Populist Historiography, Anti-clericalism and Religious Revolution

Acknowledging indebtedness to Kasravi, the quintessential intellectual of 1960s Iran, Jalal Al-Ahmad, would write:

Al-Ahmad’s selective tribute in fact conceals the intellectual indebtedness of his own highly influential concept of “West-struckness” (discussed in Chapter 6) to Kasravi’s critique of “Europeanism.” As Mohammad Tavakloi-Targhi notes, such treatments of Kasravi are examples in a pattern of “historical amnesia” persisting in studies of Iranian modernity.⁵ While this often has political reasons, the neglect of Kasravi’s pioneering role as a critic of European civilization, and specifically his anticipation of the “West-struck-ness” discourse of the 1960s and 1970s, shows glaring “disremembering” in the genealogy of intellectual modernity.⁶ Scholarly attention to Kasravi began in the early 1970s when Ervand Abrahamian noted his writings converged on a highly “integrative” form of nationalism. Without focusing on his critique of “Europeanism,” Abrahamian nevertheless drew attention to Kasravi’s project of turning religion into a modern ideology.⁷ Two decades later, however, Hamid Dabashi’s study of pre-revolutionary Iran’s “Islamic ideology” was dismissive of Kasravi, considering his ideas a “side step” on the mid-century intellectual path to Marxism.⁸ Similarly, Mehrzad Boroujedri’s study of Iranian intellectuals focused on Shadman, rather than Kasravi, as “the missing link between the earlier staunch supporters of the West and its late arch-critics.”⁹ Finally, an important 2002 article by Tavakoli-Targhi recognized Kasravi as the intellectual link between the 1920s project of “spiritual revolution” (enqelab-e ruhani) and the politicized revolutionary readings of Shi’ism later in the century.¹⁰ Tavakoli-Targhi also pointed out the deliberate historiographic amnesia concerning Kasravi’s intellectual contribution:

Kasaravi’s widely recognized achievement is his narration of constitutionalism as the biography of the Iranian nation reborn in the crucible of a popular revolution. As noted in Chapter 1, Edward Granville Browne’s The History of the Persian Revolution (1910) provided Iranian nationalism with its first modern historical “master narrative.” But it was Kasravi’s richly source-based History of Iran’s Constitutional Movement, and its companion The Eighteen-year History of Azerbaijan, that launched Iran’s populist-nationalist tradition of historiography.¹² Standing between traditional chronicle and modern narration, Kasravi’s historiography depicted the constitutional movement as the epic tale of a failed national and popular revolution. In his account, the people’s revolutionary struggle for national sovereignty was betrayed by leaders who compromised with a corrupt old order and its foreign (Anglo-Russian) backers. As Farzin Vejdani has noted, it was Kasravi who first narrated the Constitutional Revolution as a nationalist “morality tale,” with the people, or in his words “the mass,” writ large as the main protagonist, defeated and betrayed, but left on the stage to continue the struggle.¹³ Significantly, Kasravi’s writings helped popularize the Persian term tudeh, or “the mass,” as a widely used equivalent for both “the people” and “the nation.”

Kasravi’s 1930s historiography anticipated a narrative closure to be accomplished with the nation’s achievement of full political sovereignty, coterminous with moral perfection. Responding to the ideological upheavals of the post-Reza Shah era, he assumed the role of a modern prophet, calling for radical religious and moral reform beyond Islam. Braving the burden of this new role, he endured vehement clerical denunciation, which eventually led to his assassination by Muslim terrorists. To the political generation coming of age during the 1940s, however, Kasravi’s devastating criticism of traditional religion paved the way for a hasty transition to atheism and communism. Less apparent was the long-term intellectual impact of Kasravi’s blending of populist nationalism with a radical critique of both “Europeanism” and traditional Shi’ism. As we shall see in Chapters 6–7, this deeper imprint of Kasravi’s ideas echoes in the ideological projects of the 1960s and 1970s that merged Marxism, third-world nativism and revolutionary readings of Shi’ism, producing the peculiar eschatology of Iran’s 1978–1979 revolution.

As with his intellectual legacy, the genesis of Kasravi’s worldview, as a historian, nationalist and moral crusader, remains obscure. Being an “epistemological nationalist,” he was obsessed with intellectual originality and thus loath to admit foreign, and particularly European, influences on his own thoughts. Nevertheless, his historiography fits the genre of nineteenth-century Europe’s populist-nationalist historians, showing striking similarity to the works of Jules Michelet. The history of France, for Michelet, was centered on “the people,” whose divisions into modern social classes had to be overcome by their unification into an organic national body. His influential work, The People (1846), idealized France’s small property-holding peasant majority, whom he called “the mass” (la foule). Michelet also preached a kind of “peasant socialism,” based on the equitable distribution, rather than abolition, of private property. Later in life, he came to fear the rise of “machines,” anticipating the technological drift of modern industrial capitalism.¹⁴ Moreover, he believed modern society exploited working women both economically and sexually. Women, he believed, were naturally unequal to men, and thus were fitted to serve society as men’s “comforters” by staying at home and raising children under their husbands’ moral and intellectual guidance.¹⁵ Finally, Michelet was simultaneously anti-materialist and anti-clerical. Breaking with the Catholic Church, he wrote Bible of Humanity (1864), casting himself as the prophet of a new secular religion, derived from Enlightenment ideals.¹⁶ As we shall see below, Kasravi’s views on all of these subjects are quite similar to Michelet’s.

Ironically, Kasravi’s posture of intellectual autonomy is related to his being the first Iranian whose modern scholarly contribution was recognized in Europe. During the early 1920s, his original research was translated into English and Russian, he wrote for The Encyclopaedia of Islam, and joined the Royal Asiatic Society and other European and American scholarly associations. At the same time, he had found errors of translation and interpretation in the work of E. G. Browne, the best-known and most revered Orientalist among Iranians.¹⁷ Having praised Browne’s The Persian Revolution, Kasravi castigated his four-volume A Literary History of Persia (1902–1924). Unlike The Persian Revolution, he argued, the latter work diverted its readers’ attention away from Iran’s contemporary predicaments, toward the mystical realm of classical Persian literature. Going farther, he accused Browne’s Iranian associates, especially Taqizadeh and the Forughis (father and son), of colluding with Europeans in preaching moral laxness to Iranians, thus weakening their nationalist and revolutionary resolve. Specifically attacking Taqizadeh, he wrote:

His judgment on the Forughis was equally harsh:

Prematurely postcolonial, Kasravi was radically rejecting Europe’s intellectual authority, insisting that Orientalist scholarship was politically prejudiced against “Easterners,” particularly Muslims and Iranians:

This radical critique of Orientalism, however, was coupled with an equally harsh assessment of the worldview embedded in Iran’s classical literary tradition (adab). Kasravi, like his immediate predecessor Taqi Raf’at (see Chapter 3), believed the powerful mystical bent of classical Persian poetry sewed irrationality, moral degeneration, other-worldliness and sociopolitical escapism. To survive in the modern world, he argued, Iranians had to be unified in a culturally cohesive and politically sovereign nation, with a singular national will, based on reason, worldliness, moral vigilance and communal responsibility. What distinguished Kasravi from intellectuals like Taqizadeh and Forughi, as well as Raf’at, was his belief that Iran’s national regeneration was predicated upon a radical “double critique” of both its own indigenous cultural tradition and modern European culture.

Though iconoclastic in 1930s Iran, Kasravi’s ideas were in line with global intellectual trends, especially among Asian thinkers. Juxtaposing the nihilist “Western” culture of “materialism” and “the machine” to “Eastern” spirituality was a major intellectual preoccupation in interwar Europe and Asia. Partly inspired and confirmed by European thinkers like Oswald Spengler, as well as by Marxists, such negative appraisals of European civilization were prevalent among Indian thinkers like Muhammad Iqbal, Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, as well as Chinese, Japanese and Ottoman/Turkish intellectuals.²¹ Kasravi, who read Turkish, Arabic, French and English, must have known about his fellow “Eastern” critics of the modern world, though his works do not show engagement with them. He certainly was familiar with Gandhi’s ideas and must have been at least exposed to Tagore’s, whose 1932 visit to Iran became a nationally celebrated occasion.²² During the 1930s Kasravi had shared Gandhi’s negative view of large-scale industry and mechanization, believing they contributed to mass unemployment and workers’ misery. By the early 1940s, however, he wrote:

Kasravi must have been familiar too with Mohammad Iqbal (1877–1938), India’s renowned Muslim intellectual of the interwar period. Iqbal’s decades of intellectual production, in Persian, Urdu and English, culminated in his influential The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930). Directly engaged with modernist European thought, Iqbal had criticized, for example, Oswald Spengler’s characterization of Islam as a messianic “Magian” religion, focused on the cosmic struggle of good and evil. Instead, he proposed a modernist Islamic spirituality, appealing to scientific “indeterminacy” and relativity physics to challenge Europe’s nihilistic materialism. More specifically, Iqbal’s khodi (self/selfhood) philosophy modernized Islamic mysticism by arguing that the individual’s growing knowledge of God enriched selfhood and subjectivity, rather than causing their dissolution (fana) in God. Moreover, he saw Islam’s reconstruction as an integrative modern ideology/world view “uniting religion and state, ethics and politics, in a single revelation much in the same way that Plato does in his Republic.”²⁴ Iqbal’s anti-positivist philosophy of Islamic subjectivity, as well as his integrative moralistic conception of the self, society and politics, parallel but also differ from Kasravi’s ideas.²⁵

Kasravi’s Critique of Europeanism

Foreign influences on his thought notwithstanding, Kasravi’s peculiar articulation of an “Eastern” worldview was a unique intellectual contribution in 1930s Iran. A sharp critique of European culture also distinguished his advocacy of “reason” (kherd) from a contemporary Turkish nationalist “cult of reason” that closely identified with Western civilization.²⁷ Arguably, therefore, Kasravi’s salient intellectual contribution is his largely forgotten critique of “Europeanism.”²⁸ The Persian term he used, i.e. Orupa’i-gari, was his own invention, literally meaning “acting like Europeans.” A similar term, farangi-ma’abi, literally meaning “following European manners,” already existed in Persian. But, as was his wont, Kasravi replaced it with Orupa’i-gari, a neologism stressing the particular nuance he intended. In a broader linguistic contribution, he had proposed the Persian suffix “gari” as equivalent to “ism” in modern French and English, conveying “the acceptance and upholding of something,” including a creed or belief system. Therefore, as defined by Kasravi, Orapa’i-gari meant “accepting, preferring and following Europe’s life-style.”²⁹ In his small 1943 book, On Philosophy, Kasravi described the critique of Orupa’i-gari as the foundation of his life’s “endeavors”:

Kasravi’s point of departure, therefore, was the rejection of Taqizadeh’s advocacy of total “surrender” to European civilization (see Chapter 2). He was quite familiar with both Kaveh and Iranshahr, having written for both.³¹ However, his own critical views on Europe began to appear in the periodicals A’in (Creed), launched in 1932, and Peyman (The Pact), published throughout the 1930s. In many ways, Kasravi followed Kazemzadeh’s lead, whose 1920s Iranshahr had urged Iranians not to emulate modern Europe (see Chapter 2). Perhaps most importantly, he echoed Kazemzadeh’s belief that modern science and technology had neither created a better world, nor improved life for Europeans. But he also disagreed with Kazemzadeh, for example, in rejecting racist Aryanism as a negative feature of Europeanism.³² Both men thus saw the value system guiding human society as more important than technological or material progress. Significantly, Kasravi agreed with Kazemzadeh, Iqbal and their manifold Asian and European cohorts in condemning Europe’s “materialism” as the epitome of its moral bankruptcy. At the same time, he agreed with Iqbal’s positive estimation of modern science, because it discovered nature’s laws, allowing humans mastery over them. In line with Asian and European anti-positivist thinkers, however, he denied that physical science models could serve as normative guidelines for social life. Indeed, Kasravi categorically rejected the use of scientific knowledge as the foundation of a “materialist” philosophy of social life. Thus, his rare references to European thinkers include citations of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer as philosophers who showed the moral vacuity of science-based sociology of knowledge.³³

Whether knowingly or not, Kasravi’s critique of European modernity’s dichotomous split into moral and material sides echoed the views of anti-positivist Ottoman intellectuals. In 1891, for instance, Mahmud Es’ad had written:

Kasravi, however, would go farther than the Young Ottomans, or lapse backward, to reject not only Europe’s post-Enlightenment moral philosophies, but philosophy in general. Like medieval Muslim thinkers, such as al-Ghazali, and contemporary neo-mystical movements like Traditionalism (see Chapter 6), he blamed philosophers, starting with the ancient Greek rationalists, for allegedly futile speculation about God and metaphysical questions.³⁵ But, unlike Iranian and European neo-mystics, he vehemently rejected Sufism along with Shi’ism and the moral teachings of literary masters like Sa’di, Hafez and Rumi. According to Kasravi, poets and Sufi masters, like philosophers, reached beyond reason to deal in speculation, thus leading people to confusion and idleness.

In the end, Kasravi’s critique of Sufism, poetry and philosophy, as well as Europeanism, served the purposes of his “integrative” nationalism. Yet, and despite his extraordinary knowledge of Iranian history, Kasravi’s understanding of nationalism and nation formation remained ahistorical. Basically, he believed nations were, or had to be, similar to human families, being organic entities living in time. This was ironic, since Kasravi, like his generation of nationalist thinkers, admitted that his idealized Iranian nation did not in fact exist (see Chapter 3). Kasravi’s greatest consternation was that, instead of a cohesive unitary nation, Iran was highly fractured along various regional, ethnic, linguistic and religious lines.³⁶ Therefore, and despite his fiercely independent judgment, he was often in agreement with the official nationalism of the 1930s, endorsing the political centralization and cultural homogenization of Iran. He thus credited Reza Shah for such accomplishments, occasionally praising him, even during the repressive 1930s:

Kasravi’s alignment with official nationalism was evident, for example, in his participation in the 1934 millennial celebration of Ferdowsi, whose Shahnameh he considered a rare positive example of classical Persian literature because it promoted national pride and resoluteness among Iranians.³⁸ Moreover, Kasravi’s personal crusade of “purifying” modern Persian paralleled and surpassed the project of Farhangestan, a government academy created for that purpose during the 1930s.³⁹ At the same time, he remained fiercely independent, refusing to bend, like Taqizadeh or Forughi, to official diktats and political expediency. For example, while teaching history at Tehran’s colleges of theology and officer training during the mid-1930s, he was declined promotion to professorship, due to his refusal to rescind his radical views on poets and poetry.⁴⁰ He was also a fanatical believer in the autonomy of “national” languages, although his own studies of Iran’s old and new languages showed their porous boundaries and considerable overlaps. As a linguistic nationalist, Kasravi insisted that once a distinct language was formed, it had to be kept “pure,” by not mixing with other languages. His reasoning was that open-ended change and diversity in a language endangered the cohesion and unity of its speakers.⁴¹ Curiously, Kasravi’s advocacy of the communicative functionality of language was contradicted by his project of interjecting hundreds of neologisms into modern Persian, to the point that his own Persian prose became impossible to read without a vocabulary list attached to his books.

Another feature of Kasravi’s linguistic nationalism, once again congruent with official nationalist ideology of the 1920s and 1930s, was his passionate advocacy of Persian as Iran’s unifying national language, despite the fact that he was a native Turkish (Azeri) speaker.⁴² According to him:

The above passage shows that Kasravi’s nationalism was in line with modern authoritarian conceptions of the nation as a self-contained linguistic, social, political and economic community. Nevertheless, his nationalism differed from prevalent global norms in its rejection of political division and conflict, not only within but also between nations. Like Michelet, Gandhi and other nationalists who romanticized pre-industrial utopias, he imagined the nation mainly as a community of small agricultural producers, with no objective conflict of interest. In Kasravi’s political economy, “the source of life is air and land.”⁴⁴ Tilling the land established ownership of it; therefore, those who performed no personal labor on the land had no legitimate claims of proprietorship to it. The latter category was a small minority in every nation, consisting of those who lived an idle or parasitic life, exploiting the labor of others. In addition to large landowners, this included poets, clerics, fiction-writers and merchants, who profited beyond their own productive labor. Like many contemporary thinkers, Kasravi condemned “money-dominated” economies, without being concerned with capitalism as a distinct socioeconomic system. Money, he argued, had to be a means of exchange, and not of wealth creation.⁴⁵ Similar again to nationalist thinkers like Gandhi, he condemned European capitalism for its reliance on large-scale industry and mechanized factory production to increase the exploitation of the masses. This European reality of social conflict, he argued, was reflected in materialist and Social Darwinist philosophies that saw class struggle within, and war among, European nations as inevitable.⁴⁶ He thus dismissed modern industrial capitalism in favor of preserving more “natural” pre-industrial agricultural economies:

Finally, Kasravi’s views on women and gender were typically patriarchal and congruent with those of secular nationalist and Muslim modernists of his generation. To him, the advocacy of gender equality was among the worst influences of Europeanism.⁴⁸ Women, he believed, were to enjoy respect and protection as wives and mothers. These were tasks for which they were created, for women’s mental and emotional capacities differed from men’s.⁴⁹ In a rare endorsement of a contemporary European political leader, Kasravi cited Hitler’s views on women positively, praising the Nazis for retiring millions of women from jobs that were returned to men:

Like his contemporary Muslim modernists, Kasravi thought women were to be educated, but only to become better mothers and household mangers.⁵¹ He also believed the mixing of genders in public spaces inevitably led to women’s corruption. Therefore, women were not to mingle with men and had to appear modestly attired and without physical adornments in public. Kasravi even approved of the hejab, in its broader sense of “protective” gender barriers in public space. According to him, the covering of women’s faces and their being wrapped in chadors was not prescribed by Islam, since such practices did not exist during the Prophet Mohammad’s time. This too was fully in accord with 1930s Iran’s state-sponsored “anti-veiling” campaign.⁵²

A Divine Intellectual Mandate: Appropriating the Sacred and Approximating Socialism

Kasravi probably never read Toynbee, but his worldview bears a vague resemblance to the British historian’s globalist constitutionalism and critical perspective on “Western civilization,” as well as his appreciation of Asian civilizations and grounding of politics in spirituality. Moreover, Toynbee, like Kasravi, claimed divine inspiration, placing himself in “a long tradition of God’s self-revelation to specially sensitive individuals, … He never called himself a prophet, and was rather embarrassed when others did so. Yet he never repudiated the title either, and sometimes came close to claiming the role.”⁵⁴ Kasravi’s most controversial innovation, of course, was his advocacy of a new religion beyond Islam. During the 1930s, he wrote as a Muslim modernist, seeking to rationalize Islam by purging it from superstition, sectarianism and clerical abuse. Whether consciously or not, he was following the project of intellectuals like Kazemzadeh who had tried to appropriate the sacred “essence” of religion, as social power, to metaphysically fortify nationalist ideology. This important aspect of Kasravi’s intellectual endeavor makes him a direct precursor to mid-century socially conscious Islamic modernists and 1960s and 1970s thinkers like Ali Shariati, who turned Islam into a radical political ideology (see Chapters 5–6). Arguably more consistent than Muslim modernists who followed him, Kasravi, by the early 1940s, went farther, claiming divine “inspiration” as founder of a new Religion of Reason (din-e kherad). He now argued that what ordinary Muslims were taught to believe and practice was in fact irreligion (bidini). Zoroaster, Moses, Jesus and Mohammad, he claimed, were all divinely “inspired” (bar-angikhteh) to lead people in the most “rational” manner conceivable at the time. Thus, what these prophets originally taught had been true religion, whereas what their followers believed and practiced would, in time, turn into the opposite of true religion. Kasravi distinguished between God’s “messengers” (peyghambaran), who received divine “revelation,” and religious reformers who, like Zoroaster, were divinely “inspired” to show truth and fight falsehood.⁵⁵ He thus considered himself among religious reformers, divinely “inspired” to discern and propagate divine truth.⁵⁶ Such fine distinctions, however, were irrelevant to Kasravi’s Muslim detractors, and particularly the clerical establishment, who declared him an unrepentant “apostate,” and thus technically deserving of a death sentence (see below).

In a pioneering study, Abrahamian observed that by “religion” (din), Kasravi meant “an ideology that effectively integrated the individual into a nation, instilling in him social consciousness, cultural ethos, and values oriented toward the public good.” He also noted Kasravi probably borrowed this understanding of religion from his contemporary Turkish nationalist reformer Zia Gokalp, who in turn followed Emile Durkheim’s theory of religion as a cultural force serving social integration and national cohesion.⁵⁷ Gokalp’s fully fledged ideas, appearing in What is Turkism (1923), define the nation as a cultural community, based on a common language and core values. In Goklap’s illiberal collectivist view, the individual had to be totally subordinate to the national community, a position summed up in his dictum “There is no individual but nation; there are no rights but duties.” According to Gokalp, while the Turkish nation had a trans-historical existence, the masses acquired national consciousness by following “elites” (guzideler), particularly heroes (kahraman) who appear in times of crisis as champions of national culture.⁵⁸ Kasravi, who advocated similar ideas in the 1920s and 1930s, was certainly familiar with the Ottoman/Turkish project of reconstructing Islam as a rational religion compatible with science and purged of mythical and supernatural features. By the early twentieth century, the idea of Islam as a “religion of reason” had appeared in the Young Turk journal Ijtihad, partly in response to the growing influence of positivist materialism among modernizing intellectuals. As we saw in Chapter 2, the Young Turk elite had a complicated “love–hate” attitude toward European civilization, admiring its intellectual and political strength, while condemning its predatory treatment of the Ottoman Empire.⁵⁹

In addition to Ottoman and Turkish intellectuals, Kasravi appears to be influenced by global ecumenical religious movements, as well as the cyclical movements of Islamic renewal and purification, including Wahhabism, and even by the Babi-Baha’i religious innovations he vehemently attacked.⁶⁰ In the politically charged atmosphere of the early 1940s, his propagation of religion as nationalist ideology was challenged by Marxists, as well as by the clerical establishment. Forced to directly confront questions of class, politics and government, the contradictions of Kasravi’s thought became more apparent. On the one hand, he had been a defender of constitutionalism, i.e. European-style representative government. On the other, his political thought remained authoritarian, considering ordinary people in need of strict moral, and hence political, guidance by a divinely inspired intellectual elite.⁶¹ Rejecting traditional Islam, he nevertheless believed in intellectual authority as a scared trust, transferred from clerics and Sufis to the radical intelligentsia, a mandate claimed also by Arani and his Marxist followers, and later by Islamic-socialists like Ali Sharati (see Chapters 5 and 6).

The extent of Kasravi’s intellectual authoritarianism varied according to time and circumstances. As an “inspired” leader, he could be extremely rigid and fanatical, calling for violent measures to cleanse social ills and deviations. He rejected freedom of thought and imagination, which, he believed, could lead ordinary people to moral corruption and political confusion. In Platonic fashion, he condemned modern European literature along with classical Persian poetry, because they both gave free reign to imagination and sentiment. Debating Fatemeh Sayyah, a Russian-educated professor of comparative literature at Tehran University, he argued that the nation’s moral edification hinged on the study of history, rather than works of fiction. Thus, he equally condemned writers ranging from Alexandre Dumas and Giorgy Zeydan to Anatole France and Leo Tolstoy. Particularly disturbing to him was modern and classical literature’s alleged inducement of readers to sexual license. Thus, he angrily declared that Iran’s great medieval poet Sa’di deserved a death sentence for preaching homosexual acts. Condemning literature as both the cause and consequence of Europe’s moral deprivation, Kasravi predicted a day when works of fiction burnt in puritanical bonfires.⁶² His advocacy of book burning brings to mind not only familiar Catholic or Nazi practices, but the less well-known recommendation of Bayan, the mid-nineteenth-century Babi scripture.⁶³

Kasravi’s brief debate with Sayyah in the 1930s, over the social function of literature, is a fascinating faded page in twentieth-century Iranian intellectual history. It shows how Tehran University’s first woman professor was a more sophisticated intellectual than the country’s leading historian, nationalist thinker and religious reformer (on Sayyah, see also Chapter 5). Responding to Kasravi briefly but cogently, Sayyah argued that literature and the arts should not be dismissed as “lies,” just because they are not direct reflections of social reality. She reminded Kasravi that even historiography reconstructs true events from the vantage point of historians. Finally, while agreeing with Kasravi in condemning most modern European fiction as crass entertainment, she defended the morally uplifting value of fiction by writers like Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo and Anatole France, noting also how their work had helped bring about progressive social reform.⁶⁴

Kasravi’s crusade of cultural cleansing, however, went beyond the purging of classical and modern literature. His targets included philosophy, agnosticism, Sufism, Shi’ism and Baha’ism, all of which he considered socially harmful and therefore to be eliminated. Those preaching such beliefs had to be harshly dealt with at first, and executed if persistent. In Kasravi’s strict disciplinary utopia, everyone had to be morally and physically fit, while all deviant behavior, such as drunkenness, was “sinful” and to be severely punished. People were to be entertained by listening to music and reading history books, while roaming in nature and verdant gardens. The cinema was acceptable only if it showed true-to-life stories.⁶⁵ Given his own scrupulous record of service in the judiciary, Kasravi’s notion of justice and its administration was extraordinarily exacting. Judgeship was a sacrosanct vocation and judges who took bribes, for example, were to be executed. A vast litany of “criminal” offenses also were to be summarily judged and punished harshly. Modern European ideas of reforming criminals in prison were erroneous because incarceration was a social expense that did not reform, but instead hardened, criminals. Those committing premeditated crimes were to be flogged publicly, to suffer additional psychological reprimand. Not only murderers, but those who betrayed their country, or committed sodomy, deserved the death penalty. Similarly, religious frauds, fiction writers, fortune-tellers and poets who defamed others had to be executed for repeat offenses.⁶⁶ In an important way, however, Kasravi’s advocacy of morally righteous violence differed from the modernist cult of violence and warfare justified in the name of nation, class or religion. While praising the Constitutional Revolution’s popular militias and Reza Shah’s militaristic nation building, Kasravi shunned Europe’s modern arms race and total warfare, considering them as further proof of “moral corruption.” His 1930s writings, for instance, condemned growing militarism in Nazi Germany and other European countries, warning that Europe’s arms race, market-dominated culture and industrial competition inevitably led to war.⁶⁷

Fanatical Muslim violence, however, abruptly ended Kasravi’s intellectual journey just as he was drawn into the tumultuous ideological and political debates of the post-Reza Shah era. In 1945, about a year before his assassination, he published Toward Politics, a small book written in response to the political challenges Iran faced while emerging from Allied occupation. In characteristic style, he offered his own definition of politics:

Eschewing idealism, he submitted that Iranian politics was to be understood in terms of two conflicting geo-political tendencies, one pro-British and the other pro-Soviet. With uncharacteristic realpolitik, he argued that Allied-occupied Iran had to find a positive balance between these two powerful tendencies, forging good relations with the Soviet Union and Great Britain, while being independent from both.⁶⁹ At the same time, he repeated his trademark belief that without proper “cultural cleansing,” Iran’s problems could not be solved by adherence to modern ideologies like constitutionalism, fascism, socialism and communism:

As with his positive estimation of constitutionalism, Kasravi also showed some receptivity to socialism. In a section titled “Not Far from Socialism,” he admitted that, while still refusing to follow European ideologies, his own political ideals were close to socialism: “The founders of socialism were well-meaning men who worked toward the world’s betterment … They were close to us. Fortunately, their efforts bore fruit as today the world is rapidly moving toward socialism.” This qualified endorsement of socialism showed Kasravi’s alignment with an emergent global drift toward Third World socialism, a path that was different from following the Soviet Union or accepting its official ideology. Kasravi in effect approved of a “peasant socialism,” protecting small-property holders from the onslaught of large-scale concentrations of capital. Believing that “property was natural,” he argued the state should intervene in the economy to regulate markets and capital formation, not to abolish them.⁷¹

Kasravi’s brutal assassination foreclosed the possibility of new departures in his thought, for example, in confrontation with the ascendance of Marxism during the next few decades. In a glaring case of modern selective remembering, he was canonized as a first-rate historian, while his innovative ideas on nationalism, religious reform and resistance to “Europeanism” were largely glossed over as fanciful curiosities. Relegated to footnotes, he was acknowledged in the margins of intellectual history as a thinker whose innovations helped mid-century Iranian intellectuals transition to Marxism and atheism. This occluded his most important intellectual contribution, namely his anti-clerical “Protestant” reinterpretation of Islam as a nationalist ideology of resistance to Western modernity. Below, we shall see how vehement reactions to Kasravi’s “apostasy” and anti-clericalism helped derail attention to the more complex and enduring aspects of his intellectual contribution.

Young Khomeini on Clerical Authority and Modern Government

In 1944, shortly before Kasravi’s assassination, Ruhollah Khomeini intervened in the country’s intellectual and political debates by publishing Secrets Exposed (Kashf al-Asrar). This was a polemical response to what he considered frontal attacks on Islam and Shi’i clergy in a 1943 pamphlet titled Millennial Secrets (Asrar-e Hezar Saleh). Written by a former cleric, Ali-Asghar Hakamizadeh, Millennial Secrets articulated a bold anti-clerical position similar to Kasravi’s.⁷² Khomeni’s response, in Secrets Exposed, therefore was an important intervention, adding a clerical voice to the intellectual and political cacophony following the fall of Reza Shah’s dictatorship. Due to its arcane language and strict juridical style of argumentation, Secrets Exposed is a daunting read, which may in part explain why it has received much less attention than Khomeini’s other writings and pronouncements.⁷³ Yet this work merits closer scrutiny as the first systematic clerical response to decades of steadily growing criticism of traditional Shi’ism, culminating in significant curtailments of clerical power under Reza Shah.

Kasravi’s radical critique of Shi’ism was part of a broader movement that, particularly during the 1920s and 1930s, proposed a return to the “pure” Islam of the Qur’an and the Prophet. This movement’s most prominent voice was Shari’at Sangelaji, who, like Kasravi, appealed to reason in purging Shi’ism of “superstitions” and unverifiable sayings attributed to Shi’i Imams (ahadith). In a more cautious manner, Sangelaji also proposed a reform of Shi’i jurisprudence (fiqh), which, he argued, like its Sunni counterpart, was constructed largely on dubious ahadith. Steering clear of politics and social issues, reformers like Sangelaji were generally in line with the modernization projects of the Reza Shah era, including the state’s control of the clerical establishment.⁷⁴ Kasravi and his associates, like the author of Millennial Secrets, radicalized this secularizing tendency, openly challenging and effectively rejecting Shi’ism, calling clerical authority socially parasitic, politically reactionary and intellectually nonsensical.

Millennial Secrets began by addressing “the leaders of religion,” i.e. Shi’i clerics, asserting bluntly: “Ninety-five percent of what you call religion is bewilderment.” The author then invited Iran’s clerics to a public debate, challenging them to respond to about a dozen questions/objections regarding fundamental Shi’i beliefs and practices. These included the very principle of Shi’i Imamate, i.e. belief in the divinely ordained primacy of Ali and his line as successors to the Prophet; the absolutely binding authority of Shi’i clerics over their followers; the clerical establishment’s tolerance of “illegitimate” political rulers; whether Shi’i clerics could rule the people directly; whether society could legislate independent of the shar’ia; and finally the reasons for Iranians turning away from Shi’ism.⁷⁵ Secrets Exposed thus had challenged the foundational beliefs of Shi’ism, as well as the social power and intellectual authority of its clerical guardians. Picking up the gauntlet, Khomeini took it upon himself to not only respond but to demolish the premises of each and every one of these objections. His self-assured rhetorical offensive amounted to traditional Shi’ism declaring defiance of the intellectual challenges posed by modernity.

Khomeini began by promising that, like his adversaries, he would argue strictly according to reason (kherad), which he urged readers to rely upon as their criteria for judgment between the two sides.⁷⁶ He proceeded to cite “the great Muslim philosopher” Ibn Sina (Avicenna), who had said “those who believe something without reason are beyond the pale of human nature.” Without ever mentioning Kasravi or Hakamizadeh by name, he thus started from presumed common grounds they shared with believing Muslims:

However, Khomeini’s promise to debate wholly within the bounds of reason quickly runs into obstacles, which he bypasses by switching to rhetorical assertions and appeals to Shi’i authority. He concedes, for example, that the foundational Shi’i belief in the Imamate needs to be proven by reason, as it is established neither by the Qur’an nor by the Prophet’s sayings. Admittedly too, the great majority of Muslims, who are Sunni, do not share the Shi’i belief in the Imamate. Khomeini’s adherence to mutually acceptable reasoning breaks down, however, when he proceeds to “prove” the principle of Shi’i Imamate by citing “authoritative” sayings (ahadith) of Shi’i Imams.⁷⁸

It soon becomes apparent that Khomeini’s goal, throughout Secrets Exposed, is to uphold the Shi’i clergy’s traditional claims to intellectual authority and social power. He starts by mocking his opponents as “self-described intellectuals” who reject Shi’i clerical authority while “blindly following ignorant and uncivilized Wahhabi camel-herders.” At the same time, he accuses the same opponents of being inspired by European ideas. Such intellectuals, he says, claim Muslim clerics, have caused Iran to fall behind Europe, whereas in fact “Europe is closer to savagery than civilization.”⁷⁹ Interestingly, Khomeini’s passing critical references to Europe are mainly political, rather than moral and philosophical, as was the case Kasravi. For example, instead of critiquing Western atheism and “materialism,” he denounces Europeans for using Reza Shah to weaken the clergy in order to better control Iran. In sum, Secrets Exposed is much more concerned with refuting Iran’s anti-clerical intellectuals than critiquing Europe. Conceding a main claim of his opponents, Khomeini admits Iranians have become “infirm” in religion and following the clergy. But he blames this on Reza Shah’s policies, implying religious infirmity has been politically imposed on Iranians.⁸⁰ Occasionally, Khomeini assumes a rationalist posture, making passing references to different religions and philosophical systems. He briefly mentions, for instance, the beliefs of ancient natural philosophers, Zoroastrians, Manichaeans, pre-Islamic Arabs and Christians, asserting that Islam and the Qur’an reject all of these as unbelief (shirk).⁸¹ Calling Christians, or even Zoroastrians, “unbelievers” is contrary to traditional Islamic belief, as well as to views Khomeini himself would express later in life. The anti-Zoroastrianism of Secrets Exposed seems to be another defensive reaction to the growing cult of pre-Islamic Iran, and its concomitant elevation of Zoroastrians, under Reza Shah.⁸²

Curiously, while branding Christians as unbelievers, Khomeini considered Socrates and Plato to be fellow believers in “divine wisdom” (hekmat-e elahi), a doctrine he says was incorporated into Shi’ism via Molla Sadra’s teachings in sixteenth-century Iran. He also praises Aristotle, the “First Master,” in comparison to whose logic, he asserts in passing, Descartes’ “rationalist revolution” appears childish.⁸³ The arbitrary dismissal of Descartes remains Khomeini’s only direct reference to modern philosophy, whose progress beyond Molla Sadra he refuses to acknowledge. Secrets Exposed thus remains defiantly self-enclosed within the intellectual ambit of traditional Shi’i juridical thought, although Khomeini’s appreciation of Sadra’s School of Illumination hints at a deviation from the clerical mainstream.⁸⁴

Thus, in the mid-1940s, Khomeini was adamantly unengaged with modern European thought, whether philosophical, social or political. His basic position simply was that Islam, as defined by Shi’i jurisprudence, offered perfect unalterable answers to all the questions humanity ever faces both in this world and in the hereafter. It is important to emphasize that, in contrast to Khomeini’s future mindset, Secrets Exposed is largely unconcerned with subjects such as Europe’s political or cultural domination of Iran or the exploitation of its people and natural resources. For instance, regarding the British control of Iranian oil, a topic of intense national concern in the 1940s, Khomeini merely says that “foreigners handling oil mines must pay the khoms [i.e. a clerical tax].”⁸⁵ In fact, Secrets Exposed has no more than two pages of sustained commentary on Europe. A short section, titled “A Glance at Europe’s Chaotic Life,” is a harsher summary of Kasravi’s criticism, while prescribing Islam and its unalterable laws as the remedy:

Repeating Kazemzadeh’s neo-mystical claims (see Chapter 2), Khomeini argues that contemporary European interest in “spirit science,” magnetism and hypnosis proves the failure of materialism:

During the 1960s and 1970s Khomeini’s topics of interest, as well as his discursive style, would become modernized and hence accessible to wider audiences. Conforming to the Marxist and anti-imperialist nomenclature then prevalent in Iran, Khomeini’s new vocabulary would be filled with terms like colonialism (este’mar), Zionism (sahyunizm) and monarchist despotism (estebdad-e saltanati). He also would pay attention to the social question, deploring the chasm separating the country’s upper and lower classes.⁸⁸ Secrets Exposed, however, is largely devoid of such terminology and themes, displaying instead respect for property and social hierarchy. Khomeini states categorically, for example, that “world civilization is founded on the principle of property.” Moreover, while expressing sympathy for workers, he is clear that a “factory owner” must be in command of his employees.⁸⁹

Khomeini’s radical departure from traditional Shi’i views, on politics and government, was his early 1970s declaration of monarchy’s incompatibility with Islam. This clearly was not his view in Secrets Exposed, a work often considered in accord with constitutional monarchy. More accurately, Secrets Exposed accepts constitutional government only if all legislation is vetted by clerical authority. As discussed in Chapter 2, this is the doctrine of Islamic Constitutionalism (mashrute-ye mashru’e), to which Khomeini remains as committed in Secrets Exposed as he would be in his more innovative 1971 Islamic Government. Lingering confusion on the evolution of Khomeini’s political thought is related in part to an Orientalist understanding of Shi’ism, which echoes in recent scholarly literature on clerical attitudes toward secular political power. Briefly, in traditional Shi’ism, divine sovereignty is invested in the Prophet and Shi’i Imams, delegated, in their absence, to qualified Shi’i jurists (mujtahids). Starting from this premise, scholars like Ann Lambton, Hamed Algar and Said Amir Arjomand have concluded that in principle Shi’ism considers all secular authority, including kingship or sultanate, to be illegitimate. This conclusion, however, is at odds with the Shi’i clerical establishment’s systematic historical accommodation to caliphs, sultans and shahs. Another line of recent scholarship, however, explains that the “illegitimacy” of secular government in Shi’i doctrine is not absolute, but relative and nuanced. In other words, and rather similar to classical Sunni political theory, traditional Shi’ism accepts secular government, i.e. kingship (sultanate), as both necessary and beneficial, granting it legitimacy to the extent it accords with precepts established by Shi’i jurists.⁹⁰ A close reading of Secrets Exposed shows its compatibility with this latter position. According to Khomeini:

While this passage admits that, historically, Shi’i jurists have not opposed the principle of monarchy, Khomeini’s careful insertion of the qualifier “so far,” into the last sentence, anticipates the possibility of a future change in this position. Thus, according to “young” Khomeini, the qualified acceptance of monarchy in Shi’ism is a matter of historical contingency, not a doctrinal principle. Given such distinction, Khomeini’s 1971 rejection of monarchy would appear a radical “ideological revolution” in Shi’ism. In other words, in 1971 Khomeini proposed an important change in the functional form of government, without changing his basic view on the normative content of government, the latter always requiring Shi’i juridical sanction.⁹² This is why Secrets Exposed could argue that “except for deceptive terminology, there is no essential difference between constitutionalism and despotism, or democracy and dictatorship.”⁹³ His brief discussion, in Secrets Exposed, of the doctrine of the Guardianship of the Jurist elucidates this point further:

This passage contains the kernel of Khomeini’s theory of government, claiming ultimate juridical “guardianship” of its normative content, a traditional Shi’i demand which he upheld throughout his life. But Khomeini did propose two important innovations during the 1970s: The first was his categorical rejection of monarchy (see Chapter 6) and the second was his proposal that Shi’i jurists expand their “guardianship,” beyond a supervisory capacity, to rule directly in an Islamic Republic. A product of historical contingency, the second proposal was articulated only after the monarchy was overthrown in the 1978–1979 Revolution.

Last but not least, Secrets Exposed is emphatic on the necessity of systematic state violence to keep society in line with juridical norms. The full and vigorous application of shari’a punishments, Khomeini argues, is not only religiously mandated, but also beneficial to society in pragmatic ways.⁹⁵ Thus, Secrets Exposed repeatedly exhorts believers to punish transgressors like the author of Millennial Secrets. It urges Muslims to use “an iron fist and cleanse the world of the seed of these vile and ignoble individuals,” telling them that “Islamic Law will shed your blood.”⁹⁶ Without being formal fatvas of execution, such exhortations effectively amount to the same thing. Thus, the violent temper and language of Secrets Exposed is another feature of Khomeini’s discourse that remains constant from the 1940s to the 1970s, something de-emphasized in the immediate pre-revolutionary years, only to be unleashed with full force under the Islamic Republic.

Conquest of Europe via Translation: A Liberal Agenda?

In addition to Khomeini’s and Kasravi’s decidedly illiberal voices, Iran’s mid-century debate on encountering Europe included a “liberal” voice, best articulated in a small book titled The Conquest of European Civilization (1948).⁹⁷ Strictly speaking, during the first half of the twentieth century, Iranian liberalism, whether in laissez-faire and natural rights or in utilitarian welfare state varieties, was practically non-existent. Iran of course was not exceptional, since not only the Middle East and Asia, but most of Europe remained under illiberal regimes until after World War II.⁹⁸ Nor was liberal government, based on the parliamentary representation of propertied white male citizens, a defining characteristic of “Western” nation-states. That kind of government had slowly appeared only at the metropolitan centers of the British, Dutch, French and American empires, whose global political rule was blatantly, and often violently, illiberal. As comparative historian of empires, Choi Chatterjee, has observed:

In the Iranian case, the legal frame and political culture of a would-be liberal government were rudimentarily introduced during the Constitutional Revolution. However, as we saw in Chapters 2 and 3, this potential, for the gradual institutionalization of liberal government, was subverted by the 1920s intellectual and political turn to authoritarian nationalism and nation-state building. Liberal ideology could not flourish in an environment lacking a free press, political parties, meaningful electoral politics and citizens’ rights. As noted in Chapter 2, demanding such liberal institutions was introduced in Iran by social democrats and largely abandoned by nationalists, without a liberal party of any import defending them. Nor did intellectual statesmen, like Hassan Taqizadeh, Mohammad-Ali Forughi, Ali-Asghar Hekmat, Isa Sadiq or Ali-Akbar Siasi, leave behind a record of ideas or practices that might properly be called liberal. A recent political and historiographic tendency seeks to rehabilitate these men as “closet” liberals who were hampered by the illiberal constraints of “traditional” Iranian politics and culture. A pioneer of this apologetic genre calls Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, the last Shah’s longest serving and notoriously subservient prime minister, “a liberal at heart who served an illiberal master.” Such claims typically cobble together scattered utterances and pieces of writing, trying to attribute liberal “intentions” to men, like Hoveyda, Taqizadeh or Forughi, who willingly served monarchs ruling in blatant violation of Iran’s constitution.¹⁰⁰ “The hope and goal of Forughi,” according to a similar claim, “was to create suitable conditions for the implementation of modern and liberal principles in Iran, by concentrating his efforts in state reforms from above.” The author then cites Forughi’s famous The Path of Philosophy in Europe (1938–1941) as evidence of his “defense of liberal values.”¹⁰¹ The first compendium of modern European thought in Persian, this work in fact reveals Forughi’s dated conservatism, shown in his preference of Montesquieu as master political philosopher.¹⁰² Forughi’s conservatism is so thorough that he avoids discussing eighteenth-century materialist philosophes, calling them atheists whose ideas “need not occupy our time.” Similarly, his coverage of the nineteenth century eliminates thinkers like Marx, referring to socialists as “individuals whose ideas were strange and therefore had no success”¹⁰³ (on Forughi, see also Chapter 5).

Linked to constitutionalism, as it properly should be, Iran’s liberal nationalist tradition found institutional expression only in the early 1950s, in a number of small political parties joining Premier Mohammad Mosaddeq’s National Front coalition. Apart from their support of constitutional government and oil nationalization, none of these liberal parties had a popular agenda or following. (A possible exception perhaps being the Iran Party, whose moderately socialist agenda was a pale reflection of the communist Tudeh Party’s systematic program of social reform. See Chapter 5.) Thus, if a 1940s text like The Conquest of European Civilization was a liberal manifesto, it certainly had appeared in an inhospitable political and ideological context. The book’s author, Fakhreddin Shadman (1907–1967), could boast of an academic resume more impressive than any contemporary intellectual statesman. Born into an affluent clerical family, he had studied jurisprudence and law in Tehran, prior to completing a doctorate in law at the Sorbonne, and another in political science at London University. After a two-year post-doctorate at Harvard, Shadman returned to Iran, where The Conquest of European Civilization was published in 1948. The book’s considerable merit was acknowledged by contemporaries including Jalal Al-Ahmad whose West-struck-ness admitted Shaman’s “precedence” in addressing the problem of cultural confrontation with Europe (see Chapter 5). Shadman’s intellectual stature, however, was tarnished due to his close association with the country’s conservative political establishment. During his years of sojourn and education abroad, Shadman had worked for the Iranian government commission that negotiated a highly unfavorable agreement with the Anglo-Iranian oil company (see Chapter 3). Later, he held ministerial posts in several cabinets, including the one that was installed in 1953 following Mosaddeq’s overthrow by an Anglo-American coup.¹⁰⁴

Its author’s political entanglements notwithstanding, The Conquest of Western Civilization defined Iran’s encounter with Europe as an existential culture war.¹⁰⁵ Caught in a global battleground of cultures/civilizations, he argued, Iran faced only two options: the dissolution of its distinct cultural existence, or its regeneration via adopting the most vital elements of an incomparably more powerful European civilization. Shadman’s model followed the challenge/response paradigm of civilizational encounters, formulated by European thinkers like Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee. “The star of the West,” he lamented, “rose and fell while we [Iranians] were oblivious.” But he also echoed Kazemzadeh’s and Kasravi’s verdicts on Europe civilization being “sick and in deep trouble.”¹⁰⁶ Oddly for an academically trained scholar, Shadman neither cited his European sources, nor acknowledged obvious Iranian predecessors like Kasravi.¹⁰⁷ His claim to originality proved successful insofar as intellectual historians have considered Shadman, rather than Kasravi, as “the harbinger of the discourse of gharbzadegi [West-struck-ness].”¹⁰⁸

Using a phraseology Al-Ahmad would reiterate in the opening of West-struckness, Shadman’s text begins by declaring: “Today, Iranians face a calamity whose like they have never seen, a calamity that would destroy them root and branch, wiping off their name from the book of history.”¹⁰⁹ The named “calamity” is Iran’s encounter with modern Europe, contextualized by Shadman within a familiar narrative arch of Iranian history, with an additional twist from Toynbee’s philosophy of history:

Significantly, Shadman considers Iran’s real enemy to be not Europeans but Iranians who want to reshape their country according to shallow and false conceptions of Europe. The term he coins for this new type of Iranian is fokoli, derived from the French faux-col, i.e. necktie or bowtie, referring to Iranians whose superficial claims to modernity hinge on dress and appearance. In choosing this term, Shadman was probably pandering to Muslim sensibility, since wearing ties could be considered Christian or un-Islamic. The fokoli’s major fault, however, was his double immersion in cultural superficiality: incapable of truly becoming European, he also forgot how to be Iranian:

In several important ways, Shadman’s fokoli is the obvious precursor of Al-Ahmad’s more famous “West-struck man” (adam-e gharb-zadeh) (see Chapter 5). Both are lost and bewildered beings, aliened simultaneously from Iranian and European cultures, thus living a doubly inauthentic life. Moreover, fokoli, like Al-Ahmad’s “West-struck man,” is gender-confused or “effeminate,” evident, for instance, in his aspiration to superiority by taking a European spouse. Such an Iranian, says Shadman, “has taken a husband instead of a wife, allowing his own language, politics and children’s upbringing to follow the whims of a [European] spouse.”¹¹² (We saw above that marrying a non-Iranian was among the litany of charges Kasravi had leveled against Taqizadeh.) Most importantly, Shadman, like both Al-Ahmad and Kasravi, considers such Iranians to be serving the foreign “conquest” of Iran:

In an ironic instance of source attribution, Shadman credits Europeans with the fokoli’s discovery:

Admittedly, then, Shadman did not invent the fokoli prototype, whose cruder versions exist in early twentieth-century Iran’s avant-garde literary and artistic experiments. One of the most famous of the latter was a satirical play called Ja’far Khan Returns from Europe, the hero of whose title clumsily mimics French manners, having lost his Iranian character and the ability to speak Persian, after a short stay in Paris. As seen in Chapter 1, the first sketches of this personality type, dubbed alafranga, had appeared in nineteenth-century modernist Ottoman literature. Referring to pseudo-modernized Turks, recognizable by their superficial imitation of European ways, alafranga became a widely known label through the popular novels of Ahmet Midhat (1844–1912), most famously Felatun Bey and Rakim Efendi (1875). The foil to alafranga was the alaturka, whose personality showed a “balanced” combination of European and Ottoman cultures.¹¹⁵ As Kasravi and Shadman would argue a generation later, Midhat believed “what we call European civilization has bad sides as well as good sides.” The Ottomans, he proposed, had to adopt the good side of European civilization, consisting of “modern sciences and industries, as the means of economic and utilitarian pursuits,” while preserving their own character, defined by religion and language.¹¹⁶

Even closer to Shadman’s fokoli were the alafranga types created by another prolific Turkish writer, Hosein Rahmi (1864–1944). Rahmi’s early twentieth-century novels portrayed a modernizing Turkish society caught up in moral bewilderment and value disorientation. His alafranga characters “did the most ridiculous things imaginable through thinking that they were in a Europeanized Turkish society which did not really exist.” But Rahmi went beyond Midhat to show that alaturka attempts at balancing modernity and tradition were equally futile and doomed.¹¹⁷ This particular Ottoman-Turkish line of criticizing the encounter with Europe is reproduced by Shadman, who probably was not aware of its original source. But Ottoman and Turkish sources had most likely influenced Kasravi’s critique of “Europeanism,” the uncredited Iranian predecessor of Shadman’s critical remarks.

Another lacunae in The Conquest of European Civilization is the notion of modernity (tajaddod), a subject already debated by at least one generation of Iranian intellectuals. As in Kasravi’s case, Shadman’s conceptual synonym for modernity is “European civilization,” something he understood much better than Kasravi did. The Conquest of European Civilization thus cautions Iranians against simplistic judgments of an enormously powerful adversary, defined by its conflicted and paradoxical nature:

Systematically avoiding the language of colonialism and imperialism, he nevertheless concedes Europe’s fundamentally predatory posture toward the rest of the world, including Iran:

Yet Shadman believed Europeans were neither morally superior nor inferior to others. What made them powerful, and thus worthy of emulation, was their incomparable progress in science and knowledge:

According to Shadman, intellectuals like Mohammad-Ali Forughi were exceptional role models showing Iranians how to master both Iranian and European cultures:

Shadman’s solution to the problem of encounter with Europe, therefore, was a cultural crusade, led by an intellectual elite “armed” with a deep knowledge of Europe, a cultural “weapon” he called “Occidentalism” (farangshenasi). The obverse of Orientalism, this was to be an ever-expanding project of Persian-language knowledge production, focused on understanding European civilization. Quite literally, therefore, Shadman advocated a massive and systematic national translation project as the best method of appropriating European modernity. In a revealing analogy, he likened books, in various European languages, to multitudes of soldiers fighting Europe’s global war of cultural dominance. Consequently, he argued, translating each of these books into Persian enabled Iran to capture, and enlist in its own service, yet another of Europe’s endless millions of cultural soldiers.¹²²

The idea of a selective state-sponsored translation project, as an intellectual shortcut to modernity, was not entirely new. Its history went back to the nineteenth century, while a version of it was proposed by Fatemeh Sayyah during the 1930s. Responding to Kasravi’s categorical rejection of fiction, as yet another morally harmful manifestation of “Europeanism,” Sayyah had argued:

Going beyond Sayyah’s more modest proposals, The Conquest of European Civilization elevated the question of translation to the level of a global clash of civilizations, where European modernity threatened to devour the rest of the world’s cultures. This was itself a European idea, traceable to Toynbee and Spengler, and further back to Herder¹²⁴ (see Chapter 2). To his credit, Shadman was attentive to internal tensions and multiplicity within both European and Iranian civilizational constructs. He was cognizant too of history’s weight in shaping civilization and culture, although his nationalism at times tilted toward historical essentialism. Still on the positive side, his belief in the continuity of Iranian history assigned equal worth to its pre- and post-Islamic history. Moreover, despite being an advocate of Persian as national language, he was not a linguistic purist, since he criticized intellectuals, even those like his idol Mohammad-Ali Forughi, who claimed “the problem of Persian language is its being mixed with Arabic.”¹²⁵

Conclusion: Modernity, Lost in Translation?

Shadman’s call for a deeper appreciation and more balanced judgment of Europe was a corrective to Kasravi’s hasty prognosis and extreme remedies. But the weakness of his solution was its reduction of everything to a cultural project whereby Iran’s Persian-language high culture would seamlessly assimilate modern European culture via a massive translation project. Thus, while unfairly cursory, Al-Ahmad’s comments on The Conquest of European Civilization were not entirely off the mark. Banishing Shadman to a footnote in West-struckness, Al-Ahamd credits him for searching “prior to these writings, for a remedy to the acute ailment of ‘fokoli-mannerism’ (fokoli-maabi), proposing the serious teaching of Persian and the translation of Western philosophical, scientific and literary works.” He then concludes:

The efficacy of his own “remedy,” in Gharbazdegi, notwithstanding, Al-Ahmad was correct that “conquering” modernity and reversing European domination required much more than a national translation movement.¹²⁷ However, as we shall see in the following chapters, something similar to Shadman’s notion of a great translation project was indeed undertaken from the 1940s to the 1970s. But, contrary to what Shadman probably had hoped for, the result was the intellectual hegemony of socialist and Marxist ideology, blended with politicized Islamic modernism and Kasravi-style rejection of “Western” or European norms.