The 1960s and 1970s saw the emergence of a new generation of radical public intellectuals in Iran representing diverse ideological persuasions and giving expression to an array of anti-status quo sentiments. Although dissidents such as Bijan Jazani, Ali Shariati, and Jalal Al-e Ahmad were no longer alive in 1979 when a popular revolutionary uprising toppled the Pahlavi monarchy, their legacies have been discussed by Iran scholars almost exclusively in relation to the causes and consequences of the revolutionary movement. By now, it has become nearly unimaginable to consider Jazani's copious body of work beyond his theory of armed struggle, or to think of Shariati in terms other than the ideologue of an ostensibly Islamic revolution, or to write about Al-e Ahmad without linking his seminal 1962 essay, Gharbzadegi, to the postrevolutionary state's Islamization initiatives. But are there no alternative ways of reading these thinkers? Ways that consider the entirety of their intellectual output, the various influences and textures that shaped their thinking, and their continued relevance for our present moment? Hamid Dabashi's The Last Muslim Intellectual: The Life and Legacy of Jalal Al-e Ahmad challenges us to think about Al-e Ahmad's significance beyond the 1979 revolution and the postrevolutionary Islamist takeover.

While Iran's postrevolutionary rulers have often claimed Al-e Ahmad as one of their own, Dabashi rejects the idea that Al-e Ahmad's thought is cut from the same cloth as the fanatical Islamism of the Islamic Republic. His book aims to set the record straight by freeing Al-e Ahmad's legacy from abuse at the hands not only of the Islamic Republic but also of the ideological secularists who blame Al-e Ahmad for the sins of the Islamist state. A masterful homage to Al-e Ahmad's own fierce polemical style, Dabashi's indictment of those who have systematically and consistently distorted Al-e Ahmad's legacy makes for a captivating read. Against the grain of a reading of Al-e Ahmad as an anti-modern and anti-Western champion of Islamic nativism, The Last Muslim Intellectual sets out to de-nativize Al-e Ahmad by rediscovering him as a cosmopolitan Muslim intellectual who was in active conversation with all the non-Islamic elements that animated the Iranian society of his time.

For all of its harsh polemic against Al-e Ahmad's Islamist admirers and secularist detractors, The Last Muslim Intellectual is also a corrective to its author's 1992 book, Theology of Discontent. There, in the very first chapter, Dabashi discussed Al-e Ahmad as a precursor of an Islamic ideology that foregrounded the rise of the Islamic Republic. Nearly three decades later, Dabashi permits that his initial reading of Al-e Ahmad may have been colored by a total fixation on the immediate revolutionary context and the traumas unleashed by the Islamist takeover. The passage of time seems also to have modified Dabashi's assessment of the nature of the revolution. Whereas Theology of Discontent was billed as a study on the ideological foundations of the “Islamic Revolution,” The Last Muslim Intellectual insists “the Iranian revolution of 1977–9” was the outcome of a cosmopolitan political disposition which ought not be reduced to its Islamic component (pp. 10–11). Moving away from the moniker of Islamic Revolution allows Dabashi to distinguish the revolution from its outcome, and to acknowledge Al-e Ahmad's role in shaping the revolutionary consciousness without treating his oeuvre as merely another brick in the wall of a revolutionary Islamic ideology.

Dabashi's return to Al-e Ahmad, however, is less about resurrecting old debates surrounding the causes and culprits of the Islamist takeover of the revolution, and more about calling on the past to reimagine a future after the Islamic Republic. His recollection of the past for posterity's sake is a nod to Edward Said for whom the past was a counterpoint against which to reassess and transform the present. It is no coincidence that Dabashi's book on Al-e Ahmad comes immediately after his 2020 book on Said, the subtitle of which, Remembrance of Things Past, is also the title of the first chapter in The Last Muslim Intellectual. Whereas for Said, the exiled intellectual par excellence, the past to be remembered was his memory of Palestine, for Dabashi it is the lost world of his youth in 1960s and 1970s Iran that is to be recollected and reinterpreted. By summoning the forgotten spirit of a cosmopolitan public sphere in which a Muslim intellectual such as Al-e Ahmad could engage freely with a range of non-Islamic critical discourses including Marxism, existentialism, and postcolonial criticism, Dabashi hopes to identify a path to a future in which Muslims will continue to participate in the work of liberating humanity from “the combined calamities of European colonialism” and reactionary postcolonialism (p. 287). The Last Muslim Intellectual presents Al-e Ahmad as a harbinger of this path, which Dabashi calls post-Islamist liberation theology.

The book's designation of Al-e Ahmad as a quintessential non-Islamist Muslim intellectual is predicated on a distinction between two archetypes: the intellectual and the ideologue. Dabashi is adamant that Al-e Ahmad was not a revolutionary ideologue, but an organic intellectual whose worldly Muslimness never degenerated into triumphalist Islamism. This, he claims, is what makes Al-e Ahmad the last Muslim intellectual and sets him apart from an ideologue such as Shariati who took Al-e Ahmad's Islamic streak and drove it “to the edge of militant Islamism” (p. 280). Readers may be persuaded by Dabashi's propositions that Al-e Ahmad's engagement with Islam did not amount to an embrace of Islamism, and that the interventions of Al-e Ahmad and Shariati were marked by crucial differences. However, the postulated demarcation between an organic intellectual and a revolutionary ideologue loses its potency once we recall that for Antonio Gramsci, who famously theorized the concept, the role of organic intellectuals is precisely to articulate an ideology for mobilizing the social groups with whom they maintain an organic relationship.

Still, Dabashi's conception of the intellectual is far less important for the purpose of this book than his conception of Muslimness. The latter rests on Dabashi's earlier works, including Being a Muslim in the World (2013), where he argued for a renewed understanding of Muslimness founded on the innate worldliness of Islam as a dialogical proposition and a regenerative collective consciousness. In this view, Al-e Ahmad's Muslimness is tied neither to scholastic conviction nor to ritual practice but instead to an organic relationship with a historically syncretic Muslim collective consciousness. Rejecting the oft-repeated position that Al-e Ahmad returned to Islam after an affair with Marxism and existentialism, Dabashi contends Al-e Ahmad never left Islam and his attraction to Marxism and existentialism were through, not despite, his Muslimness. Dabashi's insistence that Al-e Ahmad in all that he did and in whatever identity that he assumed always remained a Muslim defies the conventional image of Al-e Ahmad, and perhaps even Al-e Ahmad's self-perception. This is not meant to convince us of Al-e Ahmad's religiosity, but to show the plural meanings of being a Muslim in the world. By taking Al-e Ahmad's legacy in a direction which Al-e Ahmad himself may not have anticipated, Dabashi is pushing the boundaries of Muslimness so as to make room for all of those who are affiliated with a collective consciousness called Islam, even as Marxists, existentialists, agnostics, or atheists.

To be sure, Dabashi's unorthodox conception offers new possibilities for moving away from a homogenizing understanding of Islam and Muslimness. However, to the extent that categories such as agnostic Muslim and atheist Muslim take Muslimness beyond the boundaries of a religious identity, readers may wonder precisely what type of identity this new conception of Muslimness represents. Readers may further ask if Dabashi's conception risks turning Muslimness into an inescapable category of identification that one is born into but can never get out of, because once a Muslim always a Muslim. What about those who do not wish to mediate their being an intellectual, a Marxist, or a feminist, through their ancestral faith tradition? What about those who no longer wish to identify as Muslim? Doesn't a conception of Muslimness as a master identity that mediates all other identities undermine the imperative of the recognition of alterity, for which Dabashi emphatically argues in this book?