(1933–1977), Iranian Islamic intellectual. Ali Shariati was an Iranian Islamic intellectual whose writings and teachings contributed to the growth of revolutionary Islam in Iran. He was born in the village of Mazinan. Soon after, he moved with his family to Mashhad. His father was Mohammad Taqi Shariati, a reformist Muslim cleric. After high school, Ali Shariati studied at a teachers training college and later began teaching in elementary schools in the area. During the oil nationalization movement, Shariati supported Prime Minister Muhammad Musaddeq; he was arrested and held in jail. After his release Shariati studied Arabic and French at Mashhad University while continuing his teaching duties. In 1959 he was awarded a scholarship to study sociology and Islamic studies at the University of Paris. It was in France that he came into contact with the scholars and intellectuals who shaped his thinking on sociology, religion, revolution, and imperialism. He earned a doctorate in sociology and theology in 1964. Upon his return to Iran he was arrested and jailed on suspicion of being a subversive. He was released six months later and went back to teaching at village schools. Soon after, Shariati began teaching at Mashhad University. He was eventually fired and moved to Tehran, where he began lecturing at Husseini Ershad, a socioreligious educational association organized by the liberation movement. He spoke in favor of mass political participation and against the regime of Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. The government shut down Husseini Ershad in the early 1970s. Shariati was arrested, and his writings banned. Three years later he was released to house arrest. In 1977 he received government permission to travel to Britain, where he died in Southampton on 19 June 1977 of an apparent heart attack; there was suspicion that the Iranian secret police was involved in his death. He was buried in Damascus.
Shariati further developed the lines of thinking on Islam by presenting the religion as modernizing and revolutionary rather than conservative and fatalistic. Furthermore, he explained the ideological position of Islam as a moderate one between socialism and capitalism. His lectures were very popular and were published in fifty volumes. One of Shariati's best-known works in the West is On the Sociology of Islam, translated into English by Hamid Algar. Although his writings and teachings provided the undercurrent for the Iranian Revolution in 1979, he has been denounced for his anticlerical message in the years since the revolution.
Further Reading
Boroujerdi, Mehrzad. (1996) Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Rahnama, Ali. (1998) An Islamic Utopian: A Political Biography of Ali Shariati. London, New York: I. B. Tauris.
Shariati, Ali. (1979) On the Sociology of Islam. Trans. by Hamid Algar. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
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