Introduction
This article examines how Iranian intellectuals engaged with modern Western science and technology across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, situating these engagements within the pressures of modernization under European imperial domination. As scholarship has shown, between the Treaty of Turkmenchay (1828) and the abolition of capitulations (1928), Iran held a semi-colonial position: formally sovereign yet bound by unequal treaties and economic dependence.Footnote 1 This liminal status shaped intellectual debates. Formal sovereignty made it possible for Iranian reformists to cast European modernity as a universal model, even as unequal power made Europe’s colonial dominance impossible to ignore. Past scholarship has often analyzed this dilemma through a binary lens. One perspective argues that intellectuals pragmatically adopted Western technologies as a necessary tool while striving to maintain cultural authenticity.Footnote 2 In contrast, another view suggests that twentieth-century intellectuals rejected Western technology as a colonial tool, adopting a technophobic stance.Footnote 3 While this binary captures the existing tension, it is reductive, overlooking both historical change and the complexities within individual critics’ thought.
I argue that intellectuals neither rejected Western technology as such nor accepted it pragmatically. Instead, they approached it through a process of translation: a dynamic framework that continually adapted to shifting political anxieties and historical conditions. By translation, I mean not only linguistic transfer but a broader practice of adoption, reworking, and refusal. Tracing debates from early nineteenth-century Qajar reform projects through the revolutionary horizon of the 1970s, I show how translation becomes the primary medium through which epistemic authority is negotiated as historical conditions change. Rather than a linear march of progress, these modes function as what David Scott terms “problem-spaces”: sites of intervention where political and ideological stakes determine which questions can be asked and which answers count as valid.Footnote 4 These spaces frequently overlap, resurfacing and reconfiguring as political horizons shift. I work across this broad historical framework because a long arc reveals translation as the enduring mechanism for navigating semi-colonial sovereignty—a practice repeatedly repurposed as the epistemic authority of Western science and technology is reframed—from reform to nation-building to global militarization, and finally a terrain of revolutionary contestation. Only this long arc makes visible translation’s recursive temporality under semi-colonial constraint, showing how later thinkers repeatedly rework earlier anxieties rather than escaping them.
Framing these engagements as translation also places the Iranian case in conversation with a central problem in postcolonial studies: what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls the “problem of translation.”Footnote 5 For Chakrabarty, translation becomes a problem when non-Western histories must be articulated through the universalist categories of European modernity. This essay extends that insight to the related problem of translating Western modernity into Iran under unequal conditions. Both directions—translating non-Western histories into European categories and translating European modernity into Iran—register asymmetries of power, but in Iran they were mediated by semi-colonial sovereignty without formal colonization. As Afsaneh Najmabadi has argued, Iran’s formal independence meant its modernity was not articulated along a direct anti-colonial axis.Footnote 6 Building on this insight, I argue that Iran’s semi-colonial condition generated a triangular structure of pressures—idealization, anxiety about imitation, and repeated efforts to reconfigure translation—that structured intellectual engagements with modernity. In the nineteenth century, the lack of direct colonization enabled the idealization of Europe as Iran’s future. By the early twentieth century, this gave way to fears of imitation. Later, those anxieties fueled efforts to disentangle knowledge from colonial and militarist histories and to craft new forms of authorship attuned to local historical concerns. These three pressures—idealization, fear of imitation under asymmetry, and the drive to reconfigure translation—constituted an enduring structural problem that intellectuals continually negotiated. Translation was thus not only the conceptual framework of this study but also the unavoidable historical condition of engagement with modernity under semi-colonialism.
These dynamics come into sharper focus when the Iranian case is read alongside Frantz Fanon’s stages of cultural negotiation, which I use as a comparative lens rather than a template. The periodization I develop is generated from Iranian debates, but Fanon offers a vocabulary that helps name shifts already visible in the sources and clarifies how Iran’s semi-colonial condition reshapes their sequence and emphasis. In “On National Culture” in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Fanon sketches three recurring moments in the intellectual’s decolonizing trajectory: an initial fascination with and emulation of the colonizer’s culture; a second phase of rejection and efforts to recover precolonial traditions; and a “combat” phase in which cultural forms are reworked in the service of political rupture.Footnote 7 I draw on Fanon for this account of intellectual negotiation—not for a full theory of decolonization as political struggle, which lies beyond this essay’s scale. Crucially, these moments are not linear: they often overlap and reverse. As Fanon stresses—and as his discussions of the veil and the radio in A Dying Colonialism underscore—decolonization zigzags, as a practice can signify submission in one moment and resistance in the next.Footnote 8 Translation, I suggest, is one way to track this zigzagging historically.
Building on this framework, I treat translation as a historically situated practice embedded in unequal global relations of power. Drawing on Richard L. W. Clarke’s analogical reading of George Steiner, I align Steiner’s triad—word-for-word, sense-for-sense, and synthesis—with Fanon’s phases to trace historically shifting modes of translation in Iran.Footnote 9 The first mode, imitation, resembles literalist translation, where the translator reproduces the colonizer’s culture word-for-word; the second corresponds to sense-for-sense translation, where greater autonomy emerges; and the third parallels Steiner’s synthesis, a transformative mode in which source and target enter into reciprocal interanimation.Footnote 10 Importantly, I employ Steiner only as an organizing analogy for shifts in translational stance, rather than as a claim of historical influence or conscious adherence by Iranian intellectuals. This method historicizes Fanon’s conceptual grammar, showing how translation makes visible these phases’ recursive interactions, marked by persistent anxieties and contradictions. It also resonates with Said’s concept of contrapuntal reading, which treats “intertwined and overlapping histories” as sites of tension rather than harmonious polyphony.Footnote 11 Viewed contrapuntally, Fanon’s phases of emulation, rejection, and combat appear as simultaneous and dissonant voices that surface and resurface across the four modes I track.
I identify four historically grounded modes of translation through which Iranian intellectuals engaged Western science and technology. In the nineteenth century, facing European militarism, epistemic translation repurposed Western knowledge for reform debates. In the early twentieth century, during the era of nation-state formation, critiques of imitation targeted the performative translator. By the 1940s, shaped by interwar debates and the unfolding of World War II, the engagement was reconfigured as emancipatory translation, seeking to detach Western knowledge from colonial and militarist entanglements and redirect it to alternative ends. In the 1970s, amid revolutionary momentum, it shifted toward iterative remembrance, where translation becomes authorship by reactivating prior inheritances.
Because translation repeatedly becomes an object of policing in these debates, I theorize performativity in relation to translation in two registers: it names both an embodied social figure and a regulatory accusation. In the first sense, the performative translator enacts a persona through staged linguistic hybridity and comportment, making the usually hidden labor of translation conspicuously visible—and therefore disruptive. In the second sense, the term functions as an epistemic gatekeeping device: by dismissing certain mediations as merely performative or imitative, dominant intellectuals recast them as display rather than method, policing the boundaries of legitimate knowledge. Translation thus becomes a contested arena in which the terms of engaging Western modernity are negotiated. Ultimately, this offers a theory of decolonization based not on severing ties but on continuous metabolization. Counterintuitively, the much-maligned performative translator, or fokoli, becomes a site of insurgent authorship.
The Birth of Epistemic Translation in Qajar Iran
Iran’s path to modernization was inextricably linked to its encounter with European militarism. The Russo-Persian War of 1804–1813, with its territorial losses, exposed Iran’s vulnerability to European power.Footnote 12 As Abbas Amanat notes, early nineteenth-century defeats shifted Qajar Iran’s self-perception from imperial center to vulnerable nation, prompting selective adoption of European material and intellectual cultures.Footnote 13 This defeat underscored the need for reform and prompted Qajar leaders to link military strength with science and technology as part of a broader modernization strategy.Footnote 14 Qajar elites attributed Europe’s military superiority to its cultivation of reason and scientific advancement, a view echoed by Crown Prince Abbas Mirza in his reported remark to Napoleon’s ambassador: “You are expert in military system, conquest of nations and utilizing the force of reason. …”Footnote 15 In 1811, Abbas Mirza sent the first group of students to Britain to study military sciences, engineering, and European languages, marking the beginning of Iran’s engagement with Western scientific and military knowledge.Footnote 16 Although the initiative was primarily military and technological, participating intellectuals broadened it to include aspirations for political reform.
Mirza Saleh Shirazi, in a subsequent cohort (1815), explained to Abbas Mirza that his aim was to acquire knowledge of European languages and the humanities.Footnote 17 He authored a safarnāmeh (travelogue) that chronicled his observations of British society and governance, interwoven with historical commentaries drawn from his readings and experiences.Footnote 18 His travelogues circulated among reformist elites and helped set the terms of later political debate. In his travelogue, he described Britain’s transformation from velāyat-e jahālat (a land of ignorance) to velāyat-e āzādī (a land of freedom), attributing this shift to democratic institutions.Footnote 19 His narrative framed Europe’s progress as a deliberate political and social reform, rejecting the notion that modernity was predetermined by cultural destiny. By introducing his readers to the concept of constitutional government, Shirazi expanded the Persian political lexicon and created new avenues for reimagining governance.Footnote 20 While state officials prioritized technology to reinforce state power, Shirazi recast modernization as a project of political renewal and institutional transformation.
This period aligns with Fanon’s first phase of intellectual engagement—a fascination with and aspiration to emulate the colonizer’s institutions.Footnote 21 At first glance, Shirazi’s project resembled simple imitation, yet his engagement was more complex. It unfolded through what I term epistemic translation: a historically specific practice that involved not merely linguistic transfer—such as coining new terms—but the repurposing of conceptual frameworks, such as British models of governance and society, for Iranian audiences.Footnote 22 This mode of translation helped generate new epistemes through which Iran’s social order could be reimagined, showing that even within an intellectual horizon that treated Western modernity as universal, translation already functioned as a dynamic, unsettling force.
Epistemic translation, in this initial phase, unsettled established frameworks while opening new spaces for political thought. As Milad Odabaei notes, the transfer of Enlightenment concepts did not just add new ideas; it disrupted existing structures, producing what he calls “epistemic confusion”—an intrinsic, productive feature of modernity.Footnote 23 Translation thus became a site of disruption where concepts like parliamentary democracy entered Persian as critical mirrors for reformist critique, occupying a liminal space of residual foreignness that was neither fully assimilated nor entirely alien. The key methods by which this broader epistemic translation was enacted were twofold: the coinage of new neologisms and what Afsaneh Najmabadi calls grafting—an inventive process that layered new meanings onto existing Persian words.Footnote 24 While grafting is the linguistic re-signification of existing terms, epistemic translation describes the overarching epistemological shift: how these linguistic acts collectively destabilized existing knowledge systems to construct a modern political lexicon.
Shirazi’s translation efforts involved both re-signifying existing Persian terms (such as āzādī for political freedom) and coining new neologisms (like parliament). These linguistic innovations were integrated into Iran’s political discourse, occupying a liminal space that was both domestic and foreign. As Lydia H. Liu explains, “neologism or neologistic construction is an excellent trope for change, because it has been invented simultaneously to represent and to replace foreign words.”Footnote 25 Neologisms remain inherently dual, never fully settled, and this instability is central to what Liu terms “neologistic imagination”—an intermediate space where translation generates conceptual innovation.Footnote 26 Shirazi’s project thus shows how translation was not merely a linguistic act but an epistemological one, opening the possibility of reimagining modernity within the Iranian context. However, the idealization of Europe as a model of progress in this phase also reinforced epistemic hierarchies. A contrapuntal reading shows that celebrating British institutions enabled reformist aspirations while often overlooking the colonial ventures that underwrote that prosperity, reproducing a Eurocentric ranking of cultures.Footnote 27 In this first phase, the intellectual’s task as translator largely occurred within an order that treated Western modernity as normative and unexamined. As the next section explores, early twentieth-century intellectuals turned their attention to the figure of the translator, critiquing this idealization and its imitation by distinguishing between the initial epistemic mode and a feared performative mode of translation.
The Performative Translator on Trial: Eurocentrism, Science, and National Anxiety in Early Twentieth-Century Iran
The nineteenth-century pursuit of scientific advancement laid crucial foundations for the Constitutional Revolution (1905–1911). By the early twentieth century, as the nation-state took shape, epistemic translation continued but increasingly came under regulation by emergent categories of national culture and language. In Fanon’s terms, intellectuals moved from imitation toward cultivating national consciousness.Footnote 28 In Iran, this intellectual shift immediately prompted fierce critiques of imitation. This dilemma—how to modernize without losing cultural and linguistic integrity—crystallized in the figure of the fokoli (from the French faux col, detachable collar), a Europhile dandy, who epitomized the perceived perils of a superficial modernization that produced only distorted knowledge. The fokoli became a focal point of intellectual critique in early twentieth-century Iran. According to Sivan Balslev, critics mobilized the fokoli to mark class boundaries, casting him as an arriviste who aped elite manners to climb socially without corresponding intellectual depth.Footnote 29 She further shows that he embodied anxieties about gender and national continuity: depicted as abstaining from marriage and pursuing women in public, he was said to endanger both women’s presence in those spaces and the family institutions on which the nation depended.Footnote 30 Cast as a “fake man”—all surface and no scientific mastery—the fokoli became the antitype to reformist projects. I read these critiques as symptoms of a deeper epistemic anxiety about method, authority, and truth: would translation deliver method or merely myth?
The fokoli is typically portrayed as speaking a fractured Persian sprinkled with European words—his sentences sounding oddly translated from French, with displaced order and imported turns of phrase. Infatuated with Europe yet lacking scientific knowledge, he reduces his engagement with Western modernity to fashion, gender transgression, and estrangement from Iranian culture. Although he often appears through failed attempts to translate European sources, he has rarely been theorized as a translator. I read the fokoli instead as a performative translator: one whose practices turn borrowed language, dress, and comportment into social techniques for claiming European affiliation and epistemic authority, often at the expense of semantic precision. Fanon’s account of language under colonial conditions is useful here not as a direct analogue but for naming a mechanism: where Europe is taken as the measure of civilization, European languages can function as public credentials—signs of education and rank—so that speaking them is experienced as proximity to European prestige.Footnote 31 In early twentieth-century Iran, however, French did not operate as a shared standard to be mastered. Rather, the fokoli mobilized French through two translational moves: citation—loanwords deliberately left untranslated—and calque, in which idioms and syntactic patterns are carried over into Persian. By combining citation and calque, he produces a hybrid register that signals European affiliation and claims distinction, even as it strains ordinary intelligibility. In this register, imitation is not a failed attempt at accuracy but a deliberate social technique. Oriented toward self-elevation rather than knowledge transfer, it is represented as yielding mistranslation—turning foreign concepts into myths and exaggerations that obscure more than they clarify. The performance is linguistic and embodied at once: accent and cadence, gesture, and dress operate as cues of Europeanization and as markers of estrangement from Iranian social life. This dynamic resonates with J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory, in which language does not merely describe but does things socially.Footnote 32 In short, the fokoli dramatizes translation as social performance, making “Europeanness” legible as rank.
Anxieties surrounding the fokoli found vivid expression in Hasan Moqaddam’s 1921 play Jafar Khān az Farang Āmadeh (Jafar Khan Has Returned from Europe).Footnote 33 Jafar returns from France after eight years of study, but instead of serving as a conduit for modern European knowledge, he has become alien to his family, whose world now feels opaque to him. His awkwardly translated speech—fractured Persian laced with French—renders him unintelligible. Fanon sketches a different but structurally related scene: the Antillean “returnee” comes home speaking metropolitan French—new accent, new diction—before an audience fluent in French who can judge him, turning his performance into a public trial in which listeners await the slightest slip that will puncture his claim to distinction and convert it into ridicule.Footnote 34 Moqaddam replays this drama under different conditions—power asymmetries between Iran and Europe but without direct colonial rule—where French is not a shared household code. Jafar’s Frenchness, therefore, cannot be graded for correctness, and the immediate effect is not a failed exam in proper French but a breakdown of kinship communication and cultural intelligibility. When refused permission to keep his dog indoors, he snaps, “I will do a proteste,” and laments, “Alas, when will these people become civilisé?”Footnote 35 The phrases function less to convey content than to do social work, staging Europeanization and estrangement. His sense of time similarly clashes with household rhythms, performed as Eurocentric discipline: when his mother suggests dinner “two or three hours after nightfall,” he objects to the vagueness, concluding in frustration, “I am sure I cannot teach these people précision and ponctualité.”Footnote 36 The French does not merely decorate his complaint; it is a technique of opacity. By leaving such key terms untranslated, Jafar produces a controlled unintelligibility that keeps his family at a semantic distance while casting their temporality as deficient.
The play’s critique is two-sided. Jafar embodies the absurdity of superficial, Eurocentric Westernization, but it also targets the family’s backwardness—most clearly in the uncle’s hostility to modernization at home. Suspicious of electricity and pavement, he treats technical change itself as a sign of danger. Yet the two camps converge in a shared, mythologized view of Western science. The uncle ironically seeds the very myth Jafar then inflates: fearing that “these sneaky Europeans are more wicked than the Devil himself; before long, they may even invent an artificial human,” he prompts Jafar to insist that “they already make artificial noses and ears—they make everything.”Footnote 37 Jafar intensifies the family’s sense of Europe as a mythic elsewhere. While Fanon’s returnee undergoes a trial of assimilation—where distinction is measured by linguistic correctness—Jafar is not judged by the metropolitan standard of his French, as in Fanon’s account of the returnee’s trial; instead, he is held accountable for his capacity to mediate—a role that requires two distinct operations. Jafar fails through a double unintelligibility. First, mediation demands cultural and linguistic intelligibility in the social world he reenters. Jafar’s French-laced Persian and Eurocentric habits function as a technique of opacity, rendering him illegible to his family. Second, mediation requires epistemic utility: the ability to transfer scientific knowledge from the Western context and render it usable within Iran’s. Here, too, Jafar fails; the play exposes his hollow claim to epistemic authority, showing that he offers only spectacle and inflation in place of transmissible scientific method. The play thus critiques the fokoli as a failed mediator whose performance produces “bad translations” that block both kinship continuity and the production of national knowledge.
In seeking to praise Europe, Jafar exposes Eurocentrism’s own dehumanizing logic—tying humanity to punctuality and dismissing his family as uncivilized. Yet by reacting with shock to his family’s utterances, he underscores their adherence to superstitious beliefs. The doubleness of this performance means that Jafar unsettles both sides: he is critiquing the rigidity of superstitious practices, while his parody unmasks the beliefs Eurocentrism is predicated on, and the contradictions of European universalism, which does not allow him to belong and pass even though he has aimed at full assimilation. In this sense, he exemplifies the figure Hamid Naficy describes: the dandy whose excess and parody destabilize not only the culture he imitates but also the one he inhabits.Footnote 38 At the same time, unlike reformists such as Shirazi, who coined neologisms to expand Persian epistemic frameworks, Jafar inserts French words that remain opaque. His translation thus does not aim at communication or intelligibility but at staging a belonging elsewhere, though never fully belonging there either.
The intensity of the critical representations of the fokoli reveals less about the fokoli himself than about the critics’ own anxieties. In the representations crafted by his critics, the fokoli appears before an audience that refuses to accept his performance for two reasons. First, they understood legitimate Europeanization for Iranians to consist in modern rationality and scientific thought, not with transgressing social norms through excessive fashion or a fractured Persian. Second, they did not believe he had genuinely forgotten his Persian or naturally acquired his foreign habits; rather, they charged him with staging them, reading his gestures as derivative mimicry and excess. As a result, his performance failed to produce the desired perlocutionary effect—convincing audiences of genuineness—because performativity succeeds only through reiteration within socially legible conventions.Footnote 39 Put differently, the gap between Jafar’s intended illocution (“I am Europeanized and authoritative”) and its reception (mimicry, fakery) is precisely the site where translation tips into (mis)translation. Policed for its overt theatricality, this embodied translation became a site of national anxiety where cultural boundaries were contested. The vehemence of this critique stemmed from the fact that the fokoli held up a distorted mirror to the critics’ own precarious position as translators mediating between powerful European sources and an Iranian target. The fokoli embodied a threefold anxiety about what could “go wrong” in the process of translation. First, he chose the wrong materials from Western modernity for translation, prioritizing, for instance, Western fashion over substantive science. Second, when he did engage with science, his method was flawed, producing distorted myths rather than rigorous knowledge. Finally, his fractured, hybrid speech raised the specter that undisciplined translation could destabilize the Persian language itself. Policing the fokoli was thus a way for the intellectual elite to police the very practice of translation—defining what to translate, how to translate it, and how to protect the integrity of the national language and culture in the process. In this sense, constant critique consolidated the social category of the “performative translator”—a figure who mediated knowledge between Iran and Europe, often in distorted forms.
At a deeper level, the fokoli’s performativity threatened the very foundations of the nationalist project. It unsettled two core illusions: first, by making the hidden labor of translation visible, and second, by shattering the ideal of a unified, homolingual community. As Naoki Sakai has argued, translation is always performative: the translator “must speak in a forked tongue,” continually re-staging and re-enacting a prior script in a new setting.Footnote 40 Yet national projects depend on concealing this performativity to sustain the fiction of a seamless, self-contained community. By putting the staged, fractured, and excessive nature of translation on display, the fokoli exposed the fragmentation at the heart of modernization, revealing it as an ongoing negotiation with external others rather than a finished and fully integrated project. At this time, translation itself had become a battleground for constructing Iran as a homolingual nation. Sakai defines homolingualism as the assumption that communication within a community always ensures comprehension—even across languages, differences are smoothed over, so understanding seems guaranteed.Footnote 41 Iranian nationalist discourse reflected this logic: translations had to appear fully intelligible to the nation. The fokoli disrupted this ideal through his hybrid Persian, marked by linguistic blending and deliberate incomprehensibility. In doing so, he challenged the very notion of a homolingual nation. His fractured speech revealed modernization not as seamless incorporation into national life but as a fragile, unstable process shaped by linguistic and epistemic tensions. His performance thus became an inadvertent political act: by refusing a smooth translation, he laid bare the anxieties of a nation striving to forge a seamless modernity, and his production of distorted knowledge rather than rigorous science heightened fears that translation itself could become a site of risk and betrayal.
Taken together, these debates mark the emergence of an epistemic nationalism that not only regulated what counted as legitimate translation but also scrutinized the translator’s body, intentions, and effects. Across these texts, the body functions both as the medium of translation—through voice, clothing, and gesture—and as the object of national regulation, where anxieties over language purity, scientific credibility, and gender order were adjudicated. This physical policing was inseparable from the policing of knowledge production, for the fokoli’s body—with its fractured speech and excessive fashion—was interpreted as the visible symptom of an internal intellectual corruption and a failure to grasp rigorous scientific thought. While earlier reformists had incorporated mythmaking as a collective justification for modernization, the critics found Jafar’s distortions unacceptable.Footnote 42 Unlike those reformists who framed mythmaking as a call for collective renewal, Jafar’s distortions served as a means of self-distinction, an attempt to assert personal superiority through proximity to an idealized Europe. The play’s critiques were thus concerned with the kind of knowledge Jafar produced and whether it served the nation. Ultimately, the body of the fokoli became a battleground on which multiple boundaries were drawn in the process of nation-building, demarcating what constituted proper engagement with Western modernity, acceptable scientific knowledge, and disciplined gender expression, while simultaneously defining what was deemed performative, mythic, incomprehensible, or transgressive. Yet the very critique of the fokoli inadvertently reinforced Europe’s primacy as the epistemic source. It exposed intellectuals’ deeper anxiety that their own projects might be reduced to copies or mistranslations of Western modernity—a fear embodied in the representation of Jafar, who occupies the unsettling space of failing to fully comprehend either side. By the late 1940s, as science itself became militarized, the fokoli would mutate from ridicule to risk.
The Emancipatory Turn: Translation, Science, and Sovereignty
The aftermath of World Wars I and II exposed the entanglement of Western science with militarism, recasting it from a presumed instrument of progress into a potentially corrupting force. Within Iranian intellectual circles of the mid-twentieth century, the spectacle of a technologically advanced Europe descending into industrialized slaughter and culminating in the atomic bomb shattered the earlier myth of science as an inherent force for universal progress. This disillusionment reoriented the goal of translation toward what I term emancipatory translation: a mode that sought to sever adopted knowledge from militarist and imperial entanglements and redeploy it toward egalitarian ends. While the emancipatory turn opened new directions, it did not erase older anxieties; rather, they were repeatedly recast in response to shifting historical contingencies. As this section will show, the critique of the performative translator was re-inscribed with new meaning, tracking shifting views of the West and, in turn, of the fokoli. The figure transformed from a superficial copy (early twentieth century) to a tainted replica of a “corrupt source” (early 1940s), then to the “enemy within” of an “attacking army” (late 1940s), and finally, to the gharbzadeh—the symptom of a national pathology (1960s). By the 1970s, translation as iterative remembrance emerged: a method that metabolized the source through cycles of forgetting and rewriting, re-engaging it only as fragments within new acts of authorship. This genealogy also reveals how the specter of the performative translator has haunted Iranian intellectual life, migrating from early twentieth-century polemics into the very categories of contemporary scholarship. Both emancipatory translation and iterative remembrance fall within Fanon’s third phase of combat, though the Iranian case reframes its temporality more as ongoing metabolization, where intellectuals aim to transform and repurpose inherited epistemic frameworks in the service of a decolonial future grounded in new consciousness.Footnote 43
The Securitization of Western Knowledge: From Corrupt Source to Attacking Army
In 1941, as World War II escalated, Ahmad Kasravi, one of the most influential twentieth-century reformist historians and political critics, published A Message to European and American Scientists. In it, he shifted responsibility for peace from politicians to scientists, recasting them as a political force capable of reshaping the global order. He posed a question, “O scientists, will there be an end to this war? … From now onwards, peace will not last for more than a while.”Footnote 44 For Kasravi, the problem was twofold: science’s entanglement with militarism and its incorporation into capitalist economies that perpetuated inequality long after wars ended.Footnote 45 He distinguished between machines that served the collective good—utilities such as electricity or clean water—and machines he rendered destructive due to being monopolized by elites, the latter accelerating Europe’s decline.Footnote 46 While he aimed to sever science and technology from war, he simultaneously upheld scientific rationalism as the only legitimate mode of knowledge, dismissing poetry, mysticism, and fiction as obsolete.Footnote 47 In doing so, he reinforced positivist hierarchies and reproduced the very epistemic divisions that had long legitimized scientific rationality’s dominance, even as he sought to purge its militarist and capitalist entanglements.
Kasravi’s pessimistic diagnosis of Western science’s entanglement with militarism was not the only response from Iranian intellectuals of the era. A striking techno-utopian counterpoint appeared a year later in Abdolhossein Sanatizadeh’s 1942 novel The Angel of Peace, which envisioned a young female scientist whose inventions—including weapons-melting rays and satellites—repurposed technology as an antidote to war.Footnote 48 Both thinkers sought a science divorced from war, yet they diverged on how such separation could be achieved. For Kasravi, the corruption of science was structural and epistemic: its institutions and methods had absorbed the logic of militarism and capitalism. Peace, therefore, required purification—ethical restraint and a moral re-disciplining of knowledge. For Sanatizadeh, by contrast, the problem was not structural but moral: science itself was neutral, only misused by its practitioners. His solution was redemptive rather than purifying—to reclaim invention for peace, to make technology’s creative power cancel its destructive past. Despite these differences, both reveal how Iranian intellectuals grappled with the same dilemma: how to translate Western science while undoing its imperial entanglements. Sanatizadeh’s vision, however, added a radical cultural intervention. By making a young woman the agent of technological redemption, the novel inverted the era’s gender coding: whereas the feminized fokoli had once symbolized failed translation, a female scientist now personified as the agent of emancipatory science.
Alongside these debates about science, anxieties over imitation persisted. Kasravi coined the term uropāyīgarī—the imitation of Europeans in everyday life by non-Europeans. Whereas the fokoli marked a specifically Iranian figure, Kasravi directed his critique of uropāyīgarī to Easterners (sharqīhā, as he called them), warning against the internalization of Eurocentrism in daily practices.Footnote 49 He linked this imitation to the ethical and religious loss of non-Western peoples, cautioning: “Europe, in the past two centuries, as a result of its inventions, has lost the very mind of civilization … and you, who rush toward it, will likewise become lost and bewildered.”Footnote 50 Unlike earlier critiques of the fokoli for superficial imitation, Kasravi shifted the terms of critique: the problem was not the inadequacy of the copy but the corruption of the source itself. The statesman Fakhreddin Shadman, writing a few years later, built on this same mid-century premise. While he also re-popularized the critique of the fokoli, he fundamentally shifted its terms.Footnote 51 For Kasravi, those who imitated Europe were not merely bad translators—they were replicating a fatally compromised model. Shadman escalated this logic further, transforming imitation into infiltration.
Where early critics had condemned the fokoli as a “bad copy” of a good model, and Kasravi had reframed him as a “copy of a corrupted source,” Shadman intensified the critique by casting the figure as evidence of a successful enemy infiltration—the “Trojan horse” in human form. Specifically, he warned that Western civilization threatened to conquer Iran through scientific and philosophical texts.Footnote 52 Imagining societies as enclosed systems, he portrayed foreign concepts as invading soldiers: the source was not merely compromised; it was an attacking army. Translation, therefore, was no longer about fidelity but about national security—reframed as a defensive act of epistemic capture, seizing Western knowledge without being conquered by it. To counter this danger, Shadman insisted that translation must be paired with deliberate efforts to preserve the Persian language and national culture, a strategy that reflected his recognition of structural asymmetry: European languages and sciences carried global authority, while Persian intellectual production occupied a peripheral position.Footnote 53 This insecurity was ultimately displaced onto the fokoli, who was transformed from caricature into an “enemy within” to be policed.
The Pathology of Gharbzadegi: Disease, Gender, and the Internal Enemy
By the 1960s, building on earlier critiques, the prominent novelist and essayist Al-e Ahmad extended Kasravi’s critique of uropāyīgarī and Shadman’s critique of fokoli into his critique of gharbzadegi (Occidentosis, Westoxication, or West-struckness). The term described a national malady rooted in two interconnected problems: Europe’s economic and political domination, and Iran’s own failure to acquire technological mastery, leaving it a dependent consumer society.Footnote 54 At its core, gharbzadegi was caused by a technological and scientific deficit: “Occidentosis thus characterizes an era in which we have not yet acquired the machine, in which we are not yet versed in the mysteries of its structure.”Footnote 55 This technological deficit manifested as a “dual failure”—neither truly mastering Western modernity nor preserving its own cultural heritage—which in turn produced an epistemic emptiness. The core components of modernity Al-e Ahmad identified—“the advance of science, … the transformations of technique, technology, and the machine, and … the possibility to speak of Western democracy”Footnote 56—existed in Iran only as semblance, a hollow display.Footnote 57 To dramatize this hollowness and the internal decay it produced, he explained, “I speak of ‘occidentosis’ as of tuberculosis. … But perhaps it more closely resembles an infestation of weevils. … The bran remains intact, but it is just a shell. …”Footnote 58 This medical analogy did not reject technology as such; it recoded uneven modernization as internal decay, crystallizing the copy versus original anxiety that had long structured Iran’s encounter with Europe—and turning it into a diagnosis that demanded a cure. By framing this hollowness as a disease, Al-e Ahmad created an urgent call for a national cure—an anti-colonial project that doubled as social policing.
The early twentieth-century critiques of the fokoli depicted him performing Europeanization excessively through fractured Persian and fashion, with no knowledge of Western science and technology. What had been a theatrical excess in the fokoli hardens into a pathological sign in the gharbzadeh, a move where Al-e Ahmad recasts performance as pathology and converts the subject into an object of diagnosis. The critique of the gharbzadeh figure, in contrast to fokoli, is shaped by Iran’s structural dependency. In Al-e Ahmad’s words, they, the gharbzadeh figures, are “… the most faithful consumer of the West’s industrial goods.”Footnote 59 They are possessed by technology rather than possessing it, treating the machine as a talisman.Footnote 60 As Al-e Ahmad writes, “The machine is a talisman to us occidentotics … this is a talisman that others have hung about our necks, so as to intimidate and exploit us.”Footnote 61 Where the fokoli filled his ignorance of Western science and technology by creating exaggerated myths, the gharbzadeh displays his ignorance by venerating the machine itself without understanding its inner workings. His failure lies in his silent, passive consumption. The critique thus shifts from a failure of knowledge expressed through false speech to a structural dependency expressed through mute consumption.
Al-e Ahmad locates the gharbzadeh’s failure of translation in two interrelated forms of dependency. The first is epistemic submission, a dependency Al-e Ahmad captures in his observation that where a verse from the Qur’an once settled arguments, authority has now shifted, in his words, to “… relating one sentence by some European, whatever the subject under discussion.”Footnote 62 Whereas critics mocked the fokoli for surface-level errors like lexical mixing, Al-e Ahmad condemns the gharbzadeh for this deeper outsourcing of intellectual judgment, which allows any Western source to function as the sole guarantor of truth. This general deference to the West becomes even more acute in the second form of dependency: the translation of Orientalists’ representations of Iran back to Iranian audiences. In Al-e Ahmad’s words, “[t]his is how he [the gharbzadeh figure] comes to know even himself in terms of the language of the Orientalist. With his own hands he has reduced himself to the status of an object to be scrutinized under the microscope of the Orientalist. Then he relies on the Orientalist’s observations, not on what he himself feels, sees, and experiences.”Footnote 63 This act of self-objectification is the crucial step: the translator demotes himself from knowing subject to known object. In this role, he no longer translates his own lived experience but instead re-presents the Orientalist’s clinical findings as if they were his own. This results in what I call ventriloquized translation—not in the stylistic sense of a clumsy performance recently used to critique Al-e Ahmad himself,Footnote 64 but in the epistemic sense of pathological submission that Al-e Ahmad diagnosed in the gharbzadeh, where the subject appears to speak with their own voice but in fact channels an external epistemic source. In Al-e Ahmad’s framing, the translator’s self-objectification reduces him to an agent whose sole function is to reproduce and validate Orientalist ideology. Translation, in this light, no longer produces knowledge but becomes a ritual of objectification that deepens dependency and estrangement—the very heart of the cultural alienation Al-e Ahmad diagnoses.Footnote 65 Here the genealogy diverges decisively from the performative translator. The fokoli’s misfires were still acts, whereas the gharbzadeh, by contrast, exhibits epistemic submission and self-objectification that convert the translator from acting subject into diagnosed object. If the fokoli’s mimicry in fashion and fractured language invited laughter, positioning the critic as satirist, the gharbzadeh’s structural dependency inspired dread, recasting the critic as physician. Al-e Ahmad’s framework thus figures dependency itself as pathological: a specific mode of translation—reimporting Orientalist authority as self-description—becomes disease, binding epistemic subordination to metaphors of contagion, hollowness, and gendered weakness.
This surrender of subjectivity—the self-objectification of the gharbzadeh—forms the core of Al-e Ahmad’s epistemic critique. But in his framework, he ties this loss of intellectual sovereignty to a deeply gendered pathology: the internal condition of being reduced from knowing subject to known object is mapped onto the external bodies of women and gharbzadeh men he renders as effeminate. Everyday acts such as women’s use of cosmetics or men’s attention to fashion are recast as symptoms of the same self-objectification, extending the epistemic critique of knowledge production into the policing of individual lifestyles. On the one hand, Al-e Ahmad advocates a radical vision of gender equality, so his critique cannot be simplistically dismissed as reactionary.Footnote 66 On the other hand, he relies on strict gender normativity to pathologize the subjects he diagnoses as gharbzadeh. Extending the earlier caricature of the fokoli, he transformed insinuations of gender transgression into a medical diagnosis. In this framework, femininity signified weakness and susceptibility to domination, while masculinity marked the sovereignty of productive strength. Al-e Ahmad explicitly included women in the diagnosis; indeed, most women appear in his account as gharbzadeh—he claims few were concerned with “work, duty, social responsibility, and character”—so women become figures for the nation’s vulnerability.Footnote 67 The female gharbzadeh embodied the effects of superficial emancipation, reduced by Al-e Ahmad to an army of consumers of powder and lipstick.Footnote 68 Only some men contracted the disease, and the male gharbzadeh was denounced as effeminate, obsessed with grooming and fashion.Footnote 69 In both cases of gharbzadeh men and women, Western modernity was inscribed on their body through display, substituting for productive labor and transforming their modes of embodiment and gender expression into markers of hollowness. Effeminacy and public femininity thus became the visible symptoms of gharbzadegi, a national condition of consumption without production. The fokoli—once a comic caricature, then Shadman’s enemy within—was finally recast as the gharbzadeh, proof that the entire national body was diseased, with only the “healthy,” productive male imagined as exempt. This gendered logic sits at the heart of the shift: effeminacy expands from an insult aimed at dandies into a generalized feminization of the nation. This shift transforms cultural embarrassment into a contagious pathology, authorizing social policing to safeguard the national body.
Jalal Al-e Ahmad argued that Iran was suffering from gharbzadegi because, remaining a peripheral provider of raw materials, it consumed Western machines without mastering the mysteries of their structure.Footnote 70 To overcome this structural asymmetry of dependency and consumption, he proposed that non-Western societies must master the knowledge and skills to produce advanced technologies, shifting their economies from raw-material providers to industrial producers.Footnote 71 This project presents an apparent paradox: to stop copying the West, one must first become a better copy of it by reproducing its technological achievements. However, Al-e Ahmad reframed this paradox as a necessary strategy—a tactical use of imitation as an instrument of emancipation rather than a sign of subordination—even while the West remained the unavoidable reference point for progress. Recognizing the danger of reproducing the very logic of domination he sought to escape, Al-e Ahmad asserted that the solution must operate on three interlocking levels: structural, epistemic, and cultural.
At the structural level, emancipation required social reorganization: without transforming the social relations that governed production, instrumental mimesis would relapse into the very capitalist corruption it sought to resist. His solution was socialism, which would treat the machine as a means rather than an end, abolish poverty, and place material and spiritual welfare within reach of all.Footnote 72 He also warned that technological advancement carried grave dangers, above all its weaponization—“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.”Footnote 73 The goal, then, was emancipatory translation: translating Western technological knowledge while freeing it from its capture by capitalism and militarism. At the epistemic level, technological mastery had to be joined with a critical comprehension of Western civilization. As he cautioned, “So long as we do not comprehend the real essence, basis, and philosophy of Western civilization, only aping the West outwardly and formally (by consuming its machines), we shall be like the ass going about in a lion’s skin.”Footnote 74 For Al-e Ahmad, learning the West was a precondition for transcending it: only by understanding its intellectual and institutional foundations could Iranians selectively adopt its strengths and reject its destructive ends. Yet this premise also perpetuated a hierarchy of epistemic legitimacy, keeping the West as the privileged source of knowledge even in the act of critique. Much like Kasravi, Al-e Ahmad, while denouncing uneven modernization, reinscribed hierarchies of knowledge—retaining scientific rationality as the privileged medium of emancipation and urging the rejection of practices he saw as superstitious or obstructive to progress.Footnote 75 At the cultural level, he asked, “Why, just because the machine is Western and we are compelled to adopt it, should we assume all the rest of the West’s standards for life, letters, and art?”Footnote 76 This vision demanded embracing rational and scientific thought while preserving social values and gender conventions. Yet this effort to safeguard distinct cultural values transformed his critique of structural dependency into an internal regime of social and gendered policing.
Al-e Ahmad synthesized his predecessors’ anxieties into a structural diagnosis of dependency, developing a model of emancipatory modernity through three linked functions of translation: emancipatory translation (severing knowledge from imperial and militarist histories), safeguarding (the defensive policing of performative translators he called gharbzadeh), and acquisition (the sovereign mastery of productive technology). Al-e Ahmad’s project performs a double analytic hardening of earlier translational logics. He radicalizes Kasravi’s call for emancipatory translation (the ethical decoupling of science and technology from imperial foundations) into acquisition. Acquisition highlights appropriating the machine’s structure and mastering its production, while divorcing it from the imperial and capitalist systems that produced it. Concurrently, he inherits Shadman’s imperative to police the performative translator but elevates the gharbzadeh figure into a contagious social disease requiring a cure and containment of the pathology. This synthesis simultaneously extends translation into the structural domain of industrial production and hardens it into a politics of pathology.
Al-e Ahmad’s core premise was that only this technological acquisition could purge feminized consumption and restore national sovereignty. The framework sought to master the machine within an anti-war and socialist context, achieve critical comprehension of Western civilization, and refine Iranian culture. However, this attempt at de-linking remained fundamentally universalist and West-centric, trapping progress within a technologically determinist horizon in which the West remained the unavoidable standard of health. The diagnosis was structural, but its rhetoric was corporeal—and that slippage was precisely what allowed a critique of dependency to harden into a program of social discipline. The resulting contradiction—between adopting the West’s means and resisting its logic—produced a compensatory politics that displaced the struggle onto the social body: gender and comportment became the sites for reasserting sovereignty, with the disciplined male citizen serving as the antidote to the gharbzadeh man or woman. Gender policing thus functioned as the cultural mechanism through which his West-centric project sought to preserve national distinction, revealing that his framework remains precariously poised between emancipation and repetition. In this tension, Al-e Ahmad’s critique of epistemic dependence gives rise to modes of social and gender discipline that coexist with, and even accompany, his efforts to resist imperial domination.
Ironically, a significant part of scholarship on Iranian intellectual history redirected the twentieth-century fokoli charge back onto its most famous theorist, Al-e Ahmad himself. Scholarly work on Al-e Ahmad’s gharbzadegi has often subjected him to the same three critiques leveled at the fokoli: incompetence, fraudulent borrowing, and infiltration. First, echoing the charge against the fokoli, Al-e Ahmad is dismissed as an incompetent translator who fundamentally misunderstood the West. In one such influential assessment, gharbzadegi was described as “a descending spiral of ahistorical nonsense [that] leads to an abyss of confusion because Al-e Ahmad lacked the critical apparatus to see the specific historical circumstances in which the project of capitalist modernity emerged.”Footnote 77 Second, repeating the mid-century view of Europe as a corrupt model, Al-e Ahmad is framed as the translator of a fraudulent source, with critics portraying his thought as a derivative nativism translated from German antimodernism.Footnote 78 Finally, echoing Shadman’s trope, he is cast as a dangerous infiltrator whose critique is reframed as “the cornerstone of the eventual Islamist takeover of the polyvocal Iranian political discourse in the 1960s, …”Footnote 79 a form of ideological smuggling that undermined Iran’s intellectual scene. What began as a policing of translation in twentieth-century debates thus resurfaces in contemporary scholarship.
The reception of a figure like Jalal Al-e Ahmad points to a structural dynamic in postcolonial scholarship. Drawing on Quentin Skinner’s warning against both reducing texts to their context and isolating them from it, the case of the peripheral intellectual reveals a distinct interpretive trap.Footnote 80 Few figures in modern Iranian thought have generated as contradictory a reception as Al-e Ahmad. Even in the work of Hamid Dabashi, a leading scholar of Iranian intellectual history, interpretations shift dramatically after 2019. In his pre-2019 writings, Al-e Ahmad is consistently cast as a product of context—either as the source of Iranian intellectuals’ provincialism and nativism,Footnote 81 described as a “colonized mind” engaged in “an act of civilizational self-othering,”Footnote 82 or as a biographical subject caught between two “father figures,” his cleric biological father and the Westernizing Reza Shah.Footnote 83 By contrast, in his post-2019 work, Dabashi reverses this judgment, elevating Al-e Ahmad into a canonical frame. He argues that Gharbzadegi “prepared the fertile ground on which Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1966) could happen and to anticipate Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978).”Footnote 84 He also insists that those who call him “a ‘nativist’ are blind to this world, deeply colonised in their Eurocentric imagination. …”Footnote 85 Highlighting the problematic ethics of scholarship on non-Western intellectual history, Al-e Ahmad’s contradictory reception exemplifies the paradox of the peripheral intellectual. In one interpretive move, his work is collapsed into a context constructed as provincial to be condemned; in the other, that context is erased and replaced with a universalized canon to be praised. In both cases, his text—and the specific debates to which it responded—disappears. What becomes obscured in this critical chaos is the dangerous political core of gharbzadegi itself: the fusion of epistemic self-objectification with a gendered pathology, a logic that risks collapsing translation and everyday life alike into a politics of social purification.
The 1970s Turn: Iterative Remembrance and Revolutionary Science
The twentieth-century revolutionary sociologist Ali Shariati shifted the debate from the policing of the translator to the practice of translation as authorship in the 1970s. In his speech Ensan-e Bīkhod, Shariati specifically engages with Fanon’s warning that Europe was “teetering between atomic destruction and spiritual disintegration.”Footnote 86 Fanon’s call for an epistemic rupture—“Let us endeavor to invent a man in full, something which Europe has been incapable of achieving”Footnote 87—became, for Shariati, a model for the practice of translation itself. “As thinkers, as intellectuals, let’s not limit ourselves to translation and imitation of what is happening in Europe’s universities. … We must learn and know whatever they say …, but we have to forget and think for ourselves,”Footnote 88 he urged, a maxim he strategically attributed to the French biologist Alexis Carrel.Footnote 89 I term his method of translation iterative remembrance: a transient stage where the source is metabolized and forgotten—not to purify it of imperial entanglements, but to enable new decolonial authorship and consciousness. Yet Shariati’s attribution of this method to a Western authority underscores how his authorship remained entangled with the very epistemic structures it sought to overcome.
Weaponizing the Performative Translator
Forgetting, in Shariati’s translation model, is not erasure or rejection but a way to metabolize translation. By forgetting, the translator absorbs the source—the Western other—and strips it of its authority, turning it into material for epistemic transformation rather than allowing it to dictate intellectual production. In this sense, translation is never an endpoint but part of a layered process of knowledge production. This shift also reorients temporality: whereas Western modernity is often imagined as the horizon of the future, Shariati positions it as already past, relocated to memory where it can be continually reinterpreted rather than upheld as a guiding force. Out of this metabolization emerges iterative remembrance: writing anew after forgetting, so that past translations resurface not as intact inheritances but as unstable fragments, reconfigured in response to present concerns. In this model, translation forms a constellation, always in dialogue with the author’s current tasks. The conception resonates with Walter Benjamin’s constellation of past and present, where history unfolds not in a linear sequence but in a messianic temporality.Footnote 90 Both thinkers theorize historical time as a messianic temporality, where past sufferings remain unfinished, and each generation possesses a weak messianic power to reactivate the past in the present—a continual longing for redemption, in which each moment holds the possibility of the Messiah’s arrival.Footnote 91 For Shariati, this means translation reappears through remembrance, sustained by the hope that each present moment can reactivate fragments of the past toward epistemic liberation. Taken together, iterative remembrance constitutes a particular form of Fanon’s third phase: a rupture that reopens authorship through cycles of forgetting and remembrance. Liberation, in this vision, lies in consuming the source as raw material to be continually worked upon and improvised.
Shariati’s method of forgetting the source raises questions about precision. Arash Davari’s work on Shariati’s narrative practice addresses this concern, arguing that Shariati was never invested in historical fact but in a truth “above reality” enacted through collective storytelling. As Davari argues, “The end of narrative described in ‘Concerning Violence’ becomes in Shari’ati’s hands the ‘public thoughts, shared collective spirit and social consciousness’ of the people who tell and retell [third Shi’ia imam] Husayn’s story.”Footnote 92 Where Davari theorizes Shariati’s narrative refiguration—a truth “above reality” enacted and validated through collective storytelling—I specify a translational technique of forgetting and remembering that relocates authority from source fidelity to revolutionary authorship. In a context where Western thought entered primarily through translation and intellectuals were policed for distortion, his practice of forgetting and rewriting sources displaced epistemic authority from fidelity to the source toward revolutionary authorship. For Shariati, this was also a method of de-alienation: alienation results from uncritical inheritance—whether through imitation of cultural heritage (Shi‘ism) or passive adoption of Western modernity—which severs knowledge from the subject’s historical and social context. Remembrance resists this alienation by reactivating both Western modernity and Shi‘ism as unstable fragments continually reinterpreted through the prism of the present.Footnote 93 Forgetting detaches knowledge from its original structure, while remembrance selectively reconfigures its fragments, grounding them in the author’s historical moment and creating the conditions for revolutionary authorship and de-alienation.
Shariati attributes his argument on translating and forgetting Western sources to Alexis Carrel, a French biologist. This attribution aligns with his tendency to frame his own ideas as translations of Western thought. Scholars Davari and Saffari interpret this through Frantz Fanon’s concept of the “true lie”—a fabricated narrative that, while not factually accurate, mobilizes belief and aligns its audience with a transformative political truth.Footnote 94 Like the Algerian peasants in Fanon’s account who told imagined stories of resistance to summon a future beyond colonial rule, Shariati’s invented citations, according to Davari and Saffari, act as performative gestures that prefigure decolonial consciousness.Footnote 95 Viewed through the lens of translation as iterative remembrance, these gestures reveal a paradox: although Shariati’s model absorbs the Western other, he still operates within a world where the West retains epistemic authority. To resolve this, he stages an encounter by attributing his ideas to a fabricated Western thinker, thereby externalizing part of himself as the other. In doing so, he translates himself into the West to gain legitimacy, only to reappropriate that projection as part of his own thought. The result is an epistemic loop in which the fabricated citation both disrupts the hierarchy between original and translation and reintroduces decolonized knowledge under the guise of Western authority. At the same time, by having his own ideas accepted as Western, Shariati unsettles the assumed distinction between Western and non-Western thought, challenging the notion that philosophical originality and depth are exclusive to the West.
Recent scholarship has emphasized the performative dimension of Shariati’s work, arguing that his fabricated citations and improvisational style were politically generative for his anti-colonial goals.Footnote 96 Critics such as the contemporary writer and translator Morad Farhadpour dismiss this imprecision as a flaw, framing Shariati as a demagogue rejecting the need for mediation with European philosophy.Footnote 97 Farhadpour’s model of “thought/translation” demands radical fidelity: the translator must empty the self, becoming a transparent medium for Western philosophy.Footnote 98 Davari and Saffari counter that despite Farhadpour’s dismissal, there is an affinity between the two thinkers.Footnote 99 Pointing to Shariati’s invention of the European thinker Chandel, they suggest both share an interest in “irresolute subjectivity” and a rejection of a static self.Footnote 100 In my interpretation, however, Shariati’s model is the inverse: the translator asserts the self by consuming the other as raw material for insurgent authorship. Where Farhadpour effaces the self to let the other speak, Shariati absorbs the other and speaks through it. The fabricated Western thinker Chandel is a reverse ventriloquism by a self so abundant it contains the multitudes it has metabolized. This contrast reflects their divergent orientations toward the universal and the particular. Farhadpour seeks refuge in the universal to avoid the pitfalls of the particular, such as distortions and provincialism, while Shariati fears that fidelity to the universal would silence him. He therefore consumes the universal and speaks it back as his own, refusing both collapse into the particular and submission to the authority of the universal source. Farhadpour’s critique, however, makes a categorical error. He reads Shariati’s project as a delusional attempt to fabricate a unified self, dishonestly covering over the gap with the other through essentialist identity.Footnote 101 In fact, Shariati does not erase the gap but stages it to gain epistemic legitimacy, even as he closes the external gap through epistemic metabolization. This raises a crucial question: by consuming the other, does he risk creating a reactionary “authentic self” with no tension left? His safeguard is iterative remembrance in perpetual authorship, which ensures the metabolized fragments never fully settle and the self remains unfinished, in constant dialogue with fragments of its absorbed others. Ultimately, Shariati’s project aligns not with Farhadpour’s but with the genealogy of the figure most associated with performative translations: the fokoli.
Shariati must be re-evaluated alongside the fokoli because he engages and subverts the same contested terrain of translation, performance, and knowledge production. The kinship with the fokoli is one of performance: while the fokoli’s self dissolves into the Western other, Shariati digests the other into his intellectual self. The fokoli’s imprecision stems from a desire to glorify Europe; Shariati’s arises from a drive to dismantle the authority of the source and write anew. He seizes the fokoli’s stage, turning a performance of social assimilation into one of epistemic intervention. His contrast with the gharbzadeh reveals a deeper rebellion. The gharbzadeh is a figure of epistemic submission, whose position is defined by dependency and self-objectification rather than performance. Shariati does not inhabit that pathology; at most, he tactically borrows one of its gestures—the act of invoking European authority—only to empty it of submission and retool it for rebellion. This inverts the logic of ventriloquized translation: the gharbzadeh becomes a passive conduit for the Orientalist’s voice, whereas Shariati turns the Western figure into a hollow puppet for his own.
One might ask: if I am arguing that Shariati’s transgressive authorship emerges through this complex engagement with the genealogy of the “bad translator,” am I not reproducing the gesture of those critics who discredit Iranian intellectuals by describing them as failed mimics? Unlike those critiques, which deploy these figures to foreclose epistemic legitimacy, my analysis reframes their terrain not as a mark of failure but as the very condition of possibility for radical authorship under semi-colonial constraints. Shariati’s inhabitation of fokoli gestures is momentary and tactical, not definitional. The positionality he occupies is not one of imitation or submission, but of insurgent appropriation: a strategy where the tools of dependency are themselves repurposed to forge a path toward intellectual sovereignty. He inhabits the border where translation had previously failed, seeking to transform it from a site of pathology into a space of generative, decolonial authorship.
This strategy of tactical appropriation, however, is not without its paradox. By weaponizing the form of epistemic submission—citing a European thinker—to deliver the content of epistemic rebellion, Shariati must momentarily gesture toward the very pathology he seeks to destroy. It is a calculated acknowledgment of his entrapment within the structural conditions of dependency that Al-e Ahmad diagnosed. Yet this dual subversion carries significant risks. His invented citations, however strategic, still traffic in the authority of the West, raising the question of whether they reinforce what they aim to subvert. The performative aspect makes his work vulnerable to critiques of precision and legitimacy. His project, then, occupies a liminal space: it radically departs from the failures of his predecessors, yet remains haunted by the specter of both—from one side, the fokoli’s charge of being an imprecise ideologue, and from the other, the gharbzadeh’s trap of reinforcing the authority of the source.
Elm in the Service of Justice: A Critique
Like his predecessors, Shariati was committed to industrialization as essential to a just future but sought to sever it from colonial legacies. He envisioned this future through the symbolic triad of the book, the scale, and iron, representing political consciousness, egalitarianism, and industrialization.Footnote 102 At the same time, he remained deeply critical of the global power structures that shaped the trajectory of modernity. As he warns: “The weapon of Genghis of yesterday was a sword, his ride was a horse, and his protection was a shield. But the ride of the Genghis of today is industry, his capital and sword is science, and his protection is freedom, humanitarianism, progress, civilization, peace, socialism, humanism, human rights, and liberalism.”Footnote 103 By listing these contemporary discourses, Shariati critiques their complicity with militarism and signals the need for an alternative political trajectory for modern science and technology.
Shariati clarifies that his critique is not a rejection of technology but a rejection of the social order that governs it, making his argument epistemological rather than ontological. He distinguishes his position from Heidegger’s by agreeing that modern societies experience alienation but rejecting the notion that this alienation is intrinsic to technology itself.Footnote 104 He argues that alienation stems not from technology per se but from the structures that govern it—what he terms machinism and scientism. Machinism, according to Shariati, is the social order under capitalism. He argues that the machine is neutral, but machinism distorts its potential: “If we free the machine from machinism, which is the order that is not inherent to the machine, … then society will be liberated from alienation caused by the machine, as alienation in the current social order is due to machinism that is set by capitalism.”Footnote 105 Machinism shapes the ways scientific and industrial advancements are utilized within capitalist economic systems. For instance, while automation could decrease work hours and improve quality of life, machinism—driven by consumerism, greed, and class oppression—keeps workers trapped in cycles of alienation and overproduction.Footnote 106 Scientism, on the other hand, refers to the dominance of empiricist science, which paradoxically limits its capacities while also allowing it to expand beyond its appropriate scope. This overextension, according to Shariati, leads to fatalism and alienation.Footnote 107 Due to scientism, empiricist science imposes its methods onto the study of society and prioritizes an uncritical acceptance of reality over its transformation, leading to fatalism. Shariati contends that in contemporary societies, scientific inquiry is driven by a desire to dominate nature rather than understand humanity’s role within it, leading to detachment from social concerns and alienation.Footnote 108 As a result of fatalism and alienation, science ceases to be a means of liberation and instead serves the interests of ruling elites.
Shariati’s critique of scientism leads him to propose an integrated form of knowledge—elm—that brings together the humanities and sciences. He further ties knowledge to politics by reintroducing normative and ethical concerns into inquiry. In this framework, elm—the integrated natural, social, and human sciences—has become indifferent to justice unless reoriented toward emancipation, arguing that: “Sociology does not tell you what kind of society ‘should’ be built for you. Biology does not answer what kind of life is ‘worthy’ of you. Anthropology does not tell you who you are, what you want, or what you ‘should’ want. When philosophy no longer offers purpose, and religion, dismissed by science, cannot guide humanity, people feel orphaned, abandoned, and meaningless.”Footnote 109 He envisions elm reoriented toward justice through reintegrating ethical and philosophical inquiry. Shariati’s vision of justice was the concrete political realization of the theological principle of divine unity. A just society was a classless, egalitarian one that had eliminated all forms of social “idolatry”—be it class exploitation or political tyranny.Footnote 110 However, he does not fully address how elm can remain open-ended and self-critical if its legitimacy is judged not by its pursuit of truth but by its alignment with a particular vision of justice.
This effort to reorient knowledge toward justice raises a key question: Can knowledge remain open-ended when it serves a revolutionary project? A comparison with Karl Jaspers helps illuminate the tensions within Shariati’s framework. Both thinkers view scientism as an overextension of science into areas beyond its proper domain, leading to alienation. Yet their concerns diverge: while Shariati sees scientism as fostering fatalism and political passivity by stripping people of their ability to challenge oppressive structures, Jaspers is primarily concerned with how scientism undermines the individual’s capacity for self-expression and subjective experience due to scientism’s emphasis on objectivity.Footnote 111 Shariati’s call to integrate science with the humanities parallels Jaspers’s insistence on joining science with philosophy; both reject the claim that science alone can furnish meaning or determine life’s goals. Jaspers maintains that science remains limited to specific empirical inquiries, cannot address existential concerns, and requires the depth of philosophical reflection to avoid becoming hollow and mechanistic.Footnote 112 For Jaspers, science and philosophy are interdependent and must remain part of the same system of knowledge, with philosophy providing guidance while preserving intellectual freedom. However, Shariati envisions knowledge as an instrument of social and political change.
Shariati’s intellectual method is anchored on the absorption and reconfiguration of sources, drawing from diverse traditions—including Western critiques of modernity, anti-colonial thought, and Shi’a theology—yet radically transforming them so that their traces remain fragmented, layered, and often unrecognizable in their conventional forms. Shariati improvises, constantly reworking and re-authoring knowledge in ways that resist any fixed epistemic authority. His approach to translation reflects this improvisational mode, an ongoing process of engagement, forgetting, and rewriting. However, while Shariati’s epistemic project destabilizes singular sources of authority, his vision of elm as an ethically and politically committed form of knowledge raises critical concerns, as his framework risks subordinating knowledge production to a predetermined political purpose. This raises urgent questions about the governance of such a system: Who decides what constitutes knowledge in service of the revolution, and what happens to knowledge that does not align with this mission? This project leaves open the possibility of an authoritarian structure of knowledge. The concern is not that Shariati’s vision of justice was itself authoritarian, but that by yoking knowledge to a revolutionary project, he risked foreclosing the open-endedness he otherwise valued in his epistemic practice—and the anti-authoritarian impulse he theorized through translation.
Conclusion
This study employed translation as a conceptual framework to analyze how Iranian intellectuals’ engagement with modern Western technology and science was shaped. Rather than being passively received, Western modernity was translated—that is, reinterpreted, contested, forgotten and remembered in fragments, and rewritten anew. Translation was the very medium through which modernity was reworked from within. Though all intellectual production involves some form of translation or interpretive mediation, in the semi-colonial context examined here, translation was not merely a metaphor for thought; it was its structural condition—the primary vehicle through which intellectual engagement with modernity could be articulated, negotiated, or contested. It was both the means and the constraint of thinking under asymmetrical global conditions.
As a consequence of translation’s structural role in Iranian modernity and the power imbalance between Iran and the West, questions of epistemic authority—namely, who could legitimately reinterpret or translate Western modernity—remained central throughout the twentieth century. The archetype of the fokoli—a Europhile dandy, later refigured as the gharbzadeh—embodied widespread anxieties about superficial engagement with the West. Appearing in literary and political texts as a fashionable imitator of European culture, this figure was depicted as lacking the historical and epistemic rigor required for meaningful intellectual exchange. Their engagement was cast as performative—marked by fashion, linguistic hybridity, and transgressive lifestyle displays—and ultimately seen as producing distorted or dangerous knowledge. The fokoli thus became a regulatory fiction that concentrated fears around cultural in-betweenness and failed translation, operating as a form of epistemic policing that determined who could legitimately partake in modernization. This discourse extended beyond twentieth-century anxieties about nation-building and continues to reverberate in contemporary scholarship, where Iranian intellectuals are often dismissed for producing “distorted” knowledge or for a supposed lack of philosophical rigor. What such critiques miss is that ambivalence toward Europe and the fractured practice of translation were not failures of thought but constitutive features of intellectual life under semi-colonial modernity.
If translation offered a method for rethinking intellectual engagement with Western modernity, temporality revealed the structure through which that engagement unfolded. Translation—far from a neutral act of mediating between societies—functioned as a temporal practice. Each mode of translation was shaped by specific historical conjunctures yet remained capable of being reactivated and reconfigured under new conditions. The temporal method employed here builds on debates around Fanon’s cultural decolonization and Mignolo’s epistemic disobedience.Footnote 113 Iranian intellectuals engaged multiple modes of translation—epistemic, performative, emancipatory, and iterative—that coexisted, overlapped, and resurfaced across time. This approach reveals how intellectual exchange unfolded through recursive and layered negotiations. This study shows imitation, rejection, and synthesis operating simultaneously rather than sequentially, destabilizing any assumption of a linear temporality of decolonization. Similarly, rather than embracing epistemic disobedience as radical delinking from the West, as theorized by Mignolo, the practices examined here metabolize Western knowledge through absorption and iterative remembrance, displacing its authority without severing from it. Rather than locating rupture in radical exteriority to Western epistemologies—or delinking from them altogether—the practices examined here, especially in the 1970s, enacted a temporal intervention: they recast Western modernity as already past, to be metabolized, and selectively remembered, within new frameworks. This repositioning transforms epistemic disobedience into an act of recursive rewriting rather than epistemic severance. The iterative remembrance mode of translation illustrates how this temporal shift enabled intellectuals to engage with inherited knowledge without replicating its authority—generating new forms of authorship that arise from, and challenge, dominant structures, and do so from the position long cast as the bogeyman of twentieth-century Iranian intellectual history: the fokoli.
Exploring this history through the lens of translation allowed us to examine the contradictions and limits in each phase. In the nineteenth century, epistemic translation generated neologisms and inspired political reform. However, it was built on a subtle acceptance of European modernity as a universal standard. As translation became the primary method for engaging with Western knowledge, its centrality eventually provoked epistemic unease, triggering new critiques and regulatory impulses. While each subsequent mode of translation opened new avenues of epistemic engagement, they also carried structural limitations. The critique of performative translation, centered on figures such as the fokoli and gharbzadeh, can be interpreted as a reaction to state-led modernization. Still, they operated as a conservative force in their own right. These figures became sites of epistemic contestation: while critics invoked them to expose the unevenness of modernization, they simultaneously deployed them to police the nation’s cultural and linguistic boundaries, reinforcing exclusionary norms around gender, fashion, lifestyle, spoken language, and epistemic legitimacy. In the post-1940s, Kasravi and Al-e Ahmad sought epistemic liberation but reinforced hierarchies of knowledge in the process, privileging certain forms of rationality while foreclosing others. Shariati’s project—though invested in creative knowledge-making and the integration of science and the humanities—was ultimately constrained by the revolutionary imperative that knowledge serve political struggle. His method of translation, as iterative remembrance, could pose limitations, especially in contexts where epistemic rigor and citation practices remain foundational. These tensions complicate efforts to dismiss their contributions as anti-modern or technophobic, or to accept them uncritically. Attending to both the emancipatory potential and structural limits of each mode of translation allows for a more complex understanding of Iranian intellectual history and its enduring struggle over how to translate, reinterpret, and rewrite under the weight of global asymmetries.
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their meticulous reading, insightful feedback, and generous attention. My sincere thanks go to my colleagues in Germany—Eva Geulen, Georges Khalil, Florian Kohstall, Yvonne Albers, and Torsten Jost—and to my colleagues at Deep Springs College—Jeff Miller, Brian Hill, and Andy Zink—for their invaluable support.
Financial support
This research, conducted for this article as part of my broader book project, was supported by fellowships from the Forum Transregionale Studien (EUME), the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL), the Leibniz Research Alliance “Value of the Past,” and Cluster of Excellence “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective,” Freie Universität Berlin.
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