[Reader-list] Suicide Intellect

[arshad amanullah]

Suicide Intellect
Ali Eteraz  dissects the work of Ali Shiarati, the intellectual force
behind the Iranian  Revolution
(c) Ali Eteraz
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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.


Ali Eteraz is a writer in NYC. He recently finished a novel about
Muslim immigrants and is now working on a play which borrows heavily
from the Quran. He also maintains the popular blog Unwilling
Self-Negation . His work has  previously appeared on The Revealer and
Killing the Buddha.
On Identity  Theory: "Suicide  Intellect"


arshad amanullah
new delhi-25.