Ali Shariati was born in Mazinan, a suburb of Sabzevar. He completed his elementary and high school in Mashhad. In his years at the Teacher’s Training College, he came into contact with youth who were from the lower economic strata of the society and tasted the poverty and hardship that existed. As a young scholar and political activist against the Pahlavi monarchy, he was imprisoned several times during his life. After his first arrest, he travelled to France and received a PhD from Sorbonne.
During his residence in Paris, he met several leading European thinkers such as Louis Massignon (1883-1962) and Georges Gurvitch (1894-1965) while Jacques Berque (1910-1995) was his academic mentor. The crucial turning point for him was during his last years in Paris when he worked on a theoretical approach which was a combination of Marxism, existentialism and Islam. The result of the mixture, he believed, was an Islamic as well as progressive revolutionary ideology which can assist political changes in the Middle Eastern societies
