What Empire Cannot Erase: Fatemeh Keshavarz-Karamustafa, Omid Safi & Mays Imad

Persian Poetry, Radical Love, and the Soul of Iran

“The path to God goes through that most difficult of beings, the human being.”

– Omid Safi

Recorded live at a SAND Community Gathering (April 2026). Watch the full conversation on the SAND Website.

We are watching, once again, what empire does: not only to bodies, but to the long memory of a people; to the libraries and sacred sites; to art, language, and the ruins that hold the oldest threads of human spiritual inquiry.

We are thinking of the civilization that gave us Rumi, Hafez, Omar Khayyam, Forough Farrokhzad — mystics and rebels and lovers of paradox who understood something about the human soul that we are still, centuries later, trying to catch up to.

This gathering invited us to come together: to read poetry aloud, to hear from Iranian voices, to sit with grief and beauty together rather than alone.

We work with political and moral vocabulary shaped by Iranian thinkers such as Ali Shariati, who wrote against domination, spiritual emptiness, and the violence of imposed power.

We make space for what doesn’t fit into headlines or talking points—the complexity of empire, the difference between a government and its people, the authoritarian forces at work not only abroad but here at home. We also gather with the political inheritance of those who taught generations to resist domination and spiritual emptiness, including Ali Shariati.

Guests

Omid Safi is a scholar of the Islamic mystical tradition and professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University. He is the author of Memories of Muhammad and Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition, and teaches online courses on Muslim mysticism. He leads contemplative journeys to Turkey, Morocco, and Mecca/Medina through Illuminated Courses.

Fatemeh Keshavarz is the Roshan Institute Chair in Persian Language and Literature and Director of the Roshan Institute Center for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland. A poet in Persian and English, she is the author of Reading Mystical Lyric, Recite in the Name of the Red Rose, Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran, and Lyrics of Life: Sa'di on Love, Cosmopolitanism and Care of the Self. She has spoken at the UN General Assembly and received the Peabody Award for her NPR program on Rumi.

Mays Imad, PhD (facilitator) is a neuroscientist, educator, and associate professor at Connecticut College whose work bridges neuroscience, philosophy, and education. An Iraqi immigrant who lived through wars and displacement, she brings both personal and scholarly depth to the themes of trauma, remembrance, and repair through the embodied nervous system.

Timestamps

00:00 — Welcome & framing

00:02 — Mays Imad opens: grief, urgency, and love

00:06 — Introducing Omid Safi & Fatemeh Keshavarz

00:07 — Saadi, Rumi, and the Persian tradition

00:12 — The war on Iran: what is being destroyed

00:21 — Don't bypass grief — the Persian mystics knew this

00:27 — Saadi on truth, power, and interconnection

00:32 — Fatemeh: togetherness, invisibilization, and Iranian resilience

00:38 — Poetry as the Silk Road of imagination

00:52 — War's corruption of language — and poetry as antidote

01:04 — Remembrance as ethical act

01:10 — Intergenerational love & closing

Resources & Links

Omid Safi

Illuminated Courses — books, podcast, courses, tours

Duke University faculty page

Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition — Yale University Press

Memories of Muhammad: Why the Prophet Matters — HarperOne

Podcast: Sufi Heart — Be Here Now Network

The Heart of Rumi's Poetry — online course

Upcoming events:

Evening workshop in London, May 5th — "Islamic Spirituality in an Age of Conflict"

Contemplative journey to Turkey, June 1–12

Rumi Retreat in Marrakech, November 22–28

Fatemeh Keshavarz

Website

Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran

Lyrics of Life: Sa'di on Love, Cosmopolitanism and Care of the Self

Cowboys and Iranians — poem by