of Western goods. The Weststruck man is described as an unauthentic (biessallat) “prissy” (qerti), who superficially mimics the West.
He is always primping; always making sure of his appearance. He has even been known to pluck his eyebrow. He places great importance on his shoes, his clothes, and his home. You would think he had just emerged from golden wrapping paper or just come from some European maison. . . . The [Weststruck] man is the most faithful consumer of Western manufactured products. (Al-e Ahmad 1982: 70–71)
Later on the author condemns the “Weststruck man” because “It is on account of him that we have such unauthentic and unindigenous [urban] architecture . . . under the ugly glare of the neon and fluorescent lights” (Al-e Ahmad 1982: 71).
Shariati too declares that “worldliness” has tainted Iranian culture. He defines “worldliness” as the nihilism of Western culture, which promotes individual hedonism (Shariati 1979: 79), stripping nations of their authenticity and transforming human beings into “consumer animals” (see Mirsepassi 2000: 122). In Shariati’s view, the main consequences of consumerism are “self-alienation” (az khod biganegi) and uprootedness from authentic Iranian/Islamic culture. Shariati’s and Ale Ahmad’s occidentophobia and attack on consumerism are presented in a patriarchal way. Throughout his speeches and publications Shariati expresses anguish that consumerism has converted Iranian women into “European dolls” (arousak-e farangi) who can only consume and consume. Al-e Ahmad’s “Weststruck” person is, in contrast, always a male, whom he labels “effeminate” (zan sefat) to belittle him. Women cannot themselves be Weststruck, but, on the other hand, they are used as means to deceive men.2 Ali Shariati, influenced by Frantz Fanon, also uses postcolonial discourse to condemn consumerism. Shariati developed a populist version of Islam, combining Fanon’s views, Marx’s criticisms of capitalism, and Shiite traditions. He believes that the “West,” in order to enslave the “East,” first turns it into a consumer of its products. Consequently the “East” becomes alienated from its own native culture, turning into an eternal identity-less consumer and slave of the West. Shariati believed that modernized meant modernized in consumption. “One who becomes modernized is one whose tastes now desire . . . European new forms of living and modern products.” Non-Europeans are modernized for the sake of consumption. Therefore, the Europeans had to make non-Europeans equate “modernization” with civilization” to impose the new consumption pattern upon them, since everyone has a desire for civilization.”3 Such fears affect secular intellectuals, too. Obsessed by concerns with authenticity but also influenced by neo-Marxist intellectuals such as Marcuse, Iranian intellectuals have targeted consumerism as a crucial feature of the Shah’s cultural policy.
A fear of consumerism has been the main theme in literature and films since the 1970s, most visibly in the book Tars va Larz and the film Keshti-ye Yonani. Tars va Larz (Fear and Tremble), written by the celebrated psychiatrist and novelist Gholam Hossein Sa‘edi (1380/2001), tells stories about coastal people along the Persian Gulf. The arrival of a foreign (European) ship changes the life of the coastal people. The foreigners are beautiful and offer the local people a large amount of food and commodities. Overconsumption metamorphoses the people from human beings into a kind of parasites waiting for the arrival of other boats.
CINEMATIC VIGNETTE
Keshti-ye Yonani (The Greek Ship, 1999, by Nasser Taghvai)
This short film is one of six episodes making up the film Tales of Kish (Qeseha-ye Kish). Kish, a little free trade zone island in the Persian Gulf with its pleasing coasts, has become a popular tourist attraction in Iran. As in Dubai, life on the island is organized around shopping. One of the attractions of the island is an old ship stranded on the southwestern shore. It is said that, a long time ago, a Greek cargo vessel reached this part of the sea for unknown reasons, but was stranded for ever. The natives say that the owners of the ship set it on fire before leaving it: and indeed nothing is left of the ship but a steel structure. Taghvai’s film tells the story of two workers who collect cardboard containers—marked by Kodak, Dauoo, Toshiba, Konica, and Aiwa brand marks—washed up on the beach from passing ships. The men dry out the boxes to build their huts. The wife of one of the men, who gathers some objects left by a passing Greek ship, is afflicted by a strange illness. The village medicine man claims it comes from the boxes. After a zar ritual, the woman is cured and the men throw the boxes in the sea. The film graphically shows how the local culture, health, and authenticity are endangered by consumerism and foreign culture. When a journalist asked Taghvai why he had chosen the Greek ship as a metaphor, the director answered: “Why not. Was Greece not the cradle of Western culture?”
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Condemning the immorality of society prior to the Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini often used commodities and consumption as examples. The Revolutionary agenda was to save the virtue and purity of the ummat from consumerism, by promoting self-restraint (qena‘at) and idealizing poverty. Excessive consumption (esraf) and an ostentatious lifestyle (tajamulgarai) became synonymous with “bourgeois aesthetics” and were automatically defined as signs of adopting an anti-revolutionary position. People preferred to conceal their wealth, in order not to be stamped as anti-revolutionary. For instance, many hid their luxury cars in their garages for several years.4
The Noble Dispossessed
At the end of the 1970s, the slum dwellers in Tehran numbered as many as a million (Bayat 1997: 29). Ayatollah Khomeini, as the opposition leader, found potential power among them for revolting against the Shah. Claiming that Islam stands on the side of the disenfranchised (mahroumin) and the “dispossessed” (mostaz‘afin), Khomeini characterized the Revolution as a movement against the “oppressors” (mostakberin). Its goal was to induce more social justice for the poor. The “dispossessed” were praised and deprivation was glorified. While the “oppressors” were depicted as venal, decadent, and corrupt, the “dispossessed” were “portrayed as the repository of innocence possessing genuine human values. If unbridled pursuit of material wealth had rendered the elite heartless lackeys of capital, the suffering of the dispossessed had humanized them” (Dorraj 1992: 221). Thus, pain (dard) and suffering (ranj) had become hallmarks of “high human values.”
Ayatollah Khomeini frequently attested his commitment to the disenfranchised in his speeches: “I kiss the hands of the simple grocer” (Khomeini 1981: 184); or “Islam belongs to the dispossessed” (quoted in Abrahamian 1989: 22). The clerics and officials of the Islamic regime were zealous in presenting themselves as belonging to the lower classes, and the gradual romanticization of poverty became a salient feature of the theocrats’ political populism (see Abrahamian 1993; Dorraj 1992). The ideological romanticization of poverty pursued by the Iranian authorities draws nourishment from Sufi traditions and literature. Poverty and a working-class lifestyle are celebrated in Iranian popular movies and soap operas. Following the famous phrase of Imam Ali, “The best wealth is self-restraint (qena‘at),” the Iranian media glorify poverty and self-abasement by an endless restaging of the martyrs’ testaments and life stories.
Even primary school textbooks are used to promote ideas of poverty and modesty. The most illustrative example of poor-is-beautiful-assessment may be in the textbook for the first grade. In the pre-Revolutionary first grade textbooks there is an illustration of a middle-class family sitting around the breakfast table.5 The father wears a suit and tie and is shaved. The mother has short hair and is unveiled. The teenage girl is dressed in red and has her arm on the table. She is the image of self-confidence. Her brother, dressed in yellow, is talking. The parents are looking at him. On the table are coffee cups, a milk jug, a sugar bowl, plates, and knives. After the Revolution this picture was replaced with a more humble one, where the family is clearly less affluent. The family members are eating dinner sitting on a rug. On a damask cloth there is traditional Iranian food, rice, vegetables, and bread. The mother is veiled and wears a simple overall. The father
