Introduction

As recent debates surrounding the phenomenon of “post-colonialism” have amply demonstrated, the European “other” played an important role in Western self-definition of its modernity. In order to understand the complex dialectics of modernity in Iran, it is essential to explore the Eurocentric and imperial narrative entrenched deep within its liberatory promises. This chapter, through readings of Montesquieu, Hegel, and Marx, explores how modernity created and preserved a conviction that the non-Western world could exist only as modernity's other. Although this narrative has recently come under serious challenge by critics such as Edward Said, Timothy Mitchell and Gayatri Spivak, it continues to hold remarkable hegemony in the media, popular culture, and among academics. As I show in my interpretations of Samuel Huntington's “clash of civilizations” thesis, and Bernard Lewis's explication of the “roots” of Muslim rage, efforts to re-envision modernity will be doomed to failure unless modernity's troubled genealogy is acknowledged, critiqued, and engaged.

Orientalism and the Occidentalist discontent

The publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978 marked an important intellectual challenge to the then prevalent Eurocentric scholarship in Middle Eastern studies.