Modernity from Elsewhere: Psychoanalysis, Ethnography, and Speculative Horizons of Self-Assertion

Abstract

Hans Blumenberg famously defined the modern epoch as the age of self-assertion.1 He was writing after the Second World War in Germany and responding to a debate on the legitimacy of the modern age in the face of unprecedented crises. Blumenberg offered a critical theory of secularization that countered accounts such as that of Carl Schmitt, who attributed to modern political society a religious essence.2 Blumenberg considered different epochs to be constituted of distinct questions and answers. Echoing his contemporary Hannah Arendt, he suggested answering modern predicaments in reference to antecedent discourses is not only theoretically misguided but is also politically dangerous.3 It forecloses scientific debate and the ethical imagination in relation to uniquely modern questions. Aside from the essentialist representation of premodern traditions—characteristic of postcolonial nationalisms across civilizational divides—what significances do premodern traditions hold for the developments of the sciences and ethics of the modern self? Or are ancient traditions relics of an unenlightened past, only legible as objects of secular aesthetic appreciation?4What follows is a reflection on the ways premodern discourses are put in conversation with the debates of the modern self and society across three sites. I begin with Omnia El Shakry's theorization of the importance of premodern Islamic discourses for the development of Arab psychoanalytic thought, The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt, and Sarah Pinto's illustration of the significance of Hindu mythopoetics for an imaginative ethics of the self, The Doctor and Mrs. A.: Ethics and Counter-Ethics in an Indian Dream Analysis (henceforth The Doctor). The Arabic Freud and The Doctor, which belong to a familiar scholarly discourse in the United States, are exemplifications of the generative intellectual space of debate between historical-archival research and anthropological modes of problematization. El Shakry and Pinto draw on the capacities of psychoanalysis and ethnography as distinct modes of inquiry to transcend the representation of modern Egypt and India as nation-states among others, and to instead conceptualize them as deterritorialized and experimental terrains for philosophical speculation and the ethical imagination that, while historical, are irreducible to history as representation. In this imaginative terrain, they elaborate on the significance of premodern Islamic sciences and Hindu mythopoetics for sciences and ethics of the self.I then turn to Javad Tabatabai's writing on Ibn Khaldun's (d. 1406) “new science,” Ibn Khaldun and the Social Sciences (henceforth Ibn Khaldun), which offers an archaeological problematization of the postcolonial migration of scientific discourse from European to Middle Eastern formations of knowledge. Ibn Khaldun is in Persian and reflects the debates on sunnat (tradition) and tajadod (modernity) in postrevolutionary Iran that are the sites of my research on interrelated questions of translation and transmission of tradition. These debates, and Tabatabai's critical intervention in them, extend beyond the scholarly public that includes academics and Shi‘i seminarians to social and political activists. They reflect the interpretive exigences of Isalmic societies such as Iran where secular transformations that enable historical comparision, cultural translation, and social theorization are themselves contested. This is an intellectual and political space where human sciences are debated as part of the extractive economies of the West, as objectification of constitutive myths, beliefs, and transcendental realities of Iranians that parallels comodification of Iranian oil.5 Responding to this situation, Tabatabai's archaeological theorization of premodern traditions does not take the perspective of human sciences (including psychoanalysis and ethnography), as well as their institutional and geopolitical locations for granted. It therefore offers an opprotunity for defamiliarization and thus better understanding of Angolophone critical theorization of premodern traditions such as El Shakry's and Pinto's.El Shakry, Pinto, and Tabatabai all elaborate on the significance of premodern discourses for the epistemological and ethical development of the modern self. They break from conventional teleological imagination of both tradition and modernity, as well as the philosophical grounding of the human subject on either side of this divide. Instead, they theorize the epochal, or political-theological emergence of the modern self and society in history.6 However, as I will argue in closing, only Ibn Khaldun turns the distinction between the premodern and the modern debates into a historical problem, thereby transcending a seemingly ahistorical epistemological frame of legibility across epochal differences.For good reason, the conventional historiography of knowledge theorizes the emergence of modern discourses of the self and society within a narrative of colonial modernity. El Shakry's and Pinto's studies can be read as part of this paradigm. Their scholarly interlocutors are European-trained practitioners who lived through the political decolonization of Egypt and India and contributed to the representations of the self in the newly independent nations.However, El Shakry's and Pinto's studies traverse the epistemological limit of secular historiography that reduces premodern Islamic and Hindu discourses to an object of enlightened aesthetic appreciation, on the one hand, or a marker of nativism and sectarianism against “enlightened culture,” on the other. El Shakry and Pinto turn their respective study of psychoanalysis to an occasion for psychoanalytic readings of the archive and ethnographic writing of history. Weaving together psychoanalytic and ethnographic modes of reading and writing, they step outside the teleology of the self to account for the self's discontinuous emergence in history. In this opening, they suspend the reign of secular humanism and instead demonstrate the central significance of Islamic and Hindu discursive traditions for the political-theological genesis of the self.The Arabic Freud identifies the point de capiton (quilting or anchoring point) in Islamic thought that enabled the suturing of psychology and psychoanalysis to existing discursive formations in midcentury Egypt. “For Jacques Lacan,” El Shakry notes, “quilting points are signifiers around which dense webs of meaning converge, thereby providing ideological coherence to discursive formations.”7 In El Shakry's generative uptake of the concept, the suturing that ties the psychoanalytic self to time and place is shown to be a multivectoral process of translation and transmission across synchronic and diachronic coordinates. El Shakry simultaneously traverses the discursive and imaginative discontinuities between Europe and the Arabic Middle East and the historical gaps between the past and the future within the Middle East. The latter move renders The Arabic Freud more than a conventional history of the postcolonial reception of European discourses or of unidirectional migrations of discourses along North-South coordinates. Instead, El Shakry theorizes the translation of modern sciences across European and Middle Eastern formations of knowledge to be predicated on a transferential relation with Islamic discursive tradition.The quilting point of psychoanalysis in Egypt is ethnographically elaborated in the Cairene salon of Egyptian psychologist Yusuf Murad (1902–66). Friday mornings throughout the 1940s and ’50s, students and scholars would gather in Murad's house to debate the self. After training in philosophy at Fu'ad I University in Cairo, Murad had received a doctorate in psychology from the Sorbonne in Paris. He returned to Egypt for a career of teaching and publication that introduced students and the wider public to modern philosophy and the psychology of the self. Murad interpreted Freudian psychoanalysis as a synthesis of philosophical introspection, positivism, and phenomenology. He drew on the form and content of Islamic philosophy and mysticism to make legible, to himself and to his Arab audience, Freudian thought and to develop what he called an integrative psychology. For example, El Shakry highlights Murad's recourse to forms of analogical reasoning (istinbat) and intuitive inference (hads) endemic to Islamic pedagogy for the elaboration of psychoanalytic epistemology (30–33). Alternatively, she shows how the medieval discourse of firasa, concerned with discerning the unknown from the known, enabled Murad's translation of Gestalt psychology (33–36).The Arabic Freud establishes the significance of formal comparison with, and semantic expansion of, prepsychoanalytic Islamic discourses for the genesis of the psychoanalytic self in relation to representations of ethics, sexuality, and law in modern Arab discourses. While knotting the analytic, sexual, and juridical subject to Islamic discourses is said to provide ideological coherence to the former, El Shakry masterfully demonstrates the gradual development of science over time through accretion of shared references and emergence of scholarly debate. In debates over criminality, for example, later scholars criticized their predecessors’ interpretations of psychoanalytic theories and in so doing extended the breadth and rigor of Arabic psychoanalytic science.El Shakry locates Murad's salon at the center of a much larger Arab intellectual engagement with questions of selfhood and modernity. The participants, who were at the time in their twenties and thirties, would go on to become the critics, philosophers, academics, and statesmen who set the parameters of public debate and knowledge production across postcolonial Arab nations. At the same time, The Arabic Freud centers the practices of reading, interpretation, and translation of Islamic discourses of the past and modern European ones around two central questions, How can the scholar be a philosopher, and How can the teacher be a mentor? El Shakry thereby theorizes Arab modernity as a speculative and ethical striving that, while entangled with discourses of law and society of the modernizing nations, necessarily exceeded them. In psychoanalytic terms, she suggests the practices of Arab intellectuals have a positive relation to the drive, exceeding the economies of subjectivity, religion, politics, and so on, that have been the loci of both postcolonial politics in the Middle East and their debates within the Anglophone academy in the global North.Pinto's approach to the archive of the self in India is similarly psychoanalytic and ethnographic. The Doctor is based on the analysis of “The day-dream of Hindu socialism,” which was dreamed and documented in 1940s Punjab. On the eve of the partition of British India into the independent states of India and Pakistan, a young woman of twenty-one years from an urban, upper-class Hindu family leaned back into free association on the couch of the psychoanalyst Dev. Satya Nand. We know her as Mrs. A., as she appears in Satya Nand's Objective Method of Dream Interpretation: Derived from Researches in the Oriental Reminiscence State (1946 or 1947). At the time, Satya Nand was a young practitioner. He was trained as a physician at the University of Edinburgh and as a psychoanalyst under colonial analyst Owen Berkeley-Hill. In the same manner and during the same decades that El Shakry's interlocutor drew on intimate and distant discourses for elaborating the self, Satya Nand brought together Indian and modern sources to develop what Pinto describes as a scientific stance toward the world, “an ethic.”8 Throughout his life, he expansively explored the ethical self through literature, mythology, philosophy, sociology, and psychology and developed an experimental doctrine of neo-individualism that brought together Sigmund Freud, Ivan Pavlov, Carl Jung, Martin Heidegger, and the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita (14–15).Objective Method is Satya Nand's first book. Pinto makes clear that the term oriental in the full title of the book, much like the term Islam for Arab scholars of Freud, did not signify the provincial nature of his method but its universality. He conceived of his method as a scientific improvement on the analytic models of Freud and Jung. The Doctor somewhat backgrounds the status of psychoanalysis as a distinct science that enables Satya Nand to bring and weave together intimate and distant discourses in Objective Method. Instead, Pinto inhabits the psychoanalytic experiment as it opens to the layered times and an impersonal topography of the psyche and as it activates the work of the ethical imagination—Mrs. A.’s, the Doctor's, and ours.The Doctor is a masterful ethnography of the imagination that disrupts the secular hermeneutics of man, myth, and time. In the space of the case the times of past, present, and future fold onto one another and new futures are born out of reimagining the past. Mythical figures Draupadi, Shakuntala, and Ahalaya documented in the Mahabharata and Ramayana acquire an ethical reality in their capacity to guide Mrs. A.’s experimental attitude toward customary practices and norms of social and sexual conduct. The psychoanalytic orientation toward the unconscious keeps the affective and embodied tension between the actual and the possible within the diagnostic frame. Through her writerly craft, Pinto keeps this tension alive.Pinto develops the dream of “Hindu socialism” by following the interpretations of Satya Nand and Mrs. A., which are included in the case report, and by putting their interpretations in conversation with her own original research and problematization of ethics and gender as an American anthropologist with a long history of research in India. Pinto highlights the knots of marriage, sexuality, and gendered selfhood that tie Mrs. A. to time and place, and to India as an ethical community and a political promise. It also shows how Mrs. A. negotiates the unraveling of these knots and forges new ones in reference to social and mythical realities. Her marriage, for example, might be at risk due to absence of a child but the emerging nation demands feminine care. Drapuadi is her guide through limits of conjugality and the possibilities of singularity. In these intimate movements, both real and hypothetical, Pinto indirectly addresses the modulations of living traditions and predicaments of a new society as indexed by the dream of Hindu socialism.In a conversation with the anthropology of ordinary ethics, Pinto recognizes the ensemble of precepts, narratives, times, and ideas about justice, the good, and life more generally, which appear in the case as “ethics” (8).9 Following Mrs. A.’s relation to ethics, hitherto defined, Pinto distills an imaginative, experimental, and reflective approach that she theorizes as “counter-ethics.” The postscript to the book offers an account of counter-ethics that draws on Michael Warner's theorization of “counter-public” (180–82).10 In the anthropology of ethics, Charles Hirschkind has used the concept to theorize the discordant resonances of Islamic and modern political forms.11 Pinto, who does not address the question of politics directly, thinks with the concept to emphasize the limit of discursive economies of tradition and modernity and retheorize ordinary ethics beyond normativity and recognition. In this movement, Pinto's counter-ethics acquires a relation to the ethics of psychoanalysis as theorized by Jacques Lacan. In his seminar on ethics, Lacan elaborates on Freud's theorization of the work of death and the death drive in the animation of subjectivity. In ways that resonate with Pinto, Lacan foregrounds the intimate excesses of “the good,” which in Aristotelian and utilitarian traditions is conceptualized as the site of ethical engagement (181).12 Yet, Lacan identifies the beyond of symbolic economies of exchange and recognition, with risk of not just “dogmatism, failure, and contradiction,” which Pinto accounts for, but of an intimate and undialectizable confrontation with destruction and with what Lacanian psychoanalysis elaborates as the (political-theological) problem of evil.13Stefania Pandolfo's study of madness, Islam, and psychoanalysis demonstrates that the space of imagination and experimentation that lies beyond the ethical economies of conventional ways of being in the world is also a space of annihilation of the subject. She shows that madness and creativity are radically intertwined. Therefore, it is difficult to valorize experimentation, imagination, and particularly reflection in the theorization of (counter-)ethics. This is also why the presence of an analyst, or a speculative scholar who is also a spiritual guide in the terrain of the imagination, is crucial in navigating the times and topographies of the unconscious and imagination. To pose ethnographic (counter-)ethics of experimentation, imagination, and reflection against anthropology's turn to virtue ethics risks turning experimentation, imagination, and reflection into anthropological virtues. In the case of Mrs. A., the projection of anthropological counter-ethics risks conceptually erasing the scholar and the ethical guide in the room (Satya Nand) and replacing him with a virtuous anthropologist.Scholars can be virtuous. In The Arabic Freud, we might identify the open-ended nature of the effort of Arab scholars of the self to be premised on a speculative scholarly ethics that traverses the limit of inherited discourses and occupies the threshold of the new. This ethics can be said to transcend discursive differences and be grounded in what Walter Benjamin theorizes as the immediate communicability (Mitteilbarkeit) and translatability characteristic of any languages or discourse.14 This is how I interpret the ethics associated with the Shi‘i practice of ijtehad (Arabic: ijtihad, learned judgment), where a learned scholar draws on revealed textuality, scholarly consensus, and reason to provide an authoritative answer to an unprecedented question. Ijtehad can be understood as a speculative and experimental ethics because absolute knowledge is impossible for the human as a finite being. Ijtehad is therefore premised on imaginative and speculative (from Latin specere, to look at, view) activity of reasoning for what can only be a tentative approximation of absolute knowledge.What would it mean to write speculatively without taking for granted the discursive organization of human sciences including ethnography and psychoanalysis? What possibilities exist for speculative thinking across discernable discourses of knowledge that does not reify the rationality of one while exploring the other?Tabatabai's Ibn Khaldun was first published in 1995 in Iran, over two decades after the 1979 revolution and the establishment of a self-proclaimed modern Islamic state, an “Islamic Republic.” A third revision and fifth printing of the text is forthcoming in Tehran. Tabatabai (b. 1945) was educated in Islamic philosophy, Persian literary and ethical genres, and law in Shi‘i seminaries and Iran's nascent academy prior to the revolution. At the time of the event, he was completing his doctorate at the Sorbonne on German idealism under the supervision of François Châtelet. In the last three decades his writing on Iran, Islam, constitutionalism, the university, and modernity more generally has emerged as a key reference of Iranian debates. This is a context where texts, theories, and methods of human sciences and social inquiry are condemned by some as agents of cultural imperialism and ethical decay and celebrated by others as a form of resistance to authoritarianism and fundamentalism.15 Some, including seminarians and bureaucrats who set the agenda of education and research across Iranian universities, see the need to Islamicize (islami-sazi) and indigenize (boomi-sazi) Iran's modern education. Others, including popular intellectuals, see religion as the antithesis to thinking itself.Reckoning with this unprecedented situation, Tabatabai turns to Ibn Khaldun, who in the late fourteenth century announced the discovery of hitherto unprecedented social science (‘ilm al'umran, the science of civilization). Ever since its discovery and popularization by French colonial scholars, Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddima (lit., Prolegomenon) has been read within a predominantly synchronic frame of “Islamic” and more recently “decolonial” social sciences. Anthropological readings of Ibn Khaldun continue this trend while historical readings of the text, such as Muhsin Mahdi's important book Ibn Khaldun's Philosophy of History, rightly situate him within the Platonic and Aristotelian coordinates of medieval philosophy.16 Tabatabai breaks with both these tendencies in an archaeological study that situates the Muqaddima in the divergent, discontinuous, and yet interrelated history of philosophy across Islamic and Christian civilizations.Tabatabai sets Ibn Khaldun's “social” science in the epistemic world of the Islamic West, the cultural space between Arab Spain on the margins of Latin Christendom and Iran in the Persianate East. It theorizes Ibn Khaldun's effort as an early attempt, prior to the Enlightenment, to establish an epistemological break from the coordinate of inherited sciences of law, philosophy, and theology as well as the mirror of the prince genre of the Islamic West and elaborate on phenomena from an epistemological standpoint of an unprecedented science. While framing this effort as an instance of what European historiography debates as the quarrel between the ancients and moderns, Tabatabai argues that Ibn Khaldun's discourse does not entirely break with earlier epistemologies and does not carve out a new science from the matrix of inherited traditions. Chapters of the book demonstrate this thesis by elaborating on the theoretical foundation of “social” thought at the time of Ibn Khaldun, theoretical foundations of modern social sciences, and by locating Ibn Khaldun's writing on justice, wealth, and economy in an epistemological in-between of the two.Tabatabai's approach to the Muqaddima is part of a more general problematization of “tradition” within the Islamic civilization. This method complements the genealogical theorization of the “condition of possibility” of modern sciences of man and society with a novel archaeological approach that Tabatabai theorizes as the “condition of im-possibility” (sharayet-e emtena’). The condition of im-possibility refers to speculative attempts that do not lead to generative quarrels with the ancients or epistemological ruptures pregnant with the political-theological birth of new discourses. On the one hand, it is in conversation with French historical epistemology, the writings of Gaston Bachelard, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault and, on the other, with German debates on secularization and political theology among Blumenberg, Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Jürgen Habermas that Tabatabai translates to reflect on tradition and modernity in Iran. Tabatabai puts forth the condition of im-possibility as a critical theory of a discourse that unfolds beyond the epistemological limits of tradition and, consequently, outside the horizon of knowledge. It is an epistemological theorization of a historical situation where modern social and human sciences emerge by the way of the unidirectional colonial and postcolonial migration of discourse, and in an epistemological and institutional gap with inherited traditions of knowledge. In this situation, Tabatabai highlights the significance of the reactivation of Ibn Khaldun's critical reckoning with the limit of inherited tradition and his attempt to elaborate on historical and social phenomena within the coordinates of a yet-unborn “new” science.In bringing together El Shakry's and Pinto's contributions with Tabatabai's, my aim is not to elide the differences that animate the three texts. Indeed, I have sought to highlight how the interrelated linguistic, cultural, and historical difference, as well as anonymous and impersonal demands internal to different languages, cultures, and histories, manifest in the three thinkers’ respective problematization of “tradition.”In contrast to El Shakry's and Pinto's ethnographic and psychoanalytic translations, Tabatabai is skeptical of the capacity of human sciences to transcend their philosophical and epistemological perspectivism and accounts for the epochal (or political-theological) genesis of modern self and society. In conversation with Foucault, he points to the distinct analytic of the human that emerged in the Enlightenment and conceives of the human as both the finite being of the empirical sciences and the transcendental condition of the possibility of modern knowing.17 This event, which emerges in a particular time and place to enable the universal consciousness of historiography, inscribes the limit of human cognition as the shadow cast on the entire field of historical knowledge. Knowledge, for the first time in the history of knowing, comes to acquire what Foucault describes as a historical and cultural unconscious. Human sciences can inquire about their own diachronic and synchronic specificity and provincialize their own self-assertion. This is what the “counter-sciences” psychoanalysis, ethnology, and linguistics come to do.18 They each push back against the self-assured self-assertion of the human sciences in ways that correspond to their respective position and function within the modern episteme.Psychoanalysis turns to death, desire, and the law as the condition of possibility of signification, rules, and normativity, unlike the human sciences, which, even while turning back towards the unconscious, always remain within the space of the representable, psycho-analysis advances and leaps over representation, overflows it on the side of finitude, and thus reveals, where one had expected functions bearing their norms, conflicts burdened with rules, and signification forming a system, the simple fact that it is possible for there to be a system (therefore signification), rule (therefore conflict), norm (therefore function). 19Ethnology, on the other hand, “suspends the long ‘chronological’ discourse by means of which we try to reflect our own cultures within itself, and instead it reveals synchronological correlation in other cultural forms.”20 Along with psychoanalysis, ethnology forms “an undoubted and inexhaustible treasure-hoard of experiences and concepts, and above all a perpetual principle of dissatisfaction, of calling into question, of criticism and contestation of what may seem, in other respects, to be established.”21 Psychoanalysis allows El Shakry and Pinto to leap beyond modern economies of representation and recognition (colonialism, virtue ethics, etc.) and relate their analyses of knowledge and ethics to the excess that Freudian psychoanalysis conceptualized in the language of the drive.But the psychoanalytic and ethnographic pushback against the one-sided operation of the human sciences and social theory that has come to define the raison d’être of the discipline of anthropology can only occur through the reification of the historical-epistemological event that occupies the center of the debates on secularization. This is the “absolutely singular event” that encompasses not only the historicity of modernity (“our historicity”) but also that of “all men who can constitute the object of an ethnology,” enabling modernity (“our culture”) to relate to “other cultures in a mode of pure theory.”22 In reacting against the human sciences toward its deprovincialization, the counter-sciences unwittingly naturalize a provincial representation of this event.23 In El Shakry's and Pinto's accounts, this epochal shift manifests as the fact of epistemological hybridity and the heterogeneity of time in ethnographic and psychoanalytic frames. We can observe social and psychological facts of singularity, hybridity, and heterogeneity to be true only because social and psychological sciences are unquestionably established.Tabatabai draws on the capacities of critical thinking to theorize a priori historical-epistemological condition of hybridization as tajaddod (modernity). Ibn Khaldun centrally relates what El Shakry and Pinto explicitly or implicitly theorize as hybridization to both the one-way flow of scientific discourse from centers of modern knowledge in Europe to postcolonial societies, and the revolutionary contestation of hybridization by secularist and Islamic movements such as those in Iran today. By turning the periodization of tradition (premodern vs. modern) into a historical problem, he powerfully and explicity relates his analysis to contestations over modernity and tradition by scholars and activists alike. Drawing on the Islamic vocabularies of speculative thought, Tabatabai argues that an ijtehad on this historical-epistemological situation, which traverses the horizon of political decolonization, is necessary. Therefore, to genealogical and postcolonial theorizations of modern discourses of self and society, he adds a critical theorization of the epistemological limit of inherited tradition. I consider his critical enterprise speculative and ethically minded, because the practice of ijtehad, not unlike critique, draws on textual sources, scholarly consensus, and reason to provide an authoritative answer to an unprecedented and practical question. Like Arab scholars of Freud and the analysand in The Doctor, it makes space for the new by reimagining the old.Perhaps it can be said that, with El Shakry and Pinto, Tabatabai emphasizes the Kantian insight into the categorical structuring of experience that is central to Foucault's discontinuous historiography of modern knowledge and to psychoanalysis and anthropology as modern sciences of the self and the other. Accordingly, the three thinkers’ historiography of modernity can be characterized in contrast to G. W. F. Hegel's. Yet, Tabatabai puts pressure on the Foucauldian tendency to define the subject (of pleasure, ethics, and freedom) primarily in relation to him- or herself. Instead, he activates the opposing tendency in Foucault to undo the distinction between the subject of understanding and the moral subject in Immanuel Kant's philosophy and further emphasizes untranslatibility and conflict in the field of intersubjectivity and hybridization. Philosophically speaking, Tabatabai occupies the space between Kant and Hegel that Foucault himself occupied and is often settled on the side of secular modernity when ethics and religion are affirmed as morality or knowledge of the self. Accordingly, Tabatabai's practice of ijtehad, unlike that of modernist and orientalist renderings of Islam, is not opposed to taqlid, or the practice of emulation of authoritative conduct that is understood to constitute the ethical community. In line with the classical synthesis of ijtehad and taqlid in Shiism, it is speculative without divorcing ethics from politics in the face of a novel circumstance (modernity).24Ibn Khaldun offers a critical theory of the territorialized and racial view of religion and science that informs the ongoing state-sponsored projects of the “Islamicization” and “indigenization” of European discourses of science in Iran. In a regional conjuncture where both secularist and Islamist revolutionary activism risks furthering authoritarianism as in Egypt and Morocco, or military interventions and civil wars as in Syria and Libya, Tabatabai pessimistically elaborates on the epistemological condition that precedes and limits seemingly alternative sociopolitical projects. I suggest that in the Euro-American context, it serves as a critical engagement with positivist historiography and anthropology of the Islamic and non-European societies more generally that elide the epistemological crises, continuities, and gaps internal to those histories and exceed the dialectics of colonialism. In this, Ibn Khaldun is resonant with El Shakry's and Pinto's efforts to shift the horizon of speculative thought and ethical imagination to Arab modernity and Indian history and account for political-theological genesis of modernity elsewhere. It echoes their call for facing the new, complementing it with an invitation to not take for granted modern sciences of the self and society—to really speculate.