Books

As recent events indicate, Iranian, Middle Eastern, and Islamic politics more broadly have been deeply influential in world affairs. Hamid Dabashi has been a highly visible and prominent commentator on these affairs, explaining, interpreting, and providing a critical perspective. This volume gathers together his most influential and insightful writings. As one of the foremost contemporary public intellectuals and scholars of our time, Dabashi's interests and writings span subjects ranging from Islamic philosophy and political ideology to Iranian art and Persian literature, from Sufism and Orientalism to Iranian and world cinema and contemporary Arab and Muslim visual arts; and from postcolonial theory and globalization to imperialism and public affairs. There is a direct connection between his theoretical innovations and the angle of his public interventions on the urgently global issues of the day. This book brings together some of his most important writings, especially those which offer new ways of understanding Islam, Iran, Islamist ideology, global art, and the condition of global modernity more generally. The book shows the underlying conceptual themes that unify Dabashi's wide-ranging and brilliantly insightful corpus. Dabashi combines deep knowledge of the subject matter about which he writes, and highly refined sociological, hermeneutical, and cultural interpretive skills, moving far beyond the limiting, distorted, and intellectually stifling character of reigning absolutist conventions. He places existing authoritative frameworks under close scrutiny in order to produce novel and penetrating insights. These essays reflect historical and geographical worlds that are best viewed when Hamid Dabashi's work is read as a whole, which this one volume work makes possible for the first time.

From the Introduction by Andrew Davison and Himadeep Muppidi

I stumbled across Hamid Dabashi, by chance, in the basement bookstore of the University of Minnesota in the early 1990s. I was a graduate student and, as was my habit, was browsing the shelves of “the Middle East” section when a provocative title framed on the thick spine of one of the volumes caught my eye. Theology of Discontent, it said. Theology of Discontent? I needed to look at it again. Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundation of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

I had been reading books and articles about the Iranian revolution and was fairly dissatisfied with most accounts. None of them seemed to address the revolution’s motivating ideas in any significant depth. Some tired me with their narcissistic description of the revolution as America’s failure, while others confounded me by instructing me to think of Ayatollah Khomeini and his revolutionary associates as anachronistic beings, somehow out of place in the contemporary world. My hermeneutic disposition rebelled against these suggestions. It was in this context that discovering Theology of Discontent was profoundly satisfying—a conceptualization of the revolution in terms of its ideological foundations, an impressively comprehensive theoretical analysis, entire chapters devoted to the main revolutionary ideologues. Dabashi’s study immediately transported me into the languages of revolutionary politics in Iran. I bought the book right away and have been teaching it in one form or another since then. Though I only met him in 2005, Hamid Dabashi has been a constant companion in my classrooms and in my thinking for the last fifteen years.

Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His work spans subjects ranging from Islamic philosophy and political ideology to Iranian art and Persian literature, from Sufism and Orientalism to Iranian and world cinema and contemporary Arab and Muslim visual arts; and from postcolonial theory and globalization to imperialism and public affairs. But more than anything else, he is a postcolonial and cosmopolitan intellectual who has made significant, original contributions to global political thought. He is that rare thinker whose scholarship exhibits both a systemic, theoretical dimension as well as a rich understanding of the interwoven character of historically and culturally complex societies. He is also a scholar who, somewhat uncharacteristically for scholars today, is oriented towards a public, and proudly dissident, role. This often means that there is a direct connection between his theoretical innovations and the angle of his public interventions on the urgently global issues of the day.

Dabashi’s writings have cast new light upon some of the most spectacular, world-historical changes and dynamics of the post-Cold war era—the Iranian revolution, the collapse of communism, the wars in the Persian/Arabian Gulf, the attacks of September 11, 2001, the “global war on terrorism,” and The Green Movement in Iran. He has helped rescue and refurbish public understandings of the plurality of Islam and its diverse ideological, philosophical, literary, and aesthetic traditions, and he has brought home the profound political, social, and cultural importance of a global philosophical and aesthetic consciousness.

My introduction to Hamid Dabashi began as my friend Andy’s mischievous and cryptic way of saying to me: “Look, you want to “provincialize Europe?” Here are the byways, highways, secret tunnels, oases in, around, and through the European desert. Don’t waste your time with them. Dwell in these lanes. Here lie the ways of other life-worlds, other wonderlands, in which we and millions of others are already at home.”

The World Is My Home:

A Hamid Dabashi Reader

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	3
Introduction	5
PART I. Counter-imagining Islam and Iran	27
Islams	28
1. In the Absence of the Face	29
2. Shi’ism as Paradox	85
3. Counter-imagining the Sacred	97
Islamic Ideology	125
4. The Power of Interpretation	126
5. Blindness and Insight: The Predicament of a Muslim Intellectual	141
Iran	168
6. On Nations Without Borders	169
7. Khomeini's Revolution	194
PART II. Emancipatory Aesthetics	201
Poetic Revolution	202
8. Nima Yushij and Constitution of a National Subject	203
9. Forugh Farrokhzad and the Formative Forces of Iranian Culture	265
Cinematic Palpitations	302
10. Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf	303
11. On Signs and Signation	335
New Global Visual Arts	348
12. Whither Iranian Cinema? The Perils and Promises of Globalization	349
13. It was in China, Late One Moonless Night	388
Hamid Dabashi: A Selected Bibliography	428

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