Mick Hartley

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, at Spiked, on Ali Shariati: the philosopher of the Iranian Revolution:

When Marxists and Islamists marched together through Tehran in 1978, or march together on elite university campuses today, many find it mystifying. Here are committed materialists and committed theists, ideological enemies by every reckoning, united in a single cause. Who is using whom, and who is fooling whom? A large supply of boxed clichés, such as ‘useful idiots’ or ‘Islamists hijacking the revolution’, has been needed to interpret the alliance and reassure Western observers. The problem is that the paradox is entirely in their mind. The relationship between the left and the Islamic Republic was never one of paradox but of shared genealogy – with both rooted in a shared, revolutionary vision of history. And the inability to read it as such was itself a symptom of the massive delusions we have been captured by, for well over a century.

In short, the compulsion for western intellectuals to find any cause, however irrational or deluded, that they can embrace against the consumerist materialist horrors of our modern liberal democracies. Communism didn’t work – so, next stop, Islamism.

Meet Ali Shariati, the Iranian philosopher who was a key player in this latest derangement.

The Islamic Republic of Iran, which has drawn upon itself the consequences of a half-century of revolutionary ideology, was the unintended offspring of such a literary mind made even more dangerous by systematic philosophical education; a single, extraordinary and almost entirely misunderstood intellectual who translated Martin Heidegger’s work into Farsi, called Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon his idols, spent his formative years in Paris, and proceeded to reconstruct the whole arc of Islamic sacred history as a mystified version of a Marxian theory of history, in which all events point towards an Islamicised, socialist ending. To understand Ali Shariati is to understand the Red-Green alliance, decolonialist narratives, and the ideological obsession with Palestinian liberation not as separate phenomena requiring separate explanations but as expressions of a single, revolutionary-cum-apocalyptic philosophy of history that has been operating, largely undetected, for the better part of a century.

Worth a read.

Yet the revolution that Shariati, more than most, helped to ferment from the ground up ended by bringing to Iran and the Middle East not the liberation it promised but a revolutionary state of torture and terror ruled by a dictatorship – not of the Marxist philosopher-king but of the Islamic law-doctor-king. Where the secular left had filled the air with slogans of progress, the new regime filled it with martyrdom, death and the promise of total war for the liberation of Palestine. The philosopher had yielded to the jurist; the Paris café had yielded to the Shia seminary, but the revolution continued, unbroken and unrepentant, under a new name and always seeking death and destruction.