The Last Muslim Intellectual

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, Aimé Césaire 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.