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Andrea GiacomuzziIranThe Shàhnàma, a national epic that versifies a
mytho-history of Iran, suggests a vital role played
by women and the notion of the feminine in gen-
eral. Omidsalar (2003) argues that feminine sym-
bols, and female figures, appear throughout this
epic to “arbitrate all significant instances of trans-
fer of power, be they royal, heroic or magical.” The
feminine, embodied at times in female literary and
historical characters such as Farànak, Barmaya,
and the goddess Anàhìtà, stands at the birth of “all
new orders” and reassuringly watches over moments
of transitional trauma.
Reading the periodicals and historical records of
the Constitutional Revolution (1905–11) in Iran
for the forgotten parliamentary debates that
focused on the nation’s responsibility for the fate of
a large number of Quchani women and girls cap-
tured or sold to the Turkmens, Najmabadi (1998)
suggests that gender may well be considered a
“uniquely structuring category” for the study of
similar transitional moments such as Iranian mod-
ernity. Though largely forgotten in subsequent ren-
ditions of the events of the constitutional period,
the debates concerning the “daughters of Quchan”
were pivotal to the consolidation of the Iranian
parliament and for the constitution of Iran’s mod-
ern identity. As with the Turkish and the Arabic, the
Persian reconfiguration of the term vatan defined a
iran 481nation that was imagined as a community larger
than the familial and the immediate and inscribed
as a female body. The female body as mother and as
beloved became principally the metaphorical, and
ultimately the material, battleground for the
inscription of the nation and its modernity.
The body of the Bàbìpoet ¢àhira Qurrat al-≠Ayn
(Fà†ima Baraghànì) is remembered in the chronicle
of the nineteenth-century Qàjàr court historian,
Mu™ammad TaqìSipihr, as one such constitutive
body. In his Nàsikh al-tavàrikh, Sipihr takes pleas-
ure in an exaggerated description of the poet’s
unveiled body. Her rumored unveiling marks a crit-
ical point in the history of Iranian modernity, situ-
ating in fact its memorable beginnings. She is
represented as the object-cause of national desire, a
desire that then is condemned by the force of the
law in such a way that the national subject is hailed
to destroy it. Reading this and other nineteenth-
century narratives hermeneutically, it is impossible
to pin down what her particular encroachment on
the nation is about. But in the recollection and
attachment of the image of this prototypical Bàbì,
to various local subjectivities in the next eight
decades, it is clear that “the Bàbì” is indistinguish-
able from the modern Iranian subject.
Reza Shah’s reign is often remembered in associ-
ation with women’s forced unveiling in 1936, an
edict that saw the veil as a marker of national
backwardness and as a measure of women’s social
retardation. The enforcement of unveiling sparked
new debates about women’s education, progress,
and women’s role in the constitution of the nation.
The Bàbìas an unveiled female body was recovered
againand again in the public and private docu-
ments of this era as a threat to the very constitution
of the Iranian nation and paradoxically as the
marker of its emerging modernity. What is at stake,
it would seem, as Najmabadi (1998) also concludes
concerning the debates that ensued during the Con-
stitutional era, is the concept of nàmùs(honor),
“which shifted in this period between the idea
of purity of woman (≠ißma) and integrity of the
nation,” both subjects of male responsibility and
protection.
For a generation of largely upper-class, urban,
educated female writers who were born before the
establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the
body and its compulsory veiling appear in memory
as overdetermined sites for the articulation of the
sociopolitical tensions that crystallized as after-
effects of the 1979 transition of power and Iran’s
subsequent war with Iraq. The ™ijàb (Islamic
dress), which was instituted in the new republic to
represent the integrity of the nation and to protect