The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

Jalal Al-i Ahmad (1923–69)

Jalal Al-i Ahmad is an intellectual and novelist famed for his pioneering role in the formulation of ideas that culminated in the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Born in Tehran into a clerical family and originally destined for a clerical career, he studied Persian literature but abandoned his studies to work for the Tudeh (communist) Party. After three or four years, he left the Tudeh Party because of its dependence on the Soviet Union and took to writing novels and short stories, translating French literature and philosophy into Persian, and creating ethnographic descriptions of the remote, rural regions of Iran. In the last years of his life, he developed a nativist ideology, which was influenced by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, German romanticism, French existentialism, engagé literature (socially responsible or engaged writing), and anticolonialist writers such as Frantz Fanon. A reaction to government policies, which had weakened the clergy and traditional institutions, his nativism went hand in hand with a return to Islamic ideals, which were not so much religious as political and social.

Al-i Ahmad’s most important book is Gharbzadagi (Weststruckness), a highly influential work in which he picks up an expression originally coined as a philosophical term by Ahmad Fardid, a follower of Heidegger, as a name for the destructive influence of the West, which has reduced the East to servitude and disorder by means of machines. Combative and rhetorical in tone, Gharbzadagi traces the roots of the West’s attack and alleged conspiracies to the period of the Crusades and even earlier, claiming that the Christian West conspired with the Turks of Transoxiana and again with the Mongols to bring about their attack on the Islamic world. Gharbzadagi interprets the travels of Marco Polo and the visits of European travelers to the Safavid court in Isfahan in the same manner. He saw the West as having repeatedly broken up “the Islamic collectivity,” most recently by the partition of the Ottoman state: Muslim/Eastern man would remain “West-struck” as long as he was a consumer of Western products and an imitator of Western culture and politics. According to Al-i Ahmad, the Muslims must try to build machines for themselves, adapting them to their indigenous, native circumstances, without becoming like the machine-dependent Westerners. Instead, they should pay attention to India, Japan, or Israel, which he briefly visited and saw as a good example of how tradition and religion could be used to build a new society. He changed his view in response to clerical criticism and the 1967 Six Day War.

Al-i Ahmad developed the same idea in On the Services and Treasons of the Intellectuals, in which he attacked Iranian and other Muslim intellectuals for their Western orientation and prepared the ground for the legitimization of Islamic discourse by charging them with estrangement from their own society. In Lost in the Crowd, an account of his pilgrimage, he also affirmed his connection with traditional Islamic religion.

Despite his emphasis on Islam, Al-i Ahmad’s language and expressions have an intellectual and nonreligious character, and thus one cannot compare him with the modern Muslim reformists and renewers in the Islamic world. He was more critical of the West and Westernization but was himself influenced by the West and Western thinkers. His concern is with inauthenticity, identity, and autonomy; this was why he turned to tradition, the better part of which naturally had a religious character. In practice, he became a link between the secular and the religious intellectuals.

The expression gharbzādagī quickly caught on among opponents of the Iranian regime, and copies of the book, which had been outlawed, passed from hand to hand. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whom Al-i Ahmad visited in Qum, had a copy of the book and used the expression gharbzādagī in the revolutionary and postrevolutionary phase to condemn the situation in Iran in the period of the shah. Al-i Ahmad also visited ‘Ali Shari‘ati in Mashhad, and Shari‘ati mixed his ideas with Shi‘i history and Islamic concepts after his death, turning them into a revolutionary ideology. Al-i Ahmad’s premature death, which some of his friends wrongly pinned on the state by way of antigovernment propaganda, transformed him into the intellectual hero of Iran. After the victory of the Islamic Revolution, his popularity among secular intellectuals waned in proportion to the esteem he gained among the clerical leaders.