Author Archives: Shervin Malekzadeh

Revisited: On What Basis, Modernity?

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In one of our first blogs, I asked you, “On what basis, modernity?”  Religious Statecraft gives us an opportunity to revisit the question, but with a sharper empirical focus on the relationship between sources of legitimacy, authority, and modern outcomes.  Take the questions below about Machiavelli and apply them to Tabaar’s text:  How is Iran, as a matter of practice and of policy, becoming modern?

On what basis, modernity—through the cleansing influence of the sacred, via the guidance of a faqih, or jurisprudent?  Or is modernity to be achieved by the consent of the ruled, the “flock,” as it were, the ummah?  Or is there a balance or negotiation between these two sources of modern “truth?”  What is the balance between the sacred, the fixed, and the contingent, and could it be that the public will embodies both of these, as we discussed in class?   You don’t need to answer all of these questions, but please use specific answers and examples drawn from Religious Statecraft.

From September 18, 2018:

The fragility of control plays a prominent if under appreciated role in Machiavelli’s The Prince.  In contrast to Lerner’s triumphalism (“I had it on top authority that during the summer of 1950 they had entered History”) or the harrowing implacability of “the Party” in Darkness at Noon, Machiavelli describes a world of constant variability and uncertainty.  No prince, no matter how savvy or cruel, can rest easy on his throne, circumstances and the variability of being his constant and insuperable foes.

Machiavelli leads us to the conclusion that there are no universal solutions, no easy recipes or checklists to follow in pursuing “the modern,” however defined.  Origins, the circumstances of coming combine with unforeseen events to make modernization a project forever uncertain and under siege.

We might ask, then, On what basis modernity?  The matter of legitimacy and authority has been at stake these past two weeks, whether of the Shah, of the multitude who comprise “the many,” or of the reasoning individual, who having adjusted his or her sights to the light outside of the cave, comes back to dispense capital-T Truth.  What or who is the source of modernity?  Might it be the individual, reaching for truth in the realm of the profane?  Or does modernity require the ballast of “fixed truths,” of a sacred authority that lies outside of the will and reason of the individual?  Might History be that source, or religion itself?  How might authority be reconciled to the individual will?

“I am a sick man…I am a wicked man”

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What is modern about our readings this week?  What is particularly “western” or “eastern” about the narratives?  Is The Blind Owl a “Persian” story, Notes from Underground, Russian?  How might we read these books as literature, outside of their contexts?  Is it possible to do so, as art or as literature?

Do either of the narrators gain perspective, perhaps a moment of change?

It seems obvious that Dostoyevsky and Hedayat would agree that thinking too much, having the ability to see all sides of an issue or problem, leads to paralysis, what Tocqueville describes as the falling into the self.  How might solipsism be prevented or ameliorated?

Take a look at pg. 62 of The Blind Owl.  Hedayat speaks of a “real face” that emerges at the end of life.  What does he mean by this?

What do the two stories tell us about the relationship between the mind and the body?  Are the grotesqueries in The Blind Owl limited to the psychological, or does it extend to the physical (for example, the scenes from the butcher shop…)

Related to the above:  What are we to make of the closing comment by Richard Pevear in the Foreward to Notes from Underground, specifically his assertion that what “bedevils our century” is “that habit of substituting the psychological for the moral, of interpreting a spiritual condition as a kind of behavior?”

Sadegh Hedayat’s grave, Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, France

Study Notes for Modernity’s Wager, by Adam Seligman

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 1.  Once you cut through the jargon, Seligman’s argument is premised on a simple claim:  Modernity’s wager rests on the notion that the individual, as an unfettered authority, will make the world better than one in which authority resides in the sacred.  Put plainly, moderns are hostile to authority other than their own.  Seligman’s assessment of how this bet has played out is grim.  Be prepared to explain why he is so skeptical of improvement, as well as what he sees as the consequences of this failed wager.
2.  Again, internal versus external sources of authority are the lynchpin of Seligman’s account of modernity.  Be ready to compare Seligman’s call for a return to the scared with Tocqueville’s prescription of “fixed beliefs.”  How might these be reconciled to individual freedom and autonomy, to modernity’s promise of emancipation and universal equality?
3.  Do you accept Seligman’s premise that modernity has called into being its own antitheses, in the form of fundamentalism, violence, etc.?  Are our lives fully transactional and measured by a calculus of exchange and choice?  Or do we still ethical lives, bound by an “irrational” (unreasoned) morality, unquestioned and taken on faith?
4.  The weakness of the individual in modernity, which we’ve discussed in the last two sessions, is highlighted rather clearly on pp. 49-50.  Please take a close look at this section.
5.  Consider the parable of Mr. Stern and the question of shame (pp. 72-77).  How does this imagined story relate to your own life, if at all?  Is this section coherent, or intelligible?

Modernity’s Wager Unmade in Iran

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Please note:  Blog posts for this week are due on Saturday, the responses to a response on Sunday.

Adam Seligman offers a provocative claim of loss and anomie against what he describes as modernity’s lost wager. In what ways do the religious thinkers and politicians that we’ve studied so far, including Taqizadeh, Al e Ahmad, Shariati, Motahhari, Soroush, among many others (please pick at least one) replicate or resolve the problematic that lies at the heart of Seligman’s book?  Alternatively, how does Farzin Vahdat’s book, God and Juggernaut, affirm or disconfirm the arguments of Modernity’s Wager?

The Status of Women in Iran

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“When a man pinches a woman’s bottom or grabs her breast on the street, modernity’s heterosocial promise has become a nightmare.  Woman’s voluntary reveiling in the 1970s in many urban centers of Islamic countries acquires a somewhat different meaning in this trajectory.  But that is a story for another time.”  Pg. 155

“From the late nineteenth century, a great deal of cultural criticism has been expended on the farangi’ma’ab.  In fact, through [the] mid-twentieth century, the prime figure of modernity’s excess was not female; the so-called Westoxicated woman did not become the main demon of gharbzadegi (Westoxication) until the 1960s and 1970s.”  Pg. 138

“The issue of women’s veil and unveil, compulsory or consensual, in Islamicate societies and communities has taken center stage in discussions of ‘the status of women’ in these societies on an international scale.  The veil, in its hypervisibility, has come to serve as a sign for more than gender; it has come to be read for ‘the state of modernity.’  This hypervisibility has compounded the erasure of that other excess figure of Iranian modernity by continuing the prior work of making woman stand as a privileged mark of modernity.”  Pg. 242

How does Najmabadi’s account of gender fluidity in premodern Islamic Iran help us to understand the ongoing debate and attention to the status of women in postrevolutionary Iran?

The Cow

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What are your initial impressions of The Cow as it relates to the themes of the course, and in particular, to our ongoing discussion of Iran’s particular movement towards modernity?  How is this an Iranian film, if at all, in your estimation?

 

Reading Notes for James C. Scott’s “Seeing Like a State”

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James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State
 
1.  James Scott seems to express skepticism of the project of modernity, at least in its manifestation in the realm of state formation.  How does Scott’s concept of “high modernist ideology” compare to Mirsepassi’s rejection of modernity’s “dark origins?”  How are their critiques similar or different?
2.  Scott is famously concerned with recovering the stories and the voices of the voiceless (“hidden transcripts” and the “weapons of the weak” are among the phrases associated with his research).  Above all, Scott disdains portrayals of state authority as a natural, benign, or even neutral force.  Across the text of Seeing Like a State, the reader gets a full dose of his skepticism, and yet he expresses ambivalence as to the worthiness of state projects and of the logic of modern rule.  Please consider his comments on pages 54 and 62, for example, on the design of Paris, or more dramatically, his take on the  mapping of Amsterdam’s Jews, found on pg. 78.  Is the “legible city” ever a neutral technology?  If “illegibility…has been and remains a reliable resource for political autonomy,” is the loss of individual freedom worth the gains made in hygiene, organization, and the preservation of private selves and property?
3.  The above question can be put another way:  On balance, what normative judgement can we make of modernity?  In class we’ve struggled with this question, leaning on the decidedly non-academic language of “good versus bad.”  How might we think of modernity in terms other than these?  Can we escape the binary?
4.  As you read Scott, keep in mind the distinctions that we’ve already touched upon, cleavages thrown up by the emergence of the modern era:  public/private, sacred/profane, as well as temporal and physical distinctions.  Why did the positivists see the past as an impediment to the future?  How does the desire for timelessness and “placelessness” compare to the discussion raised by Danny, that of “recovering modernity” in the ancient past, or the technique of “authenticating modernity?”
5.  Finally, consider the comparisons made by Scott between Lenin and Luxemburg, and Corbusier and Jacobs.  Scott offers the pairings as gendered alternatives, with a clear preference for the “right side” of the ledger.  Are you convinced?  Did his use of gender strike you as…strange?

Reading Notes on Ringer (the “Modernization Dilemma”), Vahdat (“God and Juggernaut”) and Mirsepassi (“Negotiating Modernity”)

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Class,

Please make sure you read the brief and melancholy story of “The Little Black Fish” in Laura Secor’s magnificent Children of Paradise.  We started the course with an abridged, almost fantastical history of the 1979 Revolution (Shah of Shahs), written in prose that regularly slipped into poetry.  This week Secor helps us to raise the curtain on many if not most of the major themes and players that we’ll come across over the course of the semester, including Al-e Ahmad, Shariati, Motahhari, and of course the author of The Little Black Fish, Behrangi.

Monica Ringer’s concept of “the dilemma of modernity”

What happens when the impetus for change is also the source of desired knowledge?  By the 19th century, Europe, and in particular Russia and England, posed existential threats to the continued existence of Iran as an independent, sovereign country.  Reformers inside and outside of the Qajar monarchy sought solutions to Iranian weakness and decline by looking west, as it were, to the seemingly miraculous achievements of the Europeans in numerous realms of knowledge (the gaze was turned east as well, to India and especially Japan, but that is another story for another time).  This effort to “become European while remaining Persian” raised the specter of the loss of the “true self,” what Monica Ringer describes as the “dilemma of modernity.”  How might Iran import the fruits of European modernity without becoming European, or losing its authenticity?  Does an authentic self exist?  Can the technology and science of modernity (military, political, and natural) be segregated from modernity as a cultural and philosophical experience.  Is it possible to have one without the other?

We’ll see that the response to the European threat came in the form of a negotiation, one in which the call to embrace Europe in all of its glory, completely, was met by admonitions that the good that foreign knowledge must be articulated into local practices and customs, in other words, made “native.”

Farzin Vahdat, God and Juggernaut

Our first cut at conceptualization raised a number of elemental questions:  What does it mean to be modern?  How useful is the term and concept, and what might constitute modernity’s alternative or antecedents?

This week we accelerate the interrogation, running through the proverbial wall, Wile E. Coyote style.  Lots of German and French jargon, with twisting 10-dollar words thrown in for good measure, when a 5-cent phrase will do.

Please, do not freak out!  You’ll have to sit with the words for a time, and if you see fit to study these theories beyond this class, the sitting will last for years.  There’s no way around it, the learning takes time.  That doesn’t mean that we can’t get the gist of what’s being argued by Hegel, Kant, or Foucault.

Vahdat lays out a series of oppositions in the opening of his book, and you may want to start thinking critically whether this approach leads to unnecessary and false binaries.  Thus, he pairs modernity as a “good” and emancipatory force for liberation, unprecedented in human history, against its tendency to take on disciplinary and dominative form, made manifest in the pathologies of positivism, colonialism, oppression along racial, ethnic, economic, and gender lines.

He also pairs, in somewhat confusing fashion, “subjectivity” with “universalism,” which he fits together Power Ranger style and calls “universal subjectivity.”

We’ll take each of these pairings in turn during discussion on Monday.  Don’t get bogged down in the verbiage of Vahdat’s sometimes clumsy presentation. His argument is actually straightforward:  Everything begins with the recognition of human agency, with the movement away from the sacred to the profane, a movement that begins in Europe but then quickly spreads to the rest of the world as a global phenomenon.  It’s impossible to overstate how unprecedented this transformation in the social, cultural, economic, and political lives of communities was, or how disruptive it was and remains throughout the world (see the reference to Marshall Berman/Karl Marx in Mirsepassi, “all that is solid melts into air”).

Agency implies no limits on the individual, yet it remains an open question whether absolute freedom and agency is possible outside of the presence of limits and boundaries.  If that sounds like a paradox, then you’re on the right path…This tension is what Vahdat aims to capture, and it’s the dilemma that the early modernizing intellectuals of Iran will face in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Please take note of the names and basic approaches of men like Malkum Khan and Afghani.  I don’t expect you to memorize dates and full biographies, but these thinkers played an outsized role in the development of Iran, and were critical interlocutors between European modernity (or at least an imagined and simplified version of Europe) and Iran as it moved into the modern era.

Ali Mirsepassi, Negotiating Modernity

We’ll be bouncing between the two poles of Vahdat (God and Juggernaut) and Mirsepassi (Negotiating Modernity) this week and for the remainder of the term.  Mirsepassi, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, delivers a much darker rendition of modernity than that found in God and Juggernaut.  Whereas Vahdat holds out hope for a truly universal and perhaps limitless outcome, Mirsepassi goes to great lengths to historicize and ultimately castigate—if not straight up condemn—the project of modernity.

Mirsepassi frames the question of modernity differently than Vahdat, and he does so right away in the opening pages.  Modernity is in its essence a matter of politics, totalizing and exclusionary, a question of power.  The malign project of the Europeans against the rest of the world, whether the latter is treated as a foil in the form of a retrograde “other,” or as an object and site for the extraction of material resources, renders modernity false, a false prophecy.  The domination of others is its original sin and Mirsepassi, by my reading, leaves unclear whether modernity and its European progenitors can ever be absolved.

Worst of all, Europe’s dominative impulse provokes a politics of authenticity in places like Asia and the Middle East, a defensive “return to self” that Mirsepassi sees as ultimately being self-defeating, if understandable.  What is at stake here is whether modernity can be experienced as a local phenomenon or whether it remains, inherently, a project of western ambition and domination.  Even the most radical and sympathetic of theorists come up short, pulled down by the weight of history and the internal logic of modernity.  According to Mirsepassi, “this weakness [of modernity] is a historical one” (pg. 4).

For Mirsepassi, the troubled genealogy of modernity is inescapable, and perhaps insuperable.  Modernity ascends as a liberating force in human history via the imposition of domination, colonialism, and racism, spread around the world by Europe and her merchants and armies.

There is no better passage that gets at this point than the one found on pg. 35.  Here, Mirsepassi throws down the gauntlet:  “Modernity was not a divine Spirit that ‘chose’ Europe.  There was no Spirit secretly European in nature, using the world’s people in its ascent to the summit of subjective self-realization.  The human world is not a tool box for manipulations by a single overarching Cosmic Consciousness, especially when that gigantic mask can be shattered to reveal the ordinary, self-interested men who stand behind it.”

We end by returning to the “so what?”  Please consider how we might come to terms with origins.  If what Mirsepassi claims is correct, what is left to us, we moderns?  What hope do we have?

Ok, that’s enough for now.   See you soon.

Professor Malekzadeh

On What Basis, Modernity?

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The fragility of control plays a prominent if under appreciated role in Machiavelli’s The Prince.  In contrast to Lerner’s triumphalism (“I had it on top authority that during the summer of 1950 they had entered History”) or the harrowing implacability of “the Party” in Darkness at Noon, Machiavelli describes a world of constant variability and uncertainty.  No prince, no matter how savvy or cruel, can rest easy on his throne, circumstances and the variability of being his constant and insuperable foes.

Machiavelli leads us to the conclusion that there are no universal solutions, no easy recipes or checklists to follow in pursuing “the modern,” however defined.  Origins, the circumstances of coming combine with unforeseen events to make modernization a project forever uncertain and under siege.

We might ask, then, On what basis modernity?  The matter of legitimacy and authority has been at stake these past two weeks, whether of the Shah, of the multitude who comprise “the many,” or of the reasoning individual, who having adjusted his or her sights to the light outside of the cave, comes back to dispense capital-T Truth.  What or who is the source of modernity?  Might it be the individual, reaching for truth in the realm of the profane?  Or does modernity require the ballast of “fixed truths,” of a sacred authority that lies outside of the will and reason of the individual?  Might History be that source, or religion itself?  How might authority be reconciled to the individual will?

Modernity, but How?

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In your own words, what constitutes “the modern?” Does the attempt to bring conceptual clarity to the notion of “modernity” necessarily suggest the existence of modernity’s “other,” namely the (potentially problematic) categories of “the traditional,” or pre-modern? What is your first cut read of the rabbit that we’re pursuing here…?

Once you’ve answered the above, apply your definition critically to Daniel Lerner’s seminal piece, “The Grocer and the Chief.”  How might this essay, warts and all, help us to better understand what it means to “be modern?”

Please keep your answers short (no more than 250 words, if you can!).  Post your reply using the “New Post” feature (but title it using your own creativity).  Make sure to tag it as “We Moderns?”  Remember to post a reply to a reply by Monday.  Simply scroll through the entries and reply to whichever one catches your eye!  Let me know if you have any questions.