TEHRAN-The Persian translation of the book “Persia and the Enlightenment” by Cyrus Masroori, Whitney Mannies, and John Christian Laursen has been released in the bookstores across Iran.

Shahrbanoo Masoumi has translated the book and Qoqnoos Publication has brought it out in 358 pages, Mehr reported.

Since the 5th century BCE, Persia has played a significant part in representing the “Other” against which European identity has been constructed. What makes the case of Persia unique in this process of identity formation is the ambivalent attitude that Europe has shown in its imagery about Persia.

Persia is arguably the nation of “the Orient” most referred to in Early Modern European writings, frequently mentioned in various discourses of the Enlightenment including theology, literature, and political theory. 

What was the appeal of Persia to such a diverse intellectual population in Enlightenment Europe? How did intellectuals engage with the ‘facts’ about Persia? In what ways did utilizing Persia contribute to the development of modern European identities? In this volume, originally published in 2021, an international group of scholars with diverse academic backgrounds has tackled these and other questions related to the Enlightenment’s engagement with Persia. In doing so, “Persia and the Enlightenment” questions reductionist assessments of Modern Europe’s encounter with the Middle East, where a complex engagement is simplified to a confrontation between liberalism and Islam or an exaggerated Orientalism. 

By carefully studying Persia in the Enlightenment narratives, this volume throws new light on the complexity of intercultural encounters and their impact on the shaping of collective identities.

Cyrus Masroori, Whitney Mannies, and John Christian Laursen — all three scholars of political science — have brought together contributors from the United States, France, Spain, Italy, and Brazil to address a subject that has been drawing attention at least since Paul Hazard discussed Montesquieu’s Persians in “La Crise de la conscience européenne, 1680–1715” (1935). 

In the Introduction, Masroori and Mannies present theoretical diversity as the best approach to the multiplicity of connections between Persia and Enlightenment, also distancing themselves from Edward Said’s Orientalism. At the same time, drawing on the legacy of Foucault’s thinking, they suggest that the “significance of Persia to the Enlightenment may help us better understand the Enlightenment and modernity” and define Enlightenment as an “effort to generate a new narrative of identity for Europe”.

The volume thus argues for the primacy of representation and contributes to the study of how and why Europeans drew upon their perceptions of Persia to fight their many battles. Breadth of subject and methodology allow for some tours de force on well-known topics and on sources which will prove useful to the uninitiated reader: John Marshall’s essay on Persian tolerance; the article by Masroori and Laursen on European knowledge of Persia before the Enlightenment; Mannies’s discussion of Persia in the Encyclopédie; and Myrtille Méricam-Bourdet’s article on Voltaire and Persia. 

Cyrus Masroori is a professor of political theory at California State University San Marcos. His research interests include the history of Persian political thought, utopian discourses, toleration, and Rumi’s thought.

Whitney Mannies teaches political theory at Cal Poly Pomona. Her current research focuses on the history of feminist thought in eighteenth-century France, Britain, and the United States. She is working on a monograph exploring the debate about women’s rights that was provoked by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Letter to d’Alembert.

John Christian Laursen is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Riverside.

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