ABSTRACT
An attempt is made to interpret the 1979 Iranian Revolution in terms of the emotive experiences of insurrectionaries who made this radical change possible. The study focuses on the street protests that occurred during the 1978 Shiʿa mourning rituals of Muharram, two mass demonstrations that led to the toppling of the Pahlavi regime in February 1979. The chapter makes several arguments about the 1978 Muharram rituals. The most important argument it advances is that the religious commemorative ceremonies involve experiences of emotive orientation that served as motives for revolutionary action. It also argues that the 1978 Muharram rituality was at once strategic and affective action, hence rejecting an assumed functionality of ritual as a vehicle for ideological action. Divided into four sections, the chapter first offers a critical look at a number of scholarly works that, grounded in explanatory models of revolutions, have mostly overlooked the relationship between emotions and religion and, by extension, spontaneity of action in situational context, in the 1979 Revolution. After a brief exposition of the Muharram rituals of 1978, the chapter then shifts attention to Michel Foucault, who visited and reported on revolutionary Iran in 1978–79. The author argues that Foucault’s interpretation of the 1979 Revolution through Marx’s ambiguous notion of religion equally gives importance to religion’s expressive force, not as masking reality but as an emotive release for social change. Foucault’s notion of “inner experience” in describing the Iranian Revolution lies in the nuanced mode of solidarity that affectively performs dissent in the collective will, without which a revolution, “Islamic” or otherwise, would not be possible. Finally, the author briefly explores suffering as affective action.
