In this episode, Rustin and Ali interview Alireza Doostdar, Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies and the Anthropology of Religion at the University of Chicago. He is the author of [The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Science, Islam, and the Uncanny](https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691163772/the-iranian-metaphysicals), published by Princeton University Press in 2018. Dr. Doostdar explores the neglected aspects of religion and spirituality in Iran, specifically practices that are often categorized in the realm of superstition, magic, and the occult. The interview opens with a discussion of two different yet entangled traditions that engage with the immaterial world in contemporary Iran: the "strange" or "hidden" sciences ('ulum-e qaribeh or 'ulum-e khafiyeh) that developed in Iran and nearby regions, and the esoteric sciences imported from Europe in the nineteenth century. These two lineages include beliefs and practices such as sorcery, alchemy, astrology, spiritism, mesmerism, and theosophy. Dr. Doostdar explains that these traditions form the foundations of Iranian metaphysics and serves as a testament to the plurality and ambiguity of religious practice in the Islamic Republic. Towards the end of the episode, Dr. Doostdar discusses his own perceived run-in with the unseen world during his fieldwork. ...
In this episode, Rustin interviews Dr. Aria Fani, Professor of Persian and Iranian Studies at the University of Washington, about his upcoming book project, **Making Persian Literature: Iran and Afghanistan in the Age of Romantic Nationalism**. Dr. Fani’s research explores how literature was utilized in the nation-building process in both Iran and Afghanistan during the turn of the twentieth century. His work pushes back against the narrative that the Persian language was in decline as a lingua franca across large swaths of Central and South Asia in the nineteenth century. While Persian did in fact have to compete with Russian, English, and other languages, it did remain a prominent language of transregional cultural production, and intellectuals worked to reform the language to fit within new nationalist concepts of literary discourse. In Iran and Afghanistan, nation-state nationalism did not automatically lead to the collapse of all ties across borders, but rather opened up a new site of exchange. He instead shows how Iranian and Afghan intelligentsia traveled back and forth and were in conversation about what came to be the canons for their respective national literatures. For this reason, Fani suggests that Iranians and Afghans were in fact co-conspirators of a shared literary projects. ...
In this episode, Ali interviews Dr. Mana Kia, an Associate Professor in Columbia University’s department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies about her book, [Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin Before Nationalism](http://https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=29033) (Stanford University Press, 2020). If contemporary notions of being Persian are rooted in recent history, what did it mean to be Persian before nationalism? In the interconnected spaces of premodern Asia, Persian served as a language of learning and shared communication that facilitated the exchange of texts, practices, goods, and ideas, creating a Persianate cultural sphere. Persian not only provided a shared language but also gave access to a whole series of broader ideas and practices. In this older sense of being Persian, Dr. Kia has uncovered a conception of selfhood based on a very different understanding of place and origin. In it, people always understood themselves in relation to multiple collectives, not singular nations, origins, or ethnicities. Her study argues that the wide range of possible Persianate selves allowed for a type of pluralism that the nation state has been unable to provide, a pluralism that has more promise than the eurocentric notion of tolerance. The types of kinship that are produced through these shared lineages all center around the vast notion of adab. Adab is “aesthetic in ethical form,” a notion of the proper form of things that guides seeing, experiencing, thinking, and even desiring. It was adab, she argues, that kept Persianate worlds together even as their societies collapsed-- providing a shared pluralistic moral order and language that allowed them to reconstitute after each collapse. Key to this were literary genres like poetry or tazkira writing, serving as acts of commemoration in ...
