Cultural Schizophrenia

Islamic Societies Confronting the West

Author: Daryush Shayegan Series: Modern Intellectual and Political History of the Middle East

Explores the the relationship between the Muslim world and the influence of Western modernity.

A consideration of the relationship between Muslim Culture and Western modernity. Shayegan portrays a society he perceives as bound by a slavish adherence to its own glorified history - yet facing an external reality that derives from the West. The meeting of these two worlds leads to a distortion, in how the Muslim world sees itself.

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Summary

Explores the the relationship between the Muslim world and the influence of Western modernity.

Description

Professor Daryush Shayegan's book is a major contribution to what is perhaps the most critical debate within the Muslim world today: the relationship between its own culture and the influence of Western modernity.
Based on examples ranging from Iran to Morocco, the author portrays a society he defines as peripheral--bound by a slavish adherence to its own glorified history, its "Tradition"--yet facing an external reality that derives from the West. The meeting of these two incompatible worlds sees the West but, more importantly, in how it sees itself.

Shayegan draws on a vast range of cultural experiences (from China and Japan to India and Latin America) in analyzing the type of mentality that is chained to its history. Sources as diverse as Jung and Octavio Paz widen the scope of this illuminating text.

Already published in French, Turkish, Spanish, and Arabic to great critical acclaim, this English edition of Cultural Schizophrenia will be required reading for everyone concerned with the state of the world today, whether in the Third World or the West.

Critic Reviews

“Shayegan penetrates into the deeper implications of many prevalent ideas and attitudes of those torn between tradition and modernity. He brilliantly shed new light on a number of issues that have been superficially glossed over in much of the current literature.”

No other topic has occupied a more pivotal position in the intellectual discourse of Muslim societies than the highly conflicted encounter between these societies and the West. Daryush Shayegan's Cultural Schizophrenia is an erudite, provocative, and deeply humane analysis of the cultural dimensions of this encounter by a distinguished philosopher whose lifework has contributed to much of each side's understanding of the other.

-- "Ali Banuazizi, Professor of Social Psychology, Boston College"

-- "Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Professor of Islamic Studies George Washington University"

About the Author

Daryush Shayegan is a former professor of comparative philosophy and Indology at Tehran University, former director of the Iranian Center for the Study of Civilizations and former director of the Institute for Ismai`li Studies in Paris.