THE ROLE OF DR. ALI SHARIATI IN IRANIAN REVOLUTION BY ZABIR SAEED BADAR

THE ROLE OF DR. ALI SHARIATI IN IRANIAN REVOLUTION Zabir Saeed Badar Abstract There are many persons who took part in Iranian Revolution but Dr.Ali Shariati’s role is very vital and significant among them. Dr. Ali Shariati is a great Philosophe rand a Revolutionary thinker. He is one of the most outstanding modern thinkers of Islamic world. He awakened anew interest and confidence in Islam. He is one of the most brilliant Islamic thinkers. He studied Islam and contemporary Western thoughts, which are of tremendous value to young Muslim generations. He is extensively recognized as the intellectual ideologue of the Iranian revolution. Shariati presents a very complex and diverse mix of ideas: radical Islamic fundamentalism, traditional Muslim thought, a mystical Sufi modes, dialectical Marxism, Western existentialism, and anti-imperialism. He presents the way of enlightenment to Iranian Revolution. HIS LIFE: Dr. Ali Shariati was born in 1933 in a village near Mashhad. His father, Mohammad Taqi Shariati, was a reform-minded cleric who had doffed his clerical garb and earned a living by running his own religious lecture hall and by teaching scripture at a local high school. Because he openly advocated reform, the conservative ‘ulama’ labeled him a Sunni, a Baha’i and even a Wahhabi. In later years, ‘Ali Shariati proudly stated that his father, more than anyone else, had influenced his intellectual development. As a schoolboy, the younger Shariati attended discussion groups organized by his father, and in the late 1940s father and son joined a small group called the Movement of God-Worshiping Socialists. This group was intellectually rather than politically significant. It made the first attempt in Iran to synthesize Shiism with European socialism. Following his father’s profession, Shariati entered the teacher’s college of Mashhad and continued to study Arabic and the Koran with his father. After graduating from college in 1953, he taught for four years in elementary schools in his home province. While teaching, he translated -- in a somewhat liberal manner -- an Arabic work entitled Abu Zarr: The God-Worshiping Socialist. Written originally by a radical Egyptian novelist named ‘Abd al-Hamid Jawdat al-Sahar, the book traced the life of an early follower of the Prophet who, after Muhammad’s death, had denounced the caliphs as corrupt and had withdrawn to the desert to lead a simple life and speak out on behalf of the hungry and poor against the greedy rich. For al-Sahar and Shari‘ati, as for many other radicals in the Middle East, Abu Zarr was the first Muslim socialist. The elder Shari’ati later wrote that his son considered Abu Zarr to be one of the greatest figures in world history. [1] In 1958, Shariati entered Mashad University to study for a master’s degree in foreign languages, specializing in Arabic and French. Completing the MA in 1960, he won a state scholarship to the Sorbonne to study for a Ph.D. in sociology and Islamic history. In Paris at the height of the Algerian and Cuban revolutions, he immersed himself in radical political philosophy as well as in revolutionary student organizations. He joined the Iranian Student Confederation and the Liberation Movement of Iran which was formed in 1961-1962 by lay religious followers of Mossadeq. He organized student demonstrations on behalf of the Algerian nationalists -- after one such demonstration he spent three days in a hospital recovering from head wounds. He also edited two journals: Iran Azad, the organ of Mossadeq’s National Front in Europe; and Nameh-i Pars, the monthly journal of the Iranian Student Confederation in France. Shariati took a number of courses with such famous Orientalists as Massignon and attended lectures by Marxist professors. He avidly read the works of contemporary radicals, especially Jean-Paul Sartre, Franz Fanon, Che Guevara, Giap and Roger Garaudy (a prominent Christian Marxist intellectual). Shariati translated Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare and Sartre’s What Is Poetry?, and began a translation of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and the Fifth Year of the Algerian War (better known to English readers as A Dying Colonialism). [2] While translating the last work, Shariati wrote three letters to Fanon, challenging him on the question of religion and revolution. According to Fanon, the peoples of the Third World had to give up their own traditional religions in order to wage a successful struggle against Western imperialism. But, in Shariati’s view, the peoples of the Third World could not fight imperialism unless they first regained their cultural identity. In many countries, this was interwoven with their popular religious traditions. Thus, Shariati insisted, the countries of the Third World had to rediscover their religious roots before they could challenge the West. Shariati returned to Iran in 1965. After spending six months in prison, and on being denied a position in Tehran University, he returned to his home province Khorasan. He taught first in a village school and later in Mashhad University. In 1967, however, he was able to move to Tehran and take up a lectureship at the Husseinieh-e Ershad, a religious meeting hall built and financed by a group of wealthy merchants and veteran leaders of the Liberation Movement. The next five years were to be the most productive in his life. He regularly lectured at the Husseinieh, and most of these lectures were soon transcribed into some 50 pamphlets and booklets. Tapes of his lectures were widely circulated and received instant acclaim -- especially among college and high school students. Shari‘ati’s message ignited enthusiastic interest among the young generation of the discontented intelligentsia. Shariati’s prolific period did not last long, for in 1972 the Husseinieh ceased its activities. The hall was closed for several reasons. Shariati’s popularity aroused concern among the secret police, and the Mojahedin-e Khalq, the Islamic guerrilla organization, was suspected of having a presence there. Intellectual hacks hired by the government accused Shariati of “leading youth astray with anti-clerical propaganda. Even reform-minded clerics such as Ayatollah Mottaheri felt that Shariati was stressing sociology at the expense of theology and borrowing too freely from Western political philosophy. Soon after the closing of the Husseinieh, Shariati was arrested, accused of advocating “Islamic Marxism,” and put in prison. He remained in prison until 1975, when a flood of petitions from Paris intellectuals and the Algerian government secured his release. In an attempt to create the false impression that Shariati had collaborated with his jailers, the government doctored one of his unfinished essays, added simple-minded diatribes against Marxism, and published it under the title of Ensan-Marksism-Islam (Humanity-Marxism-Islam). After his release, Shariati remained under house arrest. It was not until May 1977 that he was permitted to leave for London. There, only one month after his arrival, he suddenly died. Not surprisingly, his admirers suspected foul play. But the British coroner ruled that he had died of a massive heart attack at the young age of 43. HIS POLITICAL THEORY: Westerners commonly perceive the Iranian Revolution as an atavistic and xenophobic movement that rejects all things modern and non-Muslim, a view reinforced by the present leaders of Iran. They claim that the revolution spearheads the resurgence of Islam, and that the revolutionary movement is an authentic phenomenon uncorrupted by any alien ideas and inspired solely by the teachings of the Prophet and the Shia imams. This conventional wisdom, however, ignores the contributions of ‘Ali Shariati, the main ideologue of the Iranian Revolution. Shariati drew his inspiration from outside as well as from within Islam: from Western sociology -- particularly Marxist sociology -- as well as from Muslim theology; from theorists of the Third World -- especially Franz Fanon -- as well as from the teachings of the early Shia martyrs. In fact, Shariati devoted his life to the task of synthesizing modern socialism with traditional Shiaism, and adapting the revolutionary theories of Marx, Fanon and other great non-Iranian thinkers to his contemporary Iranian environment. [3] Readers coming to Shari‘ati at this point in time face a number of difficulties. The revolution not only made him into a household name in Iran, but also transformed him into a trophy in the contests of competing political groups. He is more eulogized than analyzed, more quoted -- obviously in a selective manner -- than published, and more seen in light of immediate conflicts than in the context of his own 1960s and 1970s. Furthermore, dubious works have been published under his name. Compounding these problems is the fact that there is not one Shariati but three separate Shariatis. First, there is Shariati the sociologist, interested in the dialectical relationship between theory and practice, between ideas and social forces, and between consciousness and human existence. This same Shariati is committed to understanding the birth, growth and bureaucratization, and thus eventual decay, of revolutionary movements, especially radical religions. Second, there is Shariati the devout believer, whose article of faith claimed that revolutionary Shiaism, unlike all other radical ideologies, would not succumb to the iron law of bureaucratic decay. Third, there is Shariati the public speaker who had to weigh his words very carefully, not only because the ever watchful secret police were eager to accuse him as an “Islamic Marxist,” but also because the high-ranking ‘ulama’ instinctively distrusted any layman trespassing on their turf, reinterpreting their age-old doctrines. As Shariati often pointed out to his listeners, contemporary Iran was at a similar stage of development as pre-Reformation Europe, and consequently political reformers needed to learn from Luther and Calvin, take up tasks appropriate for their environment, and always keep in mind that the Shia ‘ulama’, unlike the medieval European clergy, enjoyed a great deal of influence over the city bourgeoisie as well as over the urban and the rural masses. His Political Theory The central theme in many of Shariati’s works is that Third World countries such as Iran need two interconnected and concurrent revolutions: a national revolution that would end all forms of imperial domination and would vitalize -- in some countries revitalize -- the country’s culture, heritage and national identity; and a social revolution that would end all forms of exploitation, eradicate poverty and capitalism, modernize the economy, and, most important of all, establish a “just,” “dynamic,” and “classless” society. According to Shariati, the task of carrying forth these two revolutions is in the hands of the intelligentsia -- the rushanfekran. For it is the intelligentsia that can grasp society’s inner contradictions, especially class contradictions, raise public consciousness by pointing out these contradictions, and learn lessons from the experiences of Europe and other parts of the Third World. Finally, having charted the way to the future, the intelligentsia must guide the masses through the dual revolutions. The Iranian intelligentsia, Shariati added, was fortunate in that it lived in a society whose religious culture, Shiaism, was intrinsically radical and therefore compatible with the aims of the dual revolution. For Shiaism, in Shariati’s own words, was not an opiate like many other religions, but was a revolutionary ideology that permeated all spheres of life, including politics, and inspired true believers to fight all forms of exploitation, oppression, and social injustice. He often stressed that the Prophet Muhammad had come to establish not just a religious community but an umma in constant motion towards progress and social justice. The Prophet’s intention was to establish not just a monotheistic religion but a nezam-e tawhid (unitary society) that would be bound together by public virtue, by the common struggle for “justice,” “equality,” “human brotherhood” and “public ownership of the means of production,” and, most significant of all, by the burning desire to create in this world a “classless society.” Furthermore, the Prophet’s rightful heirs, Hussein and the other Shia Imams, had raised the banner of revolt because their contemporary rulers, the “corrupt caliphs” and the “court elites,” had betrayed the goals of the umma and the nezam-e tawhid. For Shariati, the Moharram passion plays depicting Hussein’s martyrdom at Karbala’ contained one loud and clear message: All Shias, irrespective of time and place, had the sacred duty to oppose, resist and rebel against contemporary ills. Shariati listed the ills of contemporary Iran as “world imperialism, including multinational corporations and cultural imperialism, racism, class exploitation, class oppression, class inequality and gharbzadegi (intoxication with the West). [4] Shariati denounced imperialism and class inequalities as society’s main long-term enemies, but he focused many of his polemics against two targets he viewed as immediate enemies. The first was “vulgar Marxism,” especially the “Stalinist variety” that had been readily accepted by the previous generation of Iranian intellectuals. The second was conservative Islam, notably the clerical variety, that had been propagated by the ruling class for over twelve centuries in order to stupefy the exploited masses. Thus many of Shariati’s more interesting and controversial works deal precisely with Marxism, particularly the different brands of Marxism, and with clericalism, especially its conservative misinterpretations of Shiism. ROLE IN IRANIAN REVOLUTION Shariati’s immense influence on modern Iranian politics was the result of his reconstruction of Shi’a Islam as a revolutionary ideology and political practice. Central to this arguably Jacobin conception of Islam was the goal of a universal socialist society in the form of a “monotheistic classless society” (jamia-e bitabaqeh-ie towhidi) where “oppression” in all its manifestations, would be abolished. Shariati believed that the consciousness of Iran’s “oppressed” multitude or “the people” was deeply marked by Islamic political imagination. He attributed the longevity of this circumstance, despite Iran’s experience of rapid and systematic modernization, to the specificity of Iran’s modern development, which had, according to Shariati, left the unproductive mercantile bourgeoisie (the bazaar) still economically dominant while creating a modern working class that was small and fragmented. But to varying degrees both classes, especially their younger generation, were, he believed, exposed to, and influenced by, western culture and thought. This recognition, Shariati continuously argued, highlighted the indispensability of a “modern” language with an effervescent and energizing “traditional” accent. “If a nation cannot know its [sic] own cultural and spiritual resources and is incapable of extracting, refining, and turning them into energy’’, Shariati argued, “it will remain ignorant and backward…” (Shariati 1981). Thus, Shariati argued that a modern and familiar language and ideology would secure the vital requirement of a revolutionary ideology that was popular in agency but class-conscious and professional in leadership. Fashioning such a language and ideology was Shariati’s political leitmotif and the distinctive character of his revolutionary Islam. However, Shariati’s project immediately confronted two main contenders: the Shi’a ulama and secular forces. Shariati ruthlessly indicted the Shi’a ulama for cultivating a socio-political imagination and disposition permeated by passivity, resignation and fatalism, ills which Shariati attributed to the formation and domination in Iran of the “evil triangle” of “wealth, force and deceit”, his euphemism for the historical collaboration of the bazaar, the monarchy, and the Shi’a ulama. The radical left was, however, a different matter. Intellectually Shariati had a deeply ambivalent attitude towards Marxism oscillating between great admiration and ethical-philosophical discontent.Marxism, Shariati argued, remained uni-dimensional, unbalanced, and incomplete in its interpretation and evaluation of “man” on the sole basis of production. As such, Marxism, Shariati argued, retained ‘the world-view of Western bourgeoisie’.[5] Politically, however, Shariati had deep sympathy for Iran’s new left. He shared their basic goals and admired their ideological devotion and revolutionary zeal. But he insisted on the incorrectness of their strategy, criticized their out-of-touch language and inability to communicate with the masses. He also criticized their cultural aloofness, which resulted in a self-imposed detention by a highly incestuous political discourse and practice. Nonetheless, Shariati saw the new left as a potential ally that ought to be engaged. This aspect of Shariati’s practice partially explains his appropriation of Marxist, and more generally modern, political and philosophical vocabulary. For Shariati did believe, probably due to his misreading of the Leninist tactic of the “vanguard party”, that the revolutionary leadership must be at the hands of the “committed intellectuals”. A key social stratum that Shariati sought to engage and influence was university and college students among whom Marxism, in its both Soviet and “revolutionary” varieties, was highly popular. Moreover, for both Shi’a intellectuals and ulama Marxism was a formidable rival that needed to be confronted intellectually. For as Hamid Dabashi argues if the Pahlavi state marginalized Shi’ism socio-politically, Marxism was “robbing [it] of both its metaphysical claim to truth and its ideological claim to political mobilization”. However, Shariati’s appropriation of Marxist vocabulary was not merely or primarily a pragmatic decision. It was an organic product of the ramifications of uneven and combined development into the processes of ideology formation in Iran, which unfolded in a mutually reinforcing relation with the politico-cultural exigencies of the citizen-subject. In what follows I demonstrate the ways in which the specificities of the citizen-subject, the dominant component of Shariati’s central category of “the people”, informed, and were rearticulated in, Shariati’s fashioning of the ideology of revolutionary Islam. In justifying his radical politicization of Islamic thought and practice Shariati consistently deployed arguments that in effect invoked the condition of inter-societal differentiation (unevenness) and its consequences of inter-national interaction and intra-national differentiation (combination). He consistently argued that inter-societal difference meant that in formulating their political strategies to overcome backwardness and bring about national-cultural regeneration radical intellectuals of the Third World must bear in mind that they cannot imitate western experiences of modern socio-economic development. This was because … The European intellectual is dealing with a worker who has gone through three centuries of the middle Ages and two centuries of Renaissance. … and lives in an atmosphere not dominated by a religious spirit. … He lives in a well-developed industrial bourgeois system … and has attained a higher stage of growth and self-consciousness. .. [European industrial proletariat] has formed a … distinct and independent class. … I live in a society in which the bourgeoisie, except in big cities, is in its nascent stage. The comprador bourgeoisie is a middle-man, not a bourgeoisie of the genuine producing system. … We still do not have a workers’ class in our society. What we have are just groups. Shariati believed human aspirations could have universal credence and reach. But he also believed that developmental and cultural difference subverts the universality of any particular notion of the political deployed for the realization of those aspirations. This highlighted the necessity for political strategies attuned to the specificities of the socio-cultural contexts within which the political agency for the realization of those strategies must be mobilized. This polysomic conception of political strategy logically necessitated “native” and “authentic” instances of “revolutionary ideology”.[6] Such an ideology must, in a dialectical fashion, combine and convey universal human ideals and culturally specific collective imaginations through a re-articulation of the entrenched present in order to supersede it. Such supersessionipso facto also supplanted linear conceptions of how this supersession had previously been attempted or achieved. Thus, in a striking statement Shariati argued that “a conscious and alert individual [could] grab history by the collar [and] propel it from feudalism to socialism”. Expectedly, this transformative consciousness was, for Shariati, a product of ideology. And this ideology was Islam. “Islam as an ideology”, Shariati asserted, “is not a scientific specialization but is the feeling one has with regard to a school of thought as a belief system and not as a culture”. However, any ideology, Shariati argued, required two fundamental elements: a “world view” and a “philosophy of history”. In fashioning these elements from Islamic thought and history Shariati deployed intellectual tools that had unmistakable Marxist provenance. However, his interpretation and deployment of these tools involved a translational translucence that produced a conception of Islam that coincided with neither Marxism nor pre-existing Islam. Crucially, this new hybrid conception was still readily visualisable through an Islamic imagination whose ethical and cosmological integrity were kept intact. Shariati described his strategy as one which retained the traditional form of Shia-Islamic theological and philosophical categories and discourse but reconstituted their content in the service of revolutionary praxis. Shariati claimed that this strategy was also used by the prophet Mohammad in relation to pre-Islamic Arab society. Moreover, its use was facilitated by what Shariati described as Islam’s “symbolical language”. Shariati’s reinterpretations of the Quranic story of “Abel and Cain” and the Shia concept of imamat provide important demonstrations of this strategy in fashioning the essential ingredients of an Islamic philosophy of history as the intellectual basis for the ideology of revolutionary Islam. The story of Abel and Cain is commonly seen by Muslims as an essentially ethical anecdote on the consequences of greed. But therein Shariati discerns a certain “historical determinism” that is generated by the “dialectical contradiction” between “two hostile and contradictory elements’ showing that ‘the history of man, God’s vice-regent on earth, began with contradiction”. In elaborating on this contention Shariati introduces modified forms of the Marxist notion of class struggle. He argues that Abel represents the age of a pasture-based economy, of the primitive socialism that preceded ownership and Cain represents the system of agriculture, and individual or monopoly ownership. … Abel the pastoralist was killed by Cain the landowner; the period of common ownership of the sources of production …. [t]he spirit of brotherhood and true faith, came to an end and was replaced by age of agriculture and the establishment of the system of private ownership, together with religious trickery … . Shariati immediately distinguishes his approach from the Marxist “mode of production” analysis by contending that contrary to Marx, the transformation of the egalitarian pastoralist society into an unequal, class-divided and property based agriculture was not the result of the development of productive forces or the division of labor but the direct outcome of the uneven distribution of power. This contention is crucial to Shariati’s overall project because it involves two modifications of Marxist approach. On one hand it becomes the basis for Shariati’s attribution of primary causality to the political contra Marx’s alleged economic determinism. On the other hand, by legitimizing the “political” category of “oppression” (derived from the centrality of “power” in historical movement) - as opposed to the “economic” category of “exploitation” (derived from the centrality of “production” in historical movement) - he enables an articulation of “the people”, “the ruled”, “the oppressed” that jettisoned the (working) class as the key agency of (modern) social change. The other important example in Shariati’s practice of “retaining the form, changing the content” concerns the Shia principle of imamat. For much of its history the doctrine of imamat - in conjunction with the concept of ghayba (occultation) - was used by the Shi’a ulama as the theological basis for a de facto legitimation of the existing states however tyrannical or oppressive they were. This use was particularly entrenched following the adoption of Shiaism as state religion by the Safavis. Thus, The burden of the trust of tawhid (monotheism or cosmological unity) was entrusted in history, after the Prophet himself … with the institution of Imamat, With Ali and his descendants. But in the course of time, Shiaism, which had begun as a protest … became a tool in the hands of the possessors of money and might. …its true visage became hidden beneath the dust of opportunism, vacillation, and misinterpretation.[7] Shariati argued that the reactionary ulama had misused the Shia notion and practice of the “awaiting” Mahdi, the hidden twelfth Shi’a imam, in order to advocate passivity and fatalism. In sharp contrast, Shariati argued that “awaiting” ought to be a basis for conscious action in order to hasten the last imam’s return and hence pave the way for the realization of Islam’s “ideal society – the umma”. Thus, he argued that ‘awaiting’ was the religion of protest (entezaar mazhab-e e’teraz). It was the revolutionary prosecution of this uninterrupted and conscious action which, according to Shariati, required leadership, i.e., the true and expanded meaning of imamat. In this sense Shariati’s reconstruction of the principle of imamat was similar to that of Khomeini which also involved what Larry Ray describes as “double anthropology”, i.e., the “dualistic construction of human nature, which permits political authority to be legitimized in the name of the mass, yet held by an elite vanguard”. Moreover, Shariati also attenuated Shia connotations of the concept of imamat (as opposed to the Sunni principle of caliphate) through an etymology of the word umma, which he identified as Islam’s ideal society. He argued that the root of the word “umma” was amm, which in Arabic meant both “path” and “intention”. Shariati argued that the combination of path and intention rendered Islam’s normative goal universal and hence beyond and above particularism of blood and soil, i.e., nationalism. Moreover, the “infrastructure of umma is the economy” since “whoever has no worldly life has no spiritual life”. Umma is therefore based on “equity and justice and ownership by people - a classless society – the revival of the system of Abel”. At this point of his ideological exegesis Shariati reintroduced the concept of imamat in a fundamentally reconstructed form: The political philosophy and the form of regime of the umma is not the democracy of heads, not irresponsible and directionless liberalism which is a plaything of contesting social forces, not putrid aristocracy, not anti-popular dictatorship, not a self-imposing oligarchy. It consists rather of “purity of leadership “not the leader, (for that would be fascism), committed and revolutionary leadership, responsible for the movement and growth of society on the basis of its worldview and ideology, and for the realization of the divine destiny of man in the plan of creation. This is the true meaning of imamat! Through de-emphasizing the personal dimension of the imamat and stressing the “path and intention”, Shariati widened his audience and engaged Sunni Muslims as well as seculars. Moreover, in his stress on the crucial role of the “intellectuals” “responsibility” and “commitment” Shariati recurrently deployed a modified form of existentialism in that he derived it not from the lack of abandonment of metaphysical truth a la Sartre, but from religious Truth. Moreover, Shariati subsumed existentialism under a politicized form of irfan or Islamic mysticism, whose practice, he believed, enabled individuals to achieve extraordinary powers; a quality that was particularly relevant for the elitist and super-committed notion of leadership that his ideology of revolutionary Islam contained. Shariati’s revolutionary Islam was a combined intellectual formation par excellence. Thus, a leftist activist in 1970’s Iran was likely to see in Shariati’s discourse a series of Marxist concepts camouflaged in Islamic vocabulary: “committed intellectual” (substituted for the absent imam) to lead “the people (substituted for socialism). On the other hand, young and educated Iranians from more religious backgrounds and persuasions felt that they had finally found an equally radical and modern yet still Islamic alternative to the left which hitherto monopolized radical theory and ideology. No wonder why Shariati’s revolutionary Islam displayed such a strong elective affinity with the citizen-subject. Conclusion The preceding argument suggests that essentialist accounts of political Islam and its various instances are fundamentally flawed because they rest on an internalize conception of modernity that is in turn rooted in an ontologically singular conception of the social. The Eurocentric effects of his singularity social ontology can even be seen in the radical Western intellectual traditions such as postmodernism and post-structuralism. This is, of course, not to overlook these intellectual projects’ enormous challenge to Western singular “self” and its self-understanding as the unique and singular site of “civilization” and “reason”. But their perception of, and reaction to, other non-European, particularly Islamic, societies suggest that their critique of European modernity is primarily driven by intellectual alertness to an essentially intra-European temporality. In other words, they are preoccupied with the ways in which social, political and cultural forms have changed diachronically within Europe. Accordingly, European development is identified and conceptualized in terms of, and with reference to, the specifically European temporalities and forms of subject hood in isolation from, or in spite of, Europe’s constant encounters and interactions with “other” non-European societies and civilizations. As Shilliam has shown, this attitude even marks the work of astute thinkers such as Gadamer and Lévinas, who pioneered the themes of difference and alterity in modern Western philosophy. [8] This is highly significant. For as I have argued, inter-societal relations and interactions, from which successive Western traditions of thought have abstracted, constitute a distinct and constitutive dimension of historic process and social reality.[9] A conceptual incorporation of this specifically international dimension of social change is, I have contended, central to the theory of uneven and combined development. Accordingly, modernity can be rehearsed as an internationally produced phenomenon with interactive and multilinker dynamics that underlie its variation across times and spaces This intellectual move has a crucial implication for the category of “nonwestern thought”. For once re-viewed as an international category, the negative definition of “non-Western thought” - constructed with reference to a singular and discreet West – will instead signify a positive and mutually constitutive interrelation. In other words, the very notions of the “West” and the “East” that represent concrete instances of socio-cultural constellations turn out to be permeated by each other at all levels. Consequently, ideological, intellectual and political products that arise from these constellations also need to be understood in terms of this basic condition of ontological co-constitution, which is what actually renders them resistant to comprehension through singular categories and linear histories. Shariati’s political thought eminently testifies to this reality. His reconstruction of the “actually existing Islam” in Iran was strategically driven by dynamics only partially internal to Iran. And the final product of this reconstruction, the idea of “revolutionary Islam” that is inscribed on the Iranian Revolution and its ongoing evolution, has had crucial consequences far beyond Iran. The recognition and conceptual integration of the international dimension of social change has wider and important implications for IR as an academic discipline. For more than two decades now, the detractors of the mainstream IR theory have invoked social (domestic) determinations of international relations and geo- politics in order to challenge the purported timelessness of the behavioral logic of states generated by “anarchy”, the basis of the mainstream IR’s paradigmatic self-definition contra sociological studies. Yet, in their concentrated attempt to de-reify anarchy as a supra-social category, they have tended to neglect a serious engagement with, and social theorization of, anarchy as a distinct field of causality. This recognition, however, needs not to re-entrap us in the mainstream IR’s ontological inside/outside duality. Rather, it essentially invites us to conceive of “the international” and “the social” as inter-related and mutually constitutive without rendering the causal significance of either of them derivative of, or reducible to, the other. This would enable a deep socialization of “anarchy” and pose a much stronger challenge to the mainstream international relations. References: [1] ‘Ali Shari‘ati, The Intelligentsia’s Task in the Construction of Society (Solon, OH, 1979), p. 6. All works of Shari‘ati are cited in the original Persian. [2] M. Muqimi, Chaotic Ideas (Tehran, 1972), pp. 13-14. [3] ’Ali Shari‘ati, The Shi‘is: A Complete Party (n.p., 1976), p. 27. [4] ‘Ali Shari‘ati, Islamology, Lesson 13, pp. 7-8. [5]Terry Eagleton, Figures of Discontent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivak, Žižek and Others (London: Verso, 2003), p. 161. [6]Kamran Matin, Recasting Iranian Modernity: The International Dimension of Social Change (London and New York: Routledge, forthcoming), Chapter 5. [7]Ali Shariati, Religion versus Religion (Tehran: Safir, 1986). [8]Ali Shariati, On the Sociology of Islam: Lectures by Ali Shriati (Berkeley, CA: Mizan Press, 1979), p. 117 [9]Ali Shariati,Civilization and Modernization. Available at www.shariati.com/machinehtml (accessed 13 January 2008).