Ermia googoosh academy biography of barack
" One Can Veil and Be a Singer! " Performing Piety on an Iranian Talent Competition
Journal of Middle East Women's Studies “One Can Veil and Be a Singer!” Performing Piety on an Iranian Talent Competition FARZANEH HEMMASI This article explores the media controversy surrounding the victory of Ermia, a veiled female vocalist, on the expatriate Iranian talent competition Googoosh Music Academy (GMA).
A historically and ethnographically informed “ethnotextual” analysis of a selection of Persian-language television programs, articles and news reports, weblogs, and Facebook posts responding to Ermia reveals how a reality television contestant came to disturb simplistic but powerful binaries of modest/immodest, religious/secular, Iranian/Western, and national/diasporic as she combined signifying elements of these positions into one unsettling figure.
The article shows how Ermia’s case gathered political valence through the contentious transnational Iranian mediascape and the televised talent genre’s premise—representing “real,” “ordinary” contestants and fostering audience participation. I argue that GMA became a space for publicly playing with cultural norms, political participation, and the politics of piety at some distance from the pressures that make publicly living difference so challenging.
ABSTRACT KEYWORDS transnational media, popular music, Iran, veiling and piety, political participation I n Iranian pop icon Googoosh began a new venture through the London-based Manoto 1 satellite television station Googoosh Music Academy (GMA), a pop music talent competition in which nonprofessional contestants performed before a panel of judges and a television audience and were promoted or eliminated by popular vote.
As the darling of Pahlavi-era popular culture who was silent for two decades following the revolution before making an explosive comeback in , Googoosh was herself a contentious enough figure to attract viewers to the program. Yet in its final season a single contestant named Ermia inspired audience participation and debate as never before. Ermia had much in common with many of her fellow contestants: she grew up in Iran, moved to Germany as a young adult,was JMEWS • Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies • • November DOI / • © by the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies Published by Duke University Press a longtime Googoosh fan, and was an avid amateur performer of Iranian popular music.
But Ermia also covered her hair with a scarf, wore body-obscuring clothing, and did not shake hands with men —all manifestations of her Muslim religious observance. While veiled female pop singers are not uncommon in Malaysia, Indonesia, Egypt, and postinvasion Afghanistan, Ermia’s combined appearance and behavior was almost a complete anomaly in modern Iranian history, where veiling has generally been viewed as antithetical to so immodest an act as singing popular music onstage before unrelated males.
A veiled woman was likewise a surprising inclusion on Iranian expatriate media, which has tended to marginalize and even reject Islam as a part of diasporic Iranian identity (Gholami , –60; Naficy ).1 In scores of Persian-language articles, blog posts, news reports, television programs, and thousands upon thousands of Facebook comments from inside and outside Iran responding to Ermia’s performances and eventual victory, she was variously ridiculed as a “clown” who didn’t understand Islam; celebrated as representative of “liberal,” “modern,” or “moderate” Islam; and decried as a “beautiful” but nefarious plot by Iran’s enemies.
Self-identified secularists and religious authors both questioned whether she was “for real” and, if so, what Ermia’s unusual example might indicate about morality, piety, and religious authority in Iranian society. If, as some posited, Ermia was not real, then who produced this elaborate fabrication, and why?
What was “behind” this reality television contestant who disturbed simplistic but nonetheless powerful binaries of modest/immodest, religious/secular, Iranian/ Western, and national/diasporic? This article examines the media representations of Ermia, and reactions to these representations in Iranian media. Ermia’s embodied and discursive performances of Shiite female piety generated widespread discomfort and represented a rare point of convergence between audience members asserting starkly contrasting orientations toward religion, thus demonstrating that female piety and morality inspire impassioned reactions not only from pious Iranians or the Iranian state but from secular Iranians as well, both in and outside the country.
As I show, while Ermia’s personal moral decision-making fit into the larger postrevolutionary transformation of piety and “Islam . . . into a body of knowledge debated in the public sphere” (Ghamari-Tabrizi , ), the lines she crossed by singing while veiling raised long-standing, politically contentious questions regarding the proper places of women and music in Iranian public life about which no broad consensus has yet been reached.
I situate Ermia and GMA’s production and circulation within a complex and contested transnational Persian-language mediascape, the makeup and dynamics of which powerfully affected how audiences understood and interpreted the competition. Well aware of the propagandistic uses of news and information, and party to the distinct and often conflicting perspectives embedded in official, expatriate, and Western government–sponsored media geared toward Persian-speaking Published by Duke University Press HEMMASI • Performing Piety Journal of Middle East Women's Studies JMEWS • Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies • November Journal of Middle East Women's Studies audiences, many Iranians consume media and entertainment under the assumption that what they encounter is neither transparent nor objective but necessitates socially, historically, and politically savvy readings.
I argue that diverse audience interpretations of Ermia are acts of meaning making and deliberation within the proliferating, contradictory media environment in which little is confirmed (or even confirmable) but nevertheless raises questions of political and social import. That so many viewers not only voted for Ermia but found it necessary to explain her very existence in light of religious authority, conspiracy, and generational and gendered sociocultural change speaks to the politically generative quality of popular culture within a fraught political environment.
The examples I present in the article are an opportunity to observe this meaning making in action. The televised talent competition is also critical to my focus on media. Described by Katherine Meizel (, ) as the “perfectly commodified marriage of democracy and capitalism,” the televised pop music talent competition has been especially effective in blurring distinctions between entertainment and politics on the one hand, and representation and “reality” on the other.
The complex nature of Turkey's relations with Syria Russia 24 December Email will not be published required. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. You can opt out at any time.Grounded in an ideal of “free and fair elections” and the supposed “ordinariness” of its contestants, GMA slotted comfortably into discussions of political process while introducing the possibility that its participants represented actually existing, offscreen social identities and political perspectives. The gravity with which audiences responded to Ermia and GMA must be understood in terms of a specific Iranian historical context that links music, female singing, and veiling with issues of morality and political expression.
In the early s the revolutionary government enforced compulsory veiling, strict limits on music making, and a ban on public female singing as part of its larger efforts to eradicate “corruption” and “Westoxification” (gharbzadigi) from the country. As I argue elsewhere (Hemmasi a, b), because many Iranians have come to associate postrevolutionary musical performance with questions of rights of expression and the influence of religion over public life, and because female solo singing yokes the postrevolutionary politicization of women to the parallel politicization of music, the Iranian female singing voice bears an overdetermined interpretation as “political” regardless of its possessor’s intentions,which, in Ermia’s case, remained opaque.
While related to a broader scholarly investigation of pious Muslim women’s performances, my attention is on a little-discussed phenomenon within this larger field: the intersection of pious women with secular cultural formations developed in response to Islamism. Unlike influential accounts of Muslim piety as a response to dominant state secularism (cf.
Hirschkind ; Mahmood ), my account looks at secularist cultural production in response to an Islamist state and the fraught attempts of post-Islamist secularists to accommodate forms of piety unaligned with the Iranian state.2 The postrevolutionary Iranian Shiite context is likewise distinct from the conditions analyzed in influential scholarly work on Muslim Published by Duke University Press piety and politics elsewhere in the region (cf.
Deeb ; Deeb and Harb ; Hirschkind ; Mahmood ). In particular, the Iranian state and ulema’s engagement with notions of dynamic jurisprudence ( figh-i puya), the prevalence of diverse lay interpreters of religious sources in the public sphere, the competing “sources of emulation” (marjaʿ-yi taqlid) with which Shiites can align themselves (in the Iranian case, in alignment with or opposition to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and his partisans), and the deep interpenetration of state and religion have together made for a complex and unique set of relations between religious observance, nonobservance, and the Iranian state.
Finally, the present article’s focus on diaspora-homeland debates and performances of morality, piety, and politics as expressed through transnational media also represents a departure from studies focused on local urban or nationally defined contexts (cf. Aghaie ; Deeb ; Deeb and Harb ; Hirschkind ; Mahmood ; Nieuwkerk , ; Torab ).
I account for the specificity of Iranian history and politics while locating Ermia’s example in a complex media environment that engages both national and transnational terms of debate, points of reference, and on-the-ground contexts to demonstrate how circulating discourses of Iranian national and religious norms encounter and engender politically productive “friction” as they travel (Tsing , 5).
This article emerges from a larger project on Iranian popular music and media in transnational perspective (Hemmasi , , , , a, b, c). Between and I conducted ethnographic research with producers and consumers of Persian-language popular music and media in the North American Iranian diasporic hubs of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Toronto, which included interviews, participant observations, oral history, and “ethnotextual” analysis (Schein , –6).
My continuous engagement with Iranian diasporic music producers and consumers as both a researcher and a fellow diasporic Iranian leads me to pursue “situated interpretation” of the media texts cited within this study; this interpretation is “from a site of [personal and] ethnographic entanglement with those whose subject positions allow a more seamless identification” with the media in question and locates texts and their interpretation “within a wider play of cultural [and political] signification that exceeds” any single text in isolation ().
Together with Golbarg Rekabtalaei, a historian of Iranian film who worked as a research assistant on this project when she was a doctoral candidate, I located, discussed, and translated the articles, television programs, and Facebook comments that are cited throughout the text. In terms of sheer numbers, laudatory and disparaging fan discourse on Facebook and YouTube (“We love you, Ermia!”/ “I hate Ermia!”) far exceeded the extended, interpretive essays we encountered.
Because my goal was to better understand how Ermia came to garner reportedly unusual levels of transnational Iranian support and suspicion, I ultimately selected for analysis a combination of twenty articles, blogs, and reports from inside and Published by Duke University Press HEMMASI • Performing Piety Journal of Middle East Women's Studies JMEWS • Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies • November Journal of Middle East Women's Studies outside Iran, and from unofficial and semiofficial news agencies.
Within these, I privileged those works I judged to most clearly represent contrasting views on Ermia and that asserted a variety of reasons for her social, moral, and/or political significance.3 The resulting study does not aim for comprehensiveness, then, but for a historically and “ethnotextually” situated investigation into the contours of a transnational debate that engaged piety, gender, politics, music, and media in new and heretofore unseen ways.
The article opens with a historical overview of Iranian Muslim women and public singing and their twentieth-century imbrication with issues of secularity, morality, and rights. After a discussion of the risks and affordances of reality television programming in the Middle East and the transnational Iranian media context, I turn to the season of the GMA competition and Ermia’s self-presentation in anticipation of controversy.
An analysis of diverse audience reactions to Ermia’s victory follows, in which I highlight secularists and religious conservatives’ theories regarding the veiled singer’s social, cultural, and political significance. The article concludes by examining Ermia’s personalized approach to morality and piety in the context of a larger expansion of religious authority among pious youth in the Middle East.
Women and Public Singing in Twentieth-Century Iran In Shiite Islam as it has been practiced in Iran for many centuries, women’s singing voices have been considered to necessitate external control. This view stems from the much-discussed dangers of women’s bodies and voices to males as well as the potentially arousing qualities of music (Husayni , 66–76).
In one form of this logic, just as women’s hair and bodies must be covered in public to prevent “visual adultery” (zina-yi ʿayini), so too must women’s voices be “covered” or muted to prevent “aural adultery” (zina al-ʿazuni) (cf. Chehabi , –53). The Iranian history of Muslim female singing on the public stage began in tandem with and is closely linked to the early twentieth-century adoption of expanding perspectives on both music and women’s roles in public.
Citizens’ expanding political rights and the contraction of clerical political influence were articulated together in the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (–11). The political and ideological effects of the Revolution were manifest in the expansion of urban sites of leisure; the influence of imported films, music, and popular culture; and the growth of a consumer public eager to take part in these new developments.
All of these developments contributed to the eventual public efflorescence of popular music and women’s singing in twentieth-century Iran. Critically, unveiling and female singing onstage have been linked in Iran since the very first public concert by Qamar ul-Muluk Vaziri, who performed without a veil at Tehran’s Grand Hotel in and sang a song criticizing the veil a full twelve years before Reza Khan’s compulsory unveiling policies (Chehabi , –60).
Death threats and riots followed Qamar’s initial Published by Duke University Press controversial performance, but she went on to become one of the most beloved singers of the twentieth century and opened the way for generations of female vocalists. By the mid-twentieth century Iranian stages, screens, radio broadcasts, and record stores featured unveiled solo female stars who acted, danced, and sang.
No one better encapsulates the mainstreaming of female singers in Pahlavi Iran than Googoosh. While many other contemporary female performers of the period battled public perception of their profession as one step away from prostitution (Meftahi ; Talattof ), Googoosh was read by many as a polished, “modern” artist and was one of a handful of female vocalists accepted into polite society and even the Pahlavi court (Breyley , ; Chehabi , ).
Googoosh (born Faegheh Atashin in ) was a child television and film star who became one of the main proponents of the polished, cosmopolitan, and heavily Western-influenced musiqi-yi pap genre that dominated broadcast media for two decades preceding the revolution. The ubiquity of Googoosh and her peers in National Iranian Radio and Television and in the Pahlavi court helped create a strong association between popular music, musicians, the monarchy’s aims, and the “liberated,” “modern” female subjectivity Googoosh embodied (Breyley , – 10; Hemmasi a, b; Rahimieh , 45).
In seeking to rid the country of all vestiges of the Westoxification (gharbzadigi), degeneration (ibtizal), and corruption ( fisad) that emerged under the Pahlavis, the postrevolutionary government silenced popular music. Most relevant for this discussion, the new government dramatically curtailed musical performance, made veiling compulsory for all females over the age of nine, and prohibited women from singing solo before unrelated (namahram) males.
Following Khomeini’s fatwa allowing the performance of music for “ethical purposes,” men began publicly performing folk and folk traditional art music (musiqi-yi asil), and numerous music schools opened. As of , a woman’s solo singing voice before mixed-sex audiences or on a recording is still not permitted.
The continued restrictions on female singing have opened it up for many investments of meaning. Following the revolution, many female (and male) vocalists departed their homeland to continue their careers in exile while Googoosh remained in Iran, disappearing from public view for twenty years. Then in , during the “reformist” (islah talab) era under President Mohammad Khatami, Googoosh was granted a passport and given permission to give concerts abroad on the condition that she return.
However, she left Iran for good, settling eventually in Los Angeles, where she built on the nostalgia and excitement surrounding her sudden visibility to reclaim her position as the biggest star of Iranian popular music. After a decade of performing and recording albums, Googoosh began adjudicating her eponymous television talent competition. Tellingly, in the first episode Googoosh framed the program as providing opportunities to young men and especially women in Iran who were negatively affected by the postrevolutionary music restrictions: Published by Duke University Press HEMMASI • Performing Piety Journal of Middle East Women's Studies Journal of Middle East Women's Studies I hope that [Googoosh Music Academy] will make it possible for kids in Iran to freely participate in .
. . [the competition] because I believe we have great talent in Iran that remains undiscovered, [people] who have no chance for their creativity to flourish— especially girls and women. Guys can find their way [through the official system] but JMEWS • Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies • November unfortunately, girls and women do not have this opportunity unless they leave Iran.4 By suggesting that there is “no chance” (shansi nist) for musical development and that female vocalists “do not have the opportunity” to sing in Iran, Googoosh glossed a much more complicated situation on the ground (Breyley ; DeBano , ; Mozafari ; Nooshin ; Youssefzadeh ).
Today many women play musical instruments in greater numbers than prior to the revolution (Milanloo ). For many years, women have been permitted to sing in vocal ensembles or duets with a male “co-singer” (ham khan) who acts as an aural veil. Women-only concerts take place on a semiregular basis; concerts attended by mixed audiences are held in private spaces; women singers record in private studios; and social networks, music sellers, and the Internet provide means for distribution.
Yet the fact that barriers to women’s solo public singing remain when so many other musical activities have been justified indicates its symbolic import. Intimately related to the Islamic Republic’s insistence on veiling that obliges women to perform the national commitment to Islam, the insistence that the singing voice emanating from the female body be obscured imbricates women’s singing with consuming questions of national identity, rights of expression, the boundaries of piety in public space, and the parameters of state influence over public morality.
The Risks and Affordances of Television Programming Just as female solo singing has become laden with political meaning, so too are televised talent competitions.
While such programs are popular the world over, scholars of Middle Eastern talent competitions have repeatedly cited the ways they appear to provide alternative platforms for political engagement and representation beyond local civil and formal governmental structures in the region (Gumpert ; Kraidy ; Meizel ; Solomon ).
Talent competitions tend to index real-world identity groups with their own politics (i.e., American Idol, Arab Star, Eurovision), while the inclusion of diverse participants that represent the demographic diversity of the competition’s intended audience contributes to a program’s legitimacy and “realness.” Googoosh’s statement that her academy could offer a corrective to the situation for singers in Iran should therefore be seen as using a discourse of “democratainment” (Hartley , ; cited by Meizel , ) in which popular culture participation contributes to goals of political inclusion and representation.
If talent competitions are conceptually based on staged reality, freedom of choice, and the channeling of sociopolitical conflict into a simulacrum of democratic Published by Duke University Press participation, for female contestants in particular these competitions have also highlighted the offstage consequences of choice, representation, and engagement when exercised in the public sphere.
The stakes have been especially high for female contestants whose actions have been perceived to transgress gender-appropriate behavior: when vocalist Setara Hussainzada dared to dance during her performance on the post-Taliban talent program Afghan Star, opponents forced her into hiding by publicly threatening her life (Marking , ).
More recently, in June , the contestant Mutlu Kaya was allegedly shot in the head by her former boyfriend for merely participating in the Turkish talent competition Sesi Çok Güzel (Agence France-Presse ). The real-world implications of “mere entertainment” indicate the deep sensitivities such performances inflame and show how staged reality can become real, sometimes disastrously so.
The Iranian transnational media public is likewise a site of communication and contention. Since their beginnings in Los Angeles and elsewhere in diaspora in the s, expatriate Iranian television and music have often expressed a strongly anti–Islamic Republic bent. Over the intervening decades expatriate media has diversified considerably, but it has largely maintained a critical if not directly oppositional stance toward the Iranian government and its policies.
Expatriate media pours into Iran where it has been widely consumed for decades as an alternative to state media products, and thereby undermines the government’s attempts to control the national public sphere as it also provides different modes of understanding Iranian history, culture, and identity than those officially sanctioned (Alikhah ; Marchant ).
Governmental satellite jamming, Internet filtering, and satellite dish confiscation efforts are only partly effective and the flow of media is largely tolerated; however, on several publicized occasions, Iranian citizens have been detained when they returned from abroad expressly because of their participation in expatriate media and popular culture (Hemmasi , –5; Papan-Matin ).
At issue is the official perception and discourse of a media and popular culturedriven “soft war” ( jang-i narm) sponsored by Western governments and expatriate opposition groups (Naficy , –48; Price ; Rahimi ; Semati ; Sreberny ; Sreberny and Torfeh , 24–30). Much of the most popularly consumed media in Iran is the work of Iranian expatriates employed by the United Kingdom’s BBC Persian Service, and the United States’ Radio Farda and Voice of America Persian Service, which craft well-funded radio, websites, and satellite television programming expressly for Iran-based audiences, consumed in diaspora as well.
These programs have greatly expanded since September 11, , when “winning hearts and minds” of Iranians and other Middle Easterners became a front-burner agenda for Western governments. For years both official conspiracy theories and rumors have surrounded foreign and expatriate media directed at Iran suggesting, for instance, that putatively privately owned television stations receive Published by Duke University Press HEMMASI • Performing Piety Journal of Middle East Women's Studies Journal of Middle East Women's Studies JMEWS • Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies • November covert funding from Western governments (see also Voss and Asgari-Targhi ).
Similar theories currently surround Manoto 1, the channel on which GMA appeared, and were elaborated in officially aligned reportage on Ermia’s victory.5 Regardless of their veracity or lack thereof, such conspiracy theories can become impactful “political imaginaries” (Iqtidar ) that shape official and lay perceptions and have been used to justify very real consequences, once again blurring the line between real and fantasy.
Unveiling Piety on GMA Manoto 1 produced just three seasons of Googoosh Music Academy: , , and The formula remained fairly similar throughout the program’s run: the contestants were young men and women in their twenties and thirties, all of Iranian descent and all residents of western Europe. Some had recently arrived and were familiar with life in contemporary Iran, while others had immigrated as children and only haltingly spoke accented Persian, the program’s exclusive language.
Over the course of a season, audiences became acquainted with contestants through “behind the scenes” interviews and by watching their interactions with the competition judges, vocal coach Hooman Khalatbari, songwriter Babak Saeedi, and Googoosh, who helped the young contestants polish their performances of preand postrevolutionary popular Iranian songs.
The competition unfolded in earnest during the live satellite television broadcasts when audience members voted by SMS for their favorites. The competition’s lone victor was awarded a £16, prize. (Though the program’s stated goal was to launch music careers, to date neither winner Soroush Tehrani nor winner Mehran Atash has achieved professional music success.) Like other programs in the reality talent competition genre, GMA attempted to bolster audiences’ interest through two main means: the inclusion of contestants whose diverse identities gestured toward the demographic diversity of its presumed audiences, and the incorporation of “unscripted,” “offstage” interactions with them in which they revealed their “real” feelings.
This combination of diversity, putative personal authenticity, and granting audiences access to contestants “behind the scenes” is crucial to what makes televised talent competitions so compelling: audience members observe people like and unlike themselves, which can intensify identification through perceived similitude, open a window onto difference, or both.
The season of GMA included contestants of Bakhtiari and Rashti descent, a nod toward regional and ethnic identities beyond the nation’s dominant Persian ethnic majority. Some viewers also regarded the inclusion of contestant Amir Hossein as expressing the program’s goal of representing diversity and tolerance. Though he never came out as such, many perceived Hossein to be queer; fan responses to his assumed sexual preference ranged from support to exhortations to homophobic violence.6 While fewer people ultimately commented on Amir Hossein Published by Duke University Press than Ermia, the explosive response to his participation pointed to the fact that talent competitions’ relatively peaceable onscreen assimilation of difference does not necessarily portend audience acceptance.
Ermia’s inclusion further tested the limits of tolerance by addressing alternative forms of Muslim piety, a most unexpected topic for a pop music talent competition produced in diaspora media, which has tended to marginalize Islam (Gholami ). As if anticipating the harsh reactions she would eventually receive, in one interview Ermia revealed that even she herself had difficulty reconciling her approach to piety with her desire to sing onstage: “I have been watching the Googoosh Music Academy for the last two years.
. . . I really wanted to participate in the show, but I thought to myself, how can I do this? I wear a rusari [headscarf ]! How could I be onstage and perform like this?”7 Ermia’s deliberations brought into focus a struggle around deeply held cultural and historical norms regarding appropriate behaviors for pious Shiite Iranian women.
Unlike many other Muslim-majority countries where veiled women sing publicly (for instance, postinvasion Afghanistan), Ermia’s appearance was a novelty not only within Googoosh Music Academy but also in dominant pre- and postrevolutionary representations of Iranian women. As discussed above, women’s public singing and the rejection of veiling have been linked since Qamar’s very first performance; when the veil became compulsory following the revolution, women’s public singing voices simultaneously disappeared.
By contrast, scantily clad women singing and dancing before males were commonplace in prerevolutionary popular culture and are a frequent, even defining feature of expatriate Iranian music videos (Hemmasi , 96–99). As Ermia’s wonderment at her own ambition seemed to express, a veiled female pop vocalist was troubling to many viewers because she disturbed simplistic but nonetheless powerful binaries of Iranian/Western, modest/immodest, and religious/secular as she combined signifying features of these positions into one unsettling figure.
Over the course of the program, Ermia acknowledged these norms but then rejected them by dismissing any “contradiction” in her choice to both veil and sing in public. In mentioning more than once that her husband (whom she described as German from a Christian family) had convinced her to participate in the program and reassured her that veiling and singing were compatible, she also communicated that she had the express permission of the adult male in her life most concerned with her modesty, invoking deference to her husband-guardian’s opinion and using “traditional” male authority to sanction nontraditional activities (Ermia did not specify whether her husband had converted to Islam).
With her spouse’s support, she had overcome her own doubts and now hoped to help others do the same: There may be people . . . who say that wearing the veil and singing don’t go together, but in my opinion . . . I don’t think there is any contradiction. I have red lines for myself in all areas of my life, and I move only within those boundaries.
I don’t like crossing my own Published by Duke University Press HEMMASI • Performing Piety Journal of Middle East Women's Studies Journal of Middle East Women's Studies boundaries. There may be some who really don’t like [my participation in the program], there may be some who like it very much, and there may be others who say, “So, we can do this, too!” Because in Iran, there are many [women] with great voices.
I have a bunch of friends whose voices are truly beautiful, but no one ever hears them—just in school or when we are [alone] together. . . . [Through my participation,] I think maybe JMEWS • Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies • November I can give them some power and courage!8 Ermia’s statement is remarkable for a number of reasons. First, she proclaimed that she followed her own “red lines” rather than those prescribed by cultural or historical norms or the boundaries of public female comportment sanctioned by the Islamic Republic.
Second, Ermia claimed to speak to (and perhaps for) untold numbers of women who enjoyed singing but abstained, not out of modesty but because they currently lacked “power” (qudrat) and “courage” ( jurʿat). Finally, she obliquely suggested that her example on GMA and, by extension, the dissemination of GMA via transnational media, might give women in Iran the necessary encouragement to enact their desires.
What would it mean for there to be large groups of women (or men!) within Iran who not only defined Islam and piety differently than the Islamic Republic but were empowered to do so in public? While Ermia’s statements may appear to be an optimistic and even hubristic assertion of her influence, they presaged many commentators’ interpretations of both her public vocal performances and her performance of independent religious judgment as significant to her appeal.
The “Ermia Phenomenon” in Transnational Iranian Media Ermia’s victory sparked a media firestorm: Facebook registered thousands of responses to her appearances,Voice of America’s Persian Language Service devoted an hour-long call-in program to debating her merits and her politics, and semiofficial newspapers and blogs within Iran and diasporic opinion pages abroad variously attacked and celebrated her and all she was taken to represent.
Ermia’s apparent ease with herself contrasted markedly with the excitement, discomfort, and confusion she spawned in many viewers, whose comments and analyses announced what some came to call the “Ermia Phenomenon” ( padidah-yi Ermia). While some of Ermia’s opponents painted her as woefully misguided in her understanding of Islam, others alleged that she was a “beautiful” but dangerous fabrication created by Iran’s various political enemies.
Still others perceived Ermia to demonstrate a new pious subjectivity that was both “personal” (shakhsi) and shared by a large but overlooked segment of the population within Iran. One of the most striking similarities between authors writing for semiofficial, governmentally aligned media outlets and the typically secular expatriate media outlets was a suspicion surrounding Ermia’s genuineness.
In contradistinction to the televised talent competition’s putative basis in reality, many of Ermia’s Published by Duke University Press detractors writing in semiofficial Iranian news media asserted that she was unreal. Specifically, she was portrayed as a tool in an elaborate plot by a dizzying array of the frequently invoked enemies of the postrevolutionary Iranian government— particularly Bahaʾis, monarchists, the Mujahidin-i Khalq Organization (MKO), British and American governments, or the Manoto 1 network who—separately or in cooperation—attempted to attack the Islamic Republic and Islam through her “beautiful” yet “contradictory” figure—accusations Ermia rejected on her Facebook page.9 An article titled “Ermia’s Life behind the Veil,” charged that “the terrorist organization MKO, which is collaborating with Googoosh, the notorious prostitute .
. . , has ordered Ermia to appear veiled [on GMA]” (Serat News ). Another article asserted that “the mission of [Manoto 1] network is to change the Iranian lifestyle and to challenge Islamic beliefs, thus complementing BBC Persian [and its agenda].” Its author then accused Ermia of exhibiting a “superficial” “British”-style adherence to her faith while holding a “vigorous commitment to transforming Islam at its core” (Jam News ).
A third alleged: “The goal of the Academy is to put a beautiful face on the MKO. . . . They have chosen a beautiful young woman, with white skin, light eyes and a beautiful voice, who follows Islam but gives people permission to have different interpretations of Islam [at the same time]” (Taamol News ). These authors repeated unsubstantiated rumors and consistently emphasized Ermia’s unsanctioned version of Muslim piety more than her singing.
Further, instead of understanding her as an isolated individual, these authors framed her and “her Islam” as part of a broader plot against the Iranian nation whose example “gave people permission” to interpret Islam in an unorthodox manner. This reasoning granted Ermia tremendous influence over her audience and played into a long-standing discourse circulated by the Iranian government and its sympathizers in which Western and expatriate media are psychological weapons in the “soft war” Iran’s enemies are said to have waged on its citizens.
By suggesting that Ermia was not real but a fabrication, her detractors worked not only to delegitimize her and “unveil” her strategy but also to portray expatriate entertainment media in general as an assault on national values. Officially aligned authors and media outlets were not the only ones that exhibited hostility toward Ermia. In one particularly vituperative Facebook post titled “Preventing Ermia’s Victory,” a writer proclaimed his support for secularism (sikularizm), his hatred of Arabs and Islam, and stated that “like pus glands, veiled [women’s] heads should be cut off because they are dangerous to society.”10 While uncharacteristically violent in comparison to most sources surveyed for this project, other commentators also noted the fear Ermia generated in “secularists” who connected her with a plot to “promote liberal Islam” (islam-i libiral ) (Darvishpour ; Harandi ).
As to why Googoosh or GMA would “promote liberal Islam” when neither had shown any prior inclination in this area, one commentator alleged that Googoosh had included Ermia in GMA to signal her continuing alliance with Published by Duke University Press HEMMASI • Performing Piety Journal of Middle East Women's Studies JMEWS • Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies • November Journal of Middle East Women's Studies the Iranian reformist politicians who had engineered her departure from Iran in “Googoosh is eating off the same plate as those who make money off of religion and reformists, and she brought [Ermia] into the game to validate herself.”11 If commentators within semiofficial media had accused Googoosh and Ermia of collaborating with monarchists, the British government, MKO, and/or Bahaʾis, others charged them with pandering to the Iranian government.
Taken together, these comments reveal a strikingly consistent anxiety in response to Ermia’s approach to piety across political and religious orientations. Ermia’s detractors were quick to attack her unorthodox religiosity as misconceived: “I love your voice but veiling and singing are two completely contradictory notions,”17 wrote one, while another asked sarcastically whether Ermia regarded religion as a “fruit market” where one could pick and choose what one wanted Self-described secularists and religious conservatives alike rejected not only her decision to sing while veiled but her right to interpret religion as she understood it.
As Ermia essayed to shift moral authority from both cultural and historical norms and from the Islamic state toward herself and to “others like [her],” many of her critics declared her misguided or claimed that she was being manipulated by shadowy actors “behind the curtain” (pusht-i pardah). Both kinds of reactions worked to erase Ermia as a reasonable or even real figure and undermined the many claims from other quarters that she might represent a larger populace with similar goals.
“Will Ermia Be Reproduced in the Islamic Republic?” Clearly, many people not only tolerated Ermia but also loved her, voting her into the winning spot and writing thousands of supportive comments on her Facebook page and elsewhere online. A survey of the more affirming commentaries on Ermia’s success reveal that, as with her detractors, her vocal abilities elicited fewer responses than her approach to piety.
Ermia won not because she had the best voice, wrote Germany-based blogger Fatemeh Kamali Chirani (), “but because she [was] brave and [had] her own definition of religion.” Playing on the participatory format of televised talent competitions, a number of writers claimed that a vote for Ermia was a vote for “liberal Islam” (islam-i libiral), with one even stating that Ermia’s victory represented a “small referendum” that overturned the historic –79 referendum establishing the Islamic Republic (Karami ).
In a provocatively titled essay, “Will Ermia Be Reproduced in the Islamic Republic?,” Mana Pahlavan (b) wrote in the expatriate online journal Tableau that “millions of Iranians cheer her on, vote for her, and leave her comments. . . . She shows that each of us has the potential to become Ermia” (see also Pahlavan a).
This repeated framing of audience participation in GMA as a manifestation of public opinion, particularly in the aftermath of the contested reelection of President Mahmood Ahmadinejad, points to the aptness of John Hartley’s () notion of democratainment in Published by Duke University Press reference to talent competitions.
Indeed, rather than brand Ermia a fabrication, as so many of her detractors did, others considered her representative of an unacknowledged reality: that the “liberal Islam” some saw her to espouse had numerous supporters inside and outside Iran who were overlooked because neither official nor dominant expatriate media represented their views A critical question, then, is not whether Ermia would “be reproduced in the Islamic Republic” but whether she represented a larger shift in attitudes toward religion that had already transpired within the country.
Interestingly, save for the comments that decried her “British” or “American” Islam, the majority of sources surveyed for this project treated Ermia as illustrative of developments in contemporary Iran rather than those in diaspora in Germany where she lived, had married a German man, and was raising a family. Overlooking these potentially salient details, commenters repeatedly referred to Ermia as part of a broader “phenomenon” of self-identified religious Muslims within Iran who took a personal, nonofficially aligned and nontraditional approach to piety, an interpretation that may have been related both to her veiled appearance and to her ability to speak polished Persian in comparison with her diasporic competitors.
The existence of this subset of practicing Muslims in Iran is supported in several studies undertaken since that assert the growing privatization and personalization of religious practice by individuals who identify as believers but do not necessarily fulfill religious obligations or enact standard markers of piety (Bayat ; Kazemipur and Goodarzi ; Kazemipur and Rezaei ; Khosrokhavar ; Tezcur, Azadarmaki, and Bahar ).
Referring to this trend in terms of a youthful Iranian “post-Islamism,” Assef Bayat (, 40) refers to masses of young people who are “forging new religious subcultures that embrace the sacred and the secular, faith and fun, the divine and diversion” that both unsettle the postrevolutionary state’s claim on Islam and its correct practice and underscore a plurality of approaches to Islam despite the state’s attempted overtaking of religion.
This variety of approaches is grounded in part in the postrevolutionary transfer of “authority of religious interpretation from the seminarians’ quarters to [both] state authorities and public intellectuals” and ordinary individuals who have been empowered to pursue their own interpretations of religious sources (GhamariTabrizi , ).
Biography of barack obama Obama met his wife Michelle while working at a law firm, and they have two daughters together. Our People Join Us! Obama was born in Hawaii in Your Profile.As in Egypt (Mahmood ) and Lebanon (Deeb ; Deeb and Harb ), in Iran the lay interpretation of canonical texts has become an important source of authority and self-determination particularly for Islamist women pursuing social and legal rights who have crafted their arguments on the very sources of the religious institutions’ or—in Iran—the state’s authority Music and popular culture are likewise important sites for experimentation among both women and men.
Farhad Khosrokhavar’s () study of attitudes and behaviors toward music among male and female youth in Qom presents an illustration: many of Khosrokhavar’s interviewees openly rejected his suggestion that listening to Published by Duke University Press HEMMASI • Performing Piety Journal of Middle East Women's Studies JMEWS • Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies • November Journal of Middle East Women's Studies music was a “sin” ( gunah), while others asserted that the variety of judgments on music issued from different marjaʿ-yi taqlids, the high-ranking “sources of emulation” who are the highest authorities in Shiite Islam.
The occasional contradiction between their opinions necessitated personal interpretation and decision making, thus justifying their individual choice in how to be pious in this area. In an ethnography of “more or less” pious Shiite youth in neighboring Lebanon, Lara Deeb and Mona Harb (, –42) also observe much variation in attitudes and behaviors around music.
Aware of influential marja‘s’ disapproval of many kinds of music, the majority of the self-identified pious youth surveyed do not reject music but carefully manage their engagement. That these individuals see no contradiction between listening to music and their identification as pious—and, importantly, that they are part of a larger movement of religiously committed youth—is taken by Deeb and Harb (, 18) as a generational shift in which young people have emphasized personal decision making and “understand many of the rules of the moral systems in which they live, including—with key exceptions like drinking alcohol—those based on religious values, as flexible and open to interpretation.” Deeb and Harb contrast sharply with Khosrokhavar, who sees similar patterns as evidence of “secularization,” yet I would assert that however conceptualized, the larger picture indicates an expansion of pious laypeople’s forthrightness in personal decision making vis-à-vis religious authority, particularly in recent generations and in relation to music.
Indeed, an article in the now-defunct women’s magazine Zanan Press explicitly linked Ermia’s actions to the “doubts” (shubahat) afflicting many Iranian girls of the “third and fourth generation” (following the revolution) and cited official limits on female singing as an area in which young women in Iran were pushing against convention (Zanan Press ).
In the last weeks of the GMA competition and in its aftermath, Ermia cited religious sources that confirmed her choice and challenged both normative and official Iranian notions of Shiite female piety. In a later appearance on Manoto 1’s New Direction (Samt-i Now) television program, Ermia revealed that prior to migrating to Germany, she underwent several years of religious education in Qom, the capital of Iranian Shiite theology She then defended her decision to sing while veiled by making recourse to senior jurists’ authoritative interpretations: “We have some jurists who say that women’s singing is permitted—[these are] Ayatollahs Sistani, Montaziri, and Saniʿi.
In their view, there are conditions: a woman must sing in a way that does not arouse others, is not degenerate [ibtizal], and does not depart from chaste behavior [raftar-i ghayr-i afifanah].”16 As the discussion switched to the subject of veiling and religious obligation, Ermia explained that her studies of the Quran and the historical context surrounding the commandment to veil showed her that women should comport themselves modestly in public, but these sources did not indicate that noncompliant women should “be put in jail, chastised, and punished.” When a program host asked her to comment on how the Published by Duke University Press Journal of Middle East Women's Studies Conclusion Televised talent competitions traffic in fantasies of “reality,” commodified expressions of neoliberal utopianism where “freedom of choice” is sublimated into choice between contestants cum consumer products.
But as the GMA season demonstrates, this television talent competition was also something more and, as I have argued, something socially meaningful: a space for publicly playing with cultural norms, political participation, and the politics of piety at some distance from the pressures that make publicly living difference so challenging. Ermia’s performance blurred commonly conceived lines between reality and fabrication, homeland and diaspora, secularity and piety, and religion and politics,which, it turned out, were no clearer on the television sound stage than in “real life.” Performing piety and pop music in diaspora and in the liminal space of transnational expatriate media, Ermia was outside the physical boundaries of her home nation but still squarely within national—and now transnational—Iranian conflicts around expression, identity, and authority.
That such issues would come to be debated in response to a veiled woman singing solo pop songs on television indicates the imbrications of massmediated popular music in political struggle, and the particular historically and culturally specific sensitivities that arise in relation to women’s public performances, Published by Duke University Press HEMMASI • Performing Piety Quranic injunction to “urge what is good and oppose what is reprehensible” (ʿamr-i bah maʿruf va nahy-i az munkar) could therefore be implemented on a societal level, Ermia laughed and said, “Why are you asking me?
I’m not an expert in Islam!,” to which the host replied, “Of course you are—you’re better than [Supreme Leader Ayatollah] Khamenei!” Ermia modestly brushed off this simultaneous joking compliment and insult of the Supreme Leader and continued, “In terms of what I have studied so far . . . [I understand] ‘enjoining the good’ to be very different from arresting someone and taking them away.” As Ermia rejected the notion that she was an “expert,” she likewise showed herself to be willing and able to come to educated conclusions about religious obligation, even if these parted ways with official Islamic Republic of Iran preferences and policies.
In distinguishing between the requirement of fulfilling one’s personal religious obligation and an interpretation of “ ʿamr bah maʿruf ” as justification for punishing women for noncompliance, Ermia also signaled disapproval of state violence in safeguarding the nation’s morality. Finally, by calling attention to the range of opinions among high-ranking jurists regarding women’s singing, she cited ulema who have had well-publicized disputes with both Khomeini and Khamenei not only on this issue but on the rulership of the jurisprudent (vilayat-i faqih), the central underlying concept upon which the Islamic Republic system is based (Khalaji ; Rahimi ).
In these and other ways, Ermia highlighted the tensions in the theory and practice of theocratic government in which multiple interpreters and interpretations gather authority, tensions now expressed in the unlikely setting of a pop music talent competition. JMEWS • Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies • November Journal of Middle East Women's Studies pious or otherwise.
These stagings of gender, piety, tolerance, and political process in GMA, and the myriad responses the program invoked from a wide range of commentators, indicate the necessity of attending to entertainment media as a platform for political expression and experimentation. Given the new popularity of televised talent competitions among Iranians, there will likely be more opportunities to think through the role this particular popular culture genre reflects and engenders in politics.
In other projects. The complex nature of Turkey's relations with Syria Russia 24 December Hidden categories: CS1 French-language sources fr Articles with short description Short description is different from Wikidata Articles containing Persian-language text. Support our work Global Voices stands out as one of the earliest and strongest examples of how media committed to building community and defending human rights can positively influence how people experience events happening beyond their own communities and national borders.A number of media producers outside Iran have established talent competitions, including the dance competition Dance and pop singing competitions Persian Talent Show, Next Persian Star, and Super Star. Manoto 1 discontinued Googoosh’s talent program but has launched another wildly popular pop music talent competition called Stage, which has so far steered clear of veiled contestants.
Iranian state media has also jumped on this trend and has produced the programs Musical Talent Search Competition, Voices, Iranian Music Academy, and Festivals for the Discovery of Talents in Islamic Iran. What kinds of “realities” will be staged in these competitions, and what will audiences invest in them? FARZANEH HEMMASI is assistant professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto.
Her work has appeared in Ethnomusicology, Mahoor Music Quarterly, Popular Communication, Popular Music, and the edited volume Muslim Rap, Halal Soaps, and Revolutionary Theater: Artistic Developments in the Muslim World (). Contact: i Acknowledgments Thanks to Golbarg Rekabtalaei for her research and translation contributions to this article, and to Jairan Gahan, Ida Meftahi, Tyler Bickford, Lauren Ninoshvilli, and James Kippen for comments on earlier drafts.
This research received partial support from the Connaught Foundation. Notes 1. The few studies of Iranian Shiite religiosity in diaspora reveal that while some individuals in diaspora still practice and identify as Muslim, many others disillusioned with the Islamic Republic have rejected Islam. The relatively high proportion of non-Muslim Iranians who relocated outside the country following the revolution also complicates any conflation of Iranian identity with Islam in diaspora.
For more on interreligious and religion/secular tensions in diaspora, see Fischer and Abedi , Gholami , McAuliffe , and Spellman 2. The work of Hamid Naficy (), Kathryn Spellman (), and Reza Gholami () represents rare exceptions. While these books all focus on Iranians in diaspora, this may simply be because the Islamic Republic of Iran was the first and most successful attempt at melding Islamism and the state.
Other similar reactionary secular cultures may yet emerge. 3. Research materials evaluated included three seasons of GMA; two television programs dedicated to Ermia’s victory; twenty online news reports, essays, and blog commentaries; and over a thousand Facebook comments. Published by Duke University Press Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 4.
See Manototv, “Googoosh Music Academy E1 P1,” October 29, , 5. In personal communication with regular consumers of Persian-language media, several noted a shared cast of journalists and guests between BBC Persian and Manoto 1 and suggest that Manoto 1 was developed as an entertaining alternative to BBC’s comparatively traditional news programming.
6. See the Facebook page “Campaign against Amir Hossein” (in Persian), (accessed October 25, ). The page was originally titled “Campaign to Gang Rape [tajavuz-i guruhi] Googoosh Music Academy’s Amir Hossein.” 7. See Manototv, “Googoosh Music Academy 3, Episode 7” (in Persian), YouTube, February 8, , 8. 9. See “Googoosh Music Academy 3, Episode 7.” See Ermia’s Facebook post from March 24, , (accessed August 28, ).
Shirali’s Facebook Page, “Preventing Ermia’s Victory,” (accessed May 8, ). Comment on Ermia’s Facebook Page by Amylee Eternal, April 19, , (accessed September 10, ). Comments on Ermia’s Facebook Page by Saeed Torfi, April 15, , , and VOA PNN Rooyekhat, “Why Did Ermia Win the Googoosh Music Academy?” (in Persian), Mehran Vahid, April 14, , (both accessed May 14, ).
YouTube, April 15, , See, among others, Mir-Hosseini , Najmabadi , and Osanloo , especially the latter’s chapter on Quranic meetings (75–). For recent studies tracing the work and legacies of twentieth-century female religious authorities in Iran, see Künkler and Fazaeli and Rutner As Mahmood (, 53–55) says of women’s participation in Egypt’s mosque movement, and as Alex Shams () discusses with regard to Iran, dramatic increases in women’s See Manototv, “Samte-no ep1,” YouTube, February 18, , This program aired almost a year after GMA’s conclusion.
Ermia did not mention which institution(s) she attended. Ibid. For Ayatollah Saniʿi’s perspectives on ghina, see Saniʿi References Agence France-Presse. “Turkish Talent Show Singer ‘Shot in Head.’ ” Guardian, May www Aghaie, Kamran Scot. The Women of Karbala: Ritual Performance and Symbolic Discourses in Modern Shiʾi Islam. Austin: University of Texas Press.
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