After Iran's 1979 revolution, the energies that had animated the struggle for a modern Islamic government were partially redirected to the task of the renewal of the Islamic tradition. Paradigmatic of this effort is “the Cultural Revolution” that has sought to combat what Islamic activists perceive as the destructive effects of Western culture and to align the production of knowledge with the teachings of Shi'i Islam. The effort to produce modern Islamic knowledge, however, has paradoxically intensified the translation of European thought and invested it with the ethos of seminary education. Drawing on a long-term engagement with postrevolutionary Iranian intellectuals, including fieldwork in Tehran and Qom, this article offers a historical and anthropological exploration of the interrelated questions of tradition, transmission, and translation. It is ethnographically centered in a seminar in which seminarian-academics translate Carl Schmitt, among others, to make sense of, and intervene in, Islamic politics. It highlights how European concepts and forms of thought come to mediate the relation between seminarian-academics and the Islamic tradition, its forms of knowledge, and its modern politics and argues that the elision of the historical incommensurability of European discourses renders the enacted tradition foreign to itself.
This article examines the politics of translation in Iran in order to contribute to a debate in anthropology around cultural difference and epistemic violence. It does so through a critical exposition of the forced confession of an Iranian politician, Saeed Hajjarian, who testified that his translation of European concepts into an Islamic idiom was responsible for unrest in Iran. It locates Hajjarian's confession within Iranian histories of anti-Western politics and an Islamic discourse of learned judgement. It argues that the enactment of the Islamic state is mediated by the translation of the West and proposes that protests manifest as a problem of incommensurability for the Islamic state analogous to the problem of incommensurability in cultural anthropology. In attempting to sequester the Islamic Republic from the West, state officials reproduce sectarianism domestically. Anthropology risks the same when it attempts to insulate the non-West from Western epistemologies and ontologies.
Conventional accounts of the 1979 Iranian revolution emphasize the loss of the revolution’s “true” spirit in the violence of the Islamic state. In contrast, this essay foregrounds a recurring dream of parricide in the generation of children of revolutionaries, to explore the fetishization of the revolution in such accounts. This dream refracts the violence and loss emphasized in the narratives of the revolution. In dethroning the fetish of the revolution, it enables a confrontation with the losses and limits of earlier theological and political paradigms indexed by the event of revolution. As a form of anthropological defamiliarization, the dream thus offers an opportunity for a speculative encounter with loss as a political-theological horizon of renewal.
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