Ali Shariati

Excerpt from the BBC documentary "The Trap".

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Ali
• Shariati
• islam
• revolution

[sarmad17]

God Bless him. But this video says that libreation and free political will was introduced to islam!! It was there from the very begining but ppl discarded it

[iiNDiTC]

Most of the comments on this youtube video are made up by individuals who have never even read a single piece of work by Dr. Ali Shariati and are mistakingly associating the current Iranian regime with his works. Please before you judge the man, his life and his works, read some of his works. Iranians for the most part, young and old, know of him and hold him in high esteem. Many pictures of him adorn the desks and walls of Iranian homes, such as myself :)

[faashande]

Comment 3 (final):

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Overall, I would say, BBC tried to change two main facts; Shariati's view on the Western ideologies and the purposes of 1979 revolution, "exactly" towards Western benefits. Something EXPECTED from BBC.

[faashande]

Comment 2:

Another point to remind is that, Dr. Shariati revealed the true democracy (not the Western one) from within the Islam and from the actions of Imam Ali, in his book called "Ali".

This video is also trying to conclude that the revolution occurred due to demand of Western democracy. This is also in huge contradiction with the realities. Although Shariati was the major factor in awakening the youth, but majority of the public were under the influence of Ayatollah Khomeini.

[faashande]

Comment 1:

Although the video talks about Dr. Shariati's roles on reforming the traditional view on the Shiism, but it also tries to impose that Dr. Shariati believed in liberalism and the Western democracy. This is far away from his directly mentioned opinion about Western democracy and liberalism:

"Dictatorship is the hit to your head, while Western democracy is the governors' hands inside your head [deceiving people]".

[iiNDiTC]

'Everyday is Ashura, every land is Karbala' - Ali Shariati (buried next to his beloved Zaynab in Damascus)

[iiNDiTC]

Shariati also criticized Fanon for his argument that 'one should go back to her/his roots' meaning to adopt cultural, historical and national ways of doing things as opposed to adopting or copying another culture (this was popular among revolutionaries and political figures in the mid 20th century). Shariati criticized Fanon for his argument about returning to one's origin since Fanon came from a psychoanalytic-Marxist background (two Western theoretical frameworks).

[iiNDiTC]

b) Shariati, again, did not adopt Fanon's theory of armed struggle (the two corresponded with each other for a short period of time -- the Algerian revolutionaries were responsible for Shariati's release from imprisonment under the shah); obviously anything that Shariati wrote on had historical validity and meaning in the sense that one could essentially find these elements in Islamic history (for eg. in the lives of Muhammed, Abu Zar, Hussein, Fatima, etc).

[iiNDiTC]

A couple points I find problematic: a) Shariati did not exactly borrow the "Western" idea of positive liberty from Sartre, he merely reasserted that it had existed all along in Red Shi'ism (pre Safavid times). In fact, Shariati criticized Sartre (the two met and spoke in Paris on a few occasions) in his works and argued Sartre's ideas were not only misunderstood and misinterpreted but that they had no resonance with the people they sought to address;

[humanity65]

Sorry. I know you all might not like it, but Shariati was a confused intellectual. He thought that sharia law and democracy are compatible. He created the idea of militant Islam and he cherished Ali, prophet Muhammad's cousin, who was a humble role model for Muslims and his own community, but a brutal dictator and killer of non-Arabs, including Iranians.

[KoolVDZ]

What a bunch of rubbish. By the time shariati was born, khomeini had already written his famous book which explained his radical ideologies about the combination of shia islam and ruling politics of an Islamic state. Who makes these documentaries?