Iranian sociologist, political theorist, and religious intellectual — the single most influential shaper of the Islamic-leftist ideology that provided much of the mass-movement vocabulary of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and the figure most responsible for the late-20th-century development of "Islamic liberation theology" as a distinct strand within Shi'a political thought. Educated in Mashhad and then at the Sorbonne (1960–64), Shariati studied with the Orientalist Louis Massignon, attended Sartre's lectures, worked with the Algerian FLN in Paris, translated Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth into Persian (Fanon wrote to him to thank him), and returned to Iran in 1964 with a synthesis of Shi'a religious tradition and Third-World socialist anticolonialism that he spent the next decade developing in lectures at Mashhad University and, most consequentially, at Tehran's Hosseinieh Ershad institute.
Shariati's central move was to read the foundational narratives of Shi'a Islam — especially the martyrdom of Husayn at Karbala in 680 CE — as political parables of perpetual revolt against tyranny. "Red Shi'ism" — the Shi'ism of Ali and Husayn — was the religion of the oppressed, revolutionary and egalitarian; "Black Shi'ism" — the Shi'ism of the Safavid clerical establishment and the quietist ulama — was the religion of the oppressors, a co-opted system that had turned the memory of revolt into ritual mourning and the expectation of justice into passive awaiting of the hidden Imam. Genuine religion was not an opiate but its opposite: the mobilizing force that would throw off both the Pahlavi monarchy and the Western imperial system it served. The position gave a generation of Iranian university students a religious vocabulary for revolutionary politics that Marxism, tainted by its Soviet associations and its hostility to religion, could not provide.
Shariati died in England in 1977 — officially of a heart attack, though his followers have long held the SAVAK responsible — two years before the Revolution he had done so much to make possible. The regime that emerged from the Revolution invoked him, then marginalized him; the present Islamic Republic's theocratic conservatism has little use for Shariati's radically egalitarian, anti-clerical Shi'ism, and his most serious contemporary readers are often found outside official Iranian religious institutions. His collected works run to thirty-six volumes in Persian; the English-translated selections remain fragmentary. His influence on the left wing of the wider Islamic world — in Lebanon's Amal movement, among Turkish Islamist intellectuals, and in certain strands of Palestinian and South Asian political Islam — is large.