Ahmad Fardid, Martin Heidegger and the Crisis of Modernity III
From Yazd to a French mediator
Fardid’s early education combined the religious schools of Yazd with a secular curriculum in Arabic, mathematics and philosophy. Like several of his generation, he then traveled to Europe, eventually reaching Paris, where the intellectual encounter that would define the rest of his career took place: not with a German thinker directly, but with a French one who had already made Heidegger his life’s work.
That thinker was Henry Corbin.
Corbin, born in Paris in 1903, had trained under Louis Massignon in the philological tradition of French Islamic studies. In 1934 and again in 1936 he traveled to Freiburg to work directly with Heidegger, and in 1938 he became the first person to translate Heidegger into French, publishing Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique? He would also translate Heidegger’s essay on Hölderlin. Fardid’s introduction to Heidegger’s thought passed through this Frenchman before it passed through any German text Fardid could read on his own.
This detail matters. It means that the concept later credited with shaping the ideological climate of the Islamic Republic did not arrive in Iran directly from Germany. It arrived filtered through a French scholar whose own primary interest was not politics but the visionary philosophy of medieval Islam.
Corbin’s Tehran
Corbin’s relationship with Iran did not end with a single encounter. From the 1940s onward he spent over three decades teaching in Tehran, eventually becoming one of the most respected — and most unusual — foreign scholars in the country’s intellectual life.
In 1945, Allameh Tabatabai, the leading Shiite philosopher of his generation, traveled from Qom specifically to meet him. Corbin devoted his scholarship to recovering the Illuminationist philosophy of Suhrawardi and the metaphysics of Ibn Arabi, presenting medieval Iranian and Islamic mysticism to Western readers as a coherent philosophical tradition rather than an exotic curiosity. He mentored Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Daryush Shayegan. According to scholars who have traced the genealogy of Heidegger’s reception in Iran, it was through this same network that Fardid became, in the words of one academic study, the first Iranian intellectual “to become aware of Heidegger’s significance.”
Corbin’s own project was rarely political. He wanted to show that the imaginal visions of Shiite and Sufi mystics, the hidden Imam, the angelology of light, could be treated as legitimate philosophical material, neither reducible to psychology nor dismissed as folklore. His method has been described by later historians as a form of spiritual phenomenology, closer to contemplation than to ideology.
He coined the term “imaginal” to name a plane of reality he believed modern thought had lost sight of. Between the sensory world, known through the senses, and the purely intelligible world of abstract essences, he located a third, intermediate realm that Islamic tradition calls the barzakh — an isthmus or threshold that both separates and joins. In this imaginal world, spiritual realities take on form and material things become spiritualized; it is where visions, dreams, and prophetic revelation occur, not as fictions of a wandering mind but as genuine perceptions of an autonomous order. He insisted on distinguishing this “imaginal” from the merely “imaginary,” the latter being, in modern usage, synonymous with illusion or subjective fantasy. Drawing on thinkers like Ibn ‘Arabi and Suhrawardi, he treated the imagination itself as an organ of knowledge rather than a producer of make-believe, capable of perceiving symbols that are literally real rather than standing in for something else. The concept of barzakh in Islamic eschatology also names the intermediate state of the soul between death and resurrection (before the akhira, the afterlife proper), and he extends this eschatological structure into a broader ontology: the imaginal is a permanent, traversable region of being, not merely a way-station reserved for the dead.
Fardid took the same material somewhere else entirely.
Gharbzadegi and its two authors
The concept for which Fardid is remembered, gharbzadegi — usually translated as “Westoxification” or “West-infection”, became famous only when the novelist Jalal Al-e Ahmad used it as the title of his influential 1962 book. Encyclopaedia Iranica and later scholarship place Fardid and Al-e Ahmad, and eventually Reza Davari Ardakani, on a shared intellectual line running from Fardid’s Heideggerian diagnosis to Al-e Ahmad’s political and cultural polemic.
For Al-e Ahmad, Westoxification meant a society intoxicated by imported machines, consumer goods and secular ideas, disconnected from its own social and economic roots.
Fardid’s own version went further. Following Heidegger’s account of Western metaphysics as a long forgetting of Being, Fardid argued that the entire trajectory of Western philosophy since the Greeks — its rationalism, its anthropocentrism — represented a metaphysical decline, one that had also infected Islamic philosophers such as al-Farabi and even Mulla Sadra. Authentic “Eastern spirituality,” in Fardid’s phrase, needed to be recovered almost from the beginning.
This was no longer Corbin’s contemplative recovery of a forgotten tradition. It was a historical diagnosis with a target and, eventually, with named human agents.
Two Heideggers
Recent comparative research on Fardid and Corbin has argued that despite sharing the same Heideggerian foundation, the two men built philosophically incompatible projects. Corbin’s engagement centered on spirituality and metaphysics, expanding Heidegger’s concepts of Being and temporality into what one study calls “a foundation for spiritual phenomenology that transcends Western intellectual bounds.” Fardid’s response was, by contrast, both philosophical and ideological, advocating what the same research describes as “a return to Islamic and Eastern authenticity to resist Western modernity’s encroachment.”
Where Corbin wanted an expanded, comparative understanding of religious imagination, Fardid wanted a corrective, a diagnosis of decline with a cure attached. Where Corbin treated Jewish, Christian and Islamic mysticism as related dialects of a single visionary tradition, Fardid’s account of Western decline increasingly identified specific groups — Jews and Freemasons among them — as its historical carriers, a strand of his thought that later scholarship on Iranian intellectual history has documented in detail as structurally embedded in his broader metaphysics rather than incidental to it.
Fardid gathered around him a circle of students, among them the young Reza Davari Ardakani, who would carry a more academically disciplined version of this anti-Western diagnosis into the philosophy faculty of the University of Tehran and eventually to the presidency of the Iranian Academy of Sciences. Corbin, for his part, never built a comparable circle of ideological successors; his students went on to comparative religion, Islamic studies and Sufism, not to state institutions.
Corbin, Shariati and the wider Sorbonne connection
Corbin’s influence did not stop with Fardid. Ali Shariati, the revolutionary sociologist who later fused Shiism with Marxism and anti-colonial theory, studied with Corbin at the Sorbonne before returning to Iran to build the ideological vocabulary that would animate a very different current of the 1979 revolution.
A single French scholar of Islamic mysticism therefore sits, without ever subscribing to either project, at the source of two of the intellectual currents that fed into the Iranian revolution: Fardid’s metaphysical anti-Westernism and Shariati’s revolutionary theology. Corbin died in 1978, the year before the revolution broke out in the streets of the city where he had taught for three decades.
An unexpected meeting point
Between 1949 and his death, Corbin was a regular lecturer at the Eranos conferences in Ascona, Switzerland, the same gathering that for the same three decades also hosted Gershom Scholem, the founder of the modern academic study of the Kabbalah. Scholem and Corbin debated each other on the nature of myth and religious symbol, and even contributed companion essays on the symbolism of color in their respective traditions.
It is a striking historical coincidence that the same esoteric conference which helped carry Heidegger’s thought toward Fardid’s Tehran should also have been, for three decades, one of the great meeting points of twentieth-century Jewish scholarship on mysticism — Scholem reconstructing, with historical rigor, a tradition many secular founders of Zionism had dismissed as embarrassing superstition, on the same Swiss hillside where Corbin was reconstructing Shiite angelology for an audience that, at one further remove, reached all the way to Tehran.
Conclusion
The road from a Heidegger seminar in Freiburg to the ideological vocabulary of the Islamic Republic did not run in a straight line, and it did not run only through Germany. It ran through a French scholar of Islamic mysticism who spent his career trying to show, in his own words, that the “imaginal” was a real order of being between sense and intellect — and through an Iranian student who took that same vocabulary and built a diagnosis of civilizational decline out of it. Corbin wanted contemplation. Fardid wanted a cure. Between the two of them, they gave twentieth-century Iran a philosophical language that could serve either purpose, depending entirely on who was doing the listening.
The main liberal-reformist opponent to this Muslim hard line was the president Mohammad Khatami, who received a BA in Western philosophy at Isfahan University. He served from 1997 to 2005. Khatami had run on a platform of liberalization and reform. During his election campaign, Khatami proposed the idea of Dialogue Among Civilizations as a response to Samuel P. Huntington’s 1992 theory of a Clash of Civilizations. The United Nations later proclaimed the year 2001 as the Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations, on Khatami’s suggestion. During his two terms as president, Khatami advocated freedom of expression, tolerance and civil society, and constructive diplomatic relations with other states, including those in Asia and the European Union. The Iranian media are forbidden, on the orders of Tehran’s prosecutor, from publishing pictures of Khatami or quoting his words, on account of his support for the defeated reformist candidates in the disputed 2009 re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Khatami utilized Jürgen Habermas’s theories of communicative action and dialogue to propose the “Dialogue Among Civilizations,” aiming to replace conflict with discourse between the West and the Islamic world. Habermas visited Tehran in May 2002, marking a significant intellectual exchange during Mohammad Khatami’s reformist presidency. The visit included meetings with Iranian intellectuals and officials, where Habermas discussed democracy, civil society, and the role of theory, often engaging with figures who sought to reconcile Islamic thought with modern, liberal concepts. However, not least due to hard-line Muslim repression, this orientation disappeared as a serious intellectual force.” (Slavoj Zizek)