Red-Light Tehran: Prostitution, Intimately Public Islam, and the Rule of the Sovereign, 1910-1980

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the urban life of the red-light district of Tehran, Shahr-i naw, from its inception in the early twentieth century to its erasure after the Islamic Revolution in 1980. “Red-light Tehran” broadens the scope of the literature on modern Islam to the arena of state sovereignty and the governance of precarious subjects. Shahr-i naw is an unlikely place to explore Islam. However, beginning in the early twentieth century in Tehran, the increasingly visible business of urban prostitution and street solicitation, perceived as an unhygienic, immoral and un-Islamic practice, became a site of contestation for larger debates about the role of Islam, in the domain of public. The district serves as a central site for inquiries about the shifting role of Islam in the governance of subjects that were never fully integrated into the political system of the modern post-constitutional state. This exploration of the history of the district remaps the force of religion in Tehran, a city that is so often glossed as a case of state-oriented top-down secularization and subsequent Islamization. In the early twentieth century, Islamic periodicals and physicians of the time anchored on the medico-moral crusade against prostitution and (re)articulated Islam as a disciplinary force, compatible with microbiological sensibilities. In response to mass religious petitioning against street prostitutes in the 1920s, the state evicted prostitutes to a segregated district outside the city gates. In the 1940s, as Tehran grew larger, enveloping the red-light district into the heart of the city, prostitutes returned to the public eye, only this time the point of attractions was their precarious lives and work conditions. This shift in concern intimated the advent of a compassionate impulse and a humanitarian Islamic culture of care. In the 1950s, the state gestured towards closing the site to “rescue” female residents, while simultaneously it experimented with modern “regimes of care,” with minimum expense and maximum ambition, through funding social work projects, and launching “salvation houses.” The district was a sixty-year long sovereign experimentation with regimes of governance, comprising of juridical, economic, welfare, and medical techniques of governance including bodily regimentation, medical regulation, and rehabilitation.