Ali Shari Ati: The 1979 Revolution

Ali Shari’ati is considered to be one of the most significant ideologues of the 1979 revolution in Iran- the events that overturned the Pahlavi monarchy and ushered in the Islamic Republic. Despite his death in 1977, just months before protesters spilled onto the streets of Tehran, Shari’ati’s lectures and published writings are said to have defined the tenor of the uprising. In some of his most influential lectures, delivered during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Shari’ati attempted to fuse radical ideas from Marxist and existentialist traditions of thought with a religious nationalist discourse. These lectures were attended by a number of activists from guerrilla groups and are considered to have been the ideological source for the insurrectionary violence against the Pahlavi regime that occurred over the course of the 1970s. Shari’ati subsequently came to form a cornerstone of the myth-making that attended the revolution, with his image carried and slogans chanted in mass demonstrations. The specific nature of Shari’ati’s …show more content…
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