Description:

proposing be read as ‘the last Muslim intellectual’. To do so I would like to begin with the last time I had an urgent occasion to write on Al-e Ahmad. Detailing the particular time of that

Review

Hamid Dabashi's The Last Muslim Intellectual: The Life and Legacy of Jalal Al-e Ahmad (2021) is an ambitious, deeply personal, and theoretically dense reappraisal of one of twentieth-century Iran's most consequential public intellectuals. Published by Edinburgh University Press as part of its Edinburgh Historical Studies of Iran and the Persian World series, the book represents Dabashi's return — some thirty years after his landmark chapter on Al-e Ahmad in Theology of Discontent (1993) — to a figure who has haunted Iranian political and literary consciousness since his untimely death in 1969 at the age of forty-six. What distinguishes this book from the considerable existing scholarship on Al-e Ahmad is Dabashi's explicit project: to rescue Al-e Ahmad from two opposing camps of abuse (the Islamic Republic's hagiographic appropriation and the liberal secularists' demonisation) and to reposition him as the essential precursor of what Dabashi terms a "post-Islamist liberation theology."

The book unfolds across nine chapters, each addressing a distinct dimension of Al-e Ahmad's life and output — his biography, his marriage to the towering novelist Simin Daneshvar, his mastery of the essay form, his seminal texts Gharbzadegi and On the Services and Treasons of Intellectuals, his literary fiction, his extensive domestic and international travels, his translation projects, and finally his lasting legacy and its implications for post-Islamist thought. This structure allows Dabashi to build a cumulative portrait that is far richer than the usual reductive treatment of Al-e Ahmad as either a proto-Islamist or a nativist reactionary.

The Introduction and first chapter ("Remembrance of Things Past") establish Dabashi's central thesis with characteristic rhetorical force: Al-e Ahmad was "the last Muslim intellectual" in a precise sense — the last figure whose Islam was dialogical, worldly, and in robust conversation with non-Islamic forces (Marxism, existentialism, anticolonial nationalism) before the Islamic Republic's triumph reduced Iranian Islam to a "one-dimensional" ideological weapon. Dabashi traces the political periodisation of Al-e Ahmad's era with meticulous care: from the Constitutional Revolution of 1906-11 through Reza Shah's tyranny, the Tudeh Party's rise and fall, Mossaddegh's nationalisation and the CIA-MI6 coup of 1953, to Khomeini's 1963 uprising and the decade of cultural cosmopolitanism that preceded the 1977-79 revolution. This historical scaffolding is essential, for Dabashi insists that Al-e Ahmad can only be understood as a product of a specific "cosmopolitan worldliness" — a pluralistic political culture where Islam, socialism, and anticolonial nationalism coexisted in creative tension.

Chapter two ("Something of an Autobiography") offers a close reading of Al-e Ahmad's own autobiographical texts, Masalan Sharh-e Ahval and Yek Chah-o-Do-Chaleh, attending not merely to their content but to their formal strategies. Dabashi identifies a recurring pattern: after each political disappointment (leaving the Tudeh Party, the failure of Mossaddegh's movement, the collapse of Khomeini's 1963 uprising), Al-e Ahmad retreats to writing, travel, and domestic life before surging forward again. The chapter makes an important theoretical contribution by applying Paul de Man's concept of autobiography as "de-facement" and emphasising how Al-e Ahmad's split between his person and his pen ("in qalam") constitutes a transferral of sacred authority from his father's Qur'anic vocation to his own secular-prophetic commitment to writing.

The third chapter ("Her Husband Jalal") is among the book's most original contributions. Dabashi reads the relationship between Al-e Ahmad and Simin Daneshvar not oppositionally — as a tired liberal feminism has habitually done — but "in apposition," as complementary creative voices whose dialogical interplay constitutes something like a Jungian anima/animus. Drawing on Daneshvar's remarkable essay Shohar-e Man Jalal and the four massive volumes of published correspondence between the couple, Dabashi reveals the deeply passionate love at the heart of their marriage and argues convincingly that Daneshvar was not merely Al-e Ahmad's first reader but his constitutive interlocutor — that their respective prose voices were formed in and through each other. The discussion of Sangi bar Guri (A Tombstone), Al-e Ahmad's agonised confession of infertility published posthumously against Daneshvar's wishes, is handled with nuance, resisting both the liberal feminist reading that reduces it to patriarchal self-pity and the Islamist appropriation that uses it to claim Al-e Ahmad for their cause.

Chapter four ("The Master Essayist") makes the case that Al-e Ahmad's signature contribution to Persian letters was not any single text but the genre of the essay itself. Dabashi traces the genealogy of Al-e Ahmad's prose from the classical masters (Naser Khosrow, Sa'di) through the simplification of nineteenth-century travel narratives to the constitutional prose of the early twentieth century. The chapter's most striking argument is that Al-e Ahmad's prose worked through "defamiliarisation" (Shklovsky's ostranenie) — making the familiar strange and the strange familiar — and that the power of his writing lay in its mimicry of orality, its feigned conversational intimacy, its approximation to what Dabashi calls "transcendental authenticity." The range of Al-e Ahmad's essays — from literary criticism of Hedayat and Nima Yushij to reflections on painting, anthropology, Dostoyevsky, and Gandhi — reveals an impatient, omnivorous mind that wrote "like a horse sensing an earthquake" rather than a seismograph registering its magnitude.

The fifth chapter ("Gharbzadegi: The Condition of Coloniality") is perhaps the book's most important and controversial intervention. Dabashi performs a close, chapter-by-chapter reading of Al-e Ahmad's famous essay and delivers a bracingly honest assessment: only the third chapter (the "Diagnosis of a Disease") plus fragments of the final chapters constitute a genuinely cogent critique of colonial modernity; the rest — particularly chapters four and five with their ahistorical fantasies about "the West" — is "complete ahistorical drivel." This is refreshingly candid from a scholar deeply sympathetic to Al-e Ahmad's project. Dabashi then systematically dismantles the two major critiques of Gharbzadegi: Daryoush Ashuri's "deeply colonised mind" and Fereydun Adamiyyat's Enlightenment fundamentalism, showing how both critics were trapped in the same "West and the Rest" binary they accused Al-e Ahmad of perpetuating. The chapter's most important move is to reframe Gharbzadegi as an expression of the same "condition of coloniality" diagnosed by Cesaire, Fanon, Memmi, Malcolm X, Du Bois, and Ashis Nandy — thinkers that Iranian critics were "blissfully unaware" of because of their own provincialism.

The companion analysis of On the Services and Treasons of Intellectuals is equally penetrating. Dabashi identifies the book's fundamental question — why couldn't the secular left and the Shi'a clergy unite during Khomeini's 1963 uprising? — as Al-e Ahmad's failed attempt at "self-theorisation." The basic problem was Al-e Ahmad's inability to grasp the Habermasian concept of the public sphere, which would have explained both the conditions of his own emergence as a public intellectual and the impossibility of the unity he desired.

Chapter six ("Literary Interludes") reassesses Al-e Ahmad's fiction with a frankness that will surprise readers expecting hagiography. Dabashi states plainly that Al-e Ahmad's works of fiction "have not" endured the test of time and that beside Hedayat, Daneshvar, Golestan, and Golshiri, Al-e Ahmad's literary work stands "in a whole different category." Yet this is not dismissal but recontextualisation: Al-e Ahmad's fiction matters not for its literary sophistication but for the way it extends his signature prose across genres. The chapter's most brilliant section concerns Al-e Ahmad's fabricated "Fourteenth Epistle of Paul the Apostle to Writers" — a fake biblical text that Dabashi reads as Al-e Ahmad's supreme act of literary defamiliarisation, where he "owned a Christian prose in his perfectly Muslim politics."

Chapter seven ("Travelling In and Out of a Homeland") is the book's longest and most theoretically inventive chapter. Dabashi proposes reading all of Al-e Ahmad's travels through the dialectic of Safar and Hazar, mapped onto Freud's Unheimlich/Heimlich and Shklovsky's ostranenie. The chapter provides careful readings of Al-e Ahmad's Hajj pilgrimage (Khasi dar Miqat, which Dabashi considers "far more cogent and powerful than his famous Gharbzadegi"), his controversial trip to Israel, his Russian conference visit, and his American sojourn at Kissinger's Harvard seminar. The extended demolition of the English translation of Al-e Ahmad's Israel travelogue, fraudulently titled The Israeli Republic, is devastating scholarship — Dabashi shows precisely how the translator's shaky Persian and ideological agenda produced a text that turns Al-e Ahmad into a theorist of Velayat-e faqih avant la lettre, an interpretation that is "utterly bizarre, unfounded and outlandish."

Chapter eight ("Translating the World") treats Al-e Ahmad's extensive translation work — from Dostoyevsky, Camus, Sartre, Gide, and Ionesco to Ernst Junger — as a form of intellectual autobiography and ventriloquism. The central insight is that Al-e Ahmad's translations were not acts of linguistic transfer but of self-projection: in Gide's disillusionment with Soviet socialism he found vindication for leaving the Tudeh Party; in Sartre's Dirty Hands he found the dramatic persona of the committed intellectual. Dabashi's argument that the false association with Heidegger — mediated through Junger and the misguided Tehran University professoriate — has sent "generations of Al-e Ahmad scholars on the goose chase of his Heideggerianism" is convincing and important.

The final chapter ("From a Short Life to a Lasting Legacy") draws together the book's threads toward the articulation of a post-Islamist liberation theology. While this chapter occasionally strains under Dabashi's ambition, it effectively argues that Al-e Ahmad's cosmopolitan Islam, read in conjunction with Latin American liberation theology and the Frankfurt School's critical theory, offers the blueprint for a renewed Muslim intellectual engagement with the world beyond the exhausted binary of Islamism and secularism.

The book has notable strengths: the extraordinary depth of Dabashi's engagement with primary sources in Persian; the theoretical sophistication of the Shklovsky/Brecht/Freud framework for reading Al-e Ahmad's prose; the unflinching honesty about Al-e Ahmad's intellectual limitations alongside genuine admiration for his moral courage; and the sustained effort to place Al-e Ahmad in global anticolonial context alongside Cesaire, Fanon, Du Bois, and Benjamin rather than the provincial framework of "Iranian Studies." Among its weaknesses: the book is discursive to a fault, with theoretical digressions that sometimes lose the thread of the argument; Dabashi's frequent self-citation and autobiographical insertions occasionally tip into self-aggrandisement; and the "post-Islamist liberation theology" remains somewhat abstract, more a promissory note than a fully articulated programme. The prose style, while powerful, is repetitive — certain phrases ("cosmopolitan worldliness," "dialogical and contrapuntal") recur with liturgical frequency.

Nevertheless, this is an essential work of intellectual history — the most comprehensive, theoretically ambitious, and critically honest assessment of Jalal Al-e Ahmad available in any language. It succeeds in its central task of liberating Al-e Ahmad from both the Islamic Republic's cult of appropriation and the liberal secularists' cult of denunciation, recovering a world of cosmopolitan Muslim intellectual life that the calamities of the past half-century have all but erased from memory.

Reviewed 2026-05-15

Notable Quotes

Today we do not remember him as a mortal human being, for he has been turned into an allegory of himself, a metaphor for our time, emblematic of something larger than himself.

Dabashi's opening characterisation of Al-e Ahmad as a historical figure who has been turned into an allegory. — intellectual legacy, myth-making, public intellectuals

His admirers adore him, whilst his political enemies despise him and hold him responsible for the atrocities of the Islamic Republic – ignoring the fact that he died decades before Khomeini returned to Iran to launch his tyranny. He has therefore become something of an Oedipal figure – as if without simultaneously loving and killing him his admirers or detractors cannot be born as adults.

On the twin abuses of Al-e Ahmad's legacy by both the Islamic Republic and its opponents. — political appropriation, Oedipal complex, postcolonial nationhood

Al-e Ahmad was the last organic Muslim intellectual, rooted in layers of Muslim learning and yet openly defiant of all of them at one and the same time. He stood on the edge between his parents' generation of scholastic learning on the one side, and the widening horizons of worldly exposures to the larger postcolonial world on the other.

Dabashi's central thesis about the cosmopolitan worldliness that Al-e Ahmad personified and that was subsequently destroyed. — cosmopolitanism, Islam, dialogical thinking, post-Islamism

With the systematic destruction of all its alterities, the Islamic Republic upon the fortieth anniversary of its violent takeover following a multifaceted revolution paradoxically ceased to be Islamic, and Muslims ceased to be Muslims, for by now the ruling state had conquered and compromised the entirety of the public sphere.

Explaining how the Islamic Republic destroyed the pluralistic political culture that made Al-e Ahmad possible. — Islamic Republic, one-dimensionality, public sphere destruction

Al-e Ahmad's evident obsession with the sanctity of the pen is a substitutionary sacred object projected from his lapsed Shi'ism onto his prophetic zeal as a public intellectual – the passion with which he wrote, and the writing that dwarfs almost the entirety of the mediocrity attacking him, was no ordinary passion.

Describing Al-e Ahmad's relationship with his pen as a transfer of sacred authority from religion to public intellectualism. — sacred and secular, pen as sacred object, Shi'ism, writing

I looked at Jalal. He was staring at the window, gazing through the windowpanes, cutting through the darkness covering the alder trees, trying to reach the seashores. He was smiling – peaceful and calm. As if he had discovered all the mysteries, as if the two curtains had been lifted and let him see the secrets, and now he was smiling, smiling and telling us 'Oh how I fooled you all and left.' This is the worst thing he ever did to me.

Simin Daneshvar's account of her husband's death, written as a lyrical lamentation. — death, mourning, love, prose as art

If I were to come back to life I would still marry Jalal, of course I wish I could marry Hafez, Rumi, or Shams . . . even as a co-wife . . . In the world of cowardly men, Jalal was a singularly chivalrous and kind man. How well he knew how to love, how to caress, and how to soothe.

Daneshvar's final word on her husband, years after his death and despite his flaws. — love, marriage, forgiveness, legacy

From morning to evening, the two of us, husband and wife, sit in front of each other just like two mirrors witnessing a space full of nothing, or else full of failures, but something must run along in between these two mirrors so we can have a vision of the infinity, but right now the fact is that we just look like two walls with no street between us for there is no one to cross that street.

Al-e Ahmad's agonised reflection on childlessness in Sangi bar Guri, using the metaphor of facing mirrors. — childlessness, marriage, existential crisis, infinity

This West is the entirety of Europe and Soviet Union and the entirety of North America, or let's say advanced countries, or developed countries or industrial countries, or countries that are able with the help of machineries to turn raw material into more complicated products and present them as commodities to the market.

Dabashi's assessment of the core of Gharbzadegi stripped of its superfluous verbiage. — colonial modernity, centre and periphery, economic domination

Not a single item he presents here makes any sense, and they are all signs of undiluted historical illiteracy and delusional fantasies, and conspiratorial predilections. Having just told us by 'the West' he means something very specific and something very recent, he now spends a whole chapter looking ahistorically for its historical roots.

Dabashi's frank assessment of Gharbzadegi's weakest chapters on the historical roots of 'the West'. — intellectual honesty, historical illiteracy, critical assessment

The colonial condition of de-subjection as subjectivity infiltrates and occupies the colonised mind in the way that the condition of governmentality infiltrates and dominates the subject of European liberal democracies. You become the vehicle of your own de-humanisation.

On the condition of coloniality as the postcolonial equivalent of Foucauldian governmentality. — coloniality, governmentality, Foucault, postcolonial theory

He wrote like a jazz musician improvising. This is the reason why the best theoretical instrument we can take with us when we enter the long, winding, exciting sojourn with Al-e Ahmad's prose is Shklovsky's theory of enstrangement picked up by Brecht in his theory of Verfremdung.

Dabashi compares Al-e Ahmad's prose to a jazz musician improvising. — prose style, Persian language, defamiliarisation, literary criticism

While for Barthes and his Europe the death of the author was the unleashing of the text, for much of the rest of the world at the mercy of the European colonial desubjection of the postcolonial person the evidence of the text was the birth certificate of its author.

Dabashi argues for the birth rather than the death of the postcolonial author, against Barthes. — authorship, postcolonial theory, Barthes, literary theory

This morning when I said 'Ya Ayyuha al-Nabi/Oh Thou the Prophet' suddenly I shivered. The Prophet's mausoleum was right in front of me, people were circumambulating it . . . suddenly I burst into tears and ran away from the Prophet's mosque.

Al-e Ahmad's epiphany during his Hajj pilgrimage at the Prophet's mosque in Medina. — Hajj, spiritual transformation, Islam, prayer

I realised I was just a speck of dust having come to the appointed desert not a person to a meeting place, and there and then I realised that Time was now the Eternity, that is to say the ocean of Time, and Miqat was anywhere and anytime, and I was alone with myself.

Al-e Ahmad's existential reflection while travelling through the desert en route to Mecca. — travel, self-discovery, Sufism, existentialism

He died unable to utter that sentence in that fatal moment when all his courage and imagination was at stake.

Dabashi's metaphor for Al-e Ahmad's inability to introduce himself to Sartre in Paris as encapsulating his relationship with 'the West'. — Europe, intellectual anxiety, colonial modernity, self-doubt

His art was in his prose, the open-ended fluidity of his diction, his oscillations between fact and fiction, home and abroad, compositions and translations, being a stranger at home and at home in foreign lands. He made the world familiar by making it look strange and in the process he de-alienated us from our colonially alienated selves.

On the nature of Al-e Ahmad's prose and its political function in overcoming colonial alienation. — prose as politics, defamiliarisation, decolonisation, Persian literature

I think that rekindling the sectarian and religious spirit would further hinder this necessary unification, which is already difficult to achieve – and distance this still non-existent nation, which is at best a 'nation in the making', from its ideal future, by bringing it closer to this past!

Frantz Fanon's prophetic letter to Ali Shari'ati, warning against rekindling sectarian religious spirit. — Fanon, Shari'ati, religion and revolution, sectarianism

The most volatile, the most real, location of Islam is on a boat floating desperately somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea. 'Islam' will have to be redefined from there, on that sinking boat, with desperate Muslims and non-Muslims about to be drowned.

Dabashi's argument about where Islam's future lies, not in any Islamic Republic. — Islam, refugees, displacement, future of faith

I write about anything about which I have the right to say something – such as dialect or travelogues or anything else... Because in our time the machine has turned in issues for which you need no expertise, even for painting, even for film... I have ears I have eyes I watch a movie just as a viewer not as an expert.

On the essayist as a type, drawing on E. B. White's definition and exceeding it. — essay writing, public intellectuals, literary genre

I therefore propose a structural affinity between these two worlds, one post-Holocaust, the other postcolonial, with the Holocaust and the colonial savageries of Europe on similar planes of affinities as traumas caused by European capitalist modernity.

On the structural affinity between post-Holocaust and postcolonial critical thinking as a basis for transcontinental critical theory. — critical theory, Frankfurt School, postcolonial thought, Holocaust