User:Mashaunix/Reza Zareii

Reza Zareii (1941–2017) was an Iranian physician and philosopher. He trained also in Germany and Algeria. Many of his writings addressed the religious challenges of modernity, often approaching secularism as a spiritual health condition. In his mature philosophical works, created in exile in Indonesia, he defended what he saw as the need for Islam to take up a central role in the establishment of a global multi-religious civilization.

Career
Born in Mashhad not long before 1941 Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran, Zareii grew up conscious of the encounter between Islamic and European culture. This interest was stimulated by his parents, both of whom worked in the modernization of Iranian healthcare while also being spiritually intense Shia believers. In the early 1960s, while studying medicine at the University of Tehran, Zareii met philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who introduced him to the thought of Avicenna and Mulla Sadra, urging him to recognize the perennial relevance of theology. Moved by Nasr's belief in the essential unity of all religions, Zareii became concerned with the tension he recognized between these attitudes and modernity (a concern not unlike that of Nasr's elder fellow Muhammad Husayn Tabatabai). On an educational stay at the German University of Cologne, he took the opportunity to study more recent thinkers concerned with similar questions. Naturally, and with Avicenna in mind, he paid special attention to physicians: Carl Jung, Albert Schweitzer, and Karl Jaspers. He even chanced to meet the last personally. Eager to apply their insights to contemporary Islam and having expanded his language knowledge to French, he sought his first medical post in Algeria. There he also met with the legacy of Frantz Fanon, whose radicalism shocked him into the first establishment of his own distinctive world-view. His early philosophical texts followed, exploring the importance of religious tradition for social progress.

Upon returning to Iran in 1971, Zareii established a medical practice in his home town, also taking up a minor academic post there at Mashhad University. In 1973, he married the harpist Hedieh Taheri; the couple would go on to have 3 children and only be separated by Taheri's death in 2013. Re-engaging with Nasr and his circle, he produced books with some impact in Iran and beyond. Perhaps the most notable was Sacred Science (1977), which outlined the relationship between religion and science as analogous to that between philosophy and medicine. This happy period was ended abruptly by the 1979 Revolution. While he was still hopeful about the social change it represented, Zareii was warned that the new regime judged his activities highly undesirable. Before the end of the year, he left with his wife and 2 young children for Indonesia, taking up the invitation of a close friend he had met in Europe. The shock of the exile and his subsequent experiences as a physician in impoverished but deeply traditional communities on Borneo and Java resulted in the final maturing of his thought. It was from writing produced in this period that Zareii assembled his best-known work, The Healing of the Ummah, published in 1995. Its passionate vision of Islam re-emerging as a global religion of tolerance to secure the spiritual future of humankind gained adherents around the world. It also secured him his first philosophy degree and post at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, Java, where he remained until retiring in 2014. Zareii died of heart failure in Yogyakarta in 2017.