Guest post by Inshah Malik
Iran is politically and economically isolated and in that isolation, to call it an experiment of nation building is misleading, but nevertheless, it is an on-going exercise. Under the crippling sanctions, the party is still on!

I don’t have the usual agenda to visit Iran. I’m not an intrepid western traveler barging into the forbidden land, to explore my political other. My two year journey within Iran is a certain sojourn necessitated by my consistent desire to unravel the personal and political meaning of my existence. As a Kashmiri scholar burdened by a political inheritance of the prolonged Kashmir conflict, I seek to unearth the connection between Kashmir and Iran. This connection, as I understand now, is not simply political, in that both places are Muslim dominated, but more spiritual. It is in the erasure and random references to Kashmir in Farsi through which I attempt to understand the crisis of a Muslim consciousness entwined with the political domination of an imperial world order.

I encounter Kashmir as a meaningful reference in the poetry of Iran’s national poet, Hafiz Continue reading In the Forbidden Land of Iran – the past, survival and imperial nostalgia: Inshah Malik →