Spektrum Iran

Persophilia Reconsidered in a Global Context: A Counterproposal to Edward Said's Critique of Orientalism

Document Type : Original Research Paper

Authors

Irmgard pinn 1
Shahin Awani 2

1 She has authored numerous publications on the history of sociology, particularly sociology during National Socialism, as well as on the image of Muslim women in European discourse. Pinn is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Duisburg Institute for Language and Social Research (DISS). Germany

2 Associate Professor of Philosophy, Khātam University, Tehran, Iran

https://doi.org/10.22034/spektrum.2023.182286
Abstract
Hamid Dabashi's study Persophilia: Persian Culture on the Global Scene (2015) is a counter draft by the Iranian-American historian Hamid Dabashi to Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism (first published 1978). While Said only focused on the repressive influence of the colonial powers on the Orient, Dabashi extended the analysis to circular processes of knowledge production in global exchange. He uses numerous examples to show how unintentionally and unknowingly by the colonizers and even against their interests through such exchange processes in the colonies analogous to civil society in Europe, as Habermas has described in his famous book The structural change of the public sphere (1990) public spheres opened up in which social criticism, national Identities and resistance to the colonial powers emerged. In retrospect, European Persophilia, as a variant of Orientalism with positive connotations, made a significant contribution to the emergence of a literary and later political public sphere in Persia (a favorite subject of Dabashi). Central to his numerous examples from linguistics, art and philosophy he emphasizes the influence of the mystical Persian poetry on German Romanticism, illustrated by Hafez’s attraction to Goethe and other poets. Finally, Dabashi looks at parallel political and economic developments in Germany and the Persian cultural area in the 20th century, which favored an amalgamation of poetic-mystical and fascist / National Socialist ideas and thus created the ideological prerequisites for pan-Islamism and political Islam in Iran.

Keywords

H. Dabashi
E. Said
Orientalism
European persophilia
Persian cultural
colonialism
pan-Islamism
paradoxical consequence

Subjects

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Spektrum Iran
Volume 36, Issue 1
July 2023
Pages 5-20

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