“Dissidence from a Distance: Iranian Politics, as Viewed from Colonial Daghestan,” The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca, ed. Nile Green (University of California Press, 2019)

This chapter explores the legacy of the Iranian reformer and intellectual Abd al-Rahim Talibuf (1834-1911), as viewed from Daghestan, where he passed the last decades of his life. Talibuf's eight books shaped the trajectory of subsequent Iranian intellectual history, and inspired the revolutionary constitutional movement. Talibuf’s example enables us to better understand the causes and origins of “dissidence from a distance,” a phrase through which I describe the process whereby diasporic Iranian communities influence political events in their homeland