Siberian Letters

About the Book

The essays before you are called Siberian Letters due to the fact that I have edited or written them while I have been in Siberia in the same city where Decemberists were exiled during 19th century in Imperial Russia. Another reason is the symbolism Siberia represents within the popular imagination as in terms of geographic location Siberia seems to be the end of the World or the Coldest place on the planet. This geographic remoteness is couched with a majestic detachment which only hermits could aspire too and this, in other words, means a sense of objectivity which is not divorced from the objective or telos of the existence as enshrined in the shrine of human soul and elegantly expressed by languages of the Holy in various religious scriptures of the Sacred. Of course we should distinguish between modernist objectivity and intelligible objectivity as the former is devoid of objective in eschatological sense while the latter is what it is due to the principles of the essential significance and aesthetically expressed in the metaphysics of religious philosophies of the sacred traditions. The question of religious reflection is one of the most pressing issues currently and globally as religious intellectuals across the globe have come to some intelligible agreement about their possible role and the place of Sacred Tradition in the constitution of society and self in their most deepest sense. Since the emergence of secularism as a social program and atheism as a cultural mode of being in Western Europe and America there arose a fundamentalist animosity towards religion (s), which continues to this very day in various forms and shapes. What is called modernity within social sciences and philosophy could not be understood if one does not take into account this incessant adversary against ‘transcendence’ by those so-called the Fathers of modern disciplinary thoughts. It is true that the shallowness of this naïve animosity towards religious intelligibility has come to prove false to the noble intellectuals across the globe but the danger lies in another front today. People, who put their hope and aspirations in Science became disillusioned by their new idol and instead have fallen to a hedonistic mode of being, which is far more dangerous than idolatry of science. The global condition of our present time poses challenges as well as opportunities to religious thinkers of various branches of the tree of the Sacred Tradition. We, as religious thinkers, should realize that any religious tradition is composed of three levels of complexities and one should not identify the goal of religion with any of these particular levels but with the fruit of religiosity, which is not but ‘M’arifat’ or ‘Gnosis’ and ‘Irfan’, as Imam Rida rightly put it.

About the Author

Seyed Javad Miri graduated from Goteborg University in Sweden and got his doctor degree from Bristol University in England and has been a Visiting Professor in England, China and Russia at the departments of Philosophy, Sociology and Social Anthropology respectively and he has been working on the relation between social theory, religion and philosophy and soon shall move to Sharif University in Iran.