On July 6, 1894, ʿIyn al-Saltanih, a Qajar prince and the king’s brother, wrote the following sentences about Tehran’s Muharram mourning ceremonies in his book of memoir:
Similar to the previous years, the Turk merchants hold magnificent mourning ceremonies in Shiykh ʿAbd al-Husayn mosque […] In rivalry with other merchants and shopkeepers, each group has designated a particular mosque and, similar to the previous year, they are busy [holding their ceremonies]. The merchants from Isfahan have occupied Aqa Siyid ʿAziz Allah mosque, the merchants from Kashan have occupied Friday mosque, and each guild has occupied a specific place for its mourning rituals.Footnote 1
In the nineteenth century, Muharram mourning rituals were one of the main religious gatherings for the Shiʿi population of Iran. Despite their shared religiosity, each guild or social group had a particular place for its mourning rituals. In other words, the spatiality of religious gatherings was segmented into numerous smaller spaces, and each community held its ceremonies separately. Why was the spatiality of Muharram ceremonies so segmented? What were the social underpinnings of this spatial segmentation? Is it possible to trace this segmentation in other instances of social life? What was the relationship between urban society and its spaces of daily life in nineteenth-century Tehran?
My objective in this chapter is to investigate these questions through the examination of the relationship between society and the city in nineteenth-century Tehran. This relationship focuses on the spatiality of ordinary people’s daily lives. In the last four decades, the analysis of the relation between the sociality and the spatiality of cities has undergone massive transformations as a result of the development of geographical and spatial understanding of social processes. Social theories of space have become a common domain for geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, and ethnographers as a means to investigate socio-spatial processes. In this chapter, I unfold this theoretical framework and explain the impact of the spatial approach on social and historical examinations of cities before presenting the main empirical analysis of daily life and social spaces in nineteenth-century Tehran.
The two decades of the 1970s and 1980s witnessed the advancement of the discipline of geography, particularly human geography, into the realms of social and historical studies. This disciplinary shift generated a novel framework for the investigation of the spatiality of social processes. Prior to this era, space was assumed to be a neutral background for social interactions; spatial settings were similar to fixed and blank canvases or empty containers. Derived from classical geography developed in the works of Kant as well as Newton’s and Descartes’s conceptions of space and time, this view conceptualizes space as a fixed and unchanging grid for social processes that can be analyzed and standardized through Euclidian geometry. In short, space was an absolute construct detached from sociality.Footnote 2
The “spatial turn” in social sciences and humanities was a response to the fixed and neutral conception of space.Footnote 3 It stresses that social processes and spatial forms are deeply interrelated; they are mutually constructed and neither is a priori. Initially developed in the works of Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey, this view became known as the social constructionist conception of space and has dominated social sciences and humanities since the 1980s.Footnote 4 The “spatial turn” is an attempt to bridge the gap between two dominant research traditions: the sociological and geographical imaginations.Footnote 5 Space is an integral aspect of social processes; in the words of Henri Lefebvre, “(Social) space is a (social) product.”Footnote 6 There is a reciprocal relationship between space and society. On the one hand, space is socially produced and can be analyzed only through its specific social context. On the other hand, space is a precondition of social interactions. Any social process demands spatiality; the spatiality of social relations is an active element in the constitution of social processes.
The notion of social space has been repeatedly presented in tripartite conceptualizations of space.Footnote 7 In these conceptualizations, the three modes of social space are investigated in mutual, dialectical relationship with each other. The first mode deals with space as a material construct. It reduces space to its physicality, which can be studied and analyzed objectively. The Newtonian conception of space and Euclidian geometry are the manifestation of this view. Henri Lefebvre calls it spatial practices or perceived spaces.Footnote 8 Spatial practices ensure societal cohesion of lived reality.Footnote 9
In contrast to spatial practices, Lefebvre introduces conceived spaces or representations of space. This is mental space; it is the realm of discourse and knowledge. Space is reduced to its representations and to subjective entities through objectified abstractions. In the words of Lefebvre, “[c]onceptions of space tend […] towards a system of verbal (and therefore intellectually worked out) signs.”Footnote 10 Space loses its symbolic meanings made through the everyday lives of ordinary people; it is reduced to an abstract construct. Abstract space is the realm of hegemonic power, which attempts to provide a simple and clarified conception of space and social life; it provides a “communality of use.”Footnote 11 There is a direct relationship between conceived spaces and architecture and urban planning professions, which attempt to provide lucid and coherent representations of space. They abstract spaces to the world of design, two- or three-dimensional drawings, and architectural typologies.Footnote 12
As a reaction to the binary spatial conceptualization of perceived and conceived, objective and subjective, absolute and relative, natural and conceptual, and material and discourse, from the 1970s onward, Marxist theoreticians and geographers such as Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and Edward Soja attempted to deconstruct the binary approach by dialectical reading of the two spatial aspects and constructing the third spatial element. The dialectical view states that the comprehension of social reality is based on the understanding of contradictions.Footnote 13 Criticizing Hegelian dialectic upon its idealistic conception, Lefebvre concludes Marx’s unfinished project by developing a “three-dimensional dialectic” in which he proposes three distinct terms that are dialectically interrelated.Footnote 14 As Edward Soja puts it, Lefebvre breaks the “closed logic of either/or” through the process of “thirding-as-Othering.”Footnote 15
Through the dialectical reading of perceived and conceived spaces, Lefebvre introduces spaces of representationFootnote 16 or lived spaces. This is the space of users and inhabitants; space is infused by symbols and signs. While conceived spaces belong to the realm of subjective knowledge and verbal representations – which attempt to represent spaces as abstract and clear entities – and perceived spaces belong to the natural and material world – which can be realized objectively – lived spaces belong to the realm of nonverbal symbols of everyday life. They are socially produced through people’s everyday lives with all their fears, dreams, and emotions. In the words of Lefebvre, spaces of representation “embodying complex symbolisms, sometimes coded, sometimes not, linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life, as also to art.”Footnote 17 Spaces of representation are objective and subjective, material and conceptual.Footnote 18
Since Lefebvre’s and Harvey’s initial deliberation in the 1970s, the “spatial turn” has become the common domain of socio-spatial investigations.Footnote 19 In the case of Middle Eastern studies and socio-spatial investigations of the region’s cities and people’s everyday lives, social theories of space have had a limited impact with a considerable delay. In the early twentieth century, the European historians took an orientalist approach to the study of these cities based on the construction and generalization of specific typologies for the concept of the Islamic city. These typologies were the outcomes of historians’ limited studies and the examinations of the cities in French colonies of Northern Africa. Through the generalization of their constructed prototypes to the entire Islamic realm, these early attempts provided a fixed and universal framework for the investigation of the cities in the entire Middle East and North Africa.Footnote 20 In order to produce generalizable models, these studies largely depended on the morphological analysis and the abstraction of the spatial structure of the so-called Islamic cities.
Despite various revisions, this approach remained the dominant framework for the investigation of Middle Eastern and North African cities up to the 1980s. The reductionist approach of these earlier studies and their attempts to produce generalizable models of the Islamic city have reduced cities and urban life to the physicality of space and overlooked their sociality. In the Lefebvrian terminology, these studies abstract spaces to the level of conceived spaces. They provide representations of space; space is reduced to discourse; space is represented as a lucid and coherent knowledge. Models establish rules of consistency and cohesiveness and act as universal molds that reshape every single city to fit their specificities. As a result, they neglect diversity and incongruity between various cases.
Although the search for generalizable models has lost its dominance since the 1980s, the morphological approach toward the examination of Middle Eastern and North African cities is still a well-established method among the scholars of the field, particularly architectural historians. In her valuable book on Istanbul, Zeynep Çelik clearly points to this approach and claims that it is the task of architectural historians to study the history of the city as an artifact.Footnote 21 The morphological approach tends to prioritize the physicality of space over its sociality. It ignores the role of social processes and people’s everyday lives in the production of social spaces.
One of the first scholars in the field of Middle Eastern and North African studies who distanced herself from morphological studies and attempted to examine the spatiality of cities through the framework of social processes was Janet Abu-Lughod, particularly her valuable article on the concept of Islamic cities. Although her first work on CairoFootnote 22 was under the influence of the orientalist approach – a fact she mentions in her article and about which she criticizes herselfFootnote 23 – later she distanced herself and attempted to distinguish various social and religious forces that have a decisive role in the production of spaces and the configuration of Islamic cities.Footnote 24 However, her work remains incomplete and does not provide a comprehensive theoretical framework. Moreover, it does not engage in dialogue with social theories of space contemporary to her era. In recent years, however, a new wave of scholarship has emerged that is more grounded in social theories of space. Particularly, the examinations of gender relationships in Islamic cities and the reciprocal relationship between gender identity and social spaces have distanced themselves from the morphological approaches and focused on the mutually constitutive nature of space and gender.Footnote 25 Moreover, each year, new studies on Middle Eastern and North African cities are published that incorporate the social theories of space for the examination of the spatiality of cities.Footnote 26
The same theoretical delay is recognizable in the case of Iranian studies. The social and historical research on Iranian urban societies has remained spatially blind. The main literature on nineteenth-century Iranian society and cities does not examine people’s socio-spatial practices. Classic works of Ervand Abrahamian, Nikkie R. Keddie, Willem M. Floor, Ann K. S. Lambton, Ahmad Ashraf, Homa Katouzian, and others are “aspatial”Footnote 27 historiographies and social analyses.Footnote 28 Although these studies provide detailed analyses of Iranian urban society in the nineteenth century, they remain relatively silent on how this society was spatially embedded. Similar to the absolutist notion of space or perceived spaces, in these studies, space is reduced to a mere background; it is a neutral container for social processes, and there is no reciprocity between society and social spaces of the cities.
The same argument applies to the historiography of the highlights of the modern history of Iran. For example, the 1905–6 Constitutional Revolution of Iran has been the subject of repeated examination, and hundreds of books and articles have investigated every aspect of the revolution. However, the spatiality of protests and political public spaces are erased from these historiographies. Similar shortcomings apply to Reza Shah’s reign, the turbulent period of 1941–53, the Oil Nationalization Movement, the 1953 coup, and the like.Footnote 29
In contrast, literatures that exclusively focus on Iranian cities and the history of urbanism in Iran are devoid of sociality. Space is abstract, without people, and clear; it has no dilemma. Space is reduced to spatial knowledge and people are like phantoms that can fill spaces without any reciprocal dialogue with them. In comparison to North African colonies, only a few orientalist studies on Iranian cities were carried out in the first decades of the twentieth century.Footnote 30 In 1974, the publication of two issues of the Iranian Studies journal focusing on Isfahan invigorated the contemporary studies of Iranian cities.Footnote 31 The examination of the articles of these issues demonstrates the dominance of the morphological approach. In almost all of these studies spaces are devoid of sociality.Footnote 32 Later works on Iranian cities suffer from the same one-sided morphological approach. These studies focus on the physicality of spaces and cities and the search for particular typologies and models that can be generalized beyond societal, historical, and geographical specificities.Footnote 33
In short, the modern social history of Iran is “aspatial,” and the literatures on cities and urban spaces are devoid of sociality. To borrow from Edward Soja, “the epistemological dualism of objectivist-materialist and subjectivist-idealist approaches”Footnote 34 has dominated Iranian historiography and has overlooked the reciprocity of society and space in historical, social, and spatial investigations.
In recent years, however, similar to the broader context of Middle Eastern studies, a new generation of historical studies is emerging that examines the spatiality of cities through social theories and investigates the instrumentality of spaces in social interactions. Afshin Marashi’s Nationalizing Iran, Talin Grigor’s works on architecture and Tehran, Babak Rahimi’s analysis of the spatiality of Muharram rituals, and, particularly, Asef Bayat’s Street Politics are some examples in this regard.Footnote 35 However, these works are more or less historical investigations devoid of spatial theoretical deliberations. They do not examine the social production of social spaces. This chapter and, in a bigger framework, this book stand alongside this new generation and aim to cover this neglected aspect of historical accounts by rewriting history in dialogue with social and spatial analysis and folding social space into social processes. My objective is to socialize the spatial analysis and, more importantly, to spatialize the social analysis.Footnote 36
This chapter focuses on the relationship between urban society and Tehran in the nineteenth century. It examines people’s everyday lives in the city and their religious and non-religious spatial practices. It investigates various social spaces of day-to-day interactions in the city. My point of departure for this spatial investigation is the analysis of urban society and its social configuration, which provides an essential framework for the understanding of people’s social spaces. As a result, I start by presenting a social analysis of Iranian urban society in the nineteenth century. Afterwards, I examine social spaces in two main categories: spaces based on religious gatherings and spaces based on non-religious practices. Finally, this chapter ends with the examination of women’s social lives and spaces in the city.
Nineteenth-Century Iranian Urban Society and the Communal Sphere
Nineteenth-century Iranian urban society was largely classless and segmented. It consisted of numerous smaller communities, which were not able to coalesce based on shared economic interests in order to form broader classes. In other words, it is not possible to talk about class consciousness in early nineteenth-century Iranian urban society.Footnote 37 Class consciousness as people’s subjective awareness “of their class interests and the conditions for advancing them”Footnote 38 is heavily based on inequalities in income, generated through people’s uneven access to life chances and inequalities in rights and powers over productive resources. Both Marxist and Weberian approaches of class analysis largely depend on economic criteria in defining class relations and class positions.
Class analysis is a well-established method for studying social structures and explaining social relations and behaviors, as well as spatial practices based on those structures. In the academic sphere, two dominant forms of class analysis are common: the Marxist and Weberian approaches.Footnote 39 Class relations and class locations in the Marxist approach are largely based on the rights and powers of people over productive resources and economic activities. Variations and inequalities in the distribution of these rights and powers create class relations. Class locations can be determined by situating individuals within the “structured patterns of interaction” and class relations.Footnote 40 The Weberian approach to class analysis has many overlaps with the Marxist tradition. However, Weber uses the concept of life chances “as the chances that individuals have of gaining access to scarce and valued outcomes” to define class situations.Footnote 41 The market distributes life chances based on the resources that people bring to it. In this condition, members of a class receive common life chances.Footnote 42
Class analysis provides an instrument for sociologists to explain various social outcomes at the macro and micro levels, from nation-states to individuals. Since the 1970s, radical and human geographers have demonstrated how class relations and positions have spatial consequences and produce patterns of uneven geographies.Footnote 43 However, the major approaches to class analysis seem to be inefficient in studying nineteenth-century Iranian urban society. In contrast to the established definitions of class consciousness and the role of economic relations in defining classes, in the nineteenth century Iranians’ communal consciousness was based on social identities.Footnote 44
Instead of broad classes, numerous smaller communities constituted a great portion of the urban population. These communities consisted of rich and poor people who shared common social identities. Sometimes, they were immigrants from the same region of the country or the same town that had moved to bigger cities; other times, they had the same profession, language, or ethnicity, or they had the same religion or sectarian affiliation. Communal ties and people’s social affiliations were stronger than their shared economic interests, and this prevented the formation of class consciousness. In the words of Abrahamian, communal ties “cut through the horizontal classes, strengthened the vertical communal bonds, and thereby prevented latent economic interests from developing into manifest political forces.”Footnote 45 Similarly, Nikki Keddie uses the term “vertical classes” for describing the Iranian population in the nineteenth century. In the “vertical divisions in society,” the homogeneous groups consisted of rich and poor people who were connected based on their shared social identity.Footnote 46
The juxtapositions of rich and poor people in the same communities were spatially manifested in their coexistence in urban wards.Footnote 47 The wards were smaller sections of the city with a more homogeneous population. Each ward was like a community whose members had a similar social identity. They were self-sufficient units with marketplaces for the daily needs of their inhabitants, bathhouses, religious buildings, gymnasiums, and coffeehouses.Footnote 48 Not only were the wards independent of each other, they had semi-independent administrative systems too. The head of the ward was the Kadkhudā, selected by the prominent families in the ward, the elders, or high-ranking members of the community.Footnote 49 Kadkhudās were the official connection of the urban communities to the state and the other communities.Footnote 50
By considering the role of the craft guilds, another element of Iranian urban life, “communal diversity”Footnote 51 becomes more complicated. People pursuing the same craft often formed a closed community.Footnote 52 The occupational identity of the guilds had its own unique spatial manifestation. Each guild had a specific section, rāstih, in the urban bazaars, which “strengthened their sense of corporate life.”Footnote 53 Moreover, similar to the wards, each guild had a Kadkhudā as the head of the guild. Following more or less the same tasks, he handled the internal conflicts of the guild and its relationship to the outer world, particularly to the state. Both the Kadkhudās of the wards and guilds worked under the direct supervision of the state’s representative in the cities.Footnote 54
The segmented nature of the urban society – the communal diversity – also had a downside. A common feature of premodern urban life in Iranian cities was the rivalry between different wards. Sometimes, the rivalry was manifested in fights between the wards. Due to religious conflicts, ethnic enmities, sectarianism, and the like, wards often had trouble getting along with each other peacefully. The conflict between the Ḥaydarī and Nīʿmatī groups is a well-studied case of such an urban rivalry. These were groups following the practices of two different mystic figures. They often engaged in violent confrontations in the cities.Footnote 55
In examining such a segmented urban society, I suggest the notion of the communal sphere for the analysis of Iranian urban society in the nineteenth century.Footnote 56 As Chapter 2 discusses at length, in contrast to the bourgeois or proletarian public spheres common in the studies of European urban societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,Footnote 57 the communal sphere was not formed based on economic interests. People’s shared affiliations were the pivotal principle for the formation of the communal spheres. More importantly, there was not a single communal sphere; segmented urban society produced various communal spheres alongside each other. The most important task of this sphere was to provide the identification of the individuals within broader society; each person was affiliated with at least one community. Moreover, the communal sphere worked toward the wellbeing of its members. The rivalry between various communities is the manifestation of this task; each community had to advance its communal interests against the others.
While in Chapter 2 I will come back to the notion of the communal sphere and investigate its political role in the formation of the public sphere and the production of political public spaces, in this chapter I investigate the socio-spatial manifestations of the communal sphere in nineteenth-century Tehran, before its 1870s expansion. I suggest that the examination of urban society based on the concept of the communal sphere is the essential analytic component for the study of social life and spaces in Tehran. I also demonstrate how the communal sphere constructed social life and spaces; the production of social spaces was in direct relationship to the communal sphere.
This chapter continues by examining social spaces based on religious practices. It examines the rituals attached to the religious months of Muharram and Ramadan. It shows that the social practices accompanying these religious months created temporary social spaces that were highly colored by communal diversity and rivalry. The chapter then turns to the non-religious instances of social life that occurred in coffeehouses, bathhouses, and traditional gymnasiums, and shows that there was a strong reciprocal relationship between these spaces and the communal sphere. While the above social spaces and practices were highly frequented by men, the chapter ends with the examination of women’s social lives and spaces. It demonstrates that the private houses played the role of communal spaces for women and depicts them as lively centers of feminine social interactions and communal life.
Communal Life and Spaces Based on Religious Practices
The boundaries of nineteenth-century Tehran initially formed in the sixteenth century, when the Safavid king, Shah Tahmasp (1524–76), built a rampart around the existing village and a bazaar inside it. However, it was in the late eighteenth century when Agha Muhammad Khan (1789–97), the founder of the Qajar dynasty, chose Tehran as his capital. During the reign of the next three Qajar monarchs, Tehran’s population grew from 50,000 to around 150,000 people, and the city expanded inside its sixteenth-century ramparts by transforming its gardens and farmlands into new neighborhoods. In the late 1860s and the early 1870s, during the reign of Nasser al-Din Shah (1848–96), the state demolished the old ramparts and expanded the city, using the European vocabulary of urban planning and design.Footnote 58
In this section, I focus on religious instances of social life and space, perhaps better referred to as communal life and spaces, in nineteenth-century Tehran. A temporal duality had a considerable impact on the spatial configurations of these gatherings: the operation of two different time-keeping systems, the lunar and solar calendars. Historically, the solar calendar was utilized for celebrating Iranian New Year, Nowruz;Footnote 59 calculating the agricultural seasons and governmental fiscal years;Footnote 60 and tracking the time of some other annual ceremonies with pre-Islamic roots. However, the Islamic lunar calendar was the one constructing people’s daily lives. People used it to calculate all religious events and ceremonies, dating daily and weekly periodicals, and structuring their day-to-day activities. The two calendars, however, do not match each other; the lunar calendar is eleven days shorter than the solar one. As a result, the events that are based on the lunar calendar move eleven days backward each year. The difference between the calendars caused Islamic rituals and events to occur in different seasons, and people had to deal with various climatic conditions. As this section discusses, this simple fact had certain spatial impacts on people’s social lives.
Muharram and the Formation of Takīyyihs
The first month of the Islamic lunar calendar, Muharram, has a great significance in defining the religious identity of the Shiʿi population. The martyrdom of Imam Husayn, the third Shiʿi Imam, symbolizes the center of the faith, which is commemorated annually by holding certain ceremonies during Muharram. The Taʿzīyih, or passion play, was a theatrical art form developed in Iran by the end of the Safavid era (1501–1736) and reached its pinnacle in the nineteenth century during the reign of the Qajar dynasty (1796–1925).Footnote 61 For the Shiʿi rulers of Iran, taʿzīyih and other Muharram ceremonies were political instruments used to construct the national and religious identity of the new kingdom.Footnote 62
In nineteenth-century Tehran, one of the main instances of social life occurred in temporary spaces called takīyyih. Takīyyihs were the places for holding Muharram ceremonies, particularly for the performance of taʿzīyih. Generally, scholars of the field examine takīyyih as a particular architectural typology. Whenever they fail to find a distinct form, they conclude that “a distinctly recognizable takia style of architecture did not emerge”Footnote 63 or that “the takiyeh was constantly in experimental stages in different regions for various patrons with the result that few final solutions were ever found.”Footnote 64 Similar to studies of Islamic cities, mere architectural examinations of takīyyihs have reduced them to abstract spaces – to an architectural typology – that can be investigated through its physical features. This framework tends to ignore the sociality of takīyyihs. In contrast, I present takīyyihs through their particular social role and introduce them as one of the most vibrant social spaces of nineteenth-century Iranian urban society.
Takīyyihs reflected the communal identities of their users. During the two months of Muharram and Safar, communal spheres manifested spatially at the place of takīyyihs; each takīyyih belonged to a certain community and served as a medium for the reproduction of communal ties. All the activities at the place of takīyyihs were collective; rich and poor; young and old; and men and, to some extent, women, all had specific jobs in the preparation of their community’s takīyyih for the mourning months and holding the related ceremonies. The term takīyyih bastanFootnote 65 – which literally means putting together or erecting a takīyyih – was used for an annual ceremony in which the takīyyihs were prepared a few days before Muharram. Designating a place for a takīyyih and its preparation were communal practices.Footnote 66 Aghaie argues that the “planning and financing of Muharram rituals […] reinforced a sense of cohesion among” the members of different social groups.Footnote 67 Peter Chelkowski provides a valuable description of this communal event:
Each individual contributed according to his means and ability. The men brought their most precious objects – crystal, lamps, mirrors, china, and tapestry – to decorate the walls of the takīyyih. Even the most humble objects were accepted as they were given or lent with religious devotion. Athletes from the gymnasium eagerly donated their strength and agility to put up the takīyyih. The women provided refreshments; the children of the aristocracy served water, a symbol of the Kerbela martyrs’ thirst, and sweetmeats to all spectators, rich and poor alike.Footnote 68
Even with a permanent building, takīyyihs were not socially recognized as mourning sites unless they had gone through the communal process of takīyyih bastan. The act of decorating the takīyyih space or building, covering the floors with carpets, adorning the walls with black fabrics and shawls, hanging tapestry and pictures of the martyrs, erecting a temporary tent roof, and so forthFootnote 69 equated to the changing of an ordinary courtyard, an empty plot of land, and even a designed and built takīyyih building into the real takīyyih, into a communal space. People’s communal acts and social practices produced takīyyih spaces. Their communal identities constituted these relatively small-scale and temporary social spaces. In return, the collective process for the preparation of takīyyihs and the mourning rituals at these places reproduced the communal identity of each community of the city.
It is important to note that most of the takīyyihs existed at the neighborhood level.Footnote 70 The communal act of takīyyih bastan happened separately in each neighborhood.Footnote 71 This act was the spatial manifestation of the segmented urban society. Consequently, there were occasional instances of factional strife and fights between the members of different communities during the mourning months. These fights usually occurred between the mourning processions, called dastihs, of different neighborhoods.Footnote 72 Dastihs were the most common form of Muharram mourning ceremonies; it was easier and cheaper to organize dastihs in the neighborhoods, as opposed to the heavier costs of erecting takīyyihs. Each dastih consisted of the members of the same community. They usually started their march from the takīyyihs of their communities and moved around their neighborhood, performing the mourning rituals.Footnote 73 Sometime, dastihs got out of their neighborhoods and encountered another dastihs. This was the perfect recipe for the outbreak of a fight between them.Footnote 74 On occasion, the authorities had to implement certain regulations to prevent possible fights between the dastihs of different neighborhoods.Footnote 75
Besides neighborhood identity, other social stratifications constituted dastihs and takīyyihs. People from the same ethnic background and the migrants from the same region of Tehran – Afsharhā, Barbarhā, Arabhā (Arabs), Qafqāzhā (Caucasians), Qumīhā (people from Qum city), Kirmānīhā (people from Kerman city), Kāshānīhā (people from Kashan city), and Kharāqānīhā (from Kharaqan region) – or people belonging to the same profession – zargarhā (goldsmiths), qātirchīhā (people who work with mules), dabāghkhānih (tanners), and kūrhā (blind people, not a profession of course) – had special takīyyihs of their own.Footnote 76 As a result, the segmented communal identity was intensely present in the takīyyihs. Neighborhood identity, ethnicity, and occupational relations produced the social spaces of takīyyihs, and in return these spaces reproduced and reaffirmed those same identities.
Takīyyihs were more like fluid social concepts in which the sociality of the rituals had priority over the physicality of space. In other words, the collective act of coming together as the members of the same community in order to hold Muharram ceremonies was the determinative factor in the production of the space of takīyyihs, rather than the availability of a particular architectural entity. Without the occurrence of this collective act, even the permanent structure of a takīyyih did not qualify as a legitimate takīyyih. This fact is clearly traceable in the seasonal fluctuations of the numbers of takīyyihs in Tehran. Due to the inconsistency between the lunar and solar calendars, the month of Muharram moves around the solar year. As a result, the heat of summer days replaces the cold and snow of winter in sixteen years’ time.
Located at the southern foot of the Alburz mountain range, Tehran has a four-season climate, with hot and dry summers and cold winters with occasional snowstorms. By the end of May and early June, the weather starts to get hot in the central city, while the northern boundaries of the city just beneath the mountain range, Shimiranat, remains cooler. This condition does not last long, and, as summer approaches, one needs to travel north, deep into the mountains, to escape the hot and dry weather. After a hot July and by the end of August, summer loses its grip on Shimiranat in the north. It is only by the end of September that the hot summer days are almost over in the central city.
In the nineteenth century, the population of Tehran followed the same seasonal rhythm. John MacDonald Kinneir, who visited Tehran in the early nineteenth century, roughly estimates “that in the months of June, July, and August, the capital cannot boast above ten thousand people. When the King is there, in the winter, the population is supposed to amount to sixty thousand souls.”Footnote 77 The villages near or deep in the mountains were havens for many people of the city during the hot summer days.
As temporary communal spaces, the number of Tehran’s takīyyihs depended deeply on the season during which the months of Muharram and Safar coincided. Consequently, with such a fluctuation in the population, the numbers of takīyyihs were not consistent during different times of the year. Particularly, the departure of the affluent people of each community during the summer could result in the lack of financial support for that community to erect its takīyyih. An 1856 entry in the Vaqayiʿ Itifaqiyyih newspaper shows that the number of takīyyihs fluctuated with the seasons. In that year, Muharram was in the summer, and many people were out of the city at the time. However, ArbaʿīnFootnote 78 ceremonies were in fall. The newspaper mentions that people erected takīyyihs for Arbaʿīn ceremonies, even in the places where there were no takīyyih during Muharram.Footnote 79
Table 1.1 shows the numbers of takīyyihs in the old city of Tehran as referred to in different documents such as maps, travelogues, and building surveys. This table demonstrates which months from the Gregorian calendar coincided with the Muharram month of the year that the documents were surveyed in. Looking at the table, it is no surprise that Berezin, a Russian orientalist, recorded fifty-eight takīyyihs in his travelogue. In 1842, possibly the year that he was in Tehran during Muharram, the mourning month was in February. The coinciding of Muharram with one of the coldest months of the year resulted in the presence of a bigger population in the city and an increase in the number of takīyyihs. However, as the table demonstrates, other documents were compiled in the years in which Muharram coincided with warmer seasons. Based on these facts, the coinciding of Muharram with the warmer months resulted in a smaller residential population in Tehran and a smaller number of takīyyihs in the 1858, 1869, and 1899 surveys.
Table 1.1 Number of takīyyihs in Tehran’s old neighborhoods
Year | Document | Corresponding months to Muharram | Number of takīyyihs |
|---|---|---|---|
1843/1259 | Berezin travelogue | February | 58 |
1852/1269 | Buildings survey | October and November | 54 |
1858/1275 | Kriziz map | August–September | 42 |
1869/1286 | Population survey | April and May | 34 |
1899/1317 | Buildings survey | May and June | 36a |
a The real number is forty-three. Seven takīyyihs belonged to the new neighborhoods of the city after the expansion in the 1870s.
As social spaces, the numbers of takīyyihs were in direct relation to the size of the population. If one examines these spaces merely as permanent architectural entities, it is not possible to explain the changes in the numbers, particularly regarding the fact that the popularity of Muharram ceremonies increased throughout the nineteenth century. Shahidi argues that the number of takīyyihs increased dramatically during the Nasser al-Din Shah era.Footnote 80 Similarly, Babak Rahimi mentions that “[w]ith the rise of Nasir al-Din Shah, the popularity of Muharram, especially in its taʿziyeh form, had grown so expansively that Tehran included a number of major takkiyeh sites at the cross section of neighborhoods.”Footnote 81 However, as is evident from the surveys – particularly the 1869–70 survey – there is a contradiction to these claims; the number of takīyyihs has dropped from fifty-four in 1852–3 to thirty-four in 1869–70.
In the context of nineteenth-century Tehran, people did not necessarily count a permanent structure as a takīyyih; the architectural permanency was not a criterion for the formation of takīyyihs.Footnote 82 Takīyyih was the place of the coming together of the members of the same community for the collective act of mourning; the collective, communal act was the determining factor in the production of the social life and space of the takīyyih. As a result, the surveys did not count takīyyihs through their physical qualities and the permanency of their structures. They counted the number of places where communities gathered for mourning rituals, regardless of the quality of their structures. It is the twenty-first-century mentality that prioritizes the architectural manifestation over the sociality of spaces and reifies every social activity with a particular physicality. The projection of this mentality over the nineteenth-century landscape of Iranian cities can cause serious flaws in the study of social spaces of the time.
Communal Life in Tehran during the Month of Ramadan
During the nineteenth century, before the first phase of urban development in Tehran, there were strict nighttime regulations in the city. Four hours past sunset, drums announced the start of a curfew, and police forces arrested people half an hour after the drumming.Footnote 83 For one month each year, however, the government suspended these strict nighttime regulations. The fasting month of Ramadan was a break in the daily routine of the city, particularly when Ramadan coincided with the warm seasons.Footnote 84 Fasting from dawn to dusk, people started their social lives after sunset. The government relaxed the nighttime curfew and people could move around the city freely.Footnote 85 As a result, for one month each year, the people of Tehran could experience a temporary nightlife.
The neighborhoods’ mosques were the main centers of communal life during Ramadan. Mosques were the centers of the daily collective prayers of the members of each urban community, and they were much more crowded during Ramadan month.Footnote 86 The most important ceremony of the month happened on Qadr Nights,Footnote 87 when people gathered in the mosques to hold a prayer vigil throughout the night:
The three nights of IhyāFootnote 88 were the praying nights; people were going to the mosques after breaking their fasts […] the preachers would go to the pulpit to do their sermons […] and since people considered crying from fear of God as worship, the preachers would make them cry. Then people would put a Quran over their heads and pray for all the Muslims. Near the dawn, they would return to their houses.Footnote 89
In 1853,Footnote 90 Tehran had 112 mosques and nine imamzadih shrines.Footnote 91 As a result, people were able to gather with their own communities at a mosque in the neighborhood they belonged to; they did not need to travel long distances in the city. Besides the mosques, people had other options for nightlife during Ramadan. Coffeehouses and bathhouses were open throughout the night. People, particularly tradesmen, would gather in coffeehouses listening to storytellers, reciting poetry, or playing games every night.Footnote 92 Bathhouses were open twenty-four hours each day, and people occupied them after their morning prayer until sunset, when they would break their fasts, and again after that until dawn.Footnote 93 As a result, Ramadan was another religious catalyst for the reproduction of the communal ties of urban society.
Non-religious Practices and Communal Spaces
In addition to the religious manifestations of the communal sphere, there were non-religious instances of social life and communal spaces in nineteenth-century Tehran. Each ward, as a section of the city with more or less homogeneous populations, and each rāstih, as a section of the bazaar with homogeneous crafts, contained certain types of communal spaces that were the centers of non-religious social life for the members of their communities. This section examines three main types of these communal spaces: coffeehouses, bathhouses, and traditional gymnasiums.
Coffeehouses
The Qajar coffeehousesFootnote 94 were the remnants of a social trend that began in the sixteenth century – Safavid era – through the mass consumption of coffee in Iranian cities, particularly in Isfahan as the capital of the empire.Footnote 95 The Safavid coffeehouses owed their success to the specific social role they adopted: they filled the existing void between two different types of social life: the one of the religious organizations such as mosques and religious schools, and the one of disreputable places such as taverns.Footnote 96 Due to such a unique position, coffeehouses spread rapidly in Isfahan and other urban centers during the Safavid era.Footnote 97
In this era, as the centers for more affluent people, coffeehouses adopted additional social roles besides leisure and coffee drinking. They were suitable places for the artists, intellectuals, and poets to meet up and exchange their works.Footnote 98 However, one of the most important roles of the coffeehouses, which continued beyond the Safavid era up to the twentieth century, was that of hosting epic storytelling or naqqālī.Footnote 99 Naqqālī was the recitation of – usually epic and non-religious – stories in front of public audiences. Using different epic stories, particularly those of Shahnama, the storyteller recited the story in the middle of a circle in a non-theatrical form.Footnote 100 He could cut his stories into pieces, telling each part on a different night. As a result, coffee-houses were great places to guarantee a permanent stage and bring the audience back the other nights. People knew where and when to find their favorite storytellers to follow their stories.Footnote 101
The architecture of coffeehouses was in direct dialogue with what happened inside them, particularly the act of naqqālī. European travelers and ambassadors to the court of the Safavid monarchs recorded detailed descriptions of coffeehouses in their travelogues. The coffeehouses did not have any chairs or tables. Instead, there were platforms made out of masonry or wood all around these interior spaces. The platforms were three feet high and three to four feet wide, and covered with carpets where people could sit. In the middle there was a water basin, and the walls were whitewashed or covered with tiles up to three to five feet from the ground.Footnote 102 Sometimes there was a stage for the storyteller, usually in the middle. As a result, similar to takīyyihs, people could surround the main happenings inside the coffeehouses.Footnote 103
By the demise of the Safavid Empire, Iranian coffeehouses went through a period of hibernation. The political turmoil that began with the 1722 collapse of Isfahan and lasted until the full establishment of the Qajar dynasty in the nineteenth century has caused scholars such as Rudi Matthee to argue that Iranian society “involuntarily” withdrew “into the confines of the private realm.”Footnote 104 By the mid-nineteenth century, the number of the coffeehouses once again grew in Iranian cities, particularly in the new capital, Tehran. However, this time tea had replaced coffee as the main drink, while the name of the establishments remained the same: qahvihkhānih, or coffeehouse.Footnote 105
European travelogues contain fewer accounts of coffeehouses in the Qajar Tehran as compared to the Safavid Isfahan. Similarly, fewer secondary sources examine this topic. The scarcity of the accounts in the Qajar period is the result of the differences between the social roles of these spaces in the Qajar and Safavid eras. During the Safavid era, coffeehouses were places for affluent people of society. Safavid kings, especially Shah ʿAbas I (1588–1629), hosted their European guests in the coffeehouses around Naqsh-i Jahan Square.Footnote 106
The Qajar coffeehouses were the centers of communal life of their owners and customers, and they adopted functions beyond mere venues for entertainment and conviviality. Each coffeehouse belonged to a certain community, and they were colored by the communal identity of their users. Sometimes, coffeehouses belonged to specific professions; for example, most guilds had their own specific coffeehouse. These coffeehouses functioned as “employment exchanges.” Traders belonging to a certain guild knew where to find their suitable workers. Similarly, people seeking a particular job opportunity just had to be present in a certain coffeehouse where their profession’s guild was situated.Footnote 107 Moreover, coffeehouses had the same function for strangers coming from other cities to Tehran. To find the people from their community they just had to go to the specific coffeehouses where they were gathering.Footnote 108 Using several sources and field studies, ʿAli Bulookbashi names more than forty coffeehouses in Tehran that were the gathering places of various professions, ethnic groups, and people from other cities of the country.Footnote 109
The interior arrangement of coffeehouses remained almost the same as that of the Safavid era. Moreover, naqqālī remained an inseparable part of their activities in nineteenth-century Tehran.Footnote 110 Based on an estimate, around 80 percent of the coffeehouses of Tehran had their own specific sessions of naqqālī.Footnote 111 In addition, coffeehouses were places for other social activities such as poetry recitation, comedy shows, and playing specific games.Footnote 112 These collective, communal activities, similar to the collective act of takīyyih bastan, could foster, reproduce, and enhance the collective identity of the members of the same community.
The only document that provides the number of coffeehouses in the nineteenth century is a book of memoirs from a member of the royal family. In 1886, the king commanded that all the coffeehouses of the city be closed.Footnote 113 The memoir mentions that, at the time of the command, there were 360 coffeehouses in the city.Footnote 114 The second document that contains the number of coffeehouses belongs to the Guilds’ Stores Survey of Tehran (1917–18), which counted 416 coffeehouses in the city.Footnote 115 Twelve years later, in 1929, another survey counted 711 coffeehouses,Footnote 116 and in 1933 there were as many as 614.Footnote 117
As communal spaces, the Qajar coffeehouses had their own particular group of customers, and they functioned as their meeting places. Men of each community gathered in coffeehouses for socializing, playing games, reciting poetry, or listening to storytellers. No outsider could enter a coffeehouse that did not belong to his community. The coffeehouses, similar to the takīyyihs, were the products of communal diversity. Segmented Iranian urban society produced small-scale social spaces highly colored with communal identity. In return, these spaces were the primary venues for the reproduction of the same social identities. The communal affiliations could be reproduced through the social interactions of the people from the same community at the place of the coffeehouse.
Bathhouses
Bathing was an indispensable part of people’s lives in nineteenth-century Iranian society. Due to religious beliefs, a Muslim must be in a state of purity if he wants to do his daily prayers. Certain activities, such as sexual intercourse, violate the purity of the body; therefore, Muslims have to take special baths, ghusl, to restore that purity.Footnote 118 Having the right ghusl demanded immersion in water in a way that the head went beneath the surface. In the nineteenth century, with their pools of water, no place was better than bathhouses to perform the right ghusl. As a result, it is no surprise that Samuel Greene Wheeler Benjamin, the first American diplomat in Tehran, states that there were many public baths in Tehran and everyone “resorts to them at least once weekly; some do it daily.”Footnote 119
The public baths were relatively cheap and there was no distinction between rich and poor in having access to them.Footnote 120 However, inside the bathhouse there were specific places, shāhnishīn, for affluent people who could receive a better service by paying extra fees.Footnote 121 Only wealthy people and people of the court had private baths in their houses.Footnote 122 Moreover, they could rent a public bathhouse for their private use by paying extra fees for certain hours.Footnote 123 Religious minorities were restricted from Muslims’ bathhouses; they had their own designated bathhouses, separate from the Muslims’.Footnote 124 Moreover, men’s and women’s baths were distinct from each other’s, or they used the same bathhouse during separate hours.Footnote 125
Bathing was a time-consuming activity, demanding two to three hours.Footnote 126 As a result, it was a social activity rather than a private one. In the words of Floor: “Bathhouses played an important role in social life. The bath was frequented for religious, hygienic, and medical reasons and for socializing and relaxation. It was also often a place for passing information and spreading rumors.”Footnote 127 People got together and socialized for hours while doing their bath activities. The architecture of the bathhouses provided the setting for such social gatherings. The inner chamber consisted of two or three pools of water, at different temperatures, where many people could get in at the same time.
The best space for socializing, however, was the main lobby after the entrance, called sarbīnih. The architecture of the sarbīnih was similar to that of coffeehouses, with masonry or wooden sitting platforms all around the interior space that were usually covered with carpets, a water basin in the middle, walls covered with tiles, and some pictures from the epic stories of Shahnama hanging from the walls.Footnote 128 Before getting into the inner chambers, and especially after returning from them, people used to spend enough time in sarbīnih to adjust their body temperature, while drinking tea or coffee, smoking, having food or snacks, napping, and socializing.Footnote 129 Gaspar Drouville, a French military officer visiting Iran in the early nineteenth century, reports that bathhouses were suitable places for merchants to get together and do business while they were smoking or having tea or coffee. They could update themselves with the recent news: “public baths are still used as a rendezvous for middleclass individuals. The foreigners and the merchants also gather to make friends or talk business.”Footnote 130 Moreover, different spaces in the bathhouse had special games, which helped people pass the long hours of bathing joyfully.Footnote 131
Besides the routine bathing and its accompanying social interactions, bathhouses provided the families of each neighborhood with appropriate loci for certain ceremonies, such as wedding baths, labor baths, circumcision baths, and the like. In these instances, the bathhouse changed into a party stage where the distribution of sweets, drinks, and fruits was part of the ceremonies, along with live music.Footnote 132
Similar to mosques, coffeehouses, and takīyyihs, most of the bathhouses served Iranians at the neighborhood level, meaning that each neighborhood had its own bathhouses and people did not need to travel long distances in the city to access a bathhouse. Based on the nineteenth-century building surveys of Tehran, in 1852 there were 153 bathhouses in the city. This number reached 182 in 1899.Footnote 133 These numbers show the accessibility of bathhouses for various urban communities. The accounts of social life at bathhouses demonstrate how these spaces were venues for various social interactions at the communal level. Similar to the other communal spaces, Iranian urban dwellers preferred to maintain their close ties with the people of their own communities and use small-scale communal spaces for socializing.
Traditional Gymnasiums, or Zūrkhānihs
Zūrkhānihs, literally meaning the house of strength, were the traditional Iranian gymnasiums.Footnote 134 At first glance they were places for male bodybuilding practices and wrestling competitions. They were arenas where men could train their bodies through specific exercises and learn wrestling techniques from the elder wrestlers of their neighborhoods.Footnote 135 Zūrkhānihs were masculine spaces; only men after puberty were allowed to enter and practice in them. The deeper examination of zūrkhānihs shows that they were institutions that exalted the ideals of traditional masculinity based on certain social and moral principles, such as “generosity, mutual help, courage, Loyalty, respect for elders, and keeping one’s word.”Footnote 136 Any Shiʿi adult man was free to enter and become a member of the zūrkhānih in his neighborhood.Footnote 137
From lay people to aristocrats, there was no limitation on joining the club. People’s social status had no place inside the zūrkhānih and members disregarded their social status in order to serve their communities.Footnote 138 Ridgeon calls it an “anti-structure” where people had to ignore their social status via symbolic stooping while entering the interior space and putting on special uniforms. He argues that in zūrkhānih, as an anti-structure, “emerges an egalitarian society of undifferentiated social relations among the athletes.”Footnote 139 However, zūrkhānihs had a specific internal social hierarchy that structured all of their rituals and social relations. This hierarchy was based on the history of participation, merits, athletic power, and social work of the members.Footnote 140
Zūrkhānihs were not mere gymnasiums, they were the centers of complex social relations penetrating the whole traditional Iranian urban society. Lūtīs were the main members of zūrkhānihs.Footnote 141 Each lūtī group was devoted to serving their neighborhood.Footnote 142 It is no surprise that there were occasional rivalries and fights between lūtī groups of different neighborhoods; they defended their neighborhoods against outsiders. Similar to Muharram ceremonies, communal conflicts were inseparable parts of the social interactions of lūtī groups. Each group regarded the members of other communities as outsiders and they could not tolerate any trespassing into their territory.Footnote 143
Being a lūtī was more than being a good wrestler; the lūtīs were respected in their communities, and in return they adopted certain social roles to serve their communities. Their social roles were confined to the neighborhood to which they belonged. Lūtīs served their communities in different ways, such as: preserving the order and safety of the neighborhood, helping poor people by collecting money and distributing food among them, and holding charity events at the zūrkhānih in order to collect money for specific people in need.Footnote 144 However, the most active times for zūrkhānih people were during religious events, particularly Muharram. During Muharram ceremonies, the lūtīs of each neighborhood took on the responsibility for cleaning their takīyyihs, preparing the covering tents, decorating the space, collecting money, and even holding the mourning ceremonies.Footnote 145
There is not much data on the exact number of zūrkhānihs in Tehran during the nineteenth century. Until 1933, the official surveys of Tehran never counted these institutions. In 1907, Eugène Aubin estimated that there were probably around 100 zūrkhānihs in the city.Footnote 146 However, this is likely to be two times more than the actual number. By the end of the nineteenth century, as Ridgeon mentions, there were forty-nine zūrkhānihs in Tehran.Footnote 147 In 1921, thirty-eight zūrkhānihs remained,Footnote 148 and finally in 1933, there were eighteen zūrkhānihs, mostly in the old neighborhoods of the city.Footnote 149
As the social roles of zūrkhānih demonstrate, the organization was somehow the ultimate socio-spatial manifestation of the communal sphere. The members of zūrkhānihs protected their communities, facilitated the communal activities, looked after the people in need, and collected money from the affluent members for the poor people in their community. Moreover, each zūrkhānih had its affiliated coffeehouses and bathhouses, and the members of each zūrkhānih were responsible for holding the mourning ceremonies in their affiliated takīyyihs.
The zūrkhānihs, takīyyihs, mosques, coffeehouses, and bathhouses of each neighborhood were interconnected. They belonged to the same communities and the same people used to frequent these spaces. Each neighborhood had its own network of these small-scale communal spaces and, collectively, these spaces accommodated the bulk of social interactions for the masculine members of each community. But, where were the places for women’s social lives? Was there any feminine space in the patriarchal landscape of nineteenth-century Iran? Were there social interactions between the women of the same community? Or were they the prisoners of the private realm?
Women’s Havens in the Patriarchal Landscape
The analysis of nineteenth-century Iranian social spaces is still half-done, because half of society is absent from the scene. As the previous sections demonstrate, the general urban spaces were masculine; women were only present, unrecognizably, beneath their dark veils. Ella C. Sykes perfectly summarizes this masculine landscape when she wonders: “The ladies, who add so much to the attractiveness of European cities, are huddled in Persia in a disguising and shapeless black wrap, by which the prettiest and the plainest are reduced to the same level.”Footnote 150 Zūrkhānihs and coffeehouses were men-only spaces. Women were allowed in takīyyihs, but they were only bystanders, watching the plays beneath their dark and impenetrable veils. Men played the female roles in taʿziyihs, and to hide their masculinity they covered their faces.Footnote 151
There is no doubt that there was a considerable disparity between men and women in nineteenth-century Iran. Women were deprived of their basic social rights; they could not work independently outside their houses; they did not receive proper education; and they had to marry as children and adapt to an adult lifestyle at a very young age.Footnote 152 In the words of Gavin R. G. Hambly, “every woman, without exception, was subordinate to the authority of and under the restraint of a particular man (i.e., father, brother, husband, son).”Footnote 153 As a result, it is not surprising that scholars usually depict nineteenth-century Iranian women as the prisoners of the private realm who were confined to the secluded life of the family.Footnote 154
In the rest of this chapter I investigate women’s so-called “secluded” life. I demonstrate that there were numerous women-only social spaces in nineteenth-century Tehran, and I examine the dynamics and politics of these spaces and their interconnection with the masculine world. I argue that besides bathhouses and mosques, the andarūnīs – inner sections – of houses were women’s primary centers of social life; they were the feminine centers of social interactions. This view contradicts the general public–private discourse and its related gendered quality superimposed over the spatiality of nineteenth-century Iranian cities. In this discourse, houses are depicted as the private, feminine realm, and social lives and communal spaces are devoted to men. I suggest that taking this gendered dichotomy at face value prevents examining andarūnīs as women’s social spaces infused with various social interactions.
Calling them women’s havens, I demonstrate that the boundaries of andarūnīs were porous for women; these spaces could change into feminine takīyyihs, party and theater stages, and marketplaces. In other words, andarūnīs were lively all-women social spaces. This alternative view provides a novel framework to examine women’s political activities and their claim over the public sphere and public spaces during the 1905–6 Constitutional Revolution. Chapter 2 returns to this topic and demonstrates how the examination of andarūnīs as women’s social spaces can cast a new light on their political role in the years to come and how these spaces accommodated the first girls’ schools and women’s political clubs after the revolution.
In this section, I focus on women’s spaces and the role of space in facilitating all-women social interaction and social life. However, it is important to remember that, since the 1980s, the bipolar categorization of spaces in Islamic societies into male/female and public/private has been repeatedly criticized. The works of Janet Abu-Lughod, Leslie Peirce, and Lucienne Thys-Şenocak have questioned this dichotomous view and entered a third space in which the interactions between men and women were more common and the accepted gendered norms were more fluid.Footnote 155 In this section, however, my primary goal is to diversify the social role of women’s spaces, demonstrate their socio-political importance, and to explain their significance as the primary incubators of women’s political participation.
The data on the everyday lives of nineteenth-century Iranian women is scarce. Most of the travelogues and memoirs belong to men. They are silent or biased against women’s social lives. Due to their lack of contact with Iranian women, European travelers were “reduced to supposition, gossip, and stereotypical commentary.”Footnote 156 Similarly, Iranian memoirs were mostly written by men who were silent about the details of their wives’ and daughters’ lives. The only window to the hidden world is a handful of travelogues and memoirs written by European and Iranian women. However, these sources disclose just a fraction of feminine society and do not provide a comprehensive picture. European women were mostly in touch with the women from the court. They were invited to the parties inside the royal harem, of which they provided detailed accounts, but they did not reveal the daily lives of ordinary women. The memoirs belong to affluent Iranian women who recorded their daily lives, without talking much about the lives of impoverished women. As a result, the investigation of Iranian women’s social spaces in the nineteenth century covers a limited section of society.
Irvin Cemil Schick, in his valuable essay on harems, uses the concept of archipelago for women’s spaces in traditional Islamic societies, “where the islands collectively represent the subspace devoted to women, and the sea the subspace devoted to men.” In his view, women’s subspaces consisted of “harems, public baths, saints’ tombs and shrines, recreational areas, cemeteries, and so forth; movement between them was carefully regulated, most notably by the practice of veiling.”Footnote 157 Here, I adopt the same concept; however, instead of the term harem I use andarūnī, meaning the inside space. In the Qajar context, the term harem had a royal connotation, mostly referring to the royal women and their living spaces in the royal compound. Harems of Nasser al-Din Shah and Fath ʿAli Shah (1797–1834) consisted of hundreds of wives, daughters, and servants. In contrast, andarūnī was part of the architecture of houses, and it referred to the inside courtyard where no man, except the head of the family and the sons, was allowed to enter. The term refers both to space and to the women of the household. It is important to note that the harem or andarūnī did not necessarily mean polygamy.Footnote 158 The concept existed even in families with a single wife.Footnote 159
Iranian houses had a particular hierarchy of spaces. The entrance room, hashtī, was like a filter dividing the access to the bīrūnī (the outer section or courtyard belonging to men) and the andarūnī (the inner section or courtyard). Using the courtyards to provide light and ventilation, the houses had no opening to the outer world, except the entrance gates. As a result, the inner courtyards, andarūnīs, and their adjacent rooms match Schick’s feminine islands. Being physically detached from the outer universe, each andarūnī and its surrounding rooms was an island belonging to the women of a household (Figure 1.1).
Figure 1.1 The sketch of a typical traditional Iranian house and the configuration of the interior spaces.
Without a doubt, andarūnīs were part of private houses, and access to them was highly controlled by social norms. However, accepting a rigid dichotomy leads us to equalize life in the andarūnīs to confinement and women to prisoners. In contrast, analysis of the social relations of these spaces suggests that one should not take this dichotomy for granted. Andarūnīs were much more than mere private spaces creating a secluded life for women. The boundaries of the andarūnīs were porous. They were lively feminine social spaces infused with varied social interactions.Footnote 160 Dominic Parviz Brookshaw demonstrates the same notion in his study of female poets and female patrons during the Qajar era. He demonstrates how an all-women network of poets and patrons existed around the royal harem.Footnote 161 This point may contradict the accepted public and private dichotomy or, in the case of this research, the private and communal dichotomy.
During the mourning month of Muharram, andarūnīs could change into women’s takīyyihs for the performance of taʿzīyih and all the other related rituals. Munis al-Duwlih, one of the few Iranian women from the nineteenth century who wrote her memoirs, mentions that wealthy women of the city, as well as the women in the royal harem, used to hold taʿziyihs for women during Muharram in the andarūnīs. Women were self-sufficient for these rituals. There were women to do the religious sermons and recitations; taʿzīyih performers were female; the stories, unlike the men’s performances, were mostly based on women characters and stories; and they even had trained ponies for the scenes that required horses.Footnote 162 Similar to the caravanserais and mosques, the central pools of the andarūnīs were converted into the performance stages by covering them with wooden boards.
In other months, andarūnīs could change into places for women’s parties. Sometimes all-women music bands and comic-show groups were paid to perform at these parties. Dancing girls were invited to dance and women storytellers, naqqāls, to tell stories.Footnote 163 The accounts of similar ceremonies are available in the European women’s travelogues, who were mostly invited to the big parties in the royal harem, sometimes taking twelve hours, as illustrated in Carla Serena’s travelogue.Footnote 164
While it seems that women’s and men’s worlds were completely separate, there were numerous interconnections between the two realms. Eunuchs, young boys, and elderly women were the third parties who conducted much of the relationship between the two worlds.Footnote 165 Eunuchs were an inseparable part of the royal harem and affluent families’ andarūnīs. Besides their routine duties to serve women, they regulated all the communications between the inside and outside worlds.Footnote 166 Munis al-Duwlih’s memoir provides an interesting example. She explains how eunuchs transferred taʿzīyih poems, acting skills, and performance tips by learning them from the male players and directors and teaching them to the actresses. Moreover, sometimes eunuchs played music during the performances.Footnote 167 Similarly, sometimes blind men were allowed into the women’s circles for playing music or reciting sermons.Footnote 168
Besides the relationship between the two realms, the islands of the archipelago were not completely separate from each other either. Some women could move between various circles and connect them together. Similar to bridges, they conducted the flow of information and social relations between different islands. The andarūnīs were meeting places for women vendors and their customers. These vendors were permitted into the andarūnīs to sell their goods to women. Deprived of independent stores in the bazaar, they were bringing the market into the women’s world. Once again, the boundary between the private spaces and social spaces is blurry. These vendors did not have a single location for their business; they were transcending all the communal–private boundaries of the city and entering different andarūnīs. Munis al-Duwlih mentions that they were andarūnī women’s best sources of news. They transferred news from one island to the other, connecting different women’s circles.
A group of these vendors, called dallālih, sold expensive objects such as jewelry, clothes, and fabrics. These women had a second duty too. Using their familiarity with different islands, they found brides for the families who had a son ready for marriage. After informing the groom’s family, the elderly women of the household would make the first contact with the bride’s family by paying a visit to their house.Footnote 169 Moreover, dallālihs informed other women about the women-only ceremonies around the city and received some money for their information.Footnote 170 It was an important social phenomenon. It shows how a parallel feminine network performed alongside the men’s world. However, due to the politics of patriarchal society, men do not reflect these social relations in their memoirs.Footnote 171
An important question to ask is whether women’s social relations followed the same principles as men’s. In other words, can we find a segmented society in the women’s realm? Based on the available data, it is hard to provide a definite answer to this question, but it is possible to make some general assumptions. First, since the demographic compositions of the neighborhoods and sub-neighborhoods were more or less based on coherent social identities, it is possible to say that the women who lived in the same area had a common social affiliation. Consequently, a sense of neighborhood identity conducted women’s relationships. That is the reason the visit of the vendors to someone’s house could coincide with the gathering of other women in that neighborhood. Munis al-Duwlih describes the visits of dallālihs to the houses as small parties, which could take several hours.Footnote 172 Second, based on Munis al-Duwlih’s accounts, the vendors were specialized in selling specific objects. This specialization was closely related to their city of origin or religion. For example, dallālihs and women physicians were mostly Jews. Vendors from Tabriz sold sifīdāb (whitening substances for bathing), women from Isfahan sold wigs, and women from Kerman sold needlework.Footnote 173 Similar to the Grand Bazaar of Tehran, where a close relationship existed between the city of origin and men’s professions, vendors’ specializations followed the social segmentation; however, these segments did not have independent spatial manifestations.
As these accounts demonstrate, andarūnīs hosted social interactions that in the masculine world each had their own particular space outside private houses. Takīyyihs in Iranian cities were the main places for the Muharram mourning rituals and the performance of taʿzīyih. Coffee-houses were men’s primary spaces for socializing, playing games, and storytelling. Bazaars were the main marketplace for merchants and craftsman. However, the andarūnīs hosted all of these functions for women.
The andarūnīs were not the only places for women’s social interactions. Mosques and bathhouses were the other two favorite places for women’s gatherings. Their gatherings in mosques were similar to the men’s. In certain times, such as Ramadan and particularly during the Qadr Nights, women crowded the mosques. On the twenty-seventh day of Ramadan, women had special ceremonies in the mosques to celebrate the execution of Ibn al-Muljan, the murderer of Imam ʿAli. Women had their specific Ramadan markets, too.Footnote 174
Women’s bathhouses were interesting women-only spaces. Even European men were fascinated by the amount of time that Iranian women spent in the bathhouses: “Women’s baths are meeting places for entertainment and exchanging the news of the city. They usually spend half a day in baths, drinking sherbets and killing time with singing and playing music.”Footnote 175 Carla Serena provides a detailed description of women’s bathhouses in her travelogue, Hommes et Choses en Perse. In the late 1870s she had the chance to spend a day in a bathhouse after the invitation of one of the royal ladies. She begins her description with these words: “[Going to a bathhouse for women] is like [going to a] joyful picnic. They go there in great numbers.”Footnote 176 In great detail she describes how bathing was an excuse for socializing. Besides bathing, wearing make-up, and dyeing their hair, women spent hours chitchatting, telling stories (naqqālī), playing music, singing, and having lunch and a nap. She mentions that eunuchs brought the lunch to the bathhouse and later came back to take out the dishes. The bathing took ten hours, from eight in the morning to six in the evening.Footnote 177
Carla Serena describes the interesting farewell scene in these words: “it was the [farewell] time. All of them put on loose and wide trousers over their short skirts, put on their slippers, then wrap themselves in dark chādurs [veil] connected to rūbands [face cover]. Under this uniform costume, princesses and maids were the same.”Footnote 178 She notes the same contrast when she departed a women’s party in the royal harem, wondering how the royal women who had metamorphosed into beautiful butterflies in the morning had to return to their “disgraceful covers” one more time.Footnote 179 The metamorphosis of women back to the veils guaranteed their safe passage from one island to the other. In Iranian patriarchal society, the feminine islands were supposed to remain undiscovered by the public male gaze. Women were like patches of the feminine world that could move around the masculine realm, as long as they were hiding beneath their chādurs.
Accepting the public–private discourse and assigning the gender dichotomy to the resulting spatiality limits our understanding of social spaces in traditional Iranian cities and prevents the investigation of women’s social lives and spaces. There were parallel universes in Iranian cities for men and women. Men and women could not pass the threshold and enter each other’s spaces without consequences. While separate from each other, they had interconnections through specific media. For women, besides mosques and bathhouses, the andarūnīs undertook the main role as social spaces. These spaces were more than a private space deep in the house; they could be lively social spaces, formed based on the communal and gender identities of women, and in return they were reproducing the same identities. It is not possible to see these social roles if andarūnīs are left in the private section of the communal–private dichotomy.
Moreover, as Chapter 2 discusses, women’s havens or feminine social spaces provided the primary centers for the first women’s movements in Iran; they were venues facilitating women’s mobilization. It would be misleading to assume that women had nothing to do, except have fun, while they were together. With the unjust balance of power between men and women, how can one deny the possibility of resistance in women’s social spaces? In 1894–5, Bibi Khanom Astarabadi, a woman from Tehran, wrote a book called Maʿayeb al-Rejal, or Vices of Men. This book was a response to an earlier book named Taʾdib al-Nesvan, or The Education of Women, written in 1886–7 by an unknown author. The latter was a controversial guidebook for husbands to teach the proper behavior to their wives. The interesting point is that Bibi Khanom mentions that her friends had urged her to write the book in response to The Education of Women.Footnote 180 Based on her accounts, their conversations occurred in women’s circles, where they gathered and discussed different topics:
one day I was in the house of a friend, where there was a gathering of women, and the meeting became very lively. This humble author was the garden’s nightingale and the singing bird of the congregation. Each story had a moral, and each tale an advice, so much so that we ended up gossiping, and I tried to stop them. I said the Prophet has said, “Gossiping is worse than adultery.” One of the women who had a sallow face and a heart full of sorrows because of her unmanly husband sighed deeply and said, “Oh my sister, you do not know anything of our grieving and burning hearts. You consider this unburdening of sorrows as gossip.”Footnote 181
This account shows how women’s gatherings could be venues for discussions regarding their social rights. In the introduction to the English translation of Vices of Men and The Education of Women, Hasan Javadi and Willem Floor argue that it is an important piece of information which “shows not only that women talked about more than their hairdos, their clothes, and the like, but also that Bibi Khanom must have been well known in these women’s circles as somebody with strong feelings about the matter of women’s rights.”Footnote 182
The question that can be asked in the context of this research is where the places for women to have such political discussions were. The answers are limited. In nineteenth-century Iran, women did not have a designated newspaper or any other sort of media as a platform for such a debate. There was no public venue through which they could act against The Education of Women. With certainty, the debates happened in an andarūnī. These spaces could be active political venues for critical gatherings rather than mere socializing circles. The next chapter examines the political role of these spaces during the Constitutional Revolution and their importance for women’s movements and Iranian women’s attempts to claim their position in the public sphere and public spaces.
Conclusion
In this chapter I intentionally avoided examining nineteenth-century Tehran through the morphological analysis of the spatial structure of the city. I avoided drawing diagrams that demonstrate the relationship between the city gates, bazaar, royal compound, and main mosques of the city. As I claimed earlier, these diagrams and typological studies dominate the main body of literature on Middle Eastern and North African cities. In contrast, the socio-spatial investigation of cities is absent from these studies. As a result, I approached nineteenth-century Tehran and its spatiality through a social analysis of the daily lives of ordinary people and the related spatiality. I investigated the places that people gathered for common social activities and I examined the reciprocal relationship between these spaces and social identities. Through this framework, I demonstrated how shared communal identities and the communal sphere played a decisive role in the social production of communal spaces.
The communal sphere was the sphere of individual people and families who could identify themselves with a common identity, such as religion or sectarian affiliation, profession, city of origin, or language. Unlike the bourgeois or proletariat public spheres, people’s economic statuses were not the basis for the formation of the communal sphere; each community consisted of both wealthy and impoverished people. The most important task of the communal sphere was the identification of individuals in the broader urban society; this provided people with a social base and identified them with a social status. Moreover, the communal sphere benefited the wellbeing of the community. More affluent members supported the collective ceremonies; members of zūrkhānih protected their neighborhoods against outsiders, helped impoverished people, and provided the workforce for ceremonies, such as Muharram mourning rituals; and all the people collaborated to hold their ceremonies collectively.
The spatial manifestation of the communal sphere in the nineteenth century was small-scale architectural spaces – communal spaces – inside the wards. These spaces were the centers of genuine social life at the communal level. From permanent spaces, such as coffeehouses, zūrkhānihs, bathhouses, and mosques, to temporary spaces, such as takīyyihs, each segment of the urban population had its particular spaces. These small-scale architectural segments were the products of Iranian communal practices and, in return, they reproduced and re-affirmed their communal identity through playing games in coffeehouses and bathhouses, practicing shared rituals in zūrkhānihs, producing the place of rituals in takīyyihs, and reciting poetry and stories in coffeehouses. In the words of Massey, “spatial differentiation, geographical variety, is not just an outcome: it is integral to the reproduction of society and its dominant social relations.”Footnote 183 The interiors of these spaces were reflections of a segmented society, suitable for small gatherings and sharing in a communal activity. As a result, each of these spaces had its particular games, events, and different sorts of entertainment. They were small places where people could feel their common bonds based on their shared affiliations.
Religiosity had a considerable role in the production of communal spheres in the nineteenth century. Some of the most significant instances of social life were based on people’s religious beliefs and practices. It is important to note that, despite the fact that most of the communities practiced the same religion, they were still detached from one another during major religious ceremonies. Their communal differences prevented their amalgamation. Each neighborhood had its own takīyyih, formed its own dastih, and held its own ceremonies.
The communal spaces and practices of coffeehouses, takīyyihs, and zūrkhānihs were extremely masculine. Women were absent from the communal scene or, in the best-case scenario, they were silent, unrecognizable figures beneath their thick and dark veils. As a result, it is convenient to claim that women belonged to the private sphere of the family. While private houses were the spatial representation of the private sphere, as this chapter demonstrated, the boundary between the private and communal realms was porous for women. There were considerable interrelations between the two realms within private houses. Private spaces could temporarily change into takīyyihs, theaters, concert and dance halls, urban markets, and other similar places for non-private activities for the women of the same community.
The communal sphere was the hallmark of Iranian urban society in the nineteenth century, which distinguishes it from its European counterparts. Examination of this sphere and its spaces is crucial for studying the formation of the public sphere in the early twentieth century and its transformation toward the mid-twentieth century. This is the task of Chapter 2. This chapter returns to the role of the communal sphere, but this time it investigates the political aspects of the communal sphere and its role in the formation of the broader public sphere and the production of political public spaces. In other words, Chapter 2 examines the relationship between society and the state as mediated through the spatiality of the city.
