Political Islam, Iran, and the Enlightenment

Ali Mirsepassi is Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Sociology at the Gallatin School, New York University. His publications include Democracy in Modern Iran (2010) and Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran (2000).

• Introduction: political Islam's romance with the 'West'; 1. Intellectuals and the politics of despair; 2. The crisis of the nativist imagination; 3. Modernity beyond nativism and universalism; 4. Heidegger and Iran: the dark side of being and belonging; 5. Democracy and religion in the thought of John Dewey; 6. Enlightenment and moral politics; 7. Conclusion.

"'This text is an extremely valuable and timely contribution to the debate. Mirsepassi's study shows clearly how the critique of the 'West' appropriated by a series of Islamist writers and thinkers, is itself a product of the Western discourse and by extension an integral part of the Western intellectual tradition. In this sense the philosophers of political Islam are no more 'authentic' in relation to Western discourse than the nationalists they rejected." - Ali M Ansari, Professor of Iranian History, University of St Andrews