Ethos: A Critique of Eurocentric Modernity

Ethos is a radical critique of Eurocentrism. In it, Ahmad Kasravi unleashes a scathing attack on Europe’s self-perceived superiority as well as on Eastern promoters of the idea. Kasravi proceeds to outline the ills of post-Enlightenment European civilization: imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, Orientalism. Embedded in Europe’s notions of ＂progress,＂ these phenomena have in reality brought about social Darwinism, racism, war-mongering, materialism, mindless consumerism, inequality and immorality in the world. Disputing the rationality or civility of these Western tokens, Kasravi warns Euro-enthusiasts in his country of the consequences of wholesale Westernization and instead advocates for a vernacular modernity premised on the noble virtues of Iranian culture and of rationalist Islam. In the process, Kasravi created the theoretical framework and the lexicon which many of his other works build upon, and which generations of other Iranian intellectuals of various persuasions would draw on. Placed in the context of similar polemical works from the global South, Ethos’s import transcends the Iranian setting. It presents an embryonic articulation of post-colonial discourse which would, decades later, come to maturity and international recognition in the works of Edward Said and others.

Ahmad Kasravi is among the most influential Iranian intellectuals in the 20th century. He received traditional Islamic education as a seminarian, but was later drawn to modern science and scholarship. A philologist, anthropologist, linguist, jurist, journalist and historian, Kasravi was assassinated in 1946, but his works continued to influence both secular and Islamist modernists in Iran and beyond.

Hamid Rezaei Yazdi is Professor at Humber College, Canada. He is the editor of Persian Literature and Modernity: Production and Reception (2019).