Ali Shari’ati: Caught Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

Dr. Robert D. Crane

Posted Jul 1, 2006      •Permalink      • Printer-Friendly Version
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Ali Shari’ati: Caught Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

  Ali Shari’ati is one of the half dozen most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, due in part to his specifically Shi’i concept of evolutionary justice.  Shari’ati is sometimes considered to be the real godfather of the Iranian revolution and the equivalent among the Shi’a of the Sunni Islamist godfather Syed Qutb.  Although he died a quarter of a century ago, he has much to say about the current upsurge of radicalism in Washington and the Holy Land.

  Part of Shari’ati’s success comes from his ability to present his sociological interpretations and revolutionary ideas in ways that are appealing to those who understand divine teachings only through conservative perspectives.  Unfortunately, in the process he may have introduced a profound misunderstanding of the world’s underlying problems and raised barriers to their solution.

  On the positive side, it seems to me as a professional long-range global forecaster that Ali Shari’ati’s concept of evolutionary justice provides a necessary perspective for both Jews and Muslims in the current Israeli re-invasion of the Occupied Territories. 

  It is inevitable that a century or so from now the State of Israel will be hardly more than a footnote to history, albeit an important and highly instructive one.  Either the Jews will redefine their identity in more universal terms so they can work together with like-minded Muslims in developing an Abraham Federation or else both will carry out the final solution against each other so compellingly advocated by Rabbi Kahane in his seminal book, They Must Go.  In either case, the concept of an exclusivist religious state, whether Jewish, Muslim, Christian, or Hindu, will have been discredited, as have other ideological utopias before it.

  Perhaps the major ideological utopia due for the dust heap of history, if there indeed are to be any future historians around to draw the necessary conclusions, is the concept of salvation through material power.  Today in the Holy Land we are witnessing in microcosm the corruption of power and the evil that breeds in the hearts of the powerful who recognize no god other than themselves.  We are also witnessing the suicidal persistence of those who are radicalized by their seeming lack of power and by their hopeless commitment to sustain their dignity by relying on counterforce.

  Ali Shari’ati was a preeminent long-range global forecaster, who provided perspective in many of his books on the current confrontation in the Holy Land.  Last night, I read his 55-page monograph, Awaiting the Religion of Protest, which clearly exhibits both his strengths and weaknesses as a philosopher of strategy.  This short book is one of his least known productions,  Awaiting the Religion of Protest.  (This was kindly emailed to me by Ali Abbas Qureshi.) This monograph confirms my long-standing impression that Shari’ati combines in an uneasy and artificial union both modern atheistic Communism from his days in Paris and the spiritual wisdom imbibed through his translation at the age of 31 in 1964 of Massignon. 

  This effort to combine the two is why I have been so critical of his otherwise excellent book on the symbolic meaning of the hajj, a subject on which Sufis have written hundreds of books over the centuries but not one of which has ever been translated into English.  Shari’ati was the first to publish on the subject at a sophisticated level in English. 

  In my view, as I have expressed it in a number of publications, the hajj represents symbolically a grand university of all Qur’anic and human thought.  It is therefore a travesty of truth for the Wahhabis to insist that symbolism is haram, because this would eliminate perhaps the greatest spiritual and intellectual product of centuries of the best minds and souls by wiping out the purpose of the hajj.  The books today on the hajj, such as Michael Wolfe’s, show no familiarity with the classics, but Michael at least goes far beyond the manuals for dummies that flooded the market after the Wahhabis tried to exert their own monopoly on the hajj worldwide twenty-five years ago.  I gave up on my project to write a book on the subject twelve years ago, funded by Safi Qureshi (the first home-grown Muslim billionaire in America), when I realized that only someone fluent in both Arabic and Farsi should ever tackle this task.  A scholarly work by definition must be based on familiarity with all the best thinking on the subject of choice.

  Ali Shari’ati’s short monograph on the sociology of “waiting” for truth and justice reflects his insights into the first part of the hajj in Makkah, which focuses on Allah and each person’s relationship with Allah as the source of truth (the jihad al akbar), but he portrays what I consider to be his superficial approach to the second part of the hajj in Arafat, which focuses on the movement of all humankind together toward justice (jihad al saghir and jihad al kabir). 

  His intent is to explain the imamate/mahdi, which is the third part of the five-part Shi’a creed, as essential to the first two, namely, awareness of God as the source of truth, and commitment to justice as a product of the first.  The result, however, is the reversal of this order, as shown by his emphasis throughout on “justice and truth” (rather than justice through truth), which comes, he asserts,  from the “forces of justice and freedom” (pp. 15 and 13)

  Shari’ati’s thesis on the validity of the imamate as a sociological imperative contrasts the popular misconception of reliance on the coming of the mahdi as a reason not to seek justice in this world and in our time with the sociological role of the concept as a principal motivating force for the human drive to seek justice in the here and now.  His analysis of “the inverted sheepskin” is used to show how grossly Muslims have inverted the Islamic drive for justice to a quietistic Christian acceptance of injustice.  On his first page, Shari’ati writes, “No religion in human history has witnessed greater estrangement between its present reality and original identity than has Islam.” 

  He criticizes the Shi’a especially because their original identity has been changed from the most profound, progressive, and committed enterprise in human history, directed toward “the final revolution,” into a battle between the “religiously biased,” i.e., the “religious fanatics,” and the “irreligously biased, ” i.e, the “ultra-modernists.”  The religiously biased in his day erred in accepting domination by those who seek power through the status quo, whereas the irreligiously biased sought power in order to block all constructive change. 

  A good analogy, though he does not use it, would compare the Shi’a to sheep worshipping wolves.  This is precisely what Imams Ali and Hussein, ‘alayhim al salam, and their followers tried to avoid.

  This failure, contends Shari’ati, is precisely why the concept of “waiting” inherent in the concept of the “hidden imam” is so important.  Rather than teaching that all we have to do in the search for justice is to wait for the return of the imam, as if justice belongs in the supernatural order and we have no role in determining our own fate, the concept of waiting should teach us that the entire period of waiting for the return of the Mahdi and Isa, ‘alayhim al salam, is designed to show us that we are responsible to seek justice in the knowledge that eventually justice will triumph.  In fact, this liberating function of the imamate is the most persuasive argument in its favor as part of the Shi’a creed.  If the belief in the imamate does not produce this commitment to justice, then those who believe in it have failed to understand its purpose.

  Shari’ati concludes on page 29 that the purpose of the imamate is, first, to provide a paradigm of progressive change toward the rule of justice and a rationale for the development of wise leaders who understand Islam as an “ideology” of “spiritual, social, moral, and intellectual development” in man’s “struggle toward progress” as a “faith.”  The second purpose is to support the development of scholars in all the modern disciplines so they can provide guidance on shaping the future beyond the narrow taqlid of the jurisprudents, who view their speciality as irrelevant to the world today and the world as irrelevant to their authority.   

  Shari’ati holds (pages 39-40) that this “waiting instinct” is inherent in all persons and all cultures, which is “why belief in a Messiah has existed in human societies from the earliest times, and why history tells us that all large societies (i.e. civilizations) are ‘waiting’ societies,” ... “since society is a living being and a living being is waiting.”  Shari’ati writes, “He who waits is hopeful and he who is hopeful is alive,” because he sees beyond the contradiction between the oppression of current reality and the promises that Islam is the solution.  His waiting instinct gives him strength in the struggle to pursue the promised new reality.  “Waiting is faith in the future,” says Shari’ati on pages 45-47, “and, by necessity, denial of the present.  He who is content with the present is not waiting,” and by implication, is is not in submission to God.  “Man’s history is an incomplete story which will end with the victory of justice and truth. ... When God wants something to happen, He creates the conditions that lead to it. ... Historical determinism, then, which is the foundation of 19th century scientific philosophy and the most important historical approach among the world’s non-Muslim intellectuals, exists in this school of thought also, but in a different form.”

  His final conclusion demonstrates the primacy in Shari’ati’s thinking of Communism over the spiritual essence of traditionalist Islam.  The major thesis of Shari’ati’s thinking and entire life is summarized on page 48 at the end of his monograph as follows: “For history proceeds along predetermined paths. ... Justice will prevail and everyone will receive an equal share of society’s resources.”

  This concept of leveling and distributism is thoroughly un-Islamic, because Islam teaches that everyone should receive the fruits of what he and his tools have produced, not what society “owes” him.  Distributive justice should be a product of contributive justice, which requires that persons and communities have equal opportunities to benefit both from the abundance of nature and from their own contributions to the production of wealth. 

  Basic to this process of creating justice is the task of removing institutional or structural barriers to ownership of private property in the tools of production, because capital (both physical and invisible tools of production) rather than labor produces almost all wealth in the world today.  All the institutions of society, both in America and the Soviet Union, were developed to concentrate the ownership of capital rather than to broaden it.  These institutions can be perfected and must be so, because injustice results not so much from bad people as from defective institutions in which good people are caught.

  Shari’ati did not see that the injustices in the world can be overcome only by diffusing the power of economic ownership.  Whoever owns the tools of production, especially where there is extensive state ownership, wields the levers of political power.  Whoever controls the government has a monopoly on coercive power.  Whoever possesses such a monopoly inevitable will be unjust, because, as Lord Acton said, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

  Shari’ati failed correctly to diagnose the practical problems of the modern world and therefore had no solutions to them.  He adduced a spiritual framework for both diagnosis and prescription, but he never connected the two realms of reality, because he did not adequately appreciate that human justice comes from transcendent truth and not truth from justice.

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