OK. So welcome to the Friday Middle East Centre Seminar webinar on this case.
Before we begin, I just have a couple of announcements to make. The format today will be as follows.
I will talk to Professor Dabashi for about 20 minutes to give us time to look at some of the main themes of the book.
And then we will go to a question and answer session if you have questions.
Please to submit them as we go so that we can get through as many as possible in the last half hour.
Could you please submit them through the Q and A box and not through the chapel?
Last one last thing is that should you wish to purchase the book at Denver University Press has given us a discount.
You need the code event three zero, and you can you can pay that into the UTI website and you'll get a discount on the book,
which is certainly well worth the cost.
And it looks so nice and it's a work of great intellectual significance.
So, Professor Deffeyes, [INAUDIBLE], I would like to, first of all,
welcome you to the Middle East centre at Oxford, albeit a virtual Middle East centre at Oxford.
It's a wonderful opportunity for us to hear you talk about your own work,
which I think we've all been looking forward to a great deal over the last few days.
I'm sure you need no introduction.
But just briefly to mention that you are the head of Vokoun, professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia,
and of course, the author of many works on a variety of topics which it's impossible to to mention so much here.
But of course, they range from the very famous theology of discontent, books on cinema,
books on Iran, on cinema, books on some of Palestine history culture and so on.
But I'm sure that this linkage is familiar to our audience.
So if I can start by asking you some fairly broad questions.
Professor. The first question is, is is quite obvious, really.
Why this book and why now? This book? So I wondered if you can tell us a little bit about the genesis of the book and how it
fits into the general trajectory of your intellectual work over the past few years.
By all means festival. I would like to begin, Stephanie, by thanking you for accepting this book in your series in Edinburgh University Press,
as I'm sure you know, I'm a great admirer of your scholarship,
and I was delighted that you have it, this series with Edinburgh University Press into which you generously and graciously accepted my my book.
Thank you for chaperoning the book into final fruition.
I'm grateful. I'm also delighted to see Eugene Rogan with us.
I just reminded him that he is one of our alumni and that we miss him right now because I'm the director undergraduate studies.
I look at him as he was a 18 year old coming to Columbia.
We're delighted to have a Columbia connexion at our school.
Now, as for this book, as you well know, a book of this sort comes together from a variety of perspectives and reasons.
And if I were to start somewhere, I would say the book has started from its end.
The last chapter you remember the book on Towards Theology, Liberation Theology,
post Islamist Liberation Theology that I had written on post Islamist Liberation Theology on varieties of occasions that,
as you know,
the origin of this idea with my dear friend and colleague ossify out and also with Rivoire who have been thinking that writing about system ism,
I have my own take on it. But the question of the theology of post Islamism was preoccupying me.
And then habitually I kind of thinking in terms of a two bookends.
I wanted to begin somewhere and end somewhere. It naturally went to.
Allama, as you well know, is a seminal figure as quote unquote controversial figure.
People either deeply loved and admired him or the other way around.
And as I say, early in the book. I grew up with Allama.
As all young people were with their fathers initially, they think it's God's gift to humanity.
Then they feel, God, how could this man be my father? And then finally settled with, oh, he's just a man like everybody else.
So it was a moment that I needed to gain for theoretical reasons.
Notions of theology, of persistent ism.
I went to him, but once I started working on him and rereading him and rereading some wonderful pieces of a scholarship,
some of them by my own students, some of them by other scholars, have worked over the last 50 years, as you well know.
And you kind of mentioned Theology of the Spanton.
I first had an encounter with I met some 40 years ago when I was working on the ideological full grounding of the revolution in Iran.
But since then, a lot has happened. Wonderful work has been done both in Persian and in English and occasionally in other languages.
So catching up with this is. She was also very, very exciting.
But perhaps the most significant discovery as I was writing was this full volume of correspondences between al-Ahmed and his wife seeming Dinah Shore,
eminent novelist of her own. Right.
And you may recall that halfway through as I was writing, I wrote to you, Nicholas, saying,
well, I've just come across this and I will probably need another 20000 more words or so.
As I was writing, that chapter became crucial in what I call gendered voice of the of our.
That reflects on many aspects of of his writings.
The other point that worth mentioning is I just finished the book with Cambridge University Press on travelogues of the 19th century,
reversing the colonial gaze in which I cover about a dozen or more travellers from Iran and India go to all around the world.
And much of this literature has been read exclusively for their European part of their travelogue rather than the entirety of their travelogue.
And one of my point of contention was actually to looking at the entirety and not just the European part,
which sometimes is only a small part of the of the book.
So that background came to my read rereading of his travelogues, his major for what he called for pedlars.
So his trip to Soviet Union to attend an anthropological conference,
his visit to unite the states for fellowship at Harvard that Kissinger had had organised.
And then, of course, his trip to Mecca, his famous trip to Mecca, and writing his travelogue as Haj Pilgrimage.
And also his trip to Jerusalem. So that was another aspect.
But the third aspect, I lost count.
These are all in the process of writing that I that I discovered was his writing on his essays.
He was a master essayist. In Persian, as you know, the origin of modern Persian essay goes back to early 19th century.
But he had a knack and panache for writing essays that were particularly the parts that
he was writing about people like Nimo You Shige on Saturday had died and so forth.
And that prose became interesting and important to me.
Finally, it is there is a it is an autobiographical aspect of this.
I just collected my work on Edwar site and published a book on it will say, Alarmed, as you know,
was probably will more than probably was the Edward side of my youth as I was growing up.
And it was say it was all a matter of my adulthood. So these two books kind of reflect each other.
And there's a serious aspect of autobiographical narrative in the in the book that is I'm
beginning to kind of have a recollection of how things happened that I am where I am.
So all of these things came together, gave the book a theoretical consistency, sort of marching, pivoting towards the end of the final chapter.
That is not just the life and legacy of Allama that actually moves towards a direction that colleagues in contemporary Islamic studies,
Middle Eastern studies,
people interested in post Islamism, the writings that have appeared, etc. they can find things in it that is not just exclusive to too much.
So that, in a nutshell, is how the book came about, a posting from a friend of my post-colonial and post-modern man.
And I still couldn't find a little bit what you mean about some kind of person.
Hi there. My reading and and definition is different from a slightly different from USCIRF buyouts and who are for me, Islamism.
Stephanie is a plus a particular epistemic formation that emerges early in the 19th
century in which Muslim intellectuals of the generation of Jamaluddin al-Afghani,
Muhammad Abdul Rashid, rather, that generation of Muslim critical thinkers and intellectual are far more important,
actually, than European Orientalists. What they are doing in the work that I have done, I describe it as follows.
They are actively engaged in a radical transformation of the of the spectrum of Islamic
intellectual history into a singular sites of resistance to European colonialism.
And this generates a particular steam of ideology production that, again,
we can say starts with sir say that Harmattan or al-Afghani Rashid, rather, just comes forward ultimately to figures like Ali Shariati.
But then what I mean by Puss Puss Islamism, that is that this particular.
His team of knowledge production and ideology production ultimately exhausts itself.
In my book, a book on Islamic Liberation Theology, Resisting the Empire.
I mark the events of 9/11 as the end of Islamism.
Not people were really looking at it as the beginning of Islam. As I say, no is Islamism has ended.
There is no people were reading Osama bin Laden.
You know, some of my own colleagues, for hints as to where his theology is, is moving.
And my argument was that there is no theology. This is this are these are visual productions.
This is violence for visual effect without any more all imaginative political or economic project behind behind the spectacle was just a spectacle.
So let's say from Napoleon's invasion and occupation of Egypt to events of 9/11,
that period is is a period of ideology production conducive on this binary between Islam and the West.
And my argument is that that binary has exhausted itself, is not producing ideologies and thinking and critical reflections anymore.
It has done it for worse or better, whatever it is has done.
We have entered into a period of what Harten Negri call in their book Empire, a period that the Emperor has no centre.
So I put I said the World Trade Centre is a misnomer.
A world trade doesn't have a centre. And because of the Smurfs nature of capital, we have an amorphous empire that has no centre.
It doesn't is all over the place. Islam may kill.
Critical thinkers have lost their interlocutors. They don't know who they are talking to.
And this is what I mean by by post Islamists. I have to control myself, not to cook too much, give more chance for you.
Thuc. Can I ask you about the title of the book, The Last Muslim Intellectual?
I think people would be happy to explain why you adopted this title.
And I would also like to ask, wasn't intended to be a little bit provocative.
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. No, no, no doubt. And if you may recall, initially, not you, but.
But Nick Lemba, our editor, was a little bit suspicious of the title.
But I insisted and she agreed the.
Yes, it is intended intentionally to be provocative.
I was talking to another launch with with colleagues in Mexico and Spain and a colleague from Spain,
Professor Moots was saying that she put it on their Twitter and people started objecting.
Well, what does he mean? Listen to that. What about that? ET cetera?
And my response was and my response is, you know, that famous joke, that old fashioned ways when we went to cinema and you know who done it.
You have to know who has done it. And if you didn't tip Dosher when he put this statue down, he would whisper to your ears.
The butler did it. So I don't want I don't want to tell.
I want my audience is teasing my audience in a way.
But I also mean, it's genuinely that is a period of a particular mode of critical thinking that I place along my next to MSRA and fun on and so forth,
that in that epistemic constellation of critical thinking,
who was the last Muslim intellectual after which we enter a period of sectarian bifurcations and positioning in which.
Muslims stop being conversant with the world.
My objective is capture the moment when Muslims are conversant in with the world.
In a book that I published a few years ago, maybe a decade ago, being a Muslim in the world, I.
I define Islam as a quintessentially dialogical proposition.
Islam has always been in dialogue with Greek philosophy, with Islamic Iranian literature,
with Indian wisdom, literature, etc. It has always been dialogical, Islamic theology,
emerging conversation with Jewish theology, Islamic philosophy and conversation with Greek philosophy,
Islamic mysticism in conversation with Buddhism and so forth.
And the same is now that is the period that culminates in Alabama.
This is why I create a multifaceted and escorted character that, yes, he's a Muslim.
Yes, he became a member of the two party and in many ways he was drawn to Marxism, initially to nationalism at colonial nationalism,
then to Third World socialism, then to existentialism and all of these phases when he was translating SAFTA Camu and so forth.
He was genuinely an existentialist.
That that that that ease and facility and generosity and catholicity of learning where we're not in in opposition to his being a Muslim.
Many people thought that when he wrote his his Hajj pilgrimage that he returned to Islam.
And my argument, he's never left Islam for him to return to Islam.
And even in his harsh pilgrimage at the end, he says very bluntly, he didn't go to Mecca to find God because he says people who want to find God.
God is everywhere. I went to find my my deceased brother.
So, yes, in answer to your question, it is a provocative title, intentionally so, but it is also meant as an argument is not just there.
It is not. It is an argument that people can accept, reject, modify or pose, agree, etc.
He makes some very large claim for the significance to La la land.
And you mention on page 59 you a combination of how how fast I myself am coming from.
I have to tell you, the non-com city in the U.S., as you mentioned, from Malcolm X,
an all time stamp programme, and I have now heard from Rocky as the kind of company he ought to be take power.
But he also points out that he's not really being inducted into that Pontell Hall Colonial Francoeur.
Why? This is partially. First of all, many of this, if you consider EMRs air and transfer there they were Francophonie, they were writing in French.
And as a result, too, especially after A-s wrote Introduction to Wretched of the Earth,
Faloon was immediately inducted into a domain of critical thinking of the colonial period.
Most of the African critical thinkers were part of the French Francophonie intellectual domain.
And the same was with people like Jose Marti and the Caribbean domain and the Latin American domain.
They were writing in Spanish and as a result, part of a different but interconnected domain.
All I meant was writing primarily in in in Persian and the language was not accessible to me.
In fact, in one of her his correspondences with his wife, he complains about the fact that he.
Right. He has to write in Persian. And the fact that he is not part of that pantheon now calling him as significant as all of this.
It doesn't mean that they are all on the same level of rootedness or engagement or sophistication, even amongst his contemporaries.
There were many critical thinkers and intellectuals and philosophers and and university professors were far more learnt than he was.
But as he says early in his travels, I that engie and Mr. Execution.
Sometimes the horse senses a coming earthquake better than as his Margaretha.
He was a provoked Arjun's provocateur.
He touched on the issue, touched on anthropology and sociology and comparative literature and poetry and travelogue.
He had a restless sowed. And then the fact is that he is one of my claim.
In the chapter on his relationship with his wife, Simona Schwa is that that combination had a had a provocative.
As you recall, I go through a whole series of what does it mean to be a more than contemporary couple?
And many people have legitimately criticised him because of certain passages in in his book Sankei by Goodyear Tombstone,
but which are, again, as I said, are legitimate. But at the same time, for a man of his generation to put it in print,
that he could not tolerate the fact that he had to take his wife to a male gynaecologist is a historical document,
is not the question of all how horrible that he was that way or anything of that sort.
But the fact that he put it committed not to paper. So 50 years from now, 100 years from then, we can actually read it.
So that flame is not a relation to fruit, for example.
He was beholden to the fact that he was beholden to Mahmoody human.
There were many of his contemporaries in many ways were more sophisticated.
But at the same time, their sophistication, their knowledge, their rootedness of their command of various intellectual fields also paralysed them.
They could not produce provocative ideas. But he he there is there was a there was a flamboyance about him.
There was the engagement.
The scene is with the with either side, if we jump this way, that Edward's side made comments about a number of his major book, tourism.
He was making comments about the whole vast history of Orientalism that I myself, amongst one of his closest admirers, have taken issue with.
But at the same time, there was a few radical courage in the writing of safe lives that as you remember in the chapter on that absurdity,
I was, um, very critical of him. Almost half of the book is gibberish.
It is only really one chapter that is that is provocative and engaging.
So I am neither, as I said at the beginning. Another great admirer of him.
No. Him, no. Blame him for Islamic Republic. The trajectory of the book goes somewhere else again towards the end of the book.
And what it means to engage, to be a Muslim intellectual and I have thought I am always that he is a Muslim.
He is intellectual. But what does it mean to be a Muslim intellectual in his time and then in order to.
You paint a very intimate portrait of their lives, compromise.
I haven't gone this far. It's quite moving.
But it does. It is quite interesting what you say about them becoming a kind of role model for a modern marriage with.
That's a very frightening kind of responsibility to have. I mean, why the warts and all Courtright?
He does come across a difficult man to be my imagine.
And then we have the story of the affair and it becomes throughout the novel and the ways that multiple marriages do become rather banal.
I wonder, you know what? I'm personally not a man. Do you think he was a difficult person?
It is difficult. I thought he had half of the reason for his credit for the best.
We are we are blessed.
The next generation is blessed with two absolutely exquisite texts that seem donor Schwab has written on her husband was one of them is called Shohat.
I'm Jallal, my husband, Jelen. And the second one is called Blue Ridge Yellow.
The Sunset Jello. Absolutely stellar example of Persian prose of of this genre of a woman writing about
her husband lovingly but also critically somewhere I think is in in my husband,
Jalloul ish, sitting on his very first tomb, says Ahmad is the first draught of what people know as the final draught.
So as a husband, she is the first draught. And then people know they have a person with, say,
Chick Navys and putting this that I know him as a first draught, but the world knows him as the final draught.
There is as a model. One of the most moving parts of their correspondences is precisely the moment of of his
extramarital affair and the struggle that she has to come to terms with this and writes to him.
I mean, there is a period that I that I navigate when she addresses him, Mr. al-Ahmad, early on and so forth, and then they married.
And then they have a varieties of the most gorgeous Persian affectionate terms, Jalala as his name.
Isn't it that until this period of anger and frustration that again, she goes back over your life,
man and such, and then again eventually goes back to Jallow as his own?
So this this trajectory is extraordinary. And at some point, she tells him, you must understand, I have a responsibility on my shoulder.
It was it was women of my, my, my homeland. And I cannot live with this and continue to pretend nothing has happened.
And he goes through a song and dance.
And apparently when they were both invited to Israel, we don't know what exactly he does in the Tel Aviv airport,
but something happens because she says after what you did in Tel Aviv airport,
we don't know, song and dance, whatever he did to apologise and moving on.
It is in that sense, a very modern marital relationship that is honest.
They didn't have children and that was a vexing issue for them, for their family and so forth.
They had a creative and critical relationship with each other, seeming to Fed tells us, for example,
when they went for their walks, they come across a scene and then in their mind, they begin to compose their stories.
Well, how would they write it? And then they will exchange notes. This is the moment that I talk about anymore.
And animists borrowing from young in terms of the relationship with each other and the gendered voice that that emerges.
It is unique. We don't have I mean, I'm sure we have we have many such relationships in any country, in any culture, but not a written record of it.
So detailed. He was obsessively writing maybe three volumes of the four volumes, actually his letters to her and one volume of her to him obsessively.
When is his pacing and waiting for the mailman to come? He just writes, Oh, I'm waiting.
I know. No mail mail amended to show up. I have to go to this party, but I will come back.
He just obsesses writing. He can't imagine himself while Donna Summer is in in a fellowship in Stanford.
And they had some money that her father had had given to them with which he was building a house.
So brick by brick, he writes to two seeming Danish.
Today I did the windows and then I bought the doors. And then I did that.
I I did as much as I could in the in the chapter of the book on the.
But as I say,
somebody has to go through these two volumes because we have an extraordinary document of what it means to have been a married life in this period.
Thanks, sir. Time is passing very quickly. But before we move to the TNI, there is one thing I'd like to.
One final thing I'd like to ask you about, which you made a brief reference to.
If what you call the controversial visit to Israel, some people would call it.
Have to reconcile. It really is quite extraordinary.
And I wonder if you can tell us a little bit, because you are very critical, extremely critical about as critical as possible to be in panic.
So are you ready to give up some entirely satisfactory explanation?
How what seems to be a complete failure political?
No, I can't say that he doesn't know about the situation, but he seemed to fail.
I guess if you can. Let me try to explain this to the this standard explanation.
With much of it, I agree,
is the fact that this is the his post in Shaab is after he parted ways with to the party and was extremely critical of the Soviet Union.
And he was part of Khalili Maliki, who was also very critical of the Soviet Union.
And the experience of kibbutzim in Israel became very attractive as an alternative form of socialism,
not just to Islam at all generation of Iranian socialists who were dissatisfied with Soviet experience and were looking for alternatives.
And the the idea of the socialist cooperative, like he would seem, was very attractive to them.
This was was primarily what attracted him to Israel.
And then he came back and he was enamoured by Israel and wrote a travelogue.
And of all people, as you know, the current leader of Islamic Republic hominine came from a woman called him and said,
how dare you to write this, something like this. I mean, they loved him and admired him, but nevertheless critical until 67 when the 67 war happens.
He completely flips.
And then there is a there is a sort of when I was writing my book on the revolution, I said, well, these two parts could not be from the same pen.
This is how odd they are from each other, but they are from the same pen.
And it is the same person who until 67, thinks some one way and after 67 thinks another way.
What I also did in this book that I had not done before was look at the writings of people were close to him, Brooke, Reza Barahona.
And so because his brother, Shamsul Ahmad, was a devotee of Islamic Republic,
casted a very different look, including the conspiracy that he was killed by Subha.
There is no such thing as a is a nonsense. But when you read people like his contemporaries, critical thinkers like this are better.
Honey, you see that it is apparently at some point says Matt was lucky that he was alive when
67 happens so he could sort of re re conceptualise his his encounter with Israel.
So I wouldn't say yes. The notion of the saviour of his instincts is is true.
But at the same time,
there is something in the period of post delusion with the Soviet Union that that they were looking for alternative modes of socialism,
that in part at least explains their attraction to Israel.
I can't say we have a large number of questions for law professor Rockhampton to begin to introduce the question,
which will occur with great pleasure. And again, thank you so much for joining us.
I mean, it's been wonderful getting to hear you talk about your new book and, of course, to reconnect with my alma mater.
So greetings to Colombia from Oxford. I'm actually going to jump the queue.
I was struck by the way you brought Edward Side and Jalal Ali Ahmad into the same line of analysis.
And the thing that strikes me is for so many of us not familiar with the work of Ali Ahmed, we really think of him as a one argument author.
It's hard not to argue that we know, and in the same way that one might say that Orientalism becomes the signature idea that people know side by.
And yet he side scholar would recognise that there is a much broader work that looks at culture and imperialism more broadly or covering Islam.
So my question to you is, in your book,
are you able to break the intellectual contribution of Ali Ahmed away from just the idea that we have obsessed on in the West?
I hope so. To see him as a three dimensional intellectual? I hope so.
The first thing that I do, I demythologise I was that I was a biggie is really a constellation of a few
articles put together that there is a lot of creampuff around the main argument.
And the main main argument is this and you move on.
Second, I pay very close attention to his travelogues, which is some of his most compelling writings,
travelogue to the Soviet Union, to United States, to Israel, to to Mecca.
And that chapter in and of itself introduces a whole different aspect of it.
Third are his essays in which he writes about comparative poetics and comparative politics.
Fourth are his translations from European sources, from Arabic sources,
from sources of Indian mythology and Persian mythology that he and his wife translate together.
So I do present a multifaceted aspect that does not negate the significance of poems and diggy, but places arrives at the gate in a larger context.
For example, in the in the chapter in his travelogues, he travelled extensively inside Iran and wrote what today we will call ethnographies,
detailed ethnographies of small villages or Haaga Island, etc.,
which are covered them in detail in in order to use whatever is possible for us to come up with.
In his extensive writings, to be fair, he is no other side and one side is a whole different ballgame,
partially because Edwar Side was in conversation with the whole spectrum of other altimetry.
Brennan's book has just been out and it will say it is absolutely a brilliant sort of coverage of
the entirety of his work and is not just the link between Orientalism and cultural imperialism,
but Edwards work on the world and the text on the significance as a literary theorist,
which is really the thing by which most people in the field know him, and also his work on music.
His work on Adorno there is a multifaceted deadness. There were two different ways, but I happen to hate the link in my mind, the link.
So as I said, the book in many ways is also autobiographical.
Thank you for that. I'm going to now open to the questions they are piling in very quickly.
There is a number that are challenging your approach to post Islamism.
And indeed, Islamism. So there'll be a couple of questions on the same field, but we'll take them one at a time.
From Iftikhar Malik, why call it Islamism? What is wrong with Islamic modernism?
Islamism has violent and often exclusive components of Islamic modernism all the way from Afghani's.
Serious said to Iqbal Shariati and Father Rahman was.
It is a genuine search for cooptation and synthesis. Excellent point.
The reason for that. First of all, Islamic modernism, of which I'm critical because of the concept of modernity and modernism,
is exclusively European phenomenon and has perfect meaning within the European context.
And it does not dovetail in Chinese or Indian or Islamic frames of references.
But Islamism, the way that I read it, as I said,
begins with transmutation of Islamic intellectual history intentionally into a political site of resistance to Western colonialism,
European colonialism.
So you can say, I disagree with this definition of Islamism and you are perfectly fine to go and write differently the way you do.
This is how I am in response to Stephanie's question.
What do you mean by post? Islam is the first I have to say what I understand and define as Islamism.
As this colleague says, you can say forget about Islamism. I don't want to talk about Islam.
I want to talk about Islamic modernism. Perfectly fine.
And Rahman wrote about Islamic modernism and many other critical thinkers have written about modernism.
Then the issue is not resolved.
The issue is compounded in a different way that a conceptual category with which is a specific to European intellectual history becomes
applied to an Islamic context that may or may not dovetail the same way that I'm uncomfortable with the phrase mediæval Islam.
Mediæval is is a period in European historiography and Pianola doesn't apply to Islamic or Chinese or Indian context.
So, yes, you can shift from Islamism to Islam and modernism or modernist Islam, perfectly legitimate.
Many have done it, but I don't think necessarily that resolves the issue.
OK, you're not off the hook that easily because you're one of the group way. Give us another question challenging the Islamist episode today.
As you said it out in a binary way,
as Ronnie and the others you mentioned creatively and energetically engaged with other cultures and non-Muslim thinking, as well as challenging them.
Your comments would be appreciated. OK. First of all, I do want to be off the hook.
The whole point is I'm here to be on the hook, not off the hook.
I'm delighted and grateful for what is perfectly wonderful questions.
Again, as I said, the kinds of engagement that a person like al-Afghani or certainly if I'm at home or Mallone, I'm on duty or, you know,
the whole spectrum of them are doing it is not Islamic intellectual history is not a joke, is a very rich and powerful tradition.
I philosophy, mysticism, literature, Arabic, Turkish or do Persian, etc.,
transforming it under colonial duress to come and respond to European colonialism.
This is what constitutes the epistemic formation of a certain kinds of ideology.
This is what I mean. Again, you're perfectly right to call to question this way that I frame it.
But the thing is, how else do you premium frame it when you frame?
Better off, is it a better sort of inroad into understanding what is happening?
And one last question for you. This phone is from Yousef Hamid.
Just saying, if we're living in a post Islamism or Islamist world, so presumably in your post 9/11.
Construction. One of the main features and characteristics of this study.
Excellent. We don't know. As I said, the period of Islamism is a period of a binary opposition.
Islam is here. The West is here. So Islam and the West are on each other's throats, OK?
That is, you take Islam from the West. Islam doesn't know what to do with itself.
OK. In other words, the Constitution of the West, a Western civilisation, is contingent on the formation of Chinese civilisation.
In the end, civilisation, Islamic civilisation. You need all territories for this thing to remain at the centre.
The exaltation, epistemic exhaustion of this binary, which I use sometimes the metaphor of the the Twin Towers right here in New York,
the collapse of the Twin Towers or the Buddha statues in Afghanistan in bombing on the collapse of this is the collapse of this binary.
The binary, I don't know. This is not sort of a speculation.
It is predicated on my reading of globalised capitalism, namely, the capital doesn't have a centre and New York is not the centre, nor is centre.
You pick up the phone. And at this very instrument that we're using is 18 hours.
Backbreaking hours of migrant labour in China has nothing to do with Steve Jobs or or Apple.
There is this this amorphous disposition of the operation of globalised capital has translated into a Memphis operation of empire.
And this is being it is not my argument. This is the heart and agree with which I totally agree.
So alternative ways of reading Islamism, perfectly plausible, has to be rooted in our reading of contemporary material,
economic, political and sociological reading of where we are.
We stand in the world patterns of labour, migration, look at parties of labour migrations.
There are right now is statistically 850 million human beings going to bed every night, hungry, 850 million.
It doesn't really matter whether they are in Africa, Asia or here, right here in the United States, where about 60 million are under the poverty line,
which now by then is trying to address 320 million human beings roam around the globe in search of job.
This is even before the current crisis of running away refugees from war torn areas.
These are demographic material, economic factors that no longer allows for Islam and the West binary kind of assumption.
And as a result, any alternative reading of our contemporary situation has to be rooted in these material realities.
Move from Islamism now there to questions that are bringing the ideas of imperialism and decolonisation into the frame.
So from Zubair Ahmed, he's wondering if you could say a bit more about the relevance of Arnotts anticolonial thought for us today.
And where would you place his legacy? These are V the D colonial critique offered by others such as his are final,
but also more recent thinkers arguing for Muslim or Islamic de Carloni allergy and Frank Timoney on the same theme.
Just wants to ask whether it's really true to say that the age of colonialism is over.
Surely what happened was a sort of false decolonisation. So could we bring decolonisation into the analysis?
Excellent point. All of them. Good.
First of all, if you begin with the period of colonialism, especially settler colonialism and by which we don't need a very sophisticated.
A theoretical definition. The British in India. The French in Algeria, et cetera.
You have a period of direct colonisation in which you don't have just a question of economic exploitation, but actual cultural domination.
Rohan Peck. I think he's coming to Europe. Just that we watched on HBO, the US premiere of Rowel Pax Exterminate All the Brutes.
Absolutely shattering four episodes documentary that I highly recommend.
So the period of colonisation results in a period of decolonisation or anticolonial,
a nationalism that results in a in a period that you have post-colonial nation states.
In my recent book, The Emperor is Naked, I talk about the proposition that the assumption of the nation is state.
The category of nation and state was actually a monkey wrench that was thrown at Muslim or African or Latin American societies didn't work.
And nations went one way and the state went another way. And a state has no legitimacy.
Period. In my in my reading of it. Now, the question is the key question is anticolonial writings of the sort of ultimate anticolonial
it'd be cool unreality literature that is emerging from Africa or from Latin America,
particularly the world that is attractive, is coming from Walter Minuto and others from from Latin America is an epistemological project that is
the decolonisation of mind that you begin to think in terms of epistemology of knowledge production,
that people like Modin, the invention of Africa is way ahead of us.
Way, way ahead of us.
What you what he why the embedded in in invention of Africa was in search of alternative at this demolishes of knowledge production that
went beyond the condition of Colonial City rather than are we mother or worry post mother or let's let us talk about Islamic modernism.
This is a trap. One has to look at the work of revolutionary thinkers like Maddin, The Invention of Africa,
or like Walter Minnillo and a whole group of Latin American thinkers who write about the colonial city to see the
issue is not just the sort of the British collecting their flags and leaving India or the French from North Africa.
But the question of changing the epistemology of knowledge production.
Some call these epistemology of the South.
I don't think we can call it epistemology of the South because it's not enough of.
So I mean, where are we right now? We are all in the Internet. I'm I'm on Europe, on the campus of your alma mater.
You are magnificent, Oxford, but we're all in the Internet.
Take this shot, this thing, and we're nowhere.
So the location of colonial AT&T Colonial City is is a whole different condition today, 2021, than it was at the time of Alabama.
But the logic of scholarship and critical thinking that has been done in Africa,
in Latin America and in the Caribbean scene is very crucial for us to begin to reflect,
not copy it when it comes to studying somebody like Ahmad or anybody else in that context,
but to see in what way they can have productive and creative conversation with them.
The book of my book on Allama, in a way,
is an invitation to that kind of deep colonial city that is yet to emerge for critical thinkers like Ahmad or later thinkers,
more sophisticated thinkers, Hermy Nutrition's Loch Ness, the Abuzaid and what he was doing in moronic hermeneutics.
That is what mass Ahmed Abu Zaid was doing. And we have no Iranian intellectual and political thinkers combative, comparable to some of the opposite.
That is the kind of colonial city that we need. You make you want to read the book.
The more you talk about it, the more. That's the whole point. I think so.
I think it's going to catch on as well. I've got a couple more questions that I'd like to share with you.
Jarana de Groot has come back with a question that sort of builds on what you
were saying about the ideal marriage and the notions of gender and masculinity.
And so Joanna asked if you could comment on the importance of a gendered analysis of his life and work using categories of
masculinity and misogyny and linking them to the wider trends of sexism and misogyny and modernist Iranian intellectual life.
I'm thinking of the mid and late 20th century that's to go beyond the biographical approach to those issues.
All I meant, like in fact, like his wife seeming done is very on Ashwell when she is writing Savage.
She is in full command of an entire history and an entire genre of writing fiction,
which is far superior to anything that anybody like Allama could ever write when she's at her writing desk room of her own, as it were.
And what is important about Allama is that he's very honest, honest to the point,
to have to a fault that, as I said, the first example of it is when he take.
He has to go with his wife to a gynaecologist. He can't take it that a male gynaecologist is examining his wife about it.
But the thing is, many Iranians, I dare say many British do I think the same way, but they don't write it and commit to paper and publish it.
And in fact, when Chancellor Schmidt published a Barghuti seemingly honest, I was very embarrassed.
So. Oh, dear, you shouldn't have published it. There was there was private.
But when you read it, you realise this is not a private writing. He is writing it for posterity.
So going to Johns question what I have done, which is really based on the scholarship that many of our colleagues have done,
Janet Zafari and Farzaneh Milani and and others in this field is yes, of course,
we are talking about a period and a culture and the context of misogyny and and patriarchy and all of that.
But at the same time, something is happening in the core and context and texture and tenor and discipline of their relationship with each other.
When you read them closely that you see the the vanguard of a different kind of reading of gendered voice work becomes evident.
And here literary scholarship, the fact that in, say, through Bastin,
we can talk about hetero glossier or through you we can talk about animals and animals,
allows us to begin to tease out from their factual writings, not imaginative wishful thinking.
Evidence of a different kind of gender relationship that we hope will eventually emerge.
Because this cannot just be you know, as I just wrote something.
What's her name? The late queen. The former queen of Iran just made herself look like Audrey Hepburn.
Well, we can do that. You know, there are plastic surgeries. There are all sorts of things.
But that doesn't really mean that you have the emergence of a genuine modern contemporary couple were Iranian in many respects.
But at the same time, they haven't renegotiated their gender relationships in multiple ways.
We have time for one last question, and this comes from Maggie Asghari.
He asks her to really take the conversation towards the role of Alien, not to the revolution itself.
This is what, Ali, I'm not entirely sure yachtie, I thought, instrumental in causing the Iranian revolution of 1979.
Please give a brief account of the reach of each his role and the comparison of their effects on the revolution in 1979.
You see in my first book, Theology of Discontent, I actually string them together.
First comes along and Koshary Shariati, that comes Matahari, then comes Talabani,
etc. But that's retroactive reading of history, although it did not anticipate the coming of an Islamic revolution.
And I even dare say if he were, he would have opposed the atrocity that is now happening.
Sherry, I did not anticipate the coming of an Islamic revolution.
If he were here, I dare say. And I say it, he would have opposed the atrocities that have happened.
But at the same time, when you did the this is what we call an assembly reading,
when you create this assemblage of all of these critical thinkers, you see that is going to a direction until Khomeini comes.
And Khomeini's critical thinking is not rooted in Oklahoma, it is not rooted in Shariati is not rooted even encloses a student of these matari.
In fact, what he was talking about, the notion of the lad at the same time that he was talking about the layout in Najaf,
Mawatari was in, you know, completely opposite of each other. So there is no conspiracy of of any sort.
So what has not should avoid being a historical in these terms.
So, yes, today, if you go to your own, there are highways named after all AAMA then stamp's named after all,
I am an award winning after all armour, but this is their appropriation of Allama for their own ideological reasons.
It doesn't mean that historically we have to kind of go back and reimagine and retrieve what was happening at the time,
which is the literal that I have done to the best of my ability.
Thank you very much. I think we have to stop there, although I think there are many more questions to be asked.
The time has gone very fast.
And I'd like to thank Professor Tomassoni for on behalf of Oxford, on behalf of the audience is clear, fascinated by this account.
And I just urging everyone to buy the book because it's got a very nice cover and it's full of the kind of issues that we've been talking about today.
Thank you very much, Professor Thomas. My pleasure. Thank you for having me, Stephanie.
Thank you, Jennifer. Come come back and visit your mother, Stephanie.
I just heard that Tunisia is hosting you for the launch of your book.
I'm very proud of her uterus. She was it was one of my earliest generation of my students.
And I'm delighted that you'll be hosting with your book. Thank you for your invitation.
Delighted to be with you. Thank you for the audience to the wonderful, provocative questions.
All I say is just go and read a book. By the way, the book is coming out in open access.
I just heard I filled out the paperwork for open access to which I hope we will all have access and then soon.
Hint. Hint. Stephanie will see to it that it comes out also in paperback.
I love her. Thank you very much.
Miklosi, thank you.