Iran

Political Culture in the Islamic Republic

Samih K. Farsoun, Mehrdad Mashayekhi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134969463
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Since the Islamic revolutionary movement overthrew the "Peacock Throne" (the Shah) in 1979 the Islamic Republic has maintained its credibility and the loyalty of the people of Iran. It has survived an extremely destructive war with Iraq, isolation from the West and the rest of the Middle East except Syria, and the death of the Ayaltollah Khomeini.

This book explores the social transformation of Iran in this period stressing the importance of political culture and ideology. It argues that the systematic building of a legitimate Islamic political culture is the key to the success of the regime.

The authors of the book address specific aspects of Iran's political culture within a general theoretical framework laid out in the introduction. There is discussion of a wide range of topics ranging from the relationship of the individual to society to "Westoxication", from Shi'ism to the Islamisation of film culture.

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INTRODUCTION

Iran’s political culture

Samih K.Farsoun and Mehrdad Mashayekhi

Contrary to the expectations of experts, the Islamic Revolution of Iran persisted, its government stabilized and its hold on Iranian society consolidated in spite of the many and powerful challenges it had faced since it came to power in 1979. The Islamic Republic survived a devastating and immensely costly eight-year war with Iraq, a crippling economic and arms embargo imposed by the West, a campaign of assassinations of its leadership by internal enemies as well as political opposition from varied opponents. The political, social and economic turmoil in the Islamic Republic, caused by internal opposition of the Mojahedeen, the liberals and the left as well as the ethnic minorities, was only surpassed by the active efforts of the external enemies to destabilize and destroy the Islamic regime. Iran was isolated without allies in Western Europe or the Middle East except for Syria. Perhaps only the Cold War saved the Islamic Republic from a potential direct Western/American assault or war. Instead, the United States, Western Europe, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and the Soviet Union aided Iraq’s war effort against Iran. The final military impasse between Iraq and Iran before the ceasefire in August 1988 was possible partly because the United States supplied Iraq with crucial military intelligence.

All the above challenges as well as the death of its founder and charismatic leader, Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini, not only failed to destabilize the Islamic Republic and topple its leadership but also failed to alienate the vast support of the proponents of the Islamic Revolution. Despite the fact of the great human and material losses during the war, the severe repression of all opposition groups, and the extensive author-itarian character of the state, the Islamic Republic nevertheless managed to develop a wide social base, legitimacy and loyalty among broad segments of the Iranian people. How was that possible? In other words, how did the Islamic Republic manage to renew and reproduce mass mobilization, destroy the former Shah’s political and social order and establish a distinctive new order? This book attempts to answer the above questions. Its focus is on one neglected aspect, the consensus-building efforts by the Islamic regime pursued to win the hearts and minds of the Iranian people, the basis for the success of such efforts and the nature/character of this new Iranian consensus. Consensus-building efforts involve the creation of a legitimate “political culture.”

Political culture is the “system of empirical beliefs, expressive symbols, and values which define the situation in which political action takes place.”¹ This book is a collection of studies by a group of social scientists which addresses important aspects of the political culture of post-revolutionary Iran. Specifically, the ideological, organizational and cultural dimensions of Shi’i Islam are analyzed as related instances of the Islamic political culture which re-emerged in the 1960s in a modern mantle as a political culture of opposition to the Shah’s regime and which became dominant, perhaps hegemonic, in the Islamic Republic after the revolution. The importance of focusing on the question of political culture in Iran is in large part related to the highly charged ideological character of the clerical theocracy of the Islamic Republic and its overcentralized and monopolistic state. Political, military, ideological, cultural, religious and economic institutions (new or restructured) are all employed to consolidate and reproduce Islamic (clerical) hegemony.

In the early 1980s, a new wave of books designed to explain the revolution were published. Some dissected the political economy of modern Iran.² The best of them, however, attempted to examine the political and cultural evolution of Iran between the two revolutions (the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–09 and the Islamic Revolution of 1978–9),³ to assess the religious culture and its role in the revolution,⁴ and, finally, to determine the economic bases of the revolution.⁵ By the mid 1980s new studies which addressed the nature of post-revolutionary Iran were published. Most were descriptive⁶ and lacked a guiding thesis or an explanatory theorem. Even the more sophisticated analyses of post-revolutionary Iran which presented a multi-dimensional analysis focused too much on the role of prominent personalities.⁷ One study, The Government of God,⁸ did make use of sociological theories of social change to explain the dynamics of Iran.⁹ Others, anchored in respective social science disciplines, emphasized varied viewpoints.¹⁰ Finally, another genre stressed the cultural dimension of Iran.¹¹

Neglected or insufficiently addressed in the literature is a significant dimension which, we believe, is responsible for both the victory of the Islamic movement and the staying power of the Islamic Republic. This is the dimension of ideology and political culture. It is our contention that an Islamic ideology, and more broadly political culture, anchored in the wider Islamic culture, was central to the victory of the Islamic movement not only against the Shah’s regime but also over its coalition allies—the liberal-nationalists, the socialists, the communists and Islamic liberals and socialists—in the opposition. Certain recent studies of Iran approached the study of the political culture of the Islamic Republic as an historical process originating in the rise of Islam in the seventh century, or in the emergence of Shi’i Islam as the official religion of the country in the sixteenth century.¹² They are quite useful prologues to the more focused analyses in this book of the political culture of the Islamic Republic in post-revolutionary Iran, especially its investigations into the conscious renewal process of Islamic political culture by the clergy.

A combination of social, political, and organizational-mobilizational factors collectively favored the rise of the Islamic revolutionaries and in turn allowed them to forge ahead. Not only did the Islamicists emerge as the leaders of the opposition to the Shah but also the Islamic movement set the parameters of the common discourse of opposition. This common discourse was composed of four major related concepts shared by all opposition groups to the Shah.

The four principal concepts of this discourse which underlie the ideology and political culture of the Islamic movement and the Islamic Republic are the following. First is nationalism, a strong and overarching preoccupation with the question of national independence exemplified by anti-imperialism and anti-foreign intervention. Second, populism, an ideological belief in the common people as the subject of history and social change. Third, social justice, a mobilizational ideology to redress the grievance and give economic security to the vast numbers of people who had been dispossessed and disenfranchised by the Shah’s regime. Fourth is the 1960s-based Third Worldist strategy of revolutionary violence to achieve liberation, independence, change, and social justice for and by the masses. The above elements of political cultural discourse informed and set the parameters of political dynamics of revolutionary and post-revolutionary Iran. These elements echoed and resonated in differing emphases among the contending allies in opposition to the Shah’s regime. Interestingly, these very same elements, perhaps in addition to the emergent issues of human rights and democracy, again in differing emphases and ordering, continue to inform the ideology of most opponents of the Islamic Republic. The tacit and at times active alliance of the opposition groups who overthrew the Shah’s regime disintegrated, shortly after the revolution succeeded, into a vicious and lethal power struggle which ended in the consolidation of Islamic hegemony.

In post-revolutionary Iran, the Islamic Republic fused Shi’i culture and politics into a single integrated political culture which it set out systematically to institutionalize. The overcentralized, monopolistic and ideological nature of the state in the Islamic Republic forces every oppositional movement to be similarly and simultaneously political-cultural in nature. Thus the highly charged cultural nature of the Islamic Republic conditions its rivals to wage their challenge in strong ideological-cultural terms as well. The struggle for the hearts and minds of the Iranian people has been and continues to be waged through the promotion of contending visions which structure the parameters of political discourse and of political, social and cultural struggle. This book, then, is a study of the political culture of the Islamic Republic.

SOCIAL FORMATION AND POLITICAL CULTURE

A constructive point of departure for analyzing most Third World social formations, including Iran, is to view them as the articulation of various modes of production, produced largely as a result of penetration of foreign capital into pre-capitalist relations. The outcome is often societies of transitional nature, characterized by a coexistence of different types of socioeconomic relations, sometimes referred to as “combined and uneven development.”¹³ Contrary to an economistic reading of the concept, this articulation is not and should not be limited to economic relations; rather, it also includes political, social and cultural relations and institutions; or in short, a combination of “all stages of civilization.” This approach is capable of avoiding simplistic assumptions and erroneous implications of both the modernization and dependency schools of thought. The former has maintained an over-optimistic view of the “modernization” process in the Third World by assuming a universalistic and linear transition from traditional to modern society, similar to the historical transition of today’s advanced capitalist societies of Western Europe and North America. The logical policy recommendation of this discourse would be an extension and acceleration of all-sided penetration of the Third World by the advanced industrialized capitalist nations.

The Third Worldist discourse, that of the dependency school, often has reverted to an opposite pessimistic interpretation by concluding that the economic development of the “periphery” is inversely related to its contacts with the advanced economies. Perpetuation of the present relations, accordingly, only is capable of generating the “development of underdevelopment” or by other accounts “dependent development.” Further, this discourse manifests a strong economistic tendency by attributing a dependant nature (the metropolis-satellite relation) to all social, political, and cultural relations prevailing in the “periphery” due to the effect of capitalist penetration from outside. The policy implication of this perspective is “delinking” from the world system and the pursuit of an “autarkic” path of socioeconomic development.

Neither of these theoretical frameworks were equipped to deal adequately with the complexities of Iranian society, the revolution of 1978–9, and the post-revolutionary transformations, especially in the realm of political culture. The modernization theorists were totally perplexed by the emergence of the Islamic Republic of Iran, due, in part, to the presence of a high level of “modernization” indicators in pre-revolutionary Iran. Nor could they explain the rise and consolidation of an Islamic political culture with its “irrational” and “anachronistic” values instead of a secular political culture characterized by pluralism, rationality, innovation, public opinion, etc.

While the dependency discourse had no difficulty explaining the anti-Western and independence seeking feature of the Iranian Revolution, its abstract and universalistic reasoning prevented the dependentistas from coming to grips with the particularities of Iranian social transformation. Why, for example, did the Shi’ite clergy lead the revolutionary movement instead of the working class or secular intelligentsia? Furthermore, given the fact that since the nineteenth century, Iranian society was integrated into the world capitalist market and expectedly should have been dependent in its entirety, how could an Islamic movement representing centuries-old indigenous religious values, institutions, and relations overwhelm the modern state and come to power? Answers to these questions were not forthcoming. And this is where both the modernization and dependency discourses converge.

It is our contention that these and some other shortcomings can be evaded by resorting to the theoretical framework organized around the notion of the articulation of modes of production (including the “superstructural” relations of culture, politics, ideology, etc.) Perhaps the most salient aspect of this approach, as relates to our discussion of political culture, is its conceptualization of transitional Third World social formations as entities with “dislocated” instances, i.e., non-correspondence between and within all economic, political, and cultural-ideological relations.¹⁴ Thus, not only does one observe a combination of various economic forms, but also the coexistence of various social and political institutions, discourses, and cultures, from the most modern to the traditional, in one society. Abdol-Karim Soroush, a leading Islamic thinker, has recently argued that Iranian society is characterized by three coexisting cultures, namely farhang-e melli (national culture), farhang-e dini (religious culture), and farhang-e gharbi (Western culture).¹⁵ Obviously, these diverse relations are represented by various social classes and categories who have vested interests in preserving those institutions and cultures. The dynamics governing the interaction among these social groups primarily stems from the reproductive requirements of the emerging modern (metropolitan) classes who promote socioeconomic modernization in conflict with the resistance of some other social groups who are either totally or partially against the imposed social changes sought by the metropolis and its internal support classes. This conflict is social, political, and culturalideological at the same time. Based on this perspective, the study of political cultures is “the historical account of their emergence, a critical analysis of the political and economic forces they represent, a study of their internal character and a rigorous critique or negation of their logic and effect.”¹⁶

PRECONDITIONS OF THE ISLAMIC REVOLUTION

Under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s, Iran exhibited many contradictions and dislocations typically associated with combined and uneven development. The developmentalist strategy of the Shah, organized around the de facto alliance of the state, foreign capital, and domestic comprador bourgeoisie, accelerated capitalist economic development and “Westernization” of the culture. The uneven and contradictory nature of this process is evident in many areas of society and in increasing income inequality (the Gini coefficient of inequality grew from 0.4552 in 1959–60 to 0.4945 in 1973–4). In the rural areas, the Shah’s land reform program eff ectively undermined the traditional organization of agricultural production without substituting it with a coherent, modern and rational strategy. The increasing migration of landless peasants to cities and their settlement in surrounding slums testify to the technocratic rationale behind the land reform. The increasing concentration of political, commercial, recreational, and educational facilities in Tehran and other big urban centers, and the open door economic policies promoting foreign investment are examples of the Shah’s policies. The open door policy resulted in the bankruptcy of small scale domestic producers and traders of the bazaar. Its results are most evident in the ratio of exports to imports which declined from 30 per cent in 1950 to only 5 per cent in 1975.

The regime adopted authoritarian policies against all its opposition including the clergy. Beginning in the early 1960s, the state, concerned by Islamic militancy, made encroachments on the clergy’s traditional financial, social, cultural, and admi-nistrative prerogatives. In the words of one scholar studying this period:

Future shock was considered virtuous, the goal of rational modernization, to be pressed forward ruthlessly by means of science, technology, planning and despotic authority. No element of tradition, no personal desire, no aesthetic value, no religious qualm, no philosophical hesitancy was to stand in the way.¹⁷

The Shah had correctly understood that his developmentalist strategy stood no chances of success without a concomitant policy of cultural modernization. Various institutions particularly education, mass media, leisure, and state bureaucracy along with a number of legal reforms in spheres such as the family, economy, and religion were all employed to instill a new world view among the populace and a new social order in the country. Justification of these policies required an ideology; this had already taken shape under his father, Reza Shah (1925–41).

Pahlavi’s official ideology was formed out of a loose combination of selective aspects of Western cultural values and ethos (increasingly American), and a romantic view of the ancient, pre-Islamic Persian civilization. None, however, had much relevance to the everyday life of the people. The ideology’s function was to remind people of the desirability of the monarchy and of Western presence in Iran. The celebration of 2,500 years of monarchy in 1971 underscored this point. This Pahlavi ideology and the related cultural policies appealed only to a minority, predominantly among the comprador bourgeoisie, landed classes, and military and bureaucratic elites. However, the growing new middle class expressed tacit support only for specific aspects of the cultural modernization process, especially its cornerstone: the secularization tendency. Although the progress of secularization was most evident in state institutions, it failed to encompass the political culture of the society at large or advance the institutions of civil society. As a result Iranian political culture during the period of the monarchy remained fragmented and incoherent.

The Pahlavi regime’s failure to create a unified secular political culture was primarily caused by its separation of secularization from democratization. Thus, it failed to expand its social base of support among the new middle strata, the intelligentsia, and the working class, the very social groups whose participation and support would be vital to any serious attempt toward modernization. By excluding these social groups from political participation, the regime undermined the formation of the institutions of civil society, exacerbated the already present crisis of legitimacy and practically drove them toward dissident social political movements and political cultures. All in all, by the mid-1970s, one could identify four political cultures in Pahlavi Iran. The first was a disorganized and weak official monarchist political culture which claimed legitimacy on the basis of a continuous 2,500 years of monarchy. It was at odds with all the essentials of a secular, democratic political culture which stressed freedom of speech, freedom of association, universal suffrage, cultural tolerance, respect for human rights and compromise.

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Tables
• Foreword: Iran and the Prism of Political Culture
• 1: Introduction
• 2: Gharbzadegi
• 3: Iran’s Religious Establishment
• 4: The Politics of Nationalism and Political Culture
• 5: Islamic Man and Society in the Islamic Republic of Iran
• 6: Shi’ism and the State in the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran
• 7: Education and the Culture of Politics in the Islamic Republic of Iran
• 8: Islamizing Film Culture in Iran
• 9: Populism and Corporatism in Post-revolutionary Iranian Political Culture
• 10: Power Politics and Political Culture