"Iran, the Green Movement and the USA": Hamid Dabashi on the Future of the Iranian Pro-Democracy Movement

Iranian protesters returned to the streets on Sunday to mark the deaths of two men killed during demonstrations last week. Police used batons and tear gas to break up the protests. Among those detained were Faezeh Hashemi, daughter of former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. “On one hand, the Iranian authorities are expressing solidarity with the democratic movement in Tunisia and Egypt and throughout the region," says Columbia University Professor Hamid Dabashi. "Then deny that very principle to their own people." [includes rush transcript]

AMY GOODMAN: On Sunday anti-government protesters gathered in different parts of Iran to mark the deaths of two men killed during demonstrations last Monday. For the second time in a week, supporters of the opposition Green Movement clashed with security forces in the capital Tehran and elsewhere. According to witnesses, in some places, police officers and baton-holding mercenaries outnumbered the protesters. Also on Sunday, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, accused Iran of “exploiting” the current political unrest in the Arab world. He emphasized the Israeli government’s concern over a plan to send two Iranian warships into the eastern Mediterranean.

BENJAMIN NEYANYAHU: I think that today we can see in what an unstable region we live, a region in which Iran is trying to take advantage of the situation and broaden its influence by transferring two warships via the Suez Canal. Israel views this Iranian step with gravity."

AMY GOODMAN: To discuss the situation in Iran and the region, we have with us Professor Hamid Dabashi from Columbia University. His most recent book is "Iran, the Green Movement and the USA". Also he has written the book Shiism. We welcome you to "Democracy Now!"

HAMID DABASHI: Thanks for having me.

AMY GOODMAN: Its great to have you. Tell us what is happening. What do you understand took place in Iran over the weekend?

HAMID DABASHI: I think beginning with the 14th of February in solidarity with the revolutions in Tunisia and in Egypt, we’ve entered a new phase of the green movement. Green Movement went through at least two phases. The first phase was phase of mass street demonstrations that began back in June of 2009 and continued all the way until February 2010. The second phase, when Mousavi began to write a series documents culminating in a charter of the Green Movement which are extraordinary documents in the history of democratic movements in Iran. But in the aftermath of this massive, massive democracy movement in North Africa to Afghanistan, in fact, these events galvanized the Green Movement in Iran. And as a result, we have entered a new phase. There are two aspects to be noticed in this new phase. Number one, the Green Movement has initiated its own calendar that is the 14th of February coincides with nothing, that is simply in solidarity with the revolutions in Tunisia and Cairo, in Egypt. And in the course of which two young demonstrators were killed by security forces, their corpses were stolen, their identities were falsified. And they were pretended to be part of the Basij organization.

On the seventh day anniversary of the death of these two young demonstrators, again the Green Movement called for a demonstration, but this time around, because the entirety of the major highways and streets and major squares of the cities were occupied by the military, by in fact the entire country was turned into a garrison, the demonstrators opted to do their work in a specific neighborhood. And also remember, the galvanizing force of Al Jazeera in the case of Tahrir Square in Cairo, Al Jazeera does not have that kind of presence in Iran. As a result, what the kids were doing, they would gather in a specific neighborhood and their mobile phones, they shot 30 seconds to a minute and a half minute of video of demonstrations and sent it to YouTube, and as a result asserted their presence.

AMY GOODMAN: And the response of the Iranian government?

HAMID DABASHI: The response has been not only massively, massive cracking down, but also hypocrisy. Because on one hand, the Iranian authorities are expressing solidarity with the democratic movement in Tunisia and Egypt and throughout the region, and then they denied that very principle to their own people. So with one move, the Green Movement has in fact achieved two ends. It reasserted itself in public space and forced the empty hand of the Islamic republic in terms of its rhetoric for democratic changes in the region.

AMY GOODMAN: You wrote a book about the Green Revolution. The whole Green Movement. But you thought it was dead in the last year.

HAMID DABASHI: I never thought it was dead. I thought it was a standstill. Because what we have is the power of Islamic Republic in the region, not because of how smart they are, but because of the horrors of the Bush administration and war in Afghanistan, war in Iraq. And as a result, the Islamic republic had emerged as a very powerful broker, peace broker. President Obama could do nothing in Afghanistan without the help of the Islamic Republic. The same in Iraq. So while Islamic Republic was very weak weak domestically inside Iran, and whatever it did it strengthened the Green Movement in the region, it was in a negotiating position if President Obama wanted to deliver on his promise to come out of Iraq, it needed the support of the Islamic Republic, particularly with the Shiite community in the south. That stand still has now changed to the benefit of the green movement because of the democratic uprising in the region.

AMY GOODMAN: And on the one hand, you had the President Ahmadinejad congratulating the protesters in Egypt and in cracking down on his own.

HAMID DABASHI: Of course. That is the hypocrisy of it. The minute the Egyptian revolution was happening, Mr. Khamenei sent a message to Egyptians in Arabic congratulating them for the revolution there were about to have. Within minutes, the Muslim Brotherhood issued in a statement this is not an Islamic revolution this is an Egyptian revolution, for Egyptians Muslims, Christians and any other person, so the rise of democratic revolutions in the region is is exposing the hypocrisy of the Islamic Republic.

AMY GOODMAN: Benjamin Minister Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister accused Iran of exploiting the current political unrest in the Arab world, highlighting his government’s concern over planned to send two Iranian warships into the eastern Mediterranean, talk about that.

HAMID DABASHI: First of all, it is not unrest Mr. Netanyahu should recognize this is a democracy movement, this is a massive revolutionary uprising for democracy. Mr. Netanyahu is used to dealing with Arab dictators, so when he sees democratic uprising, he calls it unrest. Number two, in my judgment, those were very wary of what is happening in the Arab and Muslim world are the United States, Isreal, and the Islamic Republic. Because they have entered into old tiring politics of dispair, and they cannot tolerate the rise of democratic movements in the region. The sending of two warships through the Suez Canal...

AMY GOODMAN: ...First time since 1979...

HAMID DABASHI: ..Since 1979, is an attempt by Islamic Republic to divert attention from the democratic movement both inside Iran and in the region. And lo and behold, Israel that doesn’t like the democratic movement either and calls them unrest, response immediately. I would put that exactly next to Obama’s administration’s obscene vetoing of this UN Security Council draft resolution against expansion of settlements in Palestine. Precisely because these three acts of the Islamic Republic, Israel continuing expansion into Palestine and the United States, they are trying to pull back the politics of the region into the politics of despair because what they’re witnessing they don’t like.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Dabashi, you have a very quick response on the part of the United States against the Iranian government for cracking down on the protesters. President Obama, Secretary State Hillary Clinton, not as quick response when Bahrain attacked the protesters there, the home of U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, though eventually Obama did call. Talk about that.

HAMID DABASHI: Its hypocrisy.

AMY GOODMAN: And Libya as well.

HAMID DABASHI: It is absolute hypocrisy Amy. In fact every time American administrations, neo-conservatives, even President Obama’s administration comes near the Green Movement supporting it and so forth, it discredits it. And the Green Movement has actually restored its dignity by coming close to Egyptian and Tunisian revolution. So the best thing the Obama administration can do for the Green Movement, please, don’t come near it. The hypocrisy is so palpable, the young Tunisian who set themselves on fire in desperation because of this neoliberal economics that Ben Ali was known for, the State Department even did not know, let alone express solidarity with the Tunisian people. President Obama did not come to even address the issues of the masses of millions of Egyptians in Tahrir Square until Mubarak was about to leave. The hypocrisy is what is exposed here. And as a result, the best thing that Mr. Obama and Secretary Clinton can do for the green movement, don’t come close to it. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Your latest book that’s just come out is on Shiism.What role does Shiism play in what is being called this Arab spring?

HAMID DABASHI: Shiism, the way I read it, is a religion of protest and it never belongs to people who are in power. The Islamic republic came to power back in 1979 by banking on the revolution in the aspect of Shiism, but it is a paradox within Shiism that as soon as it is in power it loses legitimacy. And that legitimacy is now cast into people, young people in the streets, fighting against the Islamic Republic. I don’t see what is happening in the region as Sunni-Shiia bifurcation at all. In fact I see it as the retrieval of a cosmopolitan political culture that includes Islam, Sunnism and Shiism both but is not really similar to it.

AMY GOODMAN: What do think is gonna happen in Iran right now? I mean, this was not predicted, of course.

HAMID DABASHI: As I have always said Amy, anything that the Islamic Republic does will strengthen the green movement is a paradox. If it cracks down, it will be strengthened. If it allows it to unfold, it will strengthen it. Right now as of yesterday, Mousavi is not only under house arrest. In fact they have just built a metal gate in the cul de sac that leads to his house. And with that…..

AMY GOODMAN: Explain who he is.

HAMID DABASHI: Mr. Mousavi was the eight-year Prime Minister under Homeni during the Iran-Iraq war. A very, one of the founding members of the Islamic republic. And then after those eight years, he went into seclusion. He’s a painter, he’s very much interested in art and so forth. His wife had more of a public role as [unintelligble] the chancellor of the university. And then during the last presidential election in 2009 he re-entered politics with a very clear message that this revolution has gone wrong and we need to retrieve its ideals and aspirations. And there is a sizable Iranians who believe he actually won the election but the election was rigged and in the aftermath of that, we have the rise of the Green Movement. His incarceration, first of all before that there were chants of death for Mousavi and, Karroubi, from the parliament of the Islamic Republic. The most clear indication of the implosion of the Islamic Republic from within where you have eight year Prime Minister and eight-year President and former Speaker of the House, you’re asking for their heads and not in the streets but…..

AMY GOODMAN: in the parliament

HAMID DABASHI:In the parliament itself.

AMY GOODMAN: They were chanting.

HAMID DABASHI:The most visible indication of the collapse, internal implosion of the Islamic Republic. But now they have even gone further and put him under house arrest but putting him under house arrest means that with that very act, the Iranian Mendela is now born. Because leading uprisings, leading revolutions from inside prison is the best thing that can happen to a political leader.

AMY GOODMAN: And Karroubi?

HAMID DABASHI: Karroubi is very much sort of hand in hand with Mousavi. They have been coordinating, as much as coordination is possible between two people in house arrest. He has his own constituency and has been very valiant, courageous, both of them extraordinarily courageous under the circumstances. But the nature of the leadership of the Green Movement, Amy, is not contingent on one person. It is a rolling kind of leadership that can be inside Iran, outside Iran. Young people in the streets, the new media YouTube etc., that is where the revolution is headed; because of demography and economics, two factors that are leading the uprising.

AMY GOODMAN: On Sunday Iranian authorities briefly detained the daughter of the former president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the most powerful opposition supporter inside the country’s clerical leadership. Faezeh Hashemi, she was born in 1962. Talk about her and her father.

HAMID DABASHI: I think the sins of the parents should not be extended to their children. 
Hashemi Rafsanjani, as a political operator in my judgment has lost credibility in this movement. He plays too much on both sides. But, that does not extend to his children, particularly for Faezeh Hashemi, his daughter who has always been an activist of women’s rights, human rights, democratic rights in the streets. And as of course she came out and said, that I was just out shopping and had nothing to do with it. But the fact the matter is that there is a sizable constituency particularly among women who look up to her.

AMY GOODMAN: And they said that she was protesting in the streets according to the IRNA news agency.

HAMID DABASHI: Exactly, exactly, exactly

AMY GOODMAN: Overall media coverage?

HAMID DABASHI: Media coverage. Nowhere near what “Al-Jazeera” did for Egypt or in fact doing for North Africa. Partially because there is no presence of global media, CNN, and so forth. [Unintelligble] was covering it from Pakistan. But I also believe this is the age of new media and smaller scale media; your own work and other similar smaller scale networks that have a global reach because of the Internet. And also the fact is that these young people, 80% of the Iran population is under the age of 40, 70% under the age of 35; they are in charge of representing themselves by virtue of this, your know, mobile phone that they carry. They feed the YouTube, they are on Facebooks. They generate the sustained pressure not only in cyberspace, but in physical space and as a result, they are the ones that had informed the global media. That is where they get their ideas. The combination of new media and globalized media is the best thing that can happen. But as I said they have had to change their strategy, how to mobilize in the streets, in the absence of globalized media.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Dabashi, Wikileaks. The trove of U.S. government cables that have come out. What have they revealed about the U.S. relationship with Iran?

HAMID DABASHI: This has been generated through most of the Wikileaks. Not much that we did not know. The fact that United States and Iran have common strategic interest in the region in the Persian Gulf area in Afghanistan, in Iraq is something that we have known forever. The fact that some of the Persian Gulf area potentates, they don’t like the rising power military and diplomatic power of Islamic Republic is also something that we have known. So altogether, I think the ability of the people, the democratic will of the people to generate and sustain information and globalize it is far more important than secret wheelings and dealings between the powers that be.

AMY GOODMAN: How long is Ahmadinejad’s term?

HAMID DABASHI: Four years. He is now two years into his second term.

AMY GOODMAN: Where do you predict this movement, now in the streets could go?

HAMID DABASHI: I think the crisis of the Islamic Republic, the burning need of Islamic Republic faces, at they face is not just who is going to be the next president. We have the globalized discrediting of the Islamic Republic, which now it faces, number one. Number two, the democratic uprising in North Africa has exposed the hypocrisy of the Islamic Republic. So, of course the Islamic Republic for 32 years has managed to stay in power precisely by using and abusing the crisis that comes its way. It’s for the first time in its 32-years that it is facing domestic and regional crisis that it cannot manage. So as a result, every day the brutal theocratic garrison state that it is, becomes more exposed.

HAMID DABASHI: Well, I want to thank you very much for being with us, professor Hamid Dabashi, is the Hagop Kevorkian professor of Iranian Studies and comparative literature, Columbia University. Among his books, "Iran, the Green Movement and the USA” and his latest is called “Shiism”.

The World Is My Home: A Hamid Dabashi Reader

As recent events indicate, Iranian, Middle Eastern, and Islamic politics more broadly have been deeply influential in world affairs. Hamid Dabashi has been a highly visible and prominent commentator on these affairs, explaining, interpreting, and providing a critical perspective. This volume gathers together his most influential and insightful writings.

As one of the foremost contemporary public intellectuals and scholars of our time, Dabashis interests and writings span subjects ranging from Islamic philosophy and political ideology to Iranian art and Persian literature, from Sufism and Orientalism to Iranian and world cinema and contemporary Arab and Muslim visual arts; and from postcolonial theory and globaliation to imperialism and public affairs. There is a direct connection between his theoretical innovations and the angle of his public interventions on the urgent global issues of the day. This book brings together some of his most important writings, especially those that offer new ways of understanding Islam, Iran, Islamist ideology, global art, and the condition of global modernity. The book shows the underlying conceptual themes that unify Dabashis wide-ranging and brilliantly insightful corpus.

Dabashi combines deep knowledge of the subject matter about which he writes, and highly refined sociological, hermeneutical, and cultural interpretive skills, moving far beyond the limiting, distorted, and intellectually stifling character of reigning absolutist conventions. He places existing authoritative frameworks under close scrutiny in order to produce novel and penetrating insights. These essays reflect historical and geographical worlds that are best viewed when Hamid Dabashis work is read as a whole, which this one- volume work makes possible for the first time.

Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His books include Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundation of the Islamic Revolution in Iran; Post- Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in a Time of Terror; and Authority in Islam among other works. The editors of this compendium,
Andrew Davison and Himadeep Muppidi, are colleagues in the Political Science Department at Vassar College, where Davison is professor and chair of the department and Muppidi is an associate professor.

Who is Hamid Dabashi ?

 Hamid Dabashi (Persian: حمید دباشی) born 1951 in Ahvaz is an Iranian-American Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York City.^[1]
He is the author of over twenty books^[2]. Among them are his Theology of Discontent; several books on Iranian cinema; Staging a Revolution; an edited volume, Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema; and his one-volume analysis of Iranian history Iran: A People Interrupted.^[3]

 Biography

Born and raised in southern city of Ahvaz in Iran, Dabashi was educated in Iran and then in the United States, where he received a dual Ph.D. in sociology of culture and Islamic studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. He wrote his dissertation on Max Weber’s theory of charismatic authority with Philip Rieff, the most distinguished Freudian cultural critic. He lives in New York with his wife and colleague Golbarg Bashi.^[4]

 

Major works

In his book Iran: A People Interrupted, Dabashi argues that Iranian history must be understood as defiance against both domestic tyranny (monarchical or Islamist) and colonialism/imperialism.

Hamid Dabashi’s books are Iran: A People Interrupted, which traces the last two hundred year's of Iran's history including analysis of cultural trends, and political developments, up to the collapse of the reform movement and the emergence of the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Dabashi argues that "Iran needs to be understood as the site of an ongoing contest between two contrasting visions of modernity, one colonial, the other anticolonial".
His book Theology of Discontent, is a study of the global rise of Islamism as a form of liberation theology. In this book Dabashi coined the term “colonial modernity," which refers to the paradoxical reception of the European project of Enlightenment modernity by the rest of the world, whereby non-Europeans are assigned subjectness precisely at the moment of the denial of their historical agency.^[5]
His other book Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, Future is the founding text on modern Iranian cinema and the phenomenon of (Iranian) national cinema as a form of cultural modernity – featured even in the Lonely Planet travel guide for Iran. In his essay "For the Last Time: Civilizations", he has also posited the binary opposition between “Islam and the West” as a major narrative strategy of raising a fictive centre for European modernity and lowering the rest of the world as peripheral to that centre.^[6]
In Truth and Narrative, he has deconstructed the essentialist conception of Islam projected by Orientalists and Islamists alike. Instead he has posited, in what he calls a “polyfocal” conception of Islam, three competing discourses and institutions of authority – which he terms “nomocentric” (law-based), “logocentric” (reason-based) and “homocentric” (human-based) – vying for power and competing for legitimacy. The historical dynamics among these three readings of “Islam”, he concludes, constitutes the moral, political and intellectual history of Muslims.
Among his other work — which has been translated into many languages — are his essays Artist without Borders (2005), Women without Headache (2005), For the Last Time Civilization (2001) and "The End of Islamic Ideology" (2000).^[7]
Hamid Dabashi is also the author of numerous articles and public speeches, ranging in their subject matters from Islamism, feminism, globalised empire and ideologies and strategies of resistance, to visual and performing arts in a global context.

 

Philosophy

Among the distinctive aspects of Dabashi’s thinking are a philosophical preoccupation with geopolitics and the transaesthetics of emerging art forms that correspond to it. Dabashi’s principle work in which his political and aesthetic philosophy becomes historically anchored is his work on the rise of national cinema. There he contends that the only way out of the paradox of colonial modernity is the creative constitution of the postcolonial subject via a critical conversation with the historical predicament of the colonial subject. Dabashi argues that it is on the aesthetic site that the postcolonial subject must articulate the politics of her emancipation. In this respect, Dabashi’s major theoretical contribution is the collapsing of the binary opposition between the creative and the critical, the true and the beautiful, the poetics and the politics etc. On the colonial site, Dabashi argues in a memorable dialogue with Nietzsche and Heidegger, the Will to Power becomes the will to resist power. (Citation needed)
In an essay on Qur’anic hermeneutics, “In the Absence of the Face” (2000), Dabashi has also taken the Derridian correspondence between the signifier and the signified and expanded it from what he considers its “Christian Christological” context and read it through a Judeo-Islamic frame of reference in which, Dabashi proposes, there is a fundamental difference between a sign and a signifier, a difference that points to a metaphysical system of signification that violently force-feed meaning into otherwise resistant and unruly signs. It is from this radical questioning of the legislated semantics of signs incarcerated as signifiers that Dabashi has subsequently developed a notion of non-Aristotelian mimesis, as best articulated in his essay on Persian Passion Play, "Ta’ziyeh: A Theater of Protest" (2005). Here he proposes that in Persian Passion Play, we witness an instantaneous, non-metaphysical and above all transitory, correspondence between the signifier and the signified and thus the modus operandi of the mimesis is not predicated on a permanent correspondence in any act of representation. There are serious philosophical implications to this particular mode of non-representational representation that Dabashi has extensively examined in his essays on the work of the prominent artist Shirin Neshat. Dabashi’s political dedication to the Palestinian cause, and his work on Palestinian cinema, has an added aesthetic dimension in which he is exploring the crisis of mimesis in national traumas that defy any act of visual, literary, or performative representation.
Dabashi’s primarily feminist concerns are articulated in a series of essays that he has written on contemporary literary, visual and performing arts. There his major philosophical preoccupation is with the emergence of a mode of transaesthetics (“art without border”) that remains politically relevant, socially engaged and above all gender conscious. In his philosophical reflections, he is in continuous conversation with Jean Baudrillard, the distinguished French philosopher, and his notion of “transaesthetics of indifference”. Contrary to Baudrillard, Dabashi argues that art must and continues to make a difference and empower the disenfranchised.
In a critical conversation with Immanuel Kant, the founding father of European philosophical modernity, Dabashi has articulated the range of social and aesthetic parameters now defining the terms of a global reconfiguration of the sublime and the beautiful—in terms radically distanced from their inaugural articulation by Kant. His essays on transaesthetics, where these ideas are articulated, have been published in many languages by major European museums.
So far in his political thought, Dabashi has been concerned with the emerging patterns of global domination and strategies of regional resistance to them. Equally important to Dabashi’s thinking is the global geopolitics of labour and capital migration migration.

 

Film and art

Hamid Dabashi has been principal advisor for many globally recognized artists and filmmakers; most recently he was the chief consultant to Ridley Scott in his making of Kingdom of Heaven^[8] (2005, Fox Twentieth Century, Hollywood, USA). Scott defended his film by saying that it was approved and verified by Dabashi, he also said that in his opinion, Dabashi is "an important man in New York".^[9]
Dabashi was the chief consultant to Hany Abu-Assad's “Paradise Now” (2005), awarded the Golden Globe for best foreign language film and an Academy Award nominee in the same category, and Shirin Neshat’s “Women without Men” (2006).
Professor Dabashi has also served as jury member on many international art and film festivals ^[10], most recently the Locarno International Festival in Switzerland. In the context of his commitment to advancing trans-national art and independent world cinema, he is the founder of Dreams of a Nation, a Palestinian Film Project, dedicated to preserving and safeguarding Palestinian Cinema.^[1] As a theorist of trans-aesthetics (“art without border”), his articles and essays on the relationship between art and politics have been featured, translated to many languages, and published by museums and cultural institutes in Europe ^[11]. For his contributions to Iranian cinema, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the Iranian film-maker called Dabashi "a rare cultural critic".

 

Public commentary and criticism

Professor Dabashi has been a commentator on a number of political issues, often regarding the Middle East, Columbia University, American foreign policy, or a combination of those.

 

Columbia University

In 2004, Professor Dabashi was involved in a dispute at Columbia University between Jewish students and pro-Palestinian professors, which included accusations of antisemitism against the professors.^[12] According to the New York Times, Dabashi was mentioned principally because of his published political viewpoints, and that he canceled a class to attend a Palestinian rally.^[13] The New York chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union sided with the professors.^[14] An ad hoc committee formed by Lee C. Bollinger, Columbia University's president, reported in March 2005 that they could not find any credible allegations of antisemitism, but did criticize the university's grievance procedures, and recommended changes. However, the committee was criticized for failing to examine an article in which Dabashi wrote that Israelis suffer from "a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture."^[15]
In 2002, Dabashi sharply criticized Rabbi Charles Sheer (who was the university's Jewish chaplain between 1969 and 2004) after he sharply criticized several professors for cancelling their classes to attend pro-Palestinian rallies. Dabashi wrote in the Columbia Spectator that Rabbi Sheer "has taken upon himself the task of mobilizing and spearheading a crusade of fear and intimidation against members of the Columbia faculty and students who have dared to speak against the slaughter of innocent Palestinians."^[16]

 

Views on Israel

Dabashi has described the state of Israel as "a dyslexic Biblical exegesis," "occupied Palestine," "a vicarious avocation," "a dangerous delusion," "a colonial settlement," "a Jewish apartheid state," and "a racist apartheid state"^[17] In an interview with AsiaSource in June 2003, Dabashi stated that supporters of Israel "cannot see that Israel over the past 50 years as a colonial state - first with white European colonial settlers, then white American colonial settlers, now white Russian colonial settlers - amounts to nothing more than a military base for the rising predatory empire of the United States. Israel has no privilege greater or less than Pakistan or Kuwait or Saudi Arabia. These are all military bases but some of them, like Israel, are like the hardware of the American imperial imagination."^[18]
In an interview with the Electronic Intifada in September 2002, Dabashi referred to the pro-Israel lobby as "Gestapo apparatchiks" and that "The so-called "pro-Israeli lobby" is an integral component of the imperial designs of the Bush administration for savage and predatory globalization." He also criticized "fanatic zealots from Brooklyn" who have settled on Palestinian lands.^[19] Dabashi has also harshly criticized the New York Times for what he describes as a bias towards Israel, stating that he paper is "the single most nauseating propaganda paper on planet."^[20]
In September 2004, Dabashi sharply criticized Israel in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, writing that:

What they call "Israel" is no mere military state. A subsumed militarism, a systemic mendacity with an ingrained violence constitutional to the very fusion of its fabric, has penetrated the deepest corners of what these people have to call their "soul."... Half a century of systematic maiming and murdering of another people has left its deep marks on the faces of these people, the way they talk, the way they walk, the way they handle objects, the way they greet each other, the way they look at the world. There is an endemic prevarication to this machinery, a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture. ^[21]

Responding to Dabashi’s Al-Ahram essay, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger said, “I want to completely disassociate myself from those ideas. They’re outrageous things to say, in my view.”^[22] Jonathan Rosenblum, director of Jewish Media Resources, later wrote that "Dabashi apparently subscribes to Lamarkian genetics [that an organism can pass on characteristics that it acquired during its lifetime to its offspring]. Not only have the alleged actions of Israeli Jews effected changes in their very bone structure, but those changes are transmitted to subsequent generations. Dabashi’s depiction of the debased Jewish physiognomy is racism pure and simple."^[23] In The Bulletin, Herb Denenberg wrote that Dabashi's article "is not borderline racism. It’s as gross and obvious as racism can get."^[24]
In a sworn statement submitted to the US Commission on Civil Rights, Dabashi stated that he has not expressed, nor ever harbored, any anti-Semitic sentiments and that the 2004 Al-Ahram essay was being misconstrued.^[25] He has also criticized pro-Israel groups in the United States, saying that the "pro-Israeli Zionist lobby in the US banked and invested heavily in infiltrating, buying, and paying for all the major and minor corridors of power."^[26] In the same article, Dabashi endorsed cultural and academic boycotts of Israel.^[26]
In a letter to the Columbia Spectator, Dabashi wrote that the above passage was "not a racial characterization of a people, but a critical reflection on the body politics of state militarism" and the effects that it has on human beings. Dabashi also apologized for "any hurt that I may have inadvertently caused" due to the interpretation of the passage.^[27]

 

Victor Luria

In September 2004, Victor Luria, a Ph.D. student who worked in a Columbia genetics lab and who served in the Israeli military in 1998, sent an email to Dabashi sharply criticizing him for an article he wrote in Al-Ahram in which wrote that black soldiers in Israel are "mesmerized pigeons now under the spell of a cobra." Luria wrote that during his service in the Israeli military, Black soldiers were always treated equally.^[21][28] Dabashi forwarded the email to several top Columbia officials, including Columbia's provost Alan Brinkley, claiming that Luria had engaged in "conduct unbecoming of a student of Columbia University." Dabashi also stated that he felt physically threatened by Luria, and asked for campus security to be notified "to protect my person from a potential attack by a militant slanderer," although he added that he would not contact the police "for the time being."^[28][29] Brinkley subsequently told Dabashi that he was overreacting, that there was nothing threatening about Luria's email and that he would not notify campus security.^[28] In an interview with The New York Sun, Luria defended his email, stating that "As a member of the university, I have the right to tell him he's wrong," and accused Dabashi of trying to "silence" him,^[28] and criticized him in an article in the Columbia Daily Spectator. Dabashi declined any further comment on the incident.^[30]

 

Criticism of the movie "300"

Dabashi criticized the film 300, the 2007 movie which depicts the of Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC of 300 Spartans against the Persian Empire. Dabashi stated that the director Zack Snyder is "fearful of all the racialised minorities in and out of the United States—Jews, Muslims, Asians, Africans, Latinos—gathering storm around his white-washed racism." Dabashi also stated "That monstrosity that Snyder pictures marching towards Thermopylae is the American empire -- and that band of brothers that stood up to that monstrosity are those resisting this empire: they are the Iraqi resistance, the Palestinians, Hizbullah."^[31]

 

Criticism of Lee Bollinger's Comments on Ahmadinejad and Allegations of White Supremacy

Following Columbia University President Lee Bollinger's statements on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during Ahmadinejad's visit to Columbia in September 2007 (in which Bollinger stated that the Iranian President was a "petty and cruel dictator" who lacked the "intellectual courage" to offer real answers on denying the Holocaust) Dabashi wrote that Bollinger's statements were "the most ridiculous clichés of the neocon propaganda machinery, wrapped in the missionary position of a white racist supremacist carrying the heavy burden of civilizing the world." Dabashi further stated that Bollinger's comments were "propaganda warfare … waged by the self-proclaimed moral authority of the United States" and that "Only Lee Bollinger's mind-numbing racism when introducing Ahmadinejad could have made the demagogue look like the innocent bystander in a self-promotional circus." In addition, Dabashi wrote that when Bollinger made these comments, "Nothing short of the devil incarnate, the Christian Fundamentalist in Bollinger thought, was sitting in front of him" and that Bollinger's "shamelessly racist" comments were "replete with racism."^[32][33]
Judith Jackson, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia who is the co-coordinator of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, criticized Dabashi for his remarks, stating that Dabashi's article was "sheer demagoguery" and that "attributing President Bollinger's remarks or behavior to racism is absurd."^[32]

 

Criticism of the U.S. foreign policy

Dabashi has described the United States as "the most devastating military machinery in human history, which in turn generates and sustains other militant monstrosities like Ariel Sharon, Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and Yasser Arafat."^[19] Dabashi has also stated that "American imperialism... is written into the DNA of this country's political culture"^[17] In a 2006 essay, Dabashi referred to the World Trade Center towers (which were destroyed by the attacks of September 11, 2001) as "two totem poles of U.S. empire in New York.".^[34]
Dabashi has also sharply criticized Iranians living in the United States who support a US policy of regime change in Iran. In August 2008, Dabashi wrote that:

"A band of useless expatriate Iranians are now swarming Washington D.C. hotel lobbies and the White House and State Department offices, seeking a pathetic role and a lucrative salary for regime change in Iran, doing nothing but wasting our tax money, while registering their ignoble names in the annals of a maligned nation. History is now recording their shameful names and will deal with them in proper time -- Abbas Milani, Mohsen Sazegara, Amir Taheri, Azar Nafisi, Ramin Ahmadi, Roya Hakakian, and an ilk of reprehensible names next to them."^[20]

 

Reading Lolita in Iran and Azar Nafisi

Main article: Reading Lolita in Tehran

In 2006, Dabashi sharply criticized Azar Nafisi for her book Reading Lolita in Tehran, stating that "By seeking to recycle a kaffeeklatsch version of English literature as the ideological foregrounding of American empire, Reading Lolita in Tehran is reminiscent of the most pestiferous colonial projects" and accusing her of being a "native informer and colonial agent."^[34] In an interview with Z Magazine, Dabashi compared Nafisi to former American soldier Lynndie England, who was convicted of abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib."^[35][36]
Nafisi responded to Dabashi's criticism by stating that she is not, as Dabashi claims, a neoconservative, that she opposed the Iraq war, and that she is more interested in literature than in politics. In an interview, Nafisi stated that she's never argued for an attack on Iran and that democracy, when it comes, should come from the Iranian people (and not from US military or political intervention). She added that while she is willing to engage in "serious argument...Debate that is polarized isn't worth my time." She stated that she did not respond directly to Dabashi because "You don't want to debase yourself and start calling names."^[35]

[edit] Views on Barack Obama and John McCain

During the 2008 Presidential election, Dabashi criticized democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama for "falling right into the oldest trap that the American Zionist cabal has in its bag of tricks" and criticized him for giving "Jerusalem to a band of white European colonial settlers," arguing instead that "Jerusalem belongs to Palestinians." Dabashi concluded by writing that Obama's pro-Israel stance "spells out the particulars of his own moral depravity and political cowardice." However, Dabashi stated the Obama was preferable to Republican Candidate John McCain because "even if [Obama] has sold his soul, ... he used to have one. That is not the case with McCain."^[17]

 

Selected bibliography

 

Islamic and Iranian studies

Islamic Liberation Theology Resisting the Empire By Hamid Dabashi

• 2008 Islamic Liberation Theology; Resisting the Empire. Routledge
• 2007 Iran: A People Interrupted. New York, New Press. [2]
• 2005 Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundations of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. (Second Edition) with a New Introduction. New York, New York University Press (1993). New Edition, New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction Publishers.[3].
• 2005 "Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism,” as an Introduction to a new Edition of Ignaz Goldziher’s Muslim Studies. New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction Publishers. [4]
• 2000 “The End of Islamic Ideology,” Social Research. Volume 67, Number 2, Summer 2000. pp. 475–518. [5]
• 1999 Staging a Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of Iran. (With Peter Chelkowski). London, Edward Booth-Clibborn Editions.
• 1993 "Historical Conditions of Persian Sufism during the Seljuk Period." In Leonard Lewisohn (ed.), Classical Persian Sufism: From Its Origins to Rumi. London and New York, Khaniqahi Nimatallahi Publishers.
• 1992 Authority in Islam: From the Rise of Muhammad to the Establishment of the Umayyads. Second Edition. New Brunswick, NJ & London, Transaction Books. Winner of the 1990 Association of American Publishers Award in the category of religion and philosophy.
• 1989 Expectation of the Millennium: Shi’ism in History. With S.H. Nasr and S.V.R. Nasr. New York, State University of New York Press.
• 1989 "By What Authority? —The Formation of Khomeini's Revolutionary Discourse, 1964-1977." Social Compass, vol. 36, no. 4, December 1989.
• 1988 Shi’ism: Doctrines, Thought, and Spirituality. With S.H. Nasr, and S.V.R. Nasr. New York, State University of New York Press.
• 1986 "Symbiosis of Religious and Political Authorities in Islam." In Thomas Robbins and Roland Robertson (eds.), Church-State Relations: Tensions and Transitions. New Brunswick, NJ, and London, Transaction Books.
• 1986 "The Sufi Doctrine of 'The Perfect Man' and a View of the Hierarchical Structure of the Islamic Culture." Islamic Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 2, Second Quarter, 1986.
• 1989 "Modern Shi’i Thought". The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modem Islamic World.

 

Islamic philosophy

• 1999 Truth and Narrative: The Untimely Thoughts of Ayn al-Qudat al-Hamadhani. London, Curzon Press.
• 1996 "The Philosopher/Vizier: Khwajah Nasir al-Din al-Tusi and His Isma’ili Connection." In Farhad Daftari (ed.), Studies in Isma’ili History and Doctrines. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• 1994 "Khwajah Nasir al-Din al-Tusi: The Philosopher/Vizier." In Oliver Leaman (ed.), A History of Islamic Philosophy. London, Routledge.
• 1994 "Mir Damad and the School of Isfahan.” In Oliver Leaman (ed.), A History of Islamic Philosophy. London, Routledge.
• 1994 "Ayn al-Qudat: That Individual." In Oliver Leaman (ed.), A History of Islamic Philosophy. London, Routledge.
• 1990 "Danish-namah-yi AIa'i”. Encyclopædia Iranica.
• 1990 "Mir Damad". The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

 

Visual, performing arts and aesthetics

• 2005 “Artists without Borders: On Contemporary Iranian Art” in Octavio Zaya (Ed), Contemporary Iranian Artists: Since the Revolution (San Sebastian, Spain: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005). In English, Spanish, and Catalan.
• 2005 “Shirin Neshat: Transcending the Boundaries of an Imaginative Geography” in Octavio Zaya (Ed), The Last Word. San Sebastian, Spain, Museum of Modern Art. In English and Spanish.
• 2005 “Women without Headaches: On Shirin Neshat’s ‘Women without Men.’” Berlin, Germany, Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart. In English and German.
• 2005 “Ta’ziyeh: Theater of Protest,” in The Drama Review (TDR). [6]
• 2002 “Bordercrossings: Shirin Neshat’s Body of Evidence,” Catalogue of Castello di Rivoli Retrospective on Shirin Neshat. Turin, Italy. January 2002.
• 2000 “In the Absence of the Face,” Social Research, Volume 67, Number 1. Spring 2000. pp. 127–185. [7]
• 1993 Parviz Sayyad's Theater of Diaspora. Costa Mesa, CA, Mazda.

 

World cinema

• 2008 Makhmalbaf at Large: The Making of a Rebel Filmmaker. London, I. B. Tauris. [8]
• 2006 Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema]. Edited, with an Introduction. London and New York, Verso. [9]
• 2006 Masters and Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema. Washington DC, Mage. [10]
• 2004 Yami Karano Kobo] (The Light Arisen from the Darkness: On Mohsen Makhmalbaf) —in Japanese, Tokyo. [11]
• 2002 “Dead Certainties: Makhmalbaf’s Early Cinema,” in Richard Tapper (Eds), Studies in Iranian Cinema. London, I.B. Tauris.
• 2001 Close up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, Future. London and New York, Verso, 2001. [Translated into Arabic, Japanese, Spanish, and Turkish].
• 1999 “Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Moment of Innocence,” in Rose Issa and Sheila Whitaker (Eds), Life and Art: The New Iranian Cinema. London, The British Film Institute, 1999. pp. 115–128.

 

Persian and comparative literature

• 2007 The Adventures of Amir Hamza. Introduction. Random House Modern Library. [12].
• 2003 "Nima Yushij and Constitution of a National subject," Oriente Moderno, Volume xxii (lxxxiii), 2003.
• 1994 "Of Poetics, Politics and Ethics: The Legacy of Parvin E’tesami. In Heshmat Moayyad (ed.), Once a Dewdrop Accosted a Rose: Essays on the Poetry of Parvin E’tesami. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers.
• 1988 "Forough Farrokhzad and the Formative Forces of Iranian Culture." In Michael C. Hillmann (ed.), Forough Farrokhzad: A Quarter Century Later. Literature East and West.
• 1985 "The Poetics of the Politics: Commitment in Modern Persian Literature." Iranian Studies, Special Issue, The Sociology of the Iranian Writer, ed. by Michael C. Hillmann, vol. 18, nos. 2-4, Spring-Autumn, 1985.
• Year? "Persian Literature" for The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modem Islamic World.

 

Postcolonial theory

• 2008 Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire. New York, Routledge. [13]
• 2001 “For the Last Time: Civilizations,” International Sociology. September 2001. Volume 16 (3): 361-368. [14]
• 2001 “No soy subalternista,” in Ileana Rodriguez (Ed), Convergencia de Tiempos: Estudios subalternos / contextos latinoamericanos estado, cultura, subalternidad. Atlanta, GA: Editions Rodopi b.v. 2001. pp. 49–59.

[edit] References

1. ^ ^{a b} Hamid Dabashi official site
2. ^ Hamid Dabashi's Official Web Site
3. ^ Iran: A People Interrupted
4. ^ Hamid Dabashi's Official Web Site
5. ^ Hamid Dabashi (2006). Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundation of the Islamic Revolution. Transaction Publishers. ISBN 1412805163. http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN1412805163&id=sTFdNNQP4ewC&pg=PR9&lpg=PP1&dq=dabashi&sig=xgqVb9Fj8S7GReyOKMafuuCuAbI. 
6. ^ For the Last Time: Civilizations - Dabashi 16 (3): 361 - International Sociology
7. ^ The End of Islamic Ideology (2000)
8. ^ "Interviews: Kingdom of Heaven Scholars". Christianity Today. Archived from the original on 2008-02-19. http://web.archive.org/web/20080219211329/http://www.christianitytoday.com/movies/interviews/KOHhistorians.html. Retrieved 2008-02-25. 
9. ^ "Film-maker defends Crusades epic". BBC News. April 28, 2005. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/film/4492625.stm. Retrieved 2008-02-25. 
10. ^ "Locarno International Film Festival". IMDB. http://www.imdb.com/Sections/Awards/Locarno_International_Film_Festival/2004. 
11. ^ Fundació Antoni Tàpies
12. ^ Columbia University's Own Middle East War
13. ^ Kleinfield, N. R. (January 18, 2005). "Mideast Tensions Are Getting Personal on Campus at Columbia". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/18/education/18columbia.html?pagewanted=2. Retrieved 2008-02-27. 
14. ^ "Civil Liberties Official Defends Columbia Professors - December 28, 2004". The New York Sun. http://www.nysun.com/article/6826. Retrieved 2008-02-27. 
15. ^ "Faculty Committee Largely Clears Scholars - March 31, 2005 -". The New York Sun. http://www.nysun.com/article/11414. Retrieved 2008-02-27. 
16. ^ "Faculty Committee Largely Clears Scholars - March 31, 2005 -". The New York Sun. http://www.nysun.com/article/11414. Retrieved 2008-02-27. 
17. ^ ^{a b c} Obama's Palestinian problem by Hamid Dabashi, Al-Ahram Weekly, 26 June - 2 July 2008, Issue No. 903.
18. ^ Nermeen Shaikh (June 12, 2003). "AsiaSource Special Report - Interview with Hamid Dabashi". Asia Source. http://www.asiasoc.org/news/special_reports/dabashi.cfm. 
19. ^ ^{a b} Campus Watch: Interview with Prof. Hamid Dabashi, The Electronic Intifada, September 30, 2002 (retrieved on November 8, 2008).
20. ^ ^{a b} How Do We Sleep While Beirut Is Burning? by Hamid Dabashi, OhmyNews, August 9, 2006.(retrieved on November 8, 2008).
21. ^ ^{a b} Hamid Dabashi (September 23–29, 2004). "For a Fistful of Dust: A Passage to Palestine". Al-Ahram Weekly. http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/709/cu12.htm. 
22. ^ Columbia’s Own Middle East War, Jennifer Senior, Jan. 10, 2005, New York Magazine, [1]
23. ^ Double standards by Jonathan Rosenblum, Jewish Media Resources, March 18, 2005.
24. ^ Columbia Has Come To Stand For Terrorism, Genocide By Herb Denenberg, The Bulletin, January 20, 2009.
25. ^ US Commission on Civil Rights - Campus Anti-Semitism, Briefing Report, July 2006.
26. ^ ^{a b} The Moral and Military Meltdown of Israel by Hamid Dabashi, The Palestine Chronicle, January 12, 2009.
27. ^ Dabashi Explains Comments on Militarism of Israel by Hamid Dabashi, Columbia Spectator, January 27, 2005.
28. ^ ^{a b c d} Professor Fearful of Attack, By Jacob Gershman, New York Sun, November 22, 2004 (retrieved on December 2, 2008).
29. ^ Columbia University's Hysterical Professor by Daniel Pipes, Frontpagemag, December 1, 2004.
30. ^ Student Intimidation Here and Now by Victor Luria, Columbia Daily Spectator, January 26, 2005 (reprinted on Campus Watch) (retrieved on December 15, 2009).
31. ^ Hamid Dabashi (August 2–8, 2007). "The '300' stroke". Al-Ahram Weekly. http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2007/856/cu1.htm. 
32. ^ ^{a b} .Annie Karni (October 15, 2007). "Columbia Professor Calls Bollinger White Supremacist". New York Sun. http://www2.nysun.com/new-york/columbia-professor-calls-bollinger-white/. 
33. ^ Of banality and burden by Hamid Dabashi, Al-Ahram Weekly, October 11–17, 2007, Issue No. 866. (retrieved on November 8, 2008).
34. ^ ^{a b} Hamid Dabashi (06-01-2006). "Native informers and the making of the American empire". Al-Ahram, # 797. http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/797/special.htm. Retrieved 09-01-2008. 
35. ^ ^{a b} Book clubbed by Christopher Shea, The Boston Globe, October 29, 2006 (retrieved on October 21, 2009).
36. ^ Reading Lolita at Columbia by Robert Fulford, National Post, November 6, 2006 (retrieved on October 21, 2009).

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamid_Dabashi