The last Muslim Intellectual

Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s is probably not a name generally known in either Muslim or non-Muslim circles. Yet, he is a figure few educated Iranians could fail to recognize. Many would associate him with the Islamic revolution of 1977–9 although he died a decade before it came to fulfilment. Litterateur and inimitable Persian prose writer, Al-e Ahmad’s best known work Gharbzadegi (‘Westoxication’) seemed to define the West’s economic and cultural domination of Iran, and became a formative idea behind the making of the Iranian revolution.

Hamid Dabashi has written a work of commitment which, it turns out, is aimed not only at vindicating the life and achievement of its subject, but endeavours to sustain Jalal Al-e Ahmad as a pathfinder for his own vision of a post-westocentric and post-Islamist world. ‘My primary reason for going back to Al-e Ahmad is to move forward to think of a post-Islamist moral and intellectual agency for a world he could not anticipate’ (p. 6).