The Living Dead of Tabriz: Explorations in Chronotopic Imagination

The following pages are the venue of numerous struggles. The most immediate struggle is mine, aimed at making sense of works composed centuries ago. Then there is the labor of the works’ authors, to relate matters assimilated from texts and personal encounters with the living and the dead. In this instance, the act of writing was part of the effort to lead a religious life sometimes at odds with a purely worldly outlook. And there are general existential paradoxes about life and death that have driven human beings to speak since times immemorial. By bringing the notion of struggle to the forefront, I want to emphasize the plenitude of ideas and experiences found in Islamic texts. As scholars of religious worlds, we are compelled to reduce complex sources into systemic phenomena. We have to present the material in distilled form, but doing so glosses over the fact that we usually thematize a small proportion of theworks and have no straightforward access to authors’ intentions. Although tied to conventions of genre, a complex textual work is also always the final product of a creative exercise in which ideas and experiences from a lived human context have been sublimated into verbal form. Registering the labors that go into writing and reading such works helps us see them as elements of scenes in motion rather than static representations of an unchanging world.