Last Muslim Intellectual

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).

• 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.