CANCELED - Mistaken Anti Modernity: Fardid After Fardid

TWO PART EVENT

March 11: Film screening of “The Fabulous Life and Thought of Ahmad Fardid,” directed by Ali Mirsepassi and Hamed Yousefi.

March 12: Professor Ali Mirsepassi discusses his book Iran’s Troubled Modernity: Debating Ahmad Fardid’s Legacy, on which the film was based.

During the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79, the influence of public intellectuals was widespread. Many espoused a vision of Iran freed from the influences of 'Westoxification', inspired by Heideggerian concepts of anti-Western nativism. By following the intellectual journey of the Iranian philosopher Ahmad Fardid, Ali Mirsepassi offers in this book an account of the rise of political Islam in modern Iran. The documentary film, “The Fabulous Life and Thought of Ahmad Fardid,” is based on Mirsepassi’s book about Ahmad Fardid and it is made by Ali Mirsepassi and Hamed Yousefi.

Ali Mirsepassi is Albert Gallatin Research Excellence Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, New York University.  He is also director of Iranian Studies Initiative at NYU. He was a 2007-2009 Carnegie Scholar and is the co-editor, with Arshin Adib-Moghadam, of The Global Middle East, a book series published by the Cambridge University Press.

He is the author of Iran’s Troubled Modernity: Debating Ahmad Fardid’s Legacy (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Transnationalism in Iranian Political Thought: The Life and Thought of Ahmad Fardid (Cambridge University Press, 2017), co-author, with Tadd Fernee, of Islam, Democracy, and Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge University Press, 2014); is the author of Political Islam, Iran and Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Democracy in Modern Iran (New York University Press, 2010), Intellectual Discourses and Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2000), and Truth or Democracy (published in Iran); the co-editor of Localizing Knowledge in a Globalizing World (Syracuse University Press, 2002. His new book, Iran’s Quiet Revolution: The Downfall of the Pahlavi State, was published in November 2019 by Cambridge University Press.