Useful information: Ali Shariati is, for many, the ideological father of the Iranian revolution. A charismatic leader and teacher, his radical blend of Islam and Marxism mobilized a whole generation of young Iranians.
This first full-length political biography looks at Ali Shariatis life and thought in the context of the complex and contradictory cultural, social and political conditions of the Iranian society that shaped him. Covering his upbringing in provincial Mashhad, his life as a student in Paris during the early 1960s, his subsequent development as a religious and revolutionary thinker at odds with both the Pahlavi regime and the ShiI clerical establishment to his death in exile at the age of forty-four, Ali Rahnema unravels much of the enigma that surrounds this important figure.
A storyteller, a master of palimpsest, riddles and charades, Shariati was at ease with words. He had the audacity, the poetic skill and the shrewd intellect to say things well without saying them in both the political and other spheres. Indeed Rahnema shows that there is much more to Ali Shariati than his political dimension. Different people, he argues, can relate to his different worlds and different lines of his work can come to symbolize different facets of a man who does not fit any classical stereotype.
Rich in detail and carefully researched this book provides a unique understanding, not only of the life of a man who played as significant a part in the Iranian revolution as Khomeini himself but also into a current of political Islam that has influenced movements throughout the Middle East.