THE FRENCHIFICATION OF PERSIA:

An appeal for empire: a review of
Theology of Discontent by Hamid Dabashi (Dmitry Shlapentokh, 7/19/07, Asia Times)

Hamid Dabashi, an eminent specialist in Iranian studies from Columbia University, following a sort of romanticized version of post-modernism, states that a philosophy based on a new interpretation of Islam was able to permeate the minds of Iranians and was the prime engine for change. Discarding socioeconomic or political reasons for discontent, he sees the revolution as caused primarily by a new vision of an ideal society that had been shaped by several key Iranian intellectuals.

In Dabashi's view, this dream about the ideal society is a myth. This statement is hardly novel. The assumption that revolution is a sort of attempt to materialize the myth is quite popular in European and Russian thought and has often been employed by conservative historians of the major modern European revolutions, eg, French and Russian, to demonstrate the basic unworkability of revolutions. The attempt to create the ideal society usually led, in the view of these historians, to the opposite result: a nightmare of tyranny and terror.

How different history might be if Ayatollah Khomeini had been exiled to London instead of Paris....

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 18, 2007 6:57 AM