Occidentalism in Iran

Occidentalism in Iran PDF Author: Ehsan Bakhshandeh
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857725483
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Negative portrayals of the West in Iran are often centred around the CIA-engineered coup of 1953, which overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, or the hostage-taking crisis in 1979 following the attack on the US embassy in Tehran. Looking past these iconic events, Ehsan Bakhshandeh explores the deeper anti-imperialistic and anti-hegemonic roots of the hostility to Westernism that is evident in the Iranian press. Distinguishing between negative and outright hostile perceptions of the West - which also encompasses Britain, France and Germany - the book traces how the West is represented as the `Occident' in the country's media. From the Qajar period and the Tobacco protests of the late nineteenth century to the ill-fated Anglo-Persian Treaty of 1919, through to the 1953 coup and 1979 hostage crisis, Bakshandeh highlights the various points in history when misinterpretations and conflicts led to a demonisation of the `other' in the Iranian media. The major recent source of contention between the West and Iran has of course been the nuclear issue and the resultant regime of sanctions. By examining how this and other issues have been represented by the Iranian press, Bakshandeh offers a crucial and often-overlooked aspect of the key relationship between Iran and the West.

Occidentalism in Iran

Occidentalism in Iran PDF Author: Ehsan Bakhshandeh
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857725483
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Get Book Here

Book Description
Negative portrayals of the West in Iran are often centred around the CIA-engineered coup of 1953, which overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, or the hostage-taking crisis in 1979 following the attack on the US embassy in Tehran. Looking past these iconic events, Ehsan Bakhshandeh explores the deeper anti-imperialistic and anti-hegemonic roots of the hostility to Westernism that is evident in the Iranian press. Distinguishing between negative and outright hostile perceptions of the West - which also encompasses Britain, France and Germany - the book traces how the West is represented as the `Occident' in the country's media. From the Qajar period and the Tobacco protests of the late nineteenth century to the ill-fated Anglo-Persian Treaty of 1919, through to the 1953 coup and 1979 hostage crisis, Bakshandeh highlights the various points in history when misinterpretations and conflicts led to a demonisation of the `other' in the Iranian media. The major recent source of contention between the West and Iran has of course been the nuclear issue and the resultant regime of sanctions. By examining how this and other issues have been represented by the Iranian press, Bakshandeh offers a crucial and often-overlooked aspect of the key relationship between Iran and the West.

Orientalism Versus Occidentalism

Orientalism Versus Occidentalism PDF Author: Laetitia Nanquette
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786731207
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
This book highlights the role of cultural representations and perceptions, such as when Iran is represented in the French media as a rogue state obsessed with its nuclear programme, and when France is portrayed in the Iranian media as a decadent and imperialist country. Here, Laetitia Nanquette examines the functions, processes, and mechanisms of stereotyping and imagining the "other" that have pervaded the literary traditions of France and Iran when writing about each other. She furthermore analyzes Franco-Iranian relations by exploring the literary traditions of this relationship, the ways in which these have affected individual authors, and how they reflect socio-political realities. With themes that feed into popular debates about the nature of Orientalism and Occidentalism, and how the two interact, this book will be vital for researchers of Middle Eastern literature and its relationship with writings from the West, as well as those working on the cultures of the Middle East.

Refashioning Iran

Refashioning Iran PDF Author: M. Tavakoli-Targhi
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403918414
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
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.

Pahlavi Iran and the Politics of Occidentalism

Pahlavi Iran and the Politics of Occidentalism PDF Author: Zhand Shakibi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786726246
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 580

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Book Description
Zhand Shakibi presents a new interpretation of the political and social dynamics of the last decade of the Shah's rule that challenges the binary view of pro-West Shah and anti-West Ayatollah by drawing attention to the Pahlavi state's reaction to the intellectual and societal backlash against cultural and moral Occidentalism in its last decade. Revising the dominant historiography of the Pahlavi ideological and discursive approach to the West, this book draws attention to the changes in the attitude of the Shah, the Empress and state intellectuals towards the position and imagery of the West in state conceptions of the authenticity of Iranian national culture and identity. Drawing on a wide-range of primary sources, Shakibi presents the multi-faceted relationship of the Pahlavi state to the West and the institutions that were created to manage this such as the Rastakhiz Party. This study argues that the Pahlavi state, having recognized this backlash, attempted to limit the threat to its legitimacy by reformulating intellectual discourses of anti-West Occidentalism and incorporating them into the ideology of the Rastakhiz Party. In so doing it played a critical role in exacerbating societal sensitivities about the spread of Western influences.

Occidentalism

Occidentalism PDF Author: Ian Buruma
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101099410
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
Twenty-five years ago, Edward Said's Orientalism spawned a generation of scholarship on the denigrating and dangerous mirage of "the East" in the Western colonial mind. But "the West" is the more dangerous mirage of our own time, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit argue, and the idea of "the West" in the minds of its self-proclaimed enemies remains largely unexamined and woefully misunderstood. Occidentalism is their groundbreaking investigation of the demonizing fantasies and stereotypes about the Western world that fuel such hatred in the hearts of others. We generally understand "radical Islam" as a purely Islamic phenomenon, but Buruma and Margalit show that while the Islamic part of radical Islam certainly is, the radical part owes a primary debt of inheritance to the West. Whatever else they are, al Qaeda and its ilk are revolutionary anti-Western political movements, and Buruma and Margalit show us that the bogeyman of the West who stalks their thinking is the same one who has haunted the thoughts of many other revolutionary groups, going back to the early nineteenth century. In this genealogy of the components of the anti-Western worldview, the same oppositions appear again and again: the heroic revolutionary versus the timid, soft bourgeois; the rootless, deracinated cosmopolitan living in the Western city, cut off from the roots of a spiritually healthy society; the sterile Western mind, all reason and no soul; the machine society, controlled from the center by a cabal of insiders—often Jews—pulling the hidden levers of power versus an organically knit-together one, a society of "blood and soil." The anti-Western virus has found a ready host in the Islamic world for a number of legitimate reasons, they argue, but in no way does that make it an exclusively Islamic matter. A work of extraordinary range and erudition, Occidentalism will permanently enlarge our collective frame of vision

Beyond Shariati

Beyond Shariati PDF Author: Siavash Saffari
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107164168
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
A new reading of Ali Shariati's intellectual legacy on Iranian political discourse and concepts of Islam and modernity.

The Philosophy of Religion in Post-Revolutionary Iran

The Philosophy of Religion in Post-Revolutionary Iran PDF Author: Heydar Shadi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135161102X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This book explores the intellectual discourse in post-revolutionary Iran. It focuses on Abdolkarim Soroush, a leading Muslim liberal thinker, whose theory of religion is regarded as highly relevant to the current theological and intellectual dynamics in the Islamic world. The Philosophy of Religion in Post-Revolutionary Iran discusses why and how Soroush's thought has developed from an Islamic apologetic modernist theology in the 1970s to a liberal theory about religion in post-revolutionary Iran. Through a close and detailed analysis of Soroush's main theories, the book argues that Soroush's thought evolved, through reception of post-positivist epistemology and interaction with Islamism in practice, into a historicist and pluralist theory of religion, a theory that regards religion, including Islam, as being a contextual and historical dialogue between man and the Absolute. The book also highlights some shortcomings of Soroush’s reform project. Specifically, it notes that Soroush, consciously or unconsciously, has not yet admitted many extensive consequences of his theories, such as those relating to historicity of religious rituals (‘ibadat) or recognition of the post-Mohammadan revelations and religions. In addition, some other features and implications of Soroush’s thought, such as a historical-critical approach to the Koran, post-secular and post-Islamist theologies, and his dialogical approach that goes beyond the Orientalism–Occidentalism dichotomy, are discussed. Providing a detailed overview on this leading Muslim thinker, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Islamic Philosophy, Middle East Studies, and Philosophy of Religion.

American Orientalism

American Orientalism PDF Author: Douglas Little
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807877611
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 462

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Book Description
Douglas Little explores the stormy American relationship with the Middle East from World War II through the war in Iraq, focusing particularly on the complex and often inconsistent attitudes and interests that helped put the United States on a collision course with radical Islam early in the new millennium. After documenting the persistence of "orientalist" stereotypes in American popular culture, Little examines oil, Israel, and other aspects of U.S. policy. He concludes that a peculiar blend of arrogance and ignorance has led American officials to overestimate their ability to shape events in the Middle East from 1945 through the present day, and that it has been a driving force behind the Iraq war. For this updated third edition, Little covers events through 2007, including a new chapter on the Bush Doctrine, demonstrating that in many important ways, George W. Bush's Middle Eastern policies mark a sharp break with the past.

Orientalism

Orientalism PDF Author: Edward W. Said
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0804153868
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
A groundbreaking critique of the West's historical, cultural, and political perceptions of the East that is—three decades after its first publication—one of the most important books written about our divided world. "Intellectual history on a high order ... and very exciting." —The New York Times In this wide-ranging, intellectually vigorous study, Said traces the origins of "orientalism" to the centuries-long period during which Europe dominated the Middle and Near East and, from its position of power, defined "the orient" simply as "other than" the occident. This entrenched view continues to dominate western ideas and, because it does not allow the East to represent itself, prevents true understanding.

The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism

The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism PDF Author: Reza Zia-Ebrahimi
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231541112
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
Reza Zia-Ebrahimi revisits the work of Fath?ali Akhundzadeh and Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani, two Qajar-era intellectuals who founded modern Iranian nationalism. In their efforts to make sense of a difficult historical situation, these thinkers advanced an appealing ideology Zia-Ebrahimi calls "dislocative nationalism," in which pre-Islamic Iran is cast as a golden age, Islam is reinterpreted as an alien religion, and Arabs become implacable others. Dislodging Iran from its empirical reality and tying it to Europe and the Aryan race, this ideology remains the most politically potent form of identity in Iran. Akhundzadeh and Kermani's nationalist reading of Iranian history has been drilled into the minds of Iranians since its adoption by the Pahlavi state in the early twentieth century. Spread through mass schooling, historical narratives, and official statements of support, their ideological perspective has come to define Iranian culture and domestic and foreign policy. Zia-Ebrahimi follows the development of dislocative nationalism through a range of cultural and historical materials, and he captures its incorporation of European ideas about Iranian history, the Aryan race, and a primordial nation. His work emphasizes the agency of Iranian intellectuals in translating European ideas for Iranian audiences, impressing Western conceptions of race onto Iranian identity.