This chapter argues that by studying statecraft as entailing acts of citizenship, Women and the Islamic Republic contributes to feminist political theory and the feminist struggle to move beyond resistance in discussions of women and the state. The importance of non-elite Iranian women to the conditioning of the state formation process is not tied to the Iranian context. Rather, my exploration of gendered citizenship in contemporary Iran can more broadly help us understand the substance of citizenship, as well as the state formation process for hybrid regimes in the region and beyond. The chapter concludes by offering a summary of each chapter that follows.

This chapter shows that during the 1980–1988 period, interlocutors in warfronts, prisons, seminaries and hospitals undermined the state’s gender limitations and discrimination by deploying what I refer to as spiritual acts of citizenship – acts of citizenship geared toward preserving one’s status as a revolutionary citizen. Spiritual acts of citizenship were constituted through the broader ethical framework that political spirituality offered during the early days of the revolution (Ghamari-Tabrizi, 2016). I address the underlying historical contingencies and real-time creativity that enabled Islamic and leftist women to individually challenge national and transnational structures of power. Additionally, I show the different forms that spiritual acts of citizenship took during the 1980–1988 period. What follows offers a dynamic view of revolutionary citizenship as one interspersed with familial love, erudite poetry, and literature, significantly dependent on different avenues to self-care and contrasting approaches to self-preservation.

The legacy of war is a neglected area of research, particularly among political scientists. This chapter thus explores the legacies of violence that occurred during the first decade of the Islamic Republic through case studies of wives and daughters of war martyrs. With a focus on tensions between the tenses, I begin by illustrating how compliance with the post-revolutionary state’s political regime can nevertheless engender act of citizenship that challenge state narratives from this inaccessible temporal site where the past and present compete and inspirations arise. Next, the chapter demonstrates how individualised memorialisations of the past are more explicitly and intentionally deployed by wives and daughters to encounter gender and familial cultures today. This section illustrates the state’s transformation through a discussion of how individual memories of the Islamic Republic’s first decade are specifically utilised by women to resist and consequently remake contemporary structures of the family. Interviewees identify personal participation during the revolution and war, and the death of husbands and fathers as central to shaping their contemporary acts of citizenship. These acts bolster their pursuit of autonomy in thought and action, particularly within and through the family.

My purpose in this chapter is to concentrate on the individual’s own remembrance of the past and how she renews memories to move history forward in accordance with her own imagination, as well as on the broader constraints and opportunities that shape her present life. The interaction that takes place between individual and collective remembrance requires further attention in the social sciences and within memory studies. This trend permits the formation of a distorted conceptualisation of how change occurs and at times results in overinvesting in a linear progression of history. I marshal various sources of evidence – including a special issue published by a Hezbollah cultural institute, some of the analysed articles from which are not publicly accessible – to argue this: at least one reading of Iranian women’s conceptualisation of their status and formation of rights, roles, and responsibilities in the post-revolutionary era is its nonlinearity and connection to individual goals and memories. I contextualise women’s own words from memoirs and other texts within long-term histories of activism in modern Iran and consider the conditions, structural spaces, and opportunities that made their acts of citizenship visible, and, at times, invisible.

During different moments of conflict, post-revolutionary Iranian’s formal and informal legislation ebbs and flows between plans to condition, eliminate or limit citizenship. This trend in the country’s post-revolutionary history also leaves much space for mediation and slippages that reconfigure national governance projects on the local terrain. In post-revolutionary Iran, then, it is not only the state’s republican elements that make it unpredictable through elections and the press (Osanloo, 2009). Women and the Islamic Republic has argued that when we integrate acts of citizenship into the state-building process, we see that the post-revolutionary Iranian state is heavily conditioned by the gendered legacies of the Iran–Iraq war. Moreover, authoritarianism is an ambiguous project when examined from within society.

Chapter 4 focuses on the controversial practice of (self-)flagellation (tatbir), which involves using swords and knives to cut the body. This highly controversial ritual practice, which is traditionally performed by men, is increasingly practiced by Shirazi Shi‘i women. Shirazi Shi‘i women in London claim that they initiated this practice among women for the first time in 2007, which has influenced and inspired other Shi‘i women to practice tatbir in other European countries and in the Middle East, including Kuwait and recently Bahrain. The chapter examines to what extent the increasing number of women performing tatbir in Europe can be regarded as a form of female religious empowerment, thus influencing the gender dynamics within Shi‘i ritual practices not only in London but also among other Shi‘i communities in other European countries and in the Middle East.

This chapter provides an overview of the trajectories of Shi‘is in the Gulf and their presence in Europe. The Shi‘a in the Gulf consist of indigenous as well as migrant and, in some cases, also converted Shi‘is. Whether forced or voluntary, the experiences of migration and settlement among Shi‘is in Europe and the Middle East varies. Often coming from minority contexts of marginalization, discrimination, and persecution, Shi‘i experiences of migration are often different to those of other Muslim immigrants in Europe as well as in the Middle East. In the 1980s, large-scale displacement of Iraqi Shi‘i Muslims, for example, forced them to migrate through a multilocal trajectory of displacement in so-called transit countries such as Iran, other Gulf countries or neighboring countries such as Jordan or came first to European countries such as Sweden, the Netherlands or Germany and later moved to the United Kingdom. The national and transnational interactions and networks of these Shi‘i communities are discussed in this chapter to offer an overview of the various diverse Shi‘i communities present in Europe and the Middle East.

Chapter 6 focuses on the production of art in the form of poetry and sermons but also material and visual culture expressed through banners, posters, and graffiti as a form of resistance and reordering of the political system. In the context of Twelver Shi‘a Islam, writing elegies and performing them in mourning rituals has been a central element in lamenting the death of Imam Husayn. The lachrymal expressions and descriptions that characterize this lamentation poetry have the religious and ritualistic function of metaphorically identifying the participants with Imam Husayn and uniting believers in the fight for his cause. This chapter focuses mainly on lamentation poetry written by men but performed by women during women-only majalis in Kuwait and London. It discusses how poetry, as an artistic production, is politicized locally but its impact is transnationally transmitted. The chapter also examines women’s use of forms of resistance art to articulate their own definition of power and authority within both private and public spaces in Bahrain.

In 2014, I visited a private women-only religious gathering (majlis, pl. majālis) organized by an Iraqi Shiʿi in her house in London. When I entered, everyone was still busy preparing the majlis: some were sorting out the seating area by laying down additional cushions on the carpet while others were making food and drinks in the kitchen. The smell of black tea, cardamom, and saffron filled the house. The walls were covered in black with numerous Islamic Shiʿi embroideries in yellow, green, and red hanging throughout the rooms. Various pictures of the Prophet’s grandson, Imam Husayn, and other Shiʿi figures were displayed. The rooms were decorated in a style to aesthetically evoke a palpable atmosphere of commemoration and imageries of death, loss, and pain. It only took a few minutes until the house was filled with women. The rooms on the ground floor were all used for the majlis, and became very crowded. Once the female reciter (mullāya, pl. mullāyāt) entered, lights were dimmed in order to evoke a sad atmosphere in the room. The mullāya started her majlis by greeting the Prophet and his family (ahl al-bayt) and sending her commemoration wishes to everyone in the room in memory of the death of Imam Husayn, whom Shiʿis commemorate yearly during the month of Muharram. Such commemoration rituals involve various bodily expressions and emotional experiences such as weeping and self-beating. During such majālis, some women stand up and form a circle, rhythmically moving their bodies while beating their breasts and faces. The other women, who remain sitting, support the rhythmic self-beating of the standing women through their own loud weeping and hitting their legs, breasts, and faces in unison.

The final chapter brings the discussion back to the definitions of resistance, female agency, and the link to the aesthetization of politics. In order to understand Shi‘i women’s self-inflicted pain practices as a sign of power and resistance, we need to examine the various structures and forms of power existing within the social structures and fields within which women operate. Shi‘i women in this study share and articulate nationally and transnationally their role in contributing to the historical continuation of Shi‘i actions of resistance through the introduction of a new definition of the new Shi‘i woman, representing it as a declaration of their true "Shi‘a-ness." Shi‘i women use performativity, language, symbols, and signs to construct a new version of the "Shi‘i woman" that is able to counter and resist male hegemonic power structures. As a conclusion for the book, the chapter argues that through women’s ritual practices of self-inflicted pain, a new female aesthetization of the feminine subject is defined, produced, and articulated on and through the female body. The newly defined Shi‘i woman is a symbol of the performativity of power dynamics but also the performativity of women’s actions resisting existing power structures that lead to a female Shi‘i transnational collective reordering of power.

This chapter covers the historical and contemporary development of the rites of mourning within Shi‘i Islam. References from historical sources on the performance of mourning rituals since the Umayyad period lay the foundation for a critical discussion on what constitutes a ritual and when the performance of commemoration rituals started. Most women interviewed believed Zaynab, Husayn’s sister, to have initiated mourning practices for the first time in order to keep the memory of the killing of her brother alive. Others, mainly within Shi‘i scholarship, see the initiation of the practice as having been shaped later by men. This chapter serves as the foundation for the whole book as it introduces each ritual practice, understood as an act of resistance, with a particular focus on the role women play therein.

The chapter discusses the various forms of the performativity of the political and examines the enactment of the Karbala paradigm through theatrical performances (tashabih) and the ritual of mashy ‘ala al-jamur (walking on hot coals). The individual and collective emotions that are generated through tashabih and their effect on the body play an important role. The emotional pain caused by the oral narration together with the visual performance and enactment of historical events are interwoven with the actual physical pain that is self-imposed through Shi‘i ritual practices. The reciprocal relation between emotions, the body, and visuality is discussed in more detail through examining this particular act of resistance.