In particular, some of his later ethical reflections- where he deliberately abandoned the call for insurrectionary violence- have been conflated with the political changes pursuant to the establishment of the postrevolutionary state. According to these accounts Shari’ati was a nativist intellectual who aggressively fostered violent and totalitarian tendencies drawn from the European tradition of “counter-Enlightenment” philosophy. As I demonstrate here, a different relationship between violence and political ethics persisted in Shari’ati’s discourse. Most notably, the call for ethical transformation in his earliest discussion of bāzgasht - a distinctly nonrevisionist discussion of the concept of “return”- which formed the conceptual backbone of his later, noteworthy speeches on insurrectionary violence or shahādat
In particular, some of his later ethical reflections- where he deliberately abandoned the call for insurrectionary violence- have been conflated with the political changes pursuant to the establishment of the postrevolutionary state. According to these accounts Shari’ati was a nativist intellectual who aggressively fostered violent and totalitarian tendencies drawn from the European tradition of “counter-Enlightenment” philosophy. As I demonstrate here, a different relationship between violence and political ethics persisted in Shari’ati’s discourse. Most notably, the call for ethical transformation in his earliest discussion of bāzgasht - a distinctly nonrevisionist discussion of the concept of “return”- which formed the conceptual backbone of his later, noteworthy speeches on insurrectionary violence or shahādat