This book deals for the first time with the cultural history of media in nineteenth-century Iran, a history that deals with how modern techniques of representation and communication were received in the Iranian Shiʿa society. This reception history is examined in religious photography, military reforms, Persian passion plays, Shiʿa medicine, and the burgeoning telegraphic culture. The problematic relationship between Shīʿa Islam and 19th-century media is conceptualised and contextualised, especially through the lens of the first Polytechnique college (Dār al-Fonun, 1851) in Iran. This college is conceptualised as a media laboratory, where the technological sphere in Iran was fundamentally transforming. It is also contextualised in the age of reform, a period in which the Middle East was undergoing widespread social, political, and military changes. Islamic (art) history, Iranian Studies, and cultural analysis form an interdisciplinary analytic framework to create new knowledge about the historical complexity of 19th-century Iran.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- List of Figures
- Transliteration table
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction
- A short overview of early reforms through the lens of Dār al-Fonun
- Print media
- Photography
- Military sounds
- Telegraphy
- Absurd as the limit to mediation
- Meaning, paradox, and the absurd in Islam: Pushing Shahab Ahmed to the limit
- Notes on methods
- Chapter 1. Resurrectional mediations: Shiʿa eschatology and photography
- Theolographic mediation in Resurrectional Photography
- The hereafter and the embodiment of deeds
- The mediated imagination of the hereafter
- Photography at the limit: From mimesis to evidentiality
- A world of meaning in the photographic image
- Chapter 2. Mourning mediations: taʿziye performances and military sonic techniques
- Military sounds
- Military sounds in Iran
- Manuals of reform
- The cultural influence of the military
- Taʿziye: A short history
- Cueing and organising: taʿziye reconstructed
- The affective mode of taʿziye
- Chapter 3. Therapeutic mediations: Shiʿa medical imagination and cholera
- Cholera in context: Medical institutionalisation and aetiologies
- The case of Cure of Cholera (ʿElāj al-Wabāʾ)
- The taste and smell of cholera
- Talismanic methods
- Counter points: Modern prophylactic approaches to cholera
- The case of Tholozan
- The case of Schlimmer
- Chapter 4. Spiritual mediations: Shiʿa demonology and telegraphy
- Haptics of the jenn
- A brief history of haptics
- Narratives of haptic jenn in Majlesi and Fozuni
- Spirits after telegraphy
- In lieu of the telegraph: The universal fluid
- The séance with Amir Kabir and the issue of mediation
- Diminishing haptics in Iranian spiritism
- Epilogue. The semiotics of Shiʿa absurdism
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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