Hamid Sadeghi; Nozhat Ahmadi
Abstract
Morteza Motahari and Ali Shariati, as two Shia thinkers-historians, under the influence of Islamist thoughts and with the support of increasing reliance on historical studies, tried ...
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Morteza Motahari and Ali Shariati, as two Shia thinkers-historians, under the influence of Islamist thoughts and with the support of increasing reliance on historical studies, tried to present a critical reading of the history of Islam and Iran. This historical approach was, first of all, the servant of their special worldview and their intellectual-ideological attachments in the form of two Shia Islamist personalities and secondly, it was an observer of their effort to highlight the contribution of Islam and Islamic thought in the cultural-identity situation of contemporary Iran. Based on this, their attention to the Safavid history made sense in the context of these Islamist tendencies and religious concerns and nationalist ideals. In this way, despite some differences in the approach of these two to the history of the Safavids, the presence of some common perspectives among them made the Safavid studies of these two figures distinct in the discourse of Safavid studies of the Pahlavi period (especially the second Pahlavi). Based on this, the problem and question of the present research is how Motahari and Shariati's Safavid studies were influenced by their intellectual and ideological backgrounds and which similar components brought their attitudes towards Safavid history together?The hypothesis of this research, which was carried out with an analytical method, is based on the claim that despite the important differences in the Safavid studies of the two, there are common components such as identity-oriented concerns (of its Islamic type) and the insights of the Ummah. Pragmatic and ideological approaches brought their view of Safavid history together, which resulted in a distinct view of Safavid history in the discourse of Safavid studies during the Pahlavi period.
