Rereading and interpreting the ideas of leading Muslim thinkers
Ebrahim Barzegar; Sajad Khodaei
Abstract
Ali Shariati is one of the influential thinkers in the contemporary history of Iran and the Islamic world. Considering the social and political circumstances of his time, he sought to redefine Islamic concepts in a way that addressed the needs of society. Serat (the path), a central metaphor in the intellectual ...
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Ali Shariati is one of the influential thinkers in the contemporary history of Iran and the Islamic world. Considering the social and political circumstances of his time, he sought to redefine Islamic concepts in a way that addressed the needs of society. Serat (the path), a central metaphor in the intellectual framework of Muslim thinkers, also holds a pivotal role in Shariati’s thought. This research seeks to answer the core question: "What role does Serat play in the political language and thought of Ali Shariati?" This study endeavors to present a new formulation of his thought by employing the metaphor of Serat as the source domain and political thought as the target domain. Through an analysis of Shariati’s ideas, we conclude that he conceptualized various concepts—such as religion, movement and institution, intellectuals, Alavid Shiism and Safavid Shiism, and others—as manifestations of Serat. By utilizing these concepts, a comprehensive analytical framework and ten foundational pillars rooted in the Serat metaphor have been extracted from Shariati’s political thought. This research adopts a qualitative content analysis methodology, enabling a deep examination of texts, identification of thematic parallels, and systematic evaluation of key terms to arrive at a structured analysis of his ideas within the domain of Serat.
Zinat Motahari; Hossein Harsij; Ali AliHosseini
Abstract
This study uses Lacanian metaphor and decolonial rhetoric as the theoretical framework in its analysis of the Iranian principalist intellectual Hassan Azghadi. It proposes that Iran’s modern polity is defined by its dual stance towards modernity at one level and modernization at another. The analysis ...
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This study uses Lacanian metaphor and decolonial rhetoric as the theoretical framework in its analysis of the Iranian principalist intellectual Hassan Azghadi. It proposes that Iran’s modern polity is defined by its dual stance towards modernity at one level and modernization at another. The analysis seeks to answer the question “How does Azghadi’s Rhetoric reproduce the nodal points of the IR’s decoloniality?”. To answer this question, we analyze the decoloniality in Azghadi’s rhetoric by highlighting the use of metaphor in it. According to the decoloniality theory, delinking from the heritage of colonialism necessitates discourse-building. To understand the metaphoricity of Azghadi both as a discourse and as a rhetorical trope at the semantic level, we rely on “conceptual metaphor”, a five-step method developed by Steen (1998). Azghadi’s speech on Islamic Civilization-making is purposively selected for its resonating decolonial content. We contend that “Islamic awakening” is a very broad metaphor that gives coherence to the idea of Islamic civilization-making. Under it, we come to four nodal points: VOCATION, TRANSCENDENCE, ORGANISM, and OTHERIZATION. While the first three construct the nodes of the IR’s decolonial discourse, the last dislocates the rivaling capitalist and fundamentalist discourses. Finally, the minor metaphors under each node are studied based on Steen’s model. In conclusion, we review how these metaphors inspire Azghadi’s audiences for delinking from the liberal epistemology and re-appropriating the Islamic thought system as the cornerstone of their civilization.
