Al-e-Ahmad, who spent several years in prison after the 1953 coup, started to question the uncritical embrace of and dependence on the West, which in his view had resulted in a people who were neither authentically Iranian nor Western. Rather, they had, he wrote, resembled a crow who tried to imitate the way that a partridge walked and forgot how to walk like a crow without learning to walk like a partridge. As the years passed, Al-e-Ahmad wanted, above all, Iranian life and culture to be authentic, not ersatz.
Al-e-Ahmad explored the ideas of Marx; he translated Camus, and brought an intense focus to his reading of Heidegger (to whom he had been introduced at the University of Tehran by an influential specialist in German philosophy called Ahmad Fardid, who actually coined the term ‘Westoxification’). These very modern critics of modernity’s spiritual damage turned out to be stops on Al-e-Ahmad’s journey to a conception of Islam itself as a revolutionary ideology. A series of ethnographic studies of rural Iran convinced him that the ‘machine civilization’ of the West posed a direct threat to Iran’s culture as well as economy. ‘To respond to the machine’s call to urbanization, we uproot the people from the villages and send them to the city, where there’s neither work nor housing and shelter for them, while the machine steps into the village itself.’ He remarked caustically of the Saudi king Ibn Sa’ud, who ‘amidst the ferocious beheadings and hand-cuttings of his own era of ignorance, has surrendered to the machine’s transformations’.
Al-e-Ahmad spoke from his own experience of Tehran’s slums as he described the fate of rural migrants. (Empathy with rural migrants coerced into an ambitious project of national modernization also motivated Sayyid Qutb, who himself came to Cairo as a teenager from a village.) Visiting an oil installation, Al-e-Ahmad concluded, ‘the entire local and cultural identity and existence will be swept away. And why? So that a factory can operate in “The West”, or that workers in Iceland or Newfoundland are not jobless.’
He derived his greatest inspiration from a trip to Israel in 1962. There had been many Muslim admirers of Jewish political and cultural renaissance since Rashid Rida in 1898 hailed Zionism as an inspiring example for the umma (the Muslim community). They concurred with David Ben-Gurion, who in 1957 declared that the establishment of the state of Israel ‘is one of the manifestations of the messianic vision which has come to pass in our time’. For Al-e-Ahmad, Israel with its evidently Spartan community knit together by religion, language and prominent national identity seemed to offer a way forward for Iran:
In the eyes of this Easterner, Israel, despite all its defects and despite all contradictions it harbours, is the basis of a power: The first step in the promise of a future which is not that late … Israel is a model, [better] than any other model, of how to deal with the West.
Israel today, one of its leading chroniclers David Grossman writes, is far from being ‘a unique national creation’, and has turned into ‘a clumsy and awkward imitation of Western countries’. But this fate – common to many other unique national creations – could not have been anticipated in the early 1960s by an awestruck Iranian observer of the Israeli ‘miracle’. Besides, like all political thinkers, Al-e-Ahmad was searching for a way for his society to define, unite and defend itself.
Rousseau had advised Poles besieged by an expansionist Russia in the 1770s that if they ‘see to it that no Pole can ever become a Russian, I guarantee that Russia will not subjugate Poland’. In this earliest known advocacy of ‘national character’, Rousseau had urged Polish leaders to ‘establish the Republic so firmly in the hearts of the Poles’ that even if foreign powers swallow up their country they will not be able to ‘digest’ it. As France confronted multiple invasions in 1794, Robespierre insisted that nationalist passions could discipline and unite the French against their enemies. Al-e-Ahmad, too, wanted to immunize Iran psychologically and emotionally against foreign antibodies.
Married to a writer and feminist, he frequently derided religion as mumbo-jumbo. But, contemptuous of the Shah’s modernization programme, unimpressed by Communism, which inspired slavish devotion among its local adherents to the Soviet Union, and appalled by the arrogance of Harvard-educated liberal elites, Al-e-Ahmad saw religion as the only likely base for mass activism in Iran. In Westoxification he began to argue that politicized Islam offered the best way for Iranians to formulate a proud indigenous alternative to capitalism and Communism.
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His emphasis on pride and dignity was not incidental. Ordinary Iranians felt deeply humiliated by their monarch. Consolidating his power, the Shah had come to radiate supreme arrogance with his corrupt sycophants and Western advisors (and his dissolute private life, rumours of which circulated widely). The most garish symbol of his aloofness from his subjects was a grand party in 1971 in Persepolis celebrating 2,500 years of ‘monarchy in Iran’. A French decorator built a tent city for visiting monarchs and heads of state; Elizabeth Arden created a new perfume and named it ‘Farah’ after the Shah’s wife; Maxim’s of Paris delivered food that was entirely French except for the caviar.
A cleric living in exile in Iraq called Seyyed Ruhollah Khomeini denounced the pageantry, asserting, in defiance of many centuries of Islamic history, that Islam was fundamentally opposed to monarchy. A year earlier Khomeini had set out his vision of velāyat-e faqīh, or guardianship by jurist – a government that guided by Islamic jurists eradicates foreign influences and prevents the pleasure-seeking ruling classes from exploiting the weak. But at the time the more influential critic of the Persepolis jamboree was an Iranian intellectual called Ali Shariati.
Shariati, a Sorbonne-educated son of a diminished cleric who spent much time in Paris translating existentialist philosophers, took up Al-e-Ahmad’s task of rewriting Islamic history in the language of modern utopia. Shariati aimed to convince young Iranians of the political viability of Shiite Islam, and to assimilate secular political objectives into ‘Islamic’ ideas. Shariati was opposed to ‘clerical despotism’ (extremist followers of his in 1979 would launch a campaign of assassination against Khomeini’s fellow clerics). Called the Rousseau of the Iranian revolution, he invoked a quasi-Rousseauian trinity of Azadi, Barabari, Erfa’n – ‘Liberty, Equality and Spirituality’. In this formula, liberty and democracy could be achieved without capitalism, equality without totalitarianism, and spirituality and religion without clerical authority.