Quotes from Hamid Dabashi

The visual possibility of seeing the historical person (as opposed to the eternal Qur'anic man) on screen is arguably the single most important event allowing Iranians access to modernity.

There is no pride in a masculinst history that deprives half of humanity a pride of place, the dignity of who and what they are.

Racism consists in devaluing the humanity of certain people by dismissing it or playing it down (even when not intentional) at the same time as highlighting and playing up European philosophy, assuming it to be universal. It may be global, because it piggybacks on imperial expansion, but it certainly cannot be universal.

To read forward Why should Europeans not be able to read, even when we write in the language they understand? They cannot read because they (as "Europeans," caught in the snare of an exhausted but self-nostalgic metaphor) are assimilating what they read back into that snare and into what they already know – and are thus incapable of projecting it forward into something they may not know and yet might be able to learn.