinīn-i Tehran] rāji‘ Bi [Muzzir Budan-I Favāhish [Khānah- Hā] va Marākiz-I Fisād [va Taqāzā-Yi Bastan-I Ān-Hā],” 1960/1336-1339 1957, 19/35/11/4/20, Library, Museum, and Document Center of the Iranian Parliament.

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Figure 15 The first page of the census report of the residents of Shahrinaw, 1956.

126 adjacency of Shahrinaw, complained about the abundance of criminal activities in the district:

We, the residents of Jamshid Street, ask in helplessness that the exalted royalty, for whom we would sacrifice our souls, order the relocation of Shahrinaw, which is developing rapidly. It is infecting all the alleys and neighborhoods. In addition, it has become the place for gambling centers, opium bars, all different kinds of transmitted diseases, and thieves and criminals’ stomping ground. [We ask that you move the red-light district] from this central part of the city where it drives all children, women, and men towards extinction, to another area a few kilometers farther away from people.244

The local police raided alcohol shops and opium bars in and around the district regularly.

However, since most of the owners used their employees’ names for licenses, the raids had merely a temporary effect.245 Soon after, the mobsters would obtain new licenses in the names of other employees and reopen their venues. During October and November of 1953, in a series of meetings, a committee consisting of Tehran’s municipality representatives, Tehran’s attorney general, the marshal of the district, and local trusted residents of the area decided on six strategies to control the spaces of “corruption and prostitution:” 1. Shutting down alcohol shops and bars in Shahrinaw; 2. The construction of public washrooms in Shahrinaw; 3. Gating

Shahrinaw; 4. Dispatching opium addicts to hospitals; 5. Establishing a police station in

Shahrinaw; and 6. Collecting all children, male and female, under the age of 15. Following these decisions, the municipality constructed walls around the district and constructed two main gates, which facilitated the monitoring of Shahrinaw’s traffic. Most probably, it is from this point on that Shahrinaw was referred to as the “Ward” (qal‘ah). A confidential letter from the municipality to the Ministry of InternalAaffairs reflects on the decision of the committee:

In 1946, the residents of District 10 [which is the district that Shahrinaw was located in] wrote many complaints to various ministries and state offices, and reflect the issue in the

244 “[Nāmah-hā-yi muti‘addid az sākinīn-i Tehran].” 245 This case can be specifically seen in Mahmūd Misgar’s property management, as he delegated the license acquisition to his inferiors. See “Ījād-I Amākin-I Fisād Dar Tehran Tavassut-I Mahmūd Misgar va Hussein Zāri‘ī.”

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press. Accordingly, the state has formed a number of committees to address their complaints and requests.246

Once again, responding to the complaints of neighborhood residents prompted the state to act sovereignly, and restrict the district through the construction of walls. In April 6, 1955, the police bureau of District 10 submitted a report that drew attention to the central location of Shahrinaw in the city:

The facade of the matter is that Shahrinaw is now gated. However, in actuality, the Ward caters to the public, while most of the houses outside the Ward, especially in Jamshīd Street, are being used by brothel leaders [sardastah] as private brothels [najīb khāna] or single houses for private costumers. And [this] puts women and children of neighboring areas in danger.247

This report reveals that the municipality viewed the district as a threat to other citizens. The construction of Shahrinaw and its residents as a threat to public order, morality, and the health of other residents is fundamental to the discourse of justice, and the respective decisions that the state took. Further, the extra-legal character of the state’s measures in the district enabled the government to navigate the rival and competing interests of the residents of Shahrinaw, local businesses, and adjacent neighbors, but, however, interrupted the implementation of a consistent plan in the district.

On December 13, 1956, Abul Hassan Shiravānī, as the representative of the tradespeople of the neighborhood, wrote a letter to Fākhir Hikmat, the head of parliament at the time. He expressed deep concern about the rumors of a plan for the complete demolition of Shahrinaw.

According to him, there were many storeowners in Shahrinaw who would be devastated if their shops were destroyed. Nevertheless, the state made an ongoing effort to prepare for the

246 “Mahsūr Shudan-I Shahrinaw,” January 1954, 340/234, National Library and Archives of Iran. 247 “Khulāsah-yi parvandah-yi Fawāhish-i Mahall-i Shahrinaw ki dar idārah-yi pulīs-i Tehran bāygānī mībāshad.”

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Figure 16 A letter from the municipality confirming the construction of walls around the district, 1965.

129 implementation of its plan, which was to ultimately move prostitutes to another neighborhood at the new margins of Tehran. On December 25, 1958, the central municipality of Tehran wrote a letter to parliament in which it reassured parliament that Shahrinaw’s relocation plan was being followed up on.248 In October 1958, a group of residents of Jamshid Street, a neighboring street of Shahrinaw, complained that the district was still intact:

Following frequent complaints of two hundred and fifty thousand residents of District 10 and 20 over the past fifteen consecutive years for the abolishment of Shahrinaw, this center of corruption, last year [the government] made the decision to relocate the residents of Shahrinaw Ward outside of Tehran. Unfortunately, not only has there not been a single measure to realize this plan, but also the domain of this corruption (fisād,) and prostitution (fahshā,) is spreading every day.249

Within a few months’ time in 1959, the northern gate of Shahrinaw was shut down. The business owners in the district did not rest. They continued to push back against the relocation plans of the state through petitions. They wrote another letter of complaint in March of the same year, copying not only the parliament but also the public press such as the newspaper Kayhān, contesting the state’s effort to control the traffic of the southern gate of Shahrinaw. According to the letter, the municipality of District 10 had ordered the local businesses in Shahrinaw to submit photographs of employees and obtain entrance cards. The businessmen found this regulation absurd. In reaction to this measure, they asked the head of parliament to consider their “painful story” and grant them a few months time so that they could manage to close down their stores and leave Shahrinaw for good. Even the prostitutes wrote a letter and complained about the injustice done to them:

In these past few days that the respective authorities have shut down the northern gate of Shahrinaw and are attempting to control the traffic of the southern gate, the Ward is in

248 “Rāji‘ bi man‘-i fahshā”; “[Nāmah-hā-yi muti‘addid az sākinīniI Tehran].” 249 “[Nāmah-hā-yi muti‘addid az sākinīniI Tehran].”

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inexplicable circumstances. The wretched (tīrahbakht) and helpless (bīpanāh) women who had been dragged to the Ward at a young age, due to the corrupt morality of men and youth, are in utmost hopelessness. From the moment when rumors started about the closing of this area, the better, more well-off leaders have rented private houses in posh neighborhoods in northern parts of Tehran. They have expanded their businesses there.250

This letter is the only petition from the prostitutes in the large pile of complaints about

Shahrinaw in the archives. Significantly, the prostitutes frame themselves as “wretched” and

“helpless” victims of men’s corrupt morality, and are therefore subjects of injustice. The perception of the prostitute as a victim, as opposed to a threat, gained currency in the post-WWII era. I discuss in more detail the conditions and consequences of this shift in Chapter IV.

However, this letter is pertinent to the discussion of this chapter as it reveals how the prostitutes employed a similar language of justice in order to claim their own “right to the city.”

In April of 1959, the local police center (kalāntarī)251 shut down all the cafes and bars in the area, including the ones located outside of the gated district, in Qazvīn and Sī-mitrī streets.

Café owners begged the state to “attend to this matter” and prevent their families “from going broke and losing shelter.” In another letter of petition, local business owners condemned the actions of a local officer who raided their shops:

You, the statesmen, are obeying the Shah’s orders to ensure peoples’ comfort [āsāyish]. However, officer Qādirī from the police station of District 20 is doing the opposite. He is driving away the well-reputed family-oriented businessmen, instead of the corrupt people. . . . If anyone attempts to defend his own right, he will be jailed and eventually die. If you have sold the one hundred thousand residents of District 20 to the head of the police station, then please publish the notarized document in the press and announce this in the radio so that everyone knows they do not have the right to life [haqq-i hayāt] . . . save us from the hands of this oppressor [zālim].252

250 “[Nāmah-hā-yi muti‘addid az sākinīn-i Tehran],” Letter no. 26416. 251 There were two different zoning systems in Tehran in the 1960s. According to the police zoning system, Shahrinaw was in District Twenty (barzan bist). This is while, according to municipality’s zoning system, Shahrinaw was in District Ten (bakhsh-i dah). See Murtizā Tafrishī, Pulīs-i khafiah-yi Iran. 252 “[Nāmah-hā-yi muti‘addid az sākinīn- Tehran].”

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The interest of local businesses hindered the implementation of a radical gentrification project, as unlike prostitutes, they were perceived as legitimate citizens. Therefore, they publicly claimed the rights and privileges of lawful citizenship, which were inaccessible to prostitutes and other outlaws. In another letter without date, twenty-seven business owners in Shahrinaw and adjacent areas, including Sī-mitrī, Qazvin, Sarāb, and Jamshīd, filed a complaint about District 10’s police to parliament. They specifically protested the fact that the police, without any legal permit, had shut down their businesses for the past six months. The petitioners complained that other similar businesses in other parts of Tehran were running without problems. Interestingly, they drew on the Charter of Rights’ Eight and Ninth Amendments to make their case:

The Eighth Amendment: All the citizens of Iran enjoy equal rights in front of the state. The Ninth Amendment: The life, belongings, place of residence, and “honor” [sharaf] of all people should be protected by the state, from any form of violation.

No one can be violated, except under the rule of law. The constitution has no restriction on people’s businesses. Therefore, unless one breaks the law, s/he does not deserve any punishment or penalty. With which court order are you prohibiting us from carrying on our business? We have done nothing wrong.253

This is the only petition which raises the question of rights, as opposed to invoking the suffering of the citizens. Most significantly, the interplay between the petitions and state’s executive actions in Shahrinaw reveal the role of the state as a moral actor, whose responsibility was to end the suffering of its worthy citizens. As seen in the last two petitions, some residents, including adjacent neighbors and local business owners, were perceived as deserving the right to a life

(haqq-i hayāt) without suffering, while others, i.e., the prostitutes, were deemed undeserving of such rights. This stratification of life value cannot be grasped by the discourse of rights and the

253 This letter does not have date or letter number. However, it is signed by the owners of cafes and restaurants in the district such as Jamshīd-i naw, Karūn-i naw, Bahār, Gul, Yigānah, Shīrāz, and Sarāb. See “[Nāmah-hā-yi muti‘addid az sākinīn- Tehran].”

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Constitutional logic, under which all citizens are equally entitled to the “right to live.” As the petitioners observed, the state ruled Shahrinaw arbitrarily as an extra-legal space. The state’s measures were not consistent with a singular plan either. Rather, they constantly oscillated between the competing concerns of the adjacent residents with moral concerns, and the business owners in the districts with financial concerns. In Chapter IV, I explore the simultaneity of different regimes of governance that ruled Shahrinaw, at the threshold of legality, in the 1960s.

For the purpose of this chapter, however, what is significant is the state’s arrangement of the moralscape of Tehran in response to citizens’ rival interests, which they framed as different forms of injustice.

These petitions provide accounts that run counter to the most common narrative of the urbanization of Tehran, which holds that the Pahlavi government, as actors of self-colonization, brought heavy top-down interventions in the urban structure of Tehran.254 These grievances, along with the government’s efforts to manage prostitution in Tehran, attest to the fact that the role of the state was not simply to unilaterally intervene in the texture of the city. Rather, the formation of Shahrinaw was an experiment of modernity and a sovereign state measure that was informed by residents’ sensibilities and a sense of personal morality, which relied on the preservation of public morality. They further demonstrate that the state acted on public moral sensibilities that were partly rooted in the public’s aspiration to have an Islamic society.

Nevertheless, the state remained the ultimate arbiter of the role of Islam in public life. After all, what does it mean for civilians to take a concern that they frame as religious to an institution that is seen as secular? To this light, the governance of Shahrinaw, as an instance of moral

254 For the urban planning aspects of Reza Shah’s modernization plans see Muhsin Habībī, Az shār tā shahr: taḥlīlī tārīkhī az mafhūm-i shahr va sīmā-yi kālbudī-i ān: tafakkur va taʼss̲ u̲ r, (Tehrān: Dānishgāh-i Tehrān, 1384/2005). Some even go so far as to refer to Reza Shah as the “positive dictator.” See for instance Ilhām Malikzādah, mu‘assisāt-i khayriyah-yi rifāhī-bihdāshtī dar dawrah-yi Reza Shah (Tehran: Tārikh-i nashr-i Iran, 1392/2013).

133 governance, is an expression of the secular power of the state, which indeterminately decided on the role of religion in public life. Shahrinaw, then, is partly an expression of the Iranian state’s experiment to define the role of Islam as the public religion of Iran under the secular Pahlavi regime.

2.7 Conclusion

Agamben conceptualizes the sovereign power of the modern state as the power that attempts to confine the outside and interiorize the excluded.255 The metaphor specifically works in the case of Shahrinaw, as the state spatially included the district within the bounds of the city, while also excluding it from the city through the erection of walls around it. Shahrinaw was never meant to be a fully regulated and legitimate part of the city. Even when the state facilitated the formation of the district in 1922, the logic was partly that Shahrinaw was not in Tehran. In the words of

Agamben, the district was that which was “included solely through its exclusion,” and therefore governed under exceptional circumstances as a space of exception.256 But what does the history of the governance of Shahrinaw tell us about moral governance in Tehran? Looking into the ways in which the state regulated other sites that were affiliated with prostitution and moral corruption outside of Shahrinaw reveals how this “state of exception” constantly extended its rule to other parts of the city. In fact, Shahrinaw was the exception through which the law was made and as such it should be posited not outside, but at the center of the governance of morality in Tehran. Although the state tried to confine the space of prostitution within the extra-legal site of Shahrinaw, brothels were dispersed all around Tehran for the better part of the twentieth

255 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 18,19. 256 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 19.

134 century. Neighboring residents continued to submit petitions to the state institutions and local officials, constantly displacing prostitution houses around Tehran. The state handled local complaints the same way that it handled the matter of Shahrinaw: indeterminately, extra- judiciary, and according to a discourse of justice that cannot be grasped by the legal and

Constitutional discourse of rights.

Other sites of immoral activities such as opium bars, cafes, alcohol shops, and private brothels were common targets of local petitions and state crackdowns throughout the twentieth century. For instance, in June 1957 local residents of District Five petitioned against an opium bar and a gambling house at Shūsh street, copying the public press including Ittillā‘āt newspaper in their petitions:

We all know that our country is an Islamic one and gambling is forbidden in Islam. Our law also directly bans this grand corruption. The urban police are responsible for busting gamblers and these centers. How is it that they are aware of such sites at the center of the city but turn a blind eye toward them and do not stop them?257

The petitioners once again invoked the discourse of suffering to render themselves worthy of the state’s care: “we are suffering, hardworking, Shah-loving [residents]. . . We expect [the state] to keep this suffering nation (millat-i ranj-didah) safe and secure.” In July 1958, the residents of

Kāvah alley, located on Ikbātān street, petitioned against the residency of a single woman, who was a singer/performer at a bar in Tehran (Café Metro), claiming that she was a prostitute, as she could afford to live alone with a maid!258 They further accused her of housing other prostitutes in her apartment, requested a search warrant for her house, and asked for her ultimate eviction from the neighborhood. In July 1959, local business owners in an alley on Nawrūzī street, which

257 “[Nāmah-hā-yi muti‘addid az sākinīn-i Tehran],” Letter no. 9436. 258 “[Nāmah-hā-yi muti‘addid az sākinīn-i Tehran],” Letter no. 20460.

135 was outside of Shahrinaw but still in District 20, wrote a petition against a madam called

Shawkat Bānū, who had recently opened a brothel in the alley.259 They complained that her manner was against all “religious and national principles” as she solicited on the street, lured young men, and served alcohol in her house. In June 1960, a group of residents of Firdawsī alley, next to the Moulin Rouge theater house in District Twelve, submitted a petition against a brothel owned by a madam named Āzar Shīrāzī, who had been evicted before from District Four and moved to their area recently.260 The letter shows that the police had relocated the madam before, throwing all her furniture out in the street, and forcing her to move out from another neighborhood. The petitioners requested the state evict her once again from her new place of residence. It was not only the district that the state ruled under the state of exception, but also the prostitutes and other moral outlaws, who were treated as exceptional subject citizens. The significant number of petitions against sites of vice all around Tehran reveals that the governance of morality, through extra-legal measures, was normalized in Tehran. Executive decisions did not reside in the periphery of governance, but were at the heart of the mechanisms of the local police for moral regulation.

The governance of Shahrinaw, together with the developing laws on morality, most significantly demonstrate that modern positive law and moral judgment are inseparable as they relate to indeterminacies in the governance of urban spaces. The petitions demonstrate that although the judicial system, in the decade long experiment with the law on morality between

1926 and 1933, developed clearer boundaries between private and public, and religious and secular matters, morality remained at the threshold of legal governance throughout the first half

259 “[Nāmah-hā-yi muti‘addid az sākinīn-i Tehran],” Letter no. 30522. 260 “[Nāmah-hā-yi muti‘addid az sākinīn-i Tehran],” Letter no. 37923.

136 of the twentieth century. As the law allowed room for the executive body of the state to arbitrate moral disputes, the moral topography of the city was never simply ruled under positive law, although it was legitimated by the judicial system. As such, any study of the place of Islam in public life, as it relates to morality, has to take into account not only judicial and intellectual discourse, but also the extra-legal space of governance and the central role of the executive body of the state that was in continuous dialogue with the residents’ moral sensibilities. While Islam as the vanguard of public morality gained momentum in the post-1910s period, the state remained the only sovereign power in charge of assuring public morality. It suspended its own law, overrode the equal rights principle, and took action within the logic of the discourse of suffering, which was in many ways rooted in religious sensibilities. The coexistence of the humanitarian discourse of suffering and the judicial discourse of rights is crucial in understanding the humanitarian movement to “rescue” the prostitute, which took off in the 1940s and is the focus of the next chapter. Finally, these petitions further demonstrate that Shahrinaw, which is today remembered and constructed in the national memory of Iranians as a testimony to Pahlavi’s top- down secular agendas, was actually a product of intense religious mobilization from below.

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Chapter 3 Compassionate Citizens: Humanitarian Islam and the Affective Landscape of Compassionate Popular Literature

3.1 Introduction

“This place is the spectacle, the place to learn, the place of wonders.”261 These are the words through which, Hidāyatullāh Hakīmillāhī, an investigative journalist in the second Pahlavi period, introduced his readership to Tehran’s red-light district in the 1940s.262 This fascinating wonderland, however, was no garden of heaven or paradise of flesh come true. Mehdī

Mashāyikhī, a prolific journalist-writer, described Shahrinaw as a wretched place:

I speak of the dark city of wrong-doers, the cursed city of the deceived, a forgotten city that is right next to us, with a bitter and painful story. . . . Behind the tall walls of this city, under the dim light of its lamps, there are dwellers . . . who are doomed to suffer [zajr kishīdan]. Sorrow pours down from the sky of this city perpetually. Its walls, its soil, its pavements, and everything that is there show the ugliness and filth. . . . Hundreds of innocent doves are trapped. They wish to be freed.263

This casting of red-light district of Tehran as the site of “filth” (palīdī), “pity” (dilsūsī),

“compassion” (shafaqat), and “fascination” (‘ajāyib) became a prominent setting for literary and

261 Hidāyat Hakīmilāhī, Bā man bi Shahrinaw bī-yāyīd, vol. I (Tehran, 1946), 5.

262 The genre of his journalistic reportage is very similar to muckraking journalism, which is a specific journalistic genre, prevalent in the early and mid-twentieth century in which reformist-journalists exposed socio-political corruption and the wrong doings of the state and corporate institutions to the public. For more information about this genre see David L. Protess, The Journalism of Outrage: Investigative Reporting and Agenda Building in America. (New York: Guilford Press, 1992). 263 Mehdi Mashāyikhī, Ghurūbī Dar Mahalla-Yi Badnām (Tehran: Ilhām, 1954), 6.

138 journalistic works, such as Tūtī (Zakariyyā Hāshimī 1969), The Resident of the District of

Sorrow (Sākin-i mahallah-yi qam 1963), Dark Times (Rūzgār-i siyāh, ‘Abbās Khalīlī 1924), and

I Too Have Cried (Man ham giryah kardam, Jahāngīr Jalīlī 1922).264 This sensationalist literature at once victimized and dehumanized the figure of the prostitute. Quite contrary to the general earlier perception of prostitutes in the petitions as causing injustice, luring men, and disrupting public order, these literary works imagined them as victims of the larger social, moral, political, and economic corruption of Iran. In this chapter, I explore this shift in the public perception of prostitutes from primary causes of injustice to the suffering victims of it.

This chapter makes three interconnected arguments through the exploration of this popular form of literature, which had the figure of the prostitute at its center. First, popular novels were part of a larger emergent literary public, and as such they were committed to both market success and socio-moral reform.265 In other words, the market success of these novels depended on the production of literary urban spectacles of vice that attracted a wide readership and preserved the moral tone of the novel. Second, this literary public provides some insight into the lived social relations in surfacing heterosocial urban publics that were perceived as sites of

264 Finding an exact translation for the word “compassion” in Farsi is a difficult task. There are numerous words with Persian and Arabic roots that are used interchangeably in the body of literature that I explore in this chapter. Such words include: shafaqat, dilsūzī, hamdardī, rahm, and riqqat-i dil. Each of these words have different etymologies. However, my observation is that there is no meaningful difference in the use of these terms in this literature. Similarly, the equivalent for the word “humanitarianism” seems to be naw‘ dūstī, bashar dūstī, and insāndūstī. As such, in this chapter I attempt to grasp the similar work these words do in the texts, rather than differentiating them. Nevertheless, the question of the translatability of “compassion” on the one hand, and the prominence of humanitarian politics that relies on it, on the other hand, deserves further investigation. 265 In this chapter, I focus on journalistic literary productions as they precede other distinctly modern cultural productions such as film. However, similar trends can be observed in popular feature films such as Kandū (Firaydūn Gulah, 1354/1975), as well as in documentaries such as Qal‘ah (Kamrān Shīrdil, 1344/1965), and the much acclaimed exhibition work of the photo-journalist Kāveh Guleistān. There is even a film titled The Other Side of Pleasure (Ān sū-yi lizzat, Dāvūd Rsūstāyī, 1356/1977) that was commissioned by Tehran’s municipality for an addiction-fighting campaign. The film is in semi-documentary format and shot entirely in Shahrinaw.

139 excessive and immoral encounters. Third, this literature can tell us something about an emergent humanitarian Islamic public that evoked Islamic terminologies and concepts, but was deeply liberal and humanistic. This popular conception of Islam relied on the production of the affective attachment of subjects to abject vulnerable bodies, i.e., the mazlūm bodies of the prostitutes.266 I demonstrate that the morally and socially responsible Muslim subject was imagined as a subject who intervened in the life of the vulnerable prostitute by paving the way for her repentance, and rescuing her. This study of literature, then, signals the emergence of a humanitarian ethos and an individualist culture of care, which rearticulated the role of compassion and suffering in Islam.267

A side argument of this chapter is to advocate for the productive use of the study of literature and journalistic works for exploring the role of religion in public life.268

In popular literature, the body of the prostitute was described as diseased, infected, pitiful, and disgusting, but still spectacular. Displaying the suffering of prostitutes not only

266 Roxana Galusca demonstrates a very similar affective politics in the interventionist feminist efforts to save “trafficked women” in the international scene of NGOs today. She demonstrates that the affective humanitarian sensationalist literature on forced prostitution emerged in the nineteenth century in the muckraking works of American journalists. As I will demonstrate in this chapter, a very similar process took place in Iran in the early twentieth century. See Roxana Galusca, “Slave Hunters, Brothel Busters, and Feminist Interventions: Investigative Journalists as Anti-Sex-Trafficking Humanitarians,” Feminist Formations 24, no. 2 (2012): 1–24. 267 During the past decade, there has been a growing amount of scholarship on the individualist and imperialist underpinnings of modern humanitarianism and protestant conceptions of compassion that are at work in different fields and organizations including international NGOs, refugee politics, and both private and public sectors. See for example, Fassin, Humanitarian Reason; Ticktin, Casualties of Care; Berlant, Compassion. 268 Francis Cody argues for the fruitfulness of discussion on publics for understanding the field of politics. Cody suggests that thinking with the publics allows us to explore the ways in which communicative practices shape the field of politics. One could extend his analysis and advocate for the work that the study of publics can do for the study of the role of religion in publics, as well as the relation between politics and religion. Cody notes that Anderson and Habermas, as the pioneers of the study of modern publics, theorize the connection between “communication, capitalism, and mass politics.” The study of early modern literature and public press can also facilitate the theorization of the relation between “mass politics and religion.” Francis Cody, “Populist Publics: Print Capitalism and Crowd Violence beyond Liberal Frameworks,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 35, no. 1 (2015): 52.

140 constructed their bodies as mazlūm (oppressed) bodies in need of rescue, but also proved to be a popular and profitable spectacle. Emerging as a sub-genre of what is broadly defined as the

“social novel,” serialized novels and exposé accounts of the district became so popular that many were later published as independent novels. Tuysarkānī, the editor of the periodical Red Twilight

(Shahfaq-i surkh), remarks in the prace of the famous 1933 novel I too Have Cried:

One of the readers, after appreciating [our efforts for publishing the novel], even suggested that we print abundant extra copies, using donations, for free distribution amongst people so that it [i.e., the novel] finds its way to coffee houses [qahvah khānah], public circles, religious ceremonies [rawzah khānī], and similar places so that it is accessible to all classes of people.269 May [this book] be a whip of a moral lesson for those who have deviated from the path of chastity.270

The idea that literature can “whip” its readership and discipline them, that reading literature is a practice that can be personally improvin, and morally refining, emerged widely with the rise of social novels in the early twentieth century against the backdrop of a growing literacy rate, and the emergence of public libraries, typographic print, textual commodification, and the commercialization of print.271 In 1935, in the weekly publication Humāyūn, Aliakbar

Hakmīzādah wrote an article about modern forms of entertainment including the novel. He argued that since “[human] nature is receptive to stories and legends,” “stories affect the self

(nafs) and conscience (vijdān).”272 The notion that morally committed literature can align readers

269 Rawzah khānī is a part of the ritualistic commemoration of the martyrs of Karbala, a prominent event in Shia history. There were professionals called rawzah-khān who recited eulogies for the sufferings of Imam Hussein, his disciples, and his family. 270 Jahāngīr Jalīli, Man ham giryah kardam (Tehran: Kāvah, 1312/1933), 1. It should be noted that there is a film with the same title, directed by Samuel Khāchikīyān in 1347/1968). However, the film is not an adaptation of this novel. 271 For more discussion on print technology in early twentieth century Iran, see Afshin Marashi, “Print Culture and Its Publics: A Social History of Bookstores in Tehran, 1900–1950,” International Journal Middle East Studies 47, no. 1 (February 1, 2015): 89–108; Zabīh Allāh, Safā, Nasr-i Fārsī (Tehran, Kitābfirūshī-i Ibn-i Sīnā, 1968): 139–141. 272 Akbar Hukmīzādah, “Tablīqāt (cinamā, rumān, girāmāfūn),” Humāyūn 1: 6 (1935): 29–30.

141 with some subjects and against others; that literature can in fact orient readers towards certain moral actions, while warding them off from obscene ones, appeared in particular in the discourse around serialized novels.

The representation of the suffering of the abject played a role in the production of intimate public social relations and an “intimate public sphere.”273 The imagined moral public relied on literary spectacles of vulnerability that evoked compassionate response in the readership, as it tied people’s public lives to their private intimate worlds through a sense of shared feeling. At the same time, these spectacles aspired to construct a certain shared understanding of moral action and social reform. In this light, this chapter explores the genealogy of popular literature to tackle larger questions about the work that literature can do for historical- ethnographic studies; the role of emotions in the construction of public morality and Islamic moral sensibilities; and the mechanisms through which disgust and compassion together became humanizing emotions that organized the public as progressive, religiously committed, moral, and political agents.

3.2 New Publics

Early popular literature in Iran, which is addressed as the “social novel,” (rumān-i ijtimā‘ī or dāstān-i ijtimā‘ī), was a part and parcel of an emerging literary public that was simultaneously committed to both entertainment and socio-moral reform. These novels first appeared in the

273 In the context of the US in the twentieth century, Lauren Berlant points to the work that emotions do in defining and constructing the notion of citizenship. Accordingly, members of the supposedly-democratic public sphere are intimately bound by shared feelings and sensibilities such as compassion. She particularly explores the politics of emotions in modern public spheres to reveal the innate contradictions that the idea of a modern public carries within itself. She uses the term “intimate public” to particularly refer to the modern publics that rely on the shared sensibilities of their members. See Lauren Gail Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship, Series Q (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 1–25.

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1920s and became widely popular in the 1930s and 1940s. There are no formalistic features such

274 as narrative style or literary tools and techniques that define this genre. However, social novels were all a part of the larger growing print culture, which was the bedrock of the emerging

275 public sphere. Although social novels were highly diverse in form, their authors were mostly journalists with similar backgrounds. As part of the emerging upper middle-class in Iran, early novelists were predominantly journalists who also held government jobs and political positions, fighting on nationalist, Islamist, and other political fronts. Mushfiq Kāzimī (1902–1977), one of the early novelists of this genre, was appointed the First Secretary of the Iranian Embassy in

Sweden. He was also on the editorial board of journals such as Iranopolis (Irānshahr) and The

Francophone Press (Nāmah-yi farangistān).276 Similarly, Ali Dashtī (1896–1982), known for his novels Sedition (Fitnah, 1945) and Magic (Jādū, 1942), was a political activist and a senator.277

In his youth, he received religious training in Najaf, but later he became critical of Islam.278 He also co-published the controversial journal The Red Twilight. In this journal, he printed popular

274 To be sure, there is no formalistic coherency even in terms of the length of these literary pieces. Scholars of modern Iranian literature include a broad spectrum in this genre, which is comprised of short stories, novellas, and long novels. Examples of these short stories include the two collections of Ali Dashtī, Sedition (Fitnah, 1945) and Magic (Jādū, 1942). Examples of novellas include Javad Fāzil’s abundance of works such as the famous The Prostitute (Fāhishah, 1952) and The Innocent Lady (Bānū-yi bi gunāh, 1952). Earlier social novels include Mushfiq Kāzimī’s The Horrific Tehran (Tehran-i makhūf, 1925) and Muhammad Hijāzī’s famous trilogy Zībā (1931), Humā (1927), and Parīchihr (1921), and are each more than three hundred pages long. The category of the “social novel” broadly incorporates popular fiction written in the first half of the twentieth century.

275 In the late nineteenth century, print culture had already come to occupy a significant place in the cultural and political landscape of Iran. Shiva Balaghi demonstrates that the emergence of print culture dates back to the early nineteenth century in Tabriz. However, the industry and culture expanded noticeably with the Constitutional Revolution in the early twentieth century. See Shiva Balaghi, “Print Culture in Late Qajar Iran: The Cartoons of Kashkūl,” Iranian Studies 34, no. 1–4 (January 2001): 165–81. 276 Yahyā Āriyanpūr, Az sabā tā nīmā: tārīkh-i sad va panjāh sāl adab-i Farsi, 5th ed., 2 vols. (Tehran: Shirkat-i sahāmī-yi kitāb-hā-yi jībī, 1978). 277 ‘Abdullah Shahbāzī, “Zindagī va zāmānah-yi Ali Dashti,” Mutāli‘āt-i tārīkhī 2, no. 1 (January 2, 2004), 8, 137. 278 Iraj Parsinejad, ʻAlī Dashtī va naqd-i adabī (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Sukhan, 1958).

143 serialized stories including Prison Days (Ayyām-i mahbas), which was the memoir of his time in prison as a political activist. Muhammad Hijāzī (1900–1974), known for his social trilogy, all three novels of which evolve around their eponymous heroines, held different political positions including being appointed and elected Senator of Tehran in the second Pahlavi period (1941–

1979).279 Since he had studied telegraph engineering in Europe, he was appointed as the director of the Ministry of Post and Telegraph. This was while he was also the director of the journal Iran

Today (Iran-i imrūz).280

Not surprisingly, these novelists with backgrounds in religious training, journalism, and politics positioned themselves as religious authorities, technocrats, doctors, and social scientists at the forefront of “socio-moral reform” (islāhāt-i akhlāqi va ijtimā‘ī).281 In the prelude to Ali

Dashtī’s famous novella Sedition, he claimed that novelists were in fact “doctors.” He further asserted that his novel was a “moral piece” (nivishtah-yi akhlāqī), since it revealed the harsh consequences of “moral deviancies.”282 As I will discuss later in this chapter, this moral message by and large was directed toward the male middle class of Iranian society and it signaled the rise of a humanitarian discourse with the prostitute at its center as the object of compassion and reform. In the prefatory remarks to another book, Magic, Dashtī quotes Ibrāhīm Sahbā’s appraisal poem, in which he recognizes Dashtī as a social physician: “You [Ali Dashtī] are the

279 Āriyānpūr, Az sabā tā nīmā, 243. 280 Abdullah Hakimfar, “Vafāyiyāt-i mu‘āsir: ustād Muhammad Hijāzī (Muti‘ al-dawlah),” Gawhar, 1: 2 (1974 March 24), 89–93. 281 The term is borrowed from Manūchihr Farsād, “Nazarī ba tārikh va dars-i ‘ibrat,” Kāvah, vol. 1, no. 9 (15 June 1916), 3. 282 Ali Dashti, Fitnah (Tehran: Ibn-Sīnā, 1944), 7.

144 doctor of social ailments, you should be writing prescriptions.”283Authors received applause for writing novels committed to socio-moral reform. In praise of the novel Nighttime Play (Tafrihāt- i shab, 1934), Jāmālzādah (1892–1997), the acclaimed literary figure, noted that the novel contained: “clear signs of strict nationalism, which prove the author’s consistent love for Iran’s land and the salvation and happiness of all its people.”284 There are numerous similar cases where socio-moral commitment is mentioned in meta-passages that are placed outside the progression of the plot in these novels. In The Prostitute (Fāhishah, Fāzil 1952), the narrator expresses his concern about social problems:

Alas! How great would it be if only in Iran, instead of ministries that encourage idlers and sloth, there was a small organization for socio-moral well-being [of people] to purify the dirty water [of the society] from its source, instead of so much poisonous political propaganda?285

The most significant common element in popular novels that has led to their prepackaging as

“social novels,” was this progressivist attitude that was intertwined with socio-moral commitment to the future of Iran.286

While the historiography of modern Iranian literature pays acute attention to the moral

287 and political underpinnings of novels, it overlooks the role of entertainment and profitability.

283 Ali Dashti, Jādū (Tehran: Ibn-Sīnā, 1952), I. 284 Muhammad Masūd, Tafrīhāt-i shab (Tehran: Telāvāng, 2006). 285 Fāzil, Fāhishah, 121. 286 Kamran Talattof interprets this progressivist attitude as a literary expression of what he calls "the Persianist ideology." See The Politics of Writing in Iran: A History of Modern Persian Literature (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 19–66. 287 The scholars of modern Iranian literature mapped these moralist sentiments onto political events of the time. Consequently, they interpret the emergence of popular serialized fiction as a result of the aftermath of the Constitutional Revolution. For instance, Hasan Mir‘ābidīnī, in his canonical work on modern Iranian literature, Hundred Years of Writing Literature in Iran, notes that “authors of [social] novels reflect the mass disappointment

145

Simultaneously with the rise of popular novels, against the backdrop of a growing literacy rate, the expansion of readership, and the passing of the upheaval of WWI, print culture was commercialized. The contents of periodicals and newspapers diversified from being mostly political news to incorporating social issues and entertainment columns, including serialized stories with historical or social themes.288 The early novels of this genre, such as The Horrific

Tehran and Zībā, were first printed as serialized stories. The former was printed in The Star of

Iran (Sitārah-yi Iran), a periodical established in 1914, while the latter was printed in The Red

Twilight, a journal started in 1921. Hussein-Qulī Musta‘ān (1904–1983), Ali Dashtī (1895–

1981), and Javad Fāzil (1914–1961) are examples of prolific authors of serialized moral-stories.

While powerful and established writers such as Sādiq Hidāyāt (1903–1951) were having a difficult time surviving the market, serialized stories were being reprinted on relatively large

of the failure of the revolution, through describing prostitution, political and bureaucratic corruption, and social insecurities that followed the constitutional years [i.e. years after the constitutional revolution in 1905–7].” Hasan, ʻĀbidīnī, Sad sāl dāstānʹnivīsī-i Īrān (Tehran: Nashr-i Chishmah, 2004). The centrality of the image of the prostitute is interpreted as a literary articulation of the mass disappointment that followed the outcome of the Constitutional movement. This line of reasoning imposes the political temporality of modern Iran onto the temporality of modern Iranian literature, as it draws a direct correlation between the constitutional revolution and the emergence of new forms of literature. Furthermore, it leads to the reduction of literary forms and concepts to ideological expressions that ignore the historical contingency of the moral sensibilities of the time, which were simultaneously both formed and informed by modern popular literature. Ghanoonparvar disregards the literary value of early social novels, including those of Dashtī and Hijāzī, partly due to their mass appeal to women. As he recounts the history of novel in Iran, he mentions this literature only very briefly and quickly moves on to an extensive analysis of Jamālzādah’s works as the origin of the modern novel. He notes that this literature was mostly written with the purpose of providing “titillating stories for middle-class readers, mostly women.” M.R Ghanoonparvar, “Iranian Novel,” in Encyclopedia of the Novel, ed. Paul E. Schellinger, Christopher Hudson, and Marijke Rijsberman, vol. 2 (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998), 608–612. 288 As Yahyā Āriyānpūr notes in Az Sabā tā Nīmā, 228-233, newspapers and publications never merely attended to political currents of the time. Rather, publications included news about science and literature from the very beginning. For instance, the heading of the newspaper Akhtar, first printed in 1876, announces that it covers “all matters from political events and politics to science, art, literature and other [matters of] public interest.” Even the practice of feuilleton writing in periodicals goes back as early as 1897, in Tarbiyyat, a weekly publication printed in Tehran. However, mass entertainment gradually moved to the forefront of periodicals and newspapers, as the readership expanded.

146 scales.289 They provided the opportunity for publishers to test the popularity of novels before printing them independently, as well as creating a sense of anticipation in the readership that ensured a market for future issues of the periodicals. In his prefatory comments to Prison Days

(Ayyām-i mahbas, 1922), Ali Dashtī notes that his decision to publish the serialized story as a separate novel was due to the strong reception from his fans and requests of his intellectual interlocutors (rufaqā-yi fāzil) in Tehran. Similarly, the prefatory comments to the novel Dark

Times (Ruzgār-i siyāh, 1925) claim that fan letters to the newspaper Action (Iqdām), which first published the novel as a serialized story, are a testament to the immense “impact of this book on people’s mentalities (rūhīyāt).” The comments further claim that the book had sold a thousand copies in a week.290 Authors practiced their socio-moral commitment by exposing what was understood as “social illness” (bimārī-yi ijtimā‘ī), while advocating for “socio-moral reform”

(islāh-i akhlāqī ijtimā‘ī). Jahāngīr Jalīlī, in a metanarrative in his famous social novel Man ham giryah kardam, writes: “If writers cannot inure human nature to moral temperaments, it is better that they abstain from narrating evil matters and quit guiding the society for good.”291

The increasingly expanding literary public facilitated the emergence of a “popular

Islamic” discourse and an Islamic public that was not strictly shaped by religious authoritative

Shi’a institutions and seminaries, or religious clerics.292 This literary Islamic public was part and

289 Hasan, ʻĀbidīnī, Sad sāl dāstānʹnivīsī-i Īrān (Tehran: Nashr-i Chishmah, 2004). 290 Abbas Khalīli, Rūzgār-i siyāh (Tehran: Iqdām, 1342), 2. 291 Jahangīr Jalilī, Man ham giryah karadm (Tehran, 1949), 83. 292 The term popular Islam denotes those Islamic discursive practices, which are separate and distinct from the state Islam, as well as institutionalized Islam. Scholars have used it mostly to address mainstream practices of Islam including Anatolian Sufi Islam in the post Mongol period and the consequent popularization of Shi’i saintly figures, as well as the Safavid Sufi brotherhood in the fourteenth century, public performances of lamentation over martyred Imam Hussein, ‘Āshūrā rituals, etc. While from the fifteenth century onwards public performances have been the primary medium of popular Islam, in the twentieth century the printing press became the prevalent

147 parcel of the larger modern literary public, in that Islamic ideas were communicated through the same mediums, networks of distribution (including newspapers and journals), and literary narration techniques. Print culture further allowed for the wide circulation of Islamic ideas and ideals outside the spaces of public performances and ceremonies. Popular Islamic discourse differed from earlier religious writings both in its medium and in its content. What I broadly refer to as the Islamic public press includes a variety of publications that were printed and distributed in different parts of Iran in diverse periods, including periodicals and newspapers that flourished before and during the Constitutional Revolution between 1905–1909, such as The

Invitation of Truth (Da‘wat al-haq, Tehran), Save the Kalām (Hifz al-kalām, Rasht) and The Call to Islam (Nidā-yi Islām, Shiraz); the Islamic periodicals that were printed in the aftermath of the

Constitutional movement, including Islam’s Slogan (Shu‘ār-i Islam, Qum), The Society of the

Jafaris (Jāmi‘ah-yi Ja‘afariyyah, Tehran), Humāyūn (Qum), Religious Admonition (Tazzakurāt-i diyānatī), and The Unity of Islam (Ittihād-i Islam, ); and other diverse publications ranging from women’s periodicals such as Blossom (Shukūfah, Tehran) and Women’s Words (Zabān-i zanān,

Isfahan), to medical journals including The Remedy (Darmān, Tehran) and satirical publications such as Distraught (Āshuftah, Mashhad).293

With the growth of print culture there emerged a sense of morality in popular culture, which was enmeshed with Islamic principles and practices but was not a part of authoritative institutional Shi‘ism. In lieu of seminary school publications, doctors, scientists, journalists,

space through which popular Shi‘a ideas circulate. For more information on earlier popular Islamic discursive practices in Iran see Babak Rahimi, Theater State and the Formation of Early Modern Public Sphere in Iran: Studies on Safavid Muharram Rituals, 1590-1641 CE. (Leiden: Brill, 29012); ‘Abdalhamīd Ziyāyī, Jāmi‘ah shināsī-yi tahrīfāt-i ‘āshūrā, (Tehran: Quqnūs, 2010). 293 In particular, early women’s periodicals insisted on the compatibility of Islam with progressive ideas about women’s education and women’s rights. See Farzin Vejdani, Making History in Iran: Education, Nationalism, and Print Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2015), 106–107.

148 intellectuals, and even non-Muslims wrote articles, books, and novels in the public press, re- imagining the role of Islam in public life. For instance, Dr. Dūbshān, whose work I discussed in

Chapter I, commented regularly on the role of Islamic practices in spreading and preventing venereal disease. In the medical book that the state commissioned him to publish at the

Parliament’s Publication House (matba‘ah-yi majlīs), he explicitly criticized the Shi‘a tradition of mut‘a (temporary marriage), and women’s Islamic-Iranian garment, the chādur, as two “local”

(būmī,) and “backward” (‘aqab-māndah) practices that fueled the spread of venereal disease.294

This is, of course, not to say that this popular discourse on Islam was polarized into two convenient categories of either progressive and secular, or traditionalist and religious. In fact,

Dūbshān evoked religious notions of “innocence” (ma‘sūmiyyat), “sin” (gunāh), and

“atonement” (kaffārah) when he lamented over an infant female patient who had contracted syphilis from her parents.295

Novelists too contributed to and actively participated in the growing literary Islamic public. Social novels commonly narrativized religious decline through literary spectacles of urban vice and bureaucratic corruption.296 The figure of the fallen woman was central to both the

Islamic moral campaign of the emerging middle class and the market success of serialized novels. The will to reform and rescue the figure of the “devient woman” (Zan-i gumrāh) was

294 Another example is Tumāniyāns, a Christian Armenian doctor and prolific writer, who published a book titled Public Hygiene in the Religion of Islam, which re-articulated Islamic notions of purity in terms of modern notions of personal and public hygiene. For more discussion on this book see, Tavakoli-Targhi, “From Jinns to Germs: A Genealogy of Pasteurian Islam.” 295 He included many anecdotes of his patients in the book. This particular anecdote is about a family that hired a wet nurse for their daughter who ended up infecting the infant daughter with syphilis in the process of nursing her. Significantly, the wet nurse was also the temporary wife of the father of the household. She performed child caring duties around the house, nursed the daughter, and had sexual relations with the father. Dūbshan morally condemned this family arrangement: “The innocent girl paid the atonement of her parent’s sins.” Dūbshān, Syphilis va mukhtasāt-i Intishār-i ān dar Iran, 20. 296 Āriyanpūr, Az sabā tā nīmā.

149 instrumental in the articulation of authors’ moral commitment. At the same time, it attracted a wide audience as it exposed a mode of urban life that was novel and emerging. Authors were urged to use novels as a platform to criticize the state and reveal the “dark reality” of urban life, which they expressed through a sense that the country was experiencing mass moral corruption.

This moral attitude was commonly articulated as a sense of loss of “religiosity” (diyānat) as well as “humanity” (insāniyyat) and the urgency for the moral recovery of society. In order to court moral temperaments, novelists appealed to Islamic notions of “purity” (pākī), “morality”

(akhlāq), “sin” (gunāh), and “innocence” (ma‘sūmiyyat). This spectacle of corruption and vice allowed novelists to position themselves as moral crusaders, and at once proved to attract a wide readership. Most significantly, serialized novels with moral decline as their central theme were instrumental in advancing the idea that Islam was the ultimate savior of society. This development can tell us something about the shifting role of Islam in the public sphere, and ultimately in public life. The commitment to moral reform facilitated and prompted the emergence of a particular individualistic humanitarian Islamic morality within this literary public.

The fallen woman was not the means to the political end goal of social novels. The figure is, rather, a literary expression of the moral sentiments of the time. In order to uncouple moral sentiments from strictly political agendas and ideologies, I demonstrate the contingency of the figure of the prostitute upon urban sensibilities and the everyday experiences of people in the rapidly growing Tehran of the early twentieth century, which in turn shaped dominant moral sensibilities of the time. Serialized novels reflected on a uniquely modern urban experience that gendered and narrativized the scenario of religious decline in the city.

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Thematically, popular reformist fictions were imbued with tales that are premised on the ideas of moral confusion, the loss of faith, and the failure of reformist will in the city, all of which were articulated through the failure of the life of a fallen woman, who literally slipped off the straight path in the city, ending up in brothels. Popular serialized novels emerged following the traces of the major transformations of urban life in Tehran in the 1900s, which prompted the emergence of novel urban sensory experiences and modes of sociability. With the construction of new roads such as Bāb-Humāyūn, Chirāq-Gāz, Lālazār, and Marīzkhānah, streets increasingly became multifunctional sites for entertainment, business transactions, and other urban services.297 The development of relatively swift modes of inner-city transportation, including horse and steam tramways and cars, allowed for the flow of people across different neighborhoods in the city. Together, these urban changes coupled with rapid population growth boosted the surfacing of new publics. Non-familiar and non-filial sites of “stranger sociability”, such as cafés, hotels, and bars, that relied on anonymous modes of sociability proliferated in

Tehran.298 Urban prostitution, gambling, alcohol, and opium consumption became visible urban vices in growing public venues such as cafes (qahvah khānah), opium bars (shirahkish khānah), gambling houses (qumār khānah), and brothels (qahbah khānah). Serialized novels depicted forms of male dominant public entertainment, framing them as “social ills” of urban life.299

297 Muhsin Habibi, Az shār ta shahr, 134. 298 Michael Warner’s term “stranger sociablity” refers to the unique feature of modern publics. Strangers in modern public come together, not as exotic others, but as members of the modern public who are circulated in the public, sharing collective affects and sensibilities. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 1. paperback ed., 3. print, 4. print (New York, NY: Zone Books, 2010), 75, 121, 122.

299 The articulation of social problems in terms of social ills dates back to the mid-nineteenth century and is in correspondence with the outburst of epidemic and pandemics such as cholera and typhoid in Iran. For a detailed account of the genealogy of the convergence of medical and the political discourse see Mohammad Tavakoli- Targhi, “Everyday Modernity and Religious Inoculation,” Iran Nameh, 4, no. XXIV (2008).

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Here, we have an interesting interplay between two distinctively modern publics. The disembodied print public who communicated through mass media described and demoralized the embodied heterosocial crowds that came together in modern sites of entertainment for being too excessive, uncontrollable, and lacking a proper sense of morality.300

Novels including Mas‘ūd’s Nighttime Play (Tafrīhāt-i shab, 1932), Making Ends Meet

(Dar talāsh-i ma‘āsh, 1933), Ashraf-i makhlūqāt (1934), and the popular I too Have Cried (Man ham giryah kardam, 1933) drew vivid, thick descriptions of Tehran at that time, exposing sub- cultures of urban prostitution and solicitation as well as other urban vices. In Nighttime Play,

Masūd took the reader to a nightclub in a cheap hotel (mihmān khānah):

The lounge is packed with people. Thick smoke, mixed with customers’ breath, has created a really miasmic and dirty atmosphere. The tumult and live music together make for annoying plangency. One hears recurrent shouts of salute and clicking sounds of wine glasse, being filled and emptied constantly. A few people are dancing on the small stage. A monkey-faced and stor- legged woman is displaying her latest dance moves with her ridiculous prancing. Customers exchange indecent words and improper jokes. Bartenders take empty bottles away and replace them with new ones stealthily.301

Social urban novels offered a thorough picture of bars through thick descriptions of customers, bartenders, and the overall ambiance.302 They portrayed heterosocial sites of entertainment as

“the drainage of social excrement.”303 Spaces of urban vice were understood as drainpipes of urban excess, which was framed as filth. The Horrific Tehran, known as the first novel with

Tehran as its central theme, traveled between neighborhoods and places with different characters,

300 The anthropologist Francis Cody, “Populist Publics,” 55. 301 Masūd, Tafrīhāt-i shab, 8. 302 ʻĀbidīnī, Sad sāl dāstānʹnivīsī-i Īrān (Tehran: Nashr-i Chishma, 2004). 303 “fāzilāb-i kisāfathā-yi ijtimā‘ī” cited in Masūd, Tafrīhāt-i shab.

152 describing in detail the Tehran of the 1890s. The novel opened with a thick description of

Tehran’s class divisions:

Although Tehran is a large city, carriages and wagons (durushkah va vāgun) traffic only in northern parts. The southern part of Tehran, where the poor reside, has extremely narrow and meandering allies and areas. In this southern part of the city, there is a neighborhood called Chālah-Maydān.304

Beginning the novel in a “disgusting” (mushma‘iz kunandah) coffee house in Chālah-Maydān, a poor neighborhood, the novel navigates the reader, from one scene to another, to a private mansion in a posh northern neighborhood, to an opium bar on Manūchihrī Street, to a brothel in

Pich Shimrān, which is referred to as the diseased neighborhood (mahallah-yi marīz). Miasma, fog, smoke, dim light, and dirt set the ambiance of these urban places of misconduct:

The day our story starts, a group of people were sitting in a coffee house [in this neighborhood] chatting. Due to the gusts of wind, the doors were closed. The smoke of opium pipes and the steam of samovars had taken over the place. It was completely dark. . . . One could see the wind levitating the abundance of dust in the alley.

The dust and the gusting wind expressed the morally chaotic Tehran. The novel established deviant excessive sexualities through journeys between these “diseased sites.” The brothel scene introduced the life stories of the prostitutes. Using a first person narrative, each character mapped her journey from the domestic sphere of her earlier life to the brothel in which she was currently residing. The brothel was literally referred to as the public house (khānah-yi ‘umūmī).

Significantly, two common terms to address prostitutes were zan-i har ja‘ī and zan-i ‘umūmī.

The former literally translates into “the anywhere woman” and the latter into “public woman.”

These terms reflect and reinforce the private/public division, with the latter as fundamentally masculine, phallocentric, heteronormative, rational, and the former as feminine, passionate, and

304 Mushfigh Kazemi, Tehran-i Makhouf [The Horrific Tehran] (Tehran: Ittihad, 1924), 15.

153 excessive.305 In this literature, the uncontainable female body of the urban prostitute that could be anywhere embodied the excessive, chaotic, rapidly changing city.

The sense of morality—or the lack thereof—in urban popular literature was profoundly entangled with urbanity, femininity, suffering, and vulnerability. The Prostitute explained the moral demise in Tehran to be in direct correlation with the growing number of brothels: “Our city is filled with brothels, from head to toe. . . . These private brothels (najīb-khānah) are agitating the modest people of this city. They are eradicating modesty, chastity, and morality from Tehran’s landscape.”306

The female characters in these novels commonly lost the path of modesty and chastity in the city and then ended up in a brothel. Ziba, the eponymous novel by the prolific social novelist,

Hijazi, well captured the enmeshment of femininity, urbanity, and morality. The plot followed a young seminary student, the devout Shaikh Hussein, who moved from Mazīnān, a small town in

Khurāsān, to Tehran, where a female prostitute seduced him. As the Shaikh fell head over heels for the prostitute, he abandoned his innocent beloved, Zainab, back in the village, left seminary school, started working a corrupt bureaucratic job—which the prostitute had found for him—and was immersed in Tehran, where he lost all his faith and spirituality. The Shaikh's encounter with the prostitute mapped an urban/rural split onto broad dichotomies including material/spiritual, feminine/masculine, and bodily/transcendent. While Tehran’s world was depicted as materialist

305 Feminist scholars have critiqued the liberalist Habermasian idea of the public sphere through exposing the deep masculine nature of it. According to Nancy Fraser, a pioneering feminist critic of the public sphere, the rational, disembodied public is not inclusive. Rather, it structurally excludes women. For more discussion on gendered analysis of the modern public sphere see Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text, no. 25/26 (1990), and Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). 306 Fāzil, Fāhishah, 135.

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(dunyā-yi māddī), the village was described as the site of spirituality (ma‘navī).307 Social novels depicted urban space as excessive, maddening, chaotic, and immoral, against the still, steady, spiritual village.308 In the words of the Shaikh:

The massiveness of the city belittled me such that I lost the thread of thought for a couple of days. . . . Everything looked gigantic to my eyes. The width and length of the streets, and the Bazar, the plentitude of the mosques, the height of the walls, all made me speechless. . . . After all, my point of reference was Mazīnān [the protagonist’s hometown] and Sabzivār [where the protagonist was sent to receive Islamic teachings]. And I wrongfully assumed that the level of knowledge and piety in this city would accordingly be as high [compared to those].309

The idea that Tehran lacked morality created a sense of urgency and the need for a moral fight, prompting the emergence of literary writers as moral crusaders. In social novels, the sense of loss of morality and faith in both God and humanity in Tehran gave rise to theological accounts of salvation (rastigārī) through the repentance (tawbah) of the prostitute and her return to the domestic sphere, which is the bedrock of humanitarian interventionist politics. Islamic moral sentiments that proliferated in early popular literature were rooted in urban social and sensory experiences, articulated in terms of displaced excessive femininity.

3.3 Between Disgust and Compassion

Literary spectacles of urban vice rendered the modern urban public as being filthy and fascinating at the same time. These spectacles, cast the reading public together as a moral and responsible body through the evocation of certain shared feelings. Beginning in the mid-1920s,

307 Muhammad Hijāzi, Zībā (Tehran, 1932). 308 Madhava Prasad, observes a similar urban/rural dynamics in Indian literature of the early twentieth century in “Realism and Fantasy in Representations of Metropolitan Life in Indian Cinema,” Journal of Moving Image 1, no. 2 (2001). 309 Hijāzi, Zībā, 21.

155 in popular fiction there developed a sub-category that strictly revolved around the lives of diseased prostitutes, many of whom died toward the end of the plot. The centrality of the figure of the diseased prostitute in this literature worked to imagine a collective affective relationship between the reading public and the spectacles of urban chaos. This figure evoked the readers’ emotional response, aspired to produce their affective attachment to the vulnerable body of the prostitute, and aligned them as moral spectators. One of the earliest novels of this kind is Abbas

Khalīlī’s semi-biographical account of his time in exile, Dark Times (Rūzgār-i siyāh, Khalīlī,

1925). This popular serialized novel is a fiction-memoir based on the life of a prostitute that the author met in Kermanshah, during the time of his exile.310 The author met the character on her deathbed, as she was suffering from advanced syphilis and tuberculosis. The story is partly told from the viewpoint of Khalīlī, as the narrator, and partly from the view point of the prostitute, whom we learn has fled Tehran to her hometown in Kermanshah from the brothel she was kept in (against her will) to a shabby shack. Khalīlī described his first encounter with her as follows:

When we [Khalīlī and a friend] went to her bed, we saw a golden face, and a pair of lovely marble teary eyes. Once the patient saw me, tears burst out of the marble of her eyes, and tumbled down her cheek, leaving a trace on her yellow visage. Sorrow was stuck in the throat of that tubercular woman. . . . I saw red blood on that infected pillow. . . . I saw it with my own eyes. I heard the heart-burning cry of her wretched body on the floor. Thou the readers, show some pity (riqqat), kindness (ra‘fat), and generosity (rahmat) towards the miserable.311

310 Born and raised in Najaf, Khalīlī fled Iraq at a young age following his involvement with the anti-colonial Nihzat-i Islamī movement for the independence of Iraq. He resided in Tehran, where he became one of the most controversial journalists of his time, writing in periodicals and newspapers including Ra‘d, Rūznāmah-yi baladiyya, Bahār, and his own newspaper Iqdām, for which he was exiled to Kermanshāh in December 1921 until January 1922. See Ja‘far Shūjā‘-Kayhānī, “‘Abbās Khalīlī, Pishru-yi sabkī jadīd dar jūrnālīsm,” Nāmah-yi farangistān 9, no. 53 (2015): 120–26. 311 Khalīli, Rūzgār-i siyāh.

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As the narrator, Khalīlī attempted to find a good physician for her, but her ailments became worse and she eventually died. This popular literature typically described the prostitute’s body as infected, pitiful (tarrahum barangīz), and disgusting (munzajir kunandah), but still spectacular

(didanī, i.e., worthy of watching), as it aspired to cultivate a compassionate interventionist commitment to the social, political, and moral future of Iran. In the preface to the second edition,

Khalīlī promised to make the third edition free to the public, as he aspired to see his work have a greater moral and educational impact. He claimed that “as a result of the impact of the book, a wrongdoing woman (zan-i siyāh kār) repented and was freed.”

It is highly unlikely that prostitutes constituted the audience of this popular literature. In fact, this literature was by and large written by and for men. The absence of prostitutes’ voices in the petitioning scene, that can be observed in Chapter II, is emblematic of a larger absence of voice in the modern, middle class, literate, and educated public sphere. Although there are proliferating moral stories of the wretched lives of prostitutes in this period, there are no autobiographical accounts of their lives. However, the validity of Khalīlī’s claims is of little importance. What is significant is that he situated his popular novel in the market, not simply as an entertainment product, but also as a piece that was emotionally impactful and could transform moral selves for the better. Social novels, especially later ones, generally aspired to reform the prostitute and function as a guide for women. Mehdi Mashāyikhī, in the prelude of An Evening in the Disreputable Neighborhood (Qurūbī dar mahallah-yi badnām, 1975) warned young girls about the “traps” of corrupt life and “hopes” that his novel would “shake” them a little.312

However, novels reflect the humanitarian aspiration of their authors as they imagined themselves

312 He writes: “I hope this book is accepted as a warning and a bitter truth […] I dedicate this to innocent birds, whose unawareness has trapped them in the merciless claws of vultures […] I hope they are shaken a little [by this book].” Mirzā Nādirī Fereydūn, Qurūbī dar mahalla-yi badnām (Tehran: Afshārī, 1975).

157 and the larger educated emerging middle-class population, as the saviors of society, who facilitated the repentance of the morally disapproved prostitute.

Mir‘ābidīnī, a prominent historian of modern literature in Iran, argues that the centrality of the figure of the diseased female body in popular literature is due to the “influence of French romantic novelists such as Alexander Dumas and Victor Hugo.”313 However, he disregards the fact that the diseased female character with tuberculosis shape-shifted into the female prostitute with both venereal disease and tuberculosis, as it traveled to Persian modern literature.314 The emergence of this particular diseased female body cannot be explained simply in terms of

Western “influence.” Rather, it has to be situated in the historical and social particularities of the

Iran of the 1920s, when venereal disease moved to the forefront of sanitary reforms as an epidemic that endangered the nation’s population. As I discussed in Chapter I, prostitutes, in particular, were understood as the primary carriers of venereal disease. The most vulnerable prostitute was conceptualized as the ultimate void medium of diseases, at once in danger and dangerous. The figure of the prostitute simultaneously evoked compassion and fear, empathy and resentment in social novels. A compassionate attitude emerged from within this literature that was tied to the miserable stories of prostitutes. Ultimately, the spectacle of misery expressed the middle-class commitment to the social, political, and moral future of Iran. In other words, the

313 ʻĀbidīnī, Sad sāl dāstānʹnivīsī-i Īrān. 314 Mir‘ābidīnī further neglects the larger circulation and reproduction of tuberculosis in popular culture including film, literature, and painting across the globe, from the nineteenth century to the present. The following are just a few examples of cultural productions that include characters with tuberculosis: Puccini’s opera La Boheme, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1956), and Bergman’s The Bell’s of St. Mary’s (1945). Today, every once in a while, Hollywood films include characters with tuberculosis, when they want to capture the feel of early twentieth century (see for example Winter’s Tale 2014, There Will be Blood 2007, Moulin Rouge 2001).

158 popular moral literary campaign to save/cure the prostitute relied on conceptualizing the prostitute as ill, and therefore vulnerable.

Another early novel, which exclusively revolves around the life of a prostitute, is I too

Have Cried (Man ham giryah kardam, 1933). The plot follows the lives of two childhood friends, who deviated “off the straight path” (as rāh-i rāst bi dar shudah and) and had fallen into the trap (talah) of prostitution. In the resolution of the plot, similar to Dark Times, one of the two friends who was suffering from both syphilis and tuberculosis died. This event caused the other friend to have an epiphany, quit her job, and return to her childhood home. What we have here is not the act of repentance, but the spectacle of the dying prostitute coupled with the repenting friend, on display, for the primarily male middle-class audience. The novel was distinct from other social novels in its unique narrative technique, as the story is a first-person narration entirely told from the point of view of the prostitute, with a confessional tone. The novel exposed the protagonist’s daily struggles as a prostitute (however fictional and hardly believable), as she solicited and served customers. Distinct scenes in cafes, bars, and streets offered an account of modes of sociability, ways of moving, as well as the ambiance, the soundscape, and even the scentscape of public venues in Tehran of the time. The reader became acquainted with minute details about social dynamics in cafes, conversations people had in bars, the way public transportation with the “automobile” worked, and men and women’s attire in public places:

Despite the honking of cars and carriages, and people’s hustle and bustle, one can still hear the striking clock of the municipality that sounds 5 o’clock. Harjā‘ī women [i.e. prostitutes] are wandering here and there. Chauffeur assistants hang together, talking nonsense, shouting and throwing indecent words at one another. Ticket sellers urge people to their automobiles and constantly shout their destinations such as Shāhpūr Street and Gumruk as they follow potential customers around.315

315 Jalīli, Man ham giryah kardam, 174–175.

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When the main character heard that her friend was on her deathbed, she tried to catch a cab in one of Tehran’s busy squares to rush to her: “My poor Parvin [the childhood friend] is ill. What should I do? No one takes me seriously. I need to lure the unfair chauffeur to get some discount on the cab fare to the suburbs.”316 This point of view allowed for the reader to see the moral demise of Tehran from the eyes of the main character and simultaneously displayed the nitty- gritty life of the prostitute. Further, it claimed a loose authenticity, while it gestured towards confessional autobiography, subjecting the reader to the main character’s conscious state of mind. This claim towards authenticity was at the core of popular literature on prostitution.

Khalīlī authenticated his own fiction-memoir in Dark Times in what follows:

What I saw was sheer reality. Although I blend reality with metaphor, and earnestness with sarcasm; although I let my pen off leash when I explain calamities of the wretched; although I quoted the ridiculous doctor [a “white-washed” character]; what I saw and put down on paper is free of artificiality and illusion. It is the truth. It is the truth, people!317

This truth claim over the prostitute’s life established the readership as active witnesses to her morally corrupt deeds, as well as her suffering. The main character of I Too Have Cried shared her inner feelings with the readership while pretending to address other imagined prostitutes who were reading the novel:

Those who have cried yourselves to sleep every night; you, the wretched and the dark- fated who have been deceived, like me, and are crying in regret; you, who know the meaning of burning from inside; I am addressing you; I too have cried!318

This passage not only reduced and solidified the life experience of prostitutes as being primarily that of suffering, but it also turned the readership into witnesses to the confession of the sufferer.

316 Jalīli, Man ham giryah kardam, 175. 317 Abbas Khalīli, Rūzgār-i siyāh, 56. 318 Jalīli, Man ham giryah kardam, 37.

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Further, as the main character articulated the destitution that she faced as a prostitute and a sinner, she allowed the audience to feel close to her and identify with her. At the same time, with a confessional tone, she apologized on behalf of prostitutes, fabricating a sense of urgency and need for change. This apologetic, confessional tone became dominant in the literature on prostitution. It invited interventionist politics, as it was premised on the idea that the prostitute needed the public, not only to pity her, but also to intervene in her life.

But to be moved by prostitutes’ confession, one had to be able to feel “with” and feel

“for” her.319 In fact, literature on prostitution relied on the possibility of transference of emotions and the incitement of “feeling with” and “feeling for” characters, through narrative techniques, some of which I discussed above. First person narration, the intimate relationship of the narrator to the characters, the vivid use of setting and ambiance such as miasmic air, and political and moral extra-narrative commentaries are shared techniques in the literature on prostitution as well as in popular literature. Significantly, in this literature, the notion that vulnerable bodies are swift transmitters, due to their loose boundaries and potential for contagion, made the body of the prostitute effective for the transference of emotions such as pity and compassion (dilsūzī, shafaqat, tarahhum). The body of the prostitute was understood particularly as the perfect medium for transmitting emotions. Many accounts of Shahrinaw clearly state that the purpose of exposing the lives of prostitutes is to induce readers’ compassion and ultimately move them.

319 I am borrowing the phrases “feeling for” and “feeling with” from Sara Ahmed, author of The Promise of Happiness (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2010). I also follow her model of the contagion of emotions, which advances the idea that we can in fact catch others’ emotions, which in turn already depend on how “I imagine the other already feels.” Feeling “with” and feeling “for” someone depends on how I imagine that someone feels in the first place. Although Ahmed finds the model of contagion of affect helpful, she is also critical of its limitations as it might “underestimate the extent to which affects are contingent” (39) and that they might shift as they transmit from one body to another, as they are contingent upon particularities of bodies and experiences.

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The title page of I was not always a Prostitute (Man Fāhishah Nabūdam, Firaydūn

Mirzā-Nādirī) reads: “In the corners of the human heart, there is no space for mercy [muruwwat] and forgiveness out of compassion [rahm]. Rather, kindness [mihrabānī] and compassion

[dilsūzī] should be manufactured [tawlīd shavad] forcefully and boldly.” In I Too Have Cried the narrator, who is a prostitute, stated: “Narrating the story of my fall shall be a red-light warning at the abysmal and dangerous well [of prostitution].”320 Literature tapped into readers’ emotions and their affective responses to scenes of suffering, and at the same time aimed to define the proper emotional response to these scenes. As much as it was believed that bad literature could move the reader in all the wrong ways, it was accepted that good literature could align the reader in all the right ways. This “moving” of the reader relied on the production of the reading public’s affective attachments to the vulnerable figure of the prostitute. This distribution of feelings facilitated the readers’ final judgment call and the embrace of the novels’ invitation to moral action.

It should be noted that compassionate narratives of prostitutes’ vulnerability were in fact rooted in the prior affective responses of the authors toward prostitutes. Feelings which tied the readership to the characters were fundamentally and thoroughly based on how male, reformist, middle-class authors felt “about” prostitutes. There is no unmediated access to the impression or expression of the prostitute’s feelings. All there is left of her feelings is the authors’ imagination and how they felt “about” prostitutes. For instance, in I was not always a Prostitute, the narrator described the girl’s smile as she was approaching him: “As she smiled wider, her sorrow increased! This redundant smile, this new face, saddened me more than it pleased me! Everyone has seen such smiles! . . . This is the same artificial smile. The fakeness of it is as clear as

320 Jalīlī, Man ham giryah kardam, 8.

162 sunlight.” Here, the feeling of sadness is transmitted to the narrator through the character’s smile, which the narrator surprisingly reads as an expression of sadness as opposed to happiness. The narrator’s sadness “for” and “with” the character is preceded by his feeling “about” her.

Consequently, the transmission of emotions from prostitute characters to the audience is limited to and defined by the author’s preconditioned feelings “about” prostitutes. In A Night at the

Disreputable District (Qurūbī dar mahallah-yi badnām) the narrator comments on prostitutes’ feelings: “In their silence thousands of cries were hidden, in their looks there were longing and begging. They wanted to talk, they wanted to cry and tell women and girls on the other side of city how they were deceived.”321 The moral, medical, and social pre-orientation of authors then limited the possibility of empathy with the characters.

The two main emotions that were evoked in these literary texts were disgust and compassion. Although the business of prostitution is derived from the commodification of sexual desire, there was little or no mention of pleasure, even in the excessive form of lust, in most of these literary accounts. Rather, they were imbued with explicit sceneries of bodies that were infected with venereal diseases. Zand-Muqaddam—a journalist-ethnographer—describes

Shahrinaw:

A step away from the gates of the fortress, into the district, rotten smells bombard your senses; the smell of urine and sludge; the suffocating smell of trash; rotten bodies; infected wounds; coagulated vomit; and suddenly there is an old woman clinging to the street like a trampled cockroach… Looking up, you see women in groups, all made-up, waiting by the doors [of brothels], with fat thighs, chubby feet, like saggy corpses, [or] seared thighs, skinny figures hidden under blouses and skirts, with bleary yellow eyes, and eyelids without eyelashes. Diseases have eaten the edge of their eyelids.322

321 Mehdi Mashāyikhī, Qurūbī dar mahallah-yi badnām (Tehran: Ilhām, 1954), 13.

322 Mahmoud Zand-Muqaddam, Qal’ah, (Tehran: Māziar Publishing House, 1958).

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There are numerous other examples of the disgusting scenes in similar novels. In A Night in the

Disreputable District, the narrator-author reports his visits to brothels and his personal encounters with prostitutes. He described a floor of a brothel as follows: “There were two rooms, each with two beds, with filthy stinking mattresses . . . the room smelled of hate and repugnance.

[It was so bad] that it immediately killed any appetite for life.”323 The next section of the book zooms into lives of prostitutes and is called “life in filth.”

Disgust has mostly been theorized in relation to desire in psychoanalytic thought (even

Kristeva’s account of the abject conceptualizes disgust as an operation of desire). 324 Its spectacle, however, had a social effect in this literature. Disgust as a spectacle played a role in the author’s aspiration to organize the public as progressive moral actors. Disgust, then, played a role in a project of social membership. While the prophylactic feeling of disgust maintains the gap between the disgusted and the disgusting (as Kristeva would have argued), reinforcing the boundaries between the ulterior self and the inferior “contaminating” other, at the same time, it defines certain set of actions and emotions for the public audience. The question here then is as

English Literature scholar Lauren Berlaunt puts it neatly: “In a given scene of suffering, how do we know what does and what should constitute sympathetic agency?”325 If we take Berlaunt’s argument that emotions are social technologies, then in this text disgust socialized the readership not to interact with disgusting objects, but to watch, learn a lesson, feel pity, and do good, all at

323 Mashāyikhī, Ghurūbī dar mahallah-yi badnām, 30. 324 Sianne Ngai aptly notes that theorizing disgust has always been conceptualized as an alternate or negated form of desire. According to her, even Kristeva’s account of the abject as the ultimate object of disgust conceptualizes disgust “in libidinal terms of ‘want’ and ‘primal repression.’” Her framework is well fitted with this literature since diseased bodies are not treated as objects of desire. Conceptualizing repugnance in terms of desire would then be reading desire forcefully into the text. See Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 332. 325 Berlant, Compassion, 4.

164 the same time. 326 Disgust then became a responsible humane feeling when confronted by the spectacle of the other’s suffering.

In I Was Not Always a Prostitute, the narrator lamented the “misfortunate” (badbakht) life of the prostitute: “Wow, how heartless humans are! They all see these horrifying views, these sad faces, and hear heartbreaking cries of orphans and miserable people, and disasters of capitalism. . . and still they are not even a little affected (muti‘ssir).327 Muti‘assir, in its Arabic root, means to be impacted, or affected. However, the Persian dictionary of ‘Amid defines it also as sorrowful (andūhgīn). To be affected in a sad way, by the filthiness of prostitutes and their life condition, worked to differentiate people who cared from people who did not care; it divided the public as those “heartless” ones and those committed ones.328 The literary public depicted the urban public as maddening, threatening, and filthy. Simultaneously, it evoked readers’ affective response to this spectacle of urban vice. As far as this popular literature was a part of a larger literary public, it affectively tied the readership to spectacles of filth and suffering, aligning the readers as compassionate moral crusaders.

3.4 Islamic Humanitarianism Beginning in the 1940s, journalists and authors with distinctive Islamic aspirations tapped into the market of popular literature. In the “affective economy” of this literature, the figure of

326 Berlaunt, Compassion, 5. 327 Fereydun Mirzā Nādirī, Man fāhishah nabūdam (Tehran: Bungāh-i matbūati-yi afshāri, 1946), 9. 328 Sara Ahmed, in The Promise of Happiness, points to the role of affect in creating communities. She notes: “To be affected in a good way by objects that are already evaluated as good is a way of belonging to an affective community." (38) She further demonstrates that affect creates shared orientations.

165 mazlūm slipped from Shi‘a discourses on justice and flipped into the figure of the prostitute.329

Positioning the reading public as agents of moral reform and change, these journalistic accounts imagined the individual readership as the ultimate compassionate actors who were also the agents of God and Islam. Hidāyatullah Hakīmillāhī was an Islamist journalist whose semi- ethnographic account of Shahrinaw, Come With Me to Shahrinaw (Bā man bi Shahrinaw biyāyīd) stands out in this literature, as he took the journalistic humanitarianism of popular literature to the actual space of Shahrinaw. Unlike other authors who sufficed to imagine themselves as the rescuers of the women, he went to the field and took pictures of the district

(just like an ethnographer), campaigned for helping the women there (just like a philanthropist), and even mobilized a few philanthropists to sponsor some of the children.330

Born in 1917, Hidāyatullah Hakīmillāhī was a professional muckraker journalist-activist who was educated in the UK at Oxford University.331 He had ties with Muhammad Bāqir Hijāzī, the editor of the Islamic newspaper Vazīfah, an Islamic opposition publication that advanced a humanitarian idea of Islam, as it regularly printed articles about the role of compassion in

Islam.332 Hakīmillāhī actively wrote letters of appeal to the Department of Justice against

329 I am borrowing the term “Affective Economy” from Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 22, no. 2 (2004), 117–39. She juxtaposes affect with economy to draw attention to the fact that emotions are commodified and as they circulate, their affective intensity accumulates. Her use of economy in understanding affect stems from a larger shift of attention from what emotions are, to what work they do. 330 I have not been able to validate his claims in relation to the charitable works he and his followers have done in Shahrinaw. Nevertheless, the strong gesture towards action is analytically significant. 331 “Vurūd-i āqā-yi Hidāyatullah Hakīmilāhī,” Vazīfah, vol. 11, no. 498 (25, Tīr 1333/16, July 1954), 1. 332 Vazīfah was first published in 1322/1943. The newspaper commonly critiqued the practice of prostitution in Tehran as a way to critique the state’s moral corruption. Furthermore, the newspaper regularly included columns on Islamic charity measures in Iran and the larger role of compassion in Islam. Just to give an example, on April 5, 1945, an article in Vazīfah, “The Guide to Religiosity,” emphasized on the practice of “helping the ones in need, caressing the orphans like a real father, clothing the nude, feeding the hungry, and serving the thirsty.” The article further claimed: “Good deeds are not feasible without belief [Imān]. It is the belief which motivates the heart, and the body to the point that compassion and mercy [shafaqat va rhmat] floods the ocean of the heart [of the

166 different government offices, including the Office of the Prime Minister and the Management and Planning Organization of Iran.333 In his journalistic career, he wrote prolifically throughout the 1940s to the 1960s and turned most of his serialized publications into independent books.

Come With Me to Shahrinaw (Bā man bi Shahrinaw Biyāyīd) belongs to his exposé series, which is the collection of his visits to and observations of different sites in Tehran and includes the following books: Come with Me to Shahrinaw (Bā man bi Shahrinaw bī-yayīd , 1946), Come with Me to the Mental Asylum (Bā man bi dār al-majānin bī-yayīd, 1947), (Bā man bi Tehran bī- yayīd, 1947), Come with Me to the Military (Bā man bi artish bī-yayīd, 1948), and Come with

Me to Schools (Bā man bi madāris bī-yayīd, 1948). He drew immense attention to Shahrinaw and inspired many to write books on the district. In the prefatory remarks to The Prostitute, Fāzil acknowledged Hakīmillāhī’s influence on his work: “You should go ahead and read my well- traveled (safar kardah) friend Hidāyatullah Hakīmillāhī’s reportage to get to know these wretched people [i.e. Shahrinaw prostitutes] closely.” Come With me to Shahrinaw particularly created a hype in the press as praises of the book circulated in journals. Parvīz Khatībī (1923–

1993), the editor-in-chief of the Tawfīq newspaper and Parvīn Dawlatshāhī (1924–2008), a literary figure and a poet, were amongst many who reflected their support for his work in the public press. Newspapers, including Kasrā, Khāvarzamīn, and Javānmardān, published appraisals of the book.334

believer] for doing good. [The heart] will then have compassion for all the Godly creatures, even for hungry and thirsty dogs. See “Rāhnamāyi dindārī,” Vazīfah 3, no. 70 (16, Farvardīn 1324/5, April 1945), 1. 333 19/172/3/1/3/4, Library, Museum, and Document Center of the Iranian Parliament. 334 A large collection of journalistic appraisals is included as an appendix at the end of the third edition of the second volume of Come With Me to Shahrinaw, 149–62. These appraisals at the same time demonstrate a shift in the population of the readership, as many of them are written by women. Interestingly, women’s commentaries show the asymmetry between the intent of the authors and the intent of the women-readers. Unlike what many authors claimed, women did not consider the stories as a moral lesson that warned them against the dangers of

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In his semi-ethnographic books, Hakīmillāhī used sensationalist language to excite and encourage people to take action against what he saw as social, moral, and political “corruption”

(fisād) and “injustice” (bi‘idālatī). He clearly stated that his purpose in exposing the lives of prostitutes was to induce the readers’ compassion and ultimately move them:

This [fighting venereal disease] is very easy; it does not need an association for fighting prostitution, or public management and the sort; rather, it only needs a social sense of reason and a bit of compassion towards these wretched people.335

His moral campaign for rescuing prostitutes relied on sensationalist narrative techniques, which he borrowed from earlier social novels.

The vulnerability of the figure of the prostitute was reaffirmed as Hakīmillāhī exposed his characters to the reading public; not only their bodies were exposed in Hakīmillāhī’s explicit descriptions, but also their private intimate feelings. This exposure was made possible through intimate relationships that the author claimed he established with his characters. The two-volume book Come With Me to Shahrinaw opens up with vivid descriptions of both customers and prostitutes and their displayed skin diseases in the district. Further in the book, there are individual intimate narratives of women and young children, both male and female, who ended up in Shahrinaw. Hakīmillāhī spent time with his subjects, interviewed them, described their appearance in detail, and exposed the reader to their personal life stories of how they ended up in

Shahrinaw. His muckraking account on Shahrinaw capitalized on an ethnographic impulse that met the curious readership and claimed authenticity. Long interviews allowed him to arbitrarily use first person narrative with the point of view of his characters who were residents of the district. This technique created a sense of intimacy with the public audience.

falling off the moral path of propriety. Rather, they described their affective response to Hakīmilāhī’s books as being that of compassion for the prostitute and motivation for rescuing her. 335 Hakīmilāhī, Bā man bi Shahrinaw bī-yāyīd. Vol. II., 1947: 73.

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In a few instances, he apologized for exposing the personal stories of people. But then he justified the intimate exposure of their private life by suggesting that his duty to society as a

“reformist journalist” (Rūznāmah nigār-i islāhtalab) was exactly that: to open their eyes. Most significantly, his work on Shahrinaw was saturated with vivid spectacles of the suffering of prostitutes. The title page of the second volume of Come With me to Shahrinaw included a column that warned against the explicit content of the book: “We apologize for the indecent words and phrases.” But he justified this content: “Since this book documents the shameful slums of society, it is impacted by the respective environment and the deplorable spectacles

[manāzir].” Hakīmillāhī further closed the second volume with a phrase that he attributed to

Imam Ali: “The Truth is bitter.” (al-Haqq murrun). He used this phrase to further legitimate his muckraking practices in Shahrinaw and the explicit spectacles that he described as an act of truth-telling that is praised in Islam. He further used the positive press about his book to prove the productivity of exposing spectacles of suffering. For instance, he closed the book with a review from the newspaper Kasrā:

The more one investigates the slums of this corrupt world, the more one sees wonders. The more these wonders are talked about, the more the ignorant rulers are moved. And finally, the more the rulers are moved, the easier it is for the nation to achieve happiness and progress.336

Hakīmillāhī then claimed that the spectacle of suffering was in line with the moral mission of the book, which was to advance moral and social reform. Another review referred to the author’s efforts as “revealing the secrets of a part of a city.”337

Both volumes were saturated with vivid descriptions of “repulsive” (tahavu’āvar) skin diseases: a woman with chancre, whose body tissue was damaged and had a very bad smell; a

336 Hidāyat Hakīmilāhī, Bā man bi Shahrinaw bī-yāyīd, vol. II (Tehran, 1947), 161. 337 Hidāyat Hakīmilāhī, Bā man bi Shahrinaw bī-yāyīd, vol. II (Tehran, 1947), 157.

169 man facing the wall trying to put a bandage on syphilitic wounds of his sexual organ--he was described throwing bloody cottons into the running ditch on the side of the street, “infecting public water”; and young children with syphilis wounds on their mouths due to unsafe oral sex.338 Describing “repulsive” diseased bodies, Hakīmillāhī invited the reader to be affected. The affect of disgust, together with a sense of sadness, created a shared social orientation and moral sensibilities for the readers. Similar to earlier social novels, the sense of disgust, or rather, inviting the readership to be disgusted, was more central in Hakīmillāhī’s narrative of Shahrinaw than desire. In other words, desire was not central to the picture he drew of Shahrinaw. In one section, the author visited a very poor brothel, where the panderer took him to a waiting room.

He described the bizarre scene of the prostitute entering the room:

Without looking at us, or giving me a price, which was the norm in Shahrinaw, in such a flagrant scene, she lied down naked on the carpet. She threw away her underpants with her feeble, skinny, dark arms!! . . . eyes closed, the woman is lying on her back. There are numerous brown spots and old deep wounds on her thighs and special thing [her genitals]. Her sexual organ is so ugly that it affects any sane person. The left side of it is completely gone. It is not clear which disease has eaten it up!!339

In another instance, he observed:

Still so many whores [badkārah] with their hellish faces are busy attracting clients . . . another woman who has no blood left in her vein due to diseases, reaches towards me pulling out her neck and head . . . a yellow, ill, filthy young girl shouts as she is exposing her naked body to me: Mr. Fucculi, how about me?340

Hakīmillāhī, inviting the reader to be affected by this scene, described the prostitute’s skin condition in further detail. For Hakīmillāhī, disgust as the antithesis of ignorance was a humane feeling when coupled with compassion. He sees the prostitutes as “mad,” “cursed,” “infected,” but also “pitiful” (riqqat-anīz, tarahhum-barangīz, mazlūm). This trend of course can be seen in

338 The author notes that young boys and girls who are too young to have intercourse engage in oral sex instead. 339 Hakīmilāhī. Bā man bi Shahrinaw bī-yāyīd. vol. II,15 340 Hakīmilāhī, Bā man bi Shahrinaw bī-yāyīd, vol. II, 6.

170 earlier novels too. For instance, in Dark Times, as the character confessed her first sexual relations with a man, she described herself as being mazlūm: “I am a weak human, a mazlūm human, a defeated human.”341

There was one particular under-aged girl named Habībah, who recurred in both volumes of his narratives. She had been brought to a brothel but had not yet been put to work. Hakīmillāhī claimed that he attempted to raise money for Habībah to “rescue” her and put her in an orphanage, but failed. In the next volume, another under-aged girl, Parvīn, is rescued with the financial help of another philanthropist. Hakīmillāhī even included a photo of the girl, standing in between himself and the other philanthropist, as evidence of his successful rescue mission. In the first scene that she appears, he claimed to have paid the fee for a full night, but instead of using her sexual services, he talked to her all night. He described his feelings towards the girl as follows: “That which is called love and affection, is [actually] excitement caused by the innocence [of the victim] and compassion [towards her].”342 Negating the visceral feeling of disgust through intimate compassion and pity brought self-satisfaction, reassuring Hakīmillāhī of his moral agency. In another scene, after describing a prostitute on her deathbed, he warned the readership “Don’t be disgusted by her face . . . crossing the fine line between glory (izzat) and humiliation (zillat) takes only a single step.” Disgust then is not a humane feeling if it is unaccompanied by compassion. The commentaries and reviews of the book also noted how

Hakīmillāhī transformed the feeling of disgust to sympathy: “At one point he [the author] is

341 Khalīli, Rūzgār-i siyāh, 96. 342 Hakīmilāhī, Bā man bi Shahrinaw bī-yāyīd. Vol. I., 1946, 112.

171 confronted by a creature [i.e., a prostitute] that is microbes from head to toe . . . and with appeasement he shows her empathy [hamdardī] and inquires about the reason of her fall.”343

The intimate and affective moral crusade evoked in Hakīmillāhī’s works and other literary and journalistic exposé accounts of Shahrinaw was not merely premised on prophylactic reasoning and the survival impulse of disgust, or on the medical science of venereal disease.344

Rather, it also relied on the aspiration to create a shared spectacle of suffering, which could only be achieved through the ambition to produce public affective attachments to the abject vulnerable bodies of prostitutes. He described his relationship with Habībah as a spiritual/religious one:

My humility, speech, and manners have affected Habibah [one of his subjects] so much that it is as if she is sitting in front of one of the Imams and is speaking to him. . . . I am not sure how far up the reader is in moral levels, and how much spiritual pleasure has s/he tasted before. I asked Habibah to keep answering my questions about her life. I felt something. I liked myself [at that moment.] I had never experienced such a state before. I had never enjoyed doing good (ihsān), being tender (mulātifat), and benefaction (nīkī). I see myself as a hero of a story.345

As Hakīmlilāhī compared himself with Imams in his encounters with prostitutes, intimacy was spiritualized. The readers witness the prostitute’s confession, in a peculiar theological account of

Shahrinaw, as Hakimilāhī evoked the compassionate discourse of Karbala. The figure of the detective-journalist-philanthropist is invested spiritual sensibilities and abilities in Shahrinaw,

“the hellish city.” Hakīmlilāhi transformed other people’s suffering into a feeling of spiritual

343 Hakīmilāhī, Bā man bi Shahrinaw bī-yāyīd, (Tehran: 1947), II, 162. 344 P. Rozin and A. E. Fallon, “A Perspective on Disgust,” Psychological Review 94, no. 1 (1987): 23–41. 345 Hidāyat Hakīmilāhī, Bā man bi Shahrinaw bī-yāyīd, vol. I (Tehran, 1946).

172 authenticity for himself.346 The profanity, hellishness, and lack of justice in Shahrinaw were precisely what enabled the figure of the philanthropist to claim spiritual capabilities. Calling

Habībah and other under-aged prostitutes martyr (shahīd), innocent (ma‘sūm), and oppressed

(mazlūm), the author evoked familiar Shi‘a stories of Karbala and Imam Hussein’s martyrdom, as the ultimate instance of suffering and injustice (zulm) in his call to compassion. This sense of religiosity is a continuation of compassionate Shi‘a Karbala discourse as far as it operates on the same cluster of words and concepts. However, it marks a departure too, as it is highly individualized and humanistic.

While personal suffering has a central role in Shi‘ism and Shi‘a piety, the literary spectacle of suffering gained a different meaning.347 The scholar of Shi‘ism Mahmoud Ayoub extensively investigates how Shi‘i Muslims “suffer with” the figure of the Imam Hussain through emulation and participation in the collective ritual of Āshura, the annual commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Hussain. According to Ayoub, enduring suffering and feeling humility before God “with the Imam” is a practice of piety which ultimately brings redemption to the practitioner. These literary spectacles of suffering, however, do not evoke this logic. Rather, they posit the spectator of this suffering as the “rescuer” (nājī) of the sufferer. In this compassionate literature, the compassionate act of the spectator is the redemption of the

346 Similar instances of reviving religion in spaces of profanity could be seen in Robert A. Orsi, ed., “Introduction: Crossing the City Line,” in Gods of the City: Religion and the American Urban Landscape, Religion in North America (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), 4. 347 Mahmoud Ayoub demonstrates the central role of suffering in Shiʻa pious subjectivity. He argues that the centrality of the event of Karbalā and the martyrdom of Imam Hussain in the Shiʻa collective imagination gives a particular place to suffering in the tradition. Participating in the Ashura commemoration ceremony, according to Ayoub, is a way to relive the suffering of Imam Hussain and feel like one of his disciples. See Redemptive Suffering in Islām: A Study of the Devotional Aspects of ʻĀshūrāʾ in Twelver Shīʻism, Religion and Society 10 (The Hague: Mouton, 1978).

173 suffering subject. The reading public does not seek redemption but offers it to the sufferer.348 In one scene, Hakīmillāhī described Habībah—the girl that he claimed he eventually rescued—as shouting “God, help” in her sleep. He addressed God as he heard her call for help: “Oh God, you have put this innocent child in Shahrinaw, while you have put similar children in silk bedsheets.

This girl is asking you for help! But you . . . Yes, you will not respond to her call for justice.”349

He then explained how affected he was by this scene: “There is turmoil in my guts. I want to respond to her cry before it reaches God. I want to rescue her from this horrifying landscape.”350

As such, he put himself above God, as the ultimate compassionate actor in the absence of a compassionate state.

By the 1960s and the 1970s, there was a well-established trend of journalistic accounts of

Shahrinaw that advanced a humanitarian idea of Islam, imagining Muslims as the ultimate moral actors with superior moral sensibilities, and as the rescuers of society. Javad Fāzil was another prolific author who rigorously introduced Islam as a moral rubric in his literary and journalistic work.351 His The Prostitute, first published in 1952, remained in print at least ten years later. As

I mentioned earlier in this chapter, he was influenced by Hakīmillāhī’s work, as he expressed his

348 This religiously-charged rescue mission also differs from redemptive narratives of repentance, since none of the subjects who are saved are prostitutes. I have bracketed the question of who gets to be saved in this chapter. However, it should be noted that the only subjects that could be “saved” were the under-aged residents of Shahrinaw who had not yet walked the path of prostitution. Although on the one hand this compassionate literature calls for sympathy toward the prostitute, it ultimately never forgives her. 349 Hakīmilāhī, Bā man bi Shahrinaw bī-yāyīd, 1946, I, 108. 350 Hakīmilāhī, Bā man bi Shahrinaw bī-yāyīd, 1946, I, 108. 351 Fāzil authored many novels with moral themes, such as The Betrayal (Khiyānat, reprint: 1964), Rawshanak (1954), and Star (Sitārah, reprint: 1962) that stayed in print even after he passed away from a heart condition. He also published books on the role of hygiene in Islam such as Medicine and Hygiene in Islam (Tibb va bihdāsht dar Islam, 1961), hagiographies of the prophet’s family including The Daughters of the Prophet Speak (Dukhtarān-i payqambar sukhan migūyand, reprint 1984). He translated the complete manuscript of the sayings of the Shi‘i Imam, Zayn al-‘Ābidin, Sahīfah-yi Sajjādiyyah, Sahīfah-yi sajjādiyya,h which is still in print today.

174 praise appraisal for him in the preface to The Prostitute. Similar to Hakīmillāhī, he considered prostitution as a sin according to the Quran and Islam, but also as a forced crime. Respectively, he imagined the prostitutes as victims of the corruption of the state and society:

Perhaps you have not seen the southern side of Tehran, called Shahrianw, but I have. You have not talked to the wretched, decadent, and miserable prostitutes, but I have. These are prostitutes and that means they commit the sin of prostitution. I can swear with confidence that not only has this group of people not sinned, but they might be the most innocent [bī-gūnāh va ma‘sūm] stratum of society.352

The price of compassion for the figure of the prostitute was to strip her of any sense of agency.

Whereas Hakīlilāhī saw the readership as rescuers of the prostitutes, Fāzil called on the state to establish a “ministry of morality” to fight corruption with all the “spiritual and material” resources of the state.353 In his novel, he asked God for the redemption of the prostitutes, as he explained that poverty had forced them to enter this disreputable profession. Other similar later works include Mehdi Mashāyikhī’s An Evening in the Disreputable Neighborhood (Qurūbī dar mahalla-yi badnām, 1975) and Why I Ended Up in the Brothel?: Analyzing some Life Issues

Under Islam (Chirā bi fāhishah khānah raftam!: tajziyah va tahlīl-i ba‘zī az masa‘il-i zindigi dar partaw-yi Islam, 1974) which is written by an anonymous author. The latter is a semi- ethnographic novel that tells the story of a religious man who visited a brothel to discover why women end up there. Very similar to what happened between Hakīmillāhī and the girl that he supposedly saved, the author met a girl in a brothel who had not yet entered the profession. In the words of the narrator, he eventually acted on his religious and humanitarian responsibility and

352 Fāzil, Fāhishah, 4. 353 Fāzil, Fāhishah, 142.

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“rescued” her before she ever took a customer.354 As the author met the girl for the first time, they entered a conversation, where she cried before him and expressed her religious beliefs: “Sir, just know that I see chastity and religiosity as the main resource for happiness, in both worlds

[i.e., this life and the afterlife].” 355 The author expressed his feelings as he heard her cry: “This moving scene made me feel pity and dedication. I thought to myself, would it be not a waste if

356 this chaste and faithful girl remains in this place and witness the fall of her chastity?” After they made arrangements for her “rescue” mission, the girl prayed for the religious man and

357 thanked him.

Witnessing the suffering of the residents of Shahrinaw was deeply humanistic, individualistic, and radically different from the suffering that Ayoub describes in Shi‘a pious practices. In Islam, doing good (‘amal-i khayr) for others is not necessarily an outcome of compassion.358 More significantly, doing good is not necessarily rewarded by “feeling good.”

This differs from the authors’ description of doing good, which brought pleasure to the doer of the good, if not more so, then at least as much as it benefited the subject in the need of help. In the case of Habībah, Hakīmillāhī expressed his self-satisfaction, as he showed compassion to her in one scene: “I put my hands on her hair and caressed her [who was] like a deer or a bird. . . . I

354 Chirā bi fāhishah khānah raftam!: tajziyah va tahlīl-i ba‘zī az masa‘il-i zindigi dar oartaw-yi Islam (Tehran: Mu‘assisah-yi intishārāt-i Dānish, 1353/1974), 8. 355 Chirā bi fāhishah khānah raftam, 8. 356 Chirā bi fāhishah khānah raftam, 10. 357 Chirā bi fāhishah khānah raftam, 11. 358 Amira Mittermaier, “Beyond Compassion: Islamic Voluntarism in Egypt,” American Ethnologist 41, no. 3 (August 2014): 518–31.

176 had never felt such satisfaction, never enjoyed doing good so much.”359 The emergent Islamic compassionate attitude in these novels, then, rearticulated the role of compassion in Islam, and centered it around the authors’ and the readership’s sense of satisfaction and moral betterment.

3.5 Conclusion

The figure of the diseased prostitute is a part of the legacy of modern Iranian literature and it continued to have a central place in later Iranian modern literary forms. In his famous short story,

“At the Red Light,” Sādiq Chūbak, an acclaimed literary author, pictured a snapshot of the lives of women in a brothel in the red-light district of Tehran. The story revolved around the death of a prostitute from a syphilis-induced epileptic seizure. The descriptions are once again vivid and disgusting.360 Similarly, Hūshang Gūlshīrī, after whom the most prestigious literary award is titled, in “Behind the Cane Stalk” described a prostitute character: “Her mouth is weird. Her mouth is deformed. . . . She is all stained, all her body. There is not one healthy part in her body.

Believe me.”361 Almost without exception, literary authors in the twentieth century relied on compassionate sensibilities that were haunted by a sense of disgust toward the vulnerable female body.

Through a close engagement with literary and journalistic perceptions of prostitutes, this chapter explored the emergence of an ethos of compassion and humanitarian interventionist politics in Iran in the mid-twentieth century. The public perception of the prostitute shifted from the cause of injustice to the subject of it. Popular literature, with a semi-ethnographic impulse, capitalized on spectacles of the suffering of prostitutes. Disgust, compassion, and fascination

359 Hakīmilāhī, Bā man bi Shahrinaw bī-yāyīd. Vol. I., 1946, 111. 360 Sādiq Chūbak, “zir-i chirāq-i qirmiz,” Khaima shab bāzī, (Tehran: Nilūfar, 1955 [1945]), 45. 361 Gulshīrī, Nīma-yi tārīk-i māh, 144.

177 were the three affects that worked together to form a moral intimate literary public. This literary spectacle of abject polluting bodies at once organized the imagined the Muslim readership as moral citizens. Starting in the 1920s and becoming popular in the 1940s, this literary and journalistic campaign flipped the prominent concept of suffering and compassion in Shi‘a literature and turned it into a project of social membership to the modern public sphere. For instance, Hakīmillāhī’s half documentary, half fictional exposé of Shahrinaw reflected modern

Islamic social sensibilities, not outside but within the emerging modern ethos of compassion.

The prostitutes’ narratives of suffering not only organized the public as progressive, religiously committed moral and political agents, but also demanded that the state intervene as a compassionate actor. Humanitarianism and a spirit of voluntarism was then placed at the center of the nation-state project, which is the focus of the next chapter. In the prelude to the first volume of Come With me to Shahrinaw, Hakīmillāhī included an open letter to Ashraf Pahlavi,

Muhammad-Reza Shah’s twin sister, so that “she takes necessary and urgent measures to cure these miseries [miseries of prostitutes.]”362 As I will discuss in more detail in the next chapter,

Ashraf Pahlavi was the royal public figure of human rights, public welfare, and women’s rights in Iran in the mid-twentieth century. Hakīmillāhī called her out on her “pretentious” visit to an orphanage in Russia, while remaining ignorant about “miserable people” of Shahrinaw. He further suggestively noted that he expected Ashraf Pahlavi to take immediate action: “I hope by the time I am writing the second book, I will be including your charitable work [in

Shahrinaw.]”363 He imagined Ashraf Pahlavi as a face of the state and a primarily compassionate actor who was responsible for responding to suffering by providing care for prostitutes. Thus,

362 Hakīmilāhī, Bā man bi Shahrinaw bī-yāyīd: Alif. 363 Hakīmilāhī, Bā man bi Shahrinaw bī-yāyīd: Bi.

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Hakīmillāhī imagined the state as a “caring” institution as opposed to the securitizing actor, whose main responsibility was to protect citizens from the threat of venereal diseases and moral demise.

In conclusion, it is evident that the advent of modern popular literature was enmeshed with reformist aspirations that were realized and produced with the narrativization of suffering, imagination of intimate spheres, and production of spectacles of vulnerability. The figure of the sick prostitute facilitated the formation of this intimate literary public with progressivist sensibilities and moral aspirations. The construction of sensibilities is understudied both in the historiography of modern Iran and in modern Iranian literature. However, they constitute the bedrock of modern literary formations, as well as modern moral subjectivities. Furthermore, literary affect is historically contingent upon everyday experiences, modes of sociability, and ways of moving and seeing. The investigation of sensibilities and their connection to literary form can open up new avenues for understanding the role of Islam in public life, and its interconnectedness to the everyday experiences of modernity in Iran.

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Chapter 4 Sovereign Experimentation: Trial and Error in the District

4.1 Introduction

Shahrinaw was initially formed as a place outside the law, located literally on the other side of

Tehran’s gates. In the 1940s, as Tehran grew larger, it enveloped the district into the heart of the city. By the 1960s, the district had expanded noticeably. It was located strategically to the south of the military camp and to the north of the central bus and railway station, which was a bustling inner-city transportation hub in Iran. Along with 1,180 female worker-residents, it housed 753 merchants and 179 stores, including grocery stores, butcheries, thrift stores, barbershops, and beauty salons. Shahrinaw had its own entertainment units comprising of bars, restaurants, and two famous theater houses, Hāfiz and Shukūfah-yi naw, which ran shows all day long. The district was 13,500 square meters, with two main streets, Hāj ‘Abdul Mahmūd and Qavām

Daftar, and thirty alleys crossing them on grid pattern, such as Kucha Hamām, Kīlīdī, Shukūh, and Urang.364

The architecture of the brothels was similar to standard older houses in Tehran, with a central yard in the middle and several rooms circling the yard with wooden doors and windows,

364 Most of the details about Shahrinaw and the everyday life condition of its residents in the late 1960s, are extracted from the thorough report that the social worker, Sattārah Farmān-farmā‘īyān, the founder of the Higher Education Institution of Social Work in Tehran (āmūzishgāh-i ‘ālī-yi khadamāt-i ijtimā‘ī) produced with the commission of Tehran’s Police. See Sattārah Farmān-farmā‘īyān, Pīrāmūn-i rūspīgarī dar shahr-i Tehran, 2nd ed. (Tehran: ̄Āmūzishgāh-yi ‘ālī-yi khadamāt-i ‘ijtimā‘ī, 1970), 13.

180 mostly painted in blue or green.365 The main waiting hall was usually ornamented with wallpapers.366 Managers, mostly female, walked around or sat behind a desk, with a plastic or leather bag of tokens (zhitun) that they tied to their waists. After greeting the guests (mihmān) upon their arrival and negotiating the terms and the price for services, managers directed guests to the prostitute in they had hired, who walked them to her room. Housekeepers (pīshkhidmat) lived in the basements. Leaders and madams who managed houses (Khanūm ra‘īs, māmān, dashtgīr), bouncers (dar bāz kun), and middlemen (vāsitah) either lived outside the district or had their own private rooms at brothels.367 Those prostitutes who did not reside within the district rented apartments on Jamshīd Street, right outside the western wall. These private houses were called “houses of the chaste” (Najībkhānah).368

Shahrinaw, however, was not run quite like any other neighborhood. In 1953, the state attempted to further restrict traffic to and from the district by warding it with brick walls and two tall brown iron gates.369 After walling the district, which was subsequently called the “Ward”

(Qal‘ah), the police announced that it would no longer accept new women to the district.370 In

1959, the municipality, with the executive hand of the police, shut down the northern gate.371

365 Farmān-farmā‘īyān, Pīrāmūn-i rūspīgarī dar shahr-i Tehran, 14. 366 The wallpaper can be seen in the black-and-white photography of Kāvah Gulistān, as well as in the movie Kandū (Firaydūn Guli, 1975), which includes scenes that are shot in brothels of Shahrinaw. 367 Farmān-farmā‘īyān, Pīrāmūn-i rūspīgarī dar shahr-i Tehran, 17. 368 Farmān-Farmā‘īyān, Pīrāmūn-I Rūspīgarī Dar Shahr-I Tehran. 369 “Mahsūr shudan-i Shahrinaw,” 1965, 340/234, Iran’s National Archives. 370 Farmān-farmā‘īyān, Pīrāmūn-i rūspīgarī dar shahr-i Tehran, 13. 371 Most of the archival material about the governance of Shahrinaw in this chapter is from three main collections, two of which I have already elaborated on in Chapter II and can be found in in the Library, Museum, and Document Center of the Iranian Parliament archives. The third collection is found in the National Archives and includes

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Consequently, the more expensive brothels moved to Qavām Street and gentrified it, while Hāj

Mahmūd became home to cheaper houses. Access to the Ward was limited and monitored with two standby soldiers at the doors. Ordinary women and underage boys were not allowed, but of course snuck in. Prostitutes had to show their entrance cards upon arrival.

Not only was the flow of people to the district narrowed, but there was also limited availability of electricity and water. As per the state’s decision, there were no allocation of power and hydro to the district.372 Most of the houses did not have showers. Almost none of the clay houses had electricity or water pipes. None of the streets were asphalted. Running ditches in alleys and pools were regularly reported as unhygienic. Many of the women did not have birth certificates or identity cards.373 The center that was responsible for the medical condition of women was an understaffed clinic on Qalamistān Street next to the Ward that could barely meet the district-women’s needs.374 Generally, the prostitutes mostly had little savings, many were in debt bondage, and most had no access to social services or medical insurance, except for mandatory venereal disease check-ups, which had turned into a matter of formality.375 With the increasing number of higher-class prostitutes outside the district, who either worked on their own

documents between 1967-1968, such as a preliminary report on prostitution in Tehran, official correspondences of the Management and Planning Organization of Iran and its Hygiene and Welfare department, and other documents such as letters about the budget of the establishment of work camps for prostitutes. As I mentioned in Chapter II, many of the letters and other documents do not have full identification information. Throughout this chapter, whenever I use documents from these three collections, I include the record number and the date, if available. Similar to Chapter II, if there is no record number, I suffice to refer to the collection. For documents on the shut-down of the northern gate of Shahrinaw in 1959 see “[Nāmah-hā-yi muti‘addid az sākinīn-i Tehran],” Letter no. 26416. 372 Farmān-farmā‘īyān, Pīrāmūn-i rūspīgarī dar shahr-i Tehran, 221. 373 Farmān-farmā‘īyān, Pīrāmūn-i rūspīgarī dar shahr-i Tehran, 214. 374 Farmān-farmā‘īyān, Pīrāmūn-i rūspīgarī dar shahr-i Tehran, 213. 375 Farmān-farmā‘īyān, Pīrāmūn-i rūspīgarī dar shahr-i Tehran, 214, 215.

182 or resided and worked in private illegal brothels and najībkhānah, the district catered to lower middle-class men. By the 1960s, Shahrinaw had turned into the second cheapest area for prostitution in Tehran.376 Although the state eventually renovated the main streets, for the better part of the 1970s the district was left with a small social work center, a poorly run clinic, and a busy police station.

***

What happened that, in spite of the compassionate campaign in public press, which imagined the prostitute as a vulnerable subject in need of rescue and care and deserving of public compassion, life conditions in Shahrinaw became increasingly precarious from the 1920s to the 1960s? How did the state decide what quality of life they deserved?377 The contradiction of the simultaneity of a growing compassionate attitude toward Shahrinaw and the decreasing quality of life of its residents was particularly due to the fact that prostitutes, as vulnerable subjects, were marked as unfit to notions of liberal subjecthood (as illustrated in Chapter I) and they were governed as exceptional citizens. In Chapter II I extensively illustrated how Shahrinaw was formed as a space of exception under the rule of the state. The sovereign state transcended its own law and acted on

376 By the 1960s, prostitution had become classed, as there were different forms of female sex-work (both formal and informal) all around Tehran. There were women who solicited independently on the streets, women who worked in the informal sector, with “server licenses” (khidmatkārī) issued by the city police at bars and cafes, women who worked in private brothels in the city, and women who worked in the slums of the south of Tehran, known as ditch-residents (gawdnishinān) or motels on the way to the then suburban area of Karaj. Shahrinaw prostitutes charged the second-lowest prices after the slum workers. According to Farmān-farmā‘īyān’s survey in 1968, even street workers outside the district charged more than women in Shahrinaw. This is telling of the low wages and life conditions of Shahrinaw prostitutes compared to other sex-workers. For more detailed information on different kinds of sex-work in Tehran see Sattārah Farmān-farmā‘īyān, Pirāmūn-i rūspīgarī dar shahr-i Tehran, 18-21. 377 Miriam Ticktin, in her study of immigrants, illustrates how diseased and vulnerable subjects in France’s immigration policies are similarly subjected to legal exceptions, and how their life was valorized differently from each other and from citizens. See Ticktin, Casualties of Care.

183 the moral concerns of its populace, not to override the rule of law and its regulatory mechanisms, but to perpetuate and expand the domain of its power. Modern law needs to overcome its own blind spots.378 The lawful regulatory power of the state expands its domain as it flags subjects or sites (such as prostitutes and Shahrinaw) as cases of exception, and then attempts to subjugate them to regulatory mechanisms. As such, states of exception are precisely those spaces through which the state expands its regulatory domain of biopolitical power and Shahrinaw was such a space. In this chapter, I further investigate the construction of the figure of the vulnerable prostitute as a subject that was both dangerous and in danger, evoking the two affects of compassion and fear. Compassion for the figure of the sick prostitute born out of humanitarian logic and fear from her diseased body, rooted in securitizing population control, were the two governing attitudes that the state experimented with in the governance of the district under the sovereign rule of the state.

Throughout the life of Shahrinaw as the red-light district of Tehran, the state was constantly torn between shutting down the Ward and legalizing prostitution and criminalizing prostitution to launch rescue missions for prostitutes and further regulating the Ward. These two modalities of governance map onto two main policies around prostitution, namely abolitionism and regulationism. While abolitionism is premised on the idea that any sex-work is a form of violence against women and should be eradicated completely, regulationism aims at monitoring and managing the health of prostitutes as threats to public hygiene and the health of the population. As mentioned in the Introduction, the two policies have been subject to continuous debates amongst feminists and governments throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Feminists and activists have shown how abolitionist politics harm sex-workers just as much, if

378 Agrama, Questioning Secularism, 2012, 142, 143.

184 not more so, as regulationist policies. As regulationism perceives the prostitute as primarily a threat, it is an articulation of the securitizing power of the state. The abolitionist policy at once victimizes and criminalizes the prostitute, and is a practice of welfare states. Rooted in humanitarnism, abolitionism dominates global NGO policies today, despite the rigorous international grassroot activist campaign against its harmful ramifications for migrant sex- workers.379 But there is a secret shared final goal between the welfare state and the security state, and that is to decide what “good life” is and what value the lives of citizens have.380 There is an inner solidarity between the two questions: Who has the right to live and how does s/he get to live? This point brings us back to the questions that I raised in the beginning of this section: how did the state valorize the lives of prostitutes? In this chapter, I illustrate that the precarious life conditions in Shahrinaw in the 1960s were the direct result of the indeterminacy and ambiguity of the state in valorizing the life of prostitutes. I demonstrate that the government’s oscillation between welfare policies and securitizing policies was enmeshed with the political and economic rationale of liberal states, the decision on how much resources prostitutes deserved, and what degree of a “good life” they ought to have.

The exploration of the governance of prostitutes, particularly in Shahrinaw, serves as a window into the formation and governance of the category of vulnerable citizens, as subjects that

379 Kempadoo is one of the earliest feminist scholars who wrote prolifically on the harms of collapsing sex-work with sex-traffic and critiqued global anti-trafficking policies. See “The Modern-Day White (Wo)Man’s Burden.” 380 Here I am using Agamben’s conception of “good life” which he defines in relation to “bare life.” According to him, “good life”, which is supposedly governed under biopolitics and is an expression of democratic modern states, and the concept of “bare life”, which is supposedly governed under thanatopolitics and is an expression of totalitarian modern states, converge constantly, as the state’s absolute sovereignty is only practiced through drawing the line between these two modes of state power. Deciding whose life has value (bare life), and deciding how much value that life has (good life) are interconnected questions for Agamben. Although he is more interested in the governance of “bare life” and most of his examples draw on the Nazi camps, he is ultimately interested in the convergence and inseparability of the two concepts as expression of the political power of the modern sovereign state.

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Figure 17 This map shows Tehran in 1969 and was created by Dr. Hussein Karīmān, a historian of Tehran. The smaller circle indicates the earliest bounds of Tehran. The second circle demarcates the borders of Tehran during the time that Shahrinaw became the red-light district. The larger shape demarcates the boundaries of Tehran in the 1970s. It can clearly be seen that Shahrinaw, which was once outside the borders of Tehran, was situated at the heart of the city by the 1970s.

186 were deemed at once dangerous and in danger. I investigate three distinct but interconnected and overlapping modalities of governance at work in the governance of the vulnerable: the medical

(through which the state rendered prostitutes as potential threats), the welfare (through which the state cared for them), and the economic (through which the state made finite decisions about them). I conclude, that ultimately, the third modality of governance, namely economic, decided the life value of citizens and prompted the state to treat the district as a laboratory for implementing different modalities of governance with minimal expense and grand ambitions.

4.2 A Brief History of the Welfare State

Historians and scholars of contemporary Iran consider welfare organizations and institutions pivotal to the populist politics of the Islamic Republic, and a later development in the formation of modern state in Iran.381 In particular, after the Iran-Iraq war (1980–1988), the state increasingly staged a caring and “service giving” attitude toward the public, through the establishment of semi-public foundations such as “The Martyrs Foundation,” (bunyād-i shuhadā) and the “Foundation for the Poor,” (bunyād-i mustaz‘afān). However, the corporatist regime of welfare emerged well before the 1979 Islamic revolution, as an indispensable part of modern state formation in Iran. In the mid-nineteenth century, during Nāsir al-Din Shah’s reign (1948–

1996), welfare institutions worked under the Ministry of Responsibilities and Endowment

(vizārat-i vazāyif va awqāf). However, the concept of the state as a caring actor that pursues the wellbeing of the people developed mainly during the late Qajar period, and consolidated later with the Constitutional Revolution (1905–1911) when the state identified welfare and security as

381 Kevan Harris, A Social Revolution: Politics and the Welfare State in Iran (Oalkland, California: University of California Press, 2017); Ervand Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

187 twin expressions of its sovereignty and legitimacy. In the Constitutional Order that was issued on

August 5, 1906, Muzaffar al-Din Shah announced that the two principle goals of the state were to ensure the “welfare and security” (rifāhiyyat va ‘amniyyat) of the people.382 The establishment of the first codified Law of Municipality (qānūn-i baladiyyah) in 1907 and the formation of

Tehran’s Council of Hygiene in 1911, which was affiliated with the larger Public Health

Assembly (majlis-i hifz al-sihhat) that was inaugurated seven years earlier in 1904, were in line with the principle goal of ensuring people’s welfare and quality of life (rifāhiyyat).383 In the codified law, the first purpose of the municipality was recounted as “protecting urban interests

384 and meeting the needs of the residents.” Providing public welfare through the advancement of public hygiene and public education; the establishment of houses for the poor, the diseased, and the disable;, and controlling the food supply of the city in case of famines were amongst the ten main responsibilities of the municipality.

In 1920, following Sayyid Zia’s coup and subsequent reorganization of state institutions, the municipality took over the “Bureau of Charity Matters” (idārah-yi umūr-i khairiyyah) and the state became officially and institutionally in charge of charity measures.385 The following

382 Muzzafar al-Din Shah, “Farmān-i mashrūtiyyat,” Rūznāmah-yi rasmī-yi Iran/Iranian Official Journal, Murdād 13, 1285/August 5, 1906, accessed May 28, 2017, Pāygāh-i ittilā‘āt-i qavānīn va muqarrarāt-i kishvar, http://www.dastour.ir/brows/?lid=1501.

383 For the script of the Law of Municipality see “Qānūn-i baladiyyah,” Rūznāmah-yi rasmī-yi Iran/Iranian Official Journal, Khurdād 12, 1286/June 3, 1907, accessed May 28, 2017, Pāygāh-i ittilā‘āt-i qavānīn va muqarrarāt-i kishvar, http://www.dastour.ir/brows/?lid=1952. For details on the formation of the Council of Public Hygiene in Tehran see Malikzādah, Nigāhī bi ‘umūr-i khairiyya dar dawra-yi Qajar, 120. For the year of inauguration of Iran’s Council of Public Hygiene see “Nashriyah (Sihhi-yi kul-i majlis hifz al-sihha) Sūrat majlīs, jalasah-yi 9,” Isfand 1306/March 1927, 297/34336, Iran’s National Archives 384 “Qānūn-i baladiyyah,” Rūznāmah-yi rasmī-yi Iran/Iranian Official Journal, Pāygāh-i ittilā‘āt-i qavānīn va muqarrarāt-i kishvar. 385 Ilhām Malikzādah, Nigāhī bi ‘umūr-i khairiyyah dar dawra-yi Qajar (Tehran: Nashr-i tārīkh, 1385), 123.

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“state-building” efforts of the Pahlavi monarchy in the 1930s were premised on the conception of the state not only as a securitizing institution, but also increasingly as a welfare one. The public increasingly understood the state as a caring and empathetic institution, addressing Reza Shah as

“the compassionate father with the crown,” (pidar-i tājdār-i dilsūz).386 The state managed private and public welfare institutions mainly through the municipality (baladiyyah) and the Red

Lion and Sun Society (Jamiyyat-i shīr va khurshīd-i surkh).387

In the 1940s, the government of Muhammad Reza Shah invoked the term Dawlat-i khidmat guzār, “the service giving state.” Shams, Reza Shah’s older daughter, as a representative of the state, was appointed the president of the Red Lion and Sun in 1948.388 During Muhamad

Reza Shah’s reign, there was a proliferation of various welfare foundations, such as The Royal

Organization of Social Services (Sāzmān-i shāhanshāhī-yi khadamāt-i ‘ijtimā‘ī, 1947) and its dependent institutions including Farah Pahlavi Hospital (1962), the Reza Pahlavi Hospital

386 Muhammad Ali Tūtiyā, "marām-i mā" Sihhat-namā-yi Iran 1, no. 1 (Farvardīn 1312/March 1933), 3. 387 The history of Iran’s involvement with the International Committee of the Red Cross goes back to the 1970s, ten years after the initial establishment of the international organization. However, it was only in 1906 that Iran proposed to use its own national title, namely the Red Lion and Sun and flag for Iran’s branch. Mumtāz al-Saltanah, the minister of foreign affairs at the time, opposed the use of the Cross in the flag in Iran, which according to him was an Islamic society. Turkey was another country that refused to use the Christian sign and flag for the organization. Despite European opposition, the Iranian Red Cross was named “Red Lion and Sun,” in 1906. The historian Gilham Malikzādah periodizes the efforts of Red Lion and Sun into the primary phase before 1940, and after. She argues that before 1940s the organization was mainly in charge of establishing health centers and hospitals, and organizing aid services across Iran. After the 1940s however, under the supervision of Shams the activities and responsibilities of the organization expanded noticeably to providing educational and social services. Malikzādah, Mu‘assisāt-i khayriyah-yi rifāhī-bihdāshtī dar dawrah-yi Reza Shah, 224-225. For more discussion on the origin of Red Lion and Sun in Iran see Rizā-āzarshāh Rizāyī, “Shīr va khurshid-i surkh-i Iran: az tadbīrī siyāsī tā zarūratī ijtimā‘ī,” Guftigū 35, no. 1 (Bahār 1381/Spring 2002): 77–86. 388 Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, “Dastkhatt-i mulūkānah,” Nāmah-yi māhānah-yi Shīr va khurshīd-i surkh-i Iran 1, no. 2 (July 1327), 2.

189

(1961), and Ashraf Pahlavi’s Nursing Institution (1949).389 Other welfare institutions include the Women’s Organizations (Sāzmān-i zanān, 1966), various orphanages, the Center for the

Fight agaisnt Tuberculosis (markaz-i mubārizah bā sil, 1956), and the Foundation for the

Regeneration of Rural Areas (Bungāh-i ‘umrān-i dihāt, 1352).390 Women in the royal family including Ashraf, the Shah’s twin sister, Shams, Shah’s elder sister, and Farah, the queen, made the tableau of the state’s humanitarian efforts.391 In 1947, Muhammad Reza Shah appointed

Ashraf to the vice chair of the Royal Organization of Social Services. After her coronation as

Muhamad Reza Shah’s queen, Farah inaugurated and led many charity and welfare organizations, the most significant of which was the Charity Society of Farah Pahlavi (jam‘iyyat- i khayriyyah-yi Farah Pahlavi) which was established in 1953, and later expanded to what is today known as Bihzīstī, a well-established state-run welfare organization. Parliament members addressed the three royal female figures as the “Angels of Benefaction” (firishtigān-i nikūkārī).392 By the 1960s, parallel with the top-down land reforms and modernization plans of the White Revolution, the state increasingly identified itself as the “service giving” state (dawlat- i khidmatguzār).393 The aim was to popularize the image of the state as a welfare state that

389 Kārnāmah-yi bīst sālah-yi sāzmān-i shāhanshāhī-yi khadamāt-i ‘ijtimā‘ī dar khidmat bi mardum, 1326-1346 (Tehran: Sāzmān-i shāhanshāhī-yi khadamāt-i ‘ijtimā‘ī, 1967), 26, 29. 390 Rāhnamā-yi mu‘assisāt-i ijtimā‘ī va khairiyyah dar Iran (Tehran: Bāshgāh-i bain al-milalī-yi zanān-i Iran, n.d.). 391 Ashraf was appointed as the head of the Organization for Social Services. She frequented Iran’s provinces for the inauguration of public clinics and other welfare centers. Farah also inaugurated the Farah Charitable Society “Jam‘iyyat-i khayriya-yi Farah” in 1953. 392 Ra‘īsī, Parliament Proceedings, Meeting no. 144 (Day 9, 1352/1973) 393 Specifically, the cabinet of Huvaidā and Mansūr were addressed as “the service giving government of Mansūr” and the service giving government of Huvaidā” in the parliament. Just for a few examples see Āsifī, Parliament Proceedings, Meeting no. 356 (Urdībihisht 19, 1346/1967); Muhazzab, Parliament Proceedings, Meeting no. 187 (Khurdād 25, 1344/1965); Rahnavrdī, Parliament Proceedings, Meeting no. 143 (Bahman 3, 1343/1964).

190 serviced its people. Around the same time, as the state was further bureaucratizing, the Ministry of Social Welfare was established.394

Earlier efforts to institutionalize welfare in Iran was concomitant with the emergence of a consciousness about the vulnerable members of the population. For instance, in 1851 the state conducted a census of the beggars of Tehran, who were incapable of performing labor. Other examples include the establishment of the Government Hospital, the Hospital for the Poor

(bimāristān-i bīnavāyān), the School for the Poor, and conducting a full report on the disabled and the impoverished in Tehran.395 The State established public welfare institutions for specific groups of society including derelict women, the disabled, the diseased, and the poor through the partial or full funding of hospitals, food banks (dār al-ītām), shelters (dār al-masākin), public drugstores, schools, and orphanages.396 Accordingly, a taxonomy of vulnerable people appeared in the language of the state. Children, the disabled, the diseased, alcoholics, the poor, the homeless, the orphans, and later addicts and prostitutes were all different categories for which the state established distinct welfare institutions.397

394 Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran, 126. 395 For an overview of the establishment of state’s public welfare efforts see Ilhām Malikzādah, Mu‘assisāt-i khayriyah-yi rifāhī-bihdāshtī dar dawrah-yi Reza Shah (Tehran: Tārikh-i nashr-i Iran, 1392). 396 Malikzādah, Mu‘assisāt-i khayriyah-yi rifāhī-bihdāshtī dar dawrah-yi Reza Shah, 134. 397 Significantly, people who could not perform labor, or whose labor was not considered “real labor,” were amongst the categories that the state marked as vulnerable and in need of help. The question of labor is one that is backgrounded in this dissertation. However, there is ample room for probing the question of labor. The state’s hostility toward prostitution was partly rooted in the fact that sex-work was not considered as legitimate labor, which included mainly production and reproduction. As I will explain later in this chapter, in the 1950s and the 1960s, the state invested in the rehabilitation of prostitutes, and aimed at teaching them skills that they could use in factories. For a comparative historical study of subjects that cannot perform productive labor and thus evoke both resentment and compassion and receive suppressive state care, see Mine Ener, Managing Egypt’s Poor and the Politics of Benevolence, 1800-1952 (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2003).

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The most significant and persistent vulnerable category of citizen was the diseased, as public health was one of the main and consistent concerns of welfare state institutions, including the municipalities, the Red Lion and Sun, and the Royal Social Services Organization. The state understood health as the first step in providing a good life for the nation. From the establishment of hospitals, clinics, and mobile clinics (marīzkhānah-yi sayyār), to providing free drugs and tests, to the founding of clinics (andarzgāh), first in Tehran and later in rural and urban areas in

Iran, providing care for the diseased has been at the forefront of welfare programs.398 The Red

Lion and Sun’s revised statute, published in 1948, began with the Quranic verse “Help one another in righteousness.”399 It then stated the goals and conduct of the organization as being that of the “reduction of pain and hardship, and the improvement of public health.” Muhammad

Reza Shah’s compassionate campaign promoted the royal crown through tapping into both nationalist and Islamic sensibilities. In his command to appoint Shams as the head of the Red

Lion and Sun, he reminded the public that “to be kind to the poor is amongst the greatest essences of ancient Persia,” and that the purpose of the Red Lion and Sun was to better implement the “sacred” responsibility of “service for humankind” according to the Quranic verse

“Help one another in righteousness.”400 During the peace time, the first responsibility of the organization was to provide health aid to underprivileged parts of Iran.401 The Royal Social

Services Organization gave priority to “health issues” in its early years of inauguration and

398 Andarzgāh were walk-in clinics. See Kārnāmah-yi bīst sālah-yi sāzmān-i khadamāt-i ijtimā‘ī (Tehran: Sāzmān-i shāhanshāhī-yi khadamāt-i ijtimā‘ī, 1346), 67. 399 Quran, al-Mā‘idah, 76:2. 400 Muhammad Reza Shah, “Dastkhat-i mulūkānah,” Nāmah-yi māhānah-yi shīr va khurshīd-i surkh 1, no. 2 ,Tīr 1327/July 1948, 2. 401 Abbas Nafīsī, “Jam‘īyyat-I Shīr va Khurshīd-I Surkh-I Iran as Nazar-I Bain Al-Milalī,” Nāmah-Yi Māhanah-Yi Shīr va Khurshīd-I Surkh 1, no. 2 (July 1327): 5.

192 focused on the establishment of clinics in rural and off the grid areas in Iran.402 Later, the organization founded numerous women’s clinics in Tehran and other cities to specifically cater to the health and hygiene of pregnant women, mothers, and their children.403 As public health stood at the center of welfare programs, the diseased subject was one of the earlier subjects that was defined as a vulnerable citizen, in the need of the care of the state. Consequently, providing medical care for the diseased was one of the earliest practices of the care of the state. Due to the fact that welfare intersected with health in Iran, inquiring about the history of the state’s health care mechanisms can further unpack the development of the modern regime of care. To explore the genealogy of the care of the state, then, one needs to probe into the following questions: How were diseased citizens defined differently or similarly from other citizens? How did the state govern and cared for the vulnerable lives of the diseased?

4.3 Medical Governance: Security or Welfare

In this section, I probe into the history of the development of the state’s medical regime, which institutionalized care for patients. In doing so, I demonstrate the inner solidarity between state- oriented compassionate attitudes toward patients and those of securitizing attitudes. It is no coincidence that welfare institutions in Iran emerged out of and parallel to public health institutions. Diseased citizens were being pulled in seemingly opposite directions: while the welfare state aimed to care for patients and save the population, the security state intended to

“fight” the diseases. The interconnectedness of the history of public health and welfare

402 Kārnāmah-yi bīst sāla-yi sāzmān-i shāhanshāhī-yi khadamāt-i ‘ijtimā‘ī. 403 Kārnāmah-yi bīst sāla-yi sāzmān-i shāhanshāhī-yi khadamāt-i ‘ijtimā‘ī, 15.

193 institutions is telling of a larger solidarity between the securitizing and compassionate modalities of governance.

From the early years of the corporatization of charity, state-run charity institutions overlapped with the state’s medical institutions. In February 1921, the Charity Institution

(mū‘assisa-yi khairiyyah) was renamed the Charity Bureau (Idārah-yi khairiyyah) and was assigned to the municipality (baladiyyah) following Sayyid Ziā al-Din Tabātabāyī’s coup d’état and the consequent rearrangement of state institutions.404 The responsibilities of the Charity

Bureau intersected largely with those of the Public Health Council. The Charity Bureau was responsible for overseeing public and private clinics, establishing special clinics for contagious diseases and controlling and managing the spread of such diseases, establishing special institutions for sanitizing private homes, assigning physicians to offer free visits for the poor

(fuqarā), overseeing the hygiene of drugstores and butcheries, and managing the hygiene of mortuaries, baths, mosques, cafes, hotels, and barbershops.405

Accordingly, physicians as agents of public health were amongst the first state-oriented compassionate actors and philanthropists. Their labor was perceived as national service, since they were at the center of the state’s public health agendas. They acquired the role of service providers, as individuals whose practice and interest was tied to citizens’ health and quality of life. Beginning in the 1890s, it gradually became common amongst physicians to hold special

404 Three months after the establishment of the new Bureau, three main departments were formed: “dār al-ītām,” which had two orphanages under cover, “dār al-masākīn,” which was a shelter for the poor, and the “municipaility factory” (kārkhānah-yi baladī), which was a factory that sheltered around 230 poor (bī bizā‘at) women as laborers who worked in carpet weaving and dressmaking departments. See Hussain Mahbūbī Ardakānī, Tārīkh-i muʾassasāt- i tamaddunī-i jadīd dar Īrān, Chāp 2, vol. Jild 2, 3 vols. (Tehran: Intishārāt-i dānishgāh-i Tehran, 1370). 405 Ilhām Malikzādah, Nigāhī bi umūr-i khairiyyah dar dawrah-yi Qajar, 123-124.

194 hours daily or weekly at their private practice for free visits for the poor. In 1915, an assemblage of physicians announced in newspapers that once a week, they would all gather in Dr. Hussein

Khan’s clinic in Qazvin gate to see patients with refractory diseases. Poor patients’ visits were free of charge.406 Many including, Dr. Amir A‘lam, a politician, physician, and philanthropist, established free clinics for the poor with their own private funds. At the same time, A’lam was also in charge of managing the state’s welfare plans. One of his most well-remembered charitable contributions was the establishment of the Women’s Hospital (bimāristān-i niswān) and the development of the Red Lion and Sun (Shīr va khurshīd-i surkh) in the 1900s. The motto of the Red Lion and Sun was the Persian expression “Humans are all members of one body.” Dr.

Tūtiyā, drawing on this expression in his popular medical journal, Iran’s Health Watch (Sihhat nāmah-yi Iran), praised A‘lam for his service in the development of the Red Lion and Sun:

Those who have good morals understand the meaning of the expression “Humans are all members of one body.” They constantly make an effort to heal the wounds of the body of humanity. In order to reach this sacred goal, they assist and seek assistance from charitable citizens to establish relevant institutions.407

Such charitable public health efforts were in line with both the state’s national vision to produce and maintain healthy citizens and to promote “good life.” Physicians invoked the common expression “service is the best prayer” to praise their own efforts in offering free services for the poor. Ali Tūtiyā opened the first issue of the second volume of Iran’s Health Watch with the following words: “In our religion there is no service more exalted than service to people and the

406 These efforts might have very well been in line with the municipalities’ suggestions or informal commission. “I‘lān [Announcement],” ‘Asr-i jadīd, September 28, 1915, Morning edition. 407 Muhammad Ali Tūtiyā, “Shīr va khurshīd-i surkh-i Iran,” Sihhat Namā-yi Iran 2, no. Special issue 1 and 2 (Ūrdībihīsht 1312/May 1333), 33.

195 greatest service is indeed raising public consciousness on health.”408 Attention to awareness about health signals a shift in the domain of physicians’ services, from their private practices to stat- run free public services and public consciousness campaigns, which shared goals with the governance of the population.409

It should be noted that the role of Islam and public Islamic sensibilities are, by and large, grounded in the post-1940s context. Instead, compassion, which seems to bring Islamic and nationalist sensibilities together, is put at the foreground of the state’s efforts in Shahrinaw.

Although the petitions demonstrate that Islam was part and parcel of the voice of the populace, the role of Islam is not at the foreground of the state’s welfare organizations. Nevertheless, a residue of Islamic concepts and practices continues to impact the state discussion on prostitution, as I will illustrate in this chapter. Having said this, there is ample room for further research on the rise of humanitarian Islam and the emergence of local and popular—both institutional and informal—forms of charity in Iran throughout the second half of the twentieth century.

In the early twentieth century, physicians were increasingly conceptualized as serving the nation by keeping the population strong and healthy. In the preface to Dr. Mihrābiyān’s book on venereal diseases, Dr. ‘Amir A‘alam thanked him for his “twelve-year long service” for “doing his duty in service through publishing useful medical manuscripts,” and praised the badge of

408 Muhammad Ali Tūtiyā, “Maqsūd-i mā,” Sihhat Namā-yi Iran 2, no. Special Issue 1 and 2 (Ūrdībihīsht 1312/May 1333), 2. 409 Amira Mittermaier, in the context of food-giving practices in Egypt points to the different temporalities in neo- liberal practices of giving that are future-oriented, and that of a local Sufi Khidmat that caters to immediate needs of the poor, and is thus oriented towards here and now. A similar distinction could possibly be drawn between physicians’ private practices and state oriented ones in the present context. However, such analysis should be done with careful consideration of the particularities of the Iranian context and is beyond the scope of this chapter. See Amira Mittermaier, “Beyond Compassion: Islamic Voluntarism in Egypt,” American Ethnologist 41, no. 3 (August 2014): 518–31.

196 honor that the Ministry of Culture granted Mihrābiyān. Dr. A‘alam himself proposed that the

Sanitary Council establish the first venereal disease hospital in Tehran in 1921. He further thanked Dr. Mihrābiyān personally as he hoped that readers would also be thankful for

Mihrābiyān’s efforts and “praise his works.” In the 1930s, the Ministry of Knowledge commissioned Dr. Kāsimī to translate a series of books on personal health and self-help. In the preface to the volume on venereal disease, he expressed his gratitude for the Ministry of Health’s

“material and spiritual assistance [madad]” in the translation and publication of books about the

“health of the body and soul of youngsters, who are the future hope of the country.”410 He noted:

“Now that the state is emphasizing nurturing youngsters’ natural vigor”, the preparation and publication of such books should be considered as “apropos service.” He then thanked God that he had begun to do this service. Physicians were thus the ultimate actors of public good in so far as they took care of the health of the nation. They expressed genuine concern for patients and performed compassionate sensibilities towards them. Dr. Tūtiyā validated the role of physicians as national service-giving actors, drawing on Reza Shah’s speech: “Before anything, a country needs humans, a healthy population. One should work for the people, attend to them, and provide for their health.”411

The other side of this caring and compassionate approach towards patients was the fight against diseases. While, on the one hand, physicians cared for diseased citizens, on the other hand they contributed to the state’s fight against diseases, and therefore were actors of regulation, surveillance, and even the criminalization of patients. Physicians became increasingly central to the systematic state-run “fight against venereal disease” (mubārizah bā bimārihā-yi

410 Sylvester, Ānchah bāyad yik javān bidānad: hikmat-i ‘ilmi, hifz al-sihha, va akhlāq, 3. 411 Sihhat namā-yi Iran, Special issue 1 and 2, vol. 2, 2.

197 zuhravī). In 1915, Dr. Nāzim al-Attibbā wrote a regular health column for the weekly publication

‘Asr-i jadīd, in which he conceptualized microbes as deathly animals (haiwānāt-i kushandah).412

Dr. Dūbshān envisioned thathis medical book would become a tool in the war against venereal disease: “Everyone should know what syphilis is so that they can fight it. Knowing the enemy is half the battle of defeating and conquering it.”413 The idea was to save the bodies but wage war against microbes that resided in them. The line between bodies and the microbes that inhabited them, however, is an ambiguous one. Diseased bodies were penalized if they eluded regular inoculation check-ups. The outburst of smallpox in 1911 in Tehran is one example where the state cornered physicians into the double position of fighters of disease and compassionate caretakers of the diseased. The Bureau of Public Hygiene (Idārah-yi hifz al-sihhat) obligated all the private clinics to offer free inoculation and examination services to the public every day from

4:00 pm until midnight.414 Physicians were also responsible for issuing health cards for customers and their follow up check-up within a week. Every week, physician-members of the

Public Hygiene Council had to bring the list of their patients to the meeting to be compared to the list of casualties. This way the Council could keep close watch on patients and their recovery or their failure. In the name of caring for citizens and killing intruding microbes, the state developed regulatory mechanisms to monitor diseased bodies. State-oriented physicians including Dr. Tūtiyā noted that every citizen’s responsibility was to come forward if they noticed symptoms. Failing to do so was a failure to perform notions of good citizenship.

412 Nāzim al-Atibbā, “Haiwānāt-i marg-āvar,” ‘Asr-i Jadīd 2, no. 7 (September 30, 1915), 6. 413 Dūbshān, Syphilis va mukhtasāt-i Intishār-i ān dar Iran, 16. 414 “‘i‘iān-i dār al-khilāfah-yi Tehran dar mawrid-i ra‘āyat-i bihdāsht-i ‘umūmī bi manzūr-i jilawgiri az shuyū‘i ‘amrāz-i musrī,” 1288/1909, 290/7710, Iran’s National Archives.

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4.4 Laws on Prostitution: Between Compassion and Fear

The tension in the state’s policies between criminalizing patients and providing care for them was more visible specifically in cases of patients who were seen as proximate to microbes, and the public and the state saw prostitutes as being particularly close to the microbes of venereal disease.415 Kāzim Lāvarī, in his critical book on the governance of Tehran, warned: “Prostitutes are at once the most wretched and the most dangerous members of the society.”416 How did these two seemingly conflicting logics come together and form the conception and practice of public service? In this section, I argue that this double attitude resulted in a long, contradictory, and conflicted process of governing prostitutes, as they were seen as bodies prone to carrying and transmitting microbes of venereal diseases. As discussed in Chapter II, one of the main drives behind the relocation of prostitutes to Shahrinaw was the prevention of the spread of venereal disease. The formation of Shahrinaw was an early effort in line with the grand fight against venereal diseases, and against microbes. The role of physicians in the regulation of prostitutes was foregrounded following the formation of the district.

Physician-members of the Council of Public Hygiene were a part of the regulatory arm of the state that supervised the monitoring of prostitutes who carried venereal diseases. For instance, on February 1, 1927, Dr. De Lapouge, a French delegate physician in Iran and a member of the Council of Public Hygiene, convinced the council to report a number of French

415 Didier Fassin, in the contemporary context of immigration policies in France, notes the rise of a similar tension between compassion and repression as two different modes of governance in governing what he calls “unwanted citizens,” i.e. immigrants and asylum seekers. See Fassin, Humanitarian Reason, 133–61. 416 Kāzim Lāvarī, Āyandah-yi Tehran yā chigūnah paytakht rā idārah kunīm (Naqshah-yi islāhāt-i panjsālah) (Tehran: Chāpkhānah-yi shirkat-i sahāmī-yi tab‘i kitāb, 1325/1946), 38.

199 women to the Ministry of Internal Affairs for spreading venereal disease in Tehran.417 According to the letter, a few French women who entered Tehran on a servant work permit (tazkarah-yi khidmatkārī) resided on Café Lux in Lālazār Street, where they began to work as prostitutes. The letter further noted that since they were “causing the spread of venereal diseases,” they should be evicted from the city and relocated in Shahrinaw, where they could be put under medical supervision (at this time, Shahrinaw was located outside the city gates and not yet a part of the city.) According to the proceedings of the Council of Public Hygiene meeting, following Dr. De

Lapouge’s orders, within a month, the police relocated eighteen women to Shahrinaw and had admitted them to a clinic for treatment (the name of the clinic is not mentioned) by March 1st

1927.418 This is an early instance in which physicians directly orchestrated the state’s “fight against venereal diseases.” Gradually, other large cities developed special health clinics and surveillance mechanisms such as mandatory health cards and medical check-ups to monitor prostitutes as primary carriers of venereal disease.

In 1930 in Isfahan, the Khurshīd clinic issued health cards for prostitutes and kept their medical records. In cases of diagnosis with venereal disease they were banned from working until recovery.419 In some cases, women were admitted to clinics and not allowed to leave until they had recovered. In 1930, in Shiraz, the Police gathered a roster of 248 prostitutes in the city.

On April 29, 1930, the committee in charge held a meeting, after which the police issued a

417 “Intiqāl-i chand tan zanān-i taba‘a-yi farānsah bi Shahrinaw,” 1305/1926, 293/873, Iran’s National Archives. 418 “Nashriyah (Sihhi-yi kul-i majlis hifz al-sihha) Sūrat majlīs, jalasah-yi 9,” Isfand 1306/March 1927, 297/34336, Iran’s National Archives. Other present members of the council included Nasrullah Khān Saif (saif al-attibā), Muhammad Khan Shaikh (ahyā al-mulk), Partaw A‘zam (Hakīm A‘zam), Muhammad Hasan Khān Luqmān Adham (Hakīm al-dawlah), Yūniz Khān Afrūkhtah, Said Khān Mālik (Luqmān al-Mulk). 419 “Guzārish-i ‘amaliyyāt-i chand māhah-yi marīzkhānah-yi Khurshīd,” 1319/1930, 293/7664, Iran’s National Archives.

200 notification that mandated prostitutes to visit the Health Bureau with two photos, to be tested and registered.420 On June 16, the police, in a letter to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, noted that the issue of prostitutes (zanān-i ma‘rūfah) was a “vital issue as it relates to public hygiene and the prevention of the spread of contagious diseases.” 421 Accordingly, the Police of Shiraz recommended that the Ministry of Internal Affairs execute similar policies in all the provinces in

Iran. On June 19, the Ministry of Internal Affairs approved of this plan.422 In 1932, in the

Mashhad municipality, through a series of correspondences with the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Central Public Health Bureau, agreed to co-fund the establishment of a venereal disease clinic for prostitutes. The report that Public Health Bureau provided noted that, since venereal diseases cause a population decrease, there needed to be serious preventive measures taken. The report held the municipality responsible for arranging for the space and establishment of a special clinic, which could both admit infected patients and provide regular check-ups for them.

The Bureau could then delegate physicians and provide medicine for the clinic.

In 1933, Ali Tūtiyā published an extended proposal for public health and claimed that he had submitted the proposal to the royal crown.423 He proposed that the state should subject all prostitutes, healthy and infected, to biweekly inspection and issues them health certificates, without which their work permits would be suspended. Drawing on the experience of the British

420 “Guzārish-i nazmiyyah-yi Shiraz dar mawrid-i ijrā-yi muqarrarāt-i sihhī dar mawrid-i sanān-i ma‘rūfah,” 1930, letter no. 2260/1322, 290/7742. 421 “Guzārish-i nazmiyyah-yi Shiraz dar mawrid-i ijrā-yi muqarrarāt-i sihhī dar mawrid-i sanān-i ma‘rūfah,” 1930, letter no. 9527290/7742. 422 “Guzārish-i nazmiyyah-yi Shiraz dar mawrid-i ijrā-yi muqarrarāt-i sihhī dar mawrid-i sanān-i ma‘rūfah,” 1930, letter no. 9527, 290/7742. 423 Muhammad Ali Tūtiyā, “Pishnahādāt-i mā,” Sihhat-namā-yi Iran 1, no. 6 (August 1933), 1.

201 with Lock Hospitals, he further suggested that the government detain infected prostitutes in special venereal disease clinics until they were cured. Acknowledging the difficulty in identifying non-official prostitutes, he suggested that the state should establish moral police centers. These centers would send policemen to theater houses, cafes, and other public places to investigate and identify prostitutes and arrest them.424 A year later, he followed up on his unattended proposal in his journal in an article titled “Syphilis is Horrifying.” He “hoped” that his proposal would be implemented. He explained, “the only way to prevent the spread of syphilis is to stop or control prostitutes.”425

Although, as demonstrated in the case of Shiraz, Mashhad, and Isfahan, some regulations were put in place from the early twentieth century, it was only on June 1, 1941 that the parliament passed the Sexually Transmitted Diseases Law, which criminalized patients who did not seek full treatment. 426 Article Two of the Act ensured that all state medical clinics offered free treatment for poor patients. Article Three held all physicians responsible for keeping full records of their patients, in record books that the city health center (bihdārī) distributed amongst them. Article Five authorized physicians to detain patients in clinics until full recovery.

However, the logistical implementation of this clause was not clearly spelled out. In 1946, the

Department of Justice passed a detailed bylaw for the implementation of this legislation, titled the “Bylaw for the Prevention of Venereal Diseases.” The bylaw clearly stated the tight collaboration of the health institution with the police (shahrbānī) in regulating and monitoring

424 Tūtiyā, “Pishnahādāt-i mā,” Sihhat-namā-yi Iran, 5-7. 425 Muhammad Ali Tūtiyā, “Syphilis Tarsnāk Ast,” Sihhat-Namā-Yi Iran 2, no. 1 and 2 (May 1934), 38. 426 The legal terminology had shifted at this point, and “venereal disease” (bimāri-yi zuhravī) had given way to “sexually transmitted disease” (bimāri-yi āmizishī). Accordingly, I will be using the term STD whenever I discuss any period that follows the 1940s.

202 patients.427 Article Seven of this bylaw classified the carriers of venereal disease into two categories, the second of which was: “the people, such as prostitutes, who are the main carriers of such diseases.” The article also referred to prostitutes as “the most dangerous,” and subjected them to more strict and regular check-ups. This article confirmed Article Seven of the legislation, which sanctioned public health clinics to compel prostitutes to visit special clinics for regular check-ups on fixed weekdays.

According to this codified law, in cases where the disease was still in the contagious phase, prostitutes’ work permits would be suspended. If they kept on working regardless, they could be subject to detention in a correctional center for up to two months.428 Further, patients could be arrested in cases of resisting treatment or hiding their diseases. According to articles

Thirteen and Fourteen, doctors were responsible for reporting patients who failed to complete their treatment cycle. Physicians were also held responsible for “discover[ing] the sources of contagion.” This clause implicitly required physicians to act as investigators, to possibly interrogate their patients, to find out the “source” of contagion, i.e. the prostitute. Through this law, physicians were once again pushed into the position of regulatory and monitoring state agents and being central to the national project of the “fight against venereal diseases.”

Imposing care as a regulatory mechanism of population control moved to the forefront of the state’s policies on prostitution in the second half of the twentieth century. In the 1950s, the

General Department of Public Health initiated a “plan for fighting sexually-transmitted diseases”

(tarh-i mybārizah bā bīmārīhā-yi āmizishī) with the cooperation of the World Health

427 “Ā‘īn-I Bīmārīhā-Yi Āmīzishī” (1325), http://www.dastour.ir/brows/?lid=38386. 428 “Qānūn-i tarz-i jilawgīrī az bīmārīhā-yi āmizishāi va vāgīrdār,” (1320/1941), 293/28274, Iran’s National Archives.

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Organization (WHO).429 The central hospital for the management of this plan in Tehran was

Bimāristān-i Nijāt, which literally translates into the “Rescue Hospital.” Even in the name of this hospital there is evidence of imagining the state as the medico-moral savior of the population. On

June 29, 1953, with the cooperation of the WHO, Nijāt Hospital officially opened the center for the “fight against STDs,” which treated patients with penicillin.430 The Management and

Planning Organization of Iran provided the funds for the next seven years of the clinic’s operation. This clinic offered services such as the free treatment of patients with STDs, free blood tests for marriage certificates, educational programs for raising awareness about STDs, and training programs for doctors and nurses. The clinic established a branch for Shahrinaw.431

According to the clinic report, in March 1954 the center in Shahrianw treated 9,000 patients with gonorrhea or syphilis between June 1953 and March 1954.432 By 1955, the “plan for fighting

STDs” had expanded and reached other central cities in Iran, offering similar free medical and social services to prostitutes.433 Further, the center ran mobile units in factories and police offices across the country to test employees’ blood and treat them in case of diagnosis.434 Such free services for the public were coupled with regulatory mechanisms that allowed for further

429 “Guzārish-i ‘amaliyāt-i sāl-i 1334,” Vizārat-i bihdārī, (Tehran: 1954), 22. 430 “Guzārish-i kumisiun-i bihdāsht-i sāzmān-i barnāmah,” 1332/1953, 220/9970, Iran’s National Archives. 431 It is not definitively clear, but highly probable that this clinic is the same as the clinic that Sattārah Farmān- farmā‘īyān mentions in her reports. If so, the clinic was located next to Shahrinaw, outside the gates, on Qalamistān street. 432 “Guzārish-i kumisiun-i bihdāsht-i sāzmān-i barnāmah,” 1332/1953, 220/9970, Iran’s National Archives. 433 “Gūzārish-i ‘amalīyyāt-i sāl-i 1334 [Idārah-yi kul-i bihdāsht]” (Tehran: Vizārat-i bihdārī, Idārah-yi kul-i bihdāsht, 1334/1955), Library, Museum and Document Center of Iran Parliament, 22. 434 “Gūzārish-i ‘amalīyyāt-i sāl-i 1334 [Idārah-yi kul-i bihdāsht]” (Tehran: Vizārat-i bihdārī, Idārah-yi kul-i bihdāsht, 1334/1955), Library, Museum and Document Center of Iran Parliament, 2.

204 surveillance of prostitutes. “Controlling prostitutes” in Tehran was a priority of this hospital. A clinic was established at the Qazvin Gate area to monitor Shahrinaw prostitutes. The clinic even ran home visits to patients to enforce the treatment of prostitutes with venereal disease. By 1957, the clinic gave regular biweekly shots of penicillin to prostitutes and held monthly workshops and film screenings for them.435

While the medical system followed the regulationist model, which implicitly allowed for the legal punishment of prostitutes, the penal code victimized prostitutes. In Chapter II, I extensively explored the prelude to the development of the codified law on morality and its shifts and turns over time. Codified law on morality is the only set of laws that addresses prostitution besides the Sexually Transmitted Diseases Act. In the very first penal code passed in January

1926, a vague description of prostitution was criminalized under Article 210, in Chapter Five,

“violation of honor and derogation from chastity.” Chapter Five included other sexual crimes such as rape, extra-marital relations, and sexual relations with minors. In 1933, parliament passed an amendment to the penal code and changed the title of Chapter Five to “Crime against public modesty and morality.” Under Article 211, the following acts were punishable by six months to three years of imprisonment or a fine from two hundred and fifty to five thousand

Rials (a remarkable amount at the time): 1. Anyone who incites, encourages, or facilitates a man or a woman to moral debauchery. 2. Anyone who coerces a man or a woman to do immodest acts, or provides the means for them to commit this act. 3. Pimps or someone who runs a brothel or hires a woman for lustful purposes. The focus of Article 211 was on facilitators of the moral crime, as opposed to the actors who commit the crime. The disregard for the accountability of the

435 “Gūzārish-i sah sālah-yi qismat-i bihdāsht va ūmūr-i ‘umūmī-yi sāzmān-i barnāmah az Mihr 1334 tā Mihr 1337” (Tehran: Sāzmān-i barnāmah, 1337/1958), 24.

205 prostitute (both male and female) runs through this section. Article 213 penalized “whoever earns a living off of the prostitution of a woman” and “whoever supports a prostitute in her/his profession,” by detainment in correctional centers for six months to two years. Finally, the amendment of Section B in Article 213 crystalized the collapse of sex-work into sex-traffic:

“Anyone who encourages a woman to go abroad, or facilitates her travel abroad, knowing that she will be involved in prostitution, will be detained in correctional centers for the duration of one to three years.”

This article is interesting since it does not immediately reflect the main concerns of the public with prostitution in that period. Public hygiene, morality, and urban vice, which were the most visible points of concern around prostitution explored in Chapter I, Chapter II, and Chapter

III, are not addressed in this article. However, the section is strikingly similar to Section Two and

Three of the Mann Act in the US penal code and is most probably inspired by it. Also known as the “White Slave Traffic Act,” The Mann Act was passed in the US in 1910, and it primarily aimed “to protect women from forced prostitution and sex trafficking.” Through this Act, the federal statute banned the transportation of women across inter-state and intra-state borders for the purposes of “prostitution, debauchery, or any other immoral purposes.” This controversial

Act was passed in the US against the backdrop of the growing visibility of prostitution and the formation of red-light districts throughout the country in the early twentieth century.436 At the same time, the act reflects the forceful predominance of the myth of “white slavery,” which was geared toward controlling white American women, and enforcing the prohibition of the mixing of whites with other racialized minorities in the US. The Mann Act, together with the

Immigration Act passed in 1907, created a racialized legal regime that controlled the mobility of

436 Philey, Policing Sexuality, 2.

206 what the American legal system saw as vulnerable but dangerous women. Racialized women and men were penalized for mixing with white Americans if they were caught crossing inter-state borders.437 More significantly for the purpose of this chapter, scholars of sex-work assert that the

Act is the earliest legal instance of the collapse of sex-work into sex-traffic that establishes women as primarily victims, while reinforcing a racialized understanding of female vulnerability.438 They illustrate that the Mann Act renders the white female subject as the victim and the racialized man as the predator. As such, it prohibits prostitution implicitly, allowing the state not to recognize sex-work as legitimate labor. This act further facilitated frequent police raids at brothels all around the US.439 While in the medical model the prostitute is a source of national threat, in the American legal model the prostitute is rendered as primarily a victim. In

Iran, the medical institution and the legal institution followed both of these two different logics, and the double conceptualizations of the figure of the prostitute.

Despite the noticeable similarity between the Mann Act in the US and the Public

Morality article in Iran, the two were passed within two decades of each other, and in two very different geographical locations, social circumstances, and political situations, serving different

437 Joyce Outshoorn, The Politics of Prostitution: Women’s Movements, Democratic States and the Globalisation of Sex Commerce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 438 Jo Doezma insightfully exposes the internal contradiction of abolitionist laws, as they rely on the transparency of intent. She further calls for a move beyond the question of coercion and intent as, most times, the law fails to protect prostitutes, regardless of their choice in entering the profession. While sex-work activists insist on the need to acknowledge sex-work as a legitimate profession, abolitionists dismiss such possibilities and treat the choice of women to enter the profession as a false consciousness. For a discussion on the discourse of sex-traffic and its harmful ramifications for sex-workers globally, see Jo Doezema, “Loose Women or Lost Women? The Re- Emergence of the Myth of White Slavery in Contemporary Discourses of Trafficking in Women,” Gender Issues 18, no. 1 (1999): 23–50. 439 For more details on the effects and consequences of the Mann Act in the US, see Gayle S. Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Redear (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

207 purposes and rationales. Court records show that in Iran, similar to the US, the “Modesty” article did not merely regulate prostitution. Rather, I demonstrated in Chapter II that codified morality law reinforced heterosexuality, as it rendered consenting homosexual relations punishable by the law. This is while the Mann Act was passed in the context of growing anti-immigration sentiments and reflected and reinforced anxieties about border crossing. Although scholars have shown that prostitutes did in fact cross borders in Iran during the twentieth century, I have not yet found any sign of a public concern about their movement across borders. Rather, as discussed in Chapter III, the public anxiety in the Iranian context mainly revolved around urban-rural migration, the Cossacks’ and other foreign soldiers’ disorderly conduct in large cities in Iran, and the increasing mobility of women in heterosocial urban sites. Nevertheless, the similarity between Article 213 and the Mann Act affirms an early discourse on prostitution that revolved around the issue of victimhood. The fact that the penal code does not punish prostitutes under the

“Modesty” section is not a sign of partial tolerance towards prostitutes. Rather, it demonstrates that the law did not recognize sex-work in its voluntary form and prohibited it. Thus, through this law, the juridical body erased the legal status of prostitutes.

The question of choice and individual intent played a central but implicit role in this act, as far as prostitution was only recognized as a forced crime. This is while the medical model did not revolve around the question of choice, sanctioned the profession of prostitution, and allowed for the possibility of criminalizing prostitutes. In the medical model, prostitutes were punished and penalized because of proximity to venereal disease. However, the legal model rendered them passive and in need of rescue. The former is premised on the fear of the contagious prostitute, while the latter is premised on a sense of compassion for the victimized prostitute. The disregard of the prostitute as a legal subject is already implicitly present in the 1926 draft of the penal

208 code. However, it is even more crystalized in the final version of the codified morality law, which explicitly criminalized pandering and victimized prostitutes.

The 1926 version did not explicitly address prostitution. Rather, Article 210 briefly stipulated one to three years of correctional prison time for “anyone who forces someone, male or female, to engage in acts against chastity, or facilitates the means for them to do so.” There was no clarification on what could be counted as “acts against chastity.” However, the finalized amended version of the codified morality law, which remained in place until the fall of the

Pahlavi regime, explicitly criminalized the “panderer” (qavvād), whoever lived on the avails of the prostitution of a woman one way or the other. The penalty was higher if the prostituted subject was a minor or a virgin. Codified penal law then never recognized voluntary sex-work and only addressed it as forced labor, leaving no possibility for penalizing prostitutes. This compassionate victimizing discourse, which complemented the medical model, could hypothetically make prostitutes immune from imprisonment. However, as we will see, it allowed for their rehabilitation into “proper” citizens in the name of saving them.

4.5 Humanitarian Visions

The image of the victimized prostitute, stripped of her freedom and forced to engage in prostitution, was at the center of the abolitionist campaign within the women’s movements in

Iran. In 1922, Zandukht (1908–1952), the owner and editor of the women’s journal The

Daughters of Iran (Dukhtarān-i Iran, 1920–1922), advocated for the complete abolition of prostitution in Iran.440 She invoked the campaign of the well-known British feminist Josephine

Butler, who repealed the regulationist laws on prostitution in Britain in the late-nineteenth

440 Zandukht Shīrāzī, “Natāyij-i ārā-yi nisvān chah būdah? va ‘avāqib shirkat-i ān-hā dar idārāt-i dawlatī chah mībāshad?,” Dukhtarān-i Iran 2, no. 7 (December 1311), 9.

209 century.441 In 1928, roughly seven years after the formation of Shahrinaw, Mihrtāj Rakhshān, a women’s activist and a columnist in the women’s journal Ālam-i niswān, published an article against Shahrinaw.442 Conceptualizing the figure of the prostitute as a vulnerable “mazlūm” figure in need of rescue “nijāt,” she proposed a master state-run plan for the elimination of the district and the institutionalized rehabilitation of women. Rakhshān asked the readership to listen with a sense of “conscience” to the “lamentable” story of prostitutes in Shahrinaw:

The stories I have heard from here and there [about Shahrinaw’s prostitutes] are so lamentable, that they forced me to furiously write these lines. You, the respectable readership! For a second, imagine the lamentable state of these lost people in your just mind, and make an effort to rescue those who are oppressed.443

She asserted that prostitutes needed to be “rescued” and not punished since they were all forced into their profession. She used the example of a runaway girl, who was deceived by “lustful” men:

After a while, those lustful disrespected people who ruined her reputation get tired of her and go after another wretched girl… now imagine what this poor girl can do? Does she dare to go back to his father’s home? Even if she is brave enough, will she survive her

441 As the leader of the feminist Ladies’ National Association in Britain, Josephine Butler strongly campaigned against the Contagious Diseases Act in Britain. The Act was passed in 1864 and gave the police force in Britain immense power to prosecute and regulate prostitutes. She is one of the earliest voices amongst women activists in the Victorian era that advocated for the complete abolition of prostitution. Similar to other early feminist activists, her views on women’s rights and roles in the society do not lend themselves to today’s clear-cut categorizations of liberal/conservative. For a detailed account of Josephine Butler’s activism and a history of regulationism in Britain see Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 442 Badr al-Dujjī Mihrtāj Rakhshān graduated from the American School in Tehran during the Constitutional Revolution and established one of the earliest women’s public schools in Tehran called “Umm al-Madāris.” She was an active figure during the Constitutional Revolution and mobilized many women to join street rallies. See Humā Sarshār, “Chi kasī bi yād-i khanūm mudīr ast?,” Qulām Rizā Salāmī and Afsaneh Najmabadi, Nahzzat-i nisvān- i Sharq, Chāp-i 1, Majmūʻah-ʼi mutālaʻāt-i zanān 2 (Tehran: Shīrāzah, 1384), 313-329. 443 Salāmī and Najmabadi, Nahzzat-i nisvān-i Sharq, 310.

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father and brother? No way! Probably after wandering around for a few days she gets trapped in the arms of a lady broker in Shahrinaw.444

The minute the girl entered the “horrible graveyard [of Shahrinaw]” all other doors were closed to her, and there was no going back. Rakhshān suggested that prostitutes commit a “forced crime,” (jināyat-i ijbārī). Her narrative at once established the myth of the over-used, consumed, and powerless prostitute. To make the distinction between prostitution and forced prostitution, she argued:

I am not a fan of prostitutes. In fact, I hate them so much that even their breath scares me. However, I defend those wretched ones who have been deceived and are now awakened from their ignorance. They regret their doings and desire to return, but all the doors are shut for them. They have no safe haven. I want to open these doors to them, and rescue them from this forced crime.445

Rakhshān resolved the moral ambivalence towards the figure of the prostitute by drawing a line between voluntary prostitution and forced prostitution. This line is premised on the assumption that there can be access to the inner intention of prostitutes and that such intensions can be transparent. Further, it evokes a compassionate attitude towards the vulnerable prostitute while allowing for a hostile response to voluntary prostitution. From narratives of runaway girls from domestic abuse to sold wives,to addict husbands or fathers, the one-line background information reiterated and re-inscribed victim narratives that invited compassionate attitudes towards prostitutes. But how can one distinguish between forced prostitution and voluntary prostitution?

This central question persists in the discourse on global sex-traffic even today. As the issue ties in with inner intention, it does not lend itself to the transparency that modern law assumes and

444 Salāmī and Najmabadi, Nahzzat-i nisvān-i Sharq, 311. 445 Salāmī and Najmabadi, Nahzzat-i nisvān-i Sharq, 311.

211 requires in order to function.446

The Iranian state regulated prostitution with medical provisions, criminalized it within the criminal code, and at the same time joined the international treatise of “Prohibition of

Prostitution,” which banned the “selling and buying of women” in 1958. The protocol collapsed all sex labor into forced labor, facilitating a compassionate attitude towards prostitutes. This compassionate state-oriented attitude, however, is haunted by a resentful shadow that fears the willful prostitute, whose intention and inner self is detrimental to nationalist and moralist agendas. The spill-over of resentment and fear into the compassionate rhetoric is visible in

Rakhshān’s proposed plan for saving prostitutes. She recommended the the state establish a

“House of Hope” (khānah-yi umīd) for the rehabilitation of prostitutes who wanted to quit their occupation. She referred to this center as a “sacred sanctuary” for prostitutes who regret their own doings. In the “House of Hope,” former prostitutes would receive health care, moral lessons, simple food and clothing, and the opportunity to learn skills such as sewing and would therefore become productive citizens. Rakhshān demanded that prostitutes’ “daily working hours, study time, sleep and dining patterns, and leisure time needs to be disciplined.” She conceptualized the state in this scenario as the main responsible actor for providing institutionalized moral recovery for prostitutes who wanted to quit their occupation. This “charitable” measure, according to her, was “the most sacred of national measures.” Later in the Second Oriental Women’s Congress, held in Tehran in 1932, Nour Hamada, the founder of the “Supreme Council of Oriental

Women,”447 praised Rakhshān’s plan and further advocated for the need for the eradication of

446 For a rich collection on contemporary debates on global sex-work and sex-trafficking see Kempadoo, Sanghera, and Pattanaik, Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered. 447 For more on Nour Hamada’s status as the founder of the “Supreme Council of Oriental Women” see Marie Sandell, The Rise of Women’s Transnational Activism: Identity and Sisterhood between the World Wars,

212 prostitution:

Following Mihrtāj Rakhshān’s speech and her plan, I want to add that in progressive countries there are societies for rescuing prostitutes and making them regretful [of their profession]. In Syria, we have a society with American women members. These American women go to brothels and rescue the women who have fallen into such traps coercively. They talk to other women there and inquire about their parents. Then they guide them and impact them such that many of these wretched women are shaken by regret. They shed tears of remorse.448

As such, rescuing prostitutes and the abolition of prostitution were a part of the vision of early women’s activists, not only in Iran, but also in the region. In a sense, women’s activists revived the notion of tawbah (to repent) in an institutionalized, state-sponsored setting.449

4.6 Calculating Compassion

In Rakhshān’s vision, there was a constant oscillation between resentment and compassion, which lended itself to the indeterminacy that was only resolvable through a third regime. Since the line between forced prostitution and voluntary prostitution is blurred, it could never be definitively decided whether prostitutes deserved compassion or hostility. How did this indeterminacy and ambiguity translate into state policies and the governance of prostitution?

International Library of Twentieth Century History 36 (London New York: I.B. Tauris, 2015), 190. For more information on the life of Nour Hamada see Ellen Carol DuBois and Haleh Emrani, “A Speech by Nour Hamada: Tehran, 1932,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 4, no. 1 (2008): 107–24. 448 Salāmī and Najmabadi, Nahzzat-i nisvān-i Sharq, 149. 449 My aim in unpacking Mihrtāj Rakhshān’s compassionate logic is neither to disregard her efforts nor to condemn them as being ill-intentioned. In fact, it seems that women activists attempted to find a way to recognize and decriminalize prostitutes. In contrast to the literature that I reviewed in Chapter III, women activists insisted that “all” prostitutes had the capacity to be saved and implied that it was never late to save them. This is while the male journalists, almost unanimously, disregarded the possibility of a prostitute’s return to a legitimate life and labor, and focused on “rescuing” the children and women in the district who had not yet been put to work. Nevertheless, the dual play between compassion and resentment, humanitarianism and repression (in Didier Fassin’s words), seems to have been a deeper running tension in notions of moral citizenship and moral governance, which at once set the possibilities and limitations of moral action. My purpose in reading women’s journals here is to point toward the larger difficulty of imagining a mode of compassionate action that is not rooted in fear and resentment of the prostitute, within the institutions of modern state, which is in fact a fundamentally securitizing actor. This is a larger tension in the governance of precarious lives.

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How did the state decide on the kind of health care or housing that it provided for them? In this section, I examine a third aspect in the practical governance of prostitution at the intersection of compassion and security. The two examples illustrate how the medical regime and the welfare regime coexisted with a third regime of governance, the economy. The state’s liberal economy rationale played a crucial and central role in the state’s indeterminate regulation of prostitutes, and the kind of care they received.

In 1940, Dr. Charles Oberlin (1895–1960), the first appointed Dean of the Faculty of

Medicine in the University of Tehran, in a proposal to the Ministry of Culture, convinced the state to merge Tehran’s Venereal Disease hospital (Nāhīd) with the department of skin diseases in Sinā Hospital. In his proposal, he argued:

The purpose of establishing Nāhīd Hospital was to open a center to fight the threat of venereal diseases by keeping prostitute women who carry syphilis under supervision. This way they could free people from the threat of this disease … The cost of this place [Nāhīd hospital] is disproportionally high, for the little benefit it has for the state.450

After the merger, he wrote a report to justify his intense lobbying against the hospital and promoted his alternative approach to control venereal disease in Tehran. In his critique of the management of the hospital, he noted:

It seems relevant to mention how these women were treated there! They had chosen a lavish house with a vast garden [for these prostitutes] and had turned it into a luxurious hospital . . . they even used the fancy method of blood test to diagnose syphilis.451

According to his post-merger diagrams, the new clinic that he had established treated triple the number of syphilis patients in Nāhīd with less cost. He concluded: “The only difference is that

450 “Pishnahād-i inhilāl-i bimāristān-i nāhīd,” (1318/1939), 270/416, Iran’s National Archives. 451 “Pishnahād-i inhilāl-i bimāristān-i nāhīd.”

214 instead of admitting a few prostitutes in a lavish hospital with pointless high costs, the clinic has treated five thousand more syphilis patients.” This example signals a foundational hierarchal structure embedded in the state’s welfare programs premised on moral values and affective orientations towards or against certain citizens. Dr. Oberlin, as a state actor, considered prostitutes’ bodies as not worthy of being treated with lavishness and niche medical technologies based on a specific moral devaluation of the prostitute rooted in prior moral sensibilities and resentment of them as transmitters of venereal diseases, i.e., prostitutes. In the coming years, the state developed and experimented with other short-lived regulatory measures in order to advance the fight against venereal disease. In the process, the fight against prostitutes was sublimated into rescue missions.

The costs of these missions, however, were calculated with minimum possible expenses.

In case of the Mashhad venereal disease clinic for prostitutes that I discussed earlier, the head of the municipality (kafīl-i baladiyya), in a letter to the Municipality Council, provided a budget for the clinic. He emphasized that the budget could be drawn from the previous year’s budgetary surplus and would cover monthly “necessary” (zarūrī) expenses of 2,250 Rials and an initial cost for establishing the clinic at 9,000 Rials. 452 The local Public Health Bureau had calculated this budget under the logic of “utmost retrenchment” (kamāl-i sarfajūyī).453 Once again, physicians, who once held free visiting hours at their clinics in 1910s and 1920s, and policed and regulated prostitutes at other times, were pushed this time into the position of stingy state agents who calculated how much the state cared for patients. Three different regimes of security, care, and

452 “Mu‘āyinah-yi zanān-i mubtalā bi amrāz-i muqāribatī dar Mashhād,” 1312/1933, 293/28274, Iran’s National Archives., Letter no. 5686. 453 “Mu‘āyinah-yi zanān-i mubtalā bi amrāz-i muqāribatī dar Mashhād,” 1312/1933, 293/28274, Iran’s National Archives., Letter no. 21.

215 calculability converged in the state’s public health institutions for prostitutes, as doctors were at once agents of compassionate moral action, resentful fighters of venereal diseases, and retrenching calculators of the cost of this fight/service.

4.7 The Indeterminate Laboratory

The regulationist and the prohibitionist models coexisted in Shahrinaw, where prostitution was at its most visible public form. Following mass complaints in the 1940s, which I explored in

Chapter II, the state became increasingly aware of the problem of Shahrinaw. The district was an unwanted place with unwanted residents. In 1950, Prime Minister Mohsen Nasr in an official letter asssured the vice chairperson of parliament that “the issue of prostitution and prevention of its spread is under study and proper and necessary measures will soon be taken.”454 In the following decade, in the 1950s, with the formation of the local “Association for Fighting

Prostitution and Corruption” (anjuman-i mubārizah bā fahshā va fisād) in 1952, there emerged an intense local movement for demolishing Shahrinaw and moving the district somewhere outside of Tehran. In 1953 in an official meeting, the police, the municipality, and the state’s

Department of Justice decided on six measures regarding Shahrinaw: 1. Ward the district, 2.

Build public bathrooms, 3. Shut down cafes that served alcohol in the district, 4. Dispatch the addicts in the area to the Royal Organization hospitals (including the Farah hospital), 5. Establish a police station in the district, and 6. Collect all the children under the age of fifteen who lived in the district.455 As mentioned in Chapter II, in 1954, in response to many complaints by

454 “Mutāli‘ah va masāyil-i fahshā va ishtiqāl az sū-yi gurūh-i bihdāsht va rifāh-i ijtimā‘ī,” 1356/1967, 220/18603, Iran’s National Archives, Letter no. 19742. 455 “khulāsah-yi parvandah-yi favāhish-i mahall-i Shahrinaw kah dar idārah-yi pulīs-i Tehran bāygānī mībāshad,” in “[Nāmah-hā-yi muti‘addid az sākinīn-i Tehran,” Ābān 21, 1336/12 November, 1957.

216

Shahrinaw’s neighbors, the state warded the district and a police station was established there.456

Warding the district, however, did not resolve the impasse of regulation/abolition. Abbas

Bahārdūst was one of the neighbors who wrote many letters to parliament asking for the state to take immediate action in Shahrinaw. Unlike women’s activists who grounded their abolitionist stance in compassionate attitudes, Bahārdūst invoked Islamic Shar‘ as the principle behind his plan for the eradication of Shahrinaw. He offered two ways of handling the district: the state could either relocate the district altogether to another marginal area on the outskirts of Tehran, or it could implement Islamic principles of the Shar‘, collect all prostitutes and put them in rehabilitation centers, and eradicate the district altogether. This is of course not to suggest that there are direct legal punishments for prostitution in Islamic Shar‘. Rather, Bahardūst invoked a particular understanding of prostitution as well as that of Shar‘ to further his abolitionist agenda.

He criticized the criminal law, which penalized only panderers, contending that the number of prostitutes was increasing due to the absence of any legal punishments for them. This is the only petition that directly requested the penalization of the prostitutes. According to Bahārdūst, sending Shahrinaw prostitutes back to the towns and rural areas that they came from and shutting the district for good was the only way to save the “lives” of the three hundred thousand residents of the neighboring areas.457 Significantly, despite the absence of the compassionate attitude toward prostitutes, Bahārdūst offered a very similar approach to the problem of Shahrinaw: the ultimate rehabilitation of prostitutes in what he called an “Education Home” (dār al- tarbiyyah).458

456 “khulāsah-yi parvandah-yi favāhish-i mahall-i Shahrinaw.” 457 “[Nāmah-hā-yi muti‘addid az sākinīn-i Tehran],” Ābān 25, 1336/November 16, 1957. 458 “[Nāmah-hā-yi muti‘addid az sākinīn-i Tehran],” Mihr 12, 1336/October 4. 1957.

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In 1957, through a series of meetings between the municipality of Tehran, the Police force, the Ministry of health, and the State Department of Planning and Budgeting, the amount of care that the state offered to improve prostitutes’ life condition, in the form of financial funds was calculated. In 1957, the state conducted a thorough census in Shahrinaw, following which it promised to allocate 20 million Tomans for the “rehabilitation” and “empowerment” of prostitutes to the Association for Fighting Prostitution.459 The Association planned for the construction of “Houses of Salvation,” (khānah-yi rastigārī), similar to what Rakhshān had imagined 30 years earlier, for the purpose of the rehabilitation and empowerment of women.

They envisioned the state would demolish the district altogether and turn it into a park (a plan which was only realized after the Islamic revolution in 1979). I have not found evidence of any of such plans being implemented between 1957 and 1958. On October 4, 1958, Sayyid Ja‘far

Bihbahani, a parliament member at the time, voiced Abbas Bahārdūst’s concerns in parliament and warned that the residents of adjacent neighborhoods might do a sit-in if the state did not take immediate action. He further reminded parliament that when the district was initially formed it was outside of Tehran, and now the district, “the center of corruption”, as at the center of the city and causing a lot of unrest in the inner city.460

Ten days later, on October 15, a meeting was conducted with the Petitions

Commissioner’s Office with Bihbahani as its chair, General ‘Alavi, the head of the police department, Mr. Mahām, the mayor of Tehran, and the attorney general from the Department of

Justice. The meeting vividly portrays the indeterminacy of the statesmen in dealing with

Shahirnaw. The head of the police department believed that eradication of the district was

459 “[Nāmah-hā-yi muti‘addid az sākinīn-i Tehran],” Letter no. 922, . 460 Sayyid Ja‘far Bihbahānī, Majlis-i shawrā-yi millī, dawrah 19, jalasah 288, Mihr 10 1337/October 2, 1958.

218 impossible since the Ward had approximately 2000 residents. It was impossible to allocate the funds for the relocation of all of them, including the businesses. He further disregarded people’s petitions: “The petitioners are the ones who have moved to this area, bought houses, and are now residing there. They are the ones to blame and I wouldn’t grant them any rights.”461 He claimed,

“The presence of the prostitute in society is like a safety valve for public modesty and preserving honor.” Bihbahani agreed that prostitution responds to the “natural instincts” of people and therefore it was impossible to eradicate it. However, he was critical of “the state legally keeping prostitutes in a corrupted place.” The attorney general noted that it was illegal to force prostitutes to evacuate. He further observed that “to go against the law overtly” as not possible. He suggested that blocking “the center of corruption” (markaz-i fisād) was one way to implicitly force residents to evacuate without having to break the law. In fact, to govern Shahrinaw, the state constantly circumvents the law, while expanding its regulatory power into illegitimate spaces. Circumventing the law, in other words, was not in opposition to the rule of the state, but central to the way it functioned.

Bihbahani noted that Mayor Mahām had a relocation plan in mind. Unlike others who understood prostitutes as the cause of public unrest, Mahām indicated that many of these women were “wretched” and had no other “choice.” He expressed his own concern for the wellbeing of prostitutes and added that if the state provided him the funds, he would do his best to establish career centers, raise funds to buy sewing machines, and provide “respectful” (ābirūmand) living conditions to help these women find other occupations. He estimated that sixty percent of them would quit! Interestingly, amongst all the attendees of the meeting, he was the only one whose ultimate goal was the complete eradication of prostitution. Other members of the committee

461 “[Nāmah-hā-yi muti‘addid az sākinīn-i Tehran],”

219 chose the pragmatic path of trying to find sustainable ways to regulate prostitution and keep the neighboring residents.

Bihbahani disagreed: “prostitution is an important issue in society. One should acknowledge that for many centuries, the knowledgeable ones and the prophets have tried to put a stop to prostitution but have not been successful.” Again, similar to the earlier example of

Bahārdūst’s evocation of Islamic Shar‘, Bihbahani referenced history and religious leaders, without prior context, to make a point. Unlike in petitions, the question of religion and religious sensibilities remains in the background of state meeting proceedings and decisions. It was eventually decided that first, a commission would be formed to pass a single Act for “the fight against prostitution.” Second, the municipality was to provide the fund for the relocation of prostitutes, and third, more freedom would be given to the police and the attorney general to prevent corruption. These three measures were at once geared toward the eradication of prostitution—partly premised on a compassionate attitude—and further allowed for police raids in the district—premised on a criminalizing attitude. It is unclear how these plans panned out in the following years. In the same year, Iran joined the UN’s international “Protocol to Prevent,

Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons.”462 This move can be read a step further in the direction of abolitionist criminalization which collapses sex-work into sex-traffic. However, there was no consistent follow-up move that meaningfully changed life conditions in Shahrinaw.

In December of the same year, Mayor Mahām, in a letter to parliament, explained that to shut down the district they first had to prepare another place for prostitutes. According to him, the winter weather, the cold, and the snow were hindering the project. He promised to follow up on

462 “Qānūn-i ijāzah-yi ilhāq-i dawlat-i Iran bah purutukul-hā-yi islāhī-yi man‘i fahshā,” (1958/1337), 97/339/257, Iran’s National Archives.

220 the plan once the weather was better.463 In 1959, the state shut down one of the main gates of the district and announced that it would shut down the other gate shortly, a plan which was never realized.

Almost a decade later, in January of 1968, the head of the Association for Fighting

Prostitution, Bihāzīn, who had apparently moved from the neighborhood in the 1950s, visited the area to check on a few of his properties there. Upon his visit, he met some of the members of the

Association. Although the Association had been inactive since Bihāzīn’s move, hearing the complaints of his old neighbors and fellow members of the Association motivated Bihāzīn to inquire about the plans and promises that the state had made to the Association. In response to his letters and complaints, Safī Asfiyā,464 the managing director of the Management and

Planning Organization of Iran, annulled the 1958 promise of 20 million Tomans for the development of a center outside of Tehran for prostitutes.465 In his response letter to Bihāzīn he noted that such construction funds are only given to an executive body that the state identifies as qualified, hinting at the Association’s incompetence. According to Asfiyā, developing such a center was not in line with the government’s “Fourth Development Plan.”466 Rather, the state

463 “[Nāmah-hā-yi muti‘addid az sākinīn-i Tehran],” (Day 3, 1337/December 24, 1958), Letter no.23964. 464 Safī Asfiyā (1916–2008) is best known for implementation of a liberal economy in Iran, through the Muhammad Reza Shah’s development plans. He initiated the practice of the state opening its development projects to private companies for biding. He was a faculty member at the University of Tehran in the department of Mining and Engineering, beginning in 1939. He was the appointed director of the Management and Planning Organization of Iran 1962-1968. Known as “the technocrats’ technocrat,” he became the deputy prime minister in charge of state development plans. For more information on his life see Abbas Milani, Eminent Persians: The Men and Women Who Made Modern Iran, 1941–1979 (New York, N.Y.: Persian World Press, 2008), 92–95. 465 “Mutāli‘a va masāyil-i fahshā va ishtiqāl az sū-yi gurūh-i bihdāsht va rifāh-i ijtimā‘ī-yi sāzmān-i barnāma,” 1357/1967-1968 1346, 220/18603, Iran’s National Archives. 466 Muhammad Reza Pahlavi’s famous reformist development plans called the White Revolution consisted of a five step development plan. The fourth development plan (1968-72) focused on housing construction,

221 had allocated 30 million Tomans for the construction of a building with the capacity of 100 people for homeless women and two working camps (urdū-yi kār), with the capacity of 50 people each, where stray women (zanān-i vilgard) would be taught certain craft skills.467 Bihāzīn wrote back suggesting that the scale of the new plan and its funding was too minimal and would not at all suffice. He had a point. Despite the state’s compassionate expression toward prostitutes, the new plan was incapable of meeting the needs of the more than one thousand women who resided in Shahrinaw, as the shelters could not serve more than one tenth of the prostitutes in the district. Nevertheless, in May of the same year, he received a similar letter, this time from the head of the Health and Welfare Department in the Management and Planning

Organization of Iran, Muhamad Bāqir Namāzī, insisting that the state was going to stick to its plan.468 The value of the state’s care was then calculated according to its liberal economic rationale, and as such that it would barely suffice to meet the immediate needs of Shahrinaw residents. The archived file of Bihāzīn’s correspondences with the state includes a research report on prostitution in Tehran that was conducted by “specialists” in the Ministry of Labor. The report asserts that most women who engage in prostitution are either “slow,” not literate, without any special skills, or “greedy” (tama‘kār), and proposed that the state run further investigations on the background, health, living conditions, and working conditions of prostitutes. Significantly,

Namāzī noted that the report was unclear in its purpose: “It is not clear whether the report aims

apartmentalization, building materials, and architectural styles. For more information, see Karimi, Domesticity and Consumer Culture in Iran.

467 Interestingly, the letter further notes that the Association has no executive power. Hence, matters regarding Shahrinaw needed to be addressed through the Ministry of Internal Affairs rather than the Association. A series of letters between the Association for Fighting Prostitution and the Management and Planning Organization of Iran follow this letter. All of those letters further emphasize the lack of authority of the Association, which was established in the 1950s. 468 “Mutāli‘a va masāyil-i fahshā va ishtiqāl az sū-yi gurūh-i bihdāsht va rifāh-i ijtimā‘ī-yi sāzmān-i barnāma.”

222 to reduce prostitution or enhance their conditions!” To go back to the problematic that I presented in the beginning of this chapter, the state valorized the life of prostitutes even as it constantly oscillated between reducing their population and care for them.

As I have illustrated, it was precisely this indeterminacy between regulation and prohibition that runs through almost all different stages of state’s decision-making processes in Shahrinaw, and caused the state to never fully implement any finite plan in the district. Similar to the rationale of the merger project for Nāhīd hospital, the state proceeded in Shahrinaw with plans that minimized expenditure, while tying in new methods of compassionate regulation. In the absence of a determinate attitude toward prostitution, the economic rationale of the state dictated the future of the district.

4.8 The Social Work Center

In the same year, the state sponsored the Social Work Higher Education Institute (Āmūzishgāh-i

‘ālī-yi madadkāri-yi ijtimā‘ī) to run a thorough study of sex-work in Tehran.469 While the study had a focus on prostitution in Shahrinaw, it was aimed at encompassing different forms of sex- work, ranging from informal sex-work at cafes and bars, to street prostitution, to private brothels in Tehran, to Shahrinaw. The report of this study was published for the public in 1970 and limited to five hundred copies. A private publishing house printed it for the second time in a run of three thousand in the same year. The report has overshadowed the collective memory of

Iranians about Shahrinaw, as it is the only publicly-accessible account of the district. Farmān-

469 The Institute itself was the first of its kind. Sattāra Farmān-farmā‘iyān, who belonged to a powerful royal family that had close ties to the state, went to the US to study social work in the 1940s. Upon her return she opened a model center to train social workers. Using her ties with the royal family, she visited Muhammad Reza Shah and convinced him to partially fund her center. For more information see Sattareh Farmānfarmā‘īyān, Dukhtarī az Īrān, trans. Maryam A‘lāyī (Tehran: Nashr-i Kārang, 2004).

223 farmā‘iyān, the founder of the Social Work Institute, was assigned to lead the study.

Consequently, she has been established as the only person who had some empathy for the prostitutes in Shahrinaw and tried to improve their living and working conditions. She recounted the central goals of the study as “Facilitating the emancipation, rehabilitation (i‘ādah-yi haysiyyat), and re-empowerment (bāztavānī) of prostitutes” as well as the “prevention of the spread of prostitution.”470

The Ministry of Internal Affairs funded the research for two main reasons, the first of which was that “the burden of arresting stray women [prostitutes outside the district]” consumed the police force. The report explained how the vicious cycle of arrest, detainment, and release was wasting a part of police force constantly without any finite result. It explained that, since the law did not penalize prostitutes, the police arrested them as stray women (zanān-i vilgard), kept them over night in the station, and transferred them to the women’s prison the next day. After booking them, they were taken to court, where they mostly accepted their charges and the punishment, which was usually detainment for the period of no more than ten days.471 This was while, the ministry explained, considering the scope of population increase and development of

Tehran, the state was constantly facing a lack of resources to cater to Tehran’s population.

Secondly, the ministry was concerned about the abundance of lay people’s petitions against prostitutes and their expressions of discontent. Ultimately, then, the project was launched and funded due to a) lack of resources and b) interest of petitioning residents. The state reported that it spent its recourses (both human force, and space [of prisons]) with no tangible ultimate return.

Further, the state held itself responsible for responding to the interest of other ordinary residents

470 Farmān-farmā‘īyān, Pīrāmūn-i rūspīgarī dar shahr-i Tehran, 13. 471 Farmān-farmā‘īyān, Pīrāmūn-i rūspīgarī dar shahr-i Tehran, 207.

224 of Tehran. As such, although the state expressed a sense of compassion toward prostitutes with launching this research project, the main drive was the neighborhood’s interests and the high cost of the management of prostitution for the urban police force. The resources that the state allocated to the social work center were partly to reduce the need for other state resources.

In order to conduct this research, Farmān-farmā‘iyān established a social service center in the district to offer services, gather data, and conduct research about the aptitudes of the discipline of social work in Iran. The center negotiated with different local institutions to improve the immediate life conditions of prostitutes in the district. The municipality asphalted the two main streets, filled the filthy pools or turned them into fountains, promised to build three hygienic public washrooms, assigned one street sweeper to clean the running ditches, and agreed to allocate hydro branches and power to the district. The center also issued health cards for the women and obligated the madams to make sure that their prostitutes kept their cards updated.472

The center further made an effort to attend to the quality of life and the health and economic conditions of prostitutes. In collaboration with the Nijāt hospital, they identified the workers who had syphilis or gonorrhea and convinced 569 of them to seek treatment. Interestingly, only 84 followed up and finished their treatments. The workers were obliged to open bank accounts with the logic that they would learn how to save money and work their way out of their debt bondages.473 The center concluded that despite prostitutes’ “unfavorable” conditions, health issues, addiction, illiteracy, and financial destitution, with assistance and reliance on their

472 Farmān-farmā‘īyān, Pīrāmūn-i rūspīgarī dar shahr-i Tehran, 216, 217. 473 Unfortunately, there are no detailed accounts of these trainings in the report. However, the idea of using banks as educational tools to teach saving could be the subject of more detailed analysis.

225 religious beliefs there was still hope for their “rehabilitation.”474 The study suggested two different lists of long-term plans and short-term immediate plans for the state to implement with regards to prostitutes in the district and beyond. The center continued to run in the district until after the Islamic Revolution, when the district was shut down.

The social work center did not entirely escape the liberal economic logic of the state. For instance, one of the recommendations was to train female brothel managers, the madams, to control and monitor the health of prostitutes. This is partly due to the fact that the madams had intimate ties with the women of their houses and could use that personal relationship for the needs of larger state politics. The implementation of such minute techniques of governance further reduced the resources that the state had to spend on the control of the health of prostitues.

Nevertheless, the attitude of the center cannot be entirely reduced down to that of the state. With twenty thousand conducted interviews, the center, to an extent, attempted to gain the trust of the madams (managers of brothels) and prostitutes and include them in the process of decision- making for the district. It further debunked myths about prostitutes, one of which was that they were primarily from rural areas and that rural-urban migration was a cause of the increase of prostitution in Tehran. The report is rather interesting since it pulls in two directions. The study sits well with previous state measures, as it ultimately targeted the elimination of prostitution.

However, at the same time it aimed to provide immediate care for the prostitutes.

Notwithstanding, the project was funded primarily as a research project. By allowing the report to go public, the state projected a compassionate image of itself. The report concluded by asserting that prostitution was an “inevitable reality” and one needed to “bear the disturbing

474 Farmān-farmā‘īyān, Pīrāmūn-i rūspīgarī dar shahr-i Tehran, 128.

226 phenomenon.”475 I have not found any documents on the following eight years of the life of the district, which potentially potentially suggests that the district continued to dwell somewhere between legitimacy and illegitimacy, as an indeterminate and improper part of Tehran.

4.9 Conclusion

The outcome of the series of meetings in 1957–1958 was a tentative decision that entailed moving the district to a “proper land” (zamīn-i munāsib) outside Tehran in the southwest end, either in Nāziābād or in Tehran-i naw. The latter literally and ironically translates as “The New

Tehran”. The police were put in charge of shutting down both gates of the districts in order to disrupt brothel businesses in Shahrinaw. The final goal was to force the owners to sell their properties in the district and relocate to the newly built neighborhood outside of Tehran. As mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, in 1959 the state shut down the northern gate to move on with the plan.476 Since businesses, including cafes and restaurant, petitioned against this unlawful action, and the budget for the purchase and construction of the new neighborhood outside of Tehran was not “provided,” the state abandoned the plan. Regardless of the outcome, it is significant that every time that the state decided to make an exceptional and unlawful measure, it eventually expanded its regulatory mechanisms over prostitutes in Tehran. The first was in 1922, when Shahrinaw was formed as a space of exception to the law and the proper space of the city. The second time was in 1954, when the district was gated. The third time was in 1957, when a police station was established in the district.

475 Farmān-farmā‘īyān, Pīrāmūn-i rūspīgarī dar shahr-i Tehran, 224. 476 “[Nāmah-hā-yi muti‘addid az sākinīn-i Tehran],” Isfand 26, 1338/March 16. 1959, Letter no. 26416.

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Farmān-farmā‘iyān’s social work offered services to prostitutes so that they could better navigate their everyday lives in the district. Nevertheless, the center experimented with modes of compassionate regulation such as health cards and using madams and brothel managers to monitor prostitutes’ health, referral services, and work camps. The interviews with prostitutes might have worked to allow the state institutions to hear the voice of prostitutes. However, ultimately, they helped the social work center estimate how many of them were willing to quit and explore different ways to motivate them to do so. It further, experimentally, put a few women in work camps with dual education-production (amūzishī-tawlidī) purposes. The eventual goal was to subject the exceptional space of Shahrinaw and prostitution to regulatory mechanisms. The state expanded its rule as its sovereignty experimented with modern regimes of care as well as with regulation mechanisms in the district for around forty years.

While the state’s biopower was expressed in the district as subjects were regulated, the liberal logic of the state and the moral sentiments of the populace did not allow for the integration of the prostitute-subjects, as vulnerable and dangerous, into the political system of the state. Hence, Shahrinaw consistently received fewer resources and funds, as the lives of its residents were marked as less worthy than the lives of other residents. The funding for the regeneration of the district that was promised in 1958 never came through. Ten years later, after one preliminary research study in 1968 conducted in Tehran University, the state funded the social work center in Shahrinaw, not necessarily to improve the lives of prostitutes, but to reduce the resources that the police were wasting on them.

Putting all the state’s policies in Shahrinaw next to one another, it becomes clear that there was never a master plan with regards to Shahrinaw. Until the 1960s, the state played the matter of Shahrinaw by ear, taking measures one at a time, letting them unfold in the texture of

228 the city. Even Farmān-farmā‘iyān’s efforts did not paradigmatically change the spatial or legal arrangement of the district. The public interests of the district’s neighbhors and the health of the population were particularly influential factors in this fifty-year long process of indeterminate experimentation in the district. Public hygiene and principles of public morality together perceived the figure of the prostitute, at once, as both a threat to the public order and threatened by disease and in need of rescue. Islamic concepts and practices were, to a great extent, backgrounded in conversations between state institutions. Nevertheless, they kept recurring in the language of the populace. The petitions and public press imagined the institutionalization of

Islamic practices such as “salvation” (rastigārī) and repentance (tawbah), through the establishment of institutional spaces such as the “House of Hope,” and the “House of salvation,” which, interestingly, was integrated into state mechanisms of regulation and control in the form of work camps, or dual purpose educational-correctional centers. As such, the district became a place where the state displayed a compassionate image of itself, attracting both nationalist and

Islamist sensibilities. The state might have acted upon Islamic and nationalist aspirations about suffering, compassion, and kindness. However, the mode of action in realizing those aspirations cannot be understood as merely arising from Islamic tradition or nationalist sentiments. Rather, they were infused with mechanisms inherent to modern modes of governance, premised on a rivalry between the regulatory power of the state and the eliminating power of the state. The ultimate sovereign act was to arbitrarily oscillate between these two expressions of the modern state.

The deep incoherency of the way in which the state managed Shahrinaw is not a sign of the ineffectiveness of state institutions. Rather, it is exactly what is at the heart of modern state: sovereign and indeterminate experimentation. In this case, with the concept of “good life” and

“welfare state,” within the liberal economic rationale of the state. In effect, the space of the

229 district, as a space where less-worthy citizens lived, served as an “underfunded and overextended” laboratory of the modern nation-state in Iran, where the relations between the state and subject citizens were constantly being tested and shaped with “minimum expense and maximum ambition.”477

477 Prakash argues that colonies served as laboratories of modernity, where authority was instituted with “minimum expense and maximum ambition.” Similarly, the space of the district was a subaltern space in relation to Tehran. See Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: University Press, 1999): 13. While his formulation reinstates a sense of lack in modernity in colonies, I find the idea of laboratory still useful.

230

Afterward On Erasure

The closure of Shahrinaw is similar to its origin story, wrapped in competing politicized myths with ideological underpinnings. In July 1979, roughly six months after the Revolution, three

Shahrinaw women were executed by firing squad. The women are mostly remembered as

Shahrinaw prostitutes, and the act of their execution as a sign of the Islamic state’s inhumane and arbitrary violence.478 Some narratives hold that other residents of the district were “ordered” to become temporary wives.479 Other accounts suggest that many of them were encouraged and sometimes even forced to repent, and were pushed into frequent temporary marriages with revolutionary guards or Iran-Iraq soldiers.480 The Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex-work claims that after the Revolution, “some prostitutes were publicly stoned.”481 These narratives of violence against the female prostitutes of Shahrinaw play a role in the production of a radical shift from the constitutional, modern, and democratic pre-revolutionary Pahlavi state, to the theocratic and backward Islamic state. The gendered “twin figure of the Islamic fundamentalist and his female victim,” lies at the center of these accounts. Regardless of their confirmability,

478 For an example of a public reference to the executed women as prostitutes see Shahāb Mirzāyī, “Mahkūmān-i dādgāh-hā-yi inqilāb-i Islāmī bi rivāyat-i tasvīr,” news, www.bbc.com, (November 6, 2015), http://www.bbc.com/persian/iran/2015/10/151018_l44_iranian_revolutionary_injustice_pic. 479 Maryam Poya, Women, Work and Islamism: Ideology and Resistance in Iran (London; New York: ZED Books, 1999), 68. 480 Shahla Haeri, Law of Desire: Temporary Marriage in Shi’i Iran (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1989), 100. 481 Melissa Hope Ditmore, “Islam,” Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006), 392.

231 these stories feed the Western fear-driven “war on terror” that dehumanizes Middle Eastern populations as either female helpless victims or heartless male predators.482

Despite the stubborn memory of the three women as prostitutes in public imagination, the

Revolutionary Court sentenced them as “prostitution gang leaders” (sardamdārān-i bānd-i fahshā).483 Sakīnah Qāsimī, Sāhib Afshārī, and Zahrā Māfīhā were the three women who were found guilty of “running brothels” and “trafficking women.” 484 On the eve of the execution,

Itillā‘āt Newspaper reported:

All three women were found to be “corruptors of the land and fatal to the generation” [mufsid fil ‘arz va muhlik-i nasl] for crimes including the spread of prostitution, running multiple brothels, and deceiving women and girls and selling them to the ill-reputed 485 district [i.e. Shahrinaw].”

A residue of humanitarian discourse persisted in the language of the state as the three women were branded as sex-traffickers and brothel owners, and not as prostitutes. Could one possibly insist on a different reading of the event in the light of this peripheral state rhetoric? Could one read Itillā‘āt‘s article in light of, and not in spite of, the humanitarian discourse on Shahrinaw that was in place before the revolution? The series of executions that took place in Iran between

1979-1980 were conducted by the “Revolutionary Court” (Dādgāh-i Inqilāb), which functioned above the juridical system and intended to purge the country from what was framed as the

482 For the gendered orientalist politics of the representation of the Middle East in Western feminist discourses, see Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2013); Charles Hirschkind and Saba Mahmood, “Feminism, the Taliban, and Politics of Counter-Insurgency,” Anthropological Quarterly 75, no. 2 (April 1, 2002): 339–54; Lila Abu-Lughod, “‘Orientalism’ and Middle East Feminist Studies,” Feminist Studies 27, no. 1 (April 1, 2001): 101–13. 483 “Sah zan dar Tehran tīrbārān shudand,” Ittila’at, 15902 edition, Tīr 21, 1358/July 12, 1979, 1. 484 “Sah zan dar Tehran tīrbārān shudand,” Ittila’at, 15902 edition, Tīr 21, 1358/July 12, 1979, 2. 485 “Sah zan dar Tehran tīrbārān shudand,” Ittila’at, 15902 edition, Tīr 21, 1358/July 12, 1979, 2.

232 corruption of the previous regime. It is estimated that the revolutionary court executed thousands of citizens, from leftist Islamist guerrillas and political activists to established government politicians and military members, to drug dealers, entertainers, and sex-traffickers, in the year that followed the Revolution. The state performed and declared a moment of rupture in the history of Iran through these mass executions. Could one read this spectacle of rupture against itself? In the case of the execution of the three Shahrinaw women, one can observe the continuation of humanitarian discourse at the peripheries of the state discourse. In addition, the abolitionist discourse that had a strong pull in the governance of Shahrinaw before the revolution continued to play a role in the series of events that led to its physical demolishment. In fact, the state narrative of the destruction of Shahrinaw was premised on Islamic humanitarian aspirations that were formed roughly in the 1940s, and were rooted in earlier transformations of the role of

Islam in public life, as the guardian of public morality, in the early-nineteenth century.

The exact progression of the plan to demolish the houses in the district is imbued with opaque, un-confirmable, and sometimes contradictory information. In 1979, shortly after the spontaneous crowd march to the district, the “Committee of the Islamic Revolution” (kumitah-‘i inqilāb-i Islamī), the branch of the South of Tehran, under the command of Ayatollah Īravānī, established an office in Shahrinaw.486 The office was responsible for identifying the three major female brothel owners in the district, who were later handed to the Revolutionary Court and sentenced to death in July. The gate of the district was officially closed a few months after the execution of the three women, in December 1979.487 The timing coincided with the month of

486 Ali-Qulī Fūdāzī, Az fa‘āliyyat-i bīsh az hizār nafar dar Shahrinaw va mukhālifat-i rūhāniyūn-i barjastah bā takhrīb- i ān tā sahm-i gūgūsh az cafe shikūfah-yi naw, interview by Abbas Tahmāsibizādah, ILNA News Agency, March 5, 2017. 487 “Barā-yi hamīshah darhā-i Qal’ah imrūz bastah shud,” 13.

233

Muharram, during which the district was closed in previous years. It is possible that the state took advantage of the month of Muharram’s customary closure of the district and never allowed the gates to be opened again. This is roughly eleven months after the initial riot in Shahrinaw.

The humanitarian discourse of the consolidating Islamic state is most visible in the interviews with government officials and clerics who were a part of the committee that was based in the district, as well as with female inhabitants of Shahrinaw. The Javānān magazine published a series of reports that followed the progression of the plan for demolishing the district. It conducted an interview with the official in charge of the Shahrinaw office, Mr. Bahārī.

Reportedly, he referred to Shahrinaw as “the cancerous tumor” and suggested that “there has to be a substantial plan for the women here. So far, we and other institutions have failed to come up with concrete plans for their rescue. There is all talk, but no action.”488 Javānān interviewed many clerics including ‘Āllāmah Nūrī (1932-2008), Shaikh Muhammad Muntazirī (1944-1981), and Ayatollah Ibrahim Khusravānī (1924-2017), who unanimously held that the state first had to plan for how to support the women, and then propose the abolition of the district.489 Despite the gesture toward a break from the previous regime, their logic was very similar to that of the officials’ meeting proceedings in the 1960s during the Pahlavi period. Another cleric commented that “the Ward is the reification of the wretchedness, disdain, and debasement of the woman and is a sign of the disregard of the real rights of women in the previous regime.”490 The later pieces on the district drew on international anti-trafficking discourse to legitimize the momentum that

488 “Qal‘ah yā mahallah-yi Badnām-i Tehran,” Javānān-i imrūz 14, no. 670 (December 12, 1358), 19. 489 “Mubārizah bā fahshā az vazāyif-i qat‘ī-yi jāmi‘ah-yi Islamī ast,” Javānān-i imrūz 14, no. 671 (Āzar 12, 1358/December 10, 1980), 18. 490 “Mubārizah bā fahshā az vazāyif-i qat‘ī-yi jāmi‘ah-yi Islamī ast,” Javānān-i imrūz 14, no. 671 (Āzar 12, 1358/December 10, 1980), 19.

234 abolitionists reached after the revolution. The magazine reported under-aged girls with fake ID cards and birth certificates in the district, and further connected the state’s temporary closure of

Shahrinaw to the larger global anti-trafficking humanitarian efforts of the United Nations. In later issues, Javānān included reported stories of the lives of women, who were trafficked into the district and trapped with debt bondages and drug addiction, that resemble the popular 1940s semi-ethnographic literature on the district.491

In March 1980, the “Bureau for Combating the Forbidden” (Idārah-‘i mubārizah bā munkarāt) ordered a team to bulldoze the houses on Shahrinaw. The committee that was based in the district claimed that many of the women found husbands with the help of the newly established “Bureau for Combating the Forbidden,” their debt bondages were paid, and many quit their addictions! The committee insisted that only some of them refused to leave, despite the frequent warnings about the destruction of the Ward. In a recent interview, Ali-Qulī Fūdāzī, the commander in charge of the demolishment plan, denied any violence against the female residents of the district. He further noted the internal disagreements amongst the higher clerical officials on the decision to destruct the district, but asserted that he was just the executor and bound by the command of his higher officer, Ayatollah Iravānī. He explained that since there was no budget allocated for the destruction of the district, his team sold the joists and girders of the houses that they demolished to pay for bulldozer rentals. He commented retrospectively on the destruction of the district: “Now, after thirty-eight years, I’d say what we did was right.”492 He recounted the poor health and hygiene conditions of Shahrinaw women and the rate of crime and

491 “Bā rūhīyyah-yi inqilābī az Shahrinaw dīdan kunīm,” Javānān-i imrūz 14, no. 673 (Day 3, 1358/Dececmber 24, 1980), 20-21. 492 Ali-Qulī Fūdāzī, Az fa‘āliyyat-i bīsh az hizār nafar dar Shahrinaw.

235 violence there, but expressed regret for not managing to help the women: “Unfortunately, we failed to rehabilitate the women and to assimilate them into society.”493 He claimed that many of the women were handed over to Bihzīstī, one of the main state social welfare organizations after the Revolution. However, due to the lack of resources, Bihzīstī was unable to shelter them and many became homeless.494

The significance of these narratives is in demonstrating that the violence against women in Shahrinaw, both before and after the Revolution, was not in spite of, but in line with humanitarian discourse, for the lack of which Iran is regularly condemned in the global scene.

Particularly, in cases where the revolutionary measures of the consolidating state did not abide by the law, the discourse of humanitarianism came in handy to legitimate the state’s move. The implication of the continuous presence of the language of humanitarianism in the governance of

Shahrinaw, both before and after the revolution, is twofold. First, this counter-narrative pushes back against the narrative of rupture that the state produced at the time of the revolution. Second, it exhibits that the legitimacy of the Islamic state was not despite modern humanitarianism, but rather was a local application of it. Commander Fūdāzī explained that ten years after the destruction of most of the houses in Shahrinaw, he ran a similar demolishment plan for the houses on Istakhr street that was located next to the district, in order to clean up the residues of prostitution businesses in the area.495 In 1997, approximately twenty years after the erasure of

Shahrinaw, the municipality inaugurated the entertainment-educational complex of Rāzī, built on

493 Ali-Qulī Fūdāzī, Az fa‘āliyyat-i bīsh az hizār nafar dar Shahrinaw. 494 Bihzīstī was inaugurated in August 1980 though merging a few social service organizations during the Pahlavi period. Thus, it was not yet formed at the time of the demolition of Shahrinaw. Fūdāzī here might be pointing to one of the other social service organizations before they were all merged into Bihzīstī. 495 Ali-Qulī Fūdāzī, Az fa‘āliyyat-i bīsh az hizār nafar dar Shahrinaw.

236

A demolished brothel in Shahrinaw, 1980. Shahrinaw, in brothel demolished A Figure12

237 top of the remnants of Shahrinaw. The complex center includes a library, a cultural center

(farhangsarā), an artificial lake with a lighthouse, and a mini amusement park. Today, what is left of Shahrinaw are the remnants of a couple of abandoned apartments at the south end of the park, unrecognizable to the eyes of the ordinary passerby.

***

I brought to closure the story of Shahrinaw in the same moment that I opened it to unpack the larger contributions of this dissertation for the fields of Iranian Studies and Islamic Studies.

Throughout this dissertation, I have attempted to problematize the ruptures and the dichotomies on which the history of the Iranian modern state is premised. I have shown that the place of Islam in public life went through transformations in the early twentieth century as it was conceptualized as a disciplinary force, pertinent to the project of controlling the territory and the population of the Iranian nation-state. Islamic periodicals and physicians of the time anchored on the moral crusade against prostitution as the primary cause of the spread of venereal disease and population decrease, and re-articulated Islam as compatible with microbiology and microbiological sensibilities. As Islam became the guardian of public morality, it was pivotal to the local movement of Tehran residents to evict prostitutes outside of the city. Through an examination of the codified law on morality, a few court cases of acts against morality and chastity, and petitions against the residency of prostitutes in the city, I illustrated how Islam was pivotal to the analytics of urban moral governance. I demonstrated that while the secularizing legislative body of the state aspired to privatize religion, other executive state institutions, including the Public Health Bureau, the municipality, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the police, indeterminately shifted the place of Islam in the governance of Tehran, sometimes acting in line with Islamic public concerns, and other times acting against them. In 1922, the state

238 responded to the concerns of the residents, rooted in medicalized Islamic morality, and formed the red-light district of Tehran. In 1980, the Islamic Republic demolished the district in the name of Islam. Despite the Islamic Republic’s insistence on a radical rupture from the Pahlavi state, its actions do not fall far from that of the Pahlavi government. They both responded to public expressions of discontent with prostitution in Tehran that anchored on Islamic moral sensibilities, and they both decided on the role of Islam in public life, albeit through two different modalities of power, i.e., one formed the space of prostitution and the other eliminated it.

Further, the plan to turn the district into a large park, which was implemented only twenty years after the Revolution in the 1990s, was first proposed by a local association more than two decades prior to the Revolution, in the 1950s. The Management and Planning Organization of

Iran reviewed this application and approved it for implementation, but the budgetary funds were never raised for its execution. If we define secularism as the power of the state to draw the line between the domains of private and public, and decide on the role of Islam in public life, then can we think about the Islamic Republic as perpetuating secularism? If so, then can one critique social and political analyses of Iran that are, one way or the other, founded on false assumptions about the strict separation between religious and secular states?496 This view allows for the analysis of the Iranian government as a modern state that is assembled with mechanisms of modern governance including secularism. My analysis of the history of the governance of the district further rejects the idea of the incompleteness of the project of modernity in Iran, opening possibilities to analyze the Iranian state as functioning within the framework of secular modern states. This view problematizes the linear historical narratives of the secularization and

496 For a similar critique of the dual modern-premodern analysis of the state through Agamben’s idea of sovereignty in Iran, see Arzoo Osanloo, “The Measure of Mercy: Islamic Justice, Sovereign Power, and Human Rights in Iran,” Cultural Anthropology 21, no. 4 (November 2006): 570–602.

239 subsequent Islamization of Iran for failing to grasp the significance of Islam as a key analytic of governmentality in pre-revolutionary Iran, as well as the presence of the secular power of the state in the post-revolutionary period.

But the history of modernity itself is told as a radical break from the past. Foucault is cast as the philosopher of the idea of modernity as the great rupture of history. Modernity, for him, comes with an epistemic reordering of things. Most significantly, in Discipline and Punish he contrasted the pre-modern eliminating power of the sovereign state with the productive institutions of the modern world. He re-conceptualized the modern power of the state as bio- power, the power that submits life to the political institutions of the state and thus politicizes life as well as bodies. Instead of expressing its power through the sovereign decision on what life to take, the modern state regulated highly mechanized institutional spaces that managed lives and cared for the population. Power then ceased to be a reductive force and became productive of docile subjects. In prisons, for instance, he illustrated how strong docile bodies were mass- produced.497 Agamben, whose work has provided the theoretical blueprint for this dissertation, revisits Foucault’s work on bio-politics to problematize this very moment of rupture in history, exposing the inner solidarity between the state’s power over life and its power over death.498

497 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 295. 498 Agamben extends Foucault’s concept of bio-politics to allow for an analysis that applies biopolitics to the politics of totalitarian regimes. He argues: “Foucault continued to investigate the processes of subjectivization that, in the passage from the ancient to modern world, bring the individual to objectify his own self, constituting himself as a subject and, at the same time, binding himself to a power of external control. Despite what one might have legitimately expected, Foucault never brought his insights to bear on what could well have appeared to be the exemplary place of modern politics: the politics of great totalitarian states of the twentieth century.” (119) He places bio-politics at the center of the violence of modern states: “only because politics in our age had been entirely transformed into bio-politics was it possible for politics to be constituted as totalitarian politics to a degree hitherto unknown.” (120) He further points to the “intimate symbiosis” between modern politics and life which lays bare the precariousness of “the intelligibility that still seems to us to characterize the juridico-political foundation of classical politics.” See, Agamben, Homo Sacer. This understanding of bio-politics is central to the conception of the modern state in this dissertation. In particular, morality intimately implicates subjects with state

240

Examining totalitarian regimes of governance in the twentieth century, he argues that the supposedly pre-modern sovereign power of the state to eliminate is at the heart of bio-politics.

The coincidence of these two modes of power, the reductive and the productive, is most visible in states of exception. Bio-power expands its regulatory reach in spaces of the dwelling of subjects that reside on the threshold of legality.

In the case of Iran, the residents of the red-light district of Tehran were marked as marginal and unfit by the system of citizenship, and as such they were governed under the state of exception. The questions as to whether to end the life of the district, or to further regulate it, allowed the state to expand its power over what it officially excluded. I have attempted to demonstrate that the study of the governance of precarious lives and vulnerable subjects reveals the deep tensions within modern state institutions. This tension is not in spite of modern state rationale, but in line with it. In particular, I unpacked how the expansion of the power of the state to regulate, regiment, and control sexual conduct and moral space was experimented on in the space of the district. Despite the humanitarian impulse that became widely popular during the

1940s, the indeterminate sovereign power of the state ceaselessly oscillated between different regimes of governance, between regulating or eliminating the district. The significance of the analysis that I have provided is that it puts the governance of a periphery, i.e. the district, at the center of the rule of the modern state, and not on the margins. This approach can open up new avenues for scholarly endeavors to understand the governance of the margins and similar sites of exception as central to modern modes of governance and not as exceptional instances that can be ignored or bracketed.

politics. But the judicial system can never quite grasp this intimate relationship between politics and morality. Therefore, moral governance resides at the threshold of legality, and its governance politicizes citizens’ lives in ways that are not fully determined by the law.

241

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