Young and Defiant in Tehran. Shahram Khosravi
attraction in Iran. As in Dubai, life on the island is organized around shopping. One of the attractions of the island is an old ship stranded on the southwestern shore. It is said that, a long time ago, a Greek cargo vessel reached this part of the sea for unknown reasons, but was stranded for ever. The natives say that the owners of the ship set it on fire before leaving it: and indeed nothing is left of the ship but a steel structure. Taghvai’s film tells the story of two workers who collect cardboard containers—marked by Kodak, Dauoo, Toshiba, Konica, and Aiwa brand marks—washed up on the beach from passing ships. The men dry out the boxes to build their huts. The wife of one of the men, who gathers some objects left by a passing Greek ship, is afflicted by a strange illness. The village medicine man claims it comes from the boxes. After a zar ritual, the woman is cured and the men throw the boxes in the sea. The film graphically shows how the local culture, health, and authenticity are endangered by consumerism and foreign culture. When a journalist asked Taghvai why he had chosen the Greek ship as a metaphor, the director answered: “Why not. Was Greece not the cradle of Western culture?”
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Condemning the immorality of society prior to the Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini often used commodities and consumption as examples. The Revolutionary agenda was to save the virtue and purity of the ummat from consumerism, by promoting self-restraint (qena‘at) and idealizing poverty. Excessive consumption (esraf) and an ostentatious lifestyle (tajamulgarai) became synonymous with “bourgeois aesthetics” and were automatically defined as signs of adopting an anti-revolutionary position. People preferred to conceal their wealth, in order not to be stamped as anti-revolutionary. For instance, many hid their luxury cars in their garages for several years.4
The Noble Dispossessed
At the end of the 1970s, the slum dwellers in Tehran numbered as many as a million (Bayat 1997: 29). Ayatollah Khomeini, as the opposition leader, found potential power among them for revolting against the Shah. Claiming that Islam stands on the side of the disenfranchised (mahroumin) and the “dispossessed” (mostaz‘afin), Khomeini characterized the Revolution as a movement against the “oppressors” (mostakberin). Its goal was to induce more social justice for the poor. The “dispossessed” were praised and deprivation was glorified. While the “oppressors” were depicted as venal, decadent, and corrupt, the “dispossessed” were “portrayed as the repository of innocence possessing genuine human values. If unbridled pursuit of material wealth had rendered the elite heartless lackeys of capital, the suffering of the dispossessed had humanized them” (Dorraj 1992: 221). Thus, pain (dard) and suffering (ranj) had become hallmarks of “high human values.”
Ayatollah Khomeini frequently attested his commitment to the disenfranchised in his speeches: “I kiss the hands of the simple grocer” (Khomeini 1981: 184); or “Islam belongs to the dispossessed” (quoted in Abrahamian 1989: 22). The clerics and officials of the Islamic regime were zealous in presenting themselves as belonging to the lower classes, and the gradual romanticization of poverty became a salient feature of the theocrats’ political populism (see Abrahamian 1993; Dorraj 1992). The ideological romanticization of poverty pursued by the Iranian authorities draws nourishment from Sufi traditions and literature. Poverty and a working-class lifestyle are celebrated in Iranian popular movies and soap operas. Following the famous phrase of Imam Ali, “The best wealth is self-restraint (qena‘at),” the Iranian media glorify poverty and self-abasement by an endless restaging of the martyrs’ testaments and life stories.
Even primary school textbooks are used to promote ideas of poverty and modesty. The most illustrative example of poor-is-beautiful-assessment may be in the textbook for the first grade. In the pre-Revolutionary first grade textbooks there is an illustration of a middle-class family sitting around the breakfast table.5 The father wears a suit and tie and is shaved. The mother has short hair and is unveiled. The teenage girl is dressed in red and has her arm on the table. She is the image of self-confidence. Her brother, dressed in yellow, is talking. The parents are looking at him. On the table are coffee cups, a milk jug, a sugar bowl, plates, and knives. After the Revolution this picture was replaced with a more humble one, where the family is clearly less affluent. The family members are eating dinner sitting on a rug. On a damask cloth there is traditional Iranian food, rice, vegetables, and bread. The mother is veiled and wears a simple overall. The father is modestly dressed and wears a beard. The daughter, barely a teenager, is veiled in an overall and a scarf. Like her mother, she looks down shyly. The children are sitting on their heels (du zanou), a position showing respect to their parents. An interesting aspect of the illustrations is their body language, which indicates the modesty expected from the young people. Sitting on one’s heels (du zanou neshastan) is a gesture whereby one lowers oneself and acknowledges a superior other. The common Iranian expression “kneeling out of politeness” (zanou-ye adab zadan) demonstrates a relationship between “sitting on one’s heels,” “good manners,” and modesty. In front of Allah, this gesture is part of daily prayers.
Female modesty is confirmed by veiling, but normative modesty defines its own fashion for men as well; khaki pants, military overcoat, boots, a Palestinian shawl, and an unshaven two- to three-day beard, testify to one’s neglect of the worldly life. This dress code gives one a “hezbollahi look” (qiyafeh hezbollahi). Paradoxically, however, the Revolutionary aesthetic has also favored American and German military overcoats.6 The Revolutionary morale has forged a kind of cultural capital, based on a working-class lifestyle, a simple appearance, and unpretentiousness. To present oneself as simple and indigent is seen as a measure of one’s commitment to the Revolution. Such an aestheticization of poverty can also be traced among secular leftist movements in Iran.7 In encounters with representatives of the authorities, “hezbollahi style” and use of Arabic/Islamic phrases play a significant role. Many times I asked my informants why they did not shave, and they answered that they were going to visit certain authorities. Dara said that when he was going to visit an authority he wore the oldest and most ragged clothes he had, adding half-jokingly, “When I attend a meeting at university I wear the dirtiest socks I have. The more they stink, the more I look like a revolutionary.” The “hezbollahi style” evokes the “proletarian style” promoted in the communist states.8 The Islamic Republic, however, has fashioned its own distinct “judgment of taste.”
BASIJI
The government’s ideal model for Iranian youth is the basiji, a modest, self-restrained (qanne), self-possessed (mattin) young man. He is “profound” (‘amiq), “weighty” (sangin), serious, and ready to sacrifice himself for Islam and the Revolution. The archetype of the basiji is Hossein Fahmideh, a thirteen-year-old basiji who at an early stage of the war destroyed an Iraqi tank by a suicide attack. Books retell his life story, and his picture is paraded on posters and stamps. Ayatollah Khomeini called him “the real leader.” After the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war in 1988 basijis somehow lost their significance. These men had left their school benches or jobs when they were still teenagers. They were seen as national heroes as long as the war lasted. They had sacrificed their careers, youth, friends, and frequently their health or parts of their body. Returning from the front, many basijis who came from poor backgrounds were disappointed to see that the original revolutionary ideas they had sacrificed themselves for were gone. An ideal basiji is modest in attitude and thereby spiritually rich but materially poor. “A rich basiji” is a contradiction in terms.
Nevertheless, sometimes the ideal necessitates a reforging of identity. Merhdad, a young basiji, comes close to pretending to be deprived. Merhdad is thirty years old and the only child of the family. He lives with his parents in the same alley where I resided during my fieldwork, in a wealthy neighborhood in North Tehran. His father is a well-off physician. Merhdad neither has nor needs an ordinary job. However, he has been active in the basij since the mid-1980s. While his father goes to his clinic in a suit and tie and his mother goes to meet her friends “not properly veiled,” Merhdad is always dressed as a hezbollahi. He goes to the mosque he belongs to unshaven and dressed in a white shirt hanging over his military pants.
In his case, this is not a matter of any generational