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.