Plagued by the West (Gharbzadigi)

by Jalal Al-i Ahmad

THE LITRARY WORK

An essay set in Iran in the mid-twentieth century; published in Persian (as Gharbzadigt) in 1962; first published in English in 1982.

SYNOPSIS

The essay traces Iran’s millennia-old relationship with the outside world to explain the abject state of the country in the early 1960s, blaming the country’s ills on a generation that apes Western values and ways.

Events in History at the Time of the Essay

The Essay in Focus

For More Information

Jalal Al-i Ahmad (1923–1969; also spelled Al-e Ahmad) spent his childhood in relative comfort. Many members of his family, including his father, older brother, and a brother-in-law, were all Muslim clerics. Early in the 1930s when the Ministry of Justice under Reza Pahlavi (also Reza Khan; ruled 1921–41) began to regulate the activities of the clergy, Al-i Ahmad’s father went into voluntary retirement. His decision forced young Jalal Al-i Ahmad to leave school and work at various jobs in the marketplace (such as watchmaking and selling leather goods). Despite his father’s expressed wishes that his son become a clergyman and succeed him, Al-i Ahmad secretly attended a secular school at night and in 1943 obtained his diploma. In 1946 he received the equivalent of a Bachelor’s degree and the next year began to teach literature in high school. Al-i Ahmad’s break with his family’s religious traditions occurred when he was in high school, when he began to read the writings of secular reformer Ahmad Kasravi (assassinated in 1945) and of the Tudeh (Iranian Communist) Party. Al-i Ahmad joined the Tudeh Party in 1944 and in the space of four years evolved from a simple rank-and-file member to a member of its Tehran Central Committee. He also edited and contributed to a number of Party publications before he and a small group of influential thinkers dissolved their ties to it in 1947. Al-i Ahmad continued to work in politics for a time, then withdrew into a “period of silence,” during which he translated the French works of André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus into Persian (Al-i Ahmad 1964, p. 50). In 1949 he married translator and novelist Simin Danishvar (see Sovushun [A Persian Requiem] , also in WLAIT 6: Middle Eastern Literatures and Their Times). When nationalization of Iranian oil became the issue of the day (1950–53), Al-i Ahmad once again entered politics as part of a group aligned with Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq (also Musaddiq al-Saltanah, 1882–1967) but dropped out altogether when a coup d’état, engineered by the Western powers, toppled Mosaddeq and restored Shah Mohammed Reza to the throne (1953). Al-i Ahmad then devoted himself to traveling, teaching, and writing. Several journeys around Iran led him to conclude that the country had become, in his words, a “Tyrannyville” (zulmabad) or “Plunder City” (gharatkadah). This pessimism achieved its fullest expression in Plagued by the West, acclaimed as the first work to speak so openly, forcefully, and eloquently in Persian of the impact on Iran of its attitude toward the West.

Events in History at the Time of the Essay

The White Revolution

After his restoration to the throne in 1953, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi sought to strengthen his hold on power. He derived internal backing from Iran’s military and security services, Western-educated technocrats, and other professionals, and from the growing middle and upper classes, who benefited

BREAKING (INSHI’AB) WITH THE IRANIAN COMMUNIST PARTY

Al-i Ahmad’s break with the Tudeh Party not only affected his personal life; it had far-reaching consequences for the intellectual history of contemporary Iran. At the heart of the dispute was party policy toward Soviet designs on Iranian territory. At the end of World War II, Soviet troops vacated all Iranian territory except for the province of Azerbaijan in the northwest corner of the country. Claiming the area had in the past been part of Russia, they established a puppet socialist government there AM Ahmad, along with fellow Iranians, opposed the occupation. In 1946, after the United States and Britain protested, the Russians withdrew (Avery, p. 439).

from modernization. The shah also relied heavily on advice and aid from foreign powers, principally the United States and Britain. In 1961 the administration of the new U.S. president, John F. Kennedy, declared that aid would depend on a program of internal reform. The shah was thus pressured to adopt at least the pretense of increased popular participation in the political and economic affairs of Iran in the early 1960s. In 1963, shortly after the release of Plagued by the West in Persian, the shah would announce a “White Revolution” aimed at instituting political and agrarian changes designed to distribute wealth more evenly among the population. The land-reform program “would do away with Iran’s reliance on agriculture” (Behrooz, p. 35). On the one hand, this would decrease the power of the social strata of large landowners (the so-called “one-thousand” families) and the clergy, who administered lands donated as religious endowments. On the other hand, it would promote the growth of industry and thereby increase the power of labor unions, presumably more democratic institutions than those of the feudal system. Though such reform never managed to equitably distribute land among the peasants, it did mechanize agriculture in Iran. The logic of using a resource (oil) that was plentiful to accelerate the production of a scarcity (food) in Iran was compelling. Change, however, did not come without social costs. Many displaced farmhands headed for the city and became part of a large urban underclass. Plagued by the West mentions the flood of foreign-made tractors that had been disfiguring the traditional countryside for some years (Al-i Ahmad, Plagued by the West, p. 41).

To inaugurate and demonstrate popular support for reform, in 1963 the shah submitted the following six principles to a plebiscite: 1) land reform; 2) sale of some state-owned factories to finance the land reform; 3) the enfranchisement of women; 4) nationalization of forests and pastures; 5) formation of a literacy corps, and 6) profit-sharing schemes for workers in industry (Arjomand, p. 72).

Though many boycotted the plebiscite, according to a revised edition of Al-i Ahmad’s essay 5,598,711 people (Iran’s population was approximately 30 million at the time) endorsed the six principles by voting for them (Plagued, p. 6).

Electoral reform

In 1962 the cabinet of Prime Minister Asadallah Alam (1919–77) decreed that localities throughout Iran were to elect their own representatives to regional and district councils. This seemingly innocuous law was groundbreaking for two reasons. First, it gave women the vote. Second, by stipulating that the representatives could swear their allegiance on any holy book, it allowed members of recognized minority faiths (Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism) to swear by their own Holy Books rather than the Quran when they took local office. This measure aroused considerable opposition among the Muslim clergy. Ayatollah “Khomeini, joined by religious leaders elsewhere in the country, protested vigorously against” the measure “and it was ultimately repealed” (Khomeini, p. 16). Plagued by the West objects to the attempt to enfranchise women that the decree entailed. In Al-i Ahmad’s view, it was a Western-inspired farce, for true elections did not exist in Iran. The opposition identified several plagues from the West: technicians and military personnel imported from

URBANIZATION AND CONSUMERISM

Iranian society of the late 1950s and early 1960s underwent a transformation associated with the mechanization of agriculture and the fostering of industry. Many people left the land and entered the cities in search of employment Meanwhile, the shah’s economic reforms abetted the growth of an urban middle class. State policy downplayed traditional Islamic ideals such as modesty and thrift, and encouraged a return to the ostentatious consumption of the Persian Empire. This is not to say that conspicuous consumption was something imported solely from the West During his reign, the shah sought to put Iran’s pre-lslamic past in the foreground, which meant touting aspects of the Achaemenian empire (700–331 b.c.e.)—especially its notion of divine kingship—and downplaying Islamic civilization Courtiers encouraged the shah to restage the lavish life style of the Achaemenian court, white the clergy countered these displays with idealized notions of frugality and plainness. The appetite for Western consumer goods—such as cars, washing machines, and electric rice-cookers—was becoming insatiable during this period. Private capital went into concrete apartment blocks and Western-style villas that began to sprout madly from cities, stopping only when they reached natural barriers like rivers and mountains. The rapidity of the transformation of traditional Iranian landscapes led many thinkers to question the wisdom of the White Revolution. It also encouraged nostalgia for a hard-to-define authenticity, for the “rear Iran of the good old days.

Western countries to supplement the indigenous work force; capitulation to the West on the issue of their soldiers’ being extradited back to the home country for trial if they broke Iranian laws; Western publications, films, restaurants, brothels, and bars in the large cities that catered to guest workers and Iranians who had returned from the West; and the beginnings of profligate spending on Western arms with which Iran was to police the Persian Gulf for America.

The fall of Mosaddeq

On August 19, 1953, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in cooperation with British intelligence, orchestrated the overthrow of Prime Minister Dr. Mohammad Mosaddeq and restored Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to the throne (Risen). To many Iranians this event was merely the latest in a series of humiliating defeats that began early in the nineteenth century when foreign powers became involved in Persian affairs. Iran was once again enmeshed in the geopolitical aims of two great powers. As the largest link in the Islamic belt that girded the southern border of the Soviet Empire, the country was vital to the U.S. policy of containing communism after World War II. In addition to its strategic importance, Iran had and still has infinitely more gas and oil than the other links in the belt: Turkey and Afghanistan. Thus, it was inevitable that the superpowers would meddle in the politics of the country.

National identity crisis

The 1953 coup was such an obvious demonstration of Iran’s lack of autonomy that it demoralized many of its intellectuals, writers, poets, clergy, and other members of society. Not only did it end in the removal of a popular politician, it meant that a great deal of Iran’s wealth would effectively remain in foreign hands. Many likened Mosaddeq’s downfall to the shameful defeats of the past: the Arab invasion of the seventh century; the onslaughts of the Mongols of the twelfth century; and the two territory-ceding treaties (Gulistan, 1813; Turkmanchay, 1828) that Iran was forced to sign with Tsarist Russia. When the reinstalled shah adopted Western models of modernization, financed the education of thousands of young Iranians at U.S. universities, and made strategic alliances with the United States, it confirmed the dissidents’ (both secular and religious) suspicions about the deliberate eradication of their national heritage.

The Amini government, 1961–62

Though many intellectuals like Al-i Ahmad withdrew from political life after the Western-engineered coup of 1953, remnants of Mosaddeq’s partisans (the National Front), along with some clergy, persisted in their active opposition to the shah’s policies. They faulted him for the corruption and waste that came with rapid modernization and westernization. While internal opposition mounted, the presidential administration in the United States was pressuring Iran to move toward democracy. Complicating the situation was the poor condition of the Iranian economy, which forced the country to appeal to the West for immediate aid. In order to mute the internal opposition and meet the Kennedy administration’s expectations of reform, the shah chose Ali Amini (b. 1905) as Prime Minister. Amini, himself a large landowner, was related to the previous royal line in Iran, the Qajars. He was also favored by the United States and had served as ambassador in Washington D.C. Amini was immediately able to secure a $33 million loan from the United States that temporarily allayed Iran’s fiscal crisis.

A skilled politician, Amini recognized the need to placate the clergy of Iran. He traveled to the holy city of Qum and met with the leading religious authorities there. But Amini’s growing popularity soon began to trouble the shah, who jealously guarded his position as “First Person of the State.” In July 1962, when Amini tried to reduce the military budget, he lost favor with the monarch and resigned. Amini’s resignation was a blow to true reform, for he was the last independent prime minister the shah appointed. After him, politics in Iran devolved into displays of competition between two government-created parties, aptly characterized as the “Yes” Party and the “Of course” Party.

The Essay in Focus

Contents summary

The first chapter of Plagued by the West describes an illness called Gharbzadigi (also Gharbzadegi, defined here as “Westitis”). Literally the term means “Weststrickenness”; so unwieldy and difficult is it to translate that there are at least three English renderings of the essay’s title: “Plagued by the West,” “Occidentosis,” and “Weststruckness.” None of these quite captures Al-i Ahmad’s monolithic intent. To him “West” is not a place, but a state of surplus; “East” is a state of need. Thus, “most of the countries of Latin America are part of the East,” while Japan is part of the West (Plagued by the West, p. 4). The West has machines, while the East lacks them, which creates a dependency relationship between the two monoliths. The West has a surfeit of military power, money, education, food, and so on. With this surfeit, it dominates the East, whose sole function is to be the willing source of such raw materials as oil, coal, rubber, precious metals and stones, and of such human capital as doctors, engineers, and technicians. By this definition pre-industrial Iran with its large oil and gas deposits, its foreign-educated technocrats, and its poverty is clearly in the East. Its situation here makes Iran eminently prone to a disease Al-i Ahmad calls “Westitis.”

The remainder of Plagued by the West explores the etiology, diagnosis, and prognosis of Westitis. Though the disease is not confined to any particular region of the world, its cause—at least in Iran—is in large part related to geography. Because they inhabited plains subject to repeated invasions from the northeast (Aryans, Parthians, Mongols) and from the west (Greeks, Arabs, Ottomans, English, Americans), Iranians had little opportunity to develop urban civilization. As soon as one aggressive wave receded, allowing time to build cities, for example, another would crash against the plains, destroying what had been built. The regular cycle of invasion and withdrawal engendered in Iranians an initiative-robbing fatalism, a “this-too-shall-pass” mentality. According to Al-i Ahmad, a sense of helplessness (bi-charagi) in the face of outside power eroded the people’s self-confidence. They internalized the outside powers’ perception of Iranians as inferior and accepted this justification for their exploitation by the West.

Plagued by the West then reviews Muslim history and finds it to be an unrelieved tale of schism and decline. From its height in the ninth and tenth centuries, says the essay, Islamic civilization (which is identified with Iran throughout the essay) continued to decay, becoming moribund by the nineteenth century. Wars, invasions, and treachery weakened the Islamic body politic so much that it was left with little immunity to Westitis.

When Plagued by the West turns to present-day Iran, its criticism becomes sharper. At the beginning of the twentieth century, impoverished Iranian governments signed agreements with both individuals and governments from the West. These agreements generally ceded the country’s mineral wealth and customs revenues to opportunistic concessionaires. In 1941 the British deposed Reza Shah Pahlavi, who had ruled for 20 years, and replaced him with his Swiss-educated son. With the enthronement of

WESTERNIZATION AND THE CHADOR

Al-i Ahmad found the symptoms of Westitis mainly in urban areas and especially among Iranians who had lived abroad, He pinpointed Western-trained intellectuals as a group afflicted with advanced Westitis because of their strong commitment to secularism, Al-i Ahmad himself conceived of Iran as a nativist blend of Islam and Persian ethnicity. In contrast, the Pahlavi regimes promoted a traditionless Iran, which in their view constituted modernity, To this end, Shah Mohammed Reza attempted in subtle ways to persuade women to abandon the traditional body veil (hador), which covered the torso, the legs, and the hair, leaving only the face showing. His father had forbidden women from wearing the chador in public places, and he himself tried more subtly to move society in this same direction. AH Ahmad noticed that the strictly enforced prohibition coincided with the rise of the mini-skirt in 1960s Iran, To many conservatives, unveiled women (whether in miniskirts or not) were naked and were violators of traditional norms of decency and modesty. Al-i Ahmad himself did not approve of the veil. His wife, Simin Danishvar, was not veiled under the shah, but, like many modern women, she re-veiled under the Islamic Republic.

Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, there was nothing to stop Westitis from infecting the entire country.

After a review of contemporary history, the essay rails against symptoms of the disease. Peasants, stunned by their first encounters with machines, suffer culture shock in the cities. Women are compelled to leave the home chador-less and live the shallow lives of those obsessively concerned with appearance. “Indigenous” media tout the latest Western achievements in science and technology, entertainment, and sports but are silent about Iran and Eastern culture.

Next the essay focuses on Westitis’s most unmistakable symptom: the West-stricken man,

who is a member of the ruling establishment of the country [and] has no place to stand. He is like a dust particle floating in space, or a straw floating on water. He has severed his ties with the essence of society, culture, and custom. He is not a bond between antiquity and modernity. He is not a dividing line between the old and the new. He is something unrelated to the past and someone with no understanding of the future.

(Plagued by the West, p. 67)

To Al-i Ahmad this neither-here-nor-there man is the principal vector of Westitis. He has corrupted education in Iran by imposing his Western, secular model on traditional forms of learning. He also serves as a conduit for Westitis by bringing back foreign brides, thereby contributing to the dilution of “authentic” Iran.

Al-i Ahmad’s prognosis for Westitis comes in the final chapter (11), whose heading, “The Hour of Resurrection Drew Near,” alludes to the Quran (14:1). He takes comfort in the fact that prescient Westerners like Albert Camus, Eugene Ionesco, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ingmar Bergman share his apocalyptic vision of the West. At the end of the book, Al-i Ahmad with characteristic hyperbole warns that if “the machine demon [is] not harnessed and put back into the bottle, [it] will place a hydrogen bomb at the end of the road for mankind” (Plagued by the West, p. 111).

Iranian essentialism

One of the most remarkable aspects of Plagued by the West was its immediate and unprecedented popularity. Before its publication, Al-i Ahmad was well-known in certain circles, particularly among leftist intellectuals, owing to his writing and editorial work. After the essay appeared, and especially after the government suppressed the work in Iran, he became a star of the first magnitude. He was in constant motion, speaking here, lecturing there, and representing dissident Iranian intellectuals everywhere.

Al-i Ahmad’s simple anti-Westernism was especially responsive to the spiritual and psychological needs of the time (Sprachman, p. 303). Iranians, naturally distressed by the complexities of modernization, began to yearn for the “good old days” when life was thought to be uncomplicated. By positing a regional suffering from Westitis, he implied the existence of a noble Iranian, pure and confident of his/her own cultural and religious lineage. The diagnosis offered by Plagued by the West was comforting. If the distress brought by modernity were a disease, then like many other maladies it might be susceptible to treatment. This model also offered the soothing notion, however valid or invalid it might be, that there was such a thing as a “Persian essence.” One merely had to regain one’s essential Iranian-ness, to return to a Persian core, to become healthy once again.

The great irony of Plagued by the West is that its author, the most famous diagnostician of Westitis, was also a victim of the disease. It is quite evident from Al-i Ahmad’s tone that his essay is a moral polemic. It relies on traditional polemist artillery: hyperbole, provocative inconsistencies and errors, jargon, and ready-made phrases to frame absolutist positions on Iranian history, education, and society.

• Today all “isms” and ideologies have become paths leading to the exalted throne of “machinism.”
• The first thing a city-dweller thinks about is his stomach, and after that is satisfied, the region below his stomach.
• Women do not have it in them to be judges, give testimony ….
  (Plagued by the West, pp. 5, 43, and 47, with changes)

The essay takes a simple bifurcated position that parallels that of some renowned Western, as well as Communist, personalities. For example, the simple identification of the West as the source of all problems echoes the black-and-white duality of Rudyard Kipling’s famous line from “The Ballad of East and West”: “Oh, East is East, and West is West / and never the twain shall meet.” Regardless of the target of the essay’s outrage (be it politics, history, or society), there is a constant set of ideological and cultural boundaries between East and West. Critics have noticed the similarities between Plagued by the West’s theory and the traditional Marxist analysis of colonialism, which demonizes imperialism as wholly exploitative. Indeed the essay’s attitude is reminiscent of the unrelenting reaction against the West exhibited by the Soviet leader Vladimir Ilich Lenin (1870–1924). Plagued by the West identifies the French historian René Grousset, for example, as one of their historians, for his views on Eastern history are their views (Plagued by the West, p. 52). The London Times and The New York Times are their newspapers and therefore report the news as they want it reported (Plagued by the West, p. 63). The spirit of the West haunts every corner of Al-i Ahmad’s version of Iran’s decline and even takes responsibility for the country’s recovery after World War II. In this rendition of contemporary history, Iran is not even in command of its own welfare. The country has been robbed of all volition by the demon West.

Sources and literary context

Intellectuals first broached the issue of Persian essentialism in the early nineteenth century, and the debate about what constitutes true Iranianness went on for at least a century and half before the appearance of Plagued by the West. One of the first modern Persian texts to address the loss of Iranian identity because of contact with the West was Taskhir-i tammadun-ijarangL (“The Appropriation of Western Culture”), written in 1947 by F. Shadman. This text castigates fowkuls (French faux cols or “false collars,” a reference to the shirts of European-educated Iranians). Al-i Ahmad acknowledges his intellectual debt to this work in the essay, but judges Shadman’s cure for loss of roots (intensive study of one’s mother tongue), to be ineffective (Plagued by the West, pp. 33, 70).

Al-i Ahmad read the basic leftist and progressive texts of the 1940s. His references in Plagued by the West show how indebted he was to French-language (or translated into French) analyses of colonialism and neo-colonialism. Among the authors he mentions are Tibor Mende, Josue de Castro, André Gide, and Andre Malraux.

Certainly Plagued by the West was influenced by its author’s life experiences. In fact, some view the essay as autobiography (Mohibbi, pp. 120–23). According to this school, although Al-i Ahmad left Islam at an early age and gravitated toward communism, in middle age he became disillusioned with secularism and began to gravitate back toward the comfort of his father’s religion. His pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina is taken as one piece of evidence of the return to his roots. Another is Plagued by the West, which prescribes a heavy dose of traditional belief as an antidote to Westitis.

Publication and reception

Plagued by the West was first prepared as a report for two sessions (29 November 1961 and 17 January 1962) of Iran’s Council on Educational Goals (Al-i Ahmad, Gharbzadigi, 1963, p. 15). Finding the book inflammatory, Pahlavi government censors suppressed all copies of the first (1962) and the second (revised) edition (1963), but the book circulated underground in Iran and was published in various formats abroad. The suppression greatly impacted the author. He grew despondent when the government suppressed his essay along with a journal, Kayhan-i mah (“Kayhan Monthly”), he edited, taking solace in trips abroad, to Western Europe (1962), the Soviet Union (1964), on a pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina (1964), and to the United States (1965). Despite or perhaps because of Al-i Ahmad’s stature among thinking people in and out of Iran, the government continued to harass him. When he participated in the founding of the Iranian Writers Union (Kanun-i Nivisandigan-i Iran) in 1968, agents of the security police (SAVAK) intensified the harassment (Musavi-Bujnurdi, p. 557). Contrary to the many rumors that circulated at the time about his suffering an untimely end because of foul play, Jalal Al-i Ahmad died naturally on September 9, 1969. His writing would remain enormously popular and influential. Despite or, perhaps, because of official suppression, it greatly impacted the generation that participated in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The book’s phenomenal popularity when it first appeared was not merely a product of its suppression, though. It conveyed ideas in very plain language that prior works had only implied. This bluntness was stunning. Unlike contemporary critiques of Iranian society and culture, which were couched in appeals to classical literature, high-sounding academic phrases, and allusions, Plagued by the West is refreshingly direct. One is never in doubt about Al-i Ahmad’s intent. This candor along with the use of colloquial language in what was masquerading as an “academic” study endeared the book to young people (Mohibbi, p. 132). On the other hand, the same candor incensed the authorities. Not only did his outspokenness incur the wrath of the censors, it was criticized harshly by professional historians. Al-i Ahmad never claimed to be documenting verifiable facts. Indeed he plainly states, “I am not writing history, I am extrapolating from it. You [the reader] will have to look up the actual events in the history books yourself (Plagued by the West, p.37). Nevertheless, one critic hunted down the errors in the essay (Aghdashlu, pp. 374–96). The historian Faridun Adamiyat went further. He saw Al-i Ahmad’s work as symptomatic of the general “decline in historiography in Iran” (Adamiyat, p. 538; trans. P. Sprachman). Plagued by the West, according to Adamiyat, was like “a silo filled with straw in which a few kernels of wheat can be found—the kernels consisting of snippets translated from [W]estern critics (especially Fanon and Memmi)” (Adamiyat, p. 548; trans. P. Sprachman). Such criticism ignores the openly polemical nature of the work, which is perhaps not so surprising since much of the writing in Iran was polemical at the time and readers were generally accepting of this fact.

The essay’s hyperbole and distortions of the historical record notwithstanding, the frankness displayed by Plagued by the West made it otherwise different from most writing of the time. No matter what their political or religious affiliations, writers of the day usually couched their views in opaque academic language and adorned—some would say clouded—plain speech with allusions to classical literature, especially to master poets of the classical period (eleventh-fifteenth century). The strategy afforded writers some protection from charges of anti-shahism, blasphemy, or breaking with the party line. Not concerning himself with such self-protection, Al-i Ahmad broke new ground by speaking his mind in plain language that could be widely understood and, though censored for his daring, nonetheless exerted an enormous impact. As one Persian reader observed, whether a person agrees with Plagued by the West or not, its purpose is to provoke, to stimulate discussion, and at this it succeeds; one cannot remain indifferent to the work (Ashuri, p. 251).

—Paul Sprachman

For More Information

Adamiyat, Faridun. “Ashuftagi dar fikr-i tarikhi.” In Yadnamah-’i Jalal Al-i Ahmad. Tehran: Pasargad, 1985.

Aghdashlu, Ay din. “Nigahi dubarah bih tarikh.” In Yadnamah-’i Jalal Al-i Ahmad. Tehran: Pasargad, 1985.

Al-i Ahmad, Jalal. Gharbzadigi. 2nd ed. Tehran: Rivaq, 1963.

_____. Plagued by the West Trans. Paul Sprachman. Delmar, N.Y.: Caravan, 1982.

_____. The School Principal. Trans. John K. Newton. With an introduction by Michael C. Hillman. Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1974.

_____. Weststruckness. Trans. John Green and Ahmad Alizadeh. Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda, 1982.

Arjomand, Said Amir. The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Ashuri, Daryush. “Jalal Al-i Ahmad.” In Yadnamah-’i Jalal Al-i Ahmad. Tehran: Pasargad, 1985.

Avery, Peter, Gavin Hambly, and Charles Melville, eds. Cambridge History of Iran. Vol. 7. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Behrooz, Maziar. Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran. London: Taurus, 1999.

Khomeini (also Khumayni), Ruhollah. Islam and Revolution. Trans. Hamid Algar. Berkeley, Calif.: Mizan, 1981.

Mohibbi, Sa’id. “Jalal nivisandah-i kih nasli-ra bih khud mashghul kard.” In Yadman-i Jalal Al-i Ahmad. Tehran: Mu‘assasah-i Farhangi-i Gustarish-i Hunar, 1988.

Musavi-Bujnurdi, Kazim, ed. “Al-i Ahmad, Jalal” Da’iratal-maarij-i buzurg-i Islami. Vol. I. Tehran: Markaz-i Da’irat al-Ma’arif-i Buzurg-i Islami, 1990.

Risen, James. “Secrets of History: The C.I.A. in Iran.” The New York Times, 16 April 2000. In The Iranian, www.iranian.com/History/2000/April/CIA (5 July 2003).

Shadman, Fakhr al-Din. Tashhir-i tamaddun-i farangi. Tehran: Majlis, 1947.

Sprachman, Paul. “Hajji Baba Meets the Westomaniac.” In Persian Studies in North America: Studies in Honor oj Mohammad AH Jazayery. Ed. Mehdi Marashi. Bethesda, Md.: Iranbooks, 1994.