Behrouz Ghamari-Tabrizi
Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Director of the Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University
Behrouz Ghamari-Tabrizi
Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Director of the Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University
Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi is Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Director of Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of three books on different aspects and historical context of the Iranian revolution of 1979 and its aftermath: Islam and Dissent in Post-Revolutionary Iran, London, New York: I. B. Tauris (Palgrave-Macmillan), 2008; Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016; and Remembering Akbar: Inside the Iranian Revolution, New York, London: O/R Books (Counterpoint), 2016. He has also coedited a special issue of Radical History Review (No. 105, Fall 2009), The Iranian Revolution Turns Thirty, Duke University Press; and a special issue of Iran-Nāmag (vol. 3, no. 2, Summer 2018), Michel Foucault and the Historiography of Modern Iran. He has written extensively on the topics of social theory and Islamist political thought in different journals and book chapters. Currently, he is working on a project on Mystical Modernity, a comparative study of philosophy of history and political theory of Walter Benjamin and Ali Shariati.
Mystical Modernity: A Comparative Study of Philosophy of History and Political Theory of Walter Benjamin and Ali Shariati
Both Walter Benjamin and Ali Shariati were situated between the Scylla and Charybdis of two totalizing orders, industrial capitalism and vulgar/evolutionary Marxism and imperialism and Islamic orthodoxies, respectively. Both struggled to conceive a revolutionary project that articulated something greater than vanguard politics in order to advance a critique of leftist orthodoxies on social, philosophical, and economic grounds. I argue that for Benjamin and Shariati, the question of Is another world possible? was intrinsically linked to the question of is another way of being in the world possible? They both delved into, albeit through incoherent vignettes, the inaccessibility of the divine and mystical creativity to establish a new philosophical foundation for a mode of being that is irreducible to modern rationalities.