Ali Rahnema, _An Islamic Utopian: A Political Biography of Ali Shari'ati_, London: Tauris, 1998, 418 pp.
During the Iranian revolution of 1978-1979 crowds of cheering protesters carried giant posters of two men who symbolized the struggle to overthrow the Shah. The first man, with whom the Western world is very familiar, was the Ayatollah Khomeini, whose bearded medieval persona projected everything that was frightening and unfamiliar about the Islamic revolution. The mass media focused on his image. The second man was plain-looking, well shaven, and dressed in a white shirt and tie. His name was Ali Shari'ati, and there was nothing about his appearance to suggest to Western reporters that he was, as most Iranians knew him to be, the intellectual father of their revolution.
Who was Ali Shari'ati? What were the sources and attractions of his ideas to a generation of young Iranians who changed their system and that of the Islamic world so profoundly? Why is he considered the ideological mastermind of the Iranian revolution? These are the kinds of questions answered by Ali Rahnema in his remarkable biography of Shari'ati, the first and only work of its kind to be published in the West. The sources of Shari'ati's thought are traced through a detailed examination of his life, from his childhood in Iran in the 1930s and 1940s, through his students days in France in the 1950s and 1960s, to his famous insurrectionary lectures, which radicalized a generation of young Iranian university students in the early 1970s. What unfolds chapter by chapter is a remarkable adventure of a young intellectual who revolutionized his world.
Ali Shari'ati was born in 1933. His father, a provincial schoolteacher, had founded in the early 1950s a center for Islamic studies that was relatively controversial at the time. It called upon its members to think critically about Shi'i Islam, to question the layers of superstition that had been encrusted upon it by centuries of religious establishment, and in so doing to discover the hidden truths buried beneath the clerical dogma. Shari'ati thus had started questioning established religion from a very early age, and continued on this quest throughout the rest of his life. Politically his father's center supported the radical nationalism of Mohammed Mossadeq. By the time he was a teenager Ali Shari'ati was already an activist against both the big oil companies and the Shah whom they had reinstalled in power. At the University of Mashhad he was arrested in 1957. General Teymur Bakhtiar of SAVAK personally interrogated him, in order to determine the potential of this young intellectual. But after a brief detention, Shari'ati was released from prison, and finished his BA the following year.
A gifted student, Shari'ati won a full scholarship in 1958 for doctoral studies at the Sorbonne (on a government grant awarded by the Shah!) where he wrote and defended a thesis on Persian literature. Paris proved to be a stimulating environment. He read Sartre, and incorporated elements of existentialism into his own philosophy. He read Marx, and took from him an eschatological framework. He read Fanon, whose expression of the struggle against colonialism became a part of Shari'ati's own discourse. At the Faculte´ de Lettres of the Sorbonne, he studied under the renowned French Islamologist Louis Massignon, whose path-breaking work in the history of Islam allowed Shari'ati to examine Iranian Shi'ism from a scientific-historical perspective. He also fell under the spell of Jacques Berque, a prominent French Islamologist who developed a "sociology of Islam." In addition to his intellectual commitments, Shari'ati was involved in the expatriate Iranian student movement, and tried to organize anti-regime activity from overseas. However, he soon grew disenchanted with student politics, which he found self-centered and irrelevant to the real struggle back home.
In 1964 he returned to Iran, and found a post as a university professor in Islamic history. He was searching for a new ideology that could synthesize his Western intellectual explorations with the cultural specificity of Shi'i Iran. The existing menu of leftist doctrines did not appeal to him. With the exception of Franz Fanon (whose _Wretched of the Earth_ he translated into Persian) Shari'ati found most Third World intellectuals to be bad imitations of their Western models. According to Shari'ati, their ideas were not suited for the underdeveloped countries to which they were being applied: "I as an intellectual should not forget that I do not live in twentieth century France or nineteenth century Germany but in Tehran" (p. 248). The result of this quest was Shari'ati's masterpiece--_Eslamshenasi_. This work, published in 1969, contains the essence of the ideas that were to fuel the Iranian intelligentsia during the revolution 10 years later. The title, which can be translated in English as "Islamology," suggests its contents. It proposes the construction of a new ideology, based on Islam -- an "Islamic ideology" -- that could be used to raise the consciousness of the people and create a liberation movement. The revolution that Shari'ati sought to ferment was politico-religious. His aim was nothing short of revolutionizing Shi'i Islam, the most deeply felt common denominator among Iranians--"the nervous system of the Iranian body politic" (p. 297). His point of departure in this discourse was the identification of a dichotomy between the original, authentic Shi'i Islam of the Imam Ali, on the one hand, and the actually existing official religion, which he called "Safavid Shi'ism," on the other. Where the former had been an oppositional force challenging the ruling order, the latter was an inauthentic degeneration. The Shi'i clergy had become active members of the ruling class whose principal task was to legitimate the monarchy's unjust rule and defend an unjust status quo. The duty of true believers was to imitate the martyrdom of Imam Ali in his struggle against injustice and oppression, to wage an Islamic revolution.
Needless to say, the Shi'i clergy in Iran did not take his criticism lightly. By 1972 many of the powerful members of that clergy began to issue fatwas against Shari'ati. The Ayatollahs Milani, Rowhani, Tabataba'I-Qomi Esfahani, and other powerful Shi'i clergy forbade their followers from reading his books or attending his lectures. Even after his death in 1978 these conservative traditionalists were issuing new fatwas prohibiting the purchase, sale or reading of any of Shari'ati's work. But such pronouncements did little to stop Shari'ati's popularity, particularly among the Iranian youth, who were being radicalized by Shari'ati's modernizing Islamic discourse. One extremely influential cleric--the Ayatollah Khomeini--did not pronounce a fatwa against Shari'ati. Although he was approached to do so by other Ayatollahs on many occasions, Khomeini refused. He said that Shari'ati's writings were not un-Islamic, and at any rate that "he was doing a service" (p. 275). To appreciate the importance of this service it is useful to recall that in the second half of the 1960s, politicized students at Iranian universities were deeply influenced by Leninism, Maoism, and Castroism. Islam was understood to be, like all religions, an opiate of the masses and a reactionary force in society. To the Marxists, Shari'ati was Islamizing and distorting their ideas. But by the early 1970s, students were flooding out of Shari'ati's lectures onto the streets of Tehran, repeating the teachings of a man who had convinced them that Islam was based, at the political level, on democracy, and at the economic level, on equality. He showed them that the Islamic religion called upon its followers to take the path of the Shi'i martyrs--to overthrow both their domestic and their foreign oppressors. The service to which the Ayatollah Khomeini referred was to bring Iranian youths who opposed the Shah away from the Marxists and into the Islamic _mujahedin_.
The Shah's secret police SAVAK followed Shari'ati's career closely. SAVAK officers regularly arrested and interrogated the popular professor throughout his career. Shari'ati played a cat-and-mouse game with these interrogators by evading, equivocating, and prevaricating whenever he was questioned on the meaning and content of his lectures and writings. His writings, more than 35 volumes by his death, were much too large for them to read. And he frequently presented himself as someone cultivating a respect for Islam among the Iranian university students who otherwise would have fallen in with the Marxists and revolutionaries. But as the guerilla movements in Iran increased in their intensity, Shari'ati's discourse became openly subversive. He was arrested in 1973, and spent the next 18 months in the notorious Komiteh prison, "the mere name of which evoked fear and terror" (p. 332). Here he was subjected to an arsenal of psychological tortures, including the imprisonment of his aged father and the torture of his former students before his eyes. By the time he was released in 1975, he had written two works of revision of his ideas, which were published in a government-sponsored newspaper to discredit his followers. During the last two years of his life, Shari'ati was kept under SAVAK surveillance and house arrest. Unable to write, speak, or engage with anything that gave his life meaning, he grew increasingly depressed. He finally attempted, almost successfully, to escape into exile. But SAVAK found out, and held his wife hostage until he agreed to return. Overcome by the psychological stress of the last month of his life, Shari'ati died in England of a heart attack. The Iranian revolution that erupted the following year transformed this death into martyrdom.
Professor Rahnema spent a decade researching and writing this book, interviewing hundreds of individuals (many of whom are now dead) to bring his subject to life. He traveled to Iran to retrace the life of Shari'ati, and followed his trail to Paris, meeting along the way the men and women who knew Shari'ati not only as a political figure but as a man. He reviewed the totality of Shari'ati's massive 35-volume life work, and in his exclusive use of Farsi sources has tapped into a rich literature which is often untranslated in the West. Rahnema's greatest strength, however, is his writing. The book's beautiful Oxford English lends dignity to the life of a man who might otherwise be dismissed as "just another" Third World intellectual. Rahnema's book changes the way you think about the Iranian revolution, often portrayed as anti-modernist, conservative, and reactionary. Reading the intellectual journey of Ali Shari'ati, one is struck by how modern he was. In functionally relating the religious culture of his society with the political ideology of Third World revolutionary thought, Ali Shari'ati managed to give new life to the international Islamic movement at a moment in history when Western hegemony was attempting to marginalize it. Perhaps what Rahnema has succeeded in doing, in this political biography, is to suggest that the time has come to reappraise both Shari'ati and the revolution he helped to inspire.
DOUGLAS A. YATES American University of Paris -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>