Last Muslim Intellectual

Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York. He is the author of many books and articles on the social and intellectual history of Islam, both medieval and modern, many of them translated into other languages. He is a globally recognized critical thinker on contemporary affairs and a regular columnist for Aljazeera.

• Acknowledgements; Introduction: The Last Muslim Intellectual; 1. Remembrance of Things Past; 2. Something of an Autobiography; 3. Her Husband Jalal; 4. The Master Essayist; 5. Gharbzadegi: The Condition of Coloniality; 6. Literary Interludes; 7. Traveling in and out of a Homeland; 8. Translating the World; 9. From a Short Life to a Lasting Legacy: Towards a Post-Islamist Liberation Theology.

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.