Mrs. Anne Marie Schimmel, a renowned German Orientalist, shares her thoughts on Islamic prayers, especially the Sahifa Sajjadiya:

"I consistently read Islamic supplications, hadiths, and news directly from their Arabic source without resorting to translations. I personally translated and published a small portion of Sahifa Sajjadiya into German.

About seven years ago, while engaged in translating the supplication for sighting the crescent moon of Ramadan and the farewell prayer for that month, my mother was hospitalized. During my visits, I found myself working on translations in a corner of her room while she drifted off to sleep.

Her hospital room had two beds. In the other bed, a very devout Catholic woman was admitted, staunch in her faith and even somewhat zealous. When she learned that I was translating Islamic prayers, she became dismayed, questioning whether we lacked anything in our Christianity and sacred texts that I turned to Islamic prayers!

Upon the publication of my book, I sent her a copy. A month later, she called me and said, 'Sincerely grateful for the gift of this book, as I read it every day instead of saying prayers.' Mrs. Schimmel believes that Imam Zain al-Abidin (peace be upon him) is effective for many people in the Western world.

#IslamicPrayers #SahifaSajjadiya #Translation #CulturalExchange #InterfaithUnderstanding 🌐 @rahyafte_en

📚 Translation as a Strategic Weapon in Psychological Warfare

🔍 Declassified documents from four major U.S. institutions — the White House, CIA, the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB), and the American Political Science Academy — reveal that translation was regarded as one of the most powerful tools of cultural infiltration.

👉 In the PSB Operation, known as the largest academic espionage project of the 20th century, human sciences were identified as the most penetrative domain of soft war, and the translation of books was declared a “strategic propaganda weapon.”

💬 As the CIA philosopher Hannah Arendt argued:

“The spread of secular science leads to the collapse of any religious system or theocratic government.”

From this viewpoint, translation became the first step in dismantling religious systems by promoting secular political philosophy.

⚔️ The Role of Jewish Philosophers & Secular Translators

🕎 Figures such as Hannah Arendt, Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin, Raymond Aron, and Thomas Kuhn were not merely academics; they were key agents in the West’s soft power strategy.

📖 CIA analysts believed that to “close the black bracket of Islamic totalitarianism in Iran,” society needed to be educated by these thinkers, just as Eastern Europe had been exposed to them during the Cold War.

In Iran, especially after 1979, a circle of secular translators attempted to import their ideas. They aimed to reshape Iran’s intellectual landscape, laying the groundwork for so-called “reform movements” built upon their philosophies.

🎭 Tragedy Turned Comedy

💡 Karl Marx once wrote:

“All great events appear twice: first as tragedy, then as farce.”

Indeed, the CIA’s “translation project” was first tested in Eastern Europe, then replayed in Iran. While initially tragic in its effects, the Iranian case became almost a comedy of secularism — rooted in miscalculations and blind imitation.

📖 The Cultural Cold War & the “Great Book Project”

During the post-WWII rivalry, both the U.S. and USSR used books, culture, and translation as weapons:

🇷🇺 The Soviets opened “Houses of Culture” in European capitals.

🇺🇸 The Americans launched the “Great Book Project” under OSS, translating anti-communist works and distributing them worldwide.

🕎 Jewish philosophers like Isaiah Berlin designed much of this project, later recycled against Iran through Persian translations of Arendt, Popper, and Berlin.

🇮🇷 Translation in Post-Revolutionary Iran

In Iran, secular translators assumed a self-imposed “historic mission”: to democratize Iran through the steady introduction of Western secular human sciences.

Some even declared:

“Translation is the only true form of thinking for us.”

They believed translation was not merely academic, but a vehicle for political transformation.

⚠️ The Ideology of Translation

Muslim scholars have warned that this “translation ideology” leads to:

📉 Intellectual dependency on the West

🛑 Suspension of original scientific creativity

⚰️ Death of indigenous thought

Translation, when weaponized, becomes the silent layer of soft war — dismantling cultures from within while appearing harmless.

🔗 Read full analysis:
👉 https://jscenter.ir/slave-jews/muslim-zionism/5933

✍ Source: Payam Fazlinejad, The Secret Army of Intellectuals, Tehran: Keyhan Publishing.

#SoftWar #Translation #CIA #CulturalColdWar #Secularism #Iran

✅ @rahyafte_en

The Hidden General: Ezzatollah Fooladvand and the Intellectual War on the Islamic Revolution
https://jscenter.ir/slave-jews/muslim-zionism/5935

On the occasion of nationwide demonstrations in support of the Islamic Republic against the 2009 sedition (9 Dey 1388/ Dec 30, 2009).

Intellectual wars are fought not with tanks, but with ideas and translations. A key, yet often hidden, figure in this long-term cultural battle within Iran was Ezzatollah Fooladvand. Described by analysts and opposition figures like Akbar Ganji as a "spiritual father of the Green Movement," his weapon was the pen, and his ammunition was Western philosophy.

🎯 The Mission: Building a Theoretical Foundation

Fooladvand operated on a core belief: "Without a 'theory,' we cannot establish the foundations of 'freedom' and 'democracy' in society." From 1979 onwards, with the encouragement of Alireza Heidari Khajehpour, director of Kharazmi Publishing, he embarked on a deliberate project: translating the works of Jewish philosophers and liberal thinkers into Persian.

His goal, as stated by his supporters, was to "teach the elites the way to fight religious authoritarianism." Over three decades, he published 48 works. More than half were books classified in U.S. and European intelligence documents as "white books"—approved resources for spreading capitalist philosophy.

📚 The Arsenal: Translating the Cold War Intellectuals

Fooladvand's translations became the theoretical backbone for a generation of secular-minded intellectuals and reformists. He meticulously translated the works of figures central to the Western liberal canon during the Cold War:

· Hannah Arendt (on revolution and violence)
· Sir Karl Popper (on the "open society")
· Sir Isaiah Berlin (on liberty)
· Raymond Aron
· Václav Havel

These translations were not seen as neutral academic work. Critics like philosopher Reza Davari Ardakani warned at the time that this sudden, competitive rush to publish Popper's "The Open Society and Its Enemies" in Iran smelled of a "political propaganda project against the Islamic Revolution." He compared the praise for Popper in Iran to the rhetoric of Radio Israel.

🔗 Connections and Recognition

Fooladvand's path was paved by pre-revolutionary connections. Educated at Columbia University (a noted hub for cultivating liberal intellectuals), he later worked with the Franklin Institute in Iran, an American-funded publishing house explicitly tasked with "spreading American philosophy and literature."
His work gainedofficial recognition during the reformist era (Khatami's presidency), winning the national Book of the Year award three times. This provided a platform, allowing his ideas to permeate major newspapers like Iran, Hamshahri, and Jam-e Jam.

⚔️ The Impact: Shaping a Movement

The impact was profound. Akbar Ganji credits reading Fooladvand's translations of Hannah Arendt in the early 1980s with a pivotal ideological shift: "I understood what a mistake we had made by making a 'revolution'... Ardent shows that classic, holistic revolutions like the 'Islamic Revolution of Iran'... do not lead you to democracy at all."
Thus,Fooladvand's three-decade project is presented as a successful long-term operation in "ideological subversion." By importing and disseminating a philosophical framework inherently hostile to revolutionary, ideological states, he helped construct the intellectual scaffolding for political movements that sought to fundamentally revise or overthrow the foundations of the Islamic Republic.

He operated not on the front lines, but in the quiet world of academia and publishing—a "small cog in a complex game," yet one that helped turn the wheels of a significant ideological challenge.

Source: Jewish Studies Center - "Ezzatollah Fooladvand, the Jew-ridden, and the Reformists"
Original Source: Payam Fazlinejad, The Secret Army of Intellectuals, Tehran: Kayhan Publications.

#Iran #IntellectualHistory #Translation #ColdWar #Philosophy #GreenMovement #IdeologicalWarfare #CulturalInfluence #Reformists

✅ @rahyafte_en