Join us as Associate Professor Seema Golestaneh examines the ways in which the contemporary mystical experience in Iran translates itself into the larger social realm, and vice versa. In particular, she will investigate an instance of the destruction of a Sufi meeting place (khaneqah) in the city of Isfahan in February 2009 and the Sufis’ response not to mourn the site, but to actively and deliberately forget it in order to disavow the material in favour of the spiritual.
Golestaneh’s talk is hence twofold: first, an analysis of the Sufis’ reaction to the actions of the destruction, both before and after the demolition, and the order’s curious decision to “remember to forget” the site; and second, how such an unknowing of memory compares to other forms of commemoration put forth by other Iranian intellectuals as well as the state itself.
The lecture is supported by the Yap Kim Hao Professorship in Comparative Religious Studies.
About the speaker
Associate Professor Seema Golestaneh
Associate Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University
Seema Golestaneh is an associate professor in Cornell University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies. Her research, situated at the nexus of anthropology and religious studies, is focused on expressions of contemporary Islamic thought in the Persian-speaking world. She is particularly interested in how metaphysical experiences make themselves known in the socio-material realm via aesthetics and epistemology. Her book, Unknowing and the Everyday: Sufism and Knowledge in Iran, examines the social and material life of gnosis (ma’arifat) for disparate Sufi communities in Iran. Essentially an anthropology of the imagination, her work also relies heavily on textual ethnography and analysis, emphasising the importance of hermeneutics within the Iranian socio-theological sphere. She is currently at work on a project tentatively entitled Utopia Lost?: Afghan Theories of Radical Poetics and Islamic Governance. Drawing largely from archival materials and oral histories, this project investigates the dreams and aspirations of Afghan intellectuals in the late 1980s and 1990s for forms of government that did not come to pass.
About the moderator
Associate Professor Nur Amali Ibrahim
Associate Professor of Social Sciences (Anthropology), and Head of Studies, Anthropology, Yale-NUS College
Nur Amali Ibrahim is an Associate Professor of Social Sciences (Anthropology), Head of Studies of Anthropology, and Yap Kim Hao Professor of Comparative Religious Studies at Yale-NUS College. He is a political anthropologist who is broadly interested in civil society, social movements, and Southeast Asia. His first book, Improvisational Islam: Indonesian Youths in a Time of Possibility (Cornell University Press, 2018), examines Muslim student activism in Indonesia following the nation’s political transition from authoritarianism to democracy. Currently he is writing a book titled Border Care: Migrant Labor in Singapore, City of Good.
