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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Alternative Sociology: Probing into the Sociological Thought of Allama M. T. Jafari Epilogue Professor Dustin J.

Byrd[^1] Western Michigan University United States of America In an age where the social sciences find themselves intellectually ghettoized, isolated not only from the broader society within which they function and study, but also from other forms of science and philosophical inquiry into the nature of reality, existence, and existential meaning, there comes thinkers that are able to bridge the gaps between not only the academic disciplines, but the sacred and secular, spirit and matter, East and West, etc., illuminating the elusive wholeness of existence that is so shattered in everyday perception.

In the thirteenth century, it was the Persian scholar/mystic Shams-i Tabrizi, who through his living wholeness, reconciliation of the spiritual and temporal, his mastery of the knowledge of the totality of the human condition – it's fragility, its temporality, its majesty, and it's purposivity – led a young conventional scholar Mevlana Jalaludin Rumi to transcend his everydayness , his compartmentalized mental and spiritual existence, until he became the greatest living poet of mystical union; a union not only of man and the divine, but man and himself.

In the 20th century, it is another Tabrizi, Allama Muhammad Taqi Jafari, that has demonstrated the possibility of a way of understanding reality, the human condition, and the meaning of human existence through a comprehensive and inter-connected orientation of sociological study; a method of study that takes seriously the metaphysical and spiritual dimensions of human life – a area of uneasiness for many Western scholars.

Allama Jafari points to the integrated wholeness of 'human being' – the tawhid of human existence with a form of communication-reason that takes into account the repositories of human spirit, values, metaphysical assumptions, and religious sensibilities, and humanistic frailties.

For Allama Jafari, no sociological study that systematically neglects, rejects, or fails to comprehend and consider the human being within his totality can be adequate in penetrating into the human condition; in effect, Jafari calls for a profoundly onto-humanistic approach to the study of man that does not systematically distort or deny man's non- physical dimension of being nor his spiritual-religious longings.