The Ali Shariati Symposium, held at the Bağlarbaşı Congress and Culture Center in Istanbul on November 17-18, 2012, can be considered a significant cultural and intellectual event, documenting the universality of intellectual interest in Türkiye. In this regard, it is particularly encouraging that a Shia Iranian intellectual and thinker is gaining popularity in the Sunni community for his ideas and works. The fact that Ali Shariati's popularity in his home country, with a delay of at most ten years, has also reached Türkiye through his books since 1978 is a privilege granted to very few foreign writers and thinkers. We believe that considering Shariati on the same level as other world-renowned Muslim thinkers such as Malik ibn Nabi, Ismail Raji Faruki, Seyyed Husayn Nasr, Fazlurrahman, Roger Garaudy, and Aliya Izetbegović, without exaggerating his Iranian and Shiite identities, would be a more sound approach to understanding him correctly and determining his place in Islamic thought and his role in the process of Islamic consciousness. Fecr Publishing, which has brought Ali Shariati's collection of 37 books, many of which have never been translated into Turkish before, from Persian to Turkish with a new and meticulous translation, has sought to crown this cultural service with a Symposium that will explore Shariati's thought from various perspectives. This book is a product of this intention, a collection of the Symposium's presentations and discussions. In this symposium, Shariati was discussed in many aspects, though not in their entirety: his intellectual stance, the literary aspect of his works, the reflections of his ideas in Iran and Türkiye, his contributions to contemporary Islamic thought, his political and economic views, his approach to modern Western movements, his position between tradition and modernism, his view of Shia and Sunni, his place in sociology and the history of religions, his approach to the issue of human freedom and alienation, his understanding of women, and his interpretations of the Hajj ritual constitute the main ones.
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