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"Iran's prison system is a foundational institution of Iranian political modernity. The Incarcerated Modern traces the transformation of Iran from a decentralized empire with few imprisoned persons at the turn of the twentieth century into a modern nation-state with over a quarter million prisoners today. In policing the line between "bad criminal" and "good citizen," the carceral system has shaped and reshaped Iranian understandings of citizenship, freedom, and political belonging. Golnar Nikpour explores the interplay between the concrete space of the Iranian prison and the role of prisons in producing new public cultures and political languages in Iran. From prison writings of 1920s leftist prisoners and communiqués of 1950s militant Islamists, to paintings of 1970s revolutionary guerrillas and mapping projects organized by contemporary dissident prisoners, carceral confinement has shaped modern Iranian political movements. Today, mass incarceration is a global phenomenon. The Incarcerated Modern connects Iranian history to transnational carceral histories to illuminate the shared architectures, economies, and techniques of modern punishment"--

Modern carcerality in Iran, with its attendant systems of surveillance, policing, and mass imprisonment, was a gendered project from the outset. In turn, the new modern prisons of the Pahlavi era (1925–79) provoked gendered anxieties about seemingly rising rates of female and child criminality, the deteriorating family unit, and the inherent sin and vice of life in a modern city. In general, it is difficult to overstate the wholesale changes that the modern carceral system has brought to Iran. The establishment of modern prisons, an effort begun in the first decades of the 20th century, has led to an enduring transformation in social worlds for Iranians of all genders. For much of Iran's pre-20th-century history, forced confinement of any kind was a relative rarity, legal practices and norms were diffuse and diverse, and long periods of incarceration were virtually nonexistent. The conceit of prisoner reform central to the modern penitentiary model—wherein centralized modern governments imagine prisons as rehabilitative spaces in which socially undesirable "criminals" can be reformed into good "citizens"— is nowhere found in the archive of Iran's pre-20th-century punishments.

Nikpour's article explores the emergence of new iterations of Islamic universalism in the mid-twentieth century by examining two important 1960s texts that are rarely if ever discussed in the same context: The Autobiography of Malcolm X and a travelogue titled Khasi Dar Miqhat (Lost in the Crowd) by Iranian intellectual Jalal al-e Ahmad. Malcolm X's famous autobiography was published in 1965, just a few months after both he and Al-e Ahmad had returned to Iran from the hajj trip that is narrated in the 1966 Khasi Dar Mighat. Nikpour argues that these hajj texts signal a new political and ethical imaginary of the anticolonial era. Malcolm X and Jalal Al-e Ahmad were both political thinkers whose lives were marked by restless intellectual and political exploration. Though both men had worldly concerns, they are each more generally read from within the provincial national concerns found in American and Iranian studies respectively. Whereas Malcolm's sudden death in 1965 is often interpreted as the tragic cutting short of his newfound ethical engagements, Al-e Ahmad's abrupt death in 1969 is seen as minor footnote in the locomotive momentum of the Islamic ideology of the Islamic Republic he is said to have helped found with his writing. This essay asks whether it is possible to read the ethical horizons imagined by these political theorists without collapsing them into common tropes of black nationalism (for Malcolm) and linear precursors to the 1979 Iranian revolution (Al-e Ahmad).