#masserat

Masserat Amir-Ebrahimi

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For the new government, however, this new and increasing presence could not be without Islamic control and ethical oversight. With the emergence of new social actors, the neutralization of the slogan of ‘‘Holy Defense’’ and revolution, and also the reentering of Iran into the international sphere, Revolutionary authority faded and became itself subjected to new simultaneities that happened in different public spaces. These simultaneities occurred especially when the new government of ‘‘Reconstruction’’ planned to re-conduct people to a controllable public life. Public spaces stood between two sets of life styles. On the one hand was Daily life/Modernity/Citizenship/International image, while on the other hand was Revolution/Tradition/Ummah/the image of Islam in the Muslim world. Consequently, public spaces entered into a schizophrenic phase, where their function moved from one world to the other, depending on time, space, and social actors. Although religious and revolutionary authority maintained their public presence, the society had developed an intense tendency toward globally identifiable forms of modern identity and a self-adaptation to the patterns of western consumer culture.

The transience of public space

In that time, the large squares of Tehran—such as Meidan-e Vanak or Meidan-e Vali-Asr—like many other important public spaces, in certain moments, at different occasions and times when revolutionary guards came to control public spaces for religious, social, cultural or security reasons, were suddenly transformed into large ‘‘enclosed spaces’’. Despite their modern characteristics, they were suddenly subjected to Islamic and traditional codes of the interior (andaruni). Large and crowded squares of the city were transformed to places in which any appearance, behavior and presence had to follow a pattern, consisting of bans and permissions. On the precise moment that the moral police was installed in the public spaces, all women tried to fix their hejab, girls and boys distanced themselves, laughter and loud voices were controlled, everything entered into the order of andaruni. Such conflicting simultaneities in urban spaces were able to change intensively the function and even the identity of place and space for a certain time, creating more complexity and more contradictions within the society. What seemed interesting in the urban society of Tehran in those years was the transformation of the permanent function and identity of places/spaces to these transient and temporary aspects.