Neguin Yavari studied medieval history at Columbia University. Her latest book, The Future of Iran’s Past: Nizam al-Mulk Remembered is a biography of a prominent eleventh-century vizier. A past visiting scholar at the Oxford Nizami Ganjavi Centre, The University of Oxford, UK. she is currently at KFG “Multiple Secularities-Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities,” University of Leipzig.
What catalyzed the supra-confessional move in the post-Mongol Persophone zone, and what did it leave in place for the ideologues of Iran’s 1979 revolution—another watershed regularly misattributed to confessional tenets—to cultivate and propagate?