Comparing Revolutionaries - Fannon and Shariati

Contemporary Political Islam Final Paper Nathaniel Whittemore

Fanon and Shariati

Third World Revolutionary Thought in the Ideology of the

Iranian Revolution

Nathaniel Whittemore

Contemporary Political Islam

Fall 2004


“Each generation must out of relative obscurity discover its mission, fulfill it,

or betray it.”

So begins the fourth chapter of Frantz Fanon’s seminal 1961 work

The Wretched of the Earth. The book is a veritable manifesto of Third

World revolutionary ideology, espoused by a French-educated psychologist

who found himself spokesman during the French-Algerian war. While

Wretched became immediately notable for its call for violence to affect

change, it is perhaps most penetrating in its analysis of both the individual

and collective psyche of “the Native.” Indeed, as it began to be translated

and disseminated, its lessons reapplied, it would become clear that what

Fanon had was a unique understanding of what forces, personal and social,

were at play in the lives of individuals and “the masses” in the period of

independence and post-independence. A young Iranian scholar, studying at

the Sorbonne in Paris, recognized this almost immediately. Ali Shariati

would go on to be the primary intellectual behind the 1979 Khomeini

revolution. Throughout the 1970s, the culmination in Iran of the climate of

unrest and political suppression, Shariati’s lectures were circulated on audio

cassettes. As the Shah was forced to abdicate, his stature was second only to

Khomeini himself. Shariati thus stands as the intellectual behind the only

complete Islamic revolution in the 20th century. But how much effect did he

really have on the course of the revolution? It is the contention of this paper

that Shariati was able to make Fanon's revolutionary third worldism

accessible to Iranian's by reframing its doctrines of salvation and personal

agency in terms of indigenous Shii theology. By advocating expression

rather than sublimation of individual cultural identity and belief, Shariati

added a sociologists understanding of movements to Fanon's penetrating

psychology of the postcolonial situation. Indeed, by asserting, if not in these

terms, that Islam was in fact the natural and correct expression of Third

Worldism in Iran, Shariati set the stage for Khomeini’a effective organization

of popular participation in the 1979 revolution. In the first part of the paper

I will do a close textual reading of Shariati's Intizar to show how Fanon's

philosophies were modified in the Iranian revolutionary context. In the

second I will look at how each thinkers writing influenced or failed to

influence the course of their perspective revolutions.


From a very young age, Shariati was interested in Islamic salvation

and the potential of alternate worldviews. His father was a reformist cleric

active in religious socialist circles.1 The father and son shared a hero in Abu

Zarr, a perhaps legendary early follower of the prophet who had denounced

the caliphs and devoted his life to providing for the poor.2

Shariati was enamored not only with this legacy, but with sources of

inspiration outside his direct experience. In 1958 he completed a master’s

program in foreign language study focusing on Arabic and French. Two

years later he won a state grant to study in Paris.3 His time there would be

instrumental in the evolution of his political, religious, and social philosophy.

Paris at the beginning of the 1960s was a city erupting with the

passion of intellectualism and revolution. The existentialism of Camus and

Sartre had set aflame the minds of young philosophers. Contemporaneous

revolutions in Cuba and Algeria had created a feeling of the tangibility of

ideas. It was here that Shariati was introduced to figures such and Mao and

Che. Moreover, it was where he discovered Franz Fanon.

Fanon was born in Martinique in 1925. He traveled to Paris to study

medicine and psychology and later to Antilles to practice. In Antilles he

began to have experiences with the brutality of transitional colonial

experience that would culminate with his seminal The Wretched of the

Earth. That book was written on the heels of his stay at a hospital in Algeria

during their war of independence. As he delved deeper and deeper into the

psyche and trauma of the colonial experience, he increasingly found his

sympathies with the rebels. By 1961, he had become a leading intellectual of

the African revolutionary cause.4 It was in this capacity that Ali Shariati was

first introduced to him.

What follows is a close textual analysis of one of Shariati’s works

which provides an excellent example of his synthesis of Fanon’s

revolutionary Third Worldism with indigenous Shii Islam.

1 MERIP Reports, No. 102, Islam and Politics (Jan., 1982), 24-28"'Ali Shari'ati: Ideologue of the Iranian Revolution"Evrand Abrahamian2 ibid3 ibid4 Fanon, Frantz The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press, Inc. 1968


The piece in question, Intizar…madhab-I I’tiraz [Awaiting…the

religion of protest], was written in 1971 as the climate in Iran continued to

heat up. Freedom of expression was more limited than it had been for years

before. Everywhere, a deadly and unstable silence and stasis was

maintained in the face of increased numbers of SAVAK secret police.5

Indeed, the first thing that should be noted about the piece is that it deals

little with an Islamic conception of state and rather focuses on the potential

and, as Shariati would argue, the necessity, of rebellious or revolutionary

action to reclaim the state. Like Fanon’s Wretched, the work does not deal

extensively with a theoretical structure to come to power after the

revolution. Indeed, Fanon’s foregoing of explication of a post-revolutionary

governing apparatus has been a main criticism lobbied on the treatise.

Instead, both works focus more directly on the potentiality of upheaval

locked inside the “masses”. Fanon writes dialectically about the spirit and

humility locked inside the would-be revolutionary to bring about justice after

the fall of the colonial power. Shariati focuses the terms of discourse on

Shiite Muslims, whom he argues have within their ideological, religious and

social framework not only the potential but the duty to rebel and take

control of their future.

To varying degrees, the inspirational tone adopted by both authors

may reflect audience. It cannot be denied that much of Wretched of the

Earth was a heady and educated polemical catharsis for Fanon. Much of his

diatribe against the colonial structure is inflected with broad historical

oversight and specific expertise that would make it inaccessible to your

average member of the lumpenproletariate or peasant class. To some extent,

it joined Marx, Mao, Che, and Jeal-Paul Sartre in the Pantheon of brilliant

revolutionary thinkers whose influence was, nonetheless, somewhat limited

to the educated intellectuals and guerillas. Yet at the same time, there are

parts of Wretched that virtually scream solidarity and cannot help but raise

a pounding in one’s chest. The last chapter especially is an example of

Fanon as he casts aside the banner of frustrated intellectual and virtually

straps on his rhetorical AK47, ready to join the fight himself and lead the

5 Course Reader, Gilles Kepel


world to a greater era of peace, justice, and equality. Fanon writes among

the final pages of his book

Come then, comrades; it would be as well to decide at once to change our ways. We must shake off the heavy darkness in which we are plunged, and leave it behind. The new day which is already at hand must find us firm, prudent, and resolute…We must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man. (Fanon, 316)Indeed, it is important to understand Fanon’s attempt to revalidate

that “we” (who he calls the masses) to understand how Shariati rejected a

type of discourse which would be accessible only to learned scholars or

clerics. Fanon gives precedent to that decision when, on page 188

It is true that if care is taken to use only a language that is understood by graduates in law and economics, you can easily prove that the masses have to be managed from above. But if you speak the language of everyday, if you are not obsessed by the perverse desire to spread confusion and rid yourself of the people, then you will realize that the masses are quick to seize every shade of meaning…(Fanon, 188)Shariati takes this tone a step further. In many ways Shariati’s

purpose in Intizar is to personalize the inspiring but grandiose and

impersonalized speech of Fanon. Shariati understood the limits of the

potential for mobilization that constrained the contemporaneous dialogue of

uprising. He recognized the difficulty of mapping a cultureless revolutionary

rhetoric onto a society with a distinct cultural consistency and very real

needs; indeed, onto a culture whose needs and identity which were

potentially radically different from those of the rhetoric’s origin.

At home in Iran he had seen examples of this difficulty as extant

socialist movements failed to capture the sentiments of any large segment of

society, save the educated and often expatriate student communities. As

Kepel writes, “the intellectuals were much more in step with the bookish

culture of proletarian internationalism that with grassroots Persian

society.”6 Intizar can be viewed from within the framework of Shariati’s

attempt, then, to make revolutionary ideology accessible to the Iranian

masses by reframing its inspiration in the indigenous terms of Islam. The

thrust of Shariati’s break with or movement from Fanon was that he

believed that only by understanding the revolution in the terms of a specific

culture could people be inspired to true productive action. Shariati sought to

6 Course Reader, Kepel


move the discussion from the classrooms to the streets in a way in which

most all revolutionaries would have supported but few knew how to do.

Finally, it is important to recognize that, for all our talk of “reframing

the revolutionary discourse,” one should not view Shariati’s Islam as simply

a useful device for a greater goal of government overthrow. More

specifically, he was not out to appropriate or co-opt Islam for his purposes.

He believed passionately, like Fanon, in the potential of the masses, but also

in Islam. Indeed, he believed not only that the two could be reconciled, but

in fact that one (Shiism) was the source, at least in Iran, for the other.

Intizar begins immediately (and unlike many other texts of political

Islam) by casting the terms of discourse onto Islam itself, rather than the

abstract “other” of the extant state apparatus or the economic dominance of

the West. Shariati writes

In the history of mankid no religion has ever witnessed such a widening gap separating “what was” from “what is”…. 7

Part of Shariati’s adoption of Fanon’s revolutionism8 to the specific

case of Iran came in the pushing aside of that “other” (namely, colonialism)

in favor of a serious and sustained self-examination. From this statement,

the tone of Intizar is one of the negative and positive cohabiting in the

extant reality. It is a tone of problem but also of potentiality. In this case, the

“widening gap” demonstrates a serious hindrance to Islam’s coming to

fruition as a revolutionary force, but also, in identifying the discontinuity,

alludes to the remedy of that break. The quote, and indeed, the entire

feeling of the piece is inflected with the notion that the first step to

overcoming one’s own challenges is to acknowledge them.

Beyond this though, the immediate discussion of Islam, Shiism, and

the disparity between secular elites, the religious clerics, and the

uneducated but pious Persians, serves to move the impersonal discourse of

Fanon to a much more home-hitting Iranian analysis. As part of his

abstraction, Fanon simplifies the world into admittedly Manichean terms,

namely, that of the oppressor (the settler or colonist) and the oppressed (the

native). Throughout Wrteched, Fanon detaches himself from specificities to

talk psychoanalytically of the condition of “the native.”

7 Course Packet, Ed. Esposito 8 From here on out used to describe the general revolutionary ideology of Fanon


The native is always on the alert…confronted by a world ruled by the settler, the native is always presumed guilty…The native’s muscles are always tensed…The native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor. (Emphasis mine, Fanon, 53) Shariati, on the other hand, re-complicates the world not only through

an emphasis on self-analysis, but on the complicated nature of the pre-

revolutionary crises. Iran was not Manichean, but rather a confusing

amalgam of different groups with different needs. Shariati discusses the

secular elites in the first few pages of Intizar, saying that they might accuse

him of “safeguarding superstitions”. He also defines the religious masses in

terms of their categorical belief in the idea of Intizar or waiting for the

return of the hidden Imam. He is drawing divisions by suggesting that they

believe this above and beyond what science would tell them of the possibility

of agelessness. Finally he discusses the clerical leaders, who he faults for

forcing unexamined faith that neglects “the necessity (which Shariati in fact

believes stems from Islam) of independent rational, scientific analysis.”

What is interesting is that for Shariati, these groups, despite their

varying positions, were connected by their common cultural starting point of

Islam. Indeed, each group was defined by their relative positions towards

that faith; the elites by their rejection of doctrine, the “religious masses” by

the necessity of their faith (“they have to have faith, and they do have it”9)

and the clerical classes by their acceptance of any and all ideas in the Quran

above and beyond reason. Regardless of each group’s stance, their identity

was fundamentally affected by the condition of their Islamic origins. How

then, he might have asked Fanon, could there be any other departure for a

revolutionary movement than that shared heritage?

Similarly, part of the re-personalizing of revolutionary thought and

movement from abstraction to Shariati’s revolutionary Islam involved the

place of the individual. The shift is subtle. Fanon argued that the idea of

individualism was a bourgeoisie Western concept employed by colonists to,

in effect, keep native populations segmented and competitive amongst

themselves. On page 47 he writes that when the struggle starts,

“Individualism is the first to disappear. The native intellectual had learned

from his masters that the individual ought to express himself fully. The

9 Course Reader, Ed. Esposito


colonialist bourgeoisie had hammered into the native’s mind the idea of a

society of individuals where each person shuts himself up to his own

subjectivity, and whose only wealth is individual thought. Now the native

who has the opportunity to return to the people during the struggle for

freedom will discover the falseness of this theory.” (Fanon, 47)

Insofar as Fanon is rejecting the potential divisiveness among a

population in need of solidarity in face of oppression, it seems as thought

Shariati would agree. Yet at the same time, it is clear from Intizar that

Shariati is nervous about a blind acceptance of shared belief, even if good

intentioned. He suggests that Shiism is an ideology that, in its very

acceptance requires individual reason and rational analysis. From his

sociologist’s perspective, Shariati was frustrated that Islam, which he

believed required a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding, had been

boiled down to simple fiqh, or jurisprudence. He suggested that “religious

beliefs can follow, step by step, social, cultural, and scientific progress.”10

Extending the sociological terms of his argument, he suggests that the

understanding of intizar and ghaybat (“the end of time”), has changed over

time because of evolving conditions, by way of different interpretations of its

“influence upon the social, political and intellectual life of its adepts.”

His most direct imploring for the necessity of individual

understanding within a greater movement, however, comes as he

renegotiates the legacy of Mohammed himself. He claims that the prophet’s

example was not to be worshipped, but rather to be learned and

appropriated by each individual. He was a guide not only to God, but to a

proper life of seeking that God. Each person had and has a duty, claimed

Shariati, to live as an individual Muslim seeking his own place in the

movement towards salvation. In this section of Intizar, the author calls upon

the (ostensibly Muslim) reader directly:

Even you, followers of the Prophet, you must not stop with the person. This is not a matter of prophetic cult, but the goal of a school of thought. The value of the Prophet lies in his showing the way to that goal. His task was, like previous prophets, to come, bring a Message, show the way, then go. If he died, or was killed, would you turn on your heels!11

10 ibid11 ibid


If we understand Shariati as adapting the revolutionism of Fanon to

the Islamic roots and realities of Iran, it would make sense that he spends

due time sorting through the necessity both of individual efforts and self-

analysis and Islamic movement politics and sociology as a whole. Islam is a

religion that has, since its very roots dealt explicitly with the macro and the

micro; what it means to be a part of Islam and what it means, oneself, to be

a Muslim. Indeed, perhaps the most pertinent example of this phenomenon

is the historical interpretation of jihad, or sacred struggle. Traditionally

there has been a division of jihad between internal and external. Certainly

there were mujahadin, fighting on the margins and borders of Islam for their

faith. This jihad brought with it special modifications of doctrine, in areas as

diverse as eternal rewards and Ramadan fasting procedures. Moreover,

there was the idea of the internal jihad, in which every Muslim faced his or

herself to live by the Koran and the example and sayings of the Prophet.

These are the so-called “lesser” and “greater” jihads. What is interesting to

note is the way in which different groups have interpreted just which is the

greater and which is the lesser. While many traditional Muslims and even

moderate Islamists have come down firmly that the internal is the greater

jihad, certain others have rejected this analysis. A link off of the main

homepage of the Islamic Resistance Movement (HAMAS) for example,

categorically denies this and suggests that in this time of great external

threat to Islam, the actually war is the greater jihad. Regardless of

interpretation, it is clear from the text that Shariati’s Islamic revolutionary

thought takes into account this fundamental cultural duality.

In the same section where he implores pious Muslims to actually think

about what it means to live in the example of the Prophet, Shariati comes to

the most important point of the text, and the concept most clearly influenced

by Fanon. This is his idea of futurism, a concept which required a

fundamental reinterpretation of the most important foundational practices of

Iranian Shiites. The context is undeniable Third World revolutionism, and

requires another look at Fanon’s seminal Wretched of the Earth.

Fanon’s Wretched is dominated by a sense of urgency. It is a push,

more than anything else, for movement. On page 53, he writes that “the

native’s muscles are always tensed.” The book is a desperate call for a


release to that tension and the total uprising that will replace the old

colonial order of things with all its vestiges of authority in the so-called

native bourgeoisie with a new order of freedom, justice and equality. It is a

call for the oppressed to assert control over their rightful destiny.

Characterizing the process of decolonization in the first few pages of

the novel, Fanon writes

…The proof of success lies in a whole social structure being changed from the bottom up. The extraordinary importance of this change is that it is willed, called for, demanded. The need for this change exists in its crude state, impetuous and compelling, in the consciousness and in the lives of the men and women who are colonized (Fanon, 1968, 36)Fanon goes on to suggest that this change must most often come

about through violent means. On page 94, he writes that violence is a way

for people within the revolutionary movement to assert control of their own

future and shake off previous stasis.

At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction…Even if the armed struggle has been symbolic and the nation is demobilized through a rapid movement of decolonization, the people have the time to see that the liberation has been the business of each and all… (Fanon, 94) Moreover, Fanon asserts strongly that, no matter what the phase of

the revolution, action is the validating force that is needed to continue to

inspire the masses. In a passage that must have resonated with the young

Shariati, who, for all his admiration of revolutionary thinkers, was facing a

domestic suppression similar to but not exactly the same as sustained

outright colonialism in Algeria, Fanon decried the post-colonial face in which

the ostensibly nationalism bourgeoisie leadership becomes corrupter by its

own inaction and maintenance of the colonial hierarchy. He places his

emphasis on their maintenance status quo:

Without that struggle, without that knowledge of the practice of action, there’s nothing but a fancy-dress parade and the blare of trumpets. There’s nothing save a minimum of readaptation, a few reforms at the top, a flag waving: and down there at the bottom and undivided mass, still living in the middle ages, endlessly marking time. (Fanon, 147)This then, is the context for Shariati’s reclamation of Intizar; a mass

kept subdued by an illegitimate nationalist control from above, a lack of

action and movement, and the very real potential for both individual and

collective action, futurism.


Intizar or “waiting” for ghaybat (“the end of time”) or the return of

the hidden Imam is for Shariati the fundamental foundational doctrine of

Shiite Islam, at least in its separation from other Islams. He suggests that

Intizar can be and has been conceived of in two opposite ways. On the one

hand, there is the belief that accepting intizar means waiting without action,

believing that it will be God’s lot to sort out the evils and ills of society and

the world when he returns the Imam at the end of time. Then there is the

idea that “waiting” requires participation in the look towards the future.

Throughout history, Shariati contends, the first interpretation had been

dominant. Moreover, it has been a corrupting fallacy in which people diluted

themselves to the true revolutionary nature of their religion.

Shariati writes that from “the moment the Prophet passed away…the

same old system resumed its rule over history. Neither truth remained, nor

justice; nor did mankind find salvation.”12 He argues that at every step of

history, with every invasion of Iran, the impetus for people to find salvation

within themselves and their own actions by understanding the words and

example of their great forbearers was neglected in favor of acquiescence to

fatalistic waiting for a destiny outside their control. He suggests that this

quiescence set the stage for the gaping hole between reality and doctrine

now facing Shiites.

We believe in and are expecting…since God had truly promised victory to Islam. He had promised the wretched masses they would become leaders of mankind; He had promised the disinherited they would inherit this earth from the mighty.13

Yet

We see that the reality occurring in the external world contradicts the Islamic truth we believe in.Finally then he suggests that it is “only intizar...the final,

predetermined triumph of Turth, [that] can solve this disparity between the

reigning false reality and the presently condemned redeeming Truth...”14

What Shariati means is that intizar inherently implies specific duties

and modes of thought, feeling, and action, from the believer who commits

himself to it. Waiting can not be static or conservative and backwards

looking because by definition, “a man who awaits, awaits the future; one

12 ibid13 ibid14 ibid


cannot away the past.” Indeed, for Shariati, intizar means hope and

inspiration; as he says, it means “futurism.”

The end of his work sees Shariati at full force with a revolutionary

reinterpretation of this doctrine. Indeed, like Fanon at the end of Wretched,

Shariati lets down his personal guard and adopts the personal banner of the

change in sentiment that a true understanding of intizar requires. In the

closing paragraphs he commits himself fully to the pursuit of a future which

will bring salvation. Moreover, he locates Muslims in this struggle by

defining its history in terms of their heroes: “The struggle for liberty and

justice follows a course similar to that of a river. There is Abraham, Moses,

Jesus, Muhammed, ‘Ali, Hasan, Husayn, and so on until the end of time when

this movement triumphs over all the world.”15

Finally, in the most complete synthesis of Fanon’s revolutionary

ideology and its adaptation or reunderstanding through Shiite Islame,

Shariati concludes that:

Intizar means to say no to what is…Even negative intizar implies revolt…Whoever is content with the present, is not awaiting. On the contrary, he is conservative; he fears the future…For a condemned nation [and here he is most certainly writing of and to Iran] to give up intizar means to accept defeat as its fat forever….I, in the part of this world and at this moment of history, am expecting, in a future that might be…a sudden world Revolution in favour of Truth and Justice and of the oppressed masses; a Revolution in which I must play a part; a Revolution which does not come about with prayers…but with a banner and a sword, with a true holy war involving all responsible believers. I believe that this movement shall naturally triumph.16

* * *

It is a natural question to ask at the end of this analysis how each of

these respective thinkers and their works were received in the societies they

hoped to inspire. How did or didn’t they affect the outcome of the conflict

and did the revolution live up to the glory and totalistic change of order that

they had hoped for? Finally, it is important how this revolutionism is

affecting contemporary political Islam.

Frantz Fanon was part of a generation of upheaval. A “Negro” by

birth, he found himself constantly caught between two worlds. Throughout

his youth he worked hard to function in one of these worlds, the European

15 Ibid16 ibid


world of glitz and intellectualism. He studied in France and married a

European woman. Still, as one of his biographers wrote, a growing

awareness of his own depersonalization and the dehumanization of blacks

worldwide led him to make “a revolutionary cathartic break with the past.”17

Having been sent to work in a French-Algerian hospital in 1953, this

break was complete when, in 1956, he sent a letter to the French Resident

Minister in Algeria resigning his post. He had wavered when war broke out

in 1954, but by the time he sent the letter, which said “the events in Algeria

are the logical consequence of an abortive attempt to decerebralize a

people…A society that drives its members to desperate solutions is a

nonviable society, a society to be replaced,”18 he had joined the FLN and was

active in the war of Independence.

His legacy in that conflict is a confused one. As is clear from

Wretched of the Earth, he believed that the only success would come from

a total violent upheaval; that indeed violence was the only validating action

possible for a colonized people. While the War of Independence was indeed

violent, it was not ended by the total violent replacing of one order with

another. Indeed, the process was not nearly as Manichean as Fanon’s

polemics would have it. Even as he wrote Wretched there was internal

dissent within the Algerian leadership. Moreover, as Jinadu explicates,

independence was not seized in the sense of Fanon’s revolutionary ideals.

The process was actually, eventually, a negotiated one, and even that was

not brought about solely by the success of violence but rather involved the

extraordinarily unpopular decision of President Charles de Gaulle that “in

the long-run it was better for France to concede Algeria’s right to self-

determination.”19

Shariati’s legacy is also confused and complicated. While his ideas

were extraordinarily influential, they were also co-opted, modified, and even

falsified by men who used his prominence to buoy their own support among

a certain group. Moreover, even his ideas themselves often experienced

17 African Studies Review, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Sep., 1973), 255-289"Some Aspects of the Political Philosophu of Frantz Fanon"L. Adele Jinadu18 ibid19 ibid


dialectic problems or contradictions. As Abrahamian points out, there were,

in fact, multiple Shariatis. As a sociologist he was passionately interested in

the rise and decay of movements. He sought to understood what drove

people to action and how bureaucratization inevitably led to the decay of

revolutions. At the same time, there was Shariati the passionate believer

“whose article of faith claimed that revolutionary Shi’ism, unlike all other

radical ideologies, would not succumb to the iron law of bureaucratic

decay.”20

There is also a question of who and how he inspired. During his life,

which ended under seemingly suspicious circumstances in Britain in 1977,

his ideas became revered rarely spurred action. Only in the student guerrilla

People’s Mujahedeen was his call for violent action heeded. And indeed, at

the time, the radical ideology was unable to attract recruits outside of the

already espoused enemies of the regime.21 It was not until Khomeini

appropriated Shariati’s legacy and began to use a multiplicity of terms that

appealed to the various needs of different segments of society that the great

uprising came to fruition. This is not to diminish Shariati’s influence; on the

contrary, he (and by extension, Fanon) provided a certain rhetorical rhetoric

necessary for Khomeini to bind those disparate groups of society. In 1978,

as Khomeini tried to appeal to those beyond his immediate followers, he

“made abundant reference to the “disinherited”, so vague a term…that it

encompassed just about everyone in Iran except the shah and the imperial

court.”22

The use of this term was not only useful in making the struggle

collective, but also indicates the sanctification of Shariati and his ideas in

Iranian society. On the same page, Kepel writes that

[Khomeini] borrowed the word from Shariati and had never used it before the 1970s. After Shariati’s death in exile in June 1977, the term had become a rallying cry for the Shiite socialist students. (111)How Shariati would have looked upon this appropriation of his term,

especially in pursuit of a “revolution” which would eventually defeat not only

20 MERIP Reports, No. 102, Islam and Politics (Jan., 1982), 24-28"'Ali Shari'ati: Ideologue of the Iranian Revolution"Evrand Abrahamian21 Course Packet, Kepel22 ibid


the regime, but all parties who in the post-upheaval setting disagreed with

Khomeini in terms of how the new republic should look is another question

entirely. What is safe to say is that in neither his case nor Fanon’s did the

particular revolution that each hoped to inspire and be a part of come to

fruition in the way they would have expected or desired.

As we enter the new millennium, the exchange between militant Islam

and Revolutionary ideology is as strong as ever. Moreover, the ability of

Islam to appropriate revolutionary third worldism to affect tangible change

is as suspect as ever. Indeed, just as Khomeini had to be aware of the

various psychosocial and socioeconomic needs of the would-be revolutionary

population, so has the modern success of revolutionary Islam depended

largely on the conditions affecting a population over and above ideology

itself. It seems as though the more tightly Israel “clamps down on terrorism”

the greater the ability of radical Hamas to inspire revolutionary sentiments

in the Palestinian populations. Examples such as Turkey show that when

Islamism is given a voice, even if marginal, in the political discourse,

revolutionary ideology has a much harder time attracting adherents.

Revolutionary ideology is, by definition, totalistic. As Fanon writes “The last

shall be put first and the first last.” It should be clear, by the example of

Shariati, Hamas and others, that Islam has within it the potential for a

revolutionary understanding. At the same time, it is self-evident that there

are countervailing interpretations as well. What seems important, as we

delve further into the next century, is understanding why it is that one or the

other of these understandings comes out, and what we can do to affect the

course of that understanding.


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Comparing Revolutionaries - Fannon and Shariati

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