Persophilia: Persian Culture on the Global Scene

by Hamid Dabashi

From the Biblical period and Classical Antiquity to the rise of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, aspects of Persian culture have been integral to European history. A diverse constellation of European artists, poets, and thinkers have looked to Persia for inspiration, finding there a rich cultural counterpoint and frame of reference. Interest in all things Persian was no passing fancy but an enduring fascination that has shaped not just Western views but the self-image of Iranians up to the present day. Persophilia maps the changing geography of connections between Persia and the West over the centuries and shows that traffic in ideas about Persia and Persians did not travel on a one-way street.

How did Iranians respond when they saw themselves reflected in Western mirrors? Expanding on Jurgen Habermas s theory of the public sphere, and overcoming the limits of Edward Said, Hamid Dabashi answers this critical question by tracing the formation of a civic discursive space in Iran, seeing it as a prime example of a modern nation-state emerging from an ancient civilization in the context of European colonialism. The modern Iranian public sphere, Dabashi argues, cannot be understood apart from this dynamic interaction.

Persophilia takes into its purview works as varied as Xenophon s Cyropaedia and Nietzsche s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Handel s Xerxes and Puccini s Turandot, and Gauguin and Matisse s fascination with Persian art. The result is a provocative reading of world history that dismantles normative historiography and alters our understanding of postcolonial nations.

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Genres: Iran, History

296 pages, Hardcover

First published October 12, 2015

About the author

Born on 15 June 1951 into a working class family in the south-western city of Ahvaz in the Khuzestan province of Iran, Hamid Dabashi received his early education in his hometown and his college education in Tehran, before he moved to the United States, where he received a dual Ph.D. in Sociology of Culture and Islamic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University.

He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Max Weber’s theory of charismatic authority with Philip Rieff (1922-2006), the most distinguished Freudian cultural critic of his time.

Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York, the oldest and most prestigious Chair in his field. He has taught and delivered lectures in many North and Latin American, European, Arab, and Iranian universities. He is a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, as well as a founding member of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University.

He has written 20 books, edited 4, and contributed chapters to many more. He is also the author of over 100 essays, articles and book reviews in major scholarly and peer reviewed journals on subjects ranging from Iranian Studies, medieval and modern Islam, comparative literature, world cinema, and the philosophy of art (trans-aesthetics). A selected sample of his writing is co-edited by Andrew Davison and Himadeep Muppidi, The World is my Home: A Hamid Dabashi Reader (Transaction 2010).
Hamid Dabashi is the Series Editor of Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World for Palgrave Macmillan. This series is putting forward a critical body of first rate scholarship on the literary and cultural production of the Islamic world from the vantage point of contemporary theoretical and hermeneutic perspectives, effectively bringing the study of Islamic literatures and cultures to the wider attention of scholars and students of world literatures and cultures without the prejudices and drawbacks of outmoded perspectives.
An internationally renowned cultural critic and award-winning author, his books and articles have been translated into numerous languages, including Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Hebrew, Danish, Arabic, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Polish, Turkish, Urdu and Catalan.

In the context of his commitment to advancing trans-national art and independent world cinema, Hamid Dabashi is the founder of Dreams of a Nation, a Palestinian Film Project, dedicated to preserving and safeguarding Palestinian Cinema. He is also chiefly responsible for opening up the study of Persian literature and Iranian culture at Columbia University to students of comparative literature and society, breaking away from the confinements of European Orientalism and American Area Studies.

A committed teacher in the past three decades, Hamid Dabashi is also a public speaker around the globe, a current affairs essayist, and a staunch anti-war activist. He has two grown-up children, Kaveh and Pardis, who are both Columbia University graduates, and he lives in New York with his wife and colleague, the Iranian-Swedish feminist, Golbarg Bashi, their daughter Chelgis and their son Golchin.

Reviews

[Chloe Worsnop · Rating 3 out of 5]

I agree with many of Dabashi's key points and he certainly raises interesting questions. My main issue with this book is that it is written poorly. I am a final year history student and honestly it takes twice as long to read as it should do purely due to Dabashi's absurdly long, rambling sentences and needlessly complex vocabulary. His pompous writing style and general tone have an exclusionary effect I am sure. He is also highly repetitive, which makes for frustrating reading when trying to use this book as an academic source.

[Wendelle]

What is Orientalism, as applied specifically to Persia? To Said, it was a tool to facilitate Western political imperialism. For Schwab, it was a description of the Western Romantics' fascination with and adoption of Oriental culture. For the author of this book, Orientalism has a third meaning: it describes a time when the independent bourgeoisie class was dominant in the West, and native Iranians who travelled to the West at that time encountered Western fascination with their culture, came to understand their culture partly through Western terms and views, found freedom to construct a literary tradition independent from courtly patronage necessary at home, and took this newly constructed space with them when they came home.

Following chapters divide chronologically the eras of Persian history that absorbed Western interest, and how these impacted the native Iranians. From the era of antiquities, Western focus was on the Greek triumph of Thermopylae and Salamis over the stuporous behemoth of the Persian Empire, and how this event founded the civilizational triumph of the West. Encountering this Orientalist view, Persians came to understand their history as a long series of empires whose ancestry their governments must lay claim to in order to assume legitimacy.

The second chapter focuses on Montesqieu's "Persian Letters" and its possible satirical technique in using the Persian Empire as a stand-in for contemporary France and its disquieting despotism. The author argues this particular publication was encountered by Persian literati and fostered their Francophone liberalism.

Third chapter concerns attempts to Latinize the Persian language for European consumption, and how expatriate Irans returned to Iran seeking to use the reconfigured alphabet in national instruction.

The 4th chapter studies how Enlightenment intelligentsia conscientiously sought out Persian texts and literature to kindle awareness of universal humanism, independent of Christian scholasticism and the dogmatic moral framework offered by the Judaeo-Christian Church.

[sanamartha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nobody loves Iran as unconditionally as Hamid Dabashi. In Persophilia, Dabashi presents "Iran" nation, culture, and most importantly *concept* as evidence that both historical (think Early Modern-->Modern period, with emphasis on the 18th/19th century) and present-day Orientalism function cyclically, breaking with Edward Said. Like Said, he engages in a kind of Foucauldian archaeology by unearthing literary/historical documents to analyze power relations between the East and the West, but his Iranian exceptionalism ultimately weakens his critique. Dabashi calls this "sociology," but I'm not convinced his methodology is all that different from Said's. I know the book is called "Persophilia," but Dabashi's "recentering" of the Oriental subject (in this case "the Persian") mostly appeals to sympathetic Westerners post 9/11. Nonetheless, for people interested in mostly secular, critical analysis of the Iran, it's a great read.

[Emer · Rating 1 out of 5]

Did not finish. Written as comic book, not as a novel.

[Sepehr · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The task, therefore, is no longer to make a mere critique of European representation, but to achieve a critical grasp of the methods and manners of "non-Western" subjection, to find agential historicity in worlding a map for the longest time glossed and covered over by the single myth of "the Western world," which, either through imperialism or through critique of that imperialism, keeps inscribing itself not just on older maps but on the ones waiting to surface."