Gharbzadegi
Gharbzadegi (
Persian: غربزدگی) is a pejorative
Persian term variously translated as "Westoxification," "West-struck-ness"
, "Westitis", "Euromania", or "Occidentosis".It is used to refer to the loss of
Iranian cultural identity through the adoption and imitation of
Western models and Western criteria in education, the arts, and culture; through the transformation of Iran into a passive market for Western goods and a pawn in Western geopolitics.
The phrase was first coined by
Ahmad Fardid (University of Tehran Professor) in the 1940s, it gained common usage following the clandestine publication in 1962 of the book
Occidentosis: A Plague from the West by
Jalal Al-e Ahmad, an eminent
Iranian writer.
Al-e Ahmed describes Iranian behavior in the 20th Century as being "Weststruck." The word was play on the dual meaning of "stricken" in Persian, which meant to be afflicted with a disease or to be stung by an insect, or to be infatuated and bedazzled.
I say that
gharbzadegi is like
cholera [or]
frostbite. But no. It's at least as bad as
sawflies in the
wheat fields. Have you ever seen how they infest wheat? From within. There's a healthy skin in places, but it's only a skin, just like the shell of a
cicada on a tree.
Al-e Ahmad argued that Iran must gain control over
machines and become a producer rather than a consumer, even though once having overcome Weststruckness it will face a new malady - also western - that of "machinestruckness."
The soul of this devil 'the machine' [must be] bottled up and brought out at our disposal ... [The Iranian people] must not be at the service of machines, trapped by them, since the machine is a means not an end.
The higher productivity of the foreign machines had devastated Iran's native handicrafts and turned Iran into an unproductive consumption economy.
These cities are just flea markets hawking European manufactured goods ... [In] no time at all instead of cities and villages we'll have heaps of dilapidated machines all over the country, all of them exactly like American 'junkyards' and every one as big as
Tehran.
The world market and global divide between rich and poor created by the machine - "one the constructors" of machines "and the other the consumers" - had superseded
Marxist class analysis.
Al-e Ahmad believed the one element of Iranian life uninfected by ‘’gharbzadegi’’ was religion.
Shia Islam in Iran had authenticity and the ability to move people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gharbzadegi
