Epilogue. The semiotics of Shiʿa absurdism

Summary

Let us consider them again: a technical manual describing the photologic mechanism of the Resurrection, a hyper-rationalised idea about the day of ʿAshura, a talismanic remedy, and an occultist oneiromantic vision. Through the lens of these cases, I went through a semiotically diverse series of narratives, ideas, images, and materialities. I traced in them a compulsion that despite the perpetuating failure to fulfil the intended signification continued to produce sense. The resurrection of deeds on the Judgement Day in and as the photographic image not only made sense for Meshkāt al-Molk but continues to do so for some Shiʿa Muslims today. Mollā Darbandi persisted in his claim about the length of ʿAshura day. Talismanic ingestion remained prevalent in the nineteenth century, and motifs of telecommunication and telepathy kept recurring in the Iranian collective imagination. In every instance, there are logics of mediation that fail to concretely signify meanings.

These recurrent logics should not be hastily interpreted and generalised as immutable essences in the Shiʿa culture. What I have termed absurdism should not be understood as an attribute that constitutes and defines any Muslim cultural identity, nor should it be understood as one. I have carefully avoided the trap of cultural essentialism in my analyses, in that I have refused to engage with Muslim identity formation, axiomatic belief systems, ethnicities, or Islamic fundamentalism, to name a few cliched ideas in cultural essentialism. I have not claimed to have found an unchanging characteristic in the Shiʿa culture that can be used as an identifying mark in all places and times. What I have rather recognised and conceptualised is a modality of thought, rather than an idea or an unchanging psychological attribute. The homologous absurdisms in the fields I have investigated are recurrences of that modality, not of any notion, ideology, or whatever essential form of thought explicitly articulated or believed in by Muslims. Of concern is a modality that can be traced in different contexts with related ramifications, which is obviously not a characteristic that defines an entire cultural past. This book has been a brief but serious engagement with different manifestations of absurdism in nineteenth-century Iran.