Babak Rahimi

The Agonistic Social Media: Cyberspace in the Formation of Dissent and Consolidation of State Power in Postelection Iran

In this article an attempt is made to rethink the phenomenon of emerging social media, not merely as a means of communication, but as social space wherein confrontational activities of political significance take place. How do political movements manifest new forums, promoting or resisting state power through social networking sites such as Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, or YouTube? How do states exert authority in the realm of digital activism? Unrest over official election results in Iran represents a case in which social media sites shape distinct sites wherein dissent is virtualized to challenge authoritarian rule, both offline and in cyberspace. Such cyberspaces of protest should be viewed in close connection with online governance through which the state can exert authority through surveillance operations, propaganda, and hacktivism. Online social media are agonistic arenas where information, ideas, values, and subjectivities are contested between (uneven) adversaries, and where new contexts could potentially emerge for new ways of doing politics.

Censorship and the Islamic Republic: Two Modes of Regulatory Measures for Media in Iran

This article focuses on censorship in Iran and offers an overall view on the control of information through complex regulatory and cultural practices that make media production possible under the Islamic Republic. In contrast to conventional views of censorship as simply restricting content, this article defines two types of regulatory measures: reactive and proactive. It is argued that the latter is distinctive since it generates an environment that establishes pervasive control of what individuals or groups may be able to say or do in a public setting.

Theater State and the Formation of Early Modern Public Sphere in Iran

This first systematic study of a wide range of Persian and European archival and primary sources, analyzes how the Muharram rituals changed from being an orginally devotional practice to public events of political significance, setting the stage for the emergence of the early modern Iranian public sphere in the Safavid period.

Satirical cultures of media publics in Iran

The article discusses the relationship between political satire and changing media practices in the context of Iranian political history. It argues how such practices produce distinct forms of publics with mediated modes of expression of dissent. From print to the Internet, media technologies have enabled different forms of communication that, correspondingly, have led to the formation of different form of satirical publics of (sub)cultural variations. First, the study offers an account of political satire in its print cultural form and, second, its reconfiguration with the introduction of the Internet to Iran in the 1990s. With the Internet, I further identify three satirical practices: (a) prose, (b) cartoon, (c) and meme, with the last introducing a new form of satirical practice as a result of interactive communication in social media. The article finally discusses limits to studying political satire, especially in Iran, and argues that the impact of political satire on politics remains to be seen.

The Exodus in Islam: Citationality and Redemption

Classical Muslim exegetes, drawn from both Quranic and non-Quranic sources, have described the exodus as an illustration of divine punishment imposed on the Israelites for their transgression against God. This study, however, understands the Quranic accounts of the exodus in terms of a salvational drama. The revelation of Torah, central to the exodus story, is about the deliverance of God’s will in the act of law giving. Moses as both a prophet and a legislator plays a key role in manifesting God as the word in the citation of an authentic divine intention through the Torah. Divine presence is also found through miracles when God orders Moses to return the sea to its original form, and so the Israelites would be saved from Pharaoh. For their lack of gratitude for God’s help, the Israelites are punished for their transgression against his command. In 5:20–25, God commands the Israelites to enter the “holy land,” but they refuse because of giants. In turn, God condemns the Israelites with 40 years of wandering (5:26). In 7:148–158 and 20:80–98 the Israelites are described to transgress God’s command for worshiping the golden calf when Moses was absent for 40 nights. In turn, Moses orders the killing of those who worshiped the golden calf. However, while the Israelites are punished for their disobedience, they are also blessed with God’s mercy and generosity. When Moses’s anger subsides after throwing down the tables after finding the Israelites worshiping of the golden calf, he took up the tablets for “those who fearful of their Lord” (7:154). Throughout the Quran, the exodus narrative provides numerous instances when God would provide numerous blessings to the Israelites. Beyond punishment and blessing, however, the exodus identifies a metanarrative of spiritual liberation. In such account, the Israelites partake in a redemptive experience of a trial through adversity that ultimately reveals divine grace, a self-reflexive reference that unravels the God it cites into existence, and hence a promise for salvation. The exodus story therefore becomes a chronicle about God’s presence in the enactment of his will through the performance of delivering the laws, even as he appears to abandon his people, even as he appears to be invisible to all.

Rethinking Digital Technologies in the Middle East

In 2003, while a graduate student working on my dissertation, I wrote an article on the Internet in postrevolutionary Iran that looked at the politics of the emerging technology in a country undergoing major political changes. In the context of political rivalries between reformists and conservatives, the Internet, I argued, “as an advancing means of communication,” played a key role in the struggle for democracy by opening up a virtual space of dissident activism. Euphoric in spirit and utopian in outlook, the article ended with the following quotation from an Iranian dissident: “At night, every light that is on in Tehran shows that somebody is sitting behind a computer, driving through information roads; and that is in fact a storehouse of gunpowder that, if ignited, will start a great firework in the capital of the revolutionary Islam.” These “information roads,” I concluded, could play a significant role in the emergence of a new form of political society in Iran and beyond.

Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt

The scholarly literature on the social history of medieval Islamic civilisation, with its diverse religious subcultures and ethnic cleavages, has been traditionally neglected in favour of elite history. Particularly, there has been less focus on how various minority communities in the medieval Islamic world might have operated in terms of socio-economic and political networks within the daily practices of sociability and in interactive spaces of public institutions. For those attempting to produce scholarly work on the everyday life of medieval communities in the Islamic World, the task can seem not only challenging due to the scarcity of evidence (primarily because of the absence of literary records of daily life), but also daunting because of the marginalised scholarly status that such an approach continues to maintain in the field of Islamic studies. Mark Cohen’s book, however, provides a new sociological study of everyday medieval life with a focus on the Jewish history of daily poverty and the complex strategies that were used to provide assistance to the poor in an Islamic milieu. Lucidly written and supported by Cohen’s extensive archival research based on the documents of the Cairo Geniza, an ancient Jewish custom of handwritten texts from Fustat, mostly dated between the fifth/eleventh and the mid-seventh/ thirteenth centuries, Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt is a stunning achievement. The study offers the most detailed study of public Jewish institutions and the culture of poverty in medieval Egypt and sheds light into an aspect of Judeo-Arabic daily culture that has been largely overlooked by historians of the Islamic World. Following the French Annales School, Cohen takes up a kind of historiography that emphasises how people viewed themselves and accommodated their needs, offering a history of non-elite mentalité that expands through time and space and across communities. Cohen’s main argument is that the management of poverty amongst Jews in medieval Egypt was a recognised and well-established social practice, entailing the existence of a system of charitable institutions. In theoretical terms, poverty and charity are daily experiences that involve intricate practices and attitudes, produce social institutions and forms of public interactions that construct and affirm a collective identity in close affinity with other co-existing communal identities. Cohen begins his study, which includes a total of nine chapters, with a clearly written Introduction on the theoretical scope and methodological approach of the volume, along with a fascinating description of the Cairo Geniza used as primary