Theory of Man in Contemporary Iranian Theology: Understandings of Man the Unknown

One of the most famous works in Iran from the beginning of the 1960s until now is Man the Unknown by Alexis Carrel. With the passage of 70 years since the first Persian translation, the market boom of this work has not yet been lost, and at the same time, its content and function in Iranian society have not been ever analyzed. This study is the first step toward this goal. By reviewing the evidence of Iranians' attention to the book, this study aims to defend this hypothesis that the widespread promotion of the book was followed by Islamist movements as a result of important theoretical implications of the work in favor of their Theology. Followers of such movements wanted to compensate the poverty of literature and theoretical weaknesses in representing a native and modern human theory by taking advantage of Carrel's book. As we will reveal in this study, with the development of the discourse of Islamic humanities, this book has been considered as confirming the necessity of choosing an Islamic humanities instead of "western humanities".