[R-G] Jalal Al-e Ahmad: An Existentialist in Mecca

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

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April 13, 1986
A SKEPTIC IN MECCA
By DONNE RAFFAT; DONNE RAFFAT IS THE AUTHOR OF ''THE CASPIAN CIRCLE''
AND ''THE PRISON PAPERS OF BOZORG ALAVI.''

LOST IN THE CROWD By Jalal Al-e Ahmad. Translated by John Green.
Introduction by Michael Hillman. l57 pp. Washington: Three Continents
Press. Cloth, $20. Paper, $9. EARLY in April 1964, Jalal Al-e Ahmad
(1923-1969), one of Iran's leading writers and social critics,
undertook a hajj, or pilgrimage to the Moslem shrines in Saudi Arabia.
Some three weeks later he returned to Teheran with a bleeding foot and
a travel diary - now available in its first English-language edition
as ''Lost in the Crowd'' - that ranks among his finest works.

Why did Al-e Ahmad, a skeptic - indeed, a former member of Iran's
Communist Tudeh Party - go on a hajj? He himself poses the question
repeatedly. His older brother, a cleric and a representative of the
Shiite religious leader Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Borujerdi, was
buried in Medina: he is there to visit his grave. He is also there
with other members of his family, who are fulfilling their duties as
pious Moslems. But none of these reasons address the central issue he
raises. ''What did I come on this journey to do?'' he writes. ''Visit
shrines? Worship? Observe?''

He does all three, constantly taking notes. The result is a graphic,
compelling account of his hajj experience, in a very readable
translation by John Green, that also reveals why the travel diary, or
safarnameh, has remained a major genre in Persian literature since the
11th century.

Just arrived in Medina, Al-e Ahmad is critical and alienated. ''It's
easy,'' he says, ''to be among the people and not be a part of them.''
He is offended by the filth, noise, traffic, inefficiency and blatant
commercialism, all of which leads him to conclude there is ''no
alternative but to internationalize these shrines, Mecca, Medina,
Arafat, and Mina, to place them under the management of a joint
council of Muslim nations, and to remove them from Saudi Arab
control.''

Yet it is also here that his personal quest finds direction. In
response to a man who asks him why he, a member of the Shiite minority
within Islam, has been praying alongside Sunni Moslems, he declares,
''My dear sir . . . we came here to lose our-selves in the crowd. We
didn't come here to reinforce our personalities and our isolation.''

But it is not until he reaches Mecca and undergoes the say, or ritual
wandering before the Kaaba, that he fully experiences the ''great
engulfing of the individual in the crowd.'' Here, ''utterly helpless''
amid the multitude, he is forced into continual contact with a host of
eyes that ''aren't really eyes, but naked consciousnesses.'' ''Before
today,'' he muses, ''I thought it was only the sun that could not be
regarded with the naked eye, but I realized today that neither can one
look at this sea of eyes.'' In that encounter the self, ''if it
doesn't exist as a particle working to build a society, is not even a
'self.' It is absolutely nothing.''

The ''great engulfing'' never becomes for Al-e Ahmad a religious
experience, though. If the self is temporarily lost in Mecca, it is
shocked back into being in Mina, a small town between Mecca and Arafat
in which ''all the streets end at a slaughterhouse, covered with
mutilated carcasses.'' The stench and animal sacrifice nauseate the
author: ''as it stands now,'' he writes, ''the Hajj is mechanized
barbarism.'' HE stops again in Mecca, Medina and Jedda on his way out
of the country, but his withdrawal has already occurred in his diary,
his ''saving grace.'' The writing - for Moslem purists itself a form
of sacrilege on the hajj - preserves and reintegrates the self, a
process confirmed in his final notes on the flight back to Teheran.
''I mainly came on this trip looking for my brother - and all those
other brothers - rather than to search for God,'' he writes.

But that has led to ''a kind of awakening,'' a deepening personal
skepticism about ideology, religious or political. ''In this way,'' he
notes, ''I am smashing the steps of the world of certainty one by one
with the pressure of experience, beneath my feet.'' Small wonder that
his foot, at journey's end, is injured.