Anti-western Occidentalism has been one of the leading categories of the Islamic Revolution(IR) of 1979 as well as Islamic Republic of Iran(IRI)’s ideology. Genealogy of this category could illustrate its contextual settings, semantical contents and various manifested forms. Iranian student diasporas and movements in European countries and the US had a prominent role to introducing and transmitting this category through the intensity of their own sense of mission from global context into Iranian public sphere before IR. Their engagement in the cosmopolitan battle against different layers of imperial and colonial powers in 1960s-70s led them to construct a kind of anti-western occidentalism in which the West, namely US and USSR, conceived as imperialist and colonialist powers. Through their narrative, the Pahlavi government was regarded as a representation of global imperial powers in Iran, which was acting in line with the global imperial interests and its internal exploitative purposes.
With focusing on the Confederation of Iranian Students (National Union), this paper seeks to trace the evolution of one of the main sources of anti-western occidentalism in Iranian revolutionary ideology. Starting with refers to the ideological transformation of this student current at the end of 1960s, it has been shown how under global contextual conditions, especially the Cold War socio-political order, as well as the circumstances of intense internal repression by Pahlavi government, the current is transformed into a cosmopolitan movement. In this regard, with a historical approach and by utilizing discourse analysis method, their publications, bulletins, official statements, reports, and other accessible materials have explored so that to present how they could, by constructing and projecting an imperial image of the West and placing the Pahlavi government in this image, promote their local and national battle to a global anti-imperial and anti-colonial fight. To illustrate this process, the formation, aspects, and elements of the image, the transformation and transmission of the fighting terrain and its relevant ideology and political practices, and the internal significance of this category for the Islamic revolution, have addressed in this paper.
