Ahmad Fardid

Martin Heidegger criticizes the loss of the truth for the being in the Western world as a result of technological development. He defines a discourse of authenticity, which seeks for vitality in tradition. Heidegger announces the end of metaphysics, which he defines as tendency that objectifies other people. Instead, Heidegger proposes overcoming of metaphysics through a return to what ancient Greeks had once done – simply letting other people unconceal and manifest themselves, without turning them into an object of thought.
Ahmad Fardid is the first commentator of Heidegger in Iran. Fardid is the author of the term “occidentosis”, with which he names the alienation of Iranians from their roots and the loss of subjectivity vis-à-vis the West.
Jalal Al-e Ahmad`s essay “Occidentosis: a Plague from the West” (1962) is an essay, whose social value is at global level. It traces a pathway for the search of a local, nativist modernity in Iran and unveils dissatisfaction with the role the West prescribes to the countries of the Third World – of an exploited periphery.
Ali Shariati turns Islam into a religion for mobilization of masses, and into an effort for return to the roots, which he sees not a step back to the past, but as a leap forward to a modernity that resonates with the Iranian essence. Shariati criticizes the “materialist cosmos”, where “man turns into an object”, while he sees in Islam “a fundamental bond, an existential relation (between man and the world). That is how the Iranian thinker copies literally ideas from Heidegger, who feels in his own times that withdrawal of religion from public life leaves men defenseless before the logic of the world of machine, in which the being is subordinated to the will for a greater power over man and life.
After the victory of the Islamic revolution, whose promise is to reconnect Iranians with their true essence, Reza Davari echoing Heidegger pleads for a return to the covenant with God (the Absolute, the Truth), from which the Iranian had departed in the times of occidentosis. This return takes place through negating the earthly subjectivity (the ego) and craves for turning man into a realizer of celestial subjectivity.
According to Bijan Abdolkarimi the huge influence of Heidegger in Iran is due to two basic reasons: he is the strongest and the most profound critic of West and at the same time he defends tradition.

Cambridge University Press, 2015. This study shows the relevance of Heidegger’s thought for contemporary evaluations of politics by responding to widespread confusion about the political implications of his work. It traces the wide variation in Heidegger’s political influence on both the right and the left to fundamental ambiguities in his thought, and shows the unified ground of Heideggerian politics in the principles of his ontology.

Ideas travel in time and space. The conference seeks to explore the transnational circulation of counter-enlightenment discourses, moods and motifs as well as those of their intellectual opponents. We will discuss the global phenomenon of anti-modern critique in its specific regional contexts in the Islamicate world, but also its wider entanglements. The cases of Ahmad Fardid and Henry Corbin are revealing examples of such transna-tional traveling of ideas and traditions. Critique of " Western " modernity is present outside and inside the West. We aim at discussing the similarities and differences between various types of such critique, including critical theory approaches and post-modern forms of critique.

This is a revised text of any interview with Professor Ali Mirsepassi conducted in 2015 for a documentary about Ahmad Fardid (released in 2016). This revised interview, in a collection of interviews with people who mostly knew Fardid in person, was edited by Dr. Mirsepassi and published as "Iran's Troubled Modernity" (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019).  A sequel to this interview/article was presented in 2016 in a panel on Ahmad Fardid in the International Biannual Conference of Iranian Studies in the University of Vienna entitled: "Fardid of All Seasons."  I am planning to publish it in the form of an journal article.

Jaffar Mahalati draws attention to the afterlife of the Aristotelian virtue of friendship in the pre-modern Iranian political milieu and considers friendship’s contemporary eclipse —and hence, its importance—in international relations. Ed Hayes offers a historical examination of cosmopolitanism in pre-Mongol Islamic imperial culture, theorizing the concept beyond its contemporary European conceptualization. Mana Kia examines representations of place in seventeenth-century Persian literature and posits an earlier form of knowledge of self and other that contrasts with representations of difference internal to colonial and post-colonial (dis)orders. Alireza Doostdar’s study of “Hollywood cosmopolitanism” in the Islamic Republic addresses modes of receptivity that exceed recognition and yet mediate the politics of difference and sameness in the contemporary global terrain. While addressing the questions raised by “Iranian cosmopolitanism,” the studies in this volume engage with the theorizations of cosmopolitanism across the social sciences and the humanities—particularly the rich and critical treatments of the concept by post-colonial scholars of pre-modern Persianate and Indian Ocean worlds.

The review essays focus on the modern cosmopolitical visions of the great Afghan thinker and politician Mahmud Beg Tarzi (1865–1933), as cyphered through his collected writings; of Iranian cinema as examined through Hamid Naficy’s expansive social history and Blake Atwood’s more recent study of post-revolutionary film; and of modern Iranian political thought as represented by Ali Mirsepassi’s study of Iran’s “oral philosopher” Ahmad Fardid.

In this article, I undertake several lines of enquiry in the history of ideological and political movements centered on the “modernity” polemic at the transnational level. By analyzing these movements in juxtaposition, I explore the possibility of more diverse narratives of modernity and antimodernity than are assumed by conventional dichotomies in contemporary academic writings. The results of my enquiry challenge several pervasive “dogmas” of post-colonial theory: that orientalism is a purely modernist intellectual project, while anti-orientalism is by necessity its more “local” discursive counterpart in a dualism of East and West.