Unknowing and the Everyday: Sufism and Knowledge in Iran, By Seema Golestaneh
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Seema Golestaneh’s Unknowing and the Everyday: Sufism and Knowledge in Iran is a beautifully written ethnographic study of Sufism in contemporary Iran. Sufis assert that Allah is unknowable because Allah is infinite. Golestaneh explores this epistemological conundrum by engaging various Sufi interlocutors, be they teachers or students, to process ways of knowing within Islamic mystical, particularly Sufi, traditions. This thoughtful study captures the complex lived realities of Sufis, particularly their ritual praxis, such as zekr (prayer of remembrance or recognition) or sama‘ (sacred audition) and the relationships between teacher (pir) and student (murid). The book focuses on the central conceptual paradigm of ma‘rifat, which Golestaneh has incisively translated as “unknowing.” From a Sufi perspective, this complicated concept renders any knowledge of the divine as ultimately limited, and it is from this unknowing state that one makes the effort to “know” the Divine, particularly through intellectual striving, such as hermeneutical interpretations of the Qur’an and literary or poetic traditions, or through ritual practice, such as via zekr, a process that aims to achieve “non-subjectivity.” It is such incisive articulations of classical Sufi concepts, such as ma‘rifat and fana (“an extinguishing of subjectivity”) that remain remarkable in this study (14). The sharply sensitive considerations of long-held Sufi theories, such as ma‘rifat as “unknowing” or the goal of zekr as a ritual step toward nonsubjectivity, is what must be praised of this book. Such penetrating translations of key Sufi concepts will invite welcome pause for any scholars of Sufism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".