A hard-drinking novelist seeded the rhetoric of Iran’s Islamic revolution

Evidence

Yet it is so, for his treatise against West-toxification was read by and crucially influenced ‘Ali Shariati and Ayatollah Khomeini, as well as other key spiritual authorities in the holy city of Qum. Later Khomeini would denounce Orientalists in terms similar to Al-i Ahmad’s: ‘They sent missionaries into Muslim cities, and there found accomplices within the universities and various information or publication centres, mobilized their Orientalist scholars in the service of imperialism – all of that only so as to distort Islamic truths.’ — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 571

Categorization

• XREF: The unlikely ideological lineage of revolution — a dissolute cosmopolitan shaping clerical revolutionary rhetoric — resonates with how secular leftists seeded Islamist movements described elsewhere.