Ahmad Sadri is Professor Sociology and James P. Gorter Chair of Islamic World Studies at Lake Forest College. Today he offers his reflections on the approaches to religion in Iran as the revolutions in the Arab world proceed. -Jeff

Iran’s religious tyranny is not the result of blind subservience to religious tradition. On the contrary, it was born of a bold innovation by the late Ayatollah Khomeini that reversed the quietist bent of the Shiite political philosophy. Khomeini claimed that in absence of the Mahdi (the occulted savior) Shiites must work to create a righteous state. After he was firmly established at the helm of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini went even further and argued that the qualified Islamic jurist is the all powerful Muslim Leviathan who can suspend even the principal beliefs and practices of Islam (including praying, fasting, going to Mecca and even monotheism) in the name of raison d’etat

Thirty years later a decisive majority of Iranians want out of that secret garden of medieval religious despotism, and they showed their collective will in the uprisings of the summer of 2009. The “Arab Spring” that is blossoming in the Middle East might have been inspired by that uprising, the “Green Movement,” but Iranians have not been able to emulate the Arab model by overthrowing their robed potentates. The Iranian religious autocrats possess both the means and the will to mow down potential crowds of protesters in the name of Khomeini’s powerful imperative to preserve the Islamic State.

As a result, the critique of religious government is slowly turning into the kind of radical anti-religious sentiment one could only find among eighteenth-century enlightenment philosophers, nineteenth-century Latin American positivists and twentieth-century Marxist Leninist countries.  I fear a narrow minded secularism is replacing a narrow minded “religionism.”

Abdolkarim Soroush © Hessam M.Armandehi | Wikimedia Commons

Consider what happened last month. Abdolkarim Soroush, a renowned Islamic reformer who lives in exile, wrote a bitter letter exposing 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 the 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” (secular) 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. This discourse 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 in one generation and aggressively turned itself into a modern theocracy. It is curious that despite this, they are still labeled as subservient to tradition.

Hussein-Ali Montazeri © Unknown | Wikimedia Commons

Let us take the career of Ayatollah Montazeri (1922-2009), a lieutenant and heir apparent of Ayatollah Khomeini and one of the architects of the Islamic Republic. Montazeri 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 Khamenei. In the last year of his life, Montazeri 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.

Montazeri’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, the government, to prove its innocence and regain the trust of the client, the people. In other words, Montazeri ruled that the Islamic Republic was already dissolved as a legitimate entity given the dissolution of people’s trust. Using religion, he develops a democratic theory.

Montazeri, who was the Thomas Hobbes of the Iranian Revolution, lived to become its John Locke. Such a change of positions is unprecedented in the history of political philosophy. He used legal ratiocination to make a case for creating a just, Islamic government in absence of the savior (Mahdi). 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 to praise Montazeri as the grandfather of the Green Movement. The point, rather, is to demonstrate that religion is 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/Montazeri theory of “Mandate of the Jurist” was. But it is also true that other religious innovations help religion accommodate and support modern ideals of freedom and democracy. 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.