Ali Shariati

Ali Shariati (1933-1977) was an Iranian sociologist and revolutionary intellectual whose lectures and writings fused sociology of religion with a politically engaged reinterpretation of Shia Islam. He distinguished a revolutionary Red Shiism, centered on justice and the mostazafin, or the oppressed, from the quietist, establishment-aligned Black Shiism he associated with the official clergy, and framed Islam itself as a vehicle of decolonization and social liberation rather than mere ritual observance. Educated partly in Paris, where he engaged with existentialist and anticolonial thought, he became one of the most widely read Iranian intellectuals of the twentieth century, and his ideas are considered to have shaped the intellectual climate that preceded the 1979 Iranian Revolution, though he died two years before it and never belonged to the clerical establishment that followed.