Jalal Al-e-Ahmed and the Garden of Zion - I

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution, one of the seminal revolutions of the 20th century – about which I have written in these pages earlier. Following the late Edward Said’s book Covering Islam, which he wrote immediately after the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979, in order to dispel the popular notion then doing the rounds on the mainstream media that Iran was all about terrorists, beards and burqas, any conversation about the country these days is full of reference to the issues of Iranian nuclear enrichment and the ongoing case of the seizure of a British ship in Iranian waters. Never mind the justifications of the Iranian side, but one wishes another Edward Said would now write to remind us that Iran actually has one of the oldest civilizations in the world. And that in addition, the country has given the world some of the most enduring and living literature in both ancient and modern times.

Two of the great Iranian intellectuals produced by Iran in the 20th century are Dr. Ali Shariati, about whom I have written previously in these pages in some detail; and Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, who passed away last month on the 9th of September, 50 years ago.

My first memory of encountering Jalal Al-e-Ahmad is a relatively hazy one, culled from a reading of Said’s book Culture and Imperialism, which was assigned to me for a book review during my undergraduate years. It was in that book that one learned about Al-e-Ahmad’s concept of “Gharbzadegi”, variously translated as “Occidentosis”, “Westruckness” or “Westoxification”, elaborated in the eponymous book of the same title in 1962. It was, to put it crudely, both a polemical attack on the dictatorial regime of the Shah of Iran, as well as a cultural critique of Westernization in Iran, subsequently becoming Al-e-Ahmad’s most influential work. Sibte Hasan’s classic work on the Iranian Revolution Inquilab-e-Iran (The Revolution in Iran) also mentions him just in passing, including the widely-held assertion that Al-e-Ahmad’s untimely death was not natural. Al-e-Ahmad though, more recently, makes a memorable cameo appearances in Pankaj Mishra’s recent books From the Ruins of Empire and Age of Anger. The sense one gets from reading even these scattered descriptions of the man is that Al-e-Ahmad, together with Shariati, was amongst the most important Iranian intellectuals of the 20th century. These two thinkers laid the intellectual and ideological basis for the Iranian Revolution of 1979; Al-e-Ahmad was the Iranian Voltaire to Shariati’s Rousseau. However, unlike Shariati, whose lectures and essays have been copiously translated into English (and are also available online in a website exclusively devoted to him) and who himself is well-served by an excellent intellectual biography by Majid Rahnema, much of Al-e-Ahmad’s work either lies unpublished or untranslated into English. However his book Gharbzadegi is enough to put him in conversation with what other 1960s’ Third World intellectuals like Franz Fanon, Aime Cesaire and Walter Rodney were also witnessing in their own societies. One hopes that this lacuna will fill with increasing interest in and further translations of Al-e-Ahmad’s voluminous work as we move towards the centennial of his birth, as well as the 50th anniversary of Iran’s revolution.

Such are the reasons why I was pleasantly surprised to find an original English translation of the travelogue of Al-e-Ahmad’s two-week journey to Israel in 1963, titled The Israeli Republic, published in 2017 by Restless Books. The introduction by the translator Samuel Thrope helps put Al-e-Ahmad’s travelogue in perspective, informing us that the writer was an eclectic thinker and a born rebel. Having being born in a clerical family, he rebelled against the family vocation in his youth and chose to get a diploma; then joined the Iranian Communist Party, the Tudeh, and rapidly rose through its ranks before breaking away from it for being too pro-Soviet. Despite being a secularist, he chose to go for pilgrimage to Makkah and later made a trip to Israel. Apart from being a prolific writer of fiction, nonfiction, literary and cultural criticism, ethnography and travel-writing, he also formed a power-couple with his wife Simin Daneshvar, a distinguished writer in her own right, author of the first modern Persian-language novel written by a woman. She, in fact, also accompanied him to Israel.

In Thrope’s words,

The enduring relevance of The Israeli Republic does not only lie in what it reveals about Al-e-Ahmad’s conception of Israel and his character and internal struggles, though, as a preeminent Iranian writer who helped lay the popular groundwork for the Iranian Revolution, that is certainly reason enough. In his thinking about Israel’s East and West, Al-e-Ahmad hit on a tension at the heart of Israeli society. It would be a stretch to argue that Israel faces a struggle between East and West in precisely the terms that Al-e-Ahmad defines, but similar dilemmas have dogged the Jewish state since its conception. Israel was, and nearly fifty years later remains, unresolved about its place in the world and its political and cultural orientation, between Europe and the Middle East, between religion and secularism, and between Judaism and democracy.”

Two thinkers laid the intellectual and ideological basis for the Iranian Revolution of 1979; Jalal Al-e-Ahmad was the Iranian Voltaire to Ali Shariati’s Rousseau

Right from the first page of his introduction to his travelogue, Al-e-Ahmad’s writing is both polemical and provocative, and the reader is not very sure if the writer merely intends to shock them with his turn-of-phrase, or whether it is actually the belief of the writer himself. For example, he begins his travelogue with the novel concept of Israel as a “guardianship” state, mirroring what the new builders of Iran’s revolutionary Islamic state some years later would call the “velayat-e-faqih”. Al-e-Ahmad gives us two senses of why this is so. Firstly, to him, Jewish rule in Israel signifies the domination of the “Children of Israel’s new guardians in the Promised Land, not the rule of the inhabitants of Palestine over Palestine.” The second reason, why Israel to him is a guardianship state is because “the present territory of Israel in no way resembles a country”, both on account of its small size, as well as geographical infelicity. The writer heaps gushing praise on the early founders of Israel namely David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan who – infamous throughout the world as war criminals for their human rights abuses against the fleeing Palestinians in 1948 – he compares to the minor prophets of the Hebrews, which Muslims also believe in. One wonders whether, had these observations been published in revolutionary Iran, Al-e-Ahmad might have had a fatwa for outright sacrilege from the ayatollahs, many of whom were his admirers.

Some of Al-e-Ahmad’s words now seem prophetic, such as, “[…] for the future of the East of which one end is Tel Aviv and the other Tokyo, and knowing that this same East is the grounds of the future events and the hope of a world tired of the West and Westoxification [...]”

Though in the light of subsequent events, one is also surprised why a seer like him could not foresee the rise of other Asian powers like India and China.

So why did Al-e-Ahmad write the book in the first place? In his own words:

“In these pages I will attempt to retell what I came to know of it, not for publicity nor as payback for free lunches that I have eaten there; not for the purpose of providing advice to Iran on its two-faced policy regarding Israel, nor to vex the Arabs – my object is not politics; not as a travelogue, nor as a screed. Rather, my goal is only that you come to know the disposition, the words, and the ‘yes, buts’ of a penman from this corner of the world – and a Persian speaker – faced with the reality of the Children of Israel’s new country in this corner of the East.”

From this vantage point, the writer goes on to describe Israel as a “bridgehead of Western capitalism” and “a coarsely realized indemnity for the Fascists’ sins in Dachau, Buchenwald and other death camps”; before confessing that, “[...] [Israel] is the West’s sin and I, an Easterner, am paying the price.”

The trouble with polemics is that sometimes they lose sight of reality in their zeal to sensationalize matters and play to the gallery. For example, there is Al-e-Ahmad’s remark that “From the bones of the Ottoman empire this last piece – this Palestine – that was set aside as a sweet morsel [...]” is contestable given that there were many more such morsels carved up from the carcass of the Ottoman Empire. For instance, Lebanon was sliced from Syria by the French and Kuwait separated from Iraq by the British, ostensibly to keep a toehold in these strategically important states. Certainly those morsels continue to accumulate given what has transpired in Iraq and Libya following Western intervention, as well as the independence of South Sudan from its parent country. Above all, the aftermath of that process continues to transpire in Syria as I write this.

Born in a clerical family, he rebelled against the family vocation in his youth and chose to get a diploma; then joined the Iranian Communist Party, the Tudeh, and rapidly rose through its ranks before breaking away from it for being too pro-Soviet. Despite being a secularist, he chose to go for pilgrimage to Makkah and later made a trip to Israel

Al-e-Ahmad then exhorts the Arabs and presumably his fellow Iranians to learn from the Israeli example:

“If you must be a base, learn from Israel and the high price it has charged! If you are forced to marry one of your distant neighbors, then follow their example! And if your lot is to play the game of democracy, and that too in a land, which as long as there was God, was crushed under the boots of the pharaohs of earth and heaven…again, learn from Israel. In any case, for me as an Easterner, Israel is the best of all exemplars of how to deal with the West, how with the spiritual force of martyrdom we can milk its industry, demand and take reparations from it and invest its capital in national development, all for the price of a few short days of political dependence, so that we can solidify our new enterprise.”

As we learn later in the book, Al-e-Ahmad was no unabashed admirer of Israel, recognizing the inherent injustice upon which the state was created in 1948, yet these gushing remarks would now seem eerily prescient – not just in the manner how the writer’s own native Iran as well as the Arab world have fared in the last fifty years since the book was written, but also in how Israel itself has transformed within this time. We also have to remember that the writer wrote these words before the Arab world’s disastrous loss to Israel just four years later – when the writer was alive – followed by another defeat to the same nation in 1973. The only way to understand Al-e-Ahmad’s advocacy of Israel is through his own experiences of visiting that country and his genuine hope that eventually his own country would come to resemble Israel in terms of authentic cultural regeneration without losing its Eastern roots. Not too long ago, Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad, in a then-farewell public appearance in 2003, had also talked about how the Jews had recovered from tragedy to unite and dominate the world by “thinking” and that Muslims, too, could learn from the former and better their plight. Yet the central thrust of that message was lost because unlike Al-e-Ahmad, Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohammad couched it in virulently anti-Semitic language.

In any case, Al-e-Ahmad’s endorsement of Israel forces us to think whether we in the Muslim world should indeed learn from Israel. Or should we recognize it? Also, has Israel used the West, or is it the other way around?

(to be continued)

Raza Naeem is a social scientist and an award-winning translator currently based in Lahore. He has been trained in Political Economy from the University of Leeds in the UK and in Middle Eastern History and Anthropology from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, USA. He is also the President of the Progressive Writers Association (PWA) in Lahore. He may be reached at: razanaeem@hotmail.com