Feeding Iran

Shi`i Families and the Making of the Islamic Republic

Rose Wellman

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780520976313
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia culturale e sociale

Since Iran's 1979 Revolution, the imperative to create and protect the inner purity of family and nation in the face of outside spiritual corruption has been a driving force in national politics. Through extensive fieldwork, Rose Wellman examines how Basiji families, as members of Iran's voluntary paramilitary organization, are encountering, enacting, and challenging this imperative. Her ethnography reveals how families and state elites are employing blood, food, and prayer in commemorations for martyrs in Islamic national rituals to create citizens who embody familial piety, purity, and closeness to God. Feeding Iran provides a rare and humanistic account of religion and family life in the post-revolutionary Islamic Republic that examines how home life and everyday piety are linked to state power.

1 Blood, Physio-Sacred Substance, and the Making of Moral Kin

Oh Zaynab!

They killed Husayn.

His thirsty lips.

Dear Zaynab, help us.

Protect our families

I vow to the family of the Prophet

God, grant our wishes.

Help our children.

Help the addicts and the sick.

Help those who cannot come home.

Those who cannot sit with their mothers and fathers and eat lunch.

Oh Zaynab, help us.

—Women’s prayer gathering, Fars-Abad, 2010

Nushin and Ahmad spoke in hurried whispers. They had just received news of Ehsan’s death. They told us to go upstairs and get ready to leave the house. Ehsan was Nushin’s nephew, and his father, Nushin’s brother, would be expecting us. Maryam and I ran to our room to put on our chadors while the boys hurried ahead. I vividly remember the silhouette of Nushin’s back as she walked a few steps ahead of us in the alley, her steps kicking up dust and her frame shuddering in shock. Fatemeh, Nushin’s married daughter, with her baby Setayesh on her hip, found us in the street and walked with us the next few blocks to the gated door of Ehsan’s home. Passing under the black cloth of mourning that hung over the alley and through a group of men sitting in the small walled courtyard, we entered the home’s living room, its walls lined with women who had somehow already arrived and were tearfully praying. At the door, I held Setayesh while Fatemeh adjusted her scarf. Marjan and Farrin, Nushin’s nieces (Ehsan’s sisters), were sitting on the floor crying, surrounded by several groups of women. Marjan, Ehsan’s eldest sister, rocked back and forth sobbing: “My brother, my brother, my brother . . . for the love of my father, my father!” Marjan’s mother wailed next to her now brotherless daughters, sometimes being hushed by the other women. Nushin went over to hold her hand.

• • • • •

Ehsan was only in his twenties when his body was found, bloated from several days in the sun, in the desert outside of Fars-Abad. He had died on the Holy Night of Power during Ramadan, they said, of a drug overdose, probably heroin.¹ Nushin told me later that the drugs had likely been trafficked “from Afghanistan and were ultimately the effect of US foreign policy there.” But it was unclear how his body had gotten to the desert, and there were unsubstantiated rumors going around town that his death was not an accident. When news of the family’s calamity spread in the town, neighbors, close friends, and kin filled the house of his parents, offering their condolences: “May God have Mercy on Him” (khodā rahmat-esh koneh), they said.

Ehsan was buried on the Thursday after his death (his burial had been delayed a few days due to ongoing investigations into the circumstances of his passing). He was brought to the cemetery by ambulance in a wooden casket, and his close male relatives carried him up the hill to the earthen gravesite. Nearly one thousand people attended the burial and the subsequent funeral. His immediate kin, both male and female, formed the first circle of black-clad mourners around the still open grave and then covered it with fresh earth. His sisters and mother cried and prayed. After the burial, they and their cousins distributed dates, fruit, and halvā (a sweet wheat paste made from browned flour and butter, rose water, sugar, and saffron) to the attendees. Then the mourners, in a long car chain, followed the sound of recitation of the Qur’an, broadcast from a truck decorated with a picture of Ehsan wreathed in flowers, to Fars-Abad’s meetinghouse for Imam Husayn. Inside the large, carpeted hall, the Friday Imam spoke on the loudspeakers about the Day of Judgment to the male and female mourners.

What can Ehsan’s tragic death and funeral tell us about how supporters of the Islamic Republic, their neighbors, and extended family members are experiencing kinship in provincial Iran? How do events like these reverberate in their lives, shape their prayers, and change their relationships, both with each other and with the state? And finally, what can we learn about their aspirations to create households that embody familial piety, purity, and closeness to God in the context of what they see as increasing societal corruption despite the promises of the Revolution?

A few months after Ehsan’s funeral, Nushin and I sat together drinking tea in her home in Fars-Abad. She folded her flowered cotton chador over her knees and confessed that she was worried about her two sons (aged nineteen and twenty-three). What if they became drug addicts like Ehsan and died in the desert too? What if her husband also became an opium addict as he grew older, like Ehsan’s father, her brother? (Ehsan’s father, Nushin’s brother, was a brilliant poet but smoked opium throughout the day.) Nushin’s concerns were not limited to the high rates of opiate addiction in Fars-Abad and elsewhere in Iran, though.² Family tensions were simmering for other reasons. Her young adult children, teenage brothers and sisters, were arguing too much. What was more, she felt that she could not trust one of her husband’s relatives, who lived in the family’s old complex close to the center of town. “It is especially ugly when people belittle each other,” she said, speaking about the tension between herself and one of these extended family members. “You have to be very good so that you can change yourself or someone else for the better. It’s very difficult, with your own good behavior, to change the bad behavior of others into good behavior.” Then she added, “In the past, people’s lives were simple. They didn’t have electricity or refrigerators, but they weren’t stressed and they weren’t quick to anger (the way we are today). . . . There was more trust.” Yet Nushin, perhaps because she supported the regime and her husband and children were card-carrying members of the Basij, did not fault the Revolution for what she saw as an increasing fragmentation of kin relationships and Islamic family values in her society: “This is not because of the Revolution—Khamenei and Khomeini are good,” she told me on another occasion as we walked in the local park. “The problem is that others have surrendered hope.”

This chapter explores the everyday religious and moral experience of being kin in postrevolutionary Iran from the perspective of the Islamic Republic’s provincial state supporters. I explore how Nushin and her family as well their extended kin and neighbors conceive of kinship as both a threat and a resource, employing their prayers and actions to protect and delineate their family households. Not surprisingly, and despite their allegiance to the state, however, my interlocutors’ experiences of kinship sometimes conflicted and sometimes converged with notions of Islamic legal kinship as shaped by inheritance laws and “marriage exclusions.”³ Although they organized their families with regard to these Islamic laws, they also held that blood and the other shared substances of kinship channel and contain not only a set of connections or relationships across generations but also “physio-sacred” qualities such as purity and piety.⁴ The “descendants of the Prophet” (sayyeds), they told me, transmit divine light, purity, and “closeness to God” (see also Ho 2006). But even for non-sayyeds, immaterial or sacred qualities such as purity and blessing help determine who counts as kin and/or who might be conceived of as a potential marriage partner.

Even more, they often talked about how their family members’ shared qualities of temperament, character, blessing, and purity could be lost or developed. And this physio-sacred “stuff” of kinship was always shifting, an object of prayer, protection, and ethical work. For state supporters like Nushin and her family, this protection was all the more important in a society pervaded by a “lack of familial trust” as well as by problems of divorce and premarital sex. This was a society in which people like Ehsan died in the desert—a result of US meddling in the Middle East. It was against this backdrop that women’s and men’s everyday pious acts such as praying, visiting, and sharing food (see chapter 2) were essential to maintaining and creating pure and moral kin relations. These “acts of kinship” infused the vulnerable bodies and souls of kin with blessing and purity, protecting children and other family members from outside physical and/or spiritual harm. After all, what was at stake for my state-supporting hosts was not only the spiritual and bodily health of kin but also their reckoning on the Day of Judgment and the future of the Islamic Republic.

SACRALIZING KINSHIP

This chapter is premised on an approach to kinship in the Middle East that does not confine understandings of kinship to a genealogical grid, notions of biology and DNA, or formalized laws. I view kin-making as an embodied, sacred, and ethical process (Cannell 2013, 2017; Wellman 2017b). The immaterial, sacred acts and qualities of kinship may work alongside or in dynamic tension with other ideas of blood, law, or genealogy, but they are no less important for doing so. This point warrants particular emphasis because kinship has traditionally been regarded as a secular affair (Cannell 2017; Delaney 1986). Schneider, for instance, examined religion as a second-order phenomenon in his work on the meanings of “blood” and “law” in American kinship and largely neglected the particular religious formations that constituted American modernity (Cannell 2013; Feeley-Harnik 1999). In The Seed and the Soil: Gender and Cosmology in Turkish Village Society, Carol Delaney (1991) began a challenge to this partitioning of kinship and religion (and of politics) by illustrating how concepts of monogenetic human procreation are linked to monotheistic understandings of divine creation in which God is the Father of creation. But too often, scholars continue to analytically separate the somatic or physical aspects of incorporation into kin groups and the nonphysical acts and qualities that create kinship (Johnson et al. 2015, 7). They rank the nonphysical, immaterial, or ritual acts of kin-making as “pseudo” or “fictive” and therefore miss how such understandings may be fundamental to local kinship(s).

New research, however, shows that there are many examples of sacred and/or sacralized kinship (Thomas, Malik, and Wellman 2017). For instance, Fenella Cannell explores the American Mormon “recognition” of past and future kin to show that kinship can occupy a “third space” in which it rests on neither biogenetic substance nor man-made law/convention, but rather on something spiritual, immaterial, and ineffable (2007, 6; 2013). Indeed, people may participate in the holy “by caring for their kin” or they may “care for their kin through participating in the holy” (Sered 1988, 130).

Scholarly research of Muslims in the Middle East has similarly begun to explore kinship as a process. Families in locations as diverse as Lebanon, Morocco, or Iran may be organized not only by blood and law but also by ideas of “closeness” (Clarke 2007b), by the sharing of houses (Bahloul 1996), and through active and shifting networks of relations (Shahshahani 1990). Shared breast milk and suckling in Islam can be a source of kin-making (Parkes 2005; Clarke 2007a).

This research lays the groundwork for understanding how my Basiji hosts conceived of kinship in Fars-Abad and beyond: as a religious and ethical process of becoming the right kind of moral and pure kin. This process of making the right kind of kin, moreover, was deeply connected to the hope of embodying the values of the Revolution and thus of protecting the Islamic Republic. This chapter attends to a full spectrum of acts and processes of kin-making—including the immaterial qualities and ritual actions that shaped my hosts’ relationships. I begin, however, with a brief overview of how they understood Islamic family law, gender, and divine creation in relation to their support of the regime.

ISLAM AND KINSHIP IN FARS-ABAD

In Islamic legal discourse, both Sunni and Shi‘a, there are three main categories of kinship: consanguinity (nasab), affinity (musāharah), and milk kinship (ridā‘) (Clarke 2007b, 381; Haeri 1989). A relative of any of these types is considered to be a “close” person and is owed certain rights and has corresponding duties (Clarke 2007b, 381). As part of this framework, Islam delineates a set of relatives who are “forbidden in marriage” (mahram). These include parents and children, aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces, and siblings, as well as some affines, but not cousins. Those who are forbidden to marry are considered to be “close” and intimate, explicitly contrasting with those for whom marriage is an option and who are “strangers” or “foreigners” (Clarke 2007b, 382–83).

Gender difference is another key element of kinship in Iran. Gender and sex are tightly connected and are premised on the categorization of male and female bodies into anatomically and hormonally opposing types (Najmabadi 2013; Torab 2007, 13). Moreover, gender and sex is conceived of as naturally fixed and God-given; even in the case of hermaphrodites, the surgeon’s role is to discover the “real” sex, not create it. This seemingly natural fixity of gender spills into ideas about family roles and responsibilities. For instance, according to Ayatollah Morteza Mutahhari (1920–79), one of the most important Islamic scholars connected to the 1979 Revolution and a disciple of Khomeini, “Familial relations are quite different from other forms of association. By their very nature motherhood and fatherhood create duties and obligations which are anchored in natural laws. Given that men and women are biologically different and have different natures, so their familial duties and obligations too are different” (quoted in Afshar 1998, 143).⁵ Here, God-given “laws of nature” regulate the differences between the sexes as well as family duties, roles, and responsibilities (Haeri 1989, 27; Mir-Hosseini 2004, 6).⁶ And further, although women are equal to men in creation and do not depend on men for attaining perfection, women and men are created differently (Mir-Hosseini 2004).⁷ The distinction between male and female is due to the inherent biological and psychological differences described in the Qur’an, in which women are typified as more emotional and men as more rational, a difference that is both given by God and natural (Paidar 1995, 175).⁸ In this framework, the most important duty for women is motherhood, and a woman’s “natural activities” should ideally occupy her inside the home.⁹ Indeed, divine creation and “natural law” (ain-e fitrat) specify a particular kind of gendered family that is at once divinely o...