Sajjad Rizvi سجاد رضوي Profile picture
@exeterIAIS intellectual historian | Persianate and Shii Islam | mysticism | decoloniality | philosophy in contemporary Islam | Global philosophy

May 2, 2020, 14 tweets

Just got this wonderful book of interview reminiscences by Daryush Shayegan (1935-2018) with #RaminJahanbegloo 1/

#Shayegan was sent to school in #England after WW2 and then read philosophy, Sanskrit and literature at #Geneva 2/

#Shayegan was close to #Corbin and his life’s account is a wonderful journey in the #intellectual_history of #Iran and its encounter with #Europe 3/

He shared #Corbin interest in #Berdyaev #Heidegger and other and had similar romanticist interests 4/

He wrote two works on #Corbin that along with this work constitute useful accounts of modern #intellectual_history of #Iran 5/

#Shayegan was a philosopher who began influenced by #traditionalists like #Guénon and became a #Sorbonne trained #Indologist and later chair of Sanskrit and comparative religions at #TehranUniversity 6/

It was #Guénon and his teacher at #UniversityofGeneva Jean Herbert (1897-1980), chair of eastern mythologies 1954-1964 7/

His dissertation, supervised by #Corbin, was on #DaraShukoh Majma al-bahrayn on the homology between #Vedanta and #Sufism that was a popular element of #PersoIndica at the #Mughal court 8/

He wrote an influential two volumes work in #Persian on the six traditional #darśanas of #IndianPhilosophy as well as many works on comparative philosophy and literature 9/

In #Tehran with #Corbin and #SeyyedHosseinNasr he became acquainted with traditional scholars of #IslamicPhilosophy and #Mysticism Sayyid Abdol-Hasan Rafii Qazwini (d. 1975), ‘Allama Tabatabai (d. 1981), Mahdi Ilahi Qumshihi (d. 1973), and Sayyed Jalalodin Ashtiyani (d. 2005) 10/

He spent many years in exile in Paris and wrote two important critiques of the #Revolution and the society of post-revolutionary #Iran and its political theology 11/

But after the election of #Khatami many like him began to return and reached a cultural and intellectual prominence 12/

In 1977 he established the first Centre for the Dialogue of Civilizations in Tehran which became a cultural policy of #Khatami after 1997 and was recognised as the beginning of it 13/

When he died in 2018 his funeral prayers in #Tehran were led by Sayyid Mostafa Mohaghegh Damad (b. 1945), a ‘reformist’ from a prominent clerical family who had also studied in Europe 14/

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