The Sovereign and the Sensible: Governing Prostitution in Iran, 1914-1933

Dr. Jairan Gahan is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at University of Toronto. Her research broadly investigates microhistories of precarious populations in the modern Middle East, spanning the twentieth century, with a focus on Iran. She is currently working on her book manuscript "Red-Light Tehran: Prostitution, Islamism, and the Rule of the Sovereign," which investigates the governance of the red-light district of Tehran from its inception in 1921 to its erasure in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution (1979) in 1981.

Abstract: This talk investigates the history of the formation of the red-light district of Tehran in 1922, to tackle larger questions about the genealogy of Islamic state in Iran, in the 20th century. Through an engagement with the Islamic local campaign against prostitution, and the state’s subsequent sovereign decision to form the district, I demonstrate how Islamic public sensibilities moved to the forefront of analytics of governance, under the quasi-secular post-constitutional state formations (1911-). This revisionist narrative 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 20th century. The aim is not to question the process of secularization or to render it incomplete, but to demonstrate how secularism in Iran negotiated and consolidated a particular relationship between Islam and sovereign modern rule. As such, I read the history of the district against the grain of the grand narrative of the Islamic Revolution’s (1979) moment of rupture to trace the genealogical roots of moral governance in the Islamic Republic, within the post-constitutional state formations in early 20th century.