Milad Odabaei is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arkansas. He studies predicaments of culture, forms of subjectivity, and fugitive itineraries that are born in the experience of geopolitical violence and socioeconomic devastation in modern Iran and the broader Persianate and Islamicate societies of the Middle East and Central Asia. He has conducted ethnographic and archival research in the Iranian academy, the research centers of the Shi’i seminaries, and private translation circles in Tehran and Qom, in Iranian Kurdistan, and in North America among LGBTQ+ refugees and diasporic communities. Based on this research, he writes about popular and learned practices of translation, as well as attempts at migration as manifestations of geopolitical violence and political hope.
On September 16, 2022, Mahsa Zhina Amini, a twenty-two-year-old woman from the Iranian province o... more On September 16, 2022, Mahsa Zhina Amini, a twenty-two-year-old woman from the Iranian province of Kurdistan, died in Tehran due to injuries incurred while in police custody. She was arrested three days earlier by the “morality police” for allegedly violating the state-enforced Islamic dress code. Her death, and the state response, angered many observers in Iran and around the world. It became the occasion of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement and its demands for systematic change. This Hot Spots series is a contribution to what we see as a critical anthropology of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. Now some months after its emergence, our aim is to move beyond the initial framing of the protests in the discourses of the Global North. These discourses tend to treat “women,” “Islam,” and “Iran” as uniform and timeless units. They narrate the movement as the awakening of “Iranian women” against “the regime.” In contrast, the curated essays move closer to the lived realities and everyday struggles for recognitions that are born in the history of revolutionary Iran from the late nineteenth century to the present. They offer theorizations of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement that are internal to Iran as, at once, a geopolitical and imaginative terrain of language and debate with specific histories and traditions. In contrast to the Manichean framing of “women vs. the state,” we suggest that the Woman, Life, Freedom movement is a manifestation of the incapacitation of patriarchal “laws” of Iranian society—from the laws of the family to those of religion and the state—and that this unveiling in turn exposes the diversity of Iranian society in Iran and the diaspora.
Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory, 2023
Conventional accounts of the 1979 Iranian revolution emphasize the loss of the revolution's "true... more Conventional accounts of the 1979 Iranian revolution emphasize the loss of the revolution's "true" spirit in the violence of the Islamic state. In contrast, this essay foregrounds a recurring dream of parricide in the generation of children of revolutionaries, to explore the fetishization of the revolution in such accounts. This dream refracts the violence and loss emphasized in the narratives of the revolution. In dethroning the fetish of the revolution, it enables a confrontation with the losses and limits of earlier theological and political paradigms indexed by the event of revolution. As a form of anthropological defamiliarization, the dream thus offers an opportunity for a speculative encounter with loss as a political-theological horizon of renewal.
Abdolhossein Azarang’s History of Translation in Iran offers the reader of Persian with the first... more Abdolhossein Azarang’s History of Translation in Iran offers the reader of Persian with the first systematic account of translation in Iran.
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East , 2022
This essay offers a reflection on the ways pre-modern discourses are invoked and put in conversat... more This essay offers a reflection on the ways pre-modern discourses are invoked and put in conversation with the debates of the modern self and society. Beginning with Omnia El Shakry and Sarah Pinto’s respective studies, The Arabic Freud and The Doctor and Mrs A, I highlight the capacities of psychoanalysis and ethnography as distinct modes of inquiry to transcend the limitation of secular humanist historiography and elaborate on the significance of pre-modern Islamic discourses and Hindu mythopoetic for the genesis of the sciences and ethics of the self in modern Egypt and India. I then turn to Ibn Khaldun and the Social Sciences by Javad Tabatabaei. This study, which was published in Persian and in Iran two decades after the 1979 Islamic revolution, offers an archeological problematization of the post-colonial migration of scientific discourse from European to Middle Eastern formations of knowledge. I will suggest that Tabatabai alone turns the encounter between modern human sciences (including psychoanalysis and anthropology) with pre-modern discourses into a historical-epistemological problem. This move, which transcends a seemingly ahistorical epistemological frame of legibility across epochal differences, relates the legibility and affordances of pre-modern traditions to scholarly and popular contestation over them that are constitutive of modernity.
This essay radicalizes the call for foreignizing translation in anthropology by pushing translati... more This essay radicalizes the call for foreignizing translation in anthropology by pushing translation beyond a reference to an anthropological self. What I recognize as "burning translations" responds to the abolitionist call for "letting anthropology burn" by developing the urgency of translation amid histories of racialization. In contrast to foreignizing translation as the self-reflexive hermeneutics of the other, burning translations are speculative approximations of exigent situations that precede and exceed anthropological debates and liberal modes of public reason more generally. Burning translations are risky not because they invent new classificatory concepts and therefore confront the discipline's intellectual and institutional resistance, but because they redirect anthropological terms and categories outside anthropological debates without attempting to add to these debates, offer a corrective, and thereby expiating what Michel-Rolph Trouillot identified as the guilty conscience of postcolonial anthropology. Burning translations test the limit of our concepts as "concepts," and not as "ours."
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2022
Social Histories of Iran centers the experiences of subaltern social groups in the history and hi... more Social Histories of Iran centers the experiences of subaltern social groups in the history and historiography of modernity in and beyond Iran. This is the history of people in revolt, the hungry, the poor, sex workers, bandits, slaves, and women who have been subjected to crises born in the wake of changing socioeconomic, political, and religious paradigms on the one hand, and to modernism's politics of representation on the other. In masterfully telling this story, Stephanie Cronin provincializes the history of the elite and their ideologies of state and society. In what is the book's second and decisively methodological intervention, the history of Iran is situated alongside that of the modern Middle East and the world more generally, pushing against a tendency that the Introduction identifies as "methodological nationalism."
This essay juxtaposes Arzoo Osanloo's masterful ethnography of Iranian law and society, Forgivene... more This essay juxtaposes Arzoo Osanloo's masterful ethnography of Iranian law and society, Forgiveness Work: Mercy, Law, and Victims’ Rights in Iran (2020), with One Word, a nineteenth-century Iranian treatise by Mirza Yusuf Khan Mustashar al-Dowleh ([1870] 2010) that introduces modern law to Iran. My aim is to reflect on the limits of an anthropological epistemology that insists on “the here and now ... [of ] the lifeworlds of others” in theorizing “complex” societies that are radically contemporaneous with the self. I suggest that the insistence on here-and-now freezes the study of contemporary Iran from its discontinuous emergence, discordant unfolding, and noncontemporaneous contemporaneity. More generally, here-and-now decouples ethnography from critical analytics of time and history (genealogy, tradition, multiple temporalities, etc.) and leads to ahistorical, static, and spatial theorization of modern “society” and “civilization.”
Review Essay. Forgiveness Work: Mercy, Law, and Victims’ Rights in Iran, Arzoo Osanloo, Princeto... more Review Essay. Forgiveness Work: Mercy, Law, and Victims’ Rights in Iran, Arzoo Osanloo, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020, ISBN 978-0-691-17203-3, 339 pp.
This article examines the politics of translation in Iran in order to contribute to a debate in a... more This article examines the politics of translation in Iran in order to contribute to a debate in anthropology around cultural difference and epistemic violence. It does so through a critical exposition of the forced confession of an Iranian politician, Saeed Hajjarian, who testified that his translation of European concepts into an Islamic idiom was responsible for unrest in Iran. It locates Hajjarian's confession within Iranian histories of anti-Western politics and an Islamic discourse of learned judgement. It argues that the enactment of the Islamic state is mediated by the translation of the West and proposes that protests manifest as a problem of incommensurability for the Islamic state analogous to the problem of incommensurability in cultural anthropology. In attempting to sequester the Islamic Republic from the West, state officials reproduce sectarianism domestically. Anthropology risks the same when it attempts to insulate the non-West from Western epistemologies and ontologies.
"RELIGIÃO E POLÍTICA." PENSANDO COM SABA MAHMOOD: APRESENTAÇÃO. Michael Allan and Bruno Reinhardt... more "RELIGIÃO E POLÍTICA." PENSANDO COM SABA MAHMOOD: APRESENTAÇÃO. Michael Allan and Bruno Reinhardt. Debates do NER, Porto Alegre, ano 19, n. 36, p. 151-154, ago./dez. 2019. Tradução por Bruno Reinhardt.
Jaffar Mahalati draws attention to the afterlife of the Aristotelian virtue of friendship in the ... more Jaffar Mahalati draws attention to the afterlife of the Aristotelian virtue of friendship in the pre-modern Iranian political milieu and considers friendship’s contemporary eclipse —and hence, its importance—in international relations. Ed Hayes offers a historical examination of cosmopolitanism in pre-Mongol Islamic imperial culture, theorizing the concept beyond its contemporary European conceptualization. Mana Kia examines representations of place in seventeenth-century Persian literature and posits an earlier form of knowledge of self and other that contrasts with representations of difference internal to colonial and post-colonial (dis)orders. Alireza Doostdar’s study of “Hollywood cosmopolitanism” in the Islamic Republic addresses modes of receptivity that exceed recognition and yet mediate the politics of difference and sameness in the contemporary global terrain. While addressing the questions raised by “Iranian cosmopolitanism,” the studies in this volume engage with the theorizations of cosmopolitanism across the social sciences and the humanities—particularly the rich and critical treatments of the concept by post-colonial scholars of pre-modern Persianate and Indian Ocean worlds.
The review essays focus on the modern cosmopolitical visions of the great Afghan thinker and politician Mahmud Beg Tarzi (1865–1933), as cyphered through his collected writings; of Iranian cinema as examined through Hamid Naficy’s expansive social history and Blake Atwood’s more recent study of post-revolutionary film; and of modern Iranian political thought as represented by Ali Mirsepassi’s study of Iran’s “oral philosopher” Ahmad Fardid.
"Iranian Cosmopolitanism is an inquiry into one such perspectival vision of political belonging b... more "Iranian Cosmopolitanism is an inquiry into one such perspectival vision of political belonging beyond the European one as it has culminated in the present (dis)order of global politics. In proposing this concept, we are not preoccupied with the present discourse of the Iranian state. Instead, we suggest exploring various traditions and histories that sustain the modern idea of 'Iran' and simultaneously the global terrain that Iran shares with others. We do not imagine that Iranian cosmopolitanism thus explored culminates in the perspective of Iran at international forums such as the United Nations. Institutions such as the United Nations are normatively bound to a particular and, as is often the case, European cosmopolitical perspective. Rather, we imagine Iranian cosmopolitanism as a perspective to compete with other such cosmopolitical visions and sensibilities, agonistically, to transform and shape global politics. Even if European hegemony renders such an agonistic politics inconceivable —a claim challenged by the present multipolarity of global politics—to exclude its possibility from consideration is to uncritically participate in one triumphant vision of shared political life."
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2019
After Iran's 1979 Revolution, the energies that had animated the struggle for a modern Islamic go... more After Iran's 1979 Revolution, the energies that had animated the struggle for a modern Islamic government were partially redirected to the task of the renewal of the Islamic tradition. Paradigmatic of this effort is " the Cultural Revolution " that has sought to combat what Islamic activists perceive as the destructive effects of Western culture and to align the production of knowledge with the teachings of Shi'i Islam. The effort to produce modern Islamic knowledge, however, has paradoxically intensified the translation of European thought and invested it with the ethos of seminary education. Drawing on a long-term engagement with post-revolutionary Iranian intellectuals, including fieldwork in Tehran and Qom, this article offers a historical and anthropological exploration of the interrelated questions of tradition, transmission, and translation. It is ethnographically centered in a seminar where seminarian-academic translate Carl Schmitt, among others, to make sense of, and intervene in, Islamic politics. I highlight how European concepts and forms of thought come to mediate the relation between seminarians-academics and the Islamic tradition, its forms of knowledge, and its modern politics, and argues that the elision of the historical incommensurability of European discourses renders the enacted tradition foreign to itself.
Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906 and Narratives of the Enlightenment, 2016
This essay explores the movement of concepts from European political culture, and the historical ... more This essay explores the movement of concepts from European political culture, and the historical and political order of things of the Enlightenment, to Iran in the nineteenth century. It elaborates translation as a process that brings together Iranian contact with European culture, and the changes in the language and practice of politics around the 1906 Iranian Constitutional Revolution. While tracing the translation of European thought to a paradigmatic piece of Qajar travel writing by Mirza Saleh Shirazi, it relates translation to the epistemic shifts that give form to ‘the modern’ in Iran. It demonstrates that Mirza Saleh Shirazi’s travelogue is marked by an ‘epistemic confusion’ that reflect the changing order of Iranian things and shape the novel religious and political discourses of the Constitutional Revolution. As a result, and in contrast to the conventional narrative that attribute the Constitutional Revolution to the emulation of Europe as a site of difference, it argues that the 1906 Revolution was made possible through a transferential relation with the difference internal to Iranian history and cultural traditions.
Attracting international investors while repelling undesirable migrants: since the Great Recessio... more Attracting international investors while repelling undesirable migrants: since the Great Recession of 2009, these two preoccupations have dominated the European agenda. Given the havoc wrought by austerity programs and the ongoing ordeal of asylum seekers, what possibilities does the near future hold, for the European Union and for the left's ability to challenge its current priorities?
A call for articles! Special Issue of the Journal of Comparative Islamic Studies. The central pro... more A call for articles! Special Issue of the Journal of Comparative Islamic Studies. The central problem is *conceptualization* of Iranian Cosmopolitanism given that various philosophical, sociological, etc. registers of "cosmopolitanism" draws on the development of European political, philosophical and religious traditions. The call solicits both theoretical reflections as well as case studies of Iranian Cosmopolitanism. Abstract deadline: March 1, 2016. Article deadline: September 15, 2016.
Critical Theory for Political Theology, Political Theology Network, 2021
Rather than establishing structural analogies or historical filiations between “religion” and “po... more Rather than establishing structural analogies or historical filiations between “religion” and “politics” (terms he opens to question), Talal Asad urges attention to shifts in the grammar of concepts across different situations.
On September 16, 2022, Mahsa Zhina Amini, a twenty-two-year-old woman from the Iranian province o... more On September 16, 2022, Mahsa Zhina Amini, a twenty-two-year-old woman from the Iranian province of Kurdistan, died in Tehran due to injuries incurred while in police custody. She was arrested three days earlier by the “morality police” for allegedly violating the state-enforced Islamic dress code. Her death, and the state response, angered many observers in Iran and around the world. It became the occasion of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement and its demands for systematic change. This Hot Spots series is a contribution to what we see as a critical anthropology of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. Now some months after its emergence, our aim is to move beyond the initial framing of the protests in the discourses of the Global North. These discourses tend to treat “women,” “Islam,” and “Iran” as uniform and timeless units. They narrate the movement as the awakening of “Iranian women” against “the regime.” In contrast, the curated essays move closer to the lived realities and everyday struggles for recognitions that are born in the history of revolutionary Iran from the late nineteenth century to the present. They offer theorizations of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement that are internal to Iran as, at once, a geopolitical and imaginative terrain of language and debate with specific histories and traditions. In contrast to the Manichean framing of “women vs. the state,” we suggest that the Woman, Life, Freedom movement is a manifestation of the incapacitation of patriarchal “laws” of Iranian society—from the laws of the family to those of religion and the state—and that this unveiling in turn exposes the diversity of Iranian society in Iran and the diaspora.
Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory, 2023
Conventional accounts of the 1979 Iranian revolution emphasize the loss of the revolution's "true... more Conventional accounts of the 1979 Iranian revolution emphasize the loss of the revolution's "true" spirit in the violence of the Islamic state. In contrast, this essay foregrounds a recurring dream of parricide in the generation of children of revolutionaries, to explore the fetishization of the revolution in such accounts. This dream refracts the violence and loss emphasized in the narratives of the revolution. In dethroning the fetish of the revolution, it enables a confrontation with the losses and limits of earlier theological and political paradigms indexed by the event of revolution. As a form of anthropological defamiliarization, the dream thus offers an opportunity for a speculative encounter with loss as a political-theological horizon of renewal.
Abdolhossein Azarang’s History of Translation in Iran offers the reader of Persian with the first... more Abdolhossein Azarang’s History of Translation in Iran offers the reader of Persian with the first systematic account of translation in Iran.
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East , 2022
This essay offers a reflection on the ways pre-modern discourses are invoked and put in conversat... more This essay offers a reflection on the ways pre-modern discourses are invoked and put in conversation with the debates of the modern self and society. Beginning with Omnia El Shakry and Sarah Pinto’s respective studies, The Arabic Freud and The Doctor and Mrs A, I highlight the capacities of psychoanalysis and ethnography as distinct modes of inquiry to transcend the limitation of secular humanist historiography and elaborate on the significance of pre-modern Islamic discourses and Hindu mythopoetic for the genesis of the sciences and ethics of the self in modern Egypt and India. I then turn to Ibn Khaldun and the Social Sciences by Javad Tabatabaei. This study, which was published in Persian and in Iran two decades after the 1979 Islamic revolution, offers an archeological problematization of the post-colonial migration of scientific discourse from European to Middle Eastern formations of knowledge. I will suggest that Tabatabai alone turns the encounter between modern human sciences (including psychoanalysis and anthropology) with pre-modern discourses into a historical-epistemological problem. This move, which transcends a seemingly ahistorical epistemological frame of legibility across epochal differences, relates the legibility and affordances of pre-modern traditions to scholarly and popular contestation over them that are constitutive of modernity.
This essay radicalizes the call for foreignizing translation in anthropology by pushing translati... more This essay radicalizes the call for foreignizing translation in anthropology by pushing translation beyond a reference to an anthropological self. What I recognize as "burning translations" responds to the abolitionist call for "letting anthropology burn" by developing the urgency of translation amid histories of racialization. In contrast to foreignizing translation as the self-reflexive hermeneutics of the other, burning translations are speculative approximations of exigent situations that precede and exceed anthropological debates and liberal modes of public reason more generally. Burning translations are risky not because they invent new classificatory concepts and therefore confront the discipline's intellectual and institutional resistance, but because they redirect anthropological terms and categories outside anthropological debates without attempting to add to these debates, offer a corrective, and thereby expiating what Michel-Rolph Trouillot identified as the guilty conscience of postcolonial anthropology. Burning translations test the limit of our concepts as "concepts," and not as "ours."
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2022
Social Histories of Iran centers the experiences of subaltern social groups in the history and hi... more Social Histories of Iran centers the experiences of subaltern social groups in the history and historiography of modernity in and beyond Iran. This is the history of people in revolt, the hungry, the poor, sex workers, bandits, slaves, and women who have been subjected to crises born in the wake of changing socioeconomic, political, and religious paradigms on the one hand, and to modernism's politics of representation on the other. In masterfully telling this story, Stephanie Cronin provincializes the history of the elite and their ideologies of state and society. In what is the book's second and decisively methodological intervention, the history of Iran is situated alongside that of the modern Middle East and the world more generally, pushing against a tendency that the Introduction identifies as "methodological nationalism."
This essay juxtaposes Arzoo Osanloo's masterful ethnography of Iranian law and society, Forgivene... more This essay juxtaposes Arzoo Osanloo's masterful ethnography of Iranian law and society, Forgiveness Work: Mercy, Law, and Victims’ Rights in Iran (2020), with One Word, a nineteenth-century Iranian treatise by Mirza Yusuf Khan Mustashar al-Dowleh ([1870] 2010) that introduces modern law to Iran. My aim is to reflect on the limits of an anthropological epistemology that insists on “the here and now ... [of ] the lifeworlds of others” in theorizing “complex” societies that are radically contemporaneous with the self. I suggest that the insistence on here-and-now freezes the study of contemporary Iran from its discontinuous emergence, discordant unfolding, and noncontemporaneous contemporaneity. More generally, here-and-now decouples ethnography from critical analytics of time and history (genealogy, tradition, multiple temporalities, etc.) and leads to ahistorical, static, and spatial theorization of modern “society” and “civilization.”
Review Essay. Forgiveness Work: Mercy, Law, and Victims’ Rights in Iran, Arzoo Osanloo, Princeto... more Review Essay. Forgiveness Work: Mercy, Law, and Victims’ Rights in Iran, Arzoo Osanloo, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020, ISBN 978-0-691-17203-3, 339 pp.
This article examines the politics of translation in Iran in order to contribute to a debate in a... more This article examines the politics of translation in Iran in order to contribute to a debate in anthropology around cultural difference and epistemic violence. It does so through a critical exposition of the forced confession of an Iranian politician, Saeed Hajjarian, who testified that his translation of European concepts into an Islamic idiom was responsible for unrest in Iran. It locates Hajjarian's confession within Iranian histories of anti-Western politics and an Islamic discourse of learned judgement. It argues that the enactment of the Islamic state is mediated by the translation of the West and proposes that protests manifest as a problem of incommensurability for the Islamic state analogous to the problem of incommensurability in cultural anthropology. In attempting to sequester the Islamic Republic from the West, state officials reproduce sectarianism domestically. Anthropology risks the same when it attempts to insulate the non-West from Western epistemologies and ontologies.
"RELIGIÃO E POLÍTICA." PENSANDO COM SABA MAHMOOD: APRESENTAÇÃO. Michael Allan and Bruno Reinhardt... more "RELIGIÃO E POLÍTICA." PENSANDO COM SABA MAHMOOD: APRESENTAÇÃO. Michael Allan and Bruno Reinhardt. Debates do NER, Porto Alegre, ano 19, n. 36, p. 151-154, ago./dez. 2019. Tradução por Bruno Reinhardt.
Jaffar Mahalati draws attention to the afterlife of the Aristotelian virtue of friendship in the ... more Jaffar Mahalati draws attention to the afterlife of the Aristotelian virtue of friendship in the pre-modern Iranian political milieu and considers friendship’s contemporary eclipse —and hence, its importance—in international relations. Ed Hayes offers a historical examination of cosmopolitanism in pre-Mongol Islamic imperial culture, theorizing the concept beyond its contemporary European conceptualization. Mana Kia examines representations of place in seventeenth-century Persian literature and posits an earlier form of knowledge of self and other that contrasts with representations of difference internal to colonial and post-colonial (dis)orders. Alireza Doostdar’s study of “Hollywood cosmopolitanism” in the Islamic Republic addresses modes of receptivity that exceed recognition and yet mediate the politics of difference and sameness in the contemporary global terrain. While addressing the questions raised by “Iranian cosmopolitanism,” the studies in this volume engage with the theorizations of cosmopolitanism across the social sciences and the humanities—particularly the rich and critical treatments of the concept by post-colonial scholars of pre-modern Persianate and Indian Ocean worlds.
The review essays focus on the modern cosmopolitical visions of the great Afghan thinker and politician Mahmud Beg Tarzi (1865–1933), as cyphered through his collected writings; of Iranian cinema as examined through Hamid Naficy’s expansive social history and Blake Atwood’s more recent study of post-revolutionary film; and of modern Iranian political thought as represented by Ali Mirsepassi’s study of Iran’s “oral philosopher” Ahmad Fardid.
"Iranian Cosmopolitanism is an inquiry into one such perspectival vision of political belonging b... more "Iranian Cosmopolitanism is an inquiry into one such perspectival vision of political belonging beyond the European one as it has culminated in the present (dis)order of global politics. In proposing this concept, we are not preoccupied with the present discourse of the Iranian state. Instead, we suggest exploring various traditions and histories that sustain the modern idea of 'Iran' and simultaneously the global terrain that Iran shares with others. We do not imagine that Iranian cosmopolitanism thus explored culminates in the perspective of Iran at international forums such as the United Nations. Institutions such as the United Nations are normatively bound to a particular and, as is often the case, European cosmopolitical perspective. Rather, we imagine Iranian cosmopolitanism as a perspective to compete with other such cosmopolitical visions and sensibilities, agonistically, to transform and shape global politics. Even if European hegemony renders such an agonistic politics inconceivable —a claim challenged by the present multipolarity of global politics—to exclude its possibility from consideration is to uncritically participate in one triumphant vision of shared political life."
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2019
After Iran's 1979 Revolution, the energies that had animated the struggle for a modern Islamic go... more After Iran's 1979 Revolution, the energies that had animated the struggle for a modern Islamic government were partially redirected to the task of the renewal of the Islamic tradition. Paradigmatic of this effort is " the Cultural Revolution " that has sought to combat what Islamic activists perceive as the destructive effects of Western culture and to align the production of knowledge with the teachings of Shi'i Islam. The effort to produce modern Islamic knowledge, however, has paradoxically intensified the translation of European thought and invested it with the ethos of seminary education. Drawing on a long-term engagement with post-revolutionary Iranian intellectuals, including fieldwork in Tehran and Qom, this article offers a historical and anthropological exploration of the interrelated questions of tradition, transmission, and translation. It is ethnographically centered in a seminar where seminarian-academic translate Carl Schmitt, among others, to make sense of, and intervene in, Islamic politics. I highlight how European concepts and forms of thought come to mediate the relation between seminarians-academics and the Islamic tradition, its forms of knowledge, and its modern politics, and argues that the elision of the historical incommensurability of European discourses renders the enacted tradition foreign to itself.
Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906 and Narratives of the Enlightenment, 2016
This essay explores the movement of concepts from European political culture, and the historical ... more This essay explores the movement of concepts from European political culture, and the historical and political order of things of the Enlightenment, to Iran in the nineteenth century. It elaborates translation as a process that brings together Iranian contact with European culture, and the changes in the language and practice of politics around the 1906 Iranian Constitutional Revolution. While tracing the translation of European thought to a paradigmatic piece of Qajar travel writing by Mirza Saleh Shirazi, it relates translation to the epistemic shifts that give form to ‘the modern’ in Iran. It demonstrates that Mirza Saleh Shirazi’s travelogue is marked by an ‘epistemic confusion’ that reflect the changing order of Iranian things and shape the novel religious and political discourses of the Constitutional Revolution. As a result, and in contrast to the conventional narrative that attribute the Constitutional Revolution to the emulation of Europe as a site of difference, it argues that the 1906 Revolution was made possible through a transferential relation with the difference internal to Iranian history and cultural traditions.
Attracting international investors while repelling undesirable migrants: since the Great Recessio... more Attracting international investors while repelling undesirable migrants: since the Great Recession of 2009, these two preoccupations have dominated the European agenda. Given the havoc wrought by austerity programs and the ongoing ordeal of asylum seekers, what possibilities does the near future hold, for the European Union and for the left's ability to challenge its current priorities?
A call for articles! Special Issue of the Journal of Comparative Islamic Studies. The central pro... more A call for articles! Special Issue of the Journal of Comparative Islamic Studies. The central problem is *conceptualization* of Iranian Cosmopolitanism given that various philosophical, sociological, etc. registers of "cosmopolitanism" draws on the development of European political, philosophical and religious traditions. The call solicits both theoretical reflections as well as case studies of Iranian Cosmopolitanism. Abstract deadline: March 1, 2016. Article deadline: September 15, 2016.
Critical Theory for Political Theology, Political Theology Network, 2021
Rather than establishing structural analogies or historical filiations between “religion” and “po... more Rather than establishing structural analogies or historical filiations between “religion” and “politics” (terms he opens to question), Talal Asad urges attention to shifts in the grammar of concepts across different situations.
The rejection of the constitutive “game” of post-revolutionary politics by the protesters does no... more The rejection of the constitutive “game” of post-revolutionary politics by the protesters does not indicate a desire to return to despotism. Rather, it expresses the reality that the vocabularies and grammars of limited political representation and the state distribution of wealth have exhausted themselves. It recognizes the limits of the debates over Islamic revolution and reform as championed by Iranian politicians. While the two-party game is expiring, no new discourse is readily available to replace it. Consequently, the sociopolitical needs of a discontented population are untranslatable to the vocabularies and grammars of national politics. It is unclear if in this situation anything other than unmediated violence can maintain Iran’s political coherence.
The following is an excerpt of a conversation with Iranian photographer Parham Taghioo about his ... more The following is an excerpt of a conversation with Iranian photographer Parham Taghioo about his 2012 collection Choogh-Alef or "Bookmark."
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on the significance of pre-modern Islamic discourses and Hindu mythopoetic for the genesis of the sciences and ethics of the self in modern Egypt and India. I then turn to Ibn Khaldun and the Social Sciences by Javad Tabatabaei. This study, which was published in Persian and in Iran two decades after the 1979 Islamic revolution, offers an archeological problematization of the post-colonial migration of scientific discourse
from European to Middle Eastern formations of knowledge. I will suggest that Tabatabai alone turns the encounter between modern human sciences (including psychoanalysis and anthropology) with pre-modern discourses into a historical-epistemological problem. This move, which transcends a seemingly ahistorical epistemological frame of legibility across epochal differences, relates the legibility and affordances of pre-modern traditions to scholarly and popular contestation over them that are constitutive of modernity.
Tradução por Bruno Reinhardt.
The review essays focus on the modern cosmopolitical visions of the great Afghan thinker and politician Mahmud Beg Tarzi (1865–1933), as cyphered through his collected writings; of Iranian cinema as examined through Hamid Naficy’s expansive social history and Blake Atwood’s more recent study of post-revolutionary film; and of modern Iranian political thought as represented by Ali Mirsepassi’s study of Iran’s “oral philosopher” Ahmad Fardid.
on the significance of pre-modern Islamic discourses and Hindu mythopoetic for the genesis of the sciences and ethics of the self in modern Egypt and India. I then turn to Ibn Khaldun and the Social Sciences by Javad Tabatabaei. This study, which was published in Persian and in Iran two decades after the 1979 Islamic revolution, offers an archeological problematization of the post-colonial migration of scientific discourse
from European to Middle Eastern formations of knowledge. I will suggest that Tabatabai alone turns the encounter between modern human sciences (including psychoanalysis and anthropology) with pre-modern discourses into a historical-epistemological problem. This move, which transcends a seemingly ahistorical epistemological frame of legibility across epochal differences, relates the legibility and affordances of pre-modern traditions to scholarly and popular contestation over them that are constitutive of modernity.
Tradução por Bruno Reinhardt.
The review essays focus on the modern cosmopolitical visions of the great Afghan thinker and politician Mahmud Beg Tarzi (1865–1933), as cyphered through his collected writings; of Iranian cinema as examined through Hamid Naficy’s expansive social history and Blake Atwood’s more recent study of post-revolutionary film; and of modern Iranian political thought as represented by Ali Mirsepassi’s study of Iran’s “oral philosopher” Ahmad Fardid.