Refashioning Iran

Mohamad Tavakoli Targhi offers a corrective to works on Orientalism that focus solely on European scholarly productions without exploring the significance of native scholars and vernacular scholarship to the making of Oriental studies. He brings to light a wealth of 18th- and 19th-century Indo-Persian texts, made "homeless" by subsequent nationalist histories and shows how they relate to Indo-Iranian modernity. In doing so, he argues for a radical re-writing of Iranian history with profound implications for Islamic debates on gender.