“The best way to resist was intellectually. High security prisons are made to deconstruct your mind and make you realise what you think is wrong,” says the 59-year-old scholar, who started noting down his thoughts on the back of biscuit wrappers that he purchased from prison kiosks. “These were more like aphorisms. I had a limited intellectual space to work in. So I tried to make the most of it,”he says. For the first 50 days of his stay in prison, Jahanbegloo had limited access to books, except for the Quran (which he read five times over). Gradually, his wife was allowed visits, and Jahanbegloo was introduced to Gandhi, Nehru and Maulana Azad’s biographies, and German philosopher Hegel’s work. “Philosophy helped me greatly; it took my mind off reality. I was not only reading it but also pronouncing these abstract concepts out loud as if he (Hegel) was joining me in the cell. I tried not to make many judgements about Iranian prisons and prison life in my book, though I touched about the political context of Iran briefly,” he says. By the end of his prison term, Jahanbegloo had over 2,000 aphorisms. He published a work in Persian, titled A Mind in Winter in 2007, which documented some of these anecdotes. (Debesh Banerjee)
Posted on: Wed, 07 Jan 2015 01:56:03 +0000
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