Unknowing of Memory: Sufi Thought and Building Amnesia in Iran

This talk will investigate the destruction of a Sufi meeting place by the local authorities in Isfahan, Iran 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 favor of the spiritual. My focus is hence twofold: first, an analysis of the Sufis’ reaction to the actions of the authorities 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.

Bio: Seema Golestaneh is Associate Professor in Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. Her research, situated at the nexus of anthropology and religious studies, is focused on contemporary Islamic thought in Persianate communities. Her first book, Unknowing and the Everyday, traces the social and material life of mystical epistemologies in Iran. Currently, she is working on an intellectual history of Islamic leftist thought in 1980-90s Afghanistan.