Political Islam in Post-Revolutionary Iran

Shi'i Ideologies in Islamist Discourse

Majid Mohammadi

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780857736789
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Process
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The relationship between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Western World is fraught with challenges and tensions. In order to generate the capacity for greater engagement and dialogue, there is a need for the West to better understand the complex ideological developments that are central to Iran. Majid Mohammadi charts the central concepts and nuances of the ideological map of post-revolutionary Iran, and examines the rise and development of Shi'i Islamism. He recognizes that the Islamic Republic of Iran and Iranian political discourse are the outcome of contesting perspectives and ideologies: identity-oriented, socialist, nationalist, authoritarian, Shari'a, scripturalist, mystical, militarist and fascist. This is a comprehensive, comparative contribution to one of today's most important topics: that of the relationship between Political Islam and the West.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Iran has been the hub of Islamism for more than three decades since the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that led to the establishment of an Islamic regime. Since then, Iranian Islamists of different political persuasions have been trying to put their theories in practice. Often, they are accused of doing so without any thought as to the consequences for the country's national interest, security and happiness of their subjects. Iran has become the first Shi‘i Islamic state in the Middle East in modern times. Meanwhile, almost all Shi‘i movements, from Lebanon to Iraq and from Bahrain to Afghanistan have been supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran. The struggle between Shi‘i movements and secular and despotic states has been intense, violent and complicated. The big project of Shi‘i Islamists is to establish an Islamic state that will allegedly enforce shari‘ah¹ law and stand against the Western interests and domination in the region.

The failures and shortcomings of political Islam and the idea of the Islamic state in the social, political, economic and cultural arenas that arose at the very outset of the victory of the Iranian Revolution paved the way for alternative approaches within the movement. The diversity of Shi‘i groups that were fighting against the monarchy, and the struggle for power among Iranian revolutionaries, highlighted the ideological diversity of the revolutionary movement. The failure to deliver the promises and difficulties involved in enforcing shari‘ah law has been evident not just for the political elite and political analysts inside and outside the country but also to the subjects of the state themselves. Even the suppression of alternative political approaches and the closing down of their media outlets have not decreased the outcry against ineffectiveness, nepotism, corruption, brutality, and the hidden agenda and policies of the ruling clerics and their loyalists in the military forces. The environment of paradox, frustration and hope in post-revolutionary Iran is reflected in contemporary Iranian art and literature and often voiced by the large Iranian dispora.

For more than a century, there has been widespread popular support for real reforms which will end the country's authoritarian regime and establish a more effective, representative and transparent government. The demand for democracy, freedom and respect for human rights has increased by conjunction with the upswing of the literacy rate, the urban population and the number of university graduates in recent decades. The disastrous experience of Islamic state regarding human rights and democracy is an unforgettable section of every Iranian's personal experience. The revolutionary regime was expected to be a part of the solution and now is part of the problem.

In Iran, the Islamism project has not been adept at the smaller goals of delivering public services and the mobilization of young Muslims for social change and social justice, which other Islamic movements in Palestine, Turkey and North Africa have successfully experienced.² The speedy victory of the Iranian Revolution did not give Iranian Islamists enough time to put some efforts in proposing practical solutions to the real day-to-day needs of the people for health services and education, freedom from sexual harassment especially at local levels, and access to micro-credit.

The Iranian Revolution offered the Shi‘i clerics an opportunity to have total power in a modernized and centralized state; but this position did not immediately translate into their delivering the basic needs of the population. The nature of the Iranian state, constructed as it was around the networks of absolute power and the nature of the rentier state, soon meant that the authoritarian power structures and corruption that were seen under the Pahlavis and Qajars were quickly duplicated and reinforced. Iran was never a failed or collapsed state that the Islamists had to rescue. Instead, they took over the already existing power structures and merely perpetuated them.

The struggles related to the Islamist and non-Islamist readings of traditional Islam have shaped and have been shaped by local and national social, cultural and political struggles. Understanding these political developments is not possible without a better understanding of the ideological struggles related to a variety of Islamist ideologies. With the Islamic Republic of Iran now in existence for more than three decades, we have now a rather large body of literature to help us understand the varied actors, schools, institutions, events and activities that have an Islamist point of reference. This study will reflect on the ideas, policies and agendas of Islamist ideologies in Iran through focusing on concepts and categories of analysis that this extended literature offers.

The principal focus of this book is the theoretical confrontation among an array of Islamist ideologies in contemporary Iran. The discussions in this book reveal the rich complexity of Islams and Islamisms in this country. It seeks to provide analyses and explanations for this complexity to fill an important gap in the ideological history of Iran in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The main goal of the study is to present Islamism as it has been developed in modern Iran, not as a monolithic phenomenon, but instead as a diverse and disparate grouping of theories.

The ideology of the Islamic state in Iran is an amalgam of a different and diverse set of Islamist ideologies which are interacting and fighting against each other. The spectrum of Islamist ideologies grew wider and wider as Iranian Islamists struggled for and monopolized power in the Islamic Republic of Iran. This has opened the door to greater internal debates among Iranian Islamists. For the most part, Shi‘i Islamist ideologies differ in two grand respects: political and ideological. Their political differences are very similar to political differences among non-Islamist groups, in issues related to transparency, speed of change, institution-building, flexibility, expediency, degree of rotation of the elites, wealth distribution, tolerance toward corruption of high-ranking officials, political participation and political competition, and the recruitment criteria for public offices. The ideological differences relate to the methods and premises of reading the religious texts, the most essential component(s) of Islam, the level of clerical authority, the basic values and their priorities, Islamic state and non-Islamic state relationships, the definition of sacred violence, the ways and means of executing Islamic rules, helping other Muslims under repression, and the rights of individuals in an Islamic state.

The perils of examining these phenomena are political, cultural and religious. The political peril is to reduce the political conflict in the country into clashes among different ideological readings of Islam. The political clashes in Iran go beyond religion and ideology and are entwined in the cultural, economic and social realities. The cultural peril is relativism, i.e. to legitimize the beliefs and practices of these ideologies in spite of their history of violation of civil and human rights and their animosity toward rule of law, human rights, democracy and tolerance. The religious peril is to reduce faith to religion and religion to religious ideology.

Background

To understand the background of Islamist ideologies and Islamist movements, it is incumbent upon us to study the religious and intellectual context, ideological circumstances, cultural developments, the socio-economic context and the political scene of Iran during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Iranian society has experienced two political revolutions, one in 1906 and one in 1979, three national movements during 1951–3, 1996–9, and 2009 and a great number of periods of reforms, whether political, social, judicial, religious or cultural.

The Religious Context

Religion in Iran is diverse: Muslims, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Baha'is and Sā'ebis have lived there side by side for centuries. Islam in Iran is also hugely diverse; there are Shi‘is and Sunnis, and each of them includes a whole variety of sects, schools, and branches. There are Twelvers, Esmā‘ilis, Zaidi and Ahl-e Haqq among Shi‘is. There are Hanafi, Māleki, Shāfe‘i and Hanbali Sunnis mostly living in provinces on the borders of Iran. Sunni Muslims constitute approximately 9 per cent of the Iranian population. A majority of Kurds, virtually all Baluchis and Turkamans, and a minority of Arabs are Sunnis, as are small communities of Persians in southern Iran and Khorasan.³ There are also hundreds of mystical orders or sufi brotherhoods such as the Ne‘matollāhi, the Dhahabi and the Khāksār, the Naqshbandi and the Qādiri among Shi‘is and Sunnis.

Iranian Shi‘i Islam as a lived experience is a very diverse phenomenon. There are usulis and akhbāris in Shi‘i jurisprudence tradition; Shi‘i, Ash‘ari and Mo‘tazeli schools of theology among Shi‘is and Sunnis, to name the most important ones; there are Mashshā'is, Eshrāqis and Sadrā'is in Islamic philosophical traditions; mystical, philosophical, literary, canonical and scientific approaches to interpretation of the the Qur'an and hadith have been competing against each other; there are sufi, philosophical-Aristotelian and Platonic-canonical, scripturalist, theological and traditional chivalry or warriorship (ayyāri) approaches to ethics among Iranian Muslims.⁴

For about two centuries, there has been an ongoing process of Islamic revivalism, whether revolutionary or reformist, during the reign of the Qājārs, Pahlavis and on to the period of the Islamic Republic. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 was not the end of this movement but instead represents a new beginning. Modern Shi‘i revivalism does not represent a return to any situation in the Shi‘i history or any former Shi‘i political theories: it is a reconstruction of the Shi‘i political tradition by recruiting modern theories and ideologies.

Intellectual Context

Iranian Shi‘i ideologies are produced and reproduced by religious intellectuals and clerics. The intellectual bases for these ideologies are religious studies research programs that are usually shaped by the intellectual and clerical circles and are mostly presented in academic and scholarly lectures and cultural magazines. Iranian religious studies research programs are under the influence of Western social sciences and humanities and flourish through the interactions and manipulations by critical comments as well as public demand for religious understanding of day-to-day events and social and political processes. A set of these religious studies research programs is presented and explained in the appendix at the end of this book.

These religious studies research programs which stand somewhere between religious studies theories and religious ideologies provide enough materials for ideology producers. Most of the time, the people who are working on these religious studies research programs initially aim to build new schools of thought. They are the ones who establish the new ideologies. Other than the researcher/ideologue, a group of disciples and followers participate in the production, post-production, distribution and the publicizing processes by asking questions and writing ideology-made-simple treatises for public magazines.

Ideological Circumstance

During three decades of Iranian Shi‘i clerics' rule, Iranian society has experienced a range of Islamic and Islamist ideologies.⁵ These ideologies as doctrines in action reflect the cultural and religious developments in society as well as international and regional conflicts. The clerics and religious intellectuals have created and elaborated these ideologies to serve specific causes such as mobilizing the public and strengthening their bases. Iranian society over the last three decades has been a fruitful field for breeding different brands of Islamic and Islamist ideologies which have their roots in a variety of sources, such as Shi‘ism, Iranian culture and history, Western ideologies, international and regional conflicts and dynamics of a developing society such as Iran.

All Iranian Shi‘i Islamists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have argued that Islam promotes a vision of society, provides guidelines for social life, and is inherently a political religion. They believe that the rules, ordinances and laws laid out in the Qur'an and the hadith mandate Islamic government. Nevertheless, they disagree about the way in which one should create an Islamic state, the methods of acquiring power, the way the government functions, and the way the government ought to deal with its citizens (subjects, in Islamists' terms). Iranian Islamists range from those who advocate limited democratic politics to those who advance theories of armed struggle, terror, and violence against their critics and dissidents.

Political Scene

Islamism is the most important ideological challenge for European and American societies in the twenty-first century. Although some varieties of Islamist ideology limit themselves to Muslim societies, others do not, and instead look to to extending their operating zone(s) to include Europe and North America. Due to the perceptions of a lasting Western colonial domination and imperialist tendencies, military interferences of European and American forces in the Muslim world and the occupation of Palestinian territories by Israel, Islamism is imbued with a particular hostility towards the West. Over the past century, Islamist thought has coincided with both external conflicts with non-Muslim powers and internal ones with local authoritarian and secular regimes.

Iranian Shi‘i Islamism has been the response of Iranian Muslim theoreticians, activists, and scholars to a variety of developments: the challenges of Western hegemony (British and then American), internal despotism, alternative anti-imperialist ideologies such as nationalism, secularism, and socialism, and frustrated aspirations and grievances due to socio-economic underdevelopment. It is also a reaction to authoritarianism and disillusionment with the failures of Western-inspired governments in the nations with a Muslim majority.

Contemporary Shi‘i Islamism is not the outcome of a reaction to the abuse of secularism. Iranian society never truly experienced secularism. Before the Iranian Revolution of 1979, religious intellectuals and only a limited group of clerics were intellectually and ideologically responding to the modernization and secularization processes implemented by the secular governments. The modern state of the Pahlavis, while following the path of a despotic state, did not subjugate the men of religion to impose on them concepts aimed solely at legitimizing the state's political options.

Iranian Shi‘i Islamism is not a response to the problems of globalization and fragmentation. Shi‘ism has already been fragmentized from Sunnism and other Islamic sects. When Iranian Shi‘i Islamism was flourishing, globalization was already in its early stages. By inventing tradition and repoliticizing Islam in modern times, Iranian Shi‘i Islamists focused on the idea of the nation-state, something that they could build to reflect their ideological position. As opposed to some brands of Sunni Islamism,⁶ Shi‘i Islamism is not solely the expression of revolt against the West; it can also read as the expression of revolt against liberal democracy and what liberal democracy stands for. Shi‘i Islamism is the enemy of democracy for all, human rights, and freedom of the media and expression, while the Western idea of global domination and hegemony is entirely absorbed by different brands of Islamism.

While responders to modernism were redefining Islam in the context of the new political and social environment and uniting the Muslim communities through a reform of Islamic beliefs, the majority of clerics were rejecting both the new ideas of Islamic reformers and the policies of the Western-oriented governments. They accused the Islamist nationalists and socialists of borrowing from Western thought and institutions, while they were attempting to establish a form of continuity between their Islamic heritage and modern change.⁷ The religious reformers and Islamist ideologues' questioning the status quo was believed to be a threat to traditional religious authority. In spite of the absolute power of clerics, this feeling of threat has extended to the Islamic Republic era.

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 awakened this majority and they began to build their own ideology to oppose the previous ones in order to have a share in the unexpected power of th...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• contents
• Tables and Figures
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• Part I Pre-Iranian Revolution Era
• Part II Post-Iranian Revolution Era
• Part III Now and Then
• Epilogue
• Appendix Religious Studies in Iran Today: Research Programs
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Back cover