Children of Paradise Read Online Free Page A

activities even after the coup, when they became dangerous. By that time Shariati had graduated and started work as a primary school teacher; he also substituted for his father from time to time as the main speaker at the family’s Islamic center. Once during those years, his biographer recounts, Shariati was caught in the dead of night scrawling pro-Mossadegh graffiti on city walls. He was forced to lick the graffiti clean, until his tongue was swollen and black.
    Amid the lengthening shadows of the late 1950s, the nationalist movement spent or crushed, Shariati retreated into Gnosticism, a mystical search for illumination based on the view that divinity resides within humans, who must somehow liberate their better nature from the debased material world—the “stinking mud,” as Shariati called it. He wrote poetry and attended poetry circles while he studied literature at the University of Mashhad. He attended the same poetry circle as a young Mashhadi cleric named Ali Khamenei.
    Shariati won a scholarship to Paris, where he studied sociology in the late fifties and early sixties and joined a circuit of politically active Iranian students abroad. During those years he grappled ferociously and publicly with his country’s vexed relationship with foreign influence. In one essay Shariati lamented that Iran’s modern, educated elite belittled itself by elevating foreign ideas. While these Iranians rejected their own history and imagined a future modeled on the West, he wrote, the common people, wedded to local tradition, embraced the past and felt the future didn’t belong to them. Shariati diagnosed the problem astutely: “A futureless past is a state of inertia and stagnation, while a pastless future is alien and vacuous.” And so he set about inventing both a useful past and a utopian future.
    To construct a new originary myth, Shariati mined the Westernphilosophical tradition for its best and most revolutionary ideas and then attributed them to a larger doctrine that was authentically Iranian—namely, Shiite Islam. But Shiism, as it was practiced in Iran, was politically quietist, more given to ritual and tears than to heroic uprisings. And so Shariati had to reinvent it. Shariati’s Shiism was revolutionary and militant; it encouraged the overthrow of despots; it was moved by dialectics and promoted a classless society. It was humanistic, in the sense that it required no clerical mediation between the individual and God. Indeed, the clerics were to be blamed for obscuring this true Shiism from the Iranian people. According to Shariati, Islam guaranteed individual liberties, including freedom of religion; it supported universal economic equality; and it could even be used to defend Darwin’s theory of evolution.
    It was not that all these ideas were compatible with Islam; rather, according to Shariati, they originated from Islam and from the lives of the Prophet and the twelve imams, beginning with Ali, whom Shiites recognize as his successors. To Shariati, collective memory was something malleable. To remember was an act not of excavation but of self-creation in the present tense.
    Shariati’s special genius was to deliver a modern, revolutionary creed to religious Iranians not as Western dogma but as their deepest birthright. And yet, to judge from an essay he called “My Idols,” Shariati’s formative influences were those he found in Paris. Among them were two French scholars of Islam, as well as the anticolonialist thinker Frantz Fanon and the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Shariati had traveled far from his homeland in order to find it. His sources were French, but they served the purpose of solidifying, in his mind, the need for Iran to turn inward.
    Shariati called for a return to an authentic Islam as an answer to modern problems. But the Islam he defined as authentic was not one any textual scholar had seen before. Rather, it was the outgrowth of modern experience and of European