Drugs, Deviancy and Democracy in Iran: The Interaction of State and Civil Society 9780755611263, 9781848856394

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

An experience that changes us, that prevents us from always being the same, or from having the same kind of relationship with things and with others that we had before Michel Foucault (1991c) Working on Iran has been like a passionate and difficult marriage, which has deeply affected my life and voice as a writer. By the same token, being evicted from Iran seemed like a traumatizing divorce, against my wishes. But despite the disappointment I have retained an immense gratitude to all the people in Iran who made the place possess me, and this gratitude has encouraged me to continue and unfold the dilemmas, controversies and compromises of Iranian politics. I want to thank all the people who took me in, showed me their Iran and made my fieldwork possible, some of whom would probably prefer not to be mentioned – but I would specifically like to thank Dr. Hooman Narenjiha from the Darius Drug Research Centre, Dr. Bijan Nasirimanesh and the Persepolis Harm Reduction NGO, Maziar Bahari for fuelling my interest in Iran’s outcasts, and Afsar for her enormous hospitality. I am profoundly grateful to Dr. Ramin Jahanbegloo, who very early in the process encouraged me to undertake this study and has continuously challenged me to become a more reflexive analyst.

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This book developed as the result of a PhD in International Development Studies at Roskilde University, Denmark. I am grateful to the Danish Research Council for granting me the funds to do my research. I deeply thank my supervisor Professor Fiona Wilson for all her accurate, energizing comments, for believing in me, and making me believe I might somehow get there. Intense gratitude goes to my co-supervisor Professor Susan Wright, who shared my fate of being expelled and directed my anthropological gaze in a most fruitful way, and to my co-supervisor Lars Erslev Andersen for his critique, bound in analytical clarity, honesty and friendship. I am very grateful to my family for their encouragements and patience: my mother, Grith, my father, Vagn, and Kirsten for giving me the courage to undertake a project of this magnitude; and my sister Nynne for her never-failing friendship. She has been a crucial cornerstone throughout my life, and continues to be so, now joined by Simon and their kids. Among my friends I particularly wish to thank Flemming Flyvholm for his amazing ability to guide me back on track, whenever I lose my way; and Christian Fabiansen for making me laugh when I feel least inclined to do so. I am indebted to Daniella Kuzmanovic and Søren Hove for their constructive comments to a number of drafts, and to Søren for the months we shared in London, while I was a visiting researcher at the School of Oriental and African Studies, in the spring of 2006. I am grateful to all my friends in England, especially Jason Reeves and Akshay Davis, who put me up on my numerous visits. For stimulating input and inspiring conversations along the way my appreciation goes to Nancy Lindisfarne, Richard Tapper, Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad, Siamak Namazi, Bijan Khajehpour, Amir Ali Nourbakhsh, Steffen Jöhncke, Sune Segal, Birgitte Bruun, Lea Unni Joensen, Frida Hastrup, Katinka Fjeldsø Villemoes, Emil Madsen Brandt, and Kristian Morville. At Roskilde University, I thank all of my colleagues for their support, particularly Professor Christian Lund for our fruitful discussions and Inge Jensen for providing the best possible environment for PhD students. I thank the award-winning photographer Jeroen Oerlemans for letting me use his picture from the Persepolis Harm Reduction NGO in Tehran for the jacket image;

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Roya Moghaddas for translating enormous amounts of Persian articles; and Sylvana Kolaczkowska for editorial assistance. Last, but not least, I thank Allan Otte for his affection and relentless support in the last, long stretch of writing up, and for replacing my ‘divorce’ from Iran with a real, true and deeply engaging relationship. Despite these acknowledgements, whatever I present here is purely my own responsibility. A short part of chapter 5 has been published in my article ‘Tehran Methadonia’, in Halasa and Bahari (eds), Transit Tehran. Young Iran and Its Inspirations (Garnet Publishing, 2008). A shortened version of chapter 4 is published in Hooglund and Steenberg (eds), Navigating Iran’s Essence: Challenging Accepted Perceptions (Routledge, forthcoming). I thank the authors for letting me reproduce it here with their permission. Janne Bjerre Christensen Copenhagen

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NOTE ON TR ANSLITER ATION

Transliteration of Persian words follows a modified version of the one adopted by the International Journal of Middle East Studies. For simplicity, no diacritical marks are used, except for ayn (‘). Words commonly used in English, like Koran, Imam and Ramadan, are spelled according to their established English spellings. All Persian words are in italics, but names of persons are not. In Persian words, but not names, I transcribe alef as ā. The articles translated from Iranian newspapers are listed in a special section of the bibliography. These articles have all been obtained from the BBC Monitoring Iran archive, and I follow the BBC’s spelling of names.

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ABBREVIATIONS

DCHQ GO ICSRC IDU ILNA INCAS IRINN IRNA ISNA NA NGO POW STD UNDCP UNDP UNODC VIRI VIRIN

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Drug Control Headquarters Governmental organization Iranian Civil Society Resource Center Injecting drug user Iranian Labour News Agency Iranian National Centre for Addiction Studies Islamic Republic of Iran News Network Islamic Republic of Iran’s New Agency Iranian Student News Agency Narcotics Anonymous Non-governmental organization Prisoner of War Sexually transmitted diseases United Nations Drug Control Programme United Nations Development Programme United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran Vision of the Islamic Republic of Iran Network

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INTRODUCTION DRUGS, NGOS AND THE IR ANIAN STATE

Be careful! It’s not the Khatami era anymore. NGO manager, October 2005, Tehran

The end On a crisp, blue December morning in 2005, I stumbled out of a plane in Istanbul from Tehran. I was numb, still not grasping what had happened. After being interrogated, for five weeks I had moved from one government office to another, trying to negotiate the terms of my stay. But the police considered me a ‘risk’ to national security. Mr. R. at the Department of Alien Affairs refused to extend my visa and threatened me with a police escort, unless I left the country. ‘It is entirely up to you’, Mr. R. said, with a freezing, sardonic smile, ‘you can leave, yourself, or the police will come and get you’. So I left. And here I was, exhausted, doped by sorrow and disbelief, walking through the streets of Istanbul with a trail of energetic, flirtatious street sellers following my steps. I passed the university and reached the Soleymania mosque. At the entrance, black garments swung from a dejected-looking clotheshorse. I covered my head and went inside. Under the serene beauty of Soleymania’s arch, I knelt down, facing Mecca, with my forehead touching the carpet. I cried like a possessed pilgrim.

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I lay there till the December frost reached my bones through the carpet-covered floor. This was it, the end. As the swirling images of the last few days spun through my mind, my last ten years’ work on Iran suddenly seemed useless. For years, I had prepared for this fieldwork, worked on my Persian, expanded my contacts, travelled back and forth between Iran and Denmark. The seven weeks’ fieldwork I had been allowed to do was amazingly intense; I had obtained access to the very intersections between civil society actors and the state I so wanted to reveal and portray. Working with a drug treatment NGO in South Tehran, I had moved much closer to Iran’s marginalized drug users and learned more about the contested policies towards them than I had ever believed possible. But now, lying under the sheltering Soleymania dome, my disappointment was absolute. ‘Don’t get interrogated’, ‘don’t get people into trouble’, and ‘don’t get evicted’ – these are the basic rules of anthropological fieldwork. I had broken them all. The fieldwork had extended into a nightmare. ‘This is as bad as it can get’, I thought, trying to compose myself before boarding a plane to Copenhagen. But I was mistaken. The problems had only just begun. And the road to understanding the Iranian statesociety relations had to be travelled in radically different ways than I had first anticipated.

The point The purpose of this book is to analyse how the Iranian state is perceived, negotiated, and reproduced at its margins, thereby conceptualizing the changes in governance and social order instigated during the Khatami reform movement. The changing policies towards drug users and NGOs are the vantage points, the ‘margins of the state’ (Das and Poole 2004b), from which I explore how the Islamic Republic and its ‘governmentality’ have changed since 1997. By focusing on the treatment of drug users and the growing involvement of local NGOs in Iran’s civil society, I will analyse the ongoing political controversies, complexities and infighting related to deciding what kind of state the Islamic Republic of Iran should become. Both

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of these margins reflect and are formed as the result of contradictory state policies, revealing key issues and conflicts in defining the means of governance, the role of ‘the people’, and the ‘right’ Islamic state order. Defining a social, Islamic order has been the central concern for the regime ever since the revolution in 1979. As part of this process, continuous demarcations of political and social inclusions and exclusions have taken place, drawing and redrawing boundaries between what is deemed ‘normal’ in an Islamic state, and what is ‘deviant’ or ‘dangerous’. Having the power to distinguish between ‘normalcy’ and ‘deviancy’, to define ‘the people’ and the ‘proper citizen’ – these are key to defining the Islamic Republic. These demarcations determine which citizens have rights, and which do not. Ever since the revolution, competing state actors and rationalities have sought widely different answers to these questions. These boundary-drawing dynamics become particularly pertinent when analysing how the policies towards NGOs and drug users have developed during the last ten to fifteen years. Both NGOs and drug users tread a fine line between being acknowledged as legitimate and treated as a danger to national security. The issue of drug use represents a significant opportunity for the Iranian state to exhibit social and political control, and to further define the distinctions between good and bad citizens. In this way, Iran’s drug policies hold a mirror to the competing political ideas and ideals of the Islamic government, as different administrations struggle to reconcile competing conceptions of, and policies towards, ‘the people’. By exploring Iran’s drug policies, it is my intention to conceptualize the political and social changes in Iran, which arose in connection with the reform movement of the 1990s. Confronted with a world record in drug use – five per cent of the Iranian population use drugs, primarily opium, heroin, hash, crack, and ecstasy – after the revolution, Iran fiercely pursued a policy of supply reduction, incarcerating and executing thousands of drug dealers and users. However, since 1998, those drug users seeking treatment have been exempted from incarceration, and extensive rehabilitation facilities have been initiated. Although drug treatment is legal, state responses – both to drug

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users and the involvement of NGOs – remain deeply contradictory, revealing the complex paradoxes and political infighting characteristic of post-revolutionary Iran. This is not a book on drug use, as such. I will not probe into medical debates on how best to prevent or treat drug use, or evaluate the work done by treatment organizations. Neither is this a book about the agonies of drug use, as perceived by individuals. Instead, following the ‘New poverty studies’, as exemplified by Goode and Maskovsky (2001), I use the issues of drug use and civil society activism as a way to portray the state and changing state of affairs. These issues of drug use and NGOs are intertwined; empirically because it is through the NGOs that I have mainly approached the drug users; analytically because changing ideas about drug treatment and the growth in NGOs to a large extent reflect the same reformist tendencies from the late 1990s. However, they also occupy different positions vis-à-vis the state, and bring out different notions of margins and marginality. NGOs are epitomized – for better or worse – as an intrinsic part of a pluralized civil society, somehow ‘naturally’ bringing about democracy. By being ‘non-governmental’ they are institutionally placed on the edge of or outside the state (at least in theory). Drug users are marginalized as social and moral outcasts, everywhere in the world. What makes the Iranian case interesting is that the dangers of drug use and the dangers of democracy are portrayed similarly – as a threat to the revolutionary Islamic order. Likewise, the supporters of NGOs and drug treatment portray both as a way of creating a more inclusive, pluralistic and democratic society. NGOs and drug users point to different aspects of ‘the people’, and thereby democracy. NGOs point to the role of ‘the people’; to discussions about how the Iranian public is meant to participate publicly, presenting a more localized, pluralized participation. The issue of drug use and treatment of drug users point to the definition of the citizen and their entitlements to rights. I will describe the ways in which local NGOs came into being as part of the reform movement under President Khatami, how they have fought to claim and hold onto a space for democratic and pluralistic public participation, and the difficulties they have faced in

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doing so. I will outline how NGOs became involved in the treatment of drug users, and how the state faced up to the social problems and radically changed its drug policies, as increasing numbers of Iranians became drug users. Lastly, I will discuss the portrayal of drug use in the media, and in Iranian cinema, and how this public debate shapes ideas about Iranian ‘normalcy’. I trace these changes through a theoretical focus on social order and ‘governmentality’ and by pointing to the ways in which the margins between state and (civil) society are being negotiated, moved and stressed (Foucault 1991a; Das and Poole 2004b; Gupta 1995). My argument is that the blurred boundaries between drug users and ‘normal people’ are reflected in the indistinct, yet ideologically enforced divisions between state and civil society. Situated in the intersection between the ‘normal’, the ‘acceptable vulnerable’, and the ‘unacceptable vulnerable’, the NGOs involved in treatment of drug users transgress and transform the notions of normalcy promoted by the state. They introduce, I argue, a pluralism of normalcy, which expands previously upheld cultural and political ideals of the ‘proper’ Islamic citizen, the ‘Islamic man’ (Bayat 2007: 50). Although state authorities also question the treatment NGOs’ legitimacy, in effect their work adds to a more pluralistic vision of citizenship, challenging the state to become more inclusive, and reframing how to establish and maintain an Islamic social order. These localized solutions to drug addiction have conflicting, but de facto inclusive and democratizing effects. Inspired by Foucault’s notion of ‘governmentality’ and anthropological studies on the state, my aim is to analyse the state by focusing on the interaction and interdependence between state and society. State and society must not be reduced to binary oppositions; one of the main goals of this book is to show in exactly what ways they are entangled and differentiated. How is the state reproduced locally through societal actors, and how do NGOs and drug users inform, resist and affect state policies? How is the ‘idea’ of the state (cf. Abrams 2006 [1988]) produced in the ongoing social and political inclusions and exclusions taking place with regard to drug users and NGOs – in media debates, policymaking, and face-to-face encounters between NGO activists,

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drug users, and state officials? How do NGOs and drug users reflect the margins of state power, yet remain deeply involved in the state and its policies? As an anthropologist, who was forced to leave Iran, I too was in a sense marginalized by being at a political intersection at a particularly ill-chosen point in time. When my fieldwork was cut short, I had to change the ways I conducted my research. It has required me to write a more fragmented ‘bricolage’, reflecting the fact that I am facing the state from different perspectives. The material I use is less cohesive than I had originally envisioned, more fragmented. I draw on multiple sources and methodologies, covering fieldwork observations, qualitative interviews, policy documents, statistics, secondary sources and discursive readings of newspaper debates and films. But, importantly, these fragments also reflect that the ‘faces of the state’ I portray are multiple, contradictory and politically fragmented (Navaro-Yashin 2002). The political processes I witnessed were fraught with and fractured by dilemmas and controversies. The issue of drug use is framed by multiple actors and located in diversified policies. Although this multilayered strategy was adopted out of necessity, the ways in which my research unfolded helped me to see the incongruities of day-to-day politics. I have come to believe that these impressions, stemming from deeply unsettling experiences, come closer to portraying what it means to be a (marginal) social actor within the Islamic Republic of Iran. As Veena Das says in regard to writing on violence: ‘Unlike a sketch that may [ ... ] still contain the imagination of the whole, the fragment marks the impossibility of such an imagination. Instead, fragments allure to a particular way of inhabiting the world, say, in a gesture of mourning’ (2007: 5). Although I was only forced into a ‘professional’ exile, I concur with Edward Said’s definition of exile as not only ‘one of the saddest fates’ (1994: 35), but also as a metaphorical unsettlement, which can become useful analytically: ‘Exile for the intellectual in this metaphysical sense is restlessness, movement, constantly being unsettled, and unsettling others. You cannot go back to some earlier and perhaps

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more stable condition of being at home; and alas, you can never fully arrive’ (ibid. 39). Analytically, I do not intend to ‘fully arrive’ either at a solid, consolidated, singular ‘face’ of the Iranian state; I want to show ‘things not simply as they are, but as they have come to be that way’ (ibid. 45), and how the ‘circumstances of shaky instability’ (ibid. 44) are not just part of being in exile, but just as much a state of being there.

Conceptualizing reform The process of social and political change I will describe is not linear. During the last ten-to-fifteen years, Iran has become increasingly polarized in all fields – socially, culturally, financially and politically – between those supporting expansion of freedoms and democratization and those seeking to protect the authoritarian values of the 1979 revolution. The effects of this polarization become especially striking when we look at the NGOs and treatment of drug users, which illustrate specific dilemmas of the Islamic Republic’s legitimacy. On the one hand, the regime is caught up in its own revolutionary promises: sovereignty of the people is enshrined in the constitution, though it must defer to the will of the Supreme Leader. The revolutionary state was morally and politically founded on the promise of ‘social justice’ to the disinherited (mostazafin). Both of these promises can be and have been used to justify and facilitate public participation, the existence of social organizations, and an inclusive approach to ‘outcasts’, such as drug users. On the other hand, both NGOs and drug users constitute a danger to authoritarian state control and the moral values of Islam, as interpreted by the current government. The policies and effects of the Islamic state are bound up in painful political compromises and consensus-building; in fluctuations between restrictive and permissive measures; in political infighting, not only between the ‘reformist’ and ‘conservative’, or ‘hardliner’ factions (however imprecise these labels may be), but just as often between different, internally competing state organizations and rationalities, between (often deeply religious) professionals and

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(non-professional) revolutionary ideologists. Viewed from outside, the Iranian state appears as an ideological stronghold of politicized Islam, but it contains profoundly competing social and moral orders. At the heart of these debates one finds continuous conflicts over the range, role and definition of ‘Islamic’ (islamiyat) and ‘republic’ (jomhuriat) in the Islamic Republic of Iran (cf. Mir-Hosseini and Tapper 2006: 177). While being Islamic, the Iranian state is also – indeed, first and foremost – modern and urbanized, home to a youthful population of comparatively well-educated, socially, financially and politically polarized people – all of whom claim rights as citizens. In order to understand the political and social developments of contemporary Iran and the state’s remarkable ability to sustain itself in spite of these contradictions, we have to take these compromises and contradictions as a point of departure and retrace their trajectories, showing by what political and social means they have come into being, and how they continue to develop. Just as importantly, we must explore the consequences these policies have for social actors. Drug policies and NGOs’ involvement in treatment of drug users are largely ignored from a social and anthropological perspective, which is one good reason to undertake this study, but these policies also raise broader questions: What are the effects of the reform movement? What is ‘reform’? How do we portray and conceptualize political and social change? Quite an extensive literature on the reform movement already exists, either directly or indirectly contributing to the standing debate on the compatibility of Islam and democracy. The surprise election of President Khatami in 1997, his political project and the advent of the Dovom-e Khordād movement have been widely covered (Menashri 2001; Brumberg 2001; Adelkhah 1999; Ansari 2000; Bayat 2007; Buchta 2000; Moslem 2002; Gheissari and Nasr 2006; Middle East Report 1999).1 The social actors and movements leading to Khatami’s election in 1997 and to the further development of civil society have been usefully depicted by, for instance Hooglund (2002), Bayat (2007), Khosrokhavar (2000, 2002), Adelkhah (1999) and Wright (2001). Among the social actors, four groups in particular have been

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highlighted: women, the intellectuals, the media and the youth, shaping the reform movement in different veins. The issue of gender and the debates on Islamic feminism have been covered by numerous researchers, who point to three dominant strains of feminism within post-revolutionary Iran: the secular feminists, to whom gender equality is impossible within the confines of Islam; the ‘traditionalists’ who favour the Islamized gender differences (but insist that they do not amount to gender inequality); and the Islamic feminists who claim that gender equality is possible in the Islamic Republic, but it requires reinterpretations of Islam and family law (Mir-Hosseini 1993, 1996, 1999, 2002a, 2006; Keddie 2000, 2001; Moghadam 1993, 2002; Kian-Thiebaut 2002; Paidar 1995, 2001). In this respect, the viewpoints of (and literature on) the Islamic feminists join the attempts by some religious intellectuals to present dynamic interpretations of Islamic jurisprudence (figh-e puyā) as opposed to traditional interpretations (figh-e sonnati) (Mir-Hosseini 1999; Farhi 2001; Mir-Hosseini and Tapper 2006: 75). An expansive literature describes the ‘religious new thinkers’ (and to a lesser extent the secular intellectuals) and the role they have played in the reform movement, questioning the legitimacy of political Islam and the monopolized reading of Islam held by the regime (Schirazi 1998; Boroujerdi 1996; Mirsepassi 2000; Sadri and Sadri 1999; Jahanbegloo 2000; Mir-Hosseini 1999; Arjomand 2002; Postel 2006; Saghafi 2001; Kian-Thiébaut 1998). These debates also link up with the contested historical relationship between modernity and tradition in Iran (e.g. Jahanbegloo 2004b; Milani 2004; Shayegan 1992). With few exceptions, the writings on and by the religious intellectuals are framed as discussions of textual reinterpretations of the Koran and Shari’a. An important exception is the book by Mir-Hosseini and Tapper (2006) who situate the ideas of the (now defrocked) cleric Hasan Yusefi Eshkevari in his life story. MirHosseini and Tapper’s account also relates the debates on reformism among the religious intellectuals with the role played by the media and daring journalists (on the media see also Barraclough 2001; Khiabany and Sreberny 2001; Khiabany 2008; Shahidi 2006; Semati 2008).

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The efforts of youth and student organizations have been recounted by, for example, Khosravi (2003), Varzi (2006), Mashayekhi (2001), Adelkhah (1999), Bayat (2007), Halasa and Bahari (2008), and, in more sensationalist veins, Basmenji (2005), Alavi (2005), Yaghmaian (2002), and numerous news features and journalistic reports. Such depictions invariably focus on resistance and on young Iranians’ detachment from the Islamic regime (Adelkhah, Bayat and Halasa and Bahari are notable exceptions). This book is a supplement to this literature, rather than a radical deviation from it. However, most of these accounts approach ‘reform’ from within the debate on the compatibility of Islam and democracy. While I believe a study of NGOs and drug policies contributes to the debates on the democratization of Iran, I prefer to approach this debate from a different angle, theorizing the shifting relations between state and society, rather than attempting to measure up to a preconceived (normative, empirical or theoretical) vision of what democracy might entail. Instead, I look at the creation of political demarcations and the shifting keywords of governance; at the ways in which policies of inclusion and exclusion are legitimized; at how governmental and social actors use interpretations of Islam and democracy in their negotiations and policy decisions. Whereas much of the literature on the Islamic Republic covers the ideological formation of the state, parliamentary politics and infighting over the constitution (for example, Schirazi 1998; Bakhash 1990; Moslem 2002; Martin 2003), I take an anthropological approach to the study of the state and ‘the political’, paying more attention to the ways in which state–society relations have been refashioned as part of the reform movement (cf. Navaro-Yashin 2002). In this respect, I am inspired by the negotiations depicted by Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad in his study of Iranian cinema (2007) and by Arang Keshavarzian’s work on bazaar and state in Iran (2007). Keshavarzian focuses on the ways in which state–society relations are negotiated through networks and policies, skilfully showing how intended state policies towards the bazaar have had unintended, even opposite, effects. Similarly, unfolding the marginal positions occupied by drug users and NGOs offers a conceptualization of

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state–society transformation, which, by adding to the debate on Iran’s process of democratization, illustrates how policy changes are instigated, and how they are tied up with shifting social orders and means of governance. Neither NGOs nor drug addiction have been properly analysed from an anthropological perspective. NGOs are instinctively viewed as a democratic potential (for example, Namazi et al. 2000; Povey 2004), but few analyses go beyond that. Asef Bayat has prominently worked on social activism in Iran during the revolution and the reform movement and I draw on his insights extensively (1997a, 1997b, 2002, 2007), but the new, local NGOs are only mentioned in passing (Bayat 2007: 109).2 Apart from analyses of poverty and the ‘disinherited’ (mostazafin) (Bayat 1997a; Messkoub 2006; Abrahamian 1993; Hooglund 1980, 1982), processes of marginalization and citizenship rights have mainly been studied in relation to the (lack of) rights for women and ethnic and religious minorities, but they seldom extend to other ‘outcast’ categories (Kazemi 1996, 2000; Mir-Hosseini 1993; Afkhami and Friedl 1994; Keddie 2000; Kazemzadeh 2000). Depictions of prostitution and drug use have mainly been done in documentaries and popular, journalistic reports (Bahari 2002, 2004; Samii (numerous); Persson 2004; Mir-Hosseini and Longinotto 2001; Afzali 2003). The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), as well as Iranian doctors, psychologists and medical experts have published a number of reports with figures on drug use, reasons for drug use, profiles of drug users, paths into addiction, treatment methods, etc., but anthropological research on Iranian drug use is largely non-existent.3 Although the drug problem is mentioned by, for instance, Bayat (2007) and Varzi (2006) in relation to the youth, and although Rejali (1994) depicts drug use in prisons as part of his work on punishment, drug policies are seldom analysed as part of the political developments. One interesting exception is Rudi Matthee’s excellent analysis of drugs and stimulants from the Safavides to the Qajar dynasty (2005).4 I am inspired by the ways in which Matthee uses the history of stimulants as a lens to write the history of Iran, showing how policies on opium use are intertwined with religious debates and contemporary politics.

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Motivation My interest in the contested relations between state and civil society in Iran goes back to the mid-1990s. In 1998–99, I did fieldwork in Esfahan for my MA thesis on youth, marriage and the state. At that time, my concern with the Iranian state related to the family policies adopted after the revolution. But arriving in Iran less than a year after President Khatami’s unexpected election in May 1997, I observed how the social and political reform movement took shape. A plethora of previously taboo issues invaded the headlines of the new booming, loud-speaking, agenda-setting media. At the universities young men and women claimed a new public space by their overwhelming participation in discussion groups, poetry readings, sport organizations and ritual festivities. In the spring of 1998, the smell of jasmine and blooming fruit trees filled the campus, as the visions for a less authoritarian society made headway. The fact that I was able to conduct seven months’ fieldwork, interviewing young women and men about their difficulties in getting married and bearing witness to their hopes and agonies under the prevailing control, was itself a sign that Iran was heading in a much more pluralistic and permissive direction (Bjerre Christensen 2000). Compared to my first visit in November 1995, where several young men were interrogated simply for talking to us, as strangers in the streets, the transformation was intoxicating – and disturbing for those within the regime, who had previously set the pace. The aim of President Khatami’s Dovom-e Khordād movement was to address the dilemmas and ‘dissonant politics’ inherent in the Islamic Republic (Brumberg 2001), dilemmas relating to the dual sovereignty between the rule of the jurists and the constitution’s democratic provisions. President Khatami’s term in office did not solve these discrepancies. Rather, it further demonstrated the gap between the ‘rule of law’ and the ‘rule of Islam’ (Arjomand 2002: 726). The Iranian Spring of 1997 did not last, but despite the apparent constraints on the reform movement, it fuelled a persistent demand for political change and rights, which continues to exist – as became evident at the 2009 presidential election.5

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In 2001, 2003 and 2004, I returned to Iran and became increasingly interested in the development and growth of local NGOs; how they developed and found their way in the new political landscape, induced with democratic enthusiasm as well as politicized restraints. I was intrigued by the ways in which civil society activists attempted to create localized solutions to Iran’s mounting social problems, applying Western developmental buzzwords of ‘social capital’, ‘civil society’, and ‘democracy’ to a local, social, Islamic world. Like the new religious intellectuals and the Islamic feminists who emphasized the compatibility of Islam with human rights and democracy, NGOs were struggling to define their own path and a ‘third way’, embracing both. The research proposal I wrote in 2004 was inspired by the keywords of President Khatami’s reform movement – ‘Islamic democracy’, ‘civil society’, ‘dialogue’, ‘reform’ and ‘social and political change’ – words and ideas which found an empirical expression in the work of local NGOs. I specifically wanted to focus on NGOs treating drug users, because drug use was one of the formerly taboo topics which suddenly began to be widely covered in the 1990s, and to which the state’s policies abruptly changed in a more inclusive fashion. However, between the time I applied for funding and the beginning of my fieldwork, the political landscape of Iran was again drastically transformed by the unexpected election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad in June 2005. This would become a first indication of the much tighter crackdowns, which developed after his re-election in 2009.

The moment I began my fieldwork in Iran in October 2005, less than two months after President Ahmadinezhad took office. I witnessed how the dominant political mindset was changing. It soon became apparent that the direction of my research would have to be altered dramatically. Khatami’s notions of ‘Islamic democracy’, ‘dialogue among civilizations’, ‘civil society’, and ‘NGOs’, which I had set out to investigate, had turned into a fierce battleground for the new political elite’s showdown with the reformists. It became a combat zone for international

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confrontation, led mainly by the USA which wanted regime change via civil society. ‘Be careful! It’s not the Khatami era anymore’, one NGO manager, whom I had interviewed on previous visits, told me when I arrived. Khatami’s celebrated days of dialogue were over. ‘We don’t want dialogue with other countries’, the interrogating officers told me when I used Khatami’s slogan to argue why my research was relevant. On previous occasions when I had been questioned (though not interrogated) by the authorities, Khatami’s call for dialogue had been hard for them to turn down. This was no longer the case. ‘What ever you write will not make any difference – the West will attack us anyway. You can just as well go to another country and do your research! Why don’t you?’ The interrogation took place after I had been in Tehran for two weeks. When I requested a visa extension I was phoned up and asked to appear at the Department of Alien Affairs the next morning. For two hours I was questioned in Persian behind a locked door, my seven visits to and connections in Iran since 1995, my publications on Iran and my working career in Denmark all being scrutinized. I was asked to name all the people I had ever talked to in Iran, and I was repeatedly asked how I could prove to them that I was actually telling the truth.6 Following the interrogation, I had to report to the Department of Alien Affairs several times a week, where they kept my passport. I received one short visa extension, but after a total of only seven weeks in Tehran I was ordered to leave. Experiencing crises in getting access or being accused of spying is not new to anthropologists (Nordstrom and Robben 1995; Lee 1995: 31; Shryock 1997: 165f; Sluka 1995; Sivert Nielsen 1996). Especially in Iran, problems in obtaining visas and official permissions, and being under surveillance are commonly faced by both foreign and Iranian researchers, and a number of researchers and journalists have been evicted over the years (Suzuki 2004; Friedl and Hegland 2004; Loeffler 2004; Hegland 2004; Rouhani 2004; Mir-Hosseini 1999, 2002b). In a sense, following the ‘extended-case method’ and ‘situational analysis’ developed by the Manchester School (Gluckman 1958), investigating crises and conflicts has been a research strategy for anthropologists,

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because controversies reveal the key issues, interests and agencies at stake. But there is a distinction, of course, between facing challenges – like most anthropologists do – and being expelled. As Steffen Jöhncke, who was denied access during his fieldwork on drug policies in Denmark, says: ‘Controversy is not a good starting point for fieldwork, but it does hold data in itself’ (2007: 59). It is mainly in hindsight that I have come to appreciate the informative density involved in these negotiations of getting (and eventually being denied) a visa. The conflicts I had with state authorities did contain information that guided my work, and my expulsion from the country was, to borrow from Jöhncke, ‘a story of a predictable refusal, which speaks volumes’ about the moment in Iran’s political history and the interrelationships of which I was a part (ibid.). The days of interrogation and exhausting negotiations came to frame the field of my research fundamentally. The process raised two questions, which became pertinent, methodologically and analytically, one relating to the NGOs, the other to the issue of drug use. These questions were bound in an intriguing paradox: investigating NGOs and civil society had become more politicized than ever, yet I had no difficulties researching the extent of drug addiction and treatment of drug users. How could that be? I will return to the issue of drug use later, but the most immediate question related to the NGOs. Although they were, of course, already deeply politicized, in the course of a few months they turned strikingly more so. Who were these new people on the political scene, President Ahmadinezhad and the osulgarān (‘principalist’) faction, for whom civil society and democratization constituted such a risk? What kind of new social order and governance was in the process of making? And what does this politicization tell us, more generally, about how NGO and civil society actors face the (Iranian) state and are faced by it? As I will outline in chapters 2 and 3, the change that followed President Ahmadinezhad’s election did not take place overnight. The showdown with the reformists had been going on for a long time. After the conservatives’ forced comeback during the parliamentary election in February 2004, it was obvious that some very powerful formations within the regime were not willing to risk any more reformist

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experiments. Still, with President Ahmadinezhad’s entrance a loud, official discourse came to the fore, literally and metaphorically arresting the reform momentum by declaring its goal illegitimate, and having the political backing to do so. Reflecting on the Chinese People’s Movement in 1989, Pieke says: ‘In the course of the movement, a moral, discursive frame had been developed to single out the enemy’ (1995: 64). Likewise, by attempting to return to the ‘true’ revolutionary values, President Ahmadinezhad’s election introduced a new ‘moral discursive frame’ in Iranian politics, creating a new climate of uncertainty, singling out new enemies.

Rationality of surveillance Although I was distressed by the visa negotiations I went through, ironically, I ended up being located and caught in exactly the negotiations I had set out to investigate: researching the intersections of state and civil society, and the ways in which NGO activists negotiate room for their manoeuvring. The methodological challenges I had in obtaining a visa echoed the negotiations about aims, intentions and permissions which the NGO activists had with the authorities all the time. They constantly feared being interrogated and arrested, and were navigating through the political uncertainties by bringing in people – patrons – who could arbitrate their cases for them. This had always been the case for the NGOs, but as the old government administration was swept out of office in 2005 and replaced by officials with no interest in nurturing civil society, there was growing despair and selfcensorship among civil society activists. The political compass had changed; the coordinates were less than clear. The people with whom both the NGO activists and I negotiated – the different personifications of the state – had been replaced, arrested or promoted. ‘There will be a bit of a chess game involved in this for you’, one of the NGO managers told me in October 2005 when giving advice on how I should avoid being accused of ‘snooping around’, whilst locating the key governmental players and asking for their permissions. Although following his advice, it became obvious that I was in a chess game where the chess pieces were in an

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urgent process of shifting characteristics. The new political parameters evidently changed the relational status of people. It was not just the relations between NGOs and governmental organizations which were transformed. The discrepancies extended to and among the ministries and governmental bodies. These were the first indicators of a state at war with itself. As part of the visa negotiations, I connected with officials within governmental organizations like the Drug Control Headquarters and the Social Welfare Organization, who were influential enough to intervene on my behalf. They wrote what amounted to a small mountain of letters. Although armed with one recommendation after the other, proving that my research was ‘useful’ (mofid) for the governmental organizations I engaged with, each appearance at the Department of Alien Affairs seemed ‘like trudging to your own execution’, as I noted at the time. Obviously, these difficulties created ethical dilemmas vis-à-vis my informants. When approaching informants I told them that I was a watched suspect. Then they could decide whether they felt safe enough to speak to me and/or intervene in my visa negotiations. Their decisions, their distance or closeness, revealed how protected they felt themselves politically, but during those weeks it became apparent that some, who had been well-connected previously – governmental as well as non-governmental actors – were no longer. ‘We don’t know anyone anymore’, as one NGO activist put it. As Linda Green has noted, ‘fear thrives on ambiguities’ (1995: 105). The feeling of rapid, uncertain change on the Iranian political scene in 2005 was combined with the acute self-awareness, produced by fear of interrogations and surveillance. As Green says, ‘the “routinization of fear” undermines one’s confidence in interpreting the world’ (1995: 106). For me it created a self-scrutinizing sense of dislocation: where had I gone wrong? Who, among the people I had been forced to name, would now face further interrogations? On an analytical level, this uncertainty confirmed my experience of the state as bound up in personified, fragmented relations. It exemplified Akhil Gupta’s ethnographic observations, questioning where the state is (Gupta 1995). Queuing up along with dozens of humbled, sweating, ragged Afghan refugees who were seeking work permits in

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the intransigent Department of Alien Affairs, I was facing one aspect of the state – represented by some militantly arrogant officials – from where I tried to locate the ‘system’, the ‘rationale’ of it all in order to undo whatever damage I had done. But the rationality to be found was of a different kind: a rationality of surveillance, of self-censorship and discipline caused by fear; the rationality of a state eager to identify and deflect internal and external enemies. I attempted to unravel the entanglements, only to get further intertwined and unsettled in a ‘Kafka-esque’ sense of uncertainty. I could only begin to contemplate what kind of state I was trying to understand. In addition to alerting me to the political transitions at the time, this experience of the Iranian state directed my analytical gaze towards what Timothy Mitchell terms the ‘state effect’ (1999) – the piecemeal, embodied, disciplinary fashions in which the state appears to stand above and apart from society.

Researching drugs The second question sparked by my methodological difficulties relates to the issue of drug policies. It was a surprise to discover that working on the issue of drug use was far less constrained and politically sensitive than working on NGOs in general. I had no difficulties getting access to and conducting interviews with the major policymakers in the field of drug policy, such as the Drug Control Headquarters and the Ministry of Health. It also proved less problematic to engage with NGOs treating drug users than with the NGO research centres and NGOs working on women’s rights and human rights, most of which were later closed down. This unexpectedly easy access in a tense political atmosphere raised the other key question directing my research: why was drug use not a controversial topic?7 What happened in the 1990s to radically change the ways in which drug users were perceived by the government? How did this change in policy – from drug users as criminals to patients – come about? How were government strategies for treatment of drug users legitimized and institutionalized? Why, exactly, was treatment of drug users not a controversial topic, a site for moral panic in an Islamic

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state so morally defined, but rather a topic – contested of course, but still assessable and accessible – to which the government obviously attributed some sort of professional pride? As I will outline in chapters 4 and 5, the topic of drug use still meets with conflicting state responses, but my initial surprise guided my attention to a wider question: apart from the immediate crisis of four million drug users and the potential for social instability and an HIV/AIDS epidemic, what else is at stake for the Iranian state when confronting the problem of drugs? What other policies does the statesupported drug intervention usher in and legitimize? In this book, I will describe how two drug discourses come about and compete. One is a discourse of ‘securitization’ (Buzan et al. 1998), in which drugs are seen as a source of danger, social corruption and conspiracies and a threat to national security. The other is what I term a ‘normalization’ of drug users, in which treatment is portrayed as an Islamic duty, a humanitarian issue, a responsibility of the state, and where the provision of drug treatment is linked to Iran’s scientific progress and technological modernity. In chapter 4, I analyse the shift in drug policies from strict supply reduction to treatment. I argue that, although it would have been easy for the Islamic Republic to keep treating drug users as mere outcasts, the fact that many war veterans and other ‘sacred’ social categories of the revolution were becoming addicts, exposed the state’s responsibility to provide for the vulnerable and bring ‘social justice’ to the ‘downtrodden’ (mostazafin). By reframing treatment of drug use as an ‘Islamic duty’, drug users could slowly be included as citizens, entitled to treatment. In chapter 6, I focus on the role of the media, particularly Iranian cinema, in facilitating this ‘normalization’ of drug use. I analyse how Iranian filmmakers have begun to depict narcotics, not as the evil effect of Western conspiracies against Iranian national security, as was fashionable in the 1980s when ‘securitization’ was the dominant discourse, but rather as a domestic problem and consequence of Iran’s indigenous, social and political developments. Chapters 4 and 6 describe a historical progression in the perception and treatment of drug users, but chapter 4 also emphasizes that the discourse of ‘normalization’ has by no means replaced that of ‘securitization’.

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The perception of drug users as criminals continues to co-exist and compete with the more recent depiction as patients, revealing numerous internal political disagreements. In chapter 5, I describe how treatment of drug users takes place in practice – how the NGOs seek solutions which adapt international treatment practices to local, religious and cultural standards. Nongovernmental efforts to reintroduce the ‘deviants’ to a sense of ‘normalcy’ through drug rehabilitation challenge ideologically enforced boundaries between the acceptable and the unacceptable vulnerable. The NGOs pluralize and reinterpret the very idea of normalcy in the Islamic Republic, but their work simultaneously reveals how the tentacles of state control permeate civil society. During my seven weeks in Tehran I worked on two different levels. First, I sought to understand how the state policies toward drug users have developed. Second, I researched the ways in which local NGOs were treating drug users in practice. I spoke to representatives from UNODC, UNDP, the Drug Control Headquarters (DCHQ), the Ministry of Health, the Social Welfare Organization, the Iranian National Centre for Addiction Studies (INCAS, supported by the Ministry of Health), and the Darius Drug Research Centre (affiliated with the Social Welfare Organization). I inquired about the background, conception and implementation of these policies, about who had been in support or opposition of treatment and for what reasons, and identified differences and conflicts between governmental organizations, departments and officials. On this policy level it was a classic case of ‘studying up’ (Nader 1972 [1969]), which in some ways makes different requirements in terms of, for example, anonymity. I will keep sensitive statements anonymous, but some of these people I will name, because they were the key players and policymakers, and their statements primarily make sense because of their positions.8 I collected statistics, juridical statements, evaluation reports, a few articles published in English from the governmental institutions and, when I faced deportation, UNODC generously allowed me to photocopy all their written material on NGOs and drug demand reduction. This material includes information leaflets from the main NGOs in Tehran and the provinces, evaluations and NGO questionnaires conducted by

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UNODC, research reports on the situation of drug users, and summaries of UNODC’s conferences attended by NGOs. I also gathered material from the NGOs Kongres 60, Tavalod-e Dobāreh (Rebirth) and Anjoman-e Motādān-e Gomnān (Narcotics Anonymous), including books written by the founders of these organizations, describing their own experiences of addiction and their treatment methodologies. After leaving Iran, I supplemented these findings by analysing how the debate on drug use and the advent of drug treatment has been unfolding in Iranian newspapers and films. Apart from numerous articles by Bill Samii, who worked on drug issues for Radio Free Europe, my main newspaper data collection stems from the BBC Monitoring Iran archive, covering news reports, political speeches, Friday prayers and parliamentary decisions.9 Since January 1997 (when the archive was initiated) thousands of articles have cited the quantities of opium and heroin confiscated by law enforcers and the numbers of smugglers arrested or killed. These figures are published in Iranian newspapers on an almost daily basis. I could not go through all of these reports, but the sheer number of them revealed the intensity of the government’s focus on drugs as a security issue. A comparatively limited number of articles deal with drug treatment, discussing the social causes of and localized solutions to drug use. However, reading through these reports it is striking that, although by no means measuring up to the security-related coverage, from the late 1990s the issue of treatment gains ground, and the social responsibility of the state is promoted.10 Similarly, using primarily the BBC Monitoring Iran archive, I analysed how President Khatami used the keywords ‘non-governmental organizations’ and ‘civil society’, and how their meanings were altered after the 2005 election.11 I spent three weeks with the Persepolis Harm Reduction NGO, which offers methadone maintenance treatment to homeless drug users in Shoush Street, in South Tehran, where I followed one of the organization’s outreach teams as they handed out clean syringes and first aid. Most of the employees were former injecting drug users now on methadone. Apart from the daily interactions with the drug users, I followed the negotiations between the NGO and the state’s counterparts, like the Tehran municipality and the Ministry of Health.12 I also interviewed former drug users and employees at the drug treatment

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NGOs Narcotics Anonymous, Kongres 60 and Tavalod-e Dobāreh, and in a private rehabilitation clinic. Narcotics Anonymous, which has a congregation of around 150,000 people, and Tavalod-e Dobāreh are the two biggest NGOs involved in treatment of drug users, and, like Kongres 60, they have rehabilitation centres around the country. These NGOs willingly took me in and let me follow their work. The fact that I spoke Persian – not fluently, but enough to get by – made them more willing to engage with me, and they wanted their stories to be heard. ‘Tell the world how it really is!’ one of the homeless drug users exclaimed. I only toured around South Tehran during the day as part of the NGO team. I did not go there at night, nor did I interview homeless drug users on my own, and although plenty of drug dealing took place in the neighbourhood, I focused exclusively on the role played by the NGO in treatment. Both the employees of the Persepolis Harm Reduction NGO and the injecting drug users in the streets were very inclusive and protective towards me. Most of them were seasoned former criminals, who knew all the tricks, and as a small but telling gesture the employees always made sure that I wore my bag so a drive-by thief would not snatch it. Although I was certainly ‘exotic’ and foreign to their world, their lives on the rough margins of society meant that they had more flexible definitions of ‘proper conduct’ than most people, and they seemed less apt to fear or judge an outsider. An elderly injection drug user we met in the park several times turned to me one day, noticing that I was smoking a cigarette. ‘That is forbidden’, he said; ‘if the police see you they will give you a fine’. I nodded embarrassed, caught off guard, knowing that many find it ‘ugly’ (zesht) for women to smoke in public. He started laughing: ‘That was a joke! Of course you can smoke here!’

Reshaping ‘the field’ Guiding my research strategy is a more policy-oriented view of ‘the field’. In their work on the anthropology of policy, Cris Shore and Susan Wright stress the need for a ‘radical reconceptualization of “the field” [ ... ] as a social and political space articulated through relations of power and systems of governance’ (1997: 14; Wright 2003). Instead of studying

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communities bounded in time and space and exclusively focusing on face-to-face interactions, they suggest we should ‘study through’ policies. They focus on ‘the interactions (and disjunctions) between different sites or levels in policy processes’, and on ‘tracing ways in which power creates webs and relations between actors, institutions and discourses across time and space’ (1997: 14). In doing so, Shore and Wright add to the anthropological debate about the concept of ‘the field’, criticizing anthropologists for privileging the ‘trademark’ of fieldwork, the ‘foregrounding of face-to-face relations of community, while other, less localized relations disappear from view’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 5, 15).13 The direct contact I had with the Iranian NGOs was invaluable to my research, but a broader view of ‘the field’ proved equally essential for studying Iranian state policies and what Blom Hansen and Stepputat call ‘languages of stateness’ (2001: 9). This would also have been the case had I not been evicted from Iran. As Gupta and Ferguson say: We are not advocating the abandonment of the practice of fieldwork, but rather its reconstruction – decentring ‘the field’ as the one, privileged site of anthropological knowledge, then recovering it as one element in a multistranded methodology for the construction of what Donna Haraway (1988) has called ‘situated knowledges’ (1997: 37). My research is clearly located in the ethnographic encounters I had with Iranian NGOs, state officials and drug users, but it is ‘multistranded’ in the sense that I have broadened my methodology to trace and document the policy formation I observed in Tehran through policy papers, documents, newspaper debates and films, using these sources as ‘contested political spaces’ (Shore and Wright 1997: 15). It is also ‘multistranded’ in the sense that it is composed of experiences, investigations and impressions gathered over a period of ten years. My analytical understanding of Iran’s social issues, the activities and restraints of the NGOs and the moral universe of contemporary Iranian politics are fundamentally shaped by my previous research visits to Iran, comprising more than a year in total. Having this background meant that I

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could conduct a great deal of work in the seven weeks I had at my disposal in 2005. My previous visits gave me in-depth experience of the contradictory nature of Iranian politics and the early stages of the reform movement. They also exposed me to the worldviews and political opinions of the so-called ‘second generation’ of the Islamic Republic, to which President Ahmadinezhad belongs (that is, the people who were the young foot soldiers of the revolution in 1979 and veterans of the Iran– Iraq war in 1980–88). When I did my first fieldwork in Esfahan in 1998–99, I studied Persian at two universities. Whereas the students exposed the reformist sentiments of the republic’s ‘third generation’ (Khosravi 2003), most of my teachers and heads of departments were deeply religious and earnest supporters of the revolution. Many of them had fought in the war, which they perceived as a war against the West. They took me to religious ceremonies at Ramadan and Moharram, where I joined in, chest-beating my way through āshurā and tāsu’ā, and they brought me to the graves of their martyred friends.14 In 2005 I was close to only a few people in Tehran who had voted for President Ahmadinezhad, but from my time in Esfahan I knew the religious motivation that had guided the ‘second generation’ through the revolution and martyrdom of the war. Also, although containing 13 million people and a great deal of variation, Tehran is still unique; it is much more urbanized, less religious and less controlled than even the bigger cities in the provinces, like Esfahan. I have used my experiences from Esfahan as a way of balancing the comparatively ‘hip’, secularized, upper-middle-class impressions, which characterize Tehran. I am well aware that a research strategy which retrospectively makes use of earlier interviews raises challenging questions as to how and when to designate ‘the field’. Key to these concerns is the fact that the ‘field’ is an analytical construct, which has a history. It is due to my work conducted previously, in the late 1990s, that the shape of the field, the analytical questions relating to ‘reform’, arose, and it is this trajectory of reform I intend to portray. The information I obtained during my previous stays – based on participant observation as well as interviews with key political actors, journalists, editors, MPs, clerics, university students, teachers, NGO managers and

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intellectuals – provides more than just a ‘context’ for the work I was able to do in autumn 2005. These experiences and investigations are the ‘text’ itself, the fabric of chapters 2 and 3 in this book, which explore the origins of both the reform movement and the counter movement of President Ahmadinezhad and his supporters. In order to study the changing policies I have looked for the central metaphors and ‘keywords’ in the texts and debates, which legitimize and frame Iran’s policies on drugs and NGOs. Anthropologists and social scientists have long been fascinated with metaphors and the ways they shape our perceptions (Williams 1976; Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Douglas 1966; Turner 1974; Sontag 1991). Shore and Wright elaborate on this focus in order to analyse political change. By identifying ‘semantic shifts’ and clusters of meanings applied to keywords, Shore and Wright use these keywords as ‘ “fingerprints” for tracing more profound transformations in rationalities of governance’ (1997: 19). A close analysis of the ways in which meaning is mobilized around keywords points to strategies and internal conflicts – first within the reform movement, and later, within Ahmadinezhad’s administration. The use of keywords like ‘democracy’, ‘participation’, ‘expertise’, ‘civil society’, and ‘social justice’ reveals how a ‘space to be governed’ has been construed quite differently by the various political actors (ibid. 30). As Shore and Wright emphasize: ‘A key concern is: Who has “the power to define” dominant discourses work by setting up the terms of reference and by disallowing or marginalizing alternatives’ (ibid. 18). How do some formulations of problems and political claims become legitimate and ‘doable’, while others are marginalized? How do political ideas about the ‘space to be governed’ overlap, contrast, and compete?

Being complicit While I was still in Iran, several people tried to intervene on behalf of my visa, and two months after I had left the country, one of my contacts put through a new visa invitation via the Ministry of Health. I was in London at the time, and immediately packed my bags in order to fly back to Copenhagen to collect my visa from the Iranian

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embassy. However, the day before my intended flight, in February 2006, the Danish ‘cartoon crisis’ hit the world. The Danish embassy in Tehran was set on fire and the Iranian ambassador to Denmark pulled out. A few hours later, I received an email from the Ministry of Health informing me that my invitation had been withdrawn. For several months, the crisis emanating from the caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad published by the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, made any thoughts of returning to Iran absurd. The cartoons had had nothing to do with my eviction – apart from Mr. R.’s tricky comment that I had ‘a problem with the police’, the reason for my expulsion was never spelled out. However, the cartoons greatly reinforced the power of those who enthusiastically opposed freedom of speech and dialogues with the West. After the cartoon crisis had waned, I got back in touch with the Iranian embassy in Copenhagen. This was April 2006, and at that time my primary worry was whether the USA would carry out a military attack on Iran. The alarm bells were at their height in the spring and summer of 2006, bringing the threat of an attack frighteningly close in August. The final disruption, however, of my fieldwork plans came from another angle. In late April 2006, Ramin Jahanbegloo was arrested in Iran. A secular philosopher with a PhD from the Sorbonne and famous worldwide for his work on democracy, modernity and tolerance, Jahanbegloo was reportedly arrested on charges of espionage and relations with foreigners. Later, his alleged crimes were reframed to instigating a US-backed ‘velvet revolution’ in Iran. In addition to being a close friend, Ramin Jahanbegloo has played a key role in my work. Since we first met in 2003 he had strongly encouraged me to do a PhD on the NGOs and civil society. I had facilitated his visit as a guest lecturer in Denmark in 2003, and he had introduced me to a number of people on my 2003 and 2004 visits to Iran. In 2005, he instigated my visa approval. Throughout my stay, Ramin generously shared with me his tiny office at the Cultural Research Bureau (CRB) where he headed the Contemporary Research Department. During my interrogation, the officers specifically probed into our connection. But although Ramin clearly knew that working as a secular philosopher and outspoken intellectual in Iran was a risky endeavour, in 2005 he seemed too

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well-known and connected to get hurt. ‘It is different with Ramin; nobody dares to touch him’, a mutual acquaintance said. This, of course, was exactly why ‘they’ might want to do so. Several things became apparent when Ramin Jahanbegloo was arrested. It seemed possible that I had been deported due to our connection and that the authorities were building a case against him at the time, using me as ammunition. Soon after I left Iran in December 2005, Ramin and his family went to India for four months and he was arrested just after their return, so the time lapse of four months between the two incidents makes sense. It was chillingly clear to me that the information the authorities had obtained during my interrogation had contributed to the charges against him. This impression was confirmed, when I met Ramin in August 2007, a year after his release. He told me that during his four months of incarceration, he had indeed been interrogated about our connection. Obviously, my ability to return to Iran had been further reduced. Our close cooperation would make the likelihood of obtaining a visa very slim, and I worried increasingly about the safety of my other Iranian contacts. Even if I did manage to return, I knew that Ramin’s arrest had unleashed a new wave of fear. ‘Ramin’s arrest scared a lot of people’, as a friend later recounted. Jahanbegloo was only the first of several civil society activists to be arrested, many of whom I knew. In the spring of 2007, another series of arrests took place in Tehran, targeting scholars and grassroots activists with connections to the West. Two were heads of influential NGO resource centres in Tehran (yet again emphasizing that NGOs were an increasingly politicized issue) and one was the scholar Dr. Kian Tajbakhsh, with whom I had twice discussed my research topic. At this point I finally gave up any plans to return. Although there is no reason to overstate my influence on Ramin’s case, I could not help feeling complicit in his arrest, and the thought of what was happening to him in Evin Prison’s Ward 209 – and to all the other people I knew – was truly terrifying. Iran is notorious for torturing political prisoners. The arrests of reformist politicians, journalists, students and intellectuals have been continual and numerous. During my previous fieldwork the political surveillance had been a

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relentless methodological hurdle (Bjerre Christensen 2000). Of course, I knew there was a risk. Yet, these realities only became screamingly urgent and upsetting when happening to someone I knew, and when I witnessed it, not just intellectually, but emotionally. In an essay on ‘complicity’, George Marcus describes complicity as an ‘affinity’ between a fieldworker and an informant: ‘This affinity arises from their mutual curiosity and anxiety about their relationship to a “third” – [ ... ] the specific sites elsewhere that affect their interactions and make them complicit (in relation to the influence of that “third”) in creating the bond that makes their fieldwork relationship effective’ (1998: 122). Although touching upon ‘anxiety’, Marcus describes the sense of complicity as an ‘effective’ and useful process of ‘teaming up’ with our informants in order to affect a (defined, detected) third party. One might say that I experienced this kind of ‘complicity’ while I was still in Iran. Our mutual relations to an (uncertain) ‘third’ governmental party shaped my conversations with NGO activists, medical doctors, drug researchers and drug users. When I was forced to name people during my interrogation – the worst breach of anonymity and confidentiality – it altered my relations to friends and informants, but rather than creating distance and suspicion, it brought us closer together. Our destinies became intertwined; we shared similar concerns, trying to discover some sort of pattern in the changing political situation. They used my visa difficulties to voice their own concerns, knowing that I had become acutely aware of the risks they faced on a daily basis. However, the feeling of complicity evoked by the arrests of people I knew, after I had left Iran, brought an entirely different dimension of guilt and powerlessness, for which there seemed no redemption. The closeness I experienced with civil society activists, and the pain of seeing people I knew being jailed, contributed to my understanding of Iranian politics. However, the emotional nature of my involvement brought a risk of loss of balance. It seemed impossible, even immoral, not to judge, not to take sides. It is very difficult indeed to keep prompting a reflexive mind when you are so emotionally engaged, by implication arresting any sense of analytical distance (cf. Pieke

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1995: 78). But dealing with these engagements is both a moral imperative and a pivotal part of the analysis. As Gupta and Ferguson write, ‘the topics we study and the methods we employ are inextricably bound up with political practice’ (1997: 38). Sometimes this political practice is reflected in deeply disturbing, personal experiences, but this is exactly why they are a vital analytical starting point.

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CHAPTER 1 (DIS)LOCATING THE STATE: OR DER AND POWER

The idea of society is a powerful image. It is potent in its own right to control or to stir men to action. This image has form; it has external boundaries, margins, internal structure. Its outlines contain power to reward conformity and repulse attacks. There is energy in its margins and unstructured areas. Mary Douglas (1966: 114)

How to govern? The Iranian reform movement of the 1990s was exceptional because it raised the question: how to govern? The reformists attempted to change the rationalities of governance. Rather than conceptualizing the reform movement as simply a quest for freedom against an oppressive state, I believe these changing rationalities of governance are a better way of analysing the power negotiations taking place. The political fight, which emerged with the election of President Khatami in 1997, has been a continuous negotiation of the Islamic social order as well as the methods of power, the means of governance. In this chapter, I will outline a theoretical framework for conceptualizing this change of social order and ‘governmentality’ and how this can be used to analyse the Iranian state. My starting point is recent

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studies which investigate the ‘career of governmentality in the postcolonies’, as Inda terms it (2005b: 12), and which focus on negotiations of state–society relations (Das and Poole 2004b; Gupta 1995, 2001; Navaro-Yashin 2002). By dislocating the conceptual coherence of the state as an analytical object, and localizing the effects of state policies ethnographically in everyday practices, I focus on the interactions of state and civil society and how the ‘state effect’ appears in contemporary Iran (Mitchell 1999). I draw extensively on Foucault’s notions of power and his genealogical methods of understanding how a ‘space to be governed’ comes into being (Shore and Wright 1997: 30). I seek to outline how different notions and methods of power intersect in the Iranian ‘governmentality’ – sovereign, disciplinary and biopolitical power – and how the Iranian state is a distinctive response to the combination of these notions (Dean 2001: 53). By analysing how Foucault’s normalizing ‘dividing practices’ are implemented (and resisted) in Iran, I will show how they make certain ideas and ideals of the state appear. More specifically I look at how the state is made visible and powerful at its ‘margins’. Bringing in anthropological conceptions of liminality to emphasize the morality, legitimacy and control related to the state’s ‘margins’, I analyse the processes by which social order is produced, and how drug users and NGOs invoke and provoke the margins not just between state and civil society but just as importantly between normalcy and deviancy. This theoretical literature raises the questions: How are drug users classified, normalized, marginalized and criminalized by state policies, and what consequences do these policies have? How are social and political inclusion and exclusion negotiated locally, informed by an ambiguous ‘language of stateness’ (Blom Hansen and Stepputat 2001a: 5)? How do people navigate in a society where power is both disciplining and sovereign, where the state is both an object of fear and desire (ibid. 9; Nelson 2004)? How are drug users and NGOs enmeshed in, opposed to and involved in reproducing the state? What do these policies, and attempts to reinterpret and resist them, tell us about the Iranian state?

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Anthropology of the state Recently, there has been an increase in ethnographic inquiries into postcolonial state formations. These studies have probed into how states are imagined (Blom Hansen and Stepputat 2001b), how states are constructed in an ongoing dialogue with their ‘margins’ (Das and Poole 2004b), and how the boundaries between what is termed state and non-state are being blurred and stressed (Gupta 1995, 2001; Sharma and Gupta 2006a).15 These inquiries stress the necessity to theoretically deconstruct the state as a singular, coherent, naturalized entity and locus of power. As Abrams famously put it, ‘We have come to take the state for granted as an object of political practice and political analysis while remaining quite spectacularly unclear as to what the state is’ (2006 [1988]: 112). Abrams distinguishes the state as an ‘idea’ from the governmental institutions, which ‘can be studied effectively without postulating the reality of the state’ (ibid.). Rather than seeing the state as a structure, he concludes that ‘The state is at most a message of domination – an ideological artefact attributing unity, morality and independence to the disunited, amoral and dependent workings of the practice of government’ (ibid. 125). As Blom Hansen and Stepputat note, modern states are ‘not the source of power but the effect of a wider range of dispersed forms of disciplinary power that allow “the state” to appear as a structure that stands apart from, and above, society’ (2001a: 4). This is ‘the powerful, apparently metaphysical effect of practices’, which Timothy Mitchell terms the ‘state effect’ (1999: 89). The interesting question for Mitchell is how this imagined unity, morality and independence of the state is created. Following Abrams’ notion of the state as an ‘idea’ rather than an actual structure, and drawing on Foucault, Timothy Mitchell probes into how this effect is generated – the political process ‘through which the uncertain yet powerful distinction between state and society is produced’ (ibid. 77). This distinction does not demarcate two ‘discrete entities’, Mitchell emphasizes, but is ‘a line drawn internally, within the network of institutional mechanisms through which a social and political order is maintained’ (ibid.).

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Several scholars emphasize the need to scrutinize this powerful, binary opposition between the state and society. Whereas Blom Hansen and Stepputat aptly show how states are imagined and ‘languages of stateness’ are shaped in public discourses and daily social encounters (2001b), Das and Poole criticize them for largely neglecting what lies outside or at the margins of the state. Das and Poole therefore frame their anthropological study of states by evoking the state’s ‘margins’. They point to the ‘sort of practices that seem to undo the state at its territorial and conceptual margins’, but which, at the same time, ‘are a necessary entailment of the state’ (2004a: 4). As Das and Poole rightly emphasize, local worlds and the state do not stand as binary opposites. Even though they are locked in unequal relations, they are enmeshed in one another. Thus, on the one hand, law is seen as a sign of a distant but overwhelming power. On the other hand, it is also seen as close at hand – something to which local desires can be addressed (ibid. 22). Along the same lines, but from a more institutional perspective, Christian Lund highlights the role of semi-statal organizations, what he terms ‘twilight institutions’. They are characterized by taking on the ‘public authority’ of the state (2006: 675). In failed or fragile states, as Lund points out, the ‘state’ becomes ‘the quality of an institution being able to define and enforce collectively binding decisions on members of society’ (ibid. 676). These institutions both blur and enhance the range of the state. My aim is to investigate this state–society ‘enmeshment’ and ‘state effect’ ethnographically: How are ‘languages of stateness’ brought into play in reproducing and opposing the state locally, by local institutions and actors? What processes are involved in the constant demarcations between state and society, despite the fact that the ‘margins’, the ‘boundary of the state (or political system) never marks a real exterior’, as Timothy Mitchell says (1999: 83)?

Producing social order and normalcy In applying the notion, or metaphor, of ‘margins’ I am inspired in part by Das and Poole (2004b), and I employ ‘margins’ here on two levels.

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One is an institutional or organizational margin, related to the NGOs and the extent to which they operate on the margins of state permissiveness and control, at the same time opposing and enhancing the range of the state. Another margin, which both the NGOs and drug users inform and reflect, relates to the processes by which social and moral order is construed and politicized through discourses, practices and disciplinary measures. My focus on margins therefore owes as much to Foucault’s notion of ‘biopolitical’ power – aimed at categorizing, controlling, disciplining and optimizing the population through institutions (Foucault 1967, 1977, 1978, 1983, 1991a), to which I will return later – as it does to ‘classic’ anthropological symbolic analyses of marginality, liminality, morality, risk, purity, and danger (Douglas 1966, 1992; Turner 1974). Both perspectives are necessary at the same time. Too often the institutional perspective on state policies is employed single-handedly, but my argument is that it is crucial to combine this perspective with the processes of constructing social and moral order. This moral order is striking in Iran, because it is a religious state, bound to Islamic ideals and provisions – a repertoire constantly activated by both state and non-state actors – but a focus on order is relevant more generally too in order to understand the ‘language of stateness’, which serves to reinforce political legitimacy. As Shore and Wright say, ‘Looked at anthropologically, the relationship between policy and morality sheds interesting light on the art of government. Both policy and morality attempt to objectify and universalize ideas. Both are guided by broader sets of cultural ideas’ (1997: 10). The question, then, is which broader cultural ideas are generated in producing Iranian state policies, and how these change over time. To Mary Douglas, ‘margins’ are not perceived as institutional or juridical, but as cultural, political, and moral processes of delineating group boundaries and marking core values of the group. These processes exist in all societies. As she points out: ‘ “Purity” and “danger” are condensed arguments passionately flung against opponents in every dialogue that every community has about its own constitution’ (1992: 14). Assessing

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risk and danger, and attributing blame, is a politicized process, central to determining what type of society or regime is being constructed: Each distinctive kind of regime will invoke a distinctive set of active powers in the universe to do three things, one cognitive, to explain disasters, one political, to justify allegiances, one system-maintaining, to stabilize the distinctive workings of the regime (ibid. 60). As I will show, these demarcations of danger and risk are used to produce – to explain, justify, and stabilize – the moral social order in Iran, and they are negotiated in many ways. The danger of drug use and the threat to the social order, which drug users entail, are negotiated in the practice of treatment NGOs, in state policies and propaganda, and in public cultural narratives such as newspapers and films (Sharma and Gupta 2006b: 18). Likewise, the ‘danger of democracy’ and threat to ‘national security’, which civil society activists constitute to authoritarian state control, also draw limits to permissible and illegitimate kinds of public participation, all of which point to what society and what state are in the process of being made. ‘There is energy in [the society’s] margins and unstructured areas’, as Douglas points out (1966: 114), and these energies are always deeply moralized and politicized. Douglas emphasizes that ‘The argument is not about the reality of the dangers, but about how they are politicized’ (1992: 29). I do not seek to question the ‘realities’ of these dangers either. The interesting question is how and when this process of politicization occurs; how and when drug use and NGOs are termed dangerous. This politicization points to ‘the lines of political legitimacy’, as Douglas says (ibid. 88): ‘Risk, danger, and sin are used around the world to legitimate policy or discredit it, to protect individuals from predatory institutions or to protect institutions from predatory individuals’ (ibid. 26). Although Douglas is not concerned with the state, there are overlaps between the boundary-drawing processes she refers to and those of Das and Poole, when they discuss the ‘margins of the state’. Negotiations of state legitimacy take place as a constant invocation of the dangers at

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the margins, as Das and Poole emphasize. Referring to Weber’s notion of the state as a monopoly of violence, they note: legitimacy [ ... ] emerged as a function of this boundary-marking effect of state practices [ ... ] In this vision of political life, the state is imagined as an always-incomplete project that must constantly be spoken of – and imagined – through an invocation of the wilderness, lawlessness, and savagery that not only lies outside its jurisdiction but also threatens it from within (2004a: 7). This invocation of wilderness takes place relentlessly in regards to drugs and NGOs in Iran. It is one of the ways in which the state ‘idea’ and what Abrams calls a ‘message of domination’ are manifested (2006 [1988]: 125). But at the same time, the state cannot be reduced to a Weberian monopoly of violence, and in that respect Foucault’s notion of ‘governmentality’ is useful.

Governmentality and ‘dividing practices’ Whereas Mary Douglas outlined how concepts of religious defilements are used to form social relations and social order universally, Foucault portrayed the introduction of ‘dividing practices’ between deviancy and normalcy as an effect of modernity (1983: 208). Foucault outlined how power was historically transformed from the medieval, spectacular displays of violence and sovereignty to a modern, disciplining, hidden, yet even more effective ‘art of government’ taking place with the advent of institutions such as prisons, hospitals, schools, factories, and the military. Much work has been done on state formation, policies, and governance, which draw on Foucault, his notions of power and de-emphasis on the state. Foucault specifically criticized the ‘reductionist vision’ of the state, condensing it to a ‘certain number of functions’ (Foucault 1991a: 103). ‘But the state [ ... ] does not have this unity, this individuality, this rigorous functionality, nor, to speak frankly, this importance’, he emphasized. Instead, Foucault invents the concept ‘governmentality’ to analyse the ‘art’ and rationality of government, which from the

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sixteenth century turns to governing and ‘normalizing’ the population (ibid.) Whereas sovereignty ‘operates through spectacle and ritual, it prohibits forms of action, it seizes things, bodies, and ultimately life itself’ (Dean 2001: 49), ‘governmentality’ works as a productive, seducing power, aimed at the health and wellbeing of the population. ‘In contrast to sovereignty, government has as its purpose not the act of government itself, but the welfare of the population, the improvement of its condition, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health, etc.’, Foucault says (1991a: 100). It is the methods rather than the institutions of power, which draw Foucault’s attention, but at the same time these methods of power do have structural, institutional effects. Timothy Mitchell seeks to bridge the literature on the state, which uses Foucault’s productive notion of power, yet is somehow at odds with the fact that Foucault was largely uninterested in the state. Mitchell’s argument is that it is exactly through the disciplinary powers instigated by modern means of governance that the state comes to appear as an external ‘structure’. As Mitchell says, despite their localized and polyvalent nature, disciplinary powers are somehow consolidated into the territorially based, institutionally structured order of the modern state. Foucault does not dismiss the importance of this larger structure; he simply does not believe that the understanding of power should begin there (1999: 87). I am inspired here by Foucault’s method to study power, and thereby (following Mitchell) the ways in which the ‘state effect’ and the state’s ‘capacity to govern’ appear (Rejali 1994). In addition, I am inspired by Foucault’s genealogical approach to understand how problems emerge historically, how ‘normalcy’ and ‘deviancy’ are produced in institutions and discourses, and the (unintended) consequences these policies have. Foucault’s primary focus was not power as such, he said, but rather the constitution of the modern subject: how power inscribes itself

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on human bodies by disciplining them within a specific regime (Foucault 1967, 1977, 1983: 208). Although known for his analyses of institutions, neither was he concerned with the institutions themselves (Foucault 1983: 222). His focus was on the practices and discipline that took place within the institutions: ‘the target of analysis wasn’t “institutions”, “theories” or “ideologies” but practices – with the aim of grasping the conditions which make these acceptable at a given moment’ (Foucault 1991b: 75). Especially relevant here is Foucault’s emphasis on the ways in which these practices are made acceptable. By locating the genealogy of practices – how phenomena come into being and become ‘natural’ at a specific point in time – we can understand the moral and social orders they work to produce. How are things, practices, and policies made ‘doable’, legitimate or illegitimate? Although tediously repeated, what is still deeply relevant to any analysis of power and governance is the fact that Foucault conceptualizes power as a relational and productive capacity, bound to a web of social relations – instead of approaching power as belonging to an exterior, hegemonic, suppressing position (Foucault 1983: 217). Power ‘comes from everywhere’ (Foucault 1978: 93) and is inscribed on the subject, who reproduces it. ‘Power relations are rooted deep in the social nexus, not reconstituted “above” society as a supplementary structure whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of’ (Foucault 1983: 222). For Foucault, the prison was ‘a specific technique of power’ (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983: 143), a diagram for how modern societies are shaped by the normalizing and disciplining techniques of surveillance, epitomized by Bentham’s Panoptikon, which made ‘it possible for a single gaze to see everything constantly’ (Foucault 1977: 173). Foucault’s historical analyses of the prison, the mental hospital, and the clinic raised a thorough critique of the ‘benevolence’ of modernity. These normalizing practices served the purpose of optimizing the productivity of the individual, Foucault stressed, pointing to the injection of science, knowledge, and truth: Science and scientific experts contributed to the regulation, discipline, and intention of control.

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‘Government’ was linked to this productive notion of power by being concerned with conduct, rather than confrontation (Foucault 1983: 220f). [Government] did not only cover the legitimately constituted forms of political and economic subjectification, but also modes of action, more or less considered and calculated, which were destined to act upon the possibilities of action of other people. To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action of others’ (ibid. 221, my emphasis; cf. Gordon 1991: 5). Central to these ‘biopolitics’ are normalizing ‘dividing practices’ (Foucault 1983: 208), the ability to delimit and construe ‘normality’ from anomaly, insanity, criminality, homosexuality, and so on. As Dreyfus and Rabinow point out, ‘the normalizing practices of biopower define the normal in advance and then proceed to isolate and deal with anomalies given that definition’ (1983: 258). By defining anomaly – whether this is drug use, insanity, or homosexuality – solutions to these problems are created at the same time. This serves to shape ‘the social’, categorizing people and activities to whom ‘something’ needs to be done (Jöhncke, Svendsen and Whyte 2004: 389). This practice of creating social and political normalcy by marginalizing the alternatives is clearly relevant in an Iranian context.

Reading Foucault in Iran: what kind of state? There is a growing literature on Foucault’s uncritically excited encounters with the Iranian revolution during his journalistic visits in late 1978 (Afary and Anderson 2005; Scullion 1995). Foucault’s exhilaration with the Iranian revolution was partly rooted in his critique of Western modernity and hegemony, which he found resembled in the ‘political spirituality’ and ‘authenticity’ of the revolution’s ‘collective will’ (Afary and Anderson 2005: 2ff, 15, 35; Foucault 1988: 215). But by reading Foucault in an Iranian context, I am not inclined to pose another critique of his orientalism, gender bias, or ‘simplistic thirdworldism’ (Afary and Anderson 2005: 7). Neither can the

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Iranian revolution conform to his critique of modernity. Although phrased as an anti-Western ‘return to tradition’, both the revolution and the Islamic Republic established afterwards were and are truly modern endeavours (cf. Jahanbegloo 2004b). More interesting, and a less referred to aspect of Foucault’s Iranian experiences, is the fact that the power of the public, the ‘will to power’ he witnessed in the Iranian revolution, inspired him to inquiry into the ‘techniques of the self’ and notions of subjectification, as opposed to or supplementing the technologies of domination (Afary and Anderson 2005: 4, 35ff). By bringing Foucault back to Iran, the interesting questions become: what kinds of power rationalities emerge and take place, and, in effect, what kind of state and modernity have evolved in Iran (cf. Rejali 1994)? One of the anthropological apprehensions towards using Foucault in non-Western settings is that the historical development in the West from powers of sovereignty to the disciplining rationalities of modernity have only partly taken place in many non-Western states (Blom Hansen and Stepputat 2001a: 37). Large parts of the world are still primarily subjected to authoritarian or even totalitarian regimes. This is also the case in Iran. One might say that the Iranian state surveillance and enforced Islamic codes of conduct typify Bentham’s Panoptikon. The displays of Machiavellian authoritarianism and sovereignty are prevalent at the same time, as the Islamic Republic through its modern bureaucracy has established wide-ranging, dividing, and disciplining practices. However, before making this too much of a binary opposition, it is worth noticing that Foucault did not see these powers as exclusively replacing each other, and, therefore, neither need we: ‘in reality one has a triangle, sovereignty-discipline-government, which has as its primary target the population and as its essential mechanism the apparatuses of security’ (Foucault 1991a: 102). In fact, as Mitchell Dean emphasizes, all modern states contain sovereign as well as biopolitical powers. But the question is how each distinctive state is a response to the combination of them (2001: 53). I would argue that the Iranian state is indeed a very distinctive and highly contradictory combination of these powers. Part of the political fight in Iran relates to these conflicting rationalities and means of government

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and to the balancing act between authoritarian rule and the normalizing practices of institutions. As Darius Rejali argues in his Foucauldian analysis of torture and modernity in Iran, Perhaps one is well advised to concentrate less on the state and more on the kinds of rationality that state officials exercise and count on to govern Iranians. By distinguishing different rationalities that characterize individuals and institutions, one can understand more accurately the state’s capacity to govern (1994: 156). The Islamic governmentality put in place after the revolution has been shaping the subject largely by the capacity to prevent, ban, and punish, but also through education, family planning, health provisions, and charity. All of these rationalities have served to shape what would be deemed acceptable Islamic behaviour. The Iranian state is not a totalitarian state, if one is to follow Hannah Arendt’s definition (1966).16 It is authoritarian, suppressing; it governs by fear, as well as through discipline and biopower, but at the same time the issue of legitimacy began to matter more profoundly during the reform movement. As I said in the beginning, what made the Iranian reform movement of the 1990s interesting was that it raised the question of how to govern. The reformists brought new rationalities of governance to the fore. But the resulting governmentality is still deeply inconsistent. As Rejali reminds us, state institutions do apply quite opposite rationalities: ‘Security police and military officers can be at odds as to what policy best promotes order since what appears rational from a carceral perspective appears to be a lapse of discipline from a military perspective’ (1994: 157). As I will show in chapter 4, the drug policies that have been implemented since the revolution are conflicting. Drug dealers are still hanged publicly, as the most blatant example of state sovereignty exercised through violence. But at the same time, a ‘treatmentality’ (Jöhncke 2007) has been put in place, which serves to treat and normalize drug users, employing ‘dividing practices’ not just between drug users

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and ‘the normal’, but also between different kinds of (more or less acceptable) drug users. The questions are: What kind of state emerges out of these competing rationalities? How is the state’s legitimacy constantly put in question in the balancing act between sovereign displays of violence and more ‘permissive’ policies of political inclusion? And how do we approach it analytically?

Biopolitics as a research method In the History of Sexuality, Foucault points to the two poles from which ‘governmentality’ and the ‘power over life’ stem and should be conceptualized: one concerns what he calls the regulatory control over the population – the ‘apparatus’ (dispositif), or the ‘biopolitics of the population’ (Foucault 1978: 139, 1980: 194ff, 1991a; Rabinow 2003) – and the other the control over and disciplining of the individual body, the individual effects of governmentality. As Greg Feldman has noted, among anthropologists there has been a tendency to mainly focus on the second of Foucault’s techniques of governmentality, namely the disciplining effects on the individuals, because it more easily lends itself to participant-observation as a methodology (Feldman forthcoming). Here I seek to focus on both of these poles of biopower – the discipline of the individual and the regulation of the population, the ‘apparatus’. The notion of ‘apparatus’ arises from Foucault’s work on sexuality and the prisons. It is, as Rabinow notes, ‘a device whose purpose is control and management’ (2003: 50), and it is more heterogeneous and wide-reaching than the concept of discourse (Foucault 1980). Foucault defines ‘apparatus’ as ‘a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions’. The apparatus is the ‘system of relations that can be established between these elements’ (ibid. 194). Or, as Feldman summarizes the ‘apparatus’, it is ‘a device of population control and economic management composed of disparate elements that coalesce in particular historical conjunctures,

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usually moments identified as “crises” ’ (forthcoming: 1; cf. Rabinow 2003: 50). Feldman uses the notion of apparatus to analyse the ‘migration management’ conducted by the European Union, but it is just as relevant when looking at how different policy domains interweave in handling, controlling, and treating the Iranian drug ‘crisis’. Like the politics of health, which Foucault analysed, the politics of drugs can be seen as ‘a politics of strategically chosen targets’ (Rabinow 2003: 50). As Rabinow says, the apparatus ‘was an articulation of technologies aimed at first specifying (and to that extent creating) those targets and then controlling (distributing and regulating) them’ (ibid. 50f). Importantly, an ‘apparatus’ is a sort of ‘formation which has as its major function at a given historical moment that of responding to an urgent need. The apparatus thus has a dominant strategic function’ (Foucault 1980: 195). It is, however, a ‘strategy without a strategist’, as Rabinow points out (2003: 52). As I said, according to Feldman anthropologists mainly ‘focus on the disciplining of the individual while the other side of biopower, the regulation of the population, “has languished in disciplinary obscurity” ’ (forthcoming: 1f). To counter this tendency, Feldman proposes an ethnographic ‘non-local methodology’ in order to ‘illuminate how an apparatus historically emerges, logically functions, and fabricates what it presents as an objective target of regulation’. This does not call for ‘the ethnographer’s immersion in “place” per se, but rather in the apparatus’s enabling discourses’, Feldman says (ibid. 21). When looking at concrete policies on drug users and NGOs, the questions I pursue work on two levels. One focuses on how an ‘apparatus’ emerges around the Iranian drug crisis. How are NGOs and drug users created and controlled as targets of state intervention? Who has the power to define what is or is not a problem? And how is this ‘apparatus’ linked up with (or the product of) specific ideas about the ‘correct’ moral social order? The other level focuses on the localized individual effects of the Iranian governmentality. How are individuals disciplined, and how do they reproduce and resist the Iranian governmentality? How do

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the attempts to ‘structure the possible field of actions of others’ work (Foucault 1983: 221)? What are their practical implications? And how do people, who are marginalized by the operations of the state, resist, respond, and claim rights to become included as citizens? I have organized the following chapters around these two targets of power. In chapters 2 and 3 I show how a new kind of ‘governmentality’ was created around the reform movement and how the transition in the means of governance took place, first from the revolutionary ‘governmentality’ to Khatami’s presidency, and then to the Ahmadinezhad presidency. More specifically, in chapter 4 I analyse how an ‘apparatus’ has been created around the drug problem, centred on a ‘sense of crisis’, bringing together a number of policies, discourses, and governmental actors to handle and control drug users in specific ways, conducting what Foucault would call a strategic control over the population. In chapter 5, I then move on to Foucault’s second focus, the individual, showing the effects of and responses to the drug policies. Chapter 6, which focuses on the ways in which drug users have been depicted in the Iranian cinema, is meant to bring together both of these targets and techniques of power – partly by showing how the drug ‘apparatus’ is formed in official discourses, partly by emphasizing how individual actors, filmmakers, and drug users subvert and alter the discourses and institutions informing the drug crisis.

Criticizing Foucault The problem with Foucault-inspired analyses is that by focusing exclusively on the disciplining practices and matrices enforced by the art of government, although effectively stressing how these practices encompass and form the individual, it is less easy to discern how agency is mobilized within these regimes and how they manage to change. Foucault, of course, was the first to acknowledge this. As he said, he was not writing a ‘history of solutions’ but a ‘genealogy of problems’ (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983: 231). One of Darius Rejali’s points in his Foucauldian take on the Iranian state is exactly that very little seems to have changed in forms of punishment before and after

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the 1979 revolution. Rejali stresses the state’s durability, its firm grip on and basis in the ways individuals have come to be formed within the regime, and therefore how they keep reproducing it (1994: 158).17 But in that analysis, individuals as agents or counter-voices simply disappear. Another problem is that since Foucault’s project was a critique of modernity, there is a normative disapproval in his work and many de-constructivist discourse analyses inspired by him. All (governmental) practices are seen to be complicit in providing the rationalities and regimes of truth, disciplining the individual. However, from a moral and political perspective I still distinguish some of these policies and practices as having better and, dare I say, more human effects than others. I find that normalizing drug users through a rehabilitation programme is a better idea than incarcerating them as criminals. Yet, from a strictly Foucauldian perspective, this distinction is irrelevant, because both form part of disciplining the individual. Although I, too, want to focus on these Foucauldian rationalities in Iran, I also want to stress the ways in which individuals are not only affected by, but also affect policies. How do people react to, resist, and reinterpret enforced policies? That emphasis calls for a more experience-near notion of individual agency and resistance.

Resistance and reinterpretation It is easy, and absolutely necessary, to denounce the brutality of the Iranian state – not least after the crackdown following Ahmadinezhad’s re-election in 2009, to which I will return in the postscript (cf. Nelson 2005: 222). But in many popular depictions of contemporary Iran prior to the 2009 uprising – especially during Khatami’s reform movement – there was a tendency to over-emphasize and romanticize resistance (Alavi 2005; Varzi 2006; Yaghmanian 2002; Basmenji 2005; Khosravi 2003). Observers seem to assume that the disenchantment of the youth will somehow ‘naturally’ evolve into another revolution (also mirroring the wish for regime change voiced among Iranian exiles). Resistance is conceptualized as directed

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univocally against the state. All actions and agencies seem to be interpreted along the lines of a binary opposition to the (inevitably ‘bad’ and oppressive) state, bringing the normative and bounded statesociety-entities back in to the analysis. There is also a tendency to read political intentions where there might not be any (cf. ZeydabadiNejad 2007: 2; Singerman 1995: 7), and to miss the fact that the same social practices (e.g. veiling or seeking sexual experiences) may contain deeply conflicting messages about power (Moruzzi and Sadeghi 2006). My apprehension against focusing exclusively on resistance does not mean, however, that resistance and suppression do not exist in Iran and are not important. They surely do and are. Random incarcerations, public clampdowns, and executions due to dissident political opinions and so-called Islamic ‘misconduct’ generate fear, deliberate and vocal self-censoring, and resistance. The shifting ‘red lines’ one should not cross in Iran heavily inform the ways state-society relations are performed and negotiated (cf. Amirani 2004; Mir-Hosseini 2002b). They produce permeating self-censorship as well as acts of subversion, internalized discipline as well as intentional stretching of boundaries. But my point is, that it is not evident how censorship and resistance are formed and negotiated – this needs to be investigated ethnographically (Zeydabadi-Nejad 2007: 214; Khosravi 2003). Also, change does not only take place, when the ‘hidden transcript’ becomes public, in James Scott’s sense; when people ‘speak truth to power’ (1985, 1990). It happens, I will argue, in more subtle, but constant ways. Rather than romanticizing resistance, we should use these forms of everyday resistance as a ‘diagnostic of power’, as Abu-Lughod says (1990: 42). Foucault is not too specific in his assessment of resistance, but he famously stated, ‘Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power’ (1978: 95f). But as Abu-Lughod rightly proposes, in order to operationalize Foucault’s statement, we need to turn it around and point to the fact that ‘where there is resistance, there is power’ (1990: 42). These sites of struggles should not be approached with a predetermined end in mind – the overthrow of an

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oppressive regime – but as ways of acting, which presuppose and reveal specific methods of power (ibid. 47). How do civil society activists, for example, perceive and challenge the methods of power to which they are subjected? What do their actions tell us about the powers in play? As I will show in chapter 3, the pressure that NGOs and activists face, and the resistance they enact, is a revealing mirror to the political currents and governmentality of the Ahmadinezhad presidency. Sometimes resistance is voiced as plain refusal, as ‘strategic non-participation’ (Robins et al. 2008: 1072); sometimes ‘reinterpretation’ is a better way of understanding the bending and negotiation of political pressure that takes place, and the potential effects of local perseverance in the face of state policies. As Gupta notes in a case from India, ‘resistance took not the form of refusal, but largely of reinterpretation [ ... ] The conduct of government itself was changed as a result of this interaction, as these groups imbued the state with their own agendas, interpretations, and actions’ (2001: 92). As I will discuss in chapters 5 and 6, the counter-discourses I witnessed in drug treatment NGOs in 2005 and the counter-narratives voiced in contemporary films on drug use do entail reinterpretations of what an Iranian normality might look like. These forms of resistance are ‘diagnostics’ of power, pointing to the ‘dividing practices’ and social order in place – but they also change and challenge them. By being entitled to treatment, drug users do, de facto, shape what the ‘morally good person’ looks like, in constant interaction with the state discourses, which portray drug users as the ‘significant Other’ to proper Islamic conduct (Mead 1934). Das and Poole point to the ‘margins’ as ‘sites of disorder’ and resistance, where the state is ‘unable to impose its order’ (2004a: 6). Likewise, following Mary Douglas, when delimiting the ‘matter-outof-place’ core values of Iranian governance are revealed. However, I also want to emphasize that the margins – in this case marginalized drug users seeking treatment in non-governmental treatment clinics – are as much a site for shaping new notions of normalcy and order, as they are sites of disorder, implying danger to the moral constitution and control of the state.

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The ‘dividing practices’ and the shifting, often contradictory rationalities engaged in drug policies and state responses toward NGOs point to the piecemeal fashion in which the Iranian ‘state effect’ is created. This state effect is closely related to what Mitchell calls the ‘production of difference’, where the margins between state and nonstate, between normalcy and deviancy, between permissible and illegitimate, are constantly addressed and evoked. The following chapter will outline how the governmentality of the Islamic Republic came to take shape after the revolution in 1979, and how the reform movement of the 1990s was intrinsically linked to the inherent contradictions in the constitution. The principles of Islamic social justice and God-given sovereignty, and the role and definition of ‘the people’, are keywords around which these rationalities of governance have been formed and debated ever since.

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CHAPTER 2 THE IR ANIAN STATE AND THE R EFOR M MOVEMENT: DEBATING GOVER NANCE

People? What people? [...] People are good only to obey God’s commands, not to interfere in them. Ayatollah Khaz’ali, May 2000 Anything that is excessive begins to act against itself. Said Hajjarian, March 2001

Islamic democracy? The governmentality of the Islamic Republic took an interesting turn in the 1990s with the emerging reform movement, which was epitomized by the election of President Khatami in May 1997. Iran’s reform movement gave rise to a localized debate on ‘Islamic democracy’, which was quite remarkable given Iran’s notorious image as an authoritarian Islamic state. The Iranian reformists gave new empirical grounding to the academic debate on Islam and democracy; a debate which was often more normative than analytical.18 Iran’s reform movement enriched the debate on whether Islam was open to new interpretations by introducing a new set of keywords. The idea of what Islamic governance might mean was radically challenged, as was the role which ‘the people’ could and should

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play politically. Social actors – youth, women, intellectuals, the media and NGOs – came forward in new ways, raising a new sense of public participation and fuelling a negotiation of state-society relations, which fundamentally questioned the extension and role of the state. Social problems took on new significance and were addressed in ways that slowly changed state policies and introduced new ‘dividing practices’ between normalcy and deviancy, shaping notions of the ‘proper’ citizen. By refashioning and discussing the role and definition of ‘the people’ and the means by which ‘the people’ should be governed, the reform movement introduced a new idea of the Iranian, Islamic state. In this chapter I will outline how the reform movement introduced this new governmentality and, implicitly, a new social order. I will show how the means of governance proposed by Khatami were linked to the intrinsic contradictions in the Iranian constitution as well as to the complex legacy of Ayatollah Khomeini. This is not an exhaustive, chronological history of the 1979 revolution or the reform movement, but a catalogue of debates and dilemmas, which have influenced the constitution of the Iranian state and the subsequent reform movement. The debates, and the clusters of keywords I trace, relate broadly to two issues: first, the role of ‘the people’ (and thereby the means of power and governance meant to designate that role), and second, the definition of ‘the people’, i.e., the attempts to create a (new) social order by defining who can belong to the category of ‘the people’ and enjoy a citizen’s rights.19 During the reform movement the role of ‘the people’ became a heated topic. The debate related to the contradictions between individual rights and Islamic values in the constitution, the issue of sovereignty, and disagreements over the means of governance: how should governance be exercised – through violence, faith, and control, or tolerance, expertise and freedom? And how should people participate publicly – in religiously legitimized mass mobilizations or in pluralized, localized and democratic fashions? The reformist debates over the definition of ‘the people’ challenged the ways the revolution attempted to create an Islamic ‘social being’ (Adelkhah 1999), framing a social and moral order based on Islamically

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legitimized demarcations of citizens’ rights. I will describe how the revolutionary parallel state institutions, state expansion and debates about ‘social justice’ created specific Islamized ‘dividing practices’ between people who were protected by the state and those deemed enemies. This revolutionary notion of Islamic normalcy and the ‘moral public’ changed during the reform movement. The policies instigated by the reformists affected the appearance and possible manoeuvrings of NGOs and the ways in which drug users became ‘treatable’. I will argue that the long-term impact of the reform movement should be viewed with regard to this new social order, which was based in debates about the role and definition of the people and the means of governance.

Implementing Islamic theocracy The 1979 revolution was more Iranian than Islamic at the outset, embracing a variety of actors from the entire political spectrum. When overthrowing the last Pahlavi Shah, most Iranians united against increasing social divides, the rapid, ‘Westoxified’ modernization, and the political surveillance, lack of political freedom and brutality of the Pahlavi government (Fischer 1980; Keddie 1981). They did not set out to create an Islamic state. Yet, as Ayatollah Khomeini became the revolution’s self-proclaimed leader, Iran became an Islamic Republic based on velayat-e faqih, or the rule of the Islamic jurists. The result was a theocracy based on ‘religious guardianship’, as the preamble to the constitution emphasizes.20 The Cultural Revolution of 1980–83 enforced a new state identity. The history of Iran was reinvented and rewritten, emphasizing the Islamic rather than the monarchical aspects of the past. The Persian ‘Great Civilization’, which was emphasized by Mohammad Reza Shah’s invented 1971 celebration of ‘2500 years of Persian kingdom’ at Persepolis, was replaced by the greatness of the Islamic past, especially the transformation to shi’a Islam introduced by the Safavides in the sixteenth century (Ansari 2003: 169–75; Vaziri 1993). The new Islamic order included gender segregation, enforced veiling of women, new family laws, changes in school and university

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curricula, Islamized codes for proper public behaviour, and a ban on music and alcohol. These measures were supposed to discipline both the public and private spheres into conforming to so-called Islamic values. Very soon after the revolution, the most brutal and authoritarian features of the Shah’s regime – including torture, executions, surveillance, and mass arrests of the political opposition and other ‘deviant’ elements – returned to political life (Abrahamian 1999; Arjomand 1988: 154–74). A penal code based on shari’a laws also introduced Islamically-authorized punishments, such as public flogging (Rejali 1994; Khosravi 2003). The new enemies of the state were those who behaved in an ‘un-Islamic’ fashion, and they were dealt with harshly. Post-revolutionary Iran was marked by sovereign state violence and ideological control, and by the casualties of the revolution and eight years of war with Iraq, totalling some 250,000 lost lives. The public space was penetrated and permeated by ‘an ideology of martyrdom’, which was politicized by the revolutionary intellectuals (Khosrokhavar 2000: 6ff; Arjomand 1988: 153). Iran’s urban public space developed ‘a new geography of violence’, ensuring the ‘visual legacy of the revolution’ through murals, streets named after martyrs, and other visual endorsements of the war and martyrdom (Bayat 2007: 51; cf. Varzi 2006). By the late 1980s, the combined damages of the Iran–Iraq war, of the new regime’s authoritarianism, and of the economic sanctions imposed by the West had left Iran in a state of dire financial, social and political crisis. Millions of people had fled the country. Widespread disillusionment with the ideological enforcement of Islam gave rise to increasing domestic critique and a crisis of legitimacy, questioning what Iran had gained from ideological Islam after all. Quoting Habermas, a legitimation crisis occurs ‘when the “organizational principle” of a society does not permit the resolution of problems that are critical for its continued existence’ (Postel 2006: 6). And the organizing principle of Islam did not seem to resolve Iran’s critical problems. When Mohammad Khatami was elected president in 1997, he became the instrument and voice of this criticism and call for reform. President Khatami was just as much a result of the movement as he was its instigator, but his arrival marked the beginning of a new political era in post-revolutionary Iran.

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A crisis of legitimacy: the advent of Khatami’s reform front A wide range of social actors were involved in the 1997 Dovom-e Khordād reform movement. These included the ‘religious new thinkers’ (digar andishan-e dini), the student movement (primarily headed by the main student organization Daftar-e Tahkim-e Vahdat, or ‘the Office to Foster Unity’), various women’s organizations, and religious feminists. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the overwhelming presence of young people (2/3 of the population were under the age of 30) had slowly but steadily increased local demands for reform (Hooglund 2002). Reflecting on the events of that period, Said Hajjarian, the primary ideologist of the reform movement, later recounted: ‘Demands cannot be pushed back for long. The 2 Khordad event [ ... ] showed how these can come up like an explosion. The 2 Khordad event was a kind of national discontent that revealed its full proportions’ (Dowran-e Emruz 2001b). The reformists questioned the monopolist reading of Islam, which had guided the governing principles of state sovereignty since the revolution. They favoured a pluralist reading of Islam, which emphasized the rights of the people. They distanced themselves from faith and violence as the basis for legitimate government, and emphasized expertise and tolerance instead. As one of the key religious new thinkers, Mohammed Mujtahed Shabestari, emphasized: ‘The official reading of Islam is now undermined by a crisis of legitimacy for three reasons. This is a reading that advocates non-participation, theorizes violence, and lacks scientific validity’ (in Arjomand 2002: 725).21 Although completely underrated by the establishment, Mohammad Khatami emerged as presidential candidate at a pregnant moment in time. Part of the surprise election of Khatami could be boiled down to a question of image. Countering the stark, dark eyebrows and demanding presence of Ayatollah Khomeini towering from the plentiful murals of Iran’s cities, Mohammad Khatami sported Armani shades and engaged the public with a smiling, benign charisma. His background also lent credibility to his reform efforts: he was a cleric, who had done his revolutionary deeds and served as the Minister of

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Cultural and Islamic Guidance in 1982–86 and 1989–92, but he also held a degree in Western philosophy and resigned as minister in protest of the government’s restrictive and authoritarian policies (Adelkhah 1999). As president, Khatami presented a new set of keywords: ‘Dialogue among civilizations’, ‘Islamic democracy’, ‘civil society’, ‘reason’, ‘transparency’, ‘accountability’, ‘tolerance’, ‘participation’ and ‘pluralism’. He also emphasized the principle of ‘rule of law’ (hukumat-e qānun), as opposed to the ‘rule of Islam’ (hukumat-e eslāmi) (Jahanbegloo 2003: 128; Arjomand 2002: 726; Khatami 2000; VIRIN1 1997b; VIRIN2 1997). These keywords altered the political discourse, both domestically and internationally, fundamentally challenging the means of governance practised since the revolution. In contrast to Ayatollah Khomeini’s famous, uncompromising slogan ‘Neither East nor West, but Islam’, Khatami urged Iranians to follow a political ‘third path’ and combine Islam and democracy. He challenged Samuel Huntington’s notorious ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis by calling for ‘a dialogue among civilizations’, warning against isolation from the West (Khatami 2000: 60, 70). Khatami also opposed the rigid ‘contradiction between modernity and tradition’ (ibid. 76). In doing so, he brought new life to a century-long intellectual debate on the reconciliation of modernity with tradition in Iran, a debate which was fashioned and fuelled throughout the twentieth century by experiences of colonialism, Westernization and political Islam (Arjomand 2002; Jahanbegloo 2004b; Mirsepassi 2000; Boroujerdi 1996; Milani 2004; Shayegan 1992). In order to reform, Khatami argued, Iran needed to re-examine its own heritage and generate a ‘sophisticated scientific and philosophical understanding of the modern world’ (2000: 18). A number of social actors – feminists, journalists, clerics – pushed for this reformist ‘third way’, and the call was exemplified by Saeed Razavi-Faqih, the head of Iran’s main student organization, the Office to Foster Unity. In 2003 he told me: We want to have modernity at the same time as our culture and tradition. We have to mix them in the best way. It is very easy

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to forget our background and take the technology and all of the good things from Europe, but the main and most important job is to mix them and create something new, which is not against our tradition (Interview, January 2003, Tehran). Or, as a political analyst told me in 2001: ‘We have to do it in our own wishy-washy way. We have to be patient. Democracy takes time’ (Interview, May 2001, Tehran). By allowing himself to be criticized and by making criticism of power a central concern, President Khatami discursively opened up a new space for debate. Most appealing to the over 20 million people who voted for Khatami in 1997 was his direct call for freedom. Khatami described freedom of thought as ‘the highest emblem of being’, admitting that ‘for centuries’ it ‘has not been respected’ (2000: 87). In 2001 Khatami stated: One of the unquestionable conditions for the realization of democracy – religious or non-religious – is freedom, the freedom to make decisions and the freedom to criticize. [ ... ] We cannot ask our youth not to ask questions. We cannot prevent ideas from entering our society from other parts of the world. We cannot block them anymore. No matter how hard you try, the [radio and television] waves will reach the remotest areas and even inside homes. People are quite aware of this fact (VIRIN2 2001). Similarly, as the reformist ideologist Said Hajjarian said in 2001: People are very sensitive [ ... ] They breathe ideology, and they know what is going on. Even if all the newspapers were shut and the right [faction] had another eight television channels, it would have the opposite effect. Anything that is excessive begins to act against itself (Dowran-e Emruz 2001b). To the dismay of his more reform-eager critics, Khatami did not promote a radical break with velayat-e faqih. Instead, he emphasized that

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Iran had to reform in order to save the Islamic Republic (cf. Menashri 2001: 81). ‘Either we reform or risk explosion’, he said, referring to the millions of young Iranians for whom the revolutionary slogans and propaganda of the preceding 20 years were wearing thin (VIRIN1 1997b; VIRIN2 1997). He warned his colleagues in the government not to ignore the demands of the youth and spoke of the dangers of an emerging ‘duality of cultures’ between the ‘official culture, which is publicized’, and ‘the culture prevalent in society’. ‘We have created an Islamic system’, said the President. ‘If we fail under such system, we will, consequently, cause people to be pessimistic about the system’. Khatami’s political claim was that by properly implementing the existing constitution, reform would be possible. Iran did not have to abandon velayat-e faqih. ‘Within the framework of the recognized law, which is our constitution, these freedoms should be ensured’ (VIRIN2 2001). Some of the reformists’ keywords were truly innovative in an Iranian context, but many of Khatami’s political aims related to the complex legacy which Ayatollah Khomeini had left at his death in 1989. One could argue that Khatami made room for reform by reframing issues which had been contested ever since the revolution. A few important themes run like a current from the formation of the Islamic Republic to the reform movement 15 years later. These issues are structural – centring on the parallel institutional structures established by the constitution, and the expansion of state control. They are also ideological, and rooted in conflicting interpretations of key ‘revolutionary’ Islamic values. How are social justice and Islamic morality to be implemented? Should sovereignty belong to the people or to God? Who are ‘the people’? Should a revolutionary Islamic state be run by experienced experts, or by ‘true believers’? In order to understand the political intricacies of these questions, I will now turn to the 1979 constitution, exploring the ways in which the idea of the state, the means of governance, and role of ‘the people’ were outlined in the founding document of the Islamic Republic.

The Islamic Republic: a contradiction in terms? The first draft of the constitution, written straight after Khomeini’s victorious return to Iran in February 1979, did not establish velayat-e

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faqih. However, after fierce negotiations and manipulations, the second and final version of the constitution (completed in late 1979) did place Iran under the guardianship (velayat) of the Islamic jurist (faqih). Thereby Twelver Shi’ism was termed the official state religion, and Ayatollah Khomeini was granted the authority as rahbar, or Supreme Leader, God’s representative on earth until the return of the ‘hidden imam’ (Arjomand 1988: 151f).22 Both the political left and several clerics warned against granting a pivotal political role to the religious clergy. They worried about the limitations to freedom inscribed in the constitution, and the authoritarianism in Khomeini’s form of divine rule. Ayatollah Shirazi argued that ‘our domestic and foreign enemies will accuse us of dictatorship and hostility to the people’, and others warned of an emerging ‘despotism of the clergy’ (in Brumberg 2001: 106f).23 But the scene was set for the creation of an Islamic Republic, which, although allegedly representing a ‘return’ to the caliphate, was a truly modern invention. The Iranian constitution was based partly on shari’a law, partly on the separation of powers found in the French Fifth Republic (Abrahamian 1993: 33). The result was a complex and conflicting structure of appointed and elected councils – a ‘system of contending authorities’ as Brumberg calls it (2001: 5). The Supreme Leader is granted a superordinate role with the right to declare war and peace, to command the armed forces, to supervise the ‘general policies of the system’, and appoint and dismiss the heads of the main governing bodies.24 According to chapter 8, article 110 of the constitution, he also holds the right to dismiss the president. Beneath the Supreme Leader is a structure of appointed councils (the main ones being the Guardians’ Councils and the Expediency Council), which supervise, control and arbitrate the elected ones (the president, the majles [parliament], and local councils). The Guardians’ Council holds the right to veto bills approved by the parliament. The final draft of the constitution assigned Islamic tasks to all state organs and state authorities, but it also included a number of concepts entirely unknown to Islamic law: nation, republic, judiciary, parliament, elections, and sovereignty of the people (Schirazi 1998: 10, 18). The result was a constitution revealing a number of contradictions

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between Islamic legalist and non-Islamic secular elements, democratic and anti-democratic aspects. According to Schirazi, ‘the concept of velayat-e faqih reduces the idea of a republic to an absurdity’ (ibid. 19). Ever since the revolution, the legitimization and institutionalization of the Islamic Republic have continued to pose dilemmas.

Individual rights and Islamic values The relationship between individual rights and Islamic values has been one such dilemma. The constitution grants extensive individual rights, but says they must be in accordance with Islamic principles. The ‘Rights of the People’, to which chapter 3 of the constitution is dedicated, include the equality of all Iranians ‘whatever the ethnic group or tribe to which they belong’; a prohibition on persecuting individuals for their opinions and beliefs; freedom of expression; the freedom to form political parties, societies and associations; freedom of assembly; the right to privacy; the entitlement to social security; legal protection; and the prohibition of ‘any kind of torture’ (cf. ibid. 17). However, the aforementioned rights are all subordinated to the overriding principle stated in chapter 1, article 4, that ‘all civil, penal, financial, economic, administrative, cultural, military, political, and other laws and regulations must be based on Islamic criteria’ (cf. Bakhash 1990: 83). There is no ‘natural’ or unilateral interpretation of ‘Islamic criteria’; as Sami Zubaida wisely reminds us, ‘the codification of the shari’a becomes an eminently political matter’ (1993: xxiii). This ‘political matter’ gave rise to at least two interconnected discussions, which only became more prominent with the reform movement – first, a vigorous hermeneutic debate on how Islam was supposed to be interpreted to meet these rights; and second, a discussion of sovereignty and the role of the people. While Ayatollah Khomeini was alive, the most rigid interpretations of Islam prevailed and individual rights were largely neglected, but even at that time ‘deep disagreements surfaced within the leadership over the definition of Islam and the revolution and the implications of this for social and economic policy’ (Bakhash 1990: 293). President Khatami and the reformists’ view of the relationship between rights and Islamic values differed

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clearly from the relationship imagined by Khomeini, which continued to guide the conservatives and the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, in the 1990s. The reformists believed that Islam was open for interpretations granting individual rights an essential role. Iran did not have to abandon velayat-e faqih in order to reform, President Khatami said. The regime could simply start by implementing the rights and democratic features already mentioned in the constitution (local councils were for example included in the constitution, but only implemented after Khatami took office. The first local council election was held in February 1999 [Tajbakhsh 2000]). Khatami thereby attempted to use the existing constitution as a basis for developing new notions of governance, with the ultimate goal of increasing citizens’ rights and individual freedoms, as well as restoring legitimacy to the Islamic regime. Khatami stressed that putting the democratic aspects of the constitution to the fore – that is, allowing political parties, non-governmental organizations and a free press to operate – was the way to implement true Islamic values. In contrast to Ayatollah Khomeini, who had categorically excluded any reference to democracy in his description of the Islamic Republic of Iran (Arjomand 1988: 137), President Khatami insisted that creating an ‘Islamic democracy’ and ‘Islamic civil society’ would not put Islam at risk, but actually secure Iran’s ‘true Islamic identity’ (Khatami 2000: 17). In that regard Khatami made an effort to induce the notion of ‘rights’ with Islamic meaning, striking a blow to the characterization of democratic values as Western values (i.e., transplanted, secular, and potentially immoral), which had been touted by many of the ulema since the revolution. Implementing the rights of the people was not an act of concession to the West, Khatami said. The rights of citizens and human rights were ingrained in Islamic traditions: ‘Respect for human rights and compliance with their relevant norms and standards is not a posture adopted out of political expediency or conformity to others. Rather it is the natural consequence of our religious teachings and precepts’ (ibid. 18). Khatami stressed the need for new, dynamic interpretations of Islamic jurisprudence (figh-e puyā as opposed to figh-e sonnati, or

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traditional Islamic jurisprudence), along the same lines as religious new thinkers like Abdolkarim Soroush, Mohammad Mujtahed Shabestari and Mohsen Kadivar to whom he often referred. ‘It is the thinkers and men of learning who are pivotal in this movement’ (ibid. 18, 48).25 Khatami also repeatedly emphasized that reason and a critical approach are essential in a religious state. It is, Khatami asserted, a ‘misconception that, with the existence of religion, man does not require reason’ (ibid. 3). Being faithful, true believers was not enough. Governing Iran needed reason and expertise, he stressed. In that respect Khatami tapped into another discussion, which had been prevalent since the beginning of the revolution: How should a revolutionary state be governed – based on expertise, education and experience, or revolutionary credentials, faith and personal loyalty (Bakhash 1990: 65, 108, 230ff)? Like President Hashemi-Rafsanjani before him, President Khatami aimed at implementing the notion of expertise and creating a technocratic elite (Bayat 2007: 53; Interviews, April 2001, January 2003, Tehran).

The issue of sovereignty Responding to the crisis of legitimacy, Khatami wanted to restore the notion of public legitimacy, of sovereignty arising from the people themselves, rather than from God: ‘The government in such a society is the servant of the people and not their master, and in every eventuality, is accountable to the people whom God has entitled to determine their own destiny’, he said (2000: 17). We should accept that participation, in all areas, economic and political, is the right of the people. The government should prepare the ground for that participation, particularly in a country like ours, where for centuries it has been ruled by self-seeking governments and the people have not been able to be present on the scene, Khatami stressed (VIRIN2 2001). In addressing the notion of sovereignty, Khatami touched upon another sore spot and contradiction in the constitution, which had

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been debated since 1979. Did the Islamic Republic grant sovereignty to the people or was God-given supremacy to be exercised by the Supreme Leader, alone (Bakhash 1990: 79)? Ultimately, according to the principle of velayat-e faqih, ‘political power emanates from God alone and is transferred from God to the Islamic jurists. It therefore in no way depends upon the voice of the people for its legitimisation’, Schirazi says (1998: 14; cf. Arjomand 1988: 149). Chapter 5, article 56 of the constitution reads: ‘Absolute sovereignty over the world and man belongs to God’. However, in the very same article it is also added that ‘The people [i.e., not the jurists] are to exercise this divine right’ (cf. Schirazi 1998: 15). Chapter 1, article 6 also emphasizes that ‘the affairs of the country must be administered on the basis of public opinion expressed by the means of elections’. Just after the revolution, several high-ranking clerics, among them Grand Ayatollah Shariatmadari, argued for the necessity of sovereignty of the people (ibid. 48). On the whole, Ayatollah Khomeini endorsed the idea of God-given sovereignty, from which he himself clearly benefited, but he was also indecisive, and kept moving his support back and forth between the publicly elected majles, giving voice to the people, and the religiously appointed Guardians’ Council (Brumberg 2001: 123). Eventually, Ayatollah Khomeini ceased to vacillate, and his often-quoted January 1988 ruling clearly opposed the people’s sovereignty. Khomeini declared, as Bakhash notes, ‘virtually unrestricted state authority’ (1990: 252).26 After Khomeini’s death in 1989, the issue of sovereignty was still not solved. Khomeini was succeeded by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who, as Schirazi points out, was not granted the same sovereignty as his predecessor: [Representing] the spirit of the constitution was not transferred to his official successor but to the totality of influential members of the clergy who held various top positions in the government or who controlled life in the religious academies in Qom and elsewhere.

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At the same time, Schirazi continues, ‘it is clear that Khomeini’s death did not have the effect of restoring sovereignty to the people’ (1998: 79f; cf. Kazemi 1996: 133). At the heart of these debates were conflicts over the role ‘the people’ should play, but the revolution had also set up specific ‘dividing practices’ determining the definition of ‘the people’. Both were central in defining the core values and extension of the Islamic state.

Social justice and ‘the people’: mostazafin The revolutionary Islamic Republic created a new social, Islamic order, which defined the ‘proper’ Muslim citizenry and imposed controls to frame the moral public and ensure the public morals. This was done in a number of ways – by amending the family laws, assigning specific roles to women, castigating drug users, prostitutes and political opponents as enemies of Islam, and by criminalizing people belonging to specific faiths, most notably the Baha’is (Kazemi 1996; Mir-Hosseini 1993; Afkhami and Friedl 1994). The debates on social justice epitomized the dialectics and dilemmas of these identity politics. The revolution was fought in the name of the ‘disinherited’, the mostazafin, but who the ‘disinherited’ were, and how they were to be socially and economically re-enfranchised was in no way obvious. Who, for example, was to benefit from land nationalization, and at whose expense? These questions were left unanswered, as Bakhash concludes in his analysis of the struggle over the land reform in the 1980s (1990: 201ff, 215). The issue of social justice was far from simple. Although a large number of social protections were promised in the constitution (chapter 3, article 29; Abrahamian 1993: 35), the real issue in the 1980s was to balance both the role of Islam and the reach of state power, and to decide whether the public or private sector should control the economy. ‘Both sides appealed to Islamic law and tradition’, as Bakhash says (1990: 248). ‘The radicals had come to power believing that Islam would smooth the way for policies of distributive justice. [ ... ] But Islamic jurists showed that Islam was a sword that cut both ways’ (ibid. 215). Islam could be used both in defence of private property

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and as an argument for state-controlled financial distribution and an expansion of the public sector. ‘The injection of Islam into the debate on property and social justice therefore proved a highly complicating factor’ (ibid.) The result was a policy which transferred wealth, not so much from the rich to the poor, but from the private to the public sector (ibid. 290). The social and economic policies stemming from Ayatollah Khomeini’s notion of the disinherited were contradictory, at best. Although Khomeini emphasized that ‘the interests of the disinherited take priority over the interests of the dwellers of great houses and the wealthy’, (ibid. 253, 248), the keyword of the mostazafin also changed its meaning along the way. Khomeini’s revolutionary interpretation of the mostazafin referred to the angry poor, the ‘exploited’ people, the peasants, small farmers, workers and people deprived of land. However, as Abrahamian points out, after the revolution, mostazafin became a far more ‘subjective category’, including those perceived as ‘fighting oppression’ and, most importantly, those who supported the revolution. ‘After the revolution [Khomeini] gradually broadened the term to bring in the propertied middle class, which actively supported the new order’ (1993: 27; cf. Adelkhah 1999: 72). By the mid-1980s, Abrahamian says, The word mostazafin ceased to be an economic category depicting the deprived masses. Instead it became – like the term sans culotte in the French revolution – a political label for the new regime’s supporters and included wealthy bazaar merchants (ibid. 52). In the end, the way in which the social welfare system was set up benefited the pro-revolution bourgeoisie far more than it did the deprived. Defining an Islamic order, which classified ‘the people’, was particularly striking in the works of the Islamic charities (the bonyāds), which established social categories and social policies based primarily on who did or did not live up to the proper Islamic standards. Some disinherited were protected and included while other outcast ‘unIslamic’ categories became all the more marginalized. These Islamic foundations also shaped the extension of the state.

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Parallel state institutions and the bonyāds In the aftermath of the revolution, a plethora of parallel, semi-statal institutions emerged, expanding the state and entrenching the conflicting features of the Islamic Republic. These organizations were endorsed by Ayatollah Khomeini, but worked partly autonomously, outside the control of the parliament and president. The parallel institutions included, among others, the self-appointed komitehs and revolutionary courts, which engaged in enforcing the moral policing of Islamic values, often through random, violent attacks. The Revolutionary Guards Corps (Sepāh-e Pāsdārān-e Enghelāb-e Islāmi) were set up as a parallel institution to the state military in order to safeguard the revolutionary values (Bakhash 1990: 55–64; Ansari 2003: 213; Arjomand 1988: 165f). These revolutionary institutions were used by Ayatollah Khomeini to intervene in policies, and he also unconstitutionally appointed so-called ‘representatives of the imam’ to the main state institutions who, as Schirazi notes, decided on practically everything (1998: 73f). Another important feature of post-revolutionary Iran was the creation of the huge, semi-autonomous charitable foundations, or bonyāds, founded on the assets and land taken over from the monarchy. These bonyāds, especially Komiteh-e Emdād-e Emām Khomeini (the Imam Reza Foundation), Bonyād-e Mostazafān va Janbāzān (Foundation of the Oppressed and Self-Sacrificers) and Bonyād-e Shāhid (Foundation of Martyrs), have been essential in framing the social welfare policies. By pursuing the revolutionary slogans of ‘social justice’ to the mostazafin, they have directly contributed to the dominant ideology of the revolution (Maloney 2000; Saeidi 2004). The state subsidies and public service delivered through the bonyāds have catered to special interest groups and thereby they have also served as a means of social control, repression and indoctrination (Messkoub 2006: 246f, 251). The bonyāds were an invention. Religious charities (vaqf ) had existed in Iran and other Middle Eastern countries for centuries. Their work was based on religious endowments, led by religious leaders, and they enjoyed an independent, non-governmental and

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largely non-political status (Kazemi 1996: 142ff; Namazi et al. 2000). In contrast, most of the bonyāds were created as part of the ideological redesign of the Islamic state (Maloney 2000: 149; Saeidi 2004: 481). The bonyā ds reflect the ‘bifurcated nature of authority’ in postrevolutionary Iran (Maloney 2000: 150); they are outside the government’s domain of authority and exempted from taxation, yet they are supervised by the Supreme Leader and contribute to the state’s ideology. Not only do the bonyā ds engage in charitable distribution of assets, through trade and commerce they have turned into multinational corporations and private monopolies, constituting a major, independent economic power. Accounting for up to 25 per cent of Iran’s GDP, yet operating outside the government’s control, they have been a consistent stumbling block to any efforts at creating accountability and transparency (Maloney 2000; Saeidi 2004). In the late 1990s, the Imam Reza Foundation was believed to be the third largest financial organization in the country (Buchta 2000: 77). In 2000, Bonyā d-e Mostazafān va Janbāzān’s total welfare-related payments reached $100 million, equal to 15 per cent of the annual state budget on health, treatment and nutrition (Messkoub 2006: 249). In the late 1990s the three main bonyā ds all in all delivered $500 million annually to the deprived, reaching six million people (ibid. 251). The impact of the bonyāds on the formation of post-revolutionary Iranian society has been immense. Financially, culturally and educationally, the bonyāds have brought social mobility to many of the deprived, thereby contributing to and fundamentally shaping the creation of a new middle class (Kian-Thiebaut 1998). As in other clientele networks of patronage, the bonyāds have used these privileges ‘to allocate key positions to those who support the ruling regime’ (Saeidi 2004: 486). The bonyāds are also extremely active in cultural and social activities, like publications, the education system, art exhibitions, museums and films, contributing to ‘the sustained indoctrination of the hundreds of younger members of the intelligentsia into Islamic political ideology’ (ibid. 487; cf. Salehi Esfahani 2004: 22).

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Parallel state institutions like the bonyāds have pursued revolutionary ideals, enforced control, and ensured a new principle for the state’s ‘dividing practices’, demarcating the proper citizens and true constituency of the revolution. As Saeidi notes, these organizations produced ‘an ideological apparatus for the new regime when the revolutionary forces could not trust the old regime’s bureaucratic apparatus’ (2004: 486). They also duplicated state bureaucracy and contributed to severe state expansion. Under the Pahlavi regime, a strengthening of state authority had already been evident, but the sprawling network of regime-enforcing institutions created by the revolution ‘greatly accelerated this process’ (Bakhash 1990: 291).

‘The people’: pluralism and participation During the reform movement, both the role and the definition of ‘the people’ were reframed and expanded. The importance of the mostazafin was not questioned as such, but a more pluralist reading of the social category of ‘vulnerable’ people in need of state support began to take shape. In the reform period, previously excluded social categories – like the drug users – were gradually included among the ‘acceptable’ vulnerable. This inclusion was scarcely deliberate on the part of President Khatami; the creeping inclusion of outcast social categories was an effect of the persistent and increasing visibility of social problems, which inevitably challenged the revolutionary promises of caring for the poor. The religious new thinkers and secular philosophers brought the issue of pluralism forward philosophically – but just as importantly, pluralism became recognized as a social reality. As Arjomand points out with regard to an essay by Abdolkarim Soroush: ‘accepting religious and cultural pluralism necessitates the acceptance of “social pluralism” ’ (2002: 724). The pluralism of social voices, social problems and the problematization of the revolution’s ‘dividing practices’ became apparent. This was partly due to the escalating freedom of the press. By appointing Ata’ollah Mohajerani as Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance, President Khatami made room for a vocal, daring, agendasetting press. The media began to report far more intensively on issues

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like drug use, prostitution, domestic violence, and HIV/AIDS. These debates opened up a discussion of the state’s responsibility and they contributed to a changing perception and definition of society’s ‘vulnerable’ groups. President Khatami and the reform movement also envisaged a ‘people’ (mardom), linked to a renewed and more pluralistic notion of participation (mosharekat). It was hardly a coincidence that the major political party in the reform front was named the Participation Front, Jebheh-ye Mosharekat. Revolutionary Iran had been defined by a vision of ‘the people’ as a homogenous mass, gaining its meaning from the umma, the collective cohorts of Muslim believers. In contrast the reformists referred to ‘the people’ using the secular word, mardom, also prominent in the word for democracy, mardom-salari. Throughout the revolution and the Iran–Iraq war, people’s participation had been based on mass mobilization. But the reconstruction period after the war paved the way for more localized, de-ideologized and pluralist meanings of whom the people were and how they were to participate publicly (Khosrokhavar 2000; Adelkhah 1999: 93; Interviews, January 2003, Tehran). The increasing participation of diverse social actors like women’s organizations, youth organizations, NGOs, the press and intellectuals complicated and challenged the notion of ‘the people’. To the key ideologists of the reform movement ‘the people’ ‘should not be taken as a homogeneous umma. Rather, the plurality of their views, orientations and life styles must be recognized’ (Bayat 2007: 95). The reform movement’s ‘localization of politics’ and ‘healthy diversification of social activities [ ... ] is basically the death of the revolutionary society’, Bijan Khajehpour, the head of the financial Atieh Bahar Consultants told me in January 2003: The real achievement of Khatami was the opening of the social space and letting the society move beyond the mass mobilization society. The problem is that most of our politicians don’t appreciate civil society. They don’t appreciate diversity. They still see everything as this mass society who comes to Friday prayers and chants the same slogans and has the same

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interests. But it’s not the case [anymore] (Interview, January 2003, Tehran). A year later, commenting on the continued political clashes over pluralism and participation, Khajehpour said: The issue for a number of conservatives is control. It’s not that they don’t want a pluralistic picture to be present in society; they want to feel that it’s pluralistic [as long as] they can control it within the Islamic and ideological limits they have (Interview, April 2004, Tehran). President Khatami’s call for pluralism, civil society, and democratic participation met with heavy opposition among the more conservative forces. Numerous attacks were orchestrated on the intellectuals’ pluralist readings of religion and emphasis on people’s rights. As Ayatollah Khaz’ali from the Guardians’ Council noted in 1999: ‘Nothing is dirtier than [the idea of] a pluralist reading of religion’ (in Bayat 2007: 113). To Khaz’ali, ‘the people’ still had to be subordinated to the will of God, as administered by the Supreme Leader and the Guardians’ Council. In May 2000 he said, ‘People? What people? [ ... ] People are good only to obey God’s commands, not to interfere in them’ (in ibid. 115). Other conservatives were more inclined to welcome people’s political participation, but unlike the reformists who called for democracy, to them the people’s primary obligation was still to participate in supporting the revolution. As Asef Bayat explains, Unlike hardline theocrats, pragmatist theocrats (the supreme leader, the Assembly of Experts, the daily Risālat) insisted on people’s support. Yet people mattered not as sovereign beings, but primarily as defenders of the Islamic state; not as rightful citizens, but as ‘participant subjects’. In sum, ‘religious democracy’ meant the obligation of people to ‘participate’ in supporting the religious state (ibid. 126).

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Women, youth and changing notions of authority One of the many paradoxes of post-revolutionary Iran is that the enforced Islamization has led to an increasing de facto secularization. Reformist pluralism and participation in public and political arenas questioned the ideological ‘dot Islamism’ which the Islamic Republic had been endowed with (Jahanbegloo 2003: 126). The revolution caused, as Bakhash points out, ‘the extension of the tentacles of the state into virtually every sphere of public and even private life’. It had the effect of dictating and legitimizing ‘standards of public morality’, insisting on ‘ideological conformity’, and instigating a widespread network of political surveillance (1990: 290; Rejali 1994: 154). But with the reform movement a lot of young people turned against the state and engaged in varying degrees of resistance against the social control enforced by the basijs and Revolutionary Guards. Young girls pushed the limits of ‘proper’ Islamic covering, raising debates on so-called ‘bad-hejab’ (Mir-Hosseini 2006). They insisted on attending football games and forced their way into stadiums (from where they were banned). Young girls and boys got together in cars while driving aimlessly around, engaged in premarital sexual relations, and went to underground parties, where alcohol, drugs and rock music abounded. More benignly, young people would stroll through the secular sanctuaries of the urban parks. Despite regular harassment and questioning from local komiteh or basij members as to the legality of their activities, the mere, overwhelming presence of these young people tested and negotiated the boundaries of proper, public Islamic conduct and the extent of state control (Bjerre Christensen 2000; Moruzzi and Sadeghi 2006). To say that the resistance of these typically middle- and upper-class young people epitomized the reform movement, as some observers would want us to believe, would be a gross distortion, but they manifested a visible and quite widespread reaction to the Islamization of the society. Rather than a denial of Islam itself, the behaviour of these young people, the ‘politics of presence’ they displayed, represented a critique of the enforced role Islam had come to play. As Bayat points

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out: ‘the post-Islamist polity called for ‘secularization’ (institutional separation of religion and state), but not ‘secularism’, which meant diminishing the significance of religion in society’ (2007: 95). PostIslamism was marked by the ‘end of ideology’, a de-emphasis on the large, overriding ideological role and official reading of Islam, which had been prevalent politically as well as culturally (ibid. 11; Bjerre Christensen 2003b).27 The crisis of legitimacy voiced by post-Islamist youth re-conceptualized authority. It was evident in the ways young people opposed state policies, but even more so within the families, where the increasingly well-educated young women – 60 per cent of Iran’s university students are female – voiced new expectations. In their relations with the opposite sex, young women raised further demands, for instance, in their marriage criteria, challenging both their suitors and future parents-inlaw (Bjerre Christensen 2000). These shifting gender and generational relations were an effect of a growing modernized individualization – influenced by urbanization, literacy, education and financial reconstruction – which affected relations to state authorities (Bayat 2007: 97; Adelkhah 1999; Mir-Hosseini 2006). Although young people were still believers, they disputed the unquestioned authority of the local clerics. Recognizing this shift in religious authority and public conduct, in 1999 a young Esfahani cleric told me: In South Esfahan you might have noticed the way in which young women dress or put on make-up. If I were to visit those neighbourhoods, I would be the odd one because of the way I dress. With a smile he pointed at his turban and cloak: I am not supposed to be the odd one! (Interview, January 1999, Hozeh-ye Elmieh, Esfahan). In 1998–99, a new fashion among young women became prevalent for a while. Displacing the usual black maghna’ehs28 and chadors, young women who supported the reform movement began to wear maghna’ehs

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in powerful green, lighting up the campuses and the streets, and raising a flag of another kind of Muslim participation. This was not the colour of mourning prescribed by an ideology of martyrdom, but Islam’s green mantle, displayed proudly by a wave of young women as they announced their emergence onto the social and political scene. The young women, and the growing social activism, showed that public participation could no longer be confined to religious rituals of mourning, mass demonstrations against the Shah or Saddam, or shouting the same slogans at Friday prayers. Participation had become pluralized, localized, individualized, less authorized and a great deal more secularized. Iran was witnessing what Jahanbegloo described as ‘the emergence of an ethic of individualism that is displacing the ethic of obedience to political or religious authority’ (2003: 128).

Violent confrontations When the reform movement waned so did the colours. When I returned just before President Khatami’s re-election in 2001, the eye-catching deep-green headscarf fashion had been displaced by a more faded, dusty green. Some of the political opposition had recently been arrested. The students I knew, who had left the university since my last visit, said that although they eagerly wanted to engage in politics it was far too dangerous. Being politically involved in the student organizations had been feasible, but outside the universities the political sphere was too risky. There was a growing frustration with the pace of reforms. But by 2001 expectations had also increased. As a political analyst emphasized at the time: If anybody had said four years ago that you would be able to put your scarf like that, and that boys and girls would be able to meet in the parks more freely, nobody would have believed them. But now people take that for granted. They’ve lived through the changes. They want more (Interview, April 2001, Tehran). Khatami was nonetheless re-elected with an overwhelming majority (77 per cent of the vote), and despite the setbacks the revolutionary

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monopoly on the public opinion had given way to pluralism, professionalism and rising awareness. Newspapers were continually shut down, but kept appearing in new forms. This duality was well expressed by Ferehsteh Ghazi, then a journalist at Hambastegi and Mellat: At Hambastegi we censor maybe eight out of ten news items. Today banning newspapers and publications is perceived as an everyday occurrence. We feel constantly less safe conducting our work and fear losing the right to continue. But that is the high price we must pay for viewing the situation critically. Although only 22 years old at the time, Ghazi had already worked for six newspapers which had been closed. Yet she was still remarkable defiant: ‘We all have to contribute to improve the situation in Iran. My way of doing so is by writing. Personally I have no reason to lose hope’ (Interview, May 2001, Tehran).29 It was increasingly obvious that Khatami’s opponents were violently opposed to his agenda and would do almost anything to prevent it from taking place. Khatami was not, at any point, able to protect those who supported his elections. When four intellectuals were killed in late 1998 by elements within the intelligence ministry (known as the ‘serial killings’), it became clear how far the parallel vanguards were willing to go in order to curb Khatami’s movement (Menashri 2001: 138; Ansari 2000: 177). Although Khatami attempted to counter some of the parallel state institutions and the inherent conflicts between the selected and elected bodies, he had a hard time. Khatami did effect an investigation into the serial killings, which clearly implicated high-ranking officers in the intelligence ministry. However, it hardly put an end to the parallel structures, as Bayat points out: ‘Although Khatami went ahead with cleansing the ministry of such “cancerous tumors” by appointing a new minister and changing personnel, the pāsdārān set up its own parallel intelligence service’ (2007: 117). When student organizations demonstrated in 1999 after the reformist daily Salam was closed, Khatami could not defend them against the

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mobs from Ansar-e hezbollah who stormed the university, killing one student, while many others were arrested and subsequently tortured. Conservative forces in the judiciary impeached or arrested several of Khatami’s ministers and close allies, most notably the mayor of Tehran, Gholamhossein Karbaschi, the Minister of Interior Abdollah Nuri, the religious intellectual Mohsen Kadivar, and the Minister of Cultural and Islamic Guidance, Ata’ollah Mohajerani (Menashri 2001: 97ff).30 Some were the target of assassination attempts, like Said Hajjarian. Others were mutilated and killed. The struggle over the means of governance revealed a constant conflict over the legitimacy of using violence. In September 1999, the impeached former interior minister, Abdollah Nuri said: The conflict between theoreticians who defend the use of religious violence and those who support religious compromise is still one of the most important issues in this country [ ... ] the debate should be about whether an Islamic government has to be a violent one [ ... ], whether Islam has placed greater emphasis on the importance of clemency and forgiveness or the use of violence (Akhbar-e Eqtesad website 1999).31 Ayatollah Ali Khamenei did not clearly denounce the use of violence as a governing principle. At a Friday prayer at Tehran University in April 2000, he said: The use of violence [ ... ] is not a principle in Islam, but at the same time it does not reject violence in instances where it could be regarded as legitimate [ ... ] When the Islamic state has to deal with bullying, aggression, riots and instances of law-breaking, it must be tough and decisive. It must deal with the matter violently. However, when it intends to serve and assist the individual members of the nation, it should observe leniency and moderation ... Islam differentiates between legitimate and illegitimate violence (VIRI 2000b). Khamenei’s unwillingness to condemn violence made it all too clear that Khatami did not enjoy the full support of the Supreme Leader.

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Khatami was not Ayatollah Khamenei’s candidate in 1997, and although Khamenei did acknowledge that the President had restored popular legitimacy to the Islamic Republic, both internally and abroad, he did not intervene in the attacks on Khatami’s supporters, nor did he support, for example, the flourishing of a free press. When, in June 2000, the newly elected reformist majles proposed a bill to amend the Press Law, granting more freedom of speech, the Supreme Leader interfered and told the speaker of parliament that the bill ‘was not in the interest of the system’ (Mir-Hosseini and Tapper 2006: 174). His intervention came as a response to the Berlin conference in April 2000, which had been attended by a number of vocal Iranian reformists, and led to a heavy clampdown on the press and intellectuals (ibid. 175). As MirHosseini and Tapper put it, ‘the tensions between religiosity and secularism and between absolutism and democracy not only became more apparent, they fused into one clear cleavage in the state’ (2006: 175). As a political analyst said in 2001, The archconservatives are playing a clever game. They need Khatami to keep their legitimacy, but they are trying to push for a reaction, so they can send in the military or revolutionary guards, just like they did at the student demonstration in the summer of 1999 (Interview, April 2001, Tehran). Dead end or heavy traffic? The physical attacks, killings, impeachments and arrests of key reformist actors slowly but steadily led to disillusionment, silencing and splintering among the reformists. Khatami was unable to break the deadlock between the elected and appointed bodies and he consistently complained of lacking ‘the required minimum authority’ (Rezaei 2003: 45; Bayat 2007: 127–31). In November 2000, Khatami admitted that he was ‘unable to enforce the rights and freedoms in the Islamic republic’s constitution’: Here I confess I have not done my best in cases of violations of the constitution. After three and a half years, I must be clear

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that the president does not have enough rights to carry out the heavy task on my shoulders (in Lyons 2000). In the period between 2000 and 2003, the Guardians’ Council vetoed over fifty major parliamentary bills proposed by the reformists (Bayat 2007: 123). In the face of these setbacks, Khatami met with increasing criticism, and there was an intense debate about whether the reform movement had been defeated or not. This debate obviously mirrored the concrete attacks on the reformists, but it also revealed a very diverse set of expectations among Khatami’s supporters to the speed, range and definitions of reforms. Some of his supporters remained remarkably optimistic. In 2001, the chief strategist Said Hajjarian, who had only barely survived an attempt on his life in March 2000, said: Where is the dead end? The way is open. Of course there is heavy traffic, and it is all disorderly, but there is no dead end. [ ... ] Reforms are not an intellectual subject in the minds of a few members of the elite, which might disappear if these people are arrested or restricted. Reforms have a social foundation. The new middle class is the foundation of reforms in Iran. It is expanding and has its own demands, and is making its own progress (Dowran-e Emruz 2001b).32 Likewise, as Morad Saghafi, the editor of the social monthly magazine Goftogu stressed, when I interviewed him in 2003: Where in the third world do you see MPs talk so much about democracy? Never before in the Iranian history have we had so many people who believe that democracy is the solution for Iran. Some of them are very religious people, but they manage to be democratic and religious [at the same time]. The French say that the way to get into God is multiple, not unique. I believe that the way to accept democracy is not unique (Interview, January 2003, Tehran).

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But others were not so sure. Indeed, to some, the reformists had already lost. As they waited for fundamental changes, which their president seemed powerless to implement, Khatami’s young, uncompromising supporters gradually lost confidence in him (Payvand’s Iran News 2003). When in 2003 I interviewed Mohammad Qouchani, the then 26-year-old chief editor of the daily Hamshahri, he spoke of the widespread ‘despair’ among Khatami’s supporters. ‘This is not the dead end’, he said: Like many others I think we came to that point a long time ago, and in that sense we are more pessimistic than Khatami. We need a referendum, which changes the fundamental issues, a referendum where the main question should be the relationship between democracy and dictatorial systems, [clarifying] which one of these institutions should play the main part in the government. If the Guardians’ Council shall rule, then we should close down the parliament, and if the parliament shall rule, then we should close the Guardians’ Council (Interview, January 2003, Tehran).

Khatami’s ‘twin bills’ In September 2002, Khatami tried to break the political deadlock by proposing measures to enhance the power of the parliament and the president, and delimit the influence of the Guardians’ Council. These became known as Khatami’s ‘twin bills’, a cynical nickname referring to the devastating fate of the twin towers in New York. The ‘twin bills’ were seen as a last effort by Khatami to show that the Dovom-e Khordād Front had exhausted the existing legal and constitutional means for bringing about non-violent change (Rezaei 2003: 45). Khatami had always insisted that the implementation of the constitution would itself pave the way for reforms, but by putting forward the twin bills he acknowledged the fact that a clarification of the constitutional impasse was needed, especially with regard to the powers of the president. To quote Saeed Razavi-Faqih, the head of the main student organization Office to Foster Unity:

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This is the end of the game; the golden shot. If they reject these bills we have realized that under Islamic regulations we cannot have democracy. Then the Guardians’ Council can stop and reject and do whatever they like. If they accept these bills, it manifests that the Iranian people have rights, and that we can have democracy (Interview, January 2003, Tehran). One bill was meant to delimit the power of the Guardians’ Council in disqualifying candidates for the national elections. The other aimed at enhancing the president’s constitutional power. According to article 113 of the constitution, the president is responsible for ‘implementing the constitution’, and is thereby entitled to identify and prevent violations of constitutional principles. However, a recurring problem during Khatami’s presidency was that he had no power to stop violations committed by the judiciary, police, military, intelligence ministry and the Revolutionary Guards, since they are all appointed and supervised by the Supreme Leader (Rezaei 2003: 42; Khajehpour 2002). The Guardians’ Council, not surprisingly, opposed any limitation of its powers, and when Khatami’s twin bills were rejected in late 2003, many observers perceived it as the end of the reform movement. I believe the impact of the reform movement in society was deeper and more long lasting than such attitudes suggest, but the rejection of the twin bills did definitively reveal the limitations to Khatami’s claim to reform Iran by ‘just’ implementing the constitution. The intrinsic contradictions of the constitution – and the forceful resistance to a new governmentality – proved too difficult to disentangle. Another problem of the reform movement was that democracy only materialized in an electoral form; it was never truly institutionalized in the shape of political parties, workers unions, etc. As Kaveh Ehsani says: ‘The reformers have presented elections as an end in themselves’ (2004). When the Guardians’ Council used its influence to disqualify most reformist candidates for the majles elections in February 2004 and the presidency in June 2005, there was little to fall back on.33

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Khatami’s legacy? Khatami left presidential office in 2005 with a mixed legacy. On the one hand, Khatami was perceived as weak and powerless, and his recurring threats to resign, which he never carried out, had greatly frustrated his supporters. Student organizations and well-known journalists and ideologists, like the imprisoned Akbar Ganji, called for a boycott of the election, demonstrating total disillusionment with the electoral and political process.34 On the other hand, there were many who still emphasized the need to participate in the election, and insisted that the reform movement was not defeated. Elaheh Koolaee, a vocal feminist and spokesperson for the reformist presidential candidate Mostafa Moin, told me at the time: ‘If they [the conservatives] take over the political power they can destroy many achievements’. Raising her voice, she continued: ‘but they cannot stop the process of change in our country! I think there are real changes in our dominant discourse and the political atmosphere of our society. So the political system must consider these realities’ (Telephone interview, June 2005). The presidential campaign preceding Ahmadinezhad’s victory in June 2005 was indeed remarkable. Khatami’s reformist slogans had been shocking eight years earlier – now they were being used by most of the candidates, even the conservatives. Watching the run up, it was fair to say that reformism – the emphasis on the rule of law, rights and freedom of speech – had become the norm. As Amir Ali Nourbakhsh, the editor of Iran Focus, said at the time: Look at the slogans of conservative candidates. If you compare them with those of eight years ago or even with those of four years ago, you will see that the entire conservative establishment has changed dramatically. I think that is Khatami’s biggest achievement (Telephone interview, June 2005). The real difference between (pragmatic) conservatives like Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani and Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf and the reformists was hard to detect. Legitimacy mattered. As Siamak Namazi, managing

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director of Atieh Bahar Consultants in Tehran, told me before the presidential election in 2005: To me the most amazing feature about this entire process is that we live in a system which is not really democratic by any imagination, or by any Western definition – that’s one diplomatic way of putting it. It is not democratic, but then again the number two person in the regime, who wants to become president [HashemiRafsanjani], cannot sleep at night thinking that he is assured a seat. He has to run for it. That, to me, is a hopeful sign. That’s healthy. Legitimacy does make a difference. Why do you think they are trying so hard? They care about legitimacy. At least the Supreme Leader cares (Telephone interview, June 2005). An important feature of this legitimacy was – even to the conservatives – to ensure popular support through the votes. Both the presidential election in 2005 and the parliamentary election in 2004 were widely condemned due to the Guardians’ Council’s mass disqualification of candidates. Ironically, the disqualifications demonstrated the excesses to which the conservatives would go in securing their own legitimacy. They had to win votes, even if banning opponents was the only way of doing it. The only presidential candidate who diverted from the de facto reformist agenda in 2005 was Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad, who made no secret of being a true hard-liner and proudly presented himself as a ‘fundamentalist’ (Naji 2008). Despite the fact that Ahmadinezhad won and managed to put on an entirely different agenda, and despite the fact that Khatami was termed a ‘lame duck’ in 2005, the electoral campaign left an impression that a radically different kind of governance had emerged during those eight years of reformism. With the result of the 2005 election it was also evident that even more fierce confrontations were waiting ahead, and that some very powerful conservative factions had decided to put an end to the reformists’ experiments.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have outlined how the reform movement put forward a range of keywords, which designated a new governmentality

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and idea of the state. These keywords linked up with new ways of conceptualizing ‘the people’, both in terms of the role they were to play politically, and the range of their rights. They proposed expertise, rationality and dialogue, instead of faith, loyalty and isolation, as governing principles, rule of law instead of rule of Islam, tolerance/non-violence instead of violence. Closely related to these means of governance were the ways in which the role of the people was reimagined by the reformists, who consistently extolled the virtues of ‘democracy’ (mardom-salari), ‘participation’ (mosharekat), ‘civil society’ (jāmeh-ye madāni) and ‘non-governmental organizations’ (zāsmānhā-ye gheir-e dolati). As I have shown, these keywords can be traced through political speeches and the policies put forward by President Khatami and his cabinet, but they also showed themselves, and were an effect of, Iranians’ changing perceptions of authority and of their own role in public and political life. When elected in 1997, Khatami’s political claim was that the Islamic Republic could be reformed within the confines of the constitution, and Khatami did make space for political freedom and rights. But at the same time the implicit contradictions in the constitutional set up became all the more striking, and the reformist social order and governmentality were severely contested by Khatami’s political opponents. The novelty of the reform project, and the threat it represented to the predominant political order, have become even clearer since President Ahmadinezhad’s election. Since 2005, conflict has increased over the political intention to implement ‘democracy’, however Islamically defined. In the next chapter I will turn to the consequences of President Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad’s election. I will show how he deliberately set out to counter the keywords of Khatami’s reform movement, particularly with regard to civil society activism. The new political elite has systematically attempted to term the reformist project illegitimate, metaphorically and physically arresting the reform momentum by reassuming the right to define and limit the role to be played by ‘the people’.

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CHAPTER 3 COUNTER ING THE DISCOUR SE OF DIALOGUE: NGOS AND THE STATE OF AHM ADINEZHAD

It will become clear that the cultural project to form the city is no gentle, academic game, but a desperate struggle, a life and death struggle. Let us be careful not to idealize the community. It does not always deal kindly with its members. Mary Douglas (1992: 103f) We did not have a revolution in order to have democracy. Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad, June 2005

Moralized margins of the state ‘This is the time for a cultural war. We have to direct the minds of our youth towards the basic principles, methods and the values of the Revolution. We have to lay down Islamic guidelines for governance’, Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad told the press shortly before he was elected President in June 2005 (in Naji 2008: 47). Whereas President Khatami entered the political scene with a claim of reforming the Islamic Republic in order to save it (‘reform or risk explosion’), President Ahmadinezhad’s political course has been radically different. He has made an attempt to

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re-revolutionize the social and political order by reviving the virtues of Ayatollah Khomeini and the ‘Islamic guidelines for governance’. The purpose of this chapter is twofold: first, I will elaborate on the reformist vision of democracy, and how it was carried out through allowing and vitalizing a civil society. The NGOs, the intellectuals and journalists put in motion Khatami’s slogans of jāmeh-ye madāni (civil society) and mardom-salari (democracy) by inducing the ‘Westernized’ notions with a local etymology. The NGOs epitomized the pluralized participation and democratizing vigour of civil society, which was key to Khatami’s political project. But during Khatami’s presidency the NGOs were also made an object of conflicting governmentalities. They were confronted by Khatami’s opponents and operated in murky legal waters – in that sense their existence paralleled the volatility of the political reform movement in general. Second, I will discuss the transition from the Khatami era to the Ahmadinezhad presidency, by outlining the vicious conflicts over the means of governance and social order, following the election of President Ahmadinezhad. Specifically targeting the NGOs, President Ahmadinezhad replaced the dialogue-seeking and civil society-promoting discourse with a so-called ‘mosque model’: a renewed focus on religious militias, ‘faith’, ‘social justice’, and ‘national security’. Thus, since 2005 the space for NGOs has been severely restricted. The broader question which this chapter raises is how these policies towards the NGOs construe the idea of the state by delimiting and redirecting the accepted role of ‘the people’, and their ways of participating socially and politically. As Foucault writes, ‘To govern is to structure the possible field of action of others’ (1983: 221). Both Khatami and Ahmadinezhad’s governments have radically structured the possible field of civil society activism, mirroring their competing visions of the right moral and social order. The NGOs are particularly interesting in this respect because they are located on the margins of the state. They become an object of and an analytical lens to the opposing governmentalities employed to control the population. The notion of margins is interesting here on two interlinked levels: an institutional or structural level and a normative level. The institutional aspect is related to the NGOs’ presumed independence from the state. The NGOs are supposed to be non-governmental, operating

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outside or on the margins of state control. As I will show, particularly because they are supposed to be ‘non-governmental’, the NGOs are subjected to immense state scrutiny. The fight over the NGOs, and their consistent attempts to create a public space in which to operate, reflect an arena of contestation and drawing of boundaries between the state and civil society. These boundaries are blurred by legal constraints and dependency on state funding, but also by controversies over the mobilization of meaning attributed to ‘NGOs’ and ‘civil society’, which leads me to the other notion of margins, the normative status of NGOs. The normativity of the NGOs is deeply connected to the conceptual baggage of ‘civil society’ and ‘democracy’, which the NGOs engage in and contribute to, and it is another reason why the idea and activities of NGOs have been contested, during the presidencies of both Khatami and Ahmadinezhad. In the view of the Ahmadinezhad presidency, the local NGOs constitute ‘margins’ in Mary Douglas’s sense as a danger of defilement, defiling the ‘true’ values of the revolution, and they are perceived to be the frontrunners of an American instigated push for ‘regime change’, threatening the national security. To Ahmadinezhad they spearhead all the things he wishes to remove, and his presidency has created a political situation where relating to the West, participating publically through democratic means, and operating on the margins of state control are highly politicized. Recalling Abu-Lughod’s notion of resistance as a ‘diagnostic of power’ (1990: 41), the coping strategies and discursive space of the NGOs reveal how they are enmeshed in, opposed to and involved in reproducing conflicting ideas of the state. But the resistance of the civil society activists, which I will discuss in the end of the chapter, also shows that although President Ahmadinezhad’s envisaged ‘return to the revolution’ and ‘Islamic guidelines of governance’ do succeed in intimidating the activists, the clampdowns also create further polarization and political disagreements among President Ahmadinezhad’s supporters.

The concept of civil society Defined as ‘a distinctive vision of the desirable social order’ (Hann 1996: 2), the concept of civil society is difficult to use analytically, because it is often uncritically applied as a political buzzword, turning it into what

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Ehteshami calls a ‘normative football’ (1998: 334). As Norton rightly points out in his two volumes on Civil Society in the Middle East (1995, 1996): ‘There is a tendency either to idealize civil society, or to impute it to a teleology’ (1996: 5). Criticizing the imagined, imminent link between civil society and democracy, Norton continues: ‘There is no sufficient connection between civil society and the transition to democracy. Societies do not take two tablets of civil society at bedtime and wake up the next morning undergoing democratization’ (ibid. 6). There are plentiful reasons why this reasoning is problematic. By idealizing civil society the ‘uncivil’ aspects of civil society risk being overlooked (Robins et al. 2008: 1071; Zubaida 2001: 240). Although stressing the importance of NGOs in getting this normative football rolling (Pearce 1993; Gubser 2002), few seek to analyse how NGOs actually operate (Hilhorst 2003: 2), and the ‘vast arrays of often uninstitutionalised and hybrid social activities which have dominated urban politics in many developing countries’ tend to be overlooked (Bayat 1997b: 55; 2002). Also, due to its Western connotations and historical trajectory, scholars have been reluctant to use ‘civil society’ as a concept in nonWestern contexts, and scholars have discussed what the concept actually entails, particularly in regard to its alleged independence from the state (Hann 1996; Kaviraj and Khilnani 2001; Diamond et al. 2003). Certainly a number of scholars would claim that an Iranian civil society is a contradiction in terms, because a ‘proper’ civil society presupposes a clear independence from the state – ideologically, financially, institutionally (Boroumand and Boroumand 2000). As Arjomand points out, ‘Civil society in the sense of an autonomous sphere of associations whose growth is facilitated by the legal system is therefore an empty slogan’ (2000: 296). However, although a clear differentiation between the state and civil society is worth striving for, it is seldom implemented in practice. As Robert Hefner says, ‘The character of civil life is never independent of the state, but deeply shaded by its policies and powers’ (1998: 289). Despite these analytical reservations the concept of civil society is employed locally to a significant extent, and people do so quite consciously. Although it was definitely launched as a slogan by Khatami, from 1997 the notion of civil society became such an important feature

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in the Iranian public discourse that it, in itself, mustered a greater sense of openness and pluralism. It affected the idea about how social change and participation should take place (Hooglund 2002). Some, of course, took over the vision of civil society as something ‘naturally’ leading to democracy in a Western fashion; others, however, were well aware of and attempted to navigate the concept’s normative pitfalls. This is why Khatami, the religious new thinkers and the social actors did so much to emphasize that they were seeking a ‘third path’, trying to unravel an ‘Islamic democracy’ and ‘civil society’ from their Western connotations. So although analytically imprecise, and although never fully implemented in Iran, civil society is still, I believe, the best notion to embrace the ‘new type of political space and new forms of agency’ emerging after 1997 (Arjomand 2000: 296; Bjerre Christensen 2003a). ‘The new political space is disorderly but also pluralistic and boisterously public, and it is inextricably linked with the government. It is the arena of competition among various social, economic and regional interests’, as Arjomand says (ibid. 296f). I therefore employ ‘civil society’ here as an empirical term; as an idea of a new order promoted politically, and as a series of activities, which people engage in, contributing to this idea.35

NGOs: the impact of a social movement Khatami’s political reform movement gave rise to and was the result of a social movement, which featured mushrooming numbers of local non-governmental organizations. The first national NGO conference was held in 1998 in Bushehr, setting off an NGO initiative, which became inscribed in the Five Year Development Plans (Namazi et al. 2000).36 Reliable statistics about the numbers of local NGOs are hard to find, but according to a survey by the Iran Statistics Center in March 2004 there were 6,914 NGOs operating across the country (Volunteer 2004: 7).37 It was still a very young and inexperienced social movement, and the degree of NGO independence was often difficult to ascertain. The process of moving towards ‘tolerance’ and leaving the revolutionary endorsement of violence behind was fragile and cut short

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by random clampdowns by the authorities. Still, a great range of NGO activities took place from the late-1990s, which related to women’s issues, health, environment, drug use, poverty, youth and cultural activities, laying the foundation for pluralism, critique of authority, and new kinds of social agency. As Bijan Khajehpour said in 2001: The NGO community and civil society is extremely active. Sometimes not on very solid ground, sometimes they don’t hold the instruments and all the knowledge they really need, but this is the story of the civil society anywhere in the world. It has to mobilize itself (Interview, May 2001, Tehran). The NGOs did so far more effectively, I would argue, than the numerous reports on ‘the failed reform movement’ would ever acknowledge (Rubin 2002). As Arshin Adib-Moghaddam argues, the movement ‘fostered a de-monopolization of the political process and thus ipso facto, has lead to a pluralistic momentum’ (2006: 668). The NGOs emphasized a Habermasian vision of democracy as bound to dialogue, not just as Khatami’s ‘dialogue among civilizations’, but as the foundation of a revised political culture. Civil society organizations were not a new thing in Iran, however. Like other Muslim countries, Iran has a century-long tradition of charity and social work related to mosques and religious organizations. This tradition was further institutionalized during the 1979 revolution and the Iran–Iraq war of 1980–88, when a number of Islamic funds and religious charities emerged to perform a variety of social welfare services (often referred to as kheirieh, meaning ‘good works’ [Adelkhah 1999: 54]). They range from the enormous para-governmental religious foundations, the bonyāds, to thousands of local, informal credit organizations, providing interest-free loans (the qarz-ol-hasaneh funds), to family networks, which perform services such as handing out food to the needy during religious rituals (Namazi et al. 2000; Saeidi 2004; Kazemi 1996: 147ff; Eickelman 2002: 317ff; Bayat 2002). These networks strengthened the social mobilization and community solidarity during and after the war, and laid the groundwork for the participation in the 1997 reform movement (Khosrokhavar

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2000; Adelkhah 1999). But whereas the mobilization in religious charities emphasized a public participation, which endorsed faith and consolidated the revolutionary, dominant ideology, the reform movement introduced a new language and set of participatory practices (Saeidi 2004: 486ff; Maloney 2000). The participation embodied by the new local NGOs drew on a global, and de facto secular, discourse of democracy, gender, human rights and civil society. They stressed a ‘rights-based approach’ in contrast to the religious charities’ ‘faith based approach’, they aimed at becoming ‘participatory’, ‘accountable’ and ‘democratic’ in their style of management, although they lacked the local networks and trust which the religious charities had built up over many years. In a series of newsletters Sohrab Razzaghi, the director of the Iranian Civil Society Resource Center (ICSRC) portrayed these objectives. He emphasized that ‘the Movement’ is pluralistic and not centralized. It promotes transparency and social participation, ‘strives to think globally’, and ‘rejects meta-narratives and emphasizes micro and community-level narratives’. First and foremost the movement has shown its ‘ability to transform political discourse’, expanding the political realm and replacing violence with tolerance. ‘For the first time in Iranian history, political actors are critiquing the concepts of violence in all its dimensions’, Razzaghi said (2002: 4). The new NGOs held numerous workshops, disseminated information and set up networks on the Internet.38 Aware of the pitfalls of uncritically embracing so-called Western concepts, they engaged in lengthy discussions on how ‘social capital’, ‘rule of Law’ and ‘good governance’ were to be implemented in an Iranian context, locating a ‘third way’ between the religious charities and global NGOs (Namazi et al. 2000; Interviews, January, October 2003, April 2004, Tehran). Hamyaran NGO Resource Centre, established in 2001, was a striking example of these new NGOs. Its director, Baquer Namazi, initiated the first ‘Situation Analysis’ of Iranian NGOs in 2000, listing their achievements and ‘daunting challenges’ (Namazi et al. 2000). Judging from my visits in 2003, 2004 and 2005, Hamyaran epitomized the humble, innovative and professional attitude of a new development paradigm emerging with the reformist civil society activism.

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The employees were all well-educated, trained in an international/ UN participatory language and methodology, which they sought to transform to the Iranian realities. Hamyaran was also extremely well-connected to the outside world more so than most local NGOs holding conferences at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington, and seeking to bring in the support of the Iranian diaspora, bridging the outside and inside diversities. Hamyaran often stressed their debt as to the traditions and ‘inherent’ social capital of community-based organizations in Iran, and they particularly engaged in creating further cooperation between what they termed the ‘modern’ NGOs and the ‘traditional’, religious, community-based organizations (CBOs). This was not least the case after the devastating earthquake in Bam in 2003, where Hamyaran set up a local centre, aiding the cooperation between the different local stakeholders and with the international NGOs (Hamyaran NGO Resource Centre 2005). Several other resource centres – like the ICSORC and the Institute for Women’s Studies and Research – facilitated capacity building, instigated NGO networks, research and databanks, and trained the volunteers in project design, strategic planning, fundraising, and negotiating techniques. Countering the hierarchical power structures of the state, which were easily reproduced in the non-governmental sector, and creating a different kind of social ‘culture’, based on trust, cooperation and professionalism, were some of the immense challenges these organizations faced. They also prompted ‘social dialogues’ with government officials to affect the mutual atmosphere of ‘suspicion and mistrust’. As Baquer Namazi said in 2003, ‘the heavy hand of the government can be felt all the time, even with the new and positive policy declarations drafted since Mr. Khatami’s election’ (in ShaeryEisenlohr 2003). These dialogues were instigated both on local levels – for example, Hamayran assisted community empowerment projects in impoverished villages – and with the central governmental bodies, holding workshops between NGOs and GOs. What also seemed significant when I visited a diverse range of human rights, women and youth NGOs in 2003 and 2004, was what I will call the ‘buzz of NGOing’ – a self-generating, energetic effectuation of being ‘modern’ NGOs, reinventing the public sphere. Although

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the organizations included different generations of activists, first and foremost they counted a number of young people, particularly young women, for whom it became quite fashionable to employ and contribute to the notion of ‘civil society’ and to engage in social issues – working for women’s rights, against violence, drug use, and caring for runaway children. The NGOs were to a large extent a feminist movement, which even the male volunteers and managers subscribed to. ‘I’m a feminist!’ several of them exclaimed. Being a volunteer in an NGO was also less risky than getting involved in politics (parliamentary or student politics). According to some people I interviewed, this was particularly the case for women, who socially found a ‘safe haven’ in NGO activism. Sometimes the specific aim of the organizations and the youthful side effects of ‘being modern’ were hard to distinguish. A small NGO I visited in Esfahan in April 2004 was set up to care for homeless, disadvantaged children. Although twenty kids were attended to by the organization, it had at least a similar number of volunteers, if not more – young men and women in their early twenties, who came to the NGO to help the children, but who also wanted to be part of and create ‘civil society’, as they said. They hung out, discussed Dostoyevsky, Foucault and Habermas, took turns in playing with the kids and making wall paintings, and had what I can best describe as a respectful, relaxed, less politically interfered-with space for becoming adults. To them the NGO was definitely a specific kind of activity, but more broadly they engaged in an idea of a different public space, a different kind of governmentality. Other social initiatives I witnessed in Tehran were more clearly bound to a greater social and financial divide, where upper-middleclass people from North Tehran would be engaged in NGOs based in South Tehran suburbs, and where the initiatives – although still reflecting a ‘civil society’ approach – were more oriented towards charity.39 All of these activities continued despite the political setbacks for Khatami. Even when Khatami’s call for ‘dialogue of civilizations’ was wearing thin and his ‘twin bills’ were rejected, the NGOs were strengthened by other means. In October 2003, I arrived in Tehran

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a few days after Shirin Ebadi received the Nobel Peace Prize, and the event gave a tremendous boost to the civil society activists, especially the women and human rights NGOs. It was not just Ebadi who received the prize, but the entire efforts of Iran’s civil society activism (cf. Mir-Hosseini 2003). The parliamentary election in February 2004, where the reformists were defeated through a massive disqualification of their candidates, did lead to increasing cautiousness and self-censorship. In April 2004, NGO activists told me that they would ‘hold their breath the next year’, awaiting the outcome of the presidential election, but the discourse of dialogue and civil society was still vivid and politically legitimate (cf. Squire 2006).

Becoming independent Surely the independence of the NGOs could be discussed, both due to their financial dependency on the state, and state interference and ideology. The religious community-based organizations did support the religious ideology of the state, although they simultaneously promoted social participation. Also, the government actively established some of the ‘modern’ NGOs (so-called GONGOs). Khatami’s presidency funded a large part of the new NGOs and established organizations like the National Youth Organization and the Centre for Dialogue among Civilizations, the aim of which was to support and encourage NGO initiatives and dialogues between the government and NGOs (IRNA website 2005a). When Ata’ollah Mohajerani was forced to resign as Minister of Cultural and Islamic Guidance, he became the head of Centre for Dialogue among Civilizations. One could hardly find a less ‘non-governmental’ figure to lead an NGO, but again, the point of these organizations was to further the dialogue and the initiatives of the upcoming NGO sector.40 However, although GONGOs are surely a contradiction in terms, the level and nature of NGO ‘independence’ is never black-and-white, and if we only judge Iran’s civil society on the independence of NGOs, we loose sight of the ways in which organizations and activities, starting out as governmental, potentially become non-governmental.

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‘You never know how they develop’, the editor of the monthly social magazine, Goftogu, Morad Saghafi, told me. Saghafi continued: Even if the state creates an NGO, after a while the NGO activists might start to take themselves seriously. Human relations are not one-dimensional. They [state officials] created two NGOs ten years ago about human rights and an NGO against violence. And that was created by the state to discuss what the Mojahedins [the Mojahedin-e Khalgh opposition group] were doing, bombing places, etc., and that was very much a GONGO. But after ten years they became very independent. They are human beings and after a while they receive letters from people in prison or family members [asking them to do something]. So after a while the man running the NGO says: ‘human rights are human rights’. During the last two years they’ve been looking at the internal, [political] prisoners and helping their families. Things change by personal experience. You go from personal experience to public decision and vice versa (Interview, January 2003, Tehran). The main problem was however, that the real drawing of boundaries between the state and civil society became more ideological than structural. What defined the reformist civil society was the kind of society and social order they envisioned, rather than its institutional distance to the state. Razzaghi emphasized this too when, in his December 2002 newsletter, he said that the movement has been too politically charged and determined to ‘transform the concepts of democracy into ideology’, despite the fact that the movement is rather a human rights movement, ‘not based in ideology’ (2002: 4). The NGOs did however also face a number of legal and ideological constraints.

Legal constraints As I will show, the election of President Ahmadinezhad clearly damaged the position of local NGOs, but a firm scepticism regarding their work existed all along – partly by the NGOs themselves, who distrusted each other’s motives, partly by the local communities, who

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were and are more inclined to trust the religious charities, and not least among the conservative factions, who opposed them for ideological reasons (Hamyaran NGO Resource Center 2003; Keyhan 2005; IRNA website 2004, 2005b). When in January 2003 I interviewed Hossein Shariatmadari, editor of the hard-line daily Keyhan, he approached the notion of civil society with scornful laughter: Talking about a civil society is something really funny. Making propaganda for this idea of civil society in the Islamic Republic of Iran was something like a psychological game. Because the reformists wanted to put this idea in the mind of the people that you have been neglected your rights in years, and now we want to give these rights to you. But is there any other country in world where they’ve asked the people even what type of regime they wanted? You know, we did this in the beginning. After the revolution they called for a referendum, asking the people what kind of society do you want, and the people said: an Islamic republic, an Islamic republic! The suspicion and surveillance from state actors and ministries were also caused by the NGOs’ unclear legal position. According to article 26 of the Iranian constitution, people are permitted to form political parties and associations, provided that ‘they do not violate the principles of independence, freedom, national unity, the criteria of Islam, or the basis of the Islamic Republic’. Until June 2005, these were the provisions under which the NGOs operated. In addition to the problem of diverging interpretations of the central government and local authorities in deciding when the NGOs’ activities violated article 26, the registration procedures for NGOs were unclear and confusing. Most NGOs should register at the Ministry of Interior, but depending on their field of activity they sometimes had to apply to other ministries and institutions as well, adding to an impenetrable bureaucracy (Katirai 2005; Maranlou 2002; cf. Kazemi 1996: 127). Since the registration procedures could easily drag on for years, some NGOs registered as ‘non-commercial organizations’ (under the

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provision of The Commercial Act of Iran, enacted in 1958) as a short cut, though this left them without legal protection. Accordingly, in the Iranian Statistics Center’s NGO survey of 2004, out of 6,914 NGOs, only 3,693 were legally registered; 6,186 had obtained some kind of working permit, but 728 had not. Those who succeeded in obtaining permits did so through a wide variety of institutions, including the Disciplinary Forces (2,080), National Youth Organisation (1,312), Ministry of Interior (1,102), Welfare Organisation (1,033), Ministry of Health and Medical Education (318), Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (291), Organisation for Preserving Environment (209) and others (503) (Volunteer 2004). As Sohrab Razzaghi, the director of the now banned Iranian Civil Society Resource Center put it in January 2003: ‘Because there is no law, everything done in regard to NGOs is done according to the taste of the authorities. Somewhere it’s good; somewhere it’s not good – because it doesn’t taste good’ (Interview, January 2003, Tehran). At the same time, for some organizations, the lack of legal clarity also had its benefits. As an NGO manager in UNDP told me: ‘NGOs are always at the risk of being closed and prosecuted. But the legal vacuum is also good. The NGOs can undertake activities, which they wouldn’t be able to, if they were [kept] in a legal straightjacket’ (Interview, November 2005, Tehran). In 2003, Razzaghi seconded this viewpoint: ‘In the present situation we prefer to operate in this ambiguity instead’. For years, a working group drafted a law to clarify the NGOs’ legal status. The NGO bill was eventually rejected by the majles in 2004, but aspects were transferred to the Executive Regulations Concerning the Formation and Activities of Non-Governmental Organizations, enacted 19 June 2005.41 These regulations somehow clarify the NGOs’ position and registration procedures, but they also legitimize a closer monitoring of their activities. Despite opposition among the NGOs, supervisory boards were set up to review applicants, operating at township, provincial and state levels and consisting of three representatives each, one from the NGOs (Article 1, 5d). In December 2003, The Hamyaran NGO Resource Centre, which took part in the drafting procedure, labelled these boards ‘indicative of a strong suspicion of the very nature and activities of NGOs’, and

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stressed that NGOs are the ‘epitome of self-regulatory entities’ and should be regulated by the ‘rule of law’ (Hamyaran NGO Resource Center 2003; Interviews, April 2004, Tehran). The Executive Regulations on NGOs are problematic in other respects, as well. The problem of needing permissions from more than one governmental institution still exists in some cases (Art. 2, 2); the room for control by the Interior Ministry is reinforced (Art. 2, 5); and although funding from the UN is acceptable, receiving financial support from abroad is also still extremely complicated (Art. 6, 2). All in all, though the new laws slightly improved the legal situation of NGOs, their assorted areas of ambiguity left many opportunities for state officials to obstruct NGOs’ activities – opportunities of which the Ahmadinezhad administration has taken full advantage.

The election of Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad As part of a systematic effort to curb the reform movement, President Ahmadinezhad and his supporters have militarized the political administration, redirected funds from the NGOs to religious associations, shut down the most high-profile NGOs in Tehran, and labelled civil society activists ‘foreign enemies’. In this revision of the political order the NGOs are targeted mainly for ideological reasons. They occupy a position vis-à-vis the state, which, according to Das and Poole, is ‘spoken of – and imagined – through an invocation of the wilderness, lawlessness, and savagery that not only lies outside its jurisdiction but also threatens it from within’ (2004a: 7). The NGOs are depicted as the very embodiment of this wilderness and lawlessness. Just like the election of Mohammad Khatami in 1997, the victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad took most observers by surprise. Unlike all the other candidates, Ahmadinezhad did not promote reformist slogans. He resurrected an isolationist, nationalist, anti-Western foreign policy, and gave plentiful promises to the poor. Though he had been a relatively successful mayor in Tehran since 2001, Ahmadinezhad was widely considered to be an inexperienced nobody, and few – if any – observers gave him a chance in the presidential race. Whether or not there was actually rigging involved in the first round of elections in

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June 2005, when Ahmadinezhad came out as a promising number two after the former President Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, is still unclear – although even Hashemi-Rafsanjani ‘expressed doubts about the validity of the election’ (Naji 2008: 74; Ehsani 2005). But there was no doubt that Ahmadinezhad made his way to the second round through the support of an expanded network of religious institutions, including the Supreme Leader and the basijs who efficiently drummed up support for him in the provinces.42 Facing Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani in the second round gave Ahmadinezhad a number of advantages. Unlike his opponent, Ahmadinezhad was able to capitalize on his image as a pious believer and self-ascribed ‘man of the people’, publicly displaying his simple lifestyle and humble house. He promised to fight corruption, to put the oil money ‘on the table’ of Iranians, and emphasized social justice. Combining ultra-leftist economic slogans with ultra-conservative and isolationist views on Islam and the West, Ahmadinezhad proposed to restore the ‘proper’ values of the revolution (International Crisis Group 2007; cf. Nourbakhsh 2004). By contrast, Hashemi-Rafsanjani’s political positions were relatively balanced and pragmatic, particularly in regard to the USA. Arguably, they could have been far more successful in rescuing both Iran’s internal financial situation and its relations with the outside world. However, to most people Hashemi-Rafsanjani epitomized the corrupt clergy elite of the country who had left Iran in its current mess. As a result, Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad – ‘President who?’ – won two-thirds of the votes (Naji 2008: 57, 88; Ehsani 2005; Keshavarzian and Maljoo 2005). It did not take long for Ahmadinezhad to stir up emotions on the international scene. First he gave a speech at the UN in September 2005, where he argued that it was Iran’s ‘right’ to share its nuclear technology with the rest of the Muslim world. Then he withdrew a number of highly experienced ambassadors from European countries who had worked hard on reaching a diplomatic solution to the nuclear issue. In October 2005, at a conference titled ‘A World Without Zionism’, Ahmadinezhad quoted Ayatollah Khomeini, saying that Israel should be ‘wiped off the face of the planet’. In December 2005,

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the Iranian President called the Holocaust a ‘myth’, adding that if the Holocaust had existed – effectively turning him into a Holocaust denier – it would be the responsibility of Europe to undo the damage. He finished by proposing that the land of Israel should be moved to Germany, Austria, or (less logically, I might add) Alaska (Naji 2008: 145f, 156ff). A year later, the President even organized an international Holocaust conference, attended by a peculiar mix of Iranian officials, neo-Nazis, and members of Ku Klux Klan (ibid. 164ff). President Ahmadinezhad’s appearance on the political scene both coincided with and dramatically escalated a developing international crisis over Iran’s nuclear capabilities and plans for enrichment. Ahmadinezhad responded to the international pressure with a defiant and confrontational nationalistic attitude. When, in early February of 2006, the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear intentions led to referral to the UN Security Council, Ahmadinezhad’s response epitomized this attitude. He simply said: ‘You need us far more than we need you’. In the West, President Ahmadinezhad was immediately portrayed as a madman, and the German chancellor Angela Merkel even termed him ‘a new Hitler’ (Conradi 2006). In fact, President Ahmadinezhad’s comments are much less irrational than they appear, for they are consistent with the President’s revolutionary ideals and credentials as a pāsdārān, a member of the Revolutionary Guards Corps. Ahmadinezhad belongs to the second generation of the revolution. They were the young foot soldiers of the revolution, and the generation who defended the country during the war with Iraq in the 1980s, when the West backed Iraq. To them, the revolution and the fight against Saddam Hussein were confrontations with the West, and that fight and revolutionary momentum never ceased. As one political commentator put it: ‘You’re not an ex-pāsdārān, you are a pāsdārān, forever’ (Interview, November 2005, Tehran). As another analyst pointed out in regard to Ahmadinezhad’s comment on wiping Israel off the map: We can put it down to him not having a political background. But we can also put it down to the fact that he doesn’t care what other people are thinking. He’s a revolutionary, he defended this

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country, he defended its values and ideals, and if Imam Khomeini said that Israel has to be wiped off the face of this planet, then that’s right! But the smart thing, he did ... He didn’t come out and say ‘I think this is policy and we should execute it’. He just said: ‘That was the right thing to say’ (Interview, November 2005, Tehran). President Ahmadinezhad’s worldview is defined in opposition to the West, and his vision for the Iranian state is a return to the values of the revolution and ‘Islamic principles of governance’. This governmentality is based on a Machiavellian notion of sovereignty. Ahmadinezhad reconceptualizes and delegitimizes the democratic role of ‘the people’ by dismissing the need for democracy, and he re-emphasizes ‘the people’s’ obligation to actively endorse the religious ideals of the revolution. He makes this political return by drawing on Ayatollah Khomeini’s legitimacy, and by emphasizing his least compromising statements. As Ahmadinezhad said in May 2005: ‘Some people keep saying that our revolution is aimed at establishing democracy. No. Neither in the Imam’s [Khomeini’s] statements nor in the message of the martyrs, nor in the words of the real pillars of the Islamic government has any such idea been considered’ (in Naji 2008: 70). In other words, Ahmadinezhad argued, ‘We did not have a revolution in order to have democracy’ (in Gheissari and Nasr 2006: vi).

‘Time for a cultural war’ After his election, Ahmadinezhad’s ministerial and administrative appointments institutionalized the shift in political discourse towards a security-led and re-revolutionized rationality. In addition to instigating a widespread ‘brother-in-law-cracy’, Ahmadinezhad granted political appointments to members of the military, the Revolutionary Guards Corps, prison organizations, and the intelligence service. Several of the ministers appointed in 2005 were rejected by the majles because of their lack of experience. President Khatami’s (and before him President Hashemi-Rafsanjani’s) attempts to build a technocratic elite, which valued experience and expertise, were displaced by a focus

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on faith, loyalty and revolutionary credentials, confirming the emergence of a radicalized and militarized political elite (International Crisis Group 2007: 2–4; Pazuki 2006; Sepehri 2005a, 2005b; Samii 2005b, 2005c; Fathi 2005). Minister of the Interior, Hojatoleslam Mustafa Pur-Mohammadi, and Minister for Intelligence and Security, Hojatoleslam GholamHussein Mohseini-Ezhei, who both hail from the hard-line Haqqani theology school affiliated with Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi, are notorious for their violence against political dissidents. Ayatollah MesbahYazdi, the mentor of President Ahmadinezhad, ‘has made no secret of his disdain for democracy’; he promotes a sovereignty and legitimacy deriving entirely from God, and endorses violence as a political means (Naji 2008: 99, 103–5). Pur-Mohammadi was implicated in the mass-executions of the political opposition in 1988. During the reform movement, both Pur-Mohammadi and Mohseini-Ezhei were linked to the ‘serial killings’ of intellectuals in 1998 and they were pivotal in attacks on President Khatami’s close allies (Human Rights Watch 2005; Alamdari 2005). As a former member of the Revolutionary Guards Corps (1980–94) and the former chief editor of the hard-line daily, Keyhan, the new Minister of Cultural and Islamic Guidance Hussein Saffar-Harandi also contributed to the new government’s ‘security outlook’ (Samii 2005b). Under Saffar-Harandi, control of the media was systematized – censorship was reinforced and permits for new publications withheld, while the most prominent reform newspaper, Sharq, was closed and the Journalists’ Union threatened with abolition (E’temad-e Melli 2006a; Rafiee 2006; Jalali 2006; Omidvar 2006). As Farideh Farhi notes: ‘The transformation of these ministries is striking precisely because great energy was spent under Khatami to render them less intrusive in Iranian life’ (2007). The universities also witnessed increasing control and a shift in priorities, from expertise back to religious credentials. For the first time, in November 2005, a non-academic cleric was appointed head of the Tehran University. Ahmadinezhad called for a ‘purge’ of socalled secular faculty members, and academics were (and continue to be) sacked, threatened, and branded as ‘foreign agents’. This happened

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to the obvious dismay of students, who demonstrated against the new religious order (Nasseri 2006; Sepehri 2005c). The changes also hit Khatami’s civil society ‘flagships’. The Centre for Dialogue among Civilizations had its funding terminated in October 2005 (Sharq 2005). A cleric was appointed to replace the vicepresident of the National Youth Organisation, which was founded in 2001 to develop a programme for youth affairs, including support to NGOs. Hojjat ol-Eslam Akbari (who allegedly served as a ‘combatpublicity cleric’ during the Iran–Iraq war) immediately announced that the world of Internet websites is ‘extremely dangerous’ for Iran’s youth and that the ‘enemies’ rely on the virtual world to corrupt young people (BBC Monitoring 2005; Farhang-e Ashti 2005a; National Youth Organization 2003). Hearing this, Reza Jalali, chief editor of the centrist daily, Mardom-Salari, pointedly replied: ‘The National Youth Organization is not a mosque!’ (Jalali 2005).

Ahmadinezhad’s ‘Mosque model’ The substitution of NGO initiatives with religious ones is a very clear trend in Ahmadinezhad’s governmentality. In his government programme, Ahmadinezhad emphasized increased public participation – not, as President Khatami did, in order to create democracy – but for the sake of ‘improving national solidarity’. Although non-governmental organizations were mentioned, primary weight was put on activities in mosques, religious charities, and the basij (volunteer militias). Among the top priorities was the promotion of ‘Islamic traditions’, and ‘protecting [the] religious values, independence and glory of the country’ (Fars News Agency website 2005). This is what is known as Ahmadinezhad’s ‘mosque model’. Shortly after the election, he proclaimed his intention to replace the ‘Western’ NGOs with religious organizations. Ahmadinezhad’s supporter, the deputy leader Hamid Reza Tarraqi from the Islamic Coalition Party, announced: Meeting the demands of the people would be impossible through the formation of NGOs. [They have] been created in our country

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according to Western ways of thinking [ ... ], which are a model uncoordinated with the ethnic and cultural structure of our country. Tarraqi emphasized that ‘the future government would try to prevent their formation and revive an appropriate replacement for them’ (Mardom-Salari 2005; cf. Memarian 2005). Whereas Khatami’s government had allocated funds to the NGOs, encouraging their growth while compromising their presumed independence, Ahmadinezhad’s government completely eliminated funding for NGOs from the 2006–07 national budget. Meanwhile, funding for religious organizations was doubled to 900 million dollars (Farhang-e Ashti 2006; Interviews, October–December 2005, Tehran). The moderate daily E’temad reported that some religious organizations had their funding increased by as much as 820 per cent, which the newspaper found ‘worthy of contemplation, in particular concerning the gradual and severe dependence of these institutions in the budget of the recent years’. E’temad expressed concern that these increases ‘indicate a particular outlook in managing the country’, also criticizing the decrease in government funding for political parties, ‘the basic pillar in a democratic system’ (E’temad website 2006a). Instead, the religious-military organizations basij and sepāh-e pāsdārān have been endorsed as the ‘true’, Iranian, non-governmental organizations. The basij is ‘the largest NGO in the world’, the commander of the basij force boasted in May 2007 (Iran 2007b). This statement was an interesting exercise in shifting semantics, as it simultaneously discredited the new NGOs and ‘NGOing’ as imported, Western notions; while at the same time endowing the basij with all the young, ‘modern’ connotations of being an NGO. More distressingly, sepāh-e pā sd ā rān immediately benefited from major deals in the oil industry and extensive civil contracts (Aftab-e Yazd 2006f; Economist 2007: 6). Also, in July 2006 the Ministry of Interior launched a much-debated bill on the electoral system, introducing the Revolutionary Guards Corps and the basijs as surveyors of the electoral candidates, thereby granting them an unprecedented political role (Samii 2006c; E’temad-e Melli 2006b).

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In January 2007 cultural minister Saffar-Harandi said that ‘party politics have not been a success in Iran’, and he ‘called for the activation of other bodies like the Basij and the clergy, so they would [ ... ] protect the people’ (Aftab-e Yazd website 2007, my emphasis). But to ‘protect’ the people from what, one might ask – from participating politically?

National security and the US pressure Most importantly, the NGOs have increasingly become an issue of national security and the epitome of foreign plots. ‘After the reformists came to power, they issued authorisation for the establishment of a number of NGOs that have now turned into opposition groups threatening the order and the country’, the conservative daily Resalat commented (Resalat 2006a). The escalation was closely linked to the confrontation over Iran’s nuclear facilities and the USA’s push for regime change. The Bush administration repeatedly proclaimed its desire to instigate regime change in Iran through civil society. In April 2005, George W. Bush allocated three million dollars to ‘boost’ democracy in Iran, and more remarkably, in February 2006 Condoleezza Rice ‘reached out to the people of Iran’ with 75 million dollars, 20 million of which should promote democracy and support NGOs (Cornwell 2005; Economist 2006; US Department of State 2006). To Ahmadinezhad, local NGOs already entailed a danger of democracy and foreign influence, but US efforts of this kind only confirmed his perception. The US policies fuelled allegations of ‘foreign interference’ and made it legitimate for the government to castigate all NGOs as enemy collaborators – no matter what their sources of funding. Minister of Intelligence Mohseini-Ezhei condemned the NGOs’ activities as being ‘in line with the objectives of the enemies’ (ISNA website 2006a). In September 2006 he stated that the ‘ultimate aims of our enemies are to create insecurity in the country [ ... ] and it has allocated 75m dollars in this respect’, thus directly accusing the US and its outreach programme (Fars News Agency website 2006).

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In April 2007, Mohseini-Ezhei threatened that the ‘domestic agents of the enemy will be treated harshly’. According to E’temad, Intelligence Minister Mohseni-Ezhe’i warns the persons [whom he calls] the ‘fifth column’ and ‘moles’ and says authorities will soon introduce and punish these persons who actually try to weaken the morale of the Iranian government and the nation and encourage the enemy to increase its pressure on Iran (E’temad 2007c). Similar arguments came across in numerous hard-line newspapers. In May 2006, the hard-line daily, Keyhan, summed up this position as follows: Yes, not all problems that exist in this country are the result of conspiracies by foreign enemies, and we mustn’t forget the mistakes and careless acts that are done inside the country. But we should also realize that the country has enemies and our enemies are not just standing by and doing nothing. Foreign plots against Iran [ ... ] are constantly being planned and carried out (Mohammadi 2006, my emphasis). The threat of foreign plots has been the most efficient tool in thwarting the legal endeavours of the NGOs, and by linking the activities of these organizations to Western conspiracies all manner of punitive repercussions are legitimized. As one NGO manager said about the regime, ‘The more paranoid they get, the further the consequences for the civil society. And at the moment they are paranoid about everything’ (Interview, October 2005, Tehran).

Attacks on civil society The reintroduction of a security-led governmentality created intensified self-censorship among the NGOs and an urgent need for new strategies, demonstrating the degree to which governmentality works as a disciplining and internalizing means of power. When the old

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administration was swept out of office and replaced by people with no interest in nurturing civil society, a growing fear emerged. There was no longer any protection. ‘Only when Khatami was president could we breathe for a while’, a woman with years of NGO experience told me. In a voice of despair, she continued: ‘I just get so tired. For how long can we go on? We don’t know anyone anymore’ (Interview, November 2005, Tehran). The pārti-bāzi (play of connections), which is inherently important in Iran as a mode for anyone to navigate through legal and political ambiguities, had become far more difficult – especially for civil society activists. It was also rumoured that the Ministry of Intelligence had prepared a list of NGOs to be prosecuted. In September 2005 the moderate daily E’temad reported that the Ministry had ‘drawn up a charter for the activities of NGOs and sent it to the cabinet’, and that this charter would require NGOs to register at the Ministry of Intelligence, as well as the ministry related to their field of work – an unprecedented move by the Ministry of Intelligence, exploiting the atmosphere of legal ambiguity to further control NGO activities. E’temad voiced a sharp critique: ‘it will bring them [the NGOs] under a security and intelligence category, which is not correct’ (Mirfattahi 2005). This allegation was entirely dismissed by Ahmadinezhad at a news conference in January 2006. Mr Najafpur, a journalist from E’temad, raised the issue: ‘It’s been heard recently that a list of NGOs has been drawn up [ ... ] with the aim of confronting them [ ... ]’ Ahmadinezhad: ‘Where has it been drawn up?’ Najafpur: ‘A list has been drawn up by the Interior Ministry and they’re to be confronted’. Ahmadinezhad: ‘Who’s going to be confronted?’ Najafpur: ‘The NGOs’. Ahmadinezhad: ‘Why?’ Najafpur: ‘Well, the report that was disseminated said that –’ Ahmadinezhad: ‘Go back five questions. It’s the continuation of the same thing’.

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Najafpur: ‘[They’re going to be confronted] On the basis of the suggestion that they’re linked to – a domestic paper reported this too, Dr Ahmadinezhad’. Ahmadinezhad: ‘They write lots of this sort of thing’. (IRINN 2006a). Despite President Ahmadinezhad’s denials, the reported attacks on civil society activists are numerous. Demonstrations by women, teachers and trade unions have been suppressed. A number of student activists have been arrested and tortured. Several people were arrested for participating in NGO conferences abroad. In March 2007, three important NGO resource centres in Tehran were closed down and their directors arrested: the Iran Civil Society Resource Center, headed by Sohrab Razzaghi; the Rahi Institute (a centre providing legal advice for women), led by Shadi Sadr; and the Women’s NGO Job Training Center, headed by Mahboubeh Abbosgholizadeh. Shirin Ebadi’s human rights NGO was threatened with closure in August 2006, and was eventually ransacked and closed down in December 2008. A number of cases have been directly ‘legitimized’ or justified using the American 75 million dollars proposal (Advar website 2007; E’temad-e Melli 2007; Memarian 2007; Mir-Hosseini 2006; Human Rights Watch 2006a, 2006b, 2008; Esfandiari 2006; Samii 2006d, 2006e; Allebadashti 2006; Tait 2007). From interviews I conducted with Razzaghi and Abbasgholizadeh in 2003 and 2004, it was clear that they worked hard to strike the right balance, pushing for their NGO agenda, but always critically assessing how to create a civil society in accordance with Iranian traditions. However, on the basis of funding they received from the Dutch Hivos Foundation, an organization allegedly connected to the US, they were accused of carrying out the project of ‘creeping subversion’. The hard-line daily, Keyhan, referred to these NGOs as ‘puppets’ controlled by European countries and the US, with ‘broad ties with the subversive oppositionists abroad’ (Keyhan 2007b). The hard-line weekly Partow-e Sokhan called on security officials to ‘purge the political arena of those working as non-government organizations or media outlets’ since ‘global arrogance funds its domestic agents with suitcases full of dollars’ (Reza’ian 2007).

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Accusing the NGOs of being ‘foreign enemies’ and corrupted by imported, ‘Western’ values is both a way of signalling change – in this case, the ascendance of a new political elite – and a way of clarifying and entrenching their ideas and ideals of the state. As Mary Douglas says: ‘The accusation can be completely outrageous; it will be credible essentially if the political system on whose behalf it is made is accepted. The process of formally accusing, testifying, verifying, and remedying play a crucial part in entrenching the system’ (1992: 87). The NGOs constitute ‘margins’ in Mary Douglas’ sense, embodying the very danger of defilement. The NGOs represent a gate to the West, a ‘weakness’ in the system, and a defilement of the ‘true’ values of the revolution. What is dangerous is not so much the fact that the NGOs embody ‘participation’, but that it is ‘the wrong kind’ of public participation, that is, it is not confined to religious organizations. President Ahmadinezhad has attempted to recast ‘democracy’ as a harmful, imperialistic invention. By pointing to the atrocities in Afghanistan and Iraq and the ways in which the USA’s ‘war on terror’ has been conducted in the name of democracy and human rights, President Ahmadinezhad has quite successfully endowed these keywords with all the negative connotations of imperialism and double standards. Addressing the people of Qazvin in June 2006, he said: As you can see, those professing to be the guardians of human rights have their hands soiled by injustice, crimes, torture and bullying. The actions of Ghengis Khan and Nero are pale in comparison to what has been going on in their prisons in Guantanamo, Abu-Ghurayb ... (IRINN 2006b; cf. Bahari 2006b).

‘In the Name of Democracy’ Several cases involving Iranians with dual citizenship also underscored the impact of the US funding proposal on the Iranian government’s tolerance for dialogue and democracy. The April 2006 detention of the secular philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo was the first such arrest. In

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Keyhan and Jomhuri-ye Eslami, Jahanbegloo was denounced as a ‘spy’ and ‘foreign operative’ with links to CIA and Mossad, and with ‘counterrevolutionary objectives aimed at overthrowing the regime’ (Rahbar 2006). After four months in solitary confinement, he was accused of instigating a ‘velvet revolution’ backed by the US (but never formally charged or tried). Upon his release in August 2006, he was driven directly to the ISNA news agency to do an interview, where he ‘confessed’ to being ‘used’ by foreigners (ISNA website 2006b). As an intellectual admired worldwide for his work on Iranian modernity, democracy and tolerance Ramin Jahanbegloo epitomized Khatami’s call for dialogue among civilizations, both by prompting dialogues between Western and Eastern intellectual traditions in his work (2004b), and by inviting distinguished Western scholars like Jürgen Habermas, Michael Ignatieff, Timothy Garton Ash, Agnes Heller and Richard Rorty to speak in Iran. As Ramin Jahanbegloo put it in an interview a few months before his arrest: In Iran today, ‘intellectualism’ is an accusation often concomitant with that of ‘being pro-Western’, a deviation from the official line. Therefore, inviting intellectuals like Negri, Rorty, Habermas, Heller and Ricoeur is a way of crossing borderlines without leaving the country. It is a way of bringing into Iran the voices of other cultures so as to further cross-cultural dialogue (in Postel 2006: 99). Lecturing on the concepts, which civil society activists sought to put into practice, he also personified the close link between the intellectuals and NGOs, which characterized the reform movement (ibid. 78; Jahanbegloo 2000, 2003). As such, Jahanbegloo’s position was outstanding, and his arrest sent a clear signal that no one should feel safe. Following the same rationality, four Iranian-American citizens were detained in May 2007 accused of espionage, cooperation with Zionists and attempts to undermine the ‘national security’. Among them were the prominent scholars Haleh Esfandiary from the Woodrow Wilson Centre for Scholars in Washington, who was released in August 2007,

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and Kian Tajbakhsh, a social scientist and former lecturer at New York School, working for, among others, the Soros Foundation’s Open Society Institute in Tehran. He was released in September 2007. In July 2007 Jahanbegloo, Esfandiary and Tajbakhsh appeared in a televised programme with the Orwellian and keyword-capturing title, ‘In the Name of Democracy’ (VIRIN1 2007). Returning to the methods of televised, coerced confessions, which had been prevalent in the 1980s (Abrahamian 1999), the detainees gave accounts of their relations with American research organizations, implying links with the US regime-change efforts. Tajbakhsh ‘confessed’ that the Soros Foundation was involved in toppling East European communist regimes in the late 1980s and that the NGOs had played a part. A ‘model based on Western democracy will promote the NGOs here’, Tajbakhsh stated, and ‘the outcome of this work will be the creation of a wedge between the government and the people via the local civil society’. This reference to a subversive ‘wedge’ clearly echoes the official line toward NGOs, but it is miles away from Tajbakhsh’s scholarly position, where he had critically engaged with the concept of civil society (Tajbakhsh 2000). In the programme it was also presented as a crime that Tajbakhsh ‘admitted’ to having translated Robert Putnam’s book, Social Capital, into Persian. The way the confession was framed contributed to mobilizing new, illegitimate meanings to the keyword of ‘democracy’. Although claims of conspiracies and ‘fifth column’ activities have been often repeated in Iranian politics throughout the twentieth century (Abrahamian 1993), it is important to specify how the present governmentality, with its systematized control and accusations of espionage interrelate with the American efforts, and also what kind of ‘space to be governed’ this political rationale makes possible (cf. Shore and Wright 1997: 30). As Mary Douglas says: ‘Blaming is a way of manning the gates through which all information has to pass [ ... ], and at the same time arming the guard’ (1992: 19). In Iran, this blame game is ammunition in a fight over the interpretations of Islam, and, more importantly, a fight to enforce a more security-oriented interpretation of governance, embracing the militarization of the revolutionary momentum.

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When I met Kian Tajbakhsh in November 2005 in Tehran, he neatly foresaw what would likely take place under the new regime. Analysing and assessing the first few months of Ahmadinezhad’s government, Tajbakhsh was worried that Iran would be moving ‘from an irrational to a rational, systematized kind of control’; from formerly random attacks by the basijs in the streets to far more systematized, discriminatory policies. This is exactly what has happened.

NGOs walking on a tightrope In addition to arresting and harassing civil society activists and intellectuals, the regime has hijacked and politicized the keywords associated with civil society, restricting the NGOs’ entire field of action. When all concepts like democracy, human rights, civil society, NGOs and social capital are equated with and made into ‘proofs’ of Western imperialism and plots, civil society activists have to work hard and cunningly in order to carve out another space in which they can operate – if they are not entirely silenced. As Ramin Jahanbegloo said, shortly before his arrest: ‘An independent and critical thinker in Iran who takes responsibility for the marginal status thrust upon him is like an acrobat walking on a tightrope’ (in Postel 2006: 124). Likewise, the NGOs are also walking on a tightrope in order to avoid being castigated as spies. They do so by keeping a low profile (‘We keep our heads down’, my informants said in autumn 2005), and using the vestiges of Khatami’s language, while embracing Ahmadinezhad’s religiously framed security concerns. NGOs have vociferously defended Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear energy, and plenty of NGOs and observers have criticized American efforts to spread democracy abroad (Postel 2006: 50ff; Esfandiari and Litwak 2007; IRNA website 2006a; Salek 2006; Ya Lesarat Ol-Hoseyn 2006b; Bahari 2006a). ‘This US interference can lead to the death of civil society at a young age’, Sohrab Razzaghi said upon his release from incarceration in June 2007: ‘The US should let societies like Iran practice democracy themselves. This may take longer but it will last longer’ (in Bozorgmehr and Dinmore 2007).

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Some of my informants stressed the need to lobby government officials, putting a stop to the mischaracterization of NGOs as ‘imported’ from the West by promoting themselves as organizations deeply-rooted within the Iranian charitable traditions. Instead of the broad advocacy efforts, promoted through big conferences, which were prevalent during my 2003 and 2004 visits, the same NGOs would now attempt to target the government at local levels, and in a more low-key fashion: ‘We just try to prove ourselves, and get on with our work. We need to prove ourselves’, as one NGO manager put it (Interview, November 2005, Tehran). An NGO activist who has been imprisoned several times (most recently in 2007), said upon her release that despite the clampdowns, the NGO activists still carried on working, but they did so in a more covert, underground way. Instead of operating out of an official NGO office, they conducted their work based on what she called ‘flexible networks’ (Interview, August 2008, Toronto). Several of my informants would try to comply with the new political discourse in framing their activities and ‘Iranizing’ their work. Rather than using the English ‘NGO’ and ‘NGO-hā’ (NGO in Persian plural), they would use the Persian translation ‘sāzmān-e (or anjoman-e) gheire dolati’ or simply refer to their organization as a ‘kheirieh’, normally used for religious charities. As an NGO activist put it, August 2005: It’s all about words and vocabulary. From the government and media’s point of view, these are ‘bad’ words: gender, equity, capacity building, civil society, empowerment; so now we have to use new ‘good’ words which are: entrepreneur, micro-credit, social justice, poverty, anti-prostitution, vulnerable groups, jobcreation, millennium development goals. It doesn’t mean we have to do anything different (in Squire 2006: 37). But the NGOs’ range of options also depends on their field of activity. Women and human rights activists have been more harshly confronted due to their proclaimed push for ‘rights’ than NGOs working on poverty alleviation, health issues and vulnerable groups like handicapped children. Whereas the former are more in line with the concepts Khatami put forward, the latter fit better with Ahmadinezhad’s

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renewed focus on social justice, the poor, and the deprived. As will become apparent in chapter 6, where I outline the work of drug treatment NGOs, the level of state scrutiny also depends on the extent to which the social services of the NGOs are useful to the state, that is, where they take over state responsibilities of caring for the ambiguous outcasts.

Media critique: NGOs as ‘guards of security’ As Lila Abu-Lughod says, resistance is a ‘diagnostic of power’ (1990: 41–2). The resistance and responses of the civil society activists reflect the prevailing kind of governmentality. But their responses also point to the continued survival of the reform movement’s notions of participation, expertise and critique of power. Although the Iranian media was instructed to ‘report positively’ on Ahmadinezhad’s government, the media continued to feature a vibrant criticism of the government’s approach to NGOs, foreign policy and the mismanagement of the financial sector (Samii 2006f). Commentators criticized the ‘constant suppression’ and ‘unkindly treatment’ of NGOs and have pushed for their protection. In part, they showed support by reinstating the keywords of the previous president’s reform movement – sovereignty of the people, expertise, dignity, legitimacy, the rule of law, and rights. They also played on the hard-liners’ security concerns. Several commentators used the threat of the enemy, that is, the USA (which they all take for granted), as a reason not to interfere with the NGOs and the media. Terming the NGOs ‘guards of security’ they emphasized that civil society can promote ‘domestic harmony and unity’ and be a countermeasure to the nuclear confrontation (Farhang-e Ashti 2005b, 2007; IRNA website 2006b, 2006c; Kargozaran 2007; E’temad website 2006b; Saleh-Jalali 2007; E’temad 2007a, 2007b). In October 2005, the well-known human rights activist Emadeddin Baqi, who in July 2007 received a three-year prison sentence, stressed that civil society would protect Iran from foreign enemies (Baqi 2005; Reporters Without Borders 2007). NGOs should be perceived as an

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asset, he wrote in the reformist daily, Sharq, for ‘a domestic critic is always more trustworthy than a foreign friend’. Denouncing the government’s ‘radical, extremist approaches’ and the ‘neglect’ of ‘society’s capacities’, Baqi emphasized that attacking civil society could prove counterproductive: Under circumstances in which America and the Western world employ every possible means to force Iran to surrender, political restrictions on domestic opposition groups could strengthen foreign positions against Iran and prepare world opinion for effective military and economic action against our nation (Baqi 2005). Meanwhile, repeated attacks on NGOs by the Minister of Intelligence led the opposition group, Freedom Movement, to issue a statement saying that the ‘approach’ of the Intelligence Ministry ‘causes concern’. Emphasizing that it is ‘natural’ for these organizations to ‘criticize’ the government, the Freedom Movement maintained that ‘making such statements may lower the dignity of the Intelligence Ministry’ and that it could ‘deal the worst blow to the legitimacy of the system’ and be exploited by foreign media (ISNA website 2006a).

Conservative cleavages: lack of expertise These vocal defences of the NGOs are but one element in a much broader critique of President Ahmadinezhad’s populist financial policies and confrontational stance to the West. His government is criticized for lacking expertise, evading its critics, ‘diverting attention from unfulfilled promises’, and for discrediting the national experts (E’temad 2007d; International Crisis Group 2007; Mehrabi 2006; Jamshidi 2006; Aftab-e Yazd 2006g).43 Public dissatisfaction has manifested in repeated demonstrations by workers, bus drivers and teachers, who challenge Ahmadinezhad’s self-depiction as the ‘man of the people’ and stress his failed promises of social justice (Maljoo 2006; Samii 2006a, 2006b, 2006e).

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One of the striking paradoxes of the arrests, which have taken place during Ahmadinezhad’s first presidency, is that they were also very clearly directed at people who were supposed to be part of his constituency. Arrests of civil society activists – including women and student activists, NGOs, intellectuals and journalists – are not entirely surprising in the current international and domestic context. Less expected and less noticed, but also significantly more precarious for Ahmadinezhad, were the numerous arrests of teachers, union leaders and labour activists which followed the arrest in December 2005 of the bus driver union leader, Mahsoud Osanlou, who is now serving a five-year prison sentence (Sepehri 2006).44 Whereas the arrests of student activists were a bloody stain on Khatami’s mantle of democracy, likewise the arrests of labour activists and teachers are a sore spot on Ahmadinezhad’s promises of social justice for the workers and the poor. As Dr. Mohammad Alizadeh, deputy of the former head of the Management and Planning Organization’s Macroeconomic Office said: The widening gap between the social layers is exactly contrary to the president’s slogans based on social justice; and the interesting point is that these deprived layers are more concerned about the Revolution, so if class distinctions sharpen, their opinion about the Revolution will also change (Resalat 2006b). Ahmadinezhad’s policies and unwillingness to change course have given rise to growing cleavages among the conservative fractions. Newspapers increasingly reported discontent among President Ahmadinezhad’s own political supporters – including MPs, the judiciary, and even hard-line newspapers like Keyhan. In July 2006, Nasser Ashuri, a member of the majles’ Economic Affairs Commission said: We, the critics, are not dissidents and opposed to the government; in fact, we are with the government and among its supporters. However [ ... ] we must try to see the social and economic realities and other facts as they really are. The truth is that rents have gone up and the price of dwellings and their leases have

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risen. The core reason has been the wrong policies of the government in this sphere ( Jomhuri-ye Eslami 2006). The administration’s lack of expertise is a common source of criticism. Both in June 2006 and in June 2007, a group of financial experts published long, lambasting letters, assessing Ahmadinezhad’s financial policies: increasing inflation, reduced economic growth, waste of oil resources, a weakening of the banking systems, and failure to obtain ‘appropriate interaction with the outside world’. The government’s ‘efforts have been contrary to scientific standards for economic policies, and to the recognized rules of the management of the public sector’, they said (E’temad website 2007b; Vaziri 2006). The centrist daily Mardom-Salari followed up: The president considers himself and his cronies to be among the experts and constantly reiterates that he is in touch with the experts. The question is whether those university lecturers and economists who wrote to the president, criticizing the actions of the Ninth Administration are not among the experts (MardomSalari website 2007a). Commenting on Ahmadinezhad’s slogan of being a ‘man of the people’ even the hard-line daily Keyhan remarked: ‘the government should not hide behind the excuse of having established direct contact with the people, and deem itself needless of cooperation and interaction with experts and consultation with prominent figures’ (Keyhan 2007a). In August 2007, most unusually, the head of the judiciary, Ayatollah Shahroudi, joined the critics and blamed the government for ‘needlessly changing top officials’ – an accusation which was completely dismissed by the President’s office (AFP 2007). The harshness of the criticism was rather significant. Equally remarkable was the continued vitality of the public sphere despite all the administration’s efforts to limit it, and the extent to which the reform movement’s call for independent media, expertise, rule of law, political parties, and NGOs continued to shape both the form and content of Iranian political debate. In January 2007, the centrist daily,

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Mardom-Salari, condemned the rising prices, Tehran’s lack of infrastructure, attacks on workers’ rights, Iran’s deteriorating foreign relations, and Ahmadinezhad’s arrogance towards the first UN resolution, enforced in December 2006. Emphasizing that ‘the time has come for the president to welcome a debate with his critics instead of delivering one-sided speeches’, Mardom-Salari argued that Ahmadinezhad has a ‘dangerous’ attitude to political parties, experts and the media: ‘The president speaks about his critics [ ... ] as if [they] are not people’ (Mardom-Salari website 2007a). Likewise, in March 2007 Morteza Kazemian, a journalist belonging to the religious-nationalist opposition movement, summarized the ‘dire consequences’ of the government – the inflation boost, suppression of NGOs, restrictions on the media, deteriorating foreign relations and ‘the repeated remarks about Holocaust’. But Kazemian still concluded on a positive note: Today’s Iran has changed in terms of culture, society, population, and economy, and does not tolerate such a government, even if there seems to be silence, calm, and indifference in the short term. ‘Hope’ is not lost. Although less active than before, Iran’s civil society movement is still alive (Kazemian 2007). Many of the NGOs and civil society activists have been silenced, some by violent means, and in that sense, the optimism of Kazemian’s closing words may seem misplaced. But what gave rise to ‘hope’ from a reformist perspective was the fact that even among conservative factions the keywords of reform – the emphasis on dialogue, expertise, legitimacy and sovereignty of the people – had become an ingrained part of the political vocabulary. Importantly, these critical statements still found their way to the newspapers.

A Frankenstein syndrome? The ways in which President Ahmadinezhad’s government has hijacked the space for local NGOs and countered Khatami’s discourse of dialogue provide a good example of how governmentality works.

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Discursively reframing the keywords, legally restricting the NGOs’ endeavours, and enforcing self-censorship, arrests and clampdowns, the government has radically restructured the NGOs’ ‘possible field of action’ (Foucault 1988: 221). As Dreyfus and Rabinow point out: ‘the normalizing practices of bio-power define the normal in advance and then proceed to isolate and deal with anomalies given that definition’ (1983: 258). This is the case for outcast social categories like drug users, which I will move onto in the next chapter, but it is also striking in regard to specific kinds of public participation. Occupying a space on the margins of the state, institutionally and normatively, the situation of the NGOs point to the techniques of power employed in Iran after 1997. These techniques transcend the state, but are an important instrument and reflection of the Iranian ‘state effect’ (Mitchell 1999). These policies are not embraced univocally, however. Local NGOs amend their strategies. To avoid being demonized as enemies of the nation, they embrace national security concerns, but they continue to employ the vestiges of Khatami’s discourse. The debates show that a fierce conflict still exists over the meanings of these words. Although Ahmadinezhad reiterates the revolutionary slogans of Ayatollah Khomeini in regard to Israel, the poor, and the downtrodden, the criticism voiced by Ahmadinezhad’s supporters shows that the attitude even among the conservatives has changed since the revolution, paving the way for more technocratic and expertise-based policies. And although drawing on Ayatollah Khomeini’s legitimacy, some of Ahmadinezhad’s political moves even defy Khomeini’s guidelines. Most notably, in his attempts to counter the discourse of democracy, Ahmadinezhad has ignored Ayatollah Khomeini’s warnings against a militarization of the political system, assigning an unprecedentedly political role to the Revolutionary Guards and the basijs. Ahmadinezhad continues to forcefully fight off his opponents, and the situation of the NGOs clearly illustrates the sovereign methods of governance he is willing to enforce – a sovereignty which, as Dean says, ‘operates through spectacle and ritual, it prohibits forms of action, it seizes things, bodies, and ultimately life itself’ (2001: 49). At the same time, the vocal critique in the media – however subtle – demonstrates that the trajectories of Khatami’s reform movement

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have not been eliminated. Instead of a glorious ‘return’ to the 1980s, Ahmadinezhad’s rule has seen further polarization between reformists and conservatives, and also among conservative factions. Political infighting reveals widely different ideas as to the role of ‘the people’, the correct way to manage the dual sovereignty enshrined in the constitution, and the ways in which the Iranian governmentality should address and protect the values of the revolution. These debates reveal one, among many, fundamental questions: what does it mean to be a ‘revolutionary’ and govern at the same time? Criticizing Ahmadinezhad’s ‘mosque model’, Mardom-Salari quoted Ludvig Wittgenstein: ‘The real revolutionary is someone who can transform him/herself’ (Mardom-Salari 2005). This encapsulates the pragmatic view held by the reformists that even the most strident revolutionaries need to meet the demands of their time. Change is necessary and must be based on people’s participation – ‘reform or risk explosion’, as President Khatami said. Khatami believed that in order to secure the revolutionary momentum, the meaning of security had to be revised, and a distinction must be made between ‘the security of the cemetery’ (security of the state) and ‘participatory security’ (security for the society and people).45 To President Ahmadinezhad, however, safeguarding the revolution’s future means a return to the security and participation prevailing in the 1980s, combined with a militarization of the public administration and political sphere, which may even go beyond what the founding father of the revolution envisioned. The internal political fight is also related to and reflects a much more aggressive American policy towards Iran after Ahmadinezhad’s election, which naturally begs the question ‘what came first?’ One can argue that the Supreme Leader endorsed Ahmadinezhad as president in 2005 because he had realized that the strategy of dialogue with the EU and the USA over Iran’s nuclear facilities had failed, and that Iran needed a more uncompromising approach. However, although Ahmadinezhad clearly was the Supreme Leader’s choice (‘entekhāb nabud, entezāb bud’, ‘it wasn’t an election, it was a selection’, as one of my informants put it in November 2005), Ahmadinezhad’s attitude and statements have also elicited increasing criticism and uneasiness among his supporters. As a financial analyst in Tehran said in

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November 2005, Ahmadinezhad’s first few months in power had raised the fear of a ‘Frankenstein syndrome’. Perhaps the regime born of the revolution had conjured up a president more radical, isolationist, and impervious to international opinion than even the conservative factions or the Supreme Leader were prepared to manage.

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CHAPTER 4 CHANGING DRUG POLICIES: INSTITUTIONALIZING A NEW SOCIAL OR DER

‘Purity’ and ‘danger’ are condensed arguments passionately flung against opponents in every dialogue that every community has about its own constitution. Mary Douglas (1992: 14)

An Iranian disease ‘We do have a problem here and we have to deal with it’, Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, head of the Expediency Council told a Friday prayer congregation in April 2006, pointing at the increasing amount of drug use (VIRI 2006a). Iran is holding an unofficial world record in drug use, which has created a crisis and led the Iranian government to reconsider its previous policies. After the 1979 revolution, rehabilitation of drug users was terminated and they were only perceived as criminals, leading to the incarceration and execution of thousands of drug dealers and drug users. In 1998, however, treatment of drug users was legalized, and since that time extensive rehabilitation facilities have been created, joined by measures to contain HIV/AIDS. The shifting place of drug users in Iranian society – from the ‘margins’ of danger and moral depravity

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to the ‘margins’ of illness and want – illustrates ongoing efforts to demarcate the ‘margins’ of the state. These ‘margins’ are territorially defined – fighting drug trafficking from Afghanistan is a territorial battlefield on the borders of the state – but they are also used to emphasize internal security concerns, erecting moral boundaries and eradicating what is perceived as ‘the significant Other’ in G.H. Mead’s sense (1934). Like the NGOs discussed in the previous chapter, the issue of drug use constitutes a moralized ‘margin’ of the state, revealing which of ‘the people’ have rights, and which do not. As I have argued, the definition and role of ‘the people’ was among the key issues debated and reframed during the reform movement. Whereas the last chapter pointed to the ways in which different political actors have fought over the role ‘the people’ can and should play, this chapter focuses on how the definition of ‘the people’ changed during the reform movement. As I said in the introductory chapter, in autumn 2005 I was struck by the fact that it was less sensitive to work on the issue of drug use than on NGOs and civil society. As Kian Tajbaksh pointed out, the real question is: why is drug use not a controversial topic in Iran (Interview, November 2005, Tehran)? What made treatment of drug users become a public, religiously endorsed, Iranian policy? How was this change from strict supply reduction to a remarkably progressive and permissive drug ‘treatment policy’ conducted and legitimized religiously? What are ‘the conditions which make these [practices] acceptable at a given moment’, as Foucault says (1991b: 75)? I will argue that although it was easy for the Islamic Republic to keep treating drug users entirely as outcasts, the fact that many of the ‘sacred’ social categories of the revolution – particularly the war veterans – also became addicted, forced the state to reclassify the categories of the vulnerable people, and to redefine drug treatment as an ‘Islamic duty’. These changing notions of vulnerability, combined with the reformist implementation of expertise, have gradually led to a more inclusive definition of ‘the people’. I use these changing drug policies as a case to show how the processes of moral inclusion and exclusion are constantly negotiated. The

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‘margins’ between the normal and the deviant, the included (patients) and the excluded (arrested or executed criminals) constitute a perpetually moving frontline on a political battlefield, revealing the intriguing dilemmas of a state in a constant process of being morally and politically re-constituted. The drug policies reflect the balancing act between security concerns, the role of religion, and the political and professional drive to implement technologically modern, medical solutions. Islamic jurists support both sides of this frontline – some of them see drug users as inherently evil, while others as patients entitled to treatment. Based on an interpretative reading of how drug policies are debated and politicized in the media, medical records and state officials’ reports, I approach the Iranian drug crisis as an ‘apparatus’ in Foucault’s sense (Foucault 1980: 194ff). As Feldman says, the ‘apparatus’ is ‘a device of population control and economic management composed of disparate elements that coalesce in particular historical conjunctures, usually moments identified as “crises” ’ (forthcoming: 1). Iran’s drug crisis brings together a number of disparate policies, discourses and governmental actors, conducting what Foucault would call a strategic control of the population. I will discuss how these different perceptions and policy domains interweave in controlling and treating the drug crisis, creating drug users as targets of contradictory state interventions. As Musto pointed out in his classic book on drug control in the USA, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control (1999 [1973]), historically drug policies have been formed in relation to contentious, political issues and developments. Similarly, the goal of this chapter is to show how drug use has become ‘an Iranian disease’. The Iranian drug ‘apparatus’ consists of two competing orders and discourses on drug users (perceiving them as criminals or patients), and two competing and intertwined notions of power. In Foucault’s terminology, the first power discourse is one of sovereign state power, which manifests itself through public displays of violence, and where drug policies become part of a ‘securitization’ discourse (Buzan et al. 1998). In the first section I focus on this ‘securitization’ of drugs, and how the keywords of ‘national security’ and ‘foreign conspiracies’ have

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been used to legitimize extensive state violence. I also discuss how the ‘securitization’ of drug trafficking has been a venue for dialogue with the West. The other power discourse reveals a ‘biopolitical’ power, which seeks to normalize, rehabilitate and medicalize drug users. In the second section of the chapter, I catalogue the events, actors and perceptions which made treatment of drug users possible. However, as the third and last section will show, the resulting ‘apparatus’ and political order is not an ‘either/or’, but a complex combination of these approaches, revealing constant contradictions in the employed strategies of control.

Iran’s history of drug use Iran holds a world record in drug use. Out of a population of 70 million people between 3.5 and 4 million are allegedly drug users – primarily of opium and heroin, but also of synthetic drugs, crack and hashish. Of those, 1.5–2.5 million people are officially recognized as ‘full time’ drug users (i.e. addicted), and 2–300,000 are injecting drug users (IDUs).46 Whereas the percentage of drug users, for instance in the USA, is around 0.5 per cent, in Iran it is closer to 5 per cent.47 In 2000, the Tehran municipality claimed that nationwide five tons of drugs were consumed daily (IRNA 2000b). Rampant drug use is not a new thing in Iran. Smoking and eating opium has been prevalent and at times widespread since the fifteenth century reign of the Safavids (and presumably before too), especially among elderly men (Matthee 2005: 97–107). By 1943, allegedly more than 10 per cent of the population had (ever) used opium (Raisdana and Nakhjavani 2002: 151). In the 1950s, 1.5 million people out of a population of 19 million were said to be drug users, according to the Ministry of Health (Saleh 1956). Even so, after the revolution the number of drug users has climbed. More significantly, the consumption patterns have changed. Drug use today is common among a younger part of the population (UNODC 2006; Interviews, January 2003, November 2005, Tehran). In the Iranian media, drug use is described as a ‘social plague’, a

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‘calamity’, a ‘rage’ among the youth. Recent statistics from the DCHQ shows that 13 per cent of high school students and 20 per cent of university students are drug users (Sarami 2006).48 Although often linked to poverty and unemployment, drug use is common among all social classes. Another important change in the pattern is that the use of heroin and injecting heroin is increasing, leading to escalating numbers of deaths due to overdoses, and rising risk of viral, blood-borne diseases like HIV (Samii and Recknagel 1999; Zamani et al. 2005: 710). In 2006, drug use was presented as the ‘fourth cause of death in the country’ (Hemayat 2006a). From 1994 to 2003, 15,365 drug-related deaths were reported (UNODC 2007a), and in an alarming 2006 report, the DCHQ noted that, ‘one addict dies every two hours in the country’ (Hemayat 2006e). In 2006, the commander of the Law Enforcement Forces announced that more than 5,000 drug users had died of overdoses within the last year (Keyhan 2006). Synthetic drugs like ecstasy are also on the rise (Samii 2003b, 2005a; Aftab-e Yazd 2006d). The reliability of these numbers is questionable, but even the more conservative estimates are surprisingly high. Why? There is no question that sharing a 936 km-long border with Afghanistan, the world’s largest opium producer, heavily contributes to the problem.49 Tons of opium and heroin are smuggled through the country every day, which means that opium and heroin are cheaply available everywhere.50 Iran’s law enforcement agencies make some 85 per cent of the world’s total drugs seizures; quantities which over the last ten years have ranged between 140 and 310 thousand tons drugs annually.51 Even so, in 2000 UNODC estimated that the police only caught 17 per cent of the drugs passing through Iran (Samii 2000a, 2003d). While the explanation for Iran’s immense drug problem is irrefutably related to drug trafficking, since the mid-1990s, state officials and professionals have recognized that addiction is widespread for a number of social reasons. In these accounts the drug crisis epitomizes the social consequences and dilemmas post-revolutionary Iran has created and is going to face: ‘the still surfacing after-effects of the imposed war’ with Iraq in 1980–88 (Iran Daily 1998); the problems of poverty (10 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line);

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urbanization, and unemployment; a bored, restless, and rebellious population of young people; social restrictions; family crises, divorces and domestic violence; 300,000 prostitutes; a high suicide rate; homelessness, and runaway children. All in all, post-revolutionary Iranian society, particularly Iranian youth, is deeply and desperately vulnerable to drug use, a fact which the government is unable to ignore (Gorgin and Recknagel 2000a, 2000c; Samii 2002b, 2002c, 2003a; Mostaghim 2004).

The dual strategy of the Pahlavi Shahs It is not the first time in Iran’s recent history that the government has attempted to curb the spread of drug addiction. During the reign of the Pahlavis (1921–79), especially the last Shah (1941–79), the drug issue was also critical. Apart from diminishing the drug trafficking from Afghanistan, one of the main supply reduction battles for Mohammad Reza Shah was to effectively put an end to poppy cultivation on Iranian territory. A law in 1956 banning poppy growing was quickly deemed ‘remarkably successful’ by foreign observers (Wright et al. 1958; Saleh 1956). With a new law enacted in June 1959, the focus shifted more towards illicit trafficking, and heavier penalties were introduced, including death penalty for ‘persistent large-scale smuggling, cultivation of the opium poppy and manufacture of heroin’ (Radji 1959; cf. Radji 1960; Wright et al. 1960). Since 1968, Iran has held a constant world record in drug seizures (Raisdana and Nakhjavani 2002: 152). During the reign of the last Shah, rehabilitation and treatment facilities for drug users were provided. The government pursued a dual strategy, which was nicely summed up by Iran’s Minister of Health in 1959, when he said: ‘A cure must be found. To cure those who can be cured and to remove by imprisonment those who cannot be cured’ (Radji 1959). In the 1960s and 1970s, drug users over the age of 50 could obtain opium coupons for treatment, and in 1974–77 the government implemented a large-scale detoxification programme, covering 30,000 patients through outpatient treatment with opium tablets and methadone (UNODC 2007a; Moharreri 1976). However, in 1974, there was still only one hospital in Tehran specializing in drug

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treatment (Moharreri 1976), and the rehabilitation facilities ‘were not effective in reducing the number of substance users’, which, in 1976, was estimated to include 2.5 per cent of the population (Raisdana and Nakhjavani 2002: 152).52

A new revolutionary order The 1979 revolution marked a new Islamic order and a radical break in the approach to drug treatment. All efforts to rehabilitate drug users on a voluntary basis were terminated; instead, for the next fifteen years, the authorities only pursued rigorous methods of supply reduction. Drug users and drug dealers – the ‘sodagarān-e marg’ (‘merchants of death’) – were subjected to severe prison sentences, if not execution. They were portrayed as a danger and ‘significant Other’ to the Islamic social order, as evidence of foreign conspiracies, and as a threat to the national security. The methods of supply reduction were (and still are) justified, not only in accordance with the amounts of drug trafficking, but also with reference to the Islamic constitution of Iran. Alongside a number of other social issues which were submitted to the revolutionary Islamization process – consumption of alcohol, music, media, films, dress code, family law – drug use was not only deemed un-Islamic but also perceived as the kind of ‘social corruption’ and ‘Westoxification’ from which the revolution and ‘true Islam’ were intended to rid Iran. Ayatollah Khomeini put the blame for Iran’s social problems, including drug use, squarely on the decadence and influence of the West (Abrahamian 1993: 120ff). Over 10,000 drug users and dealers have been executed since 1979; many of them have been hanged in public – in a Foucauldian display of state sovereignty. Like thousands of other people deemed ‘anti-revolutionary’ and ‘corrupted on earth’, hundreds, even thousands of drug users were executed in the first years after the revolution, alongside other outcasts such as prostitutes and homosexuals (Khan 2004; Rejali 1994). The danger of drug use mirrored the political fear of a counterrevolution, the revolutionary ‘need’ to purge Iran from anti-Islam and disorder, from dissidents and opposition figures (Bakhash 1990: 110–12).53

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Rehabilitation did not entirely cease to exist, but it took the form of forced detoxification, primarily in prisons and internment camps (or it took place in clinics operating underground) (Interview, November 2005, Tehran). In 1983, so-called ‘special rehabilitation centres’ were established under the State Welfare Organization where drug users were referred by the courts (Raisdana and Nakhjavani 2002: 153). In a clinical study of a rehabilitation centre in Shiraz in 1980, Dalvand, Agahi and Spencer concluded that ‘The system of registration of elderly and chronically sick addicts [who could receive opium coupons] officially ended; and the existing clinics were under considerable pressure to see a larger number and range of addicts than before’ (1984: 92). The revolutionary attitude to drug users was partly supported from a professional stance by psychiatrists who believed that detoxification provided by imprisonment was a better solution, and partly from a moral, religious point of view (Interviews, November 2005, Tehran). But even those professionals who did not agree on the newly adopted line were forced to do so. As Raisdana and Nakhjavani stress: ‘Especially after the start of the Iran–Iraq war, keeping a drug addict in a hospital, even a private hospital, warranted punishment of hospital managers, such as demotion or even dismissal. Instead, special camps were established for addicts, who were sent to them in groups as prisoners’ (2002: 153).54 As illustrated by Rudi Matthee in his vivid account of drug use in Iran from the Safavids till the end of the Qajar dynasty (1500–1900), it is worth noting that the ‘tough on drugs’ attitude periodically adopted in Iran has had more to do with political turmoil than with religious proscriptions (Matthee 2005). The ulema’s position on opium has been far from consistent. This is partly because the Koran – in contrast to its clearly stated ban on alcohol – does not mention drugs. The advocates of prohibition have historically stressed the Koran’s ban on intoxication, but as Matthee points out, often the ulema themselves used opium.55 Matthee documents that the restrictive attitudes to opium intensified primarily during periods of political instability and fear of political and urban unrest. This was striking on a number of occasions

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during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A similar connection might be drawn between the restrictive drug laws adopted in 1955 and 1959, which followed the MI5-and-CIA-instigated coup against Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953, and coalesced with the 1957 founding of the Shah’s terrifying secret police, the SAVAK. Clearly, the ‘securitization’ discourse became even more prominent during the revolution and at the end of the Iran–Iraq war. In short, whenever the regime faces escalating crises, internally or externally, the public hangings of drug users increase. Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkhali, the notorious revolutionary ‘hanging judge’ in Tehran, became the head of the anti-narcotics campaign in May 1980 and was put in charge of the ‘purification’ of drug users, leading to hundreds of executions (Bakhash 1990; Raisdana and Nakhjavani 2002: 153). These efforts were undertaken simultaneously with the outbreak of the Iran–Iraq war (1980), and the Cultural Revolution of 1980–83, when cinemas were closed, the educational curriculum was changed, university lecturers deemed ‘secular’ were terminated, etc. Fighting drug users became one rope in the moral tent erected over the Islamic Republic. There was also a massive increase in executions of drug users after the ceasefire between Iran and Iraq in 1988. Punishments for drug use and dealing were reinforced in October 1988, when the ‘Assembly for Discerning the Interests of the System of the Islamic Republic’ issued a decree enforcing the death penalty in cases of armed smuggling and/or possession of 30 gr. of heroin or 5 kg. of opium. Consumption of drugs was also made punishable (ibid.; UNDCP undated). The national Drug Control Headquarters (markaz-e mobārezeh bā mavād-e mokhader), which monitors all drug-related policies, was established at the same time.56 From January to July of 1989, 900 drug offenders were executed under the new law. This closely followed the 1988 wave of executions of the political opposition, most of whom were members of Mojahedin-e Khalgh.57 These clampdowns on drug users as well as the opposition were legitimized with references to both moral depravation and national security: ‘Frustration over a war that ended badly was expressed in a reversion to political repression and a renewed emphasis on moral rectitude’, as Bakhash explains (1990: 217).

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In their discussion of ‘social technologies’, Jöhncke, Svendsen and Whyte remind us that: ‘What is right to do, is not necessarily about what is provably effective, but what is suitable in regard to central values’ (2004: 391, my translation). The 1980s’ executions of drug users seemed ‘entirely unrelated not only to judicial considerations but also to practical ones’, as Rejali puts it, quoting Hoyatolleslam Karrubi: ‘It does not matter whether it [the execution] resolves the problem or not’ (1994: 128). What mattered was to install and impose a new Islamic, revolutionary social order, and the drug users served this purpose. As Ayatollah Sadeq Khalkhali, the hanging judge, explained: ‘I haven’t executed anyone for zena [adultery] or lavaht [homosexuality] unless they were [drug] addicts as well. [ ... ] but generally speaking, I agree with punishing sinners. After all, we’ve made an Islamic Revolution so we should act “Islamically” ’ (in Rejali 1994: 128). Stressing the central values of the new Islamic state, the ‘sinners’ were used to legitimize sovereign, spectacular means of power. The supply reduction decree of 1988 is still in place, and although an amendment allowing for treatment was added in 1998, legal persecution is still the primary way in which drug use is dealt with. In 2001, the conservative daily, Tehran Times summed up this attitude by saying that ‘drug addicts who do not reform should be drowned at sea’ (Dinmore 2001b). On average during the last ten years a continuous figure of at least 45 per cent (in some accounts, up to 60 per cent) of prison inmates have been jailed on drug-related charges (Sharq 2006; UNODC 2007c).

Outlawing the political opposition Going through the media coverage on drug use since the mid-1990s, it is quite striking how often the accusation of addiction is still invoked in regard to political dissidents and opposition groups. One pattern is that drug users are often portrayed as a ‘national threat’ in exactly the same ways as NGOs, intellectuals, student groups and political dissidents, and often they are treated the same. Another noticeable feature is that political dissidents, journalists, and intellectuals are frequently charged with ‘moral depravation’ and ‘social corruption’, either as part

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of their indictment or as their sole crime; the most common accusations are addiction to drugs, alcohol, and ‘sexual promiscuity’ (Samii 2001a; Sciolino 2003). Rather than specifying the political charges, the accusation of drug addiction and drug dealing offers both the undisputed stigma and legal framework for sidetracking and incarcerating the opposition. The morality-based charges are often drummed up when the Guardians’ Council wishes to disqualify candidates – usually reformist ones – from running in national elections. It happened in October 1998 when candidates for the Assembly of Experts were disqualified due to alleged addiction, in the legislative by-elections in June 2001, and again before the 2004 and 2008 parliamentary elections (AFP 1998; IRNA 2001b). During the 2000 mass-closure of newspapers, reformists complained that the closures were ‘based not on the Press law but on a pre-revolutionary statute aimed at controlling vagrants, drug addicts and habitual criminals’ (Lyons 2000). Specific opposition figures are also targeted by drug charges. Journalist Mahsoud Behnoud was charged with trafficking and drug addiction as part of the clampdown on the press in 2000 (Samii 2000c, 2000d). The renowned editor and intellectual, Ezzatollah Sahabi, who was also arrested in 2000 after the Berlin conference, subsequently criticized the fallacious ‘moral charges’ brought against him (Sciolino 2003). Sexual promiscuity and drug use were among the charges brought against the Iranian webloggers arrested and tortured in autumn of 2004. Several NGO activists complained in autumn 2005 that they had been accused of sexual promiscuity, alcoholism and drug use (although the ‘real’ problem was probably their civil society activism) (Interviews, October 2005, Tehran). Foucault would say that these policies serve as a display of state sovereignty by a regime which, caught in a constant ideological counterinsurgency, is determined to protect the ‘right’ religious values of the revolution. ‘Acting Islamically’ by targeting the real drug users as well as the politically invented ones is a power mechanism, which not only purges society of unwanted elements, but also serves to impose the social order on the entire population (cf. Lidz and Walker 1980: 27; Douglas 1992).

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Territorial margins The drug crisis also reflects Iran’s foreign policy concerns and the ways in which the territorial ‘margins’ of the state are guarded – physically, politically and morally. State officials primarily blame Iran’s drug problem on the proximity to Afghanistan and on conspiracies by ‘foreign enemies’, attempting to undermine the Iranian state, but the drug policies also reveal Iran’s complex relations to and increased dialogue with the West. Iran rightly blames Afghanistan for its immense poppy cultivation. Iran is the country in the world most affected by drug trafficking, and the one most dedicated to fighting it. Up to 3,500 Iranian police officers have been killed since the revolution while combating smugglers, and as previously noted, around 300 thousand tons of drugs are seized every year. Iran bears ‘the heavy burden of the global campaign against drugs’, the head of the DCHQ, Mr. Maleki, said in October 2006, adding that this grants Iran a ‘special status’ (ILNA 2006). Drug policies are both an arena for political cooperation and a blame game. Iran has repeatedly complained of the limited resources they receive from the West to fight off what they term a shared problem, thereby seeking further cooperation with the West (Reuters 1995, 1999; IRNA 1998b; Theodoulou 1999; Samii and Tarzi 2004; IRNA website 2006d). The fight against drugs was one of the ways in which President Khatami enabled his ‘dialogue among civilizations’. The issue came up in most of the then-groundbreaking meetings he held with European, regional, and American counterparts. Although Khatami also held the perception that addiction in Iran had increased ‘because of the corrupt ringleaders of former regimes’, i.e., the West (VIRIN1 1997c); when sensitive issues were raised – for instance, would Iran still execute the fatwa against Salman Rushdie? – the fight against drugs established a neutral, common ground for increasing dialogue (IRNA 1998a; Dinmore 2001a; AFP 2001; Samii 2001b). Iran had long been observing UN conventions on drugs, but President Khatami’s renewed focus on dialogue further emphasized Iran’s willingness to cooperate with the UN.58 This attitude paved the way for establishing a Tehran office for UNODC (then UNDCP) in

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1999. As Khatami stated in a meeting with the UNDCP in March 1998: ‘Based on dialogue as the new axis of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s international policy, constructive results could be attained on the drug campaign, exchanging views with international agencies ... [This] dialogue [is] based on one of the most humanitarian issues’ (IRNA 1998a).59 In company with other countries, Iran has engaged in projects whose aim is to make Afghan farmers replace poppy cultivation with other crops (Samii 2000c, 2002a). At the same time, Iran’s relationship with Afghanistan remains highly complicated. When the Taleban took over in 1996, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei proclaimed them to be ‘a disgrace to Islam’. Increasing mutual hostilities in 1997 and 1998 culminated in August 1998 when ten Iranian diplomats, 35 truck drivers, and one journalist were kidnapped and later killed in Afghanistan. In September 1998, Iran placed 270,000 troops on the Afghan border and threatened war as repercussion (Samii 2001c). In the escalating crisis, the issue of controlling drugs was also invoked and used as a pretext for prolonging the troops’ presence (VIRI 1998a). In 1998, several reports accused the Taleban of ‘legalizing’ and making drug cultivation ‘obligatory’, enforcing a ‘vast cultural and social offensive’ against Iran through pervasive drug trafficking (VIRIN1 1998; VIRI 1998b; Reuters 1998; May 1998). In October 1998, Mohammad Amirkhizi, Iran’s representative to the United Nations in Vienna, announced that it was of ‘vital importance’ to create a ‘security belt around Afghanistan’. This notion has been frequently repeated ever since (IRNA 1998e; AFP 2000a; Samii and Ridolfo 2004). However, when in 2000 the Taleban banned poppy cultivation, it was positively recognized by Iran. Drug seizures dropped remarkably in 2001 (and presumably so did the drug trafficking), which for a short while made drugs more expensive in Iran (Economist 2002; MacFarquhar 2001). Since the USA disposed of the Taleban regime in 2001–02, the production of opium has again rocketed, reaching a record of 8,200 metric tons in 2007 (UNODC 2008: 11). ‘America’s presence on the other side of our eastern frontiers in Afghanistan has led to a tenfold increase in drugs trafficking’, Mr. Maleki, the head of DCHQ stated

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in 2006 (Aftab-e Yazd website 2006e). This had added to another discourse on ‘foreign conspiracies’. As already noted, a general trend since the revolution was to blame drug use on the moral decadence and depravation of the West. At the time of the revolution, the media published large numbers of articles on drug use and explanations for it. Young people interviewed at the time parroted the official story: 52.6 per cent of non-drug users believed that addiction was ‘a gift from the West’ and that some drugs were brought in ‘from America’ (Agahi and Spencer 1982b: 105). After the overthrow of the Taleban in 2001, the habit and discourse of blaming the drug problem on the USA became even more pronounced (Samii 2003c). The accusations further intensified with the US invasion of Iraq, and the escalating nuclear standoff between the US and Iran. Although Iran surely faced the problem of drug smuggling long before the presence of American troops, often officials imply a ‘hidden plot’ by the arch ‘foreign enemy’. In this narrative, the United States deliberately floods Iran with opium and heroin in order to endanger the country’s ‘national security’. The drug trafficking from Afghanistan is a ‘ploy by Iran’s enemies’, said a representative from the law enforcement agencies in 2001 (Samii 2003c). In June 2006, an MP from the majles’ Social Committee said: ‘there are hidden hands from the West and America which are directing this affair and adding fuel to it’ (ILNA website 2006). Statements from officials also link this flooding to alleged US support of (politically opposed) ethno-political groups in Sistan-Baluchistan (on the Iran-Pakistan border) and the Kurdish areas bordering Iraq (Aftab-e Yazd website 2006e). This may or may not be true, but the allegations express a genuine fear of the USA’s ‘real reasons’ for being present in the region and this fear also has internal repercussions. As emphasized in chapter 3, the American 75 million-dollar proposal in 2006, attempting to ‘reach out to the people of Iran’, only reinforced the accusations of forced regime change. ‘I think that America’s 75m dollars to destroy Iran is in reality 750m dollars with which to destroy Iran and its youth’, a member of the majles’ Social Committee stated with reference to the distribution of narcotics ‘directed by international organizations’ (ILNA website 2006; cf. Yusefpur 2006). Blaming ‘colonialism’,

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Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani said: ‘They [the USA] can find the people who oppose them in caves but how come they can’t find the smugglers [ ... ]? You see, they can easily find and destroy heroin-making factories but they don’t want to do so’ (VIRI 2006b). Still, compared to the complex and tense nuclear negotiations, the problem of drug trafficking has also been a relatively ‘de-politicized’ arena for dialogue with the West. Despite the sanctions enforced by the UN in regard to Iran’s nuclear programme and despite the threat of a military attack from the USA, substantial dialogue and collaborations with the EU, UN, the USA, and regional partners in regard to drug trafficking continued well into 2008. However, with the sanctions enforced in June 2008, for the first time the USA put an end to the financial support to Iran’s supply reduction efforts, despite the objections by Mr. Arbitrio, the head of UNODC in Tehran. ‘We should definitely assist Iran in this respect’, he said, emphasizing that the war on drugs should be viewed as ‘a non-political area of mutual interest’ (Abbott and Karimi 2008). To summarize, the ways in which supply reduction has been and is carried out is bound up with a discourse of ‘national security’ and ‘social corruption’, which criminalizes drug dealers and drug users, and persistently deems them dangerous and deviant. This has been the case ever since the revolution (and before), but it becomes particularly significant at times when the regime faces escalating conflicts either internally or externally. At those political moments the ‘security belt’ around Afghanistan becomes ever more pressing. Apart from concretely fighting off a massive insertion of drugs from Afghanistan, the ‘securitization’ discourse generates a specific idea of state sovereignty. This is done partly by protecting the nation’s territorial ‘margins’, partly by rectifying the internal boundaries of normalcy through violence and scapegoating, capturing the ‘enemies within’ – the real drug dealers as well as the politically invented ones. Similar to the perceived threat of the NGOs, the ways in which drugs threaten the national security – symbolically and concretely manifested by the drugs penetrating the Iranian frontier and territorial sovereignty – are used to mark the internal margins between the included and excluded social categories.

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A treatment-oriented policy: a new social order Although drug users perfectly served the purpose of being the ‘significant Other’ to the revolutionary ideal of the ‘Islamic man’, the problem was – and still is – that fighting off the ‘merchants of death’ by executing and incarcerating drug users only contributed to new problems. Prisons packed with drug users became centres for an HIV/ AIDS-injecting drug use synchronized epidemic. The change in drug policies, which began to take place in the 1990s, was largely legitimized with reference to this ‘threat of an HIV epidemic’. In 2007, more than 14,090 HIV cases were officially reported, 65 per cent of which were known to be IDUs (injecting drug users), but the Ministry of Health cites figures as high as 70,000 HIV-positive (Farhang-e Ashti website 2007; Aftab-e Yazd website 2005a, 2006g; Mardom-Salari website 2006). In the next section, I will discuss how Iran moved from a drug policy of ‘securitization’ to a treatment-oriented policy. HIV clearly represented a sense of crisis which was unprecedented. But although the concrete threat of an HIV epidemic played a major role in changing the attitude of state officials, my argument is that the reasons for allowing treatment of drug users (and diminishing the taboo of HIV/ AIDS rather than enhancing it) have to be analysed in connection to the wider political and social developments in the 1990s. The drug policies are a microcosm of the tensions and debates involved in the Dovom-e Khordād reform project. Central to this Foucauldian ‘normalization’ of drug users was a convergence of disparate elements and actors, including the support of professional and middle rank authorities, close cooperation between prison departments, health authorities, judiciary authorities, and the UNODC (setting up expansive programmes), and pressure from the State Prisoners’ Organization, NGOs, the media, and clerics (Ohiri et al.: 2006). But key to ‘the conditions which make these [practices] acceptable at a given moment’, as Foucault says (1991b: 75), was also a change in the order and means of power envisioned by the reformist governmentality. The changing keywords merge in the drug ‘apparatus’ and make a different policy acceptable. Three issues are of

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particular interest: the reformists’ focus on tolerance and non-violence instead of violence as legitimate means of governance; efforts to reach expert solutions by merging expertise with more pragmatic interpretations of Islam; and increased freedom of the media and professionals to criticize government policies and point to the internal, social reasons for addiction. In order to allow for treatment, drug users had to be recognized as patients and ‘vulnerable’. The debates, which took off in the 1990s, centre on the struggles to define who are the ‘acceptable vulnerable’ categories, whom the state should treat and provide for, and who are the ‘enemies within’, to be persecuted. That social and moral margin is still fiercely negotiated: having the power to identify who the ‘proper’ citizens are is key to defining what kind of state the Islamic Republic should become.

The threat of an HIV/AIDS epidemic The first HIV case was discovered in 1987 and was caused by contaminated blood used in a transfusion, but it soon spread, mainly among imprisoned injecting drug users, where a history of shared needles exists. In 1995–96, a major incident brought attention to a possible HIV epidemic. Within a short period, 250 prisoners became infected with HIV in the Kermanshah-Kahnuj prison, alerting the State Prisoners’ Organization to the problem of shared needles. As Ahmad Qavidel, a founding member of the AIDS Patients Association (Anjoman-e Bimārān-e Mobtālā be AIDS), later told the reformist daily, Dowran-e Emrooz: ‘After AIDS became a serious issue in prisons, officials were forced to view the matter in a different light’ (Dowran-e Emrooz 2001a). Recent qualitative analyses suggest that at least half of addicted prisoners share needles or self-made, so-called pumps, and those who do may do so with 200–500 persons each (Razzaghi and Movaghar 2005: 50; Zamani et al. 2005; Rowhani-Rahbar et al. 2004a, 2004b).60 These are alarming numbers, since half of the inmates are incarcerated on drug-related charges.61 The first official analysis of HIV/AIDS was done in 1998, and since then HIV/AIDS has been portrayed as a ‘ticking bomb’, which has to

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be confronted by all available means (Esfandiari 2003; Mardom-Salari website 2006; Farhang-e Ashti website 2007). This entails, for example, free treatment for HIV/AIDS patients and government-sponsored publicity campaigns to reduce the stigma of HIV/AIDS (AFP 2002). World AIDS Day, celebrated annually on 1 December, is promoted intensely with big national conferences and vivid media coverage. Although a discourse of deviancy is still present, experts and doctors repeatedly call for prevention and sexual education to counter AIDS (IRNA 2000e, 2003). One NGO I visited in January 2003 provided sex education for 2000 young women in the suburbs of Tehran – an initiative which had only become possible due to the official attention to HIV/AIDS. It has definitely been easier for the government to discuss and approach HIV/AIDS in relation to drug use than as a sexually transmitted disease (Esfandiari 2003), which requires further recognition of pre-marital sexuality, prostitution, and homosexuality (to which heavy legal penalties still apply). These debates do take place, however, and although it remains deeply controversial, UNODC has also been able to raise the issue of homosexuality in prisons and the need for providing condoms (Interview, January 2003, Tehran; Hemayat 2006f). Recognition of HIV/AIDS and of drug use as an illness rather than a sign of ‘moral corruption’ paved the way for an amendment to the drug law. This was added on 8 November 1997 (and became effective from 23 September 1998), stipulating that drug users who are seeking treatment are exempt from the law (IRNA 1998d).62 By the time this clause was added, Iran had already developed outpatient treatment centres in all twenty-eight provinces, beginning in 1994 (UNODC 2007a). Long-term substitution programmes (in the form of methadone maintenance) were initiated in 1999 and community-based dropin centres were created from the year 2000 on (Nissaramanesh et al. 2005: 5). Acknowledging that it is ‘impossible to stop the entrance of drugs into prisons’, as the deputy health minister, Dr. Sayyari, said in January 2001 (Dowran-e Emrooz 2001a), harm reduction programmes, including needle exchange programmes and treatment

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with methadone, were allowed in Iranian prisons in 2003. These needle exchange programmes have reached around 140,000 people so far, but are still far from meeting the demands (Rowhani-Rahbar et al. 2004b; Hemayat 2006d; Zamani et al. 2005). According to the Drug Control Headquarters, in 2008 590,000 people were seeking treatment, of whom 102,000 received methadone maintenance treatment.63 These policies are very progressive, not just in comparison with the rest of the Middle East, but also by European standards.64 The treatment measures in prisons are still enforced partly as a scheme of disciplining and punishment (if the convicted drug users go through a rehabilitation programme, their sentence will be reduced or annulled), but the recognition of drug users as patients has affected the scheme of social inclusion and stressed the emphasis on medical expertise (IRNA 1998d).

From coercive methods to expertise Beginning in the 1990s, among state officials and in the DCHQ drug addiction turned from a question of ‘national security’ and moral depravation only to become a ‘humanitarian’ issue, which had social roots and reasons and had to be approached ‘scientifically’ (IRNA 2001a; Economist 2002; Samii 2003d). In March 1997, then-President HashemiRafsanjani said: ‘any effort to uproot drugs and addiction is sacred and humanitarian’ (VIRIN1 1997a). After President Khatami took office, he stressed that putting an end to drug trafficking should be considered a ‘human and Islamic duty’ (IRNA 1998c). Although hailing the efforts of the Law Enforcement Forces and their fight against drug trafficking, Khatami also expressed the necessity of creating ‘equilibrium between freedom and security’ in order to ‘prevent a dictatorial government and shield society from tension’ (IRNA 2000c). The emphasis on freedom, the criticism of unlimited coercive measures in regard to drug users closely followed the reformists’ emphasis on delegitimizing violence as a political means and redefining the meaning of ‘security’ to include security for the society and people, and not just for the state.65

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This diversion from the coercive discourse and the expressed need for expertise were neatly summed up by a commentator on Iranian radio in October 1999: It is assumed in our country that only the LEF [law enforcement forces] should deal with the problem of drug addiction. In other words, such fundamental measures as education, rehabilitation and treatment of the addicts – which are practiced in other countries – are not taken seriously in Iran. Experts believe that in addition to the legal measures, the addicts should be educated and rehabilitated. They believe also that [alongside] cultural programmes, the rehabilitated addicts should be given jobs to enable them to play a healthy role in society. Experience shows that lack of education and unemployment are responsible for the spread of addiction and drug trafficking [ ... ] This social problem should not be dealt with by the LEF [law enforcement forces] only (VIRI 1999). But what does the reformist keyword of ‘expertise’ entail in regard to drug use? The realm of expertise was defined partly through the role and interpretations of the clerics (I will return to this), and partly by the Iranian professionals. In the early 1990s, professionals and policymakers slowly adopted primarily American literature on drug treatment. As one of the key policy initiators, Emran Razzaghi (head of the Iranian National Centre for Addiction Studies), observed, it was lucky that the first professional literature available in the 1990s stemmed from the USA, which still employed less ‘permissive’, abstinencebased treatment policies. Compared to the literature from Europe, which advocated harm reduction policies such as substituting heroin with state-provided methadone and buprenophin and providing free syringes, the American inspiration made it possible for Iranian policymakers to take ‘one step at a time’, as Dr. Razzaghi said (Interview, November 2005, Tehran). According to Dr. Razzaghi, who kept introducing the American experiences and methods in Iranian publications, abstinence-based treatment was an effective forerunner for the more wide-reaching harm reduction methods, which are now allowed but

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still controversial. ‘The attitude did not totally change, but the attitude of some high-ranking authorities changed’, another key initiator from the Ministry of Health recalled (Interview, November 2005, Tehran). A number of rights-based NGOs also appeared in the field of drug use and AIDS, pushing for medical inclusion: The AIDS Patients Association, The Society for Protection of Prisoners’ Rights, Society for the Protection of Hemophiliacs, and NGOs providing treatment facilities. An ex-drug user, Foruhar Tashvighi, who had been in exile in the USA for 30 years, returned and opened a local office of Narcotics Anonymous in 1994, which soon expanded. In 2002, Tashvighi established the NGO Tavalod-e Dobāreh (Rebirth). Hossein Dezhakam, who had been addicted for twenty years, initiated the treatment NGO Kongres 60. These organizations run by previously addicted professionals brought the voices of drug users and substantiated expert opinions into the policy debates (Tashvighi 1379 [2000]; Dezhakam 1377 [1998]; IRNA 2001c). According to the DCHQ, currently 100 NGOs provide treatment to 90,000 people.66

The role of the media Apart from the fact that drug use was depicted and approached as a crisis, there was and is a growing debate about the kind of crisis drug use represents – a debate which reflects different perceptions of what constitute the ‘real’ danger and threats to the Islamic Republic. Competing with the discourse of territorial sovereignty and the threat of conspiracies (i.e., a crisis of security and morality), the new debate exposed a social crisis, linked to a plethora of social problems which endangered other, ‘sacred’ social categories of the Islamic Republic – the family, and the revolutionary constituency like the war veterans and the basijs. The main attention of the newspapers is still focused on reporting the successes of the law enforcement forces. Not a day passes without the media mentioning the large quantities of drugs caught, the numbers of heavily armed smugglers arrested and police officers being ‘martyred’ in shootouts confronting drug traffickers. But with the

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escalating freedom of the press in the 1990s, the persistent visibility of social problems became part of a self-scrutinizing debate on the social and political developments within Iranian society. The media began to report far more intensively on previous taboo topics (AFP 2000e; Dowran-e Emruz 2000; VIRI 2000a). As Iran Daily editorialized in 1998: It is positive to note our society’s attempting to deal with issues which are unpleasant and in some instances, previously taboo. Topics centering around drug addiction, homelessness and domestic violence are now being discussed openly, as people are becoming more sensitive to their social responsibilities. This is a step in the right direction (Iran Daily 1998). Likewise, as a political analyst stressed in 2001: I don’t think a single week goes by without a major feature on drug addiction or prostitution. Admitting it is half the battle. The other half is much tougher, if you ask me, but they are admitting to a lot of the issues that they have (Interview, April 2001, Tehran). The increasing social critique also showed in the ways drug use began to be portrayed and discussed. Addiction was no longer just presented as drug dealers with hoods over their faces, dangling from the cranes in cities squares. It was not simply depicted as a form of ‘moral corruption’, injected from Afghanistan or the West. Instead, drug use was exposed as an indigenous issue and an endemic problem, rising from the social ashes of the revolution and the war. The decay of the family as a ‘sacred’ institution and the state’s responsibility for the miserable state of affairs are central features in the social criticism. Alarming reports on Iran’s ‘social crisis’ emphasized how ‘drug addiction is destroying one out of every three marriages in Iran’, and that Iran is facing a high increase in divorces (47 per cent in 1998–99), undermining the sanctity of the Islamic family (Deutsche Presse-Agentur 1999; Iran Daily 1998; Moore 2001). In July 2000,

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the conservative daily, Entekhab published excerpts from a ‘shocking’ government report. The report quoted Hoyatoleslam Mohammad-Ali Zam, head of Tehran’s cultural and artistic organization: ‘Drug addiction is the rage among schoolchildren, prostitution has increased 635 per cent among high school students and the [growth] rate of suicide in the country has exceeded the record by 109 per cent’ (AFP 2000b, 2000c). In August 2000, an MP said that there are 25,000 street children in Tehran, adding that ‘Social ills such as [drug] addiction and runaway girls will someday plague us all’. The daily Iran called runaway girls and the ‘social crisis’ of prostitution and drug use ‘an appalling reflection of the nation’s social and economic situation’, and went on to blame ‘two decades of incomplete attention’ for threatening ‘the very fabric of the Iranian family’ (AFP 2000d). The first shelters for runaway girls were established in 1999 in recognition of the growing problem of domestic violence, prostitution and drug use among homeless women and girls (Sciolino 2000; Samii 2000b; Gorgin and Recknagel 2000c; Judah 2002; Mardom-Salari 2007). Despite the clampdowns on the press in other political realms, the impulse of government officials to disclose Iran’s social problems has only increased (E’temad website 2007a, Mardom-Salari website 2006; Aftab-e Yazd 2006c; Aftab-e Yazd website 2006c). Instead of celebrating the revolutionary virtues, these debates questioned what kind of Islamic order had in effect been created, and they contributed to changing the vision of who the ‘vulnerable’ groups in society were. Whom should the state provide for, and how? Who were to be socially included or excluded as citizens? Who were the ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, the ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ vulnerable (cf. the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving poor’ [Howe 1985])? Should runaway children be supported, even if they had survived by sex work? Should they be returned to their families, even if domestic violence and drug addiction surely had disrupted the ways in which the state preferred to portray the proper Islamic family? And how could the state counter an HIV/AIDS epidemic if the word ‘condom’ was not to be used on national television, experts on sexually transmitted diseases asked (MacFarquhar 2002, Interviews, January 2003, November 2005, Tehran).67

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Debating vulnerability: prostitution and drug use One of the debates, which raised the issue of the state’s responsibility and the moral margins of the vulnerable social categories, began in 2001 over the issue of prostitution. The topic became interrelated with a number of issues: drug use, the legacy of the war and war veterans, the continuous fight for ideological Islam, the political infighting between reformists and conservatives, both blaming each other for the increasing visibility of social problems, and, lastly, the need to find culturally appropriate solutions to these problems (Pak 2002). In 2001–02, 16 female prostitutes were brutally murdered in the city of Mashhad and dumped, wrapped and strangled in their chadors. The method of these murders publicly named them ‘the spider killings’. For a long time, the investigation of the killings seemed far from prioritized by the police, allegedly because the women were indigent drug-using sex workers. The ‘spider killings’ uncovered deep ideological disagreements. Conservatives used the case to blame the reformists for their political permissiveness, which had – they claimed – made prostitution rampant. When President Khatami ran for office the second time in 2001 he was widely blamed for the uncontrolled ‘addiction’ and ‘disorder’ in the society. In June 2001, Ayatollah Ali Meshkini urged people not to vote for someone ‘impotent and impious’: ‘We have never had such a number of young people who are drug addicts and ignorant of religion, like hooligans, as in recent years’ (Dinmore 2001b). When the murderer was finally captured, reformists were outraged to learn that the crime had been motivated by religious zeal. A war veteran and religious hard-liner, Saeed Hanei told the media that he was basically fulfilling a ‘religious obligation’ by killing these unworthy, un-Islamic women, who were, he stated, ‘a waste of blood’. He also perceived the killings as a ‘continuation of the war efforts’, protecting the right religious values of the revolution. Maziar Bahari’s documentary on the ‘spider killings’, where Hanei is interviewed and followed until he is hanged, also clearly disclosed that Hanei’s friends, family and colleagues largely supported his actions, a viewpoint which was also voiced in the local newspapers at the time (Bahari 2002). ‘Who

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is to be judged?’ the hard-line daily, Jomhuri-ye Eslami wrote, ‘Those who look to eradicate the sickness or those who stand at the root of the corruption?’ (in De Luce 2003; Slackman 2001). Reformists for their part used Hanei’s case to show how the war and religious warfare of the revolution had disintegrated and distorted Iranian society. Reformists further claimed that the killings were politically motivated and aimed at undermining the government (ibid.) Partly as a result of the ‘spider killings’, in 2002 a group of politicians proposed to legalize prostitution (Fathi 2002). While undeniably open to charges of deep hypocrisy, this surprising suggestion can also be seen as an example of how the government attempted to balance Islamic proscriptions with the recognition of the mounting social and health issues. Acknowledging that prostitution was widespread, that many prostitutes were drug users, that prostitution – in addition to breaking Islamic laws – increased the risk of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, politicians and religious clerics proposed to create state-run brothels. In these brothels – named ‘houses of chastity’ [sic!] – sex workers would be provided with condoms and regular health checks. Meanwhile, a cleric would be present to perform so-called ‘temporary marriages’ (sigheh), ensuring that what was taking place would conform to Islamic law.68 ‘If we want to be realistic and clear the city of such women, we must use the path that Islam offers us’, Ayatollah Bojnourdi argued (in Fathi 2002). Several doctors supported legalization. One of the leading specialists on STDs, Dr. Mino Moraz, had previously worked in Tehran’s semiofficial red light district Shahr-e no (literally: ‘the new city’), which existed in the 1970s. Back then she had checked up on local sex workers and provided them with so-called ‘health cards’, which gave the sex workers some sort of health protection (Interview, January 2003, Tehran). Shahr-e no was bulldozed as the epitome of ‘Westoxification’ in the early days of the revolution, leaving doctors with limited means of reaching out to the sex workers. This, several doctors complained, was creating huge health problems. Therefore, from a medical perspective (out of concern for the sex workers) Dr. Moraz strongly argued for state-run brothels, even if they had to include the (dubious) religious

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endorsement of temporary marriages (Interviews, January 2003, November 2005, Tehran). The ‘houses of chastity’ proposal – as one might also expect – created a huge outcry in the media and met with harsh opposition both from conservatives and reformist feminists. Soon it was taken off the table (Interviews, January 2003, Tehran; Gorgin and Recknagel 2002). The brothel proposal reveals how far apart the political factions were, and continue to be, on issues of ‘vulnerability’. It is also an example (although not a very successful one) of how policymakers have been seeking expert, medical solutions within the confines of Islam. Most importantly, the case shows an attempt to include formerly entirely excluded social categories, and emphasize the state’s social responsibility. In defending the ‘houses of chastity’ proposal, Akbar Tajik Rad, who was in charge of the project, emphasized the need to distinguish between women who become prostitutes ‘to satisfy their sexual desires’ and those who do so out of poverty. The ‘authorities are required to satisfy the financial needs of the [latter] group’, Rad said. ‘In my opinion this group is not [the] offender legally’ (Vazini 2002).

The sacred social categories The specific, Islamic kind of ‘moral being’ created by the revolution, dubbed some social categories as ‘sacred’ while others, like drug users and prostitutes, were deemed particularly abhorrent. But the ‘drug crisis’ has re-shaped the moral margins and content of these categories. As I pointed out in chapter 2, the social policies established with the revolution were imbued with Ayatollah Khomeini’s nationalistic narrative of ‘social justice’ to the disinherited (mostazafin). The bonyāds became instrumental in insuring these social promises and in institutionalizing revolutionary ideology. They did so by providing for specific kinds of vulnerable people. Targeting the ‘natural constituencies’ of the regime (Kazemi 1996: 147), they introduced specific, Islamic ‘dividing practices’ between the acceptable and unacceptable vulnerable.69 Some of the most influential foundations like the Bonyād-e Mostazafān va Janbāzān (Foundation of the Oppressed and Self-Sacrificers) and

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Bonyād-e Shāhid (Foundation of Martyrs) work specifically to support the war veterans, war widows, disabled, and the children of martyrs. The family is one of these sacred categories, for it is portrayed as safeguarding the revolution and the nation. The sacredness of the family plays a prominent role in the many debates about the position of women (as bearers of or threats to the national dignity), which makes the issue of prostitution so sensitive. But drugs also endanger the family’s sacredness. The drug crisis is portrayed as both a cause and an effect of the deteriorating Iranian family, which leads even women – the symbolic protectors of the nation – to vice. The war veterans and basijs (volunteer militias), constitute an equally important ‘sacred’ category, one which is also endangered and ‘polluted’ by drugs. A large number of war veterans and basijs are addicted, and many young men even become addicted while doing their military service (Bani-Etemad 1996; MacFarquhar 2001). ‘I fought 40 months in the war against Iraq’, an addicted basij told The New York Times in 1999, ‘When I came back the regime abandoned me [ ... ] The youth are becoming drug addicts. We have no freedom, no jobs, nowhere to go and have fun. So we are all addicts’ (Sciolino 1999). Similar stories and destinies were presented to me in the parks of Tehran – I will return to these in the next chapter. The fact that war veterans and the basijs – people who were willing to sacrifice themselves for the republic and who have been celebrated as the true revolutionaries – are also addicted is a sore spot in the official legacy of the war. The entire public sphere is used to commemorate dying and sacrifice, the true virtues of shi’a martyrdom. Murals depict the war heroes suffering through endless agony, sacrificing themselves for Islam and the revolution. That suffering is not only permissible, but desirable – a gate to eternity (cf. Varzi 2006). In contrast, the suffering of addicted war veterans dying in the streets is not heroic, but pitiful. These addicts do not reflect the proud, masculine backbone of the nation. They are the lost souls, who never made it to Paradise, but only made it back home, where they are traumatized, handicapped, scared and left to subsist on a small army pension or allowance from the bonyāds. As Mohsen Makhmalbaf so clearly depicts in his film ‘Marriage of the Blessed’ (1989), the war veterans are not heroes; they are just

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shell-shocked, half-mad, and abandoned (I will elaborate on the film in chapter 6). The fact that these ‘sacred’ social categories (the war veterans, basijs, the family) are endangered by drug use confuses – and in Mary Douglas’ sense, contaminates – the clear-cut category of the disinherited that the revolution was to elevate, creating a complex moral dilemma for the state. Excluding drug users can easily be legitimized on the grounds that addiction is un-Islamic and morally deviant. However, this would clearly violate the regime’s declared mission of creating social justice for the mostazafin. As Jöhncke, Svendsen and Whyte note: ‘It is a classic feature of drug policies that it is not the inherent qualities of the drugs, but of the users, which motivate the need for intervention’ (2004: 392, my translation). And the inherent qualities of the drug users were precisely what had changed. The addicted ‘sacred’ war veterans, the ‘sacred’ category of the family threatened by drugs, and the large numbers of – still – very poor people raised challenging questions as to the state’s responsibility and duty to create social justice. ‘Social justice’ not only entailed a recommendation to support the disinherited, it injected an Islamic principle of the right to receive support; as Messkoub notes: ‘The Islamic ethic calls for social justice requiring support for those in need who have the “right” and not just the “expectation” of support in an Islamic society’ (2006: 239). This has raised expectations about the ‘duty of the state’ to deliver social services, as Messkoub says, and has paved the way for a gradually more rights-based approach in social policy. This rights-based approach, which grew out of a religiously endorsed legislation, combined with what I will call a contamination of categories affected the drug policies. Offering treatment to drug users has been reframed as an ‘Islamic duty’ to help the needy, and the clerics have played an important role in this change of affairs.

Treatment as an Islamic duty The role of the clerics in redirecting the drug policies mirrors the development in family planning, which took place in the late-1980s. Ayatollah

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Khomeini’s revolutionary push to create an ‘army of 20 million’ and to counter the family planning policies of the Shah (deemed ‘imperialistic’) had greatly increased the fertility rate in the 1980s. This position was slowly and successfully transformed into a rational, realistic family planning programme, and the support of the clerics was crucial to the programme’s success (Hoodfar and Assadpour 2000). In a similar vein, the clerics have reacted to the growing drug crisis by re-examining their position on drugs from an Islamic perspective. As an official from the Ministry of Health noted, the clergy’s new position reflect the pragmatic foundation of religious ideas in Iran: ‘Between bad and worse you should choose bad. That’s why [the Head of Judiciary] Ayatollah Shahroudi agreed to amend the law’ (Interview, November 2005, Tehran). The new drug policies have also granted the clergy a new opportunity to provide moral guidance. Consistent efforts have been made to legitimize the new drug policy from an Islamic viewpoint. In their recent reports, the DCHQ specifically mentions that the Supreme Leader has given demand reduction his blessings. The DCHQ has constantly called on the ulema to ‘inform people of the devastating consequences’, terming it an Islamic duty to campaign against drugs and diminish the stigma of drug addiction. As Dr. Esma’il Rahdar, the managing director of DCHQ’s cultural affairs and prevention, said in January 2007: After [ ... ] the esteemed leader’s confirmation of those policies, the responsibilities of every official and ordinary member of the society towards the prevention of addiction become more serious. We hope the eminent ulema would help us and guide us on this path (Iran 2007a). Also in January 2007, Ayatollah Nuri Hamedani issued a fatwa, underlining that production, possession, buying and selling drugs is haram, but noticeably leaving consumption of drugs off the list. The fatwa described the fight against narcotics as a ‘great and sacred endeavor, which has many rewards in the life hereafter’. The policy ‘confirmed by the esteemed leader of the revolution [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei], demonstrates the determination and the serious resolve of the Islamic

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Republic of Iran to fight against that devastating curse of humanity’, he added (Iran 2007a). What is striking in the rationalities of state institutions like the DCHQ and the Social Welfare Organization is on the one hand, the emphasis on the ‘role of religion’ as a preventive measure, stressing that religious faith can serve as a deterrent, alongside education and ‘cultural efforts’ (Bani-Etemad 1996; IRNA 1998f; Siyasat-e Ruz 2006b; Abdi 2007). On the other hand, emphasis is placed on ‘scientific methods’, ‘scientific research’ and ‘expertise’ as an argument for furthering treatment, either in drop-in centres, rehabilitation camps, within the prisons or through NGOs (IRNA 2000d, 2001a; Siyasat-e ruz 2006b; ILNA 2006; Hemayat 2006c, 2007). In the ‘Approvals made by [the] expediency council on 22 July, 2006 concerning [the] regime’s general policies for fight of narcotics’ particular stress is put on ‘prevention and treatment of addicts by relying on the world’s modern knowledge and by using the related scientific and specialised capacities in the country’ (UNODC 2007b). There are disagreements as to what the policy goal of ‘expertise’ and ‘scientific methodology’ should be, however, and exactly what the balancing act of ‘role of religion’ vis-à-vis ‘modern knowledge’ entails. Unlike the reformists, who underline science and expertise in order to democratize Iran, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei emphasizes Iran’s scientific progress as a battle against imperial powers.70 But despite the differences on the ultimate goal of scientific progress, it is an interesting feature of these debates on drug use that by being ‘technologized’ and ‘medicalized’ in a Foucauldian sense, treatment can be legitimized within the confines of the state’s Islamic (and securityoriented) policies. This is the case even though the ‘scientific methods’ in practice have paved the way for harm reduction policies, which are progressive and controversial (as indeed they are all over the world). These treatment policies are not just legitimized within the social policies, framed as an Islamic duty to support the disinherited, but they also add to the image of a scientifically advanced, self-sufficient state, providing modern, medical solutions. An interesting parallel can be drawn to the ways in which transsexuality has been ‘medicalized’. Homosexuality is punished by the

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death penalty, but Ayatollah Khomeini endorsed sex-change operations before he died, because trans-sexuality could be termed an illness, and he even termed sex-change operations a ‘religious obligation’. The Imam Khomeini Relief Committee fund sex-change operations (Khan 2004). I believe that this persistent emphasis on being Islamic and technologically modern (more so than being Islamic and democratic, a much more contested issue) is a major reason for the developing pragmatism of Iranian drug policies and for the ‘normalization’ of drug users. The treatment policies provide an interesting example of how ‘expertise’ was defined and implemented during the reform movement, and how debates on vulnerability and the ‘sacred’ social categories have fundamentally shaped who ‘the people’ are.

Conflicting policies As I have shown, a number of interrelated factors turned drug users from being the ‘enemies within’ to ‘acceptable vulnerable’. However, drug users are still approached with suspicion and conflicting policies, which I will discuss in this section. The fact that drug use is criminal but treatment legal causes many difficulties. Despite the law amendment and encouragement of treatment from the Supreme Leader, ‘one consolidated policy’ does not exist, as an official from the Ministry of Health said (Interview, November 2005, Tehran). Part of the problem is that it is still up to the local judge to decide when drug use is de facto a crime. As Nissaramanesh et al. note: The judge has discretion to decide whether somebody is a drug addict or a trafficker. A defendant who tests positive for a drug is generally considered an addict, whereas anyone in possession of a drug can potentially be dealt with as a trafficker (2005: 4). In this and in other respects, clarifying the status of drug users and the specific boundary between being a patient and a criminal remains problematic, and the different state institutions – the law enforcement forces and the health organizations – tend to pull in opposite directions

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(Dowran-e Emrooz 2001a). As the commander of the Law Enforcement Forces in Tehran put it, ‘We have the Ministry of Health on one side; the law according to which we are meant to deal with these people on the other and us on the last’ (Ya Lesarat ol-Hoseyn 2006a). In order to curb these disagreements, the Head of Judiciary, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, has on several occasions reemphasized that drug treatment is, indeed, legal (IRNA 2000a). He has done so specifically to local judges who are still more inclined to arrest drug users. In January 2005 Ayatollah Shahroudi wrote an executive order to underline the fact that the Ministry of Health and Medical Education undertakes ‘provision of needles, syringes and other material used individually by drug addicts and AIDS patients as well as methadone maintenance treatment’. However, Shahroudi continues, ‘According to the Ministry some judicial authorities have considered such an intervention as an ally to crime and subject to punitive action, thus unintentionally impeding the implementation of health and treatment programmes aimed at preventing and combating the transmission of dangerous contagious diseases’. The order ends by reminding ‘all judicial authorities’ that they should ‘not accuse the service providers with unfair characterization of accompaniment in the criminal abuse of narcotics’.71 Again in June 2006, Ayatollah Shahroudi stressed that ‘The problem of addiction cannot be solved with arrests and imprisonment’. He emphasized that it was up to the Health Improvement Organization to find ‘a suitable solution’ to drug addiction problems (Firuzi 2006). Even among the health organizations ideological disparities exist, which play out in small, but telling ways. When interviewing Dr. Emran Razzaghi, the head of the Iranian National Centre for Addiction Studies (INCAS), we met in the centre’s meeting room, not in his office. The meeting room was the only place where the heating still worked, he said. The other part of the hospital next to them had turned INCAS’ heating off, because they so disliked the fact that the premises (ironically located in the former Shahr-e no) housed a clinic for drug users. ‘They think that addicts are dirty’, Razzaghi said (cf. Esfandiari 2003). INCAS could not receive any food from the hospital either but had to get that from the nearby psychiatric department. Dr. Razzaghi

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had asked the head of the university to turn up: ‘I have to show him how cold it is here’, he said with a smile (Interview, November 2005, Tehran).

A new political mindset Although the drug policies cannot be reduced to a question of contemporary political mindsets only, shifting political currents shape the field of decision-making. Whereas demand reduction was endorsed and expanded during the reform movement, after conservative factions took power of the parliament in 2004 and with the election of President Ahmadinezhad in 2005, the drug policies have been affected in a more security-oriented direction. Rather than a return to the security-led drug policies of the 1980s, the result is further polarization and contradictory compromises between the opposing factions – treating drug users as criminals and patients. The resumed focus on supply reduction marked the budgets of the DCHQ, as soon as the new parliament met in 2004. The internal conflicts between the law enforcement forces and the health organizations became more visible. It has been a repeated objection by the treatment organizations that ‘Iran has definitely been more active in reducing the drug supply’, as the Head of Welfare Organization, Gholam Reza Ansari said in 2000. The Welfare Organization received ‘a meager two per cent of the 1,120bn-rial income of the Anti-Drug Headquarters’, Ansari complained (IRNA 2000d). The competition over funding only worsened in 2005. An official from the Ministry of Health said that in 2005 they had only received one-sixth of the previous year’s budget (Interview, November 2005, Tehran).72 There has also been a re-emphasis on religious values as the ‘most important factor’ for prevention and drug control (Hemayat 2006b; UNODC 2007b). Speaking about the role of religion, an official from the Social Welfare Organization said that they cooperated with quite a number of community-based organizations and NGOs on preventing drugs. He preferred not to distinguish between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ organizations, since they were all constituted of ‘devoted’ people, but it was well known that the religious charity organizations did not want

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to engage in drug treatment and prevention out of ideological, religious reasons. President Ahmadinezhad could affect the cooperation between the Social Welfare Organization and NGOs, he said, because Ahmadinezhad was keen on directing money to the religious organizations only. That would become a problem partly because the religious organizations did not know how to address the addicted youth and partly because they sought to solve the problem merely by reinforcing people’s belief. ‘But people have belief up to here already’, the representative said, pointing at his throat, ‘that reinforcement already takes place everywhere!’ The treatment policy was far from abandoned when President Ahmadinezhad took power, and even hard-line clerics like Ayatollah Dorri-Najafabadi said that ‘the movement for the treatment and prevention of addiction should continue with more firmness’, aimed at restoring drug users’ ‘social dignity’ (Hemayat 2005).73 However, the new political discourse of the Ahmadinezhad era also reinvigorated a need for ‘strengthened control’, ‘moral security’, ‘social supervision’, and confrontation against ‘social corruption’, ‘social anomalies’, ‘unhealthy and promiscuous relations’ and the ‘propagators of rotten Western culture’. The number of death sentences has dramatically increased with the Ahmadinezhad administration. In July 2008, thirty drug dealers and other ‘thugs’ were hanged in public. This has clearly added to the ‘securitization’ discourse of drug use (Aftab-e Yazd website 2005b, 2006d; Aftab-e Yazd 2006b, 2006e; Payam-e Ostan-e Semnan 2006; Jomhuri-ye Eslami website 2006; Siyasat-e ruz 2006a). The call for renewed ‘securitization’ became more uniform because by 2005 the majority of the majles, the local councils and the presidency all belonged to conservative factions. Pinpointing that the ‘snares and traps’ of drug use and prostitution are ‘draining the community’s pure blood and injecting dirty and diseased blood instead’, in April 2006 the hard-line daily, Jomhuri-ye Eslami praised the fact that ‘tolerance and liberality’ had finally come to an end: Luckily, today the executive power, the Majlis, and the Judiciary and the other operating and decisive organs in the country are completely united in their goal and have a common and joint

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aim, and they seem to be moving in the same direction. These are ideal conditions for the country to advance without any excuse and shortcoming towards a firm and serious confrontation with vulgarity, immorality, and its diverse and covert and overt elements ( Jomhuri-ye Eslami website 2006). In spring 2006, the commander of the Law Enforcement Forces of greater Tehran also seemed pleased with his new political backing. An interviewer from the hard-line weekly, Ya Lesarat ol-Hoseyn, commented: ‘Nowadays you have a stronger basis in comparison with the past to achieve your goals like fighting with corruption [ ... ] What I mean is in comparison with the previous presidential arena’. General Talae’i replied: Our condition has become much better. I am optimistic about the social problems because of this change. The reason is that the society and the administration have a united and concordant view towards social values. They have one literature and understanding [ ... ] If I intend to confiscate the satellites today I will not face any obstructions and no one would say that satellites are good (Ya Lesarat ol-Hoseyn 2006a). This more confrontational attitude gave rise a so-called ‘round up’ of ‘dangerous addicts’, instigated in January 2006. At the time, the thenhead of DCHQ, Mr. Maleki expressed the opinion that ‘3,000 very dangerous and sick addicts [are] loose on the streets of the Tehran’, and they should be put into camps (Aftab-e Yazd website 2006b; Aftab-e Yazd 2006a, 2006e). This last case will show how complexly ingrained these two different approaches and means of power are.

Rounding up ‘dangerous addicts’ In April 2007 the centrist daily, Mardom-Salari, announced that the second part of the plan to ‘reorganize dangerous addicts’ was about to be implemented (Mardom-Salari website 2007b). The plan was to ‘gather all addicts without treatment cards and take them to camps’, the

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director-general for addiction at the Healthcare (Behzisti) Organization stated. The police will ‘round up dangerous addicts who have not presented themselves for treatment, and [ ... ] take them to camps were they would be guarded’. The director-general emphasized that this was meant as a concrete deadline for Tehran’s drug users. Within the next month they had to ‘present themselves’ at a drop-in centre and ‘receive treatment cards to protect themselves from police prosecution and referral to internment camps’. If drug users had obtained such treatment cards – and these cards had to be renewed every second week – they ‘should be referred by police to treatment and rehabilitation centres for continued treatment’. If users allowed their treatment cards to expire, the directorgeneral warned, ‘the police will act against them’. It was emphasized that the ‘round up’ was specifically targeting the ‘dangerous addicts’, and a promise was also made: if drug users ‘are cleansed, they will enjoy more services in the future’. To underscore this point, the article ended by stating that 200,000 addicts received medical services the previous year. A list of treatment facilities available nationwide was also presented: 477 private walk-in and rehabilitation centres, 27 therapeutic communities, 60 drop-in centres, 47 governmental walk-in treatment centres and 70 mobile teams working on harm reduction. On top of that the services provided by NGOs were mentioned. In this ‘round up’ of ‘dangerous addicts’ – a promise of treatment/ threat of prosecution – the competing policies between perceiving drug users as criminals and patients have merged into one paradoxical policy: get clean, get treated, get registered or face prosecution, which will either put you away as a ‘dangerous addict’ or force you into treatment – a Foucauldian delimitation of danger-and-deviancy to be submitted to either compulsory treatment or internment camps. As the city governor in Tehran argued, the ‘rounding up of addicts and [the] curing [of] their addiction must go hand in hand’ (Baztab website 2006). Several things are significant in this case. The government is determined to catch, label and demarcate the good addicts from the dangerous ones, forcing them into some sort of normalization. At the

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same time, the government keenly informs this deviant public about their rights to receive ‘medical services’ and proudly presents the many treatment facilities provided by the state. In order to balance the considerations of both the law enforcement agencies and the health organizations, new ‘dividing practices’ and disciplining efforts are invented, specifically targeting the ‘dangerous addicts’, who are defined as the injecting drug users (that is, those who also risk being HIV-positive). Treatment cards are invented surely as a means of registering and disciplining the drug users, but also, I would argue, as a way of delimiting the authority of the law enforcement forces. Although Ayatollah Shahroudi, the Head of Judiciary, has stressed time and again that treatment is allowed, factions within both the judiciary and the police have continued to question the concept of drug users ‘seeking treatment’ being exempted from the law. As a result, clashes between the police, drug users and drug treatment facilities are still extremely common. The Persepolis Harm Reduction NGO, which delivers free methadone and syringes to homeless drug users in South Tehran, was on several occasions openly raided by the police, who arrested the drug users present. The police’s attitude mirrored the fact that harm reduction treatment is found specifically suspect. The Persepolis Harm Reduction NGO therefore had to provide ID-cards to ‘their’ drug users, who received methadone, in order to keep them out of trouble (I will return to this case in the next chapter). I would therefore also argue that one could see these now officially invented ‘treatment cards’ as a way of protecting the drug users, who actually do seek treatment, from the law enforcement agencies. However, setting up camps to house 500 drug users is clearly in line with the law enforcement agencies’ desire to isolate the morally deviant and impose discipline. The reinvention of camps stands in sharp contrast to the previous position of health officials, who opposed the idea precisely because it would increase the social stigma applied to drug use and the neighbourhoods housing the camps (Interview, November 2005, Tehran). To complete the confusion, the policy of placing drug users in camps also seems to directly counteract those police raids of the last few years, in which parts of Tehran were bulldozed because they were housing far too many prostitutes and drug

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users (just as Shahr-e no was eradicated after the revolution). In 2001, a large part of the Khak-e Sefid neighbourhood in Tehran was bulldozed and at least 1000 people arrested.74 The only difference, which is clearly significant from a law enforcement perspective, is that in these new camps the drug users ‘will be guarded’ and ‘supervised’ by the police, as the director-general noted (Mardom-Salari website 2007b; Aftab-e Yazd website 2006f). Therefore, while the recent ‘round up’ provides medical services and an invitation to social inclusion for a group of citizens who were previously entirely excluded, it simultaneously reinforces new dividing practices and social demarcations. It also defines very specific disciplining rules as to how these citizens, who are still defined as marginal and deemed dangerous, can become included.

Conflicts and compromises Iran’s drug crisis and drug ‘apparatus’ converge deeply conflicting policies and definitions of ‘the people’, reflecting equally conflicting ideas of the Iranian state. Contradictory and shifting characterizations of drug users as ‘dangerous’, ‘dirty’, or ‘patients in need’ mirror the conflicting interests, factional infighting and social in-and-exclusions, which have been negotiated – imposed, endorsed, resisted – in the creation of an Islamic state. As Mary Douglas writes, ‘ “Purity” and “danger” are condensed arguments passionately flung against opponents in every dialogue that every community has about its own constitution’ (1992: 14). These policies and the ways they have shifted since the 1990s reveal how the ‘margins’ of the state are constantly politicized – the territorial margins on the border of Afghanistan, the moral margins between being deprived or corrupted, between receiving the Islamic benefits of social justice or the repercussions for being ‘enemies within’. The drug ‘apparatus’ shows a clerical government, which relies on sovereign enforcements of Islamic values and moral virtues, and which aims at protecting its revolution and ensuring national security, mostly defined in opposition to the West. But this same clerical elite also generates scientific, non-violent, disciplining means of power and stretches

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the ‘Islamic duty’ of providing social justice to include outcast categories like drug users. In that sense, Iran’s current drug treatment programme is an interesting example of how the reformist vision of expertise has been put into practice. Crucially, the competing policies of supply reduction and demand reduction (and discourses of ‘securitization’ and ‘normalization’) each receive the backing of Islamic jurists. This is reminiscent of the immediate aftermath of the revolution, when opposing political factions attempted to define ‘social justice’ by turning to Islamic jurists, who argued both ways. Some jurists said that social justice should benefit the middle class; others, the poor people in the countryside. The policies of controlling drug users as criminals and patients also find backing from Islamic jurists who, again, argue both ways. Some say that drug use is a moral deviation, a social corruption that should be eradicated by executing them as criminals; other jurists call drug use an illness, which the state has a duty to treat through ‘scientific’, medical – one might say quite secular – methods. Although the Supreme Leader supports the current ‘normalization’ and treatment of drug users, a vigorous cultural battle continues. As a most distressing postscript to the discussion of ‘expertise’, the brothers Arash and Kamiar Alae’i, two medical doctors who have been very vocal in harm reduction and the fight against HIV/AIDS, were arrested in June 2008. In January 2009 they were sentenced to six and three years in prison, respectively, having been convicted of being the ‘corrupt ringleaders’ of the Americans’ conspiracy to overthrow the regime.75 As with the cases of Ramin Jahanbegloo and Kian Tajbakhsh which I discussed in chapter 3, these doctors, who are deeply respected internationally for their groundbreaking work on harm reduction, have been targeted because they are visibly placed on the frontline – a frontline between the endorsement of expertise and internationally recognized treatment methods, and the fierce enforcement of sovereign, coercive methods, insuring ‘national security’. The work of the Alae’i brothers shows how far Iran has moved towards recognizing drug users as patients, and at the same time their imprisonment exposes how fiercely guarded the moralized ‘margins’ towards the West are. The external fire-fighting has constant, internal

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repercussions. Both political attitudes to drug users are present at the same time, mirroring how shifting Iranian governments face up to the country’s social developments and dilemmas, and constantly fight over what kind of social order and means of governance to employ. The next chapter will discuss what these ‘scientific’ and culturally acceptable solutions to drug use entail, and how non-governmental treatment organizations are mediating the role between the contradictory policies of the state and the drug users, some of whom are deemed ‘dangerous’. The political and social inclusions and exclusions taking place in drug treatment NGOs show how a space for public participation is being shaped, and how different visions of governance and of ‘the people’ – the ‘proper Muslim citizens’ – are enacted and negotiated.

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CHAPTER 5 NEGOTIATING NOR M ALCY: NGOS TR EATING DRUG USER S

This is not a negotiation. It’s a fight for our life! Bijan Nasirimanesh, Persepolis Harm Reduction NGO The government cannot ignore the NGOs. But it will not develop in a straight line. There are many zigzags. Development is not a straight road to salvation. NGO manager, UNDP Tehran, November 2005

The mediating role of NGOs The different ways in which state institutions and officials shape Iran’s drug policies, changing and adding to the categories of ‘acceptable vulnerable’ people, obviously affect how treatment of drug users is carried out. In this chapter I focus on these effects and bring in the voices of the drug users. I discuss how non-governmental organizations are involved in drug treatment, how becoming included takes place in practice and, by implication, how the margins between normalcy and deviancy are negotiated. Whereas the last chapters worked on the (Foucauldian) level of biopolitical control of the population, this chapter zooms in on the practice of treatment and the individualizing effects these policies have.

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The practice of non-governmental treatment organizations epitomizes how the margins between the state and the non-state, between the normal and the deviant are negotiated. Located in the intersection between the ‘acceptable’ and the ‘unacceptable vulnerable’, the treatment NGOs transgress and subvert the ideological boundaries of normal and abnormal, stressed by the state. They form new notions of what could be deemed ‘acceptable vulnerable’, adding to and pushing the ideologically enforced ‘dividing practices’. By focusing on the NGOs’ mediating role between drug users and the state, I will analyse two margins of the state: one is the institutional relationship between NGOs and the state; the other is the process of producing normalcy. The first level concerns how the NGOs operate within and on the margins of the state and how the political ambiguities, compromises, and contradictions described in the last chapters play out in their work. Unlike many depictions of clear-cut state–civil society divides, when approached ethnographically it is evident how enmeshed and interdependent the state and NGOs are. They are far from being locked in mutual oppositions (Das and Poole 2004a: 22). This is partly because ‘the state’ is not monolithic but institutionally divided and bound in internally opposed policies, which both limit the NGOs and make room for their manoeuvring. Partly it is because the NGOs, although challenging the state, also become an extension of the state. In relating to the drug users, the NGOs reach out to and protect drug users from the law enforcement forces, but they also form part of and extend the range of state bureaucracy and control. The second level of inquiry concerns how normalcy and citizenship are being re-created in the treatment practices, and how the margins between being socially in- and excluded are determined. What does it require to become included, to become a ‘normal’, ‘proper’ citizen, and how does that rehabilitation take place? What role do the NGOs play in this creation of normalcy and ‘acceptable vulnerability’? How do these organizations tap into social, political and state-enforced expectations of normalcy? How do the treatment organizations create localized, ‘cultural’ solutions, which are more readily accepted, socially and politically? I will argue that the NGOs induce a notion of what the acceptable ‘social being’ in Iran is like, but it is more inclusive than the

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stereotypical, politically enforced image of the ‘Islamic social being’ (Adelkhah 1999; Bayat 2007). The NGOs face a spectrum of state scepticism and support, but the normalization which they potentially provide through ‘medicalization’ in Foucault’s sense, forms part of an emerging pragmatic plurality of the public sphere, expanding the notion of normalcy. My material on the drug treatment NGOs does not allow for a systematic comparison between the different organizations and their relative (medical) successes in rehabilitating drug users. Nor do the NGOs I visited – Persepolis Harm Reduction NGO, Narcotics Anonymous (Anjoman-e Motadān-e Gomnān), Kongres 60, Tavalod-e Dobāreh – cover the entire variety of NGOs. Although Narcotics Anonymous (NA) and Tavalod-e Dobāreh presumably are the two largest civil society treatment organizations, numerous other organizations attend to thousands of drug users across the country.76 One could argue that NA is a civil society organization, and not an NGO, but since they refer to themselves as an NGO, I will not make a distinction here. However, what I will describe is the interfaces between the state authorities, the NGOs and the drug users, which the different activities of the NGOs make apparent.

Competing rationalities By approaching the NGOs as a ‘margin’ to the state, I use them as a magnifying glass to the ambiguous state policies which have emerged. Several things become visible in this respect. Firstly, the NGOs point at and tap into the structural and ideological weaknesses in Iran’s social policies. Although people can obtain social security services in a number of respects through different statal and semi-statal organizations (such as the bonyāds), there are still limits to these services. As Messkoub points out, in 2000 half the population was covered by the Medical Care Insurance Organization: ‘These are impressive figures on the paper, but once we go beyond the official coverage and look at the actual expenditure on different groups, we will realize that it will be years before the state could fulfil its promise of a universal medical coverage, especially in the rural areas’ (2006: 244; cf. Saeidi 2004: 489).77 Particularly in regard to the booming number of drug users seeking treatment, the

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state does not have the facilities to cover the demands, which has opened up a field of action for NGO initiatives and private clinics. Although President Ahmadinezhad was clearly opposed to NGOs in general, NGOs working on health- and drug-related issues operated more freely. These NGOs were less objectionable than NGOs involved in more directly ‘democracy-related’ topics like human rights or women’s issues for ideological reasons but, just as important, the government simply needed the drug NGOs’ services. Particularly in regard to allowing harm reduction – still perceived by many as being too permissive a step by the government – it was easier for the government to outsource these services to the NGOs. Secondly, the practices of NGOs intersect with the ideological and political discrepancies within the state institutions. As I discussed in the last chapter, the health authorities and law enforcement agencies disagree on the balance between supply reduction and treatment. The DCHQ (markaz-e mobārezeh bā mavād-e mokhader), the ‘watchdog’ of drug policies, is one scene for these competing rationalities. The DCHQ is located in Naft-e Shomāli in a flashy building of black marble, shiny metal, and glass. The place is built to impress, and is inhabited by men in silk suits, black shoes and with tightly trimmed beards. The DCHQ performs a role similar to the one the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance serves in regard to cultural affairs, art, films, etc. Apart from being a main policymaker, the DCHQ contains departments working on supply reduction and demand reduction, fighting over different shares of the budget. DCHQ also supervises the work of the NGOs. The Drug Control Headquarters is therefore a microcosm of opposed interests. Among the health authorities incongruities exist too. The Social Welfare Organization and the Ministry of Health disagree on treatment strategies, control over methadone and their budgets. In 2004, the Social Welfare Organization was transferred from the Ministry of Health to the Ministry of Welfare, and when I visited in autumn 2005 some sort of rivalry existed. It was not clearly spelled out in the organization’s policy mandate, but in practice the Ministry of Health evidently endorsed harm reduction and believed that roughly 90 per cent of methadone should be for methadone maintenance, and only

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10 per cent for detoxification. The sentiments in the Social Welfare Organization were a bit more mixed, but primarily they focused on and funded prevention, detoxification, and abstinence-based methods. A representative from the Social Welfare Organization emphasized that they did not want to ‘legitimize’ drugs, as ‘someone’ in the DCHQ wished to (and harm reduction was always on the brink of being perceived as a de facto legitimization). As a result, ‘the Social Welfare Organization has created some funny terms like “abstinencebased harm reduction” ’, an official from the Ministry of Health complained. ‘They hand out syringes, but raise guilt-feelings at the same time. But if you are a harm reductionist you don’t impose your own value system; you just provide people [the drug users] with different options and let them choose’, he said. Another argument related to the control of licensing drugs; who should supervise the flow of methadone to the private clinics and NGOs? ‘There can be centres both funded by the Social Welfare Organization and the Ministry of Health’, the official from the Ministry of Health continued, ‘but as long as there is methadone involved, it should only be licensed from the Ministry of Health’. The budget was another issue of contention. Whereas the Ministry of Health was accountable to the parliament, it was not specified to whom the Social Welfare Organization should account for their 10 per cent share of the budget. These discrepancies were only further underlined in 2005, because the parliament elected in 2004 had reduced the budget for drug treatment, and there was less to share. The NGOs were intertwined in these disagreements about what constitutes a correct, legitimate treatment strategy: whereas in 2005 NGOs working on abstinence-based treatment were readily endorsed, harm reduction was still perceived as far more problematic and politically sensitive.

Interfaces between the state and NGOs The interfaces between the state and drug-treatment NGOs are negotiated in regard to a number of issues, reflecting the barriers, suspicion and critique with which the NGOs are confronted. This suspicion

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relates to their legal ambiguities, disputed professionalism, independence and sources of funding. UNODC has instigated wide-reaching demand reduction programmes, research and evaluations of NGOs. The office recognized the role of NGOs and launched NGO–GO meetings to facilitate further dialogue, widely attended by all the main actors (e.g. Klaue 2004).78 However, although the NGOs played a ‘prominent role’ with respect to drug treatment, as Mrs. Mostashari, the head of UNODC’s demand reduction unit, put it, the NGOs were still disorganized, in need of managerial skills and networks: ‘Nobody works together’, she said. And although the DCHQ portrayed the NGOs as a ‘bridge’ between drug users and the state, the balance between receiving guidelines from the DCHQ and working independently was difficult to strike. ‘If the NGOs provide treatment, of course there should be guidelines for how it is conducted, but the DCHQ should not dictate their work’, Mrs. Mostashari continued (Interview, November 2005, Tehran). The criticism of NGOs also reflected a broader negotiation of political legitimacy and the normative importance they were attributed during the Khatami presidency. At the Darius Drug Research Centre, which was supported by the Social Welfare Organization, the managing director Dr. Hooman Narenjiha praised the work of Persepolis, Narcotics Anonymous, and Tavalod-e Dobāreh from a professional stance, but he was also sceptical about the independence and efficacy of NGOs. Once he sarcastically performed the opening of an NGO for me: he blew an imaginative horn, clapped his hands, cut an opening seal, and applauded the NGO initiative. Then he looked at me, as I laughed at his exquisite performance, and turned serious: ‘But then what? What are these NGOs doing? Where do they get their money from – the government! How can they be NGOs then?’ One of the problems, he contended, was that it had been a political decision to instigate and financially support the NGOs during the Khatami era. So several treatment organizations appeared because they wanted the money, not because they knew anything about drug treatment. A music organization took on the role of ‘music therapy for drug addicts’ and similar unprofessional approaches, which he found highly problematic.

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Intertwined with the issue of politicized funding from the previous government were the ideological distinctions between who were to be the ‘true’, ‘authentic’ NGOs – the new ones, established as part of the reform movement, or the religious charities. Hooman Narenjiha’s apprehension also reflected the fact that he found the kheiriehhā, the religious charities, to be far more independent and hardworking than many of the newly established NGOs. But the problem with the kheiriehhā, he agreed, was that they did not want to support drug users: Why give money to people, who do not work and create problems for their families, when they can fund a single mother, who cannot support her family? Drug users are at the bottom of the hierarchy. Only when all other socially needy have received funding, will most organizations begin to care about them. A recurring scepticism from the ministries and research centres reflected a concern about whether the NGOs were non-profit. As an official from the Ministry of Health emphasized, It’s not a problem that the NGOs receive some money from the government – that happens in all other countries. It’s OK that the ministries buy services from someone else. And it’s OK to pay people’s salaries, but it becomes a problem when it’s not transparent. The line between being an NGO and a private clinic was crucial. Several state officials I spoke to said that the mushrooming number of private clinics advertising ‘magic’, swift solutions constituted a big problem. Those drug users, who could afford to pay, would be deceived into using these clinics, although there was no proper supervision of their proposed treatment and no clear jurisdiction (cf. Nourmohammadi 2009). The unresolved sphere of responsibility between the Ministry of Health and the Social Welfare Organization was abused by the private sector, they said. As Dr. Emran Razzaghi of the INCAS centre (affiliated to the Ministry of Health) pointed out, the private clinics

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would obtain licences from both ministries: ‘Instead of solving the problem by handing out licences, the result is no control, and chaos’. On this point the state was portrayed as being weak. Allegations of exploitation by the private clinics made it all the more important to establish whether or not the drug NGOs were ‘really’ non-profit organizations. It is interesting to note that the criticism voiced regarding private clinics touches upon many of the same issues which were also raised about NGOs – for example, that there is a lack of jurisdiction, training and supervision. But whereas officials from the Ministry of Health, Social Welfare Organization and UNODC would argue from a professional stance that the state ought to take firmer action with the private sector, the same people would stress the need for the state to loosen the control over the NGOs, to legalize their activities and make it easier for them to receive funding. Although the officials frowned upon the private clinics’ ability to take the advantage of the unresolved jurisdiction, in some cases they stressed the same murky legal waters as an opportunity for the NGOs, because they could receive funding and support from several ministries. Receiving money from abroad was especially sensitive and the UNODC tried to intervene and make it possible for the NGOs to receive foreign funding through them. The DCHQ, however, wanted the money to go through their office which, NGO representatives and the UNODC agreed, would be safer for the NGOs and guarantee that they were not accused of having ‘illicit’ dealings with the West. However, this was a slow process, adding a troublesome filter of control. ‘Then the DCHQ wants to decide’, as one critic noted. During my fieldwork, these contradictory margins between state permissiveness and control were most evident in the work of Persepolis Harm Reduction NGO. Because Persepolis offers harm reduction, they were particularly vulnerable to allegations of being complicit in legalizing drug use.

Persepolis Harm Reduction NGO With five centres located in the poor areas of South Tehran, Persepolis Harm Reduction NGO attends to around 5,000 of the most destitute,

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heroin-injecting drug users (the so-called ‘dangerous addicts’). Persepolis offers free syringes, medical care and methadone maintenance treatment. Established in 2003, Persepolis Harm Reduction NGO was the first NGO in Iran (and the Middle East) to engage in harm reduction and methadone maintenance. Outreach teams conduct a lot of their work. In the beginning, Persepolis operated on an entirely illegal basis, the director Bijan Nasirimanesh recounts with a grin. The employees worked from an abandoned military container, constantly watching out for the police and shutting down whenever they appeared. But the persistence of professionals like Nasirimanesh, a doctor from Shiraz and a leading harm reduction specialist in Iran, has been a primary force in making the government legalize harm reduction.79 Every morning, 300–400 users, most of them men, line up to collect their methadone on the empty ground floor of a three-storey building in Shoush Street. The atmosphere is bustling, harsh and accommodating at the same time. People are restless and in pain; some seem entirely withdrawn and paralyzed, while others roam the room, searching for cigarettes or any other kind of relief. They are poor, dirty and devastated. Many live on the streets, scraping by through stealing, selling drugs or being sex workers. Persepolis provides tea, biscuits and food – when the organization can find a sponsor. They always try to offer the drug users something, Bijan Nasirimanesh says. Otherwise they simply starve. In addition to a samovar, a few benches, and a zinc washbasin, in a corner there is a room of 8 square metres containing a medical unit with a couch surrounded by a curtain. A nurse treats acute injuries, and the more severely ill are referred to the hospital. In a corner stands a stained metal box for accumulating used syringes, which the drug users gather in the streets and parks. On the first floor a young female psychologist screens and registers the newcomers. They are provided with an ID card and can receive methadone immediately. In a room on the first floor a pile of secondhand clothes is stocked, and the NGO hands these out to the drug users on occasions. On the second floor there are offices for the administration, where related voluntary groups on HIV/AIDS and sex workers are in the process of being set up and interviews with the target groups are carried out. From the

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very beginning, the NGO has conducted focus group interviews with the IDUs to best attend to their needs.80 Sometimes, loud quarrels and physical tensions break out: one of the IDUs enters the first floor (where they are not allowed unless they have an appointment with the psychologist). The employee (a former IDU now on methadone) gets agitated and repeatedly shouts at him: ‘Go down. I told you to go down!’ He grabs him and pushes him down the stairs. The psychologist – a woman in her early thirties, always neatly dressed in purple or pink cardigans over her white coat – looks at me and dryly comments: ‘Sometimes this place is like this’ (bazi vaghthā in mahāl mesle in-e).81

Reaching out Most of the employees are former heroin injectors who are now ‘converted’ to methadone. They form Persepolis’ outreach teams, targeting drug users in the streets. Armed with a small folding chair and a first aid kit, two men hand out clean syringes to 50–100 drug users a day and change the bandages of addicts with infected injection wounds. On the team one day is Davud. ‘Did you see Leaving Las Vegas?’ he asks me, as we sip tea from a vacuum jug, waiting for the drug users to turn up. He looks excited and disgusted at the same time: ‘It was such a wild film; he drank so much alcohol and the scene where she was attacked ...’. Davud has an open face, usually with a joking grin on it. There is something naive and soft about him, something sincere. Had we met at a party in North Tehran or at the university campus, Davud could have passed for any young Iranian thrilled and offended by the wild life of the West. But this is not the case. We are having this conversation in Shoush Street, a notorious area in South Tehran known for crime and homeless drug users roaming in the streets. Davud used to be one himself. A man of thirty, he has been addicted to heroin for ten years, several of which he spent living on the streets. And he thinks Leaving Las Vegas is wild? But within the last two years Davud has changed his life dramatically. He was one of the first heroin users to receive treatment with methadone as initiated by Persepolis in 2003. Since then, he has been employed by the organization.

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Davud’s team works in the parks and alleys around the main railway station. We cross a square with a burned-out car turned upside down and reach a small park surrounded by abandoned, roofless houses. The drug users gather here to shoot up, sleep in the dumps and try to keep warm with small fires in the winter. The walls still standing are tainted by smoke, and the ground is covered with used syringes. If you do not watch out it sounds as though you are walking on cockroaches. There is an astonishing smell of urine, rot and death. These parks are ‘risky’ (por khatar, khatarnok), the men tell me: ‘You have no idea how many people died here’. Every morning they keep count: last night three drug users died because there was cyanide in the heroin, one guy tells me. Slowly the drug users turn up and collect their daily ‘service’ (servis) – newspaper packages containing four syringes, disinfectant tissue and small pieces of cotton. When they register, they can also get a metal spoon for heating up the junk. ‘But it’s private (shakhsi). Don’t let anyone else use it!’ the outreach workers strongly emphasize, aiming to curb the spread of HIV/AIDS and hepatitis. They sometimes comment on the fix as well, having years of experience themselves with injecting heroin. ‘No, no’, says Mohammad of Persepolis to a man who begins to shoot up as soon as he grabs the new syringe. ‘That needle is too big. Use the other one instead.’ They also hand out shampoo. One man sits quietly on a bench; he looks totally lost, almost paralyzed. The employees hand him two bottles of shampoo – ‘one for your body and one for your clothes’, they emphasize. When we leave, they tell me that it is probably in vain since he has not been washed for the past four months. Mainly, the outreach team tries to persuade users to drop the heroin, come to the centre, and receive methadone instead. When a nineteenyear-old kid approaches us, still good-looking and fairly well-dressed, Davud pleads with him: Sit down and let’s talk. Look, you are so young. I wasted ten years of my life. Don’t do the same thing. Get on methadone instead. No, no, you won’t have problems sleeping. You will be calm. It’s free. You don’t have to go and search for drugs all the time. Please consider it!

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The youngster usually keeps his cool when receiving the syringes, but Davud’s moving persistence affects him; squatting in the street, he nearly starts to cry. After he has gone, Davud shrugs his head: ‘heif-e’, ‘It’s such a shame’, he says, adding with a moan, ‘I could just as well have been asleep for ten years. Suddenly you wake up and all that time has passed’.

Destitute destinies The drug users all have their reasons for ending up here. In that sense, their destinies are emblematic of the social calamities and consequences of Iran’s developments over the past decades. The young men I meet in the parks mainly relate tales of unemployment, migration, boredom and family problems. One of them is shooting up when we arrive but, when given a chance to show something of his life before becoming addicted, he interrupts the fix. Out of a black plastic bag he drags several pieces of coloured paper along with a pair of scissors. With hands covered in dirt, he swiftly begins to cut out what appears to be a multi-coloured sticker with my name. ‘He used to make posters and advertisement boards’, the man next to me explains, nodding approvingly. ‘He is a real artist’. ‘Vāghean honarmand hastid’, I agree, ‘you truly are an artist’. As with most of the other young men, this fast-cutting graphic designer who used to work in the bazaar is now unemployed. Some of them lost their jobs due to addiction; others began to use drugs because they were unemployed. The difference does not seem to matter much to them at this stage. Especially in the southern part of Tehran, urbanization and the hasty expansion of the city over the last few decades have left a trail of tragedy. Morteza, who works for Persepolis, comes from the Bakhtiari tribe in Shahr-e Kord near Esfahan. He spent his childhood in the mountains as part of a shepherd’s family. We make a fire in the park to keep warm while waiting for the drug users to turn up, and he quietly recounts his memories of the countryside, the clear sky and outdoor life, the special scent of making tea over a fire. Like many other tribal families his parents migrated to the suburbs of Tehran to find work when he was a teenager. He had been a wild kid, a sheitun, he says,

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but when they got to Tehran it became worse. He was married early, aged sixteen, to a girl who was only twelve. It obviously did not work out, he began doing drugs and they divorced because of his addiction. For five years he was imprisoned for drug dealing and armed robbery. There are plenty of them, he says, the shahrestāni, people from the provinces who migrate to Tehran in the vain hope of a better future. But with a national unemployment rate of 15 per cent – up to 25 per cent among fourteen- to twenty-five-year-olds (Amuzegar 2004b) – many end up in further poverty and despair. But the tales of the parks speak of numerous other problems. An old man in a baggy, wrinkled coat and big, infected bandages says his collapse began with the devastating earthquake of 26 December 2003 in Bam, when 26,000 people were killed and the ancient city was destroyed. He was among the survivors, and was severely injured and rushed to a hospital. But when treated at the hospital he contracted HIV, he says. Now he is suffering from AIDS, living on the streets, cursing the medical system: ‘In a government hospital! Can you believe it?!’ After the earthquake, methadone was actually one of the first things to be rushed into the city of Bam. Located close to the Pakistani border, Bam is situated on one of the major drug smuggling routes and before the earthquake about 25 per cent of the inhabitants were believed to be drug users, explaining the overwhelming need for substitute drugs. Although Bam is being restored, the media uses failings in the reconstruction efforts and psychological care to explain why drug use is rocketing among the surviving population. Numbers like 30–40 per cent drug users are mentioned (Vick 2004; Esfandiari 2005). A man in his fifties addresses me in fluent English, with a posh accent. He used to work for the UN and speaks six languages, he loudly, ramblingly, insists; he worked as a translator. And yet, this park has become his home. Why? Like numerous others who served in the war he became a POW and was detained for two years in Iraq. After that, his life fell apart. ‘It’s the government’s fault’, he continues. ‘They could stop the drugs from coming, if they really wanted to. But they don’t! They earn money this way. Tell how it really is. Tell the world!’

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Although he is the only addicted POW I meet, the consequences of the war are echoed in many other narratives. One guy proudly describes how he met Ayatollah Khomeini when returning from the front. They did not use drugs while at war, he says, but lots of war veterans were left traumatized afterwards, and drugs became an easy way out. Another guy comes from Ahwaz, close to the Iraqi border. Both his parents were killed during the war, he has been living on the streets since he was a child and was addicted when he was 14. He had survived by stealing and been repeatedly beaten by the police. ‘But it was the only way to survive’, he says quietly. As I discussed in chapter 4, the fact that many war veterans and basijs have become addicted severely questions the state’s efficacy in creating social justice and providing for those people, who literally risked their lives for the nation. Their narratives are intrinsically linked to the policies and default of the state – for the war veterans as well as the unemployed – and contain a great deal of anger, addressed to the state and its so-called Islamic values. ‘Is this supposed to be an Islamic Republic?’ one of them asked, questioning the social order which the state has in effect created. These parks are the true outskirts, as low as you can go. These are the areas of ‘danger’, ‘moral decay’ and ‘social corruption’, which are periodically bulldozed, and where repeated police attacks take place. These are people whose ‘acceptable vulnerability’ is highly questioned by the authorities. But by crossing the borders between the acceptable and unacceptable vulnerable NGOs like Persepolis negotiate the inclusion of these drug users. They do so by traversing and re-claiming the lost and ‘liminal’ places in the urban space – the parks and public toilets where drug dealing and sex work takes place and where the homeless drug users dwell.

The parks: reclaiming the liminal, urban space When Gholam-Hossein Karbaschi was the mayor of Tehran from 1989 to 1998, he encouraged the creation of parks in Tehran and turned them into flowering leisure spots. The 600 new parks in Tehran became part of the reformist renegotiation of the urban, public space as both

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Adelkhah (1999) and Bayat (2007: 55ff) have described; a more familyfriendly, less restricted, less gendered venue for public participation, which especially attracted women and young people – the new, recognized social actors of the reform movement. As Bayat points out, the newly created parks became legitimate places for women to be seen, even when not supervised by their families. In that sense, Tehran’s parks became emblematic of the reform movement and its attempt to transform public space into a zone of confidence, rather than control. ‘Whereas the urban space of the 1980s fostered domesticity, kinship, and worship, the new spatial logic embraced civility, citizenry, and secular pursuits’, Bayat points out (2007: 57). But the parks constitute a place of danger to the state control too. This is where the young, unmarried people linger and flirt (Bjerre Christensen 2000). This is where the sex workers, drug dealers and drug users gather, operate, shoot up, sleep, and die. Whereas single young women would feel safe in the parks most of the time, they could also run the risk of being perceived as sex workers – even in parks located in much less notorious areas than Shoush.82 In this respect, the parks are a contested place. They are a place of contamination for the state, a ‘liminal’ place in Victor Turner’s sense, posing danger and threat to authoritarian control, by being public places of (possible) illegitimate social encounters (Turner 1974). The parks are ‘betwixtand-between’: they are both necessary places for reformist transition and state–societal transformation, and they are places of discontent, resistance, abuse, disorder; the ‘matter-out-of-place’ (Douglas 1966).83 NGOs like Persepolis both alter and expose this danger. They focus on the parks and make the drug problems visible by addressing them. But the NGOs also reinstate a sense of control through, in Persepolis’ case, sending outreach teams to the parks, recharging the urban space. The NGO Tavalod-e Dobāreh deliberately created their rehabilitation centres in the parks. They did this partly because drug users live in the parks, partly because the parks are a less stressful place for undergoing detoxification. In the beginning, authorities opposed the location of Tavalod-e Dobāreh’s centres because they feared the centres would bring in even more drug users and further contaminate the parks (Tavalod-e Dobāreh undated a, undated b). In fact, it has worked

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the other way around. By making the rehabilitation centres in public parks, they become part of a ‘civilizing’ procedure to include the drug users and concretely and symbolically ‘cleanse’ the parks.

Street life: markers of marginality The parks are dangerous places for the drug users too – por khatar, as they say, risky – and surviving in the parks and on the streets is used as a marker of marginality within the organization. A young man, who came to collect his daily wrap of syringes, complains that he had been attacked while asleep in one of the parks. His pockets were cut open with a knife and his dope and whatever little money he possessed was stolen. A clear hierarchy is spelled out among the employees; between those who have been living on the street and those who have not. ‘Aslan nist!’ (‘Not at all!’), one employee exclaims when I ask him if he has been homeless, too. There seems to be a continuum of social liminality and marginality related to how ‘far out’ the drug users have been, not so much in terms of how many years they have been using drugs, but more related to markers of social inclusion and dignity – having a place to stay, having a family and being employed are the most relevant characteristics. If they have lost all that, the road to getting socially included and reclaiming their dignity is harder to travel. But it is also exactly those markers of esteem which they can slowly regain by becoming part of Persepolis. Sometimes the difference in their background has an effect on how the employees relate to the IDUs. Most often, it makes the previously homeless employees very empathetic. Like Davud, who pleaded with the young man, most previously homeless employees can easily relate to the problems of the IDUs who wander the parks. However, I did witness one incident in which a previously homeless employee tried to mark his newly gained status in a less positive way. Mohammad readily takes on the job to ‘interview’ the IDUs for me. He intervenes and asks people to roll up their sleeves so they can show me their injection wounds. The IDUs oblige but some are clearly annoyed with him. He shows a tendency to ‘over-rapport’, as Van

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Maanen calls it (1983). By ‘over-rapporting’ Van Maanen refers to police officers, who are being more brutal in arresting alleged criminals, as a way of showing off in front of the field researcher. Mohammad’s ‘overrapport’, taking on my job as interviewer, is less an exercise in showing off to me than it is a way of raising his own status before the IDUs, and distinguishing himself from them. His attitude creates a barrier of unwillingness, directed at him more than at me. Some of the other employees find Mohammad to be too tough on the IDUs: ‘He has only been on methadone for two months. His mind is disturbed (fekresh kharāb shod). He has forgotten where he came from. A short while ago he was like them’, one of them complains. One elderly IDU informs me that they do not want to answer those questions Mohammad asks them. I should tell him that. The other employee gives me a knowing look: ‘See! That’s what I mean’. Although employed and on methadone, Mohammad is only beginning to acquire the other markers of inclusion – knowing how to relate to others, for a start.

Facing the state: fighting the police Claiming the urban space, like the parks, is part of Persepolis’ work, but the NGO often faced a number of difficulties with state authorities in doing so. Bijan Nasirimanesh told me that they often had to change the location of where the outreach teams were posted, because of problems with the police. As I have emphasized previously, plenty of political and legal tensions still exist, mainly relating to where the exact line is drawn between what is termed treatment and what is illegal possession of drugs. Because Persepolis hands out methadone and syringes some of the law enforcement forces see that as an endorsement of drug use. Although it is now legal, harm reduction is hardly a risk-free endeavour. Sometimes the police even show up at the Persepolis clinic, attacking and arresting users who are there to receive methadone, outreach workers tell me. When I arrive in the morning, a topic of constant discussion is the numbers of drug users the police have detained the previous night and their recurring brutality. ‘Polis kheili aziat mikonand’, ‘the police are very offensive’, they tell me.

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One day the police turn up as the outreach team visits a park. They look with suspicion at the unassuming first aid kit and lonely folding chair. On the team that day is Ali, who points to a badge he has quickly put on his chest. ‘See! We are an organization (anjoman). We offer treatment’, he emphasizes.84 Eventually the officers back off and Ali puts the badge back in his pocket. ‘At least I remembered this one today’, he sighs with relief, relating how one of the employees always wears a white coat, ‘so the police can see that we are not dealing drugs, but helping people’. Even Ali is uneasy with these ongoing conflicts, although he is clearly not a timid man. Ali is thirty-two years old, tall and muscular with broad shoulders. He wears tight jeans; his beard partly covers a scar, which marks his high cheekbones; he has the eyes of an eagle. At the age of sixteen, he was caught smuggling forty kilos of opium and sentenced to twelve years. ‘It was only because I was so young that they didn’t kill me’, he says with a laugh, mimicking an imaginary loop around his neck. He is the authoritative, tireless storyteller of the team, constantly impressing people with his insights and macho tales, pointing a finger at them for emphasis: ‘Miduni chi migam?’ (‘Do you know what I’m saying?’) Prison became his college (dāneshkadeh), Ali says matter-of-factly (that is, a college for life and for drug dealing), and after serving his sentence, he continued working as a dealer for a while. When we walk the streets he greets people with whom he served time in prison or used to deal drugs. But after a few years his priorities changed. He was employed by Persepolis, got on methadone and was educated as a nurse. He is tough but fair when the IDUs put up a fuss, and he scolds those who turn up with old, neglected bandages. ‘Do you see how bad it has become? I told you to come earlier!’ he says, putting on a pair of plastic gloves and a hygiene mask before cleaning the infected wounds. In some cases the wounds are so deteriorated that it looks as if half the arm has been blown off. When one drug user walks out of the abandoned buildings with an emptied syringe in his hand, the bloody needle pointing aggressively towards us, it is also Ali who immediately tells him off: ‘Turn that thing around!’ But at the same time, he is the addicts’ guardian, protecting them from the police.

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When the officers are gone, Ali turns to the streets restlessly, catching up on news and keeping watch. Half an hour later he returns, telling us that undercover detectives posing as dealers have arrested three drug users buying drugs. Immediately Ali shouts out to the men camped in the ruins next to the park: ‘The police caught someone, go, go, hurry up!’ They climb the walls of the dumps and stumble, heads down, through the park. Tragically, however, being arrested can also be a blessing. One day, an unusually well-dressed man in his forties arrives. ‘Oh, we haven’t seen you for a long time’, Mohammad says. ‘Where have you been? Bah, bah, look at you. I couldn’t recognize you’. The man’s clothes are spotless, and he has put on weight. His explanation is that he was incarcerated for half a year. People often disappear for a few weeks, then turn up when released. ‘Actually, sometimes it’s good that they are imprisoned’, another employee tells me in a solemn voice. ‘Then, at least, they get food and have a place to stay for those weeks’. But everyone knows that being abused, beaten and getting fleas are part of the drill – and that recurring detentions solve no problems. Even if the drug users are temporarily forced out of their addiction, soon afterwards they are back on the streets. ‘I’m not bad. I’m clean’, the well-dressed man says, the day after his release. Touching his forehead he continues: ‘But my mind just can’t handle it. It’s ruined (kharāb shod), it’s all wrong’. Mohammad urges him to come to the centre and speak to the psychologist, but the man shrugs his head, thanks Mohammad for the syringes and leaves to buy heroin. Although Persepolis has to walk on a tightrope to avoid being criticized for legitimizing drug use, in the conflicts with the police their priorities become quite clear: the employees and the IDUs are on the same side. Most of the employees at Persepolis have themselves served time in prison, and they have been in numerous fights with the police. Since several of the employees have lived on the streets they know far too well what that life is like. Although their experience is a great asset to the NGO, getting them much more direct access to the drug users, to the police this probably contributes to blurring the lines of their legal endeavours. Relating to the police is, however, only one of the interfaces and negotiations Persepolis has with state authorities.

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Pārti bāzi, playing with connections The negotiations between the NGO and state authorities point to a forceful arbitrariness in state officials’ decision-making, and to the ways civil society activists attempt to curb that arbitrariness. The negotiations are bound to personal relations and to the accumulated social and political capital of the state representatives and NGO activists, respectively. They negotiate the margins between the politicized spheres of the state and civil society, yet continually blur any fixed analytical boundaries between them. In addition to confrontations with the police, Persepolis had a large number of other problems with government officials. Obtaining the sufficient doses of methadone from the Ministry of Health still proved difficult – and asking 300 craving addicts to be patient when their methadone had not arrived was not an easy task, Bijan Nasirimanesh said. Getting a proper NGO registration at the DCHQ had been another struggle. In the beginning the DCHQ had threatened to summons him. Although Persepolis had obtained the right NGO registration, being called in by the Ministry of Intelligence was a permanent concern. ‘Every day I wait for the phone to ring’, he told me firmly, assuring me that one did not get involved in this kind of business, unless you were a bit crazy, willing to run the risk and do some ‘lobbying behind the scenes’. Dealing with the municipality was another permanent issue. One source of disagreement concerned the used syringes which the NGO accumulated at the centre. Some drug users exchanged their used syringes for packets of new ones; others would collect syringes in the streets and parks. Although this was indisputably to the benefit of the municipality, doing the cleaning job for them, and thereby diminishing the risks of other people getting infected, the municipality’s garbage collectors had refused to dispose of the special metal box containing the used syringes. More seriously, one day when I turned up, Bijan Nasirimanesh told me that the municipality had ordered them to leave the building within a week. During the past two years Persepolis had renovated the house, which had been abandoned for five years, and the municipality

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had agreed to let them use it for the clinic. But now the municipality refused to extend their contract. This was mainly due to personal disagreements with the man in charge, Bijan told me ruefully, but also because the municipality felt they gained no honour from helping Persepolis. ‘That’s the problem when you have no core funding. There is no backbone’, he told me. This was shortly after I had been interrogated and while I went through my numerous visa negotiations with the Department for Alien Affairs. I told Bijan that it had made me realize what kind of negotiations they went through on a daily basis. ‘This is not a negotiation’, he said with a laugh, ‘it’s a fight for our life!’ Although he much regretted the current conflict, fighting was part of the game: ‘I’ve used every trick in the book to make this NGO’. The trick was to bring in more superiors who could intervene in the decision-making process, he said, just as he had done when he started out in Shiraz and made the first (at that time entirely illegal) drop-in centre for injecting drug users in Iran. Back then he had been summoned to court, and he only got through because an influential uncle, who was a hezbollahi, had stepped in and negotiated his case. ‘Is that how it works?’ I asked, not because I did not know, but to stress the issue. ‘Yes! Oh yes!’ he assured me. A few days later, the Department for Alien Affairs refused to extend my visa and gave me four days to leave the country. I phoned up Bijan and said: ‘Now I’m not negotiating either. I’m also fighting for my life’. He invited me to the international HIV/AIDS day, marked by a big conference at the Tehran University the next day. Everybody seemed to be present. There was a large gathering in the hall, including the Minister of Health and several of his deputies, the head of UNODC, Mr. Arbitrio, and his advisor, Mrs. Mostashari, and a number of international guest speakers. The representatives from the DCHQ formed a conspicuous, closed circle of influence in one corner, assembling around the director, Mr. Maleki. In the lobby lots of governmental organizations and NGOs had small stalls from where they handed out leaflets, posters and magazines. Some of the organizations worked on general health issues, others, like Persepolis, were more directly involved in harm reduction. Endless litres of tea and plates of shirini

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(sweets) were consumed; the pārti bāzi (playing with connections) was in full swing. The large lecture theatre was packed. One speaker followed the next, all emphasizing the need to fight HIV/AIDS, one of the main priorities of the Millennium Development Goals. Bijan was extremely busy and kept coming and going, locating the key persons with whom he had to talk in the following coffee break. As soon as he got the chance, he energetically chased them down, brought them to the Persepolis corner and showed them why it was necessary for the NGO to keep working. He showed pictures of homeless drug users dying in the streets, the plans for setting up a forth centre, the difficulties with the municipality threatening to close two out of three centres, and the successful external evaluations of their past two years’ work (Vazirian et al. 2005; Nissaramanesh et al. 2005). Playing with connections is always, however, a subtle game. When I interviewed a representative from the Ministry of Health, who knew Bijan Nasirimanesh well, I mentioned the problems Persepolis faced with the municipality. Bijan’s problem, he said, was that he involved too many people. He had connections and got money from everywhere – UNODC, UNDP, the Ministry of Health, the Social Welfare Organization, foreign embassies. That would surely get you into trouble, he added. The game was to reinforce your financial transparency and to strike the right balance between having enough influential people to vouch for you and yet steering clear of the internal discrepancies and power games of the institutions. When I spoke to Bijan on the phone a few weeks after I had left Iran, the municipality had still not executed their intentions of kicking them out. His connections in the ministries turned out to be less helpful than first anticipated, so it was still a daily hassle and he expected them to turn up with the police every moment. He was still, however, remarkably cheerful: ‘You know, this is like an Indian movie where everything has to be chaotic in the end – the sister kills the brother, the father kills the sister – before things are settled. We are in that phase right now’. Even if they were thrown out, he would still continue to work from the streets, he said. One representative from the Ministry of Health had advised him to shut down and stop working,

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just to let the municipality face the consequences if Persepolis was not there to take care of these people. But as Bijan said, although the idea seemed tempting some days, he could not let the drug users down just to make that statement. Eventually, the centre in Shoush Street was moved to a different location, but Persepolis continues to work and has expanded its field of activities. As of July 2010 Persepolis is still operating and engaged in harm reduction projects in Tehran. Dr. Bijan Nasirimanesh, however, has for political reasons been forced to leave Iran and works as a harm reduction specialist in Canada. Although NGOs like Persepolis clearly challenge state policies and visibly resist some of the state authorities (like the police), state and civil society are far from being discrete entities. An expansive interdependence and exchange between NGOs and the state takes place. The illegal work Bijan and his teams conducted in the beginning, working from a military container, did have an effect; it served to make the government accept not only treatment but also harm reduction, pushing the legal limits. But the NGO still operates in a grey zone due to the huge number of ideological, legal and political ambiguities within the state institutions as to how these ‘dangerous’ drug users should be dealt with. Tracing how these ‘negotiations/fights for life’ are conducted also emphasizes the volatility of detecting the limits of the state and ‘the political’, and by implication what can be termed ‘resistance’ towards the state (cf. Zeydabadi-Nejad 2007; Navaro-Yashin 2002: 159). Bijan was forcefully fighting for his NGO’s life and resisting the restrictions imposed, but the people he brought in to help him were just as much representatives of the state. In these negotiations there was no clear boundary of the state. It was a universe of political influence related to specific persons and an interplay of connections. The state institutions’ permissiveness or restrictions largely depended on how well-connected the NGO activists were, and whom they found within the state bureaucracy to argue their case. Persepolis found loopholes to continue their work. They embraced participatory, inclusive approaches by employing drug users and reaching out to people on the streets, who did not have a voice previously. In these non-confrontational and unobtrusive ways they claimed a space for rights (their rights as an organization as well as the rights of their

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clients) and added to more socially inclusive constructions of normalcy. But ironically, constructing this normalcy, which in many ways subverts if not directly challenges state policies, involves the need to register the drug users, including them in the state bureaucracy.

Extending the tentacles of the state Apart from claiming space vis-à-vis the state, in relating to the drug users Persepolis also expands the range and language of state control through registration and bureaucratization. The issue of registration (parvandeh) is crucial in Persepolis’ work and it keeps coming up in the conversations: ‘parvandeh gereftid?’ ‘Did you register?’ the employees ask, first thing. Often the drug users claim they did, and long arguments follow: ‘Well, you can come and look’, the employees say, pointing at the protocol, they carry every day. ‘Your name is not here. I told you so!’ The fee the IDUs have to pay in order to get registered is minimal – 200 toman to register for receiving syringes and another 200 for methadone (about 20 cents). The recurring issue of registration is a way to legitimize the work of Persepolis and control how many syringes are handed out. Sometimes the IDUs ask for more than one packet of syringes at a time: ‘But it’s for my friend! He’s at home and he’s ill. I’m going to bring it to him’, one man argues. The atmosphere is getting tense, both Davud and Ali are on their feet, insisting: ‘in servis barāye khudet!’ they say, ‘this service is for you only!’ When the man finally backs off and leaves the scene, they tell me that some of the addicts sell the syringes on the black market which makes the organization an easy target for the opponents of harm reduction. The issue of registration also becomes part of a power balance between the employees and the clients, between a need to control the IDUs (if they get more syringes than they should), keeping track of them, and marking a hierarchy towards them. An elderly man with dusty, hazy blue eyes received syringes once, but still has not registered. ‘Well, if you don’t have any money for the registration, for what do you need syringes? Then you don’t have any money for heroin either’, Ali says. A long explanation follows: he had fallen ill the evening before and had to go to the hospital and had spent all his money on that. He

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sends Ali a pleading look, but Ali turns his back on him, asking him to leave, respectfully but firmly: ‘Boro bā salāmat’ (literally: ‘Go with good health’). Still, the man squats quietly next to us for another five minutes, as a sombre sit-down protest, looking lost. When another IDU turns up, Morteza agrees to hand the first man a packet of syringes: ‘Tomorrow this will not happen. Get registered. Boro bā salāmat’. The registration negotiations are a way in which Persepolis recreates the drug users’ identity as citizens. It is a way of recognizing their existence as individuals who no longer drift uneasily outside ‘the system’, but belong to it. But there are specific rules as to how this is done and what ‘the system’ demands from such a citizenship identity. Scolding the IDUs, and making them behave ‘properly’, observing the bureaucratic rules is part of this. Registration is a practice of enforcing order and discipline where there is none, but it is also a relation of mutual promises (of rights and obligations). Because the organization itself is vulnerable to attacks from state authorities, the disciplinary practices employed in regard to the drug users reflect the constantly negotiated margin between the NGO and the state. Although Persepolis had so far only registered the IDUs with a number – which was easy for the IDUs to remember – in 2005, pressure from the police, for whom a number did not suffice as a control measure, led to the introduction of treatment cards with pictures. Making users look like ‘proper’ citizens was therefore another issue. The pictures which the drug users brought to be put on the ID cards, gave telling details in respect to how the proper citizen was to be (re-)constructed. The pictures did not really resemble the people to whom the cards belonged, possibly because they had been taken long before the addiction and street life severely kicked in. The pictures were anachronistic; they looked like images of somebody else, sometime else. Displaying them on the cards seemed a way of summoning up a bodily appearance, a displaced social being, who no longer existed, but who had existed at some point in time. The pictures appeared to be a means to restore this lost personality, the normal social being, by presenting an image of a neatly dressed, combed posture of self-control. This was the person who had been lost and excluded for a while, but

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was now reintroduced as a true social being, or who gave a promise, at least, to behave as a patient and thereby was granted the inclusive rights as a citizen (to treatment and to protection from prosecution). Treatment offers inclusion, a ‘biomedical citizenship’ as Biehl would call it (2004), through bureaucratic containment of the drug users, and by registering, counting and controlling them. In that sense, although the NGOs operate in the margins of the state, from which position they have frequent skirmishes with the police, they also become an extension of the state, taking on the job of governmental normalization. Although Persepolis does not detoxify the drug users concretely (due to their focus on methadone maintenance), they offer a symbolic detoxification of the outcasts. This is done in different ways – by reaching out to the ‘liminal’, contaminated urban places in the city (the parks) and through bureaucratic measures like registering the drug users and giving them treatment cards. As mentioned in the last chapter, the cards have the dual effect of disciplining the drug users – the official ID cards introduced in 2006 need to be renewed every second week – and of protecting them from the law enforcement forces. In this sense, the NGO becomes a re-creator of the state too, re-inscribing the individuals with ‘stateness’ by extending its bureaucracy and control, a disciplining, categorizing, productive notion of power. These bureaucratic practices are a key to creating the state in general, not only in the case of Iran (Herzfeld 1992). The examples I have mentioned here of ways in which the state is ‘performed’ and related to – registering the drug users, fighting the police, playing with connections, crossing the parks – also serve to tell how people in general meet and experience the state, and how what Timothy Mitchell calls the ‘state effect’ is generated through disciplinary ‘dividing practices’ (1999). Although the state is imagined as a concrete, unified notion (even if still utterly abstract), it is experienced in local, diversified encounters with people who happen to work for the state, or in this case for an organization taking on the ‘treatmentality’ of the state (cf. Jöhncke 2007). As Gupta points out: At the local level it becomes difficult to experience the state as an ontically coherent entity: what one confronts instead is

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much more discrete and fragmentary – land record officials, village development workers, the Electricity Board, headmen, the police, and the Block Development office. Yet (and it is this seemingly contradictory fact that we must always keep in mind) it is precisely through the practices of such local institutions that a translocal institution such as the state comes to be imagined (Gupta 1995: 384). These examples also illustrate how notions of citizenship are deeply embedded with cultural and social imaginaries of ‘the proper citizen’. Even – or perhaps exactly – within a field like treatment of drug users, which is already fraught with social and political ambiguities, the subtle demarcations and continuums of in- and exclusions reveal which values are at play when trying to re-create and re-include citizens.

Becoming normal In the second section of this chapter I will move my focus towards how the NGOs in their treatment of drug users recognize them as citizens by attempting to re-establish the ‘morally good person’. I will argue that the road to include them socially is most notably travelled through emphasis on religious values, employment and the importance of the family. Being a socially and morally good person in Iran is closely related to protecting the family, one of the ‘sacred’ social categories. This emphasis on the family pre-dates the revolution, of course (cf. Rejali 1994), but was strongly emphasized by the identity politics adopted after the revolution, highlighting the family as the most important cornerstone of the Islamic Republic (Mir-Hosseini 1993; Afkhami and Friedl 1994; Bjerre Christensen 2000). As I showed in chapter 4, the media debates on drug users – both those in favour of their medical inclusion and those wanting to eradicate them – centre on the drug users’ obstructive relation to the family. They are portrayed as abandoning, mistreating, posing a danger to and breaking up families. But the importance of keeping the links to and receiving support from the family is also highlighted – the family becomes a way of bringing drug

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users back into some sort of normalcy. This is even done by stretching the notion of ‘family’ to include temporary marriages (sigheh), which have on several occasions been advocated by authorities and clerics as a ‘solution’ to the problems of the youth, including preventing them from doing drugs.85 However, the importance of the family as it was stressed by the NGOs and in a private clinic, moves beyond any politicized or nationalized endorsement of the ‘Islamic family’. The family’s closeness and support was seen as crucial for the success of treatment. As Dr. Emran Razzaghi from the INCAS research centre said, ‘The difference between drug users in Iran and in other countries is that even though they are deeply involved in drugs, they still get support from their families’.86 This backing is both emotional and financial. Keeping, maintaining or re-creating the family bond is essential for being ‘led back in’, becoming socially included. The employees in Persepolis stood on a revealing threshold in that regard, balancing on the edge of a new, normal future. Most of the outreach workers spoke with difficulty about their pasts, shaking their heads silently. Words came slowly as they told me of imprisonment, abuse, police brutality, friends overdosing or freezing to death. But, they emphasized, because of Persepolis their future looked remarkably different, and discussing what lay ahead, describing their hopes, seemed both possible and easy. The future had become an option. Being employed, receiving a salary (however small), being able to make a difference and helping other drug users gave them an unprecedented sense of pride. Getting a small room to live in was a great step forward when they had been living on the streets for years. And a very important feature of the ‘future’ was the family. Being able to pay back the family who had supported them over the years was a mark of esteem. Being a father to your children, from whom you had been absent for years, or starting a family was suddenly achievable. Davud tells me he wants to get married and have love in his life. He would adore his wife, he adds in a heartfelt voice; he would listen to her and let her decide matters. She would be the head of the house, reis-e khāneh. Morteza looks up from his protocol registering the drug users and flashes Davud an ironic and caring smile: ‘Don’t worry,

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Davud. Women always are!’ Not picking up on Morteza’s irony, Davud in turn outlines an elaborate, peace-loving, feminist line of argument, essentially revealing all the agony he has left behind. ‘I know it’s not easy’, he nods, while doodling small hearts in the margin of the drug users’ protocol, ‘but I really hope it will happen’. The authenticity of the re-emerging social being is deeply related to forming a family.

The role of the family: a private clinic The importance of the family becomes even more significant in the practices of other treatment organizations like a private clinic, Narcotics Anonymous and Tavalod-e Dobāreh. ‘The sense of family bonding is very useful in the treatment’, Dr. Hooman Narenjiha stressed, when I visited his private clinic. Notions of respect, often stressed by reference to the shi’a Imams, and the role of the family were the most important ‘Iranian’ values, he emphasized. A charismatic man in his thirties, well-connected and devout, Dr. Narenjiha ran the clinic alongside being the deputy of the Darius Drug Research Centre and the host of a daily medical programme on the Khabar TV channel. Because he was famous from television, it meant even more to the drug users’ self-esteem that he showed them respect, he said. He was at the same time correct, respectful and informal with his patients; many of them phoned him on his private mobile. It mattered to him that he could make a difference. Dr. Narenjiha’s private clinic offered in- and outpatient treatment with methadone (focused on weaning), combined with consultations.87 The clinic consisted of a consultation room on the first floor. On the second there was a small in-patient clinic, where people could stay for ten days. The in-patients were ill; one was on the brink of passing out when we arrived, and the doctor repeatedly made sure he was still conscious. The clientele of the clinic were middle class, and a lot better off than the homeless addicts in the parks. Most of his clients were employed.88 I sat in on Hooman Narenjiha’s consultations one evening, where patients came and went, sometimes interrupting each others’ sessions. I met a few female addicts, but most women turned up with their addicted husbands, sons or brothers. A sister and her brother drove to

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the clinic on his motorbike. He was totally stoned when he stumbled into the clinic, although claiming, stridently, that he had not taken anything. The doctor did not believe him and kept asking both of them about his habits. Including the family in the treatment was key to his success, Dr. Narenjiha said: If one guy tells me: ‘if my father learns that I’m an addict, I’ll kill myself’, then for sure I will get the father to come to the clinic. If we establish a good bonding with the entire family, we get better results. Going through rehabilitation had to be motivated as an independent, personal decision, but although Dr. Narenjiha also talked to the drug users when they were on their own, his consultations were not a strictly private affair, mimicking psychological consultations in a European setting. Although people would reveal deeply personal problems and grievances, the consultations both had the character of family reunions, therapeutic sessions, and public performances of regained normalcy. Contrary to my expectations, my presence was easily accepted; often Dr. Narenjiha interrupted his conversations with the patients to explain and translate to me, making the shift in communication apparent, but I was still not rejected as an intruder. Either the patients were too ill to notice me, or they were well enough to somehow appreciate my attendance. A researcher present added to the clinic’s atmosphere of scientific professionalism, it seemed, and the patients and their family members were pleased that there was another audience to whom they could display their improvement. Some of the people turned up just to confirm that things were moving in the right direction. They typically dressed up nicely; they looked like they were going to dine out, as if to assure the doctor of their progress. There was something very public about the sessions, which, I believe, stress the importance and collectiveness of the family: being treated for addiction is not an individual, secluded or tabooed affair, and the first step after recognizing the need for treatment was to break the silence, involve the entire family and make them understand what recovery would require.

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A man who had been using opium and heroin for ten years turned up with his wife and daughter. Three months ago he had been an inpatient, and he was now gradually weaning off methadone. He felt good, he said repeatedly; they were all visibly grateful for his treatment. The recurring consultations had more to do with their continual family problems. His wife could not understand why his face did not look any better: ‘His skin is so dark’, she complained, lamenting in more than one sense that he still did not match her idea of normalcy; that his rehabilitation was not visible on his face. Dr. Narenjiha stressed the need to be patient. It would take time to get the person back they once knew. Often, Hooman Narenjiha told me, the wives of drug users were so frustrated and exhausted after years of addiction that when their husbands finally got into treatment, the wives had no endurance left to support them through it. They were seeking immediate solutions, which he could not provide. What he could do was to try and mend their relationships. A young guy came to the clinic alone – he was angry, agitated, scorned the doctor, felt really badly. He was in his late twenties, welldressed, street smart in sneakers and jeans. He was trembling, sweating, took the chair next to the doctor (instead of keeping the distance by sitting opposite to him), resting his forehead on his desk, sneering at the doctor, yet seeking his comfort: why did he not feel any better?! He had been through detoxification at the clinic and was still weaning off methadone. Although visibly craving, the real problem, he lamented, was his bad relationship with his wife. They had had a fight that night; she had called the clinic, crying. He had left the house to come here. Now, the doctor phoned her up, to make some sort of communication possible and to reassure both of them that things would get better eventually. She was deeply frustrated and on the brink of giving up. The young man walked in and out of the office, restless, in pain, interrupting the next consultations. Finally he got on the phone to her.

Narcotics Anonymous: seeking ‘cultural’ solutions The emphases on the family and religious beliefs are also specifically stressed in NGOs like Narcotics Anonymous, Tavalod-e Dobāreh

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(Rebirth) and Kongres 60. Although this is not specific to Iran, Dr. Hooman Narenjiha still stressed that the methods of NA and Tavalod-e Dobāreh had been ‘modified’ and ‘Iran-ized’ to fit Iran socially and religiously. He specifically emphasized the organizations’ ability to use religious beliefs therapeutically.89 Narcotics Anonymous’ first Iranian self-help group was established in 1994. Mr. Foruhar Tashvighi, an Iranian who had been addicted for 20 years while living in the USA and who received help from NA, returned to Iran and established an Iranian NA group, Anjoman-e Motadān-e Gomnān.90 It is now the third largest NA membership in the world, numbering some 150,000 members. NA perceives addiction as a chronic disease and establishes self-help groups, both for the clean ex-drug users and their spouses, assigning a ‘sponsor’ to each new member. All sponsors are previously addicted, ‘clean addicts’, as NA puts it. In 1999, Mr. Tashvighi started a ‘sister organization’, Tavalod-e Dobāreh, which is also founded on the twelve steps. The difference between the two is rather similar to the difference between Alcoholics Anonymous and the Minnesota model (cf. Steffen 1992: 44). Whereas NA organizes support to people in order for them to stay clean after they have gone through detoxification, Tavalod-e Dobāreh also runs rehabilitation centres, where drug users can detoxify.91 Compared to the work done by Persepolis Harm Reduction NGO, NA’s self-help groups and meetings are a lot less politicized, because NA uses abstinence-based methods. But their emphasis on readily endorsed cultural values also makes them less scrutinized by the government. An ‘unusually cheerful gathering’, I noted after visiting a public NA meeting. ‘I thought I had come to the wrong place’, I continued in my field notes. The meeting was held in one of the Social Welfare Organization’s buildings off Vali Asr Street, opposite Park-e Mellat. An enormous number of people crowded outside. It seemed as if they waited for a concert or a big family gathering, like a wedding. Flowers, big boxes of sweets, roses in cellophane circulated; people kissed each others’ cheeks and patted each other’s backs, smoked cigarettes and waited in tender excitement. Once inside, the sparkling reunion continued, comprising a motley crowd of people: a lot of young guys

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smartly dressed, elderly businessmen, truck drivers and teachers. It was primarily a gathering of the middle class, few people looked really poor. The large, brown-painted conference hall contained 150 seats, but was packed to the full. Many were standing in the back of the room and sat on the floor; possibly up to 200 gathered that evening. At least a quarter of the attendees were women, many elderly women who had been smoking opium for years, they told me, but also a number of very young girls – 16–17 years old. Most of them wore colourful rousaris, only a few were in maghna’ehs and chadors.92 Some of them came there as spouses. When asked how I fitted in, the repeated question was: ‘Are you here with someone?’ that is, are you a member or a spouse? The podium was covered with flowers and posters, which on the one hand displayed emotions which NA strived to overcome: gorosnegi (hunger), assabāni (anger), tanhābi (loneliness), khastegi (tiredness). And on the other, NA mottos of finding strength like: fekr kon (think), ravesh bebini dāshteh bāsh (use the method you find), faghat barāye emruz (one day at a time [literally: only for today]). It was hard for the organizers to get the meeting started – people kept hugging and kissing cheeks, embracing in vivid, happy greetings; mobile phones kept ringing. The speaker tapped the table repeatedly to quiet them down: ‘Friends, loved ones, please!’ Then a welcome prayer began, the 12 NA steps were read out loud and diplomas were handed out, starting with the newcomers. ‘Everyone who has been clean for up to 30 days: hands up’, said the speaker, a thin man in a white coat, with black, long hair and John Lennon-spectacles. And they would stand up: ‘Man Ahmad hastam, motād-am, 17 ruz’ (‘I’m Ahmad, I’m an addict, 17 days’). Loud clapping, whistling, specifically embracing the newcomers. And then the hierarchy moved on – to those who had been clean for 30 days, 60 days, 1 year, 2 years, etc. The NA ‘veterans’ got to the podium to tell their tales of experience (tadjrobe ta’arif kardan): how they had been using drugs, what they and their families had suffered, how they had lost their money, job, and dignity, until they had joined NA and things began to change. As one man related, he had been going to meetings everyday for the past two years, because it had been so difficult. Several were deeply moved

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and praised God, the community, their sponsor (rāhnamā or sponsor) and their families for supporting them through it. And the gathering was moved with them – people sighed and moaned with the taleteller, shook their heads in agony, some cried. In between the narratives, the atmosphere was overwhelmingly joyful, praising the members’ ability to stay clean by clapping and striking up a birthday song – ‘tavalod, tavalod, tavalod-e mobarak’, the gathering loudly cheered (cf. Steffen 1992: 42). This was clearly a day of happiness, a festivity of freedom from drugs. It was a celebration, which praised the family, the shared community of experience and equality, and the strength of belief. As Vibeke Steffen notes in regard to Alcoholic Anonymous, the narratives transform the personal experience into a more generalized circumstance or fact of life, emphasizing a sense of equality and belonging (1992: 43). This is, of course, a sense of belonging to the NA community in general, but I would also add that it is a sense of belonging to a clearly Iranian community. Although the gathering mirrors the rituals NA facilitates all over the world, the moments of narration and prayer were very similar to the ways in which rituals are performed in Iranian mosques. During the joint prayer in the end, the women sat and swayed gently, meditatively, back and forth, or from one side to the other, similar to the ways they would sit in mosques, absorbed in prayer. Some were resting their heads in their hands or on the row of chairs in front, some were crying. ‘Pray for me’, the 50-year-old woman sitting next to me said. She had been smoking opium for 25 years, had been clean for five-and-a-half months, and still needed strength. During āshurā, the shi’a ritual commemorating the death of the third shi’a Imam Hussein, or during the ritual celebrating how the Koran was revealed to the Prophet Mohammad, the prayer leader narrates the emotional tales which the entire community follows, mourning with the key characters (Thaiss 1972; Fischer 1980). Although not as long and emotional, the NA tales of experience share the same form and collective sense of belonging through suffering and release in the end (NA had ‘set her free’, as one woman said). These narratives also praised the same fundamental values: God, the community, and the family. As also in rituals in mosques, although people came for a specific occasion, it was just as important to meet other people, learning

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how they were, and sharing news on family and friends. It was, as I noted in the beginning, like participating in a wedding. Taking part in rituals – whether a wedding or commemoration of the Koran – is a frame, a setting for the intermingling of close personal and familial relations (and often, these rituals become part of the family extension; even at funerals, seeking out possible future spouses is very common). NA in Tehran stressed that they focused on the relationship to God (khodā), not to Allah, because they did not want to exclude nonMuslims. As Steffen points out, AA emphasizes a God ‘as we perceive him’ in order not to prioritize some religions over others (1992: 37). So I do not intend to ‘Islamize’ these gatherings, but I would argue that their ways of creating community feeling tap into already shared and culturally available notions of belief, belonging and redemption. Being released from your personal pain through participating in public rituals of mourning, sitting next to your neighbour, crying loudly for Imam Hossein are all ingrained parts of Iranian ‘normalcy’. Rather than being stigmatized gatherings for the incorrigible outcasts, NA meetings readily fit into the shi’a schemes of emotional redemption. Again, I do not want to reduce the help and counselling the members concretely receive in NA, but these ‘cultural features’ might also partly explain why NA is so popular in Iran. Although setting up NA self-help groups was viewed with suspicion in 1994 before treatment became legal (Tashvighi 1379 [2000]), NA’s relations to state authorities are relatively smooth. The Social Welfare Organization provides locations for NA’s meetings and supports their distribution of information. Partly this is because NA is financially independent, funded entirely by contributions from the members. Partly, I would argue, NA’s stress on abstinence, the strength of belief, the family and the community make the authorities perceive NA in a positive fashion. As I showed in chapter 4, being religious and pious is often portrayed as a deterrent against drug use by clerics and the DCHQ (the effect of which is debated). The religious values which NA stresses do play a part in the treatment efforts, but they do so in slightly different ways than the official portrayal of ‘religion as a cure’. Islam is not portrayed as a cure as such (the state-enforced religious ideology is, by many people, rather depicted as part of the reason for

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the massive drug problem). Rather NA stresses the spiritual domain. Belief, prayer and respect (for others, not least the family) are significant in rehabilitating the individual – and, I would add, in reconstructing the ‘morally good person’. Like NA, other NGOs such as Kongres 60 and Tavalod-e Dobāreh put the same weight on the role of belief in becoming clean. They also specifically emphasized belief in khodā (God), rather than Allah, to include people who were not Muslim. However, in a report on activities from 2005 in a special clause on ‘religious/belief’, Tavalod-e Dobāreh emphasizes how they also participate in Moharram rituals; are about to start up ‘5 praising stations’ and ‘6 processions of mourners in 6 Rebirth centres’, directly addressing Islamic virtues and contributing to shi’a rituals (Tashvighi 2005). These ways of drawing on Islam in treatment practices are interesting, because they add to the political debate on ‘expertise’ and ‘religion’. They show how these issues are merged in practice, and how a wide variety of treatment of drug users is endorsed through the means of Islam.93 While maintaining that belief and religious values are central to becoming clean and thereby ‘normal’ in an Iranian context, it is still, however a de-nationalized, de-ideologized belief, these NGOs underline. This is also emphasized in their participatory practices, where they stress equality, non-hierarchical and less gendered ways of taking part in the organizations.

Participation, gender and equality In general, the percentage of female addicts is a lot lower than among men and it is still much more stigmatized for women to be addicted. According to the Darius Drug Research Centre, female addicts only constitute between 2.4 and 4 per cent. But since few proper, and no secluded, places exist for women to be treated, they are under-represented in these statistics, Dr. Narenjiha stressed. At the INCAS treatment clinic, Dr. Razzaghi emphasized that ‘we try to create a female friendly environment by reserving one day a week for admitting female patients only’. But the female stigma is difficult to curb and it makes it particularly difficult for the clinics to reach the sex workers, he said.

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However, female drug users are relatively more visible in treatment facilities like Narcotics Anonymous, where there are special groups for women drug users and for spouses to the (mostly male) ‘clean addicts’. Bringing in the family, curing their ‘co-addiction’ is stressed by all the NGOs, but the fact that the ‘true esteem’ of being a member of NA is measured by the ability to stay clean also contributes to creating a less gendered space for participation. I visit the NA administrative headquarters one day, a small office with a warehouse full of information material – books, brochures, and key rings, symbolizing the one coin you need to phone up your sponsor when in trouble. The office contains a small room with a few desks, members coming and going, and constantly ringing phones. They were busy organizing a conference and training workshops for 300 sponsors, the men tell me. Although a head manager picks up most of the calls, the atmosphere is relaxed and supportive. ‘We don’t like bosses, we are very equal’, Ahmad tells me with a smile; the real hierarchy relates to how long the members have been clean (pāki, pāk kardan) (cf. Steffen 1992: 31). People introduce themselves not by recounting the amount of drugs taken or the years of addiction, but by their records of staying clean. Even after several years, they can all precisely state how many years, months, days they had been pāk. That is the true mark of esteem, and the reason why non-drug users cannot work for them voluntarily. Experience and the status of being a ‘clean addict’ are the only criterion for membership. For that reason, the female member who turns up is greeted like a true heroine. She is a 50-something year-old, middleclass woman, stout, with a direct and content look. She has been clean for over seven years. ‘Wow’, the young guys exclaim, ‘seven years!!’ ‘I was on everything’, she says, ‘opium, heroin, alcohol’, and she had gone through numerous attempts at quitting. ‘But NA was the only place that gave me an answer (djavāb dād). There, I found love and God’. None of the men I meet in the NA office got into drugs because of unemployment, but some of them lost their jobs because of their addiction. They are not destitute and despairing like the homeless drug users in the parks; they relate agonies of family crises, curiosity, and boredom. A guy in his late twenties, who works as a teacher,

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had been addicted to heroin for twelve years. He says that he began to drink alcohol when he was 12–13, because it was cool and he wanted to be like the big boys. What is common to all of them, Ahmad tells me, is that ‘we are not people with a lot of self-confidence’. Ahmad has been addicted to opium and heroin for twelve years and clean for two. Although he worked as an accountant throughout his addiction, and the last two years for the UN, still, he says, his lack of self-confidence was only addressed and put to rest, when he joined NA. Small gestures betray their discomfort – young men, who although fit, muscular and well dressed in sneakers, jeans, Tommy Hilfiger T-shirts, gold necklaces, and sunglasses in their hair, seem a bit uncomfortable in their own bodies. Small, overdone gestures to reassure each other, moving restlessly around the room, laughing a little too loudly, revealing an existential unease, a bit embarrassed in front of the foreign female visitor. And at the same time they are overtly hospitable, ordering lunch, caring for each other. Tea and cakes are constantly passed around, the men taking turns to clean up the ashtrays, which fill up frequently. Everyone chain-smokes cigarettes – ‘Well, we are addicts, you know!’ one guy comments with a smile, fidgeting with his lighter. They constantly emphasize in their body language and their way of talking to each other that NA offers them belief in God (khodā), love (eshgh) and friendship (dusti). ‘NA is like our big family’, as one of them says.

Negotiating normalcy, reclaiming rights The practice of drug treatment embodies how several margins are negotiated and intersect in Iran; margins between state institutions and NGOs, between what is deemed normal and deviant. My point is that the state should be approached from these margins, which are not just institutional or bound to legal or financial issues (such as how are NGOs funded, or how independent are they), but the margins of what is deemed normal and morally acceptable as opposed to deviant and socially corrupt. These localized negotiations of normalcy taking place on the streets of Tehran give revealing insights to how the ‘proper people’, the

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‘normal citizens’ are defined. By showing how these in- and exclusions are constructed in day-to-day encounters, I have attempted to grasp when and how the ‘languages of stateness’ are invoked and the state become apparent – as an idea and as concrete institutions. In addition, the work of these organizations shows how the state-enforced ideas of normalcy are subverted and challenged. Located in the intersection of these previously excluded drug users and the state, the NGOs work as an extension of the state bureaucracy, while at the same time challenging the official ‘dividing practices’ of the Islamic Republic. They do so by embracing and balancing at several margins – the margins of working outside the state, yet being scrutinized by state authorities; transgressing and reclaiming the ‘liminal’, ‘dangerous’, public places; bringing drug users ‘back in’ to a sense of normalcy and inclusion by drawing on fundamental cultural values. The NGOs work to reconstruct drug users both as legally included citizens and morally good persons, and they do so in constant conversations, but not in accordance, with officially held ideals of the ‘Islamic social being’. A number of political discrepancies are intertwined in the current drug policies – between the law enforcement and the health authorities, and among the health authorities as well. These disagreements are magnified in the interfaces between state authorities and the NGOs, constantly blurring and enforcing the boundaries between the state and civil society. What determines where the lines are drawn and how much the NGOs are controlled by state officials depend on a number of issues, most predominantly what kind of treatment the organizations offer. NGOs like NA, which is focused on abstinence-based treatment and clearly draws on religious values, have fewer difficulties than harm reduction NGOs like Persepolis. The case of Persepolis, in particular, points to a number of contentious areas of control: is harm reduction ‘treatment’ or endorsement of illegal drug use? Should the municipality support the NGO or fight them? Are the public parks leisure spots or places of contamination? Persepolis is caught in the middle of these political battles; the NGO has to fend off the state (the police, the municipality, the Ministry of

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Intelligence) and bring in the state (the municipality, the ministries of health and welfare) for funding and political support. The negotiations taking place with Persepolis are a ‘diagnostic of power’ (Abu-Lughod 1990: 41–2). They are fighting for their life, as the director called it. These interventions go to show how people navigate in a state where power is both disciplinary and sovereign; where the state is both an object of fear and desire (Nelson 2004, Blom Hansen and Stepputat 2001a: 9). Persepolis is facing a state to which rightful demands can be posed, but which also conducts random attacks. It is involved in a constant balancing act between using ‘rights’ as a bargaining tool – the drug users’ right to treatment, the NGO’s registered right to exist – and the fear of the state authorities’ arbitrary decision-making, which can only be curbed or negotiated through personal connections and social capital, depending on the shifting political currents. Power traverses these personal connections just like the outreach teams traverse and reclaim the ‘liminal’ urban spaces of the parks and abandoned buildings. Adding to the debate about the effects of the reform movement, the work of the organizations also reveals how discourses of ‘rights’ and ‘expertise’ have merged with religious values. The right to receive treatment is invoked and intermingles with the ways in which expertise and religious values are endorsed, not as slogans or propaganda tools, but in day-to-day encounters with the drug users. The treatment offered by these organizations draws on internationally recognized methods, to which divergent attitudes naturally exist. But these methods interact with a local, social, moral world, where specifically the role of the family and religious beliefs are important. This is not particular to Iran, since NA, for example, uses the same methods all over the world, but it still goes to show how the conversation between expertise, pragmatism and religious values that I outlined in preceding chapters, takes place in practice. Contrary to the views held by President Ahmadinezhad’s incoming political elite, expertise in regard to drug treatment and the practice of NGOs is not an uncritical submission to ‘Western’ values, but thoroughly ingrained in localized values and beliefs. The work of Persepolis, Narcotics Anonymous, Tavalod-e Dobāreh, and the private clinic also gives clues to how social inclusion to normalcy

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is conducted. Being part of a family, being employed, getting off the streets, looking proper, being hospitable, making a positive difference to others and being a believer are all emphasized in these interactions. It is less important, really, whether the drug users undergoing treatment are clean or on methadone, and more important how far they have come in observing and performing the markers of esteem. Although somehow contributing to official endorsements of the ‘Islamic social being’ (Adelkhah 1999), the pragmatic and inclusive ways in which these values are emphasized run counter to any fixed state ideologies. Rather than the propagandistic black-and-white demarcations of the ‘socially corrupt’ and ‘dangerous’ versus the ‘sacred’ categories of the nation, the process of rehabilitation shows a continuum of marginality and a much more flexible, inclusive notion of ‘normalcy’ in the making. Amidst the stigma and the social and personal tragedies, these organizations not only offer treatment but also reclaim the right to engage in an alternative, more pluralistic domain of normalcy. In conclusion, the ‘blurred boundaries’ between drug users and ‘normal people’ are paralleled in the blurred, yet ideologically enforced distinctions between state and civil society (Gupta 1995). Localized in these intersections between the normal and the ‘unacceptable vulnerable’, the NGOs expand the previously upheld ideological boundaries between normalcy and deviancy. Although state authorities constantly question the NGOs’ legitimacy they, in effect, challenge the government to become more inclusive, and reframe how to establish and maintain an Islamic social order.

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CHAPTER 6 SHOOTING DRUGS: R E-IM AGINING THE ‘MOR AL PUBLIC’

I use my films like a knife, to do surgery on society, to show what’s on the inside. Mohsen Makhmalbaf (in Weiss 2010)

Drugs on film In this chapter I move to a different domain, the cultural domain, where the margins of normalcy are also debated, contributing to the ways in which the drug crisis is perceived by the public. I will discuss how the issue of drugs has been depicted and debated in Iranian films and documentaries since the revolution. By bringing in films – focusing on those which have reached a large audience – I want to show that drug use has become a topic of wide-reaching debates, revealing societal concerns which clearly transgress the specificity of treatment organizations and closed professional circuits. Representing drug users in films forms part of a public protest, directed against state responses to the disadvantaged and the booming youth population. At the same time, these films show to what extent the state is willing to acknowledge the social problems. Drug use is increasingly being portrayed in Iranian films, highlighting onscreen the interconnections between addiction, family issues,

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and Iran’s social and political problems. These popular representations give interesting insights into the ways in which boundaries between ‘danger’, ‘deviancy’, and ‘normalcy’ are being shaped and imagined by the public. To use Foucault’s terminology, these films contribute to the drug ‘apparatus’ and drug crisis by debating what kind of problem drug use is, and by adding to the ‘conditions’, which make the treatment practices of the last ten years ‘acceptable at a given moment’ (Foucault 1991b: 75). But they also show the individualizing effects of post-revolutionary Iranian policies and voice a salient criticism of the ‘dividing practices’ initiated since the revolution. Films depicting drug users hold a mirror to the changing rationales of state policies towards drug users. Drug users have moved from the margins to the centre stage. Far from being typified as marginalized, amoral outcasts, proliferating ‘social corruption’ and Western conspiracies, recent films show drug users as main characters, who struggle to define and survive the extraordinariness of everyday life. Although using drugs is still clearly depicted as being dangerous and wrong, addiction is also becoming ‘normalized’: Drugs are everywhere, permeating the public sphere. The films show a negotiated normalcy, realistically portraying the harmfulness and devastating effects of drug use, but at the same time depicting drug use as an indigenous ‘Iranian disease’, which embodies the social and political dilemmas of the Islamic Republic. Films depicting drugs are significant on several, intertwined levels. First, I use films – both documentary and feature – as a set of semidocumentary sources, a lens through which the severity of and reasons for drug use are examined and debated. These films also add a voice to the drug users whose stories were described in the last chapter. On a second level, I focus on film directors as social actors, as representatives and negotiators of a specific intersection between the state and a broader public. I therefore deliberately analyse films which have passed the censors in Iran and become big box-office hits (as opposed to the massive underground circulation of banned or foreign films). Since the Iranian film industry is still clearly subjected to censorship, these films provide us with a double exposure: drug use is seen through the eyes of filmmakers, who raise social and cultural concerns,

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but only after these directors have negotiated the final versions of their work through face-to-face negotiations with cinema managers of Ershād, the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. Although these films are articulations of independent – and highly-acclaimed – filmmakers, what they depict on screen has been endorsed by the state. These films – daring as they are – are specifically interesting because they are shown in Iran. They add to a discussion of the balance between state permissiveness and control in Iran, and to considerations about how the media can be used to prevent drug use and HIV/ AIDS. This chapter will not attempt to provide an exhaustive or systematic list of all the Iranian films portraying drugs and addiction. Instead, it offers an interpretative reading of a few post-revolutionary films, which feature drug trafficking and characters using drugs. I primarily focus on Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s ‘Marriage of the Blessed’ (Arusi-ye khubān, 1989); Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s documentary (1996) and film (1999), both titled ‘Under the Skin of the City’ (Zir-e Post-e Shahr); and Bani-Etemad’s ‘Mainline’ (Khoon bāzi, 2006). I end by discussing a documentary by Maziar Bahari, ‘Mohammad and the Matchmaker’ (2004). Thematically, the reasons for drug use and the drug crisis portrayed in these films run parallel to the issues described in the last two chapters. They outline the consequences of the war, exposing the sacred categories of the revolution, and the heresy and uncertainties of youth, modernity and political reforms. Notions of normalcy are identified with but also obstructed by the family. The family as an institution is at once portrayed as a cure (to social ills), and as a cause of financial and emotional despair. The reform movement is depicted as a source of great hope, and massive disappointments.

The moral character of Iranian cinema With the international acclaim of the New Iranian Cinema in the 1990s, a large number of academic publications have appeared, placing the popularity of Iran’s film industry within the context of its politics and artistic traditions (Tapper 2002; Zeydabadi-Nejad

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2007; Sadr 2006; Dabashi 2001; Saeed-Vafa and Rosenbaum 2003). Iranian cinema is a contested space within the public sphere, which reflects the divergent ideas about the ‘right’ moral public. Although ticket sales have dropped from their 1989 peak of 81 million to 13 million in 2003 (Poudeh and Shirvani 2008: 330), Iranian cinema still plays a vital role in debating social issues and testing the changing ‘red lines’ of state censorship. Caught in the revolutionary Islamization of the ‘moral public’ (Rejali 1994; Khosravi 2003: 24–29), early post-revolutionary Iranian cinema struggled to define its ideological terrain. In the political greyzones and continual negotiations of state tolerance and censorship, film directors and policymakers each sought to define what Islamic cinema was supposed to look like. Naturally, topics endorsing religious values, the revolution and the war were celebrated (Zeydabadi-Nejad 2007). A whole industry of mainstream Iranian films in the 1980s focused on the ‘Sacred Defence’, as the war effort is officially called (Varzi 2002, 2006). But similar to the Islamization of the media, gender issues, high school curricula, etc., post-revolutionary Iranian cinema was often easier to define in negative terms, that is, what topics or ideas would not be allowed in ‘Islamic cinema’ (Tapper 2002: 6; Naficy 2002; Dabashi 2002: 127). In February 1983, the Ministry of Cultural and Islamic Guidance attempted to codify the cinematic expression of revolutionary and religious values. The Ministry announced that films would not receive exhibition permits if they ‘weaken’ Islamic principles, insult the Prophets, Imams and velayat-e faqih, or ‘blaspheme’ against ‘the values and personalities held sacred by Islam’ (Naficy 2002: 36). The issue of drugs was specifically mentioned. Films would be banned if they ‘encourage or teach abuse of harmful and dangerous drugs or professions which are religiously sanctioned against such as smuggling, etc.’, or ‘encourage wickedness, corruption, and prostitution’. From 1984 until 1997, yearly booklets also notified filmmakers about current regulations (Devictor 2002: 70). But although the ‘red lines’, filmmakers should not cross, were and are strictly imposed, they are also constantly negotiable. As Zeydabadi-Nejad says, the boundaries of ‘wickedness’ are blurred, at best, and determined according to the

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ministerial persons in charge, and the overall political tides (2007: 60). This has been the case ever since the revolution. In 1989, the first gradual liberalization of censorship took place, and after a decade of ‘revolutionary’ films, extolling the war and Islamic virtues, a new social criticism began to appear (Naficy 2002: 39; Poudeh and Shirvani 2008: 328ff). The pushing of boundaries only increased with the advent of the reform movement. Forming part of an endless struggle to define the ‘moral public’, the Ministry of Cultural and Islamic Guidance became the epicentre of the reform movement’s efforts to implement President Khatami’s inclusive slogan ‘Iran for all Iranians’ (Zeydabadi-Nejad 2007: 72). Since freedom of speech was one of the key issues for Khatami, the liberal Ata’ollah Mohajerani was appointed Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance, and a large number of previously banned movies were released, and less restrictive censorship was installed, leading to ‘a major re-imagining of “the nation” ’ (ibid.). The Ministry of Cultural and Islamic Guidance became one of the main battlegrounds for the ‘cultural war’ fought between reformists and conservatives, which resulted in further conflicting, dual policies and rationalities of the state (Mir-Hosseini 2002b). The reformist Ministry of Cultural and Islamic Guidance would give permits to films, books, magazines and newspapers, only to have them shut down by the conservatively dominated judiciary.

Political dualities: who is the state? A telling example of this duality and the level of permissiveness, which appeared during the reform movement, was Saman Moghadam’s movie, ‘Party’ (Party, 2001). ‘Party’ came out at the time of President Khatami’s re-election in 2001, and in many ways it summarized the keywords and turmoil of the preceding four years’ reform movement. The main character in ‘Party’ is a cool, young, modern, and reformist editor, who fights for his right to publish a story in which the official, positive legacy of the war is challenged. The film’s dialogue and particularly the editor’s claims are packed with the keywords of the time – ‘freedom of speech’, ‘rule of law’, ‘patience vs. violence’ – none of which protect the protagonist from being arrested, interrogated,

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and beaten (‘of course there is freedom of speech’, the interrogator tells him before hitting him to the ground, ‘but it differs for bastards like you’.) While the editor is in prison, his wife and brothers earn money for his bail by renting out their apartment as a venue for underground parties. The editor gets furious when he realizes what has happened. Here, the film’s director weaves a moralistic narrative, emphasizing the editor’s moral superiority, and contrasting his (rightful) claim to freedom of speech with the (amoral, un-Islamic) drinking parties and break-dance competitions. But at the same time the film exposes and explores the entire scene of the posh, cool, youthful resistance to the rules of Islamic conduct against a soundtrack which includes remixes of Sting’s ‘Desert Rose’ and classic rebellious anthems by the Beastie Boys (‘You have to fight ... for your right ... to paaaaaarty!’). Eventually the editor is killed by hezbollahi-mobs on motorbikes. The assassination in the film closely replicates an attempt on the life of reformist ideologist Said Hajjarian in March 2000, when he barely survived being shot by two men on a motorbike. ‘Party’ was hugely popular – it sold 3,100,000 tickets and became the second biggest box-office hit in 2001.94 When I watched it in Tehran that spring, the predominantly young audience seemed divided between those saddened and moved by the political repression so clearly reflecting the world outside the doors of the theatre, and those who were boisterously engaged by its vivid rock’n’roll momentum. For my part, I was simply surprised: how was it possible, I asked my friends and informants, to make and screen a film, so meticulously reflecting the suppression of freedom of speech, when the exact same abuses happened every day? How could a film reveal the parties, which the komiteh and basijs broke up on a weekly basis, the torturing of political prisoners, and even mimic the attack on Hajjarian? ‘ “Party” is a precise reflection of the Iranian reality’, a political analyst in Tehran told me at the time. ‘The political opposition, people like Akbar Ganji, Abdollah Nouri, Eshkevari, are in prison but you can still buy their books all over the place. Walk into any bookshop and Mr. Ganji’s books are still number one seller. That shows the fighting around. You can’t say that one group has won. If they had

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won, you wouldn’t see “Party”, and I couldn’t go to the bookstore and buy any of these books’ (Interview, April 2001, Tehran). Although far from reaching the artistic subtlety of filmmakers like Kiarostami or the Makhmalbafs, ‘Party’ expressed the moment, the tragic irony of the reform movement. It reflected the ‘duality of authority’, as the analyst said, the discrepancies between the then reformist Ministry of Cultural and Islamic Guidance, which had permitted the film’s release, and the judiciary, which constantly banned, accused, attacked and jailed the real-life editors and filmmakers. These competing state rationalities are one important feature of the ambiguity of control. Another characteristic is the face-to-face encounters with state officials. Like negotiations between NGOs and state officials, the approving procedures are an interpersonal battle between the ministries and the filmmakers. Ziba Mir-Hosseini vividly describes this process in regard to getting permission for filming the award-winning documentary she made with Kim Longinito, ‘Divorce, Iranian Style’ (1998; Mir-Hosseini 2002b). A fundamental part of Taghi Amirani’s documentary on the reformist newspaper Sharq, ‘Red lines and Deadlines’ (2004), goes to show how journalists circumvent these fragile margins between state permissiveness and control. These negotiations show how forceful, fragmented and personified state restrictions are, and how the filmmakers make room for manoeuvring. As the director Mohsen Makhmalbaf tells Zeydabadi-Nejad in regard to censorship: I don’t believe that one should see the authorities as black and white. One cannot say that every official in this regime is bad and their opponents are all good. In cinema, sometimes the person in charge was strict and his deputy was sympathetic, and vice versa. We always found loop-holes [ ... ] which we went through like water through a crack (Zeydabadi-Nejad 2007: 70). The importance of the cinema – and its presumed effect on the public – can also be judged from its popularity. The main films I analyse have been watched by at least one million people, some by over three million. This suggests, of course, a large interest for the topics

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they raise. But the cinema’s importance can also be deduced from the meticulous care with which the state has attempted to control the film industry, at the same time as meeting the need for popularity. As Zeydabadi-Nejad recounts, popularity became an important yardstick during the reform movement, and the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance conducted regular surveys of popularity (2007: 73). This reflects the drive for public legitimacy, which informed the political scene at the time. The dynamics of the cinema during the reform movement, as well as the rest of the media and civil society organizations, were influenced and largely determined by this ‘catch 22’ of the state: nothing would have been easier than to ban all films, which dared to criticize the regime and its effects on a doomed young generation. But the public mattered; legitimacy mattered. The need to somehow satisfy the public, and the massive public interest in those films which engaged with the less glorious realities of contemporary Iran, made the balancing act of permissiveness, control, and popularity extremely vibrant. Had Iran ‘just’ been a totalitarian state, this would not have been the case. To sum up, Iranian cinema plays a significant role in pointing to the moralized margins of the state, because it reveals the revolutionary guidelines set by the government, and it highlights how these guidelines are constantly confused, transformed and subverted by policyand filmmakers. It is within this realm that it becomes interesting to watch how the issue of drug use has slowly gained coverage.

The addicted outcast The depictions of drug users on film reflect different perceptions of what kind of crisis the drug crisis constitutes. Before the revolution and in the 1980s, drug users were portrayed as entirely marginalized and dangerous characters. Narcotics appeared in pre-revolutionary films about drug trafficking, which, according to Sadr, were ‘marred by the films’ desire to dismiss the problem as alien to Iranian society’ (2006: 107).95 Alternatively, some directors used drug-addicted characters as a symbol of social problems, casting them as excluded outcasts. Masud Kimiai’s ‘The Deer’ (Ghavaznhā, 1975) is one such example; Mehrjuee’s

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‘Mina Circle’ (Dāireh-e Mina) from 1974 another. In ‘Mina Circle’ drug addicts are portrayed as marginalized blood donors being abused by reckless blood traders, causing a scandal of infected blood in a city hospital. As Sadr notes, ‘Mina Circle’, which was banned for three years, was an ‘unflattering portrait of societal relationships that are usually kept well out of sight’ (2006: 135). After the revolution, where new moral enforcements against ‘social corruption’ and drugs were put in place, several films were banned because they were seen as ‘teaching’ or ‘encouraging’ addiction and social corruption.96 Films released in the 1980s invariably depicted drugs as a result of ‘Westoxification’ and conspiracy theories. Masud Kimiai’s ‘Blade and Silk’ (Tigh va Abrisham) from 1986 showed drug trafficking as a Western plot, intended to weaken the war effort by turning young men into addicts (Sadr 2006: 213). In the 1990s, however, the outcasts began increasingly to take centre stage. They became a symbol of the revolution’s broken promises to the poor and the postrevolutionary political transition. The appearances of drug users in films by Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Rakhshan Bani-Etemad contribute to re-imagining the boundaries between social in- and exclusions, deviancy and normalcy, between the acceptable and unacceptable vulnerable.

Makhmalbaf: attacking the sacred categories ‘Marriage of the Blessed’ by Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Arusi-ye khubān, 1989) is one of the most successful, early, critical depictions of post-revolutionary Iran’s social and political problems. In the 1980s Makhmalbaf had been truly devoted the cause of the revolution and made several ‘revolutionary’ films, supporting the ‘Sacred Defence’ (Dabashi 2002). However, in ‘Marriage of the Blessed’, Makhmalbaf takes a critical look at the war veterans (Sadr 2006: 201–6; Tapper 2002: 13). Drug users play a small, but important part in Makhmalbaf’s devastating critique of the consequences of the war and Iran’s pervading social issues. According to Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad, in 1989 this film became the first, eye-opening and hugely popular film to point at Iran’s social

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problems and raise the consciousness of the younger generation, who went on to become the primary actors in the 1990s’ reform movement. It sold 1,115,000 tickets (2007: 81–4). Zeydabadi-Nejad describes his own experience of seeing the film as ‘the realisation that some of our concerns were shared by regime insiders offered us a degree of symbolic inclusion’, raising hope for a change in the ‘stifling atmosphere’ of Iranian society (ibid. 94). ‘Marriage of the Blessed’ tells the story of one of the ‘sacred’ and ‘blessed’ – a war veteran, who is deeply traumatized by his time at the front. Judging from his flashbacks and hallucinating fits, the war was far from glorious. When Haji, the main character, does (literally) get back on his feet and regains his job as a photojournalist, his unblemished devotion to social justice makes him point his camera at the forgotten underworld of the city (and the revolution): the poor, the homeless, the deprived, the prostitutes and the drug users. Shooting these pictures at night, Haji’s camera uncovers the people to whom the revolution promised, but failed to deliver, ‘social justice’. The subjects guard themselves from the flash of his blitz, hiding their indignity and ashamed faces. By literally magnifying these people, Makhmalbaf projects the responsibility for their plight back onto the viewer, back onto the state. ‘What are you trying to prove?’ Haji’s editor scolds him, when he looks at his pictures. ‘You can’t solve social problems with a couple of photographs’. What Haji (and Makhmalbaf) can show, however, is that the social problems and the disadvantaged still exist, despite the revolutionary promises. Everybody urges Haji to get married and believes it will release him from his war traumas, emphasizing marriage as a moral and medical imperative. ‘Marriage is highly recommendable’, the doctor informs his family, when they take him out of hospital. His in-laws are apprehensive, because they perceive him as a madman, and when he finally marries his fiancé, Haji creates a major scandal at their wedding. By way of welcoming his guests, he lashes out at his wealthy in-laws, and more generally at the imbalances of society: ‘Eat the food robbed from the poor’, he shouts into the microphone. ‘Robbed food is delicious ... Robbed food is delicious ...’. Descending into another post-traumatic fit, he sings a funeral song – needless to say, highly

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inappropriate at a wedding – a funeral song for what Iran has become, one might say, lamenting the broken promises to the deprived and the human costs of the war. Most of his friends appearing at the wedding are handicapped and scarred veterans. Haji is again locked up in the psych ward, with all the other shellshocked war veterans, who spend their days playing war games in ridiculing ways. After attacking a doctor, he escapes, and ends up sleeping on the streets just like the social outcasts he photographed earlier. In a final reversal, Haji is even photographed by a journalist as he lies in the street. He has turned into one of the nameless outcasts whom he previously portrayed. But the point is: he is not nameless. Haji is one of the blessed, one of the war heroes. And since we as an audience know this, the boundaries between what would be deemed ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable vulnerability’ become blurred. Eventually, Haji regains his spirit. He leaves his wife, abandons marriage as a ‘highly recommendable’ cure, and drives off into the distance, leaving the ending uncertain. In addition to being a vital comment on post-traumatic stress syndrome, Makhmalbaf questions a number of ‘sacred categories’: the position of the ‘blessed’, the legacy of the war, and the revolution’s promise of social justice. Films like ‘Marriage of the Blessed’ and later, for example, Ebrahim Hatamikia’s ‘Glass Agency’ (Ajans-e shishei, 1997) reveal the country’s responsibility to its war veterans (Zeydabadi-Nejad 2007: 97–100) and in Hatimikia’s case the ‘undiagnosed tensions of the past that lurked behind a surface normality’ (Sadr 2006: 220). These films did not question the ‘sacredness’ of the war veterans, but the moralized and politicized boundaries surrounding ‘acceptable vulnerability’. Far from being flawless masculine symbols of the idealized ‘Sacred Defence’, the war veterans in these films are unhinged, homeless, drug users (Makhmalbaf) and hostage-takers (Hatamikia). And yet, to abandon them as outcasts is to dismiss the revolution. They cannot be dismissed, but showing the dilemmas and problems faced by the war veterans serves to accommodate and include the other, less ‘blessed’ outcast categories. Another significant aspect of Makhmalbaf’s film is the way it questions marriage as a blessing and a cure, exposing and challenging the

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widely held (and politically reinforced) belief that a person needs to get married in order to become ‘normal’.97 In ‘Marriage of the Blessed’ family is surely not portrayed as a cure. Although Haji’s wife is depicted as sincere, her concerns seem shallow and ordinary compared to her husband’s devotion to the downtrodden, and there is no happy ending for their union. An interesting parallel to this ambiguous rendition of the family as a sacred, ‘curing’ category can be found in Mohammad Rasoulof’s ‘The Twilight’ (Gāgooman, 2005). Based on a true story, the film chronicles how a long-term, notorious prisoner seeks to become ‘normalized’ and socially included through marriage. ‘You can be like normal people’, the prison manager promises him, and promptly sets him up. The prisoner marries another inmate and we follow their – simple, moving – attempts to becoming ‘normal’, building a new life as a married couple and having a child. But they cannot cope. When he is released he has difficulties finding work and cannot support the family, and eventually he gets re-arrested. Although advocated as such, marriage is not a cure, and does not offer the suggested social inclusion. Although Makhmalbaf still depicts drug users as marginalized outcasts – marginal to the story line, and portrayed as destitute and homeless, as in Mehrjuee’s ‘Mina Circle’ – they form a central part of the film’s wider social critique. Both the sacred categories of the war veterans and the family are put under fire.

Bani-Etemad: family under fire Rakhshan Bani-Etemad is the Iranian film director who has most clearly and convincingly portrayed how drug use interlinks with family relations. She made her first documentary on addiction in 1996, and her feature film ‘Under the Skin of the City’ (Zir-e post-e shahr, 1999) involves drug trafficking. With her last feature film, Khoon bāzi (translated as ‘Mainline’, but literally, and more tellingly, ‘Blood Game’ [2006]), which portrays a young female heroin addict and her attempts to quit, Bani-Etemad once and for all pulls the character of the drug user from the social margins onto centre stage.

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In order to make these films, Bani-Etemad had to become an expert on addiction. She lived with a drug-addicted family for a month and spent two years doing research for ‘Mainline’.98 Her work investigates what kind of crisis drugs pose, and how this is entangled in other social issues. Her films expose a post-war social crisis, which is both financial (scraping by to survive; dreaming of a better future) and moral (loosing faith; families arguing and splitting up; people getting involved in drugs or alcohol to escape or mentally survive, but only exacerbating their problems). The widespread portrayal of drug use in the newspapers of the late 1990s was indicative of an increasing moral panic mainly related to the decay of the ‘sacred’ institution of family. However, rather than endorsing the mainstream, romanticized depiction of the family as the cornerstone of Islamic coherence and integrity, many of Bani-Etemad’s films bravely show internal conflicts in family life, questioning what kind of institution the family is. Both ‘Nargess’ (Nargess, 1992) and ‘The May Lady’ (Banu-ye Ordibehesht, 1998) dramatically depict forbidden love and counter preconceived notions of female sexuality. They serve, as Hamid Reza Sadr says, to smash ‘the sentimental myth of family life in contemporary Iran’ (2006: 260). Bani-Etemad’s films reflect a messy reality, and they reveal how badly affected families are by the financial, social and political hardships of their time. She demonstrates that social, political, and family crises, ‘far from being exceptional, are the norm’ (ibid. 252). Bani-Etemad’s 1996 documentary film on drug addiction, ‘Under the Skin of the City’, (Zir-e post-e shahr) was funded by the Social Welfare Organization, and meant for preventative purposes. Shot before drug rehabilitation was legally allowed, the documentary reveals the debate on the social reasons for drug use which took off in the 1990s, and it reflects the educational approach emphasized by the Social Welfare Organization at the time. ‘Drug addiction is the outcome of a sick society. Drug addiction is a family illness’, the voice-over says, clearly zeroing in on the social reasons for drug use, rather than dismissing the problem as a Western conspiracy. Interviewing parents of drug users and incarcerated addicts in the, at that time, prison-like rehabilitation camps, the documentary emphasizes an alluring alienation and

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insecurity: drugs are available everywhere; getting addicted is easy; drugs are not confined to subcultures or the lower social classes (one of the interviewed addicts even tells how he got addicted while doing his military service). ‘Feeling safe is wrong’, the voice-over warns. Although emphasizing social reasons for addiction, the film mainly points to the responsibility of the parents. One should ‘not look for answers outside the family’, the voice-over says, adding in a cautionary tone to the parents: ‘How much do you know about your children?’ It also shows the shame of the afflicted parents – one interviewed mother advocates strong punishments, even executions: ‘I believe they [the government] should get rid of them [the drug users]’, she says. Although bold and realistic in its portrayal of a rampant youth problem, the documentary also clearly bears the mark of the Social Welfare Organization’s mid-1990s’ agenda. Underlining that religious beliefs are a ‘deterrent’ against drug use, the tone of the film is educational and warning. It is focused primarily on prevention (rather than treatment), and directed at the parents rather than the youth, but some scenes – particularly those from the internment camps – can also be viewed as a push for further treatment facilities. The documentary was shown by the Social Welfare Organization and Bani-Etemad herself to groups of parents, but it never appeared on TV (pers. conv., April 2008, London).

‘Under the Skin of the City’ With her feature film of the same name, which appeared a few years later (‘Under the Skin of the City’, 1999), Rakhshan Bani-Etemad presents a complex picture of a (lower) middle-class family in Tehran and their social and financial trials. The main character, Abbas, who is in his late twenties, gets involved in a drug deal as the last way out of a financial and emotional deadlock. Drug trafficking is portrayed as the final outpost of despair, as the one remaining solution to a constant incursion of interlinked problems. Throughout the film, which is set in 1997 at the time of Khatami’s presidential election, Abbas desperately wants to make a better life for himself and his family – so that he can go off and marry the girl of his dreams. But being constantly let down, eventually he becomes the driver for a drug dealer.

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Compared to Makhmalbaf’s ‘Marriage of the Blessed’, ‘Under the Skin of the City’ (both the documentary and the feature film) move a lot closer to a ‘normalization’ of drugs – depicting the phenomenon as a tragic, yet integral part of contemporary social crises. Although far from endorsing Abbas’ decision (the drug deals goes very wrong in the end), Bani-Etemad shows us the human face of a drug trafficker, subverting the official, one-dimensional characterization of dealers as ‘merchants of death’. Instead, we follow and understand Abbas’ problems. He is emblematic of the young generation, pinning their hopes on the reform movement, while struggling to get by. At the same time, the scene of drug trafficking serves to re-emphasize both the moral narrative of the film and the significance of upholding and establishing ‘normalcy’ – even illegal strategies are employed in order to save the family and make marriage possible. Bani-Etemad depicts family problems, which are both specific and universal. Abbas’ family has financial problems typical of a debt-ridden, ‘normal’, lower middle-class household, clinging on to their home and their dignity (‘God. I wish I would die to end this indignity’, Abbas’ mother laments, referring to her husband’s debt). Abbas protects his sister, who is beaten up by her husband. He helps his brother when he gets in trouble for his political activism in the reform campaign. He settles disputes between the parents – ‘if you just let me, I’ll take care of everything’, Abbas scolds his mother. Meanwhile, in the neighbouring family, the son beats up his teenage sister, forcing her to run away. Showing the urban leisure parks as an ambiguous site of policed control and danger to the young girls’ chastity, the girl is eventually found by Abbas’ sister in Park-e Mellat, where she has put on heavy make-up, suggesting that she has already become an addicted prostitute.99 ‘Under the Skin of the City’ is a portrayal of Iranian youth’s dreams of freedom which is constantly deferred (the freedom to have fun, not to get beaten up by the police or family members; the freedom to work abroad, to get married, to modestly support a family, to see the political claims of the reform movement pull through). Having paid large sums for a visa to Japan (the outside world is portrayed as a Utopian dream), Abbas is swindled, which drives him to do the drug deal. The

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deal is obstructed by his brother, who hides in the truck and throws the drugs away, morally saving him, one might say, but also definitively underlining the dilemma of family relations, and leaving Abbas on the run, fearing for his life. It is not only the drugs that Abbas’ brother throws out of the truck, but also the wedding dresses in which the drugs are concealed, symbolically disposing of Abbas’ dreams of getting married and reclaiming that sense of normalcy. In Bani-Etemad’s world, the family is both a site for support and a major stumbling block to prosperity. Meanwhile, the public urban space, the skin of the city, is exposed as a noisy, uncertain, polluted spectacle, craving a political transition. As the younger son says when his sister’s husband beats her up: ‘These kinds of things happen when women are ignorant of their rights’. The need for political reform is bluntly expressed with reformist banners, but more powerfully, the film illustrates the need for hope and change in a society crippled by personal need and despair. ‘To whom will you show this film, anyway?’ the mother asks a documentary team, filming her when she goes to the polling station in the end of the movie. Pointing at her heart, she reproaches the film team’s request for a political ‘message’: ‘I want you to film what goes on in here! In here!’100 ‘Under the Skin of the City’ was hugely popular when it was released in Iran. It sold 3,250,000 tickets and became Iran’s third largest box-office hit in 1999.101 Although the plot’s content was dramatic, it evoked concerns and emotions to which most middle-class people could relate. At the same time, the film itself was proof and celebration of a degree of free expression hitherto unknown in post-revolution Iran. The social issues portrayed in ‘Under the Skin of the City’ encompass the entire range of complaints which came out at the time of the reform movement, problems relating to youth, unemployment, financial crisis, clampdowns on student activism, brain drain, domestic violence, runaway girls, and drug trafficking. However, although the film is set in the midst of Khatami’s first election, it had actually been in the pipeline for a long time. It took Bani-Etemad ten years to get the permissions to produce the film, but during this period, as she later recounted, ‘My concerns became stronger and deeper. My worries had been well-founded and the problems were more widespread’.102

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‘Under the Skin of the City’ is typical of its time, in the sense that although the post-revolutionary problems it addresses had been rampant for a while, it was only with the advent of the reform movement that they were put on screen.

A lost generation shooting up In ‘Under the Skin of the City’ (1999) drugs feature as a minor, but still distinctive frame for the main story. But in her film ‘Mainline’ (Khoon bāzi) from 2006, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad drives the dagger into the heart of drug addiction. For the first time, a young, heroin-addicted woman stars as the main character. Sara is a 20-year-old woman from an upper-class family in Tehran, who desperately attempts to escape her addiction, so that she can marry the fiancé waiting for her in Canada. ‘Mainline’ is a study of what addiction is and does, as well as a portrayal of contemporary Iran’s family and societal crises. The film unapologetically confronts the distress of addiction, the physical fight to stay clean, the emotional hazards and peer-pressure from Sara’s friends, and the clashes between generations. Heroin addiction is portrayed as a widespread and vicious illness of the youth, and as an upper-class phenomenon (in contrast to the financial situation that gets Abbas into trouble in ‘Under the Skin of the City’ and the homeless addicts in Mehrjuee and Makhmalbaf’s work). Bani-Etemad shows how drugs permeate, invalidate, and highlight contemporary class differences: ‘You buy our stuff but party with the pretty boys’, an abusive drug dealer tells Sara, threatening to take her for ‘a quick drive’ to show her ‘a good time’. When she insists on leaving his car, he physically smacks her, assaulting both her body and her social status: ‘Bitches get noble when they have money’, he sneers. Although Sara’s family is clearly well-off, that certainly does not solve their problems. The differences between the upper and lower classes are both emphasized (some appear more noble than others, at least on the surface), and levelled (under the surface they are all potential addicts). In ‘Mainline’, drug use is portrayed as an Iranian illness, but as in ‘Under the Skin of the City’ it is also linked to the outside world.

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Sara’s desire to go to Canada and start a new, proper life as a married woman is both conveyed as a promise of a better future and a pressure to perform (which neither Sara nor her parents seem capable of doing). Escaping to the outside (the West and a drug-free life) is a visible, tempting option, yet extremely difficult to achieve. Whereas the West was portrayed as a source of moral decay and conspiracies in the early post-revolutionary films, Bani-Etemad’s films interestingly reverse this role. The predominant moral narrative in the film relates Sara’s addiction to her parent’s bad marriage and divorce. That is what Sara’s father (a wheelchair-bound alcoholic) claims, in a heated argument with her mother: ‘She became like this in the two years with you ... If you hadn’t left me, things wouldn’t have turned out this way ... You abandoned me!’ he says, and berates Sara’s mother for being selfish and pursuing her career as an engineer. She retaliates with her own abusive accusations, but also blames herself for not sacrificing enough: ‘I keep asking myself where I went wrong. If I had taken his abuse and stayed with him, this wouldn’t have happened to my child’. ‘Mainline’ clearly depicts the generational divide, the ineptitude of the parents’ generation in saving themselves and their children. An ongoing battle takes place between Sara and her mother, when she drives Sara to a rehabilitation centre by the Caspian Sea. The mother is trapped between helping Sara to stay clean (driving her to rehab, saving her from a suicide attempt), and giving in to her cravings and mischief, being complicit in a drug deal paid with her money. Although the mother is portrayed as a modern, working woman, her dominant characteristics are selflessness and sacrifice (‘Me? I take a handful of pills everyday to calm me down. I’m the last thing I think about. I miss myself’, she tells a friend on the phone). By conveying addiction as a head-on, interpersonal conflict, Bani-Etemad portrays it as a symptom of the miserable, claustrophobic condition of the Iranian family, and Iranian society in general. Although Sara fights against her mother’s pleading demands, unlike the defiant, rebellious teenagers in other films (such as Sadr-Ameli’s ‘Girls in the Sneakers’ [1998], Moghadam’s ‘Party’ [2001], or, poignantly, Jafar Panahi’s ‘Offside’ [2006]), Sara is not really a quintessential

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example of youthful resistance. At least, it is not clear what she rebels against. Although craving and misbehaving, she is somehow beyond rebellion, utterly lost in her mortifying addiction: ‘I can’t even kill myself’, she cries, when waking up in the hospital. ‘Mainline’ is also highly interesting from a gender perspective, as it threatens most ideals of feminine dignity and chastity. Ideas of what may be shown in public are torn apart – keeping up appearances is not an option. As an image of Iran, Sara becomes all the more vulnerable and dangerous, too: if this is what 20-year-old women from well-off families get themselves into, Iran is in a desperate state. Apart from bringing a female drug user to the centre stage, ‘Mainline’ makes it very clear that the most vulnerable citizens of the Islamic Republic are not the veterans or families of martyrs, but the youth. The difficulty of communication is another theme in the film, one which is connected to drugs, but by no means originates with them. Drugs merely heighten the emotional battles left unsolved, the failures to mend separations and detachments. This is conveyed in the film through an endless succession of mobile phone calls made, accepted, refused, or disconnected. In Bani-Etemad’s film ‘The May Lady’ (1998) we never see the main character’s lover. Instead the telephone is used to express feelings of affection and love, otherwise difficult to communicate, due to censorship (Whitaker 1999: 70ff). Likewise, in ‘Mainline’ mobile phones play a prominent role as an embodiment of modernity, of solitude and alienation, of closeness and distance, as does the video of Sara’s flirtatious fiancé waiting, unsuspecting, in Canada – he is both sensually close and physically distant. In the end, despite having succeeded in making the daunting trip to the rehabilitation centre, it is still not clear whether Sara will manage to quit the drugs. But in contrast to the grey filter through which the entire film has been shot, visually conveying the numbness and despair of Sara’s life as an addict, in the final scene, the leaf of a bright, blooming orange tree pierces the grey, symbolizing the advent of hope, however slight. When discussing her films at a retrospective in London, April 2008, Bani-Etemad said that she needed to end the film with some sense of hope – ‘as a film maker and as a mother’, she added.103

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‘Mainline’ was hugely popular and won the best film award at the 10th Donya-ye Tasvir Cinematic and TV Films Celebration in July 2007 (Tehran Times 2008). I talked to Rakhshan Bani-Etemad when she visited London, where she said that ‘Mainline’ had created a very positive debate in Iran because it brings up and breaks the taboo of young female addicts for the first time and shows drug use as a problem common to all social classes. Both medical doctors and representatives from the Social Welfare Organization endorsed ‘Mainline’. Because young people could relate to Sara’s situation, the state representatives found it a far more effective deterrent to drug use than most official campaigns. Because it so empathetically reveals the heroin addiction of a young, upper-class woman, ‘Mainline’ raises interesting questions as to how drug use is supposed to be depicted in order to observe the limits of not ‘teaching’ or ‘encouraging’ corruption, drug abuse and so-called ‘wickedness’. Where are the lines of permissiveness drawn? First of all, ‘Mainline’ shows the extent to which the state now admits to social ills. The fact that ‘Mainline’ became a box-office hit in 2007 reveals how central the drug crisis has become in public discourse. But although Bani-Etemad delivers a heartrending social critique in all of her films, she still depicts drug use as inherently bad, which keeps her work within the confines of the official ‘red lines’. ‘Mainline’ reminds me of a German film from my adolescence, ‘Christiane F – Wir Kinder Vom Bahnhof Zoo’ (Edel 1981). The film is based on the true story of a heroin-addicted teenage prostitute. It was a textbook example of fatal consequences of drugs which most Danish school children were forced to watch in the 1980s as a preventative measure. By revealing the terrifying consequences of drugs ‘Mainline’ is preventative in much the same way. This comparison does not make ‘Mainline’ a bad film, by any means, but it serves to explain why a film so disturbing can be made and shown in Iran. A significant change has taken place, since the early 1980s: characters who use drugs are not deviants; they are very much our nextdoor neighbours. In ‘Under the Skin of the City’ (1999), Abbas the drug trafficker is the amicable neighbour of the lower middle class. In ‘Mainline’ Sara is the upper-class neighbour. At the same time,

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the dangers of drugs are made blatantly evident. And, although criticizing the state and society at large, the normative, moral narratives primarily depict drugs as the outcome of family relations gone wrong, emphasizing the importance of the family. Bani-Etemad is subverting the state by raising critique of Iran’s social ills, but at the same time she emphasizes the values which a ‘morally good person’ should cherish. Although Sara’s fits defy any ideals of demure femininity, her selfsacrificing mother remains the film’s moral centre of gravity.

Film as prevention ‘Mainline’ adds to an ambivalent debate in the media regarding the best way to discourage drug use and HIV/AIDS. ‘The problem is that there is no consistent media strategy’, Dr. Hooman Narenjiha told me in 2005 after attending a conference on media strategies to counter HIV. As the host of a daily TV programme on medical issues, he would know. Some local TV channels have preventative programmes, but it was not addressed coherently, he said. In autumn 2005 there was still a debate about whether the word ‘condom’ could be used on national TV. Dr. Narenjiha had suggested the term ‘cover’, arguing that people would understand what they were talking about, and slowly begin to use that word instead, but the national committee had not reached any agreement. Meanwhile, the debate continues as to what should be promoted as ‘normal’ in the news media and in films. Whereas a number of filmmakers strive to portray drug users as ‘normal’ human beings, some state officials still support the alarmist tactic of depicting drug users as deviant and dangerous. Although the Social Welfare Organization emphasizes numerous preventive, positive activities to keep young people away from drugs, the main official narrative of deviancy is always audible. A report from the Social Welfare Organization on ‘principles of prevention’ teaches people never to trust drug addicts (Rahimimoghad, undated). Maintaining a negative attitude towards them is recommended, the report says. In terms of media strategies it is very important that the media show ‘the way addicted people live in a realistic way’, but the media should never portray drug addicts who

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have been cured. Always use those who have been severally injured and harmed by their addiction, the report advises. Otherwise drug use will seem ‘exciting’ to young people (ibid.) Annoyed with the official propaganda portrayals of drug users and HIV patients, in 2003 documentary filmmaker Maziar Bahari made a documentary on HIV/AIDS patients, deliberately showing them as ‘normal people’. In ‘Mohammad and the Matchmaker’ (2004), Bahari introduces us to a 47-year-old ex-heroin addict, a member of Narcotics Anonymous, who despite being HIV-positive wants to move on with his life and get married.104 The documentary follows Mohammad’s courtship (khāstegāri) and marriage proposal to an HIV-positive woman (who was infected by her heroin-addicted, former husband). The match is arranged by Mohammad’s doctors, Kamiar and Arash Alae’i. The first match does not work out, but Mohammad meets another woman in an NA meeting, and they eventually agree to marry. The documentary is consciously packed with examples of and allusions to the ordinariness and normalcy of ta’arof (courtesy) and ritualized courtship. It also depicts the excitement of Mohammad’s three years ‘birthday’ of being clean in NA (when I came to NA in November 2005 Mohammad was celebrated as one of the programme’s ‘veterans’; by then he had been clean for five years). Highlighting this normalcy was a deliberate strategy by the film director. ‘I want to show people that AIDS patients are not monsters as portrayed by the government propaganda about AIDS’, Maziar Bahari told me in November 2003. ‘They show skeletons as the image of AIDS patients. They try to scare people. I just want to show that HIV-positives and AIDS patients live among us, they are part of us, and you may have an affair with someone who doesn’t look ill at all but he or she is HIV-positive. And the people in the film say that you have to be careful. The film is not sad, it is very hopeful. It shows that even if you are HIV-positive it’s not the end of the world: you still have hope for a better life’ (Interview, November 2003, Copenhagen). As Mohammad says in the film, ‘This virus is not something you should be ashamed of’. But the film also depicts Mohammad’s fears of passing the virus on to his wife, who is HIV-negative.

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Bahari’s documentary clearly represents Iran’s vast scientific progress in offering medical solutions to addiction and how vocal the fight against HIV and addiction is. More than anything, the documentary shows how vital marriage and family life are for the process of recovery and attempts of regaining normalcy, leaving the addiction and low life of the urban parks behind. At the beginning of the film, Mohammad revisits the parks where he used to live: ‘It’s not a good feeling to be here. But it’s good to come back once in a while, just to remind myself where I was and where I am now’, he says. ‘Mohammad and the Matchmaker’ has not been shown on Iranian TV. It clearly depicts a sense of normalcy, which contradicts the official recommendations of ‘danger-and-deviancy’. As Maziar Bahari later told me, ‘I just knew that they wouldn’t show the film in Iran so I didn’t even try’. Bahari was allowed to shoot his film for BBC, and I find the documentary very informative as to how ex-drug users like Mohammad, like the people from Persepolis and NA described in the last chapter, reclaim a sense of normalcy. However, as a preventative movie in an official state context ‘Mohammad and the Matchmaker’ clearly falls short of meeting the criteria.

Normalizing drug users Previously, filmmakers depicted drugs as a conspiracy by the West, as the essence of moral deviancy, which served to support public executions of drug traffickers. But recent films place drug users at the heart of Iran’s political and social turmoil. The films I have included in this chapter reveal, reinterpret and test the boundaries of the ‘moral public’. By giving voice to drug users, the filmmakers expand previously held notions of normalcy and morality. This process of ‘normalization’ takes place in different ways. First, especially in Bani-Etemad’s work the presence of drugs is not portrayed as an exception, but rather as the rule, as a normal (although sorry) state of affair of contemporary Iran. Secondly, drug users and dealers are portrayed as normal people – whether they are our nextdoor neighbours, or the blessed veterans. Anybody (the morally corrupt

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as well as the correct) might be pushed into a drug deal, if they are pushed hard enough, as Bani-Etemad reminds us. The differences between the normal (the sacred, the blessed and the families) and the deviant (drug users) are blurred. I also refer to ‘normalization’ as the ways in which the process of recreating normalcy is depicted in these films. In all of these films, the family as an institution plays a profound role. Partly as a moral imperative – unless you get married, you will never become normal (Makhmalbaf, Rasoulof) – partly as a deep-seated wish by the characters (Bahari, Bani-Etemad). But the family is also depicted as a contested space for conciliation, which – if not handled carefully, if not nourished – creates as many problems as it attempts to solve (BaniEtemad). Although the road to normalcy is travelled through marriage, the family is depicted as a deeply fragile institution. In the last chapter I concluded that values of spirituality and family cohesion are upheld in drug treatment organizations, and that they contribute to the success of treatment. These values reflect and draw on deep-seated cultural beliefs, which are shared by the government. But at the same time they clearly refrain from conforming to any kind of strict state ideology. Likewise, the values which are expressed in regard to drugs on films reflect both normative, societal concerns and clear moral guidelines. But they do not conform to any strict revolutionary ideology; in fact they subvert them.

Resistance and re-imagination Debates about Iran typically emphasize the role of ‘resistance’, conjuring up images of a defiant, disenchanted, antireligious youth, ‘just about’ to launch another revolution and overthrow the state – an institution whose depiction is equally crude and analytically ill-defined. The films I have discussed here, which boldly expose Iran’s contemporary deadlocks and frustrations, could possibly be interpreted along the same lines, but that would be missing the point, both in regard to their content and the character of Iranian cinema. I believe that the films show a far more nuanced reality. They subvert and challenge

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the state, but stay true to a set of moral values, supportive of Islamic, Iranian ideals. Recalling the state control of Iranian cinema, the fact that films like ‘Mainline’ are made and released demonstrates among other things how far the government is willing to admit to its contemporary problems. Taboos are constantly broken down, not despite the state, but condoned by it. The concerns voiced by the films, particularly Bani-Etemad’s, are shared by both state and society, calling for a joint effort. There is no binary opposition. But recent films clearly differentiate between the means of governance employed to curb the drug crisis: they support treatment and a medical ‘normalization’ of drug users, rather than calling for further prosecutions, adding to the ‘securitization’ discourse. Recalling Akhil Gupta’s distinction between ‘resistance’ and ‘reinterpretation’ (2001), the political message we can glean from these films has less to do with resistance in the sense that film directors are frantically opposed to the state, than it has to do with a reformulation and re-imagining of public values and concerns. This re-imagining confronts the consequences of the state ideology, but insists on being moral and normatively Iranian. By expressing these values in a non-dogmatic way, the films question the confines and content of the ‘moral public’, as they have come to be defined after the revolution. They cut across the rigidly enforced, stigmatizing categories of drug users versus normal people. Instead, they point to the moving margins between normalcy and deviancy, emphasizing that it is often a matter of bad luck or sheer coincidence whether a person winds up in one category, or another. In that sense they also show how fragile the state is, despite its overwhelming power to oppress. The films show that the state’s rigidly enforced revolutionary ideals and ideologies are opposed and undermined by a number of realities. The sacred categories are neither as sacred, nor as pure as is officially assumed, and people do misbehave, destabilizing the enforced Islamization of the public. The films reinterpret the ‘moral public’, and the nation, by pointing to the failings of the revolution, and to its contrived, politically imposed moral limitations and double standards. At the same time, they uphold a

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counter-narrative, which still insists on moral, Islamic values. The family is one such moral ground, contested, as I have shown, and set blazingly on fire, but it is also recomposed and re-imagined in the midst of fire-fighting. The fact that these films are shown in Iran, stretching the revolutionary guidelines, illustrates how the ‘moral public’ has become increasingly pluralistic since the 1980s.

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CONCLUSION WHAT IS ‘R EFOR M’?

Perhaps all social systems are built on contradictions, in some sense at war with themselves. Mary Douglas (1966: 140)

A state of contradictions This book is based on fragments, and reveals a fragmented, contradictory state. It is hard to imagine that so many complex relationships can coexist within a single country’s political and cultural structure. Where is the consistency and coherence? How does the Iranian state sustain itself in the midst of these political contradictions? Are the recent clampdowns on women’s and human rights NGOs, deemed ‘foreign enemies’, really implemented by the same government, which endorses one of the most progressive, NGO-operated drug treatment programmes in the Middle East? How can the Iranian government hang drug dealers from cranes in public squares at the same time as they support needle exchange programmes in prisons? How can the Supreme Leader bless drug demand reduction and ‘scientific’ treatment methods, when two of the most prominent medical HIV-doctors are sentenced to year-long imprisonment? How can the cultural domain and the media – newspapers, photojournalism, films – be so vibrant, so packed with criticism, smashing any sentimental myths about Iran’s social developments, while journalists and intellectuals continue to be imprisoned and publications are shut down?

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These are the Iranian contradictions which have baffled me over the last many years, and which I have aimed at portraying here. Approaching the Iranian state from the margins of NGOs and drug users, I have shown that the negotiations of social and political in-and-exclusions are a revealing reflection of the dilemmas involved in the construction of the Islamic Republic. At the heart of these conflicting policies are continuous political disagreements as to which form of Islamic order and means of governance should be employed and, in effect, what kind of state the Islamic Republic should become. This battle goes on relentlessly and is, in Mary Douglas’ words, ‘a desperate struggle, a life and death struggle’ (1992: 103f), pointing to a state in a constant process of being (re)constituted – politically, socially, and morally. On one level, I have shown how a political and social progression has taken place historically, and how – underneath the political posturing of changing political figures – a pragmatic pluralism and religiously endorsed expertise have emerged. The Iran of today differs fundamentally from the Iran which existed in the immediate aftermath of the revolution. The government does admit to the social problems; taboos are constantly breaking down, and the government actively encourages domestic, medical solutions to the drug crisis, instead of just blaming the problems on ‘foreign enemies’. A new social order has definitely been created; the moral public is being re-imagined; the ‘language of stateness’ has changed (Blom Hansen and Stepputat 2001a: 9). At the same time, this book also reveals that conflicts over the social order continue to take place. They have by no means been settled in one or the other’s favour. We can point to the parliamentary and presidential elections in 2004 and 2005 and claim that reformism has been defeated, but when looking at an area like drug treatment policies, the picture looks quite different. Here reformism, in the shape of scientific methods and rights-based approaches combined with Islamic beliefs, has displaced the moralistic version of ‘Good Muslims conquering the “socially corrupted on earth” ’. However, it is just as fair to say that the revolutionary sentiments endorsing violence, faith, and isolationism from the West are forcefully at play and in power at the moment, weakening the legitimacy of the reform movement and framing it as

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a threat to national security. The space for reformist actors has been pre-empted in many, if not most, realms. Both of these orders are at play at the same time, but it is important to note that this is not a secular versus a religious order, since both the ‘securitization’ and ‘normalization’ discourses adopted in regard to drug users are granted the support of religious clerics. However, the contradictions show the dilemmas arising from the dual sovereignty inscribed in the constitution, and they show how contested the question of state legitimacy is. The complex policies expose a regime caught in a balancing act between enforcing a ‘proper’ Islamic order through authoritarian means, and at the same time seeking the electoral endorsement and participation of the people. The contradictions also point to the opposed rationalities of different state institutions in defining and relating to this ‘people’. As Arang Keshavarzian says, the ideological factionalism in Iran is expressed in a ‘Balkanized state’, guided by different institutional rationalities (2005: 77).

The conditions of reform Several questions arise when analysing these incongruous effects of the Iranian reform movement: what is ‘reform’? How do we conceptualize social and political change? How do we analytically approach and ‘measure’ a process of this complexity? Foucault focused on the practices of institutions (not the institutions, themselves), and the ‘conditions that make these [practices] acceptable at a given moment’ (1991b: 75). Rather than focusing solely on the political actors involved in the reform movement or the institutions, I have tried to track the ‘conditions’, which have made the claim of reform acceptable and legitimate during the last ten-to-fifteen years. I have attempted to understand these conditions of reform and their policy effects by using two concepts – one is social order, as defined by the relations between normalcy and deviancy. The other is the means of governance used to implement this order. The two concepts are interlinked, of course: the reformists sought to create a new order by implementing a new governmentality and by stressing new keywords – ‘tolerance’ instead of ‘violence’, ‘expertise’ rather than ‘loyalty’, ‘civil

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society’ and ‘democracy’ as opposed to ‘sovereignty’ and ‘security of the state’. Allowing treatment of drug users is an excellent example of this change in governmentality, illustrating how non-violence and expertise have been defined, put into practice, and legitimized from a religious standpoint. Analysts who focus exclusively on parliamentary politics and political actors often overlook the piecemeal ways in which the means of governance have been modified, and the ways the language of reform has been implemented. By pointing to these developments, I hope to cut across the clear, binary divisions between ‘reformists’ and ‘conservatives’, which characterize many analyses of Iran. I think we need to examine the effects of reform from a more detailed and longer-term perspective. I also want to emphasize that the notion of ‘reform’ is wider than democracy, however we define the latter. Some of these reforms do not necessarily lead to democratization; others may do so, but in different ways than the literature on Western democracies prescribes. Instead of framing this book as a(nother) general debate on the compatibility of Islam and democracy, I have focused on the ways in which ‘Islam’ and ‘democracy’ figure prominently and continually in Iran’s heated, localized, political arguments for and against NGOs and treatment of drug users. I have also exposed how different configurations of the role and definition of ‘the people’ have been debated during the reform movement as part of the attempts to create or resist reform, and that the political visions of ‘the people’ hold a mirror to the widely opposing views of the ideal Iranian, Islamic state. These debates fundamentally shape and affect government policies – for better or worse – paving the way for different notions of normalcy, which may not reflect ‘democracy’ in Western traditions, but still point to radically new ways of envisaging the relationship between state and society. ‘Reform’ should be studied in a wide range of venues and domains, and it must also be approached with a broader understanding of what ‘the political’ means (cf. Zeydabadi-Nejad 2007; Keshavarzian 2007; Navaro-Yashin 2002). In addition to outlining the dilemmas in the constitution and the domain of parliamentary politics, I have brought in the cultural domains of media and film, and the social domains of medicine and NGO activism. These different realms all contribute to

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the Foucauldian ‘conditions’, which make political and social practices acceptable at a given moment. This is not a simple game of cause-andeffect, but an entire network of complexly interwoven processes, making new notions of normalcy thinkable and legitimate. The change in drug policy is a vivid example of the different realms involved in bringing about these conditions. The drug crisis is the centre of gravity for a large number of interlinked debates: debates over the legacy of the war; the revolutionary social promises and sacred social categories; debates between professionals and clerics, between conflicting state institutions; debates inspired by vibrant NGO activism, challenging and defying state restrictions; and a vital public debate in the media and cinema. In all of these debates, an ongoing process of defining normalcy takes place. The resulting changes in the social order may be subtle and look insignificant, but they are not, and they all add to an understanding of what ‘reform’ might mean. In NGOs like Narcotics Anonymous, which have thousands of members nationwide, an inclusive and pluralistic normalcy is produced through large, public gatherings, embracing the drug addicts. When the outreach teams from Persepolis Harm Reduction NGO traverse the ‘liminal’ and risky parks in South Tehran with their first aid kits and unassuming folding chairs, they cross and transform the margins between the acceptable and unacceptable vulnerable, between the normal and the deviant. They create ‘reform’, not just by reforming the drug users in a disciplinary sense, but by medically and socially including people who have been abandoned. Likewise, the normalcy produced in public representations of drugs in films adds to, alters, and subverts previously held social and political ideals. The cinematic depictions of drug use contribute to the conditions, which make these practices legitimate, but they are also a result of this normalization. New notions of normalcy transgress ideological boundaries of ‘better’ or ‘worse’ Muslims. They challenge and re-imagine some of the ‘sacred’ categories and revolutionary ‘dividing practices’, including the role of war veterans, the forceful control of the ‘moral public’, the public spectacle of religion, and the prototype of the ‘Islamic social being’ (Adelkhah 1999). At the same time, they embrace and re-emphasize

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other, fundamental values like the family and religious faith, both of which are still extremely vital. The margin between what is normal and deviant, permissive and illegitimate, state and non-state are negotiated in all of these realms, and they reflect and reinforce each other.

The moralized margins of the state I have employed Das and Poole’s metaphor of the ‘margins of the state’, but I want to emphasize that these margins are not just institutional or bound to legal or financial issues (how are NGOs funded, how independent are they) – they are also margins of morality. The NGOs and drug use are particularly interesting for this reason, because both are imbued with normative values. The policies relating to the NGOs and drug use forcefully disclose divergent governmental orders of a deeply moralized nature (not just in an Iranian context). For a long time, I had analytical difficulties in coming to terms with the fact that NGOs are so consistently equated with normative, positive, democratic values in the academic debate. However, the more I think about the ways the NGOs have been celebrated by the Khatami government and persecuted by President Ahmadinezhad, the clearer it becomes that the NGOs are intriguing because (and not despite the fact that) they are so normatively defined. They are placed at the margin of the state, not just institutionally and legally, but also morally. The dispute over keywords like ‘democracy’ and ‘civil society’ provoked by the NGOs is a moralized fight over the political order and means of governance ideally employed in an Islamic state, which has been frantically opposed to the West. Many studies of states have been solely focused on the institutional aspects of state formation. But by bringing Mary Douglas’ classic symbolic analysis of purity, liminality and danger into a study of the state – pointing to the need for securing cultural, territorial, moral boundaries and the repercussions of trespassing them – I want to stress that these institutional processes are linked to moral values and ideas. It is my opinion that attempts to pinpoint what anthropology brings to the study of the state focus too much on the ethnographic practices

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of studying day-to-day encounters, without properly exploring the broader cultural ideas and ideals which these practices disclose. Like other moral worlds, the state is an ‘idea’, as Abrams notes (2006 [1988]). This ‘idea’ is surely tied to and enforced through institutions of security and administration, but the state ‘idea’ depends just as much on social imaginings and a moral universe played out in institutional fields of policymaking. What I have attempted to do is to show how that moral universe is negotiated and changed, and how it affects the process of finding solutions to concrete, pressing problems, often revealing clearly conflicting ideas of the state. The state becomes an ‘effect’ in Timothy Mitchell’s sense of these moralized processes of policymaking and ‘dividing practices’. Mitchell describes how the state is an effect of Foucault’s disciplinary powers, which work partly by producing ‘difference’ (1999: 84). The way I have analysed the experience of Iranian NGOs and drug users exemplifies this process, but I would add further force to the argument that this ‘production of difference’ is accomplished and legitimized by means of competing moral orders. The Islamic Republic of Iran is a fascinating case in this respect, because the state constitution was built on specific religious guidelines and Islamic conventions. The Islamic revolutionary government was dedicated to reclaiming the values and dignity of the Iranian state, which it believed had been lost during the Pahlavi period. The Cultural Revolution in the early 1980s was a fight in the name of morality, a fight for those values deemed ‘Islamic’ as opposed to ‘Western’. Today, these political values are forcefully implemented, drawing on binary orders of great strength. The normative dichotomies – between modernity and tradition, secularism and religious rule, the West and Islam – are an intrinsic and ongoing part of Iran’s historical experience (long preceding the 1979 revolution), as are the attempts to reconcile them (Jahanbegloo 2004b). But the case of Iran also reveals a more general point about how governance is conducted. The mechanism by which governance is legitimized and practised on the basis of moral claims is dramatically illustrated in Iran, but it is far from confined to that country, nor to policy debates concerning Islam. The Iranian negotiations visualize

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and epitomize the ways in which policymaking is conducted in nearly every part of the world. In Western and non-Western countries alike, policymaking and governmentalities rely on moral compasses, which may, or may not, be religious. China’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, the current ideology of secularism in France, the ways in which American drug and HIV/AIDS-related policies are debated – these are but a few examples of policy areas which draw life and direction from a register of moral values and ‘orders’. The relationship between Iranian governmentalities and differing interpretations of Islam is extreme, but instead of emphasizing the ‘exoticness’ of the Iranian case, I want to stress its usefulness as a complex but informative case study of the politics of morality. By exposing how the margins between normalcy and deviancy are determined in several, intersecting domains in Iran, we gain clues as to how the interaction between state and civil society is created and can be studied elsewhere.

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POSTSCR IPT THE 2009 ELECTION

The Green Movement The presidential election in June 2009 marked a turning point in post-revolutionary Iran. It will denote, forever, a ‘before and after’. The fraught election and forced take-over by President Ahmadinezhad resembled – or was – a military coup d´etat, backed by the Revolutionary Guards and the Supreme Leader. An unprecedented use of violence against peaceful protesters in the aftermath was followed by thousands of arrests, targeting not just the protesters, but the entire political opposition, intellectuals, journalists and civil society activists, signalling a heartbreaking return to the political violence of the 1980s. The events following the June 2009 election have pitched Iran into an unparalleled legitimacy crisis, and a further radicalization of political mindsets. The competing rationalities and dual sovereignties, described on the preceding pages, have been exposed even more drastically and dramatically than anybody could predict. On the one hand, Iran witnessed a remarkable mobilization for the Green Movement and a push for the people’s sovereignty, which stems from and is indebted to the changing notions of authority and participation launched by Khatami’s reform movement. On the other hand, President Ahmadinezhad and Ayatollah Khameini have manifested an even more forceful state sovereignty emanating from, or legitimized by God, backed by a further militarized Revolutionary Guards Corps. The result is an erosion of both the Islamic and republican aspects of the Iranian state.

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Prior to the 2009 election one mainstream way of portraying Iran claimed that due to a widespread ‘political apathy’ ‘no one’ would really care about or partake in the election. I was not convinced by this argument. Although I had not been back to Iran since my forced 2005 exit, having spent the last years writing this book, two things struck me as significant: however subdued and silenced, the reform momentum was still alive. Also, compared to the atmosphere at the 2004 and 2005 elections, where reformist supporters had pervasive doubts about the reformists’ aims and options, and a sense of apathy surely did exist, the following four years had clearly outlined the patent differences between a reform-minded president and a hard-liner. Although people had been far from satisfied with Khatami, Ahmadinezhad’s attempted ‘return to the revolution’ made it obvious that the situation could indeed get worse. I therefore argued that Ahmadinezhad’s first presidency would result in a mobilization for the reformist candidates at the 2009 election. Still, like most spectators, I was unprepared for and amazed by the vigour and vitality with which the supporters of Mir-Hossein Mousavi exposed their wish for reform. Reviving the green colour which young women had used as a sign of support for Khatami in 1998, Mousavi’s followers took to the streets in extraordinary numbers, dressed in green, painted green, waving green flags. There was no political apathy; they were determined to make a difference. Young as well as old, Tehranis as well as people from the provinces very evidently took part in the political process. The spirit of the ‘Iranian Spring’ in 1997 was not only alive; it paled in comparison. In order to understand this mobilization, the history of Iran’s civil society and the subtle ways in which the reform movement of 1997 have slowly but steadily changed the political and social awareness have to be taken into consideration – not just as a ‘soft’ appendix on civil society, but as a basis for understanding more profound changes in the parliamentary political landscape. Although observers have been eager to declare the reform movement ‘dead’ on numerous occasions, the mobilization for Mir-Hossein Mousavi showed that this was not the case. Clearly, the political reform movement was forced out of the parliament in 2004. The June 2009 run-up, however, served as a reminder that if

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we only focus on the constitutional politics, the politics with capital P, we miss the undercurrent of day-to-day politics, which pave the way for and constitute changing notions of participation and authority. The Green Movement is a continuation and culmination of the reform efforts which took off in the 1990s: the widespread civil society and NGO activism, and the new awareness and discourse centring on people’s rights which I have described in the preceding chapters. But the movement also manifests something new; or at least, it managed to appeal more broadly, partly to the youngest generation (people who were too young to take part in the 1997 reform movement and did not show an interest in politics previously), but also to the older generation who lived through the war and engaged in Khatami’s reform front. Also, this was not just a movement for the well-off or for intellectuals from North Tehran. Workers, teachers, clerics, people from the provinces joined the Greens, and the radical reaction by the regime against the Movement only reinforced this appeal among a wide variety of people, who were appalled by the state sovereignty and means of violence unleashed.

The radicalized rules of the game The counterattack by the Ahmadinezhad faction has been, although to some degree predictable, far more radical than anybody could foresee. Judging from the mobilization of the Green Movement and the widespread criticism of Ahmadinezhad even among conservatives, the election results simply did not match up. A number of indicators pointed at a forced take-over. On Election Day the opposition’s phone lines were cut; Mousavi’s headquarters was attacked and closed down, and volunteers who had witnessed vote rigging were arrested. Senior officials of the Revolutionary Guards later publicly admitted their role in orchestrating the election results (Sahimi 2010, Lucas 2009). Not only was Ahmadinezhad’s overwhelming victory suspicious, to say the least, more damaging for the future of the Islamic Republic was Ayatollah Khamenei’s uncritical, persistent defence of the election outcome. The Supreme Leader overruled the constitutional requirements and condoned Ahmadinezhad straight after the election.

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Then came the demonstrations against the result, the millions of Iranians with ‘where is my vote?’ posters marching through the streets. Then the violence: the massive incursion of police, plainclothes as well as those in heavy armour, confronting the unarmed, increasingly angry opponents; the dozens of protesters killed in the streets; basijs storming through town on motorbikes beating protesters with chains; snipers on rooftops; events unfolding as hundreds of mobile phones caught these atrocities and put them on YouTube, where the rest of the world could watch this deeply unsettling effort to crush legitimate claims for rights – the right to vote, the right to pursue an alternative, peaceful, democratic order. Thousands of people were arrested, many of them tortured to confess to being ‘foreign enemies’ or part of a ‘velvet revolution’. At least three people died in custody at the Kahrizak detention centre; several have been executed as mohareb, ‘being at enmity with God’, while many have been beaten, threatened, and raped by their interrogators. Among the arrested and abused were many high-profile political figures like the reformist ideologist Said Hajjarian, Mostafa Tajzadeh (former deputy at the Ministry of Interior during Khatami’s presidency), and Mohammad Ali Abtahi (former vice president under Khatami and advisor to Karroubi). Human rights lawyers like Abdolfattah Soltani and Mohammad Ali Dadkhah were also arrested (Human Rights Watch 2010: 11; Daragahi and Mostaghim 2010; Egherman et al. 2010: 30). In August 2009, six weeks after the election, the show trials began. Mimicking the Stalinist trials and the televised, forced confessions of the political opposition in the 1980s, hundreds of well-known political figures and intellectuals were brought to court and broadcast while they apologized for being deceived by the West and the Green Movement. I knew a couple of the people on the podium: the filmmaker and Newsweek reporter Maziar Bahari, the financial analyst Bijan Khajehpour, and the scholar Kian Tajbakhsh. Watching the pictures from the show trial, at first I could not recognize Tajbakhsh, who was clearly affected by his months of incarceration. Maziar Bahari looked like a man who had lost his soul. Kian Tajbakhsh, who had not been politically involved in any way since his 2007 imprisonment, received a fifteen year sentence. In March 2010 his sentence was reduced to five years.

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A few days before his appearance in court, Fars News Agency released a confession numbering eleven pages, where Bahari, among other things, states: The activities of Western journalists in news gathering and spying and gathering intelligence are undeniable [ ... ] I, too, as a journalist and a member of this great Western capitalism machine, either blindly or on purpose, participated in projecting doubts and promoting a color revolution (Committee to Defend Journalists 2009). It seemed self-evident that these confessions could only have been obtained under duress and torture. Maziar Bahari later confirmed this and described his ordeal in detail (Bahari 2009).105 The show trials made it even more evident that when all these people could be arrested and convicted of forming part of a ‘velvet revolution’, the rules of the game had changed. As I have argued throughout this book, observing the ‘red lines’ of the regime has long been a subtle game, involving a constant bargaining between the regime and its challengers, pushing and demarcating the lines between the permissible and illegitimate. As I have also outlined, when Ahmadinezhad was elected in 2005, he radically strengthened the rules and persecuted a number of civil society actors, allegedly for being part of a foreign plot. Even so, the show trials marked a difference. People like Bahari and Khajehpour knew the rules of the game and how to observe them. They had not been arrested previously and were well-connected. For years they had engaged in highly nuanced and balanced analyses of Iran’s social and political developments. When they could be imprisoned, the rules of the game no longer applied. The Islamic Republic, as we knew it, had entered a new phase.

Lost legitimacy: neither Islamic, nor Republic It was not just the republican aspect of Iran, which received a deafening blow at the 12 June election (ironically showing the hard-liners desperately pursuing and claiming an electoral, public victory, no matter by what means). It was also the Islamic legitimacy of the state which was ruptured.

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The fact that the Supreme Leader endorsed Ahmadinezhad as president, and, worse still, did not intervene when the ideological troopers of the law enforcement forces and the Revolutionary Guards met the protesters with live ammunition, has forever weakened his position. Whereas the Supreme Leader previously retained the elevated position as a divinely-bestowed arbiter between the factions in Iran’s complicated consensus-seeking power game, he suddenly pushed himself into the game and took sides. ‘Khamenei-jad’, as he was mockingly called, was no longer infallible and aloof from the objectionable decisions or deadly reality in the streets; instead, he endorsed them (Daragahi 2009). The one and only taboo – not to criticize the Supreme Leader – which had managed to survive the turmoil and critical frontrunners of reform, was broken. ‘Down with the dictator’, people shouted in the streets, clearly referring to Ayatollah Khamenei. ‘Khamenei is a murderer, his leadership is void!’ another slogan said (Sadjadpour 2010). Whereas the first demonstrations in June 2009 expressed frustration over the vote rigging, Khamenei’s actions, in particular, contributed to people’s contempt for the entire political system. The crisis became existential. Consequently, the trust deficit between the Supreme Leader and the opposition has grown. The criticism voiced by the opposition stressed the blatant crisis of legitimacy by emphasizing the increasingly complicated relation between the dual sovereignty of God and the people, the Islamic and republican aspects. In June 2009 Hashemi-Rafsanjani pointed at Khamenei, when he quoted the Prophet’s advice to Imam Ali: ‘You have the right to guardianship [bestowed] by God. However, if people accept you, then you rule. If they do not accept you, do not impose yourself and leave; they will rule over their society the way they want’ (Mehr News Agency 2009). Later, in his remarkable 17 July 2009 Friday prayer, HashemiRafsanjani warned the Supreme Leader, Ahmadinezhad and the new military elite, that they had to respect both the Islamic and republican parts of the state: The Islamic and republican aspects must always be together. If any one of them is damaged, the Revolution will be dead. If the system is not Islamic, we will take the wrong path, but if the republican-

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ism does not exist, the government will not be able to achieve any of its goals [and, hence, will have no legitimacy] (Sahimi 2009). The 2009 events have also manifested an unprecedented clerical cannibalism. Nobody is sacred any more. The emerging new order is founded more on the military establishment, the Revolutionary Guards Corps and the basijs, than on the clergy. A number of senior clerics from Qum protested against the election results and the attacks on the ‘seditious’ Green Movement, to no avail. Clerics were arrested alongside large parts of the political opposition. Even the presidential candidates Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi – both ‘men of the system’ – have been threatened with arrest and the charge of treason; they and their families have been physically assaulted, and Mousavi’s nephew was shot dead during the December 2009 demonstrations. Referring to the protesters and political leaders, the hard-line Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati said: ‘These people are flagrant examples of corruption on Earth, and we punished the likes of them in the early days of the revolution’ (Daragahi 2010). Most morally damaging to the Islamic foundation of the state were the killings of protesters during the āshurā demonstrations on 27 December 2009. It could hardly get worse; and hardly contain more symbolic force. Āshurā is the holiest religious holiday in Shi’a Islam, where millions mourn the death of Imam Hossein in Kerbala. His fight in 680 AD against Sunni oppressors has served for centuries as the icon of a moral, rightful battle against injustice. And here they were, the daughters and sons of the Islamic Republic, devoted Muslims, but just as devoted to their democratic rights, being shot at during āshurā for claiming justice. They immediately became martyrs – sharply opposing the state’s monopoly on martyrdom. Retaining any kind of moral or public legitimacy as an Islamic Republic after that brutal exercise seemed exceedingly difficult. In several ways people turned the emblematic Islamic signs of resistance against the state, contesting its Islamic legitimacy. In the evenings, after dark, people went to the rooftops shouting ‘Allah-o Akbar’, ‘God is Great’, as they did during the revolution toppling the Shah. The significant difference was of course that they now called on God to oppose the Islamic state.

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This turn, from a religious republic to a (religious) military dictatorship did not take place overnight. It is a culmination of everything Ahmadinezhad has promoted since 2005: paving the way for the Revolutionary Guards as a pivotal political and financial force, de-legitimizing the reform front, and systematically undermining civil society (see also Egherman et al. 2010). But whereas his first presidency still contained pragmatic considerations, the unfolding events of 2009–10 have shown an extreme willingness to stay in power by any means. President Ahmadinezhad and the Revolutionary Guards hunt down the Greens in the streets, and strengthen the control with everything deemed ‘secular’, but they also target the Islamic elite and foundation of the state to a quite different degree than during Ahmadinezhad’s first presidency. The real question is: why does Ayatollah Khamenei let this happen? Not only is his personal legitimacy severely suffering; the events are also a radical departure from the regime’s more consensus-seeking and pragmatic macro-politics (as presented in the 5 and 20 years’ plans), however difficult these are to ascertain through smokescreens of political posturing. In that sense 2009 is not just a continuation of the same, ambiguous, post-revolutionary politics with a twist, but a more extreme attempt at marking and forcing through a militarized order. One reason might be that the Supreme Leader is seeing any kind of compromise as a sign of weakness, which will eventually lead to the fall of the regime – whereas, more likely, the opposite could be the case.

Revolution, resistance, rights? Is it another revolution, the journalists keep asking? And does it still stand to reason to argue, as I did in chapter 1, that ‘resistance’ should not be the main analytical perspective on the current developments? It is clear that the marching in the streets, the unrest, the rooftop shouting is all part of a very significant expression of resistance; a culmination of curbed desires and claims for rights. Yet, analytically, I maintain that in order to understand that kind of resistance, the more subtle changing notions of authority, participation and normalcy, which I have portrayed in this book, are extremely important. They

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have paved the way for the large-scale resistance Iran has witnessed recently. I admit that for the first time I had my doubts about where the demonstrations would be leading. Particularly during the December 2009 demonstrations, when thousands of people mourned the death of Ayatollah Montazeri and the month of Moharram, even parts of the elite feared a complete collapse.106 However, I still believe that the ‘revolutionary narrative’ in understanding change in Iran has been misguided (whenever we have seen a protest during the past fifteen years, it has immediately been framed as ‘a new revolution in the making’). The focus on rights, which has been promoted by the Greens, is shaped by concrete, localized experiences of reform and political participation, quite different from the revolution of 1979. It is not a revolutionary but a civil society movement, and neither the political leadership, nor the predominant part of the Green Movement, favours a violent overthrow. Although events may still evolve unexpectedly, at least among the Green Movement’s front-figures – Mir-Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi, Mohammad Khatami and Hashemi-Rafsanjani – the aim is not a ‘revolution’, but a ‘resolution’, Mousavi has repeatedly stated. As Zahra Rahnavard, Mousavi’s wife, said in an interview with Le Monde: ‘The “Green” Movement does not want the overthrow of the regime; what it wants is reforms. It stems from civil society and it wants to be peaceful. Peaceful, I insist, even though the other side has no shortage of weapons and uses violence’.107 Insisting on keeping the Green protests non-violent has become a moral victory for the Mousavi camp. The question is, of course, whether the leadership can contain the more extremist Green protesters, who want the regime to vanish, and more importantly, whether the regime is willing, in any way, to meet the Green Movement halfway. The statements issued by Mousavi after the election show the balancing act the Movement is engaged in. Despite facing numerous threats from the regime, Mousavi’s declarations have become bolder and more critical. In January 2010, Mousavi declared Ahmadinezhad’s government illegal and illegitimate, but held him responsible for the crimes committed, and Mousavi responded to the threats by expressing his

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willingness to sacrifice himself for the Green Movement: ‘My blood is not redder than those martyred’. At the same time, Mousavi is continually pointing to the need for a compromise and emphasizing his respect for the constitution, placing the Green Movement not only in line with Khatami’s reform agenda, but also the Constitutional Revolution of 1906–11 (Lucas 2010b). Emphasizing that ‘it is still not too late’, in his 1 January 2010 statement, Mousavi argued that the administration should restore people’s trust through new, clear election laws. He has repeatedly called for the ‘independence of the judiciary, [and] non-interference of military forces with political and economic affairs’ (Lutz 2010). He has demanded the release of all political prisoners; the revocation of the ban on the press, and the recognition of people’s right to demonstrate (Lucas 2010a). Thereby he forcefully continues the conflict over the role to be played by ‘the people’. As Milani notes, ‘the movement’s ultimate goal [Mousavi] says, is free and fair elections, with no vetting process, to finally establish the will of the people’ (Milani 2010). In that sense he is restating the claims made by Khatami. The difference is that whereas Khatami never brought people to the streets to back his demands, the events of 2009–10 have to the full shown both the potentials and risks of such a confrontation. So far the regime has shown no willingness to compromise with the protesters, but, instead, an indisputable ability and will to stay in power by the use of extreme state violence. Approaching the important anniversary of the revolution, on 11 February 2010, the regime mustered an all-encompassing presence in Tehran, not allowing the Greens to form the slightest counter demonstration. As one Green protester told me, she had only dared take to the streets by not wearing a single piece of green. Anybody with as much as a green bracelet or pen was arrested. Not surprisingly, both Ahmadinezhad and the Supreme Leader translated the revolution’s anniversary into a great victory for the nation and the state, thus also contesting and competing over the meaning, role and content of ‘the people’. Khameini used the 11 February pro-government demonstration (allegedly orchestrated by bussing people in from the provinces) as his claim to represent ‘the people’:

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Was the presence of tens of millions of motivated and aware people in the festival of the thirty-first anniversary of revolution enough to awaken [to their mistakes] the internal enemies and deceived individuals who sometimes hypocritically speak of ‘the people’? (Khalaji 2010). Likewise, on the anniversary of the election, 12 June 2010, the regime by all possible means suppressed any visible signs of opposition, and Mousavi and Karroubi, although having applied for permits, retracted their call for demonstrations to spare the lives of innocents.

‘A raging fire under a heap of ash’ Although the regime can and will continue to brutally repress the protests – so far quite successfully – this ‘solution’ seems extremely short sighted. The immanent social and political problems are still unresolved, as Mousavi strongly expressed in his 1 January 2010 statement. ‘Assume that, with all the arrests, brutalities, threats, and shutting the mouths of newspapers and media, you can silence people for a few days. How do you solve the change in people’s view of the establishment? How do you rectify the lack of legitimacy? [ ... ] What do you do to the problems of the country’s weakness of the administration?’ (Lucas 2010a). These questions remain unanswered. Despite the crackdowns and setbacks for the Greens, it would be premature to dismiss the Movement and the evident frustration still lingering. As Sahimi says, quoting a Persian proverb, the Green Movement ‘is a raging fire under a heap of ash’ (Sahimi 2010). Although 170 journalists have been arrested over the last year and one hundred have left Iran, the sense of awareness and wish to keep telling the truth about the current state of affairs has only become more important for the Greens (ibid.). Emanating from the amateur videophone shootings on YouTube a new kind of citizen journalism has emerged, keeping the momentum and awareness alive. The real importance and legacy of the reform movement – Khatami’s as well as the Green Movement’s – is the unrelenting demand for rights and rule of law, and the call for non-violent means of governance. This

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discourse of rights has a stronghold in the population, and although it at the time of writing is very hard to envisage the Green Movement obtaining their goals, it is just as hard to see these deep-seated discourses and sentiments disappearing. The reformist request for rights has only been intensified by the violent confrontations. The role and definition of ‘the people’ still plays an extremely central part in the disputes over Iran’s future, as do the inherent ambiguities in the constitution of the state. The dual sovereignty, and the competing authorities between those who claim to represent the people, has been even further radicalized. The clashes following 12 June 2009 show fundamentally opposed rationalities of governance, which have only matured during the last fifteen years, expanding into deeply opposed factions of the state. But at the same time, it is important to stress that the 2009 election also marked a fundamental break, the consequences of which have not yet fully surfaced. Although the elite obviously maintains that they hold the ‘right’ interpretations of the Islamic revolution, the spiritual legitimacy of the Supreme Leader has been damaged. The Revolutionary Guards Corps, whom the Greens are facing in the streets and the interrogation rooms, still forcefully profess to represent a religiously legitimized power, but in effect the events of the last year have simply uncovered a brutal and militarized state of this world. This will pave the way for new kinds of resistance and claims for rights in the future.

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NOTES

1. Dovom-e Khordād refers to the date, 2 Khordād, or 23 May 1997, when Mohammad Khatami was elected. 2. However, Bayat (2002) does discuss the problems and possibilities of NGOs in the Middle East region, more generally. 3. Here, I refer only to research published in English. 4. Other exceptions are Raisdana and Nakhjavani (2002), Vossoghi (2005), and, recently, Afkhami (2009). 5. In the postscript I will elaborate on the 2009 election. 6. I only named people whom I believed were well-connected enough to be immune from any persecution. Needless to say, making those distinctions was a volatile endeavour. As part of the questions on ‘truth’ I was asked to translate everything I had ever written on Iran into Persian to prove that my writings were depicting Iran in the ‘right’ way. 7. I owe this formulation to Dr. Kian Tajbakhsh. 8. I took notes during these interviews, but none of them were taped. Some asked me not to tape them out of concern for confidentiality; in other cases I opted for notes because the information I was after was more factual than narrative. Many ‘interviews’ took place as informal conversations in cars, when I was offered a lift to or from a more formal interview appointment; the content of these ‘interviews’ was noted down afterwards (cf. ZeydabadiNejad 2007: 42). 9. The BBC archive covers all Iranian newspapers from January 1997 and summaries of TV and radio broadcast too. I have not specifically focused on any single newspaper, but will provide information about the political orientation of any paper I quote. I also use the Gulf2000 web archive to trace newspaper discussions from 1993 till 2005 (both Iranian newspaper clippings translated into English and foreign reports). These databases far from exhaust the reporting on drug use, and it is a methodological weakness that I have not used further newspaper collections in Persian from the beginning of the 1990s. These proved too difficult to systematically gather and translate.

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10. From January 2005 to April 2007, I gathered 120 articles, some of which are extensive reports and others brief news statements. I have paid special attention to the manner in which reasons for addiction are discussed, and the arguments given for providing treatment. I then compared my findings from 2005 to 2007 with a similar survey of drug-related news items in the Khatami period. In the period 1997–2001 I examined 50 articles, stemming from the BBC Monitoring Iran archive. In addition, from the Gulf2000 web archive, I analysed another 300 articles on drugs from 1993 to 2005. 11. In the period from January 2004 to June 2007 this search amounts to 140 articles. 12. The head of the NGO spoke English but all other interactions took place in Persian. 13. This debate is and has been intensive (e.g. Jackson 1987; Okely 1996; Nader 1972 [1969]; Marcus and Fischer 1986; Olwig and Hastrup 1997; Marcus 1995). 14. Āshurā and tāsu’ā are the two main days of mourning during the shi’ite Moharram ritual, marking the death of Imam Hossein at Kerbala in 680. On tāsu’ā, the ninth day of Moharram, Imam Hossein and his followers were denied water. On āshurā, the tenth day of Moharram, Imam Hossein was killed (Fischer 1980). 15. Studying power, authority, and structures of political leadership is, of course, far from new to anthropology. But the political anthropologists of the 1960s–70s, like Barth (1959) and Leach (1970), were still primarily focusing on political legitimacy in the absence of the state, or the centre-peripheral relationships between tribes and the state. They employed structuralist, instrumentalist notions of political power, where power was either located in some sort of (super) structure, or seemed possible to ‘map’, as was the case with the ‘network theorists’ who were also more focused on difference and exchange than political change (Southall 1973; Bosseivan 1974; Mitchell 1969; Van Velsen 1979; Gluckman 1958). Anthropologists who focused on conflicts, brokerage, and agency did however pave the way for subsequent studies on (state) violence, war, and (post)conflict, postcolonial states (Das et.al. 1997; Riches 1986; Nordstrom and Robben 1995). 16. As Hannah Arendt says, the aim of totalitarianism is to destroy ‘every trace of human dignity’ (1966: 156). ‘Authority, no matter in what form, always is meant to restrict or limit freedom, but never to abolish it. Totalitarian domination, however, aims at abolishing freedom, even at eliminating human spontaneity in general’ (ibid. 155). 17. ‘What is particularly striking about the Iranian state is not how fragile it is, but how durable it is. What needs to be explained is why the Iranian state is so durable and violent’ (Rejali 1994: 158).

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18. Contributions range from theological, textual studies of Islamic interpretations to sweeping generalizations of Muslims’ historical ‘aversions’ of democracy and Islam’s ‘inherent inability’ to transform (Kamrava and O’Mara 1998: 893; Lewis 1993). For a sound debate on the compatibility of Islam and democracy see e.g. Diamond et al. (2003), Posusney and Angrist (2005), Salamé (1994), and Hefner (1998). 19. I employ ‘the people’ as an ‘emic’ category (or keyword), which has been defined differently by political actors, as in the example of umma vs. mardom. I also employ it as an ‘etic’ category, detecting how differing notions of ‘participation’ and ‘rights’ affect the role to be played by ‘the people’. 20. I use the English translation of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, available at www.SalamIran.org. 21. Arguably, the labels ‘reformist’ and ‘conservative’ are not very precise, and they do not refer to a right/left-wing scale of parliamentary politics. Reformists differed greatly in their attitudes towards financial and social policies, ranging from the very far left to the right. What united them was the desire for political freedom and democracy, and their shared willingness to question the monopolist reading of Islam after the revolution. I divide the ‘conservatives’ into two groups. The moderate, ‘cultural conservatives’ support increases in individual, political freedom, so long as they do not undermine the Islamic ideals in the cultural domain (for example in regard to the veiling of women). They also support financial interactions with the outside world; what has been termed a Chinese reform model. Prior to the 2009 election, at least, I would classify the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khameini, as a cultural conservative. The second category of conservatives is that of the ‘hard-liners’, which includes President Ahmadinezhad, ‘old’ hard-liners of the revolution like the notorious editor at the daily Keyhan, Hossein Shariatmadari, and Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi, and part of the basijs (volunteer militias), the Revolutionary Guards Corps, and the military. This group is patently opposed to democratic reform. They support an isolationist foreign policy and a strong, centralized welfare state, with a planned economy – combining the economic preferences of the far left with the cultural and foreign policy preferences of the far right. These groupings are not, however, fixed or stable. 22. The ‘hidden imam’ is the last imam in Twelver Shi’ism, Muhammad alMahdi, who is believed to have gone into occultation in 874, and is expected to return on the last day as the ultimate saviour. 23. For a detailed history of the debates and negotiations involved in drafting the constitution, see Schirazi (1998: 22–58), Bakhash (1990: 71–91), Brumberg (2001: 105–19).

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24. These bodies are the Guardians’ Council, the judicial authority, the radio and television network, the Joint Chief of Staff, the chief commander of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, and the supreme commanders of the armed forces. 25. For detailed accounts of the religious new thinkers see e.g. Schirazi (1998), Sadri and Sadri (1999), Boroujerdi (1996), Mir-Hosseini (1999), Mir-Hosseini and Tapper (2006), Saghafi (2001), Bjerre Christensen (2003c). 26. As Khomeini asserted, an Islamic government ‘can unilaterally revoke any lawful agreements it concluded with the people ... prevent any matter, whether religious or secular’ (in Bakhash 1990: 251). 27. Asef Bayat defines post-Islamism as: ‘Not only a condition, post-Islamism is also a project, a conscious attempt to conceptualize and strategize the rationale and modalities of transcending Islamism in social, political and intellectual domains. Yet, post-Islamism is neither anti-Islamic nor un-Islamic nor secular. Rather, it represents an endeavor to fuse religiosity and rights, faith and freedom, Islam and liberty’ (2007: 11). 28. A maghna’eh is a headscarf formed like a hood, used either on its own or underneath a chador (which covers the wearer from head to toe). 29. In autumn 2004, Ferehsteh Ghazi was among a group of webloggers and civil society activists arrested and tortured (Reporters Without Border 2004; Sharq website 2004). She was also arrested and beaten after the 2009 election, and is currently in exile. 30. For an excellent account of Abdullah Nuri’s trial and defence in November 1999, see Mir-Hosseini and Tapper (2006: 136–48). He was sentenced to five years in prison. 31. Akhbar-e Eqtezad was one of the many newspapers closed down in April 2000, following the Berlin conference and Ayatollah Khamenei’s criticism of the reformist press (Sabra 2001). 32. The daily Dowran-e Emruz was closed down shortly after the interview, on 18 March 2001. 33. At the parliamentary election in 2004, a new group of young conservatives made headway under the loose label of ‘ābādgarān’, the ‘developers’, who belong to the revolution’s ‘second generation’ (Khosrokhavar 2004; Saghafi 2004; Iran Focus 2004; Amuzegar 2004a). 34. On the election see e.g. Iran Focus (2005a, 2005b), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (2005a, 2005b), Dehghanpisheh (2005). 35. I follow Cohen and Arato’s definition of civil society as ‘a sphere of social interaction between economy and state, composed above all of the intimate sphere (especially the family), the sphere of associations (especially voluntary associations), social movements and forms of public communication’ (Cohen and Arato 1992: ix–xi).

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36. In the Fourth Five-Year Development Plan (2005–2009), approved in May 2004, ‘expanding civil institutions’ are mentioned in article 99, while article 101 urges the government to ‘prepare the charter on citizen rights with the purpose of improving human rights’, adding that the government is also obliged to ‘pave the way for the people’s greater participation while reinforcing non-governmental and professional organizations engaged in cultural activities’, and to strengthen women’s participation by ‘supporting the activity of non-governmental organizations, civil institutes, and women’s organizations’ ( Jomhuri-ye Eslami 2004; Sharq 2004). 37. The numbers of NGOs may be much higher, up to 15,000 (Bayat 2002: 15). When including the religious community-based organizations, Hamyaran NGO Resource Centre put the figure at 20,000 (www.hamyaran.org/ngoCommunity.htm, accessed 22 December 2003). 38. See for instance http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ngonews/ 39. For a disturbing example of an initiative reflecting a patronizing and selfpromoting attitude towards the disadvantaged young women it exists to help, see the documentary about Marjaneh Halati’s Omid-e Mehr Foundation, ‘The Glass House’ (Rahmanian and Hibbard 2008). I have not visited Omid-e Mehr and therefore cannot judge their work, but the documentary shows Halati as rather self-obsessed. 40. I am not in a position to measure the quality of the NGOs’ work. But in assessing the performance of NGOs under the supervision of the Social Welfare Organization, Salehi Esfahani says that passing on tasks to NGOs, the reformists were ‘struggling to set up NGOs that would fulfil the tasks expected of them’, but some of these NGOs ‘have acted similar to bureaucratic units’, and their performance has not been ‘tangibly better’ than the Social Welfare Organization itself (2004: 18). 41. Translated and provided by Iran CSOs Training and Research Center, Tehran, http://irancsos.org/english/about_us/constitution/index.htm (cf. Katirai 2005: 29). 42. For a vivid account of the election see Naji (2008: 57–90) and Gheissari and Nasr (2006: 148–58). 43. As Mohammad Tabibiyan, director of the Higher Banking Institute, said in August 2006, ‘through interventionist policies, expansive financial policies, the obligatory reduction of bank interest rates and increased imports, [the new government is] trying to control prices and reduce the inflation rate and bank rates to below 10 per cent. But with these policies, the problem is merely being postponed, and one can expect a more acute economic crisis in the future’ (Tabibiyan 2006). For a critique of Ahmadinezhad’s programme of distributing so-called ‘justice shares’ see Amuzegar (2007).

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44. In 2007–2008, 286 cases against teachers were filed in the judicial system, some resulting in prison sentences. 700 teachers had their salaries cut due to labour activism, while 39 have been banned from teaching altogether (Ghaemi 2008). 45. ‘Security of the cemetery’, Mohammad Khatami stressed, relates to ‘a dominant power [which] imposes its will on society on the basis of force and the people have no role other than to obey. This kind of security is, in fact, not security. It is pressure that will lead to big social explosions. [ ... ] Another [kind of security] is participatory security’, which is not only ‘security for the rulers’, but a ‘security for society and the people, be it personal security or social security’ (VIRIN2 2001). 46. According to the Ministry of Health’s 2001 ‘Epidemiology of Substance Abuse in the I.R.I.’, the total number of opioid drug users was 3.7 million, with 1.16 million being dependent (UNODC 2007a; cf. Mardom-Salari website 2006; Aftab-e Yazd 2006a). However, numbers vary according to the sources and are not entirely reliable (IRNA 2003; Samii and Recknagel 1999; Reid and Costigan 2002; Raisdana and Nakhjavani 2002: 159). Razzaghi et al. (2006) estimate 200–300,000 IDUs and up to 3.3 million drug users. Based on the 1999 census, UNODC estimated that 2.8 per cent of the population was using drugs. Even if not reaching the higher estimate of 5 per cent of the population, this number is still a world record (UNODC 2008: 55). 47. A comparison to the US figures conceals the fact that there are relatively few people addicted to alcohol in Iran. If they are included in the comparison (no statistics seem to be available on alcoholism in Iran), the difference in the overall amounts of addiction would probably be less significant. 48. In 2007 Hamshahri noted that ‘30,000 pre-university students are addicts’ (Hamshahri 2007). 49. In 2007, Afghanistan accounted for 92 per cent of the world’s opium production (UNODC 2008: 7). 50. On consumption prices see Raisdana and Nakhjavani (2002: 161f), Razzaghi and Movaghar (2005). 51. According to the National Drug Control Reports of DCHQ, the total amounts of drugs seized are (in kg): 1997: 194,676 kg; 1998: 194,263; 1999: 253,274; 2000: 238,593; 2001: 140,814; 2002: 152,098; 2003: 189,841; 2004: 284,358; 2005: 311,181 (UNODC 2007c: 3). According to the UNODC 2008 World Drug Report, the seizures of opium and heroin in 2006 were 321,971 kg (UNODC 2008). 52. On the prevalence and visibility of drug use at the time of the revolution, see Agahi and Spencer (1982a, 1982b). In a survey conducted in Esfahan in 1981, 13.2 per cent of 712 male students aged 14–18 reported that they had

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53.

54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

59.

60. 61.

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‘some experience’ with illicit drugs, in most cases opium (Agahi and Spencer 1982a: 237f). 47 per cent of the drug users had used opium for the first time before they were 14 (ibid: 241). Nearly half of those interviewed had seen opium being used at family gatherings (Agahi and Spencer 1982b: 102), over one-third had witnessed opium smoking in Esfahan’s public gardens, and nearly three-quarters knew an opium user (ibid. 103). This view was largely supported in society. A survey from 1981 among young people shows that 54.6 per cent of non-drug users and 43.2 per cent of drug users recommended that drug traffickers be executed (Agahi and Spencer 1982b: 109). 23 per cent believed that ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and the ‘unemployed’ had been the ‘agents of drug trafficking’ after the revolution, whereas 56.8 per cent mentioned ‘established drug traffickers’ (ibid. 106). Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s documentary from 1996, ‘Under the Skin of the City’, reports from these internment camps, which clearly mimic prisons. Similarly, Raisdana and Nakhjavani note that several clerics were addicted at the time of the revolution (2002: 152). The DCHQ has a seat in the presidential office, and it coordinates all activities related to drugs, which include the activities undertaken by the police, the customs, the Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Ministries of Intelligence and Security, Ministry of Islamic Guidance, Ministry of Education, and Ministry of Health, the Social Welfare Organization, and the NGOs (see http://www.dchq.ir/html/index.php?newlang=eng). The numbers of people executed were never entirely confirmed, but a fair guess is 4,000 (Bakhash 1990: 253f, 277; Abrahamian 1999: 215f). Iran is a party to the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotics drugs, and in 1992 Iran ratified the 1988 UN Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic drugs and Psychotropic Substances (Samii 2000a). Using drug problems as a means to dialogue is not, of course, specific to Iran. For an account on Israel–Palestinean dialogue based on mutual drug issues, see Sussman (2002). A pump is ‘made up of a vacuum bulb of a dropper, an empty tube of a roller pen and a used needle’ (Razzaghi and Movaghar 2005: 50). In a Rapid Situation Assessment in Iranian prisons in 2002, UNODC found that 54.3 per cent of inmates had a history of opiate abuse prior to imprisonment. 30.7 per cent stated that they were using drugs in the prison. Among the female inmates the prevalence of drug use was reported to 10–15 per cent (UNODC 2007a). In 2005–06, 45 per cent of inmates were convicted on drug-related crimes, Society to Defend Prisoners’ Rights announced (Sharq 2006). In 2000, the Head of Prisons said that 60 per cent of inmates were incarcerated on drug related charges (Deutsche Presse-Agentur 2000;

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62.

63.

64.

65. 66.

67.

68.

69.

70.

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AFP 2000a). According to UNODC in 1979–2003, 911,646 drug users were sent to prison (out of 1,714,601 drug users arrested). In the same period were 1,644,497 drug dealers imprisoned (UNODC 2007c: 2). A summary of the amendment was provided by UNDCP in Tehran January 2003. The amendment was not a general relaxation of the drug law. Although treatment was permitted, stronger penalties for possession were enforced (IRNA 1998d). For DCHQ’s list of treatment facilities see http://dchq.ir/html/images/ dchq-l/Treatment%20and%20Harm%20Reduction/Treatment%20and%20 Harm%20Reduction.pdf (accessed 13 February 2010). In the rest of the Middle East there is also a growing recognition of the drug problem. In the Gulf countries, the ulema is involved in prevention of drug use, and treatment is allowed too (Fattah 2006). But Iran was the first country to allow harm reduction methods. cf. Khatami’s distinction between ‘security of the cemetery’ and ‘participatory security’ (VIRIN2 2001). http://dchq.ir/html/images/dchq-l/Treatment%20and%20Harm%20 Reduction/Treatment%20and%20Harm%20Reduction.pdf (accessed 13 February 2010). In 2003, Mina Moraz, a doctor specializing in STDs, emphasized that she had insisted on using the word condom on national TV when giving expert interviews, although it had been criticized (Interview, January 2003, Tehran). Hooman Narenjiha, a doctor specializing in drug issues and hosting a TV talk show on medical issues, also emphasized the difficulty of ‘condom’ (Interview, November 2005, Tehran). Sigheh (or mut’a) is a tradition, which exists only in shi’a Islam, permitting a marriage to last from 1 hour to 99 years. In Iranian family law a man can marry up to four women at the same time, but he can have unlimited numbers of temporary wives (Haeri 1989). As Foucault noted, referring to the French welfare schemes, but just as applicable here: ‘Our systems of social security impose a particular way of life to which individuals are subjected, and any person or group that, for one reason or another, will not or cannot embrace that way of life is marginalized by the very operation of the institutions’ (1988: 165). As Sadjadpour points out: ‘A recurring theme in Khamenei’s speeches is the causal relationship linking scientific advancement, self-sufficiency, and political independence. His ideal vision is of an Iran that is scientifically and technologically advanced enough to be self-sufficient, self-sufficient enough to be economically independent, and economically independent enough to be politically independent’ (2008: 11). This need for and right

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71.

72.

73.

74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80.

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to ‘scientific progress’ is central to the nuclear issue; a debate I will not get into here. The order was issued on 24 January 2005. Translation provided by the Ministry of Health, November 2005, Tehran. It is also quoted in Nissaramanesh et al. (2005: 6). In 2000, the government spent 50 million dollars annually on prevention of drug use (Gorgin and Recknagel 2000a). In 2004, it spent 76 million dollars (Samii and Tarzi 2004). In 2006, DCHQ announced that they would use 14 million dollars on treatment and prevention (ILNA 2006). Ayatollah Dorri-Najafabadi was the Minister of Intelligence during Khatami’s presidency but resigned in 1999 after the Ministry of Intelligence was accused of masterminding the ‘serial killings’ of intellectuals in autumn 1998. He is currently the head of the Supreme Administrative Court. For an excellent description of the dilemmas and controversies involved in the Khak-e Sefid affair see Khoshnamak (2008). For depictions of the Alae’i brothers’ work see Bahari (2004), Boustany (2006), Aman and Maher (2006), Srikameswaran (2005). A few examples of some of the other main drug NGOs (as of 2005): Ā ftāb Society was established in 1999 and employs 32 freelance workers and 50 active volunteer members, and works with treatment, workshops, prevention, counselling. The Drug Control Community, working on prevention and advocacy, employs 20 staff and volunteers, and has 15 branches. The Hamyarān NGO (not to be confused with the Hamyarān NGO Resource Centre) works on prevention and harm reduction. The Red Crescent Society is also involved in treatment. On top of that numerous NGO initiatives take place in the countryside (information obtained through UNODC). On Iran’s social policies and the provisions of social services see Messkoub (2006) and Karshenas and Moghadam (2006). For a list of UNODC’s programmes in Iran see http://www.unodc.org/iran/ en/drug_crime_situation.html. For evaluations of Persepolis’ work and a history of Iranian harm reduction see Nissaramanesh et al. (2005) and Vazirian et al. (2005). In 2005, Persepolis also instigated a project to get in touch with and interview addicted street children. They stress the need for a non-governmental voluntary house for the children to stay in and receive education. Getting in touch with the children had been extremely difficult – a lot more so than getting in touch with the adult addicts. The children were more scared of the authorities, including the Social Welfare

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81. 82.

83.

84. 85.

86.

87. 88.

89.

90. 91.

92.

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Organization (kā rgarā n-e behzisti), because they feared they would send them either to prison or to institutions without asking them about their needs, Persepolis reported afterwards (Persepolis Harm Reduction NGO 1384 [2005]). The NGO stressed gender equality as an employment strategy. ‘We have female leaders. I’m a feminist!’ as Bijan Nasirimanesh said. In Park-e Mellat I once had to run from a group of young men, who used the semi-hidden, unpoliced part of the park to chase and shout sexual and clearly intimidating demands after me. Bani-Etemad’s feature film ‘Under the Skin of the City’ (1999) also depicts Park-e Mellat as a spot for sex workers and runaway girls. For an interesting account of the public toilets in Park-e Laleh in Tehran and the women gathering there, see the documentary Zanāneh, ‘The Ladies’ Room’, by Mahnaz Afzali (2003). The employees would either refer to Persepolis as an anjoman or kheirieh (the term used for religious charities), but not as an ‘NGO’, cf. chapter 3. The political encouragement of temporary marriages for the unmarried youth dates back to 1992, when the then president Hashemi-Rafsanjani argued that young people should engage in temporary marriages to avoid wrongdoings until they could afford a proper marriage. This view is also supported by Day et al. (2006). In a survey of 190 drug users and injecting drug users, only 5 per cent reported that they had no family support. Let me stress that the criticism of the private clinics I described earlier does not apply to Dr. Narenjiha’s clinic. Recent statistics from the Darius Drug Research Centre stress that in 2003 18 per cent of drug users were introduced to drugs at work. In comparison, this proportion was only 9 per cent in 1998 (cf. UNODC 2007a). Among the middle class drug users I met most were employed while becoming addicted. They may subsequently lose their jobs. In a comparative perspective Al-Krenawi et al. give a revealing account of how the therapeutic significance of Sufi Islam is used in an Israeli-Palestinian drug treatment facility (2002). For a moving account of how Narcotics Anonymous was set up in Iran see Tashvighi’s autobiography (1379 [2000]). In 2005, Tavalod-e Dobā reh had 26 rehabilitation centres in 11 provinces of Iran, providing services to around 25,000 drug users (Tashvighi 2005). Rousari is a scarf. Compared to a maghna’eh and, more so, the chador, wearing a rousari is a more relaxed and informal way of being covered.

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93. Tavalod-e Dobā reh is also special in the sense that they both provide detoxification, harm reduction, abstinence-based self-help groups and prevention. 94. http://www.iranactor.com/CINEMA/Box-Office/1380.htm, accessed 15 July 2008. 95. Hamid Reza Sadr mentions for example ‘White Gold’ (Talāy-e Sefid) by Jamshid Sheibani (1962) and ‘Merchants of Death’ (Sodagarān-e Marg) by Naser Malek-Motii (1962) (Sadr 2006: 107). 96. For instance films by Said Motalebi and Hossein Davani in 1981–82, according to Sadr (2006: 186f). Similarly, Abbas Kiarostami’s audacious ‘10’ (2002) was also banned and attacked by a conservative magazine for ‘encouraging prostitution and social corruption’ (Zeydabadi-Nejad 2007: 160). 97. As one of my informants said during my 1998–99 fieldwork on marriage and the family: ‘You cannot live in this society unless you’re married – then you’re abnormal!’ 98. Conversation between Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Sheila Whitaker, 14 April 2008, as part of retrospective of Bani-Etemad’s films at the BFI Southbank, London. 99. In other films, like Jafar Panahi’s ‘The Circle’, it is mainly the bus and train stations which perform the role of ‘liminal’ urban danger (2000). In Bani-Etemad’s ‘Mainline’, the shopping mall in Tajrish serves the same function, and so do the deserted Tehranian motorways. Prior to the revolution, in films of the 1960s, it was the traditional Iranian café, which served as the place of social chaos and ‘masculine world of pleasure, adventure and disorder’ (Sadr 2006: 117). 100. The usage ‘To whom will you show this film, anyway?’ is a reference to the title of Bani-Etemad’s early documentary on disinherited slum-dwellers, In filmhā ro be ki neshun midin? (1993). 101. http://www.iranactor.com/CINEMA/Box-Office/1379.htm, accessed 15 July 2008. 102. Conversation between Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Sheila Whitaker, 14 April 2008, BFI Southbank, London. 103. Conversation between Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Sheila Whitaker, 14 April 2008, BFI Southbank, London. 104. In 2005, ‘Mohammad and the Matchmaker’ won the film award of the International Harm Reduction Association. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ programmes/this_world/3638911.stm, accessed 20 July 2008. 105. Released after 118 days of imprisonment, in absentia Maziar Bahari was sentenced to thirteen and a half years in prison and 74 lashes (Bahari 2010). Others were not so lucky to be able to leave the country.

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106. This is claimed by members of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, who have fled the country in protest of the Corps’ repressive role (Guardian Films 2010). 107. http://www.lemonde.fr/proche-orient/article/2010/05/20/1-iran-uneimmense-prison_1360395_3218.html, accessed 3 June 2010.

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——. (2006b). Untitled article, 18 February. ——. (2007a). ‘Students criticize policies of Ministries of Science’, 14 January. ——. (2007b). ‘The second warning of economists to the administration: The full letter of 57 experts and university professors to Ahmadinezhad’, 12 June. E’temad-e Melli (2006a). Untitled article, 6 August. ——. (2006b). Untitled article, 29 July. ——. (2007). ‘Bail of 200 million tumans for arrested women’, 17 March. Farhang-e Ashti (2005a)’. Head of National Youth Organization: The world of Internet websites is extremely dangerous’, 7 September. ——. (2005b). ‘Borujerdi: Recent encounters with non-governmental organizations worrisome’, 20 October. ——. (2006). Untitled article, 22 January. ——. (2007). Untitled article, 7 March. Farhang-e Ashti website (2007). Untitled article, 7 January. Fars News Agency website (2005). ‘President Ahmadinezhad’s government programme’, 16 August. ——. (2006). Untitled article, 16 September. Firuzi, Esma’il (2006). ‘The problem of addiction cannot be solved with arrests and imprisonment’, Hemayat, 1 June. Hamshahri (2007). ‘30,000 pre-university students are addicts’, 20 February. Hemayat (2005). Untitled article, 10 November. ——. (2006a). ‘Drugs are fourth cause of death in the country’, 4 March. ——. (2006b). ‘Majlis representative urges return to religious instructions’, 29 July. ——. (2006c). ‘Head of Anti-Narcotics HQ urges more funds for treatment’, 2 August. ——. (2006d). ‘Camps to rehabilitate drug users being set up in prisons’, 17 August. ——. (2006e). Untitled article, 30 August. ——. (2006f). ‘Wave after wave’, 30 October. ——. (2007). Untitled article, 15 February. Iran Daily (1998). Untitled article, 3 August. Iran (2007a). ‘Ayatollah Nuri Hamedani: Production, possession, buying and selling of narcotics and hallucinogenic drugs is religiously forbidden’, 22 January. ——. (2007b). Untitled article, 12 May. ILNA, Iranian Labour News Agency (2006). Untitled article, 26 October. ILNA website (2006). Untitled article, 27 June. IRNA, Islamic Republic of Iran’s New Agency (1998a). ‘UN official says Iran’s experience in fighting drugs “outstanding” ’, 4 April. ——. (1998b). Untitled article, 10 June. ——. (1998c). Untitled article, 28 June. ——. (1998d). Untitled article, 30 September.

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IRNA, Islamic Republic of Iran’s New Agency (1998e). Untitled article, 14 October. ——. (1998f). Untitled article, 27 December. ——. (2000a). Untitled article, 19 June. ——. (2000b). Untitled article, 5 July. ——. (2000c). Untitled article, 7 November. ——. (2000d). Untitled article, 29 October. ——. (2000e). ‘MP calls for general education to campaign against AIDS’, 10 December. ——. (2001a). ‘Anti-drug chief stresses scientific methods of drug prevention’, 10 March. ——. (2001b). Untitled article, 1 May. ——. (2001c). Untitled article, 28 May. ——. (2003). ‘Over 30,000 HIV victims in Iran: health official’, 14 May. ——. IRNA website (2004). ‘Reform camp calls on government to protect fledgling democracy in Iran’, 9 November. ——. (2005a). ‘Majlis starts debate on next year budget bill’, 27 February. ——. (2005b). Untitled article, 13 March. ——. (2006a). Untitled article, 15 January. ——. (2006b). Untitled article, 20 May. ——. (2006c). Untitled article, 23 September. ——. (2006d). Untitled article, 16 December. IRINN, Islamic Republic of Iran News Network (2006a). ‘Full text of President Ahmadinezhad’s press conference’, 14 January. ——. (2006b). ‘Full text of President Ahmadinezhad’s Speech in Qazvin 8 June’ (translated by U.S. Dept. of Commerce), 12 June. ISNA, Iranian Student News Agency website (2006a). Untitled article, 14 July. ——. (2006b). ‘Jahanbeglu: I have not been charged with the spying. We must try to bring about greater interaction [contact] between the government and the intellectuals, as much as we can’, 31 August. Jalali, Reza (2005)’. The National Youth Organization is not a mosque’, MardomSalari, 18 September. Jamshidi, Iraj (2006). ‘Ahmad Tavakkoli: Foreign currency reserve at minus 4 billion dollars’, Sharq, 12 July. Jomhuri-ye Eslami (2004). ‘By the Passage of an Article of the Fourth Development Plan, the Government Was Required To Prepare and Execute Comprehensive Plans To Eradicate Poverty and Administer Justice in the Country’, 2 May. ——. (2006). ‘Reaction of number of MPs to remarks made by president about high cost of living’, 12 July. Jomhuri-ye Eslami website (2006). ‘Enough with tolerance and liberality’, 22 April. Kargozaran (2007). Untitled article, 7 February. Kazemian, M. (2007). ‘Us, power bloc’, E’temad website, 17 March. Keyhan (2005). ‘Hamid Mowlana on ten tools of powers to advance ultra-neocolonialism’, 5 May. ——. (2006). ‘Five thousand drug addicts died of drug abuse’, 18 June.

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——. (2007a). Untitled article, 17 January. ——. (2007b). Untitled article, 23 April. Mardom-Salari (2005). ‘Ahmadinezhad will substitute the model of mosques for the NGOs’, 2 August. ——. (2007). ‘63% of girls and boys running away from home are between 13 to 18 years old’, 4 March. Mardom-Salari website (2006). ‘The Head of Health Ministry disease management centre says: “Growth of addicts by injection is three times more than population growth” ’, 18 April. ——. (2007a). Untitled article, 25 January. ——. (2007b). Untitled article, 25 April. Mehr News Agency (2009). ‘Ayatollah Hashemi-Rafsanjani: I do not Agree with the Trend Continuing in the Country; We have Educated People on Both Sides’, 23 December. Mehrabi, Ehsan (2006). ‘Inflation cannot be curbed by decree’, E’temad-e Melli, 12 July. Mirfattahi, F. S. (2005). ‘Drawing up the regulations for the activities of the NGOs by the Intelligence Ministry’, E’temad, 5 September. Mohammadi, M. (2006). ‘Editorial’, Keyhan website, 25 May. Pak, Arezoo (2002). ‘Prostitution in Iran (An interview with Professor Mohammad Hossein Farjad)’, Entekhab, 11 June. Pazuki, A. (2006). ‘Critique of Iran’s “brother-in-law-cracy” ’, Mardom-Salari website, 10 April. Payam-e Ostan-e Semnan (2006). ‘The plan for the improvement of security in society was executed in Semnan Province along with other places in the country’, 23 February. Resalat (2006a). ‘Viewpoint’, 1 January. ——. (2006b). Untitled article, 22 November. Reza’ian (2007). ‘Media pluralism and suitcases full of dollars’, Partow-e Sokhan, 19 April. Saleh-Jalali (2007). ‘Civil institutions; guards of security’, E’temad, 12 February. Salek (2006). ‘Popular weapon against America’, E’temad website, 18 February. Sarami, Hamid (2006). ‘Narcotic drugs; the biggest shock in the third millennium’, Hemayat, 13 November. Sharq (2004). Untitled article, 2 May. ——. (2005). ‘Cabinet prohibited funding Khatami’s institutes’, 20 October. ——. (2006). ‘Society to Defend Prisoners’ Rights Annual Report for 1384 [2005–2006] Part Two: Health, Employment and Furloughs’, 13 June. Sharq website. (2004). Untitled article, 4 December. Siyasat-e ruz (2006a). ‘Tehran governor general: Leniency towards corruption is no longer tolerated’, 14 March. ——. (2006b). Untitled article, 27 April. Tabibiyan (2006). ‘Inflation rate will not be reduced by ways chosen by government’, Aftab-e Yazd website, 21 August.

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Tehran Times (2008). Untitled article in English, 9 April. Vazini, Hassan (2002). ‘We wanted to make temporary marriage conform with the law’, Iran, 10, 11 August. Vaziri, Nasrin (2006). ‘Iran’s economy on track to spread poverty, analysts warned at 16th House of Parties seasonal conference’, E’temad-e Melli, 23 September. VIRIN1, Vision of the Islamic Republic of Iran Network 1 (1997a). Untitled summary, 11 March. ——. (1997b). Untitled summary, 10 May. ——. (1997c). Untitled summary, 28 September. ——. (1998). Untitled summary, 1 July. ——. (2007). ‘In the Name of Democracy’, 18, 19 July. VIRIN2, Vision of the Islamic Republic of Iran Network 2 (1997). Khatami’s inaugural lecture, 4 August. ——. (2001). Untitled summary, 2 June. VIRI, Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran (1998a). Untitled summary, 20 October. ——. (1998b). Untitled summary, 9 November. ——. (1999). Untitled commentary, 20 October. ——. (2000a). Untitled summary, 12 January. ——. (2000b). Friday prayer, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 14 April. ——. (2006a). Friday prayer, Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, 28 April. ——. (2006b). Untitled summary, 23 June. Ya Lesarat ol-Hoseyn (2006a). ‘Interview with General Talae’i, the commander of the Law Enforcement Force [NAJA] of greater Tehran’, 1 March. ——. (2006b). ‘Zeydabadi: We don’t dare to receive money from America’, 8 March. Yusefpur, Ali (2006). ‘Press, enemies’ moles’, Siyasat-e ruz, 27 May.

Films and documentaries Afzali, Mahnaz (2003). ‘The Ladies Room’ (Zanāneh), documentary, Iran. Amirani, Taghi (2004). ‘Red Lines and Deadlines’, documentary, Great Britain: Amirani Films, PBS. Bahari, Maziar (2002). ‘And Along Came a Spider’ (Va ankaboot āmad), documentary, Iran: Bahari films. ——. (2004). ‘Mohammad and the Matchmaker’, documentary. Bahari films, commissioned by BBC2 as part of ‘This World: World Weddings’ series. Bani-Etemad, Rakhshan (1992). ‘Nargess’ (Nargess), Iran. ——. (1993). ‘To whom will you show these films anyway?’ (In filmhā ro be ki neshun midin?), Iran. ——. (1996). ‘Under the Skin of the City’ (Zir-e post-e shahr), documentary, Tehran: Social Welfare Organization. ——. (1998). ‘The May Lady’ (Banu-ye Ordibehesht), Iran.

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——. (1999). ‘Under the Skin of the City’ (Zir-e post-e shahr), Iran. ——. (2006). ‘Mainline’ (Khoon bāzi), Iran. Edel, Uli (1981). ‘Christiane F – Wir Kinder Vom Bahnhof Zoo’, West Germany. Guardian Films, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (2010). ‘Former elite officers in Revolutionary Guard reveal increasing tensions in Iran regime’, video, 11 June 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2010/jun/11/ iran-revolutionary-guard-defectors Hatamikia, Ebrahim (1997). ‘Glass Agency’ (Ajans-e shishei), Iran. Kiarostami, Abbas (2002). ‘Ten’ (Da), Iran. Kimiai, Masud (1975). ‘Deers’ (Ghavaznhā), Iran. ——. (1986). ‘Blade and Silk’ (Tigh va Abrisham), Iran. Makhmalbaf, Mohsen (1989). ‘Marriage of the Blessed’ (Arusi-ye khubān), Iran: Ferdosi Multimedia. Malek-Motii, Naser (1962). ‘Merchants of Death’ (Sodagarān-e Marg), Iran. Mehrjuee, Dariush (1974). ‘Mina Circle’ (Dāireh-e Mina), Iran. Mir-Hosseini and Longinotto (1998). ‘Divorce, Iranian Style’ (Talāgh be sabk-e Iran), documentary, Iran/Great Britain. ——. (2001). ‘Runaway’, documentary, Great Britain: Channel Four Films. Moghadam, Saman (2001). ‘Party’ (Party), Iran. Panahi, Jafar (2000). ‘The Circle’ (Dayereh), Iran, Switzerland, Italy: Artificial Eye. ——. (2006). ‘Offside’ (Ofsaid), Iran: Sony Pictures Classics. Persson, Nahid (2004). ‘Prostitution Behind the Veil’, documentary, Denmark: Cosmo Doc. Rahmanian and Hibbard (2008). ‘The Glass House’, documentary. Fictionville Studio, Sundance Channel. Rasoulof, Mohammad (2005). ‘The Twilight’ (Gāgoomān), Iran. Sadr-Ameli, Rassul (1998). ‘Girls in the Sneakers’ (Dokhtari Ba Kafshhaye Katani), Iran. Sheibani, Jamshid (1962). ‘White Gold’ (Talāy-e Sefid). Iran.

Websites www.amnesty.org www.bbc.co.uk http://www.dchq.ir/html/index.php?newlang=eng www.enduringamerica.com http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ngonews/ http://gulf2000.columbia.edu/ www.guardian.co.uk www.hamyaran.org www.hrw.org

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www.iranactor.com/CINEMA/Box-Office www.rsf.org www.SalamIran.org www.unodc.org www.wikipedia.org

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INDEX

abstinence-based treatment, 137, 162, 189, 192, 196 Ahmadinezhad, Mahmoud, 13, 15–16, 24, 25, 44, 45, 47, 78–80, 81–83, 91, 94–97, 98–101, 103–105, 108, 110–117, 150, 151, 161, 197, 230, 233–235, 237, 238, 240–242 āshurā, 24, 191, 239 Bahari, Maziar, 141, 201, 220–221, 236–237 Bani-Etemad, Rakhshan, 201, 207, 210–219, 221, 222, 223 basij, 69, 95, 99, 100, 101, 108, 115, 138, 144, 145, 171, 204, 236, 239 biopolitics, biopolitical power, 31, 34, 39, 40, 42, 121, 158 bonyāds, 63, 64–66, 86, 143–144, 160 civil society (jāmeh-ye madāni), 2, 4, 5, 8, 12, 13, 14, 16, 20, 31, 128, 160, 177, 196, 198, 230, 232 attacks on civil society, 92, 94, 99, 101–105, 108–110, 128, 240 theoretical concept of civil society, 25, 54, 59, 67, 68, 80, 83–85, 91

Christensen_Index.indd 285

civil society as used by the reform movement, 82–83, 86–87, 89–92, 106–107, 110–112, 114, 206, 233–235, 241 ‘dialogue among civilizations’, 13, 54, 86, 90, 99, 106, 129 ‘dividing practices’, 31, 36, 39, 41, 47–48, 50, 51, 62, 66, 143, 154, 159, 183, 196, 200, 229, 231 Douglas, Mary, 30, 34–36, 47, 81, 83, 105, 107, 118, 145, 155, 225, 226, 230 Dovom-e Khordād, see reform movement, the Drug Control Headquarters (DCHQ), 20, 122, 129, 130, 136, 138, 146–147, 150, 152, 161–163, 165, 177, 178, 192 drug policies, 3, 8, 11, 15, 18–19, 41, 44, 48, 118–157, 158, 161, 196, 226 drug supply reduction, 150 drug trafficking, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 129, 130–132, 136, 137, 201, 206, 207, 210, 212–214 drug treatment, 3–4, 19, 21, 119, 124, 137, 149, 151, 154, 156, 158, 162–163, 195, 197, 222, 225, 226

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286

DRUGS, DEVIANCY

AND

expertise, 53, 60, 80, 110, 111, 114, 119, 136–137, 147, 148, 156, 193, 197, 227, 228 female drug users, 194, 217 ‘the field’, 22–23, 24 Foucault, Michel, 5, 31, 34, 36–40, 42–46, 82, 119, 120, 128, 133, 160, 200, 227, 231 governmentality, 2, 5, 30–31, 36–37, 41, 42–44, 47–48, 49, 79–80, 89, 97, 99, 102, 107, 110, 114, 116, 133, 227–228 Green Movement, the, 233–244 Guardians’ Council, the, 57, 61, 68, 75, 76–77, 79, 128 Hajjarian, Said, 49, 53, 55, 73, 75, 204, 236, Hamyaran NGO Resource Centre, 87–88, 92, 93–94 harm reduction treatment, 154 Hashemi-Rafsanjani, Akbar, 60, 78–79, 95, 97, 118, 132, 136, 238, 241 HIV/AIDS, 19, 67, 118, 133, 134–136, 140, 156, 166, 168, 178–179, 201, 219–220, 232 ‘houses of chastity’, 142–143 injecting drug use, 21, 22, 121, 133, 154, 166, 178 Iranian Civil Society Resource Center (ICSRC), 87, 93 Iranian National Centre for Addiction Studies (INCAS), 20, 137, 149, 164, 185, 193 Islamic democracy, 13, 49–51, 54, 59, 85

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DEMOCR ACY

IN

IR AN

Jahanbegloo, Ramin, 26–27, 71, 105–107, 108, 156 keywords, 10, 25, 49, 54, 80, 115, 133, 203, 227, 230 Khajehpour, Bijan, 67–68, 86, 236, 237 Khamenei, Ayatollah Ali Hosseini, 59, 61, 73–74, 130, 147, 235, 238, 240 Khatami, Mohammad, 4, 8, 12, 13, 21, 30, 44, 49, 50, 52–55, 58–60, 66–68, 71–80, 81–90, 94, 97–99, 106, 108, 114, 116, 129–130, 136, 141, 203, 241, 242 kheirieh, 86, 109 Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah, 50, 51, 53, 54, 56–59, 61–64, 82, 95, 97, 115, 124, 143, 146, 148, 171 Kongres 60, 21, 22, 138, 160, 189, 193 legitimacy, 5, 7, 9, 31, 34, 35–36, 41, 42, 52, 53, 59, 60, 70, 73, 74, 78–79, 97, 98, 110, 111, 114, 115, 163, 198, 206, 226–227, 237–240, 243, 244 ‘Mainline’, 201, 210–211, 215–219, 223 Makhmalbaf, Mohsen, 144, 199, 201, 205, 207–210, 213, 215 ‘Marriage of the Blessed’, 144, 201, 207–210, 213 Mesbah-Yazdi, Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi, 98 Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, 93, 161, 201, 206 Ministry of Health, 18, 20, 21, 25–26, 93, 121, 133, 138, 146, 149, 161–162, 164, 177, 179

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INDEX Mohajerani, Ata’ollah, 66, 73, 90, 203 ‘Mohammad and the Matchmaker’, 201, 220, 221 Mohseini-Ezhei, Hojatoleslam Gholam-Hussein, 98, 101–102 moral public, 51, 62, 202–203, 221, 223, 224, 226, 229 ‘mosque model’, 82, 99–101, 116 mostazafin (the disinherited), 7, 11, 19, 62–64, 66, 143, 145 Mousavi, Mir-Hossein, 234, 235, 239, 241–243 Narcotics Anonymous (Anjoman-e motadān-e gomnān), 21, 22, 138, 160, 163, 186, 188–189, 194, 197, 220, 229 Narenjiha, Hooman, 163–164, 186–189, 193, 219 Nasirimanesh, Bijan, 158, 166, 174, 177, 179, 180 New Iranian Cinema, the, 201 pārti-bāzi, 103, 177–181 participation (mosharekat), 4, 7, 12, 25, 35, 50, 54, 60, 66–68, 69, 71, 80, 82, 85, 86–87, 90, 99, 105, 110, 115, 116, 157, 172, 193, 194, 227, 233, 235, 240, 241 Persepolis Harm Reduction NGO, 21, 22, 51, 154, 158, 160, 163, 165–169, 171–183, 185, 189, 196–197, 221, 229 presidential election (2005), 13, 16, 77, 79, 80, 90, 94–97, 116, 226 presidential election (2009), 12, 13, 45, 233, 235 prostitution, 11, 67, 109, 135, 139–142, 144, 151, 202

Christensen_Index.indd 287

287

Pur-Mohammadi, Hojatoleslam Mustafa, 98 Qouchani, Mohammad, 76 Razavi-Faqih, Saeed, 54, 76 Razzaghi, Emran, 137, 149, 164, 185, 193 Razzaghi, Sohrab, 87, 91, 93, 104, 108 reform movement, the, 2, 3, 8–9, 10–12, 24, 25, 30, 41, 44, 48, 49–80, 87, 94, 98, 106, 110, 113, 119, 133, 148, 150, 164, 172, 197, 201, 203, 205–206, 213–215, 226, 227, 228, 234, 243 regime change, 14, 45, 83, 101, 107, 131 religious new thinkers, the, 9, 53, 60, 66, 85 resistance, 10, 45–47, 69, 77, 83, 110, 172, 180, 204, 217, 222, 223, 239–241, 244 Revolutionary Guards Corps, the (Sepāh-e Pāsdārān-e Enghelāb-e Islāmi), 64, 69, 74, 77, 96, 97–98, 100, 115, 233, 235, 238, 239–240, 244 securitization, 19, 120, 121, 126, 132, 133, 151, 156, 223, 227 serial killings, the, 72, 98 Shahroudi, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi, 113, 146, 149, 154 shari’a, 9, 52, 57, 58 social capital, 13, 87, 88, 108, 197 social justice, 7, 19, 25, 48, 51, 56, 62–63, 64, 82, 95, 109–110, 111–112, 143, 145, 155–156, 171, 208, 209

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288

DRUGS, DEVIANCY

AND

DEMOCR ACY

IN

IR AN

Tavalod-e Dobāreh (Rebirth), 21, 22, 138, 160, 163, 172, 186, 188–189, 193, 197

Social Welfare Organization, the, 17, 20, 147, 150, 151, 161–162, 163–165, 179, 189, 192, 211–212, 218, 219 sovereignty, 7, 12, 36–37, 40, 41, 48, 50, 53, 56, 57, 58, 60–62, 97, 98, 110, 114, 116, 124, 128, 132, 138, 227–228, 233, 235, 238, 244 spider killings, the, 141–142 state, the anthropology of the state, 6, 10, 31, 32–33, 34, 36–45 Iran’s state constitution, 51, 57–58 margins of the state, 31, 32–35, 47, 82–83, 115, 119, 159, 160, 183, 195, 230–232

velayat-e faqih, 51, 55–56, 58, 59, 61, 202 ‘velvet revolution’, 26, 106, 236, 237

Tajbakhsh, Kian, 27, 59, 107–108, 156, 236

war veterans, 19, 119, 138, 141, 144–145, 171, 207, 209, 210, 229

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‘Under the Skin of the City’, 201, 210–215, 218 United Nations Drug Control Programme (UNDCP), 6, 129–130 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), 11, 179

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