I start with myself.
One cold night in late autumn 1984 I was arrested by basijis. I was eighteen years old and in the last year of high school. Early that night a friend of mine had called me and asked me if I could take him somewhere in my car. Later on, we were driving with another friend of ours toward Julfa, the Armenian district in Isfahan. He had arranged a party for the weekend and wanted to buy illicit home-made aragh (Iranian vodka) and wine from an Armenian acquaintance, who was known in Isfahan for his good-quality aragh and wine. After the Islamic state prohibited alcoholic beverages, a lucrative underground market for home-made products emerged, particularly in the Armenian minority. I parked the car in Khaghani Street, the main street of Julfa. We waited in silence. It was getting dark. After a long and anxious wait the Armenian man appeared and my friend followed him into a narrow alleyway. After a few minutes my friend jumped into the car with a dark bag in his hand and I put the car in gear. At the end of the street, just as we were leaving the Armenian neighborhood, a basiji patrol on a motorcycle stopped us. They had apparently followed us. We were sent to the nearby mosque and from there to the office of the Central Committee (komiteh markazi). After a night in prison we were sent to the Revolutionary Court, which was located in a several-story luxury house, apparently confiscated by the Islamic state. The three of us sat opposite the judge (qazi), a middle-aged cleric, surrounded by several uniformed young men. He looked at some papers, probably a report on us. He raised his head and looked at us in silence. Then he sentenced us to flogging for “cultural crime,” thirty lashes each. The whole process lasted less than half an hour. For some reason we were not punished publicly (which is usually the case). We were led to a little room on the roof of the building. One at a time we were taken inside the room for the ritual. I was the last. While waiting my turn, I heard the screams and bellows of my friends. In the room I was placed on a metal bed with no mattress. My hands were stretched out and tied to the bars of the bed. The guard asked me kindly if I needed some piece of clothing to put in my mouth in order to prevent damage to my teeth (to avoid grinding the teeth together). I said yes and absurdly thanked him (perhaps for his concern for my teeth!). I was wearing a shirt and jeans. The guard did not insist on stripping me and the ritual began with reciting the phrase “Besm ella ahe rahmaane rahim” (In the name of Allah the beneficent the merciful)—an important phrase each Muslim should say at the beginning of every good work. Only the first five or six strokes hurt. I did not feel the rest. For many years to come red lines remained on my back to testify to how the new social order had been embodied.
* * *
Seventeen years later, in the summer of 2001, I found myself in the most agonizing part of my fieldwork. By then at the stage of choosing a topic for my study, I knew that it would become an ethnography of suffering and anguish. What I witnessed during July and August 2001, however, exceeded the scope of my imagination. More than 200 young people were publicly flogged in Tehran in only a few weeks. As a traditional Islamic punishment, public flogging appeared in the early days of the Revolution but was gradually carried out more discreetly away from the public gaze. At the end of July 2001, however, conservative forces controlling the judiciary started a fresh wave of public flogging, as a response to the reelection of the reform-minded but powerless President Mohammad Khatami the month before. Khatami had enjoyed a triumphant victory based on the support of young followers, but remained ineffective against the powerful conservative forces inside and outside the state. Simon said:
We chose Khatami and they [the conservative judiciary] are punishing us for that.
Public flogging is usually inflicted on young people. The victims are men, and occasionally women, who have been accused of different kinds of “cultural crime.” Common charges are alcohol consumption or extramarital sex. In the recent wave of flogging, the youngest victim was a fourteen-year-old boy charged with “harassing girls” in front of a girls’ high school. He received ten lashes. A young man of nineteen was given ten strokes for playing “illicit music” loudly in his car. For alcohol consumption, the number of lashes goes up to 80. More than 100 lashes may be given in the case of “sexual crimes.” There were young people who got 180 lashes.1
For me, as an anthropologist, attending the flogging was an ethical dilemma. To watch seemed important to my fieldwork. I decided to attend only some floggings and to follow others indirectly through the media. In Tehran the ceremony of flogging is usually performed in the afternoon and on a main square. All traffic in and around the square is halted. A large number of basijis are present to counter possible protests. At each ceremony, between two and twelve persons are flogged. Before the eyes of some several hundred people, the young people are in turn stripped and fastened standing to a post or sometimes to a pick-up. Their arms are stretched out and tied with ropes. The policemen who carry out the punishment usually use a cable. The mass of spectators, almost all men, watch silently. I was stunned each time I saw the whips waving slowly backward in the air and then flying forward forcefully to hit a teenager’s back, lacerating his skin and injuring the flesh. When the whip hits the back, its top rotates before slapping hard the smooth skin along the side of his body.
“Cultural crime” (jorm-e farhangi) appeared in the post-revolutionary Penal Law as a new term for breaking Islamic rules. Such crimes are seen as violations of the “collective sentiments” of the Muslim community and result in different kinds of sanction, mostly in the form of physical punishment. The Islamic regime underscores the category of age, more than class or ethnicity, as a societal factor which causes differences in participation in crime. In Islam the self is thought of as split in a conflict between reason (aql) and passion (nafs). The former directs one toward God and a harmonious life, while the latter represents Satanic forces (sheytani). Although all individuals possess both, the capacity to develop reason is seen as stronger in adult men, whilst the impulse toward passion is held to be stronger in women and young people. Youth are all passion (nafs) and therefore have an inclination to crime. In the post-revolutionary Islamic order the collective cultural experience that youth represent is seen as a central intersection of culture and crime. The anxieties of the theocracy are expressed through “moral panics,” which have led in practice to the criminalization of a large part of youth culture.
However, the range of what can be included in the notion “cultural crime” has shrunk since the early 1980s. What in the 1980s was punishable as a cultural crime had turned in the late 1990s into a daily scene on the Tehran streets. In the early 1980s, a young man would frequently be warned and “corrected” by the Islamic club or moral police for wearing a short-sleeved shirt or clothes of a “delightful color,” or for talking to a namahram (unrelated) girl. In the late 1990s, the atmosphere was considerably more relaxed, particularly after Mohammad Khatami won the presidential election in 1997. Nevertheless, a new wave of harassment and terror was launched in the summer of 2002, when special black-uniformed police units equipped with black four-wheel-drive vehicles appeared in numerous northern and eastern districts of Tehran. More violent than before, these units have begun a war against such fesad-e akhlaqi (ethical corruption) as aloudegi-ye souti (sound pollution), loud music in cars and “depraved” private parties in Tehran.2 The anti-“cultural crimes” policies grew tougher after the victory of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005.
After the Revolution the Iranian clerics embarked on a comprehensive project to desecularize the judicial system, which had been affected by seven decades of Western-inspired modernization. They also had to mold it to fit a centralized theocracy,3 which implied fundamentally transforming the principles of Shiite law. Central legislation by the state replaced the ad hoc legal interpretation carried out by Islamic jurists (see Arjomand 1989). Clerics, however, occupied powerful positions in the legal system. In the Islamic judicial system, ethical and moral regulations replaced the civil code of law in all spheres, including criminal justice. New criminal laws were introduced to enforce Islamic morality and values. The transformation of society into an ummat (Islamic community) was followed by a reduction of the individual’s status from a legal subject as a citizen to a “servant of God.” The new legal system as adjusted for “God’s servants” is based on criminalization of sins. By making an increasing number of moral offenses criminal, legal reform has progressively reduced