Arba’īn and Bakhshū’s Lament: African Slavery in the Persian Gulf and the Violence of Cultural Form (original) (raw)
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These two films will be of great interest for Iranian Studies scholars, students, and the thirsty-for-knowledge public. They help open the way for a neglected but now emerging area of investigation—the presence of African-origin people in Persia and Iran. Director and historian of modern Iran Behnaz A. Mirzai explains the transporting of African slaves into the Persian Gulf and coastal settlements—that expanded in the late 1700s—and then onward into the areas of present-day Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. She also focuses on trade relations between Persia and Africa, with ships taking dates, ceramics, and salt to northeastern and eastern Africa and bringing back ivory and mangrove—for constructing the ceilings of mud homes. As a result of both Africans brought as slaves and trade in material items, the Afro-Persian population increased especially in the southern coastal areas. Even in Tehran, where Africans were put to work by shahs and the wealthy as servants, bodyguards, soldiers, eunuchs, nannies, wet nurses, and concubines, by 1869 some 3,300 people of African background lived in Tehran, constituting 2% of the population, according to Mirzai.
Pneumatics of blackness: Nāṣir Taqvā’ī’s Bād-i Jin and modernity’s anthropological drive
Persian Literature and Modernity: Production and Reception, 2018
This article explores the vexed relationship between the development of Iranian ethnography, the Iranian New Wave, and Iranian literary modernity through the trope of the African slave descendent tradition, zar. Naṣir Taqvā’ī and Ghulām-Husayn Sā‘idī, among other Iranian authors and filmmakers, thematize zar in writings and films of the 1960s. Mining Taqvā’ī’s and Sā‘idī’s oeuvres Vaziri argues that the encounter with zar exceeds the order of eventuality; she tracks it throughout these authors’ subsequent work. Retroactively, zar, as a primitive figure for madness, produces coherence for the modernness of Iranian anxiety and alienation in New Wave films and modernist writings. This coherence depends upon the dissolution of zar’s historicity, that is, its relation to the African slave trade. The particularity of this ethnographic encounter thus elicits questions about how to navigate the ethical implications of abstraction in modernist translations of Iranian ethnography.
Review of Afro Iranian lives and African Baluchi Trance Dance
These two films will be of great interest for Iranian Studies scholars, students, and the thirsty-for-knowledge public. They help open the way for a neglected but now emerging area of investigation-the presence of African-origin people in Persia and Iran. Director and historian of modern Iran Behnaz A. Mirzai explains the transporting of African slaves into the Persian Gulf and coastal settlements-that expanded in the late 1700s-and then onward into the areas of present-day Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. She also focuses on trade relations between Persia and Africa, with ships taking dates, ceramics, and salt to northeastern and eastern Africa and bringing back ivory and mangrove-for constructing the ceilings of mud homes. As a result of both Africans brought as slaves and trade in material items, the Afro-Persian population increased especially in the southern coastal areas. Even in Tehran, where Africans were put to work by shahs and the wealthy as servants, bodyguards, soldiers, eunuchs, nannies, wet nurses, and concubines, by 1869 some 3,300 people of African background lived in Tehran, constituting 2% of the population, according to Mirzai.
Half the Household Was African: Recovering the Histories of Two African Slaves in Iran
This article is an attempt to recover the biographies of two enslaved Africans in Iran, Haji Mubarak and Fezzeh Khanum, the servants of Mirza 'Ali-Muhammad Shirazi (1819-1850), the Bab, the founder of the Babi movement. The article argues that a history of African slaves in Iran can be written, not only at the level of statistics, laws, and politics, but also at the level of individual lives.
Documentaries and Film: Afro-Iranians through the Lens of Documentarists
Khosronejad, Pedram. 2017. “Documentaries and Film: Afro-Iranians through the Lens of Documentarists,” Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d'histoire (CJH/ACH), 52.2, pp. 323–325. While historical research regarding the Iranian Persian Gulf and its people, especially Afro-Iranians, remains in its early stages, documentary filmmakers have demonstrated greater interest in this topic. Generally speaking, such documentary films are self-financed and have mostly been made by those who have a special interest in one of the many ethnographical topics of these regions of Iran. The majority of such films have been made by professional documentary filmmakers (rather than researchers) in search of historical and archaeological evidence of the Iranian Persian Gulf.
Slavery and the Virtual Archive: On Iran's Dāsh Ākul
The Cambridge Companion to Global Literature and Slavery , 2023
In the opening scene of the Iranian filmmaker Mas'ūd Kīmīāyī's Dāsh Ākul, a series of unthinkably quick shot reverse shots fuels a founding antagonism: "Everyone in Shiraz knew that Dāsh Ākul and Kākā Rustam would shoot each other's shadows." These lines, lifted from the opening of the famous short story by the modernist writer Sādiq Hidāyat, appear during the opening credits of Kīmīāyī's film of the same name. The famous, beloved story chronicles the rivalry between a village hero, Dāsh Ākul, and his foe, Kākā Rustam, while pronouncing two archetypal models of masculinity reproduced and spectacularized by Iranian film in the midtwentieth century. By unexpectedly bringing to the fore a detail that was abandoned in Hidāyat's literary vision of a legend supposedly constructed from fact, Kīmīāyī's film virtualizes a historical element of the Shirazi legend of Dāsh Ākul. This historical element presents us with an unexpected testimonya testament to the history of slavery in Iran. However, in reviving and distorting simultaneously, the film's recursive gesture reveals an aberrancy at the heart of the history of slavery in Iran and its archival foundations. Archival virtuality, or the virtual archive, exposes an original historiographical perversion. A recent topic of investigation among historians, literature on the subject of slavery in Iran unfolds in spite of, and in avoidance of this perversion that corrupts historiography's claims to truth. By contrast, drawing upon the enigmatic case of Dāsh Ākul and its literary, cinematic, and virtual adaptations, I argue that it is not possible to narrate a history of slavery, nor reckon with slavery's ambiguous legacy in the Indian Ocean context, without engaging the fundamental distortion that occurs when fact is dissociated from experience. This is not simply a matter of the inevitable and usual distortions that occur in the process of articulating experience into language, of assimilating the nonsensical into sense. Nor is it a matter of the possibilities lost to the sometimes unrational course of a historian's choice-making that arranges language, and therefore historical
Enslaved African Women in Nineteenth-Century Iran: The Life of Fezzeh Khanom of Shiraz
Iranian Studies, 2012
Fezzeh Khanom (c. 1835–82), an African woman, was a slave of Sayyed ‘Ali-Mohammad of Shiraz, the Bab. Information about her life can be recovered from various pious Baha'i histories. She was honored, and even venerated by Babis, though she remained subordinate and invisible. The paper makes the encouraging discovery that a history of African slavery in Iran is possible, even at the level of individual biographies. Scholars estimate that between one and two million slaves were exported from Africa to the Indian Ocean trade in the nineteenth century, most to Iranian ports. Some two-thirds of African slaves brought to Iran were women intended as household servants and concubines. An examination of Fezzeh Khanom's life can begin to fill the gaps in our knowledge of enslaved women in Iran. The paper discusses African influences on Iranian culture, especially in wealthy households and in the royal court. The limited value of Western legal distinctions between slavery and freedom w...
Exhibition Catalogue: Re-Imagining Iranian African Slavery: photography as material culture
Exhibition Catalogue
Dr. Pedram Khosronejad, the Associate Director for Iranian and Persian Gulf Studies at Oklahoma State University, curated a photography exhibition titled Re-Imagining Iranian African slavery: Photography as material culture that will be on display at the University of California at Davis May 10 through June 27 at the Walter A. Buehler Alumni Center. The exhibition focuses on the overlooked study of race and ethnicity in the field of Iranian photography. The photographs showcase Africans enslaved during the Qajar period of the 1840s-1920s and are considered to be a new topic in the field of visual studies of modern Iran. The exhibition is free and open to the public. This is the first ever photo exhibition organized in the United States that uses photographs of the Qajar and early Pahlavi periods to study the level of ability of the medium as material culture. Dr. Khosronejad will speak on this topic at the exhibition’s opening Thursday, May 10, from 4-5:30 p.m. in the Buehler Alumni Center. The photographs included in the exhibition are from the Dr. A. Fazel Visual Archive, Media Collection and Digital Resources (Oklahoma State University), the Kimia Foundation (U.S.A), and the Farhad and Firouzeh Diba Collection of Qajar Photographs (Spain). The exhibition is sponsored by the Mellon Research Initiative Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds and co-sponsored by Bita Daryabari Presidential Chair in Persian Language and Literature and the Art History Program at UC Davis in cooperation with the Iranian and Persian Gulf Studies at Oklahoma State University
Recovering the Lives of Enslaved Africans in Nineteenth-Century Iran: A First Attempt
Recovering Biographies of Enslaved Africans in Nineteenth-Century Iran: A First Attempt Anthony A. Lee Lecturer, UCLA Abstract African slaves were brought to Iran in large numbers in the nineteenth century as part of the Eastern slave trade. While there are no definite historical statistics on the number of slaves exported from Africa to Iran, estimates among scholars for the Indian Ocean trade during the nineteenth century vary from between one and two million. Possibly two-thirds of these slaves were women and girls. In Iran, these Africans were almost always destined for residence in Iranian households as servants, eunuchs, and concubines. Little scholarship has been undertaken on the history of Africans in Iran. There are enormous gaps in our knowledge of slavery in Iran and of the influence of African people and culture on Iranian history. More than a decade ago, Edward Alpers called forcefully for the study of the history of Africans in the northwestern Indian Ocean. However, his pioneering call for more research, for the most part, has not been taken up by other scholars. This paper is a first attempt to discover the individual biographies of slaves in nineteenth-century Iran and to reconstruct at least a part of their lives. Scholars of Middle Eastern slavery have warned about the limited value of Western legal distinctions between slavery and freedom when applied to the Muslim world. Such binary, legal concepts of slave vs. free presuppose a secular state that is able to protect the lives and property of individuals based on their claim to citizenship. They are unhelpful when discussing societies which are not built around the power of the state, but rather on concepts or kinship, belonging, religious authority, and hierarchies of dependence. This paper will examine four cases of slave experience in Iran in an effort to demonstrate the widely varying conditions of enslaved persons during the nineteenth century. First, Bahrazian Khanum and Nur Sabbah Khanum, two sisters who found their freedom in 1892, but who in the absence of protectors were quickly re-enslaved. Second, Haji Mubarak and Fezzeh Khanum, servants of the middle-class merchant and Babi (later, Baha’i) Prophet, Mirza ‘Ali-Muhammad Shirazi, the Bab (1819-1850). The former an educated eunuch entrusted with his master’s business affairs; the latter a lifelong companion to the Prophet’s wife who became a holy figure in her own right. Third, Khyzran Khanum and a young boy named Walladee, two slaves who fled to the British consulate in Lingeh in 1856 seeking freedom, but found no protection. And, fourth, Gulchihreh Khanum, captured and enslaved as a child in the late 1800s. She became a servant in a wealthy Iranian home and the beloved nanny of the family’s children, but continued to protest her enslavement to the end of her life.