[R-G] Shi'ism, Scientific and Utopian

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

<http://montages.blogspot.com/2007/10/shiism-scientific-and-utopian.html>
Shi'ism, Scientific and Utopian

What is the greatest danger to intellectuals in the Iranian diaspora
today? Their desire to "look to the West."1 Their temptation to appeal
to "American power," in the name of "a supposedly grateful Iranian
public, led by a Westernized middle class," through ideological
warfare that makes Iran out to be a Republic of Fear.

     . . . [Kanan] Makiya argued, that, once freed, they [Iraqis]
     would throw off the tired orthodoxies of Arab politics and,
     in their despair, look to the West.

     . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

     "It was doomed," [Ali] Allawi told me. "What was doomed
     was the attempt to refashion Iraq in a sort of civilizational
     makeover, using American power in an alliance with a
     supposedly grateful Iraqi public, led by a Westernized
     middle class. The assumption turned out to be false.
     And it was compounded by a series of disastrous decisions."
     (Dexter Filkins, "Regrets Only?" New York Times Magazine,
     7 October 2007)

Kanan Makiya ought to be an object lesson for leftists among the
diaspora intellectuals. They cannot love Iran in a way that I can, for
they are saddled with the burden of personal losses and historical
defeats, but if the US-led multinational empire succeeds in destroying
Iran,2 whether through economic warfare, "democracy assistance," or
military force or (as is most likely) the last after a decade of the
first two, they will miss it more than I will, just as Kanan Makiya
must miss Iraq more than I do.

1 The following words of Jalal Al-e Ahmad still ring true when one
looks at the culture of the top 20 percent or so of just about all
nations in the South, actual proportions depending on levels of their
capitalist development:

     To follow the West -- the Western states and the oil
     companies -- is the supreme manifestation of occidentosis
     [westoxification] in our time. This is how Western industry
     plunders us, how it rules us, how it holds our destiny. Once
     you have given economic and political control of your
     country to foreign concerns, they know what to sell you, or
     at least what not to sell you. Because they naturally seek to
     sell you their manufactures in perpetuity, it is best that you
     remain forever in need of them, and God save the oil
     reserves. They take away the oil and give you whatever
     you want in return -- from soup to nuts, even grain. This
     enforced trade even extends to cultural matters, to letters,
     to discourse. Go flip through our half-dozen so-called heavy
     literary publications. What news do you see of our part of
     the world? Of the east in the broadest terms? Of India,
     Japan, China? All you see is news of the Nobel Prize, of the
     new pope, of Françoise Sagan, the Cannes Film Festival,
     the latest Broadway play, the latest Hollywood film. This is
     not to mention the illustrated weeklies, which are quite
     notorious. If we aren't to call this occidentosis, what are we
      to call it? (Occidentosis: A Plague from the West, Mizan
     Press, 1984, p. 62-3)

The habit "spontaneously" cultivated by many intellectuals of all
nations who look to the West, or rather the mythical West, serves the
ruling classes of the US-led multinational empire, incorporating the
upper classes and strata of their nations into liberalism,
Americanism, the ideology of "Freedom, Equality, Property, and
Bentham." See Shirin S. Deylami, "In the Face of the Machine:
Westoxification, Cultural Collision, and the Making of Perso-Islamic
Ideology" (October 2006) for a criticism of two common
misinterpretations of Ahmad's ideology (and others like it) as "a call
to the Past" and "a disdain for modern globalization" in all its
actual and potential forms. These misinterpretations, Deylami argues,
misses the point of the criticism of "Westoxification": "a particular
targeting of one form of economic, political, and cultural hegemony"
(p. 1).

2 Iran, but for the curse of oil and the faith in the Twelfth Imam,
might have been a Japan of West Asia; conversely, if Japan had not
become an imperial power in its own right, Kita Ikki might have been a
Jalal Al-e Ahmad of Japan. As things happened, our paths went into
completely opposite directions. Intellectuals in the Iranian diaspora
do not realize that stubbornly religious working-class men and women
of their nation, who rejected them and followed Khomeini instead,
still made a finer choice than my compatriots. But if they don't look
West and look East instead, they will appreciate what they have. The
Iranians have a republic, albeit religious, of their own; the Japanese
have a client state, albeit secular, run by Japanese bureaucrats and
gangsters for the American emperor. Moreover, the republic that had
expelled its cosmopolitan intellectuals may, if it is permitted to
live, eventually welcome them back, perhaps under the banner of a
Shi'ism that is at once scientific and utopian.

--
Yoshie