Passing, Politics and Religion
A note on this article.[1]
"You can't force people into heaven, dear brother.
You are pushing so hard that they might fall off the other side into
hell."
—Marmoulak [2]
"[W]e must abandon the idea of religion as being always
and essentially the same, and as being dependent on a faith that is
independent of practical traditions because and to the extent that it is
transcendental."
—Talal Asad [3]
"In discipline, punishment is only one element of a
double system: gratification-punishment. And it is this system that
operates in the process of training and correction."
—Michel Foucault [4]
After its release in 2004, Marmoulak (The Lizard), a
comedy directed by the well-known Iranian filmmaker Kamal Tabrizi, was
screened in Iran for less than a month before authorities banned it. It
had widespread success. Shortly after being banned the film was broadly
distributed through bootleg copies and DVDs, and became one of the most
popular Iranian films, selling a million copies both in Iran and abroad.
In this comedy, Reza, a thief notorious for his ability to climb walls,
is arrested during an armed robbery. After enduring the rigid
disciplinary treatment of the prison administrator, who believes that
the prison is a psychiatric institution charged with curing criminals by
converting them into normal and respectable citizens, and facing the
possibility of being sentenced to life in prison, Reza escapes by
dressing as a Shia cleric, or akhund. Reza makes his way to
Turkey with the help of an illegal underground network of smugglers who
are supposed to fabricate a passport for him. Along the way, he is
mistaken for the well-respected clergyman also named Reza, who is being
sent to a city in Azerbaijan (not far from the Turkish border) to take
spiritual leadership of the town mosque. In a comic turn and by focusing
on Reza Marmoulak, the passer's character, the film brilliantly exposes
and unsettles notions of respectability, masculinity, and class capital
by interrogating the boundaries of normativity and criminality in what
the Islamic State considers a pious, ethical, and religious
citizen-subject. By passing as an akhund or mullah, Reza
Marmoulak gains access to the menbar (a podium or pulpit in a
mosque), from which he can address audiences while exposing the politics
of knowledge and religion as cultural and symbolic capital. As Elaine
Ginsberg argues, "passing is usually motivated by a desire to shed the
identity of an oppressed group to gain access to social and economic
opportunities."[5]
In this case, through the genre of comedy the film
displays hegemonic and subordinated models of masculinity as they relate
to the discourses of respectability and criminality. I refer to
respectability to talk about the ways in which masculinity is invoked in
modern constructions of nationalism both secular and religious. The
discourse of respectability also determines the boundaries of what is
defined as normal and abnormal or what "symbolizes the nation's
spiritual and material vitality" in Mosse's
terms.[6] Disguised as an
Akhund, Reza Mamoulak gains access to the religious speech from the
podium of the Mosque.
The emergence of a gendered Islamic subject in the context of the
Iranian revolution of 1979 and its aftermath provided a surface on which
cultural and religious nationalists were able to write their own
meanings of the Islamic nation.[7]
However, after the establishment of
the Islamic Republic, the hegemonic masculinity of the citizen/subject
became a site of tension and contradiction between the pious masculinity
of the clergyman and the secular masculinity of the
citizen.[8] This
tension continues to be present in Iranian cultural and political
spheres. The movie crosses the boundaries of religious and secular,
respectable and perverse, and normative and criminal as significant
components of hegemonic forms of masculinity under the Islamic Republic
and exposes the modern nation-state as a disciplinary apparatus for
regulating gender identities. Marmoulak, along with a number of
Iranian films that depict passing as their central theme, has created a
space for queering citizenship. By depicting gender passing and the
display of masculinity and femininity as produced by both secular and
religious modern disciplinary regimes of knowledge and power, these
films enable an interrogation of respectability, criminality, and
identity. In other words, the temporality of an Islamic citizenship
defined by the convergence of secular and religious narratives in the
performance of gender normativity is momentarily interrupted through the
unreadability of identity. These films also challenge foundational
narratives of body, religion, nation, gender, and citizenship and, more
importantly, expose the process of subject formation as produced by
cultural and social meanings and institutions, including the
nation-state, religious and secular institutions, the media, and the
prison industry.[9]
In this essay I am interested in the question of "the surface
politics of the body," in Butler's terms, or what Foucault defines as
the "body politic" or "a set of material elements and techniques that
serve as weapons, relays, communication routes, and supports for the
power and knowledge relations that invest human bodies and subjugate
them by turning them into objects of
knowledge."[10] The body is
displayed as the locus of social and cultural disciplining that contains
a repertoire of receptivities and sensibilities from verbal
communication to bodily responses, exposing Islamic normativity and
criminality in the context of the Islamic Republic. Islamic notions of
masculinity are influenced by the perceptions of the modern nation-state
and the relationship between nationalism, masculinity, and
respectability.[11]
While the body as a cultural field has been
extensively explored by a number of feminist and queer theorists, the
stylization of gendered bodies through religious practices needs more
scholarly attention. Religion and culture cannot be separated from each
other and from the historical conditions within which they emerge, and
it is impossible to understand Islam and gender without understanding
globalization, colonialism, postcolonial formations, Westernization,
religious and secular nationalisms, and
citizenship.[12] Despite the
tendency in the scholarship on Iran and Islam to disconnect religion
from the cultural politics of knowledge and power, the politics of
religion cannot be separated from body politics and gender performance
in Iranian modernity and postmodernity.[13]
In this essay, I elaborate on the ways in which Marmoulak uses
passing to focus on the character of the passer, the strategic
employment of religious identity, and the moments of rupture where "the
other" can be seen and heard. I argue that even though the narrative of
the film does not move beyond the assimilation and integration of the
outlaw and the criminal into the modern disciplinary society of the
Islamic state, Marmoulak radically challenges a number of
dichotomies prevalent in Iranian cultural and political spheres,
including secular versus religious, mokkalla (a man with a hat)
versus moammam (a man with a turban), religious culture versus
popular culture mazhabi versus ghair-e mazhabi, and respectable versus
criminal mohtaram versus mojrem.
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