Ahmad Sadri is Professor Sociology and James P. Gorter Chair of Islamic World Studies at Lake Forest College. Today he offers his reflections on the approaches to religion in Iran as the revolutions in the Arab world proceed. -Jeff
Iran’s religious tyranny is not the result of blind subservience to religious tradition. On the contrary, it was born of a bold innovation by the late Ayatollah Khomeini that reversed the quietist bent of the Shiite political philosophy. Khomeini claimed that in absence of the Mahdi (the occulted savior) Shiites must work to create a righteous state. After he was firmly established at the helm of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini went even further and argued that the qualified Islamic jurist is the all powerful Muslim Leviathan who can suspend even the principal beliefs and practices of Islam (including praying, fasting, going to Mecca and even monotheism) in the name of raison d’etat
Thirty years later a decisive majority of Iranians want out of that secret garden of medieval religious despotism, and they showed their collective will in the uprisings of the summer of 2009. The “Arab Spring” that is blossoming in the Middle East might have been inspired by that uprising, the “Green Movement,” but Iranians have not been able to emulate the Arab model by overthrowing their robed potentates. The Iranian religious autocrats possess both the means and the will to mow down potential crowds of protesters in the name of Khomeini’s powerful imperative to preserve the Islamic State.
As a result, the critique of religious government is slowly turning into the kind of radical anti-religious sentiment one could only find among eighteenth-century enlightenment philosophers, nineteenth-century Latin American positivists and twentieth-century Marxist Leninist countries. I fear a narrow minded secularism is replacing a narrow minded “religionism.”
Abdolkarim Soroush © Hessam M.Armandehi | Wikimedia Commons
Consider what happened last month. Abdolkarim Soroush, a renowned Islamic reformer who lives in exile, wrote a bitter letter exposing the Iranian security forces’ arrest and torture of his son in law. Soroush quotes his son in law in the title of his letter: “There is no God, I swear by God, there is no God.” His letter also contains a counter-theodicy. Soroush is puzzled about an omnipotent God who allows injustice in his name but seems not to brook apostasy by the victims of the injustice that has been committed in his name.
Mahmoud Morad-khani, himself the son of a dissident clergyman, immediately published a response claiming that without denouncing Islam, root and branch, Soroush’s protest is meaningless. Morad-khani, like many others, argues that the injustice in Iran is not the result of a revolutionary mutation of Iranian Islam, but rather the direct consequence of delusional religious beliefs.
The discourse of Iranian “laic” (secular) elites uses the word religion in general, but its frame of reference is limited to the politicized Shiite Islam of the last thirty years. Iranian philosophers’ discourse has been unable to offer comparative perspectives or place the experience of Iranian Islamism in its proper historical niche. Iranian intellectual discourse on religion has become a parochial soliloquy. It is a symptom of the theocratic rule rather than an analysis of it. This discourse relegates religious intellectuality to dogmatic subservience and claims that only by liberating oneself from religion can one join the dynamic flow of secular thought. Islam in Iran shed its quietist mantle in one generation and aggressively turned itself into a modern theocracy. It is curious that despite this, they are still labeled as subservient to tradition.
Hussein-Ali Montazeri © Unknown | Wikimedia Commons
Let us take the career of Ayatollah Montazeri (1922-2009), a lieutenant and heir apparent of Ayatollah Khomeini and one of the architects of the Islamic Republic. Montazeri had departed from the tradition of Shiite jurists and opted for a revolutionary reconstruction of Shiite political philosophy. Then he parted ways with Khomeini, objecting to the mass executions of political prisoners in 1981. Subsequently, the dissident Ayatollah was relieved of his position and put under virtual house arrest for the rest of his life. In this period, he continued to support the Khomeinist theocracy, but objected to its misuse by the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. In the last year of his life, Montazeri issued a subversive legal opinion to undergird the uprising of Iranians in 2009. This revolutionary fatwa spells out the conditions for the dissolution of not only the Islamic Republic but indeed any polity.
Montazeri’s fatwa is a radical political theory for revolutions of all stripes. He likens the relationship of people and their government to that of a lawyer and his/her client, where a simple suspension of trust by the client automatically dissolves the covenant. Here the burden of proof is on the lawyer, the government, to prove its innocence and regain the trust of the client, the people. In other words, Montazeri ruled that the Islamic Republic was already dissolved as a legitimate entity given the dissolution of people’s trust. Using religion, he develops a democratic theory.
Montazeri, who was the Thomas Hobbes of the Iranian Revolution, lived to become its John Locke. Such a change of positions is unprecedented in the history of political philosophy. He used legal ratiocination to make a case for creating a just, Islamic government in absence of the savior (Mahdi). Thirty years later he once again utilized the same legal skills to justify a revolt against that Islamic state. The point of this historical vignette is not to praise Montazeri as the grandfather of the Green Movement. The point, rather, is to demonstrate that religion is a stagnant pool of unreason and intellectual subservience.
Religion changes and mutates. Some of these religious mutations could be positively harmful to democracy as indeed Khomeini/Montazeri theory of “Mandate of the Jurist” was. But it is also true that other religious innovations help religion accommodate and support modern ideals of freedom and democracy. It doesn’t matter whether a society has or does not have religion. What is important is what kind of religion or irreligion pervades in that society.
Politicized religion is contrary to both religious freedom and democracy. America’s founding fathers were wise enough to realize this. And Republicans should be wise enough to understand that the Iranian theocracy is a case in point of what happens when their is no seperation of church and state.
And I agree with the author’s point that “religious innovations help religion accommodate and support modern ideals of freedom and democracy.” Tocqueville believed that Catholicism supported democratic ideals in America. However, the same was not true in France. It was important that Catholicism in the US was fomented to accomodate democracy and religious freedom. I believe it was even more important that Catholics, at least the ones Tocqueville spoke to, supported seperation of church and state. Evangelical Christians are a different matter. The seperation of church and state instituted in the US constitution–“The government shall recognize no religion”–will ultimatately prevent a theocracy in the US. Perhaps that is an article of faith, but at least the necessary legal structure is there.
I take exception to Professor Ahmad Sadri’s above-entitled article not only for what it says, but more so for what it omits. There will be NO freedom for the countries in the current upheavals until there is equality for women. Total equality. The religious oppression has created an underclass and marginalised a large portion of the population that could otherwise be contributing meaningfully to progressive change. It is NOT simply knee-jerk reactionary foolishness that has created what Mr. Sadri seems to suggest is a form of throwing the baby out with the bath water by rejecting the Islamic rule. Many of the young people in Iran consider themselves PERSIANS, and not Muslims at all. They believe their ancient traditions, beliefs and culture, commonly believed to be beyond compare in the region, to have been suppressed by Islamic occupiers for so long that reminding the people of their roots often feels futile in the face of so many religious strictures. Removed from their past identity, and living now under a forced identity, the lesser of two evils seems to be to throw off the shackles of imposed religious belief, end the theocracy in favour of a democracy, and allow the people of Iran to follow their own private beliefs, WITH AN URGENTLY DESIRED AND IMPENETRABLE SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE. They want, in short, only those freedoms which Professor Sadri enjoys himself as a resident of the United States. As long as religions is imposed and inseparable from government, there will be no freedom in Iran, for women or for anyone.
That was an interesting discussion that he presents. But in some parts,it seems that he simply does not take into account some dimension of the historical context. For example, he have considered the period before the shaping of Green movement, too plain. He talks in a way that most of people before the Green movement were generally in agreement with the policy and all of sudden the Green Movement comes up. In other words, It is not exact to say after 30 years, that people’s protest has been risen up. This kind of vast protest once had been emerged before but in a different shape.
The 7th presidential election, in which Khatami, the reformist candidate won the election, was totally unique event(and protest) in history of Islamic republic. First, about 20 million people voted for a person whose slogans were about reforming , civil society and freedom. Actually these promises in reality had no harmony to other part of the dominant ideology. Therefore, this high number of people who voted for freedom and democracy, shows their first vast official protest through voting for reformist candidate.
I mean, maybe if the power had done such an action that did for the 10th election, I am pretty sure that Khatami’s supporters would have reacted almost the same way that they did for this recent election. In any case, coming to this conclusion that : “Thirty years later a decisive majority of Iranians want out of that secret garden of medieval religious despotism, and they owed their collective will in the uprisings of the summer of 2009.” is not very exact estimation and this is sort of neglecting the previous wave of protest.
For a reader who may does not familiar with the history of Iran by reading this discussion, maybe she/he thinks that 30 years of the “Mandate of the Jurist” from the first days of Islamic republic were completely monotonous and the amount of absolutism in constitutional law the same but it is necessary to analysis this period in detail by micro-scale glasses. In the first stage of the constitutional law (which Montazeri played a role in it) the top Jurist has less power and its role was more about monitoring but in the second edition of the constitutional law, eight year after the first one, the top jurist gains more power. For example determining the policy of the country was one the role that was added and paved the way for getting closer to the complete absolutism. (but Montazeri did not play a role in this version)
Although the change that has occurred in Montazeri’s theory is to some extent correct, he discussed the “Mandate of the Jurist” theory like a plain theory. Even in this theory there are two different view points: first one assumes that the jurist absolutely is chosen by God and the other one more considers people’s role. Although Montazeri was very effective on “Mandate of the Jurist” theory and suggested adding it to the first constitutional law as mentioned above, but it seems that Montazeri’s never denies people’s role completely even in first phase ( http://www.rahesabz.net/story/5974/ ) Therefore calling him like Hobbes make a question in one’s mind that if Montazeri’s first view point is like Hobbes so how about the other side which is more absolutist? such as Mesbah Yazi who completely denies the people’s right in choosing the president. Who does Mesbah looks like in this philosophical world? (http://www.irannewsdigest.com/2010/09/03/mesbah-yazdi-democracy-and-human-rights-have-no-place-in-islamic-theology/
or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3DuoHXIiOI )
(This is not for defending or rejecting Montazeri’s discussion, rather, it is for comparing the degree of absolutism even in this theocratic perspective.)
Finally, by reviewing the history of Iran it shows that religion has had two-sided roles: for example for constitutional revolution (about one century ago) religion and modernity initially joined together but after a while some of religious figures separated and that was one of the main reason that caused this movement not to success completely. Or the movement related to the nationalizing of the oil, again modernity and religion joined but again after a while, religious part splitted and like the constitutional revolution, the result was not satisfying and the movement was stopped by the coup which was designed by C!A.
It seems that during the contemporary history of Iran the role of religion was unstable for the development of democracy specially in final stages. In other words, although in some cases religion had effects on people to be motivated initially for the political development but in further levels it conversed to untrusted factor or to put it simply barrier for the rest of the path. Therefore, all hopes turns into frustration like a “Fragile resistance” as Foran said.
P.S. Thanks Professor for informing us about this challenging discussion!
I thank the three writers who have taken the trouble of commenting on my piece. Here are my thoughts:
1. Scott is right in his analogy of Catholics who appear on the diametrically opposed side of disestablishmentarianism on different sides of the Atlantic. Scott and I agree that: it is not about religion. It is about how it is spun. The same religion could be a force for progress or reaction, and in the case of Muntazeri, he lived long enough to be on both sides of that divide.
2. Eileen objects to the absence of the subject of patriarchy in this article. That is a topic for a different article. And the issue is far more complicated than Eileen supposes. She makes a series of unfounded assumptions that lead to her simplified and Manichaean view of this subject. Among them are the suppositions that Islam was imposed on Iran, that patriarchy is the exclusive baggage of religion in general and Islam in particular, that getting rid of Islam and going back to the pre-Islamic creed of Iran would rid us of male domination. She is wrong on all accounts. Although Arabs did invade Iran, they did not impose their religion. They did not build a single mosque for the first fifty years of invading the country. This is not the behavior of a crusading army. The Arab conquest of Iran was the conquest of the super-tribe of Islamized Arabs with the aim of collecting poll taxes. Besides, Iran’s religion, before Islam, was just as patriarchal as Islam, and, indeed, the religious despotism of that religion was partly responsible for the flight of Iranians into the new religion. Zoroastrians also veiled and sequestered women. These claims are supported by the modern historiography of the Arab conquests and I will be more than happy to provide the sources that Eileen could consult.
Patriarchy is firmly anchored in Iranian culture regardless of what religion prevails there. Not even the strict separation of church and state would remedy the suppression of women. Americans disestablished the church at the dawn of the republic, but women had to wait for a century and a half to get the right to vote. It is naive to think that eradication of the Islamic Republic would eliminate patriarchy in Iran. Shadi Sadr, the controversial Iranian feminist, has recently made waves by pointing to deeper roots of patriarchy in the general male attitudes of Iranian males.
Yes, separation of church and state would have to be the foundation of any future government in Iran. But even that arrangement must be predicated on a religious interpretation of the tradition for the overwhelming majority of Iranians, who as a matter of empirical reality are and in all probability will remain, Muslims. Irreligion is and shall remain a viable choice among Iranians of certain class and level of education. But there is no evidence to suggest that Iranians will either abandon their religion or convert to some pre-Islamic religion, and woman’s issues will still be with us if they do.
3. Zara raises some interesting questions about the political background of the Green Movement. Of course this movement had its roots in the history of Islamic Republic. A proper treatment of that subject would require much more space than could be accommodated in an opinion piece. Regarding Mesbah Yazdi, I would say he is a minor character that rose to prominence only in the 1990s and became politically known only after the rise of Ahmadinejad in 2005. At the time of Khomeini’s life, Yazdi was a little known professor at the Seminary in Qum with no political profile. He has never been at the level of a first-rate jurist or political thinker like Muntazeri. He is not the Hobbes but he comes close to being the Cardinal Richelieu of the Islamic Republic.