By late 1978 and into the new year, open opposition to the late Shah of Iran by Iranians reached its peak with pictures of street demonstrations inside and outside the country regularly making it to the world news section of major newspapers around the world.

Until then, all I knew about Iran was that it a major oil producer ruled by a monarch with a glamorous empress who had visited Malaysia some years earlier and that its people are Shia Muslims, unlike much of the rest of the Muslim world.

What perplexed me most were the photos of street demonstrations in western capitals by Iranian students carrying placards bearing large portraits of Ayatollah Khomeini. At that time, socialism was the natural ideological home for politicised students the world over, even as the arrival of the Vietnamese boat people in Australia less than subtly hinted yet again at its failure.

Iranian students in Paris and Washington carrying the portraits of a religious ascetic in medieval garb instead of some world-wise socialist leader? That anachronism acutely roused my curiosity (as a first year undergraduate just barely out of my teens) to understand that phenomenon.

It was indeed a radical departure from the trend of liberation movements against despotism in the Third World. Here, religion had inspired a people to overthrow one of the most hideous tyrannies of the modern world. Among the architects of this movement, the most important is indisputably Ayatollah Khomeini himself who, in a unique fashion, had come to exercise political and religious leadership.

New generation

But the Islamic revolution would not have succeeded without the wholehearted participation of the young and the educated, and no one has had a more penetrating influence in inspiring the youth than Dr Ali Shariati.

His critique of Marxism using its own language and idioms, and presenting Islam with a fresh vision towards liberation and justice weaned the politicised young from the left, which has had a long and influential presence in Iran (discussing religion and Marxism today seems stale, but in the '60s and '70s, the competition between the two to win the hearts and minds of the masses in Iran was intense).

As a result of that, the radical leftist groups had a minor role in the final overthrow of the Shah. That Shariati died in exile unexpectedly at a relatively young age two years before the overthrow of the Shah assured his place as a martyr and icon of the Islamic revolution.

Because of his original and refreshing ideas, there was considerable interest in Ali Shariati's writings in the early 80's. The appearance of a new generation of reformers whose ideas echo that of Shariati's two decades ago, but minus the passion and style, has led me to re-read his books again.

He was not exactly the typical university scholar cloistered in academia. His 'writings' were mainly edited transcriptions of his lectures taped by his students and later disseminated throughout Iran.

On the sociology of Islam translated by Hamid Algar, professor of Persian and Islamic studies at the University of California at Berkeley (Mizan Press, 1978) and Marxism and Other Western Fallacies - An Islamic critique translated by R Campbell, graduate student from Professor Algar's department (Mizan Press, 1980), Hajj , Art Awaiting The Saviour and Fatima is Fatima are his well-known books and booklets in English that afford a glimpse of the originality and breadth of his ideas.

Ready-made slogans

If they can be taken as a measure of his genius and influence in mobilising Iranian youth against the Shah, readers would be surprised to find that in these writings there is barely a reference to the Shah or to the political and economic actualities of Pahlavi Iran during his time.

His lectures, initially at the University of Mashhad in the late '60s and later at the Husayniya Irshad, a charitable educational and religious institution in Teheran, awakened a new interest and confidence in Islam.

A large number of the secularly-educated intelligentsia who had become alienated from Islam and the masses of the Iranian nation were drawn again to Islam by the eloquence, range and originality of Shariati's thought.

He had mastered the intellectual legacy of the West, and eschewing apologetics, superficial modernism, and the much clich-d 'the best of both worlds', he presented a fresh vision of Islam that could serve as a guiding principle for Muslim society in the modern world.

Further, he endowed the discussion of religious topics in Iran with a new tone of thought and a new style of discourse that millions of young Iranians found inspiring and convincing. Memorable sentences from his lectures and writings served as ready-made slogans and they were inscribed on banners in the demonstrations that led to the Shah's overthrow.

Most importantly, many of those who lost their lives or suffered detention and torture in the course of the revolution were, directly or indirectly, the pupils of Shariati.

Marxists' monopoly

Re-reading his books 20 years down the line, the short biographical accounts in the introduction of some of those books published just before or shortly after the revolution border on hagiography. Considering the euphoric mood then and Shariati's status as a martyr of the revolution, this was not unexpected.

Although his ideas on Islam as a liberating force for humanity was consistent and he adeptly borrowed the methodology of modern sociology to analyse the socio-political situation of Iran under the Shah, at times, especially in the late, insurrectionary phase of his political lectures, these were indistinguishable from Latin America's liberation theology, .

Another fact that was little known from those biographical sketches was that Shariati had many detractors, if not real enemies, from among both the leftist intellectuals and the traditional Shia ulama .

The fact that a Muslim could also lash out at capitalism and imperialism and call for a democratic and egalitarian society robbed the Marxists of their monopoly of social criticism and change. To them, Shariati was Islamising and distorting their ideas.

But his most bitter foes came from the ranks of the traditional ulama . A recurrent theme in his lectures is the triumvirate of oppressive power, economic exploitation of the wealthy and the slavish passivism encouraged by institutionalised religion as the source of subjugation, ignorance and poverty of the common people.

He criticised superstitions, catechisms and the oppression of women in traditional religious practices but the main source of the ulama 's backlash was his attack on principal doctrines of Shia orthodoxy such as his vindication of the election of the first two Caliphs of Islam and his use of Sunni references for his arguments. (His biography however did not adequately explain how his secularly-educated followers joined forces with the religious leadership after his death in the final overthrow of the Shah).

'... art of thinking'

These are some details of this sensitive intellectual's personality, ideas, inconsistencies and contradictions that Ali Rahnema has shed light on in his book, An Islamic Utopian - a Political Biography of Ali Shariati , published in 1998 and printed in Malaysia. The author is professor of economics at the American University of Paris.

He spent five years researching the book, going through newspaper archives, published works and interviewing Shariati's friends, students and acquaintances. Factually, it has cleared some of the popular, long held misconceptions about the man. One such misconception was that his suspicious, unexpected death at the age of 44 in 1977 shortly after arriving in London as an exile was the work of the Shah's secret police (Savak).

The coroner's report stated that 'cardiac failure' was the cause of his sudden death (a plausible link is his habit of chain smoking for many years). Drawing from his biography and his works available in English, I shall attempt to sketch a brief outline of some of the more important aspects of Shariati's life, personality and ideas.

The biography by Rahnema also sheds important light on the socio-political situation of the time and the major personalities who had influenced Shariati and the development of his thought. First and foremost was his father Mohammad Taqi Shariati. Hamid Algar in his foreword to his translation On the sociology of Islam wrote that Taqi was one of the foremost members of the Iranian ulama of the time. In this he was erroneous.

He was in fact a school teacher, but a deeply religious and socially-conscious person. He founded an educational institution whose objective was to attract the youth to Islam by employing a modernist discourse in an effort to stem the influence of the long established communist Tudeh Party.

This was where Ali Shariati first cut his teeth as an orator. Shariati said of his father, '... he taught me the art of thinking'. His father's institution later became a hub for Islamic nationalists in the wake of Dr Mossadeq's oil nationalisation movement and later, opposition to the Shah after the CIA- backed coup.

Viable third way

As a politically-conscious teenager, Shariati became an active member of the 'Movement of God-Worshipping Socialists', an organisation that sought to integrate a socio-economic order of Islam with scientific socialism based on the worship of God. At the age of 18, he translated from Arabic a book on Abu Zarr, one of the early Muslims and a companion of the Prophet.

However, he freely added his own reflections, independent research and commentary and titled it Abu Zarr-e-Qifari, the God-worshipping Socialist . For him Abu Zarr was a symbol for the deeply committed, defiant, revolutionary Muslim who preached equality, fraternity, justice and liberation.

Whether the book is a factual, historical account of Abu Zarr's life is of secondary importance. His exemplary behaviour became the main ingredient for Shariati's most emotional, rhetorical and galvanising speeches and he revered Abu Zarr until his death.

By the time he was 21, he was already writing in Mashhad's prestigious daily, the Khorasan , a series of articles entitled 'The median school of Islam', which he claimed is philosophically situated between materialism and idealism and between capitalism and communism. He started by discussing the historical roots, development and principles of dialectical materialism, Hegel's contribution and Marx's development, followed by how Islam could be a viable third way.

When Shariati later enrolled at the Faculty of Literature at Mashhad University while at the same time continuing to work as a school teacher, he withdrew from political activism and occupied himself with Islamic spirituality, delving into the poetry of Rumi and Hafiz as well as writing his own. The alternating cycle of spiritualism and political activism repeated itself throughout his life, and once, when he was so depressed, the thing that saved him was Rumi's Mathnawi .

Upon graduating in 1959, he won a scholarship to study at Sorbonne University in Paris. Shariati was not the blank Third World student prepared to accept everything and anything Western. He had a deeply religious upbringing, a passion for spirituality, a romantic poetic inclination and a track record of anti-colonial and nationalistic political activities.

At that time Paris was the centre of cultural and political activity, the cradle of intellectual resistance against oppressive French colonial policies in Algeria and the scene of unrestrained intellectual debate between giants such as Camus and Satre.

At Sorbonne, Shariati's field of study was 'History of Medieval Islam" but Paris then being a veritable free university, he also immersed himself in seeking knowledge both formally and informally.

Defiant old man

He cites a number of figures whose works and views had left a deep impression on him. First and foremost was Louis Massignon, the renowned, devoutly Catholic Islamologist with whom Shariati worked as research assistant on the biography of Fatima, the Prophet's daughter. In 1972, back in Iran, in the opening sentence of his long, poetic and emotional lecture on the life and personality of Fatima, Shariati paid homage and expressed his debt to Massignon.

This very popular lecture in which Shariati eulogised the position of women in Islam was later published under the title Fatima is Fatima . Massignon's monotheistic concept of the Abrahamic religion of Judaism, Christianity and Islam as different branches of the same common spiritual source left an undeniable mark on Shariati's view of religion.

Inspired by Massignon's deeply felt compassion for the poor and oppressed, and his belief in justice as a fundamental religious principle, Shariati ascribed socio-political missions to believers of the Abrahamic religions.

Shariati came to respect George Gurvitch, his sociology professor, for his courage and political commitment. Gurvitch was a militant Jewish-Russian emigr who was Lenin's and Torsky's comrade-in-arms but fell out with the Soviet leadership and fled to Europe when Stalin rose to power. He was also an ardent supporter of Algerian independence to the point of receiving death threats from a right-wing militant organisation but the defiant old man declared in front of his students that he would not bow to such intimidations.

Gurvitch's lectures exposed Shariati to many renowned Marxist and non-Marxist sociologists and a thorough account of sociological views and debates of his time. Another eminent personality who had influenced Shariati deeply was Frantz Fanon, to whose ideas he was introduced in a lecture by Satre in a left bank restaurant. Together with his friends, he translated The wretched of the earth into Persian and in his lectures in Iran, he made numerous references to Fanon's ideas. He also translated another of Fanon's work Five years of the Algerian war .

Sartre's existentialism became an important source of inspiration for Shariati for its dynamic and change-initiating powers and he praised it as the worthiest of all doctrines, barring what he perceived to be its weaknesses. (It can be said that Shariati's core ideas of Islamic thought, repeated throughout his lectures, incorporate the justice of socialism, the liberalism of existentialism and the spirituality of the Sufis).

Vicious backlash

Following a period of introversion and spirituality in Paris, Shariati became actively involved in the student movement after returning from a vacation in Iran and the founding of the Iran Freedom Movement (IFM) by Mahdi Bazargan in 1961. Aside from IFM's political position which resembled that of Shariati's, Bazargan as a person had always been a role model for Shariati as the latter considered him a modernist and a true religious renovator.

With his powerful intellect and his pen, Shariati then went on to edit one of the most widely-read Persian language journals in Europe, the Iran-e Azad (Liberated Iran). His writings, columns and style gradually came to dominate the paper and he came to embody one of the most influential currents of thought among Iranians abroad.

Back in Iran after completing his studies, Shariati went back to his university in Mashhad in 1966 to teach at the History department. His courses 'The history of Iran after Islam and the history of civilization', 'The history of philosophy and art' became very popular because of their content and language and the captivating oratory style of his lectures. His amiable personal character of always willing to listen, and his subtle, well-discerned criticisms directed at the government endeared him to students who would flock to his classes without an inkling of the topic he was to speak on.

He would speak for up to three hours, often on a topic completely unrelated to the subject he was officially supposed to address, and students, even those from the Faculty of Sciences and Medicine, skipped their regular classes to listen to him. Shariati gradually became a source of inspiration for a large number of young people who were proud of their Islamic culture yet found it incapable of providing solutions to prevailing socio-political problems.

Shariati even appealed to a large number of middle-class students whose behaviour and outlook before coming into contact with him was far from Islamic. He never shunned or snubbed his students - his style was to challenge them to reflect and lure them into discussion.

At Mashhad University, Shariati, in 1969, published his perhaps only academically well-documented book titled Eslamshenas (Islamology). Shortly after, succumbing to the demands of his young and eager audience at different universities throughout Iran, Shariati was forced to abandon academic research in favour of repackaging some of his ideas.

Eslamshenasi contained the seed of many of the ideas which Shariati focussed and elaborated on at length later in life. It is essentially a presentation of a modern and democratic Islam compatible with the needs of a Third World country seeking a humane and egalitarian path to development. Some of these ideas run counter to Shia orthodoxy, leading to a vicious backlash from the ulama .

Solitary confinement

Shariati's influence on the young attracted the Savak's attention. In the beginning, he managed to throw the interrogators off his back by engaging in long-winded philosophising and stressing his scholarly and theoretical approach to politics and declaring that he only had the nation's interest at heart. But as opposition to the regime intensified, his teaching post was terminated at the behest of the Savak.

The peak of his activism was in the early 70's, the years that he lectured in Teheran's Husayniya Ershad. His lectures drew overflowing crowds, reached a wider audience and politicised a whole generation of youths. However, swept up by the rapid unfolding of events and the revolutionary environment that had come to prevail among the politicised youth, Shariati accelerated the pace of his frequently stated stages of political evolution.

From continually arguing that the role of the intellectual was that of awakening the social consciousness of his people, his discourses became more radical. These passionate and insurrectionary speeches were a general assault on all existing institutions - the Shah's regime, imperialism, the capitalist economic system, the class-ridden social system, western liberal culture and traditional institutionalised religion.

His biographer called this Shariati's kamikaze , the call for a revolution in a thinly veiled fashion. Indeed, some of his radicalised students joined an urban guerilla organisation, the 'Mojaheddin Khalq' (the people's army), whose internal schisms later led to a Marxist take-over and a continuation of its terrorist activities against the post-revolutionary state.

From his biography, it seems that Shariati was carried away (and came to regret it later) by his radicalised discourse which was appearing increasingly leftist, unwittingly plunging his students into armed struggle though without tacitly pushing them into it. He himself was finally imprisoned without trial in 1973 after his father was first arrested.

Released after 18 months of solitary confinement, Shariati seemed to have been pained by the direct and indirect consequences of his insurrectionary lectures, feeling himself responsible for the deaths, torture and imprisonment of his young followers. In detention, a badly tortured student of his was taken into his cell and asked to spit on his face.

Philosophical discussions

More heartbreaking was the death of Mahbubeh, daughter of a very close friend, and her husband in a street battle. He had solemnised their marriage earlier and now he had to perform their funeral rites. After his prison release he published a series of articles in the Teheran daily Kayhan entitled 'Mankind, Islam and Western doctrines'.

In these writings, one finds a revision of his most provocative ideas and invitations to struggle characteristic of his insurrectionary lectures, where he had blended Islam with Marxism and hailed the revolutionary activities of all who fought for the just cause.

His revision, however, emphasised on the structural and deep rooted differences between Islam and Marxism - in theory, practice and strategy. This was later translated as Marxism and other Western fallacies - an Islamic critique . Personally I find this a more sober critique of Western intellectual currents and unlike his previous writings, they appear as a researched piece of written work.

His new outlook showed glaring rationalisation and pragmatism, recommending theoretical and ideological engagement rather than armed struggle. But Shariati found it increasingly difficult to cope with his new freedom. Not allowed to speak in public, under constant surveillance and unaccustomed to housebound inactivity, he became depressed. His only outlet was the long hours of political and philosophical discussions with his 16-year-old son, Ehsan, and private invitations to speak at friends' homes.

Fearing that a similar fate might befall his son, he sent Ehsan to the United States and never saw him again. Finally he escaped Iran in May 1977 and went to London. He died a month later after his daughters arrived, his wife being barred from leaving Iran after his escape.

The remarkably complex and sensitive Shariati was a man of his times. He reflected the mood, conditions and pains of his era. His catchy and fiery political slogans, chanted by the hundreds of thousands during the Iranian Revolution of 1978 - 1979, will probably symbolise him to those who remember those days.

He looked at the East through Western eyes and looked at the West through Eastern eyes. He created a socio-political momentum which gave birth to a social movement that culminated in a revolution. His early death and his intense activism did not allow him the luxury of writing down his grand ideas with the rough edges smoothed out, but maybe he is best remembered that way - as a rebel, iconoclast, utopian and a teacher.