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Sacralising Bodies On Martyrdom, Governmentand Accident in Iran1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2010

RAVINDER KAUR
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Abstract

In post-revolution Iran, the sacred notion of martyrdomhas been transformed into a routine act ofgovernment – a moral sign of order and statesovereignty. Moving beyond the debates of thesecularisation of the sacred and the making sacredof the secular, this article argues that the momentof sacralisation is realised through co-productionwithin a social setting when the object ofsacralisation is recognised as such by others. Incontemporary Iran, however, the moment ofsacralising bodies by the state is also the momentof its own subversion as the political-theologicalfield of martyrdom is contested and challenged fromwithin. This article traces the genealogy ofmartyrdom in contemporary Iran in order to exploreits institutionalised forms and governmentalpractices. During the revolution, the Shi'atradition of martyrdom and its dramatic performancesof ritual mourning and self-sacrifice became centralto the mass mobilisation against the monarchy. Oncethe revolutionary government came into existence,this sacred tradition was regulated to create‘martyrs’ as a fixed category, in order toconsolidate the legacy of the revolution. In thispolitical theatre, the dead body is a site oftransformation and performance upon which theoriginal narrative of martyrdom takes place even asit displaces it and gives new meanings to the act.

A Crash

On themorning of 6 December 2005, an Iranian militaryplane C-130 carrying journalists and Armyofficials crashed near Mehrabad airport in Tehran.The plane was attempting an emergency landing whenit hit a ten-storey apartment block, setting off abig explosion which set fire to the building. Inall, one hundred and sixteen charred bodies wererecovered – ninty four passengers and twenty tworesidents of the building – from the smoke andrubble in this working class area of south-westernTehran. The residents were mostly women andschoolchildren who had stayed home – because of anofficial anti-pollution drive – to avoid a thicklayer of smog that had developed over Tehran skiesover the previous few days. Dozens of people wereinjured on the ground and the riot police had tobe called in to clear the area of curiousonlookers who were blocking the emergencyservices.

The plane crash was met withgrief, guilt and hints of anger. The Iranian mediawas most vocal in its expression of rage – seventyeight journalists had lost their lives in aninstant. The ‘Iran News Daily’, a leading Englishlanguage newspaper based in Tehran, two days laterdevoted a full page to the crash coverageincluding scathing editorials demandingaccountability and answers to “disturbingquestions” from the government. The editorialentitled ‘Duty and Responsibility’ stated that“condolences are not enough. People, the near anddear ones of victims in particular, have the rightto know. Did the C-130 have technical problems?Was it fit for the passenger service? What wouldhave really happened if the flight was cancelled?Who gave the final permission for the journey togo ahead? Is this another case of human error orengine failure? How can such major loss ofinnocent life be explained, leave [sic] alonejustified?”2 Similarly, HosseinShariatmadari, influential editor of theconservative Persian daily ‘Kayhan’, called for afull investigation, not because it would bring“the dead back to life but (to) prevent repetitionof similar incidents and further disasters”.3

As private and publiccondolences began pouring in – newspapers hadallocated prime space for such purpose – PresidentMahmoud Ahmadinejad sent a short message throughstate media that dramatically altered thenarrative of grief and anger against theauthorities. The message read as follows: “Ilearned of the catastrophe and the fact thatmembers of the press have been martyred. I offermy condolences to the Supreme Leader and to thefamilies of the victims”. With this message thedead journalists had been officially pronounced‘martyrs’ – a moral-political subjectivity thattraces its genealogy to the martyrdom of ImamHussein.4 In a single moment, the burntcorpses were no longer the bodies of ordinaryvictims of a plane crash, but the corpses ofmartyrs, and their charred remains sacrificialrelics.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 20 , Issue 4 , October 2010 , pp. 441 - 460
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 2010

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Footnotes

1

This article is based on eighteen months offieldwork in Tehran from August 2004 to March 2006including interviews with martyrs’ families andstaff at Behesht-e-Zahra,Martyrs’ Museum as well as the Foundation ofMartyrs and Veterans Affairs.

References

2 Iran News Daily (Tehran), 8 December 2005.

3 ‘Special Judge Assigned to Investigate Iran's C-130 Plane Crash’, Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) Report. http://www.payvand.com/news/05/dec/1053.html (accessed 12 December 2005).

4 Imam Hussein, the grandson of Prophet Mohammad, is considered the rightful heir to the spiritual legacy of the Prophet in the Shi'a tradition. In 682 AD, he was killed by the Sunni Caliph Yazid, along with his 72 followers in the battle of Karbala.

5 During the revolution, the student activists from the Tehran University occupied the American embassy – popularly called the ‘den of spies’ – after Muhammad Reza Shah fled Iran. American (and British) support was seen as a crucial factor in providing support to the corrupt Shah regime. The embassy was occupied and the 52 diplomats kept hostage for 444 days. Since then, Iran-US relations have remained strained.

6 The cynics were not always the opponents of the regime as they often included Ahmadinejad's electoral constituency as well. This suggests a viewpoint that is shared among a much wider demography.

7 Many private walls are donated voluntarily to the Foundation of Martyrs and Veterans Affairs as a way of ingratiating oneself with the regime, or are obtained through coercion.

8 See Verdery, Katherine, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York, 1999)Google Scholar.

9 Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA, 2007), p. 5Google Scholar.

10 See Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger (London, 2002)Google Scholar [first published 1966]. The maintenance of, for example, caste based taboos on consumption of certain foods, restrictions on marriage contracts, and even travel are everyday practices that separate the upper castes in Hinduism from the lower ones. The adornment of caste marks on one's body and style of clothing visibly set these bounded social spaces apart.

11 Clearly, martyrdom, or shahadat, is not a static concept but has been transformed in different historical settings. See Lewinstein, Keith, ‘Revaluation of martyrdom in early Islam’, in Sacrificing the Self: Perspectives on Martyrdom and Religion, ed. Cormack, Margaret (Oxford, 2001), pp 78–91Google Scholar.

12 Ibid.

13 DeSoucey, Michaela, Pozner, Jo-Ellen, Fields, Corey, Dobransky, Kerry and Fine, Gary Alan, ‘Memory and Sacrifice: An Embodied Theory of Martyrdom’, Cultural Sociology, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2008), pp. 99–121CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Imam Hussein's martyrdom was preceded by the martyrdom of his father Ali, the cousin and son-in law of Prophet Mohammad.

15 The following verse gives a sense of this meaning: And strive for Allah as you ought to strive. He elected you, and you did not impose on you any hardship in religion – the faith of your father Abraham. He called you Muslims before and in this (Qur'an) that the Apostle may bear witness against you and you may be witnesses against mankind. So, perform the payer, give the alms and hold fast to Allah. He is your master; and what a blessed Master and a blessed Master and a blessed supporter! (22:78), cited in Cook, David, Martyrdom in Islam (Cambridge, 2007), p. 16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 A number of both Shia and Sunni traditions regard fulfillment of religious duties in life, and not alone in death, as equivalents of martyrdom. One tradition draws upon Prophet Mohammad's explanation as to why a believer who died in bed in contrast to two who died in Jihad was given priority in Paradise: “No one is more virtuous in God's eyes that the believer who lives long in Islam, and is able to go on praising and glorifying God, and making the profession of faith”. Therefore, those who recite Qur'an or call for prayer are to receive the reward of 40,000 martyrs who die in the battlefield. This tradition is described in Ahmad ibn Hanbal, ‘Musnad’ (6 volumes, Beirut), I, 163, cited in Lewinstein, ‘Revaluation of martyrdom in early Islam’, p. 83. Similarly Fischer draws our attention to the Karabala paradigm in the Shi'a tradition wherein “believers are witnesses through their act of worship to the metaphysical reality that is hidden”. See Fischer, Michael M. J., Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (Madison, 2003) [first published in 1980], p. 25Google Scholar.

17 Ibid., p. 25.

18 Chelkowski, Peter J. (ed.), Ta'ziyeh, ritual and drama in Iran (New York, 1979)Google Scholar; Dabashi, Hamid, ‘Tazi'yeh as theatre of protest’, The Drama Review, Vol. 49, No. 4 (2005), pp. 91–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Abu Jafar At-Tabari ‘Tarikh ar-Rasul wal-Mulak’ (1879–1901: 216–95), cited in Jafri, S. M. H., The Origins and Early Development of Shi'a Islam (Qum, 1976), p. 200Google Scholar.

20 Fischer, Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution, p. 183.

21 Khomeini (Imam), The Ashura Uprising (Tehran, 2000), p. 7.

22 Fischer, Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution, p. 183.

23 Bayat, Assef, “Shariati and Marx: A critique of an ‘Islamic’ critique of Marxism”, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, No.10 (1990), pp. 19–41Google Scholar.

24 See Dabashi, Hamid, Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundation of the Islamic Revolution (New York, 1993)Google Scholar, and Abrahamian, Ervand, The Iranian Mujahedin (New Haven, 1989)Google Scholar.

25 Shariati, Ali, ‘Shahadat’, in Abedi, Mehdi and Legenhausen, Gary (eds), Jihad and Shahadat: Struggle and Martyrdom in Islam (Houston, 1986), pp. 153–229Google Scholar; Varzi, Roxanne, Warring Souls: Youth, Media, and Martyrdom in Post-Revolution Iran (Durham and London, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Shariati, ‘Shahadat’, p. 179.

27 Ibid., p. 194.

28 Ibid., p. 214.

29 For an in-depth discussion on the competing narratives of the battle of Karbala in Iran historically and during the revolution, see Aghaie, Kamran Scott, Martyrs of Karbala: Shi'a Symbols and Rituals in Modern Iran (Seattle and London, 2004)Google Scholar.

30 Khomeini, The Ashura Uprising, p. 7.

31 Fischer, Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution, pp. 204–205.

32 Ibid., p. 213.

33 Ibid., p. 214

34 Interview with Reza, Tehran, 20 April 2006.

35 Interview with Ashraf Ahmadi, Tehran, 2 May 2006.

36 The 15–24 years old youth population is estimated at 25.2% of a total of roughly 70 million. The under-15 year population was estimated in 2005 at 28.8%, a sizeable proportion that is set to add to the rapidly growing youth population. See UN Human Development Report 2007–8, http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR_20072008_EN_Indicator_tables.pdf (accessed 23 March 2010).

37 ‘Remains of 3 Martyrs Buried in ITU’, Iran News Daily (Tehran), 26 October 2008.

38 ‘MPs try to impeach Defence Minister over Plane Crash’, Iran News Daily (Tehran), 12 January 2006.

39 Ibid.

40 Special Judge Assigned to Investigate Iran's C-130 Plane Crash’, Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) Report. http://www.payvand.com/news/05/dec/1053.html (accessed 12 December 2005).

41 ‘Protest over C-130 Verdict’, Iran News Daily (Tehran), 31 July 2007.

42 ‘No Evidence of C-130 Crash Culpability’, Iran News Daily (Tehran), 6 September 2007.

43 Dabashi, ‘Tazi'yeh as theatre of protest’, p. 91.

44 Khomeini (Imam) Islamic Government: Governance of the Jurist (Tehran, 2002).

45 Fischer, Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution; Ansari, Ali, The History of Modern Iran since 1921: Pahlavis and After (London, 2003)Google Scholar; Arjomand, Said Amir, The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran (New York, 1988)Google Scholar.

46 Said Amir Arjomand in his seminal work reproduced an interview with Imam Khomeini where he described the ‘executive affairs like urban planning and traffic regulations’ as beneath the dignity of Islam. The government of the jurists was to concern itself with structures of governance rather than the specific day-to-day details of governance. See ibid., pp. 148–149.

47 See Cole, Juan, Sacred Space and Holy War: The Politics, Culture and History of Shi'ite Islam (New York, 2005)Google Scholar; and Abrahamian, The Iranian Mujahedin.

48 The contradiction stems from the debate over sovereignty in post–revolution Iran. The idea of ‘Islamic republic’ is contradictory because Islam posits God as the ultimate sovereign, while republic invests sovereignty in people. These two sources of sovereignty somehow shape the way the Iranian state works. A favourite expression used in Tehran to understand this is ‘experiment’, that is that Iran is the pioneer among Muslim states to attempt a modern state based on Islamic principles. Thus contradictions are accepted as part of the governmental framework, just as trial and error is part of the policy making and practice. This was emphasised during a series of interviews that I had in 2005–6 with Dr Abbas Aragchi, School of International Relations, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Tehran.

49 Mbembe, Achille, ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2003), pp. 11–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.