Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at The University of Olivet
Author: dustinjbyrd
Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Olivet College;
Critical Theorist;
Founder and Editor-and-Chief of Ekpyrosis Press;
Editor-and-Chief of Islamic Perspective Journal
On December 7th, 2024, I had the wonderful opportunity to join Rudy Leal McCormack and Maior Levitin on “The Fromm Connection,” wherein we discussed a variety of topics as they related to my recent publication, “Can Religion be Rescued in the 21st Century: On Erich Fromm’s Religious Humanism in an Age of Authoritarian Populism” (Journal of Psychosocial Studies). I deeply appreciate their invitation to discuss Erich Fromm and his continual relevance to today’s society.
Ali Shariati: Critical Social Theory and the Struggle for Decolonization, edited by Dustin J. Byrd and Seyed Javad Miri
Ali Shariati (1933-1977) is best known as a “revolutionary theorist,” closely connected to Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979. While his social, political, and religious thought was deeply influential in those turbulent times, Shariati was much more than a political ideologue. A scholar of religion, philosophy, and sociology, Shariati was fluent both in Western and Islamic thought, which allowed him to create some of the most penetrating “critical” thought in the 20th century, applicable to both the West and the dār al-Islām. While he remains controversial inside his home country, his influence has grown beyond its borders. Today, contemporary theorists are returning to Shariati’s written works, seeing his voluminous writing as a precursor to the decolonization movement, which seeks to emancipate the non-Western world from the vestiges of Western colonial domination. In many ways, Shariati laid the foundation for such emancipatory work through his own struggle against the Shah of Iran and the clerical establishment that supported the status quo. This collection of essays returns to a variety of the Shariati’s core concepts, as it seeks to interrogate them, revitalize them, and engage our own age of strife through these Shariatian perspectives.
Contributors: Dustin J. Byrd, Seyed Javad Miri, Joseph Alagha, Esmaeil Zeiny, Vahideh Sadeghi, Bijan Abdolkarimi, Raewyn Connell, Carimo Mohomed, Tanveer Azamat, Teo Lee Ken, Milad Dokhanchi, Fatemeh Shayan, Ali S. Harfouch, M.S. Kolbadi, and Mohammad Masud Noruzi.
Available on the Ekpyrosis Press website: Ali Shariati
On Thursday, November 14th, 2024, I had the great pleasure of welcoming Dr. Rainer Funk into my course on Erich Fromm, “Visionary Thinkers: Freedom and Fear.” Dr. Funk spoke with my class via Zoom from Tübingen, Germany, where he is the Director of the Erich Fromm Institute, the Co-Director of the Erich Fromm Study Center at the International Psychoanalytic University (IPU) in Berlin, and a practicing psychoanalyst. He is Erich Fromm’s sole Literary Executor and among his publications are the 10-volume German edition of Erich Fromm Collected Works (1980 and 1981; expanded to 12-volumes in 1999). We were pleased to benefit from his knowledge of Erich Fromm and wisdom about the world.
My article “Syed Hussein Alatas and the ‘Captive Mind’: Decolonizing the Non-Western Psychoanalyst,” has now been published by the journal, Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society (Springer).
Abstract: This essay examines the work of Syed Hussein Alatas and his concept of the captive mind as it relates to psychoanalysis in the non-Western context. I argue that psychoanalysts have to go through a two-part process to decolonize psycho- analysis so as to avoid trapping analysts and analysands within the confines of the captive mind, as detailed in Syed Hussein Alatas’s many writings.
My dear brother and colleague, Seyed Javad Miri, and I had a wonderful opportunity to discuss Ali Shariati with Jacek Drozda, the host of the “Emancypacje” (Emancipation) podcast out of Warsaw, Poland. We discussed Shariati’s life, work, influence on the 1979 revolution in Iran, and most importantly, Ali Shariati’s Liberation Theology.
Here’s the introduction to the podcast: We begin our new mini-series “Liberation Theologies” where we look at the intersection of emancipatory politics and religion with an exciting conversation about Ali Shariati, a renowned Iranian revolutionary, sociologist, political theologian and theoretician. Our guests are two major specialists in this field: prof. Dustin J. Byrd (The University of Olivet) and prof. Seyedjavad Miri (Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies in Tehran). As regular collaborators they authored and edited several important books together, including “Ali Shariati and the Future of Social Theory: Religion, Revolution, and the Role of the Intellectual” (Brill, 2017). Take a deep dive into Shariati’s contribution to political philosophy and the Iranian Revolution the victory of which he did not live to see.
On October 26th, 2024, I had the pleasure of discussing a very contentious subject: “Women in Power: Gynocracy and Gynophobia,” with the critical theorist, Dr. Rudolf J. Siebert. November 2024 could see the election of the U.S.’s first woman president. Or, it could see the re-election of Donald J. Trump, who has not only a long record of misogyny and adultery, has also been adjudicated to have engaged in “sexual assault” against E. Jean Carroll, and has been accused of much more by many other women. The rise of women to powerful positions has caused a backlash in the “manosphere,” wherein many men, born of deep-seated insecurities and fears, are not prepared to see a women in the most powerful position in the world. Feeling emasculated, they have retreated into a juvenile form of masculinity, one that politicizes the historical gender antagonisms. Dr. Siebert and I believe it is important to work for a democratic relationship between genders, steered on the principle of equality, as opposed to one that privileges one gender over the other in the family, civil society, and the state. This discourse was sponsored by Ekpyrosis Press and the Institute for Critical Social Theory.
I’m pleased to announce that my latest article, entitled, “From ‘We want to destroy the regime’ to ‘We want to destroy the world order’: Russian Multipolarity and the Enlistment of the Post-Arab Spring Dār al-Islām,” has now been published. It was a part of a special issue on Contemporary Muslim Thought for the journal Philosophy and Society 35, no. 3 (University of Belgrade, Serbia). In the article, I discuss Putin’s (and Alexander Dugin’s) attempt to take advantage of the turmoil in the Muslim world, especially the Middle East, to enlist their support in Russia’s rightwing challenge to the American-led Neo-liberal “rules based order” and the dismal prospects of such a “multipolar” affront to unipolarity being effective.
I’m pleased to announce the new edited volume, The Many Faces of Populism: Perspectives from Critical Theory and Beyond, which I co-edited with Mlado Ivanovic and Jeremiah Morelock, will be released by Brill this coming December.
Contributors include: Dustin J. Byrd, Emília Barna and Ágnes Patakfalvi-Czirják, Ronald Beiner, Samir Gandesha, Yonathan Listik, Grigoris Markou, Jeremiah Morelock and Felipe Ziotti Narita, Maria Cristina Dancham Simões and Carlos Antonio Giovinazzo Júnior, and Hassan Zaheer.
On September 27, 2024, I had the wonderful opportunity to participate in the 2024 Courageous Leadership Colloquium for The University of Olivet. In my presentation, I spoke about the importance of disobedience, especially as it relates to being existentially free.
dustinjbyrd
Dustin J. Byrd, Ph.D. 