Lights: the Messa Quarterly

997 LIGHTS: THE MESSA QUARTERLY FALL 2012 Volume 2, Issue 1 Copyright © 2012 by the Middle Eastern Studies Students’ Association at the University of Chicago. All rights reserved. No part of this publication’s text may be reproduced or utilized in any way or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information stor- age and retrieval system without written permission from the Middle Eastern Studies Students’ Association board or by the permission of the authors in- cluded in this edition. This journal is supported in parts by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago. Lights: The MESSA Journal Fall 2012 Vol. 2 No. 1 The Middle Eastern Studies Students’ Association’s Subcommittee of Publications at The University of Chicago Winter 2012 Staff Executive board: Gwendolyn Collaço, Graphic Design and Digital Editor John Macdonald, Review Editor Nadia Qazi, Production Editor August Samie, Submissions Editor and Managing Editor Peer reviewers: Gwendolyn Collaço Carol Fan Golriz Farshi Gordon Cooper Klose Amr Tarek Leheta Johan McDonald Kara Peruccio Nadia Qazi Tasha Ramos Mohmmad Sagha August Samie Armaan Siddiqi Samee Sulaiman Patrick Thevenow Andy Ver Steegh Patrick Zemanek Editors: Daniel Burnham Amy Frake Gordon Cooper Klose Nour Merza Emily Mitchell Brianne Reeves Faculty Advisors: Dr. Fred M. Donner and Dr. John E. Woods Table of Contents Featured Master’s Thesis: Reading Parsipur through the Eyes of Heday- at’s Blind Owl: Tracing the Origin of Magical Realism in Modern Persian Prose, by Saba Sulaiman................................................................................. 1 Branding a Country and Constructing an Alternative Modernity with Muslim Women: A Content Analysis of the United Arab Emirates, by Kateland Haas................................................................................................ 35 Mystery and Memory: St. Mark, Alexandrian Christianity, and the Evi- dence Shrouded in Mystery, by Nathan Hardy............................................ 70 The Roots of Combative Zionism: Israeli Militarism in the Works, By Michael Nance............................................................................................... 96 Refuting al-Ghazālī’s ‘Poison’: Ibn Rushd’s Doctrine of ‘Exclusive In- struction’ in his Tahāfut al-Tahāfut, by Andrew J. O’Connor................... 110 Political Economy of Ingenuity: a Case Study of Turkey’s Justice and De- velopment Party, by Mohammad Sagha.................................................... 121 Lights: The MESSA Journal Fall 2012 Vol. 2 No. 1 Featured Master’s Thesis 1 Featured Master’s Thesis Saba Sulaiman Saba Sulaiman recently completed her MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Chicago, with a focus on Modern Persian Literature. She also holds a BA in Middle Eastern Studies and Economics from Wellesley College. During her time at the University, she presented a version of her MA thesis at the 27th Annual Middle East History and Theory Conference in May 2012. After graduating in 2012, Saba moved to Connecticut, where she works for an independent book publishing company. While working as an editor and freelance writer, she continues to maintain her academic interest in comparative literature and foreign languages. 2 Lights: The MESSA Journal Fall 2012 Vol. 2 No. 1 Reading Parsipur Through the Eyes of Hedayat’s Blind Owl: Tracing the Origins of Magical Realism in Modern Persian Prose By Saba Sulaiman Copyright © 2012 by Saba Sulaiman All rights reserved. Magical Realism: Internationally Local? The view that the literary genre of magical realism is specifically a Latin American export is fairly widespread. Alejo Carpentier argues that there is something particular to its natural landscape and cultural heritage which inspires literature that infuses magic into ordinary narrative, in order to reflect its “marvelous reality.”1 In his seminal essay on Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction,2 Angel Flores acknowledges, however, that many of the Latin American predecessors to magical realism took their inspiration from Russian authors such as Nikolai Gogol and Fyodor Dostoevsky. In fact, recent scholarship on Russian writers (including, among others, Gogol and Dostoevsky) has argued that alongside Latin America, Russia was also a veritable hotbed of magical realist writings.3 The fact of the matter is that magical realism cannot conclusively be traced back to any particular literary tradition. This is because the “magic” in magical realism is often closely linked to the myths and legends of the literary, cultural, and sometimes spiritual traditions that that writers are native to. It is no surprise that this evidently cross-cultural literary trend continues to be adopted by writers from all over the world; indeed, magical realism constitutes “a discourse for a kind of international literary diaspora, a fictional cosmopolitanism of wide application.”4 And yet it is widely assumed that contemporary writers of magical realism must find their inspiration from Latin American authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, regardless of their own local literary traditions. This is particularly true of Iranian author Shahrnush Parsipur, whose prolific and often feminist writings have been banned in Iran for their explicit themes, which include sexual abuse and other forms of gender oppression. Shahrnush Parsipur: ‘Dostoevsky’s Daughter’?5 1) Alejo Carpentier, “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy P. Faris (Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1995), 104. 2) Angel Flores, “Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction,” Hispania 38.2 (1955): 187–192. 3) Alexandra Berlina, “Russian Magical Realism and Pelevin as its Exponent,” Comparative Literature and Culture 11.4 (2009). 4) As Wendy Faris argues, magical realism “gives voice in the thematic domain to indigenous or ancient myths, legends, and cultural practices, and in the domain of narrative technique to the literary traditions that express them with the use of non-realistic events and images, it can be seen as a kind of narrative primitivism.” See Wendy B Faris, “The Question of the Other: Cultural Critiques of Magical Realism,” Janus Head 5.2 (2002): 103. 5) Parsipur refers to herself as ‘Dostoevsky’s daughter’ during an interview. Please see Brian Appleton, “An Interview with Shahrnush Parsipur,” Persian Heritage 59 (2010): 23. Featured Master’s Thesis 3 As Kamran Talatoff writes in Breaking Taboos in Iranian Women’s Literature, Parsipur belongs to a literary movement that “has produced new forms and creative approaches to social problems and has addressed forbidden topics.”6 She currently lives in exile in the United States, much like other contemporary Iranian writers, such as Mahshid Amirshahi (who lives in France) and Moniru Ravanipur. In fact, Ravanipur’s work, along with Parsipur’s, has been noted for its “particular form of magical realism set in Iranian historical and regional contexts.”7 The important distinction here, however, is that scholarship on Ravanipur’s use of magical realism in her first novel Ahl-e-Gharq (1989) already exists,8 whereas there is little to no scholarship available on Parsipur’s early work, particularly her short stories, which were written between 1966-1969. Because of her unique and experimental writing style, Parsipur’s literary influences have been the subject of much speculation. From claiming to be “Dostoevsky’s daughter,” to citing Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations as one of her most significant sources of inspiration,9 Parsipur’s admiration for Western literature is widely known and acknowledged.10 Indeed, she also mentions Gabriel Garcia Marquez as an influence;11 in fact, Houra Yavari argues12 that Touba and the Meaning of Night, originally published in Persian in 1989, is clearly influenced by Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. While this hypothesis may be true for Parsipur’s later work, Marquez cannot have been an influence in Parsipur’s earlier work, because they were written before or at the same time that One Hundred Years of Solitude was first published in Spanish in 1967.13 Her stories were certainly written much before a Persian translation of Marquez’s work was available for distribution in Iran. This paper is a study of five short stories written by Shahrnush Parsipur between 1966 and 1969. These stories were first published in Parsipur’s first short story anthology, Āvīzihʹhā-yi bulūr (Crystal Pendant Earrings), in 1977. Through a close reading of the texts in question, I will demonstrate how Parsipur’s stories undeniably reflect that her greatest influence at the time was Sadegh Hedayat’s 6) For a complete biography and bibliography of her works, please see Kamran Talatoff, “Breaking Taboos in Iranian Women’s Literature: The Work of Shahrnush Parsipur,” World Literature Today 78.3 (2004): 43–46. 7) Nahid Mozaffari, Introduction to Strange Times, My Dear: The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature, ed. Nahid Mozaffari (New York: Arcade, 2005), xxii. 8) For example, see Nasrin Rahimieh, “Magical Realism in Moniro Ravanipur’s Ahl-e-Gharq,” Iranian Studies 23.1 (1990): 61–75. 9) Golbarg Bashi, “The Proper Etiquette of Meeting Shahrnush Parsipur in the United States,” The Iranian, July 9, 2006. 10) Farzaneh Milani has provided an extensive list of Parsipur’s influences. Please see Farzaneh Milani, Words, Not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP,

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