Ahmad Fardid

Who was Ahmad Fardid?

Ahmad Fardid was a prominent Iranian philosopher and an inspiring and dedicated professor of Tehran University. He is considered to be among the ideologues of the Islamic government of Iran which came to power in 1979. Fardid was under the influence of Martin Heidegger, the influential German philosopher.

Fardid studied philosophy at Tehran University, Sorbonne university and University of Heidelberg. The sparsity of Fardid’s written work has led to his recognition as an "oral philosopher". This was, to be sure a puzzling attribute. Although Fardid tried to justify his expository reluctance to the poverty and contamination of the language, some suspect his reticence stemmed from his paralyzing perfectionism. His predicament calls resemblance to Efimov, a character in Dostoyevsky's unfinished novel "Netochka Nezvanova" in which the protagonist, a violin performer, having had a brush with the sublime majesty of pure art abandons his musical instrument for good.

Fardid coined the concept of "Westoxication" which was then popularized by Jalal Al-e-Ahmad on his then widely known book Gharbzadegi, and after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, became among the core ideological teachings of the new Islamic government of Iran.