[Engaging Books is a returning series that features books by various publishers on a given theme, along with an excerpt from each volume. This installment involves a selection from Cambridge University Press on the theme of Cosmopolitanism and Political Reform in Iran. Other publishers' books will follow on a monthly basis.]
Table of Contents
Revolution and its Discontents: Political Thought and Reform in Iran
By Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi
About the Book
About the Author
Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Iranian Cosmopolitanism: A Cinematic History
By Golbarg Rektabtalaei
About the Book
About the Author
Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Both Eastern and Western: An Intellectual History of Iranian Modernity
By Afshin Matin-Asgari
About the Book
About the Author
Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Beyond Shariati: Modernity, Cosmopolitanism, and Islam in Iranian Political Thought
By Siavash Saffari
About the Book
About the Author
Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
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Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Revolution and its Discontents: Political Thought and Reform in Iran
By Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi
About the book
The death of the Islamic Republic's revolutionary patriarch, Ayatollah Khomeini, the bitter denouement of the Iran-Iraq War, and the marginalisation of leading factions within the political elite, in tandem with the end of the Cold War, harboured immense intellectual and political repercussions for the Iranian state and society. It was these events which created the conditions for the emergence of Iran's post-revolutionary reform movement, as its intellectuals and political leaders sought to re-evaluate the foundations of the Islamic state's political legitimacy and religious authority. In this monograph, Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, examines the rise and evolution of reformist political thought in Iran and analyses the complex network of publications, study circles, and think-tanks that encompassed a range of prominent politicians and intellectuals in the 1990s. In his meticulous account of the relationships between the post-revolutionary political class and intelligentsia, he explores a panoply of political and ideological issues still vital to understanding Iran's revolutionary state, such as the ruling political theology of the “Guardianship of the Jurist,” the political elite's engagement with questions of Islamic statehood, democracy and constitutionalism, and their critiques of revolutionary agency and social transformation.
About the author
Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford and Postdoctoral Associate at St Cross College, Oxford. He has taught at the University of Oxford, the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and the University of Exeter. Sadeghi-Boroujerdi was Associate Editor at the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies from 2014 to 2017 and is Series Editor of Radical Histories of the Middle East (Oneworld). His writings on Iran have been widely published in academic journals and the international media, including the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Iranian Studies, Digest of Middle East Studies, Middle East Journal, Foreign Policy, Jadaliyya, Al Jazeera, Lobelog, Muftah, Jacobin, and The Guardian.
Scholarly Praise
“This fascinating book re-interprets the post-revolutionary ideological topography of the Islamic Republic of Iran through a careful reading of the works of religious intellectuals and Islamist Left in Iran. Sadeghi-Boroujerdi complicates simplistic binary categorisation[s]… to show us the broad range of political, economic, and religious ideologies of the country's political elite.” - Laleh Khalili, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
“An intellectual history of the first order, Sadeghi-Boroujerdi's analytical narrative dissects the intellectual vitality of a movement that struggled to define itself within a political environment that proved increasingly unsettling.” - Ali Ansari, University of St Andrews, Scotland
“Sadeghi-Boroujerdi offers a theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich study of the emergence of a vibrant intellectual community in post-revolutionary Iran. His analysis takes the reader beyond the simple binaries of religious versus secular intellectuals and shows with an exemplary clarity the plurality of sources with reference to which those intellectuals intervene in politics and cultural production in the contemporary Iranian society.” - Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Princeton University, New Jersey
“Sadeghi-Boroujerdi's book represents the most sophisticated analysis yet written of post-Islamism as a form of political thought, one that will likely shape our world in unforeseen ways.” - Faisal Devji, University of Oxford
Additional Information
February 2019
454 pages
Hardback only $135.00 USD
Hardback ISBN 9781108426343
Paperback ISBN 9781108445061
Digital ISBN 9781108681834
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Excerpt
Chapter 1: Religious Intellectuals, Reform, and the Struggle for Hegemony
[E]very contradiction is a conflict of value as well as a conflict of interest; that inside every “need” there is an affect, or “want”, on its way to becoming an “ought” (and vice versa); that every class struggle is at the same time a struggle over values.1
E. P. Thompson
[A]ll political concepts, images, and terms have a polemical meaning. They are focused on a specific conflict and are bound to a concrete situation.2
Carl Schmitt
Introduction
‘Words are deeds’, declared Ludwig Wittgenstein with his inveterate pithiness.3 I consider this direct connection between words and political praxis paramount for understanding the nature and conditions of the rowshanfekran-e dini’s mode of intellectual production and engagement. The medium through which they presented and put forth their ideas for consumption by political elites and the general public is crucial to understanding the religious intellectuals’ role, not merely in post-revolutionary intellectual debates but also in terms of their broader political significance and how they informed political debate over the nature of political authority and the Islamic state. It also distinguishes this work’s approach from that of others which have thus far sought to provide an analysis of Iran’s post-revolutionary religious intellectuals’ collective output within the broader sweep of Iranian intellectual history or Muslim reformist thought or a strictly corpus-based study which occasionally hearkens back to the somewhat passé approach of Arthur O. Lovejoy.4
This chapter outlines the theoretical framework guiding the historical examination of the networks integral to the reformist project’s articulation, as well as the general and interrelated features of post- revolutionary ‘religious intellectual’ discourse and what I call the ‘reformist apparatus’. This apparatus should be thought of as the specific complex of discursive practices which frame, regulate, and govern understandings and concrete engagements with the means, nature, and ends of social change and political transformation. While making no claims to exhaust all possible ways of framing post- revolutionary religious intellectualism, it lays out some of the chief features and modus operandi of the rowshanfekran-e dini, their discourse, and the context and conditions of their intellectual production. It then moves to provide a sketch of the political convergence of the religious intellectuals and the Islamic left and the formation of the reformist apparatus, detailing its significance not merely for understanding Iran’s recent intellectual history but its political history too. In this section, the emergence of the ‘reformists’ is given brief consideration since it will undergo more detailed discussion in later chapters. The ‘material structures of ideology’ through which the reformists sought to establish hegemony over the Iranian polity and thereby forge a national-popular will is analysed through the lens of the Gramscian notion of hegemony, Bourdieu’s conceptions of field, habitus, and capital, and Foucault’s understanding of an apparatus.
Performance and Political Intervention
In any hermeneutical exercise it is vital to historicise and contextualise the oeuvre in question, and Iran’s post-revolutionary religious intellectuals are no exception. To provide an exposition of their ideas, one must also describe their intellectual and cultural milieu and the political history which both preceded and shaped them in turn. A basic reconstruction of the genealogy of post-revolutionary religious political thought and the variegated impulses driving its emergence will determine what compelled Iran’s post-revolutionary religious intellectuals to debate and increasingly challenge the ideological foundations of the theocratic-populist state. It will also contextualise these thinkers through the years of their development and gauge how their thinking has changed in step with the social and political changes which have taken place in the course of contemporary Iranian history.
Several methodological approaches will be drawn upon in order to bring to readers’ attention a defining feature of Iran’s religious intellectuals’ mode of intellectual production – namely, the manner in which they intervened into public debate and the public sphere and specifically shaped post-revolutionary political discourse in crucial ways. It is through such interventions that Iran’s religious intellectuals, in partnership with their political allies, were able to forge a new political lexicon which profoundly changed the way segments of both the political elite and the general public thought about politics. The medium through which this was achieved was less through theoretical treatises than by means of articles, interviews, comment pieces, and public speeches, which were conceived, published, and circulated in the complex nexus of intellectual reading groups and periodicals, comprising part of a wider network of individuals and institutions linked in various ways to the political elite.
As textual criticism still grapples with notions of intertextuality and the death of the author, one must be cognisant of the dangers posed by the effort to appropriate a text and impose a determinate meaning or interlocking chain of meanings upon it.5 Following Quentin Skinner, I consider a reconstruction of an author’s intended meanings germane to understanding a particular work or oeuvre. I am not concerned merely with the truth-value of a given statement but also in what the author was doing in saying it.6 Moreover, while an author’s intention or comportment in penning a particular work by no means exhausts the entirety of the ‘meaning’ of a text, knowledge of such cannot but condition our response to it.7 Dispensing altogether with authorial intentionality ignores the extent to which a ‘successful act of communication’ must be publicly legible and thus rely upon and invoke prevailing conventions which the contemporary audience can recognise and understand.8
Skinner distinguishes between intentions and motives, arguing that the former do not precede the work but can be discerned within the work itself which harbours a particular purpose in being authored. Following J. L. Austin, Skinner accepts that to issue an utterance is to speak with a certain meaning and thus illocutionary force, and to grasp the illocutionary force of an utterance is equivalent to understanding what the speaker was doing in issuing it.9 In contradistinction to the perlocutionary force of utterances, which refers to what might be brought about by saying something, their illocutionary force addresses what an author may be doing in saying something.10 Skinner expands this idea into the realm of the history of political thought through his examination of the nature of intention in speaking or writing with a certain force.
1 E. P. Thompson, ‘The Poverty of Theory or an Orrey of Errors’, in The Poverty of Theory & Other Essays (London: Montly Review Press, 1978), Loc 4077.
2 Schmitt, Concept of the Political, Loc 921.
3 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), p. 53e.
4 Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press, 1934), Introduction.
5 Graham Allen, Intertextuality (London; New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 4.
6 Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics: Volume 1: Regarding Method (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 96.
7 Ibid., p. 96. 8 Ibid., p. 97.
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Iranian Cosmopolitanism: A Cinematic History
By Golbarg Rektabtalaei
About the book
From popular and “New Wave” pre-revolutionary films of Fereydoon Goleh and Abbas Kiarostami to post-revolutionary films of Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the Iranian cinema has produced a range of films and directors that have garnered international fame and earned a global following. Golbarg Rekabtalaei takes a unique look at Iranian cosmopolitanism and how it transformed in the Iranian imagination through the cinematic lens. By examining the development of Iranian cinema from the early twentieth century to the revolution, Rekabtalaei locates discussions of modernity in Iranian cinema as rooted within local experiences, rather than being primarily concerned with Western ideals or industrialisation. Her research further illustrates how the ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity of Iran’s citizenry shaped a heterogeneous culture and a cosmopolitan cinema that was part and parcel of Iran’s experience of modernity. In turn, this cosmopolitanism fed into an assertion of sovereignty and national identity in a modernising Iran in the decades leading up to the revolution.
About the author
Golbarg Rekabtalaei is an Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern history at Seton Hall University, New Jersey. She received her PhD in Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations from the University of Toronto in 2015. She is interested in the relationships between cinematic image and space, modernity, cosmopolitanism, urbanisation, nationalism, and revolutions. Her research specifically focuses on the role of cinema, in concrete form and onscreen, in facilitating cosmopolitan imaginations and hybrid subjectivities in early twentieth-century Tehran. Rekabtalaei was a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Department of History at North Carolina State University from 2015 to 2017.
Scholarly Praise
“This book is a very important addition to social and cultural history of twentieth-century Iran that takes cinema as its prism of understanding Iranian modernity. Golbarg Rekabtalaei does a wonderful job of contextualising the experience of cinema not just through films but also across spaces of movie theatres, schools, and other urban public venues. [This is] a fresh and original case study on emerging modern cosmopolitanism in the Iranian context.” - Ali Mirsepassi, New York University
“[This] brilliant historical work uncovers the roots of Iranian cinema in the international studios and figures that produced it as a cosmopolitan construct. Boldly suggestive, Rekabtalaei's findings reveal, in this deep history, a cosmopolitan national imaginary whose sense of self, ethics, conflicts, dilemmas and humanism substantiate the overwhelming appeal of Iranian cinema to global audiences today.” - Negar Mottahedeh, author of Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema
“Locating cinema history in the urban everyday of Tehran, in its multiethnic neighborhoods, and in its institutions, Iranian Cosmopolitanism offers an original framework for the films and publications that have defined Iranian cinema.” - Kaveh Askari, Michigan State University
Additional Information
February 2019
318 pages
Hardback only $105.00 USD
Hardback ISBN 9781108418515
Paperback ISBN 9781108407465
Online ISBN 9781108290289
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Excerpt
Chapter 1: Cinematic Imaginaries and Cosmopolitanism in the Early Twentieth Century
With the emergence of new communication technologies, social spaces, novel practices, domestic conflicts, revolution and international wars in the first two decades of the twentieth century, the space of experience in Iran was constantly transforming.1 During this “new time,” cinema propelled a horizon of expectation, and in fact, a wide range of possibilities and futures for cinema audiences. Through cinema, actions in the present were informed by the past, and motivated by future expectations. As documents from the first two and a half decades of the twentieth century reveal, Iranian movie theatres predominantly featured international motion pictures in their programs, as no Persian-language short or feature film had yet been produced. Keeping in mind the “reflexive” quality of cinema that provided a cultural horizon in which the traumatic effects of modernity and modernisation were registered and articulated, one could extrapolate that the “aesthetic and sensorial” dimensions of cinema, processed through the act of spectatorship, inspired attitudes for the articulation and negotiation of national imaginations.2 The international moving pictures screened in Iran evoked a futural prospect of what Iran could and ought to be – a temporalisation of historical time on screen and in cinema space that characterised modernity in the early twentieth century. Much of the literature on early cinema in Iran has attended, in a rather dismissive tone, to the inundation of Iranian cinemas with international films, cinematic colonisation and henceforth the nonexistence of an Iranian cinema industry; very little has been expressed in terms of the cinema culture that such cinematic events engraved in the Iranian imaginaries and cinematic visions. Through a genealogical investigation of cinematic activities during that era, this chapter argues for the shaping of a cinema culture that, relating to conditions of Iranian modernity, functioned to embody the global cosmos in its vernacular morphogenesis – a trait that came to bear upon Iranian cinema in various forms in the following decades.
To recover a cinema history that has been buried under the temporality of politics in Iran, this chapter will first explore the socio-cultural heterogeneity that marked the experience of Iranian modernity in the early twentieth century. Highlighting ethnic, religious, ideological, political and cultural diversity in Tehran, the following pages argue for the existence of a cosmopolitan urban society at the turn of the century. The inauguration of cinematographic screenings and the gradual inception of a cinematic culture in the first decades of the twentieth century were much indebted to the diasporic groups and/or cosmopolitan merchants and intellectuals residing in Iran. Prompting new spaces for the socialisation of diverse residents, as well as projecting heterotopic images – of other lifestyles, peoples, cultures, landscapes, wars and practices – cinema further facilitated the creation of cosmopolitan imaginaries. With the growing popularity of cinematographic screenings and their accompanying leisure activities, cinemas became concentrated in certain areas of the city, thus further prompting the urbanisation of Tehran and the city’s compartmentalisation.
As this chapter will demonstrate, cinema’s newly found position elicited various reactions from the diverse residents of Iran. Amid the brewing of nationalist sentiments, the cosmopolitan intellectuals and the elite seem not only to have accepted cinema as a medium that projected “moral” social norms, but to have adopted it as an effective tool in the education of the public (especially students) and in the service of the nation. Therefore, film screenings were included in school and conference programs, and the masses were encouraged to attend “moral” and “scientific” film screenings. Inspired by the technology, some cosmopolitan film enthusiasts engaged in creating the first newsreels and documentaries that depicted the Iranian empire and local practices of the people in attempts to imagine and stage Iran as contemporaneous with its global counterparts. As this chapter will show, merchants, cinema patrons and social critics associated films with moral edification and national progress, and provoked national consciousness among the public in the first two decades of the twentieth century.
***
In the literature on early cinema, some scholars argue for a rethinking of cinema’s “emergence within the sensory environment of urban modernity”; much of this scholarship also draws a connection between cinema and “late nineteenth-century technologies of space and time,” as well as the “adjacent elements in the new visual culture of advanced capitalism.”3 Such Eurocentric theories are lacking, nevertheless, in that they are based on early Western cinema and its relation to “Western” modernities, industrialisation and modes of capitalism; they thus neglect the analysis of such relationships in societies with alternative histories and modernities. The literature on the history of Iranian cinema, too, is wanting in that it has mainly dealt with the fascination of the Qajar court, especially Muzaffar al-Din Shah (r. 1896–1907), with the cinematograph. The dearth of documents and scholarship on Iranian film productions (and the absence of Persian-language narrative films) in the first two and a half decades of the twentieth century has compelled scholars to overlook the highly dynamic cinematic activities of this era and their contribution to Iran’s experience of modernity;4 even when attended to, these activities have been discussed in terms of their political implications, especially with regard to the role that cinema sponsorship by foreign forces had in disseminating propaganda in the country.5 On the other hand, some scholars of Iranian cinema have considered it as a royal private enterprise, inaccessible to the public,6 thus neglecting the role of merchants and tradespeople in the promotion of cinema culture. Such literature has, for the most part, disregarded the significance of cinema in the shaping of Iranian imaginations in such a historically eventful era.
In this chapter, I intend only to scratch the surface and recover a brief history of early cinema in Iran through primary sources such as journals, autobiographies, memoirs, travelogues, official documents and newspaper articles, and then analyse, not necessarily in a chronological order, my findings in relation to Iranian modernity from 1900 to the mid-1920s through the prism of cinema.
1 It should be noted that the early years of cinema in Iran coincided with the onset of the Constitutional Revolution (1906–1911) and thus its history was much informed by the day-to-day goings-on of the conflicts.
2 Miriam Bratu Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 6(2) (1999): 69, 70.
3 Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 102.
4 See, e.g., Hamid Dabashi, Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, and Future (London: Verso, 2001), 12–18; and Hamid Reza Sadr, Iranian Cinema: A Political History (London: I. B. Tauris & Co., 2006).
5 See, Dabashi, Close Up, 17; and Sadr, Iranian Cinema, 9–10.
6 Some examples include: Sadr, Iranian Cinema, 8–9; Hamid Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema, vol. 1: The Artisanal Era, 1897–1941 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 39; and Masoud Mehrabi, Tārīkh-i Sīnamā-yi Īrān: Az Āghāz tā Sāl-i 1357 [A History of Iran’s Cinema: From the Beginning to the Year 1979] (Tehran: Mu’allif, 1992), 15.
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Both Eastern and Western: An Intellectual History of Iranian Modernity
By Afshin Matin-Asgari
About the book
Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, many Western observers of Iran have seen the country caught between Eastern history and “Western” modernity, between religion and secularity. As a result, analysis of political philosophy preceding the revolution has become subsumed by this narrative. Here, Afshin Matin-Asgari proposes a revisionist work of intellectual history, challenging many of the dominant paradigms in Iranian and Middle Eastern historiography and offering a new narration. In charting the intellectual construction of Iranian modernity during the twentieth century, Matin-Asgari focuses on broad patterns of influential ideas and their relation to each other. These intellectual trends are studied in a global historical context, leading to the assertion that Iranian modernity has been sustained by at least a century of intense intellectual interaction with global ideologies. Turning many prevailing narratives on their heads, the author concludes that modern Iran can be seen as, culturally and intellectually, both Eastern and Western.
About the author
Afshin Matin-Asgari is Outstanding Professor of Middle East History at California State University, Los Angeles. He was born in Iran and completed his PhD in Middle East history at University of California, Los Angeles. He was active in the international movement of Iranian students during the 1970s and took part in the 1978–79 Iranian Revolution. He is the author of Iranian Student Opposition to the Shah (2002), which is translated in Persian and published in Iran, and has authored more than twenty articles and book chapters on twentieth-century Iranian political and intellectual history.
Scholarly Praise
“This unique book registers the many sources of influence, hitherto overlooked by the researchers in the field, that have shaped up modern Iran. A superb and authoritative reference for scholars and public alike.” - Peyman Vahabzadeh, University of Victoria
“A highly succinct, readable, and perceptive work on the major issue confronting intellectuals in Iran from the late nineteenth century up to the 1979 revolution: the issue of how to discuss, confront, and deal with the intellectual challenge coming from the West.” - Ervand Abrahamian, City University of New York
“By focusing on the influence of the Ottoman and Russian models on Iranian intellectual thought, [this] offers an original and thought-provoking account of Iran's road toward 'modernity' in the twentieth century.” - Rudi Matthee, University of Delaware
“Deeply informed, politically committed, morally imaginative, Matin-Asgari's own book is a towering achievement of the intellectual history he chronicles with impeccable precision.” - Hamid Dabashi, Columbia University, New York
Additional Information
August 2018
370 pages
Hardback $99.99 USD Paperback $32.99
Hardback ISBN 9781108428538
Paperback ISBN 9781108449977
Online ISBN 9781108552844
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Excerpt
Introduction
This book is about the intellectual construction of Iranian modernity during the twentieth century, up to the end of the 1970s. As a work of intellectual history, it focuses on broad patterns of influential ideas, and their relation to each other, in a historical context. In a sense, this is what historians often do, as they “rethink past thoughts,” to quote R. G. Collingwood’s succinct definition of our profession. Traditionally, intellectual history, as well as historiography in general, has been the study of recognizably “influential ideas,” traceable in written or printed texts, thus implicitly biased toward elite or high culture. Historians admit, however, that “influential ideas” are defined as such via the consensus of their profession, primarily because, appearing in printed texts, they are the most accessible type of historical record. Given this definition, intellectual history focuses neither on the most objectively important ideas of a given age, nor necessarily on its “ruling ideas,” in the sense of Marx’s famous dictum. At the same time, despite focusing mainly on individual thinkers, intellectual history can be “the social history of ideas” by locating intellectual discourses and movements within broader social, political and cultural contexts. This kind of intellectual history, for example, links the ideas of nationalist, religious or revolutionary thinkers to state policies, popular culture and social movements.
Recently, intellectual history seems to have been demoted to the margins of mainstream historiography. This is a curious development since, during the past few decades, the dominant trend in American historiography has been cultural history, which, like intellectual history, is concerned ultimately with patterns of meaning, deciphered within broad clusters of ideas.1 The marginality of intellectual history is more pronounced when it comes to Middle Eastern, including Iranian, historiography. According to a fairly recent study:
A deep and unjustified divide remains between the modes of thought which intellectual history is developing in the study of Western (and non-Western, mainly South-Asian) societies and cultures and the study of the intellectual history of the Middle East, which seems to lag behind and remains ghettoized.2
English-language intellectual histories of the Middle East have largely dealt with Arab nationalist thought, while Iranian intellectual history is a new scholarly field, emerging in the aftermath of Iran’s 1978–1979 Revolution. Counting no more than a dozen major English-language works, the field of Iranian intellectual history emerged mainly in response to the paradox of a late twentieth-century popular revolution leading to a theocratic regime, dominated by Shi’i clerics. The Iranian Revolution’s deviation from the expected trajectory of modernity, primarily the demise of religion, made it a harbinger of the arrival of a global “post-modern condition.” In particular, the revolution’s triumphant “Islamic ideology” was widely perceived as a challenge to modernity’s “meta-narratives” of Marxism, liberal democracy, modernization and secularization. Michel Foucault, for example, welcomed the fall of the Shah as a “revolution against Modernity,” calling Ayatollah Khomeini’s ideas a new kind of “spiritual politics” that could come only from outside Europe.3
While hasty generalizations, such as Foucault’s, were gradually tempered by more sober reflections, the paradox of the Iranian Revolution endured as the Islamic Republic consolidated and survived into the twenty-first century. Though never repeated elsewhere, Iran’s “Islamic Revolution” initiated a burgeoning literature on topics such as Islamic fundamentalism, political Islam and Islamism, as well as on comparable global trends of religious revivalism. During the 1980s, this literature focused on particular doctrinal and/or historical features that presumably made Iranian Shi’ism a potentially revolutionary ideology. The most influential works of this genre were by sociologist Said Amir Arjomand, who recognized that the Iranian Revolution was not generically Islamic or Shi’i, but instead “an ideological revolution in Shi’ism.”4 Nevertheless, as with similar 1980s studies, Arjomand’s analysis remained preoccupied with the minutiae of Shi’i doctrine and the vicissitudes of its history, paying less attention to the revolution’s embeddedness in modern Iran’s intellectual and ideological landscape.5 At the same time, pioneering studies by Ervand Abrahamian showed Iran’s revolutionary “Islamic Ideology” was a species of modern political ideology, deeply indebted to Marxism. A similar understanding of “Islamic Ideology” meanwhile had emerged in Iran, where the post- revolutionary regime was purging its leftist factions, consciously removing Marxist “contaminations.”6 The first major scholarly work devoted entirely to the study of “Islamic Ideology” was Hamid Dabashi’s Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundations of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1993).
Building on Arjomand’s and Abrahamian’s focus on “Islamic Ideology,” Dabashi traced its genealogy in works by eight twentieth-century thinkers. Making a new thought-world available to non-Persian readers, Theology of Discontent also launched the genre of modern Iranian intellectual history, setting standards and opening pathways for studies that followed. Among these were Dabashi’s attention to the intertwining of secular and religious aspects of revolutionary ideology, and his focus on the textual authority of intellectuals in conferring, denying and challenging political legitimacy. Dabashi had diagnosed “Islamic Ideology” as Iran’s intellectual response to a painful encounter with Western modernity. Still, his emphasis remained on the religious side of “Islamic Ideology,” leading him to conclude: “The theological language of discontent was inevitable, perhaps because theology is the ultimate language of truth.”7 Related to Dabashi’s (over)estimation of theology/religion as “truth language” was his choice only of Muslim thinkers as authoritative pre-revolutionary intellectuals. In 1996, political scientist Mehrzad Boroujerdi’s Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism added a number of important secular thinkers to Dabashi’s roster, provided more social and political context, and showed the continuity of pre- and postrevolutionary intellectual production along “the central concepts of other-ness, orientalism, orientalism in reverse, and nativism.”8 Boroujedri’s focus on “nativism,” i.e. the project of constructing an “authentic” indigenious national identity, moved the analysis of Iranian intellectual discourse in a more secular direction. Moreover, Boroujerdi was the first scholar to note the influence, on both pre- and postrevolutionary Iranian intellectuals, of German Counter-modernist thought, and specifically the philosopher Martin Heidegger.
1. The predominance of Cultural History, since the mid-1990s, is based on data published by the American Historical Association. See Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company 2014), p. 31.
2. Israel Gershoni and Amy Singer, “Introduction: Intellectual History in Middle Eastern Studies” in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 28, no. 3 (2008), pp. 383–389, quoted on pp. 383–384. This is the guest editors’ introduction to the journal’s special issue on Intellectual History in Middle Eastern Studies. The field’s “ghettoization,” along national and regional lines, is evident in the fact that all four articles in this issue deal with Arab countries, while Iran and Turkey are not covered.
3. Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seduction of Islamism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005). 4. Said Amir Arjomand, “Ideological revolution in Shi’ism” in Said Amir Arjomand ed. Authority and Political Culture in Shi’ism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988): pp. 178–209.
5. Hamid Enayat, Modern Islamic Political Thought (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1982) and Shahrough Akhavi, Religion and Politics in Contemporary Iran: Clergy-state Relations in the Pahlavi Period (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1980). Both books focused on Shi’i doctrine, institutions and clergy-state relations. The same focus continues in recent works, for example, Behrooz Moazami, State, Religion, and Revolution in Iran, 1796 to the Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
6. Published a few years after the revolution, Ervand Abrahamian’s Iran between Two Revolutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), was the first scholarly work giving the left a prominent place in modern Iranian history. This was followed by Abrahamian’s The Iranian Mojahedin (New Haven CT: Yale University Press,1989)and Khomeinism Essays on the Islamic Republic (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993). Serious recognition, along with condemnation, of the left’s impact on the revolution began with Sadeq Ziabaklam, Moqaddamehibar enqelab-e Eslami (Tehran, n.d.).
7. Hamid Dabashi, Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundations of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (New York: New York University Press, 1993), p. 5.
8. Mehrzad Boroujerdi’s Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), p. xv.
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Beyond Shariati: Modernity, Cosmopolitanism, and Islam in Iranian Political Thought
By Siavash Saffari
About the book
Ali Shariati (1933–77) has been called by many the “ideologue of the Iranian Revolution.” An inspiration to many of the revolutionary generation, Shariati’s combination of Islamic political thought and left-leaning ideology continues to influence both in Iran and across the wider Muslim world. In this book, Siavash Saffari examines Shariati’s long-standing legacy, and how new readings of his works by contemporary “neo-Shariatis” have contributed to a deconstruction of the false binaries of Islam and modernity, modernism and traditionalism. Saffari examines how, through their critique of Eurocentric metanarratives on the one hand and the essentialist conceptions of Islam on the other, Shariati and neo-Shariatis have carved out a new space in Islamic thought beyond the traps of orientalism and occidentalism. This unique perspective will hold great appeal to researchers of the politics and intellectual thought of post-revolutionary Iran and the greater Middle East.
About the author
Siavash Saffari is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University, New York. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Alberta, where he taught courses in comparative politics and political theory.
Praise in the Media
“Saffari’s book is a much-needed corrective to considerations of Iranian political thought—scholarship that has spent the better part of at least two decades ignoring knowledge production in Iran.” - Arash Davari, International Journal of Middle East Studies
“Saffari provides a strong case in defense of critical postcolonialism and localized cosmopolitanism. … The book is an important contribution to a dialogical reading of Shariati’s thought and also a novel attempt to showcase the neo-Shariatis’ intellectual and sociopolitical contribution in postrevolutionary Iran.” - Mojtaba Mahdavi, The Middle East Journal
“Beyond Shariati offers a comprehensive but concise relevant history of [Shariati’s] ideas and debates over their reception, placing them into a global, particularly Global Southern, discussion that remains rooted by commitments to Iran and its future.” - Jane Anna Gordon, The American Philosophical Association blog
“Saffari’s book offers more than yet another reading of Shariati; rather, as a careful examination into Shariati’s legacy and his continuing relevance, it makes several important and original contributions to longstanding debates within Iranian studies and critical studies literature.” - Parmida Esmaeilpour, Iranian Studies
Scholarly Praise
“Beyond Shariati signals the opening horizons of fertile critical thinking to come." – Hamid Dabashi, Columbia University, New York
“By focusing on the Iranian thinker, Dr Ali Shariati and his influence on modernist thinkers in Iran and beyond in the Muslim word, Siavash Saffari has challenged prevailing theses that privilege Eurocentric analysis of the history of modernization in the global context…” – Abdulzziz Sachedina, George Mason University, Virginia
“In recent times, the relation between Western modernity and Islam has been a prominent topic of social-theoretical discussions…by focusing attention on the Iranian intellectual Ali Shariati and his later followers (the ‘neo-Shariatis’), Saffari shows that customary binaries – such as ‘Western universalism’ vs ‘Islamic parochialism’ – are hasty abstractions…” – Frd Dallmayr, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
Additional Information
February 2017
219 pages
Hardback $105.00 USD; Paperback $32.99 USD
Hardback ISBN 9781107164161
Paperback ISBN 9781316615751
Online ISBN 9781316686966
Where to purchase
Excerpt
Chapter 1: Postrevolutionary Readings of a Revolutionary Islamic Discourse
Revolution, Ideology, and the “Geography of Discourse”
Returning to Iran from Paris in 1964, and convinced that a progressive transformation in Iranian society would be impossible without a radical change in the consciousness of the masses, Shariati focused his efforts on articulating a contextually grounded revolutionary ideology by appealing to what he saw as the emancipatory potential of the local cultural and religious traditions. For him, one of the major hindrances to genuine development in Iran, as in many other non-Western societies, was the inability of intellectuals to communicate effectively with the masses. Critiquing the Eurocentricity of educated elites, Shariati wrote about a class of intellectuals in early-twentieth-century Iran, “whose most recognizable characteristic was that the further they pursued their intellectualism the further away they removed themselves from their own people; they felt estranged from their own society while feeling ever closer to Europeans.”1 These intellectuals, many of them graduates of European universities, resented what they saw as the backwardness of their own societies vis-à-vis Europe, rejected all indigenous sources of knowledge, and “judged their history, culture, religion, and themselves, against the only frame of reference that they knew,” namely European modernity.2
Shariati’s views about the estrangement of modern Iranian intellectuals from their indigenous sources of identity and their assessment of their society and culture from a Eurocentric perspective echoes Frantz Fanon’s analysis about the self-alienating effects of colonialism on the colonized. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Fanon defined “alienation” as a “psychic” form of violence and a colonial byproduct, as a result of which the colonized come to see themselves from the perspective of, and thus inferior to, their colonizers.3 Similarly, Shariati saw Eurocentrism or “Westoxication” (gharbzadegi) as a cultural consequence of colonialism with varied intellectual and social manifestations in the colonial periphery.4 In his view, though the phenomenon also took the form of adopting Western “consumption patterns and lifestyles,” its most devastating and paralyzing effect was the “Westoxication of the intellect.”5 Thus, in Iqbal and Us (Ma va Iqbal) Shariati wrote, “there is nothing more tragic than when our intellectuals see themselves through the eyes of the other and use foreign points of reference and analytical tools to gain knowledge of their own thoughts, culture, history, and religion.”6
Like Fanon, Shariati believed that self-alienation was most pronouncedly evident among the educated elites who were deeply integrated into the colonial and imperial structures of power and their associated modes of economic and knowledge production. He argued that the encounter with and the hegemony of European modernity created a chasm between the masses of the people and the intellectual class. The majority of the population at the time was under the influence of traditional sources of authority, namely the clerical institution, monarchy, and local landowning elites. Faced with and attempting to fundamentally challenge these traditional power structures, the new educated class sought to realize its modernist vision primarily by renouncing local cultural traditions and popular religious beliefs.7 “As a result,” Shariati wrote, “this intellectual minority alienated itself from the masses of the people, and rather than contributing to the organic evolution of our society it became an inorganic entity dependent on alien histories, cultures, and political agendas.”8 Though he credited the secular Left with developing a clear analysis about the economic aspects of colonialism, he nevertheless charged them with failing to see the cultural consequences of the colonial condition and even acting as the agents of the project of Westernization.9
1 Ali Shariati, Ma va Iqbal: majmooeh asar 5 (Iqbal and Us: Collected Works 5), (Aachen, Germany: Hosseinieh Ershad, 1978), 230.
2 Ibid., 231.
3 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (Originally published 1952), trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 34.
4 Ali Shariati, “Bazgasht beh kodam khish?” (“Return to Which Self?”) 1350/1971, C.W. 4, Ali Shariati: The Complete Collection of Works [CD ROM], Tehran: Shariati Cultural Foundation, 2010. The term gharbzadegi was coined originally by prominent Iranian writer Jalal Ale Ahmad in a book with the same title published in 1962.
5 Ibid.
6 Shariati, Ma va Iqbal, 152.
7 Ali Shariati,“Nameh beh Ehsan” (“Letter to Ehsan”) Farvardin-Ordibehesht 1356/April– May 1977, C.W. 1, Ali Shariati: The Complete Collection of Works [CD ROM], Tehran: Shariati Cultural Foundation, 2010.
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
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This article is part of the new Jadaliyya Iran Page launch. To inaugurate the Iran Page, its co-editors are pleased to present the following articles, interviews, and resources:
Articles
"Jadaliyya Launches New Iran Page" by Iran Page Editors
"Covering Race and Rebellion" by Naveed Mansoori
"The Systemic Problem of 'Iran Expertise' in Washington" by Negar Razavi
Media Roundup
New Texts Out Now (NEWTON) Interviews
Nile Green, The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca
Narges Bajoghli, Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic
Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Revolution and its Discontents: Political Thought and Reform in Iran
Golbarg Rekabtalaei, Iranian Cosmopolitanism: A Cinematic History
Peyman Vahabzadeh, A Rebel’s Journey: Mostafa Sho‘aiyan and Revolutionary Theory in Iran
Resources
Jadaliyya Talks: Arash Davari and Sina Rahmani on "Divorce, Iran-America Style"
"Essential Readings: Post-Revolutionary Iran" by Arang Keshavarzian