The End of Modernity: Heidegger and Iran
How the Islamic Revolution strangled Western Thought into submission
“The acme of existence”
When the first world war broke out, a new sense of euphoria was born in Europe. To many intellectuals, it seemed to be the death of Marxism and historical materialism; it was the triumph of the spiritual over the economic, an event on a scale that the world has never seen before. Describing the atmosphere in Vienna at the news of the outbreak of the war, Austrian writer Stefan Zweig observed that “As never before, thousands-hundreds of thousands-felt what they should have felt in peacetime; that they belonged to a great nation .... Each one was called upon to cast his infinitesimal self into the glowing mass, and there to be purified of all selfishness. All differences of class, religion and language were washed away by the great feeling of fraternity .... Each individual experienced an exaltation of his ego;... he was a part of the people, and his person, his hitherto unnoticed person had been given meaning.” No people felt this greater than the Germans; as Max Weber, hardly a spiritualist, famously observed that while the war may be one of bookkeeping for the French, “anyone among us with such an objective for war would not be German; German existence, not profit, is our goal in war”. To the Germans, this war could not be reduced to the economic sphere as Marxist analysis of the war did, rather this was a spiritual war, not one with economic considerations; one for the very soul of the German nation. This deeply mystical feeling in the German people would later be coined by Thomas Mann as Kriegsideologie, or the ideology of war.
Kriegsideologie
War dominated spiritual and intellectual life in post-war Germany, a new community was born from the war, bound together by their “proximity to death”. Max Weber would again give us a feel for the zeitgeist of Germany at the time, addressing soldiers heading to the front, “ …He speaks of the greatness of death in battle. In everyday life, death comes to us incomprehensible, like a destiny contrary to reason, and out of which it is impossible to make any sense. we must simply endure it. But every one of you knows what he is dying for when he is struck by fate. Those who fall on the battlefield are the seeds of the future.” Thus, the battlefield earns a privileged position as being the only place to truly understand the meaning of life, allowing soldiers to escape the banality of modern life, and create an authentic community united by their proximity to that which is undoubtedly individual: death. Sigmund Freud would offer another insight into the psychology of the era: war as a return to the reality of death, returning it to the forefront of everyday life “life is impoverished, loses interest if you cannot risk that which is the highest stake, that is, life itself… Today death can no longer be denied; we are forced to believe in it. Men really die, and no longer one at a time, but in great numbers, often tens of thousands a day. It is no longer something by chance .... And life has become interesting again, it has rediscovered all of its content”. The life of the shopkeeper is disparaged, while the life of the warrior is extolled, and no one exemplifies this attitude more than Ernst Junger. Junger, having himself fought in the war, believed that far from a disaster on a scale the world had never seen before, the war was rather the end of bourgeois security and its banishment of any sense of danger to life, recalling his famous assertion that “it is infinitely more worthwhile to be a criminal than a bourgeois”. Even Wittgenstein, a famously apolitical philosopher, could not help but obey the sense of history of the war, writing in his diary while fighting against Tsarist Russia that “from time to time I was afraid. This is the fault of a false view of life… only death gives life its meaning.”
“Ideas of 1789”
The Kriegsideologie was in essence a prelude to the rise of the German Conservative Revolution. In the wake of the defeat in the war, many German intellectuals saw this defeat as the victory of universalism over historicism. Their attack is focused on the very origin of (liberal) universalism, which starts with the French revolution, in what they dubbed the “ideas of 1789”: the revolution by which man is born free from any historical ethos. Every form of universalism is rejected, be it religious, economic, or political; It should therefore come as no surprise that the French Revolution’s greatest critic, Edmund Burke, would grow in popularity in post-war Germany. Burke’s main critique of the revolution was contrasting it with English rights, which were hereditary, to the French right of universal man. Rights in Burke’s understanding are determined historically through passed down traditions in a concretely defined community, in contrast to the abstract right of universal man. Not only Burke, but also French writer Joseph De Maistre, a contemporary critic of the French Revolution, is extolled by the German conservative revolution due to his defense of the ancien regime and attack on liberal universalism. De Maistre summed up the criticism of universalism in his now famous statement “Now, there is no such thing as ‘man’ in this world. In my life I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, and so on. I even know, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare I’ve never encountered him.” The first world war explains the German attachment to the historicism of Burke and De Maistre as, at least from their point of view, the allies launched an ideological war, one aimed at spreading liberal democracy throughout Europe; And soon, the Bolshevik revolution would represent a new paradigm of universalism in Europe.
East and West
On the day of his abdication of the throne, Wilhelm II gave warning to Europe and the German nation, stating that “faced with the danger that threatens all of Europe, it would be absurd to continue the war. Hopefully, the enemy will eventually recognize the danger bound to strike European civilization if Germany is abandoned to Bolshevism”. As a new universalism emerges in Europe, in contrast to Anglo-Saxon empiricism, the Bolshevik revolution emerges as a new pathos entirely alien to the west, as Spengler famously asserted that “Russia has cast off its white mask” and has become “…a great Asian power, a Mongolian power, burning with fiery hate for Europe.” To many German intellectuals, the Soviet Union and America were simply two sides of the same coin, both representing the triumph of modern rationality. Heidegger would put it in his introduction to metaphysics “This Europe, in its ruinous blindness forever on the point of cutting its own throat, lies today in a great pincers, squeezed between Russia on the one side and America on the other. From a metaphysical point of view, Russia and America are the same; the same dreary technological frenzy, the same unrestricted organization of the average man . . . The spiritual decline of the earth is so far advanced that the nations are in danger of losing the last bit of spiritual energy that makes it possible to see the decline . . . We [Germans] are caught in a pincers. Situated in the center, our nation incurs the severest pressure”. Carl Schmitt would offer a similar critique of the modern world, declaring that he aims to challenge the “self-defined modern man” “the era of the machine, of organization, the mechanistic era” characterized by “the most generalized calculability.” The modern world is not the era of disenchantment, to the contrary, it is the era of bewitchment by technology.
It is here that the relationship between the conservative revolution - and in particular Heidegger - becomes clear, as the Nazi party would represent, to them at least, a “third way” between Anglo Saxon empiricism and Bolshevik communism, a new political tradition that is “authentic” to Germany and “return Germany to the soil”, as Heidegger would describe his philosophy as belonging “right in the midst of the peasant’s work”. The Nazi program would run on creating a balance between the city and the countryside, ending the domination of industry over the economy, as Hitler would write in Mein Kampf that “worse than these, however, were other consequences which became apparent as a result of the industrialization of the nation. In proportion to the extent that commerce assumed definite control of the State, money became more and more of a God whom all had to serve and bow down to. Heavenly Gods became more and more old-fashioned and were laid away in the corners to make room for the worship of mammon.” Unbeknownst to the German conservatives and Heidegger, the Nazi Party would be rather an extension of Anglo-Saxon empiricism, with evidence being the critical early monetary and diplomatic support to the Nazi street gangs and later regime by the British crown against the Soviet Bolshevism.
While the legacy of the German Conservative Revolution may be tarnished by its relationship with the Nazi Party, the German conservatives, Heidegger in particular, would go on to inspire another anti-modernist project: the Iranian revolution of 1979.
“The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.“ - Karl Marx
The turn of the century in Iran was a period of intense instability. Following the turbulence of the Constitutional Revolution in Iran during the early 1910s, the brief era of democracy would come to a halt with a British-backed coup led by a relatively unknown Iranian Cossack colonel, Reza Khan. The general instability of early 20th century Iran had not gone unnoticed - whether it be the Constitutional Revolution; the incursions of the Ottomans, British, & Russians during the first world war, violating Iran’s sovereignty & neutrality; the Qajar government’s little to no authority outside of Tehran; or the various rebellions in the peripheries of the country between 1917-1921. As a result, many major players supported Colonel Reza Khan’s 1921 coup as a strongman to end this disintegration and instability in Iran. And indeed that is what he did, moving to quickly suppress various regional groups: First in Gilan, crushing the Mirza Kuchak Khan’s Persian Soviet Socialist Republic; in West Azerbaijan, quashing the Kurdish warlord & Ottoman collaborator Simko Shikak’s forces; in Khorasan, subduing Colonel Pessian’s revolutionary government; and lastly in Khuzestan, dismantling Sheikh Khaz’al’s Emirate of Muhammara. By 1925, with the support of the British, Reza Khan gained enough political gravitas to depose the Qajar dynasty itself, crowning himself the new Shah of Iran: Reza Shah of the Pahlavi dynasty. With such power, Reza Shah would go on to attempt to transform Iran into a centralized state in the image of the West.
The advances of Western civilization in the sciences, and in military domination as Iranians had just experienced firsthand, meant that a major cultural transformation was seen as necessary to catch up with the west. Nameh-ye Farangestan (“European Letter”), a journal published by European-educated Iranians, would write in their first editorial letter: “We want to Europeanize Iran and flood it with modern civilization. While preserving our innate Iranian moral qualities, we will follow this sagacious command: Iran must be come Europeanized in body and spirit, as well as in essence and appearance.” The journal would find inspiration from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini as an enlightened dictator to guide the masses into a necessary cultural transformation. Mosfhq Kazami, one of the main intellectuals behind the journal, would later write “I read in the papers how Mussolini had accomplished great reforms in Italy, putting an end to that weak country’s deplorable conditions. Gradually, I came to believe that Iran too could be shaken up only by a strong-armed man, with awareness of both world affairs and Iranian conditions... Influenced by such ideas, I wrote in Nameh-ye Farangestan of the need for an enlightened dictator ... who could save Iran.”
Soon, Iran would find this “enlightened dictator” in the form of Reza Shah. Taking inspiration from the top-down secular reforms of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Reza Shah would attempt to increase central government presence outside of Tehran with the goal of creating a modern, secular European nation-state. The creation of a standing army through conscription would prove to be the most essential tool for creating a modern Iranian nationality. Conscripts would spend the next two years interacting with other ethnic groups, swearing allegiance to the shah and the new Iranian state, and learning Persian (with 2/3rd of conscripts spending the first 6 months learning Farsi) with the aim of turning the peasantry into loyal citizens.
Prior to Reza Shah, the only professional, standing-army units in the country were the Romanov trained and influenced Persian Cossack Brigade, the Swedish-trained Gendarmerie, and the British-trained South Persia Rifles. In total, this was no more than a few thousand men, whose loyalties to the central Qajar government were questionable and influenced by foreign powers - within the context of the Great Game and World War One. Tribal levies consisted of the rest of the Qajar dynasty’s manpower, who also weren’t reliable nor were they particularly numerous or of quality either. These forces proved unable to deter violations of Iranian neutrality in the first world war, with Ottoman and Russian forces frequently violating Iranian sovereignty - in effect using Iran as another front of the war to fight each other - destroying, looting, or massacring villages in the way. The Qajar system also proved unable to enforce the territorial integrity of Iran, with various peripheral groups who wholly ignored or rebelled against the central government (Some of which were backed by foreign powers, like Simko Shikak & Mirza Kuchak Khan). These events and factors had formed the rationalization and support for Reza Shah’s coup and militarization, which had received British endorsement.
Under Reza Shah, the army would swell to almost 126,000 men by 1940, alongside 9,750 gendarmes. Reza Shah would also modernize the armament of the army to a limited extent, purchasing one hundred biplanes from Western powers, one hundred tanks from Czechoslovakia, tens of thousands of small arms and several hundred, second-hand artillery pieces from various European powers. Reza Shah’s militarization allowed him to quickly dispose of the various peripheral groups opposing his central government by the mid-1920s, only four years after his initial coup and helping form the basis of a Westernized-Iranian state. According to a 1937 report, $16.7 million, or 37.5% of the entire Iranian budget, was spent on the military. Echoing Iran’s past-traumas from loss of her northern provinces to Russia in 1812 and 1826 to Iran’s humiliations in the early 20th century, one newspaper states: “The splendor and worth of the new military organization is due to the energy and patriotism of the country’s indomitable leader, His Imperial Majesty, Reza Shah Pahlavi. Persia whose new life began with the 1921 Coup d’état, will be able, thanks to its powerful new army, to live henceforth its own life independently, free from fear of repetition of the woes of the past century - because we know that the words peace and disarmament are today but words and nothing but words”. It can thus be stated that the military was one of hallmarks of Reza Shah’s reign, and one of his monumental efforts to build and enforce an Iran based off of Western models of modernity.
In addition to the military, the shah would aim to create a new Iranian identity independent of Iran’s Islamic heritage, changing the Islamic calendar used by most people to the Zoroastrian calendar. Once again showcasing his influence from the West, in this case the ideas of classicism, Reza Shah had also begun excavations of Persepolis and Pasargadae and emphasized pre-Islamic Iranian civilization - while also rejecting the already-existing realities of Iran’s Islamic identity - throughout Iran’s newly established national school systems and universities established under his reign.
Reza Shah continued this top-down national identity-building with a new dress code in July 1935, in which traditional and tribal clothing was banned and all adult males, with few exceptions, were expected to dress in western European fashion. In particular, Reza Shah banned traditional headgear such as the chaffieyeh and instead enforced that men wear Western-style “Bowler hats”. This sparked great outrage and a large subsequent demonstration in August 1935 at Mashad’s Imam Reza Shrine, one of the largest Shi’a Muslim holy sites in the world. The demonstrations railed against corruption, taxation, Westernization, attacks on Islam, and “heretical” innovations. Demonstrators chanted slogans such as “The Shah is the new Yazid”, likening him to the Umayyad Caliph Yazid who dishonorably martyred the third Shi’a Imam, Hussein ibn Ali, in the “Battle of Karbala”. For four days, local police refused to violate the sanctity of the shrine. On the fifth day, units of the Imperial Army surrounded the Goharshad Mosque complex of the shrine and broke into the shrine. The result was a bloodbath - between 200-1000 pilgrims & demonstrators were killed, over 5000 beaten, and 1000 were arrested. This event marked the effective break between the clergy and Reza Shah, beginning an animosity that will last until the end of his reign & beyond. The shah furthermore signed the Kafsh-e Hijab (“Unveiling”) decree on January 8th, 1936, allowing women to unveil their hair and banning the traditional chador. In Tehran, there were around 4000 women walking the streets without the veil, all of whom were from upper-middle-class, European-educated backgrounds. To enforce this new dress code, Reza Shah had ordered police across Iran to forcibly remove veils from any woman who wore it in public. Women who refused were beaten, had their chadors or hijabs forcibly torn off, and had their homes searched. As a result, many conservative women often opted to not go outside to avoid confrontation, some even committed suicide to avoid being violated by the Pahlavi monarchy’s police due to the decree. This lasted until the abdication of Reza Shah in 1941.
As noted earlier, rural tribes lost all of their previous privileges, and for the first time in Iranian history, the Iranian military structure moved away from tribes and to the central government. Rural chiefs were not only stripped of their traditional clothing, roles, and social customs, but they would also be “civilized” into modern state subjects. The British consul would provide an excellent summary of the changing social landscape in Iran at the time, writing that “Next to their daily bread, what affects the people most widely is what touches the code of social habit that, in Islam, is endorsed by religion… The unveiling of women inaugurated in the preceding year attacks the people’s social conservatism as much as their religious prejudice. Above all, like conscription, it symbolizes the steady penetration into their daily lives of an influence that brings with it more outside interference, more taxation. But one can easily exaggerate the popular effect of unveiling; it is a revolution for the well-to-do of the towns, but lower down the scale, where women perform outdoor manual labour, its effects both on habit and on the family budget diminish until among the tribal folk of all degrees they are comparatively slight. Hence resistance among the greater part of the people has been passive, and, where existing, has manifested itself in reluctance of the older generation to go abroad in the streets.”
The August 1941 joint Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran would be the demise of Reza Shah. The military he had built quickly evaporated in only six days to Soviet and British armies, exposing that the force was nothing but a glorified police force that was aimed at quashing internal security threats and centralizing the state. The early Pahlavi military, which developed under close British supervision and surveillance, was by no means developed to deal with conventional armies such as that of the Red Army - contrary to Pahlavi propaganda in contemporary newspapers. Furthermore, it had been recently discovered in investigations by Mohammad Gholi Majd that much of the funds supposedly allocated for the national military budget were rather re-rerouted to Reza Shah’s personal bank accounts in the United States and elsewhere. According to Majd, of the $92,000,000 allocated for armaments procurements from 1928 to 1941, only $21,000,000 had actually been spent for arms purchases. This leaves almost a whopping $71,000,000 diverted or stolen by Reza Shah. This substantiates previously unproven claims made by former Iranian Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh (who was infamously couped by US and British intelligence in 1953), that Reza Shah had diverted the bulk of Iran’s oil revenues to bank accounts in Europe and America. Regardless, this explains the severe underdevelopment of the army compared to the supposed spending and gives evidence to the fact that the army was just a mere police force to enforce Reza Shah’s Westernization programs.
Reza Shah would eventually abdicate the throne after two weeks in September 1941 in favor of his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and be exiled to South Africa. By no means however was this the end of the Pahlavi state. The Tehran Conference in 1943 between Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, and the young shah reaffirmed the Allies’ post-war desires to maintain Iranian territorial integrity and a “return to normalcy” under the Pahlavi regime. Mohammad Reza would continue his father’s task of creating a modern nation-state modeled after Europe.
“An Island of Stability in a Turbulent Corner of the World”-
Jimmy Carter; The eve of The Revolution
Following the 1953 coup in Iran, Iranian power would reach a new apex, the economy had been booming due to the large increase in oil revenues, going from 34 million dollars to 20 billion dollars in 20 years. Coupled with the large increases in revenue was an equally large increase in military spending, increasing the budget from 60 million in 1955 to almost 7.3 billion by 1977, the army had increased in size from 127,000 men to 410,000, coupled with the most sophisticated technology bought from the United States. By 1975, Iran had the largest navy in the Persian Gulf, the largest air force in the Middle East, and the 5th largest army in the world; employing an impressive arsenal of the latest tech purchased from America, including 173 F-4 fighter jets, 141 F-5s, and 10 F-14s. This would later on be bolstered with a 20-billion-dollar arms deal with America, facilitating the purchase of 160 F-16s, 140 F-14s, along with the purchase of 10 nuclear submarines. There were even talks for Iran purchasing an aircraft carrier from the US. A US congressional report would provide an even clearer image of increasing Iranian power, stating that “Iran’s military expenditures surpassed those of the most powerful Indian Ocean states, including Australia, Indonesia, Pakistan, South Africa and India. The Shah also planned to spend an estimated $33 billion (some experts say probably three times as much) for the construction of some 20 nuclear reactors by 1994. If constructed with German, French, and American aid, they would have made Iran the largest producer of nuclear energy in the entire Indian Ocean area.”
The most important arm of the shah’s power, however, was not the army, but SAVAK, the intelligence agency established in 1957 with the help of the FBI and Mossad. SAVAK would have the power to torture political opponents, censor the media, and keep an eye and ear on all Iranians. Frances FitzGerald, the niece of the US ambassador would later explain “SAVAK has agents in the lobby of every hotel, in every government department, and in every university classroom. In the provinces, SAVAK runs a political intelligence gathering service, and abroad it keeps a check on every Iranian student ... Educated Iranians cannot trust anyone beyond a close circle of friends, and for them the effect is the same as if everyone else belonged. SAVAK intensifies this fear by giving no account of its activities. People disappear in Iran, and their disappearances go unrecorded.”
Compared to his father, Mohammad Reza Shah did not enforce the banning of the veil or traditional clothing. As Iran continued to modernize, with mechanization of agriculture forcing many rural families out of their occupations, more and more of them migrated to the cities in search of jobs and better prospects. Despite this however, the veil and traditional clothing in general was still seen as a symbol of “backwardness” in urban Iran, and a hindrance to those who wanted to climb the social ladder and have a career. It was still discouraged in government offices and public institutions, while some restaurants even refused to serve those in the veil. Those in traditional clothing were regarded as “backwards” and “uneducated” which further hurt prospects of job employment, compared to those in Western fashion in Tehran. This urban-rural divide, which was heightened in the cities as more rural families emigrated to cities and discriminated against, further exacerbated the breakdown of social cohesion - at the same time, the divide itself was further exacerbated by some of the Shah’s “White Revolution” reforms and lack of development in rural regions.
The twin topics of the White Revolution and rural development in Iran are both large topics deserving their own separate discussions, although a summation is important. In the Islamic system of inheritance, large estates broke apart relatively quickly as lands were divided up among all sons and daughters. This had resulted in the vast majority of land being traditionally owned by small landowners. Large private estates were initially formed when Reza Shah began seizing and reorganizing swaths of land in the 1930s, leading to initial conflict between the Pahlavi monarchy and the landowning class. By the 1950s, there was mounting pressure on Mohammad Reza Pahlavi by the US State Department to conduct land reform policies to prevent peasant unrest and avert the spread of communist sympathies. The State Department had prior pressured South Korea, the Philippines, and the Republic of China/Taiwan into conducting similar land reform policies.
In the case of the White Revolution between 1962-1965, 1.8 million tenants received land from the redistribution program, of which 1.6 million received private land. On the other hand, 1.3 million small landowners and 56,000 medium and large landowners had their lands expropriated. The hardest hit were the small landowners who had received no compensation from the Pahlavi regime; in effect, for every tenant who had received land, one small landowner had been reduced to poverty. The result of the White Revolution’s land reforms was a complete botching of Iran’s entire agricultural system. The disruption of ownership caused by the White Revolution led to many qanats, a traditional irrigation system consisting of networks of underground water-channels maintained & shared by several petty landowners, to be permanently ruined. It traditionally was not the tenant’s responsibility to maintain qanats, nor did they have the liquid capital to maintain their newly received farms and qanat systems. This in turn led to a drop in Iranian agricultural yields, resulting in the formerly agriculturally self-sufficient country quickly becoming an importer of foodstuffs; for instance, grain imports rising from a mere 50,000 tons in 1962 to 2.5 million tons in 1970. In the aftermath of the reforms, some of the few large landowners - courtesy of Reza Shah’s land seizures of the 1930s - consolidated their holdings and purchased more land from failing, newly independent, former tenants of petty landlords. In the end, the Pahlavi monarchy will attempt to salvage the land reform post-1970 by forming state-run collective farms, known as “farm corporations” - the irony is that, with the oversight and advisement from the US, the Pahlavi monarchy of Iran built their own “socialism”. The Shah would later quip that “The socialism of my White Revolution is… a new socialism.”
With regards to land, Iran and South Korea, Taiwan, and Philippines are geographically not comparable; Iran had a vast surplus of undeveloped, arable land - out of 30 million hectares total, only 5 million hectares were being cultivated in 1960. This is contrasted with the fact Iran in 1960 only had a population of 20 million, of which only a portion were tenants. The vast amount of land and little available labor made petty landowners dependent on sharecroppers, thus having no incentive to evict them - there were many concessions to the sharecropper tenants that made them not qualify as “landless”. Rights of tenure extended to tenant’s children, with heirs inheriting tenant rights; the so-called tenants even “traded” the land amongst themselves, giving land as dowry in marriage. Therefore, tenants effectively co-owned the land with petty landowners. This was unlike the more fully cultivated lands of South Korea etc., whose dense population and acute shortage of arable land gave landowners strong bargaining position to evict tenants. Tenants there had no such rights or privileges enjoyed in Iran as a result of high demand for the land. As a result, it is abundantly clear that land reform in Iran was unnecessary. The numbers cited in the previous three paragraphs up to this point are from Mohammad Gholi Majd’s book Resistance to the Shah: Landowners & Ulama in Iran, in which further reading on the subject can be found there. As for rural development in late Pahlavi Iran, only 47% of the country had stable access to water, most of which were in the cities; the majority of the countryside also had no access to electricity compared to the cities. Ultimately, side tangents aside, the White revolution and neglect of rural development by the Pahlavi monarchy were other large contributors to the influx of conservative rural families to the cities.
Mohammad Reza doubled down on his father’s promotion of pre-Islamic Iran as the national identity of Iran across the board in media and the education curriculum. He went as far as hosting the infamous, decadent, and extravagant “2500th Anniversary of the Persian Empire” in 1971, in which many of the world’s leaders and royal families were invited. Everyone from officials of the USSR’s Presidium, China’s National People’s Congress, and even Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia to the Saudi, British, and Dutch royal families were invited to the exclusive socialite event - one of the most expensive parties in Iranian history. The celebration was a major spectacle, with thousands of soldiers in various expensive, historically authentic LARP costumes from the last two millennia of Iranian history marching for hours. Venues were made across the historical sites of Persepolis, Pasargadae, and the tomb of Cyrus the Great. The event was estimated to cost anywhere between 20-60 million dollars. It was the ultimate insult and show of negligence to Iran’s impoverished, religious, rural masses.
While Iranian geopolitical and economic power reached heights never seen before up to this point, a new cynicism was born from the new modernization efforts; to many Iranians, the new reforms were an attempt by the shah to recreate the country into a European nation. One look at Tehran would give anyone the impression that the project of Reza Shah had finally succeeded. Everywhere, men and women dressed in European fashion, religion reduced to the mosque, and a new, secular Iranian citizenship being the culmination. With his land reform, the Shah had also intruded into the countryside, uprooting the traditional Islamic system of agriculture, upsetting swaths of now impoverished petty landlords, former tenants, and the Ulama (Islamic clergy). Even with declarations, fatwas, condemnations against the Shah’s land reforms from major figures of the Shi’a Ulama - such as Ayatollahs Borujerdi, Behbahani, Khomeini, Shirazi, Khoii, Golpayegani, and Shariatmadari, all of whom condemned the reform to violate “Islamic law” and “Iran’s constitution” - the Shah still pushed through with his land reform. Despite these supposed victories, the Shah’s ambitions to transition the country would not go over smoothly with the mostly rural Iranian nation, and a new group of intellectuals was born out of an attempt of making sense of the loss of authentic Iranian identity and the complete capitulation to Western modernity.
Gharbzadegi
“Indeed, if a philosophy of the future exists, it will have to be born outside Europe, or as a consequence of the encounters and frictions between Europe and non-Europe.” -Michel Foucault
Gharbzadegi, commonly known in the West as “westoxification”, was a term popularized by Iranian intellectual Jalal Al-e-Ahmad in his book, Occidentosis. Hailing from a long line of Iranian Shia scholars, Al Ahmad experienced firsthand the westernization of Iran, as his father would lose his job attempting to resist the secular reforms of the shah. Feeling disgusted with the meakedness of Islam, Al Ahmad would join the recently formed Tudeh party, hoping that the Soviet-aligned Communist party could provide the way for an authentic future. However, he would soon split from the party due to their consistent concessions to Soviet demands; particularly, their apologia for the Soviet attempts of seizure of Iranian oil in 1945-1947 and occupation of Azerbaijan and Mahabad during the 1946 Iran Crisis. He would later denounce the party as a puppet to foreign interests, writing that “There was a time when there was the Tudeh Party and it had something to say for itself. It had launched a revolution. It talked about anti-colonialism and it defended the workers and the peasants. And what other objectives it had and what excitement it generated! And we were young and members of the Tudeh Party, not having the slightest idea who was pulling the strings”. Disillusioned with the concession of both the Pahlavi shahs to the west and the communists to the Soviet Union, Al Ahmad would abandon politics for the next few years in an attempt to develop a new political project, and Occidentosis would be the brainchild of that project.
Al Ahmad would describe Occidentosis as “...tuberculosis. But perhaps it more closely resembles an infestation of weevils. Have you seen how they attack wheat? From inside. The bran remains intact, but it is just a shell, like a cocoon left behind on a tree. At any rate, I am speaking of a disease: an accident from without, spreading in an environment rendered susceptible to it.” The Pahlavis’ attempts at modernization by imitating the West was seen as completely foolish and futile by Al Ahmad. In Occidentosis, Al Ahmad describes the foolishness of the Pahlavis’ and other Gharbzada (“Westophile”) Iranians, stating that “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. We know what became of him. Although the one who created the machine now cries out that it is stifling him, we not only fail to repudiate our assuming the garb of machine tenders, we pride ourselves on it.” To Al Ahmad, Western modernity, symbolized as “the machine”, was never truly embraced in Iran, despite the Pahlavis’ swaths of reforms; in other words, rather than building the machine of modernity as the West did, Iran has - for now - been consuming the machine that is Western modernity. However, there is a danger to the building of the machine - the endgame of Occidentosis - with Al Ahmad noting that “For two hundred years we have resembled the crow mimicking the partridge (always supposing that the West is a partridge and we are a crow). So long as we remain consumers, so long as we have not built the machine, we remain occidentotic. Our dilemma is that once we have built the machine, we will have become mechanotic, just like the West, crying out at the way technology and the machine have stampeded out of control.” Thus, with the completion of “the machine”, the machine will stifle its creators in Iran, just as it had stifled its creators in the West.
Rather interestingly, Al Ahmad would attribute his awakening to Ernst Junger, a key figure of the German conservative revolution, writing in the preface that “Junger and I were both exploring more or less the same subject, but from two view points. We were addressing the same question, but in two languages.” Similar to the German conservatives, Al Ahmad viewed both Soviet Russia and the capitalist west as two sides of the same dreary coin, as he would put it “No longer is the specter of communism dangled before the people in the West and that of the bourgeoisie and liberalism in the East. Now even kings can be ostensibly revolutionary, and Khrushchev can buy grain from America. Now all these "isms" and ideologies are roads leading to the sublime realm of mechanization. The political compass of leftists and pseudoleftists around the world has swung ninety degrees to the Far East, from Moscow to Beijing, because Soviet Russia is no longer the "vanguard of the world revolution".” In the face of this machine, Iran has been unable to protect its civilizational identity, being described by Al Ahmad as a “onslaught” and “rout”, and thus, only one defense exists: Shia Islam. Religion, still a prominent force in Iranian society, offers the only way out of this predicament “90% of the people of this country still live according to religious criteria, including the whole rural population, some of the urban tradesman, bazaaris, some civil servants, and those making up the country’s third and fourth classes . . . they’re all waiting for the Imam of the Age.”
Shariati
“Islam is the first school of social thought that recognizes the masses as the basis, the fundamental and conscious factor in determining history and society not the elect as Nietzsche thought, not the aristocracy and nobility as Plato claimed, nor great personalities as Carlyle and Emerson believed, not those of pure blood as Alexis Carrel imagined, not the priests or the intellectuals, but the masses.” - Ali Shariati
Ali Shariati, possibly the most influential Iranian intellectual of the pre-revolutionary era, would pick up where Al Ahmad left off, attempting to build a mass political movement centered around Shia Islam, Islamic Marxism, and its revolutionary potential. Born to a religious family, Shariati would be educated in both traditional Shia Islam and, after gaining a scholarship, would familiarize himself with the Western philosophical canon, receiving lectures from the likes of Michel Foucault and Henri Corbin, Heidegger’s French translator. Similar to both the German critic of modern ideology and rationalism, Shariati would again echo Heidegger’s warning of the effects of modern rationality, writing that the “tragic way that man, a primary and supra-material essence, has been forgotten . . . Both these social systems, capitalism and communism, though they differ in outward configuration, regard man as an economic animal . . . [as a result] modern technological prodigies, who ought to have freed mankind from servitude to manual labor and increased people’s leisure time, cannot do even that much . . . Humanity is every day more condemned to alienation… Not only is there no longer leisure for growth in human values, moral greatness, and spiritual aptitudes [but it has also] caused traditional moral values to decline and disappear as well”. Just as Heidegger and Al Ahmad would argue, while the two superpowers may have been geopolitically opposed, they were ontologically the same, to again quote Heidegger, “the same unrestricted organization of the average man”. Between the failure of both Soviet communism and American capitalism to provide an authentic being and identity to the Iranian people, Shariati juxtaposes the Islamic solution to the predicament of the modern world “We are clearly standing on the frontier between two eras, one where both Western civilization and Communist ideology have failed to liberate humanity, drawing it instead into disaster and causing the new spirit to recoil in disillusionment; and where humanity in search of deliverance will try a new road and take a new direction, and will liberate its essential nature. Over this dark and dispirited world, it will set a holy lamp like a new sun; by its light, the man alienated from himself will perceive anew his primordial nature, rediscover himself, and clearly see the path of salvation. Islam will play a major role in this new life and movement.” In Shariati’s view, atheism is not just some value-neutral position, but an imposition from the West. It is here where Shariati is most hostile to Western & Soviet Marxism for its explicit atheism, explaining why the communist Tudeh party necessarily fails in Iran “Not surprisingly, the public has formed the distinct impression that [the Tudeh Party] are enemies of God, country, religion, decency, spirituality, morality, honor, truth, and tradition. In other words, the public has come to the conclusion that these gentlemen have one aim: to destroy our religion and replace it with foreign atheism. The reader is now probably smirking and muttering, “these criticisms are cheap, vulgar, and common.” Yes they are. But then the common people are exactly the kind of audience we are trying to reach. And most of our common people are peasants, not industrial workers . . . they are highly religious, not secular as in capitalist Europe”. And here Shariati shows his sympathy for Heidegger, as he attempts to find meaning in the Godless modern world “Today, in philosophy, Heidegger does not speak in the (atheistic) terms of Hegel or Feuerbach. In science, Max Planck, the outstanding exponent of the new physics, opposes the ideas of Claud Bernard. Heidegger is searching for Christ in humanity, and Planck is searching for God in the world of physics”
Shariati would die just before the Islamic revolution, but his influence would live on. At the pinnacle of the Islamic revolution, Shariati and Al Ahmad would ultimately be echoed by Khomeini in Khomeini’s book, Islam and Revolution, stating that “The poisonous culture of imperialism is penetrating to the depths of towns and villages throughout the Muslim world, displacing the culture of the Qur'an, recruiting our youth en-masse to the service of foreigners and imperialists...”
Streets in Tehran would be named after both and new postage stamps would bear their images, for inspiring the youth to rediscover their religious heritage. Al Ahmad and Shariati’s names are immortalized by Iran’s Islamic Revolution, whose legacies it carried on.
Why Heidegger?
The fingerprints of the most influential figure of the conservative revolution can be found everywhere among the intellectuals of the Islamic revolution, both in rhetoric and ideas. The reason stems from both projects’ similar environments and goals, namely an anti-modernist project in the face of an increasingly aggressive liberal universalism; to Iranian intellectuals, Heidegger offers the most cogent critique of the Western canon from within the Western canon, as Shariati would put it “It is a Heidegger’s saying that we become part of what we know and therefore, the only hope for us to be saved from the disease of Westoxification and the contemporary sickening modernity is to understand the true face and spirit of the west.” And Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being and Time, shows clearly why his philosophy would appeal to an anti-modernist project.
Part of the reason for Heidegger’s influence is his suspicion towards universals, already from his first endeavors in philosophy, he criticizes his mentor Edmund Husserl and phenomenology for not “being rooted in the soil”, Heidegger would even reject Hussrel’s view of history for being too universal, instead siding with Wilhelm Dilthey, an anti-universalist philosopher. Historicism would remain a constant theme throughout Heidegger’s philosophical career and history plays a key role in the study of being, as Heidegger writes “... it is inevitable that inquiry into being, which was designated with regard to its ontic-ontological necessity, is itself characterized by historicity”. Inauthentic history is caused by the modern triumph of rationality, resulting in a lack of roots in the western world, and this lack of roots has not allowed the western world to fully comprehend history. They are cut off from the past in an unprecedented way, as the past is an essential part of us, as Heidegger states “Whether explicitly or not, it [Dasein] is its past. It is its own past not only in such a way that its past, as it were, pushes itself along "behind" it, and that it possesses what is past as a property that is still objectively present and at times has an effect on it.” In avoiding its past, the modern West has also avoided historical being, starting with the French Revolution’s attempt to reject the past and create a new Man born free of a historical ethos; to Heidegger, this inauthentic being amounted to nihilism, which he described as “Merely to chase after beings in the midst of the oblivion of Being—that is nihilism.”
All of these themes - nihilism, rootless cosmopolitanism, technology, and inauthenticity - are what attracted Iranian intellectuals such as Ahmad Fardid and Ali Shariati to Heidegger, as he offers an intellectual defense of historical particularity in the face of an ever-increasing universalism. Heidegger’s own intellectual background, that of the Kriegsideologie, has similar origins to that of the Iranian revolution, as both emerge as an attempt to create or rediscover authentic being, being as history; a rediscovery of spiritual life as it lays dead in the shadow of the materialism of Soviet communism and American capitalism. Above all, Heidegger presents a new way for the rediscovery of civilization; it should therefore come as no surprise that almost all anti-universalist project has their origins in Heidegger, be it the French New Right or Alexander Dugin’s Eurasianism. Heidegger presents a way of cultural affirmation in the face of secular modernity, in which unsurprisingly Dugin, who also a Heideggerian, highlights the rediscovery of civilizational identity. The return to being - or Ereignis as Heidegger termed it - is foundational for the Fourth Political Theory, as Dugin writes in the Fourth Political Theory “Heidegger used a special term, Ereignis – the 'event,' to describe this sudden return of Being. It takes place exactly at midnight of the world's night – at the darkest moment in history. Heidegger himself constantly vacillated as to whether this point had been reached, or 'not quite yet.' The eternal 'not yet'...Heidegger’s philosophy may prove to be the central axis threading everything around itself – ranging from the re-conceived second and third political theories to the return of theology and mythology…Thus at the heart of Fourth Political Theory, as its magnetic centre, lies the trajectory of the approaching of the Ereignis (the 'Event), which will embody the triumphant return of Being, at the exact moment when mankind forgets about it, once and for all, to the point where the last traces of it disappear.” Similar to the concept of Westoxification, Dugin offers a critique of the West’s claim as an objective, universal civilization, which in his view, is the equivalent of the death of being and history: “Globalization is equivalent to the end of history. Both go hand-in-hand. They are semantically linked. Different societies have different histories. That means different futures. If we are going to make a 'tomorrow' common to all societies existing on the planet, if we are going to propose a global future, then we first need to destroy the history of those other societies, to delete their pasts, to annihilate the continuous moment of the present, virtualizing the realities that are constructed by the content of historical time. A 'common future' means the deletion of particular histories… Globalization is the death of time. Globalization cancels out… the Dasein of Heidegger. There would neither be any more time, nor being.”
The new protests in Iran have rediscovered the fundamental question that inspired the Islamic revolution of Iran. After the tragic death of Mahsa Amini under police custody - despite no evidence being presented of foul play indicting Iran’s police - the urban Tehrani liberal segment of Iran has gone to protest, riot, and vandalize in the street, demanding the end of the morality police and even the Islamic Republic. Iranians have been presented with a question: should Iran submit to the West’s liberal world order, or are they entitled to their own independent civilizational reality?
Great stuff, well-written.
Patriots in Control