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
Mojtaba Mahdavi is the ECMC Chair in Islamic Studies and Professor of Political Science at the University of Alberta. He is the author and editor of numerous works on post-Islamism, contemporary social movements and democratization in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), postrevolutionary Iran, and modern Islamic political thought. He is the co-editor of Towards the Dignity of Difference: Neither ‘End of History’ nor ‘Clash of Civilizations (Routledge, 2012); the guest editor of Contemporary Social Movements in the Middle East and Beyond – Sociology of Islam (2014); and the co-editor of China-Middle East Relations in the Age of Neoliberalism (Brill, forthcoming). He is currently working on two manuscripts: The Challenge of Democratization in Postrevolutionary Iran; and Ali Shariati: Life and Legacy. Dr. Mahdavi is finalizing the following two edited volumes: The Myth of ‘Middle East Exceptionalism: The Unfinished Project of MENA Social Movements; and Towards a Progressive Post-Islamism: Neo-Shariati Discourse in Postrevolutionary Iran.
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“Of Whom and Of What” is the Neo-Shariati Discourse “Contemporary”?
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“What does it mean to be contemporary?” and “of whom and of what are we contemporaries?” "Contemporary," Giorgio Agamben argues, “is the untimely”: a “relationship with time that adhere to it through a disjunction and an anachronism.” It is the ability to know how to observe the “obscurity” and the “darkness” of our time, disallowing“ to be blinded by the lights” of the epoch.
This paper asks whether and how a post-Islamist and postrevolutionary reading of Ali Shariati’s thoughts – known as the neo-Shariati discourse – remains “contemporary” in the Agambenean tradition. “Of whom and what” is the neo-Shariati discourse contemporary? In answering this question, the paper first traces back the historical origins of this discourse followed by its conceptualization. It examines epistemological and anthological underpinnings of this discourse, namely the trilogy of “freedom, social justice, and civil spirituality.” It problematizes whether the neo-Shariati’s progressive post-Islamist stance and its quest for a homegrown democratic socialism would make it a “contemporary” alternative to the “exhausted epistemics” of nativist Islamism and hyper ethnic nationalism, neoliberal capitalism and autocratic socialism.
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