The Rite of Urban Passage: The Spatial Ritualization of Iranian Urban Transformation

By Reza Masoudi

The Iranian city experienced a major transformation when the Pahlavi Dynasty initiated a project of modernization in the 1920s. The Rite of Urban Passage investigates this process by focusing on the spatial dynamics of Muharram processions, a ritual that commemorates the tragic massacre of Hussein and his companions in 680 CE. In doing so, this volume offers not only an alternative approach to understanding the process of urban transformation, but also a spatial genealogy of Muharram rituals that provides a platform for developing a fresh spatial approach to ritual studies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Aug 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781785339776

Reza Masoudi

Reza Masoudi is a native southwestern Iranian who lives in London, where he is currently a Research Associate at SOAS, University of London. He has been a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany, and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies (ZMO), Berlin. He is an urbanist whose work focuses on the geography of crowds and protests, urban violence, and studies of religious rituals in public spaces in Iran and India.

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THE RITE OF URBAN PASSAGE

Articulating Journeys: Festivals, Memorials and Homecomings

General Editors:

Tom Selwyn, SOAS University of London

Nicola Frost, Devon Community Foundation

The landscape of contemporary mobility stresses ideas of home, return, commemoration and celebration. Groups seek to mark changing elements of historical and cultural importance through architecture, narrative and festivity. Migrants and their descendants frequently travel between ‘homes’, reinventing and reshaping as they go. Such events can themselves attract travellers and pilgrims with their own stories to tell. Engaging with more substantive ethnographic features and linking back to classical anthropological and philosophical concerns, this series contributes to a new understanding of the Other encountered away from home but also of the Self and home.

Volume 1

Waiting for Elijah

Time and Encounter in a Bosnian Landscape

Safet HadžiMuhamedović

Volume 2

The Rite of Urban Passage

The Spatial Ritualization of Iranian Urban Transformation

Reza Masoudi

THE RITE OF URBAN PASSAGE

The Spatial Ritualization of Iranian Urban Transformation

Reza Masoudi

First published in 2018 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2018, 2022 Reza Masoudi Nejad

First paperback edition published in 2022

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Masoudi, Reza, author.

Title: The rite of urban passage : the spatial ritualization of Iranian urban transformation / Reza Masoudi.

Description: New York : Berghahn Books, [2018] | Series: Articulating journeys : festivals, memorials, and homecomings ; 2 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018008951 (print) | LCCN 2018016895 (ebook) | ISBN 9781785339776 (ebook) | ISBN 9781785339769 (hardback : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Tenth of Muḥarram--Iran--Dizfūl. | Islam--Iran--Dizfūl--Customs and practices. | Shiites--Iran--Dizfūl. | Urbanization--Iran--Dizfūl--History--20th century. | City planning--Social aspects--Iran--Dizfūl--History--20th century. | Dizfūl (Iran)--Social life and customs.

Classification: LCC BP194.5.T4 (ebook) | LCC BP194.5.T4 M37 2018 (print) | DDC 297.3/6--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018008951

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78533-976-9 hardback

ISBN 978-1-80073-649-8 paperback

ISBN 978-1-78533-977-6 ebook

To Kian and Azita, my son and wife

CONTENTS

List of Figures

List of Maps

Acknowledgements

Preface

Introduction

PART I. THE SPATIAL MANIFESTATION OF RITUAL

Chapter 1. Towards a Framework for Spatially Studying Religious Rituals

Chapter 2. The Spatial Genealogy of Muharram Rituals

PART II. THE SPATIAL ORGANIZATION OF RITUAL

Chapter 3. The Traditional Muharram Processions

Chapter 4. The Rite of Urban Passage

Chapter 5. Entwining Past and Present in Performed Space

Chapter 6. Reinventing Muharram Rites

Conclusion. An Urban-Spatial Approach to Muharram Rituals

Bibliography

Index

FIGURES

Figure 0.1: The cemetery around the tomb of Roodband. The tomb is in the background. Dezful, 1996.

Figure 2.1: A majlis at Khuja Jaame Masjid in Bandra during Muharram. Mumbai, India, December 2009.

Figure 2.2: A majlis in an open space between BIT Residential Blocks, off Mohammad Ali Road, during Muharram. Mumbai, India, December 2009.

Figure 2.3: A Muharram majlis of Dawodi Bohras, who are Isma’ili Shi’a, in the south of Mumbai, December 2010. Bohras congregated for a majlis during which their spiritual leader, Sayyedna Mohammed Burhanuddin, delivered his sermon. The photograph shows the mass in Bhendi Bazaar.

Figure 2.4: A public procession on Ashura day, in the old city of Dezful in Iran, 2006. The recent form of the Shi’i procession is a symbolic funeral procession towards a cemetery.

Figure 2.5: The timeline of the major dynasties in Shi’i history.

Figure 2.6: The street play in the city of Dezful on Ashura day, Iran, 2006.

Figure 2.7: Tekyeh-i Dowlat, Tehran, in the Qajar era. This is Kamal al-Molk’s famous canvas.

Figure 2.8: A ta’zyeh scene at an open space in the Qajar era, Dieulafoy, 1887.

Figure 2.9: The husseiniyeh of Fahadan in the city of Yazd, Iran, 2007.

Figure 2.10: The nakhl of Kalb-Ali Khan (left) on Ashura day in Dezful, photograph dated 1350, i.e. 1931.

Figure 2.11: A nakhl located in a local square, Yazd, Iran, 2006.

Figure 2.12: The nakhl of Mir-chakhmaq at the corner of the square in the city of Yazd, Iran, 2006.

Figure 2.13: The ritual of lifting the nakhl, at husseiniyeh Shah Nematolah-i Vali, in the city of Taft, Iran, 2011.

Figure 2.14: The ritual of ha’ya-mola in Bushehr, Iran.

Figure 3.1: Ahmad Shah Qajar honoured Haj Abbass Khan with the royal title of Asef al-Mamalek, letter dated 1923.

Figure 3.2: Letter stamped by the Minister of War in 1914, recognizing Haji Abbass Khan as the head of the borough of Masjid.

Figure 4.1: The first modern streets of Dezful, early 1930s. The circus can be seen in the middle of the photograph.

Figure 4.2: The circus with roofed pavement at the junction of two of the first streets of Dezful (the late 1950s or very early 1960s).

Figure 4.3: The city of Dezful and the new streets.

Figure 5.1: Möbius Strip.

Figure 6.1: Ashura day, Dezful, February 2006.

Figure 6.2: The last few alams at the Shrine of Roodband on the morning of Ashura day. Dezful, February 2006.

Figure 6.3: Handing a friend a shawl during a procession in Dezful, February 2006.

MAPS

Map 2.1: The geographical location of Mecca, Medina, Karbala, Kufa and Damascus.

Map 3.1: The localities and boroughs in the city of Dezful, early twentieth century. (A) Heydar-khuneh, (B) Seeyah-poushan, (C) Qaleh, (D) Mahalleh Masjed, (E) Western Sahrabedar and (F) Eastern Sahrabedar.

Map 3.2: The aggregation of procession routes on Ashura day, depicting the social division in Dezful.

Map 3.3: The procession route of Qopi-Agha Husseini on Ashura day.

Map 3.4: The procession route of Lourioun on Ashura day.

Map 5.1: The aggregation of traditional procession routes on Ashura day, depicting the social division in Dezful.

Map 5.2: The re-arranged Muharram processions in three sessions, the session of Taso’a afternoon.

Map 5.3: The re-arranged Muharram processions in three sessions, the session of Asura morning.

Map 5.4: The re-arranged Muharram processions in three sessions, the session of Asura afternoon.

Map 5.5: The traditional Heydari–Nemati border in the modern city. Dezful, 1990s.

Map 5.6: The most emotional locations in processions based on Karami’s narrative. The procession of Ashura morning (solid line), Ashura afternoon (dashed line). The background map shows the city during the early 1980s.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is a result of my long-term focus on religious rituals as part of urbanization process. This idea stems from my PhD research that had the full financial support of my father-in-law, Majid Ghandi-zadeh Dezfuli, who has always been my true mentor and friend. The manuscript of book was partly prepared during my Writing Fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity (MPI-MMG), Göttingen, Germany. I am grateful to Professor Peter Van der Veer, the director of MPI-MMG, for this generous fellowship. I have to express my gratitude to Professor Tom Selwyn for his full support ever since he was my PhD examiner in 2009.

PREFACE

The Retrospective of this Book

This book is the outcome of a usual academic process. However, it is rooted in a lifelong personal curiosity about the dynamics of urban culture. I am not sure why this curiosity has stayed with me, but I can briefly narrate its history.

When I was ten years old, I was exposed to the oral cultural history of my hometown in a way that was unusual for my generation. Every evening, I had no choice but to listen to the narratives of elderly members of my family that made our long, dark and fearful evenings bearable. It was 1980, when the Iran-Iraq war stormed the country with my hometown, Dezful, near the border. Dezful became one of the most bombed cities during the war. There was a power cut every evening to keep the city in absolute darkness because of airstrikes; there was no way to watch TV. We spent our long evenings listening to our parents and grandparents tell stories about the city and their traditional way of life, stories that were otherwise edged out by television. The war dragged our evening lifestyle back to earlier times. This experience made a substantial impact on my interest in the oral history of cities and cultures.

One of the most interesting stories was about the traditional Muharram rituals and the rearrangement of Muharram processions. Years later, I revisited this subject for my final design project and dissertation to complete my master’s in architecture at the University of Tehran in the mid-1990s. I intended to design the site of an old cemetery around the tomb of Roodband, which had been the focal point of the Dezful Muharram processions ever since their rearrangement in the very early 1950s. This site became the heart of the city during Muharram commemoration, the most important socio-cultural annual event. Nonetheless, this site was not an important place for the everyday life of the city, and was ignored by modern urban planners, remaining an empty arena at the margins of the old city. The site is on the east bank of the River Dez, with a striking view over the river. My aim was to design the site in such a way as to reposition it as the cultural heart of the city, considering that a new bridge over the river was about to change the position of this site in the urban configuration. Soon, I realized that this was not simply a normal urban design project, and that the question of ritual and city was far more complex than what I had learned about cities in a school of the built environment. My dissertation received the award for the Dissertation of Year in Art and Architecture, but the theoretical curiosity about the relationship between city and ritual stayed with me for years and fundamentally shaped my academic career. This book is certainly the result of this curiosity, but it has by no means exhausted my inquiry about ritual, space and cities.

FIGURE 0.1 The cemetery around the tomb of Roodband. The tomb is in the background. Dezful, 1996. Photo by the author.

The journey from the built environment discipline to social anthropology and ritual studies was not a short one. This was an academic voyage via a diploma, my second master’s degree, my PhD and post-doctoral research projects. My old and new colleagues may conceive this journey as a break from one discipline and into another. However, from my point of view it was a seamless journey of following a theoretical curiosity, without regard to the established disciplinary boundaries.

Since the nineteenth century, human knowledge has predominantly been developed and produced through the division of academic disciplines and establishment of respective scientific methods. However, during the second half of the twentieth century this was called into question, leading to interdisciplinary teaching and study. In Against Method (1993; orig. 1975), Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994) rejected the existence of a universal scientific method. As a philosopher of science, he made a case for an anarchistic approach in science. Feyerabend argued that the great scientific findings are often achieved when someone ignores general standard procedures and goes beyond the established scientific methods. He even stated that science is essentially an anarchic enterprise. In the opening statement of his introduction he wrote ‘that anarchism, while perhaps not the most attractive political philosophy, is certainly excellent medicine for epistemology, and for the philosophy of science’ (1993: 9). On the other hand, there has been concern about professionalizing academic disciplines, which effectively reduces academic disciplines into certain techniques or methods, such as reducing anthropology into ethnography, or history into historiography. In his talk at UC Berkeley, Hayden White mentioned that the field of history has been professionalized, thus this discipline is not often revolutionized from within. This circumstance, he argued, even pushes great thinkers out of academia: Nietzsche resigned from his position at the University of Basel and Marx never received an academic appointment. Often, someone from the periphery of the field of history, such as literature, contributes to a new discourse in this discipline (White, 2014). This situation has created the desire to engage in interdisciplinary studies, and scholars in science, social sciences, art and humanities very often borrow concepts and ideas from each other. Surprisingly, there is no common understanding about key concepts among scholars of different disciplines. The borrowed terms and concepts – such as myth, language, space, landscape and place – very often lose their meanings across disciplines and become metaphors. I am frequently surprised to see how a concept from one discipline transforms into a metaphor or complex concept with a different connotation in another field of study. I would argue that this is partly due to the effects of the ‘Chinese whisper game’ or the game of ‘telephone’, in which ideas and concepts are further distorted as they are passed ‘down the line’. In an interview, Hayden White explained that it is rather difficult to initiate a concrete interdisciplinary collaboration, since there is no longer a common language or even a theory among humanists (White, 2013). In this intellectual landscape, some scholars have been able to make substantial contributions by proposing and developing a theoretical framework that integrates diverse and fragmented understandings of a key concept, as Lefebvre (1991; orig. 1974) did with the notion of space in The Production of Space.

The contribution of the present book is not the result of borrowing ideas and concepts from other disciplines. Rather, it reflects my personal journey across disciplines throughout my academic training and research career. In other words, this book is not the result of a migration of concepts, but the disciplinary migration of its author.

INTRODUCTION

This book is entitled The Rite of Urban Passage, inspired by van Gennep’s classic book, The Rites of Passage. The reason behind this was not to have a catchy title nor to imply that this book is greatly influenced by van Gennep. The title of the book should be read as a set of keywords referring to ‘Muharram rituals’, ‘the Iranian city’, and ‘the process of modern urban transformation’. I actually coined ‘the rite of urban passage’ to describe the re-arrangement of Muharram procession routes in the city of Dezful in the early 1950s. I explain in chapter four that this historic event was a ritual per se, that signified a major change in the social constitution of Dezful during the Iranian modernization. The re-arrangement of processions ritualized the passage of the urban society from the traditional constitution into a new social make-up. Thus, ‘the rite of urban passage’ discursively implies the dynamics of Muharram rituals and urban transformation. The investigation into Muharram procession dynamics during the Iranian modernization was the starting point of this book, yet the investigation unfolded in a much broader historical and theoretical landscape. Ultimately, this book is not just about Iranian cities or Muharram rituals, by which Shi’i Muslims annually commemorate the tragic martyrdom of Hussein ibn Ali in the seventh century. It offers an alternative approach to investigating the process of urban transformation and develops a fresh spatial approach in ritual studies.

The chapters of this book are developed in two main parts. The first part includes chapter one, which formulates the ritual as a spatial practice, and chapter two, which offers a spatial reading of the evolution of Muharram rituals throughout Shi’i history. Through this alternative history, the idea of the ‘spatial manifestation’ of ritual is formulated. This idea is one of the theoretical components of ritual theory that is developed in this book. The second part predominantly focuses on ‘the spatial organization’ of Muharram processions, throughout chapters three, four and five. These chapters extensively investigate the social and spatial logic of Muharram processions before and after urban transformation, as well as the complex process of changing procession routes. The overarching aim of these chapters is to carefully examine the process of urban transformation through the prism of ritual. Muharram rituals are considered as part of an urban process by which the traditional Iranian cities transitioned into a new era. Although the second part of the book presents first-hand ethnographic and oral history materials, its main contribution is to show an alternative approach to urban studies. Each chapter contributes to developing the idea of this book that is to entwine urban and ritual studies, and the discussions in each chapter are structured so they can be read as independent texts. In other words, this book has a kind of fractal structure: while each segment is a component of a larger system, it can also be individually recognized in its own right.

Chapter one is a theoretical review of the framework of ritual studies and the paradigm shifts that have taken place in this field of research. This chapter does not offer a broad, general and extensive literature review in ritual theory; rather, it outlines the theoretical framework of this research, considering Muharram commemoration as a changing social-spatial collective performance. Although there is extensive discussion around the idea of the religious ritual as a changing social practice, the heart of this chapter is a section on the relationship between ritual, place and space. The discussion distinguishes ‘the place of ritual’ from ‘the ritual spatiality’. This idea is the theoretical foundation of chapter two, which explores the spatial genealogy of Muharram rituals.

Chapter two introduces the tragic battle of Karbala when Hussein ibn Ali, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammad, and his few companions were brutally massacred in the Muharram of 680. This historic tragedy unfolded after the political dispute over the legitimacy of the Umayyad Caliphate. The discussion then explains how this historic tragedy has since transcended into meta-history. From the Shi’i point of view this tragedy is not merely one of the historic events that established the Shi’i–Sunni division, but the Shi’i myth around which their creed and rituals are constituted. After this general introduction to the Karbala tragedy, chapter two extensively reviews the development of Muharram rituals throughout history. In parallel, the establishment of Shi’i religious buildings, such as husseinyeh and tekyeh, is also discussed. The main contribution of this chapter is to offer a spatial reading of the history of Shi’i rituals, dealing with the spatial evolution of rituals. It shifts the focus from what participants do during rituals or where they practise it, to how rituals are spatially manifested. The key point is the shift of attention from action to spatial manifestation. As I shall discuss, the rituals are either manifested in concentrated or dispersed forms (such as the service session and the procession) that produce fundamentally different social engagements. The spatial reading of Muharram ritual history shows that the evolution of a concentrated ritual into a dispersed one, or vice versa, is the process by which the new rituals were often invented. This chapter does not solely address Muharram rituals in Iran, but explores the development of rituals in its broad historical and geographical landscape. Nonetheless, the main aim is to investigate the broad historical background of rituals practised in Iran.

The second part of the book, throughout four chapters, specifically looks at Muharram processions in the city of Dezful in the southwest of Iran. It concentrates on the social and spatial logic of the processions and how they have changed during the twentieth century.

Chapter three focuses on the social logic of Muharram processions in their traditional format. This chapter begins with a discussion about traditional Iranian urban society that was constituted based on the Heydari and Nemati parts, described as social moieties by Perry (1999). Heydari-Nemati as a social organization was constituted based on the traditional ruling system in which each borough was ruled by an elite family, aka landlord families. The local elite families teamed up in two socio-political groups that competed for greater power in the city, therefore the city was governed by a polarized system. In this political landscape, the urban boroughs divided into two rival groups, Heydaris and Nematis. The discussions in this chapter review the historical background of the Heydari–Nemati division, and explains how this division is reflected in urban realities in general and Muharram processions in particular. This chapter also discusses the other features of urban society, articulating how local communities are socially constituted within each urban moiety. These discussions reveal that Muharram processions were the primary medium of practising and negotiating the social division, cohesion and solidarity by which local communities are constituted as urban society. The social investigation, through the lens of Muharram rituals, reveals that the traditional social struggle occurred among urban communities, not social classes. The social moieties of Heydari and Nemati predominated the logic of these urban negotiations. This investigation reveals