Persia and the Enlightenment. Edited by Cyrus Masroori, Whitney Mannies, and John Christian Laursen

Abstract

Cyrus Masroori, Whitney Mannies, and John Christian Laursen — all three scholars of political science — have brought together contributors from the United States, France, Spain, Italy, and Brazil to address a subject that has been drawing attention at least since Paul Hazard discussed Montesquieu’s Persians in La Crise de la conscience européenne (1680–1715) (Paris: Boivin, 1935). In the Introduction, Masroori and Mannies present theoretical diversity as the best approach to the multiplicity of connections between Persia and Enlightenment, also distancing themselves from Edward Said’s Orientalism. At the same time, drawing on the legacy of Foucault’s thinking, they suggest that the ‘significance of Persia to the Enlightenment may help us better understand the Enlightenment and modernity’ and define Enlightenment as an ‘effort to generate a new narrative of identity for Europe’ (pp. 9, 10). The volume thus argues for the primacy of representation and contributes to the study of how and why Europeans drew upon their perceptions of Persia to fight their many battles. Within this frame, the editors’ approach has been effective. Breadth of subject and methodology allow for some tours de force on well-known topics and on sources which will prove useful to the uninitiated reader: John Marshall’s essay on Persian tolerance; the article by Masroori and Laursen on European knowledge of Persia before the Enlightenment; Mannies’s discussion of Persia in the Encyclopédie; and Myrtille Méricam-Bourdet’s article on Voltaire and Persia. The book also makes space for excellent empirical research on little-known materials, as is the case with Rolando Minuti’s essay on European perceptions of Nādir Shāh, Masroori’s study of George Lyttelton’s Letters from a Persian (1735), and Erica J. Mannucci’s analysis of late-eighteenth-century French uses of Zoroastrians. Some of the interpretive perspectives also contribute to the revitalization of the research field. Minuti brings into play Reinhart Koselleck’s notion of Sattelzeit when analysing how shifting concepts of patriotism impacted on European political judgements about Nādir Shāh; Masroori and Mannucci show the potential of a balanced study of political circumstances and long-term intellectual developments; Mannucci and Mannies draw attention to the transition from allegorical, polemical, or satirical representations of Persia to the country’s embedding into historical narratives, although history itself is not neutral, as they acknowledge. However, the editors’ approach is also conducive to some weaknesses. Methodological diversity can give way to impressionism, as we find in Antônio Carlos dos Santos’s essay on the connections between travelling and tolerance. In the case of the otherwise masterly article by Marta García-Alonso on Pierre Bayle’s use of ‘Persian theology’, the Persian element is so elusive that the reader is left wondering whether specific reasons drew Enlightened Europe towards Persia, or whether Persia was just another manifestation of the exotic. Despite this, however, the volume is worth reading — especially by students of the French Enlightenment — since it offers a wealth of old and new material on how Enlightened Europe shaped itself by engaging with Persia, but also because it constitutes a step towards answering the difficult question of the specific value of Persia vis-à-vis other extra-European polities.