Hollywood Cosmopolitanisms and the Occult Resonance of Cinema

This article examines various circulations of Hollywood productions in Iran and the ways in which audiences, critics, cultural administrators, and activists relate to them. I am particularly concerned with what I call “Hollywood cosmopolitanisms,” forms of receptivity to religious and cultural others as mediated by the U.S. film industry. Rather than dividing attitudes toward Hollywood in terms of openness and refusal, or cosmopolitanism and counter-cosmopolitanism, I suggest that we attend to different modes of openness: those that are overtly acknowledged, those that are concealed, and those that pass altogether unrecognized but make their mark in the form of “occult resonance.”

Early Islamic Cosmopolitanism? Constructing the ?Umma of India in Pre-Mongol Muslim Scholarship

This article analyzes possible avenues for the study of a pre-Mongol Islamic cosmopolitanism. The ways in which the archetypically idolatrous land of India is treated by Islamicate thinkers of the ?Abbasid empire and after illuminates an Islamic cosmopolitanism that managed to incorporate the other into its view of human history and religious history. Two major fields for the generation of cosmopolitan ideas are analyzed: narratives drawn from historiography, and taxonomies erected by theological-heresiographical works. Both frameworks rely on a Muslim model of history and society in which divine truth and guidance are mediated to the communities (?umma, ?umam) of the world firstly by a prophet, but also by sages and philosopher-kings: figures who play important roles in Muslim accounts of India. Through applying these “universal” categories to Indian subject-matter, Muslim thinkers were able to depict Indians as partners in the human struggle to attain and preserve truth, albeit falling short of the Muslim community in various ways. In both the historiographical and the heresiographical fields, cosmopolitan and anti-cosmopolitan trends are observable. By incorporating Indian narratives into a universalizing historical vision, Mas??d? can best be seen to approach a cosmopolitan sensibility among thinkers within historiographic discourse. B?r?n? goes furthest among the thinkers working within a theological-heresiographical framework in analogizing Indian philosophy with Muslim thought. It is argued that both thinkers achieve a kind of cosmopolitanism only through an elitist denigration of the commoners of their communities. In addition, their cosmopolitanism was predicated on imperial expansionism into India.

Aristotle and Iranian Ethicists

From Aristotle to the end of the Middle Ages, friendship was considered to be a core notion in Western political philosophy. However, as Von Heyking and Avramenko argue, friendship has lost its prominent politico-philosophical status in the modern era, particularly in the Western liberal tradition. In the Muslim tradition, and specifically in the history of Iranian thought, friendship as a moral paradigm went through a different course of development. In this article, I will present a comparative view of friendship as reflected in the works of Aristotle and three major Iranian ethicists: Ab? ?Al? A?mad Miskawayh (d. 1030), Ab??l-Q?sim ?usayn al-R?ghib al-Isfah?n? (d. ca. 1108) and Na?ir al-D?n ??s? (d. 1274). I will examine friendship-related perspectives rooted in the Irano-Islamic philosophical traditions that represent a significant but overlooked dimension of Iranian cosmopolitanism valuable for modern peacemaking approaches beyond such concepts as: “justice before peace,” “liberal peace” and “cold peace.”

Revolution of Reform Cinema

Reform Cinema in Iran: Film and Political Change in the Islamic Republic, by Blake Atwood. Columbia University Press, 2016. 280pp., Pb. $30.00/£24.00 ISBN-13: 9780231178174; Hb. $90.00/£70.00 ISBN-13: 9780231178167.

Reading the Global Disorder with Ma?m?d-i Tarz?

Maq?l?t-i-Ma?m?d-i Tarz?, by Ma?m?d Tarz?, compiled by Raw?n Farh?d?. Mu?assasa-i Intiš?r?t-i Baihaq?, 1977. 898 pages, (selections).

“The Necessary Ornaments of Place”

This article analyzes representations of place in seventeenth-century texts to consider how early modern Persians made sense of the world. The Persian formulation of alterity stands in contrast to Edward Said’s formulation about Orientalism, by which Europe makes itself into the West. In early modern Persianate Asia, common representations of place appear in geographical and travel writing. These shared features, which I call ornaments, adorned both places that shared a learned Persian language, Muslim rule, and those beyond, in other parts of Asia and Africa. The presence or absence of these ornaments made the world intelligible for early modern Persians, creating categories of similarity and alterity that were partial, diffuse, and aporetic, defying the self-other distinctions of Orientalism. This form of knowledge about the self and the world then generated the possibility for encounters different from both modern colonial power and the nation-state.

Writing Iran from Exile

A Social History of Iranian Cinema, vol. 1: The Artisanal Era, 1897-1941. by Hamid Naficy. Duke University Press, 2011. 456pp., Pb. $28.95 ISBN-13: 9780822347750. A Social History of Iranian Cinema, vol. 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941-1978, by Hamid Naficy. Duke University Press, 2011. 560pp., Pb. $29.95. ISBN- 13: 9780822347743. A Social History of Iranian Cinema, vol. 3: The Islamicate Period, 1978-1984. by Hamid Naficy. Duke University Press, 2012. 288pp., Pb. $25.95. ISBN-13: 9780822348771. A Social History of Iranian Cinema, vol. 4: The Globalizing Era, 1984-2010. by Hamid Naficy. Duke University Press, 2012. 664 pp., Pb. $32.95. ISBN-13: 9780822348788.

Fearing the Night

Transnationalism in Iranian Political Thought: The Life and Times of Ahmad Fardid, by Ali Mirsepassi. Cambridge University Press, 2017. 408pp., Hb. £62.99, ISBN-13: 9781107187290; Pb. £19.99, ISBN-13: 9781316636473.