{"id":1562,"date":"2017-04-22T15:16:22","date_gmt":"2017-04-22T19:16:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/?p=1562"},"modified":"2017-04-24T14:50:35","modified_gmt":"2017-04-24T18:50:35","slug":"behrooz-ghamari-tabrizi-ali-shariati-precis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/behrooz-ghamari-tabrizi-ali-shariati-precis\/","title":{"rendered":"Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi | Ali Shari\u2018ati (pr\u00e9cis)"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Iranian public intellectual, sociologist, and lay theologian, Ali Shari\u2018ati (1933-1977) was one of the most significant figures in conceptualizing Islam as a political ideology. Drawing from multiple philosophical traditions, he rearticulated key concepts in Islamic theology in order to advance a theory of religion as emancipatory consciousness. He gave new meanings to the notions of\u00a0 \u201cMan,\u201d creation, salvation, love, God, and brought them together in a novel reading of Islamic eschatology. Although he was not directly influenced by Nietzschean ideas, he shared a particular affinity with Nietzsche on the notion of suffering and pain as the recurring condition of humanity.<\/p>\n

The anti-colonial and liberation movements of the 1950s-60s and its reflection in the French intellectual scene, of which he was a part, markedly informed Shari\u2018ati\u2019s reading of Islam.\u00a0 His contribution lies neither in his sophisticated knowledge of western philosophy, nor in his thorough re-examination of Islamic theology.\u00a0 Shari\u2018ati took upon himself the task of re-writing the whole \u201cdistorted\u201d history of Shi\u2018ism, to re-claim its \u201coriginal progressive core,\u201d and to restore what he called the \u201cAlavid Shi\u2018ism,\u201d the Shi\u2018ism of Imam Ali, the true Islam of the \u201cdisinherited.\u201d\u00a0 Shari\u2018ati\u2019s Alavid Shi\u2018ism was an ideology that advocated a world-view and a particular consciousness through which human beings become aware of their social location, class position, national condition, historical and civilizational direction.\u00a0 \u201cIdeology,\u201d he contended, \u201cgives meaning to the individual\u2019s historical experience upon which [his\/her] ideals and values are constructed.\u201d\u00a0 In his view, ideology embodied the contradiction between the existing (is<\/em>) and the ideal (ought<\/em>).<\/p>\n

The distinction between the [Alavid] Islam of \u201cmovement\u201d (nehzat<\/em> ) and the [Safavid] institutionalized Islam (nahad<\/em>) was the core of Shari\u2018ati\u2019s Islamic hermeneutics.\u00a0 His Islam was Shi\u2018ism in a movement for constant reproduction of itself and in the process of becoming, rather than an institution of \u201cmourners\u201d and \u201cdead rituals.\u201d Shari\u2018ati\u2019s Islam consisted of succession of martyrs who sacrificed their lives for just ends.\u00a0 He was inspired by the St Pauls and Aarons of Islam, rather than by its St Augustines and Maimonides, by those who choose Islam consciously and deliberately, by those whose Islam was realized in exile, prisons, and combat, rather than in seminary quarters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi The Iranian public intellectual, sociologist, and lay theologian, Ali Shari\u2018ati (1933-1977) was one of the most significant figures in conceptualizing Islam as a political ideology. Drawing from multiple philosophical traditions, he rearticulated key concepts in Islamic theology in… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1644,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38978],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts-13-13"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1644"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1562\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}