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| 65 3 A Critical Understanding of Modernity When in 1721 the French Enlightenment thinker Baron de Montesquieu published his Persian Letters, under a pseudonym to escape Church persecution, he probably never imagined that two centuries later his book would still have the power to stir controversy.1 The book was meant, he claimed, to be neither an empirical study nor a historical exegesis but only a “novel” inspired by what was known at the time about the Orient and the world of Islam, specifically the Ottoman caliphate. Yet in spite of its author’s modest expectations, the book turned out to be a bestseller. What excited French readers the most were the sensual depictions of harem scenes, which were thought to be a prominent feature of life in Islamic countries. Although Montesquieu had not intended to write a so-called erotic novel, his readers were apparently in good part inclined to receive the book in that spirit, based on their own vivid imaginings about a culture made mysterious and different by its sheer distance. What, however, were Montesquieu’s real intentions in writing these “letters ”? He later claimed, after the book’s first reprint, that only through a work of fiction was it possible to criticize the social ills resulting from the domination of the public and private spheres by the Church and monarchy in France. He had to present an alien world which, on the surface at least, was far removed from French society in order to openly express his views about his own country. In other words, in order to introduce his readers to the social problems of his day, he had decided to compare and contrast existing aspects of French social and cultural life to imagined worlds that were unfamiliar to them. He hoped that the tensions of this juxtaposition would bring the everyday and obvious into the nakedness of a problematic visibility . In a way, Persian Letters helped the French see their own cultural and moral conditions as outsiders gazing into their own society. To see things with a sense of wonder was a core precept of the Sufi philosophers of old 66 | A Critical Understanding of Modernity Iran. In our own post-modern times, the act of getting to know the Other, its language, culture, and history is again a way of looking critically and afresh into one’s own ways of knowing and acting and, therefore, of denaturalizing them for the purpose of critical intervention and transformation. Seeing the familiar through the eyes of the outsider is also a well-established modernist literary device. All in all, standing at the opening gates of this tradition, Persian Letters is similarly about interrogating the Self by introducing the Other. It is a multilayered text the meanings of which are not always immediately apparent. I have dealt with Persian Letters more extensively in another book.2 There I discussed a variety of accounts on Iranian society by European thinkers and asked why a French thinker would want to create two Iranian characters and have them praise European modernity and harshly criticize the ways and habits of Iranians and Muslims in their familial, religious, and political affairs. It seemed to me that what Edward Said has characterized as the discourse of Orientalism would most certainly include Persian Letters.3 There is no doubt that this popular text, with its pictures of women’s subjugation within the bounds of the harem and oppressive family relations in the context of a broader moral and societal debasement, contributed greatly to a reductive and exaggeratedly fixed Western perception of the East in the historical context of changing power relations on a global scale. Yet it is a mistake to limit reflection on this important Enlightenment work to merely this insight. A fuller view must consider Persian Letters as a more complex and layered phenomenon. In October of 2001, when the British author V. S. Naipaul was chosen to receive the Nobel Prize in literature, Persian Letters was mentioned with comparative reference to the author’s work and particularly his more recent Beyond Belief. When presenting the prize to Naipaul, who was born in Trinidad and is of Indian descent, the Swedish Academy stated: “Naipaul is a modern philosophe, carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres Persanes and Candide.4 In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.”5 This comment should be viewed in...

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