Last Muslim Intellectual
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Explores the life and legacy of Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1923 69) arguably the most prominent Iranian public intellectual of his time
A social and intellectual biography of Jalal Al-e Ahmad, a seminal Muslim public intellectual of the mid-20th century
Places Al-e Ahmad's writing and activities alongside other influential anticolonial thinkers of his time, including Frantz Fanon, Aim C saire and Edward Said
Chapters cover Jalal Al-e Ahmad's intellectual and political life; his relationship with his wife, the novelist Simin Daneshvar; his essays; his fiction; his travel writing; his translations; and his legacy
In this social and intellectual biography, Hamid Dabashi contends that Jalal Al-e Ahmad 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.
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 expands the wide spectrum of anticolonial thinking beyond its established canonicity by 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 is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York where he is a founding member of its Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. He is the author of over 25 books, including The World of Persian Literary Humanism (2014); Persophilia: Persian Culture on the Global Scene (2015); Iran without Borders: Towards a Critique of the Postcolonial Nation (2016); Iran: Rebirth of a Nation (2017); The Shahnameh: The Persian Epic as World Literature (2019); The Last Muslim Intellectual: The Life and Legacy of Jalal Al-e Ahmad (EUP, 2021). His most recent book is Mashya and Mashyana Unearthed: Myth, Metonymy and the Unknowing Subject (EUP 2024).