Background
Shariati, All was born on June 19, 1933 in Khorasan, Iran.
Islamic revolutionary philosopher
Shariati, All was born on June 19, 1933 in Khorasan, Iran.
Mashhad Teachers College, Mashhad University and Sorbonne University, Paris.
Taught at Mashhad University and the Husainiya Irshad, Tehran.
Although he had a traditional religious upbringing in provincial Iran. Shariati went to Paris for graduate study and was heavily influenced by the radical ideas of French culture and anti-colonialism. He was in frequent conflict with the Pahlavi authorities on his return to Iran and could only broadcast his views in clandestine ways. He was a modernist who argued that it is only acceptable to retain religious beliefs if these are associated with the ideology of liberation. He argued in many of his works that the Shi'ite version of Islam places the emphasis upon the idea of justice. He criticized the quietist tendency in some Shi'ite theology, and he interprets Islam as political. His thought should be distinguished from that of Khomeini, in that the latter insisted on strong authority in the people with legal authority. Shariati suggests that it is possible for anyone to grasp the essential progressive nature of Islam if they read the Qur’an in the right way. Shariati’s views should be sharply differentiated from Marxism. On his view there is a dialectical development of human history but it is structured by God's will, the desire of human beings to reach a higher state of consciousness and the class struggle as symbolized by the story of Cain and Abel, where Cain represents the powerful who rule and Abel the ruled or the masses. In the beginning society was formed of equal and free individuals who later became differentiated into classes in conflict with each other. This leads to two sorts of religion, one for the oppressors and one for the oppressed. God has sent the Prophet to establish a community that would permanently struggle to achieve social justice, human cooperation and a classless society with public and common ownership of the means of production. Although Shariati’s ideas sometimes seem rather confused, they came to have great political significance in Iran in the 1970s and 1980s, combining as they do some aspects of Marxism with Shi'ism in ways attractive to a prerevolutionary climate. His basic thesis that people in the Third World have first to regain their cultural heritage before they can overthrow imperialism and become modern is highly suggestive, and the power of his rhetoric and the force of his personality came to hold sway over large numbers of Iranian intellectuals. He was a truly modern philosopher in the sense that he was prepared to consider arguments and ideas as parts of his general ideology no matter where they originated, an unusual feature in a paradigmatically Islamic thinker.