comparing revolutionaries - fannon and shariati
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An essay comparing the work of Third World revolutionary Franz Fannon and an influential Iranian thinker Ali Shariati.TRANSCRIPT
Contemporary Political Islam Final Paper Nathaniel Whittemore
Fanon and Shariati
Third World Revolutionary Thought in the Ideology of the
Iranian Revolution
Nathaniel Whittemore
Contemporary Political Islam
Fall 2004
Contemporary Political Islam Final Paper Nathaniel Whittemore
“Each generation must out of relative obscurity discover its mission, fulfill it,
or betray it.”
So begins the fourth chapter of Frantz Fanon’s seminal 1961 work
The Wretched of the Earth. The book is a veritable manifesto of Third
World revolutionary ideology, espoused by a French-educated psychologist
who found himself spokesman during the French-Algerian war. While
Wretched became immediately notable for its call for violence to affect
change, it is perhaps most penetrating in its analysis of both the individual
and collective psyche of “the Native.” Indeed, as it began to be translated
and disseminated, its lessons reapplied, it would become clear that what
Fanon had was a unique understanding of what forces, personal and social,
were at play in the lives of individuals and “the masses” in the period of
independence and post-independence. A young Iranian scholar, studying at
the Sorbonne in Paris, recognized this almost immediately. Ali Shariati
would go on to be the primary intellectual behind the 1979 Khomeini
revolution. Throughout the 1970s, the culmination in Iran of the climate of
unrest and political suppression, Shariati’s lectures were circulated on audio
cassettes. As the Shah was forced to abdicate, his stature was second only to
Khomeini himself. Shariati thus stands as the intellectual behind the only
complete Islamic revolution in the 20th century. But how much effect did he
really have on the course of the revolution? It is the contention of this paper
that Shariati was able to make Fanon's revolutionary third worldism
accessible to Iranian's by reframing its doctrines of salvation and personal
agency in terms of indigenous Shii theology. By advocating expression
rather than sublimation of individual cultural identity and belief, Shariati
added a sociologists understanding of movements to Fanon's penetrating
psychology of the postcolonial situation. Indeed, by asserting, if not in these
terms, that Islam was in fact the natural and correct expression of Third
Worldism in Iran, Shariati set the stage for Khomeini’a effective organization
of popular participation in the 1979 revolution. In the first part of the paper
I will do a close textual reading of Shariati's Intizar to show how Fanon's
philosophies were modified in the Iranian revolutionary context. In the
second I will look at how each thinkers writing influenced or failed to
influence the course of their perspective revolutions.
Contemporary Political Islam Final Paper Nathaniel Whittemore
From a very young age, Shariati was interested in Islamic salvation
and the potential of alternate worldviews. His father was a reformist cleric
active in religious socialist circles.1 The father and son shared a hero in Abu
Zarr, a perhaps legendary early follower of the prophet who had denounced
the caliphs and devoted his life to providing for the poor.2
Shariati was enamored not only with this legacy, but with sources of
inspiration outside his direct experience. In 1958 he completed a master’s
program in foreign language study focusing on Arabic and French. Two
years later he won a state grant to study in Paris.3 His time there would be
instrumental in the evolution of his political, religious, and social philosophy.
Paris at the beginning of the 1960s was a city erupting with the
passion of intellectualism and revolution. The existentialism of Camus and
Sartre had set aflame the minds of young philosophers. Contemporaneous
revolutions in Cuba and Algeria had created a feeling of the tangibility of
ideas. It was here that Shariati was introduced to figures such and Mao and
Che. Moreover, it was where he discovered Franz Fanon.
Fanon was born in Martinique in 1925. He traveled to Paris to study
medicine and psychology and later to Antilles to practice. In Antilles he
began to have experiences with the brutality of transitional colonial
experience that would culminate with his seminal The Wretched of the
Earth. That book was written on the heels of his stay at a hospital in Algeria
during their war of independence. As he delved deeper and deeper into the
psyche and trauma of the colonial experience, he increasingly found his
sympathies with the rebels. By 1961, he had become a leading intellectual of
the African revolutionary cause.4 It was in this capacity that Ali Shariati was
first introduced to him.
What follows is a close textual analysis of one of Shariati’s works
which provides an excellent example of his synthesis of Fanon’s
revolutionary Third Worldism with indigenous Shii Islam.
1 MERIP Reports, No. 102, Islam and Politics (Jan., 1982), 24-28"'Ali Shari'ati: Ideologue of the Iranian Revolution"Evrand Abrahamian2 ibid3 ibid4 Fanon, Frantz The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press, Inc. 1968
Contemporary Political Islam Final Paper Nathaniel Whittemore
The piece in question, Intizar…madhab-I I’tiraz [Awaiting…the
religion of protest], was written in 1971 as the climate in Iran continued to
heat up. Freedom of expression was more limited than it had been for years
before. Everywhere, a deadly and unstable silence and stasis was
maintained in the face of increased numbers of SAVAK secret police.5
Indeed, the first thing that should be noted about the piece is that it deals
little with an Islamic conception of state and rather focuses on the potential
and, as Shariati would argue, the necessity, of rebellious or revolutionary
action to reclaim the state. Like Fanon’s Wretched, the work does not deal
extensively with a theoretical structure to come to power after the
revolution. Indeed, Fanon’s foregoing of explication of a post-revolutionary
governing apparatus has been a main criticism lobbied on the treatise.
Instead, both works focus more directly on the potentiality of upheaval
locked inside the “masses”. Fanon writes dialectically about the spirit and
humility locked inside the would-be revolutionary to bring about justice after
the fall of the colonial power. Shariati focuses the terms of discourse on
Shiite Muslims, whom he argues have within their ideological, religious and
social framework not only the potential but the duty to rebel and take
control of their future.
To varying degrees, the inspirational tone adopted by both authors
may reflect audience. It cannot be denied that much of Wretched of the
Earth was a heady and educated polemical catharsis for Fanon. Much of his
diatribe against the colonial structure is inflected with broad historical
oversight and specific expertise that would make it inaccessible to your
average member of the lumpenproletariate or peasant class. To some extent,
it joined Marx, Mao, Che, and Jeal-Paul Sartre in the Pantheon of brilliant
revolutionary thinkers whose influence was, nonetheless, somewhat limited
to the educated intellectuals and guerillas. Yet at the same time, there are
parts of Wretched that virtually scream solidarity and cannot help but raise
a pounding in one’s chest. The last chapter especially is an example of
Fanon as he casts aside the banner of frustrated intellectual and virtually
straps on his rhetorical AK47, ready to join the fight himself and lead the
5 Course Reader, Gilles Kepel
Contemporary Political Islam Final Paper Nathaniel Whittemore
world to a greater era of peace, justice, and equality. Fanon writes among
the final pages of his book
Come then, comrades; it would be as well to decide at once to change our ways. We must shake off the heavy darkness in which we are plunged, and leave it behind. The new day which is already at hand must find us firm, prudent, and resolute…We must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man. (Fanon, 316)Indeed, it is important to understand Fanon’s attempt to revalidate
that “we” (who he calls the masses) to understand how Shariati rejected a
type of discourse which would be accessible only to learned scholars or
clerics. Fanon gives precedent to that decision when, on page 188
It is true that if care is taken to use only a language that is understood by graduates in law and economics, you can easily prove that the masses have to be managed from above. But if you speak the language of everyday, if you are not obsessed by the perverse desire to spread confusion and rid yourself of the people, then you will realize that the masses are quick to seize every shade of meaning…(Fanon, 188)Shariati takes this tone a step further. In many ways Shariati’s
purpose in Intizar is to personalize the inspiring but grandiose and
impersonalized speech of Fanon. Shariati understood the limits of the
potential for mobilization that constrained the contemporaneous dialogue of
uprising. He recognized the difficulty of mapping a cultureless revolutionary
rhetoric onto a society with a distinct cultural consistency and very real
needs; indeed, onto a culture whose needs and identity which were
potentially radically different from those of the rhetoric’s origin.
At home in Iran he had seen examples of this difficulty as extant
socialist movements failed to capture the sentiments of any large segment of
society, save the educated and often expatriate student communities. As
Kepel writes, “the intellectuals were much more in step with the bookish
culture of proletarian internationalism that with grassroots Persian
society.”6 Intizar can be viewed from within the framework of Shariati’s
attempt, then, to make revolutionary ideology accessible to the Iranian
masses by reframing its inspiration in the indigenous terms of Islam. The
thrust of Shariati’s break with or movement from Fanon was that he
believed that only by understanding the revolution in the terms of a specific
culture could people be inspired to true productive action. Shariati sought to
6 Course Reader, Kepel
Contemporary Political Islam Final Paper Nathaniel Whittemore
move the discussion from the classrooms to the streets in a way in which
most all revolutionaries would have supported but few knew how to do.
Finally, it is important to recognize that, for all our talk of “reframing
the revolutionary discourse,” one should not view Shariati’s Islam as simply
a useful device for a greater goal of government overthrow. More
specifically, he was not out to appropriate or co-opt Islam for his purposes.
He believed passionately, like Fanon, in the potential of the masses, but also
in Islam. Indeed, he believed not only that the two could be reconciled, but
in fact that one (Shiism) was the source, at least in Iran, for the other.
Intizar begins immediately (and unlike many other texts of political
Islam) by casting the terms of discourse onto Islam itself, rather than the
abstract “other” of the extant state apparatus or the economic dominance of
the West. Shariati writes
In the history of mankid no religion has ever witnessed such a widening gap separating “what was” from “what is”…. 7
Part of Shariati’s adoption of Fanon’s revolutionism8 to the specific
case of Iran came in the pushing aside of that “other” (namely, colonialism)
in favor of a serious and sustained self-examination. From this statement,
the tone of Intizar is one of the negative and positive cohabiting in the
extant reality. It is a tone of problem but also of potentiality. In this case, the
“widening gap” demonstrates a serious hindrance to Islam’s coming to
fruition as a revolutionary force, but also, in identifying the discontinuity,
alludes to the remedy of that break. The quote, and indeed, the entire
feeling of the piece is inflected with the notion that the first step to
overcoming one’s own challenges is to acknowledge them.
Beyond this though, the immediate discussion of Islam, Shiism, and
the disparity between secular elites, the religious clerics, and the
uneducated but pious Persians, serves to move the impersonal discourse of
Fanon to a much more home-hitting Iranian analysis. As part of his
abstraction, Fanon simplifies the world into admittedly Manichean terms,
namely, that of the oppressor (the settler or colonist) and the oppressed (the
native). Throughout Wrteched, Fanon detaches himself from specificities to
talk psychoanalytically of the condition of “the native.”
7 Course Packet, Ed. Esposito 8 From here on out used to describe the general revolutionary ideology of Fanon
Contemporary Political Islam Final Paper Nathaniel Whittemore
The native is always on the alert…confronted by a world ruled by the settler, the native is always presumed guilty…The native’s muscles are always tensed…The native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor. (Emphasis mine, Fanon, 53) Shariati, on the other hand, re-complicates the world not only through
an emphasis on self-analysis, but on the complicated nature of the pre-
revolutionary crises. Iran was not Manichean, but rather a confusing
amalgam of different groups with different needs. Shariati discusses the
secular elites in the first few pages of Intizar, saying that they might accuse
him of “safeguarding superstitions”. He also defines the religious masses in
terms of their categorical belief in the idea of Intizar or waiting for the
return of the hidden Imam. He is drawing divisions by suggesting that they
believe this above and beyond what science would tell them of the possibility
of agelessness. Finally he discusses the clerical leaders, who he faults for
forcing unexamined faith that neglects “the necessity (which Shariati in fact
believes stems from Islam) of independent rational, scientific analysis.”
What is interesting is that for Shariati, these groups, despite their
varying positions, were connected by their common cultural starting point of
Islam. Indeed, each group was defined by their relative positions towards
that faith; the elites by their rejection of doctrine, the “religious masses” by
the necessity of their faith (“they have to have faith, and they do have it”9)
and the clerical classes by their acceptance of any and all ideas in the Quran
above and beyond reason. Regardless of each group’s stance, their identity
was fundamentally affected by the condition of their Islamic origins. How
then, he might have asked Fanon, could there be any other departure for a
revolutionary movement than that shared heritage?
Similarly, part of the re-personalizing of revolutionary thought and
movement from abstraction to Shariati’s revolutionary Islam involved the
place of the individual. The shift is subtle. Fanon argued that the idea of
individualism was a bourgeoisie Western concept employed by colonists to,
in effect, keep native populations segmented and competitive amongst
themselves. On page 47 he writes that when the struggle starts,
“Individualism is the first to disappear. The native intellectual had learned
from his masters that the individual ought to express himself fully. The
9 Course Reader, Ed. Esposito
Contemporary Political Islam Final Paper Nathaniel Whittemore
colonialist bourgeoisie had hammered into the native’s mind the idea of a
society of individuals where each person shuts himself up to his own
subjectivity, and whose only wealth is individual thought. Now the native
who has the opportunity to return to the people during the struggle for
freedom will discover the falseness of this theory.” (Fanon, 47)
Insofar as Fanon is rejecting the potential divisiveness among a
population in need of solidarity in face of oppression, it seems as thought
Shariati would agree. Yet at the same time, it is clear from Intizar that
Shariati is nervous about a blind acceptance of shared belief, even if good
intentioned. He suggests that Shiism is an ideology that, in its very
acceptance requires individual reason and rational analysis. From his
sociologist’s perspective, Shariati was frustrated that Islam, which he
believed required a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding, had been
boiled down to simple fiqh, or jurisprudence. He suggested that “religious
beliefs can follow, step by step, social, cultural, and scientific progress.”10
Extending the sociological terms of his argument, he suggests that the
understanding of intizar and ghaybat (“the end of time”), has changed over
time because of evolving conditions, by way of different interpretations of its
“influence upon the social, political and intellectual life of its adepts.”
His most direct imploring for the necessity of individual
understanding within a greater movement, however, comes as he
renegotiates the legacy of Mohammed himself. He claims that the prophet’s
example was not to be worshipped, but rather to be learned and
appropriated by each individual. He was a guide not only to God, but to a
proper life of seeking that God. Each person had and has a duty, claimed
Shariati, to live as an individual Muslim seeking his own place in the
movement towards salvation. In this section of Intizar, the author calls upon
the (ostensibly Muslim) reader directly:
Even you, followers of the Prophet, you must not stop with the person. This is not a matter of prophetic cult, but the goal of a school of thought. The value of the Prophet lies in his showing the way to that goal. His task was, like previous prophets, to come, bring a Message, show the way, then go. If he died, or was killed, would you turn on your heels!11
10 ibid11 ibid
Contemporary Political Islam Final Paper Nathaniel Whittemore
If we understand Shariati as adapting the revolutionism of Fanon to
the Islamic roots and realities of Iran, it would make sense that he spends
due time sorting through the necessity both of individual efforts and self-
analysis and Islamic movement politics and sociology as a whole. Islam is a
religion that has, since its very roots dealt explicitly with the macro and the
micro; what it means to be a part of Islam and what it means, oneself, to be
a Muslim. Indeed, perhaps the most pertinent example of this phenomenon
is the historical interpretation of jihad, or sacred struggle. Traditionally
there has been a division of jihad between internal and external. Certainly
there were mujahadin, fighting on the margins and borders of Islam for their
faith. This jihad brought with it special modifications of doctrine, in areas as
diverse as eternal rewards and Ramadan fasting procedures. Moreover,
there was the idea of the internal jihad, in which every Muslim faced his or
herself to live by the Koran and the example and sayings of the Prophet.
These are the so-called “lesser” and “greater” jihads. What is interesting to
note is the way in which different groups have interpreted just which is the
greater and which is the lesser. While many traditional Muslims and even
moderate Islamists have come down firmly that the internal is the greater
jihad, certain others have rejected this analysis. A link off of the main
homepage of the Islamic Resistance Movement (HAMAS) for example,
categorically denies this and suggests that in this time of great external
threat to Islam, the actually war is the greater jihad. Regardless of
interpretation, it is clear from the text that Shariati’s Islamic revolutionary
thought takes into account this fundamental cultural duality.
In the same section where he implores pious Muslims to actually think
about what it means to live in the example of the Prophet, Shariati comes to
the most important point of the text, and the concept most clearly influenced
by Fanon. This is his idea of futurism, a concept which required a
fundamental reinterpretation of the most important foundational practices of
Iranian Shiites. The context is undeniable Third World revolutionism, and
requires another look at Fanon’s seminal Wretched of the Earth.
Fanon’s Wretched is dominated by a sense of urgency. It is a push,
more than anything else, for movement. On page 53, he writes that “the
native’s muscles are always tensed.” The book is a desperate call for a
Contemporary Political Islam Final Paper Nathaniel Whittemore
release to that tension and the total uprising that will replace the old
colonial order of things with all its vestiges of authority in the so-called
native bourgeoisie with a new order of freedom, justice and equality. It is a
call for the oppressed to assert control over their rightful destiny.
Characterizing the process of decolonization in the first few pages of
the novel, Fanon writes
…The proof of success lies in a whole social structure being changed from the bottom up. The extraordinary importance of this change is that it is willed, called for, demanded. The need for this change exists in its crude state, impetuous and compelling, in the consciousness and in the lives of the men and women who are colonized (Fanon, 1968, 36)Fanon goes on to suggest that this change must most often come
about through violent means. On page 94, he writes that violence is a way
for people within the revolutionary movement to assert control of their own
future and shake off previous stasis.
At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction…Even if the armed struggle has been symbolic and the nation is demobilized through a rapid movement of decolonization, the people have the time to see that the liberation has been the business of each and all… (Fanon, 94) Moreover, Fanon asserts strongly that, no matter what the phase of
the revolution, action is the validating force that is needed to continue to
inspire the masses. In a passage that must have resonated with the young
Shariati, who, for all his admiration of revolutionary thinkers, was facing a
domestic suppression similar to but not exactly the same as sustained
outright colonialism in Algeria, Fanon decried the post-colonial face in which
the ostensibly nationalism bourgeoisie leadership becomes corrupter by its
own inaction and maintenance of the colonial hierarchy. He places his
emphasis on their maintenance status quo:
Without that struggle, without that knowledge of the practice of action, there’s nothing but a fancy-dress parade and the blare of trumpets. There’s nothing save a minimum of readaptation, a few reforms at the top, a flag waving: and down there at the bottom and undivided mass, still living in the middle ages, endlessly marking time. (Fanon, 147)This then, is the context for Shariati’s reclamation of Intizar; a mass
kept subdued by an illegitimate nationalist control from above, a lack of
action and movement, and the very real potential for both individual and
collective action, futurism.
Contemporary Political Islam Final Paper Nathaniel Whittemore
Intizar or “waiting” for ghaybat (“the end of time”) or the return of
the hidden Imam is for Shariati the fundamental foundational doctrine of
Shiite Islam, at least in its separation from other Islams. He suggests that
Intizar can be and has been conceived of in two opposite ways. On the one
hand, there is the belief that accepting intizar means waiting without action,
believing that it will be God’s lot to sort out the evils and ills of society and
the world when he returns the Imam at the end of time. Then there is the
idea that “waiting” requires participation in the look towards the future.
Throughout history, Shariati contends, the first interpretation had been
dominant. Moreover, it has been a corrupting fallacy in which people diluted
themselves to the true revolutionary nature of their religion.
Shariati writes that from “the moment the Prophet passed away…the
same old system resumed its rule over history. Neither truth remained, nor
justice; nor did mankind find salvation.”12 He argues that at every step of
history, with every invasion of Iran, the impetus for people to find salvation
within themselves and their own actions by understanding the words and
example of their great forbearers was neglected in favor of acquiescence to
fatalistic waiting for a destiny outside their control. He suggests that this
quiescence set the stage for the gaping hole between reality and doctrine
now facing Shiites.
We believe in and are expecting…since God had truly promised victory to Islam. He had promised the wretched masses they would become leaders of mankind; He had promised the disinherited they would inherit this earth from the mighty.13
Yet
We see that the reality occurring in the external world contradicts the Islamic truth we believe in.Finally then he suggests that it is “only intizar...the final,
predetermined triumph of Turth, [that] can solve this disparity between the
reigning false reality and the presently condemned redeeming Truth...”14
What Shariati means is that intizar inherently implies specific duties
and modes of thought, feeling, and action, from the believer who commits
himself to it. Waiting can not be static or conservative and backwards
looking because by definition, “a man who awaits, awaits the future; one
12 ibid13 ibid14 ibid
Contemporary Political Islam Final Paper Nathaniel Whittemore
cannot away the past.” Indeed, for Shariati, intizar means hope and
inspiration; as he says, it means “futurism.”
The end of his work sees Shariati at full force with a revolutionary
reinterpretation of this doctrine. Indeed, like Fanon at the end of Wretched,
Shariati lets down his personal guard and adopts the personal banner of the
change in sentiment that a true understanding of intizar requires. In the
closing paragraphs he commits himself fully to the pursuit of a future which
will bring salvation. Moreover, he locates Muslims in this struggle by
defining its history in terms of their heroes: “The struggle for liberty and
justice follows a course similar to that of a river. There is Abraham, Moses,
Jesus, Muhammed, ‘Ali, Hasan, Husayn, and so on until the end of time when
this movement triumphs over all the world.”15
Finally, in the most complete synthesis of Fanon’s revolutionary
ideology and its adaptation or reunderstanding through Shiite Islame,
Shariati concludes that:
Intizar means to say no to what is…Even negative intizar implies revolt…Whoever is content with the present, is not awaiting. On the contrary, he is conservative; he fears the future…For a condemned nation [and here he is most certainly writing of and to Iran] to give up intizar means to accept defeat as its fat forever….I, in the part of this world and at this moment of history, am expecting, in a future that might be…a sudden world Revolution in favour of Truth and Justice and of the oppressed masses; a Revolution in which I must play a part; a Revolution which does not come about with prayers…but with a banner and a sword, with a true holy war involving all responsible believers. I believe that this movement shall naturally triumph.16
* * *
It is a natural question to ask at the end of this analysis how each of
these respective thinkers and their works were received in the societies they
hoped to inspire. How did or didn’t they affect the outcome of the conflict
and did the revolution live up to the glory and totalistic change of order that
they had hoped for? Finally, it is important how this revolutionism is
affecting contemporary political Islam.
Frantz Fanon was part of a generation of upheaval. A “Negro” by
birth, he found himself constantly caught between two worlds. Throughout
his youth he worked hard to function in one of these worlds, the European
15 Ibid16 ibid
Contemporary Political Islam Final Paper Nathaniel Whittemore
world of glitz and intellectualism. He studied in France and married a
European woman. Still, as one of his biographers wrote, a growing
awareness of his own depersonalization and the dehumanization of blacks
worldwide led him to make “a revolutionary cathartic break with the past.”17
Having been sent to work in a French-Algerian hospital in 1953, this
break was complete when, in 1956, he sent a letter to the French Resident
Minister in Algeria resigning his post. He had wavered when war broke out
in 1954, but by the time he sent the letter, which said “the events in Algeria
are the logical consequence of an abortive attempt to decerebralize a
people…A society that drives its members to desperate solutions is a
nonviable society, a society to be replaced,”18 he had joined the FLN and was
active in the war of Independence.
His legacy in that conflict is a confused one. As is clear from
Wretched of the Earth, he believed that the only success would come from
a total violent upheaval; that indeed violence was the only validating action
possible for a colonized people. While the War of Independence was indeed
violent, it was not ended by the total violent replacing of one order with
another. Indeed, the process was not nearly as Manichean as Fanon’s
polemics would have it. Even as he wrote Wretched there was internal
dissent within the Algerian leadership. Moreover, as Jinadu explicates,
independence was not seized in the sense of Fanon’s revolutionary ideals.
The process was actually, eventually, a negotiated one, and even that was
not brought about solely by the success of violence but rather involved the
extraordinarily unpopular decision of President Charles de Gaulle that “in
the long-run it was better for France to concede Algeria’s right to self-
determination.”19
Shariati’s legacy is also confused and complicated. While his ideas
were extraordinarily influential, they were also co-opted, modified, and even
falsified by men who used his prominence to buoy their own support among
a certain group. Moreover, even his ideas themselves often experienced
17 African Studies Review, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Sep., 1973), 255-289"Some Aspects of the Political Philosophu of Frantz Fanon"L. Adele Jinadu18 ibid19 ibid
Contemporary Political Islam Final Paper Nathaniel Whittemore
dialectic problems or contradictions. As Abrahamian points out, there were,
in fact, multiple Shariatis. As a sociologist he was passionately interested in
the rise and decay of movements. He sought to understood what drove
people to action and how bureaucratization inevitably led to the decay of
revolutions. At the same time, there was Shariati the passionate believer
“whose article of faith claimed that revolutionary Shi’ism, unlike all other
radical ideologies, would not succumb to the iron law of bureaucratic
decay.”20
There is also a question of who and how he inspired. During his life,
which ended under seemingly suspicious circumstances in Britain in 1977,
his ideas became revered rarely spurred action. Only in the student guerrilla
People’s Mujahedeen was his call for violent action heeded. And indeed, at
the time, the radical ideology was unable to attract recruits outside of the
already espoused enemies of the regime.21 It was not until Khomeini
appropriated Shariati’s legacy and began to use a multiplicity of terms that
appealed to the various needs of different segments of society that the great
uprising came to fruition. This is not to diminish Shariati’s influence; on the
contrary, he (and by extension, Fanon) provided a certain rhetorical rhetoric
necessary for Khomeini to bind those disparate groups of society. In 1978,
as Khomeini tried to appeal to those beyond his immediate followers, he
“made abundant reference to the “disinherited”, so vague a term…that it
encompassed just about everyone in Iran except the shah and the imperial
court.”22
The use of this term was not only useful in making the struggle
collective, but also indicates the sanctification of Shariati and his ideas in
Iranian society. On the same page, Kepel writes that
[Khomeini] borrowed the word from Shariati and had never used it before the 1970s. After Shariati’s death in exile in June 1977, the term had become a rallying cry for the Shiite socialist students. (111)How Shariati would have looked upon this appropriation of his term,
especially in pursuit of a “revolution” which would eventually defeat not only
20 MERIP Reports, No. 102, Islam and Politics (Jan., 1982), 24-28"'Ali Shari'ati: Ideologue of the Iranian Revolution"Evrand Abrahamian21 Course Packet, Kepel22 ibid
Contemporary Political Islam Final Paper Nathaniel Whittemore
the regime, but all parties who in the post-upheaval setting disagreed with
Khomeini in terms of how the new republic should look is another question
entirely. What is safe to say is that in neither his case nor Fanon’s did the
particular revolution that each hoped to inspire and be a part of come to
fruition in the way they would have expected or desired.
As we enter the new millennium, the exchange between militant Islam
and Revolutionary ideology is as strong as ever. Moreover, the ability of
Islam to appropriate revolutionary third worldism to affect tangible change
is as suspect as ever. Indeed, just as Khomeini had to be aware of the
various psychosocial and socioeconomic needs of the would-be revolutionary
population, so has the modern success of revolutionary Islam depended
largely on the conditions affecting a population over and above ideology
itself. It seems as though the more tightly Israel “clamps down on terrorism”
the greater the ability of radical Hamas to inspire revolutionary sentiments
in the Palestinian populations. Examples such as Turkey show that when
Islamism is given a voice, even if marginal, in the political discourse,
revolutionary ideology has a much harder time attracting adherents.
Revolutionary ideology is, by definition, totalistic. As Fanon writes “The last
shall be put first and the first last.” It should be clear, by the example of
Shariati, Hamas and others, that Islam has within it the potential for a
revolutionary understanding. At the same time, it is self-evident that there
are countervailing interpretations as well. What seems important, as we
delve further into the next century, is understanding why it is that one or the
other of these understandings comes out, and what we can do to affect the
course of that understanding.
Contemporary Political Islam Final Paper Nathaniel Whittemore
Bibliography
Course Reader
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