Siavash Saffari has penned an important book about the intellectual legacy of well-known Iranian thinker Ali Shariati. While books, biographies, articles and essays on Shariati are abundant, a point to which Saffari readily concedes, Shariati’s “intellectual legacy remains a source of controversy and polarization in both academic and public discussions” (p. 11). Saffari contends that Shariati’s thought is still relevant today, and that, in fact, Shariati and neo-Shariatis are “particularly well-positioned for addressing some of the pressing issues which Muslim societies are faced with today” (p. 171). “Shariati’s postcolonial reclaiming of Islam and modernity,” Saffari suggests, can be seen as “part of a historical and ongoing effort by Muslim modernists and reformists to advance contextually grounded discourses of modern sociocultural and sociopolitical change” (emphasis added; p. 169). Though Shariati is still widely read and widely studied, both in and outside of Iran, Saffari perceptively observes that existing contributions have “been largely inattentive to the ways in which Shariati’s thought and legacy are understood by his present-day followers” (p. 14). Seeking to reconcile this gap, Saffari examines the lesser-studied contributions of Shariati’s contemporary intellectual followers, “known collectively as neo-Shariatis,” to Islamic and postcolonial discourse (p. 4).

Saffari draws extensively on existing scholarship on Shariati, his followers, and Iranian intellectual thought as well as Muslim modernists and reformists, thinkers in the colonial sphere, such as Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, and thinkers on European modernity, such as José Casanova, Immanuel Wallerstein, Enrique Dussel and Shmuel Eisenstadt. Drawing on the work of comparative political theorist Fred Dallmayr, Saffari uses the method of “dialogical comparison” to examine Shariati’s thought and its new readings as they relate to perennial debates surrounding colonialism, imperialism, modernity and Islam. Saffari consistently and carefully locates Shariati’s and neo-Shariatis’ thought in the wider context of debates on modernization, secularization and westernization, and portrays the common ground between Shariati’s work and other “local and global emancipatory discourses” (p. 18). Shariati, he writes, is “one of the pioneers of this paradigmatic shift in the Muslim world … a new phase in the historiography of modernity” (p. 168).

The book is organized into five chapters. In the first chapter, Saffari reviews existing scholarship on Shariati and his intellectual legacy. Saffari’s review is diligent and deliberate, providing equal coverage to Shariati’s critics, of which there are many, and his sympathizers, and striking a balance between the work of prominent scholars such as Ervand Abrahamian and Hamid Dabashi and more recent works by Ali Rahnema and Shireen Hunter. Saffari intricately sketches the major debates and critiques of Shariati, such as the “charge of antimodernism” popularly leveled against him, or criticisms of his tendency to essentialize, articulated by Mehrzad Boroujerdi as a deceptive portrayal of the Islamic Orient and the Christian Occident as “archetypically different entities with distinct ontologies and epistemologies” (p. 35).

Here, Saffari also compellingly portrays Shariati’s thought as an “unfinished project” (p. 45). Saffari writes that, though most intellectuals of Shariati’s rank have wide followings and rich intellectual legacies, neo-Shariatis believe that Shariati’s revolutionary ideology was “still incomplete and fragile” at the time of the revolution, and consider themselves responsible for “reviving and continuing Shariati’s project of indigenous modernity” (p. 44). Neo-Shariatis thus do not merely perceive themselves as influenced by Shariati’s thought, but see themselves as a living extension of it (p. 38). Saffari details the efforts made by neo-Shariatis to “resuscitate and move forward Shariati’s ‘unfinished project’” by continuing to deconstruct modernity and tradition, rejecting state-centric approaches, and drawing on Islamic history, ontology and epistemology as a source of progress (p. 45).

In the second chapter, Saffari documents Shariati’s role in reclaiming Islam and deconstructing the “dichotomous construct of the modern West versus the non-modern rest” that emerged out of the Eurocentric narrative of modernity, and situates Shariati and the neo-Shariatis within the broader discourse on colonialism, Islamic modernism and Islamism (p. 49). Saffari contrasts Shariati’s Islamic discourse with other prominent thinkers, such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh, and traces the trajectory of modern Islamic thought.

In the third and fourth chapters, Saffari details Shariati’s vision of indigenous modernity while describing the efforts of neo-Shariatis to perpetuate and extend Shariati’s “unfinished project.” Saffari examines Shariati’s argument that religion can mediate subjectivity and indigenous modernity, and engages critiques of Shariati by social theorists such as Ali Mirsepassi and Farzin Vahdat, who suggest that his religious ontology is antithetical to the rights-bearing individual subject. Saffari also puts Shariati and the neo-Shariatis in conversation with other critical theorists in the colonial periphery—such as Edward Said, Hamid Dabashi and Fred Dallymar—who have, since the mid-twentieth century, actively subverted the hegemonic, Eurocentric metanarrative of modernity.

Saffari indicates that new readings of Shariati have challenged “the dominant Islamic discourse … [and] have contributed to the advancement of the religious reform movement and contextually grounded discourses of democratization in post-revolutionary Iran” (p. 40). By advancing a “simultaneous critique of the hegemonic discourses of modernism and secularism, and the essentialist discourses of Islamism and traditionalism,” Shariati and his followers have had an impact not limited to Iran (p. 98). Following this, the fifth chapter tackles Orientalism, Occidentalism, and introduces Shariati’s civilizational framework as well as how neo-Shariatis reworked the civilizational framework.

Saffari’s book offers more than yet another reading of Shariati; rather, as a careful examination into Shariati’s legacy and his continuing relevance, it makes several important and original contributions to longstanding debates within Iranian studies and critical studies literature. Most notably, while many regard Shariati’s thought as “an Islamist revolutionary discourse that reached its zenith with the 1979 revolution” or hold him responsible for “what they see as the direct consequences of his project of ideologizing religion,” Saffari reinforces the position that Shariati’s thought is “a vision of bottom-up and progressive sociopolitical change that remains relevant in post-revolutionary Iran” (pp. 27, 33). Saffari convincingly shows how new readings of Shariati in particular can inform modern circumstances, especially in light of the “inadequacy of normative frameworks that assume an inherent tension and clash between Islam and modernity” and “[i]n the context of the ongoing shift to post-Islamism” (p. 170).