Hamid Dabashi Auth. Iran The Rebirth of A Nation

Hamid Dabashi
The Rebirth of a Nation

Iran
HamidDabashi
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
ISBN 978-1-137-59240-8 ISBN 978-1-137-58775-6 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58775-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016950873
The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

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Cover illustration: Parviz Kalantari, Vista, 2005, acrylic on straw-and-mud, 100x70cm
Printed on acid-free paper
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In Memory of Martyr Ahmad Ali Vahabzadeh (19651988) and for his
mourning brother Peyman Vahabzadeh and for the mother of them all, my
sister Mahfarid Mansourian who carries all their memories with grace
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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
It is my equal pleasure to acknowledge and thank the distinguished

artists whose work grace this book and who have kindly and generously
allowed me to use their work as illustrations of the points I have been
trying to make. My dear friend and distinguished colleague, Hamid
Keshmirshekan, the eminent historian of contemporary and modern art
in Iran, has been instrumental in procuring high-resolution copies and
permissions for me to be able to feature these illustrations in my book.
The artists who are my personal friends have also been kind, generous,
and gracious for allowing me to reproduce their artwork in this book.
I wish to thank Parviz Kalantari, Mana Neyestani, Golrokh Nafisi,
Koorosh Shishehgaran, Esrafil Shirchi, Amir Naderi, Abbas Kiarostami,
Nicky Nodjoumi, Sara Dolatabadi, the late Ardeshir Mohassess, Azadeh
Akhlaghi, Bahram Beizai, Golnaz Fathi and their respective galleries for
their very kind help in procuring these pictures.
My exceptionally competent research assistant Hawa Ansary is a blessing
to have had by my side over the last few years, to whom I remain always
grateful.
Thank you, friends: You are all the cause and condition of the rebirth
of any half-decent idea I may have offered in this book.
CONTENTS
Introduction: TheRebirth ofaNation 1
Chapter One: Persian Empire? 37
Chapter Two: A Civil Rights Movement 55
Chapter Three: A Metamorphic Movement 73
Chapter Four: An Aesthetic Reason 93
Chapter Five: Shiism at Large 123
Chapter Six: Invisible Signs 147
Chapter Seven: A Transnational Public Sphere 173
Chapter Eight: Cosmopolitan Worldliness 195
Chapter Nine: Fragmented Signs 217
Chapter Ten: The End oftheWest 237
Chapter Eleven: Damnatio Memoriae 253
xi
xii CONTENTS
Chapter Twelve: Mythmaker, Mythmaker, Make me aMyth 281
Conclusion: What Time Is It? 311
Index 335
LIST OF FIGURES
Image 1 Parviz Kalantari, Vista, 2005 17

Image 1 Mana Neyestani, Untitled, 2009 45
Image 1 Golrokh Nafisi, The Sky is ours, 2010 63
Image 1 Koorosh Shishehgaran, Untitled, from the War series,
circa 1984 81
Image 1 Esrafil Shirchi, If you came to visit me, unknown date 107
Image 1 Hasan Ismailzadeh, The Campaign of Rustam and
Ashkbous, no date, circa mid-twentieth century 133
Image 1 Amir Naderi, The Runner, 1985 159
Image 1 Abbas Kiarostami, Untitled, from the Roads series, 1989 183
Image 1 Nicky Nodjoumi, The Accident, 2013 204
Image 1 Sara Dolatabadi, untitled, 2012 225
Image 1 Ardeshir Mohassess, Untitled (aka Man with Tongue,
or Celebrating Teachers Day), 1995 243
Image 1 Azadeh Akhlaghi, Assassination of Mirzadeh
Eshghi, 2012 267
Image 1 Bahram Beizai, Bashu: The Little Stranger (1989) 295
Image 1 Golnaz Fathi, 120 x 120cmacrylic on
canvas2004untitled 321
xiii
Introduction: TheRebirth ofaNation
The idea of this book dawned on me by a photograph. It was early in

the evening of 1 May 2012, and Mahmoud Dolatabadi, the preeminent
Iranian novelist, was visiting NewYork. He and I had just come out of
a reading of his most recent novel, The Colonel, from the City University
of NewYork (CUNY) and were sitting at a nearby caf and having tea
with his daughter Sara. Soon we called Amir Naderi, one of the most
widely celebrated Iranian filmmakers who had left Iran years ago and lives
in New York; though he was flying to Japan the following day, within
minutes after he realized that Dolatabadi was in NewYork, he rushed to
this caf to join us. We sat there, Mahmoud Dolatabadi, Amir Naderi,
Sara Dolatabadi, and me. Here were two seminal figures in the history
of Iranian film and fiction, connected together in a moment of history.
They had met before in Iran when Naderi was working on one of his
masterpieces, Tangsir (1974), and had solicited Dolatabadis help on
his script. But the fate had separated themwith Dolatabadi working and
living mostly in Iran, and Naderi doing so mostly in NewYork. As Naderi,
Dolatabadi, and I were chatting, Sara Dolatabadi took my iPad and took
a few snapshots of us. Captured in those snapshots was a moment when
the fictive frontiers of Iran meant nothing, exposed their forced politi-
cal power, and revealed their porous disposition in understanding Iranian
cultural history. The timing of that photograph marked the untiming of a
history that had long since run along ahead of itself.
The untiming of that photograph marks the moment when I began
asking myself, what time is it? Where in the world are we? Upon what
The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1

H. Dabashi, Iran, DOI10.1057/978-1-137-58775-6_1
2 H. DABASHI
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
the Overthrow of the Regime. Turks were declaring: Government

must resign! Americans were ready to tear their financial system to
pieces. Europeans were revolting against the tyranny of European banks.
Under similar, if not identical, circumstances, Europeans of a couple of
generations earlier were marking the Collapse of German Idealism,
the Decline of the West, as Nietzsches declaration that God is Dead
echoed from one end of Europe to another, and Kierkegaard was busy
with his critique of Hegel and speculative idealism. It is also at this time,
as Gadamer recollects, among the forces that gave philosophical expres-
sion to the general critique of liberal culture-piety and the prevailing aca-
demic philosophy was the revolutionary genius of the young Heidegger.2
Gadamer further reports: The common theme that captured the imagi-
nation of the time was called existential philosophy.3 The only difference
between the time Gadamer reports and ours is that we can no longer
localize our questions to Europe or non-Europe as provincial questions
and think them universal. The crisis is, as it has always been, global and
planetary, and at this point in history, we ought to be cured of European
or non-European provincialism of one sort or another. Any question we
ask about any particular point on the globe must resonate with the rest of
the fragile planet we share.
What would that mean today, and how would we rephrase Gadamers
question beyond any particular European domesticity? What sorts of
(existential) questions do we need to raise today to meet the challenges
of our own time? What is being? This is how radically European
philosophers of this period took their epochal task seriously. In order to
learn how to ask this question, Gadamer reports, Heidegger proceeded
to define the Being of human Dasein in an ontologically positive way,
instead of understanding it as merely finite, that is, in terms of an
infinite and always existing Being, as previous metaphysicians had done.
The ontological priority that the Being of human Dasein acquired for
Heidegger defines his philosophy as fundamental ontology.
Can we ask similar, if not identical, questions from our varied locations
around the world now: philosophers and thinkers from Asia, Africa, and
Latin America, as well as those from contemporary Europe, from Greece
to Spain, no longer thinking themselves outside the fold of our humanity?
If so, what sort of questions would those be? For Europeans who thought
themselves the center of the universe, these were questions of a particular
sort. Gadamer clarifies what they were: When Heidegger raised once
again the ancient question of the meaning of Being, he did not want to
4 H. DABASHI
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
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:
Safar-e hajmi dar khat-e zaman

The journey
Of a volume upon the line of time
And with a volume
Thus to impregnate
The dry line of time:
A volume
Made of a conscious image
Returning from a feast in a mirror.6
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
THE BIRTH OFANATION

Cinematically precocious and groundbreaking and yet paradoxically
considered as a hallmark of post-Civil War racism in American culture,
D.W. Griffiths The Birth of a Nation (1915) occupies a strangely
uncanny place in world cinema.7 One is both drawn to and yet instantly
repelled by it. A historic document of the Civil War in the USA and then
Reconstruction in the South, this seminal event in world cinema is nar-
ratively predicated on the assumption that the bringing of the African to
America planted the first seed of disunion. Is this a confession of the orig-
inal sin, or is it the camouflaging of a foundational myth? Be that as it may,
that seed of disunion was coterminous with the very foundation of the
USA as a normatively racist and constitutionally white supremacist nation-
state to which a sustained history of African slavery, as well as the geno-
cidal destruction of native Americans, was and has ever since remained
definitive. It is in the explosion of the Civil War as the logical conclusion
of that defining moment, when the logic of capitalism was breaking the
Southern shackles of its own superseding reasons in the North, that the
confessional drama of The Birth of a Nation ought to be understood.
The film was widely banned in many parts of the USA, while vastly cel-
ebrated by others, especially by the members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)
who saw it as an affirmation of their racist cause. Exemplified and nar-
rated around the two families of the Stonemans in the North and the
Camerons in the South, living on the two physical and symbolic sides of
Mason-Dixon line, The Birth of a Nation narrows in on Carpetbaggers
descending upon the South as the principle culprit of the post-Civil War
trauma. In Griffiths version of this formative period in the US history, the
South appears as the beacon of aristocratic morality, while the North, as
best represented by his representation of the Carpetbaggers, as uncouth,
fanatical, rude, opportunist, and vulgar.
It is in that sharply emotive context that Griffiths portrayal of the
KKK as the normative measure of Southern righteousness will have to be
assayed, for as he understands it, the KKK is reacting to the heavy-handed
treatment of the South by the North and the collapse of a universal code
of moral authority. What Griffiths title, Birth of a Nation, suggests is
the delivery of the USA as a nation predicated on the trauma of com-
ing to terms with its racist foundation. The USA is thus born, as Griffith
suggests, not in the inaugural moment of 4 July 1776 when its initial 13
colonies declared independence from Great Britain, nor on the fact of the
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.
THE BIRTH OFPOSTCOLONIAL NATIONS

The post-Civil War era was the traumatic birth pangs of the USA when
an entire history of slavery came to a crescendo to create the most
enduring experience of a modern nation-state. The conquest of the
New World, the shedding of the shackles of old British colonialism,
the destruction of the native American culture, and the sustained slave
trade were the successive stages that ultimately came to a crescendo in
the course of the Civil Wars when the logic of capitalism necessitated a
historic battle between the industrial North and the feudal South. The
South lost and the North transformed the emerging nation-state into a
bastion of capitalist conquest.
In that sense, Griffiths Birth of the Nation is in fact emblematic
of all postcolonial nation-states and their traumatic birth onto the scene
of a globalized circulation of labor and capital. The American Civil War
between the industrialized North and the feudal South was illustrative of
a more global triumph of industrialized capitalism and its need for cheap
labor and even cheaper raw material around the globe. On that global
scale, equally traumatic moments have defined the postcolonial character
of other nations and nationalismsnations born out of specific traumas
caused by the systematizing force of capital in need of regulated labor
and expanded market. While in the USA, colonialism was internal and
predicated on a long and nasty history of slavery, around the world, it
was via an encounter with the globalized European colonialism. Nations
8 H. DABASHI
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.
The Islamic Republic was now imploding, as its ideological foreground-

ing had gone completely off kilter. The implosion of the state apparatus
and the corresponding explosion of its ideological foregrounding had
loudly announced the end of Islamism as a potent political force. The
state was imploding and thus marking the final transition of the nation-
state into a parting phase. Iran as a nation, a people, a public sphere, and
a destiny was now parting ways with the Islamic ideology as the modus
operandi of a state that had rendered itself obsolete. The split came to a
crescendo and then a crashing conclusion. We were now witness to the
rebirth of the nation beyond its entanglement with any state, in the sense
that the Islamic Republic was the aftertaste of prolonged colonial and
postcolonial periods in Iran that began early in the nineteenth century and
ended early in the twenty-first century.
What we were witnessing was the active transmutation of the Islamic
Republic into a garrison state seeking (unsuccessfully) to strip its citizens
of their social life, or spoon-feeding it if it could manage, meaning the
colonial production of convincing and mobilizing ideologies (Islamism
or otherwise) had come to a crashing political end, so that in that state
of postcoloniality, Iran was exposed to the global condition of capital,
directly, nakedly, stripped of all fabricated nativism. At this point, the state
was functioning like a besieged garrison against the nation, while seek-
ing to strip the citizens naked of their rights, while the system was being
actively incorporated into a visual regime of globality (the public death of
Neda Agha Soltan was the prime example), where the place of phantasm,
paranoia, apocalypse, public frenzy, and manufactured mysticism had all
come together in the final upholding of this or any other Islamic Republic.
The state was calling itself Islamic Republic, but there had remained
no republic under its feet over which to be Islamic or anything else.
The state had ideologically, structurally, and organically collapsed. It had
pulled the republic from under its own feet.
Islamic revolution was the final call and cry and then the death of the
colonial reasoning of revolt to end tyranny by another tyranny. The Islamic
Republic is the last tyranny that could fool the nation into believing it to
be a moment of liberation it could never be. The Green Movement was
the announcement of the moment when the postcolonial reason can no
longer deliver the emancipation of the postcolonial nation. For world at
large, postcolonial means postcolonial reason beyond the reach of
any native informant replacing the mark of Man. Postcolonial reason
means postcolonial nation in the retrieved cosmopolitan disposition of its
10 H. DABASHI
character and thus postcoloniality is the condition of an Enlightenment

to which the emancipated postcolonial can lay a legitimate claim. The
dissolution of the Islamic Republic means the fragmentation of the Islamic
ideology, and the dissolution of Islamic ideology is the sign of the final
collapse of the postcolonial reason. The nation had now finally declared
itself, as it had always beenan entirely different reality than all the ruling
states that had laid false and falsifying claims on it. The postcolonial nation
was no suzerainty of the postcolonial state.
ART ASOPERA APERTA

If indeed postcolonial reason is no longer reasonable, and the state appara-
tus has collapsed upon its own claim to legitimacy, what then? What time
of the history is it nowwhen nations and states might have exhausted
their short-lived marriage? The birth of the nation and the birth of the
state have not been coterminous, I contend. Upon the shores of its colo-
nial continents, the nation was born poetically, the state violently. If the
state was now morally, structurally, and politically reduced to pure vio-
lence, how was the nation faring: Did it have any reason to remain married
to the state? I have already argued in my previous work that the idea of
vatan/homeland stood for the public space into which the Persian poet
moved once the royal court was no longer hospitable to him. This is in
the course of the Constitutional revolution (19061911) when the Qajar
dynasty was collapsing and the Pahlavi dynasty was nowhere in sight. Let
us consider, figuratively at least, the time span between 1906 when the
Constitutional revolution began and 1926 when Reza Shah dismantled
the Qajar dynasty and declared himself a king and formed what would
soon become his own dynasty, the period when Persian poets (poets who
composed poetry in Persian) invented the idea of vatan/homeland poeti-
cally. During a hiatus between the demise of one dynastic state and the rise
of the next, the idea of the nation/vatan was born from the poetic dispen-
sation of creative minds released from one dynastic court never to return
to any other. The idea of vatan/homeland was born poetically, by poets like
Aref Qazvini and many others, while the subsequent substitution of the
Pahlavi dynasty for the Qajar was by a military coup. With the same token,
the expansion of the layered societal frontiers of the nation in the course
of successive events from the nationalization of Iranian oil in the 1950s to
the fall of the Pahlavi dynasty in the late 1970s was marked entirely by rich
and diversified poetic turns in the course of Nimaic revolution, while the
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
new? The simultaneous necessity and impossibility of any meaningful

critiquerather than the radical piety that postcolonial critics like Gayatri
Spivak flaunts as passivism, always skirting the issuedoes not abrogate
responsibility. Consider the conflicting sites of cinema between Cannes
and Kandahar, between red carpet high culture of the European bour-
geoisie out on a soire and the bloody trail of misery it screens. On these
mutually exclusive sites as careerist filmmakers will make their careers, the
murderous Taliban stage theirs, and the US military manages to subcon-
tract its torture industry, we are left with the debris of all these trajectories,
determined to make sense of a senseless world. The sense and sensibility
are made only possible if we take the commercial debris of the capital as
the allegories of an aesthetic intuition that can transcend to overcome it.
My contention in this book is to argue the active, however implicit,
formation of an aesthetic intuition of transcendence that is poised to over-
come both (1) the postcolonial reason, and (2) the colonial modernity
that had occasioned it. As the current condition of the amorphous capital
needs people to exploit and art to distract the banality of its own boredom,
we still have the active memory of the time when art served a purpose on
its habitually parapublic sphere long before and long beyond the reach of
Sotheby or any other art auctioneer or gallery could buy or sell its debris.
That active memory will not degenerate into nostalgia if it is rooted in
the debris the culture and art industry have consistently left behind. From
the multiple phases in which art has performed varied subversive roles, to
the rise of the commodity fetishism as the work of art, spreads and dwells
an allegorical momentum that in this book I wish to call and consider an
aesthetic intuition of transcendence, when art, found and lost, bought
and sold, leaves traces of itself like the dust of those broken bones and
murdered dreams in Khavaran and Sabra and Shatila mass graves, remem-
bers itself having had a self-effacing purpose, which was far from being
compromised by any politics, for it was the foregrounding of the always
already next horizon of the political.
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
leader of the 19771979 revolution was the Shah, meaning whatever he

did decided the revolutionary course of action the people adopted. In that
sense, the leader of the Green Movement was the Islamic Republic and its
entire state apparatus. The crisis-laden disposition of the Islamic Republic
has now come back to haunt it and deprive it of any legitimate claim to
national sovereignty. This is a regime that was founded on either creating
crisis (such as the Hostage Crisis) or else taking advantage of crisis others
created (the Iraqi invasion of Iran, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon). Now
that very logic keeps creating its own crisis, crisis that the ruling regime
cannot control, and has therefore just radically compromised the Iranian
national sovereignty by saving itself through a nuclear deal that effectively
subjects the Iranian nuclear energy program under intrusive inspections
no sovereign state would ever allow. From its periodic democratic spec-
tacles of elections, to varied phases of womens rights struggle, to mul-
tiple student revolts, labor unrests, to regional and global relations, the
Islamic Republic has always been a contested ruling regime. By virtue of
this crisis-laden record, it exposes its systematic, hallowed, contrapuntal,
and negational character.
The geopolitics of the region can be at once revealing and conceal-
ing this internal dynamic of state illegitimacy. Judging by the mid-June
2009 massive post-presidential election uprising, the Islamic Republic
looked at the brink of collapse. A mere half a decade later, by mid-2015,
the fortunes of the beleaguered theocracy seems to have changed dras-
tically and it appeared as a formidable force in the region, presumed
widely to be so powerful that its neighboring Arab ruling regimes and
their Israeli partner began to worry about the resurrection of the
Persian Empire. How accurate was that assumption of the internal fra-
gility, and how true are the assumptions of its regional power? Where
is Iran headed, what are its strengths and weaknesses, on its internal,
regional, and global scenes? How do we make a distinction between
its ruling regimes and its vibrant population? Does the robust inter-
nal opposition to the ruling regime strengthen or weaken it? Have we
already entered the phase of a renewed significance for an ancient civi-
lization in its topography of power and politics, culture and industry?
These are the key questions that are categorically absent in the current
debates about the Iran nuclear deal, and yet are precisely the terms that
connect the Green Movement to the will if a nation to engage in diplo-
macy against the entrenched ill will of those who oppose it in Tehran,
Tel Aviv, or Washington, DC.
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
significance in 2013, the region seemed in the midst of world-historic

changes and Iran was an increasingly dominant force in these unfolding
events, not just because of its political and military significance in mul-
tiple Arab settings but far more crucially because of its vibrant, defiant,
and politically alert population. Ever since the Green Movement of 2009,
it was increasingly obvious that we needed to make a fateful distinction
between the ruling Islamic Republic and the robust nation it wished but
failed completely to represent.
In this book, I wish to provide a provocative reading of Iran in its
current geostrategic significance, paying simultaneous attention to both
its internal and external dynamics, bringing the two together to see how
the fate of the nation is being drastically altered. I intend to produce a
succinct account of the resurrection of Iran as a powerful nation (not
a nation-state) against the backdrop of a widely dismantled regional
geopolitics, allowing for hidden and repressed political and cultural
forces to surface and redefine the future history. Iran and its environ are
undergoing deep-rooted and wide-ranging changes in the twenty-first
century, and the existing modalities, paradigms, and analytical tools have
become completely outdated and clich-ridden, regurgitated senselessly
by politicians, journalists, and area studies scholars alike. When the Green
Movement in Iran took place in June 2009, I thought the task at hand for
those deeply committed to the civil rights in Iran and its region at large
to offer a perspective from the necessary and inevitable distance of the
globality of our perspective, theoretically strengthening the movement in
a language radically different from the current clichs. Predicated on this
premise, the pattern I will follow in this book is decidedly zigzagging
between the regional and the domestic scenes, though increasingly coming
out toward a global perspective on national liberation movements that are
transnational in their origin, destinations, and vantage points.
Birth of postcolonial nation-states from the ruins of Muslim Empires
has been always precarious with porous borders, making it impossible to
tell the fate of any nation in terms domestic to its dynamics. Over the
last 300 years plus, these porous borders have been definitive to colonial
and postcolonial history of the region at large. These porous borders
have to do with fateful encounters between the dying Muslim Empires of
Mughals, the Safavids/Qajars, and the Ottomans, on one hand, and the
encroachment of European Empires on the other. The active imagination
and the aesthetic reason at the formative roots of these postcolonial nations
have always outstripped their material foundations, political wherewithal,
Image 1 Parviz Kalantari, Vista, 2005

Desert remains the imaginative site and sight of purity, of mirage, and of barrenness,
paradoxically pregnant with hidden possibilities, at once real and delusional,
implied and potential. Here in the work of Parviz Kalantari that image promises
and delivers resurrection, on the borderline of fact and fantasy, hidden pleasures
and manifest destinies. The image enables a different working of mirage in, for,
and beyond the desert. Kalantaris work delights with simplicity and purity, idyllic
in its nomadic luminosity. They are childlike in their innocence, archetypal in their
shimmering suggestions. The rebirth of the nation originates from its deepest alle-
gorical memories. Here the memorial metaphor of the desert becomes emblematic
of a distant compelling mirage that is and is not there. Every spot on that memorial
landscape is a miniature modulation of the idyllic worked to perfection. The vision
exudes with colorful jubilance, like a dream. Every spot is the snippet of what was
and what can be, picked up from a distant dream and canvassed to form the picture
of a people from a distant dream to form the picture of a people invited to come
to inhabit this dreamlike city. Who lives here? No one. Every one. The habitat is
perpetually vacant. The habitat is perpetually peopled. The picture is an invitation
sent from the past to a permanent future. The picture is a blueprint of a rebirth
conceived from the absolute metaphors of a nation, conscious or unconscious of
itself. The picture captures the most innate intuition of aesthetic transcendence to a
nation, made a nation by virtue of this intuition.
18 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.
A NUCLEAR ACCORD ANDITS CONSEQUENCES

One quick look at Iran and its environment today and you may wonder
how on earth could anyone under these circumstances speak of a rebirth
of that or any other nation. Over the last 30 years plus Iran has been ruled
by a totalitarian theocracy garbed thinly as am Islamic Republic, ruling
with an iron fist and a claim to the divine ordination of a Shii jurist to rule
the nation. The region in which Iran is located is ruled by one dictatorial
regime or another, with repeated social uprisings to change that fact invari-
ably thwarted, meandering, and murderous. The last time Iranians rose
up in the course of the Green Movement in 2009, they were ruthlessly
crushed. The rise of the Arab revolutions too soon degenerated in the
appearance of a monstrosity called ISIS, the postmortem gift of Saddam
Hussein fighting against the legacy of George W. Bush and the unfold-
ing Arab revolutions from under his grave. There are some observers
who even speak of a thirty year war in the Arab and Muslim world. But
the calamity is not limited to Iran and its Arab neighbors. From Pakistan
and Afghanistan to Turkey, Russia, Greece, and the rest of Europe are in
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
defiant nation oscillated back and forth, marking a semiotics of a tumultu-

ous moment when the nation both took advantage of a global recognition
of its existence as it discredited the ruling state that claimed its name with
suspended legitimacy.
The content of the deal has no doubt compromised the sovereignty
of the state in terms of unprecedented and intrusive permission for
inspecting and monitoring the Iranians nuclear, scientific, perhaps even
security and military sites. However, the Iranian factional divisions and
the strong internal (the only legitimate) opposition to the deal made
sure at least on the surface this compromise of the national sovereignty
was not total. But certainly the ruling regime was allowing access to its
nuclear infrastructure in a manner that no other sovereign nation-state
Russia, India, Pakistan, China, or any European countrywould ever
allow. Under circumstances when Israel is sitting on a massive stockpile
of nuclear warheads and nobody dares even to ask it to sign the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) the Iranian concessions were certainly
out of the ordinary. This compromise, however, happens in a condition
and the circumstances when Irans borders have already been porous from
inside out, with significant presence of Iranian security, intelligence, and
military forces in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Palestine, and so on. So
the inspectors who are crossing the Iranian national sovereignty to check
its nuclear program and perhaps even military and security infrastructure
are going through the same porous borders from which Qasem Soleimani,
the leading Iranian military attach in Iraq and Syria and perhaps even
beyond, has crossed to interfere in the internal affairs of the neighboring
countries. This was at a time when Turkey was bombing Iraq and Syria,
Saudi Arabia was bombing Yemen, Egypt was bombing Libya, Israel was
sitting on the broken back of Palestine, and the USA and its European and
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies were dominating from
one end of the globe to another. So no particular postcolonial border was
secure and delimiting the operation of any given state and its obvious will
to preserve itself.
The easing of sanctions will certainly increase the Iranian cash
flowbut where will that cash flow go? As a rentier state, Iran is heav-
ily contingent on oil revenue, much of which is of course under state
control and will increase the power of the Revolutionary Guard Corp
and their monopoly capitalism. But this will not translate into massive
military expenditure, nowhere near Israel, Saudi Arabia, or even the tiny
UAE.The ruling regime in Iran does not operate that way. Heavy weap-
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
itself Iranian-American promotes anything from the neoconservative

wings in Los Angeles to neoliberal wings in Washington, DC, with a
more radical force always in the offing.
THE LASTING NATION, THECHANGING STATE

In this book, I make a clear distinction between Iran as a nation and the
Islamic Republic as a state: these are two categorically distinct but politi-
cally intertwined realities. Their historic opposition to each other does not
dismantle the state or subjugate the nation: but paradoxically and con-
trapuntally strengths them both. Revolutions such as the Constitutional
(19061911) or the one that resulted in the Islamic Republic (19771979)
are launched to dismantle the state, but they far more importantly expand
the layered horizons of the nation into its transnational domains beyond
any state claim to legitimacy. It is thus imperative for us to look at the
formation of postcolonial nation-states (viz. those formed in the aftermath
of the ascendency and demise of European classical colonialism) on a dif-
ferent scale. The European and North American democratic claims to the
nation strengthened them both by virtue of collusion of interest, while
on the postcolonial site the fundamental disparity between the nation and
the state strengthened them by friction. No ruling regimein the case of
Iran from the Qajars to the Pahlavis to the Islamic Republichas ever had
a total claim to the evolving and multifarious disposition of the nation.
The hyphen between the nation and the state in the nation-state, falsely
and blindly extended from its European to its non-European provenance,
points to a categorical distinction, a separation, and therefore a critical
bifurcation. The nation has developed in one direction by accumulating
collective memories, while the state has piggybacked like a parasite on that
mobilizing and mobile memory.
What has exacerbated the distinction between the nation and the state
is the contrapuntal manner in which memories and forms of knowledge
are re/produced in the nation, and the manner in which the state has
historically sough to pacify the organicity of that dialectic. The social and
intellectual history of Iran will have to be understood in decidedly dialecti-
cal and contrapuntal terms. The three dominant postcolonial leitmotifs of
ideology production I have identified in detailssocialism, nationalism,
and Islamismhave emerged in conjunction with each other, in dialectical
reciprocity, as the verbose or silent interlocutor of each other. Marxism did
not influence the leading Islamist ideologue Ali Shariati. Shariati was
talking to Marxism. Trying to convince Marxists of his time of something

or another. Islamism influenced anticolonial nationalism too. Mohammad
Mosaddeq was not just a Muslim. He knew of the active rise of Islamism
as a potent political force and was trying to win them over to his cause.
The problem with the triumphalist Islamism that has dominated the
Iranian political culture in the form of the ruling state is that they iden-
tified, cornered, and destroyed these interlocutors and cannibalized on
their conceptual, analytical, and theoretical organs, and thereafter they
have become a totalizing monologue. However, the nation at large has
already moved to greener pastures, and with the rise of Iranian New Wave,
underground music, blogging, and now the Facebook and the Internet at
large have opened up newer horizons far beyond the arrested imagination
of the repressive and illegitimate state.
That interlocution among various ideological forces in contemporary
Iranian history was a case of active contestation as a reading of history.
When Shariati speaks, it is not just Shariati. He is more than one person,
more than one voice. He speaks a multiple voices, with a heteroglossia,
for his voice dialogically contains other voices incorporated into the idi-
omaticity of his speech, positions and their political parlances with which
he is having a running conversation, contestation, and competition. The
idiomaticities of his hidden or obvious interlocutors are integral to his
Bakhtinian utterances. This dialogical disposition of the Iranian political
culture has placed it on a global scene and operating on a transnational
public sphere from which it nourishes and sustains itself beyond the fron-
tier fiction of the state that wishes to rule it. Consider the fact that Ali
Shariati found his political parlance in Paris, Al-e Ahmad somewhere
between his militant Shiism and his mature Marxism, Morteza Motahhari
in the course of his dialogues with Henri Corbin (as facilitated by Seyyed
Hossein Nasr), Mahmoud Taleqani with Arab heritage of Third World
socialism, Mehdi Bazargan with his enduring interest in India and its anti-
colonial struggles, Bani Sadr with French (European) socialism, Allamah
Tabatabai with a tradition of European philosophy that Seyyed Hossein
Nasr and Henri Corbin had introduced to him. These are all the leading
ideologues and interpreters of the Islamic revolution in Iran and not a
single one of them, as they were forecasting the cataclysmic event, was
thinking and acting except in dialogical interlocution with the outside
world. An Islamic Republic cannot come to power via this route and then
try to shut it off completely without the route finding sublated venues of
rearticulating itself in even more universal terms.
24 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:
Ruling groups can in their thinking become so intensively interest-bound to a

situation that they are simply no longer able to see certain facts which would
undermine their sense of domination. There is implicit in the word ideology
the insight that in certain situations the collective unconscious of certain groups
obscures the real condition of society both to itself and to others and thereby
stabilizes it.9
He distinguishes this ideological thinking from its opposite Utopian

thinking and 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
I propose a more dialectical relationship between the states ideological

self-assertion and the nations utopian defiance. It is not that the state
does not see the real condition of society. It is in the interest of the state
apparatus to see, interpret, and consolidate the status quo in a manner
that sustains its power and legitimacy. In the case of the nation, it is not
that it unwittingly see only those elements in the situation which tend to
negate the state. There is in fact a very deliberate and conscious aware-
ness of the status quo in direct contravention of the states hegemony.
They are not at all concerned with what really exists: again Manheim
operates through a very positivist reading of the dialectic. The nation

is perfectly concerned with what really exists but reads it through a
whole different set of lenses. Indeed, in their thinking they already seek
to change the situation that exists: and that is where the dialectic turns
the dynamic positively contrapuntal. My little twist on Manheims theory
of ideology and utopia is simply to divest it of its positivist investment
in What really exists and propose that nothing really exists except the
reasons and rationales for the state and the nation to see things radically
differently for their respective purposes. More emphatically: Manheims
formulation is set in two mutually exclusive binaries, while I suggest them
to be mutually contrapuntal and dialectical, meaning they do not abro-
gate each other. In fact, they sustain each other through a contestatory
reciprocity.
TOWARD ANAESTHETICS OFEMANCIPATION

How would a postnational account of the nation look like? How can one
claim, as I do, that the contrapuntal tension between the nation and the
state, long in the making, does not weaken either but strengthen both? In
what terms could the rebirth of a nation so fully conscious of its distant
and more recent memories be articulated? What does it mean for a poetic
surplus of historical experiences finally overcome the paradox of colonial
modernity, resulting in the formation of an aesthetic reason that overshad-
ows and replaces the postcolonial reason and finally gives a nation its intu-
ition of transcendence? How do we detect and argue all such theoretical
propositions in the factual evidence of daily politics of the region, and how
would they help us understand the unfolding historic events ahead?
To trace the terms of such eventual reinventions, I will first look at the
current geopolitics of the region in which the ruling regime in Iran has
survived against all oddsunder severe pressure, both internal and exter-
nal to its borders. A postnational account of the nation does not abandon
the national frame of reference, but embraces it within a larger trans-
national frame of reference that contrapuntally make the national scene
more meaningful (Chapter One: Persian Empire?). My next move is to go
from the outside inward (thus thematically blurring 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) movement that will now need to be understood
in terms entirely alien to the limited political imagination of the ruling
26 H. DABASHI
regime. The rebirth of the nation 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 consciousness (Chapter Two: A
Civil Rights Movement).
The rise of this civil rights movement in Iran will have to be under-
stood in its own self-transformative terms, the manner in which it keeps
shifting its strategies of opposition, a characteristic I will identify as a
metamorphic movement. Predicated on a poetic surplus of all its expe-
riences, a social movement becomes metamorphic and thus a living organ-
ism in conversation with its changing environment. The metamorphic
movement becomes heteroglossic, ventriloquist, and self-transcending
(Chapter Three: A Metamorphic Movement). Our understanding of the
Green Movement as the simulacrum of a metamorphic movement points
to the unfolding of an aesthetic reason that I will explore in more details
in the next chapter. I will propose here that the formation of this aesthetic
reason is a key theoretical momentum finally to overcome the paradox of
colonial modernity, through which the world at large was told to be free
to think critically precisely at the moment when a colonial gun was put to
its head and told that it was the subject to European capitalist modernity
(Chapter Four: An Aesthetic Reason).
These last four chapters will expose the body politics of the region in
critical encounters with internal forces in a manner that requires a simul-
taneous attention to domestic and regional force fields, and the manner in
which we need to understand social uprisings. Next I will turn to Shiism,
as inherently a religion of protest 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 will
retrieve the repressed intuition of transcendence embedded in Shii his-
tory (Chapter Five: Shiism at Large). 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 demon-
strate this proposition, I will dwell on a particularly traumatic moment of
the murder of a young Iranian woman, Neda Aqa Soltan, 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 opposition. This chapter will begin to shift the focus of my
attention from territorial to body politics, and see and suggest the meta-
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
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.
FRAMING THIS BOOK

At the outset of this new book on Iran, it is necessary for me to place it in
the larger context of my previous work so its significance is better under-
stood. The writing of this book brings to a critical culmination much of my
previous work on Iran, which has been one of my principle sites of critical
investigation over the last few decades, when and where I have examined
the history of one particular postcolonial nation-state in details in order
to reflect on larger theoretical issues that are at the heart of my thinking
on the intersection of culture and politics. I remain convinced that the
specific sites of our critical thinking must remain consciously at the fore-
front of our scholarship if their larger implications are not to plunge into
opaque, unverifiable, and therefore universal vacuity.
My Theology of Discontent: Ideological Foundations of the Islamic
Revolution in Iran (1993) was my earliest attempt at detailing the ideo-
logical foundations of the Islamic revolution in Iran (19771979), mark-
ing the historic momentum through which the absolute metaphor of
the West had constituted the Schmittian Enemy and thus began to
generate revolutionary political normativities. Islamist ideology was of
course neither the only nor even the most potent postcolonial ideological
formation at the root of the Iranian revolution of 19771979. But the
detailed examination of the Islamist trait had given me ample space to
see in what particular terms had the West as an absolute metaphor led
Muslim thinkers to transform their religion into an ideology of revolution-
ary uprising. The formation of Islamic Ideology I had then concluded
30 H. DABASHI
was the most potent manifestation of colonial modernity, at once enabling

defiance and revolt and yet entrapping the political enterprise in its own
self-contradictions. The anti-Westernism of the Islamist ideology, I con-
cluded, was in fact the most potent form of so-called Westoxication.
In Staging a Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of
Iran (1999), my colleague Peter Chelkowski and I were concerned with
the manner in which during the revolutionary period (19771979), and
after that during the IranIraq war (19801988), a particular propaganda
campaign of ideological persuasion had been set in motion. This as a
result was an occasion for me to explore the public sphere and public space
(and what I would later eventually call parapublic sphere) upon which
the revolutionary art was being staged. This study became critical even
more after the ruling Islamist regime began doctoring the history of the
revolution, manipulating its archive, and claiming the entirety of the
revolutionary momentum for itself. The cosmopolitan disposition of that
revolution and its transnational character and culture was solidly evident
in this bookparticularly in the iconography of the pre-revolutionary
period that staged (through politically active Iranian student organizations
worldwide) anticolonial nationalist, Third World socialist, as well as
Islamist propensities.
In my Iran: A People Interrupted (2006), I narrated the Iranian history
of the last two centuries in terms of the category of colonial moder-
nity. Here my principal concern was the manner in which the European
modernity had come to much of the colonized world through the gun
barrels of colonialism, and thus became an oxymoronic contradiction in
terms. I consider that paradoxical proposition at once enabling and limit-
ing. I explored its enabling unfolding, and marked its limiting domains,
as I proposed the variegated territories of Iranian arts and cultures as sites
of resistance to colonial conditions of its receptions, and thus positing
the possibilities of an anticolonial modernity in which colonial reason is
countered by anticolonial reason and European notions of progress by
revolutionary uprisings. It was here in this book that I first articulated in
detail how I saw the rise and consolidation of the public sphere as the site
of mellat, the nation, and proposed that the word mellat was interchange-
able with public sphere.
The Fox and the Paradox: Iran, the Green Movement, and the US (2010)
is where I proposed the category of colonial modernity had yielded
to societal modernity and thus marked the transformation of revo-
lutionary aspirations of previous generations to call for civil rights, and
therefore I identified the Green Movement as a civil rights movement,

which to me was now the most radical demand of this new generation.
Through the writing of this book, my attention was increasingly drawn
to Hannah Arendt and her articulation of the public space as the domain
of liberty, to which I was now adding the idea of a parapublic space. I did
not leave Arendts theorization of the public sphere intact. I linked it to
Tocquevilles notion of voluntary associations and proposed the effec-
tive institutionalization of labor unions, womens rights organizations, and
student assemblies as the site-specific articulations of the public and para-
public spheres. I subsequently extended these ideas in my book on Arab
Spring: The End of Postcolonialism (2012), where I proposed the end of
all postcolonial formats of ideology production as a precursor of an open-
ended epistemics yet to unfold. My conclusion in these two books was
drawn toward the aggregated fragments of previous regimes of knowledge
gathering momentum in the formation of new and unforeseen directions.
One fact was now clear to me: that the formative forces of nationsacross
the Arab and Muslim worldwere now parting ways from the vagaries of
the state that wished but failed to rule them.
By this time my concern with changing modes of knowledge produc-
tion in the aftermath of the exhaustion of postcolonial modalities took
a decisive turn to Walter Benjamins later work on archives, relics, and
allegories. In Search of Lost Causes: Fragmented Allegories of an Iranian
Revolution (2013) was my initial attempt at connecting the fragmented
archives of Iranian revolutionary posters and Palestinian films together
in order to argue for the formation of revolutionary allegories, through
Benjamins theory of ruins as allegory. By this time in my thinking the
idea of a postcolonial end of ideology formation was actively searching
for the manner in which historical and cultural fragments were gathering
in a momentum toward a critical reconfigurations of a liberation poli-
tics, though not in totalizing and absolutist terms. Two crucial theoretical
implications were now imbedded in this way out of the end of postcolonial
knowledge production: the future liberations were no longer statist in
their politics, or absolutist in their metaphoric foregrounding.
My previous work on Iranian cinema, as well as on visual, performing,
and literary arts in the region and around the worldsuch as my Close Up:
Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, Future (2001) and Masters and masterpieces
of Iranian Cinema (2007) and numerous essays on modern and
contemporary arthere all came together to mark the spectrum of what
I would eventually call the poetic diffrance that has marked the unfolding
32 H. DABASHI
momentums of the nascent nations at large. What I mean by poetic

diffrance, and will eventually describe in some detail, is the summation
and eventual exhaustion of all the poetic encountersin literary, filmic,
and dramatic terms and across all the visual and performing artswith
the onslaught of colonial modernity and the traumatic creativity that it has
occasioned. The summation of that encounter canvases the wide spectrum
of such poetic productions, and their exhaustion, when and where they
run out of aesthetic possibilities, leaves a significant residue I call the
poetic residue or alternatively poetic diffrance that, just as Derrida would
say, always already points to what it has failed to achieve and at the same
time marks and anticipates the emerging intuition of transcendence deeply
rooted in them.
By now I needed to place the idea of Iran beyond its fictive frontiers
and within its larger transnational spectrum, in order to see and show the
much wider public sphere upon which it was and continues to be con-
ceived. In my Iran Without Borders: Towards A Critique of Postcolonial
Nation (2016), I did precisely that and placed the idea of the postco-
lonial nation beyond its colonial boundaries and frontier fictions on the
transnational public sphere where it was originally formed, and thereby
sought to open up its self-transformative possibilities. This book dovetails
with the three consecutive books I have done with Harvard University
Press: Shiism: A Religion of Protest (2011), The World of Persian Literary
Humanism (2013), and Persophilia (2015), where I have navigated in
some extensive historical and cultural details the layered genealogy of the
public sphere and public reason and thereupon the active formation of the
postcolonial subject.
At this point in my writing, I had already published a book that explored
a significant aspect of my thinking on the matter, gathered around the
production of a corporeal anarchy with suicidal violence in response to
structural political violence targeting the body. My Corpus Anarchicum:
Political Protest, Suicidal Violence, and the Making of the Posthuman Body
(2012) is my most sustained course of reflection on the corporeality of the
site of body politics, where I sought to trace the transformation of body
politics onto a posthuman body, a body that was now the singular site
of territorial claim to legitimacy by any and all state. Suicidal violence, I
argued, was just the tip of the iceberg around and about which politics as
Weberian (legitimate) violence was focusing its claims to legitimacy away
from national territories and toward bodily domains, with rules and regula-
tions and technologies of micromanaging artificial insemination, genetic
engineering, abortion, organ transplant, physician-assisted suicide, and so

on. as indices of this transformation. Suicidal violence was simply an exten-
sion of the mad logic of this posthuman body. The Foucauldian notions
of biopower and biopolitics had rightly drawn our attention to the system-
atized technologies of state domination. But I looked at suicidal violence as
an act of symbolic and material defiance against biopower and biopolitics.
Now in this book, Iran: Rebirth of a Nation, I pick up all these strands
and pull them forward toward a significant but hitherto unforeseen conclu-
sion and read the nation as distinct from state in the classical nation-state
construction, and then through the formation of what I will articulate as
an aesthetic reason (overcoming both colonial modernity and the post-
colonial reason it had occasioned) find and pronounce its self-sustained
sovereignty, predicated on sustained and successive waves of revolution-
ary prose, poetry, and visual and performing arts performed categorically
against the dominant censorial will of the ruling state. I will argue and
demonstrate how the sovereignty of the eventual rise of an aesthetic intu-
ition of transcendence has enabled the unfolding futurity of the nation
beyond its fictive postcolonial frontiers, and autonomous of the state
apparatus that wishes but fails to rule it. I do so first by placing the elusive
nation within and without its fictive borders and work my way toward the
constitution of the posthuman body as a metamorphic simulacrum of the
body politics and then think through the aesthetic manners in which the
body (from birth to death) is reconceived against all the strategies and
technologies of biopower and biopolitics.
I will do so through close reading of critical aspects of Iranian social
and intellectual movements and its visual and performing arts, as well as
through a critical conversation with a number of seminal works I con-
sider critical to this argument: Hans Georg Gadamers Relevance of the
Beautiful (1974), Christophe Menkes The Sovereignty of Art (1988),
Alan Singers Aesthetic Reason (2003), and Alain Badious Philosophy for
Militants (2015). Each one of these books, in its own different way and
as they articulate the relevance, autonomy, and sovereignty of the work of
art, is relevant to my argument for multiple reasons. In the last one, for
example, Badiou argues the formation of a modern militant, which he
considers a transformative figure at the front line of emancipatory poli-
tics, in which he seeks to gather a radical phalanx comprising students,
the young, workers and immigrants returning to the original call for
universal emancipation and organizing for militant struggle. I intend to
build on Badious argument by extending its decidedly European domain
34 H. DABASHI
to a more global perspective, while through Gadamer, Menke, and Singer

replace Badious philosophy with aesthetic reason. Iran as a result
will, here as elsewhere, be a nexus classicus of my examination of a much
larger postcolonial condition of agential liberation throughout the world
with critical but corroborating differences. Without such site-specific
articulation of this liberation, the theoretical abstraction will overwhelm
the subject and preempt the politics of the project. Iran for me here
is like Macondo for Marquez, or Yoknapatawpha County for Falkner:
though historical facts and institutional realities are the materials with
which I tell my stories.
In this book, I therefore contend a postnational reading of the nation
that reveals the poetic surplus that has resulted in the course of national
encounters with colonial modernity. This postnational reading of the
nation is a strategic counter-essentialization of the nation by way of de-
fetishizing its frontier fictions and therefore seeking to liberate the terms
of its emancipation from within and beyond its entrapment in the nation-
state. It works precisely in the opposite direction of the ethnic nationalism
and sectarian politics that is ripping the postcolonial nations apart. From
this premise, we will then derive an aesthetic reason that is the conditio sine
qua non of overcoming the postcolonial reason that had occasioned
the rhetoric of ethnic nationalism. A postnational reading of the nation is
made possible by retrieving the transnational origin of the nation (a task
I initially undertook in my Iran without Borders, and before that in my
Persophilia) and linking it to the geostrategic disposition of its structural
functional organism (as I do in this book). The poetic surplus that enables
that aesthetic reason is the underlining metaphysics of all colonial cultural
productions yearning for liberty in the absence of the material foreground-
ing of democracy as a politically potent floating signifier. The national
encounter with colonial modernity had occasioned these cultural produc-
tionsand the poetic surplus is generated when all such poetic possibili-
ties are exhausted: in poetry, fiction, film, drama, and so on. From this
poetic surplus rise those aesthetic reasons that will finally triumph over the
postcolonial reason that had saved and entrapped the postcolonial person
at one and the same time. A postnational articulation of the rebirth of the
nation will articulate the terms of such a liberation when the postcolonial
person overcomes the repressed memories of coloniality.
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.

38 H. DABASHI
ONE BRICK ONTHEOTHER

Iran is piling one brick on the other, warns one pundit with solemnity,
todays Iranians, with their Persian heritage, are on the march as surely
as were the armies of Xerxes 2500 years ago.1 Usually such right-wing
wizardry is the premise upon which is launched the criticism of President
Obamas evident determination to pursue a diplomatic solution to the
Iranian nuclear issue. Desperate for a legacy, this particular warmonger
surmises, our president obsesses about a deal (no matter how wretched)
on Irans nuclear program, while ignoring Irans aggression across the
Middle East. If the domain of such nonsense about the rising Persian
Empire, a blatant act of fear mongering thus to call for yet another disas-
trous war in the region to facilitate the further Israeli theft of Palestine,
were limited to these neocon artists, there would be very little to be said.
But alas, and quite regrettably, we have begun to see echoes of them
among some of the leading Arab thinkers, intellectuals, and opinion-
makers. Where did that come from?
The origin of this particular brand of fanciful ghost-busting may
seem to have been a casual remark by a verbose Iranian official who is
reported to have said, Baghdad is now capital of the Persian empire.2
But did hereally? A quick check of the actual phrase by this official, Ali
Younessi, President Hassan Rouhanis adviser on Ethnic and Religious
Minorities Affairs, does anything but corroborate that charge: cultural,
economic and political cooperation between countries in the region, he
had said, and then parenthetically added, (which in the past composed
Persian empire) could be instead of past ancient empires. Entirely high-
falutin and convoluted sentence you might say, but a claim to the rising
Persian Empireby no means. Later on, Mr. Younessi went out of his way
emphatically to deny he had ever said anything to claim the return of the
Persian Empirebut to no avail.3
If someone were to bother to read Younessis original Persian phras-
ing, the confusion about the rising currency of the Persian Empire will
become even more confounded, because in the midst of all his bombas-
tic verbiage, he keeps repeating: What I say does not mean we want to
conquer the world but we must reach historical self-consciousness and
understand our place in the world, and while thinking globally act in an
Iranian and national manner.4 Again, pompously verbose, you might
say and think the proverbial clerical penchant for vacuous hyperbole may
have overcome the man at this conference on Iranian identity, where he
delivered this speechbut calling for a Persian empire now? Not really.
PERSIAN EMPIRE? 39
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.
THERE IS NO EMPIRE BUT ONE EMPIRE

There is no longer any Persian or Arab or Ottoman or Indian or Chinese,
or British or Spanish or Mongol empire, and all the angels of mercy and
justice be praised for that. The only empire that exists, and which does
not feel particularly well or imperial these days, is the American empire. It
is a kind of postmodern empire, as it were, ruling, or wishing to rule, via
drones, proxies, mercenary armies, private contractors, and lucrative arms
sales to rich, corrupt, and bewildered potentates.
Iran has not become a Persian empire. As a fragile and internally unsta-
ble Islamic Republic, Iran has systematically and consistently spread its
sphere of influence in a region where national boundaries mean very little.
Saudi Arabia is right now in Yemen, and a couple of years ago it was
in Bahrain. While bombing Libya, Egypt wants to lead a pan-Arab army
around the region, as the European settler colony of Israel continues to
sit on and steal more of Palestinian and Syrian territories and eying even
more. Syria and Iraq are under attack by a murderous gang of former Iraqi
Baathists and other runaway hoodlums they have hired from around the
world and call themselves ISIS, a digital caliphate, as Abdel-Bari Atwan
40 H. DABASHI
rightly calls it in a new book, commenced by being lucratively funded by

the Saudi and other ruling families in the region.6 Pakistan acts freely in
Afghanistan, as Turkey does in Iraq and Syria. Kurds have run away from
Iraq to form an autonomous region and thus to protect themselves from
yet another Baathist slaughter. Iran is integral to this widening gyre of
geostrategic free-fallnot above it. To disregard the real imperial power
operating in the region, and turn a blind eye to the aggressive counter-
revolutionary mobilization and speak of Persian Empire at a time that
all postcolonial boundaries have collapsed, is a silly red herring.
Speaking of Persian Empire and thus exaggerating the influence of a
deeply flawed, menacing, and malfunctioning Islamist theocracy plays the
horn from its open side, as the Persian proverb aptly puts it, and blinds
us to the factual evidence of a chorus of counterrevolutionary forces that
place the ruling regimes of Iran and Saudi Arabia on the same (and not on
the opposite) sides. There is no Persian Empire in sight: only the hard
geostrategic facts of US imperialism reshuffling its cards to play a more
winning hand.
PERSIAN WRIT LARGE

The nervous attribution of the rise of Persian Empire to contemporary
Iran, however, points to a critical aspect of the rise of one particularly
poignant case of postcolonial nation-state that requires further atten-
tion. Although today the invocation of the phrase Persian Empire in
the current geopolitics of the region has a decidedly ethnic character that
dovetails with the bourgeois ethnic nationalism and sectarian overtone of
regional rivalries, in the idiomatic expression Persian Empire, the adjec-
tive Persian is in fact a linguistic and therefor cultural marker, and thus
does not stand for any ethnic designationthough both Persian and Arab
ethnic nationalism thus wish for it to signify. There are no such people as
Persians. There is a language and therefore a culture that can be identi-
fied as Persian. There is no race or ethnicity called Persian, the way say
the Kurds or Baluchis think and project themselves as an ethnicity on the
fictive margins of the thing that now emerges as Persian. By the same
logic, Kurds too are only marginalized as an ethnicity and there is noth-
ing in their body or blood that designates them as a race. Communities
of people are racialized by way of a power-relation, and not as a matter
of biological identity. They become a race or an ethnicity by exclusion,
negationally, by the paramount illusion of something called Persian as a
PERSIAN EMPIRE? 41
marker of ethnic identity designating its peripheries as Turkish or Kurdish

or Arab. Thus Persian works precisely in the same manner that White
works in the making of the racialized relation of power in the USA or
Europe. Throughout history from the earliest post-Islamic dynasties for-
ward, Persian could have only been a marker of linguistic and therefore
cultural formation especially after the rise of the Shuubiyyah movement
against the racialized assumption of Arab supremacy.
The term Persian Empire has no meaning in pre-Islamic imperial dynas-
ties from Achaemenids to Sassanids except the manner in which the Greeks
self-projected their own Ionian (or Dorian, Aeolian, Achaeans) identity to
the Persepolis and the Persian seat of the Achaemenid Empire in Iran.
Thus two manners of naming fused together to make Persian Empire
a Latin phrase on the model of the Roman Empire. A fusion of succes-
sive empires and Persian linguistic and cultural identity came together to
inform Persian Empire. This imperial pedigree has remained a potent
imaginary by virtue of the imperial provenance of Ferdowsis Shahnameh
epic (composed 1010). This plus all the other imperially idiomatic genres
of Persian poetryfrom panegyric to romancehave come together to
mark the phrase Persian Empire as a false marker of ethnic identity.
To be sure, and as I discuss in much detail in my book on The World of
Persian literary Humanism (2013), Persian (Farsi in both Persian and
Arabic languages) was used as a marker of ethnicity in the early Islamic
period soon after the Arab conquest in contrapuntal juxtaposition to the
Umayyad tribal racism and their patrimonial sense of superiority. But from
then on, and as Turkish and subsequently Mongol tribes from Central Asia
began forming Persianate dynasties, the term became a floating signifier,
moving from a marker of ethnos to one of logos and then to that of ethos
before dispersing into chaos. These four phases of what the word Persian
has interchangeably meant also navigates the epochal passage of a people
in the course of their Islamic history, soon after the Arab conquest of the
Sassanid Empire (226650) through successive Persianate imperial forma-
tions. The fateful encounter with European colonial modernity opened up
the public sphere upon which postcolonial nations and then states eventu-
ally emerged.
It was in the course of PersoRussian wars of 18041813 and 18261828
and the sizable loss of territories by Golestan (1813) and Turkamanchai
(1828) treaties that the current map of Iran was more or less shaped, with
the formation of Afghanistan by British colonial intrigues (as a buffer state
in the Great Game between British India and the Russian Empire) as the
42 H. DABASHI
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.
PERSIA, PERSIANS, ANDPERSOPHILIA
In what particular manner does the contemporary Iran emerge from

ancient and medieval Persian and Persianate empiresand how does that
manner qualify and anchor the current conditional of nation and nation-
hood in Iran? If my proposal for us to sever the fate of the nation from the
vagaries of the state is to hold, then we must carefully trace the rise of Iran
as a postcolonial nation (not a state or even a nation-state) on the transna-
tional public sphere that enabled its active postcolonial imagination.
In the course of writing my book on Persophilia: Persian Culture on the
Global Scene (2015), I demonstrated the formation of Iran as a postcolo-
nial nation on the site of a transnational bourgeois public sphere that had
gathered on it the remnants of the trope of Persia from the Biblical and
classical antiquity to the rise of Renaissance and Enlightenment modernity
and beyond. This articulation allowed me to see and propose the condi-
tion of postcoloniality not as a tragedy as David Scott had, for example,
proposed in his Conscript of Modernity, but more as a dialectical condition
along the lines that Kojin Karatani has proposed in his Structure of World
History.7 Affecting a radical epistemic shift in assaying the formation of the
postcolonial nation, this location of the subject on its transnational public
sphere has the advantage of once and for all curing its chronic nativism.
The attraction of Europe to Persia was precisely because of its impe-
rial heritage, a fact uniquely exclusive to Persian empires from the
Achaemenids to the Sassanids and not shared by any other ancient civiliza-
tion that Europe had encountered. These empires were known to Europe
from the Bible to the Greek and Roman sources. It was precisely the impe-
rial pedigree of the Achaemenids and their domination of a global and
PERSIAN EMPIRE? 43
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
Image 1 Mana Neyestani, Untitled, 2009

The image of rebirth, resurrection, and revolt pops up on satirical sites too, where
Iranian visual culture is replete with subversive possibilities. Here Mana Neyestani
captures the moment of political suppression in Iran during and in the aftermath of
the June 2009 presidential election, when the V-sign of victory and the Green-
sign of the Green Movement were being officially repressed and persecuted, young
activists brutally beaten up and tortured, and on occasions even point blank mur-
dered, and yet the very nature of the violent repression strengthened the logic of the
movement. The gesture is ingenious in its wit and brevity. The state violence wishes
to cut down the V-sign and Green-sign of the movement and yet paradoxically with
that very act of violence turns it into a singular sign of defiance. The gesture of the
middle finger partakes in the European and US context of the artists residence and
thus enables and enriches a more potent sign language. The middle finger does not
mean in Iran what it means in Europe or the US. The wit thus becomes globally
expanded from the site-specific location of the Green Movement in Iran into a soli-
tary register around the globe. The aesthetic and iconic universalizing of that par-
ticularity ipso facto overcomes the postcolonial reason working at the political core
of the nation, as it does the colonial modernity that had occasioned it.
46 H. DABASHI
Goethe (17491832) furthered the course of familiarizing the foreign

Persians through his attraction to and rendition into German of Hafez
and composing lyrical poetry in his fashion and calling it West-stlicher
Diwan. Soon many other European Hafezes were created on the fashion
of Goethe. Soon after Hegel (17701831) comes and brings Persians into
the fold of European and world history, where Europeans feel already
at home, and thus he makes Persians further at home in Europe. But
Hegel still denies these Persians and the rest of Orientals any possibility
of thinking; for him, they are not capable of philosophy. So Goethe and
Hegel complement each othersustaining the familiar foreigners, both
European and yet not completely so. This forerunner of European roman-
ticism however eventually yields to a kind of mysticism that paves the way
for the rise of European fascism, which in effect furthers the racialized
theories of Indo-European languages. It is this version of mysticism as
precursor of fascism that generations later Seyyed Hossein Nasr, through
what they now call Gnosis, takes to Iran, as Ananda Coomaraswamy to
India, and Frithjof Schuon back to Europe. In Iran this mysticism feeds
into Ayatollah Khomeinis ascetic revolutionary disposition, in India it
meets Hindu fundamentalism, while in Europe and the USA it is com-
mercialized into New Age mysticism.
What I discovered in the course of writing Persophilia was the complete
ideological fabrication of the West and the Rest binary, and the necessity
of placing postcolonial transnational public spheres and their contingent
nation-formations on the circularity of globalized labor, capital, and mar-
ketplace of ideas. Consider how the preeminent Indo-Pakistani thinker
Muhammad Iqbal (18771938) took Goethes version of Hafez from
Germany (where he was a student) to India and added Rumi and Dante
to it and turned it into the cornerstone of his pan-Islamism and Islamic
philosophy, while North American historical Transcendentalism took the
same European romanticism to America and led to Ralph Waldo Emerson
(18031882) considering himself a reincarnation of Sadi. At the heart of
globalized capitalism in North America, Persophilia was embedded into
an ideology of philosophical revolt against instrumental reason, while in
India, on the colonial edges of capitalism, it becomes an ideology of resis-
tance to the same-old imperialist extension of that very instrumental rea-
son. In India, it eventually helped the formation of militant Islamism that
led to the Partition and the formation of Pakistan, and had an equally fate-
ful renevous with the Islamic Republic of Iran whose ideologues were very
much indebted to Iqbal. While in the USA, Transcendentalism in time
PERSIAN EMPIRE? 47
lost to what Adorno and Horkheimer diagnosed as Culture Industry

before Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement picked its non-
violent civil disobedience aspect up, while on the selfsame scene Malcolm
X was and remained like Muhammad Iqbal and his Iranian protgs like
Ali Shariati: an Islamist before his final delivery to a more global revo-
lutionary posture. But the figure of Rabindranath Tagore (18611941),
who received his Hafez directly from Iran and for healthier reasons than
Iqbals, remains an exemplary model of a more horizontal exchange of
ideas in the formation of regional public spheres.
Persophilia, meanwhile, remained integral to the rise of the most
provocative ideas and philosophies in Europe. From the bosom of the
Hegelian denial of Oriental philosophy emerges Nietzsches Zarathustra
and his love and admiration for Hafezso that his Persian prophet, which
is a combination of an imaginative Zoroaster and a Germanic rendition of
Hafez, becomes the new European figure of revolt. The historic revolt of
Nietzsche against the whole Platonic tradition of philosophy culminating
in Hegel here assumes the symbolic force of two Persian figures (a prophet
and a poet): Zarathustra and Hafez, who in the German philosophers
mind mutate into a singular force of Dionysian revolt. This is also the point
where the whole categorical Saidian notion of Orientalism as a mode
of knowledge production at the service of European colonialism (which
is true but limited in its scope) needs to be balanced with factual evi-
dence to the contrary. Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (18831891)
and Mozart in magic Flute (1791) are anything but Orientalist in
the Saidian sense, for here they rescue Hafez and Zoroaster and deliver
them for a cataclysmic Dionysian revolt that after performing their critical
function in European intellectual and artistic history come to inform the
Nimaic revolt against Persian classical prosody and give birth to Ahmad
Shamlou and Forough and Forough Farrokhzad who become the Persian
versions of that Dionysian revolt against the sort of absolutist mysticism
that through Seyyed Hossein Nasr and his Islamist followers was now
infringing on a militant Gnosticism that dovetailed perfectly with political
Islamism. That militant Islamism, which Nasr etal. facilitated and Shamlou
and Forough gloriously resisted, has by now overcome that Dionysian
spirit and is established as an Islamic Republic. In this context, we need to
look at the poetry of Sohrab Sepehri as a curiously subversive force here,
for he infiltrates religious intellectuals mysticism and subverts it. The
result of all such reflections and counter-reflection of Persophiliac tenden-
cies on the European and by extension transnational public spheres is the
48 H. DABASHI
location of Iran as a postcolonial nation on a much wider spectrum of

sentiments, thoughts, and movements, than within the frontier fiction of
Iran as a nation-state.
Meanwhile Edward FitzGerald (18091883) published his Rubaiyat of
Omar Khayyam as a counter-Victorian poet for the other Victorians, as
the US literary historian Steven Marcus would say.8 This Khayyam offers a
de-gendered homoeroticism to Europeans that suspends both ecclesiasti-
cal and worldly authorities and opts for an erotic asceticism that best fits
not just Fitzgeralds own mostly repressed homosexuality but also dovetails
with a kind of protestant ethics at the heart of both European capitalism
and British imperialism. The global expansion of Khayyam in effect fol-
lows the footsteps of British colonialismthey go together. In the poetic
persona of Omar Khayyam, FitzGerald thus produces a new European
prophet not quite unlike Goethes Hafez and Nietzsches Zarathustra
all varied models of Dionysian revolts against Christian bourgeois ethics
and its underlying ressentiment. Again, none of this can be derogatorily
dismissed as mere Orientalism, without concealing far more signifi-
cant structural changes in European and by extension global social and
intellectual history, with only a tangential relation to colonialism. This
Khayyam later comes to Sadegh Hedayat in Iran who extends him into the
Iranian scene while he was closely connected to India where he published
his literary masterpiece The Blind Owl (1937). In Hedayat, however, his
admiration for Khayyam soon degenerated into a visceral anti-Arab and
anti-Islamic racism. From FitzGerald to Hedayats respective Khayyams,
the figure of one Persian poet circumambulates the active formation of a
transnational public sphere upon which European and Iranian social and
intellectual movements intertwine.
In his version of attraction to Persian poetry, manifested in his classic
Sohrab and Rostam (1853), Matthew Arnold (18221888) went for
the anti-Oedipal trace, putting into his own poetry the famous story of
Ferdowsis Shahnameh where the chief hero of the epic, Rostam, inad-
vertently kills his own sonand thus the earliest origin of his major
essay Culture and Anarchy (18671868), which Edward Said misread
because he did not pay any attention to the Arnoldian cultural paradox
at the heart of this seminal poem. Arnold saw a major tragic transfusion
in the transfiguration of religion culture. It is from here and other
European Shahnameh scholarship that a renewed interest in the Persian
epic eventually goes back to Iran to the Pahlavi state-building monarchy
and the recruiting of Ferdowsi for a forced formation of the fatherland, a
PERSIAN EMPIRE? 49
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.
A POSTCOLONIAL NATION WITHALONG MEMORY

Today Iran is a regionally powerful state, capable of sitting at a table with
even more powerful states of the world and negotiating its nuclear pro-
gram. Israel and its newly found Arab partners are not very happy about
that fact and accuse it of retrieving its imperial past. Why? Because Israel
and Saudi Arabia and many other small postcolonial Sheikhdoms are abso-
lutist states, and not nations, and thus have no clue how Iran as a nation has
emerged. They see it as they see themselves. They assimilate it backward
to a map drawn by British colonialism. Iran was a nation before it became
a nation-state. Israel, Saudi Arabia, and all its Gulf Cooperation Council
(GCC) partners put together emerged as colonially manufactured states
52 H. DABASHI
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
European empiresotherwise our histories will always be assimilated

backward to a commentary on the margins of European history.
It is not accidental that that the rebirth of Iran as a nation is a quintes-
sentially poetic proposition predicated on a sustained course of literary
history. For the last 1400 years of its Islamic history and before that to
the time immemorial, it has been the literary history of the nation that has
given its successive empires a sense of continuity and purpose. Empires rise
and fall, dynasties come and go, religions change from Zoroastrianism to
Manichaeism to Islam before they collapse into sectarianism and bloody
conflictsand yet every new dynasty that comes to claim any small or large
expanse of land on this vast emotive territory the first thing it does is to
commission the writing of a Shahnameh, then have it illustrated, and then
make their royal or clerical courts hospitable to poets and prose stylists, so
they might (just might) be graced by the gift of legitimacy that this liter-
ary and poetic heritage momentarily bestow upon them. It was precisely
this cadre of Persian poets who in the aftermath of the Constitutional
Revolution of 19061911 poured into something that now they called
vatan/homeland, their newly minted public sphere, and invented their
homeland outside any royal pedigree.
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
5. See: Charles Krauthammer, Irans emerging empire (Washington Post, 22

January 2015), available online here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/
opinions/charles-krauthammer-irans-emerging-empire/2015/01/22/
c3098336-a269-11e4-903f-9f2faf7cd9fe_story.html, and Marc Goldberg,
Iran Trying to Revive the Persian Empire! (Jerusalem Post, 2 January
2012). Available online here: http://new.jpost.com/landedpages/printar-
ticle.aspx?id=366148, and Soner Cagaptay, James F. Jeffrey, and Mehdi
Khalaji, Iran Won't Give Up on Its Revolution (New York Times, 26 April
2015). Available online here: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/27/
opinion/iran-wont-give-up-on-its-revolution.html?_r=2.
6. See Abdel-Bari Atwan, Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate (London:
Saqi Books, 2015).
7. See David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial
Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), and
Kojin Karatani, The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production
to Modes of Exchange (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
8. See Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and
Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (New Brunswick,
NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1966/2008). This book would later
become useful to Michel Foucault for his theories of sexuality.
9. See Hamid Dabashi, Shiism: A Religion of Protest (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2011).
Chapter Two: A Civil Rights Movement
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

56 H. DABASHI
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
DAYS THAT SHOOK THENATION

The publication of John Reeds Ten Days that Shook the World in 1919
ranks as the first post-traumatic narrative in the aftermath of the Russian
October Revolution in 1917 and marks the commencement of a century-
long ideological warfare throughout the globe, particularly in what was
soon termed the Third Worldfrom Asia to Africa to Latin America.
Ten years short of a century later, I wrote a book after ten days of massive
social unrest that followed the 12 June 2009 Iranian presidential election
and forever changed the face of the regional and perhaps global politics by
announcing an end to the era of grand ideological warfare and the active
commencement of a post-ideological struggle for civil liberties.1 If the
Russian Revolution of 1917, on the heels of the Iranian Constitutional
Revolution of 19061911, commenced a century long of revolutionary
uprisings, the Iranian presidential election of 2009 marks the rise of a
civil rights movement with unprecedented consequences in the national,
regional, and by extension global geopolitics. I wrote that book to argue
that the social uprising that followed the 12 June 2009 presidential elec-
tion marked the end of a century-long ideological warfare and the com-
mencement of a civil rights movement in decidedly post-ideological terms
in Iran with far-reaching implications for the region at large.
The history of modern Middle East begins with the very term with
which it is now designateda colonial concoction that has cast the fate
of millions of people in a convoluted conundrum of internal despotism,
external domination, and overriding contingency on world economic sys-
tem, each exacerbating the other. Though the term may have originated
in the 1850s in the British India Office, it was popularized in the early
1900 by the American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan (18401914)
who used it at the tail end of the Great Game (18131907) to refer to the
Persian Gulf as the center of a strategic line that the British had to control
in order to preempt the Russian advances into their spheres of influence.
As the historical fate would have it, this very Persian Gulf that was once
considered the fault line of the colonial rivalry for world hegemony is now
the ground zero of an epistemic shift in the postcolonial geopolitics of the
region, when the rise of a grassroots civil rights movement redefined its
future beyond the control of the outdated term the Middle East. To
the degree that European colonialism was coterminous with the age of
modern anticolonial ideologies, the rise of the civil rights movement in
Iran marks the commencement of a postcolonial spirit when the terms of
58 H. DABASHI
engagements have radically altered in non-violent and civil disobedient

terms. This is the end of a long and tiresome spectrum in ideological for-
mations in response to European colonialism. Beyond the faulty borders
of the state, the creative soul of nations seems to have been finally liber-
ated from that specter. The temporary appearance of ISIS and their mur-
derous exhibitionism has now completely distracted the world attention
from this fact. But a steely gaze and persistent analysis are required for us
to see its rise and unfolding.
This epistemic shift marks a transition from a deeply ideological to a
post-ideological generation, some 70 % of the 72 million plus Iranian
population that is under the age of 30 and has overcome their parental
politics of despair. In response to both the onslaught of European colo-
nialism throughout the nineteenth century and the gradual demise of the
Ottoman Empire and the Qajar dynasty early in the twentieth century,
three almost simultaneous ideological formations divided the attention
and loyalties of Muslimsanticolonial nationalism, Third World social-
ism, and militant nativism (Islamism). Throughout the Arab and Muslim
world, from North Africa to the Levant to Central Asia and South Asia,
these competing ideologies have navigated the contours of modern history.
That modus operandi of ideological warfare, which came to a full choral
crescendo during the Iranian revolution 9f 19771979, has now epistemi-
cally exhausted itself. While the ruling cadre of the Islamic Republic, fully
cognizant of its crisis of legitimacy, continues to speak the conspiratorial
language of an everlasting Doshman/Enemy plotting to overthrow the
regime, the young men and women marching in the streets of their home-
land are singing the lyrics of an entirely different songnot of revolt but
of civil liberties, not of changing the regime, but of making it irrelevant.
Bringing all the competing ideologies that have haunted the political
imagination of people throughout the twentieth century to a climactic cre-
scendo, the Islamic Revolution altered the geopolitical shape of the region
and precipitated much that was to happen later and culminate in the events
of 9/11 and afterwards, including the US-led invasions of Afghanistan in
October 2001 and Iraq in march 2003. The Islamic Revolution of 1979
sent a tremor throughout the region and had much popular appeal in
the Arab and Muslim world, effectively threatening many of the ArabUS
allies and their illegitimate and undemocratic rule. Two bumper zones
soon appeared on two sides of the Islamic Republic: (1) the Iraqi invasion
of Iran in September 1980 that commenced a bloody and brutal eight-
year war to the West of the nascent republic, and (2) the rise of the Taliban
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,
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
Image 1 Golrokh Nafisi, The Sky is ours, 2010

The expanded images of revolt span across the spectrum of the daily life. Here
Golrokh Nafisi captures the essence of popular support for the Green Movement in
Iran, for which she emerged as the most widely popular iconographer. Nafisi has a
gentle visual soul, covering her steadfast determination to narrate, visualize, and
perform. She represents a new generation of quiet defiance, determined but not
angry, rebellious but not violent. Her forte is the depiction of the daily life, with
ordinary men, women, and children in their urban settings as her site and citation of
quiet rebellion. Resurrection of the nation here is embedded in the everydayness, in
the habitual, in the familiar, and in the sunrise to the sunset. No revolutionary pro-
nouncement is needed, no bombastic assertion, no grand ideology. The visual idi-
oms of the artwork dismantle the pomposity of the ruling state, its grand but vacuous
claims on truth and justice, its metaphysics of violence. The work lifts and sublates
the ordinary into the defiant, effortlessly, happily, decidedly, and in it the nation sees
itself confidently, reassured, purposefully.
64 H. DABASHI
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
into the making of a post-ideological politics of emotive liberties in decid-

edly patricidal directions.
Predicated on these crucial episodes, the June 2009 election and the
making of a civil rights movement in Iran was the birth channel of the
major epistemic shift that will unfold over decades to come. From the
commencement of the presidential campaigns, to the day of voting on 12
June 2009, to the dramatic unfolding of demonstrations, streets of Tehran
became the societal setting of a massive operatic spectacle in which the
launch of Iranian civil rights movement and the historic epistemic change
it announced were performed with the very same emancipatory aesthetic
that had been in the making for generations and now claimed its rightful
place on public space for public happiness. This whole silent uprising
with a simple unanswerable question, Where is My Vote?was a work
of art, not just in the sense of its mechanical reproduction of an uprising
or its electronic metastasis, but in the manner that it left a residue, a trace,
some debris for the posterity, which I propose staged the site of an aes-
thetic intuition of transcendence.
WHAT HAPPENED TOTHEGREEN MOVEMENT?

As Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was pacing the very last few days of his lame-
duck presidency, and as the ruling regime of the Islamic Republic was
staging yet another useless spectacle to prove to itself it is still a legitimate
state, the world attention was quite naturally drawn to the presidential elec-
tion that demonstrated a massive and nationwide conviction that the elec-
tion was rigged, resulting in what its supporters affectionately called the
Green Movement.2 What did exactly happen to that Green Movement,
where are those masses of millions of Iranians who long before the rise of
the Arab Spring poured into their streets and demanded their civil liberties
with a simple, rhetorical, question: Where is my Vote?
On 23 June 2009, a spontaneous mass demonstration erupted in Iran
against the officially declared victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in per-
haps the most publicly contested presidential election in the history of the
Islamic Republic. The following day, the victorious Ahmadinejad staged
an official demonstration in support of the declared victory. The day after
that, on June 25, Iran witnessed a huge mass rally against the status quo
with the slogan of Where Is My Vote?, which eventually emerged as
the defining moment of an uprising that its supporters by now called the
Green Movement. The Green Movement progressed apace with mass
66 H. DABASHI
demonstrations and civil disobedience until 14 February 2010, when its

attempt to stage a rally in support of the emerging Arab revolutions was
brutally suppressed.
The nominal leaders of the uprising were systematically arrested, sub-
jected to kangaroo courts, and jailed. But Mir Hossein Mousavi, who
became universally recognized as the symbolic leader of the movement,
valiantly stood his ground, and in a series of public statements that
culminated in the Manshur-e Jonbesh-e Sabz (the Charter of the Green
Movement) joined the Iranian people in writing a new chapter in their
long and tumultuous struggle for civil liberties and democratic institu-
tions. Varied readings and misreading of the Green Movement ensued.
There were those among the opposition in and out of Iran, particularly
those based in the USA and aligned with the neocons interest in regime
change in Iran, who thought it was geared to dismantle the ruling regime.
The ruling regime itself termed it a Fetneh or sedition, instigated by the
triumvirate of the USA, Israel, and the UK, and their local lackeys, thus
in effect accusing its own founding figures (Mousavi was prime minister
under the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini, for eight
years during the critical years of the IranIraq war) to be instruments of
foreign designs. Both these readings were flawed, limited in critical imagi-
nation, waged from the vantage point of a regime that was clinging to
power and a bankrupt neocon ideology that wanted to dismantle it on
behalf of Israel.
In between these two partisan positions, the fact remained that there
was a collective uprising based on its slogan of Where is My Vote? From
the day one I had called it a civil rights movement demanding civil liber-
ties (and not a revolution seeking to overthrow the regime), and within a
year after its commencement, I published a book detailing my argument.3
Soon after the widespread crackdown on the movement, Mir Hossein
Mousavi, his wife Zahra Rahnavard, and his comrade Mehdi Karroubi
(who was also a presidential candidate) were all put under house arrest
and silenced. But other prominent figures continued to write and air their
opposition to the status quo. Chief among them were Abolfazl Ghadyani,
Mostafa Tajzadeh, and Mohammad Nourizad, all of whom were among
the leading revolutionaries, the founding figures of the Islamic Republic,
and still in principle committed to it.
Two other dissident figures became prominent in the course of this
uprising: human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh and filmmaker Jafar
Panahi. Scores of other Green activists still remain in jail, along with
dozens of journalists, human rights activists, and members of the Bahai

faith who had nothing to do with the Green Movement. The prominent
Iranian Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi, meanwhile, opted to stay out-
side her homeland and speak vehemently against state repression in Iran.
Leading intellectuals such as Abdolkarim Soroush, Mohsen Kadivar, and
Akbar Ganji also opted for a life in exile and began authoring a massive
body of literature that cast a categorical shadow of illegitimacy over the
entire course of the Islamic Republic. The Jaras website soon emerged
as the podium of these most religious intellectuals, who wrote learned
essays in Persian defending the veracity of the Green Movement in Iran.
These were people who had originally written the Islamic revolution into a
deeply rooted Islamic narrative. With their departure into exile and active
opposition to the ruling regime, the Islamic Republic was left a naked the-
ocracy with the militant Pretorian class of Revolutionary Guards defend-
ing its octogenarian pastoral class.
Meanwhile, thousands of Iranian dissidents fled Iran and opted for the
indignity of exile outside their homeland. Some of these dissidents joined
the US neocon operations and/or the pro-Israeli think tanks to call for
regime change in Iran. But the overwhelming majority of them opted for
a full recognition of the dignified limits of what they could say or do from
abroad and never joined the bandwagon of regime changers, or the
treasonous path of plotting against their own homeland. The outdated
monarchists and the discredited Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) tried to jump
on the bandwagon of the Green Movement but failed. The main body of
expatriate Iranians remained committed to the democratic aspirations of
their homeland but equally adamant and vocal in opposition to the crip-
pling economic sanctions that Washington neocons, their Zionist contin-
gency, in collaboration with certain nasty streak of their expat opposition
Iranian allies, were seeking to impose on Iranians, or even talk of a military
strike as a kind of humanitarian intervention.4 The debates and con-
testations among the pro-sanctions and anti-sanctions camps continued
apace, with the events in Syria and before it in Libya as a warning sign of
what would happen if democracy were to be imported.
The Green Movement marked a decisive turning point in Iranian his-
tory and brought a critical insight to full recognition: Iran will never be
ruled by a democratic state for two complementary reasons: (1) democ-
racy is already a floating signifier, a fleeting ideal, the idiomaticity of its
actual achievement always already outdated, and (2) Iranian people, as a
living orgasm, a nation ever renewing itself in wider and more enabling
68 H. DABASHI
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.
WHENCE ANDWHITHER THEGREEN MOVEMENT?

We may now wonder what did exactly happen to the Green Movement,
aside from discrediting the Islamic Republic as a champion of revolution-
ary causes in the region and around the world. As I have consistently
argued, the Green Movement was not a revolution in the classic sense of
the term. It was not violent, and it was not targeted to dismantle the rul-
ing regime. It simply declared the death of the state by posing a question
to it that it could not answer: Where is my Vote? The Green Movement
had neither the ideological nor the militant wherewithal of any classical
revolution. It was calm. It was quiet, patient, gentle, and it will outlast
all its militant nemeses and obstacles with temperate tenacity. It wishes to
raise no flag, form no state, and fathom no necessary means of violence.
The Islamic Republic may or may not fall from under the pressure of
its own inner contradictions, or under the encroaching pressures of the
geopolitics of the region, or else by the forces of neoliberal economics
it has enthusiastically embraced in the aftermath of its nuclear deal with
5+ 1. But whether it stays in power or falls, it makes no difference to the
expansive horizons of the nation that declared itself in the course of the
Green Movement, in which Where Is My Vote? will stay the course
as the measure of its once and future directions. Outdated and obsolete
expat oppositions, ranging from the corrupt MEK to the bankrupt mon-
archists, saw the Green Movement and wanted to ride on it and go back
to rule Iran. But they failed, for they had nothing to contribute or to share
with the millions of Iranians who, decades after the Iranian revolution of
19771979, had no use for their or any other obsolete ideologies. Iran as
a nation was being born in the midst of these outdated ideologies of vio-
lence, the one that ruled, and the ones that wanted to rule them.
As a sign of this rebirth, the Green Movement exposed both the
ruling regime and its bankrupt opposition for being out of touch with
reality, and highlighted the necessity of a new course that is predicated

on principles that safeguarded the nation and rendered the very idea of
state dispensable: its categorical instance on the territorial integrity of
Iran; repeated insistence against economic sanctions crippling the daily
lives of millions of Iranians; opposition to covert operations or military
strikes against Iran; against separatist movements; adamant about its
non-violent disposition; opposition to any measure or movement that
endangers the well-being of Iranians; insistence on dialogue, on the
cultivation of public reason, on cleansing the political culture that had
produced one tyranny after another.
So where is the Green Movement and what happened to it? It is there,
in the bosom of peoples dreams and aspirations, systematically changing,
claiming, redefining, the public space and the political culture it rightly
claims. Its violent disposition exposed, the Islamic Republic evaded the
more immediate consequences of the Green Movement by successfully
shifting the leverage of the national politics to the regional context, a
move that was in fact aided and abetted by the combined malfeasance of
the USA and Israel and their regional Arab allies trying to divert the force
of the Arab revolutions. But that very shift came back to haunt the Islamic
Republic in Syria, where the fall of the Assad regime will not bode well
for the ruling Shii clergy and its current defiance of the will of its own
people. That very eventuality, however, will be equally detrimental to the
US alliances with Israel and their European and regional allies to divert the
course of Arab revolutions. They will, in the long run, lose. These historic
revolutions have already changed the political DNA of the region for the
better, and with it the world. The fate of the Green Movement at this his-
toric juncture is thus exceedingly consequential. Two contradictory devel-
opments soon emerged to frame the Green Movement: the increasing
pressure of the USA and Israel to impose crippling sanctions on Iran with
the option of a military strike constantly on the horizon, and the succes-
sive Arab revolutions that began to change the geopolitics of the region.
With every turn of the screw, as the warring states in the region gave birth
to the murderous Islamic State (mirroring the Jewish State), the nation
became a healthier and more robust measure of its own claims on reality.
The Arab revolutions, which the ruling regime in Iran sought falsely to
brand as an Islamic Awakening, were in fact exactly the opposite of any
such branding and a return of the repressed for the ruling regime in Iran,
the fact that the Iranian Revolution of 19771979 was a multifaceted rev-
olution that had included anticolonial nationalists, Third World socialists
70 H. DABASHI
and liberal or hardline Islamists among its ideological strands. It was

only after the machinations of the US Hostage Crisis (19791981), the
prolonging of the IranIraq War (19801988), and the Salman Rushdie
Affair (1989), under which smoke-screens the ruling Islamists conducted
continuous university purges, monopolized the mass media, militarized
the security apparatus, carried out cultural revolutions and mass execu-
tions of political prisoners. Accordingly, the revolution was categorically
labeled Islamic, thus seeking to distort the fact that Iranian political
culture has always included liberal or hardline Islamism, but has never
been limited to it. The more the ruling regime insisted on calling itself
an Islamic Republic, the more liberated became the nation in its ever-
expanding moral imagination.
As millions of Iranians began to be deeply affected by the treacherous
crippling sanctions that the pro-Washington expat opposition encouraged,
and as the threat of war (aka humanitarian intervention) mounted, most
Iranians remained committed to their aspirations for civil liberties in their
homeland, while categorically opposing the imposition of sanctions, the
threat of war, and the assassination of Iranian scientists, widely believed
to have been carried out in collaboration with Israeli and Saudi support.
The Green Movement acted as a catalyst to help distinguish between the
morally corrupt and politically opportunist expat opposition and their
American, Israeli, and Saudi backerswhile the main and healthy body of
the movement adhered to its principled aspirations for enduring institu-
tion of civil liberties with or without an Islamic Republic.
In the larger historical and geographical context of the Green
Movement, as a result, it bloomed early like a fragrant flower, to para-
phrase a beautiful poem of Ahmad Shamlou (19252000), the Iranian
poet of liberty, announcing the winter had ended, and gently sublated
into the Arab Spring, forever changing the geopolitics of the region by
declaring all states, qua states, illegitimate. This is not to suggest that
the Green Movement caused the Arab Spring. It simply means the
fate of millions of Iranians and Arabs is not that different from each
other, and their historic march toward liberty is far more organically
linked than the manufactured sectarianism and racism that on the sur-
face mars that collective fate. The Green Movement announced the end
of postcolonial ideology, almost identically to the way in which the Arab
Spring ended a vicious cycle of domestic tyranny and imperial domina-
tion. The Green Movement and the Arab Spring come together in a
singularly powerful way to announce to sever the vagaries of the state
from the fate of nations.
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
3. See this interview on CNN: http://am.blogs.cnn.com/2009/06/22/

expert-protestors-want-civil-rights-not-revolution/, and my book
Iran, US, and the Green Movement: The Fox and the Paradox (London:
Zed, 2010).
4. For one of my earliest essays opposing such sanctions see, Hamid
Dabashi, Huge risks in Iran sanctions (CNN, 21 August 2009).
Available online here: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/
meast/08/05/dabashi.sanctions.iran/. For an even earlier essay
opposing military strike and economic sanctions against Iran see my
Iran: Let the democratic process work (Asia Times, 8 April 2006).
Available online here: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/
HD28Ak02.html.
5. See Hamid Dabashi, The Third Intifada has already begun (Aljazeera
11 October 2011). Available online here: http://www.aljazeera.
com/indepth/opinion/2011/10/2011108113224897760.html.
6. See Hamid Dabashi, The Arab Roaming the Streets of Tehran (PBS,
Frontline, Tehran Bureau, 7 July 2009). Available online here: http://
www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/2009/07/
the-arab-roaming-the-streets-of-tehran.html.
7. See Murtaza Hassan, Iraq, Syria and the death of the modern Middle
East (Aljazeera, 7 May 2013). Available online here: http://www.
aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/05/2013567200437919.html.
Chapter Three: A Metamorphic Movement
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

74 H. DABASHI
of historical experiences, a social movement becomes metamorphic and

thus a living organism in conversation with its changing environment.
The metamorphic movement becomes heteroglossic, ventriloquist, self-
transcending, speaking multiple languages, assuming different colors and
shapes, but remains steady in its assertive self-conceptions. It is the nature
of this metamorphic movement that I propose here as the propelling
engine of the rebirth of the nation as a reality sui generis and entirely liber-
ated from the delusion of any form of representative democracy, the least
of all an oxymoronic proposition that calls itself an Islamic Republic.
What happened to the Green Movement?1 What happened to those
masses of millions of human beings pouring into the streets of their home-
land demanding their civil liberties and showing the absence of a basic
trust in the political organs guaranteeing those liberties? I wish to put for-
ward the argument that social movements such as the Green Movement
do not disappear into the thin air. They metamorphose into different
shapes and forms.
On the same day that the USA announced it would be sending arms
to the opposition in Syria, a massacre took place in Syria, Iraq was roiling
in sectarian violence, and Afghans were struggling to survive the corrup-
tion of their government. In the midst of all this carnage and catastrophe,
Iranians took time off from their daily chores to go out and vote for their
next president. This election began as all others, with the ruling state stag-
ing yet another spectacle to show its legitimacy, but it got more than it
bargained for. Millions of Iranians flocked to the polling stations on 14
June 2013, a fateful day that followed months of gut-wrenching debates
between those who wanted to go back to the ballot boxesno matter
how undemocratic the vetting processand those who were adamant that
after the 2009 elections they would never again vote in this horrid Islamic
Republic.2 The battle lines were thus clearly drawn between a ruling state
that lacks legitimacy, and a nation that uses every opportunity to assert its
political will.
Of Irans 50 million-plus eligible voters, about 36 million participated,
of whom more than 18 million voted for the winner, Hassan Rouhani.3
These numbers are important, mainly due to the arguments that those
who didnt vote for him were probably going to vote in the polls regard-
less of the contenders, as opposed to those who did vote for him, who
were probably embroiled in a heated and purposeful debate on whether or
not to even bother voting. What ultimately turned the table toward voting
was not any heated discussion among the leading intellectuals, or even the
A METAMORPHIC MOVEMENT 75
ordinary peoplethough there were some delusional Don Quixotes on

Facebook who thought their status updates from the USA or Canada
or Europe encouraging voting for Rouhani was chiefly responsible for the
heavy turnout! Instead, young and old Iranians, men and women, went to
campaign stumps of their favorite candidates and partook in what Hannah
Arendt calls public happiness. It is the nature and disposition of that
public happiness which remains the only reliable measure of the political
will of a nation.
While all candidates had their own supporters and diehards, it was
Hassan Rouhani who, before he knew it, was flooded by cries of politi-
cal prisoners must be freed! or ya Hossein, Mir Hossein, an ingenious
fusion of a Shia invocation of the name of the third Shii Imam and a
reference to Green Movement leader Mir Hossein Mousavi. For the
moment, it did not matter that Rouhani did not reciprocate these cries
and remained deafeningly silent in response. The die was cast, and people
were out in the public domains and were claiming their space. Suddenly
June 2013 looked, sounded, and felt like June 2009. Though he scarcely
mentioned Mousavi or Karroubi by name, Rouhani otherwise rose to the
occasion and touched many bases: demilitarizing the public space, return-
ing joy and energy to university campuses, attending to womens rights
issues, and following a nuclear program that was not at the heavy cost of
other Iranian interests. These were peoples demands, the nations wishes,
and Rouhani was a mere instrument, a mere mouthpiece.
The Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, tried to micromanage the elec-
tion, but the intention of Iranian citizens went far beyond his or anyone
elses control. People, the nation, in their collective actions, took the pen
from Khameneis hand and authored their own history: history of the
nation, independent of the state that claimed but failed to rule them. He
thought he was using the nation to prolong his reign. The nation was
using him to expand its territorial claims, its political will, its opening,
expanding horizons.
PURSUIT OFPUBLIC HAPPINESS

In Luigi Pirandellos Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), the
curtain rises for the audience to see a theatrical company getting ready to
rehearse Pirandellos own play The Rules of the Game (19181919). As
the rehearsal is getting under way, suddenly six strange characters appear
onstage and rudely interrupt the rehearsal. The cantankerous director,
76 H. DABASHI
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
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
of the Green Movement. Neither Khatami nor Hashemi Rafsanjani is that

leader, nor could they try to pull the force of history backwards by falsely
arguing that the Green Movement was too radical and they were more
moderate. Was Rouhani bypassing the Reformists and recapping onto
the vast ocean of the nations democratic will for the next phase? It was
very hard and too early to say, and almost impossible to imagine. People
had cleared the air for him to fly, or else if he preferred the metaphor to
change, a warm and inviting sea to swim in. He could pick his metaphor
and become part of history. It made no difference whatsoever to the fate
of the nation. They would turn a dead wood into their next democratic
aspiration, and perform their public happiness (Hannah Arendt) for the
whole world to see.
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.
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:
Man pari-ye kuchak ghamgini ra mishenasam
I know a sad little fairy

Living in an ocean
Playing her heart
Ever so softly
In a wooden flute
A sad little fairy
Who dies with a kiss every night
And every morning
With a kiss
Is brought back to life.4
Perhaps a deeper root of Farrokhzads poetic intuition here may be traced

back to a famous poem of Rumi, Ro bemir ay khwaja qabl az mordanat/
Oh sir, go die before your death, which is itself predicated on a prophetic
tradition Go die before your death. Based on a Jewish and Christian
notion of second death, Philip Rieff also examined his theory of culture
in his Fellow Teachers/Of Culture and Its Second Death (1973). All of this
in the Biblical tradition points back to John 3: 121: You Must Be Born
Again. In my reading of Bahram Beizai Bashu: The Little Stranger
(1989) in one of my future chapters, I have read that seminal film as the
case of a material rebirth through an allegorical gesture toward an immacu-
late conception of a mother in the absence of any man/husband. These are
80 H. DABASHI
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
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
collaborations of the Qajar monarchy and Shii clerical order destroyed

the Babi Movement and by defeating them secured their respective ascen-
dency to define and divide and rule the Iranian political culture. They
depended on each other, but they also generated their own antithesis, the
reformist courtiers like Amir Kabir and Sepahsalar and revolutionary Shiis
like those gathered in the Babi Movement finally joined force and dis-
mantled the Qajar dynasty and launched the Constitutional Revolution of
19061911. But they failed to dismantle the institutions of monarchy and
mullarchy and replace them. The rise of the Constitutional Revolution was
ultimately the work of reformist courtiers and revolutionary clerics, and
yet paradoxically the retrograde Pahlavi monarchy and conservative cleri-
cal establishment became the institutional beneficiaries of it. To a lesser
but still significant degree the Constitutional Revolution was also the
work of a rising cadre of public intellectuals like Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani
and Mirza Habib Isfahani who would be resurrected in the next century as
the leading revolutionary poets and literati of the Pahlavi period.
The Qajar monarchy eventually yielded to the Pahlavi monarchy, and
the triumph of monarchy in pre-reformist mode of the Qajar era revised
the retrograde Shii clericalism, and thus were reconstructed the monar-
chic notion of Aryamehr/the Sun of the Aryan Race for the Pahlavi
monarch, along with identical Shii doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih/The
Supreme Authority of the Jurisconsult for its arch nemesis Ayatollah
Khomeini. These two paralleled and almost identically tyrannical institu-
tions became even more entrenched, conservative, and tyrannical. One
ruled Iran from 1926 to 1976, and the other from 1976 to 2009, when
the Green Movement finally exposed the delusion of any notion of the
nation-state as ruled by either of these delusional doctrines. The pro-
verbial cat was now out of the bag and the cosmopolitan culture of Iran
had come back to haunt the illegitimate state. The nation had retrieved
its repressed memories, and had fortified itself for its future rebirths,
while the two successive states that had laid claims on it had completely
exhausted any claim to legitimacy and reduced to pure violence. It is here
that the aesthetic intuition of transcendence overcomes both the postco-
lonial reason and colonial modernity to safeguard and sustain the nation
beyond the state apparatus that falsely lays claim on it.
What enable that aesthetic intuition above all is the potent erotics of the
body that overcomes the politics of denial and despotism that represses
the body as the most defiant cite of rebellion against tyranny. In Forough
Farrokhzads famous poetic phrase,
Dast-ha-yam ra dar baghcheh mikaram/

I will plant my hands in the garden,
Sabz khwaham shod midanam midanam midanam/
I will grow: I know, I know, I know,5
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.
FROM ETHNOS TOCHAOS

The site and citation of that bodily investiture is the historically cultivated
public sphere that encodes and enables the defiant body. The formation
of the historically anchored public sphere upon which the nation is formed
and the body become defiant in the course of its encounter with colo-
nial modernity has its layered origins in internal and external forces com-
ing together to deliver Iran in the course of its historical encounter with
European colonial modernity. In The World of Persian Literary Humanism
(2013), I have done an extensive study of the eventual rise of this public
sphere. In the shadow and shade of Arabic literary humanism as the lingua
franca of successive Arab or Arabized empires, emerged Persian literary
humanism, which the great scholar of Islamic humanism George Makdisi
did not examine to realize that humanism was a reality sui generis, and that
its open-ended sovereignty always pointed to its own anteriority and alter-
ity, even as it constituted the literary subtext of imperial cosmopolitanism
that it defined and served.6 Islamic scholasticism, categorically serving the
feudal foundations of the Arab empire, entirely lacked that defiant element
of deferred defiance of literary humanism, not just in its Arabic vintage
but, a fortiori, in the more unruly Persian literary humanism.
In order to see the rise of that literary public sphere, we first need
to note one crucial factor: In the shadow of the privileged position of
English and Comparative Literature, worlds of literature (and not the
contorted notion of World Literature) will resolve Edward Saids life-
long preoccupation with humanism without engendering agential sover-
eignty for the singular imperial world it thus constitutes, privileges, and
empowers. Retrieving the cosmopolitan worldliness of Persian literary
humanism posits a kind of comparatism crucial for the task of coming to
84 H. DABASHI
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
achieved in the Ghaznavid period the masterpieces of the genres in qasideh

to epic. These two genres are clear indications of the royal, dynastic, and
imperial context of this cosmopolitan logocentricity in which Persian lit-
erary humanism becomes the lingua franca of a vast, transnational, mul-
tiethnic, and cross-sectarian empire. The appearance of Naser Khosrow
(10041088) and Shahab al-Din Yahya Suhrawardi (11541191) in this
period and later during the Seljuqids is the sign of the oppositional alterity
within the dialectical logic of Persian literary humanism, a phenomenon
that would later be retrieved and accentuated in the making of the Persian
literary public sphere.
The imperial context of the logocentricity of Persian literary humanism
goes positively global during the Mongol empire (12061368), when the
rise of Persian historiography, arts and sciences, clearly indicate the full
dimensions of Persian literary prowess. This is the absolute height and the
zenith of the classical age with Rumi, Sadi, and soon Hafez emerging as
the towering poets of their times. Now Persian humanism has reached and
plateaued in its logocentricity, finally yielding to a literary ethos beyond
just language and deep into a culture that it creatively cultivates. In the
next stage, during the Timurids period (13701507), Persian literary
humanism becomes performative, but in Behzads (circa 14501535)
painting, Yusuf and Zoleikha, it implodes into a paralingual semiosis
and finds unprecedented visual manifestations. The logocentric atom of
Persian literature here splits, as it were, during the Timurids period and
gets ready for multiple emerging paradigms. At this point, Persian literary
humanism spreads over four and faces a fifth imperial context. Its poises
goes to the Mughal domain and becomes melos (when it discovers its musi-
cal capabilities), its semiosis goes to the Safavid court and becomes societal
(assumes social significance), while its humanism goes to the Ottomans
and becomes cosmopolitan (manifested in a vastly urban empire), as the
totality of its literary heritage goes to Russia and becomes polis (gives birth
to its political possibilities). When it finally faces European imperialism,
this very constellation of multiple possibilities occasions the splitting of its
logos into chaos.
During the Qajar period (17891926), the ethos of Persian literary heri-
tage finally faces the European imperial worldliness, and gets ready for its
explosion upon the chaos of the public sphere it invents perforce in the
face of colonial modernity and calls it Vatan/Homeland. So the pattern
that emerges is as follows: After the Arab invasion of the seventh cen-
tury, the pre-Islamic literary heritage emerges and becomes ethnos, after
86 H. DABASHI
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.
THE YEAR ONE OFACIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

How is the fate of the nation, thus located on a transnational public sphere,
now decoupled from the vagaries of the state that lays claim on itand
how can we assess that claim?
Zahra Shams was a 21-year-old student of law at Ferdowsi University
in Mashhad. She was arrested on 6 May 2010 and held in solitary confine-
ment. She was not a political activist. The reason for her arrest: Her sister
Fatemeh Shams is a poet, blogger, graduate student at Oxford University,
and a solid supporter of the Green Movement in Iran. Fatemeh Shams
became even more vocal after her sisters arrest, when then her husband
Mohammad Reza Jalaipour (they have since divorced), also a graduate
student at Oxford, was arrested in the airport as the couple was leaving
Iran to resume their studies in the UK.The authorities in Iran had evi-
dently arrested Zahra Shams to force her sister Fatemeh into silence in
Oxford. She was not silent. She became ever more decidedly vocal.
Majid Tavakoli was a 24-year-old student activist from Amir Kabir
Technical University in Tehran when the Green Movement com-
menced. He had been repeatedly jailed for long periods of time. Arrested
on 7 December 2009, during the student protests over the disputed
presidential election, Tavakoli became the subject of global solidarity

when authorities in Iran sought to humiliate him by taking his picture
garbed in mandatory womens veils. Almost instantly countless Iranian
men wore veils and published their pictures on the Internet in solidar-
ity with Majid Tavakoli. Similarly, when Majid Tavakoli went on a dry
hunger strike to protest his solitary confinement, his mother too initiated
a hunger strike in solidarity with her son, which many young Iranians
from around the globe followed. The authorities yielded and transferred
Tavakoli to a regular ward.
Majid Tavakolis body had become metamorphic, as had Zahra Shams
for her sister Fatemeh Shams. Zahra Shams, an apolitical law student, and
Majid Tavakoli, a major political activist and a pain in the neck of the
Islamic theocracy in Iran, are two typical examples of the two embrac-
ing ends of the spectrum on which young Iranians were challenging the
clerical theocracy that has ruled their land. The hopes and aspirations of
these young women and men, some 70% of them under the age of 30,
were branded a Fetneh/Sedition by the loud but entirely ineffective
propaganda machinery of the Islamic Republic, by a state apparatus that
lacked any legitimacy to call the democratic will of a nation a sedition.
Fortunately for Iran, and fortunately for the world, that old and noisy
machinery was entirely ineffective. Zahra Shams and Majid Tavakoli, and
the generation they represent, were creatively in charge of representing
themselves and telling the world what they want. The state had all the
Orwellian propaganda at its disposal, but the location of the nation on a
transnational public sphere had the momentum entirely in its hands.
In a region infested with violencegenocidal, homicidal, or suicidal
it is impossible to exaggerate the significance of a massively popular civil
rights movement that has begun and continued with the most funda-
mental democratic question of Where is my vote?a seminal question
that had never been asked in such monumental scale in any other aspiring
democracy in the region. Throughout the height of the Green Movement
(20092010) not a single Molotov Cocktail had been thrown by a single
protestor against the onslaught of a vile, brutal, and sustained state oppres-
sion. With the ring of that simple but resounding question, Where is my
vote? masses of millions of people had forced the hand of the Islamic
Republic, exposing its naked brutality. If the world were to listen and
watch carefully, from the ancient Greek theorization of democracy to the
French Revolution and the cry for liberty, equality, and fraternity, down to
the American revolt against despotism and tyranny, and ultimately to the
88 H. DABASHI
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
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.
4. 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.
5. Forough Farrokhzad, Tavallodi Digar/Another Birth (Op. Cit.).
6. See Hamid Dabashi, The World of Persian Literary Humanism
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), and George Makdisi,
Scholasticism and Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West
(Edinburgh: Edinburg University Press, 1989).
7. I have detailed this historic mistake in my essay, Left is wrong on
Iran (al-Ahram, 1622 July 2009).
Chapter Four: An Aesthetic Reason
Our understanding of the Green Movement as the simulacrum of a meta-

morphic movement changing shape and form but not purpose and direc-
tion points to the unfolding of an aesthetic reason that I wish to explore
in some detail in this chapter. Here I wish to propose that the articulation
of this aesthetic reason is a key theoretical momentum finally formed
to overcome the paradox of colonial modernity, through which the world
at large was told to be free to think critically precisely at the moment
when a colonial bayonet was put to its head and subjugated to European
capitalist modernity at gunpoint. The Green Movement, I have proposed,
was the most cogent mobilization of civic forces to articulate and defend
civil liberties in terms beyond the limited ideological means and political
imagination of the ruling Islamic Republic and even (or particularly) its
manufactured loyal opposition (the so-called Reformists), and a fortiori
the categorically discredited expat opposition that its only difference
with the ruling regime is that it covets a power it lacks. In its political
potency, the movement (however short-lived in its most public phase) was
and will remain post-ideological, and as such declared an effective end not
just to the limited legitimacy of the ruling regime but far more potently
the end of the West as an absolute metaphor of our time.
Upon this historic scene appeared, now I wish to argue, the articulation
of an aesthetic reason to replace the postcolonial reason that had informed
mobilizing ideological formations of the last 300 years, positing a major
epistemic shift that now stands for the postcolonial public reason that had
failed to secure foundational institutions of liberty and democracy in any

94 H. DABASHI
postcolonial nation-state such as Iran. After generations of phantom liber-

ties, I will argue, that turn from the postcolonial reason to aesthetic reason is
coterminous with the age of globalized capital and the society of spectacle
it has entailed. What this civil rights movement thus faced, as its principal
obstacle is the active transmutation of an Islamic Republic, now bereft of
any semblance of legitimacy, into a garrison state, occasioned by the geo-
strategic changes in the region. The end of the West as a master trope
coincides with the general global condition in which the habitual politics
of despair has exhausted itself and thus we have the birth of the first post-
colonial person liberated from an historic entrapment within the condition
of both coloniality and postcoloniality.
THE SOVEREIGNTY OFART

What does an aesthetic reason actually mean? How does it enable the for-
mation of an aesthetic intuition of transcendence? Where and what are its
roots and origins, and in what particular ways does it liberate the postco-
lonial subject from the condition of coloniality, the exhausted epistemes
of postcoloniality, the paradox of the colonial modernity, the thwarted
domain of public reason, and perforce the limits of the postcolonial rea-
son? To answer these vital questions, I first need to take a brief philosophi-
cal detour.
As Christoph Menke observes in The Sovereignty of Art (1988/1998),
the realm of the aesthetic is that of contradiction, rejection, and nega-
tion.1 Art is not politics, sociology, anthropology, a revolutionary proj-
ect, a moral edifice, or an ethical mandate. Art is not what everything else
is. Art isnot this state of negativity, Menke, following Adorno, believes
gives art its singularly definitive authority and autonomy. That it is, and it
can do, what nothing else is, what nothing else can do. Art is about noth-
ing. Art is about itself, and as such it poses a threat to everything else, to
the instrumentality of the (postcolonial) reason, by simply being there. Is
the aesthetic experience just one among other experiences made possible
by the breakdown of instrumentalized reason in the course of European
capitalist modernity, or is it, alternatively, a realm in which an existential
experience exceeds such differentiated realms of reason and posits another
altogether ulterior experience irreducible to other modus operandi of rea-
son in modernity? The experience of the postcolonial person has posited
the real of the aesthetics as one safe haven secured from both the colonial
reason and the postcolonial politics.
AN AESTHETIC REASON 95
In the European context, almost entirely oblivious to its extended

colonial shades and shadows, from Kant to Weber to Adorno all such
reflections on aesthetics have taken the differentiated realms of reason in
the course of capitalist modernity as the conditio sine qua non of coming
to terms with the aesthetic experience. If we take Weber as the German
theorist who took the aesthetic experience as one among other differenti-
ated realms of disenchanted reason, Adorno would stand opposite him as
the German theorist who thought aesthetic experience ought to be taken
as something irreducible to such differentiated realms of instrumental rea-
son. What stood between these two theorists of aesthetic modernity was
another, darker, side of modernity, namely the German Jewish Holocaust.
It was before the Holocaust that Weber thought the aesthetic realm was
one among other differentiated realms of disenchanted reason, and it was
after the Holocaust that Adorno sought to detect in the realm of the aes-
thetic a redeeming domain to overcome the instrumental reason and its
potential (now actualized) terrors.
What both Weber and Adorno disregarded, did not consider, for it was
smack in the middle of their European blind spot, was their colonial (for
the rest of the world global) site of the aesthetics, where its fate was one of
schizophrenic bifurcation between radical instrumentalization in the form
of socialist, nationalist, or nativist ideologies to oppose and end European
colonialism on one extreme end, or else abstract and aloof interioriza-
tion on another.2 Adornos instinctive insistence that resolution of this
relationship requires doing justice to the duality (Doppelpoligkeit) of aes-
thetic experience without subordinating either of its two defining features
to the other3 remains critical to its extension to the colonial site. What
Adorno was proscribing was, though entirely unbeknownst to himself as
an incurably European philosopher, the best that had been done at the
colonial site. Overcoming the differentiated realms of European reason
was ipso facto embedded in the coloniality of the reason for the rest of the
world. What Adorno suggested Europeans needed to achieve was already
achieved on the colonial edges of the European capitalist modernity. It is
thus not accidental that Adorno came to that conclusion in the aftermath
of the trauma of German Jewish Holocaust, which was a concentrated
dose of what European colonialism had been administering to the world
at large. As European reason spelled colonial reason for the rest of
the world and required and produced a revolutionary reason to oppose
and end it, in the realm of the aesthetic, overcoming that European, colo-
nial, and even revolutionary reason was always already definitive to the
96 H. DABASHI
arts that it anticipated, as perhaps best evident in the domain of magic

realism in Latin American literature, jazz and blues in US music, abstract
realism in visual arts, mimetic spontaneity in theater (Verfremdungseffekt/
Distancing Effect for Brecht with varied and older versions in Chinese,
Japanese, Indian, and Persian dramas). As yet another German who tried
to cope with post-Holocaust anxiety and thus came close, though never
consciously, to the colonial site, Brechts theorization of alienation would
anticipate much that would later happen in cinematic virtual realism in
Iranian cinema.4
To overcome that European split, Menke, following Adorno and
Derrida, has a very simple but compelling proposal that can be useful for
our reading of the postcolonial scene and the making of an aesthetic intu-
ition of transcendence. He suggests:
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
We need a number of quick adjustments and fine-tuning here. First and

foremost, on the colonial site we have been entirely disabused of that
traditional romantic view of the sovereignty of art so we need not over-
come or resolve it. European romanticism has had a very limited domestic
implication on that site and carries no particular bearing on the global
consequences of European Enlightenment modernity. But the two the-
ses that Menke offers are quite critical. The idea that the aesthetic cri-
tique of reason is the subversion rather than the overcoming of reason
resoundingly echoes in the vast and diversified experiences of the colonial
world at large, though we need to replace the word reason in Menkes
formulation with colonial reason to make more sense. Subversion of
the colonial and postcolonial reasons, in successive historic moves, is
therefore contingent on the aesthetic act in emancipatory directions. Of
equally revolutionary consequence is the Menke/Adorno insight that it
is not the contents but the effects, consequences, or repercussions of art
that are the foundations of this critique. From then on an aesthetically
generated critique of reason becomes an aesthetically generated critique

of postcolonial reason for the world at large. That once we carry Menke,
Adorno, Derridas aesthetic critique of European reason to the colonial
and postcolonial realm the act forces the European philosophy to face its
own colonial foregrounding of reason is something beyond the immediate
concern of my study here.
PUBLIC SPACE, PUBLIC REASON, ORGANIC SOLIDARITY

To conclude this quick philosophical detour, the critique and subversion
of both the colonial and postcolonial reasons has been historically culti-
vated in the aesthetic domain (from poetry to cinema) by virtue of the
absence of any sovereignty attributed to the delusion of European Reason
(for the world was at large was the Unreason of that Reason), which was
quite unreasonably brutish in its naked violence on the body politics of
the colonial world. Let me now carry the implications of this aesthetic
critique of postcolonial reason to the site of public space, public reason,
and a renewed form of organic solidarity on which it is first expressed and
from which it is eventually sublated. What is at stake here is to see how this
aesthetic reason informs a new breed of organic solidarity beyond any fic-
tive frontiers and upon a solid conceptualization of a transnational public
sphere and public reason.
The struggle for and within colonial modernity was through the con-
struction of public reason, which in the aftermath of the colonial conquest
of the world was argued by nativist inorganic intellectuals dreaming of
phantom liberties. This inorganicity, however, was adjacent to deeply
rooted aesthetic expressions by poets and artists that in turn gave birth
to the making of an aesthetic reason, which was organic to the making of
varied forms of societal modernityall of which is predicated on a post-
colonial condition when as early as 1930s Sadegh Hedayat had already
dismantled the knowing subject of capitalist modernity on its colonial
edges, and Nima Yushij had radically reconfigured the aesthetic judg-
ment of that knowing subject in his formally subversive poetry. When I
suggest that the Green Movement as a civil rights movement is predi-
cated on a post-ideological disposition, I foreground it on the active dis-
mantling of the colonized minds who keep reading it either as a Fetneh/
Sedition (by the ruling regime) or alternatively as a Enqelab/Revolution
to topple the Islamic Republic (by its opposition). I say so because the
formation of the master narrative of utopian ideologies (from anticolonial
98 H. DABASHI
nationalism to Third World socialism to militant Islamism) was predi-

cated on and produced within the context of a colonial modernity that
could not but produce inorganic intellectuals and their phantom liber-
ties on one side and their political transformation to illegitimate state
apparatus on the other.
The end of colonially conditioned ideologies produced and propagated
by inorganic intellectuals occurs in the context of the end of the West
as the principle interlocutor of anticolonial ideologies. The end of the
West means, in turn, the birth of the first postcolonial person outside the
purview of the condition of post/coloniality, the person who is capable of
thinking and acting outside the colonial machinery that did not just para-
doxically produce but in fact even anticipated the terms of his/her ideo-
logical revolts. The current and dominant, entirely amorphous, condition
of globalized capital we call neoliberalism does not coagulate around
any civilizational pole (the West) to generate alterity (the Rest), for
it lacks and defies identity. This entire globalized condition generates and
sustains a transnational public space, and its contingent public reason and
organic solidarity, that has always already trespassed any colonially, manu-
factured frontier fiction.
This transnational public sphere opens up toward a semiotic of post-
coloniality where the foreplay of signs do not mean or amount to a sta-
ble semiotics, as perhaps best represented in the globally celebrated but
entirely inconclusive work of the Iranian artist (based in NewYork) Shirin
Neshat. The making of an open-ended aesthetics retrieves the cosmopoli-
tan worldliness of cultures and thereby restores confidence to a knowing,
feeling, and intuiting subject beyond any national frontier or colonial bor-
der. The aesthetic reason predicated on this foreplay of signs emerges on
the fertile ground of the dissolution of all militant ideologies chief among
them in this case militant Islamism, which commenced long before the rise
of the barbaric ISIS.Militant Islamism radically diminished and compro-
mised the moral authority of Islam and from Iran sent the leading Muslim
theologian Mohsen Kadivar into exile to explore a figment of his own defi-
ant imagination he calls Islam-e Rahmani/Benevolent Islam, while the
prominent sociologist Asef Bayat was mapping out the contours of what
he considered Post-Islamism, and a noted philosopher Arash Naraghi
was busy justifying humanitarian intervention as a camouflage for mili-
tary interventionism. Meanwhile, what the Islamic Republic was calling a
Fetneh/Sedition (the Green Movement) was ending the very legitimacy
of this or any other postcolonial (Islamic or non-Islamic) state.
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
Benjamins theory of allegory as fragmentary and of Sergei Eisensteins

equally provocative theory of montage exceptionally pathbreaking for the
notion of a fragmented reality to posit a formative but contingent agency.
This conditiona transnational public sphere that generates its own vin-
tage public reasonpaves the ways toward a renewed notion of organicity.
The globalized circumstances of capital have created new lines of solidar-
ity. Neocons and neoliberals want to stage a regime change in places like
Iran, while nativists want the status quo, whereas a new organicity is com-
mitted to anticolonial, anti-racist, anti-imperialist and regional and global
solidarity against the amorphous capital and its postmodern empire. To
be a voice of dissent in these circumstances you must first and foremost
be a voice of dissent where you live, and from there across and around
the globe, its most atrocious trouble spots in particular, so that when you
come across the people to whom you belong by birth and breeding you
will have already set the record straight. It is only against that background
that your voice of dissent cannot be assimilated into the power structure of
the dominant hegemon that wishes but cannot assimilate you, for it gives
it indigestion. You cannot raise your voice against the criminal atrocities
in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Palestine; if you have not already raised, it
gains the far more atrocious crimes of the ISIS and Israel, or if you do, the
voice would be that much compromised by the hypocrisy and duplicity
that informs it. Just because a theocracy like the Islamic Republic is para-
noid, it does not mean that comprador intellectuals like Azar Nafisi, Abbas
Milani, or Ray Takiyeh are not aiding and abetting in the imperial design.
The transnational disposition of the public sphere that thus informs the
formation of the public reasons is quintessential to that aesthetic reason of
revolt that is now giving birth to nations.
Be that as it is, there is something far more materially grounded at work
here. To be a voice of dissent you need to be deeply rooted in and mor-
ally identify with the weakest and most vulnerable in the society where
you live. The urban poor, the impoverished working class, the invisible
illegal immigrants, the weakest and most vulnerable among Muslim and
non-Muslim refugees are where the roots of this solidarity lie. When you
thus go around the world and place yourself alongside the weakest and
the most vulnerable, you will be in a position to denounce without the
slightest hesitation the misogyny and patriarchy in the Hamas without
denying its political role in the Palestinian national liberation. Here you
can denounce Hassan Nasrallah and Ahmadinejad without dismissing
Hezbollah as a legitimate Lebanese resistance movement, or implicating
the legitimate resistance of Iranians to crippling sanctions and the threat of

war as aligning yourself with the ruling Islamic Republic. The condition of
transnational public sphere makes it impossible to hide behind the bogus
notion of exile and diaspora, becoming dually marginal in both the
country of your origin and the country where you live.
If you can see the link between vulnerable illegal immigrants and refu-
gees and the national liberation movements around the globe, you would
then not be surprised to see masses of non-Palestinian labor migrants in
the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. It is precisely in the Shii and
Palestinian neighborhoods of Dahiyah, Sabra, and Shatila, that you will see
Bangladeshi and Philippine slaves being sold to the Lebanese bourgeoisie
precisely in the same manner that other illegal immigrants are abused in
the USA or in the Europe. It is impossible to live in this world and still
fancy a blindfold around your eyes that will focus on your nativist priorities
and disregard the world.
THE SOCIETY OFSILENCE INTHESOLITUDE OF

AESTHETIC REASON
Iranians have never lived in a vacuum. The manufacturing of nativist
ideologies (Islamism or ethnic nationalism) authenticating the absolute
metaphor of the West has been instrumental in placing postcolonial
nation-states like Iran on another imaginary planet. To test the authority
of the aesthetic reason on that transnational public sphere within which
postcolonial nation-state have appeared on an entirely different political
phantasm, let me switch site and consider the matter from a different van-
tage point, from half way around the globe, where the condition of post-
coloniality will enable us to see the formation of the aesthetic reason in
similar, comparative, and liberating ways. Here my purpose is to show how
the aesthetic reason rises in multiple and varied contexts with remarkable
affinity to the Iranian scene and thus connecting the nation to a larger
transnational frame of reference entirely independent of any state appara-
tus that may or may not lay a false claim on it.
Let us begin where the master of phantasm himself endedin Mexico
City.8 The cinematic semiotic that posits Luis Buuels Phantom of
Liberty (1974) as a spoof on the bourgeois banality that Karl Marxs
commodity fetishism had theorized in the opening chapter of the first
volume of Capital (1867) and subsequently Guy Debords Society of
Spectacle (1967) had staged, let us remember, was made entirely possible
102 H. DABASHI
by none other than Etienne-Gaspard Robert (aka Etienne Robertson)

and his pioneering phantasmagoria productions in the post-revolutionary
Paris (1797). The same revolutionary dream of 1789 that transformed
Athanasius Kircher and Christiaan Huygens magic lantern (mid-
seventeenth century) into Etienne Robertson phantasmagoria in 1797
would in less than a century later stage Karl Marxs critique of political
economy into his Capital in 1867, so that by 1974, Luis Buuel would
playfully devote one of his masterpieces to see how the phantom of lib-
erty degenerates into the spectacle of bourgeois banality. Right there, in
Buuels penultimate film is precisely where art has seized the moment
to endure beyond the cul-de-sac of any possible postcoloniality. But to
see that endemic transmutations of facts and fantasies, of revolutionary
appointments and postcolonial disappointments, we need to expand the
200-year time frame to 400 longue dureso that we can see the link
from the magic lantern in mid-seventeenth to phantasmagoria in mid-
eighteenth to the theory of commodity fetishism in mid-nineteenth to the
society of spectacle in mid-twentieth century and the phantom of liberty in
the late-twentieth century.
On that spectrum, art is always ahead of politics, the undoing of the
revolution, even as, precisely at the moment that, it feigns to serve it.
The signs that come together to put their signature on the work of art
never behavealways misbehave. The occasion of the bicentenary of
Latin American wars for independence is no sign ofcannot be taken
asthe failure of the tenuous relations between aesthetics and the eman-
cipation it must always promise but fortunately can never deliver. Quite to
the contrary: something in that relationship, tenuous that it must remain,
continues to resonate beyond the dead-end of postcoloniality. There is
no postcoloniality in art, for art is always already postcolonial, for it never
was precolonial or colonial. A postcolonial aesthetic is simply to come to
terms with art. The political configurations that during the course of two
centuries of post/coloniality have informed any aesthetic emancipation
is precisely what has kept the struggle alivenot in abusive postcolonial
promises but precisely in subversive aesthetic parameters, with an aesthetic
reason overcoming the postcolonial reason that has failed to deliver. The
continued problem of emancipation within the postcolonial dynamics of
the Southern Hemisphere and beyond is no indication of the failure of
that always already tenuous relationship between art and politics but the
challenge that the condition called postcoloniality faces in order to read

the signs of our own time beyond the clichs of that postcolonial pre-
sumption. The horizon in the leaders gaze in Jos Clemente Orozcos
(18831949) Zapata (1930) is yet to be discovered, navigated, mapped
out. On the horizon of that lost gaze, Orozco secured his immortality,
procured a postcolonial relevance for everywhere that postcolonial politics
fails.
Transcending the celebratory disposition of pre- and post-independence
marks the recognition of the challenges we face in deciding where and how
would Zapata fight today. The inevitable and indispensible divide between
the discourse of political and economic emancipation in Latin America
or anywhere else for that matter and the social and aesthetic movements
that are coterminous with them points to the necessity of going beyond
the clich-ridden fields of postcolonial theory that thinks by acting as the
native informant will bypass the amorphous regime. The problem with
postcolonial theory, as it is practiced and performed by migr subalter-
nists on North American Ivy League campuses, and with no organic link to
North American subalterns that come in waves of labor immigrants, is that
they mostly have nothing or very little to say about art, for its open-ended
aesthetics cannot be figured in the closed-circuit of their entrapment in
their Europe. On that closed-circuit, art has bypassed them aesthetically,
as they have convinced themselves that they are Europeanist. The bent
neck of the white horse in Diego Riveras (18861957) Agrarian Leader
Zapata (1931) looks into the depth of an eternity yet to be fathomed
not just by the migr Europeanist theorizing subalternity, but by, and in,
the autumn of all patriarchs yet to come.
The necessity of multiple archives that includes but is not limited to
the artistic is yet to reach the threshold of postcolonial theory, as in fact
the bifurcation between the Homeric poesy and the Aristotelian poet-
ics is yet to be resolved into a postmodernity that remains committed
to the fact of the political. The Aristotelian mimesis can only promise
a kind of catharsis that can be operative only if we are witness to some-
thing at once foreign and familiar. Where is the space of that double-bind
except the solitude that is always already pregnant with the societies that
at once punctures and enables it? To be able to come to terms with that
solitary space from which art issues its misbehaving signs we need to
realize the precise nature of its paradoxical self-negation. Octavio Pazs
104 H. DABASHI
The Labyrinth of Solitude/ El laberinto de la soledad (1950/1975) is one

crucial space for seeing how this solitude works at that paradoxically soci-
etal level:
The Mexican, whether young or old, criollo or mestizo, general or laborer

or lawyer, seems to me to be a person who shuts himself away to protect
himself: his face is a mask and so is his smile. In his harsh solitude, which
is both barbed and courteous, everything serves him as a defense: silence
and words, politeness and disdain, irony and resignation. He is jealous of
his own privacy and that of others, and he is afraid even to glance at his
neighbor, because a mere glance can trigger the rage of these electrically
charged spirits. He passes through life like a man who has been flayed;
everything can hurt him, including words and the very suspicion of words.
His language is full of reticences, of metaphors and allusions, of unfinished
phrases, while his silence is full of tints, folds, thunderheads, sudden rain-
bows, indecipherable threats. Even in a quarrel he prefers veiled expressions
to outright insults: A word to the wise is sufficient. He builds a wall of
indifference and remoteness between reality and himself, a wall that is no
less impenetrable for being invisible. The Mexican is always remote, from
the world and from other people. And also from himself.9
What in my judgment Paz is offering here is much more than a reflec-

tion on his own national identitythe spiritual solitude that paradoxically
embraces a social identityfor it in fact marks the (entirely understud-
ied) aesthetic condition of postcoloniality, where an artist like Paz himself
transcends the politics of his identity in the poetics of his own fiction.
The solitude that Paz describes is in fact the tabula rasa of the birth of
the first and last postcolonial person, the person whose mind has been
decolonized, and who has now come to stand in front of the work of art
not as the political persona but as a postcolonial agent. If man indeed is,
as Paz suggests nostalgia, as he is a search for communion, then art is
the rendezvous of that communion, predicated precisely on his solitude.
It is thus about silence and solitude as an always pregnant revolutionary
moment that we need to think. I appeal to the metaphor of pregnancy, of
the fetus in the mothers womb, as the supreme moment of silence and
solitude intentionally to mark the decidedly repressed feminine disposition
of the moment that gives birth to a kind of hope for emancipation that
can never be completely delivered or totally disappointed. To make my
point I draw your attention away from Octavio Pazs reflection on solitude
to Amir Naderis cinema of solitude. In a cinematic career that has now
expanded over almost half a century, dodged a dictatorial monarchy and

an Islamic theocracy, as it has mapped out its panorama of solitude on two
continents, Amir Naderi has dwelled precisely on the moment of solitary
embracing of the universe, where his cinema becomes the microcosm of
a cosmic reflection on the borderlines of the solace of solitude and the
society of spectacle. In one of his masterpieces, The Runner (1985), the
lead protagonist, the solitary figure of Amiru, becomes the tabula rasa of
that solitude and the singular site of reflection on a pure cinematic venture
that places the subject of the artist, at the moment of artistic creativity,
outside the subject of his societal belonging. This solitude is not political,
nor is it apolitical, for it predates and survives the political. That solitude
is the site of the cultivation of an aesthetic reason that will shine upon any
meaningful society that exists and that will come.
That very solitary aura, from which art emanates, is equally evident
in the fragmented narrative of the Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleimans
cinema where a disjointed subject faces a fragmented reality and yet man-
ages to make perfect sense of itall predicated on the solitary sight of a
Palestinian man (ES) who never speaks. The character of ES, at the center
of all Elia Suleimans cinema, the acronym that is and is not standing
for Elia Suleiman, is precisely that: an acronym that is arrested at the
moment of its meaningless sign-ness and acronymity. ES never talkshe
just witnesses, remaining a sign that dismantles all other signs that feign
meaning, signification, and purpose. There is an open-ended hermeneutics
to that silence that no Israeli checkpoint can stop, no Palestine Liberation
Movement can abuse, and no future Palestinians state can foreclose. ES is
pure aesthetic reason.
That solitary sustenance of sign that at once politicizes Elia Suleimans
cinema but does so beyond the politics of any particular movement for
the liberation of Palestine is equally at work at the heart of Shirin Neshats
work. A solitary discovery of a moment that the artist is both beyond and
before her society, the visual spectrum of Shirin Neshats work can be seen
as the expansive unfolding of a solitary soul in societal forms discovering
its aesthetic reason. Born and raised in Iran but coming to artistic fruition
in the USA and celebrated globally, Shirin Neshat is the artist of the cross-
ing borders, where no political regime has any authority over her, and no
postcolonial power can afford claiming her. Her piety disrupts the secu-
lars, her eroticism disturbs the pious. She is a subject outside any regime
of subjugation. It is not accidental that Shirin Neshat reminds many of her
admirers of her Mexican antecedent Frida Kahlo. While Kahlo carried her
106 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
Image 1 Esrafil Shirchi, If you came to visit me, unknown date

The collective cultural memory at the heart of the national consciousness consistently
dissolves into abstractionverbal, poetic, visual, allegorical. Here in Esrafil Shirchis
work, the abstraction borders with an active mutation of words, letters, morphing
towards a poetic iconography. The poem in this calligraphy is a famous line from
Sohrab Sepehri, If you came to visit me/Come gently and calmly/Lest the thin glass
of my solitude/Might crack. Shirchis calligraphy dances on this line, sings with it,
performs it to perfection, transforms its audio effects into ocularcentricity, stages its
hidden poetic craftsmanship. The gentle mutation of words and shapes, colors and
forms, spatial territories and vocal invocations generates its own normative environ-
ment. The space is not sober. It is intoxicated, subversive, suggestive, illusory. It
invites in and keeps in. It is like a wombpregnant with possibilities of birth, rebirth,
resurrection. The culture here is at its melting point, when it has dissolved into forms
and finitudeindefinitely. It is upon this miasmatic fertile ground when art of the
abstraction take over the collective culture that the nation and the state are decoupled
and their dialectical antagonism results not in any synthesis but in a negative dialectic
that strengthens nation organically and the state mechanically.
108 H. DABASHI
heart of Ardeshir Mohassess art remained himself, the solitary artist no

revolution could afford claiming. Ardeshir Mohassess was aesthetic reason
incarnate.
From the selfsame solitary soul of Iranian artists in exile issues the
extraordinary work of Nicky Nodjoumi, the steadfast dreamer of night-
mares that is blinded by his own hindsight. A kindred soul of Naderi
and Mohassess, Nodjoumi is bitter, angry, sarcastic, and principled in
his categorical denunciations of the bestiality that is at the heart of
the political man. There is a perverse sexual banality at the heart of
Nodjoumis work, which disallows any comfortable coming to terms
with the politics of any emancipatory revolt. In his paintings, Nodjoumi
has gone positively elemental, and in that elemental dealing with our
predicament, there is no salvationonly depiction of the horror beyond
any redemption, not just political but far worsemetaphysical. In
Nodjoumi, we discover how a pure aesthetic reason can be merciless in
its judgments, unrelenting in dismantling any claim to political author-
ity. He is the undiluted naysayer.
The Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali (19381987) had seen far worse
atrocities and yet he managed to sustain a far more piercing gaze on the
immediacy of politics, and yet all as the solitary witness present at the
scene of a perpetual crime, the systematic armed robbery of his homeland.
Naji al-Alis legendary creation Handala (the bitter one) has his back
always to us, to the audience, and his face toward the event, the scene
of the crimea witness that cannot be bothered with our habitual dis-
tractions. Handala has survived long after the assassination of his creator
Naji al-Aliand as a runaway signifier he is beyond any state control.
He is a signature signed under any truth spoken to power. Identical with
Naji al-Ali is the Iranian cartoonist Mana Neyestani, who too has come to
that inner peace that can witness, absorb, archive, and be a witness to the
indelible present. Constitutional to Mana Neyestanis solitude is the fact
that he is a quintessentially cyberspace creation. He must of course get up
in the morning somewhere on this planet, work through the day before
falling asleepbut those facts remain entirely incidental to his cyberspace
persona, of which we are aware only through his work. He comes to life
on your screen every time you open your laptop and disappears into thin
air whenever you close it. Like Tarek al-Ghoussein and Naji al-Ali, his
Palestinian soul mates, Mana Neyestani does not exist. They are aesthetic
reason pure, simple, abstract, ephemeral, need no state issuing them any
passport for they have already crossed all borders.
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
Critique of Pure Reason, from any datum presented to knowledge in the a

priori forms of experience. Art though is no knowledge, and artist as sub-
ject is always already outside the subject. Levinas also proposed it is by
setting out from the implications of the Critique of Practical Reason that
the transcendental I will be postulated beyond its formative function of
knowledge, or, as Husserl would say, beyond the Cartesian cogito, where
it is indescribable pure Ego and nothing more.12 With its back turned
to the audience and toward the event, thus bearing witness, Handala is
the Levinasian subject outside the subject of a Zionism that the great
Jewish European philosopher could not transcend to reach for his own
very Other. If indeed as Hans-Georg Gadamer suggest in The Aktualitt
des Schnen/The Relevance of the Beautiful (1977), the work of art
transforms our fleeting experiences into stable and lasting for an indepen-
dent and internally coherent creation, and that it does so in such a way
that we go beyond ourselves by penetrating deeper into the work,13 then
the work is the final arbiter of that formal transcendence that no war of
independence can exhaust, as no postcolonial state can claim.
THREE FILMMAKERS ANDACIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

By navigating on multiple locations, I have tried to place the artist on a
transnational public sphere from which she draws inspiration and yet from
which she disappears into the thin air, her subjectivity autonomous and
triumphant by virtue of a misplaced authenticity we habitually attribute to
her work. This I propose is the manner in which the aesthetic reason both
posits the knowing subject and conceals its political whereabouts. Let me
now test this proposition by applying it to three different filmmakers deal-
ing with the Green Movement in Iran.
When D.W.Griffiths classic silent film The Birth of a Nation (aka
The Clansman, 1915), set during and in the immediate aftermath of the
US Civil War, was released, W.E.B.Du Bois, the most prominent African-
American public intellectual of his generation, wrote a scathing review of
the racial politics of the film and its glorification of the KKK.The enthu-
siastic reception of the film by white Southerners (including President
Woodrow Wilson), and the subsequent racial protests that ensued are
now considered a threshold in the commencement of the Civil Rights
Movement in the USA.
Not a classic film of that magnitude but three globally celebrated film-
makers soon emerged as the center of the non-violent civil rights move-
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
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.
FROM CANNES TOKANDAHAR

What exactly is the passage through which the aesthetic reason emerges
from the midst and the debris of such daily politics of despair? Because
of my work and interest in world cinemaIranian, Afghan, Arab, and
Palestinian cinema in particularthe relation between politics and cine-
aesthetics, between reality and its representations, has always been at
the center of my frame of reference. Examples of Iran, Afghanistan, or
Palestine at Cannesor even when Michael Moore took his Fahrenheit
9/11 (2004) to Cannesexposes the link between the nightmare we
faced during the Bush administration and the pomp and ceremony of
Cannes. Something happens on that red carpet that commodifies and
fetishizes the pain and suffering, joy and defiance of people and yet para-
doxically sublates them to a global spectatorship that acknowledges and
registers them beyond local and regional denial or repression. The point
here is to see through what remnants and debris of realities, at time con-
flicting and paradoxical, does that aesthetic reason coagulate and result.
Years ago when the interface between fact and fantasy in Iranian cinema
began to interest me in the nature and function of cinema in contested sites I
perpetrated the morphological violence on English language and suggested
we might think of Iranian cinema as working through a particular working
of factasya peculiar combination of fact and fantasy, politics and poet-
ics that at least since Forough Farrokhzads groundbreaking The House
is Black (1963) has been definitive to Iranian cinema. In another move,
114 H. DABASHI
when I was working on Palestinian cinema I thought of what Palestinian

filmmakers were facing as a mimetic crisis, namely the crisis of representa-
tion, or how can fiction exaggerate reality to make it register mimetically
when reality itself was already mimetically flooded. In the works of Elia
Suleiman in particular I thought a cinematic frivolity had choreographed
the concocted silence and mechanical motion of the protagonist ES to slow
down the unfolding of the real in order to renew its significance. Narrative
in Elia Suleiman is broken down to allegorical staccatos, and thus reality
approximated to it representational impossibilities. This crisis of mimesis is
embedded in the enduring problem of how to represent a reality that has
overcome and digested its own metaphors, leading the artist back to the
thicket of the real to rediscover new metaphors for it.
In cinema of Makhmalbaf in Afghanistan, Kandahar (2001) and oth-
ers, as indeed in the cinema of Hany Abu Assad in Palestine, particularly
his Ford Transit (2002), this crisis of mimesis became most evidenta
crisis that in Abbas Kiarostami and Amir Naderi are resolved in two dia-
metrically opposed directionswhile Kiarostami abstracts motions from
meanings to allow them to rediscover an opera aperta for themselves
(Umberto Ecos phrase), Naderi derives those realities to the point of
their chaotic breakdown before opting for a mild miraculous exit. Herman
Melvilles Moby Dick (1851) or Ernest Hemingways Old Man and
the Sea (1951), Naderi once told me, were his literary modelsbut I
cannot have that kind of ending, he addedI need a little bit of hope.
The link between fact and fantasy is not an always stable nexus and is sub-
ject to worldly circumstances and the open-ended hermeneutic to which it
subjects works of art. The fate of the film Kandahar is a perfect example
of this exegetical fluctuation. Cannes accepted the film in competition in
May 2001 but did not quite know what to do with it, and this remained
the case until the events of 9/11 when the film suddenly become a cin-
ematic cult, beating Harry Potter per audience per screen even in the
UKKandahar became a classical Opera Aperta/Open Work for the
facticity of the work of art remained contingent on the hermeneutic con-
text that society and politics kept imposing and withdrawing on and from
itso much so that the visual registers of the work of art become entirely
contingent on the contextual variability of the society and politics that
opts to embrace, interpret, or just ignore it.
This crisis of mimesis is not always conducive to creative resolution,
and in films like Hany Abu Assads Ranas Wedding becomes positively
inoperative and hits a coup de sac. When the paradoxical facts of the Israeli
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.
Between Cannes and Kandahar, the divergent sites of cinema have

trespassed the boundaries of violent politics and visual poetics and trans-
formed the literal into the allegorical, the factual into the figurative, and
thereupon the postcolonial into the aesthetic reason. But if this were a one-
way street, we would have had nothing new in the realm of the aesthet-
ics predicated on Aristotelian mimesis and Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt.
What we have is actually a two-way street, traffic between the factual and
the figurative, the literal and the allegorical, and we are not always sure
in what direction we are moving, fact to fantasy or vice versa. The traffic
soon assumes a reality sui generis, cinematically generating not just its
own aesthetics, but also its hermeneutics, even its visual metaphysics. If
Abbas Kiarostamis cinema has gone into a direction of ceaseless and even
paralytic semiosis, and in the opposite political direction Iran and environ
have plunged into a politics of despair, a cinema like that of Panahi has
hit a cine-aesthetic balance that manages visually to generate its own cine-
epistemic universe in which things begin to mean beyond our received
vocabulariessuch as positing, in a key sequence in Panahis Crimson
Gold, a Eucharist from a pie of pizza smack in the middle of a Shii coun-
try. This Eucharist is cinematic fetishism, where visual registers, mise en
scne, camera movement, lighting and darkness, reverse angle shots and
ultimately compositional editing all come together to mastermind a social
body that seeks and receives salvation neither in a church cum mosque nor
in a political party cum false promises of any ideology, and perforce in no
state, but in a movie theater that might oscillate between a cinema hall or a
laptop hooked to an external drive hooked to a Pirate Baybut either way
the site of cinema has brought together the diverging politics of despair
into a converging cinema of emancipation and salvation.
THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY

A specter was haunting the Islamic Republicthe specter of freedom. All
the powers of old guards have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this
specter: The Ayatollahs and their Warlords, Ahmadinejad and Khamenei,
hanging judges and paramilitary vigilantes. To try to exorcize that specter,
the custodians of the sacred terror ruling the Islamic republic would go
to any length. But this time arounddid they go just a bit too far? What
does it exactly mean to condemn a globally celebrated filmmaker, a dearly
loved and admired artist who has done nothing but bring credit to his
profession and glory to his homeland, to six years in prison, and on top of
118 H. DABASHI
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-
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,
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
8. This part of my argument in this chapter was first delivered as a formal

paper at the University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC) of
the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico
City, organized in collaboration with the University of California
Humanities Research Institute and the Museum of Contemporary
Art of Barcelona (MACBA), on the occasion of the bicentenary of
Latin American wars for independence. The title of the conference
was International Symposium on Aesthetics and Emancipation in
the Postcolonies: Phantom, Fetish ad Phantasmagoria, held in
Mexico City, 2730 October 2010. I am grateful to Dr. Helena
Chvez Mac Gregor and her colleagues to have included me in that
extraordinary conference.
9. Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude: The Other Mexico, Return to
the Labyrinth of Solitude, Mexico and the United States, The
Philanthropic Ogre. Translated by Lysander Kemp, Yara Milos, and
Rachel Phillips Belash. (New York: Grove Press, 1985): 29.
10. From Sohrab Sepehri, Vaheh-i dar Lahzeh/An Abode in the
Moment (1967) in Sohrab Sepehri, Hajm-e Sabz/Green Volume
(Tehran: Rozan Publishing, 1346/1967).
11. Emmanuel Levinas, Outside the Subject. Translated by Michael
B.Smith (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994): 156.
12. Emmanuel Levinas, Outside the Subject: 157.
13. Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other
Essays. Edited by Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986): 53.
14. Bainard Cowan, Walter Benjamins theory of Allegory in Peter
Osborne (Ed), Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluation in Cultural
Theory (London: Rutledge, 2015): 5669.
Chapter Five: Shiism at Large
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

124 H. DABASHI
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
prominent Shii figures of authorityjurists, theologians, philosophers,

and revolutionary leaders. Throughout the history of Shiism in its early
(7001500), middle (15001800), and recent (1800present) phases,
much of that articulation took placein each of which we see a slightly
different aspect of Shii historical unfolding: first the manner in which it
fought in revolutionary battlefields, then in its moments of dynastic tri-
umphs, positions of power, aesthetic and intellectual effervescence, and
then finally in its one last revolutionary uprising before it was forcefully
ushered into its historic encounter with European colonial modernity.
As Shiis move forward in their history, the central paradox of Shiism
becomes more organically rooted: its political success equals its moral col-
lapse, and conversely its political failures equal moral authority.
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
found a way to uplift the militant Sufism of such rebellious movements as

those of Sarbedaran and Hurufiyyah (which had by decades and centuries
anticipated Mulla Sadras philosophy in their battlefields and ideologies of
revolt) to the philosophical disposition of a new age. In his philosophical
Existentialism, Mulla Sadra brought the Shii revolutionary reason to the
public domain, with Khalq (People, Created Beings, the opposite of Haq
or Truth or God) as the centerpiece of his philosophy and one of the two
pillars (next to Truth/God) of his metaphysics. Mulla Sadra urbanized
the philosophical reason that had been made vacuous and essential in the
learned halls of the School of Isfahan and yet paradoxically evident in
the revolutionary uprisings from Ismailism to Hurufiyyah. Mulla Sadra
urbanized that feudal scholasticism, de-essentialized the School of Isfahan
away from the muddled Essentialism of its court-affiliated founding phi-
losophers: Mir Damad, Mir Fendereski, and Shaykh Bahai. In doing so,
Mulla Sadra partook in the revolutionary fusion of Shiism and Sufism of
Sarbedaran, Hurufiyyah, Nuqtaviyyah, and so on, which in turn helped
him formulate the Existentialist ontology of his own philosophy.
The evidence of the revolutionary roots and potentials of Mulla Sadras
philosophical achievement is not limited to the fact that it was predicated
on the iconoclastic ideas of the Sarbedaran and the Hurufiyyah uprisings
before it, but that in its aftermath two distant students of Mulla Sadra led
two massive revolutionary movements not despite Mulla Sadras philoso-
phy but precisely because of it, one in the nineteenth century in the form
of the messianic School of Shaykhism as the metaphysical foregrounding
of the Babi Movement, and the other in the twentieth century in the
shape of Khomeinism as a major component of the ideological foundation
of the Islamic revolution in Iran (19771979). Soon after Mulla Sadras
Existentialist meta-philosophy was thoroughly established in the Safavid
period, a student of his philosophy, Shaykh Ahmad Ahsai, laid the theo-
retical foundation of Babism, which wreaked havoc on the Qajars dynasty.
For that reason, Babism might be considered the first modern Shii revolu-
tion and not the last medieval uprisingbecause predicated on a public
reason that Mulla Sadra had already achieved by urbanizing the Shii moral
imagination, Babism wedded the revolutionary impatience that preceded
and the public reason that accompanied it.
It would be totally unfair and in fact inaccurate solely to blame French
philosophical Orientalism for the systematic obscurantism that under
the rubric of spirituality has dehistoricized Shiism and its social and
intellectual history. Much of what in fact we know today about the Shii
SHIISM AT LARGE 133
Image 1 Hasan Ismailzadeh, The Campaign of Rustam and Ashkbous, no date,

circa mid-twentieth century
The site and citation of the national memory extend from commonly frequented
public spaces to collective recollections of dramatic traumas in the stories of the
nation. Here in Hasan Ismailzadehs typical coffeehouse painting, we see the
depiction of a famous battle from Ferdowsis Shahnameh (composed 1010). The
story of Rustam and Ashkbous is typical of the heroic deeds of the Shahnameh
national hero. The style of painting originates in perhaps the most widely popular
art form in urban and rural coffee houses from which naqqals/narrators told stories
to eager audiences in a time preceding the introduction of radio, television, or cin-
ema. The stories are replete with symbolic references to the tumultuous history of
the nation. The Shahnameh marks a decidedly pre-Islamic and therefore non-
Islamic frame of reference for the nation, enriching and magnifying its Islamic heri-
tage. Add to that the poetic, mythic, literary, and legendary disposition of the
narratives and you would have an inkling of the empowering significance of the
Shahnameh stories as they are told and retold, imagined and depicted, from one
generation to another. Neither the Pahlavi monarchy, nor a fortiori the Islamic
Republic was or is in charge of that national memory. It has and will continue to
defy them both. The naqqals were the master storytellers of the nation, creatively
transforming a classical poetic text into a widely popular domain of creative and
defiant self-consciousness: the aesthetic intuition of memorial transcendence at its
most widely registered and read.
134 H. DABASHI
philosophical tradition of the Safavid and post-Safavid era was originated

in the Pahlavi period (19261979) in Iran and promoted by their principle
court philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr (born, 1933). Sensing the innate
danger of Mulla Sadras philosophical Existentialism, the Pahlavis sought,
through the intermediary function of their court philosopher Seyyed
Hossein Nasr and his French collaborator Henry Corbin, to defuse Mulla
Sadras philosophy and reverse his revolutionary Existentialism back to
Mir Damads equally court-affiliated metaphysics.4 Nasr in effect sought
to become to the Mohammad Reza Shahs royal court what Mir Damad
was to Shah Abbas, turning Mulla Sadras philosophy upside down again,
to make yet another Essentialist philosopher out of him. But as Marx
noted in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), history
repeats itself, once as tragedy and then as farce. The progeny is clear and
prolonged. Mir Damad to Shah Abbas was what Nasir al-Din Tusi was to
Hulegu. But Nasr, playing Mir Damad to Mohammad Reza Shah, never
learned from Shiism that for every Abbasid and Seljuqid empire there
is an Ismaili uprising and a Qaramita movement, and for every Nizam
al-Mulk a Hassan Sabbah, as for the Ilkhanids there was the Sarbedaran,
for the Timurids the Hurufiyyah, for the Safavids the Nuqtaviyyah and
the Mushasha, and for the Qajars the Babis. As Seyyed Hossein Nasr and
Henry Corbin (for two entirely different sets of reasons) sought to neutral-
ize Mulla Sadra and turn him into a Perennial philosopher, Mulla Sadra
dodged and re-emerged from under the cloak of Ayatollah Khomeini.
In line with his fellow French Orientalist, Jambet believes Khomeini had
turned his back to Mulla Sadra. Khomeini did no such thing. He did what
he did to the Shah not despite Mulla Sadra but because of Mulla Sadra. It
takes a lot of chutzpa for a French Orientalist to tell one troublemaking
Akhond he is not like the Akhond.5
We need to make a clear distinction between Seyyed Hossein Nasr and
Henry Corbin in any diagnosis of their systematic mystification of the
Shii intellectual history. Seyyed Hossein Nasrs derive for the mystifica-
tion of Islamic philosophy had a perfectly reasonable context. He imag-
ined himself the Mir Damad of the Pahlavi court and sought to turn the
Existentialist turn of Mulla Sadras philosophy back on its head and place
the Essentialist mystification of his own philosophy at the service of the
Pahlavi. There were two major historical reasons that justify Seyyed Hossein
Nasrs fears of the political implications of Mulla Sadras Existentialism:
one was the Babi Movement of the nineteenth century that all but over-
threw the Qajar dynasty (the dynasty that came right before the Pahlavis),
SHIISM AT LARGE 135
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
Sadra to Hegel, remystifying him in a different wayby way of marking a

pre-political moment for both the East and the West of his philosophical
imagination. But two monumental human catastrophesthe European
Holocaust and the European colonialismcannot allow that bit of philo-
sophical anthropology to be anything more than that. Jambet believes
the Islamic Republic was the death knell of spiritual Islam. It was
nothing of the sort. It was nothing different in spirit in fact than the
Babi Movement before it, led by yet another student (of the student) of
Mulla Sadraa philosophically uplifted version of the Kaysaniyyah, the
Zaydiyah, the Qaramita, the Ismailis, the Sarbedaran, the Hurufiyyah, the
Nuqtaviyyah, the Mushashaah, and the Babis.
This is not to underestimate the epistemically violent impact of the
Islamic encounter with European colonialism in the making of the
Islamic Ideology that foregrounded the rise of the Islamic Republic (as
I have thoroughly documented it in my Theology of Discontent).6 This is
simply to trace and locate the genealogy of the Islamic revolution back to
Shii revolutionary disposition before we can account for its inner contra-
dictory dynamics, a fact entirely covered up by the false binary between
spiritual Islam and non-spiritual Islam. There is of course a significant
difference between the Shii revolution that Ayatollah Khomeini led in
19771979, and all the previous Shii revolutionsa difference that in
order to understand it we need to change gear to a slightly different regis-
ter, for right at the moment when the Babi Movement was defeated in the
mid-nineteenth century, and the Constitutional Revolution was about to
happen in the early twentieth century, something extraordinary happened
to Shiism that radically altered its course of historical developments.
THE TRAUMATIC SPLIT

To recapture my principle argument so far, in this chapter I have put for-
ward the proposition that during the Safavid period, Shiism was thor-
oughly urbanized and turned into a cosmopolitan project, taken out of its
historical battlefields and feudal scholasticism alike, with its revolutionary
reason urbanized into a public reason. Based on my extensive argument
in my book on Shiism, I suggest that at the Dasht-e Moghan gathering
(1736) Nader Shah managed to dismantle not just the Safavid dynasty, but
with it the civil societal possibilities it had made institutionally and discur-
sively evident, and with it the syncretic and cosmopolitan Shiism that it
had entailed. He thus managed to kill Shii cosmopolitanism and with it
SHIISM AT LARGE 137
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
Before the advent of colonial modernity, Iran, as a model of Shii cos-

mopolitanism, could have achieved its own two crucial forces of a public
reason and a public domain, but it did not for a number of interrelated
reasons: Its highest and most urbane cosmopolitanism was destroyed in
Dasht-e Moghan; the Qajar kings and the Shii clerical class institutionally
prevented its societal formations; Babism tried to retrieve it but ultimately
failed to sublate its revolutionary reason back to public reason because
the revolutionary rhetoric of the movement and its messianic mannerism
assumed the life of its own and ultimately transmuted into the incon-
sequential universalism of Bahaism. The reformist Qajar premier Amir
Kabir (18071852) soon emerged as the champion of European colo-
nial modernity. Thus as a grassroots and historic movement domestic
to Shiis doctrinal developments, Babism fell under Amir Kabirs more
urgent agenda, for the Qajar premier had to attend to a mightier force:
the European colonialism, seeking, as he did, to wrest from it the magic
of its colonial might.
So what we witness in Shiism from the Tobacco Revolt (18901891)
forward is that colonialism supersedes and augments the Qajar nomadic
monarchism as the interlocutor of the clerical establishment and in effect
globalizes and exacerbates their position of power, because they are now
dealing with a more powerful and global forcein effect the reactiva-
tion of their role because of the Russian and Ottoman imperial incursions,
but this time with an added sense of Ressentiment. The Constitutional
Revolution of 19061911 is the last pitched battle in which the Qajar and
segments of the clerical force seek to prevent the active transformation of
the revolutionary reason into public reason. As with the Babi Movement,
the young and progressive segments of the clerical class broke rank with
their more senior leaders and sided with the Constitutional Revolution,
which was the last historic attempt to retrieve the syncretic Shii cosmopol-
itanism and constitute a public space for a public reason by (1) retrieving
the revolutionary reason of Shiism through Babism, and (2) wedding it
to the best of a more global conception of cosmopolitanism that had come
down to the constitutionalists through the Caucuses. The Constitutional
Revolution succeeded in defeating and ultimately dismantling the Qajar
dynasty, but it was ultimately defeated by a combination of colonial paro-
chialism, monarchic tribalism, and clerical feudalism. In short, the Pahlavi
monarchy and its corresponding Shii clericalism ultimately came back
together to dismantle the troubled formation of public reason and public
space and divide it into their respective spheres of influences.
140 H. DABASHI
It is exactly at this point, the last attempt at securing a public space/

reason that I suggest the traumatic split in the modern history of Shii
modernity takes place, and divides the moral and imaginative universe of
Shiism into (1) an overtly militant nativism in politics, conditioned by
a general Muslim anxiety with modernity and the commencement of a
politics of despair, and (2) an over-aestheticized formalism in art in an
emancipatory direction. From the initial success but final failure of the
Constitutional Revolution to the rise of Reza Shah dictatorship, we wit-
ness a traumatic split in the struggle of Shiis for their own take on cos-
mopolitan worldlinessa split into aesthetic modernity on one side and
militant Islamism on the other. In my book on Shiism, I have detailed
this traumatic splitdefining its contours, giving an outline of its political
side in a militant Shiism, as well as navigating through aspects of its aes-
thetic modernity. So what we witness in the aftermath of the Constitutional
Revolution is an epistemic split of the template of modernity into two
divergent and extremist directions: (1) over-formalized aesthetics, and (2)
over-politicized Shii clericalism. This critical development, I suggest, is
rooted in the historic fact that when Mulla Sadra cultivated public reason,
what he did was simply philosophically to domesticate the revolutionary
reason he had inherited from the Hurufiyyah and other Sufi-Shii syncretic
movements on a public space that was royally truncated. So what we in
effect witness is that societal modernity (as Habermas calls it) yielding to
revolutionary modernity after the Safavids in Babism and to anticolonial
modernity after the Qajars. Nader Shah did indeed manage to dismantle
the Shii cosmopolitan syncretism after all, compromising its urban and
urbane disposition of the Safavid period because it was predicated on (1)
a public space that was royally truncated, (2) a philosophical existentialism
that had to urbanize a revolutionary reason on a royally manufactured and
thus slanted public space, and (3) absence of a societal cosmopolitanism
that could have emerged through economic productivity.
From Shaykhism to Babism to the Azalis, Shii revolutionary activ-
ists took Mulla Sadra down to the Constitutional Revolution, but from
Nader Shah to Reza Shah, now aided and abetted by the European colo-
nialism sustained the cause of nomadic monarchism, with a fake and
vacuous claim to pre-Islamic imperial heritage of the Achaemenids to
the Sassanids. Meanwhile, colonial condition of vicarious productivity
presented the social class formation and societal modernity. Thus, colo-
nial cultural modernity took up and catapulted to abstract postmodernity,
with no organic link to the economic logic of later capitalism, on which
SHIISM AT LARGE 141
Shiis had remained peripheral and parasitical; while in the absence of

any enduring political institution of capitalist modernity, militant Shiism
reverted back to its rebellious disposition, though now in full control of
the clerical class.
The circularity of territorial colonialism, tribal monarchism, and feudal
scholasticism made for an aggressive provincialization of the conception
and practice of overly political Shiism as defined by the clerical order. So
precisely at the moment when in artistic creativity, aesthetic formalism,
and poetic liberation the formalized traces of cosmopolitan Shiism went
transnational, cosmopolitan, and global, in politics precisely the reverse
happens and it becomes incessantly provincial. But this provincialization
of Shiism (or Islam in general) is not entirely in its own domestic terms
and out of a historic frustration with successive attempts at transforming
its revolutionary reason and generating a public space and a public reason.
The juridical disposition of Shiism (its Usulism) goes provincial also in
part because its interlocutor, the West (European colonialism), is con-
stitutionally provincial and thus it provincializes every country, clime, or
culture it touches. All colonial encounters are in fact provincial, because
the vacuous globality of the colonial project conquers and provincializes
the cultures it encounters at one and the same time.
Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic revolution in Iran
(19771979) resumed Mulla Sadra in philosophical theory but in politi-
cal practice, and by adversarial projection and negative identification
with Reza Shah and Mohammad Reza Shah, as a tribal chieftain in his
own right, for by then from Nader Shah to Reza Shah the belligerent
Persian monarchy had made societal modernity impossible except as state-
sponsored modernization, and thus had atomized Muslims to the point
that Khomeini could not see them as the free citizens and autonomous
agents of any emerging republic, but only as militant Shiis in battlefield
of IranIraq war, or else as the speculative subjects of the Usuli juris-
prudence (fiqh). Precisely at the moment when Ayatollah Khomeini and
his Islamic Republic were putting the final nail in the coffin of societal
modernity, Abbas Kiarostami and Shirin Neshat, chief among many oth-
ers, went vicariously postmodern and excessively formal in their art and
aesthetics. The result was the exacerbated condition of that split colonial
modernity that had thrived on a schizophrenic bipolarity: militant Islamism
practicing a politics of despair on one side and artistic formalism dream-
ing an aesthetic emancipation on the otherall because of the absence
of a bona fide societal modernity, conditioned by an endemic economic
142 H. DABASHI
vicariousness, caused and exacerbated by a globalized colonial economy.

The paradoxical outcome of this schizophrenic partition between a poli-
tics of despair and an aesthetic of emancipation was the eventual substitu-
tion of an aesthetic reason for a public reason that could not fully flower and
develop in the Shii social history. In effect, the autonomy of a postcolo-
nial aesthetics overcame and subverted the authority of a public reason
that could not fully emerge.
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
from Morocco to Jordan are poised to exacerbate the manufactured sec-

tarian proclivity of Muslims to sustain their blinded will to power and
control. Resisting that will to power and dwelling in and about Shiism
are the active memories of postcolonial ideological formations that have
historically resisted state power. These are not just adjacent ideological
shadows of Shiism but the mirroring images of it in the speculum of
its own alienated selves. In addition to these regional and global forces,
domestically a wide spectrum of movements for human rights, civil rights,
students rights, labor union rights, and above all womens rights force
Shiism to come to terms with its self-contradictory measures of brutal
repression in the Islamic Republic that it has succeeded in establishing.
The repressive measures of the Islamic Republic against its own citizens
render it a liability, not an asset, for liberation movements like Hezbollah
in Lebanon or Hamas in Palestine.
Shiism is today at the crosscurrents of the overriding politics of the
region. Conflicting ideologies shape and form, direct and animate, this
politics. The ultimate self-realization of Shiism, in body and soul, is
embedded in this emancipatory politics. To partake in it, the self-alienating
trap of secular versus religious divide will have to be surpassed. The defin-
ing moment of this emancipation is not the sectarian line between Shiism
and Sunnism either. Today in much of the Arab and Muslim world, Indian
and Sri Lankan (among scores of other) guest workers are the subaltern
of the subaltern, even more disenfranchised and abused than Palestinian
refugees. The presence of these guest laborers is by far the clearest indica-
tion that from the ground up the politics of sectarianism is long since out-
maneuvered, irrelevant, and entirely fabricated for political purposes. The
tsunami has started moving from the depth of the ocean and it is a matter
of time before it hits the shores of our presumed and delusional assurance.
Based on my earlier detailed study of Shiism, in this chapter I have
sought to work out the rise of public reason and aesthetic emancipa-
tion directly from the bosom of Iranian Shii history. I have therefore
offered this chapter toward the articulation of an Islamic worldliness
that embraces both Sunnism and Shiism and is today in dire need of a
renewed theoretical articulation. Through an aesthetic of emancipation I
wish to turn the current sectarian divide between Shii clericalism of Iran
and Sunni Wahabism of Saudi Arabia upside down and cite it as in effect
the repressed cosmopolitanism innate to the full-bodied Islamic heritage.
Through the philosophical discourse of Mulla Sadra, responding to the
social transformation of Shiism from a revolutionary to a public reason,
144 H. DABASHI
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
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
4. As an example of Seyyed Hossein Nasrs systematic mystification of

Mulla Sadras philosophy and its defacement into what he and other
mystics call Sophia Perennis see his Mulla Sadra: His Teachings, in
Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Oliver Leaman (Eds) History of Islamic
Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1996): 643652.
5. While the term Akhond is a an honorific title for all Shii cleric, The
Akhond is customarily used exclusively for Akhond Mulla Sadra
Shirazi, as a sign of utmost respect.
6. See Hamid Dabashi, Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundations
of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (New York: New York University
Press, 1993); second edition with a new Introduction (New Brunswick,
NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2005).
Chapter Six: Invisible Signs
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

148 H. DABASHI
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.
MURDERMOST FOUL, STRANGE, ANDUNNATURAL
On 20 June 2009, a young woman named Neda Agha-Soltan, accompa-

nied by her music teacher Hamid Panahi and a few other friends, decided
to join one of many massive protest rallies that ensued the discredited out-
come of the 2009 presidential election in Iran. As Neda Agha-Soltan was
watching the procession of the rally, at about 6:30 PM, she was suddenly
shot in her chest by a bullet and she began instantly bleeding profusely.
She watched the blood on her chest incredulously for a few seconds and
then fell down. A crowd gathered around her dying body and a young
physician named Arash Hejazi who happened to be nearby sought des-
perately to keep her alive but failed. She was instantly driven to a nearby
hospital, accompanied by her music teacher Hamid Panahi, but was soon
pronounced dead from the gunshot wound.
The amateur 90-second video clip capturing the moment of Neda
Agha-Soltans tragic death became a sudden Internet sensation and liter-
ally millions of people around the globe watched her as she breathed, her
eyes wide open and reddened with seeping blood, her very last breaths.
Later Time Magazine reported that her death was the most widely
watched moment of a persons final breath in human history. Neda Agha-
Soltan soon emerged as one of the most potent symbol of the ensuing
Green Movement in Iran.1 There are quite a number of other young men
and women who perished in the course of the initial stages of the Green
Movement in Iran, but none of them assumed the global attention that
Neda Agha-Soltan did, and for which reason she personified the entire
youthful opposition that had been in the making perhaps for the entire
duration of the Islamic Republic over the last 30 years.
Who killed Neda Agha-Soltan and why? The details of Neda Agha-
Soltans death were entirely contingent on two crucial bodies of evidence:
first, an amateur video made on a mobile phone by another participating
observant in the rally, and the eyewitness account of the young physician,
INVISIBLE SIGNS 149
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
Aghdashloo then adds pointedly to that insight, And beyond Wuthering

Heights, Kazantzakis Freedom or Death, as the camera shows the Persian
translation of the Greek novelists 1953 masterpiece Captain Michalis. An
appropriate melody accompanies all these pointed observations.
The propaganda machinery of the Islamic Republic would of course
not be outdone by HBO, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Azar Nafisi, Saeed
Kamali Dehghan, and Antony Thomas put together. On 11 June 2010,
just three days before the HBO released For Neda, the Islamic
Republic aired a new documentary called Taqato/Intersection (2010)
in which it tried to remedy some of the major holes in its version of
the story, including the fact that Arash Hejazi was not even in the car
that had carried Neda Agha-Soltan to the hospital. In this new version,
the officials now admitted that Neda Agha-Soltan had not in fact been
responsible for her own murder, had not flushed blood on her face by
herself, had not fled to Greece, and above all that Arash Hejazi had not
murdered her, and that the bullet that killed her was not from outside
of Iran as the Islamic Republics ambassador to Mexico had claimed. In
the new documentary, it was accepted that Neda Agha-Soltan had been
killed but at the same time her murder was now considered a mystery.
They had asked Hamid Panahi, her music teacher, if he had seen or
heard Abbas Kargar Javid on the scene, and he had said nofor by the
time people had identified the Basiji as the murderer, Hamid Panahi
and Neda Agha-Soltan had left the scene. The authorities thus took
Hamid Panahis testimony as an indication that no Basiji had anything
to do with the murder of the young woman. The case for them was now
closedimplicitly still holding on to the theory that CIA, BBC, and
CNN had something to do with it.
The plot thickened in favor of the Islamic Republics conspiracy theory
when a man named Caspian Makan, claiming to be Neda Agha-Soltans
fianc visited Israel in March 2010 and met with Israeli President Shimon
Peres.6 The conspiratorially minded pro-government Iranian press had a
field day with the picture of the young and dashing Caspian Makan sitting
next to the Israeli President with an Israeli flag in the immediate back-
ground. Not just Caspian Makan and Neda Agha-Soltan, but the whole
Green Movement, including its leaders, the organs of the Islamic Republic
now triumphantly declared, were stooges of Zionism and imperialism all
alongand here was the proof!7
To put a final twist to all of this, we learn that Arash Hejazi, though
not a very prominent physician, as he has repeatedly admitted himself,
INVISIBLE SIGNS 153
is instead an accomplished novelist, translator, and publisher. His most

famous novel Shahdokht-e Sarzamin-e Abadiyat/The Princess of the Land
of Eternity (2003) was shortlisted for two major Iranian literary prizes
and was a bestseller in the year of its publication. When he graduated
from medical school in 1996, the subject of his dissertation was The
Influence of storytelling in Curing Childrens Anxieties. Arash Hejazi
was also the official translator of the globally celebrated Brazilian nov-
elist Paulo Coelho into Persian, having translated many of his works
directly from Portuguese. Among other major literary figures Arash
Hejazi has also translated Milan Kundera into Persian. His own major
novel, The Princess of the Land of Eternity, is the story of a young stu-
dent named Pouria whose mother has passed away and during his visits
to her gravesite he encounters two strangers, a man and a woman, who
end up telling him varied stories at the center of which the lead protago-
nists who are also called Pouria are somewhat, but not completely, remi-
niscent of the young Pourias life himself.8 In an interview conducted
in 2001, Arash Hejazi says he began his writing career with translating
Agatha Christies whodunit crime mysteries into Persian.9
TRUTHS ONTHIS SIDE OFTHE

PYRENEESFALSEHOODS ONTHEOTHER
So who did it, who is telling the truth? Who killed Neda Agha-Soltan
and why?10 Is this all a game of representationHBO commercialism,
Antony Thomas penchant for Oriental princesses, Shohreh Aghdashloos
bourgeois feminism international, and Azar Nafisis Kaffeeklatsch litcrit
all coming together on one side and the propaganda machinery of the
Islamic Republic on another? What about realitythe truth? Has real-
ity vanished, murdered point blank and in broad daylight, just like Neda
Agha-Soltan? Has the sign Neda subsumed and gobbled up the per-
son Neda Agha-Soltan? Is this just a sickening game of politics played
between the conspiratorial hallucinations of a delusional theocracy that
calls itself an Islamic Republic and the rescue fantasy of a bourgeois
feminism willy-nilly paving the way for the systematic demonization of any
culture of resistance to neoliberal/neoconservative delirium so that when
the US marines are sent in there is a sense of reliefor is there a fact and
force to the wasted life of a young woman gunned down at the prime of
her life, who may or may not have been reading Lolita in Tehran?
154 H. DABASHI
Are acts of representation competing cacophonies of pointless pander-

ing to no availin this case, oscillating and caught in between bourgeois
fanaticism of one sort and state-sponsored banality of another? Which is
the truth? Is truth possible, or is the soul of poor Neda Agha-Soltan now
in a purgatory between an Oriental harem full of little Lolitas waiting
to be rescued by the white men, on one side, and the Islamic Republics
matching charlatanism, on the other? Is there any truth left in between?
Did Neda Agha-Soltan actually die, did she ever live, and was she a real
human being? Or is she a victim of a dual set of propaganda? The open
eyes of Neda Agha-Soltan, as she lay there dying, stare at two parallel sets
of visual regimes and wonders: did she die in vain?
Is the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan also the murder of realitythe
same reality that Jean Baudrillard thought murdered by the disappearance
of illusion into reality?11 What made reality real, possible, and detectable
was the fact of illusion, the presence of absence, the possibility of deten-
tion, and the accumulated wisdom of subtractions that implicated all their
own opposites. What we have forgotten in modernity, Baudrillard sur-
mised, by dint of constantly adding, going for more, is that force comes
from subtraction, power from absence.12 But not any longerright? The
more you watch the clip of Neda Agha-Soltan dying the less it means any-
thing, the more it becomes a tabula rasa for the HBO documentary or
the Islamic Republic propaganda machinery to write on it whatever they
wish. Has the world become a thing of vacuous transparency and visuality,
where reality, swamped by the real time of the news media, has vanished
into the thin air? Did the anonymous cameraperson who shot Neda Agha-
Soltan dying was the co-conspirator of the Basiji who evidently shot her
dead? Is it really the case that everything, as Baudrillard says, withdraws
behind its own appearanceso much so that the fact of the murder of
Neda Agha-Soltan is forever lost into the repetition of the original video
clip, feeding into the two adjacent abysses of bourgeois feminism and the
militant Islamism it loves to hate? Arent these two conflicting claims to
truth at the end mediated by the testimonies of a writer of fiction, a wit-
ness named Arash Hejazi who may not be a good physician but he is
certainly a good novelist, a translator of among others Agha Christis who-
dunit crime mysteries?
If the revolt of signs, defying their tyrannical legislations into one visual
regime (the Islamic Republic propaganda) or another (the Expat Iranian
Opposition), is ultimately, as Guy Debord gathered, commodity fetish-
ism run amuck, does the transmutation of fact into phenomenon in the
INVISIBLE SIGNS 155
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 MURDER HAS NO TONGUE

The approximation of Yoshiro Mifune/Tajomaru/bandit/murderer/rap-
ist to Abbas Kargar Javid, as I suggest here, posits the combination of
the unfortunate bride and bridegroom Machiko Kyo/Masako Kanazawa/
the raped woman and her young husband Masayuki Mori/Takehiro
Kanazawa both to Neda Agha-Soltan, which makes Arash Hejazi the
Takashi Shimura/Woodcutter of Rashomon. The point of the allegori-
cal assimilation, following Walter Benjamin, is to leave Neda Agha-Soltans
innocent and dying body (the bodily debris of the evidence) staring at us
for an answer from the beginning to the end of the eternity that is at the
heart of Kurosawas masterpiece. In other words, I am snatching Neda
Agha-Sultans dying body away from that video clip and vicariously edit-
ing it into Kurosawas film, via an additional sequence that, in Eisensteins
language, would probably shift the visual register of the edit from metric
to rhythmic, or from tonal to overtonal.13
If we do that, as we might, then as in her counterparts in Rashomon,
namely both Masako Kanazawa and Takehiro Kanazawa, Neda as an
abused signifier does not overwhelm Neda Agha-Soltan the young woman
murdered in the course of an oppositional rally in Tehran. For Neda, the
HBO documentary, wants to capture and commercialize the sign Neda
INVISIBLE SIGNS 157
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
did in Of Grammatology (1967), published the same year as Debords The

Society of the Spectacle was to posit sign as a suggestion of diffrance in dis-
rupting the Sausserian model and thus resorting to signs their chaotic dis-
position, so that there is no unmoved mover of the sign systemand we
just float in signs, toward a signatory meltdown or semiosis. Study of sign
under erasure identifies it as already inhabited, or possessed by another
sign that points to yet another sign. Almost at the same time as Derrida
but entirely independent of him and in the literary domain, Paul de Man
in Criticism and Crisis (1967) was even more radical in his pronounce-
ment that what in effect we are witnessing in a literary work of art is a
complete breakdown between sign and meaning (between Neda and
Neda Agha-Soltan, in our case), for literature means nothing, and every-
thing is literature. Unable to bear this about literature, we assign political,
social, or any other such significance to literature, resist it how it may.17
In his System of Objects (1968), Jean Baudrillard had given an out-
line of the self-preferentiality of the infinity of advertising signs to have
become a reality sui generis. Later in his Consumer Society (1970), he fur-
ther explored the systematization of commodities into signs and signs into
floating signifiers inciting unfounded desires. Commodity-sign as a reality
sui generis became the modus operandi of capital, for they did not fulfill
any material needs but aggressively incorporated individuals, now utterly
signified themselves, into a social order of signs. Later on, in his Watching
Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture (2005), Nicholas
Mirzoeff pushed forward the globalized semiology of runaway signs into
the military domain, whereby the experience of watching the war against
Iraq on television, the Internet, the cinema, and print media shows how
the endless stream of images posited a new form of visual thinking, in
which images had become weapons.
This entire trajectory of signs signaling themselves into a semiosis has,
as it will have to have, an entirely different register in the world outside
the matrix that keeps encoding itself as the Westfor ipso facto the
Rest is different. The condition of postcoloniality, namely when capital
has exposed its decentered globality, is the restoration, or the recognition,
of the chaotics of the sign, of its not having been yet signified, colonized.
The transmutation of the chaotic sign into a solid signifier is an act of
systematic semiotic colonization, of making signs do one thing and one
thing onlymean and mean one thing alone. The condition of postcolo-
niality restores to sign its self-evident defiance, for the worldly condition
of postcoloniality has always been marked outside the Western matrix.
INVISIBLE SIGNS 159
Image 1 Amir Naderi, The Runner, 1985

A cinematic genealogy of the national memory carries its subterranean roots to meet
their visual metaphors. Here is a shot from one of the masterpieces of Iranian cinema,
Amir Naderis The Runner (1985), where the life of a young boy from Southern Iran
becomes allegorical to unending struggles. Amiru lives in an abandoned ship, makes
a living by working at all sorts of odd jobs, from collecting to sell empty bottles to
shining shoes. He loves running, from nowhere to anywhere. Running is what he
does, on every occasion, for every reason and for no reason at all. From this simple
story, Naderi crafts a work of art of unsurpassed power, quiet elegance, and subdued
beauty. Where does that power reside? It dwells in the cinematic will of Naderis alle-
gorical storytelling, his uncanny ability to allow for the forms he creates to find and
assume a life of their own. Naderis aesthetic formalism is proverbial to his cinema,
which in fact began with his overriding and professional interest in photography. The
storyline of The Runner is as thin as possible. The boy, Amiru, is not going anywhere.
He just runs, from one end of the screen to another. It is towards the end of the film
when Amiru and his friends engage in a running competition towards a vanishing
piece of ice melting by a hellish fire that the film finds its formalist absolutism, where
Naderi with a strike of filmic genius transfuses that piece of ice from trophy into sur-
vival and from there into salvation. The movie is elemental, with water, wind, fire, and
dust the four forces of its nature defining its filmic power. At the root of the brute and
elemental natural forces, Naderi reaches a cosmic certainty, a metaphysical assurance
with people, their habitat, and their survival. Never seen in the company of a father or
a mother, Amiru gives birth to himself, from within himself, born and bread to and
by mother earth herself. Patriarchy is hereby dismantled for good, and all the political
cultures (monarchic or mullarchic) rendered obsolete.
160 H. DABASHI
The dissolution of the signifier into chaotic sign as an exacerbation of the

commodity fetishism at the presumed center of capitalist modernity has
now yielded to the overriding condition of the globalized capital produc-
ing tyranny and poverty globally. The production of the masses of poverty,
the condition of subalternity, is thus conducive toward a semiotics (not a
semiosis) of postcoloniality.
THE UNRULY SIGNS

What we witness in the matrix that still insists calling itself the West is
how in the aftermath of the European Holocaust the world disappears
into itself, into the unruly sign, and how the very proposition of a mean-
ingful semiotics descended into a chaotic semiosis. But from the heart of
the selfsame Holocaust horror, there was another sign that we need to
read to see the alternative vision of the world, the world at large, beyond
that semiotic meltdown of meaning, and where the world still remains in
dire need of a signal reassertion of itself.
Long before the rise of poststructuralist semiotics, Walter Benjamin
had seen through the collapse of the world into fragmented signs in his
Trauerspiel (1927), in which he treated allegory as a literary trope that
dismantles finitude and totality and thus best posited itself in tune with the
worldly impermanence, the coming to terms with its inconclusive indeter-
minacy. For Benjamin, the enigmatic disposition of allegory rests on its
intuition of this indeterminacy. The transmutation of the world into signs
is what sustains the allegorical take on the world.18 As Bainard Cowan
puts it, allegory [for Benjamin] arises from an apprehension of the world
as no longer permanent, as passing out of being: a sense of its transitori-
ness, an intimation of mortality, or a conviction . . . that this world is not
conclusion.
If this world is not the conclusion then what is it, where is it? That
apprehension of the world dawned on Europe in the critical moment
of its moral and normative self-immolation during and after the Jewish
Holocaust. As European thinkers realized in the critical moment of their
post-Holocaust anxiety, we in the outside world, the world outside the
matrix code-named the West, cannot afford the free-floating foreplay of
assuming signs clueless. That system of signs may have indeed imploded
in the Western matrix, for inside that matrix meaning had become self-
referential. But on the colonial site, the world at large, which includes
the masses of indigenous and immigrant suffering in Western Europe
INVISIBLE SIGNS 161
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:
A substantive notion of truth is the first assumption of any theory or prac-

tice of allegory that sees it as more than a usable technique, as rather what
Benjamin calls a constant against the historical variable The notion
of truth intended by Benjamin is not the Aristotelian one of truth as an
adequatio existing in the relation between sign and signified, but rather the
Platonic conception of truth as a transcendent reality in which objects may
only partakethe plain of Truth spoken of in the Phaedrus. By resorting
to a fictional mode literally of other-discourse (allegoria), a mode that
conceals its relation to its true objects, allegory shows a conviction that the
truth resides elsewhere and is not detachable in relations between sign and
signified. Furthermore, because allegory always makes so bold as to claim it
points at the truth, its authentic defense must refute sophistic relativism as
well as the now-fashionable assertion of semiosis as pure play. Truth exists
as a goal, though not beyond signification.19
Thus a Platonic notion of truth, bypassing the Aristotelian absolutist

monism between a static signifier and its lawfully wedded signified, sus-
tains a semiotics whereby there is a transcendent truth in which signs pur-
posefully partake. This semiotics points to a plain of truth where signs
extract from society their allegorical mode of what you will soon hear me
callnot signification, butsignation.
As the Western matrix thus contemplates the dissolution of societies
into signs, facts into fantasies, difference into diffrance, and semiotics
into semiosis, the world at the thither end of its fears and aspirations see
signs as agitating signations for otherwise than reality. Society, for which
the science of sociology was invented to discover and invent it at one and
the same time, is ipso facto legislated and scripted, while a purposeful con-
stellation of signs we call cinema is the chaotics caused by their traces and
162 H. DABASHI
signatures. The sovereignty of signs staged thus to play, cinema becomes

the formal occasion of the visual event, in which signs mean nothing; and
if they are left alone to mean nothing in particular they begin to signify
many other unauthorized things. The authority of the evident resides in
the absolutist disposition of signs, where we can encounter visuality as an
event, as an abrogation.
Signs on this surface signate and mean nothing, but they, in precisely
meaning nothing, magnify many other thingsand this is precisely what
Benjamin thought allegory did. Cinema is the art of the in/visible in
which signs do not mean anything, and if they are allowed and left alone
to mean nothing, they will turn around and imply everything and cause
a havoc in the society that seeks to sustain and incarcerate them inside a
semiotics of sustained signification. They dont, they wont, they refuse,
and they rebel. Walter Benjamin saw that chaos and because the signature
paradox of German anti-Semitism would eventually lead to Holocaust,
in desperation he would soon take his own life. His death becomes an
allegory of his own making, of his own theory, a sign that signated many
things but signified nothingand that is precisely the reason we keep
remembering it, exactly the way the picture of Neda Agha-Soltan dying
will not be subsumed by any banality that seeks to buy it for one propa-
ganda machinery or another.
Allegory as sign, or taking for a ride the fragments of truth that con-
tain its whole, is where we can in fact take the part for the whole, where
metonymy is no longer just a figure of speech but a sign of something
else, and where the fragments indeed do hold the whole, as perhaps best
evident now in Elia Suleimans fragmentary, metonymic, cinema.
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
CHAOTICS OFTHESIGNS: HOW SIGNS SIGNATE

The death of Neda Agha-Sultan occurs on a camera that has preserved
for the posterity the silent signs of a murder encoded by both Benjamin
and Eisensteins codification of cinematic allegory: fragmented signs that
mean and signify beyond any legislated semantics of a ruling regime of
power or its manufactured opposition. The condition of postcolonial-
ity is the restoration, or the recognition, or the retrieval, of the chaotic
of the sign, of its not having been yet signified, controlled, canonized,
colonized, and codified into obedience. The transmutation of the chaotic
sign into a solid signifier is an act of canonical colonization, of making
signs do one thing and one thing only. The dissolution of the signifier
into chaotic signs as an exacerbation of commodity fetishism at the pre-
sumed center of capitalist modernity speaks of a larger meltdown. The
globalized capital has produced tyranny and poverty globallyand thus
the resurrection of signs as the scattered debris of disobedience and in
defiance. The masses of poverty, the condition of subalternity, are thus
historically conducive to the making of a semiotics of postcoloniality long
suppressed, long overdue.
Throughout her work as a photographer, video artist, and filmmaker,
Shirin Neshat has sought to liberate those mutated signs from their incar-
cerated bondage and let them loose to signate freely, in self-propelling,
self-mutating, and self-multiplying ways beyond the control of any sys-
temic metaphysics embedded in an overriding semiotics. Shirin Neshat is
a Trojan Horseplanted in the metropolis from the fictive colony that is
and is not Iran. As a postcolonial liberator of the incarcerated signs, it is
constitutional to her art that she invariably teases her always inadvertent
audience. Her audience thinks it is watching something, but it is always
watching something else. That sense of fragmented reality, of the seamless
narration of the world torn into bits and pieces of itself, is also evident in
the cinema of the Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman, and the work of
the Palestinian photographer Tarek Al-Ghoussein who both do the same
with staging figments of their aesthetic imagination far from their ancestral
land. What we see in their work is a revelation: Signs, restored to their
originary power, signate. They do not signify. They mean nothing. They
are made (as in forced) to mean, in some formal symbolic order, against
their defiant will. That will is inherently anarchic, subversive, and anxiety-
provoking. The counter-will to make signs signify is a repressive measure
to incarcerate their defiant revolt.
INVISIBLE SIGNS 165
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.
THAT UNBROKEN IMAGE INTHEBROKEN MIRROR

The chaotics of sign is the salvation of the world that cannot stand their
unruly behavior. The chaotics of sign is the point of no return, the melt-
down of commodity fetishism beyond any culture industry. At the end of
the tyranny of meaning of a meaningless world stands the revolution of
the sign against all cruel dictionaries of a legislated economy of colonial
conditioning of the globe.
But beyond the chaotics of sign is not the tyranny of despair. Fragments
of reality, signs and signals that fragment and yet hold it together, always
gel to mean something else, something other than here and now. In the
same manner that Walter Benjamin took the allegorical segment of reality
to navigating the overcoming of the totalizing claims of truth-telling, or
that Sergei Eisenstein went down to the fragmented forces of montage as
the building bloc of any assemblage of narration that tells and dismantles
170 H. DABASHI
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?
Fragmentation of reality (broken into simple signs) is here contingent

on the totality of a purposeful need to read it coherently, an optical delu-
sion that enables a will to life. The fate of the world and the ills that haunt
it cannot be abandoned, and is not abandoned, to the bourgeois banality
of a globalized cannibalization of other peoples struggles for the delu-
sional fantasies of bourgeois feminism on one side of the ring and the hal-
lucinatory fascism of an Islamic Republic on the other. Ultimately, there
is no difference between the dangerous delusions that sustains a brutal
theocracy like the Islamic Republic and the mendacious musings of the
feminism international that informs HBOs For Neda. They are two
worn out sides of the same outdated coin that refuses to see how long
it is it has been out of circulation. The world, alas, is governed by the
degenerative self-deceptions that these farcical fantasies cross-generate and
cross-sustain. But the fact of the world, the material defiance of its delu-
sions, demands and demonstrates a far different fate for our fragile globe.
Invisible signs mean nothing and in meaning nothing they dismantle both
the absolutist fascism of tyrannies and imperial regime changers that
want it to mean one thing and one thing only. Nation itself is this sign,
and the video of the death of Neda Agha-Soltan is the resounding sign
of the rebirth of this new nation of defiant signssinging the eulogy of a
sacrificial signature of its renewed pact with history.
INVISIBLE SIGNS 171
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
piece of investigative journalism at once far less sensationalist and thus

heavily overshadowed by HBOs For Neda.
11. See Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime. Translated by Chris Turner
(London: Verso, 1996).
12. Ibid: 4
13. For more details, see Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film
Theory (New York: Harcourt, 1969): 7284.
14. See Hamid Dabashi, Taziyeh as Theater of Protest, in Peter
Chelkowski (Ed), Eternal Performance: Taziyeh and Other Shiite
Rituals (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010).
15. Translators Preface to Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology. Translated
by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1974): lxxvii.
16. See Wine and Milk, in Roland Barthes, Mythologies. Translated by
Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972): 5861.
17. See Criticism and Crisis, in Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight:
Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (London: Routledge,
1983): 319.
18. For a study of Adornos theory of allegory see Bainard Cowan,
Walter Benjamins Theory of Allegory (New German Critique, No.
22, Special Issue on Modernism): Winter, 1981: 109122.
19. Ibid: 113.
20. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory (New York:
Harcourt, 1969): 60.
21. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory (Op. Cit.): 6061.
22. Charles Sanders Peirce, Peirce on Sign: Writings on Semiotics. Edited
by James Hooper (Chapel Hill and London: University of North
Carolina: Press, 1991): 141143.
Chapter Seven: A Transnational
Public Sphere
A major point of contention I was pushing forward in Chapter Six was to

place the body of an innocent citizen at the receiving end of a bulletfor
which the conniving 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 taming 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 what it wishes to become a dominant truth. Here I
return to regional and global context of the nation via a critical assessment
of the transnational public sphere upon which the nation is fathomed and
repeatedly performed. This works toward a detailed account of the pub-
lic sphere that is transnational in its origins and contexts and embraces
and conditions the national destiny. Here my contention is that the very
notion of the nation has ipso facto a transnational origin and therefore
relies on (for it is rooted in) that amorphous framing to renew itself.
WHEN ANAME BECOMES ALIENATED FROMITSELF

Iran as a name, a designation, a self-contained referent, has become
something of a stultified sign, fetishized, alienated from the terms of its
own dynamic engagementsas the signature of some 75 million plus
human beings trapped inside that signal designation of who they are or

174 H. DABASHI
might be. In the mass mediaincreasingly absorbed into the cyberspace

and digitized into the chaotic but nevertheless liberating new media,
which includes the old but happily is not limited to or by itIran is tossed
around between its domestic human rights abuses and its image as a threat
to regional and global peace by virtue of its suspected nuclear program
and its support foras the US and its regional and European allies call
anything they do not like and see as a threat to their interestterrorism.
Then every once in a while we hear about a great Iranian film or a
magnificent Iranian art festival, and we wonder what to make of it all.
One might argue (as I have done in my Post-Orientalism: Knowledge
and Power in Time of Terror) that at this stage we have gone far beyond
classical Orientalism and even Area Studies as the paramount modes of
knowledge production (about Iran or any one of its neighboring coun-
tries or even continents) at the recognizable interest of any particular
institution of power. After those phases of knowledge and power, we
entered the stage where the think tanks produce what I have called dis-
posable knowledge, or knowledge under duressknowledge that
think tanks manufacture for a particular military operation and dispense
with it before they move on to the next target, as it were, of opportunity.
But these think tanks are no longer interested in public persuasion or
what Noam Chomsky has aptly called manufacturing consent. There
is no longer any need for consent for it to be genuine or manufactured.
The military, security, and intelligence apparatus of the US Empire and
all its friends and foes alike produce their own necessary and instrumen-
tal knowledge, very much like the commercials intended to sell certain
brands of a productso much so that all information has in effect become
infomercials. What they are selling is a false sense of security, intelligence,
and military prowess. In every North American airport these days you
see advertisements for the American military posters next to other post-
ers for an advertisement for Calvin Klein, as you are checked through an
entirely false sense of security, and its racial profiling of terror. We sell
underwear that is more or less as dispensable or enduring as the sense of
security, the assumption of intelligence, and the bravura of militarism that
we advertise next to it.
By the same token, however, the public space that has been vacated by
agencies of power has also been liberated and thus occupied to produce
its own modes of knowledge, knowledge in the interest of the common
good, the good of the common, in issues ranging from the environments
to economy to liberating cultural contestations of the politics of despair.
A TRANSNATIONAL PUBLIC SPHERE 175
In this epistemic context, the current conceptual matrix with which we

read and understand Iran in the global media is predicated on a number of
quite limited, broad, and generic brushes. Iran is seen as posing a nuclear
threat to its regional and global contexts. The Jewish state of Israel in
particular considers the Islamic Republic of Iran an existential threat to
its existence. Israel is closely followed by Saudi Arabia and other Persian
Gulf states as being a regional nuisance. It is a country that is notori-
ous for its human rights abuses, while it is seen as actively supporting
terrorismin specific reference to its support for Hezbollah in Lebanon
and Hamas in Palestine. By imposing crippling economic sanctions and
keeping the possibility of even a military strike, both the USA and Israel
have laser-beamed on Iran as their number one regional concern, even
more threatening than the bloody unfolding in Syria. Iran is also seen
as the chief ally of Syria that along with Russia and China is keeping the
belligerent regime of Bashar al-Assad in power against a massive popular
uprising militarized by US and its Arab allies. Iran is also seen to be in
friendly terms with Latin American countries like that of Venezuela under
the late Hugo Chavez and thus threatening the regional interest of the
USA even in its own backyard, as the US is wont of calling an entire
continent. These conceptual categories with which Iran is currently read
(mostly drawn and extrapolated from the current and rapidly changing
geopolitics of the region) are quite limited but vastly dominant in the
global configuration of the Islamic Republic as a nation-state. Soon after
the historic nuclear deal between Iran and the five permanent members of
the United Nation Security Council plus Germany (5+1) on 15 July 2015,
these terms began to yield to the presumption of the increasing power of
Iran in the region, with much fanfare but limited substance.
If we turn from the regional and global geopolitics toward the domes-
tic affairs of Iran, the limited disposition of the conceptual matrix is not
that much narratively richer or cognitively more complicated. The post-
presidential election crisis of 2009 that its supporters call Jonbesh-e
Sabz/the Green Movement and the ruling regime dismisses as
Jarayan-e Fetneh/the Seditious Affair shook the Islamic Republic to its
foundations. It was brutally repressed and the contestation between the
Osulgarayan/Principalists and the Eslahtalaban/Reformists soon created
a tertiary faction around President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his sup-
porters. A mismatched body of expatriate oppositions such as the MEK
and the Pahlavi monarchists and a number of other more minor but nev-
ertheless quarrelsome figures come together to threaten the regime and
176 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.
TOWARD AMORE LIBERATING PLANE

From these two complementary and rather static angles, we need to move
up toward a more liberating plane that embraces these two perspectives
and yet sees beyond their embedded limitations. This perspective is far
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
Positing this anteriority, this self-transparency that is so present-at-hand

that escapes cognitive recognitions, Abbas Kiarostamis photography, very
much rooted in his cinema, thrives on empty and expansive landscapes,
vast and vacated panoramic visions of emptiness, or else a solitary tree
or traveler that in fact accentuates that vacuity. This is a rediscovery of
land and landscape, home and habitat, form and formal abstractions, fram-
ing a crowded life that obscures the terms of its own emancipation. The
result is a visual contemplation of form that generates a poetic implo-
sion in our received conception of space. Just as Freud suggests in Moses
and Monotheism (1937) that the very conception of God makes abstract
thought possible, Abbas Kiarostamis abstract landscapes liberates the
conception of home from homeland, geography from demography, his-
tory from historiography, as he teases out the poetry of the visual from the
prose of historicality, thereby liberating the nation from the nation-state.
Freud rightly argued how the vast abstraction of any theology in effect
liberated humanity from bondage of the empirical world. In Kiarostamis
visual registers, the emotive anteriority of the knowing subject is equally
made passible. From his Koker trilogy to his photography, and The
Wind will carry us, roads are definitive to his landscape. In an essay on
Kiarostamis cinema, Ian Buruma notes:
The peculiar genius of Kiarostami [is] in explor[ing] human character, and

the vagaries of human lives, without explaining, without turning the lives
into neat stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Life isnt logical,
nor are our encounters with others. People are rarely what they seem to
beto themselves, or to others. Which is why Kiarostamis films, though
often detached, even artificial, still feel like life.1
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
the melodic improvisations on various musical instruments. Namjoo is

trying to do to classical Persian music what Nima has done to classical
Persian poetry: breaking down its melodies and harmonies to rediscover
the innate music of sounds prior to their classical codifications into the
monumental might of various Persian musical modules. He has dared to
fuse high classical poetry with street talk colloquialism, which results in an
irreverent lyricism that has caused him much difficulty in his own home-
land and forced him into exile in California, still under severe criticism by
neoclassicists who have no patience for his musical adventurism. Among
the most controversial pieces of music he has done is his singing of the
Quran in an entirely non-canonical manner, angering the officials of the
Islamic Republic and becoming even the target of a lawsuit. He grabs hold
of a poem by the master of Persian ghazal Hafez and he sings it backward
and with only half of the complete lines, and yet have the result make per-
fect poetic and musical sense.
From the assured serenity of Kiarostami at one end to the defiant flam-
boyance of Namjoo on another, the aesthetic reason at the heart of the
defiant nation continues to map out a topography of its inner dynamics
far beyond the radars and registers of the state that claims it, and a fortiori
the geopolitics of a region that cannot but reduce the entire humanity of
nations to their radical or moderate politics.
TRUTH MUST BEBEAUTIFUL

In my Shiism: A Religion of Protest (2010), I have already demonstrated
(and in Chapter Five gave you a more detailed account of) how the realms
of politics and aesthetics were historically separated and creatively sev-
ered. It is during the nineteenth century and in the aftermath of the Babi
Movement (18441852), the last attempt at securing a public space/rea-
son, that I have suggested the traumatic split in the modern history of Shii
modernity takes place, and divides the moral and imaginative universe of
Shiism into (1) an overtly militant nativism in politics, conditioned by a
general Muslim anxiety with European colonial modernity and the com-
mencement of a politics of despair, and (2) an over-aestheticized formal-
ism in art in an emancipatory direction. Furthermore, from the initial
success but final failure of the Constitutional Revolution to the rise of
Reza Shah dictatorship, we witness a traumatic split in the struggle of
Shiis for their own take on cosmopolitan modernitya split into aesthetic
modernity on one side and militant Islamism on the other. I devoted the
180 H. DABASHI
final chapters of my book on Shiism to this traumatic splitdefining its

contours, giving an outline of its political side in a militant Shiism, as well
as navigating through aspects of its aesthetic modernity, entirely alienated
from the sites of its political contestations.
What we witness in the aftermath of the Constitutional Revolution is
an epistemic split of the template of colonial modernity into two diver-
gent and extremist directions: (1) over-formalized aesthetics, and (2)
over-politicized Shii clericalism. This critical development, I suggest, is
rooted in the historic fact that when the prominent philosopher Mulla
Sadra (c. 15721640) cultivated the simulacrum of a public reason, what
he did was simply philosophically to domesticate the revolutionary reason
he along with other Shiis had inherited from the Hurufiyyah and other
Sufi-Shii syncretic movements on a public space that was crafted by the
Safavid dynasty, and thus royally truncated. So what we in effect witness
is that societal modernity (as Habermas calls it) yielding to revolutionary
modernity after the Safavids in Babism and to anticolonial modernity after
the Qajars. Nader Shah (c. 16881747) did indeed manage to dismantle
the Shii cosmopolitan syncretism after all, compromising its urban and
urbane disposition of the Safavid period because it was predicated on (1)
a public space that was royally truncated, (2) a philosophical existential-
ism that had to urbanize a revolutionary reason on a royally manufactured
and thus slanted public space, and (3) absence of a societal modernity that
could have emerged through economic productivity.
That fateful split between militant nativism in politics and over-
aestheticized formalism in art, exacerbated under colonial duress, has now
in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (19771979) run its
course, exhausted its epistemic energies, and we can thus begin the criti-
cal task of rethinking them back together. That rethinking is now both
possible and necessary precisely because of the condition I have termed
the end of postcoloniality,2 namely the condition in which the modus
operandi of ideology production has finally climaxed and exhausted itself
and the new condition of the Empire and the amorphous capital whose
smooth operation it tries but fails to protect requires a different mode of
political thinking that is rooted in the creative imagination of the people
practicing that politics.
An alternative path of coming to terms with this period is to come to the
self-imaginative fusion between politics and poetics through the humanist
rather than the scholastic tradition, as I have demonstrated in The World of
Persian Literary Humanism, which has conditioned a manner of literary
subjection as a self-conscious worlding of the world that nativist histori-

ography, European Orientalism, and American literary criticism alike have
silenced by their respective narrative urges to flatten out the world against
the presumed centrality of the allegory of the West that they habitually
take for real by way of allegorizing the rest of the world.
The literary nationalism of the postcolonial world has unknowingly
corroborated this episteme by competing in producing ethnic nationalist
historiographies of their own. Contrary to the very grain of this train of
thinking in literary history and theory, the locus classicus of the first three
phases of Persian literary humanismfrom ethnos to logos to ethos (and
as I described in detail in Chapter One)has been the royal courts of
vast empires, while the location of the very last phase, chaos, is the public
space that Persian literary imagination has termed vatan/nation and writ-
ten with vatanparasti/nationalism and carved it somewhere in between
the Persianate courts it had exited and the European courts into which it
had no entry. Both European Orientalism and American literary criticism,
and a fortiori Iranian nativist historiography, have misread this notion
of vatan/nationone by ethnicizing Persian literary humanism in its
entirety and the other by colonizing it as Third World literature, or even
worse World literature, and thus declaring all Third World literature
are national allegories.3 This collusion of false readings is an expression
of nothing more innocent/sinister than simply being embedded in one
imperial imaginarythe one that calls itself the Westthat has imagi-
natively overcome and glossed over the historical fact and continued reso-
nance of other worldly empiresand now casting its long shadow over the
long history that has preceded it.
To see the site of that organic aesthetic reason, we need to understand
the public space that had originally occasioned and staged it with its art-
ists and literati. The fusion of the steadily abstracted aesthetic reason and
the ideologically monopolized state apparatus requires that we read the
emerging site of resistance to power of both the royal court and the cleri-
cal order as the public space upon which public reason is the moral and
intellectual manifestation of that increasingly abstracted aesthetic reason.
This public and parapublic sphere (which I read through a modifica-
tion of its articulation by Habermas for the colonial and the postcolonial
sites) is somewhere between the state and the civil society and its critical
faculties emerge through the active formations of literary and political
cultures of not just the modern bourgeois but also the subaltern classes
that it generates and disenfranchises.4 We come close to the formation
182 H. DABASHI
of this public reason through the introduction of modern technologies

of mass education such as the printing machine, simplification of prose
for more urgent public consumption, rapid urbanization, the spread of
literacy, the rise of new literary forms like the novel, literary and political
journalism, translation movements, the reconceptualization of the bazaar
and coffee houses, the emergence of schools, colleges, and universities
outside the purview of the clerical establishment and the madrasa system,
the popularity of literary clubs, salons, and a myriad of other voluntary
associations with a critical perspective on the fate of the nation that is now
being categorically defined as the locus classicus of the public sphere. To
the possibility of that public sphere I add the fact of a parapublic sphere
and thus propose the nation as infinitely more enabled once conceptu-
ally decoupled from its colonial heritage of the nation-state.
Under the duress of encounter with colonial modernity, postcolonial
nation-states thus crafted a fictive national consciousness, predicated on
a categorically nationalized history, geography, culture, character, liter-
ary and art heritage, and so on and underlying them all the active for-
mation of a national economy, society, and polity. This was a forced but
naturalized nationalization of otherwise dynastic histories converging
into various imperial contexts. The active formation of various ethnic
nationalisms inevitably privileged some and disenfranchised others
such as the Kurds who were fragmented and divided into four adjacent
nation-states of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, and their subsequent his-
tory of disenfranchisement, humiliation, and brutal suppression para-
doxically intensified their sense of victimhood and entitlement to their
own ethnic nation-state.
All of these multiple and varied forms of nationalization of postimperial
consciousness were predicated on an active formation of the public space
that the emerging public intellectuals had crafted and occupied. Poets,
novelists, journalists, dramatists, artists, filmmakers all came together to
claim and call their vatan/homeland as now the location of their emerg-
ing public sphere, and not the site of any ethnic nationalism, and as such
no state could lay a complete claim on them. Soon ethnic nationalism
(Persian) took over and centralized the notion of vatan, and thus ideo-
logically appropriated that space instead of allowing the organic expansion
of the public spaceexactly the opposite of what was in fact happening
by virtue of the increasingly globalized market economy. That process has
today finally hit a cul-de-sac, and the organic growth of the public and
parapublic spaces into global dimensions has become evident and renewed
Image 1 Abbas Kiarostami, Untitled, from the Roads series, 1989

The territorial can become ironically abstract and visually autonomous. Here in
Abbas Kiarostamis landscape photography, from his Road series, the idea of the
homeland explodes into visual celebration of itself. This series of photography
emerge from Kiarostamis penchant for the long shots of roads in his cinema.
These long shots here exit any narrative employment and become autonomous
entities. In the course of this sojourn, they assume self-sufficient visual abstraction.
They are in Iran but they can be anywhere. The distance between Iran and any-
where else is traversed by these roads, coming from somewhere going to some-
where else. The result is the pure aesthetic experience that places Iran in somewhere
else by dismantling its familiar geography. The move pulls the country as a political
proposition out of any fictive frontiers, dissolves the homeland into the landscape,
Iran into its environ, and territoriality into territoriality. No state politics has any
claim or power over this landscape (Iran now transfused into the world) and its
overriding aesthetic reason. The act of art has dislodged the politics of the state.
the possibilities of an emerging worldliness as the defining root and occa-

sion of the nation beyond any ethnic particularity or state sponsorship.
Thus in the course of the aggressive globalization of capital and the
amorphous empire it has generated those nationsthus organically
decoupled from their falsely coupled statesno longer correspond (as in
184 H. DABASHI
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.
PUBLIC SPHERES ANDPUBLIC INTELLECTUALS

These global developments coincide with equally momentous changes
more domestic to nation-sates in the Islamic world. The active formation
of three ideological trajectories in the postcolonial periodThird World
socialism, anticolonial nationalism, and militant Islamismhas effectively
come to an end and no longer produce politically mobilizing cultures of
resistance. Postcolonial nation-sates are thus drawn back to precolonial
conditions to anticipate postnational trajectories of their public space upon
which they were formed in the first place. As they are drawn to precolonial
conditions, we recognize the historic battles between Islamic scholasticism

and Persian (or alternatively Arab, Turkish, or Urdu) humanism, which
has been at work invariably for the last 1400 yearsone centered in the
mosque-madrasa system and the other at the royal court. Islamic scholasti-
cism was of course multifaceted and its center of gravity constantly changed
from the nomocentricism of Islamic law to the logocentricism of Islamic
philosophy to the homocentricism of Islamic mysticism. But in the course
of political encounter with European imperialism all these multifaceted
aspects were actively transmuted (by Muslim ideologues themselves more
effectively than by any Orientalist) into a singular cite of ideological resis-
tance to European colonial modernity, with what today we call Islamism
in effect buying into the colonially mitigated conception of religion and
transforming itself into the most recalcitrant juridicalism of the sort that
arch Muslim conservative Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahab (17031792)
could have imagined Ibn Taymiyyah (12631328) had offered.
In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the emerg-
ing public space and its public intellectuals (which included poets, nov-
elists, dramatists, filmmakers, and artists) were crafted in between the
two medieval institutions of scholasticism and humanism, based in the
mosque-madrasah and at the courts, respectively. Islamic scholasticism
had remained where it had always been, except for the rise of the lay reli-
gious intellectuals, but humanism eventually exited the court and entered
the public apace, which it now defined as vatan or homeland. The Qajar
and subsequently Pahlavi monarchies ruled forcefully against the grain of
that public space and in competition with the clerical class and their recal-
citrant juridicalism that wanted to rule the same space and dismantle the
monarchy. The mosque-madrasa succeeded in overthrowing the court and
dismantling the monarchy and sought to dominate and recodify the public
space and claim it all for itself, and yet it failed miserably and now faces
even the more diversified public space that nation at large has crafted and
occupied. The clerical class, whether it is in power like Khamenei or in
opposition like his detractors, share the common denominator that they
cannot conceive of the public sphere as an autonomous site and categori-
cally wish to designate and claim it as Islamic.
Remembering the post-Safavid (precolonial) stage resurrects the impe-
rial context of all these postcolonial nation-states and paves the way for the
recognition of the ending empires where the Arab revolts and the Green
Movement have marked the exponential expansion of the public space that
capitalism seeks to privatize, local and regional tyrannies wish to appropri-
186 H. DABASHI
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
court-affiliated reformists, Amir Kabirs (18071852) followed by those

of Mirza Hossein Khan Moshir al-Dowleh Sepahsalar (18281881)
mark far-reaching changes in the institutional foundations of the pub-
lic domainranging from education to telecommunications that ush-
ered Iran into the global economy of primary resources, skilled labor,
and foreign capital. The eventual emergence of public education, soon
augmented by Christian missionary schools began to expand literacy
and with it participation in the political process. Crucial in this regard
is the establishment of public schools by Haji-Mirza Hassan Roshdiyeh
(18511944), a legendary figure deeply committed to wresting edu-
cation from the clerical class, which violently opposed the establish-
ment of these public schools and rightly saw them as a threat to their
exclusive clerical interests. Corrupt Qajar kings were not any better
as evidenced by the fact that Naser al-Din Shah had Amir Kabir mur-
dered precisely fearing the consequences of his reforms that included
the establishment in 1851 of Dar al-Fonun, the first modern institution
of higher learning.
The two successive and critical events of the Tobacco Revolt of
18901891 and then the Constitutional Revolution of 19061911 finally
became the political manifestations of all these critical developments in
the opening of a public sphere with wide-ranging political implications.
While the Shii clerical establishment later sought to take full credit for
the Tobacco Revoltthat it was the edict of a cleric, Grand Ayatollah
Mirza Hassan Shirazi, that caused the uprisingit was in fact the defi-
ance of the Iranian merchant class and the nascent bourgeoisie that were
deeply affected by the tobacco concession to British interests that initiated
the revolt, most probably faked a fatwa, and brought their revolt against
colonialism to success.
The ideological drive to occupy the state apparatus and thereby to
monopolize the public space begins in earnest in the twentieth century
with Reza Khans (18781944) coup in 1921 and the subsequent estab-
lishment of the Pahlavi dynasty in 1925. This was the first major push for
centralized state control in the aftermath of the Constitutional Revolution
and its contingent expansion of the public domain, public sphere, and
public reason. Whatever Reza Shah did in the two decades between his
coup of 1921 and his forced abdication in 1941 was more than offset by
the Allied occupation of Iran during World War II (19391941) when
we witness a period of massive opening of the public domain and the
establishment of the Socialist Tudeh Party in active contestation with the
188 H. DABASHI
liberal nationalism of Mohammed Mosaddegh and the National Front/

Jebheh Melli. Between the abdication of Reza Shah in 1941 and the
CIA-engineered coup of 1953, a period of some 12 critical years, Iranian
political culture witnessed the largest and most effective expansion of
its public domain, with neither the Pahlavi regime, nor the clerical elite,
nor in fact the Tudeh Party in complete control of the particulars of
this domain. This period, not surprisingly also coincides with the rise of
the most enduring sketches of literary and artistic effervescencefrom
Nimas poetry to Hedayats fictionentirely independent of any political
affiliation.
Between the coup of 1953 and the Ayatollah Khomeini-led uprising
of the June 1963 the late Mohammad Reza Shah (19191980) marked
perhaps the most brutal period of state suppression and state control
of the public space. But the June 1963 uprising put an effective punc-
ture into that image and while the uprising was successfully crushed the
revolutionary potentials of Shii ideology was put on massive display,
perhaps not so effectively since the Tobacco Revolt. The Siahkal upris-
ing of 1971 inaugurated the Iranian Peoples Fedayeen Guerrillas and
marked yet another major revolutionary outburst which the Pahlavi
monarchy managed to crush. The combined effect of the June 1963
uprising and the Siahkal uprising of 1971 was the effective demonstra-
tion of the vulnerability of the Pahlavi regime, and the potentials of two
successive revolutionary gestures to reclaim the revolutionary reason that
was markedly feeding the particulars of the public reason. The expanded
forms of artistic expressions in poetry, fiction, and film in this period
now accounted major poets like Ahmad Shamlou, prominent filmmakers
like Amir Naderi, and widely popular novelists like Ahmad Mahmoud
among the politically engaged artists invigorating their peoples sense of
aesthetic reason.
The June 1963 uprising and the Siahkal guerrilla operation of 1971in
two different ways anticipated the 19771979 revolutionperhaps the
most significant political event since the Constitutional Revolution
of 19061911 in which the public domain exponentially expanded,
political participation maximized, and the presumption of the power and
legitimacy of the state categorically dismantled, as another was on its way
to take over with even harsher and more violent tenacity. The Hostage
Crisis of 19791981 became the revolutionary ruse under which the
Islamists took over the public space, radically politicized it to their own
advantage, and sought categorically to Islamize a multifaceted politi-

cal culture. The IranIraq war of 19801988 even more radically com-
promised that public space under military duress. It was not until the
postwar era of reconstruction under President Hashemi Rafsanjani and
Reform under Khatami that the public sphere began to crack open in
both economic and social terms. The Ahmadinejad presidency saw the
critical clash between the attempt of the Islamic Republic radically to
monopolize the public space by transformation into a garrison state and
the most serious challenge to it by the Green Movement. As soon as the
Green Movement was brutally repressed, the Arab Spring began and
made the expansive domain of public space entirely transnational. The
effective transnationalization of the ruling states was already happening
by virtue of Iran, Syria, Hamas, and Hezbollah plus Russia and China
effectively challenging the USA, Israel, Saudi Arabia and their Persian
Gulf allies in Syria and beyond. The combined power of these states
had effectively silenced their respective nations, but at the same time
strengthened their self-consciousness.
This whole trajectory of colonial and postcolonial Iranian experience is
the history of expositing and exponentially expanding the horizons of the
public domain as varied ideologies of power have sought to monopolize,
control, and define it. By the time of the Arab revolutions, the public
space was no longer limited to any specific nation-state and had begun
having a catalytic transnational effects from one location on each other
and in fact even beyond the Arab and Muslim world into Europe and
North and South America.
At the heart of this expanded domains of the public self-consciousness
remained its aesthetic reason. The simplification of Persian prose, the intro-
duction of printing machine, the emergence of new and socially engaged
prose, poetry, and drama, of singers and songwriters, of fiction, film, and
visual arts all posited the spectrum of a universe of creative imagination
over which presided no monarch or molla. The result was the exponential
expansion of the moral and normative imaginary of the nation. To assay
the significance of visual and performing arts on these developments, let
us turn to Freud again:
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
Prohibition against the image of God may be here figuratively extended

into prohibition against any other creature of God and thus against paint-
ing as such and in favor of theoretical abstractions in speculative theology,
or mysticism and philosophyall the varied branches of Islamic scholasti-
cism. But in the realm of visual and performing arts, the lurking possibili-
ties of abstract artof the sort we see in Kiarostamis cinema or Namjoos
music or Nodjoumis paintingssublates the sensory into the abstract in
the field of human experiences, and thus pave the way for an intuition of
transcendence from the very heart of worldly experiences. Here the post-
colonial political reason has completely collapsed and given birth to the
aesthetic reason.
Today, two centuries plus after Iranian poets and literati began exit-
ing their habitual habitat in royal court en masse and entering the public
space they now called homeland/vatan, in addition to Persian, English,
French, German, Italian, Spanish, and so on have all become Iranian
languages, for Iranians and non-Iranians alike continue to think, read,
write, and produce knowledge about Iran in these languages. English
in particular, by virtue of its imperial reach is today the lingua franca of
a global condition the same way that Arabic once was at the height of
the Abbasid Empire and the Islamic conquest of Iran, or Persian was
during the height of the Ghaznavid, Seljuqid, or Mongol empires. By
far the most advanced scholarship about Iran, its history and culture,
today appears in English. Why: Because it is the lingua franca of todays
version of Arabic at the height of the Abbasid Empire, where the most
prominent Iranian scholars and literati were writing in Arabic, while
having a full command of their mother tongue. NewYork today is the
Rome, the Istanbul, the Baghdad, the Cairo, the Isfahan, the Tabriz,
and the Delhi of its time. Persian, as a result, has today become linguis-
tically polysemousa sign that can be signified in multiple languages. It
is in this language that a renewed cosmopolitan worldliness, predicated
on a transnational public sphere, is discovered in and for Iran beyond
all fictive frontiers.
PUBLIC SPACE IS OPEN

If the constitution of the public space, as Hannah Arendt thought, is the
ultimate objective of political revolutions, upon which freedom from tyr-
anny could be exercised, then the instrumentalization of power through
various machinations has in fact vacated the public space for reoccupation.
But this time around this public domain is no longer limited to national
territories or formed within political boundaries. The process call global-
ization has put an effective end to that postcolonial illusion. By virtue of
being the imaginary heart of an amorphous empire, the globalized public
domains have regional and national repercussions beyond any state claim.
It enables, paradoxically, other worldsinvariably in terms contrary to its
own imperial interests. Consider the fact that the two major theorists of
the conditions of our postcoloniality around the globe, Edward Said and
Gayatri Spivak, became Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak in the USA, as did
Jos Mart and W.E.B.Dubois before them. The most globally celebrated
critique of this empire, Noam Chomsky is located squarely at the heart of
the empire and smack at one of its finest institutions of higher learning.
The globalized public space is not a monolithic domain. It enables other
worlds and thus systematically dismantles its own imperial hegemony.
One of my central thesis in this book is that the idea of vatan/nation
was in fact the nascent bourgeois public sphere that was formed outside
the purview of royal courts and the clerical mosque-madrasa systemthe
two major institutions of power that had divided and ruled the dynas-
tic and imperial worlds of Muslims before their fateful encounters with
European colonialism and subsequent commencement of their postco-
lonial histories. This public sphere had a tumultuous but robust history
establishing itself against both the royal court and the mosque-madrasa
network of clerics, for any inch it gained was at the expense of these two
institutions of power and privilege.
Against all odds, this public domain has consistently consolidated and
expanded itself against two successive dynastic courts and one singu-
larly recalcitrant clerical establishmentand in the postcolonial era it has
expressed itself most emphatically as anticolonial nationalism, while its two
principal ideological rivals, Third World socialism and militant Islamism,
had wedded its political project to more transnational dimensions. Both
Third World socialism and militant Islamism were transnational by vir-
tue of their ideological connections to the larger Muslim world and the
192 H. DABASHI
socialist campand thus in ideological confrontation with anticolonial

nationalism animated it with the larger colonial context in which this
nationalism was in fact conversant.
Upon the spatial open-endedness of this public space, independent
of both the mosque-madrasa and the royal court, an aesthetic reason has
eventually emerged that has systematically cultivated itself in visual and
performing arts that have given that space its own intuition of transcen-
dence away from the sense of the scared that the clerical establishment
had institutionally monopolized for itself. In Persian prose and poetry,
visual and performing arts, this aesthetic reason has become a reality sui
generis, partaking in Persian humanism of the precolonial period but
cultivating it entirely outside the royal court and upon that public space,
so that in the words of Mohsen Makhmalbaf, a leading Iranian film-
maker, what he could not find in mosque he sought and secured in
cinema. The fact of contemporary Iranian sense of the sacred is that an
average educated person who is conversant with the major social and
intellectual movements of the last 200 years knows far more poetry of
Forough Farrokhzad and Sohrab Sepehri by heart than verses from the
Quran or prophetic hadiths.
During the Qajar (17891926) and the Pahlavi (19261979) dynas-
ties, the public space, as represented by public intellectuals, was fight-
ing against two royal courts and in the course of the Islamic Republic
it has been fighting against the clerical establishment and its attempt to
claim and monopolize and populate its domain. But with the bureaucratic
and security apparatus of the state outgrowing of both the kings and the
clerics, the monarchy and mullarchy, the public space has also expanded
beyond the fictive boundaries of the postcolonial nation-state, as evi-
denced in the Arab Spring as the extended logic of the Green Movement,
and also shifted its ideological contestation against European imperialism
into securing civil liberties against the condition of the US-led Empire
that includes domestic tyrannies that it may call friends like Saudi Arabia
or foes like Islamic Republic of Iran.
The rebirth of nations is now contingent on going back to their birth-
place on the plane of public sphere, and by recognizing and expanding their
cross-national, trans-national, and supra-national character and dispositions.
This self-transcendence means the worlds that these nations occupy have
become conscious of their cosmopolitan worldliness. This transnational fact
of nations is already evident in the cosmopolitan worldliness of the postco-

lonial nation-states, not only by virtue of the rivalry of ethnic nationalism
with socialism and Islamism, but far more effectively by the transnational
character of its aesthetic intuitionsfrom poetry, to fiction, to drama, and
all the way in every other mode of visual and performing arts, which were all
without a single exception in cosmopolitan conversation with the world at
large. So taking their cues from the aesthetic intuition and firmly rooted in
the public space, these nations have already begun the long overdue task of
the necessary epistemic shift of knowledge production beyond the histori-
cally outdated and categorically flawed ethnic nationalism. On that public
sphere, you already have the globalized operation of capital and the global-
ized condition of labor migration. From the presumed heart of the Empire
to its peripheralized edges, what is being produced is a new mode of knowl-
edge production beyond the fictive boundaries of the postcolonial nation-
states, and against the condition of the Empire.
There is no mind of the group as Max Scheler called it or sensus
communis as Gadamer did, for the elite to be able to generate and sus-
tain a dominant ideology for it. There is a structuralfunctional predis-
position to Max Schelers sociology of knowledge that does not allow
for the conflictual and critical condition of societies that not just under
condition of coloniality and postcoloniality in fact produce antagonistic
forms of knowledge and then populates them with facts. What we have
are the institutions that instrumentalized powersuch as the corporate
media, their journalistic attendance upon the White House, the Pentagon,
or the State Department press briefings, and thereby disseminating the
infomercial that these governmental institutions wish to propagate. The
think thanks that are systematically operative in a manner that gener-
ates and sustains kinds of knowledge that serve and pleases their donors,
and thus a decidedly partisan spin becomes the so-called knowledge with
which the system sustains and informs and justifies and entertains itself
at one and the same time. Against the grain of this knowledge, we must
generate interested knowledge, interventionist, purposeful, knowledge,
and a knowledge that performs epistemic violence on all received forms
of knowledge that ipso facto sustain the status quo. The interlocutor is
no longer the people in position of power but those who resist power,
and thus it represents not the will to knowledge as power but the will to
knowledge to resist power.
194 H. DABASHI
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
An emerging cosmopolitan worldliness has always been coterminous

with the project of colonial modernity upon which nations were being
formed and in conversation or contestation with colonialism invariably
articulated themselves. That worldliness, from which a renewed pact with
history is today enabled, has always existed in multivariate forms, but it
becomes more evident in moments of large-scale social crisisa mili-
tary coup, a war, a revolution, and so onwhen the nation retrieves and
reactivates its aesthetic intuition of transcendence. Dominant ideologies
like Islamism, anticolonial nationalism, or Third World socialism have
always been at once enabling and misleading. My principal argument has
always been, and still remains, that all these ideologies, including those
that posited themselves as secular as opposed to Islamic, were in fact
the side effects, the by-products, and even unanticipated consequences of
colonialism, and thus paradoxically colonial in their nature and disposi-
tion. All these ideologies were invented in combative conversation and
contestation with and against a colonial modernity, a colonizing inter-
locutor that code-named itself, and was thus called, the West. In the
age of globalized capital, that West has imploded, so that dialogical
modus operandi that had paradoxically enabled it has been dissolved. The
center cannot hold, and instead of mere anarchy, we in fact have retrieved
the multiple worlds that have existed before the West covered them up.
The task today is to theorize and articulate those already evident worlds,
for it is upon their normative and moral topography that nations reassert
themselves.

196 H. DABASHI
The location of Iran in contemporary world culture and politics, and as

such the making of a cosmopolitan culture that today defines it, posits a
world in a microcosm, in and of itself. That worldly culture has been sub-
ject to a systematic distortion under a theocracy over the last 30 years. I
have been documenting that suppressed culture, that cosmopolitan world-
liness, over as many years in various aspects of my scholarship, in which
I have marked a cosmopolitan culture decidedly repressed by a violent
Islamism that had cast the whole world in its own distorted and diminu-
tive imagenot just of the world, but of the vast moral and imagina-
tive spectrum of Muslim social and intellectual history, a triumphant Shii
clericalism taking its revenge on the factual evidence that it has always
been marginal to that cosmopolitan cultural, integral to be sure, but never
definitive to it. The diminution of the world, and with it the distortion
of a multifaceted world religion, was what Islamism, and with it all its
opposing ideologies have been doing ever since their encounter with colo-
nial modernity. The diminution, to be sure, was globalChristianity was
being reduced to the US empire, Judaism to a Jewish state, Hinduism to
Hindu fundamentalism, Islam to Islamism, and so on. Religions, whatever
they were, had become ideologies; ideologies had exhausted themselves,
and were left with one vacuous fanaticism facing and exacerbating another.
Throughout my work over the last almost four decades, I have posited
this worldliness in precise opposition to what in his Location of Culture
Homi Bhabha now calls in-betweens of cultures:
It is in the emergence of the intersticesthe overlap and displacement of

domains of differencethat the intersubjective and collective experiences
of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated. How
are subjects formed in-between, or in excess of, the sum of the I parts of
difference (usually intoned as race/class/gender, etc.)? How do strategies
of representation or empowerment come to be formulated in the compet-
ing claims of communities where, despite shared histories of deprivation
and discrimination, the exchange of values, meanings and priorities may not
always be collaborative and dialogical, but may be profoundly antagonistic,
conflictual and even incommensurable?1
Far more crucial than this in-betweens, I believe what is endemic

to the worldly disposition of cultures is what defines and locates (not
separates and essentializes) them. I believe as an immigrant intellectual,
and perhaps even as a Parsi, Homi Bhabha self-theorizes himself too
much, between the here and there of his own mind, at the expense of
COSMOPOLITAN WORLDLINESS 197
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
The legitimate suspicion of all grand narrativesfrom Christianity

to Marxism, from Herodotus to Hegel, from the Bible to the Origin of
Specieshas paradoxically alerted us all to the centrality of narrative in
all acts of truth-telling. Humanity may indeed not be headed toward any
final emancipationbut it is busy telling itself one story after another pre-
cisely to that effectfrom Hinduism, Judaism, and Islam to Astrophysics
and Facebook. Years ago I wrote an essay on one of Rumis stories in the
Mathnavi, in which I sought to argue that the narrative structure of the
story itself was the modus operandi of its argumentnamely the story
itself functioned like an episteme, a mode of truth-telling.2 In that essay I
proposed narrative not merely as a literary form but as an epistemological
category in disguise. Later I took that idea and expanded it in my Truth
and Narrative, a book I wrote on the ideas of the twelfth-century Persian
mystic, Ayn al-Qudat al-Hamadhani.3 In this book I provided an extended
argument of the embedded location of truth in the narrative that carries
it. From German philosopher Hans Blumenberg to the Marxist thinker
Fredric Jameson have pointed out the mythic or narrative disposition of
our will to come to terms with the absolutism of reality. This fact puts no
end to our proclivity to myth-making, but it does put that tendency into
a liberating mode.
Cosmopolitanism as a narrative stands face to face with Islamism
and nationalism, both alternative grand narratives that pretend to stand
outside the world they present and represent, reveal and conceal, at
one and the same time. Islamism takes its authority from the heavens
(Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as Zionism, Christian fundamentalism,
and Islamism), ethnic nationalism from naturalized conceptions of race
(Persians and Greeks as two archetypes). They both protest too much.
I read and offer cosmopolitanism with no pretension of standing outside
historyquite to the contrary, as a narrative decidedly inside the world it
intends and wills to re/present. Islamism of the last 30 years has posited
itself as a master code with which to read and interpret the entirety of a
polyvocal culture, which is, ipso facto, its nemesis, for it exposes the lie
that a militant juridical Islamism wants to turn the body politics into the
juridical body and just as punctiliously to regulate and control it. As an
ideology, Islamism wants to cover up and/or repress the historical con-
tradictions it cannot entail in its story. Islamism is afraid of the world and
seeks systematically to cut and paste it to its juridical whims and whiplash
effects; cosmopolitanism (in precisely the opposite direction) celebrates
and basks in its inorganic, contradictory, and self-effacing disposition.
Cosmopolitanism has no claim to any metaphysics. It dwells in the frag-

ile spontaneity of the world. Islamism lays a false claim on the heavens
and the more it professes its other-worldly claims the less meaningful it
becomes beyond its sheer reliance on pure violence.
Islamism sought permanently to alter the societal totality it had inher-
ited from the ancien rgime and remake it in its own beleaguered and
belligerent termsterms it had inherited from its longstanding struggles
against tyranny and colonialism, terms that it was now unable to trans-
form in postcolonial and progressive terms, not even noticing it had been
turned into its own opposite absolutist tyranny. What the Islamism that
resulted distorted was not just the worldliness of the world that had occa-
sioned it in the first place but the Islam that that worldliness had outlasted.
This Islam was at odds with the world that colonial modernity had occa-
sioned, and was equally alienated from its own variegated reality before
that world permanently altered its own disposition.
On the colonial site of class antagonism, this sort of societal totalizing
becomes positively discursive, and in the presence of weak class forma-
tions, the commanding class antagonisms are not between classes, but
between ideologies. Islamism is the forced imposition of an Islamist lan-
guage. We hear only one Islamic voice because Islamism has suppressed all
other voices and silenced them, and instead co-manufactured a religious
secular dichotomy to disguise the scene of the murderand the secularists
are co-conspirators in this murder of a variegated cosmopolitan culture.
But the harder these two oppose each other, the harder they are evident
to fight the absented and repressed fact of that cosmopolitanism they are
too eager to oppose.
PARADOXICAL ROLES OFAMERICAN INIRANIAN HISTORY5

On 27 January 2010, as our attention was habitually distracted by horrors
of the world, from Haiti to Iraq, the quiet passing of two giant Americans
in a single day was barely noticed around the globe. J.D. Salinger
(19192010) and Howard Zinn (19222010) passed away on 27 January
2010 at the ages 91 and 87, respectively. It was not just in the USA that
J.D.Salingers Catcher in the Rye, his signature novel, became the cultic
rite of passage for an entire generation of Americans. The trademark novel
of Salinger was published in 1951, the year of my birth in southern Iran,
and soon after its Persian translation, it became a singularly definitive lit-
erary experience for high school and college students of the late Pahlavi
200 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
Movement in Iran unfold in mid-2009, I was much reminded of Howard

Zinns role during the Civil Rights Movement in the USA and particularly
of his years at Spelman College, to me an exemplary model of responsible
citizenship in a flawed and unjust republic. Historians like Zinn are sig-
nificant beyond their own immediate national borders and have catalytic
effect on the way history is perceived and historical scholarship performed
in many other domains.
That literary cosmopolitanism in which Iranians of my generation
grew up, and in which J.D.Salinger was a seminal figure, went under-
ground with the ascendency of a militant Islamism that went after a
fictive jargon of authenticity at the heavy expense of our lived worldly
experiences. It was not just in the USA that J.D. Salinger became a
recluse and Howard Zinn became an exemplary dissident public intel-
lectual and as such the moral conscience of his generation. In Iran too,
a fearful Islamism took over not too dissimilar to the militant nativism
of the post-Reagan era, so constitutionally alien to and at odds with
the literary worldliness and historical imagination that J.D.Salinger and
Howard Zinn represented.
Two other Americans have secured very notable, albeit diametrically
opposed, positions for themselves in the annals of Iranian struggles for
democracy over the last 100 years. Howard Baskerville (18851909),
endearingly nicknamed the Lafayette of Iran, was a Christian mis-
sionary who early in the twentieth century heroically gave his life while
fighting on the side of revolutionary constitutionalists in Tabriz. In part
because of his heroism, Iranians were among the first nations in their
region to fight for and secure a constitution and aspire to secure their
civil liberties. Baskerville has been so dearly loved by Iranians ever since
those poems have been composed for him by leading Iranian poets, and
scripts have been written on his life to be turned into a movie. Although
another prominent American, Morgan Shuster (18771960), is equally
dear to Iranians because as the first Treasure General appointed by the
newly formed Iranian Parliament soon after the Constitutional Revolution
of 19061911 helped the revolutionaries sort out their finances, the fig-
ure of Baskerville has entered the revered pantheon of young martyrs of
democratic aspirations in Iran. This seemingly ironic place of Baskerville
justly and pointedly complicates the otherwise towering binary proposed
between Americans and Iranians.
Exactly on the opposite side of Howard Baskerville stands Kermit
Roosevelt Jr. (18162000), a grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt
202 H. DABASHI
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.
IN THESHADOW OFTWO MONUMENTS

Let me now shift the axes of this cosmopolitanism away from the absolute
metaphor of the West and the USA and look at Egypt at the epicenter of
a world that maps out an entirely different (but complementary) imagina-
tive geography, at once real and palpable in its region and yet evocative in
far more global terms. Here I wish to take my encounter with two monu-
mental Egyptian artistic and philosophical figures as emblematic of a larger
frame of reference in which the formation of the nation is ipso facto trans-
national in its more enduring sense, and that the transnational disposition
of this cosmopolitanism is not exclusively tilted on an EastWest axis. The
account I now give uses the one example of my generation of Iranians as
indicative of a much larger regional vision of who and what is an Iranian,
or Egyptian for that matter. The point here is the layered subjectivity of
those who inhabit and populate the nation from within and without its
fictive frontiers.6
I have been privileged to know many great Egyptians in my life, the
dearest and closest to me being my late friend and colleague Magda al-
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
Image 1 Nicky Nodjoumi, The Accident, 2013

The power at the heart of the state apparatus is the subject of iconic dismantling
by the artist. Here in Nicky Nodjoumis work, the iconography of the nation
forms at the critical edges of its dismantling the state and all its claims to legiti-
macy. In the capable hand of Nicky Nodjoumi state is stripped naked to its brute
violence. He is a master of the bittersweet sarcasm, iconoclastic in his merciless
antagonism to power and its entire insignia of domination as it seeks to camouflage
itself in business suit or clerical robes. Nodjoumi is arguably the single most sub-
versive national artist of Iran at odds with every single sign of power claimed by
any and all states. He began his work under the Pahlavis and continued his power-
ful subversion of faked legitimacy under the Islamic Republic, and when he moved
to the US he actively incorporated the criticism of the imperial rubric of the world
at large into the iconography of his art. The result is the consistent formation of an
aesthetic reason beyond the reach of any colonial or postcolonial reason. His work
is no longer teleological, chronologically, or culture specific. His work has become
paradigmatic, emblematic of every and all forms of state imagining itself ruling
over any nation. He pulls the national rug from under the feet of the state, the
state stumbles and falls, and he stands in front of his canvas laughing for the nation
at large. In every subversive canvas he paints, his nation is born anew.
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
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-
tion in March 1993, an Egyptian Shariah court declared him an apostate

from Islam and annulled his marriage, forcing him and his wife, Ibtihal
Younis, professor of French Literature at Cairo University, into exile in
the Netherlands, when an extremist Islamist group issued a death sentence
on him. This was during one of the darkest chapters in modern Egyptian
history, when the attempted murder of the Nobel Prize-winning author
Naguib Mahfouz, and the killing in 1992 of the intellectual Farag Foda,
had created an exceedingly tense environment in the country. Despite the
banal horror of the death sentence on him, there was always a delightful
sense of humor about Nasr Hameds reflections on the whole atrocious
incident. He loved to tell stories about cartoons appearing in Egyptian
periodicals in which husbands were using him as a metaphor, wondering
how they could arrange for a similar annulment of their marriages!
When an Egyptian columnist mocked the couple for carrying on
like Romeo and Juliet because they had held hands during an interview
with CNN, Nasr Hamed had quipped, and what is wrong with Romeo
and Juliet? It is equally important to remember that Nasr Hamed never
allowed the atrocious sentence issued against him by his fellow Egyptians
to be abused by the western European and North American media as a
weapon in their Islamophobic arsenal and thus use it, as have ignoble
characters ranging from Salman Rushdie to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to promote
his own career. He endured the hardship of exile and being under a death
sentence with grace and humility and remained to his dying day a prin-
cipled and dignified Muslim.
THE MAKING OFAREGIONAL COSMOPOLITANISM

If my introduction to Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd was academic and serious
and took me a while to get to know the warm and joyous man behind
the ideas, my introduction to Youssef Chahine was playful and sparkled
with the joy of discovery and culminated in teaching the full range of his
cinema to my students at Columbia, to which I invited the great maestro
to give lectures anytime he came to NewYork. He always joked that my
interest in his films had to do with my juvenile infatuation with Hind
Rustom (the Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren of Arab cinema), the
lead actress of his Cairo Station/Bab al-Hadid.
I saw Chahines Bab al-Hadid (1958) when I was in my late teens,
while his adaptation of Abdel-Rahman Al-Sharqawis The Earth/
Al-Ard (1969), along with Sidney Franklin, Victor Fleming and Gustav
208 H. DABASHI
Machatys cinematic adaptation of Pearl S. Bucks The Good Earth

(1937), was instrumental in the political education of my generation
(the Maoist phase of our Marxism, to be precise!) With his initial tril-
ogy and subsequent quartetAlexandria Why? (1978), An Egyptian
Story (1982), Alexandria, Again and Again (1990), and Alexandria
NewYork (2004)Chahine became globally celebrated as the flamboy-
ant autobiographer of his nation. From Al-Nasser Salah Ad-Din (1963)
to Al-Massir (1997), Chahine remained the steadfast mirror image of
his people, from the trauma of the Arab-Israeli wars to the horrors of
religious fanaticism in his homeland, the same fanaticism that had forced
Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd into exile.
Youssef Chahine and Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd are two complementary
components of Egyptian intellectual and artistic cosmopolitanism of the
twentieth century, and one can scarcely know one of them fully with-
out knowing the other, above all getting to know through them the cre-
ative effervescence from which they both came. Nasr Hamed Abu Zayds
hermeneutics is predicated on a structural semiotics that reads the Quranic
literary tropes as the effervescent semiosis of a narrative logic that must
be interpreted via an interpolation with and through the rhetoric of the
Muslim readers faith. He made of faith, and this to me is the singular
sign of his interpretative genius, a hermeneutic proposition in his semiotic
reading of the holy text. This is in fact how he accounted for the central
signifier of wahy (as the modus operandi of the Quranic revelation) in any
reading of the sacred text that made it into a literary master sign without
robbing if of its metaphysical import.
That very open-ended semiosis becomes, in turn, the texture of a
flamboyant aesthetics, which Youssef Chahine borrows from later Italian
Neorealism, and from Fellini in particular, to craft his own cinematic
sense of probing frivolity. Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd teases out unsuspected
meanings from the Quran with the same hermeneutic free play that
Youssef Chahine unwinds the serious knots of reality in his own version of
Neorealism. The enduring significance of Nasr Hamed Abu Zayds herme-
neutics, as a result, is his positing of the Quran as an infinite (implosive)
play of self-sanctifying signs that internally order the sacred text as the
locus classicus of an inner sanctum that gives its believing reader/inter-
preter a compelling sense of in/voluntary belief, which is at once illusory
and revelatory. In other words, by seeing the sacred text as a system of
signs Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd placed the location of the revelatory disposi-
tion of the sacred text (the location of his hermeneutic camera, as it were)
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
complete retrospective that Marco Mueller (the festival director at the

time) had organized, but also because Yousry Nasrallah was a member of
the jury that year, and Oussama Fawzi was premiering his brilliant debut
film Kings of Asphalt/Afarit el-asphalt (1996) in competition.
Samir Farid, the distinguished Egyptian film critic, was another of
those Arabs, and so was the late Egyptian documentary filmmaker
Mohammed Shebl (19491996), who was also there that year (with a
documentary he had just done on Youssef Chahine), and through him I
was finally to meet none other (would you believe it?) than Hind Rustom
herself, when she was walking her poodle by Lake Maggiore! The active
alienation of Arab and Iranian artists, poets, literati, and intellectuals by
virtue of their mutual fixation with things in Europe is the most enduring
colonial legacy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries carried forward
to our own time.
The reception of both Youssef Chahine and Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd
in Iran was very limited by virtue of (perhaps among many other rea-
sons) the deeply troubled social and fraught intellectual disposition of the
country in the brutal aftermath of the 1979 Revolution. In that context,
everything that these religious intellectuals touched they shaped in their
own image. In that context too, and except for very few learned circles of
cineastes, Youssef Chahine remained terra incognita, and not integral to a
collective cosmopolitan consciousness. In that context, Nasr Hamed Abu
Zayd, meanwhile, was reduced to being a Quran-Pazhuh, or Quran-
Shenas, as they continue to call him today, namely a Quran scholar, or
Quranic commentator. Lost to them all was the cosmopolitan worldli-
ness, and the aesthetic intuition of transcendence, from which both the
hermeneutician and the filmmaker had emergednot because they had
no filmmaker or hermeneutician of their own but because the fertile cul-
tural memory of their common breeding was brutally repressed by the
triumphalist Shii clericalism to which these religious intellectuals now
actively catered.
Products of a radically alienated creative ego, these religious intel-
lectuals in effect did to Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd what they had done to
Iranian cosmopolitan culture, cutting him off from his worldly disposition
as an Egyptian philosopher, underplaying his hermeneutic and semiotic
disposition, and reducing him to their own self-imageto a religious
intellectual, effectively, and (despite all their love and admiration for
him), forcing him into an exile not too dissimilar in its consequences to
that religious edict issued against him by fanatical Islamists in Egypt.
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
As a hermeneutician, Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd was a healthy product of

a healthy cosmopolitan culturehis Iranian admirers were the unhealthy
outcome of a decidedly brutal distortion of (and an outright hostility
against) a similarly cosmopolitan culture and the unabashed beneficia-
ries of the bloody destruction of all alternative voices to theirs, until they
had served their political purpose of silencing and intimidating those who
thought differently than they did. Then, the innately fascistic disposition
of the Islamic Republic (not just this but any Islamic Republic) that these
religious intellectuals had willingly or unwillingly served now turned
against them. Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd was a hermeneutician and semioti-
cian of unsurpassed brilliance, the product of a cosmopolitan culture that
had naturally also given birth to Youssef Chahine and scores of other art-
ists, literati, literary critics, and intellectuals, a culture that had not been
cut by a ruling state violently and brutally into pieces when it tortured and
massacred thousands of its finest minds in mass executions in prison (at
the personal order of Imam Khomeini, as these religious intellectuals
still call him), with unsurpassed vulgarity purged from the universities,
or else forced them into silence and/or exile, or else butchered in serial
murders, so that these religious intellectuals could have the playing
field cleared for themselves and do as they willed and wished without any-
one in the vicinity seriously questioning their premises, assumptions, and
conclusions.
Whatever these religious intellectuals achieved, and they did pro-
duce a powerful and exciting chapter in modern Iranian intellectual his-
tory, they achieved on the broken back of others and in an environment
in which those who thought differently from them were systematically
imprisoned, forcefully retired, forced into the indignity of exile, disil-
lusioned and silenced, or outright serially tortured and murdered. Nasr
Hamed Abu Zayd was no religious intellectual of this sort. They cut
him to their own size and saw in him the mirror of their own broken
pieces. Whatever the historical judgment on the quality of their intellec-
tual achievements might be, these Iranian religious intellectuals were
incapable of producing anything near the hermeneutical brilliance of Nasr
Hamed Abu Zayd. They kept talking about the necessity of such a herme-
neutic, but they never had the courage, the imagination, or the moral and
intellectual wherewithal actually to produce it. This was so not because
their leading representatives were any less learned or intelligent than Nasr
Hamed Abu Zayd. This was so because Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd emerged
from the same environment that produced Kamal Abu-Deeb, for example,
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-
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:
Like particles of dust

We rise dancing
Drawn to thy shining sun!
Every mourning like the sun

We rise
From the East side of love
Shining upon the dry and the wet

Of the world and yet
Neither dry nor wet we shine
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.
I delivered the first draft of this chapter as a keynote at a conference on Social

Justice in Victoria, Canada, organized in June 2015 by my friend and colleague
Peyman Vahabzadeh.

218 H. DABASHI
BETWEEN CRITICAL INTIMACY ANDCREATIVE DISTANCING

In mid-July 2015, I was invited to deliver a keynote at a conference on
social justice in Iran convened by Peyman Vahabzadeh at the University
of Victoria in Canada. Over two days in a number of rapidly consecu-
tive panels, scholars from Europe and North America had gathered to
reflect on the fate of social justice for which the Iranian revolution had
been launched almost four decades ago. The most significant aspect of this
gathering of almost entirely Iranian scholars in Canada was the fact that
no such gathering was possible in Iran itself. The obvious and immediate
reason for that fact is the absence of academic or intellectual freedom. But
such freedoms are not just limited to freedom of speech or freedom of
peaceful assembly. Something even more significant, namely the freedom
to think, the freedom to be quiet, and the freedom to opt for solitude are
all suspect in a place like Iran. What tyrannies make impossible is not just
to express freely but in fact to think freely, for the material possibilities of
peaceful assemblies are integral to the kind of thinking that emerges from
the institutional bases of societies and addresses itself back to them. This
is not just due to the fact that the ruling regime in Iran has presided over
the systematic destruction of social sciences and the humanities. The root
of the issue is something even more sinister and troubling, for the freedom
of expression hides the freedom of silence, and thereafter the freedom of
meditation, thinking, and being.
In this gathering I shared with colleagues my conviction that the most
significant aspect of being at home away from home, not to make too
much of the condition they consider exilic or diasporic, is the fact
that in this paradoxical state, one achieves critical intimacy with both
home and exile and thus transcends them both in a third space, in an
interstitial space, where one is quite comfortable where one is and begins
to sense the necessary creative distancing that eventually results in a theo-
retical instantiation that is simply too precious to disregard. Critical inti-
macy results from being intimate with a culture, a homeland, a nation, but
ones idiomaticity with that culture has been critically enhanced by a dia-
lectic of regional and global comparatism that dissolves its fictive frontiers.
This critical intimacy is the precondition of that creative distancing that
enables multiple critical lenses coming together to form filmic montages
on the model of Eisenstein that moves toward Walter Benjamins frag-
ments and the contingent formation of allegories. Both critical intimacy
and creative distancing then come together and sublate into what one
FRAGMENTED SIGNS 219
might call theoretical instantiation, entirely impossible in the domestic-

ity of critical intelligence where one calls home. In short, one must be
away from home to be at homeand in that paradox dwells the wisdom
of taping onto the subterranean reservoirs of a culture otherwise success-
fully repressed.
For Benjamin, allegory is pre-eminently a kind of experience [It]
arises from an apprehension of the world as no longer permanent, as passing
out of being: a sense of its transitoriness, an intimation of mortality.1 This
is the Benjaminian sense of allegory with which I have increasingly found
affinity in thinking and writing about postcolonial nation-states. [It is]
the intuition, the inner experience itself. The form such an experience of
the world takes is fragmentary and enigmatic; in it the world ceases to
be purely physical and becomes an aggregation of signs Transforming
things into signs is both what allegory doesits techniqueand what it
is aboutits content.2 Following the superior logic of that insight that
on the twilight zones of home and exile, the two fictive zones in which
both notions transmute into an interstitial space, I wish to refer to Chinua
Achebes beautiful book Home and Exile (2000) to propose a paradox
that one must be at home in his or her exile, or else in exile if at homeas
we have been told from C.Wright Mills to Adorno to Bazarov to Edward
Saidto the point that the two polar opposites categorically collapse into
a tertiary space that moves toward a discovery of new horizons of differ-
ent, rising, worlds. Here one must both recognize and transcend the fact
that we all live in one amorphous empire, and it makes absolutely no dif-
ference at what planetary point on this shapeless imperium we hang our
hat, resist shapeless power, and call it home. Nothing, in short, overcomes
the towering force of the postcolonial reason and dismantles the illusion of
colonial modernity more effectively than leaving the homeland in order to
see it flourish on more expansive horizons abroad.
AN UNMARKED MASS GRAVE

Let us take the Khavaran Cemetery in the suburb of Tehran as the site of
our pilgrimage and wonder. Unmarked mass grave of political dissidents
who were summarily executed in 1980s (or before and after) marks what
the triumphant Islamists call Lanat-abad/The Damned Land, meaning
those who are buried there deserve the their executioners triumphalist
denunciation as those deserving not the blessing but the cursing of the
victors. Let us thus claim the Cursed of the Earth, as Fanon did, not The
220 H. DABASHI
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
Mahmoud Dolatabadis Zaval-e Kolonel/The Ruining of the Colonel and

the other Peyman Vahabzadehs Ketab-e Ali/The Book of Ali: Two testi-
monials, one a public and the other private mourning for a revolution, and
a revolutionary.
DISMANTLING THEDELUSION OFPROGRESS

The teleological line of Enlightenment fiction of progress is long since
dismantled. But the alternative is not disillusionment, resignation, or com-
placency. The alternative is an entirely different notion of human agency
in history. Let us look at the iconic, now emblematic, Ninth Thesis in
Walter Benjamins Theses on the Philosophy of Historyfor he spoke
from the wisdom of a depth of despair that speaks to us at a moment of
resurrection:
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he

is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes
are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures
the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a
chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage
upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay,
awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. 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. The storm irresistibly propels him into
the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him
grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.3
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
(and is) embedded in the storm of history as critical thinking: a defiant

thinking that avoids grand narratives, teleological myths of reason and
progress, accepts the ruins for what they are, as it sees the defiant will to
resist power and chart a course independent of that will to power.
In On the Concept of History, Walter Benjamin dismantles the delu-
sion of reason and progress in history, the possibility of any grand narrative
of salvation. This has always been a triumphalist mantra, sustaining those
who are victorious as on the right side of history, discrediting resistance to
power. He reverses the angle and looks at history from the vantage point
of its victims, the vanquished, those who have failed and been denounced,
mass executed, and buried under unmarked graves. This perspective leads
him to his famous dictum that there is no document of civilization that is
not at the same time a document of barbarism. He seeks to retrieve the
repressed history of the vanquished and make it integral to our reading of
history.
The condition of critical thinking today in or about Iran is not that
different from the time in Germany when Benjamin wrote this thesis.
Today too historical progress seems delusional, when the constitution of
the Islamic Republic is infinitely more retrograde than the constitution
drafted three quarter of a century before that during the Constitutional
Revolution of 19061911. The militant Islamism ruling Iran conceals
its fascistic proclivities under a thin disguise of make-believe democratic
institutions. Between hope and despair, Iranian youth in particular is
drawn back to a past with no critical assessment or else a future with no
clear vision. A massively betrayed revolution was followed by eight years
of brutish war (which Saddam Hussein began and Khomeini prolonged,
each for their own respective reasons) in which poor Iranian and Iraqis lost
their lives in their millions. The experience of the left is now categorically
discredited by the triumphant Islamists and their ultra nationalist nemesis
alike. One monkey wrench of ISIS thrown at the region, and the lead-
ing Pasdaran warlords suddenly became national heroes. In the name of
fighting terrorism, the ruling state apparatus are terrorizing their own
people into obedience. Not just the left as a whole but critical thinking has
lost credence and credibility of this new generation.
What Benjamin did in his reading of this picture was more a reflection
of his own philosophy of history than anything inherent in the picture
itself. This epistemic violence he perpetrates upon the picture is emblem-
atic of his deliberately transgressing where philosophy and poetry, critical
thinking and messianic defiance come together in his thinking. Benjamin
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.
THE DUST UNDER ANY IDIOTS FEET

Let us complicate both Derridas articulation of trace and Benjamins
imagery of debris by thinking through the supreme metaphysician of dust,
Omar Khayyam:
Khaki keh beh zir-e pa-ye har nadani-st

Kaf-e sanami o chehreh janani-st
Har khesht keh bar kongereh ivani-st
Angosht vazir ya lab e soltani-st
The dust under any idiots feet

Is the palm of a beautiful girl or else the face of a sweetheart
Every brick upon the roof of a palace
Is the finger of a vizier or else the tongue of an emperor.
Har zarreh keh dar khak-e zamini budast

Pish az man-o-to taj-e negini budast
Gard az rokh-e nazanin beh azarm feshan
Kan-ham rokh-e khub-e nazanini budast.
Image 1 Sara Dolatabadi, untitled, 2012

The allegorical registers of the nation become self-generative. Here in Sara
Dolatabadis artwork, the abstract formalism of the picture taps into the historical
consciousness of its Farbenlehre. The red abstract foreground invites the dark fig-
ural apparitions in the background. The fore- and the background fuse, as do
demarcations of red and black lit by the moonlight blue. In the background the
two figures are now allowed to be seen as a male and a female parting ways in a
deserted back alley. The slashes of diagonal lines across the picture intensify the
tension of the allegorical scene. The aboding space is nocturnal, secret, figural and
formal at one and the same time. A politics of location informs and disappears
from the scene. We know who Sara Dolatabadi is: She is an Iranian artist, she is the
daughter of a prominent novelist, and she has had group and solo exhibitions in
and out of her homeland. Through the biography of the artist, that homeland
haunts the picture, sustains its mystery, and informs the artist as a witness to an
emotive universe pushing the fictive boundaries of the nation in inner and outer
directions.
226 H. DABASHI
Every spec of dust upon the earth

Was a crown or else a royal ring before you and me
Clean up your beautiful face gently now
For the dust on your face was once the beautiful face of a sweetheart too.5
As a metaphysician of dust, Khayyam is both political and lyrical

simultaneously, interchangeably. Dust can be both bygone emperors and
withered away sweethearts. The fortress of palaces and the countenance of
sweethearts both carry the dust and debris of the past, remnants of what
was and is no more. Khayyam uses them to point to that which is no lon-
ger there in order to dissolve the solidity of that which now exists into
non-existence. What is usually read as Khayyams pessimism is actually the
fragility of his poetic joy of living. He robs life of posterity, thus underlining
the spontaneity of its passing beauty. He incorporates dust back to life, life
forward to dust. He celebrates an emotive expansion, a material unfolding,
of life.
Mehdi Akhavan-e Sales (19291990), a poet of astonishing visual
insight, expands that fragility into a poetics of fragmentary knowing, a
knowing predicated on fragments, marking ruins that are damned by his-
tory to enable knowing of a different (composite) sort:
I am the storyteller
The storyteller I am
YesIndeed!
I now repeat
What I have said
So many other times.
I tell the story

Of the forgotten myths.
I am an owl
Upon these ruins
Damned by history.
An Owl upon the roof

Of this dystopia
The wandering cuckoo

Mourning upon ruinous castles.
With what magic stratagem

Is itwhat trick, what hoax
Is it?
I ask you:
Oh the truth-tellers
Tell me in truth:
That unbroken appears
The image in the broken mirror?6
COLONEL ANDTHEBOOK OFALI

Predicate on these perceptions of ruins, trace, dust, and fragments, we
can now turn to two crucial documents: one a work of fiction by the
eminent Iranian novelist Mahmoud Dolatabadi and the other a deeply
moving memoirs by Peyman Vahabzadeh, which come together to mark
the fragments of a national act of remembrance gathering to remind and
redeem the nation in their liberating allegories.
Dolatabadi began writing his Zaval-e Kolonel/The Ruining of the Colonel
soon after the success of the militant Islamists triumphing over a categori-
cal metamorphosis of the Iranian revolution of 19771979 into a mili-
tant theocracy. Peyman Vahabzadeh could not bring himself to write his
painful recollections of his younger brother Ahmad Ali Vahabzadeh, his
Ketab-e Ali/The Book of Ali, until more than two decades after his execu-
tion in the dungeons of the Islamic Republic. But as the fate would have
it, Dowlatabadi published the German translation of his Colonel, which he
had written in the 1980s, in 2009, the same year that Peyman Vahabzadeh
published The Book of Ali. Dolatabadis Colonel and Vahabzadehs Book
of Ali come together as two memorial towers of what has happened to
and through the violently Islamized revolution of 19771979. The Colonel
and The Book of Ali are themselves two towers in ruins, two ruinous tow-
ers, traces and dusts, marking the occasion and gathering themselves into
the allegories of what has occasioned their writings: the mourning of a
revolution, the mourning of a young brother, the resurrection of a nation
in mournful defiance of a state that wishes to lay a claim on them all and
cannot.
Mahmoud Dowlatabadis Colonel is a nightmarish recollection of a career
officer, stripped of his rank for the murder of his adulterous wife, in the
Shahs army dealing with the fate of his children in the post-revolutionary
Iran. The tortured and murdered body of his teenage daughter, which
228 H. DABASHI
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
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
their liberal Zionist counterparts greasing the machine of oppression, is in

full gear, as the real power, Sepah and Sepah Quds rule the land and the
region at large. Soft power theorists and neoliberal economists need to go
to them to learn what these terms mean.
This condition of the postcolonial charade is predicated on the fact
that today the globalized capital is now completely amorphous, decen-
tered, with only one percent of the world population owning more than
50% of its wealth. The colonial has always been equally amorphous, both
at its presumed center and its designated peripheries and thus dismantling
the binary of the center and periphery. The political of this condition is
now completely Schmittian: the positing of the enemy as the marker
of virtue.
Under these circumstances, the fragmented signs of social justice
require a different kind of gathering. Social Justice itself has become a
fragmented sign: it is not in the South, or the Third World, in Asia, Africa,
Latin America, Europe, or North America. There is no Southern episte-
mology to mark it. Like debris of a world history we live, it is fragmented.
Ferguson, Missouri, Baltimore, Maryland, Charleston, South Carolina in
North America connect with the masses of millions of disenfranchised
labor migration around the globe, within or without fictive frontiers of
nation-states, to mark a different geography of liberation. On this geogra-
phy, the Kurds of Kobani have infinitely more in common with Zapatistas
in Chiapas than they do with the ethnic nationalism of Masoud Barzani
and his followers selling oil to Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel and receiving
his recognition in return. Thinking through social justice must thus always
be upon an aterritorial domain and in an imperfect future tense. We are
no longer in search of a total or perfect future, but in dwelling-on-the-
fragmentary fact of the present that enables critical thinking and struggles
but not in anticipation of an immediate result or solution.
Today not just the history of the global left, but in fact the heritage for
critical thinking is at the mercy of a triumphalist banality that deliberately
and decidedly targets the living icons of the revolutionary past to discredit
its present and future. From Che Guevara to Malcolm X to Bizhan Jazani
are now subject of vicious malice. It is useless to defend these momentous
occasions of the left. They must be summoned to a messianic momentum
that translates not into an iconography of the left but the sustained heri-
tage of continued critical thought. Benjamin did commit suicide, but he
was not suicidal in his thinking. He was constitutionally against party poli-
ticsfrom militant Zionism of his time to any other European organized
232 H. DABASHI
politics. Benjamin did not have anything to do with the Zionism of

Gershom Scholem and other German Jewish intellectuals dreaming to
redeem themselves on the broken back of another people. He would not
have any of that. When in the late 1930s Scholem became an ardent politi-
cal Zionist, Benjamin turned to the tradition of the oppressed, and made
it integral to his philosophy of history. Scholem was the exact antithesis
of Walter Benjamin: one is now a footnote to the history of Zionism, the
other the messianic revolutionary beyond all identity politics.
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
effervescence of this poetic para-realism. The poetic disposition of this para-

realism takes complete liberty with the syntax and morphology of the vio-
lence with which the colonial context of its modernity is constituted. That
poetic predilection thus articulated, then in turn it lends itself to a mode of
para-realism that stays always on the margin of the factual evidence of reality
and makes a virtue out of that strategic articulation of its brutality. Reality
is brutal on the colonial margins of the capital because it is constitutionally
compromised by an overwhelming power of representation. In a slanted and
sustained relation of power, reality becomes compromised not only in all its
given circumstances but in its very elemental formation, its essential configu-
ration, and ultimately in its politically modulated perception. What happens
in poetic para-realism is the teasing out of the otherwise-than-the-real from
the fact and features of the realstealing the light of the otherwise-than-
the-real from the heart of its darkness. If centuries into the brutal history
of colonial and neocolonial dominations, still a measure of defiant agency is
sustained in the otherwise colonized imagination of the de-subjected popu-
lations, it is precisely because of this poetic para-realism that pushes and pulls
the porous boundaries of the real in liberating and emancipatory directions.
With all its political prowess though, and despite its overwhelming aes-
thetic energy, poetic para-realism ultimately leads to an art that is sexually
arrested and erotically repressed. The reason for that is very simplethe
palindromic mimesis conceals the physical body from the naked eye. The
conspicuous absent of not just sexual encounters but far more seriously
sensual energy in Iranian cinema, and by extension in much of the rest of
the cinema that comes from what we can identify with the colonial param-
eters of the European Orient, is not simply because a so-called Islamic
Republic would not allow it, but because metaphorized in its politics and
metamorphosed in its aesthetics, the physical body is completely hidden
from the camera, squarely fallen on its blind spot. The sexually arrested and
erotically repressed are not the physical dis-attributes of the physical body
that remains off-limit to the realm of palindromic mimesis. If the body
were left to its own physical palpitations, it would exude sensuality beyond
any political control or aesthetic mutation. But there is a profoundly debili-
tating emasculation instigated in the palindromic body that arrests it sexu-
ally and represses it erotically. The best examples of this phenomenon are
in fact far more evident in the masterpieces of Palestinian cinema than its
widespread presence in Iranian cinema. Colonial domination enervates the
masculine body because as soldiers or servants, revolutionaries or reaction-
aries, defiant or compliant, it is the first site of colonial domination and
234 H. DABASHI
political violence. The result, in both political and aesthetic terms, is an

erotic repression of the physical body that is as much sexually arrested as it
is colonially dominated.
What happens in the erotic emasculation of the colonial body is in
reverse order of the European eroticization of the Orient. For Europe, the
Orient emerges as the site of the staged privacy of their repressed fantasies;
for the colonized, the body becomes physically disembodied, erotically
enervated, sexually arrested, with its sexual organs disemboweled. This
is all so because the real site of colonial domination is not the masculine
but in fact the feminine body, the veiled, denied, oppressed, symbolized
body of the colonial feminine. The principal site of the European Oriental
fantasies in both painting and opera is in fact the Oriental womenvisu-
ally staged and aesthetically laid. Womens bodies, as a result, merge as the
principal site of a palindromic violence, once by the Oriental imagination
of the European Enlightenment investing in it all its repressed fantasies,
and then again by the arrested sexuality of the colonially emasculated.
In Shamlous Az Zakhm-e Qalb-e Abai/From the Wound of Abais
Heart (1330/1951), quite typical of his political eroticism, the trans-
mutation of body politics and the erotic body into each other, and the
formation of Corpus Eroticum, as a poetic register becomes emblematic
of his enduring aesthetic of intuition for his age. The poetic voice in this
iconic poem addresses young girls in a rural setting, wonders which one of
them may have had sexual encounters with the poets hero, Abai, and in
the fusion of hard work, revolutionary aspirations, and erotic encounters,
Shamlou gathers all the registers of a political transmutation of the erotic:
Az Zakhm-e Qalb-e Abai
From the wound of Abais heart

Blood has dripped
On which one of your breasts?
Your breasts,
Which one of you,
Has blossomed in the spring of his adolescence?
Your lips,
Which one of you, tell me,
Which one of you
Has surreptitiously planted
In his palate
The scent of a kiss?11
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
The formation of the cohesive picture in a broken mirror I suggested

in the previous chapter is predicated on the fact of an implosion of the
West as an absolute and absolutist metaphor that had enabled all its bina-
ries and can no longer do so. The West was the totalizing metaphor of
European colonial modernity that wreaked havoc around the world as it
enabled a dominant elite who saw the world in a Hegelian trajectory that
saw the world at large as the infancy of the European Geist. That totalizing
metaphor is no more, and in this chapter, I will now turn my attention to
a detailed consideration of how the West as the defining metaphor of
capitalist (and colonial) modernity has finally imploded. This close read-
ing is necessary if we are to see the rebirth of the nation in terms no lon-
ger determined by the modus operandi of colonial modernity that was the
societal predicate for the rise of a postcolonial reason that had coupled the
nation and the state in a fateful delusion.
Having abused the planetary geography, physically and imagina-
tively, distorted world history, and cast the globe on a slanted relation of
I delivered the first draft of this chapter in a conference organized by my good

friend Mojtaba Mahdavi in Edmonton, Canada, and it subsequently appeared as
The End of the West and the Birth of the First Postcolonial Person in Towards
the Dignity of Difference?: Neither End of History Nor Clash of Civilizations in
Mojtaba Mahdavi and W. Any Knight (Eds), Towards the Dignity... (Burlington,
VA: Ashgate Publications, 2012).

238 H. DABASHI
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
of Civilization thesis was first and foremost domestic to the anxiety of

White America toward a multicultural and polyvocal reclaiming of the
USA, but also the turn to an isolationist exceptionalism and the abandon-
ment of the West altogether.3
Francis Fukuyamas thesis of the End of History (1989) was formu-
lated in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and
the dissolution of the eastern bloc in the late 1980s, while the publication
of Samuel Huntingtons thesis of the Clash of Civilization (1993) was
offered soon after the publication of Fukuyamas thesis and the commence-
ment of a wave of militant Islamism in the early 1990s in the aftermath of
the Soviet expulsion from Afghanistan by the US-sponsored Mojahedeen/
Taliban. Between the dissolution of one Enemy in 1989 and the fabrica-
tion of another in 1993, the precarious notion of the West was in a
state of limbo, and did not know quite what to do with itself, as perhaps
best indicated by the vacuous expression of the New World Order by
President George H.W. Bush (president 19891991) on 11 September
1991, trying to define the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the two
Superpower rivalries, and the rise of the USA as a mono-polar Empire.
Fukuyama declared an end to history very much cognizant of his Hegel
and negligent of his Karl Schmitt that political prowess (particularly of an
imperial vintage) needs an overriding Enemy. Huntington declared Islam
the civilizational Other of the West fully aware of his Schmitt and seeking
instantly to fill the gap of the Soviet socialism with militant Islamism.4 The
common denominator of Fukuyama and Huntington, their hidden shad-
ows embracing, was Karl Schmitt, the Nazi theorist of the political, and of
the state of exception. Long before Giorgio Agamben finally theorized it
in 2005, the state of exception, as the defining moment of imperial politics,
was evident in the streets of NewYork, minutes after the events of 9/11.
THE FALSE DAWN

The end of the West in the 1980s was paradoxically concealed by the
premature assumption of postcoloniality since the late 1940s, under which
critical rubric of the West, the West in fact continued its phantom
force. The end of the West in the late 1980s and the rise of a vacuous
militant Islamism as its most urgent alterity exposed the fact that the
post-World War assumption of postcoloniality was premature. The end of
European colonialism (of the British in India in particular) had given the
false impression of the end of the colonial condition and the colonized
240 H. DABASHI
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 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.
THE IMPLOSION OFTHE WEST

The false dawn of the postcolonial person was a distraction from the con-
tinued condition of colonialityin moral and material terms, the mental
condition of an arrested imagination sustaining the posttraumatic stress
syndrome of coloniality. The death knell of the colonial condition (again
paradoxically) came from the imperial site itself. Unbeknownst to them-
selves, Fukuyama and Huntington were writing the obituary of the
West when they thought they were recording its triumphant victory.
They wrote that obituary in the language of the militant triumphalism
they know only too well. At the same time, the death of the West, long
in the making and as it lost the colonial edges of its own credence, did
not mean, immediately, the birth of the first postcolonial person. The
postcolonial person we have presumed since the British packed and left
India, or the French Algeria, or the Belgians Congo, and so on was never
there. The apparition of that postcolonial person was self-evicted, for
s/he thought there was no more battles to fight, had no vision of where
the emerging battlefields were, too much preoccupied as s/he was with
where home was and where exileas the very notion of both home and
exile were being pulled from under her and his feet.
As they declared the final triumph of the West, or else provided
a new topography for its emerging battlefields, both Fukuyama and
Image 1 Ardeshir Mohassess, Untitled (aka Man with Tongue, or Celebrating

Teachers Day), 1995
The satirical extension of the collective memory has always agitated the soul of the
nation, especially in times of collective troubles, excitement, fear, and hope. Here
in Ardeshir Mohassesss work the satirical take on politics, society, and culture
informs, stirs, pokes fun at, and exacerbates the self-awareness of the nation.
Ardeshir Mohassess (19382008) was a globally celebrated Iranian artist who
singlehandedly crafted a political art form in which he fused the prose, politics, and
poetry of his homeland into figural strokes of ingenious brevity, precision, and
poignancy. There is a bittersweet defiance in his work. His artwork is historical,
memorial, eternal, proverbial, allegorical: He has a penchant for the figural ges-
tures of the mighty and the powerful of the Qajar period (17891926), which he
renders pathetic, ridiculous, pompous, and gaudy. The result is a visual iconogra-
phy that remembers and reminds the nation in its most subversive moments. He
achieved visual universality by discovering the particularity of the Iranian bur-
lesque. The Pahlavi monarchy was not pleased with his work, the Islamic Republic
pushed him out of his homeland. He landed in New York, where he thrived in his
art, as a he suffered from ill health. He worked feverishly, relentlessly, and terrify-
ingly. In his final work, Iran and the world fused together, his fear of tyranny
transformed into a fearless dismantling of power.
244 H. DABASHI
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
leading Muslim intellectuals, insisting on identify themselves as such,

is the catalytic force of a phantom force they keep calling the West
and that keeps producing eloquent but irrelevant insights in their work.
The births of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda are the other side of this
languorous conversation between two exhausted binaries: Islam and
the West. By the time 9/11 happened, the world was in fact relieved
of the binary productivity of Islam and the West. The two were taken
for yet another tiresome ride by the false delusion Samuel Huntington
had dreamt, out of his primarily internal anxieties, which the world
took for a global strategy. Both Osama bin Laden and George W.Bush
were engaged in a vacuous violence of the spectacle, with murderous
consequences. The rise of ISIS a decade and a half later did not much
change that diagnosis. Islam and the West had long since lost their
dangerous liaison.
THE STILLBIRTH OFTHEPOSTCOLONIAL PERSON

ANDTHEREBIRTH OFTHENATION
The implosion of the West is now coterminous with the exhaustion of

the Islamism that it had historically occasioned and epistemically sus-
tained. The kangaroo courts of the Islamic Republic, most obscenely on
display in the violent aftermath of the June 2009 presidential election, is
only the theatrically staged version of the military tribunals at Guantanamo
Bay as the by-products of what President George Bush inaugurated and
President Obama upheld as preemptive, prolonged, and indefinite incar-
ceration. While in Tehran, the state of exception metastasized into psy-
chotic paranoia, in Guantanamo Bay, it has thrown a monkey wrench at
the Western jurisprudence, in which law, as Giorgio Agamben observed
in his State of Exception (2005), has already become a killing machine. The
transmutation of the Shii/Islamic law into an identical killing machine
is where the two states of exception, reflecting and complementing each
other, in Tehran and Washington, DC, pave the way to a more urgent rec-
ognition. The prominence, and perhaps permanence, of these two states
of exception reflect and mirror each other, whereby Islam and the West
have at long last lost their binary fixation and their respective citizens
reduced to their naked lives. That today the West can only talk about
the human rights of the East is the most immediate and most paradoxi-
cal indication that the Muslim Bios has become the Zo of a concentration
camp Musselman.
246 H. DABASHI
The death of the West anticipated the death of its doppelganger

Islamism, the Islam it had invented to verify itself, in the body poli-
tics of any Islamic republic that laid a claim on that Islam and now faced
a moral crisis from which it could not survive, and from the ashes of that
exhausted Islamism we will witness the rebirth of the nation beyond its
colonial and postcolonial entrapments. The rebirth of the nation was now
caught in the embryonic placenta of a tentacle of belated Hegelianism
of a trajectory that linked Alexandre Kojve (19021968), Leo Straus
(18991973), Karl Schmitt (18881985), Allan Bloom (19301992),
and Francis Fukuyama, a genealogy that gave birth to American neocon-
servatism of the last quarter of the twentieth century and the first decade
of the twenty-first century, and its arch nemesis, the antiquarianism of
Talibanization of Islam and the globalization of al-Qaeda/ISIS. Both
sides of the same coin, Leo Strauss and Ayman al-Zawahiri represent two
complementary reading of Karl Schmitt: War as the virtuoso performance
of an absolutist ethics of ultimate ends (Webers term, as opposed to an
ethics of responsibility), making and sustaining the necessary Enemy
that defines those ends in reverse. As Karl Schmitts political theology
was transformed to Leo Strauss neoconservative philosophy, just before
it turned into Francis Fukuyamas apocalyptic end of history, to make
Agambens naked man/homo sacer possible, the transmutation of Molla
Omars domestic tyranny was soon globalized by Osama bin Laden,
Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadiwith Abu Ghraib and
Kahrizak now as the two identical sites of incarcerating the homo sacer, the
person who is at once sacred and sacrificial, stripped of civil (and juridical)
rights and made naked for his and her solely human rights, to be champi-
oned by US imperialism on one side and denied by militant Islamism on
the other. The naked life of the Muslim has now finally caught up with its
namesake, the concentration camp Musselmanas the template of a dead
man walking.
The messy placenta that accompanied the stillbirth of the first post-
colonial person in the Muslim worlda person who was supposed to be
born with normative, moral, and agential autonomy beyond the inherited
colonial terms of engagement with the worldanticipated the rebirth of
the nation at large evident in the commencement of the civil rights move-
ment in Iran, followed by the rise of Arab Spring. The vile and violent
crackdown of peaceful demonstrations in Iran and the Arab Worldwhich
included kidnapping, rape, torture, and murder of citizens by the ruling
regimeswas a prelude to the militant Talibanization of the faith in any
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.
THE NAKED LIFE

The implosion of the West has conditioned (as it was conditioned by)
an epistemic exhaustion of all its creative and destructive forces inherent
to all the binaries it had enabled. The (negational) site and citation of the
stillbirth of the first postcolonial person and the rebirth of the nation are
now contingent on the weakest citizen of an Islamic Republicthe for-
gotten figure of a Bahai Iranian, the persona non grata in his and her own
homeland, the non-citizen citizen of an illegitimate republic.
The Iranian Bahai is that naked lifethe weakest homo sacer in the
camp. What we are witnessing today in Iran is the political transmutation
of the Shii/Islamic law into a repressive killing machinewith the citi-
zens of the republic considered as Mohareb/The Enemy Combatants, who
as asir/POWs have no legal status. It is not enough that the late Ayatollah
Montazeri (19222009) and Hojjat al-Islam Karroubi were outraged at
the news of raping young men and women in the dungeons of the Islamic
Republic. True or false, these reports posited the legalized justification of
physical or sexual violence, with the body of the victim legally transmuted
248 H. DABASHI
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
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).
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
At this point, I need to resume my thinking through the active

transmutation of body politics and the formation of the posthuman body
together as the site of corporeal 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,
the tortured body of a state violence, the site of a bodily transmutation of
political resistance, I propose the Reconstruction of an emancipatory con-
ception of the nation and its politics. The evidence of torture in the dun-
geons of the Islamic Republic dismantles the ruling regime from within
with the broken and abused body as evidence. The tortured body of one
here becomes the tortured body of all, and if we are to think through the
decoupling of the nation from the state, on the site of these tortured bod-
ies we are witness to the unhinging of any claim to political legitimacy.
The publication of Mehdi Karroubis letter to Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani
shook the already wobbly Islamic Republic to its foundations. Nobody
had ever dared to speak so openly about the most notorious public secret
of the theocratic statesomething that everyone knew and no one ever
spoke of, that the Islamic (no less) Republic kidnaps, incarcerates, savagely
beats up, tortures, sexually abuses, and even murders, and then secretly
An earlier draft of this chapter appeared as Damnatio Memoriae in Julie

A.Carlson and Elisabeth Weber (Eds), Speaking about Torture (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2012): 140161.

254 H. DABASHI
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
remains always on the verge of leaving us behind. It is precisely this vacu-

ous distance between what one fears and what one feels that Shoja Azari
manages best to capture in his version of the story, not as much in depict-
ing the actual plot, but in portraying the emotive desolation of the envi-
ronment, that gives a sense of the Freudian uncanny to his K. The same
is true about Karroubis letter, written against the prosaic banality of an
Islamic Republic that for 30 years has sustained its warring posture in
order to hide the terror that it inflicts upon its own citizens, with juridical
precision, condemned to and by their own place of birth. Karroubi writes
this letter very much in the way that the Condemned man in Kafkas In
the Penal Colony looks at the Machine that is about to torture and mur-
der himunaware, bewildered, innocent, guilty, determined, condemned,
walking to the slaughterhouse of his own shaken convictions. He is losing
faith, as he is exercising it, consuming it.
Toward the end of the letter, Karroubi finally collects his courage and
writes:
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
He then pleads with Rafsanjani to do something about this, and concludes

by saying that I have prepared two copies of this letter, one of which I
have signed and sealed and will send to you, and will keep the other. He
then sends his salutations, signs his name, and dates it. A weight is lifted off
the old mans chest. He can breathe now, or perhaps even take a nap. The
mental picture of innocent children born barely after the Islamic revolution
he helped bring about being sexually violated in the prisons of the Islamic
Republic was just too daunting for his aging nerves to take. Perhaps he
could now take a short nap after the letter was off his chest.
The publication of Karroubis letter dropped a Napalm bomb on the
presumed legitimacy (even a certain air of sanctity) of the Islamic Republic,
whose custodians were furious with the old mansome even said that he
ought be put on trial, and lashed 80 times. Karroubi was unrepentant, and
promised he would reveal more, and he did.
On 2 Shahrivar 1388/24 August 2009, Mehdi Karroubi proceeded to

publish his first evidence in the form of a testimony by one of the victims
of sexual violence while in custody.3 In this testimony, the person (whose
name and gender were withheld) begins by reporting how it took days
of conversation with Karroubi finally to come to terms with what had
happened to him (later it was revealed that the victim was a young man)
and get rid of his false sense of shame and start talking. He then reports
how three official investigators sent by the government began interrogat-
ing him with an accusatory tone of voice and with a language that he
says he was confused if he were the plaintiff or the accused. Most of the
questions had to do with his connections with Karroubi, how he had come
to him, why did he trust him, and why did he agree to do a videotap-
ing of his story with him. They asked him against whom is he lodging a
complaint, to which he responds, I dont know, you tell memeaning
anyone from the person who raped him to the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
to the Supreme Leader. When he objects to their lines of questioning, the
interrogators tell him that he is raising some serious charges, challenging
the sacred regime, so they have to make sure. He answers back that
they seem to have forgotten what the issue is, to which they respond by
asking him how deep did they penetrate, and did they ejaculate? They
finally take him to the Surgeon General for examination, and on their way
intimidate him and accuse him of having received money to make these
accusations. At the Surgeon General, the presiding physician says that he
has to consult with the initial physician who had examined the victim, at
which point the security officials begin to accuse the plaintiff of lying and
tell him that if he was indeed raped, the physician would have been able to
tell even the size of it (using the word size in English.) They subse-
quently go to his home and do a local investigation, thereby further intim-
idating him and damaging his name and reputation in the neighborhood.
Soon after his interview was published, the victim disappeared.4
FROM KAHRIZAK TOABU GHRAIB

Following these reports, first Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader
of Iran, and then President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad explicitly acknowl-
edged that there were criminal atrocities that took place in Kahrizak
prison. Khamenei promised there would be investigations, but dismissed
the incidents as unimportant compared to the dignity of the regime,
which had been sullied.5 Ahmadinejad, meanwhile, completely reversed
258 H. DABASHI
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
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
Arthur Dantos take on Botero is exactly the opposite of Andrea K.Scotts

on Crilehe thinks Botero brings us closer to the pain of Iraqis; while
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
Iraqis were tortured bodily, so Americans could discover themselves

analytically. Here the progressive politics of Susan Sontag and Arthur
Danto and the opposing politics of Alan Dershowitz and Michael Ignatieff
had become entirely irrelevant. What mattered was who was us and
who themon one side of the political divide, Iraqis were dehuman-
ized and allowed to be tortured, and on the other dehumanized and
allowed to reveal who we are. Terrorizing at Abu Ghraib and theorizing
in NewYork now collided.
Abu Ghraib was incessantly etherized into theoretical nullity, as it
dropped from a site into a citationnot from absence of evidence but in
fact from excessive evidence, evidence so overwhelming that the whole
event had to be alienated from reality, via a bizarre case of Verfremdung, so
that Americans could vicariously feel it as theirspurchase, buy, own,
consume, and discard it. The fact and phenomenon of Abu Ghraibas
moral insolubility that had to remain that way in order to register its
horrorshad to be incessantly deciphered, coded and decoded, sold and
purchased, curated and watched, for Americans to pack and tuck away
262 H. DABASHI
and consider it done. It made no difference if Alan Dershowitz and

Michael Ignatieff legally and even morally justified torture, or Arthur
Danto and Susan Sontag visually theorized, analyzed, and implicitly or
explicitly denounced torture. What remained constant among them all
was the sublation of visual evidence into theoretical speculation, of one
sort or another, the aggressive transmutation of unfathomable horror into
comprehensible analytical tropes.
The case of Kahrizak poses exactly the opposite phenomenon but to the
same effect: its hesitant, taboo-breaking under-exposure effectively erases
the memory before it is allowed even to form and then bother. In the
Kahrizak case, the absence of visuality, evidence, and testimony was geared
to disallow the memory, to abort it, at the moment of its conception.
It is of course true that upon assuming office, President Barack Obama
prevented further exposure of incriminating Abu Ghraib pictures for rea-
sons of national security.13 But by then the visual, narrative, aesthetic,
and theoretical over-saturation had overwhelmed the scene, numbed the
senses, and buried the factsbought, sold, consumed, and discarded the
evidence. It is also reported that some of the torturers and rapists in Basij
detention camps in Iran took sadistic pleasure in taking pictures with their
mobile phones of their naked victims. According to one victim who spoke
with The Times, they [the security forces raping young people they had
arrested] also liked to take several of us out at the same time and forced
us to ride each other, doggy-style, whilst naked. They laughed and took
pictures with their mobile phones. They would watch this for ten minutes
and then proceed to rape.14 To this evident copycatting of Abu Ghraib
pictures, we also need to add the fact that at the writing of this essay, we
are only months into reports of Kahrizak atrocities, but years into Abu
Ghraibs. Reports and multiple and varied coverage of the atrocities in
Kahrizak and other detention camps in Iran may indeed snowball and
develop in unforeseen directions. But my central argumentthat in Iran
facts are buried under absence of evidence, while in the USA these facts
are over-exposedspeaks to a different concern. The effect of both prac-
tices, under-exposure of Kahrizak in Iran and the over-exposure of Abu
Ghraib in the USA, is the same: Damnatio Memoriae, damnation of mem-
ory, removal from remembrance. The difference, though, speaks to two
diametrically opposed visual regimes, one that works through an aesthetic
minimalism of the sort that is perhaps best evident in Abbas Kiarostamis
cinema, and the other via a cinematic gluttony perhaps best on display in
Quentin Tarantino.
TWO VISUAL REGIMES

What the comparison of Abu Ghraib and Kahrizak reveals, as two com-
plementary sites and citations, is the working of two divergent visual
regimes affecting the same result: covering up reality, one by over-
exposure and the other by under-exposure, one by overwhelming the
visual market, the other by underwhelming it. What the over-exposure
of Abu Ghraib reveals is not the open-minded democratic nature of the
Empireit actually does precisely the opposite. It helps conceal the
terrorizing fact under the avalanche of its evidence, fueling an imperial
visual regime that is, ipso facto, the globalization of the society of spec-
tacle that sustains and informs it, and as such overwhelms all other (and
othered) visual cultures, where the varied artistic forms from around
the world are effectively museumized in film festivals, or else over aes-
theticized and theorized, or, even worse, anthropologized by the con-
tinuing operations of ethnographic power-basing between primitivized
image and privileged theory.
What overwhelms and covers up the atrocities in Iran is not just
the absence of visual evidence, but the effective erasure of whatever
evidence is produced in the context of the aggressive reduction of the
world at large (Iran included) into an empire of camps, as Nicholas
Mirzoeff, and before him Giorgio Agamben, have diagnosed the epi-
demic.15 These camps, as Mirzoeff and Agamben understand them,
are not just the repetitions and cloning of Guantanamo Bay. They are
the result of the transmutation of nation-states into functional simula-
cra of camps, where their facts become invisible, and even when they
are made visible, they are subsequently overtly aestheticized, museu-
mized, and made into object de curiosit in art house movies in order
to be subsequently depleted of their terror and theorized into learned
cinema-studies projects. This over-aestheticization is (paradoxically)
exactly the opposite side of an equally dominant propensity toward the
primitivization of visual evidence of the camps via disciplinary regi-
mens of ethnographic exercises at the service of vacuous and useless
anthropological projects. In other words, even if produced, the visual
evidence on the sites of nation-states cum camps are (ab)used for two
diametrically opposed but effectively identical projects: excessive aes-
theticization in visual theories on one hand and systematic primitiv-
ization by ethnographic projects of visual anthropology on the other.
What are lost in between are the factual evidences of the partition of
264 H. DABASHI
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:
In 1967in response to the first wave of such image-commodification, Guy

Debord argued that modern life had become a society of spectacle that
eliminated all sense of history Debord was extending Marxs argument
about [commodity fetishization] Debord argued that the next stage of
development was for capital to abstract itself entirely from the process of
production and become an image [Now] the image has undergone a fur-
ther stage of capitalist development and accumulation. If in the 1960s capi-
tal had become an image, by 2003 the image has become a smart weapon.
Following Ernest Mandels analysis of late capitalism, such a development
might have been expected because it is precisely the existence of a perma-
nent arms economy that has prevented capitalism from falling into crisis
caused by the tendency of the rate of profit to decline Mandel argued that
the armaments economy continually intervenes in this process and changes
its dynamics, accelerating the rate of technological change. It is therefore
not surprising that the intense pace of change in visual technologies during
the 1990s, produced in part by military research, also generated a milita-
rized form of image.17
These days Hollywood precisely corroborates Mirzoeffs diagnosis by

over-saturating viewers with torture scenes, as, for example, in Gavin
Hoods Rendition (2007), where the Chicago-based chemical engineer
Anwar El-Ibrahimi/Omar Metwally is suspected of links to terrorism, kid-
napped by CIA from a US airport and sent off to a Middle Eastern
country to be interrogated and tortured. The scenes of an Arab official
torturing Anwar El-Ibrahimi are vicariousevincing things that can (pre-
sumably) happen only in an Arab/Muslim world but can only (certainly)
be seen in an American film.
Beyond their evident differences, both these diametrically opposite

visual regimes concur in burying the evidencein one way or another
corroborating what Jean Baudrillard diagnosed as the perfect crime
against reality. What we have forgotten, by dint of constantly accumu-
lating, he proposed, is that force comes from subtraction, power from
absence. Because we are no longer capable today of coping with the sym-
bolic mastery of absence, we are immersed in the opposite illusion, the
disenchanted illusion of the proliferation of screens and images.18 That
accumulation is of course now the conditio sine qua non of globalized
capitalism running amok on consumption. But that sense of subtraction,
to be sure, cannot be preached to a culture that has produced an Abbas
Kiarostami in its cinematic culturethe very cinema of subtraction if there
ever was any. But, again, the bte noire of that cinema is when it is burned
on a DVD and put on a shelf at the closest Blockbuster to a university cam-
pus to be rented by the local anthropologist and fed into the next issue of
Visual Anthropology or the next seasons catalogue of one university press
or another. Left to its own devices, and before it is neutered by anthropol-
ogy, that sense of abstraction is not lost on the world at the receiving end of
capitalist modernity, which remains the principal site of Baudrillards inves-
tigation. That site produces the over-saturation of Hollywood imagery and
over-exposure of Abu Ghraib at one and the same timefrom Charles
Graner and Lynndie England who perpetrate the crime on others to Arthur
Danto and Susan Sontag who theorize it as ours.
Iranian cinema, otherwise perfectly capable of registering the lived
experience of the people who produce it (as does any other Third World
Cinema), is instead vastly anthropologized, mystified, codified, and
symbolized for useless theoretical speculations, precisely at a time when
Hollywood has a monopoly over what Mirzoeff aptly calls the satura-
tion of images.19 Consider a book like Michael Fischers Mute Dreams,
Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges: Persian Poesis in the Transnational
Circuitry (2004),20 in which the ethnographic curiosities of a seasoned
anthropologist of Iran gets the better of him and sends him off tangent
on futile speculations about everything from ancient Zoroastrian rituals to
what he takes as postmodern fictional casuistry to produce a massive tome
of unreadable prose about non-existent phenomena. When one reads
Fischers book, the legitimate suspicion arises that it is vaguely related
to aspects of Iranian visual culture, and yet in an entirely vacuous and
deboned prose, that could have very well been about marine biology in
266 H. DABASHI
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
Image 1 Azadeh Akhlaghi, Assassination of Mirzadeh Eshghi, 2012

Memories of the nation are visually haunting and politically reproductive. Here in
Azadeh Akhlaghis photography, part of a larger series, we see the reenactment of an
iconic traumatic moment in the national history: the assassination of Mirzadeh
Eshghi, a political poet and activists at his home on 3 July 1924. In these series of
staged photography Azadeh Akhlaghi reimagines some exceptionally traumatic
moments in the history of the nation, and then places herself somewhere inconspicu-
ous inside the frame. Here you can see her at the right-center of the picture ascend-
ing the steps of a subterranean cellar. In these series of photograph, a detailed
remembrance of the most troubling turning points of a national history are reen-
acted as if staging them for a renewed remembrance, a ritual embracing, where his-
tory has simply refused to be archived, or appropriated by power of state narrations.
Azadeh Akhlaghi here decidedly reclaims those memories for the nation, entirely
independent of the political abuses to which the state has subjected them. By placing
herself inside the dram the nation she represents reclaims the event. Here she appears
as a historian, a chronologist, and a chronicler of her people. She refuses to make any
political distinction between those national heroes who supported the Islamic
Republic or those who opposed it. The Pahlavi and Islamic Republic periods here
collapse into nullity and through its artists the nation reclaims its history for itself.
empire of camps has no scruples, no moral agenda and no desire to be seen

or to make its prisoners visible, although surveillance is everywhere.25 In
our more contemporary terms, Guantnamo and Kahrizak are two sides
of the same coin, and Christian fundamentalism and militant Islamism
(as in fact messianic Zionism and Hindu fundamentalism), have no moral
268 H. DABASHI
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.
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
Nakba, Gates to the Sun (2004), is by an Egyptian filmmaker, Yousry

Nasrallah, based on an epic by a Lebanese novelist, Elias Khouri.27
Hyperrealization lives through good intentions. There is no narrat-
ing torture, analyzing it, theorizing it, packaging it, or publishing it.
Those who have been tortured do not talk about torture. It is torturous
for them. I have known people (all of them Iranians and Arabs)close
friends, scholars, filmmakers, photographers, poetswho have been tor-
tured. They never talk about torture. Except in jest, except in indirection,
in their art, in their punctuated silences, in their cinema, their photog-
raphy, their painting, their poetry, their dreamlike memoirs, from a dis-
tance, a safe (perhaps therapeutic) distance. 28 Indirection is how torture
speakswhen the speaker has been tortured. Writing about torture is
writing about, if anything, silence, and about darkness, about the decency
of being silent in face of torture, for not facing, not looking at, scenes of
torture, of turning the lights off, of darknessof shame. Only people who
have never been tortured talk about torture.
In the hidden light of that genteel darkness, and the screams of pain
hidden in that explosive silence, writing about torture is not writing about
Guantnamo Bay, not painting Abu Ghraibfor to read, write, paint, per-
form, or in any other way portray torture is to kill the messenger of the
unseen and the unseemly, destroy the revelatory evidence of the unknow-
able, and thus speaking the unspeakable act, making an obscene spectacle
of the despicable deed. Hyperrealization does not allow for emancipatory
mystery, for moments of the unknown. Those pictures of Abu Ghraib are
the very last vestiges of a sign that cannot and must not be seen, cited, or
read. The temptation to look at and read them is one liberal guilt that must
never be allowed to be allayed. There are certain scenes from which one
must turn away, and not look at evil. Once in Geneva Mohsen Makhmalbaf
told me the story of a script he had just written about a young boy who was
sworn never to cast a glance at any evil act. Years later, he turned that story
into a movie, Silence (1998), the central character of which is a blind boy.
Hyperrealization intensifies with border-crossing. Writing on torture
of colonized people in English is erasing it. Translating from an under-
exposed reality into an over-exposed language will lose the torture in
the translation. There is something terrifying about Shekanjeh in Persian
that is lost in English Torture. Translating from camp to cosmopolis, from
the peripheries into the centralized, resonates with gaps of gasps in not
being able to speak. Here, a shaky camera is infinitely better than sharply
focused pictures, for memory is more effective than overriding evidence
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
The sight of hyperrealization is the birthplace of the rebirth of the nation.

From the fragments of the unreal made of the real the nations rebuild
themselves. Hyperrealization has a colonial borderline. As the Paris attack
of 13 November 2015, back to the US events of 9/11 in 2001 clearly
show the attack on the West is an attack on humanity, while an attack
on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, or Syria is humanitarian intervention. But
precisely because of that phantom colonial divide, the over- and under-
exposure of reality collide to create the condition of hyperreal simulacrum
from which a resurrection of the postcolonial nation in terms beyond that
postcoloniality is made possible.
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
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
presidency and unequivocally denounced the civil rights movement as

a product of imperialist design. To declare, without an iota of moral dis-
comfort and even with the self-righteous assumption of the upper-hand,34
that what we are witnessing in Iran is an imperialist-instigated plot to
oppose the social justice projects of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on behalf
of the economic liberalism of Mir Hossein Mousavi simply betrays a
depth of moral corruption that defies reason and borders on obscenity. To
be able to argue,35 that the commencement of the civil rights movement
in Iran is in fact a rich peoples resentment against a poor peoples presi-
dent, reveals a depth of moral depravity that begins and ends with a total
disregard for either the masses of millions who have put their lives on the
line or been tortured, sexually violated, or cold-bloodedly murdered by
the security apparatus of the selfsame popular president.
The same tortured and violated body of the postcolonial person, evis-
cerated by an aterritorial conquest long before juridicalized by any Islamic
Republic, is also the sight of its own self-resurrection, from the ruins and
debris of its broken bones and violated dignity. The less visible the site
of that violated body, the more potent the desire of its resurrection for
agency. The more violent the colonial (the West) and juridical (Islam)
attempt at regulating that body, the more flamboyant its desire to revolt.
THE END OFHEGEMONY

The hegemony of imperial visuality is precarious, like any other culture
the promiscuous capital has created and discarded at whim. The mobile
phone images dispatched from Iranian rallies and consumed by globalized
media (BBC, CNN, Aljazeera, etal.) changed, forever, the very architec-
ture of mass media and gave currency to the notion of citizen journal-
ist. Facebook did not save Iranian civil rights movement; Iranian civil
rights movement saved Facebook by extending its architecture to a vast
social uprising. The avalanche of Persian blogs did not just force Google
to expedite its PersianEnglish translation software; it put the assump-
tion of any global (Western) control of both narrativity and visuality on
the defensive. Consider Neil Blomkamps District 9 (2009), in which
Agambens notion of the camp is turned upside down, when a very
large alien spaceship stops above Johannesburg in South Africa and a band
of aliens (prawns) are incarcerated in a camp-cum-slum called District
9. When forces of Multinational United (MNU), a private military con-
tractor not unlike Blackwater, is sent to evacuate the aliens and relocate
them, one of the MNU employees, Wikus van de Merwe/Sharlto Copley,

is infected by the aliens and in the course of the film is turning into one
of them. The superior technological machinery that is embedded in the
aliens presence dwarfs the Earthlings not just in military but also, it turns
out, moral terms. Compare the Abu Ghraib snapshots taken on digital
cameras and sent from Iraq to the USA for entertainment of family and
friends with what the very same technology did in Iranconveying for the
whole world to see the groundwork of a massive civil rights movement. In
the course of the post-electoral crisis of June 2009, Iranian demonstrators
were dictating the terms of their own visual presence and representation
in the globe and were no longer the victims of globalized visual regimes
beyond their control.
The end of visual hegemony is the end of distancing sympathy and
an invitation to equalizing empathy. The power-basing self-othering of
the victims and their victimizers has now collapsed, and claiming the pain
of others (always others) has become quite untenable. Even Aim
Csaires humanism, that he feels tortured by the news of anyone else
being tortured, amounts to a claim that affective sympathy can lead to the
annihilation of the Self by the Other. The Self must remain the same, so
that the pain of others remains theirs, rather than being imperially appro-
priated. Vicarious sympathy wipes out the site of the Other by annihilating
the site of the Selfthus denying the overriding immutability of the real.
The tortured body is the bared body, the body that is stripped of all its
civil rights and left naked and at the mercy of one human rights organiza-
tion or anotherto save it by (paradoxically) concurring with the denial
of its civil rights. We must leave the human behind in order to reach for
the rights of the citizen.
Iranian (or Palestinian) cinema, as one among many other non-
Hollywood cinemas, is the model and the precursor of visual revolts that
refuse to be regimented and thus keep one awake at nights, and it is pre-
cisely that cinema that will scandalize tyrannies that seek to censure and
regiment it. Consider, for example, Hana Makhmalbafs work, presented
at the Venice Film festival of 2009. Her Green Days (2009) narrates the
defiant streets of Tehran for the whole world to see. Twenty one-year-old
Iranian director Hana Makhmalbaf, reports Reuters, brings the bloody
street protests that followed June's presidential vote to the big screen in
a film looking at the hopes and frustrations of the countrys youth.36
This is what will bring the Islamic Republic down. Watch Shirin Neshats
Women without Men (2009), the winner of the Silver Lion Award for
276 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/.
3. For details of this testimony, see http://www.rahesabz.net/

story/681/. Accessed on 24 August 2009.
4. In his subsequent public statements, Mehdi Karroubi has accused the
official of the judiciary of intimidating the victim and creating public
embarrassment for him. He subsequently disappeared, after testifying
in front of a camera for Mr. Karroubi to produce as evidence. For more
details, see Karroubis statement on his website available at http://
tagheer.ir/fa/archives/1388,06,15/89. Accessed on 24 August 2009.
Soon after the victim disappeared, a prominent Iranian documentary
filmmaker who lives in exile in Europe revealed his identity and reported
that he has been in contact with the filmmaker asking him to document
his plight. For more details, see the testimony of Allamehzadeh and the
victim, Ebrahim Sharifi, on Allamehzadehs website: http://reza.mala-
kut.org/2009/09/post_469.html. Accessed on 20 September 2009,
and 29 November 2015.
5. For the complete text of Khameneis remarks acknowledging the
atrocities at Kahrizak and Tehran University dormitories, see his
speech to a group of students on 4 Shahrivar 1388/26 August 2009,
available at: http://www.leader.ir/langs/fa/?p=bayanat&id=5793_.
6. See Mahmoud Ahmadinejads comments in this regard in Majera-ye
Kahrizak kar-e Barandazan bud/the Kahrizak Incident was the work
of the Enemies of the State (7 Shahrivar 1388/29 August 2009 at:
http://www.donya-e-eqtesad.com/Default_view.asp?@=171937).
Accessed on 2 September 2009. Even the state-run national televi-
sion, Seda va Sima-ye Jomhuri-ye Islami, implicitly acknowledged
that there had been abuses, when it launched a massive propaganda
campaign claiming these were by a few rogue elements, and that
the security apparatus were the real victim of the post-election
violence.
7. See Inconvenient Evidence: Iraqi Prison Photographs from Abu
Ghraib (New York: International Center of Photography and the
Andy Warhol Museum, 2004).
8. See Seymour Hersh, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu
Ghraib (New York: HarperCollins, 2004).
9. For a virtual tour, see http://www1.american.edu/cas/katzen/
museum/2007nov_botero.cfm. Accessed 8 September 2009.
10. Andrea K.Scott, Susan CrileAbu Ghraib: Abuse of Power (The
New York Times, 13 October, 2006), available at http://query.
278 H. DABASHI
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.
18. Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime (London: Verso: 1995/1996): 4.
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
this respect. See also Edward Saids Representing the Colonized:

Anthropologys Interlocutors (Critical Inquiry, Volume15: Number
2, Winter 1989: 205225) for further details. See also Nicholas De
Genova, The Stakes of an Anthropology of the United States (CR:
The New Centennial Review: Volume 7: Number 2, Fall 2007) for
further elaborations.
22. See Edward Saids preface to my edited volume, Dream of a Nation:
On Palestinian Cinema (London: Verso, 2006).
23. The two Greek terms that Agamben adopts to distinguish between
the simple fact of living common to all beings (animals, men, or
gods) for zo, and the form or way of living proper to an individual
or a group for bios. See Agamben, Homo Sacer (Op. Cit.): 1.
26. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political. Translated and with an
Introduction by George Schwab, with a New Foreword by Tracy
B.Strong (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996): 26.
27. From Ghassan Kanafanis Return to Haifa (1968), made into film
in 1982, we have had no major film about Nakba until Elia Suleimans
The Time that Remains (2009).
28. For an excellent example of such modes of narrative distancing from the
memories of being tortured, see Haifa Zanganas Dreaming of Baghdad
(New York: Feminist Press, 2009). A young revolutionary activist, Haifa
Zangana was tortured by Saddam Husseins security forces in the infa-
mous Abu Ghraib prison, and her Dreaming of Baghdad is a simultane-
ous act of remembering and distancing herself from having been
tortured. The master thesis of Shahla Talebi, another victim of torture
under both the Pahlavi regime and the Islamic Republic, a former stu-
dent and now a friend and colleague, works through a similar paradox.
Her thesis is being revised and will soon be published.
29. For an examination of this Roman practice, see Harriet I.Flower, The
Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture
(Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
30. For a compilation of secret memos describing in detail the torturing
techniques used by the CIA under the Bush administrations war on
terror, see David Coles Torture Memos: Rationalizing the
Unthinkable (New York: The New Press, 2009).
31. For a BBC report on the US army recruitment of anthropologists
in its war on terror, see Kambiz Fattahi, US army enlists
280 H. DABASHI
anthropologists (BBC NEWS, 16 October 2007), available at:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7042090.stm. Accessed on
12 November 2009.
32. Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime (Op. Cit.): 4.
33. See Agamben, Homo Sacer (Op. Cit.): 136143 and 154159.
34. As does Ismael Hossein-zadeh in his Reflecting on Irans Presidential
Election (http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=33816)
35. As does Rostam Pourzal in Would MLK back Iranian Protestors in
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6270.
36. See Silvia Aloisi, Iranian Street Protests Hit Big Screen in Venice at
ABC NEWS (11 September 2009): Available at (http://abcnews.
go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=8548797). Accessed on 19
September 2009.
37. See A sneak peek at Iranian artist Shirin Neshats award-winning
movie (Los Angeles Times, 16 September 2009), available at http://
latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2009/09/
a-sneak-peek-at-iranian-artist-shirin-neshats-awardwinning-movie.
html. Accessed on 19 September 2009.
Chapter Twelve: Mythmaker, Mythmaker,
Make me aMyth
In this final chapter, I wish to 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 the 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, aesthetically foretold
in a sublime moment in Iranian cinema. By gendering the nation through
an immaculate conception, the creative reconceptualization of the very
idea of vatan/homeland gives the aesthetic intuition of transcendence a
decidedly feminine perspective.
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.

282 H. DABASHI
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
employer] are caught in the cul-de-sac of enduring social traditions, per-

sonal emotions, fear of unknown environment, and the world outside,2
still they are active moral agents, alert and aware, in their worldly affairs.
Laboring women are equally central to The Crow/Kalagh (1976). The
old, stately Mother used to be a nurse; her daughter-in-law Asiyeh is now a
teacher to deaf children. Again, the dignity of working, the social location
of a full membership in the world, is the bracing grace of these women.
It is crucial to keep in mind that Beizai does not concoct this working
status for women of his films. He is extraordinarily realistic in these depic-
tions. His realism in fact is not only rooted in the immediate historical
experiences of his society but also in his mythological reconstitution of
pre-historical nuclear family where women have been at the center of the
community of labor. Throughout his cinematic career, Beizai has always
operated on the borderline of myth and reality. Even in his most visibly
modern and urban films, such as Thunder Shower and The Crow, Beizai
sees life as the site of a ritual in which collapses myth and reality, where
myth animates actions and actions are mythologically charged. From these
earliest works, the cross-fusion of mythos and logos in the work of Beizai
has been evident. As forms of cognitive categories, myths for Beizai have
a constitutionally material, historical, and evolving character.3
The most significant aspect of The Crow, however, is Beizais constitu-
tion of the figure of women in a multidimensional, multitemporal waya
strategy that breaks the apparent solidity of the subject in any patriarchal
constitution of it. The Mother in The Crow is narrating her memoir to
her daughter-in-law Asiyeh, while a picture of her youth has mysteriously
appeared in the Lost section of the daily paper. Meanwhile, Asiyeh is
expecting a child, which could very well be a girl. Among the Mother, her
daughter-in-law Asiyeh, the picture of the Mothers youth, the narration
of her memoir, and the expected child, there thus emerges a composite
picture of one single woman: at once old (the Mother), young (Asiyeh),
unborn (Asiyehs fetus), past (the mothers memoir), present (Asiyehs
writing that memoir), visual (the Mothers youthful picture), and verbal
(the Mothers narration of her memoir). If myth is the symbolic structur-
ing of the world in a meaningful and significant way, Beizai has a Lego-
like, dismantling attitude toward myths that has been constitutional in the
social formations of a culture. In The Crow in particular, he dismantles
the fixated subjectivity of the feminine via a dismantling of it in temporal
and narrative terms. The breakdown of the feminine subject and its cine-
284 H. DABASHI
matic reconstitution is one particularly effective way of not only screening

their historical formations but also, equally important, negotiating a new
composition for that subjectivity.
THE MYTHICALLY PREGNANT REALITY

Beginning with an historically disenfranchised segment of his society,
namely women, Beizais access to what he perceives as the mythological
roots of contemporary social ills thematically expands to include far more
universal implications of the problem. His art, as Adorno would call it,
would thus strategically start to dwell on reality in a way that can begin to
manipulate and change it. Arts autonomous realm, Adorno suggests,
has nothing in common with the external world other than borrowed
elements that have entered into a fully changed context.4 The aesthetic
context within which Beizai ritually choreographs and orchestrates myth
and reality has an emancipatory angle on the self-same reality, it is not
formed in pure artistic isolation, because, again as Adorno put it, the
development of artistic process corresponds to social development5 in
such a way that the two will have authoritative correspondences with each
other. Beizai is acutely alerted to the external world in which he lives and
works. The elements of that world that he borrows and infuses into his art
are there to enter a fateful negotiation with their own mythological under-
pinnings. In his art, Beizais cinematic vision is ambassadorial, frequenting
in between the realm of the real and the domain of the mythical.
By the time that Beizai makes The Stranger and the Fog/Gharibeh va
M eh (1973), he is completely at home with his richly implicative and
pregnant mythological language, a language that despite its ascending alle-
gorical suggestiveness has a profoundly earthly quality to it. The emerging
affection in The Stranger and the Fog between Rana, the coastal woman
of permanence, and Ayat, the maritime man of migration, is rooted in
the twilight zone of land and sea, life and death, fact and fiction, reality
and myth. The village of Rana, the young widow, is ethereal, somewhere
in the north of Iran or perhaps nowhere at all. The village, on the edge
of a maritime abyss, is as foggy as real, as imaginary as material. On that
borderland of living and death, Ayat has to fight against the demons that
have chased him from the sea into the security of the village with the same
ferocity that Rana has to fight the ghosts of her dead husbands ancestors
that haunt the villagers with the same intensity as does the fear of an invad-
ing army of sea monsters. The crucial aspect of this dual, circular, warfare
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
status vis--vis the colonial consequences of those projects. Beizai, among

other visionaries of emancipation from that predicament, has been at work
not to abolish received mythic universe but to reinvent it. In his cinema,
we do not watch a revealing loss, because we could not remember
our own dreams, let alone losing them. For the colonial subject, there is
no revealing loss. For them, and as they could see themselves in their
active reimagination by Beizai, the world needed to be invented anew,
this time with the postcolonial subjects in it. The colonial subjects were
invented out of the world of the Enlightenment by the very inventors
of the Enlightenment and modernity, the author of Was ist Aufklrung
chief among them. In Beizai, among a handful of other visionary theo-
rists of our liberation, the postcolonial subjects are being invented back
into something they can call their own history, but this time with no
Hegelian teleological illusion about the term.
In Beizai, we see not through the dead or dying myth but through the
resuscitated reinventions of myths. Bataille is correct that through a dying
myth, one can see the world even more profoundly mythical. But that is
only if one has first benefited from the fruits, and not merely suffered the
dire consequences, of the illusion of the myth. In the colonial outposts of
the European Enlightenment, we have an entirely different stand vis--
vis myth. We need, as Beizai intends, to reinvent them in a way that are
affirming us in our place in the world, not denying us our historical inflec-
tion. And ultimately, because our needs are of an entirely different sort,
the need of being born into the world, we cannot have any conception of
a joyful suffering. We have had too much joyful suffering in our neck
of the woods. We called it Sufism.
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
incomprehensibility of his cinema is precisely the deep-rootedness of

these mythological referents in the mind of his Iranian audience. Beizais
attempt has invariably been to de-familiarize these myths in order to shake
his audience into a renewed pact with them.
With a gaze fixated on contemporary realities, particularly the fate of
Iranian women, but through women the entire crocked timbre of try-
ing to be an Iranian in modernity, Beizai shakes and rattles the most
anciently forgotten realities into speaking their reason, breaking their con-
spiratorial silence, effacing the banality of their claim to sacred certitude,
to authorial authenticity. Beizai opts for the archaic word Cherikeh
not in a vain search for authenticity but in order to shock the familiar
with the unknown, the comfortable with the mysterious, and the overtly
remembered with the actively forgotten. These are all effective strategies
of alienating the world from its familiar habits of cozening itself into the
habitual. Any number of other wordsAfsaneh, Ostureh, Hekayat, Qesseh,
and so onwould have been equally conveying the sense of a ballad. What
Cherikeh does here is to force the lazy audience to pause and ponder,
to dwell on the unknown, to distance from the habitual, even to distrust
the received definitions and locations of our place-in-the-language we call
home. The main function of the myth, in the judicious words of ke
Hultkrantz, the distinguished scholar of myth who conducted extensive
fieldwork among the Wind River Shoshoni Indians, is to sanction the
establishment and condition of the world and its institutions, thereby safe-
guarding the existence of people and society. In many cases, the very reci-
tation of the myth is so filled with power that it influencesor is thought
to influencethe course of actual events.8 But myths as such have a habit
of not just making the world possible, but making it possible at the heavy
price of a tyrannical subjugation of one race or one gender to another.
Beizais cinema is a gendered visual access to that mythical universe to
renegotiate newer, more just and equitable, myth for the world.
In The Ballad of Tara, which immediately after The Stranger and the
Fog is Beizais most mythically narrated film, he opts for a cinematic redac-
tion of the creation-myth, from a decidedly feminine perspective. Here, he
draws on any number of distant Iranian mythological narratives in order
to generate and render operative his own. He can do that by virtue of the
quantitatively reducible variations on the theme of a given myth.9 In this
narrative, Tara is a woman, earthly, seasonal, in tune with the land, fertile
in her attendance on the real. Tara is part of the nature, constitutional to
and constituent of its fertile celebration of life, with two children, ready
288 H. DABASHI
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:
The impeccable acting of Susan Taslimi as Tara is the indication of a perfect

choice and of the remarkable capability of the actor in the cultivation and
performance of her role. This capability is evident not only in her acting but
also in her physiognomy. Susan Taslimiwith her Wheat-like complexion,
elongated nose, set-back but penetrating, open and intimidating eyes, and
then at times, with that affectionate look, bony and sculpted cheeks, the
wrinkle of power at the side of her mouth, the thin line of thought on her
long forehead, the tall stature, and then that authority in her demeanor
and speechis the very epiphany of Mother-Earth: That very mythological
vision of woman that can very well belong to yesterday, today, or tomorrow,
and [yet] at the same time remain thoroughly woman.10
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)
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
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
completely loses sight of the possibility of collapsing the intellectual

and the visceral, as Beizai does it systematically and almost in all his
films, on the site of a mythic-ritual reconstitution of the realwith a
female character always at the center of his re-mythologies. The reason
that Barthes is theoretically blinded here is that the context of bourgeois
art in which he launches his pathbreaking collection of essays in the late
1950s was, as indeed still is in much of European theorization of the
aesthetic, oblivious of the functioning of the aesthetic in the colonial
outposts of the Enlightenment project, where no autonomous national
bourgeoisie could have existed and as a result in the face of an entirely
contingent social formation of classes and their consciousness art had a
vastly different kind of creative disposition. In this particular case, the
phenomenal cross-fusion of the intellectual and the visceral far from
feigning nature cultivates an extraordinarily revolutionary angle on
the real, forcing it to yield alternative meaning.
To see that proposition in practice, we can do no better than turn to
Bashu: The Little Stranger/Bashu: Gharibeh-ye Kuchak (1985), where
Beizai brings Tara to History, as it were. Nai is de-mythologized Tara in
the heart of History. By bringing Tara from the pre-moment of History
into History, Beizai mythologizes the now of the moment, or in Barthes
terms brings the intellectual and the visceral face to face. The now of
the moment mythologized, the then of the myth is historicized. This con-
fluence of time and narrative is crucial in our reading of Beizais cinema.
It is deadly to separate Beizais cinema into historical and mythologi-
cal.14 He is one filmmaker with no sign of visual schizophrenia about his
cinema. By historicizing mythology and mythologizing history, Beizai
visually crosses the received borders of both and takes us into a third
territory, at once historical and yet radically alerted to its self-inflicted
wounds of perhaps inevitable mythologizing urges. The site of the con-
fluence between the mythos and the logos in Beizai is his fascination with
ritual. Ritual for Beizai is the performative microcosm of a universe
in which collide both the logos of history and the mythos of making it
comprehensible.
In his Absence of the Myth, George Bataille seeks to strike the chord that
captures the moment of the unmyth as itself mythical: Night is also a sun,
and the absence of myth is also a myth: The coldest, the purest, the only
true myth.15 The world itself being mythical, and The Myth worldly,
as a filmmaker almost condemned to realism, Beizai cannot but underline
that cross-fusion. What is thus evident in Beizais cinema is the fictive

transparency of the real, the therapeutics of myth-making in the face of
the fear of the realwith working women at the heart of his recasting of
world-making myths.
Bashu is the critical evidence that the binary opposition between
History and Myth do not hold for Beizaifor in his cinematic cos-
movision he has collided both and construed a third world in which we
become radically conscious of the mythos in the operative energy of the
logos.
Despite her extraordinary critical intelligence in her reading of Beizais
women, Lahiji, regrettably, falls squarely into the trap of a patriarchal defi-
nition of motherhood, without pausing for a second to question whether
or not that power-basing definition is remotely something instinctual.
There is nothing instinctual about a definition of motherhood which
is historically constituted. In a haste to celebrate Nai as the ideal-typical
Mother,16 Lahiji completely forgets to consider that on more than one
occasion Nais attitude toward Bashu is inexcusably racist. In their first
encounter, Nai makes a nasty reference to the dark complexion of Bashu
(he being from southern Iran and darker in his complexion than Nai and
her children who are from northern Iran), and says, are you an animal or
a human being? She is at first very protective of her own biological chil-
dren and treats Bashu as if a dangerous animal in her rice paddy. The leit-
motif of racism stays quite constant in Bashu, resulting in one of the most
glorious scenes in which Nai ritually gives birth to Bashu, but not before
buying a whole bar of soap to wash his dark skin and make him white.
Having failed to make him white, she says, No way, he will not become
white. None of these racist comments, however, have the slightest effect
on the earthly majesty of Nais character. In the earthly self-confidence
of his characterization of Nai, Beizai knows only too well that she must
share the racist presupposition of her village, the universe of her physical
location and material imagination.
Nai is no mother in a limiting, patriarchally constituted, sense to
which Lahiji unfortunately resorts. Nai is earth incarnate. To her, Bashu,
her own two children, the animals to which she attends, the shooting
stems in the rice paddy are one and the same. Beizai could not possibly
constitute the most serious challenge in Iranian performing arts to the
very mythological foundations of Persian patriarchy and yet accept and
celebrate its constitution of motherhood as a trap in it.
294 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
Image 1 Bahram Beizai, Bashu: The Little Stranger (1989)

The visual registers of the nation become mythic in the capable hands of a master
mythmaker. Here in Bahram Beizais Bashu: The Little Stranger (1989), the lead-
ing Iranian filmmaker dismantles the ruling metaphors of the patriarchal order via
a reworking of the primordial parable of an immaculate conception and rebirth.
Beizai turns the simple story of a young boy, Bashu, running away from the war
torn southern Iran during the Iran-Iraq War (19801988) into a metaphor of
rebirth outside the structural purview of the patriarchal order. At the center of the
narrative is Nai, a rural matriarch who in the absence of her husband toils the
earth, raises her family, handles the nosy neighbors and ritually gives birth to
Bashu. Like all other children, she says upon delivery her son, he is the off-
spring of the sky and the earth. By the end of the film, in one spectacular filmic
feat, we are witness to the allegorical dismantling of the ruling metaphor of the
state as the patriarch of the nation, and witness the rebirth of the nation in terms
domestic to its own mythic memories.
296 H. DABASHI
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
at a pre-moment of the world, a moment which is also central to both The

Ballad of Tara and to Bashu. How does the world look like at this pre-
moment? There is, common to nearly all the myths I have spoken of,
Numazawa observes,
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:
A principal feature in so many myths, particularly those whose motif is the

banishment of heaven, is agriculture, specifically agriculture whose chief
product is rice. The central figure in these myths is a woman, and the prin-
cipal animals are cows and pigs. In the social system one may see the preva-
lence of visit marriage (Besuchsehe), the earliest form of marriage in the
matriarchal cultural sphere that developed out of the status that women had
acquired economically in the course of social development. From such facts
one may conclude that the myths we have been discussing are products of
the matriarchal cultural sphere.23
The location of an agricultural community, the pivotal importance of a rice

paddy, the centrality of a woman in the story, subtracting the pigs from
domestic animals for obvious reasons, but adding the economic autonomy
of Nai, all are the startling evidence of a conscious constitution of Bashu
on a universal mythological motif that anchors its narration on the central-
ity of the idea of mother-earth before launching its cosmovision toward a
radical reconstitution of the myth in liberating Nai and an entire gender
she represents from mental, moral, mythological, cultural, historical, and
political bondage. No other filmmaker comes even close to Beizai in his

ambitious thrust into a radical reconstitution of the Iranian culture.
Alan Dundes has suggested an Oedipal explanation of the myth-type
that Numazawa has examined, the myth in which a male offspring of
world-parents would want to separate his parents by pushing the sky-
father up off the mother-earth.24
This is quite suggestive in the case of Bashu particularly in light of the
last sequence when the father returns with his right hand, the most vis-
ible phallic symbol, cut off. The first time we see the father is when Beizai
masterfully draws his figure from a scarecrow that Bashu has made. The
father comes and stands in front of the sun, blocks the sunray, creates a
momentary night, and asks Bashu who has made that scarecrow. While sit-
ting, Bashu has a conversation with the father, not knowing that he is the
father, while in the shadow of him as an extension of the scarecrow. After
this conversation, in which Bashu gives a cup of water to the father to
drink, Bashu hears from his friends that Nais husband has returned. On
his way to Nai, for some inexplicable reason nervous and even frightened,
he picks up a stick and runs toward the rice paddy where Nai resides.
When Bashu gets there, Nai is already engaged in a quarrel with her
husband, objecting to his objection that Bashu must leave. Bashu comes
hurriedly, stands between Nai and the father, and automatically raises the
stick to attack him and protect the mother. The angle of Beizais cam-
era here is punctilious. From the corner of the fathers right side, we see
his amputated right hand, the raised stick of Bashu, and then Nai safely
behind her son. The scene is too powerful and too clear to need any fur-
ther elaboration. Beizai has by then rendered the scarecrow-figure of the
father phallically castrated, visibly redundant, and socially irrelevant. That
is the beginning of a whole new definition of family, father, mother, son,
and the relation of power that is to hold them together.
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
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
command but a critical intimacy with the mythological working of a cul-

ture. That changeability is one of the specific characteristics of myth26 is
an insight that can indeed be achieved after a long and arduous examination
of myths in their cross-cultural, and trans-historical settings, in the case of
this particular assertion by Professor Th. P.Van Barren, an Egyptologist
from the University of Groningen, via examples of mythological behavior
in as diverse a setting as in Tahiti, among the Anuak (a Mitotic tribe on the
Upper Nile), among the Papuans of the Want oat region in northeast New
Guinea, and in Ethiopia. But to initiate mythical change that are as much
rooted in the contemporaneity of our circumstances as they are launched
toward an emancipation of our future requires a critical intelligence of
an entirely different sort. Here, what is gathered in Beizais cinema is an
unusual combination of a scholar and an artist. His exceptionally detailed
knowledge of both Iranian mythology and of the Persian performing arts
is squarely at the service of his creative imagination, and then all of this
geared toward a radical, surgical, breakthrough from the historical bond-
age to myths that have so far occasioned our entrapment and slavery to
symbolics and institutions of power.
MEANWHILE THEMAAREFI FAMILY

After the opening sequence of Travelers, Mahtab Maarefi, her husband,
Heshmat Davaran, and their two children all get into their car, head south
toward Tehran, get into a fatal accident, and (just as she had told us on
Beizais camera) all die. Meanwhile, Mahtab Maarefis sister, Mahrokh and
her entire family are getting ready for her wedding. The sad news of the
tragic accident arrives. The wedding preparation turns into a mourning. But
against all the evidence, the Grandmother of the family refuses to believe
that her daughter and her entire family have perished in a fatal automobile
accident and insists for the wedding preparations to proceed as planned.
While the whole family is stricken with sorrow, she persists in her opti-
mism. Finally, at the crucial moment when the wedding was to happen and
Mahtab was to arrive with her family to bring along the auspicious mirror
for her sisters ceremonial marriage, the Grandmother insists that the bride
should go and change into her wedding gown. Against all indications and
her own better judgment, but unable to refuse the Grandmothers wish,
she goes upstairs and changes into her wedding gown. As she descends the
stairs, suddenly the door opens and in comes Mahtab Maarefi with the
promised mirror in her hands and her entire family behind her.
The Travelers is the logical culmination in the work of arguably the

most visually perceptive Iranian filmmaker. The Travelers is narrated with
haunting precision within the double-bind of two impossibilities, two
negations of the ordinary, two suspensions of the rational, two framings
of the common. Thus framed and folded, The Travelers is visualized on
a timing and a scale, a tempo and a movement that actively suspends and
transforms every shred of reality into a visual narrative of compelling power
and poise. From the very first shot of a mirror laid down on the grass, and
from the very first sequence of the Davaran family getting ready for their
trip to Tehran, that visual narrative informs of an aesthetically transformed
reality, a transformation that holds everything in suspense from the begin-
ning to the end of the story.
How are we to understand that suspense? All those who have written
on Travelers have tried in one way or another to grapple with the central
tension of the narrative, namely the startling announcement in the very
first sequence of the film and its precise reversal at the end.27
How are we to understand that? Is Mahtab Maarefi joking with the
audience? Is she mad? What sort of a film is this for a lead actor to face the
camera and tell the audience that she (not as Homa Rusta the actor but as
Mahtab Maarefi the character) and her entire family are going to die in an
automobile accident? Then how come they all come back to life at the end
of the film? Did we not see in fact that she and her family actually got into
an accident and according to all evidence, including a police report, they
all perished? The central tension of the film then is the fact that a whole
family dies and withers away early in the film and yet they are all somehow
miraculously resurrected at the end.
The resurrection of the dead: that is at least one central creative ten-
sion of Travelers. Either all the dead were resurrected back to life by
some miraculous deed, or else the expecting family, the Grandmother
in particular, wished them back to life. In either of these two cases, the
element of hope is central in a resurrection which is not into the realm
of the beyond and after but into the realm of the here and now. How
are we to deal with that? Resurrection of the dead? Well, to begin with,
Muslims have a theory of resurrection in their belief that they will all
be brought back from dead on the Day of Judgment, face God, and be
punished or rewarded for things they have done in this world. Muslims
are not alone in their belief in resurrection. Christians believe that Christ
resurrected from the dead too. To Shiism in particular, bodily resur-
rection, (Maad-e Jesmani), as it is called, is a central doctrinal issue.
304 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
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
If we have followed Ahsai so far, he is almost home free in proving why

we cannot see the dead people. If we agree with him that the only reason
that we see the living terrestrial bodies is that the composition of elemental
matters in them has caused their opacity and thus visibility, then all he has
to do, which he does, is to change the direction of camera (as it were) and
say that the reason that we do not see the celestial body is that our own
bodily organs, our eyes in this case, are made of such opacity and thus we
cannot see a thing when dissolved from that opacity. The Secondsubtle,
celestialBody is invisible to earthly beings, to the people of this world,
on account of the opacity that darkens their fleshly eyes and prevents them
from seeing what is not of the same kind as themselves.37
There is thus no mystery about Travelers at all: All Beizai has really done
at the end of the filmwith the figure of the Grandmother as the solitary
source of insight beyond the materiality of all evidenceis to turn his
camera into an instrument of vision, which art, ipso facto, is supposed to
be doing anyway, with which we overcome the opacity of our elementally
constituted and limited organ of perception. Put very simply, with Beizais
camera, we see things that we ordinarily cannot see, which is the very
rudimentary definition of art: to see things otherwise invisible. The fusion
of Beizais cinematic cosmovision and Ahsais dual theories of bodily
resurrection and its preliminary theory of optics creates a visual condition

in which we can see the Maarefis family in their true, (celestial,),
significant body, in the flesh and bone of their moral significance, the cor-
poreal veracity of their very being-in-the-world.
When God wishes to bring his creatures back to life, Ahsai stipu-
lates, he causes a rain coming from the ocean situated below the Throne
to spread out over the Earth, the water of this rain being colder than
snow38 For mortals with a gift to show the way out of a deadly entrap-
ment in the real, that rain is a shower of lightwe call it cinema.
THE MYTH OFTHENATION

Beizais cinematic mythology is the most potent simulacrum of the rebirth
of the nation beyond its postcolonial boundaries, without its political
appendage, liberated from its colonial angst. The myth of the nation is here
resurrected through an immaculate conception of the first post-patriarchal
child born without the presence or necessity of any father figure for the
nation (in other words its state apparatus). The immaculate conception here
liberates the nation (evident in the formative family of Nai and her two
biological and one allegorical child) from the state. The distance and redun-
dancy of the emasculated father here best represents the superfluous state.
This myth is not merely archetypal, it is also evident in urban, modern,
postcolonial formation of polity of the nation without any need for the state
as the simulacrum of the father figure. The myth is here posited cinemati-
cally, with a cinematic will to resist the patriarchal father. In Beizais cinema,
in Bashu in particular, the nation is effectively decoupled from the state,
the formative family from the emasculated father, and the nation is emanci-
pated and let loose. In his cinema, and before he left his homeland, Bahram
Beizai had overthrown the ruling regime in his cinematic mythology and
set his nation free. History will follow his cinematic vision.
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
2. See Shahla Lahiji, Sima-ye Z an dar Athar-e Bahram Beizai: Filmsaz

va Film-nameh-nevis. Tehran: Roshangaran Publishers, 1993: 38.
This is a pioneering and comprehensive study of the place of women
in Beizais cinema from the perspective of feminist activist who has
championed the cause of womens rights in Iran under intolerable
conditions.
3. For a short discussion of the various theories of myth, see Lauri
Honkos The Problem of Defining Myth, in Alan Dundes (ed),
Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1984: 4152.
4. Theodore W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory. Newly Translated, Edited,
and with a Translators Introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997): 5.
5. Adorno 1997: 5.
6. Georges Bataille, The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism
(London: Verso: 1994): 48.
7. See Max Weber, Science as a Vocation, in H.H.Gerth and C.W
right Mills (Trans & Eds), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1946): 155.
8. See ke Hultkrantz, An Ideological Dichotomy: Myth and Folk
Beliefs Among the Shoshoni, in Dundes 1984: 165.
9. On the quantitatively reducible number of variations on a single myth
see, for example, the astonishing discoveries of Anna Birgitta Rooth,
professor of ethnology at the University of Uppsala, about the North
American creation myths that all of the 300 myths that she had col-
lected could squarely be divided into no more than eight archetypes.
See Anna Birgitta Rooth, The Creation Myth of the North American
Indians, in Dundes 1984: 166181.
10. Lahiji 1993: 49. My translation.
11. See, for example, G.S.Kirks On Defining Myths, in Dundes 1984:
5361, as an articulation of such choices.
12. See Roland Barthes, Mythologies. Selected and Translated from the
French by Annette Lavers. NewYork: Hill and Wang, 1972: 28.
13. Barthes 1972: 28.
14. In one way or another most readers of Beizai fall into this trap. For
good examples, see Lahiji 1993: 4860; Baqer Parham, Negahi beh
Film-ha-ye Bahram Beizai in Anonymous (ed), 21 Sal: Az Amu
Sibilu ta Mosaferan. Moruri bar Athar-e Bahram Beizai beh
Bahaneh-ye Jashnvareh-ye Viennale. Vienna: Markaz- e Eshaeh-ye
Iranshenasi, 1995: 3848; Zhaleh Amuzegar, Raz-ha-ye Ostureh
dar Mosaferan, in Qukasian 1992: 2933. The unexamined binary

opposition between myth and history is central to all these diverse
readings of Beizai. In the absence of a critical attention to the place
and function of the mythical in Beizais cinema, Parham, for example,
comes to the outlandish conclusion that Bashu is parenthetical
to Beizais cinema! See Anonymous 1995: 39.
15. George Bataille, The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism.
Translated and with an Introduction by Michael Richardson. London:
Verso, 1994: 48.
16. See Lahiji 1993: 5460. Lahiji has a similarly motherly reading of
Perhaps some other Time. See Lahiji 1993: 66. In both these cases,
Lahijis laudable social concerns about the fate of Iranian mothers
dulls her critical reading of Beizais cinema.
17. These are motif-index A 625 and motif-index A 625.1 in Stith
Thompsons Motif-Index of Folk Literature.
18. See Alan Dundes editorial note in Dundes 1984: 182.
19. For the full version of Professor Numazawa, see K.Numazawa, Die
Weltanfnge in der Japanischen Mythologie. Paris-Lucerne, 1946. For
a short version of it, see Dundes 1984: 182192.
20. K.Numazawa, The Cultural-Historical Background of Myths on the
Separation of Sky and Earth, in Dundes 1984:191.
21. Numazawa in Dundes 1984: 191.
22. Numazawa in Dundes 1984: 192.
23. K.Numazawa in Dundes 1984: 192.
24. See Dundes 1984: 183.
25. Bataille 1994: 48.
26. Th. P.Van Baaren, The Flexibility of Myth, in Dundes 1984: 222.
27. The best collection of essays on Beizais Travelers is to be found in
Zaven Qukasian (ed), Dar-bareh-ye Mosaferan. (Tehran:
Roshangaran Publishers, 1371/1992).
28. Shaykh Ahmad Ahsai, Physiology of the Resurrection Body, in
Henry Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean
Iran to Shiite Iran. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977:
180. Except for minor modification, I use Corbins translation of his
extract from Kitab Sharh al-Ziyara. Corbins book contains excellent
excerpts from the works of Suhrawardi in the sixth/twelfth century to
Sarkar Agha in the fourteenth/nineteenth, on the issue of body,
which is of concern to me here. But I like to dissociate myself com-
pletely from Corbins outlandish interpretations of these texts in the
first part of this volume.
310 H. DABASHI
29. Ahsai 1977: 180.

30. Ahsai 1977: 181.
31. Ahsai 1977: 181.
32. For the centrality of all these Aristotelian references in Islamic astron-
omy, see George Saliba, The Role of the Astrologer in Medieval
Islamic Society, Bulletin dtudes Orientales. Volume 44 (1992):
4567. For more detailed accounts, see George Saliba, A History of
Arabic Astronomy: Planetary Theories during the Golden Age of Islam.
NewYork: NewYork University Press, 1994.
33. L.V.Vaglieri and G.Celantano, Trois Epitres dAl-Kindi, Annali,
Instituto Orientale di Napoli 34 (N.S. 24) [1974]: 523562, p.537.
as quoted in George Saliba, The Development of Astronomy in
Medieval Islamic Society, in Saliba 1994: 55.
34. Ahsai 1977: 182184.
35. Ahsai 1977: 183.
36. Ahsai 1977: 183.
37. Ahsai 1977: 184.
38. Ahsai 1977: 185.
Conclusion: What Time Is It?
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.

312 H. DABASHI
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
The critical question Agamben raises at the heart of Western political

metaphysics assumes a slightly different character at the colonial edges of
that imaginary, and requires very little but crucial adjustment to his prose
and politics: for our post/colonial political system has resulted from the
coupling of two heterogeneous elements, a postcolonial state and a postco-
lonial nation, a form of institutionalized tyranny on one hand, and on the
other, an open-ended possibility of revolt and autonomy against that tyr-
anny. Incommensurable that they are, they have feigned and failed confer-
ring mutual legitimacy and consistency on each other: The state needs the
nation to feign legitimacy, the nation does not need the state to declare
and thrive in its own legitimacy. Why has the possibility of emancipatory
politics of the nation (domestic to its own terms) been trapped in this false
coupling, in this bad marriage? Why must every revolution result or dream
in resulting and ending up in the nightmare of another even more repres-
sive state? What is it that gives the sovereign, the Shah, the Ayatollah, the
Emir, the king, and the president the power to ensure and guarantee the
legitimacy of the nation-state? Nothing. This is a complete and delusional
fiction, a screen set up to hide the fact that there is a void of legitimacy
at the center of this false fusion, this disconcerting union, and this bad
CONCLUSION: WHAT TIME IS IT? 313
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.
IRAN 2025 ANDBEYOND

In a cover story on its 16 November 2015 issue, featuring a young Iranian
woman gazing into a distant unknown while holding an iPhone, a ring, and a
string that links to something outside the frame of the picture, Time Magazine
proposed the year 2025 as a benchmark and asked how its next decade will
change the world.3 After doing a little of girl-watching, as he puts it, Karl
Vick narrows in on Ayatollah Khameneis launching a counteroffensive, tar-
geting the culture war he thinks is being waged against Iran following the 14
July 2015 nuclear deal, only to conclude that Iran is the most cosmopolitan
population in the Middle East. In a much better and more nuanced piece,
Cautiously, Iranians Reclaim Public Spaces and Liberties Long Suppressed,
the New York Times Tehran correspondent Thomas Erdbrink began his story
in a concert hall observing how the audience carried itself with a newfound
self-confidence, visible across the capitalwhat Iranians are calling the life-
style movement.4 He then cites an Iranian essayist observing this scene
to say, Most people are far ahead of the norms set by the government.
Erdbrink then aptly observes: In cars, cinemas and concerts, ordinary people
are increasingly taking their space. He then concludes:
Following the election of a moderate president, Hassan Rouhani, and the

signing of the nuclear agreement this summer, Iranians are increasingly tak-
ing to the streets, this time not to challenge the government but to reclaim
public spaces. Though there are plenty of skeptics who say the changes are
minimal and could be reversed at any time, the lifestyle movement seems to
be spreading across the country.5
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
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
State is the monopoly of (legitimate) violence. I am citing Max Weber

in his Politics as a Vocation when I say so, particularly when I place
the word legitimate parenthetically.6 Every state is founded on force,
Weber cites Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk, and then adds, that is indeed right.
His emphatic assertion:
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
the Islamic Republic, is no longer contingent on its national legitimacy. It

is entirely contingent on the geostrategic logic of its existence. As one lead-
ing member of the ruling regime in the Islamic Republic put it recently,
Syria is more important to them than the province of Khuzestanand he
was right so far as the survival of his regime was entirely tied up to the
geopolitics of the region and not the sovereignty over a nation, which of
course includes Khuzestan much more than Syria, which is its own sover-
eign nation (and again with no legitimate state).
What I propose is not a state of anarchy, but an active conceptual
decoupling of our reading of the nation from our critique of the state:
letting the state as a degenerate monopoly of violence do what it does best
but without any delusional claim to national legitimacy or sovereignty
and therefore freeing the nation from the moral, political, and imagina-
tive bondage to the purely violent state. The two state apparatus of the
Pahlavi monarchy and the subsequent Shii militant clericalism that have
ruled Iran since the birth of the nation as a postcolonial polity in the after-
math of the Constitutional Revolution of 19061911 are both colonially
modernized versions of the post-Safavid political posturing of the Qajar
period and therefore have limited to little to no claim to legitimacy on
the evocative and organic domain of the transnational public sphere upon
which Iran as a nation has emerged. This nation lacks any political power,
let alone a surplus of political power to invest in any state. These two
states, the Pahlavis and the Islamic Republic, have been and are parasitical
monopolies of pure violence with little to no claim to legitimacy beyond
their forcefully staged propaganda machinations. This fact is particularly
evident in such postcolonial formations as the rentier states where the class
consciousness, class formations, and class struggles at the heart of capital-
ist modernity are mitigated by the intermediary formation of the rentier
state apparatus, garrison states, deep states, or even narcostates.
Contrary to Clasters 1960s Parisian noble savage fantasy, I have no
such call or claim on the postcolonial nation. My argument is entirely
sober and real. The decoupling of the fate of the nation and the self-
perpetuating violence of the state is predicated on no illusion that such a
decoupling will dismantle the statebut it will discredit it. The states are
today the self-fulfilling prophecies of violence and once a year they gather
at the UN in NewYork as the Mecca of that prophecyto perpetuate their
myth. The myth of the state, as Ernst Cassirer realized in his classic text,
The Myth of the State (1946), was the final chapter of the Hegelian danger-
ous delusion about the state as the fulfillment of human destiny. Entirely
318 H. DABASHI
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.
DEMOS BEYOND KRATIA

What does it mean to say the nation is reborn when it is still ruled by a
tyranny masquerading as a democracy? It is first and foremost to acknowl-
edge the fact of that democratic masquerade and thereby to liberate the
nation from the illusion of its entrapment within the state apparatus that
rules it, or thinks is ruling it. The Islamic Republic is the worst kind of
tyranny for it fakes democracy. It is a one-man rule that overrules all the
phantom liberties that bogus institutions of democracy mime, mimic,
and collectively morph into a bad joke. Wendy Brown has already argued
how democracy has become globally an empty signifier. Democracy
has historically unparalleled global popularity today, she admits before

adding, yet has never been more conceptually footloose or substantively
hollow.9 How is that?
Perhaps democracys current popularity depends on the openness and even

vacuity of its meaning and practicelike Barack Obama, it is an empty sig-
nifier to which any and all can attach their dreams and hopes. Or perhaps
capitalism, modern democracys nonidentical birth twin and always more
robust and wily of the two, has finally reduced democracy to a brand, a late
modern twist on commodity fetishism that wholly severs a products salable
image from its content.10
Speaking Obama during his last presidential election in 2012, I underlined

this commodification and fetishization of democracy. As the grandest
spectacle of American politics, I wrote at the time,
the presidential election looks like a massive TV commercial, an advertise-

ment, extended over more than a year, spread all over the major and minor
networks, cable televisions, cyberspace, selling one commodity: and one
commodity onlyalways already new and improved like any other brand
of detergent The globalized showmanship of American presidential elec-
tion is geared and designed to sell one commodity and one commodity only
democracythat the US is a democracy and by virtue of that fetishized
commodity, it gets the privilege of sending its aircraft carriers and fighter jets
around the planet to drop bombs on people and their homeland and call it
humanitarian intervention.11
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
politicians like Marine Le Pen, in Holland frightful Islamophobes like

Geert Wilders and their widespread constituencies are the rising benefi-
ciaries of their revered democratic institutions. Not even the proverbial
Scandinavian democracies are outside a global conditioning of capital,
labor, market, and the political apparatus that seeks structural-functionally
to sustain it. There is no Guantanamo Bay in Sweden, Norway, or Finland,
perhaps, but they manufacture the military hardware and software that
ultimately sustains the mad logic of Guantanamo Bay.
Nations are to be liberatedconceptually, historically, narratively, aes-
thetically, and theoreticallyfrom states, emptying them of power and
denied them authority, leaving a mere shell of its existence as a relic of
terror its monopoly of violence has wreaked upon the earth. To do so
we need to open up the fictive frontiers of the postcolonial nation-states,
retrieve the transnational origin and thus destination of the public sphere
upon which nations are built, rearticulate the collective cultural memories
that are the stuff from which nations are made, and forever abandon the
delusional assumption of one day a state will finally emerge that will be
the democratic manifestation of its peoples wills. The Hegelian assump-
tion of the state as the ultimate goal and end of history, of Mind and
Geist objectified, that the State is the perfect and final social embodiment
of the Spirit, and even of God Himself, were the necessary philosophical
delusions in the height of European Enlightenment modernity, entirely
blinded to the colonial calamities it caused around the globe. Today we
need actively to reimagine and reorganize our received transnational pub-
lic spheres, recreate the very form of transnational public spheres beyond
the concept of states. We need to divide the public sphere along the lines
of labor unions, womens rights organizations, and student assemblies.
We need theoretically to shift away from the dead-end of the postcolonial
reason and turn toward the liberating possibilities of the aesthetic reason so
it can no longer be located and compromised. Find and theorize structural
links among Greece, Spain, Occupy, Green, Arab Spring, and so on. See
through counterrevolutionary forces, link Saudi ruling regime to those
of Iran and Turkey, while linking Kobani, Palestine, and Zapatistas in
Chiapas.
What holds Iran together is not the Islamic Republic, which upholds,
defends, or crosses its open borders only for its own survival reasons. The
Islamic Republic has broken, spent, and wasted its peoples trust and even
faith. What holds Iran together is its literary and poetic heritage, which
in this book I have sought to see through a sublation and theorized as its
Image 1 Golnaz Fathi, 120120cmacrylic on canvas2004Untitled

The visual fusion of forms, colors, letters, and the cumulative sensations in overriding
abstract registers reminds the national memory of its roots precisely at the moment
that it erases and overcomes them into a superior space. Here Golnaz Fathi achieves
one of the finest examples of the textural dexterity of the collective memory of her
people, its elemental forms fused into their resonances as absolute metaphors. The
black border at once separates the daring red and marks the invasive jumble of sense-
less letters. The borderline is evasive, pervasive, and subversive. Letters have become
meandering shapes in the vicinity of that inviting darkness, as the daring red can both
pull in and push back at will and at ease. Here we see one of the rarest glimpses at the
aesthetic intuition of transcendence that has absorbed and sublated the collective
memory of the nation into a plane that informs and yet stays aloof, except for when
it reveals itself to its visionary artists. Here is where that intuition expresses its presen-
tial power and preserves itself for the posterity at one and the same time.
322 H. DABASHI
aesthetic intuition of transcendence. Iran as a nation is strong not despite

the fact that it is ruled by a tyranny. It is strong precisely because it is ruled
by a tyranny. The Islamic Republic is in a strong negotiating position vis-
-vis the USA and its regional and European allies not despite the fact that
its security is challenged by internal dissent, but in fact precisely because
of it. Its repressive muscles are strong, its political intuition robust, and
its meanderings with soft and smart geostrategic power vigorous precisely
because it is a populist tyranny. Until and unless we understand this his-
toric paradox, the factual complexity of Iran as a nation, a people, a collec-
tive memory, and a shared culture will never translate into a theoretically
thick understanding of itself.
THE ART OFLIBERATION

In my Iran without Borders (2016), I have already argued and extensively
demonstrated how the nation was born on a transnational public sphere,
and thus the very ideal of the nation is ipso facto pre-, post-, and trans-
national. Here in this book I have argued that the conceptual decoupling
of the nation from the state foreshadows the rebirth of the nation through
an aesthetic reason historically articulated in the course of colonial and
postcolonial encounter with the self-contradictory, self-defeating logic of
colonial modernity. The conceptually liberated nation from a false cou-
pling with the state resumes consciously relocating itself upon the transna-
tional public sphere from which it originally emerged before it was trapped
inside the fictive frontiers of the colonially inherited postcolonial state.
That liberation is definitive to the nation beyond its colonially fictional-
ized borders and the state that within those borders lays a false claim on it.
How can the nation remember its location on that transnational public
sphere beyond the fictive frontiers that frames the false claim that state lays
on it? The whole proposition of the nationstate is the legacy of colonial
modernity, formed in the course of militant ideological encounter with
European imperialism. Both colonial and anticolonial nationalism exacer-
bated this false coupledom between the nation and the state. Postcolonial
nationalism thus became statist and sought its fulfillment in the formation
of an independent nation-state. Flags were raised, national anthems were
composed, airlines were named after the nation-state, and film festivals
followed. A false and falsifying Siamese twins of the nation and the state
were connected from their heads and hips. It has been a disconcerting
sight, forcefully prolonged. A healthy separation of the bad metaphor of
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
binary nationstate it has occasionedand in what particular terms?

In Adornos Aesthetic Theory, mimesis posits an archaic openness to
the other, to the disparate and diffuse and contrary.12 Here the artwork
assumes a reality sui generis, though rooted in historical experiences.
Successful artworks, in other words, embody a mimetic rationality and
thereby provide a crucial alternative to the control and reduction charac-
terizing the instrumental rationality that prevails under capitalism.13 That
instrumental rationality is best institutionalized in the forced coupling of
the nationstate, as if the state (thus coupled) represents that aesthetic
autonomy and sovereignty of the nation. Precisely in being irrational
and heteronomous, artworks are capable of autonomous subjectivity
despite the fact that they are socially constituted within a dialectic of
domination.14 Adorno uses the strength of the subject to break through
the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity. Critique of art, as art is, takes aim
at semblance through semblance. So through the dialectic of semblance
and subjectivity, art is embedded with the possibility of engaging in a cri-
tique of its own semblance and subjectivity to get into its social construc-
tion and political potency. For Adorno, modern art [constitutes] societal
semblance.15 What does that exactly mean?
On the one hand, modern art participates in the technological fetishism,

social blindness, and historical desperation that characterizes advanced capi-
talist societies. On the other hand, modern art also challenges advanced
capitalisms instrumentalized relationship to nature, its administrative neu-
tralization of oppositional forces, and its short-sighted blockage of a more
humane future.16
In other words, modern art is a product of the selfsame environment it

enables to discredit and dismantle. For a philosophy aiming to criticize
the same patterns, modern art is a necessary illusion, a societally unavoid-
able and instructive semblance.17
Modern art for Adorno is also a semblance of subjectivity, meaning
it embodies and attests to the subjectivity it paradoxically discredits, and
thus simultaneously engaging and unmasking subjectivity.18 In other
words, modern art gives expression to those repressed voices whose lib-
erated and pluralistic chorus would mark collective subjectivity that the
logic of domination systematically suppresses. Modern art is therefore a
negative image of a different collective future. That negative image is the
subject of the aesthetic intuition of transcendence (as I propose here) that
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
be pointed out and further articulated in order to understand and pursue

a critique of modern political reason.28 What Foucault thus offers is a
genealogy of the European state in which Greek and Christian sources
come together, go through a gestation of capitalist modernity, and pro-
duce a totalitarian apparatus into which the individual citizen is not just
incorporated but in fact implicated. The citizen becomes the instrument
of his/her own subjection/subjugation.
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:
I argue that this elusiveness should not be overcome by sharper definitions,

but explored as a clue to the states nature. Analysis of the literature shows
that neither rejecting the state in favor of such concepts as the political sys-
tem, nor bringing it back in, has dealt with this boundary problem. The
former approach founders on it, the latter avoids it by a narrow idealism
that construes the state-society distinction as an external relation between
subjective and objective entities. A third approach can account for both
the salience of the state and its elusiveness.29
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:
We are seeing the incipient formation of a type of bordering capability and

state practice regarding its territory that entail a partial denationalising of
what has been constructed historically as national and hence an unsettling
of the meaning of geographic borders. Critical to this argument is the thesis
that global processes also take place at subnational levels, hereby disrupting
the notion of mutually exclusive domains for the national and the global.30
What Sassen disregards, while accurately theorizing the national and

regional instantiation of globalization, is the renewed venues of defi-
ance against the state that the selfsame process of globalization and all its
instantiations have enabled. States partake in globalization within their
respective territories, as Sassen correctly proposes, but given the structural
violence inherent to the globalized capital and all its local, national, and
regional instantiations so do nations that are systematically disenfranchised
by the selfsame globalization process. We therefore need radically to dis-
tinguish between that which is advantaged and is a beneficiary to this
transnational and regional globalization and those who are systematically
and structurally disadvantaged and violated by it. Once we do that, the
fate of the nation and the machinations of the state fall onto two divergent
tracks in the context of globalization.
When it comes to the Islamic Republic of Iran, this radial bifurca-
tion of the nation and the state is even more particularly pronounced. The
Islamic Republic of Iran was formed some 30 years after the Jewish state
of Israel, but Pakistan became an Islamic state almost simultaneously with
the European settler colony in Palestine, as did Hindu fundamentalism,
and soon after that Buddhist nationalism, all under the tight supervision
of the Christian Empire. The formation of any Islamic republic or state,
as a result, has been in a perfect climate of sectarian and ethnic power
mongering by all sorts of sectarian states in the region.
Be that as it is, the formation of any Islamic claim to political power
requires its own diagnosis and pathology. Following Foucaults lead we
might suggest, in the case of Islam the pastoral power has been histori-
cally shared between the two complementary institutions of caliphate and
that of the jurist. The Muslim jurist has legislated that pastoral power
and entrusted it to the political office of the caliph. But the result is the
same: Islamic law (to be distinguished from the vast discursive tapestry
of Islam at large that has historically seriously compromised Islamic law)
has governed the Muslim body by way of caring for it. But Islam as a vast
civilizational proposition went through a pervasive epistemic degeneration
under colonial duress, when Muslim thinkers themselves were instrumen-
tal (far more seriously than European Orientalists) to dismantle the dis-
cursive pluralism of their own intellectual inheritance to manufacture an
Islam that was the single site of ideological resistance to colonialism. Any
claim of any statefrom Islamic republic to Islamic Stateto Islam is thus
categorically mitigated by a deeply colonized conception of Islam, as they
loudly protest too much and scream that they are fighting imperialism.
330 H. DABASHI
In his magnificent new book, the lucid summation of his lifetime of

scholarship on the matter, Wael Hallaq in his Impossible State (2012) has
persuasively argued the circuitous futility of the very idea of an Islamic
state.31 Hallaq is of course absolutely correct in his assessment, however
platitudinous his working conception of modernityas in fact radically
juridical his reading of Islammight be. Hallaqs courageous argument
that any claim to the very idea of an Islamic state is impossible because
it is contradictory implicates the Eurocentric notion of modernity too for
its dismantling of any moral project in its politics. The argument Hallaq
makes about Islam through Islamic law, I have made earlier in my book
on Shiism, about Shiism through the inner logic of protest definitive to
its doctrinal foundations: That Shiism is only legitimate when it revolts
against power and tyranny and categorically discredits itself when it is in
a position of power and therefore tyranny.32 So a Shii state is even more
impossible than any other kind of Islamic State. It is therefore provi-
dential that an Islamic Republic, a contradiction in terms long before Wael
Hallaq or I theorized it, now lays a false claim on Iran as a nation. Today
both the Islamic Republic and the Islamic State are the apt ending of all
political claims on any state apparatus that calls itself Islamicas with
the same token the contradictory claim of a Jewish democratic State
exposes the constitutional fallacy of the Israeli settler colony in Palestine.
REBIRTH OFNATIONS WITHOUT STATES

Michel Foucaults archeological investigations onto the European political
reason anticipate the working of the postcolonial reason, which has paradox-
ically consolidated colonial modernity. The task at hand today is to think
critically through the conceptual emancipation of the nation beyond its
postcolonial cul-de-sac. In my Iran Beyond Borders, I have already argued
and demonstrated that this is not a new phenomenon, and demonstrated
in fact the origin of the nation to have been transnational to begin with,
and thus released the operation of the nation from its national boundaries.
My contention in this book has been to argue the active formation of an
aesthetic intuition of transcendence overcomes both postcolonial reason
and colonial modernitythe two active ingredients of almost all postcolo-
nial nation-states over the last 300 years. I offer aesthetic in the domain of
its sovereignty, and not merely autonomy, to shift the potency of the polit-
ical into an underlying poetic of resistance. The work of art, not just in
the sense of its mechanical reproduction or electronic metastasis, leaves a
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
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.
The critique of postcolonial reason of course begins with an under-
standing of the colonial modernity that had paradoxically enabled the
nation as a particular kind of public sphere. My contention has been 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 its categorical sub-
version, and the consequence of this critique is the eventual formation
of an aesthetic intuition of transcendence. The result is a claim on an aes-
thetic 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 singular 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 tran-
scendence, 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.
Iran will never be ruled by any democratic state for two simple and
complementary reasons: (1) democracy is already a floating signifier,
a fleeting ideal, the idiomaticity of its actual achievement always already
outdated; and (2) Iranian people, as a living organism, will never be satis-
fied by any state if Jean-Jacque Rousseau and the whole Encyclopedists
ensemble descended from the Enlightenment heavens to rule them. But
the dynamics of this dialectic is a necessary and provocative momentum
for the cause of full national consciousness and procuring of civil liberties.
A game of cat and mouse has been played between Iranian people and
any state that has laid a false claim on them. The game will continue for-
ever, but the delusion of a democratic state representing the nation is
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).
INDEX
Abbasid Empire, 190 142, 147, 177, 179, 181, 183,

The Absence of Myth:Writings on 184, 18890, 192, 204, 320,
Surrealism, 292 322, 323
Absolutist Abstractions, 301 Afsaneh, 287
Abu Assad, Hany, 114, 115 the Afsharids (17361796), 137
Abu Ghraib, 89, 167, 246, 25763, Agamben, Giorgio, 239, 245, 263,
265, 26875, 277n7 312
Abu Taleb Khan, Mirza, 44 Agrarian Leader Zapata (1931), 103
Achaemenids, 41, 42, 140 Ahasuerus/Xerxes (King), 43
Achebe, Chinua, 161, 219 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 56, 60, 64,
Adiga, Aravind, 161 65, 150, 175, 257, 274
Adorno, 2, 28, 47, 947, 157, 219, Ahsai, Shaykh Ahmad, 80, 132, 137,
284, 324, 332 304
Adorno, Theodor, 157 Airbase, Bagram, 89
aesthetic emancipation, 62, 64, 102, Alamut, 127
141, 143 al-Ghousse, Tarek, 106, 108, 164
aesthetic intuition, 11, 13, 279, 33, Ali, 124
65, 68, 82, 94, 96, 120, 133, Ali, Ayaan Hirsi, 99, 207
193, 195, 210, 214, 232, 281, Ali, Naji al- (19381987), 108
3214, 3302 Ali, Shariati, 22, 23, 47, 135
the aesthetic intuition of Aljazeera, 149, 274
transcendence, 11, 68, 82, 133, Al-Jurjanis Theory of Poetic Imagery
192, 210, 281, 321, 324 (1979), 213
aesthetic modernity, 95, 140, 179, 180 al-Zawahiri, Ayman, 246
aesthetic reason, 16, 18, 257, 33, 34, Amir Kabir (18071852), 19, 82, 86,
61, 62, 64, 81, 93121, 123, 139, 187

H. Dabashi, Iran, DOI10.1057/978-1-137-58775-6
336 INDEX
Andrea, K.S., 260 Basij, 149, 152, 154, 264

Another Birth (1964), 5, 79 Baskerville, Howard, 201, 202
The Arab revolutions, 18, 69, 189 Bataille, George, 285, 286, 292, 299
Arab Spring, 15, 18, 31, 65, 70, 71, Baudrillard, Jean, 154, 158, 211, 258,
177, 184, 189, 192, 197, 206, 265, 269, 271
214, 246, 320 BBC, 149, 150, 152, 274
Arab World, 197, 246, 327 Beizai, Bahram, 118, 119, 281, 282,
Arendt, Hannah, 31, 75, 78, 295
191, 268 Benjamin, Walter, 2, 11, 27, 31, 116,
Arnold, Matthew (18221888), 156, 160, 162, 169, 217, 218,
48,49 2202, 232
A Small Place (1988), 241 Bhabha, Homi, 196
Ataturk, Mustapha Kemal, 138 The Birth of a Nation (1915), 67,
Auschwitz, 2 110
Authority, 6, 62, 82, 90, 94, 98, 101, Blackwater, 274
105, 108, 126, 127, 137, 142, Blomkamp, Neil, 274
162, 163, 198, 228, 240, 248, Bombay, 197
249, 268, 285, 288, 290, 301, The Book of Esther in the Bible, 43
316, 320, 325 Brest-Litovsk, 316, 331
Authorization for the Annihilation of Browne, E.G. (18621926), 5, 50, 323
Life Unworthy of Being Lived Bush, George W, 18, 60, 106, 245,
(1920), 273 249, 268, 271
Avicenna (980-1037), 116, 304
Azadi Square, 77
Azalis, 138, 140 Caesar, Julius, 291
Azari, Shoja, 255, 256 Canada, 19, 75, 186, 205, 217, 218,
Az Zakhm-e Qalb-e Abai/From the 237
Wound of Abais Heart, 234 Can Subaltern Speak, 240
Catcher in the Rye, 199, 200
The Caucuses, 139
Bab al-Hadid (1958), 203, 207 Central Asia, 41, 58, 59, 88, 327
Babism, 132, 13840, 180 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 8,
Bahai, Shaykh, 132 11, 149, 150, 152, 155,
Bahaism, 128, 138, 139 188, 202
Bahman Farmanaras Khak Ashena/ Csaire, Aim, 275
Native (2008), 49 Chahine, Youssef, 203, 205, 20710,
The Ballad of Tara, 28690, 297, 212, 214
300, 301 Chain of Command: The Road from
Baluchis, 40 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (2004), 259
Barthes, Roland, 291 Chalabi, Ahmad, 112, 176
Bashu:The Little Stvranger (1989), Chaos/Ashub, 84
28, 79, 281, 292, 295 Chaotics of the sign, 158, 1649
INDEX 337
Christian imperialism, 311 critical intimacy, 218219, 302

Christian Jambet, 128, 129, 135 Critique of Practical Reason, 110
civil rights movement, 26, 31, 47, The Crow/Kalagh(1976), 283
5571, 73, 78, 8690, 94, 97,
11013, 177, 201, 214, 24648,
274, 275 Damnatio Memoriae, 25376
clash of civilization, 59, 23739, Danto, Arthur, 2602, 265, 269
244, 249 Darwin,
Clastres, Pierre, 316 Dasein, 3, 4
CNN, 149, 150, 152, 207, 274 Death of a Princess (1980), 151
colonialism, 7, 22, 30, 47, 48, 502, Debord, Guy, 12, 101, 154, 157, 264
57, 58, 95, 123, 136, 13941, debris, 1113, 65, 113, 156, 164,
144, 187, 191, 195, 199, 217, 220, 221, 223, 224, 226,
23941, 285, 327, 329 22931, 274, 331
coloniality, 11, 34, 60, 94, 95, 98, The Decline of the West/Der
102, 193, 2424, 247 Untergang des Abendlandes
colonial modernity, 2, 5, 8, 13, 18, (19181922), 238
2531, 33, 34, 41, 45, 50, 61, deferred defiance, 83, 124, 125, 127
79, 826, 93, 94, 979, 126, delayed defiance, 49, 177
137, 13941, 144, 179, 180, Demos, 31822
182, 185, 195, 196, 199, 219, De Niro, Robert, 200
237, 285, 314, 322, 323, 330, Derrida, Jacques, 12, 29, 32, 96, 97,
332 157, 158, 220, 223, 224, 332
Cond, Maryse, 161 Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), 157
Conrad, Joseph, 241 Diffrance, 31, 32, 158, 161
Conscript of Modernity, 42 District 9 (2009), 274, 275
Constitutional Revolution Djebar, Assia, 241
(19061911), 8, 10, 50, 51, 53, Dolatabadi, Mahmoud, 1, 213, 221,
57, 62, 73, 77, 80, 82, 128, 135, 227
136, 13840, 179, 180, 184, dominant ideologies, 62, 195
187, 188, 201, 222, 317 Doshman/Enemy, 58
Coomaraswamy, Ananda, 46 Du Bois, W.E. B., 110
Corbin, Henri, 23 Dust, 12, 13, 27, 159, 215, 217, 220,
Corbin, Henry, 51, 116, 129, 134, 135 2247, 230
Corpus anarchicum, 12, 32, 232
Corpus Eroticum, 23, 234
cosmopolitan worldliness, 27, 83, 98, Eco, Umberto, 11, 114
99, 140, 177, 190, 193, Edward Said, 48, 83, 99, 191, 205,
195219, 250 219, 241, 266
creative distancing, 218219 Egypt, 20, 39, 52, 127, 176, 202,
Crile, Susan, 260, 269 205, 210, 213, 214, 311, 314,
crisis of legitimacy, 1318, 56, 58, 186 318, 319, 325, 331
338 INDEX
Eisenstein, Sergei, 100, 169 Ghadyani, Abolfazl, 66, 176

The End of History, 59, 238, 239, The gift of grace (charisma), 127
249 Goethe (17491832), 46, 48
The End of the West, 27, 23751 Gogan, Jessica, 259
England, Lynndie, 258, 259, Grand Ayatollah Mirza Hassan
265, 271 Shirazi,187
epistemic shift, 42, 57, 58, 615, 93, Great Game (18131907), 41, 57
177, 193 Green Movement, 2, 8, 9, 1416, 18,
Ethnos/Nezhad, 84 25, 26, 30, 45, 55, 56, 60, 61,
63, 6571, 738, 82, 8690, 93,
97, 98, 106, 110, 111, 115,
Farrokhzad, Forough, 5, 47, 79, 82, 14750, 152, 175, 177, 186,
113, 125, 192 189, 192, 197, 214, 273
The Fateful Day/Ruz-e Vaqeeh Griffith, D.W., 6, 110
(1995), 290 Guantanamo Bay, 89, 245, 263, 270,
Fatimids, 127, 129 320
Fellow Teachers/Of Culture and Its Guardian Council, 76, 77
Second Death (1973), 79
Fischer, Michael, 265
FitzGerald, Edward (18091883), 48 Habermas, Jrgen, 138
Forough, Farrokhzad, Someone who Hadith, 192
is like no one (1963), Hafez, 469, 85, 179
Foucault, Michel, 325, 330 Hallaq, Wael, 99, 332
Fragmented signs, 27, 160, 164, Hamas, 21, 62, 100, 143, 175, 189
21735 Handala, 71, 108, 110
fragments, 12, 27, 31, 1623, 169, Handels Serse (1738), 49, 50
217, 218, 220, 223, 226, 227, HBO, 1517, 167, 170
253, 272 Heart of Darkness (1899), 165, 241
Fratricide, 255 Hedayat, Sadegh, 48, 97, 323
Freud, Zigmud, 178, 189 Hegel, W. F. H., 3, 46, 47, 136,
Fukuyama, Francis, 59, 238, 239,246 198,239
Heidegger, Martin, 51, 135
Hejazi, Arash, 14850, 1524, 156
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 33, 110, 211 Hekayat, 287
Ganji, Akbar, 67, 120 Hersh, Seymour M., 259
Geist, 237, 320 Hezbollah, 21, 100, 143, 175, 189
geopolitics, 1416, 25, 37, 40, 42, 55, Hindu fundamentalism, 46, 196, 250,
57, 59, 62, 6870, 89, 111, 123, 267, 311, 329
1757, 179, 214, 317, 318 The Historical Man, 288, 289, 291
Gerdkuh, 127 Hoche, Alfred, 273
Gezi Park, 77 Holocaust, Jewish, 2, 95, 160
Gezi Park uprising, 2, 186 Home and Exile (2000), 219, 242
INDEX 339
homocentricism, 185 47, 55, 56, 5862, 6470,

Homo Hierarchicus, 168 73,74, 78, 80, 81, 879, 93,
Horkheimer, Max, 157 94,97101, 11113, 11721,
Hossein, Imam, 124 133, 136, 141, 143, 14855,
Hossein, Nasr, 23, 46, 47, 51, 99, 157, 167, 170, 175, 176, 179,
129, 134, 135 184, 189, 192, 204, 211, 212,
Hulegu, 131, 134 220, 222, 227, 229, 230,
Huntington, Samuel, 59, 238, 233,243, 2457, 249, 250,
239,245 2536,258, 267, 268, 2736,
Hurufiyyah, 127, 132, 134, 136, 137, 314, 31618, 320, 322, 323,
140, 180 32932
Hussain, Murtaza, 71 Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS),
Hussein, Saddam, 18, 59, 222 15, 18, 24, 28, 39, 58, 98, 100,
hyperrealization, 269272 222, 245, 249, 311, 331
Islamism, 9, 22, 23, 46, 47, 5860,
70, 98, 99, 101, 140, 141, 147,
ibn Ali, Zayd, 126 154, 177, 179, 185, 191, 193,
Ibn Arabi, 130 195, 196, 198, 199, 201, 213,
Ibn Taymiyyah (12631328), 185 214, 222, 223, 239, 2446, 250,
Ibrahim, Sunallah, 213 269, 311, 323
il pensiero debole/weak thought, isolationism, 4
11,115 Israel, 15, 20, 21, 28, 39, 51, 52, 66,
Impossible State (2012), 330 69, 71, 88, 99, 100, 112, 142,
indirection, 270, 271 152, 175, 176, 189, 231, 311,
Insan, 249 319, 329, 331
In the Penal Colony, 255, 256
intuition of transcendence, 11, 13,
259, 32, 33, 65, 68, 80, 82, 94, Jalaipour, Mohammad Reza, 86
96, 120, 123, 190, 192, 195, 210, James Moriers Adventures of Haji
217, 224, 232, 281, 3214, 3302 Baha of Isfahan (1824), 50
Iqbal, Muhammad (18771938), 46, 47 Jarayan-e Fetneh/ the Seditious
Iranian revolution, 31, 58, 218, 230 Affair, 175
Iranian revolution of (19771979), jasad, 3046
15, 29, 68, 69, 220, 227 Javid, Abbas Kargar, 149, 152, 156
IranIraq War (19801988), 30, 59, Javidan Kherad/Sophia Perennis, 51
62, 66, 70, 76, 81, 121, 141, Jazani, Bizhan, 231
189, 228, 295 Jefferson, Thomas, 90
Isfahani, Mirza Habib, 50, 82 jism, 304, 305
Islam-e Rahmani/Benevolent John Reeds Ten Days that Shook the
Islam,98 World (1919), 57
Islamic Republic, 4, 812, 14, 16, Jones, William (17461794), 44
18, 19, 224, 29, 30, 39, 46, June 2009 election, 65
340 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
Naderi, Amir, 1, 1046, 114, 118,

119, 159, 161, 188 Obama, Barack (President), 38,
Nafisi, Azar, 99, 100, 1513, 157 60,245
Nai, 292, 299, 307 object de curiosit, 263
Najafi, Shahin, 64 Occupy Wall Street, 186
Namjoo, Mohsen, 64, 177, 178 Occupy Wall Street Movement, 2
Nasrallah, Hassan, 100 Oedipal Complex, 48
Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd, 99, 203, Of Grammatology (1967), 157, 158,
20514, 223
nation, 134, 37, 42, 43, 45, 46, On the Nature of Sign (1873), 167
4853, 55, 5761, 63, 67, 6971, organic solidarity, 97101
7383, 868, 90, 94, 101, 106, Origin of Species, 198
107, 110, 111, 118, 120, 121, Ostureh, 287
128, 133, 138, 144, 147, 170, Ottomans, 11, 16, 43, 53, 80, 85,
173, 1759, 181, 182, 1846, 124, 137, 314, 327
342 INDEX
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
Vermgen, 248 Who Are We: The Challenges to

violence, 10, 28, 29, 32, 45, 63, 68, Americas National Identity
74, 814, 8790, 97, 111, 113, (2005), 238
184, 193, 199, 204, 221, 229, Wilders, Geert, 320
233, 234, 245, 247, 249, 253, Wind River Shoshoni Indians, 287
255, 257, 260, 268, 272, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment,
31618, 320, 323, 329, 331, 332 241
visual anthropology, 263, 265 The World of Persian literary
Humanism (2013), 32, 41,
83, 180
Wallis, Brian, 259
Warhol, Andy, 259
war on terror, 59, 89, 115, 244 Yemen, 20, 39, 71, 88
Washington, DC, 5, 14, 21, 56, Younessi, Ali, 38, 39
245,260
Washington Institute for Near Eastern
Policy (WINEP), 39 Zadeh, Reza Allameh, 119
Was ist Aufklrung, 286 Zahedan, 328
Weber, 95, 246, 285, 316, 318, 331 The Zands (17501794), 137
The West, 27, 29, 46, 49, 58, 60, Zapatista, 233, 322, 333
79, 93, 94, 98, 101, 136, 141, Zarathustra, 47, 48
157, 158, 160, 177, 181, 184, Zarghami, Ezzatollah, 150
195, 197, 202, 223, 23750, Zarif, Javad, 19
249, 250, 260, 261, 266, 268, Zaval-e Kolonel/The Ruining of the
2724 Colonel, 223, 229
The West and the Rest, 46, 197, 244 Zaydiyah, 126, 136
West-stlicher Diwan, 46 Zinn, Howard, 199202, 214
Where is My Vote?, 2, 60, 65, 66, Zoroastrianism, 53
68, 78, 87 Zoroastrian rituals, 267

Hamid Dabashi Auth. Iran The Rebirth of A Nation

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Hamid Dabashi

The Rebirth of a Nation

ISBN 978-1-137-59240-8 ISBN 978-1-137-58775-6 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016950873

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Cover illustration: Parviz Kalantari, Vista, 2005, acrylic on straw-and-mud, 100x70cm

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

It is my equal pleasure to acknowledge and thank the distinguished

Introduction: TheRebirth ofaNation 1

Chapter One: Persian Empire? 37

Chapter Two: A Civil Rights Movement 55

Chapter Three: A Metamorphic Movement 73

Chapter Four: An Aesthetic Reason 93

Chapter Five: Shiism at Large 123

Chapter Six: Invisible Signs 147

Chapter Seven: A Transnational Public Sphere 173

Chapter Eight: Cosmopolitan Worldliness 195

Chapter Nine: Fragmented Signs 217

Chapter Ten: The End oftheWest 237

Chapter Eleven: Damnatio Memoriae 253

Chapter Twelve: Mythmaker, Mythmaker, Make me aMyth 281

Conclusion: What Time Is It? 311

Image 1 Parviz Kalantari, Vista, 2005 17

The idea of this book dawned on me by a photograph. It was early in

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1

the Overthrow of the Regime. Turks were declaring: Government

Safar-e hajmi dar khat-e zaman

THE BIRTH OFANATION

THE BIRTH OFPOSTCOLONIAL NATIONS

The Islamic Republic was now imploding, as its ideological foreground-

character and thus postcoloniality is the condition of an Enlightenment

ART ASOPERA APERTA

new? The simultaneous necessity and impossibility of any meaningful

leader of the 19771979 revolution was the Shah, meaning whatever he

significance in 2013, the region seemed in the midst of world-historic

Image 1 Parviz Kalantari, Vista, 2005

A NUCLEAR ACCORD ANDITS CONSEQUENCES

defiant nation oscillated back and forth, marking a semiotics of a tumultu-

itself Iranian-American promotes anything from the neoconservative

THE LASTING NATION, THECHANGING STATE

talking to Marxism. Trying to convince Marxists of his time of something

Ruling groups can in their thinking become so intensively interest-bound to a

He distinguishes this ideological thinking from its opposite Utopian

I propose a more dialectical relationship between the states ideological

operates through a very positivist reading of the dialectic. The nation

TOWARD ANAESTHETICS OFEMANCIPATION

regime. The rebirth of the nation is predicated on a full consciousness of

FRAMING THIS BOOK

was the most potent manifestation of colonial modernity, at once enabling

therefore I identified the Green Movement as a civil rights movement,

momentums of the nascent nations at large. What I mean by poetic

engineering, abortion, organ transplant, physician-assisted suicide, and so

to a more global perspective, while through Gadamer, Menke, and Singer

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 37

ONE BRICK ONTHEOTHER

THERE IS NO EMPIRE BUT ONE EMPIRE

rightly calls it in a new book, commenced by being lucratively funded by

PERSIAN WRIT LARGE

marker of ethnic identity designating its peripheries as Turkish or Kurdish

PERSIA, PERSIANS, ANDPERSOPHILIA

In what particular manner does the contemporary Iran emerge from

Image 1 Mana Neyestani, Untitled, 2009