From Yazd to a French mediator

Fardid’s early education combined the religious schools of Yazd with a secular curriculum in Arabic, mathematics and philosophy. Like several of his generation, he then traveled to Europe, eventually reaching Paris, where the intellectual encounter that would define the rest of his career took place: not with a German thinker directly, but with a French one who had already made Heidegger his life’s work.

That thinker was Henry Corbin.

Corbin, born in Paris in 1903, had trained under Louis Massignon in the philological tradition of French Islamic studies. In 1934 and again in 1936 he traveled to Freiburg to work directly with Heidegger, and in 1938 he became the first person to translate Heidegger into French, publishing Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique? He would also translate Heidegger’s essay on Hölderlin. Fardid’s introduction to Heidegger’s thought passed through this Frenchman before it passed through any German text Fardid could read on his own.

This detail matters. It means that the concept later credited with shaping the ideological climate of the Islamic Republic did not arrive in Iran directly from Germany. It arrived filtered through a French scholar whose own primary interest was not politics but the visionary philosophy of medieval Islam.

Corbin’s relationship with Iran did not end with a single encounter. From the 1940s onward he spent over three decades teaching in Tehran, eventually becoming one of the most respected — and most unusual — foreign scholars in the country’s intellectual life.

In 1945, Allameh Tabatabai, the leading Shiite philosopher of his generation, traveled from Qom specifically to meet him. Corbin devoted his scholarship to recovering the Illuminationist philosophy of Suhrawardi and the metaphysics of Ibn Arabi, presenting medieval Iranian and Islamic mysticism to Western readers as a coherent philosophical tradition rather than an exotic curiosity. He mentored Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Daryush Shayegan. According to scholars who have traced the genealogy of Heidegger’s reception in Iran, it was through this same network that Fardid became, in the words of one academic study, the first Iranian intellectual “to become aware of Heidegger’s significance.”

Corbin’s own project was rarely political. He wanted to show that the imaginal visions of Shiite and Sufi mystics, the hidden Imam, the angelology of light, could be treated as legitimate philosophical material, neither reducible to psychology nor dismissed as folklore. His method has been described by later historians as a form of spiritual phenomenology, closer to contemplation than to ideology.

Fardid took the same material somewhere else entirely.

Gharbzadegi and its two authors

The concept for which Fardid is remembered, gharbzadegi — usually translated as “Westoxification” or “West-infection”, became famous only when the novelist Jalal Al-e Ahmad used it as the title of his influential 1962 book. Encyclopaedia Iranica and later scholarship place Fardid and Al-e Ahmad, and eventually Reza Davari Ardakani, on a shared intellectual line running from Fardid’s Heideggerian diagnosis to Al-e Ahmad’s political and cultural polemic.

For Al-e Ahmad, Westoxification meant a society intoxicated by imported machines, consumer goods and secular ideas, disconnected from its own social and economic........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)