In this article, we attempt to think both with and against the twentieth-century Iranian intellectual and dissident, Jalal Al-e Ahmad (d. 1969) and his exploration of the “guardianship state”(velāyat) in the context of his 1963 visit to Israel/Palestine. Through Al-e Ahmad's idiosyncratic use of the term and its cognates, well established in Islamic mysticism, Shiʿi theology, and jurisprudence, we argue that he advances a decolonial critique of the political theology of sovereign power and the nation-state. With the explicit aim of cohering Al-e Ahmad's critique, we situate his intervention in relation to broader debates in the history of political thought vis-à-vis the “extraordinary” character of political foundings and the establishment of a sovereign political order ensuing therefrom. We place Al-e Ahmad's insights in direct conversation with those of Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben, and Hannah Arendt, to examine the logics of erasure and dispossession commonly disavowed and obscured in the process of sovereign founding. These were logics, as we demonstrate, to which Al-e Ahmad was both sensitive and attuned. In the final sections of the article, we argue that in contradistinction to this sovereign state form, Al-e Ahmad espouses a distinct kind of being-together and form of life, namely, a being-in-common (ejtemāʿ), that refuses those iterations of difference, such as national/foreigner, rational and industrious/benighted and infantile, majority/minority, civilized/barbaric, which have emerged as staples of the nation-state and its colonial articulations in capitalist modernity. We seek to bring out those aspects of Al-e Ahmad's thought, above all his critique of colonial sovereignty, in conjunction with the insights afforded by Arendt's reflections on freedom and the basic condition of plurality.

Al-e Ahmad's travelogue to Israel has been subject to a slew of commentary, as well as a controversy by those seeking to recuperate him as an unreconstructed Zionist (Pardo, 2004), a fierce and uncompromising critic of Israeli colonialism (Dabashi, 2021, Chapter 7), or clairvoyant of Iran's post-revolutionary theocracy (Al-e Ahmad, 2013, Introduction). Several scholars have sought to delineate the different moments of Al-e Ahmad's engagement with Israel, the significance of his break with Soviet Marxism represented in the Tudeh Party, his immersion in the milieu of anti-Soviet social democracy, as well as his pronounced differences with his social democratic counterparts (Sadeghi-Boroujerdi & Yadgar, 2021). Though we will touch upon some of these readings and their attendant problems and occlusions, we are not primarily interested in the historiographical debates over when and under what circumstances Al-e Ahmad published his travelogue. Rather it is our intention to explore the extent to which his reflections on Israel