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This essay is a reflection on the everyday conceptual matters that inform the workings of the academic field of Islamic Studies and constitute its conditions of possibility. The research is based on observations I made while working at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University. The everyday of the Institute is marked by arguments that reject orientalism but also foreshadow its return in different guises. In this context, historical and linguistic approaches, with their own tensions and limits, appear as safeguards, but they are inevitably caught up in a binary that juxtaposes theory to the archive as two opposing but equally necessary modalities of knowledge. While several ideas about what constitutes Islam seem to cohabit without much friction, a quite fixed and stable notion of politics overdetermines the possibility to think otherwise. The essay is primarily descriptive, but it contains a few personal and “extra-territorial” notes on how to inhabit these matters differently and follow desire.

This book presents a cultural history of modern Iran from the point of view of Shiraz, a city famous for its poetry and its traditions of scholarship. Exploring the relationship among history, poetry and politics, the book analyses how Shiraz came to be defined as the country's cultural capital, and explains how Iranians have used the concept of culture as a way of thinking about themselves, their past and their relationship with the rest of the world. Weaving together a theoretical approach with extensive ethnographic research, the book suggests a model to integrate broad concerns with a nuanced analysis of Iran's cultural traditions and practices. The author's interdisciplinary approach sheds light on how contemporary Iranians relate to classical Persian poetry; on the relationship between expressive forms and the political imagination; and on the different ways teachers, professors, cultural managers, poets and scholars think and work. He describes how history and poetry are the two dominant modes to talk about the past, present and future of the town and demonstrates that the question of knowledge is crucial to an understanding of the political and existential dimensions of life in Iran today. This book will be a major contribution to the current effort to move away from nationalist views of Iranian history and culture, and as such will be of great interest to scholars of cultural anthropology, history, Middle Eastern studies and Iranian studies.

The power of poetry lies in its capacity to move people by engendering joy, sadness or anger via the images that it summons. Since in film it is light that constitutes images, one should first of all understand this poetic power of affection in relation to the color schemes of the sequences. The images turn black and white and the stare of the dog meets the face of the poet sleeping, then opening his eyes to an apartment window overlooking the city at dawn: a landscape of high-rises under a foggy sky with mountains in the background. Color sequences assemble images of forests, rivers, seashores and ruins, accompanied by a dramatic soundtrack and the poet’s voice-over reciting his translations of Rilke. Returning at night to the same apartment window shown at the beginning of the film, the camera frames two burning red candles while the voice of the poet dialogues in hushed, intimate and sometimes joking tones with a shadow figure (an angel?).

In the preceding chapters, I have outlined how history and poetry were constructed as two of the discourses out of which Shiraz was made into a city of knowledge. I develop this analysis by examining history and poetry as two distinct modalities of knowing. I attend to the specific and different ways in which people relate to history and poetry as modes of apprehension and representation of events. I consider the modalities of history and poetry and the ways people relate to them as the outcome of historical events, not as abstract genres. I frame their analysis with a consideration of how the 1950s in Shiraz were discussed or silenced in the late 1990s, at the time of my fieldwork. This historicizing approach opens the way for a genealogical consideration of the relevance of poetry as an existential ground for recognition.

\"What were we, and what have we become.\" For the teacher, the Abode of Knowledge was something of the past. He pointed to a set of phenomena that substantially altered the community. He often called attention to the fact that earthquakes destroyed large portions of the city and eliminated entire generations, and so did epidemics. 1 Social and economic transformations had also taken place: starting thirty years ago people gradually left the old neighborhoods and moved to newer parts of the city. Villagers and more recently Afghans replaced them. The teacher also pointed out that many Shirazis migrated either to Tehran or to foreign countries, and that during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988) as many as 200,000 refugees from the cities and villages of southwest Iran settled in Shiraz.

In the autumn of 1996, the Foundation for the Study of Fars, a cultural institution of the Shiraz municipality, organized a conference on the history and culture of the region of Fars. On that occasion, the Foundation promoted the restoration of the column in Valî 'Asr Square that had been damaged during the revolution. The shaft was repaired and repainted and a new cast was prepared from another replica of the same bull-shaped capital. 1 The bulls were once again about to dominate the square with their majestic presence. However, acting on the orders of the imâm-i jum'a of Shiraz, and with the restoration almost completed, security forces intervened and stopped the work. 2 For some time the bulls remained covered with a white cloth wrapped around the scaffolding put in place for the restoration (Figure 3.1). In the end, the capital was completely destroyed, not just damaged as it had been in the days of the revolution. The final outcome of the restoration was a perfect replica of an Achaemenid column without the bull-shaped capital (Figure 3.2).

This chapter introduces the constitutive elements of Shiraz as city of knowledge through a discussion of a set of writings and cultural initiatives from the end of the nineteenth century to 1979. The analysis of these materials aims at offering a \"pre-history\" of post-revolutionary developments as a background to the chapters that follow. I identify a set of discursive and non-discursive mechanisms that have participated in the making of Shiraz as city of knowledge and highlight the ways in which distinctive forms of knowledge, techniques of power and processes of subject formation intertwined. My aim is to offer a retrospective consideration of how a set of elements crystallized into a vision of Shiraz as city of knowledge. While I attend to the contexts in which these writings were produced, my concern here is less with historical sequence than with the constitutive features of the city of knowledge that each of the documents I analyze exhibits.

Two architectural elements stand out under the sky of contemporary Shiraz, marking its rapidly changing landscape: iskilit and sutûn. Iskilit is the skeleton frame of steel columns and horizontal I-beams used everywhere in the world as a common supporting structure for edifices. It is widely utilized in Shiraz, from large complexes to single houses. This type of building technique has been used in the city for decades, but in the last fifteen years has become a defining element of the landscape of the city: everywhere iskilits spring up in different shapes and sizes (Figure 2.1). Often in a matter of a few months the iskilit gives way to a completed building: a new house, a new apartment complex, a new private or public edifice. At other times, the iskilit remains lingering for years, framing the blue sky while rusting away.

When President Obama addressed the people and government of Iran on March 20th, 2009 he invited them to a \"new beginning\" in mutual relations by framing his political proposition with references to the history and culture of Iran. Obama's carefully crafted speech reached its rhetorical climax when he quoted the verse \"the children of Adam are limbs to each other, created of one essence\" by the twelfth century poet Sa'dî, one of the most revered figures from Shiraz, a city in Iran known through the centuries as the Abode of Knowledge.

Most of the scholars I spoke to during the first months of my stay in Shiraz were skeptical of my intention to choose one of the old neighborhoods to study the cultural history of the city. Whenever I asked them if they had suggestions about which neighborhood to choose, they would reply they thought a neighborhood was not a good unit of analysis. It was too narrow and I would be forced to leave out important people and events. Moreover, it was an impossible task due to lack of documents. My idea instead was that the reduced size of a neighborhood would help me find a point of entry into the complexity of the city and would also provide a way to explore the social relevance of knowledge. My questioning about the neighborhood was one of the strategies I used to overcome vagueness in people's responses to my inquiries. I hoped that, by focusing on a restricted area, I could be more effective in posing my questions: the neighborhood could be a good start to move to other things. I was not as concerned with leaving things out as I was with getting a better understanding of the production of knowledge in a small area I could describe in depth. I was also looking for ways to get away from the university environment and take some distance from the trajectories outlined so far in the book. I wanted to seek alternative constellations of knowledge.