PRIVATE LIVES AND PUBLIC SPACES IN MODERN IRAN

Conference - Abstracts

Janet Alexanian, University of California, Irvine

Publicly Intimate Online
Janet Armineh Alexanian
Iranian identities are increasingly being articulated through the internet, especially through online sites for reflective narration and discussion called webloggs, or blogs. Blogs are emerging as an analytic site for the examination of emergent forms of techno- or cyber-sociality, and more generally constitute a space for studying the relationship between new technological emergences and expressions of affect. In the process of teasing out these new forms of sociality, we also encounter the reconfigurations of notions of 'public' and 'private'. This paper explores Iranian interactions on an online friend community and the webloggs of several Iranian immigrants in Orange County, California. It examines social interaction on these sites and supplements empirical data with participant observation and interviews. Cyberspaces maintain a dynamic connection to the 'home'/'real world' to which they refer and simultaneously create. Iranian webloggs and online communities, as forms of technosociality, raise the question of how 'overseas Iranians' negotiate particular social constructions of reality and how they engage in particular technoscapes. Based on preliminary ethnographic research, the hypothesis of this paper is that this particular Iranian immigrant community approaches cyberspaces such as online communities and webloggs with particular cultural understandings of public and private. As the separation between the two is disrupted by this new technology, forms on sociality emerging in these spaces can be said to create possibilities for cultural awareness, transformation, and resistance. Intimacy in social relations in particular, is uniquely transformed as blogging itself becomes a process through which informants describe 'being themselves,' or 'expressing their true selves.' It is argued that this process is a significant one which has real effects on sociality and the behaviors of its participants in the 'offline' world.

Camron Amin, University of Michigan, Dearborn

Faculty Housing at Isfahan Technological University in 1978: Blurring Private and Professional Lives by Design
Camron Michael Amin
Faculty housing at ITU was designed as the integral part of an effort to create a separate and self-contained university community, near but outside of Isfahan. It was to have its own commissary, recreations facilities and schools so as to make leaving campus a luxury rather than a necessity. Private faculty lives were to be lived close to the intellectual and social mission of the university. Designed in the early 1970s as a branch of Tehran's Aryamehr Technological University, it came into existence as the Pahlavi regime that created it began to crumble in 1978. The ideal of a harmonious community of scholars, teachers and students gave way to a much more stressed and fractious community in which political and personality conflicts mixed with the academic and administrative routines of a university that was still under construction culturally and materially. Because the community was designed to be insular, it served as something of a pressure cooker as the line between work and home -blurred by design - faded altogether. Design of the campus, from its beginnings in the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, will be explored through interviews with the architect and the first two chancellors of ITU. A picture of daily life at ITU in 1978 will be drawn from interviews with former residents.

Ali Banuazizi, Boston College

Aspects of Self-Construal and Identity in Persian Culture
Ali Banuazizi
In this paper the author shows that [a] venereal diseases were one of the major endemic diseases of Iran until recent times; [b] carriers of this class of disease in 19th century and early 20th century Iran were not socially stigmatized as in Europe; [c] hence information what to do about the disease was discussed among people in social gatherings as well as publicly in print that was available to the educated class; [d] openness about this disease changed once it became generally known that VD was caused by sexual encounters that generally were adulterous in nature and hence immoral, according to Islam, [e] sexual behavior did not change significantly, however, in that sexual intercourse outside marriage remained significant, for prostitution remained a major dimension of social and sexual life. However, after the 1960s, the prevalence of VD was reduced due to the access to modern curative remedies, while condoms started to be used on a limited scale; [f] government and societal response to VD were based in male sexuality and assumptions about male sexual behavior and [g] government and societal reaction with regards to HIV/AIDS has not yet learnt from the past and sexual behavior has not adjusted to reflect the high risk involved in unsafe sexual intercourse.

Lois Beck, Washington University

Reconfiguring Private and Public: Examples from Qashqa'i Society
Lois Beck
This paper stresses the importance of examining sectors of Iranian society that are often neglected in the scholarship on Iran: communities that are not Persian-speaking or Shi'i Muslim and those that lie outside of Tehran and the middle and upper classes. It offers examples drawn from Qashqa'i society in south-western Iran, to demonstrate that the circumstances of life for many Qashqa'i, as expressed in both private and public spheres, are often different from those described for other societies in Iran. It examines the ways that the Qashqa'i create the space to live semi-autonomously within the Iranian state. It shows how the state itself permits, even encourages, such circumstances, in part by its widespread dissemination of alluring images of Qashqa'i society through the modern media (especially television, films, and photographs). The paper also examines the ways that members of the wider Iranian society use Qashqa'i territory to escape the many social restrictions under which they fall in their cities and towns of residence. In order to find private domains where they can engage in behaviors that otherwise the government attempts to restrict, they seek refuge in Qashqa'i territory, thereby changing the notions that the Qashqa'i themselves have about their own private and public domains. For this paper, the author draws on her anthropological research among the Qashqa'i over a span of thirty-five years. She suggests ways that anthropology can contribute to the study of modern Iran, especially because anthropologists have pursued, since the 1960s, many of the topics that are the themes of this conference.

Houri Berberian, California State University, Long Beach

Melding Private Lives and Public Spaces: Iranian-Armenian Memoirs and National Discourse
Houri Berberian
This study explores the relationship between memory of individual, private lives and the re-construction and writing of history. Memoirs and autobiographies written in Armenian and by Armenian participants in the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911) and others began to appear soon after the revolution in 1913 and continued until the 1960s. These narratives challenge the dichotomy between private and public spheres as anecdotal experiences of individuals translate into a public discourse on nationhood. Drawing on memoirs and autobiographies themselves as well as theoretical works on memoirs and autobiographies, the paper seeks to demonstrate the ways in which authors in writing their memories were cognizant of their own role as historical actors and as presenters of their experiences. Through the act of committing their memories to paper for a public audience, they and their readers perceived them to be worthy of recollection. They attempted to shape the memory of others while at the same time receiving group confirmation. Without that kind of reaffirmation from the larger group, individual memoirs would have withered away and not necessarily contributed to history, identity, or collective memory. In other words, here the self did not exist without the public audience. Therefore, as a genre, autobiographies and memoirs carry within them a claim to public space. As a form of political discourse, these narratives challenge us to interrogate the ways that these activists/authors created a public space in which narratives of individual and national creation coincided and overlapped, thus bringing into existence a new systematic form in which two seemingly dissimilar elements, private and public, meld into a powerful vehicle of political transformation.

Dominic Brookshaw, University of Oxford

Secluded Voices: Women at the Court of Fath-'Ali Shah Qajar
Dominic Parviz Brookshaw
The women of Fath-'Ali Shah's haramsara have often been dismissed as the by-products of the erotomania of a decadent age. But, what can we rediscover of their literary and artistic talents, their position at court and how they were regarded by the men who surrounded them? This paper will focus on the prominent wives and (especially) the daughters of Fath-'Ali Shah and it will survey the arenas in which they were most influential, namely, as poets and calligraphers; as secretaries in the andaruni; as holders of official positions in the haramsara and as religious preachers. Through an analysis of unpublished Qajar tadhkiras, published Qajar histories and contemporary western accounts, the paper hopes to shed light on the important role played by women of the royal court in this period.

Mansoureh Ettehadieh, University of Tehran

The Private Purse of Muzaffar al-Din Shah
Mansoureh Ettehadieh
This paper is based on the information contained in a small non descript booklet in siyaq found and decoded by Mr. Bahman Bayani. Upon examination the booklet proved to be Mozaffar al-Din Shah's private account book, where the pishkesh or gifts of money he received from his entourage were registered and kept under his personal supervision. The practice of giving large pishkesh of money to the Shah in order to receive an important post such as the governorship of a province is well known and has been commented upon by such scholars as Malcolm and Curzon. The sum to be offered was settled after bargaining and was considered to be a form of taxation and went to the public treasury. However, the pishkesh registered in this booklet is in the form of small sums offered personally to the Shah on various occasions and was in fact put in his private purse. Although this ancient custom has been mentioned in a number of diaries, it has not attracted any attention. This talk discusses the information of this booklet to show how this ancient and little known custom functioned. It will also show how the public and private life of the Shah merged and how in reality one was indistinguishable from the other.

Shahla Ezazi, University of Tehran

Selecting Mates in Contemporary Iran
Shahla Ezazi
At the onset of post-Qajar era, the social and economic conditions in Iran gradually changed. Widespread education, establishment of universities and public access to these institutions resulted in the formation of a modern educated class. Hence, educated women were gradually integrated into the work force of the country. The prospect of employment and becoming wage earners enabled women to become financially independent. Young women and men started intermingling at universities and at the work place. Accordingly, the definition of marriage was changed entirely rendering love and compatibility as an important component of marriage. The young couple would usually start their lives away from the family home as they had the financial means to live an independent life and were no longer under the domination of an extended family. Social conditions and evolving trends of thought culminated in the gradual decline of marriage portion (mahrieh) and dowry for women. Marriage was turned from an economic contract between two families into an affectionate and individual relationship.

>Fataneh Farahani, Stockholm University

Diasporic Sexual Narratives
Fataneh Farahani
This paper presents an analytical study of the notions of virginity among some of the first generation Iranian immigrant women in Sweden. By exploring how the concept of virginity is discursively constituted and normalized in Iranian contemporary culture it aims to show how virginity governs not only women¹s sexuality but also shapes all their movements and lives. By deconstructing the notion of virginity and its relation to the hymen, it demonstrates how virginity, as a physical technicality, not only governs women¹s sexuality but also produces enormous anxiety, within the realm of female life in general and her sexual life in particular. By gendering the ways in which the establishment of virginity is accomplished, the paper will demonstrate how the demands of women¹s virgin status becomes the core ambition in order to make the female chastity and virtue socially valuable and desirable.

Willem Floor, Independent Scholar

Venereal Disease in Iran: A Public Affair, 1855-2005
Willem Floor
In this paper the author shows that [a] venereal diseases were one of the major endemic diseases of Iran until recent times; [b] carriers of this class of disease in 19th century and early 20th century Iran were not socially stigmatized as in Europe; [c] hence information what to do about the disease was discussed among people in social gatherings as well as publicly in print that was available to the educated class; [d] openness about this disease changed once it became generally known that VD was caused by sexual encounters that generally were adulterous in nature and hence immoral, according to Islam, [e] sexual behavior did not change significantly, however, in that sexual intercourse outside marriage remained significant, for prostitution remained a major dimension of social and sexual life. However, after the 1960s, the prevalence of VD was reduced due to the access to modern curative remedies, while condoms started to be used on a limited scale; [f] government and societal response to VD were based in male sexuality and assumptions about male sexual behavior and [g] government and societal reaction with regards to HIV/AIDS has not yet learnt from the past and sexual behavior has not adjusted to reflect the high risk involved in unsafe sexual intercourse.

Elham Ghaytanchi, Santa Monica College

I Turn off the Lights: The Private Sphere in Contemporary Iranian Women's Novels
Elham Gheytanchi
Zoya Pirzad's I Turn off the Lights (2001) is a novel about the mundane life of an Armenian Iranian woman- Claris- during the 1960s in the then multicultural city of Abadan. In this novel, Claris tells her inner struggles through her ambivalent attitude towards the role of a housewife whose husband is a left-wing activist. Claris lets us into her mind and her conflicting emotions through her continuous dual conversations with herself. At the center of Claris' dualities is the event of her love to their newly arrived neighbor's son, an aristocrat Armenian man who has tumultuous relationship with his mother. After careful deliberations about her role as a mother, her religious and social responsibilities with her husband, Claris consciously decides to arrange a private meeting with Emile, her beloved, only to find out that he has fallen in love with another woman. While Claris is constantly in dialogue with her inner voice while deeply engaged in her routine activities, she does not demonize her husband or her beloved, nor does she judge herself in a moral or religious manner. The text defies the readers' expectations on two levels; one, Claris' emotions and inner struggles are not different due to her Armenian identity, second Claris' relation to men is not contemptuous. Although Claris acknowledges her Armenian identity in public, she chooses her rational response to religious doctrines towards extramarital affairs in the private sphere, an undoubtedly secular one. The novel brings out the anxieties of a modern life as lived by the 'other' whose cosmopolitan life in Abadan- the quintessential modern city in Iran's 1960s-reflects the ambivalence over conflation of religion, nationality, politics and sexuality.

Ali Gheissari, University of San Diego

Merchants and their Life-World in late-Qajar Iran
Ali Gheissari
Merchants were important players in Iran¹s early 20th century constitutional movement and a force for pushing it forward. But apart from a few exceptions, not much systematic attention has been paid to the role of individual merchants and their public or private lives at least not on par with the court and government officials, or the intellectuals, or the ulama. The social history of the Constitutional period and the role of merchants in it can be told with the help of private papers, memoirs, archival reports and other documentary material which gradually appear in print form for a wider use by students of Iranian history. This paper provides a survey of the Memoirs of a Tabirzi merchant, Hajj Mohammad-Taqi Jourabchi, during the period of the Constitutional Revolution in Iran. The time span of the Memoirs corresponds roughly to the years 1907 to 1911. The original manuscript of these Memoirs was among Jourabchi family papers. One half of the text first appeared in Tehran in 1984. Another half of the manuscript was found more recently, and a complete edited text with additions is forthcoming. The text offers valuable observations on private and public life of Tabriz and Rasht, and on the cultural climate of the country in general. It contains additional information on the Caucasus, trans-Caspian travel, Mashad, and Tehran, where the author visited and lived in this period. It also provides information on Istanbul, Izmir, Port Said and the pilgrimage route to Mecca, and especially on the Shi¹a points of pilgrimage in Mesopotamia (including Najaf, Karbala, and Kazemain) which were also visited by the author. The Memoirs contain valuable information on trade and travel. It is important to understand the ideals and motivations of the merchants who were a significant part of the Constitutional movement but whose values were not necessarily echoed by officials or by intellectuals or by the ulama. This space deserves to be studied on its own, relying on such rare source material (as these Memoirs) when merchants voice their own lives.

Mehrangiz Kar, Harvard University

Homa Katouzian, St. Antony's College

Private Parts and Public Discourses
Homa Katouzian
There is a long tradition of satire, lampoon and invective in Persian literature, not least in the 19th century with poets like Yaghma Jandaqi and Qa'ani Shirazi. But the spread of such literary forms, often in verse, in the period 1900-1925 was quite extraordinary. Not only did verse satire and lampoon become popular among writers and readers alike, but much of it fell on political issues and on victims whose politics was disliked by the author. Besides, it was much more widespread than 19th century lampoons because of political chaos and the growth of popular press. During the Constitutional Revolution, Dehkhoda and Ashraf al-Din excelled in satirical literature, in prose and poetry respectively. Other political poets such as Bahar, Aref and Lahuti had made a beginning. But political satires of that period just stopped short of overt personal abuse and invective. It was after World War I that political abuse became a regular feature of journalism, and poets such as Aref, Eshqi and Farrokhi became leading authors of political invective. The movement was resumed in the period 1941-1953 with full vigour, although this time it stopped short of abusing the victims' mothers, wives and sisters.

Shahram Khosravi, Stockholm University

Tehran Arcades
Shahram Khosravi
The Golestan shopping center is a window on the West, a scene for performing/consuming/learning 'modern being'. The hegemonic ideology in Iran promotes a revolutionary/ascetic aesthetic of modesty and invites self-abasement. That there exists such a place as Golestan, where individuals can assert themselves and show themselves off according to quite another system of values is a challenge for the 'aesthetics of modesty' promoted by the authorities, who consider Golestan as a channel for 'cultural invasion'. Golestan functions as a center of information, vision, and imagination for young people. It is also a site where the knowledge of the global inspired Tehrani subculture is communicated. This 'modern' and 'global' form of identification is based on dissociation from 'tradition'as it is embodied in the bazaar.

Mana Kia, Harvard University

Contours of Community: Naming Kinship in Travels to and from Iran
Mana Kia
This paper is part of a larger project exploring the circular migrations of Iranian families between Iraq, India and Burma in the 19th and 20th centuries. The paper highlights changing conceptions of kinship and difference as articulated through practices of naming, marriage, affiliation and loyalty. There is a long history of Iranian migration and travel to Iraq and the Subcontinent. The Shi'a shrine cities in Iraq served as centers of religious scholarship and also lay along trade pathways leading to the Persian Gulf. These cities became even more important with the fall of the Safavid state in 1722, as many Iranian religious scholars sought refuge there. Much existing historiography focuses on the rising importance of the Iraqi shrine cities in the 18th century for Shi'a Muslims as a nodal point of pilgrimage, religious education and sometimes permanent migration. As if on cue, historiography dealing with Iranian migration to India seems to fall off, with the gradual subjugation of India under British rule in the closing decades of the 18th century. While these two trends may point to two different groups of people in history, predominantly ulama in Iraq and merchants in India, these two groups are quite often indistinguishable and, at the very least, bound up with one another in networks of kinship, marriage, loyalty and patronage.

Habib Ladjevardi, Harvard University

Personal Values and Corporate Policies: The Case of Haj Seyed Mahmoud Ladjevardi and the Behshahr Industrial Group
Habib Ladjevardi
Based on interviews and private memoirs, the speaker will describe the upbringing and development of personal values of Haj Seyed Mahmoud Ladjevardi and the overwhelming impact of these values on strategic decisions and policies of the Behshahr Industrial Group.

Shahla Lahiji, Roshangaran Press, Tehran

Shireen Mahdavi, University of Utah

The Transition of the Household of an Isfahani 'Sarraf' to a Tehrani Merchant: Structure, Function and Relations Therein
Shireen Mahdavi
This paper will portray and compare two households of different economic and social status at different times and in different places. The model will be the household in Isfahan in which Haj Muhammad Hassan Amin al-Zarb grew up in 1830s and his household in Tehran before his death in 1898 by which time he had become the most important big merchant and entrepreneur in Iran. The paper will explore every aspect of daily life, available from the sources, ranging from the houses in which they lived, the food they ate, the methods of obtaining provisions and the roles of every member of the extended family and the household staff if any. The primary source used will be the Mahdavi archives in Iran which will be supplemented by other relevant primary sources such as memoirs and histories of the period.

Rochona Majumdar, University of Chicago

Mina Marefat, Library of Congress

Streets & Squares of Tehran
Mina Marefat
The advent of Reza Shah marks not just a major shift politically but also socially and spatially. The conscious transformation of the inward Oriental city into an outward Western-type city had spatial implications which changed the nature of public space. The centuries-old tradition of the street as an extension of living space and social gathering space gave way to a public passageway where the means of transport took precedence. This paper will raise questions about the changing nature of the street and our understanding of modernity as new networks of orthogonal streets surgically placed over the labyrinth of the Oriental city had irreversible implications on the nature of public space. The street and square (maydan), once places of public spectacle were redefined as spaces of commerce and interchange on the Western model. In the process, the theatrical character of the Oriental city was consciously effaced.

Abbas Milani, Stanford University

Character as Destiny: The Portrait of the Shah as a Young Man
Abbas Milani
He was born a soldier's son, grew into a reluctant king, and died a woeful pariah. He seemed forever ready to leave Iran, yet he ruled the country for thirty-seven years. In 1953 his absconding propensities nearly foiled the coup masterminded by British Intelligence and the CIA on his behalf.

In the West, he was known as 'the Shah': A handsome debonair, a bon vivant, an enlightened despot, a would-be-modernist, and a minor polyglot, competent in both French and English. He was also at least partially responsible for the sharp rise in the price of oil in the 1970s. To his critics, which included many of his countrymen, he was a frivolous man, a pseudo-modernist, a repressive despot, all too tolerant of financial corruption in his family and friends, and a ward of the West. In contrast to his mastery of foreign languages, his Persian was infamous for its stranded articles, its dissonant verbs, and its incongruent syntax.

As Iran's oil revenue grew, so did his cult of personality. He insisted on being called the 'King of Kings, the Light of the Aryans'; he grew more and more intolerant of 'saucy minions'. With the Western media, he became increasingly belligerent, often railing against what he called the failed 'democracy of the blue-eyed world'. In a now famous interview with Oriana Fallaci, he went so far as to claim that he was in direct communion with God. He also pontificated on his views about women. Though they made great strides during his reign, he subscribed to the theory of women's natural inferiority. They cannot even cook, said the modern monarch, and as proof, he observed that the greatest chefs in the world were invariably men. (That was, of course, in the days before Alice Waters and her Chez Panisse).

His childhood was marred by the strictures of his father's unbending military discipline, and further cramped by the starchy solemnities of an upstart Court. He turned out to be, not surprisingly, a shy and timid man, one who rarely looked anyone in the eye. In his youth, as in much of his life, he was gaunt in countenance, vulnerable in physique, haunted by the spectre of his imposing father. As he recounts in his ghost-written memoir, Mission for My Country, he was emotionally bruised when he came to realize that his father had no trust in his ability to safely steer the ship of state. And in the classical pattern prophetically described by Philip Larkin: 'They fuck you up, your mom and dad . . . But they were fucked up in their turn . . . Man hands on misery to man' turn directed onto his son the same debilitating distrust his father had shown in him: On more than one occasion, he opined that the Crown Prince would not be able to manage the affairs of state.

Having received little love from his father, he craved the affection and adoration of others, and thus begot a spirit of sycophancy in those around him. During the height of his power, like Shakespeare's Richard II, 'a thousand flatterers sit in his throne' At the same time, his early liberal training in a Swiss boarding school inculcated in him values ill at odds with the daily demeanor of his Court. As an authoritarian ruler, he was full of political braggadocio, regularly threatening his enemies and critics. Yet he abhorred violence, and was ever averse to using the requisite force necessary to maintain his despotic rule. He had the hesitant soul of a Hamlet, yet he put on the face of a Herod. His strength as a human being was his weakness as a despot; a soft heart is poison to the constitution of a tyrant.

The Shah fancied himself a prophet or messiah, but spent the last months of his life a deposed despot and embittered man, fighting cancer and extradition and the man he had trusted with his money. He was also tormented by the suspicion that even his closest friend, his childhood companion, Hossein Fardoust, had betrayed him, playing Lago to his insecure Othello.

Even before this sobering endgame, he had been a man of few friends. In choosing them, he was hardly a discerning judge of character. In fact, he had a peculiar propensity for picking unsavory figures as 'friends'.

At La Rosey, the young Mohammed Reza, for once free from the claustrophobic domination of his father, had a chance to choose a friend on his own. He chose a poor young boy, a Swiss national, and in an uncanny coincidence, he was, like Fardoust, also the son of a gardener of La Rosey. His name was Ernest Perron and he was, even as a child, openly gay. Over the next fifteen years, he would remain the King's constant companion. Every day, for about two hours, the two would be closeted together, behind closed doors. But when, in 1954, the intimate friend became a political liability, the Shah showed no compunction in suddenly cutting off all contact with him. He did not meet with or speak to Perron for the rest of the latter's lonely and tormented life.

Mohammed Reza Shah's strange choice of friends was not limited to these callow and youthful indiscretions. Even in the last two decades of his rule, at the zenith of his power, when he considered himself a statesman of world stature, his choice of friends was no less unusual, and no less dizzyingly destructive.

The Shah rigorously pursued the modernization of the country's economy and of its infrastructure, and tolerated even the most experimental forms of post-modern art, he did not adhere to modern ideas about democracy. Giddy minds, he believed, could best be kept busy not just by wars, but also by economic affluence. He had particular affinity for Iranian farmers; his daily mood was often hostage to the weather report. Rain, as a blessing for the country's farms, brought a smile to his face, and sunshine, as a possible portent of an arid season, was a source of anxiety. In his unrelenting advocacy of his own peculiar notion of modernity, he provoked a revolution whose patriarch was a man bent on demodernizing Iran and establishing a theocratic autarky in the country. In short, the Shah was at once an enigmatic failure and a man who loved 'not wisely, but too well'.

Farzaneh Milani, University of Virginia

Kill a Cat, Tame the Shrew
Farzaneh Milani
Persian literature abounds in graphic, often erotic, descriptions of the nuptual chamber, a space placed at the interstices of public and private domains. These narrative retellings, however, are not only of love and romance, but also of power and domination. They tame, train, and domesticate the future wife while consolidating the authority and sovereignty of the husband within the household--this 'little commonwealth'.

Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin

Negotiating the Forbidden: Women and Sexual Love in Iranian Cinema
Ziba Mir-Hosseini
Women and sexual love are time-honoured--but problematic--themes in Iranian cinema. Soon after the 1979 revolution and the establishment of the Islamic Republic in Iran, these themes were forced into the straitjacket of Islamist ideology and Islamic law (feqh), which allowed little room for current social realities. The authorities imposed dress code (hejab) and sexual segregation, and the public presence of women and the expression of romantic love became highly restricted. For almost a decade, Iranian filmgoers would look in vain to see woman and love depicted on the screen. Gradually, however, both came out of the shadows; and by the late 1990s, they were once again leading - if highly controversial - themes in Iranian cinema.

This paper explores these developments through a discussion of films, which in different ways were landmarks in the passage out of the shadows and became the focus of heated debates for their transgression of the rules. They are: Makhmalbaf¹s A Time to Love (Nowbat-e Asheqi, 1991), and Behrouz Afkhami¹s Hemlock (Showkaran, 1999).

The argument that is developed in the paper has three elements. First, the problem of the cinematic representation of women and romantic love in Iran long predates the birth of the Islamic Republic. It is part of a larger problematic, which has two elements. One is a deep-rooted ambivalence in Iranian culture and society towards love and women. The second is an ongoing struggle between the forces of modernity and traditionalism, in which women and their bodies have become a battleground. While the first element, the ambivalence, is ancient and more poetic in form and expression, the second (women¹s bodies as battleground) is contemporary and more political. This contrast is evident in the two famous 20th-century mandates on how women should appear in public. In 1936 Reza Shah, the first Pahlavi monarch, bans the veil, and punishes women who appear in public wearing hejab - i.e. chador or scarf. In 1982, the Islamic Republic does the opposite. Finally, what the Islamic Republic did through its imposition of religious rules on cinema was to accentuate and politicize the cultural ambivalence towards love and women. This in time opened the way for renegotiating some old cultural and religious taboos.

Yann Richard, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris III

European Eyes on Persian Lives in late Qajar Iran
Yann Richard
Despite early encounters between Persia and Europe, individual friendship and personal relations between Iranians and Western people were scarce until the beginning of the 20th century. Some of the best records of personal ties, in the books of Gobineau, Feuvrier, and Browne show with some variety the distance preventing to enter the private life of their Iranian friends: religious shi¹ite regulations for purity, the place of women and the duality between interiority and exteriority in Persian culture could explain this distance. The unpublished personal diaries of Georges Ducrocq and Hélène Hoppenot, respectively a French diplomat and the wife of the French minister in Iran in the years 1919-1921, will show some slight change of attitude. Further, despite a real interest and sympathy, they show a rather low familiarity with Iranian society of Western sources for contemporary history. Apart from some upper class individuals who could speak fluently French or English and had travelled in Europe, some major motivations and factors of public action, like family ties, religious convictions, personal interests and career strategies might fall away from foreign eyes.

Kamran Safa-Manesh, Urban Research Institute, Tehran

Transformation of Public Space in Modern Iran
Kamran Safamanesh
Six different periods in the evolution of public spaces and their transformation from a traditional to a modern era can be distinguished. Two are in the Qajar period, two during the reign of the first and the second Pahlavi monarchs, and finally two in the modern periods - one in the last two decades before the Islamic Revolution and the second the last two decades after Islamic Revolution. Examples and explanations for each era will be provided. The transformation of the domestic house as a private space and the way it began to open up to the public domain and its evolution from an inward spatial organization to an outward looking entity is very important. It should be noted how some of the traditional functions as private activity have been transferred to the domain of public activities and, conversely, how some public activities have been added to the space of domestic houses. The typology of function, form, model, appearance, shape, building elements, and people's behavior are among the subjects for investigation. Examples will be given of these new public spaces, with their newly introduced functions such as arteries, streets, squares, roundabouts, and buildings. Although we know that the transformation in the patterns of public spaces is due to fundamental changes in Iranian life as a result of the evolution from a traditional to a modern or semi-modern society, some elements remain the same up until the present time. The way the people of Iran today use public spaces will be illustrated through field observation and examples.

Mahsa Shekarloo, Journalist

Publicly Intimate Tehran: Desiring Subjects in Buses and Cabs
Mahsa Shekarloo
This paper will analyze how women's public presence within Tehran's context is figured in current anxieties about social and moral displacement and decay. It will evaluate the prescriptions and proscriptions claimed by different groups on women's mobility, accessibility, behavior, speech, and dress. Tehran's public transportation system, which includes both formal and informal vehicles of transport, will serve as the major site of investigation. Social and sexual encounters within the realm of formal (taxis, buses, Metro) and informal (private cars serving as passenger carriers) transportation mirror many of the contradictions and anxieties about gendered and class-based relations. The individual freedom and mobility, sexual opportunity, and loosening controls available in the city are challenging the power divisions imbedded in these relations. At the same time, women are expressing a heightened sense of vulnerability to sexual and physical danger. The dominant discourse, which simultaneously holds women as targets in need of protection and as main instigator and culprit, will be examined, as well as the extent to which women themselves participate in, internalize, and reject this discourse.

Faegheh Shirazi, University of Texas, Austin

Of Sexual Matters: Popular Religious Practices of Women
Faegheh Shirazi
This paper examines issues of female fertility, sterility, and sexuality through the eyes of the believers in olum-e ramel, jadoo, sehr, nojum (astrology/astronomy), and olum-e gharibeh (magical science), in reading such literature the author is able to identify how the most intimate private aspects of woman¹s life were discussed and documented- since this texts discuss in detail private sexual matters of women. Secondly, the paper will investigate remedies, potions and advice prescribed by the 'learned Hakim' to cure specific female problems. This section will draw on a combination of the traditions of tebb-e rohani (spiritual medicine) or tebb-e Mohammadi (the medicine of the Prophet), in addition to the information collected in the first section of the study. Thirdly, it will be demonstrated that the combination of Shi¹i Islam and such practices was important because women seem to have believed that they were following in the religious path laid down by Mohammad and the emams. Finally, the paper will look at elaborate ritualistic practices (some of which are physically harmful) that women adopted to combat sterility in order to increase their chances of having a successful, full-term pregnancy, or to secure a better chance of having a male child, and thus to win the love of their husbands in order to remain the favorite wife in his household.

Mohamad Tavakoli, University of Toronto

The Purity of the Body and the Body Politic
Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi
As the two fundamental categories of the Tawzih al-Masa'ils (Shi'i Responsa), the concepts of taharat and nijasat (purity and filth) strongly regulated modes of bodily conduct: copulating, eating, drinking, cleansing, defecating, urinating, menstruating, washing, fasting, as well as praying. As manuals of personal conduct that were written by the mujtahids for the benefit of their followers, the practical knowledge embodied in the Tawzih al-Masayils entered a period of deep crisis with the dissemination of waterborne epidemics in late 19th and early 20th centuries. Challenging the Islamic notion of purity, these diseases were initially constituted by the mujtahids as divine punishment for the deviation of Iranians from the path of 'pure Islam'. While promoting the medicalization of purity, epidemics like cholera hastened efforts to promote the concordance of Islam and modern sciences. As the general public began to adopt medicalized conceptions of cleanliness and hygiene in their everyday lives, the mujtahids aptly applied the notion of purity and filth to the body politic. They thus transformed Islam into a modern political ideology against the Pahlavi state. With the Islamic Revolution, as the public sphere in Iran has become Islamicized, the private sphere has become more intensely secularized.

Houra Yavari, Columbia University

Is Public life Publishable? Ask Shaykh Ibrahim Zanjani!
Houra Yavari
While biographical literature has a long-established reputation as a major field of Perso-Islamic studies, the production of autobiographies have been considered as limited to the Persian encounter with the West and modernity. Perso-Islamic life narratives have been thought to conform to highly stylized and rigid conventions, depicting types rather than individuals. Almost all critical studies of the genre lament the lack of depth on the private lives of their subject. Characterized not only by a dichotomous conceptualization of the self, but also divided along the axis of privacy and the ethics of public life, The Story of My Life, by Shaykh Ibrahim Ibn Hadi Zanjani (1855 -1928), in which he traces the gradual development of a pious cleric into a doubtful politician, holds a unique critical value for studying the traditional and modern modes of interpreting and representing public and private life in written form.

This study will first attempt to situate Zanjani's autobiography within the context of self-narration in Perso-Islamic culture and the way it resembles to, or differs from the more or less recognized genre of autobiography in the West. It shall then try to establish that contrary to generally held conceptions, this is a meaningful account of the public life that is missing from his autobiography. Despite the fact that Zanjani settles down to recall his life and write its story at the age of 72, he does not include anything that occurred beyond the age of 51, which corresponds to the heyday of his political and public career. His narrative is void of any reference to his failures and successes as an influential member of the Democratic Fraction of the Parliament, his betrayal of his own patriotic claims, and most importantly, the significant role he played as a member of the panel of judges that delivered the death sentence of Shaykh Fazl-Allah Nuri; a death all too present by its absence from his life narrative.

Does The Story of My Life tell one story to conceal another? Does the other story return with the very act of narration? Are we dealing with a written text in which narration repeats not by what is but by highlighting that which gets blocked or concealed by the telling?