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 cliched vision of Iran's political reality.
Ahmad Fardid (1910–94), the 'anti-Western' philosopher known to many as the Iranian Heidegger, became the self-proclaimed philosophical spokesperson for the Islamic Republic, famously coining the ...term 'Westoxication'. Using new materials about Fardid's intellectual biography and interviews with thirteen individuals, Ali Mirsepassi pieces together the striking story of Fardid's life and intellectual legacy. Each interview in turn sheds light on Iran's twentieth-century intellectual and political self-construction and highlights Fardid's important role and influence in the creation of Iranian modernity. The Fardid phenomenon was unique to the Iranian story, and yet contributed to a broader twentieth-century Heideggerian tradition that marked the political destiny of other countries under a similar ideological sway. Through these accounts, Mirsepassi cuts to the nerve of how deadly political 'authenticity movements' take hold of modern societies and spread their ideology. Combining a sociological framework with the realities of lived experience, he examines Iran's recent and astonishing upheavals, experiments, and mass mobilizations.
Ali Mirsepassi's book presents a powerful challenge to the dominant media and scholarly construction of radical Islamist politics, and their anti-Western ideology, as a purely Islamic phenomenon ...derived from insular, traditional and monolithic religious 'foundations'. It argues that the discourse of political Islam has strong connections to important and disturbing currents in Western philosophy and modern Western intellectual trends. The work demonstrates this by establishing links between important contemporary Iranian intellectuals and the central influence of Martin Heidegger's philosophy. We are also introduced to new democratic narratives of modernity linked to diverse intellectual trends in the West and in non-Western societies, notably in India, where the ideas of John Dewey have influenced important democratic social movements. As the first book to make such connections, it promises to be an important contribution to the field and will do much to overturn some pervasive assumptions about the dichotomy between East and West.
The 11th -12th century Abbasid philosopher al-Ghazālī is the center of controversy today in Western societies seeking to understand Islamic radicalism. The article initially examines the al-Ghazālī ...debate, split between popular images of al-Ghazālī as a fanatical enemy of rational thought, and scholarly depictions of a forerunner of postmodernism. After analyzing a principle example of the latter tendency, centered on the Persian term dihlı̄z, the article undertakes a sociological investigation of al-Ghazālī’s Alchemy of Happiness within the historic context of the Abbasid crisis of political legitimacy. The troubled historic vista of Abbasid politics, the unique role of al-Ghazālī as representative of ideological power, and the crucial influence of the intercontinental Sufi revolution, are discussed. The analysis focuses on al-Ghazālī’s central concepts of deen (faith) and donya (the secular), that he employed to stabilize and guarantee the continued political success of the multi-civilizational Abbasid state. Spurning the dogma of unified identity, al-Ghazālī recognized the civilizational pluralism underpinning Abbasid political survival. Reconciling multiplicity and unity, al-Ghazālī labored to integrate Islamic and non-Islamic intellectual traditions. Three elements are investigated: (1) Investing epistemology with social significance, al-Ghazālī opposed orthodox conformism; (2) Denouncing ignorance, the passions, and intellectual confusion, al-Ghazālī promoted the dialogic principle – not dogma - as the unique public guarantee of the universal truth; (3) This universal truth had an exclusively secular, not religious, dimension, based on the deen/donya distinction, separating universal secular truth from religious identity. An intellectual exploration of the secular dilemma, of corresponding imaginative magnitude, hardly existed in Western societies at the time. This casts doubt on the current academic enthusiasm for representing traditional Islam in the mirror image of French post-structuralism, and the false depiction of al-Ghazālī as the dogmatic enemy of reason. It opens an entire terrain of possible research that is barely tapped, which contradicts the confused dogmas of Islamic radicalism. A secular conceptual dualism pervaded the Islamic tradition, indeed pre-dating European secularism.
In this thought-provoking study, Ali Mirsepassi explores the concept of modernity, exposing the Eurocentric prejudices and hostility to non-Western culture that have characterized its development. ...Focusing on the Iranian experience of modernity, he charts its political and intellectual history and develops a new interpretation of Islamic Fundamentalism through the detailed analysis of the ideas of key Islamic intellectuals. The author argues that the Iranian Revolution was not a simple clash between modernity and tradition but an attempt to accommodate modernity within a sense of authentic Islamic identity, culture and historical experience. He concludes by assessing the future of secularism and democracy in the Middle East in general, and in Iran in particular. A significant contribution to the literature on modernity, social change and Islamic Studies, this book will be essential reading for scholars and students of social theory and change, Middle Eastern Studies, Cultural Studies and many related areas.
This book presents a critical study of citizenship, state and globalization in societies that have been historically influenced by Islamic traditions and institutions. Interrogating the work of ...contemporary theorists of Islamic modernity such as Mohammed Arkoun, Abdul an-Na'im, Fatima Mernissi, Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood and Aziz Al-Azmeh, this book explores the debate on Islam, democracy and modernity, contextualized within contemporary Muslim lifeworlds. These include contemporary Turkey (following the 9/11 attacks and the onset of war in Afghanistan), multicultural France (2009–10 French burqa debate), Egypt (the 2011 Tahrir Square mass mobilizations), and India. Ali Mirsepassi and Tadd Graham Fernée critique particular counterproductive ideological conceptualizations, voicing an emerging global ethic of reconciliation. Rejecting the polarized conceptual ideals of the universal or the authentic, the authors critically reassess notions of the secular, the cosmopolitan and democracy. Raising questions that cut across the disciplines of history, anthropology, sociology and law, this study articulates a democratic politics of everyday life in modern Islamic societies.
This article studies materials published in the Bonyad Monthly, a journal sponsored by the Pahlavi state. It was published for two years (1977-78), just prior to the 1979 Revolution in Iran. Bonyad ...Monthly's mission was to engage in the ongoing intellectual debates at the time in Iran's encounter with modernity. It primarily published articles, interviews and translations, with the aim of exposing the cultural and moral perils of modern western culture. The writers of Bonyad Monthly cast the modern world as morally soulless, culturally debased, politically imperial and arrogant. The Journal also depicted Iranian culture as the mirror image of the modern west, and part of the rising "Eastern spiritual" resurrection. More specifically, Bonyad Monthly helped invert and de-politicize the notion of Gharbzadegi (Westoxification). The Gharbzadegi discourse, a powerful rhetorical device, had been used by oppositional intellectuals to condemn the Pahlavi modernization programme. It was now ironically claimed by the Pahlavi state and used to craft a new state-sponsored anti-modern ideology. This signified a major ideological turning point for the modernizing state in Iran. The editor and writers of Bonyad Monthly were influenced by a broader anti-modernist current around the Pahlavi State. Very prominent scholars such as Henry Corbin, Ahmad Fardid, Hussein Nasr and Ehsan Naraghi articulated anti-modernist ideas, calling for the return to Persian and Islamic spiritual identity. This article discusses the ironies and complexities of a modernizing state imagining itself as the champion of anti-modern ideas and traditions.
This article analyzes the movies produced in the two decades prior to the 1979 Revolution in Iran. It argues that these films influenced a cultural transformation we call a 'quiet revolution.' The ...Quiet Revolution refers to a new 'national imagination' fashioned around the idea of gharbzadegi Westoxification. The gharbzadegi discourse grounded an identity based public movement. It countered the autocratic modernization of Iran, in the guise of a 'spiritual' or pastoral other. It also positioned its own narrative as the 'transcendent' other of secular and modern Iran. This article focuses upon the Iranian New Wave cinema movement. It particularly discusses the works of Daruish Mehrjui, a pioneering Iranian film director of the 1960s and 1970s.
One of the important consequences of the Iranian encounter with modernity and its efforts to Westernize has been the founding of new educational institutions.¹ Among these are the Darul-Fanoon school ...founded in 1851 by Amir Kabir, a reformist politician, as well as the many new schools, including the University of Tehran (founded in 1928), which were essential to Reza Shah’s plan to modernize and industrialize Iran. Shortly after the Islamic Revolution, the struggle for control over the university became one of the most important factors in the Islamic Republic’s assertion of political power and attainment of cultural hegemony. However, a
Within the context of contemporary Iranian and Middle Eastern politics, where a striking variety of ideological discourses have competed with one another and held sway over several decades—among them ...nativist, nationalist, and Islamist ones, just to name a few—intellectuals have likewise tended to define their roles within the limited discursive boundaries of religion, secularism, or other “local” ideological parameters. Against this politically charged background, Iranian intellectuals currently face fundamental challenges. These challenges require renewed communicative tools and an imaginative vocabulary so that they can overcome the limitations of the existing intellectual traditions and raise the questions necessary to
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