AN ISLAMIC UTOPIAN

Shariati was a man of his times. He reflected the mood, conditions, problems, pains and conceivable solutions of his time. The extent to which his discourse and his politico-religious solutions remain pertinent today depends on the degree to which times have changed the material and mental conditions of the people, the institutions governing them and the international balance of forces. Shariati’s methodology played a crucial role in his discourse. In the philosophical tradition of Manichaeans, Shariati had a binary vision, through which he analysed all topics. All concepts, objects, words and phenomenon, with the exception of the Creator and Shariati’s role-models, had a bifurcated and contradictory existence. An evil and satanic aspect confronted and challenged the coexisting good and divine. Shariati was a "natural" dialectician. His analysis of the dichotomy within the individual, society, polity, economy, history, religion, and Shi’ism in particular, is the result of this methodological application.

There is at least one line or one work in the multitude of the works of every intellectual, which personifies or symbolizes that individual. Shariati’s catchy and fiery political slogans, chanted by hundreds of thousands of people during the Iranian revolution of 1978, will probably symbolize him in the minds of those who remember those days or write and read about them. To those familiar with the Shi’I culture, and passionately concerned with the fate of their fellow beings in a world of inequality and oppression, Shariati will probably be remembered by the many lines that conveyed the message, "those who die perform a Hossein-like act and those who live should do as Zeinab did or else they would be akin to Yazid."

But there is more to Shariati than his political dimension. Different people can relate to his different worlds and different lines of his works can come to symbolize different facets of the man. Certainly one of the most distinguished intellectuals of twentieth century Iran, Shariati represented a special and unique amalgam. He does not fit into any classical stereotype. Those who try to portray him as such, simply deform the man. He was an outstanding storyteller, a master of enigma, riddles and charades. Whatever he wrote, whatever he said and whatever he did, which excited and roused him, was filled with riddles and puzzles. Such was his life. A true product of the fertile cultural soil of Khorasan, the land of epics and mystics, Ali Shariati was at case with words, the principle tool of his forefathers. He was in love with the beauty and music of the composition of words. He was an adept social psychologist of his people, correctly gauging the needs of his audience. His story was a tale they longed for. He had the audacity, the enchanting words and the shrewd intellect of saying it well without saying it. Shariati was endowed with all it took to possess real charisma and perhaps even something more. He was more than a bit of a poet, a novelist, a satirist, an artist and a journalist. Detesting confined circumferences and rigid frameworks, in whatever domain, he was cosmopolitan and broad-minded.

For Shariati, phenomena and outcomes did not have a single and simple cause. He was a master synthesizer and himself a synthesis. A first class eclectic, he was part Muslim, part Christian, part Jew, part Buddhist, part Mazdaki, part Sufi, part heretic, part Marxist, part existentialist, part humanist and part sceptic. Shariati was perfectly at case being a nationalist and internationalist at the same time, a materialist as well as an idealist and a practising spiritualist. Shariati was an individualist at war with individualism and a militant of social causes, ever evading the masses. A firm believer in the inevitability of change and the necessity of adaptation, he was a modernist who usually detested the persistence of outmoded traditions, customs and institutions. His role-models, heroes, references and loved ones represented the broadest variety. They came from different epocks, disciplines, ideaologies, lineages, religions, professions, colours, cultures and nationalities. An intellectual product of the world he lived in, he was a synthesis of the cultural and political traditions of the east and the west. A westerner in appearance, education and methodology, he sought refuge in his eastern, Persian and Shi’I culture, his perception of which was coloured by his western education. He looked at the east through western eyes. Shariati upheld his Islam with reference to non-Muslim sources and his Shi’ism with reference to non-Shi’I sources. He was a rebel against himself, his society, his religion, his past and his present. An iconoclast and a utopian, Shariati was at war with "what was" and sought to create "what ought to be".

Most of all, in his own imagery, Shariati was the unexpected rooster who took pride and pleasure in his own nocturnal crowing, shattering the deep silence of the night and upsetting the sleeping. He woke up all kinds of creatures, good and evil, the people and the enemies of the people. He woke up the inquisitive, the inquisitors and the executioners. Each crow added to his disciples and to his enemies. Inviting danger, he always tried to out-manoeuvre the enemy; and when he was out-witted, he retreated into himself, sometimes became remorseful and always paid by long bouts of depression and soul-searching, often resulting in revisionism.

In Islam, he found the language and beliefs of the people who he tried to reach through their religion. His mission was to revolutionize and modernize the understanding and interpretation of Islam. His nimble mastery of words and his artful associations created an Islamic simulacrum far more attractive to his audience than the original. He was probably the only twentieth-century Iranian intellectual who created a socio-political momentum which gave birth to a social movement, culminating in a revolution. In the ultimate social revolution he saw the end of all injustice, oppression and inequality; the birth of the "perfect" New Man. The revolution, he believed, would end the dualities and the binary system. It would usher in a personal, social, political, economic and religious monotheism, imposing the will of the good and divine over the evil and satanic. Shariati was a romantic and not a practitioner of revolutions. A firm believer in platonic relations, he did not, perhaps, want to lose the immaculate vision that he held of the revolution. The utopian idea was too good to be put to test.