<underfire> image as event -- continued

[Ananya Vajpeyi]

It's interesting, from the perspective of someone who is neither
American nor Muslim (nor even Christian or Jewish for that matter), to
see how the war in Iraq is viewed from American and Muslim points of
view. I observe the same tensions in the Underfire discussions, as I
see played out in Columbia University, where I am teaching this year.
I hear many of the same anxieties voiced online as I do on campus:
about secularism and faith, about veiling and surveillance, about
torture and human rights, about terror and compassion, about religion
and globalization, and so on.

The two voices I have heard of late that seem to me to introduce
genuinely new vantage points and allow our conversations to grow in
unexpected ways, are, on Underfire, Negar Mottahedeh's posts, taking
us into the heart of Iran and the Iranian cultural world in the West,
and, at Columbia, Ohran Pamuk's recent talks, lectures, classes and
public appearances in his capacity as this year's Nobel Laureate for
Literature who is also a faculty member here at the university. If
Negar forces us to engage Iran on its own terms, Pamuk's interventions
foreground the specific dilemmas of a secular but Muslim-majority
country like Turkey (which also has the peculiar position of lying
somewhere between Asia and Europe). In a seminar this evening (Nov 10,
2006), Pamuk in fact quoted Khomeini via Hamid Dabashi, and described
how Khomeini's pronouncements about the role of Islam in the
consciousness of the believer had troubled him (Pamuk) enough to lead
him to think through the problems of political Islam and Islamic
politics in his latest novel, "Snow".

Personally I feel it's very important for American intellectuals and
theorists to be reminded that it isn't all about religiosity and
belief out there in the non-West; that there are multiple ways of
looking at Iraq: from within Iraq, from neighboring but very different
countries like Iran and Turkey, and from places where Islam both is
and isn't front-and-center, like India. Before we came up for our week
on Underfire, Negar and I got talking on email, and she introduced me
to, among many writings, films and  other genres of cultural
production, some of the scholarship of Hamid Dabashi, who has worked,
strangely enough, on both Iranian cinema and the history of the
Islamic Revolution in Iran. So tonight when Pamuk alluded, without
spelling out the word, to Khomeini's use of the idea of
"Westoxification", I was able to see the churning on Islam that is
going on in America, and in the West more generally, in a whole new
way.

Frankly, as an Indian exposed to the multiple traditions of Indian
Islam, with their old and complex relationships of give-and-take with
the many Islamic cultures of the middle-east -- Arab, Turkish, Persian
and others -- I want to know more about how matters of faith and
violence are being debated and adjudicated in the societies that are
in America's line of fire. Or in societies like India and Iran, that
could well be next, Rumsfeld's exit notwithstanding.

Ananya.

To see an example of Pamuk at Columbia:

"Conversation: Literature and Citizenship, Arthur Danto and Orhan Pamuk" is
now available to watch in the Havel at Columbia website as well as an audio
and video podcast.  You will find the links available in the event's page:

http://havel.columbia.edu/literature.html

-- 
Ananya Vajpeyi, Ph.D.
Fellow
Nehru Memorial Museum and Library
Teen Murti House
New Delhi 110011 INDIA.