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Epilogue

Myself as Myself

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2023

Hamid Dabashi
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York
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Summary

At the end ofthis book I place my prose of historicality somewhere between Suhrawardi’s and Walter Benjamin’s respective angelology. What do we get when we do that; a transhistorical theology of their respective Islam and Judaism, where history is seen as the interface either between the left and the right wing of Gabriel or between the front and back of Angelus Novus. That is where memory and history come together. Suhrawardi’s Gabriel has one wing turned toward Divine Truth as its Necessary Being and one wing tilted toward the shaded history of humanity as his Contingent Being, while Benjamin’s Angelus Novus has his face facing the troubled past as the storm from paradise is propelling him toward a frightful future. Benjamin’s angel goes backward; Suhrawardi’s sideways. One is teleological, the other contemporaneous. There is no teleology in Suhrawardi and there is no spontaneity in Benjamin’s respective historical theologies. But read together, Suhrawardi’s and Benjamin’s become a prophetic vision of history in which reality becomes unreal in face of a Divinity neither of them could ignore. Like the rest of you, I stand in between Suhrawardi’s and Benjamin’s angelology, with all our history and all our humanity fragmented, just like these stories I have shared, between a necessary past we cannot ignore, and a contingent future we cannot see.

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Chapter
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An Iranian Childhood
Rethinking History and Memory
, pp. 195 - 208
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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  • Epilogue
  • Hamid Dabashi, Columbia University, New York
  • Book: An Iranian Childhood
  • Online publication: 13 April 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009072304.006
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  • Epilogue
  • Hamid Dabashi, Columbia University, New York
  • Book: An Iranian Childhood
  • Online publication: 13 April 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009072304.006
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Epilogue
  • Hamid Dabashi, Columbia University, New York
  • Book: An Iranian Childhood
  • Online publication: 13 April 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009072304.006
Available formats
×