Coexist with Uncertainty - The ‘Persian Model’ and the Western Vision of the Islamic World

Abstract

The present epoch is characterized by a trait over others: the renewed perception of uncertainty. It is the main engine of the current climate where one relentlessly looks for scapegoats to take the blame of the inability to understand. The possibility of analyzing configurations that the current paradigm cannot explain or understand, and which therefore condemns, is a ‘thinking differently’ (Rella, 1987) that leaves anyone displaced. Perhaps it is time to recognize that many of our frameworks of understanding are too rigid, preventing comprehension. Accepting the fact that culture is perpetually in fieri and that it resolves itself in coexisting and conflicting versions that focus on different themes has interesting consequences: it involves the denial of the absolutist claims of the dominant paradigm and, consequently, implies the synchronic coexistence of different structures of meaning. Without this awareness we tend to generalize: for example, we tend to group all Middle East peoples into categories defined a priori as ‘Arabs’, ‘Muslims’ or, worse, ‘Terrorists’, ignoring their diversity and variety. This is a legacy of Orientalism that leads to the analysis of different structures and phenomena using consolidated paradigms of Western culture (Said, 1978). A new inclusive paradigm is needed which should stimulate the knowledge and understanding of a world seems so distant and has so many facets within it. It is a paradigm, moreover, that can take into account the simultaneous presence of contradictory elements and make a new sense out of them. [...]