Hamid Dabashi tells an elegant and startling story about the significance of Persian culture in Western society, and how Western ideas about Persian culture shaped modern Iran's notions of its antiquity and literary history.
Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, University of Pennsylvania A lively and erudite account of Persophilia...Whenever Dabashi discusses particular writers, Iranian or Western, his enthusiasm brims over; his love for literature, ... Read morewhether in Persian or English, German or French, shines through and animates his prose...His astute capsule descriptions of 19th- and 20th-century Iranian writers, most of whom remain unknown in the West, will come as both provocative and enlightening to even the most jaded Persophile.
(05/01/2016) Hamid Dabashi's scholarly investigation into Persophilia
the attraction that Iran's literary humanism held for giants of European culture including Mozart, Goethe, and Nietzsche
turns simplistic views of 'Orientalism' upside down. His penetrating account of a global conversation lasting centuries forces us to rethink tired old clich s about European cultural hegemony.
Malise Ruthven, author of Islam in the World Show Less