Ananya Vajpeyi: Image As Event -- Continued
It's interesting, from the perspective of someone who is neither American nor Muslim (nor even Christian or Jewish for that matter), to see how the war in Iraq is viewed from American and Muslim points of view. I observe the same tensions in the underfire discussions, as I see played out in Columbia University, where I am teaching this year. I hear many of the same anxieties voiced online as I do on campus: about secularism and faith, about veiling and surveillance, about torture and human rights, about terror and compassion, about religion and globalization, and so on.
The two voices I have heard of late that seem to me to introduce genuinely new vantage points and allow our conversations to grow in unexpected ways, are, on underfire, Negar Mottahedeh's posts, taking us into the heart of Iran and the Iranian cultural world in the West, and, at Columbia, Ohran Pamuk's recent talks, lectures, classes and public appearances in his capacity as this year's Nobel Laureate for Literature who is also a faculty member here at the university. If Negar forces us to engage Iran on its own terms, Pamuk's interventions foreground the specific dilemmas of a secular but Muslim-majority country like Turkey (which also has the peculiar position of lying somewhere between Asia and Europe). In a seminar this evening (Nov 10, 2006), Pamuk in fact quoted Khomeini via Hamid Dabashi, and described how Khomeini's pronouncements about the role of Islam in the consciousness of the believer had troubled him (Pamuk) enough to lead him to think through the problems of political Islam and Islamic politics in his latest novel, "Snow".
Personally I feel it's very important for American intellectuals and theorists to be reminded that it isn't all about religiosity and belief out there in the non-West; that there are multiple ways of looking at Iraq: from within Iraq, from neighboring but very different countries like Iran and Turkey, and from places where Islam both is and isn't front-and-center, like India. Before we came up for our week on underfire, Negar and I got talking on email, and she introduced me to, among many writings, films and other genres of cultural production, some of the scholarship of Hamid Dabashi, who has worked, strangely enough, on both Iranian cinema and the history of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. So tonight when Pamuk alluded, without spelling out the word, to Khomeini's use of the idea of "Westoxification", I was able to see the churning on Islam that is going on in America, and in the West more generally, in a whole new way.
Frankly, as an Indian exposed to the multiple traditions of Indian Islam, with their old and complex relationships of give-and-take with the many Islamic cultures of the middle-east -- Arab, Turkish, Persian and others -- I want to know more about how matters of faith and violence are being debated and adjudicated in the societies that are in America's line of fire. Or in societies like India and Iran, that could well be next, Rumsfeld's exit notwithstanding.
> Ananya Vajpeyi
To see an example of Pamuk at Columbia:
"Conversation: Literature and Citizenship, Arthur Danto and Orhan Pamuk" is now available to watch in the Havel at Columbia website as well as an audio and video podcast. You will find the links available in the event's page:
http://havel.columbia.edu/literature.html
The two voices I have heard of late that seem to me to introduce genuinely new vantage points and allow our conversations to grow in unexpected ways, are, on underfire, Negar Mottahedeh's posts, taking us into the heart of Iran and the Iranian cultural world in the West, and, at Columbia, Ohran Pamuk's recent talks, lectures, classes and public appearances in his capacity as this year's Nobel Laureate for Literature who is also a faculty member here at the university. If Negar forces us to engage Iran on its own terms, Pamuk's interventions foreground the specific dilemmas of a secular but Muslim-majority country like Turkey (which also has the peculiar position of lying somewhere between Asia and Europe). In a seminar this evening (Nov 10, 2006), Pamuk in fact quoted Khomeini via Hamid Dabashi, and described how Khomeini's pronouncements about the role of Islam in the consciousness of the believer had troubled him (Pamuk) enough to lead him to think through the problems of political Islam and Islamic politics in his latest novel, "Snow".
Personally I feel it's very important for American intellectuals and theorists to be reminded that it isn't all about religiosity and belief out there in the non-West; that there are multiple ways of looking at Iraq: from within Iraq, from neighboring but very different countries like Iran and Turkey, and from places where Islam both is and isn't front-and-center, like India. Before we came up for our week on underfire, Negar and I got talking on email, and she introduced me to, among many writings, films and other genres of cultural production, some of the scholarship of Hamid Dabashi, who has worked, strangely enough, on both Iranian cinema and the history of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. So tonight when Pamuk alluded, without spelling out the word, to Khomeini's use of the idea of "Westoxification", I was able to see the churning on Islam that is going on in America, and in the West more generally, in a whole new way.
Frankly, as an Indian exposed to the multiple traditions of Indian Islam, with their old and complex relationships of give-and-take with the many Islamic cultures of the middle-east -- Arab, Turkish, Persian and others -- I want to know more about how matters of faith and violence are being debated and adjudicated in the societies that are in America's line of fire. Or in societies like India and Iran, that could well be next, Rumsfeld's exit notwithstanding.
> Ananya Vajpeyi
To see an example of Pamuk at Columbia:
"Conversation: Literature and Citizenship, Arthur Danto and Orhan Pamuk" is now available to watch in the Havel at Columbia website as well as an audio and video podcast. You will find the links available in the event's page:
http://havel.columbia.edu/literature.html