Bibliography: #BIB30094

web link	bahai-library.com/bibliography/BIB30094
reference type	Journal Article
title	The Bare Life of Iranian Bahā'īs : The Case of Shāhrūd, 1944
journal	Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam
author	Yazdani, Mina
authority control	Mina Yazdani
year	2023
date	2023
volume	54
abstract	This article explores the persecution of the Bahāʾīs in Iran in the first half of the 1940s. Drawing on primary sources including government documents, memoirs, newspaper articles, and the correspondence of the Bahāʾī institutions of the time, it focuses on interactions between the Shīʿī clerics, the people who followed them, the government (both central and local), and the Bahāʾīs. It proposes that the chaotic period of 1941–1944 in Allied-occupied Iran—with an increase in the religious activities of Bahāʾīs, a resurgence in the power of the ʿulamāʾ, weak and unstable cabinets, a young and inexperienced king, and governments unwilling or unable to protect Bahāʾīs—created what Giorgio Agamben (b. 1942) calls a “state of exception.” Taking a microhistorical approach, the article then focuses on events in the north-central city of Shāhrūd in 1944, when, after a period of threats and tension, Bahāʾīs were killed and their houses were plundered. Using Agamben’s conceptualizations, the article proposes that in that “state of exception,” in the “camp” of Shāhrūd Bahāʾīs fell into the category of homo sacer: forcibly reduced to the state of “bare life,” deprived of the right to live, outside the country’s legitimate social life.
language	English
keywords	PERSECUTION; IRAN; SHAHRUD; 1940s
pages	415–450
Legal note	11.

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