Moreover...

Moreover, political activity was made virtually impossible due to severe repressive measures. Jalal turning again to literary pursuits translated Gide's Re tour de l'URSS and brought out Zan-e ziyadi (The superfluous woman). He dabbled in modernist poetry and painting also for some time. But more, significant for his intellectual development was his interest in anthropology.

Within a period of four years he published three research monographs dealing with Iranian villages and their age-old customs, viz. Aurazan, Tatneshinha-ye Bul'k-i Zahra, and Jazirah-ye Khark. During this research the contradictory nature of the Western and the Islamic Eastern traditions dawned upon him, a realization that paved the way for his return to Islam. The worth of his anthropological work was immediately recognized by both the Iranian academic circles and Western universities.

He undertook extensive foreign travels: to Europe in early 1963, to the Soviet Union in 1964, and to the United States in 1965. Of all these, the journey exercising the farthest reaching impact on his psyche was his hajj pilgrimage in 1964, which proved to be a great leap towards Islam. During this period of great creativity he realized the basic conflict between the traditional Iranian social structure and the new changes being imposed on the Iranian society in the name of modernization.

The interiorization of this awareness resulted in a unique kind of self-realization-broadening of the field of self-activity to the levels of national as well as religious collective-self-realization. The Iranian-Islamic archetypal patterns of conscious and unconscious psychical processes were revealed to him to be in opposition to those patterns of thought and practice which were being imported with technology from the West and transplanted on the Eastern soil.

Jalal's realization of the contradictory characters of the Western and Eastern cultures caused him to write Gharbzadegi, an analysis of the corrupting influence of the West on the East in the historical perspective with particular reference to the Iranian society and body politic.