Utopia in Tehran

A truly authentic vision would have to show the contradictions and mutual exclusiveness of what Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre calls ‘possible impossible’ register of modern utopia. It would have to be a text that synthesised fiction, history and theory. It would have to sketch a city that could simultaneously hold the resolutely opposed aspirations of a revolutionary like Ali Sharitai and a theologian such as Ayatollah Khomeini, of someone like Fazlallah Nouri, who fought against democracy and Ayatollah Taleqani who died mysteriously for democracy. It would have to be a text to be discovered, guided and pieced together by someone who knows the city. It would be found in the ruins of the slums that used to hang from the southern tip of Tehran, edging out into the desert. It would tell the story of a journey through the city. Like the eleventh-century philosopher and traveller Naser Khusraw’s description of Fatimid Egypt, the accounts of the places visited don’t always seem to map onto real places, but rather the unveiling of a city as a code of politics, religion and power. It would have to show the mediation and fissure intrinsic to the comparative image of utopia, corresponding to the respective vicissitudes of the concepts and ideas of ‘Utopia’ and ‘Nakuja-abad’. As such, it would require two voices. The first would be the fractured and broken voice of Tehran, straining towards the divine. The second would be framed by a voice representing the European tradition, by turns uncovering and obfuscating it. 

It would be an act of the imagination. This is how it might read.

In 2008, I was invited to the Goethe Institute Tehran, to review a collection of papers that had been bought by an American scholar of Iranian religion who had bought them in a bookshop, near Tehran Sharif University. Some of them were burned and charred. They all seem to be written in the kind of dirty ink that implies a speedy composition, under pressure. Given the times described, and the politics described by the author, not to mention the clear parallels with the prison memoir style that developed in twentieth century Iran, it seems reasonable to place these writings in that tradition. I have examined the fragments that were not too fire damaged, and tried to piece them together. 

From the slums of the south to the Imperial Museum

I write this so there will be a record and so people will know the journey that brought me here. When, God willing, this Pharaonic regime falls, the people will remember martyrs, in the way I remember martyrs now. We who die to build the government of love, trade individuality for eternal life. Hussein is remembered, but who can name all the seventy-two? My life as a Muslim, and as a revolutionary has been a journey through Tehran, and it’s that journey that I want to be remembered. 

My name is Muhammad, my father was called Ghulam Ali and I was born on the fifteenth of Khordad 1326. I am 29 years old. My mother and father came from a village in the Talesh mountains, but I saw the world for the first time in one of the cardboard towns that dot the land between southern Tehran and the opening of the Kavir desert. Every summer I would go back to Gilan and stay with my uncle, but I belong to the slums.

I was eight when I began to study at school. Slum schools are modest. We shared books and pens. We were taught Farsi, Maths, Religious Studies and Arabic. Our teachers were those young clerics who want to spend their lives serving God’s creation, rather than the court. On my twelfth birthday the fifteenth of Khordad movement began. The Imam denounced the shah as a ‘vain and wretched man’ and the seminaries at Qom were attacked by the police and the SAVAK. A generation of blacklisted clerics, from humble background like mine had decided to give their lives for Iran and Islam.

When I first met Ustad Karim I knew I wanted to grow to be like him. He taught us maths and Arabic. One day he took us by bus uptown to visit the Imperial Armoury. Three times on the journey from the bus stop to the museum we were stopped by police. In the north we could see that we did not belong. That nothing belonged to us. Not the bars, not the women, not anything else behind the vitrine. 

We ate cheese and watermelon and bread under the Russian gates of the museum. American cars and French perfume breezed past us. After lunch the older boys tried to sneak away to buy single cigarettes. We queued to go into the museum, to see the ancient swords.

This first section of the text breaks off here. Like many it is creased and burned at the edges, suggesting it was on the author’s corpse when found. When I was piecing these back together, I found a piece that partially fitted the tears of this first section of text. 

In the early days of the Islamic Republic the interaction between Islamic utopians and the challenges they faced from the secular left was performed in three squares in Tehran. In 1979, caught out by their leftist rivals, the Islamic Republican Party quickly moved to appeal to the working class. A pamphlet from Khomeieni appeared bearing the quote: ‘Every day should be considered Worker’s day for labour is the source of all things, even of heaven and hell as well as of the atom particle.’ The challenge from the Marxists had been met with a slogan even more radical than the labour theory of value. 

By the mid 1980s this utopian creativity, that had produced demonstrations of hundreds of thousands snaking their way from parliament all the way to central Tehran and the ministry of labour, was over. The forced recantations of political views, collected under torture of members of the Tudeh Party’s Central Committee, were broadcast as part of state celebrations of  Worker’s day in 1983. Participation changed from large, outdoor, joyous demonstrations into solemn affairs; with the Revolutionary guard bussing in workers for the afternoon, so factories did not lose a whole day’s work. since Khomeini’s death, these events have been held indoors, at his mausoleum. Where in the utopian Tehran, May day shows the power and influence of the working class, Islamist or left, over the state, now it showed the power of the state over the working class. 

I digress. Back to the text. Burned and charred, but still recognisably an extension of the previous section. 

…Zulfiqar commissioned by Abbas the Great. I stopped and look. We pressed our faces against the glass until a museum guard slapped one of us with his guarding stick. Ustad told us all to stand back. After the guard had left, Ustad traced his finger over the glass. He looked at us and said: ‘you can learn more about Iranian history in this case boys, than you can from a thousand of my classes. Look at it: The sword of righteousness, the sword of the lion of God, the sword of two swords clashing made of gold and jewels, may God forgive me, and kept in a case in a city where we have no meat to eat downtown – all to the glory of a Pharaonic regime.

As we walked out of the museum, I saw a national service boy guarding the entrance. His sunglasses glinted orange in the evening sun, his rifle by his side. Ustad Karim spoke to him in his village language. The boy smiled. He bent close to us, so his officer couldn’t hear and patted his rifle. ‘This is the Zulfiqar of our age’, he said, ‘and every man can have one’. He let me touch it.

The Hosseinieh Ershad

This next fragment describes the Hosseinieh Ershad which stands about halfway up Tehran, from south to North, in the Zarrabkhaneh neighbourhood. Built with the subscriptions collected by the newly university educated children of low ranking bazaaris, the institute occupied a central place in the story of the utopian impulse of Iranian Islam. Ali shariati, the famous philosopher, sociologist and revolutionary, lectured here when he wasn’t being detained by the sAVAK. Having studied in Paris, he brought the ideas of Fanon, Cesaire and sartre to Iran. His response to these ideas was to radically re-imagine an insurrectionary left wing shi’ism that overturned the traditional concepts of usooli shi’ism, as it were, in the same sense Marx overturned Hegel. 

The cosmic tragedy of Hussein’s martyrdom became a story of anti-imperialist and proto-socialist martyrdom at the hands of a rapacious tyrant. shariati developed the idea of a ‘nezam-e tohidi’; the society of monotheism, a social unity in which idolatry and divisions of class would be abolished. His response to sartre and the disputes within Marxism led him to seek out the debates on the epistemological break, and side with a young Marx whom he sought to ‘free from himself’. From Fanon, he drew the idea of the need for a violent break with the experience of colonisation, and so he developed a theory of ideology, different to both the positivist and critical definitions of the term. 

Whereas for a Western radical, the struggle might be for a more democratic articulation of the management of the polis, this would never suit the colonised countries of Asia and Africa, for whom it would merely mean a more effective management of the colonised. Against this shariati posited revolutionary ideology: the ideas that show the potential for social progress, reform and self-discipline that could cut through the smooth surface of colonial oppression. As such his notion of ‘ideology’ was diametrically opposed to that developed by critical thinkers in the Western traditions. The carriers of this revolutionary potential were, of course, to be the revolutionary intelligentsia, the children of low ranking professional and bazaar merchants, the mostazefin, who had recently acquired nationalised university educations and national military training. After his early and suspicious death in exile, his picture was hung at the demonstrations that led to the establishment of the Islamic Republic. Today a Tehran metro station, just into the northern part of the city, is named after him, in roughly the same lower middle class district as the Hosseinieh.

Jamal had been volunteering at the Hosseinieh for about a year when he was invited by one of the more senior brothers to copy tapes of the lectures of different revolutionary speakers. jamal was a thin man, and his time in the Shah’s jails seemed to have made him thinner. He was showing me how the machine worked, when something stuck out from the tape; the words popping out of the background noise and into my mind. A young guerrilla leader’s voice. A New phrase: ‘The Monotheistic Society’. jamal knew what I would ask. ‘Brother’, he said, ‘don’t bring your little maktabi scowl into the Hussainia. This isn’t the place for your courtly Islam.’ I laughed. In the Hussainia, these words have become common currency. The youth who come here for the lectures are looking for an Islam that is cut off from the empty ritual and corruption of the mullahs who service the Pahlavi court. There’s the smell of youth to the place – frustration mixed with cheap eau de cologne and new ideas. 

Jamal loops the tapes into the machine carefully, tracing his finger lightly to smooth across the spool. ‘Ninety-nine per cent of what we do has no reference to the Qu’ran.’ I hold one spool for him. He carefully lays the other into the machine. By tomorrow night these speeches, recorded from radical clerics, student guerrillas and exiled intellectuals, will leave Tehran for cities all over the country. ‘Our materials, these tapes, Kalashnikov’s, they come from Europe. We bend them and shape them to the cause of Islam and freedom. Why should our ideas be any different? If those paedophile clerics want to sit in front of the shah pawing at 1,000 year old books let them. We will write our future in our faith, like the Imam says’.

 A Prison letter

Both of the sections I have presented so far appear to have been composed serially. They follow the form of prison biography, like the writings attributed to Khosrow Rouzbeh, the chief of the military branch of the Communist Party of Iran, in his final days before execution rather than the more meditative published form, pioneered by writer and novelist Bozorg Alavi in his Prison Scraps of Paper. In this section though, our author does seem to move toward the later style. In Bozorg Alavi’s work, we can a conscious grappling with the limitations of the traditional prison poems of classical Persian literature. The Iranian genre was born in Iran’s first modern jail, Tehran’s Qasr-e shah, converted from a late Qajar palace by Reza Pahlavi.

Traditional prison poetry or ‘sher-e habs’ can be seen as a sub-genre of the Arab and Persian tradition of court poetry. The Islamic middle ages being as they were, with kingship and favour changing hands as quickly as one and other, a poet could find himself in a dungeon or exiled to some far flung village easily and frequently. In these traditional forms, the poet’s imagination acts as a lawyer pleading clemency: a description of some object or moment of regal station, held by the king, is an appeal for clemency, as if an ekphrasis of power can bring the keys of the jailor to the dungeon door. 

In the twentieth century, all of these formal qualities are inverted. Where the traditional poet wants to share his work with the king, the modern dissident has to keep it hidden in case of further punishment. Where the former writes to praise the powerful, the latter writes to damn him. Where one starts from a particular object outside of the cell to beg for their release, the latter uses studies of objects within their confinement to explain why they are there. 

Yesterday morning, I was handed a letter. One of the Mojahed prisoners had passed it across to our block. All of Qasr-e Shah jail was talking about it. It was thirteen days before they transferred me here. They said everywhere in Tehran it was circulating, and the communists had copied it onto cigarette papers and got them into our cells. An open letter from a young guerrilla fighter, addressed to his father; the famous revolutionary cleric, Ayatollah Taleghani. His son is a member of the faction of the People’s Mojahedin who have broken entirely from the faith of the Prophet (Oh God, Bestow blessings on Mohammad and the family and progeny of Mohammad), and embraced the Marxism of the Vietnamese and the Cubans. Where these two ideas have up to now been intertwined in our history and our struggle, more and more of our young people are choosing one over another. 

This letter struck me, I think, because in it I seemed to see a young man, not dissimilar to me, but moving in the opposite direction. Where I had recognised that only Islam could provide an answer to the problems facing my country, and had cut ties with the communists, this young mojahed, threw away the vestiges of his Islam and carried on further down the path of Marxism. 

I am reminded of my own study. I remember Ustad lending me Jalal Aale Ahmad’s book, Westoxification. In it he explains how Iranian history is replete with revolutionary intellectuals who studied the ideas of the West, to deploy them in Iran. The liberals and the Marxists, the Democrats and the Communists, all are united in worship of foreign ideas. They go to the West to study. They lose themselves in ideas that never drew succour from their soil, or their soul. Every anti-imperialist knew the story of the three Shaykhs who had fought in the constitutional revolution against the British and the Russians. The Communists had told me how Shaykh Fazlallah Nouri had broken from the others and preached against the revolution, after the revolutionaries tried to force through unveiling and education for young women. They called him a traitor, a pro-Russian reactionary and executed him. The corpse of that great man dangling on the gallows was like a flag to me, raised to signify the triumph of this deadly disease – the plague of Westoxification. 

I read the letter again and again in jail. My thoughts acquire a coldness towards young men who I once thought fought on the same side as me. I see a river of blood separating the people, as it separates the people from their oppressors. Marxist and Muslim factions have declared war with each other.

A rubbish tip, just into the desert, south of the Tehran slums. Children come out to play and look for firewood. Stumbling over an open dump they find a charred corpse. When the police arrive with SAVAK the body is recognised. It is that of one the leaders of the faction of the Mujahedin that remained Muslim. Killed by the Marxist faction. Over the next days more bodies, from both factions are found. The regime’s newspapers crow: Now, when they want to kill a man, they burn his body and leave him in the desert. They tell the people his comrades killed him. All over the world tyrants kill rebels and dump their bodies where they can. But only Tehran can provide a setting like this. Where the slums of the south meet the breaking of the desert. For a century our jihad had moved closer to what the Marxists called class struggle, and that struggle became our jihad. In that place where grimy city and the humidity of human habitat meets the desert, the process had come apart. Burnt bodies in garbage dumps. 

I presume when they’re finished with me, that’s how I will be found too.

A Khanqah in the Bazaar

The text becomes unreadable here. The handwriting is much more rushed. And difficult to decipher. There is a point where the meaning seems to break down entirely. One piece is simply filled in entirely. You can see the heavy strokes of pen embedded in the same way a child colours in the sky. 

The psychoanalytic literature would see this as a ‘foreclosure of meaning’. The medieval Iranian mystic Najm Kobra wrote about the ‘nur-i siyah’ or ‘black light’ which illustrates the supposed ending of the relation to the sensible world and the concomitantly alleged birth of the faculties that relate to the senses beyond it. In the case of our author we might start to recognise a certain kind of psychotic episode. 

The sheikhi sect that are mentioned in the passage below, represent a little known part of the history of Iranian shi’ism. The school is one built on the practice of seeking visions of the hidden Imam, and through them ascending to visions of what in the Islamic tradition are called higher stations or ‘maqam’. 

Two points seem pertinent about the sheikhi school for the purposes of the discussion of this text. First, the sheikhi went on, through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to play a disproportionately large role in the constitutionalist and nascent socialist movements in Iran. To take one famous example: in the revolt against the second Anglo-Russian partition of Iran in 1919, sheikh Mohammad Khiabani, a young practitioner of the school, led an uprising which culminated in the fedayis and mojaheds of the Caucasian and Iranian social democratic Parties declaring the area around Tabriz as ‘Azadistan’. uprisings in Tehran were mounted in sympathy. ultimately all were brutally put down by the Pahlavi state, supported by the British. second, the visionary tradition of sheikhism has a history that goes back much further in Iranian Sufism. We can trace a thread that goes back at least to the twelfth century: to Suhravardi and the illuminationist mystics, through figures like the twelfth century Sufi Ruzbehan Baqli and thirteen century mystic Najm Kobra. In this tradition, religious experience is prized above belief; indeed practitioners are exhorted to believe in only those things that they taste and see. It would be easy to see why such a practice could lead to the long periods of political quietism and withdrawal that characterise most of its history, but more difficult to see why it results in its occasional outbreaks of utopian emancipatory fever.

I remember walking through the gardens where the Sheikh’s house met the corner of Ferdosi square. It must have been late into the night. As the Sheikh brought tea out to the garden, I could see the first stream of light leak under the gate, as I can see light illuminate the outline of the men who open my cell door when it is my turn in the interrogation room. 

The tea sits between us. Offering a cube of sugar, the Sheikh asks me why I have come to see him. I tell him I have never thought of visiting before but the walls of my life seem to be falling around me, and that the letter I read has made me question everything. The Sheikh wants to know about the questions. So I pose them to him. 

‘I come from a part of Tehran where the only solidarity that was ever shown to us was from the young spiritual brothers who came to teach us. So when Shariati wrote his Return to an Islamic Identity, I was one of the first it spoke to. But the people who were trying to return to that have splintered. And everywhere I look for an identity or a return, I just see different adaptations to the new.’

‘That’s not a question’, said the Sheikh. He offered me a sweet. ‘This house is a khanqah of the Sheikhi order.’ I thought I had spoken out of turn. ‘You should study the life of Muhammad Khiabani, the revolutionary martyr. He spent every day translating and preaching the newest communiques from the Social Democrats, and every night weeping with love for the most high.’

‘Khiabani was a Sheikhi from a long chain of mystics who some scholars trace back to Suhravardi al-Muqtal. Suhravardi told a story about the sounds he heard – the songs of the tips of Gabriel’s wings. Late one night, as morning broke, he went to a garden like this, and sat like this. An old man met him. He asked the old man where he had come from. ‘Nakuja abad’, he answered.’ The Sheikh explained: ‘Na kuja abad, means the no-where-istan. 

‘In the west, philosophers and theologians have always sought, at radical moments, as we have too, to build a City of God. To return to their religious identity. But they misunderstand their own history. In Christianity the City of God, the first no-where place, which from Greek they call U-topia, is a model that is taken from a relationship between two social organisations. Like your slum teachers and your guerrillas, say. Their perfect city was an arrangement between the Vatican and the Empire of Rome. But for Shias the situation is different.’

‘How can the aim of all politics be a relation between temporal powers, when Imam Hussein showed heaven through his two fingers?’. I can hear crickets and car horns. ‘The na kuja abad that we will build is a relationship between two kinds of time, not two kinds of space. The relationship between these two times defines the limits of the lives and cities we can imagine ourselves. On the one side we have those who want to celebrate and restore the purity and strength of the first of the believers; all they can do is look back. On the other side, those who looks forward, and see the fulfilment of the end of time. When the seventy-two looked through the fingers of the Imam they saw both.’ 

‘Na kuja abad is not in this city’, he says. ‘Keep going north. Suhravardi called the ascent from time to eternity the journey to the cosmic north. Your trip is easier. Leave the city to the North, pass the villas and into the mountains. Go to the ruins of Alamut’.

I could no longer tell which sound was that of muscle and sinew against machine, and which was Gabriel’s wings beating against the light.

From Tehran to Alamut

The final section of text seems even more broken up than the other sections. Thematically the author considers his journey to the assassins’ castle, and undergoes a vision of the day that the fourth old Man of the Mountains, Hassan II, decreed the end of time. Rashid ad-din sinan, whose account is one of the few surviving contemporary ones says: ‘on the seventieth of Ramadan, Hasan II, upon whose mention be peace, caused his followers to come to Alamut. They raised four great banners – white, red, yellow and green – at the four corners of the minbar. At noon he came down from the fortress and in a most perfect manner mounted the pulpit. Baring his sword he cried: o inhabitants of the worlds, jinn, men and angels! someone has come to me in secret from the Imam, who has lifted from you the burden of the law and brought you to the Resurrection. Then he set up a table and seated the people to break the fast. on that day they showed their joy with wine and repose.’ 

Circling the same visions and moments, the author’s voice moves out onto a level that is ultimately recognisable, not necessarily to those who study theology or the history of utopia, but to psychologists and psychiatrists who recognise post traumatic stress disorder. In book three of the City of god, writing against accusations that Christianity had brought the fall of Rome, Augustine describes the ‘edict of Mithradates, commanding that all Roman citizens found in Asia should be slain’. As a result of this massacre, a great madness descends on Rome, even on the animals of the city who, forgetting their domestication, bark and howl repetitively, echoing what Freud found in his grandson’s game of peekaboo, and the shell shocked soldiers of the first world war. What Freud calls ‘repetition compulsion’, Augustine calls ‘the cruel necessity’. 

The fragments are quite difficult to piece together at this point.

I knew from the smell of damp and the thickness of the air that I had been taken somewhere else. I thought of the stories of flight and the night time visions that dot the history of the mystics and the sufis, and I hated myself, because my religion is about fighting and struggling in this world, not smoking opium and dreaming of the next. I try and collect my memories of the night before. Leaving the old Sheikh’s house I must have walked towards artillery square. Under the moon I walked. I was singing to myself. Feeling fresh and sober. And then I was grabbed. 

Maybe, I am in the dungeons at Alamut, the place the old Sheikh told me about, but that would be stupid and depend on me believing in his tales of miracle. Maybe I am a peasant who didn’t pay rent to the lords of Alamut. Maybe I am a Seljuk prince. 

There is another break in the text here. The next fragment seems to be written on different paper, stuck to the previous pieces with some sort of homemade glue, a mix of decades old dirt and something else. The scholar in me wants to make the connection with the sAVAK’s contemporary torture methods. The ‘Chicago Tribune’ ran a story about torture methods attributed to the shah’s secret police organisation including a detailed description of what prisoners and jailers nicknamed ‘apollo’, a macabre joke about the way it looked; a prisoner strapped into an electric chair, would have a large metal mask placed around their head to muffle their screams while amplifying them for the victim. 

I wake in cold stone cells. The water running through the moss that lines the gaps in the wall is cool and refreshing, and I know the cells are carved out under a mountain. I am north of Tehran, in the air of the mountains - the ruins of Alamut. But the walls seem solid and the air seems cleaner than I have ever known. I smell the air of a different time, of different place. Of untime. Unplace. Nakuja. An active silence. Pierced only by the occasional sounds of a beating and a woman sobbing in pain. As my chains fall away I open the door or my cell, and look through the room next door.

The next passage is quite difficult to read so I preface it with a description of the tavoot-ha or ‘graves’ of ghazal Hesar Prison, taken from the report Crime and Impunity from the Iran Justice Foundation. I presume this is what the author is referring to, but cannot see how this reference could be written in 1978. The Foundation report recounted how: 

In 1983, a group of leftist women inmates were taken to an unprecedented punishment ward in ghezal Hesar Prison. From six o’clock in the morning until eleven o’clock at night prisoners were forced to sit, blindfolded and motionless, in small wooden cubicles – later referred as tavoot-ha (coffins, or graves). The head of this person called it his karkhane-ye-adamsazi (a human manufacturing factory). Covered in chador, with no movement permitted, the space was so tiny that there was no room to move anyway- while any sound, even coughing or sneezing, was punished by beatings – the inmates felt frozen in an eternal time. The overwhelming silence was broken only by the sounds of beating and the recantations, religious hymns or recitations of Qur’an broadcasted from the loudspeakers. only a small minority of these inmates survived insanity, death by suicide, or falling into the abyss of collaboration (with prison authorities).

The peculiar thing is that the text seems to imply a knowledge of what came after the foundation of the Islamic Republic. The next section reads: 

I see the room as a grid, with the grid containing nine coffins. Nine coffins each containing a woman, sit on the grid. The women are robed in black, their knees pushed up towards their chins, forced into a tiny wooden box. A radio on the wall plays the call to prayer. A woman sobs inaudibly. Too audibly. Three men crash into the room and drag her from the wooden coffin. Screaming, they push her chador away and beat her, the sound of the adhan bleeds out of a radio. It too fills the room. 

I walked up the stair well. As I turned into the light the stairs seemed sharper, and harder to climb. At the top of the stairs the brown and grey dinge of the stones above me broke apart. Luminescent cobalt and mountainous sky. 

In the courtyard the fedayeen gather. Outside the gates of the Garden of the Assassins. Roses and hashish stain the air. The courtyard grey, stone and metallic. An austere reflection of the sky above. In each corner a turret, on each turret a flag. Red. White. Black. Green. A central tower stands. On that tower, a door opens. A young man. Tall and thin. I can’t see anything but his green eyes that light the courtyard and the mountains around it. He looks to the assembly. ‘The Day of Resurrection is at hand.’ Holding his two finger apart, and gesturing for us to look through them, he says: ‘There is no other heaven than this, and no resurrection but this. The chains of the law have been broken’. 

An army of children, the boys I was at school with, marching through minefields, towards tanks and gunfire. A plastic man on a white plastic horse has shown them green plastic keys to heaven. They know he is waiting for them. And on the horizon an army gathers. Black flags are hung. They prepare a path that brings the desert into the city. Aridity. The end is coming. 

From the slum to the museums and villas of the north, through the bazaar, Khanqahs, mosques and Hosseiniehs, there is the crushing sound of the beating of wings. Tehran is born again. 

Citations

For a critical descriptions of how Utopian politics and analysis functions, the best starting point is Krishna Kumar Utopianism (University of Minnesota Press, 1991). Gregory Busquet’s Political Space in the Work of Henri Lefebvre: Ideology and Utopia is a good practical account of the relationship between cities, space and utopian politics as critique (http://www.jssj.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/JSSJ5-3.en_1.pdf).  For a discussion of the mystical significance of Nasir Khusraw’s travel writings see S.H. Nasr’s Introduction to the Nasir-i Khusraw section in Ismaili Thought in the Classical Age (I.B.Tauris & Co. 2008) or Peter Lamborn Wilson’s Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam (City Light Books 1993).  Wilson’s Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy (Autonomedia 1988) also lays out an introduction to the style of ‘Orientalismo’, that I have tried to develop in the essay, and in some recent plays. I have discussed it further on articles collected at www.attheinlandsea.wordpress.com and www.mybrotherscountry.wordpress.com.  For an introduction to al-Farabi’s philosophical and, broadly, ‘political’ writings see Majid Fakhry’s Farabi: Founder of Islamic Neo-Platonism (Oneworld 2002).  I re-read sections of Marcus Dod’s critical translation of The City of God (Hendrickson 2014) for this essay. 

Asset Bayat’s Street Politics: Poor People’s Movements in Iran  (Columbia University Press 1998) is a great introduction to the reality of life for the urban poor in twentieth century Iran, and the form that politics of resistance have taken.  Ervand Abrahamian’s Khomeinism (Univeristy of California 1993) and Adib-Moghadam’s A Critical Introduction to Khomeini (Cambridge University Press 2014) are brilliant guides to Khomeini’s ever shifting politics and theology, and Abrahamian’s book is the source of the discussion on May Day in the Islamic Republic. A good translation of Khomeini’s Guardianship of the Jurisprudence is available online (http://www.iranchamber.com/history/rkhomeini/books/velayat_faqeeh.pdf).  

Ali Shariati’s Religion Versus Religion (Kazi 1998) lays out some of the central issues of his political views, but there is yet to appear a decent critical summation of his thought in English.  Hamid Dabashi’s Islamic Liberation Theology provides some analysis of how Shariati’s work sits in the context of similar anti colonial religious thought (Routledge 2008). The phrase about ‘99% of what we do’ not being from Islam, is a phrase used by Rafsanjani in a speech delivered in 1992, quoted in Abrahamian’s Khomeinism. 

For an introduction to Iranian prison literature, as well as the writing of Bozorg Alavi, see The Prison Papers of Bozorg Alavi translated by Raffat (Syracus University Press 1985). The Iranian Mojahedin (Yale University Press 2009), by Abrahamian provides both a detailed account of the split in the guerrilla movement, and the original text of the letter that I have fictionalised.  There isn’t a huge amount in English on Ayatollah Taleghani, the left wing Ayatollah, but Zendeginame-yeh Siasiy-eh Ayatollah Taleghani (The Political Biography of Ayatollah Taleghani) (Tavani Nashr-e Ney 2013) is available. I also mention the seminal Westoxification by Aal-e Ahmad, which is available in English, translated by John Green (Mazda 1997). 

The full text of Suhravardi’s Avaz-e Rak-e Par-e Jibra’il (translated rather clunkilly) as The Sound of Gabriel’s Wings, is available at:https://www.scribd.com/doc/32993488/The-Sound-of-Gabriel-s-Wing-s-by-Suhrawardi.  

The description of torture at Gohar Dasht is taken from Crime and Impunity, a book about women’s experiences of prisons in the Islamic Republic, available online:

http://www.wluml.org/sites/wluml.org/files/CrimeImpunity.pdf.