Iran, Islam and Democracy

Jul 05, 2009 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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Last week we offered five reasons why we thought that the street protests in Iran, following charges by the opposition that the presidential elections had been rigged did not represent a “thermidor” moment for the Iranian Revolution, which had been inaugurated in 1979. Used by those who looked at revolutions comparatively, the “thermidor” is a phase of counter-revolution that supposedly follows the intensely high level of mobilization, sacrifice and bloodletting that accompanies the revolution’s initial impetus.

After conducting an audit of ten percent of the vote, the authorities have now quite firmly pronounced that there were no widespread irregularities that justified acceding to the opposition’s demands for new elections. They have closed ranks and demanded that all concerned accept the status quo. The revolution appears to have weathered the challenge successfully. Among the five reasons proffered to explain the latter circumstance, in conclusion we only mentioned in passing, the role of Islam as a variable and promised to elaborate on it further this week.

The issue of “politicised Islam” has wider relevance than just Iran. The western world, especially the US, insist that “good governance” and “democracy” are two of the planks on which it will conduct its relations with other states. Such a view, however, makes some assumptions about political participation– notwithstanding President Obama’s recent “clarification” in Cairo – that clashes with Islamic thinking which guides more than a billion people across the globe. Iran provides an opportunity for the west to go beyond their reflexive denunciations of “violations of democracy” and grapple with an alternative paradigm for arranging the affairs of mankind than the nation state that we are used to.

Imam Khomeni was, and most of Iran are, Shia while most of the rest of the Islamic world are Sunni, but their scholars and religious leaders, by and large, do not differ on the central point that Khomeni made in his foundational treatise Islamic Government. To wit that Western powers are determined to twist the meaning of Islam in order to serve their “imperialist agenda”. “The preachers they (the imperialists) planted in the religious teaching institutions, the agents they employed in the universities, government educational institutions, and publishing houses, and the orientalists who work in the service of the imperialist states—all these people have pooled their energies in an effort to distort the principles of Islam.”
Whether one agrees or not with Khomeni that there is a conspiracy in action, it is now widely accepted (in western academia, at least) that “religion” is a social construct, which can be deployed as a trope to mask socio-political agendas. The problem manifests in the first instance in the way in which the term “religion” has come to be understood in the west as apposed to that in Islamic doctrine – as well as in several eastern “ways of life”.

While there are definitions of “religion” in every area of study in the west, the presumption that there was some objective thing called “religion” out there in the world has only recently been accepted in academic circles as a fiction. As Talal Assad pointed out, we cannot discuss religious concepts and symbols outside of the social system that bequeathed meaning on those concepts and symbols. Islam and Christianity were nurtured in different societies.
In the west, Christianity was the paradigmatic “religion” that provided their generic categories to define all other religions. In the evolution of its position, the Christian concept of “giving unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” produced a dualistic division of the sacred and the profane and the fundamental notion of “secularization” that religion was confined to a private space and not to be intertwined with affairs of state.
Khomeni and most Islamic scholars vehemently reject this apolitical definition of “religion” when it is applied to Islam. It is difficult for westerners to conceive of a situation where even those Muslims who may condemn violence as a political tool would accept the position of Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian thinker, executed in 1966, who regarded all secular forms of government, including democracy (and socialism) as blasphemy, pure and simple. In Islam, one cannot divorce God from governance.

Some Muslims would extend the argument that all human agencies of power are a violation of the sovereignty of God and the best that can be done is for governments to be guided by the tenets of the Koran as interpreted by the religious scholars. This is the position that Imam Khomeni took when he expounded the concept of velayat-e faqih -guardianship of the jurist – as government appropriate for Muslims. In Iran the Supreme Leader is chosen by the Assembly of Experts – high religious clerics – and he in turn appoints the clerics that sit on the Guardian Council (the Judiciary also appoints an equal number of judges) that approves those seeking political office – from the president on down. In Iranian democracy, the people may elect only from among those vetted by the Guardians.

Imam Khomeni considered such rule “more necessary that prayer and fasting” – which those that wish to keep Muslims subjugated, have them focus on – since it would serve to prevent deviation from the Sharia – the word of God. By definition, under this worldview, such rule has to be just – since the Sharia can properly prescribe no other path. While scholars may sometimes differ on specific applications on the tradition, once one accepts the concept of “guardianship”, the foundation can never be eroded, since the entire edifice could possibly collapse.

The outcome of the June protests – after the appeal to the Guardian Council failed – was a foregone conclusion as far as “democratic” appeals were concerned. The Guardians had spoken, Ahmadinejad was the President and there can be no appeal. One can glimpse at their logic when one considers the words of Imam Khomeni when he appointed Bazargan as President: [T]hrough the guardianship [Velayat] that I have from the holy lawgiver [the Prophet], I hereby pronounce Bazargan as the Ruler, and since I have appointed him, he must be obeyed. The nation must obey him. This is not an ordinary government. It is a government based on the sharia. Opposing this government means opposing the sharia of Islam … Revolt against God’s government is a revolt against God. Revolt against God is blasphemy. (To be continued)

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