Ali Shariati Mazinani (Persian: علی شریعتی مزینانی,  23 November 1933 – 18 June 1977) was an Iranian revolutionary[2] and sociologist who focused on the sociology of religion.

[6][9] In his years at the Teacher's Training College in Mashhad, Shariati came into contact with young people who were from less privileged economic classes of society, and for the first time saw the poverty and hardship that existed in Iran during that period.

He attempted to explain and offer solutions for the problems faced by Muslim societies through traditional Islamic principles interwoven with, and understood from, the point of view of modern sociology and philosophy.

His articles from this period for the Mashhad daily newspaper, Khorasan, display his developing eclecticism and acquaintance with the ideas of modernist thinkers such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Sir Allama Muhammad Iqbal of Pakistan, among the Muslim community, and Sigmund Freud and Alexis Carrel.

[citation needed] Shariati then earned a scholarship to continue his graduate studies at University of Paris under the supervision of the Iranist Gilbert Lazard.

[citation needed] The same year he joined Ebrahim Yazdi, Mostafa Chamran and Sadegh Qotbzadeh in founding the Freedom Movement of Iran abroad.

In 1962, he continued studying sociology and the history of religions in Paris, and followed the courses of Islamic scholar Louis Massignon, Jacques Berque and the sociologist Georges Gurvitch.

[citation needed] Shariati then returned to Iran in 1964, where he was arrested and imprisoned for engaging in subversive political activities while in France.

These lectures were hugely popular among his students and were spread by word of mouth throughout all economic sectors of society, including the middle and upper classes, where interest in his teachings began to grow.

Widespread pressure from the people, and an international outcry, eventually led to his release on 20 March 1975, after eighteen months in solitary confinement.

However, in Ali Rahnema's biography of Shariati, he is said to have died of a heart attack under mysterious circumstances, although no hospital or medical records have been found.

He is buried next to Sayyidah Zaynab, the granddaughter of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, and the daughter of Ali, in Damascus, where Iranian pilgrims often visit.

[16] His ideas have been compared to the Catholic Liberation Theology movement founded in South America by Peruvian Gustavo Gutierrez and Brazilian Leonardo Boff.

[18] He believed that the most learned members of the Ulema (clergy) should play a leadership role in guiding society because they best understand how to administer an Islamic value system based on the teachings of the Prophets of God and the 12 Shia Twelver Imams.

[19] He argued that the role of the clergy was to guide society in accordance with Islamic values to advance human beings towards reaching their highest potential—not to provide/serve the hedonistic desires of individuals as in the West.

"Our mosques, the revolutionary left and our preachers," he declared, "work for the benefit of the deprived people and against the lavish and lush... Our clerics who teach jurisprudence and issue fatwas are right-wingers, capitalist, and conservative; simply our fiqh is at the service of capitalism.

[23] When he was writing the three letters to Fanon, unlike him, Shariati believed that it is not true that one must put away religion to fight imperialism.

He begins his lecture by stating that: Most often, we are satisfied by pointing out that Islam gives great value to science or establishes progressive rights for women.

[27]He continues by stating that: From the 18th through to the 20th century (particularly after World War 2) any attempt to address the special problem of the social rights of women and their specific characteristics has been seen as a mere by-product of a spiritual or psychic shock or the result of a revolutionary crisis in centers of learning or as a response to political currents and international movements.

[30]He concludes that a scholar or scientist who lives, thinks, and studies during the bourgeois age, measures collective, cultural, and spiritual values based on the economy, production and consumption.

[30] It seems that his eagerness to explore socialism began with the translation of the book Abu Zarr: The God-Worshipping Socialist by the Egyptian thinker Abdul Hamid Jowdat-al-Sahar.

However, Shariati gave a critique of the historical development of religion and the modern philosophical and ideological movements and their relationship to both private ownership and the emergence of the machine.

He maintains that the western democracy based on gold, cruelty and tricking (Zar, Zour va Tazvir) is an anti-revolutionary regime that is different from ideological Guidance.

The aim of the government in the philosophy of Syasat is to change social foundations, institutions and even all the norms of society (including culture, morality and desires etc.).

Therefore, he suggested thinking of reason as the axiom for understanding the other sources namely the holy book or Quran, ḥadīth ('tradition'), sīra (Prophetic biography) and ijmāʿ (consensus).

He insisted on the concepts of knowledge and time along with the holy book and tradition and stressed the important role of methodology and changing of viewpoint.

In this vein, he firmly criticised capitalism, and at the same time, he admired socialism because it would lead humanity to evolution and free it from utilitarianism.

[41] Despite Shariati's early death, he authored some 200 publications including "articles, seminar papers, and lecture series"[42] in addition to more than a hundred books.

Besides the work of Abu Zarr mentioned above, he translated Jean-Paul Sartre's What Is Literature?, and Che Guevara's Guerilla Warfare.

He admired Amar Ouzegane as a major Marxist Muslim and began to translate his book Le meilleur combat (The Best Struggle).