Introduction

Summary

A little more than a month after Covid-19 was declared a pandemic, sometime in late April 2020, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in Iran claimed that its basiji scientists had invented an apparatus capable of detecting any person infected with the SARS-CoV-2 from a hundred-meter distance. Broadcast on state television, which started as per usual with the blessings on the Prophet Muḥammad, the device was showcased by Iranian top state officials. It looked like a medium-size saucepan equipped with an antenna of sorts. As they put it, this machine worked by emitting electromagnetic waves and was named Mostaʿān 110. The word mostaʿān means the one sought for help, which is used in the Qorʾān to refer to God. Also significant is that number 110 is the numerological equivalent of the abjad letters ʿ-l-y, the name of the first Shiʿa Imam, ʿAli Ebn-e Abi Ṭāleb (d. 661). Virology, electromagnetism, a Qorʾānic word and Shiʿa symbolism come together in perhaps one of the rare moments of Islamic science-fictional imagination.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, an anecdote appeared in one of the first historical works in the Persian language, The History of Iranians’ Awakening (Tārikh-e Bidāri-ye Irāniyān), in which a homology with the IRGC's broadcast of Mostaʿān 110 can be detected. The story is recounted by Nāẓem al-Eslām Kermāni (d. 1919) decades after the unsuccessful military reforms began in Iran sometime in the early nineteenth century. It is about a late mullah known as Āqā Sheykh ʿAli (d. 1900), who claimed to have been the inventor of a few “wondrous” technical objects. The story centres on how the mullah had given one of his inventions – a breech-loader firearm (tofang-e tah por) which would be loaded from the rear of the barrel – to the Qājār monarch, Nāṣer al-Din Shāh (r. 1848-1896) in person.

When he gave the breech-loader to Nāṣer al-Din Shāh, the Shāh did not understand [what it was] at first. So, the late mullah himself took the gun, loaded the bullet, and fired. [Upon seeing this,] the Shāh went into raptures and said, “this man has gone beyond Ebn-e Sinā (Avicenna)”.