...from all the numerous hatreds and paranoid ideas pounding in his head and pouring out onto the pages of his articles and books. Hamid Dabashi (Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University) purports his recent IRAN: A PEOPLE INTERRUPTED to be a history of modern Iran, from the late-18th century Qajar period to the present. Once you start reading his insufferable rant, however, you'll find it is less about Iranian history (something which Dabashi considers to be only a "myth" anyway) as it is about Dabashi's self-indulgent "ax to grind." Dabashi is a stereotypical "lefty loon" (as an Iranian friend describes him) academician of the sort that Fox News loves to present on one of their talking head programs for public shock and amusement. He goes round and round in this book alternating his paeans to Che Guevara, French cinema, and his wife (obscure poet Golbarg Bashi), with childish and paranoid invective for almost all of his colleagues and predecessors who've written on Iranian history and culture; most of whom, according to the esteemed professor, are either "pestiferous orientalists" or "useless Lipstick Jihadists" (a snide reference to Azadeh Moaveni) --and all in service of America's "neo-cons." Dabashi definitely holds a special (and quite obsessive) contempt for Azar Nafisi. He dubs the author a "native informer and colonial agent," claiming her book READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN was a Pentagon psy-ops project intended to ease the American public into support for an invasion and occupation of Iran! (Are you getting the idea on this Dabashi fella by now?) If you subscribe to Dabashi's post-colonialist/post-Marxist blah-blah worldview, then you will truly have a good old time reading this book. But if you are quite sane and desire to learn more about Iran's modern history, take my sincere advice and avoid this book.
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