On the Sociology of Islam

A collection of lectures by the Iranian sociologist and activist ʿAlī Sharīʿatī, translated from Persian by Hamid Algar and published in English in 1979, the year of the Iranian revolution. Sharīʿatī presents Islam not as a set of inherited rituals but as an ideology for understanding and changing society. He proposes studying Islam through its God, its book, its prophet and the people around him, and sets out tawḥīd, the oneness of God, as a whole worldview in which nature, humanity and society form a unity, against the divisions of shirk. His anthropology reads the creation story as making the human being a mixture of clay and divine spirit, pulled between two poles and free to choose. His philosophy of history reads the story of Cain and Abel as the start of a lasting conflict between a ruling, property-owning order and the dispossessed. Critics, religious and secular alike, argue that he turned Islam into a revolutionary ideology built on Marxist categories.

It is the most accessible English source for a thinker who helped inspire the Iranian revolution, and a key text for understanding religion as a language of social protest.