Religious intellectuals, reform and the struggle for hegemony -- Constructing Behesht-e Jahan : Islam, the clergy and the state -- Political genealogies of reform : the rowshanfekran-e dini and the Islamic left -- Revolution and its discontents : ideology and the death of Utopia -- Free faith, democratic governance and the "Official Reading" of religion -- Khatami, the 2nd Khordad Font and the pedagogics of pluralism -- Sa'id Hajjariyan and reformist strategy : sovereign disenchantment and the politics of participation
This article explores the manifold lineages of crisis and revolt currently afflicting the Islamic Republic of Iran, most recently bursting forth in the 2022/2023 national uprisings where women-led mass protests and forceful rejection of mandatory veiling laws captured global attention. This interdisciplinary piece of research, bringing together several different theoretical approaches and historical literatures, interrogates and reflects upon what I call following Stuart Hall a 'conjunctural crisis' along the four major axes of (1) gender oppression and social reproduction; (2) the ethnocentric, dominative, and centralising nation-state and the still unresolved 'ethno-national question'; (3) 'religious democracy' and the impasse of the Reform movement; and (4) authoritarian neoliberalism and the Islamic Republic's political economy of predation. The article aims to show not only how these distinct crises have longer and more complicated lineages than might initially appear to be the case but also demonstrate how they have mutually constituted and shaped one another over the course of several decades, constituting part of a larger political and social system. Moreover, it aspires to provide a systematic and historically contextualised account of ongoing emancipatory struggles for democratic rights and liberation in today's Iran.
This article argues that the political thought of one of twentieth-century Iran's foremost intellectuals, Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1923-1969) and his seminal work Gharbzadegi (1962), often translated as 'West-struck-ness' or 'Westoxication', can and should be understood through the critical study of race and racialization. In contrast to the paradigms of 'nativism', 'Islamic atavism' and the demand for a return to 'cultural authenticity', which have traditionally framed the significance and reception of his thought, this article argues that Al-e Ahmad's notion of gharbzadegi provides important insights into how predatory forms of colonial capitalism stratify the economic world order in accordance with what W.E.B. Du Bois famously called the 'colour line'. The article submits that Al-e Ahmad's political thought illuminates the conditions of Eurocentric and racialized forms of knowledge production and immanent material practices, and how they structure the lived experiences of colonial and semi-colonial subjects, as well as providing a remarkable perspective on how 'race thinking' and the 'racial state' were conceived and institutionalized in twentieth-century Iran.
This article examines the importance of the political thought and praxis of politico, 'reformist' strategist and intellectual, Saʿid Hajjarian, and his rethinking of the post-revolutionary Iranian state's sources and bases of legitimacy in the 1990s and 2000s. It also provides an exposition and assessment of a number of his recommendations for the realisation of 'political development' (towseʿeh-ye siyāsi) in the post-revolutionary order and their contribution to the discourse ofeslāhātduring the presidency of Hojjat al-Islam Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005). Moreover, it attempts to situate Hajjarian within a broader spectrum of reformist political opinion and its proponents within the Islamic Republic of Iran's political class.
AbstractMostafa Malekian has yet to receive much attention in Western academic literature pertaining to Iranian intellectual life, but inside Iran, he has emerged as a popular public intellectual; seen as both a culmination of and rupture with the project of "religious intellectualism." Rather than offer a revolutionary and politically engaged vision of Islam, or a "reformist" or "democratic" interpretation of Shi῾ism, his project seeks to integrate what he calls "rationality" (῾aqlaniyat) and "spirituality" (ma᾽naviyat). As Malekian's project has developed, it has broken, in a number of important respects, with mainstream Islam as practiced in Iran, the religious reformist project, and even organized religion as a whole. This article seeks not only to offer one of the first comprehensive analysis of his existential and social thought in English, but also to analyze his project's deep affinities with a pervasive fatigue vis‐à‐vis collective projects of political emancipation and even "politics" tout court, in the latter phases of the "reformist" President Hojjat al‐Islam Seyyed Mohammad Khatami's tenure.
In this article we seek to think with and against the Iranian intellectual and dissident, Jalal Al-e Ahmad (d. 1969), and his exploration of the concept of velāyat in the context of his 1963 visit to Israel/Palestine. Through his idiosyncratic use of the term and its cognates, well-established in Islamic mysticism, Shiʿi theology and jurisprudence, he pursues a decolonial critique of the political theology of sovereignty. By placing Al-e Ahmad's thought in relation to broader debates in the history of political thought vis-à-vis the "extraordinary" character of political foundings, sovereignty and statelessness, and their complex interrelationship, we contend that in addition to delineating, what he refers to, as the "guardianship state", Al-e Ahmad pursues a critique of the latter as a specific kind of modern sovereign power, which exceeds, but is inextricably bound up with the nation-state and its colonial forms. In contradistinction to this state-form, Al-e Ahmad espouses a distinct kind of being-together and form of life, namely, a being-in-common (ejtemāʿ), which refuses those iterations of difference e.g. national/foreigner, majority/minority, civilized/barbarian that have emerged as staples of the modern nation-state and capitalist modernity. We seek to bring out these aspects of Al-e Ahmad's thought in relation to Arendt's reflections on freedom and plurality.
