This lecture takes its title from a well known story of the 1979 revolution, when supporters claimed to see Ayatollah Khomeini's face in the moon. Abbas Suri & Benjamin Suri treat that image as a starting point for a larger argument about what they call the left, and how a political movement replaces an inherited identity with a constructed one.
The lecture summarizes the left in three moves. First, it argues, the left is hostile to history and to legend, and once it discards them it must fabricate a substitute narrative, reading the past through class struggle. Second, it wants to replace the historically formed reason a people inherits with a single abstract or calculating reason, a tendency the speakers associate with a rationalist reading of Kant. Third, it reduces all human problems to financial ones, which they illustrate with Khomeini's early promise of free water and electricity. Against this the lecture sets an Iranian identity it describes as thousands of years old, drawing on Edmund Burke's idea of a historical reason and on the qanat as an image of a civilization that built its own rivers.
Along the way the lecture characterizes named figures, including Ali Shariati, Jalal Al-e Ahmad, and the historian Ervand Abrahamian, as agents of this rewriting. Those characterizations are the speakers' own, and the transcript does not present those figures answering in their own words. It also reads the Constitutional and Mahsa movements as demands for freedom before equality.
Books and Thinkers Referenced
Abbas Suri & Benjamin Suri draw on the following thinkers and works across this lecture. Descriptions are ours, offered as a starting point for readers new to them.
Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant (1781): The lecture invokes this work as the major statement of the ahistorical, rationalist tendency it associates with the left, the drive to replace inherited historical reason with a single pure or calculating reason.
Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke (1790): Cited as the source of Burke's idea of a "historical reason," an inherited, functional reason grown out of a people's own past, which the lecture contrasts with a rootless reason it says the left tries to sell in its place.
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville (1835): The lecture draws on this work for the observation that Americans hold religious tendencies while also admiring prosperity, used to argue that Iranian tradition has likewise admired the prosperous and the well-off.
Immanuel Kant: German philosopher whose Critique of Pure Reason the lecture treats as the fullest expression of the rationalist, ahistorical outlook it critiques.
Edmund Burke: Writing at the time of the French Revolution, he is presented here as a defender of historical reason and inherited heritage against a reason stripped of history and identity.
Alexis de Tocqueville: The lecture attributes to him, writing around 1830, the claim that Islam is centered more on equality than on freedom, and uses this to argue that a society deriving its values from equality tends first to lose its freedom.
Karl Marx: Cited for the argument that ideology is a cover for class interests, which the lecture presents as the root of the leftist move to read all of history as class struggle and to treat inherited ideas as tools for keeping rulers in place.
Friedrich Nietzsche: Invoked for the claim that morality is a cover for the will to power, a formula the lecture says leftists apply to figures such as Cyrus to reduce their acts to the pursuit of power.
Ervand Abrahamian: Named as a historian who, in the speaker's characterization, rewrites Iranian history through the lens of class struggle, imposing a constructed narrative onto past events.
Ahmad Shamloo: Iranian poet whom the lecture describes, in the speaker's account, as reinterpreting the legend of Zahhak and Fereydun at UC Berkeley through a class lens, casting Zahhak as an uprising against a class structure.
Ali Shariati: Cited as an author whose work the lecture characterizes as selling lies and, in the case of Fatima is Fatima, as staging a rebellion against one's father and mother, an example of what the speaker calls the left's break with inherited identity.
Jalal Al-e Ahmad: Referenced through notes read during the lecture and through his work A Stone on a Grave, offered as an example of a writer who, the speaker argues, could not himself become the model he urged on the people.
Ayatollah Khomeini: Invoked through his arrival in Iran and his speech at Behesht-e Zahra, where his early promise to make water and electricity free is used to illustrate the reduction of all human problems to financial ones.
Touraj Daryaee: Named as director of Iranica and cited for his introduction to an Oxford history, where he describes India, Egypt, and Mesopotamia as water-based civilizations, a point the lecture uses to stress that Iran built its own rivers through qanats.
Cyrus: The founding Iranian king whose conquests, including in Mesopotamia, and whose respect for local gods the lecture cites as examples that leftists, in the speaker's account, reduce to a mere will to power.
Arthur Christensen: Referred to through a book on the bravery of Iranians, drawing on the account of a Buddhist traveler, used to argue for a continuous Iranian way of understanding the world.
