Ali Shari'ti (From kavir)
Kambiz Iranpour
Forget Shariati. He is a path to nowhere !! Here is what
I wrote about him a couple of years back.
Doing away with Shariati
Ala brought this piece written by Shariati :
>The Ideal Society - the Umma
>By Dr. Ali Shariati Mazinani (Sham')
>(Translated from Islamshenasi, Vol 1, pp 97-98)
>The ideal society of Islam is called the Umma. Taking the place of
>all the similar concepts which in different languages and cultures
>designate a human agglomeration or society, such as "society",
>"nation", "race", "people", "tribe", "clan", etc., is the single
>word Umma, a word imbued in progressive spirit and implying a
>dynamic, committed and ideological social vision.
>The word Umma derives from the root Amm, which has the sense of
>path and intention. The Umma is, therefore, a society in which a
>number of individuals, possessing a common faith and goal, come
>together in harmony with the intention of advancing and moving
>toward their common goal.
>While the other expressions denoting human agglomerations have
>taken unity of blood or soil and the sharing of material benefit as
>the criterion of society, Islam, by choosing the word Umma, has
>made intellectual responsibility and shared movement toward a
>common goal the basis of its social philosophy.
>The infrastructure of the Umma is the economy, because "whoever has
>no worldly life has no spiritual life." Its social system is based
>on equity and justice and ownership by the people on the revival of
>"system of Able," the society of human equality and thus also of
>brotherhood - the classless society. This is a fundamental
>principle, but it is not the aim, as in Western socialism which has
>retained the world-view of the Western bourgeoisie.
>The political philosophy and the form of regime of the Umma is not the
>democracy of heads, not irresponsible and directionless liberalism which is
>a plaything of contesting social forces, not putrid aristocracy,
>not anti-popular dictatorship, not self-imposing oligarchy. It
>consists rather of "purity of leadership" (not the leader, for that
>would be fascism), committed and revolutionary leadership,
>responsible for the movement and the growth of society on the basis
>of its world-view and ideology, and for the realization of the
>divine destiny of man in the plan of creation. This is the true
>meaning of Emamate!
Years before the revolution, a new curiosity was discovered by the
traditionally rooted upstart intellectuals. The novices in modernism,
not yet emancipated from the traditions of peasantry thinking and with
the insularness of agrarian class of thought rediscovered itself with all
of its imperfection and conflicting paradoxes inside their soul !!
These were people who made the bulk of the new
urban inhabitants of new Iran. Mostly recent immigrants from a more humble
village life, they were filling the cities in a rapid pace. These people
were rediscovering the local past while simultaneously
getting into the main stream cosmopolitan culture which had
started to permeate their surrounding with new and colorful consumer
products and alien ideologies. The painful love-affair between the local
ideas and modernism created the many hybrid offsprings in the ideological
domain. There stood the conservatism of the past and the inertia of
the millennia-long etched ideas rooted in thousands of years of
intellectually static motionless feudalism against the hyper-dynamic
ideas of a world apart, a world alien which by its vigor threatened the
pillars of a society still intellectually sleepy and lazy
after the then recent awakening of Mashrootiat. The economical
upheavals in our country
and the pace of change was breath-taking. Our eclectic society, lost in
space, sought an anchor arranging and rearranging in its mind the
new and the old together, influenced by the way they encountered
it in its daily life. In search
of a view of our totality, we were discovering our world anew.
It was in this context that Shariati appeared, swallowing and processing
the modernism and making a new version of the social philosophies of justice
and utopianism. He took the dust away from many ideas on social justice,
rooted in early Islam, he recasted the social philosophy of an established
religion turned irrelevant in reaction to the demanding realities, into
revolutionary ideas which tried to explain the new and to render a
picture of a yet unknown and for many scary future. Shariati wasn't
an absolute home-grown intellectual but someone who had done his academic
education in the West. He recasted his version of Sir Thomas More's
"Utopia" into a "Utopia" with a local flavor. Our "pardis (ferdos)"
was slightly different from their "Paradise" ! It was in this atmosphere
that works like "gharbzadegi" by jalAl Al Ahmad appeared or "shahreh gheseh",
which treated cultural mutilation ("AghA feele"'s destiny), went on the scene.
The psychology of the time carried both an aversion against
the onslaught of the new cosmopolitan culture pursuing aggressively the
destruction of all the old frames, and the attempt to assimilate and
integrate some of these new impulses by local philosophies !!
In that context and in the strangulating atmosphere of the
1953's aftermath, liberalism almost had died. Not only because
our intellectuals were suspicious of whatever universal ideology neo-colonial
powers preached, because they had seen that humanism work in action in
Iran, in Congo, in Vietnam or elsewhere, but because physically it was
impossible to engage in liberal politics due to that very political
strangulation !!! What else then one could expect of the political
philosophies of the time than to be either radicalized or to search into
the "roots" for a way towards salvation !! I wrote in another article
that :
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At the same time the economical interest of the industrialized countries,
their controlling of the world resources and the geopolitics of
the cold war made developed
countries to even sabotage the democratic development in third world. Cold war
psychology and its paranoia didn't exactly enhance the idea of democracy.
Unwillingness of western democracies to share their democracies with us in the
third world was also based on the conflict between our national interests and
theirs
controlling of the world's resources. This was naturally seen as the hypocrisy
of the western democracies by third worldians.
^^^^
People in the third world concluded that democracy can not be equivalent
to genuine universal humanism. Those ideologies which commanded universality
became popular. many of these "universal ideologies" have been actually
very much homemade and traditionally rooted in some utopian popular
culture or they were deformed to become one. Thus these are very little
universal even if they are seen as such by their followers.
It is a logic to many that one does not oppose one's opponents
using the opponent's ideology. People judge the ideology of their enemy
as alien. Maybe it is the reason that social values did not count
that much under the recent popular uprising in the eastern block and why
the church acquired such a central role in these uprisings. Actually
people with anti social values like Tatcher and Reagan were the most
popular idols of such uprisings. Both in Iran and a country like
Poland there was also the physical leverage of religious establishments
,as the only legal organizations, that gave clerics such central roles.
In many third world countries, to some extent justly, even intellectuals
and opposition looked at the industrialized countries' cry for democracy
and human rights only as hypocritic gestures. This perception was
of course based on their historical experience with democracy which has
been exactly sabotaged by the same countries.
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The answer to keeping the national pride then became a
reversed-nationalism which came to have an actually no-answer to
the challenges of the modern world. The nationalist movement's ideology took
the form of pan-Islamism of Shariati, the way communism had played
the role of the avant-garde ideology in China or Vietnam, it played the
role of ideological glue for our scared nationalists and traditionalists !!
Political Islam, led in our country by Shariati's thoughts, even
sought its Utopia among the Ottoman empire's past. This resilience
meant that many of the new generation of our intellectuals who didn't
anymore belong to the rich families, as it was the case before, were following
a path which did not seek a futuristic option on the tomorrow of their
country or on the challenges the modernization process brought with itself.
Was it our brand of Narodnism or the nihilism of Bazarov (Ref. Fathers and
Sons- Ivan Turgeniev) which was at work? It was even Worse !!!
Today it should be clear that a modern democracy which seeks to answer
the challenges of modernization should have its own philosophy incompatible
with the kind of the ones flourished in the pre-revolutionary Iran.
The negative nihilistic attitude of that time towards the cultural
and economical challenges of our time and the utopian socialism are
antagonistic with the notion of modernization, openness and economical
growth. Why? Because we are speaking of globalization on many levels and
many planes. Information era, globalized economies and the
flow of capital internationally all detest the notions of the cultural
and economical isolationism and flees from the self-annihilating
nationalism of that
time and now, as it has proved so. A nationalism in reverse I should
call it !!! The leaders of future should not only be visionary in
terms of having an eye on the future, which may to many appears a
slogan and a platitude but not with what I have in mind, but should be a
manager and an entrepreneur rather than an ideologue; a democratic
element with technocratic accomplishments !!! Even the Chinese and
Vietnamese guardians of communism are realizing these facts and are
moving rapidly away from the dogmatic ideological teachings which put
a tight clothing on them and limited their vision on the new. The new
nationalism there, is pragmatic and not bound by ideologies and
Utopias !!!
Best regards
Kambiz
Yek Irani
Kambiz Iranpour <m.k.ir...@fys.uio.no> wrote in article
<5jsfkk$8ij$2...@ratatosk.uio.no>...
>
> Forget Shariati. He is a path to nowhere !! Here is what
> I wrote about him a couple of years back.
Right On.