CERI & CRIS Joint Seminar

Tuesday, April 25th 2023, 12:30 pm - 2:30 pm
Sciences Po (27, rue Saint-Guillaume) - Room Goguel

Bringing the Social Back In: Secularization Under Theocracy in Iran

Abdie Kazemipur

Professor of sociology and the Chair of Ethnic Studies at the University of Calgary

Discussant: Riva Kastoryano  (Sciences Po - CERI, CNRS)

The bulk of the current discussions and debates on religion and secularity in the Muslim world, including in Iran, suffers from an array of conceptual confusion, historical amnesia, and analytical simplifications. This is partly the consequence of the dominance of highly politicized narratives and the Neo-Orientalist modes of thinking, in which ‘state’ and ‘ideas’ are treated as the main drivers of historical change, including changes related to religion.

In Sacred as Secular: Secularization under Theocracy in Iran (2022, McGill-Queen’s University Press), Abdolmohammad Kazemipur offers an alternative account. Relying on a wide range of empirical data and using a Durkheimian sociological perspective, Kazemipur demonstrates the various dimensions of a deep secularization that has been underway in Iran in the Islamic Republic era and discusses the implications of those trends for the global debates on religion and secularity in the Muslim world.

Registration is mandatory. thank you.

Abdolmohammad Kazemipur is a professor of sociology and Research Chair in Ethnic Studies at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, and the past president of Canadian Sociological Association.
He received his BA and MA in sociology from University of Tehran (Iran) and his Ph.D. from University of Manitoba (Canada).
Kazemipur has authored ten books and many journal articles and book chapters on his two principal research areas – socio-cultural trends in Iran, and socio-economic experiences of immigrants in Canada – writing in both English and Farsi.
His three most recent books on these topics include: What Went Wrong? On the Decline of Community in Iran (2023, Agar Publisher), Sacred as Secular: Secularization under Theocracy in Iran (2022, McGill-Queen’s University Press), and The Muslim Question in Canada: A Story of Segmented Integration (2014, University of British Columbia Press, the recipient of the 2015 book of the year award from Canadian Sociological Association). He is currently working on a new book manuscript on the international migration ecosystem, tentatively titled Homo Emigraturus.

To find out more:

• Book Overview, McGill-Queen's University Press
• Abdie Kazemipur Personal Website
• Abdie Kazemipur Academic Webpage, University of Calgary, Dpt. of Sociology