Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Hamid Dabashi Auth. Iran The Rebirth of A Nation
Hamid Dabashi Auth. Iran The Rebirth of A Nation
Hamid Dabashi Auth. Iran The Rebirth of A Nation
Iran
The Rebirth of a Nation
HamidDabashi
Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies,
Institute for Comparative Literature and Society
Columbia University
New York, USA
I proposed the idea of this book to my good friend and Palgrave publisher
Farideh Koohi-Kamali over a delightful lunch in New York early in the
Spring 2016. I am grateful for her enduring friendship and visionary
leadership of a major publishing adventure with far-reaching consequences
for state-of-the-art scholarship.
I began writing this book in my home in NewYork, then during my
multiple trips to Europe and then finally finished it while tucked away
during a sabbatical leave from Columbia in an apartment overlooking the
Persian Gulf from its southern shores in Doha, Qatar. I would look at the
GPS on my iPhone and zoom out from my current location to see my
hometown Ahvaz, and then Shiraz, Isfahan, Tehran, and Tabriz popping
up. It was and it remains an uncanny feeling. I was there and not there. I
am neither in exile nor in diaspora, concepts for which I have no use. I live
wherever I am and I write about things I love and deeply care.
Like everything else I have written, this is the product of a peripa-
tetic thinker, a stateless person completely and confidently at home in the
world. From Mexico to Argentina, then up North toward Canada, East
toward Europe and then the Arab world, into India, Japan, and South
Korea: These are the places I have felt most at home. Everywhere I go Iran
goes with me. Do you ever go back to Iran? someone recently asked me
on my Facebook. No, I responded, Iran always comes back to me.
From this vantage point I have neither a privileged nor a disadvantaged
position: Just one position and point of view, replete with its blindness
and insights, precisely like any other book if written from my hometown
Ahvaz or from Shiraz, Isfahan, Tehran, Tabriz, or Mashhad. A primary
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
function of this fact has been an attempt to stop fetishizing the location
of the culture of writing, and recognize that you can write worldly books
never leaving Ahvaz or write punishingly nativist books from NewYork
and Paris.
I am grateful to all my friends, colleagues, comrades in four corners
of the world who have enabled me to write this way, beginning with my
colleagues at my home institution at Columbia University to any other
institution of higher learning in Latin America, North America, Europe,
Asia, or the Arab world that have over these years hosted me so kindly and
generously.
I wish to single out Timothy Mitchell and Sheldon Pollock, successive
chairs of my department at Columbia, for facilitating my leave of absence
to finish this book. I wish to thank Azmi Bishara, Yasir Suleiman, Rashid El
Enany, Abderrahim Benhadda, and Elia Zureik for their kind and gracious
hospitality while I was visiting the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies
during my sabbatical leave from Columbia.
While at Doha Institute I had the rare privilege of meeting and getting
to know many brilliant Arab scholars and academics that warmly embraced
me in the heart of their hospitality. I wish to mention in particular my dear-
est friends and colleagues in the Comparative Literature program: Ayman El
Desouky, Eid Mohamed, Atef Botros, and Nijmah Hajjarfor the sheer plea-
sure of their magnificent company while I was in Doha. I also wish to mention
my other dear friends and colleagues at the Institute: Dana Olwan, Imed Ben
Labidi, Ismail Nashaf, Suhad Nashaf, Mohamed Mesbahi, and Raja Bahlul
for their gracious company. I wish to thank the staff of the Doha Institute
for their hospitality: Nadine Ataya, Youssef Ghadban, Mohammad Almasri,
Jad Kawtharani, Malik Habayeb, Inaam Charaf, Tania Hashem, and Dena
Qaddumi. They all came together to make me feel at home not just in Doha
but by virtue of their own national origin in fact at home from one end of the
Arab world to another.
I wish to thank my Aljazeera friends and editors Tanya Goudsouzian,
Cagri Ozdemir, Azadeh Najafi, and their beautiful families for their con-
tinued friendship. Both Tanya and Azadeh were exceptionally kind and
generous in their hospitalities, offering me an Armenian and Iranian home,
respectively. I wish to thank Elia Suleiman and Hany Abu-Assad, dearest
friends and towering Palestinian filmmakers, who took me to the heart of
the Doha Film Institute while in Doha to meet the exceptionally gifted
critical thinkers and artistic directors who are running that fine institution.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
xi
xii CONTENTS
Index 335
LIST OF FIGURES
xiii
Introduction: TheRebirth ofaNation
phase in the history of nations, peoples, regions, cultures, and the fragile
earth do we dwell? Are we all on a Christian calendar, a Muslim, a Jewish,
Hindu, agnostic, atheisthow do we count our days? On a global scale,
where would we locate ourselves, morally, temporally, spatially? The thing
Europeans call modernity has failed, even and through its postmodern
renditions. For the rest of the world, colonial modernity brought nothing
spectacular either. Enlightenment ended up in Auschwitz and sent leading
German Jewish philosophers (Adorno and Horkheimer) to California to
ponder the plight of our humanity, if they were not more determined
in their terrified recognitions and committed suicide (Walter Benjamin)
before they crossed one European border to another. Not just European
modernity and Enlightenment but fake traditions that fanatical (Muslim
or Hindu, etc.) metaphysicians had fabricated exposed themselves for
being the banality that they were. So no tradition, no modernity, no
Enlightenmentwith any enduring legacy to protect and safeguard the
most basic tenets of our humanity. Now what? Not just socialist promises
of paradise, but the capitalist hell, and the Islamist lunacy it has engendered
is now murdering and causing mayhem in the heart of Muslim lands. Now
what? Where in the world are we, and what time of our history is it exactly?
Europeans have asked these sorts of questions after many critical points
in their history, after their fin de sicle, between what they call their two
World Wars, after the Jewish Holocaust, and after the collapse of the
Berlin Wall.1 But what about the world at largedo we too think and
reflect upon the eras and epochs that we have lived through? Take the
occasions of Arab revolutions of 2011, or before it the Green Movement
in Iran in 2009, or after it the Occupy Wall Street Movement in the USA,
concomitant with the Gezi Park uprising of 2013, the Indignado revolt,
the student uprising in Quebec, and the labor unrest from Greece to Spain
that resulted in major uprisings against the austerity measures imposed
by the European Union (EU). No part of the world is exempt from such
indignant uprisings. Just before the World Cup 2014in Brazil, there were
massive revolts in reaction to it. When the Israelis invaded and destroyed
Gaza there was global uproar against Zionist warmongering resulting in
a major turn to the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement.
The world at large is also poised to ask the question: where in the world
are we, what time of history is ithave we not run out of posts to mark
our predicament: postmodern, postcolonial, poststructuralist, and so on.
We are not too late, or too early, to ask these seminal questions. Iranians
were asking, Where is my Vote? just a few years ago. Arabs were demanding
INTRODUCTION: THEREBIRTH OFANATION 3
lose sight of the fact that, human Dasein does not have its real Being in
determinable presence-at-hand, but rather in the motility of the care with
which it is concerned about its own future and its own Being.4 If we were
now to look at such questions with the curious eyes of anthropologists and
wonder: What sort of ancient questions can we now ask anew? Do we
humans around the world need to be concerned with and wonder about
our motility of the care too? Does our future require any such, perhaps
equally fundamental questions? What is most striking in Gadamers
recollections is this: It is finite, historical Dasein that is in the real
sense. Then the ready-to-hand has its place within Daseins projection of
a world, and only subsequently does the merely present-at-hand receives
its place.5 Does the Dasein of the world at large too require a projection
of its own worldliness, worldliness beyond its provincial Heideggarian
articulation, perhaps yes, no, maybebut precisely in what terms?
THEORIZING THEHISTORICAL
In this book, I wish to propose that what countries like Iran need is consis-
tent theorization into the wider and deeper regional and historical param-
eters of their origin and destination, far beyond their persistent nativist
nationalism that from the early nineteenth century forwardthrough two
monarchies and now an Islamic Republichas laid fast rhetorical hold
over the self-consciousness of the nation. That consciousness is false, to
put it bluntly, a product of dominant hegemonies of power and politics
once monarchic not mullarchic. Academic scholars and public intellectuals
alike, old-fashioned Orientalists, area studies experts, think tank employ-
ees, and vast encyclopedic projects dedicated in Persian and English to a
grand narrative of Persia, have all come together fashioning a jaundiced,
rather banal, reading of the nation oscillating bewilderedly between its
imperial past and its postcolonial possibilities, categorically cut off from
its living organism as a nation, long before it was a state. Much to the
chagrin of nativist Iranian jingoists, who swing between a pathological iso-
lationism and a phony pride in a fictive past, the frontier fiction of Iran
must be positively disenchanted, its postcolonial borders flung open for a
much richer, much more enabling, reading of the nation for it to reveal
and expose its regional and global (and thereupon national) significance.
The theoretical poverty afflicting both the nativist reading of the nation
and, even worse, its area specialists have come together to pile up tomes
upon tomes of detailed historiography, or else strategic philandering to
the benefit of the think tank sponsors, having left the nation bereft of
INTRODUCTION: THEREBIRTH OFANATION 5
any meaningful and enabling reading. The road ahead is both wide open
and yet invisible from these blinded alleys. This book, and the body of
scholarship I have produced before to prepare for it, points beyond such
dead ends and toward those open highways.
Let us assume, can we, that our poets are like their philosophers. Let
us ask our poets what the world at large has been forced to learn from
European philosophersfor better or worse. Let us approximate their
philosophers and our poets. It would be a happy marriage. One such poet,
Forough Farrokhzad, has a poem, now legendary in its significance: It is
called Tavallodi Digar/Another Birth, somewhere in which she says:
Imagine the narrated history of Iran that dry line of time, and the
implosion of poets like Farrokhzad and their poetry that impregnating
volume, enabling that line to mean more than it looks, signify beyond
its dried borderlines. Now what exactly is the nature of that volume that
this poetic implosion has enabled? It is made of a self-conscious image
(tasviri agah), returning from a feast in a mirror. Without this image
and the imaginal feast from which it has just returned, the straight line
of positivist historiography means very little more than it does to the
employees of a warmongering think tank in Washington DC, or London
or Paris. Theorizing Iranian history means to be conscious of such poetic
implosions, aware of the manner in which it informs, enables, and enriches
the line of history people ordinarily read and habitually nod their head
after reading. We have had a false bifurcation between a Literary History
of Persia, as say E.G.Browne would say, and a political history of Iran as
much of the postcolonial historiography has rendered it. The task at hand
is to fuse these two histories, go upstream from their forced bifurcation,
and imagine the moment when the two were not separated artificially,
violently, and forcefully, by the force of one disciplinary formation of
colonial modernity or another.
6 H. DABASHI
pre-Civil War racial segregation, nor indeed in the post-Civil War attempt
at overcoming of that racist heritage, but in fact in the enduring trauma of
coming to terms with that racism and its bloody consequences. The USA
was born on the enduring fact of subjugation, slavery, and the racialized
codification of power that has ever since sustained its ethos of conquest.
Griffiths The Birth of a Nation summons the making of a national
traumathe trauma of racism and racial segregation at the heart of the
US historical experience. For Griffith, the trauma of racism and racial
segregation coming to a bloody end is one particular way of coming to
terms with a colonial experience, whereby African slavery was definitive to
a national history and the bloody overcoming of it becomes the bloody
birth of a nation. In that paradoxical sense, The Birth of a Nation is a
postcolonial narrative of a fragmented society emerging from its own
colonial and colonizing past, as it becomes an empire.
were thus born out of national traumas, and people made into a nation by
virtue of their colonial encounters and postcolonial struggles. Anticolonial
nationalism is the birth channel of nations and nation-states. In Iran, like
much of the rest of the colonial world, a succession of colonial encounters
has been its birth certificate as a nation-state. Formation of the nation is
the fateful encounter between the active memories of an imperial past and
the unfolding drama of a postcolonial future. From the Russian impe-
rial conquest of northern Qajar territories early in the nineteenth cen-
tury, to the simultaneous French and British colonial interests in Iran,
which continued apace into the preparatory stages of the Tobacco Revolt
and Constitutional revolution (19061911), well into the British insti-
gated coup dtat of Reza Shah (1926) and finally the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) coup of 1953, are the hallmarks of this passage of the nation
into traumatic self-consciousness.
It is in the aftermath of the 1953 coup that its trauma is retroactively cast
backward to define and characterize the history of Iranian encounter with
colonial modernity. What led to the coup of 1953 was the nationalization
of Iranian oil industry in the late 1940s and early 1950s during the height
of the Cold War, The military coup of Reza Shah in the late 1920s and
his dictatorial modernization in the 1930s. The Constitutional revolution
of 19061911, the court-based modernization of the late 1900, the Babi
Movement of the mid-nineteenth century and the Perso-Russian wars of the
early nineteenth century were now all strung together into a chronicle of
colonial encounters. From this side after the coup of 1953, the June 1963
uprising led by Ayatollah Khomeini, the Siahkal uprising of 1970, and the rev-
olutionary mobilization of 19771979, all unfolded toward a liberatory nar-
rative. From the success of the violently Islamized revolution of 1979 to the
June 2009 presidential election, the three decades of crisis management by
the Islamic Republic, until its implosion, brought this drama to a crescendo.
The accelerated implosion of the Islamic Republic in the aftermath of
the contested June 2009 presidential election soon assumed the iconic
epithet of the Green Movementa massive social uprising that had
no name, only a color, a random color, where even its leading advocates
doubted that it actually exists, compared with the leading ideologues of
the Islamic revolution who were dead sure about everything. But the
Green Movement had declared itself, however dialectically, amorphously,
by its being denied, by being called a Fetneh/Sedition by its state-sponsor
detractors, and through its works of art, that had remained decidedly
open-ended and inconclusive.
INTRODUCTION: THEREBIRTH OFANATION 9
first Pahlavi abdicated after the allied occupation of Iran during World War
II (19391944), the second returned after a CIA-sponsored coup (1953),
and the Islamic Republic took over the Pahlavi and declared itself by the
summary execution of the Pahlavi officials (1979), the militant takeover of
the US embassy (19791981), and the bloody eight-year war it sustained
with Iraq (19801988).
If that were the case, then what does freedompolitical or other-
wisemean on a national domain? Is freedom really defined and delimited
by political oppression? When political oppression is lifted (suppose it was)
are we not back to square one, without having cultivated any democratic
intuition that defines, sustains, and nourishes freedom? What happens
when habits of democratic intuition are not formed at such a potent politi-
cal level that the ruling state acknowledges it, or what do we do the day
after our political emancipation is granted or denied by the ruling state?
If indeed on the remnant domains of former empires like the Mughals,
the Safavids/the Qajars, or the Ottomans, postcolonial nations are born
poetically (narratively, aesthetically, literary) before any state apparatus lays
any claim on them, then we might consider art in general the site where
the unimagined is imagined and the unthought is intuited. Here is the
conceptual core of how I develop the notion of the aesthetic intuition of
transcendence as the poetic manner through which we overcome (have
overcome) the postcolonial reason. The open-ended aesthetics of the
work of art is where our intuition of transcendence discovers, declares, and
announces itself. Open-ended (aperta) is Umberto Ecos hermeneutic
twist on a text, as an opera aperta, which he then seeks to control via his
triangulated conception of intentions (of the author, the reader, and the
text). I combine Ecos hermeneutics with Gianni Vattimos notion of il
pensiero debole/weak thought as the modus operandi of the work of art.
From here, I propose aesthetic in the domain of its sovereignty, and not
merely autonomy, to shift the operation of the political into an underlying
poetic of resistance and final triumph.8 The work of art, not just in the
sense of its mechanical reproduction (that Walter Benjamin anticipated) or
electronic metastasis (which he could not), leaves a residue, some debris,
a trace, which I wish to propose as the site of an aesthetic intuition of
transcendence where the logic of the postcolonial reason finally exposes its
vacuity and self-implodes.
Benjamin did anticipate this overcoming of the postcolonial reason,
though as a prototypically European thinker (even as a Marxist), he never
went anywhere near the condition of coloniality. He did so inadvertently
12 H. DABASHI
when toward the end of his short and tragic life, he turned to the active
theorization of fragments and debris as the allegorical site of messianic
salvation. But I reach that site slightly differently. Let us trace the body
libido (as I did in my Corpus Anarchicum) as it transforms into body
social, and the social into the mythic, reaching for a shamanic moment
when the mythic subconscious of the decay announces itself, taking the
mass grave of the Khavaran cemetery, where the bodies of successive mass
execution of political prisoners in the dungeons of the Islamic Republic
are buried, as an event that does not allow for the evident decay to perish
into oblivion. Khavaran becomes the site of an anamnesis, remembering
the forcefully forgotten by looking at the debris, the trace, the fragmented
and disallowed memories, and therefore the dust. There is a trace of
significant relic from the dust around Khavaran and the staging of art as
public ritual, such as most pronouncedly in Shirin Neshats oeuvre as a
mobile mausoleum, as a shrine, a haram/sanctuary, full of iconic images:
a new, and a renewed iconography staged to be sold. We must go to
Shirin Neshat precisely because the global visual regime has successfully
appropriated her art, through her clever gallery salesmanship, selling it for
the visual debris of forgotten facts, for we must enter the battlefield right at
the heart of the visual regime, where, as Guy Debord prognoses it decades
earlier, the visual becomes the fetish of dead and deadening certainties.
We must go to the heart of the globalized capitalist society of spectacle
because that is where every pain is transformed into passing visual pleasure
of the highest bidder. Look at Shirin Neshat and her appropriation by
collectors, curators, journalistic art critics, or else by anthropologists. Art
is the transformation of trace into sign (Derrida), where the truth of the
visual allows for the reverse move: from the sign to the trace, the dust,
the debris, the factual site of Khavaran in the deadly vicinities of Tehran as
upstream from Barbara Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea, NewYork.
Capital as the validation of Europeanized modernity has from its very
inception been globalized, marking the site of any (and all) contempo-
rary art as the locus classicus of sellable debris, while reproductive hetero-
normativity remains the tacit globalization of the MommyBabyDaddy
triumvirate (Christianity secularized at the service of capitalism) declared
long before the capital went visually global. That hetero was and remains
the other of auto, not homo. Nowadays we can have hetero-, auto-, or
homo-normative reproductively, and the promiscuous logic of capital-
ism will buy and sell them all. The more urgent question is, What about
the massive systematicity of the present, of the now, of the everlasting
INTRODUCTION: THEREBIRTH OFANATION 13
A CRISIS OFLEGITIMACY
Let us now work our preliminary way toward the manner in which this
aesthetic intuition of transcendence manifests itself in various and multiple
social movements. Consider the most recent example of such movements.
In what sense do we consider it a movement? The late Muslim revolu-
tionary Mehdi Bazargan (19081995) is reported once to have said the
14 H. DABASHI
The prospect of a nuclear deal between Iran and the USA and its
European allies had renewed the significance of Iran on global platform.
Against all odds, the US President Barack Obama was single-mindedly
pursuing a diplomacy of rapprochement with Iran that could very well be
his lasting legacy (on par with President Nixons China initiative or the
SALT Treaty) and perhaps alter the geopolitics of the region for generations
to come. The Saudi and Israeli governments had come out with their
longstanding collaborations against the Iranian influence in the region,
thus leaving the significance of the Palestinian cause and the ArabIsraeli
conflict behind. The rising significance of Iran in the region had not been
an overnight success for them or concern for others. It had been achieved
via shrewd politics under duress over the course of the ruling regimes
entire history since the success of the Iranian revolution in 19771979 and
the Islamists outmaneuvering all their rivals. That Iran was now spoken
of as an empire, however flawed that assumption might have been, was
the sign of its extraordinary regional power to alter the course of a global
configuration of politics in the region. Iran had now emerged as a regional
powerhouse, not as much because of its revolutionary promises but on the
ruins of the catastrophic policies of the USA and its European and regional
allies, of which it was now a singular beneficiary. But whatever be its deep-
rooted causes and history, the future of that regional power demonstrated
far-reaching global consequences. The state was thus paradoxically placed
to be the beneficiary of the regional politics not despite but in fact because
of its robust internal opposition, staged for the whole world to see during
the Green Movement.
The mere possibility of a USIran rapprochement had exposed a much
larger domain of confluence between the USA, EU, and Iranian interests,
much to the chagrin of Israel and many failing and vulnerable Arab states.
It is not an exaggeration to suggest that a USIran detente would be the
biggest geopolitical event affecting the future of the region at large for
generations to come. As a sign of this transformative relation of power, the
Arab regional rivalries with Iran had increasingly assumed ethnic nation-
alistic and sectarian SunniShii overtones. Meanwhile in art and industry,
hard sciences and demographic infrastructure Iran was poised as the most
powerful nation against the backdrop of a vastly crumbling postcolonial
map of the Middle Eastwith a sizable but not unruly population on
par with India or China, and yet not as small and vulnerable as almost all
its neighbors. From the Green Movement of 2009, to the Arab Spring of
2011, to the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), to regional
16 H. DABASHI
and above all state apparatuses that have laid illegitimate claim on them.
There is always a poetic surplus between that aesthetic reason and these
material realities. I wish to think through that aesthetic reason in this book
and make it dominant in a liberating narrative of the nation. We will never
understand the fate of these nations unless and until we decouple them
from the ruling regimes of power that lay illegitimate claim on them.
The successive coincidence of the Green Movement and the Arab
Spring finally brought this aesthetic reason and poetic surplus to a glob-
ally staged crescendo, whereby the internal dynamics of power and the
external geostrategic changes reached the point of no return and caused
a major epistemic breakthrough in notions of nation and its transnational
origins and destinations. In this book, I wish to argue that in the aftermath
of the Green Movement and the rise of the Arab Spring, however violently
seasoned by the rise of ISIS, we have successfully entered a new phase of
nation-reformation that categorically leaves the postcolonial period behind
and announces a postnational politics in which nations will have to rein-
vent themselves. A postnational reading of nations and their narrations,
predicated on the articulation of an aesthetic reason and poetic surplus
accumulated in the course of colonial modernity will therefore be among
the defining moments of my story of the rebirth of Iran as a nation.
turmoil, as are widespread social unrest in North and South America. Anti-
immigrant legislations from Canada to Australia all point to structural and
endemic crisis in the context of which it is hard to imagine anyone speaking
of a rebirth of just about anything, least of all any nation.
Against all these odds, in this book I wish to share the vision of an
entirely different world in and around Iran. What I see is the unfolding
of a long dure, otherwise hidden to naked eyes blinded by the rapidity
of day-to-day events. Those who are caught up in these nasty, fast, and
furious unfolding and fail to see the bigger picture are not that dissimilar
to climate change deniers who fail to see the sea level rising. So fully cog-
nizant of what it is that I miss seeing in the immediate vicinity of Iran, I
wish to share the clear contours of what I see in the larger-scale historical
strokes of the nation and its transnational setting. At the writing of this
introduction to my new book in late July 2015, the world is enraptured by
the prospect of a nuclear deal with Iran. Perhaps the most significant aspect
of the Iran nuclear deal is its symbolic dimensions. Lifting the threat of a
military confrontation, the gradual easing of the sanctions regime, both
pales in comparison to months and weeks of relentless pictures of Foreign
Minister Javad Zarif and the US Secretary of State John Kerry appear-
ing in the same frame of many photographs bringing their silvery hairs
together for a diplomatic powwow. Nothing brought the Islamic Republic
out of diplomatic isolation from the centerfold of global capitalism more
effectively than these pictures, the content of the actual agreement would
be almost entirely insignificant compared to the cathartic powers of these
pictures, which must have driven (as they did) the Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu and his US supporters up the walls. In these pic-
tures, Zarif became the simulacrum of Iranians, in its full semiotic force,
while ostensibly he represented the ruling Islamic Republic. He managed
to cross a threshold between the repressive state and the defiant nation,
one foot in the ruling regime and the other in the defiant will of its people.
It is that cleavage that we need to mark and explore.
The actual content of the deal pales in comparison to its symbolic
triumph, for Iran to negotiate on equal footing, Zarif being consis-
tently compared by his admirers to such now legendary statesmen and
Mohammad Mosaddegh or even Amir Kabir, however exaggerated the
comparison might be. The actual accord was also compared by many of its
Iranian critics to two infamous pacts of Golestan (1813) and Turkamanchai
(1828). So between the infamy of the deal for its detractors and the hyper-
bole of praise for Zarif the balance between the repressive state and the
20 H. DABASHI
onry and massive military expenditure are not their forte. They do soft
power: widespread diplomacy, major propaganda machinery, small-scale
asymmetrical warfare, proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah. But there are
chances that the cash flow will enhance the power of the private sector
and enable a moderately independent middle class to grow, despite official
corruption. Even a moderately enriched middle class will enable a more
robust civil society and more potent public sphere, globally wired beyond
any meaningful state control. This does not mean the collapse of the rul-
ing regime. It means a more robust confrontation between the nation and
the state, which is precisely the secret of their mutual strength. This fact
is far beyond the grasp of settler colonies like Israel, where there is no dis-
tinction between the state and the nation. In Israel the settler colony state
created the nation, whereas in Iran the nation has far longer roots than
the state that wishes but fails to rule it.
To understand how the tension between the nation and the state
strengthens them both, we must also widen the frame of reference
and look at the Iranian nuclear deal first and foremost in the context
of the Obama Doctrine, or what one might call imperialism by proxy.
What to his Republican opponents and neocon detractors appears as
appeasement and disengagement is actually a much smarter form of
imperialism that works like a ringmaster in a circus or perhaps a chess
player would be a better metaphor where the master player knows the
powers and weaknesses of all his players and by making one smart move
allows for the rest to adjust their positions and moves accordingly.
One result of this mode of proxy imperialism is the de-Zionification
of the American Empire, where the interests of Israel are covered by
Washington but do not predetermine its choices. One immediate result
of this Obama Doctrine is the fact that Israel loses its monopoly of
interpreting the Middle East, for Americans. The rise of pro-Iranian
lobbying groups like the National Iranian American Council (NIAC)
is a clear indication that American Zionists have finally found their
match among a younger generation of politically ambitious and savvy
Iranian-Americans. Against all this background, Arab nationalism
collapses into ethnic provincialism, while Iranian nation expands its
emotive horizons and triumphs over state sectarianism, in diametri-
cal opposition to militant Zionist nationalism (flaunted by a settler
colony). The active Iranian national consciousness thus gets layered
memories of its successes, and failures, as it celebrates and fortifies its
reconnecting to its transnational origins. So that the brand that calls
22 H. DABASHI
The ruling state on the other hand has no capacity for such interlocu-
tion, polyfocality, or contrapuntal dialectic. The Qajars ruled in the name
of an outdated Persian monarchy, the Pahlavis sought to modernize that
political culture, while the Islamic Republic has dragged it into its Shii
and Islamic directions, radically compromising the revolutionary dispo-
sition of Shiism as a religion of protest now that is in power. None of
these states, as a result, and as a rule, can ever (conceptually, categorically,
critically) embrace and represent that evolving totality and the unfolding
contrapuntal dialectic of the nation. The state is structuralfunctional, the
nation dialectical. The state is ideological, the nation utopian, though in
slightly different way than what Karl Manheim originally formulated the
difference. In his classical Ideology and Utopia (1936), he writes:
The concept of utopian thinking reflects the opposite discovery of the political
struggle, namely that certain oppressed groups are intellectually so strongly
interested in the destruction and transformation of a given condition of soci-
ety that they unwittingly see only those elements in the situation which tend to
negate it. Their thinking is incapable of correctly diagnosing an existing condi-
tion of society. They are not at all concerned with what really exists; rather in
their thinking they already seek to change the situation that exists.10
morphic nature of both. This shift between physical territory and physical
body is necessary in order to see the manner in which the formation of the
aesthetic reason overshadows and replaces the postcolonial reason, which
is categorically predicated on the arrest and denial of the erotics of the
body and playful frivolity of emancipatory politics, its Dionysian proclivity
(Chapter Six: Invisible Signs).
A major outcome of Chapter Six is to see the placing of the body of
an innocent citizen at the receiving end of a bulletfor which the ruling
regime refuses to accept responsibilityas the singular site of a renewed
body politics. My next move is again to exit the Iran scene and to navigate
a transnational public sphere upon which national realities are instantly
read and interpreted far faster and far beyond their false hermeneutic tam-
ing within a dominant official reading. In other words, the world at large
is today much more alert and the fictive frontiers of nation-states, I argue,
far more porous for any tyrannical regime to have an exclusive claim on
a dominant truth (Chapter Seven: A Transnational Public Sphere). I will
then bring all these steps together into a critical reading of an emerging
cosmopolitan worldliness upon which nations are now formed and need to
rearticulate themselves. That worldliness, from which a renewed pact with
history is enabled, has always existed in multivariate forms but it becomes
more evident in moments of large-scale social crisis, when the nation
finally uncovers its aesthetic intuition of transcendence (Chapter Eight:
Cosmopolitan Worldliness).
For this metaphysics of fragile realities to begin to form an enabling
force, in my next chapter I will turn to Walter Benjamin and other theo-
rists, poets, and philosophers of fragments and dust to navigate the man-
ner in which a liberating politics is rooted in a poetics of ruins. This marks
the moment when no metanarrative of salvation can any longer hold and
we must teach ourselves how to see a cohesive image in a broken mir-
ror, where the intuition of transcendence is no longer predicated on any
absolutist or absolute metaphor (Chapter Nine: Fragmented Signs). The
formation of this cohesive picture in a broken mirror is predicated on the
fact of an implosion of the West as an absolute and absolutist metaphor
that had enabled all its binaries and can no longer do so. I will now turn
my attention to a detailed consideration of how the West as the defin-
ing metaphor of capitalist (and colonial) modernity has finally imploded
(Chapter Ten: The End of the West).
At this point, I will resume my thinking through the active transmuta-
tion of (1) body politics and (2) the formation of the posthuman body
28 H. DABASHI
together as the site of contestation and examine the manner in which the
trauma of torture is encountered as evidence of this bodily transmutation
into fragments and ruins. On the site of that broken body, I propose the
reconstruction of an emancipatory politics (Chapter Eleven: Damnatio
Memoriae). In the final chapter, I will turn to a singularly emblematic
moment in a masterpiece of Iranian cinema, Bahram Beizai Bashu: The
Little Stranger (1989), when the rebirth of the nation is staged as the
second birth of a child to a mother in absence of her husband and thus
as a fatherless immaculate conception. This moment I consider the most
radical, the most liberating, instance of the rebirth of the nation, aestheti-
cally foretold in a sublime moment in Iranian cinema (Chapter Twelve:
Mythmaker, Mythmaker, Make me a Myth).
These successions of chapters coagulate around the central themes
that in the rebirth of postcolonial nations, their fictive frontiers become
more porous than ever and their inhibitive borders are effectively erased
toward a global recognition of a postnational public sphere, upon which
the posthuman bodies of their citizens become the site and simulacrum
of their body politics and therefore as unruly signs refuse to behave to the
whims of illegitimate state apparatuses, or else imperial warmongering.
All forms of statefrom deep state to garrison state to security stateare
therefore rendered suspect in terms of any categorical legitimacy, forced
to expose their brute violence as the sole source of power. The rise of ISIS
alongside Israel (two identical fake states with no borders) thus stages
this final demise of nation-state as an organizing principle and therefore
the postcolonial nations are liberated from the paradox of their colonial
modernity and postcolonial reason that had enabled and entrapped them
at one and the same time. The liberation of the nation from the fetters
of the state does not amount to the end of states. It announces a final
break, an irredeemable divorce between the two falsely coupled concepts.
As the specific case of Iran indicates, this fundamental and irreconcilable
decoupling can and will in fact strengthen them both as they continue
their fake fusion.
In my conclusion, I return to these theoretical foregrounding of my
central thesis in this book, and will argue that the critique of postcolonial
reason must begin with an understanding of the colonial modernity that
had paradoxically enabled the nation as a particular kind of public sphere.
My contention here is to argue that the aesthetic critique of postcolonial
reason (extending the arguments of three seminal thinkers on the subject,
Theodore Adorno, Jacque Derrida, and Christoph Menke) foregrounds
INTRODUCTION: THEREBIRTH OFANATION 29
its categorical subversion, and the consequence of this critique is the even-
tual formation of an aesthetic intuition of transcendence. The result is a
claim on an aesthetic sovereignty thatsustaining the critical constitution
of an aesthetic intuition of transcendenceis no longer entrapped within
a postcolonial reason or, a fortiori, colonial modernity. It is as if the sin-
gular task of art in the postcolonial condition was to generate and sustain
this aesthetic intuition to transcend the trap and trappings of both colonial
modernity and the postcolonial reason that had paradoxically enabled and
arrested the postcolonial nation. Upon the site of that aesthetic intuition
of transcendence, through which alternative visions of worldliness are
enabled, the continued currency of states such as the Islamic Republic or
all its oppositional alternatives have already exhausted themselves beyond
sheer violence or else banal demagoguery.
NOTES
1. For one such occasion of the rise of such questions, see Hans Georg
Gadamer, Heideggers Ways (New York: NewYork University Press,
1994).
2. Ibid: 96.
3. Ibid: 96.
4. Ibid: 97.
5. Ibid: 98.
6. Forough Farrokhzad, Tavallodi Digar/Another Birth in Forough
Farrokhzad, Tavallodi Digar/Another Birth (Tehran: Morvarid,
1343/1964). These and all other translations from the Persian origi-
nals are all mine. Citations are permitted only with reference to this
book.
7. For a comprehensive study, see Melvyn Stokes, D.W. Griffith's the
Birth of a Nation: A History of the Most Controversial Motion Picture
of All Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
8. I rely heavily on the magnificent work of Christoph Menke, The
Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999) for this articulation of the sov-
ereignty of art.
9. Karl Manheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to Sociology of
Knowledge. Translated from the German by Louis Wirth and Edward
Shills. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1936): 40.
10. Ibid: 40.
Chapter One: Persian Empire?
At the current volatile geopolitics of the region, the ruling regime in Iran
has survived against all oddsunder severe pressure, both internal and
external to its borders. The politics of crisis management is definitive to
this state. A postnational account of the nation, as I propose to do, does
not abandon the national frame of reference, or its entanglement with
the state that claims it, but embraces the nation within a larger trans-
national frame of reference that contrapuntally makes the national scene
more meaningful. In this chapter, I begin with a panoramic view of the
region at large, where the role of Iran has become consistently more dom-
inant, to the point that some observers in the Arab and the larger Muslim
world are speaking of a resurrection of the Persian Empire. This is a
false analogy, I will argue, and a red herring. There is only one flagellant
empire in our world, the US Empire, and it is not particularly a potent or
competent empire. Instead of fishing for flawed metaphors, we need to
reconfigure the geopolitics of the region, in which the ruling regime in
Iran has amassed considerable soft power, waging a successful asymmetri-
cal warfare to protect its domestic and regional interests. What we see as
a result is not an empire but a new geostrategic reality in which Iran
is dominantly mapped out not by virtue of any inherent hard power or a
particularly powerful political leadership but mostly by virtue of the follies
of the USA and its European and regional allies and their misbegotten
imperial vagaries. Beginning with the geopolitics of the region will enable
us to frame the Iranian national scene in a far better frame of reference.
But the news of an Iranian official calling for a Persian Empire with
Baghdad as its capital was too juicy to let go and soon spread like a bush-
fire among the nervous and confused pan-Arab nationalists rightly upset
about the Iranian meddling in many Arab countries, so upset that they did
not bother to check the original and see what the man had actually said.
So where did such panicked rubbernecking around and about the
phrase Persian Empire originate? The date of this speech by Ali Younessi
is 17 Esfand 1394 on Persian calendar, which is 7 March 2015. But the
neocon American and Israeli Zionist charge of this Persian empire busi-
ness predates it by many months, and even years, until it finally found
its way to the august pages of the NewYork Times by three apparatchik
operators employed at the notorious Zionist joint Washington Institute
for Near Eastern Policy (WINEP).5 In other words, the boorish and blas
charge of the ruling regime in Iran trying to revive the Persian Empire
did not have to wait for Younessis off-the-cuff remarks at a gaudy confer-
ence on Iranian identity, for the hasty and nervous Arab opinion-makers
seem to have taken it directly from Israeli and American Zionists, with
whom they now seem to share not just the English language but a fright-
ful Iranophobia.
last blow to that territorial claim of the Qajars to any empire. That impe-
rial phantasm has now been fused with postcolonial geopolitics of various
nations. Iran has had the exact opposite history of the USA as an empire.
While Iran was diminishing, the USA was expanding its proportions, ini-
tially continentally and then globally, and from there into the outer space
and now into the cyberspace. The frontier fiction has been crucial for the
USA.For Iran, it has gone from an amorphous history into an ahistori-
cal phantasm. What remains constant is the active memory of successive
empires sustaining the collective memory of a postcolonial nation consis-
tently expanding the domain of its national self-consciousness against the
claims of any ruling state: monarchical or mullarchical.
regional context that included Europe that had made them significant
both in the Bible and for the Greek and Roman antiquities. In the Biblical
and Classical ages and textsHebrew, Greek, and RomanPersia and
Persians were familiar foreigners, neither Hebrew, nor Greek nor Roman,
nor a fortiori Christian. But they were never complete strangers either,
and thus they could not be categorically othered. The encounter with
the Persians predates the encounter with both the Ottomans and the
Mughals, which mark the European imperial encounter with the region.
Arabs become known to the Christian Europeans as Muslims as early as
the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in 711 and the subsequent
Battle of Poitiers in 732. But Persians were known to Europeans much
earlier and even before the rise of Islam and Christianity and therefore
not as Muslims or Arabs. Europeans knew them from the Hebrew Bible
and Greek literary and philosophical sources. The Book of Esther in the
Bible, where King Ahasuerus/Xerxes has a key role, is usually dated to
the third or fourth century BCE, while Aeschylus The Persians was com-
posed and performed in 472 BCE, and Xenophons Cyropaedia circa
370 BC. At this time there are no Arabs, Turks, or others in the
Bible or Greek sources. Even at the moment when Christianity becomes
a European religion in the third century, it has to compete with a tower-
ing Iranian religion, namely Mithraism. Persians were therefore familiar
foreigners that neither the Hebrews nor indeed the Greco-Roman world
could completely own or completely disown. Persian empires were always
known entitiesfeared, envied, hated, admired, but never a strangers
or unknown. These same Persians and Persophilia becomes a peculiar
attraction to Europeans of later generation during the Renaissance and
Enlightenment modernity. There is not a single period from antiquity to
modernity in which Europeans have not known or referenced Persians and
invariably marked their Persophilia. This historic antiquity is quite crucial
for when European Empires begin to conquer the world and eventually
produce a transnational bourgeois public sphere their Persophilia will have
a global repercussion and thereafter a direct impact on the formation of
Iran as a postcolonial nation, and subsequently a nation-state.
Persia and Persian empires were of particular interest to Europeans
in their age of empiresand as it happens when they were about to
launch their far-reaching projects of Enlightenment democracy against
their dynastic heritage. With the publication of Montesquieus Persian
Letters (1721), the figure of the Persian as a familiar foreigner enters the
European age of Enlightenment modernity proper. In Persian Letters,
44 H. DABASHI
the two traveling Persians, Usbek and Rica, are foreigners who are famil-
iar with the changing Europe. So the proverbial question asked in this
book What does it mean to be Persian, is really how can one be a
European? Which is the central question of Montesquieus entire philo-
sophical project as one of the key architects of the Enlightenment moder-
nity. The prose of Persian Letters best captures this strange and foreign
familiarity with Europe, at once critical and yet intimateand both from
the point of view of two travelers who are at once agitating and observing
the Europe they see in a state of flux. Thus, the proverbial question of
what does it mean to be Persian is in fact the shadow of the key question
of modernity: What does it mean to be European? Persian Letters is an
active anthropology of the Parisian public space and public spherefrom
cafes to opera houses to newspapersin its formative period. The two
Persian travelers are the conduits of not just marking this formative period
of European bourgeois public sphere but through their letters in effect
carrying it home to their recipients.
By the time we get to William Jones (17461794), the major Indo-
Iranian philologist, his theories made those foreign Persian more famil-
iar by first giving himself a Persian nameJones Oksfordi/Jones from
Oxford, and then by capitalizing on a philological theory that makes
Persian language suddenly a European language. So these Persian-
speaking people in Iran or anywhere else suddenly woke up one day
and discovered that entirely unbeknownst to themselves they were
really speaking a European language. The philological theory of Indo-
European languages had of course nasty racial undertone that went on
to wreak havoc in Europe, but it still managed to create an elective affin-
ity among Europeans, Indians, and Persian-speaking world, including
Iranians. India did not have any Biblical or classical resonance as much
as Persia and Persians did in the Bible, for the Greeks and then for the
Romans and subsequently the Christians. So the Indo-European theory
of languages had far more traumatic consequences in Europe and Persia,
awaiting later Hindu fundamentalist Aryanism in India. Though these
theories may have had earlier versions in India, Indo-Persian heritage
is in effect developed by this European theory of racialized languages.
Precisely at a moment when Persian-speaking travelers like Mirza Saleh
Shirazi and Abu Taleb Makki traveled from Iran or India and wrote
their pioneering European travelogues, these dominant theories of
Indo-Iranian-European languages placed Persian language on a public
sphere upon which Europeans were busy both conquering and defining
the world.
PERSIAN EMPIRE? 45
violent twisting of the central trauma of the Shahnameh. But the defining
stories of the ShahnamehSohrab, Esfandiar, and Seyavashremain cat-
egorically anti-Oedipal, where fathers kill their own sons, and their grand-
sons turn around to revenge their murdered fathers. This defiant theme
of the Shahnameh in turn gives rise to the persistent trait of what on an
a number of occasions I have called a delayed defiance (as opposed
to the Freudian delayed obedience) in Perso-Islamic culture, which I
have traced in detail in my book on Shiism as a religion of perpetual
protest.9 Matthew Arnolds Sohrab and Rostam resonates with a num-
ber of leading Iranian literary criticssuch as Shahrokh Meskoub and
Mostafa Rahimiwho sustain the course of the preparatory stages of the
anti-Oedipal (later appropriated as Islamic) Revolution in Iran. The
violent transformation of a quintessentially anti-Oedipal revolution into
an Islamic revolution, now presided over by octogenarian patriarchs,
remains the central paradox at the heart of the rebirth of the nation.
Staging playfully the familiar foreignness of the Persian becomes the
uncanny sight of a soprano castrato (now done by a mezzosoprano or
countertenor) singing the mighty Xerxes in Handels Serse (1738). The
opera anticipates Nietzsches critique of Wagner, in Nietzsche contra
Wagner (1895), and his denouncing of Parsifal as triumph of asceticism
over sensuality, generations later. The fascination of Matisse and Gauguin
with Persian paintings extended that early operatic Persophilia into the
groundbreaking sights of European artistic revolutions of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. The mirror image of all this soon appeared on
the Iranian cultural scenes. From varied appearances of opera scene in
Iranian cinemaMehrjuis Ejareh-neshin-ha/Tenants (1986) to Bahman
Farmanaras Khak Ashena/Native (2008)we eventually come to
Kiarostami directing Mozarts Cos fan tutte (1790), along with his ver-
sion of Taziyeh staged at Avignon, where the familiar foreigner becomes
more integral to the European imaginary. Here and elsewhere the West
continues to seek to authenticate itself with their tabloid fascination with
the late Pahlavi Mohammad Reza Shah and his royal family until the spec-
tacle comes to a crushing closure with the fierce bearded face of Ayatollah
Khomeini, just before yet another fascination with Iranian cinema rekin-
dles it. The insignia of a new generation of Iranian immigrants to Los
Angeles occasioned the rise of Persian cats, Persian caviars, and Persian
carpets to rekindle the Khayyam and Hafezs memories in dauntingly
clich-ridden, vacuous, and miserable tableaus: a spectacle that reached
a nauseating low in the American reality television series Shahs of Sunset
50 H. DABASHI
(2012). From the sublime to the ridiculous, from Handels Serse to the
Shahs of Sunset, Persophilia degenerated into Iranophobia to bring the
organicity of a globalized public sphere to the challenge of a new genera-
tion of Iranians navigating their nationhood on uncharted territories.
The experience though is not entirely unprecedented. Shahs of Sunset
had its antecedent in James Moriers Adventures of Haji Baha of Isfahan
(1824). In the capable hands of Mirza Habib Isfahani this ghastly colo-
nial clich buffoonery was turned around into a cornerstone text of the
Constitutional Revolutionand that is where the younger generation of
Iranians can find a clue of what to do with the Los Angeles idiocy that
passes for entertainment at their expense. Mirza Habib Isfahanis habitat
for that feat of literary rendition was Istanbul, the remissive cosmopolitan
space between Europe and Iran, the space where European Persophilia
yielded to Constitutional Revolution of 19061911 and Moriers rac-
ist supremacist prose inadvertently produced the Persian revolutionary
prose of Mirza Habib Isfahani. As Haji Baba went to Europe to mock
Montesquieus Persian Letters in the age of British imperialism, Mirza
Habib Isfahanis prose went to Iran to lead a historic revolution. Here
we see how British colonialism had generated its own antithesis entirely
inadvertently so that in effect a British fictive character out of European
Persophilia had come back to lead a massive revolution in Iran, where
the encounter with the European colonial modernity finally brought the
Persian figure of the familiar foreigner home to Persia itself (now being
reborn as the postcolonial nation of Iran) and thus Iranians became self-
consciously and productively aware of their own paradoxical conscious-
ness, so that there was always an Other in their Self.
There is another lesson in the unanticipated consequences of a colo-
nial fiction. The fictive character in James Moriers Adventures of Haji
Baha of Isfahan becomes a real literary historian and as E.G. Browne
(18621926) goes back to Iran to offer Iranians an enduring gift. Browne
was the European figure of Persophilia incarnate closely familiar with that
foreigner. His travelogue to Iran is the complete reversal of Moriers lit-
erary racism. As a literary historian, Brownes monumental four-volume
Literary History of Persia (19021924) emerged as a key text in the
transnational canonization of Persian literary sources and the process of
postcolonial nation building. He was closely affiliated with such leading
Iranian literati as Mohammad Qazvini, Seyyed Hassan Taghizadeh, and
Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh, and such leading periodicals as Kaveh and
Iranshahr that were laying the foundations of the emerging nations lit-
PERSIAN EMPIRE? 51
erary public sphere. These pioneering literary giants became the active
conduits in the formation of the post-Constitutional Revolution literary
public sphere, defining the nature and disposition of generations of literary
scholarship to come. It was precisely upon the fertile ground of that liter-
ary public sphere that Iran as a postcolonial nation was firmly rooted.
In an attempt to take over that public sphere by royal decree, the
Pahlavi court philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr was instrumental in facili-
tating the French Islamicist Henry Corbins journey from his youthful
fixation with Martin Heidegger to Iran to translate (with remarkable
scholarly tenacity) his Heideggarian mysticism into Shii Gnosticism. But
this powerful movement, fully funded by the royal court, was success-
fully resisted by the Gramscian appeal to the far more potent intellectual
force of Jalal Al-e Ahmad, as it was by the Nietzschean streak of rebel-
lious Dionysian joy flowing in the robust veins of the rebellious poetry
of Ahmadi Shamlou and other poets. Al-e Ahmads close affinity with the
leading Iranian dramatist Gholam-Hossein Saedi and his magic realism
best represented this grassroots revolt against the sort of Aryan authen-
ticity that Seyyed Hossein Nasr and his Javidan Kherad/Sophia Perennis
business tried but failed to sell on the Iranian intellectual scene. As this
fateful battle between the ascetic mysticism of the Corbin Circle and the
defiant Dionysian will of revolutionary prose and poetry locked horns,
the charismatic populism of Ayatollah Khomeini mobilized an entrenched
bazaar-clerical network to assume the leadership of the revolution that
toppled the Pahlavi dynasty in February 1979. But that fateful battle to
claim the effervescent forces of the transnational public sphere as the site
of the new nation continues apace.
from the clash between the dying Ottoman Empire and the European
imperial encroachments in the region. These are two vastly different his-
torical facts. The culprit in all of this is the Israeli settler colony that is a gar-
rison state pure and simple, built on the broken back of Palestinians, who
are a real people, a real nation, made into a nation by a sustained history of
anticolonial struggles. Predicated on a distant, ancient, Biblical, and imag-
ined Hebrew past in Palestine, Israel imposes a settler colonial state on the
factual evidence of another nation. With no sustained history in Palestine,
except in the diasporic communitiesAshkenazi or SephardicIsrael is
the prototype of a colonially manufactured state forcefully populated by
successive Zionist migrations. Saudi Arabia meanwhile is a family oil busi-
ness, not a nation, like the Bushes in Texas. Unless and until these very
simple historical facts are put on the table the fate of nations and their
historic encounters with domestic and foreign powers that have sought to
dominate them will never be clearly read.
In the specific sense that I propose here, there are only four major
nations in the region: India, Iran, Turkey, and Egypt. India emerged out
of the fateful encounter between the Mughal Empire and the British and
Portuguese imperialism. Iran emerged out of similar encounters between
the Safavids/Qajars and the Russian, British, and French colonial dom-
inations, and Turkey and Egypt out of the crumbling remnants of the
Ottoman Empire and its collapse under the mightier forces of the European
empires. The rest of the current postcolonial states in the region are minor
or major commentaries on the colonial encounter. We need to be entirely
clear and conscious of this fact and do not muddy the water when read-
ing the current history of the region. Out of those colonial states some
people like the Kurds did not get a state, neither did the Palestinians, while
Israel was planted by the European colonial collusion to get rid of their
Jewish Problem, and have a colonial foothold in the region. Nations
like Palestine and the Kurds, dispersed as they are across many borders,
have a far more solid and credible claim on nationhood than manufac-
tured borders within Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, or UAE.Their common
struggles against European colonialism and domestic tyrannies have given
them a robust shared memory without the presence of any state to claim
it. Central to our understanding of the region will always remain Egypt,
Turkey, Iran, and India (which historically and culturally includes Pakistan
and Bangladesh). The historical frame of reference must always remain
the last vast and multinational three Muslim Empiresthe Mughals, the
Safavids, and the Ottomansbefore the fateful colonial encounter with
PERSIAN EMPIRE? 53
NOTES
1. See: Ralph Peters, The Iranian dream of a reborn Persian Empire
(New York Post, 1 February 2015). Available online here: http://nypost.
com/2015/02/01/the-iranian-dream-of-a-reborn-persian-empire/.
2. See: Iranian advisor clarifies Baghdad capital of Iranian empire remark
(Al Arabiya News, 13 March 2015). Available online here: http://eng-
lish.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2015/03/13/Iranian-
advisor-clarifies-Baghdad-capital-of-Iranian-empire-remark.html.
3. See: Rouhani adviser denies he called for Iran's return to empire (Al-
Monitor, 10 March 2015). Available online here: http://www.al-monitor.
com/pulse/originals/2015/03/iran-iraq-rouhani-advisor-empire.html#.
4. See this link for Younessis original statements in Persian: http://www.
isna.ir/fa/news/93121709862/%DB%8C%D9%88%D9%86%D8%
B3%DB%8C-%D9%86%D8%AA%D8%A7%D9%86%DB%8C%D8%A7%
D9%87%D9%88-%D8%AF%D8%B1-%D8%A7%D8%B8%D9%87%D8%
A7%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%AA%D8%B4-%D8%A8%D9%87-%D8%
B9%D8%B8%D9%85%D8%AA-%D9%86%D9%81%D9%88%D8%
B0-%D8%A7%DB%8C%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86.
54 H. DABASHI
Let me now move from the geopolitics of the region inward (thus the-
matically seeking to blur their porous borders) and look at the changing
dynamics of critical thinking and oppositional politics that have manifested
themselves in the making of a civil rights (the Green) movement that will
now need to be understood in terms entirely alien to the political imagina-
tion of the ruling regime and the dominant state apparatus. The rebirth of
the nation I propose here is predicated on a full consciousness of its distant
and more recent memories, in a manner that social movements rely on
but transcend their collective recollections. What was affectionately called
the Green Movement (after the campaign color of the most widely loved
and endorsed presidential candidate of the 2009 election, Mir Hossein
Mousavi) was the summation and sublation of all the previous revolution-
ary uprisings in Iran in the last 200 yearsthe rebirth of the nation and
national consciousness embodied and manifested. This fact was beyond the
comprehension of both the ruling regime that sought to suppress it and the
clich ridden opposition it had generated and rejected into exile so that
by opposing the Islamic Republic would in fact corroborate it. Between the
illegitimate ruling state and this discredited opposition (seeking support
from the US neocons, Israeli Zionists, and Saudi Arabia) ran a mighty river
of national consciousness that continued apace dismissing and denouncing
them both. It was a historic moment to behold how a healthy and robust
national consciousness systematically discredited and dismantled both the
ruling state and its treacherous expat opposition. Perhaps the most signifi-
cant aspect of the Green Movement was to discredit the Islamic Republic
that ruled with an iron fist but without legitimacy and to expose the fake
and faulty expat opposition that had no conception of the layered and
organic consciousness of a national liberation movement and sought the
support of warmongers from Washington, DC, to Tel Aviv to Riyadh, to
change the ruling regime in Iran and replace it. The Green Movement was
the interpretation of a dream, and this blinded tyrants and discredited war-
mongers alike had no way of seeing or reading it.
In mid-June 2009, as the promise of long and languorous summer
days was in the offing, the spectacular rise of a series of initially joyous and
beautiful but soon angry and bloodied uprisings in Iran caught the world,
yet again, by surprise. Millions of Iranians, sporting playful green ribbons
about their bodies, faces, and fingers took to streets and sang and danced
to a tune of their own making. The presence of young and old women
at the forefront of these rallies was particularly palpable and visibly over-
whelming in the operatic unfolding of a collective democratic will. After
weeks of presidential campaigns and robust televised debates among four
major candidates, Iranians went to voting stations on 12 June 2009 in
their masses of millions40 out of a total of 46 million, according to
official estimates, some 80% plus of the eligible voters in a country of 72
million people.
When shortly after the polls were closed, the incumbent president
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was officially declared the winner, a spontaneous
outburst of defiant demonstrators took to the streets taking the officials
to task and declaring their votes stolen and the election rigged. Days and
weeks of even more determined demonstrations and violent crackdowns
ensued. Foreign correspondents were expelled from the country. Scores of
demonstrators were cold-bloodedly killed, hundreds of public intellectu-
als were arrested, and thousands of demonstrators were kidnapped off the
streets by multiple security forces. The custodians of the Islamic Republic
and their military, security, and intelligence apparatus were determined, so
were the demonstrators, and their leadersthe four main oppositional fig-
ures, Mir Hossein Mousavi, his wife Zahra Rahnavard, another presidential
candidate Mahdi Karroubi, and the former president Mohammad Khatami
in particular. Joining them soon was the elder statesman and former presi-
dent Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani who in no uncertain terms declared
the Islamic Republic in a crisis of legitimacy. Senior Shii authorities like
Ayatollah Montazeri were also of the same opinion, as his prominent stu-
dent Mohsen Kadivar was dismantling the very juridical foundation of the
Islamic Republic. What was going onthe world wondered.
A CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 57
in Afghanistan both to fight the Soviet occupation and to resist the spread
of the Islamic revolution into Central Asia. The USA under the Reagan
administration and its European and regional allies had a major role in
arming, financing, and providing vital strategic support for both these
fronts facing the Islamic Republic.
Soon after the end of the IranIraq war and the withdrawal of the
Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1988 the boomerang effect came to
full swing: Saddam Hussein used the same weapons that the USA and its
allies had given him to attack Iran to invade Kuwait, as the Taliban com-
menced its brutal theocratic reign over Afghanistan and allowed for the
rise of al-Qaeda from the same cadre of militant Muslims who had come
to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. As the Taliban brutalized Afghanistan,
al-Qaeda emerged as a transnational militant Islamism that engaged in a
series of violent operations against the US targets. Whether al-Qaeda was
or was not directly responsible for the group of militant adventurists (led
by Muhammad Ata) that perpetrated the murderous acts of 9/11, it was
coterminous with the creation of a state of asymmetrical warfare that had
occasioned it in Afghanistan. With the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the rise of
al-Qaeda as a deterritorialized militant organization, and the commence-
ment of the US war on terror, the post-9/11 state of affairs brought
the age of ideological warfare to a climactic crescendo and a dissipated
finale. The publication of Francis Fukuyamas the End of History essay
in 1989 was the American take on this end of ideology, before Samuel
Huntington radically revived it in his Clash of Civilization thesis in
1992 and put it squarely at the service of a renewed pact with now a
monopolar American imperialism. While at the wake of the collapse of the
Soviet Union, Fukuyamas idea of the End of History anticipated and
complemented Huntingtons idea of a clash of civilization and both
became a prelude for the rise of a monopolar American imperialism in
even grander and more vacuous civilizational terms, in Iran, as a vanguard
of post-ideological world no longer at the mercy of imperial thinking the
world was about to witness something entirely different.
The Islamic Republic became the last manifestation of an ideological
uprising that was at least 200 years in the making. Benefiting from and
subsuming both anticolonial nationalism and Third World socialism, the
Islamic revolution in Iran ended a beleaguered monarchy, violently outma-
neuvered its rivals, established an Islamic Republic, and occasioned a seismic
change in the geopolitics of the region that culminated in the cataclysmic
events of 9/11. In the post-9/11 world, the Islamic ideology had already
60 H. DABASHI
performed, exhausted, and wasted its political potency at the same time that
all other grand narratives of emancipationnationalist or socialisthad also
lost their continued currency. While the brutal crackdown and execution of
the oppositional forces in the 1980s might be considered the last pitched
battle between militant Islamism and its principal ideological nemesis, the
presidential election of 1997, the student-led uprising of 1999, the parlia-
mentary election of 2000, and the presidential election of 2001 might be
offered as the principal signposts of a post-ideological generation whose
contentions with the Islamic Republic were no longer in grand ideological
terms but in fact within the confinements of the constitution of the Islamic
Republic, taking both its democratic and non-democratic institutions so
seriously in fact to overcome them both. The second term of Khatamis
presidency, however, coincided with the events of 9/11 and the eight cata-
strophic years of George W.Bushs presidency, which in turn had the cata-
lytic effect of helping the election of a populist demagogue like Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad to power. It was left for the immediate aftermath of George
W.Bushs presidency and the commencement of President Obamas (and
yet entirely independent of his yet to be unfolded policies and actions) the
Reform Movement in Iran resumed its course in full throttle with the presi-
dential election of June 2009.
The Islamic ideology cannibalized and consumed the non-Islamic
ideologies and itself came to an episteme cul-de-sac in part because its
internal ideological rivals (nationalism and socialism) had all been brutally
crushed, politically defeated, forced into exile, and thus the public space
was militantly occupied by a vastly juridicalized political discourse that
began to spin around its own tale. At the same time, the principal exter-
nalized interlocutor of Islamic ideology, the West, had imploded out of
its own epistemic exhaustion and thus along with the rest of the East
Iranians were freed to think and imagine themselves in terms beyond any
entrapped epistemic coloniality, which is exactly what the younger genera-
tion did in their visual and performing, literary and poetic, arts decades
before the events of June 2009 unfolded.
After more than 200 years of a compelling and enabling delusion of a
nation-state, the Green Movement of the summer of 2009 finally disman-
tled that fatal distraction, and with a simple rhetorical question, Where is
my Vote? ended its grip on the nation. That question had no answer. The
masses of millions asking that question were only strategically challenging
the presidential voting results. They were putting a question mark in front
of the whole idea of state, any state, before and after the Islamic Republic,
A CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 61
that wanted and had failed to represent them. The Islamic Republic had
fused together and cannibalized all its competing ideologies, and manu-
factured a deeply flawed and illegitimate state. In the words of its most
prominent Shii clerical critic, Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, the Islamic
Republic was neither Islamic nor a republic! The condemnation was fatal,
final, uttered by a key architect of the very theory and idea of an Islamic
Republic. That amalgamated ideology that had foregrounded the very
idea of an Islamic Republic had now ended not just the Islamic Republic
but in fact the delusion of the nation-state and forever liberated the nation
from the state.
AN EPISTEMIC SHIFT
My central argument in this chapter is that the events of post-presidential
election of June 2009 mark the commencement of a major epistemic shift
in modern Iranian political culture, with ramifications that may indeed
extend to the wider region and categorically alter the political culture of
the Arab and Muslim world for good. What in the course of the Green
Movement we were witnessing was in fact the commencement of a civil
rights movement in Iran, carried on by a post-ideological generation that
has lost all emotive connection to their parental preoccupation with master
narratives and grand solutions. My proposal is that the dissolution of that
illusion of any form of representative democracy was the final decoupling
of the fate of the effervescence nation thriving on a transnational public
sphere away from the tyranny of this and all other postcolonial states that
had by now categorically lost the prospect of ever coupling with it in the
legitimate formation of a viable nation-state.
The course of grand postcolonial ideological thinking first crescendo
and then exhausted itself and eventually resulted, I contend, in the emer-
gence of an aesthetic reason that acted in lieu of a public reason (overcoming
the dead-end of postcolonial reason occasioned by colonial modernity) that
had failed to emerge in a viable and enduring way. The creative formation
of this public reason was initially aborted in the course of colonial moder-
nity and then made impossible by the militant predominance of a juridical
reason/manteq-e feqhi hat had completely occupied the Iranian political
scene. Visual and performing arts, I thus argue, became the harbinger of
this epistemic shift, facilitating a detour from a public reason that compet-
ing anticolonial ideologies had failed to form or even facilitate an aesthetic
reason that was cultivated in the hidden sinews of visual and performing,
62 H. DABASHI
literary and poetic, arts, and then back to a public space that was now
heavily choreographed, color-coded, and operatic in its unfolding.
The formation of the three ideological trends in Iran, from the
onslaught of the Constitutional Revolution (19061911) to the success
of the Islamic revolution (19771979), has been epistemically, narra-
tively, and institutionally self-transformative. In visual, performing, liter-
ary, and poetic arts there were those aspects that were at the service of
these ideological formations and those that began to differ and divert
from it (from the poetry of Nima Yushij to the fiction of Sadeq Hedayat
to the cinema of Abbas Kiarostami) toward a formal destruction of the
dominant ideologies and any state apparatus they could procreate and
paved the way toward an aesthetic emancipation from the entire domain
of the postcolonial reason. The main hallmarks of the consolidation of
Islamic Republic as a repressive state occurred during the crucial period
of 19771979, through the putsch to bring the Pahlavi monarchy down,
the American hostage crisis, and the ratification of the Constitution of
the Islamic Republic and its critical, tyrannical, clause of Velayat-e Faqih/
Authority of the Jurisconsult. This is the period when the ideological
forces come to full political fruition and contestation, as the realm of the
aesthetics freezes in Ahmad Shamlous famous poem Dar in Bonbast/
Against this Dead-end (1980). Before the composition of this poem
and concomitant with it, however, in three successive realms of Nimaic
poetry (1930s), Hedayatesque fiction (1960s), and Abbas Kiarostamis
cinema (1980s), the aesthetic foundations of a much wider and far more
universal cultivation of the creative judgment on the domain of aesthetic
reason were at work.
During the eight crucial years of IranIraq War (19801988), the
Islamists consolidated their power, eliminated their ideological and politi-
cal rivals, and ultimately took advantage of the Salman Rushdie Affair of
1989 to revise the constitution of the Islamic Republic in a manner that
would guarantee the preservation of their reign after Khomeinis death.
The IranIraq War introduced a critical turning point in the geopolitics
of the region and was conducive to the rise of Shii communities in Iraq
and Lebanon, as well as the two successive Intifadas and ultimately the
rise of Hamas in Palestine. In the realm of art, this is the period when the
trauma of the cataclysmic revolution and the eight years of bloody war
coagulates and forms the most catalytic force of visual creativity that will
soon come into fruition in the globally celebrated Iranian cinema. Before
the dramatic rise of Iranian cinema to transnational attention in the 1990s,
for about a decade in the 1980s the poetic and literary arts were being
A CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 63
transformed in spirit and force into visual and performing arts, and this
emotive transformation was crucial in the formal destruction of the poli-
tics of despair that had by now, in the aftermath of Ayatollah Khomeinis
charismatic terror, completely exhausted itself.
During the eight-year presidency of Hashemi Rafsanjani (19891997),
the period of the postwar reconstructions, Iran witnessed the generation
of a class of nouveau riche and along with it much resentment, anger,
and disenfranchisement that it entailed. This is also the time when the
Iranian cinema captures the global imagination, while contemporary art
and underground music become the fertile ground for the next generation
of mixed but still collective sensibilities. As the age of ideological convic-
tions comes to a complete exhaustion during the graceless presidency of
Hashemi Rafsanjani, the creative contours of a post-ideological generation
is now in full display in Iranian visual and performing arts.
The Reform Movement (19972005), spearheaded by President
Mohammad Khatami but radicalized in post-ideological terms by the
student-led uprising of July 1999, was yet again on full display during the
parliamentary election of 2000. An aesthetic reason, now in full display
in Iranian arts, was now fully functioning as the modus operandi of the
sublated public reason, spreading widely into the public domain. The col-
lapse of the ideological age was now fully evident during the eight years of
Khatami presidency, as was the effervescence of a liberating aesthetic func-
tioning beyond the reach of any grand narrative of salvationReformist
or Princiaplist, in power or in opposition. The making of Mohsen
Makhmalbafs Testing Democracy (1999) is a crucial text in marking
the first infiltration of the aesthetic forms into the post-ideological politics
of civil liberties, in this case the crucial factor of the freedom of the press,
for which Makhmalbaf transforms his camera into a pen.
During the 2005 presidential election and the subsequent presidency
of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (20052009), the inner contradictions in
the making of an Islamic Republic finally came to a full swing. The
Reform Movement had effectively failed to deliver on civil liberties, as the
economic mismanagement of the country had created a vastly disenfran-
chised class at the mercy of a new echelon of administrative populism that
Ahmadinejad best represented. The aesthetic reason in the public domain,
charting the creative modes of liberation in the realm of arts, was now
readied for a full societal performance. By this time, the underground
music of such pop artists as Mohsen Namjoo and Shahin Najafi had inher-
ited and creatively transmuted the realm of the aesthetic emancipation
A CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 65
terms, will never be satisfied by any state even if Jean-Jacque Rousseau and
the whole encyclopedists ensemble descended from the Enlightenment
heavens to rule them. The aesthetic intuition of transcendence that agi-
tates their democratic desires is always ahead of their material means. The
dynamics of this dialectic is therefore a potent, necessary, and provocative
momentum for the cause of civil liberties, predicated on a robust transna-
tional public sphere, with or without the consent of a state apparatus that
wishes but fails to rule over them.
As the Green Movement receded from the public space into the under-
ground, it began occupying a parapublic sphere that will continue to
thrive under the radar of the violent changes that now ravage the region
from Iraq to Syria, between the Jewish and the Islamic states. As such, it
will remain a prototype for a non-violent civil rights movements, a per-
fect model for the region at large, as the Arab and Muslim world goes
through massive revolutionary changes. During the earliest stages of the
Arab Spring, I suggested reading it like the Third Intifada, borrowing
a Palestinian reality and lending its allegorical power to a much larger
historic scale.5 During the height of the Green Movement, Iranians them-
selves were borrowing the term Intifada to refer to their uprising, and in
a piece on the legendary Palestinian cartoon character Handala I extended
that Palestinian icon to the cause of liberty in Iran.6 We need to use our
regional idiomaticity of revolt in understanding and expanding their revo-
lutionary potentials. Today, the ruling regime in Iran is actively present
in Iraq, in Syria, in Lebanon, in Palestine, Bahrain, Yemen, and as far as
Africa and even Latin America. The same transnational space must be used
in reverse, and in fact functions in reverse, where the transnational public
sphere is the most potent domain for the rebirth of nations beyond the
control of the states that lay illegitimate claims on them.
In a critical piece, Murtaza Hussain has rightly suggested that after
the US invasion of Iraq and the carnage in Syria, the notion of those
nation-states is in fact now just a political fiction.7 That fiction has always
been definitive to postcolonial nation-states, and their ruling regimes des-
perately trying to survive should not be the only forces that cross bor-
ders. Saudi Arabia and its Persian Gulf shadows, Israel, the USA and its
European allies systematically trespass national boundaries, and so must
liberation movements hide and then seek each other from one tyranny
to the next. The Iranian Green Movement, the Palestinian Intifada, the
Kurdish enclave of Kobani, and the Arab Spring are all like beautiful water
lilies floating on the surface of the same expansive pond, nourished by the
same subterranean gestations. What holds them together is transnational
public sphere on which all these nations are being reborn.
NOTES
1. See Hamid Dabashi, Iran, the US, and the Green Movement: The Fox
and the Paradox (London: Zed, 2010).
2. An earlier draft of this part of my argument was first published on Aljazeera
on 12 June 2013: What happened to the Green Movement in Iran?
72 H. DABASHI
The coupling of the nation and the state has been a historic mistake, a
vestige of the European colonial history and heritage, carried unthink-
ingly into the postcolonial history of other nations. As a nation, Iranians
have never come anywhere near a democratic state. From their imperial
past they collapsed into a colonial encounter with European empires, and
from the Constitutional Revolution of 19061911 they began dreaming
of democracy. That dream has turned out to be a nightmare. From the
Qajar absolutism they were delivered to the Pahlavi tyranny, and from the
Pahlavi monarchy to the even more tyrannical Islamic Republic. The ruling
states have systematically improved their techniques of domination: The
Pahlavis were better in seeking to justify their monarchy than the Qajars
were, and the Islamic Republic is even more efficient than the Pahlavis
in manufacturing the sham of consent. What we have forgotten, and left
entirely un-theorized, is the fact that the nation has also changed, altered,
expanded, and opened up its horizons to newer and more enabling vistas.
The urgent task at hand is to decouple the nation-state and let the state
dwell on its delusion of legitimacy and have a far more accurate concep-
tion of the nation and its defiant, successive rebirths.
The rise of the Green Movement as a civil rights movement will have to
be understood in its own self-transformative terms, the manner in which
it keeps shifting its strategies of opposition, a characteristic I will iden-
tify as a metamorphic movement, for it keeps changing names, colors,
identities, alterities to pursue a singular purpose of reasserting itself on an
ever-expansive transnational public sphere. Predicated on a poetic surplus
incensed by the intrusion, asks who they are. One of them says that they
are six unfinished characters in search of an author to finish them. That
by now legendary opening gambit of what later would develop as the
absurdist movement in European theater had a real-life simile in the
course of the 2013 presidential election in Iran, when eight unfinished
presidential candidates entered the Iranian stage. The contenders,
undaunted by the absurdity and handpicked by the Guardian Council to
meet the strict demands of clerical rule, searched for a way to complete
their characters and have one picked, reinvented, and delivered unto his-
tory. The author of this play, in this particular case, was the Iranian people.
Forget about Rouhani, the Iranian nation (as a living organism) effec-
tively told Khamenei and the Guardian Council: You give us the prover-
bial Molla Nasreddin (a popular folkloric character) and we will turn it
into the poster boy of our democratic hopes and dreams. It makes abso-
lutely no difference if Rouhani delivers or not on his campaign promises
(though in his first nationally televised address to the nation he specifically
promised he would) what matters is that people used the small crack the
ruling regime offered them and turned it into what Elias Canetti calls
people power.
What we witnessed during this and previous Iranian presidential elec-
tions is how the superior social intelligence of a democratically defiant
public takes what the theocratic state throws its way, breathes new life into
it, and creates their own leaders. They did this with Hashemi Rafsanjani
in 1989, soon after the devastating IranIraq war; then again in 1997,
they did this with Khatami; in 2009, with Mir Hossein Mousavi; and then
in 2013, the same with Hassan Rouhani. How this democratic will per-
forms, conscious of its public power, is a lesson for our understanding of
the larger democratic tsunami that is running its course through the Arab
and Muslim world. For four grueling and punishing years, Iran has been
in a state of limbo: Mir Hossein Mousavi was under house arrest, scores
of democracy activists were subjected to kangaroo courts and jailed, the
Khatami-led Reform movement had been rendered obsolete by the far
more potent and progressive Green Movement, all while Ahmadinejads
divisive presidency created infighting among the conservatives. As the
state was going through its motion to stage its non-existent legitimacy,
the nation was organically growing in exponential terms.
When this presidential election began, the Reformists at first hoped to
beat the dead horse of their cause and get Khatami to run. He wiggled
for a while, but then wisely realized he wasnt the man for the job, while
A METAMORPHIC MOVEMENT 77
Mousavi was alive and well under house arrest. Then the outmaneuvered
Reformists began placing wagers on Hashemi Rafsanjani, but he too was
roundly rejected by the Guardian Council (an exceedingly important
development that requires a critical reading of its own). So the discredited
and outmaneuvered Reformists entered the race with the feeble figure
of Mohammad Aref, of whom they tried to create a national hero after
he dropped out of the race to help Rouhani, before the main body of
the Greens finally resolved to flock around him. This extraordinary ability
of the public (the nation at large) to transform politicians into the per-
sonification of their democratic or rebellious wills has a magnificent ante-
cedent in the nineteenth-century Iran that is even more radical. During
the Tobacco Revolt (18901891), there was a famous fatwa issued by
Ayatollah Mirza Hassan Shirazi against the use of tobacco that was widely
believed to have inaugurated the revolt. To this day, many historians are
not quite sure that Shirazi actually issued that fatwa, or whether it was the
collective will of the people in Shiraz that wished and willed it to have been
issued. This incident toward the end of the Qajar monarchy (17891926),
and as the dress rehearsal of the Constitutional Revolution (19061911)
remains definitive to the will of the nation making of its feeble leaders the
personification of their democratic demands.
In this most recent election, the democratic will of the nation was even
more pronounced. Those who did not vote told Khamenei he could not
get away with murder. He could not order the maiming and murder-
ing of people in 2009, incarcerate and torture those who object, put the
symbolic leaders of the Green Movement under house arrest, and then in
2013, come back and call on them to vote. Those who voted, meanwhile,
told regime changers the US neocons and their Zionist allies that Iranians
were perfectly capable of using whatever means available to them to man-
age their own democratic future. It does not matter that people were out
in Gezi Park but not in Azadi square. In this grand chorale of democratic
uprising in the Arab and Muslim world, each nation does what it does
best, and they will all benefit and learn from each other. The Egyptians
and Tunisians do one thing, the Turks another, and the Iranians the next.
What mattered was the fact of a transnational public sphere on which all
these nations performed and identified themselves, entirely independent
of the states that categorically failed to rule or to represent them.
In Iran proper, the first sentence that will be uttered by the next leader
of any significant social movement will have to start from the very last
sentence of Mir Hossein Mousavis statements and his Manshur/Charter
78 H. DABASHI
A ROLLING METAPHOR
The Green Movement was the culmination of all the previous social move-
ments in Iran, their sublation into a civil rights movement, their retrieval
back to the bosom of the nation as the giver or denier of legitimacy. Where
is my Vote? was a rhetorical questionexpecting no answer. Neither the
Islamic Republic nor any other state before or even after it could ever fully
answer that question. As such the Green Movement was the ghost of all
the revolutions past and all the revolutions future. It is a metamorphic
movement, and acts as a rolling metaphor. It changes color and density,
purpose and process. It may upper as a rally here, as a presidential or
parliamentary election there, or else pop up in a widely celebrated film, a
work of fiction, the victory in a soccer match, a piece of poetry, or just in
a painting, or during a playful summer day in a park where young people
shoot water at each other.
The Green Movement was a non-violent civil rights movement that for
the first time posited and cultivated the possibilities of civil disobedience
to alter its own political culture, and not just to overthrow one useless and
illegitimate state for another. The longer it takes the better for it exposes
the violent traits that join it but cannot tolerate or understand or come to
terms with it. This is how the system, the political culture of a deeply rooted
nation, cleanses itself, rids itself of the delusion of any democratic state. This
time around the nation wants it both waysit wants neither domestic tyr-
anny nor foreign domination. What the nation was therefore retrieving was
a post-28 Mordad Syndrome, post-ideological worldwhere the traumatic
modes of ideological production had categorically exhausted themselves.
A METAMORPHIC MOVEMENT 79
Iran was now passing beyond the bugbear of secularism, retrieving its cos-
mopolitan culture, and learning how to world the world, after more than
300 years of encounter with European colonial modernity. Iran as a nation
had systematically lost its momentum over the last 300 years to Islam and
the West so it may take three decades or more to see through these epis-
temic breakthroughs. In the making of this political culture, both the ruling
regime and all its nemesis in and out of the country are lost in the maze of
their daily politicking and entirely oblivious to this unfolding path: like a
broken record repeating dead and deadening phrases.
To understand the nature and disposition of this movement, we
must come to terms with its poetics. The revelatory poem of Forough
Farrokhzad, Another Birth (1964) is particularly poignant in this sus-
tained course of reflections on the birth and rebirth of nations entirely
independent, adjacent, and far beyond the claims and control of any state
apparatus. One particular stanza of that poem sums its poignancy:
all to map out a topography of artworks, from poetry to film and fiction,
that both in specifically Iranian terms and also on a transnational literary
public sphere enable the possibility of reading the rebirth of the nation in
specifically allegorical terms that position the nation as a rolling metaphor.
Through the poetry of Farrokhzad I invoke all these references as the
clear indication of an aesthetic (in lieu of a metaphysics) of intuition of
transcendence, foregrounding the argument that the fact and phenom-
enon of nation was born before any state laid any claim on it. I have often
cited the legendary Iranian poet Aref Qazvini (18821934) who in fact
says that before he used the word Vatan/Homeland in his poetry, one
out of ten Iranians did not know what it meant. Arefs declaration is in fact
corroborated by the course of the Constitutional Revolution in the cru-
cial period between 1906 and 1926, when the Qajar dynasty was collaps-
ing, the Pahlavis were nowhere in sight, and yet the poetic and emotive
foundations of the notion of Vatan was being solidly articulated. During
the period between 1906 and 1926, a solid period of some 20 years, the
notion of the nation was being actively formed and there was no central-
ized state anywhere in sight. This is the critical period we need to consider
as the hiatus when the Qajar monarchy has collapsed, the nation as a bona
fide idea is actively formed long before the future Pahlavi state has any
centralized command over it.
So if the postcolonial nation is formed before state, by virtue of national
struggles that turns a people into a nation, then all states are only claim-
ants and usurpers, by definition, ex post facto claims on the nation. In
the case of Iran proper, we basically have had two violent takeovers of the
nation, once by a monarchy (the Pahlavis) and then by a mullarchy (the
Islamic Republic). They were the remnants of the battle two institutions
of power had waged under colonial duress, and as such they are deeply
rooted in Iranian political culture, but their categorical confrontation and
competition for power is a colonial byproduct. Why and how? Qajars were
the bastard mutation of the Safavids collapse under the Afghan invasion.
The Safavid (along with the Ottomans and the Mughals) were the last
Muslim empires developing public spheres and public reason in their own
terms. From the Afsharids to the Qajars, Iran witnessed the catastrophic
tribalization of its political culture, in the aftermath of the collapse of
the Safavid urbanism, while the Babi Movement was the last attempt to
retrieve the Safavid public space, with Shaykh Ahmad Ahsai (17531826)
resuming where Mulla Sadra (15721640) had left off. But the combined
A METAMORPHIC MOVEMENT 81
Image 1 Koorosh Shishehgaran, Untitled, from the War series, circa 1984
The national becomes memorial, the memorial iconic, abstract, and self-generative.
Here in Koroush Shishehgarans work marking the Iran-Iraq War (19801988) the
iconic act of abstraction appropriates the visual memory of the war for the people
who fought it, away from the official claim on it, marking the moment when the
nation went through the most traumatic period of its recent history. The power of
the work is precisely in its abstract concealment of the violence of the war. The work
is implicitly launched against an entire official industry of claiming the victims of the
war as state martyrs, while refusing to assume responsibility for the prolongation of
the war under which smoke screen the revolutionary momentum was confiscated to
form an Islamic Republic. As that republic went its own way towards state violence,
this painting marks the momentous occasion of the nation claiming its own victims
of the war, young men and women who died to protect their nation, not the ruling
state. The result is through a miasmatic working of the aesthetic reason the politically
confiscated public reason is sublated and made to overcome the postcolonial polit-
ical reason the state has appropriated for its own self-legitimizing rhetoric.
Shishehgarans art denies that appropriation and retrieves its master tropes for the
nation.
82 H. DABASHI
we see how the poetic body defies politics and its contingent metaphysics
of death and denial, while the rest of Farrokhzads poetry resists the bio-
power of politics and jubilantly reasserts its erotics of the body. We would
not be able to speak of a rolling metaphor of revolt in a culture were it not
for this bodily investiture of defiance.
terms with the epistemic violence that is today institutionalized in the dis-
ciplinary disposition of English and Comparative Literature, which ipso
facto delegates the open-ended multiplicity of worlds of literatures either
to the vacuity of World Literature, or else seeks to assimilate and canni-
balize them by way of distant readings, or else, close readings through
the closed-circuited hermeneutic circle of provincial Eurocentricism of
the First World. What I suggest is not out of any hostility to Eurocentric
world, for that too is a world, one among many others, that was once able
to colonize, cannibalize, and leave in ruins other worlds, but is no longer
permitted to do so.
That task at hand, as a result, is to reconfigure the literary public sphere
upon which such worlds of literary imagination have historically asserted
themselves. What I believe I discovered in my World of Persian Literary
Humanism is the inner dynamics and tropics of thematic organism of
Persian literary heritage from its ethnocentric origins early in Islamic his-
tory to its transformation into initially logocentric in the late Ghaznavid
period, then ethos-centric during the late Seljuqs and Mongol periods, and
ultimately a chaotic disposition during its encounter with European colo-
nial modernity. The ethnocentricity of Persian literarily humanism began
and lasted through the Samanids and Saffarids in reaction to the tribal
imperialism of the Arab invasion and domination, and thus as a marker
of communal identity, of Ethnos/Nezhad. In that imperial context and as
Islamic scholasticism became the modus operandi of its ideological domina-
tion, Persian literary humanism found and flourished in its linguistic iden-
tity, as a Sokhan/Logos, before it was sublated into Ethos/Hanjar during
the Mongol, and Chaos/Ashub in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Persian language and therefore literary heritage, as we speak, read,
write, and understand it for the last 14,000 years thus began as a marker
of ethnic identity in contrapuntal reaction to the rise of Arabic as a marker
of Arab conquest and cultural hegemony in the course of the Shuubiyyah
movement. That ethnocentricity was soon sublated into an active logo-
centricity in the context of the confidently Persianate Ghaznavid empire,
a Turkic dynasty that was heavily Persianized both culturally and admin-
istratively. That tropic transformation of the ethnos to logos at the heart
of Persian literary humanism was definitive to the formation of Persian
literary cosmopolitanism that was formed at the royal courts but was
fed by the worldly disposition of lands it had conquered and culturally
Persianized. At this confident moment, Persian is no longer a marker of
ethnos but one of logos. The logocentricity of Persian literary humanism
A METAMORPHIC MOVEMENT 85
the Turkic invasion that culminates in the Ghaznavid empire in the tenth
to eleventh century it becomes logos, after the Mongol invasion of the
thirteenth century it becomes ethos, and after the European invasion in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries it becomes chaos. Under the traumatic
impact of every new seismic change, the ethos remodulates and manifests
itself in varied literary tropics. During the Timurids period, this trajectory
finds room for a paralingual symbiosis, when letters become mere signs
and richly resonate in Persian paintings and manuscript illustrations. So a
deeply rooted literary ethos, we might say, is the driving force of Persian
humanism exploding into the chaos of a public and parapublic sphere when
confronting European colonial modernity. When Europe goes through its
capitalist modernity, with global colonial conquests contingent on it, the
ethos of Persian humanism defines a public sphere in terms that now con-
stitutes it as a postcolonial nation/mellat, and as Europe lingers into
postmodernity we experience the condition of chaos as the final separation
between the nation that now categorically claims a transnational public
sphere, and all the superfluous state apparatuses that have laid any false
claims on it.
commencement of the civil rights movement in the USA in the late 1950s
were all resonating in the Iranian cry for political freedom and civil liberty.
The price that a determined nation was willing to pay was epic in its pro-
portions, lyrical in its rhapsodic chants, joyous in the colors they flew.
Innocent citizens, for daring to doubt the veracity of the official results of
a presidential election, were subject to systematic and unbridled violence
by the security apparatus of a theocratic state that seemed to be, more
than anyone else, completely cognizant of its own absence of legitimacy.
The Green Movement was the end of the state. Any other election that
was performed in the Islamic Republic would be as significant as a football
match: an occasion for the nation to assert itself publicly.
The Islamic Republic was of course no exception to the rule of state-
sponsored violence against innocent civilians in the region. From Israel to
Pakistan, from Russia in Central Asia to Saudi Arabia in Yemen, the region
was and remains alternately plagued by militarized or militant, state-
sponsored or insurrectionary brutalities, imperial in its attitude or local-
ized in its dimensions. Against that backdrop, the Green Movement in
Iran had opened a new and entirely unprecedented chapter in the political
culture of the region that old colonial officers branded the Middle East.
Violent coups, militant rebellions, military invasions, and brute insurrec-
tionary uprisingsall bracketed between medieval tribalism, neoliberal
imperialism, and anything in betweenare the staple of the political cul-
ture in this region. It is in that context that the Green Movement had
emerged as the vanguard of a seismic change in the very language of politi-
cal thought and practice, a metamorphic movement that had occurred at
the year zero of a new history.
Perhaps the surest sign of the changing world that the Green Movement
had announced was the amorphous nature of its leadership, which slowed
down the measures of its immediate success in the same cadences that
sustained its unfolding democratic course. In a region where the endur-
ing formation of democratic institutions and of non-violent transition to
democracy has always been thwarted by the rise of one charismatic tyrant
or another, from Gamal Abd al-Nasser to Ayatollah Khomeini, the Green
Movement boasted no such leader and was teaching those who cared to
watch an entirely new lesson in the art and craft of small steps and careful
coalition-building on the long and arduous path to securing civil liberties.
Mir Hossein Mousavi was not as much a leader of this movement, as he
repeatedly emphasized, as its cathartic occasion, its symbolic representa-
tion. He stayed the course until he was put under house arrest, and after
A METAMORPHIC MOVEMENT 89
that he remained silent, for the chorus he had joined was singing apace, in
different tunes, but melodious in its changing harmonies.
Through non-violent social actions, the Green Movement exposed not
just the lurking violence camouflaged under the thin veneer of Islamist
claim to republicanism in Iran, but the equally violent policies of the USA
and its regional allies. The spectrum of Green Movement appropriation of
the public space bespeaks its varied social domainsranging from massive
public rallies to crowded concert halls to rambunctious subway rides to
cantankerous parliamentary maneuvers to turbulent university campuses
to a rainbow of websites, blogs, Facebook and Tweeter pages, under-
ground music, open love letters to imprisoned spouses, and so on. On
these public and parapublic spaces, it is not just the three-decades-long
false halo of sanctity around the Islamic Republic that has disappeared in
the aftermath of the Green Movement, but so has been exposed the bank-
rupt politics of despair and resignation, and the nihilistic politics of accept-
ing reality as it is, and not as it should be. It is not just the neoconservative
politics of military interventionism that is exposed for what it is but also
the conventional left-liberal nihilism that did not know how to deal with
the Green Movement and thus categorically dismisses it for (believe it or
not) it saw Ahmadinejad as a bulwark of resistance to imperialism!7
In a context that the Israeli army in matter of hours and in interna-
tional waters off the coast of Gaza kills and wounds more innocent civil-
ians trying to help 1.5 million Palestinians stranded under embargo than
the Islamic Republic has over a year of civil unrest in its own sovereign
territory, we seem to be expected to be grateful that the security appara-
tus of the theocracy only kidnaps people off the streets, beats them up,
tortures, rapes, and every once in a while murders them. Whats a little
torture in Kahrizak and Evin over the last year compared to what the USA
has done in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and Bagram Airbase in the
course of its war on terror over the last decade? The combined moral
bankruptcy of that comparison has stopped even bothering people across
political divides.
The fundamental challenge that the Green Movement faced was not
just an ethics of indifference, predicated on a politics of despair, that sus-
tains the status quo of business as usual. The geopolitics of a region that
in the game of power it plays suppresses the fate of nations and submits
them to the overriding powers of a political logic infested with state vio-
lence decides the terms of the battles that these nations face. The principle
burden of responsibility in this politics of despair falls on the sole surviving
90 H. DABASHI
superpower in the region, namely the USA, which ever since World War
II has been dragged into a quagmire of indecision and indeterminacy,
seeking to manage one crisis after another, with absolutely no overriding
principle or vision, and thus with dismal and counterproductive results,
invariably supporting undemocratic regimes to safeguard its immediate
interests, and ipso facto forfeiting its longstanding ideal and principles.
Today, Iranians braving brutal repression in their streets and on their roof-
tops are infinitely truer to the ideals and aspirations of Thomas Jefferson
and Martin Luther King than those in position of power and authority
in the USA. What their struggles show is the manner in which nations
consistently give birth to themselves in manners beyond the control of
any ruling state.
Years into its commencement, the Green Movement was unfolding in
full view of the world at large, and nothing would stop its historic, wind-
ing path. It may thunder as a cascade today or flow quietly in a plateau on
anotherbut like any other bountiful river it will not stop until it reaches
its destined ocean. From the gracious patience of Zahra Shams quietly
fasting in solitary confinement in a Mashhad prison to the noble anger
of Majid Tavakoli counting days to his peoples freedom in a cell in Evin
prison, the young Iranians are teaching nations the very alphabet of a
language of liberation that the world leaders are yet to learn. If the nation
was born poetically, literary, and the state had followed the nation and
announced its birth in pure violence, then the poetic of national liberty
was now woven into the aesthetics of peoples defiance. There will thus
always remain a legitimacy crisis by the ever-widening distance between
the poetically performed nation and the violently self-conscious state.
NOTES
1. An earlier draft of this part of my argument was published on Aljazeera
as Ballot wars: The Iranian public strikes back on 17 June 2013.
2. For an excellent chronology of events that led to the massive participa-
tion in this presidential election, see Leyla Shirazi, Irans Presidential
Elections: The Live Embers of a Democratic Opposition Glow
(Jadaliyya, 14 June 2013).
3. For identical numbers from two opposing sources citing the Ministry
of Interior, for the veracity of Rouhanis election, see here: http://
www.rahesabz.net/story/71478/, and here: http://www.farsnews.
com/newstext.php?nn=13920325001224.
A METAMORPHIC MOVEMENT 91
The aporias of the traditional romantic view of the sovereignty of art can
only be resolved by combining two theses: (1) the deconstructive thesis that
the aesthetic critique of reason is the subversion rather than the overcoming
of reason; and (2) the thesis, which can be found in Adorno, that it is not
the contents but the effects, consequences, or repercussions of art that are
the foundations of this critique. Taken together, these two claims outlined
an understanding of aesthetic sovereigntyas an aesthetically generated cri-
tique of reasonthat not only does not violate the autonomy of the enact-
ment of aesthetic experience, but is actually premised upon it.5
What the end of militant Islamism and the Islamic Republic (and with
them Islam itself) amounts to is the moral crisis of Islam as it has been
articulated since its fateful encounter with European colonial modernity.
This has in turn prepared the ground for the active retrieval and restora-
tion of a cosmopolitan worldliness that includes but is not limited to Islam.
Muslims, in other words, will have to deal with their renewed worldliness
outside any imperial domain and upon their transnational public spheres.6
The reading of the Quran as articulated by the leading Egyptian her-
meneutician Nasr Hamed Abu Zaid, or of Islamic law as complicated by
the Palestinian scholar Wael Hallaq, is the best examples of this retrieval
of what I call cosmopolitan worldliness. On a wider scale, filmmakers,
journalists, novelists, poets, historians, and so on are today operating on
a global scale that points to the incorporation of Iranian cosmopolitan
culture back into its historical worldliness. The result is the formation of
a transnational public sphere, public reason, and organic solidarity on the
emotive universe of bygone Muslim empires but true to the spirit of the
democratic age in which we live.
Opposing the rise of this cosmopolitanism is (among other forces) the
US imperial nativism that wishes to incorporate and neutralize what is hap-
pening in countries like Iran back into itself and its false imperial image,
aided and abetted by native misinformers like Azar Nafisi, Mehdi Khalaji,
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, or Abbas Milani. As the dark shadows of exilic intel-
lectuals who resist the empire (whether native to this empire like Noam
Chomsky or immigrants into it like Edward Said), these native misinform-
ers persist in alienating these cultures both from themselves and from the
imperial domain of the US global imagination. Nave and self-delusional
filmmakers like Mohsen Makhmalbaf who travel to Israel to make films
or engage in fanciful politics underline and exacerbate this alienation, as
do self-alienating anthropologists of Iranian or Arab descent who con-
tinue to travel for their field work to their own homeland to turn their
own family and friends into anthropological objects of curiosity for their
white interlocutors back on North American or Western European uni-
versity campuses. Meanwhile mystic monarchists like Seyyed Hossein Nasr
militantly oppose that cosmopolitanism by propagating a New Age mys-
ticism they have fabricated from the scattered evidence of a Tradition
that never was. Against the grain of this obscurantism the retrieval of the
central paradox of Shiism is one among many strategies to the retrieve
and restore critical dimensions of Islamic cosmopolitanism.7 Overcoming
these varied forms of self-alienation, I have found a reading of Walter
100 H. DABASHI
politics up her sleeve precisely as she was delving deep into her solitary
soul, Shirin Neshat sublates her deeply rooted politics into a panoply of
visual meditations that expose the porous borderlines of eroticism and
body politics. The result is an aesthetic reason that subverts any state that
comes close to it, but enriches the nation it thus addresses.
When it comes to the sense of art outside the territorial border of soci-
etal belonging scarce a Palestinian artist needs any prodding. The con-
temporary Palestinian photographer Tarek al-Ghoussein is iconic revolt
incarnate, though all in the solitary confinement of vacated landscapes. As
a Palestinian in perpetual exile, in an exile that has now become home, al-
Ghoussein is the artist of postcoloniality by virtue of the fact that as a per-
son, a persona, an artist, a human being, he does not, as Golda Meir once
put it, exist. His solitude as a result is transparenthe does not exist. He
has disappeared into the paradox of his own stateless status. The same soli-
tary site of migratory meandering is evident in another Palestinian artist,
Mona Hatoum, whose art is the visual chronicler of Palestinian homeless-
ness. That homelessness translates into a visual vacuity, that is, the reflec-
tion of the artists vacated soul, an aterritorial space from which the artist
becomes a subject outside the subject. The abstraction of the aesthetic
reason here has no state even to claim it. It floats globally and becomes
emblematic for every nation.
Art is a No to which no anticolonial revolt can ever be a terminal
answer. Consider the work of Termeh (a pen name for Golrokh Nafisi),
an Iranian artist who came to her own during the commencement of the
Green Movement in Iran. The solitude that is hidden in all acts of social
protest, the serenity from which political uprisings are made, palpitates in
her art. At the center of Termehs social protest is always she, the solitary
artist, assuming the social garb of her compatriots, and yet precisely at
that moment she keeps her distance, aesthetically, from all of them. That
space, that distance, is where the artist lives and dies in solitude, precisely
at the moment that she is most social. The society that revolts at the heart
of Termehs solitary art can at the very least be traced back to one of
the greatest Iranian artists of the twentieth century, Ardeshir Mohassess
(19382008), the silent screamer whose vision became his voice, singing
melodically the unmelodious resonances of the horror that chases after
him from one tyranny to another empire. Like Amir Naderi, Ardeshir
Mohassess survived both a tyrannical monarchy and a theocratic banality
to wed the fate of post-revolutionary Iranians to the neoconservative chi-
canery that has ruled the USA before and beyond George W.Bush. At the
AN AESTHETIC REASON 107
For the saintly solitude at the heart of the moment of creativity I offer
Khalvat-e Arefaneh, where Gnosticism becomes aesthetically agnostic. To
show that impossible scene, I propose the Iranian poet/painter Sohrab
Sepehri (19281980) and his notion of tanhai/solitude. For Sepehri,
both in his paintings and his poetry, the artists summoning to behold is
always in an ironic mode, via a paradox that at once invites spectatorship
and hides behind the spectacle. In effect, the artist invites and disinvites his
audience at one and the same timefor the location of the artist, where
we might meet him is nowhere in particular, effectively and only in the
work of art itself, which is, as a work of art, a fiction, a nowhereand if
you were to go to visit him in his apartment or her study or studio, the
person you will meet is really not the artist, for the artist, having finished
working, is not there to greet you, is already gone somewhere else. The
person you will meet is thus an imposter, a shadow. Now that nowhere is
somewhere, for that is where the artist creates, with and without an audi-
ence in mind. The artist breathes, lives, and creates on that space. On that
space, the artist sees the impossible, imagines the imperceptive, and charts
out the way. We may in fact never have permission to enter that impossible
space, for as Sepehri says:
Beh soragh-e man agar mi-aid/If you were to come to visit me,
Narm-o Ahesteh bi-yaid/Come ever so softly and gently
Mabada keh tarak bardarad/Lest may break
Chini-ye nazok-e tanhai-ye man/The thin china of my solitude.10
That thin china of solitude is always broken the instant the artist has
ceased working, when he is effectively invisible. When it turns political,
art is the other of itself, its self-transplanted outside itselfits phantom,
fetish, and phantasmagoria all convoluted into one illusion to beguile its
audience before it runs for cover. In Sepehris Hichestan/Nowhereville,
where he resided and where he composed his poems and painted his can-
vases, the artist becomes a Levinasian subject outside the subject of his
art. The I of the artist at the amorphous moment of creativity, continuing
with the Levinasian language, is different because of its uniqueness, not
unique because of its difference.11 That pure I, which is the subject of
the aesthetic as transcendental consciousness, and as such the author of
the aesthetic reason, is itself outside the subject: self without reflection
uniqueness identifying itself as incessant awakening. Levinas believed
that this subject outside subject has been distinguished ever since the
110 H. DABASHI
ment that was unfolding in Iran in 20092010 and that had caught the
world, and the geopolitics of the region, infested as it was with violence,
by surprise. These three filmmakers were integral to a wider context of
censorship and pressure that the Islamic Republic has exerted to manu-
facture domestic and global legitimacy for itself, where it constitutionally
lacks it among its own citizens.
The first prominent Iranian filmmaker to become intimately involved
with the Green Movement was Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Very early in the
unfolding of events, Makhmalbaf falsely introduced himself as a spokesman
for the opposition leader Mr. Mir Hossein Mousavi outside Iran, lobbying
European and American politicians to help the Green Movement, ini-
tially in generic and potentially misinterpreted ways. While many Iranians
applauded Makhmalbafs enthusiasm and cheered him on for his active
support of the movement, many others were exceedingly critical of him for
what they believed to be a self-appointed representation of a multifaceted
movement, and for unduly radicalizing its demands and making its success
contingent on foreign (aka military) interventions. On exactly the oppo-
site side of Mohsen Makhmalbaf stood Abbas Kiarostami, another globally
celebrated filmmaker. While Makhmalbaf seemed to do too much and too
early for the Green Movement, Abbas Kiarostami appeared to do too little
and too late. While his nation was pouring into streets in their millions,
facing vicious violence unleashed by the Islamic Republic, Kiarostami
stood aloof from it all and even went so far as publicly admonishing one of
his protgs, the Kurdish-Iranian filmmaker Bahman Qobadi, for his open
and candid advocacy of the Green Movement.
In between Makhmalbafs rash and temperamental politics and
Kiarostamis cool and calculated distance from the collective fate of his
people stood one Jafar Panahi who steadily, consistently, and with grace
and tenacity supported his people in time of their dire needs. In every
international film festival that he appeared as a member of the jury, Panahi
donned a green scarf, searched and found enthusiastic Iranians among
the well-wishing crowds, went to them and took pictures with them in
solidarity, and soon after his festivals were done he rushed back home to
Iran to be with his people. This was no accident. Panahis cinema, over
the preceding two decades, had been a chronicle of his peoples struggle
for civil liberties.
Early in March 2010, Jafar Panahi and a whole group of his friends and
family were arrested and jailed in Iran, many of them released soon after,
while he and another filmmaker friend, Mohammad Rasoulof, were kept
112 H. DABASHI
behind bars. Abbas Kiarostami finally came out and publically asked for
Panahis release, while at the same time distancing himself from Panahis
cinema, which he characterized as radical and sensational. This was at a
time that Makhmalbaf had altogether abandoned his cinema and was meet-
ing with American and European politicians to fine-tune the exact sort of
sanctions that he thought should be applied to Iran, indiscriminately asso-
ciating himself with expatriate powerbrokers of Ahmad Chalabi sort who
cared very little for their homeland and a lot for their own political careers.
Neither life nor art though is as black and white as this may suggest.
Life is color, as a famous phrase has it in one of Makhmalbafs sig-
nature films, Gabbeh (1996). Abbas Kiarostami is not as conserva-
tive or apolitical a filmmaker as he projects himself to be. The scripts of
some of the most politically powerful films of Jafar Panahi, like Crimson
Gold (2003), have actually been written by his mentor Kiarostami. At
the same time, the high halls of power and politics are entirely alien sites
for Mohsen Makhmalbaf, as is his recent acquaintances with comprador
intellectuals, native informers, and neocon venues. After suffering four
and a half years of jail and torture under the Pahlavi regime, Makhmalbaf
emerged as one of the most widely loved and admired filmmakers of his
people, before he and his family abandoned their homeland altogether and
devoted their lives and art to the plight of Afghan children, making films
or else building schools and hospitals for them. The vagaries of politics
caught up with Makhmalbaf later when he traveled to Israel in a moment
of self-delusional grandstanding to express his opposition to the Islamic
Republic, as Panahi ill-advisedly defied the official ban on his filmmaking,
made a few entirely forgettable films like This is not a Film (2011) and
sent it clandestine to Berlinale.
No one could or should ever tell an artist what to donor should art-
ists ever be so tested in public for their politics. The time that the politics
of a peoples despair dictates to their artists the terms of their public per-
sona or a fortiori their artistic creativity is the time of a catastrophic night-
mare. Filmmakers are not freedom fighters, and where they stand when
their nations mettle is tested is their choiceand whatever their choice
be, it will have no bearing on their art and the aesthetic reason the body
of that art entails. Makhmalbaf, Kiarostami, and Panahi are among the
most cherished and precious national treasures of their people, whatever
their politics might be. Be that as it is, each one of these three filmmakers
is today where the history and their people will always remember them
mostand that too has the logic of its own historical inevitability: Before
AN AESTHETIC REASON 113
his untimely death on 4 July 2016, Kiarostami was enjoying his freedom
in Iran and free meanwhile to travel anywhere he wanted. Makhmalbaf is
wasting his precious time lobbying European and American politicians, for
he does not know exactly what. Panahi is restricted in his freedom facing
the massive judicial injustices of the Islamic Republic, dearer and more
beloved than ever to a people in the most traumatic and fragile moment of
their fears and aspirations. These are the public personae of three master
craftsmen in doing what they do when they do it best: imagining the oth-
erwise. Artists are caught in something of an epileptic seizure when they
create. They can neither anticipate the seizure, nor do they remember it
when they have recovered from it. We mortals, on the other hand, must
remember them only when they are caught in that epileptic seizure, for
that is when they are speaking to us with an aesthetic reason that escapes
them when they have recovered.
occupation of Palestine and the Palestinian Intifada face each other in the
real battlefield of history and the filmmaker fails to hit a mimetic moment
to register let alone transcend it. But in another work of Hany Abu Assad,
Ford Transit (2002), the creative cross-metaphorization of a young
Palestinian cab driver at an Israeli military checkpoint in his homeland
and a rap by Dr. Dre manages to lend nobility to one and potency to
the other. The miasmatic crossbreeding between fact and fantasy on this
particular cinematic site always walks on a treacherous edge between com-
peting politics that can read it in one or exactly the opposite way. In the
case of Siddiq Barmaks Osama (2003), this dilemma gets completely
bogged down in the politics of space in which it is screened, revealing the
shifting contexts in which cinema as work of art are received. Addressing
the atrocities of the Taliban in Afghanistan in a relentlessly emotional
and realistic way, Osama could very well be abused in the propaganda
machinery of War on Terror to justify the US-led invasion of Afghanistan.
Here the filmmaker is caught in a double-bind where he is damned if he
does and damned if he does not address the calamities of a brutal fanati-
cism that has taken over his homeland.
These emerging and shifting sites of cinema that designate and dis-
mantle any reading of a film at one and the same time posits a herme-
neutic alterity that must learn how to dodge political abuse of one sort or
another. This unstable hermeneutics, reminiscent of what Gianni Vatimo
calls il pensiero debole/weak thought, inevitably casts filmmakers in politi-
cal framings in and out of their control, as the three cases of Kiarostami,
Panahi, and Makhmalbaf shows in the course of the Green Movement.
These three examplesone apolitical, the other too political, while the
third is transformed into the cinematic site of the Green Movement pre-
cisely at the moment when he could no longer make film. Two filmmakers
go into opposite directions by factor beyond their own cinematic control,
and the third emerges as the cinematic site of moral resistance to corrupt
theocracy positing his cinema as the simulacrum of the sacred.
What does it exactly mean for a filmmaker to become, to emerge, as
the filmmaker of a social uprising precisely at the moment when he can
no longer make any film? The incarceration of Panahi for a film that he
had not yet made turned him into a present absentee (mostly repre-
sented by an empty chair in film festivals) in his own profession. This
has extraordinary implications for the very notion of Vocation/Beruf in
the lifework of a filmmaker who can no longer make film except in his
own mind. I recently saw a cartoon depicting Panahi sitting in a cell in
116 H. DABASHI
solitary confinement projecting a film onto the wall. In other words, the
collective will of people continues to make films for him in his absentia.
When we look at the cartoon of Jafar Panahi sitting inside a cell watching
an imaginary film projected on its wall, we may yet again wonder where
exactly is the site of cinema when a globally celebrated filmmaker is
arrested and incarcerated for a film that he has not even made, harassed,
and barred from filmmaking for a film that he was merely imagining in
his cell. So where is the site of cinema? Cannes, Berlin, an empty chair in
a jury, the NewYork Film Festival, movie theaters, DVDs, Netflix, Pirate
Bay, YouTube? Where?
From censured mind of the filmmaker to the miasmatic disposition of
facts and fantasies that come together to conjugate the tropics of a differ-
ent cine-aesthetics we are now on the allegorical domains of a cinema that
posits and places its own site-specific location of where it is that cinema is
taking place, and how it is that posits its aesthetic reason. The new mix-
ture of animation and documentary. Ali Samadi Ahadis Green Wave
(2010) opts for altogether bracketing and bypassing visual reality and plac-
ing it between animation and documentary. As best evident in this fea-
ture-length film, reality has become amorphous, representation nebulous,
site of cinema tenuouswhich in fact leads us back to Walter Benjamins
theorization of allegory early in the twentieth century. Walter Benjamins
Trauerspiel/The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1927), which was predi-
cated on his fragmentary work on Baudelaire, posits allegory as positioned
on an apprehension of the world as no longer permanent, as passing out
of being: a sense of its transitoriness, an intimation of mortality, or a convic-
tion that this world is not conclusion The form that such an experi-
ence of the world takes is fragmentary and enigmatic; in it the world ceases
to be purely physical and becomes an aggregation of signs. According to
Benjamin, transforming things into signs is both what allegory does
its techniqueand what it is aboutits content.14 The privation of the
physical world implied in this transformation of things into signs makes the
lines between facts and fantasies entirely porous. What Benjamin suggests
here has an uncanny resonance in the Iranian context where this sense of
allegory can be traced back at least to the Arabic and Persian allegories of
Avicenna (9801037) and Shahab al-Din Yahya Suhrawardi (11551191)
that the French Orientalist philosopher Henry Corbin in fact translated
as visionary recitals, referring to what the medieval philosophers called
Alam al-mithal or Mundus Imaginalis. This fertile ground is where the
aesthetic reason finds its immaterial, allegorical power.
AN AESTHETIC REASON 117
it to ban him from making any film for 20 years, or from writing any script,
or attending any film festival outside his country, or giving any interview
to any journal or magazine, published in or out of his homeland? Jafar
Panahi was 50 years old at the time of this sentenceat the top of his
creative crescendo as a leading filmmaker, loved and admired around the
globe. Banning him from filmmaking for 20 years is worse than a death
sentence for a consummate artista man who was born to make movies,
to create, to imagine, to picture a vision of his people other, different,
better, freer, happier than what they are. In 20 years, judging from his
record so far, Panahi will have made 10, maybe 15 films. That would be
10 to15 more shining stars of hope lighting the path of a people through
their dark night of tyranny. Could this sentence, could the whole injustice
of the judiciary system of an oxymoronic thing called Islamic Republic
really prevent Panahi from making any more films?
Six years prison term and effectively a lifetime without permission to
create issued against a filmmaker whose mind is flooded with movies yet
to be made is worse than blowing up the Buddha statues of Bamiyan
in Afghanistan. Who are these peoplerunning a theocracy? What are
they thinking? They are worse than the Talibanthe sworn enemies of
anything sublime and beautiful, the shadowy bandits that masquerade as
a state and thus expose all other states as brute usurpers of power. The
Taliban blew up those works of art and piety that the world had already
seen, loved, admired, revered for millennia. These custodians of fear and
fanaticism did worsethey have forbidden the world to see what was yet
to be created, the measures of their sublimity and beauty yet to be assayed.
They have killed not just an artists uncharted creativity, the sinews of his
hidden and unmeasured treasuresthey have killed his unborn audiences,
aborted them, blighted the revelations the world might have seen of itself
in the mirror of a visionary recitalist of that which speaks to our better,
happier, more hopeful angels. A state thus loses legitimacy with the same
algorithm that the nation is taking momentum toward its own fulfillments.
As a filmmaker, Jafar Panahi is integral to a generation of Iranian film-
makers who came to fruition in the thick and heavy shadow of their demi-
god eldersgiants like Bahram Beizai, Amir Naderi, Nasser Taghva'i,
Abbas Kiarostami, Dariush Mehrjui, and Mohsen Makhmalbaf. It took
courage and imaginationit took guts and gloryto stand up in those
shadows and shine for the whole world to see. Panahi in particular has
pushed the boundaries of filmmaking not just in his homeland but around
the globe to piercing dimensions. For 20 years banning him from mak-
AN AESTHETIC REASON 119
ing any film is Kafkaesque in the depth of its unfathomable cruelty. The
sentence is far more than a mere banality in a judicial system that has all
its naked military and political claws out. This is the damning of an entire
art, the vengeance visited upon an entire peoplethe murdering of their
very urge to create, their will to beauty and truth. Panahis career as a film-
maker began as a protg of Abbas Kiarostami and soon assumed a distinct
character of its own, increasingly fusing two converging aspectsformal
and thematicthat became his cinematic signature: technical virtuosity
in his cinematic imagination and social consciousness that graced his aes-
thetic formalism. For the first reason, the blind custodians of the sacred
terror fear him instinctively, for the second, they dread him politically.
Thus, and there is the rub, the more the state fears him the brighter he
dwells in the national consciousness of his people.
Although Panahis cinematic career began in the mid-1980s, it was
with The White Balloon/Badkonak-e Sefid (1995) that he emerged
as a major force in the Iranian New Wave. Soon after that, his Mirror/
Ayeneh (1997) established him as a globally acclaimed cinematic vision-
ary with his distinct signature. But it was with The Circle/Dayereh
(2000), an absolute masterpiece of his signature formal virtuosity and
social cinema, that the world noticed that Panahi was up to something
entirely distinct from what was now categorically characterized as Iranian
Cinema. With Crimson Gold/Tala-ye Sorkh (2003), premiered at
Cannes, Panahi was standing tall next to his elders and gazing even beyond
their vision. He grew taller with each film, seeing farther, sensing fiercer,
commanding his camera with flair and force. When he made his Offside
(2006), about the obscenity of not allowing women into soccer stadium,
every shot was electrified with the damning power of a master craftsman
holding his peoples hopes high. Now everyone understood. He was the
dream of Terry Malloy come true. He had class. He was a contender. He
had inherited the rich and empowering cinema of a nation, carrying it for-
ward, signing his name for its signature. He had a reason to his rhetoric:
an aesthetic reason.
It is precisely that cinema that the Islamic Republic fears most. Look
at those luminaries of Iranian cinema who have been forced to leave
their homeland over the lifetime of this regime: Amir Naderi, Bahman
Farmanara, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Marziyeh Meshkini, Bahman Qobadi,
Samira Makhmalbaf, Susan Taslimi, Parviz Sayyad, Reza Allameh Zadeh.
The list is endless. Those who have remained inside and continue to work
are subject to systematic and debilitating harassments, like Bahram Beizai,
120 H. DABASHI
the legendary doyen of Iranian cinema, who too was finally forced to leave
his homeland. There are no apolitical filmmakers in this context. Even
the evidently most politically innocuous filmmakers like Abbas Kiarostami
have used Jafar Panahi as their alter ego, for Kiarostami has written the
script for some of the most politically poignant films of Panahi. What mat-
ters most is the synergetic fact of these filmmakers, wherever they happen
to stand behind a camera and say action! That synergy has been long in
the making of an aesthetic intuition of transcendence that no state, least of
all an Islamic Republic, can curtail, censor, or corrupt.
This brutal sentencing of Panahi is not an isolated incident. It comes
after 30 years of systematic brutalization and distortion of a cosmopolitan
culture to cut it down to a size that best serves an oxymoronic fabrication
called an Islamic Republic. Appalling university purges, repeated cul-
tural revolutions, mass executions, and blind censorship of the arts have
been the common staple of this regime. Today leading Islamist revolu-
tionaries, many of them in jail or in exile, are coming forward and pub-
licly apologizing for what they have done in bringing this calamity upon
their own peopleand not a moment too soon. For over 30 years, this
regime has been in the business of either silencing or forcing into exile
those it finds incompatible with its fanatical fantasies of Iran as a cul-
ture and Iranians as people. Leading novelists like Shahrnoush Parsipour,
Moniru Ravanipour, and Shahryar Mandanipour are all forced out of
their homeland into the indignity of exile. Filmmakers and novelists like
Ebrahim Golestan, literary critics like Reza Barahani, poets like Esmail
Khoi, artists like Nicky Nodjoumi and Shirin Neshat, satirist like Hadi
Khorsandi, scholars like Mashallah Adjoudani or Hossein Bashirieh, wom-
ens rights activists like Mehrangiz Kar, Mahboubeh Abbasqolizadeh, or
Parvin Ardalan, Nobel Laureates like Shirin Ebadi, among millions of
other ordinary and innocent people have left their homeland never to
return. Philosophers like Abdolkarim Soroush, theologians like Mohsen
Kadivar, investigative journalists like Akbar Ganjiall of them in fact at
some point leading the aggressive Islamization of the 19771979 revolu-
tion are ejected from their natural habitat and forced into exile. This is
a futile attempt at a slow and torturous murdering of the creative soul
of a nation. Great filmmakers like Sohrab Shahid Sales, dramatists like
Gholam Hossein Saedi, poets like Nader Naderpour, cartoonists like
Ardeshir Mohassess died a bitter and angry death away from their home-
land. Some of those who could not stand exile and stayed in their home-
land, like Ahmad Shamlou or Houshang Golshiri, died a long, lonely,
AN AESTHETIC REASON 121
and torturous death under ungodly censorship. No one knows how many
leading intellectuals, scholars, and political activists were cold-bloodedly
murdered during the so-called serial murders of the 1990s by agents of
the Ministry of Intelligence. The world today sees Jafar Panahibut what
a calamitous iceberg is hiding beneath the muddy waters of the Islamic
Republic! The Islamic Republic is the death knell of the very idea of the
state, as it has sat callously at the top of a nation finding ever so organi-
cally the whereabouts of its historical reality beyond the limited intelli-
gence of a state that falsely claims it.
Years ago in the course of a European film festival, a leading Iranian
filmmaker told me that after the revolution those who had brain left
Iran and those who had heart were killed during the IranIraq war of
19801988. Iran is a heartless and brain-dead body, he exclaimed.
That filmmaker himself and the indomitable spirit of other filmmakers,
poets, novelists, photographers, visual and performing artists, journalists,
scholars, and human rights activists are the best evidence that what that
filmmaker said was not true. But there remains a bitter and angry con-
demnation of a brute and brutal state that forces the best of a people
either into the brutalities of its dungeons or else into the indignity of exile.
Today the mind and heart of a whole nation are alive and well in the body
and moral fortitude of each and every one of its artists imagining privately
the public dreams of their nation. The art that they will not produce are
already being scripted by their offspringfree and flying.
NOTES
1. Christoph Menke, The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno
and Derrida (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988/1999): 3.
2. I have studied this historic bifurcation under colonial duress in some
detail in my Shiism: A Religion of Protest (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2011). See Chapters Seven and Eight.
3. Menke, The Sovereignty of Art: vii.
4. I have studied this aspect of multiple realisms in Iranian cinema in
detail in my Masters and Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema (Washington,
DC: Mage Publishers, 2006).
5. Menke, The Sovereignty of Art: xiii.
6. I have dealt with this renewed worldliness in my Being a Muslim in the
World (New York: Palgrave, 2013).
7. As I have sought to do in my Shiism: A Religion of Protest (Op. cit).
122 H. DABASHI
Over the last four chapters I have sought to expose the body politics of
the region in critical encounters with its internal dynamics and external
factors in a manner that requires a simultaneous attention to domestic and
regional force fields, and the way in which we need to understand social
uprisings that have now culminated in the formation of an aesthetic rea-
son, which I took the entirety of the last chapter detailing in its multiple
dimensions. Now I wish to turn to Shiism, as inherently a religion of pro-
test that has its own peculiar dynamics of power and rebellion, and which
at once enables and delimits the terms of Iranian politics in transnational
and transregional terms. The formation of an aesthetic reason predicated
on collective historical experiences has retrieved the repressed intuition
of transcendence embedded in Shii doctrinal and emotive history. Here I
turn back to the larger regional context and attend specifically to the sec-
tarian tone of SunniShii rivalries presumed to underline the geopolitics
of the region. I wish to make the entirely counterintuitive proposition that
orthodoxheterodox contestations throughout Islamic history, prior to
Muslim encounter with European colonialism, has in fact been the source
of multiple pluralistic cultures among Muslims and it is, as a result, a delib-
erate distortion by ruling regimes in Iran and Saudi Arabia (or any other
ruling regime) to cast it otherwise. A full grasp of the historical formation
of Shiism is therefore quintessential to our understanding of its geostrate-
gic dimensions in our own time.
Both Sunnis and Shiis have historically been integral to the worldly
context of Muslim empires, from the Umayyads and the Abbasids early in
the Islamic history down to the Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Mughals,
in which the juridical reasoning of the Islamic heritage has been systemati-
cally, consistently, and institutionally challenged by its philosophical and
mystical interpretations. It is only under the European colonial domina-
tion that Muslims have been instrumental in robbing themselves of that
multifarious heritage and turning their own faith into a monolithic total-
ity, and their heterodox effervesce into sectarian conflict. This dominant
sectarianism I will thus submit is entirely a by-product of colonial contes-
tation, when Muslims began aggressively transforming their own worldly
religion into a singular site of ideological contestation against European
imperialism. In other words, what today passes for Sunnism or Shiism
is in fact a complete distortion of Muslim historical experiences and the
continuation of an aggressive degeneration of Islamic worldly pluralism
under colonial duress. This chapter will therefore work toward the articu-
lation of an Islamic worldliness that embraces both Sunnism and Shiism
and is today in dire need of a renewed articulation.
DOCTRINE
While mapping out the contours of the early Shii political history in my
book Shiism: A Religion of Protest (2011), I sought to provide a sustained
course of arguments laying out the doctrinal foundations of Shiism in
the nascent spectrum of its emergence as a charismatic community of
believersgathered together via a political, doctrinal, and ritual remem-
brance of their founding figure (Prophet Muhammad) and martyred sons
(Ali and Hossein). Around three revolutionary characters definitive to the
Shii universe of sacred imaginationMuhammad, Ali, and HosseinI
devised three concentric lenses through which we could look at the rest
of Shii political and intellectual history and make sense of it.1
Central to my argument in that book is the formation of a delayed and
deferred defiance as the conditio sine qua non of Shiism, which I have
characterized as a charismatic community thriving through an enabling
paradox, whereby the religion of protest remains legitimate only so far as
it is combatant and assumes a warring posture against actual, perceived,
or manufactured injustice, and the instance that it is victorious, it loses its
moral grounds. I came up with the idea of deferred defiance by revers-
ing the Freudian notion of deferred obedience in the aftermath of the
murder of the father figure, which in the case of Shiism amounts to the
murder of the son figure (Imam Hossein). I also sought to demonstrate
SHIISM AT LARGE 125
the specific manners in which the central trauma of Shiis goes through
successive sublation and via its Karbala Complex remains in a perma-
nent state of mimetic suspension, waiting for and morphing its defining
trauma into multiple parables. Predicated on a traumatic birth and the
paradoxical constitution of a delayed and deferred defiance, conditioned by
mourning a martyred son, Shiism was born as the charismatic continuity
of a prophetic mission in which the two figures of Prophet Muhammad
and Imam Ali became metamorphic. The central trauma of Shiism then
went through a Hegelian Aufgehoben and expanded into a worldly cosmo-
politanism far beyond its immediate metaphysical vicinity, and thus giving
birth to a Karbala Complex in which multiple parables of revolt become
metamorphic and amorphous.
I laid out these basic arguments so that the rest of the story of Shiism
will make not just historical and theoretical sense, but far more impor-
tantly narrative, dramatic, and performative sense. My primary here was to
provide a picture of Shiism that is worldly and universalizing, combative
and principled, normative and emotive, and above all located within a
larger and multiple cosmopolitan set of cultures and climes that it has both
enriched and embraced, at one and the same time. The reason for doing so
is that ever since the events of 9/11 and the subsequent US-led invasion
of Iraq, and with the Shii aspects of such neighboring countries as Iran
and Lebanon, Shiism has been categorically stripped of its worldly and
cosmopolitan character and made into a solitary sectarian creed devoid of
normative life and worldly disposition. This image of Shiism, now para-
mount in the mind of any educated person concerned with our planetary
fate, does not quite tally with the manners and modes of Shii history and
the various ways in which its doctrinal foundations have been formed.
I have sought to give a far more full-bodied picture of Shiism, at once
rooted in the medieval moments central to its traumatic recollections
and yet conversant with a wider and far more cosmopolitan universe. By
reading through the words and deeds of Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries
like Khosrow Golsorkhi, or iconoclastic poets like Forough Farrokhzad
and Ahmad Shamlou, or national heroes like Gholamreza Takhti, and by
expanding the thematic variations of Shiism in pre-Islamic sources like the
epic heroes of Shahnameh, I tried to break loose of a persistent reading of
Shiism into its exclusively juridical limitations.
My account of these formative foundations of Shiism is perforce in
doctrinal and theoretical terms, which need to be made more nuanced
by way of specific historical events and through the lives and thoughts of
126 H. DABASHI
HISTORY
In a peculiar way, the history of Shiism has always been a history of the
present and not a history of the past. Shiis remember and reenact their
history in a theater of perception in which there seems to be no difference
between reality and representation, past and presentthe future always
contingent on that insoluble dialectic. Poet-philosophers like Nasser
Khosrow, groundbreaking theologian-philosophers like Mulla Sadra, and
revolutionary activists like Tahereh Qorrat al-Ayn are three kindred Shii
souls in search of a common, illusive, and illusively productive, dreamin
which time is contracted, space metamorphic. These thinkers and revo-
lutionaries have walked the ways and byways through which the foun-
dational doctrines of Shiism have acted out in history. What exactly led
the Shiis into battlefields challenging the authority and power of kings,
caliphs, and world conquerors, and conversely when were those dubious
moments when the Shiis were in the company of these kings, caliphs, and
world conquerors?
My guiding proposition throughout these reflections has been the
defining paradox of Shiism that it cannot be in power without ipso facto
rendering that very power illegitimate. The revolt of Imam Hossein in 688
against Yazid ibn Muawiyah has thus remained central to the daunted
Shii collective memory. From the death and defeat of Imam Hossein
soon emerged the Kaysaniyyah revolutionary uprising to revenge his mur-
der and give a defining cause to those disenfranchised by the Umayyad
dynasty. The quietude of the fourth Shii Imam Zayn al-Abidin is then fol-
lowed by revolt of his son Zayd ibn Ali and the Zaydiyah movement that
SHIISM AT LARGE 127
he initiated. Soon after the apolitical phase of the sixth Shii Imam, Jafar
al-Sadiq, the Ismaili movement recaptures the original rebellious disposi-
tion of Shiism. As soon as the Fatimid branch of Ismailism succeeds in
establishing a Shii dynasty in Egypt, Syria, and Palestine (9091171),
the Qaramita carry the more rebellious disposition of the religion to
its revolutionary conclusions. The Ismailis, as the best case in point,
remained a revolutionary and legitimate cause so far as they were combat-
ive and engaged in the battlefield of ideas and warfare. The instant that
the Fatimids become a dynastic empire the gift of grace (charisma) had
fled and abandoned them and gone to Hamdan Qarmat and the Qaramita
movement. When within the Fatimid dynasty the court-based Mustali
line sought to perpetuate the dynastic imperialism of the Fatimids, the fer-
tile social and political grounds opted for the Nizari alternative and moved
on with its revolutionary character. When the Mustali Fatimids and the
exhausted Qaramita had nothing to say to or to do with real historical
circumstance, Hassan Sabbah carried the Nizari revolutionary appeal to
the heartland of the Seljuqids. This is, as I have suggested, a permanently
deferred defiance of a son-religion writ doctrinally and historically large.
For as soon as a palace coup seeks to perpetuate illegitimate Fatimid rule
into the Mustali line, suddenly a revolutionary Nizari line emerges from
the bosom of the Fatimid and gives power, authority, legitimacy, and
momentum to a master revolutionary leader like Hassan Sabbah, who in
the scattered fortresses of Alamut, Quhistan, Gerdkuh, and other places
keeps the revolutionary zeal of Shiism alive.
The same line of dialectic holds true when the Mongol invasion happens
in the thirteenth century and the Sarbedaran uprising emerge in revolt, or
when Tamerlane conquers the Muslim world and the Hurufiyyah move-
ment does the same and appeals to a wide range of urban and merchant
classes as well as the impoverished peasantry, or when finally the Safavids
succeed in establishing a massive imperial project in the sixteenth century
that brought the legacy of the Buyids and the Fatimids together with that
of the Sassanids to establish a widespread Shii empire. The combined
forces of Shiism and Sufism that commenced to sustain the Safavid legiti-
macy in time created its own revolutionary shadows in such uprisings as
the Nuqtaviyyah and the Mushashaah. A similar scenario was repeated
when the Qajars came to power and demanded and exacted Shii legiti-
macy, and yet again from the bosom of Shiism, just like the Qaramita out
of the Fatimids (or as Khwaja Nizam al-Mulk would say like Mazdakism
out of Zoroastrian complacency with the Sassanid empire), emerged the
128 H. DABASHI
Babi Movement that shook the Qajar dynasty to its foundations. The rev-
olutionary urge of Shiism then in turn abandoned the Babi Movement
the instant it dissipated into the vacuous universalism of Bahais. By then
the grace and glory of revolutionary Shiism as a religion of perpetual
protest had fled Bahaism and sought refuge in the rebellious souls of such
pioneering intellectuals of the Constitutional Revolution (19061911) as
Mirza Agha Khan Kermani, Shaykh Ahmad Ruhi, and Khabir al-Mulk,
as they were helping prepare their nation for yet another massive social
uprising.
Predicated on that tumultuous history, my most important conclu-
sion here is to propose the factual evidence of the formation of a public
reason on the symbolic site of the Meydan-e Naqsh-e Jahan in Isfahan
and the solid space of the major Safavid period philosopher Mulla Sadras
Existentialist philosophy. The singular achievement of the Safavid period, I
argue, is the social and intellectual constitution of a public space and a cor-
responding public reason that had urbanized the revolutionary reason of
Shiism. This public reason was militantly subverted by Nader Shah during
the gathering of Dasht-e Moghan soon after the demise of the Safavids,
but yet again resurrected by the Babi Movement in mid-nineteenth cen-
tury during the Qajar period, wedded to its own revolutionary reason, and
then exponentially expanded through Tahereh Qorrat al-Ayns infusion of
the public figure of the feminine into the blinded masculinist disposition
of that public space. That public reason, thus expanded and fortified, was
yet again diffused and dismantled in the aftermath of the Babi Movement
in the form of the cultic communalism (Gemeinschaft) of Bahaism, but
by then it had already escaped that fate and sublated into the histori-
cal expanse of the public space (Gesellschaft) on which the Constitutional
Revolution of 19061911 was about to take place.
This simple but overriding fact about Shiism has been by and large
hidden under such alienating gazes that insist on de-historicizing the Shii
(and by extension Sunni) social and intellectual legacies. The detailed sense
of history that I have sought to interject into my narrative of Shiism is a
decidedly conscious intervention to counter its aggressive interpolation
into an ahistorical spiritualism that flies in the face of history, distorts
a peoples lived experiences, and splits the Islamic moral universe into a
militant adventurism on one side and a vacuous spirituality (whatever
that is supposed to mean) on the other. The learned French philosopher
Christian Jambet, who has an abiding interest in Shii philosophy and is a
good case in point, believes (writing on Mulla Sadra) that philosophy has
SHIISM AT LARGE 129
no history,2 and that there is a distinctly spiritual Islam that has today
been run over by political Islama spiritual Islam whose death knell
was rung during the Islamic revolution in Iran.3 The problem with such
Manichean encounters with Islamic social and intellectual history dwells
precisely in such false and falsifying binary suppositions, separating the
good Muslim philosophers from the bad Muslim revolutionaries (whether
we agree or disagree with their revolutions). The reality is somewhere
in between (Manzilatun bayn al-Munzilatayn/A Station between the Two
Stations, as the Shii position would have it on the thorny theological bifur-
cation between Free Will and Predestination). If we reduce, as Christian
Jambet does, Mulla Sadra and the Shii philosophical imagination that sus-
tained him and generations of Muslim philosophers after him to a shape-
less metaphysical monolith, to a spirituality, then the thing we call Islam
or Shiism is reduced to nothing but Islamist terrorism.
Mulla Sadra was integral to his age and to a Shii philosophical cosmo-
politanism that at once transcended and embraced him. To be properly
understood, Mulla Sadra will have to be placed within the larger imperial
cosmopolitanism of a Shiism that from the Buyids to the Fatimids to the
Safavids has transmuted its repressed universalism to a creative moral imag-
ination that wants to bring the world down to pieces in order to rebuild it
anew. Mulla Sadras philosophy is reflective of that imperial audacity and
cosmopolitan urbanity that ultimately crafted a Shii empire in the form
of the Safavids. The sort of scholarship that from Henry Corbin through
Seyyed Hossein Nasr down to Christian Jambet has been offered Shiism
cannot accommodate that cosmopolitan urbanity when it insists on strip-
ping Shii intellectual effervescence of its historical character and social
context.
Much is made, for example, of the period of solitude that Mulla Sadra
spent in Kahak, near Qom, years after he had spent in the cosmopolitan
capital of the Safavids Isfahan as a philosophy student, and before he was
invited to go back to Shiraz and teach. The figure of a lonely Muslim phi-
losopher in the outback of a remote village in the middle of the Iranian
desert very much appeals to certain brand of Orientalist fantasies. But
if Mulla Sadra spent a short portion of his life in solitude in Kahak to
compose himself and write, he was not entirely alone therehe may have
been in solitude, but he was not lonely: From the cosmopolitan universal-
ism of the Buyids and the Fatimids, transmuted into Nasser Khosrows
Neo-Platonism, to the distant echoes of Islamic Spain and North Africa
that was summoned in the philosophy of Averroes and the mysticism of
130 H. DABASHI
Ibn Arabi, to the vast imaginative geography of the known and unknown
universes as mapped out in Suhrawardis Illuminationist philosophy, to the
world-conquering audacity of the Mongol invasion that was summoned
in the scientific and philosophical universalism of Khwajah Nasir al-Din
Tusi, all the way to the cosmopolitan urbanism of the Safavids that was
expressed in the School of Isfahan and in which Mulla Sadra was trained
for years in that Shii capital were all with him, present in his mind, and
evident in his philosophy. Meydan-e Naqsh-e Jahan/The Image of the World
Square, the massive public space that Mulla Sadra saw with his own eyes
being built when he was a student of philosophy in Isfahan, was on Mulla
Sadras mind when he was in that remote village in the middle of Iranian
desertin fact imagining and remembering it far more vividly and com-
pellingly than it actually was.
Failing to recognize the cosmopolitan imaginary operative in the mind
of philosophers like Mulla Sadra means that from Corbin to Jambet we
are witness to generations of philosophical Lawrences of Arabia wandering
in the Oriental deserts of their own imagination in search of metaphysi-
cal absolutes, and more often than not, as General Allenby suspected of
T.E.Lawrence, going native. Stripping any philosophy of its history is
the first step in treating Oriental philosophy like a dead body, a cadaver,
a corpse, laid on a table in a morgue or laboratory for dissecting and
necropsy. There is no other way to come to terms with the particulars
of Islamic philosophy except first and foremost treating it like a living
organism, for that is what it is, and then trying to understand the emo-
tive, social, intellectual, epistemic, and ontological history that has made it
live and breathewhich in the case of Mulla Sadra means understanding
the imperial cosmopolitanism of the Safavid era that combined and came
to fruition with the metaphysical return of the Shii normative repressed.
In perpetual search of an Oriental Light, French Orientalist philosophers
from Corbin or Jambet have decidedly lost sight of Islamic urbanity and
are imagining a desert from which grows metaphysical cactusescolorful,
shapely, exciting, phallogocentric.
The combined effect of the post-traumatic syndrome of the Mongol
conquest of much of the civilized world from East to West, added to the
return of the Shii repressed finding a wide-ranging spectrum of pub-
lic space to reassert itself in cosmopolitan urbanism, resulted in a mode
of meta-philosophical thinking that Mulla Sadra was its most illustrious
achievement. To know Mulla Sadra and what he did, we must begin with
his teacher Mir Damad (died circa 1632), who was his spiritual father but
SHIISM AT LARGE 131
philosophical alter ego. The proximity of Mir Damad to Shah Abbas I was
reminiscent of the proximity of Nasir al-Din Tusi to Hulegutwo Shii
philosophers with minority complex at the side of an imperial claim to
power. Mir Damad and his colleagues in Isfahan founded and mapped out
the School of Isfahan in a manner that best represented the cosmopolitan
imperialism of the Safavids, but in the process historically defaced it in
order for it to remain Essentialist in ontological character and as such
effectively subservient to the Safavid monarchy. Mulla Sadras philosophy
was hostage to no such royal commitment. His departure from Isfahan for
Kahak was as much to escape the petty jealousies of feudal scholasticism of
the Shii jurists as from the compromising force of the Safavid court on his
parental generation of philosophers, Mir Damad in particular.
What Mulla Sadra carried with him from Isfahan to Kahak was not just
the cosmopolitan urbanism of the Shii capital, but above all the locus clas-
sicus of the public reason that such public spaces as Naqsh-e Jahan Square
best represented, occasioned, and constituted. The physical constitution
of a public space in the form of Naqsh-e Jahan Square marked the com-
mencement of the Kantian public reason in Islamic intellectual history
(entirely independent of what Kant would later articulate) in general and
Islamic philosophy in particular, with Mulla Sadra as the Sir Isaac Newton
(16431727) of Muslim metaphysics, discovering the gravitational uni-
verse and the magnetic field of a philosophical reason that was finally deliv-
ered from its feudal scholasticism and court-based philosophy and placed
the volatile and changing Existence over and above the absolutist and ahis-
torical Essence. Meydan-e Naqsh-e Jahan provided the public domain of
Mulla Sadras philosophical habitat, the constitution of the public reason
with which he attended his metaphysics, the Khalq/People with which he
traversed to and from Haq/Truth/God, and thereby achieved the urban-
ization of the Muslim scholastic reasoning, with the School of Isfahan,
which Mulla Sadra dismantled and re-erected with its right side up, as
an urbane philosophical institution that was the inaugural home of this
movement.
Contrary to the image of Mulla Sadra as an ahistorical and lone phi-
losopher lost in the metaphysical desert of Kahak favored by the French
Orientalist philosophers, he was an entirely worldly philosopher, with an
ontological predilection toward Existentialism. Turning his teacher Mir
Damads Essentialism upside down and putting his own Existentialist phi-
losophy right side up, Mulla Sadra took the School of Isfahan out of the
Safavid court, placed it in the battlefield of Shii revolutionary history, and
132 H. DABASHI
and the other (even closer to the legitimate fears of the Pahlavi court), the
Constitutional Revolution of the early twentieth century, again informed
by such leading intellectuals of the time as Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani that
ultimately succeeded to dismantle the Qajars. Heeding those two crucial
lessons, Seyyed Hossein Nasr saw his services to the Pahlavi monarchy
best articulated in terms of a re-essentialization (what he calls Traditional
Islam, or Sophia Perennis) of Mulla Sadra, in order to dilute his radi-
cal Existentialism and dull the sharp edge of his revolutionary potentials.
The Essentialist disposition of what Seyyed Hossein Nasr code-named
Traditional Islam is the functional equivalent of the Essentialist predi-
lection of Mir Damad and his School of Isfahan at the Safavid court. That
Seyyed Hossein Nasr ultimately lost in this endeavor and the Pahlavis fell
to yet another distant student of Mulla Sadra has very little to do with the
court philosophers capabilities, for he was both institutionally and intel-
lectually well placed to serve the Pahlavi monarchy, than the fact that two
other students of Mulla Sadra, one in a direct intellectual sense and the
other in spirit, one a certain Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the other
a certain Ali Shariati, outmaneuvered both the Pahlavis and their court
philosopher. That the publishing house that the third major revolutionary
ideologue of the Islamic revolution, Morteza Motahhari (19201979),
had founded was called Sadra (in honor of Mulla Sadra) is just one of
those historical coincidences that cries not to be called a coincidence.
The case of the French Orientalist philosophers is of an entirely dif-
ferent vintage. As an Orientalist philosopher, Christian Jambet appears
at the tail end of a prolonged mystification of Islamic philosophy that
began in earnest with Henry Corbin and had a willing and able part-
ner in Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Corbins reasons and causes for this mysti-
fication were domestic to European philosophical scene in the aftermath
of the French Existentialist reception of Martin Heidegger, which left
many mystic-minded French intellectuals like Henry Corbin without a
spiritual home. Corbin was initially deeply interested in and involved
with Heideggers philosophy, but when he discovered Shahab al-Din
Yahya Suhrawardi he left the German father of Existentialist angst to his
French readers of the Sartre and Camus generation, packed his belong-
ing and went to Tehran to read Suhrawardi in peace and turn him into
his own intellectual forefather. Corbin running away from Heideggers
dark night of Being toward an Oriental morning of Suhrawardi has
had an enduring effect on his readers both in Iran and in France. In post
9/11 syndrome, Christian Jambet is seeking (yet again) to wed Mulla
136 H. DABASHI
bury its (potential and evident) public reasonso much so that effectively
with the Safavids also ended the possibility of a Shii state apparatus with a
corresponding conception of a civil society.
This argument is predicated on the idea that the Safavids had in effect
internalized the revolutionary angst of Shiism, and in turn given space to
a nascent public reason that would have made a civil societal turn in Shii
political culture not just possible but perhaps even inevitable. Economic
prosperity, increased volumes in foreign trade, participation in regional
rivalries among the superpowers of the time, and a significant increase
in urbanization might be considered chief among the reasons and causes
for such a significant transformation from revolutionary reason to public
reason. After Nader Shah put an end to that process, we effectively dis-
continue with a sustained Shii theory of state and a corresponding con-
ception of civil society. Thus, in the post-Safavid era, from the Afsharids
(17361796) to the Zands (17501794) to the Qajars (17891925),
what we in effect have is a succession of tribal warlords and clannish kin-
ships, with an increasingly evident appeal to pre-Islamic conception of
Persian kingship to camouflage that nomadic disposition.
The territorial expansionism of the surrounding areas was of course of
crucial significance here. As the Afghans, the Russian, and the Ottomans
kept attacking the dying body of the Safavids, tearing it to pieces, Nader
Shah managed to save the territorial integrity of the country and through
militarism, warfare, clannish kingship, and even territorial expansionism
of his own retrieved a sense of geographical totality for the country. But
from Naders interlude emerged a clannish kingship of the tribal war-
lords that through the Afsharids and the Zands ultimately reached the
Qajars at the dawn of European colonial modernity. The Qajars opted
for Shiism as their state religion but remained subservient to the Shii
clerical whim to legitimize their precarious authority. In this context,
the Babi Movement of the mid-nineteenth century was infinitely more
important for future than both the Qajar monarchs and their clerical
cohorts. The Babi Movement was crucial because it effectively picked up
from where the Hurufiyyah movement, and its urbanized and cosmopol-
itan version in the School of Isfahan, and Mulla Sadra had left offthe
making of a public reason in yet again another revolutionary field. The
Babis took the public reason of the Safavids, which they had inherited
from Mulla Sadra through Shaykh Ahmad Ahsai, back to revolutionary
field, while Mulla Sadra had brought it from the revolutionary field into
the public domain.
138 H. DABASHI
As the Babis further differentiated and expanded the public reason, they
had retrieved from the Safavid period, by taking it back to the revolution-
ary field, particularly through the Qorrat al-Ayn inspired incorporation of
the feminine figure into the public domain, it is possible to see in it the
occasion of the template of a revolutionary modernity that never actually
resulted in what the German philosopher Jrgen Habermas calls societal
modernity. From Shaykhism to Babism and then through the Azalis down
to the Constitutional Revolution of 19061911, we have a consistent
intensification of a Shii conception of Gesellschaft. As Bahaism emerges as
perhaps the best example of a benign universalism, a Gemeinschaft disposi-
tion writ large, a globality of sacred imagination with no significant social
basis to sustain or make it politically relevant to the fate of any particular
nation, the enduring legacy of the Babi Movement abandons it and pro-
ceeds to inform the rise of the Constitutional Revolution of 19061911,
which in turn ups the ante and further exacerbates the formation of the
revolutionary/public reason.
The constitutional drive toward the formation of a sustainable public
domain early in the twentieth century is ultimately crushed under the boots
of Reza Shah, the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty in the 1930s, which is
the early twentieth century version of Nader Shah, a brute military war-
lord who smashed the gradual formation of both public reason and pub-
lic domain. His modern dictatorial monarchy did to the Constitutional
Revolution of 19061911 what Nader Shah did to the similar legacy of
public space and public reason in the Safavid era. The ranking elite of the
Shii clerical establishment was not only not opposed to what Reza Shah
did to that public domain but in fact wholeheartedly endorsed him and
dissuaded him from following the Mustapha Kemal Ataturks example and
establishing a republic on the Turkish model and insisted on a renewal of
a colonially mitigated version of Persian monarchy, in which they knew
they had a confident and cozy corner carved out for themselves. In the
early Pahlavi period, the monarchy and mullarchy resumed their mutu-
ally beneficial relationship developed early in the Qajar period between the
Fath Ali Shahs court and his increasing reliance on the Shii clerical estab-
lishment to help crushing any type of resistance to his tyranny. The Shii
clerical establishment had begun accumulating this power (after they had
lost it under Nader Shah) first by helping Fath Ali Shah mobilize his forces
against the Russian expansionist incursions into Qajar territories early in the
nineteenth century (which were all futile anyway), and then by helping his
descendent Nasser al-Din Shah (18311896) destroy the Babi Movement.
SHIISM AT LARGE 139
AESTHETIC EMANCIPATION
To bring this line of argument to its final conclusion, what I did toward the
end of my book on Shiism is to (1) revisit modern Shii political thought
in particular and map out the contours of its specific narrative transition
form an entrapment in a politics of despair toward agential worldliness and
creativity, (2) demonstrate how the concomitant aesthetic of emancipation
has led to a renewed syncretic cosmopolitanism, and (3) map out the man-
ner in which the emancipated Shii politics has now yielded to a state of
asymmetric warfare in three major sites of contestation in Iran, Iraq, and
Lebanon (with the non-Shii site of Palestine as the catalytic force of this
development). I thereby sought to identify and resolve a paradox that has
historically unfolded in Shiism over the last two centuries. Predicated on
its own internal history of repeated failures at manufacturing a public space
and a contingent public reason, Shiism finally collapsed into a dead cleri-
cal juridicalism and let go of its creative imaginationsettling deeply and
troubled in a politics of despair. Accentuating that despair, in the making
of an alienated aesthetics of emancipation, at once rich in its creative imag-
ination but deprived of a worldly relevance, the revolutionary reason of
Shiism finally bypassed its failed attempts at public reason and reached for
an aesthetic reason. The aesthetic reason that dwelled in this alienated cre-
ativity was the ultimate salvation of that resurrected public reason though
in hidden, distanced, estranged, and alienated forms. It is only on the site
of contemporary asymmetric warfare between nations and their tyrannical
state, and the forced condition of a will to resist power, that Shiism is now
led back to face its alienated split personality and come to terms with it.
A final, full-bodied, re-cognition of its syncretic cosmopolitanism is now
in the offing.
From Afghanistan to Palestine, the Shiism that dwells confidently in
Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon now faces the historic choice of its regional and
global reconfiguration. The USA, Israel, and their Arab and Muslim allies
SHIISM AT LARGE 143
Shiism had achieved a public reason under the Safavids for the entirety of
Islam, through a Shiism that was urbane and cosmopolitan and entirely
non-denominational. Shii clericalism destroyed that cosmopolitan heri-
tage in the course of the nineteenth century. Iranians are who they are
in a significant (but not only) way because of their rich and diversified
engagement in Shii history. This history is embedded in the notion of the
nation that they are. Shiism is a universe, not a sect. Its heterodox dis-
position when placed next to Sunni orthodoxy has enriched that national
history and not conflicted it. Shiism and Shiis do not see themselves as
manifestations of a heterodoxy. The rich and diversified history of Shiism
has enabled a pluralist and cosmopolitan possibility far beyond the current
state appropriation of a selected memory of its origins. The battle between
the ruling regimes in Iran and Saudi Arabia, cast in the false Sunni-Shii
binary, wages two would be regional hegemons at odds with the identical
democratic aspirations of both Sunnis and Shiis.
More than anytime in Shii history it is now imperative to remember how
the dominant juridical disposition of Shiism assumed a decidedly provin-
cial character in part because its Western interlocutor, (European colo-
nialism), was constitutionally provincial and therefore provincialized every
country, clime, or culture that it touched. What today we call Shiism,
or even Islam, is constitutionally a single-sided provincialized abstrac-
tion divorced of its cosmopolitan contexts, by virtue of the provincializing
power of the European colonial modernity wherever it went. All colonial
encounters have by definition been in fact provincial, because the vacuous
globality of the project of Europe modernity conquers and provincializes
the cultures it encounters at one and the same time. It is therefore on the
site of contemporary asymmetric warfare between nations and their tyran-
nical statesShii, Islamic, or otherwiseand the forced condition of a
will to resist power, that Shiism is led back to face its alienated split per-
sonality and resume its cosmopolitan character and culture. A final, full-
bodied, re-cognition of its syncretic cosmopolitanism is now in the offing.
NOTES
1. See Hamid Dabashi, Shiism: A Religion of Protest (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2011).
2. Christian Jambet, The Act of Being: The Philosophy of Revelation in
Mulla Sadra (New York: Zone Books, 2006): 27.
3. Ibid: 10.
SHIISM AT LARGE 145
In the last chapter, I walked you through the labyrinth of the doctrines
and history of Shiism by way of showing how a traumatic split occurred in
the body politics of the faith and its aesthetic formalism parted ways from
the captured imagination of the militant Islamism it flaunted to capture
power from its monarchic rival. It was toward the end of that chapter that
you saw how the aesthetic of intuition could indeed emerge from the cur-
rent history of Shiism precisely at the moment when the nation it informs
stands up to decouple itself from the state that falsely claims it. In my next
move, I wish to show that neither Islam in general nor, in fact, Shiism in
particular is any longer singularly in charge of how Iranians or Muslims
read reality. To demonstrate this proposition I will dwell on a particularly
traumatic moment of the murder of a young Iranian woman, Neda Aqa
Soltan (19832009), in the course of the Green Movement in order to
show how reading that death refuses to yield to any official metanarrative
of revisionist historiographythat the simple sign of a murder persists
through its militant appropriation by both the state and its discredited
opposition. This chapter will begin to shift the focus of my attention from
territorial politics to body politics, and see and suggest the metamorphic
nature of both as they morph into each other. This shift between territory
and body is necessary in order to see the manner in which the formation of
the aesthetic reason overshadows and replaces the postcolonial reason, which
is categorically predicated on the arrest and denial of the erotics of the
body and the playful frivolity of emancipatory politics, its Dionysian pro-
clivity to be even more precise. Here I will return to the domestic scene
but now up the ante and look at the liberating aesthetics of representa-
tion surrounding the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, when the state failed to
control the meaning of what her untimely death meant. In witnessing the
death of Neda Agha-Soltan, we are back to the chaotic sign that signate
and demand an explanation far beyond its forced reading by one faction or
another. Here I will show how unruly signs behave once they are released
from their habitual politics of complicity.
Arash Hejazi, whom we see in the original video clip trying to rescue the
dying woman. Arash Hejazi was far more verbose and talkative about the
incident than any other witness, including Hamid Panahi, the victims
music teacher who was also standing close by and who in fact accompanied
her student to hospitalfor which reason the young physician soon had to
run away from his homeland in order to be able to tell his version of what
had happened without fear of official persecution.2 Gradually two other
video clips surfaced showing the same scene of Nedas death from slightly
different angles. Who the camerapersons behind these mobile phone clips
were is not part of the evidence, which is not anything unusual, for there
were literally hundreds of thousands of such clips produced in the course
of the post-electoral crisis and then anonymously posted on the Internet
and subsequently picked up by BBC, CNN, Aljazeera, and other global
networks.
The death of Neda Agha-Soltan soon became a rallying cry for the
opposition Green Movement and a nasty thorn in the side of the ruling
regime. In his account, consistent with the video evidence the world had
seen, Arash Hejazi reported how he initially heard a gunshot, and then
he saw Neda Agha-Soltan bleeding in shock, and then falling down. He
rushed toward her and tried to save the young woman, but to no avail.
Neda Agha-Soltan is then hurried to the hospital accompanied by her
music teacher Hamid Panahi. Hejazi then reported that soon after Neda
Agha-Soltan was driven to the hospital, he witnessed a member of the
Basij militia named Abbas Kargar Javid being surrounded by people, as he
was shouting that he did not mean to kill her (Neda Agha-Soltan). In one
of the video clips we actually get a glimpse of Abbas Kargar Javid. People,
not knowing what to do with him, take away his Basij ID and let him go.3
The reaction of various organs and officials of the Islamic Republic was
entirely predictable and all predicated on their penchant for conspiracy
theories. This whole incident, they insisted, was a plot by the CIA, the
BBC, and the CNN to defame the Islamic Republic and thus pave the
way for a velvet revolution. One of the earliest reactions to the incident,
based on these conspiracy theories and organized by the officially orga-
nized Basiji students, was a pantomime performance in front of the British
Embassy in Tehran in which we see Neda Agha-Soltan conspiring with
two accomplices, the young physician Arash Hejazi and her music teacher
Hamid Panahi, to fake her own death. The theory suggests that Neda
Agha-Soltan and her accomplices faked her death for the benefit of the
camera and then got into the car evidently on its way to the hospital,
150 H. DABASHI
where the accomplices actually killed Neda, who was not party to that part
of the plot, that she will be actually killed. Based on this scenario, arrest
warrant was in fact issued for Arash Hejazi, in particular who had now run
away from the country and was speaking widely from his perspective of
the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan, by the officials of the Islamic Republic.
Along the same lines and putting forward the same conspiracy the-
ory, the Islamic Republic ambassador to Mexico, Mohammad Hassan
Ghadiri, suggested in an interview on 25 June 2009 that the CIA had
been involved in Neda Agha-Soltans death, and that the bullet used in
the murder was not even made in Iran. On 26 June, Ahmad Khatami,
a pro-government cleric in the course of a Friday prayer attributed the
murder of Neda Agha-Soltan to the demonstrators themselves in order
to give the Islamic Republic a bad name. By 30 June, the chief of police,
brigadier general Ahmadi-Moghadam, was out telling the press that they
had filed a warrant with the Interpol to arrest Arash Hejazi for disseminat-
ing false information about the case and thus maligning the government.
On 4 July 2009, Ezzatollah Zarghami, the head of the National Television
told the press that the videos of Nedas death were all fabricated by BBC
and CNN.
By the end of the year, in December 2009, Iranian state television
finally aired a program about Neda Agha-Soltans death, summarizing all
these tales into one consistent narrative, reporting the murder of Neda
Agha-Soltan as a CIA plot to defame the Islamic Republic. The program
reiterated the principle theory that Neda Agha-Soltan simulated her own
death with her two accomplices, and that she was killed afterwards, hav-
ing no knowledge of her partners intentions. Among those corroborat-
ing the regimes account was also the ambassador of Venezuela in Tehran
who told reporters that during the second election of Hugo Chavez, the
USA had arranged for similar incidents in his country. Mehdi Kalhor, one
of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad aides in charge of media, also said that Neda
Agha-Soltan was a simple-minded girl who had feigned her own death
and then Arash Hejazi killed her. Mr. Kalhor then offered the name of
Neda Agha-Soltan as proof of his claim, for the name in English means
the Cry of Mr. Monarch, meaning after 30 years of Islamic Revolution
Reza Pahlavi has to come back.4
By the end of the tumultuous year of 2009, Neda Agha-Soltan had
been transformed into the singularly globalized symbol of the Green
Movement, the Islamic Republic was happy and content with its conspira-
torial account dismissing her death as a plot by the CIA, and Arash Hejazi
INVISIBLE SIGNS 151
was out of the country talking to reporters and detailing his eyewitness
account of the murderthat the young university student had been cold-
bloodedly murdered by an official security officer of the Islamic Republic
and that the government was involved in a massive cover-up.
In less than a year after her murder, on Monday 14 June 2010, HBO
released a detailed documentary film called For Neda (2010), directed
by the British filmmaker Antony Thomas and with the help of an Iranian
undercover journalist named Saeed Kamali Dehghan. Kamali Dehghan
had filmed Nedas family for the first time and obtained footages of her
life and death for the HBOs documentary. Narrated by the prominent
Iranian-American actress Shohreh Aghdashloo, the lead actress of Cyrus
Nowrastehs The Stoning of Soraya M. (2008), based on Freidoune
Sahebjams La Femme Lapide (1990), about the stoning of a woman
in Iran, and featuring the author of the international bestseller Reading
Lolita in Tehran (2003) Azar Nafisi, For Neda gave a detailed account of
Neda Agha-Soltans murder and projected the image of the young woman
as someone that Azar Nafisi would have in fact featured in her memoir
had she known what would happen to her years later.5 Young, attractive,
sensual, hating mandatory hejab, lover of freedom, trapped inside a horrid
Islamic Republic, and yet determined to be free even at the cost of her life
were some of the salient features of Neda Agha-Soltan as she was depicted
in Antony Thomas For Neda. Among Antony Thomas other accom-
plishments as a filmmaker is Death of a Princess (1980) about a young
princess from a fictitious Middle-Eastern Islamic country and her lover
who had been publicly executed for adultery. That film became the subject
of a massive controversy leading to diplomatic row between the UK and
Saudi Arabia. Born in India, raised in South Africa, and now residing in
the UK, Anthony Thomas is also known for a detailed documentary he has
made on the Muslim holy book The Quran (2008).
Shohreh Aghdashloos voice and Azar Nafisis testimony come together
in Anthony Thomas For Neda to appropriate the story of Neda Agha-
Soltan for the cause of bourgeois transnationalyoung and pretty Iranian
women defying the power of a nasty patriarchy and fighting for their
freedom by reading Western literature and hating the mandatory scarf
almost in the same breath. At a crucial point, the documentary features
a copy of Emily Brontes Wuthering Heights among the books that Neda
Agha-Soltan was presumably reading, about which Azar Nafisi says that it
was very interesting to me, partly of course, because it is very dangerous.
It is about love and passion, and the sacredness of the profane. Shohreh
152 H. DABASHI
metropolis holds equally true for the peripheralized margins of the capital,
the former colonies now decentering the very assumption of the world
and the amorphous capital it fancies? Are there similarities between the clip
of the assassination of John F.Kennedy on 22 November 1963in Dallas,
Texas, the beating of Rodney King on 3 March 1991 in Los Angeles
California, and the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan in Tehran in June 2010?
What are the differences between the conspiratorial theories surrounding
the assassination of John F.Kennedy, or those surrounding the events of
9/11, for that matter, and those spun by the Islamic Republic about the
death of Neda Agha-Soltan? There is now a thriving industry of conspira-
torial theories regarding 9/11 that basically believes that it was an inside
job, that just like the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan, as the official of the
Islamic Republic understand it, was the work of CIA.Now what?
There is one crucial difference here. Conspiratorial theories about
9/11 stem from a will to resist the official narrative of a government that
lied its way to two successive wars. Conspiratorial theories spun by the
Islamic Republic, come from exactly the opposite direction, for they are
issued from a murderous will to power that has a record of mass execution
of those opposed to its militant imposition of a theocracy. The narrative
battle between the HBO documentary (of Nedaonly her first name
as all the other female characters in Reading Lolita in Tehranas a little
Lolita waiting to be liberated by Western literature and the US marines)
and the one manufactured by the Islamic Republic (of Neda Agha-Soltan
as the simpleton victim of a grand CIA conspiracy) dwells on the moment
when HBO tells a lie truthfully, and when the Islamic Republic willfully
tells a lieboth versions, as the fate would have it, mitigated by the truth-
ful eyewitness account of a writer of fiction?
Are we in a hall of mirrors, or is the fact staring us in the eye, but
the delusions of bourgeois feminism and the Islamist theocracy it loves
to hate do not allow us to see? In Rashomon (1950), one of Akira
Kurosawas enduring masterpieces, we learn about a rape and murder
case through a succession of narratives delivered from multiple vantage
points. Four divergent accounts come together and depart from the site
of a man murdered and a woman violated. The bandit/murderer/rapist
gives his account, the violated woman hers, the murdered husband, speak-
ing through the medium of a sorcerer his, and then that of the narrator,
the woodcutter who chances upon the murder/rape scene in the middle
of woods. In each version, it is not the fact of the murder and rape that
are contested but the overriding sense of self-proscribed dignity that
156 H. DABASHI
informs the narrator. But in every turn of the screw, no matter who goes
the narrating, what remains constant are the visual evidence of a man
murdered and a woman raped. That visual fact, consistently repeated, no
matter who does the spin, resists all its narrative detractionsa sign that
refuses to succumb to any grand narrative of self-promoting banality, or
an abiding visual regime, or sustained semiotics legislated ex officio. In
Rashomon, we see the truth mediated by all sorts of self-serving telling,
but no matter how the telling is spun, still the fact of the rape and the
body of the murdered man stare you right in the eyefor signs, simple
signs, persist against all semiotic odds.
The politics of representation, at the end of the game, as indeed at the
postcolonial edges of the capital crime, will have to yield to the playful and
anarchic sign defying and dodging any grand illusion that seeks to incar-
cerate it into one commanding narrative or another. Sign is a rebeland
we at the postcolonial edges of the capital know how it mocks, mimics,
and forges the signature of one documentary filmmaker or another propa-
gandist at the service of a dictator.
for the cause of bourgeois feminism that Shohreh Aghdashloo and Azar
Nafisi personify, and it succeeds, as does the Islamic Republic piling up
conspiratorial theories that overwhelm the fact of the murder. But the
miasmatic mimesis of signs resisting tyranny of visual regimes (that I am
now extrapolating from Rashomon) dodges and resurrects the selfsame
sign that cannot be contained, curtailed, and cannibalized. This miasmatic
mimesis, namely a mimesis that does not remain limited to a one-to-one,
Aristotelian, mimetic agreement and keeps shifting dramatic register to
preempt alienation, is something that I have extended from the Brechtian
Verfremdungseffekt in order to see through and theorize the modus ope-
randi of Taziyeh dramaturgy.14
What has happened to sign in the semiological matrix that calls itself
the West is of some pedagogical significance here for the world at large.
The systematic dissolution of sign from its status as once a signifier of some
significance into a free-floating abyss of never-ending deferrals has been the
defining moment of that master sign of all such signs that still cannot resist
signing itself as the West. The fall into the abyss of deconstruction,
said Gayatri Spivak in her Preface to Jacques Derridas Of Grammatology
(1967) inspires us with as much pleasure as fear. We are intoxicated with
the prospect of never hitting bottom.15 But can the world outside the
academy, and outside the text, afford a bottomless abyss? No. The sign,
for the world, must persistmeaning.
Long before Derrida, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in the
final chapter of their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)The Culture
Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deceptionhad seen in the making of
the popular culture, of which HBO documentaries are now prime exam-
ple, the manufacturing of cultural goods that are nothing but the signs
that self-perpetuate themselves. It was after Adorno and Horkheimers
insight that Roland Barth in his Mythologies (1957) exposed what he called
second-order signs as the modus operandi of bourgeois consumer cul-
ture that works through connotations. The bourgeois manufacturing of
modern myths generated its own semiological registers, adding a second
layer to that posited by Ferdinand de Saussure, and where signs coagulate
to generate mythas in his famous case study of a bottle of red wine that
generates and sustains a whole mythology.16
By the time Guy Debord published his The Society of the Spectacle/La
Socit du spectacle (1967), he was ready to expand on Marxs notion of
commodity fetishism to contemporary mass media, where Marxs theory
of alienation expands to domains far beyond labor activity. What Derrida
158 H. DABASHI
and North America, signs are self-referential by way of a plot, for there
reality bites. Here outside the Western matrix our signs dance to liber-
atethere inside the matrix they dance to entertain the radical fantasies
of the academic yuppies that wonder if the subaltern speaks. Here outside
the matrix the subaltern kickskicks in jazz and blues, kicks in rap and
reggae, kicks in Chinua Achebes, Jamaica Kincaids, Maryse Cond, and
Aravind Adigas fiction, kicks in Elia Suleiman, Ousmane Sembne, and
Amir Naderis cinema, and ultimately kicks in the migratory rhyme and
rhythm of labor movements from the South to the North and back. These
manners of igniting signs preempt a complete semiosis, for as Bainard
Cowan summarized Benjamins theory:
FRAGMENT-PIECES OFTHEPUZZLE
The task at hand is to see in what particular way the death of Neda
Agha-Sultan as a sign defies dispossession and dodges abuse in order to
reveal the significance of her demise beyond all systematic appropriation
for one propaganda purpose or exactly its opposite. Let us now add to
Benjamins allegorical lens one additional insight that helps us see better.
Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting,
Eisenstein asked pointedly, rather than the methodology of language,
which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combina-
tion of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects?20 Concrete
objects for Eisenstein are linguistic signs that may or may not mean
INVISIBLE SIGNS 163
anything in and of themselves, but when they are paired together some-
thing magical happens. Art happens. In regard to action as a whole,
he further added, each fragment-piece is almost abstract. The more dif-
ferentiated they are the more abstract they become, provoking no more
than a certain association.21 The almost abstract is also another name
for cinematic signs.
Signs do not mean anything, and if they are left alone to mean noth-
ing they agitate the society that has inadvertently gathered them around
each other. Cinema is the art of the invisible gathering because what is
narratively visible stands transparently in front of what is patently there
but hardly visible. The visible in cinema is ipso facto coded, encoded,
decoded, and thus made to read as self-evident. What is invisible in cin-
ema is thickly decoded and is in dire need of codification before it can be
decoded and read. A cinema with a signature, like the signature of Akira
Kurosawa or Satyajit Ray, works visually without your noticing itand
precisely because you are not noticing, it works more effectively. Cinema
is the art of implication, ramification, and bifurcation.
Signs signate on the porous borderline of cinema and society, for cin-
ema is the constellation of signs masquerading to tell a story that thinly
disguises their rambunctious meaninglessness, while society is the constel-
lation of significant symbolics, institutions, and discourses of authority,
all coming together to conspire to repress the anarchic will of signs to
chaos. Meanwhile signs facilitate uncanny conversations between cinema
as a constellation of meaningless signs and society as a construction of
repressive measures.
As the art of the invisible, cinema is the vision of the invisible, whereby
you can see what you cannot (otherwise) see. It is an art because what
you see prevents you from seeing what you do not see. What you do not
see is right in front of you, but because your eyes are distracted by what
they see they cannot see what is right in front of them but they cannot
see. Signs are meaningless indices pointing to nothing, and if they are left
alone to mean nothing, and if they are left alone to point to nothing, they
subvert the pointed corners of every society, the skeletal construction of
their meanings and purposes, ideologies and points of references. Cinema
as transgression serves its stated purpose. Cinema as a transnational art
form transgresses national boundaries of polity, economy, society, and
culture, and by semiotically trespassing their colonially manufactured
borders, ipso facto, destabilizes their repressively sedimented symbolics
of power.
164 H. DABASHI
Let us get down to signthe sign in the world. Red is red is red, as in
a rose is a rose is a rose. Red does not mean anything, let alone Stop!
Red might as well be green or yellow for that matter. But the reign of
terror and intimidation that the semantic (symbolic) rule of signification
has perpetrated upon signs has robbed them of all but a remnant of their
innately anarchic soul. We (as cultured people) have become inured to
signs and their glorious gift of anarchic frivolity. Signs are too visible to be
seen, and yet they are in the open, for everyone to see. Visions though, as
in films, dreams, ideas, hopes, or aspirations, invisible as they are, suggest
that they have seen the signs, that signs, in their naked sign-ness, have paid
them a visit. Butand here is the rubsigns are too clearly apparent to
be perceived, and thus the invisibility of visions is the only way we have
to get a glimpse of them. The cast of significant characters that cultures,
and their pernicious metaphysics, have imposed upon them prevents us
from seeing them. Signification (always through a symbolic order) is like a
veil cast upon a succession of signs to enslave them to carry a limited and
limiting message. But signs rebel against that will to dominate, and against
any cultural control to have them unilaterally signify, under the penalty of
law, one thing or another. Traffic lights, located within a symbolic order
and policed by an invisible cop, may be forced to signify and regiment
obedience during the day, but in the middle of the night and in the heart
of darkness, when the traffic cops are all asleep, they become again ghostly
apparitions, meaning many things and nothing. Sensible people (ought
to) ignore them. Visions, being invisible, have an inroad to the hidden
reservoir of signs, where they secretly but publicly signate beyond any
significant control.
Signs, like traffic lights, are made to signify: Red is to stop, green is
to go, yellow means the light is changing its mind, from green to red.
Beyond being legally mandated to signify, against their will to rebel, signs
may even occasionally signal, say when the red, or yellow, or green light
is manipulated by a traffic cop to blink incessantly in no collectively con-
clusive consensus as to what exactly it is supposed to mean. As it signals
but to no easily conceivable conclusionthere is a vague feeling that we
ought to be careful in its vicinity, even without its having a clear claim to
signification. Signation is what I have suggested we call what signs do
when they are not forced by a culture or a cop on the beat to signify, or,
if even slightly off the record, signal. I concocted this thing I call sig-
nation because it means nothing, which is exactly what signs dothey
mean nothing.
166 H. DABASHI
In and of themselves signs mean nothing. They are richly exciting and
deeply anxiety-provoking, and in them there is a healthy will to rebel
against attempts to make them signify. This liberation of signs from their
enforced and habitual significations I have identified at the root of every
new movement that we witness in national cinema, predicated on a
national trauma. On occasion of such national trauma, visionary film-
makers of national cinemas discover and unleash a whole new constellation
of misbehaving signs. Cultures and their metaphysics, politics of power
and their opposing ideologies, unilaterally impose this man-made will to
order, of signification, on them. You create a green light and order it to
mean that people can apply the gas pedal and continue on their way, and it
says Fine, thats what I will do. But the fact of the matter is that neither
the green light nor any other light, color, concept, shape, word, or change
in the weather means anything. They reluctantly and begrudgingly submit
to mean (while at the very same time that they do what you have told
them to do they wink at you otherwise). At moment of national trauma,
these misbehaving signs become ever more rambunctious.
No act of submission altogether leaves signs completely obedient. They
relentlessly bother and banter, which in turn results in signs that signate
beyond the control of the culture that created them, or even their own
reluctant obedience. This signation finds a subterranean way into our
visions (dreams, hopes, aspirations, prophetic movements, works of art,
inventions, inspirationsall the shades of our critically creative imagina-
tion, the birthing of all our revolutionary outbursts). Visions that inform
our visual subconscious (and from which we make good films, take
compelling pictures, and launch hopeful social movements) in turn are
invisible because they have been secretly ignited by the disobedient and
rebellious signs that are not content just to sit there and forcefully signal
one thing or another. Visions, as a result, are the nocturnal and subter-
ranean Trojan Horses that signs instigate to come and haunt us so that
we will not remain content and comfortable with the way we have forced
signs to signify and make life ordinary, legal, comfortable for some, and
miserable for many. So visions are in effect invisible boomerangs that signs
throw at cultures and their metaphysics that have enslaved and forced
them to signify one thing or another. Visions as boomerangs (all good
films and all worthy revolutionary uprisings are great boomerangs) come
and cause disturbances and upheavals, schisms and protests in cultures and
metaphysics, which in turn go back to release signs from their incarcerated
bondage and forced acts of signification. Visible signs send invisible visions
INVISIBLE SIGNS 167
to disrupt cultures of their domination and let them loose to roam freely,
freely to signate the world back to its originary chaos, the jubilant dance
of signs to no significant end. The order of the world is in fact the chaos of
the sign, which will not behave except under forced tyrannies.
Left to its own devices, the video of Neda Agha-Soltan dying has now
assumed the status of a sign, a constellated act of signation, like a dream,
a nightmare, that will not let goit just stares at you, irreducible to any
and all acts of narration for one political end or another. It is a sign that
cannot be read, but keeps signaling. Just like the pictures of Abu Ghraib
torture chambers taken by the US soldiers, just like George Hollidays
video of Rodney King beaten by the Los Angeles Police Department on 3
March 1991, or Nick Uts picture of Phan Th Kim Phc, taken during
the Vietnam War on 8 June 1972, or John Filos photograph of Mary Ann
Vecchio kneeling over the body of Jeffrey Miller after he was shot dead
by the Ohio National Guard in Ken State shooting on 4 May 1970the
video of Neda Agha-Soltan dying will always remain, as it must, a sign
that refuses all banal and vulgar acts of appropriation. As a sign, the pic-
ture of the dying Neda Agha-Soltan is inconsolable, insoluble, irredeem-
able, unreadable. It remains a fathom unfathomableat once positing and
resisting its deciphering. It is indecipherableand it can only stare with
incredulity at any act of interpretation, HBOs or the Islamic Republics,
all ridiculous and/or obscene attempts abusively trying to read it, and by
reading it wipe out. It will not be wiped out. It will not be dispossessed of
its power. It is a sign that keeps reproducing itself as signsignating, sig-
naling, disturbing, troubling, destabilizing, not just the Islamic Republic
or the cause of banal bourgeois feminism. It, ipso facto, destabilizes the
entire edifice of tyrannical and colonial constitution of knowability. It is
unknowable. It is the evidence of what Hans Blumenberg in his Work
on Myth (1979) called the absolutism of reality. It is an irredeemable,
undecipherable, absolutist, reality. It is a sign.
Of the three qualities of sign that Charles Sanders Peirce identified in
his essay On the Nature of Sign (1873)material quality, pure demon-
strative application, and appeal to a mind22it is only the first, material
quality that stands the absolutist test of any serious semiotics, and the
other two immaterialitiespure demonstrative application and appeal to
a mind, in Sanders languageremain entirely contingent on this irreduc-
ible material foundation. That material quality is the site of signation that
makes a sign a sign. Signation, of a picture like Neda Agha-Soltan dying,
for example, is no mystery, nor signs mystifying mirrors of some distant
168 H. DABASHI
whereabouts. The way I see and suggest it, signation is a kind of palpita-
tion, an involuntary breathing of signs, when they are left to their own
devices. Signs mean nothing, and as such they are made to make a mock-
ery of themselves when they are forced to mean something or another,
and of course of the semantics of their dominant culture, their reigning
metaphysics, their demanding parole officers, when they are made to sig-
nify (or even signal) under duress, or when a traffic cop is looking. Give
the selfsame traffic lightred, yellow, or greento Abbas Kiarostami and
he will have his camera gaze at it for such a long, lasting, interminable
time that every ounce or pretense of signification leaves it, and staring
at you will remain a gloriously glaring meaninglessness. So signs do not
signify. They just signate. What Pierce called pure demonstrative applica-
tion, and a fortiori, appeal to a mind is already the polluted signthe
sign that has been culturally, metaphysically, philosophically, aesthetically,
politically, compromised.
Signs signate, and once they do that, which is forever, incessantly, inad-
vertently, subversively, they are the mirrors in which visions are reflected.
Throughout my running conversations with Iranian cinema I have tried
to see the possibilities of those invisible visions through the impossibility
of these visible signs. That is not an easy task, because we have a struc-
tural deficiency in seeing how signs signate. We ourselves are, because of
that structural deficiency, implicated in the metaphysical tyranny of turning
rebellious signs into incarcerated signifiers. The structural deficiency is in
our inability to see our own faces. What we see in the mirror is not the plain
fact of our face. It is always already a significant mutation of the sign of our
face, always inscrutable and with the terror of Homo Hierarchicus written
all over it. It is for this reason that Emmanuel Levinas sought to alter the
site of consciousness away from our own face and to the face of the Other.
In the case of the video of Neda Agha-Soltans death, we are also always
already compromised by vicariously watching our own death, which is the
conditio sine qua non of trying immediately to read and thus to dismiss it.
What we see in the mirror is the articulated reflection of our names,
not the plain sight of our faces. The terror of the gaze of the Other that
Sartre tried to articulate and theorize in Being and Nothingness (1943) is
nothing compared to our amnesia of the sign of our own face under the
cultural duress of the anamnesis of its metaphysical signification and cultural
remembrances. Sartre took the sign of the face for the significance of the
character. When he narrowed in on the look of the Other and zeroed in
on shame as the defining moments of our consciousness, he had already
INVISIBLE SIGNS 169
taken the sign of the face as the significance of identity. He was one step
behind himself, two steps ahead of the sign of a face. Those steps are where,
both in the mirror and in the Others eyes, the face and body are already
identified and thus robbed, not just of their alterity as Levinas would later
note, but of something far more primal, that is, their constitutional incom-
prehensibility, their signating sign-ness, their strange appearances, which
have all been stolen at the moment of birth (certificate). Being-seen-by-
the-Other, as Sartre calls it, is always already in the realm of signification,
because the Other recognizes you, and the moment of that recognition is
the instant of a major robbery, which he has perpetrated on you, as you on
him, robbing each other of your signating strangeness, permanently preg-
nant with all that we are (not yet). The reign of the sign is in the realm of
being, but mutated into a signifier it already exists. Signs do not exist. They
just are. They lack an objective presence because they are unrecognizable.
Once they are recognizedhere is a red light, you must stop now, here is
a man, say hellothey have been dragged out of their jubilant/terrifying
state of simply being there and placed in the tyrannical order of existence, a
metaphysics beyond their control. The that-ness of sign is miasmatic, amor-
phous, anarchic, entirely free-floating in its own sign-ness. The case of sign
is not one of Genitivus Objectivus. Sign is too unruly to be in the genitive
case. When Levinas cited the inscrutable face of the other as the tentative
site of consciousness he came closest to this inscrutability of the face of
the self as the terrifying and absolutist reality of our existence.
truth at one and the same time, in a passage in Mehdi Akhavan Sales
Khan Hashtom/The Eight Task (1959), we have the fragmented reflec-
tion of an image in a broken mirror miraculously appearing as a whole.
I am the narrator,
The narrator I am
Yes I retell what I have told manifold before
The narrator of forgotten myths,
The owl of this ruin that is forgotten by history,
The owl sitting upon the roof of this wreck of a homelandor else
The sparrow singing sadly upon the roof of destroyed castles:
With what magical wisdom,
With what stratagem or deceit is it,
[I ask you],
Oh you truth-tellers
Tell me in truth
That unbroken appears the image in the broken mirror?
NOTES
1. For an overall account of Neda Aqa Soltans death, see Profile: Neda
Agha Soltan (BBC, 30 July 2009: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/
middle_east/8176158.stm).
2. For Arash Hejazis account, see his blog: http://arashhejazi.blogspot.
com/2010/06/blog-post.html. I am grateful to Mina Khanlarzadeh
for helping me with research on the details of Neda Agha-Soltans
murder.
3. For Arash Hejazis account to international media, see Iran doctor
tells of Nedas death (BBC, 25 June 2009: http://news.bbc.co.
uk/2/hi/middle_east/8119713.stm).
4. For more details of Mehdi Kalhors observations, see the report in BBC
Persian on 28 February 2010 at http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/
iran/2010/02/100227_u02-kalhor-election.shtml.
5. The documentary is available online: http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=F48SinuEHIk. Accessed on 18 September 2010.
6. For an account of this visit, see ISRAEL: Iranian exile linked to Neda
meets with President Shimon Peres (LA Times, 23 March 2010:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/babylonbeyond/2010/03/israel-
nedas-fiance-meets-with-israeli-president-shimon-peres.html).
7. On 4 September 2009, Amnesty International reported that Caspian
Makan was being held in Evin Prison in Tehran, and that he is
reported to have told his family that if he signs a confession saying
that the Peoples Mojahedeen Organization of Iran (PMOI), a politi-
cal body banned in Iran since 1981, killed her, then he may be
released. For more details, see the Amnesty International report at:
http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/news/neda-agha-
soltan-murder-witness-risk-torture-tehran-prison-20090904.
8. For a review of Arash Hejazis bestselling novel, see Farhad Babais
essay available at: http://www.sokhan.com/show.asp?id=84267.
9. For more details on Arash Hejazis literary career, see an interview
with him conducted on 9 October 2001, still available on this web-
site: http://www.iran-newspaper.com/1380/800717/html/art.
htm.
10. A far more balanced and sedate documentary, A Death in Tehran
(2009), was produced by Monica Garnsey for PBS Frontline. The
involvement of such professional journalists as Kelly G. Niknejad
(Associate Producer), and Iason Athanasiadis (Consultant) made this
172 H. DABASHI
at times even offer their dubious services to the USA and/or Israel and
Saudi Arabia in exchange for the assured delusion that they one daylike
their Iraqi prototype Ahmad Chalabiwill go back on their employers
tanks to rule their homeland. Facing them and the threat of a military
strike, the Revolutionary Guards/the Pasdaran are minding the shop and
running the country. Crippling economic sanctions took heavy toll on
ordinary Iranians, as a number of leading political prisoners and opposi-
tional figures under house arrestthe founding members of the Islamic
Republic like Mostafa Tajzadeh and Abolfazl Ghadyani are busy disman-
tling the regimes legitimacy. These tropes are not entirely inaccurate but
again quite limited and project a self-referential matrix that points to a
conceptual cul-de-sac.
Usually the interface between these two sitesthe geopolitics of the
region and the domestic politicsis not considered, and the dominant
conceptual matrix we ordinarily use is between the reigning empire,
the USA and its regional allies, and the domestic and national domains.
Repressed and unattended in this matrix is the interaction between the
regional and the nationalnamely precisely the sites of contestation
where alternative liberation geographies might emerge. The interface that
is required, however, should not be in merely political but far more cru-
cially in conceptual categories. How the template of one nation-state can
provide a microcosm of others, with their serious differences but never-
theless important similarities. The terms of liberation can have catalytic
effects on each other, like Tunisia for Egypt, for example, and potentially
vice versa. The crucial question that is plaguing the political left these days
is precisely this false paradox that usually one of these sites contradicts the
otherso that if you are against the imperial projects of the USA and its
allies in the region, then you must keep quiet about the atrocities of the
Islamic Republic or Syria, and if you do underline these atrocities, then
you are effectively aiding and abetting in those imperial projects. But that
will immediately appear as the false and falsifying paradox that it is if you
were to transcend the politics of despair that informs them both and lift
the critical discussion to a tertiary, more liberating, perspective.
more hidden to the naked eye and yet that much more conceptually liber-
ating and politically emancipatory. In this perspective, we can take aspects
of the Green Movement in Iran as a turning point where an epistemic shift
in contemporary Iranian history allows us to consider it as a civil rights
movement, demanding civil liberties, not human rights, predicated on
the active formation of a public space and a corresponding public rea-
sonall of which for over 200 years in the making.
This epistemic shift might also be considered a delayed defiance, pre-
dicted on a sustained course of ideological climax and exhaustion, in
which militant Islamism competed with its ideological rivals of anticolo-
nial nationalism and Third World socialism, absorbed their rhetoric and
logic into itself before outmaneuvering them. This climax and exhaustion
have ushered in a collective consciousness of a cosmopolitan worldliness
beyond the blindness and insights of one ideological narrative or another.
The course of the Arab Spring has then exacerbated that recognition.
The case of Iran exemplifies the condition in which nations that have
exhausted their postcolonial perils and promises are being born into a
new era when the hegemonically regulatory metaphor of the West is
no longer a factor in defining nations and a new sense of worldlinessa
new and more liberating imaginative geographycan be detected and
cultivated in the global reconfiguration of power. As a template for the
post-Western nation-state, Iran can thus be rescued from its stultified
fetishization in the global geopolitics and ushered into a far wider and
more meaningful frame of reference. The decoupling of the nation
from the state is critical in this rebirth.
Instrumental in this renewed cultivation of self-conscious worldliness
is contemporary Iranian visual and performing arts, such as those perhaps
best represented by filmmaker and photographer Abbas Kiarostami or
singer and songwriter Mohsen Namjoo. As soon as we enter the domain
of aesthetics, the basic question is raised as to where does art stand in
relation to the politics of despair that surrounds it. The question is often
asked, how could Iran produce such magnificent art, cinema in particu-
lar, when in claws of such a tyranny. The answer is always quite clear,
that Iranian art is what it is not despite but because of that tyranny. Art
here posits the expansive space of the self-sublimity of a culture, its source
of both solace and self-transcendence, where semblance and subjectivity
come together to propose a different, anterior, knowing subject, all predi-
cated on an active cultivation of an aesthetic reason. This suggestion is at
the heart of my argument in this book.
178 H. DABASHI
This is so because Kiarostami assimilates these lives back into the landscape
of their habitat, where they, and we, rediscover the anteriority of their, and
our, whereabouts.
Abbas Kiarostamis interior assuredness has a more subversive presence
in the leading popular musician Mohsen Namjoos music. Not without
justification compared with Bob Dylan, the signature character of Mohsen
Namjoos music is his melodic syncretism through which he moves toward
a formal destruction of the duality between lyrics and melodies, words and
sounds. He has an uncanny ability to cross over Persian classical melodies
and transform them into jazz and blues in the making of that syncretic
mode, where words and their sound qualities are formally assimilated into
A TRANSNATIONAL PUBLIC SPHERE 179
fact they have never) to the hermetically sealed propositions they were
presumed to behistorically, geographically, culturally, economically, or
any other termsand the underlying public space that had given rise to
them has expanded exponentially far beyond their fictive borders.
All those binaries made on the fictive borderline of the postcolonial
nation-sateIslam and the West, Tradition versus Modernity, and
so onhave all now exhausted their synergy and dissolved. The selfsame
public space that had in the postcolonial period termed itself the nation
is no longer defined by any national economy, polity, society, or culture
that it had imagined and cultivated in correspondence with colonial, anti-
colonial, and postcolonial episodes of its recent history. The globalized
capital and the amorphous empire that it has generated have conditioned
a postnational public space that reminds the nation of its transnational
origin away from any claim by any state. The unification of Europe and
the rise of transnational revolutions we call the Arab Spring are the most
notable signs of this development. The bloody ethnic nationalism trig-
gered today by the Saudi Arabia and Iranian ruling regimes is far more the
anxiety-ridden confirmation of this development rather than its negation.
The link I propose between the public reason and the aesthetic reason
is predicated on this genealogy of the nation, entirely alien to any ethnic
nationalism, and categorically contrary to the political reason at the root of
the state violence (monarchic or mullarchic) that wishes to lay a false and
falsifying claim on it. The aesthetic reason behind a poem from the Qajar
period at the time of the Constitutional Revolution, a work of fiction from
the Pahlavi period, or a film from the time of the Islamic Republic is far
more definitive to the layered texture of the nation than any political rea-
son at the root of any and all state violence that seeks to claim that nation
in futility.
ate and dominate, but against these odds it has discursively gone beyond
any such control by virtue of the endemic crisis of legitimacy these systems
and the state apparatus they sustain face, as in fact evident in the massive
social uprisings from the Eurozone crisis to Occupy Wall Street to student
unrest in Canada, to the Arabs Spring to the Green Movement, to the
Gezi Park uprising, and with the rise of the new media that has liberated
us from corporate media and its limited capacities to reflect these seismic
changes. This state of evident chaos preempts the use and abuse of cyber
surveillance for the exacerbation of the Foucauldian governmentality.
In these ripe historical circumstances, the public space must be reclaimed
for the public, ethnic nationalism categorically dispensed with, and their
fictive nature exposed by way of dismantling all other ethnic nationalisms.
With ethnic nationalism dismantled, citizenship will emerge as the basis
of social formations, the historical paradox of Shiism is resolved, and the
public space and the public reason will be the sole defining factor of any
claim to state legitimacy. That state legitimacy may or may not materialize,
but the fact and the phenomenon of this public reason enables the organic
power of the nation that thus sustains it.
The constitution and expansion of the public space have gone through
a successive history of social movements, historic developments, and revo-
lutionary uprisings. One might consider the dispatch of a group of Iranian
students to Europe early in the nineteenth century by the reformist Qajar
prince Abbas Mirza (17891833) as perhaps the key event that ushers in
this momentous opening up of the public space and the formation of pub-
lic intellectuals away from the court and the mosque. Mirza Saleh Shirazi,
one of these students, brings back a printing machine to Iran with which he
publishes the first Persian language newspaper, Kaghaz-e Akhbar, a vastly
influential event in the formation of a public sphere upon which matters of
public concern begin to be articulated away from the concerns and inter-
ests of the royal court and the clerical establishment. As these foundational
and institutional innovations are under way when the Babi Movement
(18441852) emerges as the most significant revolutionary event of this
period, shaking both the Shii clerical establishment (in doctrinal terms)
and the Qajar dynasty (in political terms) to their foundations, and thus
occasions a historic alliance between them to oppose the Babi Movement
and its revolutionary expansion of the public space to include the nascent
Iranian merchant bourgeoisie.
At the same time, even at the royal court certain reforms are initiated
that expand the domain of the nascent public space. Two prominent
A TRANSNATIONAL PUBLIC SPHERE 187
Among the precepts of Mosaic religion is one that has more significance
than is at first obvious. It is the prohibition against making an image of
God, which means the compulsion to worship an invisible God. I surmise
190 H. DABASHI
that in this point Moses had surpassed the Aton religion in strictness
If this prohibition was accepted, however, it was bound to exercise a pro-
found influence. For it signified subordinating sense perception to an
abstract idea; it was a triumph of spirituality over the senses; more precisely
an instinctual renunciation accompanied by its psychologically necessary
consequences.5
NOTES
1. See Ian Buruma, Kiarostamis Tokyo (The NewYork Review of Books,
13 November 2012), available at: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/
nyrblog/2012/nov/13/strangely-intimate-kiarostamis-tokyo/.
2. See Hamid Dabashi, The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism
(London: Zed, 2012).
3. Frederic Jameson, World Literature in an Age of Multinational
Capitalism (Op. Cit.): 141.
4. For details see Hamid Dabashi, Persophilia: Persian Culture on the
Global Scene (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University press, 2015): The
Introduction.
5. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism. Translated by Catherine Jones
(New York: Hogarth Press, 1939): 178.
Chapter Eight: Cosmopolitan Worldliness
not seeing (for he has not lived) the world already embedded in the
India he could call home. Cultures are embedded in their worldliness
and not hidden in their interstices, which, in and of themselves, are
created by migratory intellectual laborers who take themselves for the
culture they leave behind. They are not. Interstices emerge only in a
bifurcated world, between the West and the Rest, whereby the immi-
grant intellectual does not belong either here or there, so he theorizes
the in-between as the place to be, having failed to see the world in
the very there they left behind, and not having seen it triumphantly in
the here they now inhabit.
The overlap and displacement of domains of difference are always
already embedded and resolved in worldly cultures and need not await a
bipolar world in order to go and hide in between them. The same is true
with intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, commu-
nity interest, or cultural value that are already deeply and widely nego-
tiated within the cosmopolitan culture. Subjects are thus not formed
in-between, or in excess of, the sum of the I parts of difference, as
Bhabha thinks, but inside, within the cumulative force of the I/We com-
ponents of differences that have become organically dialectical to a cul-
ture. This business of shared histories of deprivation and discrimination,
the exchange of values, meanings and priorities, again, is something
always already plotted in the historical narrative, and the proposition that
they may not always be collaborative and dialogical, but may be pro-
foundly antagonistic, conflictual and even incommensurable impregnate
the culture with its historic alterity, rather than a homebound/outbound
vision of the colonial outpost (Bombay) and the colonizing metropo-
lis (London). Whatever London did to Bombay is already embedded in
Bombay, and much morefrom Asia to Africa to Latin America, and not
all of it colonizing and dominant, much of it also in solidarity and defi-
ance. Was the reduction of the world to evaporated ideologies, and from
there to expended fanaticism, the fate of the world we have faced and
lived? I have taken and read the rise of the Green Movement and the
Arab Spring in Iran and then the Arab world during the summer of 2009
and from January 2010 forward as the sign of the resurrection of those
cosmopolitan cultures that have taken the Islamist-secular distortion of
domesticated cultures by surprise. The worldly cosmopolitanism I have
sought to document and describe for and in Iran of the last 300 years is
embedded precisely in these moments when we act, reenact, or remember
our global whereabouts.
198 H. DABASHI
period. While Russian literature was a major staple of Iranian literary scene
since the early twentieth century, it was not until the aftermath of World
War II when American GIs left their paperback novels behind upon leav-
ing Iran that a massive wave of translation of American literature began
in earnest, with Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and
John Steinbeck as the leading representatives of a literary humanism that
for us knew no country or boundary.
For us, these authors were the hallmarks of a literary cosmopolitanism
in which we were born and raised. We read them all in exquisite Persian
translation, and whatever we lost in translation, which was not much, we
gained by reading them as integral to a world literary heritage that was
open and welcoming to all. To this day, the Persian title of J.D.Salingers
novel, Natur-e Dasht, sounds infinitely dearer and more intimate to me
than its original Catcher in the Rye. In the formation of worldly cosmo-
politanism around the globe, it is imperative to dismantle the jargon of
authenticity embedded in the notion of the original.
Holden Caulfield was definitive to my generation of Iranian youth,
always dangerously on the verge of social apathy, and thus in our case
precociously over-politicized for fear of transforming either into a ver-
min like Kafkas Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis or else a pathetic crimi-
nal like Dostoyevskys Rodion Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment.
Holden Caulfield would of course age beyond his adolescence when we
meet him in Catcher in the Rye and grow and soon be figuratively trans-
muted into Marlon Brando of The Wild One (1953), James Din of Rebels
without a Cause (1955), and even later Robert De Niro of Taxi Driver
(1976). But the Iranian love affair with J.D. Salinger would also con-
tinue with one of the masterpieces of modern Iranian cinema, Dariush
Mehrjuis Pari (1995) being based, much to Salingers chagrin when
it was premiered in NewYork, on his Franny and Zooey (1961). These
authors and artists, fictional and factual characters gathered in a universe
that cast a long and lasting light on generations of young Iranians find-
ing their place in the world.
Howard Zinn I discovered first in the USA as a fresh graduate stu-
dent at the University of Pennsylvania in the mid-1970s when my read-
ing of his A Peoples History of the United States (1980) forever marked
my understanding of American history. To this day, and in a significant
and formative way, I have tried to do in my own way for Iranian history
what Howard Zinn did for American history, with a tinge of Steinbeck
and Marquez written into my narrative. As I was following the Green
COSMOPOLITAN WORLDLINESS 201
who as a CIA agent was chiefly responsible for the infamous Operation
Ajax, which in August 1953 toppled the democratically elected govern-
ment of Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq, and through a military
coup brought Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the late Shah of Iran, back to
power. As much as Iranians remember Baskerville lovingly as the young
American who gave his life for the cause of liberty in Iran, Roosevelt is
reviled for having aborted that very cause some half a century later. The
result is the complication of the figure of the American in the active
imagination of the nation.
When you place the four figures of J.D. Salinger, Howard Zinn,
Howard Baskerville, and Kermit Roosevelt together, a clear fact about
the nature of Iranian cosmopolitan worldliness emerges. A much more
complicated and enabling presence of the US literary, intellectual, and
political spheres has reflected itself upon the unfolding of the most criti-
cal phases of Iranian history. This presence is neither entirely positive nor
categorically negative. It is multivariate and layered with individual cases
of enabling bravery and treacherous interference, in both cases triggering
agency on the Iranian public sphere. The result is the categorical collapse
of the USA as the Great Satan, as the ruling regime would wish to cat-
egorize it. The factual evidence of the nation speaks otherwise.
Nowaihi, a gifted literary critic and scholar whose beautiful and blos-
soming life was cut brutally short in 2002 when we lost her to ovarian
cancer. The sudden passing of Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd on 5 July 2010 was
reminiscent of not just one but in fact two particularly towering Egyptian
monuments under whose extended shadow our part of the world was
blessed and made more meaningful. In the span of almost exactly two
years, we lost Youssef Chahine (on 27 July 2008) and Nasr Hamed
AbuZayd (on5 July 2010), as if witnessing the syncopated fall of two
twin towers that had graced the landscape of our moral and aesthetic
imagination for over half a century. The significance of these two tower-
ing Egyptians marks the formation of an entire aesthetic and hermeneutic
world far beyond Egyptian or even Arab borders.
Not just in the Arab and Muslim world, but even globally, those who
know Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (19432010) rarely have reasons to know
Youssef Chahine (19262008), and those who have read and admired
Nasr Hamid Abu Zayds extraordinary achievements as a hermeneutician
and semiotician may scarce be able to name two of Youssef Chahines films
in one sentence, or claim to have seen his Bab al-Hadid (1958) when they
were still teenagers, or, better yet, still remember the corner of their closet
where they hung a poster of the legendary Egyptian actress Hind Rustom
(away from intrusive eyes)!
The more these monumental figures of our corner of the world pass
away, the more I realize what a privileged life my generation of Iranians
have had growing up in southern Iran, in my particular case with a father
who alternated among Mohammad Musaddiq, Gamal Abd al-Nasser, and
Jawaharlal Nehru as his political heroes, and to whose dying day the songs
of Umm Kulthum and Mohammed Abdel-Wahab, along with those of
Delkash and Banan, were his greatest joy and consolation, next to Russian
vodka of course and the company of my mother, a deeply pious and
observing Muslim whose punctilious precision in following her religious
duties was graced with a vast margin of tolerance for the impieties of the
man she loved. Without reawakening the substance and contours of such
inventory of private and public lives, the texture of our social history will
always remain mute and shallow.
Having known both Youssef Chahine and Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd per-
sonally, followed their respective works closely, and been privileged to
have been in their precious company at many film festivals and confer-
ences from Cairo to Locarno to NewYork, and then from NewYork to
Beirut to Rabat, gives me a certain perspective on both men and what
204 H. DABASHI
they have meant for all of us, for it now seems to me that I have always
seen and read one with and through the lens and text of the other. The
globality of vision that made them possible, and that (in the same vein)
produced Youssef Chahine and Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, has always been at
the mercy of the fanaticism and brutality that have paradoxically emerged
COSMOPOLITAN WORLDLINESS 205
from the very same fountainhead that fed our innermost hopes and aspi-
rations. Sayyid Qutb and Ayatollah Khomeini misinterpreted our dreams
and thoughts and delivered them back as nightmares, and we need actively
to retrieve the alternative cosmopolitanisms that have enabled us to see a
much different future.
I am now absolutely convincedthe first thought that crossed my mind
when I read the sad and shocking news that Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd had
passed awaythat the society that produced him and Youssef Chahine at
the balanced center of its judicious self-awareness ought to also be aware
of how precious that balance is, where the horizon of our moral and aes-
thetic imagination rests. As I told the distinguished Egyptian philosopher
Hassan Hanafi, when we were both at a conference in Edmonton, Canada
in 2011, there is an Egyptian balance of hope and despair, promise and
paralysis, that seems to define all of us who were born and raised in the age
of Mohammad Musaddiq, Gamal Abd al-Nasser, and Jawaharlal Nehru,
our anticolonial heroes who made us postcolonial avant la lettre.
The first memory I must get out of my mind is that of Nasr Hamed
Abu Zayd and I sitting next to each other in the back of a bus that was
taking us from our hotel in Rabat, Morocco, to the conference center
where we were both giving talks in December 2003. On behalf of the
Moroccan ministry of culture, my dear friend Anissa Bouziane had orga-
nized an international conference on The Dialogue Between Cultures:
Is It Possible? Mohamed Achaari, the Moroccan minister of culture, had
presided over the conference as a typical showcase, where, pomp and cer-
emony notwithstanding, we had more fun talking, thinking, and learning
in between official sessions than during the sessions themselves.
From Egypt, my good friend Ferial Ghazoul, a leading literary critic,
and from the Netherlands Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd had come, and I recall
that the great Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahims spectacular refusal to
accept a major official literary prize was the subject of discussions among
us during that conference. Mohammed Arkoun was there, so were Malek
Alloula, Alain Badiou, and many other leading Arab, European, and
American scholars and public intellectuals. From NewYork, Edward Said
and I were invited. But we lost Edward to leukemia in the September of
that year before that December conference. Salem Brahimi, the son of
Edwards good friend Ambassador Lakhdar Brahimi, had brought along
a documentary he had produced on Edward called Selves and Others: A
Portrait of Edward Said (2003) for public screening. It was by all accounts
a historic gathering, just before it happened Edward Said had passed away,
206 H. DABASHI
and soon after it we lost Mohamad Arkoun and Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd.
This is all before the rise of the Arab Spring in 2011 and the dubious roles
and positions that leading Egyptian intellectuals like Sonallah Ibrahim had
taken in it, with their innate Islamophobia involuntarily perhaps paving
the way for a military coup dtat aborting the course of the Egyptian
revolution.
As Nasr Hamed and I sat at the back of the bus catching up on our lat-
est news, there suddenly popped up the head of Bernard Lewis, boarding
the same bus and attending the same conference, entirely unbeknownst
to both of us. From the following day, I opted to take a cab (Taxi Saghir,
they call them in Morocco, the little cabbies) to the conference site,
forfeiting the pleasure of Nasr Hamed and other friends company during
the morning bus ride, but catching up with them at the conference site.
You Iranians are so particular in your politics, he would tell me later,
laughing. It is the Shii in you! Noah Feldman, fresh from the US-led
invasion of Iraq advised Paul Bremer, the American viceroy in Iraq at the
time, on drafting a constitution for the Iraqis (for Iraqis had no legal
scholars of their own!), and kept Bernard Lewis company for the duration
of the conference. There and then, one look at the sight of Bernard Lewis
and Noah Feldman cozying up in front of me and Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd,
I knew that no, no dialogue among civilizations was possible. Long
before that conference in Morocco, I had met Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd in
NewYork for the first time over dinner at Edward and Mariam Said Saids
reception for him, and had read his works even earlier, from my gradu-
ate student years at the University of Pennsylvania, where my late teacher
George Makdisi (19202002) had introduced me to his groundbreaking
work on Quranic hermeneutics in the mid-1980s.
At the time very few people knew of Nasr Hameds Al-Ittijah Al-Aqli fi
al-Tafsir: Dirasa fi Qadiyat al-Majaz fi l-Quran ind al-Mutazila (1982)
or even his Falsafat al-Tawil: Dirasa fi Tawil al-Quran ind Muhi al-Din
ibn Arabi (1983). Years later, when I was working on my book on Ayn al-
Qudat al-Hamadhani, I discovered his Mafhum al-Nass: Dirasa fi Ulum
al-Quran (1991) and Naqd al-Khitab al-Dini (1998). My late colleague
Magda al-Nowaihi later introduced me to Nasr Hameds Al-Mara fi
Khitba al-Azma (1995) and Dawair al-Khawf: Qiraa fi Khitab al-Mara
(1999). My favorite among Nasr Hameds work, however, has remained
his Al-Tafkir fi Zaman al-Takfir (1998), a reflection on his condition
of exile and apostasy which he wrote in the aftermath of the infamous
incident when, in the early 1990s upon his request for academic promo-
COSMOPOLITAN WORLDLINESS 207
not from above but from within, not in the authors intention (which in
this case is beyond human reach), but in the readers hope (which is always
already historical and worldly). To be able to do that and still remain a
believeras he didis a singular sign of hermeneutic gift of grace.
Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd went to read the Quran as if he were going
to see a Youssef Chahine film, where he saw a hall of mirrors full of
sacred signs waiting to reveal themselves anew: not just the unseen
through the seen, but the seer through the sign. He, hermeneuti-
cally and in effect, re-enacted the moment of divine revelationfrom
the man-prophet-Muhammad to woman/man-believer-Muslim. Nasr
Hamed Abu Zayd planted, as it were, a Youssef Chahine camera inside
the head of every Muslim who went to see/read the Quran. The
brain-dead and soulless Muslims in his vicinity instinctively saw the
magnificent danger in that vision of the Quran and were frightened
out of their witsand thus their sentence against him.
The fact of this correspondence between Nasr Hamed Abu Zayds
hermeneutics and Youssef Chahines cinematic cosmovision has been
driven home to me particularly when I look at the reception of both of
them in Iran over the last 30 years, where under the forced and violent
over-Islamization of a similarly cosmopolitan culture a whole generation of
those who call themselves religious intellectuals or Roshanfekr-e Dini
has been under the influence of what they have made of Nasr Hamed Abu
Zayd. But scarcely any one of them has a clue who Youssef Chahine was,
or have cared to come to terms with what the cosmopolitan culture that
produced them both had invested in their respective work, and as a result
they have a very limited (if not altogether contorted and flawed) image of
the gifted Egyptian hermeneutician. The discrepancy between the dialec-
tic of Abu Zayd/Chahine on one side and the Religious Intellectuals on
the other is the space between a thriving cosmopolitan culture and what
happens to that culture under the militant rule of clerical fanaticism.
This fact, alas, is not only true of these religious intellectuals but even
worse, it is equally true of the leading Iranian filmmakers and their typi-
cally Eurocentric conception of cinema. Who were those Arabs you were
hanging out with? was the question Mohsen Makhmalbaf put to me in
August 1996, when we were all at the Locarno Film Festival for a com-
plete retrospective of Youssef Chahines work. Those Arabs I was hang-
ing out with during that festival were Youssef Chahine, Yousry Nasrallah,
and Oussama Fawzi, three generations of Egyptian filmmakers who hap-
pened to be in Locarno that year not just because of Youssef Chahines
210 H. DABASHI
Calling Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd a Quran- Pazhuh is like calling any-
one from Friedrich Schleiermacher through Wilhelm Dilthey to Hans-
Georg Gadamer a Biblical Scholar, or Bach a Church Organist, or
Mozart a Court Composer, or Jean Baudrillard an Advertising Agent.
YesSchleiermacher, Bach, Mozart, Baudrillard, and Nasr Hamed Abu
Zayd had something to do with the Bible, the church, the court, com-
mercial advertising, and the Quran. But those were not their defining
dispositions. No doubt the Quran had a central significance for Nasr
Hamed Abu Zayd (as did the Bible for Schleiermacher), for it posited for
him a significant hermeneutical challenge. But he was, first and foremost,
a hermeneutician not a Quran-Pazhuha term as fallacious in defining
who and what Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd was as that which his European col-
leagues keep using of him: an Islamist. Evidently, Europeans in general
have not made up their minds yet whether this term refers to a terrorist or
to a scholar of Islamor perhaps to both!
Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd would have been a hermeneutician if he wrote
on Yellow Pages or Facebook. The text of the Quran was the playing field
of his hermeneutics, where its semiological free play provided an exciting
interpretative challenge to himas a Muslim, as a scholar, as a hermeneu-
tician, as a semiotician, as a philosopher, and all of those at one and the
same time. But just like everything else about these religious intellectuals
in Iran, they had neither the moral will nor the intellectual wherewithal,
to come to terms with the organic totality or the hermeneutic idiomatic-
ity of a thinker outside their own purview, and thus they cut and pasted
him into their own distorted, limited and limiting, and above all religiously
predetermined discourse. Thus, Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd was turned into
yet another Karl Popper at the hands of a particular penchant for militant
over-Islamization of the Iranian intellectual disposition, which continues to
this day in the various obituaries they are writing for him, even though the
leading members of this cadre of religious intellectuals no longer even live
in Iran. The fundamental flaw in the Iranian reception of Nasr Hamed Abu
Zayd was that Iranian religious intellectuals twisted and turned him into
one of their ownwith their attention to what they called Religion/Din
being the index of an obsessive compulsive disorder that could not allow
the entrusting of faith to the worldly current of history. But this was not the
case with Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd, who was no religious intellectual. The
distance between a religious intellectual and a philosopher is the distance
between an enabling worldly cosmopolitanism and the catastrophic conse-
quences of an intellectually arrested Islamic Republic and its offspring.
212 H. DABASHI
who had gone back to Al-Jurjanis Theory of Poetic Imagery (1979), almost
at the same time or just slightly before Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd had gone to
the Quran, in order to navigate the theoretical simulacrum of structural
semiotics in the formation of Arabic poetics.
The Iranian religious intellectuals were not even on speaking terms
(in more than one sense) with the Iranian counterparts of people like Kamal
Abu-Deeb (Reza Barahani), Adonis (Ahmad Shamlou), Naguib Mahfouz
(Mahmoud Dolatabadi), or Sunallah Ibrahim (Houshang Golshiri). They
had been brutally forced into silence and exile. A busload of them barely
escaped with their lives when they were thrown off a cliff to be murdered.
The throats of other representatives of them were cold-bloodedly cut and
their bodies mutilated in the course of the so-called serial murders. Unless
and until these religious intellectuals come to terms with the fact that
such club-wielding thugs attacked and silenced scores of leading Iranian
intellectuals and scholars who were not religious intellectuals, they will
never know what barbarity they have been instrumental in perpetrating
upon their homeland.
To this day if Mahmoud Dolatabadi, a leading Iranian novelist who is
not in the august gathering of religious intellectuals, were to dare to
utter a word about those who were responsible for the vulgarity of the
cultural revolution in Iran, leading religious intellectuals would write
lofty and highfalutin proclamations attacking and ridiculing him for hav-
ing dared to point a finger at them. What we know about other cultures,
or make of the great thinkers and artists they produce, tells us much less
about them and far more about us. Like any other society, Egypt has a
myriad of its own problems, struggling against its own brand of tyranny
and fanaticism. Nevertheless, it is still a complete and healthy society, not
one that is alienated from what and where it is, traumatized, bifurcated,
having been brutally cut into opposing and murderous segments by a
ruling Islamism that is only too conscious of its illegitimacy. Cairo (or
Beirut, or Casablanca, for that matter) is an infinitely more wholesome
and healthy cosmopolis than Tehran has been over the last three decades
plus, where the most innocent and healthy dreams and desires of an entire
nation, 80percent of them under the age of 40, are held hostage to the
decadent and delusional fanaticism of a ruling theocracy and its security
apparatus.
If he had not been a product of that cosmopolis, and if he had not
been in creative conversation with artists, literati, and philosophers who
thought differently than how he did, Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd would not
214 H. DABASHI
have been what he was. He did not become what he became by either
remaining silent or by being instrumental in the murder or purging of
other Egyptian intellectuals. It is only with a comparative awareness of
another society like Egypt, or the way a monumental thinker like Nasr
Hamed Abu Zayd has been cut to a much smaller size in contemporary
Iran, that we find how catastrophic have been the consequences of the
Islamist takeover of a multifaceted social revolution that militant Muslim
ideologues violently hijacked from an entire nation.
Youssef Chahine and Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd are no longer with us to
see the dawn of a new era in both Egypt and Iran, where the reflection
of their cosmopolitan consciousness has come to full fruition and reso-
nances in both nations. In the aftermath of the Tunisian and Egyptian
revolutions of 2011 and the Arab Spring they occasioned, Egypt turned
inward into a troubled phase of its own history, as in the aftermath of
the Green Movement of 2009 in Iran the nation for ever parted ways
with a state that could never lay a legitimate claim on it. In Egypt, the
Muslim Brotherhood initially won a fair and square democratic struggle
only to be dismantled by a military coup riding on the back of a popular
revolt against the fear of Islamism. Iran meanwhile advanced even fur-
ther into a critical decoupling of the nation and the state, as the ruling
regime plunged ever deeper into the geopolitics of its region. The cutting
of Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd to the size of religious intellectuals had the
unanticipated consequence of remapping Iranian social and intellectual
consciousness in even more robust terms with the troubling experience of
the failed revolution now integral to its cultural memory. As the state and
those who served it became increasingly decoupled from the nation, it was
supposed, but had categorically failed to represent, the nation moved on
in the opposite direction and unfolded in even more robust layers of its
own self-consciousness. A fuller consciousness of Nasr Hamed Abu Zayds
hermeneutics and Youssef Chahines cinema reflects with the extended res-
onances of the Iranian world in its Arab and Muslim contexts, as Howard
Zinn and J.D.Salinger extended the same worldly awareness into North
American scene. Three Iranian filmmakers in three different ways marked
a civil rights movement in their homeland with three radically different
politics, but all equally pathbreaking in articulating their nations aesthetic
intuitions of transcendence. In their living memories and dying politics,
the remnants of past experiences brighten the joy of discovery and reveals
a world dancing like particles of dusty lights (Rumis metaphor) right
before our eyessigns of an infinity of possibilities to alter the metaphys-
COSMOPOLITAN WORLDLINESS 215
ics of despair that have laid violent claim on our souls. It is to those par-
ticles of dusty lights in Rumis mind that I now turn in my next chapter:
NOTES
1. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994): 2.
2. See Hamid Dabashi, Rumi and the Problems of Theodicy: Moral
Discourse and Structural Coherence in a Story of the Mathnavi, in
Amin Banani (ed.), Proceedings of the Georgio Levi Della Vida Conference
on Rumi. Honoring Annemarie Schimmel (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988).
3. See Hamid Dabashi, Truth and Narrative: The Untimely Thoughts of
Ayn al-Qudat al-Hamadhani (London: Taylor & Francis, 1999).
4. An earlier and much shorter version of this segment of this chapter
appeared in the British journal Sight & Sound in May 2010.
5. An earlier and much shorter version of this segment of this chapter
appeared on CNN.Com on 30 January 2010.
6. An earlier and shorter version of this part of this chapter was published
in Al-Ahram Weekly (15 July 2010).
Chapter Nine: Fragmented Signs
To show how the metaphysics of fragile realties, trying to gather and make
sense of the dust upon which we dance unknowingly, can defy all such divi-
nations and begin to form an enabling force, in this chapter I will turn to
Walter Benjamin and other theorists, poets, and philosophers of fragments,
dust, and debris to navigate the manner in which a liberating politics is
rooted in a poetics of ruins. This marks the moment when no metanarrative
of salvation can any longer hold and we must teach ourselves how to see a
cohesive image in a broken mirror, where the intuition of transcendence is
no longer predicated on any absolutist or absolute metaphor. Here I intend
to articulate an even larger cosmopolitan context of understanding nations
and the living organicity of their worldliness against ethnic nationalism and
religious sectarianism. In other words, I am going to invite and lead you
in the opposite direction of the politics of despair we live and learn today.
The undaunted worldliness we see and celebrate in film, fiction, and his-
tory prepares the theoretical foregrounding of a revival of critical thinking
toward the articulation of an intuition of transcendence. The rise of a new
cosmopolitan worldliness, based on Walter Benjamins notion of debris
and other thinkers will enable us to think through the rise a critical thinking
that turns despair into ingredients of responsibility.
Wretched of the Earth, as the English rendition of his title would have it,
but as The Damned of the Earth, for his Les Damns de la Terre. Those
buried in Khavaran too are Les Damns de la Terre.
Let us take the dust, the debris, the fragments, and the broken bones
of perished youth in Khavaran as the living allegories of something beyond
those mass graves, as pointing to something outside those graves, point-
ing as they do to something beyond their own mortal reach. Let us just
take the whole rubble of ruins in Khavaran as a broken finger pointing to
something beyond their mortal remainssomething allegorical, mythic.
No, pointing not just toward their executionersfor this is not a mere
finger of accusationbut through their executioners and beyond them
pointing to a light from which they received guidance, to which they were
guiding us, now mourning them. The broken bones and dusty remains of
our brothers and sisters under the mass graves of Khavaran gather in the
varied forms of multiple allegories, as emancipatory tropes that cannot be
contained, systematized, made into total claims on our defiant credulities.
Those broken bones and spilled blood, those specs of dust are particles of
light. Let us look at and through them.
I will not have spoken of dust, of fragments, of ruins, in an imperfect
future tense if the dreams of the Iranian revolution of 19771979 were
delivered, interpreted by all its actors and realized by all its dreamers. But
now I will, for I must. The scattered dust, the ruins and relics, of the
Iranian revolutionthe last grand revolution of the twentieth century on
the model of the French and the Russian that had preceded and foretold
itof its dreams betrayed, its aspirations asphyxiatedis now a ruling
regime that calls itself an Islamic Republic. In the broken mirror of
this Islamic Republic, a self-contradictory mirage that cheats on our thirst
for justice, is evident the unbroken image of a picture of a person whose
persona is absented. I will seek to trace the signs of that absence, in antici-
pation of its resurrection, in the rebirth of a people, a nation, thus made a
nation in and through the dialectics of its triumphs and defeats.
We are on the site of Khavaran, the unmarked mass grave of some
homeless souls hovering over us like the ghost of Hamlets father seeking
solace: Who murdered them, why, how do we solicit justicewhat if the
history was not to forget, let alone forgive? To gather our courage together
and speak in a language that addresses a future we share beyond all bor-
ders, let us cross a few boundaries and bring Jacques Derridas trace,
Walter Benjamins debris, Mehdi Akhavan-Sales broken mirror,
and Omar Khayyams dust together to bear on two crucial texts: one
FRAGMENTED SIGNS 221
What could this mean for us, today? The angel would like to stay, awaken
the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. That is our attempt
to do an inventory of the dream in order to interpret and deliver it. But
a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such
violence that the angel can no longer close them. We may think this
storm from hell or paradise but its force is propelling the wings of the
angel nonetheless. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to
which his back is turned. This is the force of futurity, of rebellion, how-
ever loudly, however quietly. While the pile of debris before him grows
skyward: this is our debris, the debris we have inherited in the mass grave
of Khavaran. This storm is what we call progress. Is Benjamin being sar-
castic, pessimistic, or optimistic? None: He is being paradoxical. Progress
is embedded in this storm of debris. So the dream of redemption must be
222 H. DABASHI
was the sublime poet of the fragmentary and the perished, working it
into his messianic vision of resurrection and renewal, and thus in a pro-
phetic way even before the full scale of the horrors of the Holocaust were
know anticipated the modes of messianic defiance humanity will have to
embrace. His prophetic soul saw through the terror of the world visiting
upon the humanity long after he was gone and through his celebration
of fragments and ruins he sought a way out, not despite the ruins but
through the ruins. Through his ingenious readings of German drama,
Baroque allegory, Prousts temporal meanderings, or the debris of com-
modified objects through the streets and arcades of Paris, he taught how
to live with hope through these decays. What the emerging generation
of critical thinking in Iran and the rest of the world needs to learn is the
manner in which, through his reading of the Kabbalah, Benjamin sought
to not just retrieve but in fact restitute the past, and incorporates it into a
vision of enabling future. In the aftermath of the death of grand ideolo-
gies, not just Islamism but all other grand illusions Islamism has devoured
to impose itself, Benjamin remains the sublime philosopher of salvation
through the debris and ruins.
TRACE
In both Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology, and on many other
texts and occasions, Derrida developed the idea of trace, which in addi-
tion to its similar English meaning has a connotation of a track. Every
sign already has the alterity of its own traceso today the word Islam
already has the trace of the West on it, very much as the word abnor-
mal carries the trace of normality in it, or terrorism the state that is
mobilized to wage war against it. Without writing or even pointing to
it, the word the West implicates Islam in its shadow. Trace is thus
an absent present that must remain that way otherwise it will dismantle
the sign under which it rests: it is both a present absent, and an absented
presence. The term thus enables a deconstructive gesture that implies but
does not articulate alterity of what is there. As an exposure of the tran-
scendental signified trace is the always-already hidden that contradicts
and dismantles the metaphysical authenticity of that which conceals it. A
binary opposition (Islam and the West, Normal and Abnormal) hides a
trace, which in turn exposes a rupture within the metaphysics of meaning,
which we may expose. The logic or rhetoric of a trace in a passage or a text
can be mimetically deconstructed.
224 H. DABASHI
The trace is not a presence but is rather the simulacrum of a presence that
dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself. The trace has, properly speak-
ing, no place, for effacement belongs to the very structure of the trace.
Effacement must always be able to overtake the trace; otherwise it would
not be a trace but an indestructible and monumental substance.4
Through that simulacrum of presence the trace points beyond itself with-
out implicating itself in the nature and composition of that beyond, its
identity or alterity, evidence or metaphysics. The dislocation and displac-
ing becomes a time-lapsed agitation in the making of the trace and all
that it implicates. By both being and being under erasure, trace thus can
never be arrested, attested to, held responsible at any court of law, and
condemned to any politics of power or even resistance to that power.
Trace is amorphous. The trace effaces itself in the body of the intuition of
transcendence it detects and implicates, and keeps that momentous occa-
sion of recognition beyond identity. Trace is the dust on the gravesite of
a martyr. It marks it when the martyr is no longer there. Trace is always
somewhere else. It is an optical illusion that enables seeing otherwise.
I am the storyteller
The storyteller I am
YesIndeed!
I now repeat
What I have said
So many other times.
I am an owl
Upon these ruins
Damned by history.
the colonel is summoned to collect, is the knock at his door in a rainy and
stormy night that awakes us to the pain of the nation. The last grand revo-
lution of the twentieth century is devouring its own proverbial children,
as they say in a famous clich. But here more pointedly the aging cleri-
cal custodians of the revolution are murdering their alternative and nur-
turing their own successors. The whole book is thus the simulacrum of
a nightmare. Did the colonel actually experience these events or is this
whole book an account of a nightmare? The colonels admiration for the
nationalist icon and Reza Shah rival Colonel Mohamad Taqi Khan Pesyan
(18921921), after whom he names one of his sons, fuses the fictive and
the historical characters together, compromising both their claims to any
moral authority. The Colonels murder of his own adulterous wife adds a
dramatic momentum to the dreary narrative, and renders the relation of
the reader to his first person narrative uneasy.
Amir, the eldest son, supported the Tudeh Party, initially joined the
ruling regime, but after he lost his wife he became a recluse and sought
haven in the basement of his fathers house. Farzaneh, his eldest daugh-
ter, is married to Qorbani Hajjaj, the turgid and corrupt operator who
is in cahoots with the ruling regime. Mohammed Taqi, his second son,
has joined the Fedaian Organization and is killed in the course of the
revolution. Masooud, his youngest son is a devout supporter of Ayatollah
Khomeini and dies a martyr during the IranIraq War (19801988).
His youngest daughter Parvaneh joins the Mujahidin and is eventually
arrested and executed. Khezr Javid, whom Amir hides and protects from
the lynching mob chasing after his ilk, is the opportunist par excellence,
the running leitmotif of Iranian political history. In the delusional mind of
the Colonial we hear:
Who am I trying to fool? Im well aware that at every stage of history there
have been crimes against humanity, and they couldnt have happened with-
out humans to commit them. The crimes that have been visited on my chil-
dren have been committed, and still are being committed, by young people
just like them, by people stirring up their delusions, giving them delusions
of grandeur. So why do I imagine that people might improve? Everything
going on around us seems to indicate that the values our forebears passed
down to us no longer apply. Instead, we have sown the seeds of mistrust,
skepticism and resignation, which will grow into a jungle of nihilism and
cynicism, a jungle in which you will never find the courage to even mention
the names of goodness, truth and common humanity, a crop that is now
bearing fruit with remarkable speed.7
FRAGMENTED SIGNS 229
Dowlatabadi wrote the book soon after the revolution in the 1980s but
sat on it for a long time, as the victorious faction of the revolution was too
busy writing its own history to allow for the vanquished to have a claim
on the narrative of what had happened. The novel thus first appeared in
German and English and subsequently in many other languages except in
its original Persian and except in Iran. A Persian translation from an English
translation subsequently appeared in Iran to the anger of Dowlatabadi.
Peyman Vahabzadehs Book of Ali complements Mahmoud
Dowlatabadis Colonel. Peyman Vahabzadehs younger brother Ahmad
Ali Vahabzadeh was born in August 1965 and at the prime of his life he
was executed in August 1988having spent the last seven years of his life,
since he was 16, in the dungeons of the Islamic Republic of Iran. He was
among hundreds of other political activists summarily executed by the
ruling clerical regime. After two decades of private mourning, Ahmad Ali
Vahabzadehs older brother, Peyman Vahabzadeh published a short book,
The Book of Ali (2009), in which we read one of the rarest historical docu-
ments: a mourning family remembering their beloved son and brother,
with a language at once intensely personal, and yet profoundly political.8
The book is dedicated to Ali, my beautiful brother. In his preface to
this volume Peyman Vahabzadeh points out that his purpose is to rescue
his young brother from clich-ridden memorials, from communal remem-
brances of victims of political violence for merely expedient political pur-
poses. He insists he wishes to remember his brother for the unique human
being that he was: an attempt, he insists, to remember the life of a pre-
cious human being, my brother, who lost his life at the prime of his youth
with a demonic wave of runaway mass hysteria.9 Peyman Vahabzadehs
poetic prose struggles with the fact of remembrance and forgetfulness, and
strives to remember not just the life his young brother lived but also the
life that he did not. Peyman Vahabzadeh seeks to soothe his pain for his
lost brother in naming his own son Ali. The power of Peymans story of
his brother is precisely in beginning his recollections of their childhood.
A full-bodied human being emerges, long before his politics are outlined.
The result is a rare political biography that rescues the debris of a short life
wasted for a cogent and urgent task.
The father is political, so is the sister who comes back from Italy, thus
inevitably become politically active both Peyman and his younger brother
Ali. Peyman joins the Fedaian-e Guerrilla Organization, Ali Mujahidin-e
Khalq Organization, two competing but complementary revolutionary
outfits formed during the heights of the Pahlavi monarchy. Ali becomes
230 H. DABASHI
increasingly political, and his familys love for him drags them along into
active and conscious solidarity with him, including their grandmother. At
a fateful moment, Peyman joins the Aksariyyat/Majority, the faction of
the Fedaian that opted to support the ruling Islamic Republic, and there-
after his relation with his younger brother becomes conflictual. The pain
of Peyman in recollecting his brothers life is replete with the survivals
guilt.
Peyman Vahabzadehs recollections are augmented by those of his par-
ents, Ahmad Vahabzadeh and Mahin Mousavi. The book is replete with
pain and suffering of a mourning mother, a bewildered father, an eloquent
but angry brother. The balance of the memorial pain is ultimately in the
account of Alis mother going to every grave of a murdered revolution-
ary until she finds out where the grave of her son is, and Alis father who
simply refuses to go to his youngest sons grave. In between that maternal
particularity and paternal denial dwells the death of Ali as a metaphor, as
a fragmented allegory of something not just specific to the Vahabzadeh
family but precisely in and through that particularity to something larger,
something more historic, something visible in the invisibility of myriad of
other families whose pain and suffering has no public mark.
DUSTING THEREAL
From the censorial politics of the ruling Islamic Republic preempting the
publication of Mahmoud Dowlatabadis Zaval-e Kolonel to the painful rec-
ollections of Peyman Vahabzadeh remembering the murder of his young
brother, perished in the triumphant banality of the selfsame tyranny, the
dust and debris of the Iranian revolution gather at Khavaran cemetery.
This dust complicates reality, mutates it, and forges a common ground
between past and present, making the future always already evident in an
imperfect tense. The ruling Islamic Republic is deep rooted in neoliberal
economics of the most vicious sort, and yet flaunts like a mantra its oppo-
sition to what it disingenuously calls the Nizam-e Solteh/the Dominant
Regime. The ruling elite in the Islamic Republic is integral to that Nizam-e
Solteh, in fact a microcosm of and definitive to it. While the Vali Faqih/the
Supreme Leader insists he is a revolutionary not a diplomat, his Pretorian
Pasdars (the Islamic Republic Revolutionary Guards) are hard nose mer-
chant capitalists of the worst kind, selling and buying oil in the black market
to finance their garrison state, with Qasem Soleimani now poised as their
supreme warlord. The paraphernalia of democracy, with the reformists as
FRAGMENTED SIGNS 231
LYRICISM OFREVOLT
These allegories I mark here gather in the poetics of revoltworking
toward an aesthetic intuition of transcendence. The result is the unearth-
ing of the young bodies under the ruins of Khavaran as corpus erotics
revolting against the totalitarian claim of the Islamist jurisprudence on
the damned body of its juridical subjugationthus denied, veiled, con-
demned, and disciplined, as the body of the Islamist subject becomes the
final site of its disciplinary rules. Corpus anarchicum is a revolt against that
disciplined juridical body of the Muslim subject.10
In Ahmad Shamlous poetry in particular, we are the inheritors of a revo-
lutionary lyricism to which our adversaries are not privy. Shamlous transmu-
tation of body politics and the erotic body is the commencement of a Corpus
Eroticumm, left entirely un-theorized in Persian poetic imaginaryboth
verbal and visual. We may consider this Corpus Eroticum a body-double.
This body-doublemetaphoric in one (political) direction and metamorphic
in another (aesthetic), in turn leads to a mode of mimesis we might call pal-
indromic. Palindromic mimesisa mimesis that reads the same body in two
diametrically opposed ways, once politically metaphoric and then aesthetically
metamorphicis constitutionally different from the Aristotelian mimesis
where there is a clear demarcation between reality and its mimetic repre-
sentation. In the colonial context, reality is too serious to be taken too seri-
ously. It assumes a malleable disposition, impressionable in its texture and
disposition, compliant with reading it in any number of directions. Because
of this pliable disposition of palindromic mimesis the texture of the realism
that it exudes and enables is a peculiar kind of poetic para-realism, at once
true to the reality that it represents and yet frivolous in its attendance on
that reality. What today we simplify as yet another form of national art and
call it Iranian cinema is in fact the virtuoso performance of this palindromic
mimesis and its poetic para-realism. It is impossible to exaggerate the creative
FRAGMENTED SIGNS 233
NOTES
1. The best study of Walter Benjamins theory of allegory I have found
and from which much benefited is Bainard Cowan, Walter Benjamins
Theory of Allegory (New German Critique, No. 22, Special Issue on
Modernism (Winter, 1981): 109122.
2. Ibid: 110.
3. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations. Edited with an Introduction by
Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968): 257.
4. Jacque Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's
Theory of Signs (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973):
156.
5. All translations from the original Persian are mine.
6. From Mehdi Akhavan-e Sales, Khan-e Hashtom/The Eighth Task
(1347/1968) in Mehdi Akhavan-e Sales, Dar Hayat-e Kuchak-e Pa'iz
dar Zendan/In the Small Yard of Autumn in Prison and other poems
(Tehran: Tus, 1355/1976). My translation from the original Persian.
7. Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, The Colonel. Translated by Tom Patterdale
(London: Haus Publishing, 2011): 99.
8. See Peyman Vahabzadeh, Ketab-e Ali/The Book of Ali (Vancouver,
Canada: SubVision Publishing, 2009). I am grateful to my friend and
colleague Peyman Vahabzadeh for kindly giving me a copy of this pre-
cious book.
9. Ibid: 56. All translations from the original Persian are mine.
10. For details, see Hamid Dabashi, Corpus Anarchicum Political Protest,
Suicidal Violence, and the Making of the Posthuman Body (New York:
Palgrave, 2012).
11. From Ahmad Shamlou, Az Zakhm-e Qalb-e Abai/From the Wound
of Heart of Abai (1330/1951) in Ahmad Shamlou, Hava-ye Tazeh/
Fresh Air (Tehran, 1335/1956).
Chapter Ten: The End oftheWest
power, the West finally imploded when upon the self-destruction of the
Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the dissolution of the east-
ern European imaginary, it hit an analytic plateau and saw its own epis-
temic exhaustion. At least since the publication of Oswald Spenglers The
Decline of the West/Der Untergang des Abendlandes (19181922), the
presumed binary supposition between a Magian East and an Apollonian
West has been grand-narratively theorized and as a master trope written
backward and forward into world history.1 That world history was always
resistant, reluctant, and above all defiant to yield to any such grand illu-
sion. But in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late
1980s, and soon after that the events of 9/11 in the early 2000s, the
presumption of some sort of an apocalyptic (for Spengler tragic) end
to history has always been paramount.
The publication of Francis Fukuyamas 1989 triumphalist essay, The
End of History (and then book), paradoxically proclaimed both the final
victory (for the author) and the ultimate death (for the world at large) of
the West,2 before the publication of Samuel Huntingtons 1993 con-
frontational essay, The Clash of Civilization (and subsequent book)
sought to give it a new lease on life. Between these two crucial dates,
the death of Soviet Union as a necessary Enemy of the West in 1989
and the rise of Islam in 1993 as its renewed Nemesis, the West did
not quite know what to do with itself. Bypassing Fukuyamas Hegelian
conclusion of history, Huntington reached for his Karl Schmitt, remem-
bered the necessity of yet another Enemy to keep the West possible,
plausible, necessary. But by then the logic of capitalism had its own rhe-
torical twist and the Old Europe had also severed from the USA and
died, the EU had emerged, and the West, having exhausted its entire
creative and destructive prowess imploded. The sudden currency of the
term coalition of the willing in the aftermath of 9/11 and at the wake
of the US-led invasion of Iraq, though of an earlier coinage, points to
the historic collapse of the notion of the West that no longer seemed
to sustain any enduring significance for NATO.The US neoconservative
penchant for the term New Europe, to point to the economically and
politically impoverished eastern European states that (in contrast to some
West/Old European countries) were willing and even eager to rally
behind the US invasion of Iraq also points to this internal destruction of
the West as a unifying or meaningful factor. The publication of Samuel
Huntingtons Who Are We: The Challenges to America's National Identity
(2005), marked not only the fact that the point and purpose of his Clash
THE END OFTHEWEST 239
person with the false down of the postcolonial person (particularly exacer-
bated by the power of a group of mostly Bengali postcolonial theorists pos-
iting the point of this postcoloniality). But the end of colonialism was not
the end of the colonial person, so far as the West remained the conditio
sine qua non of thinking the postcolonial. The answer to the question that
Gayatri Spivak famously posed, Can the Subaltern Speak? was in the
negative primarily because it was a question asked prematurelybecause
she (too) still thought in Western terms, for the subaltern cannot speak
so long as the subaltern can be mis/understood by the West.5 The sub-
altern can only be understood when the West is no longer listening,
is no longer there, it is no longer. The question Can Subaltern Speak
gave the West the singular authority and power to listen, to understand,
to acknowledge. Speaking in Western terms does not authenticate its
alterity, the Eastern termsan equally vacuous illusion manufactured
by the West. But the supposition of postcoloniality still predicated itself
on the conceptual autonomy and authority of the West. Had the post-
colonial person been for real since the 1940s, we did not have to wait for
40 years for the conceptual collapse and implosion of the West, for we
would have exposed its categorical vacuity. By asking the question Can
the Subaltern Speak? we in fact consolidated the power of the West at
the critical moment of its demise, and once again empowered it with the
singular audacity and authority of asking that questionand paradoxically
the question was not asked by a European, by the West, but a Bengali,
by the West. As Fanon rightly said, Europe is the invention of the
Third World.
As the Tunisian Jewish anticolonial theorist Albert Memmi (among
many others, ranging from Frantz Fanon to Ashis Nandy to Malcolm X),
realized, and showed both in his theoretical work and autobiographical
fictions, there is an intimate relationship between the colonizer and the
colonized. They condition, necessitate, and exacerbate each other. That
the colonizer packed his belonging and left the colony did not mean that
the colonized was liberated from the mental and moral condition of colo-
nialityas indeed most famously evident in both Tayeb Salihs Mustapha
Saeed in Season of Migration to the North (1966)6 and Albert Memmis
Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche in Pillars of Salt (1955). They both
remain, in either psychopathic or innocuous ways, incarcerated within the
skeletal confinements of colonialitywherever they might go. Mustafa
Saeed left Sudan for England, and returned from England to Sudan,
and kept within the confinements of his hidden room a library full of
THE END OFTHEWEST 241
the West. His hidden library was his mental confinement, at the very
moment that it liberated him from his native Sudan. What Kurtz in Joseph
Conrads Heart of Darkness (1899) 7 kept doing was not trading in ivory,
but colonizing the mind of the natives by going native (as did Lawrence in
David Leans Lawrence of Arabia [1962]), and Mustapha Saeed is Kurtz
going back home with a vengeance. Albert Memmis Mordekhai at least
leaves the binary of Africa and Europe for the terra incognita (for him) of
Argentina to escape the trap. But as evident in these literary icons of the
postcolonial literature, the fate of the colonial person and personhood was
anything but postcolonial, for coloniality had now transformed itself into
a condition of the mind and soul, body and behavior. You could get the
colonizer out of the colony, but not colonialism out of the colonized.
Exile, from Mustafa Saeed to Edward Said, has been a simulacrum of
running away from the solid supposition of home into the inefficacy of
abroad and thus ipso facto denying any notion of assertive self or histori-
cal agency. From Edward Saids Representations of the Intellectual (1996)8
to his autobiographical account, Out of Place (2000),9 and else scattered
throughout his works and theories, his homelessness and assumptions of
peripherality are the conditio sine qua non of the colonial (not postcolo-
nial) intellectual. Traveling, as result, becomes the permanent metaphor
of exile. For Memmi at the end of Pillars of Salt going to Argentina is as
natural as it is for Assia Djebar in Women of Algiers in Their Apartment.10
Memmis protagonist, Mordekhai, is prone to reject everything,11 for
everything smells of commitmentmoral or political, communal or soci-
etal. The seeds of an agential autonomy are perfectly evident in Memmi,
but never actualized. His motto is as much self-assuring as it is alienating:
Travel if you wish, taste strange dishes, gather experience in dangerous
adventures, but see that your soul remains your own. Do not become a
stranger to yourself, for you are lost from that day on; you will have no
peace if there is not, somewhere within you, a corner of certainty, calm
waters where you can take refuge in sleep.12
A similar sense of self-alienation agitates Jamaica Kincaids cantanker-
ous A Small Place (1988) where her anger against the tourist is also
a simulacrum of her angst toward herself who is no longer at home in
Antigua either.13 If she were at home in Antigua (or in NewYork for that
matter), she would not be so incensed at the tourists, who might have also
managed to amuse her. Her incessant anger is a vibration of her homeless-
ness, of not being home anywhere, and a sense of anger at those who do,
and then go away for a short while as a tourist. She has become her own
242 H. DABASHI
bte noire, a tourist, a tourist par excellence, and always a tourist, no home
to return to and hang her hat.
Just like Kincaid in Antigua, or Said in Palestine, or Saeed in Sudan,
Memmis Mordekhai can never be home anywhereTunisia, France,
Argentina, or on the moon. Like all his presumably postcolonial broth-
ers and sisters, Mordekhai is a vacuous person, a fictive persona, hav-
ing evicted the site of his own agency. No ritual of communal identity
mean anything to Mordekhai, and ceremonies of collective identification
make him feel even more alien to himself. From his uncles death to his
mothers dancing are sources of discomfort, embarrassment, and unease
for him. Judged by their two protagonists, Mustafa Saeed and Alexandre
Mordekhai, Tayeb Salih and Albert Memmi are not harbingers of an
emancipated postcoloniality but in fact the enduring psychopathological
sites of colonialismfor there is no place where these characters can hang
their hat and call home, for there seems to be no cause that houses their
moral whereabouts and gives them a sense of purpose and agency.
Huntington were in fact mourning the death of the West, its concep-
tual incapacity to generate alterity anymore. The West died a slow and
inglorious death, a death by implosion, having exhausted all its creative
and destructive possibilities. The belligerent manufacturing of Islam
or Islamism by both Huntington and the neoconservative clamor
of War on Terror in the aftermath of 9/11, the US-led invasion of
Afghanistan in 2001 and the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, were all
high on immediate consumption and gratification but low in any endur-
ing power of persuasion. The multicultural and polyvocal force of glo-
balized labor migration no longer allows for any given culture-specific
binaries. The alterity of the West speaks too many languages, precisely
at the moment that the West can no longer even convince itself of its
whereabouts, precisely because it lacks any culture-specific Enemy. The
global economic meltdown of the late 2008 is only the most palpable
evidence that the cultural meltdown of the West and the Rest has
also been imperceptivity at work. Between September 2001 and October
2008, and forever there after the West had a very difficult time con-
vincing anyone of anything.
With the death of the West, the world was vacated, made tempo-
rarily unintelligible, having lost its master trope. Left to its own devices
for about four years between 1989 and 1993, the Washington warlords
did not know quite what to do with themselves, with the West having
imploded and the Rest free to roam the earth. As much as for the
West, so was it for the Rest not to know who or what its alterity or
alternative wasfor it was no more. In response to Huntingtons Clash
of Civilization, then Iranian President Mohammad Khatami proposed the
idea of the Dialogue of Civilization, a term much gentler in its disposi-
tion, but equally outdated in its correspondence to the post-civilizational
disposition of a vastly globalized and irreversibly syncretic world.
Almost at the same time, and echoing in the first decade of the
twenty-first century, the voice of their counterparts from mid-twentieth
century, such Muslim intellectuals as Abdolkarim Soroush and Tariq
Ramadan emerged as the prime examples of passionately talking to a
dead interlocutor,14 still in their own captured imagination, sustaining a
condition of moral and imaginative coloniality. The end of the West
thus coincided with the postmortem conversation of two leading Muslim
intellectualsan Iranian and an EgyptianAbdolkarim Soroush and
Tariq Ramadan continuing two separate but parallel conversations with
a West that was no longer there. Central to the work of these two
THE END OFTHEWEST 245
ruling state that laid a false claim on Islam, as they sought to abort the
rebirth of the nationthe nation of citizensvia the transmutation of lib-
eration movements into civil rights movements all the way from Palestine
to the rest of the Arab and Muslim world.
The stillbirth of the postcolonial person anticipated the rebirth of the
nation beyond the banality of an exhausted binary foretold from the very
beginning of that postcolonial moment when the false dawn of liberation
was witnessed and envisioned in the birth of the postcolonial nations and
theorized by a still entirely colonial theorist of the postcolonial reasona
self-confessed Europeanist theorizing the condition of coloniality. The
birth of the first theorist beyond the entire horizon of coloniality and
postcoloniality, at the same time, was hidden under the clamorous con-
sequences of the events of 9/11 and beyond, when no Muslim could be
a theorist, busy as he was being a terrorist. The rebirth of the nation
was therefore not celebrated, and like the birth of all prophetic moments,
this child too was born an orphan. The end of the West coincided with
the false down of the postcolonial nation and with the implosion of the
West. The first postcolonial person was therefore stillborn, and thus
self-evicted, and the world awaited the collective rebirth into the nation
beyond all postcolonial borders.
into the inanimate object with which it (no longer he or she) has been
violated. Unless and until the terror of an isolated over-juridicalization of
Islam and a singular command of Islamthus legalizedover a vast
and varied cosmopolitan culture is addressed, unless and until progressive
Shii jurists abandon their exclusive claim over and above the public space,
we are back to square one of 1979 and an Islamic Constitution in which
the civil rights of citizens must first be verified by a juridical system that is
ipso facto prone to become a killing machinenot despite its fixation with
justice but because of it. For here, in this machine, the Muslim, as Muslim,
has become a murtad (apostate), or else a mohareb (an enemy combatant)
and thus as either of the two is mahdur al-dam (might be killed without
legal proceedings or repercussions).
The battle between the legalism of the naked life/mahdur al-dam and
the birth of republican citizenry beyond the confinement of the colonial
is now fully on course. The postmodern predicament of an illusion of
sovereignty, legitimacy, and authority has now has now caught up with
postcolonial condition. The power at the militarized roots of the con-
ception of empire and its nemesis is now completely broken down into
the distance between potenza and potere, in Agambens Italian, between
puissance and pouvoir, in Foucaults French, or Macht and Vermgen, in
Heideggers German. The Latin root of the distance between potentia and
potestas, between power in a diffused and amorphous state, and power as
centralized, authenticated, and legitimized by virtue of the citizenry that
abides by it, speaks to the vernacular distance between civil rights and
human rights, citizenry and naked life. As much as power as potere, pou-
voir, Vermgen, and potestas were conducive to the formation of a knowing
subject and a sovereign citizen, power as potenza, puissance, Macht, and
potentia entirely lacks and perhaps has for ever lost the ability to constitute
agential autonomy for the knowing subject and sovereign agency for the
citizen (European, American, Arab, Iranian, or otherwise). The citizen is
therefore released into the domain of the collective cultural memory to
reassert its agency. This is the birth channel of the rebirth of the nation.
The terrorist as enemy combatant has now metastasized into rob-
bing all citizens of their civil liberties and of habeas corpus rights. In the
state of exception, the civil society is at the mercy of kangaroo courts, the
civil law has become Islamic law, the civil rights, a fortiori, human rights,
and thus a civil rights movement the only option for a transformative social
uprising, for the (Islamic) law has ipso facto transmuted itself (under colo-
nial duress) into a torturing, raping, and killing machinefor, to extend
THE END OFTHEWEST 249
Agambens argument into the domain of Islamic law, when auctoritas and
potestas coincide in a single person, or when the state of exception, in
which they are bound and blurred together, becomes the rule, then the
juridico-political system transforms itself into a killing machine.15
This warning is not limited to the idea and institution of Velayat-e
Faqih in which auctoritas and potestas has ipso facto become one (in both
theory and practice), for this juridico-political system is always already
embedded in Islamic law, in fiqh, in Shariah, when it is, as it is now, iso-
lated and made insular to non-juridical dimension of Islam, or given pri-
macy of legislative power and political authority over the civil society. The
warning is not limited to Velayat-e Faqih, so that if Ayatollah Khomeini
authorizes it, Ayatollah Montazeri theorizes it, just before he changes his
mind and his student Mohsen Kadivar completely discards it, we might
think the matter resolved. The danger is already embedded in the singular
potency of the aggressive fiqhification of Iranian political culture, as it is
now dominant in Iranso much so that both the monopolized discourse
and its terms of opposition are exercised in exclusively juridical terms, in
order to keep Iranian society (forcefully or softly) within the throes of Shii
jurisprudence, or Islamic juridico-political regime. The naked life of the
Muslim, under an Islamic Republic, and a fortiori under the authority of a
supreme and absolutist Jurist, at once sustains and dismantles the Islamic
legal machinery, for at that point the Quranic Insan has ceased being a
Human, let alone a Muslim.
The constitution of the Muslim homo sacer is coterminous with the
global meltdown of the West. The end of a history that was predicated on
colonial violence is actually the beginning of a history of non-violent recon-
stitution of the political, and therefore the rebirth of the nation decoupled
from all states that lay a false claim on it. Viewed from the global vantage
point, the End of History thesis paradoxically points to the commence-
ment of a renewed worldly pact with history, as nations and cultures are
released from their false binaries with the West (and the nation-states
they had created) and freed to navigate an open-ended course, while at
the same time the Clash of Civilization thesis is in fact the end of civi-
lizational thinking and the commencement of militant provincialism in
world political affairsas best exemplified by Osama bin Ladens terror-
ism and George W.Bushs war on terrorism, later degenerated into ISIS
and the United Nation (UN) resolution to defeat in the aftermath of the
Paris massacre of November 2015. Looked at from the outside world,
Fukuyamas thesis was a premature triumphalism seeking to proclaim USA
250 H. DABASHI
the winner in the post-Soviet world affairs, while Huntingtons thesis did
the same by inventing a new Schmittian Enemy for The West.
With the implosion of the West, and the moral meltdown of the
militant Islamism it had occasioned and sustained, all the historically man-
ufactured manners of civilizational othering, including the Islam that
the Orientalists and militant Islamists had invented, has also ended, and
the era of a renewed discovery of worldly cosmopolitanism, definitive to
all historical cultures, is now fast upon the world, Muslims included. The
threshold of that renewed encounter with history marks the end of the
West as the civilizational source of alienating the world from itself, and
concomitant with it the birth of the first postcolonial person.
The cosmopolitan worldliness that can override the manufactured
nativism of localized cultures is not tantamount to Americanization of
world cultures as Timothy Brenan imagines (and rightly criticizes) in
his At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (1997).16 Quite to the
contrary: What we are witnessing is the creative retrieval of a worldliness
that was already embedded in historical culturesfrom China to India to
the African, Muslim, and Latin American worlds. Opposing that evident
worldliness is the triumphalist nativism at work anywhere from an Islamic
Republic, to a Jewish State, to Hindu fundamentalism, Buddhist nation-
alism, to a Christian empire. In their imperial posturing, the more local
cultures are globalized, the more they become nativized and robbed of
their innate cosmopolitanism. In the wake of that cosmopolitanism, we,
the first postcolonial persons freed from the condition of postcoloniality,
are now naked and free, exposed and emancipated, endangered and safely
homethe tabula rasa of our future citizenry.
NOTES
1. See Oswald Spengler, The decline of the West (New York; A.A.Knopf.
1937).
2. See Francis Fukuyama, End of history? (United States Institute of
Peace in brief, no.11. Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of
Peace, 1989).
3. See Samuel Huntington, The clash of civilizations and the remaking of
world order (New York; Simon & Schuster, 1996), and his Who are we?:
the challenges to Americas identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).
For my critic of Huntingtons thesis see: Hamid Dabashi, For the Last
time: Civilizations (International Sociology 2002; 16; 361. 2001).
THE END OFTHEWEST 251
4. See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the political (New Brunswick, NJ;
Rutgers University Press. 1976).
5. Spivak, Gayatri, Can the Subaltern Speak? in Lawrence Grossberg
and Cary Nelson (Eds), Marxism and the interpretation of culture.
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988).
6. See Tayeb Salih, Season of migration to the north (London: Penguin,
2003).
7. See Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: Penguin Books,
1999).
8. See Edward Said, Representations of the intellectual: the 1993 Reith
lectures (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).
9. See Edward Said, Out of place: a memoir (New York: Knopf:
Distributed by Random House, 1999).
10. See Assia Djebar, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia. 1992).
11. Albert Memmi, Pillars of Salt (New York: Beacon Press, 1992): 41.
12. Ibid. 316.
13. See Jamaica Kincaid, A small place (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux,
1988).
14. See Abdolkarim Soroush, Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam:
Essential Writings of Abdolkarim Soroush (New York; Oxford
University Press, 2000), and Tariq Ramadan, Western Muslims and
the future of Islam (Oxford: New York; Oxford University Press,
2004).
15. Giorgio Agamben, The State of Exception (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005): 86.
16. See Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now
(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Chapter Eleven: Damnatio Memoriae
buries in mass graves its young citizens, men and women, that the prisons
of the Islamic Republic are reported to be a cut from Pier Paolo Pasolinis
Sal o le 120 giornate di Sodoma/Sal or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975).
Though the film, a troubling cinematic rendition of Fascist Italy, was never
officially screened in Iran, it was part of the underground lore at the wake
of the Islamic Revolution (19771979). As self-flagellating as Karrubis
letter was, it exuded a narrative reluctance, an emotive reticence, a discur-
sive dissonance, that defied its own prose and politics, as if the letter wrote
itself despite its author. The horrors that Karroubi was about to reveal
publicly had stirred the old man to the marrow of his bone and shaken
him to the foundations of his faith. He did not quite know how to start,
how to write, how to divulge the secret on which he had sat for a while,
and then how to end the story. The aging revolutionary was troubled.
The reality of the actual event the letter reports fades in the shadow of the
reluctant pen that has to reveal.
Dated 7 Mordad 1388/29 July 2009, and released ten days later on 17
Mordad 1388/8 August 2009, Karroubis letter was pointedly addressed to
Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former Iranian president (19891997),
and at the time this letter was written the head of the Expediency Council,
rather than to Ali Khamenei, the Vali Faqih, thus implicitly incriminating
the Supreme Leader in the atrocities he was about to reveal. Karroubi
begins his letter to Rafsanjani with a litany of wrongdoings that the heav-
ily militarized security apparatus of the Islamic Republic had perpetrated
against peaceful demonstrators in the aftermath of the June 2009 presi-
dential election, including kidnapping, beating, verbal abuse, illegal incar-
cerations, torture, and outright murder.1 Though the letter begins quite
matter-of-factly, there is a sense of frightful drama in its verbal casuistry, a
narrative anxiety bespeaking a bearing witness for victims who are other-
wise blinded, silenced, by their own fearful insightsvictims and witnesses
that they are at one and the same time.
There is something uncanny about Karroubis letter, an aging cleric,
a committed revolutionary, so openly writing against the atrocities of
a regime he has been instrumental in building after a lifetime of con-
viction and struggle. Havades-e talkh/bitter incidents is the expression
that he uses for the atrocities that the security apparatus of the Islamic
Republic had committed in the aftermath of the presidential election.
Even women, he emphasizes, have been the target of what he calls raf-
tar-ha-ye shenaat-amiz/ghastly behavior. The security forces are breaking
their clubs and batons on peoples head, injuring them so severely that
DAMNATIO MEMORIAE 255
for weeks they are unconscious, pains and bruises of injury marking their
bodies days after they were beaten up. Karroubi writes as if he is opening
the oozing bandage of a self-inflicted wound on his own body, the depth
of which is unfathomable to himwith every turn of the gauze he is gaz-
ing at an ulcerous lesion that he cannot conceive has grown on his own
body, on the body politics of the state he has spent a lifetime building.
There is something Kafkaesque about the politics of Karroubis proseas
if Gregor Samsa was writing about the metamorphosis of Iranian body
politics.
Karroubi finally opens a new paragraph and dares to look: But I have
heard something else that even still, thinking of it makes me shiver. I have
not been able to sleep the last two days since I heard this. I went to bed at
2 AM but, and I am not exaggerating, I could not fall asleep, until I finally
got up at 4 AM, read from the Koran for a while and took a shower so
that water might calm me down a little. I even did my morning prayers but
still was not able to sleep. He digresses again, turns his face away, takes
some time to assure Mr. Hashemi of the reliability of his sources for what
he is about to write, that they are high-ranking officials, that even if one
of these reports is true, it is a catastrophe for the Islamic Republic of Iran
which has turned the bright, shining history of Shia clerics into an atro-
cious, shameful fate and has outdone many dictatorial regimes, including
that of the tyrannical Shah. He still cannot completely bring himself to
write what he wants to write, goes into yet another excursion about Islam,
the Revolution, the Imam, and so on.
There is a little known Iranian film called K (2002) by the talented
multimedia artist Shoja Azari, based on three short stories of Franz
KafkaThe Married Couple, In the Penal Colony, and A Fratricide. By far
the most successful of the three is In the Penal Colony, done in a silvery
B&W that captures the eerie vacuity of the original story. I remember
when I first read In der Strafkolonie/In the Penal Colony(1914), in a
seminar with Philip Rieff at the University of Pennsylvania, where I did
my doctoral work in the late 1970s, I was completely lost in the blank-
ness of Kafkas prose that kept pulling the reader in toward a central ter-
ror that was always in the offing but never in complete view. By the time
we actually get to the core of what the blasted Machine does, it is so late
in the protracted narrative that it is as if we have become deaf, dumb,
and blind to its violence and terror, having almost no sympathy for the
wretched Condemned man, happy, almost, that we are as much invested
in the Machine and its ghastly tasks as the Visitor, whose aloof narrative
256 H. DABASHI
Mr. Hashemi, this is what I have been informed about: Some of the detain-
ees have reported that certain individuals have so severely raped some of the
girls in custody that the attacks have caused excruciating damage and injury
to their reproductive organs. At the same time, they report that others have
raped the young boys so violently that upon their release, they have had to
endure great physical and mental pain and have been lying in a corner of
their homes since.2
his own Supreme Leader and said that these abuses were planned and car-
ried out by those who wanted to topple the regimemeaning the security
apparatus of his own government were the enemies of the state.6 There
was a common denominator to the incriminating statements of the cus-
todians of the Islamic Republic: Something was rotten in the theocratic
state, and someone had to read the Mullahs and their henchmen their
Miranda Rights, as it were.
The principal feature of the Kahrizak atrocities was the reticence and
reluctance with which Karroubi initially broke the news, and the evident
outrage of the ruling regime to hear it. The narrative anxiety (an anxiety
of revelation) at the heart of the matter remained unrelenting. Those who
cared were hesitant to reveal the atrocities, those in charge were angry
to hear or admit them, and those who had perpetrated the crimes were
nowhere to be seen. If the revelation about the US military atrocities in
Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq glutinously indulged in over-exposure, in visual
fetishism, in narrative overkill, whereby the factual documentation and
the outrage about what had happened were buried under overwhelm-
ing evidence, news reports, investigative journalism, detailed analysis,
photography exhibitions, artistic productions, and aesthetic theorization
into a hyperreality the news of Kahrizak emerged in exactly the opposite
fashion, one of under-exposure, of reluctance to reveal, of fear and loath-
ing at the sight and suggestion of what had actually taken place. There
were no pictures in the case of Kahrizakthe way Lynndie England and
her comrades-in-arms posed for the camera, with heaps of their victims
piled up in front of them. One of the interrogators of the victim/witness
that Karroubi was able to persuade to talk was horrified by the news that
Karroubi had evidently videotaped his testimony.
In the case of Abu Ghraib, people saw more than they wanted or
neededthey had to turn away in shame, or else remain and watch and
soon be numbed by too much exposure to something no one should ever
watch, something that should never happen to put people in a position
to watch or not to watch. There was a massive visual orgy at work in
and about Abu Ghraib, where the reality of the atrocity became its own
simulacrum, as Jean Baudrillard would say. The torturers themselves took
pleasure at taking pictures of their victims, posed in front or behind them
in obscenely happy and triumphant gestures, and sent them as souvenirs to
their friends and families. They did not intend them for journalists, pho-
tography curators, art critics, or scholars. The US soldiers posed in front
of their victims very much the same way the Southern racist vigilantes did
DAMNATIO MEMORIAE 259
when lynching black folks, or European colonial officers with their decapi-
tated natives. There was a visual performance to the crueltyor perhaps
more accurately, the cruelty was in the visual performance. These people
tortured for the camerafor if the camera were not there to capture it
there would be no point to torturing. They tortured for posterity, for
aftertaste, for others to seea pornographic deferral was at work in these
torturing pictures. Lynndie England and her company took evident plea-
sure in imagining themselves watched by others peeping at them doing
what they were doing. The exhibitionism was integral, definitive even, to
the cruel act.
The flaunted exhibitionism of the torturing performance at Abu Ghraib
set the stage for what was to follow. When the US atrocities in Abu Ghraib
were revealed, there was in fact a public exhibition of these pictures in
NewYork, from mid-September to late November 2004, curated by Brian
Wallis at the International Center of Photography, and by Jessica Gogan
and Thomas Sokolowski at the Andy Warhol Museum, with a text written
by the prominent investigative journalist Seymour M.Hersh.7 Here was
Specialist Sabrina Harman and Specialist Charles Graner posing behind a
pile of naked Iraqis. Here was Private First Class Lynndie England, with
the face and demeanor of a young suburban housewife on a Sunday stroll
at a local mall with her beloved dog, holding, in this case, a leash to an
Iraqi prisoner. This photography exhibition of the visual orgy at work in
Abu Ghraib upped the ante, put on stage what was already stagedthere
was a double entendre in even entering that exhibition, for on exhibition
was exhibitionism. As the curators framed the pictures, the pictures staged
the curatorslike two opposite mirrors reflecting a single objet de curiosit
adinfinitum. Who was staging and who was stagedand what were the
New Yorkers doing in that exhibition, having just walked out off of a
street into the simulacrum of a torture chamber? They would soon walk
out, unharmed, off to a luncheon meeting perhaps, over sushi and sake,
probably. What was consumed in that exhibition?
The over-exposure of Abu Ghraib was not limited to such exhibitions
of their exhibitionism. The visual effects of Americans torturing Iraqis
were assuming a reality sui generis, living a life of their own. Within a
year after the revelations, and on the trail of these pictures mushrooming
around the globe on myriads of websites, Seymour Hersh had published
his bulky volume, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib
(2004), detailing the excruciating minutiae of the atrocities at the torture
chambers.8 Soon Fernando Botero, the prominent Colombian figurative
260 H. DABASHI
artist, followed suit and did a series of paintings based on the snapshots
of Abu Ghraib, put on exhibition in Washington, DC, at the American
University Museum at the Katzen Art Center (November to December
2007),9 as did before him the American artist Susan Crile, at the Leubsdorf
Art Gallery of Hunter College in NewYork (October 2006). As Andrea
K.Scott put it in her review of Susan Criles work, a sanctimonious air
permeates the show, heightened by allusions to classical Western art
Ms. Criles sincere desire to elicit empathy for her subjects is laudable,
but none of her drawings have the gut-wrenching impact of the shame-
ful photos themselves.10 Be that as it may, Susan Criles rendition of the
shameful photos themselves plunged them even further into oblivion,
as did Andrea Scotts review. The paradox had become so thick by now,
you furthered its self-negating tenacity if you learned more about Abu
Ghraib or else wished no longer to hear about it.
The crescendo, though, continued. The amassing of the visual cloning
and analytical literature on the fact and fantasy of Abu Ghraib reached an
apex when the distinguished American art critic Arthur Danto reflected
positively on the exhibition of Boteros work in NewYork:
When it was announced not long ago that Botero had made a series of paint-
ings and drawings inspired by the notorious photographs showing Iraqi
captives, naked, degraded, tortured and humiliated by American soldiers at
Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, it was easy to feel skepticalwouldnt Boteros
signature style humorize and cheapen this horror? And it was hard to imag-
ine that paintings by anyone could convey the horrors of Abu Ghraib as
well asmuch less better thanthe photographs themselves. These ghastly
images of violence and humiliation, circulated on the Internet, on television
and in newspapers throughout the world, were hardly in need of artistic
amplification As it turns out, his images of torture are masterpieces
of what I have called disturbatory artart whose point and purpose is to
make vivid and objective our most frightening subjective thoughts. Boteros
astonishing works make us realize this: We knew that Abu Ghraibs prison-
ers were suffering, but we did not feel that suffering as ours. When the
photographs were released, the moral indignation of the West was focused
on the grinning soldiers, for whom this appalling spectacle was a form of
entertainment. But the photographs did not bring us closer to the agonies
of the victims.11
she thought Criles distanced us from that pain. Common to both Scott
and Danto, however, remains the centrality of us (Americans, that is, or
that chimerical construct called the West) as the locus classicus of pain,
of feeling the pain of others, the pain of the Iraqis.
Through the process of their successive abstractionsfrom fact to pho-
tography to art to aesthetic theoryeven the Iraqis bodily pains were not
allowed to be theirs, for now that too was made oursours meaning
Americans, their art theorists, and their liberal readership, following on
the heels of their army as liberators. The same pronominal subterfuges for
who is torturing and who is being tortured was invoked by Susan Sontags
famous essay, aptly called Regarding the Torture of Others. She too
thought these pictures were usmeaning Americans.
To have the American effort in Iraq summed up by these images must seem,
to those who saw some justification in a war that did overthrow one of the
monster tyrants of modern times, unfair. A war, an occupation, is inevita-
bly a huge tapestry of actions. Considered in this light, the photographs
are us. That is, they are representative of the fundamental corruptions of
any foreign occupation together with the Bush administration's distinctive
policies. The Belgians in the Congo, the French in Algeria, practiced torture
and sexual humiliation on despised recalcitrant natives.12
the nation from their state, the systematic depravation of states from
national sovereignty, and the equally organic growth of the nation into
self-sufficient aesthetic entities.
Mirzoeff laser-beams on the second Persian Gulf War (2003-present),
where this visual fetishism at the heart of the imperial imagining came
to a crescendo, for it is during this war that more images were created
to less effect than at any other period in human history,16 a saturation
of images that continues to null, numb, and make their audiences care
less by the passage of time and the piling of more visual evidence of car-
nage. Mirzoeffs diagnosis of this development picks up from where Guy
Debord left off in the 1960s. As Mirzoeff puts it:
the Pacific Ocean. One reads from one end to the other of this anthro-
pological prying into a peoples artwork aghast at how the literary and
visual art of an entire peopleentangled as it is in matters of life and
deathcould be so categorically denied a caring intellect. Iran is not a site
of visual desolation. It has its share of visual culture, produced on a size-
able cosmopolitan canvas that can mean a lot to those who care to watch.
But the ethnographic gaze that reduces that visual culture to mere con-
jectural fieldwork destroys the evidence by reducing it to primitivized
raw data for spurious theorization. Some aspects of cinema studies
do a similar thing by over-aestheticizing the evidence in entirely vacuous
terms. In these terms, the anthropological project has found a new way of
serving the imperial imagining by reducing the visual sites of alternative
cultures to raw material for their power-basing theorization.21
OF EMPIRES ANDCAMPS
The visual imperialism that enables US militarism and facilitates American
indulgence in over-exposure to the point of regarding and thus claiming
the pain of others is precisely the modus operandi that makes the camps
that comprise it invisible. The Israeli occupation of Palestine is perhaps
the best example of how a military garrison state prohibits the visibility
of Palestinians as a people and literally (not figuratively) reduces them
to camps. As Edward Said once elaborated on Amira Hass comment
about the invisibility of Palestinians in their own homeland, invisibility is
the principal aspect of the predicament of the Palestinians ever since their
Catastrophe/Nakba in 1948.22
The Palestinian refugee camps, in and out of their homeland, are the fac-
tual prototypes of the transmutation of nation-states into stateless camps,
and its citizens into enemy-combatants, stripped of their civil rights and
reduced to their condition as zo and bereft of their bios.23 As Mirzoeff
understands them, these camps are not the exception to democratic
society. Rather they are the exemplary institutions of a system of global
capitalism that supports the West in its high consumption, low price con-
sumer lifestyle. I call this regime the empire of camps.24 Prior to Mirzoeff
and Agambens theorization, by a distance of more than half a century,
Palestinian refugee camps became the historic documentations of the phe-
nomenon, though for both Mirzoeff and Agamben the Nazi concentration
camps have provided ample evidence from Europe. Invisibility is definitive
to these camps. For all its religious overtones, Mirzoeff points out, the
DAMNATIO MEMORIAE 267
scruples against torturing or raping people. The only thing that the empire
of camps needs is an effective Enemy, which for George W.Bush was a fic-
tive Muslim terrorist he suspected lurking in every Muslim he imagined,
and for Ahmadinejad is an agent of the West lurking under the skin
of any defiant soul that said no to the banality of his evil. In this respect,
the identical banality of Bush and Ahmadinejad (two cogent examples of
Hannah Arendts diagnosis) is copycatting the Nazi political theorist Carl
Schmitt who stated that without an Enemy there would be no concept of
the political. The specific political distinction to which political actions
and motives can be reduced, Schmitt wrote, is that between friend and
enemy.26
That constitution of the Enemy in the Islamic Republic is now enter-
ing a cul-de-sac in which the political apparatus seems set to undo itself.
As the presumption of an Enemy that is dead-set to destroy the regime
has become central to its endemic anxiety of legitimacy, the very binary
of friend and foe has lost its cogency in the aftermath of the presiden-
tial election of June 2009. Kidnapping, torture, sexual violence, murder,
and nocturnal burial in mass unidentified gravesall done by Iranians to
Iranians, by Muslims to Muslimshave finally broken the fictive binary
particularly poignant in the age of tribal warfare between Islam and the
West and opened a whole new vista onto the globalized carnage of capi-
tal and its evolving culture of domination. Much of the animus of Abu
Ghraib revelations was centered on Americans torturing Iraqis, Americans
torturing Afghans, both predicated on Israelis torturing Palestiniansor,
put in a different register, Christians torturing Muslims, Jews torturing
Christians and Muslims. The case of Kahrizak seriously compromises all
such binaries, for it is the case of Iranians torturing Iranians, Muslims
torturing Muslimsso the central trope of othering is categorically over-
come and the naked life (Agambens diagnosis), stripped of its strategic
distancing via cultural registers, has been completely exposed. What is
happening here is the dissolution of Potenza as legitimate authority into
Potere as naked force, and, a fortiori, the transmutation of civic life into
naked life, of civil rights into human rights. The exposure of the naked
life, stripped of all its protective binaries, reduces the colonial body to a
homo sacer precisely at the moment when the visual regimes that have dis-
torted it to an ethnographic oddity cover and conceal it either by over- or
under-exposure. This body is the ground zero of the rebirth of the nation
beyond any claim of any state to sovereignty over it.
DAMNATIO MEMORIAE 269
HYPERREALIZING REALITY
The under-exposure of the facts of Kahrizak in Iran is coterminous with the
over-exposure of evidence of Abu Ghraib in the USA.Talking and writing
about torture or picturing torture in an over-exposed visual cultureeven
or particularly by way of remembering, reminding, or condemning it
hyperrealizes it (Jean Baudrillards term) to the point of rendering viewers
numb and its horrors nil. Writing about torture becomes a subterfuge
that allows for the camouflaging of the desire to forget it, wipe it out of
memory, through a palimpsestic palette or prose that by drawing or writ-
ing (on) torture wipes out the terror of torturebecomes a therapeutic
confessional that exonerates the confessor, perhaps, but, ipso facto, covers
up the evidence by indulging in it. The hyperrealization of Abu Ghraib in
America covers torture also by way of covering up the plight of millions
of other Iraqis who may not have been tortured in Abu Ghraib but are
victims of a malignant warmongering that Susan Sontag does not own
up to so long as she has owned up to the pictures of torturing always
other people. The scandal that emerged over Abu Ghraib eventually
became a ruse to cover over the much more horrid fact, the torturing of
the body politic of IraqAbu Ghraib was categorically condemned as an
aberration, and it most probably was, but precisely as an aberration it sum-
moned a diversionary tactic to coagulate the pain of a people, a nation, a
country, raped and burned (just like Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi), and
is getting away with it.
Hyperrealization overkills. Discussion of torture thus emerged as a
cover up for tortureits normative narrativization, robbing it of its bar-
barity by bringing it into the domain of liberal analytic, and of course even-
tually scholarly disciplines of the humanities. Visual and literary discourses
discuss torture and in doing so alienate the subject from the predicate of
talking about torture. Perhaps painting torture has been therapeutic
for Fernando Botero and Susan Crile, Arthur Danto and Susan Sontag,
but certainly not for those who have been tortured, and those who never
get to see themselves (or their tormented nation) painted, portrayed, ana-
lyzed, theorized, and terrorized at one and the same time. It is not just the
Iraqis who for generations will not be able to talk about what Americans
talk about as the Second Gulf War. More than 60 years after they have
been robbed of their homeland, Palestinians can still scarcely talk or write
or film about their Nakba. The only feature-length film that exists on
270 H. DABASHI
for that is the reason that Karroubi could not sleep, and that is precisely
how memory of torture and rape ought to be kept, so it keeps you awake.
For if Lynndie England tortured and Susan Sontag wrote about Lynndie
England, then Lynndie England subsumes Susan Sontag: For those snap
shots of Abu Ghraib are the very last vestiges of a sign that cannot and
must not be read, left indecipherable as they mustthey must remain
haunting, unnarrated, just there. Writing (about) torture is enacting a
Damnatio Memoriae, damnation of memory, removing the evidence
from the act of remembrance, as it was a form of dishonor passed by the
Roman Senate upon those it thought traitorous to the Roman Empire.29
Hyperrealization transgresses from fact to phenomenon. Writing about
Abu Ghraib is writing Abu Ghraib, authoring it, authorizing it, just like
George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeldand thus un-
writing those responsible for it, from the US President, to the US Vice
President, to the US Secretary of Defense, to the US Attorney General,
down all the way to Alan Dershowitz who thought it was necessary to
torture people, and Michael Ignatieff who seconded him.30 In defiance
of torturers and in negation of the native informers turned anthropolo-
gists of Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, or Palestine, the only way to write
about torture is to write about the defiant dignity of silencewhen in the
indirection of art, the distancing Verfremdung of laughter, the sinuous
un/certainty of poetry, tortured people refuse to be interviewed in any
field trip, to be removed from memory.
From the Secretary of Defense to the (embedded) anthropologist,31
through the art and aesthetic theory of torturing people, hyperrealization
is hard at work, where the visual has taken over the realand precisely for
that reason, Baudrillard saw Abu Ghraib coming, and saw the erasure of
Abu Ghraib coming, years before it came. Now, he said in 1995, almost
a decade before the Abu Ghraib revelations,
the image can no longer imagine the real, because it is the real It is as
though things had swallowed their own mirrors and had become transpar-
ent to themselves, entirely present to themselves in a ruthless transcription,
full in the light and in real time The reality has been driven out of reality
The only suspense which remains is that of knowing how far the world
can de-realize itself before succumbing to its reality deficit or, conversely,
how far it can hyperrealize itself before succumbing to an excess of reality
(the point when having become perfectly real, truer than true, it will fall into
the clutches of total simulation).32
272 H. DABASHI
BODY ASEVIDENCE
The absence of the body of evidence on the colonial corner of corpo-
real modernityand thus Karroubis sleeplessnesshas an archeological
site that is yet to be unearthed. Because colonial conquest was aterritorial
(people came out of nowhere, as it were, and conquered your land), it was
conducive to the production of an aterritorial body, where the colonized
became alienated from their own bodies (not just selves) and began inhab-
iting always already disembodied bodies.
The absented, disembodied, body of the colonial person is thus made
corporeally invisible and, a fortiori, incapable of pain or pleasure, for the
body has self-metamorphosed into the very last visible site of state vio-
lence. Up until Abu Ghraib, representation of torture and its signs on
the deterritorialized and disembodied colonial body was impossible
the snap shots of Abu Ghraib brought that impossibility full circle, that
body was made visible, put on a pedestal as a tortured body, sexually
molested, and physically abused. This tortured body had hitherto been
in the unconscious of the colonized subject, and Abu Ghraib was the
return of the colonized repressed, making visible the otherwise invisible
ferocity of torture, the absence of a verbal or visual language to articu-
late it. After Abu Ghraib, the Muselmann of the Nazi concentration
camps has finally come full circle and become what she or he wasa
Muslim.
The disembodied Muslim in Abu Ghraibthe updated Muselmann of the
concentration campsrefuses to be read. Ahmadinejad, denying the Muslim
youth tortured, as he was the president blames the Enemy, as did his coun-
terparts Dershowitz and Ignatieff on the opposite side of the fencethus
DAMNATIO MEMORIAE 273
doing away with the fictive fence. Karroubi, with the stroke of his pen one
sleepless night, breaks the binary, and on the following morning the self-
othering of Islam and the West has if not entirely collapsed, then been
bracketed. The Enemy is now withinthat is why the custodians of the
Islamic (no less) Republic insist it is outside. They protest too much. The
collapse (or bracketing) of the binary strips the naked life of its presumption
of clothing, for now the sacrosanct Islam Itself is implicated. The politi-
cal predicament points to a moral crisisto a metaphysical implosionfrom
which the Shii melt down occurs. From there the naked lives East and West
come together and the twain meetas the naked life is corroborated by the
extension of human rights that are lent to it momentarily to protect it,
as opposed to the civil rights that it permanently needs in order to live a
politically plausible life. Look at the Iranian kangaroo courts that replicate
Guantnamo military courts, and the idea of preemptive, indefinite incarcer-
ation that is legalized in Bushs White House, upheld in Obamas, and prac-
ticed in the Islamic Republic. The cycle of naked life is now completeand
the human body is reduced to its organs, ready for sale to the highest bidders.
Futile academic exercises to prove that the presidential election of June
2009 was perfectly finethat the Green Movement is part of an impe-
rialist designand that do so with a straight face as if peoples young
children had not been kidnapped off the streets by the security appa-
ratus of the Islamic Republic (since its very inception) tortured, sexu-
ally violated, murdered, and buried secretly in mass graves, amounts to
a diversionary tactic that can only reveal the darker densities of what is
surfacing in Iran. In Homo Sacer, Agamben notes the publication, by
the prestigious German publisher Felix Meiner, of Karl Binding and
Alfred Hoches Authorization for the Annihilation of Life Unworthy of
Being Lived (1920), and the correspondences between a certain Dr.
Roscher and Heinrich Himmler in 1941 concerning a number of VPs
(Versuchspersonen, human guinea pigs) that the doctor wished to use in his
medical experiments, for he believed using animals in such experiments
would be useless.33 As Agamben discusses these two sets of documents,
what above all is terrifying is the straight face with which these German
scientists talk about killing what they believe to be useless human beings,
or else subjecting them to experiments that will result in their torturous
death in the interest of safeguarding Nazi Germany.
A similar disregard for the most basic conceptions of human decency
is now evident among those who came to the defense of Ahmadinejads
274 H. DABASHI
the Best Director category in the same festival. At the movies Venice pre-
miere, wrote the Los Angeles Times, Neshat walked the red carpet with
her creative team, all of them dressed in green (the unofficial color of the
Iranian protest movement following the recent elections). If anyone knows
how to make a bold visual statement, its Neshat, whose video art work has
been shown in prominent museums around the world.37 Yes, this is the
plunging of the spectacle into the spectaclewhere Hana Makhmalbaf and
Shirin Neshat become the spectacle that frames and forms the bespectacled
reality. But this is also what it takes to defeat and scandalize the otherwise
hidden rapists and torturers of the Islamic Republic. The Islamic Republic
will fall not by a military strike by the US or Israeli armyacts of folly
that will in fact sustain and prolong it. It will fall by the weight of its own
insoluble invisibilitiesmade visible by a visual minimalism that eludes the
worlds widest screens. Like the insomniac nights of one aging revolution-
ary, the silenced screams and hidden horrors of innocent boys and girls
violated and tortured in invisible sites of a murderous Islamic Republic
are filled with visions of many bright and early dawns.
NOTES
1. The original letter was published on Saham News, the official website of
Mehdi Karroubis Etemad Melli Party on 8 August 2009 at http://www.
etemademelli.ir/published/0/00/65/6571/. Accessed on 8 August
2009. For a reliable English translation, see: http://enduringamerica.
com/2009/08/10/iran-the-karroubi-letter-to-rafsanjani-on-abuse-of-
detainees/. For a New York Times report of this letter, see Iran Tries to
Suppress Rape Allegations. (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/15/
world/middleeast/15iran.html). For a New York Times editorial on this
rape charges, see Shame On Iran at http://www.nytimes.
com/2009/08/28/opinion/28fri2.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&ref=global-
home&adxnnlx=1251454080-9+nzy+AIqjK2uhSxa6+UUw. Accessed
on 28 August 2009. For my initial reflections on this letter, see my CNN
commentary, Iran Confronts Rape, Torture Allegations (22 August
2009, at http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/08/22/
dabashi.iran.morality/index.html), accessed on 7 September 2009.
2. From the English translation of Karroubis letter, available at: http://
enduringamerica.com/2009/08/10/iran-the-karroubi-letter-to-rafsanjani-
on-abuse-of-detainees/.
DAMNATIO MEMORIAE 277
nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0DE5DD1130F930A25753
C1A9609C8B63. Accessed on 8 September 2009.
11. Arthur C. Danto, The Body in Pain (The Nation, 9 November 2006).
12. See Susan Sontag, Regarding the Torture of Others (The NewYork
Times, 3 May 2004).
13. For details of President Obamas decision not to release the Abu
Ghraib-related photos, see Mark Thomson. The Next Detainee Photo
Scandal: get Ready for Abu Ghraib, Act II (Time, 11 May 2009).
14. See Martin Fletcher and a special correspondent in Tehran, Raped
and beaten for daring to question President Ahmadinejads elec-
tion (The Times, 11 September 2009, available at http://www.
timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/arti-
cle6829921.ece. Accessed on 11 September 2009). The distin-
guished Iranian documentary filmmaker, Reza Allamehzadeh (who
for years has lived in exile in Europe) has also produced a number
of videos in which he has interviewed the victims of torture and
rape, and they are readily available on YouTube. For example, see:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhKs4lZBkyE&eurl=http%3
A%2F%2Freza%2Emalakut%2Eorg%2F2009%2F09%2Fpost%5F46
9%2Ehtml&feature=player_embedded (accessed on 13 September
2009).
15. See Nicholas Mirzoeff, Watching Babylon: the war in Iraq and global
visual culture (London: Routledge, 2004): 117171. See also The
Camp as the Nomos of the Modern, in Giorgio Agamben, Homo
Sacer: Sovereign Power and bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-
Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995/1998): 166-
180; and What is a Camp? in Giorgio Agamben, Means without
End: Notes on Politics. Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare
Casarino (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
1996/2000): 3744.
16. Mirzoeff, Watching Babylon (Op. Cit.): 67.
17. Mirzoeff, Watching Babylon (Op. Cit.): 7073.
18. Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime (London: Verso: 1995/1996): 4.
19. Mirzoeff, Watching Babylon (Op. Cit.): 68.
20. See Michael Fischer, Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed
Knowledges: Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry (Durham,
NC: Duke University, 2004).
21. See Talal Asads Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (New York:
Prometheus Books, 1995) for the earliest critic of anthropology in
DAMNATIO MEMORIAE 279
WOMEN AT WORK
As the Maarefi family is getting ready in Tehran for the wedding of their
young daughter Mahrokh, the brides elder sister Mahtab Maarefi, her
husband, Heshmat Davaran, and her two children get into a rented car
in the northern part of the country to drive south for the occasion. Their
luggage packed in the car, and just before getting into the car Mahtab
The first draft of this chapter appeared as An Artistic Perspective: The Women
of Bahram Beizais Cinema in Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet and Beth S.Wenger
(Eds), Gender in Judaism and Islam: Common Lives, Uncommon Heritage
(New York: NewYork University Press): 311340.
Maarefi looks straight into the camera and with a disarmingly blank face
says, We are going to Tehran to participate in my younger sisters wed-
ding. We will not reach Tehran. We will all die.
With that simple line, something extraordinary happens not only in
the creative career of, by far the most widely loved and admired Iranian
filmmaker, Bahram Beizai, but also in the very vast and variegated spec-
trum of Iranian cinema.
Bahram Beizai was born in 1938in Tehran to a prominent Iranian liter-
ary family. As both a playwright and a filmmaker, he has had a long and
illustrious career in both pre- and post-Islamic Revolution eras. From the
late 1960s, he has been at the forefront of Iranian cinemaovercoming
much censorial hardship to produce a magnificent body of work at the
core of Iranian New Wave.1
At the center of most Beizais films is a strong female character. All
women in Beizais cinema work. They work and they are located right
in the middle of a material constellation of reality. As early as Thunder
Shower/Ragbar (1971), Beizai places womens dignity grounded in their
working habitat. Atefeh, the lead character, works in a tailors workshop.
Her mother, despite her old age, weaves handmade sweaters to help out
with the expenses, and the owner of the tailor shop is also a woman. These
three women are not defined by their contingency on any other bread-
giver. They are autonomous, earthly, real, and tangible, their being-in-the-
world conditioned by the dignity of their labor.
Rooted and confidant in their working place, Beizais women have
an active, even aggressive, role in their own destiny. In the central event
of Thunder Shower, an emerging affection develops between Atefeh and
the new schoolteacher, Mr. Hekmati. Atefeh is a major actor. Atefeh has
another suitor, the local butcher, who is wealthy, powerful, determined,
and influential. By marrying him, Atefeh would have secured a comfort-
able life, she and her mother and young brother together. Her attraction
to Mr. Hekmati is gradual, logical, and yet palpably affectionate. Even
more importantly, she is an equal partner in the making of that affec-
tion possible, real, and trustworthy. The reality of Atefeh is embraced by
the realism of her mother and her employer, both of them woman, both
of them straight from the streets and alleys of Iranian reality. Even the
neighborhoods butcher contributes to the realization of Atefeh as an
active moral agent in her own life. Even if we agree with Shahla Lahijis
assessment that these three women [i.e., Atefeh, her mother and her
MYTHMAKER, MYTHMAKER, MAKE ME AMYTH 283
is that Rana and Ayat fight it together, on two simultaneous fronts, from
the land and the sea. Ayat is haunted by his fatal attraction to the sea,
Rana by the ancestral gaze of a dead husband. The invading sea mon-
sters, apparitions from Ayats own perturbed fears of the unknown and the
insinuating, have nothing less scary about them than the invisible ghosts
that roam the village in the form of traditions, customs, habits, and
manners. At the end, Ayat, Rana, and the entire village fight as much
against the invading sea monsters as they do against the monstrous appari-
tions, a whole genealogy of fear, they have themselves invented.
The chief protagonist of The Stranger and the Fog is neither Ayat nor
Rana. It is the fog. It is the furiously fogy subjugation of the real, where
the real can yield alternative visions of itself. The foggy disposition of The
Stranger and the Fog renders translucent all the received cognitive catego-
ries with which a culture constitutes itself. The symbolic structuring of
the universe of imagination called culture is actively mutated under this
hazy vision of the real. As a visual projection of the subconscious, Beizai
uses the fog to melt away the presumed rigidity of the evident. The result
is a spectacular loosening of the obvious. After watching the atmospheric
mistiness of The Stranger and the Fog, we no longer look at reality with the
same submissive matter-of-factness that there is nothing one can do about
it. With the vaporizing effusions of the visible, the authority of the sight
itself is compromised, reconstituted, negotiated anew, and implicated in a
whole new hermeneutics of subjectivity.
If by abolishing the mythic universe we have lost the universe, in
George Batailles words, the action of a revealing loss is itself connected
to the death of myth. And today, because a myth is dead or dying, we
see through it more easily than if it were alive: it is the need that perfects
the transparency, the suffering which makes the suffering joyful.6 Bataille
here speaks of what Weber, earlier in the twentieth century, had termed
the universal disenchantment of the world.7 Both Bataille and Weber are
responding to the predicament of instrumental rationalism as the greatest
achievement of the dual projects of the European Enlightenment and its
colonial modernity. But what they say has a profoundly implicative reso-
nance for the world outside the enchantment of the dual project and yet
ravished by its colonial consequences. Our mythic universe, the terms of
our enchantment, as the subjects of Beizais visual reflections, were either
actively forgotten or ferociously remembered under the dire consequences
of colonialism and the colonized subject. The culture of authenticity
that was created under these circumstances was conducive to a servile
286 H. DABASHI
RE-MYTHOLOGIZING THEREAL
By the time he made The Ballad of Tara/Cherikeh-ye Tara (1978), Beizai
had thoroughly mastered the active re-mythologization of the specifically
Iranian reality in order to negotiate a new angle on that reality. Without a
full command over the inner working of the Iranian mythological memo-
ries, it is impossible to do what Beizai does, at once resuscitating them
and manipulating them, to force them to yield to alternative modes of
meaning, being, activating. No one in the history of Iranian performing
arts comes anywhere near Beizai in his phenomenal command of Persian
mythological culture and his ability to force it into a creative convulsion.
The reason Beizai has become proverbial among his Iranian critics for the
MYTHMAKER, MYTHMAKER, MAKE ME AMYTH 287
for any new season, with no sign of self-consciousness evident about her.
The description of Susan Taslimi as Tara by Shahla Lahiji is quite poignant:
Tara as earth, nature, and fertility appears at a moment when she has lost
two of her men: A husband and a father. Meanwhile she is being pursued
by four men: By a half-crazed boy, by the brother of her murdered husband
who is probably the murderer and who loves her sickly, his name is Ashub,
meaning Chaos, by Qelich who like her is earthly and digs water from
the depth of the earth, and then by the Historical Man who is there to get
the sword and yet falls in love with her. Located between these two manly
brackets of dead and living attendants, whatever Tara has inherited from
her masculinist ancestry she distributes to everybody in the village, much
to their delight, even the sword that is brought back to her immediately
because of the fear of its being haunted. She is given back the sword but
she does not know quite what to do with it. She tries to cut wood, chop
vegetables, or hold the door with it. She throws it out into the sea, much
to the anger of the Historical Man, but the sea returns the sword back,
much to her surprise. She discovers the use of the sword when a wild dog
attacks her and her children and she kills the wild dog and thus finds out,
much to her awe, the use of the sword. Among awe, delight, surprise, and
anger, Tara defines the world, locates herself, and there places the reality of
the earthly life in which she lives. She is the original point of departure for
whatever that exist, whatever that should, and does, matter.
In The Ballad of Tara, as in all other films of Beizai, the lead woman
protagonist has the dignity of place by the ennobling grace of work. Tara
is a farmer. Her children, her domestic animals, her farm, and the retinue
that holds these together are at the center of a universe over which she
presides. In this pre-moment of history (when history has not started yet)
MYTHMAKER, MYTHMAKER, MAKE ME AMYTH 289
only work matters. Sword has no use in this pre-moment. Tara tries to
put the sword to work. But it is a useless, work-less, instrument. History
having not yet begun, there is no use for the sword. When Tara and the
Historical Man meet, he can only speak death, destruction, and honor,
while she tries to see if the man has any talent she can put to work.
The Historical Man is out to get her sword back to defend his honor,
but while here in the pre-moment of history he falls in love with Tara
and cannot leave to go back to history, until such time as he is assured
that Qelich is in love with Tara and will actually take care of her children
in her absence. At such time will the Historical Man go back to history,
having found a cause to re-enter it again. Thus, Beizai in effect holds
history hostage to a mythological renegotiation of it in the pre-moment
of history. For the Historical Man, as he enters this pre-moment, honor
precedes life, whereas Tara places life, in which dwells her love for the
Historical Man, before any Historical constitution of manly Honor. She
has no use for such cultural abstracts, particularly when defined by useless
men. Tara is noble in the pre-cultural materiality of the term. He speaks
of honor in history, and of love in the material context of a life that is too
real to collapse into any history. Central to this distinction is the function
of the sword. She first tries to use it practically, or to sell it, throw it away,
or go harvesting with it. The sword, however, belongs to the lost honor
of a tribe. But the people of the village have no use for the sword either.
She kills a dog with the sword to protect herself and her children and thus
learns the use of the sword and is petrified by it. She gives the sword back
to the Historical Man to leave, but by then she is told that he cannot go
back because he has fallen in love with her: History taken hostage to its
own pre-moment.
Far more important than defining myth as sacred tale or traditional
tale,11 it is important to see the act of myth-making as a form of communal
self-signification, a manner in which a world comes to self-consciousness.
Outside such significations, the world atrophies into confusion and chaos.
Beizais cinema in general, and The Ballad of Tara in particular, is a
singularly successful negotiation with the enduring parameters of Persian
mythologizing imagination. One of the crucial achievements of Beizai in
The Ballad of Tara is to subvert time and narrative in a way that enables
his story to find and demonstrate its own internal logic. Consider the
narrative elements of this ballad. The Historical Man has exited history
and entered its pre-moment in order to retrieve his sword, and yet he is
held back by a love affair. The Grandfather is dead and yet he speaks in
290 H. DABASHI
person beyond his grave as the solitary sound of an authority that defies
death and timing. Equally paramount in this pre-moment of history is a
sword that always mysteriously reappears, against all logic, despite all resis-
tance, in tune with a narrative logic that only a mythor perhaps more
accurately in Beizais case, a counter-mythcan generate and sustain.
Dialogues in The Ballad of Tara vary in accent and intonation, implicat-
ing no particular time or location, implicating all times and all locations.
Costumes are not all from Tavalish, the region in which the film was made,
but the visual regalia of a pre-moment in the world. The sights and sounds
here do more than just express ideas; they actually define the terms, as they
constitute the parameters, of a different world, the world of the story, the
realm of the unreal, to which the real must yield. The stylized gestures
are pantomime invitations into the sight of the unseen, the place of the
pre-moment of being-in-the-world. In The Ballad of Tara, Beizai enters
the world of myth in order to force his audience to exit the routinized
(experienced) world alerted to a whole different consciousness of reality.
To achieve that reconstitution of the real cinematically, visuality becomes
the central mechanism of Beizais narrative, which must begin to teach its
otherwise primarily audile audience how to see. Foregrounding the visual
possibility of colors and shapes as the constituent forces of the narrative
results in an active stylization of colors and shapes, which in turn results in
a formal stylization of the visual. Stylizing movements comes next, aided
admirably by an almost self-conscious stylization of the camera movement
and angles. All of these leading to the constitution of a visual world, legiti-
mately operative on its own terms, irreducible to the outside world, giving
palpable reality to film as the visual substitution of the real from which to
reconstitute the real by contesting the real. No other Iranian filmmaker
has this kind of command over the function of the visual, and so richly
rooted in the Iranian visual memories, to pull this out without collapsing
into the museumization of the culture. To see the remarkable ability of
Beizai all one has to do is to see Shahram Asadis The Fateful Day/Ruz-e
Vaqeeh (1995) that is based on Beizais script and yet visually collapses
into a museum piece of tourist attraction. Beizai is no museum curator. He
is a puppeteer of our forgotten memories.
By renarrating the myth, Beizai in effect creates the visual site of a
ritual, a sign of his lifelong dedication to and fascination with Persian
Passion Play (Taziyeh). Bringing the ritual to climactic closure is the
scene where Tara picks up the sword and attacks the receding Historical
Man into the see. In the stunningly shot and acted last scene, Tara, sword
MYTHMAKER, MYTHMAKER, MAKE ME AMYTH 291
in her hand, attacks the sea and launches her futile blows against waves
after waves. The sheer futility of Taras act and the stunning beauty of
this scene is where Beizai rests her camera for the longest time, allowing
for the ritual to sink its effect. But Beizai opts to end on a different note.
When the Historical Man leaves, Tara tells Qelich they should get marry,
as soon as the next harvest.
MYTHOLOGIES
In a short stroke against Mickiewiczs Julius Caesar, Roland Barthes
catches the fabricated spontaneity of trying to pass the fake as the real. In
a brilliant reading of the connotation of sweating as a sign of oral exertion,
Barthes formulates a shortcut into what he calls an ethic of signs.12
Signs ought to present themselves only in two extreme forms: either openly
intellectual and so remote that they are reduced to algebra, as in Chinese
theatre or deeply rooted, invented, so to speak, on each occasion, reveal-
ing an internal, a hidden facet, and indicative of a moment in time, no longer
of a concept (as in the art of Stanislavsky, for instance). But the intermediate
sign reveals a degraded spectacle, which is equally afraid of simple reality
and of total artifice. For although it is a good thing if a spectacle is created to
make the world more explicit, it is both reprehensible and deceitful to con-
fuse the sign with what is signified. And it is a duplicity which is peculiar to
bourgeois art: between the intellectual and the visceral sign is hypocritically
inserted a hybrid, at once elliptical and pretentious, which is pompously
christened nature.13
The ethics of signs that Barthes proposes here opens a whole new
window on the workings of the mythic. Beizais cinema is somewhere
between the Chinese theater and that of Stanislavsky, as Barthes typolo-
gizes them here. His cinema is at once archetypal, or what Barthes calls
openly intellectual and algebraic, and rooted in the moment. In fact,
Beizai makes a cinematic virtue out of mythical impregnating the pres-
ent moment. Simple reality and total artifice collapse in Beizais
cinema on the site of a ritualistic constitution of an angle on the real.
Barthes is here rightly disgusted with the duplicity of the pretension
of Julius Caesar to being natural. But in his anger he issues a mani-
festo in his ethics of sign that is theoretically limited. Barthes is correct
that between the intellectual and the visceral Hollywood has hypo-
critically inserted a hybrid, at once elliptical and pretentious. But he
292 H. DABASHI
RITUAL BIRTH
To understand Nai better, and what Beizai does in his characterization
of her, we need to see her in the context of the mythological motif and
against the two opposing myth-types of the world-parents.17 In the most
familiar world-parents myth-type, which is A 625in Thompsons motif-
index, we have father-sky and mother-earth as parents of the universe. This
myth-type is found in a vast historical and geographical expansion that
ranges from ancient Greece to India, eastern Indonesia, Tahiti, Africa, and
native North and South America. The less widely known world-parents
myth-type, which is motif-index A 625.1in Thompsons motif-index, is
exactly the reverse of A 625, that is, we have the mother as sky and the
father as earth.18 Nai is of course immediately identifiable as mother-earth
motif of A 625. However, Beizai does not leave the matter at that simple,
indexical, level.
Throughout Bashu, Nais husband is completely absent, and when he
does appear at the very last sequence of the film, his most visible and sym-
bolic phallic symbol, his right hand, is cut off, presumably in a war or work-
related accident. We are never told. Bashu as a result is born to Nai by
Beizai having her ritually give birth to him. Visually, this ritual birth-giving
has a number of references. One is when Nai washes Bashu at a river, and
in Beizais extremely accurate mise-en-scene the head of Bashu is precisely
located next to Nais vagina and womb, when she is sitting and washing
Bashu who is in the river. A second visual effect is when Nai fishes Bashu
out of a small brook by a net that she casts toward her. Bashu does not know
how to swim and has just fallen off a branch over which he was frolicking.
While all the village men are standing by completely paralyzed and impotent
to do anything, Nai grabs her fishing net and casts it toward the drown-
ing Bashu. Inside the pool-like brook, Bashu appears as if in Nais womb,
and more specifically in the plasmatic meconium of the fetus. The grayish-
greenish color of the water is particularly reminiscent of the meconium
the dark greenish mass that accumulates in the bowel of the fetus during the
fetal life and is then discharged shortly after birth. Nai pulls Bashu out, in a
gesture that is remarkably similar to a labor that a mother goes through to
fish her child out of her womb. She saves and thus gives birth to him,
because otherwise he would have died with all those impotent men around,
and then holds him in her bosom exactly as if he were a newborn baby, fresh
out of her womb. Having been saved by the net that Nai has cast into the
small brook, Bashu is inside the net, as a newly born baby is bursting out of
MYTHMAKER, MYTHMAKER, MAKE ME AMYTH 295
the plasmatic fetus. There are many more such birth-giving rituals, such as
the hallucinatory, ritualistic dance of Nai to Bashus magically therapeutic
drum-beats that appear like the twisting and turning of the body during the
final stages of labor. It is exactly after this scene that we see Nai washing her
clothes that she wore while she was sick (pregnant), as women do after their
childbirth, while dictating a letter to Bashu to be sent to her husband. My
son Bashu writes this letter, Nai says proudly. Like all other children, he
is the offspring of earth and the sun. Bashu is conceived immaculately, with
no need of any husband. The only remote contact with the husband
comes after the ritual birth of Bashu to Nai.
The ritual birth of Bashu to Nai in the conspicuous absence of her
husband leads us to the precise site of re-mythologization in which Beizai
has narrated his version of the world-parenting, central to his cosmovi-
sion. To see the place of Nai as mother-earth in that cosmovision, and
the revolutionary reimagination of the world through a reinvention of the
world-parent myth, we need to look at the originary myth itself prior to
Beizais reconstitution of it.
Let me begin by drawing attention to the splendid work of Professor
K. Numazawa of Nanzan University of Nagoya, Japan, on the related
motif of creation-myth, Thompson index-motif A 625.2, on the specifics
of the Raising of the Sky.19
Written by a Japanese scholar in German, published in Paris in 1946,
and predicated on material from Japanese mythology, this study could
not be farther from Beizais Bashu, Beizais knowledge of Asian perform-
ing arts and his admiration for the late Akira Kurosawa notwithstanding.
Precisely in this obvious unrelatedness dwells the universal claim that
Bashu has over a range of mythological parameters at the heart of Beizais
cosmovision. The parameters of that cosmovision work through and for a
specifically mythological reconstitution of the culture.
To achieve that objective, Beizai reaches for the most elemental and
mythological parameters of the culture. In Numazawas observations
about the Raising of the Sky motif of the creation-myth is already
evident a theory of the link between agricultural communities and their
mythologizing proclivities. The significance of agricultural communities,
into which the setting of Bashu falls, is in their physical approximation to
the earliest forms of human society. Myths that have to do with the origin
of universe, in which a mother-earth and a father-sky play the central role,
takes us directly to the communal context of patriarchal and matriarchal
patterns of social formation. The myth of world-parenting usually begins
MYTHMAKER, MYTHMAKER, MAKE ME AMYTH 297
the idea that darkness filled the universe before the separation of the sky and
earth, and that light appeared for the first time in the universe when the sky
and earth had been separated. And with the coming of the light, everything
on earth which had been hidden in the darkness appeared for the first time.20
Now, consider the fact that until the very last sequence of the film, we do
not see Nai with her husband. He is present by virtue of Nais speaking
of him, her neighbors, some of whom are her husbands relatives, remind
her of him, and of course her two children are presumably the result of
marriage to that man. The husband arrives after the ritual birth of Bashu
to Nai. So the narrative moment of Bashu is an untime of the world,
namely, the father-sky has left but his marks are on the mother-earth, and
thus the world is evident. And yet, there are many nights and days, that is,
the death and resurrection of the world, without the father-sky ever being
around. Numazawa again:
This is precisely what we see every morning at the break of down. The
breaking of dawn starts with the union of the sky and earth in the darkness
of the night. This union is the union of father sky and mother earth, and all
things that appear with the rising of the sun are born of these two.21
But we never see Nai sleeping with any man. No sign of the father-sky in
sight. The repeated emphasis of Nais sleeping patterns, in which she has
to keep an eye on the rice paddy, are visually emphatic. She sleeps alone, in
the dark. Now consider the fact that Beizais intuitive grasp of this myth,
at once critically intelligent and creatively subversive, leads him to have
a whole son being born to Nai in the absence of a husband. Now, again
consider Numazawa:
The myths in which father sky leaves mother earth in the morning show
clearly traces of the custom of visit marriage (Besuchsehe). When morning
comes, the man, like Uranos, must leave the woman. Therefore the myths
have merely transferred what happens every morning to the first morning
of the beginning of the universein other words, to the morning of the
creation of all things.22
298 H. DABASHI
The Japanese practice of the visit marriage, which we see, its patriar-
chally reversed mode in the Shii practice of mutah or temporary mar-
riage, is far closer, as Numazawa suggests, to the original matriarchal
practice where the husband is only there to occasion the birth of the child
and then goes away. But in Beizais case, what is remarkable is the ritual
elimination of the father. By Bashu being born to Nai through an immac-
ulate conception and ritually staged, even the temporary marriage is
rendered ritually superfluous. But Nai and Bashu become parent and
child not simply through a cinematically staged ritual but far more effec-
tively by working together. Work is constitutional to the emerging
parental relationship between Nai and her son Bashu. First Bashu does
not work, and the neighbors ridicule her for giving shelter for a useless
boy. Then she makes him work which results in her neighbors equally
harassing her for turning the boy into a slave! From this bit of social satire,
Nai and Bashu emerge into a parental relation that is occasioned by work.
When after her illness, Nai habitually gets up one night and sees Bashu
already awake and in charge of protecting the rice paddy, then the young
boy is already born into work and into her womb. Now get ready for a
startling revelation from a Japanese scholar who could not possibly have
seen Bashu in 1946 when he wrote his Die Weltanfnge in der Japanische
Mythologie or the shorter version of it in 1953:
URBAN LEGENDS
The fact that a universe without myth is the ruin of the universe, Bataille
suggests, reduced to the nothingness of thingsin the process of
depriving us equates depravation with the revelation of the universe.25
In the colonial frontiers apparently myths dies harderperhaps because
we keep reinventing them, sometime for the right reasons. What Beizai
has done in his long and illustrious career is precisely keeping all of us at
bay for a collapse into a universe without myth. In his and our case, it is the
300 H. DABASHI
old myths that by refusing to die continue to haunt us. We are of course
all and always at the mercy of falling into the abyss of the nothingness of
things. Beizais career, however, has been directed to have the nothingness
of things signified or mythologized into a breaking loose from the old,
lazy, overbearing, and domineering myths we have received. His cinema
has been always at work on a new revelation of the universe in which we,
as Iranians, as colonials, as having been written out of the history of our
own world, can be born again. To be born again, in terms that will finally
enable us in our own destiny, Beizai has always gone for the juggernaut.
Here is another example.
Under the calm, even prosaic, veneer of Perhaps some other Time/
Shayad Vaqti Digar (1988), Beizai has a far more ambitious agenda, even
more ambitious, I venture to say, than anything attained in The Stranger
and the Fog, The Ballad of Tara and Bashu put together. Perhaps some
other Time is predicated on a suspicion. Modabber suspects his wife Kian
of having an illicit love affair, while Kian is trying to conceal a succession
of inexplicable nightmarish memories, perhaps even the symptomatic of a
schizophrenic paranoia. While pregnant, and fighting to conceal her psy-
chological predicament, Kian finds out that she is not the natural child
of her parents and that they have adopted her. Meanwhile, Modabber is
going mad with his suspicion. He finally locates Mr. Ranjbar, the antique
dealer whom he suspects of having an affair with his wife. Kian is desper-
ate to conceal her psychological problems from her husband. Modabber is
desperate to find out the truth of his wifes fidelity. They give each other
wrong signals, add to each others confusion, lead each other to false con-
clusions. Finally, Modabber finds out that Ranjbar is married to a woman
who looks remarkably similar to his wife. She turns out to be the lost twin
sister of his wife, and Kian finds out that her recurring nightmarish images
are all from her early childhood when her mother, out of destitute and
desperation, abandoned her in a street corner to be picked up by a caring
couple.
In Perhaps some other Time, and through a very simple narrative,
Beizai examines the function of evidence, and the mechanism of gather-
ing it in the constitution of Truth and Falsehood. The place of women in
this film is of an entirely different sort and has nothing to do with Beizais
concern about the fate of women in Iranian society. Here, he is after some-
thing far more universal, far more significant, and achieves that end in a
far more ingenious way which implicates the question if masculinity/femi-
ninity in an entirely different way. To me, Perhaps some other Time is
MYTHMAKER, MYTHMAKER, MAKE ME AMYTH 301
infinitely more mythical than The Ballad of Tara and The Stranger and
the Fog put together. The urbanity of its simple appearance is too deceptive
for those who are accustomed to see the working of the mythical in rural
settings, archaic clothing, or antiquated dialogue.
Both Modabber and his wife Kian begin with a visual representa-
tion: Modabber with a video shot of his wife, Kian with the nightmarish
images the meaning of which she cannot fathom. But, and here is the rub,
Modabber is watching something that he is not watching, while Kian is
watching something that she does not know she is watching. He watches a
complete stranger to him, the lost twin sister of his wife, but he thinks he is
watching his wife. She sees in her dreams the real images of her infancy, but
she does not have the complete data and the interpretative framework of
realizing what it is she is watching. Modabber begins to interpret the video
images he watches on the false exegetical premise of a marital infidelity.
Kian begins to accumulate data, piece by piece, from her dreams and from
her husbands suspicious behavior, and yet does not have that exegetical
premise to interpret them. Hermeneutically, he is deductive, is inductive.
Logically, he operates a priori, she a posteriori. He collects indubitable data
just to end up proving himself wrong. She collects dubious data just to
prove herself right. It is only here that we can see the manner in which
Beizai has passed an historical judgment on the masculine proclivity to vio-
lent abstractions and grand metaphysics, and conversely, the feminine pro-
clivity to material fact and always provisional, substitutional propositions.
The two character-type, mythical images that Beizai construes and
examines here is that of the woman as food-gatherer and of man as
animal-hunter. Kian gathers the data of her early childhood with the
sedentary patience of an archaic Woman. Modabber hunts for Absolutist
Abstractions and Certainties, caring very little for the facts. Kian is after
no Absolutist Abstraction. She just wants to accumulate/gather enough
data/food to make sense of/feed her perturbed imagination/household.
Modabber cares very little for the facts. He just wants to hunt/Abstract
for a final explanation/Absolute Certainty that will determine his wifes
infidelity/establish the Truth. Kian lives in and by reality. Modabber is
a metaphysician par excellence. Perhaps some other Time is Beizais
manifesto against a whole history of Phallogocentricism.
By the brilliance of one cinematic strike seeking to alter, or at least visi-
bly and narratively challenge, the age-old authority of a Phallogocentricism
that for millennia has managed to conceal itself behind a metaphysical
culture to which veiling is second nature requires not only a comfortable
302 H. DABASHI
Muslim jurists have written volumes on the subject, mystics have theo-
rized it, even philosophers, including Avicenna, have grappled with the
doctrinal proposition.
One of the most recent philosophical discussions of the issue of bodily
resurrection in a specifically Shii context, but with no sectarian reason
to exclude it from being equally applicable to Islam at large is by the nine-
teenth century Iranian philosopher Shaykh Ahmad Ahsai (died 1826).
Right from the heart of the School of Isfahan and under the influence
of the monumental figure of Mulla Sadra Shirazi (died 1640), Shaykh
Ahmad Ahsai dealt with the issue of bodily resurrection in a rich philo-
sophical language that Mulla Sadra had virtually invented in the seven-
teenth century and which can very well constitute the material elements
for an Islamic theory of the body. In his treatment of the issue of bodily
resurrection, Ahsai makes a distinction between jism (the body) and
jasad (the corpse). This distinction is not only central to Ahsais own
theory of bodily resurrection, it is one of the most crucial perspectives
on an Islamic theory of the body. What seems most likely to me, Ahsai
asserts, is that originally, or as time went on, the word jasad in the Arabic
language was taken to mean the body (jism) of the living being insofar
as the spirit (ruh) is absent from it.28 Jism, as opposed to jasad, is that
which is animated by the pneuma, the spirit (ruh), as when speaking of
the body of Zayd.29 The domain of the existing beings that have this
dual aspect to their physical body is not limited to human beings. Even
metals can be represented as inanimate bodies without the spirit (ajsad),
the spirit being for them the Elixir.30 The extension is rather compre-
hensive. Even if the astronomers use the word jism it is because
the celestial spheres are in a subtle state comparable to that of the spirits,
or else because astronomers regard them from the point of view of their
eternal interdependence with the souls by which they are moved 31
Ahsais assumption here that celestial spheres are in the form of jism and
not jasad, that is, they are living things rather than dead masses of mat-
ter, or that they have interdependence with the souls by which they are
moved, is a crucial astronomical observation for which the credit should
really go to Aristotle. In Generation and Corruption, De Caelo, as well as
in Generation of Animals, Aristotle believed that the sun is the efficient
cause of all events, that the planetary spheres and the planets are respon-
sible for all worldly events, and that generation of everything, including
the generation of animals, is controlled by the movements of these heav-
enly bodies.32
MYTHMAKER, MYTHMAKER, MAKE ME AMYTH 305
From the Aristotelian sources, the idea of the planets and planetary
spheres having not just a body but also a soul that animates and enlight-
ens them and thus makes them authoritative over human affairs gradu-
ally entered Islamic astronomical beliefs. Al-Kind, for example, as one of
the greatest commentators on Greek philosophy in the earliest stages of
Islamic philosophy, believed that the planets are rational (natiqat), spir-
itual beings capable of intelligence and speech, and [themselves] cause
(failat) and administer (mudabbirat) everything in this world by the
order of the prime Creator who controls all.33
Bodies are thus either dead (jasad) or alive (jism) and bodies have a
range of multifaceted existence that extends from the stars and comes
done to human being. In their living status as jism, bodies move, rational-
ize, speak, and live. Jasad in particular is used as opposed to ruh, or the
soul which animates the body. The presence of the soul or its absence
is the distinction between a corpse and a body. Then comes Ahsais
most startling observation:
Now you should be informed that the human being possesses two jasad and
two jism. The first jasad is the one which is made up of elements that are a
prey to time. This jasad, this flesh, is like a garment that a man puts on and
later casts off again; this body in itself has neither enjoyment nor suffering; it
is subject neither to fidelity nor to rebellion As for the second jasad ,
this body survives, for the clay from which it was constituted survives in the
tomb, when the earth has devoured the elementary terrestrial body of flesh
whereas the body of celestial flesh survives and retains its perfect shape 34
This theory of the dual body generates an entirely new vista on the whole
notion of bodily resurrection. The Second (celestial) Body of which
Ahsai speaks is not subject to timely erosion and corruption as the First
(terrestrial) Body is. We die and we are placed in the tomb with our First
Body weakened and dead but our Second Body intact. The First Body
soon decomposes and its constituent elements join their originfire to
fire, earth to earth, and so onbut the Second Body which is celestial in
nature and disposition survives even in the tomb. Here, Ahsais eschatol-
ogy is aided by a theory of the optics that is very important for our pur-
pose here. The obvious question is why do we ordinarily do not see this
Second (celestial) Body when the First (terrestrial) Body has dissolved? Or
even more simply put, why do we not see dead people? Ahsais answer is
rested on his theory of the optics.
306 H. DABASHI
Ahsais theory of the optics, on the basis of which we see the terres-
trial body and do not see the celestial body, is very simple. The reason
we see Mr. Zayd in his terrestrial body, that is, when he is alive, but do
not see him in his terrestrial body, that is, when he is dead, is not because
that body is constitutional to his being. It is only because that body is
homologous to the opacity that exists in silica and potash.35 What does
that exactly mean?
When these [terrestrial bodies, i.e., silica and potash] are fused together, lique-
fied, they turn into glass. The glass is certainly the same silica and the same
potash that were completely dense and opaque. But after the fusion, the
opacity disappeared. This means that opacity is not a property of the earth
itself. The earth itself is subtle and transparent; its opacity is caused by the
clash between the elements. When water is still and pure, you see everything
in its depth. But if you stir it up, you can no longer distinguish anything in
it so long as it is in movement, because of the collision between its parts and
the rarefaction of the element of the air. What then happens when the four
elemental Natures come into collision! This jasad, this body of flesh made of
terrestrial elements, is comparable to the density that makes silica and potash
opaque, although this is not a part of their essence, of their ipseity.36
NOTES
1. This is my third, most comprehensive, encounter with the mythic
dimensions of Bahram Beizais cinema. A shorter version of this essay
was part of my chapter on Beizai (along with an extended interview)
in my Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, Future (London:
Verso, 2001): 76111. I have also dealt extensively with his Bashu:
The Little Stranger in my M asters and Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema
(Washington, DC: Mage, 2007): 252277.
308 H. DABASHI
What time is it, I asked, early upon embarking on writing this book.
Where in the world are we? What does it mean to be an Iranian, a
Muslim, an Oriental, as they call us? Upon what phase in the history
of nations, peoples, regions, cultures, and, more urgently, the fragile
earth do we dwell? Neither the European modernity nor their version of
postmodernity has held any brief for the rest of the world. Neither the
European modernity nor the fake traditions they induced nations around
the world to manufacture has held any continued relevance or valid-
ity for the inhabitants of a globe on the verge of self-destruction. The
postcolonial reason and rhetoric have resulted in Hindu fundamentalism
reigning supreme in India, Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar, militant
Islamism in Iran and beyond, a settler colony Jewish state in Palestine,
a Christian imperialism that seeks to rule over them all, and a wild chi-
mera called ISIS drawing them into its miasmatic terror running amuck
among them all.
Where do we go from here? People across the Arab and Muslim world
rose up to dismantle their ruling regimes. A massive counterrevolutionary
assault that ensued today includes Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Russia,
Israel, US, Turkeywith the US/EU allowing them to manage their con-
flicts so far as it entails the continuity of the imperial sovereignty. But
where do we go from here? The ruling regimes have now collapsed and
degenerated into Arab-Persian ethnic nationalism and Sunni-Shii
sectarianism, but these are neither the solutions nor the answers. They are
the symptomatic signs of a malady.
Suppose democracy and the sovereign nation-state are the goals. If so,
democracy in what sense? The distinguished Italian philosopher Giorgio
Agamben has recently asked this critical distinction, and so must we. As
one such key democracy, the USA has expanded into a global empire,
with the EU dovetailing it around the globe. To the rest of the world
democracy has come as a colonial construct and soon divided the world
into two master metaphors of modernity and tradition. If we were to
overcome this binary, and no longer think it valid, then where do we go?
In a key passage Agamben says:
Our Western political system results from the coupling of two heterogeneous
elements, a politico-juridical rationality and an economic-governmental
rationality, a form of constitution and a form of government.
Incommensurable they may be but they legitimate and confer mutual con-
sistency on each other. Why does the politeia get trapped in this ambiguity?
What is it that gives the sovereign, the kyrion, the power to ensure and guar-
antee the legitimacy of their union? What if it were just a fiction, a screen
set up to hide the fact that here is a void at the center, that no articulation is
possible between these two elements, these two rationalities.1
coupling. What if the task at hand were to disarticulate them and force
into the open this ungovernable that is simultaneously the source and
the vanishing point of any and all politics,2 Agamben asks and we need
no adjustment on that fact for the post/colonial scene.
While the Time Magazine was following a mere clich that the opening up
of Iran to global neoliberalism will change Iran for better, the NewYork
Times piece was much more accurate in sensing and pointing to the right
direction in terms of the public space that will remain the site of contesta-
tion between the nation and the state.
The rebirth of the nation retrieves its point of origin and return to its
transnational genesismapping itself on a moral, material, and imaginative
314 H. DABASHI
geography. Iran is today both weak and powerful by virtue of its internal
dissent and external pressures. The whole idea of the nation requires a criti-
cal rethinking toward a new organicity. As a nation, Iran is powerful not
despite its vastly based internal opposition and external challengesbut in
fact precisely because of them. The ruling regime keeps a close tab on those
oppositions and challenges and learns from them, both to keep itself in
power and turn its experiences outward. The stronger the internal national
resistance to a state, the stronger becomes the surviving instincts of the state
to preserve itself, and in turn stronger becomes the unfolding organicity of
the nation to articulate and announce itself. The dynamic is mutual. Iranian
people learn from the inner dynamics of their rulers and adjust the course
of their collective consciousness and collective actions. The same dynamics
works in and for the ruling regime. Iran is more powerful than most of its
Arab neighbors combined because these Arab states have relied so much
on the USA to protect them that their material and moral muscles have
weakened and atrophied from absence of exercise and lack of struggle for
legitimacy, while the ruling regime in Iran has led a defiant nation to fend
for itself against the systematic pressures of the US and its European and
regional allies. The Islamic Republic is stronger by virtue of that exercise.
Iranian people are a more robust nation by virtue of that resilience.
Iran is not the only nation with such characteristics. Four major coun-
tries in the regionIndia, Iran, Turkey, and Egyptare emblematic of
four nations that their historical self-consciousness predates their encounter
with European colonial modernity. The fate of these four nations in partic-
ular transcends the vicissitude of any state that lays any false claim on them.
By definition, no state apparatus is strong enough to be organic to these
nations or absorb their rich historical experiences. Three of these countries
have the active memory of the last three Muslim empires behind them: the
Mughals in India, the Safavids in Iran, and the Ottomans in Turkey. Egypt
joins them by virtue of its central significance in the formation of modern
Arab consciousness, linked to its ancient history, and thus triumphing over
both its Ottoman and European encounters. These four nations are by
definition ungovernable by any state that falsely claims them.
A PARADOX NO MORE
Emblematic of the other three nations, Iran offers a critical case study.
How could a people produce such a magnificent body of art and archi-
tecture, literature and culture, poetry and philosophy, and yet be plagued
CONCLUSION: WHAT TIME IS IT? 315
by one tyrannical ruling state after another, one military coup just before
a catastrophic theocracy? Look at Iranian history, ancient, medieval, or
modern (even if we were to divide it falsely along European historical
periodization), or one world conquering empire after another, one tyran-
nical dynasty after another, one revolution causing more misery than the
one before it (if we were to seek an internal rhyme and reason to Iranian
history itself) and yet look at the magnitude, range, and depth of ideas
and industries, philosophies and poetries produced and celebrated in the
selfsame territories, domains, country. How can that be, what does that
fact mean: a contradiction in terms or a bizarre state of affairs? Can we
make head from tail of this seeming paradoxor is this in fact a paradox?
I am sure this has as much baffled you as it has me, and generations of
others who have cared to know Iranian history and culture in the larger
domain of its geographical and cultural topography. For every Cyrus the
world conqueror, we have had a Zoroaster the prophet; for every Shapur,
a Mani; for every Anushirvan the world conqueror, a Mazdak the revolu-
tionary prophet; for every Sultan Mahmoud, a Ferdowsi; for the Mongol
invasion and conquest, the rise of poets like Rumi and Sadi. The two
Pahlavi monarchs (19261979) were coterminous with a magnificent
array of poets and novelists, while the Iranian cinema conquered the world
cultural scene at the time of an Islamist theocracy. How could that be,
what would that mean, is that a contradiction in terms, or just a bizarre
state of affairs, or perhaps a hint that we need to start thinking the nation
and the state differently?
I used to think and say that this was not in fact a paradox but a para-
digm that Iranians across centuries and generations have produced this
powerful and amazing culture not despite those tyrannies but because of
it. But I have now come to see the fact of that paradoxical paradigm as a
hint toward a superior insight, a perhaps more enabling way of thinking
through this historical panorama. I believe these facts have finally forced
us narratively, conceptually, and theoretically to sever the fate of the nation
from the tyranny of the states (any and all states) that wish but fail to claim
it for themselves. Whether you look at it as an irony, a paradox, or a para-
digm, the fact is that the fate of the nation is not trapped inside the banal-
ity of the states (monarchical or mullarchical) that wants to claim it. Quite
to the contrary: the nation is made stronger, more robust, more enabled,
more conscious of its own agency, by virtue of this fact that these violent
state apparatuses have no legitimate claim over ruling them, precisely at
the moment that they think they do.
316 H. DABASHI
If no social institutions existed which knew the use of violence, then the con-
cept of state would be eliminated, and a condition would emerge that could
be designated as anarchy, in the specific sense of this word Specifically, at
the present time, the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institu-
tions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The
state is considered the sole source of the right to use violence The state
is a relation of men dominating men, a relation supported by means of legiti-
mate (i.e. considered to be legitimate) violence. If the state is to exist, the
dominated must obey the authority claimed by the powers that be.7
Weber then cites two pillars of legitimacy for that word legitimate before
it can come out of those parenthesis: When and why do men obey? Upon
what inner justifications and upon what external means does this domi-
nation rest? My contention in this book has been that all postcolonial
nations have begun and concluded with that inner justification and are
now reduced to those external means, which is the Weberian term for
pure violence without any camouflage of legitimately.
In his pioneering study, Society against State (1989), Pierre Clastres
argues a similar point via close study of some South American Indian
groups.8 I, however, make this argument by proposing the whole cou-
pling of the nation-state a colonial concoction on the post-Industrial
Revolution, post-French Revolution European model, a product of cap-
italist modernity at its fictive European center and as such has had no
bearing whatsoever on its extended colonial shadows. We on the colonial
edges and margins of European capitalist modernity had no reason, had
no business, buying into that coupling. The fate of our nations and machi-
nations of our colonially mitigated states are two entirely different propo-
sitions, on two diametrically opposed tracks. Today the Islamic Republic
loudly decries its animosity toward the USA and yet is integral to its global
economic predilections to neoliberal economics. That fact is entirely inde-
pendent of the fate of Iranian as a nation: on one hand at the mercy of this
chicanery and yet completely liberated in the aesthetic terms of its self-
propelled emancipation. The continuity of the state, any state, including
CONCLUSION: WHAT TIME IS IT? 317
against the grain of the Hegelian fusion of the nation and the state, and
entirely in tune with Cassirers powerful critique of the totalitarian pro-
clivity of the state, I propose this decoupling of the fate of the nation
from the vagaries of the statewith violence as the defining line between
one and the other: the state as Weber rightly noted claims a monopoly of
legitimate violence, the nation is at the receiving end of that violence, thus
dismantling the Weberian subordinate clause of legitimacy. No state is
ever completely legitimate. All states are always less legitimate than they
claim. Period. In this book, I have sought to carry that fact to its logical
conclusion.
The postcolonial nation is neither pre-political nor pre-economic. Quite
to the contrary: postcolonial nations ranging from India to Iran to Turkey
to Egypt (the four postcolonial nations that are in this sense post-imperial
nations after the collapse of the last Muslim empires) are no such things.
So suppose we separate the fate of the nation from the firm grip of state
on violence and thus dismantle the fiction of nation-state. Then what? Is
the fate of nations not trapped inside the violent machinery of state? Of
course it is. However, this crucial, historically rooted bifurcation gener-
ates a whole new calculus of power, an entirely different momentum for
overriding both the nations and the geopolitics of the region now made
entirely archival to the violent working of the state apparatus: (1) legiti-
mate violence becomes pure illegitimate violence, (2) the fictive frontiers
of the state open up and liberate the nation to dwell on its transnational
public sphere, (3) the political dynamics of the nation assumes a reality
sui generis and is conceptually decoupled from the state apparatus, and
(4) states are exposed for what they are: killing machines engineered to
manufacture enemies to keep themselves afloat.
If the most critical thinkers and philosophers gathered in the crucial vol-
ume Democracy in What State (2009) at the heart of the most advanced
democracies around the world would have fully reached this conclusion,
what does it remain to be said or done in countries like Iran or its neigh-
bor: Turkey, Israel, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, India, Russia, or as far as
China or Mexico? It is not the state but the nation that needs to be criti-
cally thought through. There is no democratic state on planet earth that
can act as a model or template for aspiring democracies. The US democ-
racy today is a platform for outright fascistic ideals and aspirations of
demagogue billionaires like Donald Trump to expose the deep precipice
of USA as a dangerous empire. The UK and its mother of parliaments
help the Saudi tribal chiefs become the head of human rights panels at
the UN.In Italy billionaire clowns like Silvio Berlusconi, in France racist
320 H. DABASHI
the nationstate is the conditio sine qua non of the rebirth of the nation
and the free floating of the state as the single site of violence that can no
longer be considered legitimate to any nation to which it lays a false claim.
The more militant the ideology of resistance to European imperialism,
the more triumphalist and absolutist the political claim of the state that
ideology foretold and begat on the nation and thus the victory of Islamism
over all its ideological rivals and alternatives. Militant Islamism violently
triumphed over its ideological alternativesanticolonial nationalism and
Third World socialismand established an Islamic Republic and foreshad-
owed its categorical and institutional failure to lay a total claim on the
nation. The feat brought the whole idea of the postcolonial reason to a cul-
de-sac and caused a calamitous end to colonial modernity that had posited
the nation-state as its legacy, while the triumphalist failure of the Islamic
Republic exhausted the postcolonial production of a political reason to
sustain its legitimacy. But as the fate of the postcolonial state thus ended
in a cul-de-sac, the postcolonial nation was paving its way toward an epis-
temic liberation I designate here as predicated on an aesthetic intuition of
transcendence. But how exactly that intuition was attained and in what way
does it pave the way for the liberation of the nation from its prolonged and
paralyzing conceptual bondage to a state?
Literary, poetic, performing, and visual arts have been the most endur-
ing venues of national self-consciousness and production of cultural mem-
ory for the nation, entirely independent of any state interference. In fact,
anytime the state has intervened in such cultural productions it has been
either to censor or to distort it. The production of a national literary his-
tory for Iran began toward the end of the Qajar and was complete just
before the establishment of the Pahlavis. E.G.Brownes A Literary History
of Persia was published between 1902 and 1924, as the Qajar dynasty
(17891925) was coming to an end and the Pahlavi dynasty (19261979)
was nowhere in sight. Critical essays, innovative poetry, pathbreaking
prose, along with new waves of film, fiction, and drama all lead to a major
aesthetic revolution in the form of Nimaic poetics. The collective works
of Nima Yushij, Sadegh Hedayat, Abbas Kiarostami, and Gholam-Hossein
Saedi (in poetry, fiction, film, and drama, respectively) all lead to an aes-
thetic intuition of transcendence that summed them all up and transcended
thempredicated on an aesthetic reason and the sovereignty of the aesthetics
thus forever dismantling the postcolonial reason.
How does the idea of this aesthetic reason and the sovereignty of the
aesthetic trump over the political reason of colonial modernity and the
324 H. DABASHI
both banks on and subverts the political logic of state domination. Art is
the Trojan Horse of the very mold of political domination. It partakes in
its self-subversive reason and thereby dismantles it at one and the same
time. State cannot not lay claim on the physical body and creative soul
of its presumed citizens, for that censorial claim is the sole source of its
legitimacy, but the instance that it does so it embraces its own undoing.
WHITHER THESTATE?
The idea of suggesting the nation moving away from the state will of
course have to consider the relation of power that Michel Foucault, for
example, proposes to be operative on two complementary political fronts.
In his Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Criticism of Political Reason
(1979), Foucault focuses on the development of power techniques ori-
ented towards individuals and intended to rule them in a continuous
and permanent way. If the state is the political form of a centralized and
centralizing power, let us call pastorship the individualizing power.19
The origin of such ideas of pastorship, Foucault suggests, are not in
the Greeks or Romans political culture, but in ancient Oriental societ-
ies: Egypt, Assyria, Judaea. In this conception of power, the shepherd
wields power over a flock rather than over a land The shepherd gathers
together, guides, and leads his flock The shepherds role is to ensure
the salvation of his flock.20
Foucault subsequently returns to Greek sources to complicate his ear-
lier assertion about the Oriental genealogy of the metaphor of the shep-
herdfrom which he then concludes: The reason for my insisting on
these ancient texts is that they show us how early this problemor rather,
this series of problemsarose. They span the entirety of Western history.
They are still highly important for contemporary society. They deal with
the relations between political power at work within the state as a legal
framework of unity, and a power we can call pastoral, whose role is to
constantly ensure, sustain, and improve the lives of each and every one.21
This framing of the state as the guardian and the protector is the culprit that
paves the way for governmentality. Foucault further examines the metaphor
of the shepherd and pastoral authority in Christianity, and concludes:
Christianity, on the other hand, conceived the shepherd-sheep relationship
as one of individual and complete dependence. This is undoubtedly one
of the points at which Christian pastorship radically diverged from Greek
thought.22 So if the idea of the state is traceable to Platonic Republic and
326 H. DABASHI
Aristotelian politics, the modern European state inherits its pastoral power
from Christianity. Foucaults point is further expanded:
I have tried to show how primitive Christianity shaped the idea of a pas-
toral influence continuously exerting itself on individuals and through the
demonstration of their particular truth. And I have tried to show how this
idea of pastoral power was foreign to Greek thought despite a certain num-
ber of borrowings such as practical self-examination and the guidance of
conscience.23
From here Foucault proceeds toward a critique of the reason of state, and
comes to a critical point where he introduces the idea of police: What they
[modern European states, Germany and Italy in particular] understand
by police isnt an institution or mechanism functioning within the state,
but a governmental technology peculiar to the state; domains, techniques,
targets where the state intervenes.24 What does this mode of policing do?
It branches out into all of the peoples conditions, everything they do or
undertake The police include everything Such intervention in mens
activities could well be qualified as totalitarian.25 Here is the point where
the state through the inheritance of a Christian pastoral legacy extends
into policing as caring for its citizens. The policing both protects and gov-
erns and the fusion of the two implants a vigilant police officer inside the
head of the subject of the state.
Foucault ultimately concludes: Power is not a substance. Neither is
it a mysterious property whose origin must be delved into. Power is only
a certain type of relation between individuals.26 From which premise he
can then assert:
Political rationality has grown and imposed itself all throughout the history
of Western societies. It first took its stand on the idea of pastoral power, then
on that of reason of state. Its inevitable effects are both individualization and
totalization. Liberation can only come from attacking, not just one of these
two effects, but political rationalitys very roots.27
The result is, as Paolo Savoia demonstrates, the relationship between the
concepts of governmentality (the effect of which is totalization) and disci-
pline (the effect of which is individualization) is neither one of conceptual
incompatibility nor one of chronological succession in the development of
Foucaults thought, but rather a relation of interdependence that needs to
CONCLUSION: WHAT TIME IS IT? 327
POSTCOLONIAL STATE
Let us now complicate Foucaults critique of political reason and the dual
containment of the citizen by state and pastoral power by thinking it
through a colonial and postcolonial context, especially in the vast sway
of regions that emerged following the collapse of three Muslim empires:
the Mughals, the Safavids/Qajars, and the Ottomans. These postcolo-
nial states, ranging from India to Iran and Central Asia and the entirety
of the Arab world, inherited the category of the nationstate without
the Greek-Christian genealogy that Foucault outlines for the modern
European state. These countries received (not cultivated) this concep-
tion of the nationstate through the gun barrel of colonialism, not just
when they were subjugated by it, but even more forcefully when they
were opposing it. The postcolonial state and the postcolonial nation, as a
result, have had two opposite though interrelated destinies. Postcolonial
states assumed power by fighting against colonialism only to better their
techniques of violent domination and tyranny, now done with a perfectly
nativist flare and populist idiomaticity. The nation, on the other hand,
learned it the hard way to disguise its interests from the whims of the state
that was laying a false claim on it. Not a single postcolonial state in the
Arab and Muslim world (fragmented and formed on the ruins of those
Muslim empires) exists today that is not presiding over a vast machinery
of widespread repression, violent domination, undemocratic practices, and
brutish militarism. Conversely, not a single nation in the same Arab and
Muslim world exists that has not part ways from the state that rules it in
their desires, wishes, hopes, aspirations, and dreams for liberty from tyr-
anny and freedom to partake in political and public happiness (in Arendts
terms). This dual fact (complicating Foucaults reading of the reason of
state) must come to a full theoretical recognition of conceptually decou-
pling the nation and the state and forever dismantling the very idea of the
nationstate.
328 H. DABASHI
In his essay on the Limits of the State, Timothy Mitchell has cor-
rectly pointed out how the state has always been difficult to define. Its
boundary with society appears elusive, porous, and mobile. Upon which
premise he then proposes:
This is Mitchells way of dealing with the Foucauldian fact of the elu-
sive disposition of state and its insidious manner of implicating itself in
the mind and mentality of those it governs. My entire argument in this
book is predicated on the proposition that neither rejects the state nor
brings it back in, nor indeed allows for its salience and elusiveness to
get away, literally, with murder. States and their politico-legal apparatus, as
Agamben clearly recognized, are killing machines. All I suggest is to deny
the state the illusion of legitimacy to justify being a killing machine by
decoupling the nation from the proposition of the nationstate.
My proposal of decoupling the nation and the state is also predicated on
another reading of the state that acknowledges the significance of the global-
ized cosmopolis fictively trapped inside the boundaries of the nationstate.
The question of state and its absolute or relative power, now dwells on the
manner in which global cities (cosmopolis) are detached from their expanded
national boundaries and linked together, so that Tehran is much more related
to Istanbul, Delhi, Cairo, Paris, or New York than it is to Khorramabad,
Nishapur, Zahedan, or Sanandaj. Saskia Sassen has been consistently at work
arguing that nation-states have not been as much overcome by globalization
as becoming the regional instantiations of the global system. As she puts it:
residue, a trace, some debris, which I wish to propose as the site of an aes-
thetic intuition of transcendence. The nation was born poetically, literally,
and the state followed suit and announced its birth in pure violence. There
has always remained a legitimacy crisis by the distance between the poeti-
cally performed nation and the violently executed state.
Every state is founded on forth, Trotsky declared in Brest-Litovsk, and
Max Weber concurred, and added that the state has a claim to (legitimate)
violence. That parenthetical claim to legitimacy is precisely the distance
between the fate of the nation and the demise of state. In the absence
of state legitimacy, which is now permanent and irretrievable, the task is
not to build another state, but to dismantle all state by universalizing the
inherent revolutionary logic of the Palestinian BDS movement. BDS is
not just in defense of the Palestinian cause. It has global repercussions,
as it is replicated in Kobani and Zapatista experiments. I propose that the
irreconcilable differences operative between the totalitarian tendencies of
the state and the defiant will of the nation do not result in either disman-
tling the state or subjugating the nation. Quite to the contrary: the result
is the strengthening of both the nation and the state, but not in comple-
mentary but in entirely dialectical, contrapuntal, and contradictory terms.
The nation and the state operate on the theme of ideology and utopia,
one ideologically committed to have fulfilled its promise, while the other
is looking for its ever-expansive utopia and is thus never satisfied. The
state apparatus operative in the Islamic Republic, Israel, Turkey, or Egypt
may never fall, but every day in their prolongation also unfolds the inner
rebellious dimensions of Iranians, Palestinians, Turks, and Egyptians. As
the ruling states are robbed of their delusions of legitimacy and drawn into
their own inner conflicts, the nations falsely associated with these entrap-
ments become increasingly liberated from their traps.
The central theme of my Iran without Borders, that in the rebirth of
postcolonial nations their fictive frontiers become more porous than ever
and their inhibitive borders are effectively erased toward a global recogni-
tion of a postnational public sphere, here in this book extended to point
to a full recognition that the posthuman bodies of their citizens become
the site and simulacrum of their body politics and therefore as unruly
signs refusing to behave to the whims of illegitimate state apparatuses,
or else imperial warmongering. All forms of statefrom deep state to
garrison state to security stateare therefore rendered suspect in terms
of any categorical legitimacy, forced to expose their brute violence as the
sole source of power. The rise of ISIS alongside Israel (two identical fake
332 H. DABASHI
now completely dismantled: the state does its own thing, and so does the
nation, like two Siamese twins that were once connected at their birth and
are now free to roam around independently. No common organism, no
false familiarity, two strangers that have a phantom fear of the time they
were connected together and now in their mutual fright remember their
shared and now completely overcome memories.
NOTES
1. Georgio Agamben, Introductory Note on the Concept of
Democracy in Georgio Agamben, etal., Democracy in What State?
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2009/2011): 4.
2. Ibid: 4.
3. See Karl Vick, Is Iran finally ready for change? (Time Magazine, 16
November 2015), available online here: http://imgur.com/a/
Wxnej. Accessed 10 December 2015.
4. See Thomas Erdbrink, Cautiously, Iranians Reclaim Public Spaces
and Liberties Long Suppressed (New York Times, 5 October 2015).
Available online here: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/
world/cautiously-iranians-reclaim-public-spaces-and-liberties-long-
suppressed.html?_r=0. Accessed on 10 December 2015.
5. Ibid.
6. See Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation, in Hans Gerth and C.Wright
Mills (Eds), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1946): 78.
7. Ibid: 78.
8. See Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State: Essays in Political
Anthropology (New York: Zone, 1989).
9. See Wendy Brown, We are all democrats now, in Georgio Agamben,
etal. (Eds), Democracy in What State? (Op. cit.): 44.
10. Ibid: 44.
11. See Hamid Dabashi, The spectacle of democracy in the US
(Aljazeera, 5 April 2012). Available online here: http://www.
aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/04/20124275738887469.
html. Accessed on 20 December 2015.
12. See Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart (Eds), The Semblance of
Subjectivity: Essays in Adornos Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press, 1997): 7.
13. Ibid: 7.
334 H. DABASHI
14. Ibid: 8.
15. Ibid: 8.
16. Ibid: 89.
17. Ibid: 9.
18. Ibid: 9.
19. See Michel Foucault, Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Criticism of
Political Reason (The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Stanford
University, 10 and 16 October 1979): 227. Available online here:
http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/f/foucault81.
pdf. Accessed 15 December 2015.
20. Ibid: 229.
21. Ibid: 235.
22. Ibid: 237.
23. Ibid: 240.
24. Ibid: 246.
25. Ibid: 247248.
26. Ibid: 253.
27. Ibid: 254.
28. See Paolo Savoia, Foucaults Critique of Political Reason:
Individualization and Totalization (Revista de Estudios Sociales No.
43, Bogot, agosto de 2012): 1422. Available online here: http://
res.uniandes.edu.co/view.php/778/index.php?id=778. Accessed 15
December 2015.
29. See Timothy Mitchell, The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist
Approaches and Their Critics (The American Political Science Review,
Vol. 85, No. 1, March 1991): 7796.
30. Saskia Sassen, When National Territory is Home to the Global: Old
Borders to Novel Borderings (New Political Economy, Vol. 10, No.
4, December 2005): 523541.
31. See Wael Hallaq, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernitys
Moral Predicament (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
32. See Hamid Dabashi, Shiism: A Religion of Protest (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2012).
INDEX
Kadivar, Mohsen, 56, 67, 98, 120, 249 Lawrence of Arabia (1962), 241
Kafka, 200, 255, 256 Lebanon, 14, 62, 71, 101, 125, 142,
Kaghaz-e Akhbar, 186 143, 175, 271
Kahak, 129, 131 Libya, 20, 39, 67, 272
Kahrizak, 89, 246, 25763, 268, 269 logocentricism, 185
Kandahar (2001), 13, 11317 Lyricism of Revolt, 23234
Kant, 95, 131
Karl Binding, 273
Karroubi, Mehdi, 66, 253, 257 Maarefi, Mahtab, 281, 302, 303
Kermani, Mirza Aqa Khan, 82, 135 Macht, 248
Ketab-e Ali/The Book of Ali, 221, 227 Mahan, Alfred Thayer
Khalaji, Mehdi, 99 (18401914),57
Khamenei, Ayatollah Ali, 75, 254, 257 Makhmalbaf, Hana, 275, 276
Khatami, Ahmad, 150 Makhmalbaf, Mohsen, 64, 99, 111,
Khatami, Mohammad, 56, 64, 244 112, 118, 119, 192, 209, 270
Khavaran Cemetery, 12, 219, 230 Makhmalbaf, Samira, 119
Khayyam, Omar, 48, 220, 224 Malcolm X, 47, 231, 240
Khomeini, Ayatollah, 8, 46, 49, 51, Manichaeism, 53
64, 66, 82, 88, 134, 136, 141, Manshur-e Jonbesh-e Sabz, 66
188, 205, 228, 249 Mart, Jos, 191
Khorramabad, 328 Mason-Dixon line, 6
Khosrow, Nasser (10041088), 85, Mathnavi, 198
126, 129 Mazdakism, 127
Khuzestan, 317 Meiner, Felix, 275
Kiarostami, Abbas, 62, 111, 112, 114, Memmi, Albert, 2402
11720, 141, 168, 177, 178, Menke, Christoph, 28, 94, 332
183, 200, 201, 262, 265, 323 Meshkini, Marziyeh, 119
Kincaid, Jamaica, 161, 241 Meskoub, Shahrokh, 49
King, Martin Luther, 47, 90 metamorphic movement, 26,
Kline, Calvin, 174 7390,93
Kobani, 71, 231, 320, 331 Meydan-e Naqsh-e Jahan, 128, 130, 131
Kratia, 31822 Mickiewicz, 291
Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 6, 110 Milani, Abbas, 99, 100
Kurds, 40, 52, 182, 231 Mills, Wright, C., 219
Kurosawa, Akira, 155, 163, 296 Miranda Rights, 258
Kuwait, 52, 59 Mir Damad (died circa 1632), 1302,
134, 135
Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 158, 263
The Labyrinth of Solitude/El laberinto modernity, 2, 5, 8, 12, 13, 18, 2531,
de la soledad (1950/1975), 104 33, 34, 415, 50, 61, 79, 826,
La Femme Lapide (1990), 151 939, 126, 13741, 144, 154,
Lahiji, Shahla, 282, 288 160, 164, 179, 180, 182, 184,
INDEX 341
185, 195, 196, 199, 219, 233, 189, 1913, 195, 199, 200, 202,
237, 265, 272, 2857, 311, 312, 204, 208, 213, 214, 21820, 225,
314, 316, 317, 320, 322, 323, 227, 228, 231, 237, 243, 24549,
327, 330, 332 253, 263, 264, 266, 267, 269,
Mongols, 39, 41, 846, 127, 130, 272, 281, 295, 307, 31233
190, 317 native informers, 112, 201, 271
Montazeri, Ayatollah (19222009), nativism, 9, 42, 58, 99, 140, 179,
56, 61, 247, 249 180, 204, 250
Montesquieus Persian Letters (1721), Neda Aqa Soltan (19832009), 26, 147
43, 50 Neo-Platonism, 129
Motahhari, Morteza, 23, 135 Neshat, Shirin, 12, 98, 105, 106, 120,
Mousavi, Mir Hossein, 55, 56, 66, 141, 164, 276
757, 88, 111, 274 Netflix, 116
Mozart Magic Flute (1791), 47 Neyestani, Mana, 45, 108
Mughals, 11, 16, 43, 52, 80, 85, 124, Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra
314, 327 (18831891), 47
Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), 67, 68, 175 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 213
Mushashaah, 127, 136 Nishapur, 328
Musselman, 245, 246 Nizam-e Solteh/the Dominant
Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Regime, 230
Dispersed Knowledges: Persian Nodjoumi, Nicky, 108, 120, 204
Poesis in the Transnational nomocentricism, 185
Circuitry (2004), 265 North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Mythmaker, 28, 281307 (NATO), 20, 238
the myth of the nation, 307 Numazawa, 296299
Nuqtaviyyah, 127, 132, 134, 136
Pahlavis, 22, 23, 73, 80, 134, 135, postcolonial reason, 911, 13, 25, 26,
317, 323 28, 29, 33, 34, 45, 61, 62, 82, 93,
Pahlavi tyranny, 73 94, 96, 97, 102, 147, 204, 219,
Pakistan, 18, 20, 40, 46, 52, 237, 247, 320, 323, 331, 332
88, 329 postcolonial reason and rhetoric, 311
Palestine, 20, 38, 52, 62, 71, 100, postcolonial state, 10, 52, 61, 110,
105, 11315, 127, 142, 143, 312, 322, 323, 32730
175, 242, 247, 266, 271, 311, post-28 Mordad Syndrome, 78
320, 329, 330 postnational account of the nation, 25,
palindromic mimesis, 232, 233 37
Panahi, Hamid, 148, 149, 152 Post-Orientalism:Knowledge and
paralingual semiosis, 85 Power in Time of Terror, 174
parapublic sphere, 13, 30, 31, 71, 86, potentia, 248
181, 182 potenza, 248, 268
Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 254 potere, 248, 268
Paz, Octavio, 103, 104 pouvoir, 248
Peirce, Charles Sanders, 167 Prophet Muhammad, 124, 125
Pen, Marine Le, 320 Proust, 223
Peres, Shimon, 152 public intellectual, 4, 56, 82, 110,
Persian empire, 14, 25, 3753 182, 18486, 192, 201, 205
Persian Gulf, 57, 71, 175, 189 public reason, 32, 61, 64, 69, 80, 81,
Persian Gulf War, 264 93, 94, 97101, 128, 131, 132,
Pesyan, Mohamad Taqi Khan 13644, 177, 1802, 184, 1868
(18921921), 228 public sphere, 9, 13, 21, 23, 27, 28,
physical body, 26, 232, 233, 302, 414, 468, 50, 51, 53, 61,
304, 325 68, 71, 73, 77, 80, 837,
physical territory, 26 97101, 110, 17393, 203, 317,
Pirandello, 75 318, 320, 322, 331, 332
poetic diffrance, 31, 32 puissance, 248
poetic para-realism, 232, 233
Postcolonialism, 31
postcoloniality, 9, 10, 42, 94, 98, Qajars, 11, 16, 22, 23, 42, 52, 73, 80,
1014, 106, 158, 160, 164, 180, 127, 132, 134, 135, 137, 140,
191, 193, 239, 240, 242, 247, 180, 327
250, 272 Qaramita, 127, 134, 136
postcolonial nation, 711, 16, 22, 28, Qesseh, 287
29, 32, 34, 403, 48, 503, 71, Qobadi, Bahram, 111, 119
80, 94, 101, 182, 1846, 192, Qom, 129
193, 219, 247, 272, 312, Qorrat al-Ayn, Tahereh, 126, 128
31618, 320, 322, 323, 327, Quhistan, 127
3313 the Quran, 99, 151, 179, 192, 208,
postcolonial public reason, 93 209, 211, 213, 249
INDEX 343
Rafsanjani, Akbar Hashemi, 56, 253, Saedi, Gholam Hossein, 51, 120, 323
254 Safavids, Qajars, 11, 16, 52, 327
Rahimi, Mostafa, 49 Sahebjam, Freidoune, 151
Rahnavard, Zahra, 56, 66 Salinger, J.D., 2025, 214
Rana, 284, 285 Sal o le 120 giornate di Sodoma/
Rashomon, 1557 Sal or the 120 Days of Sodom
reading Lolita in Tehran, 151, 153, 155 (1975), 254
the rebirth of a nation, 134 SALT, 15
the Reform Movement (19972005), Sanandaj, 328
60, 64 Sarbedaran, 127, 132, 134, 136
Regarding the Torture of Others, Sartre, Jean-Paul, 135, 168, 169
261 Sassanids, 41, 42, 127, 140
religious intellectuals, 47, 67, 185, Saudi Arabia, 20, 39, 40, 51, 52, 55,
21014 71, 88, 123, 143, 144, 151, 175,
Representations of the Intellectual 176, 184, 189, 192, 311, 319
(1996), 241 Savoia, Paolo, 326
ressentiment, 48, 139 Sayyad, Parviz, 119
revolutionary reason, 95, 128, 132, Scheler, Max, 193
136, 137, 13942, 180, 188 Schmitt, Karl, 238, 239, 246
Rieff, Philip, 79, 255 Scholem, Gershom, 232
ritual birth, 294297 Season of Migration to the North, 240
Rivera, Diego, (18861957), 103 sectarianism, 21, 53, 70, 124, 143,
Riyadh, 56 217, 311
Roosevelt, Kermit, Jr. (18162000), Sembne, Ousmane, 161
201, 202 Sepehri, Sohrab (19281980), 47,
Roshdiyeh, Haji-Mirza Hassan 107, 109
(18511944), 187 Shahdokht-e Sarzamin-e Abadiyat/
Rouhani, Hassan (President), 38, 313 The Princess of the Land of
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, 48 Eternity (2003), 153
The Rules of the Game (19181919), Shah, Nader, 128, 1368, 140, 141,180
75 Shah, Nasser al-Din (18311896), 138
Rumi, 46, 79, 85, 198, 214, 215, 315 Shahnameh, 41, 48, 49, 53, 125, 133
The Runner (1985), 105, 159 Shah, Reza, 8, 10, 49, 134, 138, 140,
Russia, 18, 20, 85, 88, 175, 189, 141, 179, 188, 228
311,319 Shamlou, Ahmad, 47, 62, 70, 121,
Rustom, Hind, 203, 207, 210 125, 188, 213, 232
Shams, Fatemeh, 86, 87
Shams, Zahra, 86, 87, 90
Sabbah, Hassan, 127, 134 Shaykhism, 132, 138, 140
Sabra and Shatila, 13, 101 Shiism, 23, 24, 26, 32, 49, 99,
Sadra, Mulla, 80, 126, 12832, 12344, 147, 179, 180, 186,
1347, 140, 141, 143, 180, 304 303, 330
344 INDEX
Shirazi, Ayatollah Mirza Hassan, 77, Third World socialism, 23, 58, 59, 98,
187 177, 192, 195, 325
Shirazi, Mirza Saleh, 44, 186 Thunder Shower, 282, 283
Shuster, Morgan, 201 trace, 1113, 25, 32, 42, 48, 49, 65,
Siahkal, 8, 188 79, 106, 116, 136, 141, 161, 220,
Society against State (1989), 316 223, 224, 227, 297, 325, 331
Society of Spectacle (1967), 12, 94, tradition, 2, 23, 47, 79, 96, 99, 134,
101, 102, 105, 263, 264 135, 180, 184, 232, 283, 285,
Sokhan/Logos, 41, 846, 181, 283, 289, 311, 312
292, 293 transnational public sphere, 23, 27,
Sokolowski, Thomas, 259 32, 42, 46, 48, 51, 61, 68, 71,
Sontag, Susan, 261, 262, 265, 269, 73, 77, 86, 87, 97101, 110,
271 17393, 317, 318, 320, 322
Soroush, Abdolkarim, 67, 120, 244 Travelers, 44, 178, 302, 303, 306
The Sovereignty of Art (1988/1998), Trojan Horse, 164, 166, 325
33, 947 Trotsky, Leon, 316, 331
Spengler, Oswald, 238 Tudeh Party, 188, 228
Spivak, Gayatri, 13, 157, 191, 240 Tusi, Nasir al-Din, 130, 131, 134
State of Exception (2005), 239, 245,
248, 249
The Stranger and the Fog/Gharibeh UAE, 20, 52
va M eh (1973), 284 unruly sign, 28, 148, 1602, 331
Strauss, Leo, 246 urban legends, 2992
Suhrawardi, Shahab al-Din Yahya US Civil War, 110
(11541191), 85, 116 US empire, 37, 174, 184, 191, 196,
Suleiman, Elia, 105, 114, 161, 162, 164 219, 319
Sunnism, 124, 143 Usulism, 141
Syria, 20, 39, 40, 67, 69, 71, 74, 127,
175, 176, 182, 189, 272, 317,
319, 325 Vahabzadeh, Ahmad Ali, 227, 229
Vahabzadeh, Peyman, 217, 218, 221,
227, 229, 230
Tabula rasa, 104, 105, 154, 250 Vatan/Homeland, 10, 53, 80, 85,
Tagore, Rabindranath (18611941), 47 182, 281
Tajzadeh, Mostafa, 66, 176 Vatan/Nation, 181, 191
Taliban, 13, 58, 59, 115, 118, 239, Velayat-e Faqih/Authority of the
246 Jurisconsult, 62, 82, 249
Taslimi, Susan, 119, 288 Venezuela, 150, 175
Tavakoli, Majid, 86, 87, 90 Venice Festival, 275
Taxi Driver (1976), 200 Verfremdung, 117, 157, 261, 271
Tel Aviv, 14 Verfremdungseffekt/Distancing
Testing Democracy (1999), 64 Effect, 96
INDEX 345