Description
The prevalence and pervasiveness of the modern nation-state have been questioned for some time, with its critical usage and appropriation by anticolonial movements in the Third World granting fruitful discussions in postcolonial IR (Sajed and Seidel 2019). This literature addressed the possibilities and limits of trying to escape or pose alternatives to the nation, remarking on the power of building transnational networks of activism and anticolonial solidarities. Nevertheless, building on Robbie Shilliam’s (2015) and Jasmine Gani’s (2022) critiques, this paper explores the question of the substance and materiality of these anticolonial horizons through a venture into Islamic mysticism. Specifically, I approach the political work of Ali Shariati given the importance he had given to the construction of a Muslim Ummah for anticolonial struggle in Iran and the Third World, putting religion at the forefront of a new humanism whose substratum was to be found on mysticism. By engaging with his discourses vis-à-vis Frantz Fanon’s, I seek to discuss how the former configured an alternative political-spiritual project which questioned the nation-state as the locus of revolutionary action. Instead, Shariati’s vision entailed a commitment to building ‘deep relations' between members of a sociopolitical community by inward-looking (‘returning to self’) as a means of struggle against Pahlavi Iran and, ultimately, Western-centric modernity. Thus, this paper examines Shariati’s alternative imaginary inasmuch as it regards anticolonial connectivity from outside the nation’s confines.
