Between Aloofness and Fascination: Safavid Views of the West

Abstract

Identity implies the other. As there is no self-definition without a view of the Other, the process whereby the “Self” discovers the “Other” is crucial to the formation of a self-image, for individuals as much as for groups of people claiming a collective identity. Historically, this process has never been more acute and intense than with the explosion of intercultural contact between Europe and the rest of the world following the so-called Age of Discovery. Nothing matches the radical novelty and drama of the first encounter between Europeans and the inhabitants of the New World. Though different inasmuch as it built on previous, intermittent contact and thus lacked the shock element of the utterly outlandish and bizarre, Europe's interaction with most of the major peoples of Asia in early modern times was hardly less transformative in the long run. Unprecedented in frequency and intensity, European-Asian contact as of the sixteenth century began to undermine the exotic notions and fabulous images that had formed and developed since Antiquity and that, over time, had been allowed to harden into convention.

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