From Refashioning Iran, p 8:
Recounting the contentions for scientific rationality, historians of
modern Iran often select scholars who endorsed astrology and opposed
heliocentrism as Muslim representatives,ignoring those who did not fit
into this schema. By claiming that the Persian publication of Descartes
in the 1860s is the beginning of a new age of rationality and modernity,
these historians provide a narrative account that accommodates and
reinforces the foundational myth of modern Orientalism, a myth that
constitutes “the West” as ontologically and epistemologicallv different
from “the Orient.” This Orientalist problematic has been validated by
a nationalist historiography that constitutes the period prior to its own
arrival as a time of decay, backwardness, and despotism. By deploying
the basic dogmas of Orientalism for the enhancement of its own political
project, in this sense Iranian nationa1ist historiography has participated
“in its own Orientalizing.” As self-designated vanguards of
modernity and national homogenization, both official and counterofficial
Iranian nationalists have naturalized and authenticated the
working assumptions of Orientalism.