Children of Paradise Read Online Free Page B

influence reconsidered—an alternative history Shariati had all but created and then claimed to have liberated from suppression. As the scholar Ali Mirsepassi has written, “Shariati’s work wasa type of revivalism: out of the dialogue he produced between Shiism and Western ideology, he ‘revived’ Islamic tendencies which perhaps never existed, but spoke to people’s contemporary needs.” Curiously, the Western ideologies that he brought into this dialogue were the two great atheistic doctrines of his day: Marxism and existentialism.
    Shariati is alleged to have once admitted that if he were not a Muslim, he would have been a Marxist. And yet, for all its attractions, Marxism carried some European biases Shariati could not abide. First, it was not only irreligious but antireligious, a tendency Shariati found wholly at odds with the spiritual yearnings and convictions of his people. In the West, he noted, criticism of religion had led to freedom of thought and the growth of science. But in Islamic societies,religion was the last line of defense against imperial domination and cultural decay. Second,Shariati was still a nationalist. He did not want Iranians to dissolve their struggle into that of the international proletariat or, worse, to fuse their fate with that of the Soviet Union, which Shariati knew to be as exploitative and heartless a foreign empire as the capitalist West. So Shariati did not sign on to the international Marxist agenda. Instead, he borrowed from Marxism the ideas he liked best, and claimed them for an authentic Shiism, which he called the Shiism of Ali.
    Existentialism, the fashionable creed of postwar France, made perhaps the stranger and more problematic bedfellow. But it resonated with the work of Iran’s great philosopher of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Mulla Sadra, who argued against Aristotle for the primacy of the concrete world over the categories and attributes accorded to it by human judgment. To the existentialists of postwar Europe, this metaphysical insight—that existence precedes essence, in the phrase they coined—became a moral one. The human will acted on a world divested of intrinsic meaning; individuals had the freedom and the responsibility to forge meaning by their choices and actions.
    The idea of the emancipated individual was an intoxicating one. And yet,Shariati looked at secular, even nihilistic, postwar Europe and worried about where such ideas might lead. Shariati and other pre-revolutionaryIranian thinkers abhorred the sterility of European modernity, with its lax public morality, heartless economics, and abandoned traditions. Iran had a different experience, different hungers. Like an older Europe, it was moored to its religion, morally and socially; but, unlike that Europe, it had witnessed all of post-Enlightenment European history, wrestled with its ideas and absorbed its innovations, looking upon some of its outcomes with envy and others with aversion.
    In the end, Shariati envisioned a limited freedom for Iran. Although it was thereligious duty of Iranians to cast off despotism, their liberated country, as Shariati envisioned it, would provide righteous guidance, which would allow Iranians to subordinate their will to the will of God. Shariati likened Iranian political subjects to children in need of kindergarten. He argued for a “directed democracy” led by a leader so perfect and so incontestable that he would embody and produce the utopianrevolutionary society. Such a leader could not be constrained by the whims of an unenlightened public.
    This view suggested Plato’s Republic , with its designation of the philosopher king. Far more strikingly, it would resemble Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s theory of the rule of the Islamic jurisconsult, or velayat-e faqih , which the elderly cleric elaborated a few years later in Najaf in the early 1970s.
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    W HEN S HARIATI RETURNED from Paris in 1964, he went to teach at the University