ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Alternative Sociology: Probing into the Sociological Thought of Allama M. T. Jafari Foreword In The Heart of Man: Its Genesis for Good and Evil, in Religious Perspectives (1964.

p 93), Erich Fromm argues that ‘’our conscious mind represents mainly our own society and culture, while our unconscious represents the universal man in each of us.’’ If we could conclude the project of Allama Jafari in one sentence that would be what Erich Fromm stated about the role of unconscious and its relation to the universal in each of us.

In other words, Allama Jafari was working on the poetry of awakening the ‘universal being’ in the heart of human self in a dialectical fashion that the unconscious would turn conscious and the universal would get fused with the conscious heart in a dynamic mode. In 2010, I wrote a book on Allama Jafari entitled Reflections on the Social Thought of Allama M. T.

Jafari: Rediscovering the Sociological Relevance of the Primordial School of Social Theory , which was published by University Press of America. There I attempted to reconstruct the theoretical significance of Allama Jafari within the broad parameters of social theory by arguing that he belongs to a school of thought which has been undertheorized in the Iranian context as well as not known in the global context of social theory.

While thinking over the repercussions of such bold assertions in regard to a thinker who, is not even recognized within Iran as a relevant social philosopher (let alone a social thinker or social theorist and sociologist), I came across an unpublished manuscript by Allama Jafari entitled Sociology and Human Being dated 1976.[^1] In these unpublished lectures, he precisely takes issue with sociology as a field of knowledge and mentions the works of Western sociologists and even quotes Durkheim and other classical sociologists at length.

Reading this work I realized that we are faced with a thinker who is a many-sided theoretician that is indispensable for all who are interested in alternative sociological imaginations. In other words, the sociological works of Allama Jafari represents a novel fashion in doing sociology based on primordial school of social theory.

To put it differently, we who studied disciplinary sociology and grew within the parameters of discursive rationalized imagination have come to believe that reflections over the destiny of humanity is tantamount to the principles of disciplinary rationality.