The Evils of Westernization

Supplement 2

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 emptyclichs, 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 N'ri, 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 N'ri 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 Jamh'ri-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 N'ri 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.