Persophilia reconsidered in a global context

Hamid Dabashi's study Persophilia: Persian Culture on the Global Scene (۲۰۱۵) is a counterdraft by the Iranian-American historian Hamid Dabashi to Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism (first published ۱۹۷۸). 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 (۱۹۹۰) 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 ۲۰th 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.

کلیدواژه ها:

H. Dabashi ، E. sagte ، Orientalismus ، europäische Persophilie ، persische Kultur ، Kolonialismus ، Panislamismus ، paradoxe Konsequenz