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Iran's Troubled Modernity: Debating Ahmad Fardid's Legacy. Ali Mirsepassi, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Pp. 371. $125.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781108476393
“My conclusions have cost me some labour from the want of coincidence between accounts of the same occurrences by different eyewitnesses, arising sometimes from imperfect memory, sometimes from undue partiality for one side or the other.” With these introductory words to the History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides captures the challenges of oral history, i.e., the unreliability of reconstructed memory and the partiality of the narrators’ accounts. For Ali Mirsepassi's oral history manuscript, Iran's Troubled Modernity, both challenges loom large. There is no obvious redress for the first, but the diversity of the multiple narrators of the book could potentially reduce the severity of the second.
Known to many as the Iranian Heidegger, Ahmad Fardid was a controversial figure; a philosopher revered by some and loathed by others. His detractors consider him an enabler of fascism while his supporters deny this charge, and refer to him as one of the most sophisticated but misunderstood thinkers of Iran. Is Fardid worthy of such on-going attention? Mirsepassi seems to think so, and that might be his reason for launching this, his second book on Fardid.
Iran's Troubled Modernity is an expanded version of the thirteen interviews that appear in the penultimate chapter of his 2017 monograph, Transnationalism in Iranian Political Thought: The Life and Times of Ahmad Fardid. Almost all of these voices, are also present in the current book. Philosophy professor Ehsan Shariʿati, journalists Seyyed Ali Mirfattah and Seyyed Javad Musavi, and scholars Mohammad Reza Jozi, Mansur Hashemi, and Behruz Farnu, reside in Iran. Professors and other scholars, Abbas Amanat, Seyyed Hossein Sadr, Ramin Jahanbegloo, Abdokarim Sorush, Dariush Ashuri, and Ata'ollah Mohajerani, live abroad. The majority of the book's narrators knew Fardid personally. Three of them, Amanat, Jozi, and Farnu, were his students. As revealed in their narratives Amanat became disillusioned with Fardid and found his thoughts dangerous, while the other two remained his advocates. Nasr and Ashuri were Fardid's colleagues. As the Dean of Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, Nasr was the one who, despite the pushback from his other colleagues who had questions about whether Fardid had a Ph.D.,...