Hamid Dabashi > Quotes

“There is no pride in a masculinst history that deprives half of humanity a pride of place, the dignity of who and what they are.”
― Hamid Dabashi, Iran: A People Interrupted

“To read forward Why should Europeans not be able to read, even when we write in the language they understand? They cannot read because they (as “Europeans,” caught in the snare of an exhausted but self-nostalgic metaphor) are assimilating what they read back into that snare and into what they already know – and are thus incapable of projecting it forward into something they may not know and yet might be able to learn.”
― Hamid Dabashi, Can Non-Europeans Think?

“Racism consists in devaluing the humanity of certain people by dismissing it or playing it down (even when not intentional) at the same time as highlighting and playing up European philosophy, assuming it to be universal. It may be global, because it piggybacks on imperial expansion, but it certainly cannot be universal.”
― Hamid Dabashi, Can Non-Europeans Think?

“Equally scandalized by this election are the colorful band of lipstick jihadi Hirsi Ali wannabes who are writing one erotic fantasy after another about Iranian “women,” oversexualizing Iranian politics as they opt for “love and danger” during their “honeymoon in Tehran.” The representation of Iranian women in the flea market of the US publishing industry began under President Bush with Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran and has now reached a new depth of depravity in Pardis Mahdavi’s Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s Sexual Revolution. Between a harem full of Lolitas and a bathhouse of nymphomaniacs is where Nafisi and Mahdavi have Iranian women, marching in despair, awaiting liberation by US marines and Israeli bombers. What a contrast to the real work of women, as testified to in this election, and now on the street in defense of the collective will of the nation.”
― Hamid Dabashi, Can Non-Europeans Think?

“Zionism is a calamitous colonial project abusing the factual memories of generations of Jewish suffering. Judaism and Palestine were both colonized at one and the same time: Jews robbed of their ancestral faith and Palestinians of their ancestral homeland. Jews have always lived in Palestine and must always have a home in Palestine, next to their Muslim and Christian neighbors. But Jews must also be able to live in peace wherever else they are. American Jews are American, Iranian Jews are Iranian, German Jews are German, and Palestinian Jews are Palestinian. If there are pernicious signs of antisemitism anywhere in the world, and there are, as there is Islamophobia, we need to resist these signs together. The memory of the Holocaust must be liberated from Zionist abuse and wedded to the memories of all other genocidal terror on this earth, particularly to the Palestinian genocide.”
― Hamid Dabashi, After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization