This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution, one of the seminal revolutions of the 20th century. 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 burkhas, any conversation about the country these days is full of references 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 Said would now write to remind us that Iran actually has one of the oldest civilisations in the world. In addition, the country has given the world some of the most enduring literature in both ancient and modern times. Two of the great intellectuals produced by Iran in the 20th century are Ali Shariati and Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, who passed away earlier this month, on September 9, 50 years ago.
My first memory of encountering 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 learnt 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 Westernisation 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 memorable cameo appearances in Pankaj Mishra’s books From the Ruins of Empire and The Age of Anger. The sense one gets from reading even these scattered descriptions of the man is that Al-e-Ahmad and Shariati were the most important Iranian intellectuals of the 20th century, and who laid the intellectual and ideological basis for the Iranian Revolution of 1979 – Al-e-Ahmad was the Iranian Voltaire to Shariati’s Rousseau.
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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 is the subject of 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.
So 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 into a clerical family, he rebelled against the family vocation in his youth and chose to get a diploma. He 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 secular, he chose to go for pilgrimage to Mecca and later make a trip to Israel. Apart from being a prolific writer of fiction, nonfiction, literary and cultural criticism, ethnography and travelogues, he also formed a power-couple with his wife Simin Daneshvar, a distinguished writer and author of the first modern Persian-language novel written by a woman. She 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 pre-eminent 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.”
Jalal Al-e-Ahmad
Translated by Samuel Thrope
The Israeli Republic
Restless Books, 2017
Right from the first page of his introduction to the travelogue, Al-e-Ahmad’s writing is both polemical and provocative, and the reader is not very sure if the author merely intends to shock with his turn of phrase or actually believes what he writes. 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 reasons 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 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, Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan – infamous throughout the world as war criminals for their human rights abuses against fleeing Palestinians in 1948 – who he compares to the minor prophets of Israel, which Muslims also believe in. Had these observations been published in revolutionary Iran, Al-e-Ahmad might have had a fatwa for blasphemy on him issued by the ayatollahs, many of whom were the 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 that 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”, “a coarsely realised 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”.
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The trouble with polemics is that sometimes they lose sight of reality in their zeal to sensationalise matters and play to the gallery. For example, 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, like 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, and continues to transpire in Syria as I write this.
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 neighbours, 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, recognising the inherent injustice upon which the state was created in 1948. Yet these gushing remarks would now seem eerily prescient, not just in how the writer’s own native Iran as well as the Arab world have fared in the last 50 years since the book was written, and 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 back 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, Mahathir couched it in virulently anti-Semitic language. Yet 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 recognise it? Also, has Israel used the West, or it is the other way round?
The second chapter details the writer’s visit to Yad Vashem, the memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. Here he informs us about his fascination with the Israeli kibbutz, which according to him was modelled on Russian social democracy, and not on any notion of the Stalinist kolkhoz, from which he is keen to distance himself, given his abandonment of the Tudeh Party for the same reason. Here he once again launches into an extended diatribe on the great Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser and questions his leadership of the Muslim world, before defending Iranian ‘barbarism’ against Arab and Western ‘civilisation’:
“I, a non-Arab Easterner, have been beaten by the Arabs’ stick in the past and I am still taking a beating now…..And I, who suffered this way at the hands of these rootless Arabs, am happy with the presence of Israel in the East. With the presence of an Israel that can cut the sheikhs’ oil pipeline….in order for me….to be able to be freed from the tyranny of the puppet petro-regimes…”
Knowing Al-e-Ahmad’s egalitarian politics, which forced him out of the Tudeh and into organising for the regeneration of the party of Iran’s deposed premier Mohammed Mossadegh, it is difficult to reconcile his blind hatred for Nasser, who despite coming to power through a military coup in 1952 was literally the most charismatic and popular Arab leader of the 20th century, his prestige restored by his miraculous survival even after an attempt by a combined Western-Israeli alliance to topple him in 1956. After all, Nasser too followed the same radical social democratic policies which led to the ouster of Mossadegh.
Jalal Al-e-Ahmad with his wife, author Simin Daneshvar.
In fact, the author’s contempt for Arabs and admiration for Zionist Israel blinds him to the fact that the Arab world was and still is a tapestry of various nations: the Gulf Arab states, Jordan and a few minor Arab states like Tunisia and Morocco (which ‘pioneered’ Arab diplomatic contacts with Israel in the 1950s) were pro-Western, while the remainder more or less had revolutionary regimes opposed to the West and allied to the Soviet Union, or were non-aligned.
Secondly, it also obscures his vision to the fact that the creation of Israel was achieved by a wanton process of ethnic cleansing of Palestine’s original Muslim and Christian Arabs, and by stealing their lands. Of course what can be said in Al-e-Ahmad’s defence is that he is also here using his polemics against the gas stations of the Gulf as a metaphor for his own native petro-state of Iran, which he could not do openly since even while he was alive and afterwards, both his books and correspondence were heavily censored.
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In addition, since his visit to Israel was sponsored by the Israeli government, which was no doubt very keen to get in the good books of Iran’s towering intellectuals like Al-e-Ahmad, the latter only observes and experiences what he is allowed to see by his hosts.
The fourth chapter recounts the writer and his wife’s stay on a kibbutz. The report is positive, but Al-e-Ahmad can see problems and contradictions developing in a society which though inspired by Russian social democracy, cannot become self-sufficient. It relies on arms and shelters to defend itself against the people whose land it stole. The rest of the chapter is devoted to giving a background to Jewish immigration to Palestine.
As the reader turn towards the fifth and final chapter of the travelogue, there is a marked change in the writer’s tone. Yes, the polemic and provocation is still there, but their target now are not the Arabs but the country which had hosted him for two weeks. A lot has been speculated regarding the authorship of this chapter, which was written after Israel’s victory against the combined Arab armies in the disastrous June 1967 Arab-Israeli war; indeed Al-e-Ahmad gives a cheeky disclaimer at the beginning of the chapter that the text was written as a letter from a Parisian friend to which the former had made some additions. In his own words, “the nonsense and beard-pulling is mine; the reasonable speech his”.
As to the “nonsense and beard-pulling”, Al-e-Ahmad takes the French Left to task for failing to stand up to Zionism and blindly kowtowing to Israel; Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel laureate Eugene Ionesco, Daniel Mayer and Claude Lanzmann are not spared.
In fact, and it is possible that Al-e-Ahmad might not have known, or would have passed away by then, some of the most well-known French intellectuals also censured Israel for its expansionist designs in the 1967 war and refused to toe the Zionist line, among them the well-known Jewish Marxist Maxime Rodinson, who later theorised about Israel as a colonial settler-state, Regis Debray and writer Jean Genet, who wrote his searing testament Prisoner of Love while in the Palestinian refugee camps of Shabra and Shatila, devastated by Israel during the Lebanese Civil War in September 1982.
Throughout the chapter, Al-e-Ahmad’s invectives against Israel get stronger, variously describing the state as “the Middle Eastern branch of imperialism and the CIA”, “the direct puppet of capitalism and Western colonialism in the Middle East”; the Jews as “Nazis”; and Zionism as “the other side of the coin of Nazism and Fascism”. There is a grudging acknowledgement of Nasser, as well as appeals to anti-imperialist pan-Islamism by pointing out that Iranian oil powers Israeli tanks and planes, while Saudi and Kuwaiti oil is used in American tanks and helicopters in the Vietnam War.
In fact, when Al-e-Ahmad remarks that “the experience of Cuba and Algeria and China has shown that the hand of colonialism can only be severed with an axe”, he is anticipating what another of his illustrious contemporaries, the African-American activist Malcolm X, advocated publicly after his return from the Hajj pilgrimage in 1964, just a year after Al-e-Ahmad wrote these lines.
For this scribe, the most rewarding part of the chapter comes at the end, when in answer to his question of “what is to be done” Al-e-Ahmad proposes a series of measures designed to stem the rot in both the Arab world and Israel: a federal government of Arabs and Jews in Palestine; the end of Israel as a Zionist state; the end of dependence of the revolutionary Arab states on Gulf oil and largesse; and the beginning of Islamic cooperation and solidarity.
It can be said that more than 50 years after these words were written, much has changed in Iran, the Middle East, Israel and the world. Israel is still a Zionist state, bent on expansion of Jewish settlements, in fact the incumbent Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu promised to annex the disputed West Bank territories as part of his campaign pledge before the Israeli elections; the idea of a bi-national state in Palestine is still attractive for a certain generation of leftists, but at the moment even a two-state solution in Palestine seems suspect.
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Meanwhile, one wonders what Al-e-Ahmad would have made of the fact that the three revolutionary states he named in his aforementioned prescription have become a byword for dictatorship and disorder, certainly Egypt and Syria, and there is a lot of uncertainty in Algeria. Certainly revolution in his own native Iran did not cross Al-e-Ahmad’s mind, neither did he predict a revolution in Riyadh.
As regards Islamic fraternity, in was incidentally in August 1969 that an arson attack on the Al-Aqsa Mosque was carried out, to widespread condemnation in the Muslim world, and a few weeks later, 24 Muslim countries met in Rabat to lay the building blocks of what would become the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC); of course Al-e-Ahmad did not live to see this development, he had passed away just two weeks before this milestone in intra-Muslim cooperation.
It is difficult to romanticise Israel today the way Al-e-Ahmad did for those two weeks he was in that country in the 1960s. What one realises while reading these observations today is how conflicted Al-e-Ahmad himself was about where his own society was going; and his own place in it. Perhaps his change of heart about Israel after 1967 was a way to expiate for his sins of worshipping the Zionist state in the not-too-distant past as a way forward for his own country.
Some of our own so-called liberals in Pakistan are ready to recognise Israel today, if only so that it will offset India’s clout in Kashmir. But perhaps more than that, taking a leaf out of Al-e-Ahmad’s books, would it be too much to acknowledge that like Israel and Iran in the 1960s, Pakistan and India need not be in conflict but rather in concert, and do not need a moment like Al-e-Ahmad’s terrible post-1967 epiphany – the “beginning of disgust”, as he called it – to be caught in each other’s long-simmering internal tensions and struggles?
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.