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From Fallen Women to Citizen Mothers: Gendered Carcerality in Pahlavi Iran
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2022
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Modern carcerality in Iran, with its attendant systems of surveillance, policing, and mass imprisonment, was a gendered project from the outset. In turn, the new modern prisons of the Pahlavi era (1925–79) provoked gendered anxieties about seemingly rising rates of female and child criminality, the deteriorating family unit, and the inherent sin and vice of life in a modern city. In general, it is difficult to overstate the wholesale changes that the modern carceral system has brought to Iran. The establishment of modern prisons, an effort begun in the first decades of the 20th century, has led to an enduring transformation in social worlds for Iranians of all genders. For much of Iran's pre-20th-century history, forced confinement of any kind was a relative rarity, legal practices and norms were diffuse and diverse, and long periods of incarceration were virtually nonexistent. The conceit of prisoner reform central to the modern penitentiary model—wherein centralized modern governments imagine prisons as rehabilitative spaces in which socially undesirable “criminals” can be reformed into good “citizens”— is nowhere found in the archive of Iran's pre-20th-century punishments.
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References
1 For pre-Pahlavi Iranian legal history, see Enayat, Hadi, Law, State, and Society in Modern Iran: Constitutionalism, Autocracy, and Legal Reform, 1906–1941 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 23–112CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a description of a jailing facility in Qajar Persia from the era, see Wills, C. J., Persia as It Is (London: S. Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1886), 86–88Google Scholar. See also a brief section on “traditional punishments” in Abrahamian, Ervand, Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Recantation in Modern Iran (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 17–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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5 Fazlullah Bahrami, then head of Reza Shah's Department of Prisons, lists the number of prisoners held in Tehran in 1927 on the eve of legal centralization as 400 in the official police journal. Fazlullah Bahrami, Majalih-yi Pulis, no. 17, December 1927.
6 By the time of the 1979 revolution, there were an estimated 16,000 detainees (about forty persons per 100,000) in Iran, whereas today approximately a quarter of a million persons (about three hundred per 1000,000) are incarcerated Iran, with an approximate 3 to 4 percent of the latter total comprised of female detainees. For the 1979 number, which was quoted by a current member of Iran's Parliament, see “Qabl az Inqilab 16 Hizar Zindani Dashtim ama Aknun 240 Hizar Zindani Darim,” Etemad Online, 8 October 2021, https://etemadonline.com/content/516808/ بوروکرا‐است - باری - اسف - وضعیت - که - داریم - زندانی - هزار -240- اکنون - اما - ایم - داشته - زندانی - هزار -16- انقلاب - از - قبل . For more on the percentage of female detainees held in Iran today, see Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research, “Iran,” World Prison Brief, https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/iran (accessed 29 November 2021). The total number of detainees in today's Islamic Republic are taken from the Islamic Republic's Organization of Prisons and National Security Measures, which has under its jurisdiction the country's official prisons. This number is likely to be an undercount, however, as the jails and prisons under the jurisdiction of the country's security and military organs are not counted among this total. See “Iran's Overcrowded Prisons Hold a Quarter of a Million People, Says Chief Warden,” Radio Farda, 12 May 2018, https://en.radiofarda.com/a/iran-s-overcrowded-prisons-hold-a-quarter-of-a-million-people-says-chief-warden-/29222716.html.
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11 For more on the remarkable Qurrat al-ʿAyn, see Amanat, Abbas, Iran: A Modern History. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 241–43Google Scholar. Qurrat al-ʿAyn was executed as part of a broader wave of extraordinary violence against disciples of the Babi movement.
12 Murtiza Sayfi Fani Tafrishi, Polis-i Khafiyih-yi Iran 1299–1320: Murur-i bar Rukhdadha-yi
Siyasi va Tarikhchih-yi Shahrbani (Tehran: Intisharat-i Quqnus, 1988), 106–7. See also Khazaʾi Farayand-i Sakhtyabi-yi Nihad-i Zindan, 206–7.
13 As historian Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet astutely notes, modernist intellectuals of the late Qajar-era such as Malkum Khan emphasized legal reform as a “palliative” to Iran's perceived decline, both territorially and economically, vis-à-vis the colonial European powers; Kashani-Sabet, Firoozeh, Frontier Fictions: Shaping the Iranian Nation, 1804–1946. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 80–81Google Scholar. Legal scholar Hadi Enayat refers to this reformist obsession with the rule of law “legal fetishism”; Enayat, Law, State, and Society, 52.
14 Enayat, Law, State, and Society, 113–44.
15 As with the legal codes of the 1910s, certain infractions, particularly sex work and various forms of sexual deviance or violence, revealed the gendered implications of legal centralization. For a fascinating look at “sex-related crimes” in the legal archive of early-20th-century Iran, see Jairan Gahan Jand Reyhaneh Javadi, “Sex, Law, and the Archives: A History from Below Using the National Archives of Iran,” Jadaliyya, 10 August 2021, https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/43193.
16 The plans included five large prisons of 2700 square meters for 100 prisoners; fifty medium-size prisons of 1400 square meters for 50 prisoners; thirty small institutions of 1000 square meters for 30 prisoners; and several very small prisons of 200 square meters. See Vizarat-i Keshvar document فلآ12062– ش –4. The latter point was especially important due to Reza Shah's 1928 abrogation of capitulations to the European powers, including a law that allowed foreign nationals to avoid the Iranian justice system if accused of a crime; see Enayat, Law, State, and Society, 115–16.
17 Nasir Rubayʻi and Ahmad Rahraw Khuajah, Tarikh-i Zindan Dar ‘Asr-i Qajar va Pahlavi (Tehran: Intisharat-i Quqnus, 2011), 104–30. For more on the opening of Qasr, see also Abrahamian, Tortured Confessions, 27–28.
18 For more on the civilizational languages and logics buttressing these legal and prison reforms, see Nikpour, “The Criminal Is the Patient,” 302–6.
19 Hedayatollah Hakim-Elahi, Ba Man bih Zindan Biyayid (Tehran: Shirkat-i Sihami, 1946). Although Hakim-Elahi wrote numerous articles and several books from the 1940s through the 1960s, many of which had multiple printings, there has been scant scholarly notice of his work. For a crucial recent work on Hakim-Elahi's writing on Tehran's red-light district, see Jairan Gahan, “Red-Light Tehran: Prostitution, Intimately Public Islam, and the Rule of the Sovereign, 1910–1980” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2017), 165–77.
20 Cyrus Schayegh, “Criminal-Women and Mother-Women: Sociocultural Transformations and the Critique of Criminality in Early Post–World War II Iran,” Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 2, no. 3 (2006): 3.
21 Hakim-Elahi, Ba Man bih Zindan Biyayid, 3.
22 Ibid., 3. For the women's prison food facilities, see also Khazaʾi, Farayand-i Sakhtyabi-yi Nihad-i Zindan, 239.
23 Khazaʾi, Farayand-i Sakhtyabi-yi Nihad-i Zindan, 65.
24 For more on Ashraf and her relationship to elite women's rights efforts, see Parvin Paidar, Women and the Political Process in Twentieth Century Iran (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
25 “Mohimtarin Khabarha-yi Kishvar Va Jahan,” Khandaniha 9, no. 212 (1946): 213–14. The longtime editor of Khandaniha, ʿAli Asghar Amirani, was a staunch supporter of the Pahlavi government and was eventually executed in 1981 after the success of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, despite attempting to change allegiance to the new clerical order. Khandaniha was published continuously from September 1940 to August 1979.
26 Ibid., 214.
27 Hakim-Elahi, Ba Man bih Zindan Biyayid, 3.
28 Karman Shirdel, dir., Nedamatgah (short film), 1965. For more on Shirdel and state-funded Iranian documentary cinema of the period, see Hamid Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema, vol. 2, The Industrializing Years, 1941–1978 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 49–145.
29 For more on the discourse of patriotic motherhood, see Asfaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 181–206. For feminist efforts to push this discourse from patriotic motherhood to patriotic womanhood, see Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, “Patriotic Womanhood: The Culture of Feminism in Modern Iran, 1900–1941,” British Journal of Middle East Studies 32, no. 1 (2005): 29–46. For a related discussion of the politics of motherhood in modern Iran, see Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Conceiving Citizens: Women and the Politics of Motherhood in Iran (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
30 Kashani-Sabet, “Patriotic Womanhood,” 32.
31 This interview, which originally aired 9 May 1968, is reprinted in the literature of the state-run Institute for the Cooperation and Industry of Prisoners (ICIP; Bungah-i Taʿavun va Sanaʿiʾ-i Zindanian). See Bungah-i Taʿavun va Sanaʿiʾ-i Zindanian, Guzareshi Az Zindanha. Idarih-i Kol-i Zindanha va Chapgah-i Bungah-i Ta‘avun va Sana‘i’-i Zindanian (Tehran: 1968), 36–37.
32 Hakim-Elahi, Ba Man bih Zindan Biyayid, 5.
33 Bungah-i Taʿavun va Sanaʿiʾ-i Zindanian, Fa‘aliyat-i Sih Salih-yi Bungah-i Ta‘avun va Sana‘i’-i Zindanian (Tehran: 1965), 8.
34 Ibid., 20.
35 Ibid., 23.
36 Ibid., 12.
37 Ibid., 5.
38 Bungah-i Taʿavun va Sanaʿiʾ-i Zindanian, Guzaresh-i Az Zindanha, 2.