Lydia Apolinar writes on Ali Shariati and his use and misuse during the Iranian Revolution.

One of Ali Shariati’s principal influences, Frantz Fanon, once wrote him a letter that conveyed both admiration for the Iranian sociologist’s work and apprehension toward his use of religion as the basis for anti-colonial struggle. While acknowledging Islam’s capacity to act as a progressive force against colonialism, he wrote that if leftist intellectuals like Shariati were unable to “breathe this spirit into the weary body of the Muslim orient,” they risked instead contributing to a revival of traditionalism and sectarianism that could “divert … a ‘nation in becoming’ from its ideal future, bringing it closer to its past.” The historian Ervand Abrahamian made a similar criticism years after Shariati’s death and the 1979 revolution: “It is significant that Shariati did not even pose the major question that was to trouble his disciples during the Islamic Revolution—the question of whether one could initiate a rebellion under the banner of religion and yet keep the leadership of that rebellion out of the hands of the traditional-minded religious authorities”.

Shariati, often called the “ideologue of the Iranian Revolution,” developed an eclectic ideology that combined secular philosophical and leftist influences like Fanon, Sartre, Marx, Catholic liberation theology, and the symbolism and language of Shi’ite Islam. He envisioned Shi’ite Islam as a truly emancipatory ideology that, rather than looking back nostalgically at an archaic past, could be used to create a socialist future; an association of believers who, rather than looking inward and thinking only of salvation and the next world, would strive to achieve the monotheistic ideal of a classless society on earth. As much as he was an enemy of monarchy and imperialism, he was also no friend of the clergy, whom he viewed as reducing Islam to a set of unchanging rules and dry, meaningless rituals. His unique ideology inspired students and intellectuals—many of whom sacrificed their lives in guerrilla organizations—to revolutionary action and is worth examination in depth, particularly because of his co-option by the Islamic Republic in spite of his irreconcilable differences with conservative Islamism. Shariati’s synthesis of Islam and Marxism failed to prevent the domination and takeover of the revolution by clerical conservatives, and, as Fanon and Abrahamian observed, can be said to have unwittingly strengthened them against the secular leftists.

Ali Shariati was born in 1933 in Kahak, a village in northeastern Iran, to a family of clerics and small landowners. His father was a teacher and an Islamic scholar who engaged him in the religious left from an early age, having opened in 1947 the Center for the Propagation of Islamic Truths, an Islamic organization which took a strong nationalist stance in the late 40s and 50s and became involved in the movement for the nationalization of oil. Shariati studied at the Teachers’ Training College in Mashhad, where he became more aware of the class divisions in Iran and the struggle of the expanding urban working class, read a diverse selection of philosophers and political writers, and wrote essays that outlined an immature version of the ideas he would devote his life to.

Following his first arrest for his political activity, Shariati spent many years in Paris, where he completed his PhD at the Sorbonne. There he spent time with other exiled Iranian intellectuals and helped to found the Freedom Movement of Iran. He also came into contact with figures like Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon (whose books he translated). He attended lectures by French orientalists, whose work on Islam and Islamic mysticism influenced him deeply. Particularly interesting was his engagement with the Catholic left, something he would later avoid mention of. Shariati attended lectures by prominent Catholic thinkers like Louis Massignon—whom he once described as the single most important influence on him—and Roger Garaudy, and read Esprit, a Catholic journal that supported national liberation and frequently featured Marxist writers.

Shariati conceived of the intelligentsia as a political class that, with its educated distance from society, could act as a mediator, the leaders of a “superstructure” that would necessarily transform the mode of production. He shared this position with Mojahedin of Iran (not to be confused with the completely unrelated Mojahedin of Afghanistan; this organization, known by the initials MEK, exists today as a bizarre personality cult favored by U.S. conservatives, but was an interesting and important group in the 60s and 70s). Though he was never directly involved with them, Shariati’s thought was the main ideological influence on the organization, which was mainly composed of the university-educated from petit-bourgeois families. Shariati’s view of the intelligentsia was influenced by Georges Gurvitch, the French sociologist who founded the “school of dialectical sociology” according to which “history was made not by economic classes, but by ‘conscious classes.’” The idea of the class struggle featured prominently in Shariati’s work, but primarily as a struggle between political rather than economic classes: in Iran, the only class which could lead the revolution was the intelligentsia, who, with their enlightened, progressive understanding of Islam, would bring society toward true monotheism. Upon his return to Iran, Shariati was immediately arrested and spent several weeks in prison. When he was released, he began to teach at the University of Mashhad. He would later move to Tehran, where he frequently gave wildly popular lectures at the Hosseiniye Ershad Institute, a non-traditionalist religious institution of which he became the central figure.

The idea of “true monotheism” is one Shariati discussed in Religion v. Religion, a book comprising two of his lectures at the Hosseiniye Ershad given in the summer of 1970. This text is in part an attack on secularists who saw the primary conflict in the world and particularly in Iran as being between religion and atheism, or non-religion. Non-religion, he argued, was a new phenomenon, and mostly irrelevant until recently. Religion had always shaped the lives of human beings, and the struggle had always been the most intense within religion itself. He simplified the various religions into two—the religion of monotheism and the religion of “multitheism.” He maintained that it was impossible to separate a religion from its political and social implications, and discussed religion mainly with these implications in mind.

According to Shariati, the religion of multitheism was distinguished by its conservatism. Though many multitheists believed in one creator deity, they also found necessary a multitude of lesser gods that were, in contrast to the universal God of monotheism, confined to specific groups of people based on gender, ethnicity, and most drastically, social and economic class. The work of the multitheist was to convince the poor and oppressed person that “‘I am connected to a lower class not only because my essence is lowly, but because my god is lower than the gods of other races’”. He termed multitheism a “religion of legitimation” because it had always worked to legitimize the social classes of the societies in which it appeared, and argued that monotheism was not only the belief in a single God, but also the eternal striving for unity and equality. Since human beings were all the creations of a universal God, there was no natural or sacred justification for domination, whether by the privileged classes over the oppressed classes (a vaguely defined term which variously included and excluded the traditional petite bourgeoisie) or by the core nations over those in the periphery.

Shariati’s conception of multitheism was not limited to the literal belief in multiple gods. He claimed that “throughout history, the work of the religious leaders has been to preserve the religion of multitheism … often by assuming the name of monotheism”. While these religious leaders upheld the most superficial monotheism, they worked to preserve the classes that existed in multitheistic society, and those that arose after, making one’s class (and the right to private property) something sacred—the will of God. Shariati viewed the will of God as ultimately inevitable, but he asserted that this will could only be carried out by conscious human beings—and that God’s will was the end of class society. For him, a true believer was not necessarily a Muslim devoted to the formal aspects of religious adherance, such as praying and fasting; true belief was about action. An atheist who brought society closer to the monotheistic ideal could in some cases be preferable to a religious person who was in reality a multitheist in disguise.

A similar essay of his, “Red Shi’ism v. Black Shi’ism,” was another critique of the conservative and apolitical clergy. In this work, Shariati wrote of his conception of the revolutionary nature of Islam in general and Shi’ite Islam in particular. “Islam is the religion which makes its appearance in the history of mankind with the ‘no’ of Muhammad”—the “no” to polytheism and endless tribal warfare on the Arabian peninsula. “Shi’ism is the Islam which distinguishes itself and determines its direction with the ‘no’ of the great Ali”. Shi’a Muslims have always placed particular importance on Hussain, the grandson of the Prophet, and on his martyrdom—Hussain was killed in battle against an Umayyad caliph viewed by many Muslims as unjust and un-pious. In another essay on martyrdom, Shariati wrote that

“Hussain’s meaning becomes clear when we understand his relationship to that flow of movements which we have discussed in earlier lectures which historically begins with Abraham. This meaning should be made clear and Hussain’s revolution must be interpreted. To view Hussain and the battle of Karbala as isolated from historical and social circumstances would force us, as indeed it has for many of us, to view the man and the event purely as an unfortunate, if not tragic occurrence in the past and some­thing for us to merely cry about (and we certainly do continue to cry) rather than as an eternal and transcendent phenomenon. To separate Karbala and Hussain from their historical and ideological context is to dissect a living body, to remove only a part of it and to examine it in exclusion of the living system of the body.”

The question that arose for Shariati was of what to emphasize—Hussain, the man, and his action, which could be considered a model for martyrs in the guerrilla movements, or the simple tragedy of his martyrdom?

In “Islamology,” Shariati sought to define what he meant when he said that Islam must become not only a religion but an ideology. He gave the example of a physicist who followed a particular ideology, whose approach to physics was part of the whole, encompassed by a systematic worldview. Islam had to take on a similar role for the Muslim sociologist, because “all of the views on economics, sociology, religion, philosophy, and even on art and literature … have a cause and effect relationship to each other.” Without ideology, history was nothing but a meaningless mass of facts, the “lies that people have agreed upon.” He admonished sociologists who attempted to be non-ideological and apolitical, which he viewed as both impossible and undesirable. Islam offered both a systematic framework within which to analyze history and positive prescriptions for immediate political changes, and it was up to Islamic intellectuals to discover what they were and implement them.

In this text, Shariati used the word “utopia” in a positive sense, and defended it against socialists who mocked it as non-materialist and unscientific. He wrote that utopia “is the ideal society that one conceives of in one’s own mind [and] desires and struggles for so that human society takes that form. All philosophies, religions and human beings have a different type of utopia in their minds. Paradise is the utopia or ideal society in the mind of a religious man. Plato’s utopia was the ideal city for the aristocratic Greeks and intellectuals of his age. The City of God of St. Augustine … are all ideal societies … Essentially, the existence of an imaginary society proves that the human being is always moving from the ‘present situation’ to a more ‘desirable situation,’ whether it be imaginary, scientific, the utopia of Plato or the classless society of Marx”. This ideal society would also need its “ideal citizen,” a prototype of a human being who has reached the highest possible potential. An important part of progress would be to encourage people to actively aspire to this height. According to Shariati (who had a strained relationship with Iranian Marxists), “even Marxism, which is based on ‘materialism’ and which, as our intellectuals explain it, views the human being as an economic animal, speaks about a ‘total human being’ who has not become imperfect, paralyzed, cut into pieces or alienated. He has not been made insane by the system or been metamorphosed … He is neither a master nor a slave”. An example he gave of an “ideal human being” in Islam was Abu Dharr al-Ghifari al-Kinani, an early Muslim who protested corruption and accumulation of wealth and agitated for a more fair distribution of wealth, and who Shariati saw as the first Islamic socialist.

In some ways Shariati’s thought was a reaction to Marxism, an answer to its criticisms of religion and an attempt to create an independent Islamic socialism. Many of Shariati’s ideas came from Marx, and he often took Marxist terms and imbued them with religious meanings, as he simultaneously gave to theological terms meanings that resembled Marxist concepts. Shariati’s relationship to Marxism was complicated: though in his youth he had praised certain authors as “Muslim Marxists,” in his later years he was frequently critical of Marxism. He certainly admired Marx as a social scientist, but took issue with aspects of his philosophy and approach to history and politics. He seemed to view Marxism, or at least the Iranian Marxists, as reducing the analysis of human history to a narrow economic determinism and as dismissing spiritual concerns as “non-materialist.” The work in which Shariati most thoroughly criticized Marxism, Marxism and Other Western Fallacies, is of questionable authenticity; a collection of early essays and lectures, it was published many years after they were written, against his wishes, in a state-run journal. In the text, he criticized liberalism, existentialism, and Marxism for their “materialistic” conception of humanism, which opposed God under the false belief that He was anti-human—which may have been true of western Christianity, but had nothing to do with Islam, which was founded on the unity of God and humanity—and dismissed Marxism as yet another “western fallacy,” another European ideology imposed on Iran. One of the Shah’s favored tactics was to play Islam and Marxism against each other, and an outright denunciation of Marxism by Shariati, who had been critical but not unwilling to work with and support Marxists in their shared struggle, was of great use to the monarchy.

Shi’ite Islam had always been more formally structured and centralized than Sunni Islam. This was partially because, unlike most Sunni schools of jurisprudence, the Ja’fari school (the Twelver Shi’i school of jurisprudence) left open the door to ijtihad, or the use of independent reasoning in the interpretation of Islamic texts, usually in regards to legal questions. In order to maintain a degree of consistency and order in the faith, this privilege was reserved for Islamic scholars of the highest order, or marja al-taqlid. A Shi’i follower could choose among these formally recognized experts, who sometimes differed in their interpretations, but were obliged to choose one and follow his judgments absolutely. Shariati recognized the need for intellectual authority, but wanted to expand the privilege of ijtihad to intellectuals in general, and potentially also to ordinary Muslims who were creative and thoughtful enough to participate in the process. His concept of ijtihad also referred to much more than legal rulings and prescriptions on personal behavior—it entailed a process of refiguring the meaning of Islam in its entirety and its relation to modern problems.

Another idea of importance to Shariati was martyrdom, an ideal that was essential to the Iranian guerrilla groups, both Islamic and socialist. Taking inspiration at once from Shi’a doctrine and from the insurrectionary anarchist concept of “propaganda of the deed,” these various groups—the Muslim Mojahedin and their Marxist-Leninist splinter group Peykar, the Marxist Fedayeen, and others—may have had serious theoretical and practical disagreements, but they were united in their veneration of martyrdom. With the exception of occasional efforts, in the face of failure and continuous fatalities, to move towards organizing mass movements, these groups focused on operations they knew to be suicidal and risky assassinations. Shariati was not directly involved in any of the guerrilla movements—he called himself “emotionally and spiritually weak” for that reason—but provided most of the theory upon which the Muslim Mojahedin based their existence, and passionately praised martyrdom in a collection of lectures, Martyrdom: Arise and Bear Witness. His respect for the ideal of martyrdom brought him to the height of emotion, and according to him it had a vital significance to Shi’a and Iranian culture: “The story of martyrdom and that which martyrdom challenges is so sensitive, so belovedly exciting that it pulls the spirit towards the fire. It paralyzes logic. It weakens speech. It even makes thinking difficult. Martyrdom is a mixture of a refined love and a deep, complex wisdom. One cannot express these two at the same time and so, as a result, one cannot do them justice. In order to understand the meaning of martyrdom, the ideological school from which it takes its meaning, its expression and its value should be clarified. In European countries, the word martyr stems from ‘mortal’ which means ‘death’ or ‘to die.’ One of the basic principles in Islam (and in particular in Shi’ite culture), however, is ‘sacrifice and bear witness.’ So instead of martyrdom, i.e. death, it essentially means ‘life’, ‘evi­dence’, ‘testify’, ‘certify.’ These words, martyrdom and bearing witness, show the differences which exist between the vision of Shi’ite Islamic culture and the other cultures of the world.” Martyrdom was not the tragic end of an individual life, but rather the complete commitment of that life to a cause, belief, or idea—the highest honor one could achieve, it was not a “means, but a goal in itself”.

Seeking martyrdom was not viable as a political strategy, however. The Mojahedin experienced a continuous loss of its membership, and though they were popular among university students, they failed to appeal strongly to the working class. Their combination of anti-monarchy radicalism and Shi’a tradition appealed particularly to the university-educated from traditional bourgeois, devout families, while Marxism was more popular among the urban working class and oil workers in the south. Among the traditional bourgeoisie themselves, they may have had some appeal with their emphasis on Shi’ism, but they insulted the “sacred right to private property” and were at best ambivalent, and often hostile, toward the clergy, who the bazaar shop owners looked to as the traditional leaders of their communities. Though they were influential in 1979, the Mojahedin would have benefited from focusing on mass organization rather than propaganda of the deed.

The Shah’s government lacked firm foundations in the social classes of Iran. Though it generally favored large industrial capitalists, particularly in its extensive development plans, it initially dealt with the inflationary economic crisis of the 70s by arresting well-known “industrial feudalists” in an anti-profiteering campaign which “caused schizophrenia among rich entrepreneurs. On the one hand they benefited from the socioeconomic system … on the other hand they suffered from the political system, which placed their wealth and futures in the hands of one man.” The Resurgence Party, which held hegemonic power after 1975 as the country’s only legal political party, attempted to appeal to the left, declaring an intention to synthesize socialism and capitalism in its path toward the success of the White Revolution. In its anti-profiteering campaign, it quickly refocused its energy from large capitalists to the small bourgeoisie, the latter of which complained that the government, in imposing strict price controls on basic commodities and organizing “inspectorate teams” to wage a “merciless crusade against profiteers,” was beginning to resemble a Communist one, and the White Revolution a Red one. The anti-profiteering campaign ignited the anger of the small bourgeoisie, while the government’s war against traditional culture simultaneously offended their conservative sensibilities. Guild Courts sentenced hundreds of thousands of businessmen, and imprisoned around 8,000. In the face of this harsh treatment, the conservative small bourgeoisie began to speak of revolution.

Of course, the Shah’s government was not communist, and for all its show of anti-profiteering, it repressed the working class more consistently and with far greater brutality. Since the 1953 CIA-orchestrated coup that overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, the popular nationalist politician who represented the struggle for the nationalization of the oil industry, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi regained the absolute power his father held before his abdication in 1941. In the period between 1953 and 1978, the communist and largely working-class Tudeh Party was banned, many of its members arrested and over 40 leading members executed, socialist newspapers made illegal, and all independent unions replaced with unions under the direct control of the state. The working class was left largely unorganized and its struggle confined to sporadic illegal strikes. As anti-monarchy demonstrations escalated, however, and the government’s grip on power grew weaker, socialist organizations resumed their activities. This was also in the midst of the recession the government engineered to deal with inflation, which led to rising unemployment and falling wages. The Shah reacted to the demands of the working class in a televised press conference that became notorious: “This is intolerable. Those who do not work, we shall take them by the tail and throw them out like mice. He who does not do his job properly is betraying not only his conscience but his patriotic duty … I remember a few years ago a mason … was prepared to work a whole day for a mere meal.” The response to the government’s harsh labor policy was an enormous increase of strikes and demonstrations. Striking workers brought the country to an economic halt, with strikes especially prevalent in oil, communications, heavy industries, and power plants. The working class, repressed into dormancy since 1953, took its place in the summer of 1978 at the center of the revolution.

Though the 1979 revolution was made by a diverse group of Marxists, Islamists, and Islamic socialists—students, workers, and small bourgeoisie—Khomeini and his group of clerical conservatives took control in the years that followed, consolidating power completely by 1981. This happened for a number of reasons. First of all, Khomeini had a stronger base among the traditional bourgeoisie than Shariati had in any mass segment of society. Also, though he was openly and fervidly anti-communist, Khomeini was a careful politician who managed to endear himself to, or at least to avoid open confrontation with, all the various sides of the opposition, including Marxists who attempted to represent a left alternative within the new Islamic political order (with the exception of a few of the communist guerrilla groups). When asked by another cleric to condemn Shariati’s irreverently anti-clerical speeches at the Hosseiniye Ershad, Khomeini refused, having been well aware of the latter’s popularity. He avoided addressing sensitive and divisive issues such as women’s rights, and rather than revealing the socially conservative positions which would later become the focus of the Islamic Republic’s policy, instead made vague proclamations about the triumph of the masses, or of the suffering of the wretched, borrowing language from Shariati and Fanon. He appealed to the working class while simultaneously promising to protect private property. Khomeini attempted to be everything to everyone, at once a progressive and a guardian of tradition, and was remarkably successful in doing so.

The attitude of the Mojahedin to Khomeini was confused and contradictory. They could not entirely resist his charismatic appeal, and continuously sought the advantage of an alliance with such an influential religious figure. Though at the time he wouldn’t publicly condemn the Mojahedin, Khomeini received them coldly when a contingent came to visit him in Iraq, advising them to purify themselves from socialist delusions and return to true Islam. In spite of this experience, the Mojahedin remained ambivalent toward Khomeini until after his power was consolidated.

Secular leftist organizations remained equally ambivalent, with the Tudeh Party offering its support for the Islamic Republic in its early years. Workers’ councils were formed from the strike committees of the revolution, and by the time of its victory, all major industrial plants were under their control. Initially, most of the councils supported the Islamic Republic, and adhered to Khomeini’s back-to-work decree. However, tensions began to form early on as the working class demanded radical change—an immediate improvement of working conditions and wages, nationalization of industry, workers’ participation in management—while the country’s new leaders were content to stick to the status quo. Following the fall of Bazargan’s provisional government, the councils wouldn’t back down and refused to become mere appendages of the new state, and were replaced with “Islamic Councils” which “while creating an atmosphere of terror in the workplace, moved towards a thorough-going indoctrination of workers”. Workers suffered terribly through the long war with Iraq, with longer hours and lower wages imposed on them, as well as mandatory war fundraising and involuntary transfer to the front. The new Labor Law, passed after years of deliberation, was even more reactionary than that of the Shah when it came to the right of workers to organize.

Having died in 1977 at only 43—supposedly of a heart attack, though many suspected SAVAK was responsible—Shariati never saw the revolution he helped to shape. After extensive persecution and repeated attempts at reconciliation, in the early to mid 1980s the Mojahedin changed their position to one of militant opposition to the Islamic Republic. After organizing mass demonstrations which failed to effectively challenge the new regime, they retreated into exile, where they became increasingly insular and intense in their cult of personality around Massoud Rajavi. The organization went on to support Saddam Hussein in the Iran–Iraq war, a decision that led most Iranians to distrust them deeply, and continued to carry out terrorist attacks and assassinations while becoming increasingly alienated from the population.

Today, a street in Tehran is named after Shariati, and “no one loved Khomeini so dearly as he did,” according to Supreme Leader Khamenei. Yet Shariati’s vision of Islam as a theology of liberation differed dramatically from the reactionary politics of the Islamic Republic, and one wonders whether he would have survived the mass executions of the early 1980s, in which so many leftist revolutionaries died. Though his is not the ideology of the Islamic Republic, it was an indispensable part of the Iranian Revolution—an inspiration to the millions of workers and students who participated in a revolution that was much more complex and dynamic than the caricature all too common in the West of a mob of mullahs angry at social progress. At once a Muslim and a socialist, Shariati was a formidable rival of conservative Islamism; in his thought was a genuine liberation theology in which “the enlightened soul is the person who is conscious of his ‘human condition’ in his historical and social setting, and whose awareness necessarily gives him a sense of social responsibility.”