Age of Anger

by Pankaj Mishra

  In an essay on Pushkin, Dostoyevsky underlined a tragic dilemma: of a society that assimilates European ways through every pore only to realize it could never be truly European. The victim of feckless Westernization was someone whose ‘conscience murmurs to him that he is a hollow man’, and who tends to languish in a ‘state of insatiable, bilious malice’, suffering from ‘a contradiction between two heterogeneous elements: an egoism extending to the limits of self-adoration and a malicious self-contempt.’ This mimic man was as much a stranger to himself as to society at large. In his soul was amour propre ramped up to a degree that Rousseau had not anticipated in his own diagnosis of the bourgeois soul.

  Such a tortured figure often ended up searching for a native identity to uphold against the maddeningly seductive but befuddling West; and enumerating Western vices seemed to confirm the existence of local virtues. Russian writers from Herzen to Tolstoy repetitively denounced the Western bourgeois obsession with private property while holding up the Russian muzhik as an admirably altruistic figure; they mourned, anticipating the Futurist obsession with ‘beauty’, the disappearance of idealism and poetry from human lives in the West.

  A similar lament appears in the work of Japan’s foremost novelist, Natsume Soseki, who spent two miserable years in fin de siècle London. Novelists as varied as Junichiro Tanizaki and Yukio Mishima sought to return to an earlier ‘wholeness’. Tanizaki tried to re-create an indigenous aesthetic by pointing to the importance of ‘shadows’ – a whole world of distinctions banished from Japanese life by the modern invention of the light bulb. Mishima invoked, more gaudily, Japan’s lost culture of the samurai by dressing up as one. Both were fuelled by rage and regret that, as Tanizaki wrote in In Praise of Shadows (1933), ‘we have met a superior civilization and have had to surrender to it, and we have had to leave a road we have followed for thousands of years’.

  Gandhi tried to become an English gentleman before going on to write Hind Swaraj (1909), a book pointing to the dangers of educated men from colonized lands mindlessly imitating the ways of their colonial masters. Briefly awestruck by the corporate and commercial culture of Anglo-America, China’s foremost modern intellectuals, Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, recoiled into Confucian notions of community and harmony. The early impact on Africa’s tradition-minded societies of a West organized for profit and power is memorably summed up by the title of Chinua Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958). A more apocalyptic vision of their effect in the Middle East is found in Abd al-Rahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (1984), which describes the spiritual devastation of Arab tribal societies by American oil companies.

  A Crow Trying to Walk Like a Partridge

  Travelling to Britain from his ‘village world’, the narrator of Naipaul’s autobiographical novel The Enigma of Arrival records ‘a panic’ and ‘then a dwindling of the sense of the self’. ‘Less than twenty-four hours out of my own place,’ he remembers, ‘the humiliations had begun to bank up.’ And this ‘rawness of nerves’ lingers, turning his subsequent life in England ‘savorless, and much of it mean’. Exposure to the West usually marked ‘the first beginning of the epoch’, as Dostoyevsky wrote, ‘when our leading people brutally separated into two parties, then entered into a furious civil war’.

  This civil war often occurred within the same human soul. In Driss Chraïbi’s first novel, The Simple Past (1954), a student in a French missionary school confronts the violence he has done to his identity:

  You were the issue of the Orient, and through your painful past, your imaginings, your education, you are going to triumph over the Orient. You have never believed in Allah. You know how to dissect the legends, you think in French, you are a reader of Voltaire and an admirer of Kant.

  Like their counterparts elsewhere, the mimic men of postcolonial countries, the intellectuals of Muslim countries lived out ideological mismatches and conflicts in their inner lives. Emerging into a Europeanized world, they were conscious of their weakness but also galvanized by their apparent power to shape the future using the techniques and ideas pioneered by Europe. Like Russia’s nineteenth-century intelligentsia, and the intellectuals of Japan, India and China, they all initially expatriated, intellectually if not physically, to the West.

  Many of them also became members, like Naipaul and Rushdie, of what the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah calls a ‘comprador intelligentsia’: ‘a relatively small, Western-style, Western-trained group of writers and thinkers who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery’. Some others began to think, after close observation of European and American politics and history, that Voltaire and Kant, after all, might not hold the key to redemption, which may lie closer to home, in indigenous religious and cultural traditions.

  But, while re-staking their ground, and claiming a nativist identity, intellectuals in Muslim countries absorbed many of the ideas and premises of modern Western thought, such as progress, egalitarianism, justice, the nation state and republican virtue. A fascinating example is Jalal Al-e-Ahmad himself, the son of an exacting cleric, whose piety had acquired a harsh edge as Iran’s secular ruler, Reza Shah Pahlavi, imposed European ways on his subjects by fiat, banning Muharram ceremonies, replacing the clerical habit and turban with hat and tie. It was Al-e-Ahmad’s fate to negotiate the divide between the traditional religious authority represented by his father and the culturally deracinating secularism of the paternalist Shah.

  Supported by Western powers, and inspired by Atatürk, Iran’s ruler not only crushed the country’s many tribes in order to establish a centralized administration. He ordered, and then brutally enforced, the unveiling of women (with the net result that many women never left their homes). The autocratic tradition of double-quick modernization was upheld by his son and successor, Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who wanted to make villages ‘disappear’ in his attempt to manufacture metropolitan individuals in his country.

  He came to be hated by many Iranian intellectuals as a pawn of the West after 1953, when the American CIA and British MI6 conspired to bring down an elected government and invest the Shah with total authority, and to confer on the Western powers many of Iran’s oil and business profits. Visiting Iran in 1966, a British Member of Parliament called Jock Bruce-Gardyne was typical of the Shah’s breathless, sycophantic guests: Tehran was a ‘Mercedes museum’, the British car company Leyland had ‘established a strong and flourishing bridge head’, and British double-decker buses looked ‘surprisingly at home under the blue skies of Tehran’. (The following year, Western support for the Shah, peaking in a brutal police assault on a demonstration against his visit to Berlin, provoked a radical German student movement into being.)

  * * *

  Al-e-Ahmad, who spent several years in prison after the 1953 coup, started to question the uncritical embrace of and dependence on the West, which in his view had resulted in a people who were neither authentically Iranian nor Western. Rather, they had, he wrote, resembled a crow who tried to imitate the way that a partridge walked and forgot how to walk like a crow without learning to walk like a partridge. As the years passed, Al-e-Ahmad wanted, above all, Iranian life and culture to be authentic, not ersatz.

  Al-e-Ahmad explored the ideas of Marx; he translated Camus, and brought an intense focus to his reading of Heidegger (to whom he had been introduced at the University of Tehran by an influential specialist in German philosophy called Ahmad Fardid, who actually coined the term ‘Westoxification’). These very modern critics of modernity’s spiritual damage turned out to be stops on Al-e-Ahmad’s journey to a conception of Islam itself as a revolutionary ideology. A series of ethnographic studies of rural Iran convinced him that the ‘machine civilization’ of the West posed a direct threat to Iran’s culture as well as economy. ‘To respond to the machine’s call to urbanization, we uproot the people from the villages and send them to the city, where there’s neither work nor housing and shelter for them, while the machine steps into the village itself.’ He remarked
caustically of the Saudi king Ibn Sa’ud, who ‘amidst the ferocious beheadings and hand-cuttings of his own era of ignorance, has surrendered to the machine’s transformations’.

  Al-e-Ahmad spoke from his own experience of Tehran’s slums as he described the fate of rural migrants. (Empathy with rural migrants coerced into an ambitious project of national modernization also motivated Sayyid Qutb, who himself came to Cairo as a teenager from a village.) Visiting an oil installation, Al-e-Ahmad concluded, ‘the entire local and cultural identity and existence will be swept away. And why? So that a factory can operate in “The West”, or that workers in Iceland or Newfoundland are not jobless.’

  He derived his greatest inspiration from a trip to Israel in 1962. There had been many Muslim admirers of Jewish political and cultural renaissance since Rashid Rida in 1898 hailed Zionism as an inspiring example for the umma (the Muslim community). They concurred with David Ben-Gurion, who in 1957 declared that the establishment of the state of Israel ‘is one of the manifestations of the messianic vision which has come to pass in our time’. For Al-e-Ahmad, Israel with its evidently Spartan community knit together by religion, language and prominent national identity seemed to offer a way forward for Iran:

  In the eyes of this Easterner, Israel, despite all its defects and despite all contradictions it harbours, is the basis of a power: The first step in the promise of a future which is not that late … Israel is a model, [better] than any other model, of how to deal with the West.

  Israel today, one of its leading chroniclers David Grossman writes, is far from being ‘a unique national creation’, and has turned into ‘a clumsy and awkward imitation of Western countries’. But this fate – common to many other unique national creations – could not have been anticipated in the early 1960s by an awestruck Iranian observer of the Israeli ‘miracle’. Besides, like all political thinkers, Al-e-Ahmad was searching for a way for his society to define, unite and defend itself.

  Rousseau had advised Poles besieged by an expansionist Russia in the 1770s that if they ‘see to it that no Pole can ever become a Russian, I guarantee that Russia will not subjugate Poland’. In this earliest known advocacy of ‘national character’, Rousseau had urged Polish leaders to ‘establish the Republic so firmly in the hearts of the Poles’ that even if foreign powers swallow up their country they will not be able to ‘digest’ it. As France confronted multiple invasions in 1794, Robespierre insisted that nationalist passions could discipline and unite the French against their enemies. Al-e-Ahmad, too, wanted to immunize Iran psychologically and emotionally against foreign antibodies.

  Married to a writer and feminist, he frequently derided religion as mumbo-jumbo. But, contemptuous of the Shah’s modernization programme, unimpressed by Communism, which inspired slavish devotion among its local adherents to the Soviet Union, and appalled by the arrogance of Harvard-educated liberal elites, Al-e-Ahmad saw religion as the only likely base for mass activism in Iran. In Westoxification he began to argue that politicized Islam offered the best way for Iranians to formulate a proud indigenous alternative to capitalism and Communism.

  * * *

  His emphasis on pride and dignity was not incidental. Ordinary Iranians felt deeply humiliated by their monarch. Consolidating his power, the Shah had come to radiate supreme arrogance with his corrupt sycophants and Western advisors (and his dissolute private life, rumours of which circulated widely). The most garish symbol of his aloofness from his subjects was a grand party in 1971 in Persepolis celebrating 2,500 years of ‘monarchy in Iran’. A French decorator built a tent city for visiting monarchs and heads of state; Elizabeth Arden created a new perfume and named it ‘Farah’ after the Shah’s wife; Maxim’s of Paris delivered food that was entirely French except for the caviar.

  A cleric living in exile in Iraq called Seyyed Ruhollah Khomeini denounced the pageantry, asserting, in defiance of many centuries of Islamic history, that Islam was fundamentally opposed to monarchy. A year earlier Khomeini had set out his vision of velāyat-e faqīh, or guardianship by jurist – a government that guided by Islamic jurists eradicates foreign influences and prevents the pleasure-seeking ruling classes from exploiting the weak. But at the time the more influential critic of the Persepolis jamboree was an Iranian intellectual called Ali Shariati.

  Shariati, a Sorbonne-educated son of a diminished cleric who spent much time in Paris translating existentialist philosophers, took up Al-e-Ahmad’s task of rewriting Islamic history in the language of modern utopia. Shariati aimed to convince young Iranians of the political viability of Shiite Islam, and to assimilate secular political objectives into ‘Islamic’ ideas. Shariati was opposed to ‘clerical despotism’ (extremist followers of his in 1979 would launch a campaign of assassination against Khomeini’s fellow clerics). Called the Rousseau of the Iranian revolution, he invoked a quasi-Rousseauian trinity of Azadi, Barabari, Erfa’n – ‘Liberty, Equality and Spirituality’. In this formula, liberty and democracy could be achieved without capitalism, equality without totalitarianism, and spirituality and religion without clerical authority.

  A Holy Insurrection of the Masses, or More National Emulation?

  In the 1970s, as the Shah intensified his Westernizing reforms with the help of a repressive security apparatus, and retreated further into his bubble of pro-monarchist elites and Western admirers, Shariati became his iconic opposition in Iran. Shariati’s biggest supporters were among Iran’s nascent intelligentsia comprised of university students, intellectuals, urban classes of workers and migrants. But, echoing Rousseau’s distrust of intellectuals, Shariati was careful to confine the intelligentsia, the critical conscience of the society, to the task of initiating a ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Reformation’. There was no need for a technocratic and intellectual vanguard. It was the people who would bring about revolution.

  So they did in 1978, a year after Shariati died, under a leader he might have condemned as a very model of clerical despotism and arbitrary vanguardism. Born in a small town in 1902, Khomeini was educated as a cleric and philosopher. He came to prominence in 1963 at the head of a vigorous opposition to the Shah of Iran’s programme of modernization called the ‘White Revolution’, which included the privatization of state-owned enterprises, enfranchisement of women and mass literacy. He spent most of the next decade and a half in exile while Iranian youth absorbed the message of Al-e-Ahmad and Shariati. (Iran’s current supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, was present at one of their rare joint meetings in Mashhad back in 1969.)

  Khomeini censured laymen interpreting Islamic scripture. He thought that Sayyid Qutb was an impostor who ‘could interpret only a certain aspect of the Quran, and that much only imperfectly’. He would have raged against such a figure as Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American Salafi ideologue, who, despite lacking all formal Islamic training, would build a large base of followers in Europe and America with his internet disquisitions on the Quran and Hadith. But he was careful not to criticize his intellectual predecessors in Iran. In fact, he borrowed from Shariati and Al-e-Ahmad in forging his amalgam of revolutionary discourse and Islam:

  Colonialism has partitioned our homeland and has turned the Moslems into separate peoples … The only means that we possess to unite the Moslem nation, to liberate its lands from the grip of the colonialists and to topple the agent governments of colonialism is to seek to establish our Islamic government. The efforts of this government will be crowned with success when we become able to destroy the heads of treason, the idols, the human images and the false gods who disseminate injustice and corruption on earth.

  Khomeini railed against the whole notion of appropriative mimicry: ‘As soon as someone goes somewhere or invents something, we should not hurry to abandon our religion and its laws, which regulate the life of man and provide for his well-being in this world and the hereafter.’ In 1978 Khomeini returned from exile in France to assume the leadership of a massive popular revolt against the Shah.

  The clergy’s influence had grown and gr
own in preceding years; the Iranian masses, uprooted from their rural homes and crowded into south Tehran’s slums, gravitated to authoritative figures in their radically new conditions of uncertainty. The Shah’s brutal state had exterminated or silenced many secular and left-wing opponents of the regime. In this vacuum, Khomeini cemented the clergy’s hold. Khomeinism also initially attracted secular intellectuals, the rushanfekran, even though its primary social base was constituted by clerics, their bazaari allies and the urban poor.

  As in the original revolution of the modern era (the French), popular sovereignty in Iran turned out to be as ruthlessly absolute as royal sovereignty. ‘We must smother,’ Robespierre had said, ‘the internal and external enemies of the Republic or perish with them.’ Soon after assuming power, Khomeini inaugurated his own post-revolutionary reign of terror, sentencing thousands of enemies of the Islamic Republic to death. These were held guilty of mofsed fel-arz (spreading corruption on earth) or for being taghuti (idol-worshippers) and monafeqin (hypocrites). Khomeini himself coined much of the new language of retribution against members of the venal ancien régime.

  * * *

  One of his typical victims was Amir Abbas Hoveida, the prime minister of Iran until 1977. Born into an aristocratic family, and educated predominantly in French, Hoveida was a francophile connoisseur of poetry and art, whom the Shah himself arrested just before his downfall in a failed attempt to distance his regime from Westernized Iranians. Khomeini, however, was determined to strike a deeper blow.