Iranians In Chains: Sounds From Hell And Of Resistance
A doorbell. The faulty fan of a car. Banging on a metal door. Screaming and crying. A hymn. A bird singing at dawn. What could these sounds possibly have in common?
They are all part of the acoustic world of imprisonment: Some sounds that have remained in the memories of people who experienced arrest, detention and torture in Iran, sometimes continuing to affect their everyday lives years after their release.
But these sounds do not all have the same meaning. Some carry memories of interrogation, violence and fear. Some were imposed on prisoners as a means of psychological pressure. Others were produced by prisoners themselves — to break isolation, communicate through walls, encourage one another or simply make their presence known.
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These prisoners are not only witnesses to what happened inside Iran’s prisons. They are also earwitnesses: People whose knowledge of imprisonment comes partly through what they heard when they could not see.
Weaponizing the sacred
Noise, repetitive music and loudspeakers have been used in prisons and interrogation settings elsewhere in the world. The Iranian testimonies, however, raise an additional question: what happens when the sound being imposed is sacred or has religious origin?
From the early decades of the Islamic Republic, prisoners have described harsh physical torture, as well as psychological torture, which includes forced and repeated exposure to religious sound, including Quranic recitation, the call to prayer and noha — Shiʿi religious lamentation.
Pastor Victor Bet-Tamraz recently described such an environment. During his solitary confinement in Ward 209, the light in his small cell remained permanently on. At the same time, he says, Quranic recitations and Quran lessons were played continuously and loudly over the speakers.
Neither light nor sound was under his control.
Atena Daemi, a civil rights activist, provides another striking account in “White Torture: Interviews with Iranian Women Prisoners,” by Narges Mohammadi, the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Daemi describes the call to prayer inside prison as having a particularly disturbing effect on her. It sounded different from the calls to prayer she had heard outside prison. She compares it to a “trumpet of death.”
During Muharram (a sacred month in Islam), she also recalls loud religious lamentation and mourning being broadcast throughout the ward every day, which she says deeply disturbed her. These practices seem to have been occurring for decades.
Journalist and former political prisoner Reza Moini, who later headed the Iran-Afghanistan's desk at Reporters Without Borders, told me about similar experiences dating back to the repression of the 1980s, when thousands of political prisoners — many associated with leftist political movements — were imprisoned and many were executed.
Moini recalls the use of Quranic recitation and, particularly, religious lamentations during torture. He says testimonies from prisoners of that period describe Quranic recitation (or noha), including recordings by the well-known wartime religious singer and revolutionary guard, Sadegh Ahangaran, being played loudly while prisoners were flogged.
Moini said he personally experienced the loud playing of Ahangaran’s religious lamentations on two occasions while he was being tortured. According to his account, a prisoner’s hands and feet could be restrained while the soles of the feet were flogged. Something might also be placed in the prisoner’s mouth to suppress the screams or even make his breathing more difficult, increasing the pain.
Within such an environment, amplified sound could perform several functions at once. It could mask the prisoner’s cries from others, overwhelm the immediate acoustic environment and add another layer of sensory and psychological pressure.
A sound ordinarily associated with religious worship, collective mourning or cultural memory could consequently acquire a radically different meaning when imposed within an environment of physical violence.
Why weaponize the sacred?
This raises a difficult question: Why would a religious state use Quranic recitation, the call to prayer or religious lamentation within a coercive prison environment?
Is the purpose to demonstrate ideological authority? Do authorities assume that certain political or religious prisoners will dislike these sounds? Or might repeatedly associating sacred sounds with interrogation, fear and violence eventually change the prisoner’s relationship with them, so that hearing the same sounds after release could reactivate memories of imprisonment?
I put these questions to Reza Kazemzadeh, a Brussels-based psychologist who has written extensively about political violence, torture and its victims in Iran. Kazemzadeh begins with an important distinction: we must separate function, psychological consequence and deliberate intention.
Without access to internal instructions or direct testimony from those who designed these practices, he argues, we cannot state with certainty that authorities deliberately intended Quranic recitation or the call to prayer to create a lifelong conditioned fear response.
We can, however, examine what such practices do.
First, Kazemzadeh argues that these sounds may represent the continuous presence and ideological authority of the state throughout the prison environment. Authorities do not merely control prisoners’ bodies and behaviour. They can also control time, sensory space and potentially prisoners’ relationships with religious symbols.
The prisoner cannot turn the sound off, leave the room or choose when to listen. In this sense, the significant factor is not only the religious content of the sound but its imposition and the prisoner’s loss of control over listening.
Second, Kazemzadeh suggests that this practice can be considered in relation to policies of ideological transformation and what has been called tavvab-sazi — the attempt to produce the “repentant” prisoner.
During certain periods of the Islamic Republic’s prison system, he argues, torture was not necessarily directed only towards obtaining information. It could also be connected to attempts to transform the prisoner’s individual and social identity and replace it with one compatible with the state’s ideological expectations.
Forcing a non-religious prisoner or a religious dissident to pray or participate in religious practices provides one example. Religion is thereby displaced from the realm of voluntary belief or spiritual experience and incorporated into a structure of coercion, obedience and ideological transformation.
Third, sound can organize prison time and extend the presence of authority even when no interrogator or guard is physically inside the cell. The loudspeaker can become an acoustic extension of institutional power.
Crying and bullets
Not all coercive sounds are deliberately broadcast.
Prisoners inhabit an imposed soundscape created by the prison itself: the crying of other detainees, screams during interrogation, the sound of flogging, gunshots associated with executions, metal doors opening, keys striking iron surfaces, footsteps approaching a cell.
These sounds may communicate what the prisoner cannot see.
Reza Moini recalled the role of sudden noises inside the cells. One of the most disturbing sounds occurred when prisoners were awakened, particularly in the morning. A guard would strike the iron door with a key or another hard object.
According to Moini, the sudden metallic sound produced a state of shock. The prisoner’s body reacted before the mind had even understood what was happening. Control was therefore exercised not only through commands and direct physical violence. The rhythms of waking, waiting, movement and fear could also be organised through sound.
Kazemzadeh’s psychological analysis provides another way of understanding this process. In his work on the psychological consequences of political violence and white torture, he describes the importance of connections formed between language and the body: an interrogator’s words, threats or ideological language become associated with bodily pain and fear.
The same analysis can be extended to sound. Under such conditions, sound is no longer merely an auditory stimulus. It can become a carrier of threat, humiliation, anticipation and helplessness.
Kazemzadeh also emphasised another pattern: The continuation of the prison within the person after release.
The victim may physically have left prison, but the effects of torture, imposed silence and the unspoken experiences of detention can contribute to what might be understood as an “inner prison.”
The sudden reactivation of sounds associated with detention can be one manifestation of that continuation.
Forced to hear, forced to remain silent
If excessive sound represents one form of acoustic control, silence can represent another.
For Sedigheh Moradi, a political prisoner, prolonged silence in solitary confinement created a profound sense of isolation. In “White Torture,” she describes the silence of the cell as “devastating.”
At times, it seemed to her as though nothing existed outside the cell. As a result, ordinary sounds acquired extraordinary importance. A motorbike. A fruit seller. An alarm clock. Other prisoners singing. These sounds became evidence that life was still continuing somewhere beyond the walls.
At one point, Moradi even spoke aloud simply to hear her own voice, experiencing it almost as though she were hearing another person.
Moini describes a different and particularly disturbing combination of enforced silence and forced listening. Prisoners waiting in a corridor for interrogation were ordered to sit silently. An interrogator might eventually approach and whisper into the prisoner’s ear that it was time to move to the interrogation room. While waiting, however, prisoners could hear others being tortured nearby, including the sounds of blows directed at the soles of their feet.
According to Moini, cloth was sometimes placed in a tortured prisoner’s mouth to suppress their cries.
The arrangement created an extraordinary acoustic asymmetry: one prisoner was being silenced while another was being forced to listen.
The waiting prisoner could not speak, intervene or escape. Yet the sounds provided enough information to imagine what was happening beyond the wall — and perhaps what was about to happen to them.
Here, earwitnessing itself becomes part of the coercive environment.
Sounds of resistance
Yet prison sound does not belong entirely to the prison authorities. Prisoners also create sound.
If the authorities attempt to control the soundscape through loudspeakers, commands, imposed silence and the sounds of punishment, prisoners can attempt to reclaim small parts of that acoustic territory.
This is where sonic agency becomes important. For prisoners deprived of physical freedom and ordinary forms of communication, the voice may be one of the few resources still available to them. Singing, whispering, praying, calling through walls or responding to another prisoner’s song can transform sound from an instrument of domination into a means of presence and solidarity.
Sound can also become a form of collective political protest. During a visit by Iranian judicial officials to Evin’s women’s ward on December 27, 2023, women political prisoners reportedly chanted slogans including “Woman, Life, Freedom,” “Death to the Dictator” and “Death to the Islamic Republic.”
Several prisoners have also managed to send audio messages beyond the prison walls. Among them is Fatemeh Sepehri, an imprisoned Muslim woman, political activist and former Quran teacher, who has used such recordings to openly challenge the authorities and denounce the policies of the Islamic Republic.
Sounds of solidarity
Christian convert Mojtaba Hosseini remembered hearing someone praying in the neighbouring cell and, after listening more closely, realizing that it was a member of his own house church. Hearing his voice brought Hosseini considerable encouragement, even as he felt worried and distressed that the man had also been imprisoned.
Vahid Hakani, another Christian prisoner, recalled hearing Fariba (a jailed Christian woman from house church) cough from what he believed was the women’s corridor at the end of his own hall. The sound caused him deep distress. To encourage her, he would call out a short phrase: “Be well.”
He hoped she would hear him and know that he was praying for her.
After her release, Fariba told him that she had deliberately coughed so that those held nearby would hear her voice. Through a cough and a shouted phrase, the prisoners created a fragile acoustic link across the prison’s segregated spaces: a way of saying, “I am here,” and “You are not alone.”
A related acoustic possibility appears in the testimony of Mahvash Shahriari, a member of Iran’s Bahá’í community and a co-founder of the Bahá’í Institute for Higher Education, which was established in response to the exclusion of Bahá’í students and educators from Iranian universities.
In her interview with Narges Mohammadi in prison, Shahriari recalled how sound once exposed her to the suffering of another prisoner. From a neighboring cell, she heard “moaning and screaming.” A woman was crying, cursing and asking for a painkiller or a cigarette.
But Shahriari did not remain only an earwitness. She answered. She spoke to the woman and attempted to calm her. The episode captures the double character of prison sound: the woman’s cries transmitted suffering through the walls, but Shahriari’s own voice transformed the same acoustic space into a means of human contact.
The wall remained physically intact. Acoustically, however, the isolation had been breached.
Moini recalls another form of collective sonic solidarity. At night, prisoners would sometimes sing Morgh-e Sahar, a song deeply embedded in Iran’s political and cultural history. According to Moini, the song circulated across generations of prisoners, carrying a political memory that predated any individual cell or period of detention.
Moradi similarly describes hearing other prisoners sing and drawing strength from their voices. In the isolation of imprisonment, such voices could become evidence not only that other people existed nearby, but that the prisoner remained connected to a human community beyond the cell. Human voices could therefore counter one of solitary confinement’s most destructive messages: “You are alone.”
The sound of life
Resistance did not always require another prisoner.
For Shahriari, one of the most memorable sounds of imprisonment came from outside the human world.In a dark and unpleasant cell, she heard a bird singing at dawn. She remembers enjoying the sound because, “It was a sign of life for me.”
In ordinary circumstances, birdsong might pass unnoticed.
Inside a deprived sensory environment, however, it could become evidence of an entire world beyond the prison: Morning, nature, movement, freedom and life itself. The prison authorities had not produced the sound. They had not chosen its meaning. And perhaps that is precisely why it mattered.
Acoustic triggers: When prison returns through sound
For some former prisoners, leaving prison does not necessarily mean leaving its sounds behind. An ordinary noise encountered years later may suddenly reactivate the acoustic memory of detention.
Pastor Victor Bet-Tamraz, who spent 65 days in solitary confinement in Ward 209 of Tehran’s Evin Prison, described how one particular sound followed him home after his release: the sound of a doorbell.
The bell at his home had been broken, and when it was repaired, its sound was almost identical to the bell he had heard in Ward 209. Each time it rang, he became restless. Even years later, he says, hearing it still disturbs him.
The reason was what the bell had come to signify. In the middle of the night in Ward 209, he would hear it ring and then hear officers enter a neighboring cell and severely beat the prisoner inside. He remembers hearing officers shouting at one another to hit the prisoner in the head. Later, he heard them discussing what to do after the prisoner had lost consciousness.
Alireza Aghajari, a Christian convert, remembered the distinctive sound of the chief interrogator’s Samand car, whose faulty fan made it immediately recognizable. Whenever Aghajari heard the car approaching the detention center, he knew that the interrogator was coming.
The association persisted long after his release. For years, he says, hearing another car with a faulty fan frightened him, making him feel as though he might at any moment be taken back for interrogation. An ordinary mechanical noise had become an acoustic warning signal — and one that continued to carry the fear of interrogation long after imprisonment had ended. These experiences can be understood as acoustic triggers, or more broadly as forms of auditory memory and conditioning.
The importance of these sounds lies precisely in their ordinariness. A bell is not inherently terrifying. Neither is a car fan. But imprisonment can alter the meaning of a sound by repeatedly connecting it with fear, uncertainty or violence.
The prison is therefore capable of surviving acoustically beyond its walls. A person may leave the cell, return home and resume everyday life, while particular sounds retain the power to reopen an auditory passage back into detention.
Silence as resistance
Sonic agency, however, should not be understood only as the production of sound.
Prisoners can also resist through not sounding.
A prisoner who refuses to answer an interrogator, refuses to provide information about another person, or withholds the verbal performance of repentance demanded by authorities may use silence deliberately.
This distinction is important because prison authorities themselves also impose silence.
But resistance did not always require making a sound to answer an interrogator or declining to repeat the words demanded by authorities.
Thousands of leftist political prisoners in 1988 who did not express their repentance were executed. Besides political activists, several Baháʼís or Christian leaders, like pastor Hossein Soodmand, who did not deny his faith, faced the death penalty, too.
In Iran’s prisons, the struggle over the soundscape is between a state that uses loudspeakers, commands, imposed silence, keys, doors, threats and sounds that mask violence to instill fear — and prisoners who reclaim fragments of that acoustic world through prayer, song, chanting, coughs, replies across walls, collective memory and, at times, the deliberate refusal to speak.
Fred Petrossian is a European-based Iranian journalist, blogger and researcher.