In this thought-provoking book, Ali Mirsepassi explores the concept of modernity and exposes the Eurocentric prejudices underlying its development. He provides a new interpretation of Islamic Fundamentalism through a detailed analysis of the ideas of key Islamic intellectuals and argues that the Iranian Revolution was not a simple clash between modernity and tradition but an attempt to accommodate modernity within a sense of authentic Islamic identity and culture. He concludes by assessing the future of secularism and democracy in the Middle East in general, and in Iran in particular.
Ali Mirsepassi is professor of Middle Eastern studies and sociology at Gallatin School, New York University. He was a Carnegie Scholar (2007-2009). He is the author of Iranian Intellectuals, Islam, and the West: A radical discourse in philosophical despair, Cambridge University Press, Fall 2010, Democracy in Modern Iran, NYU Press, 2010, Intellectual Discourses and Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran Cambridge University Press, 2000, and Ethics in Public Sphere and Truth or Democracy (published in Iran); coeditor of Localizing Knowledge in a Globalizing World (Syracuse University Press, 2002); and guest editor of "Beyond the Boundaries of the Old Geographies: Natives, Citizens, Exiles, and Cosmopolitans" in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (CSSAAME), spring 2005. He was awarded the presidential award for best research of the year (Tehran 2000).
