British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies

ISSN: 1353-0194 (Print) 1469-3542 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbjm20

Persian ‘Rashti jokes’: modern Iran’s palimpsests

of gheyrat-based masculinity

Mostafa Abedinifard

To cite this article: Mostafa Abedinifard (2018): Persian ‘Rashti jokes’: modern Iran’s
palimpsests of gheyrat-based masculinity, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, DOI:
10.1080/13530194.2018.1447440

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13530194.2018.1447440

Published online: 22 Mar 2018.

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British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 2018
https://doi.org/10.1080/13530194.2018.1447440

Persian ‘Rashti jokes’: modern Iran’s palimpsests of gheyrat-

based masculinity
Mostafa Abedinifard 
Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

ABSTRACT
For almost a century, a Persian ethnic joke cycle has circulated among
Iranians about the men and women of the northern Iranian city of
Rasht, labelling them as cuckolds and promiscuous women. A foray
into the historical background and possible (gendered) functions of
these jokes is long overdue. I argue that the central motif of Rashti
jokes is gheyrat—a gendered social construct based on a man’s sense
of honour, possessiveness and protectiveness towards certain female
kin—which remains pivotal to our understanding of the texts and
the historical context of the jokes. Critically reviewing extant theories
on the historical origins of Rashti jokes, I argue they have roots in
two modern phenomena: (a) debates among turn-of-the-twentieth-
century Iranian thinkers over women’s (un)veiling; and (b) Reza Shah’s
methodical promotion of an Aryanist, pan-Persian ideology. Focusing
on the gender-disciplinary functions of the jokes, I then show how
some contemporary Rashti jokes are deployed to project and inscribe
gender-hierarchical notions that clearly surpass the jokes’ immediate,
ethnic targets by commenting on broad socio-political topics. Such
instances suggest that as a culture-wide joke cycle, Rashti jokes may
also reinforce a form of Iranian masculinity obsessed with gheyrat-
motivated control and aggression.

In a 1950s Persian collection of risqué humour titled Asrar-i Magu (Secrets to Be Kept) and
ascribed to the late Iranian poet Mehdi Soheili (1924–1987), we bump into an anecdote that,
regardless of its somewhat dated tone, sounds familiar to current Persian readers:
A Rashti woman had brought home a man with whom she was having a good time in her hus-
band’s absence. Upon hearing a knock on the door, the woman hid the man in the wardrobe. It
was her husband, who came in and sat down. He happened to have bought their kid a coloured
ball, which he rolled on the floor. The four-year-old would enthusiastically walk to the end of
the room to get the ball, sometimes stopping to sneak a peek in the wardrobe. The womanizer,
fearing that the child might say something to reveal his hiding place, would make weird faces to
scare the kid away. It had an adverse effect, though. The terrified child, pointing to the wardrobe,
kept saying to his father, ‘Daddy, monster… daddy, monster…’ The shocked father approached
the wardrobe only to discover the visitor. Realizing what the man had been doing in his house,

CONTACT  Mostafa Abedinifard  mostafa.abedinifard@utoronto.ca

© 2018 British Society for Middle Eastern Studies
2   M. ABEDINIFARD

the Rashti husband said to him, in a thick Rashti [Gilaki] accent: ‘Aberar [brother]… you screwed
my wife; good for you there! Why are you then scaring my child?’1
For 7 to 10 decades now, a peculiar brand of Persian ethnic humour known as Rashti jokes
has circulated among Iranians. These jokes feature an imaginary husband (or other adult
male) and his wife (or a related female) from the northern, Gilaki-speaking Iranian city of
Rasht whom the joke script labels as a cuckold and an unfaithful wife, respectively. Like all
joke cycles, Rashti jokes have evolved over time. Yet, the foregoing example intriguingly
contains the main themes currently associated with Rashti jokes, i.e. the Rashti-husband/
man-as-a-cuckold and the Rashti-wife/woman-as-sexually-loose stereotypes. The joke even
includes other familiar secondary themes, such as the husband’s ‘thick Rashti [Gilaki] accent’
and the wardrobe motif, which appears in much cuckoldry humour worldwide. In a contem-
porary self-referential Rashti joke, the Rashti man, upon entering a shop to buy a wardrobe,
asks the shopkeeper, ‘Do you have a wardrobe that has no one in it when I come home?’2
Particularly during the past couple of decades, thanks to online social networks and
latterly mobile apps, various types of Persian humour besides ethnic humour have emerged
among Iranians. However, Persian ethnic humour has not become obsolete. For instance,
SMS jokes still contain a significant amount of ethnic humour, including Rashti jokes.3 A 2014
study based on a thousand Persian jokes randomly collected from various websites showed
that ‘ethnic jokes (82.1%) accounted for an overwhelming majority of Persian jokes’.4 The
Rashti jokes normally rank high in popularity.5 These jokes are part of the extensive repertoire
of contemporary ethnic jokelore among Iranians, a humour collection comprising canned
jokes whose central scenario normally features one category or a combination of two. One
category targets certain regional, Persian-speaking communities whose members speak
Persian with a dialect different from the standard Tehrani accent associated with the original
inhabitants of the contemporary capital city. Examples include jokes targeting the inhabit-
ants of Shiraz, whom ‘Shirazi jokes’ label as being lazy; the folks of Isfahan, who are stereo-
typed as miserly in ‘Isfahani jokes’; and the male adults of Qazvin, represented as predatory
homosexuals in ‘Qazvini jokes’.6 The other category includes jokes targeting members of
non-Persian-speaking ethnic populations; for example, Azeri Turks are typecast as stupid in
‘Turki jokes’, and (Iranian) Arab-speaking males are branded as having overly large genitals,
being fixated on sex and sometimes being mentally challenged in ‘(Iranian) Arab man jokes’.
Rashti jokes combine features of both categories; the infamous Rashti joke characters
speak Persian with a strong Gilaki accent—erroneously called a ‘Rashti accent’ in the jokes,
since Rasht is the central city in the province of Gilan. Despite the distinctly gendered

1
Mehdi Soheili, ‘Asrar-i Magu’ [Secrets to Be Kept] (PDF copy of previously published booklet, n.d.), pp. 16–17, http://jenseyat-
vajameh.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/asraremago-sohaily.pdf (accessed 10 March 2013). All English translations of jokes,
unless otherwise indicated, are mine. Numerous characteristic examples of contemporary Iranian ethnic jokes, including
Rashti jokes, could be found on a blog (http://fckshahabi.blogfa.com) accessed by the author in July 2011 that is no longer
available. This blog is the source of all jokes in this article, unless otherwise specified. Where another source is mentioned,
it is the second source, after the blog.
2
Ebrahim Nabavi, Kashkul-i nabavi: Ahd-i jadid [Nabavi’s Anthology: New Testament] (Northbrook, IL: H&S Media, 2012),
p. 166.
3
Naghmeh Samini, ‘Gendered Taboos in Iran’s Text Message Jokes’, in Cultural Revolution in Iran: Contemporary Popular
Culture in the Islamic Republic, ed. Annabelle Sreberny and Massoumeh Torfeh (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), pp. 209–216.
4
Bakhtiar Naghdipour, ‘Jokes in Iran’, Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore 59 (2014), p. 111.
5
Ulrich Marzolph, ‘Regionale Stereotypen im Witz der Exil-Iraner’ [Regional Stereotypes in the Humour of Iranian Diaspora],
in Minderheiten und Mehrheiten in der Erzählkultur [Minorities and Majorities in Narrative Culture], ed. Susanne Hose
(Bautzen: Domowina-Verlag, 2008), pp. 196–205.
6
Mostafa Abedinifard, ‘Structural Functions of the Targeted Joke: Iranian Modernity and the Qazvini Man as Predatory
Homosexual’, HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 29(3) (2016), pp. 337–357.
 BRITISH JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES   3

dimension of the Rashti jokes, scholars have rarely examined the role of gender in them.
Here I discuss various theories of their possible historical origin and theorize a gendered
function for them, explaining how the jokes relate to the gender order of modern Iranian
society. By gender order I mean the hegemonic definitions of masculinity and femininity
and the normative patterns of gender relations between, and among, women and men at
the level of a whole society and culture.7
Manifold reasons exist for the paucity of research on Rashti jokes, including the down-
graded status of Iranian (popular) humour studies in general and the topic’s sensitivity, in
addition to the difficulties caused by censorship and sometimes self-censorship.8 Yet, Rashti
jokes evoke inevitable questions: When and how did the jokes originate? Why do they target
Rasht? Are the Rashti joke stereotypes factually grounded? Were the jokes anticipated by
similar, previous joke cycles? Finally, as a long-standing joke series in Iranian culture, focused
on sex and gender relations, can Rashti jokes be conceived as serving any functions vis-à-vis
the Iranian gender order? To answer these questions, in the next section I will first provide
an overview of cuckoldry in classical Persian humour, which will help to distinguish Rashti
jokes as an unprecedented, modern joke cycle. Critically reviewing extant hypotheses about
the jokes’ origins, I espouse the theory that the joke series most likely originated in the wake
of discourses about veiling among Iranian modernists and traditionalists during Iran’s early
modernization period. In many such discourses, the city of Rasht was intriguingly stigmatized
as the abode of cuckolds and sexually immodest women to warn Iranian men of the conse-
quences of women’s unveiling. In this immediate historical context, I suggest, Rashti jokes
exercised a disciplinary function in terms of gender hegemony by scapegoating the imag-
inary Rashti male character to teach other Iranian men a gendered lesson, depicting the
consequences of men’s loosening control on their female kin. This corrective function, as I
show through examining contextualized contemporary cases of Rashti jokes, seems to have
lasted to this day. Regardless of their immediate, regional targets, Rashti jokes appear to be
informed by and help to inform broad, key elements within modern Iranian society’s gender
order.
Central to my reading of Rashti jokes is the gendered construction, in Iranian culture, of
gheyrat, defined as a construction based on a man’s sense of honour, possessiveness and
protectiveness towards certain female kin. As Zahra Tizro puts it, ‘the ethico-juristic code of
mahrami’yat’ in traditional Islam entails that the ‘contact circle of a woman should preferably
be limited to the mahram’, i.e. legitimate individuals, as opposed to the non-mahram, or
strangers. In fact, a ‘woman can be seen unveiled only by other women, by the legitimate
owner of her sexuality, or by those men with whom she can only have a sex-neutral relation-
ship’.9 Further, Tizro identifies the discourses of gheyrat and iffat as ‘an important feature of
the army of control mechanisms in traditional Islamic discourses’:
Gheirat is the protective and possessive shield constructed around a woman, who is perceived
as carrying and personifying a Muslim man’s honour (namous). Gheirat (sexual jealousy) is the
right of the owner of the sexual faculties to defend his territory, passionately and sometimes
aggressively. It is a code of behaviour entitling and obliging men to ensure the fulfilment of the
exclusivity condition in the marriage contract. A woman is expected to internalise the monop-
olistic right of the man to her sexuality by observing the codes of chastity (effat) and modesty

7
R. W. Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987),
pp. 98–99.
8
Abedinifard, ‘Structural Functions’, pp. 340–341.
9
Zahra Tizro, Domestic Violence in Iran: Women, Marriage and Islam (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 51.
4   M. ABEDINIFARD

(haya). If she does not observe the effat-haya codes, she is punished by the codes of gheirat at
different levels of society.10
As such, ‘Gheirat forms an important part of an Iranian man’s identity’, partly defining the
modern Iranian hegemonic masculinity, i.e. the culturally ascendant notion of what it means
to be a man in modern Iranian culture.11 The Rashti jokes’ predominant script, as will be seen
through many instances that follow, features the Rashti man’s failure to aptly perform gheyrat
upon encountering violations of the iffat-haya codes by his female kin.
Some readers may object that a gheyrat-based approach to the jokes ignores their humor-
ous framework or disregards alternative interpretations of such jokes. However, claims that
the humorous discourse is a non-bona fide communicative mode12 are rigorously critiqued
by scholars interested in gender humour, among others.13 Similarly, critical analyses of racial
humour foreground humour’s rhetorical aspect, showing jokes to be conduits for serious
arguments.14 This rhetoricity of humour, I would argue, gains even further importance in
joke cycles, including the Rashti jokes. Unlike a single joke, a joke cycle comprises an aggre-
gate of thematically related jokes circulating among masses of people in a certain culture.15
If, over a significant time, numerous jokes target the alleged ‘cuckoldry’ and ‘wantonness’ of
a region, then to adopt a serious approach to studying those jokes is not far-fetched.
Moreover, in interpreting these jokes as discursive tools supportive of gender hegemony, I
do not intend to cancel out any subversive, interpretive possibilities. The jokes might be read
as narratives that emphasize the Rashti female character’s agency or even as safe discursive
channels through which many Iranians may voice socio-political critique of their current
theocratic government or release sexual tensions under censorship. Rather than standing
as a comprehensive treatment of the social roles of Rashti jokes, this article intends to explore
the probable gendered functions of these jokes by way of their historical origins.
Finally, since my primary texts are canned jokes, a note on context is helpful. Canned jokes
often lack specific contexts and may thus cause concerns regarding their status as primary
texts in a study.16 Yet, while containing much less immediate context than conversational
humour, joke cycles with specific themes do accumulate and reveal significant social context.
Therefore, as Christie Davies puts it, ‘it is difficult and dangerous to deduce much from the
analysis of a single joke, but one is on far, far surer ground when considerable numbers of
jokes exist with a common theme.’17 We should also bear in mind that, as Michael Billig
remarks, ‘Context does not necessarily refer to the immediate person-to-person context in
which a joke is told. It can also refer to a more general ideological or political context that
can affect the understanding and meaning of a joke.’18 Thus, the context in joke cycles can
comprise extra-textual references ‘at the macro-social level of class, gender and ethnic power

10
Ibid.
11
Mohsen Bakhtiar, ‘Cognitive Model of GHEIRAT in Persian’, Cognitive Linguistic Studies 2(2) (2015), pp. 257–288, here
p. 285.
12
Victor Raskin, Semantic Mechanisms of Humor (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985), pp. 100–104.
13
For some such critiques, see Janet Bing and Joanne Scheibman, ‘Feminist Humor as Thought Experiment: Blended Spaces
as Subversive Humor’, in Gender and Humor: Interdisciplinary and International Perspectives, ed. Delia Chiaro and Raffaella
Baccolini (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 14.
14
Michael Billig, Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour (London: Sage, 2005); Simon Weaver, The
Rhetoric of Racist Humour: US, UK, and Global Race Joking (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011).
15
Salvatore Attardo, Humorous Texts: A Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2001), p. 69.
16
Helga Kotthoff, ‘Gender and Humour: The State of the Art’, Journal of Pragmatics 38(1) (2006), pp. 6–7.
17
Christie Davies, Jokes and Targets (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), p. 4.
18
Billig, Laughter and Ridicule, p. 32.
 BRITISH JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES   5

relations’ rather than ‘at the micro social level of conversations’.19 Rashti jokes, for instance,
feed off certain ideologies about gender, and particularly masculinity, in contemporary Iran;
taking this contextual dynamic into account in analyses of such jokes will result in a more
complete picture of them as gendered texts than would otherwise be possible. The first step
in studying Rashti jokes as a unique cuckoldry joke cycle is to determine their folkloristic
origins; therefore, a look at cuckoldry in classical Persian humour is inevitable.

Cuckoldry in classical Persian humour

Cuckoldry has long been a common theme in the literature, particularly folk literature, of
many cultures. Stith Thompson’s Motif Index of Folk Literature enumerates 90 motifs related
to ‘deceptions connected with adultery’, describing adultery- and cuckoldry-related themes
occurring in tales from numerous geographical regions and languages.20 Hasan El-Shamy
matches many of these themes with similar ones occurring in folktales from the Arab world,
extracting their related folk types in jokes and anecdotes.21 The cuckolded husband, as a
stock character, has frequently appeared as the subject of amusing and derisive laughter in
many narratives worldwide.22 In classical Persian literature, cuckoldry is present both as an
insulting concept and as a subject of humour.
In the works of the most famous classical Persian humorist, Ubayd Zakani (c.1300–1370),
for instance, ‘cuckold’ and ‘cuckoldry’, while used repeatedly as wounding words, are also
employed to arouse laughter. In a chapter of his Book of Definitions—which contains many
Persian words used with the Arabic definite article ‘al’ for humorous effect—Zakani defines
al-badbakht (‘the unfortunate’) as ‘a young man with an old wife’, followed by al-dayyus (‘the
cuckold’) as ‘an old man with a young wife’, and al-quch-i val-shakhdar (‘the horned ram’) as
‘a man whose wife reads the romance of Vis and Ramin’.23 Another chapter, ‘On the True
Nature of Men and Women’, also contains several entries that hint at adultery and
cuckoldry.
Elsewhere, in Risalih-yi Dilgusha (The Joyous Treatise), Zakani relates three anecdotes—
one a translation from Arabic and two in Persian—that revolve around cuckoldry. In the first
tale, a man is asked why his son does not resemble him, to which he responds, ‘If the neigh-
bours would leave us alone, our children would resemble us.’24 The second story involves a
man from a particular region, the ancient city of Bukhara, whose wife gives birth to a son
only three months after their marriage. When asked, ‘What shall we name this boy?’ the man
responds, ‘Since it took him three instead of nine months to come to this world, he must be

19
George Paton, Chris Powel and Stephen Wagg, ‘Editors’ Introduction’, in The Social Faces of Humour: Practices and Issues,
ed. George E.C. Paton, Chris Powel and Stephen Wagg (Aldershot, UK: Arena, 1996), p. 2.
20
Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables,
Medieval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-Books and Local Legends, vol. 4 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1960), p. 398.
21
Hasan M. El-Shamy, Folk Traditions of the Arab World: A Guide to Motif Classification, vol. 2 (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1994); Hasan M. El-Shamy, Types of the Folktale in the Arab World: A Demographically Oriented Tale-
Type Index (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).
22
Pamela A. Brown, Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Sarah F. Matthews-Grieco, ed., Cuckoldry, Impotence and Adultery in Europe (15th–17th
Century) (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014); Amy Richlin, The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
23
Obeyd Zakani, Kulliyat-i Ubeyd-i Zakani [Obeyd Zakani’s Complete Works], ed. Muhammad Jaʿfar Mahjub (New York:
Bibliotheca Persica Press, 1999), p. 329; Obeyd Zakani, Obeyed-e Zakani: Ethics of the Aristocrats and Other Satirical
Works, trans. Hasan Javadi (Washington, DC: Mage, 2008), Kindle edition, location 1385.
24
Zakani, Ethics, location 1685.
6   M. ABEDINIFARD

called the royal courier.’25 The last anecdote also specifies the cuckold’s regional
attribution:
A man from Hamadan was going into his house when he saw a handsome young man coming
out. He was offended and said, ‘Curse upon your hamiyyat! Why do you keep going into the
houses of other people? Damn it all, get yourself a wife like everybody else, so you can satisfy
the needs of ten other men.’26
The outdated word hamiyyat, covering various meanings from ‘ardour’ and ‘zeal’ to ‘a sense
of shame’ and ‘a sense of obligation to preserve the sacred’,27 is vital to understanding this
joke. The married man, cuckolded by the young man and therefore implied as lacking ham-
iyyat, can only make a spectacle of himself by attempting to teach the young man about
that ‘virtue’. In its focal role, hamiyyat in the previous joke evokes the gheyrat in Rashti jokes,
as will be seen in what follows.
About two centuries after Zakani, in his Lata’if al Tawa’if (People’s Jokes) Muvlana
Fakhruddin Ali Safi recites the second anecdote about the man from Bukhara, who, in this
version, is replaced by a generic character: ‘a witty [person]’.28 A more recent manuscript
collection of jokes and anecdotes in Persian, Kitab-i Musamma bih Lata’if va Zara’if (Persian
Stories and Facetiae), published in 1862, also cites this joke with ‘a man’ as its protagonist.29
It also contains a variation of the same joke, with a more active, cunning role given to the
woman. In response to her husband who wonders how she gave birth to a child just three
months after their marriage, a wife confidently puts forward a complex and impossible
argument, palming off the three months as nine months. Kitab-i Musamma contains several
other cuckoldry anecdotes, too, all of which refer to the cuckolded husband generically—as
simply a ‘man’ or a ‘(witty) person’—rather than associating him with any particular region.30
In one case, the cuckolded person is an Arab sheikh, probably indicating that the anecdote
was translated from Arabic; in another case, he is the renowned Persian poet Sa`di Shirazi
(1203–1291), suggestive of the frequent projection of humorous scripts onto celebrities in
jokelore.
What strikes us through this quick overview of cuckoldry humour in classical Persian is
that the corpus, despite the noticeable presence of sporadic cuckoldry jokes in it, contains
no known regional or ethnic joke cycle about cuckoldry. Intriguingly, an anecdote in Kitab-i
Musamma enumerates what seem to be some contemporary ethnic stereotypes in Persia.
The list begins with the intriguing statement, ‘Certain things are barely to be expected of
certain people.’31 The list associates the lack of gheyrat and mardi (manhood) with the people
from the cities of Kerman and Yazd, respectively. Remarkably, however, the people of Gilan,
where the city of Rasht is located, are described as lacking muruwwat—i.e. javanmardi,
(‘compassion and chivalry’)32—showing that at least by the late nineteenth century, and to
the informed author(s) of Kitab-i Musamma, no ‘Rashti jokes’ were known.

25
Zakani, Kulliyat, p. 280; Zakani, Ethics, location 1920.
26
Zakani, Kulliyat, p. 275; Zakani, Ethics, location 1810.
27
Dihkhuda Persian Dictionary, s.v. ‘Hamiyyat’, http://parsi.wiki/dehkhodaworddetail-f65053f707cf49268823ba-
b8a68a535c-fa.html (accessed 4 June 2016).
28
Muvlana Fakhruddin Ali Safi, Lata’if al Tawa’if [People’s Jokes], trans. and ed. Ahmad Gulchin Ma`ani (Tehran: Iqbal,
1362/1983), p. 333.
29
Kitab-i Musamma bih Lataif va Zaraif [Persian Stories and Facetiae], 1862, n.p., https://archive.org/details/persianstories-
fa00vpvp (accessed 18 October 2015).
30
Ibid.
31
Ibid.
32
Ibid.
 BRITISH JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES   7

Sometime during the early twentieth century, however, a shift occurs in this treatment
of cuckoldry as a theme in Persian humour: a specific ethnic joke cycle appears, in which
‘Rashti men are gullible cuckolds, while their wives are adulterous and sexually loose.’33 An
explanation of this shift will help us not only better understand the joke series itself, but also
grasp aspects of Iranian society, for whose understanding, as Kamran Talattof reminds us, ‘it
is not enough (as it has been practiced thus far) to focus only on elite and the elite culture;
it is [also] necessary to look at popular culture.’34 Any such explanation of the Rashti jokes
requires a review of the jokes’ major themes.

The gheyrat less Rashti cuckold and his wanton wife

‘Cuckold’, as an insult or a folk culture theme, is no longer common in the West. In many classical
and early modern Western cultures, however, the derided cuckold is a recurrent figure in narra-
tives in which, as in the Rashti jokes, the burden of ridicule falls on the husband. This may be
explained by ‘the earlier notion [in European society] that the wife was the man’s property or
servant and was thus expected to obey him’.35 This gendered contemplation of cuckoldry tales
also resonates in Millington and Sinclair’s comparative study of cuckoldry in Western literature.36
The authors identify ‘two paradigms for the portrayal of the offended husband: either he is
mocked for the situation he finds himself in, or he is admired for his attitude and action in the
face of his wife’s infidelity’.37 Both models, they remark, are invested in patriarchy and its anxie-
ty-driven preoccupation with maintaining power, potency and control. Rashti jokes provide a
unique configuration of both models. The Rashti man is mocked for his lack of gheyrat; yet, he
is also doubly mocked when he ends up demonstrating ludicrously inappropriate gheyrat upon
noticing his woman’s breaching of the iffat-haya codes. (I intentionally use ‘woman’ and not ‘wife’
here. Although most Rashti jokes target the chastity of the Rashti man’s wife, his other female
kin, e.g. his daughter or mother, are also at times portrayed as kharab [trollop] or qahbih [slut].)38
The joke that opened this article implies the Rashti husband’s comically incongruous
reaction to a typically gheyrat-arousing situation. The gheyrat codes dictate that the husband
react immediately and aggressively to the situation; the Rashti man objects to the stranger,
yet not to defend his own honour, but to pursue what is implied as an absurdly insignificant
issue, i.e. the paramour’s scaring his child. The unseemly reaction can only enhance the
jocular effect. The Rashti jokes’ humorous script shows the Rashti man’s gullibility and his
ignorance of the iffat-haya codes as well as the social implications of his gheyratlessness.
The Rashti man’s gheyrat-illiteracy and his incongruous reaction in situations demanding
gheyrat are foregrounded in numerous contemporary examples. Here are two:
They say to a Rashti, ‘We saw your wife in a Renault 5 [in some versions, a Peykan], with five men!’
The Rashti says, ‘Good job, Renault [Peykan]!’39

33
Dominic P. Brookshaw, ‘Have You Heard the One about the Man from Qazvin? Regionalist Humor in the Works of `Ubayd-i
Zakani’, in Ruse and Wit: The Humorous in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish Narrative, ed. Dominic P. Brookshaw (Boston, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 65.
34
Kamran Talattof, Modernity, Sexuality, and Ideology in Iran: The Life and Legacy of a Popular Female Artist (Syracuse,
NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011), p. 4.
35
Geoffrey Hughes, An Encyclopedia of Swearing (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2006), p. 107.
36
Mark I. Millington and Alison S. Sinclair, ‘The Honourable Cuckold: Models of Masculine Defence’, Comparative Literature
Studies 29(1) (1992), pp. 1–19.
37
Ibid., p. 1.
38
See e.g. Nabavi, Kashkul, p. 163.
39
For another version, see ibid., p. 153.
8   M. ABEDINIFARD

A Rashti man leaves his wife and motorcycle while picking up something at a store. Another
man runs in, yelling, ‘Hey, someone just rode off with your wife!’ Looking out the window, the
Rashti replies, ‘Never mind her. Look at that bike’s acceleration!’40
The ‘Rashti man’, while confronted with gheyrat-provoking scenarios, is easily distracted by
irrelevant details, the jokes imply. The gheyrat being focal to Rashti jokes gains more ground
as we encounter many such jokes explicitly mentioning gheyrat:
One day a Rashti says to his friend, ‘Shame on you, you gheyratless man! My wife has seen the
tattoo of your sister’s body on Abbas Aqa’s belly!’41
The joke jabs at the Rashti man’s gheyratlessness by having him ill-manneredly impersonate
a gheyrati man (one whose sense of gheyrat is aroused) before his friend. Yet, as the joke’s
punchline reveals, both men seem to have been cuckolded by Abbas Aqa, hence the absurd-
ity of the first man’s boasting of gheyrat. The following two examples also mention gheyrat.
In them, the Rashti husband becomes gheyrati, only to fail to perform it culture-appropriately,
i.e. by responding aggressively or violently:
Upon arriving home, a Rashti finds his wife in the shower with another man. He gets gheyrati
and turns off the water heater.
Hassan Aqa’s wife arrives home late. He gets gheyrati, aggressively asking her, ‘Where’ve you
been until now?’ She says, ‘Asghar Aqa the butcher was fucking me in his shop.’ He says, ‘Alright,
ten minutes for you there; what about the rest?’42
This last example and another one below, in which the Rashti husband is referred to as ‘Hassan
Aqa’, appear in the contemporary Iranian humorist Ebrahim Nabavi’s collection of contempo-
rary Persian jokes published outside Iran. Nabavi deliberately avoids using the word ‘Rashti’
in reference to the Rashti man, instead calling him ‘Hassan Aqa’,43 a choice that probably has
more to do with cultural considerations, self-censorship or commercial observations than with
censorship—which is the case with another collection published within Iran.44 Many Iranians,
too, when telling Rashti jokes in certain circles—especially where a Rashti audience might be
present—replace the word ‘Rashti’ with khush-gheyrat (i.e. ‘one who possesses gheyrat’), a
jocular ‘euphemistic dysphemism’ that criticizes someone for not exercising gheyrat.45 Yet,
even despite Nabavi’s manipulation, many of his jokes, like the previous ones and the following
example, retain an overt preoccupation with gheyrat and gheyratlessness:
One day Hassan Aqa goes out with his wife. While walking together, his wife is jostled by another
man. She says to her husband, ‘Shame on you, gheyratless man! He just jostled me!’ Hassan Aqa
accosts the man, telling him, ‘Hey, get over there, give her a kiss, and start sweet-talking!’46
In tandem with the Rashti male character’s cuckoldry are his infertility and sexual impo-
tency.47 Thus, like his children, the Rashti cuckold is deemed illegitimate by birth. To

40
This joke appeared on a blog (http://www.jokworld.blogfa.com), accessed in July 2011, that is no longer online.
41
Abbas Aqa is a stock (paramour) character in Rashti jokes.
42
Nabavi, Kashkul, pp. 154–155.
43
Ibid., p. 147.
44
Armin Imani, comp., Latifeh’ha-yi imruzi [Today’s Jokes] (Mashhad: Sokhan-Gostar, 1389/2010). In the preface to his ‘Hassan
Aqa’ jokes section, however, Nabavi explicitly discusses ‘Rashti jokes’, thus leaving us in no doubt about the identity of his
‘Hassan Aqa’ character.
45
Bakhtiar, ‘Cognitive Model’, p. 263.
46
Nabavi, Kashkul, p. 156.
47
The conflation of male fertility and potency exists in other cultures as well. See e.g. Daphna Birenbaum-Carmeli and Marcia
C. Inhorn, ‘Masculinity and Marginality: Palestinian Men’s Struggles with Infertility in Israel and Lebanon’, Journal of Middle
East Women’s Studies 5(2) (2009), pp. 23–52, here p. 24; Kenneth Gannon, Lesley Glover and Paul Abel, ‘Masculinity,
Infertility, Stigma and Media Reports’, Social Science and Medicine 59(6) (2004), pp. 1169–1175, here p. 1174.
 BRITISH JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES   9

impregnate his wife, he has ‘to ask for the public’s help’,48 ‘to move house’ (to find more potent
neighbours),49 ‘to marry an already pregnant woman’,50 or ‘to kick out his wife and warn her
to never return unless she has a bun in the oven’.51 When asked about Rashtis’ birth control
methods, the Rashti man responds, ‘We just close the doors and the windows.’52 In yet another
joke from Nabavi’s collection, an infertile Rashti man is asked by his doctor, ‘Is there a history
of infertility in your family?’ to which he responds, ‘My dad’53—thus naively revealing his
own illegitimacy. Being impotent, too, the Rashti man relies on other men and objects—e.g.
a cucumber or a dildo—to consummate his marriage. As such, he functions as a site onto
which the notions of masculinity as virility, and of the possession of a (working) penis as ‘a
necessary precondition to the accrual of power under a patriarchal order’, are projected.54
This notion is reinforced by jokes in which the Rashti man, like the Asian and Jewish male
characters in Anglo-American jokelore, receives an outlandishly tiny penis. Significantly,
many such jokes occur in homosocial settings, confirming the observation that masculinity
is a homosocial enactment constantly negotiated in same-sex circles and subject to peers’
approval.55 Here is an example:
A Tehrani, a Rashti and an Arab are trapped on a cannibals’ island. The cannibals tell them,
‘We’ll add up the lengths of your dicks. If they measure at least one metre, we’ll set you free.’
The Arab provides a good ninety centimetres. The Tehrani’s penis comes to nine centimetres.
Finally, the Rashti antes up one centimetre, and so the whole party gets released. On the way
back, the Arab man says, ‘I’m wondering what you’d do without me!’ The Tehrani says, ‘My nine
centimetres were also a major help, I guess.’ The Rashti says, ‘What the hell! You were lucky I
could get a boner today.’56
As though a perfect fit to the Rashti man’s repertoire of masculine shortages, the Rashti
woman represents depravity. Despite her husband’s legal and religious contract with her,
she is ‘owned’ by other men, due to the Rashti man’s unmanliness but also partly due to her
own licentiousness:
A Rashti woman wants to go abroad by herself. Upon showing the officials her husband’s permit,
she is told, ‘Not accepted. For you, we need a collective permit.’
The Rashti woman’s ‘nightie’ is therefore also her ‘work clothes’,57 and the first thing she
manages to do ‘upon waking up in the morning’ is ‘to go home’.58 As one joke has it, ‘Hassan
Aqa divorces his wife and goes broke.’59 In another, ‘Hassan Aqa goes to [work in] Japan. His
wife sends him money.’60 Due to his inherent lack of gheyrat, the Rashti man surprisingly
endures, perhaps even enjoys, living with his woman-as-a-slut:

48
Nabavi, Kashkul, p. 150.
49
Ibid.
50
Ibid., p. 160.
51
Ibid., p. 161.
52
Ibid., p. 147. In another version—found on a site (http://www.jokekhoone.com), accessed in July 2011, that no longer
exists—the Rashti man replies that they change the locks on their doors.
53
Nabavi, Kashkul, p. 156.
54
David Buchbinder, Studying Men and Masculinities (London: Routledge, 2013), p. 74.
55
Michael Kimmel, The Gender of Desire: Essays on Male Sexuality (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005); Michael
Kimmel, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men (New York: Harper, 2008).
56
This joke was also taken from the now-defunct site http://www.jokekhoone.com (accessed 29 July 2011).
57
Nabavi, Kashkul, p. 153.
58
Ibid., pp. 152, 162.
59
Ibid., p. 156.
60
Ibid., p. 157.
10   M. ABEDINIFARD

One day a Rashti returns home from work and finds a crowd of men lined up to get into his
house. He asks the man at the end of the line what is going on. ‘We are queuing up to fuck your
wife,’ the man says. ‘You really should divorce her.’ The husband replie[s], ‘I can’t divorce her. Then
I will have to go to the back of the line.’61
As a uniquely gendered series in modern Persian humour, the Rashti joke cycle, especially
given its decades-long endurance and popularity among Iranians, demands an explanation
as to its possible origins and functions.

Iranian modernity and the Rashti joke cycle

Little coherent theorization exists about Rashti jokes. A repeated general hypothesis explains
them as a manifestation of the high contrast between the lifestyle of Gilani people, particu-
larly their gendered division of labour, and that of non-Gilani Iranians.62 Commenting on
the flexible pattern of male–female role distribution in Gilani households, anthropologist
Christian Bromberger notes how in Gilan, ‘to a large extent, women take an important part
in agricultural work; in their homes, the line between male and female spaces is blurred;
craftwork, industrial, and commercial activities are not the exclusive prerogative of men in
this region.’63 Focusing on this idiosyncrasy, some scholars believe that the Rashti joke ste-
reotypes originated due to increasing contact, during the 1960s and 1970s, by non-Gilani
Iranians with the Gilanis’ strikingly contrastive lifestyle.64
As the Iranian studies scholar Nasrin Rahimieh, herself a native of the Gilani town of Anzali,
writes of Rashti jokes in an autobiographical narrative about her teenage years, ‘I would hear
fellow Gilanis dismiss the jokes as rooted in fear of our liberal ways. Gilani women worked
alongside their men, perhaps worked harder than the men, and did not kowtow to male
authority. It followed that Gilani men were seen as putty in the hands of their wives.’65 This
oft-cited theory is, as I will show later, plausible on certain grounds; however, it is not suffi-
ciently explanatory. First, said gender division of labour is not unique to Gilan. The neigh-
bouring province of Mazandaran also lies along the Caspian Sea, which gives both provinces
a climate unlike that of other Iranian cities. Mazandaran has also long featured a similar
sexual division of labour, yet the Mazandaranis have never become subject to sexual stere-
otypes like those faced by Rashtis.66 Moreover, the theory does not clarify why the city of
Rasht, of all the cities in Gilan, is targeted by the jokes. Admittedly, as Rahimieh notes, non-Gi-
lanis often do not differentiate residents of different cities in Gilan. Many Iranians, I would
also add, go beyond that by using the word ‘Rashti’ indiscriminately to refer to residents of
both Gilan and Mazandaran provinces.67 However, the fact that many Rashti jokes draw
specifically on the Gilaki dialect of Persian proves that they are not meant to target

61
Marcello Di Cintio, Poets and Pahlevans: A Journey into the Heart of Iran (Toronto: A. A. Knopf Canada, 2006), pp. 60–61.
62
Jane Howard and Shahla Haeri, Inside Iran: Women’s Lives (Washington, DC: Mage, 2002), p. 69.
63
Christian Bromberger, ‘GILAN xvii. Gender Relations’, Encyclopedia Iranica, 2011, para. 1, http://www.iranicaonline.org/
articles/gilan-xvii-gender-relations (accessed 10 June 2016).
64
Nabavi, Kashkul, pp. 145–147; Mahmud Farjami, ‘Agar ba Man Shukhi Kunid, Narahat Nimishavam’ [Your Joking Will Not
Offend Me], Bihdasht-i Ravan va Jami’ih 4(10) (1388/2009), p. 14.
65
Nasrin Rahimieh, ‘Recovery’, in Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora, ed. Persis
M. Karim (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2006), pp. 117–118.
66
Parvin Paidar, Women and the Political Process in Twentieth-Century Iran (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995),
p. 37.
67
On Rasht as an ‘iconic city of the Caspian region’, see Bromberger, ‘GILAN xvii’.
 BRITISH JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES   11

Mazandaran, whose residents speak Mazandarani. Therefore, a more convincing theory about
the origin of Rashti jokes must also explain their targeting the city of Rasht.
Apart from some uncorroborated conspiracy theories attributing the jokes to the inter-
vention of Westerners in Iran during the past century,68 only one coherent theory so far exists
about the origin of the Rashti jokes: Bromberger’s culinary theory, itself based on humoralism
or Galenism, particularly on the way certain foods affect the body’s humoral balance.
According to Bromberger, Rashti jokes originated chiefly due to Gilanis’ distinctive culinary
habits, featuring ‘cold foods’ as opposed to ‘hot foods’ consumed by non-Gilani Iranians.
Based on the food classifications in Persia, he notes, ‘Hot foods regenerate the blood—a
fundamental humor—and engender an expansive temperament that sustains one’s strength,
vigor, and manliness. Cold foods, on the contrary, are associated with a phlegmatic temper-
ament, and with weakness and sexual lethargy.’69 Referring to Rashti jokes and the depiction
of Rashti men as ‘credulous cuckolds’, Bromberger identifies a whole set of phrases that
emphasize Rashti men’s ‘lack of manliness’ and that are used to characterize them, including
kamar-sust (impotent), ‘bi-rag (lacking blood vessels, i.e. gutless or excessively phlegmatic),
bi-buḵhar (lacking in steam, i.e. dull and insipid), [and] bi-gheyrat (devoid of a sense of honour,
and hence immune to sexual jealousy)’.70 Such nicknames, Bromberger concludes, ‘are not,
therefore, independent expressions of derision based on alterity’, but part of a ‘system of
representation’ that links foods with bodily temperaments.71 Despite his methodical theory,
however, Bromberger disregards the possibility that the derision in the Rashti jokes may
have roots in some contrived, rather than actually extant, ‘alterity’. Moreover, he also leaves
it unexplained why despite the similar climate and overlapping culinary practices of Gilan
and Mazandaran, only the former—and a single city in that province—is targeted by the
jokes.
This latter question remains unanswered also in another otherwise insightful hypothesis
about the origin of the Rashti jokes, which connects the jokes with the modernization pro-
gramme initiated by Reza Shah (r.1925–1941). Following the example of Western countries,
and particularly the then nascent modern republic of Turkey under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk,
Reza Shah introduced an extensive plan for sociocultural and industrial modernization of
Iranian society. On his agenda was also the mandatory change of men’s and women’s public
attire. Referring to this initiative, Houchang Chehabi states, ‘Popular reaction to the state’s
forced unveiling differed from class to class and from region to region. In the northern parts
of Iran, long exposed to European culture through contacts with Russia, it was accepted
without much resistance.’72 In a footnote to his statement, Chehabi speculates:
It may well be that the figure of the impotent and cuckold Rashti, a staple of Persian jokes,
originates in the failure of the men of Rasht and the rest of Gilan to ‘defend’ the honour of their
womenfolk in the 1930s.73

68
For a reference to these theories, see Marzolph, ‘Regionale Stereotypen’.
69
Bromberger, ‘GILAN xvii’, para. 10; Christian Bromberger, ‘Eating Habits and Cultural Boundaries in Northern Iran’, in Culinary
Cultures of the Middle East, ed. Sami Zubaida and Richard Tapper (London: I. B. Tauris, 1994), pp. 185–201; Christian
Bromberger, ‘Usual Topics: Taboo Themes and New Objects in Iranian Anthropology’, in Conceptualizing Iranian
Anthropology: Past and Present Perspectives, ed. Shahnaz R. Najmabadi (New York: Berghahn, 2009), pp. 195–206.
70
Christian Bromberger, ‘GILĀN xv. Popular and Literary Perceptions of Identity’, Encyclopedia Iranica, 2011, para. 6, http://
www.iranicaonline.org/articles/gilan-xv-identity (accessed 10 June 2016).
71
Ibid., para. 10.
72
Houchang Chehabi, ‘The Banning of the Veil and Its Consequences’, in The Making of Modern Iran: State and Society under
Riza Shah, 1921–1941, ed. Stephanie Cronin (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 202.
73
Ibid., pp. 209–76.
12   M. ABEDINIFARD

Chehabi does not explain why, in his footnote, he supplements his in-text reference to ‘the
northern parts of Iran’ with a prompt focus only on the province of Gilan, and the city of
Rasht in particular. Despite this drawback, his speculation remains noteworthy because, as
we will see, the socio-political conditions of Gilan, especially Rasht, are central to the origins
of the Rashti jokes. Moreover, as will be explained, Reza Shah’s reform programme, particu-
larly the ‘modern Iranian nationalism’ he pushed through an ‘Aryanist and pan-Persian ide-
ology’, and which ‘led to ethnic resentment and conflict’ in Iran, must also have accounted
for the reinforcement, if not inception, of Rashti jokes as an anti-ethnic set of targeted
humour.74
Although Reza Shah officially ordered the unveiling of women, the process had already
begun among some modernists during the late Qajar dynasty era (1785–1925). This initial
call for unveiling, however, while linking it with women’s emancipation, mainly deemed it
necessary for the modern heterosocialization of Iranian society. This is because the issue of
the veil was, according to Afsaneh Najmabadi, entangled with that of homoeroticism—a
more or less common practice among many adult men at the time—and the latter’s relation
to Iranian modernity.75 Long before Reza Shah called for modernization, ‘the veil’s backward-
ness stood for the backwardness of homosociality and homoerotic affectivity.’76 It was
assumed that restrictions on heterosexual contacts had inevitably caused the spread of
homosexual activity among many Iranian men. Along with this abjection of the veil came a
strong, albeit controversial, call, by some Iranian modernists, for women’s unveiling.
The objectors to the call were normally religious laymen led by the conservative clergy.
Not surprisingly, the genre of risalih-yi hijabyih (i.e. [religious] tracts in defence of women’s
veiling) simultaneously gained popularity in Iran.77 In these tracts, the authors, usually
renowned clergymen, would quote at length and vehemently contest their rivals’ pro-un-
veiling views. Tavakoli-Targhi shows78 how in such tracts the European woman (already
imagined as being ‘iffatless’ in Iranians’ European travelogues79) served as the other against
whom the unveiled Iranian woman was constantly being imagined and re-imagined on
conflicting fronts among the authors.80 Like her European counterpart, the unveiled Iranian
woman was scripted as an other, a lewd woman and a prostitute, and the veil and unveiling
were linked, more so than before, to the respective notions of chastity and impurity. Concern
with the Iranian woman’s chastity was simultaneously a concern over the Iranian man’s
gheyrat, as documented by the frequent linking of the loss of women’s iffat to men’s loss of
gheyrat in pro-veiling writings.81 Similar to her European counterpart in relation to European
men, the Iranian woman’s unveiling was explained as a manifestation of pro-unveiling Iranian
men’s being zan-sifat (effeminate), shahvat-parast (lecherous), bi-gheyrat (lacking gheyrat),

74
Homa Katouzian, The Persians: Ancient, Mediaeval, and Modern Iran (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), pp. 11, 216.
75
Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
76
Ibid., pp. 148–50.
77
Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, ‘Zani Bud, Zani Nabud: Baz-khani-yi Vojub-i Niqab va Mafasid-i Sufur’ [Once upon a Time There
Was a Woman: Rereading Vojub-i Niqab va Mafasid-i Sofur], Nimih-yi Digar 1(14) (1370/1991), p. 86.
78
Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, ‘Nigaran-i Zan-i Farang’ [Anxious over the European Woman], Nimih-yi Digar 2(3) (1375/1996),
pp. 68–69.
79
Tavakoli-Targhi, ‘Zani Bud, Zani Nabud’, p. 80; Tavakoli-Targhi, ‘Nigaran-i Zan-i Farang’.
80
Tavakoli-Targhi, ‘Zani Bud, Zani Nabud’, p. 89.
81
Tavakoli-Targhi, ‘Zani Bud, Zani Nabud’, pp. 90, 93–96; Tavakoli-Targhi, ‘Nigaran-i Zan-i Farang’, 69.
 BRITISH JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES   13

zani (adulterous), khuk-sifat (piggish [meant as ‘gheyratless’]) and farangi-muab (a derogative

term for ‘European’).82
To arouse local sensitivities, some pro-veiling authors of such tracts even contrived numer-
ous imaginary narratives, detailing the dire consequences of unveiling. Significantly, in many
such narratives, Tavakoli-Targhi argues:
the northern Iranian city of Rasht, already in the forefront of the Iranian women’s movement,
was imagined as the centre of moral corruption and gheyratlessness while the Rashti man was
visualised as impotent and overly ‘effeminate’. Many of the Rashti jokes popular in Iran are prod-
ucts of the anti-modernity discourse.83
The peculiar cultural and socio-political milieu of Rasht at the turn of the century is note-
worthy. As Bromberger observes, ‘The exposure of Rasht to international diplomacy and
trade contributed to the early development of “European-style” cultural activities, in advance
of other Iranian provinces.’84 Among Rasht’s signs of ‘Europeanization and uniqueness’ during
the early twentieth century, Bromberger notes, were ‘the very early development of women’s
associations’ including the well-known Jamʿiyat-i Saʿadat-i Nisvan (The Association for
Women’s Happiness), which released the bimonthly Peyk-i Saʿadat-i Nisvan (The Messenger
of Women’s Happiness).85 These and other leading social phenomena in Rasht, he notes,
turned it into ‘an avant-garde city’ that in turn played significant roles in both the Constitutional
Revolution and the Jangali Movement.86
More specifically, we encounter an intriguing reference to Gilani women’s sexuality in a
late-nineteenth-century manuscript of a British consul in Iran. ‘The Gilak [Gilani] women’, the
author states, ‘are pale like the men and have the [reputation] of being of easy virtue.’87 Earlier,
he notes how these women ‘generally tucked up their lower trousers thigh-high in order to
wade through the mud, and [that they] did not appear to consider their “negligé” at all
improper’.88 Nowhere in Mackenzie’s text, however, do we encounter a reference to any jokes
targeting the Rashtis or even the Gilanis in general; nor do we hear him comment on their
men’s sexual predilections. (As noted earlier, the stereotype list mentioned in Kitab-i
Musamma, published in 1862, also lacks references to Rashti joke stereotypes.) Yet, his obser-
vations indicate that Gilani women might have already been branded as loose and promis-
cuous among the non-Gilanis, an alleged reputation that would later facilitate the targeting
by conservative tract writers of the men of the central Gilani city of Rasht as lacking gheyrat.
Admittedly, no irrefutable evidence indicates that the Rashti jokes originated in the dis-
courses on veiling, as reflected in the hijabyih tracts from the turn of the century and later;
however, these tracts do provide circumstantial evidence for that possibility, as they neatly
assemble the three essential elements of Rashti jokes: (a) the city of Rasht, (b) the gheyratless
Rashti man and (c) the iffatless Rashti woman. Still, given the intricacies of the cultural milieu
of the late Qajar and the first Pahlavi (1925–1941) eras, it would be reductionist to deem

82
Tavakoli-Targhi, ‘Zani Bud, Zani Nabud’, pp. 95, 98.
83
Ibid., pp. 110, footnote no. 20, my translation. For more on Rasht’s unique cultural and political status among Iranian cities,
particularly around the Constitutional Revolution and during the first Pahlavi era, see Christian Bromberger, ‘RASHT i. The
City’, Encyclopedia Iranica, 2011, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/rasht (accessed 10 June 2016). As he puts it, Rasht
has been ‘a symbol of modernity, attractive to some, threatening to others’ (ibid., para. 15).
84
Bromberger, ‘RASHT i’, para. 6.
85
Ibid.
86
Ibid., para. 7.
87
Charles F. Mackenzie, ‘Narrative of a Journey from Resht in Gilan through Mazandaran to Asterabad during the Winter and
Spring of 1858/1859’, ms. 1859, FO 60/245, folio 19v, National Archives, London.
88
Ibid., folio 18r.
14   M. ABEDINIFARD

Rashti jokes merely as representative of an ‘anti-modernity’ discourse. Indeed, there is evi-

dence indicating that the joke cycle, due to both its ethnic and gendered aspects, may have
been reinforced equally, if not more vehemently, by Iranian modernists.
Reza Shah’s reform programme included women’s unveiling, which intriguingly caused
most pro-unveiling tracts to be written during his rule.89 However, it also included the
strengthening in Iran of the discourse of Aryanist Iranian nationalism, a discourse which had
roots in the thoughts of some late-Qajar-era modernists, and which specifically featured a
pan-Persian ideology.90 This racist discourse later took on the form of an elite-supported,
state ideology under Reza Shah.91 Feeding off and into myths about the superiority of the
Persian-speaking Iranians and the Persian language, this systematic pan-Persianism became
possible in part by denigrating other racial groups, particularly Arabs and the Turks, as well
as ‘ignoring the numerous Iranian ethnic groups (including the Turkish, Kurdish, Arab, and
other peoples) and pretending that Persian was the only language spoken in Iran’.92 This
state ideology led, for the first time in Iranian history, to serious ‘ethnic resentment and
conflict’.93 That many Rashti jokes foreground the thick ‘Rashti’ accent, often put in the punch-
line to enhance jocularity—as attested to by the example in Mehdi Soheili’s joke collection—
is itself proof of the emphasized place of ethnicity in Rashti jokes.
Moreover, not all pro-veiling authors of the said tracts could be categorized as anti-modern-
ists per se. For instance, the anonymous tract Risali-yi Sharifih-yi Lozum-i Hijab, written in 1914,
carried the phrase ‘written by a few constitutionalist Muslims’ on its first page, suggesting that
while its authors defended the Constitutional Revolution, they opposed women’s unveiling.94
Finally, it is noteworthy that while many of the late-Qajar and early-Pahlavi Iranian mod-
ernists called for women’s unveiling, they had already asked—in lieu of the literal veil, and
as a precondition for women’s justifiable presence in public heterosocial spaces—for wom-
en’s observance of another, internal, veil—hijab-i iffat (the veil of chastity).95 It is as if, in
anticipated fear of women’s forthcoming liberties, modernists were already taking pre-emp-
tive strikes to curb, and set limits on, such freedom, since the ‘newly produced woman’, as
Najmabadi reminds us, ‘could claim a place in the public space that was not threatening to
the social and cultural order’.96 Rashti jokes, with their exaggerated scenarios of iffatless
women husbanded by gheyratless men, might as well have equally served some pre-emptive
disciplinary function here.
Moreover, understanding Rashti jokes merely as ‘anti-modernity’ discourse raises the impor-
tant question of why, irrespective of their conservative origins, these jokes have by and large
enjoyed a wide circulation, regardless of the social class or education of their audience—even
if mostly within informal circles due to state censorship and cultural stigmas around sexual
topics. Not tying the jokes to a conservative discourse enables us to explain this far-reaching
circulation of the jokes among Iranians by the captivating overlap of the notions of gender

89
Rasoul Ja’farian, Rasa’el-e Hejabyih (Qom: Dalil-e Ma, 1380).
90
Katouzian, The Persians.
91
Ibid. See also Reza Zia-Ebrahimi, ‘Self-Orientalization and Dislocation: The Uses and Abuses of the
“Aryan” Discourse in Iran’, Iranian Studies 44(4) (2011), pp. 445–472.
92
Katouzian, The Persians, p. 216. See also Alireza Asgharzadeh, Iran and the Challenge of Diversity: Islamic Fundamentalism,
Aryanist Racism, and Democratic Struggles (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Reza Zia-Ebrahimi, The Emergence of
Iranian Nationalism: Race and the Politics of Dislocation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
93
Katouzian, The Persians, p. 11.
94
Ja’farian, Rasa’el-e Hejabyih, p. 100.
95
Afsaneh Najmabadi, ‘Veiled Discourse–Unveiled Bodies’, Feminist Studies 19(3) (1993), pp. 487–518.
96
Ibid., p. 489.
 BRITISH JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES   15

and sexuality among opposing ideologies in Iran during the past century, including the right
vs. the left, traditionalism vs. modernism, and Islamism vs. secularism/religious reformism. As
the historian Janet Afary reminds us, the 1979 Islamic Revolution occurred partly due to the
coalition of ‘two oppositional factions’ over ‘the sexual norms of the modern urban woman’,
that is, the leftist critics of Pahlavi despotism, Western imperialism, and consumerism, on the
one hand, and the conservative Islamists on the other.97 By the same token, the fact that Rashti
jokes, despite their conservative gendered roots, have enjoyed a fairly universal audience
within Iranian society and culture could, following the incongruity theory of humour, indicate
a social tension. In other words, this universal popularity could arise partly from the fact that
women’s veiling and bodily visibility and expression are as yet unresolved issues within the
influential socio-political factions and discourses attentive to Iranian society and culture. This
tension over women’s bodies and sexuality is perhaps nowhere as obvious as in the foregoing
discussion of early Iranian modernists’ quick replacement of the external veil with yet another,
internal, veil—i.e. the veil of iffat—hence revealing their major anxiety over women’s loss of
chastity, a concern to which the Rashti jokes have been clearly speaking.
In terms of origins, it seems plausible, therefore, to claim that sometime between the
early twentieth century (when most veiling tracts were written and when Reza Shah’s ‘pseu-
do-modernism’ was in force) and the 1950s (when Mehdi Soheili’s joke collection was pub-
lished), the Rashti jokes originated and gained public recognition. Assuming this possible
origination, we can claim that in its immediate historical context, the Rashti joke cycle served
a disciplinary function towards both the ethnic and the gender orders.98 In exercising
anti-ethnic functions, the jokes could promote ethnic stigma and shame, encouraging the
erasure of linguistic ethnicity among Gilaki-speaking people.99 Also, resorting to the correc-
tive role of ridicule as an informal social-control strategy, the jokes could serve a punitive
function concerning hegemonic gender norms.100 Such gender-disciplinary effects of jokes
‘can occur through the derision of certain gender-transgressions [in that] while certain
hegemonic gender norms or normative acts are presumed or implied, violations of them
are [derided]’.101 In exercising this gendered function, the Rashti man was marked as the
epitome of gheyratlessness, an already abject position within the gender structures of Iranian
society. While I do recognize the importance of the ethnic function, here I would like to focus
on the gendered aspect of Rashti jokes, showing how they exceed regional ethnic stereo-
types by providing, simultaneously, cultural comments on hegemonic masculine ideals on
a nationwide level and, as such, being apposite venues for some structural functions, i.e.
functions that go beyond a joke series’ immediate targets.102
Due to the shame associated with the topics of cuckoldry and women’s promiscuousness
in Iranian culture, conducting pragmatic surveys of Rashti jokes and their reception among
Iranians is difficult. My conversations with close friends from Rasht, however, confirm that

97
Janet Afary, Sexual Politics in Modern Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 11, 237–44.
98
Mostafa Abedinifard, ‘Ridicule, Gender Hegemony, and the Disciplinary Function of Mainstream Gender Humour’, Social
Semiotics 26(3) (2016), pp. 234–249. See also Billig, Laughter and Ridicule.
99
Although entailing cultural difficulties for the researcher, studying the ethnic effects of Rashti jokes seems to be promising.
The author’s close Gilani friends have often confirmed the jokes’ disciplinary function towards their ethnic identity, e.g. by
encouraging them to conceal their ethnicity within some non-Gilaki-speaking communities.
100
Giselinde Kuipers, ‘The Sociology of Humor’, in The Primer of Humour Research, ed. Viktor Raskin (Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter, 2008), pp. 361–398; James Burfeind and Dawn Bartusch, Juvenile Delinquency: An Integrated Approach (Sudbury,
MA: Jones and Bartlett, 2011).
101
Abedinifard, ‘Disciplinary Function’, p. 241.
102
Abedinifard, ‘Structural Functions’.
16   M. ABEDINIFARD

studying the effects of Rashti jokes on the masculine identity of Rashti men, and by extension
other Iranian men, seems promising. This observation is affirmed by some online users’
comments on a controversial essay about Rashti jokes by Soheila Vahdati, who conceives
the possibility of the jokes’ fuelling male violence.103 The essay appears in several places
online, including a special issue on ‘Rashti jokes’ at www.v6rg.com, a site described as a venue
for the ‘Literature and Culture’ of Gilaki-speaking people. The V6rg version of the essay has
attracted the most comments of all, mainly from users who self-identify as Gilaks or Rashtis.
Many such users leave defensive comments, entering vehement debates with others over
the jokes’ depiction of Rashti men as gheyratless. For instance, addressing ‘non-Rashti’
Iranians, a self-identified Rashti user named Damoun writes:
Just like those Europeans who think Iranians are unrestrained terrorists and would only have
to visit Iran to learn the truth, you non-Rashtis would also be disillusioned [about Rashti jokes]
upon visiting the city of Rasht. I am a Rashti, yet my townsmen and I know nothing called
gheyratlessness.
Another user, called Meysam, mentions that he was born in Rasht and grew up in Tehran (as
the capital city, associated with the Persian-speaking population) and thus can compare the
degrees of gheyrat displayed by both Tehrani and Rashti men. Meysam rejects the Rashti
jokes as a foreign plot implemented by the British and effected through certain Iranian
stand-up comics—which is reminiscent of conspiracy theories about the origins of modern
Persian jokelore—and comments that ‘Tehran itself abounds with gheyratlessness’. Vahdati’s
essay has also caused anxious reactions from non-Rashtis in Gilan province. A user named
Shahin, from the small, famous Gilani port town of Anzali, shares his concern: ‘I don’t know
about Rasht, but I can tell you that in Anzali, a man’s least reaction [to his woman’s infidelity]
is divorce, not indifference’ (emphases in original).104
The gender-disciplinary function of the Rashti jokes is admittedly not the only way they
may affect their audience; however, their reception among some Rashti and other Gilani men
proves that this punitive function remains an inevitable one. For instance, Vahdati and the
administrator(s) of V6rg comment that Rashti jokes are exaggerated narratives about the liberal
attitudes of Rashti men towards gender relations, thus reading the jokes mainly as a sign of
Rashti people’s pride, rather than embarrassment. Accordingly, the cover photo chosen by
V6rg for its special issue depicts a distressed veiled woman buried up to her waist, in apparent
preparation for lapidation. However, the V6rg admin(s), as revealed through their comment
on Vahdati’s article where it is published on a different website, admit(s) that Rashti jokes are
known to have caused some under-educated Gilaki-speaking men to develop hostility towards
their colleagues or fellow comrades-in-arms and to quit their workplaces or escape their bar-
racks, thus also acknowledging the disciplinary function of these jokes vis-à-vis gender.105
While the Rashti characters remain essential to the joke cycle’s core narrative, the series,
due to its core gendered script, easily enables reinscriptions of gender-hierarchic notions
on a culture-wide level, further demonstrating the jokes’ structural function. In a joke in

103
Soheila Vahdati, ‘Dar barih-yi Naqsh-i Ma dar Tarvij-i Khushunat-i Namusi: Chira bi Juk-I Rashti Mikhandim?’ [On Our Role
in Promoting Honour-Based Violence: Why Do We Laugh at Rashti Jokes?], 2011, http://v6rg.com/-‫ترویج‬-‫در‬-‫ما‬-‫نقش‬-‫درباره‬
‫چرا‬-‫ناموسی‬-‫( خشونت‬accessed 20 March 2017).
104
Damoun, 2 November 2011 (11:46 a.m.); Meysam, 24 April 2012 (04:34 p.m.); Shahin, 13 October 2011 (01:48 a.m.), com-
ments on ibid.
105
Soheila Vahdati, ‘Dar barih-yi Naqsh-i Ma dar Tarvij-i Khushunat-i Namusi: Chira bi Juk-i Rashti Mikhandim?’ [On Our Role
in Promoting Honour-Based Violence: Why Do We Laugh at Rashti Jokes?], Akhbar-i Ruz, 2010, http://akhbar-rooz.com/
ideas.jsp?essayId=33785&direction=backward&first=32757 (accessed 1 May 2017).
 BRITISH JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES   17

Nabavi’s collection, for instance, the Rashti cuckold—in response to the question ‘At your
home, do you go by zan-salari [matriarchy; literally, the governance of women] or mard-salari
[patriarchy; literally, the governance of men]?’—responds, ‘Neither; we go by mardum-salari
[democracy; literally, the governance of the people].’106 Given the presence of the word
mardum-salari, which was coined during Muhammad Khatami’s presidential period (1997–
2005), the joke is clearly not very old. Yet, it obviously surpasses an attack on the residents
of Rasht. Rather, by projecting onto the Rashtis certain critical issues within the sphere of
contemporary Iranian politics, the joke adopts a conservative stance towards liberalism and
democracy (and by extension gender-democratic tendencies) as discourses which gained
popularity during Muhammad Khatami’s presidency and afterwards. Given that the oppo-
sition to Khatami’s reformist tendencies mainly came from traditionalist Islamists, we may
argue that this joke, drawing on the Rashti series’ ready-made script, represents the new
coinage mardum-salari as a sugar-coated Persian version of a foreign intruder, i.e. democracy,
as a political system that eventually erodes men’s gheyrat and women’s iffat.107
As another example of Rashti jokes’ reaching beyond their immediate, regional targets, and
thus commenting on broader socio-political structures, the following joke derides the related
notion of ‘tolerance’ or open-mindedness, linking it to a loss of manliness through cuckoldry:
One time a Rashti returns home to find his wife in bed with a stranger. Yet, he sits nearby and only
watches them silently. After an hour, the stranger leaves, and the wife asks her husband, ‘What
was the matter with you, sitting there and staring at us?!’ The Rashti [man] joyfully responds,
‘Weren’t you impressed by my open-mindedness?’108
While framed typically within an exaggerated narrative, this Rashti joke reveals anxiety over
what is implied to be a thin line between a man’s tolerance—towards his woman’s sexuality
and sexual expression—and the sheer loss of his gheyrat. Given the association of gheyrat
with aggression and violence, the previous jokes also bolster, by implication, a form of mas-
culinity obsessed with keeping women and women’s bodies in check through displaying
gheyrat-based control, i.e. either pre-emptive aggression or, if necessary, instantaneous vio-
lence.109 However, in light of the aforesaid equal compatibility of Rashti jokes with modernist
tendencies, it is conceivable how the previous jokes about ‘democracy’ and ‘open-mindedness’
might also be welcomed equally by audiences with reformist/modernist inclinations, as they
also seem to speak to anxieties over the implications of ongoing Iranian modernity for trans-
formations in the gendered and sexual relations within Iranian society and culture.
Significantly, all previously discussed examples in which the Rashti man manifests insuf-
ficient gheyrat presume the audience’s expectation that a ‘real’ man would show some bel-
ligerence or forcefulness upon becoming even slightly suspicious of his woman’s (sexual)
behaviour. Some Rashti jokes even introduce specific elements to mock the Rashti cuckold’s
failure to employ due violence. In one joke, the Rashti man, upon learning that he has been
cuckolded, picks up a gun and ‘[attempts] to kill his wife and her lover’.110 Yet, for a Rashti

106
Nabavi, Kashkul, p. 155.
107
The contemporary self-exiled female Iranian journalist and activist Masih Alinejad, whose Facebook campaign Azadi-yi
Yavashaki-yi Zanan dar Iran (Women’s Stealthy Freedom in Iran) has gained widespread attention within and outside of
Iran, has been repeatedly attacked by the conservative Iranian media and accused of having ‘inappropriate’ sexual affairs.
Alinejad’s campaign has similarly aroused discussions about the gheyrat of Iranian men and the iffat of Iranian women.
108
This joke was taken from a blog (http://kolangi.blogfa.com), accessed in July 2011, that no longer exists.
109
Tizro, Domestic Violence in Iran, p. 51.
110
Palmis Seifikar, ‘Asses and Cuckolds: Regional Ethnic Jokes from Iran’ (MA thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 2003),
p. 19.
18   M. ABEDINIFARD

joke to remain typical, paramours must not be killed, for revenge would represent a culturally
expected defence of one’s honour and thus contradict the series’ central incongruity.
Therefore, while various ‘revenge weapons’ abound in Rashti jokes, they remain useless. Here
is a telling example:
A friend of a Rashti goes over to stay at his place. Upon entering the house, the friend notices
a gun hanging on the wall. He asks, ‘What’s that for?’ The Rashti says, ‘For protecting the namus
[honour]!’111 So, the friend understands that he must watch his own behaviour. At night, while
everyone is sleeping in the [same] room, the [Rashti’s] wife snorts, ‘The gun’s not working!’ The
[Rashti’s] daughter snorts, ‘It has no cartridges either!’The Rashti man himself says, ‘And I’m sleeping!’
Even when the Rashti man manages to display violence, a turn of events transforms it into
inappropriate or inopportune aggression, returning us to the familiar and expected in such
jokes:
A Rashti wife is being screwed by a man, when her husband arrives and beats the man up. The
wife says, ‘Good job! I’m really impressed by your gheyrat!’ The Rashti says, ‘Honey, the hell with
gheyrat! I’d definitely do the same to you if you were in bed with your shoes on.’112
In her provocative online essay on the relation between Rashti jokes and male violence,
Vahdati specifically connects the jokes with ‘honour killing’ in Iran.113 As Tizro shows, regard-
ing domestic violence in Iran, the codes of the mahram/non-mahram could indeed lead to
social violence.114 These codes, as demonstrated earlier, are central to the Rashti joke’s main
script. If such jokes have persisted for several decades, and if their primary theme is a man’s
being symbolically punished with ridiculing laughter on a national scale for his repeatedly
failing to perform the expected codes of gheyrat upon discovering his woman’s breaches of
the iffat codes, then a probable connection between such jokes and honour killing should
not be surprising. While discussing some ‘cultural differences’ in southern and northern
Iranian cities and how such differences influence the gender relations between couples in
these areas, Tizro alludes to the Rashti jokes.115 Ironically, however, she does not expand on
the theme, implying it is irrelevant because ‘a man from the north can be as gheiraty (jealous)
as men from any other part of Iran’.116 In claiming so, however, Tizro disregards the possibility
that the Rashti jokes themselves, due to their disciplinary power, might over time have served
as informal social- control tools to affect the attitudes of some Rashti males towards gender
relations. In its exonerating Rashti jokes from any norm-reinforcing roles, Tizro’s position is
a reminder of an ‘exculpatory’ attitude in humour studies, which contends that humour
cannot affect the social order.117 This viewpoint is challenged by the argument in this article
as well as by previous research on other types of Persian ethnic humour.118

111
Namus, similar to gheyrat, is a key concept in understanding Rashti jokes. Literally meaning ‘religion’ and ‘law’, the word
has figuratively come to also mean ‘good name’, ‘reputation’ and ‘honour’. Dihkhuda Persian Dictionary, s.v. ‘Namus’, http://
parsi.wiki/dehkhodaworddetail-ee8b9c6a1ca34bdf8154d09bfdcdf4a1-fa.html (accessed 4 June 2016).
112
This joke was also found on the now-defunct site http://www.jokekhoone.com (accessed 29 July 2011).
113
For the only source on honour killing in Iran published outside of Iran, see Parvin Bakhtiar-Nejad, Faji’ih-yi khamush:
Qatlha-yi namusi dar Iran [The Silent Disaster: Honour Killing in Iran] (Stockholm: Nashr-i Baran, 2012).
114
Tizro, Domestic Violence in Iran, p. 51.
115
Ibid., p. 138.
116
Ibid.
117
Weaver, Rhetoric of Racist Humour, p. 9. For a prominent instance of this exculpatory attitude, see Davies, Jokes and
Targets. For a scholarly dialogue about Davies’ position, see Abedinifard, ‘Structural Functions’; Christie Davies, ‘Reply to
Abedinifard’, HUMOR 30(2) (2017), pp. 239–246; Mostafa Abedinifard, ‘Reply to Davies’, HUMOR 30(2) (2017), pp.
247–253.
118
Abedinifard, ‘Structural Functions’.
 BRITISH JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES   19

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Rasoul Aliakbari, Dominic Parviz Brookshaw, Manijeh Mannani, Norma Claire Moruzzi,
Nasrin Rahimieh, Irene Sywenky, Jerry Varsava, Houra Yavari and the journal’s anonymous reviewers
of my article for their helpful feedback on several earlier versions of it.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (http://
www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/about-au_sujet/sshrc-logo-crsh/index-eng.aspx).

ORCID
Mostafa Abedinifard   http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7196-3494