Power, Legitimacy and the Public Sphere: The Iranian Ta’ziyeh Theatre Ritual

179 Pages·2017·7.281 MB·English

by  Amin Sharifi Isaloo

Power, Legitimacy and the Public Sphere
A ground-breaking study of political transformations in non-Western societies,
this book applies anthropological, sociological and political concepts to the recent
history of Iran to explore the role played by a ritual theatrical performance
(Ta’ziyeh) and its symbols on the construction of public mobilisations. With
particular attention to three formative phases – the 1978–79 Islamic Revolution,
the 1980–88 Iran–Iraq War and the 2009 Green Movement – the author concen-
trates on the relations between symbols of the ritual performance and the public
sphere to shed light on the ways in which the symbols of Ta’ziyeh were used to
claim political legitimacy. Thus, the book elucidates how symbols and images of
a ritual performance can be utilised by ‘tricksters’, such as political actors and
fanatical religious leaders, to take advantage of the prolongation of a state of tran-
sition within a society, and so manipulate the public in order to mobilise crowds
and movements to fulfil their own interests and concerns.
An insightful analysis of political mobilisation explained in terms of a set of
interrelated master concepts such as ‘liminality’, ‘trickster’ and ‘schismogenesis’,
Power, Legitimacy and the Public Sphere integrates theoretical, empirical and
‘diagnostic’ perspectives in order to investigate and illustrate links between the
public sphere and religious and cultural rituals. As such, it will appeal to scholars
of sociology, politics and anthropology with interests in social theory, public
mobilisations and political transformation.
Amin Sharifi Isaloo is a lecturer and tutor in the Department of Sociology at
University College Cork, Ireland.
Contemporary Liminality
Series editor:
Arpad Szakolczai, University College Cork, Ireland
Series advisory board:
Agnes Horvath, University College Cork, Ireland
Bjørn Thomassen, Roskilde University, Denmark
Harald Wydra, University of Cambridge, UK
This series constitutes a forum for works that make use of concepts such as
‘imitation’, ‘trickster’ or ‘schismogenesis’, but which chiefly deploy the notion of
‘liminality’, as the basis of a new, anthropologically focused paradigm in social
theory. With its versatility and range of possible uses rivalling and even going
beyond mainstream concepts such as ‘system’, ‘structure’ or ‘institution’, limi-
nality is increasingly considered a new master concept that promises to spark a
renewal in social thought.
In spite of the fact that charges of Eurocentrism or even ‘moderno-centrism’
are widely discussed in sociology and anthropology, it remains the case that most
theoretical tools in the social sciences continue to rely on taken-for-granted
approaches developed from within the modern Western intellectual tradition,
whilst concepts developed on the basis of extensive anthropological evidence and
which challenged commonplaces of modernist thinking have been either margin-
alised and ignored or trivialised. By challenging the assumed neo-Kantian and
neo-Hegelian foundations of modern social theory, and by helping to shed new
light on the fundamental ideas of major figures in social theory, such as
Nietzsche, Dilthey, Weber, Elias, Voegelin, Foucault and Koselleck, whilst also
establishing connections between the perspectives gained through modern social
and cultural anthropology and the central concerns of classical philosophical
anthropology,Contemporary Liminalityoffers a new direction in social thought.
Titles in this series
1. Permanent Liminality and Modernity
Analysing the Sacrificial Carnival through Novels
Arpad Szakolczai
2. Power, Legitimacy and the Public Sphere
The Iranian Ta’ziyeh Theatre Ritual
Amin Sharifi Isaloo
Power, Legitimacy and the
Public Sphere
The Iranian Ta’ziyeh Theatre Ritual
Amin Sharifi Isaloo
First published 2017
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 Amin Sharifi Isaloo
The right of Amin Sharifi Isaloo to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-21388-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-44740-7 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by FiSH Books Ltd, Enfield
To Anano, Mariam and Nia

Contents
List of figures viii
Preface ix
Acknowledgements xii
Introduction 1
1 Proposing democracy in Iran: The empty place of power and
the public sphere 7
2 Ta’ziyeh – origins, dimensions and power in forming the
public sphere 40
3 Ta’ziyeh and the public sphere during the 1979 Revolution 71
4 Ta’ziyeh and the public sphere during the Iran–Iraq War 96
5 Ta’ziyeh and the public sphere during the 2009 Green
Movement 116
Conclusion 151
Glossary 153
Index 156
Figures
2.1 The return of Hussain’s horse from the Karbala battlefield, without
its master 44
2.2 Dastain Ashura, Noghab, Gonabad city, Khorasan province, Iran 46
2.3 The interior of the Tekiyeh Dowlat, a painting by Kamalol Molk
from the Qajar period 48
3.1 Iranians crowd around the US Embassy in Tehran, 4 November 1979 92
4.1 Blindfolded soldier shot at gunpoint, ca. 1981 102
4.2 Certitude of belief (Yaqin), ca. 1981 103
4.3 ‘Ya Hussein’ flag in the Iran–Iraq War 106
4.4 Young boy cradling dead soldier, 1980 107
4.5 A portrait of Mohammad Hossein Fahmideh and the enemy’s tank 109
4.6 A young boy wears two of the most important symbols of Ta’ziyeh 111
5.1 Neda Agha Soltan 134
5.2 Neda Soltani 134
5.3 Protesters wrongly carrying Neda Soltani’s photo 134
5.4 Panjehposter in Muharram protests during Montazeri’s funeral,
Qom, 21 December 2009 136
5.5 The 2009 Green Movement digital logo, combining the panjah, V,
arrowand invocation ‘Ya Hussein, Mir Hossein’ 137
5.6 Neda of Ashura 138
5.7 The crowd seizing the British embassy in Tehran on
29 November 2011 139
5.8 Obama billboard in Tehran, Vali-e Asr Sq, 2 October 2013 142
Preface
My experiences play an important role in the writing of this book. The first of
these came at the time Khomeini was leading the 1979 Revolution from
Neauphle-le-Château, in a suburb of Paris, when I witnessed thousands of people
showing each other the image of Imam Khomeini upon the moon, which they
believed they could see. During this period, I learned three simple, but significant,
lessons: the majority of the people can be wrong, people imitate one other and the
public can be easily manipulated. My second experience was during the Iran–Iraq
War (1980–88) when I observed how religious and cultural symbols and images
were employed by the revolutionary clerics to form the public sphere and to
manipulate the public for the prolonged war effort. The third experience came
after the death of Khomeini, when the conflict between two key figures of the
Islamic regime, Khamenei and Rafsanjani, commenced and their subsequent
struggle for more power and wealth left Iranian society in a transitional stage full
of abstruseness and uncertainty. They utilised all possible religious and cultural
symbols, images and signs together with their linguistic skills and guile to secure
more followers, supporters and voters for their pre-planned aims and elections.
These experiences, together with other incidents that I observed remotely, such
as the September 11 attacks, the Green Movement in Iran and the Arab Spring,
raised numerous simple questions about the concept of the public sphere and
modern democracy. For example, is there any society that is truly governed by the
people for the people? Who occupies the place of power in democracy? How is
the public sphere formed and transformed? In addition to these incidents and
questions, the writings of some Iranian revolutionary clerics and theologians
living in the West, such as Abdolkarim Soroush’s writings in Reason, Freedom,
and Democracy in Islam (2000), which is initially problematic due to its short-
comings in conceptualising the proposed ‘Islamic democracy’, led me to propose
my PhD thesis investigating their misleading proposals and their sophisticated
manipulation of statements, theories and concepts. Therefore, I began to examine
the compatibility between Islam and democracy from a different point of view,
but after about one year of reading and writing, I came to understand that it is not
important, at least in this case, whether Islam is compatible with democracy.
Indeed, the puzzle of the restriction of the public sphere to rational debate by
Habermas, on the one hand, and ‘theatricalisation’ and ‘staging’ in the political