Ali Shariʿati

1933 - 1977

Iranian Islamic ideologue, whose lectures and writings on secularly educated youth helped prepare the way for the Islamic Revolution of 1978/79.

Ali Shariʿati was born in the village of Mazinan in northeastern Iran but soon moved with his father, Mohammad Taqi Shariʿati, a reformist cleric of Islam, to the city of Mashhad. There he attended high school and teachers' training college as well as pursuing a religious education under the aegis of his father. He then began working as a teacher, studying at the same time at the Mashhad Faculty of Letters and beginning his long career of oppositional activity; his first arrest came in 1957. After a year's delay, he was permitted to travel to Paris in 1960 for his doctoral studies. While in France, he came under the influence of scholars and thinkers, such as Louis Massignon and Jacques Berque, became politically involved in the struggle for Algerian independence and the organization of Iranian students in Europe, and, most importantly, acquired the ideological orientation that was essential to his thought.

Immediately on his return to Iran in 1964, Shariʿati was arrested and detained for several months before being allowed to take up a post at the University of Mashhad. His tenure there was short-lived, and it was outside the academic environment that he exercised the greatest influence. Moving to Tehran, he began lecturing on Islam in a variety of settings, most importantly the Hosayniyeh-ye Ershad, a modernist religious institution established in 1969 that attracted large crowds to its functions. Shariʿati's name became virtually synonymous with the institution, and when it was closed by the government in 1973, he was arrested for a third time. Released in 1975, he spent two years under house arrest in his native village before being allowed to leave for England. He died there on 19 June 1977, soon after his arrival, under circumstances that led to widespread suspicion of involvement by the Iranian secret police. His body was taken to Damascus for burial.

Central to Shariʿati's understanding and presentation of Islam were an emphasis on the social and civilizational functions of religion; an impatience with the niceties and abstractions of traditional Iranian Islamic culture; and a bold if often unconvincing use of themes and terms eclectically derived from non-Islamic sources. His legacy has been varyingly assessed in postrevolutionary Iran, being sometimes denounced for its syncretic nature and its implicitly anticlerical message.

Bibliography

Shariʿati, Ali. On the Sociology of Islam, translated by Hamid Algar. Berkeley, CA: Mizan Press, 1979.

— HAMID ALGAR