Reza Masoudi - The Rite of Urban Passage: The Spatial Ritualization of Iranian Urban Transformation

Tom Selwyn, SOAS University of London

Nicola Frost, Devon Community Foundation

The landscape of contemporary mobility stresses ideas of home, return, commemoration and celebration. Groups seek to mark changing elements of historical and cultural importance through architecture, narrative and festivity. Migrants and their descendants frequently travel between homes, reinventing and reshaping as they go. Such events can themselves attract travellers and pilgrims with their own stories to tell. Engaging with more substantive ethnographic features and linking back to classical anthropological and philosophical concerns, this series contributes to a new understanding of the Other encountered away from home but also of the Self and home.

Waiting for Elijah

Time and Encounter in a Bosnian Landscape

The Rite of Urban Passage

The Spatial Ritualization of Iranian Urban Transformation

Reza Masoudi

First published in 2018 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

2018 Reza Masoudi Nejad

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Names: Masoudi, Reza, author.

Title: The rite of urban passage : the spatial ritualization of Iranian urban transformation / Reza Masoudi.

Description: New York : Berghahn Books, [2018] | Series: Articulating journeys : festivals, memorials, and homecomings ; 2 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018008951 (print) | LCCN 2018016895 (ebook) | ISBN 9781785339776 (ebook) | ISBN 9781785339769 (hardback : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Tenth of Muarram--Iran--Dizfl. | Islam--Iran--Dizfl--Customs and practices. | Shiites--Iran--Dizfl. | Urbanization--Iran--Dizfl--History--20th century. | City planning--Social aspects--Iran--Dizfl--History--20th century. | Dizfl (Iran)--Social life and customs.

Classification: LCC BP194.5.T4 (ebook) | LCC BP194.5.T4 M37 2018 (print) | DDC 297.3/6--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018008951

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78533-976-9 hardback
ISBN 978-1-78533-977-6 ebook

This book is a result of my long-term focus on religious rituals as part of urbanization process. This idea stems from my PhD research that had the full financial support of my father-in-law, Majid Ghandi-zadeh Dezfuli, who has always been my true mentor and friend. The manuscript of book was partly prepared during my Writing Fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity (MPI-MMG), Gttingen, Germany. I am grateful to Professor Peter Van der Veer, the director of MPI-MMG, for this generous fellowship. I have to express my gratitude to Professor Tom Selwyn for his full support ever since he was my PhD examiner in 2009.

This book is the outcome of a usual academic process. However, it is rooted in a lifelong personal curiosity about the dynamics of urban culture. I am not sure why this curiosity has stayed with me, but I can briefly narrate its history.

When I was ten years old, I was exposed to the oral cultural history of my hometown in a way that was unusual for my generation. Every evening, I had no choice but to listen to the narratives of elderly members of my family that made our long, dark and fearful evenings bearable. It was 1980, when the Iran-Iraq war stormed the country with my hometown, Dezful, near the border. Dezful became one of the most bombed cities during the war. There was a power cut every evening to keep the city in absolute darkness because of airstrikes; there was no way to watch TV. We spent our long evenings listening to our parents and grandparents tell stories about the city and their traditional way of life, stories that were otherwise edged out by television. The war dragged our evening lifestyle back to earlier times. This experience made a substantial impact on my interest in the oral history of cities and cultures.

One of the most interesting stories was about the traditional Muharram rituals and the rearrangement of Muharram processions. Years later, I revisited this subject for my final design project and dissertation to complete my masters in architecture at the University of Tehran in the mid-1990s. I intended to design the site of an old cemetery around the tomb of Roodband, which had been the focal point of the Dezful Muharram processions ever since their rearrangement in the very early 1950s. This site became the heart of the city during Muharram commemoration, the most important socio-cultural annual event. Nonetheless, this site was not an important place for the everyday life of the city, and was ignored by modern urban planners, remaining an empty arena at the margins of the old city. The site is on the east bank of the River Dez, with a striking view over the river. My aim was to design the site in such a way as to reposition it as the cultural heart of the city, considering that a new bridge over the river was about to change the position of this site in the urban configuration. Soon, I realized that this was not simply a normal urban design project, and that the question of ritual and city was far more complex than what I had learned about cities in a school of the built environment. My dissertation received the award for the Dissertation of Year in Art and Architecture, but the theoretical curiosity about the relationship between city and ritual stayed with me for years and fundamentally shaped my academic career. This book is certainly the result of this curiosity, but it has by no means exhausted my inquiry about ritual, space and cities.