Shahrinaw, as the red-light district of Tehran in the Pahlavi period (1925-1979), has a significant place in imagining modern history of Iran. It is a site of multiple urban, social, national, and religious myths, with proliferating rumors, stories, and legends around it. Formed around 1921, and shut down after the Islamic revolution in the spring of 1979, the history of the red-light district of Tehran neatly maps the Pahlavi period. Consequently, it contributes to articulation of contested and multiple political temporalities of the 20th century Iran. The story of Lord Curzon’s humiliation and public lashing of sex-workers, which is said to have fostered the formation of Shahrinaw in 1921, the much highlighted role of the residents of Shahrinaw in 1953 coup d’état against Mosaddegh, and the execution of three famous sex-workers after the Islamic revolution in 1979, are all just a few instances of the many ways, in which Shahrinaw’s history contributes to political grand narratives of Iran’s modern history. The history of Shahrinaw in its own right however, is yet to be written.
To this end, this paper looks into the history of Shahrinaw from its inception to its erasure (1921-1979), as a window onto the way in which religious activists and moral crusaders contributed to the formation of moral topography of Tehran. It argues that Shahrinaw is a contested space formed through constant dialogue with state urban planners, mass mobilized petitions, and journalistic efforts, in an era when the religious secular divide was taking shape in Iran. This paper uses government documents including regulations about the residency of sex-workers; petitions against residency of sex-workers in Tehran’s neighborhoods; and government’s census on residents of Shahrinaw. In doing so, it contends that formation of Shahrinaw was an experiment of modernity and an outcome of a dialogue between citizens and the state. This paper further focuses particularly on the formation of affective moral landscape of Tehran and constant redistribution of spaces of faith and intimacy, in an era of relatively fast urbanization, and secularization.
