The Evils of Westernization

Supplement 5

As the five preceding chapters are a prelude to the main theme of occidentosis elaborated in the seventh chapter, the remaining four chapters, from the eighth to the eleventh, form a sequel to it. "A Society in Collapse" is again an account of the tyranny of the machine, in the wake of which the armed forces emerge as the final arbiters. Jalal has described various wings of the armed forces in terms of their utility for the oppressive regime and its subservience to its Western masters.

The ninth chapter gives an account of the pitfalls of the West-oriented educational system and its irrelevance to Iranian society and people. The educated class was a typical breed of occidentotics; all its activities and products lacked any sense of purpose and direction. Some passages from this chapter can be quoted to serve as an index for the study of the occidentotic elite of other similar countries:

With very few exceptions, the sole output of these colleges over the last twenty or thirty years has consisted of distinguished scholars, all of whom know the language, know some biography, are scrupulous workers, write marginalia in others' books, resolve tough problems in language or history, determine which graves lack tenants or which figures lack graves, explore the mysteries of Sura an-Nahl, know who is citing or plagiarizing from whom as much as a thousand years ago, and write treatises on the poets of the tenth century of the Hijra, whom one could count on the fingers of one's two hands.

Worst of all, most of them become teachers of literature, educational directors, or civil judges. Bless this last group, whose members have given some underpinnings to the Justice Ministry and some meaning to the idea of the independence of the judiciary and who well distinguish truth from falsity, if conditions allow. But what of the others? All in all, what benefit have we realized from them, besides a deeper plunge into occidentosis?

All these professors and their carefully trained pupils, with their ears stopped like Seven Sleepers', have retreated so far into the cave of texts, textual variants, and obscure expressions that even the roar of the machine cannot awaken them. Rather, they have plastered these texts to their ears to avoid hearing these most loathsome of sounds.

The encroachments of foreign tongues day by day are undermining the importance of the mother tongue and making a sound command of it less necessary. Defections to scientific and technical fields further thin the ranks of those pursuing these fields.

With things in such a state, the nation's centers for letters, legal studies, and leaning, the Colleges of Letters, Law, and the Religious and Philosophic Sciences have retreated into the cocoons of old texts, content to train pedants, just as the clergy have drawn into their cocoons of fanaticism and paralysis in the face of the West's onslaught.

These days, just as the clergy languishes in the toils of doubt between two and three and explication of ritual purity and impurity, such centers of Iranian, Eastern, and Islamic letters, law, and learning languish in the toils of whether the decorative be should be joined to the following word or whether the silent should be written.

Those exiled from the world of universals will clutch at minutiae. When the house has been carried off in the flood or has collapsed in an earthquake, you go looking for a door in the debris to bear the rotting corpse of a loved one to the graveyard.

As we speak of educational questions and questions of the university, we meet with another major question, that of the army of returnees from Europe and America, each of whom has returned at least a candidate for a position in a ministry and who collectively form the bulwark of the :nation's organizations.

Each of these educated persons is a boon-something like finding one shoe in the desert. For look closely. See, after returning and finding a post in an organization and getting entrenched there, what each of these boons turns into. They haven't the authority or the competence to do the job. They are illiberal, apathetic, and for the most part lacking in concern, mostly because they see themselves and their opinions as amounting to nothing next to the Western advisors and consultants who dominate the scene.

Contrary to the widespread view, the greater the army of returnees from Europe, the less their power to act and the greater the distress of the institutions that absorb their impact- Because there has never been a plan for where to send these youths and what specialty, what trade, what technology they should study,

they have gone each to some part of the world to study or experience something completely different from others' experiences, on their own choice and initiative, to their own taste. As they return, each having to join some group in one of our country's organizations, it becomes obvious how dissonant they are and how at a loss to carry out anything. Consider the French-educated Iranian, or the English; German; or American-educated one :

each tunes up and plays in a distinct style.

If I have hope for the future of intellectuals in Iran, however, one reason is this very diversity of methods by which our European-educated have studied, of their fields of study and places of study. This is the wellspring of the wealth of Iran's intellectual environment. Look at the intellectual environment of India, at how English its majority of Oxford-educated intelligentsia have made it. Under present conditions in this country, these youths generally resemble the lovely tulips, daffodils, and hyacinths we import as bulbs from Holland and grow in the Tehran greenhouses. When they bloom, we put them in exorbitantly priced flowerpots and give them to friends or acquaintances to set in a hot room under the sun where they will survive a week at most.

These flowers at the top of society's basket also wither in this society's climate. Or if they don't, they generally fade to the color of the society. Notwithstanding all the propaganda cranked out to lure back students from abroad in Europe, I do not believe that their return promises to be a service to the country so long as no environment suited to their future work is provided. Who is to provide this environment? In this intense cold, those can prepare it who have been both baked in the furnace and acclimated to the icehouse....

Although many young men return with European or American wives, very few of the young women return with European or American husbands. This constitutes an additional problem. As we watch crumble the foundation of the Iranian family, an intimate relationship of husband and wife of the same stock, the responsibility of these incongruous households is obvious. The saying, "the pigeon of two towers" means these youths with their families-the firsthand human products of occidentosis. (pp. 117-119)

Under the heading "Mechanosis" the distinguishing factors of a transitional period of society are discussed, which are : advance of science; transformation of technique, technology, and machine, and some semblance to Western type of democracy. In all cases these factors cause crises, which are in proportion to the speed of transformation of a society.

Iran sought to make up for a two-hundred-year lag within two decades, which naturally gave rise to social aberrations and psychological disturbances. In the West, mechanization of socioeconomic structure produced gangsters, brigands, killers, adventurers, and deportees at the social level, and militarism and fascism at the political level.

Jalal holds that the Iranian society has its own rogues, who are sometimes exported to the West under imperial patronage. He regards African and Asian countries raped and transgressed, and put to pressures, humiliations, and killings as the victims of the same abnormal phenomena. In a democratic set-up, political parties also help technocracy and bureaucracy to iron out individual differences and to mould all individuals in one and the same shape. This is again a byproduct of the machine which demands total conformity to its dictates.

Conformity in the work place", in Jalal's words, "culminates in conformity in the party and union, which in turn culminates in conformity in the barracks-that is, before the war machine." The yardstick of standardization is not only applied to dress, form, and manners, but also to thought and inner make-up. Out of this come the Blackshirts, the Brownshirts and the Fascists of all sort. In such deterministic and standardized society, psychosis and neurosis, personality split and dissociation, schizophrenia and melancholia become the order of the day.

Jalal has enumerated three specific forms of melancholia common in Iranian society. the melancholia of grandiosity, the melancholia of glorifying the nation's remote past, and the melancholia of constant pursuit.

The last chapter, "The Hour Draws Nigh", gives a brief account of some Western thinkers and writers who predicted the end of the road taken by the pursuers of the machine. First of all he refers to Albert Camus and his masterwork The Plague, then to Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros, Ingmar Bergman's film The Seventh Seal, Sartre's Erostratus and other similar works and characters. After translating The Plague one-third, a realization came to him that "the plague" symbolized mechanism, murder of beauty and poetry, spirit and humanity.

And now I, not as an Easterner, but as one like the first Muslims, who expected to see the Resurrection on the Plain of Judgement in their lifetimes, see ... that all these fictional endings raise the threat of the final hour, when the machine demon (if we don't rein it in or put its spirit in the bottle) will set the hydrogen bomb at the end of the road for humanity. On that note, I will rest my pen at the Quranic verse: "The hour draws nigh and the moon is split in two." (The Quran, 54:1) (p.137)

In Iran the occidentosis-demon has been reined and put in the bottle by the Islamic Revolution, and "Mechanosis" has been controlled to some extent. Watch out! The danger has not vanished, it still lingers on in some of the darkest corners of the society. The hour to relax has not arrived as yet. At the end, it can be pointed out that some of the translations of the titles of Jalal's books are not accurate, which are modified in this review. It is feared that such errors might have crept into the text of the book also.

*Gharbzadegi, a literary event in modern Persian literature, was published in 1962. The author Jalal Ali Ahmad is one of the most eminent writers of Iran, whose importance was not diminished by the Islamic Revolution but was rather enhanced. The English translation of Gharbzadegi by Campbell is reviewed by Dr. Wahid Akhtar, an eminent Urdu writer and poet. Dr. Akhtar is a professor of philosophy at Muslim University Aligarh, India- He is presently on the editorial board of al-Tawhid (English).