BOOK REVIEW Pseudo-intellectualism on Iran Iran: A People Interrupted by HamidDabashi
Reviewed by Kaveh L Afrasiabi
This book, which attempts to retrace the past 200 years of Iranian history, is
a seriously flawed work that oversimplifies the nation's past and culture, and
is replete with factual errors. Even worse, it is marred by a fatal
contradiction of its own doctrinal correctness that deprives it of its
purported subversive effects and replaces them with an irritating, conceited
and snobbish repression of its own kind.
Though nominally "cosmopolitan", Hamid Dabashi, a literature professor at
Columbia University, displays here the worst characteristics of tribalist
pseudo-intellectualism. He sets up intellectual bogeys with an outright
dismissive attitude toward authors he disagrees with, which range from Hegel
and Marx to
Fukuyama and Huntington, to Azar Nafisi, a former Tehran professor-turned
author of bestseller, Reading Lolita in Tehran (Random House, 2003).
Dabashi's malign resentment of Nafisi, and repeated labeling of her
outstanding, albeit impressionistic, memoir as a "whitewash" engineered for US
imperial designs on Iran, is utterly absurd and smacks of self-styled,
intellectual McCarthyism. As a whole the book should be taken as symbolic of
the serious weaknesses in Iranian studies, many of which are tainted with
Dabashi's style of literary xenophobia.
Iranian intellectuals have a lamentably thick sense of themselves, and Dabashi,
who bemoans "predatory" American imperialism while benefiting personally from
it, is an outdated imitator of the "heroic intellectual", the late Edward Said.
Like Said, Dabashi suffers from delusions of paradigmatic correctness, and
misses the essential point that intellectuals cease to be intellectuals once
they attempt to pass off overemotional, spurious intellectual persuasion as
true enlightenment.
In Dabashi's case, this means constantly reducing the autonomy of ideas for the
service of anti-imperialistic purposes. He converts a diverse range of
intellectual discourses into a cliche, as if intellectuals have no independent
commitment to ideas.
The book purports to give a "balanced reading" of modern Iranian history and
yet only manages to recycle the conventional analyses of the pre and
post-revolution Iran without breaking any new ground; it is also permeated with
obsolete, nauseating arguments about anti-colonialism.
It conflates globalization with colonialism and resurrects familiar 1960s
anti-colonial discourses without an iota of creative imagination, aside from
adding the confusion that anti-colonialism, as a "response of the colonial
world" means producing "effective [not alternative] modernities". Needless to
say, this is contradicted elsewhere in the book, which puts an emphasis on
possible alternatives.
Despite his explicitly political concerns, Dabashi's main problem is that he
can give no theoretical basis for his prescribed praxis, despite his propensity
for the "dialectical" and a superficial reading of Marx's insights on
capitalism. His narrative reflects a highly problematic, unformed conceptual
framework underpinned by an otherwise playful style which disguises
indeterminate conceptual notions with pseudo-intellectualism infected with a
tinge of anti-intellectualism. Examples of this are the author's countless,
meaningless references to Iranian intellectuals as a "disembodied group"
cooking up "phantom" ideas for liberty.
The author should have checked his facts before dishing out his narrative for
public consumption, as the factual errors are too numerous to fully recount
here. But one case in point is Dabashi's claim that the US's invasion of Iraq
in 2003 moved Iran toward nuclear weapons, and "by September 2003, Russian
technicians had begun construction of a nuclear reactor in Bushehr". (p 238) In
fact, construction of the Bushehr power plant began in the mid-1990s and was
initially due to begin operation in 1999. The US's own intelligence estimate
paints a diametrically opposite picture, namely that Iran, instead of "speeding
its nuclear program" in 2003, as Dabashi puts it, actually halted its weapons
program.
Nor is Dabashi even slightly convincing in his frequent use of contemporary
thinkers, such as Jurgen Habermas. He writes that Habermas' "communicative
reason … for much of the rest of the world ... means nothing more than perhaps
a visual delight in seeing the European Enlightenment self-destruct". (p 253)
This is just a one of immense banalities throughout the book, particularly when
it comes to his presentation on modern Iran.
Virtually no aspect of Dabashi's treatment of this subject can withstand
critical scrutiny from the standpoint of social scientific inquiry - ranging
from his romanticization of Iran's rebel groups, including one that set up a
separatist republic in northern Iran after World War I, to his simplistic view
of the second Pahlavi regime. The romanticizations are made without any hint of
awareness of the regime's evolution away from its initial surrogate role.
Equally flawed is the dubious claim that the Iranian revolution in 1979 began
not in Iran "but in Washington" due to president Jimmy Carter's human-rights
concerns, and the misrepresentation of the Islamic Republic as "neither
Islamic, nor republican".
Theoretically ill-equipped to appreciate the republican ramparts of the new
political system in Iran, Dabashi portrays it as purely theocratic and even
"totalitarian". He ignores the post-revolutionary institutional heteronomy of
the state, its peculiar system of checks and balances, and entwinement of
democratic procedures marked with regular, albeit restricted, elections with
charismatic codes of authority.
As a result, the dialectical tension of the post-revolutionary society, and
Iran's historical progress from a one-man dictatorship, ultimately evade
Dabashi, who is on firmer ground when discussing Iranian cinema and literature
than when venturing into the political arena. This would require a systematic
study of Iran's core institutions, including its legislative branch, which is
barely mentioned in the book.
Instead of undertaking such a laborious effort, Dabashi's book lazily relies on
untenable sweeping generalizations, such as on the "catastrophic failure" of
the reform movement, even though by all indications that is an
oversimplification and the movement is still viable. Its legacy, such as
normalizing relations with the European Union countries, is still largely
intact.
In fact, despite surface differences, Dabashi actually has a lot in common with
Nafisi as both authors ignore the debilitating role of the "armed opposition"
during the era of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini with respect to Iran's budding
democracy. Dabashi instead focuses almost exclusively on Khomeini's "republic
of terror" and claims the revolution's founding father, without presenting any
empirical foundation, "ordered the swift and brutal execution of any one who
even seemed to challenge his vision of an Islamic Republic". (p 163)
Similarly, Dabashi maintains that Khomeini "welcomed" Iraq's invasion of Iran
in the 1980s, without bothering to explain why, if this was the case, that his
regime implored, ultimately to no avail, the United Nations and the
international community to stop Saddam Hussein's aggression. By mistaking an
embattled leader's efforts to rally a nation behind a defensive war in the name
of lofty causes, Dabashi is guilty of a simple Western mainstream anti-regime
analysis that pretends to be different but fundamentally is not.
Dabashi also gives himself license to self-contradict, with his perverse view
of Iran as a "state of mind" that is "systematically set to contradict itself".
No such thing, Iran is an evolving objective reality with an uninterrupted long
history filled with its own paradoxes as well as popular sentiments quite at
odds with Dabashi's unsubstantiated claim that "Iranians have a sense of
impermanence about Iran as a nation".
Add to this the essentialist and static view of Islam in general - and Shi'ism
in particular - that lurks behind Dabashi's argument that a "religion of
protest" cannot legitimately claim state power. His main point that Shi'ism
"cannot be in power without instantly discrediting itself"(ps 179, 190) is
preposterously naive, and a sheer result of academic dogmatism, putting him in
the same league as Bernard Lewis and the other "neo-conservative" Islamicists
he nominally opposes.
Equally problematic is Dabashi's vast exaggeration that the Islamic Republic
today is "held together against the will of its own citizens". The regime's
weaknesses notwithstanding, it is a mistake to ignore the popular support it
still enjoys.
A more dialectical, and more historically true, understanding of religion would
doubtless preclude such faulty notions, as well as countless other questionable
comments, including: "Shi'ism has no norm of any sort of cosmopolitan culture"
(p 236) or that "the revolution has lost all its momentum". (p 245)
According to Dabashi, it is a mistake to refer to the Iranian revolution as
"Islamic" because that is interpreting it "too Islamically". Yet, his own
discussion of Khomeini's leadership in "directing communication with his
supporters who were now fully in charge of organizing the demonstrations in all
major cities", (p 157) lends itself to this interpretation. He writes in the
same breath about the revolution's "degeneration" inside Iran and also "the
incorporation of the Islamic Republic into the global geopolitics of Islamism".
(p 207)
Such flagrant incoherence notwithstanding, the book's main fallacy is its
inability to position the contemporary relevance of Iran-led Islamism in the
global public sphere, as a part and parcel of Third World anti-hegemonism.
To reject all aspects of post-revolutionary polity or its political culture as
Dabashi does is to be left with nothing that bears the mark of "progressive
forces" and, yet, true to his infinite verbal gymnastics, throughout the book
we are confronted with incoherent, schizoid ideas somehow glued together by the
fiat of a philistine intellect in dire need of deconstruction.
Iran: A People Interrupted by Hamid Dabashi. New Press (March 1, 2007).
ISBN-10: 159558059X. Price US$26.95, 240 pages.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New
Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) . For his Wikipedia entry,
click here. His
latest book,
Reading In Iran Foreign Policy After September 11 (BookSurge Publishing
, October 23, 2008) is now available.
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Iranian intellectuals have a lamentably thick sense of themselves, and Dabashi,
who bemoans "predatory" American imperialism while benefiting personally from
it, is an outdated imitator of the "heroic intellectual", the late Edward Said.
Like Said, Dabashi suffers from delusions of paradigmatic correctness, and
misses the essential point that intellectuals cease to be intellectuals once
they attempt to pass off overemotional, spurious intellectual persuasion as
true enlightenment.
