TEHRAN - Tamara Sonn is Professor in the History of Islam in the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding in the School of Foreign Service.
She works on Islamic intellectual history. Her publications have been translated into Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, and Russian. She has lectured in North America, Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright, and the U.S. Department of State, among others. She served as senior editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Islam (2003), and associate editor of Oxford's Encyclopedia the Islamic World Past and Present (2004). She is senior editor of Oxford Islamic Studies Online, and of Oxford's Encyclopedia of the Islamic World, as well as Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion. Sonn is also founding editor-in-chief of Oxford Bibliographies Online--Islamic Studies, and of Wiley-Blackwell's online journal of Religious Studies Religion Compass.
Q: The Islamic Revolution of Iran took place in a society dominated by a secular regime which was a loyal ally of the USA and which had started a modernization project. What message did this phenomenon have for international relations? Was it indicative of a global resurgence or awakening of religion?
A: Like all revolutions, the Islamic Revolution in Iran was not named until after the fact. Opposition to the Pahlavi regime came from diverse sectors, and developed over decades, directly proportionate to the regime’s lack of economic, political, and social inclusivity. It was a popular revolution against an authoritarian regime.
Ayatollah Khomeini’s voice echoed the themes of diverse reformers, religious and secular. It came to symbolize and synthesize the overwhelming opposition to authoritarianism and injustice. It is important, therefore, to recognize both the commonalities among the diverse voices of opposition and the diversity even among religious voices; Islam is not monolithic. I believe, in other words, it is important not to reduce the revolution to the simplistic secular v. religious polarity. To do so is to submit to the dominance of Euro-American modernist discourse, the source of that constructed polarity. Instead, speaking in the context of Islamic discourse, the resonance of Ayatollah Khomeini’s voice across diverse sectors of Iranian society and beyond reflects two consistent themes in Islamic history. First is the broad expectation that legitimate political powers fulfill at least minimally the objectives of Shari`ah – protection of people’s fundamental rights to religious freedom, human dignity, the sanctity of life and family, and the right to private property. Second is the role of religious authorities in channeling popular discontent when political powers fail to fulfill those expectations/obligations. In that sense, Ayatollah Khomeini and other religious authorities who spoke out, warning political powers of their failures, were playing their traditional roles. I therefore do not see the revolution as reflecting a resurgence of religion -- as Euro-American observers often put it -- but rather an example of the traditional role of religious authorities in Islamic societies. After all, the `ulama’ also figured highly in the tobacco protests of the 1890s and the constitutional revolution in the first decade of the 20th century. The end of monarchy in Iran in 1979 was revolutionary, but the prominence of religious authorities and Islamic terms of reference in revolutionary discourse was not.
Q: Positivist theories of political sciences and international relations couldn't predict the Islamic Revolution and even after its occurrence, they continued to ignore it and tried to pretend that this phenomenon was an exception which couldn't be generalized and would meet its demise in the not too distant future. What deficiencies do you find with such Western theories which have failed to understand and explain the power of religion?
A: Political Science is a modernist discipline, constructed upon modernist paradigms of the separation of religious authority from political power, and the notion that religion properly affects primarily the private sector. Weber’s modernization theory and its corollary, the secularization hypothesis, foundational to the discipline, hold that as societies industrialize and democratize, religion will “privatize.” That prediction was assumed to be an inevitability. The idea that a society could be technologically advanced and democratic, with religion still functioning in the public sphere, simply did not fit the theory. Many political scientists thus made the classic error of allowing theory to come before fact. (This is reminiscent of a humorous poem written by the famous physicist Edward Teller: “A fact without a theory is like a ship without a sail…a boat without a rudder…a kite without a tail. A fact without a theory is an inconclusive act, but if there’s one thing worse in this confusing universe, it’s a theory without a fact.”) The key weakness in modernization theory was that it was based on a limited data set, one derived from European experience alone. Rather than adjusting the theory to account for data derived from outside Europe, many political scientists simply ignored that data. In particular, they ignored the experience of Muslim-majority regions, in whose history religious authorities were not viewed as problematic. Religious authorities had not, for the most part, been integral to authoritarian governments that modern societies overturned in favor of democracy. As noted above, in fact, religious authorities often voiced popular opposition to governments viewed as unjust. Had political scientists accounted for the different role played by religious authorities in Muslim societies, they may well have been able to gain clearer understanding of Iran’s Islamic Revolution. Ironically, quintessential modernist Samuel Huntington himself at one point questioned modernization theory. In his famous The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (1996), he claims that modernization theory’s predictions were incorrect, in view of what he terms the “global revival of religion.” But, again, instead of questioning the theory, he concluded that societies in which religious discourse had a place in the public sphere were simply stuck in pre-modernity.
Q: Ayatollah Khomeini presented a new model of governance to the international arena which seemed unknown and peculiar because Western thinkers and scholars were not accustomed to seeing a leader who was both political and spiritual. What is your perception of Khomeini and his influence on world politics?
A: Ayatollah Khomeini may have been unknown outside of Iran and the Middle East more broadly, but that reflects another failing on the part of the modernist Euro-American political scientists: the tendency to marginalize not only religious authorities as representatives of civil society, but civil society itself. Focusing on what governments do when trying to analyze a country is perhaps a reasonable approach if the governments are in fact representative democracies and therefore reflect the views of civil society. But when governments are deeply unpopular, as was the case in Pahlavi Iran, such observers are bound to be surprised by revolution. Those observers who focused on the study of religion, society, and culture, on the other hand, were not surprised by the Islamic Revolution. In fact, the works of reformers using Islamic discourse, from Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb to Ali Shariati, Mohammad Baqir al-Sadr and Ayatollah Khomeini, were readily available, well known, and widely discussed by people dissatisfied with authoritarian governments and those who studied them.
That being said, Ayatollah Khomeini’s particular formulation of vilayet-e faqih, is novel, a step beyond the widely accepted notion of jurists’ responsibility to advice and guide society and government. While it is not a universally accepted interpretation, the success of the Islamic Revolution in overthrowing a deeply unpopular, secular government, and replacing it with a government clearly inspired by Islamic principles of social justice, has been immensely influential. It inspired reformers and activists throughout the Muslim-majority world to continue their struggles for representative governance in accordance with core Islamic values. Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, in fact, the presence of Islamic terms of reference in political discourse has become mainstream, and many scholars recognize the fallacies of modernization theory. Sociologist of Religion Jose Casanova, for example, notes that Western Europe’s privatization of religion resulted from the unique circumstances of European history and therefore should not be taken as a model for other societies. (“Civil Society and Religion: Retrospective Reflections on Catholicism and Prospect Reflections on Islam.” Social Research 68:4/2001:1040-1080.)
Q: Ayatollah Khomeini challenged some of the well-established rules and norms of international relations and the free world when he endorsed the occupation of the US embassy in Tehran and when he declared a fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the author of The Satanic Verses. Do you consider his narrative of political Islam as a menace to liberalism and free world values or do you think a kind of coexistence, mutual understanding and fusion of horizons between Islam and the West is possible?
A: Actually, I reject the Cold War polarities reflected in terminology such as “free world,” which was meant to contrast with Communist countries. The euphemistic character of that terminology is evident in light of the fact that such bastions of the “free world” maintained colonial empires in which people were decidedly not free. “Liberalism” is a similarly loaded term, and one that is a source of heated debate even in Euro-America. In today’s climate of right-wing populism in Western Europe and the U.S., “liberalism” has a distinctly negative connotation. “Islam and the West” is also a misleading bifurcation, given the fact that significant minorities of “Western” countries are, in fact, Muslim and have been for well over a century. (England’s first mosque was established in 1889, the oldest extant mosque in the U.S. was established in 1907, and Frances first mosque was established in 1926.) What is more, even Samuel Huntington doesn’t count all of Europe as part of “the West;” he sees Orthodox Christian countries of Eastern Europe as more akin to Muslim-majority countries than to Western Christian countries. More importantly, I don’t see the occupation of the U.S. embassy in Tehran – either the first time, in early 1979, when authorities ushered the occupiers out of the embassy, or the second time later in that year, when authorities appear to have been preoccupied internally with forming a new government and externally with instability in neighboring Afghanistan resulting from the Soviet invasion -- as representative of the ideals of political Islam. Similarly with the pronouncement of a death sentence on Rushdie. Rather, I consider Ayatollah Khomeini’s stress on the integrity of values across social sectors, private and public, and the centrality of justice to those values, to be the basis of his popular appeal and lasting impact. Human efforts to articulate and implement those values are, by nature, fallible and frequently in need of reassessment. But the centrality and integrity of values remains consistent. And in that context, I appreciate your reference to Gadamer’s “fusion of horizons.” Euro-Americans never meant for the “separation of church and state” to result in the removal of values from the public sphere. The goals included removing coercive power from the hands of religious authorities beholden to unjust governments and those who might violate religious freedom. The imperative of social justice and religious freedom are enshrined in the Qur’an (4:135 and 2:256) and guide political Islam. The Christian-dominated Euro-American historical experience and that of Muslim-majority countries differ, but their “horizons” meet in the shared, cherished values of social justice and religious freedom.
Source: Asr-Andishe magazine
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