Suicide Intellect
Ali
Eteraz dissects the work of Ali Shiarati, the intellectual force
behind the Iranian Revolution
A thinker, when unmoored from humanity, can become
like those Death-Eaters in the world of Harry Potter: a black force;
mysterious; hooded; shrouded; face-less; shooting his influence
into your mind; blurring the distinction between you and him --
and as you flicker and shimmer, an epileptic to his suggestion,
he takes your soul upon retreat.
Ali Shariati, long described as the intellectual force behind the
Iranian Revolution, one of the top three thinkers of twentieth century
Islam, and with his affiliation with the Sorbonne, Marxism, Sartre
and Frantz Fanon, naturally associated with the oppressed, was one
of those people about whom it was hard to suggest that he had anything
but the good of mankind in his heart. I know nothing of his heart,
but his work I know quite well. Oh, his work! His work is an extended
adulation of misanthropy and suicide. In the Muslim world no one
man has done more to render death more acceptable than Ali Shariati.
Much of the recent discussion about the Muslim proclivity towards
militancy looks to Syed Qutb, the Muslim Brother from Egypt. Perhaps
Qutb is the forerunner of Islamist institutional angst. But individual
suicide? Have we asked what prompted it? If the answer to that is
oppression, fine. But then we must ask, what legitimized it? Who
legitimized it? Is the will to commit suicide a latent underlying
force in a people? Does it percolate like water waiting to be drawn
upon? If it does, who draws it out? Who has gone down to Hades and
suckled at the Styx? Who has lapped up the abyssal depths to taste
the dark water? Who has come running, with tongue flopping right
to left, to share with his brethren the darkened water of suicide?
Who has brought Cereberus the three-headed dog of death? Cerebral
Ali Shariati, has. Alas. Who turned out to be, not the greatest
voice of humanism in Islam as his followers contend, but the misapplication
of continental nihilism. A man who in his desire to have us love
the rebel, instead fell in love with the murderer.
Ali Shariati came out of Shi'a Islam. One underlying element of
Shi'a Islam is the recognition of the murder of Hussein at the Battle
of Kerbala at the hands of Yazid who was the first true despot of
the Muslim world. Since that fateful day, the murder of Hussein
has made for the biggest culture of mourning a dead man this side
of
Christianity. In Iran, during the month of Muharram, death-plays
are rampant -- where the mutilation of Hussein's entire clan of
72 is lamented and wept over. In Pakistan, men beat themselves with
chains to feel a small iota of the pain that Hussein suffered when
speared. Ali Shariati knew the mourning of Shi'a Islam quite well.
What set Shariati apart was that he turned the mourning into rebellion.
In "Red Shi'ism v. Black Shi'ism" he openly disavows "Black
Shi'ism" which he considers to be rampantly pessimistic and
argues in favor of "Red Shi'ism" which arises out of the
primordial "No." He says: "Shi'ism begins with a
"No"; a "No" which opposes the path chosen by
history, and rebels against history." He redescribes Shi'a
Islam to have emerged from a negation. There shouldn't be a more
clearer proof of nihilism. But it gets worse.
Due to his access to Hussein, Shariati had at his disposable a
popular template upon which to impress his terrible philosophy.
This is where more than anywhere else Shariati is at his most insidious,
because more than making Hussein appear as a sort of hot-blooded
warrior of the William Wallace variety, he makes Hussein into a
cold, calculating, and most importantly, rational, practitioner
of suicide. In Shariati's view, martyrdom is not something imposed
upon you. It is chosen. Not just chosen, but rationally arrived
at. Shariati says that martyrdom "is a death which is desired
by our warrior, selected with all of the awareness, logic, reasoning,
intelligence, understanding, consciousness and alertness that a
human being has." Such are the words Shariati uses when describing
Hussein, Son of Ali, Grandson of Muhammad, the founder of Islam.
With Shariati, Hussein seems no more the bright-eyed idealist of
early Islamic history; no more the young man who used to clamber
upon his grandfather's back during prostrations. The pen, or should
it be wand, in Shariati's claws turns Hussain into Bakunin, Kaliayev,
Lenin, Mao, Bin Laden -- who do not unleash themselves against the
forces of their oppression, rather, plot against them. The former
is, at its worst, passion unchecked and might be reasoned against;
the latter is reason unchecked and has no feeling.
But Shariati is never fully able to let go of the mythical lore
that undergird his childhood in a Shi'a culture. He grew up in a
world of God. Everything must be for the sake of God. Even suicide.
So he resorts to legitimizing his Hussein by positing that all of
Hussein's
rationality is sanctified by God. After all, every exercise of
rationality requires it to be in the service of a higher principle.
The higher principle for Shariati, in a fit of perverted irony,
becomes the unity the martyr achieves by nearing God. In "Arise
and Bear Witness" Shariati reminds us that on the Day of Judgment
a martyr will not be wearing a shroud. Presumably this is because
with his suicide a martyr has already sacrificed "the being
of error and sin prior to death and now has arisen to bear witness."
Think of it: a martyr, then, is a man who, on the day of judgment,
when all humanity is being taken to account by God, on the great
equalizing plains of justice, is simply not accountable. It turns
out that the man who has consciously, rationally, hurled himself
against a greater force and found himself extinguished like a moth
in a flame -- for him there is no judgment. While the man who reformed,
resolved, worked and advocated will be amidst the huddled mass.
For the rebel, exemption; for the rational, judgment. The rebel,
free; the rational, a slave. Shariati thus gives to Islamic theology
the legitimacy of Hussein and Muhammad, packaged with the neurotic
freedom of Sade and the murder of the Russian Anarchists.
It should come as no surprise then that during the 1980's and early
1990's while traveling through the Muslim world one would encounter
romanticized tales of Iranian boys, strapping bombs to themselves
against Iraqi tanks. Whether these stories were based in fact or
not became irrelevant because the lore of the suicide began to spread.
Very soon Muslim people were reading suicide ack into their own
national histories. All of a sudden all tank battles involving Pakistan
were all about the young men who strapped themselves with grenades
and met the Indian tanks. Shariati's conflation of voluntary death
with the tragic and the mythic made such romanticizing very easy.
It should also not be a great surprise that the man who has best
come to represent the Shariati ideal is Osama Bin Laden who, because
he is so rich, is presumed to be calculating; and because he lives
as an ascetic is presumed to be a rebel.
It would be fascinating to sit and trace the intellectual landmines
which Shariati hit on his way to his proposals. He obviously had
Fanon's idea of violence as a cleansing in mind; he also had in
mind
the Marxist notions of a revolution. He probably also had in his
head the idea of the communist utopia, as well as the Shi'a utopia
which will exist at the end of time when the Mahdi has returned.
Such ideas, set into conversation with Islamic history, made Shariati
a great expositor of revolution. He is, therefore, rightly called
the intellectual force behind the Iranian Revolution. But merely
suggesting a social revolution is one thing. Shariati went much
further. He even re-read "reform" as revolution. In his
essay,
"Muhammad Iqbal" which is purportedly a eulogy to the
Cambridge educated lawyer and Indo-Pakistani poet and philosopher,
Shariati
manages to transform even the legalistic and methodical Iqbal into
a revolutionary. Shariati says, "When we say Iqbal was a reformer
or that the great thinkers after Sayyid Jamal are known for being
the greatest reformers of the century in the world, it is not in
the sense that they supported gradual and external change in society.
No! They were supporters of a deep-seated revolution, a revolution
in thought, in views, in feelings; an ideological and cultural revolution."
Ascribing such views of Iqbal, whose most famous work is a nine-part
lecture on how Islamic Law needs to be gradually tackled and reformed,
would be laughable, if Shariati's views on Iqbal had not already
become the authority on what Iqbal stood for. By linking Iqbal to
himself, and then subsequently to the Iranian revolution, Shariati
has, at least in the hearts of Pakistani thinker, the idea that
maybe Iqbal really was a revolutionary.
There is very little that satisfactorily explains Shariati's nihilism.
But in his poem "'One' in front of it, 'Zeroes' till Eternity"
there
is perhaps the clearest indication of the psychological proclivity
of
the man. The essential thrust of the poem is that God is the "One"
and besides him there is nothing.
There is no "1", Except God,
There is nothing,
There is nobody,
One, In front of It, Till Eternity, Zeros.
There is a tendency amidst practitioners of Islamic mysticism to
argue that since the highest ideal is to love God, the greatest
expression of this love can only be manifested if they minimize
their personal ego. Most practitioners of Sufism take this to mean
that one must be pious, humble, compassionate, and avoid arrogance.
However, there are those who have tended to take the minimization
of the personal ego to unprecedented levels. They have argued that
if we show our love to God by way of negating our personality, then
it means that upon successful negation we have become merged into
God. Shariati expresses this idea by way of "till eternity,
zeroes." There is God and there is no me. But by implication
that means that I am within God. Whether this is anthropomorphism
or a form of self-deification is a long standing debate in Islam.
For our purposes that debate is really irrelevant.
What matters is that we are able to find a root for Shariati's attraction
to negation. Contrast this with Iqbal's views on Sufism,
who argued that the highest good was not to make it to the mountaintop
of self-negation and then ascend into the bosom of God; rather,
cognizant that one could have found unity with God, the highest
good is to return down from the mountain and join your fellow man.
The fact that Shariati missed this lesson, despite the fact that
it is discussed in Iqbal's nine lectures series, is alarming. At
worst it shows arrogance; at best, irresponsibility. Such traits
would be alarming if found in any major thinker; they are downright
frightening in the hands of one Ali Shariati.
In 1977, Shariati was murdered in London under mysterious circumstances.
Whether he approved of his own killing we will never know. What
we do know is that were he around still he would approve of the
murder in the name of God.
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