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Recounts the political contests between Islamists, leftists, and others culminating in one of the twentieth century's most surprising revolutionsCombines the sensitivity of a memoir with the expertise of a scholarly study to explore lesser-known figures and events in the Iranian revolution's historyShifts the center of Iran's revolutionary history away from its capital to its provinces in an attempt to show how the global and local interacted at multiple levelsIn October 1978, a day that started like any other for Ali Mirsepassi – full of anti-Shah protests – ended in near death. He was stabbed and dumped in a ditch on the outskirts of Tehran for having spoken against Khomeini. In this book, Mirsepassi digs up this and other painful memories to ask: How did the Iranian revolutionary movement come to this? How did a people united in solidarity and struggle end up so divided? In this first-hand account, Mirsepassi deftly weaves together his insights as a sociologist of Iran with his memories of provincial life and radical activism in 1960s and 1970s Iran. Attentive to the everyday struggles Iranians faced as they searched for ways to learn about and make history despite state surveillance and censorship, The Loneliest Revolution revisits questions of leftist failure and Islamist victory and ultimately asks us all to probe the memories, personal and collective, that we leave unspoken

The Discovery of Iran examines the history of Iranian nationalism afresh through the life and work of Taghi Arani, the founder of Iran's first Marxist journal, Donya. In his quest to imagine a future for Iran open to the scientific riches of the modern world and the historical diversity of its own people, Arani combined Marxist materialism and a cosmopolitan ethics of progress. He sought to reconcile Iran to its post-Islamic past, rejected by Persian purists and romanticized by their traditionalist counterparts, while orienting its present toward the modern West in all its complex and conflicting facets. As Ali Mirsepassi shows, Arani's cosmopolitanism complicates the conventional wisdom that racial exclusivism was an insoluble feature of twentieth-century Iranian nationalism. In cultural spaces like Donya, Arani and his contemporaries engaged vibrant debates about national identity, history, and Iran's place in the modern world. In exploring Arani's short but remarkable life and writings, Ali Mirsepassi challenges the image of Interwar Iran as dominated by the Pahlavi state to uncover fertile intellectual spaces in which civic nationalism flourished

Introduction : Iranian nationalism, past and present -- Transnational cosmopolitanism : Arani's life and times -- Among the nationalists in Berlin, 1922-29 -- The Persian language : a racialized national narrative -- For a radical cosmopolitan Iran -- Persian language, past and presence -- 'Erfan, reason and the nation -- Conclusion : an unfinished Iranian enlightenment

This book continues my earlier study on the influence of the Heideggerian counter-Enlightenment in Iran. My last book, "Transnationalism in Iranian Political Thought," focused on Ahmad Fardid's thought, as part of the broader circulation of intellectual ideas to Iran (European counter-Enlightenment tradition), and the reception of Persian Islam to Europe (in Henry Corban's thought). The book explores the nature of these ideas and tradition as they travel back and forth. More specifically, I examined the ideological hazards of excessive anti-modernity, projected in the Gharbzadegi discourse (Westoxification) in Iran. I further discussed the social significance of politicized Erfan (Persian mysticism), or the desire for achieving "Eastern Spirituality", and the violently anti-democratic predicament of what Michel Foucault celebrated as the "politics of Spirituality." The current volume continues this important scholarly investigation, although in a rather different format. This new and complimentary book engages in a dialogue on Ahmad Fardid's intellectual legacy, by those who admire him, some who were once inspired by him but are now critical of his thinking, and others who may hold a more mixed and ambivalent view of Fardid and his ideas

During the Iranian Revolution of 1978/9, the influence of public intellectuals was widespread. Many espoused a vision of Iran freed from the influences of 'Westtoxification', inspired by Heideggerian concepts of anti-Western nativism. By following the intellectual journey of the Iranian philosopher Ahmad Fardid, Ali Mirsepassi offers in this book an account of the rise of political Islam in modern Iran. Through his controversial persona and numerous public and private appearances before, during and particularly after the Revolution, Fardid popularised an Islamist vision militantly hostile to the modern world that remains a fundamental part of the political philosophy of the Islamic Republic to this day. By also bringing elements of Fardid's post-revolutionary thought, as well as a critical analysis of Foucault's writings on 'the politics of spirituality', Mirsepassi offers an essential read for all those studying the evolution of political thought and philosophy in modern Iran and beyond

"This book presents a critical study of citizenship, state, and globalization in societies that have been historically influenced by Islamic traditions and institutions. Interrogating the work of contemporary theorists of Islamic modernity such as Mohammed Arkoun, Abdul an-Na'im, Fatima Mernissi, Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, and Aziz Al-Azmeh, this book explores the debate on Islam, democracy, and modernity, contextualized within contemporary Muslim lifeworlds. These include contemporary Turkey (following the 9/11 attacks and the onset of war in Afghanistan), multicultural France (2009-10 French burqa debate), Egypt (the 2011 Tahrir Square mass mobilizations), and India. Ali Mirsepassi and Tadd Fernee; critique particular counterproductive ideological conceptualizations, voicing an emerging global ethic of reconciliation. Rejecting the polarized conceptual ideals of the universal or the authentic, the authors critically reassess notions of the secular, the cosmopolitan, and democracy. Raising questions that cut across the disciplines of history, anthropology, sociology, and law, this study articulates a democratic politics of everyday life in modern Islamic societies"--

Ali Mirsepassi explores Eurocentric assumptions about modernity and Islamic Fundamentalism. He argues the Iranian Revolution was not a clash between modernity and tradition but an attempt to accommodate modernity within a sense of authentic Islamic identity and culture and assesses the future of secularism and democracy in the Middle East

In this article, I undertake several lines of enquiry in the history of ideological and political movements centered on the "modernity" polemic at the transnational level. By analyzing these movements in juxtaposition, I explore the possibility of more diverse narratives of modernity and antimodernity than are assumed by conventional dichotomies in contemporary academic writings. The results of my enquiry challenge several pervasive "dogmas" of post-colonial theory: that orientalism is a purely modernist intellectual project, while anti-orientalism is by necessity its more "local" discursive counterpart in a dualism of East and West.