The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Science, Islam, and the Uncanny
312
The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Science, Islam, and the Uncanny
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Overview
What do the occult sciences, séances with the souls of the dead, and appeals to saintly powers have to do with rationality? Since the late nineteenth century, modernizing intellectuals, religious leaders, and statesmen in Iran have attempted to curtail many such practices as "superstitious," instead encouraging the development of rational religious sensibilities and dispositions. However, far from diminishing the diverse methods through which Iranians engage with the immaterial realm, these rationalizing processes have multiplied the possibilities for metaphysical experimentation.
The Iranian Metaphysicals examines these experiments and their transformations over the past century. Drawing on years of ethnographic and archival research, Alireza Doostdar shows that metaphysical experimentation lies at the center of some of the most influential intellectual and religious movements in modern Iran. These forms of exploration have not only produced a plurality of rational orientations toward metaphysical phenomena but have also fundamentally shaped what is understood as orthodox Shi‘i Islam, including the forms of Islamic rationality at the heart of projects for building and sustaining an Islamic Republic.
Delving into frequently neglected aspects of Iranian spirituality, politics, and intellectual inquiry, The Iranian Metaphysicals challenges widely held assumptions about Islam, rationality, and the relationship between science and religion.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400889785 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/13/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 312 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
CROSSING THE LINE
I first spoke with Nafiseh on a gusty afternoon in May 2009. She was a twenty-nine-year-old divorcée and an avid enthusiast of the metaphysical. Even though she was not a professional, she had enough financial cushioning to pursue her interests with leisure — perhaps she had inherited family wealth or had received a large mehriyyeh payment from her ex-husband; I thought it impolite to ask. Her pursuits included working on the sets of several television serials, taking acting classes, and enrolling for private singing lessons. In the meantime, Nafiseh had honed her skills at lucid dreaming and claimed to pick up nonverbal communications from other people while asleep. She had encountered jinn on many occasions, some terrifying, others amusing. She wrote prayers and made talismans for close friends and kin to solve specific problems, like returning an estranged lover or cleansing negative energies from a home. She had practiced Reiki (a modern Japanese form of alternative medicine) for a time and experimented with hypnotism and telekinesis. She read widely on all matters metaphysical and occult, and participated in a number of Persian-language forums on the Internet where such topics were discussed.
Nafiseh attributed the greater part of her dedication to metaphysical inquiry to an unsettling meeting with a rammal. We met at Laleh Park, a sprawling garden just north of the University of Tehran's main campus. The park was full of Friday picnickers relaxing on the grass or playing volleyball and badminton, while children screamed and chased each other in the playgrounds. We sat at a wooden picnic table in a secluded corner of the park, and Nafiseh began to tell me of her metaphysical adventures.
The story with the rammal had started some years earlier when a middle-aged businessman at the office where she worked fell in love with her. Nafiseh had already ended her first marriage by this time, but she had no interest in this coworker. "The problem was," Nafiseh told me, "he had a wife and two grown boys." He claimed that he would be willing to provide enough for his first family to live in extravagance for the rest of their lives, if only Nafiseh would move to the south of Iran to live with him. She wanted to turn him away, but apparently a simple "no" would not do. So she came up with a plan to "create obstacles" for her suitor. "Since when I was sixteen or seventeen," she told me, "I had studied a lot of fortune-telling books. I told Mansur, 'let's go find someone who can determine if we are really suitable for each other.' I believed in energy and I thought that if I were to send negative waves toward our fortune-teller — because this really can happen — then he will tell us that we are not suitable for each other. That's what I hoped." Mansur agreed. He found a rammal, a dervish of the Qaderi Sufi order from Kermanshah who had settled in Karaj, near Tehran, and made an appointment.
Nafiseh frowned and shook her head as she recounted the event: "I didn't know this back then and only realized recently that the Qaderis are Sunnis. I've come to the conclusion that we should completely put them aside and not have anything to do with them. Even if they have any kind of [occult] knowledge, they are terrifying creatures. Charlatans." She paused and pointed to a long, thin crack on the surface of the picnic table: "You see this line? These incidents are precisely like this line. As long as you're on this side, you're on this side, and you don't know what is going on across the line. But if you cross the line, you're on the other side. You've seen, and you can no longer say 'I haven't seen.' The cost might be that you get to a point where your acquaintances tell you that you're mad. But it's not in your hands. Because it's happened to you and you've really seen."
So Nafiseh had accompanied Mansur to the dervish's house in Karaj. Mansur had said, "Shaykh, we are here to ask you something. I love this woman very much and can't let her go. I want to know whether or not we are suited for each other. We are here on her suggestion to find out." No sooner had Mansur finished his question than the dervish responded, "Yes, you are appropriate for each other and your stars match. But she has some problems and you have a problem too." "And this is why I say they are charlatans!" Nafiseh said with a knowing laugh:
You see, I can do coffee reading. It's true that I see shapes in the cup and can identify certain things, but I mostly use the sources of energy, including the energy that the person transmits to me. It suffices that you know some psychology and have a flowing sense that can capture the waves of your interlocutor. This is enough. As soon as you say two or three things [in your coffee reading] and you see the other person acknowledge it or grow pleased or volunteer more information, you just pick it up and continue from there. You still seek help from your senses; I'm not saying that it's pure charlatanry. But it has its own mechanisms, so to speak, and it's not that people just spontaneously access the unseen [gheyb]. I think that with the dervish, it was the same. And this is something that I realized later on. I wasn't thinking this way back then.
By that point though, matters had already slipped out of Nafiseh's control. She had planned to use a fortune-teller in the service of her own complicated ends, to mentally manipulate him to provide a negative reading so that Mansur would be persuaded to leave her alone. But this "charlatan" had masterfully taken charge of the situation and was pulling both Mansur and Nafiseh along.
The rammal told Nafiseh that she had been bewitched, and he would need to spread out a sofreh or dining cloth for her, in her own apartment. "I had heard the word 'sofreh' before but never knew what it meant. I wish I had never seen it." Meanwhile, the dervish instructed Mansur to buy a male goat, but he did not explain the purpose. Mansur obliged. Within an hour or two, the dervish killed the goat, extracted its bile (zahreh), and poured it into a vial. Mansur, "being a generous man," donated the meat to the dervish and his family. The three then drove to Tehran for the dining cloth ritual. Along the way, they bought some rope, safety pins, and melamine plates. The dervish made sure that Nafiseh had a pot and blanket at home. "For the entire trip," Nafiseh told me, "I was feeling awful and felt I was going to pass out. But Mansur had fallen in love with the dervish, who was constantly bragging about his magnificent feats."
In the apartment the dervish sat across from Nafiseh and placed a large pot of water between the two of them. Mansur stood near the wall. Across the pot's rim, the dervish placed a dagger engraved with spells, prayers, and indecipherable shapes. He instructed Nafiseh to recite a verse from the Qur?an, but she couldn't recall what it was. He then told her that when the jinn came, she would have to announce their arrival and recite a zekr (a short devotional phrase — Arabic dhikr) of her own choosing. Meanwhile, he asked Mansur to tie his hands and feet with the rope, ten knots on top of one another. Nafiseh saw him tightly bind the dervish. Mansur then used another piece of rope to form a lasso around his neck and tie it to his wrists so that the man would be completely immobilized. "I don't know if all this was sleight of hand or charlatanry or what. I just don't know what to make of what happened afterward," Nafiseh told me. Finally, the dervish ordered Mansur to use safety pins to affix the four corners of a blanket to the shoulders of the dervish and Nafiseh. These are the events that followed:
So I'm sitting there cross-legged with my palms facing up. The dervish is sitting across from me, tied up with rope. And the blanket is stretched out between us like a tent, with the pot of water and dagger underneath. He said it needs to be dark underneath the blanket for the jinn. He started his work and I don't know what he did. All of a sudden ... And I've wondered later on what courage I had! But it was stupidity, not courage. As I was sitting I felt that there were creatures moving around under the blanket. And he had said that he was going to make them present [ehzar] so that they would bring the talismans that had been made for me [to bewitch me]. He said that if the jinn are female they will drop the talismans in my hand, and if they are male they will fling them at me. And what a scene it was! He began to recite some formulas. And the creatures came. They were very soft. It was as though they had long hair, brushing against me like cats. Later I was able to see them in a state of half-sleep, because he didn't expel them from the apartment and it got to the point where they were bothering the neighbors. So he was saying these formulas and these things were moving around under the blanket and under my arms, and I was trembling, because like it or not, you start to tremble, thinking, "What is going to happen next?"
Their movements were very rapid and they would either brush against my hands or feet. It was very strange. On the one hand I couldn't say they were totally material like us, in a way that you could grab them, and on the other hand it wasn't that they were totally immaterial because I could feel some material touching me. And I was wondering why the man, Mansur, wasn't having a heart attack [watching all of this]. So they came and I announced, "They're here." The dervish told me to say a zekr. I said a zekr. They threw things at me. Two muddy, wet packages. As though they had been taken out of the pot. So he said that as soon as you say, "I got it," Mansur needs to start reciting the Qur?an and put the melamine plates on the blanket over where the pot is. The dervish had scribbled my name, my mother's name, and some spells and prayers around the rim of each of the twelve plates. So Mansur would bring a plate and put it on top of the blanket, and then all of a sudden something would hit it from underneath, as if it were the head of a creature gone wild. They would hit the plates like football players doing headers, and the plates would fly off to the walls or the ceiling like flying saucers. Twelve plates flying around. It was such a scene. So the twelve plates were done and Mansur stood trembling and reciting the Qur'an.
The last scene was terrible. I'm telling you I saw Satan in front of me at that moment. Imagine that the dervish had long but tidy hair at first. Now at the end of it his hair was disheveled, his eyes bulging and terrifying. Then I saw the dagger emerge from underneath the blanket and slide across his throat, inching toward his eye. He kept saying, "Don't do it! Get out of here!" and reciting spells to ward them off and prevent the dagger from poking his eye out.
At last there was calm. Mansur unfastened the blanket and untied the ropes. "But did I have any energy left?" said Nafiseh. "I was dying." On the dervish's instruction, Nafiseh opened the muddy packages to see what was inside. "One of them had a wolf or hyena's tooth. I don't remember which it was. A very long and sharp tooth. He said you need to burn all of these and cast the ashes into flowing water. But he said that there's still much more to be done. I have to recite prayers for you and do this and that. In short he was making up stories and dragging it on. So in the other package, there was a piece of sheepskin with some prayers written on it and a piece of cloth from an old shirt I had. I saw a piece of my own shirt."
Here was something that was more mundane and more shocking than anything else Nafiseh had witnessed that day. "I'm still thinking all of it was charlatanry, but what was that piece of my shirt doing there?" When she was seventeen, Nafiseh had been deeply in love with a boy. "It was adolescent love," she said, "and the boy's family also really liked me. So the boy's mom asked me to bring her a photograph of myself and a shirt, because she said 'we want to spread out a dining cloth for you.' I didn't understand what she meant at the time." The boy's mother, Nafiseh later realized, was worried that her son, who was handsome and popular with girls, might be bewitched by some envious family. So they wanted to check if Nafiseh had been entangled with any sorcery. "See, my shirt had a very distinct color," Nafiseh told me. "It was a mix of green and blue. In the course of what happened [with the rammal], whatever else I consider to be fake, I know that I got back a strip of that same exact shirt. The same color. The same fabric. This was a shirt that I had used to paint and it had paint all over it, so I said to myself that I don't need it anymore and I gave it to the boy's mother with my photograph ... And never mind that various things occurred and that that relationship ended. But after some years, I saw a piece of my old shirt with my own eyes."
Still more disturbing events lay ahead. The dervish told Nafiseh that the next stage in his sorcery cancellation had to happen in private, in the bedroom. "And what did I know?" Nafiseh said. "I followed him into the bedroom, and it's bad because sometimes curiosity gets you into trouble." The dervish instructed Nafiseh to lie down and close her eyes. He pressed his fingers on her eyelids and, as Nafiseh put it, he "made his intentions clear." He said he needed to insert the bile he had extracted from the slaughtered goat into her vagina. Nafiseh was alarmed, recognizing the dervish's words as a poor excuse for sexual abuse. She leaped to her feet, faced him sternly, and ordered him to leave her house. Mansur, meanwhile, sat in the living room, oblivious. "He must have been thinking he had brought God into my house, he trusted him so much." The dervish stormed off, but before he left, he turned around and looked at one of Nafiseh's paintings on the wall — an image of an angel. He smirked and said, "Yes, a divine spirit! Nice. You paint too!" Then he took a few steps toward Nafiseh, grabbed and twisted her ear, and said, "Watch yourself." Nafiseh stood her ground: "You should be the one to watch yourself!" The two men departed, leaving Nafiseh dazed and trembling. The dervish took the melamine plates with him. Nafiseh thought she should have prevented him from taking them because he clearly wanted to menace her with more sorcery. With the plates in his possession (inscribed with her name and her mother's name), he would have more to work with.
The encounter with the rammal started Nafiseh on a bumpy ride into the world of the metaphysical. That night, she was too frightened to sleep in her own apartment, so she visited her grandmother's house. Her younger brother was also there and they slept next to each other in the same bed. Throughout the night, she felt kicks and punches from underneath her mattress. Her brother ground his teeth loudly like he had never done before and would not stop no matter how many times Nafiseh tried to shake him awake. She was convinced that both the blows to her mattress and her brother's unusual bruxism were the work of jinn. "I was not hallucinating [tavahhom nabud]," she told me. The next day, she returned to her own apartment, where she faced even more harassment from the jinn. "They would not let me sleep," she said. Whenever she was about to fall asleep she would feel a poke on her leg or a pinch on her thigh, or there would be noises from the kitchen. One night she asked one of her neighbors, an elderly woman, to sleep next to her, but the poor woman was similarly distraught throughout the night and refused to sleep over with her the following day. For two or three months, Nafiseh could not sleep properly. "The apartment had become troublesome," she said.
Eventually the jinn showed themselves to her in full physical form. Once she woke up to see a lazy, dwarfish creature sitting on her chest with two others playing nearby. It was grayish in color, chubby, and covered in hair, with thin, vertical eyes. On another occasion, a Japanese-looking female dwarf sat on her chest. She gently placed a golden crown on Nafiseh's head and told her with a smile, "You're our queen now." Fed up with all this menace, she called a friend, a young dervish, for advice. The man told her not to repeat her jinn stories to anyone. To ward them off, he said, she should recite la hawla wa la quwwata illa billah (there is no power or strength except with God) and the ayat al-kursi (the Throne verse) ten times before going to bed, and place a Qur'an and a knife next to her pillow.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Note on Transliteration ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
PART 1 RAMMAL
1 Crossing the Line 29
2 Popular Nonsense 38
3 Legal Censure 46
4 Do Jinn Exist? 52
5 Virtuous Caution 58
6 A Scholar-Rammal 65
7 The Hesitant Officer 70
8 Metaphysical Pleasures 78
9 The Fantastic 87
10 Rammali Refashioned 93
Suppress, Accommodate, Sublimate 101
PART 2 SCIENTIST
11 Quantum Understanding 105
12 Empirical Spirits 112
13 Scientific Virtues 123
14 Wings of Imagination 136
15 Cosmic Mystics 145
16 Specters of Doubt 155
17 Becoming Witness 159
18 Authority in Experience 166
Experiments in Synthesis 171
PART 3 FRIEND OF GOD
19 A Protector Lost 175
20 Whips for the Wayfarers 181
21 Discretion and Publicity 191
22 The Politics of Veneration 199
23 Metaphysics of Vision 209
24 Technospiritual Reflexivity 217
Hagiographies Unbound 229
Conclusion 231
Note on the Cover Image 237
Notes 239
References 265
Index 287
What People are Saying About This
"Beautifully written and argued, this powerful book turns our full attention to the rationality of enchantment in the modern world. Deftly weaving gripping stories with history, theology, and political considerations, Doostdar presents an important analysis of the landscape of Iranian metaphysical inquiry and a new, fresh perspective on the conditions and qualities of reason and rationalization in the world and in anthropological inquiry."—Courtney Bender, Columbia University"Examining contemporary Iranians' wide-ranging experiments with the supernatural, including political-cultural and historical contexts, Doostdar demonstrates the profound ‘edginess' of these practitioners: their doubts and concerns with respectability. This is a captivating read and an unprecedented book, certain to appeal to anthropologists and to Middle East specialists alike."—Cyrus Schayegh, Princeton University"This original book considers Iranians' experiments with the supernatural world through investigations into their encounters with the occult, mysticism, healing, exorcism, magnetism, and Spiritism, among other practices. In engaging with the complex spiritual worlds of Iranians, The Iranian Metaphysicals reveals new meanings and uses of science in the pursuit of knowledge and the divine."—Arzoo Osanloo, University of Washington