From Refashioning Iran, p 17:
Exclusion of these “homeless texts” from national historical canons, on the one hand, has contributed to the hegemony of Eurocentric and Orientalist conceptions of modernity as something uniquely European. On the other hand, by ignoring the homeless texts, both Indian and Iranian historians tend to consider modernity only under the rubric of a belated “Westernization.” Such a conception of modernity reinforces the exceptionality of “Occidental rationality” and corroborates the programmatic view of Islamic and “Oriental” societies and cultures as static, traditional and unhistorical. This historical imagination is simultaneously grounded on two problematic conceptions of historical time. On the one hand it is grounded in the presupposition of the non-contemporaneity of the contemporaneous Western and “Oriental” societies, and on the other hand it is based on teh dehistoricizing supposition of the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous early nineteenth-century and ancient modes of life. With the onset of Westernization, consequently, the premodern repetition of ancient modes of life is replaced with the repetition of Western modality.