The first month I joined the basij we went for a military training in the mountains. When we opened our lunch boxes I was embarrassed. All had simple cheese sandwiches except me. My mother had put rice and chicken in my box. The group leader said “We have a rich kid here.” It was embarrassing.
Merhdad told me that he sold the Peugeot his father had given him as a birthday present the previous year, to buy a second-hand Iranian-made Peykan. Merhdad wants to keep his family distant from his basiji comrades, because he knows that his family’s ostentatious lifestyle is seen by other basijis as “superficial bourgeois aesthetics,” which is in stark contrast to the ideology of the basij.
However, the majority of basijis come from the working class, and being basiji empowers them in the daily class conflicts on the Tehran streets. A former basiji from the working neighborhood Javadieh confessed:
It was just to have fun, to tease the rich sousol [effeminate] kids of north Tehran. With some other basiji friends we jumped in a car and drove to Shahrak-e Gharb or Miydan Mohseni. We put a “Stop, Check Point” sign up and annoyed “rich kids” in their khareji [foreign] cars. If one had a beautiful girl in his car we teased him even more. Sometimes if we did not like one, we cut his hair to belittle him before the girls.
For this young man as well for many others, basij has been a means to transgress the social hierarchy, albeit temporarily and symbolically. The state attempts to fit basijis into the educational system and the labor market by quotas and to retain their loyalty by granting them special privileges. They are given priority for subsidies for building houses or the hajj pilgrimage. Almost 40 percent of university places are reserved for basijis, their children, or the families of martyrs (Zahedi 2001: 119–20). This has widened the gap between basijis and other young persons who consider such favoritism to be discrimination.
A Veiled Society
Another side of the aesthetic of modesty has been the politics of veiling. The first stage was a project for the desexualization of society. Modesty and chastity are conflated in the Islamic notion of female virtue. Veiling is its instrument. Religions often regard sexuality as a menace and therefore repress it in order to keep people focused on salvation, and this view of what was necessary for the task of forming modest citizens has been shared by the Iranian clergy. Women are supposed to possess an uncontrollable sexual passion which is regarded as a threat to or calamity (fetneh) for the social order. Thus, sexuality is recognized only within the boundaries of permanent or temporary (mut‘a) marriage.9 In an ideal Islamic society the sphere of the family (the site of sexuality) should be separate from society. Such a separation purifies society from social corruption such as adultery and prostitution and takes the form of veiling, a responsibility that falls on women.
A woman’s beauty and sexuality are to be reserved for her husband. A woman is expected to make up and wear attractive clothes only for her husband’s gaze. It is women’s responsibility to ensure that their faces and bodies are not being watched by unrelated (namahram) people. Even sexual relations between spouses are regulated by Islam. Married couples should not have sex during the hajj pilgrimage or fasting, as it is thought to cause impurity, and such activities require prior ritual washing. A married couple may not hug or kiss in public, not even at their own wedding. Any sexual expression in public is discouraged. The preservation of “public chastity” (‘effat-e ‘omoumi) demands the absence of anything that can be associated with (female) sexuality.10
Desexualizing society has its roots in how sexuality is conceived in Iranian society. In Iranian culture, a beautiful woman can be admiringly described as a “calamity maker” (fetneh angiz) or “one who causes confusion in town” (shahrashob) (cf. Mernissi 1975). Interestingly the “calamity making” of women is inherently linked closely to their pattern of consumption. A “chaos-making” woman is “a super-consumer of imperialist/dependent-capitalist/foreign goods; she [is] a propagator of the corrupt culture of the West. . . . She [wears] too much makeup, too short a skirt, too tight a pair of pants, too low-cut a shirt. [She is] too loose in her relations with men, she laughs too loudly and smokes in public” (Najmabadi 1991: 65). One way to control her is to constrain her sexuality by veiling.11 A woman who has been denied both her sexuality and her individuality is assigned to the single recognized role of motherhood, a role celebrated in soap operas and textbooks.12
ETHNOGRAPHIC VIGNETTE
Actress Gohar Kheirandish (in her fifties) kissed the forehead of Ali Zamani (in his twenties) as he received the top director’s prize at a ceremony in the central Iranian city of Yazd in October 2002. The clerical leaders organized protests after the kiss and the pair were accused of harming Islam. Kheirandish and Zamani were charged with immoral behavior and could face a jail sentence or up to 74 lashes for their actions but were more likely to be fined. The pair apologized for the kiss and said that it was a spontaneous, maternal gesture by Kheirandish.
The Science of Sexuality in Iran
In Iran, the suppression of sexuality has likewise extended it. In the Islamic Republic sexuality started to become repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence. Only one single and utilitarian locus of sexuality was acknowledged, the fertile heart of every household: the parents’ bedroom (cf. Foucault 1990: 3). But turning sexuality into “sin” did not make it disappear. On the contrary, it was reinforced and became something to be observed everywhere. The repressive fascination with sex resulted in an explosion of discourses—in medicine, psychiatry, and education—about sexuality. It has resulted in a pervasive discourse on sex that is a form of power/knowledge. As Foucault points out, the repression of sex in nineteenth-century bourgeois society demanded a science of sexuality, scientia sexualis (Foucault 1990: 58), in order to understand, catalog and identify the very perversion that needed to be controlled or eradicated.
Its focus [was] not the intensification of pleasure, but the rigorous analysis of every thought and action that related to pleasure. This exhaustive articulation of desire has produced a knowledge which supposedly holds the key to individual mental and physical health and to social well-being. The end of this analytic knowledge is either utility, morality, or truth. (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983: 176)
Since the Revolution a huge market for manuals, instruction booklets, and educational guidance on sexuality and sex life has emerged. A large part of these publications are published by the state, but individual clerics and religious institutes are also producing them. Publications by the “Parent-Teacher Association” (Anjoman-e Uleá va Murabian) and by the “Cultural Foundation of Islamic Message” (Bounyad-e Farhangi Payam-e Islam) aim to teach young people how to have “proper” (monaseb) and “healthy” (salem) sex. Numerous blogs and websites deal with sexual issues. One example is Weblog of Temporary Marriage,13 which, based on religious sources, aims to “configure sexuality in society.” The blog offers “information” on sex and sexual relations, such as “how to stop sickly [sexual] behavior”; “the harms of masturbation”; “ethics of sex”; “advantages of temporary marriage.”
Furthermore, every ayatollah is supposed to have published his own Towzihoule Masael (Practical Treatise), a comprehensive guide to life in general and religious/juridical matters in particular. Sexual life is a major theme in these books. What follows is an excerpt from Ayatollah Mosavi Ardebili’s Towzihoule Masael (1380/2001), which deals with rules of the senses.
ETHNOGRAPHIC VIGNETTE
Rules of Look, Touch, and Voice
Article 3032. It is haraam [unlawful] for man to look at the body of the namahram [unrelated] woman, regardless of whether it is with the intention of pleasure or not. It is also haraam to look at the faces and the arms, up to the wrists, of such women with the intention of pleasure. Similarly, it is haraam for a woman to look at the body of namahram man, without the intention of deriving any pleasure.
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