Orientalism in reverse: Iranian intellectuals and the West, 1960-1990

This dissertation seeks critically to deconstruct the ontological and epistemological premises underlying the process of identity formation of contemporary Iranian intellectuals. The study concentrates on the emergence of a new mode of thinking described as "Orientalism in Reverse," which came to dominate the political and intellectual panorama of pre- and post-revolutionary Iran. Drawing upon the works of Michel Foucault and Edward Said on how the "constitution of otherness" permeates any process of identity formation, I examine the two dominant problems confronting Iraninan intellectuals: identity per se, and encounter with the West. I maintain that since the Iranian intellectuals' vision of their "self" was constrained by their perception of the "Western other," they did not and indeed could not experiment the same types of ontological and epistemological ruptures that their Western counterparts experienced in the aftermath of the Enlightenment. As a result, Iranian intellectuals in the last three decades have increasingly turned toward nativism, traditionalism, and politicized Islam. This intellectual trend provided the theoretical guidelines for the revolutionary movement that swept to power in 1979. In identifying the Iranian intellectuals' means and modes of cultural identification, I have followed the maxims of methodological pluralism by drawing upon post-structuralism and sociology of knowledge. The study has relied upon personal interviews, oral history files, and a variety of primary as well as secondary textual sources.