[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"doc-detail-43020-en":3,"doc-seo-43020-105":30,"detail-sidebar-cat-0-en-105":83},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":6},0,"success",{"doc_id":7,"user_id":8,"nickname":9,"user_avatar":10,"doc_module":4,"category_id":11,"category_name":12,"doc_title":13,"doc_description":14,"doc_content":15,"file_id":16,"file_url":17,"file_type":18,"file_size":19,"view_count":20,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":21,"is_downloadable":21,"audit_status":21,"page_count":22,"language":23,"language_code":24,"site_id":25,"html_lang":24,"table_of_contents":26,"faqs":27,"seo_title":13,"seo_description":14,"update_tm":28,"read_time":29},43020,4398048949847,"Eliana","https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/avatar/400002536579ef2da7f?_k=1778318612642679267",8,"Research & Report","Hamid Dabashi Persophilia Persian Culture on the Global Scene Harvard","The introduction examines European fascination with Persian language, literature, religion, culture, history, geography, and archaeology, asking where such attitudes originate, what they signify, and what consequences they had for emerging postcolonial nation-states such as Iran, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan. It contrasts the views of Raymond Schwab on romantic originality and Edward Said on imperial knowledge production, then argues that a structural transformation of the bourgeois public sphere—highlighted through Habermas—better explains Persophilia’s origin and transnational spread under European empires.","Introduction  \n“LUXURY, SENSUALITY, LICENTIOUSNESS on the one hand, Scholasticism and literature on the other, have made the Persian effeminate.” This was the opinion of Sir John Chardin (1643–1713), a Huguenot jeweler who wrote a detailed account of his extensive travels in Iran. “The mysticism in which the better spirits of Persia loved to lose themselves was a higher thing, after all, than his keen worldliness.” This was the view of Edward Byles Cowell (1826–1903), a keen popularizer of Persian poetry in the Europe of his time. These worldly-wise Europeans were not alone in their penchant for things Persian. G. W. F. Hegel contemplated the nature of mysticism in Persian poetry, while Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Matthew Arnold, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (poet laureate of the United Kingdom during Queen Victoria’s reign), Edward FitzGerald, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and later American thinkers and literati wandered around the Persian neighborhood of their imaginations with fruitful results. The list goes on and on, and in fact reads like a who’swho of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century giants of European and American literary and intellectual movements who  \nBrought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated  \nDownload Date | 3/9/16 1:40 PM  \n2 INTRODUCTION  \ncategorically shaped the contemporary contours oftheir cultures and civilization. Ferdowsi, Nezami, Rumi, Sa’di, Khayyám, Hafez, and numerous other Persian poets and prose stylists were known and admired by these leading European and American poets and philosophers, who used their works in creative or critical ways to make their own marks and shape their own ideas in varied and enduring directions.1  \nWhere do these comments and attitudes come from, what do they mean, and why would the most celebrated icons of European and American social and intellectual movements be so particular about things Persian? Even more significant, what were the consequences of this European fascination with things Persian or Persians themselves, for the emerging postcolonial nationstates we would soon recognize as Iran, Tajikistan, or Afghanistan?  \nBeginning with the seventeenth century there was a sudden and dramatic increase in European interest in Persian language and literature, religion and culture, history, geography, and archeology—in both real and imaginative ways. Why was this the case? Today, we have two classical answers to that question. Whereas Raymond Schwab (1884–1956), in The Oriental Renaissance (1950),2 considered such attentions to Persian, Indian, or any other“Oriental” matter as integral to the European romantic longing for originality, Edward Said (1935–2003), in his Orientalism (1978),3 paid almost exclusive attention to European imperialism as the modus operandi of knowledge production about the Orient in general. These two perspectives in effect complement and corroborate each other: while in one we are witness to the internal dynamics ofthis attention to the Orient, in the other we understand its more global condition and consequences. Thus the two points of view do not negate each other but in fact result in a more sculpted vision of what we understand as “Orientalism.”4  \nCritical as these two texts are to our understanding of “Orientalism,” disregarded by both Schwab and Said—and thus my paramount concern in this book—is the far more critical structural transformation of the European (and by extension global) bourgeois public sphere, as Jürgen Habermas—in his The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1962)—has termed the category of bourgeois society in this period as the principal site of knowledge production about the Orient.5 My objective here is to trace the origin and disposition of Persophilia in its immediate European context and to focus on its bourgeois public sphere as ","cbCaii62kTsqvryI","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaii62kTsqvryI","pdf",5805419,3,1,285,"English","en",105,"# Introduction\n## European fascination with Persian culture\n## Competing frameworks: Schwab and Said\n## Habermas and the bourgeois public sphere\n## From European dynamics to global political consequences","[{\"question\":\"What additional focus does the author claim is missing from both Schwab and Said?\",\"answer\":\"Both accounts overlook the structural transformation of the European (and global) bourgeois public sphere, treated as a key site for producing knowledge about the Orient.\"}]",1783376018,718,{"code":4,"msg":31,"data":32},"ok",{"site_id":25,"language":24,"slug":33,"title":13,"keywords":34,"description":14,"schema_data":35,"social_meta":78,"head_meta":80,"extra_data":82,"updated_unix":28},"hamid-dabashi-persophilia-persian-culture-on-the-global-scene-harvard","",{"@graph":36,"@context":77},[37,53,68],{"@type":38,"itemListElement":39},"BreadcrumbList",[40,44,48,50],{"item":41,"name":42,"@type":43,"position":21},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",{"item":45,"name":46,"@type":43,"position":47},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/","Document",2,{"item":49,"name":12,"@type":43,"position":20},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/research-report/",{"item":51,"name":13,"@type":43,"position":52},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/hamid-dabashi-persophilia-persian-culture-on-the-global-scene-harvard/43020/",4,{"url":51,"name":13,"@type":54,"author":55,"headline":13,"publisher":57,"fileFormat":60,"inLanguage":24,"description":14,"dateModified":61,"datePublished":62,"encodingFormat":60,"isAccessibleForFree":63,"interactionStatistic":64},"DigitalDocument",{"name":9,"@type":56},"Person",{"url":41,"name":58,"@type":59},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-07-20","2026-07-06",true,{"@type":65,"interactionType":66,"userInteractionCount":20},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":67},"ViewAction",{"@type":69,"mainEntity":70},"FAQPage",[71],{"name":72,"@type":73,"acceptedAnswer":74},"What additional focus does the author claim is missing from both Schwab and Said?","Question",{"text":75,"@type":76},"Both accounts overlook the structural transformation of the European (and global) bourgeois public sphere, treated as a key site for producing knowledge about the Orient.","Answer","https://schema.org",{"og:url":51,"og:type":79,"og:title":13,"og:site_name":58,"og:description":14},"article",{"robots":81,"canonical":51},"index,follow",{"doc_id":7,"site_id":25},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":84},[85,89,93,97,102,107,112,115,120,123,127],{"id":21,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":46,"category_name":86,"show_sort_weight":87,"slug":88},"Story & Novel",90,"story-novel",{"id":47,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":46,"category_name":90,"show_sort_weight":91,"slug":92},"Literature",80,"literature",{"id":52,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":46,"category_name":94,"show_sort_weight":95,"slug":96},"Exam",70,"exam",{"id":98,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":46,"category_name":99,"show_sort_weight":100,"slug":101},5,"Comic",60,"comic",{"id":103,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":46,"category_name":104,"show_sort_weight":105,"slug":106},6,"Technology",50,"technology",{"id":108,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":46,"category_name":109,"show_sort_weight":110,"slug":111},7,"Healthcare",40,"healthcare",{"id":11,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":46,"category_name":12,"show_sort_weight":113,"slug":114},30,"research-report",{"id":116,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":46,"category_name":117,"show_sort_weight":118,"slug":119},9,"Religion & Spirituality",20,"religion-spirituality",{"id":118,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":46,"category_name":121,"show_sort_weight":118,"slug":122},"World Cup","world-cup",{"id":124,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":46,"category_name":125,"show_sort_weight":124,"slug":126},10,"Lifestyle","lifestyle",{"id":128,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":46,"category_name":129,"show_sort_weight":98,"slug":130},19,"General","general"]