The End of Islamic Ideology - Iran

Social Research, Summer, 2000 by Hamid Dabashi

AT the writing of this essay, Iranians were poised to cast their fateful vote in the sixth round of parliamentary elections after the success of the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The election of the Sixth Majles was a momentous occasion for a nation much maligned in its modern history by a debilitating combination of domestic tyranny and imperial hubris. This parliamentary election marked yet another turning point in the political maturity of a people who have inherited all the malignant ailments of a semicolonized state and none of the institutional experiences of a fully colonized country. Iran was neither fully colonized like India so that in its post-independence history could transform its anti-colonial struggles into institutional basis of a democracy, nor was it totally immune to the Russian, French, British, and ultimately American imperialism so that it could mature politically in its own domestic terms. By the commencement of the colonially mitigated project of Modernity in early Nineteenth century, no political community could any longer mature in its own domestic terms. Instead, incorporation into an increasingly global mode of production became the defining moment of every major and minor component of the planetary momentum. In Iran, successive generations of corrupt politicians facilitated the colonial plundering of the nation, while aborting any pregnant possibility of domestic political maturity. The success of the Islamic Revolution in 1979 put an effective end to half a century of tyrannical Pahlavi monarchy and its active complacency in integrating Iran into a servile state in the global configuration of capital. But two decades into its success the Islamic Republic too has catastrophically failed to rescue the nation from the full and tightening grip of the global reign of free market economy, which demands very little more from Iran than providing its faltering logic of production with oil and buying nothing more than consumer products. The general contour of Iran's economic predicament at the threshold of the Twenty- first century is thus exactly as it was at the turn of the Twentieth century: A minuscule link in the global chain of economic production. The collapse of the Qajars, the rise and demise of the Pahlavis, and the successful institutionalization of an Islamic Republic have not in the slightest measures changed the predicament of Iran from a single-product economy principally contingent on the erratic logic of global capitalism. The catastrophic consequences of this predicament have been the effective formation of a capital-intensive (rather than labor-intensive) economy with very little grass-root pressure to demand and exact (rather than theorize and expect) democratic reforms. Democratic reforms, as a result, have always been promised ideologically rather than predicated on social-structural class formations. Social revolutions, military coup d'etfit, foreign interventions, and now for the first time parliamentary elections have been the sites and sights of the most intensive ideological contestations of material forces in Iran.

On Friday the 18th of February, 2000, the Iranian electorate, the young men and women in particular, were called on to rescue the beleaguered presidency of Mohammad Khatami, whose landslide victory in May 1997 caught the entrenched vested interest of the religious right by surprise. This parliamentary election reveals beyond any shadow of a doubt the cataclysmic moment when the long and arduous history of Islamic Ideology has finally come to an end. The running wisdom in Iran and abroad has been that this election has a potential to have the Islamic parliament occupied by "Reformists," ousting the "Conservatives," and thus giving President Khatami yet another popular mandate to draw his nation out of its moral and material nightmares. This assessment, however, is only the tip of an iceberg far more colossal in its historical implications. The hasty collapse of the Iranian political tension between the two opposing camps of the Reformists and the Conservatives is as much insightful as blinding to the realities of a nation in the tightening grips of a debilitating moral and material crisis. The dominant and domineering political discourse between the Reformists (as the Liberal Left) and the Conservatives (as the Religious Right) has now assumed an almost entirely ideological disposition and the legitimate demands of Iranians for freedom of expression have successfully obscured the underlying economic forces that define and delimit the rhetorical excesses of both these ideological claims. Confined and limited by the material forces beyond the measures of their control, the Liberal Left and the Religious Right, the Reformists and the Conservatives, are nevertheless engaged in a fateful and momentous battle for the moral and material mandate of a nation.

On the side of the Reformists is an army of hopes invested in President Mohammad Khatami and his delightfully smiling face, compensating for two decades of sober and sad faces, angry and stubborn looks, stark and austere demeanors. Some 80% of the Iranian electorate, more than 38 million people, 60% of whom are under the age of 25, are initially reported to have gone to voting polls with the frightful memories of two decades of a theocratic terror in their mind. They are thirsty and hungry, impatient and restless for change. Names such as Abdolkarim Soroush, Mohsen Kadivar, Abdollah Nouri, Akbar Ganji, and Mashallah Shamsolvaezin are emerging as the leading iconic invocations of a new dawning of freedom and hope. None of these names meant anything to anyone at the dawn of the Islamic Revolution twenty years ago. All of these names have emerged from the very depth of the Islamic Revolution itself. They are its dialectical negations. Having read and analyzed, admired and criticized, these post-revolutionary visionaries of a better future, young men and women in unprecedented numbers and with precocious political alertness flooded into streets and made their presence, their demands, and their inalienable rights, palpable, undeniable, factual. Chafing under two decades of a medieval theocracy, the young people in particular have no enduring memory of the Islamic Revolution and by all accounts could not care less about that piece of historical amnesia. They are the harbingers of a new dawn in Iranian history, vanguard of a whole new visionary recital of the possible, heralding the beginning of a fresh defiance. They have successfully learnt to forget, if not forgive, their parental paralysis.