The Last Muslim Intellectual
The Life and Legacy of Jalal Al-e Ahmad
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Edinburgh University Press
Published:31st Mar '21
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This book explores the life and legacy of Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1923–69) – arguably the most prominent Iranian public intellectual of his time – and contends that he was the last Muslim intellectual to have articulated a vision of Muslim worldly cosmopolitanism, before the militant Islamism of the last half a century degenerated into sectarian politics and intellectual alienation from the world at large. Hamid Dabashi places Al-e Ahmad beside other towering critical thinkers of his time, showing how he personified a state of Muslim anticolonial modernity that has now disappeared behind the smokescreen of sectarian politics. This unprecedented engagement with Al-e Ahmad’s life and legacy is a prelude to what Dabashi calls a ‘post-Islamist Liberation Theology’. The Last Muslim Intellectual is about expanding the wide spectrum of anticolonial thinking beyond its established canonicity and adding a critical Muslim thinker to it – an urgent task, if the future of Muslim critical thinking is to be considered in liberated terms beyond the dead-end of its current sectarian predicament.
Hamid Dabashi’s remarkable work on Iranian ‘cosmopolitan humanism’ has already expanded the parameters of discussions on non-western thought to highlight the quest for an anticolonial modernity as integral to its global reach. In this well-balanced and elegantly written volume, Dabashi treats Al-e Ahmad, a preeminent intellectual of his time, as a pioneering -anticolonial theorist who Islamist thinkers, such as Ali Shari‘ati, would only later develop an elective affinity for, in the process recasting him an anti-western nativist. Dabashi situates Al-e Ahmad alongside other anticolonial thinkers to remind us that "Al-e Ahmad could not have anticipated Shari’ati would have taken him all the way to the borderlines of a committed Islamist ideologue." Along the way, this provocative work raises important questions about the evolution of an anticolonial canon and the crystallization of sectarian divisions. * Ali Mirsepassi, Albert Gallatin Research Excellence Professor, New York University *
In prose crackling with an urgency and tenor reminiscent of Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s own style in Persian, Hamid Dabashi delivers an impassioned argument for reading Al-e Ahmad as the last cosmopolitan Muslim intellectual on a par with the likes of Césaire and Fanon. * Nasrin Rahimieh, Howard Baskervile Professor of Humanities, UC Irvine *
ISBN: 9781474479288
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
304 pages