Ali Shariati 1933 – 1977

Ali Shariati was an Iranian sociologist and Islamic political philosopher, trained at the Sorbonne under Louis Massignon and Jacques Berque, who became the most influential intellectual ancestor of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. His Religion versus Religion distinguished the religion of the oppressed from the institutional religion of the powerful, while his many lectures, gathered in volumes such as What Is to Be Done? and On the Sociology of Islam, fused themes from European Marxism, Frantz Fanon, and Shia Islam into a revolutionary Islamic humanism. He died in exile in England under contested circumstances on the eve of the revolution he had done so much to inspire.

Ali Shariati was born at the village of Mazinan in Khorasan in November 1933, the son of a reformist Islamic teacher. He trained as a schoolteacher at Mashhad, took a degree in Persian literature at the new University of Mashhad, and in 1959 went to Paris on a state scholarship, where he completed a doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1964 on a medieval Persian text and worked closely with Louis Massignon, Jacques Berque, Frantz Fanon, and Jean-Paul Sartre. On his return to Iran he was briefly imprisoned, then taught at Mashhad before becoming the leading lecturer of the Hosseiniyeh Ershad institute in Tehran from 1967 until its forced closure in 1972.

His writings, mainly transcribed lectures, were collected after his death in some thirty-five volumes; the most influential are On the Sociology of Islam, Religion vs. Religion, Marxism and Other Western Fallacies, Hajj, Fatima Is Fatima, Husayn Heir of Adam, and the celebrated address Red Shi'ism vs. Black Shi'ism.

Shariati synthesised Shi'a theology, French anti-colonial thought, and a non-Marxist socialism into a revolutionary ideology in which Islam, properly understood, is the religion of the oppressed against tyrants from Yazid to the Pahlavi shah; he made the martyrdom of Husayn at Karbala the founding political act of the believer. After an eighteen-month imprisonment he was released in 1975 and emigrated to England, where he died in Southampton in June 1977 in circumstances widely attributed to SAVAK, two years before the revolution his lectures had helped to ignite.