Bijan Abdolkarimi was born in Tehran in 1963. He studied philosophy at the University of Tehran, where he completed his undergraduate and master’s degrees, before pursuing a doctorate in Western philosophy at Aligarh Muslim University in India. His doctoral dissertation, completed in 2001, examined Kantian subjectivism from a Heideggerian perspective. He subsequently became an associate professor of philosophy at Islamic Azad University, North Tehran, where his teaching and research have focused principally on Heidegger, existential philosophy, political philosophy, culture, and postmodernism.

His books include Heidegger and Transcendence, Nietzscheian World and Us, Heidegger in Iran, We and Postmodernism, and works on Shariati, political philosophy, and Iranian intellectual history.

Heidegger and the Iranian experience

Abdolkarimi’s major study Heidegger in Iran emerged from a long research project examining the philosopher’s reception in Iran. The question was not simply when Heidegger was translated into Persian, but why his thought became so unusually influential among Iranian intellectuals. Abdolkarimi argues that Heidegger’s importance lies partly in the fact that he was simultaneously one of the most profound critics of Western civilization and a philosopher deeply concerned with the question of tradition. This combination made him particularly relevant to a society attempting to understand itself under the pressure of modernity.

For Abdolkarimi, Iran’s encounter with Heidegger belongs to a much larger historical confrontation between Eastern traditions and Western modernity. Iran had inherited a sophisticated philosophical, theological, and mystical tradition, but was increasingly confronted by modern science, technology, secular political institutions, and European intellectual categories. Heidegger offered Iranian thinkers a language with which to criticize modernity from within philosophy itself.

This explains why Abdolkarimi’s interpretation of Heidegger is not merely academic. Heidegger becomes a means of asking what it means for Iran to be modern without simply becoming a copy of the West.

Ahmad Fardid and the Iranian Heidegger

No discussion of Abdolkarimi’s intellectual genealogy can avoid Ahmad Fardid. Fardid was an Iranian philosopher who became one of the earliest and most influential interpreters of Heidegger in Iran. Abdolkarimi devoted his Heidegger in Iran to an investigation of Fardid’s life, works, and ideas, and explicitly describes Fardid as the first Iranian interpreter of Heidegger.

Yet Abdolkarimi’s relationship to Fardid is not simply one of discipleship. His interest is historical and philosophical: what did Fardid see in Heidegger, and why did his interpretation acquire such influence?

Abdolkarimi argues that Fardid’s spiritual interpretation of Heidegger should not automatically be dismissed as a distortion of the German philosopher. In his own account, there........

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