In The Iranian Metaphysicals, Alireza Doostdar describes his work as contributing to “comparative anthropologies of epistemology”—“how people know things and how the conditions of their knowing undergo shifts over time.” The framework has particular purchase in a study that centers largely on things people cannot see—the occult and the metaphysical—and for which they must rely on capacities of discernment that, for the most part, they admit to lacking. In such encounters with what cannot be comprehensively known, the very task of knowing acquires a sense of anxiety, opening onto sentiments of discomfort and unease. To refer to this analysis as a comparative enterprise is to emphasize that knowledge—its conditions of possibility and its modes of production—is always historically specific. This basic premise is especially insightful in a study that grapples with an enduring scientific modernism that, in denouncing superstition and proclaiming rational religion, aspires to universality. But, apart from the emphasis on the contextually particular that it indicates, how adequate is the concept of comparison as a description of Doostdar’s account? What exactly is being compared in Doostdar’s analysis, and what are the analytical stakes of that comparison?
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Thoughts on tradition in The Iranian Metaphysicals
by
Charles Hirschkind
While this book is an extraordinary accomplishment, rich in its ethnographic wanderings and sophisticated in its theoretical framing, my interest in this short essay is confined to the book’s treatment of the question of tradition. Importantly, this decision stems not from a shortcoming of The Iranian Metaphysicals, but rather, for the sophistication and rigor with which it approaches the notion of tradition, and thus affords the reader an opportunity to reflect on what, in my view, are some of the key aspects and challenges that Talal Asad’s elaboration of this notion entails. Alireza Doostdar explores how the arguments, perspectives, and understandings of his informants are inscribed within, and extend, traditions of reasoning, including orthodox Shi’a traditions (“Shi’a reason”), as one of a number of powerful sources of authority in contemporary Iran. Focusing on metaphysical practices forged at the unstable and shifting intersection between established Islamic genres and novel techniques and practices modeled on Western inquiries into the scientific occult, Doostdar traces the patterns of transformation, rejection, accommodation, and assimilation occurring at this intersection.
The soulful, comic defiance of Heavenly Bodies
Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, something dead