Al-e Ahmad’s fight against occidentosis as a modernisation project of Iran The pre-revolutionary Iranian writer Jalal Al-e Ahmad looks for the creation of a new subject of the Iranian modernity - not in the blind Westernization, or in retreat to lifeless tradition, but in "a return forward" to breaking the spell of machine and technology and putting them in service of the Iranian nation Vladimir Mitev This article was published on 20 November 2020 in the journal Manas of the Center for Eastern Languages and Cultures of the University in Sofia in its sixth issue (volume 1), 2020. The Islamic Revolution in Iran (1979) has been resonating as an event of prime importance in its region for the last 40 years. It is one of the first cases, when the political islam takes over the power in the Great Middle East. But the Islamic Revolution doesn’t come at an empty place. It was prepared both by the historic events of the 20 th century in Iran (most of all by the American-British coup d’etat against Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953) and by the political, philosophical and literary searches of the Iranian intellectuals in the period between 1953 and 1979. After the 19 August 1953 coup d’etat the Iranian nation and a part of its elite felt traumatically the fact that their cravings for independence have been crushed by the mighty interference of the foreign powers, which controlled the oil industry of the Iranian monarchy. This happened while all over the world the times after World War Two were characterized by anti-colonial struggle and the growth of the movement of the independent states. In Iran the beginning of the 60s was marked by the introduction of social-economic reforms, which were known as the White Revolution. They included land reform, investment in transport infrastructure, in irrigation systems and dams, in improvement of the health system, support for the industrial development, easing of access to education in rural areas and mechanisms for profit sharing of factories among their workers. The idea was that Iran should develop as an industrial force, but the reform made the dissenting social layers larger. A lot of these people felt the loss of their roots. They were forced to leave their places of birth and to settle in the big city, where they felt as well the strong control of their country and its elite by the international corporations and security structures. As the researcher Ervand Abrahamian wrote in 2008: “The White Revolution had been designed to preempt a Red Revolution. Instead, it paved the way for an Islamic Revolution” (Abrahamian, 2008, p. 140). This is the context in which the first edition of the book “Occidentosis” was published in 1962. Its author is the Iranian writer, anthropologist, translator and intellectual Jalal Al-e Ahmad. This book becomes the first Iranian essay, which acquires international fame in the context of the Third world’s struggle for emancipation from the industrially developed nations. It is believed