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The Politics of Iranology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Hamid Enayat
Hamid Enayat*
Affiliation:
University of Tehran
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Extract

It may at first seem strange to speak of the politics of Iranology since until recently Iranology was so much confined within the limits of archaeology, linguistics, bibliography and other “micro” studies that any suggestion about its possible implications smacked of too conspiratorial an outlook of history. Yet if one sets aside the often unverifiable question of deliberate or non-deliberate political motives, there remains little doubt that Iranology has always been involved with politics. This statement is not difficult to prove in the case of the present phase of Iranology, when an increasing number of Iranian scholars are taking the initiative in the field, and a growing number of issues relating to the contemporary sociopolitical life of Iranians have become susceptible to political interpretation. The difficulty arises with regard to the formative period of Iranology when it was a preserve of European Orientalism and whose great pioneers were long thought to be inspired by nothing less than a pure love of knowledge. It is with this formative period of Iranology that the present paper purports to deal.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , Winter 1973 , pp. 2 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1973

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Footnotes

This article is an extended version of a talk given by the author at the Third Congress of Iranology held in Tehran (September, 1972). The author wishes to thank Jerome W. Clinton for his help in translating part of the talk into English. Thanks are also due to John Gurney and Roger Owen, of St. Antony's College, Oxford, and to Anne Enayat, for their useful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Responsibility for the content is, however, entirely the author's.

References

Notes

1. School of Oriental and African Studies, Calender (London, 1970-71), p. 71.

2. Dwight Macdonald, “In Search of Asian History,” Encounter, Vol. VII, No. 3 (September, 1956), pp. 16-17.

3. Monteil, Vincent, “The Decolonization of the Writing of History,” in Wallerstein, I., ed., Social Change: The Colonial Situation (New York, 1966), pp. 592–605.Google Scholar

4. See an account of S. H. Taqī-zādeh's notorious remarks about the necessity of complete Westernization of Iranians in Aryān-Pūr, Yaḥyā, Az Ṣabā tā Nīmā, Vol. II (Tehran, 1350), p. 232.Google Scholar

5. For some samples of recent Iranian views on Iranology, see Jalili, Abulhasan, “Sharq-shināsī va jahān-i imrūz,” ᶜUlūm-i Ijtimāᶜī, Vol. I, No. 2 (1347)Google Scholar; Ashuri, Dariush, “Irān-shināsī chīst,” Bar-resī-i Kitāb (Tehran, 1350)Google Scholar; Abul-Qasīm Injavī Shīrāzī, “ᶜIllat-i vujūdī-i istishrāq va mustashriq,” Negīn, Vol. 8, No. 85 (Khurdād, 1351).

6. Fück, J. W., “Islam as an Historical Problem in European Historiography since 1800,” in Lewis, Bernard and Holt, P. M., eds., Historians of the Middle East (London, 1962), p. 309.Google Scholar

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9. Fück, op. cit., p. 309.

10. Forward to F. Meinecke, Historism, translated by J. E. Anderson (London, 1972).

11. Catlin, George, A History of the Political Philosophers (London, 1950), pp. 74–75.Google Scholar

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13. Cf. Ḥusain, Ṱaha, Mustaqbal ath thaqaāfah fī Miṣr (Cairo, 1947).Google Scholar

14. For an example of some of the Iranian Muslim criticisms of the modern nationalist tendency to exalt pre-Islamic Iran, see Nasr, S. H., et al., Muḥammad, Khātam-i payghambarān, the Ḥusaynīyah Irshād publications, No. 1 (Tehran, no date), pp. 86–87.Google Scholar

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17. Montgomery Watt, W., Islamic Political Thought (Edinburgh, 1968), pp. 110–114Google Scholar; there are also other sketchy accounts of historical and doctrinal aspects of Shi'ism in pp. 42-45 and 82-89.

18. For an extreme version of this critical attitude see Aḥmad Kasravi, Shīᶜīgarī (Tehran, 1322).

19. Pigulevskaya, N. V., Les vilies de l'etat iranien aux époques parthe et sassanide (Paris, 1963).Google Scholar

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22. USSR Academy of Sciences, “Fifty Years of Soviet Oriental Studies,” History of Iranian Studies (Moscow, 1967), p. 4.Google Scholar

23. Chesneaux, Jean, Sur le mode de production asiatique (Paris, 1969).Google Scholar

24. M. ᶜA. Khunjī, “Bah va taḥqīq dar tārīkh-i mād,” Rāhnamaye Ketāb, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Shahrīvar, 1346)Google Scholar, supplement.