[R-G] Mohammad Salemy, "Iran's Quiet Revolution: Mohammad Javad Jahangir's The Invisible Crowd"

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On the other hand, a majority of Iranians, who neither voted for
Mousavi nor have participated in any of the post-election protests,
are nearly completely invisible in the corporate Western media, so
left-wing media must make them visible and convey their voices. --
Yoshie

<http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/salemy280709.html>
Iran's Quiet Revolution: Mohammad Javad Jahangir's The Invisible Crowd
by Mohammad Salemy

Mohammad Javad Jahangir,
The Invisible Crowd,
11 July - 7 September 2009.
Go to <http://dadabase.ca/crowd_jahan_00.php> to view the online
exhibition The Invisible Crowd.

According to Ervand Abrahamian, a scholar of Iran's contemporary
history, George Rudé's observation that "perhaps no historical
phenomenon has been so thoroughly neglected by historians as the
crowd" is particularly true about the Middle East.1

    While European journalists have invariably portrayed oriental
crowds as "xenophobic mobs" hurling insults and bricks at Western
embassies, local conservatives have frequently denounced them as
"social scum" in the pay of the foreign hand, and radicals have often
stereotyped them as "the people" in action.  For all, the crowd has
been an abstraction, whether worthy of abuse, fear, praise, or even of
humour, but not a subject of study.2

Abrahamian's classic text on the subject called "The Crowd in Iranian
Politics 1905-1953" describes the role of the crowd in politics and
conceptualizes, for the first time, the social and class makeup of the
Iranian crowd in the country's transformation from a pre-industrial to
a semi-industrial national economy and, by doing so, invents a
language with which to study the Iranian political crowd and its
history.3

Written in 1968, Abrahamian's text unfortunately does not bear witness
to the crucial role that the crowd played in the political
developments that culminated in the Islamic revolution of 1978, a task
Abrahamian finely accomplishes later in his magnum opus Iran between
Two Revolutions.4  Abrahamian is Iran's first structuralist historian
who rejects the prominence of events and personalities as clues to
history and is rather interested in the social makeup of Iran and its
various movements for political power, an energy that, according to
him, finds its proper medium of expression in the crowds and
demonstrations.

Events of the past few weeks surrounding the Iranian presidential race
and its aftermath not only were the most recent example of the social
force called the Iranian political crowd, they were also a new chance
for us to reexamine Abrahamian's thesis regarding the political crowd
in the age of global spectacle.  In doing so, a sudden interest in the
reform movement and its social makeup is not enough.  To understand
the phenomenon of political crowd, one needs to also cross to the
other side and study the pro-Ahmadinejad and the pro-government
crowds.

The Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1978 was the first of its kind,
coinciding with the rise of the spectacular global international media
that acted as a mirror reflecting the image of the street crowd onto
the pages of newspapers, magazines, and the broadcast network images.
Ayatollah Khomeini quickly understood and incorporated this mirror in
his political machinery by surrounding himself with Western-educated
members of the Iranian intelligentsia who were able to reflect his
views to Europeans and through them to the Iranian educated class.  It
was in the global media that the text about the Ayatollah and the
revolution appeared alongside the images of the crowds in the streets
of Tehran, giving meaning to the people and defining their leadership.

Today, the new wave of protests in Iran is taking place in a different
media environment where YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and text
messages have replaced Time, Newsweek, Paris Match and Der Spiegel
magazines as the international currency of news.  At the same time,
Iran is going through a kind of spectacular awakening in its Debordian
sense.5  The development of a post-Persian Gulf War consumer society
in Iran has had similar effects on Iran to those of developments in
Europe and America after World War Two.  It seems now that after
centuries of resisting the temptation of images as a needed addition
to or a replacement for the centrality of text and literature in the
creation of social meaning, globalization of the last two decades has
finally forced the Iranian society to take images, particularly their
own image, very seriously.  This new spectacular awakening among
Iranians about the role of images, visual aesthetics, and physical
beauty was apparent everywhere in the presidential campaign and its
aftermath.  The reliance on the spectacle to reflect, rather than to
engage directly in, the situation actually could be preventing much
larger violence, since appearances on a spectacular stage that in our
age involves and relies on the Internet are not limited to the
pro-reformist crowd.  To counter the wave of visual creativity in
support of reform, the Islamist friends of Ahmadinejad were also using
a large amount of imagery, alongside fashion items and accessories, to
identify themselves, to promote their candidate, and to fight the
propaganda of the opposing side.

To counter the green colour that earlier in the campaign had become
the symbol of the reformist candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi's
supporters, the Ahmadinejad campaign picked the Iranian three-colour
flag as its symbol.  In this reversal of the usual identities,
Moussavi, the closest candidate to secular nationalists, decided to
use an Islamic-defined green colour to deflect the accusation of not
being Islamic enough, while Ahmadinejad used the flag and its
nationalist association to deflect the accusation of religious
extremism.

Protests and demonstrations are not new in Iran.  In fact,
pro-government demonstrations have been institutionalized by the state
since the dawn of the Islamic Republic and have been used to both
legitimize and assert state power.  The sudden interest by the global
media in the anti-government protests in Iran has made the world
audience familiar with the faces and social makeup of the pro-reform
crowd.  Yet, a shroud of mystery surrounds the pro-Ahmadinejad crowd.
The dual nature of the Iranian society along the lines of culture,
education, region, and class has made it easy for both groups,
pro-government and reformist, to claim the title of "people."  Only a
close study of the makeup of these crowds may allow us to come to an
understanding of the Iranian society and its complex structure.

Unlike the reformist crowd that has quickly emerged through the recent
presidential campaign of Mir Hossein Moussavi, the pro-Ahmadinejad
crowd has a long, thirty-year history in the making.  A once official
crowd in service of the state, the Ahmadinejad crowd has been made up
mostly of those who returned to the street, and the ballot box, after
a decade, to launch their own reform against corruption and to renew
their support for the regional resistance against the USA and Israel.

This invisible crowd, particularly those not working for the security
services and government agencies, was asked by the state to stay home
throughout the riots to prevent the situation from turning into a
civil war.  Nevertheless, they had been present at the ballot box and
at certain demonstrations including the Friday prayer given by the
Supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei.  Captured by Mohammad Javad, they
are here to show, at least to themselves, that they exist, and to
refute the reformist candidate's claim that the reelection of
Ahmadinejad was anything but the democratic will of the people.

The Invisible Crowd exhibition borrows its name from a sign that has
inspired the work.  During one of the early pro-Ahmadinejad rallies
before the vote, Mohammad Javad Jahangir, who was present at the
scene, noticed a sign in the crowd that poked fun at the lack of the
global media coverage of large pro-Ahmadinejad demonstrations.  The
sign depicted a television containing a still frame of an empty city
street with the CNN logo at the bottom.  Underneath the television set
read the words "We are the invisible crowd for the Western media."
With this series of photographs, Mohammad Javad is attempting to map
the social and economic makeup of the pro-government masses in Iran.
Ignored by the modern secular middle class as uneducated, ignorant,
and/or hired bodies, the pro-government crowd has been, and continues
to be, an important part of the political developments in Iran.


Mohammad Javad Jahangir is an Iranian artist based in Tehran, with a
background in Islamic studies at a seminary.  He has studied and
worked with Abbas Kiarostami, Reza Abedini, and Mohsen Rastani on
several projects.  His work has been featured by BBC, Reuters, and
other international news organizations.  He graduated from Tarbiate
Moalem University of Tehran in January 2009.



1  G. Rudé, The Crowd in History, 1730-1848 (New York 1964), p. 3.

2  E. Abrahamian, "The Crowd in Iranian Politics, 1905-1953," Past &
Present, No. 41 (Oxford, 1968), p. 184-210, <dadabase.ca/crowd.pdf>.

3  Ibid.

4  E. Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions (Princeton, 1982).

5  G. Debord, The Society of The Spectacle (Cambridge, 1989).

Mohammad Salemy is an artist and curator of the DADABASE Gallery
(formerly at 183 East Broadway, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada --
now exclusively online).  He is also known for his writing and
activism.  A graduate of the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design,
he is currently an MA student at the University of British Columbia.
His work has been included in solo and group exhibitions locally and
nationally.  He is currently working on a group exhibition for
Artspeak Gallery, scheduled to open on 11 September 2009, titled
"Race: Proposals in Truth and Reconciliation."  This article was first
published on the Web site of the DADABASE Gallery; it is reproduced
here for educational purposes.  Download Salemy's article in Persian:
<dadabase.ca/press_crowd_fa.pdf>.