A Transatlantic Study of Iranian Diasporic Intellectualism

In this paper, through a comparative study of the thought and political views of two prolific Iranian diasporic intellectuals from two different geographies and generations, namely Hamid Dabashi, a first-generation Iranian immigrant to the U.S., and Navid Kermani, who was born to an Iranian family in Germany, I will argue that the political discourse in the land of residence around the land of origin (in this case, Iran) plays a distinctive role in the formation of the political views and ‘cultural imaginaries’ of diasporic communities. These views and imaginaries are mutually reflected in and reproduced by the diasporic intellectuals' cultural and academic productions which deal with the homeland.
Hamid Dabashi, a distinguished professor at Columbia University, situates his intellectual project within the postcolonial critique of Western Orientalism, U.S. imperialism and Israel’s settler colonialism. Accordingly, he responds to the U.S. media’s misrepresentations of Iran and the Middle East more generally through formulating an Iranian cosmopolitanism by referring to the history of Persian literature and Iranian Shiism.
Navid Kermani, an acclaimed author of many novels and scholarly works on Islam, advocates tolerance and an interfaith dialogue among different religions, including Islam, Christianity and Judaism, to rectify the European manichean image of Islam and the conflicts between the above-mentioned religions. Thanks to the romanticizing image Germans and other Europeans hold of Persia and the “Orientˮ at large, Iran has not been the focus of Kermani’s postcolonial project. Instead, his primary focus is on European Islamophobia, to which he responds by portraying Islam and Muslim communities in Europe in a more differentiated and colorful light.
In this paper, I argue that besides many personal concerns and interests that each author may or may not have, it is the diverging dominant political discourses in the U.S. and Germany that have contributed greatly to the emergence of dissimilar concerns in the literature and scholarship by Iranian American and Iranian German authors.