Rituals of Rebellion in Iran

Dr Matthijs van den Bos, 27 October 2022

On 26 October, crowds gathered in Saqqez, Kurdistan province, Iran, to commemorate the death in custody on 16 September of Mahsa Amini. The date marked the fortieth day after Amini’s violent demise, a traditional end timing for a mourning period in several world religions, including in Islam and its Shiite tradition. Women defied the mandatory hejab, chants were heard of ‘death to the dictator.’ Security forces responded with brutal force, again, including live rounds. Observers of Iran will have realised that we’ve been here before. Both as concerns the regular alternation of waves of protest and repression over the past four plus decades, but also in bringing to mind the ritual aspect of revolutionary mobilization that did result in regime change in 1978-9. Whither rituals of rebellion?

‘Rituals or rebellion in Southeast Africa’ is the title of an iconic published lecture from 1952 by the British social anthropologist Max Gluckman (d.1975). He was concerned with annually recurring events in which inversions of the socio-political order were performed, specifically: women mimicking men’s behaviour with various levels of aggression, and musical expressions of hatred for the king. But in Gluckman’s functionalist mindset, these rituals served the consolidation, not the overthrow of the socio-political order. Ritual solidified and contained, gave an orderly shape to hostility and discontent, leading to systemic reproduction. Rituals of rebellion were not expected to occur in societies allowing for open dissent. And they were premised on limited role differentiations.

Comparisons across time and space are never perfect but it has seemed at times that Iranian protest repertoires have assumed the shape of rituals of rebellion. Gender is now in the eye of the storm, besides an older target in the figurehead of the system. Coinciding with Green Movement protests in 2009, annual processions during the holy month of Moharram gave a different connotation to the usual chants of Ya Hoseyn Ali! Besides the reference to the third and first Imams of the Shiites, a tribute to the recently deceased, oppositional ayatollah Montazeri was heard there, and a critique of the regime that had side-lined him. There were other cycles of mourning, including for Neda Aqa Soltan, another young woman who did not survive a demonstration – but even millions of people in the streets did not mean revolution. Tehranis have sometimes captured the process of challenge and counter of the regime, related often to the cycles of electoral politics, as ‘Tom and Jerry.’ Not David and Goliath, that is – the brute is symbolically molested (and at times physically) but it is not in the relational template for him to be vanquished. The Guardian Council will let in then deselect the loyal oppositional players that it thinks the regime can afford to, a safety valve responding to the degree of popular pressure. This dilemma still divides the opposition, but not few have tended to play along.

Just as currently and in 2009, mourning rites were also involved in the Iranian revolution of 1978-9. The American cultural anthropologist Michael Fischer coined the phrase ‘Karbala Paradigm’ in 1980 to refer to the application to the then present confrontation with the Shah’s regime of an historical frame. This involved an event in what is now Iraq during the month of Moharram late in the seventh century (680), where the Imam Husayn and his company, with a divine mandate to Islamic rule, had courageously chosen martyrdom at the overwhelming hands of evil usurpers. Past and present came together in the Moharram demonstrations of the late 1970s, which provided further motivation for participants faced with the likelihood of their subjection to violence, including death. New deaths implied funeral processions that morphed into new demonstrations. This ritual complex, in Fischer’s view, in addition to crippling strikes across the economy led to the overthrow of the Shah’s regime.

What had allowed in Iran for quietist religious rituals to become entwined with political protest was, so Fischer, the recasting of the Karbala paradigm into the active mode. Will we see another instance of religious rituals redirected towards political transformation? That would probably be putting it wrongly. Firstly, the politicization of religious rituals has been the bread and butter of the Islamic Republic that is now targeted, whether in the form of state Friday prayer, national re-burials of ‘martyrs’ from the Iraq war, or the government’s projection of Ashura as applying to the fight against anti-Asad forces in Syria. More broadly, the framing of protest has inversed, from pious people confronting secularist dictatorship to that of national citizens up against religious despotism. Whereas clerics had been elevated as saintly altruists who were religiously mandated to guide the people, the last decades have seen increasing public depreciations of their role, including in the shape of recorded physical assaults. The mostly deafening silence from the clerical centres in Qom and Mashhad in the face of the current cycle of protest bears testimony to the regime’s effective subordination of traditional Shiism in Iran. Although non-clergy-led forms of Shiite religiosity remain significant in the Islamic Republic, lastly, including in the shape of associations and congregations, the regime has cracked down relentlessly on any of its expressions that are perceived as potentially oppositional. The Shiite world will be in turmoil and its politicking fierce in the event of the demise or removal of Iran’s supreme leader, but it is unlikely to be key at the current political juncture.

Protest cycles in the Islamic Republic, as during the Green Revolution of 2009, have been distinguished from the revolutionary mobilization of 1978-9 by their sectoral and issue-specific as opposed to broad, national regime-change oriented struggle. The issue at hand might be bus drivers’ wage disputes; it might be a regional articulation of ethnic repression; or it might be intellectuals’ rallying against electoral manipulation. Discernible groups have not tended to come together across, for instance, age, class, and sectarian lines. But this time, it looks different. While striking oil workers in October 1978 defined a key moment in the revolution, oil workers this month have also raised their voices, in support of what are supposed to be ‘middle class’ concerns with personal freedom.

While religious rituals are unlikely to be key to revolutionary mobilization in the current day, rituals or revolution seem to be taking shape in Iran that reflect the core meaning of religion as ‘re-binding.’ Public hair cutting, rejecting dress codes, verbal sacrilege – connecting with others to recreate a free national space. What effective ritual does in essence, borrowing loosely from the sociologist Randall Collins, is create reservoirs of emotional energy, that remain after each repeated, affirmative interaction. Besides narrative frames, this is what helps explain the bravery of individual sacrifice, defying likely violence. It may not happen tomorrow, but it seems inevitable that the long-suffering Iranian people are going to free themselves from the political nightmare that their state is now in.

Sources and further reading:

Aronoff, M.J. 2006. Forty Years as a Political Ethnographer. Ab Imperio 4:23-38.

Collins, R. 2005. Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton: Princeton university Press.

Fischer, M.M.J. 1980. Iran. From religious dispute to revolution. [Harvard studies in cultural anthropology; 3]. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Fischer, M.MJ. 2010. The rhythmic beat of the revolution in Iran. Cultural Anthropology 25 (3): 497-543.

Gluckman, M. 1954. Rituals of Rebellion in South-East Africa. (The Frazer Lecture, 1952). Manchester: Manchester University Press.