Irrationalities in Islam and Media in Nineteenth-Century Iran: Faces of Modernity 9789400604438

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Transliteration table
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
CHAPTER 1 Resurrectional mediations: Shiʿa eschatology and photography
CHAPTER 2 Mourning mediations: taʿziye performances and military sonic techniques
CHAPTER 3 Therapeutic mediations: Shiʿa medical imagination and cholera
CHAPTER 4 Spiritual mediations: Shiʿa demonology and telegraphy
EPILOGUE The semiotics of Shiʿa absurdism
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Irrationalities in Islam and Media in 19th-Century Iran

IRANIAN STUDIES SERIES The Iranian Studies Series publishes high-quality scholarship on various aspects of Iranian civilisation, covering both contemporary and classical cultures of the Persian cultural area. The contemporary Persian-speaking area includes Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Central Asia, while classical societies using Persian as a literary and cultural language were located in Anatolia, Caucasus, Central Asia and the Indo-Pakistani subcontinent. The objective of the series is to foster studies of the literary, historical, religious and linguistic products in Iranian languages. In addition to research monographs and reference works, the series publishes English-Persian critical text-editions of important texts. The series intends to publish resources and original research and make them accessible to a wide audience.

Chief Editor A.A. Seyed-Gohrab (Utrecht University)

Advisory Board of ISS A. Adib-Moghaddam (SOAS) F. de Blois (University of London, SOAS) D.P. Brookshaw (Oxford University) J.T.P. de Bruijn (Leiden University) N. Chalisova (Russian State University of Moscow) D. Davis (Ohio State University) M.M. Khorrami (New York University) A.R. Korangy Isfahani (Societas Philologica Persica) J. Landau (Harvard University) F.D. Lewis (University of Chicago) L. Lewisohn (University of Exeter) B. Mahmoodi-Bakhtiari (University of Tehran) S. McGlinn (unaffiliated) Ch. Melville (University of Cambridge) F. Melville (University of Cambridge) D. Meneghini (University of Venice) N. Pourjavady (University of Tehran) Ch. van Ruymbeke (University of Cambridge) A. Sedighi (Portland State University) S. Sharma (Boston University) K. Talattof (University of Arizona) Z. Vesel (CNRS, Paris) M.J. Yahaghi (Ferdowsi University of Mashhad) R. Zipoli (University of Venice)

IRRATIONALITIES IN ISLAM AND MEDIA IN 19TH-CENTURY IRAN Faces of Modernity

Arash Ghajarjazi

Leiden University Press

Cover design: Andre Klijsen Cover illustration: Arash Ghajarjazi Lay-out: Crius Group Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher. Iranian Studies Series, volume 29 ISBN 978 90 8728 398 8 e-ISBN 978 94 0060 443 8 DOI 10.24415/9789087283988 NUR 717 © Arash Ghajarjazi / Leiden University Press, 2022 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the publisher and the author of the book.

To my bright half Nasim

Table of Contents

List of Maps, Tables and Illustrations

9

Transliteration table

11

Acknowledgements

13

Preface

15

Introduction A short overview of early reforms through the lens of Dār al-Fonun 

17 20

Print media

22

Photography

23

Military sounds

24

Telegraphy Absurd as the limit to mediation

25 26

Meaning, paradox, and the absurd in Islam: Pushing Shahab Ahmed to the limit Notes on methods Chapter 1. Resurrectional mediations: Shiʿa eschatology and photography Theolographic mediation in Resurrectional Photography  The hereafter and the embodiment of deeds  The mediated imagination of the hereafter

28 31 33 35 36 37

Photography at the limit: From mimesis to evidentiality

41

A world of meaning in the photographic image

47

Chapter 2. Mourning mediations: taʿziye performances and military sonic techniques  Military sounds 

49 52

Military sounds in Iran

54

Manuals of reform

58

8 table of contents

The cultural influence of the military

63

Taʿziye: A short history

65

Cueing and organising: taʿziye reconstructed 

67

Prologues 

68

Main acts

72

The affective mode of taʿziye Chapter 3. Therapeutic mediations: Shiʿa medical imagination and cholera

75 79

Cholera in context: Medical institutionalisation and aetiologies

82

The case of Cure of Cholera (ʿElāj al-Wabāʾ)

84

The taste and smell of cholera

86

Talismanic methods

89

Counter points: Modern prophylactic approaches to cholera The case of Tholozan The case of Schlimmer Chapter 4. Spiritual mediations: Shiʿa demonology and telegraphy Haptics of the jenn A brief history of haptics Narratives of haptic jenn in Majlesi and Fozuni Spirits after telegraphy In lieu of the telegraph: The universal fluid The séance with Amir Kabir and the issue of mediation Diminishing haptics in Iranian spiritism

97 97 100 103 106 107 108 113 116 119 122

Epilogue. The semiotics of Shiʿa absurdism 

125

Notes

129

Bibliography

153

Index 

173

List of Figures

1 Diagram showing the coating of the photographic plate support with liquid silver. The image is produced in the lithographed edition of Resurrectional Photography. 35 2 Painting of Manṣur Khān being photographed, by Mirzā Reḍā Tabrizi in 1854-5, copy preserved at the National Museum of Tbilisi. Image credits: Sussan Babaie.

42

3 A lithographed illustration in the book of religious poems Eftekhārnāme-ye Ḥeydari. 45 4 Left: Photograph by ʿAbd al-Qāsem Ebn-e Nuri taken of Ayatollah Muḥammad Fāḍel Sharbiāni (d. 1904), copy preserved at Gulestān Palace archive, no. unknown. Right: Taken by the same photographer of Sayyed Moḥammad Hoseyn Marʿashi Shahrestāni (d. 1897), copy preserved at Gulestān Palace archive, no. unknown. Image credits: Carmen Pérez Gonzàlez.

47

5 Frontispiece of the eighteenth-century British military manual The Military Guide for Young Officers, printed in 1779 showing the position of music bands in the centre of the square.

53

6 A hand-drawn image showing a group of music performers in Ā ʿ li Qāpu, Isfahan in 1887.

56

7 The frontispiece of the military manual Movement of the Regiments by the French instructor Bohler. The lithographed book, published in 1866, is held at the Iran National Library.

62

8 Praying diagram in Cure of Cholera known as “garden of names” (jannat al-asmāʾ) in the form of a circle with part of the Throne Verse (Āyat al-korsi, Qorʾān 2: 255) written in the middle.

81

9 A ciphered square with four divine attributes on the four corners from the lithographed medical manual Cure of Cholera published in 1853. 90 10 A humanoid diagram used to undo physical or psychological damage inflicted on a person.

94

11 A humanoid figure from a handwritten manuscript used to cure various diseases.

95

Transliteration table1

Consonants

‫آ‬ ‫ب‬ ‫پ‬ ‫ت‬ ‫ث‬ ‫ج‬ ‫چ‬ ‫ح‬ ‫خ‬ ‫د‬ ‫ذ‬ ‫ر‬ ‫ز‬ ‫ژ‬ ‫س‬ ‫ش‬ ‫ص‬

ā b p t th j ch ḥ kh d dh r z zh s sh ṣ

‫ض‬ ‫ط‬ ‫ظ‬ ‫ع‬ ‫غ‬ ‫ف‬ ‫ق‬ ‫ک‬ ‫گ‬ ‫ل‬ ‫م‬ ‫ن‬ ‫و‬ ‫ـة‬/‫ـه‬ ‫ه‬ ‫ی‬ ‫ء‬

ḍ

‫ـا‬ ‫ـیـ‬ ‫ـو‬

ā

ṭ ẓ ʿ gh f q k g l m n w2 e/a h y/i ʾ

Vowels a

ُ

o

ِ

َ

e

i u

Acknowledgements

I would not have been able to imagine writing this book without the irreplaceable mentorship of Prof. Christian Lange. I cannot thank him enough for his patience with my inexperience and for gracefully sharing with me his deep and extensive insight into the field. I would like to extend my gratitude to Prof. Asghar Seyed Gohrab for his kind and unwavering support, and Dr. Pooyan Tamimi Arab for always listening to my tribulations and keeping me inspired. I am also grateful to Prof. Sussan Babaie and Prof. Christoph Werner for their invaluable and generous feedback on this book.

Preface

Every Friday evening during the early 1990s, my father would take my brother and me for a short stroll in the city of Isfahan. I was no more than seven years old, and do not remember anything more than the grim and dimly lit street, the one we always unquestioningly accepted to walk down. Every Friday evening, same time, same path, and the same wall painting. This latter snapshot is the only specificity I vividly remember, nothing spectacular, not that chromatically complex, not many characters in the picture, not at all scenic. The background was a more or less consistent light blue. On top of that blue were three cropped portraits of the most important people of the country. These are the names I would call them by at the time: Khomeini, Khamenei, and Rafsanjani. The first one had a black turban and a white beard and was positioned on the top. The second one was on His right and positioned slightly lower, and the third was placed on the opposite side, His lower left. I knew one of the lower ones was the president, a vague and shallow concept for me to fully understand. The other was not so clear, but the top one was very definitely clear: He was God. Every time we walked by that wall, I would react to it in the same way. I would raise my arms high up, as if in praying, and say in a deranged but assured tone, “Oh my dear God!”. No more than a moment later, I would snap out of it, run around a little more, get my promised snack, head back home, dart towards my game console and play video games. Every weekend, the same loop, the same image, the same reaction. I recalled those Friday strolls and the blurry context behind them many times when I was working on this book, especially that absurdly idolatrous expression directed at a wall painting and uttered with conviction and sincerity. In light of this childhood memory, this book can be read as an effort to indirectly understand how that painting could provoke such a reaction and to understand the culture that fueled the logic behind that expression. On a different note, this book is a thoroughly revised version of my dissertation, which I completed during my work in the research group SENSIS: The Senses of Islam convened at Utrecht University by Prof. Christian Lange. I kept the materials but changed the conceptual framework and arguments to respond more intimately to my personal engagement with them.

Introduction

A little more than a month after Covid-19 was declared a pandemic, sometime in late April 2020, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in Iran claimed that its basiji scientists had invented an apparatus capable of detecting any person infected with the SARS-CoV-2 from a hundred-meter distance. Broadcast on state television, which started as per usual with the blessings on the Prophet Muḥammad, the device was showcased by Iranian top state officials. It looked like a medium-size saucepan equipped with an antenna of sorts. As they put it, this machine worked by emitting electromagnetic waves and was named Mostaʿān 110. The word mostaʿān means the one sought for help, which is used in the Qorʾān to refer to God. Also significant is that number 110 is the numerological equivalent of the abjad letters ʿ-l-y, the name of the first Shiʿa Imam, ʿAli Ebn-e Abi Ṭāleb (d. 661). Virology, electromagnetism, a Qorʾānic word and Shiʿa symbolism come together in perhaps one of the rare moments of Islamic science-fictional imagination. In the first decade of the twentieth century, an anecdote appeared in one of the first historical works in the Persian language, The History of Iranians’ Awakening (Tārikh-e Bidāri-ye Irāniyān), in which a homology with the IRGC’s broadcast of Mostaʿān 110 can be detected. The story is recounted by Nāẓem al-Eslām Kermāni (d. 1919) decades after the unsuccessful military reforms began in Iran sometime in the early nineteenth century. It is about a late mullah known as Āqā Sheykh ʿAli (d. 1900), who claimed to have been the inventor of a few “wondrous” technical objects. The story centres on how the mullah had given one of his inventions – a breech-loader firearm (tofang-e tah por) which would be loaded from the rear of the barrel – to the Qājār monarch, Nāṣer al-Din Shāh (r. 1848-1896) in person. When he gave the breech-loader to Nāṣer al-Din Shāh, the Shāh did not understand [what it was] at first. So, the late mullah himself took the gun, loaded the bullet, and fired. [Upon seeing this,] the Shāh went into raptures and said, “this man has gone beyond Ebn-e Sinā (Avicenna)”. Nāṣer al-Din Shāh took the firearm and sent it abroad. After a year, two firearms just like that one were brought back to Iran. The Shāh forwarded one to Āqā Sheykh ʿAli, which is now in the possession of his son. When he saw the firearm, he became

18 introduction

extremely dismayed and sobbingly proclaimed, “I wanted to serve Islam, but now it is evident that I gave the enemy a stick to beat us with”. Nāṣer al-Din Shāh realised that he did him wrong [in that he had not taken his invention seriously], hence tried to apologise.1

Kermāni does not mention how and in what exact terms the Persian Emperor apologised to the Mullah. Nonetheless, as unimaginable as such an apology might have been, it assuaged the mullah’s bitter feelings such that he jubilantly announced, “now, I want to invent a clockwork carriage that can move one farsang (six kilometres), after which it stops for a few minutes, then its doors open to four directions firing several cannonballs to each direction, then its doors shut, and it returns to its original location”.2 However, the mullah would make this object only if the Shāh agrees to wage war against at least one enemy state and take back some of the lost territories. The Shāh refuses to submit and disappoints him once again. The mullah retreats in a village and occupies himself with farming. During this time he allegedly invents a few other devices: a compass that pointed to the north, could also point to the qeble and show the time, and “had many other features”; an alarm clock that could also catch thieves; a versatile bed that could be used as a personal carriage, a chest, and a food container at the same time; and finally, a thermodynamic piping system that would “transfer the water in Tehran to the mountain top of Tawchāl, make it into ice, and deliver it back to the city”.3 Kermāni provides no evidence to corroborate this anecdote, yet he presents it as true as the rest of the historical narratives in his book. It might have been partly fabricated, although the events and characters surrounding it were real. The authenticity of this anecdote is, to say the least, not clear. One may think that it was perhaps a regretful imaginary portrayal by Kermāni himself of a highly literate Muslim whose genius inventions were unfairly neglected by the Shāh. Another may surmise that it was a pompous story told orally by the mullah himself or his pupils, and perhaps later exaggerated by Kermāni. Could it be possible that someone made this up to promote the role of Islamic scholars (ʿolamā) in technological reforms in Iran? Or perhaps it was meant as a satire of the Shāh’s irresponsible handling of a genius Muslim scholar whose intellect surpassed that of Ebn-e Sinā (d. 1037), or even more generally, a satire of the technological backwardness in Iran. All these hypotheses aside, I cannot help but notice a homology between the state-backed broadcast of Mostaʿān 110 and the story of this Muslim inventor. I use the word homology with an etymological sensitivity. I do not see a resemblance nor any essential uniformity between them. There are very different personas behaving in very different ways and in significantly different contexts. However, there is one logic repeating in both, hence a homology. Surely, the images of Islam

introduction 19

that these irrationalities conjure up differ. One is a highly politicised abuse of Shiʿa Islam in the context of the twenty-first-century Islamic Republic, whereas the other is a clerical fantasy in the context of nineteenth-century modernity. Nonetheless, something works homologously in both despite the contextual differences between them. There is a logic that repeats and resonates in both cases, which sublimates non-existent objects into tokens of Muslim power and control. This book feels an urgency to mark and engage with this recurrent irrational logic. How can this absurdist logic be explained? How can it be historicised without losing sight of the differences between the Islams of different times and places, and without reducing it to an essentialisation of Islam? This book dissects, interrogates, and reconceptualises the absurd in nineteenth-century Iranian Shiʿa culture.4 In so doing, it practises a philosophical experiment in history, rather than a history proper. It is philosophical to the extent that it “creates concepts”,5 insofar as a past cultural landscape is approached through first a conceptual and only then a contextual lens. This concept-oriented study seeks to open a perspective on the intersections between Iranian Shiʿa thought and praxis, on one hand, and nineteenth-century technologies on the other. The book argues that the absurd should be considered a principal mode of cultural production at this intersection.6 Absurd signs point to no existing object. They are signifiers without referents. They are, to borrow from Claude Lévi Strauss, “floating signifiers” that do not refer to a real thing in the world, yet they circulate between people effectuating sense in their collective imagination.7 They are most likely false, yet they have a power over people. No semiological analysis can sufficiently explain this power of the absurd. Not only syntax and semantics but also pragmatics would be inadequate. Even discursive analysis would not do justice to their complexity. This is because they disrupt the flow of signification and sever the connection between the signifier and the signified while holding on to the signifier. They lack a real physical and/or abstract referent – a condition more aptly captured in one possible equivalent of the word absurd in Persian, puch which literally means hollow and empty. To draw from Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of sense, which I will elaborate later below, these hollow signifiers should not be confused with meaninglessness and nonsense. Rather, absurd signs make sense beyond and irrespective of signification, “they are of extra being … unable to be realised in a state of affairs”, that is, unable to stand for an external referent.8 I take Kermāni’s story and its contemporary resonance in the context of the Covid pandemic as inspiration for this book to further think about absurdism in the Muslim Iranian approach to modern sciences. I anchor my inquiries and investigation to the invocation of a few non-existent objects described in the reforming nineteenth century in Iran. My focus lies on the past, the early period of reforms

20 introduction

between 1850 and 1910, though I do comment on the present time in occasional footnotes. These are the cases: 1. A lithographed technical manual titled Resurrectional Photography (Ketāb-e ʿAksiye-ye Ḥashriye), which in non-metaphoric terms equates Divine Creation with the technical act of photography. I discuss this impossible Divine Device in the first chapter. 2. A manuscript describing the death of the third Shiʿa Imām Ḥoseyn Ebn-e ʿAli (d. 680) in Karbala, in which the author claims that the historical day of ʿĀshurā lasted for seventy-two hours. I begin the second chapter by referencing this impossible day. 3. A medical treatise titled The Cure of Cholera (ʿElāj al-Wabāʾ), which represents a talismanic diagram that allegedly cures cholera. I elaborate on the working of this non-existent object in the third chapter. 4. An oneiromantic story by one of the nineteenth-century ministers of science in Iran, which conjoins telegraphy and Islam. I begin the fourth chapter with how this story makes sense of the then-new media by resorting to Islamic occultism. I show how each of these non-existent objects/absurd signs are represented meaningfully in their respective historical context. In these cases, I think about the selected absurd objects in relation to the issue of mediation and mediated processes of meaning-making – whether they take place in a narrative, a theory, or an image. An extensive theoretical exposition on how I use the term mediation will be given below. The question is, how are these objects meaningfully mediated? What intellectual genealogies can be traced in their formation? What do they do for the ones who think of them? Pursuing these inquiries, I closely analyse these objects through the lens of the absurd and mediation, then move away from them and toward the historical contexts in which they occurred, and hence write a philosophical history of how nineteenth-century Iranian Muslims appropriated the new sciences.

A short overview of early reforms through the lens of Dār al-Fonun The nineteenth century was a time when the literate Muslim communities in Iran confronted the new sciences (ʿolum-e jadid) in a relatively short time and experienced those sciences as outlandishly empowering. They associated them

introduction 21

with the increasing strength of European states and thus sought to adapt them for their own use. In so doing, this society, at least its growing literate communities, appropriated and assimilated the oddities of telegraphy, photography, new medico-pharmacological methods, and new military techniques. In effect, they gave shape to a different technical domain. This changing technical domain came to be known as reforms, also termed tanẓimāt resonating with the cotemporaneous Ottoman efforts to modernise their state.9 This reforming domain particularly gained more momentum with the foundation of the first polytechnic institution of higher learning, the Dār al-Fonun (The Abode of Techniques), in 1851. Patronised by Nāṣer al-Din Shāh, the institute promoted a newly emerging technical sphere by offering diverse science-based courses, such as clinical anatomy, chemistry, physics as well as fine arts. Each of the absurd cases studied in this book associates directly or indirectly with this institute. Even in Kermāni’s account about Āqā Sheykh ʿAli, this educational centre figures: the mullah asks the Shāh to pay him so that he can “establish a school such that in each chamber of that school one technical science (ʿelm-e ṣanʿati) would be taught” so that techniques (al-ṣanāyeʿ) would become scientific like Islam.10 It is not clear if this request was made before or after the establishment of Dār al-Fonun. This modern college was the most concrete moment in the struggles carried out by many intellectuals, politicians, entrepreneurs, and military officers to reform. Resonating with the parallel reform projects in the neighbouring and rival Ottoman Empire, military improvement was at the top of the institute’s agenda.11 However, the military reforms proved to be largely unsuccessful. The army acquired a new skin for the same internal organisation.12 In a sense, the story of Āqā Sheykh ʿAli can also be read as a response to this failure. Recounted by Kermāni decades after the establishment of the Dār al-Fonun, the mullah’s unacknowledged invention of the breech-loader firearm may be seen as a remorseful concern with the Persian army’s abject condition. Ineffective as those military reforms might have seemed, the Dār al-Fonun served nonetheless as a pretext for broader changes. If it did not improve the army as intended, it surely set the scene for developments in other fields: in medicine, chemistry, metallurgy, and communication, to name a few. Enough has been said about this institute in the historical scholarship, and I do not wish to reproduce yet another history of it. What I want is to look at this institute as a conduit for different forms of media that were for the first time infra-structurally installed and theorised within the physical location of this college. I propose that four forms of media, namely, print, photography, telegraphy, and military sounds were key in the formation of the modern techniques in Iran. Within the confines of the polytechnics, each of these media fed into the functioning of and developments in different courses in their own specific way. Printing media provided the instructional books for the students. Telegraphy necessitated

22 introduction

the teaching of electrical engineering. Photography required the introduction of chemistry and mineralogy, and military sounds were used as concrete and effective tools for disciplining and training the new army. It was thanks to this technical locus that the infrastructural developments of these media and their associated intellectual discourses converged. From this standpoint, I approach these media as proactive context-making assemblages, rather than products of already existing external contexts, be them political, economic, religious and whatnot. Below I outline a brief sketch of each of these media and point to their significance in reforming the technical domain in Iran. Print media The medium of print was the ground zero for the reforms that were initiated in and through the Dār al-Fonun. As Maryam Ekhtiar writes in her extensive study of the institute, the establishment of the State Printing Press (Dār al-ṭebāʿa-ye dawlati) very close to the school in Tehran in 1854, “was of key importance in promoting the gradual development of an intellectual class acquainted with ideas associated with the” new sciences.13 Although not the first and only one in Iran, this printing house provided the means to publish and make accessible the course books written and/ or translated by the European staff at the school.14 It was also used regularly for the printing of the most important newspaper of the time in Iran, Vaqāyeʿ Newspaper (Ruznāma-ye Vaqāyeʿ-e Ettefāqiye), henceforth Vaqāyeʿ, and later used to publish instructional manuals of photography, telegraphy, physics, books of anatomy, and European history and fiction, and can therefore be seen as a precursor to the emergence and developments of other media.15 This medium was especially important in the early years of teaching medical sciences. In these early years, the language barrier between the European instructors and the Iranian students was a serious problem. Students knew very little French and German, which were the main languages of instruction. The teachers in turn knew next to nothing of Persian and Arabic. The course books were therefore the main form of mediation between them. They were translated by a few Iranians, who knew enough German or French, from the instructors’ own books or from their lectures.16 More significant was the anatomical diagrams in these course books. It must be understood that the Persian language at the time was very new to the complex scientific terminologies developed over centuries in European languages. This meant that the early medical course books were not adequate for conveying modern medical knowledge to students.17 They were not particularly comprehensible to them, and therefore anatomical diagrams had to fill this gap. As Ekhtiar observes, Jacob Polak, the first and most important physician and medical trainer in the Dār al-Fonun, “within six months was able to give an intelligible lecture with

introduction 23

the help of his fingers, signs and diagrams”.18 It can therefore be said that medical knowledge, and in extrapolation, knowledge in other fields was mediated through the teaching course books, and relied on the visual diagrammatic aspects as much as, and perhaps even more than, language. Printed diagrams appeared in almost all the other course books as well. In military sciences, regimental movements, battle formations, and artillery logistics were depicted diagrammatically in the very first military instructional manuals printed in the State Printing Press. 19 Similarly, course books on geography contained maps of countries and places that most Iranians did not know existed. In books of physics, themes of statics, hydraulics, refraction, magnetism, and thermodynamics were explained using diagrams. Electric circuitries necessary for the installation of telegraphy were depicted in course books on electricity, and the list goes on. Curiously, the story of Āqā Sheykh ʿAli was in a way connected to this printing infrastructure at the Dār al-Fonun. Next to his alleged inventions, we read in Kermāni’s account that he was also involved in the writing of perhaps the first book of modern Islamic law in Iran, known as The Nāṣerian Law (Qānūn-e Nāṣeri). The making of this book was ordered by Nāṣer al-Din Shāh to his then foreign minister, Mirzā Saʿid Khān Anṣāri (d. 1884) sometime in the early 1860s, or the late 1850s. This book of the law was meant to promote Shariʿa as the basis for the reformed modern state. According to Kermāni, several ʿolamā collaborated in writing this book, among them the only one who is named is Āqā Sheykh ʿAli.20 In this way, the mullah inventor was not represented as modern only in a technological sense, but also in a legal and judicial sense. Moreover, he was not the only clerical figure associated with print media. Around the same period, major works of Shiʿa scholarship appeared in Iran’s printing landscape, some of which in many ways responded or reacted to the knowledge propagated through the course books printed at the Dār al-Fonun.21 Photography Perhaps no other media became nearly as popular as photography in Iran. This popularity would have been unimaginable were it not for the Dār al-Fonun. Although the very first experience with photography in Iran dated a decade before the idea of the Dār al-Fonun took shape, it was only through the Dār al-Fonun that it became ubiquitous enough to be considered a significant factor in shaping the new media culture in Iran. The path toward this ubiquity began as early as the 1840s. Only five years after the invention of the daguerreotype in 1842 in France, this first prototype of the photographic camera was brought to Iran by a Russian diplomat and produced quite a few plates.22 Jules Richard, who was later appointed as the French instructor at the polytechnic, used the device in 1844 to photograph

24 introduction

Muḥammad Shāh and his son Nāṣer al-Din Shāh. When the college was built, other teachers began to experiment with newer photographic techniques.23 As one of the most influential prime ministers of Nāṣer al-Din Shāh, Eʿtemād al-Salṭane, reported in his journal Mirrors of Countries (Merʾāt al-Boldān-e Nāṣeri), the Austrian instructor August Krziz and the Italian Domenico Focchetti were among those who produced a number of images on paper and silver plate between 1851 and 1856.24 Luigi Pesce was later commissioned to produce the first photograph of Persepolis in 1857.25 These early practices raised the interest and curiosity of the public, the rising middle class, the state officials and the monarch himself. As a result, photography courses were appended to the curriculum and were taught regularly under the chemistry programme.26 In 1858, a team of students from the polytechnic was sent to study photography in France under the supervision of the French photographer Francis Carlihan and was subsequently invited to Iran. There the team was recruited to teach photography at the school.27 Upon their return to Iran, these photographers further popularised the craft and contributed to its institutionalisation at the Dār al-Fonun. Among these students, Āqā Reḍā ʿAkkāsbāshi along with his master Carlihan were ordered to teach photography to Nāṣer al-Din Shāh, who became one of the most ardent photographers of his time.28 Other students became professional photographers, and some were recruited by the polytechnic to teach photography. Steadily, pamphlets and manuals of photography were written, translated, and lithographed in great numbers while amateur photographers and off-campus public photographic studios began to flourish in the large cities by 1870. In the first chapter, I discuss in more detail how the introduction of this medium was perceived and experienced through examining one absurd case, namely, a technical and theological manual of photography written in the second half of the nineteenth century. Military sounds The courtyard of the Dār al-Fonun was a noisy environment. At noon, the sound of the call to prayer (adhān) echoed in between the chambers, and early in the morning the students were vocally ordered to place themselves in the classrooms. Especially important was the introduction of military sounds and music in the 1860s, which added a new sonic layer to the soundscape of the school, and later to the whole urban landscape in Tehran. This is the time when after a few years of preliminary training in military musical performance, the Frenchman Alfred Lemaire (d. 1907) was recruited and introduced the first course on, and later the first department of, music in the school.29 From this time onwards, the courtyard of the school became a new sound space, where the Shāh would be regularly greeted with a Western style musical band. The courtyard also hosted several concerts

introduction 25

for the public.30 As I will examine in detail in chapter two, the sound techniques that gradually found their way into the city – which were also theorised in the printed course books and military manuals – had a very palpable effect on Iranian performance culture, especially on taʿziye. Telegraphy Parallel to these developments in medicine and chemistry, programmes in physics and engineering were preparing the campus scene for the introduction of yet another medium, telegraphy. Having been informed of this invention in the Western world, Nāṣer al-Din Shāh ordered his minister to purchase and install this “strange invention” in the capital. We read in one Vaqāyeʿ issue on 18 March 1858 that in view of the fact that obtaining of and inquiry about this strange invention cannot be carried out for the mere purpose of listening without inspection and observation, as per the reverenced command of his majesty, may his reign last long, it was arranged that under the supervision of the prince ʿAli Qoli Mirzā Iʿtiḍad al-Salṭana and the reverend monsieur Krziz, the cavalry instructor, the necessary equipment for this affair be procured.31

The same newspaper article continues that the very first telegraphic wire was installed between two rooms in the school to test the equipment, and when all seemed to be in good order, the Shāh ordered a line to be installed between his palace and the school. The first official telegraph line was therefore installed in 1858 with the help of August Krziz between one of the rooms in the college and the Golestān Palace, and another one between the Golestān Palace and Lālezār Palace.32 The very first message communicated via this line reads “mennat khodāy rā ʿazza wa-jalla ke ṭāʿatash mawjeb-e qorbat ast o be-shokr andarash mazid-e neʿmat”, which can be roughly translated as “praise to the almighty God. Worshipping Him brings us closer to His realm and being grateful to Him brings prosperity and wealth”.33 This sentence is taken from one of the most influential works in Persian prose by the poet and prose writer Abu Muḥammad Moṣleḥ al-Din Ebn ʿAbdollāh Shirāzi (d. 1292), better known as Saʿdi. It is telling how this message is technically addressed to the Shāh, while its content is addressed to God. It is also interesting to compare this with the very first telegraphic message ever sent by Samual F. B. Morse in the United States, which is taken from the Bible and reads “What hath God Wrought?”.34 Although the courtly fascination with telegraphy proved instrumental in bringing telegraphy to Iran, the proliferation of its technologies around the country was mainly due to the interest of the British colonial power, which needed efficient communication between Europe and India. To this end, towards the close of the

26 introduction

century telegraphy had radically changed the ways the government managed its affairs across the country and plugged into the global scene. Furthermore, the religious scholars and the leading ʿolamā, though at first suspicious of this “satanic wire”,35 made telegraphy an integral part of their political activism and socioreligious power amidst the anti-state and anti-colonial tobacco movement towards the end of the century and later during the early twentieth century when the constitutional revolution was gaining momentum. In the fourth chapter, I will elaborate further on the ways in which this medium was appropriated in the Shiʿa Islamic milieu.

Absurd as the limit to mediation I use the concept of media in a broad and fundamental sense. In the words of one of the most articulate media historians of our time, John Durham Peters, media “are vessels and environments, containers of possibility that anchor our existence and make what we are doing possible”.36 They are an “ensemble of natural elements and human craft”,37 “infrastructures of being, the habitats and materials through which we act and are”.38 From this philosophical perspective, media are not merely carriers of meaning but rather, to echo the familiar aphorism by the Canadian media theorist Marshal McLuhan, media are constitutive of the meanings they seem to be carrying.39 As “vessels and environments” made up of both “natural elements and human craft”, to further borrow from Durham Peters, media are the “infrastructures” for all kinds of signs to create meaning.40 In a sense, their material logics are as important for, and as consequential to, meaning-making. From this viewpoint, I further understand mediation as the process by which media create and transmit meaning. Also important to note is that although the concept of media points to this foundational infrastructural aspect of representation and communication, it should not be conceived of as too general a notion. This view would lead to inflating the concept so much so that it extends to everything material and corporeal. Such is the extent Durham, for instance, explores in his recent works. However, my take is that despite this apparent generality in the concept of the medium, it can be used as an analytic lens to capture very particular processes, which we would be unable to see without. This lens allows us to examine and understand the process of mediation by including, at the same time, both the semiotic and material aspects of meaning-making. Media enables us to speak of the signifying interplay between different signs and the infrastructural logics that make that interplay possible: the logic of signs and of materiality. This is the notion I subscribe to and will rigorously pursue in the chapters of this book.

introduction 27

To position this book in a wider academic discourse, I should duly note that this theoretical insight has been adapted widely in religious studies over the past few decades. The field has opened productive conceptual possibilities whereby scholars across different fields in the humanities, from anthropologists to art historians, can think about religious phenomena, materiality, and mediation together. The main impetus in this field comes from the idea that religion should be understood as media.41 As the leading scholars in this field such as Hent De Vries, Jeremy Stolow, Birgit Meyer and Brian Larkin have proposed, religion and media should be understood as cultural phenomena that are inextricably interconnected and have evolved together. Communication and representational media have always been part of religious experience, and religions necessarily include and pragmatically rely on techniques and logics of mediation. 42 For a religion to be actualised and historically realised, it is not enough to have an inventory of axioms, rules, and doctrines. As Meyer argues, the primary function of a religion is to create “sensational forms”, which, depending on the specificities of the adapted medium(s), make the ideational repertoires of that religion materially meaningful. These technically grounded sensational forms are not primarily representational, but rather material, in that they contain and operationalise not only signs of different kinds, but also material and corporeal contents. It is ultimately this material aspect of media that makes the existence of a religion possible.43 That media are “intrinsic to religion”, as Meyer has it,44 or even necessary for religion to exist, as Stolow argues, implies that any analytic approach to religious axioms, ideas and narratives should also take into account the techno-material logic of mediation. As another conceptual note, I should mention that my understanding of the notion of the absurd is informed by Deleuze’s philosophy, especially his Logic of Sense.45 In line with his thought, I distinguish between absurd and nonsense. With Deleuze, there is a clear distinction between “signification” and “sense”, both of which are often rendered in English as meaning. The difference is exactly what we need in order to talk about the meaningfulness of the absurd: the propositions which designate contradictory objects themselves have a sense. Their denotation, however, cannot at all be fulfilled; nor do they have a signification … that is, they are absurd. Nevertheless, they have a sense, and the two notions of absurdity and nonsense must not be confused.46

Elsewhere, he states that “the logical value of signification … is no longer the truth … but rather the condition of truth, the aggregate of conditions under which the proposition would be true” (emphasis by Deleuze).47 The use of “the condition of truth”, enables Deleuze to sidestep the dichotomy of truth-falsehood in regard

28 introduction

to the absurd and account for its meaningfulness: Truth becomes a correlate of signification but remains external, even redundant to, sense. It is with this philosophy that Shiʿa absurdism may be better understood. In this view, non-existent objects, such as the foregoing absurd inventions, are meaningful – they belong to the logic of sense – although they fail to denote a referent truthfully – they have no signification. They make sense although they cannot be said to be true, whether theologically or technologically. In this book, I follow Deleuze’s distinction between sense and signification. Thus, the term meaning should always be read as the equivalent to both sense and signification. In case it is used to qualify an absurd instance, it would then be without signification. Having this distinction in mind, it can be said that as non-signifying signs, absurd objects are a limit to mediation.48 A sign is said to be absurd when mediation aims for a referent but fails to arrive at it. With an absurd sign, signification is never reached, the target is never hit; or to allude to Samuel Beckett’s theatre of the absurd, Godot never arrives. However, this failure does not dismantle the sign system that embeds that absurd instance but rather pushes that system to its limit. The system continues to function and live on, though on a limit-point where signification is suspended while meaning is maintained. This co-existence of non-referentiality and meaningfulness is precisely what constitutes the absurdism that I would like to address in this book. This absurdism has to do with the fact that notwithstanding the failure to signify in the absurd mode, mediation still produces meaning, sustains the sign system, and because it does, it can incite emotions, or mobilise the mass public to participate in collective actions.

Meaning, paradox, and the absurd in Islam: Pushing Shahab Ahmed to the limit In his widely appreciated book, What Is Islam?, Shahab Ahmed proffers a complex thesis on how to understand Islam without losing or reducing the contradictions and paradoxes expressed in the “Bangal-to-Balkan complex”. Ahmed feels an urgency and necessity to explain why and how Islam can accommodate actions and expressions that are contradictory, and sometimes even heretical from the orthodox standpoint – drinking wine being the most recurring example. A condensed version of this thesis reads, “something is Islamic to the extent that it is made meaningful in terms of hermeneutical engagement with Revelation to Muḥammad as one or more of Pre-Text, Text, and Con-Text”.49 Ahmed understands the three terms of Pre-Text, Text, and Con-Text as “different spatial dimensions” of the Revelation to Muḥammad. The reason why he develops these concepts is to make sure that understanding Islam together with its “internal contradictions” is not restricted to

introduction 29

the scriptural sources such as the Qorʾān, and includes experiences, or actions, as well as “different epistemologies”.50 Besides these important concepts, which I do not wish to unpack here, the terms “meaning” and “truth” are also important to Ahmed’s thesis. Accordingly, meaning is ultimately “a truth which is of consequence to and for the subject engaging (in) it”.51 From this point of view, meaning for Ahmed does not only rely on semiology. It is not enough for a sign to be syntactically, semantically and/or pragmatically meaningful; it should also do something to the subject for whom it is meaningful, or as he puts it, “consequential”. I fully subscribe to this understanding, especially given that Ahmed is also sensitive to issues of mediation, that is, to how meaning is made as well as to the “infrastructure” of meaning-making processes.52 However, I find his insistence on the concept of truth restrictive in dealing with the complexities of and in Islam. I agree with Ahmed that meaning is consequential for the subject but disagree that it is only truth that can have consequences for the subject and that it is only truth that should be included in understanding Islam and Islamic. In Ahmed’s Islamic universe, every subject, even every object, is seeking truth, which would become meaningful if it has subjective consequences.53 In Ahmed’s world, Muslims are “cognisant” of truth, always inclined towards it, whether “exploratively” or “prescriptively” engaged in ”the Pre-Text, Text, or Con-Text of Revelation”.54 If madly in love, as in the case of Majnun and the path of love (madhhab-e ʿeshq), that madness too gravitates towards truth.55 Even paradoxes are “truth-telling”.56 I would particularly like to focus on Ahmed’s invocation of the concept of paradox as it relates more closely to the theme of this book. The following is a necessary digression as I foreground precisely what my philosophical history does by drawing attention to an error in Ahmed’s reasoning. He draws from the American logician Willard Van Orman Quine (d. 2000) to support his claim that Islamic contradictions and paradoxes are “arguments for truth”.57 He takes up Quine’s understanding of paradoxical absurdity and traces them in a few examples. A verse from a work by a Javanese author, The Gift Addressed to The Spirit of The Prophet is one case in point. I reproduce Ahmed’s quote to show an interesting conceptual problem with his (mis)understanding of Quine’s paradox. The verse he quotes is as follows: When there is manifest in you the Being of God then you must understand you are not God but are not other than [He] – this is difficult to accept.58

30 introduction

Borrowing from Quine, Ahmed claims that such paradoxical locutions are “veridical paradoxes”. He quotes Quine’s definition of this kind of paradox, which reads, “a paradox is just any conclusion that at first sounds absurd but that has an argument to sustain it”.59 Let me formulate the above verse in formal logic to unpack how Ahmed misses something very important in Quine’s theory of paradoxes: if there is a y (God) in x (you), then x is neither y nor other than y. Misappropriating Quine, Ahmed considers this paradoxical poetic articulation a “veridical paradox”, that is, a “truth-telling device”: it expresses a meaningful, or a consequential truth, “in terms of paradox”.60 According to Ahmed’s view, the paradox remains so without being resolved into truth or falsehood. Rather, a truth inherent in the “Pre-Text, Text and Con-Text of Revelation”, makes the paradoxical locution truthful on a meta-level. But according to Quine’s definition, if these couplets are taken as a veridical paradox, the actual truth they are proving is that there is no y in x, that is, there is no God in you.61 Read as a logical argument, the poem above is a form of reductio ad absurdum, meaning that since the conclusion is untenable, it follows that the assumption must have been false.62 In other words, since the conclusion that x is neither y nor other than y is unsound, it follows that the assumption that there is a y in x was false to begin with, ergo there is not “manifest in you the being of God”. Quine would say that this poem-argument shows that the assumption must be false. This is the truth it proves and hence resolves the initial absurdity/ contradiction. This truth does not sustain the contradiction in the paradox, as Ahmed would like to think, but it eradicates it. The same problem is applicable to Ahmed’s personal anecdote about a Muslim’s paradoxical opinion on Ebn-e ʿArabi.63 By misappropriating the notion of veridical paradox, Ahmed explains Muslims’ truth-centric compulsion to accommodate paradox and contradiction meaningfully. Ahmed misunderstands Quine. But there is still another problem with his misunderstanding. The question we can and should ask Ahmed is what if falsehood, and not just truth, can also have consequences? What if the false can also be meaningful? This brings us back to the case of the absurd. Ahmed’s truth-centred understanding of meaning falls short of the complexity of meaning-making in Islamic traditions. I have shown how his borrowing from Quine is problematic. Next to and in relation to this objection, it should also be said that paradoxes are only one possible locution of an absurd sign – Ahmed’s verse from the anonymous Javanese author is an example. But there are absurdities that are not necessarily paradoxical, which Ahmed strategically avoids in his book. The non-existent objects in Mostaʿān 110 and Āqā Sheykh ʿAli’s inventions fit into this category. The kind of absurdism that these non-existent objects give expression to does not constitute a paradox, whether “veridical”, “falsidical”, or “antinomial” in Quine’s theory.64 Nonetheless, as I have sketchily shown earlier and will show in more detail in the chapters to come, such absurd signs recur homologously in

introduction 31

various Islamic traditions. These objects do not contradict any physical law, nor do they oppose any Islamic theological ideas. They are in fact very much in line with laws of physics and thermodynamics and pose no logical threat to notions such as God’s oneness (tawḥid), the Resurrection (maʿād) and Prophecy (nobowwa). They are, however, absurd in a different sense, for which we need different philosophers, not Quine. These non-existent inventions are absurd insofar as they make sense despite their incapacity to meaningfully signify an existent referent. This is the notion of the absurd according to Deleuze, and also powerfully captured in the performance tradition that came to be known as the theatre of the absurd as I hinted earlier.65 Without getting into too many details on this, for the purpose of my theoretical positioning it is enough to say summarily that with Quine, paradoxes are resolved by means of logical methods that retain the concept of truth at the expense of meaningfulness. Whereas with Deleuze, the relation between truth and meaning is turned on its head: the concept of truth is abandoned while meaningfulness is retained.66

Notes on methods On a methodological note, I should indicate that the way I choose, approach, and analyse my objects takes certain elements from both (art) historical methods and cultural analysis. The historiographical aspect of my methods can be seen in the creation and elaboration of the contexts. These contexts are developed according to the necessity of each chapter. In the first chapter, for instance, the contextualisation is informed by art history, in which I map out a historical backdrop where the photographic image was perceived and understood. In the third chapter, I contextualise medical knowledge and therefore come close to medical history. In the fourth chapter, as another example, the context becomes an aspect of Islamic demonology, which then necessitates me to speak more closely with historians of Islam. On the other hand, the cultural analytic side can be seen, above all, in my emphasis on concepts. The way I analyse each individual object, the way I make connections between different historical elements, and ultimately the new objects that result from these approaches are embedded in concepts that I have developed during my research. In this sense, my study is a philosophical concept-oriented experiment between a few disciplines in the humanities. The concepts that I develop, moreover, are not ready-made ahistorical and universal terms taken directly from the materials I read. They are rather the result of thinking critically and analysing them in their relevant contexts. In this sense, they are concepts that

32 introduction

I derive and develop in working with my sources rather than terms that those sources might explicitly mention. Each chapter of this book frames the historical period from the point of view of one technical domain. Each of these domains becomes a locus where a discourse on a certain media logic and a religious issue intersects. In each chapter, I start with an object that most concretely and concisely reflects the complications between that technical domain and Shiʿa thought/praxis. Starting from this central object, I then proceed to examine other similar objects and the context in which they were formed. This kind of thinking and writing can be found abundantly in the field of cultural analysis, particularly the concept-oriented tradition that Mieke Bal has promoted in her work.67 More sensitive to historical issues and methods, Michael Pickering has been most productive in stretching the methodological frameworks in cultural studies to history.68 Even the works of many historians come very close to this academic tradition, though not explicitly promoted as cultural analysis. Among them, for instance, Fahmy’s study of anatomy in nineteenth-century Egypt can be mentioned, in which the concept of the body becomes the focal point of his historical study.69 Jeremy Stolow and Brian Larkin’s works are also great examples of concept-oriented methods in the study of religions. Christian Lange and Simon O’Meara are other accomplished scholars in Islamic studies, whose works show both conceptual and contextual sensibilities. With Lange, the contexts are given more attention, while with O’Meara, it is the conceptual aspects that receive more attention.70 To recollect, considering the above methodological positioning, this book should be labelled a work of interdisciplinary scholarship, in the sense that in conversation with different fields of knowledge, it ultimately eludes them but stands, though at times precariously, between them. In the following pages, I work with historians of Islam and Iran, but then produce a knowledge that eludes history. I interrogate Islamic jurisprudential texts but ultimately evade theology. I analyse artefacts, poems, and narratives but do not land in archaeology, art history, or literary studies. By analytically moving in between, this study can be read as an experiment to push the limits of these fields in order to produce non-essentialist knowledge.

CHAPTER 1

Resurrectional mediations: Shiʿa eschatology and photography

Abstract This chapter begins with an instructional manual on photography written in 1889, Resurrectional Photography (ʿAksiye-ye Ḥashriye). Through this object, I will examine the relationship between nineteenth-century discourses on photography and Shiʿa eschatological imagination. Closely reading this work, I show how an exceptional intertwinement between the religious discourses and optical technics manifests a unique absurdism specific to the Shiʿa religious thought. In this irrationality, eschatological imagination draws on the evidential aspects of the photographic image. God resurrects people’s deeds in exactly the same way a photographer develops a photograph: a divine optical apparatus. I show how the notion of the hereafter becomes a medium different from both the classical conception of ākhera and from the common understanding of the photographic image. Despite this impossibility, Resurrectional Photography finds a way to stabilise its meaning-making system and survives.

Keywords: photography, eschatology, embodiment of deeds, photographic image

In 1889, an obscure Muslim photographer in Iran was commissioned by the state to write an Islamic instructional manual about photography. In this work, the author, Moḥammad Ebn-e ʿAli Meshkāt al-Molk, intersperses extensive Islamic eschatological discussions with technical descriptions about how to operate a photographic camera and how to capture and develop photographs.1 Titled Resurrectional Photography (ʿAksiye-ye Ḥashriye), the text repeatedly compares photography with God’s power to “record all humans’ deeds flawlessly”, which He will put on display on the day of Resurrection.2 The word ḥashriye in the title of the book is a derivative of the verb ḥashara from the root ḥ-sh-r, which in Arabic literally means to gather, to assemble, or to bring together. In Islamic eschatology, the term refers to one of the Divine Acts on the Day of Resurrection (qiāma) whereby all people and their deeds are summoned up to be judged. According to this manual, God records humans’ (mis)deeds “in exactly the same way” a photographer takes and develops pictures. Upon the Resurrection, as Meshkāt al-Molk writes, All the details [of our worldly affairs] become visible in the same way the image appears in an instance (marratan wāḥedatan) o4n the glass – when taken out of the photographic

34 chapter 1

camera frame (shāsi) and subjected to the proper techniques. Due to the perfection of God’s factory of might … each movement and behaviour is embodied (mojassam) in this [photographic] fashion and [as body parts] speak of all worldly actions. The eye testifies to have been ordered to read the Qorʾān and ḥadith and prohibited from watching strangers (nāmaḥramān). … The tongue testifies to have been submitted to honesty and kindness … The ear testifies to have been prohibited from gossip (gheybat) and urged to seek truth and knowledge … The truth is in the photographic image (ʿaks) that the divine photographer develops (mashhud midārad) such that every part that appears on it testifies to that person’s affairs.3

The absurdism in this excerpt is hard to miss. However, unlike the one at work in Mostaʿān 110 and Āqā Sheykh ʿAli’s inventions, with which I began this book, Resurrectional Photography has remained interesting enough and was even reprinted in 1998.4 Its absurdism consists, first, of a compulsion to connect with Islamic eschatology meaningfully, and second, of an impossibility to create truthful signification. The Divine Device fails to signify its intended referent from both the eschatological and the technological frameworks. Yet, there is still some sense in this absurd sign. How is this sense produced? From what sources does it derive its content and what does it do to Islamic eschatology? A bit of contextualisation is in order. Among the many manuals of photography published since the mid-1860s in Iran, this work stands out immediately. It was written by the order of one of Nāṣir al-Din Shāh’s assistants Mirzā Moḥammad Khān and had print runs of around 200. The manual pays as much attention to technical details as it does to Islamic eschatology. The above excerpt is only a small part of the much larger text, in which for every technical description of photography there are several theological statements and arguments. These theological themes directly deploy that technical knowledge, in a non-metaphoric way, within the context of Islamic eschatology. From the viewpoint of genre, this work cannot be easily categorised as literature.5 It is instead a mixture of technical writing, which became fashionable during the second half of the nineteenth century, and theological writing, as had been widely practiced in the scholastic tradition of Perso-Arabic thought. The tone is highly rhetorical and gives an immediate impression of a mullah orator addressing a strictly Muslim audience in need of moral guidance. Little is known about the author, except a few introductory words in the text, where he acknowledges having learned the craft from the court photographer Aqā Reḍā ʿAkkāsbāshi (d. 1889), who as I briefly mentioned in the introduction was partly educated in the Dār al-Fonun. Nor is it clear where he received his religious education, and whether he had been trained as a jurist. Only one other work has been ascribed to him, which is on Islamic ethics.6 It is likely that he wrote

resurrectional mediations: shiʿa eschatology and photography 35

Figure 1. Diagram showing the coating of the photographic plate support with liquid silver. The image is produced in the lithographed edition of Resurrectional Photography.

Resurrectional Photography as part of the courtly effort to promote photography as a licit and accessible craft for the Muslim audience.7 In contrast to contemporaneous manuals of photography, this work gives an odd twist to the science of photography, in that it brings two hitherto unrelated semantic fields together: theology and the scientific language. By means of this semantic fusion, this text literally graphs the mechanism of Resurrection, in terms of both a lucid technical language and visual diagrams (figure 1). It may therefore be suitable to call it a theolographic manual.

Theolographic mediation in Resurrectional Photography As the last part of the above-quoted excerpt shows particularly well, on the Day of the Resurrection, deeds speak about their past as if personified in a photographic image. This photologic – one might even be tempted to say cinematologic – framework of the hereafter, testifies truthfully to people’s affairs. It seems that media and mediation are at the heart of this resurrectional dynamics. Meshkāt al-Molk pushes his analogy as far as regarding the reality of the Last Day as equivalent to, and not a metaphor of, photographic technology. In effect, the hereafter becomes a medium different from both the classical conception of ākhera and from the common understanding of the photographic image. This Divine Apparatus is impossible not only from the point of view of biology and optics but also from the perspective of Islamic eschatology, as I will show in detail below. Despite this impossibility, the text finds a way to stabilise its meaning-making system and survives. It is in this sense that it becomes absurdist. Its expression is allowed, but finds no intellectual

36 chapter 1

homeland, no birthplace, no identity. In its failing efforts to create signification, Resurrectional Photography exercises absurdism, which is really a limit to mediation. Recalling that mediation is the process whereby media makes meaning as both sense and signification, I trace the absurdism of Resurrectional Photography in two interlocking logics of mediation. On one hand, there is the photographic logic: the chemical techniques of developing pictures from the coated glass, the optical techniques of handling the camera, and most consequential for the text, the spectral logic of the very photographic image, which makes it possible for photographs to be viewed as truthful references, or in more precise terms, as “indices” of the material world.8 On the other hand, there is also the Divine Logic, that is, the Islamic theo-logy of Resurrection: the logic of the embodiment of the dead and their deeds, and the logic whereby God records worldly affairs truthfully, “exactly as they happened”. These two media logics encounter and entangle with one another in Resurrectional Photography, where they are both explored to their limits. As they are further pushed towards the limits, absurdism intensifies. The limit of photographic logic is its indexical capacity, that is, its power to evidence reality truthfully.9 It is pushed so far as to become the logic of God’s Resurrection. God’s logic, on the other hand, is also pushed to its limit with the radicalisation of ḥashr. In other words, Meshkāt al-Molk’s teleography transforms the very mechanism of Resurrection. The question is how and to what extent can this transformation be mapped out? The issue requires a close conversation with Islamic history. The hereafter and the embodiment of deeds The substance of Meshkāt al-Molk’s eschatological views can be found abundantly in Islamic traditions. The Resurrection of all people and their deeds on the Day of Judgement are themes that many Muslim scholars, poets, craftsmen, and jurists have dealt with. The notion of the hereafter (ākhera), or the realm of the hereafter (dār al-ākhera), is the central concept in this eschatological discourse. As imagined in all Islamic traditions, it refers to the parallel world that humans pass into after their death in this world. Islamic eschatology has produced a rich archive of ideas, images, and narratives about this realm. Meshkāt al-Molk’s manual brings one aspect within this tradition to the fore and pushes it to the extreme, namely, the embodiment of deeds (tajassom-e aʿmāl).10 What does it mean for human deeds to be resurrected? To imagine their bodies resurrected is one issue, but an entirely different one when their deeds are to be re-assembled (maḥshur). In what forms will they be mediated? Will they be re-enacted or re-lived? Will they be represented or materialised? And ultimately, how does Meshkāt al-Molk change the mechanisms of these eschatological forms? Without getting too deep into the vast field of Islamic

resurrectional mediations: shiʿa eschatology and photography 37

eschatology, I intend to show the extent to which Meshkāt al-Molk re-imagines the embodiment of deeds. To do so, I first set up an emic conceptual backdrop for Meshkāt al-Molk’s theolographic thinking by recourses to the leading scholarships on the notions of the hereafter (ākhera). The idea is to give an intellectual context for what ākhera means and does for and from the point of view of Muslims. Then I show how photography intersects with this intellectual context about the ākhera in Resurrectional Photography. The mediated imagination of the hereafter In his extensively detailed work Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions, Christian Lange gives the most conceptually insightful account of how Islamic cultures have imagined ākhera. The book is rich with descriptions of the Day of Resurrection, paradise, and hell by Muslim thinkers and writers in a wide range of materials. Directly relevant to my purpose is Lange’s conceptualisation of ākhera. He points out that the connection between this world and the other world is one of partial openness and simultaneity. He traces this relation in literature, dream visions, and Islamic visual traditions to name a few main outlets.11 He also notes how certain corporeal sensations and materialities traverse the porous boundaries between the two worlds. According to Lange, not only visions of the hereafter but also the smell, sound and warmth/cold of it can be perceived in this world; there are even geographical overlaps and slipovers between them.12 Lange is critical of the views that maintain a hard and impenetrable boundary between the two worlds. He believes that there is a “storehouse of currents of thought, images, and practices that make the boundary between al-donyā and al-ākhera appear rather thin and permeable”.13 He even problematises the temporal understanding of ākhera and thinks that it is often misleading to speak about the Islamic otherworld in terms of a “hereafter,” an “afterlife,” an “afterworld,” or a “world to come.” Notions about what happens after death and resurrection of course do exist in Islam, but equally strong, perhaps even stronger, is a sense that the otherworld is in a continuous and intimate conversation with the world of the here-and-now.14

Along the same lines, elsewhere, he asserts that Muslim eschatological images and ideas should be viewed as myths. As he draws from studies on mythology, in the same way myths “tell of events outside of time”, the Muslim eschatological tradition produces timeless events, that is, beyond temporal linearity, in “endless repetition of the same”.15 With this view, ākhera becomes a spatiotemporal reality of this world insofar as it acts on the here and now. The imaginary products of ākhera,

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according to Lange “are structured reflections of earthly utopias and dystopias, as well as blueprints for the creation of various paradises and hells on earth. First and foremost, however, they are theatres of and for the imagination”.16 Lange’s understanding makes it possible to utilise ākhera as a concrete machinery of meaning-making in this world. While Lange examines its worldly functions under the rubric of imagination, I propose complementarily to theorise ākhera as mediated imagination. Ākhera and its related ideas and images have functions in this world because they are mediated. What Lange terms the “theatres of and for imagination” can also be understood as the operationalisation of that imagination within an arrangement of media infrastructures and signs. Manuscripts, paintings, diagrams, oratorial setups and corporeal performances are among the most common media infrastructures used to articulate different kinds of signs in poems, images, narratives, or theories. To recall mediation as a conceptual tool that takes into account both signs and materialities, mediated imagination enables us to address the infrastructures and the semiotics of ākhera.17 The embodiment of deeds (tajassom-e aʿmāl) is one form of expression in this mediated imagination. What is important to bear in mind is that despite the differences between understandings of this event, in the Qorʾān, in the literature of Islamic prophetic traditions (ḥadith), and by many Muslim scholars, the deeds are never imagined as a graphic image in the sense, for instance, a painting can be said to represent an image. A cursory review makes this compellingly clear. The notion of tajassom-e aʿmāl figures in the Qorʾān several times. For instance, as surat al-Zalzala puts it most explicitly, “on that day, people will come forward in separate groups to be shown their deeds” (99:6).18 And then in the same sura, part of which Meshkāt al-Molk directly quotes in his manual, “whoever has done an atom’s-weight of evil will see that” (99:8). In another instance, it is said that on the Last Day, “every person will see what their own hands have sent ahead for them” (78:40). These re-summoned deeds are more often described as written in “the book (al-ketāb)” form (18:49; 17:14; 84:7). On at least another occasion, without explicitly pointing to any media infrastructures, the deeds are said to be “present (moḥḍar)” (3:30). In the prophetic traditions (ḥadith), and afterwards, in Muslims’ hermeneutic engagements with these textual sources, these condensed excerpts continued to be unpacked and further theologised, discussing in more detail what the seeing of the deeds and their presence could mean. Some examples will suffice to give the gist of these later developments. The twelfth-century Sunni Muslim thinker, Moḥammad al-Ghazāli (d. 1111), is a good starting point. Sebastian Günther has most extensively mapped out his understanding of tajassom-e aʿmāl. As Günther makes clear, al-Ghazāli understands this idea in the most literal sense. In this view, both good and bad deeds re-appear in the hereafter as real persons, beautiful or ugly depending on the nature

resurrectional mediations: shiʿa eschatology and photography 39

of the deeds.19 In the same vein, the seventeenth-century Shiʿa scholar, Abolfaḍl Moḥammad Ebn al-Sheykh Ḥoseyn ʿĀmeli (d. 1621), known as Sheykh Bahāʾi, reiterates this view in many of his works. For instance, he writes that on the Day of Judgement, “righteous deeds and correct beliefs appear as luminous forms … and misdeeds and false beliefs appear as dark forms”.20 Elsewhere, by referencing Shiʿa narratives (rawāyāt), he argues that “the snakes, scorpions as well as the fire-blazes that manifest on the Resurrection (al-qeyāma) are in essence the obscene deeds, despicable morals, and false beliefs”.21 In his view, the deeds are corporealised in the hereafter. For some, the heaviness of this corporeality in the hereafter can even be weighed on a scale known as the Balance of Deeds (mizān-e aʿmāl).22 Resonating the same theme, a seventeenth-century scholar, Mollā Moḥsen Fayḍ al-Kāshāni (d. 1680), references narratives in which the resurrected deeds “walk” on people’s faces (yamshuna ʿalā wojuhehem).23 After Sheykh Bahāʾi, his pupil Ṣadr al-Din Moḥammad Shirāzi (d. 1640), known as Mollā Ṣadrā, further refined the concept. While largely faithful to his master’s premises, Mollā Ṣadrā foregrounded the physical reality of the hereafter by distinguishing between deeds’ material (hayulāniye) and psychic (nafsiye) manifestations. For him, deeds and beliefs change forms upon the Resurrection, and it is this changing that accounts for the possibility of their presence in the hereafter. They are real and physical, yet they do not receive the same worldly forms. Correspondingly, the body of those who committed them will resurrect according to the forms in which those deeds are re-assembled (maḥshur) in the hereafter.24 Later in the eighteenth century, this idea is re-formulated by other Shiʿā scholars. Among them, Mollā Moḥammad Mehdi Narāqi (d. 1794), for instance, claims that for every good deed a “beautiful form (ṣurat-e zibā)”, and for every bad one a “hideous form (ṣurat-e qabiha)” will accompany humans in their graves: “garrulity will turn into a scorpion and slander will turn into a viper”, which will bite and harass people.25 In contradistinction, Al-Ghazāli’s Shiʿa contemporary Abu ʿAli Faḍl Ebn Ḥasān Tabarsi (or Ṭabresi, d. 1153), also known as Sheykh Ṭabresi, opposed this literal understanding of the deeds’ embodiment. Commenting on the Qorʾān’s “when every soul finds all the good it has done present before it (moḥḍaran)” (3:30), Tabarsi suggests that deeds’ embodiment should be understood as a mediated presence. According to him, the deeds’ presence is in the written form and mediated on the “leaves of good and bad deeds (ṣaḥāʾef al-ḥasanāt wa al-sayyeʾāt)”.26 Or alternatively, as Ṭabarsi has it, this presence can also be understood as their recompense (al-jazaʾ) rather than the actual deeds themselves, that is the rewards or punishments that those deeds effect in the afterlife.27 Along the same line of thought, another Shiʿa scholar Moḥammad Bāqer Majlesi (d. 1699) objects to the literal understanding of resurrectional mechanisms in the hereafter in his large compendium of Shiʿa knowledge, Beḥār al-Anwār. This renowned seventeenth-century figure, who draws

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heavily from Sheykh Ṭabresi and many other Muslim polymaths, calls Sheykh Bahāʾi’s thinking a form of sophistry (qarib men al-safsaṭa) and argues instead that humans’ deeds are re-created in their “likeness (al-shabih)”.28 He takes the notion of likeness by interpreting a narration ascribed to the sixth Shiʿa Imām, part of which reads, “when God resurrects a Muslim from his grave, with him rises a likeness (methāl) that stands before him”.29 This likeness then speaks to the Muslim and tells him how his good deeds are now protecting him. Although the exact nature of these likenesses remains vague, they are certainly not imagined as corporeal entities, and moreover, do not appear in the same worldly form. Unlike Sheykh Bāhāʾi’s and al-Ghazāli’s literal understandings, Majlesi’s personification does not accept corporealisation, but resonating with Mollā Ṣadrā, it does allow transformation. As this short review shows, there is no explanation of deeds’ embodiments before Meshkāt al-Molk in terms of a represented image – a visual trope that Meshkāt al-Molk explores in his theleography. They are either personified, corporealised as animals and hellish beasts, materialised in their afterlife forms, or transformed according to their essence. Some of these elements do find resonance in Meshkāt al-Molk’s thought, namely, the personification and the materiality of deeds. While in the eschatological framework the two are regarded as two different interpretations of the deeds’ embodiment, in Resurrectional Photography, they are conjoined. As I have shown, for some of Meshkāt al-Molk’s predecessors, such as Sheykh Bahāʾi, the deeds were personified, and for others, they were recorded in the book of deeds (nāme-ye aʿmāl), mediated in the written form. However, in Resurrectional Photography, the deeds are both personified and materialised in and as a medium, that is, the photograph. In this distorted view, the deeds become realistic pictures, they are mediated in high resolution leaving no trace of doubt as to the veracity of their occurrence in the world. This is only one side of Resurrectional Photography’s absurdist mediation. The other side has to do with the very medium of photography. Like any novel technological form, photography could not be dissociated from the cultural milieu in which it appeared and evolved. For any medium to be adapted and operationalised meaningfully, it must tap into the existing media environment. In Iran, the photographic image had to be somehow assimilated into the existing visual culture so that it could become a culturally meaningful object. In Europe, the technical tradition in painting and the fairly long history of optical technologies had already played a significant role in shaping the social acceptance of photography.30 But in Iran, and more broadly the Middle East, photography seemed to be a shock to visual media as there had been no preceding medium that could do what photography did, namely, evince graphically someone’s “having been” undoubtedly present in a real, physical place.31 Given this peculiarity, the question is why and how could Resurrectional Photography’s absurdism happen at that time? Why was it written

resurrectional mediations: shiʿa eschatology and photography 41

after photography and not before? What was different in a photograph that could lead to such absurdism in Islamic thought? Why could not, say, a miniature painting provoke a similar response?32 In what ways was the photographic image positioned in the Muslim Iranian visual history? These inter-related issues are evidently art historical and require a change of analytic mode.

Photography at the limit: From mimesis to evidentiality In a forthcoming article, art historian Sussan Babaie draws attention to a semantic dissonance found in a painting held at the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi.33 Painted by Mirzā Reḍā Tabrizi in 1854/5, the image shows an Iranian gentleman, Manṣur Khān, being photographed by what appears to be a Western photographer (figure 2).34 The semantic anomaly is evident in the short text laid over the painting below the patio. It reads, “this is the ‘likeness’ (shabih) of Manṣur Khān while the photographic camera is set up to take a photo (ʿaks) of his face (ṣuratash) in the daguerreotype”. This brief painted text refers to three separate visual forms using three different words. The photograph to be taken of the sitter is called ʿaks; the sitter’s face is named ṣurat; and the painting that depicts the scene is called shabih. Referring to a few paintings taken from the late Safavid era, Babaie argues that “veristic lifelikeness” had never been a defining factor in this genre. Instead, what made a Safavid portraiture authentic was the recognisability of the faces in the images. Claiming that “actual depictions in Persian painting of figures are focused on the face”, Babaie concludes that one would recognise a face in a portraiture given a limited set of visual clues.35 It is in this sense that the painted figure is called a likeness (shabih) of its referent and and not its veristic lifelikeness in the way the portraits of, say, the Dutch golden age of painting depicted a person. In other words, the non-photographic visual regime at work in such pictures relies significantly on a selective mimetic logic. Islamic art historian Gülru Necipuǧlu uses the term “mimetic abstraction” as a more generic term that includes this face-centred technique in these images. This mimetic technique, as Necipuǧlu argues, was a key feature in non-perspectival images found in Islamic architecture and painting. By virtue of such abstractive methods, mimetically formed images affected their viewers in very different ways to photographs.36 Unlike perspectival images, such as photographs or most European Renaissance paintings, according to Necipuǧlu, premodern “artists in the eastern Islamic lands aspired to mirror the insightful gaze by means of soulful and evocative mimetic abstractions that enlighten the beholder”. Concerned with the internal working of sense-perception rather than the external senses, she continues, such images “solicited close attention from discerning eyes”.37 In this

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Figure 2. Painting of Manṣur Khān being photographed, by Mirzā Reḍā Tabrizi in 1854-5, copy preserved at the National Museum of Tbilisi. Image credits: Sussan Babaie.

resurrectional mediations: shiʿa eschatology and photography 43

sense, mimetic images affected and depended on one’s soul. Objects depicted in these kinds of images were thus not lifelike representations meant to stand in for their referents truthfully. Rather, they were visual signs made to incite viewers’ imagination and, consequently, kindle their emotions.38 It is in the context of this fundamental perceptual difference that the semantic discord between ʿaks (photograph) and likeness (shabih) in figure 2 makes better sense. The photograph presented a kind of image that could not be unproblematically named by taking recourse in the semantic field in which pre-photographic images were named. Hence, a photograph could not be called ṣurat, which covered a very wide range of meanings in Persian; for instance, it could be used to refer to the human face as in the example above or to iconic manifestations as in “ṣurat-e gāv” (the icon of a cow),39 or “ṣurat-e oqāb” (the icon of an eagle),40 among other connotations.41 In the instructional manuals of photography, synonymous with the word shekl (shape), ṣurat was exclusively used to denote shapes and figures that appeared on the negative, but not in the photograph.42 Other terms such as temthāl (figural likeness) and shamāyel (icon) sounded equally problematic if used to refer to a photograph.43 Resolving the semantic problem with naming photographs, the word ʿaks slowly became the most suitable word to name a photograph. According to Dihkhudā’s Persian dictionary, the word ʿaks means inversion of or the act of inverting an object, a word, or an idea. According to Steingass’ Persian-English dictionary, it also connotes the idea of reflection, reverberation, shadow, and counterpart in the Persian language. In the Persian literary sphere, it was often used to refer to the image formed in the mirror or reflected from the surface of the water, as in ʿaks-e rokh-e yār (reflection of the lover’s face).44 In the context of traditional visualising crafts in Iran, the term referred to an old visualisation technique from the late seventeenth century, which was applied to handwritten manuscripts to decorate the page margins. The technique was abandoned in the late eighteenth century, and after photography was introduced in Iran, the word was picked up again to refer to photographs. Consequently, by way of backformation, the words photography (ʿakkāsi) and photographer (ʿakkās) were derived from its root.45 The point is that ʿaks was a term taken from a semantic field quite different from that which had informed the naming of pre-photographic pictures. Next to the term ʿaks, another word was sometimes used to refer to a photograph: taṣwir. The word is a derivation of ṣawara, which means to form, and is constructed from the Arabic root of ṣ-w-r. Direct denotative uses of this word were more common in instructional manuals of photography, in which the word referred to the fully developed photograph.46 But more significant from a media historical perspective, the word was far more commonly used next to drawings and illustrations that appeared in lithographed books in this period, as in “taṣwir-e jazira” (image of an island), “taṣwir-e Moḥammad Hanifa” (image of Moḥammad

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Ḥanifa), or “bāsma-ye taṣwir” (lithographing image).47 As the leading historian of lithographic illustrations in Shiʿa visual culture, Ulrich Marzolph shows in compelling detail, lithographed illustrations could reach much wider audiences thanks to their facilitated reproducibility.48 Together with other images such as storytelling canvases and mural paintings, lithographed illustrations were crucial in constructing “popular piety” in nineteenth-century Iran.49 Illustrations in lithographed books were especially suited to the proliferation of Shiʿa narratives in that they tele-visualised significant historical religious events for audiences who would have otherwise been exposed to them on a very limited scale.50 The parallel usage of the word taṣwir for both photographs and lithographed illustrations suggests that the two visual categories might have shared a common media logic. In this sense, the socio-technical context in which these illustrations circulated might have predicted later media developments. Despite the lexical proximity of lithographic illustrations to photographic images, the former has not yet been theorised in terms of photographic media logic, namely the capacity of photographs to be used as evidence. Lithographed images are most often discussed in tandem with iconicity, and hence their indexical aspect has been overlooked. However, considering the context in which those illustrations circulated and the semantic resonance between photography and lithography, it is feasible to suggest that lithographed images might have also worked evidentially. While iconicity in these images is still the dominant semiotic logic, their re-articulation as lithographed illustration accentuates their indexicality as well. For instance, an illustration that depicts a significant historical episode in the Shiʿa religious culture (figure 3) could have very well worked as evidence that the event had really taken place.51 The parallel between the two media may become even more pronounced when the practice of making illustrations from photographs is considered. In this case, the line between the photographic and the lithographic image becomes even more blurred.52 Technically speaking, the evidential capacity in images can be found in any figural representation, be it a miniature painting inside a manuscript or a canvas painting (parda) used in storytelling – although the performative setting and the visio-textual norms of these older media are very different from photography. But in any case, with lithography, and its facilitation of the “visual repetition of salient scenes from” the Shiʿa “foundational narrative”, this evidentiality is pushed to a new limit.53 This logic of representation-as-evidence is intensified in photography while image semiotics became more complex: a combination of icons, symbols, and indices at the same time.54 This last facet concurred with common global attitudes to photographs in the nineteenth century. In this regard, as Brian Winston writes, photography was “positioned as science and located its social importance in its ability to produce evidence of all kinds of phenomena”.55 What Winston terms the “evidentiary power” of photography refers precisely to its indexical aspect. Furthermore, as

resurrectional mediations: shiʿa eschatology and photography 45

Figure 3. A lithographed illustration in the book of religious poems Eftekhārnāma-ye ḥaydari. The scene depicts a very well-known episode in Shiʿa history, namely Ghadir-e Khomm, in which the Prophet announces his son in law ʿAli as his successor. Shiʿa Muslims have continuously invoked this episode to defend their creed as the correct version of Islam. Another version of this illustration is also discussed by Marzolph.56

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Greg Hainge argues, “what appeared to present itself as an ontological precondition of photography (its indexicality) was … the result of the normal usage and perception of this medium”.56 Or as Sheehi puts it in his study of photography in the nineteenth-century Arab societies, “the index of the image … is a representational surface of dynamic constitution, history, sociability, and language”.57 To draw from Webb Keane, “[f]or indexicality to function socially, the index as such must be made apparent, and it must be furnished with instructions”, a process that ultimately leads to the formation of what he calls “semiotic ideologies”.58 Having in mind Keane’s understanding of semiotic ideology as comprising the “basic assumptions about what signs are and how they function in the world”, nineteenth-century photography can be seen as part of an emerging media environment where the photographic image could be understood and perceived as evidence for the referents’ actual presence in a real event or place. This emerging indexicality in Iranian visual culture was a unique formative moment, previously experienced in lithography and evolved much further in photography. Unlike iconic representations, the image was not a token of the divine but the divine’s intervention into the material culture aimed not at self-representation but at ensuring that representation proper appears realistic and is capacitated to stand for its referents truthfully. The term “creational photography” – which was used not only in Mihskāt al-Mulk’s teleographic writing, but also by others in the press – captures this role most succinctly: a medium that creates rather than represents. This is the mediation logic that Meshkāt al-Molk pushes to the extreme in his manual. It is quite telling how he abandons any reference to non-photographic media to explain the deeds’ embodiment. Lithography, for instance, would have been more than appropriate to be mentioned as it is more infra-structurally commensurate with the “book of deeds (nāma-ye aʿmāl) or to the “leaves of good and bad deeds (ṣaḥāʾef al-ḥasanāt wa al-sayyeʾāt)”, which many Muslim scholars held onto in their eschatological writings. Be that as it may, Meshkāt al-Molk’s invocation of photography, as absurd as it might seem, makes meaningful connections to Islamic theology, and in so doing, changes that theology by introducing and reflecting on pictorial evidentiality. It remains an open issue to inquire whether this photo-centric imagination in any capacity re-figured in the Shiʿa theology of later periods. A quick look at contemporary figures shows promising avenues for further research. For instance, Nāṣer Makārem Shirāzi, one of the most prominent Shiʿa ayatollahs of the Iranian Islamic State, mentions photographic logic several times to argue that the embodiment of deeds is physically possible in the hereafter.59 Further analysis would require much different archival work. I leave that aside for the time being. But to conclude, I analyse two photographs taken in Iran of two Muslim scholastic figures to show the photographic logic at its Shiʿa Islamic limit in practice.

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Figure 4. Left: Photograph by ʿAbd al-Qāsem Ebn-e Nuri taken of Ayatollah Moḥammad Fāḍel Sharbiāni (d. 1904), copy preserved at Golestān Palace archive, no. unknown. Right: Taken by the same photographer of Sayyed Moḥammad Ḥoseyn Marʿashi Shahrestāni (d. 1897), copy preserved at Golestān Palace archive, no. unknown. Image credits: Carmen Pérez Gonzàlez.60

A world of meaning in the photographic image Figure 4 shows two photographs taken by an Iranian photographer ʿAbd al-Qāsem Ebn-e Nuri.61 Both sitters are notable cloaked men of the Shiʿa clergy. The first is sitting on the ground, the second on a chair. In the first, the picture frame is further decorated by arabesque patterns and nastaʿliq calligraphies appear on the surface. The mullah is shown holding prayer beads in his hand and sitting against a distinctively Persian backdrop. The second sitter, in contrast, holds a book on his lap and has several more on the table beside him. These two photographs are reproduced by Carmen Pérez Gonzáles in her technically detailed book Local Portraiture: Through the Lens of the Nineteenth-Century Iranian Photographs.62 As Gonzáles points out in her brief discussion of the pictures, the text written on them is the same. It is part of a poem by the nineteenth-century poet Ḥabib Qāʾāni (d. 1854), which reads: Khalq taṣwir-e to mibinand dar yak shebr jāy Ghāfeland az yak-jahān maʿni ke dar taṣwir-e tawst People see you’re making (taṣwir) in a handspan of a space63 Yet they are oblivious to the world of meaning that resides in your creation (taṣwir)

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The poem is too complex to be interpreted in one clear sense. However, the way the verse is used on the photograph does something conceptually significant to the photographic image. This revolves around the play with the word taṣwir in Persian, which I have extensively discussed above. In Qāʾāni’s poem, it is used twice, each time in a slightly different sense. González translates both as “image” without discussing the semantic nuance between them. The first usage recalls God’s act of creation and the second, while retaining the first sense, can also be interpreted as an image made by God. Putting this verse on the pictures, the photographer deracinates the multiplex senses inherent in the word taṣwir and re-articulates it in the sense of the photographic image. On the photograph, the word taṣwir is God’s creation and at the same time the very material picture that backgrounds the verse. With this transposition, not only the visual content within the photos – most visibly symbolised in the cloaks and turbans of the mullahs – but also the verbal content written on them impart a strong Islamic sense to the viewer. The poetic superimposition does not work in the same way captions usually work. Rather, in a much more complex way, the short verse conditions both the conception and perception of the photographic image. It makes the photograph meaningful extradiegetically, that is, it structures the viewer’s fundamental understanding of what a photographic taṣwir is by something external to the photographic logic. Viewing this photograph, as per the instruction of the poem, is to consider the “world of meaning” that lies somewhere inside its depth. These pictures evince how photography was re-appropriated and how the understanding of the photographic image was re-contextualised in Iran. The extra-pictorial devices used to embellish the photographs, the sitters’ poses and the superimposed poems on the surface of the photos, among many other details, point to photography becoming “indigenous” in Iran.64 This Islamic re-appropriation can be found much more often in photographs taken in the final years of the century. Ultimately, it culminates in the Constitutional Era (1907 – 1911), when photographs intersected with clerical revolutionary agendas. At this time, photographs of mullahs circulated among the public, turning them into the legitimate faces of the Constitutional Revolution, and elevating Islam to a new public status.65

CHAPTER 2

Mourning mediations: taʿziye performances and military sonic techniques Abstract This chapter begins with reading an excerpt from an elegiac text written in 1883 about the historical death of the third Shiʿa Imam, Ḥoseyn Ebn-e ʿAli in Karbala. The author of this work, Mollā Āqā Darbandi, claims in this excerpt that the day of ʿĀshurā, the day on which the military events at Karbala unfolded, lasted for seventy two hours. This chapter departs from this absurdist moment and delves into the performance art of taʿziye as performed and reformed in the nineteenth century. Taʿziye performances in the nineteenth century were the successor of the ʿĀshurā mourning rituals, in which Shiʿa Muslims commemorated the death of Ḥoseyn Ebn-e ʿAlī from as early as the eighth century. In the nineteenth century, these rituals evolved into intricate drama plays with specific sensorial arrangements on and off stage. It was by means of this sensoriality that taʿziya mediates, or makes meaningful, the mourning rituals of ʿĀshurā for its audience. Taking first-hand observations of these drama plays during the nineteenth century as my analytic objects, I show how the acoustic experience that taʿziye performances created evolved in tandem with the military reforms that initiated in the Dār al-Fonun – particularly the sonic disciplines in which the soldiers were trained.

Keywords: taʿziye, military sounds, disciplinary acoustics, military manuals

Only a few years after the establishment of Dār al-Fonun, in 1856, well-known Shiʿa cleric Mollā Aqā Ebn-e ʿĀbed Ebn-e Ramaḍān Ebn-e ʿAli Ebn-e Zāhed Shervāni (d. 1869), better known as Mollā Āqā Darbandi wrote a controversial elegiac treatise on the death of the third Shiʿa Imām, Ḥoseyn Ebn-e ʿAli (d. 680). Titled Eksir al-ʿEbādāt fi Asrār-e al-Shahādāt, written in Arabic, and later translated into Persian in 1883, this treatise gained immense popularity among the Shiʿa Muslims in the second half of the nineteenth century. It would be frequently cited during the Moḥarram mourning rituals and the flourishing performance art of taʿziye, which Iranian Muslims observed annually to commemorate the death of Ḥoseyn Ebn-e ʿAli and his seventy-two companions in Karbala by the army of the Umayyad Caliphate Yazid Ebn Moʿāwiya (d. 683).1 The treatise fabricates a few oddities about the day of ʿĀshurā, the day on which the military events at Karbala unfolded.2 One such odd claim is of interest for this chapter: Darbandi states that the day of ʿĀshurā

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must have lasted for seventy-two hours. He argues that given the number of people killed by Ḥoseyn Ebn-e ʿAli alone, the time that must have elapsed while he was unconscious during part of the battle, and the time he spent on “preaching for the unbelievers and giving them ultimatums” as well as on “reciting poems and rants (rajaz)”, that day must have lasted for much longer than usual. Building on the commonly accepted facts about the battle at Karbala – details such as the recurrence of one-to-one battles, the number of slain unbelievers, and the fact that most of the killings happened in the afternoon and the evening – Darbandi struggles to rationalise the occurrence of so many actions in such a short time. His solution, ludicrously non-empirical, is to assume that the day lasted much longer than twenty-four hours.3 It is mainly in the organisation of the day of ʿĀshurā into hours that a modern feature can be traced. Notwithstanding the absurdism of such a claim, there is a sense of the division of the day into equal periods of one hour. This temporal organisation relates to a sense of time that came to be ever more widely experienced in nineteenth-century Iran.4 Although time-keeping techniques existed for a long time before the nineteenth century, it was only after the reign of Nāṣer al-Din Shāh that time came to be dominantly modelled by mechanical clocks and hence hours and minutes carefully observed and socially experienced.5 More consequential for Iranian society, it was only in the second half of the nineteenth century that such mechanically ordered and marked temporality became accessible to the public.6 Thus, it can be said that the question of durable actions could be meaningfully raised with regard to ʿĀshurā events in this new temporal consciousness. In this view, I understand Darbandi’s imagination of such an unusual day as a sign of a changing experience with time, most concretely worked out in the context of Moḥarram rituals. This absurdist struggle by a mullah to make sense of a mourning tradition in terms compatible with modern inventions resonates with that of Āqā Sheykh ʿAli and Meshkāt al-Molk, which I discussed before. In this chapter, I examine the specificity of this absurdism in the context of ʿĀshurā rituals, particularly in the art of taʿziye in Iran. Darbandi’s temporal re-organisation of the day of ʿĀshurā provokes further inquiries into how modern sciences, especially military techniques, changed the Shiʿa performance culture, which had traditionally been centred on taʿziye, the dramatic simulation of ʿĀshurā events on stage in front of an audience. Taʿziye is after all a descendant of certain military episodes with catastrophic results – so Shiʿa history tells us. The very events that took place in Karbala, as well as the religious rituals that evolved from them, have consistently been re-enacted in tandem with Shiʿa military cultures.7 On many occasions, people’s rage and intense emotional convulsions turned into fully-fledged fights, which often unfurled in the public domain.8 The militancy that inhered in the ritual was an inseparable

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element for its attraction as a cultural practice. As the military reforms initiated in the Dār al-Fonun gained more momentum in the latter half of the nineteenth century, taʿziye culture too began to change. Given this interdependency, I ask what elements in the reforming military culture found their way into taʿziye culture? What techniques of mediation were shared? How did those techniques help the meaning-making mechanisms in taʿziye performances? I seek to respond to these questions based on a sound-oriented reconstruction of taʿziye in the nineteenth century as attested to in the journals and travelogues of Iranian and European witnesses. Although taʿziye has been extensively studied, its sonority has not been given the attention it deserves. It is my contention that examining the sonic techniques in taʿziye sheds light on aspects of the Shiʿa absurdism I seek to understand. As far as I have been able to verify, there is no systematic study of the taʿziye soundscape and its history. Comments on its sonic aspects have been restricted to brief and descriptive notes on the musical performances, while sporadically particular non-musical aspects have been mentioned.9 I argue that sound techniques constituted the main medium for the incorporation of modern military techniques into the taʿziye culture.10 Military sounds reminded the audience, the on-stage participants, and the dancers/singers that they had to calibrate their ears in a timely and controlled fashion. The different performing groups had to attune to the auditory cues given by their masters and contain their effusive emotions within certain spatiotemporal limits. The spectators were expected to adjust their emotional expressions to the signals given by the singers’ and eulogists’ voices. A cry bursting out too early or a shriek too high in pitch were aesthetic anomalies, better avoided. In short, taʿziye created an acoustic space where time was organised by means of sonic signs. Through reconstructing this acoustic space in taʿziye, as performed throughout the late nineteenth century, I show that the inclusion of military sounds in taʿziye was not a mere appendage to an otherwise native cultural form. Rather, this synthetic moment pointed to a much more complex transformation that taʿziye culture underwent concurrent with the military reforms, as developed in the Dār al-Fonun. Broadly put, these reforms consisted of new conscripting methods, reorganisation of troops, new regimental strategies and field formations, importing new artillery technologies, the emergence of a permanent body of soldiers, and more important for the present study, new musical/sonic methods for training the army.11 I begin with a short description of the historical context in which military sounds underwent changes in Europe and Iran. Then, I focus on the military reforms in nineteenth-century Iran through the lens of four military manuals written during the period. The aim is to understand the different kinds of military sounds, their temporal logic of mediation that underlies their use in drills and battles and their broader cultural effects. In the ensuing section, I move on to closely

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examine taʿziye performances as described in the second half of the century. In this part, I reconstruct the acoustic space in taʿziye by examining a series of first-hand accounts given by both Westerners and Iranians. Drawing at the same time on taʿziye studies, I show in detail how sonic techniques influenced the sense-making mechanisms in taʿziye.

Military sounds In a British military manual published in the late eighteenth century, a diagram depicts a square formation for a battalion (figure 5).12 A contemporaneous military dictionary defines this form under the entry “hollow square” as “a body of foot-soldiers drawn up with an empty space in the centre, for the colours, drums and baggage, facing every way to charge the horse”.13 In the middle of this hollow square stand the music players, whom only the rear regiment can fully see. The rest of the battalion, having no or only a partial view of the drummers and trumpeters, has to rely more on their ears to apprehend the necessary commands for their movements and the required formations. The players’ main function is to regulate and homogenise commands across the entire battalion. The drums, among other uses, regulate the marching steps while the trumpets signal various commands such as retreat, charge, defence, and so on.14 The history of Western military music tells us that signalling functions were among the early usages for different musical instruments in the army.15 During both battle and training campaigns, drums, bugles, fifes, and trumpets were extensively used to communicate commands to the regiments. Soldiers were required to listen to the sounds performed by the music players to carry out what was expected from them. Musical signalling functions were in common use from the very earliest times in human military history.16 According to music historians Herbert and Baglow, “drummers and trumpeters had practised their skills in military units long before the existence of a standing army. They were essentially used for conveying messages from a unit’s command to its men”.17 In Europe, it was only from the second half of the eighteenth century that musical instruments became entrenched in military activities, so much so that almost all aspects of military practices were somehow coded and regulated by sonic signs.18 This is most acutely tangible in the evolution of the military march. As the nineteenth-century music historian Jacob Adam Kappey has put it, “the stepping together of large bodies of men in exact rhythm to the sounds of musical instruments was carefully taught, and became a military habit”.19 Marching steps began to conform to the drumming tempo and sophisticated trumpet patterns developed for every major regimental act.20

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Figure 5. Frontispiece of the eighteenth-century British military manual The Military Guide for Young Officers, printed in 1779 showing the position of music bands in the centre of the square.

In the European context, these acoustic commands had long been observed to affect the infantry’s bodily dispositions. A seventeenth-century British military officer, for example, notes how some infantries are already so attuned to drumbeats that they “proportion the body, legges, head, hands and every motion so exactly to every stroke or doubling of the Drumme, as if it were almost a treason in Nature to walke without that Instruments assistance”.21 This rising significance of drum-beats and trumpets for military performances occurred during what historians call a “military revolution”, which as Rudi Matthee has put it, refers primarily to “the profound changes that took place in European warfare in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” with limited but significant ramifications in near eastern Asia.22 This revolution brought about “radical changes in terms of hardware, involving equipment and ordnance, as well as in terms of army formation, training, maintenance and logistics”.23 It was not until the early nineteenth century that such auditory arrangements gave rise to military music bands, whose formations were signs of power and nobility in an army.24 As Herbert and Barlow write, The sonic and visual effect of a band was clearly inspiring, and for the mass of ordinary people at this time there was no other sight or sound in public display to match it. It afforded regiments a colourful and attractive face that rendered their law-keeping role a little more palatable to the populace and made military service an exciting prospect for some.25

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This new soundscape also found its way into the Iranian milieu. Moreover, it was this sonic expression that had the power to reach and affect society on a large scale. As Kappey notes in 1894 regarding the European context, a military band furnishes in most cases the only medium by which the toiling multitude of the working classes get an idea of musical progress. To them, the high-priced opera-house, or the fashionable concert-room are not accessible. Military bands occupy the gap between the highest and lowest classes of music, and by open-air performances of a superior kind they fill a serious void in the life of the million.26

The same was true in Iran, and as I show below, even more culturally so than militarily, since taʿziye culture mediated such military novelties to the public. Military sounds in Iran Reading through first-hand accounts written by, or ascribed to, Iranian travellers and officials, it can clearly be seen what nineteenth-century military splendour appeared and sounded like to the ears of Iranian reformists. Musicologist Mohsen Mohammadi, in an excellent work on the history of military music in nineteenth-century Iran, has reviewed some of the most significant first encounters with the European military music in the century.27 Among them, as he notes, an Iranian migrant in India, ʿAbd al-Laṭif Shushtari (d. 1805), witnessing a military parade by the British army, sees and hears musical instruments that resemble for him the Persian flute and drums. Although those instruments look familiar to him, the way the British army use them appears unfamiliar to his ears. At battles, they play the same instrument that was mentioned [for training horses], similar to balabān [flute], and also other tools similar to karnā [long horn] and korga [large drums]. Most of the tasks are done by that balabān which is named bānsari [Indian flute]. At any given place and faced towards any given direction during a battle, they play it [the flute] in a way that can be heard clearly by everybody. At marches, when midnight is passed, they play it in a certain way, signalling the troops that they should collect their items, take down the tents and prepare their equipment. Other signals can mean for the soldiers to march or to stop, and at times it could also mean an imminent ambush.28

Another first-hand account of British military music belongs to a Persian traveller and scholar, ʿAbu Ṭāleb-e Tabrizi (d. 1805 or 1806) who in his travelogue describes a military parade in Windsor, England.29 He declares that he “has not heard such an attractive music” before and that “listening to that music made [his] soul wax more and more”. He further claimed that “compared to that music, all the instruments

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and music heard and played in London sounded like the braying of the wild animals”.30 Such soul-waxing impressions were not uncommon in the nineteenth century. In this regard, Mohammadi writes that European military music affected Persians who had a chance to observe it in European countries. They simply compared it with the unmelodious sound of the Persian naqqārekhānes, Persian traditional military bands, hence, they found the melodious European military bands very charming. Early reports on European military bands provided names of the instruments that, however, coincided with similar instruments used in Persian military music. For instance, ṭabl, kus, and gavurgāh were various drums of the Persian naqqārekhānes.31

Naqqārekhānes were the closest sonic phenomena to the European military music bands and presented both an acoustic model and a semantic field for Iranians to approach and name European musical instruments. According to Dehkhodā’s dictionary, the word naqqāre refers to a percussion instrument comprised of two drums, one slightly smaller than the other. This drum set was commonly used in Iran as early as the ninth century. Together with various woodwind instruments, such as karnā and sornā, trumpets, horns, and reed pipes, they formed the main sound sources in the battlefields, and later in the Safavid era, were also played for ceremonial purposes and to announce sunrise and sunset – a function that continued well into the Qājār period.32 There are many Persian and European travel accounts that evidence the use of these musical instruments on such occasions. In one example, the French traveller Jane Dieulafoy witnessed a musical band with drums and trumpet-like instruments in ʿĀli Qāpu Palace in Isfahan in 1887. Moreover, her published travelogue provides a drawing depicting a scene of their playing.33 and finally, these musicians arrive and in memory of the religion (le culte) of their ancestors, salute the sun … at the moment when it goes out in the shadows of twilight and when it is reborn each morning at sunrise. Long brass trumpets … in the form of cylindrical-conical shells, constitute the brilliant elements of the picturesque orchestra which takes place every evening and morning on one of the terraces in front of the negārkhāna [viewing houses] or at the courtyard of ʿĀli Qāpu Palace, the highest of all the monuments of Isfahan.34

Dieulafoy’s account and similar ones by others give the impression that the musical instruments in naqqārekhānes had a different quality to the trumpets, drums, and pipes used in military bands later in Europe. Moreover, no mention of using them

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Figure 6. A hand-drawn image showing a group of music performers in ʿĀli Qāpu, Isfahan in 1887. It was not drawn by Dieulafoy herself, but made later from one of her crude sketches and later reproduced in the printed version of her travelogue.35

as disciplining instruments can be found in the sources I examined.36 Needless to say, they had a certain basic level of signalling, namely, initiating battles, and ending them, whether with victory or in retreat. In the entry to karnā in The Encyclopedia Iranica, Stephen Blum mentions that this old sound instrument was used as a signalling tool in battles. He corroborates this claim by resorting to verses from Shāhnāme and also points out a miniature illustration that shows a battle scene with quite a few trumpet-like instruments announcing the commencement of the battle.37 He also mentions the use of naqqārekhānes for religious purposes.38 Similarly, A.K.S Lambton, under the entry of naqqārekhāne in the Encyclopedia of Islam writes that the naqqārekhāne playing style had been practiced widely in Islamic territories in different historical periods, but their function, as she maps out in detail, was limited to battle calls, war victories, reception ceremonies, the departure of rulers from their palaces and, at times, even accompanying certain mourning rituals.39 I have not found any indication as to their use for regimental movements or regulating tactical manoeuvres. It might be safe to assume that what came from

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naqqārekhānes or was played in that style by musicians throughout the Iranian territories, affected their listeners emotively. I will unpack this aspect in more detail in the section on taʿziye. However, for the time being, my provisional hypothesis is that military musical instruments before the nineteenth century had negligible disciplinary elements, that is, they were not used to train soldiers, but only to affect them and the non-military audiences emotionally. It was only with European military music that the experience of listening to a military performance acquired a disciplinary dimension in Iran – although it was not simply reduced to this mode as the music was aesthetically attractive as well. The likes of Shushtari and Tabrizi, whose testimonies are reproduced above, note this disciplinary aspect in their first encounters with European military music. Following these preliminary encounters, the military reforms that began with the young ʿAbbās Mirzā in the 1810s reached their climax in the Dār al-Fonun with the recruitment of several military convoys from Europe. These missions sought to ameliorate the Persian cavalry and artillery by introducing new weaponry technologies and to improve the infantry by training foot-soldiers with new disciplinary methods.40 None of these new measures, however, had any sustained effect on the army. The organisational, logistical, and economic infrastructures remained virtually unchanged until more effective reforms took place during the Pahlavi era. For all its failure to yield any discernible upgrade, the nineteenth-century military reforms brought forth interesting side effects.41 Among the most immediate ones was the introduction of new musical instruments, genres, and compositions.42 Instruments such as kettledrums and trumpets were ordered by the Shah and other courtiers to be brought to Iran.43 Retired or exiled military officers were recruited to teach the European style of military music and to play live for the Shah and his entourage on various occasions.44 As the historian of military music in Iran Ali Bulookbashi writes, through the military cadre at the Dār al-Fonun, “new musical instruments that were used widely in Western military music bands such as the flute, oboe, saxophone, various kinds of kettle drums, and cymbals were gradually brought to Iran”.45 Among other important characters on the scene was the Frenchman Alfred Jean-Baptiste Lemaire (d. 1907), who was appointed the chief instructor for the reformation of the Iranian military.46 It was under his supervision that the new instruments, methods, and polyphonic compositions became familiar in Iran. Over a few decades, when graduates of the Dār al-Fonun began to work in the military, and when those sent abroad came back, the sounds of naqqārekhānes became an established tradition. By the 1880s, the sounds of karnā and dohol were entirely pushed out of the military parades and drills.47 Their monophony gave way to the Westernised polyphonous sounds of trumpets, flutes, oboe, and drums. Naqqārekhānes’ sounds became henceforth limited to (religious) ceremonies and

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special occasions. Listening to a collection of the most common kinds of military music, recorded for the first time on a gramophone in 1906, one can immediately distinguish the dominant polyphony in which trumpets and drums are played.48 As evinced by these snapshots, I surmise that the initial stages of the changing military sounds in Iran came about through listening to European military bands. Listeners to the European bands were primarily charmed by the new kind of music they heard in Iran and abroad, which led in later stages to further pursuing the newly emerging interest – attending more military parades, revisiting European cities, inviting European bands to Iran, purchasing European musical instruments and later, in the early twentieth century, procuring phonographic records from Europe and Russia.49 Also significant in this period was the compilation of several military manuals by the military staff at the Dār al-Fonun. These texts dealt with military tactics and regimental training and laid the basic theoretical foundation for reforming the Persian army. Similar to photography manuals that I examined in the previous chapter, these books can be approached as cultural objects standing at the juncture between materials and discourses. Below I examine these sources to show the acoustic logic of ordering and organising movement in these modern practices. Manuals of reform In this section, I closely examine three military manuals and briefly look at a fourth, written by the staff and graduates of Dār al-Fonun. The first title in the series belongs to the Austrian instructor August Krziz. Alongside his collaboration in military training, he taught physics at the institute and authored a very well-known book of physics, which came to be known as Austrian Physics (Fizik-e Namsāvi). Similar to other coursebooks at the college, Krziz’s book on the military was available only in translation. It is not clear to me if the Persian version was translated from a German or French version, or simply transcribed from his lectures. The book begins by introducing the infantry divisions according to the Western standards and their adaptations in the Iranian army. In its first few pages, it reintroduces a terminological framework, taken up a few decades before in the army of ʿAbbās Mirzā but applied on a very limited scale, for ordering and naming the various units in an army: company (daste) foot soldiers (sarbāz), sergeant (vakilbāshi), lieutenant (nāyebdaw), artillery battery (tupchi), and corporal (dahbāsh).50 Krziz describes in detail the formations these divisions should stand in or move in, how they should adjust their bodies with respect to their peers and to their commanding officers, and what movements they should perform. These details are elaborated with the help of terminologies translated or transliterated to Persian. The order to stop, for example, is given by the word “hālt (German halt)”, the command to

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march is transliterated as “mārsh” (German marsch) and the word front by “feront” (German front).51 Almost half the text deals with marching. Instructions lay out how soldiers should make their steps with respect to the commands issued by their commanding officers. The positions for each officer are carefully described to maximise the impact of their commands’ receptivity. The lieutenants’ and colonels’ places are precisely set up with respect to the companies and factions (fāksion) they manage. The text contains more than fifty different kinds of commands, meticulously explaining every possible condition that might arise for different battalion formations. These commands are densely stratified and adhere to a clear hierarchy. Below I translate an excerpt from the treatise to show how every movement is command-regulated. Sometimes it becomes necessary to form a square. To do so, the captain gives the order, “make square!”. The first section (bahra) march with their right arm stretched out while the two rear sections march with their left arms stretched out. In the first section the officer stands to the left, whence [after the section marches to a certain point] he orders “Halt!”. Immediately, the officer of the fourth section, standing to the right, gives the order “march with left hand forward!” (mārsh bāzu chap pish) until the square is formed.52

In this short excerpt, three commanding officers work together to form a square, namely, the captain and two lieutenants. They give their commands loudly to make sure every soldier of their section hears them clearly. Such a command-ridden logic pervades the entire text and sometimes reaches a level of complexity and technicality that requires a translator specialised in military history to render it into modern English. What is important to bear in mind is that this logic stood in stark contrast to how the Persian army previously operated in battle and how it was trained before the Dār al-Fonun. In one of the well-known primary sources that reflects the military conditions of the Afsharid era, Nāder Shāh’s (r. 1736-1747) confidant and historian Mirzā Mehdi Khān Astarābādi (d. 1759 or 1768), describes Nāder’s war with the Afghans with details that shed light on how military practices were observed at the time. He mentions that when the Persian army reaches the frontline, Nāder “orders them to keep their ground in a most profound silence” so that “they can hear his orders instantly: his voice … is uncommonly clear and strong”.53 There is of course a tinge of exaggeration in Astarābādi’s account, and it is not clear how exactly Nāder issued his orders to such a sizeable and ethnically diverse army. But the fact that such a moment of silence was worthy of mention in the text suggests that it must have been a noticeable moment in the military culture of the time. To substantiate this claim, let me refer to Rudi Matthee’s study of the Safavid army. Matthee suggests that nomad-warriors were largely dismissive of the

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new methods and techniques, for example, the use of firearms for the cavalry, on account of being “unmanly”.54 Receiving orders for every movement on the battlefield might have also been frowned upon by such chauvinistic proud warriors. On the whole, studies of Persian military history give the impression that the nomadbased army in Iran, whose strategical and tactical repertoires continued well into the early nineteenth century, did not follow a complicated command system but relied on the prowess and skills executed by individual warriors.55 In contrast, on account of Krziz’s military manual and other Dār al-Fonun-related instructors about whom I write below, the very notion of a soldier was transformed: no longer a warrior with physical and tactical autonomy in the field, oblivious to being told which foot to put forward first, but a soldier bereft of any distinctive personal trait and entirely dependent on the commands given to him by his officers. Another Persian military manual in the nineteenth century, The Rules of Military Drills (Qavāʿed-e Mashq-e Neẓām) elaborates on the importance of commands for the reformation of the military and outlines the conditions in which commands have to be uttered. The manual is a collection of three texts from 1883, 1854, and 1860.56 According to the first, the only one I could access, “commands should be clear and brief as much as possible as the fineness (ḥosn) and the result of movements depend on the manner in which commands are given”.57 The author further divides commands into two general categories, namely, akhbār and aḥkām. The former signifies the outcome of the movement meant by the command and the latter determines the timeline in which the movement must be executed. This latter, as the manual unpacks, “has to be uttered most quickly and succinctly”, which makes it crucial that the commander silences the drums and trumpets with the movement of his sword before issuing his command “in all the movements ordinated by drums and trumpets”. It is only after the drumbeats and trumpets stop that the commander can utter his command “in ways that it is clearly heard” by his troops. This manual also gives prominence to the role of drums and trumpets in the military march: Everyone should march a certain distance at a certain time. Hence, a soldier should always accord his foot rhythm (āhang-e pā) to the same interval for every step. The rhythm and the step distance are determined by the beats of the military musical instruments, that is, drums and trumpets (ṭabl va sheypur).58

These instruments were used for disciplinary, not aesthetic purposes. The soldiers, as the manual makes clear, must “get used to that rhythm and step-distance so that without the drums and trumpets they would be able to maintain (morāʿāt) the same rhythm and measure”. By regulating the timing of the drumbeats and trumpet patterns, the march must reach an advanced enough level that

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the whole troop moves as one single person (shakhṣ-e vāḥed) and when their marching steps become [temporally and spatially] identical, the earth would trill to their step-beats, and this would fill the enemy’s heart with fear and anxiety.59

The concept of a soldier, as we can see from these excerpts, breaks away from the nomad model. The individual soldiers are no longer recognised in terms of their personal traits but dissolve into a larger non-personal military construct. The use of drums and trumpets is not restricted to marching nor to drills. According to the manual, the signalling instruments must be used in battle as well, particularly while soldiers are engaged in firearm confrontations. As the text instructs, gunfire can only happen when there are several troops available. They have to then form successive rows and adjust their reload timing so as to make sure that “the frontline of the battalion is not left fire-less (bi-ātash)”. And whenever shooting must stop, “the captain announces it with the drums and trumpets”. This usage can immediately be put in contrast with the older military regimes during the Safavid and Afsharid periods. The Iranian military historian Jamil Quzanlu, in his two-volume Military History of Iran (Tārikh-e Neẓāmi-ye Irān), in describing the late-Safavid fighting style does not mention any musical instrument, whether in battle or in drills. For instance, he describes how a firing squad change their positions after shooting one round and give their place to the next row, without any intermediary command regulating their manoeuvre.60 Only in the second half of the nineteenth century, following the military instructions given by Dār al-Fonun’s European staff, did disciplinary and signalling drums and trumpets find their way into the army. The manual The Rules of Military Drills contains many instances in which drums and trumpets are mentioned as signalling instruments, not only on a macro-scale initiating and ending a battle but also on a micro-scale regulating minor movements in battle. Next to the aforementioned examples, these sound instruments, as per the manual, also function as micro-signals for soldiers to know when to reload their muskets during shootouts. The third book, written by another Dār al-Fonun staff member, known as Monsieur Buhler, deals with more functions for drums and trumpets. As for their importance, on the front cover, a bouquet of two swords, a musket, one kettledrum and a trumpet frame the book title (figure 7). The text, originally written in French, deals with tactical offensive/defensive movements and contains several diagrams in 980 bullet points, each distinctively numbered in red ink. In comparison to the other two books, Buhler’s book, Movement of the Regiments, covers more detail about the commands. For instance, he mentions that the commands issued by the captain can be repeated by the lieutenants so that they are certain to be heard by the soldiers. Furthermore, it deals with a much wider range of regimental movements, not only marches. In one noticeable example, Buhler pays attention

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Figure 7. The frontispiece of the military manual Movement of the Regiments by the French instructor Buhler. The lithographed book, published in 1866, is held at the Iran National Library.

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to the position of the music band during the infantry extraction from the barracks. Accordingly, “first, walk the état-majeur (etāmājor), flute players (bālābānchiān), and music bands, and then the company moves in a straight line”.61 The procession should proceed to the captain’s lodge in silence, without drumbeat or trumpet sounds. When the captain joins the columns and the companies pass the main gate, the music band is ordered to play a short pattern as a salute to the infantry.62 The text continues to explain various infantry formations, for which signalling instruments are often mentioned. In one example, we read that to join several lines (khaṭṭ) together, the captain orders “the beating of signalling kettledrums (ṭabl-e ekhbār)”, which are then accompanied by flute (balabān) players.63 The trumpets are moreover used whenever the soldiers must converge on one point backwards. Or, in another example, for the battalion to form a square (qalʿe) formation, the captain begins with ordering the drumbeats to start, with the flute players tailing their respective companies. Meanwhile, the drummers remain in fixed positions in all the cases. These signallers (mokhberān) are chosen from the most experienced officers in the army as they ensure the orderly execution of most commands, and most critically, must guide the soldiers in case they fail to attain the required formations, or in case of chaos (eghteshāsh) when the companies lose coordination during their movements. Containing more details than any other manual, Movement of the Regiments also describes how the battalion must march before a dignitary. This action occurs in a similar fashion in taʿziye preludes, which I elaborate more on later in this chapter. The text regulates this important non-battle performance by precise positioning and timing of the music bands (muzikanchiān) and drummers (ṭabbālān).64 These sound-makers are positioned at the front of their troops, where they begin playing their kettledrums, trumpets, and flutes (bālābāns). When each company covers a certain distance before the dignitary, the flute players move towards the end of the procession. Once they arrive, they stop playing and continue with the march, giving way to the next battalion who then repeat the same pattern with the drummers and flute players.65

The cultural influence of the military Put in context, these textual objects are not just written texts but cultural catalysts. The drums and trumpets in military drills and in battle became, shortly after their introduction to the Persian army, a cultural attraction and, as I argue, an addition to a military necessity. Military sounds, in a word, oscillated between aesthetics and discipline in this cultural context. In this regard, Negin Nabavi has drawn attention to how important military music was in the Dār al-Fonun, where “a special yard”

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was allocated to musical practices (ḥayāṭ-e makhṣuṣ-e muzik).66 From around 1878 onwards, all the Shah’s visits to the Dār al-Fonun included a fanfare played by the military band in training.67 Prior to this, his visits had been welcomed by military drills followed by sermon recitations (khoṭbakhwāni), but no fanfare or musical performance.68 In 1868, with the recruitment of Lemaire, military music was institutionally established and even acquired a separate department at the school.69 Through these revised music programs, which were particularly focused on but not limited to military music, the court culture began to be exposed to Western music. These reforms in music programs, however, had little bearing on the army as such. Although meant to improve the army’s dire condition, the military reform in the Dār al-Fonun had more cultural than technical effects on the military. Hence, it may not be an exaggeration to say that military reforms came to be associated more lastingly with cultural innovations than with the Iranian army’s successful modernisation. This cultural side-effect is most visibly reflected in several issues of the Vaqāyeʿ newspaper from 1852 to 1876. More than forty issues of the newspaper report the mixing of military drills with religious sermons on special occasions such as the birthdays of notable religious figures or even mourning days.70 Especially during Moḥarram, when taʿziye performances were performed nationwide, the courtyard at the Dār al-Fonun turned into a takkye where taʿziye rituals took place. During this time, military drills were suspended, and the trainees participated in the ʿĀshurā rituals instead.71 In the Moḥarram of 1853, as one example among many others, Nāṣer al-Din Shāh called for one thousand cavalry units from Turkish, Mazandarani, and Kurdish ethnicities to come to Tehran for the royal parade during the ʿĀshurā mourning rituals.72 This cross-fertilisation also took place earlier in the Safavid era. As Babak Rahimi has shown, Shāh Abbās I occasionally performed Moḥarram rituals before his attacks in the battles he fought against the Sunni Ottomans. However, these rituals were not yet dramatised.73 This coterminous enactment of military practices and taʿziye rituals created the possibility for exchange between the two performative setups. For soldiers, both taʿziye and military parades were disciplinary measures they had to follow every year. For the statesmen, they represented the splendour of the government. In this setting, the sustained effect of military performances, whether as drills, parades, or fanfares, could potentially change taʿziye’s performative setting, especially its acoustic space. To what extent can this change be traced to taʿziye performances in the period? How can the resonances between the military logic, as reflected in the military manuals discussed above, and the performative arrangements in taʿziye be characterised? In the next section, I look more closely into taʿziye performances performed in the second half of the century. Drawing on several primary sources,

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I reconstruct the proceedings in these passion performances with a particular focus on its soundscape. I show how the sonic expressions in taʿziye drew on the emerging military practices and synthesised a novel acoustic space characterised by both disciplinary and emotive constituents.

Taʿziye: A short history The taʿziye performances that many Westerners and Iranians witnessed in the nineteenth century were the pinnacle of a religious ritual that began to form a few centuries before the Qājārs, during the Safavid era. The early versions of the ritual were much simpler. The mourning was mainly performed in processions (daste) comprised of ordinary people and a few leaders walking down a passage smiting their chests and flagellating themselves with metal chains. As for musical instruments, cymbals and horns were occasionally used, but no other sound-making tools. Depending on the period and place, some processions had choirs and some others made use of one-man recitations (naqqāli). But it was only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that these varied practices coalesced into what we recognise today as taʿziye and the variegated practices transformed into a stage-based drama.74 Shiʿa communities around the world have consistently practised the mourning rituals of their third Imām Ḥoseyn Ebn-e ʿAli, who died along with his seventy odd companions in Karbala during Moḥarram in the year 680. Ḥoseyn’s retinue refused to acknowledge the sovereignty of the Sunni caliph Yazid Ebn-e Moʿāwiya whose troops had a clear advantage as they vastly outnumbered the few Shiʿa dissidents in the middle of their exodus from Medina. Fully aware of the outcome, and too stubborn to yield, Ḥoseyn and his followers died one after another during the ten days of the siege, with a few family members taken captive.75 Ḥoseyn’s death took place on the final day, the tenth day of Moḥarram, ʿĀshurā, known among the Persian speaking Shiʿas as the day of murder (ruz-e qatl). In his lifelong study of taʿziye, Peter Chelkowski notes that Moḥarram rituals had been particularly welcomed by the Shiʿas from very early on since the events at Karbala. As he states, “the annual Moḥarram mourning ceremonies were observed with great pageantry and emotion”, from as early as the ninth century.76 According to another scholar of taʿziye and Moḥarram rituals, Kamran Aghaie, “mourning for Ḥoseyn and his fallen supporters at Karbala began almost immediately after the massacre when Ḥoseyn’s surviving relatives and supporters lamented the tragedy”.77 However, there is evidence only from the tenth century onward that such mourning practices turn into ceremonies and rituals proper. There are records that show the rituals took place in the tenth century in the form of processions of

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men in black outfits matching their blackened faces.78 During these processions, the mourners beat their chests and chanted together while parading around the city during most of the day.79 These rituals lasted for ten days and culminated in the most mournful state during the tenth day, when the chest-beating and self-flagellation were practiced widely and intensely.80 With the Safavid dynasty rising to power and the concomitant institutionalisation of Shiism in Iran, Moḥarram rituals found state patronage and henceforth became an integral part of religious and national sentiments. As such, these ritual forms had not yet become taʿziye proper. There were no actors playing Ḥoseyn and his companions in Karbala and the visual/sonic expressions remained mostly unrehearsed. According to Chelkowski, it was only in the mid-eighteenth century, long after the fall of the Safavid empire, that the processional rituals merged with another performative technique in the Iranian milieu, namely, recitation (naqqāli) – a synthesis that shaped the ritual into a dramatic performance. This latter practice, naqqāli, took on various forms and genres. In its broadest manifestation, as the Iranian theatre-maker and scholar Bahram Bayzai has noted, naqqāli was the public recitation of (an) event(s) or stories, “in prose or verse with elaborate bodily gestures”.81 This performative art dated back to as early as the eighth century.82 The story-telling recitations recounted mostly pre-Islamic folktales and mythologies. Later, during the Safavid era, they incorporated Shiʿa historical ingredients drawing mostly from the martyrdom-ridden repertoires in Shiism. During this period, the narrators performed their stories in coffeehouses and caravanserais where they enjoyed a permanent audience.83 Among the many derivative genres of naqqāli were panegyric recitation (maddāḥi) and the more specialised form known as rawḍakhwāni, focused only on the life of Shiʿa martyrs.84 It was ultimately this very rawḍakhwāni that mingled with ʿĀshurā rituals and turned into what we know today as taʿziye performances.85 Taʿziyes were initially performed in public spaces, with performers carving out a space from a square or a courtyard before a coffeehouse – a practice known as “taking hold of a battlefield” (maʿarakagiri).86 Later in the nineteenth century, special places and buildings were allocated for the performative ceremonies, known as takkye. They could be as small as a tent or as large as a theatre hall, accommodating as little as fifty to as many as a thousand or more participants. The actions always took place on and around a circular stage, which was in most cases slightly elevated from the ground. Several sessions (majles) were performed throughout the whole ten days, each of which focussed on one individual, hence majles-e Qāsem, majles-e ʿAbdollāh, and so on. In larger takkyes, several such sessions were performed for hours on end. The final day was exclusively reserved for Ḥoseyn’s death, but was always preceded by other sessions, sometimes even comedic ones that spun off the main ʿĀshurā events similar to the grave diggers’ scene in Hamlet.87

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What was, and continues to be, especially fascinating about taʿziye is the viewers’ intimate involvement with the performance. Unlike other contemporaneous theatrical forms around the world, taʿziye requires the participation of the audience in the emotive dramatisation of the events at Karbala. As Andrzej Wirth has astutely suggested, unlike any other theatrical tradition, taʿziye sources its emotive power from the audience experience and minimises the actors’ involvement in the performance setup. The characters’ emotional experience is not represented by the actors but only hinted at and then relegated to the audience to act out. The viewers, and not the actors, are the characters’ emotional carriers. The actors remain simply the cueing devices, guiding the audience in their dramatic experience.88 They are therefore called likenesses (shabih), not in a representational sense as they do not embody the characters, but in the way a figure in a miniature painting is called a shabih.89 If in a miniature painting a figure is recognised by indexical mimesis, as I elaborated in the previous chapter, in the taʿziye performative setting, figures of Ḥoseyn and his companions are indexed visually but also, and centrally, sonically – a certain drum pattern, a trumpet call, or a change in the singing register. From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, taʿziye evolved on many levels: the performers became more professional, the costumes more elaborate, the poems more developed, the acts more complex, and above all, the soundscape became more pronounced and multi-layered. This sonic aspect was the most significant component in taʿziye as it was the main medium for carrying out the emotive experience for the audience. Taʿziye’s visuality, although elaborate in its own terms, was subjugated to the performance acoustics. It was above all through sound, whether in singing, chanting, signalling, or music, that mood was communicated to the audience.90 From the very beginning of the session, even before the act, acoustic signs guide the audience and help them adjust their attention and regulate their emotions. I will substantiate this claim by providing evidence later. Below, I examine this acoustic aspect in more detail. Looking into about ten first-hand accounts of taʿziye performances in the nineteenth century, I reconstruct how taʿziye was performed from an acoustic perspective. The aim is to show how the performance borrowed key techniques from military practices throughout the nineteenth century. The sources I examine are travel literatures and memoirs written by Europeans as well as Iranians. The earliest account dates back to 1812 and the latest to 1910.

Cueing and organising: taʿziye reconstructed Below, I reconstruct certain scenes and sections of taʿziye performances. Their setups constitute two parts: prologues and the main acts. For each part, I go through

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my sources chronologically, beginning from 1812, and move through the materials in a comparative fashion. In this way, I intend to show how taʿziye sounds and sonic orders changed in the nineteenth century. Prologues The British diplomat and orientalist William Ouseley (d. 1842), who was among the most influential politicians during the British quasi-colonialist projects in Iran, witnessed the Moḥarram rituals of January 1812.91 What he saw consisted of both public processions and semi-private taʿziye performances performed in various locations in the country. According to Ouseley’s account, ʿĀshurā rituals lasted for ten days, on each of which a portion of the melancholy story is publicly recited in the streets of every town, by priests and others, to crowds of people who express their sympathy and grief not only by groans and sighs, but by howls of very suspicious loudness, violent beating of breasts, rending of garments, and even tears.92

He further hears many chants in “a whining tone of voice ‘Yā Ḥoseyn! Yā Ḥoseyn!’”.93 These are the sounds he hears in the streets, around the squares, and in the bazaars. He also had the chance to view a few taʿziye sessions in their entireties, one of which in the company of Fatḥʿali Shāh.94 Ouseley describes this session in much more detail, noticing first and foremost the visual splendour of the takkye in which the taʿziye was performed and the overwhelming presence of the (mostly female) public. That particular taʿziye took place in a public square in Tehran that had been made into a takkye temporarily and compartmentalised, to satisfy the royal attendance as well as the dramatic requirements. The performance, from Ouseley’s viewpoint, begins with a group circling the stage “carrying on their shoulders the Prophet’s coffin” adorned by “a pall of gold-embroidered cloth blazing with the lustre of diamonds, emeralds and rubies”.95 Ouseley does not notice any sound element during this prologue. Another British diplomat who was Ouseley’s contemporary, James Justinian Morier (d. 1849), observes the same prologue procession in one of the sessions he joins in 1811, with more or less the same adorned coffin, which is “borne on the shoulders of eight men” and “covered with precious stones”.96 But he also notices a few more items in the prologue, some of which are sonorous. Before the Prophet’s coffin is brought in, Morier witnesses “a stout man, naked from the waist upward, balancing in his girdle a long thick pole, surmounted by an ornament made of tin”, who is further followed by another half-naked man who chants “verses with all his might in praise of the King”.97 Later, after a few groups pass by, Morier sees

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“a body of fierce-looking men, with only a loose white sheet thrown over their naked bodies”, who “sing a sort of hymn, the tones of which are very wild”.98 This prologue procession, in Morier’s view, ends with a sound-making group, whose only instruments are “two pieces of wood” which they thump together. These wood-striking sound-makers are “marshalled by a maître de ballet, who stands in the middle to regulate their movements, they perform a dance, clapping their hands in the best possible time”.99 The master’s role also includes a recitation act, “to which the dancers join at different intervals with loud shouts and reiterate clapping of their pieces of wood”.100 Ouselely observes this extraordinary dance as well, but not as part of the prologue, but rather, as an epilogue at the end of the whole performance. In brief, according to the two Englishmen, the sonic expressions in the prologue are limited to hymns, recitations, and the wood-striking sounds of the dancers. No other sound instruments are reported. Almost three decades later, only a year into the reign of Nāṣer al-Din Shāh, an English woman named Lady Mary Leonora Woulfe Sheil (d. 1869) notes down her experience with taʿziye. As the wife of an English envoy to the Qājār court, she had the privilege of attending quite a few royal events, including taʿziye performances. She witnessed the taʿziye ceremonies of the Moḥarram/December of 1848. Similar to Ouseley and Morier, she attended a royal taʿziye, though this time in a theatre hall designed for this purpose.101 Just like the earlier versions performed thirty-odd years before, the one Sheil witnesses begins with a procession, though with different elements parading around the circular stage: “camels, led horses caparisoned,” and “kajawās”102 which circle around the slightly elevated platform in the middle, and sonorously more significant, trumpets and kettledrums which “resound far and near”.103 This is the first time that the use of military sound instruments in taʿziye is recorded. Yet, Sheil does not mention hearing them during the main taʿziye. The kettledrums and trumpets aside, she takes heed of the peculiar soundscape that overwhelms her from all around. To her ears, taʿziye is full of “extraordinary and ludicrous” sounds and noises, “which one is sometimes inclined to mistake for laughter”.104 These weeping sounds, as Sheil notes, come from the intimately involved audience who “act” the sounds “with great spirit and judgement”.105 The audience, in her eyes, become one entity, much like how the Rules of Military Drills (Qavāʿed-e Mashq-e Neẓām) requires the soldiers to “move as one single person (shakhṣ-e vāḥed)” in such an orderly and harmonised fashion that “the earth would trill to their step-beats”. A few years later, in his book published in 1879, the British lieutenant Lewis Pelly describes his prolonged observation during the 1850s and 60s of taʿziye performances in Iran and India. As an officer in the East India Company, he witnessed taʿziye performances in a wider Shiʿa territory and even translated an extensive collection of the sessions into English as The Miracle Play: Hasan and Husain Collected

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from Oral Tradition. In his preface to the book, Pelly writes about his experience with and observations of taʿziye during his decade-long career in the Indo-Iranian region. More particularly, he describes a few sessions that he witnessed himself. In one such account, we read how sonic cues are used already in the late 1850s. Pelly notes that before the play begins, the audience is cued into silence “by the muffled beating of a drum, in slow time” and with “the measured beats becoming fainter and more faint” people are ushered into their seats and wait for the show to begin.106 This silence brings to mind the silence of Nāder Shāh’s army right before their offensive charge against the enemy. Just as Nāder’s soldiers needed that silence to hear their leader’s voice, the participants and actors in taʿziye required a moment of rest and quiet to be able to follow their prompter’s signals. In Pelly’s account, the prologue starts with a sermon given by a clergyman from a pulpit. Already in this prologue, Pelly hears loud cries and moaning from the audience, who have gradually built up their emotions and tune into the sound of the sermon. Their sobs and cries are then followed by the audience smiting their chests loudly and rhythmically, chanting yā ʿAli, yā Ḥasan, yā Ḥoseyn. To curb this rather early climax, as Pelly notes, the performers draw on a sonic technique. Forming a sort of chorus, they begin “chanting, in regular Gregorian music, a metrical version of the story, which calls back the audience from themselves, and imperceptibly at last soothes and quiets them again. Only then the main dramatic scenes can begin”.107 Belgian voyager and writer Caroline Hartog Morgensthein, pseudonym Carla Serena, witnessed a much more elaborate musical prologue in the winter of 1877 in Tehran. In the prologue she sees, the processions are “pompous and of all genres who circled the sakku [the elevated platform used as the stage]”.108 The adorned camels and horses appear in the same way Ouseley, Morier, and Sheil witnessed. But at the end of the procession comes a music band that plays “Persian tunes on European instruments” and is led by a French music chef.109 A contemporaneous British physician, C.J. Wills, describes two bands in his Persia as It Is, who play “sonorous discord, irrespective of each other”.110 Serena hears the cacophonous sounds produced by the rest of the performers as well as the audience, led by certain masters who signal and cue the participants by hitting their sticks against the ground or swinging them in the air. These cue-men are observed in all the previous testimonies: in Ouseley’s case they are half-naked; in Morier’s case they lead the dance and the wooden-striking parade, and in Pelly’s case they are responsible for bringing the chaos back to order. The performances of the cue-men and their masters parallel the actions of foot-soldiers and their captains in the military. In a very similar way to how the infantry had to follow their commander’s order according to the procedure laid out in Rules of Military Drills (Qavāʿed-e Mashq-e Neẓām), the dancers and the

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audience in taʿziye followed the sound cues performed on stage. This parallel can also be read in the travelogue of the late-nineteenth-century American journalist and diplomat Samual Benjamin. His descriptions, in contrast to others discussed so far, are much more sensitive to sounds. The session he describes took place in 1882-3. As he testifies, it was the fifth day of Moḥarram and the sessions were to be performed in the by then fully constructed takkye dawlat. The performance in that year follows the same style as before, namely, with a processional prologue proceeding a public sermon. In the procession, Benjamin sees the same group of dancers who strike wooden blocks in a rhythmic fashion. He further hears “the strains of martial music” which give the impression of “a funeral dirge”.111 This, Benjamin notes, “was one of the military bands of the Shah and was followed in steady procession by six other regimental bands, each in turn striking up a minor strain”.112 An Iranian dignitary and a Dār al-Fonun graduate, Dustʿali Moʿayyeri gives a bit more detail regarding this military musical performance in the prologue. In a royal taʿziye performed in 1888, for instance, Moʿayyeri writes that “the first music band carries musical instruments of silver which queen Victoria has gifted the Shah in one of his visits to England.” The second band, he adds, “are qazzāq cavalry”113 who are guided by a Persian music master”.114 The inclusion of this aspect, once again, foregrounds how taʿziye and military disciplines were closely tied. When the procession ends, Benjamin observes a scene none of our previous historical interlocutors has noticed. He sees a file of children entering the stage, “dressed in green”; the actors standing next to them. When they come to a halt, “on the solemn silence” in between the processions, “like the thrill of a bird at night, comes the voice of one of the children, low and solemn, then rising to a high, clear tone indescribably wild and thrillingly pathetic – a tragic ode of remarkable effect and power”.115 Other children and actors join the child, “one by one, until a sublime choral elegy pealed over the vast arena with such an agony of sound that it actually seemed as if these actors in this theatrical scene were giving expression of their own death-song”.116 And then the main act begins. Regarding the role of children, Benjamin elaborates more in his book. As he writes, a traveller in Iran during Moḥarram “will be surprised by a sound which is especially remarkable in the comparative stillness of an oriental city. It is the voice of children singing in clear tones, snatches of a song he [the traveller] has never heard before”.117 The sound of children singing these “weird” tunes, Benjamin further explains, has “a distinct individuality of its own, a musical cadence that fixes the attention, and touches the chords of the emotions”.118 Benjamin attests to the fact that children pick up those tunes from taʿziye performances, which they have either heard as the audience or the singers on-stage. This practice of using children as singers is called bachchekhwāni, literally meaning child-singing. Children were

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often assigned to sing mournful hymns and songs representing either the children or the women in Karbala. Once again, we can see how the appearance of the actors mattered much less than their sonic expressions. It was more significant for taʿziye directors to give a realistic vocal impression to the audience than a visual one, a preference that makes children more suitable for female roles. Another Persian dignitary, writer, and statesman A ʿ bdollāh Mostawfi (d. 1941), in his Sharḥ-e Zendegāni-ye Man (Portrait of My Life), records the most acute observation of taʿziye performances in the Persian language. During his time, in the 1900s, the procession continued to use military music and the wood-striking dance remained in place. Mostawfi, however, gives more details and subtleties only perceptible to a native eye.119 For instance, he draws attention to the rawḍakhwānis which preceded the processions, the same as the one Ouseley, Morier, and Serena dubbed “sermons given on the pulpit”. Mostawfi, however, notes that “no one listened to these rawẓas. Not even one single moan could be heard from the women.120 He also describes the prologue procession: the military music band wearing blue uniforms with white stripes and being led by an Iranian music master. They are then followed by another music band, naqqārechihā who carried karnā, dohol, and drums. These bands, Mostawfi further points out, continue to play throughout the whole procession.121 He notices the wood-striking band as well, who wear the same outfits and have wooden blocks wrapped around their hands, “which they strike against one another to the sound of dirge (nawḥe)”.122 They continue their parade until they reach the Shah’s box, whereupon they increase the rhythm to three beats per a specific (undefined) period of time. Mostawfi testifies that an “ear-scratching sound comes out of the wood-striking, and to my view it resembles a dance more than mourning”.123 What he sees becomes very close to what Monsieur Buhler instructs in his book Movement of the Regiments. In the latter’s case, the music band that leads the infantry to their captain’s lodge beat a shorter drum pattern once at the lodge, much like how the dancers increase their rhythm in front of the Shah’s seat. Sonic expressions were not limited to the prologues in taʿziye performances. Within the main body of the performance, too, different sounds reverberated in the arena. The military sounds, however, did not echo as explicitly as they did in the prologue, yet to a certain extent influenced the acoustics of the performance. Main acts Ouseley reports in his entry to taʿziye that when the main part begins, he would immediately become enthralled by the visual grandeur of the arena, and not surprisingly he ignores the acoustic elements in the sessions. We can only deduce a few auditory elements from his ocularcentric account, namely the moaning and

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lamentation sounds produced on and around the stage. But by and large, vision dominates Ouseley’s experience.124 This lack of attention to sound elements might have been due to Ouseley’s sensory preference. However, reading his contemporary, Morier, another explanation would seem plausible, namely, the fact that as high ranking officials, their “distance from the stage was too great to hear the many affecting things” taking place on the stage.125 It might have been the case that given their distance from the centre, they could only make out the musical bits in the prologue due to the less noisy reception of this part by the audience. Therefore, Ouseley and Morier might have missed the more complex soundscape of the main acts, which provoked a much louder reaction from the audience. If that is the case, from their seating point, they could only hear the cacophony of loud cries, sobs, moaning, and the chattering all mixed up and indistinguishable. However, this hypothesis is, overall, less convincing, given Samuel Benjamin’s account, analysed further below. Lady Sheil’s account, too, has the same ocularcentric component due to her sensory predisposition, and possibly also her distance from the stage. Similarly, Carla Serena and Pelly shy away from describing much sonority during the main acts. While Serena is more concerned with the actors’ costumes and the predominantly visual displays of the mise en scène, Pelly pays more attention to the public parades in Bombay and its processual unfolding. It is with Samuel Benjamin, whose observation of taʿziye performances shows a particularly insightful knowledge about its affective modes, that the taʿziye’s visual layer is bypassed and the acoustic aspects become more pronounced. Pointing to the rather underdeveloped mise en scène in the main acts, Benjamin writes that “it was not things but men that riveted the rapt attention of the vast audience; not material objects, but the achievements and utterances of the souls gazing down the vistas of time from the shining pinnacles of moral grandeur”.126 Unlike the previous witnesses to taʿziye, Benjamin has a more acoustically attuned sensorium, or perhaps he was closer to the stage than Morrier and Serena. In a perceptive description, next to noticing the visual clues given by the actors’ outfits, Benjamin takes special interest in the taʿziye director, whom he terms “prompter”.127 This weeping coordinator128, always present on the stage, “walked unconcernedly on the stage, and gave hints to the players or placed the younger actors in their position.129 At the proper moment also, by a motion of the hand, he gives the order for the music to strike up or stop”.130 The sounds that the stage director orders came from a music band “stationed at the top of the building”.131 They play, as Benjamin specifies, kettledrums and horns that sound “harsh and doleful, and startling enough to awake the dead”. The instruments, especially the horns, are to Benjamin’s eyes and ears distinctively Persian and sound as if they belonged to “the prehistoric days of Shah Jamsheed”. These auditory clues frame

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each scene and signal extradiegetically to both the actors and the audience that a certain time, space, or narration ended. At times, they are also played diegetically within a particular scene to indicate that a certain character sets out to go to battle and begin a fight.132 These two kinds of signals can be immediately compared to the two kinds of signals used in the military, namely the previously mentioned akhbār and aḥkām commands in Rules of Military Drills (Qavāʿed-e Mashq-e Neẓām). While akhbār is analogous to the extradiegetic cues, only defining the movement, aḥkām can be compared to the diegetic cues which regulate the internal temporal structure of the movements. Akhbār or aḥkām, extradiegetic or diegetic, once played, the “fierce music stimulated the glowing enthusiasm of the faithful and nerved their zeal for events yet more tragic and sublime”.133 Among such tragic events, one scene appealed to Benjamin most, which he describes with special attention to its sonic quality. The scene dramatises the individual mission of Ḥoseyn’s nephew A ʿ li Akbar who batters away at Yazid’s army to get to water sources. While circling the stage, the actor-model for this character sings “pathetic tones” predicting his death. His singing, as Benjamin recounts enthusiastically, “rang forth like a trumpet to the furthest hook of the vast building, and the response came in united wailings from the thousands gathered there”.134 C.J. Wills witnessed in 1887 a similar session dramatising the same character in which, upon A ʿ li Akbar’s departure for the fight, “the drums roll, the trumpets sound” and “men and women beat their breasts”.135 French diplomat Eugène Aubin, too, notices the use of sounds during the main acts in 1906-7.136 The stage manager had to fulfil the most important role on the stage, one that was particularly attentive to its acoustics. He was the organising connector between the actors, the audience, and the music bands. From Mostawfi ’s account, it is evident that “his [the manager’s] orders to the taʿziyekhāns are signalled by his hands and those to the music bands by his cane”137, another function analogous to military akhbār and aḥkām commands. This subtle detail, which I have not found in other testimonies, shows how disciplined sound management must have been in taʿziye performances. In Benjamin’s account, the whole place went through a trance-like acoustic experience: Beginning in a low murmur like the sigh of a coming gale, the strange sound arose and fell like the weird music of the south wind in the rigging of a ship careening in a dark night on the swelling surges of an Atlantic storm. For several moments sobs and sighs, and now and again a half-suppressed shriek, swept from one side of the building to the other.138

It was as if a sonic wave swept the arena from side to side. Ouseley, Morier, Sheila, and Serena must have missed quite a lot by focusing too much on the actors’

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appearance and spoken words. The performance provided sonic ex/impressions adding an essential dimension to the taʿziye setup. In fact, as Benjamin rightly observes, without taking part in the auditory scaffolding of the performance, there would be no taʿziye. Regarding the significance of sonic signs next to visual ones, I agree completely with Wirth that what happened on stage went a long way beyond symbolic or iconic representations. The actors did not resemble the actual characters but only carried one or two signs that marked them visually. These signs, a red cloth around the helmet, a green overall, a shroud (kafan) or a sword, were icons and symbols used indexically. They did not represent a character by virtue of resemblance or by convention but simply outlined a sketch, drawing attention to their actions and tagging their vocal performance. These singular icons/symbols did not embody a character but only guided viewers’ attention: this is Shimr speaking, that is ʿAli Akbar, and so on. What is being represented is the horror of signs, not a horror of actions. The “climax” is not the physical death of the Imam from the (antidramatic) blows he receives on stage, but the moment he dresses in a kafan. In this moment he becomes a sign carrier of his own martyrdom. The kafan is … an iconic sign. But it also functions as a sign of death, that is to say as a symbol. This symbolic sign is then used in the fashion of an index.139

Therefore, from a semiotic standpoint, all visual signs transform into indices and as such, they carry a bare minimum of signifying power. As Wirth has it, meaning-making takes place before the taʿziye proper, in the memories deposited in the Perso-Shiʿa collective imagination of the actual events in Karbala and the narrational traditions handed down ever since. A speck of blood displayed on the right spot was enough to bring into mind a whole series of events and characters; a horse missing its rider was enough for viewers to recall ʿAli Akbar’s death. taʿziye did not enact meanings, nor did it make new ones. Rather, it was a theatrical machinery that produced bare reciprocating emotions between the stage and the audience. Hence, the underdeveloped and crude props and mise en scène with an asymmetrically advanced sonic quality. It was ultimately the sounds that produced and mediated the affects in between the audience and the stage, and not the visual signs.

The affective mode of taʿziye Sonic signs are inseparable from religious experience. Religious rituals need to perform sounds – through techniques specific to the cultural milieu where the

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rituals in question take place – to affect and form its pious members. The performative space in an acoustic ritual engenders a sense of belonging, ecstatic sensations, and at times even mournful emotions. The vibrations felt in collective dancing or singing occur in and as a highly physical acoustic experience centred fundamentally on the body. With its capacity to transduce auditory sensations into more complex corporeal emotions – into quiver and convulsion, to dance and ecstasy, to anguish and fury – the body stands at the core of a religious acoustic experience. The participants in taʿziyes, both the actors and the variegated audience, longed for this psycho-physical experience. They fought for good seats and waited for hours on end, uncomfortably jumbled together in the cold of a winter Moḥarram or the dehydrating warmth of a summer one, to experience taʿziye magic. They craved for the most tragic and most agonising scenes to vent their emotions and join the collective mourn-wave. They yearned for it as pious Shiʿas and as entertainment-seekers.140 Some even spread tales about the healing effect that taʿziye recitations had on people.141 Others felt joy and ecstasy during the acts upon hearing the taʿziyekhāns. Particularly in Tehran, some took national pride in the art form and found ways to express their burgeoning sense of Persian-ness in their acoustic experience with taʿziye.142 Moreover, for the emerging reformist and government officials, I suggest, taʿziye grandeur and cultural fascination was a surrogate for the failing Persian army. The circular stage afforded soldiers a ground to march coherently and in an orderly way, getting a rare chance to display their disciplined battalions for the public. The regimental music bands emblematised the army by tapping into the taʿziye soundscape. The two depended on one another in many ways. The military needed taʿziye to connect to the public more intimately and earn their respect and trust, while taʿziye needed the military to regulate its performative setup. All these complex socio-psychological phenomena inhered above all in the syncretised taʿziye acoustic experience. It is precisely this process that can explain how taʿziye forms its specific aesthetics by discipling, or to use the frequently mentioned term in Hirschkind and Leigh Schmidt, “honing” the ear.143Hirschkind’s media ethnography in the Egyptian context has shown how the sonic performance of cassette sermons in the public and private spheres resonate both within the sensorium of sensitive listeners and outside, around them and between them … creat[ing] the sensory conditions of an emergent ethical and political lifeworld, with its specific patterns of behaviour, sensibility, and practical reasoning.144

If in the Egyptian case it was sermon cassettes, in nineteenth-century Iran it was taʿziye that functioned as one of the main performative settings for auditory honing.

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For the entire taʿziye performance, the prologue and the main acts performed by both on stage participants and the audience can be seen as an auditory space for training the ear. Scholars of taʿziye have often approached its acoustic aspects tangentially as if taʿziye sounds were extra features merely appended to the acts, almost independent from the acts and even redundant.145 I argue, however, that taʿziye is the sounds. Or, to put it in more developed terms, taʿziye evolved as an art form by virtue of setting up a highly organised and arranged acoustic time-space. The weeping coordinator, Moʿin al-bokā being the most senior example among others, regulated how the acts and recitations had to be listened to. He used a series of signals to that end: raising his cane was an order to the music bands to play or stop playing; raising his hand targeted the actors; more complexly, he very often approached the actors and touched their shoulders with his hand signalling to them that it was their turn to act or recite; knocking his cane on the ground was an act specifically aimed at the audience and sought to regulate their response. He would sometimes ask for the audience’s silence by looking at them or using his hands146. But the prompter was not the only regulator in these acoustic experiments. Sometimes, as Wirth has sharply noted in his semiotic analysis of taʿziye, the audience took over the performance. They became the directors while the on-stage participants followed suit and improvised according to the emotional mode and intensity.147 In very similar ways, the reforms in the military followed acoustic logic to order its performance in drills and battle. Commands had to be regulated sonically to make possible the desired formations and movements. The drumbeats, trumpet signals, and the marching tunes were necessary to discipline the army, but also to motivate and incite them in attack. The Iranian military and taʿziye transformed in tandem and were both embedded in the same sonic space. The failure of reformist projects at the Dār al-Fonun to change the army into a modern one, that is, capable of following standardised commands and robbed of their autonomy in the battle, was also reflected in taʿziye – especially when the audience took the emotional lead during the sessions. The army and the taʿziye audience were both of the same substance. The reform in one reflected on and affected the other. The sound cues in taʿziye mirrored the signals in the military. They were both social collectives in negotiation with the same sonic techniques.

CHAPTER 3

Therapeutic mediations: Shiʿa medical imagination and cholera1

Abstract In this chapter, I begin with a talismanic remedy for cholera, an absurdist object that claims to prevent or treat cholera by means of its ciphered and scriptural semiotics. One can accordingly distinguish between two medical regimes evolving along separate trajectories in the period, the clinical medicine (ṭebb-e jadid) and the traditional one (ṭebb-e qadim). The talisman I analyse in this chapter may thus be examined as a meaningful object dissociated from modern sciences. I examine a number of medical sources written on cholera by both clinicians and traditionalists in the nineteenth century. Close-reading these materials, I map out two gustatory-olfactory models, each forming a distinct sensory experience in relation to the cholera epidemics in the century. In the traditionalist model, the work of Musā Ebn-e ʿAlireḍā Ṣāvoji, Cure of Cholera, is analysed closely. I attend to both the linguistic and visual aspects of this text to show how this text represents a pathological model in which the sense of taste and smell play significant parts. In contrast, my analysis of two medical documents written by two staff members at the Dār al-Fonun, namely Joseph Désiré Tholozan and Johan Louis Schlimmer, shows a different conception of the body at work in the clinical model, one with distinctively diminished gustatory and olfactory affordances.

Keywords: talismans, medical history, cholera, humoral medicine, olfaction, gustation

Not all meaningful absurd objects in the period syncretised Islamic and new scientific semiotics. Some remained far apart from sciences and avoided any form of conversation with new developments but remained meaningful for the reforming society in Iran and consequential for the rising scientific community. The medical field was particularly fraught with such scientifically unresponsive objects. The following absurd instance is a case in point. During one of the cholera pandemics in the nineteenth century, sometime in 1853, this object appeared in a Persian medical treatise on cholera (figure 8), titled The Cure of Cholera (ʿElāj al-Wabā). It was a talismanic diagram in the form of a circle comprised of several concentric rings. The author of the medical text, Musā Ebn-e ʿAlireḍā Sāvoji (d. around the middle of the nineteenth century), prescribes this circle for protection against and treatment of cholera. According to Sāvoji, for the circle to yield the desired effect, it may be

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carved on a silver plate, on the surface of an astrolabe, or simply drawn on a piece of paper.2 The carrier of these talismanic forms would then be protected against the disease. More effective in the written form, moreover, it could be dissolved in water and imbibed, which would help cure the disease. Unlike the previous cases I have so far examined, this absurd object makes no effort to connect with modern sciences, in this case, clinical medicine. To make an analogy with the present time, while the absurd Mostaʿān 110 – the Coronavirus finder device with which I began this book – taps into the semiotic sources of modern sciences, the absurd circle in figure 8 remains thoroughly dismissive of modern medicine and techniques. In fact, it can be more generally said that talismanic objects such as this circle together with their embedding medical culture remained by and large aloof from the medical reforms in nineteenth-century Iran. One can accordingly distinguish between two medical regimes evolving along separate trajectories in the period, the clinical medicine (ṭebb-e jadid) and the traditional one (ṭebb-e qadim). The impossible object in figure 8 may thus be examined as a meaningful object dissociated from modern sciences. Despite this dissociation, a close inspection of this talisman and its contextualisation can reveal important details in the underlying processes of Shiʿa medical meaning making. Moreover, unravelling these processes provides entry points for a better understanding of how contemporary Shiʿa medicine has approached the twenty-first century Covid-19 pandemic. Taking this talismanic circle as the point of departure in this chapter, I delve into the history of cholera pandemics in the nineteenth century. Analysing and contextualising Sāvoji’s The Cure of Cholera, I show how the experience of cholera in Iran was made meaningful by resorting to a certain sensorial logic. This senso-reality relied mainly on taste and smell to make sense of the grave reality of cholera. A traditional physician, to give a taste of the ideas and findings that follow, would always strongly recommend that the afflicted people be nursed in a space perfumed by sandalwood, camphor, and ambergris. In many cases, a very specific diet with a distinct taste was prescribed for them: paste of pomegranate (anār), paste of sour grapes (qura), rheum (rāvand) juice, and berberis (zereshk) juice. Both pathologically and therapeutically, the clinical physicians of Dār al-Fonun approached epidemics differently to the traditionalists. Both groups struggled to understand prevalent diseases from the beginning of the century, but without much success. In his recent study on the socio-political aspects of cholera in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Iran, Amir A. Afkhami, highlighting the role of Dār al-Fonun in combating the disease, writes that the “new sanitary theories and practices, propagated by medical advisors and the proliferation of printed scientific literature from the West, transformed Iranian perspective on disease prevention from one of passive fatalism to a proactive enterprise”.3 Although Afkhami’s

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Figure 8. Praying diagram in Cure of Cholera known as “garden of names” (jannat al-asmāʾ) in the form of a circle with part of the Throne Verse (Āyat al-Korsi, Qorʾān 2: 255) written in the middle.4

rendering of the traditional methods as “passive fatalism” is too extreme, he rightly detects two very distinct medical regimes in the context of cholera treatment in the nineteenth century. While there might be commonalities between them, I maintain that their differences reveal interesting aspects of modern Shiʿa absurdism in this period.

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Cholera in context: Medical institutionalisation and aetiologies The nineteenth century was the century of cholera. A series of seven pandemics featured in the historical studies of the disease, all of which touched the Iranian plateau.5 It was a most fearsome phenomenon for everyone, from farmers, peasants, merchants, and military officers to courtiers and bureaucrats. When it hit a village or a town, it would immediately cause uncontrollable panic among the inhabitants.6 Some would flee while others would shut themselves in their houses and pray.7 The officials would abandon their posts and leave the town to its own fate. During the cholera epidemic of 1853 in Tehran, for instance, all military drills had to be cancelled and soldiers had to be sent back to their hometowns.8 Irrespective of their socioeconomic class, everyone was vulnerable. The disease could strike the very inner circle of the Shah as well as the unprotected ordinary denizens.9 If a city fell prey to an outbreak, no house, no palace, and no settlement, was immune to it. None of the methods used in maintaining one’s health (ḥefẓ-e ṣeḥḥa) could protect people from getting ill, particularly not so before the establishment of Dār al-Fonun.10 The hygienic techniques prescribed by the traditionalist physicians, religiously trained magicians, and herbalists, although widely propagated and used in Iranian society, did not deter the disease. Even after the medical programme at the Dār al-Fonun began to take shape, the situation did not tangibly improve. The epidemics always overpowered all medical efforts. The frequency of cholera pandemics was especially high in the nineteenth century due to the impact of globalisation projects in the region. Led mainly by Western governments and entrepreneurs, and later adapted and re-appropriated by Iranian clerics and reformers, these projects significantly increased the region’s commercial, military, and social mobility.11 The European ships that headed towards Indian ports, the British military presence in southern Iran, the periodical pilgrimages to Mecca and Karbala, and educational and touristic journeys to Europe created a new ecology from the Indian subcontinent, through Persia and the Arabian peninsula, to Western Europe. It was in this global space that cholera spread and killed. As part of this global scene, it became a complex biocultural phenomenon in which different aspects of science and religion intersected.12 Almost two decades after the inauguration of Dār al-Fonun, in 1868, Joseph Désiré Tholozan founded and administered the first state-supported hygienic institution, the Sanitary Council (majles-e ḥefẓ al-ṣeḥḥa). It was meant to institutionalise the hygienic measures against cholera and other epidemics but was reportedly ineffective in its effort to install and monitor regulations and assessed in retrospect, could not control the epidemics.13 Nevertheless, it set the tone for new solutions against epidemic threats: cleaning, renovating, or destroying public buildings such as bathhouses, coffeehouses, and caravanserais, suggesting quarantine measures

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and setting up vaccination centres for smallpox. As part of the educational and institutional programs of Dār al-Fonun, this council introduced different techniques to the Iranian medical culture, which often encountered multiple cultural obstacles. Among the most frustrating problems were the quarantine measures, which were not accepted by the public and were frequently breached;14 the new medications prescribed by clinical physicians faced strong resistance from the local drug stores, who were on the brink of losing their economy’s stability; and vaccination against smallpox could not convince enough people to visit the medical centres.15 In spite of these difficulties, the medical culture was changing. Some old practices were fading away. Others found resonance in, and mingled with, the clinical ones. Still, some traditionalist physicians refused to accept or even converse with the new regime and preserved their own praxis.16 Regarding its pathology, the disease of cholera, or wabāʾ, was one of the most frequently mentioned epidemic diseases of Medieval Islamic medicine. The word was used to include a very wide range of diseases. According to Pormann and Savage-Smith, it was “a more general term for pestilential disturbance or contamination of the environment”.17 Afkhami notes that it was wide enough to include what we know today as the plague and cholera at the same time. But in the course of time, and especially in the nineteenth century, the word wabāʾ came to be exclusively used to refer to cholera as we know it today.18 From an aetiological perspective, some believed that it was caused when the quality of the air changed. Some thought it was the direct intervention of demonic forces. Others believed in the role of celestial movements. But by the end of the eighteenth century, two main aetiologies shaped the global discussions on cholera. One believed a change in the quality of the air was the main cause of an outbreak; this aetiology became known as miasma theory. In contradistinction to this was the belief that the disease was contagious and transmitted from person to person. Miasma theory was rooted in Galenic medicine, which was later adapted and re-appropriated into medieval Islamic medicine as humoralism.19 It was based on the idea that the biological world consisted of four humours (akhlāt), namely, blood (dam), phlegm (balgham), yellow bile (ṣafrā) and black bile (sawdā), and four qualities, namely, cold, warm, moist, and dry. Certain combinations of these four qualities, furthermore, were associated with air, fire, earth, and water.20 Any biological condition, including a disease, was accordingly understood as a specific combination of these fourfold pairs: either cold and moist, cold and dry, warm and moist, or warm and dry. The role of the putrid air in causing a cholera outbreak was only meaningful against this conceptual backdrop of humoralism, according to which cholera was considered a warm and moist disease. Moreover, humoralism was also applicable to the climate and the environment, which played an active role in the spread of epidemics. Physicians who believed

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in miasma theory considered a change in the quality of the air a determining factor in triggering an outbreak. Such a change, in their view, could arise from sources such as stagnant water, rotten fruit, excrements or cadavers. Next to these earthly putrefactive agents, celestial and otherworldly influences also entered the equation: a stellar and planetary configuration or a demonic intervention could also cause putridity in a particular place or region. In sum, the most immediate cause of cholera was putrid air, whether caused by demonic, celestial, or earthly forces.21 In the words of Sāvoji, the author of The Cure of Cholera, this febrile disease is “a strange fever that blazes in the heart insomuch as it damages the natural (ṭabiʿiya), vital/animal (ḥayawāniya) and psychic (nafsāniya) functions and hinders their normal work”.22 Next to miasma theories, contagion theories proposed that the disease was transmissible directly from person to person. The staff of the Dār al-Fonun were among the main proponents of this theory. However, they did not specify, at least not as clearly as miasma advocates, the actual causes of the disease. The trend was rooted in much older medical traditions in different religious milieus.23 The conception of contagion held the view that a contagious disease is transmitted from the diseased to their proximity.24 The nature of this transmission and the kind of materials involved were not of primary importance.25 From miasma to contagion, it is not only that the disease is understood differently, but also the sensorial (in)capacity of the body in relation to the disease changes. Given that in miasma theory, transmission is airborne, the sense of smell, and by association that of taste, become pronounced in patients’ relation to the disease. In contrast, contagionists will give more emphasis to the sense of touch. In what follows, I focus on the first medical paradigm, that is, the humoralist miasma theory, to map out how its representatives approached and understood cholera.

The case of Cure of Cholera (ʿElāj al-Wabāʾ) Musā Ebn-e ʿAlireḍā Sāvoji was active during the reign of Moḥammad Shāh (r. 1834 – 1848) and Nāṣer al-Din Shāh (r. 1848 – 1896). Next to his The Cure of Cholera, he wrote several treatises on the aetiology and the treatment and prevention of epidemic diseases, particularly cholera and the plague.26 Besides his writing practices, he was in contact with certain elites in the court who would consult him on health issues and demand his regular visits and treatment.27 I have found no link between him and the staff/students of Dār al-Fonun. Judging from his writings, I presume that he did not welcome the clinical ideas and was antithetical to the clinical medicative methods.28 He adhered firmly to the herbal/talismanic remedies of his own medical culture. I focus on his last work titled Physicians’ Order for the

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Cure of Cholera (Dastur al-Aṭebbā fi ʿElāj al-Wabāʾ), which I often call The Cure of Cholera, written in Persian and lithographed by at least two publishers in Tehran.29 In the first part of the treatise, Sāvoji elaborates the aetiology of cholera. He reiterates the classical humoralist theories tinted with the prophetic aspect of post-Manṣurian medicine.30 This melange consists in humoral pathology, the reiteration and explication of the traditionalist miasma theory, and a discussion of the healing power of Qorʾānic scriptures. He accounts for two general types of causes, which are not entirely independent from one another and even overlap conceptually: those that instigate the choleric air and those that bring about the choleric symptoms in the body. One set of causes affected the air and made it choleric, and the other affected the body. Both the body and the air, in other words, could become choleric.31 As Sāvoji explains, the air could become corrupt if “there are many cesspits of water around the town which are putrefied by heat and from which putrid vapour ascends”, or if “there is a field around the town which secretes water from underground (zehāb)”, “a rice field around which putrid vapours form”, or “improperly buried bodies around the town”. The putrefaction of the air could also be caused by the change in the temperamental quality of a season, like when “winter becomes warm and damp”, or when “summer becomes wet”. The blowing of the southern wind in an untimely period of the year could also work as a putrefactive force. However, these external conditions, according to Sāvoji, do not necessarily lead to the appearance of symptoms in the body. It would only take place on the condition that the corresponding humoral mixtures (akhlāt) fill up the body and make it susceptible to receive the putrid air. The diseased body, in short, could only be understood as part of a larger macrocosm of causes harming it from the inside and the outside. This view cannot have come as a surprise to the intended audience in the period. The idea that the body was always open to the outside and constantly influenced by it existed in all the significant medical and religious corpora of the previous centuries. Majlesi’s opening lines of his chapter on anatomy illustrates this most representatively: God created two connected worlds: the celestial world (al-ʿālam al-ʿalawiy) and the terrestrial world (al-ʿālam al-sofliy). And He combined both worlds together in people. Hence God created the world in the shape of a round sphere (korrien modawwaran) and created the human head similar to the celestial dome (qobbat al-falak), and his hair as many as the stars, his eyes as the sun and the moon, his nostrils like the north and the south, his ears like the west and the east, and He set his glance like flash (barq), his speech like thunder, his walking in the manner of stellar movements, his sitting similar to the stellar constellation, and his sleep in the form of stars’ descent, and his death like their combustion.32

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In this imaginative anatomy, the body could only be understood as part of a larger whole, whose design determined the organic setup of the body. Furthermore, the logic of the relation between the body parts and the cosmic constituents was not that of a simile or a metaphor. The body did not resemble the cosmos but was the cosmos, the meeting point of the two worlds, not merely made in their likeness. The two celestial and terrestrial worlds folded into the body, and thus the body consisted of the same matter and substance. This body was hence understood as corporeal and cosmic at the same time. And precisely because of this entanglement, a disease could not afflict the inside without changing the outside and vice versa. Sāvoji’s aetiological reasoning about cholera fits right into this framework. The akhlāt of the body corresponded directly to those of the air and the body’s surroundings. The seasonal changes, climatic fluctuations and vegetal exudations contributed to and portended the appearance of cholera in the body. Treating the disease, therefore, consisted in restoring balance to both the inside and the outside of the body, to the digestive tract as well as to the immediate space surrounding the body, that is, the air and the foodstuff. This restoration of the balance fell under the category of treatment (tadbir-e mezāj), which occupies more than half of Sāvoji’s text. The concept of mezāj, in the term tadbir-e mezāj, illustrates the entanglement between the inside and the outside of the body, and its management and treatment required attention to both the external factors and the internal conditions of the body. It is precisely around this notion that I trace the formation of a certain sensory model for taste and smell. In the following section, I examine how this sensory model arose from the different therapeutic techniques prescribed by Sāvoji. The taste and smell of cholera Sāvoji proposes a variety of techniques to cure the disease. The first consists of a series of eating habits. The afflicted person is accordingly advised to eat a certain kind of food, at certain times of the year and of the day, depending on climatic conditions. Ultimately, it is the mezāj of the season and of the body that dictates the kind of food one must eat during the time of cholera. In Sāvoji’s therapeutic framework, springtime, for instance, provokes movement on earth, and correspondingly, in the body. The reason is the melting of the “solid materials formed in winter”, which after its eventual flow can cause excitement and anxiety in the body. At this time of the year, it is advised to eat calming food and avoid warming foodstuff (mosakhkhenāt) such as wine.33 In summer, the eating of cold food (mobarredāt) such as watermelon, plum, cucumber, and pomegranate is encouraged. In autumn, eating dry foods should be avoided and instead large amounts of fruits should be consumed accompanied by drinking cold water. And in winter, warming foodstuff such as grilled meat (kabāb) can be beneficial.34

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The notion of mezāj is, on one hand, conditioned by seasonal characteristics, and on the other, by the internal disposition of the body. To apprehend the former, that is the outside, the sense of smell plays an important role, while for the inside, the sense of taste indexes one’s approach to health. So, on one hand, the mezāj of the air is restored by means of olfactory qualities, while on the other, the mezāj of the body is transformed through certain gustatory choices. I illustrate this sensuous treatment by giving a few examples. Reporting an experience he had in Cairo, Sāvoji recounts how he managed the disease in the city “upon the emergence of putridity in the air and the appearance of the disease among the people”35. He first advised people with weaker mezāj to reduce their meals to two, one right after sunrise and the other after dark. For the first meal he prescribed bread with mint or vinegar and plum-and-barberry jam, and for the evening meal sour curry with spinach and pumpkin.36 Elsewhere, he lists a series of mostly sour food to be digested at regular intervals: pomegranate juice, bitter orange juice, apple juice, sour soup (āsh-e torsh), and sour buttermilk (dugh-e torsh). These foodstuffs were deemed beneficial if consumed cold during summer and served warm during winter. Other instances are prevalent in the period. In 1896, a Qajar courtier, Farid al-Molk Hamadāni (d. 1916), writes in his journal about a treatment he learned from an unnamed traditionalist physician. Accordingly, drinking the odorous juice of pussy willow (bidmeshk) and bitter juice of squeezed quince (sharbat-e beh) cures cholera.37 In another example, the Iranian Sufi and cleric Nāʾeb al-Ṣadr-e Shirāzi (d. 1925) writes in his travelogue about the curative quality of sour butter milk.38 In these cases, the taste of the prescribed food is almost always mentioned. Taste seems to be a therapeutic index, which would most likely help people navigate their taste-rich food ecology. But it should also be noted that the effect of these gustatory qualities is not limited to the oral stage of digestion. Sāvoji puts as much emphasis on the ways every kind of food affects the internal organs of stomach, liver, and the gallbladder. Accordingly, one must be careful not to strain the stomach, for which Sāvoji distinguishes two states of “heaviness” and “lightness” and allocates quite a few pages to describe how to understand these states in the body and how to control them. Moreover, the gallbladder and liver are constantly observed so as to avoid extra pressure on them. These internal sensations, described at length with as much verbal precision as a medical text can afford, play an important role in the gustatory experience of the remedies. To complicate this digestive experience even more, in the case of patients in more advanced stages of the disease, the consumption of laxative food is advised with the purpose of cleansing the body forcefully. Some of these laxatives are advised to be taken orally, while some are taken rectally. Interesting is the fact that in both cases, the taste of the substance matters. While for oral use a sour

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and slightly salty taste is the norm, for the rectal application, for which the terms tanqih, ḥoqna, and talʾin are used interchangeably, bitter, and strongly salty food is advised: beetroot juice, tamarisk manna (gazangabin) and manna of Alhagi maurorum (toranjabin).39 In Sāvoji’s medical model, it is important for the diseased person to be constantly aware of the taste of the substance they take in. The prescribed substances are not only a list of foods but also a map of a particular gustatory sensibility, which acts as the primary guide to manage one’s mezāj, that of the food and of the encompassing ecology. This taste-based approach to medication can also be found in Sāvoji’s classical predecessors such as Rāzi and Ebn-e Sinā. The latter, for instance, in his Qānun describes specific states of the four humoral fluids in terms of their different tastes, and not only in terms of their colour and texture: phlegm (balgham) is sweet when slightly putrid, the black bile (sawdā) is generally sour, and the yellow bile (ṣafrā) is bitter.40 Resonating with his classical masters, Sāvoji’s understanding of taste is a specialisation of the sensory capacity that provides sensations beyond the ones experienced in the oral cavity. As these sensuous prescriptions make manifest, the body’s experience with cholera is informed and shaped by a complex understanding of taste, and, to a lesser extent, smell. In this dominantly gustatory experience with cholera, at least three inter-related stages of taste can be distinguished: gustation, digestion and rectalisation. Taste is usually associated with only the first one, namely gustation, but the loaded concept of mezāj and the use of the term in the context of cholera therapeutics suggest the existence of a more complex sensory setup. This complexity, though to a lesser extent, can also be found in the management of mezāj’s external factors, namely, the olfactory management of the outside world. Giving advice on the management of the external temperament, Sāvoji’s first set of techniques has to do with the handling of the household (tadbir-e manzel). To remedy the air in houses, he suggests that every day the windows are let open to change the air inside, and if possible, to lodge on the higher floors. Inside the space, he recommends the “burning of perfumes” and “using scented substances and vapours”. Some such substances are Indian aloeswood (ʿud-e hendi), ambergris (ʿanbar), frankincense (kondor), musk (moshk), Tetraclinis (sandarus), fenugreek (ḥolba), mastic (maṣṭaki), sandalwood (ṣandal) and camphor (kāfur). According to Sāvoji, these substances can be used individually or in combination for cleansing the air.41 Another plant used to smoke out putridity is tobacco, which was reportedly used, according to Sāvoji, in the time of Hippocrates. It was burned in large amounts in several pits around the city to fumigate the urban space.42 The prescription of these ingredients is always theoretically informed by humoralism. Put simply, the logic is to prescribe foodstuff and aromatics with a

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warm temperament since cholera’s disposition is cold. But above all, for Sāvuji, saffron is the supreme remedy, which as he notes, is not “surpassed by anything else for the treatment of cholera”.43 It is beneficial not only for the body, that is, as part of a digestive experience, but also for the putrid air, that is, as part of an olfactory experience. Not only does it “eliminate the toxicity of the air … especially the choleric air”, but also, it “strengthens the heart and eliminates its putridity, corruption and ferociousness”.44 Talismanic methods It is with this theory of taste and smell that the diagram I presented above can be better understood. These examples are only a small part of Sāvoji’s mostly tastebased and partially smell-based therapy. I have limited myself to a few excerpts to illustrate his methods and the conceptual framework they adhere to on the textual level. Now I wish to complicate our understanding of this medical regime further, by suggesting that Sāvoji’s sense-centred approach is not only found in his textual descriptions and prescriptions but can also be seen in his diagrammatic instructions (figure 9), most tangibly so in the talismanic remedies given at the end of his treatise. Here, Sāvoji reminds his readers of a saying attributed to the Prophet who warns that “whoever fails to ask for divine healing, God does not cure them”.45 He also relates sayings from the twelve Imams to the effect that one must primarily rely on the Qorʾān for healing. Reciting the surah of al-Fāteḥa seven times, for instance, would bring healing benefits, “which if it did not cure, reciting it seventy times would surely do”.46 Even more progressive than recitation, Sāvoji advises the writing of these scriptures on small pieces of paper so that people could carry them around keeping them in their garments or wear them around their necks. In extreme cases, when the disease showed no sign of decline, as with the absurd circle I began this chapter with, one could dissolve the paper in water and drink the solution, or in even worse conditions, eat the paper directly. As I unpack further below, the same logic of taste that (in)forms Sāvoji’s text is reflected in these talismanic diagrams and in their affective logic.47 These ingestive methods are very well known in Islamic cultures and have been studied by scholars in the field. In one of the most conceptual studies of ingestion rituals in Islam and Christianity, Barry Flood observes that these practices “point to a desire to collapse a distinction between emulator and emulated that is central to the operation of mimesis as re-presentation”.48 According to Flood’s materially sensitive approach, the ingestion of sanctified objects should not be understood in a representational system. Talismans are not a mimetic representation of the sacred but the “becoming” of sacred, a process whereby the ingested material and the ingesting body cooperate in activating the sacred. Invoking this key Deleuzian

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Figure 9. A ciphered square with four divine attributes on the four corners from the lithographed medical manual Cure of Cholera published in 1853.49

concept, Flood understands ingestion as a technique of mediation, as opposed to that of representation.50 Along the same lines, Laura Marks points out in her concise and cutting-edge study of talismanic diagrams that the diverse visual signs in the talismans are “operational images”, which are not intended to be deciphered to make the signs meaningful. Rather, they are created as media objects to operate on the body through its senses.51 Given this understanding, Sāvoji’s therapeutic talismans can be understood as a mediation of divine power by means of an assemblage of ink, paper, text, and the digestive tract. As such, the practice of ingesting sacred texts is not a form of medication in the sense of triggering a biochemical reaction in the body. A different medicative semiotics is at work. The idea is not to cure cholera through the chemical constituents of paper and ink, but through a material mediation of the sacred. For this medicative system to function as intended, a specific conception of the body is prerequisite, a corporeal model that can imagine a body capable of

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being affected by the scripture in liquid form. Sāvoji’s Cure of Cholera can be read as a manual for producing such a model. The humoralist therapy of the first part of the treatise, as I have selectively described in this chapter, does not only aim at treating the body but also imagining one. It is through this imagination that such talismans can be seen as taste-based affective objects. In Sāvoji’s text, depictions of talismans appear on roughly every other page in the second half of the book. Some contain Qorʾānic words, others are highly cryptic in abjad letters and Arabic numerals, only decipherable by a few who knew them (figure 9).52 These sacred letters and words would then be made into amulets by people, or by physicians themselves to be carried by people. According to Pormann and Savage-Smith, these amulets were used during most of the history of Islamic medicine. They were “used not only to ward off the Evil Eye and misfortune but could also be employed to increase fertility or potency or attractiveness and avert disease and sudden death”. The visual representations in such objects, Pormann and Savage-Smith further note, “encompassed not only magical symbols but also invocations and prayers nearly always addressed to God or one of his intercessors”.53 More importantly, the written words and scriptures were not meant to be read, but touched, carried around, put under one’s pillows, or ingested.54 Figure 9, for example, is an extended and modified version of the magic boduḥ square, described by Pormann and Savage-Smith in their work – the letters are modified, and the number of squares increased. Figure 8, the circle diagram I began this chapter with, is among the most recurrent forms that could also be found in earlier sources, though with different words and codes. This diagram is particularly interesting as it brings multiple visual and textual elements into one image. It is in the form of a circle, around which a few codified words can be seen followed concentrically by parts of the Throne Verse (āyat al-korsi, Qorʾān 2: 255). According to Tewfik Canaan’s analysis of Arabic talismans, these cryptic signs index demons.55 This diagram has been especially important among the Shiʿas. It is called garden of names (jannat al-asmāʾ) and is described in a manuscript by the same name ascribed to the first Shiʿa Imam, ʿAli Ebn-e Abi Ṭāleb (d. 661), during an epidemic in Iraq in the mid-seventh century. The diagram has been redrawn, edited and commented upon by many physicians and occultists ever since.56 The most well-known version of the book in which the diagram appears has been referred to by the famed Persian polymath Abu Ḥāmed al-Ghazāli (d. 1111).57 The diagram’s crypted contents have remained unchanged: immediately around the smallest circle at the centre, nineteen letters are arranged, each of which are the first letter in the names of the Islamic guardians of hell. Adjacent to this ring, the second row of letters are six of God’s names, the total letters of which, again, amount to nineteen: al-fard [sic], al-ḥayy (The Living), al-qayyum (The Subsisting),

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al-ḥakam (The Arbiter), al-ʿadl (The Just), al-qoddus (The Holy), excluding their definite articles as well as their geminated consonants. Following this second ring, the third one contains the dissociated letters of the bismillah, a common Qorʾānic formula of “in the name of God the Compassionate the Merciful” (besm allāh al-raḥmān al-raḥim). And finally on the last ring, there are nineteen crypted signs, with various combinations of the numbers nine and one, which according to Canaan’s decipherments refer to demons.58 Interesting correlations can be noticed if the circle in figure 8 is juxtaposed with the three stages of taste that I proposed before: the outer rim might be seen as performing the same task as gustation, the geometrically organised interior doing something similar to digestion, while the circle at the centre comes close to rectalisation. I do not wish to suggest that this diagram represents or symbolises those three stages of the sense of taste or of the body but argue that there are three stages in the diagram that perform the same three functions, though with a different content. The two three-fold models refer to different contents, but their affective logic is the same, in the sense that they both operate by activating the sense of taste, and to some extent smell. The objects created according to these models are not meant as icons or symbols to be consumed by reading, seeing, or hearing. The texts are not meant to be recited. They are written and drawn in folded pieces of paper, hidden, or dissolved in water. These sacralised objects are meant to operate on the mezāj, either by explicit prescription of a particular regimen, or by the direct material mediation between a pre-conceived sacrality and the body’s digestive system. I will describe and analyse what I take to be this peculiar way of thinking in the remainder of this chapter. Sāvoji points out that the verse on the outer rim is the Throne Verse. It is written in clear letters and therefore easily readable, or palatable. On the inside of the circle, in the second concentric layer counting from the perimeter of the circle towards the inside, we see individual letters in boxes. Starting at around eight o’clock, and reading anti-clockwise, these letters add up to the besmala. In the middle section, trapezoid boxes, the “organs” of the diagram, point towards the centre. In this middle section, the words are broken up into letters and thereby, as it were, digested. Finally, in the central circle of the diagram, all scriptural meaning is dissolved; scripture disappears or is made imperceptible. The descriptions given in Garden of Names do not explicitly mention this digestive movement in the circle. However, the manuscript does describe a processual movement from the outside to the inside of the circle. According to this original description, from the outside to the inside of the circle, we move from the sky, where demons fly over and inflict epidemics on earth, to the depth of hell, where the infernal angels, indexed by the first letter of their names on the diagram, are setting ablaze the hellfire. God’s names in the middle section are meant to “strengthen [us] against the heat

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of hellfire” on the inside, and thus also against the “flames of the plague”, on the outside.59 Therefore, from the periphery to the centre, one burns into the blazes of hellfire as the body moves from the surface to the depth, from the outside to the inside. It is based on this processual description that I suggest the digestive model can also be a credible view of this talisman. To reiterate, the object, or content, of the diagram is different from that of Sāvoji’s model of tasting in three stages, yet it operates according to the same logic. While the latter functions in relation to a natural substance, food, the former functions in relation to a cultural object, divine speech. However, to borrow from Laura Marks’ study of talismanic images, they are both “operational”, or in other words, interventional, but not primarily representational. They both allow the occult practitioner to “manage the cosmos”, or in the case at hand, the diseased body, “in miniature, folding the powers of the planets and stars together with earthly people, places and objects to make things happen”.60 In this sense, figure 8 can be read as an anatomical diagram, in which the circle’s perimeter indexes the boundary of the human body, which it seeks to heal by means of the talismanic program coded into the diagram. In the same way, Sāvoji’s taste- and smell-sensitive treatments were not exceptional instances in the Shiʿa medical culture; associations between the body and such ciphered diagrams were also not unfamiliar in the period. Many examples can be found in manuals of magic and divination, some of which contain more explicit references to the body. Figures 10 and 11 are two such instances. In these images, the ciphers and shapes in figures 8 and 9 become explicit references to the human body. The numbers are digested by both the humanoid figures – they are in the abdominal areas – and by the diseased persons, in case ingestion is prescribed. The middle spaces in these humanoids function according to the same semiotics in the circle in figure 8. More, similar examples of explicit references to the human body can be found in the Iranian context.61 These images can be viewed as anatomical diagrams, or to adapt and extend the term suggested by Christian Lange “moral anatomies” that reflect a logic similar to that at work in Sāvoji’s understanding of taste, and more broadly create a conceptual model for the body. This model is implicit in Sāvoji’s medical imagination. It imagines a body that is open yet ordered, a passage of sorts, through which both matter and language flow, a body with a biocultural efficacy: biological insofar as the food content and the sensory capacity of the entire body is concerned, and cultural insofar as the verbal/scriptural aspect of the amulets is concerned. And to make this point more compelling, in the same page where Sāvoji represents the diagram in figure 8, there appears a short instruction written next to the diagram that instructs the reader to “write the words with musk and saffron”. A similar note appears in figure 11, in

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Figure 10. A humanoid diagram used to undo physical or psychological damage inflicted on a person. The short text on the top instructs the practitioner to burn this talisman before the afflicted person and make them breath in the fumes. This diagram was reproduced in an occult manual lithographed in 1951.62

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Figure 11. A humanoid figure from a handwritten manuscript used to cure various diseases. The instructions read that the crown on the humanoid’s head should be drawn by gold-water and the curves be drawn by musk and saffron. The paper should then be dissolved in water and given to the diseased person. The lithographed manual is undated, written by the very well-known sixteenth-century polymath Ḥoseyn Ebn-e ʿAli Kāshefi (d. 1504).63

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which it is advised to draw the sketch with musk and saffron. In these instances, words and olfacto-gustatory stimuli become one. In his book Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions, Christian Lange finds traces of this conception in the works of Sunni eschatologists, among them, Abu ʿAbdollāh al-Qorṭubi (d. 1273) and Abu al-Faḍl al-Raḥmān al-Soyuṭi (d. 1505).64 He points to how human beings are conceived of in this tradition as “’hollow’ (ajwaf) creatures, possessing bellies that need to be filled and thus give rise to worldly desires and greed”.65 Or in another excerpt, Lange reports from the late-medieval Muslim eschatological literature that “the inhabitants of hell, who speak a form of Old or Middle Persian … have seventy layers of coarse and thick skin through which enormous worms carve their way, roaring like wild beasts”.66 In Majlesi’s Oceans of Lights, the word ajwaf is referred to several times. According to a ḥadith ascribed to Moḥammad, Majlesi reports, one of the reasons that condemns people to hell is the appetite and lust of two cavities (al-jawfān): the belly and the genitals (al-baṭn wa al-farj).67 In another ḥadith Majlesi names these two cavities the mouth and the genitals.68 Yet in another context, not in the same one as infernal damnation, the heart is considered as ajwaf, something that can be filled with either divine or demonic presences.69 These instances gesture toward an understanding of the body as a corruptible hollow vessel. This has important discursive consequences. The capacity of the body to be affected by cosmic forces, the relation between the inside and the outside, depends precisely on this hollowness. Lange’s notion of “moral anatomy” underscores the sinfulness that inherently attaches to this hollow (ajwaf) body. Sāvoji might not intend this meaning specifically when he discusses the amulet-based treatments. However, for such treatments to be conceivable, his assumption that the scriptural amulets can heal the body by affecting it from within presupposes the corruptibility, and by association the sinfulness, of the inside. The scripture would then be imagined having the capacity to cleanse not only from the outside, if read or recited for instance, but also one’s inside through affecting that presumed sinful/corrupt hollowness. We read in one of Sāvoji’s prescriptions that a certain group of words should be written on a piece of paper, dissolved in water and drunk. The dregs of the dissolved paper should then be thrown into an abandoned water well (qanat), which was deemed to be possessed by demons and bad omens, as the final act to complete the ritual. The hollow space of the body and the inside of a qanāt both receive the divine healing through digesting the paper-based scripture. The inside obeys the same logic as that of a qanāt, namely, interconnected tubes with hollow spaces inside. This central circle, also diagrammatically imagined in figure 8 is where the inside and the outside intertwine. The external demonic/divine and material forces of the outside flow into and mingle with the internal organs in this hollow space.70

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Counter points: Modern prophylactic approaches to cholera In the second half of the nineteenth century, the medical staff working at the Dār al-Fonun came to challenge Sāvoji’s model in fundamental ways. Rather than following the gustatory and olfactory logic of traditional Iranian medicine, they proposed intricate theories and techniques to desensitise the treatment of cholera. In his travelogue, Jacob Polak mentions on many occasions that he could not understand why Iranian physicians prescribe so much laxative and strong foodstuffs for the treatment of cholera.71 He was more in favour of methods such as quarantine strategies that helped sever the connections of the outside world with the body. Tholozan was also furious with purging techniques and the sensuous dietary choices prescribed by the ḥakimbāshis.72 In the view of clinicians, purging techniques were quite dangerous for the patients and would cause serious harm and even delay the healing process. They were also suspicious of the smell and taste of things choleric. The smell of the perished bodies and of contaminated water was particularly alarming to them.73 For them, the diseased bodies were a menace to others and sources of contagion. In order to ameliorate the condition, two major treatises were written on the prophylactic measures against cholera by two physicians and teachers at Dār al-Fonun. One was written by Tholozan in 1869 titled Prophylaxie du Choléra en Orient and the other by Schlimmer in 1874 titled Du Présage et de l’Avortement de l’Imminence Cholérique.74 Below, I examine these texts and put them in context to elaborate the different conception of the body in these sources. The case of Tholozan Tholozan was the most important physician in the second half of the nineteenth century in Iran. As mentioned before, he was the founder of the Sanitary Council (majles-e ḥefẓ-e ṣeḥḥa) in 1871. Serving the Shah as his personal physician for thirty years, he was responsible for the betterment of the urban sanitary condition and collaborated with his European peers and officials to control the cholera epidemics. His sanitary council could only operate for a few months due to the lack of infrastructural and administrative resources. When he wrote his treatise on cholera, this council had already been shut down and for this reason, quite a few pages in his Prophylaxie du Choléra deal with how the lack of effective management in Tehran exacerbated the epidemics in the country.75 He frequently reproaches the lack of critical attitudes to ancient medical personae such as Ebn-e Sinā and Rāzi. He believed that the medicine practiced by Persian physicians had remained the same as in the time of the caliphates, and the same as that which used to be taught three centuries before in Europe, although he also admitted that there had been “truths as well as errors” in Persian medical culture.76

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In his view, the medical reform in Iran had to begin with a “réform littéraire”, that is, a reform in the medical texts and theories in the Persian language. He considered such a text-based reform necessary for the later stages of reform to be viably pursued. Once freed from the uncritical adherence to the medicine of Ebn-e Sinā, he proclaims, the country can realise its aspiration to “the destinies in touch with those in the modern world”.77 He strongly believed that reforming the general state of affairs was predicated on the reform of popular beliefs in society, which most seriously impeded any successful application of modern sanitary measures in the country. In this regard, he asserts in his text that “the most powerful means of change in the Orient” resides in the “scientific and popular literatures created and protected by the state”.78 Hence, he underscores the significance and priority of a state-sponsored epistemological reform. Once initiated and sustained, Tholozan believes that this reform can then proceed into more practical matters, such as managing water supplies, cleaning public places, and implementing quarantine measures. As for water management, Tholozan begins by noting how the intricate system of underground canals, “designed to supply drinking water from great distances for free”, was unscientifically maintained and susceptible to contamination.79 The problem was that water would easily get contaminated once it was brought to the surface. This water was then used by the public for washing, cooking, and bathing without there being any drainage management. As a result, public places such as baths and caravanserais became sources of contagion and contributed most gravely to the spread of epidemic diseases. The water used to wash clothes and utensils was another source of infection, which would openly flow in public spaces after use without any means to keep it separate from the drinking water.80 The lack of canalisation, as Tholozan observed, was therefore one of the main reasons for the spread of cholera. Tholozan regarded this as especially problematic in places where water transportation did not make use of “closed tubes”. In his view, the openness of water to the outside was surely the main factor in spreading the disease: “The circulation of the drinking water inside closed tubes with a precision that ensures impermeability to soil humidity is one of the most imperious hygienic necessities at all times and especially at times of cholera epidemics”.81 It can already be seen how the indigenous preference for openness to the outside world is being subverted. The unhygienic condition of lavatories added yet another layer to the crisis. There was no sewer system in Iran during the time of Tholozan. Human excrement would therefore accumulate in “non-bricked pits”, which were never emptied but would only be shut after they reached their full capacity.82 The problem would be aggravated when the clean water taken from the underground flowed in the vicinity of these pits and become contaminated as the result. This water would

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then be used for cooking, bathing, and washing. The urban ecologies of Iran were therefore radically open – the food exposed to the faeces. In Tholozan’s account, pilgrimages were another contributor to the spread of the disease. The general unhygienic condition in which pilgrims undertook their journeys to the holy places usually aggravated the cholera spread. On top of that, carrying their dead along the way made the situation even worse. Tholozan notices the strong smell of the cadavers carried by the pilgrims: “There were caravans of corpses just as there were caravans of pilgrims. And it even occurred that travellers meet a person who carried around a hundred to two hundred dead bodies. Woe to the smell when wind blows from this mass grave”.83 He also notices how sloppily they are wrapped, as a result of which cadaveric puss would leak out contaminating the environment. As a temporary suggestion, Tholozan suggested to the government that a certain injection be made into cadavers lest the infection leak out. This, according to Tholozan, was vehemently opposed as it was considered a profanity. He also suggested welding the corpses in tin plates, which as he admits, proved impractical due to the lack of technical knowledge of welding in Iran.84 His favourite method was using “terracotta cylinders tightly glazed on the inside”, which, although adding considerable weight to the pilgrims’ procession, was an effective way to close off the corpses from the outside world.85 Tholozan discusses at length the effectiveness and relevance of quarantine measures. On the one hand, he is critical of applying this method without considering the geographical and demographical specificities of the cities. The general rule of quarantine for him is that it was effective by sea (par voie de mer) but not so much by land (par voie de terre).86 The exception for him is the province of Yazd, which being surrounded by the deserts remained aloof from other cities. In other cases, he did not believe that quarantine by land could effectively be applied due to several factors such as the impossibility of restraining nomadic movements across both western and eastern borders, and the religious resistance against these measures.87 His observation of this inefficacy recalls once again the radically open and porous ecology in the region, where political borders could not be practically maintained and were irregularly and uncontrollably breached.88 For Tholozan, it is ultimately “cleanliness” (propreté) that is deemed the most effective preventive method: Cleanliness is in effect the most sovereign remedy, not only against cholera but also against most epidemic and endemic diseases. Cleanliness is not the only required thing but the most important. Cleanliness, as I understand it here, is almost all public and private hygiene.89

Tholozan instructed the hygienists to consider this private-cum-public conception of cleanliness in their approach to cholera treatment. They were instructed to first

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approach the individuals and then, on larger scales, conglomerations such as villages and towns. Treatment is hardly an issue for Tholozan. It is instead prevention that preoccupies him. In contrast, Sāvoji does not mention any of the issues picked up by Tholozan. The problems with the pilgrims, the unhygienic condition of water, and the uncleanliness of the public places are not once touched on in ʿElāj al-Wabāʾ. The case of Schlimmer Schlimmer’s medical treatise Du Présage et de l’Avortement de l’Imminence Cholérique, continued the work of Tholozan in many respects.90 In this work, he discusses the aetiology of cholera in more detail and proposes new diagnostic methods by way of focusing on the chemistry of the body fluids. Given his general interest in the chemical aspects of medicine – we can recall that his book of anatomy was titled chimie animale – his discussion centres on the detection of “albumine” in urine as a method of pre-diagnosis of an epidemic. His preventive methods build up after his diagnostic measures. Similar to Tholozan, he attends to two scales of preventive measures: individual and collective, or in his own words, administrative. On the individual scale, he admits that there exists no universal law to be followed by everyone. Attending to one’s own health, he states, depends on one’s lifestyle, food ecology, and climate.91 Notwithstanding this non-universality of hygienic practices, he proposes methods and techniques which he “used with his own family and had not failed him in yielding favourable result”.92 His description of these methods goes into much more detail than Tholozan’s treatise. His first instruction obligates the members of the family, or preferably their servants who had already healed from the disease to “scan” the whole household so as to remove all the “ordure” and all the “humid dung in the stables and the poultry yards”.93 The instruction then demands that the cesspools be covered with a layer of carbon powder and iron sulphate. He describes a detailed daily procedure for cleaning after each bowel movement, to be observed individually by every member of the household: everyone should use a separate “night vase”, to relieve themselves in, after which they should immediately sprinkle dry clay on the excrement, unload it outside of the house and then compress it by a shovel in an area protected from sunshine.94 As for the climactic condition of the house, similar to Sāvoji, Schlimmer considers the wind somewhat influential in spreading the disease. But unlike his traditionalist counterpart, he prefers to keep the windows facing north and northeast shut.95 As for the diet, he provides much more detail than Tholozan but falls short of Sāvoji’s rich lists of food. He agrees with the use of garlic, which he finds quite popular in the northern provinces in Iran. But above all, Schlimmer’s main treatment, though only applicable in the pre-epidemic stage and prior to the aggravation of symptoms, is the use of a

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medication developed at the time because of European pharmaceutical research.96 This medication is frequently mentioned by Schlimmer under the name fiel de mouton (sheep bile) which was in the form of a pill and sometimes combined with strychnine. This medication was characteristically odourless and bitter in taste. Schlimmer allocates two chapters on the methods of chemical development of the medication and the efficacy of its use. Similar to Tholozan, Schlimmer’s main emphasis is put on water management. It is important for Schlimmer that the drinking water is kept apart from all sorts of contamination, particularly with waste-water and excrement.97 He notices an interesting popular belief which can also be read in jurisprudential sources on water management, according to which flowing water can never become impure, irrespective of its sources and routes.98 Schlimmer finds this delusional “religious dogma” quite unfortunate as it caused a rapid escalation of the epidemic in the cities. On the administrative level, Schlimmer draws attention to the role that the state should play to enforce “the science” of prevention. He advises the governmental centres to carry out disinfection procedures in public places, especially the cesspools, with the use of iron sulphate.99 In view of the fact that cholera ravaged more forcefully in areas with high population densities, Schlimmer stresses the importance of regular cleanings. He also asks for large-scale diagnostic training for “medical students, pharmacists, home-nurses, midwives, military officers” and “executives of densely populated factories” to be equipped with enough skills to diagnose cholera by inspecting people’s urine.100 A number of these considerations found their way into an anonymous manuscript Guidelines for the Prefecture (Resāla-ye Dastur al-ʿAmal-e Naẓmiye), which contains instructions for the state police to apply sanitary rules to public spaces. This manuscript is undated, but it is very likely to have been published in 1879, translated from a similar document written in French by the Italian chief of police in Tehran known as Conte de Monte Forte, and approved by Nāṣer al-Din Shāh in 1879 or 1880.101 The document emphasises water management. Following the example of the United States, it suggests that the water arriving in the city be organised in such a way that “it comes out of the tap into every household”. This way, the water would not get dirty and could be kept separate from the wastewater more easily. The used water could then be steered into the arid ʿAliābād desert around Tehran. Furthermore, around each district in Tehran, depending on capacity, a special place was instructed to be made for public laundry.102 In every one of the districts, moreover, new cesspools should be dug for the collection of human excrement.103 There can be also found instructions on how to manage the rainfall, cleaning the public bath houses and controlling the cleanliness of foodstuff.104

CHAPTER 4

Spiritual mediations: Shiʿa demonology and telegraphy

Abstract In this chapter, a dream serves as the absurdist object. The dreaming subject is Eʿteḍād al-Salṭane, the minister of science and telegraphy at the time. The content of this dream provokes further inquiries into Shiʿa demonologies and its relationship to the then new medium of telegraphy. I specifically investigate the discourses in which thinking about and experiences with the beyond featured in the Iranian demonological imagination, by which I mean ideas about and beliefs in spiritual beings, jenn-related activities, and psychic phenomena. Examining my sources, I sketch out the sensorial logic at work in imagining encounters with jenn and spirits in nineteenth-century Shiʿa culture. Drawing on the concept of haptics, which I elaborate by recourse to philosophy, art history and experimental psychology, I argue that haptics formed the principle sensory mode in Shiʿa psycho-social affairs with the beyond. Understood as the multisensory experience with the proximate space, based on the sense of touch, haptics forms an indispensable mode in Iranians’ relation to Islamic demons.

Keywords: Shiʿ demonology, communication with the beyond, haptics, Spiritism, telegraphy

In the month of Moḥarram of 1859, ʿAli Qoli Mirzā, better known as Eʿteḍād al-Salṭane, the minister of science and telegraphy at the time, had a visionary dream. As recounted by his son many years later, the minister was impatiently waiting for an overdue cargo of telegraph wire in the city of Qazvin. Having waited for a long time in the city for the large delivery of around two tons of copper wire from Russia, one night, Eʿteḍād al-Salṭane dreams of blood flowing from his body.1 When he wakes up, in an oneiromantic epiphany, the science minister concludes that an amount equal to the abjad numerological value of the word blood (khun), that is 656 man, will arrive at Qazvin the next day.2 Absolutely convinced of the veracity of this interpretation, Eʿteḍād al-Salṭane dispatches a telegraph from a town near Qazvin to Tehran and informs the court that the promised Russian cargo has already been received. When he returns after dispatching the telegram to Qazvin the day after, he finds that the cargo, with an exact amount of 656 man has already been delivered.

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Telegraphy, both in terms of its infrastructures and mode of communication, forms the techno-cultural backdrop to the story: the telegraph wires and the anticipatory message he sends back to Tehran. Against this telegraphic background, Eʿteḍād al-Salṭane implants Islamic occultism in his narrative, a familiar theme in Shiʿa culture. The reason for his narrative choice remains unclear. Whether he was trying to promote telegraphy and make it compatible with certain occult ideas in Islam, or if he merely wanted to play down the commercial crisis that his ministry was facing, he tapped into a widespread and popular discourse, and used a narrative technique commonly used by many contemporaneous literati. Once again, an Islamic imagination and modern techniques are brought together instantiating another absurdity. This time, it is telegraphy that forms the media logic in this absurd syncretism, where the same asignifying sense-making absurdist logic can be traced. The gushing blood in Eʿteḍād al-Salṭane’s dream and the cargo of wire expected from Russia are convoked through the ciphering of abjad letters. In other words, the same linking mechanism that in Mostaʿān 110 brings together Islamic semiotics and electromagnetism can be seen working in Eʿteḍād al-Salṭane’s oneiromancy. Interestingly, in both cases tele-communication is central. While in Mostaʿān 110 the remote-control technology applies to a distant virus, in Eʿteḍād al-Salṭane’s case, it effectuates communication with the beyond. This form of communication has a history of its own. An array of ideas about and beliefs in spiritual beings, jenn-related activities and psychic phenomena nourished and stimulated the imagination of this tele-divination. Theological debates, practices of and literatures about magic, folkloric narratives and medical texts were among the main cultural objects within this field. How is this communication with the beyond imagined? How is it made meaningful? From what sources does it derive its logic and content, and more broadly how does it relate to Shiʿa theology and demonology? In this chapter, I examine how Iranian demonological imagination of (sensory) experiences of the beyond acquired meaning in the nineteenth century. Examining a varied range of primary sources, I flesh out the logic of mediation at work in imagining encounters with jenn and spirits in nineteenth-century Iranian culture. I argue that haptics formed the main mediative mode in Shiʿa psycho-social affairs with the beyond. Furthermore, by comparison with the late-nineteenth-century Iranian adaptation of Spiritism, I argue that parallel to, and influenced by, the advent of telegraphy, a new logic of mediation was introduced to the Iranian Shiʿa demonology. The idea is not to describe what the jenn and spirits were or how they were understood in the Shiʿa tradition, but rather my point is to show how people imagined they had communicated with them. Islamic demonology has been the subject of numerous studies, many of which I work with throughout this chapter. But more relevant than others to my research

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materials is Alireza Doostdar’s study, The Iranian Metaphysicals. In this original work, Doostdar conducts an ethnography of contemporary Iranians’ “metaphysical” practices over a discontinuous period of two years starting from 2006.3 Doostdar proposes the concept of “metaphysicals”, as an alternative to “the occult” and “the unseen”, to capture the specificity of the contemporary social imagination of the beyond in Iran. Although Doostdar’s fieldwork focuses on contemporary Iran, his conversations with historical studies have inspired what follows. The imagination of and attempts at communication with the beyond, for Doostdar as well as for my analyses, include “spiritual healing, sorcery, jenn possession, dream visions, saintly marvels”, and practices associated with Spiritism as adapted by Iranians since the nineteenth century.4 For Doostdar, the concept of rationalisation is key. Accordingly, it is a “scientistic”, empiricist rationalisation that distinguishes modern “metaphysical” phenomena from the traditionalist understandings of the occult and the unseen.5 Doostdar does not explicitly deal with issues of technics and mediation, and his analyses tend to obfuscate the paradigm shifts from traditionalists to the moderns under the rubric of “scientific virtues”.6 However, his thinking through the concept of “scientific imaginary” gives some hints as to the extent to which the late twentieth-century technical sphere in Iran has affected social affairs with the beyond.7 Doostdar’s detailed descriptions of Iranians’ psychic performances hint at how the scientistically and empirically rationalised imaginaries technically differ from older demonological models practiced in pre-modern times. In my approach, I delve deeper into the media histories and demonologies to examine the specificity of the nineteenth century. I mainly focus on Majlesi’s The Book of the Heavens (Ketāb al-Samāʾ wa al-ʿĀlam), and to a lesser extent on a quasi-historical treatise by Mir Moḥammad Hāshem Fozuni Astarābādi (d. 1660), History of Boḥayra (Tārikh-e Boḥayra). I further contrast these works with those of the very first modern Spiritists in Iran, a Dār al-Fonun graduate and physician, Khalil Thaqafi (d. 1944). I show how Spiritist séances organised by him, influenced heavily by his French models, together with his pseudo-theoretical and narrative writings portended the rise of a new media logic in the Iranian demonological imagination. In this regard, I show that in contradistinction with the earlier jenn-centred narratives and ideas, those about spirits portrayed mediated experiences with distinctively diminished haptics. While spirits, much like the jenn, were thought to have been physically present in séances, they could not communicate directly with humans. They needed a medium to send their messages across. While jenn’s voice could be directly heard, and their bodies could even be touched and seen in three dimensions, spirits were largely mute and invisible, and in most cases needed extra technical objects to communicate with humans. I further extend my arguments to claim that this shift in the demonological mediation – though by no means absolute and in no way

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indicative of the wholesale abrogation of one regime by another – was imbricated in the media evolution at the time, particularly the rise of electric telegraphy.8

Haptics of the jenn The different ways Shiʿa Muslims traditionally imagined and narrated communication with the beyond always implicated a strongly haptic presence of the jenn. One always intimately sensed the presence of jenn. A person possessed by them was called mamsus (touched) in both Iranian and Arab milieus. Another word used to describe such a person was majnun, the accusative case of the Arabic root j-n-n. It could be used to refer to a mad person, a condition often associated with demons, as well as to a person madly in love. As the verb form janna means to cover and to envelop, majnun also connotes the state of being enveloped. In this sense, when a jenn was thought to have possessed a person, the contact was always assumed to be a proximate one, embracing a person’s entire body.9 As Asghar Seyed-Gohrab notes in his study of Nezāmi’s epic romance, Majnun is also used to refer to those who fall in love with paris, the feminisd demons in Perso-Islamic imagination.10 Furthermore, jenn were seen embodied in various forms: as lifeless objects, animals or humans.11 On special occasions, Muslims reported having felt their malicious patting and slimy brushing over their hands, knees and shoulders.12 Often, one could hear their voices if they chose to talk to humans, in any language they wished. In certain circumstances, jenn even penetrated foodstuff and touched one’s soul through the digestive canal.13 If there is one component in the otherwise multifarious experience with the jenn that has remained invariant throughout centuries and even across remote Islamic geographies, it is this very physical proximity that characterises encounters with jenn. Regardless of the formats in which jenn’s meetings with humans were imagined and the effects that were expected from them, jenn’s intimate physical presence was indispensable. Soothsayers (Rammāls) were reported to have close physical connections with their personal jenn. Their fortune-telling relied on that private relationship.14 They were also reported to have been able to copulate with them.15 If heard and/or seen, the jenn’s sensational presence would always be something more than sound and more than mere visual appearances. As I will show below, the jenn did not merely appear to one’s eyes as a thin ghostly spectre or resonate in one’s ears as pure sounds. Their presence rather overwhelmed space and its inhabitants. This stress on jenn’s haptic presence invites a more careful conceptualisation of haptics. What constitutes a haptic encounter? On what condition is an object perceived haptically? How would a haptic perception be characterised? In the following, I draw on theories of haptics adapted from Gilles Deleuze’s

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philosophy, art history and experimental psychology in order to re-appropriate the concept in my later analyses of jenn-related narratives. A brief history of haptics The study of the sense of touch in the field of experimental psychology, from the German Wilhelm Wundt in the late nineteenth century to the American James Gibson in the mid-twentieth century, has complicated the common understanding of touch as limited to cutaneous sensations. Experiments in the field have shown that the human body is in touch with its environment through different corporeal mechanisms – skin contact being only one among many other modalities. The sense of balance or equilibrioception, operated primarily by the vestibular mechanism in the inner ear, the sense of orientation, proprioception, which pertains to the body’s sense of its positionality in space, and kinaesthesia, which is the sense of motility regulated by means of co-arrangements between skin, muscles and bones, are examples of different ways of understanding the extra senses involved in touch. These senses are further theorised into more intricate sub-systems and combined with one another giving way to more refined analyses of haptic media.16 Rooted in these terms, haptics has become a broad term that captures all the corporeal aspects of touch insofar as it refers to the body’s relation with its immediate surroundings. Gibson has put it most concisely. The haptic system is “the sensibility of the individual to the world adjacent to his body by the use of his body”.17 In this sense, the term is used to capture the sensory modes with which the body relates to its proximity.18 Although haptics has been largely studied by psychologists, the term’s first coinage is accredited to the nineteenth-century Austrian art historian Aloïs Riegl. Dealing exclusively with the ancient Egyptian art of bas-relief, Riegl proposed the concept as a substitute for the tactile to capture the more complex sensations that relief planes had on the viewer. He distinguished between “close vision”, “normal vision” and “distant vision”, and “haptics” was used to elaborate on the first.19 The concept had to wait more than half a century to be re-activated in the humanities, in Deleuze’s philosophy. Deleuze’s novelty resided in his radicalising the concept. While for Riegl the haptic remained within the limited discussion on ancient Egyptian art, for psychologists such as Gibson, within the experimental confines of psychophysics, with Deleuze’s work, the concept found wider resonance in the humanities. Particularly in art, media and architecture history/theory, scholars have extensively invoked the notion to talk about how the human being makes sense of its body’s proximate environment.20 By recourse to Riegl’s use and very close to Gibson’s understanding, Deleuze has accentuated the element of proximity in haptics. He argues that what makes

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haptics different from optics is not the difference in the sense organs involved: the skin for haptics and the eye for optics. Rather, the issue is whether a mediation takes place at “close-range” or at a distance.21 In a haptically defined space, to think with Deleuze, one never sees the big picture – there is no panoramic or perspectival view, nor is there a distinction between the background and the foreground. An image does not appear externally, as a picture or a projection framed and stabilised away from the body. A sound does not resonate from (an) identifiable source(s). In a haptic system, the projected picture, and its impression on the viewer merge: an image pressed against the body, which encompasses its field of vision and destabilises its perceptual reference points – a phantasmagoria in close-up. Instead of viewing an image from a distance, one rather sees in “close-range” with constantly shifting points of reference. Similarly, sounds engulf the listener, who cannot locate their source(s). A sentient being in a haptic space senses in proximity with the sensible materials – it senses textures, colours, sounds and movements without specifiable reference points. The sensible always eludes complete perception and does not yield a stable, clearly circumscribed object of perception. An animal in close-range is not seen as such but sensed, in fleeting moments, as body warmth, panting sounds, fleshy strokes, fury brushes and screeches. It is never an animal, with a fully perceptible form occupying a definitive place or moving from an A to a B. In a haptic space, “one never sees from a distance”, Deleuze and Guattari write, “nor does one see it [object of perception] from a distance”.22 Moreover, one never senses with a single sensory organ, nor does a sense organ function in only one mode. The eye is as capable of receiving and translating haptic stimuli as the skin is. The ear does not only hear, but also regulates balance. Skin does not only admit cutaneous sensations but also enters kinaesthetic and proprioceptive/interoceptive relations with the body’s interiority, with the bones and the muscles. The sensory organs and their “modes of attention”, to mix in Gibson’s preferred term, change as the sensibles come up close.23 One is always immersed in the environment which they perceive haptically. Haptic perception, in a word, is the multisensory mediation of the proximate space. Narratives of haptic jenn in Majlesi and Fozuni In all their meetings with Muslims, the jenn’s haptic presence has been recurrently emphasised. Haptics, moreover, has been conceived of in many ways, implicating various mediative modalities. In this section, I give a broad view of haptics in the many forms and expressions of divination (jafr), magic and other psychic experiences as imagined/narrated in ideas and stories about the jenn reproduced in nineteenth-century Iran. I examine two key sources originally compiled in the previous centuries that later resurfaced through the rising lithographic culture in the

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period. While the main argument revolves around the idea that haptic perception underlies the demonological imagination about the jenn, I further hypothesise that jenn’s haptic presence corresponded, and was limited, to the media specificities and affordances at the time. Among the many functions ascribed to jenn, I focus on those in which the jenn’s haptics is prominent. I trace this demonic haptics first through the characterisation of jenn’s corporeality, and then describe the way that corporeality was perceived in proximity with humans. In the first work I close-read, Majlesi’s The Book of Heavens, there is a full chapter on jenn. In this chapter, the Shiʿa scholar gives an extensive view on the Qorʾānic mention of the term as well as the extant interpretive traditions on the matter. Referencing a few verses in the Qorʾān, Majlesi draws attention to the prophet Solomon’s ownership of several jenn whom he had commissioned to perform manual labour for him. The work consisted of “hard work (aʿmāl al-shāqqah)” like “work with clay (ʿamal al-ṭin)”.24 Furthermore, as Majlesi continues quoting the Qorʾān, they built for Solomon various constructs such as “elevated chambers (maḥārib), statues (tamāthil), bowls like reservoirs (jefān), and stationary kettles”.25 Majlesi interprets the maḥārib as the abode of sharʿ such as ”mosques and palaces for worship”, to which Jerusalem also belonged.26 As Majlesi further elaborates, this meant that jenn were handy in “moulding copper, brass, glass and alabaster”. Using these materials, jenn were imagined as craftsmen who erected statues and made images.27 This was only a small manifestation of the jenn’s manual capabilities, which shows how they could engage with the physical world and contribute to people’s material culture with direct corporeal intervention. Furthermore, from Majlesi’s standpoint, they were reported to have been physically present on many occasions when Muslims recited the Qorʾān. The Book of Heavens recounts the story of their listening to God’s words when the Prophet read the Qorʾān out loud.28 This was not a spiritual, but a physical audition. Citing a verse from surah 55 (al-Raḥmān), Majlesi points to how jenn’s presence came with a certain heaviness when God addressed them as “al-thaqalān (heavy beings)”.29 It was with this heaviness that they listened to the Qorʾān. Moreover, jenn’s corporeality extended far enough to include copulation (al-jenni yaghshā kamā yaghshā al-ensi), which could happen between jenn as well as between jenn and humans.30 Jenn were therefore imagined to be supremely tactile beings. Their tactile sensibility, moreover, was not restricted to copulation, but could be found elsewhere in other modes of their communication with the material and immaterial realms. For instance, jenn’s access to the divine before Moḥammad’s ascent to prophecy was, rather counterintuitively, mediated by touch, and not hearing as one would expect. As Majlesi quotes from surah 72 (al-jenn), jenn were confronted with newly assigned guards when they “sought to touch the heaven (wa-annā lamasnā al-samāʾ)” (emphasis added). It can be deduced that for them to reach high and

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listen in on the heavenly affairs, they had to first touch it. Or to put it in terms of haptics, their listening depended on their proximity to God’s realm. Next to these Qorʾānic references, Majlesi relates several ḥadiths and folkloric narratives about jenn. In one story which he cites from Al-Ṣaduq’s Congregations (Majāles al-Ṣaduq), compiled by Sheykh al-Ṣaduq (d. 991), we read that one day Moḥammad is looking for his small grandchildren Ḥoseyn and Ḥasan.31 He finds them embracing one another in sleep while “a snake whose skin was like reed cane (qaṣab) embraced each one of them”.32 When the snake sees the Prophet, he immediately calls upon him and tells him that he has kept his grandchildren safe. When the Prophet asks him about his identity, the snake replies “I am a jenn-messenger”. He further explains to Moḥammad that he is from the Molayḥ clan (men bani molayḥ) and has come to him because his community members have forgotten a certain verse in the Qorʾān.33 He was therefore sent by his community to ask the Prophet to remind them of that verse. The story does not mention which verse the jenn-snake had in mind and leaves a lot more details unaddressed. What is, however, given attention in this short narrative is the manner in which that jenn appears to the Prophet, that is the prominent haptic presence with which the jenn embraces Ḥasan and Ḥoseyn. The Prophet perceives this tactility first. The jenn’s skin was moreover imagined having been real enough to receive hygienic care. In one narrative, Majlesi explains why it is not permissible to use dung and bones for genital ablution. According to a report (khabar) from one of Majlesi’s sources, when jenn asked the Prophet for something to wash their genitals with (al-estenjāʾ), the Prophet gave them dung and bones (al-rawth wa al-ʿaẓm).34 The jenn’s corporeality was therefore imaginatively advanced enough to require ablution. The jenn’s haptic presence was not limited to their sense of touch, although based on this sense. A wider range of senses operated whenever jenn communicated to humans. Often, their voices and sounds were heard, which guided travellers when they lost their way.35 In addressing humans, they directly talked to them without any intermediary – we hear no mention of any form of writing that mediated jenn’s message. Their communication therefore relied on their immediate presence. I could not find a single account in which a piece of information reaches a person telepathically without the jenn’s body being present at the time of the communication. Although they could reveal information from events that had taken place far away (mā yaḥdotho fi al-boʿd), at the moment of transmission they had to be physically present.36 One could not begin to imagine a communicational instance in which information was transmitted immaterially through long distances without the direct transportation of the jenn’s bodies. The jenn has to always personally travel that distance to carry the information. In one particular story in The Books of Heavens, this jenn body-based communication can be most explicitly observed. I

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will contrast this body-based telecommunication with telegraphic communication in the next section. Taken from Ṭabari’s Reasons (Dalāʾel al-Ṭabari), compiled by Moḥammad Ebn-e Jarir Ṭabari (d. 922) this story is told by a dignitary in Medina who one day receives a letter from an unknown man.37 The dignitary notices that the letter seal is still very fresh. When he realises that it is from Imām Reḍā, the sixth Shiʿa Imam, who was in Mecca at the time, he is greatly surprised. However, before he gets a chance to ask the messenger about his identity, the man disappears. A few days later, when the Imam comes back to Medina, the dignitary asks him about the letter. In his reply, Reḍā confirms that the letter was from him, delivered by a benevolent jenn who, in urgent matters, helps the Prophet’s family.38 This story is among the narratives that attest to the jenn’s tele-operational skills. It draws attention to the ability of the jenn to travel long distances in a very short time. In these space-jumps, the jenn’s very body moves from one place to another. The transmission can in no way take place without the body’s actual displacement. The materiality of the letter foregrounds this necessity. The information could not have been transmitted otherwise; for example, the letter could not have appeared in that dignitary’s hand out of thin air, or telepathically communicated to his inner senses. If that had been the narrative, the encounter would have slipped into the category of prophecy or human-angel relations.39 Such stories did not, and perhaps even could not, draw on such immaterial aesthetics. They were rather bound to certain earthly limits. These jenn-messengers figure in many other stories. They incarnate (maskh) in human forms, as in the story above, or in animal forms, in the shape of a snake or a dog.40 In any case, their body-transportation is necessary for the transmission. Even in cases in which their messages are communicated vocally without an immediate visible form, the jenn’s physical presence is essential to the authenticity and plausibility of the stories. In such cases, their presence is seen/felt as black smoke, a gust of wind- or in some cases the swirling effect of cyclones (al-zawbaʿa).41 To reiterate, the sounds and voices do not impress their audience in abstraction, as part of an inner perception, but are concretely carried or expressed by the jenn’s bodies. Another work compiled by one of Majlesi’s predecessors, Mir Moḥammad Hāshem Fozuni Astarābādi (d. 1660) narrates stories with similar haptic qualities. Titled History of Boḥayra (Tārekh-e Boḥayra) the book was lithographed a few decades after the first publication of The Book of Heavens in 1910.42 Although the work was meant as a work of history in its own time, it is a lot closer in genre to the narrative encyclopaedic style with which Majlesi compiled his Oceans of Lights a few decades after. The text contains many mythological and theological narratives juxtaposed with Islamic ethics and geo-historical facts.43 It is divided into 40 chapters (bāb). Chapter 39 narrates several stories about the jenn, each

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of which are titled sighting of the jenn (roʾyat al-jenn) and lays out testimonies by people who claimed to have communicated with the jenn. Intermittently, we also read short excerpts taken from older sources about the different forms that the jenn can take, the communities and kinds they belong to and the places in which they might appear. To avoid repetition, as the stories are very similar to the ones in The Book of Heavens, I briefly review how jenn-corporeality figures in them. In two stories, the jenn appear to people in their most common form, that is, a snake.44 In one case, a snake is accidentally killed by a man who is then abducted by a group of jenn who turn out to be the snake’s family members. They seek revenge from the man only to be appeased by the man’s resorting to a saying by the Prophet in which it was decreed that if a jenn is killed in disguise, shedding their blood would be licit.45 In another story, they appear as “black people wearing white clothes, eating bones and dung as their food”.46 On yet another occasion, a man tells the story of seeing and touching a jenn incarnated as a lamb stuck in the deep snow.47 In one particularly sensual instance, on encountering a jenn in a public bath, a naked man runs away.48 We also read a story about a love affair between a male jenn and a woman.49 Most of these jenn are described as “ugly beasts” with “hideous faces” (karih al-manẓar). A group of them are seen in the form of one-legged cyclopes, some with “animal bodies and human beards”, others with pig eyes and camel legs.50 Depending on how and where they appeared, they are given different names. One kind, called al-ghaddār (traitor), which is found in Yemen, Hejāz and Egypt, is notoriously sexual.51 This kind of jenn always seeks sexual contact with whoever she/he crosses paths. In one encounter with a male ghaddār, a man has to trick the jenn to ejaculate into his waterskin, which, upon the man’s later inspection, turns out to be filled with scorpions. From these accounts, it can be induced that in communication with jenn, corporeality plays a key part, which then predicates people’s perception of them. When jenn are present, one is confronted with their bodies proximately, sensing them in physical form directly. Recalling Gibson and Deleuze’s understanding of haptics, it can be argued that jenn-based phenomena, as narrated and theorised in the sources I examined exemplarily, are mediated in and as a haptic space. In this space, jenn corporeality, their overwhelming physical presence, is sensed intimately by those who meet the jenn. The jenn embrace, or are embraced by, humans, as a snake or a lamb, speak into their ears at close range, deliver a letter in person, copulate with and even torture humans physically. These narratives of, and ideas about, jenn and jenn-like phenomena, mediate the jenn. To do so, these narratives are compelled to also portray, describe, or classify jenn’s bodily existence. With the advent of the new media of the nineteenth century, however, a different imagination of the other world came onto the scene.

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Spirits after telegraphy Electric telegraphy was brought to Iran within a decade of the establishment of Dār al-Fonun.52 Especially during the first few decades after the installation of the first telegraphic network in Iran, not only the public but also clergymen and statesmen often associated this wondrous (ghariba) invention with occultism. The story about Eʿteḍād al-Salṭane’s dream vision was one prominent example. One encounters the use of occultist themes in tandem with telegraphy across many different sources in late-nineteenth-century Iran. The Vaqāyeʿ frequently used the term “occult (khafiye)” when speaking of telegraphy.53 Certain ʿolamā used the term the Devil’s line/writing (khaṭt-e shaytān) when referring to telegraphy. The interrelatedness between telegraphy and occultism, moreover, was not unique to the Iranian milieu. To think of telegraphy as an instrument with which, or according to the logic of which, one could connect to the beyond was particularly central to Spiritualism and Spiritism, two related religio-scientific movements that originated in the Anglo-European culture and quickly spread throughout the globe in the late nineteenth century.54 The practitioners of this new cultural fascination organised what came to be known as séances – that is, gatherings of about a dozen people in a room, usually sitting around a table – in which the spirits of the dead were invited to converse with humans. The idea of summoning up spirits was surely not the Spiritualists’ invention – next to the accounts I have already given in the previous section, one can easily find references to similar otherworldly transmissions in different geo-historical periods.55 However, Spiritualists re-articulated spirit communication in novel and concrete terms, considering it a natural phenomenon governed by (partially) measurable laws of nature.56 The spirits of the dead, according to their conception, were not only real but capable of materialising on earth through processes that could be explained, at least partly, by physics. In the séances, spirits could be physically summoned up – though as I argue later their presence could be sensed only after mediation. In most cases, participants needed a “medium”, a person capable of allowing them to speak and/or move through their bodies, to communicate tangibly. Participants in séances were also very fond of moving tables and levitating furniture – tables tournantes.57 In these séances, the spirits of deceased people revealed information about their pasts, secrets about certain participants and in some cases foretold future occurrences. These practices signalled a media re-organisation in the late nineteenth-century demonological imagination in the West as well as in Iran. The intrusion of telegraphy into the discourses on occultism, and concomitantly the popularisation of Spiritualism in Iranian cities, brought about changes in understanding the beyond and in communication methods with its inhabitants. My main argument is that

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with the advent of telegraphy, people began to relate to the unseen with a different mediative setup. As histories of Spiritualism and of telegraphy have shown, the late nineteenth-century demonological imagination was embedded in the telegraphic media ecology, both in Europe and the United States.58 In other words, to imagine communication with people far away was tantamount to communicating with spirits. As science historian Richard Noakes writes, Victorians in the mid-nineteenth century often found it hard to distinguish between telegraphy and Spiritualism. In the early 1850s, the British public grappled with mysterious spiritual communications at the same time as new telegraph companies told them it was possible to use electricity to contact friends on earth. Spirits of the dead ‘rapped’ out messages on a ‘spiritual’ telegraph, much as messages on the electric telegraph were exchanged via Samuel Morse’s code of raps.59

By the end of the century when almost all the Iranian provinces were wired together, the public had no difficulty thinking of this awe-inspiring phenomenon alongside occult practices. In Stolow’s words, “if telegraphic technologies could harness electromagnetic forces in order to communicate intentional messages, why should it not also be possible to develop comparable techniques in order to communicate with the dead?”.60 It was in this electrically networked context that Spiritism was introduced to the Iranian society. The Iranian fascination therefore paralleled that in Europe with a gap of no more than three decades. Furthermore, the technical media re-organisation that was implicated in Spiritist practices is traceable in discussions about psychic phenomena, newly formed ideas about spirits and séances organised by leading Iranian Spiritists. All this happened against the backdrop of former practices and beliefs relating to the haptic presence of the jenn. However, the ways Spiritism was practiced, and more importantly received by and assimilated in Iranian Shiʿa culture, differed from how it preoccupied European minds. In the latter, Spiritism intensified the sense of spiritual embodiment and the physical realism within which the world of spirits operated. Spirits for European Spiritism became more earthly, material, and physical. Spiritism for the Iranians, in stark contrast, moved demonological imagination toward the opposite direction: spirits became more immaterial and disembodied. Both Europeans and Iranians, however, submitted to the same necessity for technical mediation. I will unpack this further below. The first séances in Iran were organised by the Iranian physician Khalil Thaqafi (d. 1944), Tholozan’s student at Dār al-Fonun, who studied medicine in Paris and Vienna during the late 1890s. He brought back to Iran a branch of Spiritualism, that is, Spiritism, developed by the Frenchman Allan Kardec (d. 1869). Thaqafi

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established the first Spiritist organisation in Iran (anjoman-e maʿrefat al-ruḥ-e tajrebati), which attracted the rising urban middle class who had a similar educational background.61 Through numerous translations, organising many séances and participating in debates about the wondrous phenomena that occurred during sessions, the Iranian Spiritist society introduced a new corporeal model for communication with the unseen. Doostdar has made a brief connection to this historical period in his Iranian Metaphysicals. As he notes, one of Thaqafi’s important contributions to the growing of Spiritism in Iran came in his book Seventy-One Essays on the Science of Spirit (Haftād va Yek Maqāle dar Maʿrefat al-Ruḥ).62 Doostdar’s work, however, being more focused on the contemporary, does not directly engage with Thaqafi’s work, nor does he examine it closely considering European influences. Here, I seek to unpack further what Doostdar has left underexamined. To this end, I examine Thaqafi’s Seventy-One Essays on the Science of Spirit closely in the following section as it contains details of a few séances, stories about communication with spirits and pseudo-theories on Spiritism. Reading this text closely sheds light on how communication with the beyond was transformed in Iran after the arrival of telegraphy and on how the media re-organisation required by this new model was realised. I should also note that, while Thaqafi’s work serves as the main entry point to Spiritism in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Iran, it is not the only one. Intermittently, I refer to other works produced by Thaqafi, his colleagues and other circumferential sources related to Spiritism in the period: personal logs of seances, reflections on the concepts and methods used in Spiritism, as well as descriptions of Spiritist phenomena such as table-moving and automatic writing. These sources can add historical perspective to Doostdar’s ethnographic portrayal of contemporary Iran.63 In addition, I refer to the original European sources from which Thaqafi took his ideas and stories to shed light on the wider spectrum of Spiritism that backed Thaqafi’s works. Seventy-One Essays on the Science of Spirit is a collection of several stories and short articles, mostly taken from nineteenth-century European sources. The Frenchmen Nicolas Camille Flammarion and Allan Kardec are the most frequently mentioned, but also other sources of British, American, German and Italian origin are occasionally referenced.64 Informed by these sources, most stories feature Western characters and ghosts, while only a few deal with the indigenous Iranian experience, which Thaqafi must have heard from family and friends. Next to these few Iranian cases, the last part of the book reports the details of around ten séances with notable Iranian guest spirits. Mirzā Taqi Khān Amir Kabir, the founder of Dār al-Fonun, poets Khayyām and Hāfeẓ, Karbala antagonist Yazid Ebn-e Moʿāwiya, medieval thinker Ebn-e Sinā, jurist and Islamic scholar Sheykh Bahāʾi and the last king of the Zand dynasty, Karim Khān-e Zand are among the most prominent.65 Combining the European stories with the Iranian experience, this book can

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be read as a prism through which the changes in demonological discourses in late-nineteenth-century Iran can be understood. In what follows, I investigate a few excerpts taken from European sources – stories, theoretical exposés on the notion of spirits and its modes of appearance – and one séance Thaqafi personally attended in Tehran.66 My aim is to demonstrate the media re-organisation, and the media-technological implications, in the shifting demonological imagination from the jenn to the spirit model. In lieu of the telegraph: The universal fluid Many stories appear in the book that somehow allude to telegraphic communication. In these stories, we read about individuals who came to know of or experienced events beyond their ordinary sensory reach. In most of these accounts, the telegraph serves as a backdrop – either as a means to confirm the veracity of a claim, or simply as a familiar trope creating an aura of realism for readers. As an example, in a story taken from Flammarion’s book Death and Its Mystery, “a wife of the inspector of public instruction in the district of Bombay”, referred to as Mrs. Russell, talks about an extraordinary experience in which she tele-communicates to her sisters and mother. This is part of the original story: I was living in Scotland, my mother and sisters in Germany. I was living with a very dear friend and every year I went to Germany to see my people. It happened that for two years I was not able to see my family, against my custom. All at once I decided to leave, but my family knew nothing of my intention. I had never been to see them in the early spring, and I had not time to warn them by letter. I did not want to send a telegraph for fear of frightening my mother. The thought came to me to wish with all my strength to appear to one of my sisters, in such a way as to apprise them of my arrival. I focused all my senses and [power of] imagination on the thought of her with all the intensity possible (ḥavvās-e khud-rā kāmelan jamʿ va khayāl-e khud-rā motavajjeh namudam), and I wished with all my might to be seen by one of them. I believe I did not concentrate my thought for more than ten minutes.67

The day after, she set out for Germany. When she arrived at her mother’s a few days later, her sister approached her with awe and fright as she exclaimed how a few weeks before, exactly the day when Mrs. Russell claimed to have performed her “intense” telecommunication, she had seen her walking in the house. Thaqafi’s translation changes a few sentences in the original text and omits a few scenes to render the plot and the conversations more intelligible to Iranian readers. For instance, describing how Mrs. Russell concentrates on her sister to summon her up in her mind, Thaqafi uses the term “cheshm-e mokhayyela”, which

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literally means the eye of the imaginative faculty. The protagonist, therefore, sees her sister before her inner “cheshm-e mokhayyela”. Here, Thaqafi taps into the traditionalist notion of internal senses, the imaginative faculty (mokhayyela) being one of them. This term does not appear in the European version and is evidently smuggled into the text to make the story more appealing to Iranian readers. Otherwise, Thaqafi’s version does justice to the original, especially given his faithful translation of the part in which telegraphy is mentioned. In this part, we read that Mrs. Russell could have dispatched a telegraph to her mother, but, rather counterintuitively, decided not to “frighten” her and instead communicated telepathically with her sister – which somehow was perceived to have been less frightening. In this way, telegraphic communication parallels Mrs. Russell’s psychic telepathy with her sister.68 In another story, from an unidentified source, we read about a clairvoyant dream seen by a French seven-year-old boy. The boy sees in his dream that his father, who has been in Nice, is drowning. On the same day, the story continues, the family is informed by a telegram that the father has indeed drowned.69 Another similar story is told about the drowning of a boy, whose mother receives a telegram later, which confirms her earlier clairvoyance.70 Telegraphy features in many other stories as well. While in some cases a telegraph is mentioned in passing, as in Mrs. Russell’s story, in others it serves as a trustworthy instrument with which one could evaluate a visionary or clairvoyant claim. It can be therefore said that its inclusion in the stories created a realistic backdrop for the stories to work convincingly. If in the narratives about jenn told in The Book of Heavens and Boḥayra, among other traditionalist sources, the haptic presence of the jenn constituted the mechanism of the occult, for the Spiritist stories, it is telegraphy that occurs time and again. Resorting to the reality of telegraphic technologies, these stories are meant to make readers believe that wireless “brain-to-brain” telecommunication, to use Kardec words, is real as well. For the jenn in contrast, such a form of communication was not conceivable. For them to communicate, they had to be physically present, and their message had to be handed personally or whispered at close range. In the Spiritist stories, telegraphy is mentioned only to be superseded, or preferred, by psychic telecommunication. In these stories, a psychic knows about an event far away that could have only been known via telegraphy. But in lieu of the telegraph, the protagonists in these stories are informed of remote occurrences through other means. These other means are understood as more advanced forms of telegraphic communication, though belonging to the analogous technical order. As Allan Kardec originally proposed, communication with spirits takes place through a subtle fluid that permeates throughout the universe. This fluid, as Kardec explains in one of the seminal books in Spiritism, The Book of Spirits, “establishes

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a constant communication between” spirits and humans and furthermore “constitutes a sort of universal telegraph, which unites all worlds, and enables spirits to correspond from one world to another”.71 For Kardec as well as for Thaqafi, who translated many excerpts from the former in his Maʿrefat al-Ruḥ, telegraphy was not merely a metaphor for spirit communication, but worked by the same logic. To draw from Stolow again, this common logic was credible because it referenced a deeper cosmological claim about electricity as a form of ‘universal fluid’, permeating all forms of animate and inanimate being, and enabling their intercourse with one another. For some, such as John Dods, a New England Universalist Church minister, amateur scientist, and prominent trance speaker of the 1850s, electricity was part of a natural theology in which electromagnetic energy was interchangeable with the grace of God and the holy sacrament.72

In another book by Kardec, The Book of Mediums, Kardec has a spirit theorise this form of communication. Kardec’s summoned spirit, also anonymous, states that the medium’s role, that is giving his/her body to spirits in order for them to transmit their messages across, is that of an electric machine, which transmits telegraphic dispatches from one point of the earth to another far distant. So, when we wish to dictate a communication, we act on the medium as the telegraph operator on his instruments; that is, as the tac-tac of the telegraph writes thousands of miles away, on a slip of paper, the reproduced letters of the dispatch, so we, from immeasurable distance that separates the visible from the invisible world, the immaterial from the incarnated world, communicate what we wish to teach you by means of the medianimic [sic] instrument.73

This idea finds its way into Iranian Spiritism in the person of Mirzā Moḥammad Khān Vaḥid al-Saʿāda, a close colleague and friend of Thaqafi. In his The Key to Civilisation (Kelid-e Tamaddon), he writes that “spirits cannot actively engage with material bodies (ajsām-e māddi) and be perceived by our senses without a certain amount of vital fluid (sayyāle-ye ḥayāti). Spirits take this fluid from people who are called mediums (mediom)”.74 And it is through these mediums, Vaḥid al-Saʿāda continues, that they can appear on earth. From this conception, it becomes clear that the inhabitants in the unseen world no longer appear directly on earth, unlike the jenn who could move freely from one place to another without the need to take on the body of another entity. Spirits are no longer comparable to jenn who can take on any form they wish and directly converse with humans; rather, they are spirits made of a subtle substance, mute and unintelligible, who are only able to

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flow, much like “telegraphic fluids”, into vessels capable of mediating their intricate movements and thoughts. Their message can only be mediated, either via the mediums’ bodies, or via devices such as a planchette, a simple table or other more advanced telegraph-like instruments. Spirits become different species to the jenn, though both Iranian modern spirits and jenn shared similar monotheistic ideologies. This is evident in both Thaqafi and Vaḥid al-Saʿāda when they extend their Europeanised ideas to Islamic monotheism. Vaḥid al-Saʿāda concludes immediately after reiterating Kardec’s idea of vital fluid that the existence of such a phenomenon proves that God exists. The logic with which the spirits communicate with the material world through the vital fluid, according to Vaḥid al-Saʿāda, proves the existence of the “vital principle (qānun-e ḥayāti), the spirit of the world, the absolute oneness (vaḥdat) to which all connexions (ertebātāt) converge and with which they conform, the great focal point of perfection from which all ethical faculties (qovā-ye akhlāqi), such as justice (ʿadālat), grace (matānat) and love (maḥabbat) emanate and glare in infinity”.75 The séance with Amir Kabir and the issue of mediation Thaqafi organised many séances during his Spiritist activities in Iran during the early twentieth century, in which prominent characters visited his sessions and conversed with the participants through automatic writing and table tapping. One of these sessions, I suggest, was particularly representative of the ideas about spirits and the expanding demonological imagination in the late nineteenth century. The ghost-character invited to this session was none other than the founder of Dār al-Fonun, Amir Kabir. The session with him apparently lasted longer than other séances. The conversations that the sitters had with him touched on some of the key issues in Spiritism and can be read as evidencing how the experience with the beyond was no longer characterised by haptic mediation. Mirzā Taqi Khān was summoned and interrogated by Thaqafi through automatic writing via an anonymous medium. When the ex-minister makes his presence known to the participants, he is greeted by Thaqafi, who after exchanging a few introductory remarks asks him what he is doing as a spirit. Amir Kabir responds that he is studying “the nature and the grandeur of creation”. He further explains a few details about the spiritual realm (ʿālam-e ruḥāni) in which he resides and then elaborates on how spirits like himself communicate thoughts with earthly beings.76 “Whenever we wish to make something known to a person in the material world”, he informs the séance sitters, “we instil (elqā mikonim) [the idea in the person] to read a certain book. Or when we want to make someone aware that a bad deed does not have a good consequence, we inspire him (elqā) to think of its results”.77

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In another line of conversation, Amir Kabir states that “spirits can transport objects from one place to another and can also fabricate them out of ether”. When someone asks him how they can bring an object into a room, he further clarifies that “they make it into its ethereal form (ḥālat-e eteri) first, then bring it inside and turn it back to its [original material] form”.78 In regard to automatic writing through which he was communicating with séance participants, he responds à la Kardec and Vaḥid al-Saʿāda that “there is a fluid in you which we use”, even such that “the pen itself moves on its own volition”. Furthermore, when asked about what spirits look like, he responds that spirits have a complex form (shekl-e darham), “which cannot be conceived in any way (fahm nashavad)”.79 As the séance with Amir Kabir demonstrates, the séance attendees did not directly feel the presence of the ghosts. An idea would be “instilled (elqā)” in a person without any perceptible bodily presence. The spirits were no longer physically tangible – they were merely assumed to be real and physical. The subtle substance of which they were made, that is the vital fluid (sayyāl-e ḥayāti) that pervaded bodies and the universe, did not work in the same way as the stuff of which the jenn were made. If the latter could take various forms and appear directly to humans, the former could only produce barely perceptible sensations and hence could only appear to humans indirectly, that is, via an extra layer of communicational techniques. Amir Kabir was therefore not sensed to be in the room but intuited to be present by virtue of the writing performance carried out by the anonymous medium. Although séances provided their sitters with certain sensations, with almost all the senses involved in the experience, the basis was always a technically mediated performance. That participants could ascribe the sensations they felt to a ghostly presence, owed much of its credibility and realism to a technical setup. This setup drew its legitimacy from a media culture in which it was empirically evident that it was possible to communicate real-time with a person far away without their immediate presence. One cannot deny the fact that Spiritist séances around the globe in the nineteenth century affected the senses. Participants often spoke of cutaneous sensations, allegedly produced by spirits’ hands. We can also find reports of séances in which a “spirit hand” was actually seen by the sitters, and “powerful rappings” were clearly heard during sessions.80 Encounters with materialised spirits can also be found, either appearing visually out of thin air, or on the photographic plate, and in some rare cases, leaving their hand imprints in clay or wax.81 In this regard, Moore goes as far as characterising Spiritualist movements in the mid and late nineteenth century as a new religious paradigm imbued with sensuousness, arguing that “in the interest of science and to serve a population excited by scientific discovery, Spiritualists proposed a religious faith which depended upon seeing and touching”.82

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These sensuous components did exist in Spiritist practices around the globe. After all, the main allure in the séances depended on precisely this very sensory experience. But in Iran, this aspect was marginalised, to say the least. In Thaqafi’s séances, the appearance of the spirits to the participants is never mentioned. They are not seen or touched, nor even heard. Their presence is removed by a degree and strictly mediated, through the movement of the table or automatic writing. From jenn to spirits, in the Iranian demonological imagination, connecting to the beyond loses its haptics as spirits needed an extra layer of mediation to send their messages across. Technicalities such as table moving, automatic writing and rapping mediate the absence, or to be more precise, the intangible presence of spirits by extra techniques and technical objects. Even within the European context, where the direct mediation of the summoned spirits was central, Spiritualist theories and practices testify to the prominence of indirect mediation of spirits in séances. Even when spirits are allegedly seen, as physicist William Fletcher Barrett writes in 1882, “some medium” is necessary to make them visible: The waves of the luminiferous ether require a material medium to absorb them before they can be perceived by our senses; the intermediary may be a photographic plate, the rods and cones of the retina, a blackened surface, or the so-called electromagnetic resonators, according to the respective length of those waves; but some medium, formed of ponderable matter, is absolutely necessary to render the chemical, luminous, thermal, or electrical effects of these waves perceptible to us.83

According to Barrett, spirits appeared as visual forms, mediated through some material artefact that would then make the universal fluid perceptible. Going back to the Iranian context, given this medium-based appearance, it can be said that when spirits were reported to be present, their apparition was distinctively different from that of jenn as described in premodern accounts.84 What fascinated the enthusiasts and the public certainly revolved around the sensorial encounters with spirits. However, this senso-reality, in experience, manifested only after being technologically mediated: either as a picture, tapping sounds, levitating tables or automatic writing.85 What they felt in actuality was not so much the spirits, as was the case in narratives about the jenn, but the technical objects that putatively mediated the spirits. In this sense, Spiritism maintained spirits’ absence through technical means. For the jenn, in contrast, the narratives about experiences with the beyond lacked this technical requisite. Jenn usually affected their audience directly without any mediation – they would not speak through a medium’s mouth, would not write through mediums’ hands, would not move objects without being seen. If they spoke, one would hear their voices in their

122 chapter 4

immediate surroundings. If they communicated in writing, they would personally deliver the paper on which the writing was inscribed.86 But with Spiritualism, spirits’ interference into the material world changed. Voices were not heard directly, but through someone else’s throat. Writing was done through someone else’s hand. It can be said that while jenn were reportedly garrulous, modern spirits remained rather taciturn and distanced. If jenn were physically dexterous, kinaesthetically hyperactive and as the Qorʾān had it, one of the “two heavy beings” (al-thaqalān), then, spirits were in contrast thin, light, and volatile, and hence were incapable of making their presence known without technical aids. These technical extensions were central to Spiritualist practices. Without them, there would have been no séances. Pen, paper, table and/or planchette were crucial for performing spirit communication. As an example that foregrounds this technicality in the Iranian context, we find in one treatise published towards the end of the nineteenth century a section on how the table for séances should be made, with lucid details about its design, tapping function and materials, though with not a single mention of the word spirit. This treatise, Kashf al-Ṣanāyeʿ, written by an obscure author ʿAli Ḥoseyni, deals with techniques and industries in Iran, including photography, printing technologies, glass work and metallurgy to name a few.87 The work contains a short passage titled “on the quality of the wooden table”, in which we read details of the methods of construction, substances used for the surface finish, materials used in making the table and the magnetic properties with which the table could perform clairvoyance. The text explains in detail how the table taps its legs telegraphically to communicate with the attendees, for instance, four taps for a positive response and eight taps for a negative one. However, no information regarding the spirits that must have used the table to communicate with the participants in the séance can be found, nor the Spiritualist context in which such a practice would be performed. From this rather extreme viewpoint, psychic phenomena were purely technical with no necessity for spirits. The latter, in Ḥoseyni’s view, were even redundant. The table itself was enough for the performance: a technical Spiritism without spirits.88

Diminishing haptics in Iranian spiritism Spirits have occupied the human imagination across time and space, giving rise to a diverse set of depictions, engravings, talismanic practices, rituals, writings and so on. Such an enormous cultural imagination cannot possibly conform to a simple narrative that posits a unidirectional transformation from one paradigm to another between two historical periods. What I have proposed in this chapter is that after telegraphy, a new mechanism of mediation in the imagination of the beyond

spiritual mediations: shiʿa demonology and telegraphy 123

emerged in Iran. As my comparative examination shows, spirits were introduced to the demonological imagination of late nineteenth-century Iranian society, at least in the circles connected to the Dār al-Fonun – in rural areas, the case might have been different, one assumes. In the séance with Amir Kabir, when asked “are there jenn and fairies (pari) in your world?”, he answers that “what you know as jenn and pari are in fact we, the spirits. Evil spirits are jenn and good ones are pari”.89 However, in Spiritist parlance communication with the beyond was no longer congruous with jenn-centred demonologies. Although according to Amir Kabir’s response, the two were supposedly semantically interchangeable, Spiritualists never used the notion jenn when discussing psychic phenomena. Given the way spirits were summoned in séances, it would have been rather outlandish if they had continued to use the same jenn-driven terminology when describing their proceedings. The ways in which spirits appeared to Iranian Spiritists had very little in common with how traditional Shiʿa literature before them portrayed jenn and their visitation. Amir Kabir’s presence was anything but intimate. His ghost was assumed to be present only because a medium, through automatic writing, was presumably mediating his words. Other spirits were made present in the same vein, always mediated through a series of techniques and technical objects. In the séances with Iranian figures, it was not fully fledged spirit-bodies but the tapping of the table legs, or the auto-writing pen that represented the characters. It was this extra level of mediation that removed haptics from the late-nineteenth-century imagination of the beyond, the evidence of which was claimed by means of spirit photography of which there is no record in the Iranian context. Recalling that jenn haptics was embedded in and the result of a narrative tradition that foregrounded the sense of bodily proximity to the beyond, we can observe that with Iranian nineteenth-century Spiritualism, the senses connected to the spirit world remotely, that is via technical means. In so doing, the logic of mediation had to be readjusted and realigned to the technical affordances used in séances, thus losing the haptic component. Hearing spirit rappings, seeing spectral movements and feeling mellow breezes, to name a few instances of mediated communication with spirits, were the workings of a mediative machine re-organised according to an incorporeal tele-communicational logic. Unlike the one that could perceive jenn at close range, this tele-communicational logic was deployed to register and decipher the produced sensations as representative of a remote and otherwise inaccessible spirit world. In this reordered mediation, neither the human body nor that of spirits could connect to the world of the other without technical prosthetics – table legs, electromagnetic needles, pens, and papers became an extension of the body. Prosthesised by these extensions, the body was no longer in direct touch with the other world. It was mediated and therefore removed from any corporeal presence. The overwhelming and multidirectional voice of jenn that could be heard

124 chapter 4

all around one’s body turned into tapping and rapping sounds coming from solid objects, which would then be assumed to be caused by spirits. The smelly, smoky, and heavy bodies of jenn gave way to the deodorised and translucent spectres of spirits. The concept of haptic captures this transition acutely. And moreover, it gestures towards a much more general transformation in the Iranian media environment, that is, not only a re-organisation in the demonological imagination, but in Shiʿa culture at large. Losing its haptics, an Iranian media logic emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century with a whole new way of approaching the world.

EPILOGUE

The semiotics of Shiʿa absurdism

Let us consider them again: a technical manual describing the photologic mechanism of the Resurrection, a hyper-rationalised idea about the day of ʿAshura, a talismanic remedy, and an occultist oneiromantic vision. Through the lens of these cases, I went through a semiotically diverse series of narratives, ideas, images, and materialities. I traced in them a compulsion that despite the perpetuating failure to fulfil the intended signification continued to produce sense. The resurrection of deeds on the Judgement Day in and as the photographic image not only made sense for Meshkāt al-Molk but continues to do so for some Shiʿa Muslims today. Mollā Darbandi persisted in his claim about the length of ʿAshura day. Talismanic ingestion remained prevalent in the nineteenth century, and motifs of telecommunication and telepathy kept recurring in the Iranian collective imagination. In every instance, there are logics of mediation that fail to concretely signify meanings. These recurrent logics should not be hastily interpreted and generalised as immutable essences in the Shiʿa culture. What I have termed absurdism should not be understood as an attribute that constitutes and defines any Muslim cultural identity, nor should it be understood as one. I have carefully avoided the trap of cultural essentialism in my analyses, in that I have refused to engage with Muslim identity formation, axiomatic belief systems, ethnicities, or Islamic fundamentalism, to name a few cliched ideas in cultural essentialism.1 I have not claimed to have found an unchanging characteristic in the Shiʿa culture that can be used as an identifying mark in all places and times. What I have rather recognised and conceptualised is a modality of thought, rather than an idea or an unchanging psychological attribute. The homologous absurdisms in the fields I have investigated are recurrences of that modality, not of any notion, ideology, or whatever essential form of thought explicitly articulated or believed in by Muslims. Of concern is a modality that can be traced in different contexts with related ramifications, which is obviously not a characteristic that defines an entire cultural past. This book has been a brief but serious engagement with different manifestations of absurdism in nineteenth-century Iran. There is much more room to pursue the inquiries I have proposed, especially in the more contemporary periods. More urgently, the interdisciplinary analyses I have performed can be more extensively reproduced

126 epilogue

to recognise and conceptualise the present-day specificities of the Shiʿa Muslims’ relationship to modern techniques. Let me fast-forward to the twentieth century to give a rough picture of how this relationship evolved from the nineteenth century. During the constitutional era in the early twentieth century, the clerics attained unprecedented socio-political power, helped by their active use of telegraphy and photography. In the Pahlavi era, the technological reforms entered a new phase, in which not only the infrastructures for the previous media and communication technologies were far more significantly improved, but newer ones also entered the country. Next to the rise of radio and television, the modernising Iranian state and society became part of the global energy network thanks to the large-scale exploitation of oil in western Iranian providences.2 The Shīʿa clergy remained rather aloof from these later developments until they plugged their cultural machinery into the Pahlavi’s already developed infrastructures. That power culminated in the Islamic Revolution of 1979, when new electronic media, mainly radio and television, aggrandised the clerics’ status and paved the way for more legislative and political power. It can be seen how processes of mediation became more productive during this later period. In these more recent historical formations, media infrastructures and logics continued to be appropriated as instruments for the Islamic Revolution. When Khomeini wrote in his most influential work Unveiling Secrets (Kashf-i Asrār) that all communication media should be used as a platform for the clergy to propagate (tabligh) Islam nation- and worldwide, his claim was historically resonant with his forerunners during the constitutional era – though he neglected his own empowerment as integral to the Pahlavi order.3 In the decades following the Islamic Revolution, this historical penchant for technical power becomes a calcified reality in an Islamic State that desires to control all aspects of media and moreover aspires to become a nuclear power. This technical power has been most acutely conceptualised in the Persian language by the contemporary Iranian philosopher Muhammad Reza Nikfar. In an essay titled “Belief and Technique (Imān va Teknik)”, Nikfar proffers a politico-sociological analytic framework for the study of Shiʿa Islam and modern techniques. He traces “the complete and perfect functioning of instrumental reason”, which comes close to what I have called logics of mediation, in what he designates as “the repression machine”.4 In Nikfar’s view, “the engineering of coercion (qahr)” – which is a defining aspect of that modern Islamic repression machine – “subjects the position of Islamic preaching pulpit to its own [engineering] design (hendessa)”.5 The medium of the pulpit, to rephrase Nikafar in terms of the notion of mediation, is considered susceptible to that coercive power. For Nikfar, it is ultimately the clerical society that executes that “technical power”. It is this society, Nikfar argues, whose “negative enlightenment – that is, the cognisance of its time and its

the semiotics of shiʿa absurdism  127

own interest therein through antagonism against European enlightenment – has incited a dynamism dominated by instrumental reason”.6 The absurdist urge I have recognised in the examined cases is a modality of that instrumental reason. In this light, my use of the tem absurdism can be read in conjunction with Nikfar’s thesis on Shiʿa technical power.7 In conjunction with Nikfar’s psycho-sociologic assessment, the framework I have outlined reveals how exactly that imperceptive power makes sense and signification – how it operates concretely with tangible materials to create quasi-truthful signs. If Nikfar’s incisive point is about how this logic of power centres on coercion to the detriment of, say, technical efficiency, my point has been to show details of its semiotics. On the whole, different expressions of Shiʿa absurdism in Iran were predicated on the complicated relationship between Islamic knowledge and the new technical spheres. I understand this complication not in terms of a binary but of an asymmetry, in the sense that the two remain conceptually distinct, yet an arbitrary exchange of signs does take place between them. It can be said that this indigenous absurdism was posed in an unproductive but imaginative relation between an Islamic theological discourse and a technical one. Recall how Meshkāt al-Molk’s Resurrectional Photography fails to produce the full gamut of meaning, that is, sense and signification, and yet its imaginative percepts of the hereafter do make sense. They engage creatively with Shiʿa eschatology but fail to produce a concrete referent. It creates new signs but produces nothing concrete. This is one aspect of Shiʿa Islamic technical power: a coercive power that does not wish to respond to, and does not conversate with, the strictures of technical knowledge, but it nonetheless deploys it for its own socio-historical desire – a blind desire to compete.

Notes

Transliteration table 1

I use an adapted system of transliteration, based on a mixture of IJMES and EIr making it more suitable for Persian vowels. In transliterating Persian and Arabic names, I should note that in the case of contemporary figures, I avoid transliteration. For instance, I use Khomeini and not Khomeyni, or Jalal Al-e Ahmad, and not Jalāl-e Āl-e Aḥmad. Moreover, for frequent words that have become common in English, as well as names of cities that currently exist on the map, I avoid transliteration. Mullah, surah, Shah, and Karbala are the most frequent ones in this dissertation. But in case such common words are part of a name, they are transliterated. For example, Mollā Ṣadrā, Mollā Hādi, and Karbalāyi.

2

If the word is Persian, I use v instead. For example, the name Sabzavāri and not Sabzawāri. Also important is the transliteration of the Persian cluster kh-v-ā, which is pronounced khā but is written in Persian with the three letters kh, v, and ā. I transliterate this cluster as khwā.

Introduction 1

Kermāni, The History of Iranians’ Awakening (Tārikh-e Bidāri-ye Irāniyān), 146.

2

Ibid.

3

Ibid., 146–148.

4

I should note that I do not wish to suggest that irrational approaches to modern technologies are specific to the Shiʿa context. One can find similar expressions and articulations in any given culture past and present. As for the Western cultures, for instance, many works directly or indirectly deal with irrationality and the absurd in Western societies’ approach to modern sciences and technologies. See, among numerous others, Potter, Discourses of Vision in Nineteenth-century Britain, 183–212; Rosen, ‘Forms of Irrationality in the Eighteenth Century’; Pratt-Smith, Transformations of Electricity in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science, Ch. 2; Morus, ‘Galvanic Cultures: Electricity and Life in the Early Nineteenth Century’. It would require a separate study to examine this theme in a comparative perspective.

5

See Deleuz and Guattari, What is Philosphy?.

6

Historian of the Victorian age Frank M. Turner comments on this most tersely. As he writes, “[h]istorians remain concerned about the truth or falsehood of ideas, but the truth or falsehood of a set of ideas espoused by an individual thinker or a group no longer constitutes the basis for determining whether the history of that intellectual activity is worthy of investigation and analysis”. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority, 17.

7

See for instance Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Works of Marcel Mauss, 63.

8

Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 41.

130 notes

9

For studies on Ottoman reforms in the nineteenth century see among others, Quartaert 2005, The Ottoman Empire: 1700-1922, 54–74; Barkey, Empire of Difference, 264–89; Stolz, The Lighthouse and the Observatory.

10

Kermāni, 148.

11

For a complete survey of the programs and the circumstances of its construction see Ekhtiar, ‘The Dār al-Fonun: Educational Reform and Cultural Development in Qajar Iran’; Gurney and Nabavi, ‘Dār al-Fonun’; Ringer, Education, Religion, and the Discourse of Cultural Reform in Qajar Iran.

12

See Tousi, ‘The Persian Army, 1880–1907’; Matthee, ‘Unwalled Cities and Restless Nomads’.

13

Ekhtiar, ‘The Dār al-Fonun’, 247.

14

For a comprehensive history of printing technologies in Iran see Green, ‘Journeymen, Middlemen’; ‘Persian Print and the Stanhope Revolution’; Terrains of Exchange; the Love of Strangers; Ardakāni, History of New Civilisational Institutions in Iran, 215–216; Floor, ‘Chāp’.

15

Nabavi, ‘Dar al-Fonun’, 14. For a list of all the course books published at this printing house see Ekhtiar, ‘Dār al-Fonun’, 311–319.

16 17

Nabavi, ‘Dar al-Fonun’, 36. For issues regarding the translation of the technical and scientific language in the period see for instance Farahzad and Adili, “Translation, Modernization and Enlightenment”; Ekhtiar, ‘Dar al-Fonun’, 247–261; González, ‘On the Transfer of Technology and Knowledge in Iran During the Naseri Period’.

18

Ekhtiar, 141.

19

On the use of these diagrams in the military sciences I will discuss more details in chapter two.

20

See Khalili for, ‘Taṣḥiḥ-e Resāle-ye Qānun-e Nāṣeri’.

21

Notable examples were Mollā Aḥmad-e Narāqi’s Ascent of Bliss (Meʿrāj al-Saʿāda), which was a book of Shiʿa ethics, and Fakhruddin-e Ṭariḥi Najafi’s The Confluence of Two Seas (Majmaʿ al-Baḥrayn), which dealt with Quranic words and Shiʿa prophetic literatures. These books were lithographed in the main publishing house at the Dār al-Fonun with announcements regularly appearing in the press.

22

Mira Xenia Schwerda reproduces two of the plates that have remained from those early practices. Schwerda, ‘Iranian Photography’, 83.

23

Tahmasbpour, ‘Photography in Iran’, 7.

24

Eʿtemād al-Salṭane, Mirrors of Countries (Merʾāt al-Boldān), 1447–48.

25

Bonetti and Prandi, ‘Italian Photographers in Iran’, 18–19.

26

Sheikh and Pérez González, ‘Editorial’, 2.

27

Tahmasbpour, ‘Photography in Iran’, 7. For more details on these students’ fields of interest see Ringer, Education and Religion, 90.

28

Golestān Palace possesses a rich archive of photographs taken by Nāser al-Din Shāh. His main interest was his harem and thus the photographs of his wives were among the first that depicted Iranian women. For more details on his practice see Tahmasbpour, The King Photographer (Shāh-e ʿAkkās).

29

See Mohamamdi, ‘Chef de Musique or Chef de Macaroni’; ‘Modal Modernities’; Ekhtiar, ‘Harmony or Cacophony: Music Instruction at the Dār al-Fonun’, 279–281.

30

Ibid., 281.

31

See Ruznāme-ye Vaqāyeʿ Ettefāqiye, no. 272.

32

Ibid., no. 372. 375.

33

Ardakāni, 195–196.

34

See Today in History – May 24.

35

I owe this reference to the contemporary Iranian philosopher Muhammad Reza Nikfar, who mentioned this to me in a personal conversation. However, I have not yet been able to find a direct reference to the term khaṭṭ-e shayṭān. If this coinage did in fact take place, the use of the word shayṭān is significant.

36

Peters, The Marvelous Clouds, 2.

notes 131

37

Ibid., 4.

38

Ibid., 15.

39

See McLuhan, Understanding Media.

40

Whenever I use the term ‘sign’ in this book, I have Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics of signs in mind. In Peirce’s terminology, there are three kinds of signs: indices, icons, and symbols. A visual representation, to put it summarily, contains a mixture of all these signs in most cases. Icons are signs that stand for their referent according to their resemblance to the signified. Indices, however, are signs that refer to the signified without any intermediary, be it resemblance or any other conventions. They are simply pointers that directly refer to the signified without adding any extra qualification to them. A symbol, in contrast to the other two, represents the signified according to a set of rules or cultural conventions. Peirce, The Essential Peirce, 225–28. See also Lefebvre, ‘The Art of Pointing’.

41

See Stolow, ‘Religion and/as Media’.

42

Stolow, Deus in Machina, 7; Meyer and Verrips, ‘Aesthetics’, 127.

43

Stolow, Deus in Machina, 5.

44

Meyer and Verrips, ‘Aesthetics’, 127.

45

In this regard, Deleuze draws mainly from the Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong, who was also cautious of making a clear distinction between sense and meaning. Meinong, ‘On Theory of Objects’, 81; Reicher, ‘Nonexistent Objects’.

46

Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 41.

47

Ibid., 18.

48

This definition is also hinted at by the media theorist Eugene Thacker. Thacker, ‘Dark Media’, 90.

49

Ahmed, 405.

50

Ibid., 364. For his discussion of these terms see his Chapter 5.

51

Ibid., 328.

52

See among several other references to this, Ibid., 367.

53

Ibid., 325–27.

54

Ibid., 303

55

See for instance Ibid., 361–62.

56

Ibid., 400.

57

Ibid.

58

Quoted in Ibid.

59

Quine, The Ways of Paradox, 3.

60

Ibid., 401.

61

See Quine’s example of Barber’s paradox, which he fully explains and calls a veridical paradox. Quine, 5.

62

Ibid., 4. Ahmed skips this page in his references. Ahmed, 400.

63

Ahmed, 402.

64

The latter two are discussed at length by Quine, which Ahmed does not find relevant to his thesis.

65

In theatre studies, the concept of the absurd as a floating signifier that never allows even a momentary link to an existent referent is noted by Martin Esslin in his introduction to The Theatre of the Absurd. See Esslin, ‘The Absurdity of the Absurd’. The absurd as meaningful despite its non-signification is also mentioned by Peter Brook in his seminal book in theatre studies. Brook, The Empty Space, 63. Also noteworthy is a reference to Maria Reicher, who discusses the difference between Quine’s and Meinong’s view at length in her entry “Nonexistent Objects” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

66

Meinong’s trick is to make a distinction between being and existence, sosein and sein. As Maria Reicher summarises, one can say there is x, given x is a non-existent object without ending up with

132 notes

a paradox. But one cannot say x exists. As x is non-existent, it cannot exist and saying so would obviously lead to a paradox. See Reicher, ‘Nonexistent Objects’. 67

See for instance Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities; ‘Working With Concepts’.

68

See Pickering, History, Experience and Cultural Studies; ‘Engaging With History’.

69

See Fahmy, In Quest of Justice, 36.

70

For the most representative examples see Lange, Justice, Punishment and the Medieval Muslim Imagination; ‘The ‘Eight Gates of Paradise’ Tradition in Islam’; O’Meara, Space and Muslim Urban Life.

Chapter 1 1

Meshkāt al-Molk, ‘The Book of Eschatological Photography (ʿAksiyya-yi ḥashriyya)’, 478. There are several versions of this book in different libraries in Iran, one lithographed edition in Tehran University, another in Majles library, which also holds a manuscript edition. I have accessed the new edited version included in Abbas Rahimi’s collection of manuals of photography. See Rahimi, Teaching of Photography (Qājāria va Āmuzesh-e ʿAkkāsi), 470–471. There is also another edited version by Gholāmriḍā Tahāmi. See Tahāmi, Ganj-e Peydā. See the sources for more details.

2 3

Ibid., 479. Ibid., 488. The invocation of the five senses and bodily sensations during the Judgement Day is a recurrent theme in Islamic eschatology. See for instance Lange, Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions, 46.

4

Tahmasbpour, The King Photographer (Shāh-e ʿAkkās), 257–74.

5

ʿAbdol Ḥoseyn Zarrinkub notes that it is not easy to consider this text as literature strictly speaking, although one may very well apply a literary interpretation to it. Tahmasbpour, The King Photographer (Shāh-e ʿAkkās), 259.

6

See Meshkāt al-Molk, Baḥr al-Awṣāf va Behjat al-Ashrāf.

7

Afshar and Mohammad Moradi, ‘Dignitaries’ Faces’, 54.

8

See notes 38 in the Introduction.

9

As a counterpoint, it must be acknowledged that even in the early decades after the advent of photography, many were aware of the artificiality of the photographic image and even experimented with its imaginative potential. See for instance Tahmasbpour, Of Silver and Light (Az Noqre va Nur), 69–84.

10

I prefer the term embodiment to personification and materialisation. As I will show later, the re-appearance of deeds in the afterlife has been interpreted in different senses. In my view, embodiment is a better choice as it captures both the sense of materialisation and personification.

11

Lange, Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions, 7.

12

Ibid., 8.

13

Ibid., 11.

14

Ibid., 12.

15

Lange, ‘The “Eight Gates of Paradise” Tradition in Islam’, 342.

16

Lange, Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions, 13.

17

For a comprehensive overview of the different conceptualisations of the hereafter in different Islamic traditions see Günther and Lawson, Roads to Paradise.

18

I use ʿAbdol Ḥalim’s translation for all Qorʾānic verses quoted henceforth.

19

Günther, ‘The Poetics of Islamic Eschatology’, 207. For more on al-Ghazali’s views on the afterlife see Madelung, ‘Al-Ghazālī on Resurrection and the Road to Paradise’.

20

Sheykh Bahāʾi, Forty Ḥadiths (al-Arbaʿun al-ḥadithun), 402.

notes 133

21

Ibid, 494. See also Sheykh Bahāʾi, al-Kashkul, vol. 2, 192.

22

Lange, Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions, 180. See also the image that Lange reproduces in his book, which shows the eschatological map of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Ibid., 249.

23

Fayḍ al-Kāshāni, Science of Certitude on the Principles of Religion (ʿElm al-Yaqin fi al-Oṣul al-Din), 1099.

24

Reviewing Mollā Ṣadrā’s ideas of the hereafter and embodiment of deeds requires much more space and is beyond the scope of this book. In a cursory fashion, there are a few pages in his works where his ideas can be traced. See for instance Ṣadr al-Din Shirāzi, al-Maẓāher al-Elāhiye, 72–74; al-Shawāhed al-Robubiye, 329–330; Tafsir al-Qorʾān al-Karim, 282–285. For a more comprehensive review on the notion see Centre of Great Islamic Encyclopaedia, Dāneshnāma-ye Bozorg-e Eslāmi, article no. 5790.

25

Narāqi, Anis al-Mowaḥḥedin, 231.

26

Ṭabarsi, Majmaʿ al-Bayān, 732. Reference to this paper-based mediation of the deeds on the Judgement Day can also be found in the Sunni polymath Jalāl al-Din ʿAbdol Raḥmān al-Suyuṭi (d. 1505). See for instance his discussion on the transformation of bad deeds to good ones by God in al-Suyuṭi, Al-Bodur al-sāfera fi ʿolum al-ākhera, 295. See also Lange, Paradise and Hell, 144.

27

Ṭabarsi, Majmaʿ al-Bayān, 732.

28

Majlesi, Beḥār al-Anwār, vol. 7, 228–230.

29

Majlesi, Merʾāt al-ʿOqul, vol. 9, 95.

30

For a brilliant and deeply philosophical work on the history of vision in the nineteenth century Euro-American context, see Crary, Techniques of the Observer.

31

Barthes, Camera Lucida, 41. Numerous studies have dealt with the history of photography in the Middle East. For the most seminal ones see Shaw, ‘Ottoman Photography of the Late Nineteenth Century’; ‘The Ottoman in Ottoman Photography’; Ryzova, ‘Mourning the Archive’; Sheehi, The Arab Imago; Sui, ‘Early Photography of the Holy Sites of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula; Halevi, Modern Things on Trial, 116–24.

32

Several other sources in the period use tropes similar to the ones in Resurrectional Photography and evidence other instances of thinking with and about photography in religious terms. For example, in the thirteenth issue of one of the well-known Persian periodicals, Akhtar, published in Istanbul (1876 – 1896), we encounter the phrase “creational photography (fotogrāfe-ye khelqati)” in an anonymously written column. Reminding the reader that the “science of bodies always precedes the science of religions”, the column uses the term “creational photography” metaphorically, referring to the creation of humans: “If someone imagines the creation (khelqat) of a human and ponders the way a human is born out of a droplet that falls into the mother’s womb, he/she should not be taken by surprise at the appearance of new arts and qualities … The children that we see having so much in common with their fathers, almost identical with them, suggests that this is the creational photography, which turns a droplet so small into a person so big”. Akhtar, 99–100. Here, the photographic capacity to reproduce an object that can truthfully stand for its referent comes very close to God’s creation. Similar metaphorical descriptions about the divine power that employ notions taken from optics could be read in another photography manual written in 1877 by a Qājār prince A ʿ li Bakhsh Mirzā. A short literary introduction to an otherwise strictly technical text explains that when “the revelation of the primordial act shines on the imaginal world (ʿālam-e emkān) through the lens” of the divine creative will, first the Prophet and then A ʿ li Ebn-e Abi Ṭāleb and the Prophet’s daughter are created followed by the rest of the existents, analogous to an image coming forth from the dark room. Mirzā, ‘The book of photography (Ketāb-e ʿAkkāsi)’, 123. This text goes one step further than ʿAksiye-ye Ḥashriye in that it fine-tunes the theory to fit into the Shiʿa world view. According to this manual, God created humans

134 notes

starting with the Prophet and his family in the same way photographers develop photos in their dark rooms. 33

Babaie, forthcoming.

34

The painting has also been mentioned and briefly discussed by Tahmasbpour. Tahmasbpour, ‘Photography During the Qājār Era’, 58.

35

Babaie, forthcoming, 22.

36

See Necipoğlu, ‘The Scrutinizing Gaze in the Aesthetics of Islamic Visual Cultures’, 45.

37

Necipoğlu, ‘The Scrutinizing Gaze in the Aesthetics of Islamic Visual Cultures’, 46

38

In her essay “In Defence and Devotion”, art historian Christiane Gruber studies the emotional responses of viewers to such images. She shows how certain viewers would react physically to the mimetic facial representation of saintly or evil figures. See Gruber, ‘In Defense and Devotion’.

39

Eʿtemād al-Salṭane, Mirrors of Countries (Merʾāt al-Boldān), 82, 109.

40

Qazvini, Wonders of Creations (ʿAjāʾeb al-Makhluqāt va Gharāʾeb al-Mawjudāt), fol. 20.

41

Gruber, ‘Between Logos (Kalima) and Light (Nur)’, 223.

42

Maḥallāti, Photography (ʿAkkāsi), fol. 100; Lāhiji Najafi, ‘The Rules of Photography and Telegraphy (Qavāʿed-e ʿAks va Telegrāf)’, 348; Eʿtemād al-Salṭane, Mirrors of Countries (Merʾāt al-Boldān), 1447.

43

Khosronejad, The Art and Material Culture of Iranian Shi’ism, 25, 38; Marzolph, ‘The Visual Culture of Iranian Twelver Shiism in the Qājār Period’, 141; Gruber, The Image Debate, 14. Christiane Gruber has partly discussed the conceptual problem of the image in Islamic cultures in her introduction to The Image Debate. She has particularly given more attention to the word temthāl and traced its semantic complication in the Qorʾān. In addition, she has discussed the use of the word taṣwir in Islamic prophetic literature while only briefly touching upon the photographic image as such.

44

A beautiful example of such usage is a verse in the ninety fifth poem of Rumi’s Divān-e Shams, which reads: ze ʿaks-e rokh-e ān yār dar golshano golzār be har su mah-o khorshid-o thorayyāst khodāyā Rumi uses the term “reflection of the beloved’s face” (ʿaks-e rokh-e ān yār) and muses over its occurrence in the natural world.

45

Rahimi, Teaching of Photography (Āmuzesh-e ʿAkkāsi), 469.

46

Ḥosayni, Discovery of Crafts (Kashf al-Ṣanāyeʿ), fols 83–84; Abolqāsem, ‘Fizik (Physics)’, 525–26.

47

Qazvini, Wonders of Creations (ʿAjāʾeb al-Makhluqāt va Gharāʾeb al-Mawjudāt), fol. 74; Dānesh, no. 14; Marzolph, ‘Persian Incunabula’, 211; Emami ‘The Lithographic Images and Its Audiences’, 65.

48

Marzolph, ‘The Pictorial Representation of Shiʿa Themes’, 99.

49

Marzolph, ‘The Visual Culture of Iranian Twelver Shiism’, 138

50

Emami ‘The Lithographic Images and Its Audiences’, 58–59

51

Ibid., 66–67

52

Ibid., 71; Ekhtiar, ‘From Workshop and Bazaar to Academy’, 60.

53

Marzolph, ‘The Visual Culture of Iranian Twelver Shiism’, 138, 146.

54

See Lefebvre, ‘The Art of Pointing’.

55

Winston, ‘“The Camera Never Lies”: The Partiality of Photographic Evidence’, 53–54.

56

Hainge, ‘Unfixing the Photographic Image’, 716.

57

Sheehi, The Arab Imago, 93

58

Keane, ‘Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things’, 419

59

Shirāzi, Resurrection and the Hereafter (Maʿād va Jahān-e Pas az Marg), 272, 275.

60

Reproduced in González, Local Portraiture, 263–64.

notes 135

61

The pictures are reproduced in González, Local Portraiture, 263–64; González, ‘Written Images’, 213. For her discussion on these see Ibid., Local Portraiture, 92–94. González’s valuable study points to many interesting technical aspects in Iranian photography, although it often misses important details. See below for my critical view on this.

62

González, Local Portraiture, 263–64.

63

According to Steingass’ Persian-English dictionary, the word shebr refers to the space between the tip of the thumb and that of the little finger. González transcribes the poem incompletely. I received the correct version from Prof. Asghar Seyed Gohrab.

64

González discusses in detail how certain poses in photographs taken by Iranians are almost identical with poses seen in miniature paintings. González, Local Portraiture, 105–30. For the counter thesis that argues for the non-indigenousness of photography in Iran, see Behdad, ‘The Powerful Art of Qājār Photography’, 2001, 145.

65

For a thorough discussion of how photography changed and contributed to the political agenda of mullahs during the constitutional revolution see Schwerda, ‘How Photography Changed Politics’.

Chapter 2 1

Mostawfi, Portrait of My Life (Sharḥ-e Zendegāni-ye Man), 276.

2

Many learned Shiʿa clerics at the time objected violently to Darbandi’s absurd claims. Some of those objections are described in graphic detail in the beginning of the Persian translation. Darbandi, Nāṣerian felicity (Saʿādat-e Nāṣeri), 1–8.

3

Ibid., 62–63.

4

See Floor, ‘Clocks’.

5

Ruznāma-ye Dawlat ʿAliye-ye Irān, the successor of Vaqāyeʿ, for instance, for the first time in Iran, publishes regular timetables, which were announced to inform people of the exact hour and minutes for praying time during the month of Ramaḍān. Ruznāma-ye Dawlat ʿAliye-ye Irān, 130.

6

Floor, ‘Clocks’.

7

For testimonies that witnessed such links see, among many others, Wills, Persia as It Is; Allemagne, Du Khorassan Au Pays Des Backhtiaris.

8 9

As an example of such violent episodes see Aghaie, The Martyrs of Karbala, 37. In Chelkowski’s edited volume on taʿziye, there is only one contribution that deals with its acoustic quality, and even in this exceptional case, the sounds of taʿziye remain limited to its musical developments and are overshadowed by the more extensive study of its literary sources. Elsewhere, Sadigh Homayouni very briefly describes the musical instruments used in taʿziye and the ways reciters chose the different musical modes for their parts but falls short of contextualising these musical preferences in the larger taʿziye sonic space. Farrokh Gaffary has also dealt with musicality in taʿziye, though like many others, he considers musicality as a separate phenomenon that could survive thanks to the performance’s popularity. Even in Chelkowski’s works, taʿziye sounds have been either framed as music or “a cacophony of sound”, missing the deeply ingrained role of sound management in taʿziye affectivity. See Chelkowski, ‘Ta’ziyeh’; Shahidi, ‘Literary and Musical Developments’; Gaffary, ‘Evolution of Rituals and Theatre in Iran’; Homayouni, ‘A View From the Inside’.

10

Throughout this chapter, I often use the term sonic, auditory, and acoustic as adjectives for the sonic aspects in both military practices and taʿziye performances and hence avoid using the term “music” or “musical”, although most performances were indeed musical in nature. I use the term military music only when I specifically refer to the military bands playing musical interludes. The

136 notes

reason for this is that what interests me, and is central to my argument, concerns more broadly the acoustic culture at the time rather than music per se. Moreover, I do not have the expertise to tackle the complexity that the history of music in Iran demands. This chapter in no way claims to be a contribution to musicology, though I do intend to link to the discipline in productive ways. 11

For more details on these reforms see Tousi, ‘The Persian Army, 1880–1907’, 211–12, 218–19; Ekhtiar, ‘The Dār al-Fonun’, 211–19; ‘Harmony or Cacophony: Music Instruction at the Dār al-Fonun’; Cronin, ‘Importing Modernity’, 208–18; Rabi and Ter-Oganov, ‘The Military of Qājār Iran’, 340–47.

12

Simes, The Military Guide for Young Officers.

13

See Smith, Grignion, and Sandby, A Universal Military Dictionary.

14

Herbert and Barlow have reproduced this diagram in their book and state that it is not clear whether they played music during a battle or only in drills. Herbert and Barlow, Music & the British Military in the Long Nineteenth Century, 43.

15

See for example Kappey, Military Music; Farmer, Military Music; Van Orden, Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France.

16

See Herbert and Barlow, Music & the British Military in the Long Nineteenth Century.

17

Ibid., 3.

18

See also Monelle, The Musical Topic, 113–60.

19

Kappey, Military Music, 68.

20

Monelle, The Musical Topic, 115. In regard to how kettledrums entered the European military scene via the eighteenth-century Turkish influences, see Farmer, Military Music; Meyer, ‘Turquerie and Eighteenth-Century Music’.

21

Quoted in Herbert and Barlow, Music & the British Military in the Long Nineteenth Century, 23.

22

Matthee, ‘Unwalled Cities and Restless Nomads’, 390.

23

Ibid.

24

See for example Bohlman, The Music of European Nationalism.

25

Herbert and Barlow, Music & the British Military in the Long Nineteenth Century, 53.

26

Kappey, Military Music, 94.

27

See Mohammadi, ‘Chef de Musique or Chef de Macaroni’.

28

Quoted in Mohammadi, 60. Reading the original Persian text of this book, Gem of the World (Ṭoḥfat al-ʿĀlam va Dhil al-Toḥfa), I took the liberty of improving Mohammadi’s translation. See Shushtari, Gem of the World, 326.

29

Mohsen Mohammadi has already extensively studied the introduction of Western military music to Iran in the nineteenth century. As a musicologist, he has given a detailed review of the most important developments in the music of this period, to which I have not much to add. Hence, insofar as the historical context of military music in Iran is concerned, I draw from his work and only add a few extra accounts taken from travel literatures of the time for the sake of variety. I also refer to the Persian-language study by Ali Bulookbashi and Yahya Shahidi. See Bulookbashi and Shahidi, Military Music and Musical Instruments (Musiqi va Sāzhā-ye Musiqi-ye Neẓāmi).

30

Quoted in Mohammadi, ‘Chef de Musique or Chef de Macaroni’, 60.

31

Ibid., 62.

32

See Ekhtiar, ‘Harmony or Cacophony: Music Instruction at the Dār al-Fonun’, 47; Bulookbashi and Shahidi, Military Music and Musical Instruments (Musiqi va Sāzhā-ye Musiqi-ye Neẓāmi); Laʿl ShāṭEri, ‘Penetration of the West Into Military Music in Iran (Nufudh-e Gharb dar Musiqi-yi Niẓāmi-yi Irān)’.

33

Other references can be found in Henry d’Allemange’s travelogue in which he notes the use of naqqāres in wedding ceremonies. Allemagne, Du Khorassan au Pays des Backhtiaris, 363, 986. See also the travelogues written by Qājār statesmen such as Mirzā Ebrāhim and Reḍā Qoli Mirzā.

notes 137

Qājār, Travelogue of Reḍā Qoli Mirzā Nāʾeb al-Eyāla, 19; Mirza Ebrāhim, Travelogue of Astarabad, Mazandaran and Gilan (Safarnāma-ye Astarābād va Māzandarān va Gilān), 4. 34

Dieulafoy, La Perse la Chaldee et la Susiane; Relation de Voyage, 290–93.

35

Ibid., 289.

36

Bulookbashi claims that disciplining sounds were used in military music before modern times. However, he doesn’t give a single reference to sources that evidence this claim. As a matter of fact, the excerpts he chooses to reproduce in his book only evince the use of sound instruments as signs of victory or retreat, or as a way to provoke soldiers emotionally. Bulookbashi and Shahidi, Military Music and Musical Instruments (Musiqi va Sāzhā-ye Musiqi-ye Neẓāmi), 33. See also Ekhtiar, ‘Harmony or Cacophony: Music Instruction at the Dār al-Fonun’.

37

Blum, ‘Karnā’. n.p. These images corresponded directly to the poems in Shāhnāme. I owe this reference to Prof. Asghar Seyed Gohrab. For more details on the contextual aspects of Shāhnāme poems see Seyed Gohrab, ‘The Rhetoric of Persian Verbal Contests: Innovation and Creativity in Debates Between the Persians and the Arabs’, 268–269.

38

Ibid.

39

See Lambton, ‘Naḳḳāra-khāna’.

40

I do not intend to go into more detail about these reforms. I am only concerned with how sound techniques and technologies slowly transformed during this era. For more on military reforms in Iran see for example Tousi, ‘The Persian Army, 1880–1907’.

41

Both Tousi and Perry show how military proficiency in battle and the skills implemented by military officers as well as the infantry infrastructures remained virtually unchanged during the entire nineteenth century. Although there were systemic efforts by the State to improve the artillery, in effect, much of the army remained tribal and impervious to such fundamental changes. See Tousi; Perry, ‘Army iv. Afšar and Zand Periods’.

42

For a systematic study of musical reforms through the Dār al-Fonun, see Ekhtiar, ‘Harmony or Cacophony: Music Instruction at the Dār al-Fonun’.

43

Ekhtiar, ‘The Dār al-Fonun’, 279.

44

Mohammadi, ‘Chef de Musique or Chef de Macaroni’, 71. See also Qājār, First Journey, 90; Qājār, Second Journey, 199.

45

Bulookbashi and Shahidi, Military Music and Musical Instruments (Musiqi va Sāzhā-ye Musiqi-ye Neẓāmi), 43.

46

For a critical review of Lemaire’s role as a music instructor and his actual influence on the development of Western music in Iran see Mohammadi, ‘Chef de Musique or Chef de Macaroni’.

47

Bulookbashi and Shahidi, Military Music and Musical Instruments (Musiqi va Sāzhā-ye Musiqi-ye Neẓāmi), 50–51.

48

This has been digitised and made available by the Iran National Library. Yāvar and Royal orchestra, The Military Music in Qājār Era (Musiqi-ye Neẓāmi-ye Dawra-ye Qājār).

49

Mohammadi, ‘Modal Modernities’, 45.

50

Ebrahimnejad has a complete list of the terms used in this context. Ebrahimnejad, Medicine, Public Health, 159–60.

51

Krziz, Principles of Regimental March (Qavāʿed-e Mashq-e Daste), 1–22.

52

Ibid., 63.

53

I have used the English translation of this work as I could not access the original. Astarābādi, The History of the Life of Nāder Shāh, 19–20. For more details on military strategies before the Qājār era see Matthee, ‘Unwalled Cities and Restless Nomads’; Axworthy, ‘Basile Vatatzes and His History of Nāder Shāh’; Axworthy, ‘The Army of Nader Shah’; Amanat, Iran: A Modern History, 80.

54

Matthee, ‘Unwalled Cities and Restless Nomads’, 393.

138 notes

55

See Quzanlu, Military History of Iran (Tārikh-e Neẓāmi-ye Irān); Perry, ‘Army iv. Afšar and Zand Periods’; Cronin, ‘Army v. Qājār Period’.

56

One is anonymous and titled the Book of Military March (Daftar-e Mashq-e Neẓām). The second one was penned by a ʿAli Qarāgozlu titled Rules of Prudence in War (Dastur al-ʿAmal Eḥteyāt dār Jang) and the third one was a treatise named the Science of War (ʿElm-e Jang) by Antoin Rejoil Prosky. The edition I have access to, however, contained only the first in the series.

57

Qarāgozlu, ‘Qavāʿed-e Mashq-e Neẓām’, 350.

58

Ibid., 360.

59

Ibid., 365.

60

Ibid., 370.

61

Buhler, Movement of the Regiments (Ḥarkat-e Afvāj), n. 27.

62

Ibid., n. 35.

63

Ibid., n. 839.

64

Ibid., n. 964.

65

Ibid., nn. 984–971.

66

Nabavi, ‘Dar al-Fonun’, 53.

67

Ibid., 120.

68

From 1851 to the mid 1870s, according to the Vaqāyeʿ, there was no mention of any musical performance before the Shah in the public ceremonies nor in his visits to the Dār al-Fonun.

69

Ekhtiar, ‘The Dār al-Fonun’, 280. Mohsen Mohammadi, however, argues that other European staff had already pushed musical reforms in the Dār al-Fonun considerably and Lemaire’s recruitment was only a later development. See Mohammadi, ‘Chef de Musique or Chef de Macaroni’.

70

See for example Vaqāyeʿ no. 240 and no. 252.

71

See Ibid., no. 191. In one example we read that “all military officials are exempt from drills (mashq) so that they can participate in the rituals and join the taʿziye plays”. for more see Ruznāme-ye Neẓāmi, no. 4, 1293 AH, 2 Ḍihajja, p. 4, item 15.

72

Ibid., no. 142.

73

Rahimi, Theater State and the Formation of Early Modern Public Sphere in Iran, 199–202.

74

Bayzai, Performance in Iran, 116–20; Aghaie, The Martyrs of Karbala, 12–13; Chelkowski, taʿziyeh, 2–3. Bayzai, Performance in Iran, 116–20; Aghaie, The Martyrs of Karbala, 12–13; Chelkowski, Taʿziyeh, 2–3.

75

The history of the battle at Karbala and its socio-political context have been recounted in many scholarly works on taʿziye and Shiʿa history. See for instance Aghaie, The Martyrs of Karbala; Ayoub, Redemptive Suffering in Islam; Hawting, The Development of Islamic Ritual.

76

Chelkowski, Taʿziyeh, 2.

77

Aghaie, The Martyrs of Karbala, 10.

78

Bayzai, Performance in Iran, 119.

79

Chelkowski, Taʿziyeh, 3.

80

The significance of the tenth day and of the name ʿĀshurā have been studied from a strictly philological perspective by G.R. Hawting. He has traced the roots of the rituals in the Hebrew traditions through an analysis of Islamic exegeses. See Hawting, ‘The Tawwabon, Atonement and Ā ʿ shurā’.

81

Bayzai, Performance in Iran, 60.

82

Ibid., 62.

83

Hanaway, ‘Dāstān-sarāʾi’, 103. See also Babayan, Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs, 245–93.

84

The practice derived from a book compiled in the early sixteenth century in Persian, The Garden of Martyrs (Rawẓat al-Shohadā). It contained mournful recitations on the lives of Shiʿa Imams and as Chelkowski notes, functioned “as framework and spring board for the professional narrators who

notes 139

improvised creatively on the suffering and deeds of the many Shiʿa heroes”. Chelkowski, Taʿziyeh, 4. See also Aghaie, The Martyrs of Karbala, 12. 85

It should be mentioned that the history of taʿziye and performance in Iran is very complex. The associations between different art forms and the ways one genre evolved into another are uncertain issues, which I have surely overlooked in this brief sketch. For studies that have dealt with this complexity, see Chelkowski, ‘Narrative Painting and Painting Recitation in Qājār Iran’; Floor, The History of Theater in Iran.

86

According to Steingass’ dictionary, the word maʿraka means a place where people or soldiers are gathered. It can also be used in the sense of a battlefield or an arena where prize-fighters perform. Maʿarakagiri is a compound noun which denotes the act of creating a maʿreke.

87

For the significance and multiple uses of public places as takkyes see Aghaie, The Martyrs of Karbala, 29–31. For references to comic scenes in taʿziye see, for instance, Mostawfi’s testimonies in his journals. Mostawfi, Portrait of My Life (Sharḥ-e Zendegāni-ye Man), 288–89.

88

Wirth, ‘Semiological Aspects’, 34.

89

The translation likeness for the word shabih might not be the best choice. Next to the idea of likeness, the word shabih also contains the idea of sketch or schemata. The actors on stage representing the Karbala heroes were in a sense also schematic diagrams of the characters. The same issue can be said with respect to miniature paintings, which I have discussed in the second Chapter.

90

Shahidi in his contribution to Chelkowski’s edited volume has dealt with musicality in taʿziye. However, the study falls short of providing an in-depth insight into the auditory quality in the performances. See Shahidi, ‘Literary and Musical Developments’, 40.

91

See Lane-Poole, ‘Ouseley, William’. During this time, the Persian court had just been introduced to Western military music. See Laʿl Shāṭiri, ‘Penetration of the West Into Military Music in Iran (Nufudh-e Gharb dar Musiqi-ye Neẓāmi-ye Irān)’; Mohammadi, ‘Modal Modernities’.

92

Ouseley, Travels in Various Countries of the East More Particularly Persia, Vol. II, 163.

93

Ibid.

94

Ibid., 164.

95

Ibid., 166.

96

Morier, A Second Journey Through Persia, 180.

97

Ibid.

98

Ibid., 182.

99

Ibid., 183.

100

Ibid.

101

The building she described resembled takkye dawlat, but we know that it had not yet been constructed in 1848. It is not clear to me in what building that taʿziye session took place, but it is safe to assume that it was not a public square made into a temporary takkye.

102

The special seats mounted on camels for women to ride.

103

Sheil, Glimpses of Life and Manners in Persia, 128.

104

Ibid., 129.

105

Ibid.

106

Pelly, The Miracle Play of Hasan and Husain, xix.

107

Ibid., xx.

108

Serena, Hommes et Choses en Perse, 177.

109

Ibid.

110

Wills, Persia as It Is, 213.

111

Benjamin, Persia and the Persians, 389.

112

Ibid.

140 notes

113

According to Dehkhodā’s dictionary, Qazzāqs were light-arm soldiers who were trained by, or simply clad in, the style of the Russian army. The word also referred to a certain Turkish clan of the Mongolian Changiz Khān’s descendants.

114

Moʿayyer al-Mamālek, Notes (Yāddāshthā), 66.

115

Benjamin, Persia and the Persians, 389.

116

Ibid.

117

Ibid., 365.

118

Ibid.

119

He tells several anecdotes about the actors and managers, makes witty remarks and describes taʿziye plays in smaller venues. Mostawfi, Portrait of My Life (Sharḥ-e Zendegāni-ye Man), 288–302.

120

Ibid., 294.

121

Ibid., 296.

122

Ibid., 294.

123

Ibid., 295.

124

His visual bias was even strong enough to make far-reaching associations between taʿziye and European performances. After explaining to his intended European readers how each scene unfolds and how the characters’ heroisms are displayed, he hastily concludes that the spectacular play, with “the challenges of knights … their single combats; their military pomp and array; coats of mail, shields, lances and banners; the armour and caparisons of their horses, and many other circumstances, seemed to” him almost the same as he “had seen delineated in” the European “emblazoned Romances, and other illuminated Manuscripts which described the manners and customs of European nations soon after the crusades”. Ouseley, Travels in Various Countries of the East More Particularly Persia, Vol. II, 168–69.

125

Morier, A Second Journey Through Persia, 183.

126

Benjamin, Persia and the Persians, 390.

127

In Persian, this person was called taʿziyegardān.

128

This word was suggested to me by Prof. Asghar Seyed Gohrab.

129

The Polish theatre director Tadeusz Kantor drew on this technique in many of his plays. As a highly stylised personal signature, he was present on stage and would guide his actors during the play. He was said to have been familiar with taʿziye. See Chelkowski, ‘Taʿzia’.

130

Benjamin, Persia and the Persians, 392.

131

Ibid.

132

Eugène Aubin in his La Perse d’Aujourd’hui gave a bit more detail about the stage director and his personal background. He also observes that this manager was responsible for finding the right crew for each performance months before the expected time. Aubin, La Perse d’Aujourd’hui, 170. Also, Mostawfi has a separate section in his description of taʿziye and regarding this character. Mostawfi, Portrait of My Life (Sharḥ-e Zendegāni-ye Man), 290–91.

133

Benjamin, Persia and the Persians, 393.

134

Ibid.

135

Wills, Persia as It Is, 214–15.

136

Aubin, La Perse d’Aujourd’hui, 172.

137

Mostawfi, Portrait of My Life (Sharḥ-e Zendegāni-ye Man), 298. It should also be pointed out that these scenes were not restricted to takkye dawlat but could even be found in smaller arenas. Mostawfi, 298.

138

Benjamin, Persia and the Persians, 393.

139

Wirth, ‘Semiological Aspects’, 36.

notes 141

140

For one example among many regarding how amusing taʿziye plays were see Benjamin, Persia and the Persians, 390.

141

See Vaqāyeʿ no. 139.

142

At least one instance has been reported by Benjamin with respect to the tie between nationalism and taʿziye. He witnesses a scene in which ʿAbbās, Ḥoseyn’s paternal half-brother, “as if endowed with prophetic vision, gave vent to a noble apostrophe to the future splendour of Persia”. Following this comment, the audience respond with “deep murmurs and applause”. Benjamin, Persia and the Persians, 395.

143

The term honing is frequently used in Hirschkind and Schmidt’s works. Their works, one ethnographic and the other historical, are both exemplary and leading in the study of sound culture. See Schmidt, Hearing Things; Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape.

144

Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape, 8.

145

For an example see Shahidi, ‘Literary and musical developments’. In another example Mahmoud Ayoub comes close to addressing the issue of sounds in taʿziye. Although he discusses in detail the significance of poetry recitations in taʿziye culture, he ignores the acoustics of poetic performances and deals only with elegiac poetry as a literary genre with its own thematic specificities. Ayoub, Redemptive Suffering in Islam, 10:157–60.

146

Mostawfi, Portrait of My Life (Sharḥ-e Zendegāni-ye Man), 296–97.

147

Wirth, ‘Semiological Aspects’, 34.

Chapter 3 1

A re-structured version of this chapter has been published in a special issue on Senses and Islam. See Ghajarjazi, ‘The Senses of Cholera’.

2

Sāvoji, Cure of Cholera (ʿElāj al-Wabāʾ), fol. 145.

3

Afkhami, A Modern Contagion, 42.

4

Sāvoji, fol. 146.

5

See Barua and Greenough III, Cholera; Azizi and Azizi, ‘​​​History of Cholera Outbreaks’; Afkhami, A Modern Contagion.

6

Elgood, A Medical History of Persia, 496–97. See also Dickson, ‘On Cholera in Persia, 1866-68’.

7

According to Elgood “nearly four-fifths of the inhabitants of Tehran fled from their homes” in the cholera outbreak of 1852. Elgood, A Medical History of Persia, 506. See also Karimkhān-e Zand, ‘Confrontation of Native Medicine with Cholera and the Plague in Qajar Iran (Muvājiha-ye Ṭebābat-e Bumi bā Bimārihā-ye Vabā va Ṭāʿun dar Irān-e Dawra-ye Qājār)’.

8

Iranian national library, Vaqāyeʿ, 738.

9

Many courtiers and notables were reported to have contracted the disease and died. Elgood, A Medical History of Persia, 497.

10

For a historical examination of the concept of ṣeḥḥa see Kashani-Sabet, ‘Hallmarks of Humanism’.

11

Algar, Religion and State in Iran, 152–68. Algar observes how ministers and clerics were both entangled in this global space, in which Basra, Baghdad, Tehran and Delhi shared common political and religious agendas.

12

This intersection was not only extant in the Middle East but also in Europe. See Morris, Cholera 1832.

13

Ebrahimnejad, Medicine, Public Health, 40; Elgood, A Medical History of Persia, 514–37. Ebrahimnejad notes that the council managed to work for only a few months, after which it ceased

142 notes

its operations for a long time until 1881 when it recommenced its activities with new members and stronger influence. Ebrahimnejad, Medicine, Public Health, 9. 14

Elgood observes that both the Iranian religious authority and the European officials breached quarantine measures on many occasions. Elgood, A Medical History of Persia, 524–25. See also Afkhami, A Modern Contagion, 50. See also Ziamahmood p. 60.

15

Ebrahimnejad, Medicine, Public Health, 43.

16

The author of manuscript 506 is the most immediate example. See Anon. ‘On Diseases Commonly Affecting Soldiers’. Even today, an anti-Western trend in Islamic medicine can still be witnessed in Iran. One hard-to-miss trace of this trend surfaced on social media in January 2020, during the Corona pandemic. The case regarded a video that went viral. It showed a prominent Islamic physician, ʿAbbās Tabriziān, setting a seminal Western medical course book on fire. A few weeks later, in a public post on social media, the same person prescribed the application of a certain herbal mixture on the anus as a preventive method. See Deconinck, ‘Iraanse Ayatollah’; Alimardani and Elswah, ‘Trust, Religion, and Politics’.

17

Pormann and Savage-Smith, Medieval Islamic Medicine, 58.

18

In several medical treaties written in the period by traditionalist physicians, the word wabāʾ is used strictly for the intestinal disease we know today, and the word ṭāʿun was used to refer to the plague. Among many examples, Rule of Treatment can be mentioned. See Tabrizi, Rule of the Treatment (Qānun al-ʿElāj). In the medical texts written by the staff of Dār al-Fonun, the word wabāʾ was consistently used to refer only to cholera.

19

See Afkhami, ‘Humoralism’.

20

The term humour and temperament are often used interchangeably. However, these terms refer to different notions in both Greco-Roman and Islamic medicine. While humour is reserved for the naming of the four kinds of bodily fluids, temperament is used to denote the emotional and physical mood/dispositions of the body. The term khalṭ is used widely to refer more strictly to humour and the words mezāj and ṭabʿ are used interchangeably for temperament. Pormann and Savage-Smith, Medieval Islamic Medicine, 43; Afkhami, ‘Humoralism’; Afkhami, A Modern Contagion, 16.

21

Several medical texts can be found in which all these factors are mentioned as part of the medical aetiological reasoning. Examples are Solaymanian Book of Advice (Naṣiḥatnāma-ye Solaymāni) by Muhammad Ḥakim Ebn-e Mobārak (d. 1566), Rule of Treatment (Qānun al-ʿElāj) by ʿAli Ebn-e Moḥammad Ḥosayni Tabrizi (d. 1898), Details of Treatment (Dāqāʾeq al-ʿElāj) by Moḥammad Ebn-e Moḥammad Karim Kermāni (d. 1896) and the manuscript I focus on most carefully in this chapter, Cure of Cholera (ʿElāj al-Wabāʾ) by Musā Ebn-e ʿAlireḍā Ṣāvoji.

22

I follow the translation of the terms by Pormann and Savage-Smith. Sāvoji, Cure of Cholera (ʿElāj al-Wabāʾ), fol. 16.

23

For discussions on the root of contagion theory in the West see Baldwin, Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830-1930. For an in-depth study on the notion of contagion in Islam see Conrad and Wujastyk, Contagion.

24

It is worth mentioning that the belief in the contagious nature of cholera was more widely received by ordinary people than by professionals. D.G. Smith observes this to be the case in the United States while Baldwin makes this case in Europe. See Baldwin, Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830-1930; Smith, ‘Commentary’.

25

In the context of Islamic thought, scholars have noticed an ambiguity in the understanding of the notion of contagion. Two seemingly contradictory ḥadiths by Moḥammad have been often quoted to demonstrate this ambiguity. In one, the Islamic Prophet is quoted to have said “no transmission, no augury, no owl”. The other ḥadith, in contradiction, reads, “flee from a leper as you would flee from a lion”. Pormann and Savage-Smith, Medieval Islamic Medicine, 59; Conrad and Wujastyk,

notes 143

Contagion, 163–78. It is important to note that the notion of contagion was broadly applied to all epidemic diseases. For most part of the medical history of Islam, the contagiousness of all epidemic diseases was considered as one single phenomenon. Given the breadth of this notion, the above-mentioned ḥadiths were referenced to defend or reject the contagiousness of cholera in later periods of Islamic medicine. While anti-contagionists defended their view by resorting to the former, contagionists argued the opposite using the latter. 26

Sāvoji, Cure of Cholera (ʿElāj al-Wabāʾ), fol. 7. For an excellent study of the plague in the (early) Ottoman empire see Varlik, Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World.

27

Kashani-Sabet, ‘Hallmarks of Humanism’, 1187.

28

Ebrahimnejad writes that part of this rejection had to do with economic reasons in that the native drugstores were going bankrupt due to the people’s preference for new medicine. Ebrahimnejad, Medicine, Public Health, 43.

29

According to Karimkhān-e Zand the main publishing house in Tehran was the Capital’s publishing house (Maṭbaʿa-ye Dār al-Khelāfa). Karimkhān-e Zand, ‘Confrontation of Native Medicine With Cholera and the Plague in Qajar Iran (Muvājiha-ye Ṭabābat-e Bumi bā Bimārihā-ye Vabā va Ṭāʿun dar Irān-e Dawra-ye Qājār)’, 99. The version I am using is retrieved from the online library of the Iranian parliament (Majles Library) which mentions the publishing house of a Mir Moḥammad Bāqer in Tehran as the other publisher of this work.

30

See the first chapter for an explanation of prophetic medicine in Islam.

31

The first is further divided into two kinds of proximate (asbāb-e qariba) and remote causes (asbāb-e baʿida). He deals with the latter in the very final chapter. I could not find this part in the manuscript in the Majles library. The former, asbāb-e qariba, is dealt with in the first part of the book. The second, the causes for the appearance of bodily symptoms, has three further subcategories, namely, the initial (bādiya), antecedent (sābeqa) and wāṣala. Sāvoji, Cure of Cholera (ʿElāj al-Wabāʾ), fol. 20.

32

Majlesi, The Book of Heavens (Ketāb al-Samāʾ wa al-ʿĀlam), 445.

33

Sāvoji, Cure of Cholera (ʿElāj al-Wabāʾ), fol. 66.

34

Ibid.

35

Ibid.

36

Ibid., fol. 67.

37

Hamadāni, ‘Farid al-Mulk’s Travelogue (Safarnāme-ye Farid al-Molk)’, 225.

38

Shirāzi, ‘Travelogue of Nāʾeb-e Ṣadr-e Shirāzi’, 155.

39

I owe the translations of these substances to Dr. Anya King.

40

I have consulted the Persian translation, Ebn-e Sinā, The Rule in Medicine (Qānun dar Ṭebb), 334–35.

41

Sāvoji, Cure of Cholera (ʿElāj al-Wabāʾ), fol. 70.

42

Ibid., fol. 71.

43

Ibid., fol. 72.

44

Ibid.

45

Sāvoji, Cure of Cholera (ʿElāj al-Wabāʾ), fol. 130.

46

Ibid.

47

When the new Corona virus became pandemic in early 2020, one of the Shiʿa Ayatollahs, Hoseyn Vahed Khorāsāni recommended that people put their hands on their hearts every day and recite the surah of al-Fāteḥa seven times. He also advised them to recite the Throne Verse, Āyat al-korsi, part of al-Baqara twice, once in the morning and once in the evening. See Māhruyān, ‘Corona in Iran: What are religious authorities saying? (Korawnā dar Irān: Marājeʿ-e Taqlid Che Miguyand?)’.

48

Flood, ‘Bodies and Becoming: Mimesis, Mediation, and the Ingestion of the Sacred in Christianity and Islam’, 463.

49

Sāvoji, Cure of Cholera (ʿElāj al-Wabāʾ), fol. 140.

144 notes

50

Flood’s study proffers a wide range of examples of ingestion practices, among which his reference to Nāṣer al-Din Shāh’s ceremonial drinking from a scripturally-inscribed cup resonates with the present study. Ibid., 481.

51

Marks, ‘Talisman-Images: From Cosmos to Your Body’, 245, 251.

52

Numerous studies have already dealt with deciphering talismans in the Islamic world: Canaan, ‘Islamic and Indian Magic Squares. Part I’; Blair, ‘An Asmulet from Afsharid Iran’; Canaan, ‘The Decipherment of Arabic Talismans’; Porter, Saif, and Savage-Smith, ‘Medieval Islamic Amulets, Talismans and Magic’. For a more comprehensive study see Saif et al. Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice. Also relevant is the exhibition Divination and Art in the Islamic World curated by the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

53

Pormann and Savage-Smith, Medieval Islamic Medicine, 145.

54

Porter, Saif, and Savage-Smith, ‘Medieval Islamic Amulets, Talismans and Magic’, 544.

55

Canaan, ‘The Decipherment of Arabic Talismans’, 171.

56

Nasiri Savadkouhi, Occult Sciences (ʿOlum-e Asrāri), 112–13.

57

See ʿAli Ebn-e Abi Ṭāleb, Garden of Names (Jannat al-Asmāʾ).

58

Ibid., 31; Canaan, ‘The Decipherment of Arabic Talismans’, 171.

59

Ibid., Garden of Names (Jannat al-Asmāʾ), 31.

60

Marks, ‘Talisman-Images: From Cosmos to Your Body’, 234.

61

Vesel, ‘Talismans from the Iranian World: A Millinery Tradition’.

62

Hazāravi, Collyrium of the Eye (Koḥol al-ʿAyn), 93.

63

Kāshifi, Comprehensive Divination (Jafr-e Jāmeʿ), 42.

64

Lange, Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions, 148–49.

65

Ibid., 148.

66

Ibid., 149.

67

This reference can be found in The Book of Belief and Heresy, part of Oceans of Lights. Majlesi, Book of Belief and Heresy (Ketāb al-Imān wa al-Kofr), 269.

68

Ibid., 376.

69

Ibid., 271.

70

Similar instances of the inside-outside entanglement can be found in the medical debates of the time, especially in the face of the new clinical views. One of the most polemical examples is provided by the author of manuscript 506. In one instance, he complains of the Western practitioners for their dismissal of the “stellar effects” despite their witnessing “the tide of the sea every morning and night” as well as “the ebbing of the water in response to the lunar states”. Anon. ‘On Diseases’, 56.

71

Polak, Polak’s Travelogue (Safarnāme-ye Polāk), 416.

72

Elgood, A Medical History of Persia, 518.

73

Tholozan, Prophylaxie du Choléra, 250.

74

See Schlimmer, Du Présage.

75

Tholozan, Prophylaxie du Choléra, 12.

76

Ibid., 8.

77

Ibid., 13.

78

Ibid.

79

Ibid., 17.

80

Ibid., 19. In 1880, it was part of the police’s duty to monitor the public’s submission to water management regulations. This was published in the periodical Akhtar, no. 6. See below for more on this.

81

Tholozan, Prophylaxie du Choléra, 20.

82

Ibid., 21.

83

Ibid. 26.

notes 145

84

Ibid., 27.

85

Ibid.

86

Ibid., 39.

87

There were many reports telegraphed from different provinces during the epidemics which complained of public resistance against quarantine. In a medical jong (a genre of writing in the nineteenth century that contained different kinds of texts, poetry, ḥadith, prayers and prose), I found a reference to a poem supposedly written in mockery of quarantine. Jong, Majles library, MS no. 5066. See also Elgood, A Medical History of Persia, 524. It should also be mentioned that two decades before Tholozan’s sanitary council brought the issue of quarantine to the fore, discussion on its efficacy appeared occasionally in the press. In Vaqāyeʿ, for instance, quarantine is only mentioned as an issue in Europe and never discussed in relation to Iran during the epidemics in 1852 – 1853. See Vaqāyeʿ no. 84, 97, 145.

88

However, Tholozan admits that imposing quarantine at the coast and the sea borders could very well be advantageous. Tholozan, Prophylaxie du Choléra, 40.

89

Ibid., 47.

90

This treatise was originally in French but was later translated into Persian with its announcement appearing in the state-sponsored newspaper of State Newspaper of Iran (Ruznāme-ye Sina-ye Dawlat-e Irān). I could not, however, find the Persian version.

91

Schlimmer, Du Présage, 115.

92

Ibid.

93

Ibid., 116–117.

94

Ibid.

95

For Sāvoji, the refreshment of a house by way of opening the windows was a common instruction.

96

Schlimmer, Du Présage, 115.

97

Ibid., 118.

98

As a telling example, Guidance of the People (Ershād al-Omma) by Mollā ʿAli Kani (d. 1888) should be mentioned. This influential jurist deals with the issue of water in this practical treatise. In the section on water, he writes that irrespective of whether a water reservoir is closed or open, if the water flows, it is clean. This even applies if the flow is created manually on a small scale. So, one can make water clean simply by pouring it out of the reservoir into another vessel. See Kani, Guidance of the People (Ershād al-Omma), fols 7–10.

99

Schlimmer, Du Présage, 125.

100

Ibid.

101

Its publication was announced in the periodical Akhtar, no. 6. In July 1879, a short version of this document appears in the same magazine, signed by Conte de Monte Forte personally, no. 29. See also Karimi-Hakkak, ‘Censorship’; Ebrahimnejad, Medicine, Public Health, 37.

102

Monte Forte, ‘Guidelines for the Prefecture (Dastur al-ʿAmal-e Naẓmiye)’, 22.

103

Ibid., 24.

104

Ibid., 25–27.

Chapter 4 1

The story is retold in Maḥbubi Ardakāni, History of Institutions, 2:237–38.

2

One man is around three kilograms.

146 notes

3

See Doostdar, The Iranian Metaphysicals.

4

Ibid., 8.

5

For details on how Doostdar uses the term “metaphysicals” see Ibid., 7–8.

6

For Doostdar’s detailed discussion on how certain scientific virtues continued through the nineteenth century from the religious to the scientific sphere, see Doostdar, ‘Empirical Spirits’.

7 8

See specifically part three of the book Doostdar, The Iranian Metaphysicals, chaps. 19–24. I should mention that I do not intend to make any claim about the experience with jenn and spirits, but rather the imagination thereof. As I am looking into textual sources, there is not much sense in enquiring about how such experiences with the beyond actually took place. In this way, I circumvent the issue of veracity and do not attend to the question of whether any of the claims about communication with jenn or spirits were authentic or fabricated. The question is rather how such experiences were narrated, and more specifically, what meida logic ordered those imaginative narratives.

9

As one example among many, in The Book of Heavens, Majlesi interprets the Qorʾānic verse 2:275 (al-baqarah) “ellā kamā yaqumo alladhi yatakhabbaṭoho al-shayṭāno mena al-mass”, as evidence that a possessed person is ”touched (massa)” by the devil. We can find many more instances in the Qorʾān where humans are touched by evil, most frequently rendered as al-sharr. Tobias Nünlist’s extensive study of the jenn in Islamic demonology also mentions several examples, taken from the Sunni context, in which the words mass and mamsus are used to refer to a person possessed by the jenn. Nünlist, Dämonenglaube im Islam, 28:242, 275.

10

Seyed-Gohrab, Laylī and Majnūn, 222-223.

11

For discussion on the visibility of the jenn in Islam see, for instance, El-Zein, Islam, Arabs, and the intelligent world of the jenn, 67; MacDonald et al., ‘Ḏj̲inn’. Certain kinds of jenn, such as ghul for instance, have been imagined as fully visible beings. See Szombathy, ‘Ghul’; Cunial, ‘Spiritual Beings’. According to the descriptions by the English traveller Charles Montagu Doughty (d. 1926), whose account of his visit to the Arab peninsula contains rich observations of Islamic demonology in practice, jenn were certainly visible to humans to the extent that physiognomic details frequently appeared in Muslims’ experiences with them. Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta, 2:3. Further below, most of the examples I present also attest to jenn’s visibility.

12

Among many examples, the nineteenth-century poet and geographer Zeyn al-ʿĀbedin Shirvāni (d. 1838) mentions the agitating presence of the jenn in his travel writings. Shiravāni, Garden of Journeys (Bostān al-Siāḥa), 259, 669. More examples can be found in The Book of Heavens discussed further below. Instances of jenn’s haptic presence have also been reported in contemporary Iran. See Doostdar, The Iranian Metaphysicals, 31, 36, 68, 69.

13

Donaldson, The Wild Rue, 36. For studies on the cosmological status of the jenn in Islam see, among many studies, Amir-Moezzi, ‘Cosmogony and Cosmology’; Cunial, ‘Spiritual Beings’; Chabbi, ‘Jenn’; Lange, ‘Devil (Satan)’.

14

References to this can be found frequently in Doughty’s travelogue. See for instance Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta, 2:174, 259. However, jenn as a soothsayer’s agents have been more elaborately attested to in the contemporary, which Doostdar’s invaluable study reports abundantly. See Doostdar, The Iranian Metaphysicals, 46, 89, 177.

15

For sources where partnership or marriage between the jenn and humans is mentioned see Henninger, ‘beliefs in spirits among the pre-eslamic Arabs’, 28. Doughty gives the most elaborate example, in which a man from Medina weds a female jenn. The story lasts several pages in Doughty’s travelogue and ends with the disappearance of the jenn after her failed attempt to kill her baby. Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta, 2:188–93. Also see further below for one example from my own sources.

16

See Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems; Bloomer and Moore, Body, Memory, And Architecture; Paterson, The Senses of Touch; ‘On Haptic Media and the Possibilities of a More

notes 147

Inclusive Interactivity’. For studies in religious studies related to haptics see Chidester, ‘Haptics of the Heart’; O’Neill, ‘Corporeal Experience’. 17

Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, 97.

18

The term “haptic perception” in the context of psychology seems to have been first used by Jean Piaget and Baerbel Inhelder. See O’Neill, ‘Corporeal Experience’, 11.

19

Ionescu, ‘Deleuze’s Tensive Notion of Painting’, 54. See also Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 572; Deleuze, Logic of Sensation, 122, 195. A brief overview of Riegl’s understanding of haptics can also be read in Classen, The Deepest Sense, 127.

20

As a recent example of using haptics through Deleuze in architecture studies, see Brott, Architecture for a Free Subjectivity. In Islamic Studies, the leading scholars who have closely engaged with the concept in Islamic art and architecture are O’Meara, Space and Muslim Urban Life; Marks, ‘The Haptic Transfer and the Travels of the Abstract Line’; Enfoldment and Infinity. In media theory see, among many others, Parikka, ‘New Materialism as Media Theory’; Colebrook, Blake, Deleuzian Aesthetics, and the Digital. And in art and literary studies see Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts.

21

For a discussion on how Deleuze’s concept of haptics differs from and overlaps with Riegl see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 575; Ionescu, ‘Deleuze’s Tensive Notion of Painting’, 54.

22

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 573.

23

Gibson avoids using the term “five senses” and prefers instead to think of “five familiar modes of external attention”. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, 49.

24

Majlesi, The Book of Heavens (Ketāb al-Samāʾ wa al-ʿĀlam), 51.

25

Qorʾān, 34:13.

26

Majlesi, The Book of Heavens (Ketāb al-Samāʾ wa al-ʿĀlam), 53.

27

Majlesi is quick to note that since constructing images (ṣowar) was licit during Solomon’s time, such practices were allowed. He distinguishes between temthāl and ṣowar, which suggests that he might be referring to statues as well as pottery and clay work. Other references to jenn’s architectural dexterity do exist in Shiʿa literatures. One is the aforementioned Shiravāni, see above. Another prominent example belongs to Zakariyā Ebn-e Moḥammad Qazvini, better known for his popular Wonders of Creations (ʿAjāʾeb al-makhluqāt). In his Remnants of Countries and Reports of People which was translated from Arabic to Persian sometime in the first half of the nineteenth century by Mirzā Jahāngir Qājār (d. 1853), many references are made to monuments built by the jenn. Qazvini, Remnants of Countries and Reports of People (Athār al-Belād va Ekhbār al-ʿEbād), 199, 225, 281.

28

Majlesi, The Book of Heavens (Ketāb al-Samāʾ wa al-ʿĀlam), 57.

29

Here Majlesi explains that the word is not only meant to refer to the ability of the jenn to become physically heavy but also figuratively heavy, as in high-ranking beings (shaʾn). For a brilliant conceptual history of jenn’s heaviness see O’Meara, ‘From Space to Place’.

30

Ibid., 60.

31

Al-Ṣaduq’s Congregations (Majāles al-Ṣaduq) is another name for The Book of Amāli (Ketāb al-Amāli) by the tenth-century Shiʿa scholar Abu Jaʿfar Moḥammad Ebn-e ʿAli Ebn-e Bābawya al-Qomi, also known as Sheykh al-Ṣaduq. The book is a collection of his lectures to his students in Neyshābur, Ray and Mashhad, hence called congregations (majāles). See Marʿashi, ‘From the Congregations of Truth-tellers (Az majles-e rāstguyān: gozārishi az noskha-ye kohan-e amāli-ye Sheykh Ṣaduq)’.

32

Ibid., 65.

33

Under the entry to the word malaḥa in al-Zabidi’s Bride Crown Jewels Dictionary (Tāj al-ʿOrus men Jawāher al-Qāmus), this tribe is mentioned as a descendent of the al-Khozāʿa tribe. The tribe had been the custodian of Mecca before the Quraysh, into which the Prophet was born. See al-Zabidi, ‘Malaḥa’. For more details of the banu molayḥ clan see Ebn al-Kalbi, Kinship and the Great Yaman (Nasab maʿadd wa al-Yaman al-Kabir), 452.

148 notes

34

According to the ʿAmid Persian Dictionary, the word estenjāʾ is used in jurisprudence in the sense of washing the genitals with water or earth after urination and defecation.

35

Majlesi, The Book of Heavens (Ketāb al-Samāʾ wa al-ʿĀlam), 68.

36

Ibid., 77.

37

Ṭabari’s Reasons (Dalāʾel al-Ṭabari) is believed to have been compiled by the tenth-century Moḥammad Ebn-e Jarir Ṭabari (d. 922), though doubts over its authenticity have been voiced by scholars. Also known as Imams’ Reasons (Dalāʾel al-Emāma), this work deals with the life and miracles of Shiʿa Imams. For details see Ṣafri Furushāni, ‘Moḥammad Ebn-e Jarir Ṭabari Amoli and Imams’ Reasons (Moḥammad Ebn-e Jarir Ṭabari Amuli va Dalāyel al-Emāma)’.

38

Majlesi, The Book of Heavens (Ketāb al-Samāʾ wa al-ʿĀlam), 64.

39

Physical encounters between angels, such as Hārut and Mārut, were reported but only with the God’s prophets and even then only on rare occasions. One example is found in Sheykh al-Ṣaduq’s Sources of Reports (ʿOyun al-Akhbār) in which the story of Solomon’s meeting with Hārut and Mārut is accounted. According to the story, these two angels were commissioned by Solomon to teach sorcery to people while embodied in human forms. However, their goal, according to Sheykh al-Ṣaduq’s interpretation, was to help people ward off heretic sorcery. Ebn-e Bābawya, Sources of Reports (ʿOyun al-Akhbār), 266–69.

40

Majlesi, The Book of Heavens (Ketāb al-Samāʾ wa al-ʿĀlam), 83.

41

Ibid., 91. According to Lange, “the word zawbaʿa is the name of both the whirling pillars of dust or sand and the jenn that inhabit them”. Lange, ‘Revisiting Hell’s Angels in the Qorʾān’, 82.

42

For details of the sources used in the book and more information about the author see Ṣāliḥi, ‘Introducing The Book of Boḥayra By Fuzuni Asatarābādi (Muʿarrifi-ye Kitāb-e Boḥayra-ye Fozuni Astarābādi)’.

43

Majlesi, The Book of Heavens (Ketāb al-Samāʾ wa al-ʿĀlam), 141–42.

44

As Simon O’Meara points out, the Arabic homonym jānn, which is also the word used in Arabic to refer to jenn in singular, could be used to refer to snakes according to a ḥadith by the Prophet. This might explain why snakes were thought to be the most common form of the jenn. O’Meara, ‘From Space to Place’, 59.

45

Fuzuni Astarābādi, Boḥayra, 524.

46

Ibid, 526.

47

Ibid., 525.

48

Ibid.

49

Ibid., 524.

50

Ibid., 528.

51

Ibid.

52

See Maḥbubi Ardakāni, History of Institutions; Sreberny and Mohammadi, Small Media, Big Revolution; Rubin, ‘The Telegraph, Espionage, and Cryptology in Nineteenth-Century Iran’; Rubin, ‘Indo-European Telegraph Department’.

53

Vaqāyiʿ no. 275; Maḥbubi Ardakāni, History of Institutions, 2:195.

54

Spiritualism has been extensively studied. To give a few examples, for studies of Spiritualism in the British context see Noakes, ‘Telegraphy is an Occult Art’; ‘“Instruments to Lay Hold of Spirits”’. For the American continent, see Moore, ‘Spiritualism and Science’. In the French context see Sharp, Secular Spirituality; Monroe, Laboratories of Faith; Kselman, Death and Afterlife in Modern France. For the German context see Staubermann, ‘Tying the Knot’; Wolffram, ‘Hallucination or Materialization?’. The connection between this movement and telegraphy has also been picked up by few scholars, most notably by Jeremy Stolow. See Stolow, ‘Salvation by Electricity’; ‘Wired Religion’; Otis, Networking; Noakes, ‘“Instruments to Lay Hold of Spirits”’.

notes 149

55

It is especially important to take into account that Spiritism, or more broadly Spiritualism, had much more in common with Catholicism than with science. It is therefore not surprising to observe that much of Christian demonology continued well into the Spiritist framework. For a detailed history of the interdependencies and negotiations between Christianity and Spiritism see Kselman, Death and Afterlife in Modern France, 126–32.

56

As Moore points out, Spiritualists drew upon a quasi-rationality to defend their practices. They never resorted to “supernaturalism” and mostly rejected traditional Christian theology. To that end, their defence of Spiritualism took the four general courses: “a rejection of super-naturalism, a firm belief in the inviolability of natural law, a reliance on external facts rather than on an inward state of mind, and a faith in the progressive development of knowledge”. Moore, ‘Spiritualism and Science’, 485.

57

See Monroe, Laboratories of Faith.

58

Otis, Networking; Noakes, ‘“Instruments to Lay Hold of Spirits”’; Stolow, ‘Wired Religion’.

59

Noakes, ‘“Instruments to Lay Hold of Spirits”’, 422.

60

Stolow, ‘Wired Religion’, 678.

61

One example of the prominent figures was Thaqafi’s close colleague Maḥmud Khān Vaḥid Saʿd Vaḥid al-Dawle, who hosted quite a few séances for Thaqafi in his house.

62

For more detail on how Thaqafi received his medical education in Paris and how he came to be influenced by Spiritism, see Doostdar, The Iranian Metaphysicals, 113–15. I am grateful to Doostdar for generously sharing his digital version of the book with me.

63

I should also mention that more than merely adding a historical perspective to Doostdar’s study, my contribution is also conceptual, in that I show the transformation of the demonological discourses from the point of view of media techniques.

64

For a short biographical account of Flammarion and his interest in Spiritualism see Canguilhem, ‘Flammarion and Eusapia Palladino’. However, when it comes to the lesser known books, Thaqafi often does not mention the authors’ names. For instance he speaks about an English Dr. Lee whose story appeared in “one of his books”, or an Italian physician who disclosed an odd event to an acquaintance “in a letter correspondence” and so on.

65

These sessions have been mentioned in passing by Doostdar in his book. However, Doostdar does not reproduce much from the sessions nor does he analyse them in detail.

66

It might seem that the materials I present are technically speaking European materials, as Thaqafi’s work reproduces mainly stories and ideas taken from Europeans. However, I look at them as materials re-appropriated and received in Iran.

67

Flammarion, Death and its Mystery, 124. My translation is amended from the English translation. For the original, see Thaqafi, Seventy-One Essays on the Science of Spirit (Haftād va yek Maqāle-ye Maʿrefat al-Ruḥ), 10–11.

68

Ibid., 11.

69

Ibid., 19–20.

70

Ibid., 28–29.

71

Kardec and Blackwell, Spiritualist Philosophy, 130. Kardec’s ideas can be found throughout Spiritist writings in Iran. One example is the translations and writings of Mirzā Moḥammad Khān Vaḥid al-Saʿāda. See Vaḥid al-Saʿāda, 1935.

72

Stolow, ‘Wired Religion’, 678–79.

73

Kardec, Book on Mediums or Guide for Mediums and Invocators, 292–93.

74

Vaḥid al-Saʿāda, The Key of Civilisation (Kelid-e Tamaddon), 131, 297. The term fluids (sayālāt), used in plural in Persian rendition, was a common term used to refer to electrical current in telegraphic wires. The term telegraphic fluid can often be found in scientific magazines at the time. See for example Tarbiat 1896, no. 30, 118.

150 notes

75

Vaḥid al-Saʿāda, 135.

76

Elsewhere in the book, Thaqafi summarily lists three orders to which spirits belong. The higher in the echelon, the more knowledgeable. Thaqafi, Seventy-One Essays on the Science of Spirit (Haftād va yek Maqāle-ye Maʿrefat al-Ruḥ), 197–99.

77

Ibid., 290.

78

Ibid., 294.

79

Ibid., 298.

80

Moore, ‘Spiritualism and Science’, 483.

81

Thaqafi mentions all these manifestations in his book in passing without dwelling on them. In European sources, evidence for direct sensory encounters with spirits is in contrast more emphasised.

82

Ibid., 484.

83

Quoted in Noakes, ‘“Instruments to Lay Hold of Spirits”’, 9.

84

See my discussion above on The Book of Heavens and Boḥayra. I should also mention that in the European context, similar observations can be made in regard to demons in early modern times. As one example, in his The Certainty of the Worlds of Spirits (1691), the puritan Richard Baxter (d. 1691) reports an encounter with demons as described to him through a letter. We read in this excerpt that an “apparition walked in the Chamber, having an unsufferable Stench, like that of a putrefied Carcase, filling the Room with a thick Smoak, smelling like Sulphur, darkening the Light of the Fire and Candle, but not quite extinguishing it; sometimes going down the Stairs, and coming up again with a fearful noise, disturbing them in their Prayers, one while with the sound of Words which they could not discern, other while striking them so that the next Morning their Faces were black with the Smoak, and their Bodies swollen with Bruises.”. Baxter, The Certainty of the Worlds of Spirits, 25. This seventeenth-century description comes very close to jenn-visitations in Islamic sources. While European and Islamic demonologies might overlap on this haptic aspect, their transformation in modern times took different routes. For a more detailed discussion of how this transformation took its course in the Euro-American milieu see Harvey, Photography and Spirit; Gunning, ‘To Scan a Ghost’.

85

Regarding the visual appearance of spirits in the American context see Cloutier, ‘Mulmer’s Ghosts’. And for Europe see Fischer, ‘A Photographer of Marvels: Frederick Hudson and the Beginnings of Spirit Photography In Europe’. For discussions on the notion of spectrality in the European context see del Pilar Blanco and Peeren, The Spectralities Reader; Leeder, Cinematic Ghosts. It should be noted here that when it comes to the European context, it is not easy to draw a clear line between pre-photographic and post-photographic representation of spirits. In this milieu, thanks to the highly diverse and proliferating optical technologies before the invention of photography – forms such as the camera obscura, the magic lantern, phantasmagoria theatres, glass-based technologies for creating ghost illusions, peep shows, kaleidoscope, zograscope, stereoscope and many more – there was already a thick media context into which Spiritualism could tap. In Europe, therefore, mediation of spirits through visual techniques had a longer history – for instance in lantern projections in the late seventeenth century, in phantasmagoric theatres in the eighteenth century, in painting and engravings from the mid-sixteenth century. Therefore, one cannot easily separate spirit photography and the spectrality it propagated from older representational techniques. But in Iran, this separation can be observed. The nineteenth century media transformation happened in a very short time, almost like a shock, with distinguishable patterns of dissonance across only a few decades.

86

One example is the story in The Book of Heavens discussed above. Another can be found in Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta, 2:192.

notes 151

87

For a detailed discussion of the contents and the importance of this work see Afkāri, ‘The unique Persian manuscript’.

88

Ḥoseyni, Discovery of Crafts (Kashf al-Ṣanāyeʿ), 134–36.

89

Thaqafi, Seventy-One Essays on the Science of Spirit (Haftād va Yek Maqāle-ye Maʿrefat al-Ruḥ), 293.

Epilogue 1

Cultural essentialism in Islamic Studies has already been the subject of many critical studies. For a concise but astute example see, Matin-Asgari, ‘Islamic Studies and the Spirit of Max Weber: A Critique of Cultural Essentialism’.

2

For details on reforms and modernisation in the Pahlavi era see, among many others, Banani, The Modernization of Iran; Cronin, The Making of Modern Iran, especially chapters six and seven; Schayegh, Who Is Knowledgeable Is Strong; Vejdani, Making History in Iran; Amanat, Iran: A Modern History, chapters eight and nine.

3

Khomeini, Unveiling Secrets (Kashf-e Asrār), 279. Khomeini wrote this book as a response to an unpublished treatise by a cleric in Qom, titled Thousand-Year Secrets (Asrār-e Hezār Sāla), in which a strong criticism was voiced against Shiite thoughts and history. I owe this reference to Mohammad Reza Nikfar who, in a personal conversation with me, emphasised the importance of Khomeini’s book in the discussions about technics and religion in Iran.

4

Nikfar, ‘Belief and Technique’, 12. The essay has been a source of inspiration for my research. I should note that my translation of his text is not entirely accurate though I have tried to retain the important points in English as clear as I could.

5

Ibid. A literal translation of this important sentence by Nikfar would be tautological in English, as in “the engineering of coercion …. subjugates …. into its engineering”. For the first instance, the word mohandesi and for the second the word hendessa is used. This latter is a common translation for geometry, which is not really the sense of Nikfar’s sentence. To avoid tautology and misunderstanding, I have used the term ‘design’.

6

Ibid., 15.

7

Ibid.

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Index

A

D

abjad letters, 17, 91, 103-4

Dār al-Fonun (1851), 20-4, 34, 49, 51, 57-61, 63-4, 71, 77, 79-80, 82-4, 97, 105, 113-5, 119, 123

absurd absurdism, 19, 28, 30, 33-6, 40, 50-1, 81, 104, 125; ~ and Islam 28, 41; ~ and (non)sense,

Darbandi, Mollā Āqā (d. 1869), 49-50, 125 demonology, 31, 103-6, 109, 113-4, 116, 119, 121, 123-4

27-28, 31; ~ and signification, 28; ~ and mediation, 20, 26, 28; absurd sign/object,

dream, 37, 103-5, 113, 117

19-20, 28, 30, 34, 79-80; power of the ~, 19; theatre of the ~, 28, 31

E

aetiology, 83-84, 100

Ebn-e Sinā (d. 1037), 88, 98, 116

ʿĀmeli, Abolfaḍl Moḥammad Ebn al-Sheykh

embodiment of deeds (tajassom-e aʿmāl), 33, 36-40, 46, 114

Ḥoseyn (d. 1621), 39 ʿAli Ebn-e Abi Ṭāleb (d. 661), 17, 91

eschatology, 33-4, 36-7, 127,

Amir Kabir, Mirzā Taqi Khān (d. 1852), 115-116,

Eʿteḍād al-Salṭane (d. 1880), 103-4, 113

119-120, 123

Eʿtemād al-Salṭane (d. 1896), 24

anatomy, 21-2, 32, 85-6, 96, 100 Anṣāri, Mirzā Saʿid Khān (d. 1884)

F

Āqā Reḍā A ʿ kkāsbāshi (d. 1889)

face, 39, 41, 43, 45, 48, 53, 66, 112,

Āqā Sheykh A ʿ li (d. 1900)

Fayḍ al-Kāshāni, Mollā Moḥsen (d. 1680), 39

ʿĀshurā, 20, 49-50, 66, 68, 125 Astarābādi, Fozuni (d. 1660), 105, 108, 111

G

Astarābādi, Mirzā Mehdi Khān (d. 1759 or

Ghazāli, Moḥammad al- (d. 1111), 39-40, 92

1768), 59 H B

Hamadāni, Farid al-Molk (d. 1916), 87

Benjamin, Samual (d. 1914), 71, 73-5

haptics, 103-4, 106-12, 114, 119, 121, 123, 124

body

hereafter, the (ākhera), 33, 35-9, 47, 127

~ and the senses, 41, 90, 107, 110-1, 116-8,

hollow (ajwaf), 96

120-1, 123; ~ and diseases, 84-6, 88, 93, 97;

Ḥoseyn Ebn-e ʿAli (d. 680), 20, 49-50

~ and affect, 53, 57, 73, 75-7, 85, 89, 91, 96,

humoralism, 83-85, 88, 91,

121 I C

icon

clergy, the (ʿolamā), 18-9, 23, 26, 47-8, 70, 82, 113, 126 contagion, 84, 97-8 Covid-19, 17, 19, 80 cultural analysis, 31-32

iconicity, 44; ~ symbol, and index, 44, 75, 92, 131n. Islamic Revolution, 17, 126

174 index

~ reforms, 17, 21, 49, 51, 57, 64; ~ history,

J

52, 59-60; ~ manuals, 23, 25, 51-2, 58, 60,

jenn

64; ~ sound/music, 21-2, 24, 51-5, 57-8,

body of the ~, 105-6, 109-10, 112, 122;

63-4, 69, 71-2; ~ sciences, 23; techniques/

communication/encounter with the ~,

technologies, 21, 50-1

103-4, 105, 110, 112; ~ and pari, 123; ~ and sex, 112; ~ and teleportation, 110-1, 118;

mimesis, 41, 43, 67, 89

~ in the Qorʾān, 110; ~ possession, 105-6;

Mollā Aqā Darbandi (d. 1869), 49-50, 125

haptics of the ~, 106, 108-10, 114, 123; skin

Mollā Ṣadrā (d. 1640), 39

of the ~, 110

Morier, James Justinian (d. 1849), 68-70, 72-3, 75 Mostawfi, ʿAbdollāh (d. 1941), 72, 74 Moʿayyeri, Dustʿali (d. 1966), 71

K Kardec, Allan (d. 1869), 115, 117-20 Kermānī, Nāẓem al-Eslām (d. 1919), 17-9, 21, 23

N

Khomeini, Ruḥollāh (d. 1989), 15, 126

Naqqārekhāne, 55, 58

Krziz, August (d. 1886), 24-5, 58, 60

Narāqi, Mollā Moḥammad Mehdi (d. 1794), 39 Nāṣer al-Din Shāh (d. 1896), 50, 64, 69, 84, 101 non-existent object, 19-20, 28, 31

L Lemaire, Alfred Jean-Baptiste (d. 1907), 24, 57, 64 likeness (shabih), 40-1, 43

O Ouseley, William (d. 1842), 68-70, 72-3, 75

lithography lithographic image, 44; lithographic culture, 109

P Pahlavi dynasty (1925-1979), 57, 126 Pelly, Lewis (d. 1892), 69-70, 73

M

perception, 41, 48, 107-9, 111-2

magic, 82, 91, 93, 104, 108

photography courses/study of ~, 24, 46; creational ~, 46; ~

Majlesi, Moḥammad Bāqer (d. 1699), 40, 85, 96,

and evidentiality, 41, 46, 48; history of ~, 24;

105, 108-11

manuals of ~, 22, 24, 33-5, 43, 58; naming

media

the photograph, 43; photographic image,

communication ~, 126; demonological

33-6, 44, 46-8, 125; photographic logic, 36,

mediation, 106; logic of ~, 27, 32, 36, 40, 46,

40-1, 44, 46-8; ~ vs. lithography, 44

52, 104, 123-6; ~ infrastructure, 26, 38, 126; ~ re-organisation, 113-4, 116; religion and

pilgrimage, 82, 99

~ 27; techniques of mediation, 90, 105, 123;

Polak, Jacob (d. 1891), 23, 97

visual ~, 20

Prophetic literature (ḥadith), 34, 38, 96, 110

medicine ~ and reforms, 98; clinical ~, 79-80; humoral

Q

~, 79, 83; ~ and treatment, medical history,

Qāʾāni, Ḥabib (d. 1854), 47-8

31, 79; medical knowledge, 23, 31; medical

Qorʾān, 17, 29, 34, 38-9, 85, 89, 91-2, 109-10, 122

regime/culture, 79-81, 83-5, 88-9, 93, 97;

quarantine, 82-3, 97-9, 142n, 145n

medicative semiotics, 90; Shiʿa/Islamic ~, 80,

Qorṭubi, Abu A ʿ bdollāh al- (d. 1273), 96

83, 91, 93 Meshkāt al-Molk, 33, 35-8, 40, 46, 50, 125, 127

R

mezāj, 86-8, 92,

Reḍā, Imām (d. 818), 111

miasma, 83-5

Resurrection, (qiāma), 31, 33-7, 39, 125

military

index  175

Sheil, Lady Mary Leonora Woulfe (d. 1869),

S

69-70, 73, 75

Saʿdi (d. 1292), 25 Sanitary Council (majles-e ḥefẓ al-ṣeḥḥa), 82, 97

Sheykh al-Ṣaduq (d. 991), 110

Ṣāvoji, Musā Ebn-e A ʿ lireḍā (d. around the

Sheykh Bahāʾi (d. 1621), 39-40, 115

middle of the nineteenth century), 80,

Sheykh Ṭabresi (d. 1153), 39-40

84-93, 96-7, 100

Shirāzi, Nāʾeb al-Ṣadr-e (d. 1925), 87

Schlimmer, Johan (d. 1876), 79, 97, 100-1

Shushtari, A ʿ bd al-Laṭif (d. 1805), 54, 57

science

Soyuṭi, Abu al-Faḍl al-Raḥmān al- (d. 1505), 96

modern sciences, 20, 50, 79-80; scientific

Spiritism, 104-5, 113-5, 118-9, 121-2

community, 79; scientific discovery, 120;

spirits, 103-5, 109, 113-24

scientific literature, 81, 98; new sciences

ṣurat, 39, 41, 43

(ʿolum-e jadid), 20, 22; ~ and religion, 82, 113 semiotics, 27, 38, 44, 46, 75, 77, 79-80, 91, 93, 104, 125, 127 sense ~ and meaning, 19; ~ and signification, 19,

T Ṭabari, Moḥammad Ebn-e Jarir (d. 922), 111 Tabrizi, ʿAbu Ṭāleb-e (d. 1805 or 1806), 54, 57 talisman, 20, 79-80, 85, 89-91, 93-4, 122, 125 taṣwir, 43-4, 47-8

27-28, 36, 125, 127; ~ and the absurd, 19,

technical object, 17, 105, 121, 123

27, 34, 104

telegraphy, 20-23, 25-6, 103-4, 106, 113-9, 122, 126

senses external ~, 42, 73, 76, 90, 107-8, 110, 116, 118, 120-1, 123; inner ~, 111, 117; ~ organ,

Thaqafi, Khalil (d. 1944), 105, 114-9, 121 Tholozan, Joseph Désiré (d. 1897), 79, 82, 97-101, 114

108; ~ of hearing, ~ of sight; ~ of smell, 79, 84, 87; ~ of taste, 79, 87, 92; ~ of touch, 84,

travelogue, 51, 54-6, 71, 87, 97

103, 107, 110; sensory capacity, 84, 88, 93; sensory experience, 79, 103-4, 121; sensory

V

logic/setup, 49, 80, 88, 103; sensory model/

Vaqāyeʿ-e Ettefāqiye, 22, 25, 64, 113

sensoreality, 80, 86, 121 Serena, Carla (d. 1884), 70, 72-3, 75,

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P. Shabani-Jadidi Processing Compound Verbs in Persian: A Psycholinguistic Approach to Complex Predicates isbn

978 90 8728 208 0

B. Solati The Reception of Ḥāfiẓ: The Sweet Poetic Language of Ḥāfiẓ in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Persia isbn

978 90 8728 197 7

R. Tabandeh The Rise of the Ni‘matullāhī Order in 19th-Century Persia. Shi’ite Sufi Masters and Their Battle against Islamic Fundamentalism isbn

978 90 8728 367 4

S. Tabatabai Father of Persian Verse. Rudaki and his Poetry isbn

978 90 8728 092 5

K. Talattof & A.A. Seyed-Gohrab (eds.) Conflict and Development in Iranian Film isbn

978 90 8728 169 4

M. Van Zutphen (ed.) A Story of Conquest and Adventure. The Large Farāmarznāme isbn

978 90 8728 272 1

R. Zipoli Irreverent Persia. Invective, Satirical and Burlesque Poetry from the Origins to the Timurid Period (10th to 15th century) isbn

978 90 8728 227 1