Interventions

International Journal of Postcolonial Studies

ISSN: 1369-801X (Print) 1469-929X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/riij20

Frantz Fanon in Iran: Darling of the Right and the

Left in the 1960s and 1970s

Abdollah Zahiri

To cite this article: Abdollah Zahiri (2020): Frantz Fanon in Iran: Darling of the Right and the Left
in the 1960s and 1970s, Interventions, DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2020.1753548

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2020.1753548

Published online: 24 Apr 2020.

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 FRANTZ FANON IN IRAN: DARLING OF
THE RIGHT AND THE LEFT IN THE 1960S
AND 1970S

Abdollah Zahiri
English and Liberal Studies, Seneca College of Applied Arts and Technology,
Canada

..................This essay probes Frantz Fanon’s ideological influence across the political
opposition to the Shah’s rule in Iran (1941–1979) during the 1960s and
Al-e Ahmad
1970s leading to the 1979 Revolution. Fanon’s counterhegemonic
Fanon Frantz positioning galvanized both the right conservative faction, including
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran
Iran
in 1979, and the clergy, nationalists, and intellectuals. They all felt betrayed
Islam by Marxism and liberalism alike. Fanon’s discourse informed by an
indigenous framework bent to the future became the organizing principle of
nativism
the Revolution to come. This essay will shed light on the role of Ali Shariati
Shariati as the connoisseur of Fanon’s “art,” to reinscribe the other and reconstitute
a new humanity which is not Eurocentric. He introduced Fanon to
................. Iranians. Another focus of the present essay is to illuminate the role of the
translations of Fanon’s works across the opposition to lay the ideological
foundations of the Revolution.

“Everyone became my friend from his own opinion, none sought out my secrets
from within.” (Rumi, thirteenth-century Iranian mystic)

.......................................................................................................
interventions, 2020
https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2020.1753548
Abdollah Zahiri abdyzahiri@gmail.com
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
in ter v enti ons – 0 :0 2
............................
This essay examines Frantz Fanon’s ideological influence over the two
decades preceding the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Fanon’s lasting ideas
in Iran have already been noted in the works of Ali Shariati, the Iranian
sociologist who introduced him to Iranians who were thirsty for change
and searching for an alternative to the status quo during the Shah’s rule
(Boroujerdi 1996; Akhavi 1980; Keddie 2006; Abrahamian 1982). Based
on the recovered scholarship in Farsi on Fanon, this essay will provide a
deeper understanding of Shariati’s engagement with Fanon. In addition to
engagement with Shariati’s influence in Iran and how Fanon might possibly
have shaped the former’s own indigenous discourse of “return to the self,”
this essay will lay bare the modus operandi of Shariati’s indigenized “rep-
resentation” of Fanon’s thesis that endeared the latter to all Iranians thirsty
for change. I shall further probe Fanon’s discourse across the spectrum of
Iran’s different factions on the right and the left as well as Ayatollah Ruhol-
lah Khomeini, the founder of the Revolution. Specifically, this essay will
probe the attraction of the secular ideas of Fanon across the nuanced
Iranian religious establishment ranging from the conservative to moderate
and the left. It will also explore Fanon’s reach beyond seminaries and uni-
versities to the rising middle class through the various translations and rep-
rints of the translations into Farsi.

Ali Shariati: The Fanon of the Islamic Revolution

Shariati ushered in Fanon in Iran. He was a French-educated academic who

galvanized Iranian university campuses and intellectuals through his
dynamic lectures advocating an Iranian counterhegemony discursively
known as “a return to the self” in the heyday of the Shah’s push for rapid
modernization. The clergy in its entirety, from the conservative to the moder-
ate and left-leaning variations, was in awe of Fanon too. The rising middle
class was in awe of his thought. In the words of Edward Said in Culture
and Imperialism (1993, 333), these different and at times opposite entities
became all “communities of effort and interpretation.” This concurrence
gave rise to a diversity of ideological readings (Farahzad 2017, 130). The
vast interest in Fanon suggests how he, at that historical juncture, was the
darling of both the left and the right in Iran. To these diverse “communities
of effort and interpretation” Fanon was a breath of fresh air.
An historical overview will explain Iranians’ zest for change and the will to
transcend the nemesis they had faced for so long at this juncture. Being a
former empire, Iran suffered humiliating defeats in the wars that started in
the seventeenth century against the Russian tsars and the Ottomans, and at
some point Afghans in the nineteenth century (Swietochowski 1995; Sicker
2000; Keddie 2006; Andreeva 2010). The defeats by Russia led to a vast
DARLING OF THE RIGHT AND THE LEFT IN THE 1960S AND 1970S
Abdollah Zahiri
............................3

swathe of territorial concessions of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan,

Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and, lastly, Tajikistan where Farsi still is the official
language. During World War II, the Shah’s father, Reza Shah, was forced to
abdicate in 1941 by the Allied forces due to suspicions regarding his pro-
German ties. When Tehran was the venue for the Tehran Conference in
1943, the ruling Shah was not even invited (Fleming 2001). The greatest
humiliation was the CIA-MI6 coup in 1953 that toppled the democratically
elected government of Mohammad Mossadeq and restored the Shah to
power. Mossadeq had spearheaded the nationalization of the oil industry
that led to the expulsion of British Petroleum in 1951. The period after
1953 is marked by widespread repression and the arrest of intellectuals and
political opponents of the American-installed regime in Tehran. Hence, the
opposition in its entirety viewed the Shah as an American mascot.
In the 1960s Fanon’s ideas awakened a renewed sense of hope for change in
the status quo in the minds of the intelligentsia and the clergy. In 1950s Iran,
Marxist ideas for revolutionary change and the nationalist fervor for indepen-
dence were both dashed by the 1953 coup followed by the repressive rule of
the Shah. Many intellectuals were equally dismayed by the Soviet Union’s
deliberate inaction at the time of the coup in 1953. Moscow acquiesced to
the purge and execution of some members of the Communist Party in Iran,
the Tudeh party, as well as the total support of the coup by the West. In
the words of Theodor Adorno, “a gaze averted from the beaten track, a
hatred of brutality, a search for fresh concepts not yet encompassed by the
general patterns, is the last hope for thought” (Adorno 2006, 67–68).
Fanon provided a “search for fresh concepts” and a new path off “the
beaten track.”
In the minds of Iranians weary of the West and the East, Fanon’s ideas, at
this time, seemed to offer the middle path. Iran was not a colony in the sense
that India or many African states had been. Nevertheless, its behaviour could
be viewed as anticolonial as it nationalized the oil industry in 1951. Iran
behaved like a colony rebutting the Empire. A return to an indigenous frame-
work in Iran could, ipso facto, be interpreted as an anticolonial gesture even
though Iran was never a colony. That’s why many Iranians took The
Wretched of the Earth (Fanon 1968) to their hearts. Fanon assisted their onto-
logical reconstitution after centuries of humiliation. Thus a progressive nati-
vism became an ethical imperative. Iranians turned to Fanon “with an
imperfect sense of obligation toward the ideals they want to serve and the
values they seek to preserve” (Bhabha 2004, xl–xli).
As Masumeh Aliakbari (2011) puts it, “In the 60s the indigenous discourse
of ‘return to the self’ and Third Worldism became the dominant intellectual
trend in Iran as it replaced Marxism and nationalism. Understandably in
the 70s, this model along with guerrilla warfare came to the fore” (260).
The surge in armed struggle was triggered by the successful revolutions in
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............................
Algeria and Cuba, continuation of guerrilla warfare in Latin America, and the
United States’ role as a warmonger (2011, 261). Furthermore, Aliakbari
argues that in Iran Fanon’s secular ideas were indigenized and remoulded
into a religious-traditional model. Ali Shariati was, of course, the precursor
of the indigenization of Fanon’s secular discourse. However, the extant
letter of Fanon to Shariati clearly displays their divergent positioning on reli-
gion. Given the pivotal importance of this divergence that would later shed
light on Shariati’s appropriation of Fanon, that endeared the latter to Iranians
of all stripes, this part will be quoted in its entirety. Fanon argues:

And although I do not feel the same way towards it (religion) as you … I hope that
your authentic intellectuals may, with a view to raising the working masses’ univer-
sal consciousness about their country and mobilizing them for the defensive struggle
against aggression and the temptations of venomous and dubious ideas, as well as
about methods and solutions coming from Europe, I hope that your authentic intel-
lectuals may make good use of the immense cultural and social resources harboured
in Muslim societies and minds, with the aim of emancipation and the founding of
another humanity and another civilization and breathe their spirit into the weary
body of the Muslim orient. (Khalfa and Young 2018, 668)

Interestingly, the double use of the epithet “authentic” delineates the poten-
tial Fanon sees in Africa and the Middle East “to make good use of the
immense cultural and social resources harboured in Muslim societies and
minds” that could pave the way for “emancipation and the founding of
another humanity and another civilization.” However, Fanon parts with
Shariati on religion. In the same letter Fanon further articulates his secular
positioning:

I think that reviving sectarian and religious mindsets could impede this necessary
unification – already difficult enough to attain – and divert that nation yet to
come, which is at best a “nation in becoming” from its ideal future, bringing it
instead closer to its past. This is what I continue to dread and what makes me
anxious about the efforts of the upstanding militants of the Association of Maghre-
bin Ulemas – with all my respect for their effective contribution to the struggle
against French cultural colonialism. (Khalfa and Young 2018, 669)

Fanon concludes the letter as follows: “As for myself although my path
diverges from, and is seen opposed to, yours, I am persuaded that both
paths will ultimately join up towards that destination where humanity lives
well” (Khalfa and Young 2018, 669). Alice Cherki has also demonstrated
Fanon’s mistrust of religious movements in revolutionary struggles (2006,
107). In connection with Fanon’s mistrust about “reviving sectarian and reli-
gious mindsets,” Aliakbari further argues that this remoulding of secular ideas
DARLING OF THE RIGHT AND THE LEFT IN THE 1960S AND 1970S
Abdollah Zahiri
............................5

into an indigenous context contained an inconspicuous, subterranean “theo-

logical” layer (emphasis mine) that was hardly noticed by any intellectual, nor
anticipated, that would override the anticolonial, progressive Iranian model
of “return to the self” (2011, 260). Aliakbari’s identification of this subterra-
nean theological layer that went undetected by the intellectuals before the
1979 Revolution hereby reinforces Fanon’s apprehension of religion.
As to how Fanon made inroads in Iran, Ali Shariati comes to the fore. Shar-
iati is the catalyst of Fanon’s ideas in Iran. The former’s ideas were shaped
under the circumstances after the 1953 coup and the brutal repression of
the 1962 uprising led by Ayatollah Khomeini and the closure of political
parties in Iran (Delkhamoush and Mobarakeh 2013, 107). At this historical
juncture, Iranian intellectuals were no more interested in Marxism or liberal-
ism as solutions. These “beaten tracks” were no longer of interest.
During his years studying at the Sorbonne in Paris, Shariati discovered
Fanon and became comparable in their support for the Algerian Revolution.
Shariati translated Sartre’s introduction to The Wretched of the Earth into
Farsi (Salar 2002, 8). In 1962 Shariati listened avidly to a lecture by Sartre
on Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth at the Restaurant Musulman on the
Boulevard Saint Michel in Paris (Rahnema 2000, 119). Later Shariati was
credited with translating the whole book; in fact, the translation was done
by Dr. Hasan Habibi. This lecture augmented Shariati’s exposure via Sartre
to Fanon’s gospel of discontent with the West. It signified Fanon’s lasting
intellectual influence on Shariati. As a result, Shariati became the catalyst
for Fanon’s ideas that have permeated contemporary political thought in
Iran. Undoubtedly, understanding this influence may help immensely to
revise and locate the underpinnings of contemporary political thought in Iran.
In a seminar held in Paris in 2001 to commemorate the fortieth anniversary
of Fanon’s death, titled “The Unknown Fanon,” Shariati’s daughter Sara
Shariati, herself a sociologist, spoke on the legacy of Fanon in her father’s
thought:

More than anything Fanon for us is synonymous with hope and forging the “third
Way” … with the thought of the “new human” and his call for a new humanism and
then the third way that suits the Third World, the necessity of non-alignment to the
west and the east (meaning striking a balance between blind tradition and imposed
modernity), and creating an equilibrium between popular recourse to violence and
the role of intellectuals as awakeners and guides of developing nations. (Salar
2002, 2)

In the same speech, Sara Shariati further articulates her father’s impressions
of Fanon regarding a discourse based on forging a new humanism that is
devoid of cultural alienation and indigenous in essence that transcends
ethno-religious particularities and renews the Third World liberation
in ter v enti ons – 0 :0 6
............................
struggles. It would establish a new humanity that is complete and universal.
She claims it is a precursor to the poststructuralist critique of the inefficacy
of the Enlightenment project, the grand narratives, as evinced in the works
of Adorno, Horkheimer, Foucault and Derrida. She cites Sartre’s famous
introduction to The Wretched of the Earth:

Let’s not waste time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe,
where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find
them, at the corner of every one of their own streets in all corners of the globe.
For centuries they have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of so-
called spiritual experience. (Salar 2002, 8)

Sartre’s critique of the West that echoes Fanon’s, the demand to forgo the
West’s “sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry” and his push to “leave this
Europe where they are never done talking of Man” prompts another path,
away from Europe. This argument paves the way for the conceptualization
and ideologization of the “return to the self.” Sartre also mounts a postcolo-
nial critique by saying that colonialism represented by Europe and later the
United States plundered the colonies and non-colonies such as Iran alike.
Sartre continues the rebuttal.
Moving away from Europe, Fanon resumes the same challenge. He con-
tinues Sartre’s “let us burst into history, forcing it by our invasion into uni-
versality for the first time” (1968, 9). Fanon’s critique of Eurocentricism is
a great signifier of this notion of “burst into history” that drew the attention
of Shariati as he laid the ideological foundations of the Iranian Revolution in
the years to come. Sartre praises Fanon “as the first since Engels to bring the
process of history into the clear light of day” (13). Shariati was cognizant of
Fanon’s dynamic that galvanized this undying agency. It morphed into a reli-
gious discourse reinterpreted and refashioned through secular ideas such as
existentialism, humanism, and Marxism. These concepts served as analytical
tools for Shariati to contextualize Fanon’s ideas in a progressive version of
indigenous frame of reference that rings true to Iranians, who can identify
with it. In fact, Shariati rendered the atheist, irreligious Marx and the alien
notions of existentialism and humanism “kosher” to the Iranians. As
Dustin J. Byrd says:

through his “red Shi’ism” (Shi’ism saturated with class consciousness), Islam and the
best of the western Enlightenment became radical comrades in an active struggle
against human oppression, suppression, and geo-political tyranny. (Byrd and Miri
2017, 2)

Eric Goodfield (as quoted in Byrd and Miri 2017, 12) views Shariati as
“best known for sewing together Jean-Paul Sartre’s notions of freedom and
DARLING OF THE RIGHT AND THE LEFT IN THE 1960S AND 1970S
Abdollah Zahiri
............................7

Fanon’s doctrine of anticolonial autonomy and self-emancipation in the

context of the Shia revolution that swept aside the Shah in 1979–1979.”
Furthermore, Shariati carefully drew an image of Fanon in a different light.
As Shahibzadeh (2016, 46) puts it, “Shariati’s concept of the return to the self
is more than a duplication of Fanon’s discourse of the return of the oppressed,
with a peculiarly Iranian twist.” As Byrd argues (2017, 13), “In line with his
roots in Fanon, it is the duty of the oppressed to regain possession of home
and heritage.” Leube (quoted in Byrd and Miri 2017, 158) displays Shariati’s
appropriation of Fanon, whom “he fundamentally transformed in order to
turn him into a suitable vehicle for the demonstration of ideas he wished to
convey to his Iranian audience.” This approach is what Rahnema (as
quoted by Leube in Byrd and Miri 2017, 160) calls “an elaborate strategy
of literary association used by Shariati to structure and frame and interpret
his ideas.” Hence Fanon as portrayed by Shariati becomes his alter ego
(173). Since presenting Fanon as a foreign idealist would be awkward in
the context of the emerging movements, Shariati attempts to endear Fanon
to Iranians as a Third World intellectual. Hence he becomes “a native Alger-
ian of Berber background idealistically returning to his home country” (163).
This carefully designed counterfactual information was accompanied by
changing Fanon’s famous appeal in the closure of The Wretched of the
Earth to focus on the United States rather than Europe as the greater evil:

not to aim at turning Africa into a new Europe into an appeal not to turn Africa into
a new America, arguably more in line with the growing anti-Americanism in pre-
revolutionary Iran. (Salar 2002, 165)

Intertextually, this counterhegemonic positioning vis-à-vis the United States

is followed up after the Revolution when “America: the Great Satan” was a
constant refrain in Khomeini’s discourse of the United States as a global
oppressor.
Shariati also modified the “provocative aspects of Fanon’s writings” and
some parts were altered to “tune the message ascribed to Fanon to Shariati’s
presumable audience” (165). As Leube (in Byrd and Miri 2017, 167) argues,
some of the appropriations rendered by Shariati are motivated for “the greater
good” that would facilitate “a smooth reception of Fanon’s work.” This is
Shariati’s postcolonial intervention for indigenizing not just Fanon but also
major European thinkers cited in the latter’s works. Shariati also deletes the
series of paragraphs “where Fanon rejects Hegel’s notion of spirit tied to a
perception of European superiority” (Davari 2014, 93). Shariati also rewrites
Hegel’s philosophy of history to the point where the Third World nations
fulfil “the promise of spirit initially invoked by Europe” (Davari 2014, 93),
and the formerly colonized are projected as the original agents in the creation
of a “new man.” Hence, Shariati’s strategic postcolonial intervention via
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............................
Fanon and Hegel deserves more attention while this global anticolonial pulse
was throbbing in different corners of the earth.
At this juncture, an allegory in the work of the twelfth-century Iranian
mystic Farid-ud-Din Attar’s The Conference of the Birds is an apt “indigen-
ous” mystical instance of “return to the self.” In this poem, many birds
embark on a journey to find the mythical bird Simorgh whom they consider
as their spiritual guru (a mystical equivalent of the Phoenix). Many birds
die during this journey, and at the end, thirty birds manage to get to the moun-
tain where the mythical Simorgh resides. Instead, they witness only a reflec-
tion of themselves. They find themselves to be the Simorgh (literally
meaning thirty birds). The Simorgh of Shariati, despite his exposure to
western critical thought in its entirety, was Islam, the Islamic Phoenix rising
from the ashes with of course a view to the future in the making. Salman
Rushdie’s debut novel Grimus (1975) contains a thematic analogue that
reflects his view of the Islamic past. He also draws on Farid-ud-Din Attar’s
1 The protagonist, The Conference of the Birds, the Simorgh as an allegory of return.1
Flapping Eagle, a Ipso facto, Shariati then repositions himself as an Islamic intellectual bent
young Native
American, is on his on, at this historical juncture, producing his own radical interpretation of
long spiritual the faith:
journey. At the end of
this arduous quest,
We are at this difficult moment to make a great choice. The choice is between two
which lasts seven
hundred years, he options: the one we inherited from the past, and the option that we have totally imi-
realizes he finds tated from the West. Strange times! The dogs are loose and there is no stone at hand.
himself atop the Qaf This is not my fate as an individual, it is the fate of a group of thinkers not only in
mountain as in
Attar’s oeuvre. I Iran, but all over the East, that is caught between these two options, searching for a
would like to thank way for themselves. (Salar 2002, 4)
an anonymous
reviewer for pointing
this out. By saying “This is not my fate as an individual, it is the fate of a group of thin-
kers not only in Iran, but all over the East, that is caught between these two
options, searching for a way for themselves,” Shariati echoes Fanon’s agenda
as it is reflected in The Wretched of the Earth and Dying Colonialism. According
to Abbas Manuchehri, this positioning lays bare a neglected aspect of Shariati’s
episteme, which is his anticoloniality that is the theorized version of the thought
put forward in the 1960s and 1970s by Fanon and the leftist intellectuals (Man-
uchehri 2005, 14). As we shall see later in the section on Al-e Ahmad, not unlike
Shariati, he also shares this intercontinental ideological kinship and connected-
ness with the other thinkers that endears Fanon to him as well.
Shariati’s daughter Sara, in the article “The Fanon We Do Not Know,”
articulates her father’s fondness for Fanon that made him attractive for the
revolutionary generation in Iran:

The Fanon that Shariati has introduced to us had a more attractive and motivating
feature for the revolutionary generation. It was his view of the “new human,” the
DARLING OF THE RIGHT AND THE LEFT IN THE 1960S AND 1970S
Abdollah Zahiri
............................9

one that said “I am my own foundation, history does not determine any of my
actions, hence I articulate my own liberty.” (Shariati 2013, 65)

That’s how this “new human” based on his/her differences achieves uni-
versality, not built on sheer mimicry, but rather by creating a new identity pre-
dicated on a fresh reading of indigenous history, culture, and language. The
modernity of the new human, then, is not posed against tradition; rather, it
is based on it (67). Sara Shariati points out that her father also pinpoints
the pivotal role of the intellectual in the Third World. He also voices
concern about the necessity of the negation of alienation (67). It should be
noted that in Shariati’s view, alienation was not the known Marxian
reading of the proletariat caught in the cobweb of industrial capitalism;
rather, it was a cultural stasis caused by an uncritical emulation of the
West. In the words of Yadullah Shahibzadeh (2016, 46), “Shariati criticizes
the third world intellectuals and Iranian secular intellectuals as alienated
assimilés who have lost their identity.”
At the same time, as already noted, Shariati and Fanon were not in total
agreement. Religion was the bone of contention. As Abazari and Behyan
put it:

While Fanon maintained a secular discourse that emphasized on racial, historical

and temporal particularities of the Third World, Shariati’s discourse laid an empha-
sis on Islamic roots. In Shariati’s view the roots of the “self” lie in the Islamic past
especially in Shi’ism, i.e. Shi’ite ideology. (Qtd. in Byrd and Miri 2017, 108)

This remark clearly demonstrates Shariati’s departure from Fanon’s secular

convictions. Shariati’s call to the “self” is the “Islamic self,” more precisely the
Alavi Shi’ism. However, to articulate the features of this version of Shi’ism
Shariati deployed the intellectual premises of the West like Marxism and exis-
tentialism that he defied (108). As Shahibzadeh (2016, 58) argues, to Shariati
“The intellectual position of an intellectual Muslim … is a post-Marxist and
post-existentialist position.”
In his attempt to delineate his ideology, Shariati argues that epistemologi-
cally he believes in historical determinism, adopted from materialism, and
for agency he is indebted to existentialism and humanism. The outgrowth is
this “ideology” that he argues the East does have and the West does not
avail (108). However, it does not mean that Shariati was a nativist proper
as he viewed Islam as a “cultural system, not the traditionalist image” (Sha-
hibzadeh 2016, 47). In fact, Shariati is averse to institutionalized Islam (51).
This new reading is what Foucault viewed in the Iranian Islamic Revolution
as “the spirit of a world without Spirit” (1988, 215). It was this ideology that
energized the movement and was the forte of this political spirituality that was
Islamic in essence but contextualized and interpreted in modern critical
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............................
thought. Shariati was not a passive recipient of European critical thought. He
appropriated Marxism’s notions of class struggle and alienation; he reformu-
lated them to suit his anticolonial project par excellence. It could be argued
that the modus operandi of this brand of Shi’ism is modern western critical
thought, not the religious orthodoxy found in customary conservative
interpretation of Islam. This theoretical appropriation and reformulation
lent his argument a fresh unprecedented theoretical energy: a powerhouse
that would inspire Islamic societies across Asia even after his death. Fanon’s
views of a new subjectivity were intertextually instrumental in the architecture
of this project of indigenized modernity – a modernity harnessed to accommo-
date and empower the Other.
At the national level, this novel articulation of popular Shi’ism among Ira-
nians provided a new vista of life nationally and internationally and engen-
dered collective identity and unison. However, this brand of Shi’ism by no
means envisaged a return to the pre-modern or pre-industrial past (Paidar
2001, 99). It was not a retrogressive view at all. Shariati’s Islam, as a
project of indigenized modernity, argued that instead of uncritical acceptance
of Marxist materialist ideology, Islam could be the alternative that in essence
possesses revolutionary and liberating ideas that accommodate democracy
and equality. This ideological positioning argued that to fight imperialism pol-
itical theorists should make Third World ideologies compatible and politicize
them (100). Similarly, Shariati and many others resolved to create a genuine
Islamic radicalism to spur the masses (101).
Shariati, in line with Fanon’s original idea of authenticity yet divorced from
the latter’s anti-religious credo, strategizes his own reading of this ideological
view of Islam. He says:

Science never incurred struggle, philosophy has never pushed for struggle, it was the
ideologies that led to wars, sacrifices, and such glorious jihads in the course of
history. This is the nature and necessity of ideology: faith, responsibility, struggle,
and altruism. (Yusufi Ashkevari 1998, 72)

He continues:

I have found Islam – not the Islam of culture that produces scholars but the ideologi-
cal Islam that nurtures fighters, not in the Ulama seminaries according to the tra-
dition, but the one that produces Abu Dharr. (Yusufi Ashkevari 1998, 73)

Shariati presented a radical reading of “stock scriptural terms” that trans-

forms Abu Dharr, a contemporary of the Prophet in the seventh-century CE ,
into a revolutionary hero, a Che Guevara of early Islam (Abrahamian
1982, 144). Obviously, this radical interpretation was not predicated on the
teaching done in the seminaries, but was informed by modern critical
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DARLING OF THE RIGHT AND THE LEFT IN THE 1960S AND 1970S
Abdollah Zahiri
............................

thought. This is how Shariati’s secularized reading of Islam reconciled the

drift between the young generation and faith.
In consonance with Fanon, Shariati rejected the classic Marxist view that
frowned upon nationalism because it distracts the masses from socialism
and internationalism; he rather believed that Third World nations can subju-
gate imperialism only through a return to the roots, national heritage and
popular culture. In “On National Culture” Fanon argues: “The claim to a
national culture in the past does not only rehabilitate that nation and serves
as a justification for the hope of a future national culture” (1968, 210). Of
course, in this manner, they overcome social alienation and achieve a
degree of awareness to acquire western technology without compromising
their values and dignity (Abrahamian 1982, 575–578).
Again, in line with Fanon’s wish to see the emergence of a new human,
Shariati was in search of the path to return to pure humanity through a refine-
ment of the negative reactionary elements in faith, and triumph over determi-
nistic aspects in socialism, and undo the inaction inherent in existentialism
(Cragg 1985, 78). Furthermore, Shariati indigenized a Marxism that was
not godless, hence legitimate in the eyes of Iranians entrenched in religion.
His version of Marxism read class struggle as a battle between despots and
the underdogs rather than “capitalists and workers” (Abrahamian 1982,
467). This different reading of classic Marxism did not diminish his respect
for Marx’s ideals to shape human history. This view was equally shared by
Fanon (Abrahamian 1982, 468).
Overall, one can see that there is a marked Fanonian influence in Shariati’s
agenda to refine the negative elements in faith and transform the inaction in
existentialism to a call to action. These are the secular streaks that emanate
from Fanon’s and Sartre’s reading of the current intellectual trends in
Europe in the 1960s that underpin Shariati’s project of indigenized modernity,
a modernity that is harnessed and adapted to Iranian culture steeped in Islam;
yet it does not prescribe an uncritical and verbatim acceptance of the Euro-
pean model. So, it is not surprising that Abrahamian sees him as the cardinal
intellectual of the Revolution and calls him the “Fanon of the Islamic Revolu-
tion” (1982, 466). Of course, Shariati was the religious Fanon. By the same
token, Shariati’s repositioning grounded in restructuring a radical interpret-
ation of Islam as an indigenous space calls for a global nativist frame of refer-
ence that did not shy away from ideas coming from as far as Africa, and
divorced from western paradigms. Hence, European thought and influence
must give way to Arab, African and other Third World thinkers. He argues:

instead of searching for the ideas of Marx, Sartre, Jean Genet, Heidegger etc. … that
are not relevant to us until another four centuries, we should get to know Fanon,
Omar Molood, Katib Yasin, African artists and thinkers from Chad … those who
are like us and committed to the same cause. (Saghafi 1994, 60)
in ter v enti ons – 0 :0 12
............................
Despite being educated in the West, Shariati’s gaze is elsewhere – for
example, on Africa and on those whom he considers to be in the same camp.
He is cognizant that European thought and culture, even progressive figures
like Sartre, cannot be “verbatim” models to aspire to for the Third World.
Hence African and Arabic thinkers as a part of the Third World replace Europe.

Jalal Ale-Ahmad: Another Whisperer of Fanon’s Magic

Besides Shariati, the contemporary Iranian writer Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1924–
1969) is an arch nativist who was also influenced by Fanon. We witness
this notion of intellectual agency in Jalal Ale-Ahmad. He is the trailblazer
whose pioneering work, Westoxification (1962), was the first critique of mod-
ernization in Iran – the manifesto of Iranian nativism. Until 1979, the year of
the revolution, this book was banned in Iran. Clandestine copies of the book,
possession of which incurred incarceration, were made available to students
and intellectuals. The following quote from Westoxification lays bare his ideo-
logical positioning predicated on the idea of “return to the self”:

We have been unable to preserve our own historical character in the face of the
machine and its fateful onslaught … We have been unable to take a considered
stance in the face of this contemporary monster … For two hundred years we
have resembled the crow mimicking the partridge. (Al-e Ahmad 1981, 31)

The reference to the parable “the crow mimicking the partridge” is similar
to Sartre and Fanon’s disdain for mimicry of the West. Almost on a par with
Shariati, Al-e Ahmad is credited as the architect of the 1979 Revolution in Iran
(Abrahamian 1982, 468). They are ideological twins who became close
friends during their brief lives.
It should be noted that Al-e Ahmad did not ideologize tradition as Shariati
did, yet he remarkably facilitated the social presence of ideologized tradition
later (Abdolkarimi 2012, 33). In his turn, Shariati calls him the “Fanon of
Iran.” In terms of Fanon’s influence on Al-e Ahmad, a prominent Iranian
thinker, Abdolali Dastghaib, provides an anecdote. He said Bozorg Alavi,
who taught Persian literature in the then East Germany, was in Shiraz. In a
meeting, Alavi told him that one of his German students wrote a dissertation
on Al-e Ahmad’s Westoxification. This student had even claimed that Al-e
Ahmad’s book is informed by the ideas of Fanon and Albert Memmi.
Al-e Ahmad’s articulation of westoxification and reliance on local culture is
evident in the following:

Methodology can be learned, but in terms of humanities I know the subject

well. I have mentioned that more than one thousand years ago Nasser Khosrow
 13
DARLING OF THE RIGHT AND THE LEFT IN THE 1960S AND 1970S
Abdollah Zahiri
............................

(1004–1072) has said enough right under my nose. He taught me how to write, not
Newton nor Mr Sartre. (Parsania and Khaefi 2013, 58)

What Al-e Ahmad means by prioritizing a Muslim Iranian thinker who

lived centuries prior to Newton or Sartre is a reflection of his view of tradition
not in total admiration but rather as a cultural tool to articulate a new civility
to challenge the West. He draws on Islamic tradition to create a modernity
devoid of westoxification as well as traditionalism (Parsania and Khaefi
2013, 73–74).
It should be borne in mind that Shariati provided the ideological context of
the Revolution to come. Al-e Ahmad, again like Shariati, voices the same com-
mitment as an intellectual. The former also has high regard for Fanon:

If there is a pain, it is global not local, albeit we have the cancerous type. It is philo-
sophical, not emotional.

The diagnosticians of this pain, however, are always writers to find out
that this is a sociopolitical pain, not that of an individual. That is how
the knowledge about Frantz Fanon and others came about (Mousavi
2005, 35).
Not unlike Shariati, Al-e Ahmad is cognizant of this universal postcolonial
predicament. He shares the same postcolonial critique of western hegemony
spearheaded by the United States. Al-e Ahmad shares with Fanon and Shariati
this frustration against western hegemony. That is why he appreciates Fanon’s
pathology of this social pain. Al-e Ahmad argues that the “diagnosticians” of
this pain are the “writers everywhere,” not the philosophers or theologians
across Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South America, even though this
pain is philosophical in nature. The universality and commonality of
Fanon’s discontent as an intellectual endeared him to both Shariati and Al-e
Ahmad. As thinkers, they all had the same cause. Hailing from different con-
tinents they were co-visionaries in thoughts and strategies of resistance. They
were the dreamers.

Strange Bedfellows across the Tapestry of Religious Groups

Aside from Shariati and Al-e Ahmad, religious groups in Iran also had a fond-
ness for the secular Fanon. As a fierce critic of the West, he was a convenient
foil for them at a time when neither Marxism nor liberal democracy was their
Mecca. This section will engage with Fanon’s appeal across different strata in
the religious right from the ultraconservative to the left-leaning clerics. A case
in point for the ultraconservative was the admiration shown towards Fanon in
in ter v enti ons – 0 :0 14
............................
a conservative Islamic weekly, “Darshayee-az Maktab-e Eslam” (Lessons
from the School of Islam), in the early 1970s:

Black continent thinkers believe decolonization does not end with the colonizer’s
exit. Rather, the cultural aspects of colonialism should be dispensed with. Fanon,
Aimé Césaire and Diop have produced valuable works in this regard. (“Dar-
shayee-az” 1970, 61)

The anonymous Muslim conservative writer’s concurrence with Fanon in

terms of purging the cultural aspects of colonialism implies his ideation of
indigeneity as a robust antidote to the cultural hegemony of the West. This
conservative Islamic weekly is still in print and is known for its orthodox fun-
damentalist interpretation of Islam. The fact that in 1970 Fanon gets men-
tioned in this ultra-religious magazine indicates that he was a convenient
foil for them. It can be inferred that this magazine learned about Fanon,
Césaire, and Diop through Shariati. Even a decade after the Revolution,
Fanon is still a point of reference.
The same magazine draws on him to denounce nationalism: “Frantz Fanon
arrives at the same conclusion that historical factors, language, tradition, and
climate have a temporary role in the formation of national consciousness, not
a permanent one” (Pishvayee 1968, 49). Furthermore, in the late 1980s, a
leading conservative theorist, Raheem Hasanpour Azghadi, still refers to
Fanon in the following words:

Later Fanon says that they are raised in such fashion that a popular refrain in the
entire statements of the students in the Third World would be that our fathers
were idiots, our traditions rotten, and the westerners are more humane than us;
and we are incomplete, half-made while they are the perfect humans.

The seminal influence of Fanon becomes more pronounced when he is

acknowledged by this arch conservative thinker who, in September 2018,
raised the alarm in a controversial speech that enraged many leading Ayatol-
lahs in Qom when he warned that theological seminaries had become harbin-
gers of secularism.
If right-wing conservative factions of the religious establishment found
Fanon useful, the left-leaning clergy were equally if not more enamored of
him. Among the left-leaning clerics, Mahmoud Taleghani (1911–1979) is
also believed to have been influenced by Fanon, as evinced in the following
quote from a tribute to him after his untimely death in the first year of the
Revolution: “one can find in him the virtues of the most glorious guerrilla
fighters in the twentieth century including Castro, Fanon and Che Guevara,
and Ho Chi Minh and trace their ideas” (Ghasemi 2003, 54). Taleghani,
largely known as a Muslim reformer, spent time in jail as a political prisoner
 15
DARLING OF THE RIGHT AND THE LEFT IN THE 1960S AND 1970S
Abdollah Zahiri
............................

during the Shah’s rule and had a reputation as a left-leaning cleric who inter-
acted with Marxists.
In many ways the Fanonian underpinnings of nativist return can also be
traced in the writings and speeches of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini who
became the lynchpin of the Revolution. Reza Khalili specifically demonstrates
Ayatollah Khomeini’s engagement with the notion of “return to the self.” In a
2007 essay “Takveen-e ta’amoli ye deen va hoviat dar andisheh emam Kho-
meini: az soorat bandi-e goftemani ta tahavol-e enghelabi” (“The Interplay of
Religion and Identity in Imam Khomeini’s Thought: From Discourse to Revo-
lutionary Change”), the title betrays the interaction between religion and
identity. The identitarian ethos of Fanon’s thesis can be seen in Ayatollah
Khomeini’s thoughts in the 1960s. The focal point in this article on Khomeini
is the almost collective epistemic shift in the 1960s through the emergence of a
new wave of “return to the self” seen in the works of thinkers such as Allameh
Tabataba’i, Motahhari, Shariati, and Taleghani that culminates in Ayatollah
Khomeini’s thoughts and deeds (Dabashi 1992, 20).
Fanon’s discourse had made inroads into 1960s Iran as seen in the works of
Shariati and Al-e Ahmad, and through translations, it seems to have made an
2 Shams Al-e Ahmad, indelible impact on Ayatollah Khomeini.2 This influence is reflected in Kho-
the brother of Jalal meini’s argument that viewed Muslims’ cultural and intellectual reliance on
Al-e Ahmad, in his
book Az Cheshme-e the West as the cause for their backwardness and cultural alienation
Baradar (From the (Khalili 2007, 15). Ayatollah Khomeini then argues:
Brother’s Eyes)
published in 1990,
To treat this disease the western form should be replaced by the Islamic one. So far,
recounts the
following in a everything was western, all western. Now that we got rid of them, we should note
meeting with who we are and what we are.
Ayatollah Khomeini
on May 16, 1980.
The Ayatollah told Here Khomeini makes his own intervention in Sartre and Fanon’s ontic
him: “I know your urge to forge a new identity, a new “humanity” that Europe is not capable
family, your late of producing. He further articulates his Islamic alternative of return:
father Haj Seyed
Ahmad Agha;
however, I only met The only solution is that Muslim nations and governments, if national in nature,
‘Jalal Al-e Ahmad’ for strive to delink themselves from the West and retrieve their original culture and
a quarter of an hour.
promote Islam’s progressive culture which is based on the holy scripture.
In the beginning of
the movement I
noticed a gentleman Khomeini’s urge to decenter the West’s cultural hegemony is an attempt to
was present in the
reinscribe the repressed national-cum-Islamic culture buried and eroded
room, and his book
Westoxification lay in during colonialism directly and indirectly. He further continues this line of
front of me. He asked argument:
‘How did this
nonsense come to
your attention?’ or Through the revolution within (emphasis mine) victory can be gained. Otherwise, a
something to this revolution would be nothing more than transfer of power from one to the other. For
effect. Then I realized the nation nothing will change. (Nazari 2013, 60)
in ter v enti ons – 0 :0 16
............................
he must be the The notion of a “revolution within” is the Islamic version of the Fanonian
author.
ethos. As Khomeini puts it, without this ontic-epistemic break mere change in
Unfortunately, I did
not see him any more. government is an exercise in futility.
God bless his soul” A disciple of Khomeini, Ayatollah Morteza Motahhari is another major
(1990, 526). moderate cleric who largely identifies with the secular Fanon. In one of his
books, Khadamat-e motaghabel-e Iran-o-Eslam (Reciprocities between Iran
and Islam), Motahhari mentions Fanon as a conscientious African writer,
sociologist, and psychologist who has carried out impressive research on
national consciousness among African nations. Using Fanon, he says
factors such as history, language, traditions, and common climatic con-
ditions play a rudimentary role in the formation of national consciousness
(2011, 26). Motahhari also appreciates Fanon’s disdain in The Wretched of
the Earth for the intellectuals on the periphery, inclined to promote
national consciousness, albeit as Fanon maintains, they are culturally
under the sway of colonialism (2011, 27). These intellectuals, at this
point, think without thinking as sometimes happens in the process of trans-
lation where a translator attempts to translate a text much too literally: just
a mouthpiece (2011, 27). Motahhari, in consonance with Fanon, sees a
return to an indigenous framework as the solution. For an intellectual,
this notion of “return” means that he/she should purge himself/herself of
western influence and identify with the society’s values, problems, and
pains that ordinary people grapple with. This is the only path for the realiz-
ation of “national culture” (2011, 28). Akin to Sartre and Fanon, Motah-
hari yearns for the birth of a new nation predicated on indigeneity, not
western values (2011, 35). He is weary of the assimilation of the
intellectuals:

of Muslim, African, eastern stripes who wish to fashion their national culture after
western values. It is tantamount to build their culture and defend themselves with the
weapon sold by the enemy. Woe for a weapon purchased from the enemy! (Motah-
hari 2011, 34)

What could be more Fanonian than this urge by Motahhari to strip

oneself from western culture and forge a new subjectivity? He argues
that western values are unreliable weapons for the realization of this
lofty goal. Clearly, Fanon’s discourse is the unifying element that brings
intellectuals, the religious establishment, university students and the rising
discontented middle class together. He is the common thread that binds
them all: an ideological “commonwealth” of individuals desperately in
search of a new humanity pushing against all frontiers. The commonwealth
that dreams of new vistas!
 17
DARLING OF THE RIGHT AND THE LEFT IN THE 1960S AND 1970S
Abdollah Zahiri
............................

Translations: A Conduit

While at present Fanon’s ideas gain traction in postcolonial theory, in the

1960s his ideas already found a rapt audience in Iran, not a colony proper,
during the Shah’s rule when there was little tolerance for such anticolonial
rhetoric. One can gauge Fanon’s popularity through the reception of these
translations that brought a glimmer of hope. Some of the translations will
be mentioned here.
Khosrow Golsorkhi, a Marxist poet, translated Fanon’s Dying Colonialism
under a pseudonym (Katouzian). While the translation was in print, he was
arrested. Later he was tried and sentenced to death in a martial court for sedi-
tion (Bagherzadeh, Azarang, and Dehbashi 2000, 199). Despite the Shah
regime’s tight control, university students formed clandestine discussion
groups to examine the political developments in China, Vietnam, Cuba,
and Algeria, and started to translate the works of Mao, Che Guevara, and
Fanon (Abrahamian 1982, 469).
The first translation of The Wretched of the Earth was by Ali Mohammad
Kardan in 1974 followed by Abolhasan Banisadr in 1979. Shariati translated
Sartre’s introduction. Banisadr, a French-educated sociologist, the first presi-
dent after the Revolution who was impeached and forced to flee the country,
also translated it. There was another Farsi translation of David Caute’s Fanon
by Ebrahim Danaiee. It was reprinted twice: first in February 1973, then in
November 1978, four months prior to the Revolution in 1979. This was at
the time when the Shah had loosened his iron grip on the opposition,
hoping to contain growing discontent.
There was a Farsi translation of Irene L. Gendzier’s book on Fanon in 1973,
not long after the original appeared in English.

Conclusion

This essay attempts to shed new light on Fanon’s influence in Iran in the two
decades before the 1979 Islamic Revolution. It lays bare the all-encompassing
role of his critique of Eurocentrism that was remoulded as “return to the self”
as the organizing principle of the massive movement that came to fruition in
1979. Iranians, dismayed by the utter failure of Marxism and western liberal-
ism, and after centuries of humiliation, defeats and territorial concessions, and
the demise of their only democratic government through the CIA-MI6-led
coup in 1953, seized Fanon’s call to undo the nemesis and return to the
roots for a national reassertion ushering in an indigenous discourse. At this
juncture, he was a godsend. The centrifugal dynamic of his ideas held sway
on Ali Shariati, who laid the ideological foundations of the Revolution.
in ter v enti ons – 0 :0 18
............................
Shariati, despite his disagreement with Fanon on religion, was his catalyst.
Shariati was the religious Fanon. This essay also establishes that novelist, eth-
nographer and travel writer Jalal Al-e Ahmad, another towering figure, whom
Shariati calls “the Fanon of Iran,” was another recipient of Fanon’s calling.
Al-e Ahmad, not unlike Shariati, looked inward: a centripetal leap to the
Islamic core. However, their reading of religion was not mere emulation, it
was forging a new version of faith in the making, looking forward to the
future (Shahibzadeh 2016, 57). Further, it brought to light how Fanon was
viewed from the right, conservative opposition’s perspective. He was seen
with admiration across the religious establishment. Fanon was not Islamic,
but his ideas were instrumental for the fruition of the first Iranian Islamic
Republic in the Middle East. Iranians opposing the Shah all became stake-
holders in ideas, joining a commonwealth based on this collective ideological
kinship shaped across continents and pushing against all national frontiers.
Fanon’s discourse gave rise to a network of nativist movements across the
globe. They all hailed from different continents, they had a common cause
and a common pain. Dr. Fanon was the diagnostician for them all. I have
also discussed the role of the translations of Fanon in the ideological prep-
arations for the Revolution, the impact of the translations of Fanon’s
works, and the avid readership that justified the reprints. That is how
Fanon became the darling of the right and the left in Iran.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Robert J. C. Young for suggesting to probe

Fanon in Iran. My gratitude also goes to Professor Amritjit Singh (Ohio Uni-
versity) for his attentive reading and generous comments. Professor
Mahmood Fotoohi (Ali Shariati Faculty of Letters, Ferdowsi University,
Iran) provided important sources. As well, I wish to thank Julie Cain, Librar-
ian, Seneca College, King Campus.

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