Rebecca Ruth Gould, University of London
In 1960, Ali Shariati, the man who would come to be known as the “architect of the Iranian revolution,” returned to Paris after a summer of intense revolutionary activity.[1] He had been living there since 1959, supported by a government scholarship. Shariati registered for a doctoral degree at the Sorbonne and embarked on a course of study in Persian literature, under the direction of Iranologist Gilbert Lazzard.[2] Shariati’s attention, however, was focused elsewhere: on the burgeoning political movement comprised of anticolonial activists from France’s colonies. Shariati later claimed that in 1961 he struck up a correspondence with Frantz Fanon while both were living in France. Shariati proudly described himself as the “first person in Iran who has known Fanon, translated his works, spoken of him, and written and published all his thoughts.”[3]
Whether or not these specific claims by Shariati are substantiated, it is clear that the two intellectuals had much in common. Shariati had every reason to be drawn to the Martinican luminary, who by that point had already published Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and A Dying Colonialism (1959). The year of their purported acquaintance was the year when The Wretched of the Earth (1961) was first published.
According to Shariati’s testimony, Fanon wrote him three letters in total, only one of which is to our knowledge extant.[4] There are reasons to doubt the veracity of Shariati’s account, and indeed to wonder whether he ever had direct contact with Fanon at all.[5] Arash Davari and Siavash Saffari, among other scholars, have recently shed new light on Shariati’s dialectical appropriation of Fanon.[6] Davari and Saffari have persuasively argued that the most plausible reading of Fanon’s letter is to regard it as a fictitious creation by Shariati.[7]
Davari and Saffari identify two reasons for doubting the authenticity of the correspondence. First, the original versions of Fanon’s letters to Shariati have never surfaced, though Shariati quoted one at length in a “forward addressed to readers” to his treatise, Islamology.[8] There is no prior or independent evidence for these letters’ existence. Second, Shariati has his own history of sometime deliberate dissimulation. Like many Iranian revolutionaries during this period, Shariati loved to experiment with pseudonyms and false attributions. One of his many pseudonyms was a figure named Chandal, who appeared in Shariati’s writings as “a Francophone intellectual of non-European origin who engaged in revolutionary struggle against French colonialism in North Africa.”[9] This alter-ego obviously closely resembled Fanon. In light of Shariati’s penchant for using fictional alter egos to debate and transmute his own views, it is easy to imagine Shariati fabricating Fanon’s letter as means of probing more deeply into matters of concern to him.
Contrary to what one might expect from a fabrication, Fanon’s letter is emphatic regarding his disagreements with Shariati. While Shariati is often credited as the most significant ideological inspiration for the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the letter he attributes to Fanon undermines the absolute faith in the power of religion that is often associated with this legacy. Even a fictionalized Fanon could have served Shariati as a dialectical tool to stimulate debate that a more direct discussion of the issues may not have been able to achieve. Such a tool would have enabled Shariati to anticipate objections to his arguments about the role of Islam in the revolution that he hoped would transpire in Iran.
Even if the letters are not authentic, Shariati has done a remarkable job of ventriloquizing Fanon, and of capturing the voice of a revolutionary thinker whose vision did not fully overlap with his own. We can conceptualize the dialectic introduced by the Fanon letter in terms of the long-standing distinction in Persian mystical thought between the external (zahir) and latent (batin) content of an utterance.[10] Speaking through the voice of Fanon enabled Shariati to adopt a more dialectical approach than is common in the revolutionary moment in which he found himself. It also allows him to have the last word, albeit only after subjecting his ideas to significant modification through the Fanonian prism.
The critical question for this essay is not the authenticity of the letter, but rather why Shariati appropriated Fanon and what work this letter did for him with respect to his creative and ideological aims. It is possible that Shariati never met or exchanged words with Fanon, but it is certain that Shariati saw himself as a propagator of Fanon’s ideas within Iran, and that Fanon was one of his major inspirations. The letter that has reached us may have been based on an actual or imagined conversation Shariati had with Fanon. Whether or not it is authentic, it is clear that incorporating words he attributed to Fanon into his own discourse on the relation between religion and political mobilization was a carefully conceived strategy on Shariati’s part.
In the analysis that follows, I refer to the letter Shariati attributed to Fanon as “Fanon’s letter.” This does not mean that I reject the hypothesis that it is Shariati’s fabrication. Even assuming that the letter is a fabrication, it is instructive to follow a line of analysis that treats the letter an authentic text, because that Shariati presents it to us as if it is. Shariati does a remarkable job of ventriloquizing Fanon, and of capturing the voice of a revolutionary thinker whose vision did not fully overlap with his own. If “Fanon’s letter” is a fiction, the fiction is persuasive; it represents a vital current in Shariati’s own thought, and an important element in his own personal dialectic. Understanding Shariati’s creative approach to the intersection of politics and religion requires taking his self-presentation at face value and understanding the reasons for his appropriation.
Shariati never shared the letter from himself that prompted Fanon’s reply, but he went out of his way to publicize Fanon’s letter to him. Perhaps to give his fiction more credibility, he claims to have first translated into Persian three letters from Fanon addressed to him and to have published this translation in the underground Iranian press while he was still living in Paris. Shariati stated that he then passed the original versions of the letters to the Algerian freedom fighter Zohra Drif, in the expectation that she would arrange to have them published in Tunis.
All that is now extant is the excerpt from one of the letters included in Islamology, a volume that brings together Shariati’s lectures from the 1970s. Shariati prefaced the excerpt with a description of Fanon as his “genius friend, one of the most beautiful heroic figures in these cowardly times.” He added that the letter was written “during the last days of [Fanon’s] life.” Whether or not the letter is authentic, the careful framing that Shariati applied to this correspondence demonstrates a skilful appropriation of Fanon for his own ends.
My modest aim here is to offer a close reading of the letter, whatever its provenance, which is attentive to Shariati’s aims and to the wider context in which he appropriates Fanon. What does the Fanonian diagnosis of anti-colonial religious mobilization tell us about Shariati’s own thinking with respect to the role of religion in revolutionary action? Although it is beyond my scope here, the answer to this question could prompt an inquiry into how the Fanonian traces in Shariati’s dialectical theology can contribute to the movement against the authoritarian Islamic Republic in Iran today.
In the excerpt from the letter that Shariati cites, Fanon warns Shariati of the dangers of enlisting religion in the cause of the anti-colonial revolution. Although he elsewhere insisted on Fanon’s hostility to religion, Shariati’s quotation reveals a Fanon who appreciated the revolutionary potential of religion. He acknowledged to Shariati that “Islam harbours […] both an anticolonialist capacity and an anti-western character.” Yet Fanon’s appreciation stopped there; the rest of his letter is concerned with warning of the dangers that ensue when religious institutions attain political power amid revolutionary ferment. Shariati’s take on Fanon’s attitude to religion is supported by works like Black Skin, White Masks (1952), in which Fanon thoroughly examined how the Catholic Church in Martinique furthers colonial ends.
Although he expressed a common bond with Shariati in terms of their understanding of the revolutionary potential of religious mobilization, Fanon in this letter also voices his reservations. He warns that a religious revival in the Muslim world would create a counter-revolutionary situation that would do more to entrench colonial legacies than to overthrow them. In a context in which a revival of “sectarian and religious mindsets” diverted “that nation yet to come which is at best a ‘nation in becoming’” onto a counter-revolutionary path, even a putatively anti-colonial revolution might, he warned, distance its citizens from a decolonial future and instead bring it “closer to its past.” While there are many ways of interpreting the legacy of 1979, it is hard to deny its prophetic element. Shariati was the messenger—and perhaps the source—of this critique of religion. Whether it was inspired by or directly derived from Fanon, Shariati preserved it against the ravages of time and the frailty of uncertain archives, while also dedicating the rest of his life and thoughts to overcoming Fanon’s objections by bringing about a genuine Islamic revolution.
In his letter, Fanon warns Shariati that a revival of “sectarian and religious mindsets” could potentially divert “that nation yet to come which is at best a ‘nation in becoming’” onto a more treacherous and counter-revolutionary path.[11] The tenor of Fanon’s letter, in which he respectfully but firmly distances himself from the views of his correspondent, implies that Shariati’s initial letter expressed greater faith in religious mobilization as a revolutionary force in the struggle against colonialism. Hence a tension is established between religious mobilization and the revolutionary horizon. Shariati uses Fanon to acknowledge this tension, and then proceeds to overcome this tension dialectically throughout the duration of his book.
Returning to the context of the Algerian Revolution in which he was immersed, Fanon told Shariati openly that such fears prevented him from aligning with the Association of Maghrebin ʿUlama. By extension, we can infer that Shariati acknowledged such dangers with respect to the learned scholars (ʿulama) of Iran. Indeed, Shariati’s own vision for Islam diverged in important respects from that propagated by Khomeini and other leaders of the 1979 revolution, including with respect to the hijab, which was mandated by law soon after the revolution, although Shariati regarded the practice as a relic of the past.[12] Shariati was firmly persuaded of the revolutionary potential of Islam. Yet, unlike the architects of the Islamic Republic of Iran, he was sceptical of clerical power. In this respect, Fanon’s suspicions resonated well with those of Shariati. Or rather, we can say that Fanon proved useful to Shariati’s own efforts to develop a critique of religious authority when aligned with the state.
After praising Shariati for embarking on the path followed by African intellectuals such as Léopold Senghor, Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Nyerere, and Kateb Yacine, Fanon ends by at once embracing and distancing himself from Shariati’s religious stance, stating “although my path diverges from, and is even opposed to, yours, I am persuaded that both paths will ultimately join up towards that destination where humanity lives well.” The resemblances between the genealogy in which Fanon places Shariati and the genealogy Shariati claimed for himself further reveals how Fanon served as a template for Shariati’s conception of himself as an anti-colonial intellectual.
What precisely was it about Fanon’s approach to religion that made Shariati wish to incorporate it into his own work? In his lecture “Where Shall We Begin,” Shariati sheds light on the debate between himself and Fanon in terms that mirror those found in Fanon’s letter. First, Shariati aims to establish a closer personal connection between himself and Fanon. He describes Fanon as someone he “knew personally” and whose books he “translated into Persian.”[13] Shariati’s penchant for fictionalization is already on display in this description, for scholars have established that, although he was a prolific translator, Shariati was not the primary translator of any work by Fanon, including Fanon’s best known work, Les Damnés de la Terre (1961), a translation that is often attributed to Shariati.[14]
Shariati notes that Fanon “was pessimistic about the positive contribution of religion to social movement,” a position that is fleshed out in this letter in a warning about the dangers of religious mobilizations. In “Where Shall We Begin,” Shariati goes beyond simply quoting Fanon and proceeds to mount a critique of Fanon’s position. He claims to have “convinced” Fanon that “in some societies where religion plays an important role in the culture, religion can, through its resources and psychological effects, help the enlightened person to lead his society toward the same destination toward which Fanon was taking his own through non-religious means.”[15]
While acknowledging the limitations of relying on religion for political mobilization in 20th century Europe, Shariati saw Iran as an ideal society for fulfilling religion’s political potential. After juxtaposing Fanon’s view to his own and arguing implicitly for the distinctiveness of the Iranian situation, Shariati proceeds to situate Fanon in a European tradition. He argues that “Fanon’s anti-religious feeling stemmed from the unique religious experience of Europe in the Middle Ages and the ensuing freedom of European society in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.” This history, which ties secularization to freedom, has its limits for the Islamic world, Shariati adds, “because the culture of an Islamic society and the tradition which has shaped that society is utterly different from the spirit which under the name of religion ruled Europe in the Middle Ages.” In a certain sense, then, Shariati provincializes Fanon.[16] He situates his work within a European tradition, and thereby exposes its limits for an Iranian revolutionary movement.
To what extent was Shariati right to diagnose Fanon with “anti-religious feeling”? Commentators tend to agree that Fanon’s “engagement with religious traditions is significant to the development of his anti-colonialism since it is clear that he simultaneously rejected and retained them in his analysis.”[17] Fanon’s assessment of the value of religion is limited to the political ends it achieves. Unlike Shariati, he does not regard religious transformation as an end in itself.
Fanon’s controversial discussion of Algerian veiling practices in “Algeria Unveiled” is a case in point: the hijab is seen here exclusively as a political instrument in a guerrilla war, even though most proponents of the hijab in Muslim culture defend it on religious grounds.[18] With a similar emphasis on strategy, Fanon’s letter underscores his opposition to efforts to ground anti-colonial mobilization in religious identity, because religious identity can be authoritarian in a way that mirrors colonial governance. Fanon’s critique is subtle and even prophetic with respect to Iran.
While neither Shariati nor Fanon were alive at the time of the 1979 revolution, their ideas circulated widely in the post-revolutionary milieu. The first published Persian translation of Les Damnés de la Terre includes a preface by Shariati’s friend and fellow activist Abu al-Hasan Banisadr (1933-2021), who briefly held the position of President of Iran in 1980, a year after the revolution. The preface was a major step in the integration of Fanon by leftist Iranian militants into the foundational narratives of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The first edition of this book, published in Hamburg, Germany in 1969 by the newly-formed Mosaddeq Press (figure 1), gives visual form to the genealogy that leftist militants were constructing as they integrated secularists like Mohammed Mosaddeq and Fanon into their program for a future revolution.
Persian translation of Fanon, Les Damnés de la Terre (1969; image taken from Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, “Who Translated Fanon’s,” p.11).
In 1953, just six years prior to Shariati’s arrival in France, Mosaddeq had been infamously removed from power in a coup orchestrated by the CIA working in collaboration with British intelligence services. This coup fuelled anti-imperial sentiment within Iran as well as among the Iranian militants studying in Paris. After the coup, Mosaddeq would be remembered as Iran’s first democratically-minded Prime Minister. On the cover of the Mosaddeq Press edition of Fanon produced in 1969 by a group of leftist militants of which Shariati was a part, we see Mosaddeq depicted with his left arm raised and clenched into a fist.
Alongside the cover, Banisadr’s preface is significant because he uses the occasion to dedicate the translation to Mosaddeq, as if to suggest a kinship between Fanon and Mosaddeq, both of whom were secularists. Indeed, the translation of Les Damnés de la Terre was the first book released by Mosaddeq Press, a publisher that had been established in Hamburg by four Iranian activists: Abolhassan Banisadr, Hasan Habibi, Ardeshir Houshmand and Rahman Kargosha.[19] The second volume published by the short-lived press was a collection of the speeches of Mosaddeq. Yet another volume was a translation of Algerian politician Amar Ouzegane’s Le meilleur combat (The Better Struggle), a book that sought a reproachment between Islam and socialism. The lineage of this publishing history reveals that Shariati was not alone among Iranian leftists in seeking to establish a genealogy between the religious movement of the 1970s and the secular anti-colonialism of the 1950s and 1960s.[20]
With regard to this effort to link secular anti-colonial militancy with what the participants in the events of 1979 described as “religious nationalism,” Fanon served as a useful bridge. Shariati played a major role in transmitting his writings to Iran, not primarily through the translations with which he has been wrongly credited (and which he falsely attributed to himself), but by incorporating Fanon’s ideas into his own speeches, including through dialectical debates and fabricated letters.[21]
Even as he provincialized Fanon, Shariati persistently operated under his shadow. His claim to have known Fanon personally, to have translated his works, and to have received a letter from him “during the last days of his life” speaks for itself. Shariati disagreed with Fanon, yet he regarded him as a genius worth emulating, and indeed as “one of the most beautiful heroic figures in these cowardly times.”
In the lecture “Man and Islam,” Shariati expressed the wish that “we knew Kateb Yassin instead of Brecht, Omar Mawloud, Omar Ozgan, Frantz Fanon, and Aime Cesaire instead of Jean Paul Sartre and Camus.”[22] Particularly striking in this list is the juxtaposition of Fanon and Sartre, since Shariati was an admirer of both. Yet it is clear from the way the list is formed which side Shariati is on: he ties the project of an Islamicist emancipation to the gradual replacement of Sartre by Fanon. “Unless we know ourselves to the extent that we are familiar with the Western free-thinkers,” Shariati adds, “we will to the same extent become alienated from ourselves.”
Shariati’s efforts to decolonize the canon of modern philosophical thought reveals how central Fanon was to Shariati’s own project of uncovering an Iranian self free of Western influences. From its inception, Shariati’s project of collective self-realization was embedded in contradiction, just like Shariati’s own self. These contradictions explain at least in part Shariati’s penchant for pseudonyms and why he chose to speak in voices that were not his own. Ultimately, Shariati’s appropriation of Fanon demonstrates that, notwithstanding his nativist rhetoric, Shariati was deeply committed in practice to a translational and dialectical ethos.
I would like to express my debt to Kayvan Tahmasebian and the participants of the Fanon Today workshop for their critical engagements with this work.
[1] For this epithet, see Mehdi Abedi, “Ali Shariati: The Architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution of Iran.” Iranian Studies 19.3–4 (1986): 229–234.
[2] Ali Rahnema, An Islamic Utopian: A Political Biography of Ali Shari’ati (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 117.
[3] Ali Shariati, Collected Works no.12. Tarikh tamaddon [History of Civilization] Vol. 2. (Tehran:
Ghalam, 2015), 122.
[4] The letter is included in Écrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté, edited by Robert Young and Jean Khalfa (Paris: La Découverte, 2015) and subsequently translated from French into English in Frantz Fanon: alienation and freedom, edited by Jean Khalfa and Robert J.C. Young, translated by Steven Corcoran (London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 668-669.
[5] The case against the authenticity of the letter Shariati attributes to Fanon is laid out most thoroughly in Arash Davari and Siavash Saffari, “Thought/Translation and the Situations of Decolonization,” Philosophy and Global Affairs 2:1, 2022, pp. 105–135 and in idem, “Mystical Solidarities: Ali Shariati and the Act of Translation,” in this same issue.
[6] Davari and Saffari, “Thought/Translation”; Arash Davari, “A Return to Which Self? Ali Shari’ati and Frantz Fanon on the Political Ethics of Insurrectionary Violence,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (2014) 34 (1): 86–105.
[7] The French volume in which the excerpt from the letter first appeared (Écrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté), makes no judgement concerning authenticity and simple translates the relevant section from Shariati’s Islamology, crediting Shariati’s son, Ehsan Shariati, with the Persian-English translation. The English edition of the French volume (Alienation and Freedom) goes further in obscuring the source by omitting to give credit to the French translator. Other commentators who follow the lead of these editions in erasing the complex textual history of the letter and the doubts concerning its authenticity, include Adam Shatz (“When Life is Seized,” London Review of Books, 19 Jan 2017; https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n02/adam-shatz/where-life-is-seized) and Christopher Lee (“Fanon’s fugitive archive,” Africa is a Country, 29 October 2017; https://africasacountry.com/2018/10/fanons-fugitive-archive/).
[8] Ali Shariati, Collected Works no. 17. Islamshenasi [Islamology] Vol. 2, 193–194.
[9] Davari and Saffari, “Thought/Translation,” 126.
[10] I am indebted to Kayvan Tahmasbian, who introduced me to this method of analysis during our co-authored article: “Translation as Alienation: Sufi Hermeneutics and Literary Modernism in Bijan Elahi’s Translations,” Modernism/modernity Print Plus 5.4.
[11] All quotations from the letter are from the English translation in Frantz Fanon: alienation and freedom, translated by Steven Corcoran, 668-669.
[12] A.K. Ferdows, “Women and the Islamic revolution,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 15.2 (1983): 284.
[13] The translation is taken from “Where Shall We Begin,” https://shariati.com/english/begin/begin5.html.
[14] See Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, “Who Translated Fanon’s ’The Wretched of the Earth’ into Persian?” Jadaliyya (2020) https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/30630/. For an excellent overview of Shariati’s translational activity, see Davari and Saffari, “Thought/Translation,” 111-115.
[15] Shariati, “Where Shall We Begin.”
[16] I use the term “provincializing” in the sense outlined by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
[17] Federico Settler, “Religion in the work of Frantz Fanon” (PhD, University of Cape Town, 2009), 5.
[18] See Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove/Atlantic, 2022), 35-67.
[19] Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, “Who Translated Fanon’s ’The Wretched of the Earth’ into Persian?” 3.
[20] Through the end of his life, Banisadr was quite keen to refashion Mossadegh as a religious nationalist, although most historians regard him as fundamentally secular. See Banisadr’s Facebook post from 2014: https://m.facebook.com/Banisadr/photos/a.10151193850405821/10152825658990821/?type=3.
[21] For Shariati’s role in the spread of Fanon’s ideas in Iran, see Abdollah Zahiri, “Frantz Fanon in Iran: Darling of the Right and the Left in the 1960s and 1970s,” Interventions 23 (2021): 506–525.
[22] http://www.shariati.com/english/begin/begin5.html.