Al-E-Ahmad Occidentosis

A Plague from the West
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4835-5706-9
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

Suppressed in Iran during the reign of the Shah, this book for the first time in a careful, annotated translation was published after the Islamic Revolution. It is a strong and emotional statement by an Iranian intellectual deeply concerned with what he saw as his country's succumbing to 'A Plague from the West' or 'Occidentosis.' Offering observations, insights, reasons for pride in Iran's past and culture, and critical analyses of the Western role in the world. Jalal Al-e-Ahmad expresses many of the concerns that agitated the intelligentsia during the two decades before the Islamic Revolution.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Al-E-Ahmad, Jalal

Weitere Mitwirkende

Algar, Hamid

Leseproben

Introduction Jalal Al-i Ahmad was born in 1923 into a family of strong religious traditions that traced its descent back to Imam Muhammad al-Baqir, fifth Imam of the Shi‘a, by way of thirty intermediaries.1 Jalal’s father, Shaykh Ahmad, was an ‘alim, and an elder brother (Muhammad Taqi), two brothers-in-law, and a cousin are also members of the clerical class.2 Furthermore, the illustrious Ayatullah Mahmud Taleghani (d. 1979) was a paternal uncle of Jalal, and he maintained sporadic but important contact with him throughout his life.3 The family came originally from the village of Aurazan in the Taliqan district bordering Mazandaran in northern Iran, and in due time Jalal was to travel there, exerting himself actively for the welfare of the villagers and devoting to them the first of his anthropological monographs. Jalal’s childhood was spent, however, in the Pachinar district of south Tehran, where his father functioned as prayer leader at a local mosque. The family was relatively prosperous until 1932, when ‘Ali Akbar Davar, Reza Shah’s minister of justice, deprived the clerical class of its notarial function and the income they derived from it. It was decided that Jalal should not continue his education beyond primary school but instead go to work, both in order to supplement the family’s income and in order to save up enough money for the day when he might follow in his father’s footsteps by studying the religious sciences. His intentions and preferences were, however, quite different. While working as a watchmaker and electrician, he secretly enrolled in night classes at the Dar al-Funun in Tehran and obtained his high school diploma in 1943. One year later, he made a complete break with religion by joining the Tudeh party, the most powerful Marxist organization in Iran.4 It has been suggested, somewhat apologetically, that his father’s dry and unimaginative pietism was responsible for this abandonment of Islam and that, if Jalal had made early acquaintance with “true Islam,” he would have been spared the political and ideological wanderings that marked his intellectual career.5 Taleghani, for example, recalls that Shaykh Ahmad would take Jalal regularly to the shrine of Shah ‘Abd al-‘Azim to the south of Tehran for a forced recitation of the Prayer of Kumayl, that well-known text of Shi‘i piety.6 Jalal’s widow, the novelist Simin Danishvar, paints a somewhat different picture: that of a young man genuinely devout, to the point of regularly offering the supererogatory night prayer, who gradually fell away from religion under the influence of intellectual and political currents hostile to Islam.7 Al-i Ahmad himself recalls that his literary diet at the time of his break with Islam consisted chiefly of the writings of the nationalist, anti-Shi‘i ideologue, Ahmad Kasravi; the scabrous novels of Muhammad Mas‘ud Dihati depicting low life and poverty in Tehran; and, most importantly, such publications of the Tudeh party as the periodical Dunya.8 As a preliminary to his activity in the Tudeh party, Al-i Ahmad founded a literary association called the Anjuman-i Islah (The Reform Society) in the Amiriya section of Tehran which offered free instruction in French, Arabic, and oratory. At his suggestion, the members of this association joined the Tudeh party en bloc. Al-i Ahmad’s rise within the party was swift: within four years, he became a member of the central committee of the party for Tehran and a delegate to its national congress. He wrote prolifically for such party publications as Mardum and Rahbar, and, in 1946, he was appointed director of the party publishing house and entrusted with launching a new monthly, Mahana-yi Mardum.9 Al-i Ahmad’s career as a teacher and, more importantly, as a writer of fiction also began in the immediate postwar period. In 1946, he graduated from the Teachers’ Training College in Tehran; thereafter he exercised the profession of teacher for much of the rest of his life, albeit intermittently. His teaching experiences were to furnish material for a number of novels, especially Mudir-i Madrasa (The school principal), and the deficiencies and problems of the Iranian educational system became one of his lasting concerns. His first essays in fiction, Did va Bazdid (Visits exchanged), published in 1945, drew, however, on his immediate past and the milieu of his family in south Tehran. The stories in this book depict religious customs and beliefs with the serene ridicule and implicit equation of religion with superstition that were typical for the Iranian secular intelligentsia of the day. The book was in some measure the literary consecration of Al-i Ahmad’s break with Islam and his father, and many years were to pass before he was reconciled with both.10 Did va Bazdid was followed in 1947 by Az Ranji ki Mibarim (On account of our troubles), a collection of short stories conceived in the spirit of socialist realism and printed at the publishing house of the Tudeh party. But the very same year, the party was beset with a crisis when it insisted on defending the Soviet Union’s refusal to save the communist-dominated autonomous government of Azarbayjan from overthrow by the Iranian army. Critical of this as well as other instances of Tudeh submissiveness to the Soviet Union, a group of activists led by Khalil Maliki left the party. Jalal Al-i Ahmad was among them.11 Whatever the intrinsic merits of Al-i Ahmad’s motives for quitting the Tudeh party may have been, it is impossible not to see in the episode one instance of his deeply felt need for constant and abrupt change of direction, a need that his widow has called —without any pejorative intention—hadisaju’i (a search for happenings or events).12 Al-i Ahmad’s political and intellectual commitments had an unstable, restless quality that touched all he wrote: as a thinker, he often appears to be unsystematic and, as a stylist, to be careless. But at the same time, the unmistakable force, sincerity, and originality of his writings must also be traced to the same source—a consistent refusal of stability. After leaving the Tudeh party, Al-i Ahmad retained his links with Khalil Maliki but devoted his energies more to literary than to political activities. He made numerous translations from contemporary French literature (insofar as any European influence is visible in his work, it is that of modern French writers); wrote another collection of short stories, Seh Tar (Sitar), antireligious in its tone, like Did va Bazdid; and entered with Simin Danishvar in an association that was a literary partnership as well as a marriage. He returned to political activity with the beginning of Dr. Musaddiq’s campaign for the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry. The group that had left the Tudeh party with Khalil Maliki entered into an alliance with Muzaffar Baqa’i’s Hizb-i Zahmatkashan (Toilers’ party), one of the parties supporting Musaddiq in the Majlis. Like most of the alignments that succeeded each other in Iranian politics in the period from 1941 to 1953, the alliance between Maliki and Baqa’i was short-lived. In mid-1952, Baqa’i decided to withdraw his support from Musaddiq, and Maliki abrogated his alliance with Baqa’i in protest. Maliki formed a new party, known as Niru-yi Siwum (Third force), socialist in orientation without being either Stalinist or social democratic. Al-i Ahmad served the new party in a variety of capacities, ranging from renovating a building that was to serve as party headquarters to writing articles for its publications, such as ‘Ilm va Zindagi (Science and life) and Niru-yi Sivvum. But his sojourn in this organization, too, was not to last long. In 1953, not long before the American-royalist coup that overthrew Musaddiq and brought the fugitive Shah back to his throne, Al-i Ahmad left the Niru-yi Sivvum in protest against the expulsion from it of his friend, Nasir Vusuqi, and what he perceived as the dishonest tactics of the leadership.13 The conditions created by the coup of August 1953 had, in any event, made organized political activity virtually impossible. Al-i Ahmad turned again to literary pursuits with undivided energy. He translated Gide’s Retour de l’URSS as a gesture of protest against the failings of the Tudeh party and its sponsor, the Soviet Union; wrote another piece of sociocritical fiction, Zan-i Ziyadi (The superfluous woman); and began to take an interest in modernist Persian poetry (the school of Nima Yushij) and to dabble in painting.14 More significantly for his intellectual development and his ultimate return to Islam as a source of national if not personal identity was another new interest, one in anthropological research. He traveled to his ancestral village of Aurazan and recorded his impressions of the people and their customs in a monograph (Aurazan, 1954). Aurazan was followed four years later by Tatnishinha-yi Buluk-i Zahra, a study of a cluster of villages near Takistan in northwest Iran, and in 1960 by Jazira-yi Kharg, a monograph on the Persian Gulf island of Kharg. The appearance of these works led to an invitation by the Institute of Social Research at the University of Tehran to edit a series of anthropological monographs. Al-i Ahmad accepted, and five books appeared under his editorship, including Ilkhchi, the study of an Azarbayjani village by a...