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Aria Fani, "Reading Across Borders: Afghans, Iranians, and Literary Nationalism" (U Texas Press, 2024)
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- [00:00]
A
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B
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Moteza Haji Zadev from Critical Theory Channel. Today I'm honored to be speaking with a very special guest, Dr. Aria Fanim, about a recent book he has published with Texas University Press. The book is called Reading Across Borders, Afghans, Iranians and Literary Nationalism. And the book came out a year ago, if I'm not mistaken, in 2024. And Dr. Aria Fani is an assistant professor and director of Persian and Iranian Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. Arya, welcome to New Books Network.
- [01:46]
C
Thank you so much. It's a pleasure being here with you.
- [01:49]
B
Thank you. It's a topical issue, nationalism in the first place, but I guess there's a lot of discussions about nationalism. What's happening in Europe or America? Fewer people are talking about rise of nationalism in, in the Middle east and the role of culture and literature, which are the topics that you have introduced in this book. Before we get to talk about the book, can you just very briefly introduce yourself and tell us about your field of expertise and why you decided to write this book? What was the inception story of the book?
- [02:25]
C
Absolutely. I've been teaching at the University of Washington in Seattle since 2019. Recently became an associate professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures. At the uw, I co convene the Translation Studies Hub, which brings together scholars, translators, and students of translation. This is probably the most exciting initiative that I've been involved with here. And the reason why I wrote this book, apart from needing to put food on the table and getting tenure, was because of a sense of justice, quite honestly. Murtaza, as an Iranian, you know that we have a very uneasy relationship with Afghans. On the one hand, many of them share the same language with us, Persia, as well as the Islamic faith. And they're also a neighboring country. And many parts of Afghanistan used to be parts of imperial domains that now, perhaps anachronistically, we call Iran. And I think this uneasy relationship is worth unpacking. I think Afghans remind Iranians that they are not white and that they're in fact Muslim. And this gets to the heart of the Pahlavi project of nationalism to pursue a type of nationalizing identity that is rooted in the European idea of romantic nationalism, which means every nation is in possession of a singular language, literary tradition, religion and race. And you could see that when you're trying to manufacture this type of uniformity in any region on the face of this planet, but particularly Iran, which is incredibly diverse linguistically, ethnically, religiously. It could not be done without violence. And violence comes in different forms and shapes. So the story of the book is one of is how one concept, that of literature or in Persian Adabiyyat, basically served this nationalizing project. And what makes the book interesting is that it doesn't limit itself to Iran, but it looks at Afghanistan as well, and it looks at them comparatively. So the first chapter looks at how Adebiyata's discourse was constructed in various sites, such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, periodicals, and school textbooks. The second chapter looks at how Iranian and Afghan intellectuals of the early 20th century debated, collaborated, contested each other's claims to this shared Persian literary heritage. And then the third and fourth chapters return to Iran and Afghanistan as national sites. So focusing on Iran in the third chapter, Afghanistan on the fourth chapter, and the conclusion returns to this transnational collaborative framework by looking at 21st century travelogues that an Iranian academic has written in his travels on his travels to Afghanistan, and an Afghan academic has written about his explorations of Iranian society. And so that is the book in scope and topic.
- [06:17]
B
It's a great introduction, especially when you talked about how sense of justice also instigated you to write the book. And we'll get to talk about what you said about Afghans being a Real reminder to Iranians, I would say an uneasy reminder to many Iranians or so called Persians, that they are not white. They're still Muslim. Whether they practice or not, we're known as Muslims. We'll get to talk about some of these things. And that might explain why, unfortunately, their Afghans are not really treated that well in Iran. What I really enjoyed about this book is that I studied English literature myself and I read some articles about how the whole idea of Kangal Saxon race is a manufactured thing, because it sort of, the direct reference to something called Anglo Saxon doesn't exist that much in all English literature. And it was the rise of nationalism, print culture, imperialism that brought. That made the British thinkers come together. Well, not come together, but anyway, they made them rethink their literary heritage, the Old English. And they tried to kind of come up with a lineage to English language. And they constructed this thing, let's say Anglo Saxon race or Anglo Saxon literature, which is a troubled term these days, even in medieval studies. And then I read your book, which I again found amazing. I saw a lot of parallels in terms of how literature, poetry and culture heritage is used as a site of contest and nation building, identity building, let's say. And I really love the anecdote in your book, the first chapter, when you talk about how a renowned Iranian diplomat who introduces himself as Iranian or Persian, but nobody knows where the heck he comes from until he names one of the poets. Can you talk about that a little bit and tell us how this concept. Because in Iran we did not have the concept of literature or what for a city we called adebiyat, but we had something called adap. But then that shifted that concept of adap or bellet, if whatever we want to call it in English shifted to literature ad abiat, which was a nationalistic approach. Can you just very briefly tell us how this shift came about?
- [08:44]
C
Wow, you really set it up so well. In fact, before I began writing the book, the basis of which is a dissertation I wrote at the University of California in Berkeley, it began with similar inquiries, as you mentioned, in the field of English literature. Terry Eagleton, James Widdowson, they had all gestured towards the fact that there is a conceptual realignment that happens even to the European concept of literature. That the suspicion, I don't know how accurate this is, I'm not a specialist in English, but literature entered into the English language during Chaucer's time, so around the 14th century. And as you mentioned, it did denote polite learning at first, and it was actually in the prized colony of India, that the English literary canon as an instrument for creating colonial subjects, rooted in the type of, you know, civilizational learning that the British wanted to cultivate. This is the context in which English literature began to emerge as a discipline for higher education. And this is not even a controversial statement. There's an amazing book, a classic in the field called Masks of Conquest, that delves deep into this. In the case of Iran and Afghanistan, when I began my research, people spoke of this concept of literature in very passive ways, which is unsurprising, right? Because the east is supposed to be this passive recipient of a modernity that is European in character. Never mind the fact that Europe itself owes its modernizing projects to intellectual and material engagement with the East. But putting that aside, the thought was, oh, literature came to Persian through French, mediated by Ottoman, that the Ottomans basically thought edibiat would be a good equivalent to mirror the semantic kind of domain of literature. And that is just not the case. This type of passive syntax really strips people in the east of their agency, of their intellectual and social agency. So what I argue in the book is that literature should not be seen as a self evident equivalence for the word literature, because as you said, for the word adabiyyat, because as you said, adabiyyat derives, stems from adab. It's the feminine plural of adab. And adab is proper form, is the intertwined valences of aesthetics and ethics that in order to speak beautifully, one also has to behave ethically. And the good ethics is beautiful and beauty is itself ethical. It has to be ethical. And adabiyyat was a plural designation for all of these sciences, systematized forms of knowledge that an adib, somebody in possession of adab needed to cultivate. And obviously you could say, well, depending on we're talking about an imperial secretary or munshi, or we're talking about an ordinary human being. Those requirements would differ, but generally speaking, rhetoric, prosody, calligraphy, bookkeeping, basically being a bit of a polymath in a sense. Now, in the early 20th century, there is a massive conceptual realignment that adabiyyat first of all loses its plurality. It becomes a singular designation, a singular word that refers to a corpus, a body of prized writings that encapsulates the civilizational achievements and the national character of a unitary people. A unitary people meaning a race, however imagined. And this European idea created a lot of tension in the Persian literary tradition, because adab is all about acquiring, is about cultivating, is about self activating, whereas adabiyyat is about being. You are just born into a literary tradition, you consume it, you sit in national schools where literature is taught in one national language and you are the inheritor of that literary tradition. Whereas ADAB was passed down or was acquired, not passed down, through manuals on how to again embody the proper form. Manuals like the Rose Garden by Sa'di. And so many different texts of this sort across different languages, in Urdu, in Pashto, in Turkish, in Arabic. And so this tension, I argue, which is irreconcilable with these two concepts, continues to linger in the Persian literary tradition. And we could get more into that.
- [14:06]
B
There's a lot there to unpack. But I know I'm pressed for time, so I want. The idea of this interview is to give an overall overview of the book to the audience. But when you were discussing literature, another thing came to my mind. The whole idea of literature, nation building, identity building. That was, I guess about 10 years ago when I was a student in University of Auckland and there was a literary talk about Kafka and the Stolen Archive, which I thought the title was fascinating to me. So I did not know that Israel had borrowed Kafka's archive from Austria, if I'm not mistaken. And they never returned it to them. It became a site of. Because it's a new country, it's new. And they're building their, let's say, the so called identity. So they, well, they literally stole their archive and they never gave it back. So that was to me, again, I wasn't. When you were talking, I was reminded of that as well. But we'll get to talk more about these issues more specifically in relation to Iran and Afghanistan. So when we have the establishment of Adabiyat, or literature in this sense, you obviously need institutions to cement that and those institutions in Iran. And you discussed the role of angiomains or literary associations. We have in Iran, Danish Kadel Literary association and in Afghanistan Kabul Literary Association. So two different literary associations. But at the same time we have the establishment of the Faculty of Letters at the University of Tehran, where they started teaching literature. And you had, again the same thing, establishment of the Faculty of Literature in Afghanistan. You spent a lot of time discussing this and I know I'm condensing a lot of things into one question. And at the same time in Iran, we had the Pahlavi, King of Iran, who was modernizing Iran and it was building, let's say there was this nation building enterprise going on in Iran and they needed this identity and the name of Iran what changed from Persia to Iran? So the country also needed a national heritage, an identity, a national identity. And I think they also banned Pahlavi dynasty. They also banned the use of local vernaculars in schools. So people had to use, let's say in schools, media of education or in administration. The language was Persian. Can you talk about the role of associations very briefly? Introduce the idea both in Iran and Kabul, these two associations and their role in using literature, let's say, to build up that idea of national identity.
- [16:54]
C
I think we could talk about the importance of associations from so many different angles. One is that, as you said, literature is 100% inseparable from institutions. It's always been a discipline in the service of the status quo, in the service of nation building, a very conservative ideology. And people recognize literature through universities. And I think people often begin where the story of the University of Tehran and the foundation of the University of Tehran begins, which is 1935, or in the case of Kabul is 1944. But you have to go back. You have to go at least three, four decades back in these voluntary, in some cases state funded, as in the example of Cobble literary association of intellectuals, traders, translators, poets that would come together and fund the printing of a periodical where they would introduce these modern concepts, they would reconfigure older concepts to fit new meanings, to perform different functions in the world. And so in the early 1910s in Iran, you have Malik Ashwara Bahar, an iconic poet and critic and scholar who brings together a cast of characters, many of whom go on to lead very influential careers, to form this magazine that only lasted a year. But in this one year, it left such an incredible impact because it introduced concepts like literary history. It translated into Persian a French literary historical narrative, presumably from textbooks used in France, and therefore created a parallel need for such a genre to be implemented into Persian. Because at the time, I believe, only one volume of Edward Brown's Literary History of Persia had been published, but nothing else. All the other three volumes hadn't been published. Shibli Nomani's Urdu, Sheryl Ajam hadn't been published. So Persian readers just did not know what this genre entails. They didn't even know the concepts of Adabiyat. How do I know this? Because they all introduced this concept. And you could totally see that their target audience is uninitiated because they have to say, look, we've had this concept of adab. We're all familiar with that, aren't we? It's proper form. It's how you sit down At a table to have dinner. It's how you greet an elder. This is, you know, you utter words of comfort when somebody's experiencing loss. And then they transition very quickly, Mortaza, to the European iteration, and they make this effort into saying, well, you know, it's basically all part of the same discourse, but Europeans have a little bit of a different take on it. And then they move in the direction of a canon of prose and of poetry that is necessarily connected to a national community. And these Angelmans are the pioneers of civic engagement, of the proliferation of print culture. And they basically create an infrastructure for collaboration and exchange between Afghans and Iranians, and not just them, but also with Indians, with Central Asians, with Turks, with Arabs. And one can, you know, go through pages of these periodicals and see articles translated from Russian, from English, from French, from Arabic, from Urdu. And it just shows that even though the outcome of these associations was ultimately national, that it was centered in the nation state as a unit of belonging, as a unit of political sovereignty. The methods used and the conversations that were happening that were instrumental in the formation of this discourse were all decidedly, unmistakably, emphatically, transnational, global in nature. And multilingualism was basically put in the service of manufacturing monolingualism, which is a great tragedy. And this is something that you pointed out as well, with respect to the banning of vernaculars like Azeri Turkish in Iran. I'll stop here and. Because I know you have other questions, but I'd also be more than happy to stay focused on this one.
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A
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- [22:48]
B
This is. I think you set it up quite well. And it was. You mentioned the process of building a canon. The forgot the name of the magazine. Was it Taijato, the magazine they.
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A
Yeah.
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C
That came out in Azerbaijan.
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B
Yeah. And I read somewhere else about. Because you're right, because Mahmoud Taghebar is this iconic Iranian poet, but I did not know myself before reading your book and a couple of other books on the same topic about his Persian the Persian Nationalism. Let's say how he was also quite influential in establishing that idea of literary canon and building a literary historiography, which in and of itself is a cruel process of exclusion, especially in a country like Iran with the rich Persianate tradition. Not only Iran, Afghanistan, India, all those countries, they had all these wonderful poets writing in more or less the same language. And nationalism didn't really exist. It was a republic of letters, let's say. But then this canon building approach excludes a lot of those poets and literary masterpieces. The question I have here is there was a lot of tension as well between, let's say, Iranian nationalists and African nationalists in terms of how they approach Persian literature. I'm king to if I could summarize it, but I could be wrong. So I'll leave it to you to correct me if I'm wrong. Iranians are very exclusive in terms of Persian is their exclusive domain. But Afghanistan, because they also spoke Persian and other languages, they had a more pluralistic approach towards the language and literature. Is it the right assumption or how did they approach this idea of literature as nation building differently, let's say Kabul Literary association and Dhanushka Literary Association.
- [24:44]
C
So that's a really great question because essentially what you're saying, what do we stand to gain from an analytic, from a comparative method? And in this case it is seeing how the Afghan nationalizing project differs and how it's also similar to the one happening in Iran. It's different in that the Afghan state opts for a bilingual, basically linguistic policy. And this is after a number of efforts to wrestle the primacy of place from Persian and give it to Pashto. But then, as you know, these nationalistic, delusional fantasies that, you know, what makes Afghanistan Afghan is the Pashto language because the Indians have Hindi and English and the Pakistanis have Urdu and Iranians have Persian and the Turks have Turkish. So we must have a singular language as well. But then practically on the ground, they're trying to displace a language that has had at least 8, 900 years of history in Afghanistan, where all the educators, all the courtiers, all spoke Persian, and if not spoke Persian, then definitely read and wrote Persian. And so they abandoned that project. Right. But they did adopt Pashto as a national language to alongside Persian. And now one must also say that in that process they did overlook other languages in Afghanistan, Uzbek being a major one, where the Uzbekistan Turkic speaking community in Afghanistan was extremely dismayed that the new constitution, 1964, basically excluded Uzbek. And the only time you really have a progressive, multilingual approach to language ideology in Afghanistan is actually under the communist regime in the 1980s, which was ill fated for many different reasons. Whereas in Iran, the Pahlavis very much went into the route, you know, took the route of monolingualism. And, you know, nobody here is contesting the utility of Persian as a lingua franca. Persian has, as you mentioned, served as a common language of learning and communication among empires and ethnicities from Bosnia to the Bay of Bengal. And, you know, don't look at it as a unified geography, but it did serve that function. And so if perhaps there could have been a referendum, say in the early 20th century, Persian would have most likely been chosen by the people, as you know, as a language of national intercommunication. But this is not how the Pahlavi dynasty implemented this. It came at the cost of vilifying racializing non Persian speakers. Ozidi Turks were constantly disparaged in periodicals called the Yellow Danger, called the Threat to National Security. And in class, Azeri teachers themselves who could teach Persian, were instructed to physically punish students that would speak Qazidi. And can you imagine being a 7, 8 year old boy or girl going to school and all of a sudden you have to communicate only in this language that you have not at all spoken at home. This is and has been traumatizing for millions of Iranians who both in the Pahlavi dynasty and in the Islamic Republic, in spite of all of its claims to Islamic justice, this cruel and violent project of monolingualism, there's so many other differences with Afghan and Iranian discourses of nationalism. Another one is Afghans are a lot more at ease with Islam as a new community, as a new moment, you know, in the seventh century, whereas in Iran we have created this extremely bifurcated Historiography where there's a sharp distinction, a sharp rupture that Islam comes and, you know, the popular imagination is that Iranians take a pill and then they wake up Muslim and yesterday they had gone to bed Zoroastrian, speaking Middle Persian. And then the next day they wake up, you know, all of them basically not speaking for 200 years. And then all of a sudden Ferdowsi shows up. You know, this is, you're laughing and this is exactly the right intellectual reaction to this. It's laughable. Ferdowsi shows up and writes this book absolutely out of nowhere, this 50,000 verse epic, and revitalizes the new Persian language. And then we basically gain this unique identity as Persian Muslims. I mean, this is the type of mythology that unfortunately is ingrained in most Iranians. Whereas the reality is, if we look at the Afghan historiography, you will see how they celebrate with all of its flaws, with all the problems that Afghans have had to deal with. They celebrate the fact that their culture, their history is reflective of the, the spread of Buddhism, that Kabul used to be a hub of Buddhism, of the spread of Manichaeism, of Islam, of Sikhism, and they very much celebrate that. And so this is what we gain by the comparative method. We understand that these molds into which concepts have been cast and poured, they're not by default the only way we could go about this. We could reimagine this. Think of nationalism, murtaza, as one of the most robust mechanisms by which a society is ideologically transformed, that a collective comes together through shared remembrance of certain aspects of what makes them a people, and also by shared forgetfulness of things that they don't want to remember anymore. And if we can put that collective energy, that world making energy, and put it in the service of identifying with a warming, imperiled planet that is crying out for help from the voracious self devouring force of capitalism of which nationalism is an outgrowth, then I think we could all live, breathe far easier on this planet.
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B
Absolutely right. Yeah, absolutely right. I really enjoyed it when you were, you know, you were able to thread a lot of different pieces together quite beautifully. And also related to this idea of nationalism and division, which is unfortunately the global malaise now that everybody's suffering from. And you put it beautifully that the whole idea of nationalism is a collective remembrance and at the same time forgetfulness as well. And you can see it quite starkly in the case of Iranians as well. I have only a couple of questions which actually tie back to what you just said, and one of them is about the idea of race in nation building and also the role of literature, which you mentioned. A lot of people, unfortunately, have this really, really naive, reductive and incorrect story of decline. Decline of the whole Persian, I think. And Mama Tariba was also influential at coming up with this decline narrative.
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C
Yes.
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B
And then Ferdowsi came up and revived everything. And I'm really interested myself in the history of bookmaking in Europe, of course, in medieval literature. But then. And it's quite amazing how, for example, when Chaucer wrote his book, there was no printing press there. They were only very, very. There's not even a single manuscript written by him. There were other people who wrote the book. And then the whole idea of literary distribution, very few people had access to that book at that time, except for literary scholars or the elite of society. It gets more or less the same case with Shahnameh. Well, of course, people knew about the stories, but when the book was written, if you want to say that Ferdowsi saved Iranians from speaking Arabic or becoming Arabis, then how did he manage, or how was that book distributed among people back then, 1,000 years ago in Iran, where vast majority of them were illiterate, they couldn't read and write.
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C
You have to.
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B
Sorry.
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C
I think for the past 10 years, having lived in the United States, every time I read any Belikos narrative of nationalism, somehow, whether it's from China or Russia or Iran or Turkey, I process it through Trump's voice and Trump's accent, because it's all very Trumpy. It's like you imagine. Excuse me for this. He was a great man. He was a great man. He was a. He was tremendous. And by the way, he made Persia great again. Yeah. I mean, you're raising such important questions. And, you know, perhaps I have a. I have another career in comedy in the next life, doing a good. Impersonal. Periodicals are absolutely spectacularly important for the proliferation of modernity. We think of the novel in the book form. We think of, you know, and this is the genre par excellence of modernity. But in fact, it was the short form. It was the journal, the periodical, the anthology that had all of these bits and pieces in different languages from different texts. So most Iranians most probably came across the Shahnameh in written form in these periodicals, excerpts advocated, commented on. And so they played an incredibly important role. And so you asked two questions to which I should return. One is the role of literature in nation building, and the other is race for literature. I will say that that whole discourse of what the concept is and how it pertains to the nation and what the nation should do in order to safeguard its literature. That all would have been a curious footnote in a history book had it not been for the political appetite that the Pahlavi dynasty showed in making a nation state and in shaping Iranian society ideologically in its own image.
- [35:40]
B
Right.
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C
And to this day, you could find a million fault lines laying under the very shallow and vulnerable veneer of this kind of idea of national unity and national identity with race. I will say that it was baked into the discourse of literature to begin with. Now, I think a lot of Iranians and Afghans might be skeptical of this because there's this really wrong headed assumption that race is somehow a uniquely American phenomenon. It is not. Yes, there are big differences. The enslavement of Africans played a massive role in the economy of the United States. Chattel slavery does have a different history, have a distinctly different trajectory. Race was codified into law in the United States. It was measured by blood. If you were 1/4 African American, you were considered black. And this is, by the way, something that even the Nazis, when they were coming up with their own racial laws, I think Nuremberg, they thought the Americans had gone too far. And when the Nazis think you've gone too far, you're in really good company in Iran. Most of that doesn't apply, even though, yes, there was also slavery well into the 20th century, but there was also this notion that we're Aryan. Going back and drawing on the credibility of European Orientalists that have basically mapped race onto the linguistic category of Indo, European or Semitic. Right. And this congruence, the creation of this congruence between race, religion and language is at the heart of nationalism. You know, in Spain, in Franco's Spain, people would tell non Castilian speaking Spaniards, people who spoke Basque or Catalan, they would say, habla cristiano? Speak Christian. And speak Christian meant speak Spanish, speak Castilian. And so this congruence is also what happens in the case of Iran. And so I'll share one really curious anecdote with you, Murtaza, which is when the periodical Tajadud and periodical Danish Qadeh were sparring over the place of Sa' Adi in the canon. So Bahar and Rafat are arguing, writing back and forth to each other. Bahar is accusing Rafa of being impatient. He says, you want to do away with the entirety of the Persian canon. You want to import Western normatives, literary norms and genres. And I'm saying that change and becoming modern is not going to happen overnight. You don't wake up modern. It happens very gradually. So we must build upon this foundation that we already have, this new edifice of a new Persian literary heritage. And the example that Bahar gives is so stunningly racial that I genuinely for a while didn't even know how to interpret this. So he says it would be like going to a black man and saying, hey, how come your skull is of this size? How come your eyes are not blue? How come your intelligence level is not high? And the fact that he's using so seamlessly, so effortlessly, just assuming that this comparison makes total sense between basically race and literature itself just tells you the type of climate, intellectual climate they were functioning in. And so, yeah, 100% they are thinking of themselves when they say Persian literature, that we're Aryan. And don't forget, and Bita Baghulizadeh and many others keep reminding us that there are black Iranians. And blackness is used as a backdrop against which modern Iranians define themselves. And they're there. They're defiantly pluralistic and diverse as they are. And so there needs to be a lot more unpacking exactly how race appears in the discourse of literature. But this is how far at least this book takes this discussion.
- [40:14]
B
Thank you. They're real relevant points. And you're right when you mentioned Bahar and his analogy. And you know, when I come to think of other really renowned Persian literary scholars, A.F. shariwan, you know, had a lot.
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C
He was very bigoted.
- [40:28]
B
Yes, he was really, really bigoted. And the sad thing is that unfortunately a lot of Iranians, Persian speaking Iran, who live in Iran did not know about how. Did not know about this uncomfortable side of Persian literature and how these scholars who had, you know, were highly knowledgeable in their own areas, but they were highly biased as well, I guess Persian, I think a friend of mine, you know, who calls Afshar father of Persian nationalism, went away. And I don't think he's quite wrong in that because when you read some of his writings, and you're absolutely right that periodicals, that's where you need to go and read all those periodicals to better understand their thoughts. One final question that I have, and I'm trying to bring it all together about nationalism, you know, and literary nationalism, the world of culture, even without reading your book, you can easily tell that Iran, Iran and Afghanistan, I don't think you can find two countries like Iran and Afghanistan who have so much in common culturally, linguistically, literally, from a religious perspective, even geographically, with neighboring countries, as you mentioned. But unfortunately, Afghans have been so badly treated in Iran, and it's not a new thing. There have been when I grew up, 40 years ago, when I was a kid, if they wanted to scare me and in the schools, I would say, there are a couple of Afghans. That means they would kidnap you. They were looked upon as like. Like the Jews in the Middle Ages or the Gypsies of Europe. There were horrible stories about them. Even if a crime happened, they would say, it must be an Afghan. And unfortunately, we are seeing the rise of that kind of discourse again in Iran with the mass expulsion of a lot of Afghans, brothers and sisters in Iran, the fact that we Iranians claim to be very hospitable people, but we are treating people who have a lot in common with us like this. What do you think about what's happening in Iran right now in terms of the way we treat Africans and refugees? How can we get over this? How can we come to better understand our shared geography, culture, history, and legacy?
- [42:37]
C
You touched upon a subject that's very dear to me because this book, very much this inquiry for me, began with actual friendship with living, breathing Afghans, many of whom are in my life. They enrich my life. They inform me, they challenge me. They make me feel loved and cared for. And so, of course, it would be the height of academic elitism not to speak out against the mass displacement of 800,000 Afghan residents of Iran. And we must be very careful with our language. In fact, we are in the business of linguistic economy. This is the weapon we have in our hands, right? We don't have votes in parliaments. We don't have money to buy influence with. We don't have weapons. We must be very careful with the use of language. And I say displacement. I say Afghan residents of Iran instead of using the nation state parlance of deportation, which just assumes that the nation state should have the right to declare who's a citizen and who's not, and what are they entitled to. You cannot be an opponent of the Islamic Republic as a ruling regime. And also in the same breath, say it is okay for 800,000 human beings who live in Iran, and many of them have lived for decades just to be displaced, kicked out into a country they barely know, a country dealing with drought, which, of course is a byproduct of global heating, which is created by colonial imperialists like the United States. And this is exactly the same force that displaces these innocent human beings, is the same force then strips women of their rights and of their dignity, strips gay people, strips are Baha' I brothers and sisters of their rights. And so we must oppose the nation state holistically and not just take issue with this one because it happens to be Islamic in character or that it proclaims to be and somehow have replace it with other delusional fantasies that mortaza are absolutely all over. Iranian studies as a field where you have millions and millions of dollars poured into these money laundering schemes that masquerade as academic units that glorify the ancient past, that have multiple scholars working on dead Iranians that wrote in Middle Persian, but somehow a contemporary society of 90 million human beings that are producing, that are producing poetry and theater and cinema and fiction, somehow that is not really worthy of becoming an object of inquiry. And so this book is not just about the first half of the 20th century. The ramifications of the institutionalization of literature can be seen in our world today. Why is it that again, a center working on contemporary Iran or modern literature would struggle finding the type of funding that these centers that glorify this ancient imagined area and empire just accruing millions upon millions of dollars. Once a field becomes identitarian, becomes a means of identifying with a certain group, that is the beginning of a very, very drastic intellectual rot that will ultimately consume the entirety of that field.
- [46:46]
B
I'm glad you called out many Iranian Studies department. You're absolutely right. And I'm not an expert in that area. I don't live in the United States.
- [46:55]
C
You don't have to be to see it.
- [46:56]
B
But you're right, but I can see that. And the interesting thing is that I'll mention it. It's an interesting thing is a couple of years ago I was doing a podcast about the book which had absolutely nothing to do with Iran. It was in the. But the person wrote the book about the necessity of humanities and how the idea of humanities had changed in the United States. It was called the Battle of Classics was the name of the book. And it was about how the humanity had changed in United states from the 19th to 20th century. And the person was teaching at the University of Maryland? Yes. And he told. When he realized I was Iranian after the interview, he told me there's a particular thing about the Iranian Studies department. They have a lot of money. They're not like us. They're not like that. They have a lot of money. But they seem to be very choosy and selective in the projects that they fund for scholarship. Which way? He didn't say it in that way directly, but that was the way that it was pointing to, that it was all about glorifying an ancient past rather than dealing with something more contemporary, something that is more perhaps relevant to, you know, to humanities scholars around the world and to the things that are happening in the world. Similar to your book. Like this is.
- [48:14]
C
This is exactly. You brought it full circle. You just brought the entire conversation to where we began. We began with adabiyyat as a word that used to be a plural designation for adab, as proper form, as beauty and ethics. In the process of this conceptual realignment, Adebiyat became only preoccupied with aesthetics, with beauty, and lost its, jettisoned its other valence of ethics. And adab still lingers in adabiat, meaning that when I, as a professor in the 21st century, teach a text that deals with state violence, that deals with linguistic violence, how could I not mention what is happening to the Palestinian people in the hands of a settler colonial state that is funded and armed to the teeth by imperial forces? How could I now, what kind of ethics would that be if I don't inspire my students to go and enact those egalitarian values in the world, not in abstraction, but in actual reality? And here I'd like to mention and end this conversation with remembering my student, Aishanur Ezgi Egi, a graduate of the University of Washington, who, after a year of activism on our campus to raise awareness about the plight of the Palestinian people, went to the west bank as part of the international solidarity movement and was assassinated by the Israeli occupation forces in cold blood. There has been no investigation, no accountability, as is the case with the state of Israel. And Aisha Nur, to me, is the embodiment of adap, someone who said beautiful things and someone who stood for beautiful things. And most importantly, someone whose actions created beauty in our world.
- [50:24]
B
Okay, I think this is a perfect ending to this podcast. Thank you very much. And you're absolutely right. If adapt or literature cannot change the world, it's what's the point? What's the point of that? And I'm glad that you're teaching students, you're inspiring them, you're raising awareness about justice, about what's happening to people of Afghanistan, to the people of Palestine. And even there, you can see how even Israel is using literature to fabricate this story for themselves. Not only literature, the culinary culture, let's say the cinema, you name it. Everything is being co opted by them. So it's important to read against the grain and resist those kind of narratives. And also enact, enact what we learn in these wonderful pieces of literature which you're a student and you are perfect examples of. Dr. Aryafani, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us. Such a wonderful book. And I strongly recommend the book to our listeners reading Across Borders, Afghans, Iranians and Literary Nationalism. And I must say, it's true that you've written about Afghans in Iran, but the framework applies to a lot of literary, literary studies, national and studies of nationalism as well. Thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us on New Books Network.