Jorjani's Iran book: a Nietzschean reading of Iranian political theology, arguing the Islamic Republic is a failed synthesis and sketching a Promethean Iran, with an ethnographic trip through the country's occult underground.
Documented
The stated argument
Iranian Leviathan (Arktos, 2019) is the primary text: a history of Iranian political forms from Cyrus to the Islamic Republic, read through the Zarathushtrian revolution, the world's first apocalyptic dualism on the author's account, with the claim that Iran's imperial and messianic templates seeded both Western eschatology and modern totalitarian statecraft.
Assessment: Documented: the book and its argument. The Zoroastrian influence on apocalyptic literature is mainstream scholarship; the Promethean prescriptions are the author's program.
Stories
The occult fieldwork
The book's second half is documented travel: interviews with Iranian practitioners, sorcery markets, dervishes, the underground of a theocracy where the occult is prosecuted and ubiquitous. Whatever the philosophy, the fieldwork records a real stratum, esoteric practice surviving under, and through, a clerical state that officially denies it.
Assessment: Documented as the author's fieldwork account. The stratum it describes is corroborated by independent reporting on Iran's occult crackdowns.
Interesting claims
The mirror thesis
The critical reading: the book's Iran, light against darkness, empire as metaphysical vocation, is the author's own Promethean system wearing national dress, and its prescriptions, a technologically unleashed post-revolutionary Iran, read as self-portrait. Sympathetic reviewers called it visionary; detractors called it an ideology in search of a country.
Assessment: Interesting: both readings cite the same pages. The archive files the book under political theology and under autobiography, because it is both.
Sources and further reading
Jason Reza Jorjani, Iranian Leviathan: A Monumental History of Mithra's Abode, Arktos, 2019 (claim's primary text)
Mary Boyce, Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (the mainstream dualism scholarship)
Documented reporting on Iran's occult crackdowns and sorcery prosecutions (the fieldwork's corroboration)
Worth asking
When a philosopher reads his own nation as a metaphysical project, is it analysis or self-mythology?