Soundscape and sonic memory: dynamics of Jewish and Muslim day-to-day social interactions in Udlajan, Tehran

Abstract

Being home to a majority of Jews before the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979, Udlajan is one of the oldest neighbourhoods in Tehran. Through interviews with a select group of its past Jewish and Muslim residents, this research considers Udlajan’s past soundscape and its former residents’ sonic recollections in order to examine the role of sounds and silences in the social construction of space. By narrating sound memories together with other ones, Udlajan former residents express their understanding of space, communications with others, sense of identity, self and otherness, and norms of inclusion and exclusion. This paper illustrates how the Jewish residents, despite aspects of their everyday lives being circumscribed, are not mute victims but exercise agency in appropriating, negotiating and using public space.

Keywords:

• Soundscape
• Udlajan
• Tehran
• neighbourhood
• Jew
• Muslim
• sonic
• memory

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank all the interviewees who contributed to the work described in this research. Also, I thank my academic advisors, Dr. Federico Spinetti and Dr. Mary Ingraham for their guidance and support.

Notes

1. Udlajan is located in the southern part of Tehran. Today, south Tehran is home to the low-income population while the majority of wealthy and well-educated residents live in north Tehran.

2. During their long history of residence in Iran (more than 2700 years), the Jewish community assimilated more easily in Iranian society in the historical periods in which the emphasis was on secular-nationalist discourses and the glorification of Iran’s pre-Islamic past (Rahimyian, 61). Secular Iranian nationalism provided the Jews with a sense of their historic connection to the land in which they resided. The Jewish community argues that there are no contradictions between Judaism and secular Iranian nationalism, as Jews believed that the Bible and the Talmud had a positive view of ancient Iran and Cyrus the Great, the founder of the ancient Persian Empire. Cyrus was known as “the redeemer of the Jewish people and the messiah of God” (Netzer 1996, 251–252). In Mohammad Reza Shah’s era (1941–1979), Iran experienced a dynamic sociopolitical period that caused an open cultural environment. The number of newspapers and weeklies increased, Jewish organisations and synagogues could work freely, and the Jewish community found the chance to renew its Zionist activities (Rahimiyan, 62). Moreover, the economic status of the Jewish community improved to the extent that by the time of the Islamic Revolution the majority of Jews were middle class citizens (Sanasarian, 47).

3. Based on the census of Iran in 2011, Shi'ite Muslims make up 90% of the total population of 75,149,669, and Sunni Muslims follow in size with 8%, Christians number 117,704 or 0.156%, Zoroastrians number 25,271 or 0.033% and Jews number 8,756 or 0.012% (Choksy 2012, 272).

4. Also known as Bungāh-i shādī literally meaning “Happiness Institution”.

5. The soundscape is a term coined by R. Murray Schafer. For more information on this concept see Schafer (1994).

6. For more information see Attali 1985; Tonkiss 2003; Thompson 2014.

7. Muharram is the first month of the Islamic calendar. It is a month of remembrance and is often considered synonymous with Ashūrā. It refers to the tenth day of Muharram. It is well-known because of mourning for the martyrdom of Imam Ḥusayn, the third Shia Imam.

8. Only talking to two interviewees who reside in the USA, I cannot consider this research the study of Iranian Jewish community’s diasporic memory. However, it can provide a preliminary context for further studies on Iranian Jewish community in diaspora.

9. I conducted semi-structured interviews with open-ended questions to allow both the interviewees and myself the flexibility to go into details when needed and to provide the opportunity for two-way communication. When conducting interviews, I asked my informants about their daily sonic experiences as residents of Udlajan: How has the soundscape changed and why? What could they remember about the neighbourhood’s sonic environment? What was their first sonic-recall from their childhood? What was their favourite sound? What was the most annoying sound? What did either Muslims or Jewish residents think about sounds of each other’s communities? As the nature of the questions was informal and the conversation guided the topics, my informants could elaborate on the themes that they found more interesting. As a result, some of the responses that I received are not directly related to sound. I allowed the conversations to guide follow-up questions that further investigated previous ones. I conducted all my interviews in Farsi (Persian), as most of my informants did not speak English. Being a Farsi native speaker, I decided to transcribe the interviews in Farsi, then translate them to English. In organising the interview materials, I had the challenge of whether I should consider all the responses that I received or only include the sound memories. I decided to be more faithful to the first approach and included non-sound-related responses that could help to contextualise the sound memories more easily and would provide a more comprehensive image of the neighbourhood. However, on account of ethical considerations such as my informants’ concerns about their position in the society, I did not include names, connections or stories they recounted that might breach their privacy and anonymity.

10. As holding an Iranian passport prevented me from traveling to Israel, and restricted my ability to contact individuals there, I decided to conduct interviews with former Jewish residents of Udlajan who now live in the USA.

11. One of my Jewish informants lives in California, Los Angeles, one in Vermont, Putney, and three in Tehran. All of my Muslim informants reside in Tehran. It is worth mentioning that all my Jewish and Muslim interviewees were born in Udlajan and spent their childhood there.

12. Before starting my filed research, I did not know any of my informants. I spent some time with each interviewee to make connections and give my informants the chance to know me better.

13. According to Schafer (1977) there are three main elements of the soundscape: sound signals, keynote sounds and soundmarks. Sound signals are foreground sounds, which are listened to consciously. In contrast, keynote sounds do not have to be listened to consciously.

14. For instance, as I explain later, houses mainly known as private spaces can turn into public spaces during certain events such as wedding ceremonies and they can be open to both Muslim and Jewish neighbours.

15. Both Muslim and non-Muslim Iranians have known Iranians Jews as Kalīmī. Following the establishment of the General Registry Office in 1924, Iranian Jews required to register their religious affiliation in their ID cards as Kalīmī. The word referring to the Jews of Iran derives from an Arabic root meaning “to address” and “to speak.” The designation in this context has derived from the particular “epithet given to the prophet Moses as Kalim-Allah, that indicated in the Koran: And to Moses God spoke directly” (Netzer 2011, 376).

16. See Tsadik 2007 for a succinct overview of these restrictions and the concept of najāsat (impurity) that limited the Muslims from physical contact with the Jewish community in Iran.

17. Mutrib, a term with an Arabic root (tarab), in Tehrani culture was perceived as synonymous with illiterate musicians with low moral principles who did not play serious or sophisticated music (Fatemi 2014, 19–25). Mutribs, whether Muslim or Jew, had a low social status. As Loeb (1972) notes, “in Shiraz, until the 1950s, the term motreb [mutrib] was colloquially synonymous with Jewish professional musician” (6). On the Jewish occupational prestige index, musicians did not rank high and only the butcher, beggar and the body-washer ranked below them (8–9).

18. For more information about the mutribs’ situation in pre-Revolutionary Iran see Meftahi 2016.

19. In the Jewish faith Shabbat is the Jewish day of rest that starts from Friday night until Saturday evening.

20. To maintain my interviewees confidentiality while presenting detailed accounts of their social life, I introduce them in my research with the first letter in their family names.

21. Rīāl is the currency of Iran, although Iranians mainly express amounts of money in Tumān.

22. For more information see Freidenreich 2011.

23. For more information see Siamdoust 2013.

24. Dr. Sapir hospital is a Jewish charity hospital in Tehran that is located in Udlajan area.

25. Tikkīah is a building particularly designed to serve as venues for Muharram rituals. For more information see http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/hosayniya

26. Nawḥah is an elegy depicting mournful subjects such as martyrdom of holy Imams.

27. enshāllāh and mā̄shāllāh are Arabic expressions. The first expression means, "if God wills it" and the second one is mainly used to express praise and thankfulness.

28. Being in charge of certain businesses, including entertainment and fabric retail, Jewish shopkeepers had control over prices and sales in the neighbourhood.

29. For more information see Takmil Homayoun 2014.

30. For more information see http://www.7dorim.com/gooyesh/gooyesh.asp

31. It is a neighbourhood in northwest Tehran.

32. Noshahr is a port city in north of Iran.

33. maestero.

34. Mr. Sh has a number of musical compositions for violin and piano about his life in the neighbourhood.

35. A respected title given to a man who has made a pilgrimage to Mecca.

36. Yazd is a city in central Iran and people from this city speak Persian with an accent known as Yazdī.

37. I would like to emphasise that Ms. K similar to the majority of Iranian Jews spoke Persian with a particular accent. Iranian Jews of different cities of Iran have their own dialects such as Judeo-Kashanī and Judeo-Hamedanī (Yar-Shater 1989; Gindin 2011; Habib Borjian 2012).

38. Although Schafer used this argument to point to different languages that were spoken in a neighbourhood, in this study I applied this argument to point to Persian language that was spoken in different accents.

39. Referring to Bijsterveld (2008), sounds that bother some people can be music to the ears of others (2). Also, Labelle (2010) notes, although noises impact health and environmental well-being, they may represent a precise liveliness within the culture and the expression of freedom in social sphere (xiii).