The Evils of Westernization
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)
Westernization is not an isolated phenomenon
confined to Iran.
All colonies of the West in the East had
to meet this challenge. For instance, the
Indian subcontinent, which remained under
the British colonial rule virtually for about
two centuries, underwent a process of Westernization,
but it could affect a minority of civil servants
and upper ruling class only, and failed to
engulf the vast majority of the Muslim and
non-Muslim population. The Western education
system was thrust upon the subcontinent partly
due to needs of the British rulers for efficient
functionaries for their administration, and
partly because a few far-sighted leaders
considered the old Muslim and Hindu systems
of education out-dated and felt that the
Indians' acquaintance with modern sciences
was the only means of rescuing them from
total destruction. A section of orthodox
Muslim 'ulama' and staunch champions of Hindu
culture put up some resistance to the Western
influence. This resistance, though not lasting
long, served as a warning as well as a safety
measure and effective restraint in checking
complete surrender of India to the W est.
Thus, the Indians were enabled to master
modern scientific knowledge and its tools
without being totally alienated from their
own cultural traditions. Only a negligible
minority of timeservers took pride in Anglicizing
themselves, but the majority of the Muslims,
Hindus, and other communities, including
even new converts to Christianity, retained
and preserved their traditional style of
life. As a consequence of firm adherence
to their native traditions, Indians learnt
modern sciences and proved themselves to
be the equals, in specialized fields, of
the Westerners, but at the same time they
retained their "Indianness". Contrarily,
in Iran, after the early resistance against
Westernization by the clergy was repressed
by force, there was no check against Westernization.
It is more tragic that instead of trying
to specialize in modern sciences they remained
content in imitating Western ways of dressing,
living and eating, and they forcibly unveiled
their women without initiating them into
modern spirit. Another factor that accelerated
superficial Westernization was affluence,
which came in the wake of the oil money.
Jalal repeatedly uses the phrase "the
ugly head of oil" for referring to the
negative consequences of the oil. Though
the lion's share of oil revenue was usurped
by the Western powers and companies, yet
the remnant of it was enough to ensure Iranians
that they could buy all they needed from
the West. They became accustomed to the use
of the machine without having technical know-how.
Gradually they became more and more easygoing
and comfort-loving, and surrendered their
social, cultural, political, and economic
freedom to the despotism of the machine.
When Jalal curses the machine and holds it
responsible for Iran's slavery to the machine-producing
West, his criticism issues from a realization
that the machine played the key role in subjecting
Iran to occidentosis. The imported machine
and technology required expertise, which
was not available in the country, and hiring
of foreign experts meant importing the necessary
paraphernalia. which was accompanied by all
sorts of foreign cultural influence, including
that of the Orientalists, sociologists, political
analysts, functionaries of cultural exchange
programmes, etc. With all this, Iran's subjection
to occidentosis was complete. The same process
took place in the Arab countries also with
some minor differences. But probably the
pre-Revolution Iran had become much more
Western in its life-style than any other
Muslim or Eastern country. All diseases produce
corresponding antibodies. Similarly the plague
of occidentosis produced from within writers
like Jalal and a combating resistance force
in the form of the 'ulama', who untiringly
fought against all forms of Western supremacy.
This concerted struggle ultimately culminated
in the movement led by Imam Khumayni. Jalal
witnessed its beginning and anticipated correctly
its far-reaching socio-political effects.
The fifth chapter '"The War of Contradictions",
brings out the main contradictions of the
Iranian society caused by the machine transformation.
The logic of machine consumption compelled
premature urbanization, as a consequence
of which villages were deserted and agriculture
destroyed. This change forced Iranian consumers
to be dependent on foreign food grains and
frozen or tinned food products. The entire
Iranian economy collapsed. The figures which
are supplied and analysed by Jalal concern
the years 1331-1340 (1952-1961), which marked
just the beginning of Iran's dependence on
the West, and particularly the U. S. A. Desertion
of the countryside and total collapse of
agriculture in the coming years turned Iran
into a country spoon-fed by the West. Oil
reserves were drilled and exported with an
alarmingly fast rate. No long-term planning
was even conceived at any level. The White
Revolution did nothing except darkening the
conceivable future of the nation. Urbanization
and occidentosis everywhere and always go
hand in hand:
First, the new urban resident attends initially
to the wants of his stomach and then to those
of the region beneath his stomach, and for
the sake of the latter, to his grooming.
(p. 66)
In this period, as compared to the most advanced
cities of the world, Tehran had 2200 licensed
men's barbers and women's hairdressers and
2500 unlicensed ones. Comparing this with
London's 4300 barbers and hairdressers, or
Moscow's 3900, one can appreciate how much
the people of Tehran devoted themselves to
maintaining their appearance. Similarly the
number of cinema houses and other places
of refuge from urban anxiety, home and family,
school, and sexual and other deprivations
increased stupendously. The bank accounts
of the Hollywood film-makers were incessantly
fed from the pockets of lower and middle
class Third World citizens. The amounts spent
and earned in this business were staggeringly
high. Secondly, the problem of security grew
serious day by day. Thirdly, traditional
industries and handicrafts were ruined.
Fourthly, a whole course of time is needed
to accustom people to the use of the machine.
In the West, the people's consciousness and
mode of living developed with the evolution
of the machine, whereas in Iran its introduction
on a large scale was so sudden that people
in general lost the sense of all proportion.
A simple villager came to the city and w
as astounded to such a degree that he fell
an easy prey to all sorts of temptations,
which led him to a life of easy-money and
crime.
In this process corruption was logically
accepted as a way of life.
Fifthly, in a medieval social set-up that
did not provide women with respectable work
and valued their labour much cheaper than
that of men, women were superficially emancipated.
Without being trained in any trade of social
significance, they had no other job but to
freshen and exhibit themselves as objects
of sex. Sixthly, ninety per cent of the people
of Iran have deep-rooted faith in the return
of the Twelfth Imam (A), "all awaiting
him, each in his own way; because none of
the Iranian governments ever lived up to
the least of its promises; for oppression,
injustice, repression, and discrimination
had been always pandemic." In such a
clime of waiting for a just government, propagation
of the idea of a national government with
all its tools and institutions of oppression,
the SAVAK and the torture, and an alien system
of education could cause only a wider breach
between faith and practice. Such a system
could breed either cynics and rebels or timeservers
and hypocrites. Another contradiction to
which Jalal attracts attention is that in
this age of shrinking international boundaries
with all the affluence that provides every
Iranian an opportunity for travel, Iranians
remained usually ignorant of their immediate
neighbours and their cultures :
But if the Afghan and I, united in our religion,
language, and racial stock, know nothing
of each other or if to travel to Iraq Or
India is harder than to penetrate the iron
Curtain, it is because we are within the
sphere of influence of one corporation and
the Afghan in that of another.
Jalal's conclusion is that the world is compartmentalized
according to the interests of our masters
who pull our strings from behind the scene
and we submit like puppets to them. In Jalal's
view, the most dangerous of all the contradictions
arising from occidentosis is our ignorance
of our own situation in that part of the
world in which significant events are taking
place. The locus of threat has been transferred
to the Middle East.
The sixth chapter contains some positive
suggestions as to how we can break the spell
of occidentosis. Jalal says that the road
Iran has so far followed is to remain only
a consumer of the machine, to submit utterly
to this twentieth-century juggernaut.
... First we need an economy consistent with
the manufacture of machines, that is, an
independent economy. Then we need an educational
system, then a furnace to melt the metal
and impress it with the human will. Then
we need schools where these skills may be
practically imparted. Then we need factories
to convert the metal into machines and other
industrial goods. And then we need markets
to make them available to the people in the
towns and villages.
To achieve control of the machine, one must
build it. Something built by another-even
if it is a charm or a sort of talisman against
envy-certainly carries something of the unknown,
something of fearsome "unseen worlds"
beyond human access. It harbors a mystery.
The one who carries that talisman does not
possess it but in a sense is possessed by
it in living under its aegis, in taking refuge
in it and living in constant dread of giving
it offense. (pp. 79-80)
According to Jalal, the main reason for Iran's
occidentosis is the mode of thinking which
says: "Now that we are an oil-producing
country and the European brings us everything
from soap to nuts on a silver platter, why
should we go to the trouble of building factories,
heavy industry, with all the attendant problems...."
(p. 81) It is due to this way of thinking
that almost the entire oil income goes to
the West:
The Westerners extract, refine, transport,
and compute the cost of the oil themselves
and figure our annual share at, say, forty
million pounds sterling, given us as credits
toward purchase of their manufactured goods
and deposited in their own banks in our accounts.
We are necessarily compelled to return these
credits by buying from them. Who are they?
Forty percent is America and its satellites,
40 percent England and its adherents, and
the rest, France, the Netherlands, and other
Western European nations. In return for the
oil they take, we must import machines, and
in the wake of the machines, specialists
in the machines, dialectologists, ethnologists,
musicologists, and art historians. (pp. 83-85)
In this context Jalal refers to the under-the-counter
transactions, which sometimes involve estimable
Orientalists like Peter Avery, a fellow of
the reputed Cambridge. It came as a revelation
to Jalal that people are similarly small
around the world. In 1962 Iran had thirty
thousand foreign experts, engineers and specialists.
This number multiplied in the coming years
under de facto American rule.
The seventh chapter entitled "Asses
in Lions Skins, or Lions on the Flag"
is a vivid description of occidentotics,
and is relevant to all countries and nations
under the spell of Westernization.
The term Gharbzadegi was actually coined
by Ahmad Fardid, as Jalal himself acknowledged,
but it would have .lapsed into obscurity
were it not for Jalal's book. This chapter
forms the core of the book. I quote liberally
from this chapter because of another reason
also, that is, the passages quoted are the
best examples of Jalal's powerful style,
which is retained to a great extent by Campbell.
Campbell, in his foreword, explains the difficulties
of translating Ali Ahmad's style which "has
a certain rough and uneven quality, marked
by great informality and a deliberate disregard
for the syntax of conventional literary expression."
The translator has made an attempt to convey
not only the ideas of the original text but
also something of the tone in which they
were presented. The following account of
the Westoxicated Iranian is equally true
of all Westernized people of different Eastern
nations who are infected by the epidemic
called rootlessness. They have been uprooted
from their native soil, alienated from their
own culture, society, people, past, heritage
and are even estranged from their present.
They live in a vacuum, lead the life of parasites
and feed their lust with exported luxuries.
Ideas and fashionable trends in arts also
form a part of their mental luxury. Here
follows Jalal Ali Ahmad's portrayal of this
class:
The occidentotic is a man totally without
belief or conviction, to such an extent that
he not only believes in nothing, but also
does not actively disbelieve in anything-you
might call him a syncretist. He is a timeserver.
Once he gets across the bridge, he doesn't
care if it stands or falls. He has no faith,
no direction, no aim, no belief, neither
in God nor in humanity. He cares neither
whether society is transformed or not nor
whether religion or irreligion prevails.
He is not even irreligious. He is indifferent.
He even goes to the mosque at times, just
as he goes to the club or the movies. But
everywhere he is only a spectator. It is
just as if he had gone to see a soccer game.
He is always to be seen off in the grandstands.
He never invests anything of himself-even
to the extent of moist eyes at the death
of a friend, attentiveness at a shrine, or
reflection in the hours of solitude. In fact
he is not accustomed to solitude at all;
he flees it. Because he is in terror of himself,
he turns up everywhere. He offers opinions,
if it is appropriate, and particularly if
it is fashionable to offer opinions, but
only to someone from whom he hopes to gain
some further benefit. Never do you hear from
him any outcry or protest, any but or why
or wherefore. He will explain everything
with the utmost gravity and grandiloquence.
He will feign optimism.
The occidentotic seeks ease. He lives in
the moment, although not in the sense the
philosophers intend. If his car is running
and he looks debonair, nothing troubles him.
If in some distant age, concern for offspring,
bread, clothing, and provisions held Sa'di
back from spiritual wayfaring, the occidentotic,
with his head submerged in his own fodder,
will do nothing for the sake of anyone else.
He doesn't go looking for any headaches for
himself, and he easily shrugs things off.
Because he has figured out just what his
job is, because he doesn't take an unconsidered
step, because he sees every action as the
product of an equation, he doesn't stick
his nose into others' affairs, let alone
feel concern for their welfare.
The occidentotic normally has no specialty.
He is jack-of-all-trades and master of none-
But because he is schooled, literate, and
perhaps educated, he knows to use polysyllables
and to bluff his way into every company.
Perhaps once he had a specialty, but he has
seen that in this country one cannot, with
a single specialty, grasp the horn of plenty.
Therefore he necessarily has involved himself
in other lines of work. He is just like the
old women in a household who in the course
of lifetimes of experience have learned a
little about everything, although their knowledge
is limited by the perspective of illiterate
women. The occidentotic too knows a little
about everything, and his knowledge is limited
by the perspective of the occidentotic. He
has tabs on the topics of the day-what will
be useful on television, what will be useful
on the educational commission and at the
seminar, what will be useful for the mass
circulation newspapers, what will be useful
for talks at the club.
The occidentotic has no character- He is
a thing without authenticity. His person,
his home, and his words convey nothing in
particular, and everything in general. It
is not that he is cosmopolitan, that the
world is his home. He is at home nowhere
rather than everywhere. He is an amalgam
of singleness without character and character
without singularity. Because he has no security,
he dissembles. In the very act of being so
polite and sociable, he mistrusts whom he
is speaking to. And because suspicion dominates
our age, he must never open his heart to
anyone. The only palpable characteristic
he has is fear. In the West individuals'
characters are sacrificed to their field
of specialization, but the occidentotic has
neither. He has only fear: fear of tomorrow,
fear of dismissal, fear of anonymity ...
The occidentotic is effete. He is effeminate.
He attends to his grooming a great deal.
He spends much time sprucing himself up.
Sometimes he even plucks his eyelashes. He
attaches a great deal of importance to his
shoes and his wardrobe, and to the furnishings
of his home. It always seems he has been
unwrapped from gold foil or come from some
European "maison." He buys the
latest prodigy in automotive engineering
every year. His house, which once had a porch
and a cellar, a pool, awnings, and a vestibule,
now looks like something different every
day. One day it resembles a seaside villa
with picture windows all around, and full
of fluorescent lamps. Another day it resembles
a cabaret, full of gaudy junk and bar stools.
The next day all the walls are painted one
color and triangles of all colors cover every
surface. In one comer there is a hi-fi, in
another a television, in another a piano
for the young lady, in others stereo loudspeakers.
The kitchen and other nooks and crannies
are packed with gas stoves, electric washers,
and other odds and ends.
Thus the occidentotic is the most faithful
consumer of the West's industrial goods.
If he should rise one morning and find that
the hairdresser, the tailor, the shoeshiner,
and the repairman have all closed up shop,
he would turn to the qibla in desperation
(that is, he would do so if he knew where
the qibla was).
All his preoccupations and Western products
are more essential to him than
any school, mosque, hospital, or factory.
It is for his sake that we have an architecture
with no roots in our culture....
The occidentotic hangs on the words and handouts
of the West. He has nothing to do with what
goes on in our little world, in this comer
of the East.
If perchance he is interested in politics,
he is cognizant of the faintest right or
left tendencies in the British Labour Party
and is more familiar with the current U.
S. senators than with the ministers in his
own government. And he knows more about the
staff of Time or the News Chronicle than
about some nephew way off in Khurasan. And
he supposes them more veracious than a prophet
because all these have more influence on
the affairs of his country than any domestic
politician, commentator, or representative.
If he is interested in letters, his only
concem is knowing who won this year's Nobel
Prize or who was awarded the Goncourt or
Pulitzer Prizes. And if he is interested
in research, he folds his hands and closes
his eyes to all the problems within the country
that could be studied. He seeks to learn
only what some orientalist has said and written
about the questions within his field. If
he is one of the ordinary people who read
the weeklies and the pictorials, we have
seen what a sorry lot they are.
If there used to be a time when one could
silence opponents and end all arguments by
citing one verse of the Qur'an or one tradition
transmitted in Arabic, now one does so by
relating one sentence by some European, whatever
the subject under discussion. (pp. 94-98).
As the five preceding chapters are a prelude
to the main theme of occidentosis elaborated
in the seventh chapter, the remaining four
chapters, from the eighth to the eleventh,
form a sequel to it. "A Society in Collapse"
is again an account of the tyranny of the
machine, in the wake of which the armed forces
emerge as the final arbiters. Jalal has described
various wings of the armed forces in terms
of their utility for the oppressive regime
and its subservience to its Western masters.
The ninth chapter gives an account of the
pitfalls of the West-oriented educational
system and its irrelevance to Iranian society
and people.
The educated class was a typical breed of
occidentotics; all its activities and products
lacked any sense of purpose and direction.
Some passages from this chapter can be quoted
to serve as an index for the study of the
occidentotic elite of other similar countries:
With very few exceptions, the sole output
of these colleges over the last twenty or
thirty years has consisted of distinguished
scholars, all of whom know the language,
know some biography, are scrupulous workers,
write marginalia in others' books, resolve
tough problems in language or history, determine
which graves lack tenants or which figures
lack graves, explore the mysteries of Sura
an-Nahl, know who is citing or plagiarizing
from whom as much as a thousand years ago,
and write treatises on the poets of the tenth
century of the Hijra, whom one could count
on the fingers of one's two hands. Worst
of all, most of them become teachers of literature,
educational directors, or civil judges. Bless
this last group, whose members have given
some underpinnings to the Justice Ministry
and some meaning to the idea of the independence
of the judiciary and who well distinguish
truth from falsity, if conditions allow.
But what of the others? All in all, what
benefit have we realized from them, besides
a deeper plunge into occidentosis?
All these professors and their carefully
trained pupils, with their ears stopped like
Seven Sleepers', have retreated so far into
the cave of texts, textual variants, and
obscure expressions that even the roar of
the machine cannot awaken them. Rather, they
have plastered these texts to their ears
to avoid hearing these most loathsome of
sounds. The encroachments of foreign tongues
day by day are undermining the importance
of the mother tongue and making a sound command
of it less necessary. Defections to scientific
and technical fields further thin the ranks
of those pursuing these fields. With things
in such a state, the nation's centers for
letters, legal studies, and leaning, the
Colleges of Letters, Law, and the Religious
and Philosophic Sciences have retreated into
the cocoons of old texts, content to train
pedants, just as the clergy have drawn into
their cocoons of fanaticism and paralysis
in the face of the West's onslaught. These
days, just as the clergy languishes in the
toils of doubt between two and three and
explication of ritual purity and impurity,
such centers of Iranian, Eastern, and Islamic
letters, law, and learning languish in the
toils of whether the decorative be should
be joined to the following word or whether
the silent should be written.
Those exiled from the world of universals
will clutch at minutiae. When the house has
been carried off in the flood or has collapsed
in an earthquake, you go looking for a door
in the debris to bear the rotting corpse
of a loved one to the graveyard.
As we speak of educational questions and
questions of the university, we meet with
another major question, that of the army
of returnees from Europe and America, each
of whom has returned at least a candidate
for a position in a ministry and who collectively
form the bulwark of the :nation's organizations.
Each of these educated persons is a boon-something
like finding one shoe in the desert. For
look closely. See, after returning and finding
a post in an organization and getting entrenched
there, what each of these boons turns into.
They haven't the authority or the competence
to do the job. They are illiberal, apathetic,
and for the most part lacking in concern,
mostly because they see themselves and their
opinions as amounting to nothing next to
the Western advisors and consultants who
dominate the scene.
Contrary to the widespread view, the greater
the army of returnees from Europe, the less
their power to act and the greater the distress
of the institutions that absorb their impact-
Because there has never been a plan for where
to send these youths and what specialty,
what trade, what technology they should study,
they have gone each to some part of the world
to study or experience something completely
different from others' experiences, on their
own choice and initiative, to their own taste.
As they return, each having to join some
group in one of our country's organizations,
it becomes obvious how dissonant they are
and how at a loss to carry out anything.
Consider the French-educated Iranian, or
the English; German; or American-educated
one :
each tunes up and plays in a distinct style.
If I have hope for the future of intellectuals
in Iran, however, one reason is this very
diversity of methods by which our European-educated
have studied, of their fields of study and
places of study. This is the wellspring of
the wealth of Iran's intellectual environment.
Look at the intellectual environment of India,
at how English its majority of Oxford-educated
intelligentsia have made it. Under present
conditions in this country, these youths
generally resemble the lovely tulips, daffodils,
and hyacinths we import as bulbs from Holland
and grow in the Tehran greenhouses. When
they bloom, we put them in exorbitantly priced
flowerpots and give them to friends or acquaintances
to set in a hot room under the sun where
they will survive a week at most. These flowers
at the top of society's basket also wither
in this society's climate. Or if they don't,
they generally fade to the color of the society.
Notwithstanding all the propaganda cranked
out to lure back students from abroad in
Europe, I do not believe that their return
promises to be a service to the country so
long as no environment suited to their future
work is provided. Who is to provide this
environment? In this intense cold, those
can prepare it who have been both baked in
the furnace and acclimated to the icehouse....
Although many young men return with European
or American wives, very few of the young
women return with European or American husbands.
This constitutes an additional problem. As
we watch crumble the foundation of the Iranian
family, an intimate relationship of husband
and wife of the same stock, the responsibility
of these incongruous households is obvious.
The saying, "the pigeon of two towers"
means these youths with their families-the
firsthand human products of occidentosis.
(pp.
117-119)
Under the heading "Mechanosis"
the distinguishing factors of a transitional
period of society are discussed, which are
: advance of science; transformation of technique,
technology, and machine, and some semblance
to Western type of democracy. In all cases
these factors cause crises, which are in
proportion to the speed of transformation
of a society. Iran sought to make up for
a two-hundred-year lag within two decades,
which naturally gave rise to social aberrations
and psychological disturbances. In the West,
mechanization of socioeconomic structure
produced gangsters, brigands, killers, adventurers,
and deportees at the social level, and militarism
and fascism at the political level. Jalal
holds that the Iranian society has its own
rogues, who are sometimes exported to the
West under imperial patronage. He regards
African and Asian countries raped and transgressed,
and put to pressures, humiliations, and killings
as the victims of the same abnormal phenomena.
In a democratic set-up, political parties
also help technocracy and bureaucracy to
iron out individual differences and to mould
all individuals in one and the same shape.
This is again a byproduct of the machine
which demands total conformity to its dictates.
"Conformity in the work place",
in Jalal's words, "culminates in conformity
in the party and union, which in turn culminates
in conformity in the barracks-that is, before
the war machine." The yardstick of standardization
is not only applied to dress, form, and manners,
but also to thought and inner make-up. Out
of this come the Blackshirts, the Brownshirts
and the Fascists of all sort. In such deterministic
and standardized society, psychosis and neurosis,
personality split and dissociation, schizophrenia
and melancholia become the order of the day.
Jalal has enumerated three specific forms
of melancholia common in Iranian society.
the melancholia of grandiosity, the melancholia
of glorifying the nation's remote past, and
the melancholia of constant pursuit.
The last chapter, "The Hour Draws Nigh",
gives a brief account of some Western thinkers
and writers who predicted the end of the
road taken by the pursuers of the machine.
First of all he refers to Albert Camus and
his masterwork The Plague, then to Eugene
Ionesco's Rhinoceros, Ingmar Bergman's film
The Seventh Seal, Sartre's Erostratus and
other similar works and characters. After
translating The Plague one-third, a realization
came to him that "the plague" symbolized
mechanism, murder of beauty and poetry, spirit
and humanity.
And now I, not as an Easterner, but as one
like the first Muslims, who expected to see
the Resurrection on the Plain of Judgement
in their lifetimes, see ... that all these
fictional endings raise the threat of the
final hour, when the machine demon (if we
don't rein it in or put its spirit in the
bottle) will set the hydrogen bomb at the
end of the road for humanity. On that note,
I will rest my pen at the Quranic verse:
"The hour draws nigh and the moon is
split in two." (The Quran, 54:1) (p.
137)
In Iran the occidentosis-demon has been reined
and put in the bottle by the Islamic Revolution,
and "Mechanosis" has been controlled
to some extent. Watch out! The danger has
not vanished, it still lingers on in some
of the darkest corners of the society. The
hour to relax has not arrived as yet.
At the end, it can be pointed out that some
of the translations of the titles of Jalal's
books are not accurate, which are modified
in this review. It is feared that such errors
might have crept into the text of the book
also.
*Gharbzadegi, a literary event in modern
Persian literature, was published in 1962.
The author Jalal Ali Ahmad is one of the
most eminent writers of Iran, whose importance
was not diminished by the Islamic Revolution
but was rather enhanced. The English translation
of Gharbzadegi by Campbell is reviewed by
Dr. Wahid Akhtar, an eminent Urdu writer
and poet. Dr. Akhtar is a professor of philosophy
at Muslim University Aligarh, India- He is
presently on the editorial board of al-Tawhid
(English).
|
