Islam and Dissent in Postrevolutionary Iran

Abdolkarim Soroush, Religious Politics and Democratic Reform

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781845118792
• eBook ISBN: 9781786724922
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

The Islamic Republic of Iran came into being in 1979, the result of a radical revolution that overhauled not only the foundations of Iranian society, religion and politics, but also our understanding of the role of religion in modern government. Here Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi takes us on an enlightening journey, showing that contrary to widespread assumptions the Iranian revolution opened up the public sphere to competing interpretations of Islam, with profound consequences for the nature of democratic reform. Ghamari-Tabrizi sheds new light on the contingencies within which the new regime evolved, and traces the steps by which the clerical establishment sought to consolidate power during the immediate postrevolutionary period. Contrary to the received view, he argues that the ruling class failed to institute a theocratic regime, and, more significantly, unintentionally established the grounds for civic challenges to government policies underwritten by official interpretations of Islam. Far from being the exclusive preserve of high-ranking seminarians, interpretations of doctrinal Islam in contemporary Iran now form a contested, varied and negotiated discourse in which lay theologians, intellectuals, lawyers and social activists are active and influential interlocutors. Against the background of this unexpected development, Ghamari-Tabrizi addresses the early and late works of Abdolkarim Soroush, an Iranian philosopher who has become one of the most influential Muslim intellectuals in recent years, a leading force behind Iran's pro-democracy movement and vocal critic of the state. Through a close reading of Soroush's evolving ideas, and of the works of Ali Shari`ati, and by tracing the links between Muslim intellectual critique and the realpolitik of postrevolutionary power struggles, Ghamari-Tabrizi offers nothing less than a pathbreaking reassessment of the Iranian revolution. In so doing, he demonstrates how democratic transformation in Muslim societies has taken place by means of a public engagement with the teachings of Islam and highlights a most significant, if unintended, consequences of the Iranian revolution - namely the secularization of Islam. Drawing on a wealth of sources and with powerful insights, 'Islam and Dissent' is essential for an understanding of the Muslim world today and of the new relationships between religion, culture and political power visible across the globe.

1

Introduction: Ideological Certainties, Past and Present

My first serious encounter with Islamic literature was during my imprisonment from 1981 to 1985. I read the Qur’an for the first time in its entirety while I was in the Towhid Committee, an underground prison that the Islamic Republic’s Revolutionary Guards inherited from the notorious SAVAK.¹ At Towhid, torture was common and, according to the government’s estimates, more than 75 per cent of political prisoners detained in Towhid between 1981-82 were eventually executed.² Later, in the gruesomely infamous Evin prison, as part of the regime’s indoctrination programs cum ‘ideological education,’ I read contemporary writings on Islamic philosophy, economy, and politics. Needless to say, I was not exposed to Islamic literature in an encouraging environment. By this unusual opening, I do not intend to add to the drama of the book. Rather, my purpose is, first, to locate myself vis-à-vis the subject of my study, and second, to emphasize my own awareness of the stakes in proposing a critique of ‘universalizing’ narratives of history.

As a student activist against Mohammad Reza Shah’s US-backed dictatorship, like many of my fellow students, I considered myself a Marxist-Leninist. As a dominant ideological foundation of national liberation movements around the world, Marxism-Leninism envisioned a speedy bypass from the characteristic ‘pre-capitalist’ conditions in the Third World to socialism. Marx predicted that the transition to socialism would be realized through the advancement of the forces of production which would eventually supersede the fetters of capitalism. This formula considered the most advanced capitalist societies to be the forerunners to the establishment of socialism, a path which was to be followed by less-developed countries. Leninism (and Maoism) turned this prediction upside down and regarded anti-imperialist liberation movements as the engine of the world revolution. Lenin turned Marxism into an attractive ideology within which, while remaining faithful to the grand historical commitment of establishing socialism, my comrades and I could justify our nationalist pride. By virtue of this ideology the Third World became the torchbearer of progress towards socialism; the most advanced industrial societies were to follow us.

While the 1978-79 revolutionary movement reinforced my ideological commitment, losing the post-revolution power struggle to the militant clergy planted the seeds of doubt in my mind and generated deep schisms in the Iranian Left. Two major leftist parties supported the establishment of the new Islamic regime.³ By 1980, only one year later, the question of acceptance or rejection of the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic became the wedge issue that divided the Left into two distinct camps. Although the rift within the Left seemed deep, and the two positions were growing increasingly antagonistic, both sides remained faithful to their socialist ideals. On the one hand, the supporters of the regime believed that the Islamic Republic, with its petit-bourgeois anti-imperialist propaganda and its rhetoric of social justice, would take Iranian society a step closer to socialism,⁴ while the opponents argued that the petit-bourgeoisie exhausted its revolutionary potential upon assuming political power. Therefore, for the latter group, the Islamic Republic hindered the establishment of socialism and had to be toppled.

I was associated with the second current; I organized student groups, wrote propaganda pamphlets and theoretical position papers, and orchestrated demonstrations against the Islamic regime. I was arrested in 1981. Soon, the leftist supporters of the government endured the same fate. They were persecuted, imprisoned, and executed by the thousands. The government’s indiscriminate suppression of the Left solved at least one problem: the Islamic regime was not heading towards socialism, or if it were, it did not regard the Bolshevik Left as its ally.

In prison, in addition to extreme violence, we were subjected to constant indoctrination cum ‘ideological training.’ Watching three hours of Islamic educational television every morning from 9 to 12 was mandatory, reading books was optional. It was an open secret, however, that torture had proven to be more effective than education in ‘converting’ Marxists to Islam. Tehran’s Chief Revolutionary Prosecutor, Asadollah Lajevardi, once confided to a group of us on death row that converts did not enjoy the respect of the regime. ‘They are like weeping willows,’ Lajevardi chastised them, ‘which tremble with winds blowing from any direction.’

The great majority of people do not experience matters of faith and ideology in such extreme circumstances. But, both temporally and spatially, prison was a condensed and, at the same time, exaggerated version of everyday life. Ideological commitments in prison were literally a matter of life and death. It is not clear to me why, even in the face of death, some of us chose to remain faithful to our ideology. But ideology is a totalizing discourse through which one defines one’s historical and social location. It is a dogma that provides certainty and comfort, especially in the times of crisis. I was sheltered against my captors’ ideological training, for I was immunized by my certainty about the legitimacy of my Marxist convictions. I regarded anything outside my Marxist worldview, especially religion, as either false consciousness (in cases where I did not question the intentions of the actors) or mere deception. I considered myself to be a part of an irreversible force of history, a part in the unfolding of an historical necessity.

My second encounter with Islamic literature was during my graduate education. Stressful though it was to fulfill the requirements for the doctoral program in sociology, this time I did not feel coerced to study the material. Contrary to what the cliché of ‘studying your captors’ might suggest, from the beginning of my graduate training I was interested in reexamining my own convictions rather than those of my captors. Of course, soon the two became indistinguishable as totalizing ideologies. Another distinction in my second encounter was the collapse of communism and the spectacle of all those nations who had fought admirably to de-link from global capitalism and who were now struggling to rejoin the fold. It was time I came to terms with the idea that rather than a bridge between capitalism and communism, Bolshevik socialism was a transitional period from feudalism to capitalism.⁵

Totality, Utopia, and Foundationalism

The shattering of certainty is a traumatic experience. The pain of this trauma is radically alleviated if one totalizing system replaces another: Marxism giving way to liberalism, or to conversion to Islam. In recent years, thanks to religious revivals of different sorts, certainty has also been associated with fundamentalism: free-market fundamentalism;⁶ Enlightenment fundamentalism;⁷ Christian-Jewish-Islamic fundamentalisms; etc. Accordingly, I redefined my previous convictions as Marxist-Leninist fundamentalism. The pejorative association of certainty with fundamentalism (or less pejoratively with foundationalism) was related to the rise of, to be playful with the concept, a fundamentalist assertion of indeterminacy in social life and history.

Indeterminacy raises the fear of chaos and legitimizes the quondam counter-culture notion of anything goes.⁸ Without foundational persuasions, rather than a ‘natural’ progressive movement with identifiable laws, history becomes a contested realm of human subjectivity with the possibility of infinite formations. This brings me to my second concern in writing this book: the stakes of a relativist approach.

A few years ago, an old friend who knew that I was searching for a theoretical framework for making sense of Islamist movements pleaded with me: we should not allow postmodernism to cross the border into Iran! If it does, it would have disastrous consequences. Although he was not specific about how it was possible to close the borders against the spread of an idea, he passionately elaborated on the disaster he anticipated. If it is true that anything goes, then the Islamic regime in Iran may legitimize its atrocities according to their own cultural codes. How would it be possible to criticize the Islamic Republic’s violations of the human rights without recourse to a universally accepted normative point of reference?

My friend’s concern, in spite of its simplicity, in many ways resonated with foundationalist critiques of post-structuralism. Although it is unlikely that Ayatollah Khomeini was ever aware of the post-structuralist critique of humanism, his response to his western-minded critics about violations of human rights was that he respected neither western notions of humanity nor western conception of rights. The regime candidly opposed the universal declaration of human rights and western notions of democracy. While despotic regimes often try to commit their atrocities behind closed doors, the Islamic Republic was unashamedly blunt about its bloody crackdown on the opposition in 1981 and thereafter. Government-sponsored daily papers published the names of the executed––a list that occasionally consisted of 100-150 people per day in the summer and fall of 1981.⁹

Although my friend’s fear that the Islamic Republic might justify its oppressive anti-democratic politics through appropriating (co-opting) postmodernism suggested a scene from the theater of the absurd, it points to an ongoing academic debate about the risks of losing the universal referent. Of course, none of the theorists of postmodernism or post-structuralism would ever endorse any regime’s massacre of its dissidents as a legitimate particularist position. Nevertheless, the anxiety that a Derridian post-foundationalist position generates both for the progressive Left and for the liberal humanist needs to be appreciated.¹⁰

The question is how the non-western subject may translate the politics of difference or the negation of ‘White mythologies’¹¹ into an emancipatory politics, without reference to the various foundational myths: History as the March of Man, Reason, Civilization, Progress, Modes-of-Production?¹² Is an emancipatory politics conceivable without a careful look at ‘what are we emancipating ourselves into?’¹³ From this rhetorical question, one may conclude that without a totalizing conception of a good society (Utopia), ‘emancipation becomes a Nietzschean act of pure autonomous will [...] a struggle purely internal to the consciousness of those who resist and only represented by them.’¹⁴

Conversely, politics without foundational myths convey emerging processes of emancipation, through which the concept of the good society is constructed. This view inevitably negates the position that where there is a totality, there exists a mapping, cognitively drawn by a totalizer.¹⁵ In this context, not only is an a priori knowledge of the totality, into which we are stepping, problematized, but also the relation between those who resist and those who represent the resistance is re-imagined and reconstituted. Both Gramsci and Foucault influenced this debate by distinguishing between ‘traditional versus organic’ and ‘universal versus specific’ intellectuals, respectively. In their view, intellectuals can emerge from any social class or group. Whereas for Foucault specific intellectuals operate in a more modest social sphere, Gramsci’s organic intellectuals act more universally and historically. But for each the new type of intellectual is also an acknowledgment that the masses do not need to have understanding thrust on them from above.¹⁶ Contrary to what O’Hanlon and Washbrook contend, this does not mean the end of representation altogether. For the fact remains that the assertion that oppressed subjects speak, act, and know for themselves, ‘leads to an essentialist, utopian politics.’¹⁷

Totality and totalizing conceptions of history depict the problematique of postmodern politics. Of course, it is plausible to argue that postmodernist approaches are themselves built around a form of totalizing abstraction that ‘distinguishes postmodern culture,’ as Jameson once wrote, ‘by its logic of difference and its sustained production of random and unrelated subsystems of all kinds.’¹⁸ While the philosophical foundations of critique of totalizing conceptions of reality lie elsewhere, the political motivation of the ‘war on totality,’ as Jameson observed, rests on ‘a fear of Utopia that turns out to be none other than our old friend 1984, such that a Utopian and revolutionary politics, correctly associated with totalization and a certain ‘concept’ of totality, is to be eschewed because it leads fatally to Terror . . .’¹⁹

There are numerous examples where revolutionary movements, once having attained political power, turned into totalitarian regimes of terror. Totalizing emancipatory visions, be they revolutionary movements of the oppressed, or the self-proclaimed ‘liberating’ forces of colonialism, have most often been realized violently against perceived reactionary social and historical elements. But does this imply, as Jameson rhetorically asked, that the ‘revolutionary, Utopian, or totalizing impulse is somehow tainted from the outset and doomed to bloodshed by very structure of its thoughts?’²⁰

Or, conversely, does the negation of ideological totality imply, as Habermas maintains, a reactionary, neo-conservative political function?²¹ The potentiality for a reactionary politics of course is not uniquely a characteristic of postmodernism. Liberalism, humanism, Marxism, and other post-Enlightenment rationalities have already demonstrated their oppressive and violent potentials. Islamism, like other political ideologies, does not offer an alternative free of repressive tendencies. Does a ‘good’ politics only emerge through the spirit, or what Derrida called the ‘metaphysics,’ of the project of Enlightenment (either the instrumental or the humanist sides) in which absolute and unified explanations of political, economic, and cultural processes are produced? If we accept the proposition that there is an inescapable association between Utopia and Terror, between imagining an ideal society and totalitarianism, are we not suggesting the end of all that is political?

One can argue that the essence of distinctly political thought is the imagining of the good society as a whole. Mannheim once predicted tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Ideological Certainties, Past and Present
• 2. The Islamic Roots of Modernity and the Modern Roots of Islamism
• 3. Legitimizing the Postrevolutionary Regime: The Genesis of the New Constitution
• 4. Abdolkarim Soroush: The Intellectual Voice of the Islamic Republic
• 5. From the Reign of Terror to Let A Thousand Flowers Bloom
• 6. From Liberation Theology to State Ideology: Shari`ati and the Emergence of New Religious Intellectuals
• 7. The Silence of the Shari`ah: Abdolkarim Soroush and the Theological Foundations of Political Reform
• 8. Islam, Democracy, and Religious Pluralism
• 9. Conclusion: Social Change and the Symbolic Universe of Religion
• Notes
• Bibliography