From the Medieval Garden to the Contemporary Noble Peasant

As the village motif in Persian literature is a relatively recent phenomenon, and has not yet developed into its own distinct literary genre, it is worth plotting its origins in wider pastoral thematics. While classical Persian literature does draw on rural themes, traditionally these references are to the garden (bāgh), particularly the rose garden (golestān), and are limited to generic nature imagery rather than countryside collectives or agrarian landscapes. Literary scholars and historians such as William Hanaway and Julie Scott-Meisami, who have studied the imagery of Persian gardens in traditional literature, highlight its commonalities with the Garden of Paradise and an aggrandizing vision of the cosmic order.Footnote ³ Beyond this—aside from some occasional references to the simple nature of villagers in the medieval genre of Wisdom Literature (Adabiyāt-e Taᶜlimi)—there is no trace of an idealized depiction of the village as a symbolic entity. The few earliest examples, cited later in this article, were not originally intended as moralized standpoints on village life and can only be retrospectively analyzed as precursors to the contemporary village motif by a modern reader.

Village and peasant allegories first start to appear in Iran in the work of Constitutionalist poets in the wake of early twentieth century modernism and its concurrent rapid urbanization. These initial references are almost always a protest against social injustice, inequality and poverty in rural settings, as the macroeconomic focus of the state shifted to the industrialized city. Poets such as Farrokhi Yazdi (1889‒1939), Seyyed Ashraf al-Din Hosseini (1872‒1934) and Abolqāsem Lāhuti (1887‒1957) were among the prominent voices of the Constitutional Revolution (1902‒12) to introduce the “poor peasant” as a protagonist in their verse. The peasant represented the downtrodden masses whose rural lives had been deeply affected by the rapid pace of industrialization, as exemplified by Mohammad Farrokhi Yazdi: “If the peasant is the one who makes the wheat / Why is his share as tiny as a lentil seed?”Footnote ⁴

Poet Farrokhi Yazdi came from a small village. From childhood, he witnessed the pain and suffering of the poor and became aware of the constant presence of social injustice in their lives. As an adult, Farrokhi Yazdi used his poetry to voice his protest against the monarchy and social injustice through appreciating the humble life of the peasants:Footnote ⁵

Other poets of the constitutional era embarked on the same theme in their verse to highlight social injustice and tyranny. The peasant protagonist came to represent the voice of a deprived nation in an increasingly socialist polemic of the haves and have-nots. Abolqāsem Lāhuti’s poem, for example, pitches the macro-binary of despotism versus suffering against the micro-binary of the landowner and the peasant:

Although Lāhuti and Farrokhi had socialist tendencies, and their politics was significant in their poetry, poets whose leanings were more religious than political also used the peasant protagonist to critique the status quo. This criticism was usually underpinned by a religious context, as illustrated by the following lines by Ashraf al-Din Hosseini (also known as Nasim Shomāl) during the Constitutional Revolution:

Numerous poems like these, written in the wake of the Constitutional Revolution, provided the foundation for the development of the pastoral motif by modernist poets and writers from the mid-1930s onwards. The modernist movement, pioneered by Nimā Yushij (1897‒1960), envisioned the pastoral as “organic.” In Nimā’s poetry, the rural environment is presented as synonymous with nature itself. His depiction of his village home in Yush evokes a natural retreat in which the poet seeks refuge from the pressures and exhaustion of urban life. As Houman Sarshar suggests, Nimā’s depiction of the countryside as an integrated part of the organic wilderness “may further be interpreted as the poet’s imminent departure from the rigid classical prosodic structures and his adoption of the more organic rhymes, rhythms, and verse paragraphs that he introduces in his famous poem, ‘The Phoenix’ (Qoqnus, 1937).”Footnote ⁹

His biographical sketches may nostalgically depict his home as a romanticized idyll, but elsewhere in his later work, the village and the peasant are far from ideological allegories. Indeed, Nimā’s rare depictions of the village often betray a darker tone. In his well-known poem “The Soldier’s Family” (Khānevādeh-ye Sarbāz, 1947), the village is saturated with poverty, suffering and despair. In “Māneli” (1957), the village is depicted as a “dark, stagnant and unattractive place” to which Māneli, the protagonist, has no desire to return.Footnote ¹⁰ In his detailed analysis of “Māneli,” Kamran Talattof suggests that “the village brings to mind old ideas and in some instances the old poetry.”Footnote ¹¹

Nimā’s village motif gradually faded as mid-century modernist poets became more involved with post-World War II politics and a growing engagement with post-colonial thinking. Despite their leftist leanings, poets of this period did not develop an interest in the symbolic cultivation of the village theme as a political allegory. Ideological ambivalence emerges in the works of engagé poets of this period; “Mist” (Meh, 1956) by Ahmad Shāmlu (1925‒2000), for instance, portrays the village as a dusky, quiet place that brings to mind the post-1953 oppressed face of Iranian society:

Although Shāmlu’s poetics tended in general to be much more influenced by his urban upbringing, he occasionally made symbolic and aesthetic reflections on the idea of the village as a remote place. This is evident in the third part of the lengthy poem “Nocturnal” (Shabāneh, 1961), which can be interpreted as a powerful evocation of the aesthetic qualities of the village as a distant place:

Perhaps no modernist poet of this period is more nostalgic than Sohrāb Sepehri (1928–80) when it comes to the pastoral and its sharp contrast with the dark side of the urban setting. A native of Mashhad-e Ardehāl village in Kashan, Sepehri spent most of his life in the countryside of his birth. The deep influence of both Indian Buddhism, and his passion for painting natural scenes, are two important factors that relate to his choice of the village and its surrounding countryside as a living space. Sepehri’s poetic discourse can be easily distinguished from that of his contemporaries, mainly due to the strong presence of rural elements and a natural setting, neither of which are used in an allegorical or symbolic manner.Footnote ¹⁵ Sepehri’s nostalgic depiction of the countryside stands out even more when one compares it with his dull portrayal of urban scenery in “Footsteps of Water” (Sedā-ye pā-ye āb, 1964):

The White Revolution and Politicizing the Village

In the 1950s and 1960s, the village as a politicized entity starts to emerge for the first time in Iranian literature; however, rather than in poetry specifically, the grittier depictions of the reality of village life appear in prose, short stories, novels and essays. The village emerges as a prevailing theme used by leftist intellectuals to protest against modernization and the destructive impact of land reforms on village life, offering literary critiques of the state’s autocratic modernization policies.

Jalāl Āl-e Ahmad (1923–69), Gholāmhossein Sāᶜedi (1936–85) and Mahmud Dowlatābādi (b. 1940) are three of the most prolific prose writers who shaped the village writing of this period with their novels, novellas, screenplays and anthropological monographs.

Āl-e Ahmad, a pioneering voice in village writing, published “Urāzān” (1954) and “Tat People of the Boluck of Zahrā” (Tāt-neshinhā-ye bolūk-e Zahrā, 1959) in the form of anthropological sketches of the extreme hardships of village life in the years preceding the White Revolution (1963). In “The Curse of the Earth” (Nefrin-e zamin, 1967), which tells the story of an urban schoolteacher commissioned to teach in rural areas, Āl-e Ahmad gives a detailed account of rural life in Iran after the implementation of the land reforms. The novel predominantly revolves around the difficulties of rural living caused by socioeconomic deprivation and the decline of the agricultural sector. Through the schoolteacher’s eyes, we are presented with the sharp differences between rural and urban lifestyles and attitudes. The following passage from the novel is an example of Āl-e Ahmad’s use of country scenes and vernacular, which in turn heavily influenced contemporary prose writers:

Inspired by Āl-e Ahmad’s village writings, Gholāmhossein Sāᶜedi (1936–85), another influential writer of the same period, published a play entitled ‘Gol Village’ (Kalāt-e gol), which, in his own words, “tried to show how Reza Shah’s modernization program destroyed and despoiled the landscape and ruined many villages.”Footnote ¹⁸ Prior to the 1953 coup, when the 18-year-old Sāᶜedi was still based in Azerbaijan, he joined the Youth Organization of the Azerbaijan Democratic Party and began to work as a journalist.Footnote ¹⁹ “The main pillar of the Tabriz Democratic Party’s ideology,” according to Sāᶜedi, “revolved around the idea of the village. The party’s main goal was to organize a peasant movement led by the peasants (nehzat-e dehqāni).”Footnote ²⁰ In addition to Azerbaijani influence, leading prose writers of this period were deeply influenced by the Bolshevik intelligentsia, whose peasant nostalgia and resentment of urban life was part of an attempt to even out the social differences between the peasantry and the proletariat.Footnote ²¹

The state modernization program continued apace, however, and as inequality deepened, and rural dwellers moved to the cities for work, the prevalence of the symbolic village in literature increased.Footnote ²² The renowned novelist Mahmud Dowlatābādi (b. 1940) emerged as a significant documenter of village society, depicting rural life in the northeastern province of Khorasan. In his monumental ten-volume novel, Kelidar (1977‒84), he tackles the impact of industrialization and land reforms on the lives of the peasant community. The cycle portrays the tragic fate of the Iranian peasantry and nomadic tribes under the reign of the Pahlavi dynasty. Dowlatābādi’s typical theme is of a peasant community that finds itself in severe difficulties, usually as the result of outside forces.

The Role of the Rural Revolutionary

Opposition to the state program of industrialization and agrarian denigration grew, both among the people and in the literary works produced during this period. As revolutionary sentiment intensified, poetry became a way for the “downtrodden” to find a voice and communicate their protest. If the city was the home of the government, the village was the spiritual home of the people; if autocracy belonged to the factories, collectivity belonged to the fields. Authors with leftist backgrounds who spent time in prison for their political activities composed literature with sympathetic depictions of the proletariat and rural folk that became hugely influential in the build-up to the 1979 revolution. A good example of such work comes again from Dowlatābādi, entitled “Missing Soluch” (Jāy-e khāli-e soluch, 1979), published in the wake of the revolution. The novel is about village life in a fictional place in northern Iran in the 1960s, a time when many people from the countryside were moving to the cities. It shows how the poor struggle with everyday calamities such as theft, starvation and violence, paralleling the demise of the village to the forces of modernity. “Missing Soluch,” and to a certain extent also the work of Al-e Ahmad, perhaps has more in common with the ideas and views of the revolutionaries with Islamist leanings who overtook the revolutionary movement than with other works composed by the leftist literati of this time. It is important to note, however, that they did not aim to represent the village as a utopian space; overall, their treatment of the pastoral motif was empathetic and realistic, directly criticizing the aggressive urbanization process undertaken by the Pahlavi state.

The damaging effects of rapid modernization, and the migration of considerable numbers of village dwellers to marginal zones on the edges of towns, continued to affect Iranian society after the revolution. The emergent Islamist intelligentsia adopted a sympathetic approach to villagers as “invisible masses” who suffered in order to survive. A new wave of village writing emerged, this time more prevalent in poetry than in prose. This poetic genre was informed by new leader Khomeini’s frequent references to rural life, highlighting the destructive impact of the 1960s land reforms on the livelihood of villagers; thus reminding his people of the persuasive rhetoric that had got him into power in the first place. Khomeini—himself a former villager and a fan of classical poetry—heralded the displaced villagers residing in the city slums (kukh-neshinān) as the engine of the revolutionary movement.

Policy and poetry moved in symbiosis with one another as the Iranian rural sector was revived by Khomeini’s new government. In June 1979, the Construction Jihad (Jahād-e sāzandegi) was established to reconstruct Iranian agriculture and improve the quality of peasants’ lives. The Ministry of Agriculture expanded considerably in the first decade after the revolution. According to Linda Darling, “with five times the funding of the White Revolution and the social enthusiasm of crowds of young people concerned for social justice,” the Construction Crusade succeeded in enhancing agricultural productivity and contributing to the housing, health and essential needs of farmers.Footnote ²³

And so the village gradually became a keyword in Islamic revolutionary discourse, one that initially resonated with the ideals of the left, but was redefined and manipulated by the ideologues of the Islamic state (including the official poets) immediately after the revolution. While exhibiting some common features with the realist accounts of village life by Jalal al-e Ahmad, and the gritty, empathetic portrayals by Dowlatābādi, these emerging official poems presented a different image of village life—one that was overtly nostalgic. The official poets, under state jurisdiction, identified the village with an authentic lifestyle that was to be promoted in alignment with revolutionary ideas.

The Village in the Works of Official Poets

Who were these official poets? How did the work of the Islamic Republican poets interact with the state? The arrival of the new regime in 1979 heralded a cultural revolution (1980‒83). Secular and dissident scholars and students were purged, teaching materials were redrafted, and a new group of Islamist intellectuals gained influence in the official cultural scene.Footnote ²⁴ The provincial poets and writers whose voices had been at the forefront of the revolution were now an official part of the state apparatus, embedded in the doctrine—and the pockets—of the Islamic Republic. Newly established cultural institutions funded by the state, most notably the Center for Islamic Art and Thought (Hawzeh-e honar va andisheh-ye eslāmi, est. 1980) and the Organization for Islamic Propaganda (Sazmān-e tabliqāt-e eslāmi, est. 1981), played a significant role in mobilizing this new intelligentsia. Islamic revolutionary rhetoric was largely preached and conceptualized by Ayatollah Khomeini, himself a passionate and popular poet, and fed to the cultural organizations for official poets to craft and deliver. The slogans and texts created by these poets, under the state’s watchful eye, came to define the ideological agenda of the Islamic Republic; particularly the core message of social justice. Islamic Republican poets were quick to adopt these themes and slogans in their work. In terms of form, many of these poets revisited classical structures such as quatrain, mathnavi and ghazal in the wake of the revolution, as well as moving into modern forms such as Nimāʾi and Sepid.

Spotlight: Abdolmalekiān and the “gaze that tastes of milk.”

One of the leading voices of Islamic Republican poetry is Mohamadreza Abdolmalekiān (b. 1952), whose early poems (1974–86) largely venerate the village and tribal life, while offering an unfaltering critique of urbanism. Moreover, his nostalgic poems about the village stand out in terms of both quantity and quality when compared with those by his fellow revolutionary poets. As a native of Nahāvand in Hamedan and a graduate student of agricultural engineering, Abdolmalekiān was appointed to work at the Ministry of Agriculture after the end of the revolution, where his main responsibility was to reconstruct and improve ruined villages. Poems such as “Village” (Qaryeh, 1974), “Evil City” (Shahr-e bad, 1974), “Father! Let’s Return to the Farm” (Pedar biā beh mazraᶜeh bargardim, 1977), “Tribal Man” (Iliāti, 1984), “With this Entrenched, Rainy Heart” (Bā in del-e rishehdār-e bārāni, 1984) and “Identity Card” (Kārt-e shenāsāʾi, 1985) are just a few examples of his many poems narrated by a disheartened urban dweller who greatly misses the village of his birth. Abdolmalekiān is clearly sympathetic to the peasantry, as well as to revolutionary ideas that advocated the superiority of villagers; in the works of ideologues such as KhomeiniFootnote ²⁵ and Ali Shariati,Footnote ²⁶ for example, villages are portrayed as authentic, the home of the deprived masses, embodying the primacy of the rustic lifestyle.

The peasant figure in Abdolmalekiān’s work has a “gaze with the taste of milk,” “hands with the scent of wheat,” “a knap-sack full of companionship and love,” “sandals made of compassion” and “a shirt the color of sincerity.”Footnote ²⁷ Typical of romantic depictions of authentic village life, such imagery laments the peasant’s unhappiness and bewilderment in the city. The scent of “gunpowder and homesickness” present in the city’s air upon arrival prompts recollections of the oppressive nature of the urban setting at the peak of industrialization in Iran. “The frowning square,” “stone-made, dull alleyways,” “grey, hazy sky” and “the deceiving absurd sunshine” are all parts of the urban setting that become essential imagery in Abdolmalekiān’s peasant poetry, thus creating a form of protest literature in the years preceding the Islamic revolution.Footnote ²⁸

Abdolmalekiān penned most of these poems during the four to five years leading up to the revolution, or at least during the first decade after its completion. Except for a few examples, almost all were written during his stay in his native provincial town of Nahāvand. In the “Evil City,” the poet’s cynicism about urban life reaches its climax, as the city becomes a “zone of scarecrows where the ants think about leprosy.”Footnote ²⁹ The poet clearly feels the weight of the skyscrapers pushing on his chest as breathing becomes impossible. He expands and deepens a strain of class-oriented cynicism that goes against city life by involving real scenes from the everyday lives of secular urban dwellers and contrasting them with scenes from the lives of the lower and deprived classes: “Perfumed women swallowing thirsty gazes” versus “poor men throwing up in their night seclusion and dreams”; “beautiful body organs all labeled by different factory brands” and “the seductive fake eyelashes that deceive hearts.” The poem offers a critical view of urban industrialization, placing it in contrast with the natural beauty of rural life. Whatever belongs to urban life seems artificial in the eyes of the poet.

In another poem, “Shepherd” (Chupān, 1984), Abdolmalekiān recounts the story of a shepherd and his herd and their deteriorating state and all-consuming confusion in the urban life. His depiction of the city as the source of alienation and ugliness echoes in the voices present in his poetry throughout this period:

In his poems written prior to the 1979 revolution, the rural or tribal identification of the poet seems to convey a sense of resistance towards the ruling state. The narrator of “The Tribal Man” is a deprived man of the Bakhtiāri tribe who describes himself as belonging to the “generation of despair with fractured hands.”Footnote ³¹ The ending lines of the poem render the protesting voice of the poem more apparent as the narrator openly portrays the city as an oppressive environment that calls upon him to surrender:

Abdolmalekiān’s poems touching on the theme of rural life and the village are too numerous to cover comprehensively in this article. But the examples quoted above, as well as similar work, show how prevalent the theme of the village had become among adherents of the Islamic Republican trend.

Spotlight: ‘Machine-made bread’ and the work of Aminpur. Another early practitioner of village poetry from a rural background is Qaysar Aminpur (1959‒2007), a native of Gotvand in Khuzestan province and originally a member of the Bakhtiāri tribe. Aminpur’s ‘Machine-Baked Bread’ (Nān-e māshini, 1978) features a critical narrative of urbanized developments in his home village. More specifically, Aminpur depicts a rural setting with an idle and lifeless nature in a way that is deliberately political:

The resident of a deteriorating village, the narrator of the poem finds his natural surroundings to be completely lifeless and polluted by the industrial gloom that fills the sky and engulfs nature. Even the bread-making tradition, one of the most important symbols of village life, has been demolished at the monstrous hands of industrialization. The fall of the village, Aminpur reflects, is the fall of authenticity. The rural lifestyle has been replaced by a material and spiritual void.

In another poem, “Composition” (Enshāʾ, 1978), Aminpur draws attention to the deep disturbance that the land reforms created in the rural area of his boyhood. The poem is narrated by the collective voice of primary school children obliged to write about the White Revolution. As the poem begins, the narrators are placed under constant surveillance during an examination. They eventually rebel by standing up and refusing to write:

The positive and, to a large extent, romantic depiction of the village in a great number of works produced by both Aminpur and other Islamic Republican poets should be read and understood in relation to the socio-political context of their time. The collective voice of revolution and war on the one hand, and the special attention paid to agricultural reform by the revolutionary state on the other, prompted these writers to leave their own mark on the rise of village writing during this period.

There is a shift, however, in Aminpur’s perception of rurality as the reign of the Islamic Republic goes on. In “The Ancient Heritage” (Mirās-e bāstāni, 1980), for instance, he draws on the inaugural Day of the Downtrodden (Ruz-e mostazᶜafān) to echo the main slogans of the revolution that focused on the noble nature of the poor and the empowerment of the working classes, both of which were embraced under the aegis of Islamic justice. Concepts such as “decaying shoes,” “shoes of fatigue” or “shoes made up of calluses” in the second part the poem refer to the physical sensation and rustic qualities of such people and recapitulates a famous saying by Khomeini, who often alleged that the revolution belonged to the barefoot and the poor:Footnote ³⁵

The pastoral motifs evident in poems of this kind provide important evidence of an evolution in Islamic Republican ideology. During this period, village poems often represented a departure from the secular, modernist views of the Pahlavi regime that had pursued the industrialization of villages, seeing them as culturally inferior and politically backward. The Islamist doctrine, however, provided ideological justification for the revival of villages and pastoral culture and largely implemented this plan under the Construction Crusade program. This Islamist doctrine is more explicit in Aminpur’s third collection, “Storm in Parentheses” (Tufān dar parāntez, 1985). This collection of prose for young adults was published during a period when the revitalization of the agricultural sector was still at its peak. In a piece entitled “Spring Manifesto” (Mānifest-e bahār, 1985), a farm is depicted in a state of severe trouble and its improvement rests in the hands of the revolutionary forces working under the Construction Crusade plan:

In his poems of the late 1980s, Aminpur touches upon the most troublesome part of peasants’ lives: displacement and migration to the city. Internal migration from rural to urban areas in Iran in the 1970s and 1980s led to what Saïd Amir Arjomand has described as “an explosive geographic expansion of cities that was followed by extensive land seizure by squatters, and the so-called revolutionary housing.” Islamic Republican authors responded to this social change by drawing on ideas that secular socialists and leftists had subscribed to prior to the 1979 revolution, blending them with their Islamic pro-justice values. Their works served the state’s agenda of both promoting its rhetoric of social justice and subverting the secular leftist literary trend. Imagery such as those of village peasants and the villager were gradually superseded by depictions of the slum-dwelling, marginalized urban population; people who had joined the frontline during the Iran‒Iraq war. In Aminpur’s poetry of revolution and war, the poor of metropolitan cities (Mardom-e pāʾin-shahr/jonub-e shahr), the factory workers (Kārgarān-e kārkhāneh) and slum dwellers (Hāshiyehneshinhā)—all originally villagers (Rustāʾi)—become martyrs of the war. Poverty, inferiority, ideological commitment and martyrdom became directly related in the official poetry of this period.

“Simple, Like a Village”: The Rise of a Rustic Utopia

During the 1980s, the attitudes and imagery of the simple rural lifestyle were adopted extensively by Islamic Republican poets as a way to dismiss the secular lifestyles of Iranians who did not conform to the Islamic norms valued by the state. Such attitudes were mostly informed by the pro-justice rhetoric of the Islamic left. A poem by Salmān Harāti (1959–86), originally published in the early 1980s, is a unique example of this trend. It recounts the ideological disagreements evident within a family after the revolution. Within this piece, the utopian image of the village is manifested in the chastity of a woman and her Islamic dress. The piece describes in detail differences in the belief systems and lifestyles of revolutionaries and “modern” Iranian citizens, as represented by the poet’s brother:

Harāti never embraced urban settlement and preferred to commute between the village of his birth in the north and the capital city, where he attended the poetry sessions of the Hawzeh. He eventually died at the age of twenty-eight in a car accident on one of his return trips from Tehran to his hometown. Though he was mainly based in Tonkābon and only occasionally visited the capital, his poetry expresses a constant sense of loss and nostalgia for his village, which may come from his fear that the village as a manifestation of an authentic lifestyle would disappear.

For most Islamic Republican poets of rural origin, to die in the city was to face a miserable fate filled with a sense of isolation and absurdity. The best manifestation of such imagery can be found in a poem, again by Harāti. In “I Too Shall Die” (Man ham mimiram, 1984), dying in a village is contrasted with dying in a city, with the former portrayed as meaningful while the latter is seen as absurd. The beginning and ending lines of the poem are as follows:

From Noble Peasant to Migrant Margin Dweller

As the eight years of war with neighboring Iraq ended in 1988, the resulting destruction and economic hardship gave rise to a new wave of internal migration. The lives of these peasant immigrants later coalesced with those of the country’s margin dwellers and urban proletariat in the works of the Islamic Republican poets; the struggles and sentiments of the villagers were transposed onto more urban settings. During this period, a number of Islamic Republican poets were engaged extensively in creating literature for children and young adults. Village and margin dwellers therefore entered into the realm of children’s literature. Published in 1991, Aminpur’s fifth prose collection, “Flying Without Wings” (Bi-bāl paridan), contained many poems of this kind. The bitter story of migration and dwelling in the margins is portrayed alongside the destruction of the villages, a contrast that constitutes a leading theme in this collection. In the poem “Life in the Margins” (Zendegi dar hāshiyeh, 1986), the narrator is a youngster living on the margins of the city who describes his family background throughout the work:

The word “margin” (Hāshiyeh) informs the entire piece. More specifically, the margin is presented as a black zone, and one that makes both death and a lifetime spent there seem equal. At the end of each stanza, we hear the narrative voice of a young adult and margin dweller and he speaks of his urge to “reform” the status quo:

The same collection contains anti-industrialist prose pieces written in defense of the urban proletariat. In “Equal Distribution” (Taqsim-e ᶜādelāneh, 1986), the leftist and religious pro-justice doctrines are bridged by way of a confrontational tone:

Such a critical depiction of the economic hardship experienced in Iran during the 1980s, as well as the prevailing tensions and conflicts between the rich and the poor, is rooted in the war and the development policies of the postwar state. By the end of the war in 1988, the state and society both came under economic pressure and serious ideological challenges emerged within state factions. Furthermore, “it was a period of continuity with and change from the revolutionary past during which new economic, social and political developments pushed the state and society in new directions.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Many of the development plans of the Pahlavi period that focused on industrial development and urbanization had initially been rejected as part of an agenda for westernization; however, these were now revived as part of the reconstruction project that commenced during Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani’s presidency. Indeed, Rafsanjani’s development policies promoted economic growth and prosperity without earlier attention to the demands for social justice. “Equal Distribution” and “Life in the Margins” represented a new critical response to the newly established policies.

The Postwar Era and the Fading Village

Many Islamic Republican poets were engaged in elegy writing following the death of Khomeini in 1989 and subsequently they ceased to write about the village. With Khomeini’s death, the Islamic Republic as a political entity and ideology entered a new stage. Hashemi Rafsanjani’s presidency, and his political and economic pragmatism, heralded a new phase in Iranian politics. One of its major components was a new wave of both rural and particularly urban reconstruction, which accelerated in the first half of the 1990s. Cities grew larger and denser. Villages too went through a phase of reconstruction. One of the outcomes of rehabilitating villages was a rapid decline in the rate of internal migration. The urban dwellers were accustomed to their urban lifestyle and began to lose ties with their village homesteads. Amid this rapid postwar urbanization, those official poets who once had conveyed a sense of nostalgia for their rural homes as a gesture of authenticity began to feel alienated from their origins. They responded to this separation in a rather melancholic and exilic literary tone. In 1993, when Aminpur published his sixth and most famous collection, Sudden Mirrors (Āyenehhā-ye nāgahān), he no longer identified himself as a villager but as a middle-aged urban poet with a sense of remorse for the lost connection he had felt for his village. In the poem “The Sun of the Village” (Khorshid-e rūstā, 1989), he speaks wistfully of the village as a faded place that exists in his inner world to which he still yearns to return:

Another poem, “Utopia” (Madineh-ye fāzeleh, 2000), published in Aminpur’s second collection after the Iran–Iraq war, is also of interest. Feeling distant and uprooted did not stop poets like Aminpur from considering the village a divine entity created by the Almighty, while resembling the sanctuary of allegorical gardens as Paradise in classical Persian poetry. The village clearly stands against the mundane nature of the city as the human creation as well as the utopia of the poets, which in fact was never successfully created:

Reviving the Village

With the ascendency of a new conservative politics during Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency, the government returned to promoting the village as representative of an authentic lifestyle. Newly emerging voices in the official literary trends have been encouraged to pay special attention to the village as a symbol of the downtrodden, forsaken, according to Ahmadinejad and his supporters, by pragmatists and reformists. Saᶜid Haddādiān (b. 1965), the flamboyant official eulogist who regularly appears at the annual state poetry nights with Ayatollah Khamenei, once voiced his concern about the absence of the village as a symbolic representation of the simple life of the deprived masses in Islamic Republican poetry:

As we trace the theme of the village through the works of three generations of officially sanctioned literary authors, similar patterns of village politicization and romanticization emerge. It is a conviction shared by many Islamic Republican poets that the village consistently represented goodness in all its capacity. Proponents of this sentiment received state-sponsored poetry prizes, and their verse was largely praised by newly appointed members and directors of the Hawzeh during the 1990s and 2000s.Footnote ⁴⁸

This trend continues with the next generation, as younger Islamic Republican poets have inherited the theme of the dark imagery of the city, filled with skyscrapers, cafes, smoke, hospitals and a population deceived by “westruckness.” A poem by Abbas Ahmadi (b. 1978), “Parenthetic Poems” (Sheᶜrhā-ye moᶜtarezeh, 2013), is worth mentioning in order to briefly note the prevailing rural versus urban themes in officially sanctioned poetry:

Although, as mentioned above, the nostalgic notion of scaled-down community life gradually faded, replaced by the critical treatment of urban life after the Iran–Iraq war, conservative hardline media and politicians—especially under the presidency of Rafsanjani and Khatami—have again used the village as a political tool to delegitimize progressive reformist strategies.

#WeTooAreVillagers: The New Voice of Protest

In August 2015, Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani’sFootnote ⁵⁰ derogatory remark about revolution and villagers sparked a major online protest campaign, reviving this pastoral motif and resurrecting concomitant quotes by Khomeini and other revolutionary figures. The catalyst was a public lecture by Hashemi-Rafsanjani, criticizing a group of hardliner revolutionaries for their unjustifiably violent actions. He referred to them as “former villagers who did not take part in the revolution and now claim to be revolutionaries.” It sparked a huge backlash from the hardliners, who allegedly launched an online campaign with the hashtag #WeTooAreVillagers, condemning Hashemi-Rafsanjani for insulting villagers and the poor as, in Khomeini’s words, “the main owners of the Islamic Revolution.” The campaign garnered a profound response across Iran; even the conservative newspaper Vatan-e emruz led with the headline: “I, too, am a villager.”.

In the wave of attacks, Hashemi-Rafsanjani was criticized for his own rural origins. His opponents accused him of corruption as his way of making it to the top echelon of the Islamic Republic. The collective tone of their slogan functioned as a reminder of past revolutionary slogans, which were not to be forsaken at any cost. However brief, this ideological scandal involving Rafsanjani and his supporters who have often been labeled as “bourgeois” by radical right-wingers, clearly suggests that the struggle over the conceptualization of the village and its ideological implications for politicians is still very much in place and perhaps will continue in one way or another in the coming years.