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The intellectual relationship between Shariati and Frantz Fanon is one of the most fertile and least studied of the twentieth century. Shariati did not merely admire Fanon; he translated him into Persian, taught him, and made him a bridge between the revolutionary consciousness of the Third World and the Iranian intellectual youth. He understood, before most of his contemporaries, that the Algerian revolution was not merely a historical event: it was a model of thought.Read Part I here: Ali Shariati, the Iranian Revolution, and the Arrogant New Empire
Fanon was a Martinican psychiatrist trained in Lyon, committed to the Algerian revolution, and a theorist of liberating violence and psychic decolonization. In The Wretched of the Earth-prefaced by Sartre and published in 1961, weeks before Fanon's death at 36-he formulates the disturbing thesis that colonization is not merely economic and military domination. It is a destruction of being: "Colonialism is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence."
Shariati absorbs this-but transforms it. For him, Fanon's liberating violence can only be interior before it is exterior. Minds must be decolonized before territories. And for an Iranian people steeped in Shia culture, this interior decolonization necessarily passes through Islam-not despite it, but through it. He would call this re-reading Alavid Shiism vs. Safavid Shiism. The Red against the Black. Ervand Abrahamian wrote in this respect, "Shariati had understood something Fanon had not seen: in societies with strong religious cultures, revolution must speak the language of the sacred, or it does not speak at all. He did what Marx refused to do: he took religion seriously as a force for mobilization."
Jean-Paul Sartre himself-a convinced atheist-is widely reported to have said: "I have no religion, but if I were to choose one, it would be Shariati's." The remark, frequently cited in Iranian intellectual circles though difficult to trace to a single authenticated source, nonetheless captures something real: that Shariati's thought had reached, even in Parisian existentialist milieux, a stature that transcended confessional boundaries-and that makes all the more glaring the abysmal ignorance of those who today claim to bomb his country in the name of freedom.
Safavid Shiism-the black Shiism-transforms the memory of Karbala into a liturgy of defeat, into an institutionalized aesthetic of lamentation. The mourning of Imam Hussein becomes an annual spectacle that keeps the people in a permanent posture of victimhood, incapable of action, waiting for the Mahdi's return. It is, Shariati says bluntly, an opium of the people-but an Islamic opium, infinitely more effective than the Marxist version, because it speaks the language of the heart and anesthetizes reason through tears.
Alavid Shiism-the red Shiism-is the Shiism of origins, that of Karbala, not as defeat but as choice. For Hussein knew he was walking toward death. He had the intelligence reports. He knew the numerical superiority of Yazid's forces. And he marched anyway-not out of fatalism, but as a founding act: to tell all future generations that injustice is not a destiny, that one can say no, that refusal is a sacred act.
For Shariati, to mourn Hussein without understanding why he died is to betray Hussein. The formula is cutting. It hits its mark. And it reaches far beyond Iran: How many revolutions have been betrayed by their heirs, who kept the vocabulary while abandoning the spirit?
Bennabi (1905-1973) is, alongside Shariati, one of the greatest politico-theological thinkers of the twentieth-century Islamic world. An economist by training and a self-taught genius, he spent part of his life in Paris before returning to Algeria after independence, where he directed the Higher Islamic Institute of Algiers until his death in 1973.
His central concept is that of colonizability, that is, the interior disposition that makes a people vulnerable to colonization. For Bennabi, the colonizer can only colonize those who allow themselves to be colonized-not out of innate cowardice, but because a declining civilization has lost its internal cohesion, its ideological vitality, and, most importantly, its capacity to produce new ideas.
Bennabi's diagnosis is brutal: the Islamic world was not colonized because the West was strong. It was colonized because it was empty-empty of ideas, empty of projects, and empty of that ʿasabiyyah in the Khaldunian sense, that social cohesive energy that alone allows a civilization to defend itself and project itself into the future.
Bennabi develops his theory of the three constitutive worlds of a civilization: the world of ideas, the world of persons, and the world of things. A civilization dies when the world of ideas dries up. It may still have wealth and populations - like the oil-rich Arab world - but without the ferment of ideas, it is merely a soulless body, a carcass to be colonized.
Although they moved in similar Islamic intellectual circles (1960s-1970s) and shared ideas about cultural and social revolution, there is no direct documentary evidence or widely accepted historical testimony confirming a physical meeting between Malek Bennabi and Ali Shariati. Their connection was primarily intellectual and ideological, both emphasizing the need to move from an "inherited" (traditional) Islam to a "conscious" or engaged Islam, capable of responding to the challenges of modernity and decolonization. This connection was therefore essentially literary: Shariati was an avid reader of Bennabi; he affectionately called him "the guide" and drew heavily on his concepts, particularly that of "colonizability" and the necessity of rebuilding the individual before rebuilding society.
Yet the convergence must not obscure a genuine tension. Bennabi distrusts the charismatic intellectual-the inspired orator who electrifies crowds but leaves no institutional scaffolding behind. His civilizational project is structural: it demands patient reconstruction of the world of ideas before any political mobilization. Shariati, by contrast, is all urgency. He speaks to a generation that cannot wait for the slow chemistry of civilizational renewal; it needs a language of revolt now. Where Bennabi warns that a colonizable society will simply reproduce its servitude under new masters, Shariati bets everything on the catalytic force of consciousness-on the possibility that a single lecture, a single book, can fracture the interior chains. The disagreement is not trivial. It is the perennial question of all liberation movements: does one build institutions first and mobilize second, or does one ignite consciousness and trust that structures will follow? Iran in 1979 would answer that question-tragically-in Bennabi's favor: the consciousness was ignited, but without institutional architecture, the revolution was captured by those who had the structures ready. The mullahs had the hawza. Shariati had only his voice-and he was already dead.
"Power does not reside in the number of soldiers but in the cohesion of the group, in the ʿasabiyya. When it decomposes, the empire falls, even if it possesses all material resources." Ibn Khaldun said it seven centuries ago. Bennabi translated it into modern terms. Shariati set it on fire.
Shariati's vision is mainly laid out in a book. Guarding against the risks of alienation and loss of cultural and religious bearings to which Muslims and Muslim societies are exposed under the growing influence of Western models, he advocates a return to oneself, insisting that this is the only way to meet all needs and satisfy consciences. A strong and self-aware Muslim personality is the foundation of a society capable of responding to contemporary demands and challenges. But returning to oneself, Shariati hastens to add, implies, first of all, knowing who one is. He argued that this Muslim identity cannot be defined according to old and outdated traditions but rather according to the profound teachings of Islam, the very ones that are factors of freedom, modernity, and progress. He wrote in this respect, "There are many presuppositions that distort our culture, and it would have been better if the European had told us that we have no culture, no literature, no science, no civilization, and no religion. We could then have led our generation to rediscover itself, to fulfill all its needs, and to satisfy its conscience and understanding. Instead, we currently smell the stench of hatred hanging in the air, in feelings, and in minds, and even as we are about to speak of the self, we run to seek refuge in Western models. This is why Aimé Césaire can say, 'Let us return to ourselves.' But I cannot help but ask, 'To which self?' Is it this distorted self that has been presented to us? No, it is impossible to return to such a self. That would amount to clinging to tradition and to things old and outdated and to retreating from progress."
Shariati recounts that the publication of his work entitled "Az Kuja Biyāvarim?" (translated into English as "Where Shall We Begin?" and in which he questions, among other things, the starting point of the intellectual and spiritual revival of contemporary Muslim societies) caused a great uproar among the thinkers of his time who were against him. To such an extent that he was on the verge of being brought to court. He was accused of being a "reactionary worshiper of traditions" and an "element refusing the future and hostile to progress," "lamenting the past." Those who accused him of such "crimes," he said, "did not, however, get to the heart of the matter, contenting themselves with presenting my book as a piece of evidence."
Abou Dharr al-Ghifari was a companion of the Prophet Mohammed who refused the accumulation of wealth, publicly sided with the poor against the Umayyad governors, and was exiled into the desert of Rabadha, where he died alone in 652 CE, faithful to his convictions to his final breath. Shariati wrote about him, "What Marx said with the concepts of the nineteenth century, Abou Dharr said with those of the seventh. But Abou Dharr spoke the language of a society's conscience, not an imported theory." This idea is explosive for several simultaneous reasons. It allows Shariati to decolonize the Iranian left: no need to borrow a Western Marxist framework to critique injustice-Islam itself, in its founding texts, contains the critique. It also disarms the conservative clergy who associated any discussion of economic justice with godless communism. It is a double movement of intellectual liberation that few thinkers in the world have achieved with such elegance. This is precisely why the traditional mullahs hated him. Not because he was wrong. But because he was right.
The SAVAK-the Shah's secret police, created in 1957 with the multifaceted assistance of the CIA and Mossad-had unlimited powers of arrest and committed a considerable number of assassinations within the ranks of the opposition. It was dismantled during the 1979 Islamic Revolution by Imam Khomeiny. The SAVAK classified him as an "Islamic Marxist." Arrested, imprisoned twice, placed under house arrest, and harassed relentlessly for years, he continued to write, to give clandestine lectures, and to form generations of young Iranians who would make a revolution he himself would not have wanted to turn out as it did.
But the traditional clergy liked him no better. His method-encouraging believers to read and interpret the Quran directly, without clerical intermediary-threatened the entire edifice of institutional religious power. He was accused in turn of being Wahhabi, communist, modernist, and a foreign agent. Ayatollah Khomeini himself had profoundly ambiguous relations with Shariati. He acknowledged his influence on the youth-precious to the ongoing revolution-but distrusted his independent thinking, his radical anti-clericalism, and his absolute conviction that the Islamic revolution needed no clerical guardianship. That is the tragic paradox of his entire life: Shariati intellectually prepared a revolution whose result he would never have wanted.
At the same time, it is particularly interesting to mention the following remarks made by the recently assassinated Supreme Leader Sayyid Ali Khamenei about Shariati in 1969, that is, during the last year of Jalal Al Ahmad's life, when the latter came to Mashhad: "We then gathered in the presence of Dr. Ali Shariati and a number of friends. When the conversation turned to the ulema, the late Al Ahmad turned to Ali Shariati and asked him why he was criticizing the hawzas so vehemently rather than attacking the intellectuals. Dr. Shariati's response gives us an indication of how he distinguished between 'people of spirituality' as they embody a certain position and situation and 'people of spirituality' as ulema. He said, 'The reason I criticize the hawzas so insistently is that we expect a great deal from them, while we don't expect much from our intellectual elite who grew up within the embrace of Western culture.' The hawza is the solid rock from which we hope to see many things emerge. It is only when it fails to fulfill its function that we criticize it."
Khamenei added that "the work of reconstruction in question must give rise to a new stage, one that will be beneficial for our generation. In other words, what we need today is to read Shariati alongside Motahari. What emerges from this convergence of the beauty of Shariati's ideas and Motahari's mastery of Islamic thought is precisely what our current generation needs. What makes Shariati a pioneer is his extraordinary ability to reformulate Islam in modern language that resonates with the generation of his time. While many preceded him in this path, none achieved the success he did."
The official cause: cardiac arrest. No thorough autopsy. No serious investigation. The case was closed with suspicious speed, as if someone wished the matter settled before it was even examined. The SAVAK had a well-documented reputation for eliminating its targets abroad by medically undetectable means. The timing is troubling: Shariati had just begun building connections with Iranian opposition networks in Europe, was working on new texts, and was-according to those close to him-in better intellectual form than ever.
Ibrahim Yazdi-who was with Shariati in the days before his death and would later serve briefly as Foreign Minister in the revolutionary government-stated publicly that Shariati had shown no signs of cardiac illness and had been in full intellectual vigor. Ahmad Shariati, Ali's son, has maintained throughout his life that his father was assassinated. The British authorities, for their part, displayed no curiosity. A coroner's report was filed; no inquest was opened. The body was released with remarkable efficiency-as if the only thing that mattered was to close the file before the questions began.
Shariati is buried in Damascus, near the shrine of Sayyida Zaynab-the sister of Imam Hussein, who, having survived Karbala, carried the message of resistance to Damascus before Yazid himself. A symbolic geography that resembles a testament.
The revolution he had conceived would erupt two years later, in 1979. His portrait was everywhere in the streets of Tehran. Millions of demonstrators chanted his title: Mo'allem-e Enqelab-the Teacher of the Revolution. But power falls into the hands of institutional clergy-exactly those he had critiqued. The architect had drawn the plans. Others built differently. And very quickly, his Islam of protest became inconvenient for a state now demanding obedience.
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