by Eva Hoffman
Azyumardi Azra CBE is Professor of History at the State Islamic University in Jakarta. He is also co-chair of the United Kingdom–Indonesia Muslim Advisory Council (formed by Tony Blair in 2006) and has written about the position of Islam today in various recent books such as Islam and Democracy and Islam in the Indonesian World.
7
The Intercultural Imperative
and Iranian Dreams
Ramin Jahanbegloo
Culture is not a source of conflict but it can be a valuable resource for peace. However, cultural identities can clash, as these identities may signify much more than ethical values to some people. Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that it is currently fashionable to decry the fact that people’s particularistic attachments shape their ethics. Certainly the sense of belonging to a culture is a constituent element of our individuality that should be cherished. But this does not mean that universal human rights and the ideal of being an autonomous individual are merely Western liberal prejudices which could be put away once and for all. This suggests a bridge between a relativistic, multiculturalist liberalism based on tolerance of diversity and an Enlightenment liberalism which upholds the ideal of the rational, emancipated individual. Accepting the importance of identities does not necessarily mean that they are sole narrative models for allowing us to enhance our individuality. It is, nevertheless, true that, as Herder affirmed, ‘Each nation has its centre of gravity within itself, just as every sphere has its centre of gravity.’ But each culture is accompanied by the memory of what all nations have in common – and that is human civilisation. As such, every intercultural dialogue is a dialogue on and with humanity. Therefore, every culture should be exposed to the virtues of self-criticism, tolerance, dialogue, openness to change and self-control of its own destiny.
Thanks to the global reach of information in today’s world, members of even the most traditional and isolated societies are daily exposed to different forms of ideas, institutions, moral and social practices, and forms of life which encourage a sense of common belonging to humanity and global citizenship. In other words, cross-cultural diversity has become an inescapable fact of life in our global century, and attempts to dismantle it are undertaken in the name of what one could call ‘forcibly universalised particularisms’, which is what all fundamentalisms are about. Taking one’s particular religious options and preferences and trying to impose them is, indeed, nothing but particularism-with-violence, or pseudo-universalism. Only half a decade ago, fundamentalism would have been considered as ‘militant opposition to modernity’. In other words, fundamentalism emerges very often as a violent rejection of modernity and as retrogression to pre-modern religious fundamentals. However, the most important feature of ‘fundamentalism’ in our world is the politicisation of religion and the process of ideologisation of the tradition. A common definition of fundamentalism points to religious movements that strive to reestablish socially, culturally and politically core elements within a religious tradition. Therefore, fundamentalism is reactive to and defensive towards pluralism of values, and a hermeneutical methodology applied to religious traditions. On the contrary, in fundamentalist movements, there is an affirmation of the absolute validity of the fundamentals of a tradition. This is the reason why it is easier to establish a fundamentalist movement where core principles are spelled out explicitly in a sacred text. The authoritarian and absolutist dimensions of fundamentalist movements manifest themselves, among other elements, in the ideological manipulation of a religious tradition. In the eyes of most religious fundamentalists, societies must be constituted on the basis of religious community. There ought to be neither singular identities nor idiosyncratic quests for a personal meaning. In other words, all individuals must belong to a religious collectivity, and their everyday lives must be governed by the normative traditions of such collectivities.
From the side of the religious fundamentalists, the essential aspect of their global struggle with the world is about the primacy of religion. Secular fundamentalists, who hold that spirituality should have no place at all in political life, are often not that different from their religious cousins, whom they claim to hate so much; they alone know what is best for all, and they alone have knowledge of everything. It just so happens that the two belong to two diverse groups. In both cases, however, we have a dogmatic worldview that fails to respect democratic values, including the importance of dialogue and compromise. To be more accurate, the belief that a separation of religion and state is a core feature of democracy does not necessarily mean that religious groups should be excluded from explicit public life. There is no strict connection between being a secularist and being a democrat. In fact, spirituality and democracy are not incompatible with each other if both function in their well-defined spheres. Democracy needs a spiritual force as spirituality needs a political one without interfering with each other within politics. Most of the cultural and religious communities which feel threatened by the network of global civil society and transnational solidarities tend to become suspicious and closed-minded, and to suppress internal differences, while avoiding all but minimal contacts with other cultures. However, diversity is desirable not only for ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities, but also for the society as a whole. It adds a valuable ethical dimension to society, widens the range of moral and cultural empathy, and encourages critical self-reflection. In short, there is no moral progress of humanity without cultural pluralism. No democratic society, then, can ignore the demands of diversity. One’s self-respect is therefore closely bound up with respect for other cultures and ways of life as long as they do not violate human rights. As such, no culture or tradition is beyond criticism and moral sanction of humanity. If it were so, we would leave no secure and effective space for humanness.
This is where civil society as a sphere of citizenship which is ‘always already becoming’ holds a promise for the future of individual autonomy and for the protection of collective diversity beyond political and religious sectarianism. Civil society, more than any other topic, is the subject of intense debate and contention in Iran today. Looked at from the Iranian context, civil society is not a homogeneous entity. More than a ‘voluntary sector’ or a ‘charity sector’ it is an ‘ethical sector’. As a matter of fact, talking about civil society in the context of a theocracy like Iran leads one to speak of a society of citizens, as opposed to a society organised on grounds of religiosity. In the Iranian context, the obvious question is: what political culture has been the most conducive to the development of civil society? It is certainly not a religious culture, nor necessarily a secular one. But it is certainly an anti-sectarian one. I think the conditions for the formation and consolidation of a civil society in a fundamentalist society like Iran have been threefold. First, there has been a great effort on the issue of ‘publicity’, in the domain of what citizens know about public life. The struggle of independent journalists to create journals in order to inform citizens not only about local conditions, institutions and interests but also about the government has been one of the pillars of the Iranian civil society. Second, on the ethical side there has been the effort of Iranian intellectuals to defend the truth against lies and to promote the ethical and political capacity to pass judgment on those who are responsible for the conduct of affairs in the public domain. Finally, the third pillar has been the horizontal relationship of cooperation and mutual support, instead of tension and conflict among the Iranian citizens themselves, as actors of the Iranian civil society.
Factionalism at the top of the political hierarchy has allowed the rest of the society to find spaces to engage in politics. People who were not part of the leadership – young people, university students, intellectuals and others – could delve into politics precisely because politics at the top was so openly fractious. The tumult in the parliament, and the daily battles among those running the country, emboldened people to criticise and even resist the authorities. Had there been a solid consolidation of power and ideological coherence at th
e top, such spaces would not have been opened and such resistance would not have been possible.
The idea of civil society has also penetrated the day-to-day politics of the country, in the slogans of candidates for various offices. Three principal positions have emerged in the civil society debate now raging in Iran. First, there are those who regard the whole concept as antithetical to the basic values and ideals of an Islamic society and state. These are the hard-line conservatives, who occupy the most powerful positions within Iran’s political establishment. They control all the means of violence in Iranian society (the Revolutionary Guards, the security services), and they hold much of the economic power as well. Second, there are those who want to Islamicise the idea of civil society, to make it compatible with the existing norms and values of the present order. They advocate an ‘Islamic civil society’ that would be clearly distinguishable from its secular, Western counterparts. Third, there are those who view the concept as ideologically neutral in terms of the ultimate goals and values of society, but useful as a basis for structuring state–society relations, protecting the relative autonomy and freedom of citizens and their associations, and promoting a more tolerant, pluralistic and democratic order. Post-revolutionary Iranian civil society is undergoing today, from my point of view, a period of transition from utopian thinking and a quest for an ‘ideological modernity’, to a non-imitative dialogical exchange with modernity and the West. Taken as the capacity for choice among different alternatives, negative liberty has become the central framework for a plural view of Iranian history where teleological and deterministic perspectives are replaced by the adoption of a self-creative perspective through choice-making. The centrality accorded to dialogue with the outside world in the constitution of the new Iranian intellectual space reveals once again the affinities of the new generation of intellectuals with the imperatives of an intercultural dialogue.
Iranian intellectuals and the intercultural dialogue
The spectre of democracy has haunted Iranian intellectuals for more than 150 years. For over 150 years Iranian intellectuals embraced and appropriated Western political and cultural values while at the same time keeping a critical distance. Actually, in both achieving a discourse on democracy and creating a distance from it, they contributed to the creation of a dual attitude, in which a magnanimity towards modernity was coupled with a wounded sense of national pride and a resentment of the cultural and political intrusion of the West in Iran. The initial romantic ‘fascination with Western liberalism’, which took shape among the Iranian intellectuals in late nineteenth century, was replaced after the Second World War with a broader romantic ‘revolt against the Western values of capitalism and liberalism’. Surprisingly, the universal sameness of Iranian traditions in opposition to the supposedly universal otherness of modernity became a common denominator in both right-wing romantic nationalism and in Marxist anti-imperialist nationalism in Iran. In both cases, this romance of the authentic cultural and national body was characterised by feelings of cultural relativism and traditional anxiety. Different attempts to generate a sense of national pride, triggered by a growing awareness of Iran’s backwardness vis-à-vis the West, were translated into serious calls for Europeanisation, internationalism and pan-Islamism. One must not forget that the sense of ancient nationhood, particularly in contrast with the Western form of temporality, was a useful mechanism of voicing opposition in Iran against different political status quos while being a strong argument for a discourse of ‘authenticity’. As a matter of fact, because of the double structure of romancing but at the same time rejecting the West, a constant oscillation was generated between democratic universalism and Iranian particularism among Iranian intellectuals. Particularism and universalism did not form an antinomy but rather mutually reinforced each other. The building of an imaginary glorious past under the old Persian kings or the narrating of a utopian Iranian secular or religious society were different modes of particularistic thinking among Iranian intellectuals, who thought of themselves as universalistic without coming across the otherness of the other. One must not forget that all along in the twentieth century, many Iranian intellectuals joined Arab, Asian and African intellectuals around the world in extolling the virtues of Iranian traditions as a tool for purifying the non-West from the contamination of Western domination. Such romantic resentment was often portrayed as a gesture of emancipation and liberation. For the Iranian intellectuals the ‘return to roots’ and the affirmation of the Perso-Islamic heritage as much as the acquisition of Western democracy was considered as the protection of one’s civilisation against outside civilisation. That is to say, in the past 150 years the Iranian intellectual movement has gone through a cycle of erratic oscillations in which moments of democratic hope and promotion of democracy have alternated with times of ideologisation of politics and tradition.
Although the making of the two Revolutions of 1906 and 1979 in Iran involved a short and fragile alliance between intellectuals and social and political actors of the religious class, most of the mainstream historians of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution and the Iranian Revolution of 1978 agree that Iranian intellectuals played an important role in both events in terms of developing ideas of progress, equality, constitutionalism and reform through their encounters with the modern world. The intellectual background for such a contribution was laid down in the nineteenth-century writings of Iranian intellectuals that challenged absolutism and arbitrary political power. It was in relation to this theme that the idea of parliamentary liberalism was formulated. A shared conception of law among the leading intellectuals of this period was the direct outcome of the reading of European thinkers and writers. These included Francis Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Voltaire, Rousseau, Bentham, Hume and John Stuart Mill. Such contact with Western ideas helped to create a fertile ground for intellectual changes and later political reforms in Iran.
In the late nineteenth century, a number of Iranian intellectuals living inside and outside Iran became advocates of political liberalisation and social equality. Among them were the playwright Mirza Fath Ali Akhundzadeh (1812–1878), the writer Abd-al Rahim Talebov (1834–1911), the socialist thinker Mirza Aqa Khan Kirmani (1854–1896) and the modernist Mirza Malkum Khan (1834–1908). The latter is most often credited for his nationalistic views and for his call on the struggle against government autocracy and increasing domination of Iran by imperial powers. After Naser al-Din Shah banned Malkum’s Freemason society (the Faramushkhaneh) and sent him into exile, Malkum began to publish a liberal journal by the name of Qanun (Law) from London. In his widely circulated and read editorials, Malkum denounced openly the lawlessness and tyranny of the Qajars and demanded a popularly elected assembly. As Hamid Algar argues in his book on Malkum Khan, ‘This call for parliamentary government was a new element in Malkum’s political pronouncements. Earlier in his treatises, he had proposed only the establishment of law and had even defined Iran, in a kind of draft constitution, as “an absolute monarchy operating through law”. But his disgrace and dismissal, coming at a time of growing discontent and rebellion in Iran, caused him to address himself to a wider audience with more radical proposals.’ Malkum, however, was not among those Iranian intellectuals who rejected religion in general. Still, ‘his view of Islam suggests that he did not grasp the implications of its fundamental role in Persian society, nor its inherent tension with modernity. Instead, he saw Islam simply as instrumental in bringing about a program of political action.’
Unlike Malkum Khan, many other secular intellectuals of the late Qajar period dissociated religion and politics. Akhundzadeh is the most significant representative of the Iranian secular Aufklarers. Despite being Turcophone, Akhundzadeh identified deeply with Iranian nationalism. In his Maktubat, Akhundzadeh promoted free thinking and freedom from religious terror and he strongly invited Iranians to liberate themselves from despotism. However, this could only be ‘achieved via knowledge and knowledge could not be acquired unless through progress, and p
rogress could not be achieved unless by being liberal, and being liberal is not possible without getting rid of [religious] beliefs’. For Akhundzadeh, religion in general and Islam in particular were obstacles to social and intellectual progress. That is the reason why he considered as a free thinker somebody who ‘is not subject to religious terror, and does not believe in what is beyond reason and outside the law of nature’. There is no doubt that Akhundzadeh was a reader of John Stuart Mill and David Hume. His purported ‘Letter from David Hume to the Muslim Clergy of India’ written in 1860 and his commentary of Mill’s On Liberty are strong evidence for this argument. But one can conclude by reading Akhundzadeh’s writings that he ‘did not share Hume’s scepticism and was instead a firm adherent of nineteenth-century positivism’. An examination of Akhundzadeh’s life and writings suggests that he was an outspoken advocate of secularism and tried to curb clerical power in Iran whenever he found an opportunity.
The obsession with religion and with liberal values remained a salient character of Iranian intelligentsia at the end of the nineteenth century. Two of the most influential advocates of judicial and economic modernisation in nineteenth-century Iran were Mirza Yusef Khan Mostashar od-Dowleh and Mirza Huseyn Khan Mushir od-Dowleh. These two, in the same manner as Kirmani, Malkum Khan and Akhundzadeh, laid some of the groundwork for the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, in the decade of the 1870s. Mushir od-Dowleh was the reformist statesman of his day who was deeply influenced by the Tanzimat reforms. His experiences in Istanbul as a Qajar ambassador to the Ottoman Empire awakened him to the need of applying modern solutions to Iran’s social and economic problems. What grieved Mirza Huseyn Khan more than anything else was that the Iranian ruling class and the king himself were so alien to the idea of a parliamentary government. In a dispatch to the Iranian Foreign Ministry he expressed his distress: ‘I am grieved and know that I am seeking the impossible. I know that what I wish for my country cannot be achieved overnight, and must be attained gradually. But the reason for my sadness is that, not only have we made no effort in this direction yet, but that we do not even believe there is anything wrong with our state, or that our affairs need improvement. To the contrary, we believe that we have reached the highest degree of progress, and there is nothing we have to do or to worry about.’ Mirza Huseyn Khan never took the risk of challenging openly the Iranian ulama and that was the basic reason for his failure to accomplish his reforms during his own lifetime. His efforts, however, did create a new dynamic within Iran’s political and judicial institutions. His strong belief in the advancement of European civilisation was translated into a wide range of innovations, from installing gaslights in Tehran to encouraging the Iranian aristocracy to pay more attention to the new methods of education. Mirza Huseyn Khan’s reforms did not have an immediate impact on his contemporaries, but considering the considerable lack of resources for the reforms and the inadequate executive authority to enforce them, it is a miracle that Mushir od-Dowleh’s principles came later to be considered as the standards of modernisation in Iran.
While Mushir od-Dowleh was trying to develop and sustain a coherent theory of judicial and political reforms, Mirza Yusef Khan Mostashar od-Dowleh, whose major work, Yek Kalameh (One Word) played an important role in the process of constitutionalism in Iran, was challenging the political backwardness and economic stagnation of Qajar Iran by acknowledging the major achievements of the West. Answering the question: ‘What was the secret of Europe’s progress?’ the author reminded his readers that the answer was only one word, yek kalameh, a state of law. According to Mostashar od-Dowleh the Muslim thinkers ‘had failed to understand that the basis of Europe’s power was not its technological and scientific achievements, but its political and administrative organisation as well as its judicial machinery’. As a French-speaking Iranian diplomat influenced by the ideals of the French Revolution, Mostashar od-Dowleh envisioned a constitutional Iranian state with laws modelled on those of France helping to create new institutions and social forms. The comparison between Islamic law and French law led him to talk about the logical, popular and immanent nature of the French law (loi) as a basis for the establishment of a constitutional form of government. He did not, however, talk about secularism as a required element for the modernisation of Iranian society. Indeed, it may very well be argued that Mirza Yusef was more critical towards the Iranian officials and leaders than towards the Iranian ulama. He truly believed that the Qajar aristocracy had failed to modernise Iran and that as long as Iran was not bound to overcome backwardness and stagnation by adopting a European model, it was in danger of being dominated by European powers. Ultimately, modernisation did not come about as Mostashar od-Dowleh had envisioned it in Yek Kalameh, but ‘his strategy of presenting European ideas under the mask of Islam left a profound impact on some educated and religious-minded Iranians who played an important role in the constitutional revolution of 1906. These Iranians were converted to the cause of constitutionalism after reading Yek Kalameh, which reassured them that borrowing from Europe did not necessarily mean the loss of their religious and cultural identity.’ However, the lack of acknowledgement by Mirza Yusef Khan of the fundamental discrepancies between European and Islamic traditions did play a delaying role in the making of the secular mind in Iranian intellectual history.
It is not surprising that these ‘men of the pen’ referred to themselves as modernists (mutajaddidin). Most of these intellectuals avoided the extremes of either full identification with the West or full retreat to ‘traditional’ values. Instead, the majority of them found in Western culture ideas such as liberalism, rationality and nationalism. In other words, the odyssey of the Iranian intellectuals in the twentieth century began by searching for ways to best incorporate rationality and democratic values in the Iranian culture. Nowhere can this incorporation be more clearly seen than in the political life and in the intellectual work of Muhammad Ali Furughi, one of the Iranian precursors of Iranian liberalism who in his political and philosophical writings reflected the first genuine attempt by an Iranian intellectual to articulate a systematic understanding of modern political and philosophical traditions. Furughi belonged to the second generation of Iranian intellectuals, who, thanks to the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, were able to participate more actively in the political life of the country. The hope and goal of Furughi was to create suitable conditions for the implementation of modern and liberal principles in Iran, by concentrating his efforts on ‘reforms from above’. In order to achieve these goals, Furughi attempted to influence not only the political actions of Reza Shah (who ruled from 1921 to 1942), by involving himself in the different branches of government, but also by introducing modern philosophical, economic and political ideas to Iranians through translations, speeches and writings.
Also, all through his career Furughi advocated liberal forms of citizenship. Actually, Furughi’s general interest in the history of philosophy came about partly because he considered philosophy as a mode of ‘Enlightenment from Below’ helping Iranians to become more mature in their political judgment and everyday reasoning. Indeed, for him philosophy was a continuous process of thinking, which stemmed from his pragmatic view of human intervention in the world. Without philosophy, he contended, no tangible and pragmatic results could be obtained in Iran. For Furughi, as for Mirza Malkum Khan before him, freemasonry was an institution dedicated to striving to spread the ideals of modernity in Iran through universalisation and promotion of western principles of freedom, education and secularism. As a follower of the principles of the French Enlightenment and namely Montesquieu, Furughi insisted on the idea of the separation of the different branches of government. As he wrote in Huquq-e Asasi Ya’ni Adab-e Mashrutiyat, published in Tehran in 1907: ‘The duty of government is to be the protector of the rights of the people, that is, to be keeper of justice. The government will not be able to undertake its duty unless it acts according to laws. The existence of laws will not be realised except by two means: first, through
making laws, and second, through execution of laws. Therefore, the government has two powers: first, the making of laws, and second, the execution of laws. If the powers of legislation and execution remain in the hands of a single person or a single group, the conduct of government will result in despotism… Therefore, government is constitutional only when it has separated these two powers from each other and invested them in two separate groups.’ For Furughi, the raison d’être of laws is precisely to prevent misuse of power, and sovereignty belongs only to the nation. It is within the context of these ideas that Furughi introduces Montesquieu’s idea of separation of different branches of power and the concept of a just and lawful government. What comes across in Furughi’s writings is an absolute belief in the idea of progress, as well as a discussion of the separation of powers and the rights of the people under a liberal constitution. First and foremost in Furughi’s thought is the idea of the inevitability of progress and the fact that progress in the West has been entirely responsible for a liberal re-organisation of the social, economic and political spheres. Furughi was among the first Iranian intellectuals and statesmen to deal with these ideas in a serious and systematic way. This is why one can say that Furughi’s influence on the genesis and development of Iranian liberal heritage is without parallel. Of all statesmen and intellectuals involved somehow with the spirit of constitutionalism and the project of liberalism in Iran, Furughi stands out as the most prominent and also as the most relevant for a renaissance of liberalism in Iran.
In contrast to Furughi as the paradigmatic intellectual of his generation, who repeatedly endowed the individual as the beneficiary of modern subjectivity, someone like Ali Shariati considered the same human subjectivity as the privilege of the Iranian masses. Unlike Furughi and Malkum, who in their non-ideological approach to modernity were in search of creating the dialogical bridge between democratic individualism and its materialisation in the concept of law and rights of citizenship, Shariati’s crucial emphasis on the role of free human volition found its ontological and anthropological grounds in an ideal Islamic ideology. Shariati introduced rationalism and philosophy of history in Shiite Islam and succeeded in mobilising Iranian religious intellectuals in a social movement that led to the 1979 revolution.
When the revolutionary movement started in 1978 and the Shia clergy appeared as its central force, it was hard to find any intellectual who doubted the anti-intellectual, anti-modern and anti-Western attitude of the Iranian revolution. At the same time, even those who were at some point close to the Shah’s regime (either as university professors or public servants) found themselves attracted by the revolutionary wave. That is the reason why the Iranian revolution was not accompanied with an intrinsically critical response among the Iranian intellectuals, which would impel them to speak truth to power. As a result of this, Iranian intellectuals entered the first period of the revolution as weak and subordinate allies of the Islamist forces.
One can distinguish in 1979 two main groups of intellectuals in revolutionary Iran: on the one side, there were those who supported the Iranian revolution, and on the other side, there were those who were victims of it. The less radical and less political intellectuals who had adopted a much more democratic and tolerant discourse in the early 1980s because of their liberal views (people such as Mostafa Rahimi and Shahrokh Meskoob) or were listed as the followers and courtesans of the Shah’s regime (such as Daryush Shayegan and Jamchid Behnam) were among the first to be expelled from the political, social and cultural spheres. Most of them had to face either a cultural persecution or to leave Iran for exile in the European capitals such as Paris and London. Practically all these non-revolutionary intellectuals had to face a public sphere dominated by anti-intellectual and ideological discourses, and controlled by Islamic and Marxist-Leninist slogans. They also had to face the emergence in the early 1990s in Iran of those who came to be known as the ‘religious intellectuals,’ as their cultural and political rivals. More than 15 years after the creation of the Islamic Republic, the religious intellectuals became the architects of the reform movement in the Iranian presidential elections of 1997. For eight years, after the landslide victory of Khatami in 1997, the ruling clergy continued to resist the establishment of a political platform for debate and rational discourse, and the question remained whether Khatami’s presidency had been an utter failure and therefore a mere footnote in the evolution of Iran’s Islamic Revolution. What is certain is that Khatami’s landslide election in 1997 was a positive step in the transition to popular sovereignty. The enthusiastic participation of a new generation of voters in 1997 increased the pressures for political pluralism. Iran’s youth, many previously too young to vote or alienated from the political system, made up a large part of the 20 million who gave Khatami his surprise victory. They were joined by unprecedented numbers of women. Both groups perceived Khatami to be an agent for change. That they believed they could achieve change by means of the existing political system speaks well for the actual contradictions inside the Iranian political system. As for Khatami, he used Islamic vernacular and nationalistic symbols to articulate a new discourse of governance in Iran based on popular sovereignty.
It can hardly be contested that Khatami’s election and his eight years of presidency had popularised the discourse of democracy in Iran and opened once again the debate about democratisation in Iran. However, the main issue in this debate was less the transition to some kind of multiparty democracy than the consolidation of Iranian civil society and the improvement of civil liberties. The genie of democratisation was certainly out of the bottle and could not be forced back into it. Yet the struggle of the reformists for eight years showed that the institutional configuration and the fractionalised nature of Iranian politics did not allow quick reforms. Still, the fact remained that, since Khatami’s election, a new political discourse gained currency whose main themes were: the rule of law, tolerance versus violence, inclusivism versus exclusivism and the need to move towards a civil society. Also, the political opening via electoral politics increased the integrative capacity of the Islamic political system and enhanced the regime’s survivability. Of course, since Khatami presented himself as a supporter of people’s sovereignty (mardomsalari) and not necessarily an advocate of the Iranian civil society, he never spelled out clearly the development of civil society against the arbitrary political powers, such as the myriad courts that in many cases over the eight years of his presidency stifled public debate, freedom of the press and cracked down on dissident intellectuals. While the reform movement, which started with the 1997 elections that brought Mohammad Khatami to power, did not fully achieve any of its engagements, it nevertheless produced one big change in the way politics was practised in the Islamic Republic of Iran: elections became the most important place where the struggle for power had to occur. It was with the aim of stopping the expansion of the electoral process as the centre of Iran’s political system and thus preventing it from becoming the primary tool for the creation of political authority, that the conservative forces opposed fiercely the reform movement and finally reached their aim of annihilating it.
Despite all the uncertainties and challenges during the Khatami years, journalists, intellectuals and artists found a greater place and presence in the Iranian public sphere. The activities of most of the influential reformist newspapers in the late 1990s (which reached circulation of more than a million), such as Salaam, Jame’eh, Tous, Khordad, Sobh-e emrouz, Neshat, Mosharekat, Asr-e Azadegan and Bahar, depended on the role and presence of these intellectuals. In the broad sense of the term, religious intellectuals were considered as all those individuals (cleric or non-cleric) who were interested in the ideas of Iranian Muslim thinkers and politicians such as Mehdi Bazargan, Ayatollah Mahmoud Taleghani, Ali Shariati and Ayatollah Morteza Mottahari. No need to add that while criticising the conservative wing of the regime, most of the ‘religious intellectuals’ like Mojtahed Shabestari, Hamidreza Jalaeipour, Abdlkarim Soroosh, Alavi-Tabar or M
ohammad Khatami and many others supported fully the Revolution and never denied clearly their past affiliations with the Islamic regime as either members of the Council of the Cultural Revolution or as members of the Revolutionary Guards and the Security Forces. Among these, Mohsen Kadivar was the only one who spent a year and a half in prison for doubting the velayat faqih, the rule of Islamic jurists, as it was conceived by Ayatollah Khomeini.
If we go back to the first years of the Iranian Revolution, we can say that the key question for a historian of contemporary Iran is: why did most of the Iranian intellectuals align themselves with the forces of the Revolution while others remained silent? The answer resides certainly in the absence of ‘ethical responsibility’ among those that we can name as the ‘revolutionary intellectuals’ in Iran. These intellectuals supported the revolution for two reasons. First, because of the seduction of the concept of ‘revolution’ and what surrounded it. This was accompanied by a sense of ‘utopian idealism’ and a deep attitude of ‘political romanticism’, which was very common in the 1960s and 1970s among the Leftist intellectuals in Iran. However, the revolutionary quest of the leftist intellectuals in Iran was characterised by a series of political, strategic and philosophical shortcomings. In other words, their ideological preoccupations with the cultural and political dimensions of the Iranian reality was accompanied by a lack of coherent and systematic analysis of Iranian history and of the Western philosophical heritage. Many of these ideological attitudes are reflected in the Leftist intellectual literature of the late 1970s and early 1980s. These works were written mainly to convey a revolutionary message based on a process of utopian thinking, rather than to serve the cause of critical thinking as the paradigmatic element of intellectual modernity. Second, many among the pro-revolutionary intellectuals strived to defend new strategic positions in the new revolutionary society of Iran. For some of them, intellectual purges at the level of universities and government offices made room for new faces and new ways of thinking. Unfortunately, as time went by, only those who were close to the regime and presented no danger for it could find a solid place inside the institutions controlled by the government. Thousands of Leftist scholars and students were expelled from universities during Iran’s Cultural Revolution in the early 1980s. As a result of this, the same revolutionary intellectuals who supported the Iranian Revolution of 1979 in the name of anti-Westernisation, anti-imperialism and struggle against Iranian capitalists were considered as the enemies of Islam and dangerous elements for the future of the Islamic regime in Iran. Many of these Leftist intellectuals had to flee for their lives, abandoning behind them the Revolution and the hope of one day seeing a socialist Iran. Others who stayed in Iran suffered imprisonment and death and found themselves not only disenchanted and disillusioned by the political defeat of the Left in Iran, but also betrayed by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. However, those among the Islamic revolutionary intellectuals who remained faithful to the Islamic regime adopted an instrumentalist view of Islam as a mobilising political ideology and tried to bridge the gap created by the modern institutions during the Pahlavi regime between intellectuals and clergy. This philosophical–political attitude, which could be called the ‘Al-Ahmad syndrome’, could be considered the first anti-intellectual discourse elaborated by modern intellectuals in Iran.
While the revolutionary intellectuals had failed to present alternative narratives and alternative perspectives on politics to the dominant discourse of the Iranian revolution, because they failed to construct fields of social existence, the ‘religious intellectuals’ of the 1990s tried to reconsider and rethink from a new perspective the old clash between modernity and tradition. Today, the religious intellectuals are divided into two diverse groups in Iran: on one side, we find the reformists and on the other side the neo-conservatives. The reformist group is represented by figures such as Abdolkarim Soroosh, Mohsen Kadivar, Alavi-Tabar, Hasan Yousefi Eshkevari, Mojtahed Shabestari, and many others. The unifying traits of these intellectuals include their recognition of reform in Islamic thought, democracy, civil society and religious pluralism, and their opposition to the absolute supremacy of the Faqih. The rise of religious intellectuals can be followed through the writings of Soroosh. Soroosh’s main idea is that there are perennial unchanging religious truths, but our understanding of them remains contingent on our knowledge in the fields of science and philosophy. Unlike Ali Shariati, who turned to Marxism to bring a historicist perspective to the Shiite thought, Soroosh debates the relation between democracy and religion and discusses the possibility of what he calls ‘Islamic democracy’. According to Abdolkarim Soroosh, who is now living in England, the role of the philosopher is to try to reconcile religion and freedom, to give an understandable new definition of religion and to link democracy and religion. What Soroosh has been trying to do during the past decade is convince his fellow citizens that it is possible to be Muslim and to believe in democracy. Soroosh stresses that there are two views of religion, a maximalist and a minimalist one. In the maximalist view, according to him, everything has to be derived from religion, and most of the current problems in Islam come from this view. But the minimalist view implies that some values cannot be derived from religion, like respect for human rights. For Soroosh, the maximalist view of religion has to be replaced by a minimalist view, otherwise the balance between Islam and democracy would not be possible. Therefore, for Soroosh a democratic Islamic society would not need any Islamic norms from above.
Mojtahed Shabestari is among the rare religious intellectuals in Iran who have challenged the monistic view of Islam. According to Shabestari, the official Islamic discourse in Iran has created a double crisis. The first crisis is due to the belief that Islam encompasses a political and economic system offering an answer relevant to all the historical periods; the second crisis is entailed by the conviction that the government has to apply Islamic law (shariah) as such. These two ideas have emerged, according to Shabestari, in relation to the Islamic revolution and the events that followed it. But the fact is, according to Shabestari, that Islam does not have all the answers to social, economic and political life at all times in history. Also, there is no single hermeneutics of Islam as such. Therefore, the relation between religion and ideology is simply unacceptable and leads to the desacralisation of religion.
Unlike the reformist intellectuals, the neo-conservative intellectuals in Iran are in favour of the supremacy of the Supreme Guide (the faqih) and against concepts such as democracy, civil society and pluralism. This movement includes figures such as Reza Davari Ardakani, Qolam-Ali Haddad Adel and Mehdi Golshani. The famous personality among these is Reza Davari Ardakani, who as an anti-Western philosopher is very familiar with the works of Martin Heidegger. Davari Ardakani, unlike Soroosh, takes some of the features of Heidegger’s thought, mainly his critique of modernity, and puts it into an Islamic wording. He rejects the Western model of democracy, which is based on the separation of politics and religion. President of the Iranian Academy of Science, Reza Davari Ardakani could be considered the philosophical spokesman of the Islamic regime. This is to say that for the past 30 years the Iranian intellectual arena has been left in between two dominant intellectual trends: on the one hand, an intellectual wave of critiques of modernity and democracy, and in favour of a pure return to the Iranian-Islamic traditions; and on the other hand a softer trend which emerged in the 1990s among the Islamic followers of the Revolution looking for an Islamic answer to the problems of modernity and democracy.
It is a fact that reformist and neo-conservative intellectuals do not dominate the entire Iranian public sphere. Next to them, one can consider a new generation of Iranian intellectuals who do not attempt to promulgate any ideologies or to struggle for the establishment of an Islamic democracy in Iran, and yet they undermine the main philosophical and intellectual concepts of the established order. This generation is mainly characterised by the secular post-revolutionary intellectuals, such as Javad Tabatabai, Babak Ahmadi, Ha
mid Azodanloo, Moosa Ghaninejad, Nasser Fakouhi and Fatemeh Sadeghi, who are in their forties and fifties, and who can be referred to as the ‘dialogical intellectuals’ (in contrast with the revolutionary intellectuals of the 1970s and early 1980s). In other words, for this new generation of Iranian intellectuals, the concept and the practice of dialogue provide an ontological umbrella for all the political and cultural meanings and understandings. The very objective of this ‘culture of dialogue’ is to no longer consider the other as an ‘enemy’ (who needs to be terminated as an individual or as a social class), but to promote a full acknowledgement of the other as a subject. In this case different intellectual attitudes are asked to coexist side by side, to find an intersubjective basis for their search for modernity and democracy.
This move away from master ideologies among this new generation of Iranian intellectuals is echoed by distrust in any metaphysically valorised form of monist thinking. Unlike previous generations of Iranian intellectuals, the critical thinking of modernity has taught the new generation to adopt a general attitude that consists of being at odds both with ‘fundamentalist politics’ and with ‘utopian rationalities’. This philosophical wariness is not joined to any kind of dream of rearranging totally the Iranian society. The intervention here is not only a reflection upon the pluralistic mechanisms of politics, but also upon the political self. This issue of value-pluralism also raises the question of the West as the ‘other’ in the context of modernising projects. As an antidote to the ‘monolithic’ and ‘one-view’ formulas of previous generations, the political and intellectual urgency of Iran’s encounter with globalised modernity leads to an ethos of ‘dialogical and cross-cultural exchange’. This dialogue is an exposure of the Iranian consciousness to the ‘Otherness’ of the modern West. It requires from the Iranian intellectual a willingness to risk preconceived political and intellectual attitudes and to plunge headlong into a transformative process, instead of being in the position either of full imitation, or ideological rejection of modernity. In this cross-cultural dialogue, modernity is no longer reduced to the status of a simple technical and instrumental object or rejected as a dangerous enemy of the Iranian identity. Maybe for the first time since Iran’s encounter with the West, modernity is finally considered as a process which could provide us lessons for the affirmation of our own identity without having fears of recognising the heritage of modern times as ours. In helping to maintain this dialogical exchange with modernity, the new generation of Iranian intellectuals frees itself from the intellectual blackmail of ‘being for or against the West’. At a closer look, things become more complex and modernity is no longer considered as a ‘package deal’, but as a destiny that invites us to face up to the questions of our time. The question of globalised modernity and its debate with the concept of Iranian traditions has become the central question of Iranian intellectuals 30 years after the Iranian revolution. Also, the moral crisis due to the Islamic Revolution and the problems faced by a society confronting a theocratic state has increased the attractiveness for the idea of secular democracy among the new generation of Iranian intellectuals. It is true to say that the Islamic Republic of Iran has not achieved a relatively well-functioning transition to the process of democratisation and does not seem to be deepening or advancing whatever democratic progress exists. But there is a wide gulf today in Iran between the actions of the political elites and the will of the post-revolutionary intellectuals. Unlike Latin America, where civil society is used overwhelmingly to designate popular social movements and the organisations of the excluded and the poor, Iranian civil society bears a great resemblance to that of East and Central Europe in the 1980s, where the projects are strongly identified with the intellectual movements.
As in Eastern Europe, the new generation of Iranian intellectuals has played an important role in the formation and the strengthening of Iranian civil society. Actually, in the case of the new generation of Iranian intellectuals, the disillusionment with the given boundaries of traditional politics and traditional religious thought and with the restrictions of ideological politics, provoked interest in civil society as a means of rejuvenating Iranian public life and preparing the democratic transition of thinking in Iran. This was mainly accompanied by the collapse of the intellectual models that dominated post-Second World War understandings of politics and modernity. This collapse gave a new currency to the idea of democracy and democratisation against ideology and ideologisation of the tradition. The very notion of ‘ideology’ has lost much of its coherence among the new generation of Iranian intellectuals and it has accompanied the crisis of political legitimacy in Iran. This crisis was felt in Iran as a vacuum that was left by the ontological and political failure of creeds such as Marxist-Leninism and Islamic Fundamentalism. This vacuum is filled today by the category of ‘civil society’, which could serve as a conceptual and practical key to the democratic transition in Iran. The concept of civil society is used today in the literature of the new generation of Iranian intellectuals not only as an institutional package, but also mainly as a particular mode of thinking and a special mode of political conduct. As a matter of fact, the category of civil society has a true significance for the new generation of Iranian intellectuals both as a critical tool and as a regulative principle for the democratisation in Iran. Taken at this level, the idea of civil society as it is discussed by Iranian intellectuals today embodies the debate on Western modernity and raises the question about the significance of the historical experience of Western politics. The point here is not about the imitation of democratic practices and institutions, but about the possibility of identifying a set of common goals and purposes best described by Iranian intellectuals as the idea of accountability and responsibility. The two concepts of ‘accountability’ and ‘responsibility’ can introduce a new complexity and sharpness to assessments of the difficulties facing the process of democratic transition in Iran, both in establishing preconditions and dealing with its consolidation. It is true that cultural globalisation could lead to the empowerment of civil society in many countries including Iran, and the new generation of Iranian intellectuals can influence Iranian youth by helping them to understand how the world is changing. But the process of democratisation is not fully dependent upon the progress of globalisation; it depends on the idea of ‘globality’, which is linked to the idea of ‘responsibility’. As we can see from their writings, Iranian intellectuals do not identify their role any more as that of engaging in ideological politics, but of expressing critical views concerning the anti-democratic and authoritarian aspects of Iranian political and social traditions.
Today, Iran is going through a cycle of erratic oscillations in which moments of democratic hope (the eight years of Khatami’s presidency) alternate with times of great despair (the victory of Mahmood Ahmadinejad in the presidential elections of June 2005). Yet this erratic situation of uncertainty is accompanied by the absence of a romantic and dogmatic view of the Iranian intellectual as an avant-garde guardian of ideologies. The shock of the revolution and the reevaluation of political ideals have been part of a learning process that has generated a collective sense of responsibility among the post-revolutionary intellectuals in Iran, and led them to opt for cultural dissent rather than ideological politics. Thirty-eight years after the Revolution, the distinctive contribution of the new generation of Iranian intellectuals to the Iranian democratic debate is not how to choose between morality and politics in a country where dogmatism and confusion cover the voices of common sense and decency, but how to forge a politics of responsibility in the absence of which democracy would become a void concept. In other words, for the new generation of Iranian intellectuals the revolution of yesterday has become the dissent of today.
Conclusion
Today, we are living in a very exciting moment in history. Something profound and wonderful is happening, which can be seen only if we stand back and observe the spectrum of cultures and religions that have been evolving over the centuries.
If we can do this and enter into an interreligious and intercultural dialogue, something amazing begins to show itself, a deep pattern that has been centuries in the making. It appears that the different religions and cultural worlds converge in a common horizon of acting and judging ethically. Civilisation is a difficult and daunting task. It is an unending quest for excellence and exemplarity. It is the thin distance that mankind has placed between itself and barbarianism. That is the reason why the intercultural dialogue is a deep change in our being. It is not simply standing where we are in our particular worldviews and speaking out to others or listening to others from afar. It calls for a true ethical challenge and a true responsibility. It means a willingness to revise and transform our global culture in a critical and dialogical way. But it also means that this consciousness of dialogue and this essential task of mutuality and togetherness is an effort at making a global ethics across cultures and religions. As such, today there is no true ethics which does not aspire to be a universal moral principle. For our dialogue emerges principally not only at the level of human beings, but also at the level of our responsibility for the non-humans. Our future is at risk and this risk is directly related to the nature of our responsibility towards the non-human. This understanding of the close relationship between the human and the non-human, beyond all processes of the inhuman, is the true ontological ground for all future culture of dialogue. To learn to think beyond the inhuman, as an absence of dialogue, we not only have to unsettle and shake up our well-entrenched concepts and categories; but also our task is to resist our comfortable familiar ethical and political categories which turn us away from an ethical and spiritual definition of life and sink us deeper into barbarism. We should not forget that, as Diderot said, ‘From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step.’ If we do not want the ultimate tendency of our civilisation to be towards barbarism, we need to manage tensions and violence in our world through a nonviolent dialogue of cultures; otherwise, we should be prepared to accept barbarism. A dialogue of cultures is humanity caring for dialogue, culture and the future of the globe. If we can really understand this challenge, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the challenge.
