The “Arab Spring” that is blossoming
in the Middle East might have been
inspired by the Iranian uprising of
2009, but Iranians have not been able to
emulate the Arab model. The Iranian
religious autocracy possesses both the
means and the will to mow down potential
crowds of protesters to protect itself.
As a result the critique of religious
government is slowly turning into the
kind of anti-religious sentiment one
could only find among eighteenth-century
enlightenment philosophers,
nineteenth-century Latin American
positivists and twentieth-century
Marxist Leninist countries like Cambodia
and Albania.
Consider what happened last week.
Abdolkarim Soroush, a renowned Islamic
reformer who lives in exile, wrote a
bitter letter to expose the Iranian
security forces’ arrest and torture of
his son-in-law. Soroush quotes his
son-in-law in the title of his letter:
“There is no God, I swear by God, there
is no God.” His letter also contains a
counter-theodicy. Soroush is puzzled
about an omnipotent God who allows
injustice in his name but seems not to
brook apostasy by the victims of the
injustice that has been committed in his
name.
Mahmoud Morad-khani, himself the son
of a dissident clergyman, immediately
published a response claiming that
without denouncing Islam, root and
branch, Soroush’s protest is
meaningless. Morad-khani, like many
others, argues that injustice in Iran is
not the result of a revolutionary
mutation of Iranian Islam but rather the
direct consequence of delusional
religious beliefs.
The discourse of Iranian “laic”
elites uses the word religion in general
but its frame of reference is limited to
the politicized Shiite Islam of the last
thirty years. Iranian philosophers’
discourse has been unable to offer
comparative perspectives or place the
experience of Iranian Islamism in its
proper historical niche. Iranian
intellectual discourse on religion has
become a parochial soliloquy. It is a
symptom of the theocratic rule rather
than an analysis of it.
One of the popular tropes used in
this discourse is a rationalist binary
that relegates religious intellectuality
to dogmatic subservience and claims that
only by liberating oneself from religion
can one join the dynamic flow of secular
thought. Islam in Iran shed its quietist
mantle within one generation and
aggressively turned itself into a modern
theocracy. It is curious that despite
this and other paradigm shifts devised
by religious thinkers they are still
labeled as subservient to tradition.
Let us take the career of Ayatollah
Muntazeri (1922-2009), a lieutenant and
heir apparent of Ayatollah Khomeini and
one of the architects of the Islamic
Republic. Muntazeri had departed from
the tradition of Shiite jurists and
opted for a revolutionary reconstruction
of Shiite political philosophy. Then he
parted ways with Khomeini, objecting to
the mass executions of political
prisoners in 1981. Subsequently the
dissident Ayatollah was relieved of his
position and put under virtual house
arrest for the rest of his life. In this
period he continued to support the
Khomeinist theocracy but objected to its
misuse by the Supreme Leader Ali
Khamenie. In the last year of his life
Muntazeri issued a subversive legal
opinion to undergird the uprising of
Iranians in 2009. This revolutionary
fatwa spells out the conditions for the
dissolution of not only the Islamic
Republic but indeed any polity.
Muntazeri’s fatwa is a radical
political theory for revolutions of all
stripes. He likens the relationship of
people and their government to that of a
lawyer and his/her client where a simple
suspension of trust by the client
automatically dissolves the covenant.
Here the burden of proof is on the
lawyer (or the government) to prove its
innocence and regain the trust of the
client/people. In other words, Muntazeri
ruled that the Islamic Republic was
already dissolved as a legitimate entity
given the dissolution of people’s trust.
Muntazeri, who was the Thomas Hobbes
of the Iranian Revolution, lived to
become its John Lock. Such a change of
positions is unprecedented in the
history of political philosophy. He used
legal ratiocination to make a case for
creating an Islamic government in
absence of the savior (Mahdi) who was
charged with this grave task. Thirty
years later he once again utilized the
same legal skills to justify a revolt
against that Islamic state. The point of
this historical vignette is not praising
Muntazeri as the grandfather of the
Iranian uprising also known as the Green
Movement. The point, rather, is that
religion is not a stagnant pool of
unreason and intellectual subservience.
Religion changes and mutates. Some of
these religious mutations could be
positively harmful to democracy as
indeed Khomeini/Muntazeri theory of
“Mandate of the Jurist” was. But it is
also true that other religious
innovations could help religion
accommodate itself to modernity. For our
intents and purposes it doesn’t matter
whether a society has or does not have
religion. What is important is what kind
of religion or irreligion pervades in
that society.
References
Ahmad Sadri and Mahmoud Sadri,
“Delegitimizing the Islamic Republic of
Iran with a Fatwa: the Significance of
Ayatollah Montazeri’s Post-Election
Legal Ruling of July 2009,” The
People Reloaded: The Green Movement and
the Strugge for Iran’s Future. Editors:
Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel
(Melvilhouse: New York, 2010).
Ahmad Sadri is Professor
of Sociology and James P. Gorter Chair
of Islamic World Studies at Lake Forest
College.