Negotiating the Relationship Human – Non-Human as a Question of Meaning in 20th Century Iranian Authenticity Discourse: the Role of Ǧalāl Āl-e Aḥmad‘s Essay ‚West Infection‘

Negotiating the distinction between human and non-human constitutes a vital aspect of Iranian authenticity discourses since the 1960s. One intellectual boosting this debate was the writer Ǧalāl Āl-e Aḥmad (1923- 1969) who in his seminal essay Westoxication (Ġarbzadegī) set the tone for following generations by identifying Iran's sociocultural crisis with a form of dehumanization caused by technological domination of Iranians at
the hands of an imperialist ‚West‘.
Āl-e Aḥmad negotiates the distinction between human and non-human in the framework of the distinction between meaningfulness and meaninglessness, thereby transferring the debate from a mere being-issue of traditional ontology to a meaning issue of modern hermeneutics.
In this process, Āl-e Aḥmad challenges the definition of ‚human‘ developed by both Enlightenment thought and positivism on the grounds that essentializing human being to a thinking thing like in Cartesianism or to a manifestation of natural-scientific laws like in positivism results in dehumanizing humans by denying them meaningfulness. Thus, for the adherents of the Iranian authenticity discourse, the understanding of ‚human‘ current in modern Western thought does not signify empowerment of an autonomous human subject, but rather its reduction to something ‚less-than-human‘ and to a mere object of some non-human power.
Āl-e Aḥmad, in his quest to escape such reductionist essentializations of 'human', resorts to considering religion the only focus of identification, at least for Iranians, that does not again subject human to some form of dehumanizing essentialization. This understanding of religion releases religion from traditional religious understanding and practice and transforms it into an existential choice. It is this understanding of religion, ushered in by Āl-e Aḥmad, that was adopted by many intellectuals after him and contributed to shaping the Iranian revolutionary discourse.