Description
This paper examines the intellectual and political significance of Ali Shariati and Gustavo Gutiérrez as two influential Global South thinkers whose ideas reshaped understandings of religion, liberation, and anti-imperial solidarity across Iran and Latin America. Although emerging from distinct religious and historical traditions, both figures developed revolutionary frameworks that reimagined Islam and Christianity as ethical and political responses to oppression, inequality, and foreign domination. Their writings challenged Western imperial power and domestic systems of injustice while centering the experiences of the marginalized in political life.The paper argues that placing Shariati and Gutiérrez in conversation recovers an intellectual dimension for understanding the ideological foundations of Iran–Latin America relations. Rather than approaching these relations solely through diplomacy or geopolitics, this project situates them within broader intellectual and geosocial currents circulating across the Global South during the 1960s and 1970s. Shariati’s revolutionary Shi‘ism and Gutiérrez’s liberation theology articulated parallel critiques of colonialism, capitalism, and dependency that resonated across anti-imperial movements in both regions. By tracing these shared trajectories, the paper reconceptualizes Iran–Latin America relations as part of a broader history of Third Worldism, liberationist thought, and Global South political imagination.