If Dostoevsky, Jung and Kierkegaard Were to Speak with Shariati

These days, when the ideas of resistance, revolution, justice and liberation that lay at the foundations of Iran’s Islamic Revolution have once again risen to the surface of politics at the centre of a major confrontation, a unique space for reflection has opened.

How did we arrive here? What in the foundations of our political thought gave birth to our social and global reality in its present form?

Many people imagine that Shariati and his ideas are thoughts faded into history and irrelevant to our present.

The truth is that the fabric of the garment we have placed upon contemporary politics was woven from his ideas—ideas that have brought considerable harm to our society.

This is not because Shariati was backward or reactionary, nor because he possessed a dangerous ambition to unite Marxist justice, existentialist freedom and the revolutionary force latent in Shi‘ism. It is because his understanding of human reality and the existential nature of the human being contained a major deficiency.
That mistaken understanding, and his superficial psychology of the human being, lie at the root of a large part of the problems from which our society suffers today.

Shariati’s thought took shape through his revolutionary interpretation of “Red Shi‘ism”: a Shi‘ism that, in his view, unlike conservative Black Shi‘ism, was founded upon justice, resistance to repression and revolutionary activism.

In Shariati’s view, genuine human freedom passes through an effective union between one’s “inner freedom” and one’s “political freedom.”

In his thought, human beings must first attain inner freedom and liberate themselves from egoism, ignorance and material attachments so that, in later stages, they can wage an effective struggle in the external world against systems of repression and imperialism.

For him, Red Shi‘ism was an instrument for freeing the self from inner slavery while simultaneously resisting and struggling against structures of oppression that have drawn us into external slavery.

Freedom, for Shariati, was inseparable from resistance and revolution. In his view, Shi‘ism, with a history saturated with martyrdom and resistance, is in its foundations a revolutionary and liberating thought.

Such freedom would be realised not through passive acceptance of religion but through active struggle against injustice and repression, both within the territorial borders of one’s own country and beyond them.

Here another of his key ideas is born: freedom is responsibility.
The person who has liberated themselves has a duty to struggle for the freedom of others wherever in the world they may be.

It is within this framework that he succeeds in bringing spiritual growth, freedom, resistance and revolution into a romantic union within Red Shi‘ism.

It is not difficult to see how his thought has travelled like a storm from the past into our present.
The fundamental question is what, within his thought, helped create so much of the suffering of our society today.
As a widely read and prolific thinker, what did he misunderstand? Where did he see wrongly?

Whenever I think about Shariati’s ideas, I wonder what deeply religious and profoundly faithful thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky or Jung might have written in critique had they read his works.

Dostoevsky, I believe, would have told him how mistaken his understanding of human nature was.
He would have challenged the belief that there is a point called inner purification leading to inner freedom, after which the human being becomes a liberated and transcended being capable of carrying out an effective and emancipatory revolution in the external world.

The human being is a teaching composed of astonishing contradictions. Dostoevsky’s human being is the underground man, who is never as good as his ideals and never will be; the ridiculous man who, even if given a world full of balance and harmony, will destroy it.
He is the person who, like Ivan Karamazov, knows a great deal and possesses the best ideas, yet in practice drives the world toward destruction.

Human growth never occurs all at once, and the idea that somewhere one reaches liberation and then proceeds to liberate the world is fundamentally illusory.

Continued in the next post ...