Rethinking the Islam/Modernity Binary: Ali Shariati and Religiously Mediated Discourse of Sociopolitical Development

Abstract

In much of the academic literature on the modern processes of sociopolitical change in Muslim-majority societies, Islam and modernity have been described in oppositional terms. This article examines the development of a religiously mediated discourse of indigenous modernity by prominent twentieth-century Iranian thinker Ali Shariati and his contemporary intellectual followers in post-revolutionary Iran. It asks how Shariati's thought and its new readings by neo-Shariatis may contribute to the current rethinking of the Islam/modernity binary. A case is made that, by giving simultaneous recognition to mobilizational and inspirational capacities of public religion, the discourses of Shariati and neo-Shariatis challenge both Eurocentric and culturalist discourses of social and political change, while also presenting a social democratic alternative to the vision of indigenous modernity advanced by the advocates of Islamic liberalism.