Larijani’s final dialogue

The Iranian writer Jafar Modarres Sadeghi opens his novel An Appointment in Aleppo (2004) with a line from the Persian poet Saadi of Shiraz, foretelling that the end of time will come ‘when strife breaks out in al-Sham [Syria]’. Sadeghi constructs a deliberately tangled plot in which a celebrated Sufi of the sixth Islamic century (the twelfth century AD) reappears in the body of a Pakistani militant who arrives in Damascus to rescue his disciple, detained by a Palestinian faction on charges of recruiting volunteers for jihad in Afghanistan.

On reaching the city, the militant, confronted by the ubiquitous portraits of Hafiz and Bashar al-Assad, begins to recall another life, in another body: a time when the ruler of these lands was Saladin, and his son al-Zahir Ghiyath al-Din governed Aleppo. The prince inclined towards the teachings of Shihab al-Din al-Suhrawardi and his philosophy of illumination, with its debts to the sages of ancient Persia. This provoked the hostility of Ash‘ari jurists, who turned Saladin against him. Suhrawardi was denounced as a heretic and condemned to death. According to the traditional accounts, he was confined in isolation, deprived of food and water, and died in the citadel of Aleppo at the age of thirty-six, in 1191 AD.

The semi-official Iranian website Jada greeted the novel with enthusiasm. Its administrators appear to have found in the book’s ideological suggestiveness – its weaving together of past and present – a value that outweighed the obscurity of its plot and the ambiguity of its intentions. What the novel offers, above all, is a framework for linking centuries of Islamic history, beginning with what the Egyptian writer Taha Hussein, followed by historians such as Hichem Djaït, called the ‘Great Fitna’. That foundational rupture has served as a reservoir whose details continue to accumulate, shaping the conflicts of Islamic history and thought: the rise and fall of empires, the proliferation of sectarian and philosophical schisms, and the entanglement of geography, religion and politics.

The modern period is not short of upheavals: the collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate, the ascendancy of Western powers, and, more recently, the cascading crises of the Middle East – the fall of the Assad regime, the wars in Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen and Iran, and the reverberations of the current American-Israeli confrontation with Iran across Syria and the wider region. These conflicts appear to reactivate ancient religious forms, from the Abrahamic traditions to Hinduism and Buddhism, even as they are conducted with the most advanced instruments of globalisation: artificial intelligence, sophisticated technologies, tunnels and hypersonic missiles. Eschatological ideologies and the rhetoric of holy war coexist with the apparatus of late modernity.

Sadeghi’s novel offers a vision of Syria suited to such an apocalyptic moment, in which long-accumulated ideological capital – grievances, hatreds, prophecies – is reactivated and recombined.

The idea of Suhrawardi returning in another body to avenge his death at Saladin’s hands recalls, in part, the Druze doctrine of transmigration, according to which the soul passes at death into a newly born human body. Death is not annihilation but a change of garments. It also evokes certain Alawite beliefs in the migration of souls, where impiety may be punished by rebirth in an animal, or even as inanimate matter, while the faithful may return in other human forms, across religious boundaries.

Yet in Sadeghi’s narrative this motif becomes one more element in an already convoluted design. The choice of a Sunni Muslim protagonist from Pakistan – with hints of affiliation to the Islamic State, thinly disguised as ‘the Renaissance Organisation’ – to embody the spirit of Suhrawardi, the Persian illuminationist, produces a layering of identities that is difficult to reconcile. Suhrawardi’s thought, as described in works such as Georges Tarabishi’s Dictionary of Philosophers, draws eclectically on Hermes, Plato and Zoroaster, a syncretism that finds echoes in certain Alawite doctrines, just as the Druze venerate Socrates. It is not hard to imagine that these tensions – doctrinal, historical, ideological – contribute to the protagonist’s ultimate destruction.

The strangeness of Sadeghi’s fiction has been heightened by a recent claim from the Russian thinker Alexander Dugin, who reported that he had engaged in a long philosophical conversation with Ali Larijani, the former head of Iran’s National Security Council, shortly before Larijani’s assassination by Israel. ‘It was not about Kant’, Dugin remarked – despite Larijani’s well-known writings on the German philosopher – ‘but about Suhrawardi, his theory of the Tenth Intellect, the imaginal world, and the archangel of purple light’. These are, of course, central concepts in Suhrawardi’s philosophy of illumination.

Dugin himself, a theorist of ‘neo-Eurasianism’ often associated with a strain of neo-fascist thought hostile to Enlightenment values, began his intellectual career in circles preoccupied with occultism, esotericism and the supernatural. Larijani’s engagement with Western philosophy has attracted attention from figures such as Slavoj Žižek and the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy. 

Yet Dugin’s account, if it is to be believed, suggests that there are other, more obscure dimensions to the intellectual world inhabited by Iranian thinkers – from Larijani himself to Sadeghi, whose novel begins as a tale of vengeance against Saladin (a figure viewed with particular hostility in some quarters for his overthrow of the Fatimid Caliphate), only to culminate in the unlikely embodiment of Suhrawardi in a Sunni extremist militant, a Pakistani who converses in English with Palestinian fighters in Damascus.

Is this transmigration, in the Druze sense, or a form of metamorphosis closer to Alawite belief? The question remains suspended.

What can be said with certainty is that, for Larijani, the end came in a manner not unlike the ‘end of time’ evoked in Sadeghi’s novel. It is conceivable that his contact with his Russian interlocutor – whose own daughter was killed in an attack apparently intended for him – formed one of the many threads that enabled Israel, whose prime minister appeals to evangelical supporters in the United States with promises of an imminent Second Coming, to trace and bring about that end.