A Reassessment and Critique of the East-West Discourse in the Thought of Iranian Contemporary Scholars of Religion, with Emphasis on Second Pahlavi Era

Despite their differences, right and left thinkers in the decades preceding the Iranian revolution had a relatively similar understanding of the place of Iran and Islam in the world. This understanding was about both the difference between perception in the East and West and dealt with the particularity of the Iranian Muslim, and considered the Iranian-Islamic experience extending to different parts of the world. This picture of Iran and Islam in the works of conservative and revolutionary thinkers, such as A. Zarrinkoub, A. Fardid, M. Motahhari, Al. Shariati, D. Schayegan, and H. Nasr is studied in the present essay. The central signifier in these narratives about Islam and Iran in response to the question of "we" and "others" is the East-West binary. In other words, Iranian Muslims had to know what their relationship with others (Arab Muslims an Non-Muslim Europeans) is. According to the prevailing narrative of the separation of Iranians from an originally Aryan (or European) identity, Iranians were separated from their identity once at the time of the Arab conquest, and another time in the retardation from the progressive world. Many of these authors tried to solve this problem by several strategies: To resolve the question of the relation between Islam and Iran, they tried to answer this question by constructing a narrative of progress in Islamic tradition. They also emphasized that the conditions of understanding in the East and West are entirely different, and thus showed themselves up as the leaders of progressive method of esoteric and non-argumentative understanding that has been troubled throughout history and has caused the retardation of Muslim and Iranians from their cultural legacy. In this essay, after describing the intellectual atmosphere of Iran in the Pahlavi period, I highlight the common intellectual elements in the work of the above authors. In the end, by reference to a critical perspective and by recourse to postcolonial theory, I will show how this discourse is a non-native construct, based on European hegemonic assumptions.