Gharbzadegi

Gharbzadegi (Persian: غرب‌زدگی‎) is a pejorative Persian term variously translated as ‘Westernized’, ‘West-struck-ness’,[1] ‘Westoxification’, ‘Westitis’, ‘Euromania’, or ‘Occidentosis’.[2] 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.[3][4]

The phrase was first coined by Ahmad Fardid, a professor of philosophy at the University of Tehran, 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. Fardid's definition of the term as referring to the hegemony of ancient Greek philosophy, differed from its later usage as popularised by Al-e Ahmad.[5]

Gharbzadegi - from a Negligible Neologism to a Catch-Phrase. In 1965, Peter Avery referred to the topic of Al-e Ahmad’s essay as the “disease of Westernism,” and Al-e Ahmad himself reportedly equated it with “Occidentalization”. In the early 1970s, Michael Craig Hillmann used the term “Weststruckness,” and by the late 1970s Paul Sprachman considered “Weststrucktedness” archaic and “West-strickenness” as cacophonic and stylistically problematic. Since then, post-revolutionary Iranian discourse has produced an impressive collection of neologisms that have, in turn, fostered lively scholarly debate. Attempting to render “gharbzadegi” while preserving the various ideas encapsulated in Persian, Edward Mortimer in Faith and Power used “Westities,” a term also used in Sprachman’s translation to distinguish between the noun (gharbzadegi) and the essay’s title (“Plagued by the West”), which is often included in German references as well (Geplagt vom Westen). “Occidentosis” appears in the title of Robert Campbell’s English translation and L’occidentalite in the French. Hamid Algar opts for the term “Xenomania” in his notes to the translation of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Government, while “Westomania,” is preferred by Reza Baraheni in The Crowned Cannibals, and was also chosen by Farzaneh Milani in Veils and Words. Although Roy Motaheddeh used the term “Euromania” in The Mantle of the Prophet, Hamid Dabashi stressed that it “leaves much of the weight of ‘gharb’– which is ‘West’ not ‘Europe’ – behind”. He also emphasizes, “the construction of ‘the West’ as a monolithic ‘Other,’ quintessentially different from the historical experiences of ‘Europe,’ is central to the ideological disposition of Al-e Ahmad and all other Muslim ideologues in modernity”. Assuming Al-e Ahmad was “playing on the word senzadegi, the affliction of wheat by an aphid[-]like pest quite common in Iran,” Brad Hanson found other renderings of gharbzadegi to be too literal. He chose “westoxication,” by far the predominant translation in English references, and argues that it seeks to convey both intoxication (the infatuation with the West) and infection (Westernization as the poisoning of an indigenous culture). Following Hanson, Mehrzad Boroujerdi added, “it most closely resembles Al-e Ahmad’s usage of gharbzadegi as a medical metaphor denoting a social illness”. In contrast, John Green argued that “westoxication” misses both the disease and contagion in Persian, and the sense of blow. He further emphasized that the Persian participle “zadeh” has broad semantic latitude and morphological flexibility, “which carries the meanings of being struck, smitten, incapacitated, stupefied, sabotaged, diseased, infested, and infatuated, all at once”.[6]