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"Politics and culture - Iran"
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Political Islam, Iran, and the Enlightenment
Ali Mirsepassi's book presents a powerful challenge to the dominant media and scholarly construction of radical Islamist politics, and their anti-Western ideology, as a purely Islamic phenomenon derived from insular, traditional and monolithic religious 'foundations'. It argues that the discourse of political Islam has strong connections to important and disturbing currents in Western philosophy and modern Western intellectual trends. The work demonstrates this by establishing links between important contemporary Iranian intellectuals and the central influence of Martin Heidegger's philosophy. We are also introduced to new democratic narratives of modernity linked to diverse intellectual trends in the West and in non-Western societies, notably in India, where the ideas of John Dewey have influenced important democratic social movements. As the first book to make such connections, it promises to be an important contribution to the field and will do much to overturn some pervasive assumptions about the dichotomy between East and West.
eBook
Democracy in Modern Iran
Can Islamic societies embrace democracy? In Democracy in Modern Iran, Ali Mirsepassi maintains that it is possible, demonstrating that Islam is not inherently hostile to the idea of democracy. Rather, he provides new perspective on how such a political and social transformation could take place, arguing that the key to understanding the integration of Islam and democracy lies in concrete social institutions rather than pre-conceived ideas, the every day experiences rather than abstract theories. Mirsepassi, an Iranian native, provides a rare inside look into the country, offering a deep understanding of how Islamic countries like Iran and Iraq can and will embrace democracy.Democracy in Modern Iran challenges readers to think about Islam and democracy critically and in a far more nuanced way than is done in black-and-white dichotomies of Islam vs. Democracy, or Iran vs. the West. This essential volume contributes important insights to current discussions, creating a more complex conception of modernity in the Eastern world and, with it, Mirsepassi offers to a broad Western audience a more accurate, less cliched vision of Iran's political reality.
eBook
Politics, Patronage and the Transmission of Knowledge in 13th-15th Century Tabriz
In Politics, Patronage and the Transmission of Knowledge in 13th - 15th Century Tabriz, an international group of specialists investigate the role of Tabriz as one of the foremost centres of learning, cultural productivity, and politics in post-Mongol Iran and the Middle East.
eBook
Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization
In this thought-provoking study, Ali Mirsepassi explores the concept of modernity, exposing the Eurocentric prejudices and hostility to non-Western culture that have characterized its development. Focusing on the Iranian experience of modernity, he charts its political and intellectual history and develops a new interpretation of Islamic Fundamentalism through the detailed analysis of the ideas of key Islamic intellectuals. The author argues that the Iranian Revolution was not a simple clash between modernity and tradition but an attempt to accommodate modernity within a sense of authentic Islamic identity, culture and historical experience. He concludes by assessing the future of secularism and democracy in the Middle East in general, and in Iran in particular. A significant contribution to the literature on modernity, social change and Islamic Studies, this book will be essential reading for scholars and students of social theory and change, Middle Eastern Studies, Cultural Studies and many related areas.
eBook
\Produce and Consume\ in the Islamic Republic
“Produce to Solve Iran's Problems.”1 “Boost Production to Exit This Labyrinth of Difficulties.”2 “A New Road [different] from the Past” has to be taken.3 “Big Successes of Our Economy.”4 Iran's “New Goals Are: Development, Growth, Efficiency.”5 “We Should Promote Industrial Research.”6 “The Youth Looking for a Job Needs To Be Skilled to Succeed.”7 If newspapers are sites for the public sphere and give any indication about the top-down narratives in Iran, the mantra behind these headlines was certainly “decide, produce, and succeed.” Since the early 1990s, the dominant discourse within the Islamic republic de facto customized the dictum “produce and consume” (tulīd va maṣraf). Although Iran's path toward liberalism has been “tortuous,” when Hashem Rafsanjani took the helm of the presidency in 1989 the myth of the winner in a competitive society began to take shape.8 During the reconstruction era (sāzandigī) after the Iran–Iraq war, a new narrative boosting domestic production, fostering the idea of impressive career growth, and promoting recognition of talents began to permeate the Iranian public sphere.
Journal Article
Civic Culture and Spatial Politics in Contemporary Iran
On 4 January 2020, United States President Donald Trump announced via a tweet that he would attack fifty-two locations in Iran, including cultural sites, if Iran retaliated for the US-authorized assassination of military commander Major General Qasem Soleimani at Baghdad International Airport. Iranians and non-Iranians alike voiced their opposition and flooded Twitter with images of their favorite cultural sites in Iran. This recent incident illustrates the interplay between spatial politics and civic culture that this roundtable addresses. What are civic and public cultures, and how do we “find” them? How do civic and public culture interplay with bottom-up vernacular culture to invite unexpected subjectivities and contestation of space? What are the particulars of a society such as Iran at this historical moment—postrevolutionary, confronting new shifts in relations with the US, attempting to curtail or bypass international sanctions, confronting continued social unrest, and living in an increasingly authoritarian global setting?
Journal Article
When and Where Is Iran? Fragments of Ethnographic Work in Iran
A perfect railway station, according to Heidegger, is one that never fails to offer a train ready to depart when one walks in. Otherwise, the station becomes a site of boredom, an essential mood that one experiences as being dragged by time, held in limbo.1 However, on a winter day in 1980 the railway station in Ahwaz was neither a perfect station nor a site of boredom. The station welcomed `Abbas with an uncanny scene of departed bodies when he walked in: “It was then that I truly realized that the war had begun.” A few months back, when Iraq dropped its first bomb on Kermanshah, that very first bomb hit Maryam's neighborhood. Her parents were at work. Her little sister was injured. Through the echoes of explosions and screams, she too realized that something, something immense and unknown, had begun. I interviewed `Abbas, now in his sixties, and Maryam, now in her forties, several times at a small office in central Tehran. The office belonged to a talkative middle-aged man who was in the illegal business of selling wolves’ skins and talismans to the superrich.
Journal Article