#gharbzadegi

[jt1674]

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[bossdesboss]

[thedesertsoflove]

The Weststruck man is a man totally without belief or conviction 0 to such an extent that he not only believes in nothing, but also does not actively disbelieve in anything - you might call him a syncretism. He is a time server. Once he gets across the bridge, he doesn't care if it stands or falls. He has no faith, no direction, no aim, no belief, neither in God nor in humanity. He cares neither whether society is transformed or not, nor whether religion or ir religion prevails. He is not even irreligious. He is indifferent. He even goes to mosques at times, just as he goes to the club or the movies. But everywhere he is only a spectator. It is just as if he had gone to a soccer game...

Gharbzadegi (literally : Weststruckness or Occidentosis, Jalal al-e Ahmad

[derakhtesokoot]

We have now altogether forgotten the sense of competition. It has been substituted by the sense of helplessness, the sense of servitude. We no longer see ourselves as deserving any right... Nay, even if we seek to justify an aspect of our this- or otherworldly affairs we evaluate them on [Westerners’] principles, following the injunction of their advisers and counselors. We study like them; take census like them; do research like them. But even that is all right, because science has assumed a kind of universal methodology... But the interesting thing is that we get married like the Westerners do; imitate liberalism like they do; evaluate the world, dress, and write like they do. As if our own principles have all been superseded... Yes, now from those two old rivals finally one has ended up cleaning after the circus; the other one runs the show. And what a show! A pornographic scandal, stupefying, stultifying obscenity. So that they can plunder the oil.

Jalal Ale Ahmad, Westoxication

[ray-rabies]

Gharbzadegi-Robert Wyatt

[post-makhno]

Although Al-e Ahmad’s distinction between East and West is rooted in political economy, his project is ultimately an exercise in the critique of ideology. By consuming Western products, Iranians are participating in a system that leads to both economic dependence and cultural dissolution. In consuming commodities, the Iranian bourgeoisie fails to recognize the underlying social relations of production that such consumption is reinforcing. In other words, westoxification is a form of commodity fetishism, but its effects are amplified by the geography of uneven development. For Marx, the commodity form disguised the way that surplus value was created though the expropriation of workers’ labor time; for Al-e Ahmad, the commodity now justifies the neoimperial relationship between countries. Western nations benefit both by acquiring raw materials (oil, for example) at advantageous prices and by creating a market for surplus goods.

Margaret Kohn, Political Theories of Decolonization p. 42

[maleke-dande]

when other MENA tumblrians you follow complain about the little habits white people have....

... habits which you share.

[greasycoat]

I can’t help wishing that I could show you the following scene in the tense, angular camera angles we might expect from a James Bond film. It’s August 30th, 1981. A number of the top members of Iran’s government — the Supreme Defense Council — are at the table in a large echoey boardroom, I assume they are wearing simple white turbans and sober grey, brown and black. An aide enters, sets a briefcase on the table near the President and his Prime Minister. Papers are shuffled, we hear muted conversation in a sort of pre-meeting hush. The aide passes on, out of the room, and just as he leaves we see the scene inside, framed over his shoulder, through the doorway: someone has paused to open the briefcase. The noise is tremendous, fire is everywhere and we see smoke blow into the hallway as the aide hustles away from the explosion out towards the street.

Five members of the government were killed in that explosion, including President Mohammed-Ali Rajai and Prime Minister Mohammad Javad Bahonar. In the 1970’s and early 1980’s it was remarkably easy to get killed in Iranian politics, and remarkably difficult to decide who to believe when it came to pointing out the killer. In this case we might as well accept the government verdict that the People’s Mujahedin of Iran were responsible — that doesn’t seem too unlikely.

We in the US are used to the term Mujahedin being used to describe the Muslim fighters who took part in repulsing Soviet ambitions in Afghanistan and who have now been turned loose to follow various anti-Western Islamist causes. In this context, we should get used to the term mujahedin as simply meaning someone who struggles on behalf of Islam, and recognize the People’s Mujahedin as Marxists pursuing an Iranian nationalist struggle — at first against the Shah of Iran, who ruled as a cruel and greedy dictator helping the Western powers to his countries oil-wealth, and then against the fundamentalist clerics who managed to throw out the Shah only to then take over as a tyrannical dictatorship for themselves.

The Marxists had been a vital undercurrent in the struggle against the Shah, although the Shah’s secret police had done their jobs quite well killing, torturing and imprisoning great numbers of them. Marxists were a lot easier for the Shah to target and eliminate than the mullahs — people didn’t want you getting too rough with the clergy, but it was easy to paint the Marxists out as merely stooges working for the USSR, Iran’s giant atheistic neighbor to the North. Iran is a solidly Shi’ite Muslim country, home to a number of very important holy shrines and centers of learning, Marxism had to undergo a serious process of Shi’afication in order to appeal to the Iranian sensibility. And did a good job too, really. Shi’i Islam is a religion that values the struggle against greed and tyranny — the history of Shi’ism abounds with martyrs dying in the cause of freeing Muslims the oppression of powerful worldly rulers.

Probably the most important writer in this process of making Marxist ideals compatible with the worldview of Iranian Shi’ites was Ali Shariati, who interpreted the Shi’a catchphrase ‘Everyday is Ashoura, every place is Karbala’ as presaging the Marxist call for universal class struggle. Explaining the significance of Ashoura and Karbala may go some way to explaining Shi’ism to anyone who, like myself, hasn’t had a lot of experience with the distinction between the Sunni and Shi’a branches of Islam. In the Shi’a faith, Ashoura is a day of fervent mourning, commemorating the death of Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of Muhammad, at the town of Karbala in 680 AD. The Shi’a revere Husayn as the Third Imam, and to some extent the division between the Shi’a and Sunni comes down to the difference between adhering to a spiritual leadership descending from Muhammad through bloodlines — the Shi’a Imams — or a more worldly progression of power through the Sunni Caliphs. The Sunni Caliphs were chosen for their abilities to protect Islam through their strength and proven ability to rule, they were defenders of the faith but not necessarily spiritual figures. The Shi’a Imams were specifically religious leaders, their spiritual authority being passed down through their direct relationship with the Prophet; to the Shi’a, the Sunni Caliphs usurped the position that the Imams should have held over Islam.

And Shi’ism puts a lot of stock in this underdog status — Husayn ibn Ali, the Third Imam, was in direct conflict with the rich and powerful Sunni Caliph Yazid I. Many of Husayn’s followers are represented as having been freed slaves and Persian prisoners of war, victims of inequalities that would have been denounced by Muhammad and yet were becoming standard in the power structure of the emerging Islamic empire. According to Shi’a history, Husayn, his family and his followers were massacred near the town of Karbala, by an overwhelming force sent against him by Yazid I. The dead were mutilated, Husayn was dismembered and beheaded and the bodies left to rot. Ashoura is a funeral, not a festive occasion really, a reminder that martyrdom is central to Shi’a righteousness in its struggle against overwhelming corruption and abuse of power.

So the Shah of Iran was a pretty obvious stand in for Yazid I. And with the more fiery of the Shia’ clergy and the Marxist mujahedin both rallying to the cry that ‘everyday is Ashoura and every place is Karbala’ it seems obvious that the Shah, no matter how much help he might get from the Western oil-concerns, was eventually going down. The Marxists were pretty weak though, their ideology was influential but their organizations had been pretty well stamped down by the Shah. The clergy on the other hand had massive popular support, and their leader Khomeini wasn’t too subtle about appealing to the ingrained Shi’a desire to see a return of the earthly rule of the Imams. Death and torture and imprisonment returned as standard governing procedures in the wake of the revolution, mostly in the name of stamping out Gharbzadegi — the infectious spread of toxic and addictive Western influences. The unfortunate Marxists who had helped point out the dangers of Gharbzadegi were now just as likely to get jailed and murdered by the guardians of the theocratic dictatorship they helped bring to power.