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Articles by Alireza Doostdar
Witnessing Genocide
Wael Dahdouh stood on a rooftop in Gaza, facing the camera. Behind him, black smoke billowed in a thick column from a distant bomb site, stretching out horizontally and blending with dust and smoke from other explosions. He was wearing his familiar uniform, a blue helmet and vest marked “Press” in all-caps, blue against large white rectangles. His voice rose above the ambient sounds of artillery fire, ambulance sirens, and the buzzing of drones.
Scientific Seances in Twentieth-Century Iran
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, people in many parts of the world were adapting to rapid scientific advances, trying to figure out how they reconciled with religious and moral systems. Iran was no different. As religion scholar Alireza Doostdar writes, one form this took was the adoption of “scientific” Spiritism—conducting experiments in speaking with the dead, in a manner similar to its Anglo-American counterpart, Spiritualism.
Lessons From the Qur'an as the Bombs Fell on Tehran
The first time I memorized a chapter from the Qur’an, the sky was raining bombs. I must have been around six and my family lived in Gisha, a neighborhood in north-central Tehran that Saddam Hussein’s warplanes had attacked at least once, sending many residents to flee as they waited out the bombings. I remember visiting one residential complex reduced to rubble only several blocks away. Our neighbors said the victims included children at a friend’s birthday party, children around my age.
Peer-Reviewed Articles Review: Spring (Part 3)
[The Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI) brings you the eighth in a series of “Peer-Reviewed Article Reviews” in which we present a collection of journals and their articles concerned with the Middle East and Arab world. This series will be published seasonally.
Occultism and New Age Take Off in Iran: An Interview with Alireza Doostdar
RD: What inspired you to write The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Science, Islam, and the Uncanny? My book is about occultism and spiritual experimentation in modern Iran, and I examine these in terms of attempts to achieve rational, scientific understandings of the immaterial and the extraordinary (what we usually think of as the “supernatural,” a term I try to avoid). The book grows out of and expands on my PhD dissertation. Two things inspired me to do the research.
Portrait of an Iranian Witch
A brass amulet to render its bearer more attractive and help her capture and subdue a lover. The lover is symbolized here as a beast of burden. Aspiring for middle-class life in Tehran can become an occult pursuit In November 2008, I received a lesson in witchcraft. At a hole-in-the-wall café in Ariashahr, a young and populous district in western Tehran, my tutor, a 24-year-old woman named Mersedeh, sat with me at a table near the window, not far from two men smoking and playing backgammon.
(PDF) Internet Stoning: Power, resistance and the subaltern on web discourses
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