|
FOREWORD
The 1979 Iranian Revolution has been a source of inspiration for the Islamic revivalist movement in many Muslim countries. We believe that the experience of Iran under the rule of the Islamic Republic is also a sobering lesson for those who have placed hopes for liberation of their people in the victory of Islamic revivalism. The specific features of any social movement, including those that are mobilized under the banner of Islam, are determined by the concrete socio-historical circumstances of the society in which these movements take place. It follows that the pe-culiarities of Iranian society, the rule of the Shah, and Iranian Shi'ism helped to shape the unique features of the Iranian Revolution, the Islamic Republic, and the course of post-revolutionary developments in Iran. We believe, however, that Islamic states, which it is the aim of Islamic move-ments to establish, share certain universal characteristics defined by the general nature of Islamic revivalism.
In the Introduction we present a framework for the analysis of a revivalist Islamic state. We argue that Islamic revivalism, in essence, is a populist-conservative movement. Its populism resides in its celebration of social justice, benevolence and people’s power. It promises to deliver equity and dignity to the underprivileged urban and rural masses, freedom to alienated and suppressed intellectuals, and prosperity to artisans, merchants and industrialists frustrated in their competition with powerful domestic oligopolies and multinational corporations. It promises a utopia wherein everyone imbued with Islamic values will live in peace and affluence on the high plateau of Islamic morality, shepherded by an Islamic state that is guided by no less than the eternal and divine laws of Islam. The conservatism of the movement (the diversity of Islamic interpretations notwithstanding) lies in the fact that Islamic divine law (Shari'a), as expressed by the Quran and by Mohammad, and articulated by fourteen centuries of Islamic jurisprudence, unequivocally defends property rights, gainful activities and the accumulation of wealth. These are the very stuff of a capitalist economy, to which Islamic populism so intensively objects. An Islamic state, constituted upon the victory of an Islamic revivalist move-ment, is the arena of contestation between these two tendencies. The post-victory crisis in an Islamic state is one of self-definition. This, as we show in the Introduction, entails a long drawn out and painful process of negation of populism and affirmation of conservatism. Iran’s experience with Islamic revivalism provides, in our view, a hard-learned lesson for all those who support the struggle for equity, social justice and human dignity in the Middle East.
We certainly hope to include among our audience the people of the Middle East — in Algeria, Egypt, Turkey and other countries where Islamic revivalism is gaining popular support. But more immediately, we aim to address those Muslim intellectuals, Western liberal Islamicists and Middle Eastern scholars who have joined in the celebration of Islamic revivalism, who may see the populist orientation of this movement as a spark of hope for the liberation of the people of the Middle East. We believe that the prevailing relativism among postmodernist liberals, who remain deeply frustrated by the failure of their futile attempt - and that of their disciplines - only a couple of decades ago to trace the path of modernity by negating traditionalism, has now come round to negate secularism and the secular struggle for social liberation in the Middle East. We believe that this new celebration of revivalism, too, will prove to be a misdirected effort. Of course, only history can prove the viability of a social theory; although one should hope that intellectual vigilance may facilitate our understanding of the course of history. We appreciate the position of the liberal Islamicists and Middle Eastern scholars in the West: they see themselves and everyone else (particularly their students) as bombarded by the anti-Islamic propaganda of the defenders of the status quo. They indeed find themselves between a rock and a hard place. Nevertheless, it is disheartening to witness the quietism of these liberal scholars in the West in the face of brutal violations of human dignity and threats to life and freedom in the Islamic states, as noble as is their fear of transgressing the sanctified walls of ‘otherness’, which were erected only to ward off intruders who committed such violations.
The chapters in this book comprise comprehensive studies of several dimensions of the crisis of a revivalist Islamic state in Iran: its socio- historical background, its economic turmoil, and its attempt to effect the ideological reconstruction of Iranian society. These studies, written by scholars with a first-hand knowledge of Iranian society and its revolution, are each independent and do not form part of a project aiming to under-score the crisis of post-revolutionary Iran. In fact, there may or may not be agreement among the various authors in this volume on the course of social development in post-revolutionary Iran, or on its various dimensions.
Part I considers three fundamental issues shaping the character of the Iranian Revolution. Ahmad Ashraf examines the nature of social transformation and class formation in the pre-revolutionary period. He stresses the growth of the well-to-do farmers, and the rise of the new urban middle class, the modern bourgeoisie, and the working class, at the expense of the bazaar merchants and the clergy. He believes that the militant ulema, their bazaari followers and an activist intelligentsia formed the nucleus of a revolutionary coalition that spearheaded the 1979 revolution. Fatemeh E. Moghadam studies the connection between state policy, political stability and the articulation of property rights in Iranian history since the early nineteenth century. The significance of the issue to the study of the Iranian Revolution is that, on the one hand, the Shah’s land reform and subsequent social policies redefined property relations, and on the other, the definition of private property rights has been one of the major dilemmas facing the Islamic Republic. Ali Rahnema and Farhad Nomani scrutinize the spectrum of ideological and political positions among the various Islamic orientations. They examine the subsystems of Islam articulated by Mortaza Motahhari, Ali Shariati, Navab Safavi and Mehdi Bazargan, and trace the role of Ayatollah Khomeini in the politics of competing subsystems in the post-revolutionary period.
Economics has played a pivotal role in post-revolutionary Iran for two reasons. First, the Islamic revivalist movement and the Islamic Republic proclaimed an Islamic economic system to be an important dimension of the rule of the oppressed (mostaafiri) that it promised to establish in Iran. Second, the post-revolutionary economic crisis has produced one of the most serious dilemmas to face the Islamic Republic. Part II presents studies of various dimensions of the effort toward Islamization of the economy and of the economic crisis in post-revolutionary Iran. Sohrab Behdad examines the course of the economic crisis and its impact on the transformation of politics in Iran. He shows that the inability of the Islamic Republic to define a viable economic system, and the consequent continuation of the economic crisis, have led the regime into a dead end; its only route to survival is thus to negate itself by repudiating its populist policies of the past sixteen years. A study of the development of the industrial structure in the pre-revolutionary decade and the Islamic Republic’s subsequent experimentation with various industrial policies is presented by Saeed Rahnema. He argues that after a decade and a half the Islamic Republic has not made any progress toward the creation of a dynamic industrial base in Iran.
Oil revenues and exchange-rate policies are two crucial aspects of the Iranian economy. Djavad Salehi-Isfahani investigates the oil policy of the Islamic Republic in the international and domestic arena, in the context of constraints on oil production, a sluggish international market, and a fast-growing domestic demand for petroleum products. A high rate of population growth, a stagnating domestic economy, and decline in the real value of oil revenues (mainly from exporting crude oil) manifested themselves in a large foreign-exchange gap. Hossein Farzin investigates Iran’s attempt to realign its exchange rate in response to the complications resulting from its policy of maintaining exchange control in a system of multiple exchange rates and in the face of social and economic problems confronting the regime following a sharp devaluation of the currency.
Part III is a study of some important aspects of the social policies of the Islamic Republic. Sussan Siavoshi and Asghar Rastegar examine different aspects of the Islamic Republic’s education policy. Siavoshi compares the treatment of a number of political and ideological issues in the textbooks of the pre- and post-revolutionary periods, and shows how both regimes have attempted to acquire legitimacy by inculcating their values in the young. Rastegar focuses on health policy and medical education in the Islamic Republic. He shows that the Islamic Republic has attempted to increase its control over the university system by centralizing and politicizing the universities. At the same time, the government made efforts to increase the output at the universities. Rastegar argues, however, that these policies have resulted in substantial deterioration of medical education in Iran.
Shahrzad Mojab and Amir Hassanpour consider the politics of nation-ality and ethnic diversity by examining the policies of the Islamic Republic toward Iranian Kurdish people. They argue that, although the Islamic leaders denounce nationalism as a Western conspiracy, the Islamic Republic has itself pursued a national chauvinistic policy not unlike that of the Pahlavi regime.
Finally, Haideh Moghissi takes on the controversial issue of women’s presence in public life in the Islamic Republic. She investigates policies aimed to restrict the presence of women in the public sphere, and describes the struggle of Iranian women to assert their rights. Moghissi reveals the complex realities and contradictions of sexual politics in Iran and analyses the rise of a Muslim female elite, which was initially mobilized to support the Islamization policies and yet which has come to demand changes in the gender status quo. She argues that the emergence of reformist Muslim women in Iran is a reflection of the contradictions of a society which, although it is well integrated into the world market, persists in preserving an archaic mode of human and social conduct.
Saeed Rahnema and Sohrab Behdad
Introduction:
Crisis of an Islamic State
From Malaysia to Tunisia, Islamic movements are posing a serious challenge to the existing political and social orders. The 1979 revolution in Iran established the viability of Islamic movements in leading a popular revolution. An ayatollah in exile gained the leadership of a victorious revolution against a powerful, and seemingly invulnerable, authoritarian regime. The Shah was ousted, his regime collapsed, and an ‘Islamic republic’ was erected. Allah-o Akbar, Khomeini Rahbar! The force of the masses that shouted this slogan incapacitated the Shah’s military machine and drowned out the slogans of the other contenders for political power, from liberal reformers to radical revolutionaries.
‘Independence, Liberty, Islamic Republic’ became the holy triad of the Iranian revolutionary movement.
The Islamic Republic declared itself the rule of the oppressed (mosta^afin), liberated from ‘exploitation and imperialist domination’. Khomeini was hailed as the ‘hope of the world’s oppressed’, and Iran became the Mecca of Muslim activists of the world. To the Afghan Mojahedin, the Shi'is of Kuwait, Lebanon and Iraq, and the opposition forces of Pakistan, Syria, Algeria, Egypt and Malaysia, the Islamic victory in Iran became a source of inspiration and a model for emulation. It appeared that the oppressed people of the world had, at last, found a way to liberation. However, it turned out that the crucible of Iranian revolu¬tion produced one of the most disappointing results in the history of revolutionary experimentation.
Meanwhile, the fear of Islamic radicalism incited the reactionary offensive of the status quo everywhere, especially in the West. Their image¬making machinery became engaged in a propaganda war, shaping the public consensus in opposition to the revolutionary movements in Mus¬lim countries.’ After all, the intellectual tradition of the West had already ingrained a deep anti-Islamic and anti-Arab (anti-Middle East) sentiment in the cultural consciousness of its people.2 Fundamentalism, fanaticism … |
