Shariati

Ali Shariati was undoubtedly among the most important of the prerevolutionary Islamist thinker particularly insofar as he made Islam a politically respectable force for many young men and women in Iran's traditional middle classes. Shariati was novel for the time in terms of his education and intellectual influences. The clear attraction of ideology for Shariati is that he believes by means of it man is endowed with the capacity to transform the world around him. The current paper tries to explore the manner in which Shariati carried out his highly politicized reading of Islam, assigning centrality to the notion of a just order. Author argues that Shariati's quest for a just order is more important than the order itself.

The purpose of this study is to identify the roots of cultural policy making in the IRI. Having a historical approach this article has used a thematic content analysis with a “content coding technique” to review the works of three Islamic revolutionary scholars whose views have been frequent reference to many cultural policy makers before and after the revolution. In this regard there have been “thirty headlines” identified as policy making headings which are divided into: ten headlines from Ali Shariati’s book called “Returns”, eight headlines from "The Future of the Islamic Revolution" a book by Morteza Motahari, and twelve headlines from a series of Seyyed Ahmad Fardid’s lectures, titled as "Hereafter Conquest and Meetings of Farahi". According to the results of this research, the sharing feature of these three views, albeit from different origins of ideas, is the two following lines "Confrontation with Being Westernized" and "the Priority of Reform, and the Development of Thought and Culture". Another result of this research indicates the influence of the document "Principles of cultural policy of the country" through the views of these scholars. At the end of this article, it is claimed that the Islamic Republic of Iran's cultural policies, both elective and compound, are rooted in the cultural theorists of the revolution, and it cannot be accepted that the Islamic Republic of Iran, in its forty-year lifetime, departed from the first designed cultural principles. It is a form of early thought that has been recognized and formed as normal

Justice has been reflected upon by various religious and nonreligious thinkers since ancient times. In Islam, discussions of justice among theologians started in different sects with a discussion of divine justice and gradually expanded to reach discussions of social and political justice. While examining the various aspects of sociopolitical justice in Islam, this article makes an attempt to follow this concept in three jurisprudential, philosophical and sociological approaches among contemporary Muslim thinkers. In this respect, the views of three thinkers, who paid attention to this concept in their works, is of significance. To this end, the views of Allâmé Mirzâ Hoseyn Nâini will be discussed from the Islamic jurisprudential point of view, those of Ayatollah Mortezâ Motahari from the philosophical point of view and those of Dr. Ali Shariati from the sociological point of view. This study will also make an attempt to establish landmarks in the discussion of justice, with which the reader can make a comparative study. For this purpose, the philosophical, social and sociological foundations of justice will be emphasized and various aspects of justice (political, social, economic and philosophical justice) will be identified and introduced accordingly.

Civilization plays a central role in Ali Shariati's intellectual framework, to the extent that understanding his broader philosophical system is nearly impossible without comprehending his views on the concept of civilization and the evolution of human society throughout history. This article seeks to explore Shariati’s approach to civilization by employing the dynamic framework of Thomas A. Spragens and addressing five interconnected questions: What is the concept of civilization? What are the characteristics that shape human nature? What are the obstacles to human development? What are the factors that can free humanity from these obstacles? And, finally, what drives the progress of human civilization? The findings of this study shows that Shariati views civilization as the collective achievements and accumulated knowledge of human society, which do not naturally exist in the environment but are created by humans due to three inherent qualities: self-awareness, free will, and creativity. These attributes are inherited from God and exist as latent potentials within each individual. To actualize these qualities, however, humanity must overcome four determinisms: nature, history, society, and the self. According to Shariati, the gradual mastery over these four constraints leads to the formation of civilization. Throughout historical processes, humans gradually liberate themselves from these external and internal forces. In this transformation, individuals evolve from beings shaped by nature, society, history, and the self into creators of nature, society, history, and the self. As a result, their divine-like attributes—self-awareness, will, and creativity—reach full potential, leading them to the ultimate ideal of a true, exemplary human, which in Shariati's view, is a near-divine figure.