BEYOND ORIENTALISM AND OCCIDENTALISM" IRANIAN SCHOLARS' AND SOCIAL SCIENTIST' POINT OF VIEWS

Gholam Abbas Tavassoli

Dr Gholam Abbas Tavassoli is a Senior Lecturer at the
Tehran Univesity

"Alternative discourses" in the social sciences has a long
previous history: If we renounce from the endless battle between Marxism and
positivism in western tradition, we may take in consideration other alternatives
such as universalism / particularism, globalism / regionalism, institutionalism
/ individualism, internationalism / nationalism and concepts such as relativism
/ absolutism, divergence / convergence, universal social sciences / societal
social sciences, western rationalism, orientalism, African perspective, other
underdevelopment in the Arab world, self-creative society etc. In Asia and in
Islamic societies, we are witness of some other concepts such as decolonization
of social sciences, Islamisation of knowledge. Indigenization (or endogenous:
Atal, 1974). Although "indigenization" has been the concern that Iranian
sociologists and thinkers share with other third world social scientists, and
several thinkers has been struggling with the idea of an indigenous sociology
reflecting Iranian socio-cultural values, norms, and world view (Al-ahmad
Shariati, Naghavi), but the "islamisation of knowledge (including sociology) may
be considered as a post revolution concept, put forward, specially by some
clergyman and some fundamentalists who wanted to encourage the applications of
moral rather than social criteria for evaluating various social phenomena.

In this paper we will try to identify the theoretical framework
on the state of the social sciences in Iran, concept and argumentation on
alternative social sciences. We will give a bibliography at the end.