Behrouz Ghamari-Tabrizi
Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Director of the Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University
Behrouz Ghamari-Tabrizi
Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Director of the Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University
Sara Naderi
Sara Naderi is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology with the concentration on Cultural, Social and Political Thought (CSPT) at University of Victoria, and a Graduate Student Fellow at the Centre for Global Studies. Her main interest is questioning and criticizing modern subjectivity. By doing so, she is seeking the possibility of alternative and critical subjectivities. Sara endeavors to articulate the marginalized narratives of subjectivity by giving voice to the less heard narratives of the Self and the world within the modern human mind. Furthermore, the process of changing life experiences from nonverbal, intuitive experiences to the discursive, structured, and articulated experiences has always been striking for her. Sara's dissertation is about Iranian women's subjectivity in a postcolonial society, which arises from their marginalized subject position in the modern world. Her empirical research mainly focuses on the women of Iran, and some parts of her previous research have been published in a book titled, Introduction to Feminine Narrative of the City: A study on Women's Lived Experience.
Who is an Emancipated Critical Subject? Reading Ali Shariati’s “Kaviriyat” in Today’s Context
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Ali Shariati (1933-1977) was one of the main influential intellectuals in contemporary Iran. He is well-known as a Muslim intellectual who offered a modern, anti-colonial interpretation of Shi‘i Islam that went beyond traditional and clerical readings of Shi‘ism in pre-revolutionary Iran. Shariati himself, divides his writings into three categories: Ejetemaiyat (social and political studies), the part of his writings that were popular within his own time among the Iranian people and intellectuals; Islamiyat (Islamic studies), the other part which were of interest to both himself and his social audience; and finally, Kaviriyat (existential and philosophical debates about the exilic nature of human life and history). Kaviriyat represents Shariati in its whole entity to the extent that he claims, in Kaviriyat: “I am neither doing my job nor writing, but living and dwelling!”
The mainstream reading of Shariati, however, has interpreted Kaviriyat as an auxiliary to his political thought/theory of state. In other words, while we enjoy reading Kaviriyat in order to become familiar with the “poetic Shariati”, we barely read it as a core dimension of Shariati’s epistemological and ontological critique of alienated “Modern Subjectivity.” Kaviriyat, however, serves as a philosophical foundation of Shariati’s Islamic and political theory.
My inquiry in this paper is not about Shariati’s texts itself; rather, it is a critique of the dominant approach to the study of Shariati’s thoughts. This paper suggests that a critical and epistemological examination of Shariati’s thoughts reveals that Shariati’s multilayer and sophisticated thoughts are being reduced to his theory of state (being an Islamic state, a “guided” democracy or even a secular democracy). Hence, I propose that we need to shift our focus from the body of Shariati’s texts to its soul. In this approach, instead of asking “what is to be done?”— that is, inquiring about social and political emancipation as his epochal mission that he wished to accomplish all the way through his life — I will ask “who is an emancipated critical subject?”— alluding to the spirit of a unique model of (social and individual) being and thinking that he lived; a life depicted in his Kaviriyat.
This paper therefore demonstrates that shifting the dominant epistemological discourse/focus in reading the intellectual legacies of public intellectuals (with a focus on Shariati) will open a new horizon in reading their political thoughts, and more broadly, contribute to imagination and realization of an indigenous democracy in Iran.
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