Muslim Democracy as Realistic Utopia: Reading Ali Shariati in a Bandung Spirit

• In Event: Imagining Past and Future: Myth, Metaphor, Utopia

Abstract

This paper presents an alternate reading of one of Ali Shariati’s most controversial texts, 1968’s Ummat va Imāmat [The Muslim Community and Shia Leadership]. Since the event of the 1979 revolution in Iran, Ummat va Imāmat has either been wielded as a weapon for state legitimation or been the subject of trenchant critique labeling Shariati a progenitor of autocratic tendencies in the Islamic Republic. But readings of the text in English, French, and Persian-language scholarship alike are mired in a national historiography overdetermined by the outcome of the 1979 revolution; critics have too readily taken the text’s references to the 1955 Bandung conference as an endorsement of authoritarian leadership, sectarianism, state-centered policies, and illiberal populism. Even sympathetic readings of Shariati strive to distance the text from the broader ethos animating his ideas (Saffari 2017). For the former, Ummat va Imāmat constitutes damning evidence of complicity in historical errors; for the latter, it constitutes an unfortunate and unrepresentative outlier. Recent interventions in the historiography of modern Iran––interventions that reimagine the spatial and temporal qualities of the 1979 revolution––invite reading Ummat va Imāmat otherwise. Spatially, they encourage a global perspective; temporally, they emphasize a non-teleological reading of the event as lived experience, disassociating modes of revolutionary mobilization from post-revolutionary outcomes (Ghamari-Tabrizi 2016; Sohrabi 2018). Centering the text’s references to the May 68 uprisings in France in light of their continuities with the Algerian war of independence (Ross 2002), I argue that Ummat va Imāmat favors an imagined “Bandung Spirit” rich in democratic potential both for and from the Third World. Along the way, it replaces Karl Marx and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s conceptions of democracy, social justice, and utopia––ideas articulated in response to events in continental Europe since criticized for populist tendencies of their own––with a notion of Muslim democracy as realistic utopia (March 2010). Re-signifying the text most often taken to signal his worst tendencies stretches Shariati’s thought beyond Iran’s borders. In this guise, he affords innovative and valuable insights regarding prospects for democratic social justice in the populist phase of today’s “Global War on Terror.”

Author

• Arash Davari, Whitman College