Intimidation and De-Intimidation in the Book “Dar Khedmat va Khīānat-e rowšanfekrān (The service and betrayal of the intellectuals)” by Jalal Al-e-Ahmad

The ruling political system duringthe Pahlavi II era, with its cultural policies, development-oriented economic views, and the creation of an atmosphere of repression and suffocation, turned its desirable discourse of Iranian identity, originated in Westernism, modernism, and archaism, into the only dominant discourse and marginalized other parallel discourses and voices. In such an atmosphere, the idea of "return to self" was raised and favored in the intellectual circle. In almost all research, this idea has been investigated as an answer to the question of identity and the desire to seek the identity of Iranian society. This article focuses its central question on the relationship between "return to self" and the Intimidation of the ruling political system and believes that according to Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, this idea has been an attempt to create an alternative to the dominant ideological and identity discourse of the political system. The hypothesis of the present article considers "return to self" as an attempt to de-Intimidationthe dominant discourse of the ruling political system; however, within this idea, the seed of Intimidationand turning into a single voice and marginalizing alternatives and other voices have also been cultivated.