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Ali Shariati (Persian: علی شريعتی‎) (1933–1977) was an Iranian sociologist, well known and respected for his works in the field of sociology of religion. He translated Frantz Fanon' The Wretched of the Earth in Persian ^[1].

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Shariati and Khomeini 2 Legacy 2.1 Shariati's most important books and speeches 3 References 4 Further reading 5 See also 6 External links

Ali Shariati was born in 1933 in Mazinan, a suburb of Sabzevar, north-east of Iran. His father, Mohammad-Taghi, was a progressive nationalist preacher and Islamic scholar, founder of the Center for Propagation of Islamic Truths. He would later participate in his son's political movements.

In his years at the Teacher's Training College, Shariati came into contact with young people who were from the less privileged economic classes of the society, and for the first time saw the poverty and hardship that existed in Iran during that period. At the same time he was exposed to many aspects of Western philosophical and political thought as evident in his writings. He attempted to explain and provide solutions for the problems faced by Muslim societies through traditional Islamic principles interwoven with and understood from the point of view of modern sociology and philosophy. Shariati was also deeply influenced by Moulana Rumi and Muhammad Iqbal.

In 1952 he became a high-school teacher and founded the Islamic Students' Association, which led to his arrest after a demonstration. He became in 1953 a member of the National Resistance Movement, the year of Mossadeq's overthrow by the CIA. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Mashhad in 1955. In 1957 he was arrested again by the Shah's police, along with 16 others members of the National Resistance Movement.

Ali Shariati then managed to obtain a scholarship for France, where he continued his graduate studies at the University of Paris. Considered as a brillant student (elected best students in letters in 1958), he earned his doctorate in sociology in 1964. During this period in Paris, Shariati started collaborating with the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) in 1959. The next year, he began to read Frantz Fanon and translated an anthology of his work in Persian. Shariati would introduce Fanon's thought in Irani revolutionary emigrees circles. He was arrested in Paris during a demonstration in honour of Patrice Lumumba, on January 17, 1961.

He was a founding member of the Freedom Movement of Iran abroad, along with Ebrahim Yazdi, Mostafa Chamran and Sadegh Qotbzadeh in 1961.

In 1962 he continued studying sociology and history of religions, and followed the courses of Islam scholar Louis Massignon, Jacques Berque and the sociologist Georges Gurvitch. He also came to know the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre that same year, and published in Iran Jalal Al-e Ahmad's Occidentosis.

He then returned to Iran in 1964 where he was promptly arrested and imprisoned by the Imperial Iranian authorities who had accused him of engaging in subversive political activities while in France. He was eventually released some time later in 1965, at which point he began teaching at the University of Mashhad. His courses became popular among students from all social classes, which once again prompted action by the Imperial authorities who forced the University to prevent him from teaching.

Shariati then went to Tehran where he began lecturing at the Hosseiniye Ershad Institute. These lectures proved to be a hugely popular success amongst his students and as a result word of mouth spread rapidly throughout all economic sectors of the society, including among the middle and upper classes where interest in Shariati's teachings began to grow immensely.

The Imperial authorities soon took a special interest once again in Shariati's continued success, and the police soon had him, as well as many of his students, under arrest. Widespread pressure from the populace and international outcry eventually led to the end of his eighteen month prison term in solitary confinement, and he was released by the Imperial state on March 20, 1975 under special circumstances whereby he would not be allowed to teach, publish, or hold gatherings, whether public or private. The state security apparatus, SAVAK, would also maintain close scrutiny of his every movement.

Shariati rejected these conditions and decided to leave the country for England. Three weeks later he died in Southampton of what was announced as a heart attack.^[2]He was strongly against Islamic fundamentalism. He died a very strange death and even stranger was his burial.

He died just few weeks after having taken a position in favor of Shah. The hasty burial of him is still debated. Members of a group of Khomeini devotees in London prevented autopsy on very false premises. They managed that the cadaver became mummified referring to cultural details. In fact mummifying is banned in Islam and he himself was against rituals like that. An empty Jumbo jet was flown from Damascus and snatched the body from London back to Damascus. This was very extra ordinary act while his family were never able to pay for the package. His followers were then badly suppressed in Iran when Khomeini came to power amongst them members very passionate about him in a group named Froghan. Forghan is name taken from holey script Koran preaching about the purity of the religion and it freeness from priests. His works were banned in two decades in the Islamic republic in Iran. A Shariati House was opened in Tehran 2005 but none of his family members were allowed to attain the opening ceremony.The fact remains that shariati played a significant role in easing the way for Rohallah Khomeini.^[3] However there are significant differences between the ideologies of the two revolutionaries. Shariati’s ideology was a blueprint for a radical transformation of the social order, while Khomeini’s was primarily a design for the political and cultural transformation of the existing order. The agenda for Shariati was a social revolution; for Khomeini it was a political revolution aimed at the establishment of a theocracy.These different ideas appealed to different constituencies. The followers of Shariati’s ideas were almost exclusively the young intelligentsia; Khomeini’s Islam appealed to some of the same social elements plus a segment of the clergy and several thousand theology students. The Islam that Shariati viewed was anathema to that of 19th century reformers such as Abu Zarr and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani—Shariati championed a version of Islam that was one of individualism, science, faith and personal devotion culminating in the concepts of “Liberty, Equality, and Spirituality.” It was this trilogy existing alongside his vision of democracy without capitalism or totalitarianism that made up the core of Shariati’s vision of the Iranian utopian state. Within it, Islam represented the social glue, the cultural hegemony in a Gramscian sense, and the intelligentsia, in spite of their paucity of formal religious training, not the ulema, acted as its advocates and political heads. Shariati opposed the clerical version of Islam because it promoted religion as an opiate for the masses. In contrast, “radical Islam” served a more dynamic dual purpose; through the rise of the intellectuals, a revolution would to restore justness in spite of the Shah; it would eradicate poverty through the restructuring of social classes by ousting the imperialist rulers who were the impediments to it.

Khomeini and Shariati found much common ground in their opposition to the monarchy and in Iran’s inauspicious social conditions, as they both interpreted the Iranian nation as growing rapidly less devout and increasingly stratified by economic class, with the Shah at the very pinnacle. It was on this point that Khomeini, emerging as the ultimate leader of the Islamic revolution, incorporated much of Shariati’s ideologies into his own. Indeed, Khomeini found that by using Shariati’s Marxist, ‘Third Worldist’ ideology in his works he could better amalgamate various groups opposed to the Shah; Khomeini declared himself emissary of the disinherited in Marxist terms in his post-1970 discourse and promoted the idea of the poor uniting against the rich. Khomeini’s concept of the mostazafin (oppressed) and the zagheh-neshinha (slum dwellers) rising up against the mostakberin (oppressors) and the kakh-neshinha (palace dwellers) had obvious socialist connotations and served to answer the supplication of the people to recalibrate the increasing economic and social imbalances within Iran. Replacing Shariati’s concept of rawshanfekran, or ‘enlightened intellectual’ as the leader of the Islamic revolution, with this idea of fiqh, Khomeini put these Marxist ideas in the context of Islam and his villayet al-fiqh. Moreover, Shariati condemned the reactionary segments of islam, preferring to follow a reformist notion of the religion. He emphasized both the historical and religious approach to islam encouraging muslims to deeply read history with the holy book Quran[1]

Shariati is considered to be one of the most influential philosophical leaders of pre-revolutionary Iran and the impact and popularity of his thought continues to be felt throughout Iranian society many years later.

1. Hajj (The Pilgrimage)
2. Marxism and Other Western Fallacies : An Islamic Critique
3. Where Shall We Begin?[2]
4. Mission of a Free Thinker[3]
5. The Free Man and Freedom of the Man[4]
6. Extraction and Refinement of Cultural Resources[5]
7. Martyrdom (book)[6]
8. Ali
9. An approach to Understanding Islam PART1-[7]PART2-[8]
10. A Visage of Prophet Muhammad[9]
11. A Glance of Tomorrow's History[10]
12. Reflections of Humanity
13. A Manifestation of Self-Reconstruction and Reformation
14. Selection and/or Election
15. Norouz, Declaration of Iranian's Livelihood, Eternity
16. Expectations from the Muslim Woman
17. Horr (Battle of Karbala)
18. Abu-Dahr
19. Islamology
20. Red Shi'ism vs. Black Shi'ism
21. Jihad and Shahadat
22. Reflections of a Concerned Muslim on the Plight of Oppressed People
23. A Message to the Enlightened Thinkers
24. Art Awaiting the Saviour
25. Fatemeh is Fatemeh
26. The Philosophy of Supplication
27. Religion versus Religion
28. Man and Islam - see chapter "Modern Man and His Prisons"

• Ali Rahnemā, An islamic utopian : A political biography of Ali Shariati, I.B.Tauris, Londres, 1998.

• List of Islamic scholars
• Intellectual Movements in Iran
• Religious Intellectualism in Iran
• Islamic Marxism
• Abdulaziz Sachedina, a student of Shariati
• Philosophy in Iran

• The Official Web Site of Dr Ali Shariati
• Another website dedicated to Ali Shariati
• Humanity and the People Power: A Tribute to Dr. Ali Shariati by Dr. Mohammad Omar Farooq
• Ali Shariati and the Istehmar Theory by Tarek Heggy
• 'Ali Shari'ati: Islamic Fundamentalist, Marxist Ideologist and Sufi Mystic by David Zeidan
• Critical Religious Reason: Ali Shari'ati on Religion, Philosophy and Emancipation by Abbas Manoochehri
• Dr. Ali Shariati and the Role of Sacred Morality by Daniel Trent Dillon
• The forgotten revolutionary: Ali Shariati by Lawrence Reza Ershaghi