By far the greater part of Shariati’s work concerns the social and political action which he believes to be an essential and integral part of Islam. The other three works under discussion all focus on this element. Two of them, Approaches to the Study of Islam and Where Shall We Begin?, examine the state of Muslims’ present existence, the state of their understanding of Islam, and why Islam as it is presently understood does not address the issues confronting modern societies.
This is perhaps the core of Shariati’s thought. The third paper, What is to be done?, elaborates some of the answers to these questions, proposing programmes of intellectual work. Nowhere, however, does Shariati address the explicitly political questions that seem to emerge naturally from the social issues he raises. This is usually attributed to the circumstances in which he wrote, in Iran under the extremely repressive regime of Reza Shah Pahlavi.
