 Thank you everybody for your patience while we resolve the technical issues. My name's Phil Clark and I'm a professor of international politics at SOAS and also co-director of the Center on Conflict Rights and Justice, which is the center that's hosting today's webinar. It's a real privilege to have Azu Ansalu with us. Azu I know will be very familiar to many of you already, so she hardly needs an introduction but nevertheless I will introduce her. Azu's professor of Law, Societies and Justice at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she's also the director of the Middle East Center. She's a legal anthropologist with a PhD in cultural anthropology from Stanford, but amongst many other things she's also a former asylum and refugee attorney. Her work really covers many areas but particularly looks at women's rights and human rights in different cultural contexts. She's obviously done a huge amount of ethnographic work in Iran specifically. Her first monograph which came out in 2009 was entitled the Politics of Women's Rights in Iran and her second monograph which she's going to speak to us about today is called Forgiveness Work, Mercy, Law and Victims' Rights in Iran. I can hold up my personal copy. It's a really fantastic book. I can't recommend it to you highly enough. Elegantly written, persuasively argued, amazing, empirical material but also I think the theoretical contributions even beyond the Iran case are really profound. So Azu, it's a real pleasure for the center and for so asked to have you very much looking forward to hearing you speak about your book. You're extremely welcome. Over to you. And just in terms of the format, Azu's going to speak for about 40 minutes or so and then there'll be lots of time for question and answer afterwards. So Azu, thanks very much. And thank you so much for this invitation. It's really delightful to be here. And just so you know, the light really is the way you see it here. Our sun is coming up a bit late this morning but it's still coming. Thank you again for this invitation. I'll try to move along so that maybe because we started a little bit late it won't take so much time. But yeah, so I want to talk a little bit about my research for this book. And one of the things I did a lot of was sit in on trials in criminal court, murder trials in particular. And there was one trial that really caught my eye that I want to talk a little bit with you about today and then talk about some of the implications of that trial. So in August 2016 I was sitting in a criminal trial in Tehran's provincial criminal court and that's the court for the entire province, not just the city, where a wife and two daughters accepted the charges of having murdered their husband and father by poisoning then strangling him and finally dismembering the body with an electric saw before stuffing its bits into black plastic bags for disposal. And they were caught just as they were stuffing the pieces in the bag. Now at the end of the nearly three hour hearing the chief judge brought the trial to a close by having the plaintiffs, that is the victim's brother and two sisters, and the defendants that is their nieces and sister-in-law sign their testimonies. The judge then looked at the parties on both sides of the room and said, I think you need to talk. Now as he proposed to clear the courtroom of spectators, he announced, in this case there is room for forgiveness. And so with the parties agreement the chief judge along with his two associate judges stepped out of the role of fact finder to that of mediator holding a reconciliation meeting between the parties in that very space. The judge aimed to avoid the imposition of the harshest sentence the plaintiffs could demand, re-sauce or retribution, which in this case meant death. In the final admonition, the judge noted, look, I'm not taking any side in this hearing. Then turned to the family of the victims and said, your right to retribution is preserved by law, but I want you to consider this. Every murder has its reason. Now to those in the courtroom who had sat in on the entire trial, this was a reference to the notarized letters that the defendants had submitted alleging years of violent behavior consisting of beatings and verbal and sexual abuse. And the judge continued, I recommend you read the letters your nieces have written. Now the problem with the letters was that there were allegations unsupported by any other evidence besides the defendant's own assertions. During questioning, one of the judges had noted that they read the letters in the file, but give us something that can prove your claims, he added. Did you ever tell anyone about the abuse? Over the alleged decades of abuse, the women in the family had never reported the violence, had never filed a police report, had never even confided in a family member. Given this society's grave concerns with propriety and face-saving, it surprised no one when the defendants responded with an unequivocal no. One of the defendants, the older daughter, testified, our mother told us that what he did to us should never leave this house. Such testimony may have been useful in making a claim that the killing was in self-defense, but without corroborating evidence, there was little the judges could do to avoid a finding of intentional murder. The sentence for which was retribution, but a sentence that only the victim's nearest relatives could exercise. So the judges convened this reconciliation meeting between the parties. A tete-a-tete provided the family of the victim a forum in which they could air their anger and hurt. It also allowed a non-official, non-recorded, and thus face-saving venue in which the defendants could speak of the violence and abuse, not as justification for murder, but as factors contributing to the defendant's state of mind, what we might call mitigating factors. So while such practices have been occurring in Iran on an ad hoc basis for years, generations really, Iran's recently revised code of criminal procedure confirms the judge's role as mediators and even strongly encourages them to try to achieve reconciliation. Now in my talk today, I want to explore the legal right of forbearance in Iran's criminal justice system. And I know that this forbearance is not something we often hear about with regard to Iranian criminal sanctioning. So I wanted to understand how the codification of forbearance operated in that legal system in which the family of the victim possesses a private right of retribution. And by private right, I mean that literally it's a property right that is actually inherited. And so they can exercise it or they can forego it. Now this element of the system that in homicide and numerous other crimes, not just homicide, retribution is literally the right of the victims, is little known and understudied. Much criminal sanction, much research on criminal justice, not just in Iran or the Middle East, but just generally, suggests that people want revenge after the death of a loved one. And scholars have suggested that is exactly why we must not have a justice system that gives so much power to victims. So I thought this was an interesting case study to look at the implications of a system that provides this form of relief and indeed is a system in which the preservation of victims' rights is at its very core. So in the larger project, the book that Phil so kindly held up, I explore what I see as an example of an extreme victim-centered approach to criminal justice. And I do this through an ethnographic study that focuses on who forgives and why, when the law gives them the right to pursue retribution. My research began in 2007 on this project and during annual research trips to Iran, I conducted participant observation with families of victims, lawyers, judges, prosecutors. I sat in on murder trials and interviewed and followed the activities of social workers and other actors, such as actual actors, athletes, members of the Olamah, their religious scholarly community, and other prominent individuals who work with families of victims to move them towards forgoing their right of retribution. In this talk, I want to focus on how the state, through its judicial officials, works both to maintain the victim's right to retribution and at the same time to encourage them to forgo it. Although forbearance can and does take place at any stage in the criminal proceeding after the indictment, during the trial, and after sentencing, it actually very rarely takes place in the trial stage. The most forbearances take place while the case is pending in the implementations unit, that is, during the long period between the sentence being issued and its implementation when the perpetrator is waiting. Now just a few words about the criminal process. After their system, you know, I come from the United States and we have a British common law system with some civil codes. Now there is much more akin to a French common law, sorry, a French civil law system, their procedures. So after a judge in the criminal court issues the sentence of gossas retribution, therefore validating a finding of intentional murder, the case returns to the prosecutor's office and the file is then sent to this implementations unit. Once all the appeals are exhausted and the head of Iran's judiciary issues what is called an istizan or a permission to carry out the sentence, then the case is ready for execution quite literally. And it is in that period that judges, all of these forgiveness workers actually aim to stretch out the period in which the sentence is actually carried out. Iran's system of criminal justice is notoriously harsh. We know that. Iran has the world's highest rate of capital punishment per capita and most executions are for drug convictions. In the past it was between two thirds and three fourths. And I say in the past because in 2018 Iran's parliament passed legislation that removed the death penalty for most drug related crimes and thus has reduced its overall executions significantly. But the issue that I examine in my book is death penalty for murder, for intentional murder cases, which are guided by the shat, which are guided by Islamic principles, not other kinds of laws, what are called tazid. Now through this case I wanted to understand in socio legal terms what the phrase that the judge used room for forgiveness means. How does it come about? What even motivates judges in the post trial mediation to engage in this. And so in the talk I want to just say a little bit about the criminal justice system in Iran then situate forgiveness work in this case and finally conclude with some thoughts about what it means to have a victim centered criminal justice system. So as many of you may be aware, after the 1979 revolution Iran's leaders rewrote the national laws to conform with Islamic principles as they saw them. And major revisions to the criminal laws in 2012 and 2015 actually finalized those codes for the first time. But they did confirm particularly severe retributive sanctioning, which we do hear about quite often. At the same time they strengthened and enhanced the possibility of the plaintiffs for barons, which they derive from the Muslim mandate to be merciful and compassionate. And there are specific provisions, chapters, verses in the Quran that are the basis for this. One is chapter five, verse 45, and the other is chapter two, verse 178. And so the codes of criminal procedure. So there's the substantive law that is based on these religious obligations to be merciful and compassionate. The codes of criminal procedure also create. This is new, what I call an imperfect duty on the part of government officials to work to bring about reconciliation whenever possible. So that means the penal codes, the substantive law, recognize for barons as a right. And the code of criminal procedure call on government agents tasked with carrying out that substantive law to do so with an eye towards achieving the greater goal of reconciliation. And there are numerous articles in the penal code and the code of criminal procedure that lay this out that make it clear. Now, this moral and legal obligation notwithstanding, there are virtually no guidelines regulating how officials and others should go about attaining for barons. Nor do the codes specify any specific group or agency to do this work. Hence, my question about the judge's motivations to engage in forgiveness work. This tension between the compulsion to seek reconciliation and yet no guidance on how to do so has proved to be a productive one. And this is actually how I start thinking about all of this forgiveness work that I see going on. Over the years, numerous groups and individuals, political and nongovernmental have intervened in murder cases and others that I don't talk about in the book. But they have intervened in these cases to which they are not parties with the aim of bringing about reconciliation between victims and perpetrators. And the absence of meaningful guidelines alongside a manifest moral and legal duty to forgive, I argue, has generated an informal cottage industry of advocacy that engenders numerous avenues for negotiating forgiveness and forging reconciliation. And I use the term cottage industry intentionally because I want to highlight the informality of the system as well as its ritual forms that engage and actually, you know, fill up this lack of other guidelines, right? The use of ritual forms engage what is now a flourishing complex of activity or industry around forgiveness, especially when it comes to capital punishment. So in thinking about the cottage industry, I draw on Sally Falkmore's notion of semi-autonomous social fields, more proposed that a field be studied through its semi-autonomy, the idea that it can generate rules and customs and symbols internally, but also that it is vulnerable to forces outside as well. So this semi-autonomous social field has rule-making capacities and the means to induce compliance, but it is also set in a larger matrix of who can affect it. So Moore developed this approach to study distinct groups within pre-existing social arrangements. And she observed that in these fields legislation is handed down by centralized governments and it encroaches on the social fields that already have their own rules and customs. But I'm suggesting something slightly different. In this case, it's the legislation itself, which in some important ways forges this social field, the forgiveness industry, if you will. But the important contribution of Moore's approach here is that she says studies in the nature of the autonomy and the quality of their self-regulation might yield valuable information about the processes of social life in complex societies. And this is, I think, what drew me to this work of Moore because we are able to learn something about how in an absence of guidelines, these self-regulation could happen and we're looking at a complex society, unlike what she was doing. So by employing this approach, I want to better understand the processes that create this industry for forgiveness work, as I call it, and also condition the granting of forgiveness by the families of victims. And then, of course, there are the judges who are duty bound by law and scriptures. So now I want to go back to the meeting, the reconciliation meeting, with the room cleared. There remained the parties, the judges, there are three of them, the prison guards, the psychologists from the juvenile correction center because one of the perpetrators was under the age of 18, two social workers who were present at the request of the defendants, several journalists from local newspapers, and myself, the researcher. So that's with the room cleared. Now, to assure the propriety of what was about to take place, the judge, the chief judge, reiterated that the hearing, the trial phase, had come to an end. Everything is over, he said. This is the start of the reconciliation and meeting and settlement meeting. Jalece is solo solos-ish, for those of you who speak Persian. Now, as though taking those words as a cue to step away from the role of the impartial trier of fact to sage advisor, one of the younger associate judges stepped off the judge's raised platform. He walked over to the parties, holding out his arms, and he reiterated, there is room for forgiveness in this case. He had read the detailed letters of abuse and was apparently swayed by the pleas on the part of the perpetrators. The letters, however, as I said, carried no legal weight, even if they were telling and sympathetic to the perpetrators. On the side of the victim's family, the uncle or the brother of the victim first cried out, I'm not ready to have them executed, but right now I am exploding with grief, he said. So many times I told them, if something is wrong, come and tell me, but they never did. The last time I said, if you don't like my brother, then divorce. All these people are getting divorced, not wanting to veer into retrying the facts. The chief judge, now mediator, spoke, we don't want to hear this now, and then added, our duty in all of our cases is to arrive at reconciliation. I want to ask this of you, that you try to come to a solution between you. Then one of the aunts answered, they don't pray. As a way of undercutting the young woman's character and credibility. Now, looking directly at her two nieces who were slowly walking towards her, the aunt said, if my brother was so bad, why didn't you tell me? The young women were now shepherded by the social workers towards their aunts and uncle. The social workers and the prison guards and the others started to admonish the young women, plead, go, go, ask for forgiveness. As they approached, the aunts began castigating the young women and the guards stood closely by to protect them from any physical harm. The journalist and the researcher hung back, taking in the situation. The girls then fell to their knees at the feet of their aunts and begged for their lives through their tears. They repeatedly cried, forgive us, please, please, forgive us. The aunts looked away, folded their arms at their chests, and instead looked up at the crowd gathered around them. Why should we forgive? Why should we be merciful when they were not? By now, everyone, including the prison guards and the journalists, were advocating to spare the lives of the women. And different voices spoke with varying degrees of rapidity. They did wrong, but you do right. No, I won't forgive. By killing them, you won't receive God's mercy. Now, the chief judge was still on his perch, tidying his desk, packing his briefcase, and he spoke loudly over the others. With your mercy, you will be helping them become better people. But they said those things about our brother. No, I won't agree. Then the associate judge did something interesting. He leaned towards the aunts while standing beside the defendants and said, you saw what we did. We didn't accept the things they said about him. They are your brother's family, though, his children. Do this act of kindness on your brother's behalf. Do it for him, for his memory, and it will bring you peace. The associate judge was attuned to the effect that the women's testimony, the defendants' testimony, had had on the family of the victim. And as a consequence, on their chances of foregoing retribution, that testimony, although providing context and motive in the defendant's legal case, elicited only anger and grief in the siblings. In such context, families of victims often spoke to me about a double injury. First, they had to contend with the physical loss of their loved one. And now on top of that, they had to endure the desecration of his reputation. Hear the legal process of truth seeking clashes with the culture of face saving. This particular attention arose frequently as a delicate conundrum in the context of forgiveness work. How could the family of the victim forego retribution, or even forgive the perpetrator, after the hurtful claims that the defendant had made? Even if as a legal defense. In such context, families feared that others would see their forbearance as a validation of the defendant's claims. On the other hand, carrying out retribution felt, some felt would prove and punish what the family saw as lies and provide a relief to the surviving kin. And a certain redemption of the deceased's reputation. Most hearings that deal with questions around morality and chastity, such as rape, are actually held in camera without the public in attendance. And even if only one of the charges has to do with sexual conduct, the judges will clear the courtroom for testimony on that particular issue. In this case, the testimony was more difficult to play down because it was presented as part of a defense. The judges further admonished the defendants during the testimony and said, you know, we've read the file. This was a less than subtle reference to the fact that they were aware of the defendant's sexual abuse allegations, but did not want them to be announced in the courtroom. But my brother didn't do those things. He didn't, one of the aunts said. The associate judge turned to the older defendant now, the older sister, and said, say you made a mistake. And she repeated through thoughts, I made a mistake. And then her younger sister, too, repeated, I made a mistake. Their mother did the same. Now the judge apparently saw an opening and called for the clerk to bring him the court's official forms. He looked at the aunts and said, look, they admitted they were wrong to have done that. Say those things about your brother. Now have mercy. You'll see, you'll find peace. And the judge began to dictate the contents. There's a standard turn of phrase. While the clerk wrote it out in longhand, then the judge, the same judge called over a journalist and told him to go and do an interview with the victim's family to clarify for the record that their brother was not an immoral person to be published in the next day's edition. The journalist stepped forward, knelt in front of the uncle and began writing in his notepad. At that time, the associate judge went to work on the forbearance affidavit. And the social workers stepped in. One clarified that what appeared to be a point of confusion for the aunts and said, oh, no, no, they won't be freed from, if you forego retribution, they'll be sent to prison for 10 years. A prison guard added, even after being released, they will have parole. And another added, and they won't be furloughed either. And a social worker then chimed in. And you can also receive compensation. Now, while the statement of forbearance had legal effect and the agreement between the parties would be approved by the court, none of the assurances by the social workers and prison guards carried the same weight. The uncle expressed uncertainty about taking compensation. And the associate judge came back and said, you don't have to keep it, you can take compensation, or you can give it to charity. And then one of the social workers added, but let them pay something for what they did. Finally, upon the approval, the case would be remanded back to the same court for sentencing. Now, not for murder crime, but for the public offense of disturbing peace and security. And the maximum sentence for that was indeed 10 years minus time served. There was still no guarantee that the defendants would actually receive all of that. Nevertheless, the time had come to sign the affidavit. And the judge pushed it in front of the aunts. And what it says is that each member of the family who has a private and individual right to retribution says they will forgo it without doubt or reservation, a legal term of art that would not invalidate the agreements, extrajudicial agreements between the parties that include things like compensation. The associate judge extended the document to the aunts and said, do it for God, sign. The first aunt signed, then the judge handed it over to the other one. And I'm asking this of you, sign, the chief judge called over. The judges were aware that their words carried tremendous weight. Besides having judicial authority, the stature of judges, especially the respected ones, carries with it moral rectitude as well. Meanwhile, the young women, the defendants, are on their knees, wailing now out of a cautious relief. Finally, everyone had signed and the associate judge victoriously proclaimed with your benevolence and chivalry, Javan Madi, you have foregone your right of retribution. The mood in the room quickly shifted into a celebratory one. And people congratulated one another, sent greetings to the prophet, and finally, they gathered themselves, stood up, and returned. They had to go back to prison until the processing of the case. Now, as we filed out, some, many people were congratulating the judges for how well they presided over the hearing and handled the reconciliation meeting. The judges seemed unaffected. I met the chief judge in the elevator, and I noted how rare it was to hold such a meeting right after the trial on the merits. And I asked, how did you know? What made you hold the meeting right then and there? He just looked at me and said, 43 years of experience. So a few days later, the associate judge was a bit more forthcoming. And he said to me, I knew the plaintiffs, by their hesitation, were open to foregoing their right of retribution. He said, when I asked them what they want to do, they replied, the uncle especially, this is the judge shocking, said, the uncle had said he didn't want retribution. And the judge added, I knew these were not the type of people to carry out this sauce. Since I knew they would eventually forgive, I thought we could just finish it right then and there. When I continued impressed, what were the motivations for holding, for being so engaged in the reconciliation? After all, he's a judge. He replied, this is both in our religion and in our laws. And this phrase in our religion and our laws is one I often heard in the process of carrying out this research. The distinction frequently made to me by state officials raised for me an important question between the two. What does it mean in an Islamic Republic that bureaucrats, government functionaries, make this distinction between religion and law? In Iran's Islamic Republic, it is government representatives who have the final and definitive word on state laws based on their readings of religious principles. So the distinction between religion and law is important because in the final analysis, law is a question of state sovereignty. Ultimately, the state's monopoly on law and its interpretation overtake the heated debates and nuance found in Islamic jurisprudential thought. Thus, in this context, the fact that the judge points out his religious duty as significant, I'm sorry, the fact that the judge points out his religious duty has significance because such an obligation suggests a concern with ethics derived from a duty to God, which is not sublimated by or reduced to the worldly concerns of the state's monopoly over legitimate violence. In other words, the law. It remains, however, that what is being adjudicated in criminal court is not law and not, sorry, it remains that what is being adjudicated in criminal court is law and not shat Islamic principles. Rather, the court's process processes reveal how law conceals by its very codification, the ethical attributes, the room for nuance, the space for debate implicit in Sharia Islamic principles, while at the same time securing the state's sovereign authority over the people. While the scholarly debates in the seminaries of Om and Najaf highlight the changing fluid and evolving nature of the Sharia, their codification as law ossifies the principles and disassociates them from their ethical underpinnings, the very basis of their fluidity. It is us, sorry, it is thus left up to the individual judges, the better trained among them to be sure, to apply a skilled ethical discretion taking in the ethical foundations of the Shad into their application of the criminal codes. The ossification and inflexibility of law is apparent in the codification of the homicide crimes for which there are three categories and only three categories I might add intentional murder, unintentional murder and quasi intentional or accidental murder. As one defense lawyer told me, this is a big problem in our law. Judges are forced to give the ruling for intentional murder when it is not always so. Few exceptions exist in the law, but the revisions to the law, these more recent revisions I mentioned, permit some argument on the part of lawyers that there were circumstances to mitigate a sentence of intentional murder. So what I'm trying to say is that the legal code constrains the law. And for the first three and a half decades of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the emphasis was on a re-institution of the foundational aim of preserving the right of the victim's family. The new revisions to the law however offer increased flexibility, discretion, and even some alternative sanctioning. While the judges cannot forego the re-sauce, the retribution, private right of re-sauce, and the law constrains them in their sentencing in this respect, particularly due to the overly broad definition of an intentional murder, their discretion however is broadened in their duty to seek reconciliation. And you know, I grant you discretion can be problematic, but discretion is broadened in the context of forbearance and the duty to seek reconciliation and to bring the parties to a settlement can offer possibilities for forbearance at any and all stages in the sanctioning process from the original arrest and investigation to the indictment, the judgment, and later even the implementation. So I just have like a few pages left, but I'm going to just try to quickly say what what I think this means. If we look more at the idea of codifying mercy, we want to situate legal forbearance in the context of this changing and standardizing legal process, which creates this problematic, if you will, the duty to reach reconciliation while preserving the victim's rights to retribution. This idea, this system, recognizes that loss or injury to a loved one creates a private right of equal justice. And there are two important points to take from this. One is that it's the family of the victim who is the victim here. Sorry, that makes no sense. The family of victim decides how to dispose of that right. It's their right. Second, the state sees its role as preserving that right. So it's actually a very classic liberal move that the sovereign harnesses the authority to preserve the peace by mediating over disputes. So the judiciary's role, thus, is one of harnessing and regulating that space for settling accounts so people don't go out and take revenge into their own hands. So the state claims the monopoly on legitimate violence by requiring that any payback take place within its processes. And by giving private citizens the right to ask the state to exercise that violence, the state does implicate them in its own logic for settling disputes, regardless of whether they exercise the right or forego it. Now, this process bears some resemblance to state formation in common law and civil law countries as well, but with notable distinctions. So in his introduction to English legal history, J. H. Baker contends Anglo-Saxon codes did not codify existing tribal laws, let alone make new law. Instead, he says, the new codes were directed at readers who could be presumed to know the customs already and offered fixed rules to govern situations which must previously have rested on discretion. So codes limited discretion but sought to repair loss or injury based on the pre-existing customs of the time. They just didn't spell them out. Nevertheless, the codification of tort law, not just in Iran, but even in western societies, are still bound up with pre-legal customs that sought to extract damages incurred for the staining of honor. Now, what legal anthropologist Robert Redfield described this as simple societies moved from employing retaliative sanctions to developing what he called proto-legal institutions. And Redfield and actually in an essay almost two decades later by Foucault suggested that the formalization of law emerged through the development of systems of compensation or forms of socially approved retaliation in the development of what might be called a rudimentary law of torts. And the overall goal was to rein in unlimited revenge between groups. So it is this proto-tort law that Redfield and others argue is the beginnings of a modern justice system. And the reason for that is because at the other side we have something that looks like criminal law. So the creation of two sets of laws, tort law and criminal law, is for many scholars the beginning of a modern justice system. The harm that the law punished in criminal law was done to societies, not just to the families. And we can remember Maine's very important assertion that we move from status to contract, right? But in addition to that, this shift was also recognizing that codes secularized and individuated these earlier practices and ultimately privileged the harm done to society over those of the family. So in many jurisdictions in the US at least, not maybe where you are, it's the state that has the right to capital punishment, not the family of the victim. In Iran, it's the reverse, right? So by giving the victim's family the paramount decision over life and death, the system is still more focused on family relationships and perceived kinship structures, and thus to some extent on status over contract. One of the effects of this is that the emphasis on honor is much more explicit than in contemporary Western context, which I have a separate article where I argue that we're also very concerned with honor, but since it's not written into our codes, it's much more implicit. The Iranian system's emphasis on the injury to the victim's family not only has the effect of accentuating the social importance of the family's honor, but it also serves to entrench the perceptions of gender roles that emerge from them. And that's why if you read the book, you'll see women are very intimately involved in forgiveness work and are many times designated by their families to be the decider for what happens in these cases. But what's interesting about this that I want to point out is that even while the system kind of raises or privileges the importance of honor in this kin-based system, we also see it privilege and raise the importance of reconciliation and settlement processes, which we don't see as much in the, at least in the United States, in these jurisdictions. So one of the residual effects of precodified practices on this Iranian legal system is the greater entrenchment with gender roles, explicit concern with honor, but also a greater interest in seeking reconciliation. So what I wanted to say here, and this is where I'll end, is that in as much as the process perpetuates gendered and status-based relationships, the new laws also limit them in important ways. The new provisions in the penal codes also draw from other practices and customs that aim to restore the broken peace. So I'm sorry if I went a little bit long, and I thank you for your attention. Fantastic. Thanks, Arzu. Such a rich presentation. There's so much there to unpack and discuss. I'm going to throw it open to the group now for anyone who has any questions or comments or clarifications. I can see Nishan already. I mean, maybe before people speak, if you could just introduce yourself, so that Arzu knows exactly who she's speaking to. But yeah, I see a hand up and Nishan over to you. And maybe tell Arzu where you are as well, because I know a lot of you are scattered around the world at the moment. So having a sense of the geography of this group might also help. So yeah, Nishan. Yeah, hi. So I'm in India right now at the moment. So my question is that when we speak about this retributory form of justice, which is served out by Iran, so you spoke about the fact that how the victims are getting their right to decide whether there should be capital punishment or not. So isn't that kind of creating more conflict within the victim and perpetrator? Because if a certain victim chooses to use the power of capital punishment, but the other one chooses to forgive, isn't that creating a division in society and a certain inequality between two different murder victims? Great. Do you want to take that, Arzu? Yeah, I just want to make sure I understood the question. So when you said doesn't that create inequality between different murder victims, but you were also talking about within families or not? Yes, yes, exactly. So like within families, if a certain family member is given capital punishment, another one is spared. So that is, there is clearly a division there because when the state is deciding, they're deciding on the basis of mitigating circumstances and aggravating circumstances. Thank you for your question. So I understand your question, but I actually want to open it in two ways. One, in one murder case, there are multiple family members and every single family member must forego their right of retribution in order to spare the perpetrator. And that's already a huge debate within families. And then what you're talking about is the unequal application of law in the context of giving the families this right. And it's so interesting that you asked this question. So a lot of people in sort of my legal scholarly friends in the United States said the same thing to me. And I actually asked several judges and I asked, I was in Rome, which is the jurisprudential capital in Iran and much of the Shi'i world. And I said, what do you say about this? And the judge said, well, you know, in the US at least, I can talk about the US. That's what I know. He said, well, every state has different laws. How is that not unequal application? So criminal law in general is not federalized or standardized. So we have 50 states and every state has their own. We have states that don't have the death penalty. We have states that do have the death penalty. We have states that have a moratorium on the death penalty. And he said he, so that's what that judge said about application. Then another judge, literally the next morning came to me with a print out of an execution. And this is in my book. I can't remember, but it was the state of, I don't remember Alabama or Georgia or something. They had, or Virginia anyway, they had executed a man who in the US, this was in 2015, I think, who was deemed to have had an IQ below 70 or something. And he said, this is what, where is this? And they reference the high rate of incarceration by black and brown people in the US. I was surprised how well they knew what was going on. And I should just tell you, I've been following the case in this case in the US where the federal government has now used the death penalty eight times and has not, it had not been used in the last 15 years. And in the last year, I think they've used it eight times. And now between now and the inauguration of the new president, they're trying to execute three people. And so it's, so I agree with you. Like that was my first instinct too. What about the application of the law? And the judge's response was that what, why do you assume that the state applies the law evenly, but families of victims can't. And in fact, they argue that they're the victims, they're the closest to the injury. So what's more fair than that? That, you know, that's their way of, of, of responding to that. But thank you for your question. Yeah. Thank, thank you. Because I mean, like, this is actually the, you know, like, they've stuck to the traditional norms which were used to be like the eye for an eye whenever somebody was killed in the, in the medieval times, like you, the victim used to decide and they've used that analogy in, even in today's date. So that is why it's kind of interesting in that way. But thanks a lot for your answer. I would just clarify one thing. We, like, we do have a retributive system of law. We don't give the right of retribution to the family of the victim, but our system in the United States is still a retributive system. Great. Thanks Nishan. Another question or comment who would like to, who would like to intervene. So I'm going to abuse my role as chair then, Azu. I have so many questions about this, but one of them, I guess, is about the, the idea of forgiveness in this entire process and, and what you think it leads to. So, you know, this is an unusual approach to forgiveness in some senses. You know, it's firstly, it's incredibly public, you know, which might go against some people's default expectation of what forgiveness is that, that it's often very personal, done out of the public gaze in order to secure its sincerity and its meaning for the parties. So the public element seems complex. You've got a high degree of mediation, not just by parties who are directly involved in the harm, but extraneous parties like the judge in this kind of situation. And much of this seems to carry some notion of obligation. I mean, you use the word duty quite a lot. And, and I wonder, you know, from your vantage point as a, as an anthropologist studying this, what do you think of the, this type of forgiveness and how meaningful it is and, and do you think that it stands a chance of leading to the kind of reconciliation that the system is, you know, purportedly supposed to be given all the pressure that we see exerted on the nature of the forgiveness process. I just, I just wonder if you can talk about the impact of it and what do you think it ultimately leads to for the parties that you observed? Sure, I will do that. Thank you for that wonderful question. It's really a thought-provoking question. I want to say two things at the outset. First is, in the book, and maybe we don't have time in the talk to do this, but I really make a distinction between the legal act of forbearance, which actually has its own term. It's gozache. You forego your right of retribution. It's codified. It's in there. And forgiveness, what in Persian is bachsheesh. And I think those two are really different. Now, I kind of might have used the terms interchangeably because my interlocutors use those terms interchangeably and they very much see the legal act as a legal act. And I always ask that question, that follow-up question to my interlocutors who did forego their right of retribution and said, but did you forgive? And like I write about it in the book and it's very hard for me to say, oh, yes, they all forgave or they didn't or some did some. It is, as you say, it's not public. It's very personal. And some of the stories that I heard were really like mind-blowing. So when I asked that question of a woman whose son was murdered by her daughter-in-law and then after many years she forewent retribution, she said that her son came to her in a dream and he told her that it would be all right to forego retribution. And that highlights two things. One, a lot of times the victim's family knows that they're just, in a sense, they've inherited the actual victims write a retribution, right? And so they have to do right by that person. And I have so many cases where people had a dream where their loved one came to them. And I said to her, this mother, I said, did you forgive so again, your daughter-in-law? And she said with all of my heart. But a lot of that came from the release of forbearance. So forbearance releases her in order to forgive. And I saw this in many cases. And the other thing I would say that's really interesting is most of the, okay, most, maybe 50%, like right there, right in the middle, of the forgiveness workers that I knew and worked with were already people who had done this. They were victims of a crime and they forgave the perpetrator. What I write about in the book that's really interesting from a broader sociological standpoint, if you will, is that many of the people I met who were forgiveness workers were already touched by crime and they, it was very difficult and they forgave. Then they started doing this forgiveness work. But they said to me, we only work on behalf of, you know, people, kids, youth, under the age of 18, we only work on that because we really don't believe they should be executed. This is before Iran changed their laws. It's now much harder to execute youth. And then a few years later, that same person said to me, oh, no, well, you know, there are actually a lot of cases, it's much more complicated. So we work on behalf of anybody who we think has, you know, mitigating circumstances. And then a few years later, I'm totally against the death penalty there. It's just completely wrong. And I'm going to so I saw the transformation over this period of 13 years of people shifting in their own, in their own hearts, in their, in who they were. And many people talk about this, like, you know, I don't want to get corny here, but like a very cathartic experience of forgiveness led to being a more forgiving overall. And just one last comment is the part about whether it's public. The way I think I presented this makes it look like it's public. But after there, there have been a lot of public campaigns, but after the very, very sad execution of Rehana Jabari in October 2014, most of this kind of advocacy is now very, very private, very, very behind the scenes. And in my research, I would meet people, you know, because I have an American accent or whatever they would say to me, are you a journalist? We don't want this to go virtual. We don't, Matt Josie, we don't want this to go public. So they came to see that the broader public advocacy actually in many cases hurts the family of the victim even more. And so that's become kind of standard policy, like the forgiveness work is becoming more and more standardized too, and that's one of the ways they've standardized it. Right. It's so interesting. Yeah, Arshan. Yeah, thank you. Hi, Arshan. How are you? Welcome to to Sawas. I love to chat, but it's not the, it's not the right forum. Thanks for a wonderful talk. I had one year at a board meeting. Phil knows what I'm talking about. So you may have answered this, but I was wondering about the role of emotions in the process of forgiveness. It seems to be such a charged atmosphere and I really envy you that you were right in there, you know, to feel how these people were processing these, you know, enormous emotions. So has there been any research in that regard? And if not, how did it feel to you when you were there? Did you feel that, you know, there was this ability on an individual level to rationalize this process? Or was it more about emotions? Yeah, it's fascinating. I would just love to know what you thought about this. Oh, that's a wonderful question. Thank you so much. I write a lot about the emotion and there's, I'm so glad you said that, like, I worked really hard in this presentation to try to make you see how emotional it was and what a charged atmosphere it was. And you see, this is a very, maybe subtle strategy on the part of these judicial officials. What they want is to use the courtroom, the charge to the space here of the state to allow the anger, the grief, the emotion to be expelled. And even I think while Halak in one of his books has also written about this, that this space is intended. So that's why there's this demarcation, there's legal reasons for the demarcation between the trial, where you don't want to show too much emotion. But there's also the Jalice Solisages, the reconciliation meeting, where that's where they want you. They want people to scream and cry. And, you know, the prison guards came to because they were afraid the ants were going to hit the girls, but, you know, no physical violence, but seriously scream and cry and beg and plead and say what you want. They try to open this space to do that. I had a meeting with the head of the juvenile corrections center. And it was very interesting because I asked him if, you know, he had any experiences with this. And he has a PhD in psychology himself. And he would hold these reconciliation meetings in his office. And he told me this story, it took place over seven years of trying to get this family to forego retribution for a youth under 18 who had killed someone in their family. And then he told me the story in the steps. You know, he brought them to the office and he brought both, he would summon both parties and a lot of them do this. And as he was telling me the story of how, like, the first meeting, like, they fought, like it got even worse. And the last thing they said was, now I'm definitely going to execute. I wasn't sure before, but now I'm definitely, and I said to him, didn't you feel bad? Weren't you worried? And he said, no, this is the process, the expiation that needs to happen. And we try to create a place for it. And their idea is that if they do that, we'll get closer to forbearance. But at the same time, it will prevent the likelihood of violence that, you know, taking the violence into their own hands and going out into the communities. I hope I answered your question. Thank you so much. You're fascinating. I could listen to that the whole day. It's really amazing. I mean, the type of field research that you've done for this book, it's unique. Really, really fascinating stuff. Thank you. Thank you. Other questions, comments? There are so many angles on this book. Who have we got there? Ifa. Yeah, sorry. Ifa. I can't figure out how to raise my hand, so I'm just kidding. I don't know either. I've had six weeks to work out how to use Blackboard and Zoom is beyond me, so you're ahead of me there, Ifa. Yeah, it looks like I'm co-host as well, so I don't know how that happened to you there, but I'll just roll with it. You can do what you like. It's like the legal forums Azuz is talking about. There's a lot of popular power in the process. Yeah, over to you. I just had to clarify questions. Just as you were talking there about that it took seven years, in one case, and then it was immediate after the other one, I was just wondering, like it made me think, are they just doing it for as long as the people agree and like agree to forego their right, especially since the judges seemed quite pushy in the first example, so I was just wondering right that. And then also I had another question, what was it? Oh yeah, just because you were touching on earlier about how our system is still retributive even if it's not necessarily capital punishment, I just wanted to clarify that they're foregoing their right to capital punishment, but they don't have any say in whether they go to prison or not, right? So that I would still consider punishment and retributive, but they don't get a say there. Am I right in saying that? Yeah, that's a great question. Both of your questions are excellent. Thank you so much. So I have a whole chapter on time because it was the last chapter I wrote and I felt, I realized like time is actually a character. Like I have a chapter on the lawyers, the social workers, and I'm like I need a chapter on time because time plays such a huge role here. And you know, I asked the judge in the implementations unit, the one whose job it is to like set up the execution and carry it out. I said, well, how do you decide when like all avenues for forbearance have been exhausted? And he said that he can tell, you know, kind of like the judge in the story, like they can tell, they just can tell, but they do let the deliberations go on when it's other social workers or just people come to them and say, look, we're working on it. It's it's sorry. It's happening. We're working on it. So yes, for as long as the judges feel like there's something going on that, like in fact, when I was in the office of the judge of the implementations unit, the his staff person who's in charge of scheduling executions, how morbid that sounds came into his office. And he went down the list and he's like, this one, he's like, yes, this one, no, they're still deliberating, I believe they're close to settlement. This one, I've called them to my office. So, you know, he's like kind of figuring out how to do it. So time plays. But you have to remember also, the family of the victims hate that like this thing is just sitting on them. And all they do is think about this day and night and all kinds of random people are constantly getting in touch with them to forgive. And so while I was in this judge's office one time, the gentleman walked in, he was sweating, he was angry, he had driven through the night from like six hours away. And he was like, when are you going to do this? We're sick of it. We've been waiting five, six, I can't remember years for this to happen. What are you guys doing? Just kill them already. So you see, they're also balancing like preserving this right because if we don't, these people might take it out on their own hands. And as a state, the state is that's their most important concern. And that's your second question. Yes, I didn't say this clearly in the talk. So in this system, the murder case, the private case has has priority. And that one is tried first. If there's a forgiveness for parents, then you have the state sanctioning, which is not for murder. It's for disturbing the peace. And the maximum sentence for disturbing the peace is 10 years. And in the US, for example, it's the opposite. So the state prosecutes the trial and the state has the death penalty. If they don't reach that decision, the family of the victim can then sue for what we call unlawful death lawsuits. And they get a monetary injury sum. So it's actually the order is different, but there are the two processes both exist. I don't know, are we out of time? I don't want to feel bad. Like we started late, people might have things to do. Oh, it's fine. I was going to see if there were further comments or questions. I have so many. I was looking down my list. I didn't know where to start. Can I just say one thing about the last question too? It's really interesting. So in the new criminal code, if the family hasn't made a decision, so this brings your two questions together. If the family hasn't made a decision within 10 years, the perpetrator has reached the maximum state sanction for prison. So now they can actually petition, put up some kind of security, and get out of prison. And the family still hasn't made a decision. And I said, well, what happens if the family, like on the 11th year says, oh, we changed our minds? Like technically they can do that. Like that's really bizarre to me, but that's in the new law. Because sometimes families just, they don't want to make a decision. They don't want to forgive the killer of their family, but they also don't want to be responsible for executing someone. So they just do nothing. Sorry, go ahead. One of the things I was interested in, I do both in your presentation and also in the book, is I mean, I mean, Arshon's right. Your empirical material is really breathtaking. I think the ethnographic depth, the examples, but also the long engagement that you've got with a lot of your interlocutors, you can tell there's a real sense of trust there. You follow up on these cases, you kind of watch them all the way through. I wondered about where your findings go beyond the Iranian context. Because you have a lot to say in the book about the theoretical relevance of your findings. Look, and I asked this because I guess in the politics department itself, that's one of the things that we're interested in is how concepts travel across time and space. And how understandings of concepts like justice and forgiveness and mercy and forbearance in one particular context might still have a resonance beyond that context. Even the concept of law, I think is heavily contested in the work that you're doing. And you do talk about this in the book, so I know you've got an answer for it. I just wondered if you could say something about that, where you see the relevance, the significance of your work, even beyond the very particular context in which you did all of that amazing ethnographic fieldwork. What's the answer in the book? No, just kidding. So this is a really interesting question. I'm coming from, I'm in a country that has not had diplomatic relations with Iran for 40 years. I'm in a country that has unilaterally sanctioned Iranian people collectively. And so it's an odd question from my standpoint that people would think that they have something to learn from the Iranian system, if you will. But you know, I'm surprised sometimes by people like some of my own students, and one of them is here, Bori, hi. When they ask me questions that are so like sincere and earnest and really interested in the kind of thing that you're talking about, what can we learn from this? And what I can tell you is, from our days in Fetzer Institute, where we worked on forgiveness, there are a lot of cases in the US where there is no possibility of forbearance. In the criminal trials and murder trials in the United States, there have been cases, actually, many that Phil and I have come across because of that other project we run, where families of victims want to forgive the perpetrator, but there's no room for forgiveness, if you will. There's no space in which that has any kind of impact or effect. And that was actually one of the ways I was able to do this project. I would tell judges, they were like, are you a journalist? You just want to expose our human or our murder capital stuff? I said, people, like everybody already knows that. Everybody already knows that you guys execute people. What people don't know is that there's forgiveness in the system, because we don't have it in the United States. And when I said that, that was like all hands on. That's when I got access. And there have been a lot of cases where people want to forgo retribution in the United States. And it doesn't have any legal meaning. Now, to be more precise with regard to your question, I have a colleague in my department who works with lifers who are on death row. And they, I'm sorry, they're not, they're either on their lifers, they're on, they're on, they're not on death row, they're in prison for life. And a lot of them wish, he says, they could just be executed because it's like a double death sentence. One death sentence is being sentenced to life in prison. And the other one is that you die in prison. So it's a double death sentence. And a lot of times he told me that people, not, not the lifers necessarily, but sometimes come up for a parole hearing to be paroled after spending 20, 30 years in prison. And you know what they say? The family of a victim comes to this meeting and says, you didn't even apologize. You didn't even say you were sorry. And what's really interesting that I didn't know is that in many of these cases, the perpetrator is prohibited from contacting the family of the victim. There's actually what is called a no contact order. So then the family of the victim comes to oppose the parole because the person never apologized. So I think there are incremental things that can happen. Like if we recognize how important these meetings are, even the ones where there's yelling and screaming because of the expiation necessary, like I want to yell and scream at the person who did me wrong. I don't want to come home and it's not enough to like come home and yell and scream at somebody else. Do you see what I'm saying? So yes, I think these avenues exist. And just quickly, there was a very interesting case in Florida where a young man, you know, because people have guns in America killed his girlfriend. They were having a fight. And the family of the victim who were about to welcome this young man as their son-in-law, they wanted to forgive him. They're very Christian, very religious, and religion plays an important part. And they held, they had a mediator come in, not a religious mediator, but come in and they had a circle, a forgiveness circle, and they wanted Colin to tell them exactly what happened. And the mother of the victim was sitting right next to Colin and she said, like, what happened? And he told her, I shot her. And she said in her book that she was hoping he would say it was an accident. And what's more, like then, like initially she said she thought, maybe he should have like five years in prison. But when she realized that she thought, no, he should be in prison for a longer period. In addition to that, the prosecutor was a part of the circle. And as soon as Colin said that, he got up and left because he just got evidence that he could use against Colin. So the way that that worked, it wasn't so great. I think Colin ended up getting 25 years in prison. So there's so much more, I think, that we could talk about. But I think we have reached the end of our time. The only thing I think that's left to say is that, yeah, Nisha. I had a question. Yeah, I had a question. Yeah, if you could keep it short. Yeah, sure, sure, sure. Yeah, so my question is basically, you spoke about how religion has to play a big part in the execution, because I'm not really conversant with the Sharia law, the Islamic principles, whether death penalty is how much it is accepted, and whether under the Islamic fundamental principles, whether killing of another person is right or wrong. Because as you are aware in the US, like there are pro-right Republicans who are against the death penalty, and there are certain pro-right Republicans who are for the death penalty. So that's what I was wondering. So how does it play out in the case of the Islamic law? That's actually a very interesting question. And it's exactly what creates this quandary on the part of the perpetrators. Killing someone is 100% prohibited in Islam. However, if you are the victim, or the family of the victim of someone who's been Islam does, according to the people who've interpreted this way, give you this right of retribution, and at the same time encourages forgiveness, forbearance of that retribution. Now, just one caveat. As I said in my talk, these concepts in the Sharia are debated in Islamic seminaries. What I'm telling you is the state law. And there's a very important distinction to be made here, because when I go to Oman Najaf, you see papers, you see scholarly journals. There are dozens of scholarly journals in Najaf on just this topic. And one very famous, highest ranking scholar. You know what I'm talking about. The highest ranking scholar. His name is Bayat Zanjani. He said to me that, you know, I went to see him and he said, well, like, what do you know? Prove that you know something. And I talked to him about the provisions that give the right of retribution. And then he quoted an Arabic saying that's in the Qur'an. I don't speak Arabic, Persians don't speak Arabic generally, but the Qur'an is written in Arabic. And he said, what do you think that phrase means? And I said, it's the right of retribution. He said, no. It means you follow the story. Qesas, what people say is retribution, comes from shares with Qesas story. What it means to follow the story means you need to have a procedure, criminal procedure. There needs to be a process. It doesn't mean you have to kill the perpetrator. So even on that point, there's tremendous debate. When I've talked about this to my Western Islamic law scholars, they told me that that guy in Qom doesn't know what he's talking about. I actually believe the guy in Qom. But what I want to say is even there, there's debate. Thank you so much. Fantastic. As you can see, the conversation could continue for a very long time. But unfortunately, I'm going to have to draw this to a close. Look, once again, people get a copy of forgiveness works. Your host isn't doing his job if he's helping you at least try to shift a few copies of the book. Everyone can tell that from the quality of the presentation, the richness of the material, the clarity of the thinking. This has really been a fantastic discussion. We're really grateful for you giving up time, especially very early in the day on a Tuesday there in Seattle. But thanks once again, and we'll undoubtedly have you back at SOAS probably to talk about your next book, which I'm sure you're working on already. So thanks again. It's been a real privilege. Thank you for your attention. I mean, I know this is really hard and I am really grateful to the invitation and all of you for participating, staying late, starting late, all that stuff. And hopefully for the next book, we can have you in person in London. That would be ideal. I have to write another book to get invited. How about an article? It's a tough gig here. It's a tough gig. Thanks again, Ozzy. Really fantastic. And thanks everybody for coming. Thank you, Ozzy, John. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for being here. Thank you. Thank you. See you soon. Bye-bye.