The Islamic Revolution of 1357 [1979] was indeed the victory of the project of modernity over that of modernism.

Saeed Hajjarian, Az Shahed Qodsi ta Shahed Bazari; Orfi Shodan Din dar Sepehr Siyassat (From Sacred Witness to Profane Witness: The Secularization of Religion in the Political Sphere), 1380/2001

On February 1, 1979, an Air France Boeing 747 carrying Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini landed at Tehran's international airport. After fifteen years of exile in Turkey, Iraq, and France, he was arriving as the leader of an ongoing revolution. From the airport he went directly to the cemetery where the martyrs of the revolution were buried, and declared: "I will appoint a government, I will crush the present government." He achieved what he claimed: in a few days the age-old Persian monarchy fell and an Islamic government replaced it. Here, the adjective Islamic refers to a particular Shi`i interpretation of politics and polity. Shi`a is an Arabic word meaning "party" or "faction." It originated as the name of a group of Muslims who supported the candidacy of Ali (assassinated in 661) to be head of the newly founded Islamic state after the death of the Prophet in 632. Shi`ism was a minority view before becoming the official religion of Iran in the sixteenth century and the foundation of the state after the 1979 revolution. This book captures the intellectual development among the ruling elites who fomented the revolution and have guided postrevolutionary rule.

The revolution took everyone by surprise. Very few thought the regime of the Pahlavis, the most powerful monarchy in the Third World and an "island of stability" in the region, would fall so easily and quickly. It was widely believed that the long-established process of modernization, reforms, and development in Iran would never be threatened by a religious movement that might ultimately succeed in creating a seemingly archaic social and political norm. Moreover, since all segments of Iranian society, regardless of creed or ideology, participated in the upheaval, few expected that a group of hard-core Islam-minded activists would become predominant. How did the ancien régime fall? Why did the dominant political group in the new regime become victorious? A response to these questions would require two completely different books. The historical reasons for the fall of the old regime differ from those for the formation of the new regime—here, the Islamic Republic. The two stories involve diverse protagonists. The present work is interested in the origin of the Islamic Republic and its evolution. It will be concerned with the causes of the fall of the old regime insofar as they help the reader grasp the evolution of Islamic discourse more clearly.

Each of these questions can be, and has been, the subject of independent inquiries, and, indeed, many studies have focused on the reasons for the fall of the Pahlavi monarchy. Surprisingly, though, very few studies have focused systematically on the outcome of the last phase. How did the protagonists of the Islamic movement survive the second half of the revolution? There are many works dealing with the emergence of religionism and even Islamism in general, but fewer works specifically address the Iranian Islamic movement. There is, of course, some good scholarship that focuses on particular groups that participated in the revolution (for example, Abrahamian 1988, Chehabi 1990, and Siavoshi 1990), but none of it looks at the Islamist movement as a whole. Some books published in Iran have attempted to tackle this question, but they are either very descriptive or highly opinionated (for example, Davani 1360/1981 and Rouhani 1362-1364/1983-1984).

The present book is concerned with the second phase of the revolution and its general connotation meaning and implications. Those who took power in 1979, with Khomeini as their architect, came from a wider milieu, which had taken shape over decades, and that shape was in turn rooted in a wider intellectual terrain, one developed throughout Muslim history. This book aims also to capture that milieu; it analyzes the origin, formation, development, and fate of the Islamic movement in Iran. At the same time, the incongruity of the establishment of Qom as the most important Shi`i center in the face of the Pahlavi dynasty's radical modernism has to be explained.

Ever since the challenge of modernity disrupted the sociocultural life of the Muslim world, the people of that region have tried to present their own responses to the new challenge. The present study is mainly concerned with those responses, which are presented within a theoretical framework as well as within the historical context and heritage of Islam. The result has been a complex, paradoxical system that appears to share traditional norms, though its content and message are radical. Moreover, Islam comprises a multifaceted body of thoughts and approaches, and this heterogeneity has made some scholars, perhaps hastily, talk about "the failure of political Islam" (Roy 1994). This study portrays these various groupings and their views within the Iranian Shi`i context.

As long as Islam-minded Iranians felt that modernity was helping the people, they supported the forces of modernization, but when "modernism" swept Iran and the region, they instituted movements aimed at resisting it. This book begins with this moment of resistance and captures the various postures the movement has taken. The resistance movement against modernism (the aim of what I call the first generation) began with a quietist political stance combined with gestures of refusal, challenging modernism through what I call a revival of Islam and a refutation of modernism. Later, the extremism of the 1960s gave more confidence to concerned Islam-mined Iranians and radicalized the Muslim world. Activist Muslims of the second generation took more critical views of modernism and modernity, and claimed to present Islamic alternatives to the latter. By making an ideology out of Islam, they gave rise to the Islamic Revolution. Following the victory of the 1979 revolution and the restoration of lost confidence, many hoped that a more sober attitude toward modernity would emerge. Instead, the revolution gave rise to a radical force that turned Islam into an instrument of violence. I call this trend Islamism and radicalism, and its proponents (the third generation) have become an important force in the politics of postrevolutionary Iran. At the same time, the failure of Islamism has given rise to a serious reconstruction of Islam as a faith rather than an ideology, and the goal of the fourth generation has been to combine Islam and modernity by trying "to Islamize modernity." This book captures the views of these four generations of Muslim activists.

Two sets of broad questions guide the discussion throughout this study. First, why did the Islam-minded movement's protagonists gain power in the revolution, when both traditional (the bazaar, the ulama [scholars of Islam], and the old nobility) and modern (the middle class, the intelligentsia, and the masses) social forces participated in dethroning the Pahlavis? Second, what is the content of the alternative polity they proposed? Is it viable? Or is it, as labeled by some, an anachronistic restoration of the traditional Muslim polity? In responding to these broad questions, I was guided by the following more specific inquiries: What was the origin of the Islam-minded movement in Iran? When did modernity turn into modernism in Iran, and how did it help give birth to the Islam-minded movement? Were the protagonists politically oriented from the very beginning of their formation? How did they organize themselves? What were their original objectives? How did they evolve into a radical revolutionary group? What was the impact of outside factors? What contributed to their politicization—internally, regionally, and internationally? How sophisticated are their views and theories on various issues pertaining to statesmanship and governance? What are their views on government, the economy, culture, society, foreign policy, and the world system? What is their modus operandi? How will the "New Information Civilization," globalization, and the "multiple worlds of postmodern thinking" of the 1990s and beyond influence their fate?

The interplay of Islam and modernity was my main concern in researching and compiling this work. While the interaction between the two has produced occasions of mutual fecundation and a constructive battle of ideas, their degeneration into isms, i.e., Islamism and modernism, has produced an almost century-long zero-sum battle between opposing worldviews, marked by recurring coups, uprisings, resurgences, and revolutions. The primary reason for this battle is that behind the isms lies a feeling of stasis, a condition void of dynamism, nuance, or imagination.

Any ism denotes an ideology—not a way of approaching the world as a thinking agent, but a seeming certitude that claims to possess all the answers. An ideology is a project with a clear blueprint that requires only mechanical implementation. It provides assurance because it offers easy answers to the most difficult and fundamental questions. Approaching the world through the lens of an ideology renders redundant the human processes of constantly thinking, evaluating, facing hard choices, and balancing. The ideologies of modernism and Islamism are extreme and selective approaches to the understanding of modernity and Islam, respectively. Islamism has betrayed many of the tenets of Islam as a divine message; as a way of life; as a civilization, polity, and state; as a religion; and as a body of thought composed of a moral and ethical system. Modernism has done the same to modernity, to its political and philosophical foundations, and to liberty as its core value. In any society in which Islamism and modernism have taken root, these twin degenerations have wrenched those societies from their past and from their organic development. Modernism became the dominant paradigm in the Muslim world during the first half of the twentieth century, and Islamism enchanted it in the second half.

It is important to note that both Islam and modernity were responses to the powerful grip of traditionalism. The prophet of Islam brought the message of rescuing individual freedom from the grip of tribalism, just as modernity was an attempt to undermine the hold of the church and the feudal system. Table I.1 canvasses the main features of the categories employed here.

Since Muslims' fate was tied to modernity, their venture in the modern world, particularly from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century became linear as well. Thus, at any given historical moment, the dialectical interaction of any pair of these concepts produced the predominant path or paradigm, leading to the generational unfolding of revival, revolution, Islamism, and post-Islamist restoration. Intellectually, Islamism reached its climax in the 1990s and in the disastrous events of September 11, 2001, when self-proclaimed defenders of Islam crashed passenger planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

I call this event the climax of Islamism because its "defenders" shocked the rest of the Muslim world and awoke Muslims to the fact that their religion had been hijacked, taken hostage, and misused for perverted objectives. Things are beginning to change today: most Muslims live within the paradigms of post-Islamism, and modernism is under attack in the West, where many view the world from postcolonial and postmodern perspectives. Post-Islamists hope to revive the basic tenets of Islam and embrace modernity. They aim for a restoration of "Muslim politics," which they define so as to reconcile the teachings of Islam with the imperatives of the modern technological world. Postmodern sensibilities seem to reject modernism's atomistic fragmentation of the human life-world and the consequent loss of social harmony and cohesion, taking instead a holistic view of human life and paying respect to all human achievements, Western and non-Western. The post-Islamist generation seems to appreciate and utilize the achievements of postmodernity to deconstruct Islamism and its ideology. Indeed, Islamism and modernism are by-products of modernity's advent as a new paradigm in human civilization production. In no part of the Muslim world has this dynamic unfolding been as vivid as in Iran, where, in 1979, a major revolution occurred with the aim of creating an Islamic state and an Islamic alternative to modernity.

Antecedents to the Revolution of 1979

Existing accounts of the causes of the revolution take various approaches. The most prevalent explains the revolution as a conservative, traditional, and religious response to too much modernization occurring too quickly. Others apply theories such as "social breakdown," "Davis's J-curve," "Marx's theory of revolution," "resource mobilization," and the "conjunctural causal model." For example, Foran applies them not only for analyzing the 1979 revolution but also for discussing Iran's social history from Safavid times to the postrevolutionary period (Foran 1993). He claims, however, that the conjunctural causal model is more applicable than other explanations because it takes several factors into account, most notably the "world system, modes of production, situations of dependency, the nature of state and political culture" (13).

Even here, the main assumption is that outside challenges proved too great for Iranian society to overcome. While this approach seems more comprehensive and promising than others, it requires modification in certain respects. Like most models applied by outsiders, this model imposes an external logic on the unfolding of events in Iranian history. Its positivist outlook treats a complex religious ethos as merely a socioeconomic variable. More particularly, it overemphasizes the role of various modes of production; the emphasis on the arrival of a dependent capitalist mode of production misses the enormous cultural and religious underpinnings of the revolution. It seems that what has to be modified in the conjunctural causal model relates to these modes of production and to its emphasis on dependency. As one Iranian scholar, Mashayekhi, rightly points out, economic dependency came very late to Iran, since "in the early 1960s . . . the dependency problematic was in the formative stage" (Mashayekhi 1992, 93). While all factors are given their due consideration in the current study, the central emphases will be on the fate of "Iranian civilization" and on Iran's perception of itself in its encounter with modernity and industrial civilization.

The revolution occurred because three main currents came together in the late twentieth century. First, the genuine voices of modernization in Iran, so disrupted by the Pahlavi dynasty, were revived, and sought to construct a new inclusive identity for Iranians. The revolution was a call for Iranians to return to their cultural home. Second, a politics of restoration—focused on reversing what I call the "erosion of confidence" (za`f-e esteqlal)—last voiced by Mosaddeq, was once again returning. As a result of the infiltration of Iran by outsiders, which Iranians felt had become total in the 1960s, a powerful plea for nativist restoration became the dominant paradigm in the 1970s. The third current was a shift in the international system, which tolerated and even celebrated various brands of nativism as the information and communication revolutions began turning the world into a global village. While the first and the third trends served as cause and catalyst, respectively, it was the second factor, the politics of restoration, that played the key role. The erosion of confidence was doubtless affected by all those conjunctural causes, but the subjective, mental, and ontological dislocation that forced the Iranian nation to lose an authentic perspective on its existence lay at the heart of the contention between the state and society. Indeed, if a certain degree of dependency dominated the Iranian body politic, it had less to do with economics than with what has rightly been termed "psychological dependency" (Sreberny-Mohammadi and Mohammadi 1994, 11).

The internal logic of Iranian political and social history tells us that Iranians have been haunted by their inability to produce and renew their civilization since the fall of the Safavid dynasty, in 1736. Though they created a state and some governance, and even produced some commanding leaders, such as Nader Shah, who invaded the Indian subcontinent in 1738 (and brought the Peacock Throne to Iran from Delhi), the paucity of their statesmanship and civilization was telling. This lack showed itself clearly when Russia defeated Iran in the wars of 1813-1828, which resulted in an enormous loss of territory. Most subsequent attempts to restore Iranian national pride and independence met with failure: reforms undertaken in the mid-nineteenth century ended with the poisoning of popular nationalist prime minister Mirza Taqi Khan Amir Kabir (1807-1851); reform attempts from the 1870s through the 1890s ended with the king's assassination in 1896; the attempted reform of constitutionalism ended with fourteen years of crisis and a foreign-assisted coup in 1921; nationalist reforms ended with another foreign-assisted coup and the 1953 exile of Iran's most popular nationalist leader, Mohammad Mosaddeq (1882-1967); and the populist movement of the early 1960s ended with the crushing of movement and the exile of its leader in 1963.

These experiences of protest, rebellion, coup, and revolution attest to a state of anomie in contemporary Iranian life. The main reason for this anomie was the persistence of the notion of an erosion of confidence. No wonder revivalism, the return to indigenous values, and authenticity became persistent themes in Iran's recent past: from Amir Kabir to Khatami, nearly all notable figures in Iranian cultural and political discourse, including Seyyed Jamal Assadabadi (d. 1897), Mirza Hassan Shirazi (d. 1895), the protagonists of constitutionalism, Mohammad Mosaddeq (d. 1967), Jalal Al-Ahmad (d. 1969), Ali Shari`ati (d. 1978), Mehdi Bazargan (d. 1995), and Khomeini (d. 1989), advocated self-reliance and authenticity as the solution to the problems Iran was facing. Of course, each proposed his own particular means of authenticity.

In the early nineteenth century, Iranians first realized that their societal problems stemmed from their outdated state and its modes of economic production. To catch up with the West, a process of reeducation was necessary. Iran had to revise its understanding of life, society, polity, and selfhood. No wonder the first students dispatched abroad were called "the caravan of understanding" (karevan-e ma`refat) (Farmanfarmayan 1968 and Mahbubi-Ardakani 1368/1989). Then came systematic attempts at modernizing the country; the first, initiated by Amir Kabir, resulted in the establishment of the first modern-style university in Iran. An across-the-board modernization plan introduced in the 1870s led to a modern form of governance and statecraft. Interesting to note is the fact that in all of these processes, two factors were prevalent. First, the sophisticated social classes of Iran—the religious class (ulama), the nobility (a`yan), the landowners (malekin), and the merchants (bazaar)—all participated in and contributed to the process (Rajaee 1994b). During the constitutional revolution against both arbitrary internal rule and the foreign influence exerted through concessions in the latter part of the nineteenth century, these classes composed the revolutionary coalition. Second, a complicated theoretical and intellectual debate was launched to explain the intricacies of modernity and the difficulty of adopting it to Iran's old ways (Adamiyat 1340/1961).

The road to progress and development was being paved slowly but steadily. By 1900, a group of prominent and skilled intellectuals with long-term plans for the new Iran had emerged. For example, they created civic societies whose main objective was to propagate their project of Iranian modernity. The pages of the proceedings of the first and second parliaments are filled with such debates. Then, under pressure from the chaos and disorder following the postconstitutional revolution, as well as from the impact of World War I and the inability of the young Iranian parliamentary system to cope with mounting economic, political, and social problems, the Iranian polity came to a deadlock. The interference of foreign powers, notably Britain, that were unable to tolerate disorder and chaos on the border of the newly established Soviet Union inspired a coup in 1921, which brought to power Reza Khan, a man with no roots in any of the Iranian social classes. A powerful figure, he centralized governmental authority in Tehran, and the intellectuals who wanted so badly to implement their dreams of a modern Iran saw in him a protector (Dolatababdi 1336/1957, vol. 1).

What these intellectuals did not know was that Reza Khan had his own plans, and he gradually eliminated any competitors, inaugurating himself as Reza Shah Pahlavi, the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty. He hijacked the modernization process already in progress and stripped it of all its intricacies and sophistication. In place of modernization, he inaugurated a project of pseudomodernization (Katouzian 1981), or what I call modernism. Reza Shah fundamentally relied on the army, and the more he consolidated his power, the more he alienated Iran's various social classes. The Pahlavi regime associated itself with outside powers partly because neither Reza Shah nor his son, Mohammad Reza Shah, could derive his political power from any indigenous social force.

The Pahlavi dynasty created a baseless state. Faced with a problem of legitimacy during most of its precarious existence, the regime relied so heavily on foreign interests that they should be considered a component of the Iranian polity during the Pahlavi era. The British helped Reza Shah come to power, and in 1941, when it suited them, they persuaded him to leave for a death in exile and supported the inauguration of his son as the new king. Threatened by the nationalist forces led by Mohammad Mosaddeq, Mohammad Reza Shah asked outsiders for support: in 1953, a British and American coup against Mosaddeq helped restore Mohammad Reza Shah to his position of power. In the wake of the popular uprising of 1979, the American general Robert E. Huyser traveled to Tehran and convinced the shah to leave, never to return.

The Pahlavis' reliance on foreign support had exacerbated the Iranians' lack of confidence, self-identity, and self-respect. The protagonists of the Islamic movement capitalized on this loss of confidence and propagated the notion of "the return to the self," which in their view would restore Iran to its rightful national and international position. This explains the appeal and popularity of Khomeini, even for the most secular and nationalist of Iranians. Today, after almost three decades of Islamic rule and despite a great deal of social and economic hardship, the one positive point to which everyone refers is the restoration of Iranian self-confidence. Thus, while discussing this erosion of confidence as the main cause of the nation's distress, I have tried also to follow social-movement theories carefully. Although I recognize their contribution to our understanding of group behavior and collective actions, the more I investigated the cultural and civilizational aspects of Islamic and Iranian history, the more the internal logic of that part of the world manifested itself. Where common bonds led to common patterns of behavior, I have acknowledged and applied general research tools, and where unique analysis has shown itself to be necessary, I have applied that as well.

Features of the Islamic Movement

Bruce Lawrence, an American professor of religion, correctly observes that without modernity there would be no fundamentalism (Lawrence 1989, 2). While the Islamic movement in Iran is such a trend, not all movements among Muslims can be described as such. Perhaps the observation of Edmund Burke III can guide us. He focuses on two questions with regard to the revival of Islam: Are we talking about "Islamic political movements? Or social movements in Islamic societies?" (Burke 1988, 18; original emphasis). This is an important distinction. The former question applies to the Islamic movement in particular, and the latter to Muslim politics more generally. In modern Muslim history, particularly since the weakening and subsequent dismemberment of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires (Hodgson 1973, vol. 3), many devout individuals and groups have been active in the political life of their respective communities, but they were not protagonists of the Islamic movement. At the same time, since the formation of the first Muslim community in Medina in 632, politics has constituted the main part of Muslim discourse. Whatever Muslims have achieved in making sense of their creed and putting it into practice may be termed Muslim politics.

I make such a claim because none of the achievements in the long history of Islam had the adjective "Islamic" in its label. Furthermore, none of the Muslim dynasties called their polities Islamic per se, nor did any of the Muslim scholars identify their works as Islamic. Consider the case of the most famous dynasties, the Abbasids, Fatimids, Moors, Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals, and so on—all of which were named after the family or the dynasty that founded them. Or consider the most famous and authoritative works of theology and philosophy, or even the books of tradition that constitute the main sources of Islamic teaching: Sahih, Usul al-Kafi, Kitab al-Ershad, Kitab al-Kharaj, and so forth. This provides us with an interesting indicator. Ever since the encounter of the Muslim world with modernity, and more so in its response to modernism, the term "Islamic" has been adjectively used for everything—Islamic banking, Islamic government, Islamic education, you name it!

What does this tell us? It seems that modernism, with its exclusivist secularism, has threatened the totality of Islam and produced a reaction aimed at defending this totality. The concern is not just with being a good Muslim, which is at the heart of the practice of Islam, but more so with defending Islam itself. The Islamic movement, therefore, is a modern phenomenon whose fundamental impetus has been a defensive reaction to the perceived threat of modernism. A simple, perhaps simplistic, description of activism in the Muslim world would claim that this defensive reaction converts Muslim politics into the politics of the Islamic movement and then into its radical form, Islamism. The protagonists of the Islamic movement are those individuals or groups who feel that modernism has endangered the totality of their religion and that they should respond to this danger. Since reaction to modernity has swept through all religious traditions, the Islamic movement is not isolated, but is rather part of a universal phenomenon. Under the experience of modernity, Muslims reacted as Islam-minded agents, but in response to the ideology of modernism, they became possessive of their heritage and insisted on being Islamic. This peculiar historical interaction between the Muslim world and the modern West has made the responses acutely political, inimical, vociferous, and in some ways bloody. Thus Leonard Binder, a longtime observer of the Muslim world, correctly points out that "no other cultural region is so deeply anxious about the threat of cultural penetration and Westernization" (Binder 1988, 83). We might add that more than any other group in the region, the protagonists of the Islamic movement feel that this penetration has endangered their value systems. They are determined to uphold their religion, and they see the guarding, upholding, enhancing, and propagating of Islam as their duty.

Whereas not all Muslims feel that Islam is under siege, the protagonists of the Islamic movement do feel that way, and this explains their apparent xenophobic and conspiratorial mindset. In short, unlike most Muslims, the protagonists of the Islamic movement are persons or groups who not only are anxious about the fate of their religion, but also feel that it is under siege and are prepared to take action to remedy the situation. They think the best way to do this is to restore their religious tradition. It is possible to make the following five general observations about the movement's protagonists.

First, they feel as though Islam in its totality is in danger from the comprehensive challenge of modernity, but more seriously from the projects of modernism. The latter has infiltrated the Muslim world in various ways, but most specifically by promoting the emergence of Westernized elites who are modernizing and reforming their societies, modeling them after those in the West. The protagonists of the Islamic movement contend that modernism is encroaching on Muslims in various ways, through colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, and, more recently, a Western cultural onslaught. Having said this, I am not in any way suggesting that the Islamic movements owe their very existence to modernity. Other Islamic groups have arisen because of other perceived challenges to Islam: the Wahhabi movement in the Arabian Peninsula and the Sanussi movement in North Africa, for example, were organized in response to perceived threats to Islam, though they were mostly concerned with the dangers of internal irreligiosity. Indeed, one could argue that Islamic movements are recurrent phenomena, propagated by concerned Muslims who feel the tenets of their religion have been overlooked (Enayat 1980).

Second, they have turned religion more and more into an exclusively public event and a form of social protest. In such a context, religion has become a doctrine and an ideology with a clear demarcation of "us" against "them." No longer is religion a sophisticated body of rituals, mores, belief systems, ethical values, and moral codes in which an individual has a great degree of maneuverability. For the Islamic movements, religion has become a body of thought that "can be fixed with precision and finality" (Gellner 1992, 2). This is why the Islamic movements emphasize a practical commitment to their understanding of Islam as the precondition for membership in their communities and organizations.

Third, they believe that "it is possible to run a modern, or at any rate modernizing, economy, reasonably permeated by appropriated technological, educational, organization principles, and combine it with a strong, pervasive, powerfully internalized Muslim conviction and identification" (Gellner 1992, 22; original emphasis). That is to say, they are not against modernity; they welcome it. What they are against is a modernism that emphasizes a hegemonic narrative of modernity and what it has to offer.

Fourth, their movements are ongoing processes that will not retreat to a quietist role after responding to the challenge of modernism. It seems that all great world civilizations, whether Christian, Chinese, or Indian, have embraced secularization—except for the Muslim world, despite many genuine attempts to do so in the past few centuries, beginning with the Ottoman reforms in 1839 (Berkes 1964). Now that Islamic movements aim to modernize their societies without succumbing to secularism, all they need are organization and sophisticated efforts.

Finally, their movements have taken various forms: cultural activism, intellectual debate, etc. However, two distinct approaches are detectable at present. One, emphasizing the Islamic struggle, calls for resistance, uprising, and revolution; the other calls for reform from below, i.e., educational, social, and cultural reforms. In the past, the religious attitudes of the movements' protagonists have gone through several paradigm shifts, marked by revival, revolution, violence, and restoration.

Who are the protagonists of the Islamic movement? Contrary to the stereotype, they are not frustrated lower-class persons who are simply reacting to a marginal fate. No doubt many of the persons doing the dirty work of the movement have emerged from the marginal strata of society; however, most are sophisticated people committed to revivalism and the making of the Islamic state. I think one can justifiably characterize the majority in the following three ways.

First, they are both secular and puritan. A Muslim activist is neither completely secular, mainly preoccupied with mundane affairs, nor puritanical and obsessed only with the hereafter. He or she is against extreme piety as well as extreme secularity. For him or her, religion is a public event. Since juridical approaches to understanding religious doctrine are more amenable to the "precision and finality" (Gellner 1992, 2) associated with public displays of faith, modern Muslim activists are adamant advocates of a juridical approach to understanding Islam. Hence, the centrality of Islamic-revealed law, shari`a, which comprises two main parts: prayer (`ebada, regulating man's relation to God for eternal salvation, and transaction (mo`amela, regulating man's relations with his fellow man so that worldly transactions, smoothly conducted, will pave the way for eternal salvation. Both are devotional acts, whether one recites the word of God or concludes a business transaction. Here lies the root of the inseparability of religion and politics in Islam. An average Muslim, therefore, by the sheer dictates of his faith, must be both secular—that is, concerned with the profane and serious about worldly affairs—and religious—that is, pious and free from worldly attachment—while remaining aware that "the world is the cultivating ground for the hereafter" (ad-Donya Mazra al-Akhera). In other words, the average Muslim should be a saint in addition to whatever else he does: a saint-merchant, a saint-soldier, a saint-politician, a saint-doctor, a saint-professor, and so on, combining the idealism of what ought to be with the realism of what actually is.

An important cautionary note is in order. The present Islamic movement should thus be seen as different from the whole sophisticated civilizational milieu and process that Islam has produced. The juridical interpretation of Islam constitutes only one approach to understanding that revealed message. Other trends, such as philosophical, theosophical, mystical, and Gnostic approaches, have provided different outlooks on Islam, and these in many ways contradict the picture presented by contemporary Islamism. For the moment, however, it is the juridical interpretation that has captured the ears and the minds of the masses throughout the Muslim world.

Second, the protagonists of the Islamic movement are modern and even postmodern but not Western. In 1987, when Time magazine first named Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, its "Man of the Year" (he was honored so again in 1989), he was described as a modern but not a Western man. The same can be said about the members of the Islamic movement today.

The early reformers or religionists of the Muslim world either opposed modernity as being contradictory to Islam or else considered Westernization and modernization a process borrowed from the Muslim world. But the Muslim activists at the beginning of the twentieth century took an accommodating position toward the Westernization project advocated by the emerging middle class. They accepted the introduction of the new ways as a lesser evil that would help Muslims fight greater evils (daf`-e afsad be fassed), such as tyranny and backwardness. Since the 1960s, however, a new group of Muslim activists has replaced the secular middle class as the main force of modernization. For them, modernity is a necessity of the present age, the voices of the Islamic movement concluded. Many of them became strong believers in the concept of revolution, despite its being, in essence, the product of a modern worldview. For the ancients, revolution referred to the rotation of the moon and the earth, not to the volitional transformation of the social order. For this kind of transformation to be accepted, there had to be a radical change in the perception of what it means to be human. Life had to become temporal and secular and not subject to a natural order. Revolutionary ideas meant transgressing the accepted order and cosmology. And the notion of revolution was embedded in a larger system of temporal science, instrumental rationality, empirical studies, and critical reason. Contemporary Islam-minded people accept all this, and it is no wonder that most of the protagonists of the Islamic movements began their education and professions in fields other than Islamic studies. Table I.2 shows the educational affiliation of the major modern Islamist leaders.

So far as the influence of a postmodern sensibility is concerned, the case of the fourth generation of the Islamic movement is even more telling. Here the example of Abdolkarim Soroush, a contemporary Iranian reformist, and his followers is very important. His emphasis on the distinction between religion and man's understanding of it resonates with the importance of narratives in postmodern discourse. He acknowledges the existence of a pertinent religious essence but argues that any representation of this essence is simply a narrative, and thus cannot be considered the truth or, therefore, sacred. Also, the prominence of the works of people such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida among contemporary Muslims cannot be overlooked.

Finally, the protagonists of the Islamic movement follow Islamic tradition but are not traditionalists. With the exception of the Islamists—that is, the third generation—members of the Islamic movement emphasize the tenets of Islam but have little tolerance for their traditional interpretation. As the previous table shows, most of the leaders were educated in modern science, and even those who focused on Islamic studies either were self-taught or attended modern universities that offer Islamic studies. For example, neither father of the two prominent modern Muslim radicals, Qutb and Mawdudi, permitted his son to attend traditional religious schools; even Khomeini concentrated on philosophy and mysticism in his studies, not jurisprudence.

The cases of Mawdudi and Khomeini are very interesting because both of them were accepted by the traditional clerical class, yet both opposed the predominance of the traditional approach among the established clergies. Moreover, many of the key voices in the Islamic movement belong to engineers and doctors, most of whom were educated in modern universities, either in the Islamic world or abroad. Even the turbaned clergymen take pride in having obtained an advanced degree from a foreign university. It may seem ironic, but the majority of the Iranians pursuing Islamic studies at McGill University are turbaned mullahs from Qom, even if they do not wear the turban in public—a practice, incidentally, in accordance with the principle of taqiyyah (expedient dissimulation). The great intellectual protagonists of contemporary Islamism—Mawdudi, Qutb, and Shari`ati—had enormous contempt for the traditional centers of Islamic teachings.

To sum up: The grave enemy of the contemporary Islamic movement is modernism, i.e., a particular Western narrative of modernity. The hegemonic narrative of modernism disrupted the cultural homogeneity of the Muslim world and afflicted the minds of the people with "Weststruckness"—modern jahiliya (ignorance), or "Westamination"—a notion that lies at the heart of the proposed Islamic modern imagined community. Although conservatism, or traditionalism—the rigid interpretation of Islamic tenets—has, in the name of protecting authenticity, blocked the path to any genuine modernization, some parts of the Islamist movement have nonetheless welcomed modern influences.

Generational Views and a Possible Starting Point

Islam-minded Iranians had been active in politics and society since the Safavids made Shi`ism the country's official religion, in the sixteenth century. In the late nineteenth century, when Iran modernized and a secular version of nationality became dominant, these Islam-minded Iranians adopted a strategy of compromise because they claimed that the new, modern ways would help the people. Indeed, they remained actively supportive as long as modernization followed its promise of emancipation, but when modernism began to emerge, they felt threatened and took the successive postures of revival, revolution, radicalism, and restoration that I have described. The protagonists of each posture belong to a generation.

The first generation that shaped Iran's Islamic movement appeared when a strong wave of modernism overtook Iran. Its members felt they had to quietly defend Islam against this onslaught. They avoided politics and worked to consolidate the position of the clerics in the face of what seemed to be a threat to their very existence, and they even tacitly acquiesced in what was going on in the country. They tried to revive their religion and modernize their faith by creating modern institutions. In the process, they introduced a paradigm shift, turning Islam into a sociocultural project.

The second generation of the Islamic movement reacted against Americanization in the 1960s and 1970s and advocated a complete end to Westernization. Its members relied on the ideologization of Islam. Intellectually, the second generation questioned modernity and reevaluated both it and their faith. They thought they could achieve this through the politics of revolution. The victory of the 1979 revolution inaugurated a new phase, during which one might have expected a moderation of the Islamic movement. Indeed, in December 1982, Khomeini declared the end of the revolution.

Little did he know that revolutions unfold in their own peculiar patterns. It appears that in the postrevolutionary era, two trends manifested side by side. The first, riding the crests of the postrevolutionary tide—the hostage crisis (1979-1981) and the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988)—gave birth to a generation that further politicized Islam by turning it into an instrument of power and exclusion. Political purges, executions, and radicalism gained currency, and thus was born a third generation, whose views and positions I describe as Islamist and extremist. This generation believed that the sacred ideals of the past had to be re-created in the present, that tradition had to be safeguarded against the modern condition, and that modernity, once eradicated, had to be replaced by Islamism.

The second trend was a moderate approach that sought to quench this revolutionary zeal. Indeed, the failure of Islamism, the consequences of globalization, and the maturation of the children of the revolution brought about the fourth generation, which has invited a rethinking of both Islam and modernity. Its members aim for localization of the global and globalization of the local. They want to restore to Islam its focus on the individual, part of the essence of the original revelation.

Each chapter of this book deals with one of these trends. While the historical unfolding of events provided an occasion for each generation to emerge, the interaction between the challenge of modernity and the response of the Islamic movement provided the substance of each generation's views.

The revivalists remain loyal to Islam, but their understanding of modernity is instrumental; the revolutionaries accept modernity's invitation to institute a secular polity through revolution, but they use Islam as an instrument of activism and revolt. The Islamists have complete faith in instrumental rationality insofar as they make both Islam and modernity instruments of power. The advocates of restoration take Islam and modernity to be two distinct value systems that require special reverence and careful consideration. Figure I.1 captures the four conditions that result from the interactions among modernity, Islam, modernism, and Islamism, the latter pair considered degenerations of the first.

When did the Islamic movement begin? Since it is a by-product of Iran's encounter with modernity, it is as old as the process of modernization in Iran. But in fact, it truly began when Islam-minded Iranians became concerned about the pitfalls and negative consequence of modernity. It was then that Islam-minded Iranians became more than conscious of the danger of foreign powers—became paranoid, in fact—and took a defensive posture against modernity's negative impact. Iranian encounters with the modern West date back to the time of the Safavids (1501-1736). Such an encounter, however, was an interaction between powers that were equal, or at least perceived to be equal. Iranians had enormous self-confidence about their culture and mores. The post-Safavid encounters with the West, however, proved to be of a different kind: interactions between a decaying civilization and a dynamic and blossoming culture. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the long war between Iran and Russia in 1805-1828, ending with a disastrous defeat that made Iranians realize that they had to adopt modern ways.

One possible date for the beginning of the Islamic movement, as suggested by an Iranian historian, falls precisely within this period (Davani 1360/1981). Apparently, some contemporary religious leaders expressed concern for the war and even issued a legal ruling (fatwa) against Russia. For example, Davani refers to the fatwa of Muhammad Mojahid against the Russians during that war as the beginning of the Islamic movement in Iran. However, this was not the first time a member of the ulama had opposed foreign infiltration. Moreover, Mojahid's effort did not translate into a general and comprehensive movement. Iranian scholar and historian Homa Nateq suggests that Mojahid's fatwa was not even religiously motivated; rather, it had been orchestrated by the shah to attract the support of the people for his unpopular war (Nateq 1368/1990, 34-35).

Another suggested starting point of the Islamic movement was the tobacco crisis in 1890-1891. The story began when the Qajar king, Nasir al-Din Shah (assassinated in 1896), granted a monopoly over the sale and export of tobacco to the British Imperial Tobacco Company for fifty years. The monopoly came to an end after a fatwa attributed to the then highest religious leader of Shi`ism, Hassan Shirazi (d. 1895), forbade the use of tobacco, declaring it to be tantamount to a war against the Vanished Imam. The government had to back down and repeal the concession. While this is one of most-cited episodes in the fight of Shi`i ulama against local tyranny and European encroachment, it should not be seen as the beginning of the Islamic movement in Iran. Some historians have suggested that this was in fact a clear uprising against a foreign company by the merchant class, using the power and influence of the ulama to further their cause (Adamiyat 1360/1981).

Neither of these dates is very convincing. A more critical moment came when Iranians began to formulate an alternative view to modernity; it was then that Islam-minded Iranians had to explain or justify the position of Islam. I contend that these attempts began with the assassination of the shah in 1896, which marked a clear break with the past; the bullet that penetrated the king's body also shook the cosmological view that had been held by Iranians for centuries. In the aftermath of this event, the Constitutional Movement began constructing a framework for a new polity. All segments of society participated.

Many scholars contend that both events, the assassination and the tobacco protest, were partly instigated by Sayyed Jamal Assadabadi, better known as al-Afghani, who launched a campaign of awareness about the backwardness of Islamic societies. Since Islam-minded Iranians initiated the process of reform in the wake of the assassination, this occurrence should be taken as the beginning of the movement. In practice, however, what al-Afghani was inviting Iranians to do was take active part in their own political life, using Islam as a cultural umbrella. This invitation was congruent with Muslim politics from previous centuries. The advent of the Pahlavi family, as I will show in the next chapter, marked a new phase in Iranian history. Modernity changed to modernism, and Iran was meant to become like the West, rather than grasping modernity on its own terms and localizing it. This transition created a powerful schism that was never repaired. The Pahlavis introduced a battle of worldviews that forced Islam-minded Iranians to begin thinking of isolating themselves from the modernizing process, and later presenting alternative frames of thought and plans of action. Thus, the story of this book begins with the 1921 coup that brought the Pahlavis to power and changed the face of Iran.

Approach, Organization, and Sources

In this study, I have taken a civilizational approach in which modernity represents the predominant framework of contemporary industrial civilization. When I observe Iran's response to modernity, I also consider the civilizational framework that underlies Iran as a polity. Because of my training in international affairs, I used to take the modern state as my unit of analysis, but there are two difficulties with such an approach. The first is that modernity is about much more than just the modern state; it is also about economic, culture, and imagination. Second, the voices expressing the concerns of the state in Iran did not represent the views of the wider Iranian cultural and the civilizational milieu, whose participants responded to challenges of the sophisticated modernity-based civilization of the West in their own terms. It seems that Iranians understood the potential of the new civilization for both hegemony and emancipation. Iranians associated first France and later America with emancipation, and later they associated first Britain and subsequently America, when the latter became "the Inheritor of Colonialism" (Bahar 1344/1965), with the notion of hegemony. From the nineteenth-century Iranian minister Amir Kabir to the most popular nationalist leader, Mosaddeq, America was seen as a faraway party to be used against imperial Britain or Russia.

A few words are in order about the title, organization, and methodology used in this book. The title captures the dialectical interaction between two parallel trends. One trend is the transformation of European modernity into modernism and the emergence of self-criticizing postmodernity. I make the claim that the modern sensibility, with an emphasis on the free and autonomous self, degenerated into modernism, an ideology of political power and economic gain. The second trend is the transformation of Islam into the Islamic movement and Islamism, and now the emergence of a self-criticizing post-Islamism. I hope this book captures how the unfolding of these trends and their interactions have manifested in recent Iranian history.

The main chapters of the present work are devoted to the generations through which the Islamic movement has interacted with modernism in Iran. Chapter One shows how and why the first generation of the Islamic movement established a stronghold in the city of Qom and became culturally active while remaining politically quiet. The chapter canvases the time, life, and views of those who followed the politics of revival. Its followers were dismayed with politics but were active in defending their faith culturally. Chapter Two elaborates on the reasons for the politicization of the movement and the emergence of the second generation, which claimed to present an alternative program to the existing Westernizing regime. This generation was successful in bringing about the destruction of the ancient regime in Iran and the formation of an Islamic Republic. However, its success notwithstanding, the generation reduced Islam to an ideology of revolution for the sake of power, and thus, through its politicization of Iranian society, paved the way for the politics of extremism and radicalism of the third generation, which propagated Islamism with a vengeance. Chapter Three concentrates on the logic behind the use of Islam as means of violence, radicalism, and revolution. In 1989, Khomeini died in full power, leaving millions of Iranians to mourn for days. His departure coincided with the revision of the 1979 constitution, and for the story of the Islamic movement, the book could end here.

Yet life goes on, and an age of globalization and a world of one civilization and many cultures have set in. Postmodernity and the politics of identity have opened new chapters in many parts of the world, including the Muslim world. There are clear signs that the new generation of Islam-minded Iranians that has emerged is challenging Islamism and is interested in a new form of religiosity. It hopes to combine Islam and modernity. Thus, Chapter Four deals with this latest generation of Muslims, who, first and foremost, have restored their own confidence and feel that they can shape and decide their own fate. Unlike the Islamist religionists, they do not see the world as an us-them dichotomy, and unlike their revolutionary brothers, they do not see life as a constant struggle along a friend-enemy divide. They speak the language of dialogue and inclusion. Their main questions aim at how to survive in a world of complicated and contending ideologies while preserving their complex Iranian-Islamic identity. In the concluding chapter, I argue that Iranian politics has become a competition between the third and fourth generations. While the politics of Iran was dominated by the fourth generation from 1997 to 2005, for example, the election of the new president in Iran in 2005 brought members of the third generation to the center of power. The conclusion captures a general evaluation of the Islamic movement, the meaning of the oscillation in Iranian politics, and makes some generalizations regarding the future of the movement in Iran and the world over.

As to my method for presenting my findings, each chapter has two main sections: one section discusses the context and the other focuses on the voices, whether those of individuals or groups. Some criticisms could be offered against such a division. First, it may appear historicist, suggesting that the context has determined the content and the shape of the voices. I am aware of the danger of crude materialism, and this is not my intention here. However, I hold that the context presents and suggests the challenges and the questions to which conscious members of society feel the need to respond. Thus, a discussion of the context helps identify the chief areas of concern and the irritated souls who responded to them, although I will be as brief as possible. Second, concentrating on certain individuals, institutions, or publications may not reflect the spirit of the time, but, rather, may amount to an artificial construction on my part. For example, it is a fact that the now dominant notion of "the Guardianship of the Jurisconsult" (velayat-e faqih) does not represent the whole of Shi`i political thought. And as rightly pointed out by late professor Enayat, "the idea of the guardianship of the jurisconsult belongs to the realm of what the jurists themselves term disputation (ekhtelaf) and independent reasoning (ijtihad)" (correspondence with the author, 1982). In other words, to treat Khomeini's idea as the dominant paradigm may reduce the sophisticated political thought of Shi`ism to the issue of power and authority only. Also, concentrating on certain individuals and publications, in the words of the late Albert Hourani, "may be too rigid" (correspondence with the author, 1991). Yet, like all researchers, I had to isolate certain events or certain people and their works in order to illustrate the challenges and responses issued by modernity, Islam, and Iran, as observed and responded to by Islam-minded Iranians. I maintain, however, that the voices discussed here represent the dominant or epoch-making trends in their times.

What the reader may find wanting about all four generations is how preoccupied they are with the "big ideas" of eradicating despotism, imperialism, and the dialogue of civilizations. Iranian society has been concerned with the issue of justice, i.e., "the house of justice" (edalat-khaneh), as it was embodied in the demands of the protagonists of the 1905 constitutional revolution. This concept of justice entailed gender, religious, ethnic, educational, economic, and political equality. Its proponents hoped for a civilizational milieu in which linguistic, religious, ethnic, and cultural diversities were recognized and respected. Iranian women, furthermore, have been speaking out for political participation and equal status in new and revolutionary Iran. Yet Islam-centered discourse lacks any plans or measures to deal with these demands. If there are some, as in the works of Mutahari and Soroush, they are in reaction to existing measures by the powers that be. For example, Mutahari's work on women's issues was produced in response to the discussions in the pages of the popular magazine Zan-e Ruz (Today's Women) in the sixties, rather than as a serious treatment of gender issues in Iran. Indeed, one could make the same observation about Islamic movements throughout the world. Only the new, postmodern generation of Muslims in the diaspora unapologetically deal with what they have called "gender, justice, democracy and pluralism deficit" (Safi 2003).

The irony is that in today's Iran women have become a significant voice. How is this explained? One deliberate policy of the Islamic Republic, namely that of sex segregation, has had an indirect effect. Since women and men are supposed to be physically separated, an almost parallel set of structures has evolved. If women cannot be secretaries or if women nurses cannot minister to strange men, one has to encourage members of both sexes to become professionals in order to serve the demands of the growing population. Thus, in every conceivable profession, opportunities are provided for both sexes, leading to an indirect and unanticipated empowerment of women. This indirect effect of an Islam-centered policy is fascinating, but lies beyond the scope of this work.

A few words about sources are in order. To construct my narrative, I have relied on various sources. To understand the evolution of modernity, I looked first to the modernity-postmodernity debate. Fate brought me to Carleton University, in Canada, and as part of my responsibilities in the College of the Humanities, I found myself teaching Samir Amin, Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Ellul, Michel Foucault, Marshall McLuhan, Karl Polanyi, Edward W. Said, and Charles Taylor. At the same time, I was doing a research project for the International Development Centre in Ottawa, which resulted in my book Globalization on Trial. Together, these experiences helped me understand clearly the metamorphoses of modernity.

Regarding sources on the Islamic movement in Iran, I conducted research in the Iranian research and archival institutions created after the 1979 revolution; a large body of documents dealing with the Pahlavi era is preserved there. During my ten years of research and teaching in Iran, 1986-1996, I also interviewed many of the protagonists of the Islamic movement and tried to both participate in and observe events there. To conduct further research, I traveled to Iran in 1998, 2000, 2001, 2004, and 2006 for short-term research and the procurement of sources. These sources are discussed here. (Note: In text citations to sources in Persian, dates are given in AH/AD [anno Hegirae/anno Domini] form.)

First, I drew on the resources of the Institute of Cultural Research and Inquiry, or Mo'assesseye Tahqiqat va Pazhuheshhaye Farhangi, which holds confiscated private documents, books, and papers of more than one thousand families of the Pahlavi elite, including those of the royal court. The diaries, files, and records of many officials are accessible to researchers. I also made use of other institutions, such as the National Archive, or Sazemane Asnad-e Meli, where most official records are preserved. Among these, for example, are the trial proceedings related to the assassination of the prominent intellectual and historian Ahmad Kasravi (1890-1946); these records reveal a great deal about the sociopolitical climate and factional politics in Iran in the aftermath of World War II.

The second body of material comprised long interviews and conversations I had with many people who were either active in the Islamic movements or had known the people at the center of this story. I will mention a few as examples. First, the late Mehdi Bazargan (1907-1995)—the first prime minister of revolutionary Iran and, more importantly, one of the main protagonists of the movement for over half a century—patiently talked with me for almost a decade, from 1986 to his death in 1995, about his career and those of his colleagues. Second, the late Murteza Passandideh, Khomeini's older brother, shared with me many eventful stories of the life of his brother and his involvement in the Islamic movement. Third, Abdolkarim Soroush, the prominent theorist and activist, spoke with me regularly in his office at the Iranian Academy of Philosophy. Finally, Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, Hojjatoleslam Mohsen Kadivar, and Saeed Hajjarian generously also gave me their time.

The Iranian custom of bar-e `am, or open house, provided me with another source of information and insights. Throughout the history of Iran, and perhaps that of the Middle East as a whole, men and women of stature, including the monarch and the economic, cultural, and political elites, hold open houses for a few hours every week and welcome anyone who cares to attend. During these social gatherings, there is open discussion on matters related to politics, society, history, and civilization. To name just a few, I attended regularly the bar-e `am of Ostad Mohammad Mohit Tabataba'i, Ayatollah Mohammad Reza Sadr, Ali Akbar Sa`idi Sirjani, Mohammad Javad Mashkur, and Mohammadali Eslami Nadushan. Recently, some educational and cultural establishments have held institutional open houses, and I attended those of the Da'rotma`arefe Tashiyu` (Shi`i Encyclopedia), the Bonyad-e Tarikhe Iran (the Foundation for Iranian History), and the Entesharat-e Farzan (Farzan Publishing House). I encountered many members of the intelligentsia at these gatherings.

Yet another source of information was the journals, books, and occasional papers published by the various members of the Islamic movement. As examples, I mention Homayun and Maktab-e Islam, the journals of the Qom religious establishment; Maktab-e Mobarez and Payam Mojahed, published by the movement abroad; and Asr-e Ma and Mahsreq, the organs of active political groups. Further, I drew upon the enormous body of research and the voluminous publications on Shi`ism, Iran, and the revolution by both Iranian and non-Iranian scholars and researchers. These studies have been growing rapidly since the Islamic revolution.