Children of Paradise (4 page)

To construct a new originary myth, Shariati mined the Western
philosophical 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 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 was
a 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-revolutionary
Iranian 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 the
religious 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 utopian
revolutionary 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 of Mashhad. Many of his students came from the upper and upper-middle classes, which leaned to the left and took little interest in religion. Shariati made it his project to lure young minds to an Islam that he laid before them as a rival to the left and a purveyor of the students’ most treasured ideals: social justice, reason, scientific progress, the refusal of despotism. At the same time, for young people from the traditional classes, burned by the condescension of the secular elites, Shariati supplied the stuff of empowerment. They were not backward practitioners of an outmoded faith: they were the revolutionary vanguard.

Shariati made enemies among the clergy. He did not believe that clerics
were really needed to mediate between man and God. Islam should be open to multiple, competing interpretations, he insisted. When Jalal Al-e Ahmad visited Mashhad in 1969, he tried to persuade Shariati that intellectuals and the clergy needed to work together to defeat the shah.
At a meeting during that visit, Al-e Ahmad extended his hand to the only cleric in the room—Ali Khamenei—as a gesture of that cooperation.

Shariati did forge a brief and fateful alliance with one clergyman. In Tehran, Iran’s vibrant, sprawling twentieth-century capital, Ayatollah Morteza Motahhari had helped found an institution where modernist clerics—those who believed in a dynamic Islam that could be interpreted to meet contemporary needs—could gather, deliver lectures, and build a new community of believers. That institution officially opened its doors in 1967 as Hosseiniyeh Ershad, a marble-fronted complex in northern Tehran that included, under its graceful blue-tiled dome, a lecture hall, library, and ornately mosaic-covered mosque. Its founders purposely situated the Hosseiniyeh in Tehran’s north so that it would be insulated from the conservative clerical establishment that clustered around the city’s bazaar and its traditional southern quarters. The new thinkers who lectured at Hosseiniyeh Ershad meant to reach the city’s secular elite, who tended to live in the north, and to draw them away from Marxism, toward Islamic modernism.

Ayatollah Motahhari and his inner circle, including a young cleric named Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, delivered nearly all the institute’s lectures until 1969, when Shariati, originally at Motahhari’s invitation, came to Tehran to speak regularly at the Hosseiniyeh. Shariati would quickly overshadow Motahhari and Rafsanjani as Hosseiniyeh Ershad’s main draw. As one observer later recalled, when Motahhari spoke, the lecture hall was often only half full; but for Shariati, the crowds spilled from the grand hall into “
the staircases, the yard, and even the basement.” Shariati’s lectures were anticlerical and openly political; he spoke of cultivating a “revolutionary society.” It was not long before Hosseiniyeh Ershad became known above all as the place to hear Shariati—and as a hotbed of revolutionary Islamism.

Motahhari was uneasy with this development. He worried that Shariati
was using religion to political ends and putting Hosseiniyeh Ershad at risk. Along with Rafsanjani and the other clerics who had once made Hosseiniyeh Ershad their home, Motahhari left the institute. More conservative clerics began to call Hosseiniyeh Ershad a house of infidels and to question Shariati’s piety. For Shariati was not merely a believer seeking answers in the texts; he was a prospector, extracting the meanings that served his purposes. He took great liberties with Islamic history and theology. And his purpose, it appeared more and more, was mobilization—indeed, the fashioning of Islam into a mobilizing ideology. More than once, Shariati bluntly explained that what Marx could not inspire Iranian peasants to do, Islam could.

As the intensity of opposition to the shah mounted, so did the intensity of Shariati’s rhetoric. In the mid-1960s, Shariati had stopped short of preaching revolution. In 1965, Shariati said, “
Our society is neither intellectually nor conceptually prepared for what should come after the shah. Rushing events could be disastrous.” This was a view Shariati would espouse frequently, when he wasn’t calling for its opposite—violent and immediate revolt. Was he dissembling, making a public show of quiescence for fear of SAVAK, the shah’s brutal intelligence and security apparatus, while secretly nurturing his militancy? Perhaps this bipolarity was simply true to Shariati’s intellect and character. He was too passionate to adopt a moderate view of anything, but too mercurial to cleave to his passion, and so he embraced opposites, sometimes successively, sometimes simultaneously.

Only in 1971 did Shariati take a decisive radical turn. That year, armed militants attacked a gendarmerie post in the village of Siahkal. The militants became popular heroes. The shah, awake now to the restiveness of the country, cracked down. Iran’s already capacious prison system expanded seemingly overnight. The very year of Siahkal, a grim new prison complex sprang up on Tehran’s northwestern outskirts. Run by SAVAK, Evin Prison would quickly earn a reputation surpassing Qasr, the notorious Tehran prison of the day, as the site of the monarchy’s cruelest tortures and
the country’s new Bastille.

Now Shariati bent to the force he had helped unleash and began
exhorting his crowds to rise against the state. He called the militants martyrs and said that “
the martyr is the pulsing heart of history.” By 1972, Hosseiniyeh Ershad had become a prime recruiting ground for a band of Islamic leftist guerrillas known as the Mojahedin-e Khalq. Shariati was neither the leader nor even a member of the Mojahedin, which had promoted armed revolt since the mid-1960s; but the underground group’s ideology—leftist, Islamist, anticlerical, and given to violence and martyrdom—overlapped significantly with his, which made his work good propaganda and his followers easy recruits. SAVAK was displeased.

On November 10, 1972, Shariati gave a lecture about existentialism that would be his last at Hosseiniyeh Ershad. According to his biographer, Shariati knew that the police would raid the institute the following week; that there would be clashes between the students and the police; and that he and his associates would likely be arrested. And so this orator who once said, “
Wage jihad and kill if you can, if you cannot, accept martyrdom and die,” fled with his father to the north of Iran. On November 17, the police surrounded Hosseiniyeh Ershad while the students occupied the building in protest. They staged a prayer session in the unfinished mosque, chanted slogans well into the night, prayed, and wept.

For a year Shariati hid. SAVAK’s men searched for him in vain. They did, however, find his books. They found them in the homes, the hands, the minds of Islamist militants everywhere they looked; they arrested people for the simple crime of their possession. Finally, they arrested Shariati’s elderly, ailing father and kept him in prison as a hostage. If Shariati turned himself in, then—maybe—his father would be released. Shariati pondered this proposition for two and a half months. At last he surrendered, but his father was held for almost a year more.

Shariati was held for eighteen months without a trial. According to SAVAK sources cited in his biography, he wrote two tracts in prison at his captors’ behest. One claimed that no similarity existed between Islam and Marxism—that the two creeds were in fact irreconcilable. Such was the monarchy’s official line against the left and particularly against the Mojahedin; political prisoners in the early 1970s were
forced to parrot that
argument in public recantations. Shariati’s other prison essay, “Return to Self,” was a celebration of Iranian national greatness.

According to the SAVAK file, Shariati handwrote these essays in prison; intelligence agents typed them and gave them to
Kayhan
, the country’s largest newspaper, for publication. But the authenticity of the SAVAK file is disputed, and Shariati’s defenders are adamant that Shariati remained independent to the end and that he penned these works outside prison as a result of a genuine change of heart. Whatever the truth about the two tracts, after his release, Shariati followed them with “Return to Which Self?”—which sounded the same themes and called for the opposition to back away from revolutionary action. He left for England in May of 1977.

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