Keynote: Sites of Secularity in Early 20th Century Iran

Nahid Mozaffari will deliver the keynote lecture on Sites of Secularity in Early 20th Century Iran - Major Shifts: Converting from the Religious to the Secular at the Research Workshop Conversions – Changing Sides: The Propagated, Visible, and Tacit in Society, Religion, and Discourses at LMU Munich 12 June 2018.

The workshop intends to facilitate scholarly exchange and a critical debate of ongoing research projects at the Institute for the Near and Middle East. It intends to offer participants the opportunity to discuss research projects, to broach and develop questions, theories, discourses, obstacles but also breakthroughs, insights and new directions. The framing of conversion not just in terms of religion or faith but as a change of sides in the broadest sense is a process or a situation that frequently emerges in the fields of researchers dealing with subjects related to the Near and Middle East as a concrete topic or indirect part of discourses, personal decisions, events, or conflicts. This may include such acts as religious conversion, switching a political party or ideology, changes of gender, apostasy, desertion, disavowals of faith or ideology, or public renunciations. This means, themes of this workshop do not revolve around religious conversions or changes of faith only, but aim to understand why and how the switching of sides in the broadest sense--historically, politically, religiously, culturally, scientifically as well as literarily, intellectually and ideologically--take place. Changeovers or conversions can be a personal, or private matter, they can have an open performative or propagandist character, both individually and on a societal level, or in networks or parts of a system. Part of the discussion is how discourses change, ideologies alter or tilt, how such changes, whether open, propagandist, performative or hidden, privately or unpronounced are implemented, and what consequences and effects are entailed by ‚turning coats‘.