"Gharbzadegi" is one of many cerebral Persian neologisms from the decades leading up to the Islamic Revolution. This particular coinage from the 1940s was the philosopher (and revolutionary ideologue) Ahmad Fardid's, but it was popularised by the novelist Jalal Al-e-Ahmad in his clandestine 1962 book Occidentosis: A Plague from the West. Where Fardid had coined the term strictly in reference to Greek philosophy, post-1962, it took on the much broader meaning of "Westoxification", "Westoxication", "Euromania", "Weststruckness", "West-strickenness", "Westernized", "Occidentalization", even "Westities", etc. (Till this day, no scholar of Persian, Occidental or Oriental, has managed to offer a translation that captures the multitude of meanings loaded onto the Persian, although the prefix "West" is generally preferred to "Euro" given that "Gharb" means the West.) Believed to be a play on "senzadegi", a disease afflicting wheat, the neologism, after Al-e-Ahmad, sought to encapsulate 20th century Iranian attitudes towards the West. Al-e-Ahmad wrote: "We have been unable to preserve our own historicocultural character in the face of the machine and its fateful onslaught. Rather, we have been routed… So long as we do not comprehend the real essence, basis, and philosophy of Western civilization, only aping the West outwardly and formally (by consuming its machines), we shall be like the ass going about in a lion's skin." In his 1971 Message to the Pilgrims, Khomeini, borrowing from Al-e-Ahmad, wrote about the "poisonous culture of imperialism" which was "penetrating to the depths of towns and villages throughout the Muslim world, displacing the culture of the Qur'an, recruiting our youth en masse to the service of foreigners and imperialists…"

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