Contemporary Political Islam Final Paper

Nathaniel Whittemore

Fanon and Shariati Third World Revolutionary Thought in the Ideology of the Iranian Revolution

Nathaniel Whittemore Contemporary Political Islam Fall 2004

Contemporary Political Islam Final Paper

Nathaniel Whittemore

Each generation must out of relative obscurity discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it. So begins the fourth chapter of Frantz Fanons seminal 1961 work The Wretched of the Earth. The book is a veritable manifesto of Third World revolutionary ideology, espoused by a French-educated psychologist who found himself spokesman during the French-Algerian war. While Wretched became immediately notable for its call for violence to affect change, it is perhaps most penetrating in its analysis of both the individual and collective psyche of the Native. Indeed, as it began to be translated and disseminated, its lessons reapplied, it would become clear that what Fanon had was a unique understanding of what forces, personal and social, were at play in the lives of individuals and the masses in the period of independence and post-independence. A young Iranian scholar, studying at the Sorbonne in Paris, recognized this almost immediately. Ali Shariati would go on to be the primary intellectual behind the 1979 Khomeini revolution. Throughout the 1970s, the culmination in Iran of the climate of unrest and political suppression, Shariatis lectures were circulated on audio cassettes. As the Shah was forced to abdicate, his stature was second only to Khomeini himself. Shariati thus stands as the intellectual behind the only complete Islamic revolution in the 20th century. But how much effect did he really have on the course of the revolution? It is the contention of this paper that Shariati was able to make Fanon's revolutionary third worldism accessible to Iranian's by reframing its doctrines of salvation and personal agency in terms of indigenous Shii theology. By advocating expression rather than sublimation of individual cultural identity and belief, Shariati added a sociologists understanding of movements to Fanon's penetrating psychology of the postcolonial situation. Indeed, by asserting, if not in these terms, that Islam was in fact the natural and correct expression of Third Worldism in Iran, Shariati set the stage for Khomeinia effective organization of popular participation in the 1979 revolution. In the first part of the paper I will do a close textual reading of Shariati's Intizar to show how Fanon's philosophies were modified in the Iranian revolutionary context. In the second I will look at how each thinkers writing influenced or failed to influence the course of their perspective revolutions.

Contemporary Political Islam Final Paper

Nathaniel Whittemore

From a very young age, Shariati was interested in Islamic salvation and the potential of alternate worldviews. His father was a reformist cleric active in religious socialist circles.1 The father and son shared a hero in Abu Zarr, a perhaps legendary early follower of the prophet who had denounced the caliphs and devoted his life to providing for the poor.2 Shariati was enamored not only with this legacy, but with sources of inspiration outside his direct experience. In 1958 he completed a masters program in foreign language study focusing on Arabic and French. Two years later he won a state grant to study in Paris.3 His time there would be instrumental in the evolution of his political, religious, and social philosophy. Paris at the beginning of the 1960s was a city erupting with the passion of intellectualism and revolution. The existentialism of Camus and Sartre had set aflame the minds of young philosophers. Contemporaneous revolutions in Cuba and Algeria had created a feeling of the tangibility of ideas. It was here that Shariati was introduced to figures such and Mao and Che. Moreover, it was where he discovered Franz Fanon. Fanon was born in Martinique in 1925. He traveled to Paris to study medicine and psychology and later to Antilles to practice. In Antilles he began to have experiences with the brutality of transitional colonial experience that would culminate with his seminal The Wretched of the Earth. That book was written on the heels of his stay at a hospital in Algeria during their war of independence. As he delved deeper and deeper into the psyche and trauma of the colonial experience, he increasingly found his sympathies with the rebels. By 1961, he had become a leading intellectual of the African revolutionary cause.4 It was in this capacity that Ali Shariati was first introduced to him. What follows is a close textual analysis of one of Shariatis works which provides an excellent example of his synthesis of Fanons revolutionary Third Worldism with indigenous Shii Islam.
1

MERIP Reports, No. 102, Islam and Politics (Jan., 1982), 24-28 "'Ali Shari'ati: Ideologue of the Iranian Revolution" Evrand Abrahamian
2 3

ibid ibid 4 Fanon, Frantz The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press, Inc. 1968

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Nathaniel Whittemore

The piece in question, Intizarmadhab-I Itiraz [Awaitingthe religion of protest], was written in 1971 as the climate in Iran continued to heat up. Freedom of expression was more limited than it had been for years before. Everywhere, a deadly and unstable silence and stasis was maintained in the face of increased numbers of SAVAK secret police.5 Indeed, the first thing that should be noted about the piece is that it deals little with an Islamic conception of state and rather focuses on the potential and, as Shariati would argue, the necessity, of rebellious or revolutionary action to reclaim the state. Like Fanons Wretched, the work does not deal extensively with a theoretical structure to come to power after the revolution. Indeed, Fanons foregoing of explication of a post-revolutionary governing apparatus has been a main criticism lobbied on the treatise. Instead, both works focus more directly on the potentiality of upheaval locked inside the masses. Fanon writes dialectically about the spirit and humility locked inside the would-be revolutionary to bring about justice after the fall of the colonial power. Shariati focuses the terms of discourse on Shiite Muslims, whom he argues have within their ideological, religious and social framework not only the potential but the duty to rebel and take control of their future. To varying degrees, the inspirational tone adopted by both authors may reflect audience. It cannot be denied that much of Wretched of the Earth was a heady and educated polemical catharsis for Fanon. Much of his diatribe against the colonial structure is inflected with broad historical oversight and specific expertise that would make it inaccessible to your average member of the lumpenproletariate or peasant class. To some extent, it joined Marx, Mao, Che, and Jeal-Paul Sartre in the Pantheon of brilliant revolutionary thinkers whose influence was, nonetheless, somewhat limited to the educated intellectuals and guerillas. Yet at the same time, there are parts of Wretched that virtually scream solidarity and cannot help but raise a pounding in ones chest. The last chapter especially is an example of Fanon as he casts aside the banner of frustrated intellectual and virtually straps on his rhetorical AK47, ready to join the fight himself and lead the world to a greater era of peace, justice, and equality. Fanon writes among the final pages of his book
5

Course Reader, Gilles Kepel

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Nathaniel Whittemore

Come then, comrades; it would be as well to decide at once to change our ways. We must shake off the heavy darkness in which we are plunged, and leave it behind. The new day which is already at hand must find us firm, prudent, and resoluteWe must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man. (Fanon, 316)

Indeed, it is important to understand Fanons attempt to revalidate that we (who he calls the masses) to understand how Shariati rejected a type of discourse which would be accessible only to learned scholars or clerics. Fanon gives precedent to that decision when, on page 188
It is true that if care is taken to use only a language that is understood by graduates in law and economics, you can easily prove that the masses have to be managed from above. But if you speak the language of everyday, if you are not obsessed by the perverse desire to spread confusion and rid yourself of the people, then you will realize that the masses are quick to seize every shade of meaning(Fanon, 188)

Shariati takes this tone a step further. In many ways Shariatis purpose in Intizar is to personalize the inspiring but grandiose and impersonalized speech of Fanon. Shariati understood the limits of the potential for mobilization that constrained the contemporaneous dialogue of uprising. He recognized the difficulty of mapping a cultureless revolutionary rhetoric onto a society with a distinct cultural consistency and very real needs; indeed, onto a culture whose needs and identity which were potentially radically different from those of the rhetorics origin. At home in Iran he had seen examples of this difficulty as extant socialist movements failed to capture the sentiments of any large segment of society, save the educated and often expatriate student communities. As Kepel writes, the intellectuals were much more in step with the bookish culture of proletarian internationalism that with grassroots Persian society.6 Intizar can be viewed from within the framework of Shariatis attempt, then, to make revolutionary ideology accessible to the Iranian masses by reframing its inspiration in the indigenous terms of Islam. The thrust of Shariatis break with or movement from Fanon was that he believed that only by understanding the revolution in the terms of a specific culture could people be inspired to true productive action. Shariati sought to move the discussion from the classrooms to the streets in a way in which most all revolutionaries would have supported but few knew how to do.
6

Course Reader, Kepel

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Nathaniel Whittemore

Finally, it is important to recognize that, for all our talk of reframing the revolutionary discourse, one should not view Shariatis Islam as simply a useful device for a greater goal of government overthrow. More specifically, he was not out to appropriate or co-opt Islam for his purposes. He believed passionately, like Fanon, in the potential of the masses, but also in Islam. Indeed, he believed not only that the two could be reconciled, but in fact that one (Shiism) was the source, at least in Iran, for the other. Intizar begins immediately (and unlike many other texts of political Islam) by casting the terms of discourse onto Islam itself, rather than the abstract other of the extant state apparatus or the economic dominance of the West. Shariati writes
In the history of mankid no religion has ever witnessed such a widening gap separating what was from what is. 7

Part of Shariatis adoption of Fanons revolutionism8 to the specific case of Iran came in the pushing aside of that other (namely, colonialism) in favor of a serious and sustained self-examination. From this statement, the tone of Intizar is one of the negative and positive cohabiting in the extant reality. It is a tone of problem but also of potentiality. In this case, the widening gap demonstrates a serious hindrance to Islams coming to fruition as a revolutionary force, but also, in identifying the discontinuity, alludes to the remedy of that break. The quote, and indeed, the entire feeling of the piece is inflected with the notion that the first step to overcoming ones own challenges is to acknowledge them. Beyond this though, the immediate discussion of Islam, Shiism, and the disparity between secular elites, the religious clerics, and the uneducated but pious Persians, serves to move the impersonal discourse of Fanon to a much more home-hitting Iranian analysis. As part of his abstraction, Fanon simplifies the world into admittedly Manichean terms, namely, that of the oppressor (the settler or colonist) and the oppressed (the native). Throughout Wrteched, Fanon detaches himself from specificities to talk psychoanalytically of the condition of the native.
The native is always on the alertconfronted by a world ruled by the settler, the native is always presumed guiltyThe natives muscles are
7 8

Course Packet, Ed. Esposito From here on out used to describe the general revolutionary ideology of Fanon

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Nathaniel Whittemore

always tensedThe native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor. (Emphasis mine, Fanon, 53)

Shariati, on the other hand, re-complicates the world not only through an emphasis on self-analysis, but on the complicated nature of the prerevolutionary crises. Iran was not Manichean, but rather a confusing amalgam of different groups with different needs. Shariati discusses the secular elites in the first few pages of Intizar, saying that they might accuse him of safeguarding superstitions. He also defines the religious masses in terms of their categorical belief in the idea of Intizar or waiting for the return of the hidden Imam. He is drawing divisions by suggesting that they believe this above and beyond what science would tell them of the possibility of agelessness. Finally he discusses the clerical leaders, who he faults for forcing unexamined faith that neglects the necessity (which Shariati in fact believes stems from Islam) of independent rational, scientific analysis. What is interesting is that for Shariati, these groups, despite their varying positions, were connected by their common cultural starting point of Islam. Indeed, each group was defined by their relative positions towards that faith; the elites by their rejection of doctrine, the religious masses by the necessity of their faith (they have to have faith, and they do have it9) and the clerical classes by their acceptance of any and all ideas in the Quran above and beyond reason. Regardless of each groups stance, their identity was fundamentally affected by the condition of their Islamic origins. How then, he might have asked Fanon, could there be any other departure for a revolutionary movement than that shared heritage? Similarly, part of the re-personalizing of revolutionary thought and movement from abstraction to Shariatis revolutionary Islam involved the place of the individual. The shift is subtle. Fanon argued that the idea of individualism was a bourgeoisie Western concept employed by colonists to, in effect, keep native populations segmented and competitive amongst themselves. On page 47 he writes that when the struggle starts, Individualism is the first to disappear. The native intellectual had learned from his masters that the individual ought to express himself fully. The colonialist bourgeoisie had hammered into the natives mind the idea of a
9

Course Reader, Ed. Esposito

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Nathaniel Whittemore

society of individuals where each person shuts himself up to his own subjectivity, and whose only wealth is individual thought. Now the native who has the opportunity to return to the people during the struggle for freedom will discover the falseness of this theory. (Fanon, 47) Insofar as Fanon is rejecting the potential divisiveness among a population in need of solidarity in face of oppression, it seems as thought Shariati would agree. Yet at the same time, it is clear from Intizar that Shariati is nervous about a blind acceptance of shared belief, even if good intentioned. He suggests that Shiism is an ideology that, in its very acceptance requires individual reason and rational analysis. From his sociologists perspective, Shariati was frustrated that Islam, which he believed required a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding, had been boiled down to simple fiqh, or jurisprudence. He suggested that religious beliefs can follow, step by step, social, cultural, and scientific progress.10 Extending the sociological terms of his argument, he suggests that the understanding of intizar and ghaybat (the end of time), has changed over time because of evolving conditions, by way of different interpretations of its influence upon the social, political and intellectual life of its adepts. His most direct imploring for the necessity of individual understanding within a greater movement, however, comes as he renegotiates the legacy of Mohammed himself. He claims that the prophets example was not to be worshipped, but rather to be learned and appropriated by each individual. He was a guide not only to God, but to a proper life of seeking that God. Each person had and has a duty, claimed Shariati, to live as an individual Muslim seeking his own place in the movement towards salvation. In this section of Intizar, the author calls upon the (ostensibly Muslim) reader directly:
Even you, followers of the Prophet, you must not stop with the person. This is not a matter of prophetic cult, but the goal of a school of thought. The value of the Prophet lies in his showing the way to that goal. His task was, like previous prophets, to come, bring a Message, show the way, then go. If he died, or was killed, would you turn on your heels!11

If we understand Shariati as adapting the revolutionism of Fanon to the Islamic roots and realities of Iran, it would make sense that he spends due
10 11

ibid ibid

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Nathaniel Whittemore

time sorting through the necessity both of individual efforts and self-analysis and Islamic movement politics and sociology as a whole. Islam is a religion that has, since its very roots dealt explicitly with the macro and the micro; what it means to be a part of Islam and what it means, oneself, to be a Muslim. Indeed, perhaps the most pertinent example of this phenomenon is the historical interpretation of jihad, or sacred struggle. Traditionally there has been a division of jihad between internal and external. Certainly there were mujahadin, fighting on the margins and borders of Islam for their faith. This jihad brought with it special modifications of doctrine, in areas as diverse as eternal rewards and Ramadan fasting procedures. Moreover, there was the idea of the internal jihad, in which every Muslim faced his or herself to live by the Koran and the example and sayings of the Prophet. These are the socalled lesser and greater jihads. What is interesting to note is the way in which different groups have interpreted just which is the greater and which is the lesser. While many traditional Muslims and even moderate Islamists have come down firmly that the internal is the greater jihad, certain others have rejected this analysis. A link off of the main homepage of the Islamic Resistance Movement (HAMAS) for example, categorically denies this and suggests that in this time of great external threat to Islam, the actually war is the greater jihad. Regardless of interpretation, it is clear from the text that Shariatis Islamic revolutionary thought takes into account this fundamental cultural duality. In the same section where he implores pious Muslims to actually think about what it means to live in the example of the Prophet, Shariati comes to the most important point of the text, and the concept most clearly influenced by Fanon. This is his idea of futurism, a concept which required a fundamental reinterpretation of the most important foundational practices of Iranian Shiites. The context is undeniable Third World revolutionism, and requires another look at Fanons seminal Wretched of the Earth. Fanons Wretched is dominated by a sense of urgency. It is a push, more than anything else, for movement. On page 53, he writes that the natives muscles are always tensed. The book is a desperate call for a release to that tension and the total uprising that will replace the old colonial order of things with all its vestiges of authority in the so-called native

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bourgeoisie with a new order of freedom, justice and equality. It is a call for the oppressed to assert control over their rightful destiny. Characterizing the process of decolonization in the first few pages of the novel, Fanon writes
The proof of success lies in a whole social structure being changed from the bottom up. The extraordinary importance of this change is that it is willed, called for, demanded. The need for this change exists in its crude state, impetuous and compelling, in the consciousness and in the lives of the men and women who are colonized (Fanon, 1968, 36)

Fanon goes on to suggest that this change must most often come about through violent means. On page 94, he writes that violence is a way for people within the revolutionary movement to assert control of their own future and shake off previous stasis.
At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction Even if the armed struggle has been symbolic and the nation is demobilized through a rapid movement of decolonization, the people have the time to see that the liberation has been the business of each and all (Fanon, 94)

Moreover, Fanon asserts strongly that, no matter what the phase of

the revolution, action is the validating force that is needed to continue to inspire the masses. In a passage that must have resonated with the young Shariati, who, for all his admiration of revolutionary thinkers, was facing a domestic suppression similar to but not exactly the same as sustained outright colonialism in Algeria, Fanon decried the post-colonial face in which the ostensibly nationalism bourgeoisie leadership becomes corrupter by its own inaction and maintenance of the colonial hierarchy. He places his emphasis on their maintenance status quo:
Without that struggle, without that knowledge of the practice of action, theres nothing but a fancy-dress parade and the blare of trumpets. Theres nothing save a minimum of readaptation, a few reforms at the top, a flag waving: and down there at the bottom and undivided mass, still living in the middle ages, endlessly marking time. (Fanon, 147)

This then, is the context for Shariatis reclamation of Intizar; a mass kept subdued by an illegitimate nationalist control from above, a lack of action and movement, and the very real potential for both individual and collective action, futurism. Intizar or waiting for ghaybat (the end of time) or the return of the hidden Imam is for Shariati the fundamental foundational doctrine of Shiite

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Islam, at least in its separation from other Islams. He suggests that Intizar can be and has been conceived of in two opposite ways. On the one hand, there is the belief that accepting intizar means waiting without action, believing that it will be Gods lot to sort out the evils and ills of society and the world when he returns the Imam at the end of time. Then there is the idea that waiting requires participation in the look towards the future. Throughout history, Shariati contends, the first interpretation had been dominant. Moreover, it has been a corrupting fallacy in which people diluted themselves to the true revolutionary nature of their religion. Shariati writes that from the moment the Prophet passed awaythe same old system resumed its rule over history. Neither truth remained, nor justice; nor did mankind find salvation.12 He argues that at every step of history, with every invasion of Iran, the impetus for people to find salvation within themselves and their own actions by understanding the words and example of their great forbearers was neglected in favor of acquiescence to fatalistic waiting for a destiny outside their control. He suggests that this quiescence set the stage for the gaping hole between reality and doctrine now facing Shiites.
We believe in and are expectingsince God had truly promised victory to Islam. He had promised the wretched masses they would become leaders of mankind; He had promised the disinherited they would inherit this earth from the mighty.13

Yet

We see that the reality occurring in the external world contradicts the Islamic truth we believe in.

Finally then he suggests that it is only intizar...the final,

predetermined triumph of Turth, [that] can solve this disparity between the reigning false reality and the presently condemned redeeming Truth...14 What Shariati means is that intizar inherently implies specific duties and modes of thought, feeling, and action, from the believer who commits himself to it. Waiting can not be static or conservative and backwards looking because by definition, a man who awaits, awaits the future; one cannot away the past. Indeed, for Shariati, intizar means hope and inspiration; as he says, it means futurism.
12 13

ibid ibid 14 ibid

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Nathaniel Whittemore

The end of his work sees Shariati at full force with a revolutionary reinterpretation of this doctrine. Indeed, like Fanon at the end of Wretched, Shariati lets down his personal guard and adopts the personal banner of the change in sentiment that a true understanding of intizar requires. In the closing paragraphs he commits himself fully to the pursuit of a future which will bring salvation. Moreover, he locates Muslims in this struggle by defining its history in terms of their heroes: The struggle for liberty and justice follows a course similar to that of a river. There is Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammed, Ali, Hasan, Husayn, and so on until the end of time when this movement triumphs over all the world.15 Finally, in the most complete synthesis of Fanons revolutionary ideology and its adaptation or reunderstanding through Shiite Islame, Shariati concludes that:
Intizar means to say no to what isEven negative intizar implies revoltWhoever is content with the present, is not awaiting. On the contrary, he is conservative; he fears the futureFor a condemned nation [and here he is most certainly writing of and to Iran] to give up intizar means to accept defeat as its fat forever.I, in the part of this world and at this moment of history, am expecting, in a future that might bea sudden world Revolution in favour of Truth and Justice and of the oppressed masses; a Revolution in which I must play a part; a Revolution which does not come about with prayersbut with a banner and a sword, with a true holy war involving all responsible believers. I believe that this movement shall naturally triumph.16

*** It is a natural question to ask at the end of this analysis how each of these respective thinkers and their works were received in the societies they hoped to inspire. How did or didnt they affect the outcome of the conflict and did the revolution live up to the glory and totalistic change of order that they had hoped for? Finally, it is important how this revolutionism is affecting contemporary political Islam. Frantz Fanon was part of a generation of upheaval. A Negro by birth, he found himself constantly caught between two worlds. Throughout his youth he worked hard to function in one of these worlds, the European world of glitz and intellectualism. He studied in France and married a European woman. Still, as one of his biographers wrote, a growing awareness
15 16

Ibid ibid

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of his own depersonalization and the dehumanization of blacks worldwide led him to make a revolutionary cathartic break with the past.17 Having been sent to work in a French-Algerian hospital in 1953, this break was complete when, in 1956, he sent a letter to the French Resident Minister in Algeria resigning his post. He had wavered when war broke out in 1954, but by the time he sent the letter, which said the events in Algeria are the logical consequence of an abortive attempt to decerebralize a peopleA society that drives its members to desperate solutions is a nonviable society, a society to be replaced,18 he had joined the FLN and was active in the war of Independence. His legacy in that conflict is a confused one. As is clear from Wretched of the Earth, he believed that the only success would come from a total violent upheaval; that indeed violence was the only validating action possible for a colonized people. While the War of Independence was indeed violent, it was not ended by the total violent replacing of one order with another. Indeed, the process was not nearly as Manichean as Fanons polemics would have it. Even as he wrote Wretched there was internal dissent within the Algerian leadership. Moreover, as Jinadu explicates, independence was not seized in the sense of Fanons revolutionary ideals. The process was actually, eventually, a negotiated one, and even that was not brought about solely by the success of violence but rather involved the extraordinarily unpopular decision of President Charles de Gaulle that in the long-run it was better for France to concede Algerias right to self-determination.19 Shariatis legacy is also confused and complicated. While his ideas were extraordinarily influential, they were also co-opted, modified, and even falsified by men who used his prominence to buoy their own support among a certain group. Moreover, even his ideas themselves often experienced dialectic problems or contradictions. As Abrahamian points out, there were, in fact, multiple Shariatis. As a sociologist he was passionately interested in the rise and decay of movements. He sought to understood what drove people to
17

African Studies Review, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Sep., 1973), 255-289 "Some Aspects of the Political Philosophu of Frantz Fanon" L. Adele Jinadu
18 19

ibid ibid

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action and how bureaucratization inevitably led to the decay of revolutions. At the same time, there was Shariati the passionate believer whose article of faith claimed that revolutionary Shiism, unlike all other radical ideologies, would not succumb to the iron law of bureaucratic decay.20 There is also a question of who and how he inspired. During his life, which ended under seemingly suspicious circumstances in Britain in 1977, his ideas became revered rarely spurred action. Only in the student guerrilla Peoples Mujahedeen was his call for violent action heeded. And indeed, at the time, the radical ideology was unable to attract recruits outside of the already espoused enemies of the regime.21 It was not until Khomeini appropriated Shariatis legacy and began to use a multiplicity of terms that appealed to the various needs of different segments of society that the great uprising came to fruition. This is not to diminish Shariatis influence; on the contrary, he (and by extension, Fanon) provided a certain rhetorical rhetoric necessary for Khomeini to bind those disparate groups of society. In 1978, as Khomeini tried to appeal to those beyond his immediate followers, he made abundant reference to the disinherited, so vague a termthat it encompassed just about everyone in Iran except the shah and the imperial court.22 The use of this term was not only useful in making the struggle collective, but also indicates the sanctification of Shariati and his ideas in Iranian society. On the same page, Kepel writes that
[Khomeini] borrowed the word from Shariati and had never used it before the 1970s. After Shariatis death in exile in June 1977, the term had become a rallying cry for the Shiite socialist students. (111)

How Shariati would have looked upon this appropriation of his term, especially in pursuit of a revolution which would eventually defeat not only the regime, but all parties who in the post-upheaval setting disagreed with Khomeini in terms of how the new republic should look is another question entirely. What is safe to say is that in neither his case nor Fanons did the

20

MERIP Reports, No. 102, Islam and Politics (Jan., 1982), 24-28 "'Ali Shari'ati: Ideologue of the Iranian Revolution" Evrand Abrahamian
21 22

Course Packet, Kepel ibid

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particular revolution that each hoped to inspire and be a part of come to fruition in the way they would have expected or desired. As we enter the new millennium, the exchange between militant Islam and Revolutionary ideology is as strong as ever. Moreover, the ability of Islam to appropriate revolutionary third worldism to affect tangible change is as suspect as ever. Indeed, just as Khomeini had to be aware of the various psychosocial and socioeconomic needs of the would-be revolutionary population, so has the modern success of revolutionary Islam depended largely on the conditions affecting a population over and above ideology itself. It seems as though the more tightly Israel clamps down on terrorism the greater the ability of radical Hamas to inspire revolutionary sentiments in the Palestinian populations. Examples such as Turkey show that when Islamism is given a voice, even if marginal, in the political discourse, revolutionary ideology has a much harder time attracting adherents. Revolutionary ideology is, by definition, totalistic. As Fanon writes The last shall be put first and the first last. It should be clear, by the example of Shariati, Hamas and others, that Islam has within it the potential for a revolutionary understanding. At the same time, it is self-evident that there are countervailing interpretations as well. What seems important, as we delve further into the next century, is understanding why it is that one or the other of these understandings comes out, and what we can do to affect the course of that understanding.

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Bibliography Course Reader Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, No. 1o, Marxism and the Critical Discourse (1990), 19-41 "Shariati and Marx: A Critique of an "Islamic" Critique of Marxism Assef Bayat MERIP Reports, No. 102, Islam and Politics (Jan., 1982), 24-28 "'Ali Shari'ati: Ideologue of the Iranian Revolution" Evrand Abrahamian The American Historical Review, Vol. 88, No. 3 (Jun., 1983), 579-598 "Iranian Revolutions in Comparative Perspective" Nikki R. Keddie International Affairs (Royal Institue of International Affairs 1944-), Vol. 56, No. 3 (Summer, 1980), 443-457 "Iran's Revolution: Patterns, Problems and Prospects R.K. Ramazani African Studies Review, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Sep., 1973), 255-289 "Some Aspects of the Political Philosophu of Frantz Fanon" L. Adele Jinadu Transition, No. 46 (1874), 25-36 "Frantz Fanon: Portrait of a Revolutionary Intellectual" Emmanuel Hansen The Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Dec., 1986), 679-689 "Fanon and Africa: A Retrospect" Derek Wright Fanon, Frantz The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press, Inc. 1968