Ali Shariati: Islam, Modernity, and the Complicated Aesthetic of the Iranian Revolution

The study of Ali Shariati’s oeuvre reveals an understanding of the Iranian Revolution vis-à-vis the pervasive critique of industrial modernity, promoted in the second half of the twentieth century across the globe. Frustrated with the isolation and alienation of the modern man in a Godless world, a product of liberal democracy and its communist alternative, Shariati strove to produce a liberating and revolutionary reading of Islam to challenge modern conditions. Yet, his intellectual endeavor is not only rooted in his commitment to and proficiency in Islam but also provoked by his knowledge of and interest in the Western philosophical tradition that promoted liberalism and communism both. This conflation, therefore, reframes his aim and attempt to have a revolutionary reading of Islam as not antimodernist but alternative modernism.

To understand this blend of leftist ideas and Islamic thought as an alternative approach to modernity, I scrutinize Shariati's lectures on art against the backdrop of the global intellectual atmosphere that was influential on him, along with the analysis of a revolutionary visual discourse that was structured around his aesthetic theory. According to this observation, this paper examines the ways in which Shariati translated the global intellectual impact of the second half of the twentieth century into his “modern” configuration of Islam as a tool to challenge modernity itself, and asks how this rendering could possibly change our ideas about the historical role of critical (and aesthetic) theory in relation to alternative practices of modernism.