A possible perfection

Abstract

AbstractAmong my interlocutors in Mashhad, Iran's second‐largest city, were individuals who repeatedly claimed that some persons, philosophies, and ethical lives not only might be but actually were perfect (kāmel). The salavāt, a polyvalent blessing upon the Prophet and his descendants, evinces this. By evoking a unified, authoritative, egalitarian moment, reoriented in praise of perfect religious exemplars, the salavāt provides a sonic mechanism that manifests a utopian public of Republican ambition. This acoustic form, and the perfect Islamist public that it creates, prompts an analysis that rethinks existing inquiry, which typifies moral lives as principally shaped by fracture. It calls instead for an examination that recognizes questions of ethics as potentially inflected by a utopianism, the legacies of which refract through societies for fleeting but powerfully sensed moments.