In this episode, Kamyar and Rustin welcome back Dr. Stefan Williamson Fa to talk about the extraordinary life and music of Sufi-Flamenco star, Aziz Balouch. Stefan has re-issued Balouch's EP, *Sufi Hispano-Pakastani*, originally produced in 1962, with [Death is Not the End Records ](https://deathisnot.bandcamp.com/album/sufi-hispano-pakistani) in 2020. Dr. Williamson Fa traces Aziz's biography, from a young boy born in Baluchistan in 1910, to studying in Sindh at a sufi shrine, before making his way to Gibraltar and falling in love with Flamenco music. Balouch became a student of legendary Flamenco master, Pepe Marchena, and spent the rest of his life exploring the deep connections between Andalusian music and mystical Islam. To learn more about Dr. Willamson Fa's research on Aziz Balouch and to listen to his songs in their entirety, visit the accompanying article, "[From Sindh to Andalusia: The Life and Times of Sufi-Flamenco Star Aziz Balouch](https://ajammc.com/2021/01/11/sufi-flamenco-aziz-balouch/)" on the Ajam Media Collective website. ...
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, Kamyar and Rustin reunite in New York to speak with Nahid Siamdoust, Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer and the Ehsan Yarshater Fellow at Yale University. She is the author of [Soundtrack of the Revolution: the Politics of Music in Iran (Stanford University Press, 2017) ](https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=24949) Nahid gives an overview of the role of music in Iran’s social and political movements throughout the 20th century, before discussing how music became one of the first causalities of the Islamic Republic before it was slowly reintroduced, albeit with many restrictions on what can be played and whom can perform. From Persian classical music, to underground rock, hip-hop, and pop, Dr. Siamdoust shows how music continues to be a central site of negotiation and struggle between ideologues, bureaucrats, and musicians in Iran. In addition to the music included throughout the interview, Nahid has curated a Soundcloud playlist, [The 10 Songs That Define Modern Iran](https://soundcloud.com/nahid-siamdoust/10-songs-that-define-modern-iran). ...
