by HAMID DABASHI
Hamid Dabashi is an Iranian-American professor at Columbia University. He has authored more than 20 books and has expertise in subject areas including Iran, US foreign policy, the Middle East, identity politics and empire.
Dabashi grew up in Ahvaz in Iran, moved to Tehran in the 1970s and then relocated to the USA with his family in 1976.
In this interview he speaks about what life was like growing up in an Iran that was ruled by the CIA-backed shah and what it was like experiencing the Iranian revolution from afar, seeing the repressive regime of the Shah being replaced by a repressive theocracy.
Dabashi then touches on confronting the US empire and white supremacy as a brown-skinned Muslim in a period when the US has been engaged in wars in Arab and Muslim lands.
He recollects his long-standing friendship with the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said and how they as faculty of Columbia University along with other colleagues planted seeds that have blossomed into what have become solidarity protests with the Palestinian national cause on Columbia’s campus, which he describes as a “glorious sight”.
Dabashi believes that zionism, white supremacy and any other settler colonial ideology will inevitably be doomed.
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