Seyed Mohammad Marandi
Encyclopedia
Seyed Mohammad Marandi, a graduate of Birmingham University and associate professor of English Literature
English literature
English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, J....

 at University of Tehran
University of Tehran
The University of Tehran , also known as Tehran University and UT, is Iran's oldest university. Located in Tehran, the university is among the most prestigious in the country, and is consistently selected as the first choice of many applicants in the annual nationwide entrance exam for top Iranian...

, is the founder and director of the Institute for North American and European Studies (INAES). Marandi, born in 1966 in Richmond, Virginia
Richmond, Virginia
Richmond is the capital of the Commonwealth of Virginia, in the United States. It is an independent city and not part of any county. Richmond is the center of the Richmond Metropolitan Statistical Area and the Greater Richmond area...

, is the son of former Iranian Health Care Minister and present Iranian Member of Parliment, Alireza Marandi, and a supporter of the Islamic Republic. He is also a frequent interlocutor at international news networks as CNN
CNN
Cable News Network is a U.S. cable news channel founded in 1980 by Ted Turner. Upon its launch, CNN was the first channel to provide 24-hour television news coverage, and the first all-news television channel in the United States...

, BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

, Al Jazeera
Al Jazeera
Al Jazeera is an independent broadcaster owned by the state of Qatar through the Qatar Media Corporation and headquartered in Doha, Qatar...

, and Press TV
Press TV
Press TV is a 24-hour English language global news network owned by the Iranian government. Its headquarters are located in Tehran, Iran, with bureaux in Beirut , Damascus , London , Seoul and Washington DC ....

, where he has made significant attempts at justifying the policies of the Islamic Republic with regard to its nuclear program
Nuclear program of Iran
The nuclear program of Iran was launched in the 1950s with the help of the United States as part of the Atoms for Peace program. The support, encouragement and participation of the United States and Western European governments in Iran's nuclear program continued until the 1979 Iranian Revolution...

, and, more recently, the suppression of the Iranian domestic protests.

In an interview with Al Jazeera, he has also tried to cast aspersions on the late Grand Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri (1922–2009), the dissident Iranian cleric and an advocate of human rights and separation of religion from state who was placed under house arrest virtually for life by the Islamic Republic, and to deny his role in bringing about the so-called Reform Movement in Iran since the late 1980s. According to Marandi: "After his [Montazeri's] inner circle was discovered to be linked to Mujahidin
People's Mujahedin of Iran
The People's Mujahedin of Iran is a terrorist militant organization that advocates the overthrow of the Islamic Republic of Iran....

 terrorists based in Iraq, he was isolated by the reformists.... He is not a major player and has always been very critical".

Marandi's main focus of concern, however, has been his pet project, INAES. This institute, starting as a subsidiary arm to the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures of Tehran University, in a few years' period has grown into a formidable independent center for reverse cultural engineering and producing the Islamic Republic's version of Occidentalism
Occidentalism
The term Occidentalism is used in one of two main ways: a) stereotyped and sometimes dehumanizing views on the Western world, including Europe and the English-speaking world; and b), ideologies or visions of the West developed in either the West or non-West. The former definition stresses negative...

 through the exploitation of the critical discourses on Orientalism
Orientalism
Orientalism is a term used for the imitation or depiction of aspects of Eastern cultures in the West by writers, designers and artists, as well as having other meanings...

 by such prominent figures as Edward Said
Edward Said
Edward Wadie Saïd was a Palestinian-American literary theorist and advocate for Palestinian rights. He was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a founding figure in postcolonialism...

, Ziauddin Sardar
Ziauddin Sardar
Ziauddin Sardar is a London-based scholar, writer and cultural-critic who specialises in Muslim thought, the future of Islam, futures studies and science and cultural relations...

, and Bill Ashcroft, for both domestic and international consumption.

In line with this, Marandi has entered arguments over what he calls the "Westernized
Westernization
Westernization or Westernisation , also occidentalization or occidentalisation , is a process whereby societies come under or adopt Western culture in such matters as industry, technology, law, politics, economics, lifestyle, diet, language, alphabet,...

" outlooks of the Iranian diaspora, especially as embodied in the bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books is a book by Iranian author and professor Azar Nafisi.Published in 2003, it has been on the New York Times bestseller list for over one hundred weeks and has been translated into thirty-two languages....

(2003) by the exile Iranian writer, Azar Nafisi
Azar Nafisi
Azar Nafisi, born ca. 1947, is an Iranian academic and bestselling writer who has resided in the United States since 1997 when she emigrated from Iran. Her field is English language literature....

:
In a recent work, under the title Ayatollah Khamenei and a Principled Foreign Policy, wherein Marandi crowns Khamenei with the magniloquent titles of Ayatollah al-Udhma (Grand Ayatollah) and Imam, the former he is not, and the latter is used only to address Khomeini in the context of the Islamic Republic, he goes as far as to state: "I venture to say that in some respects his [Khamenei's] leadership has been even more impressive than that of the late Imam, as he did not have the advantage of being the founder of the Revolution." Also, laying meticulously and comprehensively before the readers the instances of the Islamic Republic's "judicious" foreign policy under the "just, pious, courageous, and wise" Imam Khamenei, Marandi fails to mention anything about the Islamic Republic's foreign policy with regard to its closest ally in the region, namely the government of Syria
Syria
Syria , officially the Syrian Arab Republic , is a country in Western Asia, bordering Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea to the West, Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east, Jordan to the south, and Israel to the southwest....

, and the bloodshed that has been going on in that country, with the flagrant complicity of the Islamic Republic, for quite some time now.

In this very article, he mendaciously attributes the recent wave of liberation movements in the Middle East to the "culture of resistance advocated by Imam Khamenei":
With regard to Marandi's reporting of the news of Iran to the outside world, the Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 professor and political critic, Hamid Dabashi
Hamid Dabashi
Hamid Dabashi born 1951 in Ahvaz is an Iranian-American Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York City.He is the author of over twenty books...

, has derisively described him as a "native informer". Also, Reza Parchizadeh, the Iranian writer, political activist, and a former student who claims to be a former colleague of Marandi's at University of Tehran, has called him a "spin doctor"; and in an open letter has accused him of being one of the key architects of the Second Cultural Revolution in Iran under the pretext of the Islamization
Islamization
Islamization or Islamification has been used to describe the process of a society's conversion to the religion of Islam...

of Universities.
It is necessary to mention that not all people believe Mr. Reza Parchizadeh’s accusations. Most of Marandi’s students admire his courage and temerity in standing by his beliefs and in fact, look at him as a role model.

A respected scholar of English literature, Prof. Marandi teaches on such wide range of topics as literary criticism, American literature and history, and post-colonial discourse. He has published several academic works in international journals and he is a strong critic of all forms of Eurocentrism and academic imperialism. He is the co-founder of the Institute for North American and European Studies at the University of Tehran. Currently, he is the head of American Studies graduate program at the University of Tehran. He is a distinguished member of the American Studies Association.

In his youth Marandi volunteered in the Iran-Iraq war, suffering several serious injuries in the frontline and survived chemical attacks by Saddam.
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