Reform Cinema in Iran: Film and Political Change in the Islamic Republic

Much had changed in the thirteen years since Khomeini had urged Khatami to return to Iran from Germany in order to participate in the Islamic Republic’s new government. Khatami had been a member of Khomeini’s inner circle, a part of the conservative ruling elite against which he was now positioning himself. In 1982, the same year that the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance took control of cinematic affairs in the country, Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi appointed Khatami as the head of the ministry, and filmmakers dubbed his arrival “the year that love entered cinema.” Despite this early optimism, Khatami oversaw the ministry as it established a series of strict regulations over the film industry, including censorship policies that still haunt film production. Although his letter of resignation indicated that his disagreement (mokhālefat) with Khomeini’s conservative policies began with the leader’s views on music, Khatami’s professional work throughout the 1980s nevertheless provided a legal framework for tight control over film production in the country and attested to his commitment to the Islamic Republic’s conservative values at the time.

To understand how Khatami’s quiet acquiescence in the Islamic Republic’s first decade became the impassioned defiance of his resignation letter requires an examination of the years immediately preceding his departure from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. The late 1980s and early 1990s represented a particularly fraught period in Iran’s contemporary history. The end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq War in August 1988 also marked the end of austere wartime politics. Less than a year later, Ayatollah Khomeini’s death in June 1989 signaled the start of factionalism in Iranian politics as the country’s policy makers struggled to agree on their country’s direction in the absence of a revolutionary and spiritual leader to provide absolute guidance on political and social issues. Within the context of this turbulent period, the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance gradually began to relax the strict censorship policies that had determined artistic production for nearly a decade. Between 1989 and 1992, the ministry allowed the publication of some of Iran’s most controversial works of art, including Shahrnush Parsipur’s novel Zanān bedun-e mardān (Women without men, 1989), an open depiction of female sexuality, and Bahram Beyzaie’s film Bāshu: gharibeh-ye kuchak (Bashu, the little stranger, 1989), an explicit critique of the Iran-Iraq War.

Perhaps unexpectedly, it was the representation of love that began to shake the revolutionary foundation on which the festival had been built, and the 1991 Fajr Film Festival program, which featured a number of films about love, revealed changing priorities within the film industry. The public’s reaction to this program, however, showed that the country’s policy and taste makers were not ready to leave behind the social issues and conservative values that had helped shape film production in the Islamic Republic up until that time in order to bring love stories to the big screen. As one editorialist in Jomhuri-ye Eslāmi wrote, “It is a shame that cheap love is taking the place of higher love at the Fajr Film Festival.”³ The controversy surrounding the Fajr Film Festival in 1991 exposed the cracks forming in the unified vision of what cinema should achieve in the Islamic Republic.

No film was more controversial at the 1991 festival than Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Time for Love, which depicted a woman’s adulterous affair and—most shockingly—absolved her. The criticism launched against the film opened up an unprecedented debate about the role of cinema in society. This debate, which played out in the country’s periodicals, including newspapers and trade publications, and in religious sermons, indicted Makhmalbaf, the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, and Khatami, and it helps us understand the reconfiguration of commitment to the revolution during the 1980s into a set of reformist policies that diverge considerably from the original ideals of the Islamic Republic at the turn of the twenty-first century. At what point did revolutionary fervor begin to subside and disillusionment set in? Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Mohammad Khatami played important roles both in the propagation of the Islamic Republic’s early ideals and in the period of reform that emerged two decades later, and their role in the Time for Love debates hinted at the discontent with the revolution that would emerge more fully several years later. Ultimately, the controversy surrounding Time for Love represented a pivotal moment in the transition from revolution to reform, both politically and cinematically.

At the core of the Time for Love debates is the question of who controlled the film industry in Iran in the early 1990s. This question was further complicated by the fact that the Islamic Republic played a significant role in the production and release of films. Beyond the practice of censorship, the government exerted control over the industry by providing huge yearly subsidies. It supplied financial backing for one-third of the country’s film production and offered incentives to the industry by providing tax breaks and reduced-interest loans.⁴ This dependency developed because the country’s rigid censorship practices curtailed viewership and, subsequently, foreign imports drew greater audiences. Unable to generate enough revenue to cover production costs, the Iranian film industry faced extinction immediately after the revolution. The state recognized the transformative value of film and opted to support the indigenous film industry.⁵ But with this support came expectations about accountability and the social value of the films that the government supported, which in turn gave rise to questions about categorization. Should a film be classified as the director’s work, or does it in part belong to the government? Who is accountable for its controversial release? A study of the Time for Love debates, by focusing on public perceptions of the film and the film industry, illuminates emerging fissures and rising discontent among those individuals charged with the creation and regulation of art in the early 1990s.

Time for Love functions as a complicated and shifting matrix of morality and consists of three distinct episodes, each of which tells the same basic story but with a different ending. In the first section, a married woman, Güzel, has an affair, which her husband ultimately discovers. Outraged and angry, he kills her lover, and the episode ends with a judge sentencing him to death. In the second version, Güzel once again has an affair. But this time her lover kills her husband, and the same judge sentences him to death. In this version, the actor who plays the husband in the first episode plays the lover in the second. In both episodes, Güzel, distraught by the death of her lover, commits suicide. In the third and final part, the husband (the actor who plays the husband in the first part) once again tries to kill the lover, but during the course of their battle the lover grabs the husband’s knife and refuses to kill him. The husband, touched by the event, decides to recognize the love between his wife and her lover and plans their wedding. The film ends with the wedding ceremony, at which the judge from the first two parts is present as a guest.

At first critics targeted the director Makhmalbaf and the film Time for Love specifically. The lengthy debate began with an article published in Resālat (Mission) on February 21, 1991, in which the author, M. Shushtari, lamented, “Oh, God, what do I see? Can this be the same Makhmalbaf that criticized Gol-hā-ye dāvudi [Chrysanthemums, 1984]?”⁶ Conservative groups in particular were outraged that Makhmalbaf, who had played an important part in solidifying the ideology of the new republic with early films such as Towbeh-ye Nasuh (Nasuh’s repentance, 1983), Bāykot (Boycott, 1985), and Dastforush (The peddler, 1986), had dared to create a film that was at such odds with the Islamic Republic’s interpretation of Shi‘i Islam. Hamid Dabashi credits Makhmalbaf with the rise of an “Islamic set of aesthetics” that was “initially squarely at the service of the Islamic Revolution…and the Islamic Republic.”⁷ And Time for Love marked the initial decline of that relationship. Shushtari’s disbelief suggested the degree to which Makhmalbaf’s cinematic goals had changed. Time for Love explores the possibilities of multiple moralities rather than promoting the Islamic Republic’s single interpretation of morality.

A. Nasrabadi noted this change in Makhmalbaf’s approach to cinema in the article “The Film Festival of 1991: Armed with Love and the Negation of Desire,” published in Keyhān on March 3, 1991. He argued, “It is no surprise that the Makhmalbaf of Nasuh’s Repentance and Boycott has become the Makhmalbaf of…Time for Love.” He further remarked on the shifting perception of Makhmalbaf among intellectuals by indicating that secular thinkers, who until recently “were shooting at his shadow,” had reevaluated their position and “today have abandoned their boycott on his films and now include him in the same category as the likes of Shahrnush Parsipur.”⁸ Nasrabadi’s alignment of Makhmalbaf with the novelist Shahrnush Parsipur is at once dangerous and in some ways appropriate. Always a controversial and anticonformist figure, Parsipur was arrested three times by the Islamic Republic. News of her 1990 incarceration for the publication of Women Without Men likely remained fresh in readers’ minds at this time.⁹ Makhmalbaf’s representation of women’s sexuality in Time for Love was similarly problematic. Critics accused him of “defending liberal women who are gharbzade [Westoxicated]” and “unconstrained.”¹⁰

Yet not all parties reacted negatively to this particular depiction of love and sexuality. When asked to comment on the film, Dr. Abdolkarim Soroush, an important reformist philosopher who will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter, told Omid that he did not “understand why earthly love is bad.” He questioned whether it “is possible to achieve a higher love without the lower love.” Time for Love, he said, “is about this earthly love” and he “liked it.”¹¹

Makhmalbaf, however did more than simply represent women’s sexuality. He also threatened the Islamic Republic’s ethical system by proposing an alternative and relativist model for morality.¹² Critics attacked the film as a “condemnation of morality” and an attempt “to make relative morals prevail.”¹³ Ali Motahhari even suggested that Makhmalbaf put his filmmaking career on hold until he had resolved his “intellectual qualms regarding women and the idea that truths are relative.”¹⁴ This statement reaffirmed the extent to which the country’s administrative elite believed in the influential power of film, and this view on the role of film in society served as a basis for the government’s support of the film industry, an arrangement that expected cinema to function not as a site of contestation or ambiguity but rather as a medium for the propagation of a certain kind of ideology.

Political and religious leaders expected cinema to promote the Islamic Republic’s conservative interpretation of Shi‘i Islam, one that located the value of art in its ability to represent idealized types. This interpretation was codified within the film industry in 1982, when the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, newly equipped with authority over the film industry, began holding films to a new “rule of modesty” that sought to represent a “purified” culture.¹⁵ The representation of women was especially contentious within this new policy, and women were to be limited to characters who embodied the “idealized” Muslim woman, especially in her role as mother and wife. Time for Love was problematic because it represented a woman whose extramarital affair disintegrated the family structure. Time for Love does more than fail to condemn her actions. It justifies them by creating a system wherein moral relativity is an idealized possibility.

By jeopardizing the “purified” culture that it was supposed to be promoting, Time for Love threatened public accountability, and the second wave in the debates consisted primarily of attempts to place responsibility for the film’s controversial release. As the dispute began to extend beyond the film, blame initially rested on the Fajr Film Festival. Critics of the film expressed dismay that “the festival organizers inadvertently allowed the new and improved Makhmalbaf a place in the festival.”¹⁶ One editorial criticized the festival programmers for carving out a space for the representation of love at all.¹⁷ A statement released by the festival’s public relations office at this time, however, neglected even to mention Time for Love and therefore refused to participate in this debate.¹⁸ As a result, people began looking higher for accountability and aimed their attention at the government, and specifically at the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance.

N. Mahdiar first articulated this kind of attack in an article called “Defective Criticism Is Wrong: We Should Go After the Roots,” published in Keyhān on March 14, 1991. The author wondered “which policy charted this downward course for Makhmalbaf.” This line of questioning suggested a provocative causal relationship between official governmental policy and Makhmalbaf’s cinematic work and indicated a significant reversal. Whereas previously his works influenced policy by reinforcing revolutionary values, with Time for Love, Mahdiar claimed, policy asserted its influential power over Makhmalbaf. He further argued, “Makhmalbaf is a shining example of the supervised governmental policy over cinema.” Yet Mahdiar’s harshest criticism came with his assertion that Time for Love, which had been trashed in the papers by this point, is “the product of your guidance and support.”¹⁹ This statement refocused his point of address directly to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, and his choice of words—“guidance and support,” which clearly referenced the ministry’s name—left no room for doubt that Mahdiar was criticizing the ministry.

Gradually criticism against the ministry became more narrowly focused, and its head, Mohammad Khatami, emerged as the primary target. Said Motamedi, for example, addressed the minister directly and asked, “Mr. Khatami, if you are actually opposed to the cheapness of the West, then why is the film Hamlet (in which the lips of a boy and a girl come within a few millimeters of one another) being shown in cinemas right now? Your censors…edit the film in such a way that the viewer can easily guess what has been cut out.”²⁰ Motamedi’s question demonstrated the way that this debate, which began squarely focused on Makhmalbaf, had developed into larger commentary on ministry practices. This author expressed no interest in the lasting legacy of Time for Love but used its controversy to call into question Khatami’s own system of beliefs and to censure loosening censorship policies. A second critic, A. Darai, also addressed Khatami directly and wrote: “Dear Mr. Khatami…you should have responded to central complaints that have entered the press in the Friday sermons of Qom…and asked for forgiveness from the people of the Shi‘i community [hezbollah].”²¹ This kind of request targeted Khatami as the agent responsible for the content of Time for Love and positioned him against a larger religious community.

Darai’s comment also alluded to an important feature of the debate: much of the commentary entered the newspapers through the Friday sermons of Qom, Tehran, and other major cities. Ahmad Jannati, the interim prayer leader of Qom, launched the severest criticism of Khatami and the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance during a Friday sermon on March 7, 1991, that was later published in the newspaper Ettelā‘āt. During his speech, Jannati warned that there is a “movement crawling in the name of art” that threatens the “Islamic Republic, the committed artists, and the Revolution.” He urged his listeners to “put up a serious fight against these kinds of movements.”²² Jannati perhaps foresaw the reformist movement and its special relationship with art, but he also made an important distinction between those artists still committed to the revolutionary ideals and those artists who were aligning themselves with this growing movement.

Jannati’s speech mirrored in some ways the larger debate at play as he shifted its focus from art and the artist to Khatami and the ministry. He claimed, “They brag that our film has been the subject of acclaim and appreciation outside of the country and foreigners conclude that art is alive and well in Iran. What a strange kind of art you’ve created.”²³ Jannati significantly changed the subject of these two sentences, juxtaposing an ambiguous “they” with an equally indistinct “you.” And yet the space he created between these two subjects remains certain as he relocates his point of address in the second person. This act placed specific blame not on an individual artist but rather on a larger system of government oversight.

Khatami took this point of address personally and responded to Jannati’s remarks directly, commenting on the Time for Love controversy for this first time. In a speech published in several newspapers on March 12, 1991, he cautioned that these words “raise doubt and create ambiguity.” He attempted to trivialize Jannati’s comments and suggested that “it is unlikely that Mr. Jannati has the base of knowledge necessary to assess the cultural and artistic events of this country, including film festivals.” Nevertheless, he noted that the “decisiveness” with which he “issues the angriest orders disturbs the peace of mind of the experts who are doing this sensitive work and upsets the cinema.” Khatami reiterated this point and requested “forgiveness from all the people knowledgeable of culture and art” for Jannati’s comments. He asked “the dear artists and men of culture to tolerate these unkind things with generosity of spirit.”²⁴ Khatami made a powerful statement with this seemingly innocent request for forgiveness. He distinguished between the artistic community and conservative religious groups and, importantly, suggested that an individual must possess a certain kind of knowledge in order to evaluate art effectively. This claim precluded the participation of religious officials in the formation of governmental policy that oversees artistic production. Khatami’s comment anticipated the 1992 publication of the Culture Principles of the Islamic Republic, a government document that recommends “the task of handling sociocultural issues…be left to the ‘experts’ and not the clergy.”²⁵

The exchange between Khatami and Jannati touches on a defining feature of this period. A great deal of uncertainty ensued after Khomeini’s death in 1989, and the country’s leaders faced the challenge of reconciling a set of paradoxical policies that he had enacted during his ten-year rule. His various documents codified, in a sense, the aim of the republic, and in his absence administrators were left to their own instincts and powers of interpretation. Fakhreddin Anvar, the deputy of cinematic affairs, noted the difficulties that came with this uncertainty and classified “the experience of this year” as “a very sensitive and complicated episode.” However, he defended the ministry’s actions during this time and contended that “we have been very successful.”²⁶ Ultimately, though, the variety of responses to the ministry’s “success” that emerged during the course of these debates signified the factionalism that marked the post-Khomeini period.

Khatami’s direct intervention into this controversy signaled the third shift in the Time for Love debates. During this final period in the debate, people initially responded to Khatami’s statement and reiterated many of the same points, but the discussion eventually narrowed its focus to the reaction of the film industry. At this point, a series of directors began commenting on the controversy. Many of these filmmakers attempted to distance themselves from the two figures at the center of the storm, Mohsen Makhmalbaf and the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. Seyfollah Dad, who would later become the deputy for cinema affairs during Khatami’s presidency, for example, suggested that one of the mistakes in current debates was “confusing the identity of current cinema in Iran with Mohsen Makhmalbaf.” He also reminded readers that film did not serve as a “reflection of…the state or the Ministry of Guidance.” He ended his article with a poetic warning by Rumi: “In Balkh an ironsmith sinned / in Shustar they cut the neck of an ironsmith.”²⁷ This couplet served as a caution against the kind of generalization that rests at the center of these debates. In many ways, this wave of response represented the beginning of the breakdown of the connection between politics and cinema that was constructed in the second phase of the debate. With this breakdown came the dissolution of the perception of a heavy-handed relationship between cinema and the ministry.

As writers like Dad downplayed the significance of the interplay between politics and cinema, the notion of aesthetics reemerged as a central concern of the debate. These responses remained critical of Makhmalbaf. The director Rahim Rahimipur, critical of a cinematic trajectory that would permit a film like Nasuh’s Repentance to give way to Time for Love, indicated that “if [Iranian cinema] continues down this path, only God knows where it will end up.” He suggested that Iranian society should be “worried and concerned that The Little Jungle Boy, who has gotten married and settled down, gave up his battle to present the history of Islam and the Islamic Revolution through cinema.”²⁸ Rahimipur offered his biting critique by playing with Makhmalbaf’s film titles and insinuated that the director had gone soft with his depiction of love in Time for Love. Rahimipur criticized Makhmalbaf’s neglect of more serious issues affecting the country at that time and lamented the fact that Iran does not “even have one example of one film in line with the goals of the regime and reconstruction after the war.”²⁹ With this article, the debate came full circle, as it once again examined the purpose of film. However, whereas previously criticism was very much tied up in what film should not do (e.g., promote moral relativism), this artistic response was concerned more with what film should attempt to do (e.g., reinforce reconstruction efforts after the Iran-Iraq War).

At this point, the debate as a cohesive body began to break down. A unified set of concerns no longer drove the responses, and the discussion slowly tapered off. By the end of April, just two months after the film’s first and only showing, Time for Love and the related disputes no longer appear regularly in the main newspapers. In June the monthly journal Film published a follow-up report that summarized some of the major exchanges of the debate and officially brought the controversy to a close. My examination charts some of the major concerns of the Time for Love debates and at the same time highlights the public’s overwhelmingly negative response to the film. This collective response indicated that the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance had, whether intentionally or unintentionally, loosened its grip on the art world and had challenged the limits of cultural expression in Iranian society at that time. The disconnect between the public criticism of the film and Khatami and Makhmalbaf’s open defense suggested that whereas society in the spring of 1991 by and large situated art in the hands of the government, Khatami and Makhmalbaf provided agency to the artist.

The release of Time for Love and the controversy surrounding it suggested a shift in policy, both personal and political. This episode represented a critical moment for Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Mohammad Khatami. Both men had played important roles in the republic’s first decade, but their support of this film revealed that their beliefs were no longer in line with the ideals of the conservative revolutionaries. With this film, Makhmalbaf declared his independence as an artist and no longer accepted his role as the propagator of the Islamic Republic’s ideology. Dabashi notes that “Makhmalbaf’s early career was…seriously implicated in…the Islamic Republic” and his works played an “integral” part in its reign.³⁰ The release of Time for Love, however, marked Makhmalbaf’s move away from this “early career.” The shift in the way that Makhmalbaf perceived himself and his relationship to the government was evident in the two public responses he issued. In the first press release, published relatively early in the debates, on March 10, 1991, he indicated that “the writer of these lines knows very well that these disputes don’t even have anything to do with him and the dispute is…between the power-hungry forces.”³¹ Whereas previously Makhmalbaf’s role was tied up in this struggle for power, at this point he was distancing himself from that process.

In his second statement, issued several weeks later during the wave of artistic responses, Makhmalbaf addressed an “open letter” to “Dear Mr. Mehdi Nasri, Brother who is committed and revolutionary.” He quickly corrected himself, however, and wrote, “Pardon me, A. Nasrabadi, the managing director and actually the one who does everything at Keyhān!” With this introduction, Makhmalbaf alluded to the fact that Mehdi Nasri, the managing director of the newspaper Keyhān, had written a series of articles against the film, Makhmalbaf, and the ministry under the name “A. Nasrabadi.” He attacked Nasri’s failure to sign his articles with his own name and accused him of “benefiting from behind the curtain.” Makhmalbaf asked, “If you claim to have faith, why don’t you stand behind your words?” His most telling statement, however, came when he inquired, “Don’t we, the artists of your country, stand like men under your beating sticks with our real names?”³² Makhmalbaf’s emphasis on names and signing one’s work functioned as a way of reaffirming his agency. He accepted responsibility for the controversy but also asserted the film as his own.

In his letter to Nasri, Makhmalbaf argued that the managing editor was only interested in “ridiculing the Ministry.”³³ Nasri’s eagerness to criticize the ministry may very well have rested in the agency’s move away from the conservative policies of the republic under Khomeini. Khatami was responsible for steering the ministry in this new direction, and his reaction to the Time for Love debates highlighted his growing discontent in the post-Khomeini period. Like Makhmalbaf, who promoted the Islamic Republic’s ideology through his films, Khatami contributed significantly to the formation of the Islamic Republic, serving in many of the country’s highest administrative posts, including the Majles, the Keyhān Publishing House (under the direct control of the Supreme Leader), and the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. By the time that Time for Love premiered at the 1991 Fajr Film Festival, Khatami had been in the service of the republic for more than a decade.

His response to the Time for Love episode recalls the language that would mark his letter of resignation from the ministry a year later, and it brings into focus emerging cracks in his commitment to a revolutionary framework as the kind of governance that would best serve the Islamic Republic. In his public response to Jannati’s critique of the film and the ministry, after addressing Jannati directly, Khatami attended to the film Time for Love and the complaints launched against the ministry. He suggested that he was proud of the ministry for “holding steadfast” as weak and narrow-minded people tried “to load their own political and cultural agenda onto society as a whole.”³⁴ Khatami’s charged language in this speech spoke to his defense of the ministry’s new, more moderate direction.

During this course of this speech, however, Khatami did more than just defend his ministry. He also began to express a new ideology, one that diverged considerably from the revolutionary values that had marked his earlier career. He asserted that “today our society is facing great tragedies,” and he located the root of these problems in the “judicious and courageous confrontation by his eminence Imam Khomeini…, the terror that he caused on various occasions, and the fatwas and provocative opinions he had concerning every area, especially cultural and artistic.”³⁵ While Khatami remained respectful of Khomeini and the necessity of his drastic measures, he also felt limited by the policies of the revolution, especially with regard to artistic expression.

Just as Makhmalbaf’s film Time for Love promoted antiabsolutism, so too did Khatami’s speech advocate for the possibility of relativity in policy making. His statement on the film suggested that the policies and aims of the republic must adjust to fit the changing conditions and evolving political environment, a belief at the heart of the reformist efforts that would define the political landscape less than a decade later. The very core of the reformist philosophy can therefore be traced back to Khatami’s work in the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, and the film Time for Love was a point of rupture that contributed to this new discourse of reform. The film and the controversy surrounding it marked a departure in the way in which certain artists and politicians, like Makhmalbaf and Khatami, understood the film industry’s place within the Islamic Republic. By providing the film industry with more agency and relocating ownership in the artists themselves, these budding reformists began to reimagine what the Islamic Republic could achieve outside of the revolutionary and wartime politics that had dictated life in Iran for more than a decade.

Before expounding the political potential of mysticism as a feature of a reformist aesthetic, it is important to establish Time for Love as a film invested in and indebted to the Persian mystic tradition.³⁷ Two important Sufi concepts, ma‘refat (knowing God) and haqiqat (reality, truth), inform a mystic exploration of Time for Love, and the poetry of Jalal al-Din Rumi proves instructive to any effort to classify Time for Love as a representative example of cine-mysticism in Iran in the early 1990s. The application of Rumi here is particularly relevant because both Makhmalbaf and Soroush have professional connections to him. Whereas Makhmalbaf has on several occasions quoted Rumi in reference to his films, Soroush is a scholar of Rumi and has edited an authoritative edition of his Masnavi-ye ma‘navi.³⁸ By reading Time for Love’s engagement with ma‘refat and haqiqat as Rumi understood them alongside Makhmalbaf’s published philosophy on the film, the mystic qualities that underpin the film fully emerge.

The Sufi concept of ma‘refat, as Franklin Lewis reminds us in his extensive study of Rumi, is “an intuitive and experiential knowing of God…achieved not by studying the law, but by loving God.”³⁹ This definition collapses knowing God with the act of loving him, and it positions love as central to the mystic experience in Persian literature. Annemarie Schimmel also emphasizes this point when she argues that although Persian mystic poets draw on three categories of symbols, “the center of their thoughts is always Love.”⁴⁰ The nature of this love according to Schimmel is metaphoric, and she cites the proverb al-majāz qantaratu‘l-haqīqa (The metaphor is the bridge that leads to Truth) to illuminate the way in which Persian mystic poets imagine the relationship between love and truth. Persian mystical poetry ultimately depends on the tension between human love and divine love, wherein the former may, but does not necessarily, function as a metaphor for the latter, and Schimmel, like Lewis, also notes the opposition between love and intellect in the mystic tradition. For the mystic poets, she claims, “reason, or intellect, leads to talk while Love silently reveals the inside of the mysteries.”⁴¹

The title Time for Love underscores the centrality of love in Makhmalbaf’s film, and the public debates surrounding it similarly suggested that love was a point of concern for audiences. These published debates indicate that, by and large, the public considered the film’s representation of love in earthly terms; other films at the 1991 Fajr Film Festival, Hamid Naficy has noted, were celebrated for their representations of “spiritual and mystic love.”⁴² Despite the way in which audiences received Time for Love at the time of its release, its representation of love is also metaphoric, a testament to the mystic love that marked a millennium of Persian poetry before it. Abdolkarim Soroush was the first to consider the romantic qualities of Time for Love in divine terms when he asked in a review of the film whether it “is possible to achieve a higher love without the lower love.”⁴³ In a second essay, he expanded on the metaphoric power of love in the film and wrote that “being in love is not emphasized or treated topically” in Time for Love, but, rather, love functions as “proof” in a more complicated case study on the human experience.⁴⁴

Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s own philosophy of the film, which was published in a three-volume collection of essays and reviews called Gong-e khābideh (Muted dreams, 1993), picks up on Soroush’s classification of the film as mysticism and, like the mystic poets of the classical Persian tradition, considers the concept of love both in metaphoric relation to the divine and as at odds with intellectualism. Gong-e khābideh is an idiom in Persian that describes the disorientation of waking up from a dream and recognizing the physical shapes of reality once again, and the state of gong-e khābideh describes Makhmalbaf’s career and especially his disillusionment with the dream of the revolution. Within this framework, Time for Love is the moment of gong-e khābideh and attests to Makhmalbaf’s recognition of the restrictive realities of the Islamic Republic, in contrast to the revolution’s promises.

In Muted Dreams, Makhmalbaf’s notes on Time for Love challenge and ultimately collapse two binary oppositions: manteq-e sar–manteq-e del (the logic of the mind–the logic of the heart) and ‘eshq-e zamini–‘eshq-e āsemāni (earthly love–heavenly love). The tension generated in Time for Love between and through these opposing forces ultimately imbues the film with its mystic character. In his discussion of logic, Makhmalbaf begins with a statement that appeals to the rational mind: the whole is bigger than the part.⁴⁵ But according to the director, Time for Love allows us to image how the heart’s logic functions differently from the mind’s, in such a way that this generally accepted truth about the relationship between the whole and the part no longer seems rational and the whole is no longer bigger than the part.

Two moments in the film demonstrate the ways in which the heart’s logic triumphs over the mind’s rationale. In the film’s first section, Güzel’s husband accepts his death sentence and insists, “I am content because I have defended my honor.” As Makhmalbaf notes, logically, one’s honor represents only one part of one’s life as a whole.⁴⁶ The husband’s willingness to sacrifice his life to defend his honor confounds the proportional relationship between the whole and the part. Yet this act does not strike us as unreasonable, because it appeals to an emotional logic, according to which the desire to defend one’s honor is greater and more urgent than life itself.

The logic of love also drives the first two sections of the film, when Güzel commits suicide because her lover dies, first at the hands of her husband and later at the hands of the justice system. Here again one might reasonably argue that love represents but one piece of life as a whole. However, Güzel’s desire to forsake the whole for the benefit of the part conforms to the same emotional logic, a logic that resonates more soundly with human desire than the rationalized logic toward which humans often strive. Time for Love asserts the differences implicit in the mind’s logic and the heart’s logic, but the film also shows that human experience privileges the latter. The characters make decisions based on emotional rather than rational impulses, and it is only by deferring to the undeniable pull of an emotional logic that the viewer is able to make sense of the characters’ actions and reactions. Makhmalbaf argues, “If it weren’t so, we would have to consider all of the people in this story raving mad.”⁴⁷

The appeal to emotion in Time for Love is also an appeal to the logic of love, and within the mystic tradition romantic concerns often signal divine love. In his notes, Makhmalbaf questions the relationship between ‘eshq-e zamini (earthly love) and ‘eshq-e āsemāni (heavenly love). He observes some of the shades of gray that naturally exist between these two intermingled concepts and notes, for example, that love between a man and his wife is earthly because it is physical, but also divine because it has been sanctioned religiously. For Makhmalbaf, sex undoubtedly falls into the category of carnal desire, regardless of its relationship to love. He indicates that it is significant that Güzel’s love is never consummated even after it has been sanctioned. According to Makhmalbaf, the lack of sexuality leaves Güzel’s love within the realm of mysticism because it does not close out the possibility of divine or heavenly love.⁴⁸ That Güzel’s desires are not sexualized within the narrative is significant insofar as it gestures toward the mystic possibility of the love represented by Time for Love.

At the same time, if the representation of love in Time for Love is completely platonic and squarely within the realm of the divine, then why did it provoke such a furious debate about morality? Were critics and audiences shortsighted in their evaluation of the film, or does the film visually gesture toward the possibility of sex? One scene in particular fueled criticism, and viewers saw it both as explicitly sexual and as an unabashed absolution of carnal desire. In the film’s first episode, Güzel and her blond lover ride in the back of a horse-drawn carriage. The camera pans down to the horses’ hooves, and their rhythmic galloping on a stone road establishes a pulsating soundtrack for the scene. The camera moves back up the horses’ bodies, and they neigh in seeming delight as their bodies and heads push together. A cut relocates to the view behind the horses, where only the top of the carriage and the sky above are visible; Güzel and her lover have slouched down in their seat. Suddenly the man raises his scarf in his hand and holds it still in the moving air. Güzel follows: raising her headscarf with an outstretched arm. The two scarves dance in the wind, and the long take emphasizes the intimate entanglement of the fabrics as they move through the breeze. A sudden, abrupt cut shows a medium shot of Güzel and the man lying on the grass next to the road. It appears they have just collapsed, and, out of breath, they lie almost head-to-head and pant quietly.

It is easy to appreciate how audiences at the time understood this scene in sexual terms. The rhythmic sounds of the horses’ hooves seem to mimic the mechanics of sexual intercourse; the two scarves appear to be proxies for their owners, approximating the physical intimacy that cannot be shown onscreen; and the scene’s final shot of Güzel and the blond man lying in the grass reasonably completes a sexual arch that ends with a climax. Although the representation of sex in Iranian cinema remains understudied, Shahla Haeri has demonstrated that filmmakers working under the strict production guidelines of the Islamic Republic have developed strategies to convey the experience of “carnal desire” onscreen.⁴⁹ At the same time, the “sex scene” in Time for Love, which predates the examples in Haeri’s study by several years, alongside Makhmalbaf’s insistence that the film never consummates Güzel’s affair, invites a framework that understands the coded representation of sex on Iranian screens not just in terms of production but also with regards to consumption. Makhmalbaf’s suggestion that the film never fulfills the extramarital affair’s carnal desire might signal a politically minded sleight of hand, another attempt to distract censors and government officials from the film’s explicit sexuality. But such a reading would also unravel the very mystical philosophy that Makhmalbaf claims for his Time for Love project. Instead, it is possible to understand audiences’ reaction to this scene (which differed from Makhmalbaf’s stated intentions) as the result of viewing practices that were developing in the Islamic Republic at the time and that encouraged viewers to find meaning in codes and allegories. In such a scheme, the “sex scene” in Time for Love becomes a fulfillment of some viewers’ desires rather than simply a strategy on the part of the director.

The possibility of multiple interpretations of the “sex scene” and the movie as a whole is crucial to its mystic texture. The existence of multiple realities—the pluralism of Soroush’s philosophy or the moral relativism of Ayatollah Motahhari ⁵⁰—is central to the film’s mystic orientation. In his director’s notes, Makhmalbaf insists that Time for Love is philosophical at its core, and for him it is the possibility of multiple avenues constructed from a set of unique circumstances and the film’s interest in exploring those circumstances that ultimately lend the film its philosophical character.⁵¹ The very possibility of different circumstances generates multiple realities and truths, and this notion in Time for Love self-consciously recalls a similar idea in mystic poetry. On at least two occasions, and once in direct reference to this film, Makhmalbaf has alluded to a well-known anecdote from Rumi that illustrates this idea: “The truth is a mirror that shattered as it fell from the hand of God. Everyone picked up a piece of it, and each decided that the truth was what he saw reflected in his fragment rather than realizing that the truth had become fragmented among them all.”⁵² In his director’s notes, Makhmalbaf describes his project as an exploration into the “role of ‘circumstance’ on the fate of every single human being.”⁵³ It is therefore the individualization of the reception of truth that occupies a paramount position in Time for Love. Soroush sees the film in similar terms and argues that the film promotes the idea that whether an event is “good or bad, right or wrong, when two people change places, they are like one another.”⁵⁴ For Soroush Time for Love brings to focus the fact that circumstance can for two individuals create “two spheres, wherein one finds fault in the other and one is even willing to kill another.”⁵⁵

This analysis by Soroush underscores an important and often overlooked feature of Time for Love. Although many of the discussions and debates about the film revolve around Güzel and her honor, it is actually the two men who act as variables in the film and participate as subjects in Makhmalbaf’s study. The film’s actors and its mise-en-scène inscribe this feature visually. It is significant that the actress who plays Güzel remains the same in all three sections, and the character’s circumstances leading up to the film’s events remain similarly consistent: she has fallen in love with a man who is not her husband. The film reinforces visually the character’s stability throughout the three episodes, and each episode begins with the same shot of Güzel standing in front of a house right before a train passes in front of the camera. The film also ends with the same shot, which suggests the continuation of this pattern and the possibility of other truths and realities beyond those posited by the film’s three episodes.

It is ultimately the consistency of the representation of Güzel that signals to us the repetition of the film’s main narrative in each of the three sections. Makhmalbaf exactly replicates certain shots of Güzel from the first episode in the second. At other times, he stages a frame in the second episode in exactly the same manner as the first, but although Güzel’s placement remains the same, the male characters have switched places. Each instance further positions Güzel as a constant while the men switch and change, and their shifting circumstances are ultimately the variables that interest the director.

Because the men in Time for Love are only identified in the film’s screenplay by their physical characteristics, mu-meshki (dark-haired) and mu-bur (blond), and not by names, when the actors switch roles in the second episode, one must assume that the characters have similarly changed places. Through the switching male actors and characters, the film imagines multiple possibilities and realities, each conditioned by a particular set of circumstances. Quite simply, Time for Love creates the opportunity for two rivals to act according to the other’s circumstances. The film’s second section, for example, creates the possibility that if fate had granted the blonde lover of the first section a taxi and a certificate of military completion (like the dark-haired man of the first episode), then he would have been Güzel’s husband. By being her husband, however, he is denied her love. Similarly, if the husband in the first section possessed neither a taxi nor a certification of military completion, then he might have become Güzel’s lover, privy to a love he was denied in the role of her husband. And this possibility becomes his fate in the film’s second section. A complex web of circumstances and conditions thus defines both men and their relationships to Güzel, and by engendering an empathetic perspective, wherein the viewer is made to consider the circumstances of both men before reaching conclusions about their actions, Time for Love advocates a new relative order, one that fully rejects absolutism.

In his description of the film, Makhmalbaf argues that perfectionism in man’s behavior depends on perfect conditions, and he quotes a famous couplet from Hafez (Ghazal no. 143): “If the Holy Spirit casts His blessings once again / Others too will do as Christ did.”⁵⁶ This relationship between fate and circumstance, on the one hand, and legal and ethical conditions, on the other, is mediated through the character of the judge. Makhmalbaf suggests that the presence of the judge confirms the film as a philosophical endeavor.⁵⁷ The judge’s role in the film imbues its mysticism with a political element as well, because within the context of the Iranian legal system, which is based on religious law and is carried out in an Islamic republic, issues of and judgments in morality always assume a political dimension.

The judge plays the only character in the film who is aware of—or at least acknowledges—the film’s episodic structure. In the third section, he laments the repetition of similar but contradictory events in the first two parts and resigns from his post. As Makhmalbaf notes, in the first two episodes the judge too willingly conforms to social norms and acts in a manner too “expedient.” The director describes his role as “judicial.”⁵⁸ In the film’s third episode, however, the judge reflects on these expedient and judicial rulings and asks, “How could I have condemned individuals whose preordained conditions are far more effective on their actions than their personal share?” He continues by emphasizing his desire to empathize, an act that cannot be carried out in the present legal system: “I carefully thought of each convict and without a doubt if I had been in their exact situation, I would have behaved exactly as they did.” Issues of morality and the human ability to arbitrate them accurately become both for the judge and for us increasingly muddied once the film introduces multiple variables and dimensions into its complicated matrix.

The judge more clearly delineates the role of condition in one’s ability to empathize as he defends his resignation. He says, “Whenever I contemplate the grave consequences of a criminal’s actions, I condemn him at once, but when I consider the specific reasons underlying the crime, I see him as acquitted.” The judge’s recognition of the film’s structure, which increasingly makes space for the recognition of incident and stipulation, ultimately leads to his advocacy of it. The judge’s position calls into question man’s ability to render proper judgment and make true decisions. The film reveals man’s access to truth as conditional, multiple, and variable, and at the same time it demonstrates that by appreciating the conditions that breed a particular situation and thereby approximating a truer truth, man falls prey to the pulls of empathy and sympathy, which alter his ability to judge the situation at hand.

Makhmalbaf suggests that the film’s first two episodes are intended to demonstrate the predestination of one’s actions, and the final episode advocates for the “relative role of man’s freedom.”⁵⁹ And it is with this freedom to sympathize and act accordingly that the film ends and an unfinished fourth episode begins as the viewer is once again confronted with the image of Güzel standing in front of a house and a train passing by. The unfinished and cyclical nature of Time for Love adds to its mystic texture by creating a place for the interrogation of multiple truths, the literal and metaphoric powers of love, the relationship between fate and circumstance, and man’s ability to know God.

A number of other films in the late 1980s and early 1990s—including Abbas Kiarostami’s internationally successful Koker Trilogy: Khāneh-ye dust kojāst? (Where is the friend’s house?, 1987), Zendegi va digar hich (Life and nothing more, 1992), and Zir-e darakhtān-e zeytun (Through the olive trees, 1994)—similarly drew on the mystic tradition. Dariush Mehrjui’s Hamun (Hamun, 1990), though, begins to trace a theoretical framework for the rise of mysticism among Iranian intellectuals in the early 1990s. Hamun premiered at the Fajr Film Festival the year before Time for Love and was identified in 1997 by Film as the best Iranian film, dethroning Mehrjui’s 1969 classic Gāv (The cow). The film is a psychological drama that comprises a series of scenes that alternate between dream and reality, fantasy and life. The film’s title character, Hamid Hamun, is an aspiring intellectual who has been struggling for years to finish his doctoral thesis on love and faith. In the meantime, he has taken on a job in the corporate world in sales in order to support his family, especially his wife Mahshid, who is accustomed to a more comfortable lifestyle.

His life begins to crumble when Mahshid demands a divorce and takes custody of their only child, and the film examines Hamun’s mental state in these trying times by navigating the psychological terrain of memory on the one hand and anxiety on the other. In addition to the narrative that takes place in the present, Hamun features a number of flashbacks that go as far back as the protagonist’s childhood but primarily chart the course and collapse of his marriage to Mahshid. The main narrative is also fragmented by a number of Fellini-style dream and fantasy sequences that express Hamun’s anxiety about losing his wife, family, and ultimately control over his life. These scenes, which approach the absurd and include dancing midgets dressed as court jesters and faceless women, capture the breakdown of the character’s psychological wellbeing and function as wild alternatives to the stagnation of his own existence.

That this stagnation is Hamun’s starting point is significant insofar as it serves as a base from which the film’s narrative visually constructs his further disempowerment. Hamun is significant in part because it is one of the first films after the revolution to depict a man, and especially an intellectual man, in a weakened state in a nonredemptive way. The previous wave of films attempted to commit audiences first to the revolution and the Islamic Republic and later to the Iran-Iraq War, tasks that required a strong male figure. Hamun is in many ways the quintessential Iranian intellectual hero: wrought with brooding “anguish and tortured self-examination” at the same time that he is “a man of great physical vitality and charm.”⁶⁰ And yet, Hamun renders its protagonist socially, emotionally, and physically weak at various points in its narrative.

At one point in the film, Hamun is enraged by his wife’s plans to divorce him, and he confronts her violently as she is hanging laundry on the roof of their apartment building. Their neighbors have to come and separate them. These violent moments in the film were the first time that a man and a woman touched onscreen in post-revolution cinema.⁶¹ Far from being sexualized, this moment reveals Hamun as uncontrolled and unraveling. The film visually reinforces this conclusion with a flood of neighbors who take over the frame with scorn and condemnation.

At other points in the film, Hamun is reduced to childlike tears, ashamed of his own actions and heartbroken by his wife’s. The breakdown of his physical prowess occurs as he unsuccessfully tries to complete the sale of medical equipment. The doctor in charge rejects the initial offer, so Hamun decides to stage a demonstration. He attempts to supply the necessary sample of blood himself and inadvertently passes out because he has drained too much (figure 1.1). This scene in the film is the ultimate metaphor for the collapse of the intellectual man in post-revolution Iran; he is literally dried up and unconscious.

Throughout the film, Hamun attempts to ground his life through a series of mystical journeys. Specifically, he goes in search of Ali, his ostād, or spiritual guide, who has achieved Sufi unity despite the tragic loss of his family. Hamun likens him to Hallaj, a great mystic figure, and explains, “You leapt into the silver pond and reached yourself and God.”⁶² Hamun yearns for this spiritual unity, and he believes that he can only achieve it by uniting with Ali. In this way the spiritual guide becomes a kind of beloved figure. However, as is typical of a mystical journey, Hamun never reaches his destination and never finds that for which he is searching. He travels from Tehran to Ali’s village only to discover that Ali is in Tehran. Later Hamun passes Ali in a car, which leads to a frantic car chase that ends in Hamun colliding with another car. This scene demonstrates how the closer one gets to the beloved the farther he actually is. Even though Hamun sees Ali in the next car, his crash ultimately causes his life to spin out of control even more, undermining his search for stability. The film’s ending revisits this theme. Hamun tries to drown himself, but he is rescued by Ali. It is only in this momentary death that he can be reunited with his beloved figure.

One of the film’s flashbacks returns Hamun to his childhood during ‘āshurā, the Shi‘i mourning ceremony for the martyrdom of Hussein. Six-year-old Hamun navigates the rituals of self-flagellation in search of Ali Abedini.⁶³ He eventually finds Ali, who appears to be the same age as he is during the film’s present, thirty-five years later. Ali’s agelessness captures the timelessness of this mystic journey. At the same time, Hamun’s search represents an alternative to the communal religion represented by the mourning ceremonies.

It is the possibility of this alternative that allows us to return to mysticism as a historically grounded event in Iran in the early 1990s. The film Hamun theorizes how those intellectuals who felt disempowered and stagnant found purpose and meaning in mysticism, as an alternative to the religion being promoted by the Islamic Republic. The early 1990s represented a unique period in Iran’s history, shaped by the death of Khomeini, the end of the Iran-Iraq War, and the gradual abatement of revolutionary fervor. After a decade of excitement and movement, the late 1980s and early 1990s represented a political and intellectual lull. Although the extreme circumstances of the revolution and the war were no longer in place, the corresponding policies, which limited economic, social, and political mobility, left many intellectuals feeling trapped, and mysticism represented the possibility of redemption.

The turn to mysticism represented in Time for Love and Hamun allows us to rethink the implications of cine-mysticism in Iran, particularly in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The appropriation of a mystic aesthetic at this juncture in Iran’s history represents a point of concern for critics like Hamid Dabashi, who sees cine-mysticism as a “sad and rather pathetic outcome of the dispirited Iranian bourgeoisie’s loss of confidence” in the revolutionary project.⁶⁴ He classifies this effort in Iranian cinema as “strange flirtation with…a belated attraction to a bourgeois version of Persian mysticism.”⁶⁵ Dabashi describes cine-mysticism as a “disease” and as potentially “fatal”⁶⁶ and explains that the moment of redemption for Makhmalbaf occurred when he recovered from this illness. Dabashi finds value in Makhmalbaf’s mysticism—which he describes as “ghastly”—only through the idea that this brush with cinematic death ultimately strengthened his later films. Dabashi’s analysis, however, neglects the possibility that mysticism functioned as a strategic effort for Makhmalbaf as he sought to claim his own creativity, and by reducing this mystic aesthetic to bourgeois dabbling and brushing it aside, Dabashi misses the productivity that comes with considering cine-mysticism within its historical context. Indeed, his studies of Makhmalbaf represent an effort to bring about “a creative restoration of historical agency in the post/colonial subject,”⁶⁷ which he locates in the director’s later films. As a result, he analyzes the director’s earlier works through the lens of his later films: death avoided, illness overcome. This narrow observation, however, fails to acknowledge meaningful possibilities of mysticism within both the context of Makhmalbaf’s career and Iranian cinema more generally.

The value of mysticism in films like Time for Love and Hamun extends well beyond an “exorcism.”⁶⁸ The cinematic appeal to mysticism at this time also initiated profound transformations as to what could be shown onscreen and contributed to the development of an aesthetic that accepted and even encouraged multiple interpretations. These shifts in film industry practices are most visible in the representation of women; for example, cine-mysticism in Hamun gave way to the first contact between a man and a woman onscreen, and a mystic appeal in Time for Love generated the possibility of onscreen sex for viewers. As film became less dogmatic and more open to multiple possibilities and interpretations, it began to lay the discursive foundation for political reform. In this way, the cine-mysticism of the early 1990s resonated with other intellectual efforts, which also drew on the mystic tradition, and together these efforts foresaw the coming of Khatami’s reformist movement less than a decade later.

The philosophical contributions of Abdolkarim Soroush are a particularly salient point of departure for this kind of argument because the film Time for Love clearly appealed to his philosophical, aesthetic, and political sensibilities. By identifying the mysticism implicit in his philosophies and by reading these works against Time for Love, it is possible to position mysticism (in both its cinematic and philosophical manifestations) as a politically potent strategy that resonated with imminent revolutionary discontent and an emerging set of reformist concerns. Soroush credits Rumi with introducing him to a “love-based mysticism” that is at odds with and ultimately saved him from the fear-based mysticism of Al-Ghazali. Historian Afshin Matin-asgari notes that Soroush’s philosophies feature a “strong mystical tendency” that draws from and is structured around references to Rumi and his poetry. Matin-asgari further argues that a “deep and unresolved tension” exists between this mystic tendency and his attraction to philosophical reason.⁶⁹ The incongruities between these two modes of thought inevitably result in contradictions in Soroush’s writings. Nevertheless, in the 1990s Soroush maintained that his understanding of morality appealed to “a mystical esthetics of divine beauty,” and in a 1992 lecture he argued that mysticism is the “only path” out of the postmodern condition because it “doubted rationality from the onset.”⁷⁰

By the mid-1990s, Soroush’s espousal of mysticism was replaced by a call for the rationality of science. Matin-asgari cites an important lecture that Soroush gave in 1996 on “Iranian identity,” in which he claimed that mysticism fosters “fatalistic thinking (jabr-andishi) and perplexity (hayrat)” within Iranian society. As a solution, he advocated the rational and critical philosophy of Kant. It is within this move toward rationalism and away from nihilism that Matin-asgari locates Soroush’s contribution to the secularization of Islamic thought.⁷¹ Matin-asgari’s useful delineation of the development of Soroush’s philosophy brings to focus an important aspect of the study of this important figure. Soroush’s philosophy comprises an expansive and expanding body of works, and each of his beliefs is grounded in a particular historical moment. To ignore that historicity is to violate the very nature of his philosophy. Qabz va bast-e te‘urik-e shari‘at: nazarieh-ye takāmol-e ma‘refat-e dini (The theoretical contraction and expansion of religious law: The concept of the evolution of religious knowledge, 1999), a book published from a four-part series of articles that the author wrote between May 1988 and March 1990, speaks to the same historical circumstances that gave rise to Makhmalbaf’s Time for Love. By reading these two cultural products side by side, mysticism emerges as a far-reaching trend among the country’s intellectuals in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This mystic project corresponded both temporally and ideologically with the nascent but budding reformist discourse.

Soroush’s choice of title, The Theoretical Contraction and Expansion of Religious Law, immediately signals the book’s mystic tones. In the original Persian, the first and third words, qabz (contraction) and bast (expansion), signify two Sufi concepts that describe the movement of a mystic’s heart: the literal tightening and loosening of the muscle and the corresponding symbolic desolation and elation therein. In The Theoretical Contraction and Expansion of Religious Law, Soroush appropriates these terms to describe “altering moments of epistemic openness and closure of Islamic societies”⁷² to generate a mystic-based model that he hopes will fill an epistemological and theoretical gap in the efforts by Islamic reformists and revivalists.⁷³ In its most basic form, the theory of contraction and expansion aims to distinguish “religion and people’s understanding of it,” wherein “that which remains constant is religion (din)” and “that which undergoes change is religious knowledge and insight [ma‘refat-e dini].”⁷⁴ Whereas religion itself represents perfection, human understanding of religion (or religious knowledge), as a product of the human experience, is wrought with imperfection. We can only gain access to religion through interpretation, a human science, and as Soroush notes, “defects abound in exegeses.”⁷⁵ The role of reason in this theory is to acknowledge the distinction between religion and religious understanding. Reason, Soroush maintains, does not “complement” religion; “it struggles to improve its own understanding of religion.”⁷⁶

Soroush describes religion as “unblemished by the artifacts of the human mind,”⁷⁷ and this description captures the temporality of religious knowledge, which is weighed down by the historical artifacts of the human mind. He goes so far as to state that the degree of the temporality of religious knowledge approaches “the synchronization and adaptation of this branch of human knowledge with the sciences and needs of each age.”⁷⁸ The nature of religious knowledge may, therefore, more closely approximate, historically, the contours of human knowledge than the true meaning of religion. Soroush is able as a result of this supposition to reconcile a tension he detects between eternity and temporality, and by extension he renders moot debates about tradition and modernity in the Islamic world.⁷⁹ Ultimately the separation he maintains between religion and religious knowledge brings to mind the distance in Sufi poetry between lover and beloved and the divine implications of this mystic love. As Ashkan Dahlén notes, this theory “is connected to mysticism in that it renders meaning to the traditional distinction between shari‘at, tariqat (the esoteric way), and haqiqat,” and this distinction is “grounded in the eternal differences of hermeneutical methodology.”⁸⁰

The critique of absolutism that surfaces in Soroush’s approach in The Theoretical Contraction and Expansion of Religious Law echoes the mysticism put forth by Makhmalbaf in Time for Love. Although Soroush and Makhmalbaf interrogate slightly different terminologies (Makhmalbaf favoring “relativism” over “pluralism”), both are interested in human access to a definite, and presumably religious, truth. These models suggest the relativity of that access. Makhmalbaf’s film suggests that the perfect judgment—that is, a judgment that corresponds precisely with religious truth—depends on the perfect conditions. Soroush’s argument helps refine this idea as it is presented in Time for Love. The observation that religious knowledge of truth is necessarily grounded in and conditioned by the historical trends of flawed human thought, which in turn shapes the mechanisms that govern societies, is significant here insofar as it suggests the impossibility of perfectionism within the human condition. In both Soroush’s philosophy and Makhmalbaf’s Time for Love this rejection of absolutism opens the door to a pluralism that accepts the possibility of multiple paths to a universal truth. In Time for Love this pluralism takes the form of moral relativism and is represented by the film’s structure, which features a number of moral paths without imposing a privileging system on any of them. For Soroush, the resolute denial of absolutism clears the way for plurality of the religious community, which is a “shallow indicator of the plurality of souls,”⁸¹ and he uses this indicator to call for tolerance.

Soroush’s philosophies also enable us to envision the political possibilities latent in mysticism in contemporary Iran, including the kind represented in Time for Love. Although Soroush examines the religious and mystical nature of an Islamic hermeneutic process, the political implications of his argument are undeniable. The very call for pluralism implicit in Soroush’s discussion threatened the existence of the Islamic Republic, which depends on velāyat-e faqih, a ruling system that privileges and enforces a single religious understanding under the guise of religion itself.⁸² Soroush’s use of mysticism to discredit the system of velāyat-e faqih is significant because Khomeini’s construction of the concept drew on mystic thought.⁸³ Therefore, Soroush used Khomeini’s own scholarly tools to refute his most important political and intellectual contribution to Iranian society. Moreover, the application of Soroush’s ideas to political reform is paramount. He provided, according to Oliver Roy, “the ‘political philosophy’ of the Khatamists” by considering “how to secularize politics in a society which cannot afford to reject its heritage and origin: an Islamic Revolution.”⁸⁴

Whereas Roy’s assessment, written in 1999, grounds Soroush and mysticism in the present (i.e., Khatami’s presidency), historians have traced a long trend in Iranian intellectualism that drew heavily from the mystic tradition. In particular, the genealogy of dissent in Iranian social and religious thought reveals that the Sufis of the seventeenth century produced an intellectual model for dissent that would inform the social and political restlessness of the nineteenth century and later the Constitutional Revolution (1905–1911) and the Islamic Revolution (1978–1979).⁸⁵ This historical resonance positions mysticism within a political framework at the time that Makhmalbaf released Time for Love. It is clear, then, that mysticism has been epistemologically wrought with political meaning in Iran for centuries. Makhmalbaf’s appropriation of mysticism in Time for Love is necessarily political. The film, through its critique of absolutism and its promotion of moral relativity, gently challenges the status quo in the Iranian political system by creating a complicated space for the many complications and possibilities that arise from modes of human moral judgment. As such, Time for Love signaled a revival of the political appropriation of mysticism. The film traces a new contour in this mystic-political trajectory as it moves away from resistance and toward the ideals of humanism.

The politicization of Soroush’s philosophies and their resonance with Makhmalbaf’s Time for Love demonstrate that mysticism in the early 1990s, far from just representing a desire to escape the Islamic Republic’s interpretation of Islam, also functioned as a deliberate strategy for the enactment of political and social reform. Both Soroush and Makhmalbaf used mysticism to stress the importance of considering temporality in matters of governance and jurisprudence. Their emphasis on context represented an important step on the part of reformists to locate the Islamic Revolution as a historically grounded event, rigid but necessitated by a certain set of extreme circumstances, rather than as an ongoing and ahistorical process. As such, reform, and later the reformist movement, became a means of reconciling a glorified history with the need to move beyond the closed policies that Khomeini and his revolution enacted.

The mysticism that intellectuals began engaging with in the early 1990s became a fully formed part of reformist discourse several years later, when, on November 4, 1998, in one of his first international acts as president, Mohammad Khatami addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York and introduced the concept of goftegu-ye tamaddon-hā (dialogue among civilizations) as an alternative to Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations.”⁸⁶ The UN welcomed his invitation to think beyond the limiting dichotomies popular at the time—including Iranian/non-Iranian and Muslim/non-Muslim—and declared the year 2001 the Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations. In 2000, during a preliminary UN roundtable discussion about the concept, Khatami offered mysticism as a means of clearing the way for new intercultural paths. He said, “In addition to poetic and artistic experiences, mysticism also provides us with a graceful, profound and universal language for dialogue. Mystical experience, the constitution of the revelation and countenance of the sacred in the heart and soul of the mystic, opens new existential pathways to the human spirit.”⁸⁷ Khatami indicated that international cooperation and intercultural dialogue depends on an openness that approximates the expansion of the mystic’s heart.

Yet quite unexpectedly Khatami punctuated this esoteric call for mysticism with an emphasis on the central role of government. He argued, “The unique and irreplaceable role of governments should never be overlooked in the process.”⁸⁸ Khatami collapsed the metaphysical on the one hand and the political on the other, and the origins of the use of mysticism as an intellectual strategy for the enactment of political and social reform in the late twentieth century can be traced back a decade earlier, when examples of cine-mysticism, like Makhmalbaf’s Time for Love, forced Khatami to articulate his changing political views at a time when mysticism formed the philosophical underpinnings of a reformist ideology. This brand of political reform would shake the political and social landscape in Iran on a spring day in 1997, when Mohammad Khatami was elected as the Islamic Republic’s fifth president.