Paradox as Decolonization: Ali Shariati’s Islamic Lawgiver

Who Is Chandel?

Born in 1933, Ali Shariati grew up under the shadow of his father, Mohammad Taqi Shariati, who trained in theology only to forego a clerical career and become a teacher. ¹⁹ The elder Shariati established various educational initiatives that addressed sociopolitical and economic issues through unconventional interpretations of divine sources. He effectively bypassed the hadith and schools of jurisprudence to fuse socialism with Islam. His son followed in his footsteps. An auto-didact and aficionado of poetry, Ali Shariati earned teaching credentials before completing his high school diploma and quickly assumed prominent speaking roles under the auspices of his father’s initiatives.

After earning an undergraduate degree at Mashhad University in Persian literature, Shariati received a scholarship to pursue doctoral studies in the French capital, spending five heady years between 1959 and 1964 immersed in Parisian intellectual and political life. Numerous experiences outside of his degree program left a lasting impression. He engaged, directly or otherwise, with an array of leading lights—from George Gurvitch to Louis Massignon and Fanon. All the while Shariati continued to nurture vocations he first embarked upon in Iran as a Persian-language journalist and translator, working in collaboration with activists aligned against the ruling monarchy.

The years in Paris sparked a conversation with anticolonial nationalists from across the global south. Shariati carried that conversation over to Iran in 1965 where, after a brief stint in prison for his role in anti-shah political organizing abroad, he landed a position teaching history at his undergraduate alma mater. By the late 1960s, his star had risen. Shariati toured the country, delivering electrifying lectures that refashioned Islam as an ideology equipped to rival nationalism and Marxism for the hearts of the country’s restless youth. Stretching the problem of colonial alienation to include Muslims and countries never formally colonized like Iran, he envisioned a world in which terms central to the Muslim faith signified revolutionary axioms suited to fight contemporary injustice. In anticipation of Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism, Shariati revised the concept of “return” featured prominently in writing by Aimé Césaire and Fanon (as distinct from a literal return to the temporal past) to argue that Western colonialism “disfigured” (maskh) Muslims when acknowledging their histories and identities in altered form. ²⁰ Those disfigurations worked in the service of domination.

Shariati was prolific, leaving behind 36 volumes of speeches, essays, books, and poetry over the span of a short career. He was also a gifted speaker, displaying a penchant for theatrics and a performative flair. A group of clerics and religiously minded nationalists invited him in 1968 to lecture at the Hosseiniyeh Ershad in northern Tehran, an institute intended to host educational events with novel interpretations of Shia Islam’s role in modern Iran. Shuttling between Mashhad and Tehran, he quickly became the institute’s main attraction. Not everyone was impressed: a growing number of clerical detractors saw him as a competitor, including the very individuals who initially invited him to speak.

The height of his popularity corresponded with the spread of armed urban guerrilla movements arrayed against the Pahlavi state. His lectures at Ershad invited new recruits, particularly for the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, who espoused a position amalgamating Islam with Marxism. ²¹ The state shuttered the institute in 1972 and sought to discipline its principle parties. Shariati spent the remaining five years of his life first in hiding, then reading and writing in a prison cell, and finally under effective house arrest. He died in London in 1977 at the age of 44, shortly after having managed to escape the country under a false identity and just months before the onset of a popular revolution that repeatedly and loudly invoked both his ideas and his name.

Controversy followed Shariati in death as in life. Some clerics expressed vocal support for him beginning in the mid-1970s. Others remained hostile to his ideas, issuing fatwas in 1977 and 1978 intended to consolidate clerical authority over religious affairs and dissuade misguided adherents of Shariati’s views once and for all. The 1979 Iranian revolution made it impossible to close the casket. Even Shariati struggled to contain the insurrectionary tide his Ershad lectures inspired. He spent his final years writing tracts and giving speeches that emphasized the need for greater theoretical reflection as a precondition for political change.

Contentious interpretations primarily concern his stint at Ershad during the early 1970s when, advocating insurrection, Shariati called upon audiences to “die like Husayn”—the third Shia Imam, a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed who willingly sacrificed his life to propagate his faith and institute a just social order. These lectures demanded the immediate creation of an ideal society, in many ways akin to Sukarno’s call for immediate revolution against “slow but sure” reform. Shariati’s insurrectionary discourse similarly claimed the process of ideal self-formation should occur within a prospective ideal society. ²² For Rahnema, this position marks a departure from Shariati’s earlier speeches and writings, where he refrained from political advocacy and insisted on the merits of cultural and theoretical education. The young Shariati believed the conditions for revolution were neither present nor objective, a refrain he would adopt once more in later writings.

While select portions of Shariati’s collected works appear foundationalist, the vacillations of his intellectual project—shifting between seemingly introverted “desert writings” (kavīrīyyāt) and assertive political speeches—best capture his method. He resisted self-identification as early as his university years: “How terrifying it is to feel that the more I seek to find myself the less I succeed, whatever I recognize as myself is not me but a stranger who deceitfully poses as ‘me.’” And then, in relation to God: “I would like to relate all these ‘I’s’ that I find in myself to a mysterious truth which is ‘other than I,’ all manifestations of Him.” ²³ Rather than dismiss these statements as authorial idiosyncrasies, Shariati demands readers follow his peripatetic style.

Nor should these idiosyncrasies be chalked up to the vicissitudes of ideology. Hamid Dabashi’s oft-cited characterization of Shariati as “the Islamic ideologue par excellence” attributes inconsistences in his oeuvre to a single-minded focus on affecting political change in defiance of fact or “systematized political theory.” In this reading, Shariati’s energies were entirely oriented toward an ideological refashioning of the status quo, his “private pieties” sublimated into “public virtue.” ²⁴ Shariati undoubtedly sought to construct an Islamic ideology, but he consciously did so as a strategic response to a specific time and place—1970s Iran, when and where ideological thinking held purchase. Explaining away his changeable pronouncements by characterizing his oeuvre as the machinations of an ideologue robs it of its searching quality.

Rahnema instead locates in Shariati a methodology of “becoming” (shudan). According to his landmark study, Shariati understood the human as a godlike and hence creative being for whom “nothing is final and all is in transition until he or she attains God’s attributes, ascending from the lowest to the highest form.” ²⁵ The method mimics the human condition as Shariati sees it by identifying dialectical contradictions from which “becoming” emerges. Those contradictions facilitate our ascendance to the divine, an end goal we can never expect to fully secure on earth. Shariati appears in this light as a romantic—a utopian who crafted an “immaculate vision” beyond the reach of any actual revolutionary movement. ²⁶

It would be easy to dismiss Chandel as another one of Shariati’s idiosyncrasies. On the contrary, invocations of Chandel are signposts illuminating the contours of his method. Chandel (or chandelle, “candle” in French) is first and foremost fictional. ²⁷ Shariati published politically contentious articles in his youth under the penname shamʾ (; “candle” in Persian), an anagram of his full initials. ²⁸ After his stay in Paris, he translated the former pseudonym, effectively referencing himself when citing the authority of a French professor, a North African writer, a linguist, a music teacher living in Rome, or a compatriot of Rabindranath Tagore—depending on the circumstances. ²⁹ For Shariati’s critics, the device merely covered unseemly thoughts. ³⁰ Treating authorial intent like a murder mystery, these claims overlook the lessons Shariati imparts insofar as the performance of the device itself communicates substantive points. Above all, Chandel was “becoming” incarnate. ³¹

Mentions of Chandel introduce questions about epistemological authority. Shariati describes Chandel as a thinker whose “spirit” circulates in the same space as his own:

whose thought contains the combination of power and delicacy I dream to have in my own; whose writing, language, and perspective convey the style I strive to fashion in my own. His sayings, apart from the depth of thought they convey, have a distinct taste and feel, a special character, that sates me intensely. He has mixed Greek philosophical logic with Eastern transcendental sentiment [theosophy], equipped it with contemporary knowledge [ʿulūm] and the scientific method, and decorated it with art, especially poetry. He has built for himself a perspective to view the world, a language with which he speaks, and a spirit with which he lives. ³²

When Shariati introduces Chandel as an immaculate vision of epistemological autonomy—equipped with a distinct perspective, language, and spirit of his own—he recalls enduring questions about the prospect of decolonization. Fanon once described the impossibility of breaking French colonial rule while thinking and speaking in French. ³³ Shariati’s decision to communicate the virtues of autonomy using a French moniker strikes a sharp contrast. This is aspirational autobiography shrouded in irony, an elaborate act of self-disidentification. Shariati represents himself as a disfiguration of Chandel, a replica striving to reach a perfect (French) original. And yet, Chandel is a product of Shariati’s imagination, a disfiguration he authored, a Western source who turns out to be non-Western. The play encourages a sensibility attuned to paradox and also, I argue, a concept of paradox as decolonization.

Religion against Religion

Shariati brings together two strands of thought associated with Rousseau. Anticolonial thinkers writing in the heyday of decolonization understood freedom as nondomination, effectively turning Rousseau on his head. Where Rousseau saw alienation in the move from a state of nature to human artifice, twentieth-century freedom fighters equated alienation with colonization. ³⁴ Later, theorists of democracy interpreted the paradox of founding undergirding Rousseau’s theory of the social contract as a resource to navigate difference in already formed polities. For many, Rousseau’s lawgiver seemed to resolve the paradox, relegating it to the past. Contemporary democratic theorists reinterpreted paradox as a persistent, irresolvable feature of the present. Recasting the paradox of founding as a paradox of politics, they declared the democratic virtues of nonlinear and plural temporalities. ³⁵ Postcolonial political theory is only now beginning to address the question of founding on its own terms.

The effort to address the paradox of founding through a noble lie cannot be imported wholesale from Europe to the periphery. The dilemma facing proponents of guided democracy, in other words, does not reductively mirror the paradox of founding described in The Social Contract. This is in large part due to the foreignness of the lawgiver in Rousseau’s model. A foreigner who mysteriously appears and disappears and who by virtue of being a foreigner is not socialized by existing custom to fear change, the lawgiver is impervious to alienation, exploiting nondemocratic means to transform a loosely affiliated collective into an autonomous people. ³⁶ The actual lawgivers of the postcolonial world were indigenous revolutionaries who continued to govern after the declaration of formal sovereignty. Seeking to address alienation, they were obliged to maintain at least a pretense of authenticity. Sukarno’s concept of guided democracy projects a lawgiver that is both real and native, manifest in the embodied person of a postcolonial statesman. But guided democracy cannot explain how or why this indigenous lawgiver would emerge with sufficient distance from a condition of alienation to legislate and relinquish control when necessary. The project of postcolonial founding, it was claimed, cannot be so general as to compromise self-determination.

Fanon took a more radical, grassroots approach, rendering the problem of postcolonial governance as an opposition between the spontaneity of a multitudinous Third World revolutionary subject and Marxist organization. He “historicized and reworked” Rousseau’s notion of the general will to demonstrate how national consciousness emerges from the popular experience of anticolonial struggle, dissolving the lawgiver into the figure of les damnés. ³⁷ Largely associated with the peasantry, les damnés was a “nonworldly” and expansive category that could also include the slum-dwelling lumpen-proletariat and members of the Third World’s working and middle class. ³⁸ Fanon thus endorsed the “intercontinental populism” of a Third World “collective subject” at odds with “hierarchical political relations between elites and masses” ³⁹ —the kinds of relations latent in Sukarno’s concept. Accordant with interpretations of Rousseau’s general will as the active and ongoing participation of democratic citizenry, this argument roots self-governance in popular will, from the moment of decolonial founding on through postcolonial governance. ⁴⁰

Fanon, however, did not historicize enough. His thinking on this topic was inspired by encounters with the Algerian peasantry’s anticolonial struggle against French occupation in the 1950s. That peasantry developed “spontaneity” through generations of deliberate organizing around Islam. In other words, Fanon’s opposition between spontaneity and organization was in fact between two forms of organization, Islamist and Marxist. ⁴¹ This is not to say that Fanon ignored differences between mass politics across locales, merely reducing the (Algerian) people’s general will to secularism. In the imagined dialectical formation of an “intercontinental” collective subject, national liberation struggles articulated a welcome rejoinder to the empty abstractions of pan-ethnic and pan-racial anticolonial resistance. ⁴² Meanwhile, the discussion of national consciousness in The Wretched of the Earth suggests the people must not attempt to emulate God—or, for that matter, any lawgiver invoking a civil religion—but rather act godlike by authoring their own destiny. ⁴³ And yet, insofar as Fanon takes the Algerian peasantry as a canvas to formulate these concepts, his rendering fails to adequately heed its own call to recognize and follow the people. Operating from a distinct theological tradition, many of “the people” in Algeria did seek to emulate God. The resulting erasure of Islam, I would suggest, resembles the disavowal of Black thought and experiences from the Western canon.

The Islamists who inherited the project of postcolonial state formation in many Muslim-majority countries failed to adequately address overlaps with Rousseau’s paradox in their own right. According to Andrew March, Abu’l Aʿla Mawdudi argued that the ummah (as opposed to the nation) exists through self-identification with divine law, something that “preexists a specific political order.” We can infer that a virtuous people invariably will the sovereignty of divine law over politics such that the process of inculcating virtue appears superfluous. Sayyid Qutb imagines a more active expression of popular sovereignty. While Mawdudi and Qutb outright rejected unconditional popular sovereignty (in their estimation, the ummah could not disavow divine law), Qutb draws a fine line between passively rejecting identification, on the one hand, and actively embracing an identity on the other. The distinction allows for a republican model where Muslims live under the law they give themselves. Rashid Ghannushi extends this reasoning to suggest that the ummah is the lawgiver. The people are God’s deputy on earth and in no need for transformation. Rather, the ummah authorize leadership. Likewise, they oversee and constrain it after it has been established. ⁴⁴ Where some Islamists presume that the act of reciting the shahada alone grants believers a general will, Ghannushi, like Fanon, locates virtue in the collective’s authorial capacity. The exercise of the general will, we are told, automatically creates the general will.

These notions of Islamic popular sovereignty share an assumption about the mere existence of an ummah. Shariati stands apart, questioning any essentialist, prefabricated Muslim identity on principle. As his self-proclaimed intellectual heirs have argued at length, Shariati’s attention to “becoming” and his use of a method committed to the impossibility of self-identification forecloses the fixity taken for granted by his Islamist peers. ⁴⁵ Crucially, it also diverges from Fanon, whose dialectic settles on a materialist foundation. Les damnés signals a collective subject produced not only by the colonial expropriation of wealth, but also the attendant negation of local history, culture, and tradition. It is a “nothing-ness,” its projected universalism a consequence of absolute dispossession. ⁴⁶ Viewing colonialism through anti-Black racism—which reduced the colonized to embodied “things”—Fanon inverted the harm by projecting an irresolute future horizon rooted in the materiality of his body. “Oh my body,” he would declare, “make of me always a man who questions!” ⁴⁷ The rendering presumes a bare form of self-identification as its point of departure. Shariati reportedly disagreed with Fanon on the potential use of Islam to orient anticolonial struggle. ⁴⁸ From his Islamic perspective, our material constitution cannot tell the entire story of our existence. Humans are at best godlike.

A 1970 Ershad lecture delivered at the height of Shariati’s tensions with clerical detractors and in the midst of an insurrectionary phase, Religion against Religion (hereafter RR), illustrates his differences with foundationalists of both metaphysical and materialist stripes. The lecture advances Shariati’s “task of placing old Islamic concepts in a new light,” ⁴⁹ distinguishing between shirk (idolatry or polytheism) and tawhīd (monotheism, associated with the Abrahamic prophets). He describes tawhīd as movement toward the absence that is God, which, like other Islamists, Shariati understands as the ultimate sovereign (sāhib, mālik). Shirk locates sovereignty—property, especially—on this earth. ⁵⁰ While tawhīd promises revolution, shirk maintains the status quo. When “materialist intellectuals in Europe” debase religion as the opium of the masses, they are in fact referring to shirk, not tawhīd. ⁵¹

But Shariati does not see tawhid as unitary. RR reiterates and develops his methodology—specifically, his dialectic of disfiguration. Shariati revaluates the term kufr, commonly used to describe nonbelievers and atheists (kufār), as that which covers tawhīdī religion in the manner of soil covering a seed. Abrahamic prophets, he claimed, coined the term for their antagonists at the time: people with misguided religious feelings. ⁵² Shariati similarly redefines tāghūt. The word classically refers to idols worshipped in lieu of God, thereby “exceeding the limits” of Islam. It was later redefined (by Mawdudi, among others) to signal rebellion against God and his will. Shariati recasts tāghūt as anything and everything humans author, that which “we ourselves have carved”—in a word, artifice. ⁵³ These resignifications imply the need to pass through disfigurations like kufr and tāghūt to reach for the absence that is God.

Shariati thereby positions secular critics of religion as allies who help uncover tawhīd. He goes so far as to compare them to the Abrahamic prophets, provoking charges of blasphemy and later descriptions of his thinking as ideology geared toward mobilization at all costs. ⁵⁴ On closer examination, Shariati characterizes tawhīd as “a unity of all traditionally believed contradictions . . . a negation of negations.” ⁵⁵ “Materialist intellectuals in Europe” perform a service by suggesting adherents of tawhīd are complicit in promulgating shirk when those adherents fail to challenge the status quo. The Europeans, Shariati suggests, are only mistaken when they go so far as to conflate tawhīd and shirk as one. ⁵⁶ Recalling Hegel, Shariati endorses a critique of tawhīd in order to affirm tawhīd. Simple celebration of the peasantry, the ummah, les damnés, or even tawhīd—of any single moment in the dialectical movement between opposing poles, of any product of human artifice—fails to capture the spirit of religion. The seed grows from the nourishing soil of kufr that covers it. A nonfoundational concept of Islam approaches the divine through disfiguration.

The Ummah and the Imamate

Shariati’s rendering of Islam fashions a perspective attuned to political paradox, but only if his audience never expects to reach the divine. If decolonization requires the institution of an ideal society, a utopia, or an historically concrete Aufheben in the dialectic of disfiguration, then Shariati’s postrevolutionary critics are right to be wary. In this case, tawhīd would correspond with a unitary vision of sovereignty designed to incorporate, if not suppress, any divergence. Critics who read Shariati in this light charge him with seeking to pursue heaven on earth (bihisht-i jahānī). ⁵⁷ Blame for the excesses of the Islamic Republic are attributed accordingly.

UI receives near unanimous scorn as a particularly egregious example of Shariati’s disdain for democracy. The text transcribes a series of lectures delivered at Ershad between March 31 through April 3, 1969—only his second engagement at the institute and the first of his political statements in that setting. Shortly after these lectures, in late April, Shariati was banned from public speaking in Iran for six months. These later appeared in print under his supervision. ⁵⁸ For scholars, UI is at best a “perplexing” text. ⁵⁹ At worst, Shariati is a sophist armed with remarkable oratory legerdemain, deliberately tricking audiences into later accepting authoritarian rule. ⁶⁰ UI, in this reading, echoes theories of the state advanced by certain prominent Shia clerics (as well as the Pahlavi shahs) that indefinitely defer democracy. ⁶¹ There are notable exceptions to these interpretations when it comes to Shariati’s thinking in general. A significant contingent insists on historical context, claiming the parts of Shariati’s corpus that speak to contemporary democratic sensibilities comprise the essence of his thought. And yet, even these revisionist efforts disown UI. They cast the parts of Shariati’s corpus that do not speak to democratic sensibilities as aberrations, products of the era of decolonization. UI is the main culprit. ⁶²

This consensus is premature. UI offers a sustained reflection on the relationship between the formation of a political community and its leadership from Shariati’s Islamic perspective. He poses an ambitious question: can the project of postcolonial democracy avoid the respective pitfalls of statecraft in Western and non-Western societies alike? What distinguishes Shariati are the intertextual connections between his written words and their public performance. UI muddles categorical distinctions that could otherwise justify indefinite authoritarian rule, a pattern consistent with Shariati’s broader methodology.

One historical account suggests that, with UI, Shariati intended to address the controversy following the January 1969 publication of his Islāmshināsī lectures at Mashhad University. First delivered in 1966–67, the Mashhad lectures aim to present a democratic version of Islam as the religion’s ideal and original identity. Citing the concepts of shawrā (consultation) and ijmāʾ (consensus), Shariati recounted an instance where the Prophet conceded to majority opinion even when it erred; claimed that the second caliph Umar left the selection of his successor, Uthman, up to elections; and noted that the fourth caliph, Ali, came to power by winning the general vote and never begrudged those who voted against him. ⁶³ He further argued that the procedure used to select Abu Bakr, the first caliph after the Prophet Mohammed, was democratic. This last point caused a stir among an emerging contingent of clerical detractors, a number of whom privately communicated their concerns in the months preceding the UI lectures at Ershad. Others later published screeds claiming Shariati betrayed the founding principles of Shia Islam which viewed Ali, the Prophet Mohammad’s cousin and son-in-law, as the rightful successor—an argument that placed limits on the exercise of democracy in Islam’s founding moment. ⁶⁴ This history, combined with an incident in December 1968 in which Shariati refrained from speaking at Ershad due to tensions caused by clerical rivalries, ⁶⁵ set the stage for UI—and for Shariati to benefit from the use of indirection behind the guise of Chandel.

UI is conscious of its broader historical moment. Shariati makes reference to the Bandung conference as well as the May 1968 uprising in France. ⁶⁶ More substantively, he describes Sukarno and Tito as personifications of “guided” or “committed” democracy (dimukrāsī-yi hidāyatī or mut‘ahid), translating the notion into the language of Shia Islam through the tradition of the Imamate. ⁶⁷ Iran’s postrevolutionary state aired recordings of the lectures on public radio, part of a campaign to conscript Shariati as its intellectual forefather. Despite hostility to Shariati’s repeated attacks on their authority, a bourgeoning class of newly empowered clerical political leaders adopted guided democracy as articulated in UI. ⁶⁸ This seemingly affirmed the accusation that the text legitimated Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s unassailable leadership as a living Shia Imam.

It should be noted that the Imamate corresponds to differing models of leadership across Sunni and Shia Islam. ⁶⁹ Shariati took the projected schism as an invitation for dialectical analysis. He repeatedly transgressed the divide in his characterizations of religion, favoring “Muhammad Sunnism” and “Ali Shi’ism” over “Umayyad Sunnism” and “Safavid Shi’ism.” ⁷⁰ His concept of the Imamate inhabits the conventional Shia notion and inverts it. The Shia believe that leadership of the Muslim community (or ummah) following the Prophet’s death should be assumed by his descendants, the Imams, who are said to hold charismatic authority in their person. Following the occultation of the twelfth designated descendent, the ‘ulamā (learned jurists or clerics) are believed to hold provisional authority. They offer conditional guidance by educating the community.

A year after Shariati presented UI, Khomeini delivered his own series of lectures from exile in Najaf, recapitulating the ‘ulamā’s authority under the Imamate to also include political rule. Allamah Tabatabai had ventured a similar formulation a decade prior but fell short of nominating a jurist to govern. ⁷¹ Khomeini’s concept of wilāyat al-faqīh (the guardianship of the jurist) would be incorporated into Iran’s political system (in significantly altered form) after the revolution. An ensuing historiography concerned with why the revolution occurred and why it resulted in an Islamic Republic has obscured the fact that Shariati’s redefinition of the Imamate addressed cultural traditions and clerical institutions distinct from Khomeini’s intervention. Attempts to read Shariati as modernist or anticlerical similarly obscure the fact that Shariati’s redefinition both was and was not consistent with those traditions and institutions. ⁷² He discards the expectation of jurisprudential expertise intimated by Tabatabai and later decreed by Khomeini but retains the ascription of provisional authority now refashioned as revolutionary leadership.

UI thus delivers a sharp critique of liberal democracy as part of a broader argument for continued revolutionary leadership following the ancién regime’s overthrow. ⁷³ Shariati’s version of guided democracy posits a distinction between sīyāsat and politique—one that accords with the more familiar distinction between extraordinary and ordinary politics in contemporary political theory and, in his opponents’ worldview, between Shia and Sunni Islam. Western liberal democracies are suited for politique, the administrative management of what is (“being” [būdan]). By contrast, non-Western societies require sīyāsat, a mode of political organization necessary for transformation (“becoming” [shudan]). ⁷⁴

OPEN IN VIEWER

Western	Non-Western
politique	sīyāsat
being (būdan)	becoming (shudan)
leaders are “determined” (ta‘īn)	leaders are “discerned” (tashkhīs)
Sunni Islam	Shia Islam

Due to their developmental stagnation (marhaliyih rākid), newly emancipated non-Western societies would simply vote themselves back into the state of autocratic exploitation created by Western colonization. Western societies have presumably reached the requisite stage of development and are suited to navigating the pitfalls of democratic governance. But for Shariati, even in the West, democracy goes unrealized. Because of undue economic influence in the political sphere, Westerners too are not actually democratic. Claims to the contrary suggest bad faith. ⁷⁵

Rather than glorify the non-Western (or an undeveloped concept of Shia Islam), Shariati associates the Muslim community with sīyāsat and politique at once. In essence, the ummah is a “migratory society,” a process of “going” (raftan) and “becoming.” Its “going” should not be confused with passive movement from one point to another, leaving the subject of migration unchanged. It instead signals a dynamic movement transforming the subject along the way. That said, the perpetual change defining the ummah is not open-ended but oriented by and toward permanence, predicated on a notion of movement toward a determinate goal. Shariati explains the idea with reference to the practice of circumambulation around the Kaaba, an “infinite movement (seven times), without cessation, without obstacles, without returning, but around one fixed axis.”

The specific perspective [bīnish] of Islam becomes apparent here—a wondrous emphasis on the principle of movement and action, but a movement with a determinate orientation. Islam has thus combined perpetual change and perpetual permanence. The Islamic perspective is based on this principle, expressed in the circling of the Kaaba. ⁷⁶

An exemplary leader, acting from on high, transforms a people to eventually participate in democratic self-governance. What Shariati calls for—his characterization of the essence of Islam—both stands against and affirms ijmā’ (or an undeveloped concept of Sunni Islam). ⁷⁷ Democracy, which his clerical detractors equate with Sunni Islam, can appear once the Muslim community has first been prepared for it by way of Shia Islam under the guidance of elite figures, or Imams. ⁷⁸

Shariati configures the Shia Imam, its apotheosis in Ali, as becoming who he essentially and already is through the transformation he imparts to the community. Whereas the classic Imam may only be “discerned” (tashkhīs) for what he is, a contemporary Imam (or political leader) may be “determined” (ta‘īn) by the people. ⁷⁹ In other words, the hero of a revolutionary movement—separate from the ideologue that precedes and the statesman that follows the uprising—is defined by the process of being discerned for what he is as he becomes it. The process recalls Shariati’s aspirational autobiography vis-à-vis Chandel:

He is born and comes to life through the union between jihād and belief. In love, through the negation of himself, he asserts himself. And in search of the people, in losing himself, he finds himself—he senses himself. In action, toward consciousness; in failure, toward victory; in quitting himself and departing [migrating, hijrat] from himself toward the people [mardum]; he becomes human [bi insān mīrisad]. There, he comes to himself. In the fires, his identity transforms. In the people [khalq], he creates the destiny of his society, his own destiny. In everything he builds, he becomes self-determined [self-built, khud sākhtih]. In everything he cultivates, he becomes self-cultivated [khud parvardih]. ⁸⁰

The lectures begin with an indirect acknowledgment of the polemics his then recently published Mashhad lectures inspired, noting accusations from certain clerical circles that he was a covert Sunni. ⁸¹ On the one hand, Sunni Islam, momentarily equated with liberal democracy, appears as the end-goal of worldly politics. In a gesture sure to needle his opponents, Shariati renders clerical authority temporary and Shia Islam a passing phase in the realization of Sunni Islam. On the other hand, Shariati depicts Sunni Islam as an ineluctable goal, evincing a utopian streak. From this perspective, UI legitimates a revolutionary form of Shia Islam imbued with an indefinite mandate. The charge that Shariati laid the discursive groundwork for Khomeini’s later identification as an “Imam” might seem justified. ⁸²

Another reading in line with Shariati’s concept of nonfoundational Islam attends to the text’s definition of the ummah as both being and becoming, Sunni and Shia. Shariati, here, bridges sectarian divides, meaning he sees democracy (being) and its transformative preconditions (becoming) simultaneously. This aspirational vision of Islam conflicts with the text’s rigid linear teleology from one stage to the next. Moreover, it positions Shariati’s religion against the one promulgated by his detractors. Which of these accounts are we to believe? UI deliberately leaves the problem unresolved. The lectures’ democratic promise resides in the performative indeterminacy of its form, meaning the text cannot be judged as democratic or undemocratic based on written words alone. Rather, Shariati demands listeners (and later readers) attend to his embodiment of becoming as a guiding ethos. He leaves it up to his audience to realize it.

A Postcolonial Lawgiver

Consistent with his reconfiguration of conventional clerical authority under the auspices of the Imamate, Shariati retains the ‘ulamā’s pedagogical functions, assuming the mantle of the educator in their stead and of the teacher as lawgiver. Rousseau’s account of founding understands popular political education as a necessary first step in the formation of a republic. ⁸³ His lawgiver brandishes civil religion, convincing prospective citizens to submit to its curriculum before they attain the virtues needed to appreciate the merits of doing so. When postcolonial statesmen and theorists suppress or conceal their deployment of religion, they champion top-down institutional change (Sukarno) or abstract populism (Fanon). Both approaches can sanction polities at odds with democracy.

A different trend in anticolonial thought privileges ethical and educational transformation, recalling Rousseau’s conception of teaching as foundational. ⁸⁴ Islamists of various stripes endorsed this approach, inviting “work for the reform of selves (nufus), of hearts and souls by joining them to God the all-high.” ⁸⁵ At times, they would even grant ethical transformation indefinite temporal priority over changes to political governance, inverting the problem plaguing guided democracy. How Islamists viewed ethical and educational transformation, however, varied. Because they ascribe a fixed identity to the ummah, influential Islamists like Mawdudi, Qutb, and Ghannushi differ from Shariati in their assessments. For Ghannushi, subject formation involves the cultivation of “inner restraint” to accord with revealed law. ⁸⁶ In Shariati’s view, pedagogy functions as a mirror in which the people can see themselves as a people and thus see past colonial disfigurations. The formation of a collective self in UI is not limited to conformity to divine law. It invites the ummah to see itself as the ummah in the first place.

Shirk religions, Shariati argues in RR, depend on blind acceptance of religious principles to ensure the status quo. ⁸⁷ To inspire the movement required for tawhīd, Shariati embarks on a pedagogical project meant to inspire movement within his audience—revolution not just on a distant political stage, but also within oneself. Constant movement can take two forms. Following Mawdudi, Qutb, and Ghannushi, Islamic pedagogy can involve the continuous submission of the self to external disciplinary practices in order to create and further cultivate internal sensations of belief. This brand of ethical and educational transformation invites a theory of the self as incommensurate with the secular liberal Enlightenment. ⁸⁸ Shariati traverses the presumed divide between Islam and the West in UI, a move consistent with his nonfoundational rendering of Islam as tawhīd. He conveys a different vision of Islamic pedagogy—one still oriented toward the cultivation of Enlightenment subjects in the image of Kant’s answer to the question Was ist Aufklärung? Yet Shariati seeks to foster relentlessly skeptical, rational, and atomized individuals critical of even themselves. ⁸⁹ The differences salient for this version of Islamic pedagogy do not lie in predetermined characterizations of Islam or the West, but in the specific process a prospective citizen navigates to arrive at an Enlightenment subjectivity suited to modern democracy. If tawhīd emphasizes movement, then (pedagogical) process and performance matter above all.

Invocations of Chandel prove central to the task. UI laments an unmoored modern condition, swapping an “ethical sub-structure” (zir-banā-yi akhlāqī) for (a caricature of) Marx’s economic base. ⁹⁰ The move recapitulates self-determination. Anticolonial nationalists extended the concept from formal statehood to include economic conditions that would allow for democratic governance domestically and equal standing internationally. ⁹¹ Shariati’s identification of an “ethical sub-structure” follows in Fanon’s footsteps, broadening self-determination to include the embodied, normative, and psychic dimensions of domination. ⁹² A political community cannot claim autonomy if the people within that community remain burdened by colonial mores. In this vein, Shariati deplores the inconsistent signs (‘alāmat), or arrows (filāsh), contemporary intellectuals leave behind to guide readers when they propose secular utopias. The ummah, a migratory society ready for “going” and “becoming,” also lacks signposts suited to its quest. ⁹³ Considering Shariati’s history of planting biographical clues, Chandel’s appearances across the lectures promise guiding signs where other less grounded and more ethically fickle intellectual contemporaries failed. ⁹⁴

Shariati teaches through Chandel. His ironic references recall characteristic features of iconoclastic utopianism, which similarly views God as an absence. ⁹⁵ For Kierkegaard as well, following Socrates, irony is an experience. We transcend a practical identity to realize the principle, or spirit, underlying that identity. Modern Islamic thought similarly seeks to recapture the spirit of Islam’s founding moment. Shariati’s irony takes the project one step further. Like Kierkegaard, who also wrote under pseudonyms, he communicates an experience of irony exceeding the act of simply positing an ironic question. The experience comes to fruition in the relationship between a teacher and his audience. ⁹⁶

Shariati’s Islamic utopianism, his performance as Chandel, privileges spoken pedagogical exchange as a nonliteral, extratextual site imbued with potential for greater proximity to the divine. As Naveed Mansoori argues, these exchanges allowed Shariati to undercut the legitimacy of the Pahlavi monarchical state, which took silence as tacit consent. Shariati performed a different kind of silence, reclaiming a link between popular sovereignty (the ummah) and the universal silence of God. Along the way, he modeled a different kind of perceptual behavior for his audience. ⁹⁷

Chandel is a puzzle for readers to solve from his very first appearance in UI’s introduction. They must discern who Shariati is and what he is saying behind the veneer of Chandel, just as one would discern (tashkhīs) a classical Imam for what he is. Shariati begins with a statement about method. He gives his audience clues, indirect instructions on how to receive his ideas, while insisting that they listen as sociologists and not believers. He implores them to arrive at whatever judgment they wish so long as they judge on social scientific terms. ⁹⁸ A scientific method facilitates widespread understanding, a democratizing force allowing everyday people, and not just experts, to see past the disfigurations of a clerical class. ⁹⁹

Shariati seems to have reversed course by the end of the introduction. He repeats the imperative to take responsibility and think for ourselves, not waiting on elites. He then says we must adopt a scientific perspective with respect to Islam such that we disfigure it (explicitly using the word maskh). In deliberately marring Islam through its translation into scientific terms, he claims, we prepare ensuing generations for a swarm of information and ideas. By virtue of having learned to see past disfigurations in his lectures, these generations will have developed the strength within to resist the impending swarm. ¹⁰⁰ Chandel appears just before the introduction’s final reversal. To demonstrate that the Quran should not be read as a metaphysical text, Shariati uses what he calls a scientific method to list the disproportionate number of chapter titles in the Quran referencing the natural world. Recall the double entendre he deploys in naming Chandel: Shariati asks that we look beyond the names to the relationship between form and content structuring the Quran.

He goes on to note that the Quran’s first and last utterances are Allah and al-nas (which he translates from Arabic as “God” and, erroneously, “the people” or mardum in Persian). ¹⁰¹ He then performs a mistake. He claims that the text’s bookends suggest a clear path between God (khudā) and the human (insān) only to theatrically correct himself:

I was mistaken! ‘The human’? No, ‘the people’ [mardum]! The Quran does not use ‘the human’ here, rather ‘al-nas’! I understand why now. The human is an imagined being, the name of a form. . .In Chandel’s words: ‘The human? What does it mean? Tell me who, so that I may tell you what it is.’ ‘Al-nas,’ the people [mardum], has objectivity. It is a human that has achieved external manifestation. . . . ¹⁰²

Consider the various ironic registers operating in this passage. Without acknowledging it, Shariati earnestly cites an invented authority—a literally manufactured human in Chandel—to argue against invented notions of humanity. He undermines his authority as a teacher in a lecture about leadership where the teacher–student relationship models the relationship between a revolutionary leader and his followers. Shariati decenters himself by centering a fabricated figuration of himself and does so to challenge a colonial mode of rule predicated on disfiguration. These inversions suggest that the truth of Shariati’s words lie not in what he says, but in how he says them—not in being, but in the being of becoming. Shariati presents himself as a modest and humble teacher, proposing contingent ideas. After all, he admits, “I have arrived at conclusions, but neither you nor I should believe what I say to be one hundred percent correct.” ¹⁰³

As he was wont to do, Shariati translated concepts from Islamic traditions into experiences salient in modern life. UI equates the status of an Imam, a prophet, and by extension a lawgiver to that of a good teacher. In either case, the people “discern” (tashkhīs) the figure in question. Even “the most democratic and intellectual of today’s liberals” would not suggest that we “determine” (ta‘īn) them by casting votes. ¹⁰⁴

This particular teacher-turned-lawgiver transforms the ethical dispositions of both audience and readers, producing a self-determined, critical, scientifically minded people suited for the actualization of democracy. As a pedagogue, Shariati seeks to cultivate a democratic sensibility in his audience. References to Chandel are a device, disfigurations meant to be figured out. Listening to the lectures, and identifying when and how to see past Chandel, is an exercise in becoming, one that affords an opportunity to practice self-determination. Shariati wants us to catch him acting the part of an untrustworthy source, in doing so rendering the lawgiver’s services irrelevant. The Imam in question is not Ayatollah Khomeini, but rather the messenger himself. Poised safely behind the veneer of Chandel’s authority, Shariati plays the role of an exemplary figure. It is no coincidence that the first Shia Imam was also named Ali. For anyone unable to read between the lines, in the culminating lecture Shariati describes his pedagogical work as prophetic, akin to the cultivation of human beings by the Prophet Muhammad and Imam Ali. ¹⁰⁵

This implies yet another ironic twist: Shariati brandishes an instrument of disfiguration to foster self-determination. European colonization erases traditional models and exemplars. The only substitute in an otherwise empty world is a modern-seeming fabrication of itself. ¹⁰⁶ And Chandel embodies that fabrication. He is a direct reflection of the alienation fostered by Western colonial rule. Shariati can pass Chandel off as an authority because the latter appears to possess a vaguely Francophone identity. As it turns out, he is a forgery of the author (Shariati) intended to be deciphered. It would appear that Chandel adds scholarly heft to Shariati’s arguments. But adjusted for irony, as opposed to positivist social science, the use of Chandel reveals gentile, pseudo-scientific Orientalists as the true charlatans. Put differently, Shariati repurposes the Orientalist assumptions greasing the imaginative wheels of European colonization rendering Muslims inferior.

Should the audience discover the truth about Chandel, it would distrust Shariati, their “Imam.” This is by design. Like Rousseau’s lawgiver, Chandel is a foreigner. In line with postcolonial articulations of the lawgiver, Shariati identifies with the people he seeks to transform. The difference is that he also intends to foster the audience’s distrust and doubt. Those who adhere to his method come to think for themselves. As a result, they practice a realistic and realizable brand of self-determination in the present. The act sheds the underlying problem with Western colonization and domestic authoritarian rule alike, including the clerical kind. The point is made all the more forcefully because Chandel is Shariati, but his audience may initially think otherwise. Were they to search for the actual Chandel, the source of pure authority, they would invariably be disappointed. The model of leadership, as it is modeled for them, is contingent and partial.

Shariati’s second citation of Chandel registers the need for signposts to realize ethical ideals in a modern world lost to uncertainty:

In the words of Professor Chandel, we have defeated all the heroes of the past, all those grand and sacred figures. Through worship of them, we continuously brought ourselves to a state of completion. Through a constant yearning to approximate them, we maintained hope for salvation from defeat and confusion. Through our appeals to them, through our praise and love for them, by worshipping them, we would approach and habituate ourselves to the virtues and values [they possessed]. For when I praise a collection of values, when I like them, when I get close to and think about someone who possesses them, I cultivate them in myself. Nowadays, those statuesque figures have all been shattered. They no longer exist. And we do not believe in them. ¹⁰⁷

Recall the predominant scholarly consensus regarding UI. That Shariati asserts the need for stable and consistent leadership with reference to the authority of a nonexistent reflection of himself should give discerning readers pause. Against his own endorsement of Sukarno’s guided democracy, Shariati’s rhetorical performance does not justify authoritarian rule, indefinite or otherwise. Quite the opposite, the performance is an act of lawgiving, cultivating a disposition primed for inconsistency and uncertainty—the stuff of democracy.

Shariati conjoins Rousseau’s dictum about “men as they are” with a tenable iteration of the lawgiver as a foreigner through a deliberate effort to cultivate uncertainty. This is not to say that UI pursues uncertainty for its own sake. Rather, the uncertainty provoked by the lectures cultivates internal strength and resolve in the face of increasingly disorienting fabrications. Shariati is speaking in the shadow of a coup engineered by the West, an event that weaponized fake news in the service of empire. UI aims to cultivate a posture of resistance in response. A people otherwise deemed incapable of self-determination follow an “Imam” who follows a nonexistent figure. The audience comes to think for itself in the process. This is not fabrication meant to secure authoritarian rule; it is fabrication meant to subvert authority in any garb.

Chandel’s final appearance in the text calls for restrictions on democracy in the name of democracy:

The greatest enemy to freedom and democracy, in its Western form, is democracy itself, liberalism itself, individual freedom itself. ¹⁰⁸

And then:

Democracy in a backward and unaware society that needs revolutionary leadership and guidance is the enemy of democracy itself. ¹⁰⁹

By now, the fourth night of the lectures, we have been trained to read Shariati. The statements repeat an ironic aspiration for the essence of a thing—in this case, democracy—beyond its practical appearance. But Shariati takes matters a step further. Couching the apparent tautology in citations to Chandel adds a layer of irony—specifically, the dramatic irony of an audience that may be in on the joke. Shariati’s appeal to a fictive authority undercuts the statements’ literal argument against democracy—the most troubling facet of the book for scholars today. It also undercuts the statements’ ironic gesture toward a vague and indeterminate democratic essence. Shariati is not advocating teleological development toward the eventual, or infinitely deferred, realization of liberal democracy. Rather, by positing an ever-absent divine telos, his rhetoric performs the nonteleological cultivation of a democratic ethic in the here and now.

Conclusion: Paradox as Decolonization

Bonnie Honig opens the first chapter of Emergency Politics with an account of postrevolutionary Iran. Ryszard Kapuściński’s musings on the popular revolutionary movement’s outcomes prompt Honig to introduce her concept of political paradox. Kapuściński remembers, “everyone . . . opposed the Shah” but “everyone . . . imagined the future differently.” Liberal dissidents who sought to replicate “the sort of democracy they knew from their stays in France or Switzerland” quickly lost power when faced with a pro-Khomeini majority. Gradually thereafter, “the enlightened and open ones” among that majority lost the upper hand to “conservative hardliners.” The “paradoxical situation” leaves Kapuściński with a feeling of pessimism. Honig sets herself the task of recovering the “positive possibilities such a paradox might harbor, and what sort of orientations and perspectives might open those possibilities to view.” ¹¹⁰

Both Kapuściński and Honig presume a separation between liberal democracy and the Islamic Republic. Honig’s political theory follows directly from this opposition. Non-Western theorists and statesmen adopt a different perspective. Sukarno’s formulation of guided democracy was designed to ward against an unchecked exercise of liberal democracy that threatened to undermine the gains of decolonization. The hasty affirmation of liberal democracy could perpetuate enduring colonial influence at odds with the principle of self-determination. In Kapuściński and Honig’s accounts, the project of ongoing decolonization central to the 1979 Iranian revolution disappears altogether. Honig instead understands the paradox of politics as distinct from the act of founding. Where “founding” (conflated, here, with origins) implies resolution by proposing a discernible break in linear time, a focus on “politics” eschews the prospect of resolution to affirm the nonlinear recurrence of paradox in democratic polities.

Decolonization poses its own dilemma. Theorists of agonistic democracy describe paradox as enduring on account of a claim that the paradox of founding is, in fact, irresoluble. From a decolonial perspective, to claim founding (associated, again, with origins) as irresoluble is to cast doubt on the independence of formerly colonized peoples, however nominal it may be. Meanwhile, to deny the enduring quality of the anticolonial project is to accept the pittance provided by formal decolonization and thus deny ongoing international hierarchies.

Shariati’s performed theory of leadership in The Ummah and the Imamate offers an incipient account on the basis of which to address this dilemma. It retains both the paradox underlying founding in general and the pursuit of resolution demanded by decolonization. Thinking with Shariati, in this sense, complements efforts to pivot from prevailing concepts of founding focused on ethical challenges against “established authority” to founding as a tenuous “practice of world building.” ¹¹¹ Using his status as a teacher and the figure of Chandel, Shariati proposes to resolve the problem of founding seemingly shared between Rousseau’s paradox and Sukarno’s theory of guided democracy. That resolution depends on the proliferation of a sensibility attuned to paradox—which in turn presumes a nonfoundational Islamic perspective. Where theorists of agonistic democracy see attempts to resolve the paradox of founding as anathema to the paradox of politics and its attendant democratic possibilities, Shariati reconfigures the paradox of founding as a problem of colonization, the resolution of which depends on the cultivation of a broader paradoxical sensibility refracted on a global scale. To think decolonization (which presumes some measure of linear time) and the enduring paradoxes of a formed polity (which presumes nonlinear time) at once is a paradox as well. The democratic possibilities it affords remain to be seen.