Hassan al-Banna, an Egyptian schoolteacher, founded the Muslim Brotherhood to fill material and spiritual voids in civil society. Along with other pious Muslims, he was crestfallen at the Ottoman Caliphate's collapse in 1924. Much like Shia clerics in Persia, he saw Islam threatened by atheism, imperialism, and the widening scientific gap between the West and the Islamic East. Al-Banna was a Sunni Muslim, but he had no quarrel with the Shia, whom he regarded as fellow Muslims. Instead, he advocated a solid Shia-Sunni Islamic front against non-Muslims and particularly detested the British. Iranian Islamic revolutionaries praised the Brotherhood and mourned al-Banna when he was killed in 1949.
After al-Banna’s death, the Egyptian intellectual Sayyid Qutb, sometimes spelled Sayeed Qutb, became the Muslim Brotherhood’s leading theorist until Egyptian ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser ordered his execution in 1966. In the late 1940s, Qutb attended a teachers’ college in the United States and wrote a phantasmagorical account of his experience titled The America I Saw. He loathed America, describing its women as vixens, its men as vulgar, its society as devoid of religion, and its cultural tastes as unrefined and salacious. Iranian mullahs echoed his descriptions of America. Qutb was not a cleric, and his commentary on Islamic scripture does not carry authority among the more pious. However, he shone as a general strategist and opinion-maker for the Muslim masses. Future supreme leader of Iran Ali Khamenei translated Qutb’s works into Persian.
The Persian activist-intellectual Said Jamaleddin Asadabadi, sometimes called Jamal al-Dinal-Afghani, was a principal architect of the first wave of religious revivalism. Revolutionary Iran’s founders, including Ayatollahs Ruhollah Khomeini and Khamenei, were profoundly influenced by the militant Navvab Safavi, who promoted the work of Egyptian Brotherhood leaders, notably Qutb. The Iranian Ali Shariati is often regarded as the ideologue of the Iranian Revolution. He promoted Islam as a complete lifestyle and advocated purging Iran of all nonreligious elements. This appealed to Iran’s religious, weak, and alienated. Shariati took avant-garde leftist designs for social justice and wedded them to Shia Islam. Shariati was influenced by the radical, trendy ideas popular in Paris, where he lived in the 1950s and earned a doctorate in religious studies from the Sorbonne. His prose was fluid and energetic. Said a friend, “He was a Gramsci, Guevara, Fanon, Malcolm X, and Iqbal rolled into one.”
Stirred by the revolutionary zeal he found among Europe’s progressive salon set, Shariati sought to revitalize Shia Islam. He described two versions of Shia Islam—a “red” or authentic Shia and a “black” Shia, which was stagnant and worn. Shariati was part nationalist, Islamist, and revivalist, and his message inspired scores of activists in the 1960s and 1970s. Above all, he was an advocate for Shia Islam. He believed Shia Muslims should stop passively waiting for the return of the Twelfth Imam. Instead, they should create conditions that would hasten his return, writing, “Every day is Ashura; every place is Karbala.” He argued that the clergy’s role was to guide society through a synthesis of Islamic values and left-oriented activism. His work remains foundational in Iran today.
