ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an exercise in intertextuality and epistemological genealogy. Despite epistemological differences and diverging ideological orientations, Hamid Dabashi and Ali Mirsepassi's thinking about knowledge and power converge in their concerns freedom, democracy and civil rights. Dabashi is very critical of what he refers to as the 'autonormativity' of Western thinking, which is the result of its self-proclamation as the benchmark for all critical thinking and intellectual rigour. But at the same time he mines that legacy for the intellectual deposits needed to forge this counter discourse. Dabashi's new agenda is also very much the outcome of introspection and self-reflection. Based on critical examinations of the Iranian revolution and its religious underpinnings in historical Shi'a Islam, Dabashi's analysis concludes that the success of the Iranian revolution also heralds the failure of political Islam.
