A Glimpse at the Political Philosophy of Islam

A Review Article

by

Dr. Wahid Akhtar
Jalal Ali Ahmad

Occidentosis: A Plague From the West

trans. R. Campbell; ed.

Hamid Algar;

Mizan Press, Berkeley, Contemporary Islamic Thought Persian Series (1984), §5. 95.

Occidentosis (Gharbzadegi) is Jalal Ali Ahmad's tryst with the infinite world of ideas, for which the scene is set in twentieth-century Iran and the background is provided by the vast panorama of the East faced with the onslaughts of the Western civilization. The first draft of the book in Persian was presented at two of the many sessions of the Congress on the Aim of Iranian Education, on 29 November 1961 and 17 January 1962 in the form of a report, but it did not find a place in the proceedings of the Congress due to its critical nature. The first one-third part of Gharbzadegi was published in the periodical Kitab-e Mah causing the suspension of the journal. The author published it as a separate work privately in 1341/1962. Since its publication the book has been discussed, criticized and analysed heatedly both in Iran and abroad. It is acknowledged by both admirers and critics as a work of unique significance because of its content as well as its approach. R. Campbell has done a commendable service to contemporary Islamic thought by rendering the book into English.

Hamid Algar, a specialist in the field of recent Iranian thought and politics, has greatly enhanced the value of the translation by adding well-researched scholarly notes to it. The notes by Algar are both informative and corrective, for Jalal Ali Ahmad, being not a historian and a meticulous researcher, had committed certain errors that needed to be pointed out for the sake of providing readers with more accurate and definite information about the events referred to in the book.

Algar has done the editorial job with superb competence.

Jalal Ali Ahmad is one of the most eminent figures of contemporary Persian literature, basically a fiction writer, but nevertheless an equally important ideologue of modern Iran. In many respects he is a precursor of Dr. Ali Shari'ati, who, despite exercising far greater influence than Jalal on the youth, could not surpass Jalal Ali Ahmad in literary excellence.

Jalal Ali Ahmad (b. 1923) belonged to a family of strong religious traditions. The famous revolutionary Ayatullah Mahmúd Taliqani (d. 1979) was his paternal uncle and Jalal Ali Ahmad had been always impressed by him, but particularly during his later religious phase came closer to him. Jalal's family was reasonably well-off. When the clerical class was deprived of its notarial function and the income they derived from it, his family was put to hardship and Jalal had to give up his education after primary school. Instead he was sent to work to supplement the family's income. Jalal secretly enrolled in night classes and obtained his high school diploma in 1943. One year later he joined the Túdeh party, and made a complete break with religion. There he founded a literary association of Marxist writers, and within three years was appointed director of the party's publishing house with the responsibility of launching a new monthly Mahanah-yi mardum. He wrote prolifically for the party journals. In this period he was under the influence of the nationalist, anti-Shi'i writer Ahmad Kisrawi. In 1946, he graduated from the Teachers' Training College in Tehran, and started his career as a teacher and as a writer of fiction almost sirnultaneously.

His first collection of stories Did wa Bazdid (Visits exchanged) was published in 1945, and his anti-religion stance in those stories marked his complete break with Islam and his father. His second collection of short stories Az ranji ki mibarim, an exercise in socialist realism, was published in 1947 The very same year he came out of the Túdeh party along with a group of activists led by Khalil Maliki as an aftermath of the party's support to the Soviet Union's refusal to save the communist-dominated autonomous government of Azarbayjan. Now he devoted most of his time, except brief occasional sojourns in politics, to literary work. Seh Tar, his third collection of stories is product of this period. He returned to political activity with Dr. Musaddiq's campaign joined an alliance for the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry and' with Hizb-e Zahmat Kashan. In 1952, as a result of Maliki's rift with the Hizb-e Zahmat Kashan, a new party Nirú-ye Sewwum was formed and Jalal served it for a short time. In 1953, when the fugitive Shah was brought back by the U.S.A., Jalal left this party also.

Moreover, political activity was made virtually impossible due to severe repressive measures. Jalal turning again to literary pursuits translated Gide's Re tour de l'URSS and brought out Zan-e ziyadi (The superfluous woman). He dabbled in modernist poetry and painting also for some time. But more, significant for his intellectual development was his interest in anthropology. Within a period of four years he published three research monographs dealing with Iranian villages and their age-old customs, viz. Aurazan, Tatneshinha-ye Bulúk-i Zahra, and Jazirah-ye Khark. During this research the contradictory nature of the Western and the Islamic Eastern traditions dawned upon him, a realization that paved the way for his return to Islam. The worth of his anthropological work was immediately recognized by both the Iranian academic circles and Western universities. He undertook extensive foreign travels: to Europe in early 1963, to the Soviet Union in 1964, and to the United States in 1965. Of all these, the journey exercising the farthest reaching impact on his psyche was his hajj pilgrimage in 1964, which proved to be a great leap towards Islam. During this period of great creativity he realized the basic conflict between the traditional Iranian social structure and the new changes being imposed on the Iranian society in the name of modernization.

The interiorization of this awareness resulted in a unique kind of self-realization-broadening of the field of self-activity to the levels of national as well as religious collective-self-realization. The Iranian-Islamic archetypal patterns of conscious and unconscious psychical processes were revealed to him to be in opposition to those patterns of thought and practice which were being imported with technology from the West and transplanted on the Eastern soil. Jalal's realization of the contradictory characters of the Western and Eastern cultures caused him to write Gharbzadegi, an analysis of the corrupting influence of the West on the East in the historical perspective with particular reference to the Iranian society and body politic. In the last years of his life he produced two major works: the novel, Nafrin-e zamin (The curse of the land), published in 1967, a damaging criticism of the so-called Land Reform; and a work of ideological importance, Dar khidmat wa khiyanat-e rawshanfikran (Concerning the service and disservice of the intellectuals), which was posthumously published during the peak hours of the Revolution.

Jalal died on September 9, 1969 in a village in Gilan, and was buried near the Firúzabadi mosque at Shahri Ray. Thus came to end an intellectual career, apparently chequered with swift shifts in political and philosophical position, but in reality depicting the journey of a restless soul in search of its true identity, a quest for the roots. Jalal's psychological and intellectual biography is not different from those of many others who underwent similar radical upheavals and transformations in the post-Second-World-War period of disillusionment with almost all the modern ideologies causing a deep sense of rootlessness.

Jalal traced back the roots of his own existence along with the roots of Iranian culture and soul to Islam-a diagnosis of great relevance to the Muslim world in general. Hamid Algar's introduction to the translation of Gharbzadegi furnishes all necessary information about Jalal's literary and political life.

Algar's following observation provides the key to understanding the real nature of Occidentosis:

It is important to remember that its author was neither a historian nor an ideologue. He was a man who after two decades of thought and experimentation had discovered an important and fundamental truth concerning his society-disastrous subordination to the West in all areas-and was in a hurry to communicate this discovery to others. He had neither the time nor the patience to engage in careful historical research, and at some points in the book he even enjoins his readers to dig up the historical evidence for a given assertion. (p. 14).

A more important observation made by Algar concerns the nature of Jalal's rediscovery of the soul of Islam. In his view, Jalal's return to Islam is not straightforward, because, firstly, he could not completely free himself from the Orientalist influence, and secondly, there was an unmistakably nationalist colour to Ali Ahmad's proud claim that

"Islam became Islam when it reached the settled lands between the Tigris and the Euphrates, until then being the Arabs' primitiveness and Jahiliyyah" Jalal in Occiden tosis blames Orientalists for inflating the Iranian ego by causing them to believe that they are the people with a great past and consequently making them think that they did not need learn anything new from the West except the use of machine. Then taking advantage of this false pride and complacence, in his view, Western scholars changed the moulds of Iranian thought substituting them by their own measures. It is strange that an intellectual of Jalal's calibre, who was aware of the Western scholars' conspiracy, fell so cheaply into their trap and explained the origin of Islam in terms of "a kind of delayed response to the call of Mani and Mazdak" or, using Marxist jargon, "a new call based on the needs of the urban populations of the Euphrates region and Syria". These and many other false notions and criteria are fabrications of the Western mode of thinking imported to the East in the name of "scientific tools of socio-historical analysis".

And our intelligentsia is so allured by the temptation of being considered modern that a conscious writer like Jalal, fully aware of Western intellectual conspiracy, applies them to the realities of Islam and the Eastern culture unhesitatingly. Unfortunately all intellectuals who have been and are in the vanguard of political and intellectual movements in the third world have been using Western concepts and criteria to interpret and solve the complexities of their own traditions.

Modernism, liberalism, scientism, secularism, sociologism and many other 'isms' were evolved and developed in the West according to the changing conditions of the Western society and polity, which were confronted with a fundamental contradiction between new scientific modes of thinking and Christian-dominated medieval ways of life and thought that caused an unbridgeable breach between sacred and profane, spiritual and physical, worldly and otherworldly, religion and social existence, or the church and the state. So-called Eastern intelligentsia in general, and Muslim intellectuals in particular, without applying their intellect to the fundamental opposition between Oriental and Occidental milieu, accepted Western notions as if they were universally true and applicable to various realities.

Nationalism is also such a category having little relevance to the realities and ideals of Islam. Iranian Islam, Indian Islam, Malaysian Islam, Pakistani Islam, Turkish Islam and Arab Islam as terms have become so current in contemporary writings that even the most cautious and meticulous of Muslim scholars brought up under the Western educational system use them as valid. Undoubtedly Islamic teachings due to their immense potential of adaptability could fit in different environs without being altered basically, but it did not mean that Islam could be variously interpreted. Since such a wrong conception of Islam became current, Muslim Ummah as a whole began to lose political and economic power and became stagnant intellectually and scientifically. Jalal's pride in an Islam which became Islam after settling in what is presently known as Iraq, Syria and Iran stems from a similar nationalist oriented misconception. Surprisingly enough Jalal is critical of the Safawid Iran for playing into the hands of anti-Muslim Eastern and Western powers by stabbing the Ottoman Muslim empire in the back which proved to be the last stronghold of Muslim resistance against the world supremacy of the West. Granted that his criticism is not justified concerning all the points, nonetheless his analysis, though defective, reveals his keen desire for Muslim unity. He is also aw are that the breaking up of the Ottoman empire into small states and principalities was engineered by Western imperialist designs. This awareness should have led him to understand the true nature of the movements of nationalism in the Muslim world. The seeds of nationalism were sowed in the hearts of the Muslims by a well-planned conspiracy of Western imperialism, intellectually supported by Orientalists and Western educators with a view to break Muslim unity.

The Arabs who are still serving their Western masters, with their overemphasis on Arab nationalism fail to realize that the differences within their own fold are due to themselves and are offshoots of the spirit of nationalism cultivated in their minds by the vested Western interests. The divisive role of nationalism does not stop at alienating Arab Muslims from the rest of the Muslim world, but it goes further and deeper by causing subdivisions among themselves making them even more dependent on the West. Like many modern and so-called progressive writers of the past generation Jalal Ali Ahmad, in his diagnosis of the evil effects of Western influence, could not smell the danger of the West-inspired nationalism. Thus he, whose messianic mission was to liberate Iranians from the clutches of Westernization, fell an easy prey to the Occidental trap not realizing the ideological pitfalls in Western thought. This is how Orientalists consciously coin certain notions with ulterior motives and our Eastern, or more precisely Muslim, intellectuals imitate them unconsciously subscribing to their views and serving their motives.

Algar, quoting Simin Danishwar, Jalal's wife, concludes that Jalal's "relative return to religion was a means to preserving national identity and a path leading to human dignity, mercy, reason, and virtue." All these terms are ambiguous, rather emptyclichés, confusing "Islamic identity" with a particular kind of "national identity." Jalal's return to Islam is dubbed as incomplete by Algar, for, even in Khassi dar Miqat, Jalal's travelogue of his hajj pilgrimage, despite his occasional emotional outbursts, he is more concerned with the human and material surroundings than with his own inner experience. On the one hand, it may be explained in terms of a hangover from his Marxist past, and on the other, it can be deciphered "as an attempt to flee from the mosque" The last phrase occurs in Khassi dar Miqat (Tehran: 1345/1966, p. 74) on the occasion of his visit to the tomb of the Prophet (S) in Medina.

In the morning when I said, 'peace be upon you, O Prophet,' 1 was suddenly moved. The railing surrounding the tomb was directly in front of me and 1 could see the people circumambulating the tomb ... I wept and fled from the mosque. (Occidentosis, p.18)

However, this incomplete return to Islam in itself is significant, because it paved the way for the coming of many an intellectual in the fold of the Islamic Revolution. Ayatullah Taliqani remarked of him: 'Jalal was very good toward the end of his 'life.' Had he lived till the victory of the Islamic Revolution, most probably he would have been on the side of the 'ulama'. This is not a shallow conjecture, but can be supported with ample evidence. He was the first member of the intelligentsia to lament the killing of Shaykh Fadl Allah Núri, the chief opponent of Western-style constitutionalism. .Jalal reevaluated his positive role in blocking the smooth sailing of the Western interests in Iran in the following words:

... The martyred Shaykh Núri was forced to mount the gallows not as an opponent of constitutionalism, which he had defended early on, but as an advocate of rule by Islamic law (and as an advocate for Shi'i solidarity). This is why they all sat waiting for the fatwa from Najaf to kill him-this in an age when the leaders among our occidentotic intellectuals were the Christian Malkum Khan and the Caucasian Social Democrat Talibov. Now the brand of occidentosis was imprinted on our foreheads. I look on that great man's body on the gallows as a flag raised over our nation proclaiming the triumph of occidentosis after two hundred years of struggle. Under this flag we are like strangers to ourselves, in our food and dress, our homes, our manners, our publications, and, most dangerous, our culture .... (Occidentosis, pp. 5657)

Ali Ahmad was probably the lone litterateur who recognized the significance of the 15 Khurdad 1342 (6 June 1963) uprising, and could see how decisive a role the 'ulam a' were to play in shaping the destiny of Iran. He also went to see Imam Khumayni, who was quoted as saying: I once saw Jalal Ali Ahmad for a quarter of an hour. It was in the early part of our movement. I saw someone sitting opposite me, and the book Gharbzadegi was lying near me. He asked, 'How did you come by this Nonsense?' and I realized it was Ali Ahmad. Unfortunately, I never saw him again. May he enjoy the mercy of God. (Commemorative supplement to Jamhúri-ye Islami, p.10)

The first chapter of Occidentosis deals with the nature of the disease. It is said that the division of the world in two blocs, East and West, or communist and non-communist, has become redundant. In fact there exist two blocs, and they are: producers of the machine and buyers of the machine. It makes all the difference who exports and who imports machines. Economy, politics, sociology, psychology, and every other thing including prosperity, mortality and birth-rates, social welfare, nutrition, culture, and socio-political structure depend upon this single fact. The West or the exploiter owns the machine, and the East or the oppressed, or in more respectable terms the developing countries, need the machine. The boundaries of the East and the West are also floating and shifting. Sometime the East overlaps the West, and vice versa.

The East includes Asia, Africa, and Latin America, while the West comprises Europe, America, Japan, South Africa and Israel. In such a division ideological compartmentalization becomes superfluous. Jalal discovered this radically new reality in the early sixties. In the past the area from the Eastern Mediterranean to India (and China), presently called by the West 'the East' was the advanced and civilized part of the world, whereas the present West then led a semi-barbaric life. Now the balance is tipped in favour of the other side. It was success in trade and advancement in machinery and technology that vested the West with superior authority in all respects. With the process of civilization, or rather Christianization, the worst forms of deprivation, exploitation and dehumanization encroached upon the lands of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Religion, culture, economy, social structure and the old value systems were destroyed by the colonizers. It was only Muslim unity that obstructed the onward march of imperialism. With the elimination of Islamic Andalusia the last battle scene was set in the Ottoman empire, the last citadel of formal or real Islamic unity.

When the Ottoman empire was disintegrated as an aftermath of the first world war, its provinces, formed as independent states, but virtually Western satellites, fell an easy prey to the ever-increasing lust of the West. Iran was a part and parcel of this scheme, where a dictator of the West's choice was crowned emperor. This entire process was facilitated by importing into Iran the machine and its Western experts along with all its paraphernalia. The post-war period witnessed the all-embracing tentacles of occidentosis rapidly taking into their deadly embrace the entire Iran and all the aspects of its religious, cultural, social and economic life. This was the end of a national identity.

The next three chapters describe the earliest signs of the illness, the wellsprings of the flood, and the first infections. In these chapters Jalal gives an account of the historical events leading to the ultimate surrender of the East to the West. The villain of this long drawn drama is the machine-a substitute for Fate, the villain in the classical Western play-as a tool of the demigods of money and political power in Iran.

The delayed reaction on the part of the East, like that of Shakespearian hero Hamlet, comes to the surface at the end of the nineteenth century, in the form of constitutionalism, which also proved to be inspired and manoeuvred by the Britishers. It is in this perspective that the martyrdom of Fadl Allah Núri is assessed as a sacrifice of great significance by the author. Before that Jalal had analysed the vital role of Iran-Turkey conflict as an instrument of strengthening the forces of the West.

In the fourth chapter, "The First Infections", among other things, Jalal evaluates the nature and character of Western education. The first point he makes out is that the entire Western education is based upon and modelled according to Christianity. In the East it aims at alienating the Eastern people from their culture, religion, and social structure. It is an irony of events that an educational system more advanced than that of the medieval Christian system was put aside as being obsolete and retrogressive in the name of modern science and technology. This type of education alienated the so-called elite from their people, soil, and their traditions, without bestowing upon them the slightest spark of expertise in modern science and technology. In the Iranian context, Jalal makes note of the following fact:

This estrangement came about because the two generations that have cropped up here since the Constitutional Era to become professors, writers, ministers, lawyers, general directors, and so on, only the doctors among them having any true specialized competence ... they all went astray in opting for "adoption of European civilization without Iranian adaptation".... (p. 58)