Every once in a while, one comes across a book in which a singular decision on translation exposes the author's poetic gift. For those with a passing acquaintance with Sufism—the mystic orientation in Islam that subsequently developed into more institutionalized Sufi “orders”—the term maʿrifat refers to a special mode of knowing often glossed as “gnosis” in Western academic parlance. Derived from Arabic, the word in Persian simply means knowing or knowledge, and by extension, wisdom (ḥikmat) or even “traditional heritage” (turās-i taqlīdī). In Seema Golestaneh's intricately woven sufrih of a book, titled Unknowing and the Everyday: Sufism and Knowledge in Iran, the author makes a consequential decision to translate maʿrifat not as gnosis or knowledge, but as “unknowing.” “We might posit non-knowledge not as a form of antiknowledge or metaknowledge but rather as an awareness of that which we do not know, an engaged awareness that we know nothing” (p. 4, emphasis original). So claims Golestaneh in the introduction of the book.

Just as “unlearning” in our humanistic academy implies not so much a refusal to learn as a deep commitment to an epistemological as well as ontological refashioning of one's world to expose the injustices that underpin earlier forms of knowledge, so is maʿrifat a call to a paradigm of knowing in which knowing that one knows not is the critical condition for any worthy advancement on the spiritual and intellectual path toward the divine. To demonstrate the significance of this point, Golestaneh draws on four ethnographic case studies in which she “trace[s] the affective and sensory dimensions of maʿrifat as it influences the mystics’ understanding of text and authority (chapter 2), the self (chapter 3), memory (chapter 4), and place (chapter 5)” (p. 5). In the inaugural chapter she walks the reader through the entanglement of Sufism with the modern history of Iran, from Ruhollah Khomeini's training in Sufism to the continual grip of tasavvuf on eminent Iranian clerics.

Of particular interest in this first chapter is Golestaneh's disambiguation of three key terms at times used interchangeably to refer to Sufism: namely, irfan, tasavvuf, and sufigari. Irfan is a kindred term to maʿrifat, tasavvuf is an Arabic term formed as the gerund (masḍar) of the verb taṣawwafa, meaning “to be a Sufi” or literally, “to be wearing wool” (the word ṣufī is but a later derivation from taṣawwuf), and sufigari is a still later Persian creation. Sufigar means, quite literally, “a person doing what the Sufis do,” and sufigari, in a somewhat tautological manner, refers to “the thing that a person doing what the Sufis do does.” The tautology already gives the word a somewhat pejorative air, as is so often the case in the circle of Iranian theologians critical of what they consider the disreputable practices of wandering Sufis (e.g., “idleness,” “opium smoking,” and “begging”; p. 33). Although Chapter 1 also includes an introduction of the Nimatullahi Order among whose loosely affiliated members the author carried out her fieldwork, this institutional identity seems somewhat tangential, if at all relevant, to the ethnography and the main argument of the book.

Those familiar with classical Islamic scholarship will know the weight of textual hermeneutics in this tradition; regardless of one's speciality a student will first have to be something of a minor philologist before advancing to the next level. In Chapter 2, Golestaneh demonstrates how the interpretation of poetic texts constitutes a major site for knowledgeable shaykhs to deny (thereby unknowing) their own authority and give way, now to the intuition of the inner heart (qalb), now to the ultimate openness and impenetrability of poetry. The author here draws extensively from the transcript of the interviews she carried out with two shaykh interlocutors, a practice that greatly befits the argument she tries to make, for is not dialogic pedagogy the very method that defines the philosophical approach linking the Iranian shaykhs to their Arabic and Greek predecessors of earlier times? If Chapter 2 is about the unknowing of authority, in Chapter 3 Golestaneh moves on to examine how the self and the body are annihilated (fanā), or rendered unknown, through popular zikr rituals (remembrance of God). This chapter shares with Chapter 4, “Unknowing of Memory,” attention to a tension that perhaps many ordinary Sufi followers, past and present, would have to grapple with in their spiritual pursuit: to what extent is their attempt to annihilate the self and dissolve themselves in the oneness of God only an escapist evasion of worldly worries? Or do the two at all contradict?

Following this same train of thought, in Chapter 4 Golestaneh describes a remarkable act of active forgetting after the municipal government of Isfahan demolished a shrine for Sufi gathering at Takhteh-Foulad (the steel throne), an open-air cemetery at the heart of the city. Although some Sufis continue to lament the destruction, others seem to have embarked on a journey of willful amnesia. The way this amnesia manifests itself is worth noting. “No, you must be mistaken. There was no tomb there,” one said when being interviewed (p. 149). Another stated, point-blank, that “there was never any building in Takhteh-Foulad” (p. 149). By Golestaneh's own admission these are awkward moments in fieldwork. They are moments of arrest in the sense of hindering further inquiries, but also, by not offering a verbal explication, the interlocutors leave space for contending conjectures, all equally plausible: Did the anthropologist use the wrong word to refer to the demolished building and cause confusion by doing so? Are the Sufis in question so traumatized by the experience their minds have blocked out the memories altogether? Or have they been so terrorized they feel uncomfortable sharing their thoughts with an outsider anthropologist? Or, perhaps, as Golestaneh argues in the book, they are involved in an act of resistance in which, by deliberately forgetting and thereby overcoming the trauma, they are able to rebuild a continuity on the spiritual level in which the razing of a material shrine in no way interrupts their mystical pursuit. All of these are conceivable scenarios, and all of them may have been present simultaneously among the Sufis involved.

In the last chapter, Golestaneh turns her attention to the use of sound among young Sufis. With characteristic subtlety and the tenderness of a poet she describes how the hosts of a Sufi gathering gently tap on a daf (frame drum) to produce music just loud enough to guide interested participants to their destination without soliciting excessive attention from other passersby, or unwanted interference from the government. The gentle rhythm acts like the wafting scent of incense to draw the seekers of mystical truth to the warm embrace of poetry and zikr. Golestaneh's writing throughout the book is lucid and effective, frequently poetic. The book is heavily descriptive and does a wonderful job dissecting the nuances of the many interviews it cites. Unknowing and the Everyday is a solid piece of scholarship; it also can be considered a beautifully crafted memoir of a wandering Sufi of an academic, lost in the charmingly mystical landscape of contemporary Isfahan.