"Rencontre avic Aramech Dusdar" by Ali Amini and Farhad Farhadi, 2000 (Farsi with French subtitles)

Aramesh Dusdar

Aramesh Dustdar (born in Tehran) is an Iranian philosopher, writer, scholar and a former philosophy lecturer at Tehran University.Dustdar received a PhD degree in philosophy from University of Bonn. He is known in Iran as a secular Heideggerian philosopher (in contrast to Reza Davari Ardakani who is a religious Heideggerian philosopher). (From Wikipedia)


"[Aramesh Dusdar] belongs to the same generation of Tehran's academic "philosophers" in the early 1970's, people like Shayegan, Davari, Enayat, Nasr and a few minor figures around them, who were thinking within the same problematic discourse that Ahmad Fardid (via Al-e-Ahmad) laid its parameters out: the destiny of our culture against the onslaught of Western civilization; questions of History (capital H), faith, modern science and technology and what lays ahead, our future in the world. Aramesh Dustdar was the black sheep of the gang, the antichrist among the gatekeepers of Hekmat-e-Elaahi.

Then something strange happened which is not dissimilar to Germany in the 30s. Amazing parallels! History took a grave turn and everybody got caught up in its tremors. We don't get in to that story but one immediate result was a moratorium on thinking, the kind which had just started.

Regardless of what we think of these individuals and the weight and caliber of their thinking (I happen to think the majority were ersatz-philosophers), we should grant them that they were the first group of post-Mashrootiat intellectuals who could be called "thinkers" or "philosophers." All the others before them were Adeebs, Mohaghgheghs, encyclopedists and Alems, and of course a mass of journalists that we can loosely call our modern intelligentsia.

But among that crew of thinkers, Aramesh Dustdar was the oddball; he did not have the nativist peasant attitude sporting a tassbih, clearing his throat with verses of Hafiz (or hooey from Sepehri) every step of the way, and he certainly was not a dilettante-tourist-philoshophe with Parisian accent searching Illuminations from the East. He was a true German mandarin of strong atheistic stripes, a heavy-weight. And he was bent to grapple with all those mystifications generally known as farhang-e Irani-Islami. Only one person before him had done something similar, a serious wake-up call, little understood up until even today: a man named Ali Esfanidari, otherwise known as Nima Youshij." (From "Demanding criticism" by Abdee Kalantari)