Ali Shariati and Cultural Alienation

The subject of “alienation” is one of the key and major issues in Shariati’s thoughts. As a matter of fact he analyzes and explains contemporary human’s concerns and issues through this concept. According to Shariati, in “self-alienation”, man feels as if “another individual” is “himself” and loses self-consciousness and suffers from a kind of “fraud self-consciousness”.Self-alienation is in other words like losing the “true and essential self”, in addition to the “social self.” Shariati believes that whatever distances mankind from his humanistic features- which possess a certain definition for him- is a factor for alienation. Based on Shariati’s thoughts, instrumental intellectuality, bureaucracy and machinery have altogether alienated man from own true self in the twentieth century; whereas he criticizes these issues from this point of view. Still he does not regard these as the problem; yet he believes we suffer from lack of machinery and if we complain from lack of it, it becomes obvious that we are feeling other pains and suffering from them. He claims that humankind is the essence of history and his cultural environment, and as long as they possess their own individual culture, religion and pains, they enjoy their own “true self”. But cultural imperialism has alienated men from themselves by distorting history, culture and also the religion of the third world countries; and therefore they suffer from“fraud self-consciousness”. He assumes that the solution is not offering a mass and general solution, but before anything else, we must return back to our own true “selves” and let go of “self-alienation” and free ourselves of it.