The World of Persian Literary Humanism - download pdf or read online

By Hamid Dabashi

ISBN-10: 0674066715

ISBN-13: 9780674066717

What does it suggest to be human? Humanism has quite often thought of this question from a Western standpoint. via an in depth exam of an enormous literary culture, Hamid Dabashi asks that question anew, from a non-European perspective. The solutions are clean, provocative, and deeply transformative. This groundbreaking learn of Persian humanism provides the unfolding of a convention because the inventive and subversive unconscious of Islamic civilization.

Exploring how 1,400 years of Persian literature have taken up the query of what it capability to be human, Dabashi proposes that the literary unconscious of a civilization can also be the undoing of its repressive measures. this would account for the masculinist hostility of the early Arab conquest that accused Persian tradition of effeminate delicacy and sexual misconduct, and later of clinical and philosophical inaccuracy. because the specified female unconscious of a decidedly masculinist civilization, Persian literary humanism speaks from a hidden and defiant vantage point-and this can be what inclines it towards inventive subversion.

bobbing up neither regardless of nor due to Islam, Persian literary humanism was once the creative manifestation of a sophisticated urbanism that emerged within the aftermath of the seventh-century Muslim conquest. faraway from the language of scripture and scholasticism, Persian literary humanism occupies a different universe of ethical duties during which "a really apt lie," because the thirteenth-century poet Sheykh Mosleh al-Din Sa'di writes, "is higher than a seditious truth."

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If, alternatively, we were to consider the epic proportions of Persian literature (Ferdowsi in par ticular), it will emerge as the literary heritage of an imperial confidence now cast in the form of figuratively dominated subjects when placed next to the triumphant (colonizing) Arabic language and literature— a fact that paradoxically casts Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh as the triumphant memory of a rebellious people remembering themselves at the time of their political defeat. This exposes yet 30 Introduction another layer of a split subject writing Persian literary humanism— at once politically defeated and poetically triumphant.

The entire spectrum of Persian literature thus appears as an expansive event spreading eastward into successive empires from Iran to central to south Asia, and yet localized by virtue of its neighborhood to the political triumphalism of Arabic literary, scientific, and scholastic traditions moving westward into the Mediterranean domain. In the very same vein, Persian literary imagination appears as an imperial cosmopolitanism made to look vernacular by virtue of being adjacent to the mighty Arabic cosmopolitanism that had already laid a solid claim on the Mediterranean.

Compared to the vast whirlwind of decentered subjectivity thus narratively and poetically performed in Persian literary humanism, what today passes as a radical critique of the subject is in fact exceedingly limited and even arrested. The combined effect of multiple and metamorphic modes of decentered subjection feeds on itself to make the emotive center of Persian literary humanism always amorphous, invariably somewhere else, with never a single all-knowing subject in sight to question and/or dismantle.

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The World of Persian Literary Humanism by Hamid Dabashi


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