Amin Ghodratzadeh is a PhD candidate for the ERC Advanced Grant: “Beyond Sharia: The Role of Sufism in Shaping Islam,” focused on the project: Wise Fools and the Interrogation of God. This project studies the origin, ideology and representations of the ‘wise insane’ in Iran, Central Asia, Syria and Egypt between the 9th and 12th centuries, as possible precursors of qalandars. They were a prominent ‘social type’ in Islamic urban culture. The mainstream religious schools at the time remained within a fairly well-defined orthodoxy, but the “wise lunatics” show us what was happening on the fringes and periphery of religious and philosophical thought. These “wise lunatics” violated every conceivable social norm, but they were tolerated and even admired. They were not expected to abide by the law or customary rules. Having completely renounced the secular, they were deemed to be involved in fundamental questions concerning Islam’s holiest tenets, including God’s justice, benevolence and compassion, as well as the afterlife. To understand the development of the phenomenon of wise insane, Amin will study a wide variety of sources, ranging from literary sources to philosophical, ethical and religious books.
Amin is very interested in Islamic mystical philosophy, Persian poetry and philosophical sources.
Source: Utrecht University. https://www.uu.nl/medewerkers/AGhodratzadeh/Profiel
