Warring Souls: Youth, Media, and Martyrdom in Post-Revolution Iran
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Warring Souls: Youth, Media, and Martyrdom in Post-Revolution Iran
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Overview
Highlighting trends that belie the government’s claim that Islamic values have taken hold—including rising rates of suicide, drug use, and sex outside of marriage—Varzi argues that by concentrating on images and the performance of proper behavior, the government’s campaign to produce model Islamic citizens has affected only the appearance of religious orthodoxy, and that the strictly religious public sphere is partly a mirage masking a profound crisis of faith among many Iranians. Warring Souls is a powerful account of contemporary Iran made more vivid by Varzi’s inclusion of excerpts from the diaries she maintained during her research and from journal entries written by Iranian university students with whom she formed a study group.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822388036 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/31/2006 |
| Series: | e-Duke books scholarly collection. |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Roxanne Varzi is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine.
Read an Excerpt
Warring Souls
Youth, Media, and Martyrdom in Post-Revolution IranBy ROXANNE VARZI
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2006 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3709-6
Chapter One
The Image and the Hidden Master
It [the Iranian revolution] was a picture-perfect revolution. PETER CHELKOWSKI
ISFAHAN, CEMETERY OF THE MARTYRS OF THE IRAN-IRAQ WAR, SPRING 2000 Row upon row of young male faces, frozen in framed photographs, stare out from the gates of the cemetery. The technicolor backgrounds suggest innocent auras or angelic visions. Many of the boys have small tufts of hair above their upper lip in an attempt to look older-a more benign attempt than the one that landed them in this premature resting place. As you walk along reading each unique name, epitaph, longing, and desire to die written in last will and testaments-a declaration of loyalty to the nation and Islam neatly penned from Khomeini's writings-you sense the individual in the shadow of similarities. You continue row by row until you reach the back of the cemetery where you will turn around and return. It takes half an hour before you reach the end and can turn to face the front. The backs of the elevated picture cases face you now, and you expect to be safely protected from the stares, to have a moment of reprieve before you walk back through the crowd of dead faces. But your expectation of blankboards is instead met by hundreds of pictures of the same face, that of Khomeini-the shadow, the unmovable image glued to the reverse side of every dead boy's individual illumination-stares back at you. His is the ghost here that most haunts. He is the reverse side of every unique martyr.
In Khomeini's Iran the concept of the image functioned as more than just a sign; it was an actual actor on the political stage. Those in power knew the strength of the image to foster belief and to topple a regime. Ayatollah Khomeini told his followers at the beginning of the Iranian revolution in 1979 not to be discouraged by the lack of arms: "propaganda," he noted, "is as explosive as a grenade." In Khomeini's Iran, the image was a site of special power that must either be contained or exploited. The cultural architects of this period created a perfect balance by politically exploiting some images while containing others by restricting visual subjects that could potentially undermine the Islamic program.
During both the war and the revolution the Western media portrayed Iran as an impermeable surface of images and imaginings: a nation of angry fists and of crazed martyrs rushing the frontlines of battle with the Iraqis; a place where for years the black and red colors of mourning and martyrdom shrouded the nation. The foreign press devoured these images, created at the height of Iran's revolutionary fervor, and regurgitated them faster than the Islamic republic could produce them. While the Western press for the most part has misrepresented the Islamic republic of Iran, at the beginning of the war they actually played right into the Islamic project.
The state carefully controlled the perception of two different audiences holding two opposing ideas about the same place. What was constructed domestically was not the picture allowed for export internationally. And, while forbidden satellite dishes infiltrated this domestic project, thereby allowing Iranians a glimpse of the world outside the Islamic sphere, little about the Islamic republic's actual domestic scene was known outside of Iran. This strict division of domestic and international image production was especially true of the war. The government kept complete property rights to all war images by giving only a few and select foreign reporters permission to report on the war from the inside; they knew that the images were the true spoils of this war. As I demonstrate in the pages following, it was the war that ultimately defined the Islamic republic as an image machine.
In revolutionary Iran images were only acceptable if they promoted an Islamic lifestyle, the glory of the Islamic republic, or the sanctity of the imam. At first an Islamic public sphere was created in which Khomeini was the sole living human image. This was reversed years later, just before Khomeini's death, when most currency and stamps contained photographs of martyrs and revolution heroes but rarely pictures of Khomeini himself. Could this policy have been, as Peter Chelkowski suggests, a clever manipulation of the people to suggest that Khomeini is their chosen representative? Chelkowski bases this idea on observing the expectation that the people themselves will "out of love and devotion carry his portraits and decorate every conceivable surface with his image." Khomeini projected his own image as that of the nation, and thus to love the nation was to love Khomeini. Hidden in every image that portends freedom was the ideology of subordination to a leader and to death: the absolute masters. The situation was similar to the case in Iraq where, as Samir al-Kahil notes, "much as Americans experience in daily life the culture of consumerism and advertising, Iraqis experience the awesome power of their leader."
Khomeini secured power through his own image by reproducing it everywhere, and his photographic image played as important a political role as did the man himself. Through these images the country would memorize his face, not just as a visual act but also as an act of blind habit. Moreover, not only was Khomeini's photograph looked at, but it also looked back. He was always watching, knowing, and most important: known. Susan Sontag claims that politicians never look directly into the camera, but this was not true of Khomeini whose penetrating gaze, even after his death, still stares out at his subjects from the highest place on every public wall in Iran.
If, as Walter Benjamin notes, the aura as a "unique phenomenon of distance however close it might be, represents nothing but the cult value of the work of art," then Khomeini's photograph is the perfect cult object in its ability to create distance through his penetrating gaze. In a regime of paint and paper (most images in Tehran were, and are, painted), Ayatollah Khomeini was the only living person to be represented through photographic film negative; his was the only image worthy of photography and, in turn, of mass production. As such, he becomes the all-seeing leader who appears everywhere because photography is easily mass produced. This was especially true of the war years, as documented in the fascinating and morbid book The Imposed War: Defense vs. Aggression, published by the Ministry of War. As page after page reveals images of death and destruction and moments of religious zeal, the reader cannot help but concentrate on the one image that remains constant throughout-that of Khomeini. While not physically present on the battlefront, Khomeini is there in spirit in the form of his photograph pinned to every living and dead soldier's uniform (and later, as noted above, afixed to the graves of the dead).
In the opening credits of Morteza Avini's documentary on the war, soldiers march past a picture of Khomeini pinned to a palm tree.
In order to understand this image regime we need to look at the important function of the guide in mystical Islam and ways in which the notion of the guide was utilized in the creation of an Islamic republic. In the first part of this chapter I concentrate on the image regime created by the cultural architects of the revolution, especially that of Khomeini who manipulated the mystical use of images to place himself as the sole guide and interpreter of such a regime. The image is an important device used by novices on the Sufi path to move from earthly love to metaphoric love and finally to divine oneness. The image is also tied to a larger world of images, the alam-al-mithal (world of images or archetypes), which can only be accessed by a seer with the kind of vision that is the result of alchemy, magic, dreams, and love. In some Sufi orders it is fundamental for a novice to locate a guide who is practiced at tawil, Shiite hermeneutics, to navigate through the image world. When the novice has mastered tawil, or comes closer to oneness, the exoteric guide is no longer needed because the hidden master that is connected to the alam-al-mithal is now found within.
While the image is a vehicle to oneness with the beloved in mystical Islam, it can also function as a distraction on the mystic path. The novice runs the risk of veering off the path by looking for the image from without and forgetting that the real beloved is within the seeker's own being. The twelfth-century Persian writer Nizami Ganjavi illustrates the danger (and mystical utility) of the image in his Tale of Leili and Majnun. In Nizami's story, it is the mental image of Leili that allows Majnun the ultimate spiritual experience of oneness with God, but this happens only after he forsakes her image in favor of what he has already internalized-her image. In researching war images, it is clear that some Iranian soldiers who came to the war on a spiritual path used Khomeini's image as a vehicle to oneness, yet they never arrived at the stage where the image is discarded in favor of true oneness. Most of the soldiers died before reaching the point on the mystic path where they realized that the image was no longer necessary, for the beloved was already within them. Death played the role of ultimate union.
Nizami Ganjavi's Tale of Leili and Majnun can be used to help fully appreciate the historic role of the image in mystical Islam and in Khomeini's Iran. This tale was composed in Persian around 1188 in what is present-day Azerbaijan. Written in the form of a lyric poem, the story is based on an Arab legend of ill-fated lovers: a young boy named Qays falls in love with Leili, who has already been promised to another man. When Qays is prevented from marrying Leili he isolates himself in the desert to compose poems lamenting his love. The people of the community observe his actions and they are compelled to give him a new persona-that of the character of a talented poet and a pronounced madman, Majnun. Leili and Majnun are never united in life, but in death they are buried in a single tomb.
In Leili and Majnun the journey to the core of abandon (and an eventual union with the ultimate beloved-God) begins innocently, a requited love that will take the inevitable archetypical tragic turn when the lover makes the mistake of revealing his love publicly, to the detriment of his social obligations as a student and son. As a result he is forcefully distanced from his beloved, which begins his journey of abandon and madness. Mystics often choose metaphorical love in preparation for divine love. At the core of this tale is the platonic notion that the nature of love is an irrational desire toward physical beauty, if only an image, which ultimately will end in self-annihilation, bi-khodi. Jalal al-Din Rumi (or Mawlana), a contemporary of Nizami's and perhaps the most famous Sufi poet ever to live, believed this union and self-annihilation could only work if the fire of love burned within the image. Rumi believed that only by killing the rational self, nafs, and becoming a martyr of love, shahid, can one become a witness to God's truth.
We see the image function in this capacity as Nizami's story progresses and Majnun replaces Leili with her image. The image is what will allow him to move from physical to spiritual love. When Majnun is separated from Leili he incorporates her in his imagination as memory, and by doing so he makes her present in everything.
The degree to which Leili has become incorporated, mythical, metaphorical, and ethereal is most evident when Majnun faints during his only opportunity to be with her. He has already incorporated her, and her physicality no longer exists for him. Leili's presence takes away the distance necessary to propel him on his mi'raj (journey). What is described as madness or a visionary state is a way of envisioning and seeing the beloved. The beloved and lover can only be united or present to each other in the realm of the unconscious, which Majnun enters through fainting. It is the replication of the beloved's mental image that Majnun has incorporated at the expense of his own identity; Leili's image becomes his "reality." She is replaced by an image that moves from flesh to word. Leili's image brings her closer to him yet also keeps her at a comfortable distance, allowing for desire to take effect. Such contemplation of the image (mental or physical), like the repetition of a name, is a step toward divine union while keeping a foot in the "real" world. It is the image that is incorporated and consumed. This brings the novice closer to the world of image and sign, alam-al-mithal.
The mystic Ibn Arabi states that it is the creative imagination that links the mystic to alam-al-mithal. In the Tale of Leili and Maj-nun, the entrance into alam-al-mithal can only happen through a move of bi-khodi or self-loss, thereby killing the nafs. Like Majnun, the novice may seek the beloved through an object or being on the outside, not realizing that the beloved is an image that has already been incorporated within. Majnun discovers this when Leili comes to stand before him and threatens to replace the image of her that he has already internalized. The internalization of the image is what has allowed Majnun the ultimate presence of self-which Leili's material presence threatens to destroy. The image can no longer be real when she is present, and if the image is not real then the spiritual experience is less powerful. Thus the image is not outside of him but within him. As Henry Corbin remarks: "So excessive is the nearness that it acts at first as a veil. That is why the inexperienced novice, though dominated by the image which invests his whole inner being, goes looking for it outside of himself, in a desperate search from form to form of the sensible world, until he returns to the sanctuary of his soul and perceives that the real beloved is deep within his own being; from that moment on he seeks the beloved only through the beloved."
The first symptom of bi-khodi is a disregard for the protective barriers that society furnishes for the self. Shame and humiliation fade as the self becomes centered on a new self: an object of love. For mystics this is the first step toward truth, toward the stripping of cultural clothing and baring the soul. This happens when Qays is renamed "Majnun," as one who is not "self"-contained (bi-khod). Revelation, an unveiling of self, is an important act in the mystical journey of love and abandon. The first physical sign of Qays's state is his use of and relation to language; an early symptom that identifies a breakdown of self is the loss of coherent speech. Is reality just a discursive practice? Is the beginning of self-erosion a move to create distance from common signification, pointing to the role of metaphor? Are "real" objects, including nations and states, no more and no less than the effects of discourse?
The mystical voice becomes a poetic inscription of being or incorporation, the ultimate connection between words, reality, and desire. Of a piece with this is the move by desire to contain or consume the image by means of metaphor. The repetition of memory through symbols is tied to the issue of inspiration, through the collectively symbolized unconscious as represented by the world of archetypes, the alam-al-mithal. For Sufis the name, tied to an image or a nonimage, is the key to meditation and trance in the practice of zekr, where the various names of God are repeated in order to concentrate on becoming completely centered on His being. For Rumi, love is a mi'raj, a heavenly journey to divine presence, to a state of selflessness, bi-khodi. This is the state that Sufis enter in the practice of zekr, where they replace their nafs, or self, with His name. Rumi says that lovers are strange because the more they are killed the more they are alive. It is this symbolic death (of the nafs) that is paramount to the Sufi experience.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Warring Souls by ROXANNE VARZI Copyright © 2006 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixPrologue: The Journey xiii
Introduction. Divination: An Archeology of the Unknown 1
1. The Image and the Hidden Master 23
2. Mystic States: Martyrdom and the Making of the Islamic Republic 44
3. Shooting Soldiers, Shooting Film: The Cinema of the Iranian Sacred Defense 76
4. Visionary States: Inhabiting the City, Inhabiting the Mind 106
5. Shifting Subjects: Public Law and Private Selves 131
6. Majnun's Mask: Sex, Suicide, and Semiotic Malfunctioning 155
7. The Ghost in the Machine: (Just War?) Remainders and Reminders of War 175
8. Reforming Religious Identity in Post-Khatami Iran 194
Conclusion. Mehdi's Climb 209
Epilogue 214
Notes 219
Works Cited 263
Index 269