The foreign expert
December 30, 2009
Finally, your pale white skin can absorb the sun’s rays as you conduct your daily errands. You can now worry about whether the wind gusts that ambush you in the financial district will ruin your hair style. You no longer have to worry about the incendiary looks that you once received on the transit system, nor is your look deemed incendiary. You can finally find solace in the fact that you can adopt a liberalized disposition vis-a-vis your religion. The sordid fantasy of multiculturalism is actualized, whereby the most subversive attributes of your religion are disposed in order to proclaim the pettiest of unities between yourself and the cretin that once saw you as a degenerate. Have we not encountered the final triumph over shame? This is rather speculative and wholly contingent upon the “atonal” thesis put forward by Badiou. However, one thing is certain: There is always an extimate substance that forever forecloses the possibility of attaining perfectly aligned self-certainty and self-unity. The command of the unconscious will never permit this. Something will always gnaw at the subject. This is reflected quite nicely in a certain phenomenon that took place during the latter stages of modernization in Iran. One of the main impetuses behind the massive educational initiatives put forth by the imperial regime of the early twentieth century was the idea of gradually limiting the contracts that were being offered to foreign specialists. Mottahedeh describes the outcome in the following way: “The pool of Iranian skilled labourers and technical experts that Isa Sadiq[i] wanted to create in order to replace ‘the Belgians, Americans, French and Germans’ poured forth from the high schools and universities; but the foreign experts nevertheless stayed. [...] [S]ecretly the government always thought the foreigners knew better.”[ii] The foreign expert is the foreign body that remains embedded in the Muslim woman even after unveiling.
[i] Isa Sadiq, historian and imperial senator during the Pahlavi era.
[ii] Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran, 67.
© Arshavez Mozafari – Ph.D. Candidate – Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations – University of Toronto. None of the ideas expressed here can be reduplicated in any shape or form without the explicit consent of the author: a.mozafari@utoronto.ca
“The two lungs of public life in Iran”
December 30, 2009
It is the shroud that heralds in the profoundly anti-utopian bent of Islam. Herein we discover the odd affinity that exists between Islam and Marxian thought. In their Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx and Engels broach upon the intrigues of utopianism. With total disregard for “historical development” utopianism “inculcated universal asceticism and social levelling in its crudest form.” It devised fanciful programs that totally misunderstood the “undeveloped state of the proletariat”, especially during the collapse of the feudal mode of production.[i] In the case of certain ideologues of the Iranian Revolution, there was an attempt to enact an ill-conceived overlapping of domains: “Let us have the kingdom of heaven right here on earth.”[ii] No matter how overtly utopian aspects of this ideology appeared, it was not able to by-pass the violence of Islam. This violence is not associated with the purges that took place after the revolution, but the purposeful decimation of those who were shrouded. It is at this level that one is able to observe the anti-utopianism at work in this religion. The shroud is the embodiment of an anti-pacifist doctrine, much loathed by utopians. The “wish to attain their ends by peaceful means”[iii] is heartily ridiculed by the dislocated ones.
In this way, the all-enveloping garb is strictly homologous to the interaction that takes place between the “two lungs of public life in Iran”,[iv] the marketplace and the mosque. A crucial aspect of this garment lies in the following statement Mottahedeh makes apropos the bazaar: “When the bazaar boils over [during a tumultuous period of socio-political unrest], it simply shuts. Streets of shop fronts barred by heavy shutters testify to the determination of merchants not to let normal life continue until the common concern is dealt with.”[v] The shroud is similarly actualized, a priori, in order to deal with a perennial “common concern”. When studying social commentary regarding the marketplace and its sporadic shutdowns, it is important to realize the relative unimportance of inventory stock. It is the spilling out that is of concern. There is always an insistence upon the power of dislocation. During periods of tumult, it is the mosque that is the locus of the dislocated. It is the mosque that is the focus of raging intellection and debate. The shroud never smothers thought. It simply dislocates it into the abode of God’s vicegerents. It is always within the bounds of Islam that thought, in its dislocated glory, intransigently persists.
[i]Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton & Company), 497-8.
[ii] Hamid Dabashi, Theology of Discontent (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 3.
[iii] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 498.
[iv] Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran, 34.
[v] Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran, 35.
© Arshavez Mozafari – Ph.D. Candidate – Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations – University of Toronto. None of the ideas expressed here can be reduplicated in any shape or form without the explicit consent of the author: a.mozafari@utoronto.ca
“The blood of martyrs has prevailed over the sword”
December 30, 2009
Of the various anti-governmental declarations that adorned plastered posters throughout the major cities of Iran during the last few months of 1979, one is especially interesting considering the topic of our current discussion: “The blood of martyrs has prevailed over the sword.”[1] Putting the patent message of innocuity overcoming the most concrete manifestation of state aggression aside for a moment, what if we were to consider the numerical dimension of this relationship? Not in the sense of a multitude of singularly weak elements being hypothetically capable of overcoming a goliath type figure, but rather in the sense of shear acquisition. In other words, it is only through the concentration of the volume of blood within strict parameters that results in the sword wielders total submersion. Without this total submersion, the sword would not lose its efficacy. Imagine the state trying to brandish its sword in liquid! It is from here, the numerical acquisition of martyrs and the consequent suspension of the militarized efficacy of the state, that we must commence our brief commentary on the contemporary conception of the martyr in Iran. What the current theocratic regime has so skilfully done is obstruct the drainage of blood while permitting its own ascendance to the surface. While it is true that the lifeless remain restless like an ebbing sea, the regime has the bodies of the deceased to anchor its tow. Where did all this blood come from? It is interesting how some are capable of relaxation when all they are confronted with is their own wrinkled skin.
[1] Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2004), 14.
© Arshavez Mozafari – Ph.D. Candidate – Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations – University of Toronto. None of the ideas expressed here can be reduplicated in any shape or form without the explicit consent of the author: a.mozafari@utoronto.ca
