ABSTRACT
Ali Shariati is widely regarded as the ideological architect of the Iranian Revolution (Abrahamian 1982; Sachedina 1983; Esposito 1986; Abedi 1986; Burgess 1988, p. 6). The extant approaches to Shariati’s political thought highlight his creative appropriation of modern Western political philosophies in his politicized re-imagination of the Shi’a Islam. Accordingly, Shariati’s ideology of ‘revolutionary Islam’,2 an influential variety of the wider phenomenon of ‘political Islam’, has been categorized under the rubrics of ‘liberation theology’, Third World populism or ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ (Keddie 1981, p. 217; Esposito 1986, p. xi). However, these ideological typologies or discursive deconstructions, illuminating as they might be, arguably provide only a political morphology and not a theoretical comprehension. What seems to be lacking is a social theoretical explanation of political Islam as part of a wider theory of the development of modern non-Western political thought.3
