Nationalist Hegemony Over Islamist Dreams in Iran and Pakistan: Who Were Shariati and Maududi?

Abstract

This article examines two prominent ideologues, Ali Shariati of Iran and Maulana Maududi of Pakistan, in order to determine their influence on national politics in the second half of the 20th century. Were they only fundamental actors of political Islam in their societies, or did they also have a significant impact on the reformation of Iranian and Pakistani nationalism? If they did, who exactly were Shariati and Maududi, and what are their legacies? In order to answer these questions, this article focuses on the Iranian experience with nationalism before and after the Iranian Revolution (1979) and Pakistani nationalism embedded with Islamism from independence (1947) until the end of the 1980s. In light of Ranajit Guha's concept of hegemony, this article brings to the foreground the possibility of alternative ways of thinking and belonging.

Iran and the Arab Spring: Why Haven't Iranians Followed the Arabs in Waging Revolution?

“…Those who fight against the Ba'athist regime in Syria are not revolutionary forces, it was argued, but a group of people organized and supported by the West in general and America in particular, Israel, and their Arab and non-Arab allies in the region. 15 According to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Such diversified views on the Arab Spring, either by the supporters of the Green Movement or the ruling elites, should not lead us to forget that both trends in Iran as well as in their Arab counterparts had also been influenced by transnational ideological currents such as the Third World Marxism of Frantz Fanon (1959Fanon ( , 1961, which inspired both Middle Eastern nationalists and Islamists to take radical antistate positions, or the intellectual Islam of Ali Shariati (Pasaoglu, 2013), whose influence went beyond Iran to the Arab world, Turkey, and Afghanistan (Abrahamian, 1993;Ahmadi, 1986Ahmadi, , 2004Rahnema, 1998). More importantly, both Iranian and Arab reformist and pro-democracy movements drew inspiration from the global move toward democratization and civil society in Eastern Europe and Latin America during the 1980s and early 1990s.…”