From Refashioning Iran, p 18: The formation of Orientalism as an area of European academic inquiry was grounded on a “genesis amnesia” that systematically obliterated the dialogic conditions of its emergence and the production of its linguistic and textual tools.…
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…
From Refashioning Iran, p 16-17: The conventional Persian literary histories […] regard poetry as a characteristically Iranian mode of self-expression. With the privileged position of poetry in the invented national mentalite, the prose texts of teh humanities are devalued and…
From Refashioning Iran, p 16: By anticipating a period of decline that paved the way for the British colonization, historians of Mughal India have searched predominantly for facts taht illustrate the backwardness and the disintegration of this empire. Mughal historiography…
From Refashioning Iran, p 10: [Francois] Bernier (a student of the philosopher Gassendi and a recipient of a “Doctor of Medicine” in 1652), who is considered as a founding figure of modern Orientalism, was an employee of Mirza Shafi’a, who…
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…
From Refashioning Iran, p9: In the mid-seventeenth century a purely self-congratulatory view of European civilization as the paragon of universal reason and the concurring “blackmail of the Enlightenment” had not yet been formed. Similarly, Europe’s Oriental-Other had not yet been…