Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography

by Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi

Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi offers a corrective to recent works on Orientalism that focus solely on European scholarly productions without exploring the significance of native scholars and vernacular scholarship to the making of Oriental studies. He brings to light a wealth of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Indo-Persian texts, made 'homeless' by subsequent nationalist histories and shows how they relate to Indo-Iranian modernity. In doing so, he argues for a radical rewriting of Iranian history with profound implications for Islamic debates on gender.

Genres: History, Iran

232 pages, Hardcover

First published December 7, 2001

Reviews

[Brian Griffith · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a dense book, full of competent research that puts together records of Persian writing in India and Persia, and thereby manages to trace the intellectual interchange between Western and Persianate people over hundreds of years. It reminds me of Martin Bernal's work ("Black Athena"), showing the influence of Egyptian thought on Europe, and "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow, which highlights the influence of Native American thought on the European "Enlightenment." Overall, Tavakoli-Targhi demonstrates how orientalising and occidentalising have always been two-way streets.