Governing Place of Refuge: A Boulevard Around the Shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad-Iran (1912-1935)

This article examines the urban modernization in the first half of 20th century (from 1928 to 1941), in the Shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad, exploring its impacts on the social function of asylum seeking in the shrine. The Shrine of Imam Reza is a pilgrimage site since 9th century and the resting place of the eighth Imam of the Shi’a Muslims in Iran. Due to its significance, the trusteeship of this shrine during the reign of Pahlavi had always been by the Shah himself. With the beginning of modern developments and master plans of Iranian cities, a round-boulevard had been created surrounding the Shrine in 1932, which can be considered the first attempt to reshape the form and practice of pilgrimage for the years to come. This article opens with an act of asylum seeking in the Shrine of Imam Reza following a rebellion in 1912 and ends with another asylum seeking and upheaval in the same shrine on the same day only twenty-three years later in 1935. The urban impact of the newly constructed round boulevard during these twenty-three years is being explored.
By looking at the practices of three actors: the architect, the state, and the client, I analyze the power relations, professional discourses, and rhetoric, which direct me to demonstrate the representation of their participation in this religiously and nationally sensitive project, and to illustrate how their positions and interactions on different problems, as experts, influenced greatly the outcome of which they sometimes intriguingly question. The study attempts to go beyond the normative framework of analyzing spatiality in sacred sites, and focuses on the subtle social strategies and technologies of power used by the actors in different occasions, which make a building complex, religiously vindicated. This article will contribute to a social understanding of spatial alterations in the ritual of pilgrimage and asylum seeking to the Shrine. It examines the process of modern development by the developers in a traditional building complex under the supervision of a secular state and explores how the sacredness of this site and consequently the pilgrimage and asylum seeking is concretely fashioned by the politics of modernization in Iran.