In a poem lamenting the victims of the 2009 Green Movement, Hila Sedighi recalls the “resonance of the cries, the weeping of the mourning mothers over unmarked graves.”Footnote 1 The young poet refers to the “mothers of Khavaran,” who take their name from the location of a mass grave in south Tehran far from the city's main cemetery. In doing so, she evokes the lasting memory of what has come to be known as Iran's 1988 “prison massacre.” Decades after their loss, the families regularly visit the burial place of their loved ones, most of whom were young leftist activists, numbering over 1,000 by most estimates. Some mourners draw pictures of the missing tombstones in the dirt, as if to reconstruct memories that were deliberately erased by the state.
In a bleak antecedent to the mass graves, during the post-1979 revolutionary period a group of Islamic enthusiasts had demanded that the authorities remove the remains of leftist victims of the revolution who had been buried in Tehran's Muslim cemetery, on the grounds that “the souls of our martyrs will be in turmoil” (arvāḥ-i shuhad-yi mā nārāḥat mīshavand).Footnote 2 These remains were reburied in an unmarked location safely distant from the Muslim cemetery. The graveyard radicals were seeking to expunge any trace of apostasy from Tehran's main cemetery, which to them was the ultimate pure Muslim space. The activists had declared war not only against their living left-leaning rivals but also against the dead ones.
One can find many historical precedents in Iran for this enduring preoccupation with corpses. In the second half of the 19th century, bodies were often mutilated during the frenzy surrounding the execution of Babis and Bahaʾis, and the desecration of graves and the exhumation and burning of the remains were recurring elements in the riots instigated against these communities. In fact, with the exception of a brief period under Riza Shah's rule (1921–41), dishonoring the memory of the dead through the desecration of tombs and the burning of human remains has had a steady albeit unexamined presence in modern Iran. Obsession with the tombs and corpses of nonconformists and political enemies was not uncommon in Europe during the medieval and early modern periods and has been associated with the Inquisition. However, modern cases of bone burning are rare outside Iran and have occurred primarily in times of great social upheaval.Footnote 3
In Iran, the graveyard has been an arena of occasional conflict over the posthumous definition of an individual's identity. In the 19th century, when religion was the cornerstone of communal distinctions, the verse on a person's gravestone was the ultimate label of his religious identity and a dominant marker of his memory. Yet communal dividing lines were not always clearly drawn in the period under discussion, which witnessed the emergence of a variety of unconventional religious (and later secular) identities. For Jews, conversion to Islam, Christianity, and, more prominently, the Bahaʾi faith was one vehicle for constructing a new identity. Such converts often maintained multiple, overlapping, and at times secret convictions to various faiths and could not always be easily defined as believers or apostates.Footnote 4 Yet despite their elusive nature, conversions were common enough to cause new communal tensions between converting nonconformists and their steadfast traditionalist opponents. Such hostilities were sometimes expressed by the exclusion of alleged apostates or infidels from Muslim and Jewish communal cemeteries.
The exclusion of apostates, or even those with unconventional beliefs, was often justified by Muslim religious authorities who, as the guardians of conformism, restricted cemetery burial to those who had died as believers. Such restrictions were in line with a strict reading of the shariʿa, which prohibits the burial in a Muslim cemetery of those defined in the Qurʾan as infidels of various kinds.Footnote 5 These limitations were often defined more specifically in the rules of endowments earmarked for such sites and sometimes were invoked to justify removal of the remains of a suspected nonbeliever. Such legalistic considerations were intertwined with popular beliefs, such as that the devil might possess the bodies of the ritually unclean and thereby torment the souls of Muslims or somehow interfere with their salvation on the Day of Judgment.Footnote 6
At a deeper level, a preoccupation with burial practices, including the elaborate specifications outlined in Shiʿi ritual literature, is rooted in eschatological scenarios. In detailed depictions of the Day of Judgment, the circumstances of a body's burial are essential to its eventual salvation. These concerns guide the Shiʿi burial rituals, which are a mixture of legalistic exercise and popular religion.Footnote 7 Resurrection in the company of Shiʿi saints was the primary motive for the transportation of corpses to sacred sites, most commonly the cemeteries adjacent to the shrines of Najaf and Karbala, until 1928, when the practice was banned in Iran.Footnote 8 In Shiʿi eschatology, the cemetery is the main arena for the resurrection scenario, and its purity is central to the scenario's proper enactment. The presence of nonbelievers could threaten the sanctity of the cemetery and complicate the salvation of believers.
Although cremation has become a common and ecologically preferable way to dispose of the dead in the West and elsewhere, the practice is prohibited in Islam, as well as in orthodox Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and the Bahaʾi faith, and the destruction of human remains is a severe insult to the family of the deceased. Tombs are seen as a vital part of a family's sense of self, and the relationship between the living and the departed is kept alive by regular graveside visitations, including on religious holidays. As recently as the mid-20th century, on the eighth day before the New Year (Nowruz), “the day of the graveside” (rūz-i sar-i qabr) was observed to remember the dead and repair their graves, and spending a day picnicking with the family at the cemetery was not uncommon.Footnote 9 The soul of the departed was often seen as present and active in the lives of relatives for some time after death. If other deaths occurred within the extended family, intervention by a recently departed family member was seen as the cause: “it was believed that he had taken his shroud in his mouth or was biting on it,” which was believed to cause more death. In such a case, the grave would have to be opened in order to take the shroud out of the mouth of the deceased.Footnote 10
Ritualized visitations of a relative's tomb have roots in pre-Islamic Iran. In the Zoroastrian practice, “consecrated offerings” during the first three days after a relative's death was followed by similar offerings after thirty days and then annually for thirty years, “to provide for [the soul] in the underworld kingdom of the dead.”Footnote 11 Traces of this practice continue to this day in the form of offerings and feeding the poor on the fortieth day and on the anniversary of a relative's death. Other indications of the supernatural properties attributed to graves can be observed in the practices of unmarried women looking for husbands, such as cooking ḥalwa and distributing it at the graves of young men.Footnote 12
The role of a grave as the repository of family memory is generally limited to the lifespan of those who still remember the deceased. After thirty years, or two generations, reverence toward the burial site gives way to economic necessities. During the Pahlavi period, for example, the recycling of cemeteries for purposes such as building schools was common and acceptable from the standpoint of both shariʿa and customary (ʿurf) practices.Footnote 13 Such pragmatism leads to a gap in the Shiʿi eschatological scenario: the emphasis on the purity of burial sites and the detailed burial instructions in anticipation of resurrection are contradicted by the recycling of cemeteries.
IRAN'S INTERNAL “OTHER”
The problematic of the grave as a core of the communal divide is rooted in the tension between nonconformists and traditionalists and in the complex and elusive history of Iran's interfaith relations. On the one hand, a general religious intolerance and an obsession with the internal “Other” are reflected in a deeply held belief in the “impurity” (nijāsat) of nonbelievers. This attitude, though not unique to Iran, is shared among Iran's Shiʿa, Jews, and Zoroastrians, who refer to nonbelievers as khārij az dīn, gūʾīm, and agdīn, respectively. Perhaps in part because of this strain of intolerance, institutions such as the Ottoman millet system, which allowed considerable self-rule to “people of the book,” were not institutionalized in post-Safavid Iran despite having pre-Islamic roots. While a degree of informal autonomy for non-Muslims was recognized by the state, it was often circumvented by the authority of the Shiʿi ʿulamaʾ and local government officials. On the other hand, a deep-rooted tradition of cultural exchange and relative tolerance also existed and was manifested in mutual influences between Judaism and Iranian religions, especially in the areas of cosmology and eschatology.Footnote 14 Jews collaborated with Muslim scholars in medieval science and medicine.Footnote 15 Many Sufis disregarded purity laws in favor of learning, dialogue, and other interfaith interactions.Footnote 16 In early 20th-century Iran, some Jews in Gilan fasted during Ramadan, and the Jews of Kurdistan celebrated the Jewish festival of Simha-Tora with familiar Sufi dances leading to a state of trance.Footnote 17
Arguably, however, this collective spirit has been increasingly eclipsed since the 17th century, a trend that was manifested in the celebrated Shiʿi scholar Muhammad Baqir Majlisi's (d. 1698) emphasis on ritual impurities and that became more prominent around the turn of the 19th century with the ascendency of the Usuli exclusivist orthodoxy.Footnote 18 Anti-Jewish discriminatory practices that drew on Shiʿi “impurity” laws contributed to the economic decline of the Jews. By the late 19th century, most Jewish merchants had been expelled from the main bazaars and thereby eliminated as competition for non-Jewish merchants.Footnote 19 Other “impurity” restrictions, such as a prohibition on Jews leaving their homes on rainy days, though haphazardly enforced, created significant obstacles for Jewish physicians making house visits, thus impeding one of the few professions in which Jews had maintained a level of prominence.Footnote 20
In the mid-19th century, Iran's legalistic Shiʿism was challenged by the emergence of a new religious discourse. The Babi movement initially grew out of the seminary (madrasa) and soon became a widely popular messianic movement, eventually declaring itself a new independent faith that defied the belief in Islam as the final divine dispensation.Footnote 21 The Babi movement had deep roots in Iranian Shiʿism but can be traced in particular to developments in the 18th century, when a long period of foreign occupation, chaos, and civil war led to the collapse of the central state and the ascendancy of a rather small group of legalistic, conservative, and high-ranking Usuli ʿulamaʾ. The Babi movement was in part a reaction to the orthodoxy of these ʿulamaʾ. It was also an open challenge to the legitimacy of Qajar rule.Footnote 22
For a majority of the Babis, the movement's messianic tendencies found new expression in the freshly defined moral vision that later came to be known as the Bahaʾi faith. Under the leadership of Mirza Husayn ʿAli Nuri Bahaʾuʾllah (1817–92), who claimed to be the fulfillment of the prophecies of all earlier religions, a post-messianic order emerged that in time broke from the cultural bounds of Islam and, during a formative century, underwent substantial evolution. Bahaʾuʾllah articulated a new moral faith with an inclusive social message of nonviolence, universal peace, and a universal lingua franca (to be learned with vernacular languages). He praised constitutional monarchy, called for an international collective security order, and denounced the rise and dominance of military ambitions in the West. He also advocated public welfare and reduced taxation through the reduction of military expenditure and war efforts.Footnote 23
Babis and Bahaʾis used a variety of methods to deconstruct traditional conventions. A Western-style positivist perspective was used to subvert popular religion by branding it “archaic” and “superstitious.” On the level of religious polemics, Babis and Bahaʾis drew on a deep-rooted indigenous tradition. Through a mystical hermeneutic discourse they tried to undermine conventional readings of the Islamic and Biblical scriptures and the doctrine of the finality of religious dispensations, a major source of contention with other Muslims. The rapid dissemination of subversive ideas sparked an immediate reaction from rich and powerful ʿulamaʾ who denounced Babis and later Bahaʾis as heretical. To this day they are Iran's most persecuted religious community.Footnote 24
A substantial number of Persian Jews were attracted to the persecuted Bahaʾi faith.Footnote 25 Although historically there has been much interaction between Jews and Sufis, conversion to a persecuted minority religion is an unusual if not a unique phenomenon in the history of Persian Jewry.Footnote 26 A variety of historical forces contributed to the attraction of Jews to the Bahaʾi faith. One was the acceleration of a deep-rooted sense of expectation for the coming of a savior or messiah (mashiyah). Western missionary activities, although attracting few converts, revitalized messianic fervor and introduced new options in religious conviction.Footnote 27 At times disillusionment with unfulfilled expectations among Jews for the “return” of the Messiah in a given year led to conversions to Islam as well as to Christianity and the Bahaʾi faith.Footnote 28
The 19th century was also a time of encounter with expanding Western power, which presented a challenge to Muslims’ conception of the superiority of Islam. Many Iranians found a response to modernity in indigenous messianic beliefs and became attracted to the Babi and Bahaʾi religions. Others turned to a variety of unconventional belief systems ranging from reformist Shiʿism to agnosticism, secular nationalism, and socialism. Iranian Jews faced the same conditions of crisis and turmoil as their compatriots, and many sought to escape years of economic deprivation, cultural isolation, and a broken educational system by experimenting with unconventional beliefs. Some adopted new religious identities such as Christianity and the Bahaʾi faith, while others tried to reconcile their encounter with modernity through Zionism or socialism.Footnote 29 The Orientalist Walter Fischel compared the effect of the Bahaʾi faith on Persian Jews to that of the French Revolution on Western Jewry: “As in the case of the French revolution, Persian Jews were seized by a profound enthusiasm and admiration for their new faith.”Footnote 30 In a reformulation of Fischel's thesis, Amnon Netzer similarly uses the analogy of the impact of the French Revolution on European Reformed Judaism but argues that Persian Jewry lacked the intellectual tradition of the European Jews and therefore had to search beyond its own boundaries for meaningful change.Footnote 31
Sporadic harassment of Jews, Babis, and Bahaʾis in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including riots, looting, and occasional murder, is documented in primary and secondary sources.Footnote 32 The riots were driven in part by urban factionalism and social discontent but also were often instigated by some ʿulamaʾ to flex their muscles in a complex urban scene, settle accounts with other contenders among the ʿulamaʾ, challenge the state authority, or even influence international politics. At times the rural populations, who were subjected to oppression by landowners and local officials, became accomplices in the looting and harassment of non-Muslims in neighboring towns.Footnote 33 The weak Qajar central government was often unable to control outbreaks of anti-minority violence, especially in distant provinces.Footnote 34 Beginning in the 1860s, Iranian Jews, like their Christian counterparts, received a level of protection from European powers. Even Zoroastrians found support among their co-religionists in India. Yet Babis and Bahaʾis lacked any comparable external allies despite frequent accusations that they were the agents of foreign powers, and they were extremely vulnerable to occasional mob attacks and premeditated riots that included murder, looting, confiscation of personal property, and the rape or forced marriage of surviving women.Footnote 35
DEFILING THE “OTHER”
As a transitional space between a living community and its dead, the graveyard can be an ideal location to attack a system of belief or to defame or avert the salvation of one's enemy. Sometimes corpses became the means of settling feuds among the living. The highly developed category of curses related to burial in Persian, such as pidar sūkhtih (burned father) and pidar dar āvardan (lit., to exhume the corpse of one's father), may well reflect historical practices of defamation, especially of religious nonconformists or political enemies.Footnote 36
It is difficult to establish with any certainty the origin and frequency of the practice of exhuming bodies and burning them in the pre-modern period. Some scholars have linked the practice to the Turko-Mongol tradition of the 13th century, which placed great emphasis on the survival of the bones of humans and animals in the process of rebirth.Footnote 37 One can detect even deeper roots. According to the Shiʿi eschatological literature, the Hidden Imam will return to avenge the injustices inflicted upon Shiʿi saints by resurrecting and burning the bodies of the first two caliphs.Footnote 38 The famous case of the exhumation and burning of the Umayyad tombs during the Abbasid period may well be related to this prophecy.Footnote 39 Examples in the medieval period point to the continuation of the practice.Footnote 40 Shah Ismaʿil I (r. 1501–24), in an attempt to eliminate the influential and mostly Sunni Sufi leaders, attacked the tombs of their ancestors.Footnote 41 Ismaʿil also exhumed and burned bodies to avenge the death of his father, Shaykh Haydar, and carry out other personal vendettas.Footnote 42
In the 19th century, the urban spectacle of mobs parading the fresh or exhumed corpses or heads of Babis and Bahaʾis around town was not uncommon. The practice was sufficiently widespread that in 1870, Shaykh-i Mazgan, an elderly Babi village elder, pleaded prior to his execution in Kashan's main square that his remains not be dragged around the square. Perhaps in honor of his wish, his body, along with the bodies of two young men, was only left in the public square for several hours. The two young men had been accused of taking part in a peasant revolt led by a certain Shah Mirza, a Babi lūṭī rebel from Kashan with ties to the ʿulamaʾ and notables. It is possible that the shaykh of Mazgan had also been accused of collaboration with the rebels.Footnote 43
On occasion, Bahaʾis managed to save the corpses of executed co-religionists from mistreatment by negotiating payments to retrieve the bodies. Mulla ʿAli Jan Mahfrujaki (Mazandarani) was a thirty-eight-year-old Babi leader who had obtained the rank of mujtahid before becoming a Bahaʾi. When he returned to his hometown of Mahfurujak in Mazandaran, he converted the whole village to the new religion, establishing schools for boys and girls as well as agricultural cooperatives that sold their cotton harvests to Russian agents. In 1883, an alliance between local clergy and provincial authorities led to the execution of the reform-minded rural cleric on charges of instigating a peasant rebellion.Footnote 44
After the execution of ʿAli Jan, the executioner made his customary rounds in the bazaar, carrying ʿAli Jan's head, to collect gratuities from the shopkeepers as a coercive token of community endorsement of the execution.Footnote 45 Late the following night, a group of Tehran Bahaʾi womenFootnote 46 paid the guards and retrieved the body from the executioner for proper burial. In an urgent move, one of the women, a certain Fatima Sultan Khanum, reportedly traded her pearls as part of the price for the corpse. She was married to Hajji Faraj, cousin and pīshkār (steward) to Chief Minister Mirza ʿAli Asghar Khan Amin al-Sultan. When a group of royal stable workers who were known for their anti-Bahaʾi sentiments planned a riot to exhume and burn ʿAli Jan's remains (presumably because he was buried in a Muslim cemetery), Hajji Faraj obtained a ruling from the chief minister to have the grave protected “for a few nights” by government-mounted agents (savār). “He then arrested, imprisoned, and bastinadoed the culprits” (chūb-i bisyār zadand).Footnote 47 The aspiring Amin al-Sultan's swift punishment of the unruly muleteers may have been meant to assert his own authority and put an end to the embarrassing practice, at least in the capital city.
On occasion, a corpse became the instrument of rivalry among the ʿulamaʾ. In the 1890s, the relatives of a modest textile dyer Sayyid ʿAbd al-Baqi Rangraz from Kashan had to negotiate through the hierarchical ranks of the Shiʿi ʿulamaʾ in order to gain protection against any mistreatment of his body. He had been beaten about the head after a bold exchange with Kashan's governor in which he refused to recant his Bahaʾi beliefs. He died soon afterward and was buried in the Muslim cemetery. Subsequently, a low-ranking cleric named Habib Allah, who reportedly had earlier recanted his own Babi beliefs, ordered his followers to exhume the sayyid's body, cut off the right arm with a shovel, and drag the rest of the body through the dirt. On the Day of Judgment, according to the Qurʾan, believers receive a book of their deeds in their right hand. Without the right arm, the deceased is presumably bound for hell. The relatives of the sayyid, appealing on the basis of his status as a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, managed to prevent family dishonor by obtaining a fatwa from a higher ranking cleric, a mujtahid by the name of Muhammad Husayn, stating that the sayyid had recanted his Babi beliefs prior to his death, and therefore his body could not be harmed.Footnote 48
However, the same Mulla Habib Allah did manage to fulfill his desire to punish corpses “during the last year of his life,” when he ordered his followers to exhume the body of a modest Bahaʾi silk craftsman known as Amu Ibrahim. They “dragged his body through the dirt across town [Kashan] from Isfahan Gate to the Jewish cemetery where they threw it. The Jews had the body thrown into the fields outside of town.” During the night, Amu Ibrahim's sons took his homeless remains and buried them on the outskirts of Kashan behind the town's ice depot (yakhchāl), which was owned by some Bahaʾis.Footnote 49
THE SUBALTERN PEDDLER
The Jews had their own interment challenges. One group often subjected to hardship and harassment, especially in the countryside, was Jewish peddlers. Aqajan Shakeri (1884–1964) was a Jewish Bahaʾi convert and a textile merchant of modest means from Hamadan who dealt extensively with the town's Jewish peddlers. His autobiography details his struggle for economic survival in a changing environment.Footnote 50 Shakeri draws a bleak picture of the life of peddlers in the Hamadan region, which included long travels and separation from their families, sometimes for as long as a year. They were seen as outsiders and the ostracized “Other,” and “the children threw stones at them and incited stray dogs to attack them.”Footnote 51 At times Shakeri's depictions, such as that of a peddler being buried alive for no good reason, seem extreme.Footnote 52 Nevertheless, the lack of access to kosher food and the unavailability of bathhouses in the countryside made for a particularly difficult life. When a Jewish clothier secretly used the public bath in the middle of the night in a village near Hamadan, “they attacked him and wanted to kill him [for polluting the bath].” The affair was resolved after the peddler became a Muslim and was forced “to marry a coarse [nakarih] woman.”Footnote 53
Shakeri's business associate Aqa Haym, a Jewish peddler from Isfahan who traveled around the northwest Malayer region around the turn of the 20th century, met a hideous end. His associates had warned him against going to the countryside in the nearby region of Arak, which was known for its unruliness prior to the establishment of Pahlavi central rule. Some creditors had even insisted on settling accounts with Aqa Haym before he left. At Turgir Fortress, near Khundab on the outskirts of Arak, he revealed his Jewish convictions to the inhabitants (presumably after having claimed to be a Muslim) when he turned down the communal meal he was offered and asked for boiled potatoes instead. “They choked him to death using carpet wool yarns. They broke his scull and peeled the skin off his face.”Footnote 54 Aside from concerns over the ritual impurity of non-Muslims, the hosts’ violent reaction may be indicative of occasional hostility toward Jewish peddlers in particular in this period. While the peddlers provided an important service in a predominantly rural society, they may well have been blamed for the rampant inflation of the Muzaffari period (1896–1906). Aqa Haym's fate also points to the hazards of unruly conditions in the region of Arak, where many pockets of independence from Qajar state control persisted.Footnote 55
The saga of Aqa Haym's interment demonstrates the resolve of Persian Jews to perform proper burial rites. In particular, the recitation of mourning prayers (kaddīsh) was considered an essential family obligation to ensure the salvation of the deceased. When the news of Aqa Haym's murder finally reached the few Jews living in Malayer, they were too frightened to venture into the hazardous area to retrieve his body. Shakeri and five other Jewish Bahaʾis volunteered for the dangerous task of bringing the corpse home for proper burial. Empowered by their access to new social networks, the converts received help from an influential local Bahaʾi, the head of the gendarmerie in Malayer. He gave them a letter addressed to his counterpart in Khundab requesting protection for the benevolent volunteers. After the retrieval party had traveled on foot for two days to Khundab, the friendly gendarme commander there gave them horses and accompanied them with his men in a challenging search that led Shakeri to a disturbing encounter with his late associate:
His [Aqa Haym's] donkey was wandering around with some of his fabric merchandise draping from it. As soon as his son Yuhanna saw the grave he said, “These are my father's shoes.” They had dug a shallow grave in the middle of the night. Unable to see in the dark, they had left his feet sticking out. . . . The officer said, “You must bury him here, as he was killed eighteen days ago.” But I said, “He is Jewish, and his family wants to visit his grave and say prayers for him.” They brought a ladder, and we pulled the corpse out from under the dirt, put it on a mule, and got to Khundab late at night. There we left the corpse in the mosque, but soon people complained, saying, “Your [Jewish] corpse has polluted our mosque.” Immediately we sent men to move it. The village elders were very hospitable to us [despite Shakeri's Jewish association and perhaps because of the involvement of the officer]. Eventually we managed to bring the corpse to Malayer, but we suffered immensely, as the stench of a human corpse is worse than that of any animal.Footnote 56
Shakeri's empowerment through connections to gendarme officers is a noteworthy case of Bahaʾi transnational networking in the context of Iran's early attempt to establish a modern treasury and gendarmerie. This project was started with the help of a group of American experts headed by Morgan Shuster, who was recruited by a Bahaʾi.Footnote 57 Upon their arrival in Tehran in 1911, the American experts employed a group of clerks and administrators that included a number of Bahaʾis. This link may explain the fact that at the inception of the Treasury Gendarmerie by the Shuster mission, a number of Bahaʾis (and at least one Jew) were recruited as officers.Footnote 58 However, this connection did not survive the reorganization of the armed forces under Riza Shah, when Bahaʾi officers were discharged in an attempt to boost the state's “Islamic credentials.”Footnote 59
CORPSES IN INHERITANCE DISPUTES
At times, the graveyard became the scene of family inheritance disputes and a prism of Iran's shifting religious identities. A number of such cases took place in Hamadan around the turn of the 20th century and are recorded in the memoirs of Yuhanna Khan Hafizi (1870–1951), a well-educated physician and entrepreneur from a privileged family of Hamadan Jewish physicians with close ties to the local nobility.Footnote 60 Hafizi's detailed accounts are of great value in studying social change in Hamadan, a major center of Jewish conversion to Christianity, Islam, and, most prominently, the Bahaʾi faith from the mid-1870s through the early 1930s.Footnote 61 An expanding economic center after the opening of the Karun shipping route in 1865, Hamadan attracted a large number of young Jewish immigrants.Footnote 62 It was also a center of Christian missionary activity, an important byproduct of which was the establishment of a number of European-style schools. Schools for boys and girls were established starting in the 1880s by American Presbyterian missionaries and in 1900 by the Alliance Israélite Universelle, in the latter case to serve a large population of Jewish children, despite opposition from Jewish rabbis.Footnote 63
Yuhanna Khan Hafizi's family became Christian sympathizers in the mid 1870s through efforts of the American Presbyterian missionaries but seem to have become Bahaʾis almost simultaneously. During the anti-Jewish persecutions in September 1892, when Jews were forced to wear the long-abandoned “patch,” the family was among a sizable group of Jews—including a number of physicians who had become Bahaʾis—to adopt an Islamic identity. Hafizi maintained his Bahaʾi convictions but also became a close business associate of Mulla ʿAbd Allah Burujirdi, the prime instigator of the anti-Jewish persecutions.Footnote 64
According to Hafizi, a certain Rabiʿ and his son Mirza Nasir, both Jewish converts to Islam, were known for their sour relations with each other; there were rumors that Mirza Nasir may have been responsible for his father's sudden death. In order to validate his claim to sole ownership of the family assets, Mirza Nasir reportedly spent the substantial sum of 200 to 300 tomans (400–600 pounds sterling) “to get a judgment from the ulama to prove that his father was not a true Muslim and to prevent his father's burial in the Muslim cemetery.”Footnote 65 This posthumous reverse conversion (from Islam back to Judaism), though costly, demonstrates the fluidity of religious identities in this period, at least among affluent converts, and casts doubt on assumptions of the impenetrability of the barriers separating Iran's religious communities at a time of rapid social change.
Another privileged family that held multiple religious identities while maintaining a position of leadership in the Jewish community was that of Tehran's highly educated and influential court physician, Hakim Nur Mahmud. His family's complex religious affiliations, and the fact that a number of family members converted to Islam and the Bahaʾi faith, demonstrate their receptiveness toward new ideas. Their secret conversion to Islam allowed them to overcome obstacles created by Shiʿi impurity laws and provided them with access to the royal court, a crucial step in their professional advancement. Moreover, conversion to Islam became a legal strategy to protect their vast family assets during inheritance disputes. According to Shiʿi law, any surviving family member who converted to Islam was entitled to total ownership of the family estate. To counter such claims by one of his brothers, Nur Mahmud and his brothers adopted a Muslim identity, probably by reciting the shahada in front of a favorite mujtahid to whom they paid alms.Footnote 66 The flexible application of Shiʿi law made it possible for privileged and influential sectors of the Jewish community to use nominal conversion as a legal maneuver without incurring the usual demands on converts to publicly observe Islamic edicts such as attendance at the mosque or strict observance of laws of “impurity,” particularly with reference to their Jewish relatives. There are also numerous examples of multiple identities among less privileged Jewish converts, a number of whom became Muslims before adopting a Bahaʾi identity.Footnote 67
If a secret conversion to Islam, or even a posthumous return from Islam to Judaism, was possible for the privileged in inheritance disputes, the reversal from a Bahaʾi identity to Judaism was much easier to accomplish. An example of the reclamation of Jewish identity driven by power relations and economic interest can be observed in the burial of the Jewish Bahaʾi convert Hajji ʿAziz ʿAlaqband of Hamadan, who had adopted a Bahaʾi identity around the turn of the century. He made a small fortune in the Baghdad trade and accumulated a sizable landed interest. In his funeral procession in 1935, some 200 Jews and Bahaʾis are said to have accompanied his remains en route to the Bahaʾi cemetery. However, in a prearranged move by his sons, the procession was suddenly redirected midway to the Jewish cemetery, where he was buried. This allowed his sons, who had their own ambiguous identities, to exclude their married sisters entirely from the family inheritance. In effect, his own relatives reduced his complex identity to that of a conventional Jew in order to promote their economic interests. Ironically, it was Hajji ʿAziz's affluence that helped to deny him a Bahaʾi identity.
Years of litigation by Hajji ʿAziz's married daughters ultimately proved ineffective because, in matters relating to the inheritance of Jews and, by extension, that of “unrecognized” Bahaʾis, the Pahlavi judicial system favored a textual reading of Jewish law relating to inheritance.Footnote 68 The new legal systems abandoned earlier nuances that had given women room for legal maneuvering. For example, in the 19th century, well-to-do Jewish women had on occasion converted to Islam in order to claim a part of the family inheritance as provided for under the shariʿa.Footnote 69
HOMELESS CORPSES
As conversion became more widespread among Jews in the late 19th century, it naturally led to reactions by the rabbis who sought more control over the performance of religious ceremonies, especially burial rites. Like the Shiʿi clerical hierarchy, Iran's Jewish clerical establishment was informal and decentralized in nature and rabbis could not always prevent individual colleagues from presiding over converts’ marriage and circumcision ceremonies.Footnote 70 However, since an individual rabbi had control over a town's Jewish cemetery, it often became one religious space in which the manipulation of layered identities met sober obstacles. This often entailed complications in the burial of Jewish converts and resulted in the phenomenon of the homeless corpse. During the 19th century, the cemetery was often the arena where the lines of communal boundaries were drawn by religious authorities.
The barring of converts from Muslim and Jewish cemeteries was a way of defining communal loyalties based on religious or customary considerations. Jewish law specifically allows the burial of apostates in the Jewish cemetery, at least in theory, since death is seen as atonement for one's sins. Nevertheless, customary practices trumped such forgiving prescriptions. At the same time, Jewish and Muslim Bahaʾi converts saw their new faith as a fulfillment of Jewish and Islamic prophecies and, in the absence of Bahaʾi cemeteries, perceived no contradiction in following their past burial practices.
In Kashan at least, Jewish women rarely crossed communal boundaries. According to Rayhan Rayhani, his young wife was the only Jewish woman Bahaʾi convert in Kashan. She suffered much humiliation, mostly from other women, including those also married to converts.
When she died, the rabbi did not allow the washer of the dead to handle her body or the gravedigger to dig her grave, and he prohibited Jews from attending her funeral . . . Even her brothers did not come. Three Bahaʾis came, and the four of us carried her body. We dug a grave beyond the cemetery wall, for they would not allow her to be buried within it.Footnote 71
If Rayhani's unnamed wife was a subaltern social outcast in the conservative Kashan of the early 1890s, elsewhere influential Jews with complex identities could not easily be excluded from the Jewish cemetery. Hakim Aqajan was a reputable physician from Hamadan, a major center of trade and conversion in the latter part of the 19th century, as mentioned earlier. He seems to have converted to both Christianity and the Bahaʾi faith almost simultaneously around 1877. By the time of his death in 1880 he was perceived, at least by the Presbyterian missionaries in Hamadan, as a leading and devout Christian who had been baptized and had faced the opposition of the rabbis. However, in the Bahaʾi sources, he is known as Hamadan's first Jewish Bahaʾi convert and was responsible for attracting around fifty, mostly younger, Jews to the nascent Bahaʾi community.Footnote 72
Hakim Aqajan's funeral was held in the Jewish cemetery of Hamadan despite the rabbis’ initial opposition and after reported intervention by Bahaʾi notables (aʿyān) and the intimidation of Jewish elders by young Jewish-Bahaʾi enthusiasts. Many, including the Bahaʾis and the Presbyterian missionaries, apparently saw no contradiction in Aqajan's Jewish, Christian, and Bahaʾi convictions.Footnote 73 Shamʿun, a Nestorian priest turned Presbyterian missionary, delivered a sermon at the funeral to some 300 mourners of different faiths, including many multiconfessional Jews with Christian and/or Bahaʾi sympathies or convictions.Footnote 74 As with the Nur Mahmud family, Aqajan's case demonstrates how class and power relations helped open up space for unconventional identities, at least in the case of early converts. However, starting in the 1880s, as Bahaʾi conversions became more widespread,Footnote 75 pressure against conversion grew stronger and was manifested in obstacles to the interment of converts.
During Hamadan's anti-Jewish persecutions of 1892, which were led by the town's prominent mujtahid, Mulla ʿAbd Allah Burujirdi, a group of about forty Jews and Jewish Bahaʾis converted to Islam. Some affluent converts such as the influential physician Hafiz al-Sihha and his son Yuhanna Khan Hafiz even developed close ties with Hamadan's influential ʿulamaʾ and landed elite. But conversion to Islam did not always guarantee full assimilation into the Muslim community. In fact, on occasion it brought increased isolation for Jewish converts. Many new converts, who were disdainfully referred to as jadīd al-Islām (new Muslim), were not fully accepted as true Muslims, and the Shiʿi ʿulamaʾ were not always attentive to their needs.
One example of discriminatory practices against Jewish converts to Islam was the arbitrary prohibition of their burial in both Jewish and Muslim cemeteries. In one instance around 1903, according to Hafizi, a certain new convert, Mirza Nabi, traveled from Rasht to arrange a Jewish marriage ceremony for his daughter. This led to a public protest by the Jews, and the rabbis boycotted the wedding ceremony. The affair caused Mirza Nabi much distress and led to his death soon afterward. Barred from both Jewish and Muslim cemeteries, his corpse remained unburied and was kept in his home in a chest that served as a temporary coffin. The fate of this and other homeless corpses is unknown.Footnote 76 Hafizi also reports the case of Mirza Eshaq, a Jew who became a Muslim and later a Bahaʾi, and who died in 1905 during Hamadan's cholera epidemic. Unlike Mirza Nabi, Mirza Eshaq's corpse did not meet a homeless end. His family managed to bury him in the Muslim cemetery, albeit “with much difficulty,” implying a larger than usual expenditure to gain permission for his burial.Footnote 77
The efforts of the Jewish and Shiʿi clergy to establish clear lines of religious conviction by asserting their authority over burial rites were not always productive. Sometimes converts found ways to circumvent these strict religious boundaries. For example, the leaders of the small new convert community of Hamadan purchased a property for a “private” cemetery, evidently an abandoned cemetery from bygone times. But when human remains were found in older graves on the property, charges were raised of Bahaʾis destroying the remains of Muslims, charges that could easily have led to persecution had it not been for the Hafizi family's close connections with the city's ʿulamaʾ and notables.Footnote 78
Even the remains of some of Iran's non-Muslim national heroes met a homeless end. A mysteriously lost grave belonged to a martyr of the Constitutional Revolution, Howard Baskerville, a young American missionary who joined the constitutionalists and gave his life during the 1909 siege of Tabriz. He was buried in the Armenian cemetery after a funeral that turned into a “great rally.”Footnote 79 However, a group of scholars recently failed to locate his grave using contemporary photographs nor could local authorities or the cemetery custodian locate the whereabouts of Baskerville's final resting place. One can only speculate whether the American martyr's grave was either forgotten and recycled or destroyed as part of an attack against the Great Satan.Footnote 80
THE PAHLAVI PERIOD
Remarkably, after two decades of the secularization project implemented by Riza Shah's centralized state, when mob violence was noticeably absent from Iran's urban scene, the 1950s witnessed a revival of attacks on Bahaʾi cemeteries. These incidents were a testament to the ease with which the obsession with corpses could be reignited even under the regime of a centralized state. The young Muhammad Riza Shah, who was seeking the political support of the ʿulamaʾ, tolerated and even encouraged anti-Bahaʾi sentiments at times through the use of the modern state apparatus.
Early 1951 was a period of tension and harassment of the Bahaʾis in the village of Amirabad, located in the vicinity of Ardakan near Yazd. After intimidating the head of the gendarmerie into silence, the crowds (many from the nearby village of Mehrjerd, possibly carrying a hostile history) looted the Bahaʾis’ homes and set fire to their property and livestock. They then set fire to the Bahaʾi center, attacked the Bahaʾi cemetery, exhumed a number of graves, and burned the remains.Footnote 81 The reveling crowd—which included many lūṭīs and some locals on bicycles—then headed to Ardakan with much fanfare, some using drums and trumpets (ṭabl va shaypūr). The crowds grew in size as they congregated in front of the gendarmerie. The authorities’ sole reaction was to call on Sayyid Ruhollah Khatami (later Ayatollah)—who was himself part of the anti-Bahaʾi conspiracy—to disperse the crowds. His presence seems to have only invigorated the participants, who then attacked the Bahaʾi center and looted the homes of two affluent Bahaʾi families. A few Bahaʾis recanted, while others migrated shortly afterwards.Footnote 82 Within a few years, the Ardakan Bahaʾi community, which had thrived around the turn of the century and included peasants and a number of local notables, was destroyed under pressure of a clergy-run economic boycott. In an interview around 1980, Ardakan's imām jumʿa, Hujjat al-Islam Muhammad Husayn Bihjati, admired Ayatollah Ruhollah Khatami's handling of the Bahaʾi affair “with skill and sophistication” (bā mahārat va pukhtigi). He added:
When people gathered and attacked the homes of the Bahaʾis, it was done in such a way that led to results while no one got caught [ham natīja giriftand va ham kasī giriftār nashud]. . . . For example, he caused the people of Ardakan to engage in a mass boycott of Bahaʾis, and since Ardakan was a small town, anyone who violated the boycott would be known, causing him shame. In the end all Ardakan Bahaʾis were banished [ikhrāj shudand], and even though the Bahaʾis spent money and complained [to the authorities], the affair did not lead to any conflict [dargīrī] [with the ʿulamaʾ].Footnote 83
The new “soft” approach to banish Bahaʾis using economic boycott was supported by other ʿulamaʾ in this period.Footnote 84
As 19th-century-style riots were now considered too uncouth, anti-Bahaʾism soon found a new, modern, and more potent expression. In 1955, as a conciliatory gesture to the ʿulamaʾ for their support of the 1953 coup and the subsequent suppression of the left, Muhammad Riza Shah agreed to a state-sponsored Bahaʾi persecution campaign. The increasingly powerful Ayatollah Burujirdi communicated the ʿulamaʾ's demands to the shah and obtained support to start anti-Bahaʾi attacks, including through the state-run radio.Footnote 85 In the end, the 1955 campaign, which included a proposed bill in the majlis for the effective ethnic cleansing of Bahaʾis, could not withstand the wave of international protest. Nevertheless, it caused great harm, including the loss of numerous lives, especially among Bahaʾis in small towns and villages.Footnote 86
A surreal incident that took place in Malayer during the 1955 Bahaʾi persecutions is reported in an anonymous letter to a journal. According to this source, the recently buried corpse of Dr. Salman, identified as a Bahaʾi advocate (muballigh), was exhumed overnight “and reportedly . . . [human feces] was placed in palms of his hands,” presumably to prevent him from receiving the account of his good deeds and thereby ensure his damnation. The anonymous author then quotes a letter he sent to the “Hujjat al-Islam” of Malayer, asking him to prevent such acts. He adds:
[Bahaʾis] are too insignificant to cause any harm to Islam. [The Bahaʾi leader] Shoghi Effendi and his followers have less power than dogs [chih sagī hastand] against the Muslim community. Their religion originated in sexual excesses [shahvatrānī] and trifling with honor [nāmūs-bāzī]. In their secret gatherings [mahafil] they engage in revelry [ʿayyashi]. They are a fifth column acting in favor of foreigners and against the country. Like mice they play in their holes and they are drawn to betrayal.Footnote 87
The anonymous author's desire for a more amiable and sanitized modern image evidently did not preclude hatred toward Bahaʾis.
The exhumation of graves and the burning of remains recurred during the short-lived 1963 rebellion known as the 15 Khordad uprising. Led by Ayatollah Khomeini, the movement opposed women's right to vote, land reform, and America's rising political influence in Iran. The rebellion was put down in a fierce military response that killed hundreds of protesters. Among the targets of the protesters had been Tehran's Bahaʾi cemetery. According to a police report, the protesters exhumed an unspecified number of graves and burned the remains.Footnote 88 The report also refers to the looting of Tehran's Bahaʾi-owned gold and jewelry stores. These events took place in the midst of a rebellion that lasted only a few days, at a time when anti-Bahaʾi sentiments were undergoing a transformation. Attacking skeletons and looting gold may be ironic allusions to the new anti-Bahaʾism of the 1960s, which added a leftist tint to the old religious hostilities. A number of left-leaning intellectuals in the post World War II period branded the Bahaʾis as “agents of foreign imperialism,” thereby giving anti-Bahaʾism a new political dimension.Footnote 89
REVOLUTIONARY DAYS
If the Bahaʾi community of Ardakan did not survive Pahlavi rule, the Bahaʾi community of Abadeh, located midway between Isfahan and Shiraz, was crushed under the post-revolutionary wrath of semiofficial attacks. Some two months after the 1979 revolution, during a period that came to be known as the “Spring of Liberty” (bahār-i āzādī), a group of revolutionaries equipped with a bulldozer gathered at the town's Bahaʾi center (also known as Hadiqat al-Rahman) with the intention of demolishing it. Complaints to the local authorities were unproductive, as the revolutionaries ignored and even tore into pieces a local court injunction. Complaints to the office of Ayatollah Khomeini were left unanswered and the demolition project was efficiently completed. The tomb of Siraj al-Hukama (1843–1913), an early Bahaʾi physician from a family of local notables buried at the same site, was destroyed, and his remains were exhumed and set on fire.Footnote 90
Siraj al-Hukama's massive tombstone (possibly placed as an extra measure of protection),Footnote 91 which was crushed into pieces by the passionate and well-equipped revolutionaries of 1979, had already been damaged during at least one previous mob attack. In April 1944, following a period of anti-Bahaʾi incitement by a local mulla, and days before Muhammad Riza Shah's visit to Abadeh, mobs looted, vandalized, and burned part of the Bahaʾi center and damaged the tomb of Siraj al-Hukama. The attack on the community, which included many injuries among the terrified Bahaʾis, took place despite the presence of the police, the gendarmerie, and even a military base (established in Abadeh to counter the threat of rebellious Qashqaʾi tribes). Upon his arrival, the young shah, whose rule was considered shaky at best, victoriously demonstrated his benevolent authority by declaring military rule, while the military commander declared the Bahaʾis’ equal legal status in public bulletins.Footnote 92
The full story of Siraj al-Hukama's destroyed burial site covers a long span of Babi–Bahaʾi history. During the second Nayriz Babi rebellion in November 1853, some 100 Babis who had surrendered their fortified positions in the adjacent mountains were killed, while other men and women were taken captive.Footnote 93 Amid much revelry and celebration, the heads of the victims arrived in Shiraz “raised on lancers” and were then sent off to the capital.Footnote 94 Upon arrival at Abadeh, orders arrived to bury the decaying heads. However, due to local concerns, the heads had to be buried outside Abadeh's Muslim cemetery. Some years later, around 1862, a small group of young seminarians from Abadeh became Babis in Isfahan. Among them was Mirza ʿAta Allah, later known as Siraj al-Hukama, who became a leading physician and was first among a number of converts from the families of Abadeh notables. The Bahaʾi community thrived around the turn of the century, partly through the support and protection provided by Bahaʾi notables and land-owning families, including some high-ranking local officials (kalāntar).Footnote 95 As a gesture of reverence to Babi martyrs, Siraj al-Hukama purchased the site where the severed heads of the Nayriz victims were buried, although the exact burial site remained a secret. Through community effort, including building a water canal (qanāt), the site was developed into an orchard and became known as Hakim's garden (baghi Hakim) or Hadiqat al-Rahman. Footnote 96 The property was situated at the center of the growing town, and parts of it became the site of a Bahaʾi center, the Bahaʾi boys’ school. However, as in many other small towns and villages, the Bahaʾis of Abadeh were effectively banished after the 1979 revolution under official pressure and semiofficial attacks. The ultimate fate of the skeletons of the Babi rebels remains unknown.
The burning of bones and the destruction of community centers belonging to a silenced community did not receive much attention during Iran's revolutionary heyday. However, the zeal to burn corpses may in part explain a footnote to Iran's post-revolutionary execution frenzy. Amir ʿAbbas Hoveida (1919–79) was the shah's flamboyant premier, known for his survival skills in an otherwise tenuous term of office (1965–77) and for his complete obedience to the royal whim. According to one observer, following his summary execution, “his body was kept at the morgue for about three months, lest the burial become occasion for further attack on his family or on his corpse. He was then buried anonymously in a cemetery outside Tehran.”Footnote 97
After the confiscation of the Tehran Bahaʾi cemetery and before the Bahaʾis were given a new site, many of the victims executed in the anti-Bahaʾi persecutions of the 1980s were buried in the semiofficial makeshift Khavaran burial site. One example of the kind of harassment endured by family members of deceased outcasts whose corpses were homeless can be observed in the case of Farhang Enayati, an elderly Bahaʾi woman who died in 1989. Her family members were asked to pay ten times the normal administrative fee for a burial certificate. They refused, not only to resist discrimination but also because of the hardship it would create for other impoverished Bahaʾis. Their appeals to “high-ranking officials” only led to further bureaucratic entanglements. In the meantime, the homeless bodies of a dozen other Bahaʾis facing the same obstacles (some left in coffins adjacent to municipal buildings) accumulated in Tehran's main morgue. After forty-one days, their relatives finally obtained approval for burial from the office of the mayor of Tehran, but they were told that the makeshift Khavaran cemetery would not provide them with any facilities to prepare the graves.
On a cold snowy day, some of the relatives went to the morgue to get the bodies, and we went to the cemetery with another Bahaʾi family to dig the graves. We found picks and shovels and started by breaking through the ice and snow to dig a couple of graves, but we were stopped by revolutionary guards who took away our picks and shovels and said in a harsh and angry tone, “You have no permission to dig graves here.” One of them then contacted the main morgue using radio and instructed them not to release the bodies to the relatives.
After much argument, the relatives were told to fill the half-dug graves and return the next day to dig in a different location. The next day some of the relatives went to the cemetery to prepare fresh graves while others went to the morgue to identify the corpses.
There, we waited in the “death queue” for several hours until a couple of relatives went in but were distressed when they could not find their deceased. When my turn came, they showed me a couple of bodies. One was full of blood. I said, “This is a man and the other one has black hair, and my mother had gray hair.” He slammed the door of the morgue and said in a harsh tone, “You can't even recognize your own mother.” I said, “I have her picture with me.” In the end, someone whose job was to bury the unclaimed bodies said, “She was buried [in a mass grave] along with four other Bahaʾis whose bodies were destroyed during execution.”Footnote 98
The family's efforts, which included a complaint lodged by Farhang Enayati's son through the German foreign ministry requesting permission to exhume the grave for proper Bahaʾi burial, were futile. Hers is among numerous bodies of the deceased and executed who were branded as “nonbelievers” and whose burial sites remain unknown to their families.Footnote 99
In a more recent case of burial harassment, the local authorities in Semnan refused to issue a burial certificate to the family of a deceased Bahaʾi and demanded that the family agree to install Islamic headstones for those buried in Semnan's Bahaʾi cemetery, thereby posthumously assigning the deceased Islamic identities.Footnote 100 Other instances of burial harassment are common, especially in the provinces.Footnote 101
In a curious report published on a pro-government website in November 2010, Bahaʾis in the remote village of Hasanabad near Marvdasht in Fars province were accused of creating fake graves in order to inflate their membership. “Upon investigation by authorities in a formally confiscated Bahaʾi cemetery, it was determined that many graves with headstones have no corpses within them.”Footnote 102 One can only speculate about the motives of the authorities in conducting such a peculiar subterranean investigation and whether missing remains could be related to rising property values in many of Iran's rural communities. The occasional desecration of Bahaʾi cemeteries is not uncommon up to the present time and in some instances seems to be connected to rising property values.Footnote 103 In 2009 in the village of Ivel near Kiyasar in Mazandaran, local authorities put the cemetery up for sale in a public auction, advertised in a regional newspaper. By 1983 the twenty remaining families of Ivel's Bahaʾi's who had resisted forced conversion to Islam were banished. Their homes gradually went to ruin, and their 100-year-old cemetery was deserted.Footnote 104 At a cemetery in Najafabad near Isfahan, possibly in an attempt to once again confiscate property that had been officially provided to the Bahaʾis for a burial site after the revolution, unknown agents using bulldozers desecrated the graves and placed a sign prohibiting any future burials there.Footnote 105
TAINTED TOMBS AND PURIFIED SPACES
In an urgent move soon after the 1979 revolution, under the leadership of the terrorizing (though mocked) revolutionary judge Ayatollah Sadiq Khalkhali, Riza Shah's modernist mausoleum of concrete and steel was razed by a volunteer demolition crew using bulldozers. Significantly, the shah's body was spared exhumation and burning, a punishment reserved for the remains of infidels.Footnote 106 Some years later, in 1988, at a location not too far from the razed Pahlavi monument and the shrine of Shah ʿAbd al-ʿAzim, bulldozers were essential equipment in the unusually efficient completion of the initial phase of a much larger shrine complex for Ayatollah Khomeini's final resting place. The complex is a collection of modern steel structures, some decorated with minarets and covered with traditional domes. The project, which includes a five-star hotel, remains under construction today.Footnote 107
In 1979, the revolutionary authorities confiscated Tehran's Bahaʾi cemetery (established in the early Pahlavi period), as part of Bahaʾi communal properties, and in 1981 they closed it down.Footnote 108 Beginning in 1992, this cemetery was demolished to make way for the “Khavaran Cultural Center,” named after the adjacent municipal district. Here the Shiʿi prohibition against the exhumation of graves prior to a thirty-year interregnum was superseded by the compulsion to erase a Bahaʾi presence, even that of the dead. The destruction of a cemetery of the followers of a religion with manifold affinities to Persian culture (Bahaʾi writings refer to Iran as kishvar-i muqaddas, the “sacred land”) in order to make room for a cultural complex is a macabre irony. The overhauling of human remains for such a purpose goes beyond Khayyamian metaphors of the skull bearing the wine of existential self-awareness.
The “recessed” courtyard design of the Khavaran Center attempts to follow other fine examples of Iranian architecture (although the attempt was unsuccessful according to one observer).Footnote 109 However, the huge depression may also be a modern solution to the medieval problem of the “ritual pollution” (nijāsat) of the property resulting from decades of burials of apostates (kuffār). The massive excavation made for a ritually pure and structurally sound foundation on a site with unstable soil conditions resulting from years of grave digging. In a response to the United Nation's special representative in 1993, the Iranian representative claimed that the new structure only affected areas of the cemetery with “old” graves. In fact, the construction of the 30,000-square-meter complex involved the removal of over 1,000 remains, practically an industrial undertaking.Footnote 110 According to an anonymous source, the excavated dirt and the remains were used as fill material in a nearby highway-building project.
It is worth noting that such destruction, though extremely disrespectful, did not carry a cosmic weight proportional to that which Shiʿa assign to cemeteries. By assigning a hermeneutic meaning to resurrection and other worldly concerns, the Bahaʾis discarded any connection between burial and eternal salvation. It can be argued that they rationalized Shiʿi burial practices by simplifying their rites. Even though minimal burial rituals have survived in the use of a shroud, a ring, a coffin, and a communal prayer for the departed, other practices such as transporting the corpse adjacent to a shrine have been specifically prohibited. A Bahaʾi cemetery or gulistān-i javīd (eternal rose garden) should be “bordered all around by trees . . . and each grave must be separate and have a flower bed on all four sides.”Footnote 111
THE AMALGAMATED “OTHER”
In the early 1980s, following a fatwa by Ayatollah Khomeini barring the burial of infidels (kuffār) in Muslim cemeteries, a group of his supporters took the initiative of exhuming the graves of leftist activists who had been executed in 1981 from Tehran's Muslim cemetery and reburying them at Khatunabad, a site in southeastern Tehran also later known as Kufrabad (infidel land) or La'natabad (accursed land) but more commonly known as Khavaran (not far from the aforementioned cultural center).Footnote 112 Among the bodies removed was that of the notable activist poet Saʿid Sultanpur, a leading figure of the left known for his imprisonment during the shah's regime.Footnote 113 It was reported that corpses resurfaced from the shallow graves at the makeshift burial site, a morbid metaphor for the resistance of the victims’ families.Footnote 114
In 1988, an estimated 3,000 prisoners, including members of the Mujahidin-i Khalq and leftist organizations serving various sentences, were executed after summary trials in what has become known as Iran's “prison massacre.”Footnote 115 The remains of the leftist victims, transported from the prisons in refrigerated meat trucks, were buried at the Khavaran site in unidentified shallow mass graves not far from other atheists, Hindus, and miscellaneous infidels. Curiously, executed members of the Mujahidin, who were considered Muslims but branded as “opponents” (muḥārib) of Islam, were buried in an unmarked location in a Muslim cemetery.Footnote 116
Although Khavaran is mostly associated with Marxist activists, it has become a burial ground for the amalgamated “Other,” where unmarked graves represent victims stripped of their identities. The families of those executed in the 1988 prison massacre presumably feel a connection to one another through the unusual link of their loved ones sharing a mass grave. The relatives, referred to as the “mothers of Khavaran,” hold annual commemorations at the gravesite to mourn their loved ones, usually several days before the Nowruz celebrations. These commemorations are acts of resistance to preserve a memory and to thwart the project of erasing a memorial to the mass prison killings. Families are occasionally harassed for mourning their loved ones, detained for questioning, and even imprisoned, casualties of a struggle over memory.Footnote 117
Nevertheless, Khavaran has become an emblem of the Islamic Republic's atrocities and a disturbing testimony to the state of human rights in Iran today. In January 2009, under the guise of a “redevelopment project” (tarḥ-i sāman-dihi), the authorities used heavy equipment to remove much of the funerary remains still on the site and then planted new trees. The trees may have been intended to sanitize an ominous space, erase a dark memory, or even destroy evidence of “crimes against humanity.” Yet efforts to desecrate what the state fears may become a shrine to the nonconformists’ resistance only brought morbid memories of the past back into light. Once again the bulldozers turned up the clothing and personal effects of anonymous victims, just as other remnants had resurfaced decades earlier.Footnote 118 The unearthed articles may be a graphic token of resistance to the state's efforts to establish absolute religious and ideological conformity.
IRAN'S GRAVEYARD POLITICS
Today, graveyard politics continue to play a part in Iran's diminishing civil society, where even the purity of a public figure's belief in Islam often comes under question. Shaming public figures by questioning the purity of their beliefs is typically connected to “accusations” of conversion in their family history. The fairly common charge of being a “recent Muslim” (jadīd al-Islām) is usually a euphemism for having a Jewish family background and only a nominal belief in Islam. The list of political figures who have been called neo-Muslims has grown relentlessly. It includes the Islamic Republic's first president Abulhasan Bani-Sadr and the conservative religious leader Ayatollah Misbah Yazdi. Astonishingly, President Ahmadinejad and his advisor on matters relating to the Holocaust, Muhammad ʿAli Ramin, as well as his controversial advisor Esfandiyar Rahim-Mashaʾi, have also been accused of being new converts.Footnote 119 More recently, in 2011, a lawsuit was filed by the office of the president to protest “insulting accusations” made against Rahim-Mashaʾi for being “Jew-like” (yahūd-ṣefat) and part of the “infiltration process” (jarayān-i nufūẓī)—presumably by Jews or Zionists—into the president's closest circles.Footnote 120
In at least one instance, a public figure has pointed to a grave as evidence of his true faith in Islam. ʿAbbas Amir-Entezam, deputy prime minister under the provisional government of Mehdi Bazargan in 1979, was one of the first public figures accused of being a neo-Muslim. His ancestors were said to have converted to Islam during the anti-Jewish persecutions and forced conversions in Mashhad in 1839. Some 150 years later, he cited his father's burial place in Mashhad's Muslim cemetery as proof of his pure belief in Islam. This evidence supposedly distinguishes his family from the majority of Jewish converts in Mashhad who, as new Muslims, abandoned the Jewish cemetery but maintained their own “Jadid” cemetery separate from the Muslim cemetery for over a century (until they reconverted to Judaism in the 1940s). This arrangement was probably favored by the nominal Jewish Muslims, most of whom did not wish or were not allowed to fully integrate into the Shiʿi community, and by the Shiʿi ʿulamaʾ who, for the most part, never recognized the so-called Jadids as true believers in Islam.Footnote 121
CONCLUSION
Studying the history of mortality can be a morbid but productive way of digging into the past. The restrictions on interment and the posthumous mistreatment of nonconformists offer a new angle on the question of intolerance in 19th-century Iran. Paradoxically, burial rites and practices also point to a good deal of fluidity and multiple identities in this period. However, the modern Pahlavi state often demanded rigidified boundaries and retained strains of religious intolerance.
The Islamic Republic's fixation on coercing Shiʿi uniformity has led to a revival of certain pre-constitutional restrictions and discriminatory practices. A conformist Shiʿi center is enforced through the use of a highly developed modern state apparatus and daunting modern tools. The image of pre-modern mobs following a cleric's order and reveling in skeleton sport may be less horrifying than those of a bulldozer obliterating cemeteries or of mass graves created under the aegis of the modern state apparatus. The bulldozer—like the crane, which has replaced the gallows—is a reminder of the industrialization of violence.
If an ancestor's tombstone can serve as an identity card to validate Shiʿi conformism, it can also be desecrated to tarnish an internal “Other.” The interplay of memory and identity unfolds in the sanctity of the cemetery between those who strive to preserve a memory and those who seek to erase all traces of nonconformity by defiling the dead. The urge to violate or to burn corpses may be a window onto a dark and suppressed inner compulsion that has persisted in Iran's collective memory. One can only speculate about deeper psychological ramifications.Footnote 122 The survival of this medieval subterranean preoccupation points to a cosmic struggle between good and evil that is central to pre-Islamic and Shiʿi Iran. This is a battleground meant for hearts and heavens that at times is drawn into the underworld of tombs and cemeteries.
