Book Review: Unknowing and the Everyday
Book review of Unknowing and the Everyday: Sufism and Knowledge in Iran, by Seema Golestaneh (2023)
Unknowing and the Everyday: Sufism and Knowledge in Iran, by Seema Golestaneh (2023). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
In recent years, many observers of Islam have emphasized the significance and resourcefulness of literary tropes within the Islamic tradition. The late Shahab Ahmad went so far as to hold the hermeneutic possibilities that these tropes allow in Muslims’ engagement with Koranic revelation to be the defining feature of Islam itself. Some—prominently Don Cupitt—have seen in the writings of mystics a spirited affirmation of the postmodern condition wherein nothing, theological or secular, is unconditionally available to us. As the refrain of a famous Naz Khialvi ghazal, which was performed to renown by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, goes, God is gorakh dhanda, a puzzle—and religion is, at best, an attempt to solve it. How far and deep the literary and the everyday overlap when one steps out of one’s study is a glaring question indeed. It is, however, patent that our everyday life overflows with irony, contradiction, hyperbole, and analogy. More pertinent to ask, thus, is how such tropes figure in the lives of believers and what they do with them.
This is the aim of Seema Golestaneh’s Unknowing and the Everyday as she follows members of the Nimatullahi Sufi order in the Iranian cities of Isfahan, Kerman, and Tehran. Framed as an ethnography of ma’rifat, translated by the author as the titular “unknowing,” the book explores the generative potential of this seemingly negative concept. While ma’rifat is typically understood as experiential knowledge or gnosis, Golestaneh reinterprets it as an affirmation of the unknowability of the divine, grounded in such knowledge. The translation of ma’rifat as a verbal noun—unknowing—emphasizes its function as a mode of engagement with the divine and the world, rooted in the intuition that it provides. Following a historical introduction, the book traces this mode of engagement—the process of unknowing—across four chapters, examining how it unfolds and figures in the relationship of Golestaneh’s interlocutors with texts, notions of the self and place, and memory.
Founded by Shah Nimatullah Vali, the Nimatullahi order prospered in fourteenth and fifteenth century Iran before being exiled to Bidar, India, for three centuries. This displacement followed the rise of the Safavids, who viewed it as a challenge to their emerging Shi’ite ideology. Nevertheless, the Safavids appropriated a significant part of the philosophy of the prevailing esoteric and theosophic schools, including that of the Nimatullahi order. The order permanently returned to Iran during the Qajar era (1785–1925) and attained peak influence under the early Pahlavi regime (1925-41), led by the efforts of Javad Nurbaksh. During the Qajar era, a distinct Shi’a identity was developed, and the order maintained an active dialogue with the Shi’ite ulema, playing a politically engaged role. Under the Pahlavi regime, it received patronage from the Shah’s family but was forced into retreat, as Reza Shah became apprehensive of its growing popularity. Following the 1979 Revolution, the order expanded beyond Iran, while within the country it aligned with the new post-revolutionary political and religious establishment. The historical overview presented in the book is concise and adequate for its general purpose. Many readers, however, may find the treatment of the order’s development in the post-revolutionary period and current organizational structure, operations, and influence in Iran to be lacking in detail.
The core practices of the order are recounted in the following four chapters, with its wide textual engagement with the Persian poetic canon and a range of Islamic and other works. Golestaneh elucidates the cultural production that these texts and their hermeneutics engender. The broader literary tradition, erfan, with which the Nimatullahis engage, treats poetry as a microcosm of the world, filled with the multiplicity and ambiguity of meaning, and showcasing—through metaphor—the hiddenness of the Real beneath the Unreal. Much has been written, of late, about the uses of ambiguity and interpretation in Islamic textual genres (see, for example, Thomas Bauer’s A Culture of Ambiguity); Golestaneh’s exploration of these themes is unique in its depiction of the complex interplay between the intuitive approach to interpretation (qalb-e batini), the authority of shaykhs as guiding interpreters, and the simultaneous role of ma’rifat’s ineffability as a check on that authority.
The resourcefulness of this textual engagement becomes evident in how Nimatullahis conceptualize notions of the self, memory, and place. For some, reading texts or performing zekr offers relief from the burdens of their social identities—being jobless, for example; for others, it enables a more ecstatic, esoteric experience—a spiritual shedding of the self, known in Sufism as fana. When the gathering place of a group at the Takht-e-Foulad cemetery in Isfahan is demolished as part of a beautification campaign, they turn to zekr as a way to willfully forget the physical site. In doing so, they re-enact the Sufi motif of the impermanence of the material and permanence of the immaterial. Another group renders literal peripateticism—a common figurative motif in Sufi metaphysics and legend. In this phenomenon of sargardan, urbanites wander through suburban areas toward a designated location from which music is broadcast, guiding their movement and their auditory senses. Though playful (bahal), the activity transforms the otherwise mundane acts of walking and listening into something more enchanted—union can “happen in this world too, just from a noise on a street corner,” as an interlocutor remarks (18).
All of this contributes to a colorful and composite ethnography that opens a window into the inner workings of the Nimatullahis, the dynamics of a modern spiritual order (tariqa), contemporary Sufism more broadly, and a form of modern religiosity found among certain sections of Iranians. Any effort, however, to construct a cohesive or explanatory account of any of these matters or trace intersecting developments in the religious, social, and political lives of the author’s interlocutors remains elusive. The analysis relies on the interlocutors’ perspectives too much, and, while these offer a wealth of local insight and detail, they leave the reader with little with which to assemble an account of Nimatullahi theology or soteriology or modern Sufi religiosity in Iran.
In the epilogue, an authorial perspective emerges as Golestaneh reflects on the improvisational character of mysticism. Regardless, while suggesting that reaching the limits of thought propels further movement—“improvising and armed with unknowing, a long and sightless walk awaits, pathways formed and unformed” (192)—the author stops short of unpacking what this entails beyond registering that obvious contradictions—unknowing leading to knowing—can serve a pragmatic purpose, especially for believers. Depictions of events like this, richly detailed with a poetic flourish, have become characteristic of recent anthropological writing, forcing a trade-off of explanation for loose prose aiming for sentimental ethnographic authenticity. Unknowing and the Everyday aligns with this trend. The book also rarely descends from the realm of metaphysics to consider how Sufi ideas and practices shape the everyday lives of Iranians. We learn little about the Nimatullahis beyond their interpretive and spiritualist personalities, for instance. Socio-economic and political issues, although palpable throughout the text and closely accompanying accounts of Sufi metaphysics, remain in the background.
When Golestaneh does address the socio-economic and political contexts that her interlocutors inhabit, however, one can discern some subtle, undisclosed developments and aspects of their religiosity and religious labor that would be worthy of more explicit mention in the conclusion. Notably, much of the Nimatullahis’ activity appears voluntaristic and self-aware. Without resorting to too much psychologizing, readers should notice that many of the Nimatullahis’ practices—especially those related to self-fashioning—are significant for the regular upkeep of their personal and social integrity. Moreover, the religious role that shaykhs play is more vocational than occupational. As Golestaneh documents, even though the shaykhs Noorozi and Alizadeh are central to the spiritual journey of their mentees, they voluntarily relent their authority. For them, their vocational calling is not dissimilar to the calling of their mentees. (Compare this authority, at the risk of some essentializing, to that of the ulema, whose expertise lends them a clear distinction vis-à-vis laypersons.) Noorozi and Alizadeh perform the labor of mentoring, though this labor is neither regulated nor is their mentorship authoritative. Such religious voluntarism and spiritual counseling function as modes of self-care, including its spiritual aspect. As modes of self-care become increasingly marketized, regimented, and regulated in neoliberal economies, one can see in the work of shaykhs and in their relationship with their mentees not only the emergence of (self-)care but also an alternate imagination of how the labor of care can be performed. The work of pirs and hakims (spiritual counselors and traditional healers) in India-controlled Kashmir, where I conduct fieldwork, similarly reveals the ingenious ways that local religious networks strive to offer care. Even when the labor involved in such work is acknowledged and results in remuneration, it functions differently than it otherwise would according to the logics of the capitalistic market economy.
All in all, Unknowing and the Everyday offers an intimate portrayal of how theological speculation about the unknown and people’s everyday spiritual and secular wants intersect, engendering local, practical theologies and creative religiosities. That said, the book would have benefited greatly from a more elaborate analysis of said theologies and forms of religiosity, had it been offered alongside their ethnographic portrayal.
