Table of Contents

Introduction: between cultural essentialism and hegemonic universalism; 1. Post-revolutionary readings of a revolutionary Islamic discourse; 2. Islamic thought in encounter with colonial modernity; 3. A postcolonial discourse of public religion; 4. The enlightenment subject and a religiously mediated subjectivity; 5. Orientalism, Occidentalism, and the civilizational framework; Conclusion: toward a postcolonial cosmopolitanism; Bibliography.

Promotional Information

A new reading of Ali Shariati's intellectual legacy on Iranian political discourse and concepts of Islam and modernity.

About the Author

Siavash Saffari is an assistant professor of West Asian Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations, Seoul National University. He received a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Alberta, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University, New York.

Reviews

'Beyond Shariati signals the opening horizons of a fertile critical thinking to come.' Hamid Dabashi, Columbia University, New York

'By focusing on the Iranian thinker, Dr Ali Shariati and his influence on modernist thinkers in Iran and beyond in the Muslim world, Siavash Saffari has challenged prevailing theses that privilege Eurocentric analysis of the history of modernization in the global context … No student of modern Islam or Iran can afford to ignore this valuable contribution.' Abdulaziz Sachedina, George Mason University, Virginia

'In recent times, the relation between Western modernity and Islam has been a prominent topic of social-theoretical discussions … By focusing attention on the Iranian intellectual Ali Shariati and his later followers (the 'neo-Shariatis'), Saffari shows that customary binaries - such as 'Western universalism' vs 'Islamic parochialism' - are hasty abstractions and also neglect a crucial geopolitical binary: that between center and periphery, between colonizers and colonized.' Fred Dallmayr, University of Notre Dame, Indiana