The perils of utopia: Between ‘ethical static’ and moral perfectionism in Iran

Abstract

Following the Iranian Revolution, ideologues within the Republican system promised the possibility of ethical perfection so long as Iranians adhered to guidelines promulgated by the state. Drawing on a case study of both critics and supporters of the government living in Mashhad, I argue that one of the inadvertent outcomes of this commitment to perfectionism has been its instrumentalization by government critics as a tool to condemn the behaviour of state supporters. Inconsistencies of behaviour demonstrated by state supporters were interpreted by these government critics as gross indecencies and major evils, rather than as part of a modality of ‘ethical static’ that has been advocated for as an understanding of everyday morality. The ethnographic tension in this article illuminates both the impacts of state-led projects of moral utopianism, and their ramifications for anthropology.

‘Hypocrite!’ (do-ru) Ahmad spat and rolled his eyes. He and the other young men present were unable to restrain their contempt for the protagonist in an anecdote I had just told. The story concerned a person none of them knew, and whose identity I kept well-hidden from them, but whose apparent hypocrisy touched a nerve. Its chief character, an anonymous member from among my interlocutors in the basij, ¹ was deeply conservative and committed to a vision of the Islamic Republic that closely aligned with the principlist (osulgarā) forces. ² This person also liked to watch pornography. Once, on a train trip into the city centre, they cornered me, asking me whether I had heard of a famous American porn star. As a member of the basij, this person was ‘meant’ to stay away from these kinds of pleasures of the flesh. Revealing my own biases, I was initially taken aback by their awareness of this erotic star, and so I pressed them on how they justified the seemingly contradictory behaviours that they juggled. There was nothing contradictory, they pushed back, suggesting that what they were doing was necessary and, to quote, ‘educational’. In re-telling this story to these young men, who were critics of Iran’s current modality of governance, I found a generally consistent response – this basiji’s behaviour was evidence of the hypocrisy, insincerity, and lies that many considered to be the hallmarks of the basij. What I ultimately found to be most striking was not so much this basiji’s ‘hypocrisy’ as the frustration of those I told about it.

Certainly, as a basiji employed to practise the Islamic dictates of amr be ma’aruf va nahy az monkar, or ‘enjoining the good and forbidding the bad’, the sin of watching pornography could be interpreted as problematic. But there was something in the vituperative tone of Ahmad and others’ derision that hinted that the anonymous basiji’s behaviour impinged upon a broader moral world. After all, that a figure who held themself up as the enforcer of public virtue might in private also make use of pornography struck me initially not only as singularly plausible, but almost quotidian, part of the jumble of competing ethical demands and assemblages that make up what many anthropologists of ethics and morality have described as the typically fragmentary nature of the moral quest. Yet for my interlocutors who were critical of the status quo, what they perceived as a double standard hit them in a particularly profound way. They insisted on far more from their state-supporting co-nationals, making an assumption of and demand for total moral consistency. It was, to paraphrase Mazzarella (2015: 92), an itch in their imagination, a concern that took on great proportions.

In this article, drawing on my work elsewhere (see Theobald, forthcoming), I hold that one of the outcomes of the 1979 revolution and the establishment of Iran’s semi-theocratic system of governance has been reification of a perfectionist ethical position that is marked not by its fragmentary nature or its lapses, but rather by its assertion of the possibility and need to consistently uphold a moral utopia. This moral perfectionism is contrastable to the theorizing of authors, particularly those in the anthropology of Islam like Schielke (2009, 2015a), Koning (2013), Beekers and Kloos (2018) and Clarke (2018), but also others in the field of the anthropology of morality (e.g. Laidlaw, 2014; Laidlaw and Mair, 2019), whose work has tended to be characterized by a disposition I typify as ‘ethical static’. Like static on a television or phone, something that interrupts a clear image or a crisp sound, I use ‘ethical static’ to refer to the attempt to build lives that these authors characterize as ‘moral ambivalences’ (Fadil, 2019), bricolages or assemblages made of contradictory components. I believe, however, that since its inception, supporters of Iran’s Islamic Republic have presented for their citizens the idea of ethical perfection as something that, instead of being an impossibility, was within their grasp, so long as they adhered to the moral dictates of its governance. The irony is that in its attempt to elaborate this vision of moral perfectionism, Republican figures were in effect caught in a bind of their own making. As they encouraged citizens to lead a virtuous life, they had reified the ideal of individual and collective moral perfection as a possible utopia – not merely as something to strive for, but something that was actually achievable. In this article, I argue that the inadvertent result of this was that it provided those among my interlocutors who were critics of the status quo a mechanism through which to critique the morality of the state supporters they disagreed with on matters political and social. In effect, any lapse of judgement, any failure to live up to the ideal, rather than being brushed away as part of an inevitably imperfect moral reality, took on outsized importance.

In unpacking these themes, I have divided this article in the following way. The first part concerns the research environment, demographics, and appropriate appellations – difficult though they may be – for my interlocutors in Mashhad. After this, I look to an ethnographic case study that examines the Revolution Day parade (rāhpaymāyi-ye bistodovum-e bahman) and the response of my interlocutors to it. Amid a calendar already punctuated by regular intervals of heightened moral appeal, this example is an important point through which we might examine the tensions between positions of ‘ethical static’ and moral perfectionism. I then provide an analysis of the emergence of this moral perfectionism that took form in the aftermath of the revolution, before situating the material in the context of anthropology of Islam and of morality and ethics, focusing on works that have advocated ‘ethical static’ as a preferred heuristic of analysis. I conclude with reference as to how we might frame these in the broader context of what the promise of perfection means for anthropologies of utopia and the state.

Research in Mashhad: ‘State supporters’ and ‘critics of the status quo’

Mashhad − Iran’s second largest city, close to the border with Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, and home to the shrine of Imam Reza, the eighth Imam of Twelver Shi’ism, Iran’s dominant confession − was the ethnographic locus of this field research. During my work there, I drew on the experiences of a varied collection of interlocutors who represented a gamut of opinions and positions. Finding an appropriate appellation for these diverse communities is difficult. With regard to the two groups that I focus on here, I have had to make do with referring to them as ‘state supporters’ and ‘critics of the status quo’. My dilemma here lies in the attempt to maintain their anonymity, without so obscuring who they are to the point that they become totally faceless. What I can say with some certainty is that the interlocutors I refer to in this article as ‘critical/critics of the status quo’ – a term that is awkward perhaps, but maybe sufficiently broad to capture the diversity of potential ideological positions – were a representative of a group of key interlocutors, predominantly young men, in their early twenties, pursuing higher education, and rarely religious, who came from middle-class backgrounds. Their preferred hang out was the western suburban fringe of Mashhad, an area associated in the social geography of the city with their middle-class, educated disposition, and theorized to be generally opposed to the political status quo, unlike the eastern suburbs (referred to pejoratively as posht-e haram or ‘behind the shrine’), which are poorer, and understood to be more supportive of the government. Beyond this, however, what unified them was their critique of the Republican system. Criticism of the current government in Iran is complex and multifarious, encapsulating groups with a diverse spectrum of opinions, from royalist supporters of the former imperial regime, to critics who may consider themselves religious but whose understanding of faith does not fit with the state-supported narrative, to leftists, as well as ethnic minority separatist groups.

The other group I refer to as ‘supporters of the state’, but that too is a difficult label. By it, I mean to include both the basiji whose use of pornography provided the opening vignette to this article, as well as those who participate in the 22nd of Bahman parade that forms the ethnographic bulk of material, and that we will come to shortly. But this leaves lingering questions. After all, does a position of critique include political reformists (eslāhtalabān), those who do not wish to overthrow the Islamic Republic, but look forward to an incremental change in its political tenor? And on the other side are principlists (osulgarāyān), those who cluster ideologically close to the most conservative politics in Iran, but who often becomes ‘critics’ of the government when reformists hold the balance of power in the parliament and the presidency. These terms are imperfect markers then, but I use them nonetheless to describe at least political and social persuasions, if not highly discrete and concretized groups.

Protest against performance, sincerity against hypocrisy, on the anniversary of the Revolution

I turn now to my experiences at the annual parade that commemorates the anniversary of the revolution. The ‘parade for the 22nd of Bahman’ (rāhpaymāyi-e bistodovum-e bahman) is demonstrative of the concern of this article with the tension between ‘ethical static’ and moral perfectionism, for two primary reasons. First, because the parade was an official recapitulation of the victory of the ‘Islamic Revolution’, ³ the moment at which this insertion of a state-led vision of Islamic ethical precepts into everyday life became particularly acute. It encapsulated in microcosm much of the ideological and ethical message that the Islamic Republic had sought to instil in its citizens, and more broadly the world, since its inception. This event, rich with meaning, was for state ideologues the expression of the triumph of a moral order over an immoral one, the (re)-insertion of Islamic values into a society where they had been sorely missing, the recurring apogee of a new social movement that promised virtuous perfection. It had, to borrow a term from Cooper (2022), a ‘moral atmosphere’, a social ambience in which ‘tone or mood are shaped by the principles of right and wrong’ (Cooper, 2022: 5–6). And, second, because for those among my interlocutors who were critical of the status quo, the parade was also a moment which elicited a response that I argue to be an index of the ramifications of moral perfectionism and its impact on elements within Mashhadi society.

The celebrations of the ‘Victory of the Islamic Revolution’ (ruz-e piruzi-e enghelāb-e eslāmi) mark the annual anniversary of the return from exile of Ayatollah Khomeini, as well as the final collapse of Shāpur Bakhtiyār’s provisional republican administration that administered the country in the brief interlude following the Shah’s flight from Tehran. This period, referred to as the Ten Days of Dawn (dahe-ye fajr) was one of the few truly exuberant state-sponsored and sanctioned festivities – if not the only one – in the Islamic Republic. The parade is well known for its sloganeering and pro-government rhetoric used by these ‘supporters of the state’, typical phrases such as ‘death to America’ ⁴ (marg bar āmrikā) and ‘death to Israel’ (marg bar isrā-el) often paired with other revolutionary exhortations like the rhyming refrain ‘Independence, Freedom, Islamic Republic’ (esteghlāl, āzādi, jomhuriy-e eslāmi).

The 22nd of Bahman parades take place across the country in cities and towns large and small, and over the course of 2015 to 2018, I attended the parades three times in Mashhad, noting both subtle differences in what were politically salient issues in any given year, as well as a generally shared conservative tenor. The architects and organizers of the parade updated the content in response to major political events – the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear energy programme, for instance, or the capture in 2016 of several members of the United States’ Navy Riverine Command boats by the Revolutionary Guard corps. Other political themes – a visceral opposition to Zionism for instance or American imperialism – remained perennial favourites. The parades in Mashhad are particularly effervescent emotional occasions, with the route oriented along an axis that faces towards the shrine of Imam Reza at the heart of the city, providing a sacral geography that encapsulates one of the core aims of the Republican state, that is, the combination of religious and political authority. As participants wound their way towards the shrine, both men and women made minor prostrations and bows before the tomb of the deceased saint.

Yet for all its charged political atmosphere and orchestrated displays of rage against the perceived enemies of Iran, at least in Mashhad, the rallies of the 22nd of Bahman were usually family affairs, hospitable, domestic, friendly. Young couples pushed children in strollers, grandparents raised babes in arms on their shoulders, school children giggled, university students flashed toothy smiles and made ‘v’ signs with their fingers. Other mundane activities, like shopping for groceries, or even swapping numbers between men and women for potential relationships, were all incorporated into the broader category of practices that one might undertake while taking part in the parade.

What I found particularly striking though was the way my partner and I, obviously foreign, were embraced by members of the crowd, who welcomed us to Iran, asking: ‘Who is your favourite Imam? Mine’s Imam Reza! Do Christians have Imams?’, ‘Have you become a Muslim yet? No? Well, God-willing, while you’re here, you will become a Muslim’, and ‘Take our photo!’ In the women’s section, my partner was bundled up in the hugs and kisses of older women, even as they gently reminded her to correct her loose hijab; younger girls begged her to appear in selfies with them. ‘Where are you from? Are you American? We love America! You’re Australian? Even better! Welcome to Iran!’ they echoed.

The parade was, then, rather than simply some kind of singularly evocative or monologic (cf. Barry, 2017) Orwellian ‘hate week’, a polysemic event. There are quotidian elements – finding potential love matches, decisions on what to buy while in the city centre, as well as more particular concerns of moral conduct, like kindness and hospitality towards strangers from the West (my partner and I), which were then brought into close proximity with marked condemnations of American imperialism and Zionism, and the triumph of the conservative moral order promulgated (to greater and lesser degrees) by figures in the state.

This in itself, I would suggest, is not particularly remarkable. It is rather demonstrative I believe of the themes of ‘ethical static’ that have become a hallmark of the recent anthropology of morality, particularly in the Islamic world. I came to this analogy of ‘ethical static’ in thinking about the ways in which the perfectionist stance of my critical interlocutors produced a kind of moral monotone, in contrast to the colourful and polysemic ethical motivations used by those who were supportive of the status quo. Static, a feature of analogue technology, is by comparison heterochromatic, or at the very least dichromatic, and affords us then a metaphor for thinking about how this multiplicity of moral responses interferes at various levels. That one might in one breath call for condemnation of the United States, and then clutch a Western foreigner to one’s breast illustrates, if not so much moral ‘ambivalence’, at the very least a lived reality of multiple moral rubrics (see Deeb and Harb, 2013) being played out simultaneously. On the one hand, there is the ethical obligation of kindness to strangers, regardless of their origin, expressed in a culture of hospitality (mehmānavāzi) that has been noted in Iran (cf. Yarbakhsh, 2021). On the other there is a commitment to upholding the state-sanctioned opposition to US imperialism, Zionism, and other perceived enemies of the revolution.

In the days and weeks afterwards, however, my appearance at the parade took on great significance, particularly for my interlocutors critical of the status quo. When I described the parade to them, the emotions I had during the event, and this seemingly complex overlapping of moral behaviours, they recoiled. The following excerpt, taken from my fieldnotes transcribing a conversation with a number of interlocutors critical of the status quo, is indicative of the tenor of their response:

It’s not protest [eterāz], it’s performance [namāyesh]. The movement is political, the majority are…look, the state organizes it, they [the protesters] can’t spontaneously gather. Those who go probably don’t comprise more than 30–40% of the population. We think you’re playing with us, mocking us [maskhare], when you say you find the 22 of Bahman interesting. The people who go, they’re mostly students from high school, who are forced to go, there are those government workers, and there are those who are in the basij, all of whom are given some kind of positive [mosbat] reward and then there is some percentage of the population, who are like us, and – despite their lack of understanding – still go [nafahmidan va miran]. These people are hypocrites [do-ru].

In such an assessment, the question that lingers for me is the concern elicited by accusations of performance (namāyesh) and hypocrisy (do-ruii). These terms are not just some throwaway lines, but serious accusations, rooted at least in part in Islamic concerns around the sincerity of speech, a clear relationship between internal moods and motivations (bāten) and outward presentation (zāher) that has been noted by Beeman (2001) in his work on language in Iran, and the anger and opprobrium directed towards those who manifest a pious exterior while in their personal thoughts they are opposed to Islam (monāfeqin). The last accusation – of being a monāfeq – has been levelled particularly against opponents of the Islamic Republic, and especially the Mujahideen-e Khalq, who combined leftist politics with Islamic theology, and who carried out numerous attacks on figures in the new Republican administration. These two words stand in contrast to eterāz, which I think we might read as more than just ‘protest’, but in this context as something like ‘sincere’ or ‘genuine’ protest. But why was it so pivotal for these critics of the status quo to stress such resonant notions? The possibility that there may have been more than a singular ethical consideration in operation at a single time, that like the response to the young basiji at the beginning of this article, the protesters might be living with jostling moral considerations – their contempt for American politics on the one hand, the necessity of kindness to strangers on the other – was not raised.

What I want to suggest here is that the response that my interlocutors made was driven by an attempt to instrumentalize the state’s promise of ethical perfectionism as a way of condemning those ‘supporters of the state’ who participated in the parade. The dilemma for the Republican government was that by promising perfectionism, they had inadvertently both primed and provided their opponents with a powerful instrument for critique. It was the utopian vision of the state and its promise that one might live a life of virtue, uncontradicted by the ramifications of everyday inconsistency, that had instilled a preoccupation with a Manichaean standard of right and wrong where any paradox or deviation from unerring consistency took on outlandish proportions. To do one thing and say another was then not just a small matter of the reality of life, of ‘ethical static’, but a lapse of the most egregious kind, at least when performed by those with whom my interlocutors who were critics of the status quo disagreed. The rest of this article aims to situate and unpack the emergence of this phenomenon.

Morality and ethics in Iran

What might help us best understand such an emergence? Let me start with my initial aspiration in researching in Iran, which was to apply what has been described as ‘the ethical turn’ (Mattingly and Throop, 2018) in anthropology towards the question of Islamic governance and everyday life in a society guided by the principles of a semi-theocratic state. The last two decades or so have seen a flowering of work on moral and ethical concerns in anthropology (Faubion, 2011; Laidlaw, 2002, 2014; Laidlaw and Mair, 2019; Lambek, 2010; Mattingly, 2012; Robbins, 2007, 2013; Zigon, 2008). The recent anthropology of Islam has provided a particularly fruitful realm for analysis in this field, with work like Deeb and Harb (2013) among Shi’ites in Lebanon, Simon (2009) in Minangkabau, and Agrama (2010) in Egypt, to name but a few. There is also a small but growing field of work on ethical life in contemporary Iran through the lens of women’s piety (Haeri, 2020), the juridical system (Osanloo, 2020), and through kinship and food (Wellman, 2021), while ethical concerns appear perhaps tangentially throughout much of the anthropological materials on Iran from the beginning of the 21st century (Khosravi, 2008, 2017; Mahdavi, 2009; Varzi, 2006) although a work dedicated exclusively to this subject remains absent.

In my research in Mashhad, I aimed to tackle very explicitly how matters of morality and ethics were inserted into everyday contexts. The Persian word akhlāq, originally derived from Arabic, is the term that I would be inclined to render in English as ‘ethics’ or ‘morality’. There has been debate in the anthropology of ethics and morality about whether these words describe different phenomena (e.g. Zigon, 2008). In this article, influenced by my interlocutors’ use of the term akhlāq, while I recognize that they may describe different registers in particular contexts, I think that we might treat them as referring to what are at least locally a similar reality. Akhlāq also carries with it a quotidian sensibility that potentially applies well to the everyday sense that I am trying to get at, which we might similarly translate as ‘behaviour’ or ‘manner’. In characterizing the personality of individuals, someone might be ‘khosh-akhlāq’, potentially best understood in English as ‘good natured’. Such an understanding is worth comparing to Lambek’s (2010) interpretation of what he refers to as ‘ordinary ethics’, and certainly owes a debt to the focus of medieval Islamic philosophers on Aristotelean virtue ethics for theories of moral comportment. ⁵

It was put to me also that there might be something of a ‘category confusion’ when referring to morality or ethics in Iran, and that much of that which is construed under this rubric might be better thought of as fiqh (Persian feqh), that is, Islamic jurisprudence. Bucar (2018), for example, suggests that much of the writing on Islamic ethics by Western (what she reads as European and American) authors tends to look at matters that are more properly classified as feqh. To the extent that much of the moral positioning of the state of Iran is derived from the authority that is invested in the clerical hierarchy and the power of the ‘ulema to interpret the Shi’ite shari’at, I would recognize that there is perhaps a formal element of ethical discussion that might be best classified as the domain of feqh. But among both the critics of the status quo and supporters of the state that I worked with in Mashhad, there was little notion that feqh was synonymous with akhlāq. Instead, the realm of feqh was better understood as a matter of religious legal abstraction, rather than what we would think of as individual moral comportment or behaviour that distinguished between good and bad. In addition, I was informed by those who were critical of Islamic ethics, that that which was allowed by the feqh was not necessarily moral (akhlāqi). The example I most often heard was religious permission for more polygyny. Joking invocations that because God was one, monogamy was preferred were paired alongside more serious condemnations, one interlocutor referring to the affordance of multiple wives as part of the ‘pornography of Sharia’ (pornography-ye shari’at), that is, what they argued to be the ultimately immoral (gheyr-e akhlāqi) element of religious law.

The emergence of moral perfectionism

One half of the central dilemma of this article, the concept of moral perfectionism, requires further unpacking. Where did this state-supported ideology of moral perfectionism emerge? There is a long perfectionistic and utopian tradition in Iran, going back to Zoroastrian times (see Bakhsh, 2013; Khosravi, 2021). It is nonetheless difficult to draw a teleological chain between such an ancient past and the present. Looking for more recent antecedents, we might turn to the particular constellation of ethical authority and religious perfectionism embodied in Twelver Shi’ite belief that dominates the social topography of contemporary Iran. The theological substantives of this phenomenon are complex, but the doctrine of ‘ismah, translated from Arabic as ‘protection’, while referring more broadly to the concept of moral infallibility, provides a useful starting point. A fundamental of Shi’ite Twelver theology, this notion held that it was not only the Prophet ⁶ who possessed such miraculous powers, but also Muhammad’s daughter Fatima, her husband (and the Prophet’s cousin) Ali, and their descendants in the personages of the eleven other Imams. Lambton (1989: 94) argues that it is the ‘assumption of human perfection in the Imam’ that was the ultimate source of the theological split between emergent Shi’ism and Sunnism.

The doctrine of infallibility is important not only in signposting the split between Shi’ism and Sunnism, but ultimately because it is in part the point of origin for the authoritative, now state-led, mode of ethical conduct that characterizes the contemporary semi-theocratic Islamic Republic in Iran. Without dwelling on the intricacies of this, which is better explored elsewhere (e.g. Corboz, 2015; Walbridge, 2001), this doctrine ultimately gave rise to a model of clerical authority in which a leading cleric capable of conducting ijtihad (independent reasoning) became a ‘source of emulation’ (marja’-e taqlid) for Shi’ite communities. This authoritative moral position has meant that, as Walbridge notes, ‘to many Shi’a the opinions of the marja’ are the “final word” on an issue. The marja’, therefore, has the potential to wield great influence and a strong marja’ can be a powerful unifying force’ (Walbridge, 2001: 4).

Of course, the authoritative position of the marja’ in Twelver Shi’ism does not mean that all Iranians have a marja’, or that they necessarily follow their pronouncements to the letter. But the consolidation of religious authority in the position of marja’ for those who are pious and committed to normative Twelver Shi’ism as it is practised in Iran does help to distinguish what we might say has been the anthropology of morality and Islam’s hitherto predominant focus (see e.g. Hirschkind, 2006; Mahmood, 2011; Marsden, 2005; Schielke, 2009, 2015a) on the more diffuse, individualistic even, Sunni and especially Salafi forms of religious praxis. In Twelver Shi’ism, this hierarchical, authoritative, and comparatively rigid modality of ecclesiastical authority that I have referred to has flow-on effects for the way in which the cultivation of virtues is understood. This distinction becomes even more acute in the Iranian case study, given the pivotal events of the 1979 revolution, which provide a very particular modern inflection point for the emergence of ethical perfectionism.

The overthrow of the imperial government under the Shah, and the eventual outmanoeuvring of leftist forces by the groups associated with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, saw the triumph of Khomeini’s particular vision of a society, in which questions of morality and religion were deeply fused with matters of statecraft. As I note elsewhere (see Theobald, forthcoming) Khomeini’s utopian vision of his new society was strongly informed by his own belief in the possibility of individual moral perfection. Moin (1994) argues that the principal influence on Khomeini’s utopian thought was his mystical understanding of the possibility of human perfection, seeing himself as the ‘perfector of Man’ (Moin, 1994: 64), who would ultimately establish a government of ‘absolute justice’ that would guide society ‘towards absolute perfection’ (Moin, 1994: 73).

Khomeini’s tutelage over the new Republic following the victory of the revolution was characterized, then, by a period of Islamization of cultural institutions such as universities, marking a turning point in a particular mode of the public cultivation of an ethical disposition. This is not to suggest that the Pahlavi period, that is, the previous imperial regime, or the periods before it, were unconcerned with moral decision making, and the high modernism of the Pahlavi monarchs represents in itself a specific kind of ethical discourse. But certainly, the advent of a self-proclaimed Islamic government, in combination with the increasing power of a centralized state, marked the intrusion of political institutions into the realm of virtue in a way that had largely been previously unthinkable. As Salomon notes with the Inqadh regime in Sudan, Iran’s Islamic Republican model was not the first government to ‘base its strength on Islamic legitimacy’, but ‘never before had any government so comprehensively utilised the legal, law enforcement, media, and military tools of a modern state in the service not only of government reform but of the moral reform of individuals as well’ (Salomon, 2016: 72–3).

The period of Islamization in the aftermath of the revolution of 1979 is more comprehensively covered elsewhere (see e.g. Shorish, 1988), so here I wish only to chart some of the most salient aspects. In the period following the revolution, the newly formed state and its ideologues became pre-eminently concerned with matters of public comportment, assuring that it adhered to their exacting standards of what they understood as the constituent forms of Islamic piety. This was demonstrated in a host of changes from the specifically legal – changes to the constitution outlining moral duties like amr be ma’ruf va nahy az monkar (Golkar, 2011), women and men’s dress, inheritance rights and divorce rights (Mir-Hosseini, 1993) – to more abstract or less mandatory manifestations like the exhortation to give to charity or for regular prayer. Much of the policing of morality was performed by the basij in their role as the enforcers of public virtue (Golkar, 2011).

Although this invasive state-led public moralizing has ebbed and flowed, often contingent on whether reformists or ‘principlists’ hold the reins of the presidency and majles, government efforts imploring the cultivation of pious dispositions and ethical values remain a feature of the urban landscape, suffusing all aspects of the everyday. Throughout the year, admonitions to prayer bedecked the signage across Mashhad and other cities and towns. During the summer months in particular, campaigns equating women not wearing the chador to sweets unwrapped and buzzing with flies served to underscore the government’s commitment to a mode of virtuous attire. These physical reminders stood alongside verbal pleas and scoldings to adhere to such ethical dressing.

Although historians like Sadeghi-Boroujerdi (2019) have argued that Khomeini’s utopianism was extinguished on the battlefields of the war with Iraq (1980–88), I suggest (see Theobald, forthcoming) that the ‘promise of perfection’ that Khomeini advocated for continues to influence, sometimes in a subtle manner and at other times more overtly, elements of quotidian moral reflection if not in Iran in its entirety, then certainly among those with whom I interacted in Mashhad. This idea of perfectionism was manifest in a plurality of ways, with elements of life in Mashhad, both quotidian and more exceptional, thought to be either perfect, or capable of perfection. I want to abnegate the tendency to write this off as something merely something like ‘loose talk’, that is, the kind of self-aggrandizing that we see among individuals of various stripes who like to imagine that their country, of all places, is ‘the best’. There was something deeper here, a more persistent thread of ethical utopianism.

None of this means however that Iran was a moral utopia, or a place in which citizens carried out their ethical obligations unreflexively and automatically. On the contrary, many of my interlocutors who were critical of the status quo did not necessarily believe that Islamic comportment was truly ethical or virtuous, and those who were opposed to the government often made reference or appealed to some kind of transcendent pan-human and pre-cultural ethical position as evidence of the Republic’s own moral failings. Even among those who did think Islamic values were ethical, it did not mean that they believed the state had necessarily achieved the aim of moral perfection. It was common to complain about both the failings of the state with regard to its ethical duties towards citizens, and also the failure of citizens in their duties to one another. What the government had achieved, rather, was a heightened ethical expectation, a greater attunement to moral matters. In the explication of a sense that it might be possible to live a life that was free from ethical ambivalences and with an exacting clarity, the notion that an individual ethical assemblage might include moments of lapse, relapse, or other forms of contradiction had, at least in certain circumstances, withered away. Again, we ought to be careful of blanket statements. I do not wish to suggest that there was a universal belief in the possibility of moral perfection. But as the state promulgated a reified vision of the perfectly moral man and woman, so it primed its citizens to be especially sensitive to questions and performances of the ethical.

Understanding ‘ethical static’

This brings us back to the matter of this ‘ethical static’, and how it sits in contradistinction to the idea of moral perfectionism. What I refer to as the concept of ‘ethical static’ emerged largely in response to the work of Talal Asad and those influenced by him like Saba Mahmood (2011), Charles Hirschkind (2006) and Hussein Ali Agrama (2010) whose work, all focused on Egypt, looked at the cultivation of ethical virtues among pious subjects. In contrast, a new generation of authors working in the field of the anthropology of Islam (and also to some extent other religions) and morality have tended to focus instead on an analysis that stresses ambivalence and fragmentation (see e.g. Beekers and Kloos, 2018; Clarke, 2018; Koning, 2013; Laidlaw and Mair, 2019; Schielke, 2009, 2015a, 2015b), although as Hefner (2019) notes, Ewing (1990) was perhaps among the first to assert that ‘rather than being seamlessly consistent, human subjectivity is prone to aspirational plurality and experiential inconsistency’ (Hefner, 2019: 145). At the heart of the effort of these authors is an attempt to break what they saw as the privileging of the lives of the pious, single-minded interlocutors at the expense of ‘conveying the complex and sometimes conflictual experiences of people actually pursuing those projects’ (Laidlaw and Mair, 2019: 346).

Such a concentration on ambivalence has not escaped criticism, however. Fadil and Fernando (2015: 61) argue that by calling for a study of the ‘everyday’ or ‘actual’ lives of Muslims, researchers mark revivalist Muslims as ‘exceptional, and more insidiously, not “real”’. It is worth also noting that such analyses have been ethnographically delimited – Egypt is a particularly strong focus of such materials and, with the exception of Deeb and Harb (2013), all of these treatments have focused exclusively on Sunni communities, rather than Shi’ite, or other Muslim minorities.

Even as we might recognize the limitations that Fadil and Fernando elucidate, I maintain that the heuristic of ‘ethical static’ still does provide a useful rubric for understanding some of the complex and multivalent elements that assemble to form individual moral outlooks. Accepting the accusation of hypocrisy rather flattens the behaviour of the basiji in the vignette which began this article, and his ‘educational’ justification of using pornography. If we accept instead this behaviour as being a matter of ‘ethical static’, we may hold out then the possibility of a far more nuanced set of impulses. Likewise, to return to the vignette from the 22nd of Bahman, a recognition of ‘ethical static’ helps us escape moralizing judgements about insincerity that my interlocutors critical of the status quo made of the supporters of the state who participated in the parades, allowing instead for a far greater complexity of moral motivations. As I have suggested, that one might both call for the death of Western imperialism, while also hugging a Western stranger, is not then particularly exceptional if we accept that ‘ethical static’ is indeed a feature of the moral landscape.

But there is something at least noteworthy about the way in which my interlocutors who were critics of the status quo respond to these manifestations of ‘ethical static’. Their response was primed instead by one of the achievements of the Iranian Revolution and the Islamist ideologues who ultimately wrested power: that is the reification of an ideology that suggests that through adherence to Islamic laws, and through the cultivation of its corresponding ethical dispositions, inhabitants of the Islamic Republic might be able themselves to lead morally perfect, uncontradicted lives, a kind of total coherence of the moral self, or what Lambek (in Berliner et al., 2016: 6) refers to as “forensic” personhood. The dilemma here, at least for the Iranian state, is that for my interlocutors who were critics of the status quo, the promise of perfection provided the tools for condemning the state supporters they held in contempt.

Taking stock of a state-led project of moral perfectionism

This material is impactful both for our thinking about the anthropology of ethics and morality, as well as more generally about the state. To start, I hold that these state-led projects of ethical utopianism ought to encourage anthropologists to engage more substantively with the way that perfectionism is writ in societies, and the ramifications of a commitment to perfectionism. Too often there is a tendency to think of perfectionism as an ephemera, rather than an impactful moral phenomenon. This work here demonstrates precisely one of those meaningful outcomes that a commitment to moral perfectionism can have.

But there are also lessons for our understanding of the interrelation between the state and utopianism. For example, this state project of moral perfectionism demonstrates the persistence of a utopian ideology that is all too often understood to have been relegated to the dustbin of history. There has been a tendency in scholarship (one need look no further than Francis Fukuyama’s famed and ultimately repudiated essay, The End of History and the Last Man) to assume that since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the pursuit of utopian governance has been put aside in favour of more ‘pragmatic’ if imperfect goals in much of the world. This is equally true of Iran, which since signing the peace treaty with Iraq following the war of 1980 to 1988, is largely assumed to have followed a policy of Realpolitik in contrast to its earlier revolutionary fervour (see e.g. Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, 2019). The behaviour of my interlocutors critical of the status quo indicates that these moral projects have not been subsumed into or replaced by mundane politics, but rather that they continue to have relevance for sections of Iranian society.

The examples here also help us trouble literature on utopianism that suggests that those Arcadian projects that continue to be experimented with are almost always small-scale and micro-communal, organized against the purview of the dominant society (see e.g. Cooper, 2013). In Mashhad we see instead what happens when something at as grand a scale as the state attempts to put into practice utopian ideals. Finally, these examples show the unpredictable ways in which such utopian moralizing comes to be experienced as a lived reality. It is not as though there is a clear-cut connection between the ideals of the state, and the way that such perfectionism is actually felt. On the contrary, this utopianism shines through to us in surprising and unexpected ways: perhaps most acutely in the ironic situation that those who are most critical of the project of Islamist governance since the 1979 revolution are the ones who insist on moral perfectionism. A moral utopia remains then a force to be reckoned with, as much as it is one that is unpredictable.