Ali Shariati

Dr. Ali Shariati was born in Khorasan into a religious family and earned a doctorate in sociology from the Sorbonne in Paris, where he was influenced by Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Che Guevara. Returning to Iran, he was repeatedly imprisoned by the Pahlavi regime before lecturing at the Hosseiniyeh Ershad in Tehran.

Shariati's electrifying lectures captivated hundreds of thousands of Iranian students and intellectuals. He reformulated Shi'ite theology as a revolutionary liberation theology—contrasting 'Red Shi'ism' (the religion of martyrdom, justice, and popular struggle exemplified by Imam Husayn) against 'Black Shi'ism' (institutionalized clerical passivity and state subservience), standing as the foremost intellectual architect of pre-revolutionary youth mobilization.