The varieties of religious reform: Public intelligentsia in Iran

International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society

Volumn 15, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 271-282

  Sadri, Ahmad ^a  

^a LAKE FOREST COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

Intelligentsia; Iran; Islam; Religious reform

Indexed keywords

EID: 33644551990     PISSN: 08914486     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1012925202685     Document Type: Article

References (33)

1. The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York, Modern Library, 1999), P. 217.
2. Asr-e Ma, 2/23/2001.
3. These media outlets have been effectively choreographed to launch massive anti-reform investigative serials (e.g., Identity and Carnival of Ashoura,), show-trial-confessions and cover-up infomercials (e.g., Lantern). A cadre of powerful functionaries operates this powerful arm of the right wing in fluid roles of newspaper editor, writer of top-secret bulletins, and interrogator.
4. Akbar Ganji's open letter to President Khatami on February 27, 2001 (www.iran-emrooz.de/khabar/ganjio1208.html.)
5. Gouldner adopts the term from Basil Bernstine's socio-linguistic studies. Alvin W. Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (New York, Seabury Press, 1979), pp. 28-43.
6. Iranian intellectuals, like their comrades everywhere else in the modern world, have to conform to local "templates" that define who they are supposed to be (status) and what they are expected to do (mission). In Iran being an intellectual is a "master status" that carries significant role expectations at the price of considerable personal sacrifices. Thus the Iranian intellectuals may be idolized by the people and scrutinized, prosecuted and persecuted by the state. But they are never ignored.
7. The staff of Kian had been fired earlier from a government-subsidized publication named the Cultural Keyhan (Keyhan-e Farhangi) for their liberal editorial policies.
8. Deserving as they are of particular attention, members of such reform organizations as the Combative Clerical Organization, the Organization of the Mojahedeen of the Islamic Revolution, and the Office for Fostering Unity between the University and the Seminary are not included in the ideal type of the intellectuals here.
9. The letter of the most radical Islamic student organization (The Office for Fostering Unity between the University and the Seminary) to the Supreme Leader (March 1, 2001) is the case in point. This letter was so strident that the remaining reform newspapers refrained from publishing it. www.iran-emrooz.de/khabar/tahkim1210.html.
10. The duality of the Islamic Republic's constitution is almost as old as the republic itself. The first Assembly of Experts revised the democratic constitution, lacing it with theocratic ideas. These ideas hatched like so many fledglings of a cowbird and starved the legitimate progeny of the revolution that had been conceived in the idea of liberty. The charisma of Ayatollah Khomeini was invoked by the conservative faction in the Assembly to suppress opposition to its revision (during the meetings and in the process of constitution's popular ratification) as unthinkable. The gradual implementation of the weak and flawed constitution in the absence of democratic checks and balances and in the context of an authoritarian political culture made concrete the oligarchic potentials of the revised constitution.
11. Hamshahri, 12/7/2000.
12. Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, who is one of the architects of the present theocratic system in Iran, has criticized its present applications as entirely illegitimate. The reformer Ayatollah Kadivar has recently echoed the older critique of Ayatollah Khomeini's theory of the Mandate of the Juristconsult first articulated by the Grand Ayatollah Khouie. Ayatollah Khouie's response to Ayatollah Khomeini's contentions at the time of the latter's lectures in early seventies in Iraq was published at the time under the title of Al-Ijtihad wa al-taghlid.)
13. See Peter Iver Kaufman's worthy study of the subject: Redeeming Politics: (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
14. The fourth century bishop of Caesarea, Eusebius wrote the first authoritative history of the church, not only interpreting the enthronement of the first Christian Emperor, Constantine, as divine ordination but also reinterpreting the previous three centuries of the Roman Empire as a foreshadowing of The Holy Roman Empire. See: Eusebius, The History of Church from Christ to Constantine, Trans. G.A. Williamson. (New York: Penguin Books, 1989)
15. Also see: Garth Fowden, Empire to Common Wealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 85-97.
16. Also see: Richard Rubenstein, When Jesus Became God (New York: Harcourt Press, 1999), pp. 65-66.
17. The eleventh century papal apologist, Manegold defended papal political autonomy against the scriptural text and Christian practice by arguing that the injunction to follow one's emperor was valid but only "if" the emperor honored the church. Redeeming Politics, Ibid, P. 86, 87.
18. Also see: Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State 1050-1300, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1988), pp. 127-139.
19. The seventeenth century Puritan preacher of William Cromwell's New Model Army who believed that the pulpit was superior to the altar. Redeeming Politics, Ibid, pp. 62-73.
20. Recent revelations in Ayatollah Montazeri's recently published memoirs published on the internet indicates that the disgruntled son of the late Ayatollah may have been murdered for his lingering ambitions to succeed his father. www.montazeri.com/html/KAHTER49.html.
21. This is a category in Saeed Hajjarian's classification of the types of theocracy, to which we will return later in this article.
22. Ganji's lecture at Shiraz University was entitled "Satan Was the First Fascist" (May 1996.) He was charged with defaming the Islamic Republic and tried in a closed court. His defense was later published under the title of "Fascism is one of the Mortal Sins." (Kian, Number 40, February 1997.)
23. Ganji's gambit would have been impossible before the tenure of President Khatami not only because of the freedom he enjoyed in publishing the results of his investigations but mainly because it was Khatami who withstood the pressure of the right to brush the scandal under the rug. Khatami insisted that at least the four murders that were committed under his watch be solved and prosecuted. This was possibly the most decisive departure of Khatami with the modus vivendi of his predecessors.
24. Baaghi who is also a political prisoner in Iran has published two volumes on the subject of the Iranian "dirty war" entitled: "The Tragedy of Democracy in Iran."
25. For the concept of "Iconic Intellectuals" see Mahmoud Sadri and Ahmad Sadri, "Introduction" to Reason Freedom and Democracy: The Essential Writings of Abdolkarim Soroush (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
26. Saeed Hajjarian, Republic: Demystifying Political Power (Jomhooryat: Afsoon-zedaie Az Ghodrat) (Tehran: Tarh-e No Publishers, 1999), pp. 659-669.
27. For a concise account of the Kharejites history see John Esposito's Islam the Straight Path (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 41-43.
28. Hajjarian, Republic, Idem.
29. One of the most prominent leaders of the reform movement and the current vice speaker of the parliament (Behzad Nabavi) is quoted as saying: "Absolute mandate of the Supreme Leader/Juristconsult is absolute only within the framework of the law, for if it were otherwise, there would be no point in having any kind of law to begin with." The obvious tautological tenor of this statement and the violence it does to the meaning of the word "absolute" was hidden to neither the secular critics of the Islamic Republic nor to the right-wing critics of the Reform. Quoted in: Asr-e Ma, Number 61, 1995.
30. Hajjarian, Republic Ibid, 677-688.
31. Leszek Kolakowski, Toward a Marxist Humanism (New York: Grove, 1968).
32. Masood Deh-Namaki, The Retreat of the Reform started with the Elimination of Hajjarian, Interview with ISNA, www.iran-emrooz.de/khabar/namaki1214.html. March 6, 2001.
33. The subject of this article does not allow addressing the plight of the Iranian secular intellectuals and intelligentsia, upon whom measures of brutal repression have been visited with terrible regularity.