Refashioning Iran Orientalism, Occidentalism, and Historiography

Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi offers a corrective to recent works on Orientalism that focus solely on European scholarly productions without exploring the significance of native scholars and vernacular scholarship to the making of Oriental studies. He brings to light a wealth of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Indo-Persian texts, made "homeless" by subsequent nationalist histories and shows how they relate to Indo-Iranian modernity. In doing so, he argues for a radical rewriting of Iranian history with profound implications for Islamic debates on gender.

Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi is Associate Professor of Historiography and Middle Eastern History at Illinois State University.