Sovereignty Support Movement Sovereignty for West Asia
by Amir Nour and Laala Bechetoula, published on Global Research, March 31, 2026
“Every century has its Abou Dharr. Islam is waiting for its own.” (Ali Shariati, Islam and the Social Question, 1972)
“The wretched of the earth no longer wait. They act.” (Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961)
“The human being is not a product of his environment but a project in the making.” (Malek Bennabi, The Problem of Ideas in the Muslim World, 1970)
Author’s Note: This article is published in three parts.
Part I [this article] traces the life, thought, and intellectual legacy of Ali Shariati.
Part II explores Shariati’s intellectual dialogue with Frantz Fanon and the decolonization of consciousness, his revolutionary distinction between Alavid (Red) and Safavid (Black) Shiism, his debt to Malek Bennabi’s concept of colonizability, the figure of Abou Dharr as the archetype of Islamic social justice, and the forces that closed in on him until his mysterious death in Southampton in 1977.
Part III draws the bridge between Shariati’s unfinished revolution and the world burning today: the 2026 war on Iran and the geotheological framing that legitimizes it, the Shah’s son calling foreign bombs upon his own country, and the civilizational endurance of a people that has decided to live standing upright.
Editor’s note: I don’t know if I will publish the entire series here, but this piece makes the point that culture is a major issue in evaluating current events on a global scale. I think this point is largely missed, only in the United States.
Trump, Iran, and the New Empire’s Ignorance
In a Fox News interview with Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara on February 26, 2026, US envoy Steve Witkoff said President Donald Trump was “curious” about Tehran’s position. Witkoff revealed that the President was questioning why Iran has not “capitulated” in the face of Washington’s military buildup aimed at pressuring Tehran into a nuclear deal, saying,
“The president understands he has plenty of alternatives, but he’s curious as to why they haven’t… I don’t want to use the word ‘capitulated,’ but why they haven’t capitulated? (…) why, under this pressure, with the amount of sea power and naval power over there, why haven’t they come to us and said, ‘We profess we don’t want a weapon, so here’s what we’re prepared to do’? And yet it’s sort of hard to get them to that place.”[1]
Witkoff’s remarks came as two rounds of Oman-mediated US-Iran talks resumed in Geneva, talks that later stalled over major sticking points, including uranium enrichment levels, Iran’s missile program, and the scope of sanctions relief.
A month later, as the bombs were still falling on Iran, as the Iranian Red Crescent counted more than 1,400 dead, as the oil price trembled, and as the Strait of Hormuz holds its breath, Trump, again, described the ancient civilization he had just attacked as “very different and strange” and their diplomats as people who are “begging,” saying, “The Iranian negotiators are very different and strange. They are begging us to make a deal…”
Read this sentence again. Read it slowly. Let it settle. Here’s a man who, 26 days earlier, had ordered the bombing of Iran. The man who, on February 28, 2026, launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran, historically known as Persia, one of the oldest continuous civilizations in the world, with a history stretching back more than five millennia. The man who, in the hours that followed, watched Khamenei be assassinated and said—when asked who would replace him—something along the lines of, “We’ll see. There are very good people there.”
Let us first take this word, “strange,” and hold it up to the light. Because it reveals, with an involuntary precision that no satirist could have invented, the full depth of the brazen ignorance from which this dangerous war was born.
To begin with, here’s what no Washington policy paper will ever contain, what no think-tank briefing has ever grasped: Iran does not capitulate because Iran has never capitulated. Not before Alexander the Great, who conquered but could not hold. Not before the Arab armies, who brought a new faith but were themselves absorbed into Persian culture within two generations. Not before the Mongols, who razed entire cities and were, within a century, writing poetry in Farsi. Empires that conquered Iran were swallowed by it. This is not a policy posture. It is not a negotiating tactic. It is something older, deeper, and entirely beyond the reach of sanctions, carrier groups, and the particular fury of a president who mistakes stubbornness for strategy.
Donald Trump does not know Iran. He does not know Persia. He does not know that the Persian language—Farsi—is one of the oldest living literary languages in the world, that Hafez and Rumi wrote verses that are still recited by millions of people around the world seven centuries later, and that the poetry of Omar Khayyam reached Europe before Shakespeare was born. He does not know that Cyrus the Great—the same Cyrus that Reza Pahlavi invokes in his opportunistic speeches, the same Cyrus whose name adorns the “Cyrus Accords”[2] supposed to bind a future Iran to Israel—drafted the first human rights declaration in human history, five centuries before Jesus Christ, on a clay cylinder now housed in the British Museum. He does not know that Avicenna—Ibn Sina—codified medicine and philosophy while medieval Europe was burning its witches and books. He does not know that Zarathushtra Spitama, more commonly known as Zoroaster, conceived the cosmic struggle between Good and Evil when Rome was still a village of shepherds along a river no one had yet named the Tiber.
Strange. The word bounces back like a boomerang. Because there is nothing stranger—nothing more incomprehensible in the history of civilizational encounters—than a country that bombs another country whose history it barely reads, whose language it does not speak, and whose thinkers it hears of once in a blue moon.
And if Donald Trump does not know Cyrus, does not know Avicenna, and has never opened Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh—how could he possibly know Ali Shariati?
Most Americans do not know Iran. They have an image of it: angry mullahs, fanatic crowds, fatwas, nuclear threats, hostages, terrorism, and the Axis of Evil. An image constructed over 45 years of carefully maintained propaganda, amplified by media outlets that have almost never sent a correspondent to such wonders as Isfahan, Tabriz, or Shiraz and that do not know that Tehran is a city of ten million souls where people discuss philosophy in cafes, where women study medicine and law, and where a sophisticated, proud, and industrious people—battered by severe and illegal sanctions—watch bombs fall on their homes, hospitals, factories, schools, and universities and wonder what they have done to the world to deserve this.
Trump most likely does not know Shariati. Nor does Netanyahu. Reza Pahlavi never cites Shariati. And this is precisely where the scandal lies: a country is being bombed by people who do not know its thinkers. A “regime” is the object of an attempted overthrow by those who have probably never read the philosophers who conceived its birth. And a people are being “liberated” by those who are ignorant of their dreams.
Let us now turn to the other outrageous utterance. The Iranian negotiators are “begging,” said Trump. Really? Perhaps they are doing what their civilization has always done when confronted with overwhelming force: enduring, absorbing, and waiting. Because a civilization that has survived Alexander the Great, the Arab conquests, the Mongol invasions, British imperial manipulation, overt and covert American-engineered coups and subversion, and 45 years of sanctions has certainly learned something about time that no X/Twitter account — or Truth Social post — can grasp.
It is for all the above-mentioned reasons that the present article needed to be written. Because before the bombs, there were ideas; because after the bombs, there will still be ideas; and because the man who thought about Iran, perhaps more deeply than anyone else in the twentieth century, deserves to be read—especially now that his country burns and the man who bombed it calls its people “strange.”
His name is Ali Shariati. He was the opposite of strange. He was a mirror. And his ideas and memory, no bomb—not even the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB), nicknamed the “Mother of All Bombs”—can kill.
The Upright Man
There are men whom history absorbs without digesting. Thinkers whose ideas ignite the fire and then are consumed by the very flames they set alight.
Ali Shariati is one of them. Born in 1933 in the small village of Mazinan in the Khorasan province, he was neither an ayatollah, nor a general, nor a politician. He was a teacher. He wore European suits, smoked cigars, and spoke French with the ease of a Parisian intellectual. And yet his lectures at Tehran’s Husseyniyeh Ershad drew thousands of young Iranians who found there what neither imported Marxism nor clerical Islam could offer them: an identity standing upright, a consciousness refusing to bow.
The Iran of the 1950s was a country torn apart. On one side, the corrupt monarchy of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, closely tied to Washington and London since the 1953 coup that overthrew the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh—guilty of having dared to nationalize Iranian oil[3]; on the other hand, a Marxist left incapable of speaking to a society deeply rooted in Shia Islamic culture. Between these two dead ends, educated Iranian youth were searching for a third way.
It was into this intellectual and political void that Shariati plunged —not to fill a gap, but to pose a question no one dared formulate: What if Islam were not the problem, but the solution? Not the Islam of court mullahs or sterile rituals, but an Islam of struggle, an Islam of liberation, an Islam that thinks, acts, and refuses?
Shariati’s Parisian years, from 1959 to 1964, were decisive: he earned his doctorate in Islamic studies and sociology at the Sorbonne, he encountered Jean-Paul Sartre, read Albert Camus, frequented the circles of the French anti-colonial left, translated Fanon into Persian, and met militants from the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). It was there and then, precisely, that Algeria entered his life—not as a backdrop but as a revelation.
Algeria, School of Revolution
Paris, 1959. Shariati arrives in a city seized by revolutionary fever. The Algerian War was reshaping not only the geography of North Africa but also the political consciousness of the entire world. It was not merely a colonial war; it was the first great demonstration, in the eyes of the Third World, that a Muslim people—poor, lightly armed—can stand up to one of the great military powers of the era and win.
From 1959, Shariati begins to actively collaborate with the FLN in Paris.[4] This was not an intellectual posture; it was a concrete, physical, risky commitment: on January 17, 1961, he was arrested during a demonstration in honor of Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese leader assassinated with CIA complicity.[5] Shariati was not an observer of revolution; he was a participant in it.
It was above all Algeria, whose struggle for independence was reaching its climax during Shariati’s years in Paris, that had a decisive impact on him. Algeria taught him what no philosophy book can teach: that theory without bloodshed is vain, that revolution is not a concept but a flesh, and that liberation is paid for at the highest price—and that this price can be willingly accepted.
Algeria also taught him something more subtle and more enduring: that decolonization is not only military. Once the colonizer has left, one must still decolonize oneself. One must reinvent an identity that is neither the mimicry of the colonizer nor a fantasized return to a mythicized past. This was precisely the problem that Shariati would pose to Iran.
Then came Algerian President Houari Boumediene. Boumediene—who took power in Algeria in 1965, nationalized Algerian oil in 1971 without flinching before Western companies, hosted the fourth Non-Aligned Movement summit in Algiers in September 1973, and made the Algerian capital the geopolitical center of the Third World for a decade—embodied something Shariati had not yet seen at the scale of a state: an authentic attempt to combine Islam, socialism, and national sovereignty into a single civilizational project.[6]
Algeria under Boumediene was for Shariati a living proof, within reach. Boumediene supported liberation movements across Africa, the Arab world, and Latin America unconditionally. He nationalized hydrocarbons. He Arabized education. He built dams and factories. He made Algeria a state that stands upright—a word that Shariati will make resonate throughout his political philosophy.
For Shariati, watching all this from Tehran, where the Shah reigned with Washington’s blessing, Algeria was a permanent challenge. If a people who suffered one hundred and thirty-two years of brutal French colonization can rise and build a sovereign state that dares to say no to the great powers, then why should Iran, heir to a millennial civilization, accept American tutelage and Safavid Shiism as its only possible horizons?
Boumediene Intervenes with the Shah for Shariati
The link between Algeria and Shariati was not limited to intellectual influence. At a precise moment, it took the form of a concrete act—discreet, diplomatic, and decisive.
In September 1973, after the forced closure of the Husseyniyeh Ershad on the Shah’s orders, Shariati is arrested by the Iranian secret police, the Bureau for Intelligence and Security of the State, shortened to SAVAK. He disappears into the regime’s prisons. Eighteen months of detention, isolation, and interrogation[7]—during which a man whose ideas had set an entire generation ablaze vanished behind the walls of Evin Prison, while the world fell silent. The world, but not entirely. Algeria did not fall silent.
Boumediene—the same man who had just made Algiers the moral capital of the Third World—intervened with the Shah of Iran on behalf of Shariati’s liberation. This gesture deserves close attention. In 1975, the Shah was a strategic ally of Washington, a pillar of the American order in the Middle East. To intervene on behalf of a political prisoner whom SAVAK considered one of the most dangerous intellectuals in Iran was therefore an act of diplomatic courage that few heads of state would’ve dared. Boumediene dared. Because he knew the value of a thinker. Because, for him, Third World revolutionary solidarity was not a rhetorical formula but a moral obligation.
In March 1975, Shariati was released—placed under house arrest, harassed, and banned from publishing, but alive. Alive and able to write for two more years, until his forced exile of 1977. We will never know with certainty how many pages Shariati managed to write, thanks to this Algerian gesture, how many minds his 1975–1977 texts have shaped and how many seeds they have sowed in the earth of a revolution that was about to erupt.
The Algiers Accords and the Price Paid in Blood
The story of Algeria and Iran does not stop there. It has a second act—greater, more tragic, and almost completely ignored by world opinion.
On November 4, 1979, Iranian students stormed the American Embassy in Tehran. Fifty-two American diplomats were held hostage for 444 days.[8] The United States and Iran had no diplomatic relations. No credible intermediary existed. No power could speak to both sides simultaneously without losing its neutrality. Except one: Algeria.
Faithful since its independence to the values of dialogue and cooperation, faithful to the doctrine of non-alignment forged in the mountains of its war of liberation, Algeria did not hesitate to step in. It was Mohamed Seddik Benyahia—foreign affairs minister, former FLN militant, and youngest negotiator of the Évian Accords in 1962, a man whose diplomatic intelligence commanded admiration as far as Washington and whom his peers had nicknamed “the desert fox”—who took charge of the mediation. He assembled a high-level team of diplomats, bankers, and legal experts who would shuttle between Algiers, Washington, and Tehran, sometimes without sleeping for days.[9]
On January 19, 1981, the Algiers Accords were signed.[10] The following day, at 3 o’clock in the morning, an Air Algérie plane landed on the tarmac of Algiers airport with all 52 Americans on board, free after 444 days of captivity. Former President Carter and Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher personally praised Benyahia, noting that he often worked without sleep to ensure the hostages’ return. Decades later, the American Embassy in Algiers still published annual tributes, writing that “America will remain forever grateful” to him and his colleagues.[11] America had been saved from humiliation. By Algeria.
One year later, Benyahia is once again on a peace mission. This time between Iran and Iraq, whose war had been killing hundreds of thousands since September 1980. On May 3, 1982, his plane—a Gulfstream II belonging to the Algerian presidency—exploded in full flight on the Iran-Turkey border. With him died eight senior officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a journalist, and the four crew members.¹⁰ There were no survivors.
The accumulation of evidence and subsequent testimonies point overwhelmingly to Iraqi responsibility for the attack: the plane is believed to have been shot down by a Soviet-made missile fired by a MiG-25 of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi Air Force—which did not want the war to end, because the great powers supporting it did not want it to end either. Mohamed Seddik Benyahia was 50 years old. He had negotiated the Évian Accords at 30. He had freed 52 Americans at 49. He died at 50 attempting to save hundreds of thousands of Iranians and Iraqis whose names no one in Washington knew.
The United States themselves officially acknowledged, in their own diplomatic archives, that “the 1982 mediation mission between Iraq and Iran cost the lives of former Foreign Minister Ben Yahia and so many of his colleagues.”[12]
Algeria had saved American honor in 1981. It paid for that service with the lives of its best diplomats in 1982.[13] And a few years earlier, it perhaps saved the final pages of Ali Shariati by intervening with the Shah for his liberation.
Three acts. Three gestures of gratuitous dignity are the hallmark of great peoples. Three gestures that the world, and in particular today’s America, would do well to remember before sending its bombs over Tehran in the belief that it is doing history a service.
Trump does not know Shariati. He probably does not know Benyahia either. He does not know that an Algerian plane brought his compatriots back to freedom on a January night in 1981, nor that another Algerian plane was shot down by a missile from his future Iraqi ally while an Algerian diplomat was trying to stop a war. He does not know that Algeria paid with human lives for the peace that America is unwilling to build. He bombs a country. Without knowledge. Without memory. Without shame.
Amir Nour is an Algerian researcher in international relations, author of the books “L’Orient et l’Occident à l’heure d’un nouveau Sykes-Picot” (The Orient and the Occident in Time of a New Sykes-Picot) Editions Alem El Afkar, Algiers, 2014 and “L’Islam et l’ordre du monde” (Islam and the Order of the World), Editions Alem El Afkar, Algiers, 2021.
Laala Bechetoula is an Algerian journalist and writer, author of “The Book of Gaza Hashem: A Testament Written in Olive Wood and Ash”.
They are regular contributors to Global Research.
Notes
[1] Agencies and Times of Israel Staff, “Witkoff says Trump ‘curious’ why Iran hasn’t ‘capitulated’ under US pressure”, The Times of Israel, February 22, 2026. [2] See: Reza Pahlavi, “A Path to the Cyrus Accord”, March 26, 2026, and Gila Gamliel, “The Cyrus Accords: The beginning of a new chapter in Israel-Iran relations”, The Jerusalem Post, September 18, 2025. [3] On the 1953 coup against Mosaddegh, see: Stephen Kinzer, “All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror”, John Wiley&Sons, 2003. The CIA and MI6 roles were officially acknowledged in 2013. [4] Shariati began collaborating with the FLN in Paris in 1959. See: Ali Rahnema, “An Islamic Utopian: A Political Biography of Ali Shariati”, I.B. Tauris, 1998, pp. 134–140; Wikipedia, “Ali Shariati”. [5] Shariati was arrested on January 17, 1961 during a demonstration in honor of Patrice Lumumba, assassinated that same day in Congo with CIA and Belgian complicity. Source: Wikipedia. [6] On Boumediene and the Non-Aligned Movement, see: BISA, “Algeria’s Self-Determination and Third Worldist Policy Under President Houari Boumédiène”; Wikipedia, “Houari Boumédiène”. [7] Shariati was imprisoned by SAVAK from September 1973 to March 1975. See: The Philosophy Room, “Ali Shariati”, 2024; MERIP, “Ali Shariati: Ideologue of the Iranian Revolution”, 1982. [8] On the Iran hostage crisis, see: NESA Center, “40 Years Later: The Role of Algerian Diplomacy During the Iran Hostage Crisis”, January 2021 and Wikipedia, “Algerian mediation in the Iran hostage crisis”. [9] On Benyahia’s role, see: Stimson Center, “The Algerian Connection: Lessons Learned from Covering the Iran Hostage Crisis”, 2024 and UPI Archives, “Mohammed ben Yahia, Algerian foreign minister”, May 1982. [10] See: NESA Center, op cit. and also Wikipedia, “Algiers Accords (1981)”. [11] US Embassy Algiers, tribute published on May 3, 2021, cited by Algerian Press Service and Radio Algérienne. [12] US Department of State, Office of the Historian, Historical Documents, letter citing “the 1981 mediation mission between Iraq and Iran that cost the lives of Algeria’s former Foreign Minister Ben Yahia and so many of his colleagues”, history.state.gov. [13] Le Matin DZ, “Il y a 30 ans disparaissait Mohamed Seddik Benyahia”, May 3, 2012; La Patrie News, “Mohamed Seddik Benyahia”, May 2022; Wikipedia, “Mohammed Seddik Benyahia”.Featured image is from the authors
