The study of Ali Shariati’s oeuvre reveals an understanding of the Iranian Revolution vis-à-vis the pervasive critique of industrial modernity, promoted in the second half of the twentieth century across the globe. Frustrated with the isolation and alienation of the modern man in a Godless world, a product of liberal democracy and its communist alternative, Shariati strove to produce a liberating and revolutionary reading of Islam to challenge modern conditions. His interpretation of Islam aimed at promoting Shi’ism as a socio-cultural theocratic solution that could stand strong against the failures of both Western liberalism and Eastern communism. Yet, his intellectual endeavor is not only rooted in his commitment to and proficiency in Islam but also provoked by his knowledge of and interest in the philosophical tradition that promoted liberalism and communism both. Therefore, a detailed assessment of Shariati’s body of work cannot be achieved without noticing his critical engagement with Western philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre, and the influence of anti-Western intellectuals like Frantz Fanon, who himself bore the lineage of (leftist) Western thought in his advocacy for social justice and decolonization. This conflation both justifies and complicates Shariati’s aim and attempt to have a “modern” reading of Islam and can be read not as antimodernist but as alternative modernism. This inquiry examines Shariati’s oeuvre to understand the appropriation of leftist concepts that fomented his revolutionary reading of Islam, and in particular the place of aesthetic theory in his thought. To understand this blend of leftist ideas and Islamic thought as an alternative approach to modernity, I scrutinize Shariati's lectures on art against the backdrop of the global intellectual atmosphere that was influential on him, along with the analysis of a revolutionary visual discourse that was structured around his aesthetic theory. According to this observation, this paper examines the ways in which Shariati translated the global intellectual impact of the second half of the twentieth century into his “modern” configuration of Islam as a tool to challenge modernity itself, and asks how this rendering could possibly change our ideas about the historical role of critical (and aesthetic) theory in relation to alternative practices of modernism.