The Existence of Nonexistence

This chapter reconstructs uses of indirection to organize street protests against the Pahlavi regime. I focus on a vernacular tradition that gained traction in the 1960s through which leftist and Islamist activists hid their political objectives behind nonpolitical veneers. In 1968, Iranian activists transitioned from using nominally nonpolitical institutions for cover to more fluid, and hence more potent, uses of informal “nonpolitical” practices in public. The transition began with mourning ceremonies for the popular wrestler Gholamreza Takhti. In conflating public expressions of loss with action, activists were able to hide in plain sight, leveraging confusion to facilitate popular assemblies. Their actions planted a seed, a contentious repertoire that blossomed into a cycle of protest a decade later. This chapter describes the terms according to which the transition occurred. It theorizes changing significations of the word senf (guild) from a noun into an adjective, senfi . Thus, practices associated with intermediary bodies (institutions conventionally seen as “premodern” and hence transitional) gave shape to an intermediary ethic central to revolutionary action.