Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2022
Among other Middle Eastern countries, Iran and Turkey stand out as the two neighboring countries with many linguistic and cultural similarities. The question that comes to the fore is: to what extent do these two countries know each other? This article attempts to provide a picture of the state of Iranian Studies in Turkey with specific attention to three monographs originally written as PhD dissertations in various Turkish universities over the last three decades. Produced from within three different social science and humanities divisions, i.e. Political Science, Persian Literature and History, these are three of the very few scholarly monographs produced on Iran in Turkey. Based on a close reading of these studies, it seems possible to observe that they are mostly ill-balanced by methodological, ethnocentric as well as Turkish nationalist biases.
Although the original idea behind this paper dates from a few years ago, it mostly took shape while Metin Yüksel was a post-doctoral research fellow of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) in Tehran in the summer of 2013.
Yüksel is thankful to TÜBİTAK for its 2219 Post-doctoral Fellowship for Research, which provided him with a productive research opportunity in Tehran. He is grateful to Mezher Yüksel for his thoughtful and encouraging suggestions and comments from the beginning of this project. Thanks also to Kaveh Hemmat, Melissa Bilal, Cihangir Gündogˇdu, Hani Khafipour and Burak Onaran for their assistance and comments. Translations from Turkish into English, unless otherwise noted, belong to the author.