Westernization / A bit of machine-intoxication too

Gharbzadegi (Westoxication, 1962) is Jalal Al-e Ahmad's best known essay and one of the most influential Iranian books of the twentieth century. In a series of short chapters it argues that Iran had become a consumer of Western machines and manners without the industry or the thought behind them, and asks what a society loses when it borrows a civilisation instead of making one. First circulated privately, the book shaped a generation of intellectual and political debate. Al-e Ahmad died in 1969, and his work is in the public domain in Iran; the full text is on Persian Wikisource.