Recent scholarly literature has attempted to demonstrate the influence of Western thought on the development of political Islam in Iran. While moving the discussion about the ideas that inspired the 1979 revolution beyond a purely theological domain, this work overlooks the extent to which some of the most significant Iranian ideologues of the 1960s and 1970s developed their thoughts in conversation with other non-Western theorists and activists. My paper counters this trend by providing an alternate history of Ali Shariati’s notion of “a return to self” (bazgasht). Where existing scholarship situates Shariati’s idea in relation to Martin Heidegger’s reflections on authenticity, I argue that this concept is more appropriately the product of an engagement with Frantz Fanon’s efforts to adopt and adapt G.W.F. Hegel’s theory of recognition in 1952’s "Black Skin, White Masks" and, most prominently, 1963’s "The Wretched of the Earth." This line of inquiry brings to attention the important theoretical contributions that Fanon and Shariati make to our understanding of political recognition. My paper begins with Hegel’s "Phenomenology of Spirit," where the explicitly non-violent activity of labor is the means by which life becomes “a living thing” in the emergence of an autonomous self-consciousness. Fanon by contrast introduces the constitutive role that violence plays on the formation of subjectivity in racially determined conditions of colonial and imperial power. In particular, "Wretched" involves a revaluation of violence as labor in the colonized subject’s effort to achieve independence. For Fanon, thought can only proceed in the colonial world as consequent to the racially charged significations attached to physical bodies, thereby opening the possibility of affirming one’s own identity through the physical death of another. I argue that Shariati’s notion of “a return to self” envisions a similar form of recognition on collective terms. The shahid (martyr) who dies for a political cause persists as a living entity; he realizes authentic selfhood as an absent presence that shapes the formation of subjectivity for those that physically remain. My paper pursues this concept in light of the mass-based uprising that drew inspiration from Shariati’s ideas two years after his death. How does a consideration of recognition through violence introduce a technique of the self heretofore unexamined in considerations of subject formation? In turn, how do both Shariati and Fanon bring to light a tragic sensibility regarding the possibility for collective liberation despite efforts to characterize their work as strictly, and problematically, utopian?