Democracy in Modern Iran
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Democracy in Modern Iran

Islam, Culture, and Political Change

Ali Mirsepassi

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eBook - ePub

Democracy in Modern Iran

Islam, Culture, and Political Change

Ali Mirsepassi

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About This Book

Can Islamic societies embrace democracy? In Democracy in Modern Iran, Ali Mirsepassi maintains that it is possible, demonstrating that Islam is not inherently hostile to the idea of democracy. Rather, he provides new perspective on how such a political and social transformation could take place, arguing that the key to understanding the integration of Islam and democracy lies in concrete social institutions rather than pre-conceived ideas, the every day experiences rather than abstract theories. Mirsepassi, an Iranian native, provides a rare inside look into the country, offering a deep understanding of how Islamic countries like Iran and Iraq can and will embrace democracy.

Democracy in Modern Iran challenges readers to think about Islam and democracy critically and in a far more nuanced way than is done in black-and-white dichotomies of Islam vs. Democracy, or Iran vs. the West. This essential volume contributes important insights to current discussions, creating a more complex conception of modernity in the Eastern world and, with it, Mirsepassi offers to a broad Western audience a more accurate, less clichéd vision of Iran’s political reality.

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Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2010
ISBN
9780814758649

1
The Origins of Secularism in Europe

The impact of the late-twentieth-century rise of political Islam on theories of secularism and religion has been considerable. Reactions have taken shape around two broad responses. The first argues that developing Islamic societies have failed in their efforts to create a viable form of modern secularism, and Islamist movements represent surviving premodern traditions and religious impulses which surface in dangerous reaction to this political failure. The secularization process, this view argues, has been historically weak and inadequate in spite of whatever limited achievements it has made. This might be called the thesis of the “incomplete Enlightenment,” which proposes that only a vigorous campaign for the secularization of civil society and the flushing of religiosity from the public sphere can extend the reach of reason in an Enlightenment-style Kulturkamph.1 The second response, in its crudest form, takes the position that secularism is a fundamentally Western or even Christian contribution, and insists on the impractical and undesirable nature of any effort to force Islamic societies to secularize against their will. Modernity, secularism, and even democracy, the most vulgar form of this view urges, are alien to the Muslim sensibility.2
In their most widespread and vulgar form both these arguments make several dubious assumptions. First, the concepts of secularism and religion are discussed as if they were watertight categories, each containing a distinctive and clearly defined essence. Second, particularly with regard to the first response, secularism and secularization are described as if they were “natural” or deterministic facts in the modern history of human evolution and not sociological and structural processes that occur within specific historical and social contexts.3 They seem to have a universal and abstract quality, when in fact we find distinctive and different secular traditions within different national settings—for instance, in Britain, France, Turkey, or India. In countries such as Japan, where there is no monotheistic tradition, the question of secularism may not even have substantial meaning. It is, therefore, inappropriate to consider secularism as a universal or objective “reality.” For the same reason, it is difficult to maintain the notion of a strict barrier between the secular and the religious. Not only are the terms conceptually interdependent, but in the British Enlightenment religious intellectuals and values contributed to the development of secular ideas and institutions.4 Consequently, a more complex and nuanced view of the question of secularism is required than those offered by the dominant arguments in order to clarify the rise of political Islam and the status of secularism in the societies of the Middle East. This chapter attempts to stake out such a path by providing a history of secularism designed to show the political stakes involved in the question without either yielding to the fantasy that history and modernity are inherently on the side of Enlightenment values or defining the entire world tacitly in terms of the “secularized” categories of monotheism by insisting that the world must be remade in the human image.
In tracing the discourses of the European Enlightenment back to their major intellectual roots in the seventeenth century—Deism, natural rights, and social morality—we find that the individuals who conceived of them were often political refugees, victims of long religious wars. These discourses nearly always advocated tolerance of “multiple ways” versus belief in providence as a “single way,” introducing a new religious concept in order to address the political fragmentation of post-Reformation Europe. On the side of tolerance we find, for example, Isaac d’Huisseau calling in 1670 for a belief system large enough to “encompass the universe” and surmount sectarian difference.5 Hugo Grotius, the founder of modern natural rights theory, was a Dutch refugee living in Paris in 1625 during the religious wars. He argued that the supernatural and divine should be replaced by the imminent order of nature. These conceptual moves were linked to “nature” as newly conceived by the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution. This concept of “nature” paradoxically contained both a descriptive determinism stemming from Newtonian physics and a normative ideal of subjective agency reflecting new post-Renaissance humanist values. Such early articulations of secularism express the universal scope envisioned by the founders, a feature at once inclusive of certain conditions and exclusive of others on “humanist” grounds. For European humanism evolved ideologically through the Enlightenment to have specific normative dimensions beyond the mere biological fact. The emerging secular humanist worldview was moreover embedded in the epistemic framework of “representation,” a problem-solving mode privileging “pure” cognitive objects before “rational” consciousness. Both the humanist imaginary and the epistemic substratum of representation have been the target of attack by thinkers and movements opposed to secularism.
Within this secular framework the “secret” designs of God, used to justify atrocities in the name of providence, could yield to an accessible “natural law” by which these atrocities might be abolished through human agency.6 In this way “natural law” came to be conceived of as both the essence of humanity and as a new normative conception of universal human rights. Inevitably, these emerging values and ideas were linked to the emergence of the early modern European nation-state, stating in new terms the conditions of its legitimacy or lack thereof. Pierre Bayle, a French Protestant refugee in Holland, argued in 1686 that “concord in a state with ten religions” would follow if “each religion adopted the spirit of tolerance” on the grounds that it is “impossible in our present condition to know with certainty whether or not what appears to us to be the truth [of religions] is absolute truth.”7 In this way the early doctrine of natural rights followed the metaphysical and epistemological conceptions of Nicholas of Cusa by insisting on the necessarily partial and relative character of human knowledge, and the impossibility of a purely univocal or objective representation of the universe. Nicholas of Cusa called this position “learned ignorance.”8 A lingering tension between this open view and a persistent neo-Platonic legacy ran through the Enlightenment and culminated intellectually in Kant’s sober epistemic limits wedded to the elusive concept of transcendental idealism, and politically in the violent rational absolutism of revolutionary France as an intended moment of “rupture.”
At the same time, the arguments for providence grounded in divine right theory were also of early modern origin. European rulers sought, by inventing the doctrine of divine right, to “close” the hermeneutical and political maelstrom produced by the radically unsettling experience of the Reformation and religious wars—or face the demise of Christendom. The waves of rebellion and assassination “forced the proponents of strong monarchy to develop counterarguments which would bolster the prince’s absolute sovereign power” by making “attacks upon him sacrilegious as well as treasonable.”9 Two different things were at stake in these debates for both sides: the political problem of limiting the power of the early modern state, and the religious problem of managing diversity within the self-defining early modern nation. This development took place within the competing matrix of early modern European nation-states as they increasingly subordinated the self-sufficient economies of Asia and the Americas to their control via the emerging global market. The uncompromising Platonic ideal of perfect knowledge inherited from Western philosophy and now linked to providence as a political ideology became at once a weapon and a wound without hope of being healed in the broader context of “the new secular forces which were transforming western civilization—overseas expansion to Asia and America, commercial capitalism, dynastic rivalry, nationalism, and state sovereignty.”10
This is why the complex problem of violence as an ideologically sanctioned instrument of change belongs at the core of any consideration of early modern European politics, well in advance of its archetypal eruption in the French Revolution as the self-described birth of secular modernity. The secular political doctrine was originally conceived in order to eradicate the destabilizing danger of interconfessional violence, while the secular world as a way-of-being came to be constituted in profound part by the singularly violent elements of early modernity in the course of its historical development. The interconfessional European wars were increasingly projected outward into secularly conceived colonial wars of “rational” conquest, with the conquered territories deemed a “state of nature” to be exploited, destroyed, or transformed as necessary. The French Revolution—itself intimately connected with this colonial process and its stakes—introduced a more subtle and pervasive but ideologically linked violence by totally rejecting existing traditions. This was the deeper meaning of Rabaut Saint-Etienne’s neo-Cartesian rallying phrase: “The French nation is not made for following examples, but for giving them.”11 In the new political conception of agency linked to liberty that came to dominate the French Enlightenment, there was nothing from the past worth saving except modern science. A new world was to be created on the basis of the certainties furnished by the rise of modern science. Here the intellectual premises of factuality, spilling across the borders that divided metaphysical worldviews and specific demonstrations of scientific fact, were grounded in hopes for a fully conscious transformation of human society into its ideal form by means of scientific knowledge. In this we see the aggressive aspect of early secular modernity as a political and philosophical worldview, a battle cry for Kulturkamph that is remote from the original pacifist ideals of d’Huisseau and Grotius.
What is notable in the earlier natural rights debates, from the point of view of the Enlightenment, is that very rarely did these thinkers take an anti-religious stance. To the contrary: they often sought to save religion from the tainting limits of sectarianism and manipulative political violence—and in so doing redefined it. Samuel Pufendorf of Germany, the first professor of natural rights, did not deny divine power but distinguished the plane of pure reason from that of revelation in order to articulate a secular conception of civil society.12 The gradual effect of these discourses was to construct an ideal of tolerance as a virtue that laid the early foundations of modern secularism as a political doctrine and an epistemology. This debate had a long history threading through Holland, England, and France in seventeenth-century Europe in relation to “the evolution of two strikingly effective forms of state power—absolute monarchy, best exemplified by Bourbon France, and constitutional monarchy, best exemplified by Stuart England.”13 The 1688 Glorious Revolution and 1689 Toleration Act in England were the political and policy embodiments of this growing seventeenth-century trend, while the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1684 and the Inquisition of Philip II expressed the political ideology of providence as a national program of religious homogenization based on divine right theory. For Philip II the “Inquisition not only in Spain, but also in the Netherlands and Latin America, was not just a matter of faith” but also “an instrument of political consolidation.” His policy of using the Catholic clergy as an arm of the state led to revolts and wars in which he, in the case of the Moriscos, “forcibly resettled 80,000 survivors in other provinces of Spain.” Furthermore, their “silk industry was obliterated” and the “last remnants of Arabic scholarship for which Spain had once been famous were also destroyed.”14 This example shows the human stakes involved in the early struggle for the political doctrine of secularism. It suggests, at the same time, that secularism was never simply a “natural occurrence,” an unveiling, or a discovery of “reality” as dominant Enlightenment discourses sought to portray it; rather, it had to be historically constructed as a political tradition through a scattered web of contingencies and transformations, to say nothing of struggle.
The seventeenth-century discourse on religious tolerance found its culmination in the writings of John Locke, who produced his most important writings during a period of political exile in Holland (1683–88). The experience of the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe and Britain inspired Locke’s discourse on secularism (“A Letter concerning Toleration”), which insisted on a strict separation of religious institutions and state on the interrelated premises of (a) religious nonviolence, and (b) religious truth. He argued that no human mind can obtain “absolute knowledge” and so no religious belief imposed by force by the state or violence in general can be true belief. Belief, by this logic, can only be a matter of personal conscience. Locke, in sum, sought to disconnect the ontological and political link made between “truth” and “violence” during the religious wars. He attempted to do so by introducing the de-ontologized language of natural science to political problems, within the framework of “human nature.” Explicitly rejecting futile intellectual plunges “into the vast Ocean of Being,” he broke with the absolutist tradition stretching back to Plato and opened up a temporal horizon.15
Unlike Hobbes, Locke did not see either religion or religious pluralism in itself as an obstacle to peace. His Two Treatises of Government (1690), written to justify the Whig Rebellion and the Revolution of 1688, suggests that a state with limited powers would reduce religious conflict and direct attention in the public sphere to more mundane concerns such as public investment, public goods, and institution making. These secularly conceived “inalienable rights,” stressing the accountability of the state with respect to the market through the precariousness of the seventeenth century, became the essence of the early modern conception of the “natural human” as autonomous subject. The ground was thereby laid for secularism as a political doctrine to become “ontology and an epistemology,” ultimately compromising the pluralistic and nonviolent hopes that had initially animated natural rights theory as a deontological framework for conflict resolution.16
Post-Reformation Europe had been a giant theological battleground fought over by two crusading armies, Calvinist and Catholic. Both these groups made claims to a single and supreme theological “truth” while seeking to convert the other by sheer brute force, indicating a firmly established if hidden link between violence and claims to truth on the ontological plane. Following 1560, “ the rulers of western Europe were no longer able to blunt the revolutionary force of the religious crisis” as “Calvinists and militant Catholics began to rebel against the political status quo.” A revolutionary politics emerged as both groups “organized effective opposition against rulers who did not share their religious convictions” and “launched a wave of civil wars and rebellions against constituted authority.” In this way, “sixteenth-century Calvinists organized themselves into the first modern radical political party.”17 These experiences demonstrated the potential for violence in political party formations linked to singular ontological claims.
The ontological concept of providence also served revolutionary purposes. In the context of the English Civil War the dominant discourse linked the representative principles of republican politics centered around justice and tolerance to a higher ideal of religious “truth” as the means to attaining the political closure of the Promised Land, or the “many signs and wonders towards a place of rest.”18 William Prynne, a lawyer who had come to public attention as the spokesman of widespread anger over England’s failure to aid the Protestant cause in the Thirty Years’ War, epitomized this ideological trend. After being mutilated and imprisoned for life in 1637 for criticizing the state church under Charles I, he was released in 1649 during the English Revolution. During the Civil War he formulated a new and influential theory of sovereignty linking “true” religion and the political cause of parliament, which sought both to construct a rival principle of authority and justify the deaths of so many men in the battle against the king.19 Cromwell presented his own perspective in this early modern debate, establishing ontological sanction for imminent acts of political violence. He declared the “act of violence” to be based upon “things that fell within the compass of our certain knowledge.” This is essentially a claim to religious foundational knowledge based on a reading of the signs of providence. The nation is “at the edge of the promises and prophecies.”20 The English nation is “as like the forming of God as ever people were.”21
Locke grew up in the shadow of the English Civil War, when mass slaughter was carried out in the name of claims to absolute religious truth and the country was laid to ruin. Opposing this union of political violence and religious truth as a worldly phenomenon, Locke made his philosophical and ultimately political intervention against futile intellectual plunges “into the vast Ocean of Being.” This went against an entire tradition of Western philosophy: from Aristotle to the most recent contributions of the Cambridge neo-Platonists, the avowed aim of ...

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