ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books The Evils of Westernization Supplement 2 The Arabs who are still serving their Western masters, with their overemphasis on Arab nationalism fail to realize that the differences within their own fold are due to themselves and are offshoots of the spirit of nationalism cultivated in their minds by the vested Western interests.

The divisive role of nationalism does not stop at alienating Arab Muslims from the rest of the Muslim world, but it goes further and deeper by causing subdivisions among themselves making them even more dependent on the West. Like many modern and so-called progressive writers of the past generation Jalal Ali Ahmad, in his diagnosis of the evil effects of Western influence, could not smell the danger of the West-inspired nationalism.

Thus he, whose messianic mission was to liberate Iranians from the clutches of Westernization, fell an easy prey to the Occidental trap not realizing the ideological pitfalls in Western thought. This is how Orientalists consciously coin certain notions with ulterior motives and our Eastern, or more precisely Muslim, intellectuals imitate them unconsciously subscribing to their views and serving their motives.

Algar, quoting Simin Danishwar, Jalal's wife, concludes that Jalal's "relative return to religion was a means to preserving national identity and a path leading to human dignity, mercy, reason, and virtue." All these terms are ambiguous, rather emptyclichs, confusing "Islamic identity" with a particular kind of "national identity." Jalal's return to Islam is dubbed as incomplete by Algar, for, even in Khassi dar Miqat, Jalal's travelogue of his hajj pilgrimage, despite his occasional emotional outbursts, he is more concerned with the human and material surroundings than with his own inner experience.

On the one hand, it may be explained in terms of a hangover from his Marxist past, and on the other, it can be deciphered "as an attempt to flee from the mosque" The last phrase occurs in Khassi dar Miqat (Tehran: 1345/1966, p. 74) on the occasion of his visit to the tomb of the Prophet (S) in Medina. In the morning when I said, 'peace be upon you, O Prophet,' 1 was suddenly moved.

The railing surrounding the tomb was directly in front of me and 1 could see the people circumambulating the tomb ... I wept and fled from the mosque.