Indeed, This Is How It Was, Brother! by Ali Shariati

Ali Shariati’s travelogue Indeed, This Is How It Was, Brother is widely regarded as one of his most distinctive works. In this brief yet profound critical-creative piece, Shariati (1933–1977), a leading Iranian anti-colonial thinker, returns to his lifelong concern: the question of liberation. For him, liberation – existential at its core and only then political – is mostly fully realized through literature, where form and content merge to express the inexpressible: to give voice to ideas, emotions, and critiques that dominant discourses suppress, or for which, as yet, no language exists. This conception of the literary, as a dynamic interplay between form and content, is exemplified in “Indeed, This Is How It Was, Brother”. Here, Shariati revives the epistolary genre, rooted in Persian literary history, to confront the sociopolitical challenges of his time while also opening a space for readers to reconsider the functions of the literary in the present world.