THE REFORM MOVEMENT AND THE DEBATE ON MODERNITY AND TRADITION IN CONTEMPORARY IRAN

Extract

To appreciate the significance of the reform movement represented by the books selected for this survey, one needs the sharply contrasting background of Islamic thought in Iran from the mid-1960s to the end of 1980s, the period perceptively surveyed by Mehrzad Boroujerdi in Iranian Intellectuals and the West. Boroujerdi shows that the moral indignation against Westernization in Iran pre-dated the outburst of revolution in 1979 by a few decades, beginning as a series of nativistic protests that gradually cohered in the shape of an Islamic ideology. The mythical construction of the West was not exclusively or primarily a religious affair. It was, rather, a fairly general indigenous or nativistic response to Western cultural domination in which Islam played a varying and fluctuating role before the revolutionary crescendo of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The essence of this nativistic cultural response was what Boroujerdi analyzes as Occidentalism, or, borrowing a phrase from Edward Said's Syrian critic Sadiq al-עAzm, as “Orientalism in reverse.”