"I had arrayed myself in a new suit of clothes made by a Yezdi tailor,
of white shawl-stuff, on the pattern of an English suit. These were cool,
comfortable, and neat; and though they would probably have been regarded
as somewhat eccentric in England, I reflected that no one at Yezd or Kirmán would doubt that they were the
ordinary summer attire of an English gentleman. Haji Safar [Browne's
young Persian assistant], indeed, laughingly remarked that people would
say I had turned Bábí (I suppose because early Bábís were wont to wear white raiment), but otherwise expressed
the fullest approval." (Browne, A Year 452)
The term 'Babi' in this anecdote is not only addressed to the
eccentricity of the foreign other, but to the wearing of an extraordinary
configuration of clothing, the color of which may connote an act of
dissent. The anecdote represents not only what Browne as a British Orientalist associates with his suit, but
fortuitously reveals an assumption about the Yazdi and Kirmani mind.
Although Browne was extremely interested and driven to understand the
Persians and moreover the Babis, he failed to grasp the historical connection (made by his travel companion) between what he was wearing and the perceived role of the Babi in innovating fashions in
The unveiled Qajar princess, Taj al Saltanih's
memoirs (1884-1914) also situate the connotative values of the term 'Babi'
quite illustratively within the context of modern education, naturalism
and irreligiosity. Speaking of the effects of her education on the development of her mature identity she writes:
"Right up to my eighteenth year, I had held beliefs taught
to me by my nanny that the heavens were pulled by a chain in an angel's
hand, or that when God's wrath was incurred, the sound of thunder
came...As I progressed in my studies day by day, my irreligiosity grew until I was a complete naturalist myself.
Since these ideas were new to me, I was eager to impart them to my mother,
my relatives, and my children. As I would begin to talk, however, my
mother would curse at me, 'You have turned Babi!' My relatives would invoke God's forgiveness and keep their
distance, refusing to listen." (Amanat, Crowning 309)
Taj's memoir as a whole constructs clear connections between her
modern education, her unveiling, women's liberation, and her desire and
respect for European ideals as encountered by her in various French
literatures and philosophies. Yet in this brief anecdote set in the chamber of familiarity the term 'Babi', and not
'Imperialism,' arises to effect the connection between her modern
subjectivities and her alleged naturalism and irreligiosity.
literary reference to the derogatory term 'Babi' is found in a short story
by Rasul Parvizi which humorously relates the effects of the panoptic
enforcement of modern clothing policies under the Reza Shah (1925-41) in
the young man's home town of Shiraz. As is well known Reza Shah's dynastic legacy in Iranian
history falls within the realm of modernization in his enforcement of
European clothing and the forced injunction to unveil Iranian women in the
late nineteen thirties and early forties. Houchang Chehabi sketches this "progressive move" from the institution
of the Pahlavi hat (similar to the French kepi ) as the official hat for
all Iranian men in 1927 to the decree in 1935 that established the
chapeaux in an effort to construe an Iranian Westernization. (Chehabi 212, 215) Chehabi notes the violent
reproach by the general populace towards these new policies, which
reluctantly moved them from a complex diversity of cultural practices in
clothing towards the mobilization of a national front through the forced uniformity of dress. This done, the
institution of new policies in the 1930's, and especially the injunction
to unveil, introduced 'the people' into an international system of
clothing and etiquettes that would ultimately distinguish them from others in bordering countries. 5
The panoptic enforcement of the rules of clothing through the active
engagement of the police force, the school system, the traffic
comptrollers, and even undercover agents in bathhouses to monitor
compliance, especially with respect to the rule to appear unveiled in public places, strikes one as almost surreal.
The general reaction towards this totalized foreign mimicry enforced
by the disciplinary institutions resonates in the young Shirazi's chant,
in Rasoul Parvizi's story, as he walks around town knocking off people's
Pahlavi hats and ripping them to pieces:
"We don't want a blue hanky,
We don't want a
We don't want a foreign hat.
The survival of the stereotype 'Babi' in this piece of prose,
three quarters of a century after the collapse of the Babi movement is
remarkably linked not only to the enforced introduction of foreign values
and internationalism, but to a variety of associations with a change of clothing.
The stereotypical denotation 'Babi' as a memory in miniature in
these brief anecdotes ambivalently joins the two poles of outside
appearance and personal identity - the traditional realms of the zaher and
the baten in the ordinary and everyday speech of the Iranian people. Remarkably, it conflicts with the official
attempts to dissociate the two realms during the reign of Reza Shah whose
counter-imposition of the veil on prostitutes was meant to prevent "the
association of unveiling with unwholesome mores." (Chehabi 219)
Historically organized around the problems of spatiality and
vision, the concepts of external appearance and personal identity have a
fundamental relation to Persian models of subject formation. By embracing
a fluctating negative stereotype such as 'the Babi' in the act of formulating a modern identity, they play themselves
out on the uncanny scene of fetishism. As such they are caught in the
problematics of a 'scrambled' identity, associated with the pleasure and
anxiety that the fetishized memory/image of 'the Babi' gives rise to. I use the term fetishim (or the
stereotype as fetish) here to discuss the subject's desire for a pure
origin which is threatened by a realization of difference. This
understanding of fetishism is informed by the work of the postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha who in rereading the work of Edward Said on "Orientalism" and Frantz Fanon on the problematics of
representation in the colonial context, redefines the stereotype or fetish.
Bhabha defines the fetish as a concept that gives "access to an 'identity' which is predicated as much on
mastery and pleasure as it is on anxiety and defence." The fetish or
stereotype, in Bhabha's reading, is a form of "multiple and contradictory
beliefs in its recognition of difference and its disavowal of it." (75) Thus in light of Bhabha's discussion of
fetishism, its role in the subject's reckoning with difference and its
imbrication in the Foucauldian apparatus of knowledge and power, 6 I argue below that the stereotypic or fetishized image of 'the Babi', attached as it was to aspects of
Persian modernity, complicates the modern subject's relation to
him/herself and to the constitution of the modern nation as homogeneous and
whole. The discussion of historical accounts of the Babi movement will elaborate and illustrate this claim
further. But first, as the issue of fetishism bears on the problematics of
sexuality and spatiality, let us pause to reflect on the ways in which
sexuality and territoriality conflate in Islamic discourse.
We have come to learn that sexuality, in the context of Islam,
is territorial (Mernissi, Beyond 81). Sexuality is mapped, as it were,
unto the specific topology of the public and the private. In this
context, female veiling is formulated as a way to ensure the purity of the public sphere, generally designated as male,
and the protection of the female, in the same context, through a gesture
of dissimulation. As such, this construction permits the definition of
female identity, in the Muslim context, as split. On the one hand, in the context of the perception of her
natural constitution, the female is seen as a distraction, an invasion or
intervention to the male's formulation of his identity as pious or divine.
Her presence as a sexual being in the public sphere, in other words, interferes with the Muslim man's
relation to Allah. On the other hand, in the context of her cultural
status in Muslim history and as the embodiment of the community's identity
as such, the female is seen as weak, indeed in need of protection in the male domain. The veil thus covers over
her constitutional split, creating a unified or whole subject that is both
dangerous by nature and incapable to defend herself or the Muslim
community's identity within the social domain.7 Without the veil this dual and dangerous quality
is thought to come to the fore, unveiling a "scrambled" identity,
dangerous and mutilated.
The unveiled woman in the Muslim public realm is perceived as
naked. 8 Her unveiling, especially in the Irano-Islamic
context, is a sure sign of her sexual promiscuity, her unleashed sexuality
and transgression. 9
It is on the basis of this perception that I would propose a conjunction
between the moment of Qurrat al-Ayn Tahirih's unveiling in a garden in
Badasht, systematically signaled as the first act of public unveiling in
Iranian history, and the psychoanalytic scene of fetishism. For the sake of clarity, let me reiterate the
scene of fetishism before making the historical connection.
Freud's fable describes the scene of fetishism in very specific
terms. It is set on the stage of maternal undressing where the boy
discovers the absence of the penis. Recognizing the threat of castration
(his own) in the form of the castrated mother, he creates a substitute. The terrifying sight of the castrated maternal
figure forces the child to disavow what he has seen by masking it. In the
act of disavowal, the boy transfers the importance of the penis onto
another object - the substitute object or fetish. This conflict between the "weight of the perception" and
the force of the "counter-wish" situates in the substitute-object the
former pleasure in the penis as well as the horror of castration.
Affective value is thus transferred onto the fetish. The mixture of horror and pleasure in the fetish renders it
therefore ambivalent. Produced on the basis of recognition and disavowal,
the object retains within itself, the affective pleasure of continued
belief (that the mother actually has one), the unshakable horror of recognition (that she doesn't) and the anxiety
of castration (that the father did it and may strike again!). The
ambivalent fetish object serves to maintain the child's sense of
wholeness. (Freud 154)
A glance at the various historical accounts of Qurrat al-Ayn'
Tahirih's unveiling present us with a similar dynamic of historiographic
recognition and disavowal. The historian Abbas Amanat's disparate
discussions of various historiographic and autobiographical sources betrays an uncanny ambivalence in the affirmation of
Qurrat al-Ayn Tahirih's unveiling, as if an 'act of nudity' is concomitant
with an absolute and unremitting disavowal. According to Amanat's
assertions, many sources claim that Qurrat al-Ayn Tahirih did indeed unveil in public. Most say, however, that
she only did so in the gathering of "believers" (i.e. other Babis). And
while most sources agree that she never unveiled publicly before the
Badasht Conference in 1848, others even doubt that she did so on that occasion. (Amanat, Resurrection 295-316). A
double disavowal takes place in the reconfiguration of these various
narratives, wherein firstly none but the 'believers' are incriminated by
this public violation and secondly, no one is whatsoever.
Historiography remains suspect and any search for the true
origins of these narratives is doomed to failure. This is perhaps why
Friedrich Nietzsche in his critical discussions of the historiographic
venture pointed out that 'a monkey stands at the entrance'. (Nietzsche 49) But in the wildly hallucinatory account of the "moonfaced" Qurrat al-Ayn in the work of the Qajar Court chronicler
Sipihr, known as 'The Tongue of the Kingdom', we can only imagine the
extent to which her acts entered into popular imagination as moments of primal fantasy. From this chronicler's
shamelessly sensual account of Qurrat al-Ayn, we can perhaps gather up the
traces of her gestures (whether rhetorical or physical) which activated
the processes of recognition and disavowal in the minds of those who believed her to be the reincarnation of
Fatimih, the Prophet's daughter-- "a representation which guaranteed her
sanctitude by lineage, marriage and motherly love." 10
Sipihr, the Qajar Court chronicler mustering the full force of
his sobriety, reports that Qurrat al-Ayn Tahirih not only believed in the
unveiling of women, but endorsed the marriage of one wife to nine
husbands. For her public addresses, he says:
"She would decorate her assembly room like a bridal chamber and her body like a
peacock of Paradise. Then she summoned the followers of the Bab and
appeared unveiled in front of them. First she ascended a throne and like
a pious preacher reminded them of Heaven and Hell and quoted amply from the Qur'an and
the Traditions. She would tell them: "Whoever touches me, the intensity
of Hell's fire would not affect him." The audience would then rise and
come to her throne and kiss those lips of hers which put to shame the ruby of Ramman, and rub their faces
against her breasts, which chagrined the pomegranates of the garden."
(Amanat, Resurrection 321)
The dynamics of pleasure, fear, recognition and disavowal in the
juxtaposition between this scene of fantasy, probably derived from the
renowned Conference at Badasht, and the scene of utter horror described in
the eyewitness records of that same Conference in Nabil's Narrative, (when at the sight of Qurrat al Ayn's
unveiling an Isfahani zealot is said to have cut his own throat in an act
of self- mutilation ) is an uncanny reactivation of the moment of
terrifying recognition and phantasmagoric substitution in the psychoanalytic scene of fetishism. 11
The conjunction between the historical moment and the psychoanalytic one,
however, gains more clarity as we go on to observe the ways in which the
precursors and the consequences of this event are constituted in a variety
of historiographic texts.
Most historical sources agree that the
Badasht Conference took place in 1848, the summer of one of the main Babi
uprisings in Iran. By 1852 it was clear that the Babi claim that a
communal effort towards the reform of the nation was no longer imminent, but rather long overdue became too much to take for the majority of
Iranians. A number of violent confrontations between the Babis, the
Shaykhis (a heterodoxy of Shi'ih Islam), and the orthodox Shi'ite Muslims
combined with scenes of stupefying and humiliating public torture reportedly drove many Babis to their wits end.
Qurrat al-'Ayn Tahirih's uncle, one of the leading Muslim scholars in
the town of Qazvin, is said to have been humiliated by the rumors of his
niece's immorality (her public unveiling among other things). (Amanat,
Resurrection 322) These accusations, thought to bring ill repute to his house, added to his pronounced hatred
for the Babis, thus aggravating the situation between the Babis and the
Shi'ite Muslims all the more. One morning, while praying at his mosque,
it is claimed that the well known religious leader was murdered by a Babi sympathizer. (ibid.) The most
notable Babis of Qazvin, all suspected accomplices, were rounded up,
charged with the murder of the Mulla Muhammad Taqi and dispensed with at
will. Typical of later anti-Babi killings, the Qazvin executions were carried out by a mob. Most sources claim
that they were incited by religious leaders who both promised rewards in
the hereafter and encouraged the tortures as gestures in active defense of
Shi'ih Islam. (Amanat Resurrection 324)
An undeniably potent space is set up in their religious
rhetoric that calls up a conjunction between, if not a complete
superimposition of, the scene of absolute terror and the fantastic space
of the hereafter. The fear of humiliation (castration, if you will) is virtually displaced in the activation of a scene of bliss
and pleasure -- the scene of paradise-- and transferred into the active
'body' of Shi'ih Islam. The site/sight of the mutilated Babi is disavowed
and simultaneously retained through the appropriation of this discursive and palimpsestic space by the
popular imaginary, permitting a fetishistic scene of phantasm as one
figured in the Court Chronicler's narrative.
After these horrifying
public executions, Qurrat al-'Ayn Tahirh, was also suspected of
co-conspiracy in her uncle's assassination and was put under house arrest
until after the suppression of the above mentioned uprisings. Various
recollections assert that she was then sent to Tehran where she was brought to the court of
Nasir al Din Shah. Upon inspecting her the Monarch reportedly exclaimed :
"I like her looks: leave her, and let her be." (Browne, Traveler's 313)
One can only wonder what the Shah saw and heard, for he is said to
have asked her for her hand should she stop expounding her beliefs. Her
reply was a somewhat poetic, but a nonetheless defiant "No!":
"Kingdom, wealth and power to thee
Beggary, exile and
loss for me
If the former be good, it's thine
If the latter is
hard, its mine.
(qtd. in Milani 88)
One will search in vain for a record of this transaction in the Court
Chronicler's recollections "whose ears," according to the orientalist E.
G. Browne, "must hear what is pleasant rather than true and whose actions
must be not only justified but extolled as models of wisdom and virtue." (Browne, Traveler's 187)
perhaps four years later, in August of 1852 according to most documents,
that a conspiracy was masterminded by a Babi, Shaykh Ali Mirza --also
known as Azim-- to murder the young dynast, Nasir al-Din Shah. The
monarch was only wounded, but this act set the scene for massive arrests and a general massacre of all
Babis. The 'Babi threat' reached its full force. "The Qajar officials,
alarmed by the potential threat of the 'nihilists' and 'anarchists'
devised 'Machiavellian means' for their extermination." (Browne, Traveler's 328) Convinced of the existence of
wide-spread disaffection towards his four-year reign, the Shah agreed to
instigate a widespread plan for the extermination of the Babis. Edward G.
Browne describes the plan in these
"It was suggested that if the responsibility for
the doom of the captives rested solely on the Shah, the Prime Minister, or
the ordinary administrators of the law, these would become thereafter
targets for the vengeance of the Babis. If, on
the other hand, a partition of the prisoners were made amongst the
different classes; if a representative body of each of these classes were
made responsible for the execution of one or more Babis; and if it were
further signified to the persons thus for
ced to act the part of executioners, that the Shah would be able to
estimate their loyalty to himself by the manner in which they disposed of
their victims, then all classes, being equally exposed to the retaliation
of the survivors, from whom they would
therefore be effectually and permanently alienated, while at the same time
the Shah himself would avoid incurring the odium of the massacre."
(Browne, Traveler's 328)
Many Babis were killed during this massacre including Qurrat
al-'Ayn Tahirih herself. But in the involvement of representatives of
every class in the massacre, the Shah managed to transfer his actual "fear
of castration" (decapitation, in another register) onto his subjects. Masked in a rhetoric of nihilism and anarchism,
this threat of ultimate mutilation was thus perpetuated by the agitation
of representatives of every class, throughout the body of the Persian
populace, allowing for numerous permutations.
The anecdotal examples (above) that enumerate the way in which
the term 'Babi' was used to connect various instances of innovation and
modernization in the modern period in Iran serve to remind us that the
stereotypical image does not merely refer
to the absent 'originary' act of sartorial innovation. Its point of
reference is not, to quote contemporary psychological discourse, "the
source memory". In its various permutations the image of 'the Babi'
carries within it traces of fear and anxiety, or the affects associated with 'the Babi threat'. I have argued that it
does so because of its entanglement in the dynamics of fetishism.
Freud remarks that the fetish object is instituted at the
moment of traumatic amnesia, the stopping of memory at the moment of
shock. (155) This shock, in historical terms, occurs at the moment when
memory stops in reaction to the threat of the subject's own endangerment (castration by the father). In terms of the
historical materials gathered here this endangerment is the threat of
decapitation transferred to the masses from the endangered body of the
king and the ulama and through the activation
of the subject's own threatened identity in such accusations as nihilism
and anarchism, both terms associated with the 'Babi threat'. 12 The subject in turn is encouraged to mutilate the Babis
on behalf of the king/ulama and is thereby given the promise of his or her own preservation in the rhetoric of an
Neurologists argue that three things can occur to memories at
moments of psychological stress, moments of fear, horror or endangerment.
1) The memory of the moment is repressed and lost. 2) It is repressed and
retrieved in parts. 3) It is recovered
with errors in the memory trace. Memories can also be implanted,
constructed on site or in retrospect (hence the recent debates in Western
popular culture around the False Memory Syndrome). From within the
dynamics of Freudian fetishism, I have argued
that at the sight/site of the mutilated body of a Babi, a memory in
miniature is created in defense against the claims of the external reality
( the threat of the father/king/mulla). This substitute memory/image
whether "implanted" or constructed is grasped by the subject as the relation that mutually defines the two spaces of
externality -the mutilated and the sovereign bodies. As a fetishized
image, it is used as a means to ensure the subject's continued wholeness.
This memory/image is reactivated at other times and places when
the threat of the subject's disintegration occurs: in the introduction of
foreign values and ideas, the threat of change and innovation, and in the
loss of a secure identity in the absence of religion's stabilizing reassurance. Thus the "novel" statements of
the unveiled princess Taj al- Saltaneh, as evidence of a scrambled body,
pose a threat to her immediate family and relatives. Their reaction is to
recall the fetishized image 'the Babi' and invoke "God's forgiveness" securing thereby the preservation and
wholeness of their own identity.
This memory/image of 'the Babi' is fetishized as "the relation"
that makes different spaces and times "interactively and precariously
define one another." (Mowitt 175) The bliss of paradise, the evil of
nihilism, and the parade of naturalism voluptuously erupt at the site/sight of the sybaritic carnival that is 'the Babi'.
This memory, therefore is not only an ambivalent and charged image, it is
also multiple and layered -- a palimpsest. Its various spaces cancel out
time and inform one another through their superimposition. Any act of innovation or foreignness, then,
instinctively recalls a history of unveiling, of perceived promiscuity, of
heresy and of mass slaughter in a massive abridgment. This history is
crystallized into a monadic image,
which in Walter Benjamin's words, "flashes up at an instant when it can
be recognized" in the guises of the foreign English gentleman's clothing
or in the general injunction to unveil. 13 Browne's
white suit retroactively defines the "originary" sartorial gesture by signaling the innovation as a change from
veil to white clothing while the fetishized notion of a heresy
simultaneously defines the very constitution of Browne's "foreign"
The recovered fetishized image, as an abridgment of history,
introduces a conjunction between two different spaces and times each
defining the other with uncanny reverberations. An instance such as this
is perhaps best summed up in Sadeq Hedayat's haunting mirroring "that Khomeini" the prototype of modern Shiih Islam and
Iranian politics, "was more than a little a Babi in his rhetoric and his
slogans."(Fischer Abedi 245)
* My thanks to Dr. William Garlington, Dr. Juan R.
Cole and Dr. John Mowitt for their valuable suggestions to the first draft
of this paper.
1 They were part of the heterodoxy
called the Shaykhi school in Iraq.
2 For a
detailed account of the life and writings of Bahá'u'lláh consult H.M.
Balyuzi, Bahá'u'lláh, The King of Glory. Oxford: George Ronald 1980.
3 Of course Akhundzadeh is not promoting the work
to save Islam from Babism, but to save the civil state from 'the Babi
threat'. He saw the Babis as just more Islam-type fanaticism.
4 Letter to Shaykh Muhsin Khan dated February 1879, quoted in
5 Chehabi remarks that despite the
efforts to elucidate the intentions of the policy, "traditional Iranians
saw it as an attempt to turn a virtue into a vice. "(219)
6 For a review of this position see Foucault's chapter
entitled "Panopticism" in Discipline and Punish and "The Confession of the
Flesh" in his Power/Knowledge.
7 The issue of
women's incapability to secure the identity of the Muslim community is
complicated and related to the early history of Islam and the context of
the events that led to the Muslim Prophet's decision to veil the female
members of his household. A thorough and engaging discussion of this can
be found in Fatima Mernissi's The Veil and the Male Elite.
8 For an excellent discussion of these issues consult Fatima
Mernissi's discussion of unveiling in Beyond the Veil, 85.
9 Farzaneh Milani discusses the perception of recent
unveilings by female poets in these terms. See Veils and Words, 7-9 >
10In Islamic history, Fatimih is known as the daughter
of the Prophet Muhammad, the wife of Ali and the mother of Imam Hasan and
11 For further reference see Amanat's
discussion of the Badasht conference in Resurrection and Renewal, 325-326
12 As Judith Butler points out in an extended
discussion of the historical relevance of the psychoanalytic fable of
fetishism in Bodies That Matter: "The failure to submit to castration
appears capable of producing only its opposite, the spectral figure of the
castrator Holophernes's head in hand." (102) For further elaboration on
the thematics of 'the threat', see her chapter "Phantasmatic
Identification and the Assumption of Sex"
further elaboration of history as image, refer to Walter Benjamin's
"Theses on the Philosophy of History" in Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt
New York: Schocken Books 1968
14 I put forward the
conjunction between the two moments in these particular terms, since no
other historical document categorically confirms the Haji Safar's
observation about the Babis' preference for white attire. One historical
recollection documented by E. G. Browne claims that one of the key
players of the movement always dressed himself in white, however.
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