Shari‘ati and the (Elusive) Quest for a Just Order

Ali Shariati was undoubtedly among the most important of the prerevolutionary Islamist thinker particularly insofar as he made Islam a politically respectable force for many young men and women in Iran s traditional middle classes. Shariati was novel for the time in terms of his education and intellectual influences. The clear attraction of ideology for Shariati is that he believes by means of it man is endowed with the capacity to transform the world around him. The current paper tries to explore the manner in which Shariati carried out his highly politicized reading of Islam, assigning centrality to the notion of a just order. Author argues that Shariati s quest for a just order is more important than the order itself.