The Impish Revolutionary: Mischief, Play, and Counter-Sovereignty in Iran

Vortrag von Alireza Doostdar (University of Chicago Divinity School)

Can revolutionary energy be understood as a form of mischievous play? This lecture takes up shaytanat—deviltry, roguishness, impish mischief—as an overlooked idiom of Iranian revolutionary life, one that runs alongside the more familiar registers of heroic piety and martyrdom. Beginning with Ali Shariati's myth of primordial human mischief that God secretly cherishes, I trace an impish revolutionary ethos through the memoirs of Revolutionary Guard demolition battalions, where self-described shaytūn soldiers set their daredevilry and clowning against the somber "legends" of superabundant piety, and where irreverence and insubordination are absorbed into revolutionary self-representation rather than disciplined away. Reading play against sovereignty, I ultimately suggest that the revolutionary state is not only one that devours its children but one that teaches them to revolt against it.

Alireza Doostdar is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies and the Anthropology of Religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is the author of The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Science, Islam, and the Uncanny (Princeton University Press, 2018). His next book, also with Princeton, is titled Facing Satan: The Iranian Revolution and Its Demons.