Unknowing of Memory: Sufi Thought and the Emergence of a Wilful Amnesia in Iran (27 Mar 2024)

Associate Professor Seema Golestaneh from Cornell University examined the ways in which the contemporary mystical experience in Iran translates itself into the larger social realm, and vice versa. In particular, she presented a case study about the destruction of a Sufi meeting place (khaneqah) in the city of Isfahan in February 2009 and the Sufis’ response not to mourn the site, but to actively and deliberately forget it in order to disavow the material in favour of the spiritual, a term referred to as wilful amnesia.
The lecture was supported by the Yap Kim Hao Professorship in Comparative Religious Studies.