About this Event
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by Hamid Dabashi
In this book, Hamid Dabashi offers a radical reconsideration of the parable in Persian literature, arguing that parabolic thinking is a mode of philosophical reflection. Dabashi eschews the conventional focus on the supposed moral or political allusions in these parables—the “moral of the story”—to allow the radical surfaces of their poetic disposition to reveal themselves. He turns his attention instead to what Kafka called “the fabulous yonder” as the defining moment of the parable. Focusing on a sustained course of Persian parables through the ages, Dabashi shows that the genre is not limited to masterpieces by such iconic poets as Sa’di, Rumi, Attar, and Sana’i. In fact, he argues, parabolic thinking has a much wider domain in Persian literature and philosophy and plays a distinct role within Persian and Islamic traditions.
The cumulative result of these parables spread across Persian prose and poetry is an alam al-mithal, a parabolic world—a world of parables, similitudes, and verisimilitudes. Dabashi points to the moment in these works when life is absorbed into the formal fabric of the stories, erasing the borderline between fact and fantasy, history and story, the living and the dead, the real and the unreal—and life itself, as we live it, becomes a strange and captivating parable. With this circular self-referentiality, parables enable a way of thinking as a philosophical form.
About the Author
is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He received a dual Ph.D. in Sociology of Culture and Islamic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Max Weber’s theory of charismatic authority with Philip Rieff (1922-2006), the most distinguished Freudian cultural critic of his time. He has written more than two dozen books, edited four, and contributed chapters to many more. He is also the author of over 100 essays, articles, and book reviews on subjects ranging from Iranian and Islamic Studies, comparative literature, world cinema, and the philosophy of art (trans-aesthetics).
About the Speakers
is Julius Silver Professor of Comparative Literature and French Literature, Thought and Culture at New York University. She is the author of Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse and the Impolitic (Verso, 2018); Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013); Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (co-edited with Barbara Cassin, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood) (2014); The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006). Since 2000 she has edited the book series Translation/Transnation with Princeton University Press. Essays have appeared in New Literary History, Representations, differenes, October, Public Culture, Crisis and Critique, History and Theory, Diacritics, PMLA, Comparative Literature, Critique, Les Temps qui Restent, Art Journal, Third Text, Paragraph, boundary 2, Artforum, Esprit Créateur, and Critical Inquiry.
is the Gustave M. Berne Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. She is the editor of Oxford Philosophical Concepts and Oxford New Histories of Philosophy, both series devoted to making the history of philosophy more accurate and inclusive. Her activist work includes Just Ideas, an award-winning program in Brooklyn’s maximum-security Metropolitan Detention Center. In 2019-20, she served as President of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division. Among other honors, she has received Guggenheim, ACLS, Humboldt, and Radcliffe Institute Fellowships, and was the president of the Eastern American Philosophical Association, 2019-20. She has been honored with Columbia’s two most prestigious teaching awards, the 2008 Columbia College Great Teacher Award, and the 2012 Mark van Doren Award, which annually recognizes a professor for “commitment to undergraduate instruction, devotion to truth and inspiring leadership.”
is the William B. Ransford Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University. Educated at Queens’ College, Cambridge and Princeton University in the fields of law, history, and politics, he works across the disciplinary boundaries of history and the social sciences. His writings, which have been translated into Arabic and fifteen other languages, examine the history of colonialism, the politics of energy, the political economy of capitalism, and the making of expert knowledge. His books include Colonising Egypt, Rule of Experts, and Carbon Democracy. His latest book, The Alibi of Capital: How We Broke the Earth to Steal the Future on the Promise of a Better Tomorrow, was published in March 2026.
is Assistant Professor of Sanskrit and premodern South Asia. Before joining MESAAS, he taught at Stanford University and at the University of Toronto, where he completed his PhD in 2021. Jonathan is a scholar of Sanskrit literature and philosophy and an intellectual historian of religion in premodern South Asia. He works closely with several areas of Sanskrit learning, including Vedanta, linguistics, epistemology, and poetics, and he has broader interests in Indo-Persian and Marathi literature, and the cultural history of Persianate Deccan. His current book project uses an unstudied archive of Sanskrit polemics to think about histories of Hindu difference on the eve of colonialism. His second book examines the poetics of Hindu-Muslim intimacy in Mughal north India.
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Event venue & nearby stays
Heyman Center for the Humanities, East Campus Residence Hall, New York, United States
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